Academic literature on the topic 'Great Britain. (2007 June 21 and 26)'

To date, discrete event stochastic simulations of large scale biological reaction systems are extremely compute-intensive and time-consuming. Besides, it has been widely accepted that spatial factor plays a critical role in the dynamics of most biological reaction systems. The NSM (the Next Sub-Volume Method), a spatial variation of the Gillespie’s stochastic simulation algorithm (SSA), has been proposed for spatially stochastic simulation of those systems. While being able to explore high degree of parallelism in systems, NSM is inherently sequential, which still suffers from the problem of low simulation speed. Fine-grained parallel execution is an elegant way to speed up sequential simulations. Thus, based on the discrete event simulation framework JAMES II, we design and implement a PDES (Parallel Discrete Event Simulation) TW (time warp) simulator to enable the fine-grained parallel execution of spatial stochastic simulations of biological reaction systems using the ANSM (the Abstract NSM), a parallel variation of the NSM. The simulation results of classical Lotka-Volterra biological reaction system show that our time warp simulator obtains remarkable parallel speed-up against sequential execution of the NSM.I.IntroductionThe goal of Systems biology is to obtain system-level investigations of the structure and behavior of biological reaction systems by integrating biology with system theory, mathematics and computer science [1][3], since the isolated knowledge of parts can not explain the dynamics of a whole system. As the complement of “wet-lab” experiments, stochastic simulation, being called the “dry-computational” experiment, plays a more and more important role in computing systems biology [2]. Among many methods explored in systems biology, discrete event stochastic simulation is of greatly importance [4][5][6], since a great number of researches have present that stochasticity or “noise” have a crucial effect on the dynamics of small population biological reaction systems [4][7]. Furthermore, recent research shows that the stochasticity is not only important in biological reaction systems with small population but also in some moderate/large population systems [7].To date, Gillespie’s SSA [8] is widely considered to be the most accurate way to capture the dynamics of biological reaction systems instead of traditional mathematical method [5][9]. However, SSA-based stochastic simulation is confronted with two main challenges: Firstly, this type of simulation is extremely time-consuming, since when the types of species and the number of reactions in the biological system are large, SSA requires a huge amount of steps to sample these reactions; Secondly, the assumption that the systems are spatially homogeneous or well-stirred is hardly met in most real biological systems and spatial factors play a key role in the behaviors of most real biological systems [19][20][21][22][23][24]. The next sub-volume method (NSM) [18], presents us an elegant way to access the special problem via domain partition. To our disappointment, sequential stochastic simulation with the NSM is still very time-consuming, and additionally introduced diffusion among neighbor sub-volumes makes things worse. Whereas, the NSM explores a very high degree of parallelism among sub-volumes, and parallelization has been widely accepted as the most meaningful way to tackle the performance bottleneck of sequential simulations [26][27]. Thus, adapting parallel discrete event simulation (PDES) techniques to discrete event stochastic simulation would be particularly promising. Although there are a few attempts have been conducted [29][30][31], research in this filed is still in its infancy and many issues are in need of further discussion. The next section of the paper presents the background and related work in this domain. In section III, we give the details of design and implementation of model interfaces of LP paradigm and the time warp simulator based on the discrete event simulation framework JAMES II; the benchmark model and experiment results are shown in Section IV; in the last section, we conclude the paper with some future work.II. Background and Related WorkA. Parallel Discrete Event Simulation (PDES)The notion Logical Process (LP) is introduced to PDES as the abstract of the physical process [26], where a system consisting of many physical processes is usually modeled by a set of LP. LP is regarded as the smallest unit that can be executed in PDES and each LP holds a sub-partition of the whole system’s state variables as its private ones. When a LP processes an event, it can only modify the state variables of its own. If one LP needs to modify one of its neighbors’ state variables, it has to schedule an event to the target neighbor. That is to say event message exchanging is the only way that LPs interact with each other. Because of the data dependences or interactions among LPs, synchronization protocols have to be introduced to PDES to guarantee the so-called local causality constraint (LCC) [26]. By now, there are a larger number of synchronization algorithms have been proposed, e.g. the null-message [26], the time warp (TW) [32], breath time warp (BTW) [33] and etc. According to whether can events of LPs be processed optimistically, they are generally divided into two types: conservative algorithms and optimistic algorithms. However, Dematté and Mazza have theoretically pointed out the disadvantages of pure conservative parallel simulation for biochemical reaction systems [31]. B. NSM and ANSM The NSM is a spatial variation of Gillespie’ SSA, which integrates the direct method (DM) [8] with the next reaction method (NRM) [25]. The NSM presents us a pretty good way to tackle the aspect of space in biological systems by partitioning a spatially inhomogeneous system into many much more smaller “homogeneous” ones, which can be simulated by SSA separately. However, the NSM is inherently combined with the sequential semantics, and all sub-volumes share one common data structure for events or messages. Thus, directly parallelization of the NSM may be confronted with the so-called boundary problem and high costs of synchronously accessing the common data structure [29]. In order to obtain higher efficiency of parallel simulation, parallelization of NSM has to firstly free the NSM from the sequential semantics and secondly partition the shared data structure into many “parallel” ones. One of these is the abstract next sub-volume method (ANSM) [30]. In the ANSM, each sub-volume is modeled by a logical process (LP) based on the LP paradigm of PDES, where each LP held its own event queue and state variables (see Fig. 1). In addition, the so-called retraction mechanism was introduced in the ANSM too (see algorithm 1). Besides, based on the ANSM, Wang etc. [30] have experimentally tested the performance of several PDES algorithms in the platform called YH-SUPE [27]. However, their platform is designed for general simulation applications, thus it would sacrifice some performance for being not able to take into account the characteristics of biological reaction systems. Using the similar ideas of the ANSM, Dematté and Mazza have designed and realized an optimistic simulator. However, they processed events in time-stepped manner, which would lose a specific degree of precisions compared with the discrete event manner, and it is very hard to transfer a time-stepped simulation to a discrete event one. In addition, Jeschke etc.[29] have designed and implemented a dynamic time-window simulator to execution the NSM in parallel on the grid computing environment, however, they paid main attention on the analysis of communication costs and determining a better size of the time-window.Fig. 1: the variations from SSA to NSM and from NSM to ANSMC. JAMES II JAMES II is an open source discrete event simulation experiment framework developed by the University of Rostock in Germany. It focuses on high flexibility and scalability [11][13]. Based on the plug-in scheme [12], each function of JAMES II is defined as a specific plug-in type, and all plug-in types and plug-ins are declared in XML-files [13]. Combined with the factory method pattern JAMES II innovatively split up the model and simulator, which makes JAMES II is very flexible to add and reuse both of models and simulators. In addition, JAMES II supports various types of modelling formalisms, e.g. cellular automata, discrete event system specification (DEVS), SpacePi, StochasticPi and etc.[14]. Besides, a well-defined simulator selection mechanism is designed and developed in JAMES II, which can not only automatically choose the proper simulators according to the modeling formalism but also pick out a specific simulator from a serious of simulators supporting the same modeling formalism according to the user settings [15].III. The Model Interface and SimulatorAs we have mentioned in section II (part C), model and simulator are split up into two separate parts. Thus, in this section, we introduce the designation and implementation of model interface of LP paradigm and more importantly the time warp simulator.A. The Mod Interface of LP ParadigmJAMES II provides abstract model interfaces for different modeling formalism, based on which Wang etc. have designed and implemented model interface of LP paradigm[16]. However, this interface is not scalable well for parallel and distributed simulation of larger scale systems. In our implementation, we accommodate the interface to the situation of parallel and distributed situations. Firstly, the neighbor LP’s reference is replaced by its name in LP’s neighbor queue, because it is improper even dangerous that a local LP hold the references of other LPs in remote memory space. In addition, (pseudo-)random number plays a crucial role to obtain valid and meaningful results in stochastic simulations. However, it is still a very challenge work to find a good random number generator (RNG) [34]. Thus, in order to focus on our problems, we introduce one of the uniform RNGs of JAMES II to this model interface, where each LP holds a private RNG so that random number streams of different LPs can be independent stochastically. B. The Time Warp SimulatorBased on the simulator interface provided by JAMES II, we design and implement the time warp simulator, which contains the (master-)simulator, (LP-)simulator. The simulator works strictly as master/worker(s) paradigm for fine-grained parallel and distributed stochastic simulations. Communication costs are crucial to the performance of a fine-grained parallel and distributed simulation. Based on the Java remote method invocation (RMI) mechanism, P2P (peer-to-peer) communication is implemented among all (master-and LP-)simulators, where a simulator holds all the proxies of targeted ones that work on remote workers. One of the advantages of this communication approach is that PDES codes can be transferred to various hardwire environment, such as Clusters, Grids and distributed computing environment, with only a little modification; The other is that RMI mechanism is easy to realized and independent to any other non-Java libraries. Since the straggler event problem, states have to be saved to rollback events that are pre-processed optimistically. Each time being modified, the state is cloned to a queue by Java clone mechanism. Problem of this copy state saving approach is that it would cause loads of memory space. However, the problem can be made up by a condign GVT calculating mechanism. GVT reduction scheme also has a significant impact on the performance of parallel simulators, since it marks the highest time boundary of events that can be committed so that memories of fossils (processed events and states) less than GVT can be reallocated. GVT calculating is a very knotty for the notorious simultaneous reporting problem and transient messages problem. According to our problem, another GVT algorithm, called Twice Notification (TN-GVT) (see algorithm 2), is contributed to this already rich repository instead of implementing one of GVT algorithms in reference [26] and [28].This algorithm looks like the synchronous algorithm described in reference [26] (pp. 114), however, they are essentially different from each other. This algorithm has never stopped the simulators from processing events when GVT reduction, while algorithm in reference [26] blocks all simulators for GVT calculating. As for the transient message problem, it can be neglect in our implementation, because RMI based remote communication approach is synchronized, that means a simulator will not go on its processing until the remote the massage get to its destination. And because of this, the high-costs message acknowledgement, prevalent over many classical asynchronous GVT algorithms, is not needed anymore too, which should be constructive to the whole performance of the time warp simulator.IV. Benchmark Model and Experiment ResultsA. The Lotka-Volterra Predator-prey SystemIn our experiment, the spatial version of Lotka-Volterra predator-prey system is introduced as the benchmark model (see Fig. 2). We choose the system for two considerations: 1) this system is a classical experimental model that has been used in many related researches [8][30][31], so it is credible and the simulation results are comparable; 2) it is simple but helpful enough to test the issues we are interested in. The space of predator-prey System is partitioned into a2D NXNgrid, whereNdenotes the edge size of the grid. Initially the population of the Grass, Preys and Predators are set to 1000 in each single sub-volume (LP). In Fig. 2,r1,r2,r3stand for the reaction constants of the reaction 1, 2 and 3 respectively. We usedGrass,dPreyanddPredatorto stand for the diffusion rate of Grass, Prey and Predator separately. Being similar to reference [8], we also take the assumption that the population of the grass remains stable, and thusdGrassis set to zero.R1:Grass + Prey ->2Prey(1)R2:Predator +Prey -> 2Predator(2)R3:Predator -> NULL(3)r1=0.01; r2=0.01; r3=10(4)dGrass=0.0;dPrey=2.5;dPredato=5.0(5)Fig. 2: predator-prey systemB. Experiment ResultsThe simulation runs have been executed on a Linux Cluster with 40 computing nodes. Each computing node is equipped with two 64bit 2.53 GHz Intel Xeon QuadCore Processors with 24GB RAM, and nodes are interconnected with Gigabit Ethernet connection. The operating system is Kylin Server 3.5, with kernel 2.6.18. Experiments have been conducted on the benchmark model of different size of mode to investigate the execution time and speedup of the time warp simulator. As shown in Fig. 3, the execution time of simulation on single processor with 8 cores is compared. The result shows that it will take more wall clock time to simulate much larger scale systems for the same simulation time. This testifies the fact that larger scale systems will leads to more events in the same time interval. More importantly, the blue line shows that the sequential simulation performance declines very fast when the mode scale becomes large. The bottleneck of sequential simulator is due to the costs of accessing a long event queue to choose the next events. Besides, from the comparison between group 1 and group 2 in this experiment, we could also conclude that high diffusion rate increased the simulation time greatly both in sequential and parallel simulations. This is because LP paradigm has to split diffusion into two processes (diffusion (in) and diffusion (out) event) for two interactive LPs involved in diffusion and high diffusion rate will lead to high proportional of diffusion to reaction. In the second step shown in Fig. 4, the relationship between the speedups from time warp of two different model sizes and the number of work cores involved are demonstrated. The speedup is calculated against the sequential execution of the spatial reaction-diffusion systems model with the same model size and parameters using NSM.Fig. 4 shows the comparison of speedup of time warp on a64X64grid and a100X100grid. In the case of a64X64grid, under the condition that only one node is used, the lowest speedup (a little bigger than 1) is achieved when two cores involved, and the highest speedup (about 6) is achieved when 8 cores involved. The influence of the number of cores used in parallel simulation is investigated. In most cases, large number of cores could bring in considerable improvements in the performance of parallel simulation. Also, compared with the two results in Fig. 4, the simulation of larger model achieves better speedup. Combined with time tests (Fig. 3), we find that sequential simulator’s performance declines sharply when the model scale becomes very large, which makes the time warp simulator get better speed-up correspondingly.Fig. 3: Execution time (wall clock time) of Seq. and time warp with respect to different model sizes (N=32, 64, 100, and 128) and model parameters based on single computing node with 8 cores. Results of the test are grouped by the diffusion rates (Group 1: Sequential 1 and Time Warp 1. dPrey=2.5, dPredator=5.0; Group 2: dPrey=0.25, dPredator=0.5, Sequential 2 and Time Warp 2).Fig. 4: Speedup of time warp with respect to the number of work cores and the model size (N=64 and 100). Work cores are chose from one computing node. Diffusion rates are dPrey=2.5, dPredator=5.0 and dGrass=0.0.V. Conclusion and Future WorkIn this paper, a time warp simulator based on the discrete event simulation framework JAMES II is designed and implemented for fine-grained parallel and distributed discrete event spatial stochastic simulation of biological reaction systems. Several challenges have been overcome, such as state saving, roll back and especially GVT reduction in parallel execution of simulations. The Lotka-Volterra Predator-Prey system is chosen as the benchmark model to test the performance of our time warp simulator and the best experiment results show that it can obtain about 6 times of speed-up against the sequential simulation. The domain this paper concerns with is in the infancy, many interesting issues are worthy of further investigated, e.g. there are many excellent PDES optimistic synchronization algorithms (e.g. the BTW) as well. Next step, we would like to fill some of them into JAMES II. In addition, Gillespie approximation methods (tau-leap[10] etc.) sacrifice some degree of precision for higher simulation speed, but still could not address the aspect of space of biological reaction systems. The combination of spatial element and approximation methods would be very interesting and promising; however, the parallel execution of tau-leap methods should have to overcome many obstacles on the road ahead.AcknowledgmentThis work is supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSF) Grant (No.60773019) and the Ph.D. Programs Foundation of Ministry of Education of China (No. 200899980004). The authors would like to show their great gratitude to Dr. Jan Himmelspach and Dr. Roland Ewald at the University of Rostock, Germany for their invaluable advice and kindly help with JAMES II.ReferencesH. Kitano, "Computational systems biology." Nature, vol. 420, no. 6912, pp. 206-210, November 2002.H. Kitano, "Systems biology: a brief overview." 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Introduction: Our current obsession with the lives of others “Biography—that is to say, our creative and non-fictional output devoted to recording and interpreting real lives—has enjoyed an extraordinary renaissance in recent years,” writes Nigel Hamilton in Biography: A Brief History (1). Ian Donaldson agrees that biography is back in fashion: “Once neglected within the academy and relegated to the dustier recesses of public bookstores, biography has made a notable return over recent years, emerging, somewhat surprisingly, as a new cultural phenomenon, and a new academic adventure” (23). For over a decade now, commentators having been making similar observations about our obsession with the intimacies of individual people’s lives. In a lecture in 1994, Justin Kaplan asserted the West was “a culture of biography” (qtd. in Salwak 1) and more recent research findings by John Feather and Hazel Woodbridge affirm that “the undiminished human curiosity about other peoples lives is clearly reflected in the popularity of autobiographies and biographies” (218). At least in relation to television, this assertion seems valid. In Australia, as in the USA and the UK, reality and other biographically based television shows have taken over from drama in both the numbers of shows produced and the viewers these shows attract, and these forms are also popular in Canada (see, for instance, Morreale on The Osbournes). In 2007, the program Biography celebrated its twentieth anniversary season to become one of the longest running documentary series on American television; so successful that in 1999 it was spun off into its own eponymous channel (Rak; Dempsey). Premiered in May 1996, Australian Story—which aims to utilise a “personal approach” to biographical storytelling—has won a significant viewership, critical acclaim and professional recognition (ABC). It can also be posited that the real home movies viewers submit to such programs as Australia’s Favourite Home Videos, and “chat” or “confessional” television are further reflections of a general mania for biographical detail (see Douglas), no matter how fragmented, sensationalized, or even inane and cruel. A recent example of the latter, the USA-produced The Moment of Truth, has contestants answering personal questions under polygraph examination and then again in front of an audience including close relatives and friends—the more “truthful” their answers (and often, the more humiliated and/or distressed contestants are willing to be), the more money they can win. Away from television, but offering further evidence of this interest are the growing readerships for personally oriented weblogs and networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook (Grossman), individual profiles and interviews in periodical publications, and the recently widely revived newspaper obituary column (Starck). Adult and community education organisations run short courses on researching and writing auto/biographical forms and, across Western countries, the family history/genealogy sections of many local, state, and national libraries have been upgraded to meet the increasing demand for these services. Academically, journals and e-mail discussion lists have been established on the topics of biography and autobiography, and North American, British, and Australian universities offer undergraduate and postgraduate courses in life writing. The commonly aired wisdom is that published life writing in its many text-based forms (biography, autobiography, memoir, diaries, and collections of personal letters) is enjoying unprecedented popularity. It is our purpose to examine this proposition. Methodological problems There are a number of problems involved in investigating genre popularity, growth, and decline in publishing. Firstly, it is not easy to gain access to detailed statistics, which are usually only available within the industry. Secondly, it is difficult to ascertain how publishing statistics are gathered and what they report (Eliot). There is the question of whether bestselling booklists reflect actual book sales or are manipulated marketing tools (Miller), although the move from surveys of booksellers to electronic reporting at point of sale in new publishing lists such as BookScan will hopefully obviate this problem. Thirdly, some publishing lists categorise by subject and form, some by subject only, and some do not categorise at all. This means that in any analysis of these statistics, a decision has to be made whether to use the publishing list’s system or impose a different mode. If the publishing list is taken at face value, the question arises of whether to use categorisation by form or by subject. Fourthly, there is the bedeviling issue of terminology. Traditionally, there reigned a simple dualism in the terminology applied to forms of telling the true story of an actual life: biography and autobiography. Publishing lists that categorise their books, such as BookScan, have retained it. But with postmodern recognition of the presence of the biographer in a biography and of the presence of other subjects in an autobiography, the dichotomy proves false. There is the further problem of how to categorise memoirs, diaries, and letters. In the academic arena, the term “life writing” has emerged to describe the field as a