Journal articles on the topic 'Falu red paint'

The effect of various mulch colors (black, yellow, red, blue, white, and aluminum) on growth and development of `Vates' collards was evaluated in Fall 1996 at the E.V. Smith Research Center in Shorter, Ala. Black polyethylene mulch was installed onto raised, fumigated beds, then sprayed with a 1: 2 (v/v) mixture of exterior oil-based enamel paint to paint thinner with one of the five mulch colors listed. Five-week-old plants were transplanted into beds. Beginning two weeks after transplanting and continuing every other week thereafter, heads were harvested to determine head fresh weight and dry weight. Hourly soil temperatures at 10 cm soil depth were recorded and growing degree days (GDDs) with a base temperature of 4.4 °C were calculated. At two weeks after transplanting, average head fresh and dry weight were highest for the aluminum-colored treatment with head fresh (24.7 and 12.3 g, respectively) and dry weights (2.7 and 1.3 g, respectively) twice that of the yellow treatment (P ≤ 0.05). By four weeks after transplanting and up through the final harvest, marketable yield and average head fresh weights did not differ among the treatments (17,900 kg/ha, 1.4 kg per head, respectively). The red and black mulch treatments accumulated more GDDs than the other treatments, but total marketable yields did not differ among any treatments.

Abstract BACKGROUND: Mature circulating red blood cells, though devoid of a nucleus, have been shown to contain an abundance of miRNAs. Further, it has been shown that sickle cell patient-derived RBCs have a dramatic difference in miRNA content than normal RBCs. Given that a range of miRNAs are involved in the regulation of immunity, including the release of inflammatory mediators, we hypothesize that miRNAs enriched in circulating red blood cells function to prolong the inflammatory state in sickle cell disease. Further, we hypothesize that these miRNAs can be used as biomarkers for use in the clinic to predict crisis and differentiate acute versus chronic pain. Exploring this miRNA enrichment in circulating red blood cells in sickle cell patients will provide practical insight for the inflammation state and will inform characteristics of patients who may need greater care in the clinic. METHODS: Twenty steady state patients were recruited and categorized according to their chronic pain status and crisis frequency per year. Whole blood was drawn during routine visits to the OSU Wexner Medical Center Hematology Clinic. Additionally, whole blood was drawn from five patients either in acute pain crisis (recruited prior to crisis) or within a few days of crisis. Samples were subject to double gradient centrifugation and red cells were resuspended in Trizol and cryopreserved. MiRNAs were isolated from red cell Trizol suspensions using a commercial isolation kit (QIAGEN Cat#217004). Isolated miRNAs were then subject to a NanoString Human miR (v3) expression assay. Differential expression analysis was conducted to compare miRNAs with at least 1.5 fold difference (p = 0.05) between steady state and acute crisis. Target prediction and GO ontology analysis was performed for statistically significant miRNAs using DIANA Tools mirPath v3. Follow-up qPCRs were performed using TaqMan Advanced miRNA cDNA Synthesis Kit (Cat#A28007) and TaqMan Advanced miRNA Assays (Cat#A25576) to validate the decreased expression of miRNAs. Additional qPCRs were performed using TaqMan Gene Expression Assays (Cat#4331182) to investigate mRNA regulatory effects of significant miRNAs in the total red cell population. Western blots were also performed to investigate regulatory effects of these miRNAs at the protein level. RESULTS & CONCLUSION: Comparison of RBC miRNA profiles from patients during acute crisis to those in steady state shows several significantly decreased (>1.5 fold) miRNAs in crisis. Among these miRs we have found previously uncharacterized miRNAs, hsa-miR-2116-5p and hsa-miR-302d-3p. DIANA tools miRNA analysis software predicts these miRNAs to be involved in regulation of cell-to-cell adhesion pathways through gene transcripts such as Protocadherin Beta 6 (PCDHB6) and Neural Cell Adhesion Molecule 2 (NCAM2). Interestingly, inspection of miRNA predicted targets that fall under significant GO terms also predicts several individual miRNAs to regulate inflammatory response and nociceptive signaling gene transcripts like A20 (TNFAIP3) and Cathepsin S (CTSS). Validation of these miRNAs was performed via qPCR for 5 out of the 6 significantly decreased miRNAs. Of the 5 miRNAs tested, hsa-miR-2116-5p, hsa-miR-302d-3p, and hsa-miR-1246 were validated as having decreased expression in acute crisis patients compared to steady state. qPCRs were then performed to probe for miRNA based regulation of top predicted target mRNA transcripts. Both CTSS and TNFAIP3 showed increased expression of mRNA transcripts in acute crisis patient red cells as compared to steady state. Next, western blot analysis was performed on red cell protein lysate. Interestingly, this analysis revealed a pattern in activated CTSS expression that was independent of acute crisis. Steady state patients reporting chronic pain showed increased activated CTSS compared to those without chronic pain. Activated CTSS was not found in red cell lysates from three normal, non-SCD donors. Taken together, these results suggest that red blood cells may play a larger role in inflammation and pain responses in sickle cell disease than previously thought. Further these results suggest activated CTSS as a potential biomarker for differentiating chronic pain in patients. Follow-up studies are underway to further stratify and investigate these findings. Disclosures Desai: University of Pittsburgh: Research Funding; Ironwood: Other: Adjudication Committee; NIH: Research Funding; FDA: Research Funding; Selexy/Novartis: Research Funding; Pfizer: Research Funding.

Abstract Red Blood Cell Adhesion in Adult Patients with Sickle Cell Disease, at Baseline and with Pain, Measured on SCD Biochip Microfluidic Assay Alexandra Boye-Doe1, Erina Quinn1, Charlotte Yuan1, Umut A. Gurkan, PhD1, and Jane A. Little, MD2 1Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, OH; 2Division of Hematology/Oncology, Case Western Reserve University/ University Hospitals Seidman Cancer Center, Cleveland, OH Background: Despite being monogenic, sickle cell disease (SCD) has a variable phenotype, in which clinical complications and manifestations evolve as patients age. In children, pain generally resolves between crises, whereas adults may experience acute, chronic, or acute-on-chronic pain. We have taken a multifaceted approach to characterize adhesion and inflammation during self-identified pain episodes in adults with SCD in order to better understand pain syndromes in adults and the potential for more specifically targeted therapies. In this pilot study, we assessed changes in red blood cell (RBC) adhesion to the subendothelial protein laminin (LN) during crisis in adults with SCD self-reporting for pain crisis on whom we had baseline adhesion data from a routine clinic visit. Methods: Surplus blood from patients' routine bloodwork was used. Crisis samples were collected from patients at the Acute Care Clinic or Emergency Department at University Hospitals Cleveland Medical Center (UHCMC) when patients presented for management of pain. Baseline samples were collected during routine visits to the Sickle Cell Clinic. This study was approved by the IRB at UHCMC. Within a 24-hour period, RBC adhesion to LN was quantitated by microscopy after passage of unprocessed whole blood through a LN-coated microfluidic adhesion assay, the SCD biochip [1]. Samples were analyzed for hemoglobin (Hb) phenotype by high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) in the clinical lab. Correlative clinical data, including, baseline lab values, and medical history, were obtained from the patients' medical records and used to characterize our results. Data from people with multiple samples were used as median values. Results: Blood samples from 19 unselected patients with sickle cell hemoglobin SS (HbSS) were obtained at crisis, and compared with baseline samples obtained from 2014 to 2018 (n = 67 samples). 2 groups were identified: Group 1 with increased adhesion (>25% rise from baseline, n= 10) during crisis, and Group 2 with decreased adhesion (>25% fall from baseline, n=8) or no change (<25% change) (n=1) during crisis (Fig. 1). Time between a patient's initial crisis event and when they presented for pain management varied, possibly affecting observed adhesion. Nonetheless, patients showing an increased adhesion in crisis also showed a decrease in Hb (p = 0.039) between their baseline analyses and the crisis visit. A decrease in Hb may associate with increased adhesion, if the latter contributes to crisis-related hemolysis. However, other markers of hemolysis did not change. By contrast, patients with decreasing RBC adhesion showed a decrease in absolute reticulocyte count (ARC, p = 0.019) at their crisis visit. Statistical analysis of HbS, HbA, and HbF levels n = 64 showed no significant change between baseline or crises. Discussion: A decrease in adhesion during crisis may reflect the presence of sickled RBCs that adhere preferentially to other basement membrane proteins such as fibronectin or thrombospondin. In addition, inflammatory white blood cell adhesion, possibly central to vaso-occlusion, is not evaluated in this study. We are currently examining cytokine and monocyte profiles from people with SCD presenting for management of pain, so that we may better understand inflammatory mediators of pain. Our data are the first to try to understand RBC adhesion in people with SCD who present for management of pain, whether this as an isolated or common event for that person. We found that unselected adults with SCD who presented for management of pain had heterogeneous changes in RBC adhesion, which may reflect differences in underlying mechanism. The pathophysiologic heterogeneity of pain in adults with SCD will be important to understand as anti-adhesion therapies are being developed and adopted clinically. Disclosures Little: Doris Duke Charitable Foundations: Research Funding; NHLBI: Research Funding; Hemex: Patents & Royalties: Patent, no honoraria; PCORI: Research Funding.

Abstract Nursing Home (NH) nurses care for over 1.6 million older residents each year. Among this vulnerable population, an estimated 50 percent of older residents fall each year. Although licensed nurses caring for NH residents who fall intervene to prevent fall recurrence, we know little about nurse’s perceptions of the most effective interventions for various types of falls they manage. The purpose of this qualitative study is to describe and compare licensed nurse’s perceptions of fall prevention interventions believed to be due to acute underlying causes of a fall versus those believed to be due to chronic underlying conditions. This study is a secondary analysis of existing qualitative data from a multi-site parent study conducted in three NH sites in the northeastern U.S. designed to test nurse’s knowledge of falls prevention and interventions. Forty seven registered or licensed practical nurses, English speaking who were full or part time employees were recruited to participate. Most were female (n=46; 98.7%) with a median age of 49.5 years and ten years’ experience. Using Colazzi’s (1978) method, 47 responses of nurse’s were read from typed transcripts and analyzed independently by 2 judges. Significant statement were extracted to derive meanings and form themes. For falls related to acute causes, nurses most often stated they would collaborate with the physician, propose a blood pressure intervention and promote safety. For falls due to chronic causes, nurses promoted ambulation safety, pain interventions and collaborated with specialists. Since nurses intervened differently, identifying fall type is critical in selecting appropriate interventions.

Introduction: The aging process causes a decrease in physical abilities which can cause fall events. Fall events are influenced by fear of falling. Some risk factors of fear of falling were age, gender, balance while walking, use of a walker, depression and a history of previous falls. This study aim was to identify risk factors related to fear of falling among the elderly in nursing home.Methods: A cross-sectional study was used in this study. Respondents were elderly aged ≥60 years, can communicate well, able to read and write and not being sick which causes balance disorders and pain when walking. Respondents totaled 155 obtained by proportional random sampling. A questionnaire was used to retrieve data such as age, gender, use of a walker, depression, previous fall history and balance walking. Results: The results showed a significant relationship between all of these risk factors with the fear of falling (p <0.05) and the power of significance for each variable was different. The age variable was power significance 0.228, gender C = 0.2, previous fall history C = 0.374, use of a walker C = 0.367, balance walking C = 0.355 and depression rs = 0.196. There are three risk factors most closely associated with fear of falling in terms of balance walking (B = 1.424 Exp(B) = 4,153), use of a walker (B = 1,365 Exp(B) = 3,914) and previous fall history (B = 1.425 Exp(B) = 4.159). These factors had strength of 27%. Conclusion: Balance walking, use of a walker and previous fall history were the strongest risk factors.

A tall dark-haired man sits at a black, desklike, rolling cart in the center of a large empty room. Paint chips off the white walls, and dead autumn leaves cover the floor. The man is clean shaven and wears a black overcoat and black pants, but no shoes. Without speaking, he plays a tape recording of the overture to Béla Bartók's operaDuke Bluebeard's Castle (Herzog Blaubart's Burg). As the music begins, he rises and stands over a small dark-haired woman in a red dress, who lies on her back among the leaves, her arms stretched upward as if simultaneously reaching and waiting for something. The man hurls himself on top of her, and she drags his heavy body across the floor, her effort clearing a path through the leaves. As the overture becomes louder, the man rises and stops the tape player, rewinds it, and begins again, returning to his curled position on top of the woman's body. She drags him toward the chair, and as the music reaches the opening line, the man's efforts to stop, rewind, and fall onto her become more frantic. Suddenly he stands, lifting the tiny woman onto her feet and embraces her. Her hand creeps from under his arms and up his torso, inquisitively searching the surface of his chest, neck, and finally his face.

Abstract Wrist pain commonly affects military members and while most instances are benign, some require urgent orthopedic attention to prevent permanent loss of function. A 27-year-old male Marine while deployed presented with wrist pain after a seemingly benign fall during recreation. Radiographs were initially read as unremarkable and treated as a sprain. Though when reviewed by the Shock Trauma Platoon physicians, a perilunate dislocation was noted. After unsuccessful closed attempts to reduce injury, the Marine was sent to orthopedic surgery and underwent open reduction internal fixation and required a subsequent closed reduction and percutaneous pinning. Perilunate dislocations are uncommon but are among the most severe types of wrist injuries. This case is a reminder that proper evaluation of all injuries is critical. Proper evaluation of wrist injuries includes an attentive physical exam and careful examination of the radiographs; paying close attention to Gilula arcs and collinearity of the radius, lunate, and capitate. Prompt recognition and referral to specialty care for definitive treatment are important to maximize functional outcomes.

Introduction: The quality of sleep can be influenced by several factors, insomnia in turn has an effect on the state of health. Aim: The aim of our survey is to measure the effects of insomnia, furthermore, the sleep affecting agents and habits to help to fall asleep among adults. Method: We collected the online nationwide and the written datas from the South-Transdanubia region, 455 adults filled the questionnaire which contains the Athens Insomnia Scale. Results: 13.4% of participants has insomnia, it is influenced by the quality of diet (p<0.001), comsumption of coffee (p = 0.045) and the physical activity (p = 0.011), what is more in correlation with the prevalency of chronic deseases (p = 0.001) and psychosomatic symptoms (p<0.001). The most frequent causes of sleep disorders are: work-related stress (35.6%), personal-life stress (35.4%) and pain (24.2%). In case of dormition problems most of the participants watch television (52.1%) and read (33%); 7.5% and 11.4% of the responders use sleeping pills and tisane. Conclusions: We attract attention to the prevalency and effects of insomnia, and the habits to help to fall asleep. Orv. Hetil., 2016, 157(49), 1955–1959.

Introduction. Retroperitoneal hematoma may occur as a result of trauma, but also from rupture of arterial aneurysms (aortic or iliac), surgical complications, tumors or anticoagulation therapy. Case report. We presented a patient on permanent anticoagulation therapy. On the day of admission to our institution, the patient had the value of his INR 5.57 which required immediate suspension of the therapy. The main symptom in this patient was pain in the right inguinal canal with propagation along the right leg, which was indicated in clinical picture of spontaneous retroperitoneal haematoma. After three days the fall of hemoglobin occurred, so the additonal diagnostics was done. A computed tomography of the abdomen was performed showing well limited, large retroperitoneal hematoma (213 x 79 x 91 mm). Transfusion of concentrated red blood cells was performed twice with satisfactory correction of hemoglobin level, and four units of fresh frozen plasma. The patient was hemodynamically stabilized and discharged after a two-month long intensive care unit treatment, with the advice to use low-molecular weight heparin 2 x 0.4 mg subcutaneusly, due to persistent arrhythmia. Conclusion. In patients on anti-coagulation therapy regular monitoring of the anticoagulant status is extremely important, because of the possibility of fatal complications development, such as retroperitoneal hematoma.

The history of medicine shows that myocardial infarction is one of the significant causes of death in humans. The rapid evolution in autonomous technologies, the rise of computer vision, and edge computing offers intriguing possibilities in healthcare monitoring systems. The major motivation of the work is to improve the survival rate during a cardiac arrest through an automatic emergency recognition system under ambient intelligence. We present a novel approach to chest pain and fall posture-based vital sign detection using an intelligence surveillance camera to address the emergency during myocardial infarction. A real-time embedded solution persuaded from “edge AI” is implemented using the state-of-the-art convolution neural networks: single shot detector Inception V2, single shot detector MobileNet V2, and Internet of Things embedded GPU platform NVIDIA’s Jetson Nano. The deep learning algorithm is implemented for 3000 indoor color image datasets: Nanyang Technological University Red Blue Green and Depth, NTU RGB + D dataset, and private RMS dataset. The research mainly pivots on two key factors in creating and training a CNN model to detect the vital signs and evaluate its performance metrics. We propose a model, which is cost-effective and consumes low power for onboard detection of vital signs of myocardial infarction and evaluated the metrics to achieve a mean average precision of 76.4% and an average recall of 80%.

Ear tagging is perceived as less painful or stressful than tattooing and therefore is generally considered less harmful or costly to welfare. However, ear tags are more difficult to read than tattoos and can fall out, and mice usually require restraint for the tag numbers to be read accurately. We assessed the welfare and scientific implications of tattooing by using a commercial device compared with restraint in a device versus ear tagging. Male and female BALB/c mice (n = 32) underwent procedures after 1 wk of tail or nonaversive (tunnel) handling to determine whether tunnel handling reduced anxiety. Pain was evaluated using both the Mouse Grimace Scale (MGS) and manual and automated behavior analyses; light–dark preference testing and voluntary interaction with the handler's hand were used to assess anxiety. Tail inflammation after tattooing was quantified using bioluminescent imaging, and ear tag and tattoo misidentification rates were estimated from volunteer staff records. Tunnel handling reduced anxiety compared with tail handling. According to the MGS, tattooing was not more painful than ear tagging but caused significant tail inflammation and more agitation and anxiety. However, all tattoos were read correctly without handling, whereas all ear tagged mice needed restraint, and at least 25% of the tag codes were misread. Handling stress together with identification errors at this rate represent potentially serious concerns regarding the scientific integrity of data from studies using ear tagging. These concerns are unlikely to arise with tattooing. Although tattooing was stressful, so were restraint and ear tagging. However, considering the other major advantages of tattooing, the total costs associated with tattooing were not substantially greater than for ear tagging.

Background: Aging is a natural process associated with many functional and structural changes. These changes may include impaired self-regulation, changes in tissues and organs. Aging also affects mood, physical status and social activity. There are adverse changes in cognitive behavior, perceived sensation and thinking processes. Regular physical activity can alleviate many health problems; yet, many older adults are inactive. Yoga is one of the scientific and popular lifestyle practice considered as the integration of mind, body and soul. Results of previous studies reported positive effects of yoga on multiple health outcomes in elderly. However, there is scarcity of scientific information where yoga’s effect is examined on over well-being and on multiple health outcomes simultaneously in elderly. This protocol describes methods for a 12-week yoga-based intervention exploring the effects of yoga on well-being in physically inactive elderly living in community. Methods and analysis: This two group parallel single blind randomized controlled trial that will be conducted at a designated facility of R.D. Gardi Medical College, Ujjain, Madhya Pradesh, Central India. A 12-week 60-min yoga intervention three times weekly is designed. Comparison group participants will undergo a 60-min program comprising light exercise focusing on conventional stretching to improve mobility. After screening, 144 participants aged 60–80 years will be recruited. The primary outcome is subjective well-being. Secondary outcomes include mobility, fall risk, cognition, anxiety and depression, mood and stress, sleep quality, pain, physical activity/sedentary behavior and cardio-metabolic risk factors. Assessments will be conducted at baseline (0 week), after the intervention (12+1 week) and at follow-up (36+1 week). Intention-to-treat analyses with mixed linear modeling will be applied. Discussion: Through this trial, we aim to determine whether elderly people in the intervention group practicing yoga show more favorable primary (well-being) and secondary outcomes than those in the light exercise focusing on conventional stretching group. We assume that yoga may be practiced to maintain health, reduce particular symptoms commonly associated with skeletal pain, assist in pain relief and enhance well-being. We anticipate that practicing yoga will improve well-being and mental health and may lead to significant improvement in depression, pain and sleep quality.Ethics and dissemination: This study is approved by the Institutional Ethics Committee of R.D. Gardi Medical College, Ujjain, IEC Ref No. 09/2018. All participants would be provided with written and verbal information about the purpose of the project and would be free to withdraw from the study at any time. Refusal to participate in the study would not have any negative consequences. Confidentiality of the information of each participant would be ensured. Knowledge obtained would be disseminated to stakeholders through workshops, meetings and relevant scientific conferences.Trial Registration: The trial is prospectively registered with the Indian Council of Medical Research Trial Registry CTRI/2018/07/015051.

Abstract Abstract 5147 Background: Ruxolitinib (INC424), a potent and selective oral JAK1 and JAK2 inhibitor, has demonstrated rapid and durable reductions in splenomegaly and improved disease-related symptoms, role functioning, and quality of life in 2 phase 3 studies (the COMFORT studies) in patients with primary myelofibrosis (PMF), post-polycythemia vera-MF (PPV-MF), and post-essential thrombocythemia-MF (PET-MF). Consistent with ruxolitinib's known mechanism of action, anemia was one of the most frequently reported adverse events (AEs) and was generally transient and manageable and led to discontinuation in only one patient. In clinical practice, anemia can be managed with erythropoietic-stimulating agents (ESAs), which promote red blood cell proliferation via cytokine receptors that signal through the JAK pathway. Because these agents act upstream of ruxolitinib in the JAK2 pathway, it is important to determine the effects of these medications on the safety and efficacy of ruxolitinib. Methods: COMFORT-II is an open-label, randomized, multicenter study in patients with MF. Patients were randomized (2:1) to receive ruxolitinib 15 or 20 mg twice daily or best available therapy (BAT; as selected by the investigator). Use of ESAs (eg, darbepoetin alfa, epoetin alfa), although not prohibited, was discouraged for patients randomized to ruxolitinib because they can increase spleen size, which could confound the efficacy analyses. This post hoc analysis evaluates the safety and efficacy of ruxolitinib in patients receiving concomitant ESAs in the COMFORT-II study. Results: Use of ESAs was reported for 9 (PMF, n=6; PET-MF, n=2; PPV-MF, n=1) of the 146 patients who were treated with ruxolitinib (darbepoetin alfa, 1.4% [n=2]; epoetin alfa, 4.8% [n=7]), with a median duration of exposure to ESAs of 22.1 weeks. The median dose intensity of ruxolitinib was numerically higher for patients who received ESAs (+ESA group; 39.2 mg/day) compared with those who did not receive ESAs (–ESA group; 30.0 mg/day). The mean change from baseline in spleen volume at week 48 was similar in both groups (+ESA, –29.8%; –ESA, –30.1%); 44.4% of the +ESA group (4 of 9 patients) and 27.0% of the –ESA group (37 of 137 patients) achieved ≥ 35% reduction in spleen volume from baseline at week 48. The mean number of packed red blood cell units received per month while on treatment was similar in both groups (+ESA, 0.78; –ESA, 0.86). The AEs reported in the +ESA group were similar to those reported in the –ESA group; serious AEs (SAEs) were reported for 4 patients in the +ESA group (patient 1: fracture of the distal radius after a fall; patient 2: urinary tract infection, abdominal pain, and anemia; patient 3: herpes zoster; patient 4: respiratory infection, decrease in general condition, and acute renal insufficiency). SAEs determined to be possibly related to study medication (respiratory infection and decrease in general condition) occurred in 1 patient who discontinued the study; this patient died from respiratory infection. At baseline, patients in the +ESA and –ESA groups had median creatinine levels of 70.2 and 75.4 μmol/L, respectively. Median changes from baseline at week 48 were similar for reticulocytes (+ESA, –13.6%; –ESA, –9.1%) and hemoglobin (+ESA, –5.8%; –ESA, –5.7%). The +ESA group had higher median levels of erythropoietin (39.0 and 7.0 pg/mL) at baseline and a larger increase at week 48 (485.0% and 185.2%). Conclusions: In the COMFORT-II study, ruxolitinib resulted in significant reduction in spleen size compared with BAT in patients with PMF, PPV-MF, or PET-MF. In these analyses, although the sample size is small, the use of ESAs did not appear to affect the efficacy of ruxolitinib concerning spleen size reduction, and no substantially different AEs were reported between patients receiving ESAs and those who did not. Additionally, concomitant use of ESAs may have allowed for an increased dose of ruxolitinib. The use of ESAs for the treatment of anemia is common in clinical practice, and further analyses in combination with ruxolitinib in this patient population are warranted. Disclosures: McMullin: Novartis: Honoraria; Amgen: Honoraria; Bristol Myers: Honoraria. Harrison:Novartis: Honoraria; Incyte: Honoraria; S*Bio: Honoraria; Celgene: Honoraria; Sanofi Aventis: Honoraria. Niederwieser:Novartis: Speakers Bureau. Sirulnik:Novartis: Employment. Wearver:Novartis Pharma AG: Employment. Stalbovskaya:Novartis Pharma AG: Employment. Kiladjian:Novartis: Honoraria; Celgene: Honoraria.

Introduction: MF is a clonal stem cell disorder characterized by progressive bone marrow failure, extramedullary hematopoiesis, and debilitating constitutional symptoms. Approximately 60% of pts develop anemia within a year of diagnosis; pts who are transfusion dependent have worse survival and quality-of-life outcomes (Tefferi A, et al. Mayo Clin Proc 2012;87:25-33). Treatment for MF-associated anemia remains critically unaddressed, with no approved therapies available. Luspatercept is a first-in-class erythroid maturation agent that has been shown to increase hemoglobin and reduce transfusion burden in pts with myelodysplastic syndromes (Fenaux P, et al. N Engl J Med 2020;382:140-51) and β-thalassemia (Cappellini MD, et al. N Engl J Med 2020;382:1219-31). Pts have also achieved multiple response episodes with luspatercept (Fenaux P, et al. Blood 2019;134:841). We previously reported findings from the ongoing open-label, phase 2 ACE-536-MF-001 trial evaluating luspatercept in pts with MF-associated anemia (Gerds AT, et al. Blood 2019;134:557). Here we report updated study results, focusing on response in pts requiring RBC transfusions. Methods: 79 pts with MF and anemia were enrolled (Figure). Of these, 43 were requiring RBC transfusions, defined as 6-12 U/84 d prior to treatment, or 4-12 U/84 d for the 3 expansion cohort pts. Pts in Cohort 3B received a stable ruxolitinib (RUX) dose for ≥ 16 wks (40 wks for expansion cohort pts), whereas Cohort 2 pts did not (Figure). Pts in Cohort 3B received a median RUX dose of 20 mg/d (range 5-40) for a median of 73 wks (range 29-359) prior to treatment. Pts received luspatercept every 21 d at a starting dose of 1.0 mg/kg (1.33 mg/kg for 3 expansion cohort pts in Cohort 3B), with doses escalating up to 1.75 mg/kg; 81% and 50% of pts in Cohorts 2 and 3B escalated to 1.75 mg/kg. Primary endpoint for pts receiving transfusions was RBC transfusion-independence (RBC-TI) for ≥ 12 consecutive wks within the first 24 wks on study. However, as responses were observed that did not fall within the 24-wk response window, additional assessments were conducted for the entire treatment duration for RBC-TI and ≥ 50% decrease in RBC transfusions (minimum 4 RBC U decrease) from baseline. Intent-to-treat data were analyzed as of March 29, 2020. Results: Pts in Cohorts 2 and 3B received a median of 8 cycles of luspatercept (range 1-39), for a median (mean) duration of 24 (31) and 23 (39) wks, respectively. Pts in Cohorts 2 and 3B received a median of 2.7 RBC U/28 d (range 1-5) and 2.7 RBC U/28 d (range 2-4), respectively. For the primary endpoint, 2/21 (10%) and 6/22 (27%) pts receiving transfusions in Cohorts 2 and 3B achieved RBC-TI over any consecutive 12 wks during the first 24 wks. Median time to start of first RBC-TI response period in Cohorts 2 and 3B was 1.5 days and 37 days; median duration of response was 49 wks (range 16-82) and 42 wks (range 12-111), respectively. When assessing the entire treatment period, 4/21 (19%) and 8/22 (36%) pts in Cohorts 2 and 3B achieved RBC-TI ≥ 12 wks, respectively. 25% of the RBC-TI responders in both cohorts experienced 2 separate episodes of RBC-TI ≥ 12 wks. Median cumulative duration of all individual ≥ 12-wk response episodes of RBC-TI was 59 wks (range 24-82) in Cohort 2 and 55 wks (range 12-116) in Cohort 3B. 8/21 (38%) and 10/22 (46%) pts in Cohorts 2 and 3B achieved a ≥ 50% reduction in RBC transfusion burden (minimum ≥ 4 U reduction) over 12 wks; of these, 38% and 20% of responders in Cohorts 2 and 3B experienced 2 separate ≥ 12-wk response episodes, and 1 pt (13%) in Cohort 2 experienced 3 separate responses. 4/15 (27%) and 8/14 (57%) pts in Cohorts 2 and 3B who reached 24 wks of treatment achieved clinical benefit and therefore continued luspatercept on an ongoing basis. Safety is reported for all 79 pts on study. 5 (6%) pts had grade 3-4 treatment-related adverse events (AEs); these AEs were diarrhea (n = 2), dehydration (n = 1), and hypertension (n = 3). There were no treatment-related deaths. Treatment-related AEs (any grade) occurring in ≥ 5% of pts were hypertension (13%), bone pain (9%), and diarrhea (5%). 8 (10%) pts had ≥ 1 AE leading to discontinuation. 16 (20%) pts remain on treatment. Conclusions: These longer-term findings suggest durable activity of luspatercept in pts with MF-associated anemia. In addition, a quarter of pts receiving transfusions achieved more than one ≥ 12-wk episode of RBC-TI response with luspatercept. The incidence of grade 3-4 AEs with luspatercept was low. Disclosures Gerds: Roche/Genentech: Research Funding; Celgene: Consultancy, Research Funding; Sierra Oncology: Research Funding; AstraZeneca/MedImmune: Consultancy; Incyte Corporation: Consultancy, Research Funding; Pfizer: Research Funding; Apexx Oncology: Consultancy; CTI Biopharma: Consultancy, Research Funding; Gilead Sciences: Research Funding; Imago Biosciences: Research Funding. Vannucchi:Novartis: Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees, Speakers Bureau; Blueprint: Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees; AbbVie: Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees, Speakers Bureau; Celgene/BMS: Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees, Speakers Bureau; Incyte: Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees. Passamonti:Novartis: Speakers Bureau; BMS: Speakers Bureau; Roche: Other: Support of parent study and funding of editorial support. Kremyanskaya:Constellation Pharmaceuticals: Research Funding; Incyte Corporation: Research Funding; Bristol Myers Squibb: Research Funding; Protagonist Therapeutics: Consultancy, Research Funding; Astex Pharmaceuticals: Research Funding. Gotlib:CTI Biopharma: Research Funding; Kartos: Consultancy, Honoraria, Research Funding; Incyte: Consultancy, Honoraria, Research Funding; Roche: Honoraria, Research Funding; BMS: Research Funding. McCaul:BMS: Speakers Bureau; Seattle Genetics: Speakers Bureau; Karyopharm: Speakers Bureau; Incyte: Speakers Bureau. Ribrag:argenX: Research Funding; pharmamar: Consultancy, Honoraria, Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees; servier: Consultancy; nanostring: Honoraria, Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees; gilead: Honoraria, Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees; BMS: Honoraria, Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees; AZD: Honoraria, Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees, Other; Infinity: Honoraria, Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees; Roche: Honoraria, Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees; Incyte: Honoraria, Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees; MSD: Honoraria, Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees; gustave roussy comprehensive cancer center: Current Employment; EPZ: Honoraria, Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees; epizyme (EPZ): Research Funding. Mead:Novartis: Consultancy, Honoraria, Other: travel, accommodations, expenses, Research Funding, Speakers Bureau; Celgene/BMS: Consultancy, Honoraria, Other: travel, accommodations, expenses, Research Funding; Abbvie: Consultancy; CTI: Consultancy; Gilead: Consultancy. Harrison:Roche: Honoraria; Gilead Sciences: Honoraria, Speakers Bureau; Incyte Corporation: Speakers Bureau; Janssen: Speakers Bureau; CTI Biopharma Corp: Honoraria, Speakers Bureau; Sierra Oncology: Honoraria; Celgene: Honoraria, Research Funding, Speakers Bureau; Shire: Honoraria, Speakers Bureau; Novartis: Honoraria, Research Funding, Speakers Bureau; AOP Orphan Pharmaceuticals: Honoraria; Promedior: Honoraria. Mesa:Sierra Oncology: Consultancy; LaJolla Pharmaceutical Company: Consultancy; Novartis: Consultancy; Incyte: Research Funding; CTI BioPharma: Research Funding; Genentech: Research Funding; AbbVie: Research Funding; Promedior: Research Funding; Bristol Myers Squibb: Research Funding; Samus Therapeutics: Research Funding. Kiladjian:AbbVie: Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees; AOP Orphan: Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees; Bristol Myers Squibb: Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees; Novartis: Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees. Barosi:Bristol Myers Squibb: Consultancy. Gerike:Bristol Myers Squibb: Current Employment, Current equity holder in publicly-traded company. Shetty:BMS: Current Employment, Current equity holder in publicly-traded company. Pariseau:Bristol Myers Squibb: Current Employment. Miranda:Bristol Myers Squibb: Current Employment. Schwickart:Bristol Myers Squibb: Current Employment, Current equity holder in publicly-traded company. Giuseppi:BMS: Current Employment, Current equity holder in publicly-traded company. Zhang:Bristol Myers Squibb: Current Employment, Current equity holder in publicly-traded company. Backstrom:Acceleron Pharma: Current Employment, Current equity holder in publicly-traded company; BMS: Current equity holder in publicly-traded company. Verstovsek:AstraZeneca: Research Funding; Roche: Research Funding; CTI Biopharma Corp: Research Funding; Genentech: Research Funding; Incyte Corporation: Consultancy, Research Funding; NS Pharma: Research Funding; Novartis: Consultancy, Research Funding; PharmaEssentia: Research Funding; ItalPharma: Research Funding; Sierra Oncology: Consultancy, Research Funding; Celgene: Consultancy, Research Funding; Blueprint Medicines Corp: Research Funding; Promedior: Research Funding; Gilead: Research Funding; Protagonist Therapeutics: Research Funding.

Abstract Introduction: Venous thromboembolism (VTE) in the form of deep venous thrombosis (DVT) or pulmonary embolism (PE) is a complication of malignancy. Several studies have demonstrated the superiority of dalteparin (Fragmin®), a low molecular weight heparin (LMWH), in comparison to oral vitamin K antagonists in preventing VTE recurrence in the setting of active cancer. LMWH is the preferred treatment of cancer associated thrombosis. However, the cost of LMWH can be prohibitive and the need for daily subcutaneous injections can decrease patients' quality of life. While rivaroxaban (Xarelto®), a Factor Xa inhibitor, has been approved for the treatment and secondary prevention of DVT and PE, there is limited data regarding its use in cancer patients. The objective of our study is to determine the efficacy and safety of rivaroxaban compared to dalteparin in cancer associated thrombosis. Methods: This is a retrospective chart review of cancer patients greater than age 18 treated at H. Lee Moffitt Cancer Center between May 3, 2010 and June 30, 2015 on anticoagulation with rivaroxaban or dalteparin. Patients were excluded if the length of anticoagulant therapy was < 30 days, anticoagulant therapy was initiated > 6 months after VTE diagnosis, the indication for treatment was not DVT/PE, if patients had contraindications to either LMWH or rivaroxaban, or patients were not on treatment doses of therapy. Out of 459 patients identified, 226 patients (107 in the rivaroxaban group, and 119 in the dalteparin group) were eligible for analysis based on our exclusion criteria. Efficacy was determined by the incidence of recurrent VTE, such as recurrent DVT, new fatal or non-fatal PE within 30 days. The secondary endpoint of the study was to determine the safety of rivaroxaban compared to dalteparin in cancer patients for the treatment of VTE. Safety was determined by the incidence and severity of bleeding. Major bleeding was defined as clinically overt if it was associated with a fall in hemoglobin of 2 g/dL or more, required transfusions of ≥ 2 units of packed red blood cells, involved retroperitoneal, intracranial, or critical site bleeding, or if it contributed to death. Minor bleeding was defined as overt bleeding not meeting the criteria for major bleeding but associated with medical intervention, unscheduled contact with a physician, interruption or discontinuation of anticoagulation treatment, or associated with any other discomfort such as pain or impairment of activities of daily life. Descriptive statistical analyses were utilized. Chi square analysis and t- test were performed to compare categorical and continuous variables. All data was analyzed using SPSS version 21.0 statistical software. Results: Rivaroxaban had a similar rate of DVT and PE failure with 1 event versus 2 with dalteparin (p = 0.625). The rivaroxaban group had 0 major and 8 minor bleeds compared to 3 major and 8 minor bleeds in the dalteparin group with p values of 0.09 and 0.86 respectively. Comorbidities and risk factors for thrombosis were similar in both groups as summarized in Table 1. Table. Rivaroxaban vs. Dalteparin: No Significant Differences in the Efficacy and Safety Profile in Cancer Associated Thrombosis RivaroxabanN = 107 DalteparinN =119 P value DVT Failure within 30 days 1 (0.93%) 2 (1.68%) 0.625 PE Failure within 30 days 1 (0.93%) 1 (0.84%) 0.94 Major Bleeding 0 (0 %) 3 (2.5%) 0.09 Minor Bleeding 8 (7.5%) 8 (6.7%) 0.864 Median Age (Yrs) 61 65 0.93 MaleFemale 58 (54.2%) 49 (45.8%) 60 (50.4%) 59 (49.6%) 0.596 Active Cancer 96 (86.5%) 111 (93.2%) 0.350 Surgery within 30 Days 14 (13.1%) 13 (10.9%) 0.684 Hypertension 58 (54.2%) 61 (51.3%) 0.69 Diabetes 14 (13.1%) 14 (11.8%) 0.84 Coronary Artery Disease 6 (5.61%) 11 (9.2%) 0.326 History of Previous DVT 12 (11.2%) 5 (4.2%) 0.074 BMI >30 39 (36.4%) 48 (40.3%) 0.585 Creatinine Clearance (Cr Cl) 30 - 50 Cr Cl 50 - 70 7 (6.5%) 100 (93.3%) 7 (5.9%) 112 (94.1%) 0.837 Conclusions: Our study evaluated the safety and efficacy of rivaroxaban compared to dalteparin in patients with predominantly active cancer treated at a large comprehensive cancer center and found rivaroxaban to be comparable to dalteparin in this cohort. There were no significant differences in regards to recurrent VTE or major/minor bleeding with patients on rivaroxaban or dalteparin in our cohort of patients. Large randomized trials evaluating the efficacy and safety of rivaroxaban in the oncology population are needed to further validate our findings. Disclosures No relevant conflicts of interest to declare.

Introduction: Mixed donor chimerism (MDC) occurs in nearly 35% of patients with sickle cell disease (SCD) post allogeneic hematopoietic cell transplant (alloHCT). Donor myeloid engraftment of &gt;20% is considered necessary to support disease resolution. However, in a disease known for its clinical variability, we hypothesize that patients (pts) with a severe pre-HCT phenotype may have abnormal RBC rheology at a level of chimerism and %HbS believed to be consistent with a cure. RBC rheology is markedly abnormal in SCD; these abnormalities are associated with SCD related clinical complications. Even fully oxygenated, sickle RBC are less deformable than those of HbAA or HbAS individuals; upon deoxygenation, deformability further declines. Sickle RBC morphology reflects the tendency to polymerize, with characteristic sickle forms. Sickle RBC are more adherent to the endothelial cell lining of the vasculature than HbAA or HbAS RBCs. The goal of any cell-based therapy of curative intent should be normalize the red cell rheology. To determine if the rheology of blood from SCD pts post-HCT with varying degrees of donor chimerism fall into the HbSS range of values, we propose to functionally assess the peripheral blood from a series of 6 post alloHCT SCD patients using a battery of rheological tests measuring deformability, sickling, adherence, percent dense cells (%DRBC), and RBC morphology. Methods: Peripheral blood samples (EDTA) from 6 SCD pts post alloHCT with a matched sibling donor were collected and immediately analyzed using oxygenscan (Lorrca), artificial microvascular network (AMVN), microfluidic image acquisition, and an ADVIA hematology analyzer. The Lorrca with oxygenscan measures RBC deformability (elongation index EI), under a range of pO2 (150-0 mmHg). EImax is the deformability of the oxygenated sickle RBC; EImin is the deformability of deoxygenated RBCs. The point of sickling (PoS) is the pO2 at which RBC deformability rapidly declines. RBC adhesiveness is measured by the difference in rate of perfusion of RBC through the AVMN coated with adhesive proteins (adherent AVMN) and a non-adherent, uncoated AVMN. %DRBC was measured by an ADVIA hematology analyzer. Microscopic RBC images were acquired and classified to determine the fraction of sickled RBCs in well-oxygenated samples. Additional clinical data including Hb profile, donor chimerism, and symptoms were obtained via chart review. Reference ranges were generated as described above using n=45 HbSS samples ages 2-21, on hydroxyurea, chronic transfusion, or untreated; n=14 HbAS, and n=43 HbAA. Results: In Figure 1, we show the measurements obtained by the Lorrca with oxygenscan on 5 pts post-alloHCT with a range of donor chimerism, as well as typical values for HbAA, HbAS, and HbSS patients. Patient 1 and 3 exhibit normal rheology; both were transplanted with a HbAA donor, with high chimerism and no detectable HbS. Patient 2 has 40% whole blood chimerism, well above the 20% threshold described with myeloid chimerism, and a HbS less than 50%, yet their plot resembles that of an untransplanted HbSS pt; the donor to Patient 2 exhibits the expected HbAA deformability. Patients 5 and 6 exhibit rheology in the HbAS range; they have intermediate chimerism from a HbAS donor. Clinical details and biomarker panel values for all 6 pts analyzed are in Table 1, as well as ranges of values for HbSS and HbAS subjects generated in the Sheehan and Shevkoplyas labs. Patient 2 is the only subject with values in the HbSS range, and the only subject with SCD symptoms. Conclusions: Our rheological tests identified a pt with values consistent with a HbSS pt of moderate severity or treated with hydroxyurea despite variable donor chimerism above the 20% threshold and HbS &lt;50% thought to be sufficient for cure. The pt reported pain events beginning two years prior, indicating a clinical correlation supporting the validity of the rheological tests we propose to use to distinguish cure from persistent SCD. Current post-HCT evaluation depends on chimerism and hemoglobin profiles, and would not detect the significant functional abnormalities visible by Lorrca with oxygenscan biomarkers that indicate that Patient 2 is at risk for SCD related complications. Our results suggest that this functional analysis may help with management of post alloHCT SCD pts, and may be even more essential to assessing new gene-based therapy approaches to curing patients with SCD. Disclosures Rab: RR Mechatronics: Research Funding. van Wijk:Agios Pharmaceuticals: Consultancy, Research Funding; RR Mechatronics: Research Funding. Shevkoplyas:SSS: Research Funding; New Health Sciences: Consultancy.

Background Transfusion-dependent β-thalassemia (TDT) is a severe genetic disease caused by impaired β-globin production leading to severe anemia and lifelong transfusion dependence. Autologous CD34+ cells encoding a βA-T87Q-globin gene (LentiGlobin for β-thalassemia) is currently being evaluated in patients with TDT. In the phase 1/2 Northstar study, 3/8 patients with β0/β0 genotypes became transfusion independent. The drug product (DP) manufacturing process (CD34+ cell transduction) was then refined to improve clinical outcomes. Interim results are presented here from the ongoing, international, single-arm, phase 3 Northstar-3 study (HGB-212; NCT03207009) evaluating LentiGlobin gene therapy in patients ≤50 years of age with TDT and either β0 or β+ IVS-I-110 mutations on both HBB alleles. Methods Patients with TDT undergo hematopoietic stem cell mobilization with G-CSF and plerixafor. CD34+ cells collected via apheresis are transduced with BB305 lentiviral vector. Patients undergo myeloablative, single-agent, pharmacokinetic-adjusted busulfan conditioning over 4 days and are infused with transduced cells. The primary efficacy endpoint is transfusion reduction (≥60% reduction in transfused red blood cell (RBC) volume post-DP infusion compared with pre-DP infusion). A key secondary endpoint is transfusion independence (TI; weighted average hemoglobin [Hb] ≥9 g/dL without RBC transfusions for ≥12 months). Patients are followed for 2 years and offered participation in a long-term follow-up study. Summary statistics presented as median (min - max). Results As of 12 April 2019, 11 patients (7 β0/β0, 2 β0/IVS-I-110, 2 homozygous IVS-I-110genotypes) were treated with LentiGlobin and have a median follow-up of 4.6 (1.5 - 15.7) months. Median age at enrollment was 17 (7 - 33) years; 3 patients were &lt;12 years of age. DP vector copy number (VCN) and proportion of transduced cells were higher in Northstar-3 (N=11) compared to Northstar (N=18). In Northstar-3, median DP VCN was 2.5 (1.2 - 4.3) copies/diploid genome (c/dg) compared to 0.7 (0.3 - 1.5) c/dg in Northstar; 74% (34% - 83.5%) and 32% (17% - 58%) of cells were transduced in Northstar-3 versus Northstar, respectively. Median time to neutrophil and platelet engraftment was 26 (14 - 38) days and 36 (25 - 64) days, respectively; 3 patients with 1 - 3 months follow-up had not yet achieved platelet engraftment. There was one grade 3 bleeding adverse event (AE) of epistaxis from DP infusion to platelet engraftment, but no grade ≥ 3 bleeding AEs after platelet engraftment. Non-hematologic grade ≥3 AEs in ≥2 patients after DP infusion were febrile neutropenia, stomatitis, and pharyngeal inflammation. AEs considered possibly related to LentiGlobin were abdominal pain (n=2) and leukopenia and thrombocytopenia in one patient. Serious AEs after DP infusion were pyrexia (n=2), and one event each of febrile neutropenia, headache, neutropenia, stomatitis, thrombocytopenia, and congestive heart failure. Congestive heart failure occurred in a patient (screening cardiac T2* 16.6 msec) who had a fall in left ventricular ejection fraction associated with worsening of cardiac iron pre-engraftment. Three of 4 patients followed for ≥ 6 months have stopped transfusions for ≥ 6 months with total Hb of 10.5 - 13.6 g/dL at last visit. Gene therapy-derived HbAT87Q stabilized approximately 6 months after infusion and was 9.5 - 12.6 g/dL at last assessment. The fourth patient with ≥ 6 months follow-up had a Hb of 8.6 g/dL at last visit after being off transfusions for 2.8 months; however, has since received additional transfusions due to symptomatic anemia. The only patient with ≥12 months follow-up (β0/β0 genotype) achieved transfusion independence. Of the 5 patients with ≥3 to &lt;6 months follow-up, 4 have been off transfusions for ≥2 months and one patient continues to receive transfusions. Longer follow-up and outcomes from additional patients treated will be presented. Summary Interim results from Northstar-3 indicate that refinements in the manufacturing of LentiGlobin gene therapy led to higher DP VCN and proportion of transduced cells. In patients with TDT and either a β0 or IVS-I-110 mutation at both alleles of the HBB gene, 3/4 with ≥ 6 months have stopped transfusions and one patient has achieved the protocol definition of transfusion independence. The safety profile of LentiGlobin gene therapy was generally consistent with myeloablative busulfan conditioning. Disclosures Lal: Terumo Corporation: Research Funding; Celgene: Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees, Research Funding; Insight Magnetics: Research Funding; Protagonist Therapeutics: Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees, Research Funding; bluebird bio: Research Funding; Novartis: Research Funding; La Jolla Pharmaceutical Company: Research Funding. Locatelli:Amgen: Honoraria, Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees; Bellicum: Consultancy, Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees; bluebird bio: Consultancy; Miltenyi: Honoraria; Novartis: Consultancy, Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees. Kwiatkowski:Terumo: Research Funding; Novartis: Research Funding; Imara: Consultancy; Apopharma: Research Funding. Kulozik:Bluebird Bio: Consultancy, Honoraria, Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees; Novartis: Consultancy, Honoraria, Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees. Porter:Celgene: Consultancy, Honoraria; Agios: Consultancy, Honoraria; Protagonism: Honoraria; La Jolla: Honoraria; Vifor: Honoraria; Silence therapeutics: Honoraria; Bluebird bio: Consultancy, Honoraria. Thuret:Celgene: Other: investigators for clinical trials, participation on scientific/medical advisory board; Novartis: Other: investigators for clinical trials, participation on scientific/medical advisory board; Apopharma: Consultancy; BlueBird bio: Other: investigators for clinical trials, participation on scientific/medical advisory board. Elliot:bluebird bio, Inc.: Employment, Equity Ownership. Chen:bluebird bio, Inc.: Consultancy. Colvin:bluebird bio, Inc.: Employment, Equity Ownership. Thompson:bluebird bio, Inc.: Consultancy, Research Funding; Celgene: Consultancy, Research Funding; Novartis: Consultancy, Research Funding; Baxalta: Research Funding.

The call for the decolonisation of South African space that started to resound throughout South Africa in 2015 has, for a large part, centred on the institutional and historical legacy of Cecil John Rhodes. The Rhodes Must Fall movement has, for example, demonstrated the degree to which Rhodes is still entangled with the South African landscape. Although this movement has largely exposed the race-based prejudices of Rhodes’ imperialist endeavours for South(ern) Africa, Rhodes’ legacy also carries overt biases towards gender and sexuality. As this article demonstrates, the spectre of Rhodes’ alleged homosexuality has haunted him not only during his lifetime, but has persisted to the present day. The concept of Rhodes as a homosexual man stands in a complex relationship to the public image of imperialist, statesman and entrepreneur that he and key agents in the British Empire have tried to foster. However, in the wake of a crumbling British Empire, Rhodes have been left exposed to critics who have strategically used him as an example of the way in which decolonisation can be exacted upon a memorialised legacy. As this article demonstrates, Rhodes’ entanglement with the ideas surrounding race, gender and sexuality that were prevalent during his life had a direct impact on his conduct in South Africa. When it comes to the active decolonisation of South African spaces and institutional discourses, Rhodes’ whiteness, masculinity and possible homosexuality present a complex picture of the history of empire-building – of British dreams to paint Africa red.

