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1

Lauper, K., D. Mongin, S. A. Bergstra, D. Choquette, C. Codreanu, D. De Cock, L. Dreyer, et al. "POS0093 HETEROGENEITY IN ADVERSE EVENT ASSESSMENT BETWEEN COUNTRIES PARTICIPATING IN AN INTERNATIONAL COLLABORATION OF REGISTRIES OF RHEUMATOID ARTHRITIS PATIENTS USING JANUS KINASE INHIBITORS (THE JAK-POT STUDY)." Annals of the Rheumatic Diseases 80, Suppl 1 (May 19, 2021): 256–57. http://dx.doi.org/10.1136/annrheumdis-2021-eular.2216.

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Background:Industry, regulators, and the rheumatology community have recognized the need for observational studies to monitor the safety of new antirheumatic agents. Registries provide a unique opportunity to understand the safety of newer therapies, but pharmacovigilance studies require large number of patients to evaluate rare drug-related adverse-events (AEs). Because JAK-inhibitors (JAKi) have only recently been approved for the treatment of rheumatoid arthritis, it makes sense to combine data from several registries in order to obtain a sufficiently large sample size to promote earlier detection of adverse events.Objectives:The purpose of this analysis was to evaluate how AEs are assessed in the various registries in preparation for a collaborative pharmacovigilance analysis, and present preliminary results.Methods:The “JAK-pot” collaboration includes 19 RA registries. The principal investigators of the participating registries were sent a structured questionnaire on AE assessment and 18 (94%) provided complete responses on the AE assessment procedures of their registries. We present simple descriptive statistics of the AE assessment procedures employed by the participating registries.Results:The 19 registries represent 7186 patients initiating a JAKi (Table 1), who are on average 57 years old, with a mean disease duration 11 years, seropositive (83%), female (82%) and with moderate disease activity at treatment initiation.Table 1.Country, registryN° of patients on JAKi includedAustria, BIOREG87Belgium, TARDIS2113Canada, RHUMADATA363Czech Republic, ATTRA197Denmark, DANBIO506Finland, ROB-FIN229Germany, RABBIT620Italy, GISEA244Israel, I-RECORD96Netherlands, METEOR4Norway, NOR-DMARD97Portugal, REUMA.PT44Romania, RRBR252Russia, ARBITER428Slovenia, biorx.si141Spain, BIOBADASER139Switzerland, SCQM738Turkey, TURKBIO404UK, BSRBR484After ineffectiveness, AEs was the second most common reason for JAKi discontinuation (25.5%), with large differences between registries (Figure 1).Of the participating registries, 2 registries do not collect AEs, while 16 (89%) assess incident AEs, by means of a pre-specified extraction form (3 registries), by free text (5 registries), by a combination of both (6 registries) and/or the use of linkage to external electronic records (3registries). AEs are coded using a predefined coding system by 11 registries (MeDRA (8), other (3)), but nearly all are recording the severity of the AE (15, 94%), AE related-death (15, 94%), or AE-related hospitalisation (15, 94%). AEs of special interest, such as serious infections (15, 94%), thromboembolic events (15, 94%), or shingles (9, 56%), are recorded by most registries. Incident AEs are linked by the treating physician to specific therapies in 11 registries (69%), while the other 5 registries extrapolate potential causal associations based on therapy start and stop dates. A pre-specified adjudication process for AEs is made only by 5 registries (31%).Conclusion:Substantial heterogeneity exists among registries regarding AE assessment within the JAK-pot collaboration. These differences must be taken into account when analysing the safety of JAKi across different countries in collaborative studies. For comparative analyses, stratified analyses by country are required to account for differential AE assessment and varying degrees of potential under-reporting.Disclosure of Interests:Kim Lauper: None declared, Denis Mongin: None declared, Sytske Anne Bergstra: None declared, Denis Choquette: None declared, Catalin Codreanu: None declared, Diederik De Cock: None declared, Lene Dreyer: None declared, Ori Elkayam: None declared, Kimme Hyrich: None declared, Florenzo Iannone: None declared, Nevsun Inanc: None declared, Eirik kristianslund: None declared, Tore K. Kvien: None declared, Burkhard Leeb: None declared, Galina Lukina: None declared, Dan Nordström: None declared, Karel Pavelka: None declared, Manuel Pombo-Suarez: None declared, Ziga Rotar: None declared, Maria Jose Santos: None declared, Anja Strangfeld: None declared, Delphine Courvoisier: None declared, Axel Finckh Speakers bureau: Eli-Lilly, Pfizer, Consultant of: Eli-Lilly, Pfizer, Grant/research support from: BMS, Pfizer.
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Jatav, Vinod, Dk Singh, Nk Singh, and A. Panchbhaiya. "Principal Component Analysis in Bitter Gourd (Momordica Charantia L.)." Bangladesh Journal of Botany 51, no. 1 (March 31, 2022): 1–7. http://dx.doi.org/10.3329/bjb.v51i1.58813.

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Investigation was carried out to assess genetic diversity through principal component analysis (PCA) and D2 analysis. Twenty four genotypes of bitter gourd were grown in RBD with three replications including two checks (Pant karela-1 and Pant karela-2). Principal component analysis showed that the first Eigen root had maximum of 26.83% variation of total variation, while the first six principal component axes together with explained 84.05% variation, which were used for cluster analysis, suggesting first six principal axes are adequate to explain the variation in reduced dimension. Clustering through D2 analysis revealed maximum inter-cluster distance of 498.80 between clusters IV and V followed by cluster III and V (322.81). Thus the genotypes grouped under cluster V, IV and III may yield maximum heterosis upon hybridization and also create wide variability including transgressive segregants in selfed generations. Bangladesh J. Bot. 51(1): 1-7, 2022 (March)
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3

Lauper, K., D. Mongin, S. A. Bergstra, D. Choquette, C. Codreanu, D. De Cock, L. Dreyer, et al. "OP0231 COMPARATIVE EFFECTIVENESS OF JAK-INHIBITORS, TNF-INHIBITORS, ABATACEPT AND IL-6 INHIBITORS IN AN INTERNATIONAL COLLABORATION OF REGISTERS OF RHEUMATOID ARTHRITIS PATIENTS (THE “JAK-POT” STUDY)." Annals of the Rheumatic Diseases 79, Suppl 1 (June 2020): 146–47. http://dx.doi.org/10.1136/annrheumdis-2020-eular.346.

