Journal articles on the topic 'Creative writing; Magda; dream'

I examine Rey Chow's assertion that the process of racialization parallels the challenge of coming to terms with language. In 2011, Anthony Webster coedited the American Indian Culture and Research Journal special issue “American Indian Languages in Unexpected Places” and called for an extension of his work on Blackhorse Mitchell's novel Miracle Hill: The Story of a Navajo Boy. My argument looks at writing as a matter of choices the writer makes (following William L. Leap's work in American Indian English) and the requirements expected of readers. Moving away from the error analyses and ethnographic readings that afflict racialized readings, I place Webster's work on Navajo poetics and intimate grammars into conversation with postcolonial theory and language revitalization work concerned with similar questions: what does it mean to write, and what does it mean to write in English? I argue that Mitchell resists the subjugation required of a colonial education through his refusal to write like a native speaker. He figures writing as a place to dream as one pleases; writing is the miracle on Miracle Hill. Readers can locate his choices throughout the text, particularly in his poem, “The Drifting Lonely Seed,” his chapter on creative writing, and his speech at his grandmother's graveside.

<p>The novels of Vera Feyder are concerned with identity, memory, space and travel. In her writing her characters inhabit past and present, dream and reality. In particular, dreams and aquatic landscapes intersect in various creative ways in her oeuvre. This article analyses the contours of such landscape, understood in terms both internal and external, in two of her novels: Caldeiras (1982) and La Belle voyageuse endormie dans la brousse (2002).</p>

We all dream. Even my dog dreams; he whines when he dreams, perhaps because his dreams are as filled with anxiety as my own sometimes are. Dreams – bad dreams and nightmares, particularly – can be profoundly unsettling and disturbing. They can shock and terrify us because they cannot be controlled: they are their own narrators, and the only way we can resolve their penetrating stories is by attempting to interrupt them. Only by jolting ourselves and waking up, we can enlighten ourselves and come to light, and only by generating daydreams, we can counteract the malign influences of bad dreams and nightmares and take charge of our lives. Bad dreams and nightmares can bring dread and devastating realizations: they can leave us marooned in our past. Daydreams, by contrast, can generate options, and perhaps a renewed joy in life as well: they demand that, despite obstacles and despair, we move onwards into the future. They are artful stories; they are the art of utopia and are filled with our wishes and anticipatory illumination. They appeal to us to become artists and narrators of our lives. Participating in the creative arts – writing, painting, acting and making music – is to envision dream-like visions of where we want to go with our lives. Without the arts, without writing especially, and without our conscious picturing the ideal other life, there is little possibility that our desires will be fulfilled. We need hope, and we need daydreams to map our destiny. I believe we need to act on our daydreams, and not slumber into nocturnal nightmares. These beliefs and ideas have been informed by studying the work of Ernst Bloch and his notions about daydreams (not nocturnal dreams). He is a neglected, iconoclastic philosopher, and I believe brilliant. In this article, I propose to discuss his theories about daydreams and then turn to the neglected, Austrian-Jewish painter Mariette Lydis, who in her various works offers proof that daydreams play an immense and important role in our creative lives. Contemporaries, both Bloch (1885–1977) and Lydis (1887–1970) wrote and/or painted during the same century as Freud (1856–1939) and Jung (1875–1961). Both were of Jewish origin. Both survived the First World War, the Nazis and the Second World War. Both kept realizing their desires for a better world through writing and picturing their writing.

The paper addresses the creative activity approach in teaching English language for medical students of the first and second years. Activation of the cognitive, design-research and practical activities of students is based on authentic material and material with an ethnocultural component. The study involved first and second year students of the Medical Institute of Northeastern University named after M.K. Ammosov 36% of students defending creative projects rated their skills at 3 points out of 5. Creative projects on the topics My Dream Trip and My Native District and my Village received the greatest response in students (43%). A total of 36% of students assessed their knowledge of special terminology (medical) at 3 and 4 on a five-point scale. Improvement in pronunciation and the ability to extract basic information from a text/article (medical) were noted by 43% of students. Students report difficulties in writing of the main part of annotation and rated their skills at 3 points (36%), 4 points (21%), and 2 points (28%). A total of 64% of students improved their knowledge on the Republic of Sakha Yakutia due to the geographical lotto used in English lessons. The creative activity approach is implemented by enhancing the cognitive, design-research and practical activities of students based on authentic material and material with an ethnocultural component.

This creative project is a romantic suspense novel that tells about the emotional bond of a cruel psychopath, Lukas, who kidnaps people and commits drug exploitation on them, and Sharon, who is one of his victims. To develop the plot and the characterization, I used four theories: Psychoanalysis, Antisocial Personality Disorder, Stockholm syndrome and Dream Analysis. The themes are about perception, exploring that of the psychopath’s false perception about people’s lives, and purpose, in which we explore both the psychopath and the victim’s contradicting purpose. This novel will also explore the topics of drug exploitation, factors that trigger Stockholm syndrome to the victim, and the syndrome’s effects to both the psychopath and victim. These are to assist me in conveying my purpose of writing this novel which are to raise the ever-growing issue of kidnapping and drug abuse, so that people could raise their guard more; also, for the people to know the underlying causes of a problematic person’s actions, so they are not quick to judge.

The article deals with the role of the Association of Ukrainian Writers in Exile “Word” in publication of the most complete collection of works by Vasyl Pachovsky in two volumes. Vasyl Pachovsky was a prominent member of Young Muse – an informal modernist group of writers and artists in Western Ukraine founded in 1906. In Ukrainian literature, he is mostly known as a lyric poet, but Vasyl Pachovsky is also the author of dramatic works. His modernistic dramas are lyrical allegories. At the same time they are highly patriotic works describing Ukraine’s long quest for freedom. Pachovsky’s most prominent dramas are: “Dream of Ukrainian Night”, “Sun of the Ruin”, “The Sphinx of Europe”, “Prince Roman the Great”, and “Het’man Mazepa”. Some of the works by Vasyl Pachovskyi were published in various journals or as separate books, but many of his works of art and historical articles remained in manuscripts. They are saved in the archives of the author’s family in the USA. In the context of solving this issue the publishing activity of the Association of Ukrainian Writers in Exile “Word” has been examined. The organization continued the traditions initiated by the Ukrainian Artistic Movement (Mystets’kyi Ukrayins’kyi Rukh). Its most famous members were Hryhorii Kostiuk, Yurii Sherekh, Vasyl Barka, Yurii Lavrinenko, Ostap Tarnavskyi and others. Their purpose was to create a literary center that would unite Ukrainian writers of diaspora. The organization also had to promote the development of independent Ukrainian writing, Theory of Literature and Literary Criticism, to create a publishing house in which the authors would be able to print their works. In general, a great number of different books (works of art, documentary, literary studies) have been published under the stamp of this Association. The collected works by Vasyl Pachovsky in two volumes have been published in 1984–1985, when Ostap Tarnavskyi was the chairman of the union. A lot of efforts have been made by sons and daughter of the writer. The structure and peculiarities of the publication are observed, the prefaces by the members of the Association Ostap Tarnavskyi and Vasyl Barka to each volume are considered. The texts of these authors are very important for the research into creative legacy of Vasyl Pachovskyi.

The given article deals with Klen’s research of the German dramatist George Kaiser. The main parameters of artistic universe of this author are presented in the article. There are also outlined the methodological strategies of research the German dramatist’s creativity by Yuri Klen – a well-known Ukrainian literary critic. Georg Kaiser is one of the brightest representatives of theatrical and literary expressionism. His plays are the unique phenomenon in the 20th century drama. His expressionism appeared to be the special one and the global and scope of plots allowed scientists to call G. Kaiser a «new myth creator». Among world scientists, who comprehended the features of author manner of this sign artist for history of world drama, a main place belongs to the Ukrainian literary critic – Yuri Klen. In his scientific work there is the article «George Kaiser», which an author compositionally divides into seven parts. Its pre-condition is an original metaphorical lineation (vivid registration of which is adopted from astronomy), structural-semiotics assertion that every writer creation has a basic idea or favourite main image, that can be found in many writings of the author. However, in the Ukrainian literary critic’s opinion, it is not impossible to say it on the first sight about George of Kaiser because every work of this author has a new incarnate idea, new and unexpected development of a plot, new and original interpretation of that problem which has been solved in his previous works. In the article “George Kaiser” by Yuri Klen the biographic approach can be highlighted while analyzing creative works of the German dramatist. The Ukrainian literary critic also outlines the secrets of psychology of the German artist creation in expressionism manner. Expressionism drama is always drama of ideas; therefore acting persons of this drama are not individuals, but types which helps writer to lead the general action of the characters. Yuri Klen asserts transformation of images in dramas by George of Kaiser, their original reduction up to separate characters and allegories: his characters lost the outlines of people and become symbols of idea, super individual creatures, typical samples, and logic of acting can be sacrificed for the sake of the higher logic – logic of composition and dramatic construction. Few times a researcher accents on closeness an artistic world view of the German dramatist to cubism: characters mainly don’t have the names, but appear on the stage under the names: a «father», «multimillionaire», «black», «yellow» – they are structural formulas. Summarizing these the structural-semiotics searches, Yuri Klen marks once again that in George Kayiser’s works can be found: 1) central idea of man renewing which is peculiar for all his creative work; 2) leading motive of escape-chasing and 3) element of contingency which manages events, that is a case-shove which suddenly gives dynamic of action and sets fire before a man as a distant lighthouse – dream about renewal. It is also possible to assert that researches of expressionism by some authors whose creation correlates with expressionism views demonstrates complete maturity of Yuri Klen to be a serious literary critic armed by the newest methodological approaches to study literature as theoretician and practician of literature studies.

This paper discusses the issues of the poetic grammar of the infinitive. The author suggests that grammar is no less involved in the formation of the poetic text artistic peculiarities than lexis. Linguistic analysis of the poetical texts is based on the methodological apparatus of functional grammar becoming increasingly important for studying poetical structures. Poetical texts by B. Akhmadulina, I. Brodsky, and A. Kushner devoted to the dream theme were analyzed for typical features of the “infinitive writing” (A. K. Zholkovsky), a special poetical technique. The author assumes that the analysis considering the creative laboratory of infinitive poetry through the eyes of a linguist can considerably develop and compliment valuable observations of A. K. Zholkovsky. The infinitive specificity is that it opens up opportunities for its unusual, stylistically and semantically significant research. The detailed analysis revealed the features of expressing the categories of temporality and modality in dependent and independent infinitive constructions, which are considered serial. A conclusion was made that infinitive constructions, especially those with an independent infinitive, leave a great space for multiple interpretations in a poetic context. The very use of the infinitive writing technique is intentional, allowing the author of the text to form a special “meditative mood” (A. K. Zholkovsky). The infinitive constructions are most suitable for deepening the text’s modal plan and making the text more expressive. Without pointing directly to the external time, they allow focusing on the internal flow of the action, bringing its aspectual characteristics to the foreground.

Time and being can be seen as a space. A modern-day diary is a way of exploring that space or state of being. Outlining and shaping it requires word, image and imagination. The question is framed cultural-philosophically, and the mode of writing is poetic essayism. Otherwise, the creative untangling and differentiation of the poetics of lived space is not possible. After all, the goal is to combine science and art and weave them into the same reflective fabric. The essential aspects include thoughts about the fullness and filling of something, about its fulfilment. Then the present moment is not seen as marking a boundary in just one direction: it is not just an endpoint of the past. Nor is it exclusively the starting point of the future. The present must be seen as a boundary in two directions. The researcher's gaze can simultaneously focus on both the bygone and the future. Consciousness meanders backwards down memory lane and journeys forwards on a trip of anticipation. A moment of insight means the fulfilment of time. Time is right for a deepening of self-understanding. Simultaneously, it also means fulfilling the ideal of self-reflection: an overall picture, clear and enlightened, of the the self’s place in time and being. When humans long for the past or dream of the future, they are living in the impasse of a now-moment. It is not a boundary in any direction. It is, in fact, a dimensionless photographic moment. Its spatial self-containedness results in no more than semi-fulfilment. The present becomes irrelevant. In fulfilment, humans themselves are the boundary facing in all directions. The overall perception of the enlightened subject reveals a reality that includes freedom, space, and human existence. Then it is easy for each and every person to exist as their own self.

Franz Schubert was not generous in commenting his own creative procedures, or in revealing his artistic inspirations. Therefore, it is even today not clear why Wilhelm Müller’s collection of poems entitled Winter journey attracted Schubert so strongly that he was so determined to set it as a whole to the music. In this article the author mentions, and rejects as well, couple of commonly accepted interpretations. The path to the lieder cycle Winter journey was paved neither by Schubert’s identification with the main character – outcast overwhelmed by desperation and anticipation of the approaching death – and his strange ways of experiencing the world; neither by composer’s acceptance of impious beliefs hidden in Müller’s poems. The author argues that both poet and composer of Winter journey shared the affinity for the wandering (and wanderer) motive which was one of the central topics in the rising romantic Weltanschauung. Schubert was dealing with this motive from 1815 until his death mainly in his lieder, sometimes in very complex manner. In order to understand the real nature of Schubert’s artistic rapprochement to the motive of wandering, the author was obliged to consider and, at the first place, evaluate the works of scholars (such as Theodor Adorno, David Gramit, and Jeffrey Perry) who have been dealing with this problem. After that the author focuses her attention to the narrative entitled My dream, the most extensive and enigmatic writing left behind Schubert; she analyses the role of wandering in it, arguing that Schubert was participating in the spiritual currents of his time even unconsciously and trying to adapt them in order to serve as the solutions to his own existent ional dilemmas. Finally, she concludes that the composer was very sensitive for the complexity of the phenomena of wandering, when romantic Weltanschauung was at its peak, and eager to come to terms with this complexity artistically, paying the most attention to one of its layers – the regenerative one.

Paris, “The Centre of All Centres”. Is It Still the Case? In La République Mondiale des Lettres published in 1999 and 2008, Ms. Casanova wrote: “Paris is the Greenwich meridian for literature” for the 19th and 20th centuries. Writers and artists have come to the city in the past because it was extremely attractive for creative and economic reasons. But at the beginning of the 21st century, with the rise of the New Media for writing, publishing and diffusing, is it correct to say that Paris is still supreme? Is location more important than the time devoted to writing and reading? The claims on which Ms. Casanova builds her assertions are not supported by the facts of recent history and geography. She refers to “La belle santé économique et la liberté” in Paris but she forgot to mention why artists came from central Europe. It was just because the life was cheaper in Paris than in Berlin, as Walter Benjamin observed in 1926. She notes that Paris was the world centre for high fashion and that writers came together there to be inspired by the place and each other. But these things are no longer true: Paris is one of the most unaffordable cities in the world. Fashion in clothes is determined in many centres, with fashion weeks held in New York, Milan and China; aesthetics no longer depend on a single country. Literary creativity has spread across many continents and the internet and social media provide access to millions of people around the globe. Globalisation has unified the world, note Jean-Philippe Toussaint and Sylvain Tesson, and brought the standardization of cultures. There is also the matter of the dominant language today. The French language has not changed since Ms. Casanova was doing her research, but French writers now dream of being translated into English to reach the largest audience around the world. Publishers also favour English to make the most profit because literature and art are now worldwide commodities. Writers and researchers use the Internet, which connects them with documents, libraries and people all over the world. Newspapers such as Le Monde and Le Figaro in France provide literary reviews from around the world; for example, Histoire de la Traduction Littéraire en Europe Médiane, compiled by Antoine Chalvin, Marie Vrinat-Nikolov, Jean-Léon Muller and Katre Talviste, was written up in Cahiers Littéraires du Monde. What about the readership? If publishing and merchandizing are accelerating and globalizing because of how the Internet changes time and distance, the writer still has to follow the rhythm of the subject.

Paris, “The Centre of All Centres”. Is It Still the Case? In La République Mondiale des Lettres published in 1999 and 2008, Ms. Casanova wrote: “Paris is the Greenwich meridian for literature” for the 19th and 20th centuries. Writers and artists have come to the city in the past because it was extremely attractive for creative and economic reasons. But at the beginning of the 21st century, with the rise of the New Media for writing, publishing and diffusing, is it correct to say that Paris is still supreme? Is location more important than the time devoted to writing and reading? The claims on which Ms. Casanova builds her assertions are not supported by the facts of recent history and geography. She refers to “La belle santé économique et la liberté” in Paris but she forgot to mention why artists came from central Europe. It was just because the life was cheaper in Paris than in Berlin, as Walter Benjamin observed in 1926. She notes that Paris was the world centre for high fashion and that writers came together there to be inspired by the place and each other. But these things are no longer true: Paris is one of the most unaffordable cities in the world. Fashion in clothes is determined in many centres, with fashion weeks held in New York, Milan and China; aesthetics no longer depend on a single country. Literary creativity has spread across many continents and the internet and social media provide access to millions of people around the globe. Globalisation has unified the world, note Jean-Philippe Toussaint and Sylvain Tesson, and brought the standardization of cultures. There is also the matter of the dominant language today. The French language has not changed since Ms. Casanova was doing her research, but French writers now dream of being translated into English to reach the largest audience around the world. Publishers also favour English to make the most profit because literature and art are now worldwide commodities. Writers and researchers use the Internet, which connects them with documents, libraries and people all over the world. Newspapers such as Le Monde and Le Figaro in France provide literary reviews from around the world; for example, Histoire de la Traduction Littéraire en Europe Médiane, compiled by Antoine Chalvin, Marie Vrinat-Nikolov, Jean-Léon Muller and Katre Talviste, was written up in Cahiers Littéraires du Monde. What about the readership? If publishing and merchandizing are accelerating and globalizing because of how the Internet changes time and distance, the writer still has to follow the rhythm of the subject.

The article states that the base of the non-referent (non-address-communicational) lyrics are parts of stylistic and surrealism. Such poetry is built on principle “text like text”, the artistic world looses its referency completely and is transformed into a sign. The function of such poetry is non-referential (arbitrary). The most common for such lyrics is stimulation and continuousness of the expression plan (not the contests) that commonly is done on the phonic and graphic levels. The main semiotic classificators here are arbitrary convention and symbol sign. They are non-address and non- communicational. If index has illocutive power, then a symbol sign has a power of categorical imperative. The system of non-referential lyrics in its own way is a spere of experimants. One of them, or maybe the most principal, which made “the exploitation” of the subconsciousness possible, and often gave metaphysical results, was so called automatic writing (ecriture automatique). The main point of it was to write having maximum freedom from the control of the mind, moving in the stream of free associations, and not returning to the written text; in any case nothing should be corrected (creative work of Zinoviy Berezhan). Second is orientation on dreams. Formal distinctive mark of “hooked” to the artistic world neurospace is the image of a dreamer – the one who watches a nightdream and tells about its cotntents (it can be either a narrator, as in the majority of the poems by Boychuk, or an animal, plant or an insect as in the works of Andrievska). The image has two functions: 1. to receive and transmit the contents of a dream spiritually; 2. to associate the contents of seen in a dream with the feelings, or in the other words transform it into the concrete feeling images. Semantic variety of expressionalism against impressionalism (the antipode of which it became) has also the character of conversion, and concerning existentionalism -– inversion. The differences between the styles of non-referential lyrics we can imagine in the shape of inversion. Stylizations also pretend to autonomy. Their structure e.g., in the poem by Olexa Stephanovich “From the chronic”, is defined by not immanently “imagined” in the “reality” norms but by convention -– as if a transition from outside, in advance, only to stress the function of a speaker. In the works of Yuriy Lypa, especially in his stylization “About the seamster Kozhumiaka” the artistic shape net catches the breething of a “chronical”, inner and outer world of a character connecting it with his pseudoarchaic way of narration, the poet makes stylization not only of characters’ dialogues (“The Monk and the Death”), but also the language of a storyteller (“The Deivil”, “The demons and the catcher”), receiving in such a way harmony of languages – the vision of the world. The same was done by Euhen Malanuk in his poem “The rye in the field is spoiled by the hoofs”, in which he eliminated from the narrative language expressions, that went away from geographical-phyhological base of our 20-th century’s menthality.

<p>Research „Poetry by Rainis in Latgalian” tried to establish impulse and reasons for publishing poetry by Rainis in Latgalian (original texts and renderings) using biographical method, but semiotic methods helped to analyze poetic means in poems written in Latgalian, revealing meaning of concept „Munu jaunu dīnu zeme” (Land of My Youth) in poem by Rainis and Latgalian culture.</p><p>Poems by the most significant Latvian literature classic Rainis (1865–1929) in Latgalian can be divided into original texts („Sveicins latgališim”/Greetings to Latgalians), original texts with renderings into Latvian („Munu jaunu dīnu zeme”/Land of My Youth) and renderings from Latvian (at least 16 poems from selections: „Tālas noskaņas zilā vakarā”/Far off Echoes on a Blue Evening, 1903;„Tie, kas neaizmirst”/Those Who Don’t Forget, 1911; „Gals un sākums”/The End and the Beginning, 1912), besides, surely we can say author’s renderings are only „Munu jaunu dīnu zeme” (Land of My Youth) has well as all other texts from literally scientific and social magazine „Reits” (Morning), because Rainis had been one of the editors of this magazine. Poems by Rainis published in Latgalian in newspapers – „Drywa” (Cornfield), „Gaisma” (Light), „Latgolas Wòrds”(Latgalian Word), „Jaunò straume” (New Flow) – are possibly work of authors of these periodicals, considering significant differences in stylistics with magazine „Reits” (Morning) and earlier published poems by Rainis.</p><p>Publishing of original texts and especially renderings in Latgalian press are mainly related to political activities of Rainis. But writing in Latgalian for Rainis also meant remembering his roots, remind of cultural wealth of native land and value; being a mediator in strengthening people’s unity and widening own supporters as well as the number of readers.</p><p>In the discourse of Rainis personality and creative work „Munu jaunu dīnu zeme” (Land of My Youth) is 1) homeland, native nature and home of poet’s childhood and colorful impressions of his youth (Rainis father’s rented manor house (semi-manor house) in Zemgale and Latgale); 2) Rainis’ land of youth is writer’s „second homeland” – Latgale, its’ nature, people and language; 3) particular semi- manor house in Latgale – Jasmuiža.</p><p>Origination of lyrical Me is emphasized in epos „Saules gadi” (Solar years) – Latgalian was born. From Rainis point of view Latgale is multinational keeper of authentic cultural values. About eight languages had been spoken in Rainis family. In Latgale, customs, folk-songs have been maintained untouched owing to certain isolation, historical and administrative separation from other parts – some kind of reserve effect. During years of his studies Rainis had intended to write a book about civilization untouched Latgale, but this intention left unimplemented.</p><p>Memories about homeland motivated Rainis to write and render into Latgalian, but original texts in Latgalian – „Munu jaunu dīnu zeme” (Land of My Youth) and „Sveicins latgališam” (Greetings to Latgalian) – were written on behalf of stylistic searches in particular period of Rainis creative work; they chronologically incorporate with philosophical stage (according to Janīna Kursīte). In this time poet’s ontology forms, still balancing between allegory (transmission transparency, dichotomy) and symbol (polysemy and ambivalence) structures.</p><p>In Rainis’ neo-romantic (1895–1904) and allegoric stage (1905–1909) poetry nature cycles project mainly society, not individual; only humanity will exist and revive eternally, precondition of immortality – death and birth of individual people.</p><p>In the poetry of philosophical stage (starting from 1910) Rainis frequently lingered on individual’s immortality reflection, which he called search and recoveries. A person lives not only according to nature laws, but according to existence laws and dies according to these same laws. Symbol, most frequently mythologeme, becomes a sign of existence glimpse for Rainis; lyrical Me of Rainis is awaiting new experience, knowledge, and moral enlightenment. One has to search in order to find, and searching/cognition signal in his poems is a cycle of time and space (nature, society, human) and three- dimensional structure (outer world/history, individual/soul, philosophy/ being). In the poem „Munu jaunu dīnu zeme” (Land of My Youth) it is possible to follow 3 of the mentioned cycles development in peculiar symmetry: 1st , 6th stanzas are a framework of individual’s inner cycle – dream/illusion/ desideratum and interchange of wakefulness/ reality/ actuality; 2nd and 4th stanzas contain nature cycle allegory – nature in spring awakes from winter sleep; while 3rd and 5th stanzas are related to social processes, which are covered with day-and-night cycle. Basics of symmetry – state of sleep and awakening in all levels of previously mentioned time and space, creating triple parallelism.</p><p>It is interesting how stanzas within a single cycle (1 and 6, 2 and 4, as well as 3 and 5) mutually relate: 1st , 2nd and 3rd stanzas contain reminiscences as symbolic sleep/dream abstractions of Rainis previously written poetry, while 4th , 5th and 6th stanzas specify something in nature, society and individual’s desires, dreams which have to wake up. Reminiscence carries out necessary associations for philosophical perceiving of functions time and space cycle, but especially – form and maintain transmission basics: historical (people’s destinies) – 3rd stanza, psychological (individual’s dreams, desires) – 1st stanza, philosophical (order of existence) – 2nd stanza.</p><p>The above mentioned allows stating that poem created by Rainis in Latgalian „Munu jaunu dīnu zeme” (Land of My Youth) indeed incorporates into Rainis creative work philosophic stage, where allegory as a supplementary tool and symbol as a dominant harmonically gets along with poet’s revelation of ontological sense.</p><p>Poem „Sveicins latgališim” (Greetings to Latgalians) has one addressee – a Latgalian, new reader of the newspaper. The text is artistically created on the allegoric stage standards of Rainis creative work – here features of one cycle (human in society) are present. Social cycle stages revealed in the poem are parting/uniting, hatred/love, old life/new life, celebrations/work.</p><p>Artistic structure of poems in Latgalian indicates on dominance of allegory or symbol in time and space. Cycle has a special meaning in reflection of existence order.</p>

Background. The little-known pages of the work of an outstanding Chinese composer are presented. The genesis of chamber-vocal style is explored on the example of early chamber and vocal creativity of the 1940s. This is the stage in the formation of the musical language of the composer, which coincides with the “experimental” period of the formation of Chinese chamber vocal music of the twentieth century. Zhu Jiangier became one of the pioneers in the attempts of creative synthesis of national and European musical experience. Specificity of musical content and features of the intonational language, form, texture of the piano accompaniment of the cycle or. 1 (1940–1944) and two songs created in 1944 are considered. The characterization of the composer’s early song creativity, features inherent in his style, is generalized. It is proved that the earliest period of creativity, in particular, the sphere of chamber vocal music, which formed the personality of Zhu Jiangera style. Objectives. The purpose of this article is to consider and study the early period of the chamber-vocal creativity of Zhu Jian’er, the formation of his talent in his young years. The section of the creative biography of the composer, connected with the 1940s, has been least studied by researchers. At the same time, it was he who laid and formed the foundations of Zhu Jianar’s compositional personality in the field of vocal music. Methods. The methods of research are based on the scientific approaches necessary for the disclosure of the topic. The methodology is based on an integrated approach that combines the principle of musical-theoretical, musical-historical and executive analysis. Results. The specifics of the musical content, peculiarities of the intonational language, the composition form and texture of the piano accompaniment of the vocal cycle op. 1 (1940–1944) and two songs created in 1944 are considered. The subject content of the cycle songs covered a wide range of musical images. The central place in the songs is devoted to philosophical reflections on the meaning of life, the theme of love for the homeland, everyday sketches, and landscape and love lyrics, separation. The general composition of the first opus is of considerable interest – the first play is divided into four parts, which allows one to speak of such a structural phenomenon as a cycle in a cycle. There is clearly felt the influence of Western European compositional technology. At the same time, the song has features of traditional Chinese music, which is due, above all, to the elements of pentatonic in the melody of the vocal part of the work. The first song of op. 1 No. 1 “Memory” is a mini-cycle consisting of four parts. Poetic text determines the detailed nature of the musical composition with a pronounced ballad color and complex drama, the structure of the song is based on the principle of end-to-end development, the change of emotional mood occurs in one breath. Already on this composition it is clear that at the very beginning of his work Zhu Jian’er had the skill of a versatile depiction of inner experiences and difficulties encountered in the life of the hero. The second number or. 1 No. 2 “Waves washing sand” – imbued with a lyrical and philosophical mood. In the musical-figurative sphere, the landscape poetry occupies a central place with philosophical overtones, symbolically revealing the images of waves on the sand, characterizing the lyrical experiences of the hero and his sadness. op. 1 No. 3 “Lullaby” – the lyrical center of the cycle, a song of meditation with a predominant shade of sadness and philosophical overtones – the theme of enlightenment, the general meaningful canvas corresponds to the genre of lullabies, the appeal to the child, full of tender feelings. The fourth song Or. 1 No. 4 “I want to return to my homeland”, serves as a kind of finale. The basis of the song is the topic of separation, which is very popular in the songwriting of Chinese composers. The content of the song is symbolic: it is not only dreams of a distant friend, family and friends, but also a reflection of emotional feelings of separation from the motherland. Songs “Spring, when you return” and “Dream” were created by the composer in 1944, are devoted to events from the life of the composer. Zhu Jian’er saturates the musical fabric of the song with unstable harmonies, offers a more complex texture solution to the piano part (alternating polyphonic and homophonic-harmonious presentation) and gives it greater independence as an independent layer of musical tissue. The vocal melody also acquires a new look. An arioso-declamatory by nature, it embodies all the nuances of a poetic text that is pronounced with a special sentimental feeling (“Spring, when you return”) or a joyful hope (“Dream”). The analysis completes the generalized characterization of the composer’s early song-writing, in which the inherent features are distinguished. The skill and artistic significance of his songs testify to the fact that Zhu Jian’er succeeded in original compositions with vivid national characteristics. In the early chamber-vocal works of Zhu Jian’er, musical embodiment was achieved both in luminous, lyrical, and sad, even grim character themes related to the reflection of deep emotional, indeed – philosophical aspects of being revealed through a change of experiences. The theme of many songs is associated with the embodiment of the thoughts and feelings of a person, with the chanting of a beautiful nature. Conclusions. The least studied early period of creativity, in particular, the sphere of chamber-vocal music formed the individuality of the compositional style of Zhu Jian’er. Zhu Jian’er’s songs are characterized by vivid musical images and colorful writing, vividly representing the individuality of the composer’s musical language. These works alone allow us to say that in his early years the composer Zhu Jian’er was a high-level musician.

Введение. Творческое наследие Н. В. Гоголя, являющегося одним из самых небезынтересных русских писателей, по сей день побуждает многих литературоведов к продуктивным исследованиям. В частности, интерес у них вызывает интертекст В. А. Жуковского в произведениях писателя. При рассмотрении работ, посвященных личности и творчеству Гоголя, действительно трудно не обнаружить упоминания об этом русском поэте, поскольку он был важен для творческого сознания Гоголя.В связи с этим целью статьи является определение степени знакомства Гоголя с творчеством Жуковского во время написания «Петербургских повестей». Важным представляется также выявление и анализ мотивов, сюжетов, аллюзий и реминисценций произведений Жуковского в повестях Гоголя. Это поможет увидеть особенности освоения Гоголем произведений поэта, выявить трансформации, которые претерпели в художественной системе Гоголя используемые им открытия Жуковского.Материал и методы. Поскольку больше всего отсылок к творчеству Жуковского присутствует в повестях Гоголя «Невский проспект», «Портрет» и «Шинель», на основе них и будет организовано исследование. В работе используются биографический и компаративный методы исследования.Результаты и обсуждение. В повести «Невский проспект» повествователь описывает утонченную, творческую натуру. Подобный типаж часто возникает и в лирике Жуковского. Кроме того, обнаруживаются черты идиллий Жуковского в описании образа встретившейся Пискареву незнакомки: в нем воспевается простота и очевидно стремление героя к гармонии и непорочности. Можно обратить внимание и на то, что художник обожествляет встреченную им юную особу. Вероятно, в ее образе автор пытался отразить высшее проявление женской красоты на земле, каковым для Гоголя-христианина, безусловно, являлась Мадонна. В данном случае чувства юноши сходны с теми, которые описывает Жуковский в эстетическом манифесте «Рафаэлева Мадонна». Однако красавица приводит Пискарева в публичный дом. Его идеалистическое сознание не может допустить того, что красота и пошлость могут быть синонимами. Это соотносится с принципами калокагатии, которые были распространены в русской литературе эпохи романтизма и нашли отражение в творчестве Жуковского.Не сумев разрешить конфликт между реальностью и мечтой, Пискарев прибегает к опиумному сну, который, подменяя для него жизнь, становится одним из факторов, приведших к трагической развязке, ибо, видя во сне свой персональный рай, художник все больше отдаляется от действительности и в конечном счете теряет способность к реальной жизни. В этом можно увидеть трансформацию идиллических мотивов произведений Жуковского (в частности, мотива сна). Сталкиваясь с реальностью, Пискарев теряет рассудок. Подобный финал соотносим с сюжетами баллад, переведенных Жуковским, в которых зло искушает и заманивает несчастную жертву в ловушку, а затем забирает у нее жизнь («Кубок, «Лесной царь»). Таким образом, красота у Гоголя отныне не есть признак доброго. Он приближается к пониманию красоты истинной и красоты ложной Жуковского-балладника, показывает хрупкость гармонии в мире.Повесть «Портрет» рассматривается некоторыми исследователями как эстетический манифест Гоголя. В этом также можно предположить следование традициям Жуковского. Кроме того, двухчастная структура повести может отсылать к архитектонике повести Жуковского «Двенадцать спящих дев». Две ее баллады «Громобой» и «Вадим» также противоположны по своей этике и имеют идейную схожесть с повестью Гоголя. В произведении можно обнаружить и сюжетные «переклички» с такими произведениями поэта, как баллады «Людмила» (роптание Людмилы на судьбу сходно с поведением Чарткова) и «Варвик» (грех персонажа также провоцирует появление потусторонних сил, которое является своего рода предупреждением и испытанием). Можно упомянуть и то, что герои-бунтари Жуковского, недовольные своим уделом, как правило, терпят болезненное поражение, и их душа отправляется в ад. Нечто похожее происходит и с Чартковым. Что же касается второй части повести, то она тоже имеет общие черты с манифестом Жуковского «Рафаэлева Мадонна», ведь и иконописец Гоголя создает картину, буквально «дышащую» божественной благодатью. В повести «Шинель» же прозреваются гуманистические и христианские мотивы. Главный герой не ждет лучшей доли, а смиренно исполняет должностные обязанности. Детская восторженность и искренность вкупе с поистине ревностной службой превращают его в настоящего подвижника и аскета. Чистота и любовь Башмачкина к людям, как и его самопожертвование, позволяют говорить, что его поведение сродни рыцарству, которое было свойственно главному герою «Дон Кишота Ламанхского», переводчиком какового произведения выступил именно Жуковский.Однако встретившись с шинелью, ошибочно принятой героем за метафорическое воплощение «прекрасной дамы», Башмачкин начинает исполнять службу уже не столь ревностно. С этим можно связать трагическую концовку произведения. Подобные же этические законы действуют и в художественном мире Жуковского. Тем не менее после смерти чиновник возвращается к истинному служению: посещение Башмачкиным в виде призрака (каковой образ характерен для произведений Жуковского) значительного лица и других чиновников высокого ранга с целью отобрать их шинели восстанавливает равновесие в мире. Таким образом, вновь актуализируется универсальная справедливость, свойственная художественному миру Жуковского.Заключение. «Петербургский период» творчества Гоголя тесно связан с творческой деятельностью Жуковского. Гоголь знакомится с лирикой и публицистикой поэта, активно рефлексирует над прочитанным. Важно подчеркнуть, что Гоголь непосредственно воспринимает эстетику и поэтику Жуковского, после чего репродуцирует отдельные аспекты творчества поэта в своих произведениях, подвергая их собственной творческой переработке, что в целом способствует становлению неповторимого гения писателя. Introduction. The creative heritage of N. V. Gogol to this day encourages many literary critics to productive studies. In particular, researchers are interested in the intertext of V. A. Zhukovsky in the works of the writer. When considering the works dedicated to the personality and creativity of Gogol, it is really difficult not to find a mention of this Russian poet, since he was important for Gogol’s creative consciousness.In this regard, the purpose of the article is to determine the degree of Gogol’s acquaintance with Zhukovsky’s work during the writing of the “Petersburg Stories”. It is also important to identify and analyze the motives, plots, allusions and reminiscences of Zhukovsky’s works in Gogol’s stories. This will help to see the peculiarities of Gogol’s mastering of the poet’s works, to identify the transformations that Zhukovsky’s discoveries used by him have undergone in Gogol’s artistic system.Material and methods. Since most of the references to Zhukovsky’s work are present in Gogol’s stories “Nevsky Prospekt”, “The Portrait” and “The Overcoat”, the study will be organized on the basis of them. Biographical and comparative research methods are used in the work.Results and discussion. In the story “Nevsky Prospekt”, the narrator describes a refined, creative nature. A similar type often appears in Zhukovsky’s lyrics. In addition, the features of Zhukovsky’s idyll are revealed in the description of the image of the stranger Piskarev met: simplicity is glorified in it and the hero’s desire for harmony and purity is obvious.You can also pay attention to the fact that the artist deifies the young person he met. Probably, in her image, the author tried to reflect the highest manifestation of female beauty on earth, which for Gogol-Christian, of course, was the Madonna. In this case, the feelings of the young man are similar to those described by Zhukovsky in the aesthetic manifesto “Raphael’s Madonna”.However, the beauty leads Piskarev to a brothel. His idealistic consciousness cannot admit that beauty and vulgarity can be synonymous. This correlates with the principles of kalokagatiya, which were common in the Russian literature of the Romantic era and were reflected in the works of Zhukovsky.Having failed to resolve the conflict between reality and dream, Piskarev resorts to opium sleep, which, replacing life for him, becomes one of the factors that led to the tragic denouement, because, seeing his personal paradise in a dream, the artist increasingly moves away from reality and, ultimately, loses the ability to real life.In the features of the story’s plot, one can see the transformation of the idyllic motifs of Zhukovsky’s works.Faced with reality, Piskarev loses his mind. Such a finale is correlated with the plots of ballads which were translated by Zhukovsky. In them evil tempts and lures the unfortunate victim into a trap, and then takes his / her life (“Der Taucher”, “Erlkönig”). Thus, beauty for Gogol is no longer a sign of good. He comes closer to understanding the true beauty and the false beauty of Zhukovsky’s balladeer, shows the fragility of harmony in the world.The novel “Portrait” is considered by some researchers as an aesthetic manifesto of Gogol. This also suggests following the traditions of Zhukovsky.In addition, the two-part structure of the story may refer to the architectonics of Zhukovsky’s story “The Twelve Sleeping Maidens”.Her two ballads “Gromoboi” and “Vadim” are also opposite in their ethics and have ideological similarities with Gogol’s story. In the work, one can also find plot echoes with such works of the poet as the ballads “Lyudmila” (Lyudmila’s grumbling at fate is similar to Chartkov’s behavior) and “Varvik” (the character’s sin also provokes the appearance of otherworldly forces, which is a kind of warning and test). It can also be mentioned that Zhukovsky’s rebel heroes, dissatisfied with their lot, as a rule, suffer a painful defeat and their soul goes to hell. Something similar is happening with Chartkov.As for the second part of the story, it also has common features with Zhukovsky’s manifesto “Raphael’s Madonna”, because Gogol’s icon painter creates a picture that literally “breathes” divine grace.In the story “The Overcoat”, humanistic and Christian motives are revealed. The main character does not expect a better fate, but humbly fulfills his official duties. Children’s enthusiasm and sincerity, coupled with a truly zealous service, turn him into a real ascetic. Bashmachkin’s purity and love for people, as well as his self-sacrifice, allow us to say that his behavior is akin to chivalry, which was characteristic of the main character of “Don Quixote of La Mancha”, the translator of which was Zhukovsky.However, having received “God’s mercy” in the form of a greatcoat, which could well personify a “beautiful lady”, Bashmachkin is no longer so zealously performing his service. The tragic ending of the work can be connected with this. Similar ethical laws apply in the art world of Zhukovsky. Nevertheless, after death, the official returns to true service: by returning in the form of a ghost (which is the image characteristic of Zhukovsky’s works) to a significant person and other high-ranking officials to pick up overcoats, he restores a certain balance in the world. Thus, the universal justice inherent in the artistic world of Zhukovsky is being actualized again.Conclusion. The “Petersburg period” of Gogol’s work is closely connected with Zhukovsky’s creative activity. Gogol gets acquainted with the poet’s lyrics and publicism, actively reflects on what he found in it. It is important to emphasize that Gogol directly assimilates the aesthetics and poetics of Zhukovsky, after which he reproduces certain aspects of the poet’s creativity in his works, subjecting them to his own creative processing, which in general contributed to the formation of the writer’s unique genius.

Journal of Environmental Biology is one of the leading international, interdisciplinary, open access and peer reviewed research journal that has been publishing research papers for over 40 years. The mission of the journal has been to keep scholars, academicians and scientists abreast of latest research. My first encounter with Journal of Environmental Biology was in the library of Indian Institute of Toxicology Research, Lucknow that I would frequently visit to explore different journals for collecting research material for my doctorate program, followed by submitting research papers for publication in journal, however, in my wildest dream I had never imagined that someday I would be working in JEB. My father's scientific background had a strong influence on me which inspired me to opt for science stream for taking research as a career. After enrolling for a doctorate program, once again I was lucky to work under a supervisor who encouraged her scholars to visit libraries and study journals before commencing for laboratory experiments. Further, my passion for reading also propelled me to visit different libraries of research institutes during free time. Although, Google was available for literature search, but full length research papers were not easily available as most journals were paid, this further compelled us to visit libraries for collecting literature. After completing my doctorate program, instead of taking up a conventional career, I got an opportunity to join the R&D Division of JEB as a scientist. This turned out to be a turning point of my career as again I was fortunate to work under Dr. R.C. Dalela, the Editor-in-chief of JEB who is a known academician and researcher of India. He has been a teacher, a guide, a mentor and also a torchbearer to innumerable students. His constant guidance, training, support, and gesture towards life and work has shaped my career. After working in JEB for over a decade, I feel privileged and proud to serve as an Editor of JEB, looking after the entire publication work. Over time the journal has also grown, transformed and established itself on the International platform. The rising popularity among the scientific community and the feedback received from researchers and Editorial Board Members has propelled us to expand our horizons. For the year 2022, I have made efforts to give a new and modified look to the journal. To begin with, I warm-heartedly welcome the new members of the Editorial Board, and thank them for accepting my invitation to join JEB Editorial Board-2022. Also, I deeply acknowledge the co-operation received from the serving members of the Editorial Board during the pandemic period in the smooth functioning of the journal affairs and their time to time suggestions for upgrading the journal's policies. The Editorial Board-2022 is robust, dynamic and diverse, constituting experts of varied fields. Further, the growing popularity of JEB can be witnessed by the e-mails we receive from the scientists to serve journal as EB members and reviewers. Quite often we have been receiving research articles from new emerging areas of Cancer Biology, Environment Toxicology and Health, Climate Change and Biodiversity, Conservation Biology, Nanoscience, and Wild Life Conservation. Looking into the interest of the researchers, we have included these new areas under the scope of the journal. This step would open new doors for researchers to submit their new innovative high-quality research work in JEB and also make JEB a top multidisciplinary journal. Looking into the flow of research articles we receive, the journal has introduced a new section “Theme Section” where research articles pertaining to a specific theme can be submitted. We invite research articles on the following theme: Regime Shift Ecology; Wildlife Conservation; Environmental Toxicants and Human Health; Nanotechnology and Environmental Protection; Rewilding lost ecosystem. On the basis of suggestions and ideas received from the Editorial Board Members, the journal has launched new sections: v Monographs v Book Review where authors and publishers can get their books reviewed and published in JEB. v Events: Announcements related to academic events such as conferences from academic institutions will be advertised on the journal's website. v Achievements: Academic achievements and awards of Editorial Board Members, Reviewers and Authors will be showcased on the journal's website. We further plan to encourage and motivate the research scholars and scientists for suitably awarding them for their outstanding contribution in the research field. The journal aims to provide leading services to the global research audience worldwide, which is well reflected in the Open Access facility of the journal. This facility is provided to the researchers, especially scholars so that the published research articles are readily available to them, free of charge, and also for rapid dissemination of research published in the journal publically. As an Editor of the journal, I encourage scholars to make maximal use of the Open Access facility of journals as this would significantly increase their knowledge and also make them aware of the latest research carried out worldwide. Laboratory studies are an integral part of the doctorate program, but reading and writing skill is equally essential for presenting the experimental output. Often, while evaluating the manuscripts for scientific content, I observe that the papers are rejected due to poor presentation despite strong scientific study. Therefore, I strongly suggest the supervisors to motivate their research scholars to take out some time and visit libraries to cultivate the habit of reading literature and also develop their writing skills. I believe this would positively improve the vocabulary, grammar, and of course ability to write a good research paper. There should be group discussion among the scholars and most important constant communication with their supervisor. Each day I come across several submissions in JEB, most of them are prepared and submitted by research scholars. Here, I would like to specify that JEB is not a platform for submitting Ph. D. work. Authors, especially supervisors should instruct their research scholars to first visit the website of the journal, read the Publication Policies and “Guidelines for Authors” of the journal. Before submitting their research articles, authors should strictly prepare their manuscript as per the Guidelines of the journal, and ensure manuscript for scientific merit, clarity, and correct English. Now onwards, all the manuscripts submitted for publication in JEB will be strictly scrutinized by the R&D Division before it is subjected to peer review. The peer-review system will be made more rigorous and meticulous. JEB strictly condemns plagiarism, therefore, manuscripts with plagiarized content will be outrightly rejected. These steps are being taken to save the time of Editorial staff and avoid delay in the processing of manuscripts. Editorial and Publication work requires immense hard work. It is not only a job but also a service. One has to be industrious, efficient, creative and competitive, and also derive pleasure from work. Fortunately, I and my team enjoy our work, abide by the norms of the organization and try to give our best services to the scientific society. It gives me and my team immense pleasure to release the January issue-2022 with a new look and content. I hope this issue would be of much relevance and interest to JEB readers. For further improvement, we welcome suggestions and feedback from our contributors and readers. “ I slept and dreamt that life was joy. I awoke and saw that life was service. I acted and behold, service was joy ” Rabindra Nath Tagore

This article focuses on dreaming and remembering as they relate to process, postulating creative writing as a form of dream-membering. I take an interest in what is going on in our brains, in creative practice, and have begun an exploratory pilot study that maps brain activity, in “real-time”, using Magnetoencephalography (MEG), while participants are engaged in a creative writing workshop (a partnership with Swinburne Neuroimaging). Reflecting upon my practice, across the development of a novel and a collection of short stories, I ponder the ramifications of deep, sensory imagining as it relates to stimulus-for and stimulus-in, in acts of narrative making – considering my engagement with the past, including pre-conscious memories and mental processes. I consider the neural conditions that are necessary for stimulus-induced activity, in my personal practice. Further, I give thought to the brain’s dreamlike capacity to trigger its own neuronal activity within the context of stimulus-induced creative acts. An analysis of processes of dream-membering involves an examination of experiential knowledge, as well as consideration of the relative realness of the narrative world. This leads to a dialogue about the theories of regression (in dreaming) and memory reconsolidation, as twin concepts that more fully explicate iterative processes in creative writing practice. My practice-led research focuses theories from neuropsychoanalysis, specifically the concept of ideasthesia or “sensing concepts” from neuroscience (Nikolić 2016, p. 2), as well as the “unthought known” from psychoanalysis (Bollas 2014, 2017). These theories underpin a process I call ideasthetic imagining. Reflecting upon the impact of my practice on my mind, and my mind’s eye on my practice, I extend previous discussion about ideasthetic imagining, deploying the concept of dream-membering – paying particular attention to the way I employ sensory imagining (informed by pre-conscious memories and mental processes).

This paper describes the process of making sense of the experience of Walking Threads, as mediated by the activities of writing and of drawing. It explicitly mobilises forms of imagination and inflections of consciousness which pertain to memory, dream and creative engagement.

Title(s): Sappho's Last Dream, The Stroke and After Words Leilani R. Hall is author of the poetry collection Swimming the Witch. Her poetry and essays have appeared in numerous journals, including the Laurel Review, the Cincinnati Review, North American Review, and the Mississippi Review. She teaches creative writing, poetics, and disability studies at California State University Northridge.

This essay explores dreams and dreaming with reference to Gaston Bachelard’s rather overlooked essay Water and Dreams (1941), where he defines two modes of imagination that are discrete but not disconnected. First is the formal mode that arises from emotions and sensations; next is the material mode, where images arise directly from matter: in this case, water. The phenomenological perspective he offers on water and its oneiric properties aligns very well with creative practice-led research – which, for us, comprises poetry (Jen Webb) and painting (Lorraine Webb). We explore Bachelard’s notion of dream, which departs from the conventional views to suggest a different way of understanding what dreaming might be for creative practitioners. This, the concept of waking dreams, provides one conceptual frame for the affordances of dream for creative practice. The second frame attends to the fragmentary, aleatory, and haphazard nature of living in the world, and this we draw from Bertrand Russell’s writing (1953), which incorporates both day and night dreams, and their poetic, allegorical qualities. We work through and around these two conceptual frames to reflect on the often confounding issue: how to be and to become, in a life that is both dream and concrete reality.