How self-images, the perceptions of others, and caricatures can fundamentally shape human existence and what role the image of man plays in the Bible are discussed by the author with her examination of the two creation narratives in Gen 1,1-2,4a and Gen 2,4b-3,24. After a brief introduction to the origins and the differences between the Priestly and Jahwist accounts of creation, she first analyzes the Priestly account, which focuses on the creation of the world as a whole. The idea expressed here of the human being as an ›image of God‹, which includes women and men equally, initially paints an exceedingly positive picture of people and the world, so that the author asks herself whether ultimately this story doesn’t seem almost naive, since there is no evil in it at all and everything is given the predicate ›good‹. With this question she goes into the analysis of the second account of creation, which focuses more on the creation of man and describes him as a kind of »in-between being made of divine breath and matter«. Here it becomes clear that it is man who gives existence to evil by reaching for the fruits of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil without authority, obeying the voice of Satan more than that of God. This turns his salvific state into an unsalvific one, which according to this idea continues to this day. Divided into a before and after, the author examines this biblical account of ›the Fall‹ in detail in order to summarize subsequently what constructive and destructive meanings can be read out of these two accounts of creation for our present image of man.

Introduction: The Creative Arts and Regional Well-BeingThe relationship between regionalism, well-being, and the creative arts has enjoined significant attention from community activists, commercial entrepreneurs, policy analysts, artists, and researchers over recent years (Australia Council for the Arts, “Living Culture”; Australia Council for the Arts, “The Arts in Regional Australia;” Drummond, Keane, and West; Elg; Warren, and West; Woodward, Bremner, and Cahalan). Underpinning most of the activity and research in this area is the understanding (occasionally bordering on an un-critical presumption) that the creative arts make a positive contribution to regional well-being. Commenting on the Live. Love. Life. creative-arts wellness festival in Daylesford, Victoria, Mary-Anne Thomas (Member of Parliament for the state seat of Macedon) stated that the festival will “reinforce Daylesford and the Macedon Ranges’ status as one of the nation’s leading wellness destinations” (Elg). For Thomas, it would appear that the linkage of the creative arts to regional well-being is never in doubt; which is to say, always already available for reinforcement. According to university-based researchers Margaret Woodward, Craig Bremner, and Anthony Cahalan, writing in a more scholarly and critical register, “there is a growing body of research which shows that thriving creative industries and cultural activities are crucial for the health and vitality of a region and its communities” (3). Qualifying this, they add that: “Achieving high levels of community well being through thriving creative activity is not however without its challenges in regional Australia” (3). Similarly, Rozaline Drummond, Jondi Keane, and Patrick West present their work as a test of the efficacy of the creative arts in aiding regional well-being: The opportunity to work collaboratively with a community like the one at Lake Bolac [Victoria] 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. (n.p.)Deleuzean philosophy aside, quantitative data indicates that people in regional Australia are increasingly optimistic about the positive impact of the creative arts on their well-being. In 2016, 57% believed the arts impacted their sense of well-being and happiness, up from 52% in 2013 (Australia Council for the Arts, “The Arts in Regional Australia”). Given this article’s emphasis on place and well-being in relation to located creative-arts production, it is worth citing another dataset from the same Australia Council for the Arts publication, which details the “Location of Professional Artists”:There continues to be a concentration of artists in urban areas. Three quarters (74%) live in cities, compared to two thirds of the Australian population. This urban concentration […] may in part be related to concentration of cultural infrastructure in cities.1 in 6 Australian artists live in regional cities or towns (16%) and around 1 in 10 live in rural, remote or very remote areas (11%). (n.p.)Regional artists are a minority voice in the Australian creative arts. But the ways in which a minority voice is constructed, and the (potential) impact a minoritarian position has within the wider debate about regional well-being and the creative arts, requires careful unpacking. Ironically, creative artists themselves have been relatively neglected actors in this space. Working with Tony Birch’s short story, “The Red House”, as a neglected text of regionalism, this article exposes oversights in current understandings of the connection between well-being and regionalism. The Voice of the Regional Artist and “Resistant Speech” It is important to recognise that the “concentration of artists in urban areas” may sometimes lead to situations where non-regional artists, in the undoubtedly well-meaning pursuit of regional well-being, drown out the voices of regional artists in regional places (Australia Council for the Arts, “The Arts in Regional Australia”). Drummond, Keane, and West, all city-based artists, show sensitivity to this problem in their observation that: “It is not for the artists to presume that they can empower a [regional] community.” Certainly, regional artists and communities should take the lead in the development of regional well-being through the creative arts. The problem of (not) speaking for the other is, however, not so easily dealt with (Spivak). While urban artists might adopt the strategy of consciously allowing regional artists a voice, making such allowance could itself be viewed as a play of privilege and power by the city-based practitioner, resourced by their greater “concentration of cultural infrastructure” (Australia Council for the Arts, “The Arts in Regional Australia”). It is notoriously difficult to give the slip to the relatively invisible operations of entitlement. Furthermore, even if the regional artist is given a voice, there are many different ways of being heard or not heard. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s distinction between “speaking” and “talking” is useful here. Discussing “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in an interview with Bulan Lahiri, Spivak notes that: “It was not about talking. It was about: when the subaltern speaks there is not enough infrastructure for people to recognise it as resistant speech. That’s what it means.” In this crucial move, Spivak refines understanding of the issues at stake around the minoritarian position of regional artists. It is not enough for regional artists merely to “talk”; rather, they must be heard with the full impact of “resistant speech” (Lahiri). Obviously, what Spivak means by the “infrastructure” of “resistant speech” differs from the meaning the word “infrastructure” has in the Australia Council for the Arts publication referred to above, which employs the term as part of a governmental and technocratic discourse (“The Arts in Regional Australia”). The distance separating these two usages of “infrastructure” indicates the difference between the quantitative and the qualitative. Working with Spivak, this article’s focus is on the gap or failing in the infrastructure of qualitative research that has led to the relative neglect of Tony Birch’s short story “The Red House” as a significant text of regionalism. The Australia Council for the Arts, with its quantitative and empirical methodology, would not count Birch as a regional writer (to the best of the author’s knowledge, Birch lives and works in Melbourne). Its definition of a regional artist undermines the possibilities of a qualitative research infrastructure. However, recognizing the powerful regional concerns within a text by a primarily city-based writer like Birch is a key move, not only in expanding the definition of who counts as a minoritarian regional writer, but in giving voice to the “resistant speech” of women and children, subalterns on Spivak’s terms, within the regional-urban flux (Lahiri). The aim of this article is to give voice to Tony Birch as a regional writer, at least insofar as he is the author of “The Red House”, while also addressing the issue of well-being (as linked to the curse of domestic violence), through attention to Birch’s artistic re-creation of regionalism. In this way, working with Spivak’s reference to “infrastructure,” the aim is to nurture the growth of a research infrastructure open to a more productive engagement with regionalism, which begins by nuancing the definition of regional. It is not that regional artists, defined either by their demography or (as with Birch) by their creative concerns, are not “talking” rather, what they are saying is not being recognised in Spivak’s strong sense of “speaking”. Indeed, the very fact that Birch is not a regional writer in an empirical sense, and that, as will be explored later in this article, “The Red House” is not even primarily set in a regional location, has at least one important consequence. Potentially, it increases the value of Birch’s short story to an engagement with regionalism, given that “The Red House” unfolds regionalism as a concept always already in productive dialogue with other frameworks of place (such as the urban and the international). To the extent that Birch is a city-based writer of regionalism, and thus on the (urban) margin of the (regional) margin, he enlivens an exquisite position of minoritarian power. Furthermore, “The Red House” contains a diversity of acute insights into the nexus of regionalism and well-being that, to date, critics have overlooked. “The Red House” and the Well-Being of Places Comparatively little scholarly attention has been paid to creative work that itself dramatises and interrogates the issue of regional well-being. Tony Birch’s short story “The Red House” (2006), from his collection of linked stories (which is sometimes referred to as a novel) Shadowboxing, is a particularly interesting candidate to fill this gap in the literature, given how delicately it ranges across, and problematises, the division between the urban and the regional.“The Red House” is the opening story of Shadowboxing. Covering a period of close to a decade, loosely overlapping with the 1960s, and set in different parts of Victoria and Melbourne, it is told in the voice of Michael, who recounts the story of a peripatetic family under stress and struggling to survive. The first sentence reads: “We moved to the red house in the winter after my younger sister, May, died of meningitis” (1). The first page also establishes the place-based coordinates of the story: “In the weeks following our move from Clunes back to Fitzroy, our new house was almost submerged by a rising flood” (1). Birch’s interrogation of regionalism will henceforth operate largely along the Clunes-Fitzroy axis. Fitzroy is an inner-city suburb of Melbourne while Clunes is a small regional town (present population: approximately 2000) about 140 kilometres north-west of Melbourne (Clunes). A flashback section of three pages or so, early on in the story, fills in the events leading up to the return to Melbourne after May’s death in Clunes. Apart from this, the story has a linear structure. The various spatial shifts of “The Red House”, both within Melbourne and between Clunes and Melbourne, are all triggered by threats against, or the pursuit of, multiple modes of well-being. The first move reflects the promise of a fresh romantic union: “It was only after he [Michael’s father] had met my mother and moved with her to my [maternal] grandmother’s house over in Carlton that he had left Fitzroy for the first time in his life” (4–5). This move from Fitzroy to Carlton is followed by a much bigger one: Carlton to Clunes. Implicated in this move are at least two modes of well-being: “The eventual move to the bush had come on the advice of a doctor at the public hospital. He said that the fresh air would help my dad recover from [his] asthma” (5); however, “My grandmother told me years later that the move did not really have all that much to do with his asthma. It was the drink” (5). The context is the husband’s assault of “his six months’ pregnant wife” with “a straight right on the end of her nose” (5). The decision to move to Clunes is made by Michael’s mother: “He fought with her so much that my mother eventually decided that she would have to move away from her mother’s house, for both their sakes. Clunes was a drastic move. But it worked, for a time […]. They appeared happy” (6). This part of “The Red House” unpacks the complexities of how well-being and (physical and mental) health are linked in a social matrix; a physical ailment (asthma) elides an addiction to alcohol, until a doctor’s discourse (validated by the authority of a medical establishment) is subverted by the subalternate voice of Michael’s grandmother. This passage also dramatises the abject scenario of a victim (Michael’s mother) attending to the well-being of her persecutor (Michael’s father) by moving to Clunes “for both their sakes” (6).Subsequently, May is born in Clunes, “a ‘special baby’. She was magical even…” (6). Indeed, “My father’s habit of explosive anger melted before May. He was truly besotted with her” (6). Just before what would have been her second birthday, May dies. “My father wanted to bring May back to Melbourne for burial, but my mother stood up to him and demanded that she be buried in the town where she was born” (6). This is the most powerful enduring connection of Michael’s family to regional Clunes. Significantly, well-being (in the sense of survival and the rebuilding of happiness after the tragic death of a daughter) is dispersed differently, through place, by mother and father, along gendered lines. While the mother wants her daughter’s birthplace and place of death to coincide, the father wants to possess his daughter, almost as if she were an object, by returning her to the city for burial. (Space restrictions preclude further exploration here of the many issues raised by May’s death, including those around the gendered nexus between well-being [happiness] and the proximity or otherwise to a child’s burial place.) After May’s death, Michael’s father’s behaviour deteriorates once more. The domestic violence continues: “It was difficult for my mother to find anything safe to say to him […]. She tried to talk about May with him several times, but he either responded with silence, or swore and yelled at her uncontrollably. He also found his way back to the pubs” (7). The decision to return to Melbourne is made by Michael’s father, against his wife’s wishes: And then one night after he had walked in from the pub he sat down at the table and just said to her, ‘Fuck all this fresh-air bullshit, we’re going back to Melbourne.’ She tried persuading him to stay, talked about his job and my school, but he would not listen. He got sick of her talking and slammed a fist into his heavy palm. ‘We’re fucken going. That’s it. We’re going.’ And that was it.She looked across the table that night and saw once again the man she had married six years earlier, the man who she had deceived herself had faded and eventually disappeared with the move away from the city. (7)In this passage, well-being (even if only imagined rather than real) is explicitly linked to place. Shortly afterwards, the family moves into the red house, where they will remain. The flashback section of the text has already sketched out the chain of events that leads to the return to the city, while also commenting on the agency Michael’s mother exercises in dealing with what, to her, is an unwelcome situation: “Mum […] had argued against coming back to the city. She sensed the looming danger in my father moving back both to his old streets and his old habits. But on realising that she had no real say in the matter, she was determined to ensure that she at least have some say in the house she was moving into” (4). Specifically, Michael’s mother turns her Fitzroy house into the regional house left behind in Clunes. Under her influence, “It wasn’t long before the inside of the house came to life and began to resemble the old place at Clunes” (11). Again: she brings a portrait of May, along with assorted baby belongings, into the Fitzroy house, keeping this secret from her husband. Thus, Michael’s mother infiltrates regional place into urban place as a strategy of (subalternate) well-being. In summary, “The Red House” unpacks well-being as an expansive category shaped by domestic violence, in a negative sense, but also more positively by the actuality or promise of happiness. It also interrogates the fine-grained links between well-being in its incarnations as medical and emotional health. At the same time, it maps the rise and fall of well-being against a human geography of regional and urban places, refusing any simplistic connection of place to well-being (more faintly, there is even the problematising presence of international place, in the character of the Italian landlord, Mr Carboni, and the reference to “the local Italian community [2]). Thus, the text’s regionalism suggests a strategic model, reliant on human intervention in the (re-)creation of place; this is most evident in Michael’s mother’s actions. “The Red House” rewards interpretation as a text of how regional place (Clunes) is re-made in urban place (Fitzroy) through the rehabilitation of a house in the interests of well-being. Well-Being and Domestic Violence across Places It is hard to imagine a greater threat to the well-being of women and children than domestic violence. This makes it all the more surprising that “The Red House” is one of relatively few texts (to the author’s knowledge) to offer a detailed outline of the territory of well-being, in its many forms stretching from the health-based to the emotional, while also including a direct and unflinching consideration of domestic violence. (One cognate text is Kathryn Heyman’s novel The Breaking, which merges medical disability and domestic violence within a broader consideration of regional well-being.) Even more unusual is the way Birch’s story of well-being and domestic violence is mapped in relation to regional and non-regional places. “The Red House” is rare and valuable for its triangulation of well-being, domestic violence, and place; above all, in its refusal to resort to any comforting notion that regional places have essential qualities that make them necessarily better for well-being than the experience of cities. This is perhaps the meaning of the colour of the red house, a colour Michael’s father hates. According to a local know-all, Emu Bailey, the red was originally a form of protest by Ettie Rogers, “‘some sort of communist’” (10). “‘Most everyone around here back then was DLP [Democratic Labour Party]. Still is, some of them. Ettie wasn’t in agreement with the others in the street, so she let them know all about it. Redone it every summer too, the same colour, red’” (10). When Michael’s mother responds to her husband’s injunction to re-paint the house “‘any colour but that fucken red’” (13) by preparing to re-paint it, subversively, “a deep red splash of colour” (19) it is not difficult to discern a silent protest, passed down from woman to woman, against the domestic violence suffered by Michael and his mother. Indeed, Birch comes very close to describing the red of the house as blood-like, labelling it “a rich congealed red” (2). “Congealed” is often used to describe blood. In this way, through a colour that evokes the body, a house becomes a visible and metaphorical protest against the bodily violence (but also emotional and mental torment) that is domestic violence. As Meg Mundell argues, “the body is integral to how literary sense of place is produced” (8). This bodily, coloured protest folds back into the special sort of place the Fitzroy home becomes. If Michael’s mother cannot keep living in Clunes, she can at least paint her city house red. Perhaps attesting to the success of this female protest, there is, towards the end of “The Red House”, a fascinating moment when, as if influenced by the domestic circumstances of transplanted place (from regional Clunes) created by Michael’s mother, domestic violence threatens, but is thwarted. Michael’s mother has just told her husband that she is going to have another baby: “He spun around and moved towards her. I thought that maybe he was going to hit her. But he didn’t. He stopped in front of her. They were toe to toe” (17). Place and (pregnant) body, in an intensified combination (or even, to riff on Spivak’s terminology, as an “infrastructure”), allow the subaltern to “speak” against her oppression. Conclusion: Re-Defining Regionalism through the Literary Creative Arts Tony Birch’s “The Red House” re-creates the regional as something other than a pre-determined place. Regionalism is “activated,” in a strategic mode, within the flux of the urban and the regional. This is particularly evident in the actions of Michael’s mother. She preserves her well-being (located in Clunes, as it were, where her daughter is buried) even after she is forced by her husband to return to Melbourne (the place she left to escape from his domestic violence). The picture of May acts as a talisman of well-being (aptly, given Clunes is described by Michael as “a town where old superstitions held sway over logic” [6]), which Michael’s mother smuggles from regional Clunes into her Melbourne house. “The Red House” is thus a vital literary rejoinder to the conceptualisation of well-being, and regional areas employed by government bodies and commercial entities, which instrumentalizes a binary opposition of the regional/non-regional. By extension, it contests the naïve linkage of regional place to well-being through a nuanced investigation into the complex links between place (regional, urban, even international) and multi-faceted well-being. Birch’s story is a valuable, fine-grained creative analysis of well-being (extending from happiness, comfort and security through to what might be called the “ill-being” of domestic violence), which is matched to an equally fine-grained engagement with multiple modalities of place. It challenges the reader to creatively re-think how regionalism and well-being might align. References Australia Council for the Arts. “Living Culture: First Nations Arts Participation and Wellbeing.” Sydney: Australia Council for the Arts, 2017. 10 Mar. 2019 <https://www.australiacouncil.gov.au/research/living-culture/>.———. “The Arts in Regional Australia: A Research Summary.” Sydney: Australia Council for the Arts, 2017. 10 Mar. 2019 <https://www.australiacouncil.gov.au/research/regional-arts-summary/>.Birch, Tony. “The Red House.” Shadowboxing. Melbourne: Scribe, 2006. 1–19. Clunes, Victoria. Wikipedia. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clunes,_Victoria>.Drummond, Rozalind, Jondi Keane, and Patrick West. “Zones of Practice: Embodiment and Creative Arts Research.” M/C Journal 15.4 (2012). 1 Mar. 2019 <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/index.php/mcjournal/article/view/528>.Elg, Hayley. “New Wellness Festival for Daylesford.” The Advocate 22 Jan. 2018. 1 Mar. 2019 <https://www.hepburnadvocate.com.au/story/5182322/the-live-love-life-festival-is-coming-to-daylesford-this-november/>.Heyman, Kathryn. “When I First Wrote about Domestic Violence, No One Talked about It. Now the Shame has Lifted.” The Guardian. 21 May 2017. 10 Mar. 2019 <https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/may/21/when-i-first-wrote-about-domestic-violence-no-one-talked-about-it-now-the-shame-has-lifted>.Lahiri, Bulan. “In Conversation: Speaking to Spivak.” The Hindu 5 Feb. 2011. 1 Mar. 2019 <https://www.thehindu.com/books/In-Conversation-Speaking-to-Spivak/article15130635.ece>.Mundell, Meg. “Crafting ‘Literary Sense of Place’: The Generative Work of Literary Place-Making.” JASAL: Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature 18.1 (2018): 1–17. 10 Mar. 2019 <https://openjournals.library.sydney.edu.au/index.php/JASAL/article/view/12375>.Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader. New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993: 66–111. Warren, Brad, and Patrick West. “From Ecological Creativity to an Ecology of Well-Being: ‘Flows & Catchments’ as a Case Study of NVivo.” Landscapes: The Journal of the International Centre for Landscape and Language 5.2 (2013): 1–15. 1 Mar. 2019 <https://ro.ecu.edu.au/landscapes/vol5/iss2/21/>.Woodward, Margaret, Craig Bremner, and Anthony Cahalan. “Defining the Geography of Creativity in a Regional Australian University.” Proceedings of the 2012 Australian Council of University Art and Design Schools (ACUADS) Conference: Region and Isolation: The Changing Function of Art & Design Education within Diasporic Cultures and Borderless Communities. Australian Council of University Art and Design Schools (ACUADS) Conference 2012. Perth: Australian Council of University Art and Design Schools (ACUADS), 2012: 1–13. 1 Mar. 2019 <https://acuads.com.au/conference/article/defining-the-geography-of-creativity-in-a-regional-australian-university/>.

“After the fall of formal beauty, the sublime was the only aesthetic idea left to modernism” (Adorno 1997: 197). Positioning at its core the category of the sublime, the modernist aesthetic famously engenders a problematic relationship between music – characterised as an autonomous, self‑relating agent of nonrepresentational negativity pursuing on its own terms a powerful critique of the Western metaphysic of presence – and its embeddedness in cultural contexts. At its most radical, like in Lyotard’s aesthetic, music’s ‘immaterial matter’ becomes a traumatic, ‘in‑human’ Otherness, a sublime, otherworldly sound-event, “which is not addressed […and] does not address” (Lyotard 1991a: 142). The musicologist Susan McClary recently highlighted how in the last few decades a new generation of composers has arisen, which by still drawing on the modernist tradition nonetheless engages more directly with signification and the cultural inscription of music. On this basis McClary calls for rehabilitating the allegedly feminine category of the beautiful, thus relocating music’s essence within the anthropological boundaries of pleasure and opening it for cultural diversity and contextuality. Yet, is the beautiful the more apt category for aesthetically framing this artistic development? As Catherine Belsey has pointed out, the specific twist at the core of Žižek’s philosophy consists in its conflating Lacan’s psychoanalytical theory of sublimation with Kant’s concept of the sublime (Belsey 2005: 141). Žižek’s sublime object thus intermingles not only pleasure and pain but also the absolute negativity of the Lacanian Real and the positive features of its cultural inscription. In my paper I explore the potential this theoretical frame offers for reading these recent artistic developments neither in terms of a domesticated modernism nor as a return to the aesthetic category of beauty as a culturally embedded fit between form and content. Instead, I will propose that we read them as the exploration of a specific, twisted space at the crossroad of the ‘meaningful’ positivity of culture and that ‘sublime’ negativity that the modernist aesthetic sees as the nonrepresentational essence of music.

The contemporary video game market is as recognisable for its brands as it is for the characters that populate their game worlds, from franchise-leading characters like Garrus Vakarian (Mass Effect original trilogy), Princess Zelda (The Legend of Zelda franchise) and Cortana (HALO franchise) to more recent game icons like Miles Morales (Marvel's Spiderman game franchise) and Judy Alvarez (Cyberpunk 2077). Interactions with these casts of characters enhance the richness of games and their playable worlds, giving a sense of weight and meaning to player actions, emphasising thematic interests, and in some cases acting as buffers to (or indeed hindering) different aspects of gameplay itself. As Jordan Erica Webber writes in her essay The Road to Journey, “videogames are often examined through the lens of what you do and what you feel” (14). For many games, the design of interactions between the player and other beings in the world—whether they be intrinsic to the world (non-playable characters or NPCs) or other live players—is a bridging aspect between what you do and how you feel and is thus central to the communication of more cohesive and focussed work. This essay will discuss two examples of game design techniques present in Transistor by Supergiant Games and Journey by thatgamecompany. It will consider how the design of “playful” interactions between the player and other characters in the game world (both non-player characters and other player characters) can be used as a tool to align a player’s experience of “intent” with the thematic objectives of the designer. These games have been selected as both utilise design techniques that allow for this “playful” interaction (observed in this essay as interactions that do not contribute to “progression” in the traditional sense). By looking closely at specific aspects of game design, it aims to develop an accessible examination by “focusing on the dimensions of involvement the specific game or genre of games affords” (Calleja, 222). The discussion defines “intent”, in the context of game design, through a synthesis of definitions from two works by game designers. The first being Greg Costikyan’s definition of game structure from his 2002 presentation I Have No Words and I Must Design, a paper subsequently referenced by numerous prominent game scholars including Ian Bogost and Jesper Juul. The second is Steven Swink’s definition of intent in relation to video games, from his 2009 book Game Feel: A Game Designer’s Guide to Virtual Sensation—an extensive reference text of game design concepts, with a particular focus on the concept of “game feel” (the meta-sensation of involvement with a game). This exploratory essay suggests that examining these small but impactful design techniques, through the lens of their contribution to overall intent, is a useful tool for undertaking more holistic studies of how games are affective. I align with the argument that understanding “playfulness” in game design is useful in understanding user engagement with other digital communication platforms. In particular, platforms where the presentation of user identity is relational or performative to others—a case explored in Playful Identities: The Ludification of Digital Media Cultures (Frissen et al.). Intent in Game Design Intent, in game design, is generated by a complex, interacting economy, ecosystem, or “game structure” (Costikyan 21) of thematic ideas and gameplay functions that do not dictate outcomes, but rather guide behaviour and progression forward through the need to achieve a goal (Costikyan 21). Intent brings player goals in line with the intrinsic goals of the player character, and the thematic or experiential goals the game designer wants to convey through the act of play. Intent makes it easier to invest in the game’s narrative and spatial context—its role is to “motivate action in game worlds” (Swink 67). Steven Swink writes that it is the role of game design to create compelling intent from “a seemingly arbitrary collection of abstracted variables” (Swink 67). He continues that whether it is good or bad is a broader question, but that “most games do have in-born intentionality, and it is the game designer who creates it” (67). This echoes Costikyan’s point: game designers “must consciously set out to decide what kind of experiences [they] want to impart to players and create systems that enable those experiences” (20). Swink uses Mario 64 as one simple example of intent creation through design—if collecting 100 coins did not restore Mario’s health, players would simply not collect them. Not having health restricts the ability for players to fulfil the overarching intent of progression by defeating the game’s main villain (what he calls the “explicit” intent), and collecting coins also provides a degree of interactivity that makes the exploration itself feel more fulfilling (the “implicit” intent). This motivation for action may be functional, or it may be more experiential—how a designer shapes variables into particular forms to encourage the particular kinds of experience that they want a player to have during the act of play (such as in Journey, explored in the latter part of this essay). This essay is interested in the design of this compelling thematic intent—and the role “playful” interactions have as a variable that contributes to aligning player behaviours and experience to the thematic or experiential goals of game design. “Playful” Communication and Storytelling in Transistor Transistor is the second release from independent studio Supergiant Games and has received over 100 industry accolades (Kasavin) since its publication in 2014. Transistor incorporates the suspense of turn-based gameplay into an action role-playing game—neatly mirroring a style of gameplay to the suspense of its cyber noir narrative. The game is also distinctly “artful”. The city of Cloudbank, where the game takes place, is a cyberpunk landscape richly inspired by art nouveau and art deco style. There is some indication that Cloudbank may not be a real city at all—but rather a virtual city, with an abundance of computer-related motifs and player combat abilities named as if they were programming functions. At release, Transistor was broadly recognised in the industry press for its strength in “combining its visuals and music to powerfully convey narrative information and tone” (Petit). If intent in games in part stems from a unification of goals between the player and design, the interactivity between player input and the actions of the player character furthers this sense of “togetherness”. This articulation and unity of hand movement and visual response in games are what Kirkpatrick identified in his 2011 work Aesthetic Theory and the Video Game as the point in which videogames “broke from the visual entertainment culture of the last two centuries” (Kirkpatrick 88). The player character mediates access to the space by which all other game information is given context and allows the player a degree of self-expression that is unique to games. Swink describes it as an amplified impression of virtual proprioception, that is “an impression of space created by illusory means but is experienced as real by the senses … the effects of motion, sound, visuals, and responsive effects combine” (Swink 28). If we extend Swink’s point about creating an “impression of space” to also include an “impression of purpose”, we can utilise this observation to further understand how the design of the playful interactions in Transistor work to develop and align the player’s experience of intent with the overarching narrative goal (or, “explicit” intent) of the game—to tell a compelling “science-fiction love story in a cyberpunk setting, without the gritty backdrop” (Wallace) through the medium of gameplay. At the centre of any “love story” is the dynamic of a relationship, and in Transistor playful interaction is a means for conveying the significance and complexity of those dynamics in relation to the central characters. Transistor’s exposition asks players to figure out what happened to Red and her partner, The Boxer (a name he is identified by in the game files), while progressing through various battles with an entity called The Process to uncover more information. Transistor commences with player-character, Red, standing next to the body of The Boxer, whose consciousness and voice have been uploaded into the same device that impaled him: the story’s eponymous Transistor. The event that resulted in this strange circumstance has also caused Red to lose her ability to speak, though she is still able to hum. The first action that the player must complete to progress the game is to pull the Transistor from The Boxer’s body. From this point The Boxer, speaking through the Transistor, becomes the sole narrator of the game. The Boxer’s first lines of dialogue are responsive to player action, and position Red’s character in the world: ‘Together again. Heh, sort of …’ [Upon walking towards an exit a unit of The Process will appear] ‘Yikes … found us already. They want you back I bet. Well so do I.’ [Upon defeating The Process] ‘Unmarked alley, east of the bay. I think I know where we are.’ (Supergiant Games) This brief exchange and feedback to player movement, in medias res, limits the player’s possible points of attention and establishes The Boxer’s voice and “character” as the reference point for interacting with the game world. Actions, the surrounding world, and gameplay objectives are given meaning and context by being part of a system of intent derived from the significance of his character to the player character (Red) as both a companion and information-giver. The player may not necessarily feel what an individual in Red’s position would feel, but their expository position is aligned with Red’s narrative, and their scope of interaction with the world is intrinsically tied to the “explicit” intent of finding out what happened to The Boxer. Transistor continues to establish a loop between Red’s exploration of the world and the dialogue and narration of The Boxer. In the context of gameplay, player movement functions as the other half of a conversation and brings the player’s control of Red closer to how Red herself (who cannot communicate vocally) might converse with The Boxer gesturally. The Boxer’s conversational narration is scripted to occur as Red moves through specific parts of the world and achieves certain objectives. Significantly, The Boxer will also speak to Red in response to specific behaviours that only occur should the player choose to do them and that don’t necessarily contribute to “progressing” the game in the mechanical sense. There are multiple points where this is possible, but I will draw on two examples to demonstrate. Firstly, The Boxer will have specific reactions to a player who stands idle for too long, or who performs a repetitive action. Jumping repeatedly from platform to platform will trigger several variations of playful and exasperated dialogue from The Boxer (who has, at this point, no choice but to be carried around by Red): [Upon repeatedly jumping between the same platform] ‘Round and round.’ ‘Okay that’s enough.’ ‘I hate you.’ (Supergiant Games) The second is when Red “hums” (an activity initiated by the player by holding down R1 on a PlayStation console). At certain points of play, when making Red hum, The Boxer will chime in and sing the lyrics to the song she is humming. This musical harmonisation helps to articulate a particular kind of intimacy and flow between Red and The Boxer —accentuated by Red’s animation when humming: she is bathed in golden light and holds the Transistor close, swaying side to side, as if embracing or dancing with a lover. This is a playful, exploratory interaction. It technically doesn’t serve any “purpose” in terms of finishing the game—but is an action a player might perform while exploring controls and possibilities of interactivity, in turn exploring what it is to “be” Red in relation to the game world, the story being conveyed, and The Boxer. It delivers a more emotional and affective thematic idea about a relationship that nonetheless relies just as much on mechanical input and output as engaging in movement, exploration, and combat in the game world. It’s a mechanic that provides texture to the experience of inhabiting Red’s identity during play, showcasing a more individual complexity to her story, driven by interactivity. In techniques like this, Transistor directly unifies its method for information-giving, interactivity, progression, and theme into a single design language. To once again nod to Swink and Costikyan, it is a complex, interacting economy or ecosystem of thematic ideas and gameplay structures that guide behaviour and progression forward through the need to achieve a single goal (Costikyan 21), guiding the player towards the game’s “explicit” intent of investment in its “science fiction love story”. Companionship and Collaboration in Journey Journey is regularly praised in many circles of game review and discussion for its powerful, pared-back story conveyed through its exceptional game design. It has won a wide array of awards, including multiple British Academy Games Awards and Game Developer’s Choice Awards, and has been featured in highly regarded international galleries such as the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. Its director, Jenova Chen, articulated that the goal of the game (and thus, in the context of this essay, the intent) was “to create a game where people who interact with each other in an online community can connect at an emotional level, regardless of their gender, age, ethnicity, and social status” (Webber 14). In Journey, the player controls a small robed figure moving through a vast desert—the only choices for movement are to slide gracefully through the sand or to jump into the air by pressing the X button (on a PlayStation console), and gracefully float down to the ground. You cannot attack anything or defend yourself from the elements or hostile beings. Each player will “periodically find another individual in the landscape” (Isbister 121) of similar design to the player and can only communicate with them by experimenting with simple movements, and via short chirping noises. As the landscape itself is vast and unknown, it is what one player referred to as a sense of “reliance on one another” that makes the game so captivating (Isbister 12). Much like The Boxer in Transistor, the other figure in Journey stands out as a reference point and imbues a sense of collaboration and connection that makes the goal to reach the pinprick of light in the distance more meaningful. It is only after the player has finished the game that the screen reveals the other individual is a real person, another player, by displaying their gamer tag. One player, playing the game in 2017 (several years after its original release in 2012), wrote: I went through most of the game by myself, and when I first met my companion, it was right as I walked into the gate transitioning to the snow area. And I was SO happy that there was someone else in this desolate place. I felt like it added so much warmth to the game, so much added value. The companion and I stuck together 100% of the way. When one of us would fall the slightest bit behind, the other would wait for them. I remember saying out loud how I thought that my companion was the best programmed AI that I had ever seen. In the way that he waited for me to catch up, it almost seemed like he thanked me for waiting for him … We were always side-by-side which I was doing to the "AI" for "cinematic-effect". From when I first met him up to the very very end, we were side-by-side. (Peace_maybenot) Other players indicate a similar bond even when their companion is perhaps less competent: I thought my traveller was a crap AI. He kept getting launched by the flying things and was crap at staying behind cover … But I stuck with him because I was like, this is my buddy in the game. Same thing, we were communicating the whole time and I stuck with him. I finish and I see a gamer tag and my mind was blown. That was awesome. (kerode4791) Although there is a definite object of difference in that Transistor is narrated and single-player while Journey is not, there are some defined correlations between the way Supergiant Games and thatgamecompany encourage players to feel a sense of investment and intent aligned with another individual within the game to further thematic intent. Interactive mechanics are designed to allow players a means of playful and gestural communication as an extension of their kinetic interaction with the game; travellers in Journey can chirp and call out to other players—not always for an intrinsic goal but often to express joy, or just to experience and sense of connectivity or emotional warmth. In Transistor, the ability to hum and hear The Boxer’s harmony, and the animation of Red holding the Transistor close as she does so, implying a sense of protectiveness and affection, says more in the context of “play” than a literal declaration of love between the two characters. Graeme Kirkpatrick uses dance as a suitable metaphor for this kind of experience in games, in that both are characterised by a certainty that communication has occurred despite the “eschewal of overt linguistic elements and discursive meanings” (120). There is also a sense of finite temporality in these moments. Unlike scripted actions, or words on a page, they occur within a moment of being that largely belongs to the player and their actions alone. Kirkpatrick describes it as “an inherent ephemerality about this vanishing and that this very transience is somehow essential” (120). This imbuing of a sense of time is important because it implies that even if one were to play the game again, repeating the interaction is impossible. The communication of narrative within these games is not a static form, but an experience that hangs unique at that moment and space of play. Thatgamecompany discussed in their 2017 interviews with Webber, published as part of her essay for the Victoria & Albert’s Video Games: Design/Play/Disrupt exhibition, how by creating and restricting the kind of playful interaction available to players within the world, they could encourage the kind of emotional, collaborative, and thoughtful intent they desired to portray (Webber 14). They articulate how in the development process they prioritised giving the player a variety of responses for even the smallest of actions and how that positive feedback, in turn, encourages play and prevented players from being “bored” (Webber 22). Meanwhile, the team reduced responsiveness for interactions they didn’t want to encourage. Chen describes the approach as “maximising feedback for things you want and minimising it for things you don’t want” (Webber 27). In her essay, Webber writes that Chen describes “a person who enters a virtual world, leaving behind the value system they’ve learned from real life, as like a baby banging their spoon to get attention” (27): initially players could push each other, and when one baby [player] pushed the other baby [player] off the cliff that person died. So, when we tested the gameplay, even our own developers preferred killing each other because of the amount of feedback they would get, whether it’s visual feedback, audio feedback, or social feedback from the players in the room. For quite a while I was disappointed at our own developers’ ethics, but I was able to talk to a child psychologist and she was able to clarify why these people are doing what they are doing. She said, ‘If you want to train a baby not to knock the spoon, you should minimise the feedback. Either just leave them alone, and after a while they’re bored and stop knocking, or give them a spoon that does not make a sound. (27) The developers then made it impossible for players to kill, steal resources from, or even speak to each other. Players were encouraged to stay close to each other using high-feedback action and responsiveness for doing so (Webber 27). By using feedback design techniques to encourage players to behave a certain way to other beings in the world—both by providing and restricting playful interactivity—thatgamecompany encourage a resonance between players and the overarching design intent of the project. Chen’s observations about the behaviour of his team while playing different iterations of the game also support the argument (acknowledged in different perspectives by various scholarship, including Costikyan and Bogost) that in the act of gameplay, real-life personal ethics are to a degree re-prioritised by the interactivity and context of that interactivity in the game world. Intent and the “Actualities of (Game) Existence” Continuing and evolving explorations of “intent” (and other parallel terms) in games through interaction design is of interest for scholars of game studies; it also is an important endeavour when considering influential relationships between games and other digital mediums where user identity is performative or relational to others. This influence was examined from several perspectives in the aforementioned collection Playful Identities: The Ludification of Digital Media Cultures, which also examined “the process of ludification that seems to penetrate every cultural domain” of modern life, including leisure time, work, education, politics, and even warfare (Frissen et al. 9). Such studies affirm the “complex relationship between play, media, and identity in contemporary culture” and are motivated “not only by the dominant role that digital media plays in our present culture but also by the intuition that ‘“play is central … to media experience” (Frissen et al. 10). Undertaking close examinations of specific “playful” design techniques in video games, and how they may factor into the development of intent, can help to develop nuanced lines of questioning about how we engage with “playfulness” in other digital communication platforms in an accessible, comparative way. We continue to exist in a world where “ludification is penetrating the cultural domain”. In the first few months of the global COVID-19 pandemic, Nintendo released Animal Crossing: New Horizons. With an almost global population in lockdown, Animal Crossing became host to professional meetings (Espiritu), weddings (Garst), and significantly, a media channel for brands to promote content and products (Deighton). TikTok, panoramically, is a platform where “playful” user trends— dances, responding to videos, the “Tell Me … Without Telling Me” challenge—occur in the context of an extremely complex algorithm, that while automated, is created by people—and is thus unavoidably embedded with bias (Dias et al.; Noble). This is not to say that game design techniques and broader “playful” design techniques in other digital communication platforms are interchangeable by any measure, or that intent in a game design sense and intent or bias in a commercial sense should be examined through the same lens. Rather that there is a useful, interdisciplinary resource of knowledge that can further illuminate questions we might ask about this state of “ludification” in both the academic and public spheres. We might ask, for example, what would the implications be of introducing an intent design methodology similar to Journey, but using it for commercial gain? Or social activism? Has it already happened? There is a quotation from Nathan Jurgensen’s 2016 essay Fear of Screens (published in The New Inquiry) that often comes to my mind when thinking about interaction design in video games in this way. In his response to Sherry Turkle’s book, Reclaiming Conversation, Jurgensen writes: each time we say “IRL,” “face-to-face,” or “in person” to mean connection without screens, we frame what is “real” or who is a person in terms of their geographic proximity rather than other aspects of closeness — variables like attention, empathy, affect, erotics, all of which can be experienced at a distance. We should not conceptually preclude or discount all the ways intimacy, passion, love, joy, pleasure, closeness, pain, suffering, evil and all the visceral actualities of existence pass through the screen. “Face to face” should mean more than breathing the same air. (Jurgensen) While Jurgensen is not talking about communication in games specifically, there are comparisons to be drawn between his “variables” and “visceral actualities of existence” as the drivers of social meaning-making, and the methodology of games communicating intent and purpose through Swink’s “seemingly arbitrary collection of abstracted variables” (67). When players interact with other characters in a game world (whether they be NPCs or other players), they are inhabiting a shared virtual space, and how designers articulate and present the variables of “closeness”, as Jurgensen defines it, can shape player alignment with the overarching design intent. These design techniques take the place of Jurgensen’s “visceral actualities of existence”. While they may not intrinsically share an overarching purpose, their experiential qualities have the ability to align ethics, priorities, and values between individuals. Interactivity means game design has the potential to facilitate a particular kind of engagement for the player (as demonstrated in Journey) or give opportunities for players to explore a sense of what an emotion might feel like by aligning it with progression or playful activity (as discussed in relation to Transistor). Players may not “feel” exactly what their player-characters do, or care for other characters in the world in the same way a game might encourage them to, but through thoughtful intent design, something of recognition or unity of belief might pass through the screen. References Bogost, Ian. Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Video Games. MIT P, 2007. Calleja, Gordon. “Ludic Identities and the Magic Circle.” Playful Identities: The Ludification of Digital Media Cultures. Eds. Valerie Frissen et al. Amsterdam UP, 2015. 211–224. Costikyan, Greg. “I Have No Words & I Must Design: Toward a Critical Vocabulary for Games.” Computer Games and Digital Cultures Conference Proceedings 2002. Ed. Frans Mäyrä. Tampere UP. 9-33. Dias, Avani, et al. “The TikTok Spiral.” ABC News, 26 July 2021. <https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-07-26/tiktok-algorithm-dangerous-eating-disorder-content-censorship/100277134>. Deighton, Katie. “Animal Crossing Is Emerging as a Media Channel for Brands in Lockdown.” The Drum, 21 Apr. 2020. <https://www.thedrum.com/news/2020/04/21/animal-crossing-emerging-media-channel-brands-lockdown>. Espiritu, Abby. “Japanese Company Attempts to Work Remotely in Animal Crossing: New Horizons.” The Gamer, 29 Mar. 2020. <https://www.thegamer.com/animal-crossing-new-horizons-work-remotely/>. Frissen, Valerie, et al., eds. Playful Identities: The Ludification of Digital Media Cultures. Amsterdam UP, 2015. Garst, Aron. “The Pandemic Canceled Their Wedding. So They Held It in Animal Crossing.” The Washington Post, 2 Apr. 2020. <https://www.washingtonpost.com/video-games/2020/04/02/animal-crossing-wedding-coronavirus/>. Isbister, Katherine. How Games Move Us: Emotion by Design. MIT P, 2016. Journey. thatgamecompany. 2012. Jurgensen, Nathan. “Fear of Screens.” The New Inquiry, 25 Jan. 2016. <https://thenewinquiry.com/fear-of-screens/>. Kasavin, Greg. “Transistor Earns More than 100+ Industry Accolades, Sells More than 600k Copies.” Supergiant Games, 8 Jan. 2015. <https://www.supergiantgames.com/blog/transistor-earns60-industry-accolades-sells-more-than-600k-copies/>. kerode4791. "Wanted to Share My First Experience with the Game, It Was That Awesome.”Reddit, 22 Mar. 2017. <https://www.reddit.com/r/JourneyPS3/comments/60u0am/wanted_to_share_my_f rst_experience_with_the_game/>. Kirkpatrick, Graeme. Aesthetic Theory and the Video Game. Manchester UP, 2011. Noble, Safiya Umoja. Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism. New York UP, 2018. peace_maybenot. "Wanted to Share My First Experience with the Game, It Was that Awesome” Reddit, 22 Mar. 2017. <https://www.reddit.com/r/JourneyPS3/comments/60u0am/wanted_to_share_my_f rst_experience_with_the_game/>. Petit, Carolyn. “Ghosts in the Machine." Gamespot, 20 May 2014. <https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/transistor-review/1900-6415763/>. Swink, Steve. Game Feel: A Game Designer’s Guide to Virtual Sensation. Amsterdam: Morgan Kaufmann Publishers/Elsevier, 2009. Transistor. Supergiant Games. 2014. Wallace, Kimberley. “The Story behind Supergiant Games’ Transistor.” Gameinformer, 20 May 2021. <https://www.gameinformer.com/2021/05/20/the-story-behind-supergiant-games-transistor>. Webber, Jordan Erica. “The Road to Journey.” Videogames: Design/Play/Disrupt. Eds. Marie Foulston and Kristian Volsing. V&A Publishing, 2018. 14–31.