whole. Within the genre of life writing, there are, however, still recognised sub-genres. Academic definitions vary, but generally a biography is understood to be a scholarly study of a subject who is not the writer; an autobiography is the story of a entire life written by its subject; while a memoir is a segment or particular focus of that life told, again, by its own subject. These terms are, however, often used interchangeably even by significant institutions such the USA Library of Congress, which utilises the term “biography” for all. Different commentators also use differing definitions. Hamilton uses the term “biography” to include all forms of life writing. Donaldson discusses how the term has been co-opted to include biographies of place such as Peter Ackroyd’s London: The Biography (2000) and of things such as Lizzie Collingham’s Curry: A Biography (2005). This reflects, of course, a writing/publishing world in which non-fiction stories of places, creatures, and even foodstuffs are called biographies, presumably in the belief that this will make them more saleable. The situation is further complicated by the emergence of hybrid publishing forms such as, for instance, the “memoir-with-recipes” or “food memoir” (Brien, Rutherford and Williamson). Are such books to be classified as autobiography or put in the “cookery/food & drink” category? We mention in passing the further confusion caused by novels with a subtitle of The Biography such as Virginia Woolf’s Orlando. The fifth methodological problem that needs to be mentioned is the increasing globalisation of the publishing industry, which raises questions about the validity of the majority of studies available (including those cited herein) which are nationally based. Whether book sales reflect what is actually read (and by whom), raises of course another set of questions altogether. Methodology In our exploration, we were fundamentally concerned with two questions. Is life writing as popular as claimed? And, if it is, is this a new phenomenon? To answer these questions, we examined a range of available sources. We began with the non-fiction bestseller lists in Publishers Weekly (a respected American trade magazine aimed at publishers, librarians, booksellers, and literary agents that claims to be international in scope) from their inception in 1912 to the present time. We hoped that this data could provide a longitudinal perspective. The term bestseller was coined by Publishers Weekly when it began publishing its lists in 1912; although the first list of popular American books actually appeared in The Bookman (New York) in 1895, based itself on lists appearing in London’s The Bookman since 1891 (Bassett and Walter 206). The Publishers Weekly lists are the best source of longitudinal information as the currently widely cited New York Times listings did not appear till 1942, with the Wall Street Journal a late entry into the field in 1994. We then examined a number of sources of more recent statistics. We looked at the bestseller lists from the USA-based Amazon.com online bookseller; recent research on bestsellers in Britain; and lists from Nielsen BookScan Australia, which claims to tally some 85% or more of books sold in Australia, wherever they are published. In addition to the reservations expressed above, caveats must be aired in relation to these sources. While Publishers Weekly claims to be an international publication, it largely reflects the North American publishing scene and especially that of the USA. Although available internationally, Amazon.com also has its own national sites—such as Amazon.co.uk—not considered here. It also caters to a “specific computer-literate, credit-able clientele” (Gutjahr: 219) and has an unashamedly commercial focus, within which all the information generated must be considered. In our analysis of the material studied, we will use “life writing” as a genre term. When it comes to analysis of the lists, we have broken down the genre of life writing into biography and autobiography, incorporating memoir, letters, and diaries under autobiography. This is consistent with the use of the terminology in BookScan. Although we have broken down the genre in this way, it is the overall picture with regard to life writing that is our concern. It is beyond the scope of this paper to offer a detailed analysis of whether, within life writing, further distinctions should be drawn. Publishers Weekly: 1912 to 2006 1912 saw the first list of the 10 bestselling non-fiction titles in Publishers Weekly. It featured two life writing texts, being headed by an autobiography, The Promised Land by Russian Jewish immigrant Mary Antin, and concluding with Albert Bigelow Paine’s six-volume biography, Mark Twain. The Publishers Weekly lists do not categorise non-fiction titles by either form or subject, so the classifications below are our own with memoir classified as autobiography. In a decade-by-decade tally of these listings, there were 3 biographies and 20 autobiographies in the lists between 1912 and 1919; 24 biographies and 21 autobiographies in the 1920s; 13 biographies and 40 autobiographies in the 1930s; 8 biographies and 46 biographies in the 1940s; 4 biographies and 14 autobiographies in the 1950s; 11 biographies and 13 autobiographies in the 1960s; 6 biographies and 11 autobiographies in the 1970s; 3 biographies and 19 autobiographies in the 1980s; 5 biographies and 17 autobiographies in the 1990s; and 2 biographies and 7 autobiographies from 2000 up until the end of 2006. See Appendix 1 for the relevant titles and authors. Breaking down the most recent figures for 1990–2006, we find a not radically different range of figures and trends across years in the contemporary environment. The validity of looking only at the top ten books sold in any year is, of course, questionable, as are all the issues regarding sources discussed above. But one thing is certain in terms of our inquiry. There is no upwards curve obvious here. If anything, the decade break-down suggests that sales are trending downwards. This is in keeping with the findings of Michael Korda, in his history of twentieth-century bestsellers. He suggests a consistent longitudinal picture across all genres: In every decade, from 1900 to the end of the twentieth century, people have been reliably attracted to the same kind of books […] Certain kinds of popular fiction always do well, as do diet books […] self-help books, celebrity memoirs, sensationalist scientific or religious speculation, stories about pets, medical advice (particularly on the subjects of sex, longevity, and child rearing), folksy wisdom and/or humour, and the American Civil War (xvii). Amazon.com since 2000 The USA-based Amazon.com online bookselling site provides listings of its own top 50 bestsellers since 2000, although only the top 14 bestsellers are recorded for 2001. As fiction and non-fiction are not separated out on these lists and no genre categories are specified, we have again made our own decisions about what books fall into the category of life writing. Generally, we erred on the side of inclusion. (See Appendix 2.) However, when it came to books dealing with political events, we excluded books dealing with specific aspects of political practice/policy. This meant excluding books on, for instance, George Bush’s so-called ‘war on terror,’ of which there were a number of bestsellers listed. In summary, these listings reveal that of the top 364 books sold by Amazon from 2000 to 2007, 46 (or some 12.6%) were, according to our judgment, either biographical or autobiographical texts. This is not far from the 10% of the 1912 Publishers Weekly listing, although, as above, the proportion of bestsellers that can be classified as life writing varied dramatically from year to year, with no discernible pattern of peaks and troughs. This proportion tallied to 4% auto/biographies in 2000, 14% in 2001, 10% in 2002, 18% in 2003 and 2004, 4% in 2005, 14% in 2006 and 20% in 2007. This could suggest a rising trend, although it does not offer any consistent trend data to suggest sales figures may either continue to grow, or fall again, in 2008 or afterwards. Looking at the particular texts in these lists (see Appendix 2) also suggests that there is no general trend in the popularity of life writing in relation to other genres. For instance, in these listings in Amazon.com, life writing texts only rarely figure in the top 10 books sold in any year. So rarely indeed, that from 2001 there were only five in this category. In 2001, John Adams by David McCullough was the best selling book of the year; in 2003, Hillary Clinton’s autobiographical Living History was 7th; in 2004, My Life by Bill Clinton reached number 1; in 2006, Nora Ephron’s I Feel Bad About My Neck: and Other Thoughts on Being a Woman was 9th; and in 2007, Ishmael Beah’s discredited A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier came in at 8th. Apart from McCulloch’s biography of Adams, all the above are autobiographical texts, while the focus on leading political figures is notable. Britain: Feather and Woodbridge With regard to the British situation, we did not have actual lists and relied on recent analysis. John Feather and Hazel Woodbridge find considerably higher levels for life writing in Britain than above with, from 1998 to 2005, 28% of British published non-fiction comprising autobiography, while 8% of hardback and 5% of paperback non-fiction was biography (2007). Furthermore, although Feather and Woodbridge agree with commentators that life writing is currently popular, they do not agree that this is a growth state, finding the popularity of life writing “essentially unchanged” since their previous study, which covered 1979 to the early 1990s (Feather and Reid). Australia: Nielsen BookScan 2006 and 2007 In the Australian publishing industry, where producing books remains an ‘expensive, risky endeavour which is increasingly market driven’ (Galligan 36) and ‘an inherently complex activity’ (Carter and Galligan 4), the most recent Australian Bureau of Statistics figures reveal that the total numbers of books sold in Australia has remained relatively static over the past decade (130.6 million in the financial year 1995–96 and 128.8 million in 2003–04) (ABS). During this time, however, sales volumes of non-fiction publications have grown markedly, with a trend towards “non-fiction, mass market and predictable” books (Corporall 41) resulting in general non-fiction sales in 2003–2004 outselling general fiction by factors as high as ten depending on the format—hard- or paperback, and trade or mass market paperback (ABS 2005). However, while non-fiction has increased in popularity in Australia, the same does not seem to hold true for life writing. Here, in utilising data for the top 5,000 selling non-fiction books in both 2006 and 2007, we are relying on Nielsen BookScan’s categorisation of texts as either biography or autobiography. In 2006, no works of life writing made the top 10 books sold in Australia. In looking at the top 100 books sold for 2006, in some cases the subjects of these works vary markedly from those extracted from the Amazon.com listings. In Australia in 2006, life writing makes its first appearance at number 14 with convicted drug smuggler Schapelle Corby’s My Story. This is followed by another My Story at 25, this time by retired Australian army chief, Peter Cosgrove. Jonestown: The Power and Myth of Alan Jones comes in at 34 for the Australian broadcaster’s biographer Chris Masters; the biography, The Innocent Man by John Grisham at 38 and Li Cunxin’s autobiographical Mao’s Last Dancer at 45. Australian Susan Duncan’s memoir of coping with personal loss, Salvation Creek: An Unexpected Life makes 50; bestselling USA travel writer Bill Bryson’s autobiographical memoir of his childhood The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid 69; Mandela: The Authorised Portrait by Rosalind Coward, 79; and Joanne Lees’s memoir of dealing with her kidnapping, the murder of her partner and the justice system in Australia’s Northern Territory, No Turning Back, 89. These books reveal a market preference for autobiographical writing, and an almost even split between Australian and overseas subjects in 2006. 2007 similarly saw no life writing in the top 10. The books in the top 100 sales reveal a downward trend, with fewer titles making this band overall. In 2007, Terri Irwin’s memoir of life with her famous husband, wildlife warrior Steve Irwin, My Steve, came in at number 26; musician Andrew Johns’s memoir of mental illness, The Two of Me, at 37; Ayaan Hirst Ali’s autobiography Infidel at 39; John Grogan’s biography/memoir, Marley and Me: Life and Love with the World’s Worst Dog, at 42; Sally Collings’s biography of the inspirational young survivor Sophie Delezio, Sophie’s Journey, at 51; and Elizabeth Gilbert’s hybrid food, self-help and travel memoir, Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman’s Search for Everything at 82. Mao’s Last Dancer, published the year before, remained in the top 100 in 2007 at 87. When moving to a consideration of the top 5,000 books sold in Australia in 2006, BookScan reveals only 62 books categorised as life writing in the top 1,000, and only 222 in the top 5,000 (with 34 titles between 1,000 and 1,999, 45 between 2,000 and 2,999, 48 between 3,000 and 3,999, and 33 between 4,000 and 5,000). 2007 shows a similar total of 235 life writing texts in the top 5,000 bestselling books (75 titles in the first 1,000, 27 between 1,000 and 1,999, 51 between 2,000 and 2,999, 39 between 3,000 and 3,999, and 43 between 4,000 and 5,000). In both years, 2006 and 2007, life writing thus not only constituted only some 4% of the bestselling 5,000 titles in Australia, it also showed only minimal change between these years and, therefore, no significant growth. Conclusions Our investigation using various instruments that claim to reflect levels of book sales reveals that Western readers’ willingness to purchase published life writing has not changed significantly over the past century. We find no evidence of either a short, or longer, term growth or boom in sales in such books. Instead, it appears that what has been widely heralded as a new golden age of life writing may well be more the result of an expanded understanding of what is included in the genre than an increased interest in it by either book readers or publishers. What recent years do appear to have seen, however, is a significantly increased interest by public commentators, critics, and academics in this genre of writing. We have also discovered that the issue of our current obsession with the lives of others tends to be discussed in academic as well as popular fora as if what applies to one sub-genre or production form applies to another: if biography is popular, then autobiography will also be, and vice versa. If reality television programming is attracting viewers, then readers will be flocking to life writing as well. Our investigation reveals that such propositions are questionable, and that there is significant research to be completed in mapping such audiences against each other. This work has also highlighted the difficulty of separating out the categories of written texts in publishing studies, firstly in terms of determining what falls within the category of life writing as distinct from other forms of non-fiction (the hybrid problem) and, secondly, in terms of separating out the categories within life writing. Although we have continued to use the terms biography and autobiography as sub-genres, we are aware that they are less useful as descriptors than they are often assumed to be. In order to obtain a more complete and accurate picture, publishing categories may need to be agreed upon, redefined and utilised across the publishing industry and within academia. This is of particular importance in the light of the suggestions (from total sales volumes) that the audiences for books are limited, and therefore the rise of one sub-genre may be directly responsible for the fall of another. Bair argues, for example, that in the 1980s and 1990s, the popularity of what she categorises as memoir had direct repercussions on the numbers of birth-to-death biographies that were commissioned, contracted, and published as “sales and marketing staffs conclude[d] that readers don’t want a full-scale life any more” (17). Finally, although we have highlighted the difficulty of using publishing statistics when there is no common understanding as to what such data is reporting, we hope this study shows that the utilisation of such material does add a depth to such enquiries, especially in interrogating the anecdotal evidence that is often quoted as data in publishing and other studies. Appendix 1 Publishers Weekly listings 1990–1999 1990 included two autobiographies, Bo Knows Bo by professional athlete Bo Jackson (with Dick Schaap) and Ronald Reagan’s An America Life: An Autobiography. In 1991, there were further examples of life writing with unimaginative titles, Me: Stories of My Life by Katherine Hepburn, Nancy Reagan: The Unauthorized Biography by Kitty Kelley, and Under Fire: An American Story by Oliver North with William Novak; as indeed there were again in 1992 with It Doesn’t Take a Hero: The Autobiography of Norman Schwarzkopf, Sam Walton: Made in America, the autobiography of the founder of Wal-Mart, Diana: Her True Story by Andrew Morton, Every Living Thing, yet another veterinary outpouring from James Herriot, and Truman by David McCullough. In 1993, radio shock-jock Howard Stern was successful with the autobiographical Private Parts, as was Betty Eadie with her detailed recounting of her alleged near-death experience, Embraced by the Light. Eadie’s book remained on the list in 1994 next to Don’t Stand too Close to a Naked Man, comedian Tim Allen’s autobiography. Flag-waving titles continue in 1995 with Colin Powell’s My American Journey, and Miss America, Howard Stern’s follow-up to Private Parts. 1996 saw two autobiographical works, basketball superstar Dennis Rodman’s Bad as I Wanna Be and figure-skater, Ekaterina Gordeeva’s (with EM Swift) My Sergei: A Love Story. In 1997, Diana: Her True Story returns to the top 10, joining Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes and prolific biographer Kitty Kelly’s The Royals, while in 1998, there is only the part-autobiography, part travel-writing A Pirate Looks at Fifty, by musician Jimmy Buffet. There is no biography or autobiography included in either the 1999 or 2000 top 10 lists in Publishers Weekly, nor in that for 2005. In 2001, David McCullough’s biography John Adams and Jack Welch’s business memoir Jack: Straight from the Gut featured. In 2002, Let’s Roll! Lisa Beamer’s tribute to her husband, one of the heroes of 9/11, written with Ken Abraham, joined Rudolph Giuliani’s autobiography, Leadership. 2003 saw Hillary Clinton’s autobiography Living History and Paul Burrell’s memoir of his time as Princess Diana’s butler, A Royal Duty, on the list. In 2004, it was Bill Clinton’s turn with My Life. In 2006, we find John Grisham’s true crime (arguably a biography), The Innocent Man, at the top, Grogan’s Marley and Me at number three, and the autobiographical The Audacity of Hope by Barack Obama in fourth place. Appendix 2 Amazon.com listings since 2000 In 2000, there were only two auto/biographies in the top Amazon 50 bestsellers with Lance Armstrong’s It’s Not about the Bike: My Journey Back to Life about his battle with cancer at 20, and Dave Eggers’s self-consciously fictionalised memoir, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius at 32. In 2001, only the top 14 bestsellers were recorded. At number 1 is John Adams by David McCullough and, at 11, Jack: Straight from the Gut by USA golfer Jack Welch. In 2002, Leadership by Rudolph Giuliani was at 12; Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson by Robert Caro at 29; Portrait of a Killer: Jack the Ripper by Patricia Cornwell at 42; Blinded by the Right: The Conscience of an Ex-Conservative by David Brock at 48; and Louis Gerstner’s autobiographical Who Says Elephants Can’t Dance: Inside IBM’s Historic Turnaround at 50. In 2003, Living History by Hillary Clinton was 7th; Benjamin Franklin: An American Life by Walter Isaacson 14th; Dereliction of Duty: The Eyewitness Account of How President Bill Clinton Endangered America’s Long-Term National Security by Robert Patterson 20th; Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith by Jon Krakauer 32nd; Leap of Faith: Memoirs of an Unexpected Life by Queen Noor of Jordan 33rd; Kate Remembered, Scott Berg’s biography of Katharine Hepburn, 37th; Who’s your Caddy?: Looping for the Great, Near Great and Reprobates of Golf by Rick Reilly 39th; The Teammates: A Portrait of a Friendship about a winning baseball team by David Halberstam 42nd; and Every Second Counts by Lance Armstrong 49th. In 2004, My Life by Bill Clinton was the best selling book of the year; American Soldier by General Tommy Franks was 16th; Kevin Phillips’s American Dynasty: Aristocracy, Fortune and the Politics of Deceit in the House of Bush 18th; Timothy Russert’s Big Russ and Me: Father and Son. Lessons of Life 20th; Tony Hendra’s Father Joe: The Man who Saved my Soul 23rd; Ron Chernow’s Alexander Hamilton 27th; Cokie Roberts’s Founding Mothers: The Women Who Raised our Nation 31st; Kitty Kelley’s The Family: The Real Story of the Bush Dynasty 42nd; and Chronicles, Volume 1 by Bob Dylan was 43rd. In 2005, auto/biographical texts were well down the list with only The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion at 45 and The Glass Castle: A Memoir by Jeanette Walls at 49. In 2006, there was a resurgence of life writing with Nora Ephron’s I Feel Bad About My Neck: and Other Thoughts on Being a Woman at 9; Grisham’s The Innocent Man at 12; Bill Buford’s food memoir Heat: an Amateur’s Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-Maker, and Apprentice to a Dante-Quoting Butcher in Tuscany at 23; more food writing with Julia Child’s My Life in France at 29; Immaculée Ilibagiza’s Left to Tell: Discovering God amidst the Rwandan Holocaust at 30; CNN anchor Anderson Cooper’s Dispatches from the Edge: A Memoir of War, Disasters and Survival at 43; and Isabella Hatkoff’s Owen & Mzee: The True Story of a Remarkable Friendship (between a baby hippo and a giant tortoise) at 44. In 2007, Ishmael Beah’s discredited A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier came in at 8; Walter Isaacson’s Einstein: His Life and Universe 13; Ayaan Hirst Ali’s autobiography of her life in Muslim society, Infidel, 18; The Reagan Diaries 25; Jesus of Nazareth by Pope Benedict XVI 29; Mother Teresa: Come be my Light 36; Clapton: The Autobiography 40; Tina Brown’s The Diana Chronicles 45; Tony Dungy’s Quiet Strength: The Principles, Practices & Priorities of a Winning Life 47; and Daniel Tammet’s Born on a Blue Day: Inside the Extraordinary Mind of an Autistic Savant at 49. Acknowledgements A sincere thank you to Michael Webster at RMIT for assistance with access to Nielsen BookScan statistics, and to the reviewers of this article for their insightful comments. Any errors are, of course, our own. References Australian Broadcasting Commission (ABC). “About Us.” Australian Story 2008. 1 June 2008. ‹http://www.abc.net.au/austory/aboutus.htm>. 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Online edition. 1 June 2008 ‹http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0%2C9171%2C1569514%2C00.html>. Gutjahr, Paul C. “No Longer Left Behind: Amazon.com, Reader Response, and the Changing Fortunes of the Christian Novel in America.” Book History 5 (2002): 209–36. Hamilton, Nigel. Biography: A Brief History. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2007. Kaplan, Justin. “A Culture of Biography.” The Literary Biography: Problems and Solutions. Ed. Dale Salwak. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996. 1–11. Korda, Michael. Making the List: A Cultural History of the American Bestseller 1900–1999. New York: Barnes & Noble, 2001. Miller, Laura J. “The Bestseller List as Marketing Tool and Historical Fiction.” Book History 3 (2000): 286–304. Morreale, Joanne. “Revisiting The Osbournes: The Hybrid Reality-Sitcom.” Journal of Film and Video 55.1 (Spring 2003): 3–15. Rak, Julie. “Bio-Power: CBC Television’s Life & Times and A&E Network’s Biography on A&E.” LifeWriting 1.2 (2005): 1–18. Starck, Nigel. “Capturing Life—Not Death: A Case For Burying The Posthumous Parallax.” Text: The Journal of the Australian Association of Writing Programs 5.2 (2001). 1 June 2008 ‹http://www.textjournal.com.au/oct01/starck.htm>.