IntroductionDreams feature frequently in poetry as framing devices for lyrical and narrative content. By contrast, Thom Gunn’s poem “The Annihilation of Nothing” (1958) theorises how dream, through its relationship to the states of sleeping and waking up, serves the creative process of practising poets. To this extent, Gunn is a challenging fellow traveller in the dream-poetry tradition. “The Annihilation of Nothing” is usually categorised by critics as a philosophical poem informed by Existentialist notions. This article supplements such a reading by showing how the poem’s Existentialism is related specifically to the creative process of writing poetry. Theory about the practice of writing poetry is potentially to be found as much in poetry itself as in commentary about poetry. Ultimately, Gunn’s poem sutures its philosophical concerns to the understanding of the poet’s creative process first theorised by John Keats as Negative Capability. Gunn’s poem suggests an abstract and structural approach to the use of dream to write poetry, informed by Keatsian negativity, which exploits that creatively fertile moment when sleep transforms into the waking state. Sigmund Freud’s assertion that sleep is the essential condition of dream supports the idea that, for Gunn, sleep in itself may have the power of dream for the writing of poetry. “The Annihilation of Nothing” offers practical guidance, informed by theory and philosophy, to poets keen to insert themselves into the dream-poetry tradition. Bolstering the reading of “The Annihilation of Nothing”, my article also considers an instance of Gunn’s non-fiction writing on poetry and dreams, in which he links “a series of anxiety dreams” to the writing of his poem “Jack Straw’s Castle” (1976). Dream Poetry and Thom Gunn The literature on the relationship of poetry and dreaming is massive, multi-faceted, and deeply impacted by the movement of history. A.C. Spearing’s Medieval Dream-Poetry reminds us that the literary combination of poetry and dreaming is many centuries old (Spearing passim). Since the late nineteenth century, the theories of Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung have invited new ways of activating the interpretation and creation of dream poetry (Shafton passim). A more recent contribution to the field of dream-poetry studies is Night Errands: How Poets Use Dreams, which foregrounds the voices of contemporary American poets reflecting on matters of poetry and dreaming through the personal essay form (Townley passim). In his article “Dream Poetry as Dream Work”, Richard A. Russo observes that “poets use dreams in many different ways” (13). My article works from the premise that dream-poetry can be identified and discussed even when a poet does not explicitly identify as a dream poet. The Anglo-American poet Thom Gunn (1929-2004) is not usually thought of as a dream poet; still, in an interview conducted in 1977, he states that “I think everything significant that happens to me—whether it’s an event, an idea or a dream—gets into my poetry eventually” (Scobie 13; my emphasis). Nor, so far as I am aware, has Gunn’s 1958 poem “The Annihilation of Nothing” ever been interpreted as a dream poem (Gunn, “Annihilation” 4). Framing Gunn’s poetry as dream poetry is therefore an unusual move in the appreciation of his work, which by that very token seeds fresh opportunities to contribute to the ongoing scholarly and practice-based conversations about dream poetry in general. As I will show in what follows, Gunn’s method of using dreams is very different from that of most other poets. Rather than fixating on, and elaborating, the details of this or that particular dream, Gunn works at a more general level, to explore how dreams relate to the poetic creative process. For this article, I am particularly interested in exploring how the powerfully activated philosophical elements of “The Annihilation of Nothing” intersect with an engagement with the craft of poetry making as this is influenced, not only by dream itself, but by the sleeping, dreaming and waking routine of Gunn as a practising poet. Additionally, I will be arguing that—against the grain of most dream poetry—Gunn tends to work with dream as a structural principle of poetic creation. This is evident not only in “The Annihilation of Nothing” but in Gunn’s non-fiction writing about the 1976 poem “Jack Straw’s Castle” (Gunn, “Jack” 48-56). This is not, however, to privilege the non-fiction voice of the poet over the voice within their poetry, in matters of theory. As much as theory about the practice of writing poetry is to be found in commentary about poetry, it is also to be found, I suggest, in poetry itself. Ultimately, Gunn contributes as much to the tradition of the poetic strategy of Negative Capability, as first theorised by the poet John Keats (“Negative Capability”), as to the tradition of dream poetry. “The Annihilation of Nothing”, Existentialism and the Craft of Poetry Writing “The Annihilation of Nothing” is a relatively short poem, and my reading of it for this article necessarily assumes close working knowledge of its nuances and complexities (if not its paradoxes) in the reader. For these reasons, I am including the text of the poem here, in full: Nothing remained: Nothing, the wanton nameThat nightly I rehearsed till led awayTo a dark sleep, or sleep that held one dream.In this a huge contagious absence lay,More space than space, over the cloud and slime,Defined but by the encroachments of its sway.Stripped to indifference at the turns of time,Whose end I knew, I woke without desire,And welcomed zero as a paradigm.But now it breaks—images burst with fireInto the quiet sphere where I have bided,Showing the landscape holding yet entire:The power that I envisaged, that presidedUltimate in its abstract devastations,Is merely change, the atoms it dividedComplete, in ignorance, new combinations.Only an infinite finitude I seeIn those peculiar lovely variations.It is despair that nothing cannot beFlares in the mind and leaves a smoky markOf dread. Look upward. Neither firm nor free,Purposeless matter hovers in the dark. (Gunn, “Annihilation” 4) “The Annihilation of Nothing” has been categorised by literary critics as one of Gunn’s philosophical poems and it is generally interpreted using an Existentialist lens. B.J.C. Hinton, for example, states that the poem “is based on an existentialist problem and adopts its terminology” (131). Additionally, “the poem is based on the paradox that nothingness, itself often a subject of terror, is seen first as comforting and then as illusory. This fusing of philosophical inquiry and genuine passion is typical of Gunn at his best, and gives the poem great force” (Hinton 143-144). Curiously, I have not been able to locate any reading of Gunn’s poem that unpacks what is arguably the poem’s most obvious detail: that is, the narrator falls asleep, experiences “a dark sleep, or sleep that held one dream”, then wakes up. Hinton notes that the poem’s “very title is based on terms common in [Jean-Paul] Sartre’s L’Etre et le neant” (143) but he overlooks the fact that the poem’s key term, “nothing”, is part of the narrator’s method of falling asleep: “Nothing, the wanton name / That nightly I rehearsed till led away / To a dark sleep.” When the word (“wanton name”) has served its purpose and the narrator has fallen asleep, precisely “Nothing remained”; the word has been replaced by the state it describes. Such a pointed differentiation of the word and the state invites the reader to grapple with that most intriguing of concepts: nothingness as a something that is nothing. The last line of the first stanza deepens the poetic meaning of nothingness in Gunn’s hands. “To a dark sleep, or sleep that held one dream” suggests an equivalence between “sleep” and “dream”. The comma before the “or” implies that a “sleep that held one dream” is just another way of saying “a dark sleep,” while the notion of “one dream” strengthens this implication—one sleep and one dream coincide with each other in their matching singularity. Dream, Gunn seems to be suggesting, is what “darkens” sleep; all the same, sleep always already retains strong cultural associations with darkness, which suggests that the poet is actually more concerned to hollow out the concept of dream, as a marker of nothingness. Dream, in this reading, thus exists in an ambiguous overlap with the notion of sleep itself; within this overlap, furthermore, dream’s nothingness consists in its absorption into sleep. In other words, the Existentialist philosophy of the poem is activated as a dialogue between the concepts of a dream that is nothing—one reduced, as it were, to the status of mere (dream-less) sleep—and the freshly waking state of the narrator, which identifies the period when Sartrean being rushes in to replace dream-sleep nothingness. Being and nothingness are overlaid onto, and to an extent replaced by, the twin states of waking from sleep and of a dream that, far from being any dream in particular, is characterised only as “a dark sleep”. When the philosophical or Existentialist framework for the reading of “The Annihilation of Nothing” is nudged to one side, though not abandoned, and the dream and waking-from-sleep elements of the poem are given their appropriate weight in the interpretation of the poem, an affiliation with the tradition of dream poetry emerges. Certainly, Gunn’s poem exhibits features linked to Sartre’s philosophical preoccupations, but its Existentialist engagement, I suggest, is narrowed to a concern with the borderline between sleep and the waking state as the condition of a certain mode of poetic creation. In this lies the connection to the tradition of dream poetry, and the distinctiveness of Gunn’s intervention into that tradition. To this extent, “The Annihilation of Nothing” straddles philosophy and the craft of poetry writing. The discussion of dream in an abstract or philosophical sense is precisely what makes Gunn’s poem a practical resource for other poets, with their own dreams to transform into poetry. Poetic creation, for Gunn, relates to the activation of those energies present at the borderline of sleep and being awake. These energies, in turn, relate to the theory of Negative Capability. Negative Capability in “The Annihilation of Nothing” To continue to unpack Gunn’s lesson in poetry-making, I underscore how odd it is, in the first place, that Hinton links Gunn’s poem to a work of prose philosophy by Jean-Paul Sartre rather than to a more poetically cognate antecedent. A more appropriate companion text to Gunn’s poem than Sartre’s Existentialist masterpiece, I suggest, is the poetic strategy known as Negative Capability. The Glossary of Poetic Terms managed by the Poetry Foundation discusses Negative Capability in terms of “the artist’s access to truth without the pressure and framework of logic or science” and defines it, in part, as “the [poet’s] power to bury self-consciousness [and] dwell in a state of openness to all experience” (“Negative Capability”). The poet John Keats was, of course, the first to articulate the theory of Negative Capability (“Negative Capability”). What evidence is there that Negative Capability, rather than Existentialism, is a more relevant accompaniment to Gunn’s poem? Stanzas two and three describe the nothingness of a dream that is only “a dark sleep” through reference to “a huge contagious absence” and to the comment “And welcomed zero as a paradigm.” Notice what is happening here. The absence is deemed “contagious”, and a “paradigm” is usually defined as a typical example or pattern of something. What appears to be going on here is an attempt to show how creation is triggered by concepts aligned with negativity, such as absence and zero. Such concepts further align, like unconscious sleep itself, with Keats’s “[buried] self-consciousness”. In mirror image, the same pattern shows up later on in the poem. Whereas the first three stanzas of “The Annihilation of Nothing” detail the descent into sleep, dream and nothingness, the stanzas after the fourth stanza are all about the creation that occurs upon waking, at the end of dream, with the advent of what might be called (creative) somethingness. Crucially, this period of creation possesses an element that mirrors the “contagious absence” and “zero as a paradigm” gestures from earlier in the poem. Previously, nothingness was expressed as a prompt to creation (“contagious” and “a paradigm”); here, in a 180 degree switch, somethingness is only indirectly expressed by reference to its polar opposite. The key line is “It is despair that nothing cannot be.” Creation is shadowed by a sort of negative energy; it comes about only through the annihilation of nothing, or “in [self-?] ignorance”: “The power that I envisaged, that presided / Ultimate in its abstract devastations, / Is merely change, the atoms it divided / Complete, in ignorance, new combinations.” The negative with a positive charge has been replaced by the positive with a negative charge, twin movements which reassert Keats’s theory of poetic creation. Nothingness prompts the creation of somethingness while somethingness always retains its debt to nothingness. Negative Capability thus tarries between the lines of “The Annihilation of Nothing.” Creation simmers away even in the midst of nothingness and absence (in the early stages of the poem), without the support of self-consciousness. Reversing and reinforcing this, the activism of poetic creation (which is conventionally based in self-consciousness) is strangely inverted in the final sections of the poem, where the somethingness of poetic creation is figured merely as a by-product of the “despair that nothing cannot be.” In fine, Gunn’s poem transfigures Existentialism in such a way that it produces a new version of Keats’s theory of Negative Capability. And Gunn’s intervention is precisely a theoretical intervention, to the extent that it produces transferable knowledge, about the production of poetry, related to how the writing of poetry may be structured in relationship to the division—at heart Existentialist—between sleeping (configured in Gunn’s poem as a new form of dreaming) and creatively waking up. There is an interesting crossover here between Gunn’s poem and Freud’s idea from The Interpretation of Dreams that “at bottom dreams are nothing other than a particular form of thinking, made possible by the conditions of the state of sleep” (Freud 510, fn. 1; my emphasis second). As part of his contribution to a theory of the creative practice of poetry writing, Gunn draws out something not always given its due weight in Freudian theory: that is, the crucial if not essential connection between sleep and dream. It is this connection, I suggest, that Gunn sees as vital to the practice of writing poetry in the tradition of dream poetry. The moment of waking from sleep is when (dream-like) Negative Capability may be most fruitfully activated. Indeed, Gunn comes close to suggesting, in “The Annihilation of Nothing”, that whether one dreams or not is inconsequential, so long as one has—quite mysteriously—“a dark sleep.” The sleep state itself—necessarily accompanied by the waking from sleep—may possess the creative power of dream when it comes to the writing of poetry. “Jack Straw’s Castle” and Dream-Poetry Structure Further theoretical knowledge may be harvested from another moment in Gunn’s discourse, in which he responds to an interviewer’s question about the process of writing “Jack Straw’s Castle”. As suggested above, I do not see a distinction, and certainly not a hierarchy, between theory about poetry writing to be found within poetry itself and theory about poetry writing constructed within a non-fictional context, as in the interview containing this exchange: WS [W.I. Scobie]: Why are there so many references to rooms in your poetry—not only rooms, but dungeons, cellars, cells—confining spaces?…TG [Thom Gunn]: While I was writing Jack Straw’s Castle I was moving from a house I’d lived in for ten years into this place [Gunn’s house in San Francisco], and I had a series of anxiety dreams. I had moved into the wrong house. I had moved in with the wrong people. Once to my horror I found I was sharing an apartment with [Richard] Nixon. Very often I would keep discovering new rooms in the house that I’d known nothing about. All this became very much the scheme for the nightmare world of Jack Straw’s Castle. (Scobie 11; my emphasis) Gunn’s theoretical attitude to dream in this non-fiction commentary bears similarities, I suggest, to his theorisation of dream in “The Annihilation of Nothing”. Rather than stressing the content of his “anxiety dreams” (for example, individual houses or Richard Nixon), Gunn characteristically emphasises the structural aspect of dream. His choice of words is significant: Gunn’s dreams become a “scheme” for the production of poetry. Granted, the content of “Jack Straw’s Castle” does include many references to rooms and the like, but Gunn segues, in this interview extract, from content to form. Notably, in this context, “Jack Straw’s Castle” is divided into eleven sections, as if the poet (in writing the poem) and the reader (in reading it) were moving from one section to the next the way one moves from one room to the next. (It is perhaps no coincidence that Gunn’s best-known poem is entitled “On the Move”.) The Existentialist and person-focused structural approach to the writing of poetry of “The Annihilation of Nothing” is replaced here by a more formal type of structure. Conclusion This article has attempted to locate Thom Gunn within the tradition of dream poetry even as he challenges the mainstream of that tradition. His challenge lies in how he constructs dream as a structural prompt to the writing of poetry, in a way that departs from the more familiar dream-poetry approach of elaborating the lyrical or narrative content of this or that particular dream. Gunn is both a practitioner of dream poetry and also, in the footsteps of John Keats and others, a theorist of the writing of poetry. Theory about the practice of writing poetry is potentially to be found as much in poetry itself as in commentary about poetry. The main focus of the article has been Gunn’s poem “The Annihilation of Nothing”. My intent has not been to show that the Existentialist reading of this poem is wrong, so much as to show that it must be supplemented by attention to the poem’s concern with dreaming, sleeping and waking and, by extension, to the specific Existentialism of the practising writer of poetry. Read this way, the poem presents itself as a text in the tradition of Negative Capability. References Freud, Sigmund. The Interpretation of Dreams. New York: Basic Books, 2010. Gunn, Thom. “Jack Straw’s Castle.” Jack Straw’s Castle. London: Faber and Faber, 1976. 48-56. ———. “On the Move.” Poetry Foundation, 1957. 3 Feb. 2020 <https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/57037/on-the-move>. ———. “The Annihilation of Nothing.” Poetry 93.1 (Oct. 1958): 4. 3 Feb. 2020 <https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/browse?contentId=27820>. Hinton, B.J.C. The Poetry of Thom Gunn. M.A. thesis. Faculty of Arts, Birmingham University, 1975. 3 Feb. 2020 <https://etheses.bham.ac.uk/id/eprint/5366/1/Hinton1975MA.pdf>.“Negative Capability.” Glossary of Poetic Terms. Poetry Foundation, 2020. 3 Feb. 2020 <https://www.poetryfoundation.org/learn/glossary-terms/negative-capability>. Russo, Richard A. “Dream Poetry as Dream Work.” Dreaming 13.1 (Mar. 2003): 13-27. 3 Feb. 2020 <https://link.springer.com/article/10.1023/A:1022134200865>. Scobie, W.I. “Gunn in America.” London Magazine (Dec. 1977): 5-15. Shafton, Anthony. Dream Reader: Contemporary Approaches to the Understanding of Dreams. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995. Spearing, A.C. Medieval Dream-Poetry. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976. Townley, Roderick. Night Errands: How Poets Use Dreams. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1999.

This paper explores the dream-inspired poetry and video poetry of award-winning Brisbane poet Anna Jacobson. Jacobson’s surreal poetic narratives draw on memory, dreams, desires and destiny, using simple language and vivid imagery to evoke strong emotional responses. Her manner of exploring dreams in a number of poetic and narrative forms allows whimsical, gentle but also vigorous creative work of personal resilience and understanding. Her work is framed also by explorations of her Jewish culture and family and driven by unbridled imagination. In particular, the paper investigates Jacobson’s process of interweaving visions and memories for the purpose of tracing personal histories lost through periods of mental illness, exploring how she mines dreams for the purpose of writing and healing. It questions how her poetic process allows her to reclaim agency through unpacking experiences she wants to recover or further understand. Distilled from a series of interviews with the poet, the paper explores Jacobson’s interest in working at the cusp of different media and how this blend of the word and the visual image is particularly apt for dream exploration.

In the 2019 documentary Chasing Happiness, recording artist/musician Joe Jonas tells audiences that the band was “living the dream”. Similarly, in the 2012 documentary Artifact, lead singer Jared Leto remarks that at the height of Thirty Seconds to Mars’s success, they “were living the dream”. However, for both the Jonas Brothers and Thirty Seconds to Mars, their experiences of the music industry (much like other commercially successful recording artists) soon transformed into nightmares. Similar to other commercially successful recording artists, the Jonas Brothers and Thirty Seconds to Mars, came up against the constraints of the industry which inevitably led to a forfeiting of authenticity, a loss of creative control, increased exploitation, and unequal remuneration. This work will consider how working in the music industry is not always a dream come true and can instead be viewed as a proverbial nightmare. Living the DreamIn his book Dreams, Carl Gustav Jung discusses how that which is experienced in sleep, speaks of a person’s wishes: that which might be desired in reality but may not actually happen. In his earlier work, The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud argued that the dream is representative of fulfilling a repressed wish. However, the creative industries suggest that a dream need not be a repressed wish; it can become a reality. Jon Bon Jovi believes that his success in the music industry has surpassed his wildest dreams (Atkinson). Jennifer Lopez considers the fact that she held big dreams, had a focussed passion, and strong aspirations the reason why she pursued a creative career that took her out of the Bronx (Thomas). In a Twitter post from 23 April 2018, Bruno Mars declared that he “use [sic] to dream of this shit,” in referring to a picture of him performing for a sold out arena, while in 2019 Shawn Mendes informed his 24.4 million Twitter followers that his “life is a dream”. These are but a few examples of successful music industry artists who are seeing their ‘wishes’ come true and living the American Dream.Endemic to the American culture (and a characteristic of the identity of the country) is the “American Dream”. It centres on “a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for every man, with opportunity for each according to his ability and achievement” (Adams, 404). Although initially used to describe having a nice house, money, stability and a reasonable standard of living, the American Dream has since evolved to what the scholar Florida believes is the new ‘aspiration of people’: doing work that is enjoyable and relies on human creativity. At its core, the original American Dream required striving to meet individual goals, and was promoted as possible for anyone regardless of their cultural, socio-economic and political background (Samuel), because it encourages the celebrating of the self and personal uniqueness (Gamson). Florida’s conceptualisation of the New American dream, however, tends to emphasise obtaining success, fame and fortune in what Neff, Wissinger, and Zukin (310) consider “hot”, “creative” industries where “the jobs are cool”.Whether old or new, the American Dream has perpetuated and reinforced celebrity culture, with many of the young generation reporting that fame and fortune were their priorities, as they sought to emulate the success of their famous role models (Florida). The rag to riches stories of iconic recording artists can inevitably glorify and make appealing the struggle that permits achieving one’s dream, with celebrities offering young, aspiring creative people a means of identification for helping them to aspire to meet their dreams (Florida; Samuel). For example, a young Demi Lovato spoke of how she idolised and looked up to singer Beyonce Knowles, describing Knowles as a role model because of the way she carries herself (Tishgart). Similarly, American Idol winner Kelly Clarkson cited Aretha Franklin as her musical inspiration and the reason that she sings from a place deep within (Nilles). It is unsurprising then, that popular media has tended to portray artists working in the creative industries and being paid to follow their passions as “a much-vaunted career dream” (Duffy and Wissinger, 4656). Movies such as A Star Is Born (2018), The Coal Miner’s Daughter (1980), Dreamgirls (2006), Begin Again (2013) and La La Land (2016) exalt the perception that creativity, talent, sacrifice and determination will mean dreams come true (Nicolaou). In concert with the American dream is the drive among creative people pursuing creative success to achieve their dreams because of the perceived autonomy they will gain, the chance of self-actualisation and social rewards, and the opportunity to fulfil intrinsic motivations (Amabile; Auger and Woodman; Cohen). For these workers, the love of creation and the happiness that accompanies new discoveries (Csikszentmihalyi) can offset the tight budgets and timelines, precarious labour (Blair, Grey, and Randle; Hesmondhalgh and Baker), uncertain demand (Caves; Shultz), sacrifice of personal relationships (Eikhof and Haunschild), the demand for high quality products (Gil & Spiller), and the tense relationships with administrators (Bilton) which are known to plague these industries. In some cases, young, up and coming creative people overlook these pitfalls, instead romanticising creative careers as ideal and worthwhile. They willingly take on roles and cede control to big corporations to “realize their passions [and] uncover their personal talent” (Bill, 50). Of course, as Ursell argues in discussing television employees, such idealisation can mean creatives, especially those who are young and unfamiliar with the constraints of the industry, end up immersed in and victims of the “vampiric” industry that exploits workers (816). They are socialised towards believing, in this case, that the record label is a necessary component to obtain fame and fortune and whether willing or unwilling, creative workers become complicit in their own exploitation (Cohen). Loss of Control and No CompensationThe music industry itself has been considered by some to typify the cultural industries (Chambers). Popular music has potency in that it is perceived as speaking a universal language (Burnett), engaging the emotions and thoughts of listeners, and assisting in their identity construction (Burnett; Gardikiotis and Baltzis). Given the place of music within society, it is not surprising that in 2018, the global music industry was worth US$19.1billion (IFPI). The music industry is necessarily underpinned by a commercial agenda. At present, six major recording companies exist and between them, they own between 70-80 per cent of the recordings produced globally (Konsor). They also act as gatekeepers, setting trends by defining what and who is worth following and listening to (Csikszentmihalyi; Jones, Anand, and Alvarez). In essence, to be successful in the music industry is to be affiliated with a record label. This is because the highly competitive nature and cluttered environment makes it harder to gain traction in the market without worthwhile representation (Moiso and Rockman). In the 2012 documentary about Thirty Seconds to Mars, Artifact, front man Jared Leto even questions whether it is possible to have “success without a label”. The recording company, he determines, “deal with the crappy jobs”. In a financially uncertain industry that makes money from subjective or experience-based goods (Caves), having a label affords an artist access to “economic capital for production and promotion” that enables “wider recognition” of creative work (Scott, 239). With the support of a record label, creative entrepreneurs are given the chance to be promoted and distributed in the creative marketplace (Scott; Shultz). To have a record label, then, is to be perceived as legitimate and credible (Shultz).However, the commercial music industry is just that, commercial. Accordingly, the desire to make money can see the intrinsic desires of musicians forfeited in favour of standardised products and a lack of remuneration for artists (Negus). To see this standardisation in practice, one need not look further than those contestants appearing on shows such as American Idol or The Voice. Nowhere is the standardisation of the music industry more evident than in Holmes’s 2004 article on Pop Idol. Pop Idol first aired in Britain from 2001-2003 and paved the way for a slew of similar shows around the world such as Australia’s Popstars Live in 2004 and the global Idol phenomena. According to Holmes, audiences are divested of the illusion of talent and stardom when they witness the obvious manufacturing of musical talent. The contestants receive training, are dressed according to a prescribed image, and the show emphasises those melodramatic moments that are commercially enticing to audiences. Her sentiments suggest these shows emphasise the artifice of the music industry by undermining artistic authenticity in favour of generating celebrities. The standardisation is typified in the post Idol careers of Kelly Clarkson and Adam Lambert. Kelly Clarkson parted with the recording company RCA when her manager and producer Clive Davis told her that her album My December (2007) was “not commercial enough” and that Clarkson, who had written most of the songs, was a “shitty writer… who should just shut up and sing” (Nied). Adam Lambert left RCA because they wanted him to make a full length 80s album comprised of covers. Lambert commented that, “while there are lots of great songs from that decade, my heart is simply not in doing a covers album” (Lee). In these instances, winning the show and signing contracts led to both Clarkson and Lambert forfeiting a degree of creative control over their work in favour of formulaic songs that ultimately left both artists unsatisfied. The standardisation and lack of remuneration is notable when signing recording artists to 360° contracts. These 360° contracts have become commonplace in the music industry (Gulchardaz, Bach, and Penin) and see both the material and immaterial labour (such as personal identities) of recording artists become controlled by record labels (Stahl and Meier). These labels determine the aesthetics of the musicians as well as where and how frequently they tour. Furthermore, the labels become owners of any intellectual property generated by an artist during the tenure of the contract (Sanders; Stahl and Meier). For example, in their documentary Show Em What You’re Made Of (2015), the Backstreet Boys lament their affiliation with manager Lou Pearlman. Not only did Pearlman manufacture the group in a way that prevented creative exploration by the members (Sanders), but he withheld profits to the point that the Backstreet Boys had to sue Pearlman in order to gain access to money they deserved. In 2002 the members of the Backstreet Boys had stated that “it wasn’t our destinies that we had to worry about in the past, it was our souls” (Sanders, 541). They were not writing their own music, which came across in the documentary Show Em What You’re Made Of when singer Howie Dorough demanded that if they were to collaborate as a group again in 2013, that everything was to be produced, managed and created by the five group members. Such a demand speaks to creative individuals being tied to their work both personally and emotionally (Bain). The angst encountered by music artists also signals the identity dissonance and conflict felt when they are betraying their true or authentic creative selves (Ashforth and Mael; Ashforth and Humphrey). Performing and abiding by the rules and regulations of others led to frustration because the members felt they were “being passed off as something we aren’t” (Sanders 539). The Backstreet Boys were not the only musicians who were intensely controlled and not adequately compensated by Pearlman. In the documentary The Boy Band Con: The Lou Pearlman Story 2019, Lance Bass of N*Sync and recording artist Aaron Carter admitted that the experience of working with Pearlman became a nightmare when they too, were receiving cheques that were so small that Bass describes them as making his heart sink. For these groups, the dream of making music was undone by contracts that stifled creativity and paid a pittance.In a similar vein, Thirty Seconds to Mars sought to cut ties with their record label when they felt that they were not being adequately compensated for their work. In retaliation EMI issued Mars with a US$30 million lawsuit for breach of contract. The tense renegotiations that followed took a toll on the creative drive of the group. At one point in the documentary Artifact (2012), Leto claims “I can’t sing it right now… You couldn’t pay me all the money in the world to sing this song the way it needs to be sung right now. I’m not ready”. The contract subordination (Phillips; Stahl and Meier) that had led to the need to renegotiate financial terms came at not only a financial cost to the band, but also a physical and emotional one. The negativity impacted the development of the songs for the new album. To make music requires evoking necessary and appropriate emotions in the recording studio (Wood, Duffy, and Smith), so Leto being unable to deliver the song proved problematic. Essentially, the stress of the lawsuit and negotiations damaged the motivation of the band (Amabile; Elsbach and Hargadon; Hallowell) and interfered with their creative approach, which could have produced standardised and poor quality work (Farr and Ford). The dream of making music was almost lost because of the EMI lawsuit. Young creatives often lack bargaining power when entering into contracts with corporations, which can prove disadvantaging when it comes to retaining control over their lives (Phillips; Stahl and Meier). Singer Demi Lovato’s big break came in the 2008 Disney film Camp Rock. As her then manager Phil McIntyre states in the documentary Simply Complicated (2017), Camp Rock was “perceived as the vehicle to becoming a superstar … overnight she became a household name”. However, as “authentic and believable” as Lovato’s edginess appeared, the speed with which her success came took a toll on Lovato. The pressure she experienced having to tour, write songs that were approved by others, star in Disney channel shows and movies, and look a certain way, became too much and to compensate, Lovato engaged in regular drug use to feel free. Accordingly, she developed a hybrid identity to ensure that the squeaky clean image required by the moral clauses of her contract, was not tarnished by her out-of-control lifestyle. The nightmare came from becoming famous at a young age and not being able to handle the expectations that accompanied it, coupled with a stringent contract that exploited her creative talent. Lovato’s is not a unique story. Research has found that musicians are more inclined than those in other workforces to use psychotherapy and psychotropic drugs (Vaag, Bjørngaard, and Bjerkeset) and that fame and money can provide musicians more opportunities to take risks, including drug-use that leads to mortality (Bellis, Hughes, Sharples, Hennell, and Hardcastle). For Lovato, living the dream at a young age ultimately became overwhelming with drugs her only means of escape. AuthenticityThe challenges then for music artists is that the dream of pursuing music can come at the cost of a musician’s authentic self. According to Hughes, “to be authentic is to be in some sense real and true to something ... It is not simply an imitation, but it is sincere, real, true, and original expression of its creator, and is believable or credible representations or example of what it appears to be” (190). For Nick Jonas of the Jonas Brothers, being in the spotlight and abiding by the demands of Disney was “non-stop” and prevented his personal and musical growth (Chasing Happiness). As Kevin Jonas put it, Nick “wanted the Jonas Brothers to be no more”. The extensive promotion that accompanies success and fame, which is designed to drive celebrity culture and financial motivations (Currid-Halkett and Scott; King), can lead to cynical performances and dissatisfaction (Hughes) if the identity work of the creative creates a disjoin between their perceived self and aspirational self (Beech, Gilmore, Cochrane, and Greig). Promoting the band (and having to film a television show and movies he was not invested in all because of contractual obligations) impacted on Nick’s authentic self to the point that the Jonas Brothers made him feel deeply upset and anxious. For Nick, being stifled creatively led to feeling inauthentic, thereby resulting in the demise of the band as his only recourse.In her documentary Gaga: Five Foot Two (2017), Lady Gaga discusses the extent she had to go to maintain a sense of authenticity in response to producer control. As she puts it, “when producers wanted me to be sexy, I always put some absurd spin on it, that made me feel like I was still in control”. Her words reaffirm the perception amongst scholars (Currid-Halkett and Scott; King; Meyers) that in playing the information game, industry leaders will construct an artist’s persona in ways that are most beneficial for, in this case, the record label. That will mean, for example, establishing a coherent life story for musicians that endears them to audiences and engaging recording artists in co-branding opportunities to raise their profile and to legitimise them in the marketplace. Such behaviour can potentially influence the preferences and purchases of audiences and fans, can create favourability, originality and clarity around artists (Loroz and Braig), and can establish competitive advantage that leads to producers being able to charge higher prices for the artists’ work (Hernando and Campo). But what impact does that have on the musician? Lady Gaga could not continue living someone else’s dream. She found herself needing to make changes in order to avoid quitting music altogether. As Gaga told a class of university students at the Emotion Revolution Summit hosted by Yale University:I don’t like being used to make people money. It feels sad when I am overworked and that I have just become a money-making machine and that my passion and creativity take a backseat. That makes me unhappy.According to Eikof and Haunschild, economic necessity can threaten creative motivation. Gaga’s reaction to the commercial demands of the music industry signal an identity conflict because her desire to create, clashed with the need to be commercial, with the outcome imposing “inconsistent demands upon” her (Ashforth and Mael, 29). Therefore, to reduce what could be considered feelings of dissonance and inconsistency (Ashforth and Mael; Ashforth and Humphrey) Gaga started saying “no” to prevent further loss of her identity and sense of authentic self. Taking back control could be seen as a means of reorienting her dream and overcoming what had become dissatisfaction with the commercial processes of the music industry. ConclusionsFor many creatives working in the creative industries – and specifically the music industry – is constructed as a dream come true; the working conditions and expectations experienced by recording artists are far from liberating and instead can become nightmares to which they want to escape. The case studies above, although likely ‘constructed’ retellings of the unfortunate circumstances encountered working in the music industry, nevertheless offer an inside account that contradicts the prevailing ideology that pursuing creative passions leads to a dream career (Florida; Samuel). If anything, the case studies explored above involving 30 Seconds to Mars, the Jonas Brothers, Lady Gaga, Kelly Clarkson, Adam Lambert and the Backstreet Boys, acknowledge what many scholars writing in the creative industries have already identified; that exploitation, subordination, identity conflict and loss of control are the unspoken or lesser known consequences of pursuing the creative dream. That said, the conundrum for creatives is that for success in the industry big “creative” businesses, such as recording labels, are still considered necessary in order to break into the market and to have prolonged success. This is simply because their resources far exceed those at the disposal of independent and up-and-coming creative entrepreneurs. Therefore, it can be argued that this friction of need between creative industry business versus artists will be on-going leading to more of these ‘dream to nightmare’ stories. The struggle will continue manifesting in the relationship between business and artist for long as the recording artists fight for greater equality, independence of creativity and respect for their work, image and identities. References@BrunoMars. “I use to dream about this shit!! #stilldreamin.” Twitter, 23 Apr. 2018, 00:31. <https://twitter.com/brunomars/status/988319530698059776?lang=en>.@ShawnMendes. “My life is a dream.” Twitter, 21 July 2019, 12:46. <https://twitter.com/shawnmendes/status/1153028603573145601?lang=en>.Adams, James Truslow. The Epic of America. New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 2012 [1931].Amabile, Teresa M. “Motivating Creativity in Organizations: On Doing What You Love and Loving What You Do.” California Management Review 40.1 (1997): 39-58.Artifact. Dir. J. Leto. Paradox, 2012.Ashforth, Blake E., and Ronald H. Humphrey. “Emotional Labor in Service Roles: The Influence of Identity.” The Academy of Management Review 18.1 (1993): 88-115.Ashforth, Blake E., and Fred Mael. “Social Identity Theory and the Organization.” Academy of Management Review 14.1 (1989): 20-39.Atkinson, Brian T. “Jon Bon Jovi Talks about Sambora, Songwriting and Living the Dream.” Statesman 8 Apr. 2013. 15 Sep. 2019 <https://www.statesman.com/article/20130408/NEWS/304089715>.Auger, Pascale, and Richard W. Woodman. “Creativity and Intrinsic Motivation: Exploring a Complex Relationship.” The Journal of Applied Behavioral Science 52.3 (2016): 342-366.Backstreet Boys: Show ‘Em What You’re Made Of. Dir. S. Kijak. Pulse Films, 2015.Bain, Alison. “Constructing an Artistic Identity.” Work, Employment and Society 19.1 (2005): 25-46.Beech, Nic, Charlotte Gilmore, Eilidh Cochrane, and Gail Greig. “Identity Work as a Response to Tensions: A Re-Narration in Opera Rehearsals.” Scandinavian Journal of Management 28.1 (2012): 39-47.Bellis, Mark A, Karen Hughes, Olivia Sharples, Tom Hennell, and Katherine A. Hardcastle. “Dying to Be Famous: Retrospective Cohort of Rock and Pop Star Mortality and Its Association with Adverse Childhood Experiences.” BMJ 2.6 (2012): 1-8. Bill, Amanda. “’Blood, Sweat and Shears’: Happiness, Creativity, and Fashion Education.” Fashion Theory 16.1 (2012): 49-66. Bilton, Chris. Management and Creativity: From Creative Industries to Creative Management. Malden: Blackwell, 2007.Blair, Helen, Susan Grey, and Keith Randle. “Working in Film: Employment in a Project Based Industry.” Personnel Review 30.2 (2001): 170-185.Burnett, Robert. The Global Jukebox: The International Music Industry. London: Routledge, 1996.Caves, Richard, E. Creative Industries: Contracts between Art and Commerce. Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2001. Chambers, Iain. “Some Critical Tracks.” Popular Music 2 (1982): 19-36.Chasing Happiness. Dir. J. Taylor. Amazon, 2019. Cohen, Nicole, S. “Cultural Work as a Site of Struggle: Freelancers and Exploitation.” TripleC 10.2 (2012): 141-155.Currid-Halkett, Elizabet, and Allen J. Scott. “The Geography of Celebrity and Glamour: Reflections on Economy, Culture, and Desire in the City.” City, Culture and Society 4.1 (2013): 2-11.Duffy, Brooke Erin, and Elizabeth Wissinger. “Mythologies of Creative Work in the Social Media Age: Fun, Free, and ‘Just Being Me’.” International Journal of Communication 11 (2017): 4652-4671.Eikof, Doris Ruth, and Axel Haunschild. “Lifestyle Meets Market: Bohemian Entrepreneurs in Creative Industries.” Creativity and Innovation Management 15.3 (2006): 234-241.Elsbach, Kimberly D. and Andrew B. Hargadon. “Enhancing Creativity through ‘Mindless’ Work: A Framework of Workday Design.” Organization Science 17.4 (2006): 470-483.Farr, James L., and Cameron M. Ford. “Individual Innovation.” Innovation and Creativity at Work: Psychological and Organizational Strategies. Eds. Michael A. West and James L. Farr. London: Wiley, 1990. 63-80.Florida, Richard. “The New American Dream.” The Washington Monthly 35.3 (2003): 26-33Freud, Sigmund. The Interpretation of Dreams. Trans. A.A. Brill. Dover Publications, 2015.Gaga: Five Foot Two. Dir. C. Moukarbel, Netflix, 2017.Gamson, Joshua. Claims to Fame: Celebrity in Contemporary America. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992.Gardikiotis, Antonis, and Alexandros Baltzis. “’Rock Music for Myself and Justice to the World!’ Musical Identity, Values, and Music Preferences.” Psychology of Music 40.2 (2011): 143-163.Guichardaz, Rémy, Laurent Bach, and Julien Penin. “Music Industry Intermediation in the Digital Era and the Resilience of the Majors’ Oligopoly: The Role of Transactional Capability.” Industry and Innovation 26.7 (2019): 843-869.Hallowell, Edward M. “Overloaded Circuits: Why Smart People Underperform.” Harvard Business Review Jan. 2005. 17 Sep. 2019 <https://addmindfulness.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/Hallowell-HBR-Overloaded-Circuits.pdf>.Hesmondhalgh, David, and Sarah Baker. “A Very Complicated Version of Freedom: Conditions and Experiences of Creative Labour in Three Cultural Industries.” Poetics 38 (2010): 4-20.Hernando, Elisa, and Sara Campo. “Does the Artist’s Name Influence the Perceived Value of an Art Work?” International Journal of Arts Management 19.2 (2017): 46-58.Holmes, Su. “’Reality Goes Pop!’ Reality TV, Popular Music, and Narratives of Stardom in Pop Idol.” Television & New Media 5.2 (2004) 147-172.Hughes, Michael. “Country Music as Impression Management: A Meditation on Fabricating Authenticity.” Poetics 28 (2000): 185-205.IFPI. “Global Recorded Music Sales.” 18 Oct. 2019 <https://www.ifpi.org/global-statistics.php>.Jones, Candace, N. Anand, and Josè Luis Alvarez. “Manufactured Authenticity and Creative Voice in Cultural Industries.” Journal of Management Studies 42.5 (2005): 893-899.Jung, Carl Gustav. Dreams. Trans. Richard Francis Carrington Hull. Routledge, 2002.King, Barry. “Stardom, Celebrity, and the Money Form.” The Velvet Light Trap 65.1 (2010): 7-19.Konsor, Kellie J. Essays on the Industrial Organization of the Modern Music Industry. PhD dissertation. Purdue University, 2017. Lee, Christina. “Adam Lambert Parts Ways with RCA, Says ‘My Heart Is Simply Not in Doing a Covers Album.” Idolator 13 July 2013. 15 Sep. 2019 <https://www.idolator.com/7470764/adam-lambert-covers-album-parts-ways-with-rca?chrome=1>.Loroz, Peggy Sue, and Bridgette M. Braig. “Consumer Attachments to Human Brands: The ‘Oprah Effect.’” Connections 32.7 (2015): 751-763.Meyers, Erin. “’Can You Handle My Truth?’: Authenticity and the Celebrity Star Image.” Journal of Popular Culture 42.5 (2009): 890-907. Moisio, Laura, and Maija Rökman. “Musician’s Fans’ and Record Company’s Value Co-Creation in Internet.” Paper presented at The 2011 Naples Forum on Service. University Federico II, Capri, Italy, 14-17 June 2011.Neff, Gina, Elizabeth Wissing, and Sharon Zukin. “Entrepreneurial Labor among Cultural Producers: ‘Cool’ Jobs in ‘Hot’ Industries.” Social Semiotics 15.3 (2005): 307-334.Negus, Keith. “Where the Mystical Meets the Market: Creativity and Commerce in the Production of Popular Music.” The Sociological Review 43.2 (1995): 316-341.Nicolaou, Elena. “Fallen in Love with A Star Is Born? Watch These Movies Next.” Refinery29 17 Oct. 2018. 14 Sep. 2019 <https://www.refinery29.com/en-gb/2018/10/214287/movies-about-hollywood-showbiz#slide-13>.Nied, Michael. “Kelly Clarkson Freed from American Idol Contract.” PPCORN. 15 Sep. 2019 <http://ppcorn.com/us/kelly-clarkson-freed-from-american-idol-contract/>.Nilles, Billy. “How Aretha Franklin Inspired Kelly Clarkson, Jennifer Hudson and More Stars.” ENews 16 Aug. 2018. 19 Sep. 2019 <https://www.eonline.com/news/960776/how-aretha-franklin-inspired-kelly-clarkson-jennifer-hudson-and-more-stars>.Phillips, Ronnie J. Rock and Roll Fantasy? The Reality of Going from Garage Band to Superstardom. Colorado: Springer, 2013. Samuel, Lawrence, R. The American Dream: A Cultural History. New York: Syracuse UP, 2012.Sanders, Maria A. “Singing Machines: Boy Bands and the Struggle for Artistic Legitimacy.” 20 Cardozo Arts & Entertainment Law Journal 3 (2002): 525-588Scott, Michael. “Cultural Entrepreneurs, Cultural Entrepreneurship: Music Producers Mobilising and Converting Bourdieu’s Alternative Capitals.” Poetics 40 (2012): 237-255Shultz, Benjamin. “The Work behind the Scenes: The New Intermediaries of the Indie Crafts Business.” Regional Studies 49.3 (2015): 451-460.Simply Complicated. Dir. H.L. Davis. Philymack Productions, 2017,Stahl, Matt, and Leslie Meier. “The Firm Foundation of Organizational Flexibility: The 360 Contract in the Digitalizing Music Industry.” Canadian Journal of Communication 37.3 (2012): 441-458.The Boy Band Con: The Lou Pearlman Story. Dir. A. Kunkel. 1620 Media, 2019.Thomas, George M. “’Maid’ for Fame: J. Lo Living a Dream.” Chicago Tribune 12 Dec. 2002. 15 Sep. 2019 <https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-2002-12-12-0212120189-story.html>.Tishgart, Sierra. “Demi Lovato on Launching Secret’s Anti-Bullying Campaign.” TeenVogue 17 Oct. 2012. 19 Sep. 2019 <https://www.teenvogue.com/story/demi-lovato-secret-anti-bullying>.Ursell, Gillian. “Television Production: Issues of Exploitation, Commodification and Subjectivity in UK Television Labour Markets.” Media, Culture & Society 22.6 (2000): 805-825.Vaag, Jonas, Johan Håkon Bjørngaard, and Ottar Bjerkeset. “Use of Psychotherapy and Psychotropic Medication among Norwegian Musicians Compared to the General Workforce.” Psychology of Music 44.6 (2016): 1439-1453. Wood, Nichola, Michelle Duffy, and Susan J. Smith. “The Art of Doing (Geographies of) Music.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 25.5 (2007): 867-889.Yale University. “Lady Gaga Emotion Revolution Summit 2015.” YouTube, 12 Nov. 2015. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=so2nDTZQmCo>.

Introduction This article presents the trans-disciplinary encounters with and perspectives on embodiment of three creative-arts practitioners within the Deakin University research project Flows & Catchments. The project explores how creative arts participate in community and the possibility of well-being. We discuss our preparations for creative work exhibited at the 2012 Lake Bolac Eel Festival in regional Western Victoria, Australia. This festival provided a fertile time-place-space context through which to meet with one regional community and engage with scales of geological and historical time (volcanoes, water flows, first contact), human and animal roots and routes (settlement, eel migrations, hunting and gathering), and cultural heritage (the eel stone traps used by indigenous people, settler stonewalling, indigenous language recovery). It also allowed us to learn from how a festival brings to the surface these scales of time, place and space. All these scales also require an embodied response—a physical relation to the land and to the people of a community—which involves how specific interests and ways of engaging coordinate experience and accentuate particular connections of material to cultural patterns of activity. The focus of our interest in “embody” and embodiment relates to the way in which the term constantly slides from metaphor (figural connection) to description (literal process). Our research question, therefore, addresses the specific interaction of these two tendencies. Rather than eliminate one in preference to the other, it is the interaction and movement from one to the other that an approach through creative-arts practices makes visible. The visibility of these tendencies and the mechanisms to which they are linked (media, organising principle or relational aesthetic) are highlighted by the particular time-place-space modalities that each of the creative arts deploys. When looking across different creative practices, the attachments and elisions become more fine-grained and clearer. A key aim of practice-led research is to observe, study and learn, but also to transform the production of meaning and its relationship to the community of users (Barrett and Bolt). The opportunity to work collaboratively with a community like the one at Lake Bolac provided an occasion to gauge our discerning and initiating skills within creative-arts research and to test the argument that the combination of our different approaches adds to community and individual well-being. Our approach is informed by Gilles Deleuze’s ethical proposition that the health of a community is directly influenced by the richness of the composition of its parts. With this in mind, each creative-arts practitioner will emphasize their encounter with an element of community. Zones of Practice–Drawing Together (Jondi Keane) Galleries are strange in-between places, both destinations and non-sites momentarily outside of history and place. The Lake Bolac Memorial Hall, however, retains its character of place, participating in the history of memorial halls through events such as the Eel Festival. The drawing project “Stone Soup” emphasizes the idea of encounter (O’Sullivan), particularly the interactions of sensibilities shaped by a land, a history and an orientation that comprise an affective field. The artist’s brief in this situation—the encounter as the rupture of habitual modes of being (O’Sullivan 1)—provides a platform of relations to be filled with embodied experience that connects the interests, actions and observations produced outside the gallery to the amplified and dilated experience presented within the gallery. My work suggests that person-to person in-situ encounters intensify the movement across embodied ways of knowing. “Stone Soup”. Photograph by Daniel Armstrong.Arts practice and practice-led research makes available the spectrum of embodied engagements that are mixed to varying degrees with the conceptual positioning of material, both social and cultural. The exhibition and workshop I engaged with at the Eel Festival focused on three level of attention: memory (highly personal), affection (intra-personal) and exchange (communal, non-individual). Attention, the cognitive activity of directing and guiding perception, observation and interpretation, is the thread that binds body to environment, body to history, and body to the constructs of person, family and community. Jean-Jacques Lecercle observes that, for Deleuze, “not only is the philosopher in possession of a specific techne, essential to the well-being of the community, a techne the practice of which demands the use of specialized tools, but he makes his own tools: a system of concepts is a box of tools” (Lecercle 100). This notion is further enhanced when informed by enactive theories of cognition in which, “bodily practices including gesture are part of the activity in which concepts are formed” (Hutchins 429) Creative practices highlight the role of the body in the delicate interaction between a conceptually shaped gallery “space” and the communally constructed meeting “place.” My part of the exhibition consisted of a series of drawings/diagrams characterized under the umbrella of “making stone soup.” The notion of making stone soup is taken from folk tales about travelers in search of food who invent the idea of a magical stone soup to induce cooperation by asking local residents to garnish the “magical” stone soup with local produce. Other forms of the folk tale from around the world include nail soup, button soup and axe soup. Participants were able to choose from three different types of soup (communal drawing) that they would like to help produce. When a drawing was completed another one could be started. The mix of ideas and images constituted the soup. Three types of soup were on offer and required assistance to make: Stone soup–communal drawing of what people like to eat, particularly earth-grown produce; what they would bring to a community event and how they associate these foods with the local identity. Axe soup–communal drawing of places and spaces important to the participants because of connection to the land, to events and/or people. These might include floor plans, scenes of rooms or views, or memories of places that mix with the felt importance of spaces.Heirloom soup–communal drawing of important objects associated with particular persons. The drawings were given to the festival organizer to exhibit at the following year’s festival. "Story Telling”. Photograph by Daniel Armstrong.Drawing in: Like taking a breath, the act of drawing and putting one’s thought and affections into words or pictures is focused through the sensation of the drawing materials, the size of the paper, and the way one orients oneself to the paper and the activity. These pre-drawing dispositions set up the way a conversation might occur and what the tenor of that exchange may bring. By asking participants to focus on three types of attachments or attentions and contributing to a collective drawing, the onus on art skills or poignancy is diminished, and the feeling of turning inward to access feeling and memory turns outward towards inscription and cooperation. Drawing out: Like exhaling around vowels and consonants, the movement of the hand with brush and ink or pen and ink across a piece of paper follows our patterns of engagement, the embodied experience consistent with all our other daily activities. We each have a way of orchestrating the sequence of movements that constitute an image-story. The maker of stone soup must provide a new encounter, a platform for cooperation. I found that drawing alongside the participants, talking to them, inscribing and witnessing their stories in this way, heightened the collective activity and produced a new affective field of common experience. In this instance the stone soup became the medium for an emergent composition of relations. Zones of Practice–Embodying Photographic Space (Rozalind Drummond) Photography inevitably entails a certain characterization of reality. From being “out there” the world comes to be “inside” photographs—a visual sliver, a grab, and an upload, a perpetual tumble cycle of extruded images existing everywhere yet nowhere. While the outside, the “out there” is brought within the frame of the photograph, I am interested rather in looking, through the viewfinder, to spaces that work the other way, which suggest the potential to locate a “non-space”—where the inside suggests an outside or empty space. Thus, the photograph becomes disembodied to reveal space. I consider embodiment as the trace of other embodiments that frame the subject. Mark Auge’s conception of “non-places” seems apt here. He writes about non-places as those that are lived or passed through on the way to some place else, an accumulation of spaces that can be understood and named (94). These are spaces that can be defined in everyday terms as places with which we are familiar, places in which the real erupts: a borderline separating the outside from the inside, temporary spaces that can exist for the camera. The viewer may well peer in and look for everything that appears to have been left out. Thus, the photograph becomes a recollection of what Roland Barthes calls “a disruption in the topography”—we imagine a “beyond” that evokes a sense of melancholy or of irrevocably sliding toward it (238). How then could the individual embody such a space? The groups of photographs of Lake Bolac are spread out on a table. I play some music awhile, Glenn Gould, whose performing embodies what, to me, represents such humanity. Hear him breathing? It is Prelude and Fugue No. 16 in G Minor by Bach, on vinyl; music becomes a tangible and physical presence. When we close our eyes, our ears determine a sound’s location in a room; we map out a space, by listening, and can create a measureable dimension to sound. Walking about the territory of a living room, in suburban Melbourne, I consider too a small but vital clue: that while scrutinizing these details of a photographic image on paper, simultaneously I am returning to a small town in the Western District of Victoria. In the fluid act of looking at images in a house in Melbourne, I am now also walking down a road to Lake Bolac and can hear the incidental sounds of the environment—birdcalls and human voices—elements that inhabit and embody space: a borderline, alongside the photographs. What is imprinted in actual time, what is fundamental, is that the space of a photograph is actually devoid of sound and that I am still standing in a living room in Melbourne. In Against Architecture, Denis Hollier states of Bataille, “he wrote of the psychological power of space as a fluid, boundary effacing, always displaced and displacing medium. The non-spaces of cities and towns are locations where it is possible to be lost in a collective space, a progression of thoroughfares that are transitional, delivering the individual from one point and place to another—stairwells, laneways and roadsides—a constellation of streets….” (Hollier 79). Though photographs are sound-less, sound gives access to the outside of the image. “Untitled”. Photograph by Rozalind Drummond from “Stay with me here.” 2012 Type C Digital Print. Is there an outline of an image here? The enlargement of a snapshot of a photograph does not simply render what in any case was visible, though unclear. What is the viewer to look for in this photograph? Upon closer inspection a young woman stands to the right within the frame—she wears a school uniform; the pattern of the garment can be seen and read distinctly. In the detail it is finely striped, with a dark hue of blue, on a paler background, and the wearer’s body is imprinted upon the clothing, which receives the body’s details and impressions. The dress has a fold or pleat at the back; the distinct lines and patterns are reminiscent of a map, or an incidental grid. Here, the leitmotif of worn clothing is a poetic one. The young woman wears her hair piled, vertiginous, in a loosely constructed yet considered fashion; she stands assured, looking away and looking forward, within the compositional frame. The camera offers a momentary pause. This is our view. Our eye is directed to look further away past the figure, and the map of her clothing, to a long hallway in the school, before drifting to the left and right of the frame, where the outside world of Lake Bolac is clear and visible through the interior space of the hallway—the natural environment of daylight, luminescent and vivid. The time frame is late summer, the light reflecting and reverberating through glass doors, and gleaming painted surfaces, in a continuous rectangular pattern of grid lines. In the near distance, the viewer can see an open door, a pictorial breathing space, beyond the spatial line and coolness of the photograph, beyond the frame of the photograph and our knowing. The photograph becomes a signpost. What is outside, beyond the school corridors, recalled through the medium of photography, are other scenes, yet to be constructed from the spaces, streets and roads of Lake Bolac. Zones of Practice–Time as the “Skin” of Writing, Embodiment and Place (Patrick West) There is no writing without a body to write. Yet sometimes it feels that my creative writing, resisting its necessary embodiment, has by some trick of metaphor retreated into what Jondi Keane refers to as a purely conceptual mode of thought. This slippage between figural connection and literal process alerted me, in the process of my attempt to foster place-based well-being at Lake Bolac, to the importance of time to writerly embodiment. My contribution to the Lake Bolac Eel Festival art exhibition was a written text, “Stay with me here”, conceived as my response to the themes of Rozalind Drummond’s photographs. To prepare this joint production, we mixed with staff and students at the Lake Bolac Secondary College. But this mode of embodiment made me feel curiously dis-embodied as a place-based writer. My embodiment was apparently superficial, only skin deep. Still this experience started me thinking about how the skin is actually thickly embodied as both body and where the body encounters, not only other bodies, but place itself—conceivably across many times. Skin is also the embodiment of writing to the degree that writing suggests an uncertain and queered form of embodiment. Skin, where the body reaches its limit, expires, touches other bodies or not, is inevitably implicated with writing as a fragile and always provisional, indexical embodiment. Nothing can be more easily either here or somewhere else than writing. Writing is an exhibition or gallery of anywhere, like skin in that both are un-placed in place. The one-pager “Stay with me here” explores how the instantaneous time and present-ness of Drummond’s photographs relate to the profusion of times and relations to other places immanent in Lake Bolac’s landscape and community (as evidenced, for example, in the image of a prep student yawning at the end of a long day in the midst of an ancient volcanic landscape, dreaming, perhaps, of somewhere else). To get to such issues of time and relationality of place, however, involves detouring via the notion of skin as suggested to me by my initial sense of dis-embodiment in Lake Bolac. “Stay with me here” works with an idea of skin as answer to the implied question, Where is here? It creates the (symbolic) embodiment of place precisely as a matter of skin, making skin-like writing an issue of transitory topography. The only permanent “here” is the skin. Emphasizing something valid for all writing, “here” (grammatically a context-dependent deictic) is the skin, where embodiment is defined by the constant possibility of re-embodiment, somewhere else, some time else. Reminding us that it is eminently possible to be elsewhere (from this place, from here), skin also suggests that you cannot be in two places at the one time (at least, not with the same embodiment). My skin is a sign that, because my embodiment in any particular place (any “here”) is only ever temporary, it is time that necessarily sustains my embodiment in any place whatsoever into the future. According to Henri Bergson, time must be creative, as the future hasn’t happened yet! “Time is invention or it is nothing at all” (341). The future of place, as much as of writing and of embodiment itself, is thus creatively sheathed in time as if within a skin. On Bergson’s view, time might be said to be least and greatest embodiment, for it is (dis-embodied) time that enables all future and currently un-created modes of embodiment. All of these time-inspired modes will involve a relationship to place (time can only “happen” in some version of place). And all of them will involve writing too, because time is the ultimate (dis-)embodiment of writing. As writing is like a skin, a minimal embodiment shared actually or potentially with more than one body, so time is the very possibility of writing (embodiment) into the future. “Stay with me here” explores how place is always already embodied in a relationship to other places, through the skin, and to the future of (a) place through the creativity of time as the skin of embodiment. By enriching descriptive and metaphoric practices of time, instability of place and awarenesses of the (dis-)embodied nature of writing—as a practice of skin—my text is useful to well-being as an analogue to the lived experience, in time and place, of the people of Lake Bolac. Theoretically, it weaves Bergson’s philosophy of time (time richly composed) into the fabric of Deleuze’s proposition that the health of a community is linked to the richness of the composition of its parts. Creatively, it celebrates the identity that the notion of “here” might enable, especially when read alongside and in dialogue with Drummond’s photographs in exhibition. Here is an abridged text of “Stay with me here:” “Stay with me here” There is salt in these lakes, anciently—rectilinear lakes never to be without ripple or stir. Pooling waters the islands of otherwise oceans, which people make out from hereabouts, make for, dream of. Stay with me here. Trusting to lessons delivered at the shore of a lake moves one closer to a deepness of instruction, where the water also learns. From our not being where we are, there. Stay with me here. What is perfection to water if not water? A time when photographs were born out of its swill and slosh. The image swimming knowingly to the surface—its first breaths of the perceiving air, its glimpsing itself once. The portraits of ourselves we do not dare. Such magical chemical reactions, as in, I react badly to you. Such salts! Stay with me here, elsewhere. As if one had simply washed up by chance, onto this desert island or any other place of sand and water trickling. Daring to imagine we’ll be there together. This is what I mean by… stay with me here. Notice these things—how music sounds different as one walks away; the emotional gymnastics with which you plan to impress; the skin of the eye that watches over you. Stay with me here—in your spectacular, careless brilliance. The edge of whatever it is one wants to say. The moment never to be photographed. Conclusion It is not for the artists to presume that they can empower a community. As Tasmin Lorraine notes, community is not a single person’s empowerment but “the empowerment of many assemblages of which one is part” (128). All communities, regional communities on the scale of Lake Bolac or communities of interest, are held in place by enthusiasm and common histories. We have focused on the embodiment of these common histories, which vary in an infinite number of degrees from the most literal to the most figurative, pulling from the filigree of experiences a web of interpersonal connections. Oscillating between metaphor and description, embodiment as variously presented in this article helps promote community and, by extension, individual well-being. The drawing out of sensations into forms that produce new experiences—like the drawing of breath, the drawing of a hot bath, or the drawing out of a story—enhances the permeability of boundaries opened to what touches upon them. It is not just that we can embody our values, but that we are able to craft, manifest, enact, sense and evoke the connections that take shape as our richly composed world, in which, as Deleuze notes, “it is no longer a matter of utilizations or captures, but of sociabilities and communities” (126). ReferencesAuge, Mark. Non-Places: An Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity. London: Verso, 1995. Barrett, Estelle, and Barbara Bolt. Eds. Practice as Research: Approaches to Creative Arts Enquiry. London: I. B. Tauris, 2007. Barthes, Roland. The Responsibility of Forms. New York: Hill and Wang, 1985. Bergson, Henri. Creative Evolution. Mineola, New York: Dover Publications, 1998. Deleuze, Gilles. Spinoza: Practical Philosophy. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1988. Hollier, Denis. Against Architecture: The Writings of Georges Bataille. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989. Hutchins, Edwin. “Enaction, Imagination and Insight.” Enaction: Towards a New Paradigm for Cognitive Science. Eds. J. Stewart, O. Gapenne, and E.A. Di Paolo. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010. 425–450.Lecercle, Jean-Jacques. Deleuze and Language. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002.Lorraine, Tamsin. Deleuze and Guattari’s Immanent Ethics: Theory, Subjectivity and Duration. Albany: State University of New York at Albany, 2011.O’Sullivan, Simon. Art Encounters: Deleuze and Guattari—Thought beyond Representation. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006.