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Background:In many countries, JAK-inhibitors (JAKi) have only recently been approved as treatment for patients with rheumatoid arthritis (RA).Objectives:To evaluate the effectiveness of JAKi compared to bDMARDs in RA patients in the real-world population in an international collaboration of registers (the “JAK-pot” collaboration).Methods:Patients initiating either JAKi, TNFi, IL-6i or abatacept (ABA) during a time period when JAKi were available in each country (19 registers, Table) were included. We compared the effectiveness of JAKi and bDMARDs in terms of retention using crude and adjusted survival analysis. Missing covariates were imputed using multiple imputation.Results:Among 25521 included patients, 6063 initiated a JAKi, 13879 a TNFi, 2348 ABA, and 3231 an IL-6i. Patients were on average 55 years old, with a mean disease duration 10 years, mostly seropositive (67%), female (77%) and with moderate disease activity at treatment initiation. The main reason of stopping treatment was ineffectiveness (49%), followed by adverse events (21%). Patients on JAKi were treated more often as monotherapy, had higher CRP and disease activity at baseline and had experienced more previous ts/bDMARDs. Crude median retention was 1.4 (95% CI 1.2-1.5) years for JAKi, 1.6 (1.6-1.7) for TNFi, 1.5 (1.3-1.7) for IL6i and 1.1 (1.0-1.3) for ABA. After adjustment, the hazard ratio (HR) for discontinuation tended to be lower for JAKi (HR 0.86 (0.65-1.13)) compared to TNFi, but comparable for ABA (1.02 (0.94-1.10)) and IL6i (0.99 (0.88-1.10)) (Figure 1). HRs differed notably between countries (Figure 2).Table 1.RegistersCountry, registerNJAKi, n (%)Austria, BIOREG*Belgium, TARDIS62882113 (33.6)Canada, RHUMADATA528114 (21.6)Czech Republic, ATTRA374253 (67.6)Denmark, DANBIO4721506 (10.7)Finland, ROB-FIN807234 (29.0)Germany, RABBIT*Italy, GISEA757250 (33.0)Israel, I-RECORD40094 (23.5)Netherlands, METEOR16424 (0.2)Norway, NOR-DMARD50799 (19.5)Portugal, REUMA.PT79744 (5.5)Romania, RRBR593328 (55.3)Russia, ARBITER526483 (91.8)Slovenia, BIORX.SI583146 (25.0)Spain, BIOBADASER781139 (17.8)Switzerland, SCQM2956796 (26.9)Turkey, TURKBIO2150397 (18.5)UK, BSRBR111163 (5.7)*Registers planning to participate in future studies but not included yetConclusion:The adjusted overall drug retention of JAKi tended to be higher than for TNFi, with large variation between countries. Other measures of effectiveness, such as the evaluation of CDAI remission and low disease activity are planned to shape a more comprehensive picture of JAKi effectiveness in the real world.Disclosure of Interests:Kim Lauper: None declared, Denis Mongin: None declared, Sytske Anne Bergstra: None declared, Denis Choquette Grant/research support from: Rhumadata is supported by grants from Pfizer, Amgen, Abbvie, Gylead, BMS, Novartis, Sandoz, eli Lilly,, Consultant of: Pfizer, Amgen, Abbvie, Gylead, BMS, Novartis, Sandoz, eli Lilly,, Speakers bureau: Pfizer, Amgen, Abbvie, Gylead, BMS, Novartis, Sandoz, eli Lilly,, Catalin Codreanu Consultant of: Speaker and consulting fees from AbbVie, Accord Healthcare, Alfasigma, Egis, Eli Lilly, Ewopharma, Genesis, Mylan, Novartis, Pfizer, Roche, Sandoz, UCB, Speakers bureau: Speaker and consulting fees from AbbVie, Accord Healthcare, Alfasigma, Egis, Eli Lilly, Ewopharma, Genesis, Mylan, Novartis, Pfizer, Roche, Sandoz, UCB, Diederik De Cock: None declared, Lene Dreyer: None declared, Ori Elkayam Speakers bureau: AbbVie, BMS, Pfizer, Roche, Sanofi-Aventis, Novartis, Jansen, Kimme Hyrich Grant/research support from: Pfizer, UCB, BMS, Speakers bureau: Abbvie, Florenzo Iannone Consultant of: Speaker and consulting fees from AbbVie, Eli Lilly, Novartis, Pfizer, Roche, Sanofi, UCB, MSD, Speakers bureau: Speaker and consulting fees from AbbVie, Eli Lilly, Novartis, Pfizer, Roche, Sanofi, UCB, MSD, Nevsun Inanc: None declared, Eirik kristianslund: None declared, Tore K. Kvien Grant/research support from: Received grants from Abbvie, Hospira/Pfizer, MSD and Roche (not relevant for this abstract)., Consultant of: Have received personal fees from Abbvie, Biogen, BMS, Celltrion, Eli Lily, Hospira/Pfizer, MSD, Novartis, Orion Pharma, Roche, Sandoz, UCB, Sanofi and Mylan (not relevant for this abstract)., Paid instructor for: Have received personal fees from Abbvie, Biogen, BMS, Celltrion, Eli Lily, Hospira/Pfizer, MSD, Novartis, Orion Pharma, Roche, Sandoz, UCB, Sanofi and Mylan (not relevant for this abstract)., Speakers bureau: Have received personal fees from Abbvie, Biogen, BMS, Celltrion, Eli Lily, Hospira/Pfizer, MSD, Novartis, Orion Pharma, Roche, Sandoz, UCB, Sanofi and Mylan (not relevant for this abstract)., Burkhard Leeb Grant/research support from: chairman of BioReg, Consultant of: AbbVie, Pfizer, Roche, Lilly, Grünenthal, Gebro,, Paid instructor for: Lilly, Biogen, Speakers bureau: Biogen, Lilly, Pfizer, Grünenthal, Astropharma,, Galina Lukina Speakers bureau: Novartis, Pfizer, UCB, Abbvie, Biocad, MSD, Roche, Dan Nordström Consultant of: Abbvie, Celgene, Lilly, Novartis, Pfizer, Roche and UCB., Speakers bureau: Abbvie, Celgene, Lilly, Novartis, Pfizer, Roche and UCB., Karel Pavelka Consultant of: Abbvie, MSD, BMS, Egis, Roche, UCB, Medac, Pfizer, Biogen, Speakers bureau: Abbvie, MSD, BMS, Egis, Roche, UCB, Medac, Pfizer, Biogen, Manuel Pombo-Suarez Consultant of: Janssen, Lilly, MSD and Sanofi., Speakers bureau: Janssen, Lilly, MSD and Sanofi., Ziga Rotar Consultant of: Speaker and consulting fees from Abbvie, Amgen, Biogen, Eli Lilly, Medis, MSD, Novartis, Pfizer, Roche, Sanofi., Speakers bureau: Speaker and consulting fees from Abbvie, Amgen, Biogen, Eli Lilly, Medis, MSD, Novartis, Pfizer, Roche, Sanofi., Maria Jose Santos Speakers bureau: Novartis and Pfizer, Anja Strangfeld Speakers bureau: AbbVie, BMS, Pfizer, Roche, Sanofi-Aventis, Delphine Courvoisier: None declared, Axel Finckh Grant/research support from: Pfizer: Unrestricted research grant, Eli-Lilly: Unrestricted research grant, Consultant of: Sanofi, AB2BIO, Abbvie, Pfizer, MSD, Speakers bureau: Sanofi, Pfizer, Roche, Thermo Fisher Scientific
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López, Marissa. "The Difference latinidad Makes." American Literary History 31, no. 1 (December 21, 2018): 104–21. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/alh/ajy044.

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AbstractThis essay-review examines three recent works in the study of Chicanx literature, Robert Con Davis-Undiano’s Mestizos Come Home!: Making and Claiming Mexican American Identity (2017), Karen Roybal’s Archives of Dispossession: Recovering the Testimonios of Mexican American Herederas, 1848–1960 (2017), and María Josefina Saldaña-Portillo’s Indian Given: Racial Geographies across Mexico and the United States (2016). López is primarily concerned with how the books position themselves in relation to broader discussions around latinidad. She structures her investigation around three main axes: racial discourse, intersections of politics and form, and periodization in literary studies. The books, she argues, trace an aesthetic and political trajectory leading from concerns over representation and canon formation to wholesale interrogations of genre and political action. López reads this trajectory in the context of theoretical developments in Critical Ethnic studies that privilege difference over diversity.
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Nham, E., R. Aymon, D. Mongin, S. A. Bergstra, D. Choquette, C. Codreanu, O. Elkayam, et al. "OP0266 TREATMENT DISCONTINUATION DUE TO ADVERSE EVENTS AS AN OVERALL MEASURE OF TOLERANCE AND SAFETY OF JAK-INHIBITORS: AN INTERNATIONAL COLLABORATION OF REGISTRIES OF RHEUMATOID ARTHRITIS PATIENTS (THE “JAK-pot” STUDY)." Annals of the Rheumatic Diseases 81, Suppl 1 (May 23, 2022): 177–78. http://dx.doi.org/10.1136/annrheumdis-2022-eular.2342.