In PilsenTwenty-six Station Road,She climbed to the third floorUp stairs which were all that was leftOf the whole house,She opened her doorFull on to the sky,Stood gaping over the edge.For this was the placeThe world ended.Thenshe locked up carefullylest someone stealSiriusor Aldebaranfrom her kitchen,went back downstairsand settled herselfto waitfor the house to rise againand for her husband to rise from the ashesand for her children’s hands and feet to be stuck back in placeIn the morning they found herstill as stone, sparrows pecking her hands.Five Minutes after the Air Raidby Miroslav Holub(Calder 287) Holding Still Detonation. Affect. During the Second World War, London and other European cities were subjected to the terrors of aerial bombardment, rendered through nightmarish anticipations of the bomber (Gollin 7) and the material storm of the real air-raid. The fall of bombs plagued cities and their citizens with the terrible rain of explosives and incendiary weapons. A volatile landscape was formed as the urban environment was ‘unmade’ and urged into violent motion. Flying projectiles of shrapnel, debris and people; avalanches of collapsing factories and houses; the inhale and exhale of compressed air and firestorms; the scream of the explosion. All these composed an incredibly fluid urban traumatic, as atmospheres fell over the cities that was thick with smoke, dust, and ventilated only by terror (see for instance Sebald 10 and Mendieta’s 3 recent commentary). Vast craters were imprinted onto the charred morphologies of London and Berlin as well as Coventry, Hamburg and Dresden. Just as the punctuations of the bombing saw the psychic as well as the material give way, writers portraying Britain as an ‘volcano island’ (Spaight 5) witnessed eruptive projections – the volleys of the material air-war; the emotional signature of charged and bitter reprisals; pain, anguish and vengeance - counter-strikes of affect. In the midst of all of this molten violence and emotion it seems impossible that a simultaneous sense of quiescence could be at all possible. More than mere physical fixity or geographical stasis, a rather different sort of experience could take place. Preceding, during and following the excessive mobilisation of an air raid, ‘stillness’ was often used to describe certain plateuing stretches of time-space which were slowed and even stopped (Anderson 740). Between the eruptions appeared hollows of calm and even boredom. People’s nervous flinching under the reverberation of high-explosive blasts formed part of what Jordan Crandall might call a ‘bodily-inclination’ position. Slackened and taut feelings condensed around people listening out for the oncoming bomber. People found that they prepared for the dreadful wail of the siren, or relaxed in the aftermath of the attack. In these instances, states of tension and apprehension as well as calm and relief formed though stillness. The peculiar experiences of ‘stillness’ articulated in these events open out, I suggest, distinctive ways-of-being which undo our assumptions of perpetually fluid subjectivities and the primacy of the ‘body in motion’ even within the context of unparalleled movement and uncertainty (see Harrison 423 and also Rose and Wylie 477 for theoretical critique). The sorts of “musics of stillness and silence able to be discovered in a world of movement” (Thrift, Still 50), add to our understandings of the material geographies of war and terror (see for instance Graham 63; Gregory and Pred 3), whilst they gesture towards complex material-affective experiences of bodies and spaces. Stillness in this sense, denotes apprehending and anticipating spaces and events in ways that sees the body enveloped within the movement of the environment around it; bobbing along intensities that course their way through it; positioned towards pasts and futures that make themselves felt, and becoming capable of intense forms of experience and thought. These examples illustrate not a shutting down of the body to an inwardly focused position – albeit composed by complex relations and connections – but bodies finely attuned to their exteriors (see Bissell, Animating 277 and Conradson 33). In this paper I draw from a range of oral and written testimony archived at the Imperial War Museum and the Mass Observation wartime regular reports. Edited publications from these collections were also consulted. Detailing the experience of aerial bombing during the Blitz, particularly on London between September 1940 to May 1941, forms part of a wider project concerning the calculative and affective dimensions of the aeroplane’s relationship with the human body, especially through the spaces it has worked to construct (infrastructures such as airports) and destroy. While appearing extraordinary, the examples I use are actually fairly typical of the patternings of experience and the depth and clarity with which they are told. They could be taken to be representative of the population as a whole or coincidentally similar testimonials. Either way, they are couched within a specific cultural historical context of urgency, threat and unparalleled violence.Anticipations The complex material geographies of an air raid reveal the ecological interdependencies of populations and their often urban environments and metabolisms (Coward 419; Davis 3; Graham 63; Gregory The Colonial 19; Hewitt Place 257). Aerial warfare was an address of populations conceived at the register of their bio-rhythmical and metabolic relationship to their milieu (Adey). The Blitz and the subsequent Allied bombing campaign constituted Churchill’s ‘great experiment’ for governments attempting to assess the damage an air raid could inflict upon a population’s nerves and morale (Brittain 77; Gregory In Another 88). An anxious and uncertain landscape constructed before the war, perpetuated by public officials, commentators and members of parliament, saw background affects (Ngai 5) of urgency creating an atmosphere that pressurised and squeezed the population to prepare for the ‘gathering storm’. Attacks upon the atmosphere itself had been readily predicted in the form of threatening gas attacks ready to poison the medium upon which human and animal life depended (Haldane 111; Sloterdijk 41-57). One of the most talked of moments of the Blitz is not necessarily the action but the times of stillness that preceded it. Before and in-between an air raid stillness appears to describe a state rendered somewhere between the lulls and silences of the action and the warnings and the anticipatory feelings of what might happen. In the awaiting bodies, the materialites of silence could be felt as a kind-of-sound and as an atmospheric sense of imminence. At the onset of the first air-raids sound became a signifier of what was on the way (MO 408). Waiting – as both practice and sensation – imparted considerable inertia that went back and forth through time (Jeffrey 956; Massumi, Parables 3). For Geographer Kenneth Hewitt, sound “told of the coming raiders, the nearness of bombs, the plight of loved ones” (When the 16). The enormous social survey of Mass Observation concluded that “fear seems to be linked above all with noise” (original emphasis). As one report found, “It is the siren or the whistle or the explosion or the drone – these are the things that terrify. Fear seems to come to us most of all through our sense of hearing” (MO 378). Yet the power of the siren came not only from its capacity to propagate sound and to alert, but the warning held in its voice of ‘keeping silent’. “Prefacing in a dire prolepsis the post-apocalyptic event before the event”, as Bishop and Phillips (97) put it, the stillness of silence was incredibly virtual in its affects, disclosing - in its lack of life – the lives that would be later taken. Devastation was expected and rehearsed by civilians. Stillness formed a space and body ready to spring into movement – an ‘imminent mobility’ as John Armitage (204) has described it. Perched on the edge of devastation, space-times were felt through a sense of impending doom. Fatalistic yet composed expectations of a bomb heading straight down pervaded the thoughts and feelings of shelter dwellers (MO 253; MO 217). Waves of sound disrupted fragile tempers as they passed through the waiting bodies in the physical language of tensed muscles and gritted teeth (Gaskin 36). Silence helped form bodies inclined-to-attention, particularly sensitive to aural disturbances and vibrations from all around. Walls, floors and objects carried an urban bass-line of warning (Goodman). Stillness was forged through a body readied in advance of the violence these materialities signified. A calm and composed body was not necessarily an immobile body. Civilians who had prepared for the attacks were ready to snap into action - to dutifully wear their gas-mask or escape to shelter. ‘Backgrounds of expectation’ (Thrift, Still 36) were forged through non-too-subtle procedural and sequential movements which opened-out new modes of thinking and feeling. Folding one’s clothes and placing them on the dresser in-readiness; pillows and sheets prepared for a spell in the shelter, these were some of many orderly examples (IWM 14595). In the event of a gas attack air raid precautions instructions advised how to put on a gas mask (ARPD 90-92),i) Hold the breath. ii) Remove headgear and place between the knees. iii) Lift the flap of the haversack [ …] iv) Bring the face-piece towards the face’[…](v) Breathe out and continue to breathe in a normal manner The rational technologies of drill, dressage and operational research enabled poise in the face of an eventual air-raid. Through this ‘logistical-life’ (Reid 17), thought was directed towards simple tasks by minutely described instructions. Stilled LifeThe end of stillness was usually marked by a reactionary ‘flinch’, ‘start’ or ‘jump’. Such reactionary ‘urgent analogs’ (Ngai 94; Tomkins 96) often occurred as a response to sounds and movements that merely broke the tension rather than accurately mimicking an air raid. These atmospheres were brittle and easily disrupted. Cars back-firing and changing gear were often complained about (MO 371), just as bringing people out of the quiescence of sleep was a common effect of air-raids (Kraftl and Horton 509). Disorientation was usually fostered in this process while people found it very difficult to carry out the most simple of tasks. Putting one’s clothes on or even making their way out of the bedroom door became enormously problematic. Sirens awoke a ‘conditioned reflex’ to take cover (MO 364). Long periods of sleep deprivation brought on considerable fatigue and anxiety. ‘Sleep we Must’ wrote journalist Ritchie Calder (252) noticing the invigorating powers of sleep for both urban morale and the bare existence of survival. For other more traumatized members of the population, psychological studies found that the sustained concentration of shelling caused what was named ‘apathy-retreat’ (Harrisson, Living 65). This extreme form of acquiescence saw especially susceptible and vulnerable civilians suffer an overwhelming urge to sleep and to be cared-for ‘as if chronically ill’ (Janis 90). A class and racial politics of quiescent affect was enacted as several members of the population were believed far more liable to ‘give way’ to defeat and dangerous emotions (Brittain 77; Committee of Imperial Defence).In other cases it was only once an air-raid had started that sleep could be found (MO 253). The boredom of waiting could gather in its intensity deforming bodies with “the doom of depression” (Anderson 749). The stopped time-spaces in advance of a raid could be soaked with so much tension that the commencement of sirens, vibrations and explosions would allow a person overwhelming relief (MO 253). Quoting from a boy recalling his experiences in Hannover during 1943, Hewitt illustrates:I lie in bed. I am afraid. I strain my ears to hear something but still all is quiet. I hardly dare breathe, as if something horrible is knocking at the door, at the windows. Is it the beating of my heart? ... Suddenly there seems relief, the sirens howl into the night ... (Heimatbund Niedersachsen 1953: 185). (Cited in Hewitt, When 16)Once a state of still was lost getting it back required some effort (Bissell, Comfortable 1697). Cautious of preventing mass panic and public hysteria by allowing the body to erupt outwards into dangerous vectors of mobility, the British government’s schooling in the theories of panicology (Orr 12) and contagious affect (Le Bon 17; Tarde 278; Thrift, Intensities 57; Trotter 140), made air raid precautions (ARP) officers, police and civil defence teams enforce ‘stay put’ and ‘hold firm’ orders to protect the population (Jones et al, Civilian Morale 463, Public Panic 63-64; Thomas 16). Such orders were meant to shield against precisely the kinds of volatile bodies they were trying to compel with their own bombing strategies. Reactions to the Blitz were moralised and racialised. Becoming stilled required self-conscious work by a public anxious not to be seen to ‘panic’. This took the form of self-disciplination. People exhausted considerable energy to ‘settle’ themselves down. It required ‘holding’ themselves still and ‘together’ in order to accomplish this state, and to avoid going the same way as the buildings falling apart around them, as some people observed (MO 408). In Britain a cup of tea was often made as a spontaneous response in the event of the conclusion of a raid (Brown 686). As well as destroying bombing created spaces too – making space for stillness (Conradson 33). Many people found that they could recall their experiences in vivid detail, allocating a significant proportion of their memories to the recollection of the self and an awareness of their surroundings (IWM 19103). In this mode of stillness, contemplation did not turn-inwards but unfolded out towards the environment. The material processual movement of the shell-blast literally evacuated all sound and materials from its centre to leave a vacuum of negative pressure. Diaries and oral testimonies stretch out these millisecond events into discernable times and spaces of sensation, thought and the experience of experience (Massumi, Parables 2). Extraordinarily, survivors mention serene feelings of quiet within the eye of the blast (see Mortimer 239); they had, literally, ‘no time to be frightened’ (Crighton-Miller 6150). A shell explosion could create such intensities of stillness that a sudden and distinctive lessening of the person and world are expressed, constituting ‘stilling-slowing diminishments’ (Anderson 744). As if the blast-vacuum had sucked all the animation from their agency, recollections convey passivity and, paradoxically, a much more heightened and contemplative sense of the moment (Bourke 121; Thrift, Still 41). More lucid accounts describe a multitude of thoughts and an attention to minute detail. Alternatively, the enormous peaking of a waking blast subdued all later activities to relative obsolescence. The hurricane of sounds and air appear to overload into the flatness of an extended and calmed instantaneous present.Then the whistling stopped, then a terrific thump as it hit the ground, and everything seem to expand, then contract with deliberation and stillness seemed to be all around. (As recollected by Bill and Vi Reagan in Gaskin 17)On the other hand, as Schivelbusch (7) shows us in his exploration of defeat, the cessation of war could be met with an outburst of feeling. In these micro-moments a close encounter with death was often experienced with elation, a feeling of peace and well-being drawn through a much more heightened sense of the now (MO 253). These are not pre-formed or contemplative techniques of attunement as Thrift has tracked, but are the consequence of significant trauma and the primal reaction to extreme danger.TracesSusan Griffin’s haunting A Chorus of Stones documents what she describes as a private life of war (1). For Griffin, and as shown in these brief examples, stillness and being-stilled describe a series of diverse experiences endured during aerial bombing. Yet, as Griffin narrates, these are not-so private lives. A common representation of air war can be found in Henry Moore’s tube shelter sketches which convey sleeping tube-dwellers harboured in the London underground during the Blitz. The bodies are represented as much more than individuals being connected by Moore’s wave-like shapes into the turbulent aggregation of a choppy ocean. What we see in Moore’s portrayal and the examples discussed already are experiences with definite relations to both inner and outer worlds. They refer to more-than individuals who bear intimate relations to their outsides and the atmospheric and material environments enveloping and searing through them. Stillness was an unlikely state composed through these circulations just as it was formed as a means of address. It was required in order to apprehend sounds and possible events through techniques of listening or waiting. Alternatively being stilled could refer to pauses between air-strikes and the corresponding breaks of tension in the aftermath of a raid. Stillness was composed through a series of distributed yet interconnecting bodies, feelings, materials and atmospheres oriented towards the future and the past. The ruins of bombed-out building forms stand as traces even today. Just as Massumi (Sensing 16) describes in the context of architecture, the now static remainder of the explosion “envelops in its stillness a deformational field of which it stands as the trace”. The ruined forms left after the attack stand as a “monument” of the passing of the raid to be what it once was – house, factory, shop, restaurant, library - and to become something else. The experience of those ‘from below’ (Hewitt 2) suffering contemporary forms of air-warfare share many parallels with those of the Blitz. Air power continues to target, apparently more precisely, the affective tones of the body. Accessed by kinetic and non-kinetic forces, the signs of air-war are generated by the shelling of Kosovo, ‘shock and awe’ in Iraq, air-strikes in Afghanistan and by the simulated air-raids of IDF aircraft producing sonic-booms over sleeping Palestinian civilians, now becoming far more real as I write in the final days of 2008. Achieving stillness in the wake of aerial trauma remains, even now, a way to survive the (private) life of air war. AcknowledgementsI’d like to thank the editors and particularly the referees for such a close reading of the article; time did not permit the attention their suggestions demanded. Grateful acknowledgement is also made to the AHRC whose funding allowed me to research and write this paper. ReferencesAdey, Peter. Aerial Geographies: Mobilities, Bodies and Subjects. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010 (forthcoming). 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Abstract The aim of this study was to evaluate the current practice in surgical techniques for esophageal and gastroesophageal junction cancer surgery worldwide and to compare the results to the previous surveys in 2007 and 2014. An online survey was sent out among surgical members of the International Society for Diseases of the Esophagus, the World Organization for Specialized Studies on Disease of the Esophagus, the International Gastric Cancer Association, the Association of Upper Gastrointestinal Surgery of Great Britain and Ireland and Dutch gastroesophageal surgeons via the network of the investigators. In total, 260 surgeons completed the survey representing 52 countries and 6 continents; Europe 56%, Oceania 14%, Asia 14%, South-America 9%, North-America 7%. Of the responding surgeons, 39% worked in a hospital that performed >51 esophagectomies per year. Total minimally invasive esophagectomy was the preferred technique (53%) followed by hybrid esophagectomy (26%) of which 7% consisted of a minimally invasive thoracic phase and 19% of a minimally invasive abdominal phase. Total open esophagectomy was preferred by 21% of the respondents. Total minimally invasive esophagectomy was significantly more often performed in high-volume centers compared with non-high-volume centers (P = 0.002). Robotic assistance was used in 13% during the thoracic phase and 6% during the abdominal phase. Minimally invasive transthoracic esophagectomy has become the preferred approach for esophagectomy. Although 21% of the surgeons prefer an open approach, 26% of the surgeons perform a hybrid procedure which may reflect further transition towards the use of total minimally invasive esophagectomy.