Jessica craned her head to take in the imposing, stone building, then lowered her gaze to the gold-plated sign at the base of the steps. “Institute of Methodology”, it read. Inside the heavy iron doors, a woman sat at a desk, her face devoid of expression. “Subject area?” asked the woman. “Uhmm, feminism ... and fiction, I think.” “Turn right.” “Do you have a map?” “No.” “How am I meant to find things?” “Each has their own method; it’s not up to us to prescribe that.” Jessica sighed, readjusted her handbag and turned right. A corridor stretched out before her. She set off, her stiletto boots echoing on the hard wooden floor. The first door she arrived at had the words “Deleuze and Guattari” positioned squarely in the middle. She hesitated, then turned the doorknob. The room was white and empty. A male voice issued from somewhere but she couldn’t tell the direction from which it came. It droned on, with some inflection, but there was no way of knowing where the sentences started and finished. She picked out a few words: a thousand plateaus, becoming, burrowing, but couldn’t piece them into anything meaningful. She backed out of the room, frowning, and asked me, How am I going to learn anything if they only have these voices? I can’t lipread them. And how can I produce something factual if I haven’t heard it all? I might make stuff up. You always make things up anyway. After the barrier of disembodied sound, the silence of the corridor was soothing. Jessica always had difficulty with hearing men’s voices, for their registers were lower. Sometimes, she wondered if this was the reason she’d become interested in feminism: women were simply easier to understand. The next door was labelled “Facets of Phenomenology.” After that was “Post-It Notes and Poststructuralism”, “Interpretation of Geometric Design”, “Knitting Class” and “Cyberspace and Geography.” None of these were very helpful. She wanted something on bodies and writing. She walked on. It was, she soon realised, so terribly easy to lose one’s way. The corridors continued. She turned right most of the time, and occasionally left. Her arches began to ache. After a while she came to the conclusion that she had no idea of where she was. Immediately, a bird appeared and dived down her throat. Trapped, it thudded against her ribs. Breathe, I told her. Breathe. She put a hand out to the wall. Outside another door she heard, a voice with a distinct Australian accent. She checked the label on the door. “Fictocriticism,” it read. The door opened. The bird climbed out of her chest and flew away. A young woman stood before her, wearing bright red lipstick. “We saw your shadow beneath the door.” She pointed to Jessica’s feet. “We don’t like barriers, so come in.” The room was airy and brilliantly lit, with a high ceiling patterned with pressed metal vines and flowers. A man and a handful of women sat at a table covered with papers, bottles of wine, brie, sundried tomatoes and crackers. “Wine?” asked the woman, a bottle in her hand. “It’s from Margaret River.” “Oh yes, please.” Jessica pulled out a chair from the table. The people’s faces looked friendly. “What brings you here?” The woman with red lipstick asked, handing her a glass. “I’m trying to find a writing style that’s comfortable for me to use. I just can’t relate to abstract texts, like those by Deleuze and Guattari.” Jessica eyed the cheese platter on the table. She was hungry. “Help yourself,” said the man. Jessica picked up the cheese knife and a cracker. “You’d like my essay, then, ‘Me and My Shadow.’” It was an older woman speaking, with soft grey hair and luminous eyes. “In it I assert that Guattari’s Molecular Revolution is distancing and, she pushed the pile of paper napkins towards Jessica, ‘totally abstract and impersonal. Though the author uses the first person (‘The distinction I am proposing’, ‘I want therefore to make it clear’), it quickly became clear to me that he had no interest whatsoever in the personal, or in concrete situations as I understand them – a specific person, a specific machine, somewhere in time and space, with something on his/her mind, real noises, smells, aches and pains” (131). Jessica thought about the first room, where Deleuze’s and Guattari’s voices had seemed to issue from nowhere. “Of course,” she said. “If my comprehension comes from reading faces and bodies, it follows that those writers who evince themselves in the text will be the ones that appeal to me.” The rest of the table was silent. “I’m deaf,” Jessica explained. “I’ve no hearing in my left ear and half in my right, but people don’t know until I tell them.” “I’d never have guessed,” said the woman with red lipstick. “I’m good at faking it,” Jessica replied wryly. “It seems to me that, if I only hear some things and make the rest up, then my writing should reflect that.” “We might be able to help you — we write about, and in the style of, fictocriticism.” Two women were talking at once. It was difficult to tell who was saying what. “But what is it?” Jessica asked. “That’s a problematic question. It resists definition, you see, for the form it takes varies according to the writer.” She glanced from one woman to the other. It was hard to keep up. They went on, “Fictocriticism might most usefully be defined as hybridised writing that moves between the poles of fiction (‘invention’/‘speculation’) and criticism (‘deduction’/‘explication’), of subjectivity (‘interiority’) and objectivity (‘exteriority’). It is writing that brings the ‘creative’ and the ‘critical’ together – not simply in the sense of placing them side by side, but in the sense of mutating both, of bringing a spotlight to bear upon the known forms in order to make them ‘say’ something else” (Kerr and Nettlebeck 3). “It began to incorporate narratives and styles that wrote against omniscience in favour of fragmentary, personal perspectives.” Concentrating on cutting and spreading her brie, Jessica couldn’t see who had said this. She looked up, trying to see who had spoken. “In addition,” said a young, slim woman, “The use of autobiographical elements in ficto-criticism that include the body and personal details … realises a subjectivity that is quite different from the controlling academic critical subject with their voice from on high” (Flavell 77). Jessica bit into her cracker. The brie was creamy, but rather too strong. She piled sundried tomatoes onto it. “It is of course, a capacious category,” the man added, “as it must be if it is inspired by the materials and situation at hand. One might urge the interested writer not to feel that their practice has to conform to one or another model, but to have the confidence that the problem characterising the situation before them will surprise them into changing their practices. Like all literature, fictocriticism experiments with ways of being in the world, with forms of subjectivity if you like” (Muecke 15). Jessica nodded, her mouth full of biscuit and brie. Oil dripped from the tomatoes down her fingers. “Yes,” it was the two women in their duet, “in fictocritical writings the ‘distance’ of the theorist/critic collides with the ‘interiority’ of the author. In other words, the identity of the author is very much at issue. This is not to say that an ‘identity’ declares itself strictly in terms of the lived experience of the individual, but it does declare itself as a politic to be viewed, reviewed, contested, and above all engaged with” (Kerr and Nettlebeck 3). “That makes sense,” Jessica thought aloud. “Everything I write is an amalgam of fact and fiction, because I hear some things and make the rest up. Deafness influences the way I process and write about the world, so it seems I can’t avoid my body when I write.” She lifted a napkin from the pile and wiped her oily fingers. “Yet, to use a language of the body, or écriture féminine, is also to run the risk of essentialism, of assuming that, for example when we write long, silky sentences, we are saying that this is how every woman would write. It’s also true that, when writing, we don’t have to be limited to our own bodies – we can go beyond them.” She paused, thinking. “It’s been said that sign language is a form of écriture féminine, for a person who signs literally writes with their hands. Where are my notes?” She ferreted through her handbag, pushing aside tubes of lip gloss and hand cream, a bus pass and mirror, and extracted some folded pieces of paper. “Here, H-Dirksen L. Bauman comments on the possibilites of écriture féminine for the disabled, writing that, The project of recognizing Deaf identity bears similarities to the feminist project of re-gaining a ‘body of one’s own’ through linguistic and literary practices. Sign, in a more graphic way, perhaps, than l’écriture féminine is a ‘writing of/on the body.’ The relation between Sign and l’écriture féminine raises questions that could have interesting implications for feminist performance. Does the antiphonocetric nature of Sign offer a means of averting these essentializing tendency of l’écriture féminine? Does the four-dimensional space of performance offer ways of deconstructing phallogocentric linear discourse? (359) “As Sign is a writing by the body, it could be argued that each body produces an original language. I think it’s this, rather than antiphonocentrism — that is, refusing to privilege speech over writing, as has been the tradition — that represents the destabilising effects of Sign.” “Here’s Jamming the Machinery.” The slim woman pushed a book towards Jessica. “It’s about contemporary Australian écriture féminine.” Jessica opened the covers and began reading: As a counter-strategy, écriture féminine, it is argued, is theoretically sourced in the bodies of women. Here, the body represents one aspect of what it ‘means’ to be a woman, but of course our bodies are infinitely variable as are our socio-historical relations and the way that we live through and make meaning of our particular bodies. Texts, however, are produced through the lived practices of being socially positioned as (among other things) women, so those effects will be inscribed in actively inventing ways for women to speak and write about ourselves as women, rather than through the narrative machinery of patriarchy (Bartlett 1-2). I agree with that, Jessica mused to herself. Even if, on paper, écriture féminine does run the risk of essentialism, it’s still a useful strategy, so long as one remains attentive to the specificity of each individual body. She looked up. The conversation was becoming loud, joyful and boisterous. It was turning into a party. Sadly, she stood. “I’d like to stay, but I have to keep thinking.” She pushed in her chair. “Thank you for your ideas.” “Goodbye and good luck!” they chorused, and replenished their wine glasses. Outside, it was getting dark. She trailed her fingers along the wall for balance. Her sight orientated her; without it, she was liable to fall over, particularly in stilettos. Seeing a movement near the ceiling, Jessica stopped and peered upwards. Dragons! she cried. Sitting in the rafters were three small, pearly white dragons, their scaly hides gleaming in the darkness. Here, she called, stretching out a hand. One dropped, swooping, and landed on her wrist, its talons gripping her arm. Ouch! It looked at her curiously with its small gold eyes, then stretched its wings proudly. Dark blue veins ran across the soft membrane. You’re not very cuddly, she told it, but you are exquisite. Tell me, are you real? For an answer, it leaned over and gently nipped her thumb, drawing blood. Its tail swished like a cat’s in a frisky mood. Stop making things up, I scolded her. This is supposed to be serious. Abruptly, the dragon sprang from her wrist, winging gracefully back to the ceiling. Jessica rubbed her arm and continued, feeling ripples of unevenly applied paint beneath her fingertips. Let me pose a question, I suggested: if a fairy godmother offered you your hearing, would you take it? Well, deafness has made me who I am— You mean, an opinionated, obnoxious, feminist thinker and writer? Yes, exactly. So perhaps I wouldn’t take it. And where would you be without silence, which has given you the space in which to think, and which has shaped you as a writer? Without silence, you wouldn’t have turned to words. Hmmm, yes. She slowed. It’s awfully dark in here now. And quiet. For deaf people, silence has often been yoked together with negative connotations – it’s a cave, a prison, a tomb. Sometimes it can feel like this, but, as you know, at other times it’s liberating. You don’t have to listen to someone yakking on their mobile phone on the bus, nor overhear your flatmate having loud sex in the room above; you can simply switch off your hearing aid and keep reading your book, or thinking your thoughts. In a somewhat similar situation, Stephen Hawking, the theoretical physicist, has said that ‘his disability has given him the advantage of having more time to think,’ although Susan Wendell points out that he is only able to do this ‘because of the help of his family, three nurses, a graduate student who travels with him to maintain his computer-communications systems’ – resources which are unavailable to many disabled people” (109). Thus although disability has been largely theorised as lack, it would seem that the contrary is the case: disability brings with it a wealth of possibility. Jessica slowed, feeling vibrations in the wall and beneath our feet. Her heartbeat quickened. Maybe it’s music. It’s not. It’s irregular. Then we heard the sound, like distant thunder. Get back against the wall, I ordered her. Seconds later a crowd of creatures ran past, rattling the floorboards. They were so black we couldn’t see them. What was that? she asked. They smelled like horses. Musky, but sharp too. Let’s get moving. And I told you to stop making things up. I didn’t make that up! she protested. Her pulse was still rapid, so I kept talking to distract her. The difficulty is to avoid referring to the disabled person as having lost something. Of course, you can lose your hearing, but you gain infinitely more in other ways – your senses of touch, taste, smell and sight are augmented. In the current climate of thinking, this is easier said than done. Lennard Davis indicates with distaste that discussions of disability stop theorists in their tracks. Disability, as it has been formulated, is a construct that is defined by lack. Rather than face this ragged imaged [of the disabled individual], the critic turns to the fluids of sexuality, the gloss of lubrication, the glossary of the body as text, the heteroglossia of the intertext, the glossolalia of the schizophrenic. But almost never the body of the differently abled (5). Theorists of disability consistently point out that, if more effort and energy were directed towards the philosophical implications of the disabled body, a wealth of new material and ideas would emerge that would shatter existing presumptions about the corporeal. 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. Jessica saw with relief that there was a large bay window at the end of a corridor, looking out onto the Institute’s grounds. She collapsed onto the bench beneath it, which was layered with cushions. The last of the sun was fading and the grass refracted a golden sheen. She unzipped her boots and swung her legs onto the bench. Leaning her head back against the wall, she remembered a day at primary school when she was eleven. She sat on the blue seat beneath the Jacaranda tree, a book open in her lap. It was lunchtime, the sun was warm and purple Jacaranda blossoms lay scattered at her feet, some squidged wetly into the cement. She looked up from the book to watch her classmates playing soccer on the field, shouting and calling. She would have joined them, except that of late she had felt awkwardness, where before she had been blithe. She, who was so used to scrambling over the delightful hardness of wool bales in the shearing shed, who ran up and down the banks of creeks and crawled into ti trees, flakes of bark sticking to her jumper, had gradually, insidiously, learnt a consciousness of her body. She was not like them. We were silent. The electric lights on the walls of the building came on, illuminating sections of the stonework. At the time, she hated being isolated, but it forced to look at the world differently. Spending so much time on her own also taught her to listen to me, her imagination, and because of that her writing flourished. There was a flutter in the hallway. The tiny dragon had returned. It braked in the air, circled, and floated gently onto her skirt. Was this your doing? She asked me suspiciously. Maybe. She held out her palm. The dragon jumped into it, squeaking, its tail whipping lazily. Jessica smiled. References Bartlett, Alison. Jamming the Machinery: Contemporary Australian Women’s Writing. Toowoomba: Association for the Study of Australian Literature, 1998. Bauman, H-Dirksen L. “Toward a Poetics of Vision, Space and the Body.” The Disability Studies Reader. Ed. Lennard J. Davis. Hoboken: Routledge, 2006. 355-366. Davis, Lennard J. Enforcing Normalcy: Disability, Deafness, and the Body. London: Verso, 1995. Flavell, Helen. Writing-Between: Australian and Canadian Ficto-Criticism. Ph.D. Thesis. Murdoch University, 2004. Gibbs, Anna. “Writing and the Flesh of Others.” Australian Feminist Studies 18 (2003): 309–319. Kerr, Heather, and Amanda Nettlebeck. “Notes Towards an Introduction.” The Space Between: Australian Women Writing Fictocriticism. Ed. Heather Kerr and Amanda Nettlebeck. Nedlands: U of Western Australia P, 1998. 1-18. Muecke, Stephen. Joe in the Andamans: And Other Fictocritical Stories. Erskineville: Local Consumption Publications, 2008. Tompkins, Jane. “Me and My Shadow.” Gender and Theory: Dialogues on Feminist Criticism. Ed. Linda Kauffman. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989. 121-139. Wendell, Susan. “Towards a Feminist Theory of Disability.” Hypatia 4 (1989): 104–124.

IntroductionThe death of Chris Cornell in the spring of 2017 shook me. As the lead singer of Soundgarden and a pioneer of early 1990s grunge music, his voice revealed an unbridled pain and joy backed up by the raw, guitar-driven rock emanating from the Seattle, Washington music scene. I remember thinking, there’s only one left, referring to Eddie Vedder, lead singer for Pearl Jam, and lone survivor of the four seminal grunge bands that rose to fame in the early 1990s whose lead singers passed away much too soon. Alice in Chains singer Layne Staley died in 2002 at the age of 35, and Nirvana front man Kurt Cobain’s death in 1994 had resonated around the globe. I thought about when Cornell and Staley said goodbye to their friend Andy Wood, lead singer of Mother Love Bone, after he overdosed on heroine in 1990. Wood’s untimely death at the age of 24, only days before his band’s debut album release, shook the close-knit Seattle music scene and remained a source of angst and inspiration for a genre of music that shaped youth culture of the 1990s.When grunge first exploded on the pop culture scene, I was a college student flailing around in pursuit of an English degree I had less passion for than I did for music. I grew up listening to The Beatles and Prince; Led Zeppelin and Miles Davis; David Bowie and Willie Nelson, along with a litany of other artists and musicians crafting the kind of meaningful music I responded to. I didn’t just listen to music, I devoured stories about the musicians, their often hedonistic lifestyles; their processes and epiphanies. The music spoke to my being in the world more than the promise of any college degree. I ran with friends who shared this love of music, often turning me on to new bands or suggesting some obscure song from the past to track down. I picked up my first guitar when John Lennon died on the eve of my eleventh birthday and have played for the past 37 years. I rely on music to relocate my sense of self. Rhythm and melody play out like characters in my life, colluding to make me feel something apart from the mundane, moving me from within. So, when I took notice of grunge music in the fall of 1991, it was love at first listen. As a pop cultural phenomenon, grunge ruptured the music and fashion industries caught off guard by its sudden commercial appeal while the media struggled to galvanize its relevance. As a subculture, grunge rallied around a set of attitudes and values that set the movement apart from mainstream (Latysheva). The grunge sound drew from the nihilism of punk and the head banging gospel of heavy metal, tinged with the swagger of 1970s FM rock running counter to the sleek production of pop radio and hair metal bands. Grunge artists wrote emotionally-laden songs that spoke to a particular generation of youth who identified with lyrics about isolation, anger, and death. Grunge set off new fashion trends in favor of dressing down and sporting the latest in second-hand, thrift store apparel, ripping away the Reagan-era starched white-collared working-class aesthetic of the 1980’s corporate culture. Like their punk forbearers who railed against the status quo and the trappings of success incurred through the mass appeal of their art, Kurt Cobain, Eddie Vedder, and the rest of the grunge cohort often wrestled with the momentum of their success. Fortunes rained down and the media ordained them rock stars.This auto-ethnography revisits some of the cultural impacts of grunge during its rise to cultural relevance and includes my own reflexive interpretation positioned as a fan of grunge music. I use a particular auto-ethnographic orientation called “interpretive-humanistic autoethnography” (Manning and Adams 192) where, along with archival research (i.e. media articles and journal articles), I will use my own reflexive voice to interpret and describe my personal experiences as a fan of grunge music during its peak of popularity from 1991 up to the death of Cobain in 1994. It is a methodology that works to bridge the personal and popular where “the individual story leaves traces of at least one path through a shifting, transforming, and disappearing cultural landscape” (Neumann 183). Grunge RootsThere are many conflicting stories as to when the word “grunge” was first used to describe the sound of a particular style of alternative music seeping from the dank basements and shoddy rehearsal spaces in towns like Olympia, Aberdeen, and Seattle. Lester Bangs, the preeminent cultural writer and critic of all things punk, pop, and rock in the 1970s was said to have used the word at one time (Yarm), and several musicians lay claim to their use of the word in the 1980s. But it was a small Seattle record label founded in 1988 called Sub Pop Records that first included grunge in their marketing materials to describe “the grittiness of the music and the energy” (Yarm 195).This particular sound grew out of the Pacific Northwest blue-collar environment of logging towns, coastal fisheries, and airplane manufacturing. Seattle’s alternative music scene unfolded as a community of musicians responding to the tucked away isolation of their musty surroundings, apart from the outside world, free to submerge themselves in their own cultural milieu of rock music, rain, and youthful rebellion.Where Seattle stood as a major metropolitan city soaked in rainclouds for much of the year, I was soaking up the desert sun in a rural college town when grunge first leapt into the mainstream. Cattle ranches and cotton fields spread across the open plains of West Texas, painted with pickup trucks, starched Wrangler Jeans, and cowboy hats. This was not my world. I’d arrived the year prior from Houston, Texas, an urban sprawl of four million people, but I found the wide-open landscape a welcome change from the concrete jungle of the big city. Along with cowboy boots and western shirts came country music, and lots of it. Garth Brooks, Reba McEntire, George Straight; some of the voices that captured the lifestyle of my small rural town, twangy guitars and fiddles blaring on local radio. While popular country artists recorded for behemoth record labels like Warner Brothers and Sony, the tiny Sub Pop Records championed the grunge sound coming out of the Seattle music scene. Sub Pop became a playground for those who cared about their music and little else. The label cultivated an early following through their Sub Pop Singles Club, mailing seven-inch records to subscribers on a monthly basis promoting new releases from up-and-coming bands. Sub Pop’s stark, black and white logo showed up on records sleeves, posters, and t-shirts, reflecting a no-nonsense DIY-attitude rooted in in the production of loud guitars and heavy drums.Like the bands it represented, Sub Pop did not take itself too seriously when one of their best-selling t-shirts simply read “Loser” embracing the slacker mood of newly minted Generation X’ers born between 1961 and 1981. A July 1990 Time Magazine article described this twenty-something demographic as having “few heroes, no anthems, no style to call their own” suggesting they “possess only a hazy sense of their own identity” (Gross & Scott). As a member of this generation, I purchased and wore my “Loser” t-shirt with pride, especially in ironic response to the local cowboy way of life. I didn’t hold anything personal against the Wrangler wearing Garth Brooks fan but as a twenty-one-year-old reluctant college student, I wanted to rage with contempt for the status quo of my environment with an ambivalent snarl.Grunge in the MainstreamIn 1991, the Seattle sound exploded onto the international music scene with the release of four seminal grunge-era albums over a six-month period. The first arrived in April, Temple of the Dog, a tribute album of sorts to the late Andy Wood, led by his close friend, Soundgarden singer/songwriter, Chris Cornell. In August, Pearl Jam released their debut album, Ten, with its “surprising and refreshing, melodic restraint” (Fricke). The following month, Nirvana’s Nevermind landed in stores. Now on a major record label, DGC Records, the band had arrived “at the crossroads—scrappy garageland warriors setting their sights on a land of giants” (Robbins). October saw the release of Soundgarden’s Badmotorfinger as “a runaway train ride of stammering guitar and psycho-jungle telegraph rhythms” (Fricke). These four albums sent grunge culture into the ether with a wall of sound that would upend the music charts and galvanize a depressed concert ticket market.In fall of 1991, grunge landed like a hammer when I witnessed Nirvana’s video for “Smells Like Teen Spirit” on MTV for the first time. Sonically, the song rang like an anthem for the Gen Xers with its jangly four-chord opening guitar riff signaling the arrival of a youth-oriented call to arms, “here we are now, entertain us” (Nirvana). It was the visual power of seeing a skinny white kid with stringy hair wearing baggy jeans, a striped T-shirt and tennis shoes belting out choruses with a ferociousness typically reserved for black-clad heavy metal headbangers. Cobain’s sound and look didn’t match up. I felt discombobulated, turned sideways, as if vertigo had taken hold and I couldn’t right myself. Stopped in the middle of my tracks on that day, frozen in front of the TV, the subculture of grunge music slammed into my world while I was on my way to the fridge.Suddenly, grunge was everywhere, As Soundgarden, Nirvana, and Pearl Jam albums and performances infiltrated radio, television, and concert halls, there was no shortage of media coverage. From 1992 through 1994, grunge bands were mentioned or featured on the cover of Rolling Stone 33 times (Hillburn). That same year, The New York Times ran the article “Grunge: A Success Story” featuring a short history of the Seattle sound, along with a “lexicon of grunge speak” (Marin), a joke perpetrated by a former 25-year-old Sub Pop employee, Megan Jasper, who never imagined her list of made-up vocabulary given to a New York Times reporter would grace the front page of the style section (Yarm). In their rush to keep up with pervasiveness of grunge culture, even The New York Times fell prey to Gen Xer’s comical cynicism.The circle of friends I ran with were split down the middle between Nirvana and Pearl Jam, a preference for one over the other, as the two bands and their respective front men garnered much of the media attention. Nirvana seemed to appeal to people’s sense of authenticity, perhaps more relatable in their aloofness to mainstream popularity, backed up with Cobain’s simple-yet-brilliant song arrangements and revealing lyrics. Lawrence Grossberg suggests that music fans recognise the difference between authentic and homogenised rock, interpreting and aligning these differences with rock and roll’s association with “resistance, refusal, alienation, marginality, and so on” (62). I tended to gravitate toward Nirvana’s sound, mostly for technical reasons. Nevermind sparkled with aggressive guitar tones while capturing the power and fragility of Cobain’s voice. For many critics, the brilliance of Pearl Jam’s first album suffered from too much echo and reverb muddling the overall production value, but twenty years later they would remix and re-release Ten, correcting these production issues.Grunge FashionAs the music carved out a huge section of the charts, the grunge look was appropriated on fashion runways. When Cobain appeared on MTV wearing a ragged olive green cardigan he’d created a style simply by rummaging through his closet. Vedder and Cornell sported army boots, cargo shorts, and flannel shirts, suitable attire for the overcast climate of the Pacific Northwest, but their everyday garb turned into a fashion trend for Gen Xers that was then milked by designers. In 1992, the editor of Details magazine, James Truman, called grunge “un fashion” (Marin) as stepping out in second-hand clothes ran “counter to the shellacked, flashy aesthetic of 1980s” (Nnadi) for those who preferred “the waif-like look of put-on poverty” (Brady). But it was MTV’s relentless airing of Nirvana, Pearl Jam, and Soundgarden videos that sent Gen Xers flocking to malls and thrift-stores in search grunge-like apparel. I purchased a pair of giant, heavyweight Red Wing boots that looked like small cars on my feet, making it difficult to walk, but at least I was prepared for any terrain in all types of weather. The flannel came next; I still wear flannos. Despite its association with dark, murky musical themes, grunge kept me warm and dry.Much of grunge’s appeal to the masses was that it was not gender-specific; men and women dressed to appear unimpressed, sharing a taste for shapeless garments and muted colors without reference to stereotypical masculine or feminine styles. Cobain “allowed his own sexuality to be called into question by often wearing dresses and/or makeup on stage, in film clips, and on photo shoots, and wrote explicitly feminist songs, such as ‘Sappy’ or ‘Been a Son’” (Strong 403). I remember watching Pearl Jam’s 1992 performance on MTV Unplugged, seeing Eddie Vedder scrawl the words “Pro Choice” in black marker on his arm in support of women’s rights while his lyrics in songs like “Daughter”, “Better Man”, and “Why Go” reflected an equitable, humanistic if somewhat tragic perspective. Females and males moshed alongside one another, sharing the same spaces while experiencing and voicing their own response to grunge’s aggressive sound. Unlike the hypersexualised hair-metal bands of the 1980s whose aesthetic motifs often portrayed women as conquests or as powerless décor, the message of grunge rock avoided gender exploitation. As the ‘90s unfolded, underground feminist punk bands of the riot grrrl movement like Bikini Kill, L7, and Babes in Toyland expressed female empowerment with raging vocals and buzz-saw guitars that paved the way for Hole, Sleater-Kinney and other successful female-fronted grunge-era bands. The Decline of GrungeIn 1994, Kurt Cobain appeared on the cover of Newsweek magazine in memoriam after committing suicide in the greenhouse of his Seattle home. Mass media quickly spread the news of his passing internationally. Two days after his death, 7,000 fans gathered at Seattle Center to listen to a taped recording of Courtney Love, Cobain’s wife, a rock star in her own right, reading the suicide note he left behind.A few days after Cobain’s suicide, I found myself rolling down the highway with a carload of friends, one of my favorite Nirvana tunes, “Come As You Are” fighting through static. I fiddled with the radio to clear up the signal. The conversation turned to Cobain as we cobbled together the details of his death. I remember the chatter quieting down, Cobain’s voice fading as we gazed out the window at the empty terrain passing. In that reflective moment, I felt like I had experienced an intense, emotional relationship that came to an abrupt end. This “illusion of intimacy” (Horton and Wohl 217) between myself and Cobain elevated the loss I felt with his passing even though I had no intimate, personal ties to him. I counted this person as a friend (Giles 284) because I so closely identified with his words and music. I could not help but feel sad, even angry that he’d decided to end his life.Fueled by depression and a heroin addiction, Cobain’s death signaled an end to grunge’s collective appeal while shining a spotlight on one of the more dangerous aspects of its ethos. A 1992 Rolling Stone article mentioned that several of Seattle’s now-famous international musicians used heroin and “The feeling around town is, the drug is a disaster waiting to happen” (Azzerad). In 2002, eight years to the day of Cobain’s death, Layne Staley, lead singer of Alice In Chains, another seminal grunge outfit, was found dead of a suspected heroin overdose (Wiederhorn). When Cornell took his own life in 2017 after a long battle with depression, The Washington Post said, “The story of grunge is also one of death” (Andrews). The article included a Tweet from a grieving fan that read “The voices I grew up with: Andy Wood, Layne Staley, Chris Cornell, Kurt Cobain…only Eddie Vedder is left. Let that sink in” (@ThatEricAlper).ConclusionThe grunge movement of the early 1990s emerged out of musical friendships content to be on their own, on the outside, reflecting a sense of isolation and alienation in the music they made. As Cornell said, “We’ve always been fairly reclusive and damaged” (Foege). I felt much the same way in those days, sequestered in the desert, planting my grunge flag in the middle of country music territory, doing what I could to resist the status quo. Cobain, Cornell, Staley, and Vedder wrote about their own anxieties in a way that felt intimate and relatable, forging a bond with their fan base. Christopher Perricone suggests, “the relationship of an artist and audience is a collaborative one, a love relationship in the sense, a friendship” (200). In this way, grunge would become a shared memory among friends who rode the wave of this cultural phenomenon all the way through to its tragic consequences. But the music has survived. Along with my flannel shirts and Red Wing boots.References@ThatEricAlper (Eric Alper). “The voices I grew up with: Andy Wood, Layne Staley, Chris Cornell, Kurt Cobain…only Eddie Vedder is left. Let that sink in.” Twitter, 18 May 2017, 02:41. 15 Sep. 2018 <https://twitter.com/ThatEricAlper/status/865140400704675840?ref_src>.Andrews, Travis M. “After Chris Cornell’s Death: ‘Only Eddie Vedder Is Left. Let That Sink In.’” The Washington Post, 19 May 2017. 29 Aug. 2018 <https://www.washingtonpost.com/newsmorning-mix/wp/2017/05/19/after-chris-cornells-death-only-eddie-vedder-is-left-let-that-sink-in>.Azzerad, Michael. “Grunge City: The Seattle Scene.” Rolling Stone, 16 Apr. 1992. 20 Aug. 2018 <https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/grunge-city-the-seattle-scene-250071/>.Brady, Diane. “Kids, Clothes and Conformity: Teens Fashion and Their Back-to-School Looks.” Maclean’s, 6 Sep. 1993. Brodeur, Nicole. “Chris Cornell: Soundgarden’s Dark Knight of the Grunge-Music Scene.” Seattle Times, 18 May 2017. 20 Aug. 2018 <https://www.seattletimes.com/entertainment/music/chris-cornell-soundgardens-dark-knight-of-the-grunge-music-scene/>.Ellis, Carolyn, and Arthur P. Bochner. “Autoethnography, Personal Narrative, Reflexivity: Researcher as Subject.” Handbook of Qualitative Research. 2nd ed. Eds. Norman Denzin and Yvonna Lincoln. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2000. 733-768.Foege, Alec. “Chris Cornell: The Rolling Stone Interview.” Rolling Stone, 28 Dec. 1994. 12 Sep. 2018 <https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/chris-cornell-the-rolling-stone-interview-79108/>.Fricke, David. “Ten.” Rolling Stone, 12 Dec. 1991. 18 Sep. 2018 <https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-album-reviews/ten-251421/>.Giles, David. “Parasocial Interactions: A Review of the Literature and a Model for Future Research.” Media Psychology 4 (2002): 279-305.Giles, Jeff. “The Poet of Alientation.” Newsweek, 17 Apr. 1994, 4 Sep. 2018 <https://www.newsweek.com/poet-alienation-187124>.Gross, D.M., and S. Scott. Proceding with Caution. Time, 16 July 1990. 3 Sep. 2018 <http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,155010,00.html>.Grossberg, Lawrence. “Is There a Fan in the House? The Affective Sensibility of Fandom. The Adoring Audience” Fan Culture and Popular Media. Ed. Lisa A. Lewis. New York, NY: Routledge, 1992. 50-65.Hillburn, Robert. “The Rise and Fall of Grunge.” Los Angeles Times, 21 May 1998. 20 Aug. 2018 <http://articles.latimes.com/1998/may/31/entertainment/ca-54992>.Horton, Donald, and R. Richard Wohl. “Mass Communication and Para-Social Interactions: Observations on Intimacy at a Distance.” Psychiatry: Interpersonal and Biological Process 19 (1956): 215-229.Latysheva, T.V. “The Essential Nature and Types of the Youth Subculture Phenomenon.” Russian Education and Society 53 (2011): 73–88.Manning, Jimmie, and Tony Adams. “Popular Culture Studies and Autoethnography: An Essay on Method.” The Popular Culture Studies Journal 3.1-2 (2015): 187-222.Marin, Rick. “Grunge: A Success Story.” New York Times, 15 Nov. 1992. 12 Sep. 2018 <https://www.nytimes.com/1992/11/15/style/grunge-a-success-story.html>.Neumann, Mark. “Collecting Ourselves at the End of the Century.” Composing Ethnography: Alternative Forms of Qualitative Writing. Eds. Carolyn Ellis and Arthur P. Bochner. London: Alta Mira Press, 1996. 172-198.Nirvana. "Smells Like Teen Spirit." Nevermind, Geffen, 1991.Nnadi, Chioma. “Why Kurt Cobain Was One of the Most Influential Style Icons of Our Times.” Vogue, 8 Apr. 2014. 15 Aug. 2018 <https://www.vogue.com/article/kurt-cobain-legacy-of-grunge-in-fashion>.Perricone, Christopher. “Artist and Audience.” The Journal of Value Inquiry 24 (2012). 12 Sep. 2018 <https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/BF00149433.pdf>.Robbins, Ira. “Ten.” Rolling Stone, 12 Dec. 1991. 15 Aug. 2018 <https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-album-reviews/ten-25142>.Strong, Catherine. “Grunge, Riott Grrl and the Forgetting of Women in Popular Culture.” The Journal of Popular Culture 44.2 (2011): 398-416. Wiederhorn, Jon. “Remembering Layne Staley: The Other Great Seattle Musician to Die on April 5.” MTV, 4 June 2004. 23 Sep. 2018 <http://www.mtv.com/news/1486206/remembering-layne-staley-the-other-great-seattle-musician-to-die-on-april-5/>.Yarm, Mark. Everybody Loves Our Town: An Oral History of Grunge. Three Rivers Press, 2011.

[Editors’ note: this lyric essay was presented as the keynote address at Edith Cowan University’s CREATEC symposium on the theme Catastrophe and Creativity in November 2012, and represents excerpts from the author’s publication Threading Light: Explorations in Loss and Poetry. Regina, SK: Hagios Press, 2011. Reproduced with the author’s permission].Essay and verse and anecdote are the ways I have chosen to apprentice myself to loss, grief, faith, memory, and the stories we use to tie and untie them. Cat’s cradle, Celtic lines, bends and hitches are familiar: however, when I write about loss, I find there are knots I cannot tie or release, challenging both my imagination and my craft. Over the last decade, I have been learning that writing poetry is also the art of tying together light and dark, grief and joy, of grasping and releasing. Language is a hinge that connects us with the flesh of our experience; it is also residue, the ash of memory and imagination. (Threading Light 7) ———Greek katastrophé overturning, sudden turn, from kata down + strophe ‘turning” from strephein to turn.Loss and catastrophe catapult us into the liminal, into a threshold space. We walk between land we have known and the open sea. ———Mnemosyne, the mother of the nine Muses, the personification of memory, makes anthropologists of us all. When Hermes picked up the lyre, it was to her—to Remembrance —that he sang the first song. Without remembrance, oral or written, we have no place to begin. Stone, amulet, photograph, charm bracelet, cufflink, fish story, house, facial expression, tape recorder, verse, or the same old traveling salesman joke—we have places and means to try to store memories. Memories ground us, even as we know they are fleeting and flawed constructions that slip through our consciousness; ghosts of ghosts. One cold winter, I stayed in a guest room in my mother’s apartment complex for three days. Because she had lost her sight, I sat at the table in her overheated and stuffy kitchen with the frozen slider window and tried to describe photographs as she tried to recall names and events. I emptied out the dusty closet she’d ignored since my father left, and we talked about knitting patterns, the cost of her mother’s milk glass bowl, the old clothes she could only know by rubbing the fabric through her fingers. I climbed on a chair to reach a serving dish she wanted me to have, and we laughed hysterically when I read aloud the handwritten note inside: save for Annette, in a script not hers. It’s okay, she said; I want all this gone. To all you kids. Take everything you can. When I pop off, I don’t want any belongings. Our family had moved frequently, and my belongings always fit in a single box; as a student, in the back of a car or inside a backpack. Now, in her ninth decade, my mother wanted to return to the simplicity she, too, recalled from her days on a small farm outside a small town. On her deathbed, she insisted on having her head shaved, and frequently the nursing staff came into the room to find she had stripped off her johnny shirt and her covers. The philosopher Simone Weil said that all we possess in the world is the power to say “I” (Gravity 119).Memory is a cracked bowl, and it fills endlessly as it empties. Memory is what we create out of what we have at hand—other people’s accounts, objects, flawed stories of our own creation, second-hand tales handed down like an old watch. Annie Dillard says as a life’s work, she’d remember everything–everything against loss, and go through life like a plankton net. I prefer the image of the bowl—its capacity to feed us, the humility it suggests, its enduring shape, its rich symbolism. Its hope. To write is to fashion a bowl, perhaps, but we know, finally, the bowl cannot hold everything. (Threading Light 78–80) ———Man is the sire of sorrow, sang Joni Mitchell. Like joy, sorrow begins at birth: we are born into both. The desert fathers believed—in fact, many of certain faiths continue to believe—that penthos is mourning for lost salvation. Penthus was the last god to be given his assignment from Zeus: he was to be responsible for grieving and loss. Eros, the son of Aphrodite, was the god of love and desire. The two can be seen in concert with one another, each mirroring the other’s extreme, each demanding of us the farthest reach of our being. Nietzsche, through Zarathustra, phrased it another way: “Did you ever say Yes to one joy? O my friends, then you have also said Yes to all Woe as well. All things are chained, entwined together, all things are in love.” (Threading Light 92) ———We are that brief crack of light, that cradle rocking. We can aspire to a heaven, or a state of forgiveness; we can ask for redemption and hope for freedom from suffering for ourselves and our loved ones; we may create children or works of art in the vague hope that we will leave something behind when we go. But regardless, we know that there is a wall or a dark curtain or a void against which we direct or redirect our lives. We hide from it, we embrace it; we taunt it; we flout it. We write macabre jokes, we play hide and seek, we walk with bated breath, scream in movies, or howl in the wilderness. We despair when we learn of premature or sudden death; we are reminded daily—an avalanche, an aneurysm, a shocking diagnosis, a child’s bicycle in the intersection—that our illusions of control, that youthful sense of invincibility we have clung to, our last-ditch religious conversions, our versions of Pascal’s bargain, nothing stops the carriage from stopping for us.We are fortunate if our awareness calls forth our humanity. We learn, as Aristotle reminded us, about our capacity for fear and pity. Seeing others as vulnerable in their pain or weakness, we see our own frailties. As I read the poetry of Donne or Rumi, or verse created by the translator of Holocaust stories, Lois Olena, or the work of poet Sharon Olds as she recounts the daily horror of her youth, I can become open to pity, or—to use the more contemporary word—compassion. The philosopher Martha Nussbaum argues that works of art are not only a primary means for an individual to express her humanity through catharsis, as Aristotle claimed, but, because of the attunement to others and to the world that creation invites, the process can sow the seeds of social justice. Art grounds our grief in form; it connects us to one another and to the world. And the more we acquaint ourselves with works of art—in music, painting, theatre, literature—the more we open ourselves to complex and nuanced understandings of our human capacities for grief. Why else do we turn to a stirring poem when we are mourning? Why else do we sing? When my parents died, I came home from the library with stacks of poetry and memoirs about loss. How does your story dovetail with mine? I wanted to know. How large is this room—this country—of grief and how might I see it, feel the texture on its walls, the ice of its waters? I was in a foreign land, knew so little of its language, and wanted to be present and raw and vulnerable in its climate and geography. Writing and reading were my way not to squander my hours of pain. While it was difficult to live inside that country, it was more difficult not to. In learning to know graveyards as places of comfort and perspective, Mnemosyne’s territory with her markers of memory guarded by crow, leaf, and human footfall, with storehouses of vast and deep tapestries of stories whispered, sung, or silent, I am cultivating the practice of walking on common ground. Our losses are really our winter-enduring foliage, Rilke writes. They are place and settlement, foundation and soil, and home. (Threading Light 86–88) ———The loseability of our small and larger worlds allows us to see their gifts, their preciousness.Loseability allows us to pay attention. ———“A faith-based life, a Trappistine nun said to me, aims for transformation of the soul through compunction—not only a state of regret and remorse for our inadequacies before God, but also living inside a deeper sorrow, a yearning for a union with the divine. Compunction, according to a Christian encyclopaedia, is constructive only if it leads to repentance, reconciliation, and sanctification. Would you consider this work you are doing, the Trappistine wrote, to be a spiritual journey?Initially, I ducked her question; it was a good one. Like Neruda, I don’t know where the poetry comes from, a winter or a river. But like many poets, I feel the inadequacy of language to translate pain and beauty, the yearning for an embodied understanding of phenomena that is assensitive and soul-jolting as the contacts of eye-to-eye and skin-to-skin. While I do not worship a god, I do long for an impossible union with the world—a way to acknowledge the gift that is my life. Resonance: a search for the divine in the everyday. And more so. Writing is a full-bodied, sensory, immersive activity that asks me to give myself over to phenomena, that calls forth deep joy and deep sorrow sometimes so profound that I am gutted by my inadequacy. I am pierced, dumbstruck. Lyric language is the crayon I use, and poetry is my secular compunction...Poets—indeed, all writers—are often humbled by what we cannot do, pierced as we are by—what? I suggest mystery, impossibility, wonder, reverence, grief, desire, joy, our simple gratitude and despair. I speak of the soul and seven people rise from their chairs and leave the room, writes Mary Oliver (4). Eros and penthos working in concert. We have to sign on for the whole package, and that’s what both empties us out, and fills us up. The practice of poetry is our inadequate means of seeking the gift of tears. We cultivate awe, wonder, the exquisite pain of seeing and knowing deeply the abundant and the fleeting in our lives. Yes, it is a spiritual path. It has to do with the soul, and the sacred—our venerating the world given to us. Whether we are inside a belief system that has or does not have a god makes no difference. Seven others lean forward to listen. (Threading Light 98–100)———The capacity to give one’s attention to a sufferer is a rare thing; it is almost a miracle; it is a miracle. – Simone Weil (169)I can look at the lines and shades on the page clipped to the easel, deer tracks in the snow, or flecks of light on a summer sidewalk. Or at the moon as it moves from new to full. Or I can read the poetry of Paul Celan.Celan’s poem “Tenebrae” takes its title from high Christian services in which lighting, usually from candles, is gradually extinguished so that by the end of the service, the church is in total darkness. Considering Celan’s—Antschel’s—history as a Romanian Jew whose parents were killed in the Nazi death camps, and his subsequent years tortured by the agony of his grief, we are not surprised to learn he chose German, his mother’s language, to create his poetry: it might have been his act of defiance, his way of using shadow and light against the other. The poet’s deep grief, his profound awareness of loss, looks unflinchingly at the past, at the piles of bodies. The language has become a prism, reflecting penetrating shafts of shadow: in the shine of blood, the darkest of the dark. Enlinked, enlaced, and enamoured. We don’t always have names for the shades of sorrows and joys we live inside, but we know that each defines and depends upon the other. Inside the core shadow of grief we recognise our shared mortality, and only in that recognition—we are not alone—can hope be engendered. In the exquisite pure spot of light we associate with love and joy, we may be temporarily blinded, but if we look beyond, and we draw on what we know, we feel the presence of the shadows that have intensified what appears to us as light. Light and dark—even in what we may think are their purest state—are transitory pauses in the shape of being. Decades ago my well-meaning mother, a nurse, gave me pills to dull the pain of losing my fiancé who had shot himself; now, years later, knowing so many deaths, and more imminent, I would choose the bittersweet tenderness of being fully inside grief—awake, raw, open—feeling its walls, its every rough surface, its every degree of light and dark. It is love/loss, light/dark, a fusion that brings me home to the world. (Threading Light 100–101) ———Loss can trigger and inspire creativity, not only at the individual level but at the public level, whether we are marching in Idle No More demonstrations, re-building a shelter, or re-building a life. We use art to weep, to howl, to reach for something that matters, something that means. And sometimes it may mean that all we learn from it is that nothing lasts. And then, what? What do we do then? ———The wisdom of Epictetus, the Stoic, can offer solace, but I know it will take time to catch up with him. Nothing can be taken from us, he claims, because there is nothing to lose: what we lose—lover, friend, hope, father, dream, keys, faith, mother—has merely been returned to where it (or they) came from. We live in samsara, Zen masters remind us, inside a cycle of suffering that results from a belief in the permanence of self and of others. Our perception of reality is narrow; we must broaden it to include all phenomena, to recognise the interdependence of lives, the planet, and beyond, into galaxies. A lot for a mortal to get her head around. And yet, as so many poets have wondered, is that not where imagination is born—in the struggle and practice of listening, attending, and putting ourselves inside the now that all phenomena share? Can I imagine the rush of air under the loon that passes over my house toward the ocean every morning at dawn? The hot dust under the cracked feet of that child on the outskirts of Darwin? The gut-hauling terror of an Afghan woman whose family’s blood is being spilled? Thich Nhat Hanh says that we are only alive when we live the sufferings and the joys of others. He writes: Having seen the reality of interdependence and entered deeply into its reality, nothing can oppress you any longer. You are liberated. Sit in the lotus position, observe your breath, and ask one who has died for others. (66)Our breath is a delicate thread, and it contains multitudes. I hear an echo, yes. The practice of poetry—my own spiritual and philosophical practice, my own sackcloth and candle—has allowed me a glimpse not only into the lives of others, sentient or not, here, afar, or long dead, but it has deepened and broadened my capacity for breath. Attention to breath grounds me and forces me to attend, pulls me into my body as flesh. When I see my flesh as part of the earth, as part of all flesh, as Morris Berman claims, I come to see myself as part of something larger. (Threading Light 134–135) ———We think of loss as a dark time, and yet it opens us, deepens us.Close attention to loss—our own and others’—cultivates compassion.As artists we’re already predisposed to look and listen closely. We taste things, we touch things, we smell them. We lie on the ground like Mary Oliver looking at that grasshopper. We fill our ears with music that not everyone slows down to hear. We fall in love with ideas, with people, with places, with beauty, with tragedy, and I think we desire some kind of fusion, a deeper connection than everyday allows us. We want to BE that grasshopper, enter that devastation, to honour it. We long, I think, to be present.When we are present, even in catastrophe, we are fully alive. It seems counter-intuitive, but the more fully we engage with our losses—the harder we look, the more we soften into compassion—the more we cultivate resilience. ———Resilience consists of three features—persistence, adaptability transformability—each interacting from local to global scales. – Carl FolkeResilent people and resilient systems find meaning and purpose in loss. We set aside our own egos and we try to learn to listen and to see, to open up. Resilience is fundamentally an act of optimism. This is not the same, however, as being naïve. Optimism is the difference between “why me?” and “why not me?” Optimism is present when we are learning to think larger than ourselves. Resilience asks us to keep moving. Sometimes with loss there is a moment or two—or a month, a year, who knows?—where we, as humans, believe that we are standing still, we’re stuck, we’re in stasis. But we aren’t. Everything is always moving and everything is always in relation. What we mistake for stasis in a system is the system taking stock, transforming, doing things underneath the surface, preparing to rebuild, create, recreate. Leonard Cohen reminded us there’s a crack in everything, and that’s how the light gets in. But what we often don’t realize is that it’s we—the human race, our own possibilities, our own creativity—who are that light. We are resilient when we have agency, support, community we can draw on. When we have hope. ———FortuneFeet to carry you past acres of grapevines, awnings that opento a hall of paperbarks. A dog to circle you, look behind, point ahead. A hip that bends, allows you to slidebetween wire and wooden bars of the fence. A twinge rides with that hip, and sometimes the remnant of a fall bloomsin your right foot. Hands to grip a stick for climbing, to rest your weight when you turn to look below. On your left hand,a story: others see it as a scar. On the other, a newer tale; a bone-white lump. Below, mist disappears; a nichein the world opens to its long green history. Hills furrow into their dark harbours. Horses, snatches of inhale and whiffle.Mutterings of men, a cow’s long bellow, soft thud of feet along the hill. You turn at the sound.The dog swallows a cry. Stays; shakes until the noise recedes. After a time, she walks on three legs,tests the paw of the fourth in the dust. You may never know how she was wounded. She remembers your bodyby scent, voice, perhaps the taste of contraband food at the door of the house. Story of human and dog, you begin—but the wordyour fingers make is god. What last year was her silken newborn fur is now sunbleached, basket dry. Feet, hips, hands, paws, lapwings,mockingbirds, quickening, longing: how eucalypts reach to give shade, and tiny tight grapes cling to vines that align on a slope as smoothlyas the moon follows you, as intention always leans toward good. To know bones of the earth are as true as a point of light: tendernesswhere you bend and press can whisper grace, sorrow’s last line, into all that might have been,so much that is. (Threading Light 115–116) Acknowledgments The author would like to thank Dr. Lekkie Hopkins and Dr. John Ryan for the opportunity to speak (via video) to the 2012 CREATEC Symposium Catastrophe and Creativity, to Dr. Hopkins for her eloquent and memorable paper in response to my work on creativity and research, and to Dr. Ryan for his support. The presentation was recorded and edited by Paul Poirier at Mount Saint Vincent University in Halifax, Nova Scotia. My thanks go to Edith Cowan and Mount Saint Vincent Universities. ReferencesBerman, Morris. Coming to Our Senses. New York: Bantam, 1990.Dillard, Annie. For the Time Being. New York: Vintage Books, 2000.Felstiner, John. Paul Celan: Poet, Survivor, Jew. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001.Folke, Carl. "On Resilience." Seed Magazine. 13 Dec. 2010. 22 Mar. 2013 ‹http://seedmagazine.com/content/article/on_resilience›.Franck, Frederick. Zen Seeing, Zen Drawing. New York: Bantam Books, 1993.Hanh, Thich Nhat. The Miracle of Mindfulness. Boston: Beacon Press, 1976.Hausherr, Irenee. Penthos: The Doctrine of Compunction in the Christian East. Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 1982.Neilsen Glenn, Lorri. Threading Light: Explorations in Loss and Poetry. Regina, SK: Hagios Press, 2011. Nietzsche, Frederick. Thus Spake Zarathustra. New York: Penguin, 1978. Nussbaum, Martha. Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Oliver, Mary. “The Word.” What Do We Know. Boston: DaCapo Press, 2002.Rilke, Rainer Maria. Duino Elegies and the Sonnets to Orpheus. (Tenth Elegy). Ed. Stephen Mitchell. New York: Random House/Vintage Editions, 2009.Weil, Simone. The Need for Roots. London: Taylor & Francis, 2005 (1952).Weil, Simone. Gravity and Grace. London: Routledge, 2004.Further ReadingChodron, Pema. Practicing Peace in Times of War. Boston: Shambhala, 2006.Cleary, Thomas (trans.) The Essential Tao: An Initiation into the Heart of Taoism through Tao de Ching and the Teachings of Chuang Tzu. Edison, NJ: Castle Books, 1993.Dalai Lama (H H the 14th) and Venerable Chan Master Sheng-yen. Meeting of Minds: A Dialogue on Tibetan and Chinese Buddhism. New York: Dharma Drum Publications, 1999. Hirshfield, Jane. "Language Wakes Up in the Morning: A Meander toward Writing." Alaska Quarterly Review. 21.1 (2003).Hirshfield, Jane. Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry. New York: HarperCollins, 1997. Lao Tzu. Tao Te Ching. Trans. Arthur Waley. Chatham: Wordsworth Editions, 1997. Neilsen, Lorri. "Lyric Inquiry." Handbook of the Arts in Qualitative Research. Eds. J. Gary Knowles and Ardra Cole. Thousand Oaks: Sage, 2008. 88–98. Ross, Maggie. The Fire and the Furnace: The Way of Tears and Fire. York: Paulist Press, 1987.