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BackgroundThe recently presented “ORAL Surveillance Study” has suggested increased risk of serious adverse events (AEs) with tofacitinib, a JAK-inhibitor (JAKi), compared to a comparator TNF-inhibitor (TNFi). Currently, there is limited real world evidence for the tolerability and safety of JAKi (1).ObjectivesTo assess the safety of JAKi compared to other biologic agents in rheumatoid arthritis (RA) patients in a real-world population, by evaluating treatment discontinuation for AEs.MethodsPooled patient database from 16 national RA registries from across Europe, Québec (Canada), Turkey, and Israel were used. Treatment discontinuation due to AEs by treatment groups, JAKi versus (vs) TNFi and JAKi vs bDMARDs with other modes of action (OMA), were compared as an overall measure of tolerability and safety of JAKi. Standard descriptive statistics were used for baseline characteristics. We plotted unadjusted cumulative incidence, then the cause-specific Cox model was used to account for competing risks, and to obtain association between covariates and the instantaneous hazard rate for AEs. Variables listed in Table 1 were used for adjustment in the fully-adjusted cause-specific Cox model.Table 1.Baseline characteristics of the study populationJAKi1(BARI, FILGO,TOFA,UPA)OMA2(ABA, ANAK, SARI, TOCI)TNFi3(ADA, CERT, ETAN, GOL, INFL)n = 9208n = 16737n = 64533Treatment duration* (yrs)0.7 [0.2, 1.7]1.1 [0.4, 2.8]1.5 [0.5, 3.9]Age57.556.853.2Female (%)81.380.773.2Disease duration (yrs)9.913.110.7Seropositivity (%)78.775.969.8Previous b/tsDMARD (%) 034.030.859.7 120.925.924.3 216.621.710.4 3 or more28.521.55.6Concomitant GC (%)44.650.741.3Concomitant CsDMARD (%) MTX22.622.028.8 MTX + other9.59.713.1 None50.552.543.5 Other17.415.914.7CRP13.2 (24.1)13.3 (25.6)12.3 (24.1)CDAI23.7 (13.8)22.9 (13.5)22.6 (14.0)DAS 284.7 (1.5)4.7 (1.6)4.6 (1.6)HAQ1.2 (0.7)1.2 (0.7)1.1 (0.7)BMI27.1 (5.9)26.8 (5.8)26.8 (5.8)Patients with at least one Comorbidity (%)51.753.949.6csDMARDs = classical synthetic DMARDs, MTX = methotrexate, GC = glucocorticoids, CRP = C-reactive protein, CDAI = Clinical Disease Activity Index, DAS 28 = Disease Activity Score 28, HAQ = Health Assessment Questionnaire, BMI = Body Mass Index, *Treatment duration (median [IQR]) = Last visit date – start date (if treatment is ongoing), treatment stop date – treatment start date (if treatment has stopped). 1BARI (baricitinib; 44.41 %), FILGO (filgotinib; 0.23%), TOFA (tofacitinib; 49.59%), UPA (upadacitinib; 5.78%); 2ABA (abatacept; 39.96%), ANAK (anakinra; 2.64%), SARI (sarilumab; 3.14%), TOCI (tocilizumab; 52.55%); 3ADA (adalimumab; 31.00%), CERT (certolizumab; 8.33%), ETAN (etanercept; 38.83%), GOLI (golimumab; 9.36%), INFL (infliximab; 12.56%)Results90,478 treatment courses were included in the analysis (Table 1). We observed similar crude incidence rate of treatment discontinuation due to AEs between JAKi and TNFi, but less in JAKi vs OMA (Figure 1). The fully adjusted hazard rate of treatment stop for AEs was also similar in JAKi vs TNFi (HR = 1.02 (95% CI 0.92 – 1.13)), and in JAKi vs OMA (HR= 1.08 (95% CI 0.97 – 1.20)). The rate of treatment stop for AEs was higher in women (HR = 1.29 (95% CI 1.21 – 1.37)) and with an increasing number of previous b/tsDMARDs (HR = 1.50; 1.48; 1.68 for 1, 2, and 3 or more previous b/ts DMARDs, respectively).Figure 1.Comparison of cumulative incidence of treatment discontinuation for adverse events in JAKi, TNFi, and OMA groupConclusionAfter adjusting for potential confounders, the rate of treatment discontinuation for AEs was comparable between JAKi and OMA or TNFi. Treatment discontinuation for AEs comprises a wide range of AEs; future analyses will be performed to investigate specific AEs, such as cancer, serious infections or major adverse cardiovascular events.References[1]Ann Rheum Dis 2022. doi: 10.1136/annrheumdis-2021-221915.Disclosure of InterestsEric Nham: None declared, Romain Aymon: None declared, Denis Mongin: None declared, Sytske Anne Bergstra: None declared, Denis Choquette Speakers bureau: DC reports speaker or consultant fees from Abbvie, Amgen, Eli Lilly, Fresenius-Kabi,Pfizer, Novartis, Sandoz, Tevapharm, Consultant of: Stated above, Catalin Codreanu Speakers bureau: CC reports speaker/consulting fees from AbbVie, Amgen, Astra Zeneca, Boehringer Ingelheim, Ewopharma, Lilly, Novartis, Pfizer, Richter, Consultant of: Stated above, Ori Elkayam Consultant of: OE has received consultant and honorary fees from Pfizer, Lilly, Abbvie, Novartis, Jansen, BI, Kimme Hyrich Speakers bureau: KLH has received speaker honoraria from Abbvie, Grant/research support from: KLH has received grant income from Pfizer and BMS, Florenzo Iannone Speakers bureau: FI has received consulting/speaker’s fees from Abbvie, BMS, Celgene, Eli Lilly, Galapagos, Janssen, MSD, Novartis, Pfizer, SOBI, Roche and UCB, Consultant of: Stated above, Nevsun Inanc Speakers bureau: NI has received consultant and speaker/honoraria from Abbvie, Lilly, MSD, Novartis, Pfizer, Roche, Amgen, Celltrion,UCB., Consultant of: Stated above, Lianne Kearsley-Fleet: None declared, Eirik kristianslund: None declared, Tore K. Kvien Speakers bureau: TKK has received fees for speaking and/or consulting from several companies among them Pfizer, AbbVie, Lilly and Galapagos/Gilead, Consultant of: Stated above, Burkhard Leeb Speakers bureau: BFL has received speaker honoraria from Sandoz, Abbvie, Eli-Lilly, Pfizer, Roche, Grünenthal, Biogen, Celgene, Galina Lukina Speakers bureau: GVL has received speaker fees from Abbvie, Lilly, Novartis, MSD, Roche, Pfizer, Dan Nordström Consultant of: DCN has acted as consultant for AbbVie, BMS, Lilly, MSD, Novartis, Pfizer, Roche and UCB, Karel Pavelka Speakers bureau: KP has received honoraria for lectures: MSD, Pfizer, Roche, Eli Lilly, Medac, UCB, SOBI, Biogen, Sandoz, Viatris, Manuel Pombo-Suarez Speakers bureau: MPS reports advisor and speaker honoraria from Janssen, Lilly, MSD, Novartis, Sanofi, Consultant of: Stated above, Ziga Rotar Speakers bureau: ZR has received fees for speaking/consulting from several companies among them Pfizer, AbbVie, and Eli Lilly, Consultant of: Stated above, Maria Jose Santos Speakers bureau: MJS has received speaker fees from Abbvie, AstraZeneca, Lilly, Novartis and Pfizer, Delphine Courvoisier: None declared, Kim Lauper Speakers bureau: KL reports speakers fees for Pfizer, Viatris and Celltrion, Consultant of: KL reports consulting fees for Pfizer, Axel Finckh Speakers bureau: AF reports honoraria and consultancies from Pfizer, BMS, MSD, Eli-Lilly, AbbVie, Galapagos, Mylan, UCB, Viatris, Consultant of: Stated above, Grant/research support from: AF reports grants from Pfizer INC, AbbVie, Galapagos, Eli Lilly
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Ortiz-Ortiz, Karen J., Axel Gierbolini-Bermúdez, Ana P. Ortiz, Karen Pabón-Cruz, Chi-Fang Wu, Jeslie Ramos-Cartagena, Reydi Morales-Martínez, and Ashish A. Deshmukh. "Abstract A052: Lifetime cost of care associated with squamous cell carcinoma of the anus in Puerto Rico." Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers & Prevention 32, no. 1_Supplement (January 1, 2023): A052. http://dx.doi.org/10.1158/1538-7755.disp22-a052.