Introduction Mentors play a role in real life, just as they do in fiction. They also feature in reality television, which sits somewhere between the two. In fiction, mentors contribute to the narrative arc by providing guidance and assistance (Vogler 12) to a mentee in his or her life or professional pursuits. These exchanges are usually characterized by reciprocity, the need for mutual recognition (Gadamer 353) and involve some kind of moral question. They dramatise the possibilities of mentoring in reality, to provide us with a greater understanding of the world, and our human interaction within it. Reality television offers a different perspective. Like drama it uses the plot device of a mentor character to heighten the story arc, but instead of focusing on knowledge-based portrayals (Gadamer 112) of the mentor and mentee, the emphasis is instead on the mentee’s quest for ascension. In attempting to transcend their unknownness (Boorstin) contestants aim to penetrate an exclusive creative class (Florida). Populated by celebrity chefs, businessmen, entertainers, fashionistas, models, socialites and talent judges (to name a few), this class seemingly adds authenticity to ‘competitions’ and other formats. While the mentor’s role, on the surface, is to provide divine knowledge and facilitate the journey, a different agenda is evident in the ways carefully scripted (Booth) dialogue heightens the drama through effusive praise (New York Daily News) and “tactless” (Woodward), humiliating (Hirschorn; Winant 69; Woodward) and cruel sentiments. From a screen narrative point of view, this takes reality television as ‘storytelling’ (Aggarwal; Day; Hirschorn; “Reality Writer”; Rupel; Stradal) into very different territory. The contrived and later edited (Crouch; Papacharissi and Mendelson 367) communication between mentor and mentee not only renders the relationship disingenuous, it compounds the primary ethical concerns of associated Schadenfreude (Balasubramanian, Forstie and van den Scott 434; Cartwright), and the severe financial inequality (Andrejevic) underpinning a multi-billion dollar industry (Hamilton). As upward mobility and instability continue to be ubiquitously portrayed in 21st century reality entertainment under neoliberalism (Sender 4; Winant 67), it is with increasing frequency that we are seeing the systematic reinvention of the once significant cultural and historical role of the mentor. Mentor as Fictional Archetype and Communicator of ThemesDepictions of mentors can be found across the Western art canon. From the mythological characters of Telemachus’ Athena and Achilles’ Chiron, to King Arthur’s Merlin, Cinderella’s Fairy Godmother, Jim Hawkins’ Long John Silver, Frodo’s Gandalf, Batman’s Alfred and Marty McFly’s Doc Emmett Brown (among many more), the dramatic energy of the teacher, expert or supernatural aid (Vogler 39) has been timelessly powerful. Heroes, typically, engage with a mentor as part of their journey. Mentor types range extensively, from those who provide motivation, inspiration, training or gifts (Vogler), to those who may be dark or malevolent, or have fallen from grace (such as Michael Douglas’ Gordon Gekko in Wall Street 1987, or the ex-tribute Haymitch in The Hunger Games, 2012). A good drama usually complicates the relationship in some way, exploring initial reluctance from either party, or instances of tragedy (Vogler 11, 44) which may prevent the relationship achieving its potential. The intriguing twist of a fallen or malevolent mentor additionally invites the audience to morally analyze the ways the hero responds to what the mentor provides, and to question what our teachers or superiors tell us. In television particularly, long running series such as Mad Men have shown how a mentoring relationship can change over time, where “non-rational” characters (Buzzanell and D’Enbeau 707) do not necessarily maintain reciprocity or equality (703) but become subject to intimate, ambivalent and erotic aspects.As the mentor in fiction has deep cultural roots for audiences today, it is no wonder they are used, in a variety of archetypal capacities, in reality television. The dark Simon Cowell (of Pop Idol, American Idol, Britain’s Got Talent, America’s Got Talent and The X-Factor series) and the ‘villainous’ (Byrnes) Michelin-starred Marco Pierre White (Hell’s Kitchen, The Chopping Block, Marco Pierre White’s Kitchen Wars, MasterChef Australia, New Zealand, South Africa) provide reality writers with much needed antagonism (Rupel, Stradal). Those who have fallen from grace, or allowed their personal lives to play out in tabloid sagas such as Britney Spears (Marikar), or Caitlyn Jenner (Bissinger) provide different sources of conflict and intrigue. They are then counterbalanced with or repackaged as the good mentor. Examples of the nurturer who shows "compassion and empathy" include American Idol’s Paula Abdul (Marche), or the supportive Jennifer Hawkins in Next Top Model (Thompson). These distinctive characters help audiences to understand the ‘reality’ as a story (Crouch; Rupel; Stradal). But when we consider the great mentors of screen fiction, it becomes clear how reality television has changed the nature of story. The Karate Kid I (1984) and Good Will Hunting (1998) are two examples where mentoring is almost the exclusive focus, and where the experience of the characters differs greatly. In both films an initially reluctant mentor becomes deeply involved in the mentee’s project. They act as a special companion to the hero in the face of isolation, and, significantly, reveal a tragedy of their own, providing a nexus through which the mentee can access a deeper kind of truth. Not only are they flawed and ordinary people (they are not celebrities within the imagined worlds of the stories) who the mentee must challenge and learn to truly respect, they are “effecting and important” (Maslin) in reminding audiences of those hidden idiosyncrasies that open the barriers to friendship. Mentors in these stories, and many others, communicate themes of class, culture, talent, jealousy, love and loss which inform ideas about the ethical treatment of the ‘other’ (Gadamer). They ultimately prove pivotal to self worth, human confidence and growth. Very little of this thematic substance survives in reality television (see comparison of plots and contrasting modes of human engagement in the example of The Office and Dirty Jobs, Winant 70). Archetypally identifiable as they may be, mean judges and empathetic supermodels as characters are concerned mostly with the embodiment of perfection. They are flawless, untouchable and indeed most powerful when human welfare is at stake, and when the mentee before them faces isolation (see promise to a future ‘Rihanna’, X-Factor USA, Season 2, Episode 1 and Tyra Banks’ Next Top Model tirade at a contestant who had not lived up to her potential, West). If connecting with a mentor in fiction has long signified the importance of understanding of the past, of handing down tradition (Gadamer 354), and of our fascination with the elder, wiser other, then we can see a fundamental shift in narrative representation of mentors in reality television stories. In the past, as we have opened our hearts to such characters, as a facilitator to or companion of the hero, we have rehearsed a sacred respect for the knowledge and fulfillment mentors can provide. In reality television the ‘drama’ may evoke a fleeting rush of excitement at the hero’s success or failure, but the reality belies a pronounced distancing between mentor and mentee. The Creative Class: An Aspirational ParadigmThemes of ascension and potential fulfillment are also central to modern creativity discourse (Runco; Runco 672; United Nations). Seen as the driving force of the 21st century, creativity is now understood as much more than art, capable of bringing economic prosperity (United Nations) and social cohesion to its acme (United Nations xxiii). At the upper end of creative practice, is what Florida called “the creative class: a fast growing, highly educated, and well-paid segment of the workforce” (on whose expertise corporate profits depend), in industries ranging “from technology to entertainment, journalism to finance, high-end manufacturing to the arts” (Florida). Their common ethos is centered on individuality, diversity, and merit; eclipsing previous systems focused on ‘shopping’ and theme park consumerism and social conservatism (Eisinger). While doubts have since been raised about the size (Eisinger) and financial practices (Krätke 838) of the creative class (particularly in America), from an entertainment perspective at least, the class can be seen in full action. Extending to rich housewives, celebrity teen mothers and even eccentric duck hunters and swamp people, the creative class has caught up to the more traditional ‘star’ actor or music artist, and is increasingly marketable within world’s most sought after and expensive media spaces. Often reality celebrities make their mark for being the most outrageous, the cruelest (Peyser), or the weirdest (Gallagher; Peyser) personalities in the spotlight. Aspiring to the creative class thus, is a very public affair in television. Willing participants scamper for positions on shows, particularly those with long running, heavyweight titles such as Big Brother, The Bachelor, Survivor and the Idol series (Hill 35). The better known formats provide high visibility, with the opportunity to perform in front of millions around the globe (Frere-Jones, Day). Tapping into the deeply ingrained upward-mobility rhetoric of America, and of Western society, shows are aided in large part by 24-hour news, social media, the proliferation of celebrity gossip and the successful correlation between pop culture and an entertainment-style democratic ideal. As some have noted, dramatized reality is closely tied to the rise of individualization, and trans-national capitalism (Darling-Wolf 127). Its creative dynamism indeed delivers multi-lateral benefits: audiences believe the road to fame and fortune is always just within reach, consumerism thrives, and, politically, themes of liberty, egalitarianism and freedom ‘provide a cushioning comfort’ (Peyser; Pinter) from the domestic and international ills that would otherwise dispel such optimism. As the trials and tests within the reality genre heighten the seriousness of, and excitement about ascending toward the creative elite, show creators reproduce the same upward-mobility themed narrative across formats all over the world. The artifice is further supported by the festival-like (Grodin 46) symbology of the live audience, mass viewership and the online voting community, which in economic terms, speaks to the creative power of the material. Whether through careful manipulation of extra media space, ‘game strategy’, or other devices, those who break through are even more idolized for the achievement of metamorphosing into a creative hero. For the creative elite however, who wins ‘doesn’t matter much’. Vertical integration is the priority, where the process of making contestants famous is as lucrative as the profits they will earn thereafter; it’s a form of “one-stop shopping” as the makers of Idol put it according to Frere-Jones. Furthermore, as Florida’s measures and indicators suggested, the geographically mobile new creative class is driven by lifestyle values, recreation, participatory culture and diversity. Reality shows are the embodiment this idea of creativity, taking us beyond stale police procedural dramas (Hirschorn) and racially typecast family sitcoms, into a world of possibility. From a social equality perspective, while there has been a notable rise in gay and transgender visibility (Gamson) and stories about lower socio-economic groups – fast food workers and machinists for example – are told in a way they never were before, the extent to which shows actually unhinge traditional power structures is, as scholars have noted (Andrejevic and Colby 197; Schroeder) open to question. As boundaries are nonetheless crossed in the age of neoliberal creativity, the aspirational paradigm of joining a new elite in real life is as potent as ever. Reality Television’s Mentors: How to Understand Their ‘Role’Reality television narratives rely heavily on the juxtaposition between celebrity glamour and comfort, and financial instability. As mentees put it ‘all on the line’, storylines about personal suffering are hyped and molded for maximum emotional impact. In the best case scenarios mentors such as Caitlyn Jenner will help a trans mentee discover their true self by directing them in a celebrity-style photo shoot (see episode featuring Caitlyn and Zeam, Logo TV 2015). In more extreme cases the focus will be on an adopted contestant’s hopes that his birth mother will hear him sing (The X Factor USA, Season 2, Episode 11 Part 1), or on a postal clerk’s fear that elimination will mean she has to go back “to selling stamps” (The X Factor US - Season 2 Episode 11 Part 2). In the entrepreneurship format, as Woodward pointed out, it is not ‘help’ that mentees are given, but condescension. “I have to tell you, my friend, that this is the worst idea I’ve ever heard. You don’t have a clue about how to set up a business or market a product,” Woodward noted as the feedback given by one elite businessman on The Shark Tank (Woodward). “This is a five million dollar contract and I have to know that you can go the distance” (The X Factor US – Season 2 Episode 11, Part 1) Britney Spears warned to a thirteen-year-old contestant before accepting her as part of her team. In each instance the fictitious premise of being either an ‘enabler’ or destroyer of dreams is replayed and slightly adapted for ongoing consumer interest. This lack of shared experience and mutual recognition in reality television also highlights the overt, yet rarely analyzed focus on the wealth of mentors as contrasted with their unstable mentees. In the respective cases of The X Factor and I Am Cait, one of the wealthiest moguls in entertainment, Cowell, reportedly contracts mentors for up to $15 million per season (Nair); Jenner’s performance in I Am Cait was also set to significantly boost the Kardashian empire (reportedly already worth $300 million, Pavia). In both series, significant screen time has been dedicated to showing the mentors in luxurious beachside houses, where mentees may visit. Despite the important social messages embedded in Caitlyn’s story (which no doubt nourishes the Kardashian family’s generally more ersatz material), the question, from a moral point of view becomes: would these mentors still interact with that particular mentee without the money? Regardless, reality participants insist they are fulfilling their dreams when they appear. Despite the preplanning, possibility of distress (Australia Network News; Bleasby) and even suicide (Schuster), as well as the ferocity of opinion surrounding shows (Marche) the parade of a type of ‘road of trials’ (Vogler 189) is enough to keep a huge fan base interested, and hungry for their turn to experience the fortune of being touched by the creative elite; or in narrative terms, a supernatural aid. ConclusionThe key differences between reality television and artistic narrative portrayals of mentors can be found in the use of archetypes for narrative conflict and resolution, in the ways themes are explored and the ways dialogue is put to use, and in the focus on and visibility of material wealth (Frere-Jones; Peyser). These differences highlight the political, cultural and social implications of exchanging stories about potential fulfillment, for stories about ascension to the creative class. Rather than being based on genuine reciprocity, and understanding of human issues, reality shows create drama around the desperation to penetrate the inner sanctum of celebrity fame and fortune. In fiction we see themes based on becoming famous, on gender transformation, and wealth acquisition, such as in the films and series Almost Famous (2000), The Bill Silvers Show (1955-1959), Filthy Rich (1982-1983), and Tootsie (1982), but these stories at least attempt to address a moral question. Critically, in an artistic - rather than commercial context – the actors (who may play mentees) are not at risk of exploitation (Australia Network News; Bleasby; Crouch). Where actors are paid and recognized creatively for their contribution to an artistic work (Rupel), the mentee in reality television has no involvement in the ways action may be set up for maximum voyeuristic enjoyment, or manipulated to enhance scandalous and salacious content which will return show and media profits (“Reality Show Fights”; Skeggs and Wood 64). The emphasis, ironically, from a reality production point of view, is wholly on making the audience believe (Papacharissi and Mendelson 367) that the content is realistic. This perhaps gives some insight as to why themes of personal suffering and instability are increasingly evident across formats.On an ethical level, unlike the knowledge transferred through complex television plots, or in coming of age films (as cited above) about the ways tradition is handed down, and the ways true mentors provide altruistic help in human experience; in reality television we take away the knowledge that life, under neoliberalism, is most remarkable when one is handpicked to undertake a televised journey featuring their desire for upward mobility. The value of the mentoring in these cases is directly proportionate to the financial objectives of the creative elite.ReferencesAggarwal, Sirpa. “WWE, A&E Networks, and Simplynew Share Benefits of White-Label Social TV Solutions at the Social TV Summit.” Arktan 25 July 2012. 1 August 2014 <http://arktan.com/wwe-ae-networks-and-simplynew-share-benefits-of-white-label-social-tv-solutions-at-the-social-tv-summit/>. 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In the 2019 documentary Chasing Happiness, recording artist/musician Joe Jonas tells audiences that the band was “living the dream”. Similarly, in the 2012 documentary Artifact, lead singer Jared Leto remarks that at the height of Thirty Seconds to Mars’s success, they “were living the dream”. However, for both the Jonas Brothers and Thirty Seconds to Mars, their experiences of the music industry (much like other commercially successful recording artists) soon transformed into nightmares. Similar to other commercially successful recording artists, the Jonas Brothers and Thirty Seconds to Mars, came up against the constraints of the industry which inevitably led to a forfeiting of authenticity, a loss of creative control, increased exploitation, and unequal remuneration. This work will consider how working in the music industry is not always a dream come true and can instead be viewed as a proverbial nightmare. Living the DreamIn his book Dreams, Carl Gustav Jung discusses how that which is experienced in sleep, speaks of a person’s wishes: that which might be desired in reality but may not actually happen. In his earlier work, The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud argued that the dream is representative of fulfilling a repressed wish. However, the creative industries suggest that a dream need not be a repressed wish; it can become a reality. Jon Bon Jovi believes that his success in the music industry has surpassed his wildest dreams (Atkinson). Jennifer Lopez considers the fact that she held big dreams, had a focussed passion, and strong aspirations the reason why she pursued a creative career that took her out of the Bronx (Thomas). In a Twitter post from 23 April 2018, Bruno Mars declared that he “use [sic] to dream of this shit,” in referring to a picture of him performing for a sold out arena, while in 2019 Shawn Mendes informed his 24.4 million Twitter followers that his “life is a dream”. These are but a few examples of successful music industry artists who are seeing their ‘wishes’ come true and living the American Dream.Endemic to the American culture (and a characteristic of the identity of the country) is the “American Dream”. It centres on “a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for every man, with opportunity for each according to his ability and achievement” (Adams, 404). Although initially used to describe having a nice house, money, stability and a reasonable standard of living, the American Dream has since evolved to what the scholar Florida believes is the new ‘aspiration of people’: doing work that is enjoyable and relies on human creativity. At its core, the original American Dream required striving to meet individual goals, and was promoted as possible for anyone regardless of their cultural, socio-economic and political background (Samuel), because it encourages the celebrating of the self and personal uniqueness (Gamson). Florida’s conceptualisation of the New American dream, however, tends to emphasise obtaining success, fame and fortune in what Neff, Wissinger, and Zukin (310) consider “hot”, “creative” industries where “the jobs are cool”.Whether old or new, the American Dream has perpetuated and reinforced celebrity culture, with many of the young generation reporting that fame and fortune were their priorities, as they sought to emulate the success of their famous role models (Florida). The rag to riches stories of iconic recording artists can inevitably glorify and make appealing the struggle that permits achieving one’s dream, with celebrities offering young, aspiring creative people a means of identification for helping them to aspire to meet their dreams (Florida; Samuel). For example, a young Demi Lovato spoke of how she idolised and looked up to singer Beyonce Knowles, describing Knowles as a role model because of the way she carries herself (Tishgart). Similarly, American Idol winner Kelly Clarkson cited Aretha Franklin as her musical inspiration and the reason that she sings from a place deep within (Nilles). It is unsurprising then, that popular media has tended to portray artists working in the creative industries and being paid to follow their passions as “a much-vaunted career dream” (Duffy and Wissinger, 4656). Movies such as A Star Is Born (2018), The Coal Miner’s Daughter (1980), Dreamgirls (2006), Begin Again (2013) and La La Land (2016) exalt the perception that creativity, talent, sacrifice and determination will mean dreams come true (Nicolaou). In concert with the American dream is the drive among creative people pursuing creative success to achieve their dreams because of the perceived autonomy they will gain, the chance of self-actualisation and social rewards, and the opportunity to fulfil intrinsic motivations (Amabile; Auger and Woodman; Cohen). For these workers, the love of creation and the happiness that accompanies new discoveries (Csikszentmihalyi) can offset the tight budgets and timelines, precarious labour (Blair, Grey, and Randle; Hesmondhalgh and Baker), uncertain demand (Caves; Shultz), sacrifice of personal relationships (Eikhof and Haunschild), the demand for high quality products (Gil & Spiller), and the tense relationships with administrators (Bilton) which are known to plague these industries. In some cases, young, up and coming creative people overlook these pitfalls, instead romanticising creative careers as ideal and worthwhile. They willingly take on roles and cede control to big corporations to “realize their passions [and] uncover their personal talent” (Bill, 50). Of course, as Ursell argues in discussing television employees, such idealisation can mean creatives, especially