1909–22: Turkey exterminated over 1.5 million of its ethnically Armenian, and hundreds of thousands of its ethnically Greek and Assyrian, citizens. Most died in 1915. This period of decimation in now widely called the Armenian Genocide (Balakian 179-80).1910: Siamanto first published his poem, The Dance: “The corpses were piled as trees, / and from the springs, from the streams and the road, / the blood was a stubborn murmur.” When springs run red, when the dead are stacked tree-high, when “everything that could happen has already happened,” then time is nothing: “there is no future [and] the language of civilised humanity is not our language” (Nichanian 142).2007: In my novel The Edge of the World a ceramic bowl, luminous blue, recurs as motif. Imagine you are tiny: the bowl is broken but you don’t remember breaking it. You’re awash with tears. You sit on the floor, gather shards but, no matter how you try, you can’t fix it. Imagine, now, that the bowl is the sky, huge and upturned above your head. You have always known, through every wash of your blood, that life is shockingly precarious. Silence—between heartbeats, between the words your parents speak—tells you: something inside you is terribly wrong; home is not home but there is no other home; you “can never be fully grounded in a community which does not share or empathise with the experience of persecution” (Wajnryb 130). This is the stubborn murmur of your body.Because time is nothing, this essay is fragmented, non-linear. Its main characters: my mother, grandmother (Hovsanna), grandfather (Benyamin), some of my mother’s older siblings (Krikor, Maree, Hovsep, Arusiak), and Mustafa Kemal Ataturk (Ottoman military officer, Young Turk leader, first president of Turkey). 1915–2013: Turkey invests much energy in genocide denial, minimisation and deflection of responsibility. 24 April 2012: Barack Obama refers to the Medz Yeghern (Great Calamity). The use of this term is decried as appeasement, privileging political alliance with Turkey over human rights. 2003: Between Genocide and Catastrophe, letters between Armenian-American theorist David Kazanjian and Armenian-French theorist Marc Nichanian, contest the naming of the “event” (126). Nichanian says those who call it the Genocide are:repeating every day, everywhere, in all places, the original denial of the Catastrophe. But this is part of the catastrophic structure of the survivor. By using the word “Genocide”, we survivors are only repeating […] the denial of the loss. We probably cannot help it. We are doing what the executioner wanted us to do […] we claim all over the world that we have been “genocided;” we relentlessly need to prove our own death. We are still in the claws of the executioner. We still belong to the logic of the executioner. (127)1992: In Revolution and Genocide, historian Robert Melson identifies the Armenian Genocide as “total” because it was public policy intended to exterminate a large fraction of Armenian society, “including the families of its members, and the destruction of its social and cultural identity in most or all aspects” (26).1986: Boyajian and Grigorian assert that the Genocide “is still operative” because, without full acknowledgement, “the ghosts won’t go away” (qtd. in Hovannisian 183). They rise up from earth, silence, water, dreams: Armenian literature, Armenian homes haunted by them. 2013: My heart pounds: Medz Yeghern, Aksor (Exile), Anashmaneli (Indefinable), Darakrutiun (Deportation), Chart (Massacre), Brnagaght (Forced migration), Aghed (Catastrophe), Genocide. I am awash. Time is nothing.1909–15: Mustafa Kemal Ataturk was both a serving Ottoman officer and a leader of the revolutionary Young Turks. He led Ottoman troops in the repulsion of the Allied invasion before dawn on 25 April at Gallipoli and other sites. Many troops died in a series of battles that eventually saw the Ottomans triumph. Out of this was born one of Australia’s founding myths: Australian and New Zealand Army Corps (ANZACs), courageous in the face of certain defeat. They are commemorated yearly on 25 April, ANZAC Day. To question this myth is to risk being labelled traitor.1919–23: Ataturk began a nationalist revolution against the occupying Allies, the nascent neighbouring Republic of Armenia, and others. The Allies withdrew two years later. Ataturk was installed as unofficial leader, becoming President in 1923. 1920–1922: The last waves of the Genocide. 2007: Robert Manne published A Turkish Tale: Gallipoli and the Armenian Genocide, calling for a recontextualisation of the cultural view of the Gallipoli landings in light of the concurrence of the Armenian Genocide, which had taken place just over the rise, had been witnessed by many military personnel and widely reported by international media at the time. Armenian networks across Australia were abuzz. There were media discussions. I listened, stared out of my office window at the horizon, imagined Armenian communities in Sydney and Melbourne. Did they feel like me—like they were holding their breath?Then it all went quiet. Manne wrote: “It is a wonderful thing when, at the end of warfare, hatred dies. But I struggle to understand why Gallipoli and the Armenian Genocide continue to exist for Australians in parallel moral universes.” 1992: I bought an old house to make a home for me and my two small children. The rooms were large, the ceilings high, and behind it was a jacaranda with a sturdy tree house built high up in its fork. One of my mother’s Armenian friends kindly offered to help with repairs. He and my mother would spend Saturdays with us, working, looking after the kids. Mum would stay the night; her friend would go home. But one night he took a sleeping bag up the ladder to the tree house, saying it reminded him of growing up in Lebanon. The following morning he was subdued; I suspect there were not as many mosquitoes in Lebanon as we had in our garden. But at dinner the previous night he had been in high spirits. The conversation had turned, as always, to politics. He and my mother had argued about Turkey and Russia, Britain’s role in the development of the Middle East conflict, the USA’s roughshod foreign policy and its effect on the world—and, of course, the Armenian Genocide, and the killingof Turkish governmental representatives by Armenians, in Australia and across the world, during the 1980s. He had intimated he knew the attackers and had materially supported them. But surely it was the beer talking. Later, when I asked my mother, she looked at me with round eyes and shrugged, uncharacteristically silent. 2002: Greek-American diva Diamanda Galas performed Dexifiones: Will and Testament at the Perth Concert Hall, her operatic work for “the forgotten victims of the Armenian and Anatolian Greek Genocide” (Galas).Her voice is so powerful it alters me.1925: My grandmother, Hovsanna, and my grandfather, Benyamin, had twice been separated in the Genocide (1915 and 1922) and twice reunited. But in early 1925, she had buried him, once a prosperous businessman, in a swamp. Armenians were not permitted burial in cemeteries. Once they had lived together in a big house with their dozen children; now there were only three with her. Maree, half-mad and 18 years old, and quiet Hovsep, aged seven,walked. Then five-year-old aunt, Arusiak—small, hungry, tired—had been carried by Hovsanna for months. They were walking from Cilicia to Jerusalem and its Armenian Quarter. Someone had said they had seen Krikor, her eldest son, there. Hovsanna was pregnant for the last time. Together the four reached Aleppo in Syria, found a Christian orphanage for girls, and Hovsanna, her pregnancy near its end, could carry Arusiak no further. She left her, promising to return. Hovsanna’s pains began in Beirut’s busy streets. She found privacy in the only place she could, under a house, crawled in. Whenever my mother spoke of her birth she described it like this: I was born under a stranger’s house like a dog.1975: My friend and I travelled to Albany by bus. After six hours we were looking down York Street, between Mount Clarence and Mount Melville, and beyond to Princess Royal Harbour, sapphire blue, and against which the town’s prosperous life—its shopfronts, hotels, cars, tourists, historic buildings—played out. It took away my breath: the deep harbour, whaling history, fishing boats. Rain and sun and scudding cloud; cliffs and swells; rocky points and the white curves of bays. It was from Albany that young Western Australian men, volunteers for World War I, embarked on ships for the Middle East, Gallipoli, sailing out of Princess Royal Harbour.1985: The Australian Government announced that Turkey had agreed to have the site of the 1915 Gallipoli landings renamed Anzac Cove. Commentators and politicians acknowledged it as historic praised Turkey for her generosity, expressed satisfaction that, 70 years on, former foes were able to embrace the shared human experience of war. We were justifiably proud of ourselves.2005: Turkey made her own requests. The entrance to Albany’s Princess Royal Harbour was renamed Ataturk Channel. A large bronze statue of Ataturk was erected on the headland overlooking the Harbour entrance. 24 April 1915: In the town of Hasan Beyli, in Cilicia, southwest Turkey, my great grandfather, a successful and respected businessman in his 50s, was asleep in his bed beside his wife. He had been born in that house, as had his father, grandfather, and all his children. His brother, my great uncle, had bought the house next door as a young man, brought his bride home to it, lived there ever since; between the two households there had been one child after another. All the cousins grew up together. My great grandfather and great uncle had gone to work that morning, despite their wives’ concerns, but had returned home early. The women had been relieved to see them. They made coffee, talked. Everyone had heard the rumours. Enemy ships were massing off the coast. 1978: The second time in Albany was my honeymoon. We had driven into the Goldfields then headed south. Such distance, such beautiful strangeness: red earth, red rocks; scant forests of low trees, thin arms outstretched; the dry, pale, flat land of Norseman. Shimmering heat. Then the big, wild coast.On our second morning—a cool, overcast day—we took our handline to a jetty. The ocean was mercury; a line of cormorants settled and bobbed. Suddenly fish bit; we reeled them in. I leaned over the jetty’s side, looked down into the deep. The water was clear and undisturbed save the twirling of a pike that looked like it had reversed gravity and was shooting straight up to me. Its scales flashed silver as itbroke the surface.1982: How could I concentrate on splicing a film with this story in my head? Besides the desk, the only other furniture in the editing suite was a whiteboard. I took a marker and divided the board into three columns for the three generations: my grandparents, Hovsanna and Benyamin; my mother; someone like me. There was a lot in the first column, some in the second, nothing in the third. I stared at the blankness of my then-young life.A teacher came in to check my editing. I tried to explain what I had been doing. “I think,” he said, stony-faced, “that should be your third film, not your first.”When he had gone I stared at the reels of film, the white board blankness, the wall. It took 25 years to find the form, the words to say it: a novel not a film, prose not pictures.2007: Ten minutes before the launch of The Edge of the World, the venue was empty. I made myself busy, told myself: what do you expect? Your research has shown, over and over, this is a story about which few know or very much care, an inconvenient, unfashionable story; it is perfectly in keeping that no-one will come. When I stepped onto the rostrum to speak, there were so many people that they crowded the doorway, spilled onto the pavement. “I want to thank my mother,” I said, “who, pretending to do her homework, listened instead to the story her mother told other Armenian survivor-women, kept that story for 50 years, and then passed it on to me.” 2013: There is a section of The Edge of the World I needed to find because it had really happened and, when it happened, I knew, there in my living room, that Boyajian and Grigorian (183) were right about the Armenian Genocide being “still operative.” But I knew even more than that: I knew that the Diaspora triggered by genocide is both rescue and weapon, the new life in this host nation both sanctuary and betrayal. I picked up a copy, paced, flicked, followed my nose, found it:On 25 April, the day after Genocide memorial-day, I am watching television. The Prime Minister stands at the ANZAC memorial in western Turkey and delivers a poetic and moving speech. My eyes fill with tears, and I moan a little and cover them. In his speech he talks about the heroism of the Turkish soldiers in their defence of their homeland, about the extent of their losses – sixty thousand men. I glance at my son. He raises his eyebrows at me. I lose count of how many times Kemal Ataturk is mentioned as the Father of Modern Turkey. I think of my grandmother and grandfather, and all my baby aunts and uncles […] I curl over like a mollusc; the ache in my chest draws me in. I feel small and very tired; I feel like I need to wash.Is it true that if we repeat something often enough and loud enough it becomes the truth? The Prime Minister quotes Kemal Ataturk: the ANZACS who died and are buried on that western coast are deemed ‘sons of Turkey’. My son turns my grandfather’s, my mother’s, my eyes to me and says, It is amazing they can be so friendly after we attacked them.I draw up my knees to my chest, lay my head and arms down. My limbs feel weak and useless. My throat hurts. I look at my Australian son with his Armenian face (325-6).24 April 1915 cont: There had been trouble all my great grandfather’s life: pogrom here, massacre there. But this land was accustomed to colonisers: the Mongols, the Persians, latterly the Ottomans. They invade, conquer, rise, fall; Armenians stay. This had been Armenian homeland for thousands of years.No-one masses ships off a coast unless planning an invasion. So be it. These Europeans could not be worse than the Ottomans. That night, were my great grandfather and great uncle awoken by the pounding at each door, or by the horses and gendarmes’ boots? They were seized, each family herded at gunpoint into its garden, and made to watch. Hanging is slow. There could be no mistakes. The gendarmes used the stoutest branches, stayed until they were sure the men weredead. This happened to hundreds of prominent Armenian men all over Turkey that night.Before dawn, the Allies made landfall.Each year those lost in the Genocide are remembered on 24 April, the day before ANZAC Day.1969: I asked my mother if she had any brothers and sisters. She froze, her hands in the sink. I stared at her, then slipped from the room.1915: The Ottoman government decreed: all Armenians were to surrender their documents and report to authorities. Able-bodied men were taken away, my grandfather among them. Women and children, the elderly and disabled, were told to prepare to walk to a safe camp where they would stay for the duration of the war. They would be accompanied by armed soldiers for their protection. They were permitted to take with them what they could carry (Bryce 1916).It began immediately, pretty young women and children first. There are so many ways to kill. Months later, a few dazed, starved survivors stumbled into the Syrian desert, were driven into lakes, or herded into churches and set alight.Most husbands and fathers were never seen again. 2003: I arrived early at my son’s school, parked in the shade, opened The Silence: How Tragedy Shapes Talk, and began to read. Soon I was annotating furiously. Ruth Wajnryb writes of “growing up among innocent peers in an innocent landscape” and also that the notion of “freedom of speech” in Australia “seems often, to derive from that innocent landscape where reside people who have no personal scars or who have little relevant historical knowledge” (141).1984: I travelled to Vancouver, Canada, and knocked on Arusiak’s door. Afraid she would not agree to meet me, I hadn’t told her I was coming. She was welcoming and gracious. This was my first experience of extended family and I felt loved in a new and important way, a way I had read about, had observed in my friends, had longed for. One afternoon she said, “You know our mother left me in an orphanage…When I saw her again, it was too late. I didn’t know who they were, what a family was. I felt nothing.” “Yes, I know,” I replied, my heart full and hurting. The next morning, over breakfast, she quietly asked me to leave. 1926: When my mother was a baby, her 18 year-old sister, Maree, tried to drown her in the sea. My mother clearly recalled Maree’s face had been disfigured by a sword. Hovsanna, would ask my mother to forgive Maree’s constant abuse and bad behaviour, saying, “She is only half a person.”1930: Someone gave Hovsanna the money to travel to Aleppo and reclaim Arusiak, by then 10 years old. My mother was intrigued by the appearance of this sister but Arusiak was watchful and withdrawn. When she finally did speak to my then five-year-old mother, she hissed: “Why did she leave me behind and keep you?”Soon after Arusiak appeared, Maree, “only half a person,” disappeared. My mother was happy about that.1935: At 15, Arusiak found a live-in job and left. My mother was 10 years old; her brother Hovsep, who cared for her before and after school every day while their mother worked, and always had, was seventeen. She adored him. He had just finished high school and was going to study medicine. One day he fell ill. He died within a week.1980: My mother told me she never saw her mother laugh or, once Hovsep died, in anything other than black. Two or three times before Hovsep died, she saw her smile a little, and twice she heard her singing when she thought she was alone: “A very sad song,” my mother would say, “that made me cry.”1942: At seventeen, my mother had been working as a live-in nanny for three years. Every week on her only half-day off she had caught the bus home. But now Hovsanna was in hospital, so my mother had been visiting her there. One day her employer told her she must go to the hospital immediately. She ran. Hovsanna was lying alone and very still. Something wasn’t right. My mother searched the hospital corridors but found no-one. She picked up a phone. When someone answered she told them to send help. Then she ran all the way home, grabbed Arusiak’s photograph and ran all the way back. She laid it on her mother’s chest, said, “It’s all right, Mama, Arusiak’s here.”1976: My mother said she didn’t like my boyfriend; I was not to go out with him. She said she never disobeyed her own mother because she really loved her mother. I went out with my boyfriend. When I came home, my belongings were on the front porch. The door was bolted. I was seventeen.2003: I read Wajnryb who identifies violent eruptions of anger and frozen silences as some of the behaviours consistent in families with a genocidal history (126). 1970: My father had been dead over a year. My brothers and I were, all under 12, made too much noise. My mother picked up the phone: she can’t stand us, she screamed; she will call an orphanage to take us away. We begged.I fled to my room. I couldn’t sit down. I couldn’t keep still. I paced, pressed my face into a corner; shook and cried, knowing (because she had always told us so) that she didn’t make idle threats, knowing that this was what I had sometimes glimpsed on her face when she looked at us.2012: The Internet reveals images of Ataturk’s bronze statue overlooking Princess Royal Harbour. Of course, it’s outsized, imposing. The inscription on its plinth reads: "Peace at Home/ Peace in the World." He wears a suit, looks like a scholar, is moving towards us, a scroll in his hand. The look in his eyes is all intensity. Something distant has arrested him – a receding or re-emerging vision. Perhaps a murmur that builds, subsides, builds again. (Medz Yeghern, Aksor, Aghed, Genocide). And what is written on that scroll?2013: My partner suggested we go to Albany, escape Perth’s brutal summer. I tried to explain why it’s impossible. There is no memorial in Albany, or anywhere else in Western Australia, to the 1.5 million victims of the Armenian Genocide. ReferencesAkcam, Taner. “The Politics of Genocide.” Online Video Clip. YouTube. YouTube, 11 Dec. 2011. 6 Mar. 2013 ‹http://www.youtube.com/watchv=OxAJaaw81eU&noredirect=1genocide›.Balakian, Peter. The Burning Tigress: The Armenian Genocide. London: William Heinemann, 2004.BBC. “Kemal Ataturk (1881–1938).” BBC History. 2013. 6 Mar. 2013 ‹http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/historic_figures/ataturk_kemal.shtml›.Boyajian, Levon, and Haigaz Grigorian. “Psychological Sequelae of the Armenian Genocide.”The Armenian Genocide in Perspective. Ed. Richard Hovannisian. New Brunswick: Transaction, 1987. 177–85.Bryce, Viscount. The Treatment of the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1916.Galas, Diamanda. Program Notes. Dexifiones: Will and Testament. Perth Concert Hall, Perth, Australia. 2001.———.“Dexifiones: Will and Testament FULL Live Lisboa 2001 Part 1.” Online Video Clip. YouTube, 5 Nov. 2011. Web. 6 Mar. 2013 ‹http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mvVnYbxWArM›.Kazanjian, David, and Marc Nichanian. “Between Genocide and Catastrophe.” Loss. Eds. David Eng and David Kazanjian. Los Angeles: U of California P, 2003. 125–47.Manne, Robert. “A Turkish Tale: Gallipoli and the Armenian Genocide.” The Monthly Feb. 2007. 6 Mar. 2013 ‹http://www.themonthly.com.au/turkish-tale-gallipoli-and-armenian-genocide-robert-manne-459›.Matiossian, Vartan. “When Dictionaries Are Left Unopened: How ‘Medz Yeghern’ Turned into a Terminology of Denial.” The Armenian Weekly 27 Nov. 2012. 6 Mar. 2013 ‹http://www.armenianweekly.com/2012/11/27/when-dictionaries-are-left-unopened-how-medz-yeghern-turned-into-terminology-of-denial/›.Melson, Robert. Revolution and Genocide. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1996.Nicholson, Brendan. “ASIO Detected Bomb Plot by Armenian Terrorists.” The Australian 2 Jan. 2012. 6 Mar. 2013 ‹http://www.theaustralian.com.au/in-depth/cabinet-papers/asio-detected-bomb-plot-by-armenian-terrorists/story-fnbkqb54-1226234411154›.“President Obama Issues Statement on Armenian Remembrance Day.” The Armenian Weekly 24 Apr. 2012. 5 Mar. 2013 ‹http://www.armenianweekly.com/2012/04/24/president-obama-issues-statement-on-armenian-remembrance-day/›.Polain, Marcella. The Edge of the World. Fremantle: Fremantle Press, 2007.Siamanto. “The Dance.” Trans. Peter Balakian and Nervart Yaghlian. Adonias Dalgas Memorial Page 5 Mar. 2013 ‹http://www.terezakis.com/dalgas.html›.Stockings, Craig. “Let’s Have a Truce in the Battle of the Anzac Myth.” The Australian 25 Apr. 2012. 6 Mar. 2013 ‹http://www.theaustralian.com.au/national-affairs/opinion/lets-have-a-truce-in-the-battle-of-the-anzac-myth/story-e6frgd0x-1226337486382›.Wajnryb, Ruth. The Silence: How Tragedy Shapes Talk. Crows Nest: Allen and Unwin, 2001.

IntroductionMusically-inclined people often speak about the soundtrack of their life, with certain songs indelibly linked to a specific moment. When hearing a particular song, it can “easily evoke a whole time and place, distant feelings and emotions, and memories of where we were, and with whom” (Lewis 135). Music has the ability to provide maps to real and imagined spaces, positioning people within a larger social environment where songs “are never just a song, but a connection, a ticket, a pass, an invitation, a node in a complex network” (Kun 3). When someone is lost in the music, they can find themselves transported somewhere else entirely without physically moving. This can be a blessing in some situations, for example, while living in a disaster zone, when almost any other time or place can seem better than the here and now. The city of Christchurch, New Zealand was hit by a succession of damaging earthquakes beginning with a magnitude 7.1 earthquake in the early hours of 4 September 2010. The magnitude 6.3 earthquake of 22 February 2011, although technically an aftershock of the September earthquake, was closer and shallower, with intense ground acceleration that caused much greater damage to the city and its people (“Scientists”). It was this February earthquake that caused the total or partial collapse of many inner city buildings, and claimed the lives of 185 people. Everybody in Christchurch lost someone or something that day: their house or job; family members, friends, or colleagues; the city as they knew it; or their normal way of life. The broken central city was quickly cordoned off behind fences, with the few entry points guarded by local and international police and armed military personnel.In the aftermath of a disaster, circumstances and personal attributes will influence how people react, think and feel about the experience. Surviving a disaster is more than not dying, “survival is to do with quality of life [and] involves progressing from the event and its aftermath, and transforming the experience” (Hodgkinson and Stewart 2). In these times of heightened stress, music can be a catalyst for sharing and expressing emotions, connecting people and communities, and helping them make sense of what has happened (Carr 38; Webb 437). This article looks at some of the ways that popular songs and musical memories helped residents of a broken city remember the past and come to terms with the present.BackgroundExisting songs can take on new significance after a catastrophic event, even without any alteration. Songs such as Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans? and Prayer for New Orleans have been given new emotional layers by those who were displaced or affected by Hurricane Katrina (Cooper 265; Sullivan 15). A thirty year-old song by Randy Newman, Louisiana, 1927, became something of “a contemporary anthem, its chorus – ‘Louisiana, they’re trying to wash us away’ – bearing new relevance” (Blumenfeld 166). Contemporary popular songs have also been re-mixed or revised after catastrophic events, either by the original artist or by others. Elton John’s Candle in the Wind and Beyonce’s Halo have each been revised twice by the artist after tragedy and disaster (Doyle; McAlister), while radio stations in the United States have produced commemorative versions of popular songs to mark tragedies and their anniversaries (Beaumont-Thomas; Cantrell). The use and appreciation of music after disaster is a reminder that popular music is fluid, in that it “refuses to provide a uniform or static text” (Connell and Gibson 3), and can simultaneously carry many different meanings.Music provides a soundtrack to daily life, creating a map of meaning to the world around us, or presenting a reminder of the world as it once was. Tia DeNora explains that when people hear a song that was once heard in, and remains associated with, a particular time and place, it “provides a device for unfolding, for replaying, the temporal structure of that moment, [which] is why, for so many people, the past ‘comes alive’ to its soundtrack” (67). When a community is frequently and collectively casting their minds back to a time before a catastrophic change, a sense of community identity can be seen in the use of, and reaction to, particular songs. Music allows people to “locate themselves in different imaginary geographics at one and the same time” (Cohen 93), creating spaces for people to retreat into, small ‘audiotopias’ that are “built, imagined, and sustained through sound, noise, and music” (Kun 21). The use of musical escape holes is prevalent after disaster, as many once-familiar spaces that have changed beyond recognition or are no longer able to be physically visited, can be easily imagined or remembered through music. There is a particular type of longing expressed by those who are still at home and yet cannot return to the home they knew. Whereas nostalgia is often experienced by people far from home who wish to return or those enjoying memories of a bygone era, people after disaster often encounter a similar nostalgic feeling but with no change in time or place: a loss without leaving. Glenn Albrecht coined the term ‘solastalgia’ to represent “the form of homesickness one experiences when one is still at home” (35). This sense of being unable to find solace in one’s home environment can be brought on by natural disasters such as fire, flood, earthquakes or hurricanes, or by other means like war, mining, climate change or gentrification. Solastalgia is often felt most keenly when people experience the change first-hand and then have to adjust to life in a totally changed environment. This can create “chronic distress of a solastalgic kind [that] would persist well after the acute phase of post-traumatic distress” (Albrecht 36). Just as the visible, physical effects of disaster last for years, so too do the emotional effects, but there have been many examples of how the nostalgia inherent in a shared popular music soundtrack has eased the pain of solastalgia for a community that is hurting.Pop Songs and Nostalgia in ChristchurchIn September 2011, one year after the initial earthquake, the Bank of New Zealand (BNZ) announced a collaboration with Christchurch hip hop artist, Scribe, to remake his smash hit, Not Many, for charity. Back in 2003, Not Many debuted at number five on the New Zealand music charts, where it spent twelve weeks at number one and was crowned ‘Single of the Year’ (Sweetman, On Song 164). The punchy chorus heralded Scribe as a force to be reckoned with, and created a massive imprint on New Zealand popular culture with the line: “How many dudes you know roll like this? Not many, if any” (Scribe, Not Many). Music critic, Simon Sweetman, explains how “the hook line of the chorus [is now] a conversational aside that is practically unavoidable when discussing amounts… The words ‘not many’ are now truck-and-trailered with ‘if any’. If you do not say them, you are thinking them” (On Song 167). The strong links between artist and hometown – and the fact it is an enduringly catchy song – made it ideal for a charity remake. Reworded and reworked as Not Many Cities, the chorus now asks: “How many cities you know roll like this?” to which the answer is, of course, “not many, if any” (Scribe/BNZ, Not Many Cities). The remade song entered the New Zealand music charts at number 36 and the video was widely shared through social media but not all reception was positive. Parts of the video were shot in the city’s Red Zone, the central business district that was cordoned off from public access due to safety concerns. The granting of special access outraged some residents, with letters to the editor and online commentary expressing frustration that celebrities were allowed into the Red Zone to shoot a music video while those directly affected were not allowed in to retrieve essential items from residences and business premises. However, it is not just the Red Zone that features: the video switches between Scribe travelling around the broken inner city on the back of a small truck and lingering shots of carefully selected people, businesses, and groups – all with ties to the BNZ as either clients or beneficiaries of sponsorship. In some ways, Not Many Cities comes across like just another corporate promotional video for the BNZ, albeit with more emotion and a better soundtrack than usual. But what it has bequeathed is a snapshot of the city as it was in that liminal time: a landscape featuring familiar buildings, spaces and places which, although damaged, was still a recognisable version of the city that existed before the earthquakes.Before Scribe burst onto the music scene in the early 2000s, the best-known song about Christchurch was probably Christchurch (in Cashel St. I wait), an early hit from the Exponents (Mitchell 189). Initially known as the Dance Exponents, the group formed in Christchurch in the early 1980s and remained local and national favourites thanks to a string of hits Sweetman refers to as “the question-mark songs,” such as Who Loves Who the Most?, Why Does Love Do This to Me?, and What Ever Happened to Tracey? (Best Songwriter). Despite disbanding in 1999, the group re-formed to be the headline act of ‘Band Together’—a multi-artist, outdoor music event organised for the benefit of Christchurch residents by local musician, Jason Kerrison, formerly of the band OpShop. Attended by over 140,000 people (Anderson, Band Together), this nine-hour event brought joy and distraction to a shaken and stressed populace who, at that point in time (October 2010), probably thought the worst was over.The Exponents took the stage last, and chose Christchurch (in Cashel St. I Wait) as their final number. Every musician involved in the gig joined them on stage and the crowd rose to their feet, singing along with gusto. A local favourite since its release in 1985, the verses may have been a bit of a mumble for some, but the chorus rang out loud and clear across the park: Christchurch, In Cashel Street I wait,Together we will be,Together, together, together, One day, one day, one day,One day, one day, one daaaaaay! (Exponents, “Christchurch (in Cashel St. I Wait)”; lyrics written as sung)At that moment, forming an impromptu community choir of over 100,000 people, the audience was filled with hope and faith that those words would come true. Life would go on and people would gather together in Cashel Street and wait for normality to return, one day. Later the following year, the opening of the Re:Start container mall added an extra layer of poignancy to the song lyrics. Denied access to most of the city’s CBD, that one small part of Cashel Street now populated with colourful shipping containers was almost the only place in central Christchurch where people could wait. There are many music videos that capture the central city of Christchurch as it was in decades past. There are some local classics, like The Bats’ Block of Wood and Claudine; The Shallows’ Suzanne Said; Moana and the Moahunters’ Rebel in Me; and All Fall Down’s Black Gratten, which were all filmed in the 1980s or early 1990s (Goodsort, Re-Live and More Music). These videos provide many flashback moments to the city as it was twenty or thirty years ago. However, one post-earthquake release became an accidental musical time capsule. The song, Space and Place, was released in February 2013, but both song and video had been recorded not long before the earthquakes occurred. The song was inspired by the feelings experienced when returning home after a long absence, and celebrates the importance of the home town as “a place that knows you as well as you know it” (Anderson, Letter). The chorus features the line, “streets of common ground, I remember, I remember” (Franklin, Mayes, and Roberts, Space and Place), but it is the video, showcasing many of the Christchurch places and spaces only recently lost to the earthquakes, that tugs at people’s heartstrings. The video for Space and Place sweeps through the central city at night, with key heritage buildings like the Christ Church Cathedral, and the Catholic Basilica lit up against the night sky (both are still damaged and inaccessible). Producer and engineer, Rob Mayes, describes the video as “a love letter to something we all lost [with] the song and its lyrics [becoming] even more potent, poignant, and unexpectedly prescient post quake” (“Songs in the Key”). The Arts Centre features prominently in the footage, including the back alleys and archways that hosted all manner of night-time activities – sanctioned or otherwise – as well as many people’s favourite hangout, the Dux de Lux (the Dux). Operating from the corner of the Arts Centre site since the 1970s, the Dux has been described as “the city’s common room” and “Christchurch’s beating heart” by musicians mourning its loss (Anderson, Musicians). While the repair and restoration of some parts of the Arts Centre is currently well advanced, the Student Union building that once housed this inner-city social institution is not slated for reopening until 2019 (“Rebuild and Restore”), and whether the Dux will be welcomed back remains to be seen. Empty Spaces, Missing PlacesA Facebook group, ‘Save Our Dux,’ was created in early March 2011, and quickly filled with messages and memories from around the world. People wandered down memory lane together as they reminisced about their favourite gigs and memorable occasions, like the ‘Big Snow’ of 1992 when the Dux served up mulled wine and looked more like a ski chalet. Memories were shared about the time when the music video for the Dance Exponents’ song, Victoria, was filmed at the Dux and the Art Deco-style apartment building across the street. The reminiscing continued, establishing and strengthening connections, with music providing a stepping stone to shared experience and a sense of community. Physically restricted from visiting a favourite social space, people were converging in virtual hangouts to relive moments and remember places now cut off by the passing of time, the falling of bricks, and the rise of barrier fences.While waiting to find out whether the original Dux site can be re-occupied, the business owners opened new venues that housed different parts of the Dux business (live music, vegetarian food, and the bars/brewery). Although the fit-out of the restaurant and bars capture a sense of the history and charm that people associate with the Dux brand, the empty wasteland and building sites that surround the new Dux Central quickly destroy any illusion of permanence or familiarity. Now that most of the quake-damaged buildings have been demolished, the freshly-scarred earth of the central city is like a child’s gap-toothed smile. Wandering around the city and forgetting what used to occupy an empty space, wanting to visit a shop or bar before remembering it is no longer there, being at the Dux but not at the Dux – these are the kind of things that contributed to a feeling that local music writer, Vicki Anderson, describes as “lost city syndrome” (“Lost City”). Although initially worried she might be alone in mourning places lost, other residents have shared similar experiences. In an online comment on the article, one local resident explained how there are two different cities fighting for dominance in their head: “the new keeps trying to overlay the old [but] when I’m not looking at pictures, or in seeing it as it is, it’s the old city that pushes its way to the front” (Juniper). Others expressed relief that they were not the only ones feeling strangely homesick in their own town, homesick for a place they never left but that had somehow left them.There are a variety of methods available to fill the gaps in both memories and cityscape. The Human Interface Technology Laboratory New Zealand (HITLab), produced a technological solution: interactive augmented reality software called CityViewAR, using GPS data and 3D models to show parts of the city as they were prior to the earthquakes (“CityViewAR”). However, not everybody needed computerised help to remember buildings and other details. Many people found that, just by listening to a certain song or remembering particular gigs, it was not just an image of a building that appeared but a multi-sensory event complete with sound, movement, smell, and emotion. In online spaces like the Save Our Dux group, memories of favourite bands and songs, crowded gigs, old friends, good times, great food, and long nights were shared and discussed, embroidering a rich and colourful tapestry about a favourite part of Christchurch’s social scene. ConclusionMusic is strongly interwoven with memory, and can recreate a particular moment in time and place through the associations carried in lyrics, melody, and imagery. Songs can spark vivid memories of what was happening – when, where, and with whom. A song shared is a connection made: between people; between moments; between good times and bad; between the past and the present. Music provides a soundtrack to people’s lives, and during times of stress it can also provide many benefits. The lyrics and video imagery of songs made in years gone by have been shown to take on new significance and meaning after disaster, offering snapshots of times, people and places that are no longer with us. Even without relying on the accompanying imagery of a video, music has the ability to recreate spaces or relocate the listener somewhere other than the physical location they currently occupy. This small act of musical magic can provide a great deal of comfort when suffering solastalgia, the feeling of homesickness one experiences when the familiar landscapes of home suddenly change or disappear, when one has not left home but that home has nonetheless gone from sight. The earthquakes (and the demolition crews that followed) have created a lot of empty land in Christchurch but the sound of popular music has filled many gaps – not just on the ground, but also in the hearts and lives of the city’s residents. 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"... sphincters have no souls."-- Germaine Greer. "Love." The Whole Woman. 222. "Place your hands on my (w?)hole, run your fingers through my soul..." -- Gary Stringer. "Place Your Hands." Glow. A remarkable pseudo-sodomitical sight gag in the Hollywood comedy film Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me brings to mainstream discourse two new queer desiring and desired figures: the man-fisting woman and the woman-fisted man. The simulated act of anal fisting occurs in a tent between leading male and female agents Austin Powers (Mike Myers) and Felicity Shagwell (Heather Graham). While Powers is on all fours, Shagwell inserts her hand and forearm into his utility bag and removes various objects including an opening umbrella and a gerbil. However, to a posse of astounded males hiding in the bushes, it appears in silhouette that Shagwell has inserted her fist into Power's rectum and is slowly removing the objects from deep inside his anal canal. This subversive heterosexual performance draws upon marginalised visual narratives of female and male sodomites. The queer man-fisting woman comprises a revolutionary feminist figure. Before surfacing to stake her claim in Austin Powers, the figure of the fisting woman gathered representational momentum in underground pornographic and erotic visual art discourses. Until recently, queer female sodomites penetrated males by finger or dildo, not by whole hand. For example, an erotic sadomasochistic (SM) drawing from the 1930s by Bernard Montorgueil (Néret backflap) depicts several clothed women stimulating the ani of various naked tied-up ejaculating men with small mechanical dildos. A pornographic photograph from the 1950s features a bikini-wearing woman with her strapped-on dildo in the anus of a naked reclining spread-legged man (Waugh 20). By the 1990s images of female-in-male fisting acts had appeared in coffee table art monographs. Jacqueline Kennedy's photograph Other Chambers (Salaman 138) depicts such a scene with only the braceleted arm and male torso showing. Andres Serranos' photograph The History of Sex (The Fisting) shows a fully-dressed erect woman with her fist in the anus of a naked man who poses on all fours at the bottom of the picture. One of Doris Kloster's SM photographs shows a man sandwiched between two women. The strapped-on dildo of one woman fills the man's mouth while that of the other woman projects into his rectum. These female sodomites seemingly merge the figures of the SM dominatrix and the female penetrator of males, to form a new creation that could be named the 'penetratrix'. Queer performance artist Annie Sprinkle, who (as "Queen of the Hellfire" SM club) fist-fucked a man up to her elbow (Heidenry 161), is one such pioneering penetratrix. Another is queer writer Zoë Schramm-Evans, who has documented her fistfucking relationship with a gay man in British journal, Body Politic. Schramm-Evans probably speaks for other penetratrices when she declares of her desires to fist the male anus: "I like a man who will lie on his back with his legs in the air -- who will offer his secrets in the way I offer mine. I consider this an equilibrium" (cited in Dowsett 28). The man-fisting penetratrix is a queer production that brings narratives of corporeal cross-sexual power relationships full circle: the penetrator is now the penetrated. The inscription of Felicity as 'top' would not work without Austin as 'bottom' -- a heterosexual male persona that embodies the pleasure of being penetrated by a female agent. The image of anal-receptive Austin draws on the pantheon of fisted gay, bisexual and heterosexual men that have featured in representations of the fisting female sodomite, such as those already mentioned. Other influential works might include Andres Serrano's photograph The History of Sex (Christiaan and Rose) (1996), which depicts a woman pressing the dildo worn over her vulva against a man's buttocks. The cover of Enema of the State, a compact disc by all-male heterosexual band Blink-182, contains a photograph of a smiling female nurse pulling a blue glove over her raised hand. The extended Shagwell-in-Powers fisting gag entails from a history of 'red hanky' SM representations of gay male anal erotica which has tested the diametric limits of the most dilatable orifice in the male body. Examples include Robert Mapplethorpe's photograph Helmut and Brooks, N.Y.C., 1978 (Danto plate 107), which shows one man's large forearm in another's anus, and the Mo' Bigga' Butt video which has two male hands in a male anus. One patron of the Hellfire reportedly could take "an entire rack of billiard balls up his rectum" (Heidenry 161). Such inter-male sexual practices produce "intense sexual pleasure while bypassing, to a greater or lesser extent, the genitals themselves" and involve "the eroticisation of non-genital regions of the body" (Halperin 47). In countenance to standard heterosexual productions in which "the phallus is monolithic and absolute", in these gay male productions "attraction to the penis, contextualized in a holistically eroticized body, is not always the focus of sexual desire" (Jackson 147). In Homosexual Desire, Guy Hocquenghem contended that the gay sauna, a private inter-male consensual sex sphere of the 1970s, would provide a pornutopian space for such "primary sexual communism" (111). In the contemporary popular screen production Austin Powers, the fisted man has become a public, post-orgasmic, de-phallicised object of heterosexual female desire. Man-fisting females and woman-fisted males con-fuse the modern sex/gender identities deployed this century to categorise desiring agents. At the end of his article "What Is Sexuality?", Gary Dowsett asks of the Schramm-Evans female-in-male fisting relationship, "in being fist-fucked by a woman is the gay man still homosexual? In committing sodomy with her arm, is Schramm-Evans still woman?" (29). We could ask similar questions about the gender identities and sexual desires of the queer women, men, and transgenderists, who have contributed to the imag(in)ing of the 'penetratrix'. The simple answer may be that all are 'bisexual/s'. However, gay, lesbian, bisexual and heterosexual categories of identity hinge upon desires for specific (similar and/or different) genital morphologies. These identities are upset by performances such as anal-fisting which inscribe organs with omnisexual, non-genital morphologies as objects of desire. In lesbian-in-gay fisting performances "not only has gender been exposed as a masquerade in the service of modern heterosexuality, sexuality has become a field of possibilities where the entanglements of bodies and pleasures and the manufacture of meaning are already bursting through their century-long confinement" (Dowsett 29). Feminists such as Germaine Greer have reformulated sexual metaphors to challenge narratives that define woman as castrated lack. In The Whole Woman, Greer explains that her earlier feminist text, The Female Eunuch, "attempted to provide a different version of female receptivity by speaking of the vagina ... as if it sucked on the penis and emptied it out rather than simply receiving the ejaculate" (39). She now notes that such "cunt-power" has "still to manifest itself". Instead, "penetration mania, the outsize dildo and the fist, [and] the world split open" (39) have manifested "in the last third of the twentieth century [when] more women were penetrated deeper and more often than in any preceeding era" (6). On all these accounts Greer is correct but offers only part of the story. Her desire to change (heterosexual) women's views of their (and male) anatomies is admirable, but such new (hetero)sexual metaphors alone may have negligible effects on male viewpoints. Let's also note that, in the last thirty years, more men were penetrated through the anus (and other orifices) deeper, wider, and more often than ever before (in medical and sexual, indeed, any contexts). Also significantly, more women actively penetrated more men (and more women) deeper, wider and more often than ever before. Man's world and body are also splitting open, and women, too, are wielding dildos and fists and medical equipment to make them split. Queer women who directly act on their desires to infiltrate male bodies (while doing as they desire with their own vulvae) also create cunt-power. It may be most difficult for theorists, including some queer theorists, who have cast the lesbian feminist "with or without dildo" as "the dreaded figure of castration and lack" (Probyn 46) to so typify a queer woman who twists her fist into a male anus. The potential power of the newly arrived male-fisting penetratrix is palpable for women and men. Thus, the penetratrix, as an image "freed from its post within a structure of law, lack, and signification, can begin to move all over the place. It then causes different ripples and affects, effects of desire and desirous affects. Turning away from the game of matching signifiers to signifieds, we can begin to focus on the movement of images as effecting and affecting movement" (Probyn 59). The moving image of Felicity Shagwell with her forearm supposedly in Austin Power's anus has the potential to unleash a new chain of queer sexual metaphors. It may be most difficult for theorists, including some queer theorists, who have cast the lesbian feminist "with or without dildo" as "the dreaded figure of castration and lack" (Probyn 46) to so typify a queer woman who twists her fist into a male anus. The potential power of the newly arrived male-fisting penetratrix is palpable for women and men. Thus, the penetratrix, as an image "freed from its post within a structure of law, lack, and signification, can begin to move all over the place. It then causes different ripples and affects, effects of desire and desirous affects. Turning away from the game of matching signifiers to signifieds, we can begin to focus on the movement of images as effecting and affecting movement" (Probyn 59). The moving image of Felicity Shagwell with her forearm supposedly in Austin Power's anus has the potential to unleash a new chain of queer sexual metaphors. What better way for men to understand some of the pleasure and pain involved in vaginal births or deep vaginal penetrations than to have (at least imagined) a large object going in and out of their rectum? Rather than trying to formulate such rhetoric, Greer claims that men are correct to resist regular ano-digital examinations for prostate problems. Now that heterosexual men have begun to experience physical insertions that rupture their monolithic masculinity, Greer discourages them. Critical reactions to the groundbreaking images of the male-penetrating female in Austin Powers have been mixed. In the national newspaper Evan Williams remarked rather uncomfortably that "the silhouetted extraction of assorted paraphernalia from Austin's backside -- go[es] on much too long". On national youth radio Michael Tunn rather excitedly praised the gag as "the funniest I've seen". At the cinema I attended, several adults giggled during the scene. I was bent over in hysterics while a young woman up behind me laughed most powerfully. Did the sudden stunned silence of a teenage male who had been sniggering with desire for Heather Graham's body hide his excited discomfort at the realisation of her phallic desiring power and his desire to be penetrated? Clearly, a chord had been struck deep within him. The positive subversive effects on children exposed to the graphic imaging of reversed bodily sex and gender rôles should also not be underestimated. The queer man-fisting woman reconfigures standard feminist sexual (pre)positions. To the heterocentric paradigm of woman-on-top and man-on-bottom have been added the queer figures of the woman-as-top and the man-as-bottom. The genito-centric anti-penetration agenda espoused in The Whole Woman denies the desires and effects of such man-penetrating female and woman-penetrated male agents. Austin Powers, on the other hand, celebrates these desiring figures in a climactic gender-fucking pièce de résistance. This Hollywood film only flirts with notions of fistfucking but is a credit to collaborating heterosexual actors Mike Myers and Heather Graham. Their queer simulated penetration scene comprises the film's most graphic and comedic representation of a (hetero)sexual act. At the end of the millennium, some women are taking matters of queer politics in hand, by raising their clenched feminist fists for a new sexual revolution. Some men are opening their ani wide to them and the pleasures and pains of (pomo)sexual equality, with rippling desires to become fulfilled queer male (w)holes. References Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me. Dir. M. Jay Roach. New Line Cinema, 1999. Blink-182. Enema of the State. MCA 1999. Danto, Arthur C. Mapplethorpe. New York: Random House, 1992. Dowsett, Gary. "What Is Sexuality?: A Bent Answer to a Straight Question." Meanjin 55.1 (1996): 16-30. Greer, Germaine. The Whole Woman. London: Doubleday. 1999. Halperin, David M. "Becoming Homosexual: Michel Foucault on the Future of Gay Writing." Island 63 (Winter 1995): 44-51. Heidenry, John. What Wild Ecstasy: The Rise and Fall of the Sexual Revolution. Port Melbourne, Vic.: William Heinemann, 1997. Hocquenghem, Guy. Homosexual Desire. 1972. Trans. Daniella Dangoor. Durham, N.C.: Duke UP, 1993. Jackson, Earl. "Explicit Instruction: Teaching Gay Male Sexuality in Literature Classes." Professions of Desire: Lesbian and Gay Studies in Literature. Ed. George E. Haggerty and Bonnie Zimmerman. New York: MLA, 1995: 136-155. Kloster, Doris. Doris Kloster: Photographs. Cologne: Benedikt Taschen, 1996. Mo' Bigga' Butt. Dir. Steven Scarborough. Plain Wrapped Video, 1997. Néret, Gilles, ed. Erotica Universalis. Cologne: Benedikt Taschen, 1996. Probyn, Elspeth. Outside Belongings. New York: Routledge, 1996. Salaman, Naomi, ed. What She Wants: Women Artists Look at Men. London: Verso, 1994. Schramm-Evans, Zoë. "Internal Politics." Body Politic 4 (1993). Serrano, Andres. The History of Sex (The Fisting). 1996. ---. The History of Sex (Christiaan and Rose). 1996. Stringer, Gary, voc. "Place Your Hands." Glow. By Reef. Sony, 1997. Tunn, Michael. Lunch. Triple J. 4JJJ, Brisbane. 28 June 1999. Waugh, Thomas. Hard to Imagine: Gay Male Eroticism in Photography and Film from Their Beginnings to Stonewall. New York: Columbia UP, 1996. Williams, Evan. "Knickers in a Twist." Weekend Australian Review 19-20 June 1999: 21. Citation reference for this article MLA style: Simon-Astley Scholfield. "Newly Desiring and Desired: Queer Man-Fisting Women." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2.5 (1999). [your date of access] <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9907/queer.php>. Chicago style: Simon-Astley Scholfield, "Newly Desiring and Desired: Queer Man-Fisting Women," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2, no. 5 (1999), <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9907/queer.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: Simon-Astley Scholfield. (1999) Newly desiring and desired: queer man-fisting women. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2(5). <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9907/queer.php> ([your date of access]).