As a feminist bilingual journal dedicated to experimental writing, Tessera’s fostering of a concerted dialogue between Francophone and Anglophone women writers played a pioneer role between the 1980s and 1990s in inscribing the question of translation at the heart of feminist discourse. Critical attention has been steadily directed at the work of the journal’s mostly Anglophone first collective (1984-1993), which promoted a hopeful erotics of translation, driven by ‘sextual’ pleasure in the polysemic variances of languages and a deep seated trust in translation’s capacity to modify different languages’ topographies of sexual difference in profound ways. Tessera, however, published regularly for over twenty years and had three different collectives working at its helm. This paper seeks to address the critical imbalance by focusing on the poetics of translation promoted in the last years of Tessera’s life (2002-2005), when operations shifted from Toronto to Montreal and a mostly Francophone Editorial and Advisory Board took over. Indeed, against the optimism of the early bilingual experiments that emphasized common cross-cultural understandings of writing in the feminine, the texts published in the early 2000s consistently draw attention to the constitutively exilic relation to linguistic diversity held by diasporic queer bodies that live in the interstices of overlapping cross-cultural norms. Nathalie Stephens (now Nathanaël), a poet featured prominently in Tessera’s last volumes, is possibly the most significant writer to perform the un-decidable dimensions of such interstitial dwelling. In particular, I analyze a multilingual text by Stephens published in Tessera in 2002, whose overt intertextual allusions to Nicole Brossard and Suzanne de Lotbinière-Harwood’s bilingual text Sous la langue/Under Tongue provide an interesting terrain of comparison with previous translation poetics. Contrary to the utopic ‘dream of a common language’ of Sous la langue/Under Tongue bilingual cross-contaminations, Stephens’ jagged multilingualism weaves lesbian desire with questions of bodily and cultural/linguistic exile, which provoke a radical queering (and querying) of such dream. At the crossroads of erotic and genealogic affinities Stephens gestures towards a space of collapsed translation, where the ideal “fusion” of tongues evoked by Brossard and de Lotbinière morphs into a painful and yet necessary con-fusion of languages marked by transversal alliances that anchor the text’s ‘je’ to the provisional rootedness of a diasporic memory. Despite the marked shift in tone, at the end of the essay I argue that both Stephens and her predecessors participate in Tessera’s consistent commitment to inscribing translation as a creative practice of heterotopic displacement and semiotic proliferation. A commitment, I would argue, which remains to date singularly feminist and singularly productive.

Both as a concept and a practice, remix has become enshrined in media theory and production. Using an existing creative expression as materials to produce a new creative expression, remix highlights how culture operates through a continual circulation of shared elements. Remix reincorporates this practice into the present culture as an alternative to the dominant logic of the culture industries. However, as a useful principle applied in a general way, the specific cultural and historical conditions of remix’s origins become obscured and mythologized, obscuring how emergence and creativity function as part of culture in specific conditions. Moreover, although we frame remix as an alternative or oppositional practice, it remains compatible with the logic of creativity as the work of the genius or auteurs. It reinforces the idea of art as an expressive object that can be commodified for the consumption of an audience. The time is right to rethink what the term ‘remix’ does and what it accomplishes. Remix presents an alternative to the dominant mode of production, but can it offer a transformative opposition that not only remakes culture, but remakes the ways we make culture? If not, what can? This presentation offers a complementary concept I call “recreative practice”, meant in the sense of re-creative (re-new-ing through creativity) as well as in the sense of recreational (“to refresh oneself by some amusement”). It emerges from a synthesis of Dewey’s writing on the aesthetic experience (1934/2005), Williams’ theory of the residual, dominant and emergent (1977), and Barad’s call responsive/responsible theory (2012). The production of something that has never been is influenced by what has come before, and reception is framed by understanding of what is familiar to us. Recreative practice recognizes that the production of aesthetic experience does not belong to a class apart – culture is ordinary, everyone is creative, and we are constantly generating and circulating culture. Nor are theorists and artists exempt – we are inextricably entangled in the world we seek to transform, and our work, too, is part of a process of the everyday and the ordinary. To further demonstrate recreative practice, I draw from my forthcoming dissertation, An Effective Dream is a Reality, as well as several years’ experimentation with algorithmic cinema. I give this a focus through presentation of speculative project: Cinemanhatta. Cinemanhatta is a speculative proposal building on Manhatta (1921) as a foundation. An antecedent of recreative practice, Manhatta drew on existing creative traditions in a way that created new possibilities for meaning-making and influenced the conditions for meaning-making itself. Cinemanhatta honors that tradition and exemplifies recreative practice by proposing three interrelated projects, each inspired by a significant creative effort: Heidi Rae Cooley’s Finding Augusta and the accompanying Augusta App (2014), Perry Bard’s Man With A Movie Camera: Global Remake (2007-present), and Barbara Lattanzi’s HF Critical Mass (2002). These projects work together to produce a material-semiotic performance of exchange and collaboration, using a set of recreative practices to construct a community of inquiry.

Welcome to the 2018 issue of the Journal of Jungian Scholarly Studies. This year, my first as General Editor, confirmed for me the sweetness of respectful collaboration. The expertise of the editorial staff; the gracious mentorship by my predecessor, Inez Martinez; and the authors’ and reviewers’ dedication to excellence, made it possible to produce a peer-reviewed publication that demonstrates the relevance of Jungian thought in a tumultuous world. Essays in this collection reflect the theme of the 15th annual conference held in Arlington, Virginia: “Complexity, Creativity, Action.” The significance of our location—across the Potomac from the White House—was not lost on the individuals who gathered to hear papers in June 2017. Jungians, like other serious intellectuals, are challenged to engage in the heated and often dissonant cultural discourse that has only intensified since the presidential election of November 2016. As depth psychologists, we are obligated to reject simple explanations bounded by the spirit of the times. The prevailing social and political chaos is complex and requires creative thought and action—in prose, poetry, and art. The first essay, entitled “Trump’s Base, Ahab, and the American Dream” by Inez Martinez, is a compelling transdisciplinary study that uses Jungian complex theory and Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick to analyze the fury and rage of Trump supporters. The erosion of white-male dominance in America has produced a victim complex, Martinez argues, that bears strong similarities to Ahab’s sense of victimization by the white whale. Ahab is trapped in a losing struggle for dominance and meets his end forever bound to the thing he vowed to kill. Ishmael, on the other hand, survives by embracing diversity and interdependence. His survival, Martinez says, suggests a creative possibility for all US citizens: to re-vision the American dream so that the individual pursuit of happiness is modulated by concern for the common good. Concern for a common good is also a theme of Jonathan Vaughn’s essay, “SoulSearching at Standing Rock.” Like Martinez, Vaughn uses Jungian complex theory to explore the conflict between members of over 300 Native American tribes and the private company, Energy Transfer Partners, hired to build the Dakota Access Pipeline. Vaughn argues that two cultural complexes, a Native Complex and a Pilgrim Complex, which have been continuously functioning since the nation’s founding, manifested in the Standing Rock controversy. Whereas the Native Complex is characterized by the perceived invisibility of indigenous peoples, the Pilgrim Complex is characterized by a separatist drive that demands freedom at all costs (even death) and justifies destructive, genocidal behavior as a means of preserving colonial culture and community. Vaughn points out that both complexes intersect at a place where each group intensely seeks freedom, relevance, and acceptance. The complex political conflict that Martinez and Vaughn address in their essays is the subject of Joli Hamilton’s analysis of the drug abuse, sexual manipulation, and murder dramatized in the television series House of Cards. The power-obsessed central characters, Frank and Claire Underwood, are morally repugnant yet strangely enticing; audiences flock to the show’s grotesque imagery. To explain this phenomenon, Hamilton creates a dialogue between Jacques Lacan’s theory of the phallus and Thomas Moore’s discussion of the sadistic aspect of psyche. The intense dramatic events in the series, she argues, are the necessary sacrifice of innocence required to increase consciousness. House of Cards ravishes American political ideals and depicts a multitude of perversions possible in the bureaucratic shadows of its fictional world. Hamilton concludes that it is dangerously naïve to focus exclusively on the light aspects of psyche or passively enjoy the darkness depicted in the series as mere entertainment. She suggests instead an active and creative response to the multitude of perversions evident in fiction and in reality: the intentional psychological digestion of darkness, as necessary today as it was in the time of the Marquis de Sade. The theme of an inclusive psyche featured in Hamilton’s essay is central to Matthew Fike’s analysis of Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands. Although Borderlands aligns with Jungian psychological concepts and is particularly indebted to James Hillman’s Revisioning Psychology, Fike demonstrates how Anzaldúan thought re-visions that work by emphasizing expanded states of awareness, body wisdom, and the spirit world. For Anzaldúa, a more inclusive vision of the psyche is reflected in El Mundo Zurdo (the Other World) of the personal and collective unconscious, dreams, and creative imagination. El Mundo Zurdo is real, and Anzaldúa accesses it in the writing process through becoming a conduit for imagery from the collective unconscious. Fike concludes his sophisticated analysis by arguing that Anzaldúa and her text embody and enact the change that she seeks to inspire in her readers: dwelling in a third thing, a Borderland, that acknowledges but transcends binary points of view. Anzaldúa’s writing process, in which she places her conscious mind in service to imagery arising from unconsciousness, expresses a theory of creativity that Jonathan Erickson explores in his essay “Jung and the Neurobiology of the Creative Unconscious.” Creativity, which has always been a mystery, has attracted numerous theories to explain it. There has been explosive interest in the interdisciplinary field of creativity studies, with more than 10,000 papers published in a single decade (1999 to 2009). The essay begins with a brief excursion on C. G. Jung, who asserts an inextricable link between creativity and the unconscious, then segues into a discussion of recent neurobiological accounts of conscious creativity. While noting our understandable cultural fascination with the brain, Erickson warns against the reductive materialism inherent in the biological perspective. We of the depth psychological persuasion, he concludes, should be mindful not to allow the current prominence of neuroscientific models to eclipse or, or even worse, devour our field. We continue the innovative practice, begun last year, of including poetry and art in the Journal since they too furnish a creative response to complexity. A separate section includes all of the art selected for this year’s issue, accompanied by the artist’s statements about the work. Selected works have been paired with the essays and poems to create a conversation between image and text. On behalf of the editorial team, wonderful collaborators all, I welcome you to Volume 13 of the Journal of Jungian Scholarly Studies. Elizabeth Èowyn Nelson,General Editor

As the ball dropped on 1999, is it any wonder that No Doubt played, “It’s the End of the World as We Know It” by R.E.M. live on MTV? Any discussion of the Nineties—and its pinnacle moment, Y2K—requires a discussion of both the cover and the glitch, two performative and technological enactments that fomented the collapse between author-reader and user-machine that has, twenty years later, become normalised in today’s Post Internet culture. By staging failure and inviting the audience to participate, the glitch and the cover call into question the original and the origin story. This breakdown of normative borders has prompted the convergence of previously demarcated media, genres, and cultures, a constellation from which to recognise a stochastic hybrid form. The Cover as a Revelation of Collaborative MurmurBefore Sean Parker collaborated with Shawn Fanning to launch Napster on 1 June 1999, networked file distribution existed as cumbersome text-based programs like Internet Relay Chat and Usenet, servers which resembled bulletin boards comprising multiple categories of digitally ripped files. Napster’s simple interface, its advanced search filters, and its focus on music and audio files fostered a peer-to-peer network that became the fastest growing website in history, registering 80 million users in less than two years.In harnessing the transgressive power of the Internet to force a new mode of content sharing, Napster forced traditional providers to rethink what constitutes “content” at a moment which prefigures our current phenomena of “produsage” (Bruns) and the vast popularity of user-generated content. At stake is not just the democratisation of art but troubling the very idea of intellectual property, which is to say, the very concept of ownership.Long before the Internet was re-routed from military servers and then mainstreamed, Michel Foucault understood the efficacy of anonymous interactions on the level of literature, imagining a culture where discourse would circulate without any need for an author. But what he was asking in 1969 is something we can better answer today, because it seems less germane to call into question the need for an author in a culture in which everyone is writing, producing, and reproducing text, and more effective to think about re-evaluating the notion of a single author, or what it means to write by yourself. One would have to testify to the particular medium we have at our disposal, the Internet’s ultimate permissibility, its provocations for collaboration and co-creation. One would have to surrender the idea that authors own anything besides our will to keep producing, and our desire for change; and to modulate means to resist without negating, to alter without omitting, to enable something new to come forward; the unfolding of the text into the anonymity of a murmur.We should remind ourselves that “to author” all the way down to its Latin roots signifies advising, witnessing, and transferring. We should be reminded that to author something means to forget the act of saying “I,” to forget it or to make it recede in the background in service of the other or others, on behalf of a community. The de-centralisation of Web development and programming initiated by Napster inform a poetics of relation, an always-open structure in which, as Édouard Glissant said, “the creator of a text is effaced, or rather, is done away with, to be revealed in the texture of his creation” (25). When a solid melts, it reveals something always underneath, something at the bottom, something inside—something new and something that was always already there. A cover, too, is both a revival and a reworking, an update and an interpretation, a retrospective tribute and a re-version that looks toward the future. In performing the new, the original as singular is called into question, replaced by an increasingly fetishised copy made up of and made by multiples.Authorial Effacement and the Exigency of the ErrorY2K, otherwise known as the Millennium Bug, was a coding problem, an abbreviation made to save memory space which would disrupt computers during the transition from 1999 to 2000, when it was feared that the new year would become literally unrecognisable. After an estimated $300 billion in upgraded hardware and software was spent to make computers Y2K-compliant, something more extraordinary than global network collapse occurred as midnight struck: nothing.But what if the machine admits the possibility of accident? Implicit in the admission of any accident is the disclosure of a new condition—something to be heard, to happen, from the Greek ad-cadere, which means to fall. In this drop into non-repetition, the glitch actualises an idea about authorship that necessitates multi-user collaboration; the curtain falls only to reveal the hidden face of technology, which becomes, ultimately, instructions for its re-programming. And even as it deviates, the new form is liable to become mainstreamed into a new fashion. “Glitch’s inherently critical moment(um)” (Menkman 8) indicates this potential for technological self-insurgence, while suggesting the broader cultural collapse of generic markers and hierarchies, and its ensuing flow into authorial fluidity.This feeling of shock, this move “towards the ruins of destructed meaning” (Menkman 29) inherent in any encounter with the glitch, forecasted not the immediate horror of Y2K, but the delayed disasters of 9/11, Hurricane Katrina, Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill, Indian Ocean tsunami, Sichuan Province earthquake, global financial crisis, and two international wars that would all follow within the next nine years. If, as Menkman asserts, the glitch, in representing a loss of self-control “captures the machine revealing itself” (30), what also surfaces is the tipping point that edges us toward a new becoming—not only the inevitability of surrender between machine and user, but their reversibility. Just as crowds stood, transfixed before midnight of the new millennium in anticipation of the error, or its exigency, it’s always the glitch I wait for; it’s always the glitch I aim to re-create, as if on command. The accidental revelation, or the machine breaking through to show us its insides. Like the P2P network that Napster introduced to culture, every glitch produces feedback, a category of noise (Shannon) influencing the machine’s future behaviour whereby potential users might return the transmission.Re-Orienting the Bizarre in Fantasy and FictionIt is in the fantasy of dreams, and their residual leakage into everyday life, evidenced so often in David Lynch’s Twin Peaks, where we can locate a similar authorial agency. The cult Nineties psycho-noir, and its discontinuous return twenty-six years later, provoke us into reconsidering the science of sleep as the art of fiction, assembling an alternative, interactive discourse from found material.The turning in and turning into in dreams is often described as an encounter with the “bizarre,” a word which indicates our lack of understanding about the peculiar processes that normally happen inside our heads. Dreams are inherently and primarily bizarre, Allan J. Hobson argues, because during REM sleep, our noradrenergic and serotonergic systems do not modulate the activated brain, as they do in waking. “The cerebral cortex and hippocampus cannot function in their usual oriented and linear logical way,” Hobson writes, “but instead create odd and remote associations” (71). But is it, in fact, that our dreams are “bizarre” or is it that the model itself is faulty—a precept premised on the normative, its dependency upon generalisation and reducibility—what is bizarre if not the ordinary modulations that occur in everyday life?Recall Foucault’s interest not in what a dream means but what a dream does. How it rematerialises in the waking world and its basis in and effect on imagination. Recall recollection itself, or Erin J. Wamsley’s “Dreaming and Offline Memory Consolidation.” “A ‘function’ for dreaming,” Wamsley writes, “hinges on the difficult question of whether conscious experience in general serves any function” (433). And to think about the dream as a specific mode of experience related to a specific theory of knowledge is to think about a specific form of revelation. It is this revelation, this becoming or coming-to-be, that makes the connection to crowd-sourced content production explicit—dreams serve as an audition or dress rehearsal in which new learning experiences with others are incorporated into the unconscious so that they might be used for production in the waking world. Bert O. States elaborates, linking the function of the dream with the function of the fiction writer “who makes models of the world that carry the imprint and structure of our various concerns. And it does this by using real people, or ‘scraps’ of other people, as the instruments of hypothetical facts” (28). Four out of ten characters in a dream are strangers, according to Calvin Hall, who is himself a stranger, someone I’ve never met in waking life or in a dream. But now that I’ve read him, now that I’ve written him into this work, he seems closer to me. Twin Peak’s serial lesson for viewers is this—even the people who seem strangers to us can interact with and intervene in our processes of production.These are the moments that a beginning takes place. And even if nothing directly follows, this transfer constitutes the hypothesised moment of production, an always-already perhaps, the what-if stimulus of charged possibility; the soil plot, or plot line, for freedom. Twin Peaks is a town in which the bizarre penetrates the everyday so often that eventually, the bizarre is no longer bizarre, but just another encounter with the ordinary. Dream sequences are common, but even more common—and more significant—are the moments in which what might otherwise be a dream vision ruptures into real life; these moments propel the narrative.Exhibit A: A man who hasn’t gone outside in a while begins to crumble, falling to the earth when forced to chase after a young girl, who’s just stolen the secret journal of another young girl, which he, in turn, had stolen.B: A horse appears in the middle of the living room after a routine vacuum cleaning and a subtle barely-there transition, a fade-out into a fade-in, what people call a dissolve. No one notices, or thinks to point out its presence. Or maybe they’re distracted. Or maybe they’ve already forgotten. Dissolve.(I keep hitting “Save As.” As if renaming something can also transform it.)C: All the guests at the Great Northern Hotel begin to dance the tango on cue—a musical, without any music.D: After an accident, a middle-aged woman with an eye patch—she was wearing the eye patch before the accident—believes she’s seventeen again. She enrolls in Twin Peaks High School and joins the cheerleading team.E: A woman pretending to be a Japanese businessman ambles into the town bar to meet her estranged husband, who fails to recognise his cross-dressing, race-swapping wife.F: A girl with blond hair is murdered, only to come back as another girl, with the same face and a different name. And brown hair. They’re cousins.G: After taking over her dead best friend’s Meals on Wheels route, Donna Hayward walks in to meet a boy wearing a tuxedo, sitting on the couch with his fingers clasped: a magician-in-training. “Sometimes things can happen just like this,” he says with a snap while the camera cuts to his grandmother, bed-ridden, and the appearance of a plate of creamed corn that vanishes as soon as she announces its name.H: A woman named Margaret talks to and through a log. The log, cradled in her arms wherever she goes, becomes a key witness.I: After a seven-minute diegetic dream sequence, which includes a one-armed man, a dwarf, a waltz, a dead girl, a dialogue played backward, and a significantly aged representation of the dreamer, Agent Cooper wakes up and drastically shifts his investigation of a mysterious small-town murder. The dream gives him agency; it turns him from a detective staring at a dead-end to one with a map of clues. The next day, it makes him a storyteller; all the others, sitting tableside in the middle of the woods become a captive audience. They become readers. They read into his dream to create their own scenarios. Exhibit I. The cycle of imagination spins on.Images re-direct and obfuscate meaning, a process of over-determination which Foucault says results in “a multiplication of meanings which override and contradict each other” (DAE 34). In the absence of image, the process of imagination prevails. In the absence of story, real drama in our conscious life, we form complex narratives in our sleep—our imaginative unconscious. Sometimes they leak out, become stories in our waking life, if we think to compose them.“A bargain has been struck,” says Harold, an under-5 bit player, later, in an episode called “Laura’s Secret Diary.” So that she might have the chance to read Laura Palmer’s diary, Donna Hayward agrees to talk about her own life, giving Harold the opportunity to write it down in his notebook: his “living novel” the new chapter which reads, after uncapping his pen and smiling, “Donna Hayward.”He flips to the front page and sets a book weight to keep the page in place. He looks over at Donna sheepishly. “Begin.”Donna begins talking about where she was born, the particulars of her father—the lone town doctor—before she interrupts the script and asks her interviewer about his origin story. Not used to people asking him the questions, Harold’s mouth drops and he stops writing. He puts his free hand to his chest and clears his throat. (The ambient, wind-chime soundtrack intensifies.) “I grew up in Boston,” he finally volunteers. “Well, actually, I grew up in books.”He turns his head from Donna to the notebook, writing feverishly, as if he’s begun to write his own responses as the camera cuts back to his subject, Donna, crossing her legs with both hands cupped at her exposed knee, leaning in to tell him: “There’s things you can’t get in books.”“There’s things you can’t get anywhere,” he returns, pen still in his hand. “When we dream, they can be found in other people.”What is a call to composition if not a call for a response? It is always the audience which makes a work of art, re-framed in our own image, the same way we re-orient ourselves in a dream to negotiate its “inconsistencies.” Bizarreness is merely a consequence of linguistic limitations, the overwhelming sensory dream experience which can only be re-framed via a visual representation. And so the relationship between the experience of reading and dreaming is made explicit when we consider the associations internalised in the reader/audience when ingesting a passage of words on a page or on the stage, objects that become mental images and concept pictures, a lens of perception that we may liken to another art form: the film, with its jump-cuts and dissolves, so much like the defamiliarising and dislocating experience of dreaming, especially for the dreamer who wakes. What else to do in that moment but write about it?Evidence of the bizarre in dreams is only the evidence of the capacity of our human consciousness at work in the unconscious; the moment in which imagination and memory come together to create another reality, a spectrum of reality that doesn’t posit a binary between waking and sleeping, a spectrum of reality that revels in the moments where the two coalesce, merge, cross-pollinate—and what action glides forward in its wake? Sustained un-hesitation and the wish to stay inside one’s self. To be conscious of the world outside the dream means the end of one. To see one’s face in the act of dreaming would require the same act of obliteration. Recognition of the other, and of the self, prevents the process from being fulfilled. Creative production and dreaming, like voyeurism, depend on this same lack of recognition, or the recognition of yourself as other. What else is a dream if not a moment of becoming, of substituting or sublimating yourself for someone else?We are asked to relate a recent dream or we volunteer an account, to a friend or lover. We use the word “seem” in nearly every description, when we add it up or how we fail to. Everything seems to be a certain way. It’s not a place but a feeling. James, another character on Twin Peaks, says the same thing, after someone asks him, “Where do you want to go?” but before he hops on his motorcycle and rides off into the unknowable future outside the frame. Everything seems like something else, based on our own associations, our own knowledge of people and things. Offline memory consolidation. Seeming and semblance. An uncertainty of appearing—both happening and seeing. How we mediate—and re-materialise—the dream through text is our attempt to re-capture imagination, to leave off the image and better become it. If, as Foucault says, the dream is always a dream of death, its purpose is a call to creation.Outside of dreams, something bizarre occurs. We call it novelty or news. We might even bestow it with fame. A man gets on the wrong plane and ends up halfway across the world. A movie is made into the moment of his misfortune. Years later, in real life and in movie time, an Iranian refugee can’t even get on the plane; he is turned away by UK immigration officials at Charles de Gaulle, so he spends the next sixteen years living in the airport lounge; when he departs in real life, the movie (The Terminal, 2004) arrives in theaters. Did it take sixteen years to film the terminal exile? How bizarre, how bizarre. OMC’s eponymous refrain of the 1996 one-hit wonder, which is another way of saying, an anomaly.When all things are counted and countable in today’s algorithmic-rich culture, deviance becomes less of a statistical glitch and more of a testament to human peculiarity; the repressed idiosyncrasies of man before machine but especially the fallible tendencies of mankind within machines—the non-repetition of chance that the Nineties emblematised in the form of its final act. The point is to imagine what comes next; to remember waiting together for the end of the world. There is no need to even open your eyes to see it. It is just a feeling. ReferencesBruns, Axel. “Towards Produsage: Futures for User-Led Content Production.” Cultural Attitudes towards Technology and Communication 2006: Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference, eds. Fay Sudweeks, Herbert Hrachovec, and Charles Ess. Murdoch: School of Information Technology, 2006. 275-84. <https://eprints.qut.edu.au/4863/1/4863_1.pdf>.Foucault, Michel. “Dream, Imagination and Existence.” Dream and Existence. Ed. Keith Hoeller. Pittsburgh: Review of Existential Psychology & Psychiatry, 1986. 31-78.———. “What Is an Author?” The Foucault Reader: An Introduction to Foucault’s Thought. Ed. Paul Rainbow. New York: Penguin, 1991.Glissant, Édouard. Poetics of Relation. Trans. Betsy Wing. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1997.Hall, Calvin S. The Meaning of Dreams. New York: McGraw Hill, 1966.Hobson, J. Allan. The Dream Drugstore: Chemically Altered State of Conscious­ness. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001.Menkman, Rosa. The Glitch Moment(um). Amsterdam: Network Notebooks, 2011.Shannon, Claude Elwood. “A Mathematical Theory of Communication.” The Bell System Technical Journal 27 (1948): 379-423.States, Bert O. “Bizarreness in Dreams and Other Fictions.” The Dream and the Text: Essays on Literature and Language. Ed. Carol Schreier Rupprecht. Albany: SUNY P, 1993.Twin Peaks. Dir. David Lynch. ABC and Showtime. 1990-3 & 2017. Wamsley, Erin. “Dreaming and Offline Memory Consolidation.” Current Neurology and Neuroscience Reports 14.3 (2014): 433. “Y2K Bug.” Encyclopedia Britannica. 18 July 2018. <https://www.britannica.com/technology/Y2K-bug>.

As the distinction between disclosure-fuelled celebrity and lasting fame becomes difficult to discern, the “based on a true story” label has gained a particular traction among readers and viewers. This is despite much public approbation and private angst sometimes resulting from such disclosure as “little in the law or in society protects people from the consequences of others’ revelations about them” (Smith 537). Even fiction writers can stray into difficult ethical and artistic territory when they disclose the private facts of real lives—that is, recognisably biographical information—in their work, with autoethnographic fiction where authors base their fiction on their own lives (Davis and Ellis) not immune as this often discloses others’ stories (Ellis) as well. F. Scott Fitzgerald famously counselled writers to take their subjects from life and, moreover, to look to the singular, specific life, although this then had to be abstracted: “Begin with an individual, and before you know it, you find that you have created a type; begin with a type, and you find that you have created—nothing” (139). One of the problems when assessing fiction through this lens, however, is that, although many writers are inspired in their work by an actual life, event or historical period, the resulting work is usually ultimately guided by literary concerns—what writers often term the quest for aesthetic truth—rather than historical accuracy (Owen et al. 2008). In contrast, a biography is, and continues to be, by definition, an accurate account of a real persons’ life. Despite postmodern assertions regarding the relativity of truth and decades of investigation into the incorporation of fiction into biography, other non-fiction texts and research narratives (see, for instance: Wyatt), many biographers attest to still feeling irrevocably tied to the factual evidence in a way that novelists and the scriptors of biographically-based fictional television drama, movies and theatrical pieces do not (Wolpert; Murphy; Inglis). To cite a recent example, Louis Nowra’s Ice takes the life of nineteenth-century self-made entrepreneur and politician Malcolm McEacharn as its base, but never aspires to be classified as creative nonfiction, history or biography. The history in a historical novel is thus often, and legitimately, skewed or sidelined in order to achieve the most satisfying work of art, although some have argued that fiction may uniquely represent the real, as it is able to “play […] in the gap between the narratives of history and the actualities of the past” (Nelson n.p.). Fiction and non-fictional forms are, moreover, increasingly intermingling and intertwining in content and intent. The ugly word “faction” was an attempt to suggest that the two could simply be elided but, acknowledging wide-ranging debates about whether literature can represent the complexities of life with any accuracy and post-structuralist assertions that the idea of any absolute truth is outmoded, contemporary authors play with, and across, these boundaries, creating hybrid texts that consciously slide between invention and disclosure, but which publishers, critics and readers continue to define firmly as either fiction or biography. This dancing between forms is not particularly new. A striking example was Marion Halligan’s 2001 novel The Fog Garden which opens with a personal essay about the then recent death of her own much-loved husband. This had been previously published as an autobiographical memoir, “Cathedral of Love,” and again in an essay collection as “Lapping.” The protagonist of the novel is a recently widowed writer named Clare, but the inclusion of Halligan’s essay, together with the book’s marketing campaign which made much of the author’s own sadness, encourages readers to read the novel as a disclosure of the author’s own personal experience. This is despite Halligan’s attempt to keep the two separate: “Clare isn’t me. She’s like me. Some of her experience, terrors, have been mine. Some haven’t” (Fog Garden 9). In such acts of disclosure and denial, fiction and non-fiction can interrogate, test and even create each other, however quite vicious criticism can result when readers feel the boundaries demarking the two are breached. This is most common when authors admit to some dishonesty in terms of self-disclosure as can be seen, for instance, in the furore surrounding highly inflated and even wholly fabricated memoirs such as James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces, Margaret B. Jones’s Love and Consequences and Misha Defonseca’s A Mémoire of the Holocaust Years. Related problems and anxieties arise when authors move beyond incorporating and disclosing the facts of their own lives in memoir or (autobiographical) fiction, to using the lives of others in this way. Daphne Patai sums up the difference: “A person telling her life story is, in a sense, offering up her self for her own and her listener’s scrutiny […] Whether we should appropriate another’s life in this way becomes a legitimate question” (24–5). While this is difficult but seemingly manageable for non-fiction writers because of their foundational reliance on evidence, this anxiety escalates for fiction writers. This seems particularly extreme in relation to how audience expectations and prior knowledge of actual events can shape perceptions and interpretations of the resulting work, even when those events are changed and the work is declared to be one of fiction. I have discussed elsewhere, for instance, the difficult terrain of crafting fiction from well-known criminal cases (Brien, “Based on a True Story”). The reception of such work shows how difficult it is to dissociate creative product from its source material once the public and media has made this connection, no matter how distant that finished product may be from the original facts.As the field of biography continues to evolve for writers, critics and theorists, a study of one key text at a moment in that evolution—Jill Shearer’s play Georgia and its reliance on disclosing the life of artist Georgia O’Keeffe for its content and dramatic power—reveals not only some of the challenges and opportunities this close relationship offers to the writers and readers of life stories, but also the pitfalls of attempting to dissemble regarding artistic intention. This award-winning play has been staged a number of times in the past decade but has attracted little critical attention. Yet, when I attended a performance of Georgia at La Boite Theatre in Brisbane in 1999, I was moved by the production and admiring of Shearer’s writing which was, I told anyone who would listen, a powerfully dramatic interpretation of O’Keeffe’s life, one of my favourite artists. A full decade on, aspects of the work and its performance still resonate through my thinking. Author of more than twenty plays performed throughout Australia and New Zealand as well as on Broadway, Shearer was then (and is) one of Australia’s leading playwrights, and I judged Georgia to be a major, mature work: clear, challenging and confident. Reading the Currency Press script a year or so after seeing the play reinforced for me how distinctive and successful a piece of theatre Shearer had created utilising a literary technique which has been described elsewhere as fictionalised biography—biography which utilises fictional forms in its presentation but stays as close to the historical record as conventional biography (Brien, The Case of Mary Dean).The published version of the script indeed acknowledges on its title page that Georgia is “inspired by the later life of the American artist Georgia O’Keeffe” (Shearer). The back cover blurb begins with a quote attributed to O’Keeffe and then describes the content of the play entirely in terms of biographical detail: The great American artist Georgia O’Keeffe is physically, emotionally and artistically debilitated by her failing eyesight. Living amidst the Navajo spiritual landscape in her desert home in New Mexico, she becomes prey to the ghosts of her past. Her solitude is broken by Juan, a young potter, whose curious influence on her life remains until her death at 98 (Georgia back cover). This short text ends by unequivocally reinforcing the relation between the play and the artist’s life: “Georgia is a passionate play that explores with sensitivity and wry humour the contradictions and the paradoxes of the life of Georgia O’Keeffe” (Georgia back cover). These few lines of plot synopsis actually contain a surprisingly large number of facts regarding O’Keeffe’s later life. After the death of her husband (the photographer and modern art impresario Alfred Steiglitz whose ghost is a central character in the play), O’Keeffe did indeed relocate permanently to Abiquiú in New Mexico. In 1971, aged 84, she was suffering from an irreversible degenerative disease, had lost her central vision and stopped painting. One autumn day in 1973, Juan Hamilton, a young potter, appeared at her adobe house looking for work. She hired him and he became her lover, closest confidante and business manager until her death at 98. These facts form not only the background story but also much of the riveting content for Georgia which, as the published script’s introduction states, takes as its central themes: “the dilemma of the artist as a an older woman; her yearning to create against the fear of failing artistic powers; her mental strength and vulnerability; her sexuality in the face of physical deterioration; her need for companionship and the paradoxical love of solitude” (Rider vii). These issues are not only those which art historians identify as animating the O’Keeffe’s later life and painting, but ones which are discussed at length in many of the biographies of the artist published from 1980 to 2007 (see, for instance: Arrowsmith and West; Berry; Calloway and Bry; Castro; Drohojowska-Philp; Eisler; Eldredge; Harris; Hogrefe; Lisle; Peters; Reily; Robinson).Despite this clear focus on disclosing aspects of O’Keeffe’s life, both the director’s and playwright’s notes prefacing the published script declare firmly that Georgia is fiction, not biography. While accepting that these statements may be related to copyright and privacy concerns, the stridency of the denials of the biography label with its implied intention of disclosing the facts of a life, are worthy of analysis. Although noting that Georgia is “about the American artist Georgia O’Keeffe”, director of the La Boite production Sue Rider asserts that not only that the play moves “beyond the biographical” (vii) but, a few pages later, that it is “thankfully not biography” (xii). This is despite Rider’s own underscoring of the connection to O’Keeffe by setting up an exhibition of the artist’s work adjacent to the theatre. Shearer, whose research acknowledgments include a number of works about O’Keeffe, is even more overtly strident in her denial of any biographical links stating that her characters, “this Juan, Anna Marie and Dorothy Norman are a work of dramatic fiction, as is the play, and should be taken as such” (xiii).Yet, set against a reading of the biographies of the artist, including those written in the intervening decade, Georgia clearly and remarkably accurately discloses the tensions and contradictions of O’Keeffe’s life. It also draws on a significant amount of documented biographical data to enhance the dramatic power of what is disclosed by the play for audiences with this knowledge. The play does work as a coherent narrative for a viewer without any prior knowledge of O’Keeffe’s life, but the meaning of the dramatic action is enhanced by any biographical knowledge the audience possesses. In this way, the play’s act of disclosure is reinforced by this externally held knowledge. Although O’Keeffe’s oeuvre is less well known and much anecdotal detail about her life is not as familiar for Australian viewers as for those in the artist’s homeland, Shearer writes for an international as well as an Australian audience, and the program and adjacent exhibition for the Brisbane performance included biographical information. It is also worth noting that large slabs of biographical detail are also omitted from the play. These omissions to disclosure include O’Keeffe’s early life from her birth in 1887 in Wisconsin to her studies in Chicago and New York from 1904 to 1908, as well as her work as a commercial artist and art teacher in Texas and other Southern American states from 1912 to 1916. It is from this moment in 1916, however, that the play (although opening in 1946) constructs O’Keeffe’s life right through to her death in 1986 by utilising such literary devices as flashbacks, dream sequences and verbal and visual references.An indication of the level of accuracy of the play as biographical disclosure can be ascertained by unpacking the few lines of opening stage directions, “The Steiglitz’s suite in the old mid-range Shelton Hotel, New York, 1946 ... Georgia, 59, in black, enters, dragging a coffin” (1). In 1946, when O’Keeffe was indeed aged 59, Steiglitz died. The couple had lived part of every year at the Shelton Towers Hotel at 525 Lexington Avenue (now the New York Marriott East Side), a moderately priced hotel made famous by its depiction in O’Keeffe’s paintings and Steiglitz’s photographs. When Stieglitz suffered a cerebral thrombosis, O’Keeffe was spending the summer in New Mexico, but she returned to New York where her husband died on 13 July. This level of biographical accuracy continues throughout Georgia. Halfway through the first page “Anita, 52” enters. This character represents Anita Pollitzer, artist, critic and O’Keeffe’s lifelong friend. The publication of her biography of O’Keeffe, A Woman on Paper, and Georgia’s disapproval of this, is discussed in the play, as are their letters, which were collected and published in 1990 as Lovingly, Georgia (Gibiore). Anita’s first lines in the play after greeting her friend refer to this substantial correspondence: “You write beautifully. I always tell people: “I have a friend who writes the most beautiful letters” (1). In the play, as in life, it is Anita who introduces O’Keeffe’s work to Stieglitz who is, in turn, accurately described as: “Gallery owner. Two Nine One, Fifth Avenue. Leader of the New York avant-garde, the first to bring in the European moderns” (6). The play also chronicles how (unknown to O’Keeffe) Steiglitz exhibited the drawings Pollitzer gave him under the incorrect name, a scene which continues with Steiglitz persuading Georgia to allow her drawings to remain in his gallery (as he did in life) and ends with a reference to his famous photographs of her hands and nude form. Although the action of a substantial amount of real time is collapsed into a few dramatic minutes and, without doubt, the dialogue is invented, this invention achieves the level of aesthetic truth aimed for by many contemporary biographers (Jones)—as can be assessed when referring back to the accepted biographical account. What actually appears to have happened was that, in the autumn 1915, while teaching art in South Carolina, O’Keeffe was working on a series of abstract charcoal drawings that are now recognised as among the most innovative in American art of that time. She mailed some of these drawings to Pollitzer, who showed them Steiglitz, who exhibited ten of them in April 1916, O’Keeffe only learning of this through an acquaintance. O’Keeffe, who had first visited 291 in 1908 but never spoken to Stieglitz, held his critical opinion in high regard, and although confronting him over not seeking her permission and citing her name incorrectly, eventually agreed to let her drawings hang (Harris). Despite Shearer’s denial, the other characters in Georgia are also largely biographical sketches. Her “Anna Marie”, who never appears in the play but is spoken of, is Juan’s wife (in real life Anna Marie Hamilton), and “Dorothy Norman” is the character who has an affair with Steiglitz—the discovery of which leads to Georgia’s nervous breakdown in the play. In life, while O’Keeffe was in New Mexico, Stieglitz became involved with the much younger Norman who was, he claimed, only his gallery assistant. When O’Keeffe discovered Norman posing nude for her husband (this is vividly imagined in Georgia), O’Keeffe moved out of the Shelton and suffered from the depression that led to her nervous breakdown. “ Juan,” who ages from 26 to 39 in the play, represents the potter Juan Hamilton who encouraged the nearly blind O’Keeffe to paint again. In the biographical record there is much conjecture about Hamilton’s motives, and Shearer sensitively portrays her interpretation of this liaison and the difficult territory of sexual desire between a man and a much older woman, as she also too discloses the complex relationship between O’Keeffe and the much older Steiglitz.This complexity is described through the action of the play, but its disclosure is best appreciated if the biographical data is known. There are also a number of moments of biographical disclosure in the play that can only be fully understood with biographical knowledge in hand. For instance, Juan refers to Georgia’s paintings as “Beautiful, sexy flowers [... especially] the calla lilies” (24). All attending the play are aware (from the exhibition, program and technical aspects of the production) that, in life, O’Keeffe was famous for her flower paintings. However, knowing that these had brought her fame and fortune early in her career with, in 1928, a work titled Calla Lily selling for U.S. $25,000, then an enormous sum for any living American artist, adds to the meaning of this line in the play. Conversely, the significant level of biographical disclosure throughout Georgia does not diminish, in any way, the power or integrity of Shearer’s play as a literary work. Universal literary (and biographical) themes—love, desire and betrayal—animate Georgia; Steiglitz’s spirit haunts Georgia years after his death and much of the play’s dramatic energy is generated by her passion for both her dead husband and her younger lover, with some of her hopeless desire sublimated through her relationship with Juan. Nadia Wheatley reads such a relationship between invention and disclosure in terms of myth—relating how, in the process of writing her biography of Charmain Clift, she came to see Clift and her husband George Johnson take on a larger significance than their individual lives: “They were archetypes; ourselves writ large; experimenters who could test and try things for us; legendary figures through whom we could live vicariously” (5). In this, Wheatley finds that “while myth has no real beginning or end, it also does not bother itself with cause and effect. Nor does it worry about contradictions. Parallel tellings are vital to the fabric” (5). In contrast with both Rider and Shearer’s insistence that Georgia was “not biography”, it could be posited that (at least part of) Georgia’s power arises from the creation of such mythic value, and expressly through its nuanced disclosure of the relevant factual (biographical) elements in parallel to the development of its dramatic (invented) elements. Alongside this, accepting Georgia as such a form of biographical disclosure would mean that as well as a superbly inventive creative work, the highly original insights Shearer offers to the mass of O’Keeffe biography—something of an American industry—could be celebrated, rather than excused or denied. ReferencesArrowsmith, Alexandra, and Thomas West, eds. Georgia O’Keeffe & Alfred Stieglitz: Two Lives—A Conversation in Paintings and Photographs. Washington DC: HarperCollins and Calloway Editions, and The Phillips Collection, 1992.Berry, Michael. Georgia O’Keeffe. New York: Chelsea House, 1988.Brien, Donna Lee. The Case of Mary Dean: Sex, Poisoning and Gender Relations in Australia. Unpublished PhD Thesis. Queensland University of Technology, 2004. –––. “‘Based on a True Story’: The Problem of the Perception of Biographical Truth in Narratives Based on Real Lives”. TEXT: Journal of Writers and Writing Programs 13.2 (Oct. 2009). 19 Oct. 2009 < http://www.textjournal.com.au >.Calloway, Nicholas, and Doris Bry, eds. Georgia O’Keeffe in the West. New York: Knopf, 1989.Castro, Jan G. The Art and Life of Georgia O’Keeffe. New York: Crown Publishing, Random House, 1985.Davis, Christine S., and Carolyn Ellis. “Autoethnographic Introspection in Ethnographic Fiction: A Method of Inquiry.” In Pranee Liamputtong and Jean Rumbold, eds. Knowing Differently: Arts-Based and Collaborative Research. New York: Nova Science, 2008. 99–117.Defonseca, Misha. Misha: A Mémoire of the Holocaust Years. Bluebell, PA: Mt. Ivy Press, 1997.Drohojowska-Philp, Hunter. Full Bloom: The Art and Life of Georgia O’Keeffe. New York: WW Norton, 2004.Ellis, Carolyn. “Telling Secrets, Revealing Lives: Relational Ethics in Research with Intimate Others.” Qualitative Inquiry 13.1 (2007): 3–29. Eisler, Benita. O’Keeffe and Stieglitz: An American Romance. New York: Doubleday, 1991.Eldredge, Charles C. Georgia O’Keeffe: American and Modern. New Haven: Yale UP, 1993.Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Diamond as Big as the Ritz and Other Stories. Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin, 1962.Frey, James. A Million Little Pieces. New York: N.A. Talese/Doubleday, 2003.Gibiore, Clive, ed. Lovingly, Georgia. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1990.Halligan, Marion. “Lapping.” In Peter Craven, ed. Best Australian Essays. Melbourne: Bookman P, 1999. 208–13.Halligan, Marion. The Fog Garden. Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 2001.Halligan, Marion. “The Cathedral of Love.” The Age 27 Nov. 1999: Saturday Extra 1.Harris, J. C. “Georgia O’Keeffe at 291”. Archives of General Psychiatry 64.2 (Feb. 2007): 135–37.Hogrefe, Jeffrey. O’Keeffe: The Life of an American Legend. New York: Bantam, 1994.Inglis, Ian. “Popular Music History on Screen: The Pop/Rock Biopic.” Popular Music History 2.1 (2007): 77–93.Jones, Kip. “A Biographic Researcher in Pursuit of an Aesthetic: The Use of Arts-Based (Re)presentations in “Performative” Dissemination of Life Stories”. Qualitative Sociology Review 2.1 (Apr. 2006): 66–85. Jones, Margaret B. Love and Consequences: A Memoir of Hope and Survival. New York: Riverhead Books, 2008.Lisle, Laurie. Portrait of an Artist: A Biography of Georgia O’Keeffe. New York: Seaview Books, 1980.Murphy, Mary. “Limited Lives: The Problem of the Literary Biopic”. Kinema 17 (Spr. 2002): 67–74. Nelson, Camilla. “Faking It: History and Creative Writing.” TEXT: Journal of Writing and Writing Courses 11.2 (Oct. 2007). 19 Oct. 2009 < http://www.textjournal.com.au/oct07/nelson.htm >.Nowra, Louis. Ice. Crows Nest: Allen and Unwin, 2008.Owen, Jillian A. Tullis, Chris McRae, Tony E. Adams, and Alisha Vitale. “Truth Troubles.” Qualitative Inquiry 15.1 (2008): 178–200.Patai, Daphne. “Ethical Problems of Personal Narratives, or, Who Should Eat the Last Piece of Cake.” International Journal of Oral History 8 (1987): 5–27.Peters, Sarah W. Becoming O’Keeffe. New York: Abbeville Press, 1991.Pollitzer, Anita. A Woman on Paper. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1988.Reily, Nancy Hopkins. Georgia O’Keeffe. A Private Friendship, Part II. Santa Fe, NM: Sunstone Press, 2009.Rider, Sue. “Director’s Note.” Georgia [playscript]. Sydney: Currency Press, 2000. vii–xii.Robinson, Roxana. Georgia O’Keeffe: A Life. London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 1990. Shearer, Jill. Georgia [playscript]. Sydney: Currency Press, 2000.Smith, Thomas R. “How Our Lives Become Stories: Making Selves [review]”. Biography 23.3 (2000): 534–38.Wheatley, Nadia. The Life and Myth of Charmian Clift. Sydney: Flamingo, 2001.Wolpert, Stanley. “Biography as History: A Personal Reflection”. Journal of Interdisciplinary History 40.3 (2010): 399–412. Pub. online (Oct. 2009). 19 Oct. 2009 < http://www.mitpressjournals.org/toc/jinh/40/3 >.Wyatt, Jonathan. “Research, Narrative and Fiction: Conference Story”. The Qualitative Report 12.2 (Jun. 2007): 318–31.