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Abstract Background: Squamous cell carcinoma of the anus (SCCA), caused by human papillomavirus infection (HPV), is the most frequently diagnosed form of anal cancer (85%-90%). SCCA incidence has increased dramatically among the general population in Puerto Rico (nearly 5% annually) and the risk is disproportionately elevated among patients living with HIV. SCCA is preventable through HPV vaccination and screening. Therefore, the study of the cost of anal cancer care could have significant implications for understanding preventable economic burden in Puerto Rico. Objective: Determine the lifetime and phase-specific cost of SCCA cases aged ≥21 diagnosed during 2009-2016 in Puerto Rico. Method: This population-based study used the Puerto Rico Central Cancer Registry-Health Insurance Linkage Database (PRCCR-HILD), which links PRCCR data with health insurance claim data from the principal health insurance companies and the government health plan. PRCCR-HILD has information for almost 90% of Puerto Rico's cancer cases from 2008. We matched SCCA cases and non-cancer control (1:1) by age and sex for each phase of care (initial, continuation, and terminal). SCCA-related costs were calculated by subtracting the costs between SCCA patients and the control group. We used the phase-specific monthly cost estimates combined with survival data, stratified by age and cancer stage (localized, regional, and distance), to calculate the lifetime and average annual cost (discount at 3%) for SCCA. The cost was adjusted to 2019 US dollars using the consumer price index. We used the number of SCCA incident cases for 2019, stratified by age group and multiplied by the lifetime SCCA cost estimates, to calculate the SCCA-related lifetime economic burden for Puerto Rico. Results: Of the 351 patients with SCCA included in this study, the mean age at diagnosis was 64 years, 66.4% were women, 57.6% were diagnosed at a localized stage, and 23.1% were enrolled in private insurance. The overall survival after cancer diagnosis was 18 years. Meanwhile, the average monthly costs per patient were higher in the initial phase ($4,755), followed by the terminal phase ($3,499). The main cost driver in all phases was the outpatient costs. However, inpatient costs increased substantially at the terminal phase of care. The average lifetime cost for patient with SCCA was $137,343 (95% CI: $130,873-$145,241) (2019 US dollars). The average SCCA per year cost was $9,193 (95% CI: $8,744-$9,895), while the SCCA-related lifetime economic burden for 2018 in Puerto Rico was nearly $8.7 million. Conclusion: To our knowledge, this is the first study to describe the cost of SCCA management in Puerto Rico. Although SCCA continues to be relatively rare among the general population, our study shows that the SCCA-related lifetime economic burden is substantial and could continue to rise due to the rising SCCA burden in Puerto Rico. These findings could support the evaluation of the impact of strategies to reduce the SCCA burden through HPV vaccination and anal cancer screening for high-risk populations. Citation Format: Karen J. Ortiz-Ortiz, Axel Gierbolini-Bermúdez, Ana P. Ortiz, Karen Pabón-Cruz, Chi-Fang Wu, Jeslie Ramos-Cartagena, Reydi Morales-Martínez, Ashish A. Deshmukh. Lifetime cost of care associated with squamous cell carcinoma of the anus in Puerto Rico [abstract]. In: Proceedings of the 15th AACR Conference on the Science of Cancer Health Disparities in Racial/Ethnic Minorities and the Medically Underserved; 2022 Sep 16-19; Philadelphia, PA. Philadelphia (PA): AACR; Cancer Epidemiol Biomarkers Prev 2022;31(1 Suppl):Abstract nr A052.
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Liu, Cheng-Chien, Yueh-Cheng Chang, Stefani Huang, Frank Wu, An-Ming Wu, Soushi Kato, and Yasushi Yamaguchi. "First space-borne high-spatial-resolution optical imagery of the Antarctic from Formosat-2." Antarctic Science 20, no. 6 (May 16, 2008): 605–6. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0954102008001338.

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Coordinating and collecting satellite data of changing polar environments is one of the prime activities of International Polar Year (IPY) 2007–08 (Rapley et al. 2004). Within this framework, the requirements to obtain spaceborne snapshots of the Polar Regions and key high latitude processes have been prepared by the international cryospheric community under the auspices of the approved IPY project titled the Global Inter-agency IPY Polar Snapshot Year (GIIPSY). Earlier efforts in manoeuvring Radarsat-1 in a special mode provided radar images with a spatial resolution of 30 m over the entirety of Antarctica during September–October 1997 (Jezek et al. 1998). Limited to their altitude (AL), swath (SW) and pointing capability (PC), however, the operation of optical satellites with high-spatial-resolution sensors is generally restricted to certain latitudes. For example, Landsat (AL:705 km/SW:185 km/PC:0°) mission has been able to provide high-spatial-resolution optical imagery only to ~81°N to ~81°S since the 1980s. The coverage is now extended to ~86° by ASTER (AL:705 km/SW:60 km/PC:24°) (Kargel et al. 2005), but there has been no availability of space-borne optical image of the polar regions with a resolution equivalent or higher than Landsat type sensors with latitudes higher than 86°, until the successful operation of Formosat-2 (AL:891 km/SW:24 km/PC: ± 45° across and along track). Equipped with two-axes high torque reaction wheels, Formosat-2 is able to point not only to ± 45° across track, but also to ± 45° along track (Liu et al. 2007). Figure 1 shows the accessible areas (longer lines: along track ± 0°, across track ± 45°; shorter lines: along track ± 0°, across track ± 30°) and the corresponding ground tracks (solid curves) of Formosat-2 in the Polar Regions. Note that the accessible areas would be even greater if the pointing direction is also set to ± 45° along track. The detailed comparison of Formosat-2 with other similar sensors, including the multi-spectral bands and imaging repeat period, can be found in table I in Liu et al. (2007). To support IPY 2007–08, the National Space Organization (NSPO) of Taiwan launched a Polar Imaging Campaign (PIC) in March 2006. Up to September 2007, a total of 1 131 624 km2 in the North Polar Region and a total of 57 408 km2 in the South Polar Region had been imaged by Formosat-2. All Formosat-2 images taken during the NSPO PIC are available from the authors.
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Barghi, Farinaz, Pankita H. Pandya, M. Reza Saadatzadeh, Khadijeh Bijangi-Vishehsaraei, Barbara J. Bailey, Erika A. Dobrota, Courtney Young, et al. "Abstract 2011: Targeting CDK4/6 inhibitor resistance in relapsed RB-proficient osteosarcoma patient-derived xenografts via PI3 Kinase/mTOR inhibition." Cancer Research 82, no. 12_Supplement (June 15, 2022): 2011. http://dx.doi.org/10.1158/1538-7445.am2022-2011.