The whole problem of speaking about the end…is that you have to speak of what lies beyond the end and also, at the same time, of the impossibility of ending. Jean Baudrillard, The Illusion of the End(110) Jean Baudrillard’s insights into finality demonstrate that “ends” always prompt cultures to speculate on what can or will happen after these terminations and to fear those traumatic ends, in which the impossible actually occurs, may only be the beginning of chaos. In the absence of “rational” explanations for catastrophic ends and in the whirlwind of emotional responses that are their after-effects, the search for beginnings and origins – the antitheses of Baudrillard’s finality – characterises human response to tragedy. Strangely, Baudrillard’s engagement with the end is linked to an articulation predicated on our ability “to speak” events into existence, to conjure and to bridle those events in terms of recognisable, linear, and logical arrangements of words. Calling this verbal ordering “the poetry of initial conditions” (Baudrillard 113) in which memory imposes a structure so that the chaotic/catastrophic may be studied and its elements may be compared, Baudrillard suggests that this poetry “fascinates” because “we no longer possess a vision of final conditions” (113). The images of contemporary catastrophes and their subsequent visualisation serve as the ultimate reminders that we, as viewers and survivors, were not there – that visualisation itself involves a necessary distance between the horrified viewer and the viewed horror. In the case of the September 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Centre, the need to “be there,” to experience vicariously a trauma as similarly as possible to those who later became its victims, perhaps explains why images of the planes first slamming into each of the towers were played and repeated ad nauseam. As Baudrillard suggests, “it would be interesting to know whether…effects persist in the absence of causes … whether something can exist apart from any origin and reference” (111). The ongoing search for these causes – particularly in the case of the World Trade Centre’s obliteration – has manifested itself in a persistent cycle of image production and consumption, prompting those images to serve as the visible/visual join between our own survival and the lost lives of the attacks or as surrogates for those whose death we could not witness. These images frequently allowed the West to legitimise its mourning, served as the road map by which we could (re-)explore the halcyon days prior to September 11, and provided the evidence needed for collective retribution. Ultimately, images served as the fictive embodiments of unseen victims and provided the vehicle by which mourning could be transformed from an isolated act to a shared experience. Visitors on the Rooftop: Visualising Origins and the Moments before Destruction It goes without saying that most have seen the famous photograph of the bundled-up tourist standing on the observation deck of the World Trade Centre with one of the jets ready to strike the tower shortly thereafter (see Figure 1). Though the photograph was deemed a macabre photo-manipulation, it reached thousands of e-mail inboxes almost two weeks following the horrific attacks and led many to ponder excitedly whether this image truly was the “last” image of a pre-September 11 world. Many openly debated why someone would fabricate such an image, yet analysts believe that its creation was a means to heal and to return to the unruffled days prior to September 11, when terrorism was thought to be a phenomenon relegated to the “elsewhere” of the Middle East. A Website devoted to the analysis of cultural rumours, Urban Legends, somewhat melodramatically suggested that the photograph resurrects what recovery efforts could not re-construct – a better understanding of the moments before thousands of individuals perished: The online world is fraught with clever photo manipulations that often provoke gales of laughter in those who view them, so we speculate that whoever put together this particular bit of imaging did so purely as a lark. However, presumed lighthearted motives or not, the photo provokes sensations of horror in those who view it. It apparently captures the last fraction of a second of this man’s life ... and also of the final moment of normalcy before the universe changed for all of us. In the blink of an eye, a beautiful yet ordinary fall day was transformed into flames and falling bodies, buildings collapsing inwards on themselves, and wave upon wave of terror washing over a populace wholly unprepared for a war beginning in its midst…The photo ripped away the healing distance brought by the nearly two weeks between the attacks and the appearance of this digital manipulation, leaving the sheer horror of the moment once again raw and bared to the wind. Though the picture wasn’t real, the emotions it stirred up were. It is because of these emotions the photo has sped from inbox to inbox with the speed that it has. (“The Accidental Tourist”) While the photograph does help the viewer recall the times before our fears of terrorism, war, and death were realised, this image does not episodically capture “the last fraction of a second” in a man’s life, nor does it give credibility to the “blink-of-an-eye” shifts between beautiful and battered worlds. The photographic analysis provided by Urban Legends serves as a retrospective means of condensing the space of time in which we must imagine the inevitable suffering of unseen individuals. Yet, the video of the towers, from the initial impacts to their collapse, measured approximately 102 minutes – a massive space of time in which victims surely contemplated escape, the inevitability of escape, the possibility of their death, and, ultimately, the impossibility of their survival (“Remains of a Day” 58). Post-traumatic visualising serves as the basis for constructing the extended horror as instantaneous, a projection that reflects how we hoped the situation might be for those who experienced it, rather than an accurate representation of the lengthy period of time between the beginning and end of the attacks. The photograph of the “accidental tourist” does not subscribe to the usual tenets of photography that suggest the image we see is, to quote W.J.T. Mitchell, “a purely objective transcript of reality” (Mitchell 281). Rather, this image invites a Burginian “inva[sion] by language in the very moment it is looked at: in memory, in association, [where] snatches of words and images continually intermingle and exchange one for the other” (Burgin 51). One sees the tourist in the photograph as a smiling innocent, posing at the wrong place and at the wrong time. Through that ascription, viewers may justify their anger and melancholy as this singular, visible body (about to be harmed) stands in for countless, unseen others awaiting the same fate. Its discrepancies with the actual opening hours of the WTC observation deck and the positioning of the aircraft largely ignored, the “accidental tourist” photo-manipulation was visualised by countless individuals and forwarded to a plethora of in-boxes because September 11 realities could not be shared intimately on that day, because the death of aircraft passengers, WTC workers, and rescue personnel was an inevitable outcome that could not be visualised as even remotely “actual” or explainable. Computer-based art and design have shown us that approximations to reality often result in its overall conflation. Accordingly, our desperate hope that we have seen glimpses of the moments before tragedy is ultimately dismantled by an acknowledgement of the illogical or impossible elements that go against the basic rules of visualisation. The “accidental tourist” is a phenomenon that not only epitomises Baudrillard’s search for origins in the wake of catastrophic effects, but underscores a collective need to visualise bodies as once-living rather than presently and inevitably dead. Faces in the Smoke: Visualising the Unseen Although such photo-manipulations were rampant in the days and weeks following the attack, many people constructed their own realities in the untouched images that the media streamed to them. The World Trade Centre disaster seemed to implore photography, in particular, to resurrect both the unseen, unremembered moments prior to the airliners’ slamming into the building and to perform two distinct roles as the towers burned: to reaffirm the public’s perception of the attack as an act of evil and to catalyse a sense of hope that those who perished were touched by God or ushered peacefully to their deaths. Within hours of the attacks, photographic stills captured what many thought to be the image of Satan – complete with horns, face, eyes, nose, and mouth – within the plumes of smoke billowing from one of the towers (see Figure 2 and its detail in Figure 3). The Associated Press, whose footage was most frequently used to reference this visual phenomenon, quickly dismissed the speculation; as Vin Alabiso, an executive photo editor for AP, observed: AP has a very strict policy which prohibits the alteration of the content of a photo in any way…The smoke in this photo combined with light and shadow has created an image which readers have seen in different ways. (“Angel or Devil?”) Although Alabiso’s comments defended the authenticity of the photographs, they also suggested the ways in which visual representation and perception could be affected by catastrophic circumstances. While many observers openly questioned whether the photographs had been “doctored,” others all too willingly invested these images with ethereal qualities by asking if the “face” they saw was that of Satan – a question mirroring their belief that such an act of terrorism was clear evidence of evil masterminding. If, as Mitchell has theorised, photographs function through a dialogical exchange of connotative and denotative messages, the photographs of the burning towers instead bombarded viewers with largely connotative messages – in other words, nothing that could precisely link specific bodies to the catastrophe. The visualising of Satan’s face happens not because Satan actually dwells within the plumes of smoke, but because the photograph resists Mitchell’s dialogue with the melancholic eye. The photograph refuses to “speak” for the individuals we know are suffering behind the layers of smoke, so our own eye constructs what the photograph will not reveal: the “face” of a reality we wish to be represented as deplorably and unquestionably evil. Barthes has observed that such “variation in readings is not … anarchic, [but] depends on the different types of knowledge … invested in the image…” (Barthes 46). In traumatic situations, one might amend this analysis to state that these various readings occur because of gaps in this knowledge and because visualisation transforms into an act based on knowledge that we wish we had, that we wish we could share with victims and fellow mourners. These visualisations highlight a desperate need to bridge the viewer’s experience of survival and their concomitant knowledge of others’ deaths and to link the “safe” visualisation of the catastrophic with the utter submission to catastrophe likely felt by those who died. Explaining the faces in the smoke as “natural indentations” as Alabiso did may be the technical and emotionally neutral means of cataloguing these images; however, the spotting of faces in photographic stills is a mechanism of visualisation that humanises a tragedy in which physical bodies (their death, their mutilation) cannot be seen. Other people who saw photographic stills from other angles and degrees of proximity were quick to highlight the presence of angels in the smoke, as captured by WABC from a perspective entirely different from that in Figure 2 (instead, see Figure 3). In either scenario, photography allows the visual personification of redemptive or evil influences, as well as the ability to visualise the tragedy not just as the isolated destruction of an architectural marvel, but as a crime against humanity with cosmic importance. Sharing the Fall: Desperation and the Photographing of Falling Bodies Perhaps what became even more troubling than the imagistic conjuring of human forms within the smoke was the photographing of bodies falling from the upper floors of the North Tower (see Figure 5). Though newspapers (re-)published photographs of the debris and hysteria of the attacks and television networks (re-)broadcast video sequences of the planes’ crashing into the towers and their collapse, the pictures of people jumping from the building were rarely circulated by the media. Dennis Cauchon and Martha T. Moore characterised these consequences of the terrorist attacks as “the most sensitive aspect of the Sept. 11 tragedy … [that] shocked the nation” (Cauchon and Moore). A delicate balance certainly existed between the media’s desire to associate faces with the feelings of desperation we know those who died must have experienced and a now-numb general public who ascribed to the photographs an unequivocal “too-muchness.” To read about those who jumped to escape smoke and flames reveals a horrific and frightfully swift narrative of panic: For those who jumped, the fall lasted 10 seconds. They struck the ground at just less than 150 miles per hour – not fast enough to cause unconsciousness while falling, but fast enough to ensure instant death on impact. People jumped from all four sides of the north tower. They jumped alone, in pairs and in groups. (Cauchon and Moore) The text contextualises these leaps to death in terms that are understandable to survivors who read the story and later discover these descriptions can never approximate the trauma of “being there”: Why did they jump? How fast were they travelling? Did they feel anything when their bodies hit the ground? Were they conscious during their jump? Did they die alone? These questions and their answers put into motion the very moment that the photograph of the jumping man has frozen. Words act as extensions of the physical boundaries of the photograph and underscore the horror of that image, from the description of the conditions that prompted the jump to the pondering of the death that was its consequence. If, as Jonathan Crary’s analysis of photographic viewing might intimate, visualisation prompts both an “autonomy of vision” and a “standardisation and regulation of the observer” (Crary 150), the photograph of a man plummeting to his death fashions the viewer’s eye as autonomous and alive because the image he/she views is the undeniable representation of a now-deceased Other. Yet, as seen in the often-hysterical responses to the threats of terrorism in the days following September 11, this “Other” embodies the very possibility of our own demise. Suddenly, the man we see in mid-air becomes the visualised “Every(wo)man” whose photographic representation also represents our unacknowledged vulnerabilities. Thus, trauma is shared through a poignant visual negotiation of dying: the certainty of the photographed man’s death juxtaposed with the newly realised or conjured threat of the viewer’s own death. In terms of humanness, those who witnessed these falls firsthand recall the ways in which the falling people became objectified – their fall seemingly robbing them of any visible sense of humanity. Eric Thompson, an employee on the seventy-seventh floor of the South Tower, shared an instantaneous moment with one of the victims: Thompson looked the man in the face. He saw his tie flapping in the wind. He watched the man’s body strike the pavement below. “There was no human resemblance whatsoever,” Thompson says. (Cauchon and Moore) Obviously, the in-situ experience of viewing these individuals hopelessly jumping to their deaths served as the prompt to run away, to escape, but the photograph acts as the frozen-in-time re-visitation and sharing of – a turning back toward – this scenario. The act of viewing the photographs reinstates the humanness that the panic of the moment seemingly removed; yet, the disparity between the photograph’s foreground (the jumping man) and its background (the building’s façade) remains its greatest disconcerting element. Unlike those photographic portraits that script behaviours and capture us in our most presentable states of being, this photograph reveals the unwilling subject – he who has not consented to share his state of being with the camera. Though W.J.T. Mitchell suggests that “[p]hotographs…seem necessarily incomplete in their imposition of a frame that can never include everything that was there to be…‘taken’” (Mitchell 289), the eye in times of catastrophe shifts between its desire to maintain the frame (that does not visually engage the inferno from which the man jumped or the concrete upon which he died) and its inability to do so. This photograph, as Mitchell might assert, “speaks” because visualisation allows its total frame of reference to extend beyond its physical boundaries and, as evidenced by post-September 11 phobias and our responses to horrific images, to affect the very means by which catastrophe is imagined and visualised. Technically speaking, the negotiated balance between foreground and background in the photograph is lost: the desperation of the falling man juxtaposed with a seemingly impossible background that should not have been there. Lost, too, is the viewer’s ability to “connect” visually with – literally, to share – that experience, to see oneself within the contexts of that particular visual representation. This inability to see the viewing self in the photograph is an ironic moment of experiential possibility that lingers still in the Western world’s fears surrounding terrorism: when the supposedly impossible act is finally visualised, territorialised, and rendered as possible. Dead Art: The Destructions and Resurrections of Works by Rodin In many ways, the photographing of those experiences so divorced from our own contributed to intense discussions of perspective in visualisation: the viewer’s witnessing of trauma by means of a camera and photographer that captured the image from a “safe” distance. However, the recovery of artwork that actually suffered damage as a result of the World Trade Centre collapse prompted many art historians and theorists to ponder the possibilities of art’s death and to contemplate the fate of art that is physically victimised. In an anticipatory vein, J.M. Bernstein suggests that “art ends as it becomes progressively further distanced from truth and moral goodness, as it loses its capacity to speak the truth about our most fundamental categorical engagements…” (Bernstein 5). If Bernstein’s theory is applied to those works damaged at the World Trade Centre site, the sculptures of Rodin, so famously photographed in the weeks of excavation that followed September 11, could be categorised as “dead” – distanced from the “truth” of human form that Rodin cast, even further from the moral goodness and the striving toward global peace that the Cantor Fitzgerald collection aimed to embrace. While many art critics believed that the destroyed works should not be displayed again, many (including Fritz Koenig, who designed The Sphere, which was damaged in the terrorist attacks) believe that such “dead art” deserves, even requires, resuscitation (see Figure 6). Much like the American flags that survived the infernos at the World Trade Centre and Pentagon site, these lost and re-discovered artworks have served as rallying points to accomplish both the sharing of trauma and an artistically inspired foundation for the re-development of the lower Manhattan site. In the case of Rodin’s The Thinker, which was recovered at the site and later presumed stolen, the statue’s discovery alongside aircraft parts and twisted steel girders served as a unique and rare survival story, almost as the surrogate representative body for those human bodies that were never found, never seen. Dan Barry and William K. Rashbaum recall that in the days following the sculpture’s disappearance, “investigators have been at Fresh Kills [landfill] and at ground zero in recent weeks, flashing a photograph of ‘The Thinker’ and asking, in effect: Have you seen this symbol of humanity” (Barry and Rashbaum)? Given such symbolic weight, sculpture most certainly took on superhuman proportions. Yet, in the days that followed the discovery of artwork that survived the attacks, only passing references were made to those figurative paintings and drawings by Picasso, Hockney, Lichtenstein, and Miró that were lost – perhaps because their subject matter or manner of artistic representation did not (or could not) reflect a “true” infliction of damage and pain the way a three-dimensional, human-like sculpture could. Viewers visualised not only the possibility of their own cultural undoing by seeing damaged Rodins, but also the embodiment of unseen victims’ bodies that could not be recovered. In a rousing speech about September 11 as an attack upon the humanities and the production of culture, Bruce Cole stated that “the loss of artifacts and art, no matter how priceless and precious, is dwarfed by the loss of life” (Cole). Nevertheless, the visualisation of maimed, disfigured art was the lens through which many individuals understood the immensity of that loss of life and the finality of their loved ones’ disappearances. What the destruction and damaging of artwork on September 11 created was an atmosphere in which art, traditionally conjured as the studied and inanimate subject, transformed from a determined to a determining influence, a re-working of Paul Smith’s theory in which “the ‘subject’ … is determined – the object of determinant forces; whereas ‘the individual’ is assumed to be determining” (Smith xxxiv). Damaged sculptures gave representative form to the thousands of victims we, as a visualising public, knew were inside the towers, but their survival spoke to larger artistic issues: the impossibility of art’s end and the foiling of its death. Baudrillard’s notion of the “impossibility of ending” demonstrates that the destruction of art (in the capitalistic sense that is contingent on its undamaged condition and its prescribed worth and “value”) does not equate to the destruction of meaning as such, but that the new and re-negotiated meanings deployed by injured art frighteningly implicate us – viewers who once assigned meaning becoming the subjects who long to be assigned something, anything, be it solace, closure, or retribution. Importantly, the latest plans for the re-vitalised World Trade Centre site indicate that the damaged Rodin and Koenig sculptures will semiotically mediate the significations established when the original World Trade Centre was a vital nexus of activity in lower Manhattan, the shock and pain experienced when the towers collapsed and individuals were searching for meaning in art’s destruction and survival, and the hope many have invested in the new buildings and their role in the maintenance and recovery of memory. A Concluding Thought Digital manipulation, photography, and the re-contextualisation of artistic “masterpieces” from their hermetic placement in the gallery to their brutal dumping in a landfill have served as the humanistic prompts that actively determined the ways in which culture grappled with and shared unimaginable horror. Images have transformed in purpose from static re(-)presentations of reality to active, changing conduits by which pasts can be remembered, by which the intangibility of death can be given substance, by which unshared moments can be more intimately considered. Oddly, visualisation has performed simultaneously two disparate functions: separating the living from the dead through a panoply of re-affirming visual experiences and permitting the re-visitation of those times, events, and people that the human eye could not see itself. Ultimately, what the manipulations, misinterpretations, and destructions of art show us is that the conveyance of meaning between individuals, whether dead or alive, whether seen or unseen, is the image’s most pressing and difficult charge. Works Cited “Angel or Devil? Viewers See Images in Smoke.” Click on Detroit. 17 Sep. 2001. 10 February 2003 <http://www.clickondetroit.com/sh/news/stories/nat-news-96283920010917-120936.php>. Barry, Dan, and William K. Rashbaum. “Rodin Work from Trade Center Survived, and Vanished.” New York Times. 20 May 2002: B1. Barthes, Roland. Image, Music, Text. New York: Hill and Wang, 1977. Baudrillard, Jean. The Illusion of the End. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1994. Bernstein, J.M. The Fate of Art: Aesthetic Alienation from Kant to Derrida and Adorno. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992. Burgin, Victor. The End of Art Theory: Criticism and Post-Modernity. Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1986. Cauchon, Dennis and Martha T. Moore. “Desperation Drove Sept. 11 Victims Out World Trade Center Windows.” Salt Lake Tribune Online. 4 September 2002. 19 Jan. 2003 <http://www.sltrib.com/2002/sep/09042002/nation_w/768120.htm>. Crary, Jonathan. Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990. Mitchell, W.J.T. Picture Theory. Chicago: University of Chicago P, 1994. “Remains of a Day.” Time 160.11 (9 Sep. 2002): 58. Smith, Paul. Discerning the Subject. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1988. “The Accidental Tourist.” Urban Legends. 20 Nov. 2001. 21 Feb. 2003 <http://www.snopes2.com/rumors/crash.htm>. Links http://www.clickondetroit.com/sh/news/stories/nat-news-96283920010917-120936.html http://www.sltrib.com/2002/sep/09042002/nation_w/768120.htm http://www.snopes2.com/rumors/crash.htm Citation reference for this article Substitute your date of access for Dn Month Year etc... MLA Style Smith, Royce W.. "The Image Is Dying" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture< http://www.media-culture.org.au/0304/09-imageisdying.php>. APA Style Smith, R. W. (2003, Apr 23). The Image Is Dying. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture, 6,< http://www.media-culture.org.au/0304/09-imageisdying.php>

To Rodica, who died first / To Mircea, who continues me [I]In his book Picturing Health and Illness: Images of Identity and Difference, Sander L. Gilman argues that during the nineteenth century the healthy norm perceived as ugly not only those who were deformed, but also those who were ill, ageing, and/or experienced different bodily “loss of function” (53). In the nineteenth century, how much was medicine responsible for defining ugly as ill, deformed, and getting old, versus beautiful as healthy, and then, for the sake of the community’s health, firmly promoting these ideas? Furthermore, with the rise of photographic art, medicine was able to manipulate and control these ideas even more efficiently. According to Deborah Lupton, “The new technology of photography that developed from the mid-nineteenth century became a valuable strategy in the documentation of patterns of disease and illness, and the construction of the sites of dirtiness and contagion” (30). This essay focuses on the skin’s narrative as it presents its story when photographed. William Yang takes photos of his good friend, Allan, who is dying of AIDS. Of interests here is to discuss/approach the photographic art not from its scopophilic angle, that is, not from its perverse and pleasurable voyeuristic angle, but to analyze it side-by-side with Drew Leder’s notion of the “the remaining body.” He believes that in states of severe pain, one’s body “dys-appears,” “from the Greek prefix signifying ‘bad,’ ‘hard,’ or ‘ill,’” and he gives as example the English word “dysfunctional” (84). Yang’s photos offer variations of the “body that remains,” and, as we shall see, of the body that gradually did not remain. Through his work, Yang approaches visually the theme of the ars moriendi of the entropic body in pain as reminder of its mortal, gradually disabling fabric. [II] In the section of his work dedicated to AIDS, Gilman discusses only a collection of posters that have circulated in mass-media, which he researched at the National Library of Medicine at Bethesda, Maryland. Gilman thinks these posters function as the “still images of illness” (174). In other words, he believes these posters may have had an impact on the lay community, although not the intensified, urgent one, as he would have hoped. Because Gilman did not include a single photo of a patient dying of AIDS — although he understood this lack — I juxtapose one of the posters from his book with Yang’s photos taken of his dying friend, Allan, from his project entitled Sadness: A Monologue with Slides. Here I discuss the impact of Allan’s increasingly emaciated body versus the static, almost ineffective quality of the poster in order to consider the idea according to which “AIDS victims are living sculptures. … Both subject and object of art … they combine with their disease to overcome the narcissism of human consciousness. … It is an art of continuous transformation of subject into object and object into subject” (Siebers 220-21). Yang is an Australian artist with Chinese parentage. The images presented in this section originally appeared in print in Thomas W. Sokolowski’s and Rosalind Solomon’s collection of essays entitled Portraits in the Time of AIDS. According to the editors, Yang presented them as “monologues with slide projection in the theatre” (34) because the main actor of this one-man show is dying of AIDS. Yang’s work consists of seventeen slides with short texts written underneath them. In an attempt to respect the body that is dying, the texts are not recited, but the readers/spectators read them subvocally. The brilliance of this piece resides in its hushed tone, which parallels the act of dying when the patient’s body and mind become more and more tacit and lifeless. From one photo to another, and from one text to another, we discover Allan, although we never quite get to know him. The minitexts relate Allan’s story: how he was hospitalized at St. Vincent’s, known as “the AIDS ward” (35); how he decided to return home, into a studio shared with a dealer; how AIDS first attacked his lungs, and so he had to keep next to him “a large cylinder of oxygen as he was often out of breath” (37); how AIDS then affected his sight, and he developed a condition known as “CytoMegalo Virus — C.M.V. Retinctus” that gradually “destroyed the retina” of his eyes (39); how he decided “to go off medication” (46); and, how, finally “he went into a coma. I saw a nurse give him a glass of water but the water just ran out of his mouth” (50). To look at these photos time and time again is to be reminded of Albert Einstein’s vision of the passenger trapped in the train running with the speed of light. That passenger could not sense all that was happening in the train, and especially outside of it, because time moves in its cosmic, non-human, slippery dimension, and thus sensation could not profusely permeate his body. Juxtaposing Einstein’s vision with Allan’s decaying body, I read the latter’s body as if it were coiled up inside his mind just like a snail covers a part of its body under its hard shell. The photos are presented rapidly with no entr-acte in between; in a matter of minutes, time and space seem to collapse. There is no time for a prolonged reminiscence of Allan’s spent life. Allan is dying now, and he does not have time to remember his life. He barely has time to feel his body, a touch, or a kiss on his face, which seems to Yang “to have caved in” (47). Through this work, not only does Yang capture the disturbing moments of a friend dying, but he also touches on the “epidermis” of despair. This “epidermis” is both endotopic and exotopic, meaning that it starts within the patient and then it radiates/extends to his relatives and friends. Yang’s images of Allan dying give the impression that his body levitates, jutting out into space — but unfortunately without much meaning. On the other hand, the posters advertised for AIDS are simple, if not quite embarrassing and disrespectful given the gravity of this illness. They rarely touch on any aspects related to the illness itself, as they allude more to the immorality of homosexual acts. Gilman explains part of the rationale involved in the process of not presenting people dying of AIDS as follows: The image of the ‘positive’ body or the body with AIDS is strictly controlled in the world of the public health poster. Nowhere is an image of the ‘ugly’ or diseased body evoked directly, for any such evocation would refer back to the initial sense as a ‘gay’ disease. … Mens non sana in corpore insano cannot be the motto. For representing the ill body as a dying body is not possible. Such a body would point to ‘deviance from the norm’ in the form of illness. And this association with homosexuality and addiction labeled as illness must be suppressed. … All these images are images not of educating, but of control. (162) The poster chosen for illustration reads “LOVE AIDS PEOPLE,” with AIDS used as a verb and not as a noun; nonetheless, the construction’s subtlety is rather counterproductive. To a certain extent, this poster can be related to Michelangelo Merisi Caravaggio’s The Incredulity of Saint Thomas (1601-02). There, the Apostle touches the actual wound because he needs tactile proof to accept its existence. The act of touching, as well as the skin open by the wound, reveal the fact that “Skin lacks the depth, the interiority we want it to give us. … The flesh we crave as confirmation of our forms cannot do anything but turn us forever out even as we burrow into the holes we find there” (Phelan 42). But the poster presented below brings into focus verbally (therefore propagandistically) how one’s body might be destroyed because of AIDS. Furthermore, the symbol of the arrow is a recurrent motif in the art representing AIDS, especially in light of its religious association with the martyrdom of Saint Sebastian (see for example David Wojnarowicz art works which offer a personal interpretation of the martyrdom of Saint Sebastian). But if LOVE AIDS PEOPLE, and if gay men identify themselves with a martyr, then they might easily fall target to this twisted logic and think of themselves as victims. As Larry Kramer notes, gay men are tragic people partly because they feel responsible for an illness that has been affecting both the homosexual and heterosexual communities: “The continuing existence of HIV is essential for the functioning of the totalitarianism under which gay people now live. It works like this: HIV allows ‘them’ to sell us as sick. And that kills off our usefulness, both in our minds — their thinking we are sick — and in the eyes of the world — everyone thinking we are sick” (65).Gay men have always been a target since, allegedly, they are a menace to the institution of marriage, procreation, and to morality in general. Endocrinology studies have been conducted on gay men, but their results have not been able to say with certainty why some people prefer to engage in homosexual rather than heterosexual acts. According to Jennifer Terry, earlier studies from the 1930s aimed at determining distinct somatic features of homosexuals for the most part failed to produce any such evidence. Most of them focused on the overall physical structure of bodies, measuring skeletal features, pelvic angles and things like muscle density and hair distribution. (144) (Another useful resource is Holt N. Parker’s 2001 article “The Myth of the Heterosexual: Anthropology and Sexuality for Classicists.”) How and by whom are our sexual identities created? Does the presence of one specific anatomical organ delimit one person’s sexual identity? We have been trained into believing that there are only two genders, male and female, partly because of our binary way of thinking. Needless to say, just as in one color there are degrees of its intensity and saturation, so there are in us verbal, behavioral, and sexual tendencies that could make us look and act more or less masculine or feminine. Even more productive is to note the importance of power (control) and the erotic in our lives considering that the photos (and the minitexts) presenting Allan seem insufficient to initiate a dialogue by themselves. Because the eroticized body is what dies, that is, what is put at risk or could become powerless because of AIDS. The body that cannot touch and be touched anymore; the body that cannot control its needs and desires; and, ultimately, the body that is deprived of its pleasures and thus loses its erotic self. Therefore, AIDS is not only a way to redefine our erotic life, but also becomes a reason to question our hygiene practices. Elizabeth Grosz points out that “erotic pleasures are evanescent, they are forgotten almost as they occur” (195). But when erotic pleasures are controlled, as seems to be the case because of AIDS, have we intervened in such a manner as to program our intercourse? Admittedly, AIDS is predominantly linked with one’s sexuality and, hence, it could make one feel too self-aware about one’s needs, as well as rigid and self-conscious in an (intimate) act which, in essence, is all about losing oneself, being uninhibited. In the end, Allan’s sense of identity seems to be imprinted only in the camera’s objective lens. After he died, as Yang remembers, “I read his diaries […]. AIDS was a tragedy that was for sure, but as well he had an addictive personality and his day to day life was full of desperation. I hadn’t realize the extent of this and it came as a shock. Yet there were moments of clarity when his fresh test for life shone” (51). Yang does not say more about Allan’s intimate writings and, as he suggests, it was quite surprising for him to discover a richer, more intimate dimension of his friend. Still, until Allan’s diaries will be released to the public to offer us a more palpable view on his life, we rely exclusively on the selections of photos and minitexts accomplished by Yang, thus being aware that, no matter how exquisite they are, they could only say a few things about this enigmatic patient.[III] After exposing Allan’s gradually collapsing body, we may want to analyze to which extent is dying/death something that reveals our self-centricity. It is by now a truism to say that death is the final moment of our embodiment to which we are denied access. Nonetheless, we cannot stop thinking about (our) death, and the last passage of this essay proposes its own reflection on this subject. Norbert Elias argues that each one of us is a homo clausus (Latin for “closed, self-sufficient being”). He believes that this condition is a consequence of our living an advanced phase in our individualized life. Surprisingly, he relates this self-sufficiency to the ritual of dying. He believes that in highly industrialized societies, a patient may benefit from the most recent technical and medical equipment, but that that person usually dies alone, meaning without his family/relatives around him. On the other hand, as he goes on to argue, “families in less developed states … often go hand in hand with far greater inequalities of power between men and women. [The dying] take leave of the world publicly, within a circle of people most of whom have strong emotive value for them, and for whom they themselves have a such a value. They die unhygienically, but not alone” (87). Elias does not explore this idea in depth, so we are left to wonder what he meant by dying unhygienically, or if he thought that method was better in coping with death. Also, he never mentioned the exact countries/regions he had in mind when he made that remark; therefore, we are left unsatisfied by his comment. Nonetheless, as Elias reminds us, it is important to remember that the traditional death rituals were and are intimate moments (and they should remain like this). The homo clausus idea may be linked with a body that is reaching its final embodiment, and hence becoming a closing-in-itself body. However, how does a body transact and/or negotiate the moments of its final embodiment? The process of sinking in one’s body, to which I refer, is not a visually, aurally, or especially olfactorily pleasant experience. Our deceitful memory misdirects our emotional brains by indicating which subsystem is still functional and open and which has become useless, that is, closed. In this light, we should redefine Elias’s idea by saying that what appears to be a monolithic structure — a body: closed, sealed, and/or self-contained — is in fact a very fluid body; that death does not reveal our self-centricity because that reasoning may generate an absurd idea, namely, we die alone because we have spent a life alone. Consequently, the dying body becomes the margin par excellence, which, because it is completely out of control, does not stop from leaking and/or emitting smells. This theory is confirmed by a study conducted on dying patients, Dying Process: Patients' Experiences of Palliative Care (2000), where Julia Lawton notes that “on a number of occasions, staff kept aromatherapy oil burners running throughout the day and night in an attempt to veil the odour of excretia, vomit and rotting flesh. … I observed that smell created a boundary around a patient, repelling others away” (135). One has to close one’s eyes to vaguely imagine what it must feel like for the medical personnel to keep the vigil of the dying bodies. Nonetheless, the lay community is exposed to photographs of the dying only on rare occasions. According to Gilman, these images are not made public because “The classical model of ‘healthy/beauty’ and ‘illness/ugliness’ is part of a cultural baggage that accompanies any representation of the ill or healthy body” (118-19). While the skin is endowed with the capacity of regenerating itself after it has been wounded, thus effacing time, a photograph of a dying body seems to efface one’s memory of one’s accumulated experiences. Such a photograph makes its contents (that is, the time, location, personal context of the shooting) disappear since its details will eventually fade away. As a corollary, the absent body effaces its photographed version, leaving it few chances to be remembered. The theme of the ars moriendi, as presented in this essay, has demonstrated that what dies is not only one’s body, but also the echoed memory of its erotic self. ReferencesElias, Norbert. The Loneliness of Dying. New York: Blackwell, 1985. Gilman, Sander. Picturing Health and Illness: Images of Identity and Difference. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1995. Grosz, Elizabeth. Space, Time, and Perversion: Essays on the Politics of Bodies.New York: Routledge, 1995. Kramer, Larry. The Tragedy of Today’s Gay. New York: Penguin Group, 2005. Lawton, Julia. Dying Process: Patients' Experiences of Palliative Care. New York: Routledge, 2000. Leder, Drew. The Absent Body. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990. Lupton, Deborah. The Imperative of Health: Public Health and the Regulated Body. Thousand Oaks, California: Sage Publications, 1995. Peggy Phelan. Mourning Sex: Performing Public Memories. New York: Routledge, 1997. Siebers, Tobin. The Body Aesthetic: From Fine Art to Body Modification. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000. Jennifer Terry. “The Seductive Power of Science in the Making of Deviant Subjectivity.” Posthuman Bodies. Eds. Judith Halberstam and Ira Livingston. Bloomington : Indiana University Press, 1995: 135-162. Yang, William. “Allan from Sadness: A Monologue with Slides.” Portraits in the Time of AIDS. Eds. Thomas W. Sokolowski and Rosalind Solomon. New York: Grey Art Gallery & Study Center, 1988: 34-51.

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]).

Blaise Pascal once offered the following advice to those perennially worried about knowing fact from fiction: “how few things can be demonstrated! Proofs only convince the mind; custom provides the strongest and most firmly held proofs” (148). The concern about whether or not God existed was for Pascal an unnecessary anxiety: the question couldn’t be answered by human knowledge, and so ultimately one just had to “wager” on whatever stood to be most beneficial, act as if this chosen answer was true, and the mind would eventually fall into line. For Pascal, if one stood to gain from believing in the truth of an idea then the great problems of epistemology could be reduced to a relatively simple and pragmatic calculation of benefit. Doubt, suspicion, and all the attendant epistemological worries would only count as wasted time.It might at first seem surprising that this somewhat antiquated idea of Pascal’s, conceived in seventeenth-century France, appears at the core of a novel by a writer considered to be the quintessential “modern” author, David Foster Wallace. But consider the following advice offered to a recovering drug addict in Wallace’s 1996 novelInfinite Jest. To reap the benefits of the AA program, Don Gately, one of the central characters of the novel, is told by resident counsellor Gene M to imagine he is holding a box of Betty Crocker Cake Mix. The box of cake mix represents Boston AA. Gately is advised that the “box came with directions on the side any eight-year-old could read”: Gene M. said all Gately had to do was for fuck’s sake give himself a break and relax and for once shut up and just follow the directions on the side of the fucking box. It didn’t matter one fuckola whether Gately like believed a cake would result, or whether he understood the like fucking baking-chemistry of howa cake would result: if he just followed the motherfucking directions, and had sense enough to get help from slightly more experienced bakers to keep from fucking the directions up if he got confused somehow, but basically the point was if he just followed the childish directions, a cake would result. He’d have his cake. (467) This advice indeed seems lifted from Pascal almost verbatim (plus or minus a few turns of phrase, of course):Learn from those who have been bound like you, and who now wager all they have. They are people who know the road you want to follow and have been cured of the affliction of which you want to be cured. Follow the way by which they began ... (Pascal 156).While the Pascalian influence on Wallace’s work is perhaps interesting in its own right, and there are certainly more extensive and capable analyses of it to be done than mine, I invoke it here to highlight a particular emphasis in Wallace’s work that I think exceeds the framework through which it is usually understood. Wallace’s fiction is commonly considered an attack on irony, being supposedly at the vanguard of a movement in recent American literature that Adam Kelly, in an illuminating analysis, has called the “New Sincerity” (131). But before anything else irony is a particular trope of understanding, a way of situating oneself in regards to an object of knowledge, and so Wallace’s work needs not only to be understood in terms of what a culture considers unhip, trite, and sentimental, but how it comes to decide upon those things at all, how it chooses to understand its reality. Inspired by the Pascalian influence apparent in Wallace’s portrayal of the Alcoholics Anonymous program, I intend to shift the focus away from issues of irony and sincerity and instead consider the importance of the epistemological tropes of suspicion and trust in reading Infinite Jest. More than anything else Wallace’s depiction of the AA program tells us he is interested, like Pascal, in the existential implications of suspicion, in what might be lost in following doubt to its most “radical” conclusions. I SuspicionIt is fruitful to view Western intellectual practice as exhibiting suspicious tendencies. From Descartes’s “hyperbolic doubt,” the “hermeneutics of suspicion” that Ricœur and Foucault see coming out of the legacy of Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud, to the endless “paranoia of the postmodern” that typifies recent academic trends (Bywater 79), the refusal to trust the veracity of surfaces has been a driving force in post-Enlightenment thought, becoming largely inextricable from how we understand the world. As a mode of critique, suspicion has a particular anxiety about the way fiction masquerades as truth. When a suspicious mind reads a given object, be it an advertisement, a novel, a film, a supermarket, or an egg carton, it most often proceeds by first separating the text into what Paul Ricœur calls an “architecture of meaning” (18), defining those elements it considers fictive and those it considers truer, more essential, in order to locate what it considers “the intentional structure of double meaning” (Ricœur 9). Beneath the fictive surface of a novel, for example, it might find hidden the “truer” forces of social repression and patriarchy. Behind the innocence of a bedtime tale it might discern the truth of the placating purpose of story, or the tyranny of naïve narrative closure, the fantasies of teleology and final consonance. And behind Pascal’s wager it might find a weak submission to ideological fictions, a confirmation of the processes of social conditioning.Over the years suspicion has doubtless proved itself a crucial resource for various politics of resistance, for challenging ossified structures of knowledge, and for exposing heinous fictions that definitely needed exposing. But some contend that these once fruitful intellectual practices have become so deeply entrenched that they are now the things to be suspiciously overcome. Rather than being a subversive tactic of liberation, the “routinisation” of suspicion can stand to mark a hermeneutic stasis. It can even, as Bruno Latour argues, mire important social and ecological issues in counterproductive doubt, the most obvious example being the tiresome “debates” about global warming:the danger would no longer be coming from an excessive confidence in ideological arguments posturing as matters of fact—as we have learned to combat so efficiently in the past—but from an excessive distrust of good matters of fact disguised as bad ideological biases! (Latour 227) The work of David Foster Wallace can be considered another example of such a discourse, one that definitely admits suspicion’s hermeneutic force, but is a little uneasy with its predominance. While Wallace’s work is most commonly understood in relation to irony, irony itself, as I have suggested, can in turn be understood as related to a subtending culture of suspicion and cynicism. In his 1993 essay “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction,” Wallace notes a complex interaction between knowledge, suspicion, art, and televisual culture, in which a particular rendering of irony—a mistrust in clichéd sentiment and all those words we now so confidently put between “shudder” quotes—is commoditised and exploited in order to constantly provide the psychological payoffs of knowingness, those feelings of superiority, safety, and power that come from suspiciously seeing through to the “truth” of things. In Wallace’s reading, ostensibly postmodern advertisements draw attention to their fictive layers to make viewers feel attuned to the supposed truth of their intent. But this access to the “truth” is itself just another fiction aimed to mislead them into commercial pliancy:[TV can] ease that painful tension between Joe’s need to transcend the crowd and his status as Audience member. For to the extent that TV can flatter Joe about “seeing through” the pretentiousness and hypocrisy of outdated values, it can induce in him precisely the feeling of canny superiority it’s taught him to crave, and can keep him dependent on the cynical TV-watching that alone affords this feeling. (Wallace 180) The ironic viewer who would stand above these deliberately naive appeals would then also, and perhaps before anything else, be a suspicious reader, someone predisposed to seeing through the “surface” of a text. Irony, in these examples, would even be alike to the effect gained from “successful” suspicion, something like its reward, rather than an epistemological mode in itself. While in his essay Wallace ultimately intends that his critique of such tendencies will highlight the way much contemporary fiction struggles to subvert this culture, and thus we cannot help but look to his own work to see how it supposedly “attacks” irony, it is also just as crucial to consider its embedded critique of suspicious hermeneutics.II Trust In Infinite Jest’s portrayal of Boston’s Alcoholics and Narcotics Anonymous programs, Wallace attempts to propose a kind of neo-Pascalian “wager.” And like Pascal’s, Wallace’s is based on the willed performance of that most critically maligned of concepts, trust: that is, a willingness to become, like Pascal, blasé with truth as long as it stands to be beneficial. Within the novel the fictitious Ennet Drug and Alcohol House, along with the adjacent Enfield Tennis Academy, is staged as a school of personal (re)development, dramatising approaches to self-help in the damaged landscape of the Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment’s Boston. And it is here where Don Gately, the novel’s unlikely hero, has ended up on his quest to escape the “spider” of addiction. As it openly admits, Alcoholics Anonymous is an easy target for a suspicious mode of thought bent on locating fictions because it “literally makes no sense” (368). But like Pascal, Wallace’s AA submits the problem of truth and error to a more primary consideration of benefit, and celebrates the power of language and custom to create realities, rather than being suspicious of this process of linguistic mediation. So it is a system, like signification itself, that functions on “the carrot-and-donkey aspect of trudging to Meetings only to be told to trudge to still more Meetings” (1001); like any transcendental signifier, the revelations it hints at can never truly arrive. It is also based on assertions that “do not make anything resembling rational sense” (1002). For example, Joelle van Dyne battles with the AA precept “I’m Here But For the Grace of God.” She finds the phrase is literally senseless, and regardless of whether she hears it or not it’s meaningless, and that the foamy enthusiasm with which these folks can say what in fact means nothing at all makes her want to put her head in a Radarange. (366) But perhaps the strongest reason Joelle feels uncomfortable with the present example is that she senses in its obvious untruth the potential truth of all meaning’s fictitiousness, how all sense might just be made up of nonsense of one form or another. Within the AA program these words are a means to an end, rather than something to be resisted or deconstructed.To exist within Infinite Jest’s AA program is thus to be uncomfortably close to the linguistic production of reality, to work at meaning’s coalface, exposed to the flames of its fictitiousness, but all the while being forced to deny this very vista. So while AA is a process firmly against the mechanisms of denial (one of its favourite slogans is “Denial is not a river in Egypt” [272]), it is also based on a paradoxical imperative to deny the status of meaning as a production, as well as the denial of the significance of this paradox: For me, the slogan [Analysis-Paralysis] means there’s no set way to argue intellectual-type stuff about the Program [...] You can’t think about it like an intellectual thing [...] You can analyse it til you’re breaking tables with your forehead and find a cause to walk away, back Out There, where the Disease is. Or you can stay and hang in and do the best you can. (1002) Although it is common knowledge that its precepts are full of logical contradiction and impasse, that it is a blatantly fictitious enterprise, the difficulty which Wallace’s portrayal poses, both for his characters and for his readers schooled in suspicious hermeneutics, is that as a process of healing the AA program somehow seems to work with great efficacy. Enter the redemption of Don Gately.Despite his initial reluctance to embrace the program’s undertakings, much to his surprise Gately finds it having a definite effect: he “all of a sudden realised that quite a few days had gone by since he’d even thought about Demerol or Talwin or even weed” (467). The bracketing of the desire to know and interpret, and the willed trust in the efficacy of a process that one cannot know by necessity, initially frustrates him, and even makes him suspicious: “He couldn’t believe it. He wasn’t Grateful so much as kind of suspicious about it, the Removal [of his addiction]” (468). And all this can definitely be intellectually uncomfortable for a reader well-versed in suspicious hermeneutics, let alone the somewhat unintellectual Gately:It did, yes, tentatively seem maybe actually to be working, but Gately couldn’t for the life of him figure out how just sitting on haemorrhoid-hostile folding chairs every night looking at nose-pores and listening to clichés could work. Nobody’s ever been able to figure AA out, is another binding commonality. (349)Ultimately the AA program presents the novel’s hero and its readers with an impasse, a block to what one knows and can critique, refuting the basic assumption that links narrative progression and change with the acquisition of knowledge. While others in AA seek to understand and debunk it, they also significantly fail to achieve the kind of recovery experienced by Gately. As Elizabeth Freudenthal suggests, “despite the problems one may have with AA as a vehicle for healthy living, Gately’s mode of fighting addiction is the only one in the novel that actually works” (191). And while Freudenthal suggests that Gately’s success comes through a ritual “anti-interiority,” a “mode of identity founded in the material world of both objects and biological bodies and divested from an essentialist notion of inner emotional, psychological, and spiritual life” (192), to me it seems that were Gately unable to resist the pleasures of the suspicious mind then little of his “abiding” in the exterior world would be possible. Ultimately, what Gately achieves comes through a kind of epistemological “trust.”III Reading TrustfullyBy occupying such a central place in the narrative, this neo-Pascalian wager around which the novel’s AA program is built is obviously intended to bear not only on its characters, but on how the novel is read. So how might we also “learn” from such Pascalian gambits? How might we read the novel without suspicion? What might we gain by becoming Don Gately? What, on the other hand, might we lose? While this essay is far too short to conduct this kind of investigation in full, a few points might still be raised in lieu of a proper conclusion.By openly submitting to his ignorance of what his actions mean, Gately is able to approach success, conclusion, and fulfillment. What the novel’s ending has in store for him is another question altogether, but Freudenthal views Gately’s closing scenes as the apotheosis of his “anti-intellectual endeavor” (206). Gately’s narrative thus also presents a challenge to readers thoroughly led by suspicious hermeneutics, and encourages us, if we are to accept this notion that is key to Infinite Jest (but we can, of course, refuse not to), to place ourselves in the position of the AA attendee, as a subject of the text’s discourse, not in possession of knowledge through which to critique it and scale that “architecture of meaning.” Many aspects of the novel of course impel us to read suspiciously, to gather clues like detectives, to interrogate the veracity of claims. Consider, for example, the compounded conflicting accounts of whether Joelle van Dyne has been horribly disfigured by acid, or is sublimely beautiful (compare, for instance, the explanation given on 538 with that on 795). Yet ultimately, recalling the AA ethos, the narrative makes it difficult for us to successfully execute these suspicious reading practices. Similar to a text like Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, that for Brian McHale ultimately resists any attempt to answer the many questions it poses (90-91), Infinite Jest frequently invokes a logic of what we might call epistemological equivocation. Either the veil-wearing Joelle van Dyne is hideously and improbably deformed or is superlatively beautiful; either AA is a vapid institution of brainwashing or is the key to recovery from substance abuse; either the novel’s matriarch, Avril Incandenza, is a sinister “black widow” or a superlatively caring mother. The list goes on.To some extent, the plethora of conflicting accounts simply engages an “innocent” readerly curiosity. But regardless of the precise nature of this hermeneutic desire stimulated by the text, one cannot help but feel, as Marshall Boswell suggests, that “Wallace’s point seems to be that these issues are not the issue” (175). If we read the novel attempting to harmonise these elements, interrogating the reliability of the given textual evidence, we will be sorely disappointed, if not doomed to the “analysis paralysis” that is much feared in the novel’s AA program. While one of the pleasures Wallace’s novel offers readers is the encouragement to participate actively in the text, it is also something it is wary of. And this is where the rub of the book lies. Just like in AA, we can potentially keep analysing its ambiguities forever; it is indeed designed to be pleasurable in just this way. But it is also intended, at least so Wallace tells us, to resist the addictive nature of pure entertainment:The original title was A Failed Entertainment. The idea is that the book is structured as an entertainment that doesn’t work [...]. And the tension of the book is to try to make it at once extremely entertaining—and also sort of warped, and to sort of shake the reader awake about some of the things that are sinister in entertainment. (Wallace in Lipsky 79)If we consider what it might mean to view the book as a “Failed Entertainment,” and consider what it is we love to do when reading suspiciously, we can then see that it is perhaps intended to steer us away from trying to decode it, especially when it is constantly suggested to us that it is this effort of analysis that tends to move one out of the immediacy of a given moment. The fact that “nobody’s ever been able to figure AA out” (349), yet it still indubitably works, seems to suggests how we are to approach the novel.But what are we offered instead of these pleasures of suspicious reading? Perhaps, like the AA attendee, the novel wants us to learn to listen to what is already in front of us: for the AA member it is all those stories offered up at the “podium”; for us it is all the pain and joy written in the text. In place of a conclusive ending that gives us all that we want to know, that shows us everything that “happens,” in its final scene the novel instead tells the story of a man finding his “bottom,” his lowest ebb, waking up “flat on his back on the beach in the freezing sand” (981). This man, of course, is Don Gately. If we see this final moment only as a frustration of narrative desire, as a turning away from full understanding, from a revelation of the “truth” the narrative has been withholding, then we perhaps fail the task Wallace’s text, like AA, constantly asks of us: to listen, to accept, to trust.ReferencesBoswell, Marshall. Understanding David Foster Wallace. Columbia, SC: U of South Carolina P, 2003.Bywater, William. “The Paranoia of Postmodernism.” Philosophy and Literature 14.1 (1990): 79–84. Foucault, Michel. “Nietzsche, Freud, Marx.” Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology: Essential Works of Foucault 1954–84, Volume 2. Ed. James Faubion. Trans. Robert Hurley et al. London: Penguin, 2000. 269–78. Freudenthal, Elizabeth. “Anti-Interiority: Compulsiveness, Objectification, and Identity in Infinite Jest.” New Literary History 41.1 (2010): 191–211. Kelly, Adam. “David Foster Wallace and the New Sincerity in American Fiction.” Consider David Foster Wallace: Critical Essays. Los Angeles: Sideshow Media Group Press, 2010. 131–46.Latour, Bruno. “Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern.” Critical Inquiry 30.2 (2004): 225–48.Lipsky, David. Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip With David Foster Wallace. New York: Broadway Books, 2010.McHale, Brian. “Modernist Reading, Post-Modern Text: The Case of Gravity's Rainbow.” Poetics Today 1.1 (1979): 85–110.Pascal, Blaise. Pensées and Other Writings. Trans. Honor Levi. Ed.Anthony Levi. New York: Oxford UP, 1995.Ricœur, Paul. Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation. Trans. Denis Savage. New Haven: Yale UP, 1970.Wallace, David Foster. “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction.” Review of Contemporary Fiction 13.2 (1993): 151–94. ---. Infinite Jest. New York: Back Bay Books, 1996.

The phenomenological experience of art is one of embodied awareness. Now more than ever, as contemporary art becomes more interactive and immersive, our perceptions of embodiment are useful tools to gauge the efficacy of visual art as a stimulus for knowledge, new experience and expression. Art has a mimetic and interactive relationship with the world. As Schopenhauer said, “The world is my representation” (3). So which takes effect first: the lungful of excited breath or the synapses, is it the miasmic smell of dust on whirring video projectors or the emotion? When we see great art (in this instance, new media work), do we shudder, then see and understand it? Or do we see, tremble and, only then, know? “Art unleashes and intensifies...Art is of the animal” (Grosz, Chaos 62-3). Are our bodies reacting in response to the physical information at hand in the world? “Why do you like Amy?” I asked my six year old son, who was in love at the time. “I like her face,” he said. Was this a crude description of infantile love or an intuitive understanding of how all kinds of passion begin with the surface of the face? Peter Sloterdijk writes about the immersion and mimicry, the life and death mutualism of faces, of gazing on another’s face. He says, “Both of these, self-knowledge as well as self-completion, are operations in a sphere of illusory bipolarity that, like an ellipse, only formally possess two focal points” (205). It seems to me that this desire for the love, beauty and knowledge of another is mutual; a reciprocal narrative thrust, the same existential motivation. Elizabeth Grosz writes about the first emotions of the newborn child and the immediate expressiveness of the face, with those of the parents. She refers to Alphonso Lingis to develop this connection between emotion and bodily expression as: “the pleasure and pains the body comes to articulate: human infants laugh and weep before they can speak.” (Grosz, Chaos 51) To be acknowledged, to see a reflection of one’s own face in that of another’s face as an expression of love, is a craving common to all humans.Art, like new love, has the ability to set our hearts aflutter, lips aquiver, our palms turned upwards in awe, our eyes widened in surprise. “The reverie of love defies all attempts to record it” (Stendhal 63). We are physically drawn to great works, to their immediacy, to their sudden emerging determination and tangibility (Menke). Our perceptions are entangled, our attitudes are affected, our imaginations are piqued and our knowledge and memory are probed.So what happens next? Once our hearts are pounding and our legs are wobbling, then what? As our unconscious experience becomes conscious (as the result of our brain letting our body know and then identifying and analysing the data), we start to draw associations and allow the mind and the body to engage with the world. The significance of what we see, an art object worthy of love for instance, is interpreted or distinguished by our memory and our personal accumulation of information over our lives. When we are away from the object, we perceive the art work to be dispassionate, inanimate and impassive. Yet standing before the object, our perception shifts and we consider the art work to be alive and dynamic. I believe the ability to ‘fall’ for an art work reflects the viewer’s heart-breaking longing to ensnare the beauty (or ugliness) that has so captured his or her soul. Like the doppelganger who doesn’t recognise its own double, its own shadow, the viewer falls in love (Poe 1365). This perverse perception of love (perverse because we usually associate love as existing between humans) is real. Philosopher Paul Crowther writes about the phenomenology of visual art. Where I am talking about a romantic longing, a love of the love itself, the face falling for the face, the body falling for the body, bodily, Crowther breaks down the physical patterns of perceiving art. Though he does not deny the corporeal reality of the experience, he talks of the body operations discriminating at the level of perception, drawing on memories and future expectations and desire (Crowther, Phenomenology 62). Crowther says, “Through the painting, the virtual and the physical, the world and the body, are shown to inhabit one another simultaneously and inseparably” (Phenomenology 75). I am not sure that these experiences occur simultaneously or even in tandem. While we perceive the experience as full and complex and potentially revelatory, one element more likely informs the next and so on, but in a nanosecond of time. The bodily senses warn the heart which warns the mind. The mind activates the memories and experiences before alerting us to the world and the context and finally, the aesthetic judgement.Crowther’s perception of transcendence operates when reality is suspended in the mode of possibility. This informs my view that love of art functions as an impossibility of desire’s end, gratification must be pushed back every time. What of Crowther’s corporeal imagination? This is curious: how can we imagine with our bodies (as opposed to our mind and spirit)? This idea is virtual, in time and space outside those we are used to. This is an imagination that engages instantly, in a self-conscious way. Crowther refers to the virtually immobilised subject matter and the stationary observer and calls it a “suspension of tense” (Phenomenology 69). However I am interested in the movement of the spectator around the art work or in synchronicity with the artwork too. This continues the face to face, body to body, encounter of art.Crowther also writes of phenomenological depth as a condition of embodiment which is of significance to judgement; phenomenological depth is “shown through ways in which the creation of visual artworks embodies complex relations between the human subject and its objects of perception, knowledge, and action” (Phenomenology 9). Although Crowther is leaning on the making of the artwork more heavily than the viewers’ perception of it in this account, it relates well to the Australian artists and twins Silvana and Gabriella Mangano, whose action performances, presented in three-screened, large-scale video were represented in the 2012 Sydney Biennale. The Mangano twins collaborate on video performance works which focus on their embodied interpretations of the act of drawing. In the Mangano sisters’ 2001 Drawing 1, the twins stand beside a wall of paper, facing each other. While maintaining eye contact, they draw the same image on the wall, without seeing what mark they are making or what mark the other is making. This intuitive, physical, corporeal manifestation of their close connection becomes articulated on paper. Its uncanny nature, the shared creativity and the performative act of collaborative drawing is riveting. The spectator is both excluded and incorporated in this work. Such intimacy between siblings is exclusive and yet the participation of the spectator is necessary, as witnesses to this inexplicable ability to know where the other’s drawing will move next. The sisters are face to face but the spectator and the artwork also function in a face to face encounter; the rhythmic fluidity of movement on the video screen surface is the face of the artwork.When experiencing the Mangano works, we become aware of our own subjective physical experiences. Also, we are aware of the artists’ consciousness of their heightened physical relations with each other, while making the work. I am writing in an era of digital video and performance art, where sound, movement, space and shifts of temporality must be added to more traditional formalist criteria such as form, surface, line and colour. As such, our criteria for judgement of this new surge of highly technical (though often intuitively derived) work and the immersive, sometimes interactive, experiences of the audience have to change at the same pace. One of the best methods of aesthetic critique to use is the concept of embodiment, the perceptual forces at work when we are conscious of the experience of art. As I sit at my desk, I am vaguely aware of my fingers rattling across the keyboard and of my legs crossed beneath me. I am conscious of their function, as an occupied space within which my consciousness resides. “I know where each of my limbs is through a body image in which all are included. But the notion of body image is ambiguous,” (102) says Merleau-Ponty, and this is a “Continual translation into visual language of the kinaesthetic and articular impressions of the moment” (102). Mark Johnson reiterates this dilemma: “We are aware of what we see, but not of our seeing.” (5) This doesn’t only relate to the movement of the Mangano twins’ muscles, postures and joint positions in their videos. It also relates to the spectator’s posture and straining, our recoiling and absorption. If I lurch forward (Lingis 174) to see the video image of the twins as they walk across a plain in El Bruc, Spain, using Thonet wooden chairs as stilts in their 2009 work The Surround, and if my eyes widen, if my hands unclench and open, and if I touch my cheek in wonder, then, is this embodied reaction a legitimate normative response? Is this perception of the work, as a beautiful and desirable experience, an admissible form of judgement? If I feel moved, if my heart races, my skin prickles, does that mean the effect is as important as other technical, conceptual or formalist categories of success? Does this feeling refer to the possibility of new intelligence? An active body in a bodily space (Merleau-Ponty 104) as opposed to external space can be perceived because of darkness needed for the ‘theatre’ of the performance. Darkness is often the cue for audiences that there is performative information at work. In the Manganos’ videos in Spain (they completed several videos during a residency in El Bruc Spain), the darkness was the isolated and alienating landscape of a remote plain. In their 2010 work Neon, which was inspired by Atsuko Tanaka’s 1957 Electric Dress, the movement and flourish of coloured neon paper was filmed against a darkened background, which is the kind of theatre space Merleau-Ponty describes: the performative cue. In Neon the checkered and brightly coloured paper appeared waxy as the sisters moved it around their half-hidden bodies, as though blown by an imaginary wind. This is an example of how the black or darkened setting works as a stimulant for understanding the importance of the body at work within the dramatic space. This also escalates the performative nature of the experience, which in turn informs the spectator’s active reaction. Merleau-Ponty says, “the laying down of the first co-ordinates, the anchoring of the active body in an object, the situation of the body in the face of its tasks. Bodily space can be distinguished from external space and envelop its parts instead of spreading them out” (115) The viewer, however, is not disembodied, despite the occasional sensation of hallucination in the face of an artwork. The body is present, it is in, near, around and sometimes below the stimulus. Many art experiences are immersive, such as Mexican, Rafael Lorenzo Hemmer, and Dane, Olafur Eliasson, whose installations explore time, light and sound and require audience participation. The participant’s interaction causes an effect upon the artwork. We are more conscious of ourselves in these museum environments: we move slowly, we revolve and pause, with hands on hip, head cocked to the side. We smile, frown, sense, squint, laugh, listen and touch. Traditional art (such as painting) may not invite such extremes of sensory multiplicity, such extremes of mimicking movement and intimate immersion. “The fact that the self exists in such an horizon of past and possible experiences means that it can never know itself sufficiently as just this immediately given physical body. It inhabits that body in the sense of being able, as it were, to wander introspectively through memory and imagination to places, times and situations other than those of its present embodiment” (Crowther, Phenomenology 178). Crowther’s point is important in application to the discussion of embodiment as a normative criteria of aesthetic judgement. It is not just our embodied experience that we bring to the magistrate’s court room, for judgement, but our memory and knowledge and the context or environment of both our experience and the experience that is enacted in relation to the art work. So an argument for embodiment as a criteria for normative judgements would not function alone, but as an adjunct, an add-on, an addition to the list of already applied criteria. This approach of open honesty and sincerity to art is similar to the hopefulness of new love. This is not the sexualised perception, the tensions of eroticism, which Alphonso Lingis speaks of in his Beauty and Lust essay. I am not talking about how “the pattern of holes and orifices we sense in the other pulls at the layout of lips, fingers, breasts, thighs and genitals” nor “the violent emotions that sense the obscenity in anguish” (175-76), I am instead referring to a G-rated sense of attachment, a more romantic attitude of compassion, desire, empathy and affection. Those movements made by the Mangano twins in their videos, in slow motion, sometimes in reverse, in black and white, the actions and postures that flow and dance, peak and drop, swirl and fall: the play of beauty within space, remind me of other languorous mimetic accents taken from nature. I recall the rhythms of poetry I have read, the repetitions of rituals and patterns of behaviour in nature I have witnessed. This knowledge, experience, memory and awareness all contribute to the map of love which is directing me to different points in the performance. These contributors to my embodied experience are creating a new whole and also a new format for judgement. Elizabeth Grosz talks about body maps when she says, “the body is thus also a site of resistance...for it is capable of being self-marked, self-represented in alternative ways” (Inscriptions and Body Maps 64). I’m interested less in the marking and more in the idea of the power of bodily participation. This is power in terms of the personal and the social as transformative qualities. “Art reminds us of states of animal vigour,” Nietsche says (Grosz, Chaos 63). Elizabeth Grosz continues this idea by saying that sensations are composites (75) and that art is connected to sexual energies and impulses, to a common impulse for more (63). However I think there is a mistake in attributing sexuality, as prescribed by Lingis and Grosz, despite my awe and admiration for them both, to the impulses of art. They might seem or appear to be erotic or sexual urges but are they not something a little more fleeting, more abstract, more insouciant? These are the desires at close hand but it is what those desires really represent that count. Philosopher John Armstrong refers to a Vuillard painting in the Courtauld Institute: “This beautiful image reminds us that sexuality isn’t just about sex; it conveys a sense of trust and comfort which are connected to tender touch” (Armstrong 135). In other words, if we assume there is a transference of Freudian sexual intensity or libido to the art work, perhaps it is not the act of sex we crave but a more elaborate desire, a desire for old-fashioned love, respect and honour.Sue Best refers to the word communion to describe the rapturous transport of being close to the artwork but always kept at a certain distance (512). This relates to the condition of love, of desiring an object but never attaining it. This is arrested pleasure, otherwise known as torture. But the word communion also gives rise, for me, to an idea of religious communion, of drinking the wine and bread as metaphor for Christ’s blood and body. This concept of embodied virtue or pious love, of becoming one with the Lord has repetitions or parallels with the experience of art. The urge to consume, intermingle or become physically entangled with the object of our desire is more than a philosophical urge but a spiritual urge. It seems to me that embodiment is not just the physical realities and percepts of experience but that they stand, mnemonically and mimetically, for more abstract urges and desires, hopes and ambitions, outside the realm of the gallery space, the video space or the bodily space. Crowther says, “Art answers this psychological/ontological need. ...through the complex and ubiquitous ways in which it engages the imagination” (Defining Art 238). While our embodied or perceptual experiences might seem slight or of less importance at first, they gather weight when added to knowledge and desire. Bergson said, “But there is, in this necessary poverty of our conscious perception, something that is positive, that foretells spirit: it is in the etymological sense of the word, discernment” (31). This art love is an aspiration for more, for hopes and expectation that the art work I fall for will enlighten me, will enrich my experience. This art work reminds me of all the qualities and principles I crave, but know in my heart are just beyond my fingertips. Perhaps we can consider the acknowledgement of art love as, not only a means of discernment but also as a legitimate purpose, that is, to be bodily, emotionally and intellectually changed and to gain further knowledge.ReferencesArmstrong, John. Conditions of Love. London: Penguin, 2002.Bergson, Henri. Matter and Memory. New York: Dover Philosophical Classics, 2004.Best, Sue. “Rethinking Visual Pleasure: Aesthetics and Affect.” Theory and Psychology 17 (2007): 4.Crowther, Paul. The Phenomenology of Visual Art. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009.---. Defining Art: Creating the Canon. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007.Menke, Christoph, Daniel Birnbaum, Isabell Graw and Daniel Loick. The Power of Judgement: A Debate on Aesthetic Critique. Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2010.Grosz, Elizabeth. Chaos, Territory, Art: Deleuze and the Framing of the Earth. New York: Columbia University Press, 2008.---. “Inscriptions and Body-Maps: Representations and the Corporeal.” Feminine/Masculine and Representation. Eds. Terry Threadgold and Anne Granny-France. Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1990. 62-74. Johnson, Mark. The Meaning of the Body. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007.Lingis, Alphonso. “Beauty and Lust.” Journal of Phenomenological Pyschology 27 (1996): 174-192.Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception. New York: Routledge Classics, 2002.Poe, Edgar Allen. “William Wilson: A Tale.” The Norton Anthology of American Literature. New York: Nortin, 1985.Schopenhauer, Arthur. The World as Will and Representation. New York: Dover, 1969.Sloterdijk, Peter. Bubbles, Spheres 1. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2011.Stendhal. Love. London: Penguin, 2004.