The 2000s have been a lively decade for cities. The Worldwatch Institute estimated that 2007 was the first year in human history that more people worldwide lived in cities than the countryside. Globalisation and new digital media technologies have generated the seemingly paradoxical outcome that spatial location came to be more rather than less important, as combinations of firms, industries, cultural activities and creative talents have increasingly clustered around a select node of what have been termed “creative cities,” that are in turn highly networked into global circuits of economic capital, political power and entertainment media. Intellectually, the period has seen what the UCLA geographer Ed Soja refers to as the spatial turn in social theory, where “whatever your interests may be, they can be significantly advanced by adopting a critical spatial perspective” (2). This is related to the dynamic properties of socially constructed space itself, or what Soja terms “the powerful forces that arise from socially produced spaces such as urban agglomerations and cohesive regional economies,” with the result that “what can be called the stimulus of socio-spatial agglomeration is today being assertively described as the primary cause of economic development, technological innovation, and cultural creativity” (14). The demand for social justice in cities has, in recent years, taken the form of “Right to the City” movements. The “Right to the City” movement draws upon the long tradition of radical urbanism in which the Paris Commune of 1871 features prominently, and which has both its Marxist and anarchist variants, as well as the geographer Henri Lefebvre’s (1991) arguments that capitalism was fundamentally driven by the production of space, and that the citizens of a city possessed fundamental rights by virtue of being in a city, meaning that political struggle in capitalist societies would take an increasingly urban form. Manifestations of contemporary “Right to the City” movements have been seen in the development of a World Charter for the Right to the City, Right to the City alliances among progressive urban planners as well as urban activists, forums that bring together artists, architects, activists and urban geographers, and a variety of essays on the subject by radical geographers including David Harvey, whose work I wish to focus upon here. In his 2008 essay "The Right to the City," Harvey presents a manifesto for 21st century radical politics that asserts that the struggle for collective control over cities marks the nodal point of anti-capitalist movements today. It draws together a range of strands of arguments recognizable to those familiar with Harvey’s work, including Marxist political economy, the critique of neoliberalism, the growth of social inequality in the U.S. in particular, and concerns about the rise of speculative finance capital and its broader socio-economic consequences. My interest in Harvey’s manifesto here arises not so much from his prognosis for urban radicalism, but from how he understands the suburban in relation to this urban class struggle. It is an important point to consider because, in many parts of the world, growing urbanisation is in fact growing suburbanisation. This is the case for U.S. cities (Cox), and it is also apparent in Australian cities, with the rise in particular of outer suburban Master Planned Communities as a feature of the “New Prosperity” Australia has been experiencing since the mid 1990s (Flew; Infrastructure Australia). What we find in Harvey’s essay is that the suburban is clearly sub-urban, or an inferior form of city living. Suburbs are variously identified by Harvey as being:Sites for the expenditure of surplus capital, as a safety valve for overheated finance capitalism (Harvey 27);Places where working class militancy is pacified through the promotion of mortgage debt, which turns suburbanites into political conservatives primarily concerned with maintaining their property values;Places where “the neoliberal ethic of intense possessive individualism, and its cognate of political withdrawal from collective forms of action” are actively promoted through the proliferation of shopping malls, multiplexes, franchise stores and fast-food outlets, leading to “pacification by cappuccino” (32);Places where women are actively oppressed, so that “leading feminists … [would] proclaim the suburb as the locus of all their primary discontents” (28);A source of anti-capitalist struggle, as “the soulless qualities of suburban living … played a critical role in the dramatic events of 1968 in the US [as] discontented white middle-class students went into a phase of revolt, sought alliances with marginalized groups claiming civil rights and rallied against American imperialism” (28).Given these negative associations, one could hardly imagine citizens demanding the right to the suburb, in the same way as Harvey projects the right to the city as a rallying cry for a more democratic social order. Instead, from an Australian perspective, one is reminded of the critiques of suburbia that have been a staple of radical theory from the turn of the 20th century to the present day (Collis et. al.). Demanding the “right to the suburb” would appear here as an inherently contradictory demand, that could only be desired by those who the Australian radical psychoanalytic theorist Douglas Kirsner described as living an alienated existence where:Watching television, cleaning the car, unnecessary housework and spectator sports are instances of general life-patterns in our society: by adopting these patterns the individual submits to a uniform life fashioned from outside, a pseudo-life in which the question of individual self-realisation does not even figure. People live conditioned, unconscious lives, reproducing the values of the system as a whole (Kirsner 23). The problem with this tradition of radical critique, which is perhaps reflective of the estrangement of a section of the Australian critical intelligentsia more generally, is that most Australians live in suburbs, and indeed seem (not surprisingly!) to like living in them. Indeed, each successive wave of migration to Australia has been marked by families seeking a home in the suburbs, regardless of the housing conditions of the place they came from: the demand among Singaporeans for large houses in Perth, or what has been termed “Singaperth,” is one of many manifestations of this desire (Lee). Australian suburban development has therefore been characterized by a recurring tension between the desire of large sections of the population to own their own home (the fabled quarter-acre block) in the suburbs, and the condemnation of suburban life from an assortment of intellectuals, political radicals and cultural critics. This was the point succinctly made by the economist and urban planner Hugh Stretton in his 1970 book Ideas for Australian Cities, where he observed that “Most Australians choose to live in suburbs, in reach of city centres and also of beaches or countryside. Many writers condemn this choice, and with especial anger or gloom they condemn the suburbs” (Stretton 7). Sue Turnbull has observed that “suburbia has come to constitute a cultural fault-line in Australia over the last 100 years” (19), while Ian Craven has described suburbia as “a term of contention and a focus for fundamentally conflicting beliefs” in the Australian national imaginary “whose connotations continue to oscillate between dream and suburban nightmare” (48). The tensions between celebration and critique of suburban life play themselves out routinely in the Australian media, from the sun-lit suburbanism of Australia’s longest running television serial dramas, Neighbours and Home and Away, to the pointed observational critiques found in Australian comedy from Barry Humphries to Kath and Kim, to the dark visions of films such as The Boys and Animal Kingdom (Craven; Turnbull). Much as we may feel that the diagnosis of suburban life as a kind of neurotic condition had gone the way of the concept album or the tie-dye shirt, newspaper feature writers such as Catherine Deveny, writing in The Age, have offered the following as a description of the Chadstone shopping centre in Melbourne’s eastern suburbChadstone is a metastasised tumour of offensive proportions that's easy to find. You simply follow the line of dead-eyed wage slaves attracted to this cynical, hermetically sealed weatherless biosphere by the promise a new phone will fix their punctured soul and homewares and jumbo caramel mugachinos will fill their gaping cavern of disappointment … No one looks happy. Everyone looks anaesthetised. A day spent at Chadstone made me understand why they call these shopping centres complexes. Complex as in a psychological problem that's difficult to analyse, understand or solve. (Deveny) Suburbanism has been actively promoted throughout Australia’s history since European settlement. Graeme Davison has observed that “Australia’s founders anticipated a sprawl of homes and gardens rather than a clumping of terraces and alleys,” and quotes Governor Arthur Phillip’s instructions to the first urban developers of the Sydney Cove colony in 1790 that streets shall be “laid out in such a manner as to afford free circulation of air, and where the houses are built … the land will be granted with a clause that will prevent more than one house being built on the allotment” (Davison 43). Louise Johnson (2006) argued that the main features of 20th century Australian suburbanisation were very much in place by the 1920s, particularly land-based capitalism and the bucolic ideal of home as a retreat from the dirt, dangers and density of the city. At the same time, anti-suburbanism has been a significant influence in Australian public thought. Alan Gilbert (1988) drew attention to the argument that Australia’s suburbs combined the worst elements of the city and country, with the absence of both the grounded community associated with small towns, and the mental stimuli and personal freedom associated with the city. Australian suburbs have been associated with spiritual emptiness, the promotion of an ersatz, one-dimensional consumer culture, the embourgeoisment of the working-class, and more generally criticised for being “too pleasant, too trivial, too domestic and far too insulated from … ‘real’ life” (Gilbert 41). There is also an extensive feminist literature critiquing suburbanization, seeing it as promoting the alienation of women and the unequal sexual division of labour (Game and Pringle). More recently, critiques of suburbanization have focused on the large outer-suburban homes developed on new housing estates—colloquially known as McMansions—that are seen as being environmentally unsustainable and emblematic of middle-class over-consumption. Clive Hamilton and Richard Denniss’s Affluenza (2005) is a locus classicus of this type of argument, and organizations such as the Australia Institute—which Hamilton and Denniss have both headed—have regularly published papers making such arguments. Can the Suburbs Make You Creative?In such a context, championing the Australian suburb can feel somewhat like being an advocate for Dan Brown novels, David Williamson plays, Will Ferrell comedies, or TV shows such as Two and a Half Men. While it may put you on the side of majority opinion, you can certainly hear the critical axe grinding and possibly aimed at your head, not least because of the association of such cultural forms with mass popular culture, or the pseudo-life of an alienated existence. The art of a program such as Kath and Kim is that, as Sue Turnbull so astutely notes, it walks both sides of the street, both laughing with and laughing at Australian suburban culture, with its celebrity gossip magazines, gourmet butcher shops, McManisons and sales at Officeworks. Gina Riley and Jane Turner’s inspirations for the show can be seen with the presence of such suburban icons as Shane Warne, Kylie Minogue and Barry Humphries as guests on the program. Others are less nuanced in their satire. The website Things Bogans Like relentlessly pillories those who live in McMansions, wear Ed Hardy t-shirts and watch early evening current affairs television, making much of the lack of self-awareness of those who would simultaneously acquire Buddhist statues for their homes and take budget holidays in Bali and Phuket while denouncing immigration and multiculturalism. It also jokes about the propensity of “bogans” to loudly proclaim that those who question their views on such matters are demonstrating “political correctness gone mad,” appealing to the intellectual and moral authority of writers such as the Melbourne Herald-Sun columnist Andrew Bolt. There is also the “company you keep” question. Critics of over-consuming middle-class suburbia such as Clive Hamilton are strongly associated with the Greens, whose political stocks have been soaring in Australia’s inner cities, where the majority of Australia’s cultural and intellectual critics live and work. By contrast, the Liberal party under John Howard and now Tony Abbott has taken strongly to what could be termed suburban realism over the 1990s and 2000s. Examples of suburban realism during the Howard years included the former Member for Lindsay Jackie Kelly proclaiming that the voters of her electorate were not concerned with funding for their local university (University of Western Sydney) as the electorate was “pram city” and “no one in my electorate goes to uni” (Gibson and Brennan-Horley), and the former Minister for Immigration and Citizenship, Garry Hardgrave, holding citizenship ceremonies at Bunnings hardware stores, so that allegiance to the Australian nation could co-exist with a sausage sizzle (Gleeson). Academically, a focus on the suburbs is at odds with Richard Florida’s highly influential creative class thesis, which stresses inner urban cultural amenity and “buzz” as the drivers of a creative economy. Unfortunately, it is also at odds with many of Florida’s critics, who champion inner city activism as the antidote to the ersatz culture of “hipsterisation” that they associate with Florida (Peck; Slater). A championing of suburban life and culture is associated with writers such as Joel Kotkin and the New Geography group, who also tend to be suspicious of claims made about the creative industries and the creative economy. It is worth noting, however, that there has been a rich vein of work on Australian suburbs among cultural geographers, that has got past urban/suburban binaries and considered the extent to which critiques of suburban Australia are filtered through pre-existing discursive categories rather than empirical research findings (Dowling and Mee; McGuirk and Dowling; Davies (this volume). I have been part of a team engaged in a three-year study of creative industries workers in outer suburban areas, known as the Creative Suburbia project.[i] The project sought to understand how those working in creative industries who lived and worked in the outer suburbs maintained networks, interacted with clients and their peers, and made a success of their creative occupations: it focused on six suburbs in the cities of Brisbane (Redcliffe, Springfield, Forest Lake) and Melbourne (Frankston, Dandenong, Caroline Springs). It was premised upon what has been an inescapable empirical fact: however much talk there is about the “return to the city,” the fastest rates of population growth are in the outer suburbs of Australia’s major cities (Infrastructure Australia), and this is as true for those working in creative industries occupations as it is for those in virtually all other industry and occupational sectors (Flew; Gibson and Brennan-Horley; Davies). While there is a much rehearsed imagined geography of the creative industries that points to creative talents clustering in dense, highly agglomerated inner city precincts, incubating their unique networks of trust and sociality through random encounters in the city, it is actually at odds with the reality of where people in these sectors choose to live and work, which is as often as not in the suburbs, where the citizenry are as likely to meet in their cars at traffic intersections than walking in city boulevards.There is of course a “yes, but” response that one could have to such empirical findings, which is to accept that the creative workforce is more suburbanised than is commonly acknowledged, but to attribute this to people being driven out of the inner city by high house prices and rents, which may or may not be by-products of a Richard Florida-style strategy to attract the creative class. In other words, people live in the outer suburbs because they are driven out of the inner city. From our interviews with 130 people across these six suburban locations, the unequivocal finding was that this was not the case. While a fair number of our respondents had indeed moved from the inner city, just as many would—if given the choice—move even further away from the city towards a more rural setting as they would move closer to it. While there are clearly differences between suburbs, with creative people in Redcliffe being generally happier than those in Springfield, for example, it was quite clear that for many of these people a suburban location helped them in their creative practice, in ways that included: the aesthetic qualities of the location; the availability of “headspace” arising from having more time to devote to creative work rather than other activities such as travelling and meeting people; less pressure to conform to a stereotyped image of how one should look and act; financial savings from having access to lower-cost locations; and time saved by less commuting between locations.These creative workers generally did not see having access to the “buzz” associated with the inner city as being essential for pursuing work in their creative field, and they were just as likely to establish hardware stores and shopping centres as networking hubs as they were cafes and bars. While being located in the suburbs was disadvantageous in terms of access to markets and clients, but this was often seen in terms of a trade-off for better quality of life. Indeed, contrary to the presumptions of those such as Clive Hamilton and Catherine Deveny, they could draw creative inspiration from creative locations themselves, without feeling subjected to “pacification by cappuccino.” The bigger problem was that so many of the professional associations they dealt with would hold events in the inner city in the late afternoon or early evening, presuming people living close by and/or not having domestic or family responsibilities at such times. The role played by suburban locales such as hardware stores as sites for professional networking and as elements of creative industries value chains has also been documented in studies undertaken of Darwin as a creative city in Australia’s tropical north (Brennan-Horley and Gibson; Brennan-Horley et al.). Such a revised sequence in the cultural geography of the creative industries has potentially great implications for how urban cultural policy is being approached. The assumption that the creative industries are best developed in cities by investing heavily in inner urban cultural amenity runs the risk of simply bypassing those areas where the bulk of the nation’s artists, musicians, filmmakers and other cultural workers actually are, which is in the suburbs. Moreover, by further concentrating resources among already culturally rich sections of the urban population, such policies run the risk of further accentuating spatial inequalities in the cultural realm, and achieving the opposite of what is sought by those seeking spatial justice or the right to the city. An interest in broadband infrastructure or suburban university campuses is certainly far more prosaic than a battle for control of the nation’s cultural institutions or guerilla actions to reclaim the city’s streets. Indeed, it may suggest aspirations no higher than those displayed by Kath and Kim or by the characters of Barry Humphries’ satirical comedy. But however modest or utilitarian a focus on developing cultural resources in Australian suburbs may seem, it is in fact the most effective way of enabling the forms of spatial justice in the cultural sphere that many progressive people seek. ReferencesBrennan-Horley, Chris, and Chris Gibson. “Where Is Creativity in the City? Integrating Qualitative and GIS Methods.” Environment and Planning A 41.11 (2009): 2595–614. Brennan-Horley, Chris, Susan Luckman, Chris Gibson, and J. Willoughby-Smith. “GIS, Ethnography and Cultural Research: Putting Maps Back into Ethnographic Mapping.” The Information Society: An International Journal 26.2 (2010): 92–103.Collis, Christy, Emma Felton, and Phil Graham. “Beyond the Inner City: Real and Imagined Places in Creative Place Policy and Practice.” The Information Society: An International Journal 26.2 (2010): 104–12.Cox, Wendell. “The Still Elusive ‘Return to the City’.” New Geography 28 February 2011. < http://www.newgeography.com/content/002070-the-still-elusive-return-city >.Craven, Ian. “Cinema, Postcolonialism and Australian Suburbia.” Australian Studies 1995: 45-69. Davies, Alan. “Are the Suburbs Dormitories?” The Melbourne Urbanist 21 Sep. 2010. < http://melbourneurbanist.wordpress.com/2010/09/21/are-the-suburbs-dormitories/ >.Davison, Graeme. "Australia: The First Suburban Nation?” Journal of Urban History 22.1 (1995): 40-75. Deveny, Catherine. “No One Out Alive.” The Age 29 Oct. 2009. < http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/society-and-culture/no-one-gets-out-alive-20091020-h6yh.html >.Dowling, Robyn, and K. Mee. “Tales of the City: Western Sydney at the End of the Millennium.” Sydney: The Emergence of World City. Ed. John Connell. Melbourne: Oxford UP, 2000. 244–72.Flew, Terry. “Economic Prosperity, Suburbanization and the Creative Workforce: Findings from Australian Suburban Communities.” Spaces and Flows: Journal of Urban and Extra-Urban Studies 1.1 (2011, forthcoming).Game, Ann, and Rosemary Pringle. “Sexuality and the Suburban Dream.” Australian and New Zealand Journal of Sociology 15.2 (1979): 4–15.Gibson, Chris, and Chris Brennan-Horley. “Goodbye Pram City: Beyond Inner/Outer Zone Binaries in Creative City Research.” Urban Policy and Research 24.4 (2006): 455–71. Gilbert, A. “The Roots of Australian Anti-Suburbanism.” Australian Cultural History. Ed. S. I. Goldberg and F. B. Smith. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1988. 33–39. Gleeson, Brendan. Australian Heartlands: Making Space for Hope in the Suburbs. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2006.Hamilton, Clive, and Richard Denniss. Affluenza. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2005.Harvey, David. “The Right to the City.” New Left Review 53 (2008): 23–40.Infrastructure Australia. State of Australian Cities 2010. Infrastructure Australia Major Cities Unit. Canberra: Commonwealth of Australia. 2010.Johnson, Lesley. “Style Wars: Revolution in the Suburbs?” Australian Geographer 37.2 (2006): 259–77. Kirsner, Douglas. “Domination and the Flight from Being.” Australian Capitalism: Towards a Socialist Critique. Eds. J. Playford and D. Kirsner. Melbourne: Penguin, 1972. 9–31.Kotkin, Joel. “Urban Legends.” Foreign Policy 181 (2010): 128–34. Lee, Terence. “The Singaporean Creative Suburb of Perth: Rethinking Cultural Globalization.” Globalization and Its Counter-Forces in South-East Asia. Ed. T. Chong. Singapore: Institute for Southeast Asian Studies, 2008. 359–78. Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space. Trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith. Oxford: Blackwell, 1991.McGuirk, P., and Robyn Dowling. “Understanding Master-Planned Estates in Australian Cities: A Framework for Research.” Urban Policy and Research 25.1 (2007): 21–38Peck, Jamie. “Struggling with the Creative Class.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 29.4 (2005): 740–70. Slater, Tom. “The Eviction of Critical Perspectives from Gentrification Research.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 30.4 (2006): 737–57. Soja, Ed. Seeking Spatial Justice. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2010.Stretton, Hugh. Ideas for Australian Cities. Melbourne: Penguin, 1970.Turnbull, Sue. “Mapping the Vast Suburban Tundra: Australian Comedy from Dame Edna to Kath and Kim.” International Journal of Cultural Studies 11.1 (2008): 15–32.

The first time I read Hélène Cixous’s The Laugh of the Medusa I swooned. I wanted to write the whole thing out, large, and black, and pin it across an entire wall. I was 32 and vulnerable around polemic texts (I was always copying out quotes and sticking them to my walls, trying to hold onto meaning, unable to let the writing I read slip out and away). You must "write your self, your body must be heard" (Cixous 880), I read, as if for the hundredth time, even though it was the first. Those decades old words had an echoing, a resonance to them, as if each person who had read them had left their own mnemonic mark there, so that by the time they reached me, they struck, immediately, at my core (not the heart or the spine, or even the gut, but somewhere stickier; some pulsing place in amongst my organs, somewhere not touched, a space forgotten). The body that read The Laugh was so big its knees had trouble lifting it from chairs (“more body, hence more writing”, Cixous 886), and was soon to have its gallbladder taken. Its polycystic ovaries dreamed, lumpily and without much hope, of zygotes. The body that read The Laugh was a wobbling thing, sheathed in fat (as if this could protect it), with a yearning for sveltness, for muscle, for strength. Cixous sang through its cells, and called it to itself. The body that read The Laugh wrote itself back. It spoke about dungeons, and walls that had collected teenaged fists, and needles that turned it somnambulant and concave and warm until it was not. It wrote trauma in short and staggering sentences (out, get it out) as if narrative could save it from a fat-laden and static decline. Text leaked from tissue and bone, out through fingers and onto the page, and in increments so small I did not notice them, the body took its place. I was, all-of-a-sudden, more than my head. And then the body that read The Laugh performed the ultimate coup, and conceived.The body wrote then about its own birth, and the birth of its mother, and when its own children were born, of course, of course, about them. “Oral drive, anal drive, vocal drive–all these drives are our strengths, and among them is the gestation drive–all just like the desire to write: a desire to live self from within, a desire for the swollen belly, for language, for blood” (Cixous 891). The fat was gone, and in its place this other tissue, that later would be he. What I know now is that the body gets what the body wants. What I know now is that the body will tell its story, because if you “censor the body [… then] you censor breath and speech at the same time” (Cixous 880).I am trying to find a beginning. Because where is the place where I start? I was never a twinkle in my mother’s eye. It was the seventies. She was 22 and then 23–there was nothing planned about me. Her eyes a flinty green, hair long and straight. When I think of her then I remember this photo: black and white on the thick photo paper that is hard to get now. No shiny oblong spat from a machine, this paper was pulled in and out of three chemical trays and hung, dripping, in a dark red room to show me a woman in a long white t-shirt and nothing else. She stares straight out at me. On the shirt is a women’s symbol with a fist in the middle of it. Do you know the one? It might have been purple (the symbol I mean). When I think of her then I see her David Bowie teeth, the ones she hated, and a packet of Drum tobacco with Tally-Hos tucked inside, and some of the scars on her forearms, but not all of them, not yet. I can imagine her pregnant with me, the slow gait, that fleshy weight dragging at her spine and pelvis. She told me the story of my birth every year on my birthday. She remembers what day of the week the contractions started. The story is told with a kind of glory in the detail, with a relishing of small facts. I do the same with my children now. I was delivered by forceps. The dent in my skull, up above my right ear, was a party trick when I was a teenager, and an annoyance when I wanted to shave my head down to the bone at 18. Just before Jem was born, I discovered a second dent behind my left ear. My skull holds the footprint of those silver clamps. My bones say here, and here, this is where I was pulled from you. I have seen babies being born this way. They don’t slide out all sealish and purple and slippy. They are pulled. The person holding the forcep handles uses their whole body weight to yank that baby out. It makes me squirm, all that pulling, those tiny neck bones concertinaing out, the silver scoops sinking into the skull and leaving prints, like a warm spoon in dough. The urgency of separation, of the need to make two things from one. After Jem was born he lay on my chest for hours. As the placenta was birthed he weed on me. I felt the warm trickle down my side and was glad. There was nothing so right as my naked body making a bed for his. I lay in a pool of wet (blood and lichor and Jem’s little wee) and the midwives pushed towels under me so I wouldn’t get cold. He sucked. White waffle weave blankets over both of us. That bloody nest. I lay in it and rested my free hand on his vernix covered back; the softest thing I had ever touched. We basked in the warm wet. We basked. How do I sew theory into this writing? Julia Kristeva especially, whose Stabat Mater describes those early moments of holding the one who was inside and then out so perfectly that I am left silent. The smell of milk, dew-drenched greenery, sour and clear, a memory of wind, of air, of seaweed (as if a body lived without waste): it glides under my skin, not stopping at the mouth or nose but caressing my veins, and stripping the skin from the bones fills me like a balloon full of ozone and I plant my feet firmly on the ground in order to carry him, safe, stable, unuprootable, while he dances in my neck, floats with my hair, looks right and left for a soft shoulder, “slips on the breast, swingles, silver vivid blossom of my belly” and finally flies up from my navel in his dream, borne by my hands. My son (Kristeva, Stabat Mater 141). Is theory more important than this? The smell of milk (dried, it is soursweet and will draw any baby to you, nuzzling and mewling), which resides alongside the Virgin Mother and the semiotics of milk and tears. The language of fluid. While the rest of this writing, the stories not of mothers and babies, but one mother and one baby, came out smooth and fast, as soon as I see or hear or write that word, theory, I slow. I am concerned with the placement of things. I do not have the sense of being free. But if there’s anything that should come from this vain attempt to answer Cixous, to “write your self. Your body must be heard” (880), it should be that freedom and theory, boundary-lessness, is where I reside. If anything should come from this, it is the knowing that theory is the most creative pursuit, and that creativity will always speak to theory. There are fewer divisions than any of us realise, and the leakiness of bodies, of this body, will get me there. The smell of this page is of lichor; a clean but heady smell, thick with old cells and a foetus’s breath. The smell of this page is of blood and saliva and milk mixed (the colour like rotten strawberries or the soaked pad at the bottom of your tray of supermarket mince). It is a smell that you will secretly savour, breathe deeply, and then long for lemon zest or the sharpness of coffee beans to send away that angelic fug. That milk and tears have a language of their own is undeniable. Kristeva says they are “metaphors of non-language, of a ‘semiotic’ that does not coincide with linguistic communication” (Stabat Mater 143) but what I know is that these fluids were the first language for my children. Were they the first language for me? Because “it must be true: babies drink language along with the breastmilk: Curling up over their tongues while they take siestas–Mots au lait, verbae cum lacta, palabros con leche” (Wasserman quoted in Giles 223). The enduring picture I have of myself as an infant is of a baby who didn’t cry, but my mother will tell you a different story, in the way that all of us do. She will tell you I didn’t smile until I was five months old (Soli and Jem were both beaming at three months). Born six weeks premature, my muscles took longer to find their place, to assemble themselves under my skin. She will tell you I screamed in the night, because all babies do. Is this non-language? Jem was unintelligible much of the time. I felt as if I was holding a puzzle. Three o’clock in the morning, having tried breastfeeds, a bath with Nick Drake’s Pink Moon, bouncing him in a baby sling on the fitball (wedged into a corner so that if I nodded off I would hopefully swoon backwards, and the wall would wake me), walking him around and around while rocking and singing, then breastfeeding again, and still he did not sleep, and still he cried and clawed at my cheeks and shoulders and wrists and writhed; I could not guess at what it was he needed. I had never been less concerned with the self that was me. I was all breasts and milk and a craving for barbecued chicken and watermelon at three in the morning because he was drinking every ounce of energy I had. I was arms and a voice. I was food. And then I learnt other things; about let downs and waking up in pools of the stuff. Wet. Everywhere. “Lactating bodies tend towards anarchy” (Bartlett 163). Any body will tend towards anarchy – there is so much to keep in – but there are only so many openings a person can keep track of, and breastfeeding meant a kind of levelling up, meant I was as far from clean and proper as I possibly could be (Kristeva, Powers of Horror 72).In the nights I was not alone. Caren could not breastfeed him, but could do everything else, and never said I have to work tomorrow, because she knew I was working too. During waking hours I watched him constantly for those mystical tired signs, which often were hungry signs, which quickly became overtired signs. There was no figuring it out. But Soli, with Soli, I knew. The language of babies had been sung into my bones. There is a grammar in crying, a calling out and telling, a way of knowing that is older than I’ll ever be. Those tiny bodies are brimming with semiotics. Knees pulled up is belly ache, arching is tired, a look to the side I-want-that-take-me-there-not-there. There. Curling in, the whole of him, is don’t-look-at-me-now-hands-away. Now he is one he uses his hands to tell me what he wants. Sign language because I sign and so, then, does he, but also an emphatic placing of my hands on his body or toys, utensils, swings, things. In the early hours of a Wednesday morning I tried to stroke his head, to close his wide-open eyes with my fingertips. He grabbed my hand and moved it to his chest before I could alight on the bridge of his nose. And yesterday he raised his arm into the air, then got my hand and placed it into his raised hand, then stood, and led me down to the laundry to play with the dustpan and broom. His body, literally, speaks.This is the language of mothers and babies. It is laid down in the darkest part of the night. Laid down like memory, like dreams, stitched into tiredness and circled with dread adrenalin and fear. It will never stop. That baby will cry and I will stare owl-eyed into the dark and bend my cracking knees (don’t shake the baby it will only make it worse don’t shake don’t). These babies will grow into children and then adults who will never remember those screaming nights, cots like cages, a stuffed toy pushed on them as if it could replace the warmth of skin and breath (please, please, little bear, replace the warmth of skin and breath). I will never remember it, but she will. They will never remember it, but we will. Kristeva says too that mothers are in a “catastrophe of identity which plunges the proper Name into that ‘unnameable’ that somehow involves our imaginary representations of femininity, non-language, or the body” (Stabat Mater 134). A catastrophe of identity. The me and the not-me. In the night, with a wrapped baby and aching biceps, the I-was batting quietly at the I-am. The I-am is all body. Arms to hold and bathe and change him, milk to feed him, a voice to sing and soothe him. The I-was is a different beast, made of words and books, uninterrupted conversation and the kind of self-obsession and autonomy I didn’t know existed until it was gone. Old friends stopped asking me about my day. They asked Caren, who had been at work, but not me. It did not matter that she was a woman; in this, for most people we spoke to, she was the public and I was the private, her work mattered and mine did not. Later she would commiserate and I would fume, but while it was happening, it was near impossible to contest. A catastrophe of identity. In a day I had fed and walked and cried and sung and fed and rocked and pointed and read books with no words and rolled inane balls across the lounge room floor and washed and sung and fed. I had circled in and around while the sun traced its arc. I had waited with impatience for adult company. I had loved harder than I ever had before. I had metamorphosed and nobody noticed. Nobody noticed. A catastrophe of identity it was, but the noise and visibility that the word catastrophe invokes was entirely absent. And where was the language to describe this peeling inside out? I was burnished bright by those sleepless nights, by the requirement of the I-am. And in those nights I learned what my mother already knew. That having children is a form of grief. That we lose. But that we gain. At 23, what’s lost is possibility. She must have seen her writer’s life drilling down to nothing. She knew that Sylvia Plath had placed her head, so carefully on its pillow, in that gas filled place. No pungent metaphor, just a poet, a mother, who could not continue. I had my babies at 34 and 36. I knew some of what I would lose, but had more than I needed. My mother had started out with not enough, and so was left concave and edged with desperation as she made her way through inner-city Sydney’s grime, her children singing from behind her wait for me, wait for me, Mama please wait for me, I’m going just as fast as I can.Nothing could be more ‘normal’ than that a maternal image should establish itself on the site of that tempered anguish known as love. No one is spared. Except perhaps the saint or the mystic, or the writer who, by force of language, can still manage nothing more than to demolish the fiction of the mother-as-love’s-mainstay and to identify with love as it really is: a fire of tongues, an escape from representation (Kristeva, Stabat Mater 145).We transformed, she and I. She hoped to make herself new with children. A writer born of writers, the growing and birthing of our tiny bodies forced her to place pen to paper, to fight to write. She carved a place for herself with words but it kept collapsing in on her. My father’s bi-polar rages, his scrubbing evil spirits from the soles of her shoes in the middle of the night, wore her down, and soon she inhabited that maternal image anyway, in spite of all her attempts to side step it. The mad mother, the single mother, the sad mother. And yes I remember those mothers. But I also remember her holding me so hard sometimes I couldn’t breathe properly, and that some nights when I couldn’t sleep she had warm eyes and made chamomile tea, and that she called me angel. A fire of tongues, but even she, with her words, couldn’t escape from representation. I am a writer born of writers born of writers (triply blessed or cursed with text). In my scramble to not be mad or bad or sad, I still could not escape the maternal image. More days than I can count I lay under my babies wishing I could be somewhere, anywhere else, but they needed to sleep or feed or be. With me. Held captive by the need to be a good mother, to be the best mother, no saint or mystic presenting itself, all I could do was write. Whole poems sprang unbidden and complete from my pen. My love for my children, that fire of tongues, was demolishing me, and the only way through was to inhabit this vessel of text, to imbibe the language of bodies and tears and night, and make from it my boat.Those children wrote my body in the night. They taught me about desire, that unbounded scribbling thing that will not be bound by subjectivity, by me. They taught me that “the body is literally written on, inscribed, by desire and signification” (Grosz 60), and every morning I woke with ashen bones and poetry aching out through my pores, with my body writing me.This Mother ThingI maintain that I do not have to leavethe house at nightall leathery and eyelinered,all booted up and raw.I maintain that I do not miss thosesmoky rooms (wait that’s not allowed any more)where we strut and, without looking,compare tattoos.Because two years ago I had you.You with your blonde hair shining, your eyes like a creek after rain, that veinthat’s so blue on the side of your small nosethat people think you’ve been bruised.Because two years ago you cameout of me and landed here and grew. There is no going out. We (she and me) washand cook and wash and clean and love.This mother thing is the making of me but I missthose pulsing rooms,the feel of all of you pressing in onall of me.This mother thing is the making of me. And in text, in poetry, I find my home. “You only have to look at the Medusa straight on to see her. And she’s not deadly. She’s beautiful and she’s laughing” (Cixous 885). The mother-body writes herself, and is made new. The mother-body writes her own mother, and knows she was always-already here. The mother-body births, and breastfeeds, and turns to me in the aching night and says this: the Medusa? The Medusa is me.ReferencesBartlett, Alison. Breastwork: Rethinking Breastfeeding. Sydney: UNSW Press, 2005.Cixous, Hélène, Keith Cohen, and Paula Cohen (Trans.). "The Laugh of the Medusa." Signs 1.4 (1976): 875-93. Giles, Fiona. Fresh Milk. Crows Nest, NSW: Allen & Unwin, 2003. Grosz, Elizabeth. Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism. St Leonards, NSW: Allen & Unwin, 1994.Kristeva, Julia, and Leon S. Roudiez (Trans.) Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. New York: Columbia University Press, 1982.Kristeva, Julia, and Arthur Goldhammer (Trans.). "Stabat Mater." Poetics Today 6.1-2 (1985): 133-52.

This special issue of Networking Knowledge really showcases the breadth and richness of the research being done by MeCCSA’s postgraduate community. Based on papers given at the PGN’s annual conference at the University of East Anglia last year, the articles below cover topics ranging from the promotion of the latest Bond film to the movement of Baltic artists around Europe, and methodologies including original archival discoveries, various forms of discourse analysis, and interviews with industrial and creative professionals. This shows that, as media forms and methods of communication become evermore diverse, fragmented, converged and fast-changing in the digital age, the future of research in these fields promises a suitably multi-faceted and adaptable approach to the challenge of understanding it all. The issue stays true to this journal’s title, bringing together, as did the conference, a fascinatingly interconnected set of subjects. Indeed, networking knowledge in this way is, I think, an indispensable habit for all scholars within MeCCSAs subject, if we are to remain relevant and effective as researchers in the current climate of fragmentation: working with and through the links between our many various questions, fields, methodologies and institutional priorities, and seeing them as innovative opportunities, rather than inconvenient barriers. The issue starts with four articles that each add a different perspective on the broad theme of re- viewing cinema’s history. Julia Bohlmann’s contribution gives insight into a previously untouched moment in the history of film censorship debates, focusing the broad issue of moral panic about early cinema’s impact on children through the perspective of regional (Scottish) jurisdictions. Filipa Antunes then picks up nicely on the same topic, but in a quite different ‘transitional moment’, at the other end of the twentieth century. Her article considers the ambiguities surrounding a new film classification in the United States in 1980s that arguably created a new sub-genre, the ‘tween’ horror. Through a case study of a single film, the article opens onto a set of issues that have been hotly contested in media and film studies in recent years beyond classification itself: genre, demographics and fan discourse. Adam Scales’ article on Nightmare on Elm Street 2 continues on the theme of horror, synthesising analysis of textual and reception discourses in order to understand the complex and ambiguous construction of ‘alternative’ – in this case queer – audiences. Moving from horror to an even more slippery label, Michael Ahmed then gives a timely consideration of what the ‘exploitation film’ might be in the British context. Like Scales, Ahmed shows how our frameworks for understanding exactly how films are received and defined by audiences and critics must not be rigid, but instead allow for the inevitable overlaps, fluid interconnections and confusion between categories. The following three articles examine media paratexts. Stephanie Janes offers a detailed explanation of the promotional alternate reality game, with original interviews with some of the creators and players of these new multi-media marketing experiences. Her interrogation of the player and ‘puppetmaster’ roles shows a complex negotation of power, collaboration and ownership at work that unsettles previous distinctions made between producers and users. Boundaries are questioned too in Dolores Moreno’s article, which encourages the developing field of screenplay studies to consider the after-lives of film scripts – in terms of finished films, award recognition for writing, and published screenplay – as equally important a part of ‘screenplay discourse’ as the strictly pre- production process of conception. Again, negotiations of power and ownership sit behind Moreno’s discussion, especially powerful in her critique of the pedagogical consensus on how screenwriters should be trained. Concluding this section, Sarah Kelley gives a survey of the means by which Skyfall was made into a comeback hit for the James Bond franchise. Isolating the key themes of nationality, nostalgia and notability, this article is an engaging reminder of the way in which contemporary media promotion works dynamically across platforms and cultural contexts and simultaneously towards a multitude of strategic ends.We return to the economy of cultural capital at work in generic classification with Patrick Bingham’s article on the television series Pretty Little Liars. This article also returns to the topics of teenage audiences and homosexual narratives, the two intersecting in the question of how ‘drama’, ‘mystery’ and ‘teen TV’ have been set into a value-laden hierarchy by the programme’s promoters and critics. Emma Duester presents her detailed ethnographic study of artists based in the Baltics, arguing that a new conception of ‘mobility’, rather than ‘migration’, is needed to account for the trans-national and fluidly networked experience of her subjects. This shifts the focus to the art world and to geography, showing how the impact of globalisation on creative industries throws up complex forms of experience that resist simplistic oppositions like ‘liminal’ and ‘central’. Finally, Thomas James Scott brings the issue back to where it started, with the early decades of feature- length cinema. Scott considers the representation of another example of mobility – that of Irish nationals to the United States – drawing on numerous instances from the archives to trace how depictions of Irish immigrants was refined and adapted as the medium matured, leading us to consider how ethnic difference, and immigration itself, were gradually built in to Hollywood’s image of the American Dream. With such an eclectic mix of topics and approaches, there really is something for all scholars in this issue. With that in mind, it serves as a perfect launch-pad for the new policy at Networking Knowledge of inviting articles on an open basis, to complement its usual themed collections. It is hoped that this will allow for the publication of more ground-breaking postgraduate and early career research even if it doesn’t fit within any of the upcoming themes, and so broaden further the network’s discussions and discoveries. I also hope it provides ample inspiration for new postgraduates to join the network and all members to submit their work to this year’s PGN conference at the University of Leeds. It is sure to be just as dynamic and stimulating as the work represented here.

Futuristic fiction almost by definition enters into a dialogue with the present as a future past. As a consequence, history haunts even the most inane visions of the future in often quite subtle ways. An excellent prompt to speculate on this issue is provided by Luc Besson's popular film The Fifth Element (1997). Like many science-fiction films, it is about a future troubled by its own promises. It almost goes without saying that while not specifically figured around Y2K, the attention to dates and time in the film combined with its late '90s release date also inscribe it within Millennial anxieties about the end of the world. History plays a series of roles in The Fifth Element. In common with many science-fiction fables, the film stages an inverted fictional genealogy, in which the viewer is actively encouraged to revel in identifying extrapolated features and concerns of the present. This heralds a basic historicity: that is, it invites us to grasp our present as history through its defamiliarisation. Moreover, like another futuristic film of the same year, Gattaca, it is aesthetically marked by the pathos of what might be called millennial "nostalgia for the future" -- that lost utopian real of Modernist aesthetic desire which seems to haunt these "post-post-apocalyptic", Space-Age futures1. This is only enhanced by quoting generously from earlier moments of the science fiction genre (such as Blade Runner). Striking, however, is that despite all of this, everyday America -- globalised and projected two hundred and fifty years hence -- is not so much dystopian or utopian as just ordinary. People still smoke, but filters makes up three-quarters of a cigarette's length; we still get stuck in chaotic traffic, even if it flies above the ground; we still eat Chinese takeaway, only now the restaurants fly to you; and cops still eat take-away at drive-through McDonald's, which are now floating fixtures in the cityscape. That individuals are so stylish (thanks to costume design, everyone is wearing Jean-Paul Gaultier) also seems significant, because this aestheticised ordinariness helps focus attention on the lived time of everyday utopian yearnings. In these ways and more, our contemporary moment is immanent in the film. However, at certain other crucial moments in the film, History is directly presented as an excess. Let me explain. Two hundred and fifty years into the future, a "Supreme Being" -- Leeloo (Milla Jovovich) -- is genetically reconstructed by scientists. Dubbed the missing "fifth element", she belongs to a highly developed extra-terrestrial species who have a protectoral relation to humanity. In the beginning, Leeloo is cut off from human language -- speaking in a tongue that combines a mixture of European dialects with baby-speak (her favourite phrase, as anyone who has seen the film will recall, is "[Big] badda-boo!"). She speaks what a priest in the film calls the "Divine language", "spoken before time was time" -- evoking the theological dream of a universal pre-symbolic language, of a pure speech that speaks the world rather than speaks of it. Her very first English word is "Help!" -- which she reads off a taxi sticker advertisement for starving black orphans. And it is perhaps no accident that she identifies with this future's expropriated. Leeloo is a body cast into marginality. Caged as an exhibit from the moment of her arrival on Earth, with her exotic appearance, wide-eyed wonderment and capacity for mimicry, she displays all the tropes of the infantilised and sexualised Other. Romanticised as a primitivist fantasy, she represents a classically vulnerable redemptive figure2. Two hundred and fifty years into the future, a "Supreme Being" -- Leeloo (Milla Jovovich) -- is genetically reconstructed by scientists. Dubbed the missing "fifth element", she belongs to a highly developed extra-terrestrial species who have a protectoral relation to humanity. In the beginning, Leeloo is cut off from human language -- speaking in a tongue that combines a mixture of European dialects with baby-speak (her favourite phrase, as anyone who has seen the film will recall, is "[Big] badda-boo!"). She speaks what a priest in the film calls the "Divine language", "spoken before time was time" -- evoking the theological dream of a universal pre-symbolic language, of a pure speech that speaks the world rather than speaks of it. Her very first English word is "Help!" -- which she reads off a taxi sticker advertisement for starving black orphans. And it is perhaps no accident that she identifies with this future's expropriated. Leeloo is a body cast into marginality. Caged as an exhibit from the moment of her arrival on Earth, with her exotic appearance, wide-eyed wonderment and capacity for mimicry, she displays all the tropes of the infantilised and sexualised Other. Romanticised as a primitivist fantasy, she represents a classically vulnerable redemptive figure2. Leaving aside for the moment the perhaps inevitably romantic resolution to this predicament, we can interpret this scene as a critique of the Enlightenment pretension to "total History". The "arbitrary" order of alphabetisation, which replaces the seemingly determined disorder of historical narratives, is akin to the Kantian dream of a cosmopolitan state of "universal history". Think, too, of the aging Hegel, writing in 1830: We witness a vast spectacle of events and actions, of infinitely varied constellations of nations, states and individuals, in restless succession. ... Everywhere we see a motley confusion ... But ... we grow weary of particulars and ask ourselves to what end they all contribute. We cannot accept that their significance is exhausted by their own particular ends; everything must be part of a single enterprise. (325-7) Leaving aside for the moment the perhaps inevitably romantic resolution to this predicament, we can interpret this scene as a critique of the Enlightenment pretension to "total History". The "arbitrary" order of alphabetisation, which replaces the seemingly determined disorder of historical narratives, is akin to the Kantian dream of a cosmopolitan state of "universal history". Think, too, of the aging Hegel, writing in 1830: We witness a vast spectacle of events and actions, of infinitely varied constellations of nations, states and individuals, in restless succession. ... Everywhere we see a motley confusion ... But ... we grow weary of particulars and ask ourselves to what end they all contribute. We cannot accept that their significance is exhausted by their own particular ends; everything must be part of a single enterprise. (325-7) If The Fifth Element critiques the universal history lesson, it also revolves around a dialectical relation between past and present. Although the opening scene in late colonial Egypt locates the film's narrative historically, these later scenes suggest a break with conventional, clean historiographical separations between the past and the present5. Leeloo's reading of History implies that embodied historical reception is in a perpetual in-between state. Not only the representation of the past as History but the experience of Time itself becomes less a matter of chronology than of a Freudian retroactivity, a "present past" with everyday variations which belong as much to future possibilities as to what we perceive as the present. The necessary absence of a determinate "past object" (referent) in historical understanding means that historicity is a traumatic process of deferral. In psychoanalytic terms, Leeloo's forced recognition of the unnatural deaths of Others is a traumatic encounter which generates a hole in the symbolic order of Leeloo's "real". Leeloo's traumatised body metaphorically becomes the singular "truth" of the symbolic world6. A global history is in fact nobody's history in particular -- belonging to everybody and nobody. This is the fate of the CD-ROM: a "memory" overwhelmingly composed of media images, and an allegory for our own situation of image saturation (whose stereotypical symbol is the isolated individual glued to a flickering screen). Yet when Leeloo enters history with a kiss, a fragile dialogical exchange in which her own life "story" begins, the fate of media images is to become socialised as part of non-synchronous particular narratives7. The grand "nightmare" of History has become comprehensible through her particular access to universal History -- and the result is an appropriated, ongoing experience with an undisclosed future. The Fifth Element thus presents a distinctly everyday solution to the problem of historical time -- and is this not how media history is experienced? No doubt in the future no less than the present, history will be less a matter of the Past itself, than of the allegorical reverberation of events documented and encountered in the everyday mediasphere. Footnotes Mark Dery recently berated the trend for retro-futurism as a Wallpaper-inspired plot, poised to generate a nostalgia for ironic dreams of fading technological utopias, while revealing the banality of design fashions that demand the ever new. See "Back to the Future", posted to Nettime (5 Sep. 1999) It is also worth noting the sublime role of the Diva in the film, whose pained operatic performance embodies what Slavoj Zizek once called the jouissance of modernity. Humanity's potential will to "creative destruction" has previously been embodied in Gary Oldman's evil business figure of Zorg, who undoubtedly represents the excesses of corporate capitalism (he illustrates his Ayn Rand-style vitalist philosophy at one point by letting a glass fall from his desk and shatter on to the ground: gleefully watching as a team of mechanical robots whiz around the floor sweeping it up, he croons: "see -- a lovely ballet ensues, adding to the great chain of life -- by creating a little destruction, I am in fact encouraging life". See Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi. Vol. 10, Theory and History of Literature. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1984; Jacques Derrida, Spectres of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf. London: Routledge, 1994. Historiographical time can be distinguished from psychoanalytic time on the basis of two different ways of organising the space of memory. While the former conceives the temporal relation as one of succession and correlation, the latter treats the relation as one of imbrication and repetition. Michel de Certeau, Heterologies: Discourse on the Other. Translated by Brian Massumi. Vol. 17, Theory and History of Literature. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1986. 4. An interesting sf intertext here is Andrei Tarkovsky's Solaris, in which a woman who is a projection of a man's memory unsuccessfully attempts to kill herself to prove that she is made of historical reality. In this traumatic scene, she consumes liquid nitrogen and writhes on a metallic floor in a frozen state until she gradually thaws into human movement. Leeloo is finally brought into the "un-Historical" time of everyday embodied subjectivity with a single kiss. To borrow the language of psychoanalytic film studies, her "screen memories" are reconfigured by an imaginary resolution in the present. I use the term screen memories with a nod to both the computer screen and Freud's compelling if problematic account of repressed mnemic material. Freud writes: "As the indifferent memories owe their preservation not to their own content but to an associative relation between their content and another which is repressed, they have some claim to be called 'screen memories'". Sigmund Freud, The Psychopathology of Everyday Life. Vol. 5, The Pelican Freud Library. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1960. 83. References Fukuyama, Francis. The End of History and the Last Man. New York: Avon Books, 1992. Hegel, G.W.F. "The Philosophical History of the World: Second Draft (1830)." German Idealist Philosophy. Ed. Rüdiger Buber. London: Penguin, 1997. 317-39. Citation reference for this article MLA style: Daniel Palmer. "Nostalgia for the Future: Everyday History and The Fifth Element." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2.9 (2000). [your date of access] <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/0001/nostalgia.php>. Chicago style: Daniel Palmer, "Nostalgia for the Future: Everyday History and The Fifth Element," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2, no. 9 (2000), <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/0001/nostalgia.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: Daniel Palmer. (2000) Nostalgia for the future: everyday history and The Fifth Element. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2(9). <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/0001/nostalgia.php> ([your date of access]).