those who are young and unfamiliar with the constraints of the industry, end up immersed in and victims of the “vampiric” industry that exploits workers (816). They are socialised towards believing, in this case, that the record label is a necessary component to obtain fame and fortune and whether willing or unwilling, creative workers become complicit in their own exploitation (Cohen). Loss of Control and No CompensationThe music industry itself has been considered by some to typify the cultural industries (Chambers). Popular music has potency in that it is perceived as speaking a universal language (Burnett), engaging the emotions and thoughts of listeners, and assisting in their identity construction (Burnett; Gardikiotis and Baltzis). Given the place of music within society, it is not surprising that in 2018, the global music industry was worth US$19.1billion (IFPI). The music industry is necessarily underpinned by a commercial agenda. At present, six major recording companies exist and between them, they own between 70-80 per cent of the recordings produced globally (Konsor). They also act as gatekeepers, setting trends by defining what and who is worth following and listening to (Csikszentmihalyi; Jones, Anand, and Alvarez). In essence, to be successful in the music industry is to be affiliated with a record label. This is because the highly competitive nature and cluttered environment makes it harder to gain traction in the market without worthwhile representation (Moiso and Rockman). In the 2012 documentary about Thirty Seconds to Mars, Artifact, front man Jared Leto even questions whether it is possible to have “success without a label”. The recording company, he determines, “deal with the crappy jobs”. In a financially uncertain industry that makes money from subjective or experience-based goods (Caves), having a label affords an artist access to “economic capital for production and promotion” that enables “wider recognition” of creative work (Scott, 239). With the support of a record label, creative entrepreneurs are given the chance to be promoted and distributed in the creative marketplace (Scott; Shultz). To have a record label, then, is to be perceived as legitimate and credible (Shultz).However, the commercial music industry is just that, commercial. Accordingly, the desire to make money can see the intrinsic desires of musicians forfeited in favour of standardised products and a lack of remuneration for artists (Negus). To see this standardisation in practice, one need not look further than those contestants appearing on shows such as American Idol or The Voice. Nowhere is the standardisation of the music industry more evident than in Holmes’s 2004 article on Pop Idol. Pop Idol first aired in Britain from 2001-2003 and paved the way for a slew of similar shows around the world such as Australia’s Popstars Live in 2004 and the global Idol phenomena. According to Holmes, audiences are divested of the illusion of talent and stardom when they witness the obvious manufacturing of musical talent. The contestants receive training, are dressed according to a prescribed image, and the show emphasises those melodramatic moments that are commercially enticing to audiences. Her sentiments suggest these shows emphasise the artifice of the music industry by undermining artistic authenticity in favour of generating celebrities. The standardisation is typified in the post Idol careers of Kelly Clarkson and Adam Lambert. Kelly Clarkson parted with the recording company RCA when her manager and producer Clive Davis told her that her album My December (2007) was “not commercial enough” and that Clarkson, who had written most of the songs, was a “shitty writer… who should just shut up and sing” (Nied). Adam Lambert left RCA because they wanted him to make a full length 80s album comprised of covers. Lambert commented that, “while there are lots of great songs from that decade, my heart is simply not in doing a covers album” (Lee). In these instances, winning the show and signing contracts led to both Clarkson and Lambert forfeiting a degree of creative control over their work in favour of formulaic songs that ultimately left both artists unsatisfied. The standardisation and lack of remuneration is notable when signing recording artists to 360° contracts. These 360° contracts have become commonplace in the music industry (Gulchardaz, Bach, and Penin) and see both the material and immaterial labour (such as personal identities) of recording artists become controlled by record labels (Stahl and Meier). These labels determine the aesthetics of the musicians as well as where and how frequently they tour. Furthermore, the labels become owners of any intellectual property generated by an artist during the tenure of the contract (Sanders; Stahl and Meier). For example, in their documentary Show Em What You’re Made Of (2015), the Backstreet Boys lament their affiliation with manager Lou Pearlman. Not only did Pearlman manufacture the group in a way that prevented creative exploration by the members (Sanders), but he withheld profits to the point that the Backstreet Boys had to sue Pearlman in order to gain access to money they deserved. In 2002 the members of the Backstreet Boys had stated that “it wasn’t our destinies that we had to worry about in the past, it was our souls” (Sanders, 541). They were not writing their own music, which came across in the documentary Show Em What You’re Made Of when singer Howie Dorough demanded that if they were to collaborate as a group again in 2013, that everything was to be produced, managed and created by the five group members. Such a demand speaks to creative individuals being tied to their work both personally and emotionally (Bain). The angst encountered by music artists also signals the identity dissonance and conflict felt when they are betraying their true or authentic creative selves (Ashforth and Mael; Ashforth and Humphrey). Performing and abiding by the rules and regulations of others led to frustration because the members felt they were “being passed off as something we aren’t” (Sanders 539). The Backstreet Boys were not the only musicians who were intensely controlled and not adequately compensated by Pearlman. In the documentary The Boy Band Con: The Lou Pearlman Story 2019, Lance Bass of N*Sync and recording artist Aaron Carter admitted that the experience of working with Pearlman became a nightmare when they too, were receiving cheques that were so small that Bass describes them as making his heart sink. For these groups, the dream of making music was undone by contracts that stifled creativity and paid a pittance.In a similar vein, Thirty Seconds to Mars sought to cut ties with their record label when they felt that they were not being adequately compensated for their work. In retaliation EMI issued Mars with a US$30 million lawsuit for breach of contract. The tense renegotiations that followed took a toll on the creative drive of the group. At one point in the documentary Artifact (2012), Leto claims “I can’t sing it right now… You couldn’t pay me all the money in the world to sing this song the way it needs to be sung right now. I’m not ready”. The contract subordination (Phillips; Stahl and Meier) that had led to the need to renegotiate financial terms came at not only a financial cost to the band, but also a physical and emotional one. The negativity impacted the development of the songs for the new album. To make music requires evoking necessary and appropriate emotions in the recording studio (Wood, Duffy, and Smith), so Leto being unable to deliver the song proved problematic. Essentially, the stress of the lawsuit and negotiations damaged the motivation of the band (Amabile; Elsbach and Hargadon; Hallowell) and interfered with their creative approach, which could have produced standardised and poor quality work (Farr and Ford). The dream of making music was almost lost because of the EMI lawsuit. Young creatives often lack bargaining power when entering into contracts with corporations, which can prove disadvantaging when it comes to retaining control over their lives (Phillips; Stahl and Meier). Singer Demi Lovato’s big break came in the 2008 Disney film Camp Rock. As her then manager Phil McIntyre states in the documentary Simply Complicated (2017), Camp Rock was “perceived as the vehicle to becoming a superstar … overnight she became a household name”. However, as “authentic and believable” as Lovato’s edginess appeared, the speed with which her success came took a toll on Lovato. The pressure she experienced having to tour, write songs that were approved by others, star in Disney channel shows and movies, and look a certain way, became too much and to compensate, Lovato engaged in regular drug use to feel free. Accordingly, she developed a hybrid identity to ensure that the squeaky clean image required by the moral clauses of her contract, was not tarnished by her out-of-control lifestyle. The nightmare came from becoming famous at a young age and not being able to handle the expectations that accompanied it, coupled with a stringent contract that exploited her creative talent. Lovato’s is not a unique story. Research has found that musicians are more inclined than those in other workforces to use psychotherapy and psychotropic drugs (Vaag, Bjørngaard, and Bjerkeset) and that fame and money can provide musicians more opportunities to take risks, including drug-use that leads to mortality (Bellis, Hughes, Sharples, Hennell, and Hardcastle). For Lovato, living the dream at a young age ultimately became overwhelming with drugs her only means of escape. AuthenticityThe challenges then for music artists is that the dream of pursuing music can come at the cost of a musician’s authentic self. According to Hughes, “to be authentic is to be in some sense real and true to something ... It is not simply an imitation, but it is sincere, real, true, and original expression of its creator, and is believable or credible representations or example of what it appears to be” (190). For Nick Jonas of the Jonas Brothers, being in the spotlight and abiding by the demands of Disney was “non-stop” and prevented his personal and musical growth (Chasing Happiness). As Kevin Jonas put it, Nick “wanted the Jonas Brothers to be no more”. The extensive promotion that accompanies success and fame, which is designed to drive celebrity culture and financial motivations (Currid-Halkett and Scott; King), can lead to cynical performances and dissatisfaction (Hughes) if the identity work of the creative creates a disjoin between their perceived self and aspirational self (Beech, Gilmore, Cochrane, and Greig). Promoting the band (and having to film a television show and movies he was not invested in all because of contractual obligations) impacted on Nick’s authentic self to the point that the Jonas Brothers made him feel deeply upset and anxious. For Nick, being stifled creatively led to feeling inauthentic, thereby resulting in the demise of the band as his only recourse.In her documentary Gaga: Five Foot Two (2017), Lady Gaga discusses the extent she had to go to maintain a sense of authenticity in response to producer control. As she puts it, “when producers wanted me to be sexy, I always put some absurd spin on it, that made me feel like I was still in control”. Her words reaffirm the perception amongst scholars (Currid-Halkett and Scott; King; Meyers) that in playing the information game, industry leaders will construct an artist’s persona in ways that are most beneficial for, in this case, the record label. That will mean, for example, establishing a coherent life story for musicians that endears them to audiences and engaging recording artists in co-branding opportunities to raise their profile and to legitimise them in the marketplace. Such behaviour can potentially influence the preferences and purchases of audiences and fans, can create favourability, originality and clarity around artists (Loroz and Braig), and can establish competitive advantage that leads to producers being able to charge higher prices for the artists’ work (Hernando and Campo). But what impact does that have on the musician? Lady Gaga could not continue living someone else’s dream. She found herself needing to make changes in order to avoid quitting music altogether. As Gaga told a class of university students at the Emotion Revolution Summit hosted by Yale University:I don’t like being used to make people money. It feels sad when I am overworked and that I have just become a money-making machine and that my passion and creativity take a backseat. That makes me unhappy.According to Eikof and Haunschild, economic necessity can threaten creative motivation. Gaga’s reaction to the commercial demands of the music industry signal an identity conflict because her desire to create, clashed with the need to be commercial, with the outcome imposing “inconsistent demands upon” her (Ashforth and Mael, 29). Therefore, to reduce what could be considered feelings of dissonance and inconsistency (Ashforth and Mael; Ashforth and Humphrey) Gaga started saying “no” to prevent further loss of her identity and sense of authentic self. Taking back control could be seen as a means of reorienting her dream and overcoming what had become dissatisfaction with the commercial processes of the music industry. ConclusionsFor many creatives working in the creative industries – and specifically the music industry – is constructed as a dream come true; the working conditions and expectations experienced by recording artists are far from liberating and instead can become nightmares to which they want to escape. The case studies above, although likely ‘constructed’ retellings of the unfortunate circumstances encountered working in the music industry, nevertheless offer an inside account that contradicts the prevailing ideology that pursuing creative passions leads to a dream career (Florida; Samuel). If anything, the case studies explored above involving 30 Seconds to Mars, the Jonas Brothers, Lady Gaga, Kelly Clarkson, Adam Lambert and the Backstreet Boys, acknowledge what many scholars writing in the creative industries have already identified; that exploitation, subordination, identity conflict and loss of control are the unspoken or lesser known consequences of pursuing the creative dream. That said, the conundrum for creatives is that for success in the industry big “creative” businesses, such as recording labels, are still considered necessary in order to break into the market and to have prolonged success. This is simply because their resources far exceed those at the disposal of independent and up-and-coming creative entrepreneurs. Therefore, it can be argued that this friction of need between creative industry business versus artists will be on-going leading to more of these ‘dream to nightmare’ stories. The struggle will continue manifesting in the relationship between business and artist for long as the recording artists fight for greater equality, independence of creativity and respect for their work, image and identities. 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Introduction The scientific validity of climate change claims, how to intervene (if at all) in environmental, economic, political and social consequences of climate change, and the adaptation and mitigation needed with any given climate change scenario, are contested areas of public, policy and academic discourses. For marginalised populations, the climate discourses around adaptation, mitigation, vulnerability and resilience are of particular importance. This paper considers the silence around disabled people in these discourses. Marci Roth of the Spinal Cord Injury Association testified before Congress in regards to the Katrina disaster: [On August 29] Susan Daniels called me to enlist my help because her sister in-law, a quadriplegic woman in New Orleans, had been unsuccessfully trying to evacuate to the Superdome for two days. […] It was clear that this woman, Benilda Caixetta, was not being evacuated. I stayed on the phone with Benilda, for the most part of the day. […] She kept telling me she’d been calling for a ride to the Superdome since Saturday; but, despite promises, no one came. The very same paratransit system that people can’t rely on in good weather is what was being relied on in the evacuation. […] I was on the phone with Benilda when she told me, with panic in her voice “the water is rushing in.” And then her phone went dead. We learned five days later that she had been found in her apartment dead, floating next to her wheelchair. […] Benilda did not have to drown. (National Council on Disability, emphasis added) According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), adaptation is the “Adjustment in natural or human systems in response to actual or expected climatic stimuli or their effects, which moderates harm or exploits beneficial opportunities” (IPCC, Climate Change 2007). Adaptations can be anticipatory or reactive, and depending on their degree of spontaneity they can be autonomous or planned (IPCC, Fourth Assessment Report). Adaptations can be private or public (IPCC, Fourth Assessment Report), technological, behavioural, managerial and structural (National Research Council of Canada). Adaptation, in the context of human dimensions of global change, usually refers to a process, action or outcome in a system (household, community, group, sector, region, country) in order for that system to better cope with, manage or adjust to some changing condition, stress, hazard, risk or opportunity (Smit and Wandel). Adaptation can encompass national or regional strategies as well as practical steps taken at the community level or by individuals. According to Smit et al, a framework for systematically defining adaptations is based on three questions: (i) adaptation to what; (ii) who or what adapts; and (iii) how does adaptation occur? These are essential questions that have to be looked at from many angles including cultural and anthropological lenses as well as lenses of marginalised and highly vulnerable populations. Mitigation (to reduce or prevent changes in the climate system), vulnerability (the degree to which a system is susceptible to, and unable to cope with, the adverse effects of climate change), and resilience (the amount of change a system can undergo without changing state), are other important concepts within the climate change discourse. Non-climate stresses can increase vulnerability to climate change by reducing resilience and can also reduce adaptive capacity because of resource deployment to competing needs. Extending this to the context of disabled people, ableism (sentiment to expect certain abilities within humans) (Wolbring, “Is there an end to out-able?”) and disablism (the unwillingness to accommodate different needs) (Miller, Parker and Gillinson) are two concepts that will thus play themselves out in climate discourses. The “Summary for Policymakers” of the IPCC 2007 report, Climate Change 2007: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability, states: “Poor communities can be especially vulnerable, in particular those concentrated in high-risk areas. They tend to have more limited adaptive capacities, and are more dependent on climate-sensitive resources such as local water and food supplies.” From this quote one can conclude that disabled people are particularly impacted, as the majority of disabled people live in poverty (Elwan). For instance, CARE International, a humanitarian organisation fighting global poverty, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, and Maplecroft, a company that specialises in the calculation, analysis and visualisation of global risks, conclude: “The degree of vulnerability is determined by underlying natural, human, social, physical and financial factors and is a major reason why poor people—especially those in marginalised social groups like women, children, the elderly and people with disabilities—are most affected by disasters” (CARE International). The purpose of this paper is to expose the reader to (a) how disabled people are situated in the culture of the climate, adaptation, mitigation and resilience discourse; (b) how one would answer the three questions, (i) adaptation to what, (ii) who or what adapts, and (iii) how does adaptation occur (Smit et al), using a disabled people lens; and (c) what that reality of the involvement of disabled people within the climate change discourse might herald for other groups in the future. The paper contends that there is a pressing need for the climate discourse to be more inclusive and to develop a new social contract to modify existing dynamics of ableism and disablism so as to avoid the uneven distribution of evident burdens already linked to climate change. A Culture of Neglect: The Situation of Disabled People As climates changes, environmental events that are classified as natural disasters are expected to be more frequent. In the face of recent disaster responses, how effective have these efforts been as they relate to the needs and challenges faced by disabled people? Almost immediately after Hurricane Katrina devastated the Gulf Coast, the National Council on Disability (NCD) in the United States estimated that 155,000 people with disabilities lived in the three cities hardest hit by the hurricane (about 25 per cent of the cities’ populations). The NCD urged emergency managers and government officials to recognise that the need for basic necessities by hurricane survivors with disabilities was “compounded by chronic health conditions and functional impairments … [which include] people who are blind, people who are deaf, people who use wheelchairs, canes, walkers, crutches, people with service animals, and people with mental health needs.” The NCD estimated that a disproportionate number of fatalities were people with disabilities. They cited one statistic from the American Association of Retired Persons (AARP): “73 per cent of Hurricane Katrina-related deaths in New Orleans area were among persons age 60 and over, although they comprised only 15 per cent of the population in New Orleans.” As the NCD stated, “most of those individuals had medical conditions and functional or sensory disabilities that made them more vulnerable. Many more people with disabilities under the age of 60 died or were otherwise impacted by the hurricanes.” As these numbers are very likely linked to the impaired status of the elderly, it seems reasonable to assume similar numbers for non-elderly disabled people. Hurricane Katrina is but one example of how disabled people are neglected in a disaster (Hemingway and Priestley; Fjord and Manderson). Disabled people were also disproportionately impacted in other disasters, such as the 1995 Great Hanshin Earthquake in Japan (Nakamura) or the 2003 heatwave in France, where 63 per cent of heat-related deaths occurred in institutions, with a quarter of these in nursing homes (Holstein et al.). A review of 18 US heatwave response plans revealed that although people with mental or chronic illnesses and the homeless constitute a significant proportion of the victims in recent heatwaves, only one plan emphasised outreach to disabled persons, and only two addressed the shelter and water needs of the homeless (Ebi and Meehl; Bernhard and McGeehin). Presence of Disabled People in Climate Discourse Although climate change will disproportionately impact disabled people, despite the less than stellar record of disaster adaptation and mitigation