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Abstract In children, adolescents, and young adults (AYA), osteosarcoma (OS) is the most common type of bone cancer and ~35% patients relapse following frontline cytotoxic therapy. Thus, there is a critical need to identify therapies targeting specific molecular signatures in OS. Hyperactivation of cyclin-dependent kinases 4 and 6 (CDK4/6) has been identified by us and others as a top actionable marker in OS. CDK4/6 binds to cyclin D resulting in a complex that mediates RB phosphorylation leading to cell cycle progression. While CDK4/6 inhibitors (CDK4/6i) have shown promise clinically, one drawback is that CDK4/6i induces cell cycle arrest rather than cell death. Furthermore, prolonged CDK4/6 inhibitor therapy can confer therapeutic resistance in RB1-proficient (RB+) tumors where compensatory pathways such as PI3K/mTOR are activated. To mitigate such CDK4/6i resistance in OS, we hypothesized that dual inhibition of CDK4/6 and PI3K pathways will promote cytotoxicity in hyperactivated CDK4/6 OS models. RB+ OS cell lines and a TT2-77 xenoline were evaluated in vitro. Combination index and Bliss independence analyses indicated that inhibition of OS growth by exposure to CDK4/6i (Palbociclib or Abemaciclib) and PI3K/mTOR inhibitor (PI3K/mTORi-Voxtalisib or LY3023414) was additive-to-synergistic and lead to increased apoptosis at clinically relevant concentrations. Short-term pharmacodynamic study of vehicle- versus Palbociclib-treated TT2-77 patient-derived xenograft (PDX) was analyzed by global/phospho-proteomics and kinome profiling. RB1 and MKI67 phosphopeptides as well as the total protein levels of CDK1 were reduced by Palbociclib, thus, confirming modulation of the cell cycle. Kinome profiling analysis of PDX from Palbociclib-treated mice indicated increased activity of AXL, a receptor tyrosine kinase linked to PI3K pathway activation. Increased activity of the autophagy marker PIK3C3 was also evident. OS PDX models TT2-77 and HT96 (RB+, CDKN2Anull, CCND3 amplified) were treated with Palbociclib (50 mg/kg), Voxtalisib (50 mg/kg) or Palbociclib + Voxtalisib. In TT2-77 PDXs treated for four weeks, tumor growth was significantly reduced in single-agent and combo groups compared to vehicle (p<0.05, Two-way ANOVA; Holm-Sidak). We observed a trend that the combo was more efficacious than single agent, but statistical differences were not evident. Increasing the dosing timeline to six weeks may be beneficial. In HT96 PDXs, tumor growth was significantly decreased in single-agent and combo groups compared to vehicle. Notably, Palbociclib + Voxtalisib was more efficacious than single-agent (p<0.05, Two-way ANOVA; Holm-Sidak). These data highlight the need to optimize CDK4/6i+PI3K/mTORi dosing schedules and provide evidence that Palbociclib + Voxtalisib therapy is safe, efficacious, and can decrease CDK4/6i resistance in aggressive PDX models of OS. Citation Format: Farinaz Barghi, Pankita H Pandya, M. Reza Saadatzadeh, Khadijeh Bijangi-Vishehsaraei, Barbara J. Bailey, Erika A. Dobrota, Courtney Young, Melissa A. Trowbridge, Kathryn L. Coy, Henry Mang, Reagan K. Wohlford, Anthony L. Sinn, Emily C. Sims, Matt J. Repass, Nuri Damayanti, Niknam Riyahi, Harlan E. Shannon, Steve P Angus, Michael J Ferguson, Jamie L. Renbarger, Karen E. Pollok. Targeting CDK4/6 inhibitor resistance in relapsed RB-proficient osteosarcoma patient-derived xenografts via PI3 Kinase/mTOR inhibition [abstract]. In: Proceedings of the American Association for Cancer Research Annual Meeting 2022; 2022 Apr 8-13. Philadelphia (PA): AACR; Cancer Res 2022;82(12_Suppl):Abstract nr 2011.
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Schroeder, Mark A., Jonathan D. Ricks, Jaebok Choi, Julie Ritchey, Matthew Holt, Brian K. Dieckgraefe, and John F. DiPersio. "Pegylated Recombinant Murine GM-CSF Is a Potent Mobilizer of Murine Bone Marrow Progenitors, Synergizes with BIO5192 and Plerixafor (AMD3100), and Skews Mobilized Cells to a Tolerogenic Phenotype." Blood 114, no. 22 (November 20, 2009): 2432. http://dx.doi.org/10.1182/blood.v114.22.2432.2432.

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Abstract Abstract 2432 Poster Board II-409 Granulocyte-macrophage colony stimulating factor (GM-CSF) is a naturally occurring acidic glycoprotein growth factor that regulates proliferation and differentiation of hematopoietic stem and progenitor cells. Inflammation results in the release of GM-CSF from numerous cell types including T-cells, macrophages, and neutrophils. Murine GM-CSF (mGM-CSF), unlike human GM-CSF, has a very short half-life in vivo. Pegylation of mGM-CSF (peg-mGM-CSF) has been shown to prolong its half-life. There are numerous reports of GM-CSF use in humans to mobilize stem cells. It was observed by our group that patients who were transplanted with stem cell products mobilized by GM-CSF had a lower incidence of acute GVHD (Devine et al. BBMT 2005; 36:531). The reason for this is unclear. A recent report suggested that regulatory T-cells (T-regs) express the low affinity alpha subunit of the mGM-CSF receptor and can be expanded ex vivo in the presence of GM-CSF and independent of IL-2 (Kared et al. Blood 2008;112:2575). We hypothesized that peg-mGM-CSF may expand T-regs in vivo and act synergistically with the CXCR4 antagonist Plerixafor (AMD3100) and a small molecule inhibitor of VLA-4, BIO5192, to generate optimal peripheral blood stem cell products enriched in hematopoietic progenitors and T-regs. Peg-mGM-CSF was manufactured in a bioreactor as previously described (Sainathan et al. Prot Express and Purification 2005;44:94). C57/Bl6 mice were injected with peg-mGM-CSF 5ug IP, daily x 4 days then bled and analyzed for CFU progenitor assays (CFU-C) and FACS analysis. The same mice were then injected with AMD3100 (5mg/kg SC) with or without BIO5192 (1mg/kg IV) and serially bled at 30 minutes, 1 hour, 3 hours, and 6 hours. CFU-C were performed and blood and spleen were analyzed for T-cell and dendritic cell subsets by FACS. We observed that peg-mGM-CSF was a potent mobilizer of hematopoietic progenitors and resulted in leukocytosis (mean difference 17.98 K/uL +/- 2.15, 95%CI 13.4 - 22.53, p<0001, n=6) and splenomegally. Peg-mGM-CSF increased CFU-C by 26.5 fold compared to PBS treated mice (n=6, 95% CI = 10.25-42.73). Peg-mGM-CSF had synergistic effects on progenitor mobilization when combined with AMD3100 (89.8 fold, 95% CI 61.6-118, n=6) or BIO5192 (94 fold, 95% CI 46.5-141.6, n=6) compared to PBS treated mice. The combination of peg-mGM-CSF, AMD3100 and BIO5192 resulted in 119.7 fold (95% CI 63.7-175.6, n=6) increase in progenitor mobilization over PBS treated mice and peaked at 30 minutes. In addition, peg-mGM-CSF increased circulating CD4+ FoxP3+ T-regs from a mean of 10.66% +/- 2.65 to 23.86% +/- 4.7 at 5 days (n=15, p=0.001 by paired t-test). Splenic T-regs were also increased from 16.09% +/- 2.7 to 31.56% +/- 4.34 (n=9, p=0.001 by paired t-test). This effect was sustained out to 4 days after the last dose of peg-mGM-CSF. Furthermore, there was no significant change in thymic T-regs, and this effect was not significantly affected by the addition of AMD3100 or BIO5192. The function of these peg-mGM-CSF T-regs, as measured in a MLR was found to be equivalent to T- regs from PBS treated control mice (n=3, p=0.27, by paired t-test). Interestingly, analysis of the spleens from animals on day 5 after peg-mGM-CSF demonstrated an increase in absolute CD11c+ cells, as expected, and a 4 fold increase in the absolute number of plasmacytoid dendritic cells as determined by CD11c+ SiglecH+ staining. Additional studies are underway to assess the functional impact of murine peripheral blood stem cells mobilized with peg-mGM-CSF in combination with small molecule inhibitors of the CXCR4 and VLA-4 axes on engraftment and graft versus host disease in a murine acute GVHD parent to F1 model. Disclosures: DiPersio: Genzyme Corporation: Honoraria.
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Minguzzi, Isabella Rodrigues, Joverlany Pessoa de Albuquerque, and Julicristie Machado de Oliveira. "culinária e o cuidado." Temas em Educação e Saúde, November 30, 2022, e022008. http://dx.doi.org/10.26673/tes.v18i00.16189.

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O objetivo deste trabalho foi avaliar um processo pedagógico, alicerçado em “A Festa de Babette”, para estudantes de Nutrição, da Universidade Estadual de Campinas. Primeiramente, analisou-se o conto “A Festa de Babette”, de Karen Blixen, e o filme homônimo, de Gabriel Axel, com base em conceitos e obras de referência. Posteriormente, foi elaborado, aplicado e analisado um processo pedagógico na disciplina Educação Alimentar e Nutricional. Na coleta de dados, foram realizados dois grupos focais com sete estudantes voluntárias e discutidos os principais temas identificados: o choque de cultura entre a alimentação francesa e as práticas restritivas religiosas, a dedicação de Babette ao jantar e a relevância da comensalidade. Em conclusão, a culinária e o cuidado, atrelados ao cozinhar e ao comer, fomentaram rotas para a compreensão de conceitos trabalhados na disciplina, a sensibilização sobre essas dimensões e as possibilidades de atuação profissional que considerem outros matizes da vida social.
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Minguzzi, Isabella Rodrigues, and Julicristie Machado de Oliveira. "Entre a temperança e a gula." Revista dos Trabalhos de Iniciação Científica da UNICAMP, no. 26 (January 16, 2019). http://dx.doi.org/10.20396/revpibic262018634.