In January of 1908 H. Addington Bruce, a writer for the North American Review, observed that "On every street, at every corner, we meet the neurasthenics" (qtd. in Lears, 50). "Discovered" by the neurologist George M. Beard in 1880, neurasthenia was a nervous disorder characterized by a "lack of nerve force" and comprised of a host of neuroses clustered around an overall paralysis of the will. Historian Barbara Will notes that there were "thousands of men and women at the turn of the century who claimed to be ‘neurasthenics,’" among them Theodore Roosevelt, Edith Wharton, William and Henry James, and Beard himself. These neurasthenics had free roam over the American psychiatric landscape from the date of Beard’s diagnosis until the 1920s, when more accurate diagnostic tools began to subdivide the nearly uninterpretably wide variety of symptoms falling under the rubric of "neurasthenic." By then, however, nearly every educated American had suffered from (or known someone who had) the debilitating "disease"--including Willa Cather, who in The Professor’s House would challenge her readers to acknowledge and engage with the cultural phenomenon of neurasthenia. Cultural historian T.J. Jackson Lears, long a student of neurasthenia, defines it as an "immobilizing, self-punishing depression" stemming from "endless self-analysis" and "morbid introspection" (47, 49). What is especially interesting about the disease, for Lears and other scholars, is that it is a culture-bound syndrome, predicated not upon individual experience, but upon the cultural and economic forces at play during the late nineteenth century. Barbara Will writes that neurasthenia was "double-edged": "a debilitating disease and [...] the very condition of the modern American subject" (88). Interestingly, George Beard attributed neurasthenia to the changes wracking his culture: Neurasthenia is the direct result of the five great changes of modernity: steam power, the periodical press, the telegraph, the sciences, and the mental activity of women. (qtd. in Will, 94) For Beard, neurasthenia was a peculiarly modern disease, the result of industrialization and of the ever-quickening pace of commercial and intellectual life. Jackson Lears takes Beard’s attribution a step further, explaining that "as larger frameworks of meaning weakened, introspection focused on the self alone and became ‘morbid’" (49). These frameworks of meaning--religious, political, psychosexual--were under steady assault in Beard’s time from commodifying and secularizing movements in America. Self-scrutiny, formerly yoked to Protestant salvation (and guilt), became more insular and isolating, resulting in the ultimate modern malady, neurasthenia. While Willa Cather may have inherited Beard’s and her culture’s assumptions of illness, it ultimately appears that Cather’s depiction of neurasthenia is a highly vexed one, both sympathetic and troubled, reflecting a deep knowledge of the condition and an ongoing struggle with the rationalization of scientific psychology. As an intellectual, she was uniquely positioned to both suffer from the forces shaping the new disease and to study them with a critical eye. Godfrey St. Peter, the anxious protagonist of The Professor’s House, becomes then a character that readers of Cather’s day would recognize as a neurasthenic: a "brain-worker," hard-charging and introspective, and lacking in what Beard would call "nerve force," the psychological stoutness needed to withstand modernity’s assault on the self. Moreover, St. Peter is not a lone sufferer, but is instead emblematic of a culture-wide affliction--part of a larger polity constantly driven to newer heights of production, consumption, and subsequent affliction. Jackson Lears theorizes that "neurasthenia was a product of overcivilization" (51), of consumer culture and endemic commodification. Beard himself characterized neurasthenia as an "American disease," a malady integral to the rationalizing, industrializing American economy (31). Cather reinforces the neurasthenic’s exhaustion and inadequacy as St. Peter comes across his wife flirting with Louis Marsellus, prompting the professor to wonder, "Beaux-fils, apparently, were meant by Providence to take the husband’s place when husbands had ceased to be lovers" (160). Not only does this point to the sexual inadequacy and listlessness characteristic of neurasthenia, but the diction here reinforces the modus operandi of the commodity culture--when an old model is used up, it is simply replaced by a newer, better model. Interestingly, Cather’s language itself often mirrors Beard’s. St. Peter at one point exclaims to Lillian, in a beatific reverie: "I was thinking [...] about Euripides; how, when he was an old man, he went and lived in a cave by the sea, and it was thought queer, at the time. It seems that houses had become insupportable to him" (156). The Professor’s "symptom of hopelessness," Beard might explain, "appears to be similar to that of morbid fear--an instinctive consciousness of inadequacy for the task before us. We are hopeless because our nerve force is so reduced that the mere holding on to life seems to be a burden too heavy for us" (49). Both Beard and Cather, then, zero in on the crushing weight of modern life for the neurasthenic. The Professor here aches for rest and isolation--he, in Beard’s language, "fears society," prompting Lillian to fear that he is "’becoming lonely and inhuman’" (162). This neurasthenic craving for isolation becomes much more profound in Book III of the novel, when St. Peter is almost completely estranged from his family. Although he feels he loves them, he "could not live with his family again" upon their return from Europe (274). "Falling out, for him, seemed to mean falling out of all domestic and social relations, out of his place in the human family, indeed" (275). St. Peter’s estrangement is not only with his family (an estrangement perhaps rationalized by the grasping or otherwise distasteful St. Peter clan), but with the human family. It is a solipsistic retreat from contact and effort, the neurasthenic’s revulsion for work of any kind. Neurasthenia, if left untreated, can become deadly. Beard explains: "A certain amount of nerve strength is necessary to supply the courage requisite for simple existence. Abstaining from dying demands a degree of force" (49). Compare this to the scene near the end of the narrative in which St. Peter, sleeping on the couch, nearly dies: When St. Peter at last awoke, the room was pitch-black and full of gas. He was cold and numb, felt sick and rather dazed. The long-anticipated coincidence had happened, he realized. The storm had blown the stove out and the window shut. The thing to do was to get up and open the window. But suppose he did not get up--? How far was a man required to exert himself against accident? [...] He hadn’t lifted his hand against himself--was he required to lift it for himself? (276) This classic scene, variously read as a suicide attempt or as an accident, can be understood as the neurasthenic’s complete collapse. The Professor’s decision is made solely in terms of effort; this is not a moral or philosophical decision, but one of physiological capacity. He is unwilling to "exert" the energy necessary to save himself, unwilling to "lift his hand" either for or against himself. Here is the prototypical neurasthenic fatigue--almost suicidal, but ultimately too passive and weak to even take that course of action. Accidental gassing is a supremely logical death for the neurasthenic. This appropriateness is reinforced by the Professor at the end of the narrative, when he remembers his near death: Yet when he was confronted by accidental extinction, he had felt no will to resist, but had let chance take its way, as it had done with him so often. He did not remember springing up from the couch, though he did remember a crisis, a moment of acute, agonized strangulation. (282) Again, the Professor is a passive figure, couch-ridden, subject to the whims of chance and his own lack of nerve. He is saved by Augusta, though, and does somehow manage to carry on with his life, if in a diminished way. We cannot accredit his survival to clinical treatment of neurasthenia, but perhaps his vicarious experience on the mesa with Tom Outland can account for his fortitude. Treatment of neurasthenia, according to Tom Lutz, "aimed at a reconstitution of the subject in terms of gender roles" (32). S. Weir Mitchell, a leading psychiatrist of the day, treated many notable neurasthenics. Female patients, in line with turn-of-the-century models of female decorum, were prescribed bed rest for up to several months, and were prohibited from all activity and visitors. (Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s "The Yellow Wallpaper" has long been considered a critique of Mitchell’s "rest cure" for women. Interestingly, St. Peter’s old study has yellow wall paper.) Treatments for men, again consistent with contemporary gender roles, emphasized vigorous exercise, often in natural settings: Theodore Roosevelt, Thomas Eakins, Frederic Remington, and Owen Wister were all sent to the Dakotas for rough-riding exercise cures [...] Henry James was sent to hike in the Alps, and William James continued to prescribe vigorous mountain hikes for himself[.] (32) Depleted of "nerve force," male neurasthenics were admonished to replenish their reserves in rugged, survivalist outdoor settings. Beard documents the treatment of one "Mr. O," whom, worn out by "labor necessitated by scholarly pursuits," is afflicted by a settled melancholia, associated with a morbid and utterly baseless fear of financial ruin...he was as easily exhausted physically as mentally. He possessed no reserve force, and gave out utterly whenever he attempted to overstep the bounds of the most ordinary effort. [As part of his treatment] He journeyed to the West, visited the Yellowstone region, and at San Francisco took steamer for China [...] and returned a well man, nor has he since relapsed into his former condition. (139-41) Beard’s characterization of "Mr. O" is fascinating in several ways. First, he is the prototypical neurasthenic--worn out, depressed, full of "baseless" fears. More interestingly, for the purposes of this study, part of the patient’s cure is effected in the "Yellowstone region," which would ultimately be made a national park by neurasthenic outdoors man Theodore Roosevelt. This natural space, hewn from the wilds of the American frontier, is a prototypical refuge for nervous "brain-workers" in need of rejuvenation. This approach to treatment is especially intriguing given the setting of Book II of The Professor's House: an isolated Mesa in the Southwest. While St. Peter himself doesn’t undertake an exercise cure, "Tom Outland’s Story" does mimic the form and rhetoric of treatment for male neurasthenics, possibly accounting for the odd narrative structure of the novel. Cather, then, not only acknowledges the cultural phenomenon of neurasthenia, but incorporates it in the structure of the text. Outland’s experience on the mesa (mediated, we must remember, by the neurasthenic St. Peter, who relates the tale) is consistent with what Jackson Lears has termed the "cult of strenuousity" prevalent in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. According to Lears neurasthenics often sought refuge in "a vitalistic cult of energy and process; and a parallel recovery of the primal, irrational sources in the human psyche, forces which had been obscured by the evasive banality of modern culture" (57). Outland, discovering the mesa valley for the first time, explains that the air there "made my mouth and nostrils smart like charged water, seemed to go to my head a little and produce a kind of exaltation" (200). Like Roosevelt and other devotees of the exercise cure, Outland (and St. Peter, via the mediation) is re-"charged" by the primal essence of the mesa. The Professor later laments, "his great drawback was [...] the fact that he had not spent his youth in the great dazzling South-west country which was the scene of his explorers’ adventures" (258). Interestingly, Outland’s rejuvenation on the mesa is cast by Cather in hyperbolically masculine terms. The notoriously phallic central tower of the cliff city, for instance, may serve as a metaphor for recovered sexual potency: It was beautifully proportioned, that tower, swelling out to a larger girth a little above the base, then growing slender again. There was something symmetrical and powerful about the swell of the masonry. The tower was the fine thing that held all the jumble of houses together and made them mean something. It was red in color, even on that grey day. (201) Neurasthenics embraced "premodern symbols as alternatives to the vagueness of liberal Protestantism or the sterility of nineteenth-century positivism" (Lears xiii). The tower stands in striking contrast to St. Peter’s sexless marriage with Lillian, potentially reviving the Professor’s sagging neurasthenic libido. The tower also serves, in Outland’s mind, to forge meaning out of the seemingly random cluster of houses: "The notion struck me like a rifle ball that this mesa had once been like a bee-hive; it was full of little cluff-hung villages, it had been the home of a powerful tribe" (202). Outland’s discovery, cast in martial terms ("rifle ball"), reinscribes the imperialistic tendencies of the exercise cure and of Tom’s archeological endeavor itself. Tom Lutz notes that the exercise cure, steeped in Rooseveltian rhetoric, exemplified "a polemic for cultural change, a retraining, presented as a ‘return’ to heroic, natural, and manly values...The paternalism of Roosevelt’s appeal made sense against the same understanding of role which informed the cures for neurasthenia" (36). Outland seems to unconsciously concur, reflecting that "Wherever humanity has made that hardest of all starts and lifted itself out of mere brutality, is a sacred spot" (220-1). While Outland does have genuine admiration for the tribe, his language is almost always couched in terms of martial struggle, of striving against implacable odds. On a related note, George Kennan, writing in a 1908 McClure’s Magazine edited by Cather, proposed that rising suicide rates among the educated by cured by a "cultivation of what may be called the heroic spirit" (228). Cather was surely aware of this masculinizing, imperializing response to neurasthenic ennui--her poem, "Prairie Dawn," appears at the end of Kennan’s article! Outland’s excavation of Cliff City and its remains subsequently becomes an imperializing gesture, in spite of his respect for the culture. What does this mean, though, for a neurasthenic reading of The Professor’s House? In part, it acknowledges Cather’s response to and incorporation of a cultural phenomenon into the text in question. Additionally, it serves to clarify Cather’s critique of masculinist American culture and of the gendered treatment of neurasthenia. This critique is exemplified by Cather’s depiction of "Mother Eve": "Her mouth was open as if she were screaming, and her face, through all those years, had kept a look of terrible agony" (214-15). Not only does this harrowing image undermine Outland’s romantic depiction of the tribe, but it points to the moral bankruptcy of the cult of strenuousity. It is easy, Cather seems to argue, for Roosevelt and his ilk to "rough it" in the wilderness to regain their vigor, but the "real-life" wilderness experience is a far harsher and more dangerous prospect. Cather ultimately does not romanticize the mesa--she problematizes it as a site for neurasthenic recovery. More importantly, this vexed reading of the treatment suggests a vexed reading of neurasthenia and of "American Nervousness" itself. Ultimately, in spite of his best efforts to recover the intense experience of his past and of Tom Outland’s, St. Peter fails. As Mathias Schubnell explains, Cather’s "central character is trapped between a modern urban civilization to which he belongs against his will, and a pastoral, earth-bound world he yearns for but cannot regain" (97). This paradox is exemplified by the Professor’s early lament to Lillian, "’it’s been a mistake, our having a family and writing histories and getting middle-aged. We should have been picturesquely shipwrecked together when we were young’" (94). The reader, of course, recognizes the absurdity of this image--an absurdity strongly reinforced by the image of the deceased "Mother Eve" figure. These overcivilized men, Cather suggests, have no conception of what intense experience might be. That experience has been replaced, the Professor explains, by rationalizing, industrializing forces in American culture: Science hasn’t given us any new amazements, except of the superficial kind we get from witnessing dexterity and sleight-of-hand. It hasn’t given us any richer pleasures...nor any new sins--not one! Indeed, it has taken our old ones away. It’s the laboratory, not the Lamb of God, that taketh away the sins of the world. You’ll agree there is not much thrill about a physiological sin...I don’t think you help people by making their conduct of no importance--you impoverish them. (68) St. Peter, the neurasthenic humanist, gets here at the heart of his (and America’s) sickness--it has replaced the numinous and the sacred with the banal and the profane. The disorder he suffers from, once termed a sin, has become "physiological," as has his soul. It is worthwhile to contrast the Professor’s lament with Beard’s supremely rational boast: "It would seem, indeed, that diseases which are here described represent a certain amount of force in the body which, if our knowledge of physiological chemistry were more precise, might be measured in units" (115). The banal, utterly practical measuring of depression, of melancholia, of humanity’s every whim and caprice, Cather suggests, has dulled the luster of human existence. The Professor’s tub, then, becomes an emblem of the relentless stripping away of all that is meaningful and real in Cather’s culture: "Many a night, after blowing out his study lamp, he had leaped into that tub, clad in his pyjamas, to give it another coat of some one of the many paints that were advertised to behave like porcelain, but didn’t" (12). Porcelain here becomes the religion or art which once sustained the race, replaced by the false claims of science. The Professor, though, seems too world-weary, too embittered to actually turn to religious faith. Perhaps God is dead in his world, eliminated by the Faustian quest for scientific knowledge. "His career, his wife, his family, were not his life at all, but a chain of events which had happened to him" (264). Godfrey St. Peter, like the rest of the neurasthenics, is doomed to an incurable sickness, victim of a spiritual epidemic which, Cather suggests, will not soon run its course. References Beard, George M. A Practical Treatise on Nervous Exhaustion (Neurasthenia). A. D. Rockwell, ed. New York: E.B. Treat & Company, 1905. Cather, Willa. The Professor’s House. London: Virago, 1981. Fisher-Wirth, Ann. "Dispossession and Redemption in the Novels of Willa Cather." Cather Studies 1 (1990): 36-54. Harvey, Sally Peltier. Predefining the American Dream: The Novels of Willa Cather. Toronto: Associated UP, 1995. Hilgart, John. "Death Comes for the Aesthete: Commodity Culture and the Artifact in Cather’s The Professor’s House." Studies in the Novel 30:3 (Fall 1998): 377-404. Kennan, George. McClure’s Magazine 30:2 (June 1908): 218-228. Lears, T.J. Jackson. No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation American Culture. New York: Pantheon Books, 1981. Lutz, Tom. American Nervousness, 1903: An Anecdotal History. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1991. Schubnell, Matthias. "The Decline of America: Willa Cather’s Spenglerian Vision in The Professor’s House." Cather Studies 2 (1993): 92-117. Stouck, David. "Willa Cather and The Professor’s House: ‘Letting Go with the Heart." Western American Literature 7 (1972): 13-24. Will, Barbara. "Nervous Systems, 1880-1915." American Bodies: Cultural Histories of the Physique. Tim Armstrong, ed. New York: NYUP, 1996. 86-100. Links The Willa Cather Electronic Archive The Mower's Tree (Cather Colloquium Newsletter) George Beard information

In one of the earliest films about a whistleblower, On the Waterfront (1954), the dock worker Terry Malloy (Marlon Brando), who also works for the union boss and mobster Johnny Friendly (Lee J. Cobb), decides to testify in court against him and uncover corruption and murder. By doing so he will not only suffer retribution from Friendly but also be seen as a “stool pigeon” by his co-workers, friends, and neighbours who will shun him, and he will be “marked” forever by his deed. Nonetheless, he decides to do the right thing. Already it is clear that in most cases the whistleblowers are not simply the ones who reveal things, but they themselves are also revealed.My aim in this article is to explore the depiction of Edward Snowden and Julian Assange in fiction film and its connection to what I would like to call, with Slavoj Žižek, “Hollywood ideology”; the heroisation of the “ordinary guy” against a big institution or a corrupt individual, as it is the case in Snowden (2016) on the one hand, and at the same time the impossibility of true systemic critique when the one who is criticising is “outside of the system”, as Assange in The Fifth Estate (2013). Both films also rely on the notion of individualism and convey conflicting messages in regard to understanding the perception of whistleblowers today. Snowden and AssangeAlthough there are many so called “whistleblower films” since On the Waterfront, like Serpico (1973), All the President’s Men (1976), or Silkwood (1983), to name but a few (for a comprehensive list see https://ew.com/movies/20-whistleblower-movies-to-watch/?), in this article I will focus on the most recent films that deal with Edward Snowden and Julian Assange. These are the most prominent cases of whistleblowing in the last decade put to film. They are relevant today also regarding their subject matter—privacy. Revealing secrets that concern privacy in this day and age is of importance and is pertinent even to the current Coronavirus crisis, where the question of privacy again arises in form of possible tracking apps, in the age of ever expanding “surveillance capitalism” (Zuboff).Even if Assange is not strictly speaking a whistleblower, an engagement with his work in this context is indispensable since his outsider status, up to a point, resembles those of Snowden or Manning. They are not only important because they can be considered as “authentic heroe[s] of our time” (Žižek, Pandemic, 7), but also because of their depiction which differs in a very crucial way: while Snowden is depicted as a “classic” whistleblower (an American patriot who did his duty, someone from the “inside”), Assange’s action are coming from the outside of the established system and are interpreted as a selfish act, as it is stated in the film: “It was always about him.”Whistleblowers In his Whistleblower’s Handbook, Kohn writes: “who are these whistleblowers? Sometimes they are people you read about with admiration in the newspaper. Other times they are your co-workers or neighbours. However, most whistleblowers are regular workers performing their jobs” (Kohn, xi). A whistleblower, as the employee or a “regular worker”, can be regarded as someone who is a “nobody” at first, an invisible “cog in the wheel” of a certain institution, a supposedly devoted and loyal worker, who, through an act of “betrayal”, becomes a “somebody”. They do something truly significant, and by doing so becomes a hero to some and a traitor to others. Their persona suddenly becomes important.The wrongdoings that are uncovered by the whistleblower are for the most part not simply isolated missteps, but of a systemic nature, like the mass surveillance by the National Security Agency (NSA) uncovered by Snowden. The problem with narratives that deal with whistleblowing is that the focus inevitably shifts from the systemic problem (surveillance, war crimes, etc.) to the whistleblower as an individual. Moretti states that the interest of the media regarding whistleblowing, if one compares the reactions to the leaking of the “Pentagon Papers” regarding the Vietnam War in the 1970s by Daniel Ellsberg and to Snowden’s discoveries, shifted from the deed itself to the individual. In the case of Ellsberg, Moretti writes:the legitimate questions were not about him and what motivated him, but rather inquiry on (among other items) the relationship between government and media; whether the U.S. would be damaged militarily or diplomatically because of the release of the papers; the extent to which the media were acting as watchdogs; and why Americans needed to know about these items. (8)This shift of public interest goes along, according to Moretti, with the corporate ownership of media (7), where profit is the primary goal and therefore sensationalism is the order of the day, which is inextricably linked to the focus on the “scandalous” individual. The selfless and almost self-effacing act of whistleblowing becomes a narrative that constructs the opposite: yet another determined individual that through their sheer willpower achieves their goal, a notion that conforms to neoliberal ideology.Hollywood IdeologyThe endings of All the President’s Men and The Harder They Fall (1956), another early whistleblower film, twenty years apart, are very similar: they show the journalist eagerly typing away on his typewriter a story that will, in the case of the former, bring down the president of the United States and in the latter, bring an end to arranged fights in the boxing sport. This depiction of the free press vanquishing the evil doers, as Žižek states it, is exactly the point where “Hollywood ideology” becomes visible, which is:the ideology of such Hollywood blockbusters as All the President’s Men and The Pelican Brief, in which a couple of ordinary guys discover a scandal which reaches up to the president, forcing him to step down. Corruption is shown to reach the very top, yet the ideology of such works resides in their upbeat final message: what a great country ours must be, when a couple of ordinary guys like you and me can bring down the president, the mightiest man on Earth! (“Good Manners”)This message is of course part of Hollywood’s happy-ending convention that can be found even in films that deal with “serious” subject matters. The point of the happy end in this case is that before it is finally reached, the film can show corruption (Serpico), wrongdoings of big companies (The Insider, 1999), or sexual harassment (North Country, 2005). It is important that in the end all is—more or less—good. The happy ending need not necessarily be even truly “happy”—this depends on the general notion the film wants to convey (see for instance the ending of Silkwood, where the whistleblower is presumed to have been killed in the end). What is important in the whistleblower film is that the truth is out, justice has been served in one way or the other, the status quo has been re-established, and most importantly, there is someone out there who cares.These films, even when they appear to be critical of “the system”, are there to actually reassure their audiences in the workings of said system, which is (liberal) democracy supported by neoliberal capitalism (Frazer). Capitalism, on the other hand, is supported by the ideology of individualism which functions as a connecting tissue between the notions of democracy, capitalism, and film industry, since we are admiring exceptional individuals in performing acts of great importance. This, in turn, is encapsulated by the neoliberal mantra—“anyone can make it, only if they try heard enough”. As Bauman puts it more concretely, the risks and contradictions in a society are produced socially but are supposed to be solved individually (46).Individualism, as a part of the neoliberal capitalist ideology, is described already by Milton Friedman, who sees the individual as the “ultimate entity in the society” and the freedom of the individual as the “ultimate goal” within this society (12). What makes this an ideology is the fact that, in reality, the individual, or in the context of the market, the entrepreneur, is always-already tethered to and supported by the state, as Varoufakis has successfully proven (“Varoufakis/Chomsky discussion”). Therefore individualism is touted as an ideal to strive for, while for neoliberalism in order to function, the state is indispensable, which is often summed up in the formula “socialism for the rich, capitalism for the poor” (Polychroniou). The heroic Hollywood individual, as shown in the whistleblower film, regardless of real-life events, is the perfect embodiment of individualist ideology of neoliberal capitalism—we are not seeing a stylised version of it, a cowboy or a masked vigilante, but a “real” person. It is paradoxically precisely the realism that we see in such films that makes them ideological: the “based on a true story” preamble and all the historical details that are there in order to create a fulfilling cinematic experience. All of this supports its ideology because, as Žižek writes, “the function of ideology is not to offer us a point of escape from our reality but to offer us the social reality itself as an escape from some traumatic, real kernel” (Sublime Object 45). All the while Snowden mostly adheres to Hollywood ideology, The Fifth Estate also focuses on individualism, but goes in a different direction, and is more problematic – in the former we see the “ordinary guy” as the American hero, in the latter a disgruntled individual who reveals secrets of others for strictly personal reasons.SnowdenThere is an aspect of the whistleblower film that rings true and that is connected to Michel Foucault’s notion of power (“Truth and Power”). Snowden, through his employment at the NSA, is within a power relations network of an immensely powerful organisation. He uses “his” power, to expose the mass surveillance by the NSA. It is only through his involvement with this power network that he could get insight into and finally reveal what NSA is doing. Foucault writes that these resistances to power from the inside are “effective because they are formed right at the point where relations of power are exercised; resistance to power does not have to come from elsewhere to be real … It exists all the more by being in the same place as power” (Oushakine 206). In the case of whistleblowing, the resistance to power must come exactly from the inside in order to be effective since whistleblowers occupy the “same place as power” that they are up against and that is what in turn makes them “powerful”.Fig. 1: The Heroic Individual: Edward Snowden in SnowdenBut there is an underside to this. His “relationship” to the power structure he is confronting greatly affects his depiction as a whistleblower within the film—precisely because Snowden, unlike Assange, is someone from inside the system. He can still be seen as a patriot and a “disillusioned idealist” (Scott). In the film this is shown right at the beginning as Snowden, in his hotel room in Hong Kong, tells the documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras (Melissa Leo) and journalist Glenn Greenwald (Zachary Quinto) his name and who he is. The music swells and the film cuts to Snowden in uniform alongside other soldiers during a drill, when he was enlisted in the army before work for the NSA.Snowden resembles many of Stone’s typical characters, the all-American patriot being disillusioned by certain historical events, as in Born on the 4th of July (1989) and JFK (1991), which makes him question the government and its actions. It is generally of importance for a mainstream Hollywood film that the protagonist is relatable in order for the audiences to sympathise with them (Bordwell and Thompson 82). This is important not only regarding personal traits but, I would argue, also political views of the character. There needs to be no doubt in the mind of American audiences when it comes to films that deal with politics, that the protagonists are patriots.Stone’s film profits from this ambivalence in Snowden’s own political stance: at first he is more of a right winger who is a declared fan of Ayn Rand’s conservative-individualist manifesto Atlas Shrugged, then, after meeting his future partner Lindsey Mills, he turns slightly to the left, as he at one point states his support for President Obama. This also underlines the films ambiguity, as Oliver Stone openly stated about his Vietnam War film Platoon (1986) that “it could be embraced by … the right and the left. Essentially, most movies make their money in the middle” (Banff Centre). As Snowden takes the lie detector test as a part of the process of becoming a CIA agent, he confirms, quite sincerely it seems, that he thinks that the United States is the “greatest country in the world” and that the most important day in his life was 9/11. This again confirms his patriotic stance.Snowden is depicted as the exceptional individual, and at the same time the “ordinary guy”, who, through his act of courage, defied the all-powerful USA. During the aforementioned job interview scene, Snowden’s superior, Corbin O’Brian (Rhys Ifans), quotes Ayn Rand to him: “one man can stop the motor of the world”. Snowden states that he also believes that. The quote could serve as the film’s tagline, as a “universal truth” that seems to be at the core of American values and that also coincides with and reaffirms neoliberal ideology. Although it is undeniable that individuals can accomplish extraordinary feats, but when there is no systemic change, those can remain only solitary achievements that are only there to support the neoliberal “cult of the individual”.Snowden stands in total contrast to Assange in regard to his character and private life. There is nothing truly “problematic” about him, he seems to be an almost impeccable person, a “straight arrow”. This should make him a poster boy for American democracy and freedom of speech, and Stone tries to depict him in this way.Still, we are dealing with someone who cannot simply be redeemed as a patriot who did his duty. He cannot be unequivocally hailed as an all-American hero since betraying state secrets (and betrayal in general) is seen as a villainous act. For many Americans, and for the government, he will forever be remembered as a traitor. Greenwald writes that most of the people in the US, according to some surveys, still want to see Snowden in prison, even if they find that the surveillance by the NSA was wrong (365).Snowden remains an outcast and although the ending is not quite happy, since he must live in Russian exile, there is still a sense of an “upbeat final message” that ideologically colours the film’s ending.The Fifth EstateThe Fifth Estate is another example of the ideological view of the individual, but in this case with a twist. The film tries to be “objective” at first, showing the importance and impact of the newly established online platform WikiLeaks. However, towards the end of the film, it proceeds to dismantle Julian Assange (Benedict Cumberbatch) with the “everyone has secrets” platitude, which effectively means that none of us should ever try to reveal any secrets of those in power, since all of us must have our own secrets we do not want revealed. The film is shown from the perspective of Assange’s former disgruntled associate Daniel Domscheit-Berg (Daniel Brühl), who wrote a book about his time at WikiLeaks on which the film is partly based on (Inside WikiLeaks). We see Assange through his eyes and delve into personal moments that are supposed to reveal the “truth” about the individual behind the project. In a cynical twist, it is Daniel who is the actual whistleblower, who reveals the secrets of WikiLeaks and its founder.Assange, as it is said in the film, is denounced as a “messiah” or a “prophet”, almost a cult leader who only wants to satisfy his perverse need for other people’s secrets, except that he is literally alone and has no followers and, unlike real cult leaders, needs no followers. The point of whistleblowing is exactly in the fact that it is a radical move, it is a big step forward in ending a wrongdoing. To denounce the radical stance of WikiLeaks is to misunderstand and undermine the whole notion of whistleblowing as a part of true changes in a society.The cult aspects are often referred to in the film when Assange’s childhood is mentioned. His mother was supposed to be in a cult, called “The Family”, and we should regard this as an important (and bad) influence on his character. This notion of the “childhood trauma” seems to be a crutch that is supposed to serve as a characterisation, something the scriptwriting-guru Robert McKee criticises as a screenwriting cliché: “do not reduce characters to case studies (an episode of child abuse is the cliché in vogue at the moment), for in truth there are no definitive explanations for anyone’s behaviour” (376).Although the film does not exaggerate the childhood aspect, it is still a motive that is supposed to shed some light into the “mystery” that is Assange. And it also ties into the question of the colour of his hair as a way of dismantling his lies. In a flashback that resembles a twist ending of an M. Night Shyamalan thriller, it turns out that Assange actually dyes his hair white, witnessed in secret by Daniel, instead of it turning naturally white, as Assange explains on few occasions but stating different reasons for it. Here he seems like a true movie villain and resembles the character of the Joker from The Dark Knight (2008), who also tells different stories about the origin of his facial scars. This mystery surrounding his origin makes the villain even more dangerous and, what is most important, unpredictable.Žižek also draws a parallel between Assange and Joker of the same film, whom he sees as the “figure of truth”, as Batman and the police are using lies in order to “protect” the citizens: “the film’s take-home message is that lying is necessary to sustain public morale: only a lie can redeem us” (“Good Manners”). Rather than interpreting Assange’s role in a positive way, as Žižek does, the film truly establishes him as a villain.Fig. 2: The Problematic Individual: Julian Assange in The Fifth EstateThe Fifth Estate ends with another cheap psychologisation of Assange on Daniel’s part as he describes the “true purpose” of WikiLeaks: “only someone so obsessed with his own secrets could’ve come up with a way to reveal everyone else’s”. This faux-psychological argument paints the whole WikiLeaks endeavour as Assange’s ego-trip and makes of him an egomaniac whose secret perverted pleasure is to reveal the secrets of others.Why is this so? Why are Woodward and Bernstein in All the President’s Men depicted as heroes and Assange is not? The true underlying conflict here is between classic journalism; where journalists can publish their pieces and get the acclaim for publishing the “new Pentagon Papers”, once again ensuring the freedom of the press and “inter-systemic” critique. This way of working of the press, as the films show, always pays off. All the while, in reality, very little changes since, as Žižek writes, the “formal functioning of power” stays in place. He further states about WikiLeaks:The true targets here weren’t the dirty details and the individuals responsible for them; not those in power, in other words, so much as power itself, its structure. We shouldn’t forget that power comprises not only institutions and their rules, but also legitimate (‘normal’) ways of challenging it (an independent press, NGOs, etc.). (“Good Manners”)In the very end, the “real” journalism is being reinforced as the sole vehicle of criticism, while everything else is “extremism” and, again, can only stem from a frustrated, even “evil”, individual. If neoliberal individualism is the order of the day, then the thinking must also revolve around that notion and cannot transcend that horizon.ConclusionŽižek expresses the problem of revealing the truth in our day and age by referring to the famous fable “The Emperor’s New Clothes”, where a child is the only one who is naive and brave enough to state that the emperor is in fact naked. But for Žižek today,in our cynical era, such strategy no longer works, it has lost its disturbing power, since everyone now proclaims that the emperor is naked (that Western democracies are torturing terrorist suspects, that wars are fought for profit, etc., etc.), and yet nothing happens, nobody seems to mind, the system just goes on functioning as if the emperor were fully dressed. (Less than Nothing 92)The problem with the “Collateral Murder”, a video of the killing of Iraqi civilians by the US Army, leaked by Wikileaks and Chelsea Manning, that was presented to the public, for instance, was according to accounts in Inside Wikileaks and Inside Julian Assange’s War on Secrecy, that it did not have the desired impact. The public seems, in the end, to be indifferent to such reveals since it effectively cannot do anything about it. The return to the status quo after these reveals supports this stance, as Greenwald writes that after Snowden’s leaks there was no substantial change within the system; during the Obama administration, there was even an increase of criminal investigations of whistleblowers with an emergence of a “climate of fear” (Greenwald 368). Many whistleblower films assure us that in the end the system works; the good guys always win, the antagonists are punished, and laws have been passed. This is not to be accepted simply as a Hollywood convention, something that we also “already know”, but as an ideological stance, since these films are taken more seriously than films with similar messages but within other mainstream genres. Snowden shows that only individualism has the power to challenge the system, while The Fifth Estate draws the line that should not be crossed when it comes to privacy as a “universal” good because, again, “everyone has secrets”. Such representations of whistleblowing and disruption only further cement the notion that in our societies no real change is possible because it seems unnecessary. Whistleblowing as an act of revelation needs therefore to be understood as only one small step made by the individual that in the end depends on how society and the government decide to act upon it.References All the President’s Men. Dir. Alan J. Pakula. Wildwood Enterprises. 1976.Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity. “Oliver Stone- Satire and Controversy.” 23 Mar. 2013. 30 Juy 2020 <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7s2gBKApxyk>.Bauman, Zygmunt. Flüchtige Moderne. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2003.Bordwell, David, and Kristin Thomson. Film Art: An Introduction. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2010.Born on the 4th of July. Dir. Oliver Stone. Ixtian, 1989.The Dark Knight. Dir. Christopher Nolan. Warner Brothers, Legendary Entertainment. 2008.Domscheit-Berg, Daniel. Inside WikiLeaks: My Time with Julian Assange at the World’s Most Dangerous Website. London: Jonathan Cape, 2011.The Fifth Estate. Dir. Bill Condon. Dreamworks, Anonymous Content (a.o.). 2013.Foucault, Michel. “Truth and Power.” Power: Essential Works of Foucault 1954-1984. Vol. 3. Ed. James D. Faubion. Penguin Books, 2000. 111-33.Frazer, Nancy. “From Progressive Neoliberalism to Trump – and Beyond.” American Affairs 1.4 (2017). 19 May. 2020 <https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2017/11/progressive-neoliberalism-trump-beyond/>.Friedman, Milton. Capitalism and Freedom. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1982.“Full Transcript of the Yanis Varoufakis/Noam Chomsky NYPL Discussion.” Yanisvaroufakis.eu, 28 June 2016. 15 Mar. 2020 <https://www.yanisvaroufakis.eu/2016/06/28/full-transcript-of-the-yanis-varoufakis-noam-chomsky-nypl-discussion/>.Greenwald, Glenn. Die globale Überwachung: Der Fall Snowden, die amerikanischen Geheimdienste und die Folgen. München: Knaur, 2015.The Harder They Fall. Dir. Mark Robson. Columbia Pictures. 1956.The Insider. Dir. Michael Mann. Touchstone Pictures, Mann/Roth Productions (a.o.). 1999.JFK. Dir. Oliver Stone. Warner Bros., 1991.Kohn, Stephen Martin. The Whistleblower’s Handbook: A Step-by-Step Guide to Doing What’s Right and Protecting Yourself. Guilford, Lyons P, 2011.Leigh, David, and Luke Harding. WikiLeaks: Inside Julian Assange’s War on Secrecy. London: Guardian Books, 2011.McKee, Robert. Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting. New York: Harper-Collins, 1997.Moretti, Anthony. “Whistleblower or Traitor: Edward Snowden, Daniel Ellsberg and the Power of Media Celebrity.” Moscow Readings Conference, 14-15 Nov. 2013, Moscow, Russia.North Country. Dir. Niki Caro. Warner Bros., Industry Entertainment (a.o.). 2005.On the Waterfront. Dir. Elia Kazan. Horizon Pictures. 1954.Oushakine, Sergei A. “The Terrifying Mimicry of Samizdat.” Public Culture 13.2 (2001): 191-214.Platoon. Dir. Oliver Stone. Hemdake, Cinema ‘84. 1986.Polychroniou, C.J. “Socialism for the Rich, Capitalism for the Poor: An Interview with Noam Chomsky.” Truthout, 11 Dec. 2016. 25 May 2020 <https://truthout.org/articles/socialism-for-the-rich-capitalism-for-the-poor-an-interview-with-noam-chomsky/>.Scott, A.O. “Review: ‘Snowden,’ Oliver Stone’s Restrained Portrait of a Whistle-Blower.” The New York Times, 15 Sep. 2016. 5 May 2020 <https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/16/movies/snowden-review-oliver-stone-joseph-gordon-levitt.html>. Serpico. Dir. Sidney Lumet. Artists Entertainment Complex, Produzioni De Laurentiis. 1973. Silkwood. Dir. Mike Nichols. ABC Motion Pictures. 1983.Snowden. Dir. Oliver Stone. Krautpack Entertainment, Wild Bunch (a.o.). 2016.Žižek, Slavoj. “Good Manners in the Age of WikiLeaks.” Los Angeles Review of Books 33.2 (2011). 15 May 2020 <https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v33/n02/slavoj-zizek/good-manners-in-the-age-of-wikileaks>.———. Less than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism. Verso, 2013.———. Pandemic! COVID-19 Shakes the World. New York: Polity, 2020.———. The Sublime Object of Ideology. Verso, 2008.Zuboff, Shoshana. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future and the New Frontier of Power. New York: Public Affairs, 2020.