Introduction In the wake of the disaster of World War I, the Surrealists formulated a hostile critique of the novel that identified its limitations in expressing the depth of the mind's faculties and the fragmentation of the psyche after catastrophic events. From this position of crisis, the Surrealists undertook a series of experimental innovations in form, structure, and style in an attempt to renew the genre. This article examines how the praxis of shock is deployed in a number of Surrealist city novels as a conduit for revolt against a society that grew increasingly mechanised in the climate of post-war regeneration. It seeks to counter the contemporary view that Surrealist city dérives (drifts) represent an intriguing yet ultimately benign method of urban research. By reconsidering its origins in response to a world catastrophe, this article emphasises the Surrealist novel’s binding of the affective properties of shock to the dream-awakening dialectic at the heart of the political position of Surrealism. The Surrealist City Novel Today it has almost become a truism to assert that there is a causal link between the catastrophic devastation wrought by the events of the two World Wars and the ideology of rupture that characterised the iconoclasms of the Modernist avant-gardes. Yet, as we progress into the twenty-first century, it is timely to recognise that new generations are rediscovering canonical and peripheral texts of this era and refracting them through a prism of contemporary preoccupations. In many ways, the revisions of today’s encounters with that past era suggest we have travelled some distance from the rawness of such catastrophic events. One post-war body of work recently subjected to view via an unexpected route is the remarkable array of Surrealist city novels set in Paris in the 1920s and 1930s, representing a spectrum of experimental texts by such authors as André Breton, Louis Aragon, Robert Desnos, Philippe Soupault, and Michel Leiris. Over the past decade, these works have become recuperated in the Anglophone context as exemplary instances of ludic engagement with the city. This is due in large part to the growing surge of interest in psychogeography, an urban research method concerned with the influence that geographical environments exert over the emotions and behaviours of individuals, and a concern for tracing the literary genealogies of walking and writing in broad sweeping encyclopaedic histories and guidebook style accounts (for prominent examples see Rebecca Solnit’s Wanderlust and Merlin Coverley’s Psychogeography). Yet as Surrealist novels continue to garner renewed interest for their erotic intrigue, their strolling encounters with the unconscious or hidden facets of the city, and as precursors to the apparently more radical practice of Situationist psychogeography, this article suggests that something vital is missing. By neglecting the revolutionary significance that the Surrealists placed upon the street and its inextricable connection to the shock of the marvellous, I suggest that we have arrived at a point of diminished appreciation of the praxis of the dream-awakening dialectic at the heart of Surrealist politics. With the movement firmly lodged in the popular imagination as concerned merely with the art of play and surprise, the Surrealists’ sensorial conception of the city as embedded within a much larger critique of the creators of “a sterile and dead world” (Rasmussen 372) is lost. This calls into question to what extent we can now relate to the urgency with which avant-gardes like the Surrealists responded to the disaster of war in their call for “the revolution of the subject, a revolution that destroyed identity and released the fantastic” (372). At the same time, a re-evaluation of the Surrealist city novel as a significant precursor to the psychogeograhical dérive (drift) can prove instructive in locating the potential of walking, in order to function as a form of praxis (defined here as lived practice in opposition to theory) that goes beyond its more benign construction as the “gentle art” of getting lost. The Great Shock To return to the origins of Surrealism is to illuminate the radical intentions of the movement. The enormous shock that followed the Great War represented, according to Roger Shattuck, “a profound organic reaction that convulsed the entire system with vomiting, manic attacks, and semi-collapse” (9). David Gascoyne considers 1919, the inaugural year of Surrealist activity, as “a year of liquidation, the end of everything but also of paroxysmic death-birth, incubating seeds of renewal” (17). It was at this time that André Breton and his collaborator Philippe Soupault came together at the Hôtel des Grands Hommes in Paris to conduct their early experimental research. As the authors took poetic license with the psychoanalytical method of automatic writing, their desire to unsettle the latent content of the unconscious as it manifests in the spontaneous outpourings of dream-like recollections resulted in the first collection of Surrealist texts, The Magnetic Fields (1920). As Breton recalls: Completely occupied as I still was with Freud at that time, and familiar with his methods of examination which I had had some slight occasion to use on some patients during the war, I resolved to obtain from myself what we were trying to obtain from them, namely, a monologue spoken as rapidly as possible without any intervention on the part of critical faculties, a monologue consequently unencumbered by the slightest inhibition and which was, as closely as possible, akin to spoken thought. (Breton, Manifesto 22–23) Despite their debts to psychoanalytical methods, the Surrealists sought radically different ends from therapeutic goals in their application. Rather than using analysis to mitigate the pathologies of the psyche, Breton argued that such methods should instead be employed to liberate consciousness in ways that released the individual from “the reign of logic” (Breton, Manifesto 11) and the alienating forces of a mechanised society. In the same manifesto, Breton links his critique to a denunciation of the novel, principally the realist novel which dominated the literary landscape of the nineteenth-century, for its limitations in conveying the power of the imagination and the depths of the mind’s faculties. Despite these protestations, the Surrealists were unable to completely jettison the novel and instead launched a series of innovations in form, structure, and style in an attempt to renew the genre. As J.H. Matthews suggests, “Being then, as all creative surrealism must be, the expression of a mood of experimentation, the Surrealist novel probes not only the potentialities of feeling and imagination, but also those of novelistic form” (Matthews 6). When Nadja appeared in 1928, Breton was not the first Surrealist to publish a novel. However, this work remains the most well-known example of its type in the Anglophone context. Largely drawn from the author’s autobiographical experiences, it recounts the narrator’s (André’s) obsessive infatuation with a mysterious, impoverished and unstable young woman who goes by the name of Nadja. The pair’s haunted and uncanny romance unfolds during their undirected walks, or dérives, through the streets of Paris, the city acting as an affective register of their encounters. The “intellectual seduction” comes to an abrupt halt (Breton, Nadja 108), however, when Nadja does in fact go truly mad, disappearing from the narrator’s life when she is committed to an asylum. André makes no effort to seek her out and after launching into a diatribe vehemently attacking the institutions that administer psychiatric treatment, nonchalantly resumes the usual concerns of his everyday life. At a formal level, Breton’s unconventional prose indeed stirs many minor shocks and tremors in the reader. The insertion of temporally off-kilter photographs and surreal drawings are intended to supersede naturalistic description. However, their effect is to create a form of “negative indexicality” (Masschelein) that subtly undermines the truth claims of the novel. Random coincidences charged through with the attractive force of desire determine the plot while the compressed dream-like narrative strives to recount only those facts of “violently fortuitous character” (Breton, Nadja 19). Strikingly candid revelations perpetually catch the reader off guard. But it is in the novel’s treatment of the city, most specifically, in which we can recognise the evolution of Surrealism’s initial concern for the radically subversive and liberatory potential of the dream into a form of praxis that binds the shock of the marvellous to the historical materialism of Marx and Engels. This praxis unfolds in the novel on a number of levels. By placing its events firmly at the level of the street, Breton privileges the anti-heroic realm of everyday life over the socially hierarchical domain of the bourgeois domestic interior favoured in realist literature. More significantly, the sites of the city encountered in the novel act as repositories of collective memory with the power to rupture the present. As Margaret Cohen comprehensively demonstrates in her impressive study Profane Illumination, the great majority of sites that the narrator traverses in Nadja reveal connections in previous centuries to instances of bohemian activity, violent insurrection or revolutionary events. The enigmatic statue of Étienne Dolet, for example, to which André is inexplicably drawn on his city walks and which produces a sensation of “unbearable discomfort” (25), commemorates a sixteenth-century scholar and writer of love poetry condemned as a heretic and burned at the Place Maubert for his non-conformist attitudes. When Nadja is suddenly gripped by hallucinations and imagines herself among the entourage of Marie-Antoinette, “multiple ghosts of revolutionary violence descend on the Place Dauphine from all sides” (Cohen 101). Similarly, a critique of capitalism emerges in the traversal of those marginal and derelict zones of the city, such as the Saint-Ouen flea market, which become revelatory of the historical cycles of decay and ruination that modernity seeks to repress through its faith in progress. It was this poetic intuition of the machinations of historical materialism, in particular, that captured the attention of Walter Benjamin in his 1929 “Surrealism” essay, in which he says of Breton that: He can boast an extraordinary discovery: he was the first to perceive the revolutionary energies that appear in the “outmoded”—in the first iron constructions, the first factory buildings, the earliest photos, objects that have begun to be extinct, grand pianos, the dresses of five years ago, fashionable restaurants when the vogue has begun to ebb from them. The relation of these things to revolution—no one can have a more exact concept of it than these authors. (210) In the same passage, Benjamin makes passing reference to the Passage de l’Opéra, the nineteenth-century Parisian arcade threatened with demolition and eulogised by Louis Aragon in his Surrealist anti-novel Paris Peasant (published in 1926, two years earlier than Nadja). Loosely structured around a series of walks, Aragon’s book subverts the popular guidebook literature of the period by inventorying the arcade’s quotidian attractions in highly lyrical and imagistic prose. As in Nadja, a concern for the “outmoded” underpins the praxis which informs the politics of the novel although here it functions somewhat differently. As transitional zones on the cusp of redevelopment, the disappearing arcades attract Aragon for their liminal status, becoming malleable dreamscapes where an ontological instability renders them ripe for eruptions of the marvellous. Such sites emerge as “secret repositories of several modern myths,” and “the true sanctuaries of a cult of the ephemeral”. (Aragon 14) City as Dreamscape Contemporary literature increasingly reads Paris Peasant through the lens of psychogeography, and not unproblematically. In his brief guide to psychogeography, British writer Merlin Coverley stresses Aragon’s apparent documentary or ethnographical intentions in describing the arcades. He suggests that the author “rails against the destruction of the city” (75), positing the novel as “a handbook for today’s breed of psychogeographer” (76). The nuances of Aragon’s dream-awakening dialectic, however, are too easily effaced in such an assessment which overlooks the novel’s vertiginous and hyperbolic prose as it consistently approaches an unreality in its ambivalent treatment of the arcades. What is arguably more significant than any documentary concern is Aragon’s commitment to the broader Surrealist quest to transform reality by undermining binary oppositions between waking life and the realm of dreams. As Hal Foster’s reading of the arcades in Surrealism insists: This gaze is not melancholic; the surrealists do not cling obsessively to the relics of the nineteenth-century. Rather it uncovers them for the purposes of resistance through re-enchantment. If we can grasp this dialectic of ruination, recovery, and resistance, we will grasp the intimated ambition of the surrealist practice of history. (166) Unlike Aragon, Breton defended the political position of Surrealism throughout the ebbs and flows of the movement. This notion of “resistance through re-enchantment” retained its significance for Breton as he clung to the radical importance of dreams and the imagination, creative autonomy, and individual freedom over blind obedience to revolutionary parties. Aragon’s allegiance to communism led him to surrender the poetic intoxications of Surrealist prose in favour of the more sombre and austere tone of social realism. By contrast, other early Surrealists like Philippe Soupault contributed novels which deployed the praxis of shock in a less explicitly dialectical fashion. Soupault’s Last Nights of Paris (1928), in particular, responds to the influence of the war in producing a crisis of identity among a generation of young men, a crisis projected or transferred onto the city streets in ways that are revelatory of the author’s attunement to how “places and environment have a profound influence on memory and imagination” (Soupault 91). All the early Surrealists served in the war in varying capacities. In Soupault’s case, the writer “was called up in 1916, used as a guinea pig for a new typhoid vaccine, and spent the rest of the war in and out of hospital. His close friend and cousin, René Deschamps, was killed in action” (Read 22). Memories of the disaster of war assume a submerged presence in Soupault’s novel, buried deep in the psyche of the narrator. Typically, it is the places and sites of the city that act as revenants, stimulating disturbing memories to drift back to the surface which then suffuse the narrator in an atmosphere of melancholy. During the novel’s numerous dérives, the narrator’s detective-like pursuit of his elusive love-object, the young streetwalker Georgette, the tracking of her near-mute artist brother Octave, and the following of the ringleader of a criminal gang, all appear as instances of compensation. Each chase invokes a desire to recover a more significant earlier loss that persistently eludes the narrator. When Soupault’s narrator shadows Octave on a walk that ventures into the city’s industrial zone, recollections of the disaster of war gradually impinge upon his aleatory perambulations. His description evokes two men moving through the trenches together: The least noise was a catastrophe, the least breath a great terror. We walked in the eternal mud. Step by step we sank into the thickness of night, lost as if forever. I turned around several times to look at the way we had come but night alone was behind us. (80) In an article published in 2012, Catherine Howell identifies Last Nights of Paris as “a lyric celebration of the city as spectacle” (67). At times, the narrator indeed surrenders himself to the ocular pleasures of modernity. Observing the Eiffel Tower, he finds delight in “indefinitely varying her silhouette as if I were examining her through a kaleidoscope” (Soupault 30). Yet it is important to stress the role that shock plays in fissuring this veneer of spectacle, especially those evocations of the city that reveal an unnerving desensitisation to the more violent manifestations of the metropolis. Reading a newspaper, the narrator remarks that “the discovery of bags full of limbs, carefully sawed and chopped up” (23) signifies little more than “a commonplace crime” (22). Passing the banks of the Seine provokes “recollection of an evening I had spent lying on the parapet of the Pont Marie watching several lifesavers trying in vain to recover the body of an unfortunate suicide” (10). In his sensitivity to the unassimilable nature of trauma, Soupault intuits a phenomenon which literary trauma theory argues profoundly limits the text’s claim to representation, knowledge, and an autonomous subject. In this sense, Soupault appears less committed than Breton to the idea that the after-effects of shock might be consciously distilled into a form of praxis. Yet this prolongation of an unintegrated trauma still posits shock as a powerful vehicle to critique a society attempting to heal its wounds without addressing their underlying causes. This is typical of Surrealism’s efforts to “dramatize the physical and psychological trauma of a war that everyone wanted to forget so that it would not be swept away too quickly” (Lyford 4). Woman and Radical Madness In her 2007 study, Surrealist Masculinities, Amy Lyford focuses upon the regeneration and nation building project that characterised post-war France and argues that Surrealist tactics sought to dismantle an official discourse that promoted ideals of “robust manhood and female maternity” (4). Viewed against this backdrop, the trope of madness in Surrealism is central to the movement’s disruptive strategies. In Last Nights of Paris, a lingering madness simmers beneath the surface of the text like an undertow, while in other Surrealist texts the lauding of madness, specifically female hysteria, is much more explicit. Indeed, the objectification of the madwoman in Surrealism is among the most problematic aspects of its praxis of shock and one that raises questions over to what extent, if at all, Surrealism and feminism can be reconciled, leading some critics to define the movement as inherently misogynistic. While certainly not unfounded, this critique fails to answer why a broad spectrum of women artists have been drawn to the movement. By contrast, a growing body of work nuances the complexities of the “blinds spots” (Lusty 2) in Surrealism’s relationship with women. Contemporary studies like Natalya Lusty’s Surrealism, Feminism, Psychoanalysis and Katharine Conley’s earlier Automatic Woman both afford greater credit to Surrealism’s female practitioners in redefining their subject position in ways that trouble and unsettle the conventional understanding of women’s role in the movement. The creative and self-reflexive manipulation of madness, for example, proved pivotal to the achievements of Surrealist women. In her short autobiographical novella, Down Below (1944), Leonora Carrington recounts the disturbing true experience of her voyage into madness sparked by the internment of her partner and muse, fellow Surrealist Max Ernst, in a concentration camp in 1940. Committed to a sanatorium in Santander, Spain, Carrington was treated with the seizure inducing drug Cardiazol. Her text presents a startling case study of therapeutic maltreatment that is consistent with Bretonian Surrealism’s critique of the use of psycho-medical methods for the purposes of regulating and disciplining the individual. As well as vividly recalling her intense and frightening hallucinations, Down Below details the author’s descent into a highly paranoid state which, somewhat perversely, heightens her sense of agency and control over her environment. Unable to discern boundaries between her internal reality and that of the external world, Carrington develops a delusional and inflated sense of her ability to influence the city of Madrid: In the political confusion and the torrid heat, I convinced myself that Madrid was the world’s stomach and that I had been chosen for the task of restoring that digestive organ to health […] I believed that I was capable of bearing that dreadful weight and of drawing from it a solution for the world. The dysentery I suffered from later was nothing but the illness of Madrid taking shape in my intestinal tract. (12–13) In this way, Carrington’s extraordinarily visceral memoir embodies what can be described as the Surrealist woman’s “double allegiance” (Suleiman 5) to the praxis of shock. On the one hand, Down Below subversively harnesses the affective qualities of madness in order to manifest textual disturbances and to convey the author’s fierce rebellion against societal constraints. At the same time, the work reveals a more complex and often painful representational struggle inherent in occupying the position of both the subject experiencing madness and the narrator objectively recalling its events, displaying a tension not present in the work of the male Surrealists. The memoir concludes on an ambivalent note as Carrington describes finally becoming “disoccultized” of her madness, awakening to “the mystery with which I was surrounded and which they all seemed to take pleasure in deepening around me” (53). Notwithstanding its ambivalence, Down Below typifies the political and historical dimensions of Surrealism’s struggle against internal and external limits. Yet as early as 1966, Surrealist scholar J.H. Matthews was already cautioning against reaching that point where the term Surrealist “loses any meaning and becomes, as it is for too many, synonymous with ‘strange,’ ‘weird,’ or even ‘fanciful’” (5–6). To re-evaluate the praxis of shock in the Surrealist novel, then, is to seek to reinstate Surrealism as a movement that cannot be reduced to vague adjectives or to mere aesthetic principles. It is to view it as an active force passionately engaged with the pressing social, cultural, and political problems of its time. While the frequent nods to Surrealist methods in contemporary literary genealogies and creative urban research practices such as psychogeography are a testament to its continued allure, the growing failure to read Surrealism as political is one of the more contradictory symptoms of the expanding temporal distance from the catastrophic events from which the movement emerged. As it becomes increasingly common to draw links between disaster, creativity, and renewal, the shifting sands of the reception of Surrealism are a reminder of the need to resist domesticating movements born from such circumstances in ways that blunt their critical faculties and dull the awakening power of their praxis of shock. To do otherwise is to be left with little more than cheap thrills. References Aragon, Louis. Paris Peasant (1926). Trans. Simon Watson Taylor. Boston: Exact Change, 1994. Benjamin, Walter. “Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia” (1929). Trans. Edmund Jephcott. Walter Benjamin Selected Writings, Volume 2, Part I, 1927–1930. Eds. Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap P, 2005. Breton, André. “Manifesto of Surrealism” (1924). Manifestoes of Surrealism. Trans. Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane. Ann Arbor, MI: U of Michigan P, 1990. ———. Nadja (1928). Trans. Richard Howard. New York: Grove P, 1960. Breton, André, and Philippe Soupault. The Magnetic Fields (1920). Trans. David Gascoyne. London: Atlas P, 1985. Carrington, Leonora. Down Below (1944). Chicago: Black Swan P, 1983. Cohen, Margaret. Profane Illumination: Walter Benjamin and the Paris of Surrealist Revolution. Berkeley, CA: U of California P, 1993. Conley, Katharine. Automatic Woman: The Representation of Woman in Surrealism. Lincoln, NE: U of Nebraska P, 1996. Coverley, Merlin. Psychogeography. Harpenden: Pocket Essentials, 2010. Foster, Hal. Compulsive Beauty. Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 1993. Gascoyne, David. “Introduction.” The Magnetic Fields (1920) by André Breton and Philippe Soupault. Trans. David Gascoyne. London: Atlas P, 1985. Howell, Catherine. “City of Night: Parisian Explorations.” Public: Civic Spectacle 45 (2012): 64–77. Lusty, Natalya. Surrealism, Feminism, Psychoanalysis. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2007. Lyford, Amy. Surrealist Masculinities: Gender Anxiety and the Aesthetics of Post-World War I Reconstruction in France. Berkeley, CA: U of California P, 2007. Masschelein, Anneleen. “Hand in Glove: Negative Indexicality in André Breton’s Nadja and W.G. Sebald’s Austerlitz.” Searching for Sebald: Photography after W.G. Sebald. Ed. Lise Patt. Los Angeles, CA: ICI P, 2007. 360–87. Matthews, J.H. Surrealism and the Novel. Ann Arbor, MI: U of Michigan P, 1996. Rasmussen, Mikkel Bolt. “The Situationist International, Surrealism and the Difficult Fusion of Art and Politics.” Oxford Art Journal 27.3 (2004): 365–87. Read, Peter. “Poets out of Uniform.” Book Review. The Times Literary Supplement. 15 Mar. 2002: 22. Shattuck, Roger. “Love and Laughter: Surrealism Reappraised.” The History of Surrealism. Ed. Maurice Nadeau. Trans. Richard Howard. New York: Penguin Books, 1978. 11–34. Solnit, Rebecca. Wanderlust: A History of Walking. London: Verso, 2002. Soupault, Philippe. Last Nights of Paris (1928). Trans. William Carlos Williams. Boston: Exact Change, 1992. Suleiman, Susan Robin. “Surrealist Black Humour: Masculine/Feminine.” Papers of Surrealism 1 (2003): 1–11. 20 Feb. 2013 ‹http://www.surrealismcentre.ac.uk/papersofsurrealism/journal1›.

IntroductionCoffee, as a stimulant, and the spaces in which it is has been consumed, have long played a vital role in fostering communication, creativity, and sociality. This article explores the interrelationship of café space, communication, creativity, and materialism. In developing these themes, this article is structured in two parts. The first looks back to the coffee houses of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to give a historical context to the contemporary role of the café as a key site of creativity through its facilitation of social interaction, communication and information exchange. The second explores the continuation of the link between cafés, communication and creativity, through an instance from the mid-twentieth century where this process becomes individualised and is tied more intrinsically to the material surroundings of the café itself. From this, we argue that in order to understand the connection between café space and creativity, it is valuable to consider the rich polymorphic material and aesthetic composition of cafés. The Social Life of Coffee: London’s Coffee Houses While the social consumption of coffee has a long history, here we restrict our focus to a discussion of the London coffee houses of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It was during the seventeenth century that the vogue of these coffee houses reached its zenith when they operated as a vibrant site of mercantile activity, as well as cultural and political exchange (Cowan; Lillywhite; Ellis). Many of these coffee houses were situated close to the places where politicians, merchants, and other significant people congregated and did business, near government buildings such as Parliament, as well as courts, ports and other travel route hubs (Lillywhite 17). A great deal of information was shared within these spaces and, as a result, the coffee house became a key venue for communication, especially the reading and distribution of print and scribal publications (Cowan 85). At this time, “no coffee house worth its name” would be without a ready selection of newspapers for its patrons (Cowan 173). By working to twenty-four hour diurnal cycles and heightening the sense of repetition and regularity, coffee houses also played a crucial role in routinising news as a form of daily consumption alongside other forms of habitual consumption (including that of coffee drinking). In Cowan’s words, “restoration coffee houses soon became known as places ‘dasht with diurnals and books of news’” (172). Among these was the short-lived but nonetheless infamous social gossip publication, The Tatler (1709-10), which was strongly associated with the London coffee houses and, despite its short publication life, offers great insight into the social life and scandals of the time. The coffee house became, in short, “the primary social space in which ‘news’ was both produced and consumed” (Cowan 172). The proprietors of coffee houses were quick to exploit this situation by dealing in “news mongering” and developing their own news publications to supplement their incomes (172). They sometimes printed news, commentary and gossip that other publishers were not willing to print. However, as their reputation as news providers grew, so did the pressure on coffee houses to meet the high cost of continually acquiring or producing journals (Cowan 173; Ellis 185-206). In addition to the provision of news, coffee houses were vital sites for other forms of communication. For example, coffee houses were key venues where “one might deposit and receive one’s mail” (Cowan 175), and the Penny Post used coffeehouses as vital pick-up and delivery centres (Lillywhite 17). As Cowan explains, “Many correspondents [including Jonathan Swift] used a coffeehouse as a convenient place to write their letters as well as to send them” (176). This service was apparently provided gratis for regular patrons, but coffee house owners were less happy to provide this for their more infrequent customers (Cowan 176). London’s coffee houses functioned, in short, as notable sites of sociality that bundled together drinking coffee with news provision and postal and other services to attract customers (Cowan; Ellis). Key to the success of the London coffee house of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was the figure of the virtuoso habitué (Cowan 105)—an urbane individual of the middle or upper classes who was skilled in social intercourse, skills that were honed through participation in the highly ritualised and refined forms of interpersonal communication, such as visiting the stately homes of that time. In contrast to such private visits, the coffee house provided a less formalised and more spontaneous space of sociality, but where established social skills were distinctly advantageous. A striking example of the figure of the virtuoso habitué is the philosopher, architect and scientist Robert Hooke (1635-1703). Hooke, by all accounts, used the opportunities provided by his regular visits to coffee houses “to draw on the knowledge of a wide variety of individuals, from servants and skilled laborers to aristocrats, as well as to share and display novel scientific instruments” (Cowan 105) in order to explore and develop his virtuoso interests. The coffee house also served Hooke as a place to debate philosophy with cliques of “like-minded virtuosi” and thus formed the “premier locale” through which he could “fulfil his own view of himself as a virtuoso, as a man of business, [and] as a man at the centre of intellectual life in the city” (Cowan 105-06). For Hooke, the coffee house was a space for serious work, and he was known to complain when “little philosophical work” was accomplished (105-06). Sociality operates in this example as a form of creative performance, demonstrating individual skill, and is tied to other forms of creative output. Patronage of a coffee house involved hearing and passing on gossip as news, but also entailed skill in philosophical debate and other intellectual pursuits. It should also be noted that the complex role of the coffee house as a locus of communication, sociality, and creativity was repeated elsewhere. During the 1600s in Egypt (and elsewhere in the Middle East), for example, coffee houses served as sites of intensive literary activity as well as the locations for discussions of art, sciences and literature, not to mention also of gambling and drug use (Hattox 101). While the popularity of coffee houses had declined in London by the 1800s, café culture was flowering elsewhere in mainland Europe. In the late 1870s in Paris, Edgar Degas and Edward Manet documented the rich café life of the city in their drawings and paintings (Ellis 216). Meanwhile, in Vienna, “the kaffeehaus offered another evocative model of urban and artistic modernity” (Ellis 217; see also Bollerey 44-81). Serving wine and dinners as well as coffee and pastries, the kaffeehaus was, like cafés elsewhere in Europe, a mecca for writers, artists and intellectuals. The Café Royal in London survived into the twentieth century, mainly through the patronage of European expatriates and local intellectuals such as Wyndham Lewis, Ezra Pound, T. S. Elliot, and Henri Bergson (Ellis 220). This pattern of patronage within specific and more isolated cafés was repeated in famous gatherings of literary identities elsewhere in Europe throughout the twentieth century. From this historical perspective, a picture emerges of how the social functions of the coffee house and its successors, the espresso bar and modern café, have shifted over the course of their histories (Bollerey 44-81). In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the coffee house was an important location for vibrant social interaction and the consumption and distribution of various forms of communication such as gossip, news, and letters. However, in the years of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the café was more commonly a site for more restricted social interaction between discrete groups. Studies of cafés and creativity during this era focus on cafés as “factories of literature, inciters to art, and breeding places for new ideas” (Fitch, The Grand 18). Central in these accounts are bohemian artists, their associated social circles, and their preferred cafés de bohème (for detailed discussion, see Wilson; Fitch, Paris Café; Brooker; Grafe and Bollerey 4-41). As much of this literature on café culture details, by the early twentieth century, cafés emerge as places that enable individuals to carve out a space for sociality and creativity which was not possible elsewhere in the modern metropolis. Writing on the modern metropolis, Simmel suggests that the concentration of people and things in cities “stimulate[s] the nervous system of the individual” to such an extent that it prompts a kind of self-preservation that he terms a “blasé attitude” (415). This is a form of “reserve”, he writes, which “grants to the individual a [certain] kind and an amount of personal freedom” that was hitherto unknown (416). Cafés arguably form a key site in feeding this dynamic insofar as they facilitate self-protectionism—Fitch’s “pool of privacy” (The Grand 22)—and, at the same time, produce a sense of individual freedom in Simmel’s sense of the term. That is to say, from the early-to-mid twentieth century, cafés have become complex settings in terms of the relationships they enable or constrain between living in public, privacy, intimacy, and cultural practice. (See Haine for a detailed discussion of how this plays out in relation to working class engagement with Paris cafés, and Wilson as well as White on other cultural contexts, such as Japan.) Threaded throughout this history is a clear celebration of the individual artist as a kind of virtuoso habitué of the contemporary café. Café Jama Michalika The following historical moment, drawn from a powerful point in the mid-twentieth century, illustrates this last stage in the evolution of the relationship between café space, communication, and creativity. This particular historical moment concerns the renowned Polish composer and conductor Krzysztof Penderecki, who is most well-known for his avant-garde piece Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima (1960), his Polymorphia (1961), and St Luke Passion (1963-66), all of which entailed new compositional and notation techniques. Poland, along with other European countries devastated by the Second World War, underwent significant rebuilding after the war, also investing heavily in the arts, musical education, new concert halls, and conservatoria (Monastra). In the immediate post-war period, Poland and Polish culture was under the strong ideological influence exerted by the Soviet Union. However, as Thomas notes, within a year of Stalin’s death in 1953, “there were flickering signs of moderation in Polish culture” (83). With respect to musical creativity, a key turning point was the Warsaw Autumn Music Festival of 1956. “The driving force” behind the first festival (which was to become an annual event), was Polish “composers’ overwhelming sense of cultural isolation and their wish to break the provincial nature of Polish music” at that time (Thomas 85). Penderecki was one of a younger generation of composers who participated in, and benefited from, these early festivals, making his first appearance in 1959 with his composition Strophes, and successive appearances with Dimensions of Time and Silence in 1960, and Threnody in 1961 (Thomas 90). Penderecki married in the 1950s and had a child in 1955. This, in combination with the fact that his wife was a pianist and needed to practice daily, restricted Penderecki’s ability to work in their small Krakow apartment. Nor could he find space at the music school which was free from the intrusion of the sound of other instruments. Instead, he frequented the café Jama Michalika off the central square of Krakow, where he worked most days between nine in the morning and noon, when he would leave as a pianist began to play. Penderecki states that because of the small space of the café table, he had to “invent [a] special kind of notation which allowed me to write the piece which was for 52 instruments, like Threnody, on one small piece of paper” (Krzysztof Penderecki, 2000). In this, Penderecki created a completely new set of notation symbols, which assisted him in graphically representing tone clustering (Robinson 6) while, in his score for Polymorphia, he implemented “novel graphic notation, comparable with medical temperature charts, or oscillograms” (Schwinger 29) to represent in the most compact way possible the dense layering of sounds and vocal elements that is developed in this particular piece. This historical account is valuable because it contributes to discussions on individual creativity that both depends on, and occurs within, the material space of the café. This relationship is explored in Walter Benjamin’s essay “Polyclinic”, where he develops an extended analogy between the writer and the café and the surgeon and his instruments. As Cohen summarises, “Benjamin constructs the field of writerly operation both in medical terms and as a space dear to Parisian intellectuals, as an operating table that is also the marble-topped table of a café” (179). At this time, the space of the café itself thus becomes a vital site for individual cultural production, putting the artist in touch with the social life of the city, as many accounts of writers and artists in the cafés of Paris, Prague, Vienna, and elsewhere in Europe attest. “The attraction of the café for the writer”, Fitch argues, “is that seeming tension between the intimate circle of privacy in a comfortable room, on the one hand, and the flow of (perhaps usable) information all around on the other” (The Grand 11). Penderecki talks about searching for a sound while composing in café Jama Michalika and, hearing the noise of a passing tram, subsequently incorporated it into his famous composition, Threnody (Krzysztof Penderecki, 2000). There is an indirect connection here with the attractions of the seventeenth century coffee houses in London, where news writers drew much of their gossip and news from the talk within the coffee houses. However, the shift is to a more isolated, individualistic habitué. Nonetheless, the aesthetic composition of the café space remains essential to the creative productivity described by Penderecki. A concept that can be used to describe this method of composition is contained within one of Penderecki’s best-known pieces, Polymorphia (1961). The term “polymorphia” refers not to the form of the music itself (which is actually quite conventionally structured) but rather to the multiple blending of sounds. Schwinger defines polymorphia as “many formedness […] which applies not […] to the form of the piece, but to the broadly deployed scale of sound, [the] exchange and simultaneous penetration of sound and noise, the contrast and interflow of soft and hard sounds” (131). This description also reflects the rich material context of the café space as Penderecki describes its role in shaping (both enabling and constraining) his creative output. Creativity, Technology, Materialism The materiality of the café—including the table itself for Penderecki—is crucial in understanding the relationship between the forms of creative output and the material conditions of the spaces that enable them. In Penderecki’s case, to understand the origins of the score and even his innovative forms of musical notation as artefacts of communication, we need to understand the material conditions under which they were created. As a fixture of twentieth and twenty-first century urban environments, the café mediates the private within the public in a way that offers the contemporary virtuoso habitué a rich, polymorphic sensory experience. In a discussion of the indivisibility of sensation and its resistance to language, writer Anna Gibbs describes these rich experiential qualities: sitting by the window in a café watching the busy streetscape with the warmth of the morning sun on my back, I smell the delicious aroma of coffee and simultaneously feel its warmth in my mouth, taste it, and can tell the choice of bean as I listen idly to the chatter in the café around me and all these things blend into my experience of “being in the café” (201). Gibbs’s point is that the world of the café is highly synaesthetic and infused with sensual interconnections. The din of the café with its white noise of conversation and overlaying sounds of often carefully chosen music illustrates the extension of taste beyond the flavour of the coffee on the palate. In this way, the café space provides the infrastructure for a type of creative output that, in Gibbs’s case, facilitates her explanation of expression and affect. The individualised virtuoso habitué, as characterised by Penderecki’s work within café Jama Michalika, simply describes one (celebrated) form of the material conditions of communication and creativity. An essential factor in creative cultural output is contained in the ways in which material conditions such as these come to be organised. As Elizabeth Grosz expresses it: Art is the regulation and organisation of its materials—paint, canvas, concrete, steel, marble, words, sounds, bodily movements, indeed any materials—according to self-imposed constraints, the creation of forms through which these materials come to generate and intensify sensation and thus directly impact living bodies, organs, nervous systems (4). Materialist and medium-oriented theories of media and communication have emphasised the impact of physical constraints and enablers on the forms produced. McLuhan, for example, famously argued that the typewriter brought writing, speech, and publication into closer association, one effect of which was the tighter regulation of spelling and grammar, a pressure toward precision and uniformity that saw a jump in the sales of dictionaries (279). In the poetry of E. E. Cummings, McLuhan sees the typewriter as enabling a patterned layout of text that functions as “a musical score for choral speech” (278). In the same way, the café in Penderecki’s recollections both constrains his ability to compose freely (a creative activity that normally requires ample flat surface), but also facilitates the invention of a new language for composition, one able to accommodate the small space of the café table. Recent studies that have sought to materialise language and communication point to its physicality and the embodied forms through which communication occurs. As Packer and Crofts Wiley explain, “infrastructure, space, technology, and the body become the focus, a move that situates communication and culture within a physical, corporeal landscape” (3). The confined and often crowded space of the café and its individual tables shape the form of productive output in Penderecki’s case. Targeting these material constraints and enablers in her discussion of art, creativity and territoriality, Grosz describes the “architectural force of framing” as liberating “the qualities of objects or events that come to constitute the substance, the matter, of the art-work” (11). More broadly, the design features of the café, the form and layout of the tables and the space made available for individual habitation, the din of the social encounters, and even the stimulating influences on the body of the coffee served there, can be seen to act as enablers of communication and creativity. Conclusion The historical examples examined above indicate a material link between cafés and communication. They also suggest a relationship between materialism and creativity, as well as the roots of the romantic association—or mythos—of cafés as a key source of cultural life as they offer a “shared place of composition” and an “environment for creative work” (Fitch, The Grand 11). We have detailed one example pertaining to European coffee consumption, cafés and creativity. While we believe Penderecki’s case is valuable in terms of what it can tell us about forms of communication and creativity, clearly other cultural and historical contexts may reveal additional insights—as may be found in the cases of Middle Eastern cafés (Hattox) or the North American diner (Hurley), and in contemporary developments such as the café as a source of free WiFi and the commodification associated with global coffee chains. Penderecki’s example, we suggest, also sheds light on a longer history of creativity and cultural production that intersects with contemporary work practices in city spaces as well as conceptualisations of the individual’s place within complex urban spaces. References Benjamin, Walter. “Polyclinic” in “One-Way Street.” One-Way Street and Other Writings. Trans. Edmund Jephcott and Kingsley Shorter. London: Verso, 1998: 88-9. Bollerey, Franziska. “Setting the Stage for Modernity: The Cosmos of the Coffee House.” Cafés and Bars: The Architecture of Public Display. Eds. Christoph Grafe and Franziska Bollerey. New York: Routledge, 2007. 44-81. Brooker, Peter. Bohemia in London: The Social Scene of Early Modernism. Houndmills, Hamps.: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Cohen, Margaret. Profane Illumination: Walter Benjamin and the Paris of Surrealist Revolution. Berkeley: U of California P, 1995. Cowan, Brian. The Social Life of Coffee: The Emergence of the British Coffeehouse. New Haven: Yale UP, 2005. Ellis, Markman. The Coffee House: A Cultural History. London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 2004. Fitch, Noël Riley. Paris Café: The Sélect Crowd. Brooklyn: Soft Skull Press, 2007. -----. The Grand Literary Cafés of Europe. London: New Holland Publishers (UK), 2006. Gibbs, Anna. “After Affect: Sympathy, Synchrony, and Mimetic Communication.” The Affect Theory Reader. Eds. Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Siegworth. Durham: Duke University Press, 2010. 186-205. Grafe, Christoph, and Franziska Bollerey. “Introduction: Cafés and Bars—Places for Sociability.” Cafés and Bars: The Architecture of Public Display. Eds. Christoph Grafe and Franziska Bollerey. New York: Routledge, 2007. 4-41. Grosz, Elizabeth. Chaos, Territory, Art: Deleuze and the Framing of the Earth. New York: Columbia UP, 2008. Haine, W. Scott. The World of the Paris Café. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1996. Hattox, Ralph S. Coffee and Coffeehouses: The Origins of a Social Beverage in the Medieval Near East. Seattle: U of Washington P, 1985. Hurley, Andrew. Diners, Bowling Alleys and Trailer Parks: Chasing the American Dream in the Postwar Consumer Culture. New York: Basic Books, 2001. Krzysztof Penderecki. Dir. Andreas Missler-Morell. Spektrum TV production and Telewizja Polska S.A. Oddzial W Krakowie for RM Associates and ZDF in cooperation with ARTE, 2000. Lillywhite, Bryant. London Coffee Houses: A Reference Book of Coffee Houses of the Seventeenth, Eighteenth, and Nineteenth Centuries. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1963. McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. London: Abacus, 1974. Monastra, Peggy. “Krzysztof Penderecki’s Polymorphia and Fluorescence.” Moldenhauer Archives, [US] Library of Congress. 12 Jan. 2012 ‹http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/collections/moldenhauer/2428143.pdf› Packer, Jeremy, and Stephen B. Crofts Wiley. “Introduction: The Materiality of Communication.” Communication Matters: Materialist Approaches to Media, Mobility and Networks. New York, Routledge, 2012. 3-16. Robinson, R. Krzysztof Penderecki: A Guide to His Works. Princeton, NJ: Prestige Publications, 1983. Schwinger, Wolfram. Krzysztof Penderecki: His Life and Work. Encounters, Biography and Musical Commentary. London: Schott, 1979. Simmel, Georg. The Sociology of Georg Simmel. Ed. and trans. Kurt H. Wolff. Glencoe, IL: The Free P, 1960. Thomas, Adrian. Polish Music since Szymanowski. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2005. White, Merry I. Coffee Life in Japan. Berkeley: U of California P, 2012. Wilson, Elizabeth. “The Bohemianization of Mass Culture.” International Journal of Cultural Studies 2.1 (1999): 11-32.