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O entendimento do nutricionista sobre a complexidade do ato de comer é essencial para sua atuação. Assim, as atividades pedagógicas, aplicadas durante sua formação, que contribuam para compreensão de conceitos como comer, comensalidade, culinária e cuidado, tornam-se imprescindíveis. Nesse contexto, este projeto buscou compreender o efeito de um processo pedagógico aplicado com a literatura e o cinema para estudantes de graduação em Nutrição. Primeiramente, foi realizada a análise do livro "A festa de Babette", de Karen Blixen, e do filme com o mesmo nome, de Gabriel Axel. Posteriormente, foi elaborado e aplicado um plano de aula para os estudantes da disciplina Educação Alimentar e Nutricional do curso de Nutrição da FCA/Unicamp. Por meio de grupos focais, foram captadas as opiniões de sete estudantes voluntários da disciplina sobre o plano de aula aplicado. Observou-se que o cuidado, por meio da comida, da culinária e da cultura presentes nos livro e no filme foram capazes promover um aprofundamento reflexivo sobre os conceitos trabalhados na disciplina e sensibilizar os estudantes diante do ato de comer.
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"Rezensionen." Politisches Denken. Jahrbuch 30, no. 1 (January 1, 2020): 189–212. http://dx.doi.org/10.3790/jpd.30.1.189.

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Stephen Greenblatt: Tyrant – Shakespeare on Politics. W. W. Norton &amp; Company, New York/London 2018, 212 p. (Norbert Lennartz, Vechta) Björn Spiekermann: Der Gottlose. Geschichte eines Feindbilds in der Frühen Neuzeit. (Das Abendland, Neue Folge 44). Vittorio Klostermann, Frankfurt am Main 2020, 772 S. (Hans-Christof Kraus, Passau) Karen Gloy: Macht und Gewalt. Politik, Wissen, Psychologie, Geld, Netzwerke. Verlag Königshausen &amp; Neumann GmbH, Würzburg 2020, 229 S. (Peter Nitschke) Carl Müller Frøland: Understanding Nazi Ideology – The Genesis and Impact of a Political Faith. Translated by John Irons. McFarland &amp; Company, Jefferson, N.C. 2020, VI, 345 S. (Bertram Wojaczek) Wolfram Eilenberger: Feuer der Freiheit. Die Rettung der Philosophie in finsteren Zeiten. 1933 – 1943. Klett-Cotta, Stuttgart 2020, 400 S. (Isabelle-Christine Panreck) Axel Schildt: Medien-Intellektuelle in der Bundesrepublik. Wallstein-Verlag, ‌Göttingen 2020, 896 S. (Hans-Christof Kraus) Ulrich Bröckling: Postheroische Helden. Ein Zeitbild. Suhrkamp Verlag, Berlin 2020, 276 S. (Eva-Maria Kaufmann) Richard Tuck: The Left Case for Brexit. Reflections on the Current Crisis. Polity, Cambridge/Medford, MA 2020, VIII, 178 S. (Samuel Garrit Zeitlin) Ruud Koopmans: Das verfallene Haus des Islam. Die religiösen Ursachen von Unfreiheit, Stagnation und Gewalt. C.H. Beck, München 2020, 288 S. (Yousry Hammed) Isabelle-Christine Panreck (Hrsg.): Populismus – Staat – Demokratie: Ein interdisziplinäres Streitgespräch. Springer VS, Wiesbaden 2020, VII, 240 S. (Josefin Graef)
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Wilson, Michael John, and James Arvanitakis. "Resilient Matters." M/C Journal 16, no. 5 (October 13, 2013). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.740.

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To be or not to be resilient? That is no longer the question. For many years, being resilient or non-resilient, as it were, represented the dominant framework in resilience theory emerging out of the psychological sciences. As research into the elusive concept progressed, the theoretical and empirical emphasis shifted away from essentialising criteria and individualistic understandings of the ‘resilience construct’ to more ‘everyday’ and socially interactive aspects of resilience in our world. Although there is arguably a hangover effect attributable to the longstanding psychological science regime, resilience research appears to have moved beyond an understanding of the phenomenon as a discrete trait or defining characteristic of ‘resilient’ or ‘invulnerable’ individuals, communities, economies or environmental systems. While there is a distinctly personal component to the accumulation of resilience, its formation and distribution is now seen as traversing and intersecting multiple social categories, cultural contexts and geographic boundaries. In this edition of M/C Journal, the seventeen contributing authors have explored the concept of resilience and what in means to be ‘resilient’ in a variety of local, national and international contexts. The common thread running through each article relates to the interactive and iterative nature of resilience, as extending into and circulating within our diverse social worlds. So let’s get into it. In the feature article, Michael John Wilson and James Arvanitakis provide an overview of resilience research to date. They propose an expanded and expanding perspective on resilience, one that accounts for the accumulative and relational dimensions of the phenomenon. For them, resilience is best conceived as a meta-capacity, which is closely tied to the formation and expression of an active and enabling hope. As a result of broad scale movements in human mobility, climate change and global economic integration, it is their contention that resilience, as an analytical framework and object of inquiry, will gain increasing attention and relevance as we move further into the 21st century. In Resilience and Refugees, David Eades proposes a continuum for understanding refugees’ experiences from individualised trauma to posttraumatic growth. Calling for a thicker description of resilience that incorporates a positive orientation towards health and growth, David contends that the re-prioritisation of associated therapeutic discourse must be informed by the recognition of refugee populations’ worldviews. Following on from David’s piece, Neroli Colvin’s article Resettlement as Rebirth presents a novel take on refugees’ transitional experiences of migration and resettlement. She does so by exploring the symbolic and physical parallels between refugees’ separation from their ‘mother country’, and the biological birthing process involving separation of mother and infant. Neroli makes the valuable point that successful resettlement can involve multiple rebirths, requiring reserves of hope, imagination, energy, and above all, resilience. Following this, Dorothy Bottrell’s article investigates the centrality of resilience-building and resilient practices for neoliberal social policy concerned with the quality of people’s lives affected by, and forged within, conditions of marginalisation and disadvantage. Words have the power to empower and subjugate. In his article, Queer Youth Resilience, Rob Cover critiques the discourse of hope and hopelessness in Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender (LGBT) suicide representation. He develops the important idea that – as with processes of growing up – resilience and vulnerability are informed and formed by a series of transitions, as well as expected and unexpected cultural encounters and circumstantial changes. With similarities to the term ‘queer’, ‘crip’ or ‘cripple’ has been re-appropriated and inscribed with new meaning (and potential) by persons living with a disability. In their article “Cripping” Resilience, Emily Hutcheon and Gregor Wolbring propose the concept of “‘cripping’ resilience” as a way of augmenting traditional conceptions of resilience with additional political and analytical power. Following on from the work by Emily and Gregor, Katie Ellis explores the idea of a politics of resilience in a disabling world. Her contribution investigates the role of resilience within critical disability studies and in particular, popular understandings of disability and the emergence of a disability culture. In Reproductive Resiliency, Katherine Reilly and Ayumi Goto share with us a deeply moving piece that explores the phenomenon of resilience in relation to their personal experiences with reproductive loss. Drawing on individual carers’ narratives, Timothy Broady offers an account of the various factors and practices that promote or constrain carers’ wellbeing. In moving beyond an understanding of carers’ as simply ‘coping’ with their caring responsibilities, Timothy proposes a more nuanced method for interpreting carers’ varied experiences and attitudes towards caring. In developing the term “discursive” resilience, Andrew Munro takes us on a journey back to the early 2000s to explore what it meant to be ‘resilient’ in the light of a sensational homicide case, an economic crisis and a deeply unstable political landscape in Argentina. David Torres and Jeremy Fyke, in their article Communicating Resilience, challenge current concepts of optimism, hope and resilience in terms of leadership perspectives and work contexts. They propose a ‘discursive leadership orientation’ in an effort to highlight the communicative and social construction of resilience. In Building Resilient Communities, Karey Harrison performs a metaphoric analysis to examine the differences between complex adaptive systems models of resilience in the ecology and climate change literature, and the linear ‘equilibrium’ models, which have come to dominate resilience research in psychology and economics. In her article Prognosis Critical, Michele Grossman reflects on the potential for protective impacts resulting from a greater recognition of ethnocultural diversity and social cohesion, and the benefits this can have in terms of strengthening a community’s resilience to threats of national security, emergency management and disaster response. In drawing on the storytelling practice of Aunty Hilda Wilson, Ngarrindjeri Aboriginal elder, Karen Hughes explicates the subjective aspects of resilience, agency and resistance embedded within Indigenous knowledge systems of relationality, kin and work. In Anxious settler belonging, Lisa Slater examines the potential for creating resilient postcolonial subjects. In particular, she identifies the political and ethical potential of affects, in this case, anxiety or anxiousness, as potential utilities for bringing to the surface and confronting the continence of colonial power relations in Australia. In his historical analysis of events in the rural Norwegian community of Volda in the late 1880s, Roy Krøvel examines how the struggle for recognition, acts of resistance against stigmatisation and ideological polarisation can provide insights and opportunities for the formation of social learning and collective creativity in resilient communities. Rounding out the issue, Nicolas Marquis adopts an interdisciplinary perspective to investigate how self-help readers make use of the “language game” of resilience. In particular, he examines how the common sense notion of resilience is mobilised as a cultural resource by readers of self-helps books and why this understanding of resilience sheds light on some important characteristics of liberal-individualistic societies, when compared with traditional societies. Acknowledgements We would like to thank all the contributing authors, the peer reviewers who took time out of their busy schedules to review one or more articles, Axel Bruns, and our resilient copy editors, Gregory Wilson and Jayde Cahir.
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Barnett, Tully, Simon Dwyer, Rachel Franks, and Jane Mummery. "Regional." M/C Journal 22, no. 3 (June 19, 2019). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.1548.