We are looking for a tongue that speaks with reverence for life, searching for an ecology of mind. Without it, we have no home, have no place of our own within the creation. It is not only the vocabulary of science that we desire. We also want a language of that different yield. A yield rich as the harvests of the earth, a yield that returns us to our own sacredness, to a self-love and respect that will carry out to others (Hogan 122). Through storytelling the world is created and recreated: in the values and worldviews stories offer, in the patterns of thinking and knowing that listening and reading place in our spirits and minds, in the stories we tell and live. We walk in the ripples our old people left behind and we follow them up, just as our children and the generations after us will walk in shapes and patterns we make with our lives. Our delicate world is poised on a precipice with increasing species extinction and loss of habitat, deforestation, displacement of animal and human communities, changing weather patterns, and polluted waterways. How do we manage the environmental and cultural issues of our complex global world? How do we come together to look after each other and the world around us? Often there is a sense that science will save us, that if we keep “progressing” at a fast enough rate we can escape the consequences of our actions. However, science alone, no matter how sophisticated, cannot alter the fundamental truths of action and reaction in Country: that if you take too much, something, somewhere, will go without. As Guungu Yimithirr man Roy McIvor writes: Dad often spoke about being aware of the consequences of our actions. He used different stories as teaching tools, but the idea was the same. Like a boomerang, your bad actions will come back to hurt you (89). In the end, it will not be technological innovation alone that will alter the course we have set out for ourselves. Rather, it will be human beings embracing a different way of relating to the environment than the current dominant paradigm that sees people take too much, too often. With this is mind, we would like to consider the integral role children’s literature plays in sustaining knowledge patterns of Country and ecology for the future. In the context of children’s literature and ecology the idea of sustaining environmental and cultural awareness is shared via the written word—how it is used, presented, and read, particularly with ideas of the child reader in mind. Our children will be the ones who struggle with the ripples we leave in our wake and they will be the ones who count the cost of our decisions as they in turn make decisions for the generations that will follow them. If we teach the right values then the behaviour of our children will reflect those ideas. In the Aboriginal way it’s about getting the story right, so that they can learn the right ways to be in Country, to be a human being, and to look after the world they inherit. As Deborah Bird Rose states, Country is a “nourishing terrain; a place that gives and receives life” (Rose Country 7). This paper will examine two Aboriginal children’s stories that teach about a living, holistic, interrelated world and the responsibilities of human beings to look after it. Specifically, the authors will examine Joshua and the Two Crabs by Joshua Button and Dingo’s Tree by Gladys and Jill Milroy. Both stories are published by Aboriginal publisher Magabala Books and represent a genre of Aboriginal writing about Country and how to take care of it. They form part of the “language of that different yield” (Hogan 122) that Indigenous writer Linda Hogan advocates, a language that emerges from an ecology of the mind that locates human beings as an interconnected part of the patterns of the earth. The first text discussion focuses on the sharing of implicit meaning via textual form—that is, the lay out of the story, its peritext, and illustrations. The second textual discussion centres explicitly on content and meaning. Both textual analyses aim to open up a dialogue between Aboriginal ecology and children’s literature to provide inter-subjective approaches for Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal readers/listeners. Aboriginal Story Ecology In Aboriginal philosophy the universe is the creative expression of Dreaming Ancestors who created the world—the land, plants, animals, stars and elements—and then settled into the creation they had made: …white people also call this the Dreaming. The Tjukurpa tells how the landscape, animals, plants, and people were made and what they mean for one another. The Tjukurpa is in everything. It is in the rocks, in the trees, even in the mice, mingkiri (Baker xii). Through their actions they formed the pattern of reality that finds its expression in human beings and in everything around us—the stars, earth, rivers, trees, rocks, and forms of life that make up the world. Aboriginal knowledge systems understand the patterns of life and our relationships to them through the structure of story. Dreaming stories—stories about the creation of the world and how the fundamental Laws were handed down to the people—have special significance. However, the stories we make with our lives and experiences are also important—stories about funny things that happened and our relationships with our families and loved ones. These stories are also a part of Country because there is nothing that does not emerge and return to the land, nothing that is not part of the pattern that the Dreaming Ancestors made: The Story is the Land, and the Land is the Story. The Story holds the people, and the people live inside the Story. The Story lives inside the people also. It goes all ways to hold the land (Turner 45). The imprint of creation, the structure of the relationships that make up the world, is held in story. Thus, in Aboriginal logic the patterns of nature, the patterns of stories, and the patterns of language, society, and culture are reflections and expressions of the pattern of creation woven by the Dreaming Ancestors. As Yunipingu writes: …For us society and nature are not separate. We have Yirritja and Dhuwa, and these categories contain elements which are both natural and social. Also, of course, they have elements which Europeans call supernatural or metaphysical (9). Through stories we come to know not just the world but who we are and the proper ways of relating to the ecology’s around us. As we learn stories the pattern of learning grows inside of us, in our ways of thinking, doing, and being. They provide the framework for our spirit and mind to develop so we come to know and be in the world in a proper or straight way—to enhance the pattern of life, not to destroy it. This is an Aboriginal “Story Ecology” where stories serve as maps that teach us who we are and our role in the world. Yuin Elder Max Harrison (2009) observes the three truths on passing on traditional knowledge: See the land…the beautyHear the land….the storyFeel the land…the spirit (no pg). To sustain Country is to sustain the self. To tell, share, and know story is to know the environment and to sustain the environment. As Kathy Deveraux writes ‘it’s like the spider: a lot of things tie in together, so when you ask one thing, you get a whole big history’ (qtd in Rose, Country 7). Aboriginal story promotes ecological practice by enlivening the reader’s empathy toward the environment and nurturing a sense of union between what is within us and what is outside of us. The imagery and text of Aboriginal story often achieves this umbilical in two defining ways. The first is through the positioning of the age, setting, or backdrop. The second is born from the relationships animated between these vitally active surrounds and the characters contained therein. Makere Stewart-Harrawira states that: All human experiences and all forms of knowledge contributed to the overall understandings and interpretations. The important task was to find the proper pattern of interpretation. Hence it can be said that indigenous peoples have traditionally regarded knowledge as something that must be stood in its entire context. The traditional principles of traditional knowledge [...] remain fixed and provide the framework within which new experiences and situations are understood and given meaning. As such, these principles are the means by which cultural knowledge becomes remade and given meaning in our time. Another principle is that every individual element of the natural world, each individual rock and stone, each individual animal and plant, every body of land and of water, has its own unique life force (155). Examples of these features of Aboriginal story ecology can be seen in our analysis of the following two stories Joshua and the Two Crabs and Dingo’s Tree. Joshua and the Two Crabs In Joshua and the Two Crabs by Joshua Button, published by Magabala Books in 2008, the narrative, illustrations, and peritext all combine to enable alternative eco-cultural understandings and values. Joshua Button is a young Indigenous author from saltwater country, as is the protagonist in the text. Joshua, the character, observes the movements of country and its inhabitants and Joshua, the author and illustrator, expresses these meanings via words, colours, and illustrations. In particular, the text represents relationships with, and within, Crab Creek. The peritext offers information about Crab Creek—a tidal creek in the mangroves of Roebuck Bay in north-west Western Australia. “The area abounds with wildlife, including migratory birds, fruit bats, crabs and shellfish. It is a place for local people to spend the day fishing off the beach for a ‘pan-sized’ feed of salmon, queenfish, silver bream or trevally. Catching and cooking mud crabs is one of Joshua’s favourite things to do” (no pg). Story, place, and child are now formally positioned as the centre of the narrative and their relationship strengthened by the colours used to represent country and movement. The narrative focuses on Joshua’s family trip to Crab Creek and his interactions with the land, the water, and the animals. His story reveals a meeting of land and sea, a reading of land and sea, and a listening to land and sea. Country and its inhabitants are revealed as having multiple relationships. From the moment his mob arrives, the narrative emphasizes listening to and reading country: Joshua’s Mum moves faster when she reads the movement of the tides and when Joshua ventures into the mangroves he listens to the “Plop! Plop! Plop! Of the air rising up through the mud” (Button, no pg.). With his bucket and spear Joshua’s movements through country are observed and considered by the creatures around him; wader birds carefully watch him and Joshua engages in a dialogue with two big mud crabs that remind the boy that he has also been perceived by Country, which is itself sentient. Animals and country speak and observe—the tide moves, the sand is hot, mudskippers skip, and crabs escape and hide. Joshua’s relationship with the mud crabs is dependent on the boy and the crabs seeing each other and communicating: “‘I can see you two!’ ‘Well, we can see you too,’ said the crabs” (Button, no pg). The narrative provides a beautifully simplistic example of different perspectives and positions for the intended child reader. Both Joshua and the crabs’ perspectives are given space to be acknowledged and understood: one character is searching, another character is escaping. When Joshua finally catches the crabs he carefully brings them back to camp and the entire family have a good feed of them and the golden trevally Joshua’s Mum caught. “Afterwards they sat watching the tide empty out of the bay. Long-legged wader birds picked their way across the silvery mudflats. It had been a good day” (Button, no pg). The story offers a colourful, fun, and cyclical way of seeing country from a perspective that centres the relationship between family, food, and land. It presents this relationship and the implicit meaning of observing and living in country via traditional textual elements such as the written word, colour illustrations, and movement from left to right, but in doing so, the text becomes a form of sustaining relationship with country as well, not just for Joshua but also for the intended child reader. Dingo’s Tree Dingo’s Tree by Jill and Gladys Milroy is a much longer story than Joshua and the Two Crabs and also deals with more serious themes. The story is about Dingo who drew his own rain tree on a rock because the other animals didn’t share their shade with him. The tree then becomes real and grows beyond the limit of the sky and keeps Dingo’s waterhole full through the drought season. The others come to rely on Dingo’s waterhole and feel bad for not sharing with him and teasing him about his tree. As the water dries up, one single special raindrop is found on a little tree and Dingo decides to spare the drop even when all the waterholes become dry. Dingo feels that something is wrong when he sees that the raindrop is slowly growing larger. To survive, Dingo and his friend Wombat teach Little Tree to walk to water. He becomes known as Walking Tree and they are soon joined by all of the others in the land. On their way to the mountain to find water they see the river and half the mountain replaced by mining, and Walking Tree soon becomes overburdened with the weight of the others. The birds decide to carry him—his branches full of friends—and they succeed for a short time only to grow tired. Soon they are all falling toward their impending death until Dingo chooses to use the last raindrop, now much larger, and their fall is broken and a new waterhole is made. However, it is only enough for Walking Tree to live forever and because he is the last tree, the others (but one baby crow) go to the Heavens awaiting their return at the end of humankinds reign on the land. In the story of the Dingo’s Tree the adventure begins in “unspoiled country” with its inventory of cast members who, in real life, naturally inhabit the area. All are shown to be adjusting recurrently within the known cycles of drought and abundance, suggested by the authors in the line “the drought came”, then a subtle reference to patterns of migration as the season is introduced and the cast move to more reliable waterholes. Establishing the story in this space encourages the young reader to identify the natural landscape as “normal”, and part of that normality are the cycles that create and degenerate growth. It is the antagonist that is responsible for the creation of unnatural change. Mining becomes the assassin of country with men as poachers "carting away great loads of rock and earth in huge machines" (Milroy and Milroy 39). This scene is of great importance, although it is only allocated a single page, because it shows where the artery of country has been severed. Its effects have been cleverly woven into the storyline beforehand in several ways. The line “the drought stayed” illustrates a seasonal defiance. In turn, Dingo becomes aware of this imbalance: "for a while Dingo lived happily in his cave but lately he’d begun to worry about the country, something wasn’t right" (Milroy and Milroy 1). Dingo reads the signs of the country. His attention to the life cycles of the land are brought to the attention of the reader teaching children about the important role of observation in caring for country. In addition to this, a warning is given to Crow by the Rain Tree through a vision of a future landscape devastated and dying: "It is what your country will become…The mining is cutting too deep for the scars to heal. Once destroyed the mountains can’t grow again and give birth to the rivers that they send to the sea…"(Milroy and Milroy 20). Contained in this passage is a direct environmental truth, but the beauty of the passage lies in the language chosen by the authors. The phrase “cutting too deep for the scars to heal” links a human experience to an environmental one, as does the phrase “give birth to the rivers”. A child is able to recognise the physical pain of a cut and a child is also able to recognise that birth belongs to the Mother. The use of this language forges a powerful connection in the mind of the reader between the self and the Earth - the child and the Mother. Country feels pain, the mountains and rivers activate their own membership in life’s cycles, and even the far off Moon participates in thought and conversation, all of which awaken a consciousness within the reader toward the animate spirit of the natural world, parenting a considerate relationship to land. It is this animate relationship with the land that it is at the heart of the story. It is the mountain that sends the rivers to the sea, rather than the abstract force of gravity. If the authors were to omit this living relationship between the mountains, the rivers, and the sea, the readers understanding would be contained to simple geophysical processes with their life force reduced to an impersonal science, if thought of at all. Instead, the mountain chooses to send the rivers to the sea because it is the right way, so natural processes become exposed as conscious participants in story rather than being portrayed as passive or inanimate objects and this not only deepens the impact of their destruction later in the plot, it also deepens the connection between the reader and the land. Writing the Future Joshua and the Two Crabs and Dingo’s Tree offer two different Aboriginal stories with underlying commonalities: they both position relationships, Country, and people into an integrated web and provide a moral framework for sustaining the relationships around us. Children’s picture books and narratives are foundational initiations for many Australian child readers in their ecological education—whether overtly or covertly. How a society, a character, a narrative, represents, treats, and perceives the land influences how the reader encounters the landscape. We argue that Indigenous Australian children’s literature, written, illustrated, produced, and disseminated largely by Indigenous knowledges, offers counter-point views and stories about the land and accompanying interrelated relationships that provide the reader with a space to re-consider, re-inhabit, or transform their own ecological positioning. References Baker, Lynn. Mingkirri: A Natural History of Ulu-ru by the Mu-titjulu Community. Canberra: IAD Press, 1996. Button, Joshua. Joshua and the Two Crabs. Broome: Magabala Books, 2008. Harrison, Max. My Peoples Dreaming. Sydney: Finch Publishing, 2009. Hogan, Linda. “A Different Yield.” Reclaiming Indigenous Voice and Vision. Ed. Marie Battise. Toronto: UBC Press, 2000. 115 – 23. McIvor, Roy. Cockatoo: My Life in Cape York. Broome: Magabala Books, 2010. Milroy, Gladys and Jill Milroy. Dingo’s Tree. Broome: Magabala Books, 2012. Rose, Deborah Bird. Country of the Heart: An Indigenous Australian Homeland. Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 2002. ——-. “Pattern, Connection, Desire: In Honour of Gregory Bateson”. Australian Humanities Review, 35 (2005). 14th June 2012, ‹http://wwwlib.latrobe.cdu.au/A1IR/archive!lssue-June 2005/rose.html›. Stewart-Harawira, Makere. “Cultural Studies, Indigenous Knowledge and Pedagogies of Hope.” Policy Futures in Education 3.2 (2005):153-63. Turner, Margaret. Iwenhe Tyerrtye: What It Means to Be an Aboriginal Person. Alice Springs: IAD Press, 2010. Yunupingu, Mandawuy. Voices from the Land. Canberra: Australian Broadcasting Corporation, 1994.

IntroductionThe European will to modify the natural world emerged through English landscape design during the eighteenth century. Released from the neo-classical aesthetic dichotomy of the beautiful and the ugly, new categories of the picturesque and the sublime gestured towards an affective relationship to nature. Europeans began to see the world as a picture, the elements of which were composed as though part of a theatrical scene. Quite literally, as I shall discuss below, gardens were “composed with ‘pantomimic’ elements – ruins of castles and towers, rough hewn bridges, Chinese pagodas and their like” (McGillivray 134–35) transforming natural vistas into theatrical scenes. Such a transformation was made possible by a habit of spectating that was informed by the theatrical metaphor or theatrum mundi, one version of which emphasised the relationship between spectator and the thing seen. The idea of the natural world as an aesthetic object first developed in poetry and painting and then through English landscape garden style was wrought in three dimensions on the land itself. From representations of place a theatrical transformation occurred so that gardens became a places of representation.“The Genius of the Place in All”The eighteenth century inherited theatrum mundi from the Renaissance, although the genealogy of its key features date back to ancient times. Broadly speaking, theatrum mundi was a metaphorical expression of the world and humanity in two ways: dramaturgically and formally. During the Renaissance the dramaturgical metaphor was a moral emblem concerned with the contingency of human life; as Shakespeare famously wrote, “men and women [were] merely players” whose lives consisted of “seven ages” or “acts” (2.7.139–65). In contrast to the dramaturgical metaphor with its emphasis on role-playing humanity, the formalist version highlighted a relationship between spectator, theatre-space and spectacle. Rooted in Renaissance neo-Platonism, the formalist metaphor configured the world as a spectacle and “Man” its spectator. If the dramaturgical metaphor was inflected with medieval moral pessimism, the formalist metaphor was more optimistic.The neo-Platonist spectator searched in the world for a divine plan or grand design and spectatorship became an epistemological challenge. As a seer and a knower on the world stage, the human being became the one who thought about the world not just as a theatre but also through theatre. This is apparent in the etymology of “theatre” from the Greek theatron, or “seeing place,” but the word also shares a stem with “theory”: theaomai or “to look at.” In a graceful compression of both roots, Martin Heidegger suggests a “theatre” might be any “seeing place” in which any thing being beheld offers itself to careful scrutiny by the beholder (163–65). By the eighteenth century, the ancient idea of a seeing-knowing place coalesced with the new empirical method and aesthetic sensibility: the world was out there, so to speak, to provide pleasure and instruction.Joseph Addison, among others, in the first half of the century reconsidered the utilitarian appeal of the natural world and proposed it as the model for artistic inspiration and appreciation. In “Pleasures of the Imagination,” a series of essays in The Spectator published in 1712, Addison claimed that “there is something more bold and masterly in the rough careless strokes of nature, than in the nice touches and embellishments of art,” and compared to the beauty of an ordered garden, “the sight wanders up and down without confinement” the “wide fields of nature” and is “fed with an infinite variety of images, without any certain stint or number” (67).Yet art still had a role because, Addison argues, although “wild scenes [. . .] are more delightful than any artificial shows” the pleasure of nature increases the more it begins to resemble art; the mind experiences the “double” pleasure of comparing nature’s original beauty with its copy (68). This is why “we take delight in a prospect which is well laid out, and diversified, with fields and meadows, woods and rivers” (68); a carefully designed estate can be both profitable and beautiful and “a man might make a pretty landskip of his own possessions” (69). Although nature should always be one’s guide, nonetheless, with some small “improvements” it was possible to transform an estate into a landscape picture. Nearly twenty years later in response to the neo-Palladian architectural ambitions of Richard Boyle, the third Earl of Burlington, and with a similarly pictorial eye to nature, Alexander Pope advised:To build, to plant, whatever you intend,To rear the Column, or the Arch to bend,To swell the Terras, or to sink the Grot;In all, let Nature never be forgot.But treat the Goddess like a modest fair,Nor over-dress, nor leave her wholly bare;Let not each beauty ev’ry where be spy’d,Where half the skill is decently to hide.He gains all points, who pleasingly confounds,Surprizes, varies, and conceals the Bounds.Consult the Genius of the Place in all;That tells the Waters or to rise, or fall,Or helps th’ ambitious Hill the heav’ns to scale,Or scoops in circling theatres the Vale,Calls in the Country, catches opening glades, Joins willing woods, and varies shades from shades,Now breaks or now directs, th’ intending Lines;Paints as you plant, and, as you work, designs. (Epistle IV, ll 47–64) Whereas Addison still gestured towards estate management, Pope explicitly advocated a painterly approach to garden design. His epistle articulated some key principles that he enacted in his own garden at Twickenham and which would inform later garden design. No matter what one added to a landscape, one needed to be guided by nature; one should be moderate in one’s designs and neither plant too much nor too little; one must be aware of the spectator’s journey through the garden and take care to provide variety by creating “surprises” that would be revealed at different points. Finally, one had to find the “spirit” of the place that gave it its distinct character and use this to create the cohesion in diversity that was aspired to in a garden. Nature’s aestheticisation had begun with poetry, developed into painting, and was now enacted on actual natural environments with the emergence of English landscape style. This painterly approach to gardening demanded an imaginative, emotional, and intellectual engagement with place and it stylistically rejected the neo-classical geometry and regularity of the baroque garden (exemplified by Le Nôtre’s gardens at Versailles). Experiencing landscape now took on a third dimension as wealthy landowners and their friends put themselves within the picture frame and into the scene. Although landscape style changed during the century, a number of principles remained more or less consistent: the garden should be modelled on nature but “improved,” any improvements should not be obvious, pictorial composition should be observed, the garden should be concerned with the spectator’s experience and should aim to provoke an imaginative or emotional engagement with it. During the seventeenth century, developments in theatrical technology, particularly the emergence of the proscenium arch theatre with moveable scenery, showed that poetry and painting could be spectacularly combined on the stage. Later in the eighteenth century the artist and stage designer Philippe Jacques de Loutherbourg combined picturesque painting aesthetics with theatrical design in works such as The Wonders of Derbyshire in 1779 (McGillivray 136). It was a short step to shift the onstage scene outside. Theatricality was invoked when pictorial principles were applied three dimensionally; gardens became sites for pastoral genre scenes that ambiguously positioned their visitors both as spectators and actors. Theatrical SceneryGardens and theatres were explicitly connected. Like “theatre,” the word “garden” was sometimes used to describe a collection, in book form, which promised “a whole world of items” which was not always “redeemable” in “straightforward ways” (Hunt, Gardens 54–55). Theatrum mundi could be emblematically expressed in a garden through statues and architectural fabriques which drew spectators into complex chains of associations involving literature, art, and society, as they progressed through it.In the previous century, writes John Dixon Hunt, “the expectation of a fine garden [. . .] was that it work upon its visitor, involving him [sic] often insidiously as a participant in its dramas, which were presented to him as he explored its spaces by a variety of statues, inscriptions and [. . .] hydraulically controlled automata” (Gardens 54). Such devices, which featured heavily in the Italian baroque garden, were by the mid eighteenth century seen by English and French garden theorists to be overly contrived. Nonetheless, as David Marshall argues, “eighteenth-century garden design is famous for its excesses [. . .] the picturesque garden may have aimed to be less theatrical, but it aimed no less to be theater” (38). Such gardens still required their visitors’ participation and were designed to deliver an experience that stimulated the spectators’ imaginations and emotions as they moved through them. Theatrum mundi is implicit in eighteenth-century gardens through a common idea of the world reimagined into four geographical quadrants emblematically represented by fabriques in the garden. The model here is Alexander Pope’s influential poem, “The Temple of Fame” (1715), which depicted the eponymous temple with four different geographic faces: its western face was represented by western classical architecture, its east face by Chinese, Persian, and Assyrian, its north was Gothic and Celtic, and its south, Egyptian. These tropes make their appearance in eighteenth-century landscape gardens. In Désert de Retz, a garden created between 1774 and 1789 by François Racine de Monville, about twenty kilometres west of Paris, one can still see amongst its remaining fabriques: a ruined “gothic” church, a “Tartar” tent (it used to have a Chinese maison, now lost), a pyramid, and the classically inspired Temple of Pan. Similar principles underpin the design of Jardin (now Parc) Monceau that I discuss below. Retz: Figure 1. Tartar tent.Figure 2. Temple of PanStowe Gardens in Buckinghamshire has a similar array of structures (although the classical predominates) including its original Chinese pavillion. It, too, once featured a pyramid designed by the architect and playwright John Vanbrugh, and erected as a memorial to him after his death in 1726. On it was carved a quote from Horace that explicitly referenced the dramaturgical version of theatrum mundi: You have played, eaten enough and drunk enough,Now is time to leave the stage for younger men. (Garnett 19) Stowe’s Elysian Fields, designed by William Kent in the 1730s according to picturesque principles, offered its visitor two narrative choices, to take the Path of Virtue or the Path of Vice, just like a re-imagined morality play. As visitors progressed along their chosen paths they would encounter various fabriques and statues, some carved with inscriptions in either Latin or English, like the Vanbrugh pyramid, that would encourage associations between the ancient world and the contemporary world of the garden’s owner Richard Temple, Lord Cobham, and his circle. Stowe: Figure 3. Chinese Pavillion.Figure 4. Temple of VirtueKent’s background was as a painter and scene designer and he brought a theatrical sensibility to his designs; as Hunt writes, Kent particularly enjoyed designing “recessions into woodland space where ‘wings’ [were] created” (Picturesque 29). Importantly, Kent’s garden drawings reveal his awareness of gardens as “theatrical scenes for human action and interaction, where the premium is upon more personal experiences” and it this spatial dimension that was opened up at Stowe (Picturesque 30).Picturesque garden design emphasised pictorial composition that was similar to stage design and because a garden, like a stage, was a three-dimensional place for human action, it could also function as a set for that action. Unlike a painting, a garden was experiential and time-based and a visitor to it had an experience not unlike, to cautiously use an anachronism, a contemporary promenade performance. The habit of imaginatively wandering through a theatre in book-form, moving associatively from one item to the next, trying to discern the author’s pattern or structure, was one educated Europeans were used to, and a garden provided an embodied dimension to this activity. We can see how this might have been by visiting Parc Monceau in Paris which still contains remnants of the garden designed by Louis Carrogis (known as Carmontelle) for the Duc de Chartres in the 1770s. Carmontelle, like Kent, had a theatrical background and his primary role was as head of entertainments for the Orléans family; as such he was responsible for designing and writing plays for the family’s private theatricals (Hays 449). According to Hunt, Carmontelle intended visitors to Jardin de Monceau to take a specific itinerary through its “quantity of curious things”:Visitors entered by a Chinese gateway, next door to a gothic building that served as a chemical laboratory, and passed through greenhouses and coloured pavilions. Upon pressing a button, a mirrored wall opened into a winter garden painted with trompe-l’œil trees, floored with red sand, filled with exotic plants, and containing at its far end a grotto in which supper parties were held while music was played in the chamber above. Outside was a farm. Then there followed a series of exotic “locations”: a Temple of Mars, a winding river with an island of rocks and a Dutch mill, a dairy, two flower gardens, a Turkish tent poised, minaret-like, above an icehouse, a grove of tombs [. . .], and an Italian vineyard with a classical Bacchus at its center, regularly laid out to contrast with an irregular wood that succeeded it. The final stretches of the itinerary included a Naumachia or Roman water-theatre [. . .], more Turkish and Chinese effects, a ruined castle, yet another water-mill, and an island on which sheep grazed. (Picturesque 121) Monceau: Figure 5. Naumachia.Figure 6. PyramidIn its presentation of a multitude of different times and different places one can trace a line of descent from Jardin de Monceau to the great nineteenth-century World Expos and on to Disneyland. This lineage is not as trite as it seems once we realise that Carmontelle himself intended the garden to represent “all times and all places” and Pope’s four quadrants of the world were represented by fabriques at Monceau (Picturesque 121). As Jardin de Monceau reveals, gardens were also sites for smaller performative interventions such as the popular fêtes champêtres, garden parties in which the participants ate, drank, danced, played music, and acted in comedies. Role playing and masquerade were an important part of the fêtes as we see, for example, in Jean-Antoine Watteau’s Fêtes Vénitiennes (1718–19) where a “Moorishly” attired man addresses (or is dancing with) a young woman before an audience of young men and women, lolling around a fabrique (Watteau). Scenic design in the theatre inspired garden designs and gardens “featured prominently as dramatic locations in intermezzi, operas, and plays”, an exchange that encouraged visitors to gardens to see themselves as performers as much as spectators (Hunt, Gardens 64). A garden, particularly within the liminal aegis of a fête was a site for deceptions, tricks, ruses and revelations, assignations and seductions, all activities which were inherently theatrical; in such a garden visitors could find themselves acting in or watching a comedy or drama of their own devising. Marie-Antoinette built English gardens and a rural “hamlet” at Versailles. She and her intimate circle would retire to rustic cottages, which belied the opulence of their interiors, and dressed in white muslin dresses and straw hats, would play at being dairy maids, milking cows (pre-cleaned by the servants) into fine porcelain buckets (Martin 3). Just as the queen acted in pastoral operas in her theatre in the grounds of the Petit Trianon, her hamlet provided an opportunity for her to “live” a pastoral fantasy. Similarly, François Racine de Monville, who commissioned Désert de Retz, was a talented harpist and flautist and his Temple of Pan was, appropriately, a music room.Versailles: Figure 7. Hamlet ConclusionRichard Steele, Addison’s friend and co-founder of The Spectator, casually invoked theatrum mundi when he wrote in 1720: “the World and the Stage [. . .] have been ten thousand times observed to be the Pictures of one another” (51). Steele’s reiteration of a Renaissance commonplace revealed a different emphasis, an emphasis on the metaphor’s spatial and spectacular elements. Although Steele reasserts the idea that the world and stage resemble each other, he does so through a third level of abstraction: it is as pictures that they have an affinity. World and stage are both positioned for the observer within complementary picture frames and it is as pictures that he or she is invited to make sense of them. The formalist version of theatrum mundi invokes a spectator beholding the world for his (usually!) pleasure and in the process nature itself is transformed. No longer were natural landscapes wildernesses to be tamed and economically exploited, but could become gardens rendered into scenes for their aristocratic owners’ pleasure. Désert de Retz, as its name suggests, was an artfully composed wilderness, a version of the natural world sculpted into scenery. Theatrum mundi, through the aesthetic category of the picturesque, emerged in English landscape style and effected a theatricalised transformation of nature that was enacted in the aristocratic gardens of Europe.ReferencesAddison, Joseph. The Spectator. No. 414 (25 June 1712): 67–70. Eighteenth Century Collections Online.Garnett, Oliver. Stowe. Buckinghamshire. The National Trust, 2011.Hays, David. “Carmontelle's Design for the Jardin de Monceau: A Freemasonic Garden in Late-Eighteenth-Century France.” Eighteenth-Century Studies 32.4 (1999): 447–62.Heidegger, Martin. The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays. Trans. William Lovitt. New York: Harper and Row, 1977.Hunt, John Dixon. Gardens and the Picturesque: Studies in the History of Landscape Architecture. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1992.———. The Picturesque Garden in Europe. London: Thames and Hudson, 2002.Marshall, David. The Frame of Art. Fictions of Aesthetic Experience, 1750–1815. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2005.Martin, Meredith S. Dairy Queens: The Politics of Pastoral Architecture from Catherine de' Medici to Marie-Antoinette. Harvard: Harvard UP, 2011.McGillivray, Glen. "The Picturesque World Stage." Performance Research 13.4 (2008): 127–39.Pope, Alexander. “Epistle IV. To Richard Boyle, Earl of Burlington.” Epistles to Several Persons. London, 1744. Eighteenth Century Collections Online.———. The Temple of Fame: A Vision. By Mr. Pope. 2nd ed. London, 1715. Eighteenth Century Collections Online. Shakespeare, William. As You Like It. Ed. Agnes Latham. London: Routledge, 1991.Steele, Richard. The Theatre. No. 7 (23 January 1720).

Introduction This paper is based upon an investigation into the life of a street market in the city of Ha Noi in Vietnam, and experience of the street food served on Ha Noi’s pavements. It draws upon interviews with itinerant food vendors conducted by the researchers and upon accounts of their daily lives from a Vietnamese film subtitled in English and French, sourced from the Vietnamese Women’s Museum (Jensen). The research considers the lives of the people making and selling street food against the distilled versions of cultural experience accessible through the pages of two recent English language cookbooks focussing upon this cuisine. The data from the fieldwork is used as a point for critical comparison (Fram) with recipes and descriptions from Hanoi Street Food (Vandenberghe and Thys) and Vietnamese Street Food (Lister and Pohl), two recent relevant English language cookbooks. The research question addressed is “How are the everyday lives of Vietnamese street market cooks (mis)represented in cookery-related books published for an English-language readership?” The research team comprises an Australian Cultural Studies academic (Lelia Green) and a bi-lingual Vietnamese researcher (Nguyen Hong Van), who is Ha Noi born and bred, but who has lived overseas and whose first degree, in Sociology, is from a Canadian university. In each other’s company and over a period of some weeks, Lelia and Van spent more than 40 hours on ethnographic fieldwork in street markets, and interviewing street vendors. The purpose of the research was exploratory, but it was also undertaken as a means of making the labour and lives of marginalised women more visible, since most itinerant food vendors in Vietnam are women (Jensen). As Bhomik notes, male vendors “are engaged in motor cycle repair or sale of higher priced goods such as personal products, souvenirs etc. and their earnings are higher” (2261). Although the teamwork between Lelia and Van went some way to resolve the challenges posed by insider/outsider qualitative research (Corbin, Dwyer, and Buckle), Van has never lived or worked as a street vendor. First Take an Informal Street Market … Eating on the Street An informal Vietnamese street market is a multi-layered space, ordered according to the geography of the area in which the food is prepared and consumed. The informality of a street market indicates its status between legitimacy and repression. Informal street markets spring up in locales where there is significant demand—usually office workers nearby, and schools. The food they sell is cheap and flavourful, catering for the needs of people who have little time or money and want something hot and nourishing to start, punctuate, or end the day. As markets grow, so the vendors in the market constitute a secondary population in need of sustenance. Itinerant street vendors carry with them everything they need for their day’s work. Typically this includes a little oil or coal-based stove, their raw ingredients, dishes or trays for food preparation and serving, often a bowl for washing food or utensils, and a large bag to carry the dirty dishes used by their customers. Often these tools of their trade will be carried in two baskets balanced upon a pole that acts as a yoke across the vendor’s neck. Sometimes well-resourced vendors will also carry, (or push a bicycle or cart with), sets of small plastic stools and tables, so that their clients can sit and enjoy their food. In the semi-tropical climate of Ha Noi, carrying the raw materials to cook for and feed dozens of patrons is a tiring and difficult business. These street vendors’s lives are made more complex by the semi-legitimacy of the informal street market where itinerants are viewed as potential sources of income by a series of officials who extort small but frequent payments in the form of demanding bribes, or levying fines for illegal activity such as obstructing the pavement (Lincoln). Trung, who sells crab noodles, says the police are the most difficult aspect of her job: “they can come anytime and confiscate all my stuff and give me a fine. One time I was so panicked when I saw them approaching on a small truck that I took all my bowls and ran. The bowl slipped out of my hands and cut into my leg. I still have a deep scar from that accident” (Trung). Now add a smattering of street vendors. Bánh Mỳ: Bread Rolls “1 French baguette”, states the Vandenberghe and Thys recipe for bánh mỳ, implicitly acknowledging the hundred years of French colonisation which provides Vietnam with its excellent breads and pastries, “beat the eggs lightly in a mixing bowl, crumble the paté and combine the paté and the lightly beaten eggs. Put the oil in a small frying pan and cook the omelette […] fold the omelette double and put it on the [grilled, heated] bread […] the variations are endless” (71). The young Vietnamese woman, Anh, sells bánh mỳ trứng ngải cứu, bread rolls with egg cooked with mugwort, an aromatic leafy herb. She explains her initial motivation to sell food on the street: “some women in my village already came to the city to sell. I can’t earn much money at home and I need money to send my children to school, so I decided to follow them” (Anh). She shares rented accommodation in the city with other women—sometimes up to ten people in a room (Jensen)—and starts her day at 4.30am, washing vegetables and preparing her baskets. Although a street trader herself, she is networked into a complex set of supply and delivery connections. Her eggs and bread are delivered fresh each morning and she buys the mugwort from a market near her lodgings. “I leave home around 6am and start walking along the streets. […] I mostly sell to shop keepers. They have to stay in their shop so I bring breakfast to them. I walk through a lot of streets, whenever someone calls out I will stop and make bread for them” (Anh). Mid-morning, at around 10am, Anh goes back to her home to have lunch and prepare for the afternoon, with a fresh delivery of eggs around 1.00-1.30pm. Usually, she leaves again around 2.00pm “but if it’s too hot outside, I will stay until 3pm, because it is very tiring to walk in the heat, and people don’t eat that early either. I go home whenever I sell out […], sometimes as early as 4pm, or as late as 7pm” (Anh). Like many street vendors, Anh has sought out points of contact with the local community to punctuate her walking with episodes of rest. Her customers are mainly other Vietnamese people, “shop keepers and residents of the streets I walk along every day. There is an old lady. I sit in front of her shop every afternoon from 3pm to 5pm. She eats one egg every day” (Anh). Anh has been selling Bánh mỳ on the streets for three years, but this is not her only source of income: “At home I grow rice, but I can only harvest it at the end of the season. It only takes a storm or hail to destroy the whole effort I spend for months […] This [food] is very easy to make, and I make a little profit everyday” (Anh). She has never worked from a recipe book: “I think only people in hotels, like a big chef who makes complicated dishes need recipes, this one is very easy, just a common everyday food” (Anh). As for the problems posed by the policing of informal markets, Anh says: “if I am not careful, the ward police will give me a fine for selling on the street.” Such a calamity can write off the profit of many hours’ or days’ work. Xôi: Sticky Rice Xôi is a popular street food dish, and Lister and Pohl provide two recipes, one for xôi lạc (sticky rice with peanuts)(68), and one for xôi xéo (sticky rice with turmeric and mung beans, and fried shallots) (80). Nga, the xôi seller interviewed for this research, sells both types of sticky rice along with xôi gậc (a festive red sticky rice cooked with and coloured by spiny bitter gourd, and typically eaten at Tết, the celebration for the Lunar New Year) and xôi đỗ đen, sticky rice with black bean. She used to specialise in only one kind of sticky rice but, as she says, “business was slow so I added other types of sticky rice. I sit here in the morning everyday anyway, so I sell different types, a small quantity for each” (Nga). The biggest complication for street vendors selling sticky rice is the requirement that it is still being steamed just before being sold, so that it is hot, soft, and sticky, and not dried out. The cooked sticky rice is usually packed in banana leaves under a plastic cover and put in a bamboo basket. The basket helps with ventilation while banana leaves keep the rice moist and the plastic cover keeps in heat. Traditionally, xôi is also sold in banana leaves. Nga uses first a layer of banana leaf, then one of plastic, and finally newspaper. Nga is a grandmother and constructs her street vending as a retirement job, which puts food on the table for her husband and herself. In Vietnam, there is a tradition that the younger generations look after their elders, but her work as a street vendor means that Nga and her husband can retain their autonomy and help their own family, for longer. Nga starts cooking at 4.00am, but her street food is only one element of her income: “In addition to selling here, I also deliver to restaurants. Actually most of my income comes from them. I deliver at around 5 to 5.30am, and start selling here at 6” (Nga). Both of Lister and Pohl’s recipes start with soaking the sticky rice overnight in water, just as Nga does. She says, “I wash the rice and soak them before I go to bed the night before. I get up, start the stove which uses black coal. I sell out all the rice everyday, otherwise it won’t taste good […] usually I sell out at 8 or 8.30am, 9am at the latest. I don’t work in the afternoon. I pick up my grandchildren at 4pm and take care of them until the end of the day.” Nga has strong views about the place of recipes in cooking, especially in cooking as a business: I don’t need to learn from a book. Written recipes or informal teaching from relatives is the same, they are just the starting point. What matters is you learn from your own experience. For example, you soak your rice for 6 hours today, but your customers complain that the rice is not soft, so you soak it for 8 hours next time. Or maybe you sell to a poorer community, you will adjust your ingredients to cheaper type, so you can reduce your price but still make profit; but if you sell in a richer neighbourhood, you make sure you have good quality, even with higher price, or else they will not buy from you (Nga). Lister and Pohl dedicate a two-page spread (70-1) to Ðặng Thị Sáu and her Xôi shopfront stall, noting that she learned her business from her mother-in-law who was “an itinerant sticky rice peddler for most of her life, walking the city streets, selling from bamboo baskets. It was a hard and uncertain life and not one Sáu wanted to follow” (70). Sáu’s compromise, ultimately, was to sell sticky rice from the comparative security and stability of a fixed location. Lister and Pohl’s focus upon Sáu and her food, along with the pictures of everyday life featured in Vietnamese Street Food, mean that this is more than an inspirational cookbook. It is a vivid introduction to the vernacular foodways of Vietnam “a set of social, economic and cultural practices around the production and consumption of food that are normatively distinctive to an ethnocultural group” (Jonas 119). Bún Riêu Cua: Crab Meat Noodle Crab meat noodle is a complicated recipe and a reminder that many people who eat street food do so because these are favourite Vietnamese dishes which may require considerable effort to prepare. The specialisation of street food vendors, making a complicated dish for the relish of dozens of customers, allows busy Vietnamese workers to enjoy their authentic cuisine at an affordable cost without the time constraints of buying multiple ingredients and making the dish themselves. The recipe in Hanoi Street Food involves several steps: preparation of the sauce using sautéing, frying and reducing (Jones); cooking of the crab in boiling water (not including separately bought crabmeat used in the sauce); creation of a chicken stock, to which the sauce is added; along with the washing and chopping a range of vegetables including soya bean sprouts, spring onions, lettuce, fresh herbs, lime etc., some of which is used as garnish (Vandenberghe, and Thys 90). Trung and her husband have been selling their bún riêu cua for five years. For nine years prior to working as a street food vendor, Trung was a recyclables collector. She began working in the city when she “followed a cousin to Ha Noi so I could earn money to support my family of six people. At first I collected materials such as plastic bottles, metal, papers, etc, but because I carried too much on my shoulders, I developed severe back pain and shoulder pain” (Trung). Now she and her husband use a bicycle to help carry the various necessities for her bún riêu cua street stall, using the vehicle to reduce some of the physical burden of the work. Trung learned how to make bún riêu cua from an aunt in Hai Phong, “I just observed her and other people”. The dish remains time consuming, however:I get up at 3am to start preparing the crab and cook the soup. My husband washes vegetables. It often takes us about 2 hours. By 5am, we leave the house, and we are here by 5.30, ready to sell breakfast […] I am most busy during lunchtime, from 10am to 1-2pm. Breakfast time can last from 6am to 9am. When I am not selling to customers I often get tired and easily fall asleep because I always crave sleep. In between, my husband and I wash dishes. He also delivers to people too. We get lots of phone calls from patients of the hospitals nearby. They say my food is more delicious than food in the hospital’s canteen […] Usually I go home around 4pm in the summer and 5 to 6pm in the winter. But I also stop by different shops to buy ingredients for the next day on my way home. Once I get home, I wash the bowls, re-supply and re-arrange my stuffs, and do some preparation. I work until I go to bed at 9pm (Trung). The illustration for this recipe in Hanoi Street Food is not of the dish itself, but of young Vietnamese men enjoying the dish. As is the case with Lister and Pohl, Vandenberghe and Thys’s book is about more than recipes, it is a rich evocation of daily life on the streets of Vietnam. Serve with a Side-dish of Conclusions Authentic street food is cooked, sold and consumed on the street. However, street food cookbooks tend to recommended shopfront eateries, partly because they are easier to find, and are more convenient, in that neither the tourist nor the vendor is at risk of police intervention. Another reason for featuring the more established vendors with their own premises concerns food hygiene: In 1989 the Vietnamese government adopted a law on the protection of people’s health. A survey on food samples in Hanoi showed that 47 per cent were microbiologically unsafe. [This has now changed.] The government has adopted two practices for ensuring safer street food, namely, monitoring street food vendors through a licensing system, and educating and training them on hygiene (Bhowmik 2260). Such licensing, training and the maintenance of hygiene standards are more difficult to police with itinerant food vendors. In the two cookbooks featured, ingredients tend to be measured as to specific amounts, with the idea that the result should be predictable. Street vendors, however, learn to cook their signature dishes from friends, relatives, and experience. They do not measure their ingredients while cooking, and their products vary from one vendor to another, and also to some extent from day to day, even given the same cook. This creates a special characteristic of street food and means that regular customers gravitate to particular vendors whose choice of seasoning and cooking techniques culminates in the most attractive results according to their personal taste. While there are lots of stalls captioned as bánh mỳ, regular customers will find that there are significant differences between stalls. One reason for this is offered in Lister and Pohl: small quantities of special ingredients that are difficult to get in Vietnam and impossible elsewhere. The cook in a featured Bánh cuốn stall (selling rice pancakes) adds a drop of giant water bug juice to season her dipping broth: “ ‘It’s the real thing! One drop off the top of a chopstick is enough’ she explains” (Lister, and Pohl 33). As is clear from the interviews with vendors, itinerant sellers of street food don’t use recipe books, and have generally learned how to cook their dishes through women’s networks of family and friends. The two cookbooks discussed are designed for consumption by people who engage in or aspire to “food and drink tourism” (Boniface vii) in Vietnam, whether the readers have visited in person or become aware of the cuisine through popular culture, such as Luke Nguyen’s SBS cooking shows (Nguyen). They are as much coffee table books as collections of recipes, and are written by westerners for a western readership. The recipes focus on ingredients that can be sourced in everyday western contexts but the beautiful and evocative photographs of daily life in Vietnam, supplemented by written commentary on people and place, clearly locate the recipes in their Vietnamese cultural context. Culinary tourism allows people unfamiliar with a cuisine and culture to use “food to explore new cultures and ways of being” (Long 21). Street food vendors are part of many communities. They require knowledge, skill, and personal networks to acquire the quality ingredients at the best possible price for the daily routine of food preparation and selling. Whereas recipe books deal with domestic-scale food production, a vendor may cook for a hundred or more people in a single day. Many itinerant street food sellers work in the city to support absent husbands and children in rural locations, taking money home on a regular basis ($20 profit a fortnight makes their labour worthwhile), and spending 10 days in 14 on the streets (Jensen). As women help each other to begin a career as a vendor through oral teaching, observation, and first-hand experience, they do away with the invisible, authoritative voice of cookbooks. Itinerant food sellers are also a part of the larger communities in which they work, including customers, their suppliers, and other actors such as the authorities and the media. This larger community sets the tone for their food, and their lives. The vast majority of vendors of street food are women, prepared to work hard and with passion and pride to make enough money to make a difference to their families. Books about street food might help recreate some of the dishes that can be bought on the streets of Vietnam. After participating in street life, however, as an observer or customer, it becomes clear that recipe cookbooks intended for English readers only capture part of the complexity and beauty of street food, and the lives of those who make it. References Anh. Personal communication. Trans. Nguyen Hong Van. 2013. Boniface, Priscilla. Tasting Tourism: Travelling for Food and Drink. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003. Bhowmik, Sharit K. “Street Vendors in Asia: A Review.” Economic and Political Weekly (2005): 2256–64. Burr, Vivien. Social Constructionism. 2nd ed. Oxford: Routledge, 2003. Corbin Dwyer, Sonya, and Jennifer L. Buckle. “The Space Between: On Being an Insider-Outsider in Qualitative Research.” International Journal of Qualitative Methods 8.1 (2009): 54–63. Fram, Sheila M. “The Constant Comparative Analysis Method Outside of Grounded Theory.” The Qualitative Report 18, Article 1 (2013): 1–25. 28 Apr. 2013 ‹http://www.nova.edu/ssss/QR/QR18/fram1.pdf›. Jensen, Rolf. Street Vendors [DVD of three films, Their Voices, Thuy’s Story and Loi’s Story]. Ha Noi: Vietnamese Women’s Museum, 2012. Jonas, Tammi. “Eating the Vernacular, Being Cosmopolitan.” Cultural Studies Review 19.1 (2013): 117–37. 19 May 2013 ‹http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index.php/csrj/article/viewFile/3076/3428›. Jones, G. Stephen. “The Difference between Sautéing, Pan Frying and Stir Frying [blog post].” The Reluctant Gourmet. 30 Apr. 2010. 28 Apr. 2013 ‹http://reluctantgourmet.com/cooking-techniques/frying/item/856-saute-pan-fry-and-stir-fry›. Lincoln, Martha. “Report from the Field: Street Vendors and the Informal Sector in Hanoi.” Dialectical Anthropology 32.3 (2008): 261–5. Lister, Tracey, and Andreas Pohl. Vietnamese Street Food. Rev. ed. Melbourne: Hardie Grant, 2013. Long, Lucy. “A Folkloristic Perspective on Eating and Otherness.” Culinary Tourism. Ed. Lucy Long. Lexington: UP of Kentucky, 2004. 20–50. Nga. Personal communication. (trans. Nguyen Hong Van), 2013. Nguyen, Luke. Luke Nyugen’s Vietnam [SBS]. 2009 ‹http://www.sbs.com.au/shows/lukenguyen/watchonline/page/i/1/show/lukenguyen›. Trung. Personal communication. Trans. Nguyen Hong Van. 2013. Vandenberghe, Tom, and Luk Thys. Hanoi Street Food: Cooking and Travelling in Vietnam. Tielt: Uitgeverij Lannoo nv, 2011.