efforts towards disabled people, and despite the fact that other social groups (such as women, children, ‘the poor’, indigenous people, farmers and displaced people) are mentioned in climate-related reports such as the IPCC reports and the Human Development Report 2007/2008, the same reports do not mention disabled people. Even worse, the majority of the material generated by, and physically set up for, discourses on climate, is inaccessible for many disabled people (Australian Human Rights Commission). For instance, the IPCC report, Climate Change 2007: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability, contains Box 8.2: Gender and natural disasters, makes the following points: (a) “men and women are affected differently in all phases of a disaster, from exposure to risk and risk perception; to preparedness behaviour, warning communication and response; physical, psychological, social and economic impacts; emergency response; and ultimately to recovery and reconstruction”; (b) “natural disasters have been shown to result in increased domestic violence against, and post-traumatic stress disorders in, women”; and (c) “women make an important contribution to disaster reduction, often informally through participating in disaster management and acting as agents of social change. Their resilience and their networks are critical in household and community recovery.” The content of Box 8.2 acknowledges the existence of different perspectives and contributions to the climate discourse, and that it is beneficial to explore these differences. It seems reasonable to assume that differences in perspectives, contributions and impact may well also exist between people with and without disabilities, and that it may be likewise beneficial to explore these differences. Disabled people are differently affected in all phases of a disaster, from exposure to risk and risk perception; to preparedness behaviour, warning communication and response; physical, psychological, social and economic impacts; emergency response; and ultimately to recovery and reconstruction. Disabled people could also make an important contribution to disaster reduction, often informally through participating in disaster management and acting as agents of social change. Their resilience and their networks are critical in household and community recovery, important as distributors of relief efforts and in reconstruction design. The Bonn Declaration from the 2007 international conference, Disasters are always Inclusive: Persons with Disabilities in Humanitarian Emergency Situations, highlighted many problems disabled people are facing and gives recommendations for inclusive disaster preparedness planning, for inclusive response in acute emergency situations and immediate rehabilitation measures, and for inclusive post-disaster reconstruction and development measures. Many workshops were initiated by disabled people groups, such as Rehabilitation International. However, the disabled people disaster adaptation and mitigation discourse is not mainstreamed. Advocacy by people with disability for accessible transport and universal or “life-cycle” housing (among other things) shows how they can contribute significantly to more effective social systems and public facilities. These benefit everyone and help to shift public expectations towards accessible and flexible amenities and services—for example, emergency response and evacuation procedures are much easier for all if such facilities are universally accessible. Most suggestions by disabled people for a more integrative, accessible physical environment and societal attitude benefit everyone, and gain special importance with the ever-increasing proportion of elderly people in society. The IPCC Fourth Assessment Report is intended to be a balanced assessment of current knowledge on climate change mitigation. However, none of the 2007 IPCC reports mention disabled people. Does that mean that disabled people are not impacted by, or impact, climate change? Does no knowledge of adaptation, mitigation and adaptation capacity from a disabled people lens exist, or does the knowledge not reach the IPCC, or does the IPCC judge this knowledge as irrelevant? This culture of neglect and unbalanced assessment of knowledge evident in the IPCC reports was recognised before for rise of a ‘global’ climate discourse. For instance, a 2001 Canadian government document asked that research agendas be developed with the involvement of, among others, disabled people (Health Canada). The 2009 Nairobi Declaration on Africa’s response to climate change (paragraph 36) also asks for the involvement of disabled people (African Ministerial Conference on the Environment). However, so far nothing has trickled up to the international bodies, like the IPCC, or leading conferences such as the United Nations Climate Change Conference Copenhagen 2009. Where Will It End? In his essay, “We do not need climate change apartheid in adaptation”, in the Human Development Report 2007/2008, Archbishop Desmond Tutu suggests that we are drifting into a situation of global adaptation apartheid—that adaptation becomes a euphemism for social injustice on a global scale (United Nations Development Programme). He uses the term “adaptation apartheid” to highlight the inequality of support for adaptation capacity between high and low income countries: “Inequality in capacity to adapt to climate change is emerging as a potential driver of wider disparities in wealth, security and opportunities for human development”. I submit that “adaptation apartheid” also exists in regard to disabled people, with the invisibility of disabled people in the climate discourse being just one facet. The unwillingness to accommodate, to help the “other,” is nothing new for disabled people. The ableism that favours species-typical bodily functioning (Wolbring, “Is there an end to out-able?”; Wolbring, “Why NBIC?”) and disablism (Miller, Parker, and Gillinson)—the lack of accommodation enthusiasm for the needs of people with ‘below’ species-typical body abilities and the unwillingness to adapt to the needs of “others”—is a form of “adaptation apartheid,” of accommodation apartheid, of adaptation disablism that has been battled by disabled people for a long time. In a 2009 online survey of 2000 British people, 38 per cent believed that most people in British society see disabled people as a “drain on resources” (Scope). A majority of human geneticist concluded in a survey in 1999 that disabled people will never be given the support they need (Nippert and Wolff). Adaptation disablism is visible in the literature and studies around other disasters. The 1988 British Medical Association discussion document, Selection of casualties for treatment after nuclear attack, stated “casualties whose injuries were likely to lead to a permanent disability would receive lower priority than those expected to fully recover” (Sunday Morning Herald). Famine is seen to lead to increased infanticide, increased competitiveness and decreased collaboration (Participants of the Nuclear Winter: The Anthropology of Human Survival Session). Ableism and disablism notions experienced by disabled people can now be extended to include those challenges expected to arise from the need to adapt to climate change. It is reasonable to expect that ableism will prevail, expecting people to cope with certain forms of climate change, and that disablism will be extended, with the ones less affected being unwilling to accommodate the ones more affected beyond a certain point. This ableism/disablism will not only play itself out between high and low income countries, as Desmond Tutu described, but also within high income countries, as not every need will be accommodated. The disaster experience of disabled people is just one example. And there might be climate change consequences that one can only mitigate through high tech bodily adaptations that will not be available to many of the ones who are so far accommodated in high income countries. Desmond Tutu submits that adaptation apartheid might work for the fortunate ones in the short term, but will be destructive for them in the long term (United Nations Development Programme). Disability studies scholar Erik Leipoldt proposed that the disability perspective of interdependence is a practical guide from the margins for making new choices that may lead to a just and sustainable world—a concept that reduces the distance between each other and our environment (Leipoldt). 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Through my last lengthy writing project, it did not take long to I realise I had become obsessed with paths. The proof of it was there in my notebooks, and, most prominently, in the backlog of photographs cluttering the inner workings of my mobile phone. Most of the photographs I took had a couple of things in common: first, the astonishing greenness of the world they were describing; second, the way a road or path or corridor or pavement or trail led off into distance. The greenness was because I was in England, in summer, and mostly in a part of the country where green seems at times the only colour. I am not sure what it was about tailing perspective that caught me.Image 1: a) Undercliffe Cemetery, Bradford; b) Undercliffe Cemetery, Bradfordc) Leeds Road, Otley; d) Shibden Park, Halifax Image 2: a) Runswick Bay; b) St. Mary's Churchyard, Habberleyc) The Habberley Road, to Pontesbury; d) Todmorden, path to Stoodley Pike I was working on a kind of family memoir, tied up in my grandmother’s last days, which were also days I spent marching through towns and countryside I once knew, looking for clues about a place and its past. I had left the north-west of England a decade or so before, and I was grappling with what James Wood calls “homelooseness”, a sensation of exile that even economic migrants like myself encounter. It is a particular kind of “secular homelessness” in which “the ties that might bind one to Home have been loosened” (105-106). Loosened irrevocably, I might add. The kind of wandering which I embarked on is not unique. Wood describes it in himself, and in the work of W.G. Sebald—a writer who, he says, “had an exquisite sense of the varieties of not-belonging” (106).I walked a lot, mostly on paths I used to know. And when, later, I counted up the photographs I had taken of that similar-but-different scene, there were almost 500 of them, none of which I can bring myself to delete. Some were repeated, or nearly so—I had often tried to make sure the path in the frame was centred in the middle of the screen. Most of the pictures were almost entirely miscellaneous, and if it were not for a feature on my phone I could not work out how to turn off (that feature which tracks where each photograph was taken) I would not have much idea of what each picture represented. What’s clear is that there was some lingering significance, some almost-tangible metaphor, in the way I was recording the walking I was doing. This same significance is there, too (in an almost quantifiable way), in the thesis I was working on while I was taking the photographs: I used the word “path” 63 times in the version I handed to examiners, not counting all the times I could have, but chose not to—all the “pavements”, “trails”, “roads”, and “holloways” of it would add up to a number even more substantial. For instance, the word “walk”, or derivatives of it, comes up 115 times. This article is designed to ask why. I aim to focus on that metaphor, on that significance, and unpack the way life writing can intersect with both the journey of a life being lived, and the process of writing down that life (by process of writing I sometimes mean anything but: I mean the process of working towards the writing. Of going, of doing, of talking, of spending, of working, of thinking, of walking). I came, in the thesis, to view certain kinds of prose as a way of imitating the rhythms of the mind, but I think there’s something about that rhythm which associates it with the feet as well. Rebecca Solnit thinks so too, or, at least, that the processes of thinking and walking can wrap around each other, helixed or concatenated. In Wanderlust she says that:the rhythm of walking generates a kind of rhythm of thinking, and the passage through a landscape echoes or stimulates the passage through a series of thoughts. This creates an odd consonance between internal and external passage, one that suggests that the mind is also a landscape of sorts and that walking is one way to traverse it. (5-6)The “odd consonance” Solnit speaks of is a kind of seamlessness between the internal and external; it is something which can be aped on the page. And, in this way, prose can imitate the mind thinking. This way of writing is evident in the digression-filled, wandering, sinuous sentences of W.G. Sebald, and of Marcel Proust as well. I don’t want to entangle myself in the question of whether Proust and Sebald count as life writers here. I used them as models, and, at the very least, I think their prose manipulates the conceits of the autobiographical pact. In fact, Sebald often refused to label his own work; once he called his writing “prose [...] of indefinite form” (Franklin 123). My definition of life writing is, thus, indefinite, and merely indicates the field in which I work and know best.Edmund White, when writing on Proust, suggested that every page of Remembrance of Things Past—while only occasionally being a literal page of Proust’s mind thinking—is, nevertheless, “a transcript of a mind thinking [...] the fully orchestrated, ceaseless, and disciplined ruminations of one mind, one voice” (138). Ceaselessness, seamlessness ... there’s also a viscosity to this kind of prose—Virginia Woolf called it “impassioned”, and spoke of the way some prosecan lick up with its long glutinous tongue the most minute fragments of fact and mass them into the most subtle labyrinths, and listen silently at doors behind which only a murmur, only a whisper, is to be heard. With all the suppleness of a tool which is in constant use it can follow the windings and record the changes which are typical of the modern mind. To this, with Proust and Dostoevsky behind us, we must agree. (20)When I read White and Woolf it seemed they could have been talking about Sebald, too: everything in Sebald’s oeuvre is funnelled through what White described in Remembrance as the cyclopean “I” at the centre of the Proustian consciousness (138). The same could be said about Sebald: as Lynne Schwartz says, “All Sebald’s characters sound like the narrator” (15). And that narrator has very particular qualities, encouraged by the sense of homelooseness Wood describes: the Sebald narrator is a wanderer, by train through Italian cities and New York Suburbs, on foot through the empty reaches of the English countryside, exploring the history of each settlement he passes through [...] Wherever he travels, he finds strangely vacant streets and roads, not a soul around [...] Sebald’s books are famously strewn with evocative, gloomy black-and-white photographs that call up the presence of the dead, of vanished places, and also serve as proofs of his passage. (Schwartz 14) I tried to resist the urge to take photographs, for the simple reason that I knew I could not include them all in the finished thesis—even including some would seem (perhaps) derivative. But this method of wandering—whether on the page or in the world—was formative for me. And the linkage between thinking and walking, and walking and writing, and writing and thinking is worth exploring, if only to identify some reason for that need to show proof of passage.Walking in Proust and Sebald either forms the shape of narrative, or one its cruxes. Both found ways to let walking affect the rhythm, movement, motivation, and even the aesthetic of their prose. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn, for example, is plotless because of the way it follows its narrator on a walking tour of Suffolk. The effect is similar to something Murray Baumgarten noticed in one of Sebald’s other books, The Emigrants: “The [Sebaldian] narrator discovers in the course of his travels (and with him the reader) that he is constructing the text he is reading, a text at once being imagined and destroyed, a fragment of the past, and a ruin that haunts the present” (268). Proust’s opus is a meditation on the different ways we can walk. Remembrance is a book about momentum—a book about movement. It is a book which always forges forward, but which always faces backward, where time and place can still and footsteps be paused in motion, or tiptoed upstairs and across tables or be caught in flight over the body of an octogenarian lying on a beach. And it is the walks of the narrator’s past—his encounters with landscape—that give his present (and future) thoughts impetus: the rhythms of his long-past progress still affect the way he moves and acts and thinks, and will always do so:the “Méséglise way” and the “Guermantes way” remain for me linked with many of the little incidents of that one of all the divers lives along whose parallel lines we are moved, which is the most abundant in sudden reverses of fortune, the richest in episodes; I mean the life of the mind [...] [T]he two “ways” give to those [impressions of the mind] a foundation, depth, a dimension lacking from the rest. They invest them, too, with a charm, a significance which is for me alone. (Swann’s Way 252-255)The two “ways”—walks in and around the town of Combray—are, for the narrator, frames through which he thinks about his childhood, and all the things which happened to him because of that childhood. I felt something similar through the process of writing my thesis: a need to allow the 3-mile-per-hour-connection between mind and body and place that Solnit speaks about seep into my work. I felt the stirrings of old ways; the places I once walked, which I photographed and paced, pulsed and pushed me forwards in the present and towards the future. I felt strangely attached to, and disconnected from, those pathways: lanes where I had rummaged for conkers; streets my grandparents had once lived and worked on; railways demolished because of roads which now existed, leaving only long, straight pathways through overgrown countryside suffused with time and memory. The oddness I felt might be an effect of what Wood describes as a “certain doubleness”, “where homesickness is a kind of longing for Britain and an irritation with Britain: sickness for and sickness of” (93-94). The model of seamless prose offered some way to articulate, at least, the particularities of this condition, and of the problem of connection—whether with place or the past. But it is in this shift away from conclusiveness, which occurs when the writer constructs-as-they-write, that Baumgarten sees seamlessness:rather than the defined edges, boundaries, and conventional perceptions promised by realism, and the efficient account of intention, action, causation, and conclusion implied by the stance of realistic prose, reader and narrator have to assimilate the past and present in a dream state in which they blend imperceptibly into each other. (277)It’s difficult to articulate the way in which the connection between walking, writing, and thinking works. Solnit draws one comparison, talking to the ways in which digression and association mix:as a literary structure, the recounted walk encourages digression and association, in contrast to the stricter form of a discourse or the chronological progression of a biographical or historical narrative [...] James Joyce and Virginia Woolf would, in trying to describe the workings of the mind, develop of style called stream of consciousness. In their novels Ulysses and Mrs Dalloway, the jumble of thoughts and recollections of their protagonists unfolds best during walks. This kind of unstructured, associative thinking is the kind most often connected to walking, and it suggests walking as not an analytical but an improvisational act. (21)I think the key, here, is the notion of association—in the making of connections, and, in my case, in the making of connections between present and past. When we walk we exist in a roving state, and with a dual purpose: Sophie Cunningham says that we walk to get from one place to the next, but also to insist that “what lies between our point of departure and our destination is important. We create connection. We pay attention to detail, and these details plant us firmly in the day, in the present” (Cunningham). The slipperiness of homelooseness can be emphasised in the slipperiness of seamless prose, and walking—situating self in the present—is a rebuttal of slipperiness (if, as I will argue, a rebuttal which has at its heart a contradiction: it is both effective and ineffective. It feels as close as is possible to something impossible to attain). Solnit argues that walking and what she calls “personal, descriptive, and specific” writing are suited to each other:walking is itself a way of grounding one’s thoughts in a personal and embodied experience of the world that it lends itself to this kind of writing. This is why the meaning of walking is mostly discussed elsewhere than in philosophy: in poetry, novels, letters, diaries, travellers’ accounts, and first-person essays. (26)If a person is searching for some kind of possible-impossible grounding in the past, then walking pace is the pace at which to achieve that sensation (both in the world and on the page). It is at walking pace that connections can be made, even if they can be sensed slipping away: this is the Janus-faced problem of attempting to uncover anything which has been. The search, in fact, becomes facsimile for the past itself, or for the inconclusiveness of the past. In my own work—in preparing for that work—I walked and wrote about walking up the flank of the hill which hovered above the house in which I lived before I left England. To get to the top, and the great stone monument which sits there, I had to pass that house. The door was open, and that was enough to unsettle. Baumgarten, again on The Emigrants, articulates the effect: “unresolved, fragmented, incomplete, relying on shards for evidence, the narrator insists on the inconclusiveness of his experience: rather than arriving at a conclusion, narrator and reader are left disturbed” (269).Sebald writes in his usual intense way about a Swiss writer, Robert Walser, who he calls le promeneur solitaire (“The Solitary Walker”). Walser was a prolific writer, but through the last years of his life wrote less and less until he ended up incapable of doing so: in the end, Sebald says, “the traces Robert Walser left on his path through life were so faint as to have almost been effaced altogether” (119).Sebald draws parallels between Walser and his own grandfather. Both have worked their way into Sebald’s prose, along with the author himself. Because of this cocktail, I’ve come to read Sebald’s thoughts on Walser as sideways thoughts on his own prose (perhaps due to that cyclopean quality described by White). The works of the two writers share, at the very least, a certain incandescent ephemerality—a quality which exists in Sebald’s work, crystallised in the form and formlessness of a wasps’ nest. The wasps’ nest is a symbol Sebald uses in his book Vertigo, and which he talks to in an interview with Sarah Kafatou:do you know what a wasp’s nest is like? It’s made of something much much thinner than airmail paper: grey and as thin as possible. This gets wrapped around