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The experiences of regional Australia are unique. This issue of M/C Journal solidifies some of the understandings of the experiences of living, working, creating, researching or thinking in, or through, regional Australia. Our work explores regional cultural constructions of these places, spaces, and identities, as well as of the communities that breathe life into these landscapes, whilst also bringing into question relations between the regional, the local, and the global. The contributions to this issue have all worked to investigate sites of collaboration and innovation, to tell stories about diverse communities, and cultural centres in addition to sites of hardship, innovation, and resilience.Moreover, regional Australia has often been marginalised and routinely activated as a symbol of what it means to live in the Great South Land, thus these places are often situated in the shadows of major metropolitan areas. This issue seeks to be a small redress of such acts of marginalisation and activation. Indeed, one of the central purposes of this collection of articles is to privilege regional voices. To this end, the editors have maintained the authorial voices within each piece. Revealed here is a diversity of point of view, of writing styles, and, most importantly, a diversity of scholarly approaches to what we know (and what we might come to know) of ‘regional’ in Australia. The feature article, from Karen Hall and Patrick Sutczak, takes up ideas of regional Australia through an examination of three site-based creative arts projects in the Tasmanian Midlands, arguing for an understanding of regionality as an accretion of environmental and cultural histories. Steven Pace has written on how a high-bandwidth data network project identified a special challenge for the Mackay region which had traditionally prospered from industries such as coal, sugar, and tourism; two decades later, how does the reality compare with the original vision? Alison Sheridan, Jane O’Sullivan, Josie Fisher, Kerry Dunne, and Wendy Beck have argued, looking at television media, that there is greater cultural diversity and complexity in regional towns and cities than portrayed in popular programming that often focus on landscapes and resilient communities, or on the lifestyle benefits of living in a regional area. Damien Webb and Rachel Franks have explored the institutional collecting of stories vital to the culture and knowledge of Aboriginal Australians and how such stories, generated by colonists, can be shared—across metropolitan and regional locations—with Indigenous communities through meaningful collaboration. Robin Ryan, with Uncle Ossie Cruse, has discussed Koori culture in New South Wales and the value of bringing together emerging regional artists, national headline performers of music, dance, and poetry, complemented by art, craft, culinary, language, and performing arts demonstrations. Terry Eyssens has also looked carefully at Indigenous issues and argues that the Australian colonial project has been to convert the entire continent into a region of Europe, in the process he has challenged readers to see the spaces they inhabit in a new way.In highlighting a collaboration between the Bonegilla Migrant Experience site, the Albury LibraryMuseum, and Charles Sturt University, Jessie Lymn has considered the role of regional libraries and museums in collecting, preserving, and making accessible the history of migrant communities. Alison Wishart has also looked at the cultural sector through the lens of the important issue of training and ways to connect the staff and volunteers of galleries, libraries, archives, and museums in regional areas to low-cost professional development and networking opportunities. Ellen Forsyth has investigated how local studies collections in public libraries can help people navigate the various experiences of regional Australia, paying particular attention to how this discovery work can be done onsite and online.Patrick West has examined how the concept of the regional is tied to ideas of well-being through the lens of domestic violence in Tony Birch’s short story “The Red House”. Creativity is central to Susie Elliott’s article which draws on her work on the social, economic, and local conditions that can support art practices, this research highlights alternative ways to live well while entering into the shared space of cultural production. We bookend this issue with another piece of scholarship from Tasmania. The notion of regional has been expanded here by Hanne Nielsen, Chloe Lucas, and Elizabeth Leane with their investigation into Antarctica and how this polar cap has been conceptualised as a region and what that might mean for people in this southern-most state of Australia. AcknowledgementsOur sincere thanks to the members of the Advisory Board of the Australasian Consortium of Humanities Research Centres (ACHRC) for encouraging us in this project. The ACHRC supports two Member Initiatives: Humanities in the Regions; and Humanities in Cultural Institutions. The Humanities in the Regions Member Initiative, established in 2014, seeks to promote Humanities-based research in regional areas across Australia. We thank our enthusiastic contributors, those who gave their expertise and time in the blind peer review process, and Axel Bruns.
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"Book reviewsCharlie Cook's Favourite Book, Special 10 Years Anniversary Edition By Julia Donaldson and Axel Scheffler Macmillan Children's Books ISBN: 978-1-447276784 Price: £6.99 Reviewed by Victoria Tetley-IsleElephant (Eye on the Wild) By Suzi Esztehas Frances Lincoln Children's Books ISBN: 978-847806550 Cost: £7.99 Reviewed by Karen FauxWhat Makes Your Body Work? By Gill Arbuthnott Bloomsbury Children's Books ISBN: 978-1472908865 Cost: £8.99 Reviewed by Viv HampshireAttachment Theory and Research, New Directions and Emerging Themes Edited by Jeffry A Simpson and W Steven Rholes Guilford Press/Taylor & Francis Group ISBN: 978-1462512171 Cost: £43.99 (hardback) Reviewed by Karen FauxNever Tickle a Tiger By Pamela Butchart and illustrated by Marc Boutavant Bloomsbury Children's Books ISBN: 978-1408839041 Cost: £6.99 Reviewed by: Jessica SargentThe Fire Children – A West African Folk Tale By Eric Maddern and illustrated by Frané Lessac Frances Lincoln Children's Books ISBN: 978-1847806529 Cost: £7.99 Reviewed by Karen Faux." Practical Pre-School 2015, no. 174 (July 2, 2015): 24–25. http://dx.doi.org/10.12968/prps.2015.174.24.

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"Buchbesprechungen." Zeitschrift für Historische Forschung: Volume 47, Issue 4 47, no. 4 (October 1, 2020): 663–808. http://dx.doi.org/10.3790/zhf.47.4.663.