By the time you read this, it will be wrong. Things seemed to be moving so fast in these first days after airplanes crashed into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and the Pennsylvania earth. Each certainty is as carelessly dropped as it was once carelessly assumed. The sounds of lower Manhattan that used to serve as white noise for residents—sirens, screeches, screams—are no longer signs without a referent. Instead, they make folks stare and stop, hurry and hustle, wondering whether the noises we know so well are in fact, this time, coefficients of a new reality. At the time of writing, the events themselves are also signs without referents—there has been no direct claim of responsibility, and little proof offered by accusers since the 11th. But it has been assumed that there is a link to US foreign policy, its military and economic presence in the Arab world, and opposition to it that seeks revenge. In the intervening weeks the US media and the war planners have supplied their own narrow frameworks, making New York’s “ground zero” into the starting point for a new escalation of global violence. We want to write here about the combination of sources and sensations that came that day, and the jumble of knowledges and emotions that filled our minds. Working late the night before, Toby was awoken in the morning by one of the planes right overhead. That happens sometimes. I have long expected a crash when I’ve heard the roar of jet engines so close—but I didn’t this time. Often when that sound hits me, I get up and go for a run down by the water, just near Wall Street. Something kept me back that day. Instead, I headed for my laptop. Because I cannot rely on local media to tell me very much about the role of the US in world affairs, I was reading the British newspaper The Guardian on-line when it flashed a two-line report about the planes. I looked up at the calendar above my desk to see whether it was April 1st. Truly. Then I got off-line and turned on the TV to watch CNN. That second, the phone rang. My quasi-ex-girlfriend I’m still in love with called from the mid-West. She was due to leave that day for the Bay Area. Was I alright? We spoke for a bit. She said my cell phone was out, and indeed it was for the remainder of the day. As I hung up from her, my friend Ana rang, tearful and concerned. Her husband, Patrick, had left an hour before for work in New Jersey, and it seemed like a dangerous separation. All separations were potentially fatal that day. You wanted to know where everyone was, every minute. She told me she had been trying to contact Palestinian friends who worked and attended school near the event—their ethnic, religious, and national backgrounds made for real poignancy, as we both thought of the prejudice they would (probably) face, regardless of the eventual who/what/when/where/how of these events. We agreed to meet at Bruno’s, a bakery on La Guardia Place. For some reason I really took my time, though, before getting to Ana. I shampooed and shaved under the shower. This was a horror, and I needed to look my best, even as men and women were losing and risking their lives. I can only interpret what I did as an attempt to impose normalcy and control on the situation, on my environment. When I finally made it down there, she’d located our friends. They were safe. We stood in the street and watched the Towers. Horrified by the sight of human beings tumbling to their deaths, we turned to buy a tea/coffee—again some ludicrous normalization—but were drawn back by chilling screams from the street. Racing outside, we saw the second Tower collapse, and clutched at each other. People were streaming towards us from further downtown. We decided to be with our Palestinian friends in their apartment. When we arrived, we learnt that Mark had been four minutes away from the WTC when the first plane hit. I tried to call my daughter in London and my father in Canberra, but to no avail. I rang the mid-West, and asked my maybe-former novia to call England and Australia to report in on me. Our friend Jenine got through to relatives on the West Bank. Israeli tanks had commenced a bombardment there, right after the planes had struck New York. Family members spoke to her from under the kitchen table, where they were taking refuge from the shelling of their house. Then we gave ourselves over to television, like so many others around the world, even though these events were happening only a mile away. We wanted to hear official word, but there was just a huge absence—Bush was busy learning to read in Florida, then leading from the front in Louisiana and Nebraska. As the day wore on, we split up and regrouped, meeting folks. One guy was in the subway when smoke filled the car. Noone could breathe properly, people were screaming, and his only thought was for his dog DeNiro back in Brooklyn. From the panic of the train, he managed to call his mom on a cell to ask her to feed “DeNiro” that night, because it looked like he wouldn’t get home. A pregnant woman feared for her unborn as she fled the blasts, pushing the stroller with her baby in it as she did so. Away from these heart-rending tales from strangers, there was the fear: good grief, what horrible price would the US Government extract for this, and who would be the overt and covert agents and targets of that suffering? What blood-lust would this generate? What would be the pattern of retaliation and counter-retaliation? What would become of civil rights and cultural inclusiveness? So a jumble of emotions came forward, I assume in all of us. Anger was not there for me, just intense sorrow, shock, and fear, and the desire for intimacy. Network television appeared to offer me that, but in an ultimately unsatisfactory way. For I think I saw the end-result of reality TV that day. I have since decided to call this ‘emotionalization’—network TV’s tendency to substitute analysis of US politics and economics with a stress on feelings. Of course, powerful emotions have been engaged by this horror, and there is value in addressing that fact and letting out the pain. I certainly needed to do so. But on that day and subsequent ones, I looked to the networks, traditional sources of current-affairs knowledge, for just that—informed, multi-perspectival journalism that would allow me to make sense of my feelings, and come to a just and reasoned decision about how the US should respond. I waited in vain. No such commentary came forward. Just a lot of asinine inquiries from reporters that were identical to those they pose to basketballers after a game: Question—‘How do you feel now?’ Answer—‘God was with me today.’ For the networks were insistent on asking everyone in sight how they felt about the end of las torres gemelas. In this case, we heard the feelings of survivors, firefighters, viewers, media mavens, Republican and Democrat hacks, and vacuous Beltway state-of-the-nation pundits. But learning of the military-political economy, global inequality, and ideologies and organizations that made for our grief and loss—for that, there was no space. TV had forgotten how to do it. My principal feeling soon became one of frustration. So I headed back to where I began the day—The Guardian web site, where I was given insightful analysis of the messy factors of history, religion, economics, and politics that had created this situation. As I dealt with the tragedy of folks whose lives had been so cruelly lost, I pondered what it would take for this to stop. Or whether this was just the beginning. I knew one thing—the answers wouldn’t come from mainstream US television, no matter how full of feelings it was. And that made Toby anxious. And afraid. He still is. And so the dreams come. In one, I am suddenly furloughed from my job with an orchestra, as audience numbers tumble. I make my evening-wear way to my locker along with the other players, emptying it of bubble gum and instrument. The next night, I see a gigantic, fifty-feet high wave heading for the city beach where I’ve come to swim. Somehow I am sheltered behind a huge wall, as all the people around me die. Dripping, I turn to find myself in a media-stereotype “crack house” of the early ’90s—desperate-looking black men, endless doorways, sudden police arrival, and my earnest search for a passport that will explain away my presence. I awake in horror, to the realization that the passport was already open and stamped—racialization at work for Toby, every day and in every way, as a white man in New York City. Ana’s husband, Patrick, was at work ten miles from Manhattan when “it” happened. In the hallway, I overheard some talk about two planes crashing, but went to teach anyway in my usual morning stupor. This was just the usual chatter of disaster junkies. I didn’t hear the words, “World Trade Center” until ten thirty, at the end of the class at the college I teach at in New Jersey, across the Hudson river. A friend and colleague walked in and told me the news of the attack, to which I replied “You must be fucking joking.” He was a little offended. Students were milling haphazardly on the campus in the late summer weather, some looking panicked like me. My first thought was of some general failure of the air-traffic control system. There must be planes falling out of the sky all over the country. Then the height of the towers: how far towards our apartment in Greenwich Village would the towers fall? Neither of us worked in the financial district a mile downtown, but was Ana safe? Where on the college campus could I see what was happening? I recognized the same physical sensation I had felt the morning after Hurricane Andrew in Miami seeing at a distance the wreckage of our shattered apartment across a suburban golf course strewn with debris and flattened power lines. Now I was trapped in the suburbs again at an unbridgeable distance from my wife and friends who were witnessing the attacks first hand. Were they safe? What on earth was going on? This feeling of being cut off, my path to the familiar places of home blocked, remained for weeks my dominant experience of the disaster. In my office, phone calls to the city didn’t work. There were six voice-mail messages from my teenaged brother Alex in small-town England giving a running commentary on the attack and its aftermath that he was witnessing live on television while I dutifully taught my writing class. “Hello, Patrick, where are you? Oh my god, another plane just hit the towers. Where are you?” The web was choked: no access to newspapers online. Email worked, but no one was wasting time writing. My office window looked out over a soccer field to the still woodlands of western New Jersey: behind me to the east the disaster must be unfolding. Finally I found a website with a live stream from ABC television, which I watched flickering and stilted on the tiny screen. It had all already happened: both towers already collapsed, the Pentagon attacked, another plane shot down over Pennsylvania, unconfirmed reports said, there were other hijacked aircraft still out there unaccounted for. Manhattan was sealed off. George Washington Bridge, Lincoln and Holland tunnels, all the bridges and tunnels from New Jersey I used to mock shut down. Police actions sealed off the highways into “the city.” The city I liked to think of as the capital of the world was cut off completely from the outside, suddenly vulnerable and under siege. There was no way to get home. The phone rang abruptly and Alex, three thousand miles away, told me he had spoken to Ana earlier and she was safe. After a dozen tries, I managed to get through and spoke to her, learning that she and Toby had seen people jumping and then the second tower fall. Other friends had been even closer. Everyone was safe, we thought. I sat for another couple of hours in my office uselessly. The news was incoherent, stories contradictory, loops of the planes hitting the towers only just ready for recycling. The attacks were already being transformed into “the World Trade Center Disaster,” not yet the ahistorical singularity of the emergency “nine one one.” Stranded, I had to spend the night in New Jersey at my boss’s house, reminded again of the boundless generosity of Americans to relative strangers. In an effort to protect his young son from the as yet unfiltered images saturating cable and Internet, my friend’s TV set was turned off and we did our best to reassure. We listened surreptitiously to news bulletins on AM radio, hoping that the roads would open. Walking the dog with my friend’s wife and son we crossed a park on the ridge on which Upper Montclair sits. Ten miles away a huge column of smoke was rising from lower Manhattan, where the stunning absence of the towers was clearly visible. The summer evening was unnervingly still. We kicked a soccer ball around on the front lawn and a woman walked distracted by, shocked and pale up the tree-lined suburban street, suffering her own wordless trauma. I remembered that though most of my students were ordinary working people, Montclair is a well-off dormitory for the financial sector and high rises of Wall Street and Midtown. For the time being, this was a white-collar disaster. I slept a short night in my friend’s house, waking to hope I had dreamed it all, and took the commuter train in with shell-shocked bankers and corporate types. All men, all looking nervously across the river toward glimpses of the Manhattan skyline as the train neared Hoboken. “I can’t believe they’re making us go in,” one guy had repeated on the station platform. He had watched the attacks from his office in Midtown, “The whole thing.” Inside the train we all sat in silence. Up from the PATH train station on 9th street I came onto a carless 6th Avenue. At 14th street barricades now sealed off downtown from the rest of the world. I walked down the middle of the avenue to a newspaper stand; the Indian proprietor shrugged “No deliveries below 14th.” I had not realized that the closer to the disaster you came, the less information would be available. Except, I assumed, for the evidence of my senses. But at 8 am the Village was eerily still, few people about, nothing in the sky, including the twin towers. I walked to Houston Street, which was full of trucks and police vehicles. Tractor trailers sat carrying concrete barriers. Below Houston, each street into Soho was barricaded and manned by huddles of cops. I had walked effortlessly up into the “lockdown,” but this was the “frozen zone.” There was no going further south towards the towers. I walked the few blocks home, found my wife sleeping, and climbed into bed, still in my clothes from the day before. “Your heart is racing,” she said. I realized that I hadn’t known if I would get back, and now I never wanted to leave again; it was still only eight thirty am. Lying there, I felt the terrible wonder of a distant bystander for the first-hand witness. Ana’s face couldn’t tell me what she had seen. I felt I needed to know more, to see and understand. Even though I knew the effort was useless: I could never bridge that gap that had trapped me ten miles away, my back turned to the unfolding disaster. The television was useless: we don’t have cable, and the mast on top of the North Tower, which Ana had watched fall, had relayed all the network channels. I knew I had to go down and see the wreckage. Later I would realize how lucky I had been not to suffer from “disaster envy.” Unbelievably, in retrospect, I commuted into work the second day after the attack, dogged by the same unnerving sensation that I would not get back—to the wounded, humbled former center of the world. My students were uneasy, all talked out. I was a novelty, a New Yorker living in the Village a mile from the towers, but I was forty-eight hours late. Out of place in both places. I felt torn up, but not angry. Back in the city at night, people were eating and drinking with a vengeance, the air filled with acrid sicklysweet smoke from the burning wreckage. Eyes stang and nose ran with a bitter acrid taste. Who knows what we’re breathing in, we joked nervously. A friend’s wife had fallen out with him for refusing to wear a protective mask in the house. He shrugged a wordlessly reassuring smile. What could any of us do? I walked with Ana down to the top of West Broadway from where the towers had commanded the skyline over SoHo; downtown dense smoke blocked the view to the disaster. A crowd of onlookers pushed up against the barricades all day, some weeping, others gawping. A tall guy was filming the grieving faces with a video camera, which was somehow the worst thing of all, the first sign of the disaster tourism that was already mushrooming downtown. Across the street an Asian artist sat painting the street scene in streaky black and white; he had scrubbed out two white columns where the towers would have been. “That’s the first thing I’ve seen that’s made me feel any better,” Ana said. We thanked him, but he shrugged blankly, still in shock I supposed. On the Friday, the clampdown. I watched the Mayor and Police Chief hold a press conference in which they angrily told the stream of volunteers to “ground zero” that they weren’t needed. “We can handle this ourselves. We thank you. But we don’t need your help,” Commissioner Kerik said. After the free-for-all of the first couple of days, with its amazing spontaneities and common gestures of goodwill, the clampdown was going into effect. I decided to go down to Canal Street and see if it was true that no one was welcome anymore. So many paths through the city were blocked now. “Lock down, frozen zone, war zone, the site, combat zone, ground zero, state troopers, secured perimeter, national guard, humvees, family center”: a disturbing new vocabulary that seemed to stamp the logic of Giuliani’s sanitized and over-policed Manhattan onto the wounded hulk of the city. The Mayor had been magnificent in the heat of the crisis; Churchillian, many were saying—and indeed, Giuliani quickly appeared on the cover of Cigar Afficionado, complete with wing collar and the misquotation from Kipling, “Captain Courageous.” Churchill had not believed in peacetime politics either, and he never got over losing his empire. Now the regime of command and control over New York’s citizens and its economy was being stabilized and reimposed. The sealed-off, disfigured, and newly militarized spaces of the New York through which I have always loved to wander at all hours seemed to have been put beyond reach for the duration. And, in the new post-“9/11” post-history, the duration could last forever. The violence of the attacks seemed to have elicited a heavy-handed official reaction that sought to contain and constrict the best qualities of New York. I felt more anger at the clampdown than I did at the demolition of the towers. I knew this was unreasonable, but I feared the reaction, the spread of the racial harassment and racial profiling that I had already heard of from my students in New Jersey. This militarizing of the urban landscape seemed to negate the sprawling, freewheeling, boundless largesse and tolerance on which New York had complacently claimed a monopoly. For many the towers stood for that as well, not just as the monumental outposts of global finance that had been attacked. Could the American flag mean something different? For a few days, perhaps—on the helmets of firemen and construction workers. But not for long. On the Saturday, I found an unmanned barricade way east along Canal Street and rode my bike past throngs of Chinatown residents, by the Federal jail block where prisoners from the first World Trade Center bombing were still being held. I headed south and west towards Tribeca; below the barricades in the frozen zone, you could roam freely, the cops and soldiers assuming you belonged there. I felt uneasy, doubting my own motives for being there, feeling the blood drain from my head in the same numbing shock I’d felt every time I headed downtown towards the site. I looped towards Greenwich Avenue, passing an abandoned bank full of emergency supplies and boxes of protective masks. Crushed cars still smeared with pulverized concrete and encrusted with paperwork strewn by the blast sat on the street near the disabled telephone exchange. On one side of the avenue stood a horde of onlookers, on the other television crews, all looking two blocks south towards a colossal pile of twisted and smoking steel, seven stories high. We were told to stay off the street by long-suffering national guardsmen and women with southern accents, kids. Nothing happening, just the aftermath. The TV crews were interviewing worn-out, dust-covered volunteers and firemen who sat quietly leaning against the railings of a park filled with scraps of paper. Out on the West Side highway, a high-tech truck was offering free cellular phone calls. The six lanes by the river were full of construction machinery and military vehicles. Ambulances rolled slowly uptown, bodies inside? I locked my bike redundantly to a lamppost and crossed under the hostile gaze of plainclothes police to another media encampment. On the path by the river, two camera crews were complaining bitterly in the heat. “After five days of this I’ve had enough.” They weren’t talking about the trauma, bodies, or the wreckage, but censorship. “Any blue light special gets to roll right down there, but they see your press pass and it’s get outta here. I’ve had enough.” I fronted out the surly cops and ducked under the tape onto the path, walking onto a Pier on which we’d spent many lazy afternoons watching the river at sunset. Dust everywhere, police boats docked and waiting, a crane ominously dredging mud into a barge. I walked back past the camera operators onto the highway and walked up to an interview in process. Perfectly composed, a fire chief and his crew from some small town in upstate New York were politely declining to give details about what they’d seen at “ground zero.” The men’s faces were dust streaked, their eyes slightly dazed with the shock of a horror previously unimaginable to most Americans. They were here to help the best they could, now they’d done as much as anyone could. “It’s time for us to go home.” The chief was eloquent, almost rehearsed in his precision. It was like a Magnum press photo. But he was refusing to cooperate with the media’s obsessive emotionalism. I walked down the highway, joining construction workers, volunteers, police, and firemen in their hundreds at Chambers Street. No one paid me any attention; it was absurd. I joined several other watchers on the stairs by Stuyvesant High School, which was now the headquarters for the recovery crews. Just two or three blocks away, the huge jagged teeth of the towers’ beautiful tracery lurched out onto the highway above huge mounds of debris. The TV images of the shattered scene made sense as I placed them into what was left of a familiar Sunday afternoon geography of bike rides and walks by the river, picnics in the park lying on the grass and gazing up at the infinite solidity of the towers. Demolished. It was breathtaking. If “they” could do that, they could do anything. Across the street at tables military policeman were checking credentials of the milling volunteers and issuing the pink and orange tags that gave access to ground zero. Without warning, there was a sudden stampede running full pelt up from the disaster site, men and women in fatigues, burly construction workers, firemen in bunker gear. I ran a few yards then stopped. Other people milled around idly, ignoring the panic, smoking and talking in low voices. It was a mainly white, blue-collar scene. All these men wearing flags and carrying crowbars and flashlights. In their company, the intolerance and rage I associated with flags and construction sites was nowhere to be seen. They were dealing with a torn and twisted otherness that dwarfed machismo or bigotry. I talked to a moustachioed, pony-tailed construction worker who’d hitched a ride from the mid-west to “come and help out.” He was staying at the Y, he said, it was kind of rough. “Have you been down there?” he asked, pointing towards the wreckage. “You’re British, you weren’t in World War Two were you?” I replied in the negative. “It’s worse ’n that. I went down last night and you can’t imagine it. You don’t want to see it if you don’t have to.” Did I know any welcoming ladies? he asked. The Y was kind of tough. When I saw TV images of President Bush speaking to the recovery crews and steelworkers at “ground zero” a couple of days later, shouting through a bullhorn to chants of “USA, USA” I knew nothing had changed. New York’s suffering was subject to a second hijacking by the brokers of national unity. New York had never been America, and now its terrible human loss and its great humanity were redesignated in the name of the nation, of the coming war. The signs without a referent were being forcibly appropriated, locked into an impoverished patriotic framework, interpreted for “us” by a compliant media and an opportunistic regime eager to reign in civil liberties, to unloose its war machine and tighten its grip on the Muslim world. That day, drawn to the river again, I had watched F18 fighter jets flying patterns over Manhattan as Bush’s helicopters came in across the river. Otherwise empty of air traffic, “our” skies were being torn up by the military jets: it was somehow the worst sight yet, worse than the wreckage or the bands of disaster tourists on Canal Street, a sign of further violence yet to come. There was a carrier out there beyond New York harbor, there to protect us: the bruising, blustering city once open to all comers. That felt worst of all. In the intervening weeks, we have seen other, more unstable ways of interpreting the signs of September 11 and its aftermath. Many have circulated on the Internet, past the blockages and blockades placed on urban spaces and intellectual life. Karl-Heinz Stockhausen’s work was banished (at least temporarily) from the canon of avant-garde electronic music when he described the attack on las torres gemelas as akin to a work of art. If Jacques Derrida had described it as an act of deconstruction (turning technological modernity literally in on itself), or Jean Baudrillard had announced that the event was so thick with mediation it had not truly taken place, something similar would have happened to them (and still may). This is because, as Don DeLillo so eloquently put it in implicit reaction to the plaintive cry “Why do they hate us?”: “it is the power of American culture to penetrate every wall, home, life and mind”—whether via military action or cultural iconography. All these positions are correct, however grisly and annoying they may be. What GK Chesterton called the “flints and tiles” of nineteenth-century European urban existence were rent asunder like so many victims of high-altitude US bombing raids. As a First-World disaster, it became knowable as the first-ever US “ground zero” such precisely through the high premium immediately set on the lives of Manhattan residents and the rarefied discussion of how to commemorate the high-altitude towers. When, a few weeks later, an American Airlines plane crashed on take-off from Queens, that borough was left open to all comers. Manhattan was locked down, flown over by “friendly” bombers. In stark contrast to the open if desperate faces on the street of 11 September, people went about their business with heads bowed even lower than is customary. Contradictory deconstructions and valuations of Manhattan lives mean that September 11 will live in infamy and hyper-knowability. The vengeful United States government and population continue on their way. Local residents must ponder insurance claims, real-estate values, children’s terrors, and their own roles in something beyond their ken. New York had been forced beyond being the center of the financial world. It had become a military target, a place that was receiving as well as dispatching the slings and arrows of global fortune. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Deer, Patrick and Miller, Toby. "A Day That Will Live In … ?" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5.1 (2002). [your date of access] < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0203/adaythat.php>. Chicago Style Deer, Patrick and Miller, Toby, "A Day That Will Live In … ?" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5, no. 1 (2002), < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0203/adaythat.php> ([your date of access]). APA Style Deer, Patrick and Miller, Toby. (2002) A Day That Will Live In … ?. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5(1). < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0203/adaythat.php> ([your date of access]).

Introduction: Conceptualizing DisabilityThe two most prominent models for understanding disability are the medical model and the social model (“Disability”). The medical model locates disability in the person and emphasises the possibility of a cure, reinforcing the idea that disability is the fault of the disabled person, their body, their genes, and/or their upbringing. The social model, formulated as a response to the medical model, presents disability as a failure of the surrounding environment to accommodate differently abled bodies and minds. Closely linked to identity politics, the social model argues that disability is not a defect to be fixed but a source of human experience and identity, and that to disregard the needs of people with disability is to discriminate against them by being “ableist.”Both models have limitations. On the one hand, simply being a person with disability or having any other minority identity/-ies does not by itself lead to exclusion and discrimination (Nocella 18); an element of social valuation must be present that goes beyond a mere numbers game. On the other hand, merely focusing on the social aspect neglects “the realities of sickness, suffering, and pain” that many people with disability experience (Mollow 196) and that cannot be substantially alleviated by any degree of social change. The body is irreducible to discourse and representation (Siebers 749). Disability exists only at the confluence of differently abled minds and bodies and unaccommodating social and physical environs. How a body “fits” (my word) its environment is the focus of the “ecosomatic paradigm” (Cella 574-75); one example is how the drastically different environment of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006) reorients the coordinates of ability and impairment (Cella 582–84). I want to examine a novel that, conversely, features a change not in environment but in body.Alien LegsTim Farnsworth, the protagonist of Joshua Ferris’s second novel, The Unnamed (2010), is a high-powered New York lawyer who develops a condition that causes him to walk spontaneously without control over direction or duration. Tim suffers four periods of “walking,” during which his body could without warning stand up and walk at any time up to the point of exhaustion; each period grows increasingly longer with more frequent walks, until the fourth one ends in Tim’s death. As his wife, Jane, understands it, these forced excursions are “a hijacking of some obscure order of the body, the frightened soul inside the runaway train of mindless matter” (24). The direction is not random, for his legs follow roads and traffic lights. When Tim is exhausted, his legs abruptly stop, ceding control back to his conscious will, whence Tim usually calls Jane and then sleeps like a baby wherever he stops. She picks him up at all hours of the day and night.Contemporary critics note shades of Beckett in both the premise and title of the novel (“Young”; Adams), connections confirmed by Ferris (“Involuntary”); Ron Charles mentions the Poe story “The Man of the Crowd” (1845), but it seems only the compulsion to walk is similar. Ferris says he “was interested in writing about disease” (“Involuntary”), and disability is at the core of the novel; Tim more than once thinks bitterly to himself that the smug person without disability in front of him will one day fall ill and die, alluding to the universality of disability. His condition is detrimental to his work and life, and Stuart Murray explores how this reveals the ableist assumptions behind the idea of “productivity” in a post-industrial economy. In one humorous episode, Tim arrives unexpectedly (but volitionally) at a courtroom and has just finished requesting permission to join the proceedings when his legs take him out of the courtroom again; he barely has time to shout over his shoulder, “on second thought, Your Honor” (Ferris Unnamed 103). However, Murray does not discuss what is unique about Tim’s disability: it revolves around walking, the paradigmatic act of ability in popular culture, as connoted in the phrase “to stand up and walk.” This makes it difficult to understand Tim’s predicament solely in terms of either the medical or social model. He is able-bodied—in fact, we might say he is “over-able”—leading one doctor to label his condition “benign idiopathic perambulation” (41; my emphasis); yet the lack of agency in his walking precludes it from becoming a “pedestrian speech act” (de Certeau 98), walking that imbues space with semiotic value. It is difficult to imagine what changes society could make to neutralize Tim’s disability.The novel explores both avenues. At first, Tim adheres to the medical model protocol of seeking a diagnosis to facilitate treatment. He goes to every and any (pseudo)expert in search of “the One Guy” who can diagnose and, possibly, cure him (53), but none can; a paper in The New England Journal of Medicine documents psychiatrists and neurologists, finding nothing, kicking the can between them, “from the mind to body back to the mind” (101). Tim is driven to seek a diagnosis because, under the medical model, a diagnosis facilitates understanding, by others and by oneself. As the Farnsworths experience many times, it is surpassingly difficult to explain to others that one has a disease with no diagnosis or even name. Without a name, the disease may as well not exist, and even their daughter, Becka, doubts Tim at first. Only Jane is able to empathize with him based on her own experience of menopause, incomprehensible to men, gesturing towards the influence of sex on medical hermeneutics (Mollow 188–92). As the last hope of a diagnosis comes up empty, Tim shifts his mentality, attempting to understand his condition through an idiosyncratic idiom: experiencing “brain fog”, feeling “mentally unsticky”, and having “jangly” nerves, “hyperslogged” muscles, a “floaty” left side, and “bunched up” breathing—these, to him, are “the most precise descriptions” of his physical and mental state (126). “Name” something, “revealing nature’s mystery”, and one can “triumph over it”, he thinks at one point (212). But he is never able to eschew the drive toward understanding via naming, and his “deep metaphysical ache” (Burn 45) takes the form of a lament at misfortune, a genre traceable to the Book of Job.Short of crafting a life for Tim in which his family, friends, and work are meaningfully present yet detached enough in scheduling and physical space to accommodate his needs, the social model is insufficient to make sense of, let alone neutralize, his disability. Nonetheless, there are certain aspects of his experience that can be improved with social adjustments. Tim often ends his walks by sleeping wherever he stops, and he would benefit from sensitivity training for police officers and other authority figures; out of all the authority figures who he encounters, only one shows consideration for his safety, comfort, and mental well-being prior to addressing the illegality of his behaviour. And making the general public more aware of “modes of not knowing, unknowing, and failing to know”, in the words of Jack Halberstam (qtd. in McRuer and Johnson 152), would alleviate the plight not just of Tim but of all sufferers of undiagnosed diseases and people with (rare forms of) disability.After Tim leaves home and starts walking cross-country, he has to learn to deal with his disability without any support system. The solution he hits upon illustrates the ecosomatic paradigm: he buys camping gear and treats his walking as an endless hike. Neither “curing” his body nor asking accommodation of society, Tim’s tools mediate a fit between body and environs, and it more or less works. For Tim the involuntary nomad, “everywhere was a wilderness” (Ferris Unnamed 247).The Otherness of the BodyProblems arise when Tim tries to fight his legs. After despairing of a diagnosis, he internalises the struggle against the “somatic noncompliance” of his body (Mollow 197) and refers to it as “the other” (207). One through-line of the novel is a (failed) attempt to overcome cartesian duality (Reiffenrath). Tim divides his experiences along cartesian lines and actively tries to enhance while short-circuiting the body. He recites case law and tries to take up birdwatching to maintain his mind, but his body constantly stymies him, drawing his attention to its own needs. He keeps himself ill-clothed and -fed and spurns needed medical attention, only to find—on the brink of death—that his body has brought him to a hospital, and that he stops walking until he is cured and discharged. Tim’s early impression that his body has “a mind of its own” (44), a situation comparable to the Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886; Ludwigs 123–24), is borne out when it starts to silently speak to him, monosyllabically at first (“Food!” (207)), then progressing to simple sentences (“Leg is hurting” (213)) and sarcasm (“Deficiency of copper causes anemia, just so you know” (216)) before arriving at full-blown taunting:The other was the interrogator and he the muttering subject […].Q: Are you aware that you can be made to forget words, if certain neurons are suppressed from firing?A: Certain what?Q: And that by suppressing the firing of others, you can be made to forget what words mean entirely? Like the word Jane, for instance.A: Which?Q: And do you know that if I do this—[inaudible]A: Oof!Q: —you will flatline? And if I do this—[inaudible]A: Aaa, aaa…Q: —you will cease flatlining? (223–24; emphases and interpolations in original except for bracketed ellipsis)His Jobean lament turns literal, with his mind on God’s side and his body, “the other”, on the Devil’s in a battle for his eternal soul (Burn 46). Ironically, this “God talk” (Ferris Unnamed 248) finally gets Tim diagnosed with schizophrenia, and he receives medication that silences his body, if not stilling his legs. But when he is not medicated, his body can dominate his mind with multiple-page monologues.Not long after Tim’s mind and body reach a truce thanks to the camping gear and medication, Tim receives word on the west coast that Jane, in New York, has terminal cancer; he resolves to fight his end-of-walk “narcoleptic episodes” (12) to return to her—on foot. His body is not pleased, and it slowly falls apart as Tim fights it eastward cross-country. By the time he is hospitalized “ten miles as the crow flies from his final destination”, his ailments include “conjunctivitis”, “leg cramps”, “myositis”, “kidney failure”, “chafing and blisters”, “shingles”, “back pain”, “bug bites, ticks, fleas and lice”, “sun blisters”, “heatstroke and dehydration”, “rhabdomyolysis”, “excess [blood] potassium”, “splintering [leg] bones”, “burning tongue”, “[ballooning] heels”, “osteal complications”, “acute respiratory distress syndrome”, “excess fluid [in] his peritoneal cavity”, “brain swelling”, and a coma (278–80)—not including the fingers and toes lost to frostbite during an earlier period of walking. Nevertheless, he recovers and reunites with Jane, maintaining a holding pattern by returning to Jane’s hospital bedside after each walk.Jane recovers; the urgency having dissipated, Tim goes back on the road, confident that “he had proven long ago that there was no circumstance under which he could not walk if he put his mind to it” (303). A victory for mind over body? Not quite. The ending, Tim’s death scene, planned by Ferris from the beginning (Ferris “Tracking”), manages to grant victory to both mind and body without uniting them: his mind keeps working after physical death, but its last thought is of a “delicious […] cup of water” (310). Mind and body are two, but indivisible.Cartesian duality has relevance for other significant characters. The chain-smoking Detective Roy, assigned the case Tim is defending, later appears with oxygen tank in tow due to emphysema, yet he cannot quit smoking. What might have been a mere shortcut for characterization here carries physical consequences: the oxygen tank limits Roy’s movement and, one supposes, his investigative ability. After Jane recovers, Tim visits Frank Novovian, the security guard at his old law firm, and finds he has “gone fat [...] His retiring slouch behind the security post said there was no going back”; recognising Tim, Frank “lifted an inch off [his] chair, righting his jellied form, which immediately settled back into place” (297; my emphases). Frank’s physical state reflects the state of his career: settled. The mind-body antagonism is even more stark among Tim’s lawyer colleagues. Lev Wittig cannot become sexually aroused unless there is a “rare and extremely venomous snak[e]” in the room with no lights (145)—in direct contrast to his being a corporate tax specialist and the “dullest person you will ever meet” (141). And Mike Kronish famously once billed a twenty-seven-hour workday by crossing multiple time zones, but his apparent victory of mind over matter is undercut by his other notable achievement, being such a workaholic that his grown kids call him “Uncle Daddy” (148).Jane offers a more vexed case. While serving as Tim’s primary caretaker, she dreads the prospect of sacrificing the rest of her life for him. The pressures of the consciously maintaining her wedding vows directly affects her body. Besides succumbing to and recovering from alcoholism, she is twice tempted by the sexuality of other men; the second time, Tim calls her at the moment of truth to tell her the walking has returned, but instead of offering to pick him up, she says to him, “Come home” (195). As she later admits, asking him to do the impossible is a form of abandonment, and though causality is merely implied, Tim decides a day later not to return. Cartesian duality is similarly blurred in Jane’s fight against cancer. Prior to developing cancer, it is the pretence for Tim’s frequent office absences; she develops cancer; she fights it into remission not by relying on the clinical trial she undergoes, but because Tim’s impossible return inspires her; its remission removes the sense of urgency keeping Tim around, and he leaves; and he later learns that she dies from its recurrence. In multiple senses, Jane’s physical challenges are inextricable from her marriage commitment. Tim’s peripatetic condition affects both of them in homologous ways, gesturing towards the importance of disability studies for understanding the experience both of people with disability and of their caretakers.Becka copes with cartesian duality in the form of her obesity, and the way she does so sets an example for Tim. She gains weight during adolescence, around the time Tim starts walking uncontrollably, and despite her efforts she never loses weight. At first moody and depressed, she later channels her emotions into music, eventually going on tour. After one of her concerts, she tells Tim she has accepted her body, calling it “my one go-around,” freeing her from having to “hate yourself till the bitter end” (262) to instead enjoy her life and music. The idea of acceptance stays with Tim; whereas in previous episodes of walking he ignored the outside world—another example of reconceptualizing walking in the mode of disability—he pays attention to his surroundings on his journey back to New York, which is filled with descriptions of various geographical, meteorological, biological, and sociological phenomena, all while his body slowly breaks down. By the time he leaves home forever, he has acquired the habit of constant observation and the ability to enjoy things moment by moment. “Beauty, surprisingly, was everywhere” (279), he thinks. Invoking the figure of the flâneur, which Ferris had in mind when writing the novel (Ferris “Involuntary”), Peter Ferry argues that “becoming a 21st century incarnation of the flâneur gives Tim a greater sense of selfhood, a belief in the significance of his own existence within the increasingly chaotic and disorientating urban environment” (59). I concur, with two caveats: the chaotic and disorienting environment is not merely urban; and, contrary to Ferry’s claim that this regained selfhood is in contrast to “disintegrating” “conventional understandings of masculinity” (57), it instead incorporates Tim’s new identity as a person with disability.Conclusion: The Experience of DisabilityMore than specific insights into living with disability, the most important contribution of The Unnamed to disability studies is its exploration of the pure experience of disability. Ferris says, “I wanted to strip down this character to the very barest essentials and see what happens when sickness can’t go away and it can’t be answered by all [sic] of the medical technology that the country has at its disposal” (“Tracking”); by making Tim a wealthy lawyer with a caring family—removing common complicating socioeconomic factors of disability—and giving him an unprecedented impairment—removing all medical support and social services—Ferris depicts disability per se, illuminating the importance of disability studies for all people with(out) disability. After undergoing variegated experiences of pure disability, Tim “maintained a sound mind until the end. He was vigilant about periodic checkups and disciplined with his medication. He took care of himself as best he could, eating well however possible, sleeping when his body required it, […] and he persevered in this manner of living until his death” (Ferris Unnamed 306). This is an ideal relation to maintain between mind, body, and environment, irrespective of (dis)ability.ReferencesAdams, Tim. “The Unnamed by Joshua Ferris.” Fiction. Observer, 21 Feb. 2010: n. pag. 19 Sep. 2018 <https://www.theguardian.com/books/2010/feb/21/the-unnamed-joshua-ferris>.Burn, Stephen J. “Mapping the Syndrome Novel.” Diseases and Disorders in Contemporary Fiction: The Syndrome Syndrome. Eds. T.J. Lustig and James Peacock. New York: Routledge, 2013. 35-52.Cella, Matthew J.C. “The Ecosomatic Paradigm in Literature: Merging Disability Studies and Ecocriticism.” Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 20.3 (2013): 574–96.De Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. 1980. Trans. Steven Rendall. Berkeley: U of California P, 1984.Charles, Ron. “Book World Review of Joshua Ferris’s ‘The Unnamed.’” Books. Washington Post 20 Jan. 2010: n. pag. 19 Sep. 2018 <http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/01/19/AR2010011903945.html>.“Disability.” Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia 17 Sep. 2018. 19 Sep. 2018 <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disability>.Ferris, Joshua. “Involuntary Walking; the Joshua Ferris Interview.” ReadRollShow. Created by David Weich. Sheepscot Creative, 2010. Vimeo, 9 Mar. 2010. 18 Sep. 2018 <https://www.vimeo.com/10026925>. [My transcript.]———. “Tracking a Man’s Life, in Endless Footsteps.” Interview by Melissa Block. All Things Considered, NPR, 15 Feb. 2010. 18 Sep. 2018 <https://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?storyId=123650332>.———. The Unnamed: A Novel. New York: Little, Brown, 2010.Ferry, Peter. “Reading Manhattan, Reading Masculinity: Reintroducing the Flâneur with E.B. White’s Here Is New York and Joshua Ferris’ The Unnamed.” Culture, Society & Masculinities 3.1 (2011): 49–61.Ludwigs, Marina. “Walking as a Metaphor for Narrativity.” Studia Neophilologica 87.1 (Suppl. 1) (2015): 116–28.McCarthy, Cormac. The Road. New York: Vintage, 2006.McRuer, Robert, and Merri Lisa Johnson. “Proliferating Cripistemologies: A Virtual Roundtable.” Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies 8.2 (2014): 149–69.Mollow, Anna. “Criphystemologies: What Disability Theory Needs to Know about Hysteria.” Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies 8.2 (2014): 185–201.Murray, Stuart. “Reading Disability in a Time of Posthuman Work: Speed and Embodiment in Joshua Ferris’ The Unnamed and Michael Faber’s Under the Skin.” Disability Studies Quarterly 37.4 (2017). 20 May 2018 <http://dsq–sds.org/article/view/6104/4823/>.Nocella, Anthony J., II. “Defining Eco–Ability: Social Justice and the Intersectionality of Disability, Nonhuman Animals, and Ecology.” Earth, Animal, and Disability Liberation: The Rise of the Eco–Ability Movement. Eds. Anthony J. Nocella II, Judy K.C. Bentley, and Janet M. Duncan. New York: Peter Lang, 2012. 3–21.Poe, Edgar Allan. “The Man of the Crowd.” 1845. PoeStories.com. 18 Sep. 2018 <https://poestories.com/read/manofthecrowd>.Reiffenrath, Tanja. “Mind over Matter? Joshua Ferris’s The Unnamed as Counternarrative.” [sic] – a journal of literature, culture and literary translation 5.1 (2014). 20 May 2018 <https://www.sic–journal.org/ArticleView.aspx?aid=305/>.Siebers, Tobin. “Disability in Theory: From Social Constructionism to the New Realism of the Body.” American Literary History 13.4 (2001): 737–54.“The Young and the Restless.” Review of The Unnamed by Joshua Ferris. Books and Arts. Economist, 28 Jan. 2010: n. pag. 19 Sep. 2018 <https://www.economist.com/books-and-arts/2010/01/28/the-young-and-the-restless>.

As a mode of open access public self-expression, blogs are one form of the unfolding massification of culture (Lovink). Though widely varied in content and style, they are characterised by a reverse chronological diary-like format, often produced by a single author, and often intimately expressive of that author’s thoughts and experiences. The purpose of this paper is to explore the use of blogs as a space for the detailed and on-going expression of the day to day experiences of sufferers of serious illness. We might traditionally consider the experience of illness as absolutely private, but illness, along with the process of recovery, retains a social and cultural aspect (Kleinman et al). A growing body of literature has recognised that the Internet has become a significant space for the recovery work that accompanies the diagnosis of serious illness (Orgad; Pitts; Hardey). Empowerment and agency are often emphasised in this literature, particularly in terms of the increased access to information and support groups, but also in the dynamic performances of self enabled by different forms of online communication and Web production. I am particularly interested in the ongoing shifts in the accessibility of “private” personal experience enabled by blog culture. Although there are thousands of others like them, three “illness blogs” have recently caught my attention for their candidness, completeness and complexity, expressing in vivid depth and detail individual lives transformed by serious illness. The late US journalist and television producer Leroy Sievers maintained a high profile blog, My Cancer, and weekly podcast on the National Public Radio website until his death from metastasised colon cancer in August 2008. Sievers used his public profile and the infrastructure of the NPR website to both detail his personal experience and bring together a community of people also affected by cancer or moved by his thoughts and experiences. The blogger Brainhell came to my attention through blogsphere comments and tributes when he died in February 2008. Spanning more than four years, Brainhell’s witty and charming blog attracted a significant audience and numerous comments, particularly toward the end of his life as the signs of his deteriorating motor system as a result of Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS, or “Lou Gherig’s disease”) riddled his intimate posts. Another blog of interest to me here, called Humanities Researcher, incorporates academic Stephanie Trigg’s period of illness and recovery from breast cancer within a pre-existing and ongoing blog about the intersection between professional and personal life. As I had crossed paths with Trigg while at Melbourne University, I was always interested in her blog. But her diagnosis with breast cancer and subsequent accounts of tests, the pain and debilitation of treatment and recovery within her blog also offer valuable insight into the role of online technologies in affecting experiences of illness and for the process of recovery.The subject matter of illness blogs revolves around significant personal transformations as a result of serious illness or trauma: transformations of everyday life, of body and emotional states, relationships, physical appearance, and the loss or recovery of physical ability. It is not my intention in this brief analysis to overgeneralise on the basis of some relatively limited observations. However, many blogs written in response to illness stand out for what they reveal about the shifting location or locatability of self, experience and the events of ongoing illness and thus how we can conceptualise the inherent “privacy” of illness as personal experience. Self-expression here is encompassing of the possibilities through which illness can be experienced – not as representation of that experience, a performance of a disembodied self (though these notions have their merits) – but an expressive element of the substance of the illness as it is experienced over time, as it affects the bodies, thoughts, events and relationships of individuals moving toward a state of full recovery or untimely death. Locating Oneself OnlineMany authors currently examining the role of online spaces in the lives of sufferers of serious illness see online communication as providing a means for configuring experience as a meaningful and coherent story, and thus conferring, or we could say recovering, a sense of agency amidst a tumultuous and ongoing battle with serious illness (Orgad, Pitts). In her study of breast cancer discussion forums, message boards and websites, Orgad (4) notes their role in regaining “the fundamentals disturbed by cancer” (see also Bury). Well before the emergence of online spaces, the act or writing has been seen as “a crucial affirmation of living, a statement against fearfulness, invisibility and silence” (Orgad, 67; Lorde, 61). For many decades scientists have asserted that “brief structured writing sessions can significantly improve mental and physical health for some groups of people” (Singer and Singer 485). The Internet has provided an infrastructure for bringing personal experiences of illness into the public realm, enabling a new level of visibility. Much of the work on illness and the Internet focuses on the liberatory and empowering act of story telling and “disembodied” self-expression. Discussion forums and cancer websites enable the formation of patient led “discourse communities” (Wuthnow). Online spaces such as discussion forums help their participants gain a foothold within a world they share with other sufferers, building communities of practice (Wegner) around specific forms of illness. In this way, these forms of self-expression and communication enable the sufferer of serious illness to counter the modes by which they are made “subjects”, in the Foucauldian sense, of medical discourse. All illness narratives are defined and constructed socially, and are infused with relations of power (Sontag; Foucault, Birth of the Clinic). Forms of online communication have shifted productive practice from professions to patients. Blogs, like discussion forums, websites, email lists etc., have come to play a central role in this contemporary shift. When Lovink (6) describes blogs as a “technology of the self” he points to their role in “self-fashioning”. Blogs written about and in the context of personal illness are a perfect example of this inclination to speak the truth of oneself in the confessional mode of modern culture borne of the church, science and talkshow television. For Foucault (Technologies of the Self, 17), technologies of the self: Permit individuals to effect by their own means or with the help of others a certain number of operations on their own bodies and souls, thoughts, conduct and way of being, so as to transform themselves in order to attain a state of happiness, purity, wisdom, perfection, immortality. Likewise, as a central concept for understanding Internet identity, the notion of performance (eg, Turkle) highlights the creativity with which illness bloggers may present their role as cancer patient in online spaces, perhaps as an act of resistance to “subjectifying” medical discourses and practices. Many bloggers wrest semiotic power through regular discussion of the language of pathology and medical knowledge, treatment processes and drugs. In the early stages of her treatment, Trigg plays with the new vocabulary, searching for etiologies and making her own semantic connections: I’ve learnt two new words. “Spiculated” describes the characteristic shape of a carcinoma on an ultrasound or x-ray. …The other word is at the other end of the spectrum of linguistic beauty: “lumpectomy”. It took me quite a while to realise that this was not really any different from partial mastectomy; or local excision. It’s an example of the powerful semantic connotations of words to realise that these phrases name the same processes: a long cut, and then the extraction of the diseased tissue (Humanities Researcher, 14 Oct. 2006).Partly due to the rarity of his illness, Brainhell goes through weeks of waiting for a diagnosis, and posts prolifically in an attempt to test out self-diagnoses. Amidst many serious and humorous posts analysing test results and discussing possible diagnoses Brainhell reflects on his targeted use of the blog: I am a word person. I think in sentences. I often take complex technical problems at work and describe them to myself in words. A story helps me understand things better. This blog has become a tool for me to organize my own thoughts about the Mystery Condition. (Brainhell, 6 Jan. 2004)The emancipatory potential of blog writing, however, can be easily overstated. While it is valuable to note and celebrate the performative potential of online production, and its “transformative” role as a technology of the self, it is easy to fall back on an unproblematic distinction between the actual and the virtual, the experience of illness, and its representation in online spaces. Textual expression should always refer us to the extra-textual practices that encompass it without imposing an artificial hierarchy of online and offline, actual experience and representation. As with other forms of online communication and production, the blog culture that has emerged around forms of serious illness plays a significant role in transforming our concepts of the relationship between online and offline spaces. In his My Cancer blog, Sievers often refers to “Cancer World”. He notes, for example, the many “passing friends” he makes in Cancer World through the medical staff and other regular patients at the radiation clinic, and refers to the equipment that sustains his life as the accoutrements of this world. His blog posts revolved around an articulation of the intricacies of this “world” that is in some ways a means of making sense of that world, but is also expressive of it. Sievers tries to explain the notion of Cancer World as a transformation of status between insider & outsider: “once we cross over into Cancer World, we become strangers in a strange land. What to expect, what to hope for, what to fear – none of those are clear right now” (My Cancer, 30 June 2008). Part of his struggle with the illness is also with the expression of himself as encompassed by this new “world” of the effects and activities of cancer. In a similar way, in her Humanities Researcher blog Trigg describes in beautiful detail the processes, routines and relationships formed during radiation treatment. I see these accounts of the textures of cancer spaces as lying at the point of juncture between expression and experience, not as a disembodied, emancipatory realm free from the fetters of illness and the everyday “real” self, but always encompassed by, and encompassing them, and in this way shifting what might be understood to remain “private” in personal experience and self-expression. Blogs as Public Diary Axel Bruns (171), following Matthew Rothenberg, characterises blogs as an accessible technological extension of the personal home page, gaining popularity in the late 1990s because they provided more easy to use templates and web publishing tools than earlier webpage applications. Personalised self expression is a defining element. However, the temporal quality of the reverse chronological, timestamped entry is equally significant for Bruns (171). Taking a broader focus to Bruns, who is most interested in the potential democratisation of media in news related blogs, Lovink sees the experimentation with a “public diary” format as fundamental, signalling their “productive contradiction between public and private” (Lovink 6). A diary may be written for posterity but it is primarily a secretive mode of communication. While blogs may mirror the temporal form of a diary, their intimate focus on self-expression of experience, thoughts and feelings, they do so in a very different communicative context.Despite research suggesting that a majority of bloggers report that they post primarily “for themselves” (Lenhart and Fox) – meaning that they do not deliberately seek a broad audience or readership – the step of making experiences and thoughts so widely accessible cannot be overlooked in any account of blogging. The question of audience or readership, for example, concerns Trigg in her Humanities Researcher blog: The immediacy of a blog distinguishes it from a journal or diary. I wrote for myself, of course, but also for a readership I could measure and chart and hear from, sometimes within minutes of posting. Mostly I don’t know who my readers are, but the kindness and friendship that come to me through the blog gave me courage to write about the intimacies of my treatment; and to chart the emotional upheaval it produced. (Trigg)In their ability to produce a comprehensive expression of the events, experiences, thoughts and feelings of an individual, blogs differ to other forms of online communication such as discussion forums or email lists. Illness blogs are perhaps an extreme example, an open mode of self-expression often arising abruptly in reaction to a life transforming diagnosis and tracking the process of recovery or deterioration, usually ending with remission or death. Brainhell’s blog begins with MRI results, and a series of posts about medical examination and self-examination regarding his mystery condition: So the MRI shows there is something on my brain that is not supposed to be there. The doctor thinks it is not a tumor. That would be good news. …As long as you are alive and have someone to complain to, you ain’t bad off. I am alive and I am complaining about a mystery spot on my brain, and lazy limbs. (Brainhell, 24 Dec. 2003)Brainhell spent many weeks documenting his search for a diagnosis, and continued writing up to his final deterioration and death in 2008. His final posts convey his physical deterioration in truncated sentences, spelling errors and mangled words. In one post he expresses his inability to wake his caregiver and to communicate his distress and physical discomfort at having to pee: when he snorted on waking, i shrieked and he got me up. splayed uncomfortably in the wc as he put dry clothes on me, i was gifted with his words: “you choose this, not me. you want to make it hard, what can i do?” (Brainhell, 13 Jan. 2008). The temporal and continuous format of the blog traverses the visceral, corporeal transformations of body and thought over time. The diary format goes beyond a straightforward narrative form in being far more experiential and even experimental in its self-reflective expression of the events of daily life, thoughts, feelings and states of being. Its public format bears directly on its role in shaping the communicative context in which that expression takes place, and thus to an extent shapes the experience of the illness itself. Nowhere does the expressive substance of the blog so fully encompass the possibilities through which the illness could be experienced than in the author’s death. At this point the blog feels like it is more than a catalogue, dialogue or self-presentation of a struggle with illness. It may take on the form of a memorial (see for example Tom’s Road to Recovery) – a recovery of the self expressed in the daily physical demise, through data maintained in the memory of servers. Ultimately the blog stands as a complex trace of the life lived within its posts. Brainhell’s lengthy blog exemplifies this quite hauntingly. Revealing the Private in Public Blogs exemplify a further step in the transformation of notions of public and private brought about by information and screen technologies. McQuire (103) refers to contemporary screen and Internet culture as “a social setting in which personal identity is subject to new exigencies”. Reality television, such as Big Brother, has promoted “a new mode for the public viewing of private life” (McQuire 114) contributing to the normalisation of open access to personal, intimate revelations, actions and experiences. However, privacy is “an elusive concept” that relates as much to information and property as to self-expression and personal experience (McCullagh). That is, what we consider private to an individual is itself constituted by our variable categories of personal information, material or immaterial possessions, or what counts as an expression of personal experience. Some analysts of online storytelling in the context of illness recognise the unsustainability of the distinction between public and private, but nonetheless rely on the notion of a continuum upon which activities or events could be considered as experienced in a public or private space (Orgad, 129-133). One of the characteristics of a blog, unlike other forms of online communication such as chat, discussion forums and email, is its predominantly public and openly accessible form. Though many illness bloggers do not seem to seek anonymity or hold back in allowing massive access to their self-expression and personal experience, a tension always seems to be there in the background. Identification through the proper name simply implies potential broader effects of blog writing, a pairing of the personal expressions with the person who expresses them in broader daily interactions and relationships. As already “public” figures, Stephanie Trigg and Leroy Sievers choose to forego anonymity, while Brainhell adopted his alias from the beginning and guarded his anonymity carefully. Each of these bloggers, however, shows signs of grappling with the public character of their site, and the interaction between the blog and their everyday life and relationships. In his etiquette page, Brainhell seems unclear about his readership, noting that his blog is for “friends and soul-mates, and complete strangers too”, but that he has not shared it with his family or all of his friends. He goes on to say: You may not have been invited but you are still welcome here. I made it public so that anyone could read it. Total strangers are welcome. Invited friends are welcome. But of those invited friends, I ask you to ask me before you out me as the blog author, or share the blog with other people who already know me. (Brainhell, 18 Feb. 2004) After his death Ratty took steps to continue to maintain his anonymity, vetting many comments and deleting others to “honor BH’s wishes as he outline in ‘Ettiquett for This Blog”’ (Brainhell, 2 Feb. 2008). In Leroy Sievers’ blog, one post exploring the conflict raised by publicly “sharing” his experiences provoked an interesting discussion. He relays a comment sent to him by a woman named Cherie: I have stage four colorectal cancer with liver mets. This is a strange journey, one I am not entirely sure I can share with my loved ones. I am scared it might rob them of the hope I see in their eyes. The hope which I sometimes don’t believe in. (My Cancer, 26 July 2006) Sievers struggles with this question: “How do you balance the need to talk about what is happening to you with the tears of a close friend when you tell him or her the truth? There’s no simple answer.” The blog, in this sense, seems to offer a more legitimate space for the ongoing, detailed expression of these difficult and affective, and traditionally private experiences. In some posts the privacy of the body and bodily experiences is directly challenged or re-negotiated. Stephanie Trigg was concerned with the effect of the blog on her interactions with colleagues. But another interesting dilemma presents itself to her when she is describing the physical effects of cancer, surgery and radiation treatment on her breast, and forces herself to hold back from comparing with the healthy breast: “it's not a medical breast, so I can't write about it here” (Humanities Researcher, 10 Jan. 2007). One prostate cancer blogger, identified as rdavisjr, seems to have no difficulties expressing the details of a physical intrusion on his “privacy” in the far more open forum of his blog: The pull-around ceiling mounted screen was missing (laundry?), so Kelly was called into the room and told to make a screen with a bed sheet. So here I am with one woman sticking her finger up my ass, while another woman is standing in front of the door holding an outstretched bed sheet under her chin (guess she wanted a view!)The screen was necessary to ensure my privacy in the event someone accidentally came into the room, something they said was a common thing. Well, Kelly peering over that sheet was hardly one of my more private moments in life! (Prostate Cancer Journal, 23 Feb. 2001). ConclusionWhatever emancipatory benefits may be found in expressing the most intimate of experiences and events of a serious illness online, it is the creative act of the blog as self-expression here, in its visceral, comprehensive, continuous timestamped format that dismantles the sense of privacy in the name of recovery. The blog is not the public face of private personal experience, but expressive of the life encompassed by that illness, and encompassing its author’s ongoing personal transformation. The blogs discussed here are not alone in demonstrating these practices. The blog format itself may soon evolve or disappear. Nonetheless, the massification enabled by Internet technologies and applications will continue to transform the ways in which personal experience may be considered private. ReferencesBruns, Axel. Gatewatching: Collaborative Online News Production. New York: Peter Lang, 2005.Bury, Michael. “Chronic Illness as Biographical Disruption.” Sociology of Health and Illness, 4.2 (1982): 167-182.Foucault, Michel. Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception. Trans. A.M. Sheridan. London: Tavistock, 1973.———. “Technologies of the Self” Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault. Ed. Luther H. Martin, Huck Gutman, Patrick M. Hutton, 1988: 16-49. Hardey, Michael. “‘The Story of My Illness’: Personal Accounts of Illness on the Internet.” Health 6.1 (2002): 31-46Kleinman, Arthur, Veena Das, and Margaret Lock, eds. Social Suffering. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997. Lenhart, Amanda, and Susannah Fox. Bloggers: A Portrait of the Internet’s New Storytellers. Washington: PEW Internet and American Life Project, 2006. Lorde, Audre. The Cancer Journals. San Francisco: Spinsters Ink, 1980.Lovink, Geert. Zero Comments: Blogging and Critical Internet Culture. London: Routledge, 2008. McCullagh, Karen. “Blogging: Self Presentation and Privacy.” Information and Communications Technology Law 17.1 (2008): 3-23. McQuire, Scott. “From Glass Architecture to Big Brother: Scenes from a Cultural History of Transparency.” Cultural Studies Review 9.1 (2003): 103-123.Orgad, Shani. Storytelling Online: Talking Breast Cancer on the Internet. New York: Peter Lang, 2005. Pitts, Victoria. “Illness and Internet Empowerment: Writing and Reading Breast Cancer in Cyberspace.” Health 8.1 (2004): 33-59.Rothenberg, Matthew. “Weblogs, Metadata, and the Semantic Web”, paper presented at the Association of Internet Researchers conference, Toronto, 16 Oct. 2003. ‹http://aoir.org/members/papers42/rothenberg_aoir.pdf›.Singer, Jessica, and George H.S. Singer. “Writing as Physical and Emotional Healing: Findings from Clinical Research.” Handbook of Research on Writing: History, Society, School, Individual, Text. Ed. Charles Bazerman. New York: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2008: 485-498. Sontag, Susan. Illness as Metaphor; And, AIDS and Its Metaphors. London: Penguin, 1991. Trigg, Stephanie. “Life Lessons.” Sunday Age, 10 June 2007. Turkle, Sherry. Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995. Wenger, Etienne. Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning and Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Wuthnow, Robert. Communities of Discourse: Ideology and Social Structure in the Reformation, the Enlightenment, and European Socialism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989.BlogsBrainhell. ‹http://brainhell.blogspot.com/›. rdavisjr. Prostate Cancer Journal. ‹http://pcjournal-rrd.blogspot.com/›. Sievers, Leroy. My Cancer. ‹http://www.npr.org/blogs/mycancer/›. Tom’s Road to Recovery. ‹http://tomsrecovery.blog.com/›. Trigg, Stephanie. Humanities Researcher. ‹http://stephanietrigg.blogspot.com/›.

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.