and around like pastry, like a millefeuille, and can get as big as two feet across. It weighs nothing. For me the wasp’s nest is a kind of ideal vision: an object that is extremely complicated and intricate, made out of something that hardly exists. (32)It is in this ephemerality that the walker’s way of moving—if not their journey—can be felt. The ephemerality is necessary because of the way the world is: the way it always passes. A work which is made to seem to encompass everything, like Remembrance of Things Past, is made to do so because that is the nature of what walking offers: an ability to comprehend the world solidly, both minutely and vastly, but with a kind of forgetting attached to it. When a person walks through the world they are firmly embedded in it, yes, but they are also always enacting a process of forgetting where they have been. This continual interplay between presence and absence is evidenced in the way in which Sebald and Proust build the consciousnesses they shape on the page—consciousnessess accustomed to connectedness. According to Sebald, it was through the prose of Walser that he learned this—or, at least, through an engagement with Walser’s world, Sebald, “slowly learned to grasp how everything is connected across space and time” (149). Perhaps it can be seen in the way that the Méséglise and Guermantes ways resonate for the Proustian narrator even when they are gone. Proust’s narrator receives a letter from an old love, in the last volume of Remembrance, which describes the fate of the Méséglise way (Swann’s way, that is—the title of the first volume in the sequence). Gilberte tells him that the battlefields of World War I have overtaken the paths they used to walk:the little road you so loved, the one we called the stiff Hawthorn climb, where you professed to be in love with me when you were a child, when all the time I was in love with you, I cannot tell you how important that position is. The great wheatfield in which it ended is the famous “slope 307,” the name you have so often seen recorded in the communiqués. The French blew up the little bridge over the Vivonne which, you remember, did not bring back your childhood to you as much as you would have liked. The Germans threw others across; during a year and a half they held one half of Combray and the French the other. (Time Regained 69-70)Lia Purpura describes, and senses, a similar kind of connectedness. The way in which each moment builds into something—into the ephemeral, shifting self of a person walking through the world—is emphasised because that is the way the world works:I could walk for miles right now, fielding all that passes through, rubs off, lends a sense of being—that rush of moments, objects, sensations so much like a cloud of gnats, a cold patch in the ocean, dust motes in a ray of sun that roil, gather, settle around my head and make up the daily weather of a self. (x)This is what seamless prose can emulate: the rush of moments and the folds and shapes which dust turns and makes. And, well, I am aware that this may seem a grand kind of conclusion, and even a peculiarly nonspecific one. But nonspecificity is built by a culmination of details, of sentences—it is built deliberately, to evoke a sense of looseness in the world. And in the associations which result, through the mind of the writer, their narrator, and the reader, much more than is evident on the page—Sebald’s “everything”—is flung to the surface. Of course, this “everything” is split through with the melancholy evident in the destruction of the Méséglise way. Nonspecificity becomes the result of any attempt to capture the past—or, at least, the past becomes less tangible the longer, closer, and slower your attempt to grasp it. In both Sebald and Proust the task of representation is made to feel seamless in echo of the impossibility of resolution.In the unbroken track of a sentence lies a metaphor for the way in which life is spent: under threat, forever assaulted by the world and the senses, and forever separated from what came before. The walk-as-method is entangled with the mind thinking and the pen writing; each apes the other, and all work towards the same kind of end: an articulation of how the world is. At least, in the hands of Sebald and Proust and through their long and complex prosodies, it does. For both there is a kind of melancholy attached to this articulation—perhaps because the threads that bind sever as well. The Rings of Saturn offers a look at this. The book closes with a chapter on the weaving of silk, inflected, perhaps, with a knowledge of the ways in which Robert Walser—through attempts to ensnare some of life’s ephemerality—became a victim of it:That weavers in particular, together with scholars and writers with whom they had much in common, tended to suffer from melancholy and all the evils associated with it, is understandable given the nature of their work, which forced them to sit bent over, day after day, straining to keep their eye on the complex patterns they created. It is difficult to imagine the depths of despair into which those can be driven who, even after the end of the working day, are engrossed in their intricate designs and who are pursued, into their dreams, by the feeling that they have got hold of the wrong thread. (283)Vladimir Nabokov, writing on Swann’s Way, gives a competing metaphor for thinking through the seamlessness afforded by walking and writing. It is, altogether, more optimistic: more in keeping with Purpura’s interpretation of connectedness: “Proust’s conversations and his descriptions merge into one another, creating a new unity where flower and leaf and insect belong to one and the same blossoming tree” (214). This is the purpose of long and complex books like The Rings of Saturn and Remembrance of Things Past: to draw the lines which link each and all together. To describe the shape of consciousness, to mimic the actions of a body experiencing its progress through the world. I think that is what the photographs I took when wandering attempt, in a failing way, to do. They all show a kind of relentlessness, but in that relentlessness is also, I think, the promise of connectedness—even if not connectedness itself. Each path aims forward, and articulates something of what came before and what might come next, whether trodden in the world or walked on the page.Author’s NoteI’d like to express my thanks to the anonymous reviewers who took time to improve this article. I’m grateful for their insights and engagement, and for the nuance they added to the final copy.References Baumgarten, Murray. “‘Not Knowing What I Should Think:’ The Landscape of Postmemory in W.G. Sebald’s The Emigrants.” Partial Answers: Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas 5.2 (2007): 267-287. 28 Sep. 2018 <https://doi.org/10.1353/pan.2007.0000>.Cunningham, Sophie. “Staying with the Trouble.” Australian Book Review 371 (May 2015). 23 June 2016 <https://www.australianbookreview.com.au/abr-online/archive/2015/2500-2015-calibre-prize-winner-staying-with-the-trouble>.Franklin, Ruth. “Rings of Smoke.” The Emergence of Memory: Conversations with W.G. Sebald. Ed. Lynne Sharon Schwartz. New York: Seven Stories Press, 2007. 121-122.Kafatou, Sarah. “An Interview with W.G. Sebald.” Harvard Review 15 (1998): 31-35. Nabokov, Vladimir. “Marcel Proust: The Walk by Swann’s Place.” 1980. Lectures on Literature. London: Picador, 1983. 207-250.Proust, Marcel. Swann’s Way. Part I. 1913. Trans. C.K. Scott Moncrieff in 1922. London: Chatto & Windus, 1960.———. Time Regained. 1927. Trans. Stephen Hudson. London: Chatto & Windus, 1957.Purpura, Lia. “On Not Pivoting”. Diagram 12.1 (n.d.). 21 June 2018 <http://thediagram.com/12_1/purpura.html>.Schwartz, Lynne Sharon, ed. The Emergence of Memory: Conversations with W.G. Sebald. New York: Seven Stories Press, 2007.Sebald, W.G. The Rings of Saturn. 1995. Trans. Michael Hulse in 1998. London: Vintage, 2002.——. “Le Promeneur Solitaire.” A Place in the Country. Trans. Jo Catling. London: Hamish Hamilton, 2013. 117-154.Solnit, Rebecca. Wanderlust: A History of Walking. 2001. London: Granta Publications, 2014.White, Edmund. Proust. London: Phoenix, 1999.Wood, James. The Nearest Thing to Life. London: Jonathan Cape, 2015.Woolf, Virginia. “The Narrow Bridge of Art.” Granite and Rainbow. USA: Harvest Books, 1975.

Bones are one of the oldest materials used to create musical instruments. Currently, the world’s oldest known instruments are flutes made out of bones (Turk, Turk, and Otte 11). In fact, bones have been used to create or enhance musical instruments in a variety of settings throughout history and in modern day instrument making. Bone bull roarers, jaw bone percussion, clappers, trumpets, drum shells, lyres, or construction parts, such as frets, plectrums, pipes and pipe fittings, embouchure adjustments, or percussive strikes are just a few of the more common uses of bones in musical instrument construction. One man even made a guitar out of the skeleton of his dead uncle to memorialise the person who influenced his musical tastes and career (Bienstock). Bones can therefore be taken as a somewhat common material for making musical instruments. All of these instruments share a common trait, and not just the obvious one that they are all made out of or incorporate bones. None of these instruments are intended to represent something monstrous. Instead, they represent the ephemeral nature of humanity (Cupchik 33), a celebration of lineage or religious beliefs (Davis), or simply are the materials available or suitable to create a sound-making device (Regan). It is not possible to know the full intentions of a maker, in many cases, but a link to monstrosity and a representation of the ‘horrific’ or ‘freakish’ seems missing for the most. There are instruments, however, that do house this sentiment and some that utilise bones in the construction with the purpose of making this connection between the remains and something beast-like. In this article, I argue that the Bone Guitar Thing (BGT) built and played by raxil4 is one of those instruments. Introducing the 'Thing' Raxil4 is the stage name of sonic artist Andrew Page. He has been playing his Bone Guitar Thing for almost twenty years in a variety of settings (Page, email interview, 25 June 2021). The instrument has undergone slight changes during that time, but primarily it has retained its specific visual, timbral, and underlying associative features. The BGT is complex, more so than it may seem at first. By investigating the materials used, the performance techniques employed, and raxil4’s intentions as a musician, instrument maker, and community member within his circles of activity, the monstrous nature of the BGT comes to light. The resultant series of entanglements exhibits and supports a definition of what is a 'monster' that, like several definitions in monster theory discourse (Levina and Bui 6; Cohen 7; Mittman 51), includes challenging that which may be seen as ‘normal’ and thereby may nurture levels of unease or fear. However, in the case of the BGT, that which is monstrous is simultaneously being taken as something positive alongside its beast-like characteristics, and rather than evolving into something that needs to be repressed or eliminated, the ’monster’ here becomes a hero or champion, colleague, or even a friend. The Bone Guitar Thing is not really a guitar. It is a zither with a piece of driftwood for a base, (currently) five strings, and an electric pick-up (see Fig. 1). The bridge for the instrument is two bones, and the pitch and timbre of the strings is sometimes changed with bones used for Cage-like preparation (Cage 7-8; Bunger). Bones are also used to play the instrument, sometimes like a plectrum, others like a hammered dulcimer, or occasionally, simply pounding the string or the soundboard with great force to make a combination of percussive and string sounds. Glissandos are created by using the plectrum bones as a slide, and Page also uses jaw bones to introduce ratchet sounds, string scraping, and precise pitch bending (with the sharper edged part of the bones) (raxil4, “Livestream”). The instrument is electric, so the bones are enhanced with guitar pedals (typically reverb, distortion, and octave-splitter; Page, email interview, 25 June 2021), but the tonal qualities retain a semblance of the bone usage. Fig. 1: raxil4's Bone Guitar Thing. Photograph: Andrew Page. Page often uses the BGT as part of his sonic arsenal to perform dark ambient music, noisescapes, improv music, or live film soundtracks both in live concerts and recording situations. He plays solo as much as with ensembles, and more often improvises his music or parts, but occasionally works with predetermined organisation or scores of some description (although he admits to typically abandoning predetermined passages or scores during live performances; Page, email interview, 14 July 2021). Currently in London, raxil4 presents concerts in a variety of settings, typically well-suited for his brand of sonic art, such as Ryan Jordan’s long-running concert series Noise=Noise (raxil4 feat. King Sara), experimental music shows at the Barbican (raxil4 + King Sara + P23), and dark ambient showcases promoted and arranged by one of his record labels, Sombre Soniks (Wright). Sounds beyond Words: Monstrous Music One series of performances in which raxil4 used the BGT took the form of an immersive theatre show produced by Dread Falls Theatre called Father Dagon, based on the works of horror author H. P. Lovecraft. The performance incorporated a breaking of the ’fourth wall’ in which the audience wanders freely through the performance space, with actor- and sometimes audience-interactive musical performances of partially improvised, partially composed passages by musicians located throughout the set. Director and writer Victoria Snaith considered the use of live, semi-mobile, experimental music dispersed through the audience (mixed with an overall backing soundtrack) as heightening the intensity of the experience by introducing unfamiliar aspects to the setting. She discusses having made this decision based on Lovecraft’s own approach to story-telling that highlights a sense of unfamiliarity and therefore sense of “fear of the unknown”. The usefulness of creating unfamiliarity in this context can serve to support the parts of the narrative that contains supernatural and monstrous aspects. Given that the elements of the supernatural and horrible monsters in Lovecraftian tales are primarily indescribable (both because Lovecraft would recount beasts and fantastic magical happenings in his works as being such, and because in a practical theatrical situation, these things would be impossible to describe, especially without text or specific props or costumes, which the show purposefully uses sparingly, also as a conscious choice to embrace the unknown). Sounds created on instruments that are unique, or generated through unusual performance techniques would lend themselves to being more difficult to describe, and therefore fitting to support a desire to present something regarded as also difficult to describe, that being supernatural happenings or horrific creatures. (Connor 77) Page’s use of the BGT in these performances added directly to this notion both sonically and visually. The homemade nature of his instrument increased the potential that audience members would be less familiar with the source of his sounds, even if they were watching him perform, and the resultant soundscape he provided introduced harsh timbres, undulating pads, and aggressive punctuation of movement. Page sees the BGT as an instrument “reclaimed from the watery depths” (matching the theme of the show’s narrative), therefore as one fitting into the Lovecraft show “quite nicely” (Page, email interview, 25 June 2021). He likens the sounds created by the BGT as presenting “otherworldly melodies” akin to those played by Erich Zann (a character in another Lovecraft story who conjures a gateway to an alternate dimension full of indescribable creatures and nightmares via performing unusual music on his viola de gamba), which Page also sees as fitting (ibid.). His instrument in this setting as a producer and provider of unfamiliarity is supportive of constructing and maintaining a definition of “monstrous” or “terrifying” (Levina and Bui 6). Fig. 2: raxil4 performing in Dread Falls Theatre's Father Dagon, London 2012. Photograph: Pierre Ketteridge. Finding Community in the 'Freakish' Raxil4 also notes that the Bone Guitar Thing is appropriate for creative input within improv music circles (Page, email interview, 25 June 2021). Generally speaking, contemporary improv music (meaning the broad genre) is improvised performance focussing on sonic exploration over melodic, harmonic, or rhythmic content (even though all will be present in most cases; Toop 132-137). In my experience working with improv musicians since 1981, I find that these performers typically attempt to create sounds that are unusual or unexpected. Players often embrace extended techniques, repurposing non-musical items to be sound-making devices, and employ self-built instruments. Improv musicians seek to break free from the constraints of what may be seen as Western standard musical practices (ibid.), but they simultaneously strive to uphold some parallel aspects of artisanship and virtuosity, perhaps as a means to validate their departure from Classical/mainstream music norms. The instruments and approaches can be seen as factors that separate the experimental artists from the conservatory-based performers, yet still affords them the clout of being hard-working, innovative, expressive, and professional. As the name implies, improv music emphasises improvisation. André Hodier (23-36) in his classic book The Worlds of Jazz likens improvising jazz musicians to an alien race who battle each other on a daily basis (via jazz battles) in order to see who resides at the top of the improvisation chain. Improv musicians (some of whom come from a jazz background) tend to engage in this sort of hierarchical status ranking system using a much more ’polite’ and co-supportive mentality (at least in the scenes in which I have been privileged to participate). Improv musicians can occasionally embrace a friendly attitude that one should surpass the experimental nature of other performers, and may do so by presenting a new sound, technique, or instrument. The BGT can serve this function. It can stand out among other improv musicians’ gear, even if a majority of the instruments are self-built, through its use of bones and its intentional evocation of something horrific. Improvised music is sometimes looked down upon by musical communities who value conservatory training, popular music, or more traditional Western classical approaches to music. Referring to avant-garde jazz in the 60s and 70s, Valerie Wilmer (6) recounts that critics and Classical music enthusiasts perceived experimental and improv music as “‘freakish’ and only worthy of passing interest”. The dynamic is different today, but the overall attitude remains, at least in part. The improv music scene is creatively valid, but in comparison to conservative or more mainstream music, incorporates more experimental practices, therefore sometimes musical form, interactions, and preparation is less obvious to audience members outside the experimental music circles. The Bone Guitar Thing also plays into this construction. It is artistically valid, yet perhaps simultaneously challenging to the less-experienced listener. The BGT in this setting is multifunctional. Page (email interview, 25 June 2021) sees the BGT as a means to cut through or rise above other improv musicians, partly by being more recognisable as a “freakish” instrument at performances where the music is already considered freakish by some outsiders. Additionally, the fact that Page has taken the time to make this instrument, and uses notably practiced techniques to create the sounds he introduces, may position him as an innovative professional, rather than a non-trained imposter. The BGT can (at least for raxil4, but for others as well) become a monster among monsters that allows Page to validate his brand of creativity (Ibid). Musical ’freakishness’ appears in other settings as well. An example of this is a performance in which raxil4 took part where an ensemble provided experimental music for a live tattooing event (raxil4, “Listening”). Here, the congruency with being monstrous or freakish is perhaps more overt. Similar to the soundscape being performed, Fenske (6) points out that tattoos may still be seen as unfit or unexpected for certain classes, genders, or education levels, and may even still be associated with illustrated circus performers of the past. Furthermore, Kinzey (32) suggests that avant-garde and counter-culture communities (such as ones where tattooing and live music converge in a single event) often value uniqueness that serves to “erase boundaries between everyday life and art”. The combined performativity of live music and tattoo inking (both the artistic activity and the art itself) associates raxil4 and the BGT with this non-mainstream circle (to some degree), potentially conjuring an identity of something freakish or monstrous to people with different values. Engaging with Expressive Objects The conception and evolution of the Bone Guitar Thing has its roots in personal experience, art experimentation, and material culture related to Page’s life and the musical communities in which he played and plays. In the past, Page endeavored to make small sculptures to be given as Christmas and birthday gifts from materials he found on the shore of the River Thames, many including bones. Page then began to create new musical instruments with what he had available. Page’s brother is a doctor specialising in gunshot wounds and knife trauma, and his apartment was filled with remnants of his brother’s occupation, including a number of crutches. From these, Page crafted his first instruments in this period: crutch harps that utilised the leftover medical devices to build stringed sound generators. He claims the instruments at first were not overly successful, so he began to experiment with his bone sculptures to create more serviceable instruments. An early attempt was a percussion instrument made from various found bones, which Page deemed the “Xylobone” (see Fig. 4). This instrument and advanced crutch harps (6-string tenor (see Fig. 3.) and 2-string bass) became his first arsenal of sound makers, but Page felt the instruments ultimately failed to meet expectations and opted to rethink his approaches and designs. Fig. 3: One of Page's 6-stringed crutch harps. Photograph: Andrew Page. Fig. 4: The Xylobone - raxil4's bone xylophone percussion instrument. Photograph: Andrew Page. The BGT was intended to be more “playable”, “expressive”, and audible to battle louder co-performers. As mentioned, the driftwood base and bones for the instrument originated from the River Thames. The electronics come from a destroyed guitar that was the result of performing in a previous project in which Page was the singer, where the guitarist “had a habit of smashing his guitars on stage, in a sort of expensive tribute to [grunge guitarist] Kurt Cobain" (Page, email interview, 25 June 2021). The BGT started off as a 6-string zither that used guitar-gauge steel strings, but according to Page, given the harsh performance technique of beating or scraping the strings with bones, he was encouraged to switch