I was born illegitimate. Born on an existential precipice. My unwed mother was 36 years old when she relinquished me. I was the fourth baby she was required to give away. After I emerged blood stained and blue tinged – abject, liminal – not only did the nurses refuse me my mother’s touch, I also lost the sound of her voice. Her smell. Her heart beat. Her taste. Her gaze. The silence was multi-sensory. When they told her I was dead, I also lost, within her memory and imagination, my life. I was adopted soon after but not told for over four decades. It was too shameful for even me to know. Imprinted at birth with a psychological ‘death’, I fell, as a Late Discovery Adoptee (LDA), into a socio-cultural and psychological abyss, frozen at birth at the bottom of a parturitive void from where, invisible within family, society, and self I was unable to form an undamaged sense of being.Throughout the 20th century (and for centuries before) this kind of ‘social abortion’ was the dominant script. An adoptee was regarded as a bastard, born of sin, the mother blamed, the father exonerated, and silence demanded (Lynch 28-74). My adoptive mother also sinned. She was infertile. But, in taking me on, she assumed the role of a womb worthy woman, good wife, and, in her case, reluctant mother (she secretly didn’t want children and was privately overwhelmed by the task). In this way, my mother, my adoptive mother, and myself are all the daughters of bereavement, all of us sacrificed on the altar of prejudice and fear that infertility, sex outside of marriage, and illegitimacy were unspeakable crimes for which a price must be paid and against which redemptive protection must be arranged. If, as Thomas Keneally (5) writes, “original sin is the mother fluid of history” then perhaps all three of us all lie in its abject waters. Grotevant, Dunbar, Kohler and Lash Esau (379) point out that adoption was used to ‘shield’ children from their illegitimacy, women from their ‘sexual indiscretions’, and adoptive parents from their infertility in the belief that “severing ties with birth family members would promote attachment between adopted children and parents”. For the adoptee in the closed record system, the socio/political/economic vortex that orchestrated their illegitimacy is born out of a deeply, self incriminating primal fear that reaches right back into the recesses of survival – the act of procreation is infested with easily transgressed life and death taboos within the ‘troop’ that require silence and the burial of many bodies (see Amanda Gardiner’s “Sex, Death and Desperation: Infanticide, Neonaticide, and Concealment of Birth in Colonial Western Australia” for a palpable, moving, and comprehensive exposition on the links between 'illegitimacy', the unmarried mother and child murder). As Nancy Verrier (24) states in Coming Home to Self, “what has to be understood is that separation trauma is an insidious experience, because, as a society, we fail to see this experience as a trauma”. Indeed, relinquishment/adoption for the baby and subsequent adult can be acutely and chronically painful. While I was never told the truth of my origins, of course, my body knew. It had been there. Sentient, aware, sane, sensually, organically articulate, it messaged me (and anyone who may have been interested) over the decades via the language of trauma, its lexicon and grammar cellular, hormonal, muscular (Howard & Crandall, 1-17; Pert, 72), the truth of my birth, of who I was an “unthought known” (Bollas 4). I have lived out my secret fatality in a miasmic nebula of what I know now to be the sequelae of adoption psychopathology: nausea, physical and psychological pain, agoraphobia, panic attacks, shame, internalised anger, depression, self-harm, genetic bewilderment, and generalised anxiety (Brodzinsky 25-47; Brodzinsky, Smith, & Brodzinsky 74; Kenny, Higgins, Soloff, & Sweid xiv; Levy-Shiff 97-98; Lifton 210-212; Verrier The Primal Wound 42-44; Wierzbicki 447-451) – including an all pervading sense of unreality experienced as dissociation (the experience of depersonalisation – where the self feels unreal – and derealisation – where the world feels unreal), disembodiment, and existential elision – all characteristics of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). In these ways, my body intervened, acted out, groaned in answer to the social overlay, and from beyond “the dermal veil” tried to procure access, as Vicky Kirby (77) writes, to “the body’s opaque ocean depths” through its illnesses, its eloquent, and incessantly aching and silent verbosities deepened and made impossibly fraught because I was not told. The aim of this paper is to discuss one aspect of how my body tried to channel the trauma of my secret fatality and liminality: my pre-disclosure art work (the cellular memory of my trauma also expressed itself, pre-disclosure, through my writings – poetry, journal entries – and also through post-coital glossolalia, all discussed at length in my Honours research “Womb Tongues” and my Doctoral Dissertation “The Womb Artist – A Novel: Translating Pre-verbal Late Discovery Adoption Trauma into Narrative”). From the age of thirty onwards I spent twelve years in therapy where the cause of my childhood and adult psychopathology remained a mystery. During this time, my embodied grief and memories found their way into my art work, a series of 5’ x 3’ acrylic paintings, some of which I offer now for discussion (figures 1-4). These paintings map and express what my body knew but could not verbalise (without language to express my grief, my body found other ways to vent). They are symptom and sign of my pre-verbal adoption trauma, evidence that my body ‘knew’ and laboured ceaselessly and silently to find creative ways to express the incarcerated trauma. Post disclosure, I have used my paintings as artefacts to inform, underpin, and nourish the writing of a collection of poetry “Womb Tongues” and a literary novel/memoir “The Womb Artist” (TWA) in an ongoing autoethnographical, performative, and critical inquiry. My practice-led research as a now conscious and creative witness, fashions the recontextualisation of my ‘self’ into my ‘self’ and society, this time with cognisant and reparative knowledge and facilitates the translation of my body’s psychopathology and memory (explicit and implicit) into a healing testimony that explores the traumatised body as text and politicizes the issues surrounding LDAs (Riley 205). If I use these paintings as a memoirist, I use them second hand, after the fact, after they have served their initial purpose, as the tangible art works of a baby buried beneath a culture’s prejudice, shame, and judgement and the personal cries from the illegitimate body/self. I use them now to explore and explain my subclinical and subterranean life as a LDA.My pre-disclosure paintings (Figures 1-4) – filled with vaginal, fetal, uterine, and umbilical references – provide some kind of ‘evidence’ that my body knew what had happened to me as if, with the tenacity of a poltergeist, my ‘spectral self’ found ways to communicate. Not simply clues, but the body’s translation of the intra-psychic landscape, a pictorial and artistic séance into the world, as if my amygdala – as quasar and signal, homing device and history lesson (a measure, container, and memoir) – knew how to paint a snap shot or an x-ray of the psyche, of my cellular marrow memories (a term formulated from fellow LDA Sandy McCutcheon’s (76) memoir, The Magician’s Son when he says, “What I really wanted was the history of my marrow”). If, as Salveet Talwar suggests, “trauma is processed from the body up”, then for the LDA pre-discovery, non-verbal somatic signage is one’s ‘mother tongue’(25). Talwar writes, “non-verbal expressive therapies such as art, dance, music, poetry and drama all activate the sub-cortical regions of the brain and access pre-verbal memories” (26). In these paintings, eerily divinatory and pointed traumatic, memories are made visible and access, as Gussie Klorer (213) explains in regard to brain function and art therapy, the limbic (emotional) system and the prefrontal cortex in sensorimotor integration. In this way, as Marie Angel and Anna Gibbs (168) suggest, “the visual image may serve as a kind of transitional mode in thought”. Ruth Skilbeck in her paper First Things: Reflections on Single-lens Reflex Digital Photography with a Wide-angled Lens, also discusses (with reference to her photographic record and artistic expression of her mother’s death) what she calls the “dark matter” – what has been overlooked, “left out”, and/or is inexplicable (55) – and the idea of art work as the “transitional object” as “a means that some artists use, conceptually and yet also viscerally, in response to the extreme ‘separation anxiety’ of losing a loved one, to the void of the Unknown” (57). In my case, non-disclosure prevented my literacy and the evolution of the image into language, prevented me from fully understanding the coded messages left for me in my art work. However, each of my paintings is now, with the benefit of full disclosure, a powerful, penetrating, and comprehensible intra and extra sensory cry from the body in kinaesthetic translation (Lusebrink, 125; Klorer, 217). In Figure 1, ‘Embrace’, the reference to the umbilical is palpable, described in my novel “The Womb Artist” (184) this way; “two ropes tightly entwine as one, like a dark and dirty umbilical cord snaking its way across a nether world of smudged umbers”. There is an ‘abject’ void surrounding it. The cord sapped of its colour, its blood, nutrients – the baby starved of oxygen, breath; the LDA starved of words and conscious understanding. It has two parts entwined that may be seen in many ways (without wanting to reduce these to static binaries): mother/baby; conscious/unconscious; first person/third person; child/adult; semiotic/symbolic – numerous dualities could be spun from this embrace – but in terms of my novel and of the adoptive experience, it reeks of need, life and death, a text choking on the poetic while at the same time nourished by it; a text made ‘available’ to the reader while at the same narrowing, limiting, and obscuring the indefinable nature of pre-verbal trauma. Figure 1. Embrace. 1993. Acrylic on canvas.The painting ‘Womb Tongues’ (Figure 2) is perhaps the last (and, obviously, lasting) memory of the infinite inchoate universe within the womb, the umbilical this time wrapped around in a phallic/clitorial embrace as the baby-self emerges into the constrictions of a Foucauldian world, where the adoptive script smothers the ‘body’ encased beneath the ‘coils’ of Judeo-Christian prejudice and centuries old taboo. In this way, the reassigned adoptee is an acute example of power (authority) controlling and defining the self and what knowledge of the self may be allowed. The baby in this painting is now a suffocated clitoris, a bound subject, a phallic representation, a gagged ‘tongue’ in the shape of the personally absent (but socially imposing) omni-present and punitive patriarchy. Figure 2. Womb Tongues. 1997. Acrylic on canvas.‘Germination’ (Figure 3) depicts an umbilical again, but this time as emerging from a seething underworld and is present in TWA (174) this way, “a colony of night crawlers that writhe and slither on the canvas, moving as one, dozens of them as thin as a finger, as long as a dream”. The rhizomic nature of this painting (and Figure 4), becomes a heaving horde of psychosomatic and psychopathological influences and experiences, a multitude of closely packed, intense, and dendridic compulsions and symptoms, a mass of interconnected (and by nature of the silence and lie) subterranean knowledges that force the germination of a ‘ghost baby/child/adult’ indicated by the pale and ashen seedling that emerges above ground. The umbilical is ghosted, pale and devoid of life. It is in the air now, reaching up, as if in germination to a psychological photosynthesis. There is the knot and swarm within the unconscious; something has, in true alien fashion, been incubated and is now emerging. In some ways, these paintings are hardly cryptic.Figure 3. Germination.1993. Acrylic on canvas.In Figure 4 ‘The Birthing Tree’, the overt symbolism reaches ‘clairvoyant status’. This could be read as the family ‘tree’ with its four faces screaming out of the ‘branches’. Do these represent the four babies relinquished by our mother (the larger of these ‘beings’ as myself, giving birth to the illegitimate, silenced, and abject self)? Are we all depicted in anguish and as wraithlike, grotesquely simplified into pure affect? This illegitimate self is painted as gestating a ‘blue’ baby, near full-term in a meld of tree and ‘self’, a blue umbilical cord, again, devoid of blood, ghosted, lifeless and yet still living, once again suffocated by the representation of the umbilical in the ‘bowels’ of the self, the abject part of the body, where refuse is stored and eliminated: The duodenum of the damned. The Devil may be seen as Christopher Bollas’s “shadow of the object”, or the Jungian archetypal shadow, not simply a Judeo-Christian fear-based spectre and curmudgeon, but a site of unprocessed and, therefore, feared psychological material, material that must be brought to consciousness and integrated. Perhaps the Devil also is the antithesis to ‘God’ as mother. The hell of ‘not mother’, no mother, not the right mother, the reluctant adoptive mother – the Devil as icon for the rich underbelly of the psyche and apophatic to the adopted/artificial/socially scripted self.Figure 4. The Birthing Tree. 1995. Acrylic on canvas.These paintings ache with the trauma of my relinquishment and LDA experience. They ache with my body’s truth, where the cellular and psychological, flesh and blood and feeling, leak from my wounds in unspeakable confluence (the two genital lips as the site of relinquishment, my speaking lips that have been sealed through non-disclosure and shame, the psychological trauma as Verrier’s ‘primal wound’) just as I leaked from my mother (and society) at birth, as blood and muck, and ooze and pus and death (Grosz 195) only to be quickly and silently mopped up and cleansed through adoption and life-long secrecy. Where I, as translator, fluent in both silence and signs, disclose the baby’s trauma, asking for legitimacy. My experience as a LDA sets up an interesting experiment, one that allows an examination of the pre-verbal/pre-disclosure body as a fleshed and breathing Rosetta Stone, as an interface between the language of the body and of the verbalised, painted, and written text. As a constructed body, written upon and invented legally, socially, and psychologically, I am, in Hélène Cixous’s (“To Live the Orange” 83) words, “un-forgetting”, “un-silencing” and “unearthing” my ‘self’ – I am re-writing, re-inventing and, under public scrutiny, legitimising my ‘self’. I am a site of inquiry, discovery, extrapolation, and becoming (Metta 492; Poulus 475) and, as Grosz (vii) suggests, a body with “all the explanatory power” of the mind. I am, as I embroider myself and my LDA experience into literary and critical texts, authoring myself into existence, referencing with particular relevance Peter Carnochan’s (361) suggestion that “analysis...acts as midwife to the birth of being”. I am, as I swim forever amorphous, invisible, and unspoken in my mother’s womb, fashioning a shore, landscaping my mind against the constant wet, my chronic liminality (Rambo 629) providing social landfall for other LDAs and silenced minorities. As Catherine Lynch (3) writes regarding LDAs, “Through the creation of text and theory I can formulate an intimate space for a family of adoptive subjects I might never know via our participation in a new discourse in Australian academia.” I participate through my creative, self-reflexive, process fuelled (Durey 22), practice-led enquiry. I use the intimacy (and also universality and multiplicity) and illegitimacy of my body as an alterative text, as a site of academic and creative augmentation in the understanding of LDA issues. The relinquished and silenced baby and LDA adult needs a voice, a ‘body’, and a ‘tender’ place in the consciousness of society, as Helen Riley (“Confronting the Conspiracy of Silence” 11) suggests, “voice, validation, and vindication”. Judith Herman (3) argues that, “Survivors challenge us to reconnect fragments, to reconstruct history, to make meaning of their present symptoms in the light of past events”. I seek to use the example of my experience – as Judith Durey (31) suggests, in “support of evocative, creative modes of representation as valid forms of research in their own right” – to unfurl the whole, to give impetus and precedence for other researchers into adoption and advocate for future babies who may be bought, sold, arranged, and/or created by various means. The recent controversy over Gammy, the baby boy born with Down Syndrome in Thailand, highlights the urgent and moral need for legislation with regard to surrogacy (see Kajsa Ekis Ekman’s Being and Being Bought: Prostitution, Surrogacy and the Split Self for a comprehensive examination of surrogacy issues). Indeed, Catherine Lynch in her paper Doubting Adoption Legislation links the experiences of LDAs and the children of born of surrogacy, most effectively arguing that, “if the fate that closed record adoptees suffered was a misplaced solution to the question of what to do with children already conceived how can you justify the deliberate conception of a child with the intention even before its creation of cruelly removing that child from their mother?” (6). Cixous (xxii) confesses, “All I want is to illustrate, depict fragments, events of human life and death...each unique and yet at the same time exchangeable. Not the law, the exception”. I, too, am a fragment, an illustration (a painting), and, as every individual always is – paradoxically – a communal and, therefore, deeply recognisable and generally applicable minority and exception. In my illegitimacy, I am some kind of evidence. Evidence of cellular memory. Evidence of embodiment. Evidence that silenced illegitimacies will manifest in symptom and non-verbal narratives, that they will ooze out and await translation, verification, and witness. This paper is offered with reverence and with feminist intention, as a revenant mouthpiece for other LDAs, babies born of surrogacy, and donor assisted offspring (and, indeed, any) who are marginalised, silenced, and obscured. It is also intended to promote discussion in the psychological and psychoanalytic fields and, as Helen Riley (202-207) advocates regarding late discovery offspring, more research within the social sciences and the bio-medical field that may encourage legislators to better understand what the ‘best interests of the child’ are in terms of late discovery of origins and the complexity of adoption/conception practices available today. As I write now (and always) the umbilical from my paintings curve and writhe across my soul, twist and morph into the swollen and throbbing organ of tongues, my throat aching to utter, my hands ready to craft latent affect into language in translation of, and in obedience to, my body’s knowledges. It is the art of mute witness that reverses genesis, that keeps the umbilical fat and supple and full of blood, and allows my conscious conception and creation. Indeed, in the intersection of my theoretical, creative, psychological, and somatic praxis, the heat (read hot and messy, insightful and insistent signage) of my body’s knowledges perhaps intensifies – with a ripe bouquet – the inevitably ongoing odour/aroma of the reproductive world. ReferencesAngel, Maria, and Anna Gibbs. “On Moving and Being Moved: The Corporeality of Writing in Literary Fiction and New Media Art.” Literature and Sensation, eds. Anthony Uhlmann, Helen Groth, Paul Sheehan, and Stephan McLaren. Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009: 162-172. Bollas, Christopher. The Shadow of the Object: Psychoanalysis of the Unthought Known. New York: Columbia UP, 1987. Brodzinsky, David. “Adjustment to Adoption: A Psychosocial Perspective.” Clinical Psychology Review 7 (1987): 25-47. doi: 10.1016/0272-7358(87)90003-1.Brodzinsky, David, Daniel Smith, and Anne Brodzinsky. Children’s Adjustment to Adoption: Developmental and Clinical Issues. California: Sage Publications, 1998.Carnochan, Peter. “Containers without Lids”. Psychoanalytic Dialogues 16.3 (2006): 341-362.Cixous, Hélène. “To Live the Orange”. The Hélène Cixous Reader: With a Preface by Hélène Cixous and Foreword by Jacques Derrida, ed. Susan Sellers. Oxford, UK: Routledge, 1979/1994. 81-92. ---. “Preface.” The Hélène Cixous Reader: With a Preface by Hélène Cixous and Foreword by Jacques Derrida, ed. Susan Sellers. Oxford, UK: Routledge, 1994. xv-xxii.Coull, Kim. “Womb Tongues: A Collection of Poetry.” Honours Thesis. Perth, WA: Edith Cowan University, 2007. ---. “The Womb Artist – A Novel: Translating Late Discovery Adoptee Pre-Verbal Trauma into Narrative”. Dissertation. Perth, WA: Edith Cowan University, 2014. Durey, Judith. Translating Hiraeth, Performing Adoption: Art as Mediation and Form of Cultural Production. Dissertation. Perth, WA: Murdoch University, 2010. 22 Sep. 2011 .Ekis Ekman, Kajsa. Being and Being Bought: Prostitution, Surrogacy and the Split Self. Trans. S. Martin Cheadle. North Melbourne: Spinifex Press, 2013. Gardiner, Amanda. “Sex, Death and Desperation: Infanticide, Neonaticide, and Concealment of Birth in Colonial Western Australia”. Dissertation. Perth, WA: Edith Cowan University, 2014. Grosz, Elizabeth. Volatile Bodies. NSW: Allen &. Unwin, 1994. Grotevant, Harold D., Nora Dunbar, Julie K. Kohler, and Amy. M. Lash Esau. “Adoptive Identity: How Contexts within and beyond the Family Shape Developmental Pathways.” Family Relations 49.3 (2000): 79-87.Herman, Judith L. Trauma and Recovery: From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror. London: Harper Collins, 1992. Howard, Sethane, and Mark W. Crandall. Post Traumatic Stress Disorder: What Happens in the Brain. Washington Academy of Sciences 93.3 (2007): 1-18.Keneally, Thomas. Schindler’s List. London: Serpentine Publishing Company, 1982. Kenny, Pauline, Daryl Higgins, Carol Soloff, and Reem Sweid. Past Adoption Experiences: National Research Study on the Service Response to Past Adoption Practices. Research Report 21. Australian Institute of Family Studies, 2012.Kirby, Vicky. Telling Flesh: The Substance of the Corporeal. New York and London: Routledge, 1997. Klorer, P. Gussie. “Expressive Therapy with Severely Maltreated Children: Neuroscience Contributions.” Journal of the American Art Therapy Association 22.4 (2005): 213-220. doi:10.1080/07421656.2005.10129523.Levy-Shiff, Rachel. “Psychological Adjustment of Adoptees in Adulthood: Family Environment and Adoption-Related Correlates. International Journal of Behavioural Development 25 (2001): 97-104. doi: 1080/01650250042000131.Lifton, Betty J. “The Adoptee’s Journey.” Journal of Social Distress and the Homeless 11.2 (2002): 207-213. doi: 10.1023/A:1014320119546.Lusebrink, Vija B. “Art Therapy and the Brain: An Attempt to Understand the Underlying Processes of Art Expression in Therapy.” Journal of the American Art Therapy Association 21.3 (2004): 125-135. doi:10.1080/07421656. 2004.10129496.Lynch, Catherine. “An Ado/aptive Reading and Writing of Australia and Its Contemporary Literature.” Australian Journal of Adoption 1.1 (2009): 1-401.---. Doubting Adoption Legislation. n.d.McCutcheon, Sandy. The Magician’s Son: A Search for Identity. Sydney, NSW: Penguin, 2006. Metta, Marilyn. “Putting the Body on the Line: Embodied Writing and Recovery through Domestic Violence.” Handbook of Autoethnography, eds. Stacy Holman Jones, Tony Adams, and Carolyn Ellis. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press, 2013: 486-509.Pert, Candace. Molecules of Emotion: The Science behind Mind-body Medicine. New York: Touchstone, 2007. Rambo, Carol. “Twitch: A Performance of Chronic Liminality.” Handbook of Autoethnography, eds. Stacy Holman Jones, Tony Adams, and Carolyn Ellis. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press, 2013: 627-638.Riley, Helen J. Identity and Genetic Origins: An Ethical Exploration of the Late Discovery of Adoptive and Donor-insemination Offspring Status. Dissertation. Brisbane: Queensland University of Technology, 2012.---. “Confronting the Conspiracy of Silence and Denial of Difference for Late Discovery Persons and Donor Conceived People.” Australian Journal of Adoption 7.2 (2013): 1-13.Skilbeck, Ruth. “First Things: Reflection on Single-Lens Reflex Digital Photography with a Wide-Angle Lens.” International Journal of the Image 3 (2013): 55-66. Talwar, Savneet. “Accessing Traumatic Memory through Art Making: An Art Therapy Trauma Protocol (ATTP)." The Arts in Psychotherapy 34 (2007): 22-25. doi:10.1016/ j.aip.2006.09.001.Verrier, Nancy. The Primal Wound: Understanding the Adopted Child. Baltimore, MD: Gateway Press, 1993.---. The Adopted Child Grows Up: Coming Home to Self. Baltimore, MD: Gateway Press, 2003. Wierzbicki, Michael. “Psychological Adjustment of Adoptees: A Meta-Analysis.” Journal of Clinical Child Psychology 22.4 (1993): 447-454. doi:10.1080/ 01650250042000131.

IntroductionIn this article, I set out to accomplish two tasks. The first is to map coffee and cafés in Mainland China in different historical periods. The second is to focus on coffee and cafés in the socio-cultural milieu of contemporary China in order to understand the symbolic value of the emerging coffee/café-scape. Cafés, rather than coffee, are at the centre of this current trend in contemporary Chinese cities. With instant coffee dominating as a drink, the Chinese have developed a cultural and social demand for cafés, but have not yet developed coffee palates. Historical Coffee Map In 1901, coffee was served in a restaurant in the city of Tianjin. This restaurant, named Kiessling, was run by a German chef, a former solider who came to China with the eight-nation alliance. At that time, coffee was reserved mostly for foreign politicians and military officials as well as wealthy businessmen—very few ordinary Chinese drank it. (For more history of Kiessling, including pictures and videos, see Kiessling). Another group of coffee consumers were from the cultural elites—the young revolutionary intellectuals and writers with overseas experience. It was almost a fashion among the literary elite to spend time in cafés. However, this was negatively judged as “Western” and “bourgeois.” For example, in 1932, Lu Xun, one of the most important twentieth century Chinese writers, commented on the café fashion during 1920s (133-36), and listed the reasons why he would not visit one. He did not drink coffee because it was “foreigners’ food”, and he was too busy writing for the kind of leisure enjoyed in cafés. Moreover, he did not, he wrote, have the nerve to go to a café, and particularly not the Revolutionary Café that was popular among cultural celebrities at that time. He claimed that the “paradise” of the café was for genius, and for handsome revolutionary writers (who he described as having red lips and white teeth, whereas his teeth were yellow). His final complaint was that even if he went to the Revolutionary Café, he would hesitate going in (Lu Xun 133-36). From Lu Xun’s list, we can recognise his nationalism and resistance to what were identified as Western foods and lifestyles. It is easy to also feel his dissatisfaction with those dilettante revolutionary intellectuals who spent time in cafés, talking and enjoying Western food, rather than working. In contrast to Lu Xun’s resistance to coffee and café culture, another well-known writer, Zhang Ailing, frequented cafés when she lived in Shanghai from the 1920s to 1950s. She wrote about the smell of cakes and bread sold in Kiessling’s branch store located right next to her parents’ house (Yuyue). Born into a wealthy family, exposed to Western culture and food at a very young age, Zhang Ailing liked to spend her social and writing time in cafés, ordering her favourite cakes, hot chocolate, and coffee. When she left Shanghai and immigrated to the USA, coffee was an important part of her writing life: the smell and taste reminding her of old friends and Shanghai (Chunzi). However, during Zhang’s time, it was still a privileged and elite practice to patronise a café when these were located in foreign settlements with foreign chefs, and served mainly foreigners, wealthy businessmen, and cultural celebrities. After 1949, when the Chinese Communist Party established the People’s Republic of China, until the late 1970s, there were no coffee shops in Mainland China. It was only when Deng Xiaoping suggested neo-liberalism as a so-called “reform-and-open-up” economic policy that foreign commerce and products were again seen in China. In 1988, ten years after the implementation of Deng Xiaoping’s policy, the Nestlé coffee company made the first inroads into the mainland market, featuring homegrown coffee beans in Yunnan province (China Beverage News; Dong; ITC). Nestlé’s bottled instant coffee found its way into the Chinese market, avoiding a direct challenge to the tea culture. Nestlé packaged its coffee to resemble health food products and marketed it as a holiday gift suitable for friends and relatives. As a symbol of modernity and “the West”, coffee-as-gift meshed with the traditional Chinese cultural custom that values gift giving. It also satisfied a collective desire for foreign products (and contact with foreign cultures) during the economic reform era. Even today, with its competitively low price, instant coffee dominates coffee consumption at home, in the workplace, and on Chinese airlines. While Nestlé aimed their product at native Chinese consumers, the multinational companies who later entered China’s coffee market, such as Sara Lee, mainly targeted international hotels such as IHG, Marriott, and Hyatt. The multinationals also favoured coffee shops like Kommune in Shanghai that offered more sophisticated kinds of coffee to foreign consumers and China’s upper class (Byers). If Nestlé introduced coffee to ordinary Chinese families, it was Starbucks who introduced the coffee-based “third space” to urban life in contemporary China on a signficant scale. Differing from the cafés before 1949, Starbucks stores are accessible to ordinary Chinese citizens. The first in Mainland China opened in Beijing’s China World Trade Center in January 1999, targeting mainly white-collar workers and foreigners. Starbucks coffee shops provide a space for informal business meetings, chatting with friends, and relaxing and, with its 500th store opened in 2011, dominate the field in China. Starbucks are located mainly in the central business districts and airports, and the company plans to have 1,500 sites by 2015 (Starbucks). Despite this massive presence, Starbucks constitutes only part of the café-scape in contemporary Chinese cities. There are two other kinds of cafés. One type is usually located in universities or residential areas and is frequented mainly by students or locals working in cultural professions. A representative of this kind is Sculpting in Time Café. In November 1997, two years before the opening of the first Starbucks in Beijing, two newlywed college graduates opened the first small Sculpting in Time Café near Beijing University’s East Gate. This has been expanded into a chain, and boasts 18 branches on the Mainland. (For more about its history, see Sculpting in Time Café). Interestingly, both Starbucks and Sculpting in Time Café acquired their names from literature, Starbucks from Moby Dick, and Sculpting in Time from the Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky’s film diary of the same name. For Chinese students of literature and the arts, drinking coffee is less about acquiring more energy to accomplish their work, and more about entering a sensual world, where the aroma of coffee mixes with the sounds from the coffee machine and music, as well as the lighting of the space. More importantly, cafés with this ambience become, in themselves, cultural sites associated with literature, films, and music. Owners of this kind of café are often lovers of foreign literatures, films, and cultures, and their cafés host various cultural events, including forums, book clubs, movie screenings, and music clubs. Generally speaking, coffee served in this kind of café is simpler than in the kind discussed below. This third type of café includes those located in tourist and entertainment sites such as art districts, bar areas, and historical sites, and which are frequented by foreign and native tourists, artists and other cultural workers. If Starbucks cultivates a fast-paced business/professional atmosphere, and Sculpting in Time Cafés an artsy and literary atmosphere, this third kind of café is more like an upscale “bar” with trained baristas serving complicated coffees and emphasising their flavour. These coffee shops are more expensive than the other kinds, with an average price three times that of Starbucks. Currently, cafés of this type are found only in “first-tier” cities and usually located in art districts and tourist areas—such as Beijing’s 798 Art District and Nanluo Guxiang, Shanghai’s Tai Kang Road (a.k.a. “the art street”), and Hangzhou’s Westlake area. While Nestlé and Starbucks use coffee beans grown in Yunnan provinces, these “art cafés” are more inclined to use imported coffee beans from suppliers like Sara Lee. Coffee and Cafés in Contemporary China After just ten years, there are hundreds of cafés in Chinese cities. Why has there been such a demand for coffee or, more accurately, cafés, in such a short period of time? The first reason is the lack of “third space” environments in Mainland China. Before cafés appeared in the late 1990s, stores like KFC (which opened its first store in 1987) and McDonald’s (with its first store opened in 1990) filled this role for urban residents, providing locations where customers could experience Western food, meet friends, work, or read. In fact, KFC and McDonald’s were once very popular with college students looking for a place to study. Both stores had relatively clean food environments and good lighting. They also had air conditioning in the summer and heating in the winter, which are not provided in most Chinese university dormitories. However, since neither chain was set up to be a café and customers occupying seats for long periods while ordering minimal amounts of food or drink affected profits, staff members began to indirectly ask customers to leave after dining. At the same time, as more people were able to afford to eat at KFC and McDonald’s, their fast foods were also becoming more and more popular, especially among young people. As a consequence, both types of chain restaurant were becoming noisy and crowded and, thus, no longer ideal for reading, studying, or meeting with friends. Although tea has been a traditional drink in Chinese culture, traditional teahouses were expensive places more suitable for business meetings or for the cultural or intellectual elite. Since almost every family owns a tea set and can readily purchase tea, friends and family would usually make and consume tea at home. In recent years, however, new kinds of teahouses have emerged, similar in style to cafés, targeting the younger generation with more affordable prices and a wider range of choices, so the lack of a “third space” does not fully explain the café boom. Another factor affecting the popularity of cafés has been the development and uptake of Internet technology, including the increasing use of laptops and wireless Internet in recent years. The Internet has been available in China since the late 1990s, while computers and then laptops entered ordinary Chinese homes in the early twenty-first century. The IT industry has created not only a new field of research and production, but has also fostered new professions and demands. Particularly, in recent years in Mainland China, a new socially acceptable profession—freelancing in such areas as graphic design, photography, writing, film, music, and the fashion industry—has emerged. Most freelancers’ work is computer- and Internet-based. Cafés provide suitable working space, with wireless service, and the bonus of coffee that is, first of all, somatically stimulating. In addition, the emergence of the creative and cultural industries (which are supported by the Chinese government) has created work for these freelancers and, arguably, an increasing demand for café-based third spaces where such people can meet, talk and work. Furthermore, the flourishing of cafés in first-tier cities is part of the “aesthetic economy” (Lloyd 24) that caters to the making and selling of lifestyle experience. Alongside foreign restaurants, bars, galleries, and design firms, cafés contribute to city branding, and link a city to the global urban network. Cafés, like restaurants, galleries and bars, provide a space for the flow of global commodities, as well as for the human flow of tourists, travelling artists, freelancers, and cultural specialists. Finally, cafés provide a type of service that contributes to friendly owner/waiter-customer relations. During the planned-economy era, most stores and hotels in China were State-owned, staff salaries were not related to individual performance, and indifferent (and even unfriendly) service was common. During the economic reform era, privately owned stores and shops began to replace State-owned ones. At the same time, a large number of people from the countryside flowed into the cities seeking opportunities. Most had little if any professional training and so could only find work in factories or in the service industry. However, most café employees are urban, with better educational backgrounds, and many were already familiar with coffee culture. In addition, café owners, particularly those of places like Sculpting in Time Cafe, often invest in creating a positive, community atmosphere, learning about their customers and sharing personal experiences with their regular clients. This leads to my next point—the generation of the 1980s’ need for a social community. Cafés’ Symbolic Value—Community A demand for a sense of community among the generation of the 1980s is a unique socio-cultural phenomenon in China, which paradoxically co-exists with their desire for individualism. Mao Zedong started the “One Child Policy” in 1979 to slow the rapid population growth in China, and the generations born under this policy are often called “the lonely generations,” with both parents working full-time. At the same time, they are “the generation of me,” labelled as spoiled, self-centred, and obsessed with consumption (de Kloet; Liu; Rofel; Wang). The individuals of this generation, now aged in their 20s and 30s, constitute the primary consumers of coffee in China. Whereas individualism is an important value to them, a sense of community is also desirable in order to compensate for their lack of siblings. Furthermore, the 1980s’ generation has also benefitted from the university expansion policy implemented in 1999. Since then, China has witnessed a surge of university students and graduates who not only received scientific and other course-based knowledge, but also had a better chance to be exposed to foreign cultures through their books, music, and movies. With this interesting tension between individualism and collectivism, the atmosphere provided by cafés has fostered a series of curious temporary communities built on cultural and culinary taste. Interestingly, it has become an aspiration of many young college students and graduates to open a community-space style café in a city. One of the best examples is the new Henduoren’s (Many People’s) Café. This was a project initiated by Wen Erniu, a recent college graduate who wanted to open a café in Beijing but did not have sufficient funds to do so. She posted a message on the Internet, asking people to invest a minimum of US$316 to open a café with her. With 78 investors, the café opened in September 2011 in Beijing (see pictures of Henduoren’s Café). In an interview with the China Daily, Wen Erniu stated that, “To open a cafe was a dream of mine, but I could not afford it […] We thought opening a cafe might be many people’s dream […] and we could get together via the Internet to make it come true” (quoted in Liu 2011). Conclusion: Café Culture and (Instant) Coffee in China There is a Chinese saying that, if you hate someone—just persuade him or her to open a coffee shop. Since cafés provide spaces where one can spend a relatively long time for little financial outlay, owners have to increase prices to cover their expenses. This can result in fewer customers. In retaliation, cafés—particularly those with cultural and literary ambience—host cultural events to attract people, and/or they offer food and wine along with coffee. The high prices, however, remain. In fact, the average price of coffee in China is often higher than in Europe and North America. For example, a medium Starbucks’ caffè latte in China averaged around US$4.40 in 2010, according to the price list of a Starbucks outlet in Shanghai—and the prices has recently increased again (Xinhua 2012). This partially explains why instant coffee is still so popular in China. A bag of instant Nestlé coffee cost only some US$0.25 in a Beijing supermarket in 2010, and requires only hot water, which is accessible free almost everywhere in China, in any restaurant, office building, or household. As an habitual, addictive treat, however, coffee has not yet become a customary, let alone necessary, drink for most Chinese. Moreover, while many, especially those of the older generations, could discern the quality and varieties of tea, very few can judge the quality of the coffee served in cafés. As a result, few Mainland Chinese coffee consumers have a purely somatic demand for coffee—craving its smell or taste—and the highly sweetened and creamed instant coffee offered by companies like Nestlé or Maxwell has largely shaped the current Chinese palate for coffee. Ben Highmore has proposed that “food spaces (shops, restaurants and so on) can be seen, for some social agents, as a potential space where new ‘not-me’ worlds are encountered” (396) He continues to expand that “how these potential spaces are negotiated—the various affective registers of experience (joy, aggression, fear)—reflect the multicultural shapes of a culture (its racism, its openness, its acceptance of difference)” (396). Cafés in contemporary China provide spaces where one encounters and constructs new “not-me” worlds, and more importantly, new “with-me” worlds. While café-going communicates an appreciation and desire for new lifestyles and new selves, it can be hoped that in the near future, coffee will also be appreciated for its smell, taste, and other benefits. Of course, it is also necessary that future Chinese coffee consumers also recognise the rich and complex cultural, political, and social issues behind the coffee economy in the era of globalisation. References Byers, Paul [former Managing Director, Sara Lee’s Asia Pacific]. Pers. comm. Apr. 2012. China Beverage News. “Nestlé Acquires 70% Stake in Chinese Mineral Water Producer.” (2010). 31 Mar. 2012 ‹http://chinabevnews.wordpress.com/2010/02/21/nestle-acquires-70-stake-in-chinese-mineral-water-producer›. Chunzi. 张爱玲地图[The Map of Eileen Chang]. 汉语大词典出版 [Hanyu Dacidian Chubanshe], 2003. de Kloet, Jeroen. China with a Cut: Globalization, Urban Youth and Popular Music. Amsterdam: Amsterdam UP, 2010. Dong, Jonathan. “A Caffeinated Timeline: Developing Yunnan’s Coffee Cultivation.” China Brief (2011): 24-26. Highmore, Ben. “Alimentary Agents: Food, Cultural Theory and Multiculturalism.” Journal of Intercultural Studies, 29.4 (2008): 381-98. ITC (International Trade Center). The Coffee Sector in China: An Overview of Production, Trade And Consumption, 2010. Liu, Kang. Globalization and Cultural Trends in China. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2004. Liu, Zhihu. “From Virtual to Reality.” China Daily (Dec. 2011) 31 Mar. 2012 ‹http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/life/2011-12/26/content_14326490.htm›. Lloyd, Richard. Neobohemia: Art and Commerce in the Postindustrial City. London: Routledge, 2006. Lu, Xun. “Geming Kafei Guan [Revolutionary Café]”. San Xian Ji. Taibei Shi: Feng Yun Shi Dai Chu Ban Gong Si: Fa Xing Suo Xue Wen Hua Gong Si, Mingguo 78 (1989): 133-36. Rofel, Lisa. Desiring China: Experiments in Neoliberalism, Sexuality, and Public Culture. Durham and London: Duke UP, 2007: 1-30. “Starbucks Celebrates Its 500th Store Opening in Mainland China.” Starbucks Newsroom (Oct. 2011) 31 Mar. 2012. ‹http://news.starbucks.com/article_display.cfm?article_id=580›. Wang, Jing. High Culture Fever: Politics, Aesthetics, and Ideology in Deng’s China. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: U of California P, 1996. Xinhua. “Starbucks Raises Coffee Prices in China Stores.” Xinhua News (Jan. 2012). 31 Mar. 2012 ‹http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/china/2012-01/31/c_131384671.htm›. Yuyue. Ed. “On the History of the Western-Style Restaurants: Aileen Chang A Frequent Customer of Kiessling.” China.com.cn (2010). 31 Mar. 2012 ‹http://www.china.com.cn/culture/txt/2010-01/30/content_19334964.htm›.

Introduction: How Do We Learn What We Know? “Deaf.” How do we learn what we know about being deaf and about deafness? What’s the difference between “being deaf” and “deafness” as a particular kind of (non) hearing? Which would you rather be, deaf or blind: children commonly ask this question as they make their early forays into imagining the lives of people different from them. Hearing people cannot know what it is like to be deaf, just as deaf people cannot know what it is like to hear ... or can they? Finally, how can we tell fresh and authentic stories of “being deaf” and the state of “deafness” that disrupt our familiar—perhaps even caricatured—patterns of understanding? In this special “deaf” edition of M/C Journal we wanted to create a body of work in which deaf writers and thinkers would have their say. Mindful that "Deaf history may be characterized as a struggle for Deaf individuals to 'speak' for themselves rather than to be spoken about in medical and educational discourses" (Bauman 47), we were particularly keen to place the contributions of deaf writers and thinkers alongside the mainstream hearing culture. This is why we have chosen not to identify each writer in this edition as deaf or hearing, preferring to leave that biographical auditory detail to the writers themselves. We already knew that "there isn't a large body of literature about the deaf by the deaf" (Henry Kisor 3). Thomas Couser writes that "this should not be surprising, for a number of factors militate against deaf autobiography ... making them unlikely and rare entities" (226). And so we welcomed the diversity of topics and range of genres to this edition: they included a playful ficto-critical exploration of deafness; personal reflections on deafness (ranging from regarding it as a condition of hearing loss to a state of being); poetry; a filmography; and several fresh analyses of representations of deafness, hearing technology and deaf people’s lives in theatre, film and television (this was a particularly popular theme); the poetics of embodiment (indeed, embodiment was a recurring theme across many of the submissions); a commentary on the role of interpreters in deaf-hearing relationships; and an analysis of the role of the Web 2.0 and other technology in deaf people’s communications. However, we noted that most of the uncommissioned submissions in response to our call for papers came from hearing people. We had to seek out contributions from deaf writers and thinkers and wondered why this was so. Mainstream publication avenues for writing by deaf people on the topic of deafness are rare in Australia: perhaps deaf writers lack the necessary confidence or belief that they would be read? In this edition, they certainly reveal that they have much to say ... and inspire us to lean in and think carefully about their words. A Deaf Knowingness In writing her poem “The Triton”, Sandra Hoopman was inspired by her frequent visits to her deaf grandmother at her old Lambert Street, Kangaroo Point home, where she had a huge triton on her wrought iron veranda. Her grandmother would put the triton up to her ear and show Sandra how to 'listen' to it so that she could ‘hear’ the sea. Her poetry recalls to mind Robert Panara's most-quoted poem, “On His Deafness”, in which he imagined that he might even hear 'the rustle of a star!' Following Sandra Hoopman’s poem, we are pleased to feature the essay “Body Language” by Jessica White, shortlisted for the ABR 2010 Calibre Prize, and Sydney Morning Herald Best Young Novelist for 2008 for her first novel A Curious Intimacy (Penguin 2008). In her essay, Jessica playfully explores the idea of not having a singular fixed identity by traversing a dialogue between the imagination and the character of Jessica, showing different selves at play and in conversation, and again in conversation with others at the ficto-critical room and with the ideas articulated by different authors. As with post-structuralist explorations, the essay emphasises the active and formative nature of language, story and ideas, which help us to deconstruct and reformulate versions of our lives and its possibilities. Play is a device that enables people to move beyond the confines of the social world. The joyful spirit of White’s essay is signalled when she writes: For example, there are still immense possibilities thrown up by theorising a jouissance, or pleasure, in the disabled body. As Susan Wendell points out, “paraplegics and quadriplegics have revolutionary things to teach us about the possibilities of sexuality which contradict patriarchal culture’s obsessions with the genitals” (120). Thus if there were more of a focus on the positive aspects of disability and on promoting the understanding that disability is not about lack, people could see how it fosters creativity and imagination. White’s essay is a ‘picaresque’, following a traveller who narrates her adventures and encounters. It is a wonderful model for narratives of difference as it departs, refreshingly, from mainstream Hollywood-style plot conventions, i.e of progress through conflict towards a climax and resolution. Instead, the picaresque allows for a variety of roles, settings and pathways for the wanderer, multiple characters and illuminating dialogues. It demonstrates literally as well as figuratively, productive encounters with the Other, jolting us into new understandings, ways of knowing and possibilities of being. In this way, White’s essay “Body Language” sets a thematically rich tone for this special “deaf” issue of M/C Journal. Through her essay and the following narratives, commentaries, articles and essays, we are immersed in the theme of the importance (and liberating possibilities) of contesting fixed and limited images, disrupting the representations and labels that are so readily assigned to the deaf or deafness. Different strategies and styles are employed, from figurative creative writing or life narrative to the critical essay or media analysis. Yet all contributions emphasise shifting perceptions, commence from a position of not being comfortable with the given representations or ideas that surround deaf identity. The personal narratives and essays assert a strong sense of disjuncture between deaf reality and common representations and ideas of deafness. Reading these contributions, we gain an acute sense of not being at one with the image or idea of a deaf person, not being at one with the social world, not being any one thing but rather many different and varying things and roles. The conditions of possibility are touched upon in the personal reflective pieces, resonating with the critical essays in their exploration of the possibilities of destabilizing hegemonic representations. For example, in “Becoming Deaf”, Karen McQuigg’s personal reflective essay, she describes several stages of the deaf experience. Her description of her son’s responses and adaptations is moving, and Karen mines a range of emotional responses to deafness. She shares with the reader the advice and support she received from other people: some readers will remember with affection the role of Elizabeth Hastings and John Lovett in the Australian Deaf community. McQuigg’s reflections sharply highlight the fluid nature of our individual experience and understanding of deafness. She (and we do too) shifts from what was experienced and understood initially as a blank, a not-comprehending—a ‘blank’ that is linked with loss and constraints, grief, suffering and isolation—to a discovery of how those views and experiences can change, along with changing environment and opportunities. This comes across also in Christy L Reid’s piece “Journey of a Deaf-Blind Woman”: possibilities are linked with where the narrator is living, with life events as varied as training and job opportunities, changes in health, marriage, the birth and development of children, child rearing, and of personal triumphs. Michael Uniacke’s personal essay “Fluid Identities: A Journey of Terminology” has much in common with Jessica White’s essay as he too engages playfully with his ideas. He uses language and figurative play to challenge the reader’s understandings of deaf identity, and to demonstrate the fluid and multiple nature of identity. For example, his opening anecdote about the Hearing Impaired Businessman plays to an embodiment of the idea that many people have, through categories and labels, of a deaf person, as Other, a caricature figure with no interiority or humour or nuanced life. Uniacke engages with this figure in a kind of dialogue, making him surreal, highlighting his typecast nature. By the end of his essay, Michael has shown us how identity can be context-specific and composed of many parts. In “Interpreters in Our Midst”, Breda Carty takes us on a jaunty, personal and engaging commentary that provokes the reader into taking a fresh look at the role of interpreters in mediating/translating relationships between deaf and hearing people. She asks, ‘When interpreters are in our midst, whose interests are they representing? And why are those interests not always clear to the observer?’ Originally written as a short piece for the Australian Sign Language Interpreters' Association (ASLIA), the article is informed by Breda’s immersion in particular professional and personal communities and experiences. While the tone of her commentary is light-hearted, using film screen representations of interpreters to illustrate her points, Breda nevertheless succeeds in politicizing the subject of interpretation and interpreters. She makes us aware of the social assumptions and hierarchies that structure our understanding of interpreting, which, if left unexamined, might seem a neutral and apolitical practice. Rebecca Sánchez makes an exciting contribution to the field of poetry. In her paper “Hart Crane's Speaking Bodies: New Perspectives on Modernism and Deafness”, Rebecca writes about looking for ideas about deafness in unexpected places, namely the poetry of hearing modernist Hart Crane. Taking up the theme of embodiment, evident in several other papers in this edition, Rebecca offers an interesting connection between a poetics of embodiment—Crane was influenced by Walt Whitman, a trail-blazer in embodied language in American poetry—and the more literal embodiment of manual languages. Although Hart Crane was not writing about deafness per se, his work explores the potential of embodied languages to alter the ways in which we interact with one another. When asked to define deafness, most people’s first response is to think of levels of hearing loss, of deficiency, or disability. By contrast, Crane’s non-literal approach provides a more constructive understanding of what communicative difference can mean, and how it can affect our und,erstanding of language itself. Rebecca’s essay's strength arises from its demonstration of Crane's desire to imagine the possibility of a language that lives within the body as rich and enabling, as are manual languages. Miriam Nathan Lerner’s professional training as a librarian is evident in her filmography “The Narrative Function of Deafness and Deaf Characters in Film”. During 2010, she is collaborating with a technical support faculty member at the Rochester National Technical Institute of the Deaf to design a website with quick-time windows so that the reader can click on and watch film clips of the works she references in her filmography. A lively, chatty introduction to some forty-three films with deaf characters and deafness, in which she provides her admittedly quirky approach to categorisation, Miriam Lerner’s filmography will one day be recognised in the same breath as Jonathon Miller’s “Rustle of a Star: An Annotated Bibliography of Deaf Characters in Fiction.” (Miller was also a librarian: they obviously possess the requisite skills of categorisation!) Pamela Kincheloe’s article “Do Androids Dream of Electric Speech? The Construction of Cochlear Implant Identity on American Television and the ‘New Deaf Cyborg’” offers an important analysis of popular (mis)conceptions of deafness and ‘assistive technologies’ as is evident from American television representations of deaf people with Cochlear Implants. She notes the prevalence of cochlear implants in television drama, identifies a couple of very limited narrative frames that dominate such representations, and discusses their implications. In her discussion of the ‘abject’ horror associated in television series with the cochlear implant recipient (often already a corpse) Kincheloe asserts that the Cochlear Implant technology is increasingly used in such narratives to convey intensified anxieties, not only about the deaf Other, but also about technology and the emergent ‘cyborgs’, humans modified by technology. Sharon Pajka-West’s well-researched article “Deaf Characters in Adolescent Fiction”, excerpted from her doctorate thesis, originated in a request from a young deaf reader for a book with which she could connect. Pajka-West takes us on her pursuit to fulfil this request, giving us many fascinating insights along the way. Her blog is essential reading not only for anyone interested in the field of adolescent literature, but also for those who understand the significance of providing young deaf readers access to literature in which the multiple possibilities for deaf lives, deaf identities, and deafness are canvassed. In her article “Marginalising the Mainstream: A Signed Performance of The Miracle Worker”, Caroline Heim places deaf issues centre-stage. Her thesis is that a way needs to be found to increase access to theatrical events for the deaf. She tackles this by viewing a Crossbow Production performance of The Miracle Worker (the story of the teaching relationship between Helen Keller and Annie Sullivan from different perspectives: accessibility, funding, plot construction and actors’ interpretation, the detail of production design (sound, colour and tactile) and the use of theatrical device, and post performance discussion. Arguably, Heim’s article might have benefited from more focus on the concept of inclusion, rather than exclusion. The claim that not enough money is given to providing ‘access’ for the deaf to mainstream productions may be difficult to uphold as a stand-alone argument when the budget of the majority of Australian theatre companies would highlight the fiscal difficulty they have just getting productions on the stage. All the same, Heim’s article provokes us, the reader, into investigating the many layered meanings of ‘access’ and also reminds us, yet again, of theatre’s potential magic in engaging audiences across all spheres of life. In her essay “Looking across the Hearing Line”, Nicole Matthews has written a stimulating paper on youth, Deaf people, and new media. Her paper is especially interesting as an exploration of the intersection between disability and Web 2.0 technologies. In particular, Matthews picks up a thread of Web 2.0 technologies relating to visual communication and expression to provide some insights into the emerging, complex nature of Deaf users’ engagement with digital media in contrast with the continuing problems of inaccessibility and exclusion in the mainstream world. Conclusion: Learning Our Knowingness from What We Don’t Know This special “deaf” issue of M/C Journal is not a “project”, in the Modern sense of that word, i.e. a unified collective effort to define identity, in this case deaf identity, or to consolidate and express a unique world view. Nor does it seek to enlighten the public about what it is to be deaf. Such a totalising project would inevitably suppress heterogeneity and the specificities of people’s lives. Rather, this collection offers many different particular and localised accounts - some personal and poetic, some analytical, some working through critique - which explore the conditions of possibility for human subjects, and in particular, people who are deaf. The contributions highlight in very different ways the complex and shifting fields within which people’s lives and experiences are formed. These works give us insight into the varied and changing social and environmental conditions that not only shape our lives but are in turn shaped by who we are and by our practices and choices. The constraints and possibilities of people’s lives change significantly and differ widely. They are linked inextricably with where people are, in terms of geography or location, and with the circumstances they find themselves in or create for themselves: circumstances of gender, family, social networks, economics, education, work, lifestyle, health or illness, physical abilities, differences and limitations. These works stress the highly contingent nature of human social development and the fluidity of deaf experience rather than identity. Identity shifts and takes on meaning in relation to others and situations; we come to know who we are through a process of differentiating ourselves from others and from identities that we do not feel comfortable with. In almost all of these accounts here experiences of deafness are not the same those conjured up by labels or stereotypes. This act of disassociation from the usual notions of deafness, highlights that our received language and labels do not give us knowledge. Disavowal reminds us that we do not know, except through some disruptive encounter with the Other, whether that is the otherness of our own deafness or the deafness of others. These writings that demonstrate the particularity and detail of deaf people’s experiences, enable us to know the limits and inaccuracies of the labels and identities so commonly assigned to deafness and the deaf. Thus, we come back to the beginning and find our equivocal, tentative answers to the question, ‘how do we learn what we know about being deaf and deafness?’ We learn what we know in various ways, yet hearing or deaf, we are exposed to particular ideas of deafness, limiting labels and assumptions that reinforce ‘ableist’ values. These writings have demonstrated the proliferation of limited stereotypes; they recur in narratives, news stories, television and films, and have power regardless of their disconnection from the real, and from the lived experience of deafness. It is a significant starting point to recognise the limitations of what we think we already know, through our media and social institutions, of deafness. These essays and writings represent a different epistemology; they explore not what deafness is or how it can be defined, but different ways of knowing deafness. References Couser, G. Thomas. “Signs of Life: Deafness and Personal Narrative” Ch. 6 in Recovering Bodies: Illness, Disability, and Life Writing. Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 1997. Bauman, H-Dirksen L. “Voicing Deaf Identity: Through the ‘I’s’ and Ears of an Other.” In S. Smith, and J. Watson, eds., Getting a Life: Everyday Uses of Autobiography. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989. 47-62. Kisor, Henry. What’s That Pig Outdoors? A Memoir of Deafness. New York: Hill and Wang, 1990.

There are many ways to construct, shape and frame a history of popular music. From a focus on performers to a stress on cities, from theories of modernity to reveling in ‘the post,’ innovative music has been matched by evocative writing about it. One arc of analysis in popular music studies focuses on the record label. Much has been written about Sun, Motown, Factory and Apple, but there are many labels that have not reached this level of notoriety and fame but offer much to our contemporary understanding of music, identity and capitalism. The aim of this article is to capture an underwritten history of 21st century music, capturing and tracking moments of collaboration, movement and contact. Through investigating a specific record label, we explore the interconnectiveness of electronica and city-based creative industries’ initiatives. While urban dance culture is still pathologised through drug scares and law and order concerns, clubbing studies and emerging theories of sonic media and auditory cultures offer a significant trigger and frame for this current research. The focus on Off World Sounds (OWS) traces a meta-independent label that summons, critiques, reinscribes and provokes the conventional narratives of capitalism in music. We show how OWS has remade and remixed the collaborations of punk to forge innovative ways of thinking about creativity, policy and popular culture. While commencing with a review of the origin, ideology and intent of OWS, the final part of the paper shows where the experiment went wrong and what can be learnt from this sonic label laboratory. Moving Off World Popular cultural studies evoke and explore discursive formations and texts that activate dissent, conflict and struggle. This strategy is particularly potent when exploring how immigration narratives fray the borders of the nation state. At its most direct, this analysis provides a case study to assess and answer some of Nabeel Zuberi’s questions about sonic topography that he raises in Sounds English. I’m concerned less with music as a reflection of national history and geography than how the practices of popular music culture themselves construct the spaces of the local, national, and transnational. How does the music imagine the past and place? How does it function as a memory-machine, a technology for the production of subjective and collective versions of location and identity? How do the techniques of sounds, images, and activities centered on popular music create landscapes with figures? (3) Dance music is mashed between creativity, consumerism and capitalism. Picking up on Zuberi’s challenge, the story of OWS is also a history of what happens to English migrants who travel to Australia, and how they negotiate the boundaries of the Australian nation. Immigration is important to any understanding of contemporary music. The two proprietors of OWS are Pete Carroll and, one of the two writers of this current article, Stephen Mallinder. Both English proprietors immigrated to Perth in Australia. They used their contacts to sign electronica performers from beyond this single city. They encouraged the tracks to move freely through lymphatic digital networks for remixing—‘lymphatic’ signalling a secondary pathway for commerce and creativity where new musical relationships were being formed outside the influence of major record companies. Performers signed to OWS form independent networks with other performers. This mobility of sound has operated in parallel with the immigration policies of the Howard government that have encouraged insularity and xenophobia. In other eras of racial inequality and discrimination, the independent record label has been not only an integral part of the music industry, but a springboard for political dissent. The histories of jazz and rhythm and blues capture a pivotal moment of independent entrepreneurialism that transformed new and strange sounds/noises into popular music. In monitoring and researching this complex process of musical movement and translation, the independent label has remained the home of the peripheral, the misunderstood, and the uncompromising. Soul music in the United States of America is an example of a sonic form that sustained independence while corporate labels made a profit. Labels like Atlantic Records became synonymous with the success of black vocal music in the 1960s and 1970s, while the smaller independent labels like Chess and Invicta constructed a brand identity. While the division between the majors and the independents increasingly dissolves, particularly at the level of distribution, the independent label remains significant as innovator and instigator. It retains its status and pedagogic function in teaching an audience about new sounds and developing aural literacies. OWS inked its well from an idealistic and collaborative period of label evolution. The punk aesthetic of the late 1970s not only triggered wide-ranging implications for youth culture, but also opened spaces for alternative record labels and label identity. Rough Trade was instrumental in imbuing a spirit of cooperation and a benign mode of competition. A shift in the distribution of records and associated merchandizing to strengthen product association—such as magazines, fanzines and T-Shirts—enabled Rough Trade to deal directly with pivotal stores and outlets and then later establish cartels with stores to provide market security and a workable infrastructure. Links were built with ancillary agents such as concert promoters, press, booking agents, record producers and sleeve designers, to create a national, then European and international, network to produce an (under the counter) culture. Such methods can also be traced in the history of Postcard Records from Edinburgh, Zoo Records from Liverpool, Warp in Sheffield, Pork Recordings in Hull, Hospital Records in London, and both Grand Central and Factory in Manchester. From the ashes of the post-1976 punk blitzkrieg, independent labels bloomed with varying impact, effect and success, but they held an economic and political agenda. The desire was to create a strong brand identity by forming a tight collaboration between artists and distributors. Perceptions of a label’s size and significance was enhanced and enlarged through this collaborative relationship. OWS acknowledged and rewrote this history of the independent label. There was a desire to fuse the branding of the label with the artists signed, released and distributed. No long term obligations on behalf of the artists were required. A 50/50 split after costs was shared. While such an ‘agreement’ appeared anachronistic, it was also a respectful nod to the initial label/artist split offered by Rough Trade. Collaboration with artists throughout the process offered clear statements of intent, with idealism undercut by pragmatism. From track selection, sleeve design, promotion strategy and interview schedule, the level of communication created a sense of joint ownership and dialogue between label and artist. This reinscription of independent record history is complex because OWS’ stable of performers and producers is an amalgamation of dub, trance, hip hop, soul and house genres. Much of trans-localism of OWS was encouraged by its base in Perth. Metaphorically ‘off world’, Perth is a pad for international music to land, be remixed, recut and re-released. Just as Wellington is the capital of Tolkien’s Middle Earth as well as New Zealand, Perth is a remix capital for Paris or New York-based performers. The brand name ‘Off World Sounds’ was designed to emphasise isolation: to capture the negativity of isolation but rewrite separation and distinctiveness with a positive inflection. The title was poached from Ridley Scott’s 1980s film Bladerunner, which was in turn based on Philip K. Dick’s story, “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” Affirming this isolation summoned an ironic commentary on Perth’s geographical location, while also mocking the 1980s discourses of modernity and the near future. The key was to align punk’s history of collaboration with this narrative of isolation and independence, to explore mobility, collaboration, and immigration. Spaces in the Music Discussions of place dictate a particular methodology to researching music. Dreams of escape and, concurrently, intense desires for home pepper the history of popular music. What makes OWS important to theories of musical collaboration is that not only was there a global spread of musicians, producers and designers, but they worked together in a series of strategic trans-localisms. There were precedents for disconnecting place and label, although not of the scale instigated by OWS. Fast Products, although based in Glasgow, signed The Human League from Sheffield and Gang of Four from Leeds. OWS was unique in signing artists disconnected on a global scale, with the goal of building collaborations in remixing and design. Gripper, from the north east of England, Little Egypt from New York, The Bone Idle from Vienna, Hull and Los Angeles, Looped for Pleasure from Sheffield, Barney Mullhouse from Australia and the United Kingdom, Ooblo from Manchester, Attache from Adelaide, Crackpot from Melbourne and DB Chills from Sydney are also joined by artists resident in Perth, such as Soundlab, the Ku-Ling Bros and Blue Jay. Compact Disc mastering is completed in Sydney, London, and Perth. The artwork for vinyl and CD sleeves, alongside flyers, press advertising and posters, is derived from Manchester, England. These movements in the music flattened geographical hierarchies, where European and American tracks were implicitly valued over Australian-derived material. Through pop music history, the primary music markets of the United Kingdom and United States made success for Australian artists difficult. Off World emphasised that the product was not licensed. It was previously unreleased material specifically recorded for the label and an exclusive Australian first territory release. Importantly, this licensing agreement also broadened definitions and interpretations of ‘Australian music’. Such a critique and initiative was important. For example, Paul Bodlovich, Director of the West Australian Music Industry (WAM), believed he was extending the brief of his organisation during his tenure. Once more though, rock was the framework, structure and genre of interest. Explaining the difference from his predecessor, he stated that: [James Nagy] very much saw the music industry as being only bands who were playing all original music—to him they were the only people who actually constituted the music industry. I have a much broader view on that, that all those other people who are around the band—the manager, the promoters, the labels, the audio guys, the whole shebang—that they are part of the music industry too. (33) Much was absent from his ‘whole shebang,’ including the fans who actually buy the music and attend the pubs and clubs. A diversity of genres was also not acknowledged. If hip hop, and urban music generally, is added to his list of new interests, then clubs, graf galleries, dance instructors and fashion and jewelry designers could extend the network of musical collaborations. A parody of corporate culture and a pastiche of the post-punk aesthetic, OWS networked and franchised itself into existence. It was a cottage industry superimposed onto a corporate infrastructure. Attempting to make inroads into an insular Perth arts community and build creative industries’ networks without state government policy support, Off World offered an optimistic perspective on the city’s status and value in a national and global electronic market. Yet in commercial terms, OWS failed. What OWS captures through its failures conveys more about music policy in Australia than any success. The label has been able to catalogue the lack of changes to Perth’s music policy. The proprietors, performers and designers were not approached in 2002 by the Western Australian Contemporary Music Taskforce to offer comment. Yet Matthew Benson and Poppy Wise, researchers for that report, stated that “the solution lies in the industry becoming more outwardly focused, and to do this, it must seek the input of successful professionals who have proven track records in the marketing of music nationally and globally” (9). The resultant document argued that the industry needed to the look to Sydney and Melbourne for knowledge of “international” markets. Yet Paul Bodlovich, the Director of WAM, singled out the insularity of ‘England,’ not Britain, and ‘America’ in comparison to the ‘outward’ Perth music industry: To us, they’re all centre of the universe, but they don’t look past their walls, they don’t have a clue what goes in other parts of the world … All they see say in England is English TV, or in America it’s American TV. Whereas we sit in a very isolated part of the world and we absorb culture from everywhere because we think we have to just to be on an equal arc with everyone else. We think we have to absorb stuff from other cultures because unless we do then we really are isolated … It’s a similar belief to the ongoing issue of women in the workplace, where there’s a belief that to be seen on equal footing you have to be better. (33) This knight’s move affiliation of Perth’s musicians with women in the workplace is bizarre and inappropriate. This unfortunate connection is made worse when recognizing that Perth’s music institutions and organisations, such as WAM, are dominated by white, Australian-born men. To promote the outwardness of Perth culture while not mentioning the role and function of immigration is not addressing how mobility, creativity and commerce is activated. To unify ‘England’ and ‘America,’ without recognizing the crucial differences between Manchester and Bristol, New York and New Orleans, is conservative, arrogant, and wrong. National models of music, administered by Australian-born white men and funded through grants-oriented peer review models rather than creative industries’ infrastructural initiatives, still punctuate Western Australian music. Off World Sounds has been caught in non-collaborative, nationalist models for organising culture and economics. It is always easy to affirm the specialness and difference of a city’s sound or music. While affirming the nation and rock, outsiders appear threatening to the social order. When pondering cities and electronica, collaboration, movement and meaning dance through the margins. References Benson, Matthew, and Poppy Wise. A Study into the Current State of the Western Australian Contemporary Music Industry and Its Potential for Economic Growth. Department of Culture and the Arts, Government of Western Australia, December 2002. Bodlovich, Paul. “Director’s Report.” X-Press 940 (17 Feb. 2005): 33. Zuberi, Nabeel. Sounds English: Transnational Popular Music. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 2001. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Brabazon, Tara, and Stephen Mallinder. "Off World Sounds: Building a Collaborative Soundscape." M/C Journal 9.2 (2006). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0605/13-brabazonmallinder.php>. APA Style Brabazon, T., and S. Mallinder. (May 2006) "Off World Sounds: Building a Collaborative Soundscape," M/C Journal, 9(2). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0605/13-brabazonmallinder.php>.

In The Practice of Everyday Life, Walking in the City, Michel de Certeau celebrates the glorious sublimity of an Icarian moment as his gaze from the 110th floor of the World Trade Centre soars over Manhattan. Having taken such a voluptuous pleasure (92) in the view myself, and watched the twin towers collapse into rubble on my television screen last September, as I re-visit the aerial site through de Certeau, his words resonate strongly with the oneiric force of memory, myth and the wonder of urban possibility. For while theorising, does de Certeau not write his own story of the city as dream, as imaginative longing, consuming and producing an urban 'text' (93) as he reads from on high? Participating in the logic of one of the city's opportunities, a tourist attraction, his analytic practice is a creative expression of his own subjective experience. Theoretically, the story begins in the labyrinth of the cityscape, where the urban text is humanised by its mobile, unpredictable practitioners whose everyday operations style, invent and generate ways of being and becoming. What de Certeau offers us is something quite beautiful and noble, almost consolatory, in the idea of an artful, other spatiality that slips, undetected, into the banal routine of daily existence. To explore how lived space (96) is authorised by its heroic practitioners, made other, as it is inscribed into and outside the historic, social and economic realities or strategies of the urban environment, I resort to fiction, where the certain strangeness (93) of the everyday surfaces to be read. Colum McCann's novel, This Side of Brightness, takes us down below de Certeau's down below to the subterranean spaces of the New York City subway tunnels where the central character, Treefrog, estranged from his family, makes his home: his dark nest, high in the tunnel (McCann 2). Treefrog's escape into this murky, cavernous netherworld is a disappearing act for this is where no ordinary practitioners of the city live 'down below,' [down] below the thresholds at which [an everyday] visibility begins. (de Certeau 93) Seeking refuge, this is where the city's resident asylum seekers migrate, claiming exile as a right. To be outcast is an autonomous and pragmatic spatial tactic, a self-imposed, self-composed state of being as other. Here, survival is a process of resistance, an illegal occupation. Errant and devious, the lifestyle choice these urban consumers make violates the civil ordinances of the city. Venturing topside, Treefrog repels, offends and embarrasses the ordinary practitioners of the city travelling on the subway (96, 240) and in the reading room at the public library (93). The disgust and fear aroused by his stench and squalid appearance make no allowance for pity or pride. In these aboveground collective social spaces his unhygienic, undomesticated presence is not proper; it signals defiance in its fetid, imposing refusal to be controlled or to disappear. Treefrog is an anonymous manifestation of the cityscape. Disguised by long hair, a beard, ragged clothes, filth and dirt (242), his real identity is undetectable: Clarence Nathan Walker is invisible. Seemingly primitive, this sight is decidedly modern in its ubiquitous depiction of the contemporary urban indigent. A place of wounded spirits, Treefrog's 'mole' neighbourhood confesses the shame of an overwhelming suffering born of the streets. Papa Love's grief is monumentalised in the surreal gargantuan murals and portraits of the dead he paints on the walls of the tunnel. Crack addicts, Angela and Elijah, get high, wasted, underground. A symbolic toilet seat hangs wreath-like on Faraday's front door; as a doorbell (128). Dean, the Trash Man, collects the discarded remains of an urban consumer society and installs them in his 'front yard' as an assemblage of ready-made materials and found objects. Textually, his 'work' orchestrates a cacophony of human ruin and putrescence: the mounds of human faeces and the torn magazines and the empty containers and the hypodermic needles with blobs of blood at their tips like poppies erupting in a field...the broken bottles and rat droppings and a baby carriage and smashed TV and squashed cans and discarded cardboard boxes and shattered jars and orange peels and crack vials and a single teddy bear with both its eyes missing, its belly nibbled into by rats. (56) In this community, housing isolates, shelters and incarcerates, each inhabitant has their own cubicle, concrete bunker, solitary cell (56). In contrast to this depressed existential vista, before his incarnation as Treefrog, Clarence Nathan knows the sublime erotic charge of towering over New York City, expressed by de Certeau. Working construction on the city's skyscrapers, he seeks ascension, going, willfully, higher than any walking man in Manhattan....Beneath him, Manhattan becomes a blur of moving yellow taxis and dark silhouettes. There is something in this rising akin to desire, the gentle rock from side to side, the cooling breeze, the knowledge that he is the one who will pierce the virginity of space where the steel hits the sky....The elevator clangs and stops. Clarence Nathan finishes his coffee, tosses the paper cup and walks across the metal decking towards two ladders which jut up in the air. For a joke the men call this area the POST: The Place of Shrivelled Testicles. No ordinary man will go further. The nimblest Clarence Nathan and Cricket...climb three ladders to the very top of the building, where columns of steel reach up into the air. (195-6) Unaffected by vertigo and impervious to the danger, there is a seeming nonchalance, a banality, to Clarence Nathan's activity as he finishes his coffee, tosses the paper cup and gets to work; this is a practice of everyday life for him. And yet this productive activity, governed by city council planning and approval, contains a liberatory ruse, an 'anthropological,' poetic and mythic experience of space, (93) as proposed by de Certeau. High above, he performs a transcendent manoeuvre, a magic trick, creating and constructing space out of thin air, nothing. Icarian, Clarence Nathan's desire seems not for scopic pleasure but for the pure visceral elation of being unrestrained, unprotected, autonomous, above and beyond the rest of the world. At such a height Clarence Nathan does not speculate or even think he forgets where he is, that his 'body even exists.' (177) Surpassing rational comprehension and linguistic expression, his elevation articulates an unadulterated liberation, an erotics of feeling and an ecstasy of being: [s]ometimes, for a joke, Clarence Nathan takes out his harmonica at the top of the column and blows into it using just one hand. The wind carries most of the tune away, but occasionally the notes filter down to the ironworkers below. The notes sound billowy and strained, and for this the men sometimes call him Treefrog, a name he doesn't much care for. (198) From this pivotal point, high on the extreme vertical axis of the cityscape, Clarence Nathan has much further to fall when he loses his balance mentally, descending into an abyss of human despair. Being down is not deep enough. Going underground, Clarence Nathan reclaims this haunted, burrowed space of the city as a legacy bequeathed to him by his grandfather, one of the sandhogs who dug the tunnels of the New York subway, and reinvents himself as Treefrog. An appropriate moniker for this uncivilised, otherworldly realm, [a]ll darkness and dampness and danger, (7) sometimes it is the only name he can remember (29). Foregrounding memory and myth, McCann's fable weaves the creation story of a family through the interstices of a city's legends and official history, allowing us to read the appropriation, the othering, of the city's spaces by its inhabitants in the practice of their lives as ephemeral markings of artistic activity. Through the incantation of spatial and narrative trajectories, as de Certeau suggests, [a] migrational, or metaphorical, city thus slips into the clear text of the planned and readable city (93). Writing himself into these catacombs, literally, Treefrog embraces his interment, his burial rights, as a return to his primordial home: In his notebook Treefrog writes: Back down under the earth, where you belong. Back down under the earth where you belong....He could make a map of those words, beginning at the B and ending at the g where all beginning begins and ends and they would make the strangest of upground and belowground topographies. (139) So as not to forget the strange topographies of existence, Treefrog inscribes them on the surface of his skin: [h]is chest is scrimshawed with stabwounds and burns and scars. So many mutilations of his body. Hot paper clips, blunt scissors, pliers, cigarettes, matches, blades they have all left their marks. (30) Mapping an abstract expression, intimately, these are the warrior scars of the initiate. Belowground, Clarence Nathan eludes the clinical strategies of his obsessive-compulsive post-traumatic stress disorder; he avoids the nuthouse (228). Here, in retreat, as Treefrog, he is free to create, dream and imagine, unrestrained and unexamined; it is an elegant self-prescribed remedy. For Clarence Nathan, the tunnels are therapeutic and restorative. Ultimately, they enable him to be resurrected back into the light, upground, leaving Treefrog, like a discarded doppelgänger, to the shadows of the tunnels (242-3). An ironic compensation for his mental instability, Clarence Nathan's gift of perfect physical balance, his inheritance, (170) determines his survival underground. Safe and secure with his cave positioned high in the tunnel wall, Treefrog's daily movements are dependent upon the demonstration of an agile bodily grace, a mobility that defies gravity in its series of acrobatic swings and precarious tight-rope walking. Enhancing the danger and difficulty of his daring by performing blindfolded, Treefrog negotiates space intuitively: he walks onto the catwalk with his eyelids shut. The narrow beam requires supreme balance below him is a twenty foot drop to the tunnel. He swings his way down to the second beam ten feet below, crouches, then leaps and drops soundlessly to the gravel, knees bent, heart thumping. He opens his eyes to the darkness. (25) Mimetically Treefrog appropriates this eternal nocturnal realm and makes it his own, a part of himself, he feels the darkness, smells it, belongs to it. (23) As from his subterranean perch Treefrog fills the emptiness with the eerie, improvised strains of his harmonica, the stale, dank, tired air of the tunnels, is filtered through the human body, and used to make something strangely ethereal, beautiful, fresh and new: in the miasmic dark, Treefrog played, transforming the air, giving back to the tunnels their original music (2). Treefrog accepts this other spatiality, carved into and out of the urban environment, as a gift, and his performance reciprocates a generosity that signals hope and healing; '[t]he world, he knows, can still spring its small and wondrous surprises (53). McCann presents the tunnels of New York City as an urban wilderness, a lawless frontier. And yes, Treefrog's community is comprised of "demonic subterraneans madmen, perverts, addicts, criminals, murderers," but challenging Blanche Gelfant's account of the lower states, this reverse spatial direction does not necessarily signify a metaphorical mobilisation of values downward into the unexplored depths of moral disorder (417). Rather, in This Side of Brightness, moral disorder is a condition of ordinary, everyday existence aboveground, where violence, chaos, vulnerability, persecution, terror, inequality, kindness, disregard, compassion, indifference, awe, tragedy, compose, socially, [a] landscape of loving and hating. A palpable viciousness in the air. And yet a tenderness too. Something about this part of the world being so alive that its own heart could burst from the accumulated grief. As if it all might suddenly fulminate under the gravity of living. (185) Figured imaginatively through Treefrog the tunnels become an enchanted otherworldly space, '[a] heaven of hell,' (70) in which darkness, solitude and anonymity have the miraculous power to strengthen and absolve. Amidst the waste and detritus a beauty is brutally, painfully laid bare. For Treefrog, for Clarence Nathan, the tunnels are an emotional and psychological sanctuary and their appropriation is a courageous life-affirming act: it is only underground that...men become men, integrated, whole (37). References de Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Trans. Steven Rendall. Berkeley: U of California P, 1988. Gelfant, Blanche. Residence Underground: Recent Fictions of the Subterranean City. The Sewanee Review. 83 (1975): 406-38. McCann, Colum. This Side of Brightness. London: Phoenix House, 1998. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Williams, Marisa. "Going Underground" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5.2 (2002). [your date of access] < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0205/underground.php>. Chicago Style Williams, Marisa, "Going Underground" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5, no. 2 (2002), < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0205/underground.php> ([your date of access]). APA Style Williams, Marisa. (2002) Going Underground. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5(2). < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0205/underground.php> ([your date of access]).

Cities are shared spaces. As the massive worldwide Iraq war protests that began in 2002 indicate, the structure of the city allows for the presentation of social statements, where large groups can gather, share ideas or argue beliefs, and where media outlets can broadcast these activities. While cities enable these forms of interaction, digital technologies also allow for worldwide connections, both through communication and entertainment. What is the relationship between the shared, often contested spaces of the city and how they are represented in interactive media such as videogames? What statements are formed in the streets of Grand Theft Auto? In this paper I will discuss three popular games that reproduce urban spaces: the Grand Theft Auto series (1998-2006), Tony Hawk’s American Wasteland (2004), and Getting Up: Contents under Pressure (2006). These games are of interest due to their popularity, as well as the forms of interaction reinforced by the urban game environment. Cities have always been spaces for interaction and competition, becoming the site for festivals, protests and games. Ancient forms of graffiti in Rome and Pompeii have been re-envisioned in a worldwide graffiti movement, transforming blighted areas into image-laden environments. Games of stickball, hockey and football transform streets into fields, as do modern marathons and bicycle races. The city street becomes a zone of interpretation, for adaptation and personalization. More recently, skateboarders have transformed cities into skateparks, forcing designers to develop such curiosities as handrail and planter augmentation meant to deter skating. Even more peculiar, a possible response to the anti-skating backlash is the sport known as ‘free-running’ or le parkeur, where participants use the existing infrastructure to express themselves, jumping from rooftop to rooftop, climbing concrete peaks and adding stylistic flourish with each step. These forms of urban gameplay may also be accompanied by dangerous activities as well. Jenkins suggests that discussions on the negative effects of increased gameplay might be addressed by looking at socioeconomic factors, such as the increasing numbers of young people living in urban or semi-urban areas who have fewer opportunities for activity that takes place out of doors, creating the prospect for increased interaction with videogames (“Complete Freedom”). The adaptability combined with the dangerous allure of the city street makes for problematic, intriguing representations in contemporary videogames that deal with urban spaces. I will first discuss a brief history of games that deal with urban spaces, before discussing three popular games and the manner in which they attempt to represent, and recreate the experiences in the city. Games and the City One of the earliest examples of the city represented in a videogame can be seen in Rampage, released by Bally/Midway in 1986. The game includes the city only as backdrop for demolition by hyperagressive mutant animals. SimCity, created by Will Wright and released in 1989, is considered a landmark in the history of videogames, as it is based in forms of cooperation rather than competition. It has spawned at least 21 varieties, including the highly anticipated Spore, a game that allows the player to control life on a microbiological level. Game developers also have explored the recreation of cities from the past. Games such as Civilization and Children of the Nile: Immortal Cities (2004) allow players to control events on a broad social scale, in the style of SimCity, with the addition of historical information that comes into play. As videogames have developed, an increase in processing power has allowed programmers to create spaces rendered in real-time, in three dimensions, allowing for immersive ‘first-person’ perspectives not possible in earlier game systems. This perspective has changed the way in which the city is engaged, from the simplistic destruction of Rampage to more nuanced ways of moving through game space. When discussing the perspective of the player in the urban game space, we should also discuss the perspective of the city inhabitant. As de Certeau describes it, the act of walking in the city represents a form of ownership, reading and creating ‘texts’ through movement. This perspective can shift, through travel in automobile or train, or by ascending in skyscrapers, changing the understanding of the text in the process. This process is inevitably collaborative, as the urban terrain that is monitored both by individuals and by groups: businesses, governments, police. As Flynn suggests, this notion of walking closely resembles the procedural nature of generating meaning in many videogames. Recent games such as the Grand Theft Auto series (1998-2006), Tony Hawk’s American Wasteland (2004), and Getting Up: Contents Under Pressure (2006) raise issues regarding the representation of the city, and the possibilities afforded the player. Of interest are the following questions: How is the urban environment represented? What options are provided to players for interaction within this environment? Are their implications for everyday practices that borrow from these game-based environments? Grand Theft Auto Grand Theft Auto (GTA) was first released in 1998, and has since expanded into a series of increasingly controversial games. Originally designed for top-down gameplay, a third person point of view was introduced in GTA II (2001). Along with this new point of view came the ability for players to interact with a highly detailed cityspace, deviating from the urban gangster storyline, and interacting with city inhabitants in any number of illicit ways. This interactivity was taken to an extreme in GTA: San Andreas (2004). GTA: San Andreas is set in a state that is a fictional blend of California and Nevada. It continued the gangster storyline of the previous games, becoming notorious for including an encoded, hidden level that allowed players to take part in explicit sex scenes. It featured a style of nonlinear gameplay that allowed players to entertain themselves, exploring the urban landscape free from rigid game requirements. It also limited interactions with city dwellers, limiting narrative elements to ‘cut scenes’ that allow for uninhibited gameplay. As Frasca suggests, the later Grand Theft Auto games are really about moving through space, typically seen as a mundane activity, in an interesting way. However, that which makes the movement interesting typically involves killing and maiming and destroying that which stands in the way of the main character. Without getting into a discussion of morals and videogames, the GTA series certainly has pushed the boundaries of video game acceptability, as well as engaging gameplay, allowing players to drift through the urban environment. The Situationist International (SI) sought to engage with the city, opening up possibilities for new forms of engagement and interaction through drifts, or derivé. Through various forms of derivé they engaged with the psychogeographic space of the city, walking through varied areas, and reorganizing these experiences as though in a dream state, or, perhaps, game (Sadler). Surely any video game can be experienced in a similar manner. I suggest that the GTA series, through interactive openness, allows players to reread the text of this virtual city, while at the same time contributing to the ‘society of the spectacle’ that situationist Guy Debord so maligned (Debord). As a successful yet problematic blend of simulation and quest, the rules in GTA: San Andreas are not made explicit; we are familiar with the urban spaces depicted in GTA, at least through the stereotypes portrayed in the media. Players therefore know the rules implicit to these spaces, and what happens when we break them; thus, the allure of the simulated urban environment. The text created is one that combines lived experience, mediated images, and interaction with the fictional urban space. What happens when this environment is made specific, when the game depicts a real city? Tony Hawk Pro Skater The Tony Hawk Pro Skater (THPS) series became very popular after its release in 1999, capitalizing on the marketing of ‘extreme sports’ as seen in events such as ESPN X Games, which debuted in 1995. While not the first skateboarding game on the market, THPS captured the imagination of the game buying audience, allowing players to skate as Tony Hawk, or any number of pro skaters. The latest installment of the series is Tony Hawk American Wasteland (THAW), which promotes the seamless connections between levels that are detailed reproductions of Los Angeles. While the GTA series allows for, and in many cases encourages, activities that would be deemed illegal, THAW extends the possibility that the player could actually perform these acts in the place depicted in the game. Does this allow for greater immersion, which then inspires players to ‘take it to the street?’ Or, does the gameplay reinforce the argument against such activities in the actual urban space, affirming their ‘destructive’ nature? Although skaters can be a nuisance, particularly in crowded downtown areas, the appropriation of utilitarian infrastructure can also be seen as improvisational art, adapting existing urban features in the process of skating. The SI notion of detournement can be seen in the actions of many skaters, as the process of skating brings new meanings to the urban landscape. Whether the Pro Skater series adds to the possibilities for detournement, or further limits the actual skating that happens in the city, is only relevant to those who skate and those who attempt to prevent this sport from taking place. As you skate through the city, writing the text of your experience through railslides and grinds, you are also given the ability to ‘tag’ the walls of Los Angeles, literally inscribing your place in the environment. The control of urban spaces, and the possibilities for rewriting these spaces—for detournement—brings me to my third example. Getting Up Marc Ecko, clothing designer and hip-hop aficionado, released Getting Up: Contents under Pressure in 2006. Players assume the identity of ‘Trane,’ a young graffiti artists desparate to learn the ropes in the city of ‘New Radius.’ New Radius is currently under the draconian control of ‘Mayor Sung,’ who has promised to rid the city of the scourge of graffiti. As Trane, you make your way through New Radius, battling foes and meeting graffiti legends, who teach you new skills along the way. Getting Up is unique from the games previously mentioned, as you have the ability to interact with the urban environment in a manner that is not incessantly violent or overtly destructive. In fact, the game is marketed as a way to get the thrill of ‘tagging’ without actually taking part in illegal activity. It is also a unique experience, as Trane walks through the entire environment. This slows down the gameplay, and allows the character to take in the highly detailed environments. It a very literal way, the player in Getting Up is writing the city, as de Certeau describes it, though this writing is typically underappreciated as creative activity, much less art. Conclusion The games that I have described present the city in very different ways, and offer players diverse options for interacting and thinking about the city. While, the impact of these games remains to be seen, and may never register beyond the world of the gamer, these games present urban environments as active spaces for engagement, even if it is the thuggishness reinforced in Grand Theft Auto. I would hope that the creativity shown in Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater would lead to the creation of not only more skateparks in suburban spaces, but the acknowledgement of the need for detournement in public urban spaces such as Philadelphia’s Love Park, a favorite East Coast US skate spot that has been the center of much controversy as a result of its popularity. If Pro Skater brings the issue of street skating to a national audience, it is doing good, both as entertainment and social force. Similarly, Marc Ecko’s Getting Up has the potential to not only memorialize the birth of graffiti and hip hop in 1970’s New York; it can also instruct on the flourishing worldwide graffiti scene, allowing those who deserve (and desire) attention to have it. Recent projects such as pacmanhattan have inverted the relationships between gaming and the urban environment that I have described. Taking the game to the city, players engage in interpretations of the video game classic Pac Man in the streets of Manhattan, utilizing a variety of locative media devices. While these games do not change the physicality of the city, they surely change our psycheographical interpretation of that space, in a way that folds together the freedom of gameplay with the control of the street. Jenkins suggests that designers should pay more attention to the work of architects and urban planners as they create interactive worlds (“Game Design”). I would also suggest that the opposite take place. Urban designers might learn from the urban spaces created in games such as American Wasteland and Getting Up, as they present options for the detournement of fixed spaces evident in the graffiti and skate cultures. Increased control will result in diverse responses that subvert this control. Cities should remain spaces for walking, for drifting, for protesting: for games. References Bureau of Public Secrets. Situationist International Anthology. Ed. K. Knabb. Berkeley, Calif.: Bureau of Public Secrets, 1981. Debord, Guy. Society of the Spectacle. New York: Zone Books, 1991. De Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1984. Flynn, B. Languages of Navigation within Computer Games. Paper presentation, Digital Art and Culture, Melbourne, Australia, 2003. April 2006 http://hypertext.rmit.edu.au/dac/papers/Flynn.pdf>. Jenkins, Henry. “Complete Freedom of Movement: Videogames as Gendered Play Spaces.” In The Game Design Reader: A Rules of Play Anthology. Eds. K. Salen and E. Zimmerman. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2006. Jenkins, Henry. “Game Design as Narrative Architecture.” In The Game Design Reader: A Rules of Play Anthology. Eds. K. Salen and E. Zimmerman. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2006. Frasca, G. Sim Sin City: Some Thoughts on Grand Theft Auto. Game Studies 2003. April 2006 http://www.gamestudies.org/0302/frasca/>. Sadler, S. The Situationist City. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1998. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Sweeny, Robert. "Code of the Streets: Videogames and the City." M/C Journal 9.3 (2006). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0607/07-sweeny.php>. APA Style Sweeny, R. (Jul. 2006) "Code of the Streets: Videogames and the City," M/C Journal, 9(3). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0607/07-sweeny.php>.

Introduction In a 2019 report for the International Journal of Communication, Baym et al. positioned distributed blockchain ledger technology, and what would subsequently be referred to as Web3, as a convening technology. Riffing off Barnett, a convening technology “initiates and serves as the focus of a conversation that can address issues far beyond what it may ultimately be able to address itself” (403). The case studies for the Baym et al. research—early, aspirant projects applying the blockchain concept to music publishing and distribution—are described in the piece as speculations or provocations concerning music’s commercial and social future. What is convened in this era (pre-2017 blockchain music discourse and practice) is the potential for change: a type of widespread, broadly discussed, reimagination of the 21st-century music industries, productive precisely because near-future applications suggest the realisation of what Baym et al. call dreams. In this article, we aim to examine the Web3 music field as it lies some years later. Taking the latter half of 2021 as our subject, we present a survey of where music then resided within Web3, focussing on how the dreams of Baym et al. have morphed and evolved, and materialised and declined, in the intervening years. By investigating the discourse and functionality of 2021’s current crop of music NFTs—just one thread of music Web3’s far-reaching aspiration, but a potent and accessible manifestation nonetheless—we can make a detailed analysis of concept-led application. Volatility remains throughout the broader sector, and all of the projects listed here could be read as conditionally short-term and untested, but what they represent is a series of clearly evolved case studies of the dream, rich precisely because of what is assumed and disregarded. WTF Is an NFT? Non-fungible tokens inscribe indelible, unique ledger entries on a blockchain, detailing ownership of, or rights associated with, assets that exist off-chain. Many NFTs take the form of an ERC-721 smart-contract that functions as an indivisible token on the Ethereum blockchain. Although all ERC-721 tokens are NFTs, the inverse is not true. Similar standards exist on other blockchains, and bridges allow these tokens to be created on alternative networks such as Polygon, Solana, WAX, Cardano and Tezos. The creation (minting) and transfer of ownership on the Ethereum network—by far the dominant chain—comes with a significant and volatile transaction cost, by way of gas fees. Thus, even a “free” transaction on the main NFT network requires a currency and time investment that far outweighs the everyday routines of fiat exchange. On a technical level, the original proposal for the ERC-721 standard refers to NFTs as deeds intended to represent ownership of digital and physical assets like houses, virtual collectibles, and negative value assets such as loans (Entriken et al.). The details of these assets can be encoded as metadata, such as the name and description of the asset including a URI that typically points to either a file somewhere on the Internet or a file hosted via IPFS, a decentralised peer-to-peer hosting network. As noted in the standard, while the data inscribed on-chain are immutable, the asset being referred to is not. Similarly, while each NFT is unique, multiple NFTs could, in theory, point to a single asset. In this respect ERC-721 tokens are different from cryptocurrencies and other tokens like stable-coins in that their value is often contingent on their accurate and ongoing association with assets outside of the blockchain on which they are traded. Further complicating matters, it is often unclear if and how NFTs confer ownership of digital assets with respect to legislative or common law. NFTs rarely include any information relating to licencing or rights transfer, and high-profile NFTs such as Bored Ape Yacht Club appear to be governed by licencing terms held off-chain (Bored Ape Yacht Club). Finally, while it is possible to inscribe any kind of data, including audio, into an NFT, the ERC-721 standard and the underpinning blockchains were not designed to host multimedia content. At the time of writing, storing even a low-bandwidth stereo audio file on the ethereum network appears cost-prohibitive. This presents a challenge for how music NFTs distinguish themselves in a marketplace dominated by visual works. The following sections of this article are divided into what we consider to be the general use cases for NFTs within music in 2021. We’ve designated three overlapping cases: audience investment, music ownership, and audience and business services. Audience Investment Significant discourse around NFTs focusses on digital collectibles and artwork that are conceptually, but not functionally, unique. Huge amounts of money have changed hands for specific—often celebrity brand-led—creations, resulting in media cycles of hype and derision. The high value of these NFTs has been variously ascribed to their high novelty value, scarcity, the adoption of NFTs as speculative assets by investors, and the lack of regulatory oversight allowing for price inflation via practices such as wash-trading (Madeline; Das et al.; Cong et al.; Le Pennec, Fielder, and Ante; Fazil, Owfi, and Taesiri). We see here the initial traditional split of discourse around cultural activity within a new medium: dual narratives of utopianism and dystopianism. Regardless of the discursive frame, activity has grown steadily since stories reporting the failure of Blockchain to deliver on its hype began appearing in 2017 (Ellul). Early coverage around blockchain, music, and NFTs echoes this capacity to leverage artificial scarcity via the creation of unique digital assets (cf Heap; Tomaino). As NFTs have developed, this discourse has become more nuanced, arguing that creators are now able to exploit both ownership and abundance. However, for the most part, music NFTs have essentially adopted the form of digital artworks and collectibles in editions ranging from 1:1 or 1:1000+. Grimes’s February 2021 Mars NFT pointed to a 32-second rotating animation of a sword-wielding cherubim above the planet Mars, accompanied by a musical cue (Grimes). Mars sold 388 NFTs for a reported fixed price of $7.5k each, grossing $2,910,000 at time of minting. By contrast, electronic artists Steve Aoki and Don Diablo have both released 1:1 NFT editions that have been auctioned via Sotheby’s, Superrare, and Nifty Gateway. Interestingly, these works have been bundled with physical goods; Diablo’s Destination Hexagonia, which sold for 600 Eth or approximately US$1.2 million at the time of sale, proffered ownership of a bespoke one-hour film hosted online, along with “a unique hand-crafted box, which includes a hard drive that contains the only copy of the high-quality file of the film” (Diablo). Aoki’s Hairy was much less elaborate but still promised to provide the winner of the $888,888 auction with a copy of the 35-second video of a fur-covered face shaking in time to downbeat electronica as an Infinite Objects video print (Aoki). In the first half of 2021, similar projects from high-profile artists including Deadmau5, The Weekend, Snoop Dogg, Eminem, Blondie, and 3Lau have generated an extraordinary amount of money leading to a significant, and understandable, appetite from musicians wanting to engage in this marketplace. Many of these artists and the platforms that have enabled their sales have lauded the potential for NFTs to address an alleged poor remuneration of artists from streaming and/or bypassing “industry middlemen” (cf. Sounds.xyz); the millions of dollars generated by sales of these NFTs presents a compelling case for exploring these new markets irrespective of risk and volatility. However, other artists have expressed reservations and/or received pushback on entry into the NFT marketplace due to concerns over the environmental impact of NFTs; volatility; and a perception of NFT markets as Ponzi schemes (Poleg), insecure (Goodin), exploitative (Purtill), or scammy (Dash). As of late 2021, increased reportage began to highlight unauthorised or fraudulent NFT minting (cf. TFL; Stephen), including in music (Newstead). However, the number of contested NFTs remains marginal in comparison to the volume of exchange that occurs in the space daily. OpenSea alone oversaw over US$2.5 billion worth of transactions per month. For the most part, online NFT marketplaces like OpenSea and Solanart oversee the exchange of products on terms not dissimilar to other large online retailers; the space is still resolutely emergent and there is much debate about what products, including recently delisted pro-Nazi and Alt-Right-related NFTs, are socially and commercially acceptable (cf. Pearson; Redman). Further, there are signs this trend may impact on both the willingness and capacity of rightsholders to engage with NFTs, particularly where official offerings are competing with extant fraudulent or illegitimate ones. Despite this, at the time of writing the NFT market as a whole does not appear prone to this type of obstruction. What remains complicated is the contested relationship between NFTs, copyrights, and ownership of the assets they represent. This is further complicated by tension between the claims of blockchain’s independence from existing regulatory structures, and the actual legal recourse available to music rights holders. Music Rights and Ownership Baym et al. note that addressing the problems of rights management and metadata is one of the important discussions around music convened by early blockchain projects. While they posit that “our point is not whether blockchain can or can’t fix the problems the music industries face” (403), for some professionals, the blockchain’s promise of eliminating the need for trust seemed to provide an ideal solution to a widely acknowledged business-to-business problem: one of poor metadata leading to unclaimed royalties accumulating in “black boxes”, particularly in the case of misattributed mechanical royalties in the USA (Rethink Music Initiative). As outlined in their influential institutional research paper (partnered with music rights disruptor Kobalt), the Rethink Music Initiative implied that incumbent intermediaries were benefiting from this opacity, incentivising them to avoid transparency and a centralised rights management database. This frame provides a key example of one politicised version of “fairness”, directly challenging the interest of entrenched powers and status quo systems. Also present in the space is a more pragmatic approach which sees problems of metadata and rights flows as the result of human error which can be remedied with the proper technological intervention. O’Dair and Beaven argue that blockchain presents an opportunity to eliminate the need for trust which has hampered efforts to create a global standard database of rights ownership, while music business researcher Opal Gough offers a more sober overview of how decentralised ledgers can streamline processes, remove inefficiencies, and improve cash flow, without relying on the moral angle of powerful incumbents holding on to control accounts and hindering progress. In the intervening two years, this discourse has shifted from transparency (cf. Taghdiri) to a practical narrative of reducing system friction and solving problems on the one hand—embodied by Paperchain, see Carnevali —and ethical claims reliant on the concept of fairness on the other—exemplified by Resonate—but with, so far, limited widespread impact. The notion that the need for b2b collaboration on royalty flows can be successfully bypassed through a “trustless” blockchain is currently being tested. While these earlier projects were attempts to either circumvent or fix problems facing the traditional rights holders, with the advent of the NFT in particular, novel ownership structures have reconfigured the concept of a rights holder. NFTs promise fans an opportunity to not just own a personal copy of a recording or even a digitally unique version, but to share in the ownership of the actual property rights, a role previously reserved for record labels and music publishers. New NFT models have only recently launched which offer fans a share of IP revenue. “Collectors can buy royalty ownership in songs directly from their favorite artists in the form of tokens” through the service Royal. Services such as Royal and Vezt represent potentially massive cultural shifts in the traditional separation between consumers and investors; they also present possible new headaches and adventures for accountants and legal teams. The issues noted by Baym et al. are still present, and the range of new entrants into this space risks the proliferation, rather than consolidation, of metadata standards and a need to put money into multiple blockchain ecosystems. As noted in RMIT’s blockchain report, missing royalty payments … would suggest the answer to “does it need a blockchain?” is yes (although further research is needed). However, it is not clear that the blockchain economy will progress beyond the margins through natural market forces. Some level of industry coordination may still be required. (18) Beyond the initial questions of whether system friction can be eased and standards generated without industry cooperation lie deeper philosophical issues of what will happen when fans are directly incentivised to promote recordings and artist brands as financial investors. With regard to royalty distribution, the exact role that NFTs would play in the ownership and exploitation of song IP remains conceptual rather than concrete. Even the emergent use cases are suggestive and experimental, often leaning heavily on off-chain terms, goodwill and the unknown role of existing legal infrastructure. Audience and Business Services Aside from the more high-profile NFT cases which focus on the digital object as an artwork providing a source of value, other systemic uses of NFTs are emerging. Both audience and business services are—to varying degrees—explorations of the utility of NFTs as a community token: i.e. digital commodities that have a market value, but also unlock ancillary community interaction. The music industries have a longstanding relationship with the sale of exclusivity and access tailored to experiential products. Historically, one of music’s most profitable commodities—the concert ticket—contains very little intrinsic value, but unlocks a hugely desirable extrinsic experience. As such, NFTs have already found adoption as tools of music exclusivity; as gateways into fan experiences, digital communities, live events ticketing and closed distribution. One case study incorporating almost all of these threads is the Deathbats club by American heavy metal band Avenged Sevenfold. Conceived of as the “ultimate fan club”, Deathbats is, according to the band’s singer M. Shadows, “every single thing that [fans] want from us, which is our time, our energy” (Chan). At the time of writing, the Deathbats NFT had experienced expected volatility, but maintained a 30-day average sale price well above launch price. A second affordance provided by music NFTs’ ability to tokenise community is the application of this to music businesses in the form of music DAOs: decentralised autonomous organisations. DAOs and NFTs have so far intersected in a number of ways. DAOs function as digital entities that are owned by their members. They utilise smart contracts to record protocols, votes, and transactions on the blockchain. Bitcoin and Ethereum are often considered the first DAOs of note, serving as board-less venture capital funds, also known as treasuries, that cannot be accessed without the consensus of their members. More recently, DAOs have been co-opted by online communities of shared interests, who work towards an agreed goal, and operate without the need for leadership. Often, access to DAO membership is tokenised, and the more tokens a member has, the more voting rights they possess. All proposals must pass before members, and have been voted for by the majority in order to be enacted, though voting systems differ between DAOs. Proposals must also comply with the DAO’s regulations and protocols. DAOs typically gather in online spaces such as Discord and Zoom, and utilise messaging services such as Telegram. Decentralised apps (dapps) have been developed to facilitate DAO activities such as voting systems and treasury management. Collective ownership of digital assets (in the form of NFTs) has become commonplace within DAOs. Flamingo DAO and PleasrDAO are two well-established and influential examples. The “crypto-backed social club” Friends with Benefits (membership costs between $5,000 and $10,000) serves as a “music discovery platform, an online publication, a startup incubator and a kind of Bloomberg terminal for crypto investors” (Gottsegen), and is now hosting its own curated NFT art platform with work by the likes of Pussy Riot. Musical and cross-disciplinary artists and communities are also exploring the potential of DAOs to empower, activate, and incentivise their communities as an extension of, or in addition to, their adoption and exploration of NFTs. In collaboration with Never Before Heard Sounds, electronic artist and musical pioneer Holly Herndon is exploring ideological questions raised by the growing intelligence of AI to create digital likeness and cloning through voice models. Holly+ is a custom voice instrument that allows users to process pre-existing polyphonic audio through a deep neural network trained by recordings of Holly Herndon’s voice. The output is audio-processed through Holly Herndon’s distinct vocal sound. Users can submit their resulting audio to the Holly+ DAO, to whom she has distributed ownership of her digital likeness. DAO token-holders steward which audio is minted and certified as an NFT, ensuring quality control and only good use of her digital likeness. DAO token-holders are entitled to a percentage of profit from resales in perpetuity, thereby incentivising informed and active stewardship of her digital likeness (Herndon). Another example is LA-based label Leaving Records, which has created GENRE DAO to explore and experiment with new levels of ownership and empowerment for their pre-existing community of artists, friends, and supporters. They have created a community token—$GENRE—for which they intend a number of uses, such as “a symbol of equitable growth, a badge of solidarity, a governance token, currency to buy NFTs, or as a utility to unlock token-gated communities” (Leaving Records). Taken as a whole, the spectrum of affordances and use cases presented by music NFTs can be viewed as a build-up of interest and capital around the technology. Conclusion The last half of 2021 was a moment of intense experimentation in the realms of music business administration and cultural expression, and at the time of writing, each week seemed to bring a new high-profile music Web3 project and/or disaster. Narratives of emancipation and domination under capitalism continue to drive our discussions around music and technology, and the direct link to debates on ecology and financialisation make these conversations particularly polarising. High-profile cases of music projects that overstep norms of existing IP rights, such as Hitpiece’s attempt to generate NFTs of songs without right-holders’ consent, point to the ways in which this technology is portrayed as threatening and subversive to commercial musicians (Blistein). Meanwhile, the Water and Music research DAO promises to incentivise a research community to “empower music-industry professionals with the knowledge, network and skills to do more collaborative and progressive work with technology” through NFT tokens and a DAO organisational structure (Hu et al.). The assumption in many early narratives of the ability of blockchain to provide systems of remuneration that musicians would embrace as inherently fairer is far from the reality of a popular discourse marked by increasing disdain and distrust, currently centred on NFTs as lacking in artistic merit, or even as harmful. We have seen all this talk before, of course, when jukeboxes and player pianos, film synchronisation, radio, recording, and other new communication technologies steered new paths for commercial musicians and promised magical futures. All of these innovations were met with intense scrutiny, cries of inauthentic practice, and resistance by incumbent musicians, but all were eventually sustained by the emergence of new forms of musical expression that captured the interest of the public. On the other hand, the road towards musical nirvana passes by not only the more prominent corpses of the Digital Audio Tape, SuperAudio, and countless recording formats, but if you squint and remember that technology is not always about devices or media, you can see the Secure Download Music Initiative, PressPlay, the International Music Registry, and Global Repertoire Databases in the distance, wondering if blockchain might correct some of the problems they dreamed of solving in their day. The NFT presents the artistic and cultural face of this dream of a musical future, and of course we are first seeing the emergence of old models within its contours. While the investment, ownership, and service phenomena emerging might not be reminiscent of the first moment when people were able to summon a song recording onto their computer via a telephone modem, it is important to remember that there were years of text-based chat rooms before we arrived at music through the Internet. It is early days, and there will be much confusion, anger, and experimentation before music NFTs become either another mundane medium of commercial musical practice, or perhaps a memory of another attempt to reach that goal. References Aoki, Steve. “Hairy.” Nifty Gateway 2021. 16 Feb. 2022 <https://niftygateway.com/marketplace/collection/0xbeccd9e4a80d4b7b642760275f60b62608d464f7/1?page=1>. Baym, Nancy, Lana Swartz, and Andrea Alarcon. "Convening Technologies: Blockchain and the Music Industry." International Journal of Communication 13.20 (2019). 13 Feb. 2022 <https://ijoc.org/index.php/ijoc/article/view/8590>. Barnett, C. “Convening Publics: The Parasitical Spaces of Public Action.” The SAGE Handbook of Political Geography. Eds. K.R. Cox., M. Low, and J. Robinson. London: Sage, 2008. 403–418. Blistein, Jon. "Hitpiece Wants to Make Every Song in the World an NFT. But Artists Aren't Buying It." Rolling Stone 2022. 14 Feb, 2022 <https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/hitpiece-nft-song-controversy-1294027/>. Bored Ape Yacht Club. "Terms & Conditions." Yuga Labs, Inc. 2020. 14 Feb. 2022 <https://boredapeyachtclub.com/#/terms>. Carnevali, David. "Paperchain Uses Defi to Speed Streaming Payments to Musicians; the Startup Gets Streaming Data from Music Labels and Distributors on Their Artists, Then Uses Their Invoices as Collateral for Defi Loans to Pay the Musicians More Quickly." Wall Street Journal 2021. 16 Feb. 2022 <https://www.wsj.com/articles/paperchain-uses-defi-to-speed-streaming-payments-to-musicians-11635548273>. Chan, Anna. “How Avenged Sevenfold Is Reinventing the Fan Club with Deathbats Club NFTs”. NFT Now. 2021. 16 Feb. 2022 <https://avengedsevenfold.com/news/nft-now-avenged-sevenfold-reinventing-fan-club-with-deathbats-club/>. Cong, Lin William, Xi Li, Ke Tang, and Yang Yang. “Crypto Wash Trading.” SSRN 2021. 15 Feb. 2022 <https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3530220>. Das, Dipanjan, Priyanka Bose, Nicola Ruaro, Christopher Kruegel, and Giovanni Vigna. "Understanding Security Issues in the NFT Ecosystem." ArXiv 2021. 16 Feb. 2022 <https://arxiv.org/abs/2111.08893>. Dash, Anil. “NFTs Weren’t Supposed to End like This.” The Atlantic 2021. 16 Feb. 2022 <https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/04/nfts-werent-supposed-end-like/618488/>. Diablo, Don. “Destination Hexagonia.” SuperRare 2021. 16 Feb. 2022 <https://superrare.com/artwork-v2/d%CE%BEstination-h%CE%BExagonia-by-don-diablo-23154>. Entriken, William, Dieter Shirley, Jacob Evans, and Nastassia Sachs. “EIP-721: Non-Fungible Token Standard.” Ethereum Improvement Proposals, 2022. 16 Feb. 2022 <https://arxiv.org/abs/2111.08893>. Fashion Law, The. “From Baby Birkins to MetaBirkins, Brands Are Facing Issues in the Metaverse.” 2021. 16 Feb. 2022 <https://www.thefashionlaw.com/from-baby-birkins-to-metabirkins-brands-are-being-plagued-in-the-metaverse/>. Fazli, Mohammah Amin, Ali Owfi, and Mohammad Reza Taesiri. "Under the Skin of Foundation NFT Auctions." ArXiv 2021. 16 Feb. 2022 <https://arxiv.org/abs/2109.12321>. Friends with Benefits. “Pussy Riot Drink My Blood”. 2021. 28 Jan. 2022 <https://gallery.fwb.help/pussy-riot-drink-my-blood>. Gough, Opal. "Blockchain: A New Opportunity for Record Labels." International Journal of Music Business Research 7.1 (2018): 26-44. Gottsegen, Will. “What’s Next for Friends with Benefits.” Yahoo! Finance 2021. 16 Feb. 2022 <https://au.finance.yahoo.com/news/next-friends-benefits-204036081.html>. Heap, Imogen. “Blockchain Could Help Musicians Make Money Again.” Harvard Business Review 2017. 16 Feb. 2022 <https://hbr.org/2017/06/blockchain-could-help-musicians-make-money-again>. Herndon, Holly. Holly+ 2021. 1 Feb. 2022 <https://holly.mirror.xyz>. Hu, Cherie, Diana Gremore, Katherine Rodgers, and Alexander Flores. "Introducing $STREAM: A New Tokenized Research Framework for the Music Industry." Water and Music 2021. 14 Feb. 2022 <https://www.waterandmusic.com/introducing-stream-a-new-tokenized-research-framework-for-the-music-industry/>. Leaving Records. “Leaving Records Introducing GENRE DAO.” Leaving Records 2021. 12 Jan. 2022 <https://leavingrecords.mirror.xyz/>. LePenne, Guénolé, Ingo Fiedler, and Lennart Ante. “Wash Trading at Cryptocurrency Exchanges.” Finance Research Letters 43 (2021). Gottsegen, Will. “What’s Next for Friend’s with Benefits?” Coin Desk 2021. 28 Jan. 2021 <https://www.coindesk.com/layer2/culture-week/2021/12/16/whats-next-for-friends-with-benefits>. Goodin, Dan. “Really Stupid ‘Smart Contract’ Bug Let Hacker Steal $31 Million in Digital Coin.” ARS Technica 2021. 16 Feb. 2022 <https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2021/12/hackers-drain-31-million-from-cryptocurrency-service-monox-finance/>. Grimes. “Mars.” Nifty Gateway 2021. 16 Feb. 2022 <https://niftygateway.com/itemdetail/primary/0xe04cc101c671516ac790a6a6dc58f332b86978bb/2>. Newstead, Al. “Artists Outraged at Website Allegedly Selling Their Music as NFTS: What You Need to Know.” ABC Triple J 2022. 16 Feb. 2022 <https://www.abc.net.au/triplej/news/musicnews/hitpiece-explainer--artists-outraged-at-website-allegedly-selli/13739470>. O’Dair, Marcus, and Zuleika Beaven. "The Networked Record Industry: How Blockchain Technology Could Transform the Record Industry." Strategic Change 26.5 (2017): 471-80. Pearson, Jordan. “OpenSea Sure Has a Lot of Hitler NFTs for Sale.” Vice: Motherboard 2021. 16 Feb. 2022 <https://www.vice.com/en/article/akgx9j/opensea-sure-has-a-lot-of-hitler-nfts-for-sale>. Poleg, Dror. In Praise of Ponzis. 2021. 16 Feb. 2022 <https://www.drorpoleg.com/in-praise-of-ponzis/>. Purtill, James. “Artists Report Discovering Their Work Is Being Stolen and Sold as NFTs.” ABC News: Science 2021. 16 Feb. 2022 <https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2021-03-16/nfts-artists-report-their-work-is-being-stolen-and-sold/13249408>. Rae, Madeline. “Analyzing the NFT Mania: Is a JPG Worth Millions.” SAGE Business Cases 2021. 16 Feb. 2022 <https://sk-sagepub-com.ezproxy.lib.rmit.edu.au/cases/analyzing-the-nft-mania-is-a-jpg-worth-millions>. Redman, Jamie. “Political Cartoonist Accuses NFT Platforms Opensea, Rarible of Being 'Tools for Political Censorship'.” Bitcoin.com 2021. 16 Feb. 2022 <https://news.bitcoin.com/political-cartoonist-accuses-nft-platforms-opensea-rarible-of-being-tools-for-political-censorship/>. Rennie, Ellie, Jason Potts, and Ana Pochesneva. Blockchain and the Creative Industries: Provocation Paper. Melbourne: RMIT University. 2019. Resonate. "Pricing." 2022. 16 Feb. 2022 <https://resonate.is/pricing/>. Rethink Music Initiative. Fair Music: Transparency and Payment Flows in the Music Industry. Berklee Institute for Creative Entrepreneurship, 2015. Royal. "How It Works." 2022. 16 Feb. 2022 <https://royal.io/>. Stephen, Bijan. “NFT Mania Is Here, and So Are the Scammers.” The Verge 2021. 15 Feb. 2022 <https://www.theverge.com/2021/3/20/22334527/nft-scams-artists-opensea-rarible-marble-cards-fraud-art>. Sound.xyz. Sound.xyz – Music without the Middleman. 2021. 14 Feb. 2022 <https://sound.mirror.xyz/3_TAJe4y8iJsO0JoVbXYw3BM2kM3042b1s6BQf-vWRo>. Taghdiri, Arya. "How Blockchain Technology Can Revolutionize the Music Industry." Harvard Journal of Sports & Entertainment Law 10 (2019): 173–195. Tomaino, Nick. “The Music Industry Is Waking Up to Ethereum: In Conversation with 3LAU.” SuperRare 2020. 16 Feb. 2022 <https://editorial.superrare.com/2020/10/20/the-music-industry-is-waking-up-to-ethereum-in-conversation-with-3lau/>.