to using wound, bass-gauge strings, affording him a lower pitch and greater resistance to energetic performance practices. One tuning peg, however, snapped off quite early in its life (as it was in a thinner, more weathered part of the driftwood), leaving the instrument one string shorter. Page says he likes to think that the instrument decided itself that it would be a “5-stringed beast” (ibid.). Conclusion The Bone Guitar Thing is, in fact, beast-like, at least in the settings, sonic attributes, and mindsets of the player and the communities in which the instrument is played, but it may not be the case that this beast-like nature is equal to being monstrous. Cohen (3-25) in his discussion of seven potential monster theories outlines several different notions of what can be considered “monstrous” and relates the monster in each theoretical situation to those fearing the monstrous construct. Most closely related to the situation in which the BGT is observed is a parallel theory based on the concept of “Us versus Them”, meaning “Us” as those who are dealing with the monster in question, and “Them” as being those on the side of the monster or the monster itself (Cohen 19-20). However, with the BGT, the monster is not unanimous with “them”, but rather with “us”. In all the situations outlined here, the instrument takes on the role of a beast, but not a negative role for Page (email interview, 14 July 2021) or fans of raxil4 (Wright). Instead, the beast is more like part of the team of noise makers actively engaged in the community’s activities of creation, entertainment, identity, and validation of values upheld thereof. Each of the performance settings can be argued to exhibit a sense of welcoming outsiders or praising diversity, rather than ostracising it. The Lovecraft performance and story were constructed on the premise of questioning what is a monster and who determines that definition. The Bone Guitar Thing supports and interacts precisely within this parameter to enhance the artistic commentary presented. Within the improv music setting, the instrument assists Page to achieve uniqueness among that which is already unique and highlights the values of community including a show of innovation, exploration, and personal performance technique development. For the live tattooing, the instrument stands out as a unifying sonic flag, connecting other (perhaps less-monstrous) artists into a stronger group of alternative creatives. Effectively, the BGT is a 'freak among freaks', serving to simultaneously fit in and rise above, all while maintaining a sense of “us” within respective circles. The beast-like nature is not entirely an outward force. Page (email interviews, 25 June 2021 and 14 July 2021) is aware that he has received no formal education in music. He admits he is less familiar with music theory, and more familiar with the science and technology behind the music. Page considers himself to be experimental in his approach to sound creation, which he sees as being more unique due to ignoring the “rulebooks” (ibid.). As a result, he feels (at least a slight) pressure of feeling “unprofessional” or “correct” in the eyes of Western conservatory-trained musicians and composers or those with a similar mentality (Page, email interview, 25 June 2021). The BGT was also, to a degree, built to battle being told what was “right”. For Page, his instrument is akin to a beast that helped him break free of the constraints of Western tonal and virtuosic constraints. “I made my own [instrument] so that nobody could tell me I was playing it the wrong way” (ibid.). His “beast” helped him break down barriers and asserted himself as an innovative musician and creative professional. So, then, the Bone Guitar Thing is a monster; sonically, visually, and physically. It represents a monster, it is called “the beast”, and it takes on the role of a terrifying creature raging through (sometimes, extremely quietly – raxil4; raxil 4 feat. King Sara; raxil4 + King Sara + P23) soundscapes, settings, and performances, rallying the like-minded and routing the unsuspecting or “others”. That is an overdramatic take on the situation, perhaps, but the instrument does uphold a series of values and creative aesthetics that fosters positive relationships between the artist, the community, and the sonic and physical qualities of the zither. Rather than being a device that places a horrific barrier to be overcome in an “us versus them” scenario, the monster takes on an alternate role and becomes a source of empowerment for “outsiders” or marginalised groups or people (Mittman 51). Thus the Bone Guitar Thing allows Page to demolish barriers and amalgamate fellow community members into a larger version of “us” to create a space in which the beast is no longer a monster. References Bienstock, Richard. “Man Builds Guitar Out of His Dead Uncle’s Skeleton.” Guitar World 11 Feb. 2021. Web. 13 June 2021 <https://www.guitarworld.com/news/man-builds-guitar-out-of-his-dead-uncles-skeleton-uses-it-to-play-black-metal>. Bunger, Richard. The Well-Prepared Piano. Colorado Springs: Colorado College Music P, 1973. Cage, John. Empty Words: Writings ’73-’78. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University P, 1981. Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome. “Monster Culture (Seven Theses).” Monster Theory: Reading Culture. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1996. 3–25. Connor, Will. “Performing the Sounds of Darkness: An Exploratory Discussion of Musical Instruments and the Gothic Aesthetic.” The Dark Arts Journal: Reimaging the Gothic 2.I2 (Autumn 2016). 26 June 2021 <https://thedarkartsjournal.files.wordpress.com/2017/04/the-dark-arts-journal-2-21.pdf>. Cupchik, Jeffrey. “Buddhism as Performing Art: Visualizing Music in the Tibetan Sacred Ritual Music Liturgies.” Yale Journal of Music & Religion 1.1 (2015): 31–62. Davis, Josh. “Some Bronze Age Britons Turned the Bones of Dead Relatives into Musical Instruments.” Natural History Museum. 1 Sep. 2020. 23 June 2021 <https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/news/2020/september/bronze-age-britons-turned-the-bones-of-dead-relatives-into-musical-instruments.html>. Fenske, Mindy. Tattoos in American Visual Culture. New York: Palgrave, 2007. Hodier, André. The Worlds of Jazz. New York: Grove P, 1972. Kinzey, Jake. The Sacred and the Profane: An Investigation of Hipsters. Winchester, U.K.: Zero Books, 2012. Levina, Marina, and Diem-My T. Bui. “Introduction: Toward a Comprehensive Monster Theory in the 21st Century.” Monster Culture in the 21st Century: A Reader. Eds. Marina Levina and Diem-My T. Bui. New Delhi: Bloomsbury. 1–14. Mittman, Asa Simon. “Introduction: The Impact of Monsters and Monster Studies.” The Ashgate Research Companion to Monsters and the Monstrous. Eds. Asa Simon Mittman and Peter J. Dendle. London and New York: Routledge, 2013. 44–60. Raxil4. Listening Circuits: 19/06/21 with Live Tattooing from Catmouse. 21 June 2021. 23 June 2021 <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VZgUC5TTOxk&list=LL&index=3>. ———. raxil4 – Livestream for Iklecktik: 21/06/20. 22 June 2020. 23 June 2021 <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zW-Mw2jRDQ&list=LL&index=6>. Raxil4 feat: King Sara. raxil4 feat: King Sara – Sawbones 13 – Live @ Noise=Noise (14/01/13). 26 Jan. 2013. 23 June 2021 <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fxFMA77yQ_A&list=LL&index=5>. raxil4 + King Sara + P23. raxil4 + King Sara + P23 – Barbican: 15/08/13. 11 Sep. 2018. 23 June 2021 <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N619ooZxx-0&list=LL&index=4>. Page, Andrew. Email interview. 25 June 2021. ———. Email interview. 14 July 2021. Regan, Marty. Video interview. 13 July 2021. Snaith, Victoria. Personal interview. 17 April 2016. Toop, David. Ocean of Sound. London: Serpent’s Tail, 2001. Turk, Matija, Ivan Turk, and Marcel Otte. “The Neanderthal Musical Instrument from Divje Babe I Cave (Slovenia): A Critical Review of the Discussion.” Applied Sciences 10-1226.2 (2020): 1–11. Wilmer, Valerie. As Serious as Your Life. London: Serpent’s Tail, 2018. Wright, Kevin. Email interview. 29 June 2021.

IntroductionThree broad stages of Australia’s arts and culture sectors may be discerned with reference to the Northern Hemisphere. The first is in Australia’s early years where artists travelled to the metropoles of Europe to learn from acknowledged masters, to view the great works and to become part of a broader cultural scene. The second is where Australian art was promoted internationally, which to some extent began in the 1960s with exhibitions such as the 1961 ‘Survey of recent Australian painting’ at the Whitechapel gallery. The third relates to the strong promotion and push to display and sell Indigenous art, which has been a key area of focus since the 1970s.The Allure of the NorthFor a long time Australasian artists have mostly travelled to Britain (Britain) or Europe (Cooper; Frost; Inkson and Carr), be they writers, painters or musicians for example. Hecq (36) provides a useful overview of the various periods of expatriation from Australia, referring to the first significant phase at the end of the twentieth century when many painters left “to complete their atelier instruction in Paris and London”. Many writers also left for the north during this time, with a number of women travelling overseas on account of “intellectual pressures as well as intellectual isolation”(Hecq 36). Among these, Miles Franklin left Australia in “an open act of rebellion against the repressive environment of her family and colonial culture” (37). There also existed “a belief that ‘there’ is better than ‘here’” (de Groen vii) as well as a “search for the ideal” (viii). World War I led to stronger Anglo-Australian relations hence an increase in expatriation to Europe and Britain as well as longer-term sojourns. These increased further in the wake of World War II. Hecq describes how for many artists, there was significant discontent with Australian provincialism and narrow-mindedness, as well as a desire for wider audiences and international recognition. Further, Hecq describes how Europe became something of a “dreamland”, with numerous artists influenced by their childhood readings about this part of the world and a sense of the imaginary or the “other”. This sense of a dream is described beautifully by McAuliffe (56), who refers to the 1898 painting by A.J. Daplyn as a “melancholic diagram of the nineteenth-century Australian artist’s world, tempering the shimmering allure of those northern lights with the shadowy, somnolent isolation of the south”.Figure 1: The Australian Artist’s Dream of Europe; A.J. Daplyn, 1898 (oil on canvas; courtesy artnet.com)In ‘Some Other Dream’, de Groen presents a series of interviews with expatriate Australian artists and writers as an insight into what drove each to look north and to leave Australia, either temporarily or permanently. Here are a few examples:Janet Alderson: “I desperately wanted to see what was going on” (2)Robert Jacks: “the dream of something else. New York is a dream for lots of people” (21)Bruce Latimer: “I’d always been interested in America, New York in particular” (34)Jeffrey Smart: “Australia seemed to be very dull and isolated, and Italy seemed to be thrilling and modern” (50)Clement Meadmore: “I never had much to do with what was happening in Melbourne: I was never accepted there” (66)Stelarc: “I was interested in traditional Japanese art and the philosophy of Zen” (80)Robert Hughes: “I’d written everything that I’d wanted to write about Australian art and this really dread prospect was looming up of staying in Australia for the rest of one’s life” (128)Max Hutchison: “I quickly realised that Melbourne was a non-art consuming city” (158)John Stringer: “I was not getting the latitude that I wanted at the National Gallery [in Australia] … the prospects of doing other good shows seemed rather slim” (178)As the testimony here suggests, the allure of the north ranges from dissatisfaction with the south to the attraction of various parts of the world in the north.More recently, McAuliffe describes a shift in the impact of the overseas experience for many artists. Describing them as business travellers, he refers to the fact that artists today travel to meet international art dealers and to participate in exhibitions, art fairs and the like. Further, he argues that the risk today lies in “disorientation and distraction rather than provincial timidity” (McAuliffe 56). That is, given the ease and relatively cheap costs of international travel, McAuliffe argues that the challenge is in adapting to constantly changing circumstances, rather than what are now arguably dated concepts of cultural cringe or tyranny of distance. Further, given the combination of “cultural nationalism, social cosmopolitanism and information technology”, McAuliffe (58) argues that the need to expatriate is no longer a requirement for success.Australian Art Struggles InternationallyThe struggles for Australian art as a sector to succeed internationally, particularly in Britain, Europe and the US, are well documented (Frost; Robertson). This is largely due to Australia’s limited history of white settlement and established canon of great art works, the fact that power and position remain strong hence the dominance of Europe and North America in the creative arts field (Bourdieu), as well as Australia’s geographical isolation from the major art centres of the world, with Heartney (63) describing the “persistent sense of isolation of the Australian art world”. While Australia has had considerable success internationally in terms of its popular music (e.g. INXS, Kylie Minogue, The Seekers) and high-profile Hollywood actors (e.g. Geoffrey Rush, Hugh Jackman, Nicole Kidman), the visual arts in particular have struggled (O’Sullivan), including the Indigenous visual arts subsector (Stone). One of the constant criticisms in the visual art world is that Australian art is too focussed on place (e.g. the Australian outback) and not global art movements and trends (Robertson). While on the one hand he argues that Australian visual artists have made some inroads and successes in the international market, McAuliffe (63) tempers this with the following observation:Australian artists don’t operate at the white-hot heart of the international art market: there are no astronomical prices and hotly contested bidding wars. International museums acquire Australian art only rarely, and many an international survey exhibition goes by with no Australian representation.The Push to Sell Australian Cultural Product in the NorthWriting in the mid-nineties at the time of the release of the national cultural policy Creative Nation, the then prime minister Paul Keating identified a need for Australia as a nation to become more competitive internationally in terms of cultural exports. This is a theme that continues today. Recent decades have seen several attempts to promote Australian visual art overseas and in particular Indigenous art; this has come with mixed success. However, there have been misconceptions in the past and hence numerous challenges associated with promoting and selling Aboriginal art in international markets (Wright). One of the problems is that a lot of Europeans “have often seen bad examples of Aboriginal Art” (Anonymous 69) and it is typically the art work which travels north, less so the Indigenous artists who create them and who can talk to them and engage with audiences. At the same time, the Indigenous art sector remains a major contributor to the Australian art economy (Australia Council). While there are some examples of successful Australian art managers operating galleries overseas in such places as London and in the US (Anonymous-b), these are limited and many have had to struggle to gain recognition for their artists’ works.Throsby refers to the well-established fact that the international art market predominantly resides in the US and in Europe (including Britain). Further, Throsby (64) argues that breaking into this market “is a daunting task requiring resources, perseverance, a quality product, and a good deal of luck”. Referring specifically to Indigenous Australian art, Throsby (65) reveals how leading European fairs such as those at Basel and Cologne, displaying breath-taking ignorance if not outright stupidity, have vetoed Aboriginal works on the grounds that they are folk art. This saga continues to the present day, and it still remains to be seen whether these fairs will eventually wake up to themselves.It is also presented in an issue of Artlink that the “challenge is to convince European buyers of the value of Australian art, even though the work is comparatively inexpensive” (Anonymous 69). Is the Rite of Passage Relevant in the 21st Century?Some authors challenge the notion that the rite of passage to the northern hemisphere is a requirement for success for an Australian artist (Frost). This challenge is worthy of unpacking in the second decade of the twenty-first century, and particularly so in what is being termed the Asian century (Bice and Sullivan; Wesley). Firstly, Australia is far closer to Asia than it is to Europe and North America. Secondly, the Asian population is expected to continue to experience rapid economic and population growth, for example the rise of the middle class in China, potentially representing new markets for the consumption of creative product. Lee and Lim refer to the rapid economic modernisation and growth in East Asia (Japan to Singapore). Hence, given the struggles that are often experienced by Australian artists and dealers in attempting to break into the art markets of Europe and North America, it may be more constructive to look towards Asia as an alternative north and place for Australian creative product. Fourthly, many Asian countries are investing heavily in their creative industries and creative economy (Kim and Kim; Kong), hence representing an opportune time for Australian creative practitioners to explore new connections and partnerships.In the first half of the twentieth century, Australians felt compelled to travel north to Europe, especially, if they wanted to engage with the great art teachers, galleries and art works. Today, with the impact of technology, engaging with the art world can be achieved much more readily and quickly, through “increasingly transnational forms of cultural production, distribution and consumption” (Rowe et al. 8). This recent wave of technological development has been significant (Guerra and Kagan), in relation to online communication (e.g. skype, email), social media (e.g. Facebook, Twitter) as well as content available on the Web for both informal and formal learning purposes. Artists anywhere in the world can now connect online while also engaging with what is an increasing field of virtual museums and galleries. For example, the Tate Gallery in London has over 70,000 artworks in its online art database which includes significant commentary on each work. While online engagement does not necessarily enable an individual to have the lived experience of a gallery walk-through or to be an audience member at a live performance in an outstanding international venue, online technologies have made it much easier for developing artists to engage from anywhere in the world. This certainly makes the ‘tyranny of distance’ factor relevant to Australia somewhat more manageable.There is also a developing field of research citing the importance of emerging artists displaying enterprising and/or entrepreneurial skills (Bridgstock), in the context of a rapidly changing global arts sector. This broadly refers to the need for artists to have business skills, to be able to seek out and identify opportunities, as well as manage multiple projects and/or various streams of income in what is a very different career type and pathway (Beckman; Bridgstock and Cunningham; Hennekam and Bennett). These opportunity seeking skills and agentic qualities have also been cited as critical in relation to the fact that there is not only a major oversupply of artistic labour globally (Menger), but there is a growing stream of entrants to the global higher education tertiary arts sector that shows no signs of subsiding (Daniel). Concluding RemarksAustralia’s history features a strong relationship with and influences from the north, and in particular from Britain, Europe and North America. This remains the case today, with much of Australian society based on inherited models from Britain, be this in the art world or in such areas as the law and education. As well as a range of cultural and sentimental links with this north, Australia is sometimes considered to be a satellite of European civilisation in the Asia-Pacific region. It is therefore explicable why artists might continue this longstanding relationship with this particular north.In our interesting and complex present of the early twenty-first century, Australia is hampered by the lack of any national cultural policy as well as recent significant cuts to arts funding at the national and state levels (Caust). Nevertheless, there are opportunities to be further explored in relation to the changing patterns of production and consumption of creative content, the impact of new and next technologies, as well as the rise of Asia in the Asian Century. The broad field of the arts and artists is a rich area for ongoing research and inquiry and ultimately, Australia’s links to the north including the concept of the rite of passage deserves ongoing consideration.ReferencesAnonymous a. "Outposts: The Case of the Unofficial Attache." Artlink 18.4 (1998): 69–71.Anonymous b. "Who’s Selling What to Whom: Australian Dealers Taking Australian Art Overseas." Artlink 18. 4 (1998): 66–68.Australia Council for the Arts. Arts Nation: An Overview of Australian Arts. 2015. <http://www.australiacouncil.gov.au/workspace/uploads/files/arts-nation-final-27-feb-54f5f492882da.pdf>.Beckman, Gary D. "'Adventuring' Arts Entrepreneurship Curricula in Higher Education: An Examination of Present Efforts, Obstacles, and Best Practices." The Journal of Arts Management, Law, and Society 37.2 (2007): 87–112.Bice, Sara, and Helen Sullivan. "Abbott Government May Have New Rhetoric, But It’s Still the ‘Asian Century’." The Conversation 2013. <https://theconversation.com/abbott-government-may-have-new-rhetoric-but-its-still-the-asian-century-19769>.Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984.Bridgstock, Ruth. "Not a Dirty Word: Arts Entrepreneurship and Higher Education." Arts and Humanities in Higher Education 12.2–3 (2013,): 122–137. doi:10.1177/1474022212465725.———, and Stuart Cunningham. "Creative Labour and Graduate Outcomes: Implications for Higher Education and Cultural Policy." International Journal of Cultural Policy 22.1 (2015): 10–26. doi:10.1080/10286632.2015.1101086.Britain, Ian. Once an Australian: Journeys with Barry Humphries, Clive James, Germaine Greer and Robert Hughes. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1997.Caust, Josephine. "Cultural Wars in an Australian Context: Challenges in Developing a National Cultural Policy." International Journal of Cultural Policy 21.2 (2015): 168–182. doi:10.1080/10286632.2014.890607.Cooper, Roslyn Pesman. "Some Australian Italies." Westerly 39.4 (1994): 95–104.Daniel, Ryan, and Robert Johnstone. "Becoming an Artist: Exploring the Motivations of Undergraduate Students at a Regional Australian University". 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