The release of the Urban issue of M/C a journal of media and culture is particularly timely. This same month, the United Nations General Assembly is hosting the World Urban Forum [http://www.unhabitat.org], designated as an advisory body to support implementation of the Habitat Agenda and to meet the Millennium Development goal of improving living conditions of slum dwellers throughout the globe. Anna Kajumulo Tibaijuka, Executive Director of UN-Habitat, promotes the forum by asking us to imagine a world without slums, replaced with productive and inclusive cities that meet the needs of all their citizens, rich and poor alike (Guardian Weekly, 11 April). The focus of the World Urban Forum might serve to remind us that what characterises a particular use of space as urban is not its status as a built environment but the degree to which its habitudes facilitate a lived environment. It is the experience rather than the artefact which constitutes the urban. To put the same point in a rather more banal way, it is not the street but the motion of the pedestrians, commuters upon the street that marks out the trajectories and shapes of urban life. Yet there is also in Tibaijuka's sales pitch for the World Urban Forum a fundamental contradiction that cannot be ignored here. The vision of cities meeting the needs of all citizens seems to invert the ancient logic of civitas, the city appropriate to the needs of its inhabitants, because this vision is blinkered against the economies of scale (and the scale of economics) from which urbanisation proceeds. Rich and poor alike: there is a suggestion here that class or wealth precedes the formulation of needs that a city may be developed to accommodate, as if class structures are not bound up in the lines of demarcation and divisions of space separating the good side of the tracks from the bad. Being able to imagine a world without slums, without resorting to utopian idealisations, requires a realistic acceptance that citizenship and the city emerge togetherthe latter is not built from scratch to meet the needs of a pre-existing citizenry. The urban might indeed be usefully thought of as the site of emergence for both the city and its citizenry, the mode of becoming-civic. Thus, it is important to keep in mind the specificity of the urban experience and to account for this experience, in some sense, on its own terms. Once upon a time, it was fashionable to define the city in opposition to the country. Of course, there is something to be said for this kind of differentiation. A quick drive from Brisbane out through the western suburbs and onwards toward the Darling Downs may remind the traveller of how different from each other the city and the country really are: they look different, they smell different, they seem to function at different rates and on different timescales. Yet we may wonder if the inhabitant of an apartment block in New York ever conceives of her life in terms of its difference from that of the farmer whose agrarian lifestyle she has never encountered. Life in the city is not experienced in terms of something other than city life. Life in the city simply is life in the city. Just as the emphasis on practised and lived space directs our attention to the everyday and the mundane, sites of banality that Benjamin once insisted were crucial sites of political and cultural importance, the attempts of urban theorists to capture the quotidian result in a series of impasses including high/low and theory/practice antinomies. If we are still caught in residual thinking in which, as Lefebvre remarked, a city of nightmares is only countered by a city of dreams, then we are still a far cry away from appreciating the complexities and contradictions of lived and practised urban space. We are even further away from--perhaps too far above--addressing the plight of the slum dweller that the World Urban Forum urges we must. Caught within a theory-practice fold, a desire to plan the utopian quest must always be tempered by a cautious approach. Looking back to modernity's plans and some of the disasters of urban planning, we recognise a continual catapaulting of the urban into the realm of danger and chaos. Importantly, these realms unfold in such a way that they encompass both the level of individual experience and global processes. Indeed, as these words were being written, an explosion in a tower in New York sent shudders through the population: was this another terrorist attack? The types of experiences defining urban life have undergone a major transformation in the last six months, a paradigm shift of sorts, collapsing the range of possible urban experiences into the discourse of terror and the political (and economic) ends it serves. The World Urban Forum represents another way in which the paradigm of the urban is being redefined on a global scale, although the mechanisms of change it institutes will no doubt be more gradual, and we might wonder whether they will be anywhere near as effective. The urban issue Fresh on the heels of the 'fear' issue of M/C, this 'urban' issue again raises the politics of fear. The city is perhaps the prime scene and space of fear. Vocabularies of fear produce and generate the meanings in which the city is lived. It might be politically motivated then to claim the city's deemed disorder as liveable. Indeed, many of the contributions to this issue seem to address issues of representing the urban: how do we mark out this terrain for ourselves. As our feature article by Gerard Goggin suggests, the boundaries of the city are a slippery signifier upon which to place any demarcation of urban experience. Divisions such as city and country, urban and suburban, collapse under the weight of the sprawl of human movements and settlements that might more accurately be represented by the concept of the con-urban. While the boundaries of the city are indeed slippery, one of its common limits has been placed at the sub-urban. In Re-writing Suburbia, Emily Bullock brings that often rejected space to bear on considerations of the urban. Tying the suburban to dreams of home ownership and to dreams of nationness, Bullock finds in Suneeta Peres da Costa's recent novel Homework a textual space that subverts the suburban Australian dream without re-invigorating the urban-suburban binary. The limits of how we define urban life are also tested by the question of scale, between the level of individual experience and global paradigm shifts, for example. One way of working through this issue is suggested by David Prater and Sarah Miller, who focus on the paradox of considering the privatised, physically disengaged human behaviour of internet use undertaken within the public space of the internet cafe. Their analysis of this practice points us towards implications for thinking about notions of the public and private in the contemporary city. Chris McConville also examines the limits of the urban via the relationship between what we might conventionally consider to be urban and that which is urbane. Using a reading of some of the classic private detective figures, McConville demonstrates that in the imaginative realm of popular fiction, a figure such as the detective type provides us with many of the images we use to construct representations of our own cityscapes. The link between imagined and real experiences through the medium of popular fiction also crosses over into class and gender constructions, just as the built environment feeds back into the detective fiction genre as one of its conventional parameters. Perhaps it is only inevitable that the politics of fear and the shaping of what Mike Davis calls defensible space characterises so much of urban living and scheming. Coming from an urban planning background, Simon Bennett theorises Brisbane urban planners' inculcation of safety principles and locates this practice in longstanding imaginative and discursive productions of the urban from a number of quarters. The desire to make safe, Bennett argues, banishes from the city the imaginative spur it might otherwise contain and depletes community networks. The city becomes merely a place to which we commute: unliveable but economically functional. Liveability is also at issue in John Scannell's contribution. In his tracing of the graffiti artist's tracing of the American city, Scannell reveals a reappropriation of urban space by those relegated to the urban squalor and left behind in the great American post-war suburban exodus. But, for the graffiti artist, like the underground dweller, urban decay becomes a site of potential and promise: the city as a liveable and intimately habitable space that the graffiti artist inscribes and practices as her own. Life underground, or below the radar of conventional analysis, also interests our next two contributions. Jason Wilson looks to the often overlooked space of the arcade, likening it to modernity's cinematic and spectator spaces. Finding in the game player another urban fringe dweller, Wilson tracks the liminal spatiality of arcades and its practitioners who, he shows, resist the pastoral longings and projections of the game player to a backstreet urban scene. From a more literal perspective, Marise Williams puts the ethics of de Certeau's down below wandersmänner to work to consider the potential offered for those city dwellers who chose to live, quite literally, underground. In her reading of Colum McCann's This Side of Brightness, Williams suggests that a world without slums might potentially amount to a flattened world without difference. But the difficulty resides in the way these spaces are demarcated and bound up in increasingly calcified class lines that the poststructuralist move towards down below and proclamation of the street--to use an explicitly urban metaphor--might be said to efface in imagining the choice to slum (something one does for kicks) as an option available to all. Aaron Darrell is not interested so much in down below as he is with underneath. As he documents the pivotal cultural and colonising role the museum had maintained in ordering urban space and policies of heritage and history, he questions whose history find its way into Sydney's Hyde Park Barracks Musuem. He then invites us to consider what happens when an unexpected, surfaced over history appears and is reclaimed within the discursive and framing apparatus of the institution. Writing the city as he traverses it, Felix Cheong discusses the imaginative spur the city has long provided poets. In a Poet's Sense of the City, Cheong writes about a city in which life in the city can be nothing but. Lacking the props and boundaries of country and suburban, Singapore as city-state fascinates Cheong's poetic insider, yet distanced, perspective. Using the poet's eye, Linda Neil's Sunflowers complicates postmodern pleasurable choices on offer for the mobile flaneuse in a fictive piece that sweeps our readers along its own Mrs. Dallowayesque promenade of Sydney, art, depression and sunflowers. The role of creativity in shaping the production of urban spaces is central to Nityanand Deckha's article on the Cool Britannia phenomenon. Deckha's analysis of BritSpaceTM demonstrates the ephemeral nature of such productions, yet also suggests that creativity lends to such productions their capacity for re-production. The disparate components of the creative quartercopy, print, art supply and film developing stores, hip cafes and restaurants, galleries, studios, loft conversions and street furniture--combine to form a recognizable and potentially iterative matrix, overlaid on existing spaces. The urban is thus a potentially limitless site for expression, even as the confines of the prevailing discourses attempt to limit its scale. City life has been heralded and promoted recently as the space of sex and freedom, despite the dominance of fear in constructions of the urban. Emma Felton takes this dilemma on board in a review of feminist urban theorists and frames her reading of the safe (but risqué) city locally and personally and wonders what delights the city holds for women in the past and for future generations. Felton's reflection on the changing face of the city for women is crucial especially when the city is still related to female sexuality, a metaphorical tendency Felton reveals in a collection of urban commentators and theorists. Links http://www.unhabitat.org/ Citation reference for this article MLA Style Johnson, Laurie and Kulperger, Shelley. "Editorial" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5.2 (2002). [your date of access] < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0205/editorial.php>. Chicago Style Johnson, Laurie and Kulperger, Shelley, "Editorial" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5, no. 2 (2002), < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0205/editorial.php> ([your date of access]). APA Style Johnson, Laurie and Kulperger, Shelley. (2002) Editorial. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5(2). < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0205/editorial.php> ([your date of access]).

Closer examination of contemporary art forms including music videos in addition to the Gothic’s literature legacy is essential, “as it is virtually impossible to ignore the relationship the Gothic holds to popular culture” (Piatti-Farnell ii). This article critically examines how Gothic themes and modes are used in the music videos of Lana Del Rey; particularly the “ways in which Gothic is dispersed through contemporary non-literary media” (Spooner and McEvoy 2). This work follows the argument laid down by Edwards and Monnet who describe Gothic’s assimilation into popular culture —Pop Gothic— as a powerful pop cultural force, not merely a subcultural or cult expression. By interpreting Del Rey’s work as a both a component of, and a contributor to, the Pop Gothic advance, themes of social climate, consumer culture, gender identity, sexuality and the male gaze can be interrogated. Indeed the potential for a collective crisis of these issues in early 21st Century western culture is exposed, “the façade of carnivalised surfaces is revealed to hide the chaos and entropy of existential emptiness.” (Yeo 17). Gothic modes have been approximated by Pop Gothic into the mainstream (Edwards and Monnet) as a driving force behind these contradictions and destabilisations. The Gothic has become ubiquitous within popular culture and continues to exert influence. This is easily reflected in the $392 million the first Twilight movie grossed at the box office (Edwards and Monnet). Examples are abundant in pop culture across music, film and television. Edwards and Monnet cite the movies Zombieland and Blade in the Pop Gothic march, along with TV shows including Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Being Human, True Blood as well as Lady Gaga’s Fame Monster music album. Edwards and Monnet observe that the Gothic aesthetics of the 1980s and 1990s, “melancholy and imagery associated with death, dying and the undead” (3), shifted from the corners of subculture to the mainstream of millennial popular culture. With this shift comes the rebelliousness and melancholy that characterises Gothic texts. This is evident when a pop star of Lana Del Rey’s popularity —her Summertime Sadness video alone has over 160 million views on youtube.com (YouTube)— narratively represents themes of death and suicide repeatedly in her videos. In two of Lana Del Rey’s music videos —Blue Jeans and Born to Die— either she or a representation of her persona dies. In a third video, Summertime Sadness, her companion takes her own life and Lana ultimately follows suit. Themes of death and loss are just the most obvious of Gothic elements present in Del Rey’s work. Del Rey’s songs and videos speak of the American dream, of aestheticised beauty, of being immaculately presented, well dressed and having hair “beauty queen style”, as in Summertime Sadness. She depicts an excess of hedonistic consumption and love that knows no bounds, not even death. Much of the delivery has resonance with the Gothic; performatively, visually and musically, and shows a subversion and fatalism that juxtaposes, contests and contradicts pop cultural tropes (Macfarlane). This contrary nature of the Gothic, as characterised by Botting, can provoke a sense of otherness; the uncanny, including “displays of uncontrolled passion, violent emotion or flights of fancy to portrayals of perversion or obsession” (Gothic 2). It is argued that these characteristics have been commodified into merchandisable and mainstream stylistic representations (Edwards and Monnet). Del Rey’s visual work uses this otherness and representation of repressed darkness as subversion or contestation to the bubble gum consumerist, fairy tale sexualisation of the Katy Perry brand of neo-liberal pop music that floods the mainstream (Macfarlane). Del Rey also harnesses the Gothic mode in her music, underscoring social anxieties through moments of sound which act as “a sonic imp, this music enters perception through the back door, and there it does its destabilising work” (van Elferen 137). As potential psychosocial sources of this otherness in the Gothic (Botting, Gothic), Jung argued that as a collective consciousness by repressing our darkest side, we can be dislocated from it. Further he argued that many modern ills —conflict, war, disenfranchisement, poverty— stem from culturally rationalised divisions of ‘good vs evil’ (Tacey). Providing a space for these dark sides to surface, Swirski comments that cultural product can act "as a social barometer and a cultural diagnostic tool. It identifies social trends and cultural patterns and weaves elaborate counterfactuals- literary fictions- that hang human faces on large-scale human abstractions such as society and culture" (1). Jung proposes the large-scale social abstraction; that to truly live with ourselves we need embrace the otherness inside us— to learn to live with it (Tacey). The Gothic may enable this living with, rather than living without. Jung asserts that we now rely so much on what we can touch, taste and own, that western culture has become a “creed without substance” (Tacey 32). In more concrete terms, Hoffie argues that popular media today tells stories: in terms of disaster and crisis: weather patterns: disastrous. Climate Change: disastrous. Global Financial Crisis: disastrous. Political situations: disastrous. Unemployment: disastrous. And so on. The high-pitched wail of this lament corrodes the peaks and troughs of potential emotional responsiveness; the vapours of benumbing apathy steam upwards like a bewitching spell. All stands still. Action, like in a bad dream, seems impossible. (14) This apathy in the face of crisis or disaster is well expressed in Del Rey’s work through the Gothic influenced lyrics and videos; she describes her partner as so good looking as to be “sick as cancer” in Blue Jeans and that her lover left her because he was “chasing paper”. Represented here is the social current that the need to acquire goods in late capitalism’s climate “of unrestrained consumerism” (Heine and Thakur 2) is her lover’s priority over companionship. Revealing more of the Gothic aesthetic is that her videos and songs represent this loss, they depict “disturbances of sanity and security” (Botting, Gothic 2) and thematically reflect the social climate of “disaster and crisis” (Hoffie 14). This sense of otherness through Gothic influences of the uncanny, death and melancholy have a significant impact on creative expression creating music videos that play like a kind of half remembered nightmare (Botting, Love Your Zombie; Macfarlane). In the black and white video for Blue Jeans the opening shot shows an image of Del Rey rippling and blurred, framed by circular waves of water as black as oil. The powerful Gothic aesthetic of the abyss is rendered here, “to convey the figurative meaning of a catastrophic situation seen as likely to occur whereby the individual will sink to immeasurable intellectual, ethical or moral depths” (Edwards and Monnet 9). This abyss is represented as Del Rey sings to her ghostly tattooed lover that she will love him until “the end of time” and climaxes in the suggestion that he drowns her. As in Edwards and Monnet‘s description of zombie films, Del Rey’s videos narratively “suggest that the postmodern condition is itself a form of madness that disseminates cultural trauma and erases historical memory” (8). This view is evident in contrasting Del Rey’s interview comment that she finds conversations about feminism boring (Cooper). Yet in her song delivery and lyrics she retains an ironic tone regards feminine power. This combination helps “produce a darkly funny and carnivalesque representation of sex and waste under late capitalism” (Edwards and Monnet 8). Further evidence of these ironies and distorted juxtapositions of loss and possession are evident in the song Radio. The video —a bricolage of retrospective fashion imagery— and lyrics hint at the persistent desire for goods in US western culture (Heine and Thakur). Simultaneously in her song Radio, she is corruptibly engorged by consumption and being consumed (Mulvey) as she sings that life is “sweet like cinnamon, a fucking dream on Ritalin”. The video itself represents distorted dreams hyper-real on Ritalin. Del Rey’s work speaks of an excess; the overflow of sensations, sexual excess, of buying, of having, of owning, and at the same time the absence; of loss or not knowing what to have (Botting, Love Your Zombie). Exemplified by the lyrics in What Makes Us Girls, “do I know what I want?” and again in Radio “American dreams came true somehow, I swore I’d chase until I was dead”. Increasingly it is evident that Del Rey sings “as a woman who does not know what she wants” (Vigier 5). She illustrates the “endemic narcissism” (Hoffie 15) of contemporary western culture. Del Rey therefore clearly delineates much of “the loneliness, emptiness, and alienation that results from rampant consumerism and materialism under advanced capitalism” (Edwards and Monnet 8). As a theme of this representation, Del Rey implies a sense of commodified female sexual energy through the male gaze (Mulvey), along with a sense of wasted youth and opportunity in the carnivalesque National Anthem. The video, shot as if on Super 8 film, tells the story of Del Rey’s ‘character’ married to a hedonistic style of president. It is reminiscent of the JFK story including authentic and detailed presentation of costume —especially Del Rey’s Jackie Onassis fashions— the couple posing in presidential gardens with handsome mixed-race children. Lavish lifestyles are depicted whilst the characters enjoy drinking, gambling and consumerist excess, Del Rey sings "It's a love story for the new age, For the six page, We're on a quick sick rampage, Wining and dining, Drinking and driving, Excessive buying, Overdose and dyin'". In National Anthem sexual excess is one of the strongest themes communicated. Repeatedly depicted are distinct close up shots of his hand on her thigh, and vice versa. Without being sexually explicit in itself, it is an overtly sexual reference, communicating something of sexual excess because of the sheer number of times it is highlighted in close-up shots. This links to the idea of the Gothic use of jouissance, a state of: excessive energies that burst in and beyond circuits of pleasure: intensities are read in relation to a form of subjectivity that finds itself briefly and paradoxically in moments of extreme loss. (Botting, Love Your Zombie 22) Del Rey represents these moments of loss —of herself, of her man, of her power, of her identity being subsumed by his— as intense pleasure, indicated in the video through sexual referencing. Botting argues that these excesses create anxieties; that in the pursuit of postmodern excess, of ownership, of consumption: the subject internalises the inconsistencies and contradictions of capitalism, manifesting pathologies not of privation but overabundance: stress, eating disorders, self-harming, and a range of anxieties. (Love Your Zombie 22) These anxieties are further expressed in National Anthem. Del Rey sings to her lover that he cannot keep his “pants on” and she must “hold you like a python”. The python in this tale simultaneously symbolises the exotic, erotic and dangerous entrapment by her male suitor. Edwards and Monnet argue for the Gothic monster, whose sign is further referenced as Del Rey swims with crocodiles in Blue Jeans. Here the male power, patriarchy and dominance is represented as monstrous. In the video she shares the pool with her beau yet we only see Del Rey swim and writhe with the crocodiles. Analogous of her murderous lover, this adds a powerful otherness to the scene and reinforces the symbols of threatening masculinity and impeding disaster. This expression of monstrousness creates a cathartic tension as it “puts the ‘pop’ in Pop Goth: its popularity is based on the frisson of selling simultaneous aversion from and attraction to self-destruction and cultural taboo” (Edwards and Monnet 9). In a further representation of anxieties Del Rey conforms to the sexual object persona in large part through her retro pin-up iconography —meticulous attention to costume, continuous posing and pouting— and song lyrics (Buszek). As in National Anthem her lyrics talk of devotion and male strength to protect and to “keep me safe in his bell tower”. Her videos, whilst they may show some of her strength, ultimately reside in patriarchal resolution (Mulvey). She is generally confounded by the male figures in her videos appearing to be very much alone and away from them: most notably in Blue Jeans, Born to Die and Video Games. In two cases it is suggested she is murdered by the male figures of her love. Her costume and appearance —iconic 1960’s swimsuits, pantsuits and big hairstyles in National Anthem— portray something of the retro pin-up. Buszek argues that at one time “young feminists may poke fun at the pin-up, but they do so in ways that betray affinities with, even affection for, the genre itself” (3). Del Rey simultaneously adheres to and confronts these normative gender roles, as is characteristic of the Gothic mode (Botting, Gothic). These very Gothic contradictions are also evident in Del Rey’s often ironic or mocking song delivery, undermining apparent heteronormative sexual and gender positioning. In National Anthem she sings, as if parodying women who might sincerely ask, “do you think he’ll buy me lots of diamonds?”. Her conformity is however, subverted. In Del Rey’s videos, clear evidence exists in her facial expressions where she consistently portrays Gothic elements of uncertainty, sorrow, grief and a pervading sense that she does not belong in this world (Botting, Gothic). Whilst depicted as a brooding and mourning widow —simultaneously playing the mistress luxuriating on a lion skin rug— in National Anthem Del Rey sings, “money is the anthem of success” without a smile or sense of any attachment to the lyrics. In the same song she sings “God you’re so handsome” without a trace of glee, pleasure or optimism. In the video for Blue Jeans she sings, “I will love you til the end of time” staring sorrowfully into the distance or directly at the camera. This confident yet ‘dead stare’ emphasises the overall juxtaposition of the largely positive lyrical expression, with the sorrowful facial expression and low sung notes. Del Rey signifies repeatedly that something is amiss; that the American dream is over and that even with apparent success within this sphere, there exists only emptiness and isolation (Botting, Love Your Zombie). Further contradictions exist as Lana Del Rey walks this blurred line —as is the Gothic mode— between heteronormative and ambiguous gender roles (Botting, Gothic; Edwards and Monnet). Lana Del Rey oscillates between positions of strength and independence —shown in her deadpan to-camera delivery— to that of weakness and subjugation. As she plays narrator, Del Rey symbolically reclaims some power as she retells the tragic story of Born to Die from her throne. Represented here Del Rey’s persona exerts a troubled malevolence, with two tigers calmly sat by her side: her benevolent pets, or symbols of contrived excess. She simultaneously presents the angelic —resplendent in sheer white dress and garland ‘crown’ headdress of the spurned bride in the story— and the stoic as she stares down the camera. Del Rey is powerful and in many senses threatening. At one point she draws a manicured thumbnail across her neck in a cut-throat gesture; a movement echoed later by her lover. Her character ultimately walks symbolically —and latently— to her death. She neither remedies her position as subservient, subordinate female nor revisits any kind of redemption for the excessive male dominance in her videos. The “excess is countered by greater excess” (Botting Love Your Zombie 27) and leads to otherness. In this reading of Del Rey’s work, there are representations that remain explicitly Pop Gothic, eliciting sensations of paranoia and fear, overloading her videos with these signs (Yeo). These signs elicit the otherness of the Gothic mode; expressed in visual symbols of violence, passion or obsession (Botting, Gothic). In our digital visual age, subjecting an eager viewer to this excess of signs creates the conditions for over-reading of a growing gender or consumerist paranoia, enabled by the Gothic, “paranoia stems from an excessive over-reading of signs and is a product of interpretation, misinterpretation and re-interpretation based on one’s knowledge or lack of it” (Yeo 22). Del Rey stimulates these sensations of paranoia partly through interlaying intertextual references. She does this thematically —Gothic melancholy— and pop culturally channelling Marilyn Monroe and other fashion iconography, as well as through explicit textual references, as in her most recent single Ultraviolence. In Ultraviolence, Del Rey sings “He hit me and it felt like a kiss”. Effortlessly and simultaneously she celebrates and lays bare her pain; however the intertextual reference to the violent controversy of the film A Clockwork Orange serves to aestheticise the domestic violence she describes. With Del Rey it may be that as meaning is sought amongst the texts as Macfarlane wrote about Lady Gaga, Del Rey’s “truth is ultimately irrelevant in the face of its interlayed performance” (130). Del Rey’s Gothic mode of ambiguity, of transgressed boundaries and unclear lines, shows “this ambience of perpetually deferred climax is no stranger to contemporary culture” (Hoffie 15) and may go some way to expressing something of the “lived experience of her audience” (Vigier 1). Hermes argues that in post-feminist pop culture, strong independent post-feminist women can be characterised by their ability to break traditional taboos, question or hold up for interrogation norms and traditions, but that ultimately narrative arches tend to restore the patriarchal norm. Edwards and Monnet assert that the Gothic in Pop Gothic cultural representation can become “post-race, post-sexuality, post-gender” (6). In places Del Ray exhibits this postmodernism but through the use of Gothic mode goes outside political debates and blurs clear lines of feminist discourse (Botting, Love Your Zombie). Whilst a duality in the texts exists; comments on consumerism, the emptiness of capitalist society and a suicidal expression of hopelessness, are undermined as she demonstrates conformity to subservient gender roles and her ambiguously ironic need to be “young and beautiful”. To be consumed by her man thus defines her value as an object within a consumerist neo-liberal trope (Jameson). This analysis goes some way to confirming Hermes’ assertion that in this post-feminist climate there has been a “loss of a political agenda, or the foundation for a new one, where it signposts the overcoming of unproductive old distinctions between feminist and feminine” (79). Hermes further argues, with reference to television shows Ally McBeal and Sex and the City, that presentation of female characters or personas has moved forward; the man is no longer the lone guarantor of a woman’s happiness. Yet many of the tropes in Del Rey’s work are familiar; overwhelming love for her companion equal only to the emphasis on physical appearance. Del Rey breaks taboos —she is powerful, sexual and a romantic predator, without being a demon seductress— and satirises consumerist excess and gender inequality; yet she remains sexually and politically subservient to the whim and sometimes violently expressed or implied male gaze (Mulvey). Del Rey may well represent something of Vigier’s assertion that whilst society has clear direction for the ‘success’ of women, “that real liberation and genuine satisfaction elude them” (1). In closing, there is no clear answer as to whether Del Rey is a Beauty Queen or Gothic Princess; she is neither and she is both. In Vigier’s words, “self-exploitation or self-destruction cannot be the only choices open to young women today” (13). Del Rey’s work is provocative on multiple levels. It hints at the pull of rampant consumerism and the immediacy of narcissistic desires, interlinked with contradictions which indicate the potential for social crises. This is shown in Del Rey’s use of the Gothic — otherness, the monstrous, darkness and death— and its juxtaposition with heteronormative gender representations which highlights the persistent commodification of the female body, its subjugation to male power and the potential for deep anxieties in 21st-century identity. References Blue Jeans. Dir. Yoann Lemoine. Perf. Lana Del Rey. Interscope Records, 2012. Botting, Fred. Gothic. New York: Routledge, 2014. Botting, Fred. "Love Your Zombie." The Gothic in Contemporary Literature and Popular Culture. Ed. Edwards, Justin and Agnieszka Monnet. New York: Routledge, 2012. 19-36. Buszek, Maria. Pin-Up Grrrls Feminism, Sexuality and Popular Culture. London: Duke University Press, 2006. Cooper, Duncan. "Lana Del Rey Cover Interview." Fader, June 2014. Edwards, Justin, and Agnieszka Monnet. "Introduction." The Gothic in Contemporary Literature and Popular Culture. Eds. Justin Edwards and A. Monnet. New York: Routledge, 2012. 1-18. Heine, Jorge, and Ramesh Thakur. The Dark Side of Globalisation. New York: UN UP, 2011. Hermes, Joke. "The Tragic Success of Feminism." Feminism in Popular Culture. Eds. Joanne Hollows and Rachel Moseley. New York: Berg, 2006. 79-95. Hoffie, Pat. "Deadly Ennui." Artlink Magazine 32.4 (2012): 15-16. Jameson, Fredric. "Globalisation and Political Strategy." New Left Review 2.4 (2000): 49-68. Lana Del Rey. "Radio." Born To Die. Interscope Records, 2012. "Lana Del Rey - Summertime Sadness" YouTube, n.d. 12 June 2014 ‹http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nVjsGKrE6E8›. Lana Del Rey. "This Is What Makes Us Girls." Born To Die. Interscope Records, 2012. Macfarlane, K. "The Monstrous House of Gaga." The Gothic in Contemporary Literature and Popular Culture. Ed. Justin Edwards and A. Monnet. New York: Routledge, 2012. 114-134. Mestrovic, Stjepan. Postemotional Society. London: Sage, 1997. Mulvey, Laura. Visual and other Pleasures. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. National Anthem. Dir. Anthony Mandler. Perf. Lana Del Rey. Interscope Records, 2012. Paglia, Camille. Lady Gaga and the Death of Sex. 12 Sep. 2010. 2 June 2014 ‹http://www.thesundaytimes.co.uk/sto/public/magazine/article389697.ece›. Piatti-Farnell, Lorna. "Introduction: a Place for Contemporary Gothic." Aeternum: the Journal of Contemporary Gothic Studies 1.1 (2014): i-iv. Spooner, Catherine, and Emma McEvoy. The Routledge Companion to Gothic. New York: Routledge, 2007. Summertime Sadness. Dir. Chris Sweeney. Perf. Lana Del Rey. Interscope Records, 2013. Swirski, Peter. American Utopia and Social Engineering in Literature, Social Thought, and Political History. New York: Routledge, 2011. Tacey, David. The Jung Reader. New York: Routledge, 2012. Van Elferen, Isabella. "Spectural Liturgy, Transgression, Ritual and Music in Gothic." The Gothic in Contemporary Literature and Popular Culture. Eds. Justin Edwards and A. Monnet. New York: Routledge, 2012. 135-147. Vigier, Catherine. "The Meaning of Lana Del Rey." Zeteo: The Journal of Interdisciplinary Writing Fall (2012): 1-16. Yeo, David. "Gothic Paranoia in David Fincher's Seven, The Game and Fight Club." Aeternum: The Journal Of Contemporary Gothic Studies 1.1 (2014): 16-25. Young and Beautiful. Dir. Chris Sweeney. Perf. Lana Del Rey. Interscope Records, 2013.

In January of this year, artist Christian Marclay’s 24-hour video installation The Clock came to Melbourne. As Ben Lerner explains in 10:04, the autofictional novel Lerner published in 2014, The Clock by Christian Marclay “is a clock: it is a twenty-four hour montage of thousands of scenes from movies and a few from TV edited together so as to be shown in real time; each scene indicates the time with a shot of a timepiece or its mention in dialogue, time in and outside of the film is synchronized” (52). I went to see The Clock at ACMI several times, with friends and alone, in the early morning and late at night. Each time I sank back into the comfortable chairs and settled into the communal experience of watching time pass on a screen in a dark room. I found myself sucked into the enforced narrative of time, the way in which the viewer – in this case myself, and those sharing the experience with me – sought to impose a sort of meaning on the arguably meaningless passing of the hours. In this essay, I will explore how we can expand our thinking of the idea of autofiction, as a genre, to include contemporary forms of digital media such as social media or activity trackers, as the authors of these new forms of digital media act as author-characters by playing with the divide between fact and fiction, and requiring their readers to ascertain meaning by interpreting the clues layered within. I will analyse the ways in which the meaning of autofictional texts—such as Lerner’s 10:04, but also including social media feeds, blogs and activity trackers—shifts depending on their audience. I consider that as technology develops, we increasingly use data to contextualise ourselves within a broader narrative – health data, media, journalistic data. As the sociologist John B. Thompson writes, “The development of the media not only enriches and transforms the process of self-formation, it also produces a new kind of intimacy which did not exist before … individuals can create and establish a form of intimacy which is essentially non-reciprocal” (208). New media and technologies have emerged to assist in this process of self-formation through the collection and publication of data. This essay is interested in analysing this process of self-formation, and its relationship to the genre of autofiction.Contemporary Digital Media as AutofictionWhile humans have always recorded themselves throughout history, with the rise of new technologies the instinct to record the self is increasingly becoming an automatic one; an instinct we can tie to what media theorist Nick Couldry terms as “presencing”: an “emerging requirement in everyday life to have a public presence beyond one’s bodily presence, to construct an objectification of oneself” (50). We are required to participate in ‘presencing’ by opting-in to new media; it is now uncommon – even unfavourable – for someone not to engage in any forms of social media or self-monitoring. We are now encouraged to participate in ‘presencing’ through the recording and online publication of data that would have once been considered private, such as employment histories and activity histories. Every Instagram photo, Snapchat or TikTok video contributes to an accumulating digital presence, an emerging narrative of the self. Couldry notes that presencing “is not the same as calling up a few friends to tell them some news; nor, although the audience is unspecific, is it like putting up something on a noticeboard. That is because presencing is oriented to a permanent site in public space that is distinctively marked by the producer for displaying that producer’s self” (50).In this way, we can see that in effect we are all becoming increasingly positioned to become autofiction authors. As an experimental form of literature, autofiction has been around for a long time, the term having first been introduced in the 1970s, and with Serge Doubrovsky widely credited with having introduced the genre with the publication of his 1977 novel Fils (Browning 49). In the most basic terms, autofiction is simply a work of fiction featuring a protagonist who can be interpreted as a stand-in for its author. And while autofiction is also confused with or used interchangeably with other genres such as metafiction or memoir, the difference between autofiction and other genres, writes Arnaud Schmitt, is that autoficton “relies on fiction—runs on fiction, to be exact” (141). Usually the reader can pick up on the fact that a novel is an autofictional one by noting that the protagonist and the author share a name, or key autobiographical details, but it is debatable as to whether the reader in fact needs to know that the work is autofictional in the first place in order to properly engage with it as a literary text.The same ideas can be applied to the application of digital media today. Kylie Cardell notes that “personal autobiographical but specifically diaristic (confessional, serial, quotidian) disclosure is increasingly positioned as a symptomatic feature of online life” (507). This ties in with Couldry’s idea of ‘presencing’; confession is increasingly a requirement when it comes to participation in digital media. As technology advances, the ways in which we can present and record the self evolve, and the narrative we can produce of the self expands alongside our understanding of the relationship between fact and fiction. Though of course we have always fabricated different narratives of the self, whether it be through diary entries or letter-writing, ‘presencing’ occurs when we literally present these edited versions of ourselves to an online audience. Lines become blurred between fiction and non-fiction, and the ability to distinguish between ‘fake’ and ‘real’ becomes almost impossible.Increasingly, such a distinction fails to seem important, and in some cases, this blurred line becomes the point, or a punchline; we can see this most clearly in TikTok videos, wherein people (specifically, or at least most typically, young people—Generation Z) play with ideas of truth and unreality ironically. When a teenager posts a video of themselves on TikTok dancing in their school cafeteria with the caption, “I got suspended for this, don’t let this flop”, the savvy viewer understands without it needing to be said that the student was not actually suspended – and also understands that even less outlandish or unbelievable digital content is unreliable by nature, and simply the narrative the author or producer wishes to convey; just like the savvy reader of an autofiction novel understands, without it actually being said, that the novel is in part autobiographical, even when the author and protagonist do not share a name or other easily identifiable markers.This is the nature of autofiction; it signals to the reader its status as a work of autofiction by littering intertextual clues throughout. Readers familiar with the author’s biography or body of work will pick up on these clues, creating a sense of uneasiness in the reader as they work to discern what is fact and what is not.Indeed, in 10:04, Lerner flags the text as a work of autofiction by sketching a fictional-not-fictional image of himself as an author of a story, ‘The Golden Vanity’ published in The New Yorker, that earned him a book deal—a story the ‘real’ Ben Lerner did in fact publish, two years before the publication of 10:04: “a few months before, the agent had e-mailed me that she believed I could get a “strong six-figure” advance based on a story of mine that had appeared in The New Yorker” (Lerner 4).In a review of 10:04 for the Sydney Review of Books, Stephanie Bishop writes:we learn that he did indeed write a proposal, that there was a competitive auction … What had just happened? Where are we in time? Was the celebratory meal fictional or real? Can we (and should we) seek to distinguish these categories?Here Lerner is ‘presencing’, crafting a multilayered version of himself across media by assuming that the reader of his work is also a reader of The New Yorker (an easy assumption to make given that his work often appears in, and is reviewed in, The New Yorker). Of course, this leads to the question: what becomes of autofiction when it is consumed by someone who is unable to pick up on the many metareferences layered within its narrative? In this case, the work itself becomes a joke that doesn’t land – much like a social media feed being consumed by someone who is not its intended audience.The savvy media consumer also understands that even the most meaningless or obtuse of media is all part of the overarching narrative. Lerner highlights the way we try and impose meaning onto (arguably) meaningless media when he describes his experience of watching time pass in Marclay’s The Clock:Big Ben, which I would come to learn appears frequently in the video, exploded, and people in the audience applauded… But then, a minute later, a young girl awakes from a nightmare and, as she’s comforted by her father (Clark Gable as Rhett Butler), you see Big Ben ticking away again outside their window, no sign of damage. The entire preceding twenty-four hours might have been the child’s dream, a storm that never happened, just one of many ways The Clock can be integrated into an overarching narrative. Indeed it was a greater challenge for me to resist the will to integration. (Lerner 52-53)This desire to impose an overarching narrative that Lerner speaks of – and which I also experienced when watching The Clock, as detailed in the introduction to this essay – is what the recording of the self both aims to achieve and achieves by default; it is the point and also the by-product. The Self as DataThe week my grandmother died, in 2017, my father bought me an Apple Watch. I had recently started running and—perhaps as an outlet for my grief—was looking to take my running further. I wanted a smart watch to help me record my runs; to turn the act of running into data that I could quantify and thus understand. This, in turn, would help me understand something about myself. Deborah Lupton explains my impulse here when she writes, “the body/self is portrayed as a conglomerate of quantifiable data that can be revealed using digital devices” (65). I wanted to reveal my ‘self’ by recording it, similar to the way the data accumulated in a diary, when reflected upon, helps a diarist understand their life more broadly. "Is a Fitbit a diary?”, asks Kylie Cardell. “The diary in the twenty-first century is already vastly different from many of its formal historical counterparts, yet there are discursive resonances. The Fitbit is a diary if we think of diary as a chronological record of data, which it can be” (348). The diary, as with the Apple Watch or Fitbit, is simply just a record of the self moving through time.Thus I submitted myself to the task of turning as much of myself into digital data as was possible to do so. Every walk, swim, meditation, burst of productivity, lapse in productivity, and beat of my heart became quantified, as Cardell might say, diarised. There is a very simple sort of pleasure in watching the red, green and blue rings spin round as you stand more, move more, run more. There is something soothing in knowing that at any given moment in time, you can press a button and see exactly what your heart is doing; even more soothing is knowing that at any given time, you can open up an app and see what your heart has been doing today, yesterday, this month, this year. It made sense to me that this data was being collected via my timepiece; it was simply the accumulation of my ‘self,’ as viewed through the lens of time.The Apple Watch was just the latest in a series of ways I have tasked technology with the act of quantifying myself; with my iPhone I track my periods with the Clue app. I measure my mental health with apps such as Shine, and my daily habits with Habitica. I have tried journaling apps such as Reflectly and Day One. While I have never actively tracked my food intake, or weight, or sex life, I know if I wanted to I could do this, too. And long before the Apple Watch, and long before my iPhone, too, I measured myself. In the late 2000s, I kept an online blog. Rebecca Blood notes that the development of blogging technology allowed blogging to become about “whatever came to mind. Walking to work. Last night’s party. Lunch” (54). Browning expands on this, noting that bloggingemerged as a mode of publication in the late ’90s, expressly smudging the boundaries of public and private. A diaristic mode, the blog nonetheless addresses (a) potential reader(s), often with great intimacy — and in its transition to print, as a boundary-shifting form with ill-defined goals regarding its readership. (49)(It is worth noting here that while of course many different forms of blogging exist and have always existed, this essay is only concerned with the diaristic blog that Blood and Browning speak of – arguably the most popular, and at least the most well known, form of blog.)My blog was also ostensibly about my own life, but really it was a work of autofiction, in the same way that my Apple Watch data, when shared, became a work of autofiction – which is to say that I became the central character, the author-character, whose narrative I was shaping with each post, using time as the setting. Jenny Davis writes:if self-quantifiers are seeking self-knowledge through numbers, then narratives and subjective interpretations are the mechanisms by which data morphs into selves. Self-quantifiers don’t just use data to learn about themselves, but rather, use data to construct the stories that they tell themselves about themselves.Over time, I became addicted to the blogging platform’s inbuilt metrics. I would watch with interest as certain posts performed better than others, and eventually the inevitable happened: I began – mostly unconsciously – to try and mould the content of my blogs to achieve certain outcomes – similar to the way that now, in 2019, it is hard to say whether I use an app to assist myself to meditate/journal/learn/etc, or whether I meditate/journal/learn/etc in order to record myself having done so.David Sedaris notes how the collection of data subconsciously, automatically leads to its manipulation in his essay collection, Calypso:for reasons I cannot determine my Fitbit died. I was devastated when I tapped the broadest part of it and the little dots failed to appear. Then I felt a great sense of freedom. It seemed that my life was now my own again. But was it? Walking twenty-five miles, or even running up the stairs and back, suddenly seemed pointless, since, without the steps being counted and registered, what use were they? (Sedaris, 49)In this way, the data we collect on and produce about ourselves, be it fitness metrics, blog posts, Instagram stories or works of literature or art, allows us to control and shape our own narrative, and so we do, creating what Kylie Cardell describes as “an autobiographical representation of self that is coherent and linear, “excavated” from a mass of personal data” (502).Of course, as foregrounded earlier, it is important to highlight the way ideas of privacy and audience shift in accordance with the type of media being consumed or created. Within different media, different author-characters emerge, and the author is required to participate in ‘presencing’ in different ways. For instance, data that exists only for the user does not require the user, or author, to participate in the act of ‘presencing’ at all – an example of this might be the Clue app, which records menstruation history. This information is only of interest to myself, and is not published or shared anywhere, with anyone. However even data intended for a limited audience still requires participation in ‘presencing’. While I only ‘share’ my Apple Watch’s activity with a few people, even just the act of sharing this activity influences the activity itself, creating an affect in which the fact of the content’s consumption shapes the creation of the content itself. Through consumption of Apple Watch data alone, a narrative can be built in which I am lazy, or dedicated, an early riser or a late sleeper, the kind of person who prefers setting their own goals, or the kind of person who enjoys group activities – and knowing that this narrative is being built requires me to act, consciously, in the experience of building it, which leads to the creation of something unreal or fictional interspersed with factual data. (All of which is to admit that sometimes I go on a run not because I want to go on a run, but because I want to be the sort of person who has gone on a run, and be seen as such: in this way I am ‘presencing’.)Similarly, the ephemeral versus permanent nature of data shared through media like Snapchat or Instagram dictates its status as a work of autofiction. When a piece of data – for instance, a photograph on Instagram – is published permanently, it contributes to an evolving autofictional narrative. The ‘Instagrammed’ self is both real and unreal, both fictional and non-fictional. The consumer of this data can explore an author’s social media feed dating back years and consume this data in exactly the way the author intends. However, the ‘stories’ function on Instagram, for instance, allows the consumption of this data to change again. Content is published for a limited amount of time—usually 24 hours—then disappears, and is able to be shared with either the author’s entire group of followers, or a select audience, allowing an author more creative freedom to choose how their data is consumed.Anxiety and AutofictionWhy do I feel the need to record all this data about myself? Obviously, this information is, to an extent, useful. If you are a person who menstruates, knowing exactly when your last period was, how long it lasted and how heavy it was is useful information to have, medically and logistically. If you run regularly, tracking your runs can be helpful in improving your time or routine. Similarly, recording the self in this way can be useful in keeping track of your moods, your habits, and your relationships.Of course, as previously noted, humans have always recorded ourselves. Cardell notes that “although the forms, conditions, and technology for diary keeping have changed, a motivation for recording, documenting, and accounting for the experience of the self over time has endured” (349). Still, it is hard to ignore the fact that ultimately, we seem to be entering some sort of age of digital information hoarding, and harder still to ignore the sneaking suspicion that this all seems to speak to a growing anxiety – and specifically, an anxiety of the self.Gayle Greene writes that “all writers are concerned with memory, since all writing is a remembrance of things past; all writers draw on the past, mine it as a quarry. Memory is especially important to anyone who cares about change, for forgetting dooms us to repetition” (291). If all writers are concerned with memory, as Greene posits, then perhaps we can draw the conclusion that autofiction writers are concerned with an anxiety of forgetting, or of being forgotten. We are self-conscious as authors of autofictional media; concerned with how our work is and will continue to be perceived – and whether it is perceived at all. Marjorie Worthington believes that that the rise in self-conscious fiction has resulted in an anxiety of obsolescence; that this anxiety in autofiction occurs “when a cultural trope (such as 'the author' is deemed to be in danger of becoming obsolete (or 'dying')” (27). However, it is worth considering the opposite – that an anxiety of obsolescence has resulted in a rise of self-conscious fiction, or autofiction.This fear of obsolescence is pervasive in new digital media – Instagram stories and Snapchats, which once disappeared forever into a digital void, are now able to be saved and stored. The fifteen minutes of fame has morphed into fifteen seconds: in this way, time works both for and against the anxious author of digital autofiction. Technologies evolve quicker than we can keep up, with popular platforms becoming obsolete at a rapid pace. This results in what Kylie Cardell sees as an “anxiety around the traces of lives accumulating online and the consequences of 'accidental autobiography,' as well as the desire to have a 'tidy,' representable, and 'storied' life” (503).This same desire can be seen at the root of autofiction. The media theorist José van Dijck notes thatwith the advent of photography, and later film and television, writing tacitly transformed into an interior means of consciousness and remembrance, whereupon electronic forms of media received the artificiality label…writing gained status as a more authentic container of past recollection. (15)Autofiction, however, disrupts this tacit transformation. It is a co-mingling of a desire to record the self, as well as a desire to control one’s own narrative. The drive to represent oneself in a specific way, with consideration to one’s audience and self-brand, has become the root of social media, but is so pervasive now that it is often an unexamined, subconscious one. In autofiction, this drive is not subconscious, it is self-conscious.ConclusionAs technology has developed, new ways to record, present and evaluate the self have emerged. While an impulse to self-monitor has always existed within society, with the rise of ‘presencing’ through social media this impulse has been made public. In this way, we can see presencing, or the public practice of self-performing through media, as an inherently autofictional practice. We can understand that the act of presencing stems from a place of anxiety and self-consciousness, and understand that is in fact impossible to create autofiction without self-consciousness. As we begin to understand that all digital media is becoming inherently autofictional in nature, we’re increasingly required to force to draw our own conclusions about the media we consume—just like the author-character of 10:04 is forced to draw his own conclusions about the passing of time, as represented by Big Ben, when interacting with Marclay’s The Clock. By analysing and comparing the ways in which the emerging digital landscape and autofiction both share a common goal of recording and preserving an interpretation of the ‘self’, we can then understand a deeper understanding of the purpose that autofiction serves. ReferencesBishop, Stephanie. “The Same but Different: 10:04 by Ben Lerner.” Sydney Review of Books 6 Feb. 2015. <https://sydneyreviewofbooks.com/10-04-ben-lerner/>.Blood, Rebecca. "How Blogging Software Reshapes the Online Community." Communications of the ACM 47.12 (2004): 53-55.Browning, Barbara. "The Performative Novel." TDR: The Drama Review 62.2 (2018): 43-58. Davis, Jenny. “The Qualified Self.” Cyborgology 13 Mar. 2013. <http://thesocietypages.org/cyborgology/2013/03/13/the-qualified-self/>.Cardell, Kylie. “The Future of Autobiography Studies: The Diary.” a/b: Auto/Biography Studies 32.2 (2017): 347-350.Cardell, Kylie. “Modern Memory-Making: Marie Kondo, Online Journaling, and the Excavation, Curation, and Control of Personal Digital Data.” a/b: Auto/Biography Studies 32.3 (2017): 499-517.Couldry, Nick. Media, Society, World: Social Theory and Digital Media Practice. Great Britain: Polity Press, 2012.Greene, Gayle. “Feminist Fiction and the Uses of Memory.” Signs 16.2 (1991): 290-321.Lerner, Ben. 10:04. London: Faber and Faber, 2014.Lerner, Ben. “The Golden Vanity.” The New Yorker 11 June 2012. <https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/06/18/the-golden-vanity>.Lupton, Deborah. “You Are Your Data: Self-Tracking Practices and Concepts of Data.” Lifelogging. Ed. Stefan Selke. Wiesbaden: Springer, 2016. 61-79.Schmitt, Arnaud. “David Shields's Lyrical Essay: The Dream of a Genre-Free Memoir, or beyond the Paradox.” a/b: Auto/Biography Studies 31.1 (2016): 133-146.Sedaris, David. Calypso. United States: Little Brown, 2018.Thompson, John B. The Media and Modernity: A Social Theory of the Media. California: Stanford University Press, 1995.Van Dijck, José. Mediated Memories in the Digital Age. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2007.Worthington, Marjorie. The Story of "Me": Contemporary American Autofiction. Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 2018.