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Becher, Matthias / Stephan Conermann / Linda Dohmen (Hrsg.), Macht und Herrschaft transkulturell. Vormoderne Konfigurationen und Perspektiven der Forschung (Macht und Herrschaft, 1), Göttingen 2018, V&amp;R unipress / Bonn University Press, 349 S., € 50,00. (Matthias Maser, Erlangen) Riello, Giorgio / Ulinka Rublack (Hrsg.), The Right to Dress. Sumptuary Laws in a Global Perspective, c. 1200 – 1800, Cambridge [u. a.] 2019, Cambridge University Press, XVII u. 505 S. / Abb., £ 95,00. (Kim Siebenhüner, Jena) Briggs, Chris / Jaco Zuijderduijn (Hrsg.), Land and Credit. Mortgages in the Medieval and Early Modern European Countryside (Palgrave Studies in the History of Finance), Cham 2018, Palgrave Macmillan, 339 S. / graph. Darst., € 149,79. (Anke Sczesny, Augsburg) Rogger, Philippe / Regula Schmid (Hrsg.), Miliz oder Söldner? Wehrpflicht und Solddienst in Stadt, Republik und Fürstenstaat 13.–18. Jahrhundert (Krieg in der Geschichte, 111), Paderborn 2019, Schöningh, XI u. 282 S. / Abb., € 64,00. (Tim Nyenhuis, Düsseldorf) Seggern, Harm von (Hrsg.), Residenzstädte im Alten Reich (1300 – 1800). Ein Handbuch, Abteilung I: Analytisches Verzeichnis der Residenzstädte, Teil 1: Nordosten (Residenzenforschung. Neue Folge: Stadt und Hof, I.1), Ostfildern 2018, Thorbecke, XVII u. 687 S., € 85,00. (Martin Fimpel, Wolfenbüttel) Walsh, Michael J. K. (Hrsg.), Famagusta Maritima. Mariners, Merchants, Pilgrims and Mercenaries (Brill’s Studies in Maritime History, 7), Leiden / Boston 2019, Brill, XX u. 300 S. / Abb., € 116,00. (Jann M. Witt, Laboe) Hodgson, Natasha R. / Katherine J. Lewis / Matthew M. Mesley (Hrsg.), Crusading and Masculinities (Crusades – Subsidia, 13), London / New York 2019, Routledge, XII u. 365 S., £ 110,00. (Melanie Panse-Buchwalter, Kassel) Pálosfalvi, Tamás, From Nicopolis to Mohács. A History of Ottoman-Hungarian Warfare, 1389 – 1526 (The Ottoman Empire and Its Heritage, 63), Leiden / Boston 2018, Brill, XIV u. 504 S. / Abb., € 135,00. (Sándor Papp, Szeged) Rubin, Miri, Cities of Strangers. Making Lives in Medieval Europe (The Wiles Lectures), Cambridge [u. a.] 2020, Cambridge University Press, XV u. 189 S. / Abb., £ 18,99. (Uwe Israel, Dresden) Hummer, Hans, Visions of Kinship in Medieval Europe (Oxford Studies in Medieval European History), Oxford / New York 2018, Oxford University Press, 380 S., £ 65,00. (Wolfgang P. Müller, New York) Kuehn, Thomas, Family and Gender in Renaissance Italy 1300 – 1600, Cambridge / New York 2017, Cambridge University Press, XV u. 387 S., £ 24,99. (Inken Schmidt-Voges, Marburg) Houlbrooke, Ralph, Love and Dishonour in Elizabethan England. Two Families and a Failed Marriage, Woodbridge 2018, The Boydell Press, XX u. 272 S., £ 50,00. 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(Axel Flügel, Bielefeld) Seitschek, Stefan, Die Tagebücher Kaiser Karls VI. Zwischen Arbeitseifer und Melancholie, Horn 2018, Berger, 524 S. / Abb., € 29,90. (Tobias Schenk, Wien) Köntgen, Sonja, Gräfin Gessler vor Gericht. Eine mikrohistorische Studie über Gewalt, Geschlecht und Gutsherrschaft im Königreich Preußen 1750 (Veröffentlichungen aus den Archiven Preußischer Kulturbesitz. Forschungen 14), Berlin 2019, Duncker &amp; Humblot, VIII u. 291 S., € 89,90. (Nicolas Rügge, Hannover) Polli-Schönborn, Marco, Kooperation, Konfrontation, Disruption. Frühneuzeitliche Herrschaft in der alten Eidgenossenschaft vor und während des Leventiner Protestes von 1754/55, Basel 2020, Schwabe, 405 S. / Abb., € 58,00. (Beat Kümin, Warwick) Kubiska-Scharl, Irene / Michael Pölzl, Das Ringen um Reformen. Der Wiener Hof und sein Personal im Wandel (1766 – 1792) (Mitteilungen des Österreichischen Staatsarchivs, 60), Wien 2018, StudienVerlag, 756 S. / graph. Darst., € 49,20. 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17

Bruns, Axel. "The Fiction of Copyright." M/C Journal 2, no. 1 (February 1, 1999). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.1737.

Full text
Abstract:
It is the same spectacle all over the Western world: whenever delegates gather to discuss the development and consequences of new media technologies, a handful of people among them will stand out from the crowd, and somehow seem not quite to fit in with the remaining assortment of techno-evangelists, Internet ethnographers, multimedia project leaders, and online culture critics. At some point in the proceedings, they'll get to the podium and hold a talk on their ideas for the future of copyright protection and intellectual property (IP) rights in the information age; when they are finished, the reactions of the audience typically range from mild "what was that all about?" amusement to sheer "they haven't got a clue" disbelief. Spare a thought for copyright lawyers; they're valiantly fighting a losing battle. Ever since the digitalisation and networking of our interpersonal and mass media made information transmission and duplication effortless and instantaneous, they've been trying to come up with ways to uphold and enforce concepts of copyright which are fundamentally linked to information as bound to physical objects (artifacts, books, CDs, etc.), as Barlow has demonstrated so clearly in "Selling Wine without Bottles". He writes that "copyright worked well because, Gutenberg notwithstanding, it was hard to make a book. ... Books had material surfaces to which one could attach copyright notices, publisher's marques, and price tags". If you could control the physical media which were used to transmit information (paper, books, audio and video tapes, as well as radio and TV sets, or access to cable systems), you could control who made copies when and where, and at what price. This only worked as long as the technology to make copies was similarly scarce, though: as soon as most people learnt to write, or as faxes and photocopiers became cheaper, the only real copyright protection books had was the effort that would have to be spent to copy them. With technology continuously advancing (perhaps even at accellerating pace), copyright is soon becoming a legal fiction that is losing its link to reality. Indeed, we are now at a point where we have the opportunity -- the necessity, even -- to shift the fictional paradigm, to replace the industrial-age fiction of protective individual copyright with an information-age fiction of widespread intellectual cooperation. As it becomes ever easier to bypass and ignore copyright rules, and as copyright thus becomes ever more illusionary, this new fiction will correspondingly come ever closer to being realised. To Protect and to ... Lose Today, the lawyers' (and their corporate employers') favourite weapon in their fight against electronic copyright piracy are increasingly elaborate protection mechanisms -- hidden electronic signatures to mark intellectual property, electronic keys to unlock copyrighted products only for legitimate users (and sometimes only for a fixed amount of time or after certain licence payments), encryption of sensitive information, or of entire products to prevent electronic duplication. While the encryption of information exchanges between individuals has been proven to be a useful deterrent against all but the most determined of hackers, it's interesting to note that practically no electronic copyright protection mechanism of mass market products has ever been seen to work. However good and elaborate the protection efforts, it seems that as long as there is a sufficient number of interested consumers unwilling to pay for legitimate access, copy protections will be cracked eventually: the rampant software piracy is the best example. On the other hand, where copy protections become too elaborate and cumbersome, they end up killing the product they are meant to protect: this is currently happening in the case of some of the pay-per-view or limited-plays protection schemes forced upon the U.S. market for Digital Versatile Discs (DVDs). The eventual failure of such mechanisms isn't a particularly recent observation, even. When broadcast radio was first introduced in Australia in 1923, it was proposed that programme content should be protected (and stations financed) by fixing radio receivers to a particular station's frequency -- by buying such a 'sealed set' receiver you would in effect subscribe to a station and acquire the right to receive the content it provided. Never known as uninventive, those Australians who this overprotectiveness didn't completely put off buying a receiver (radio was far from being a proven mass medium at the time, after all) did of course soon break the seal, and learnt to adjust the frequency to try out different stations -- or they built their own radios from scratch. The 'sealed set' scheme was abandoned after only nine months. Even with the development of copy protection schemes since the 1920s, a full (or at least sufficiently comprehensive) protection of intellectual property seems as unattainable a fiction as it was then. Protection and copying technology are never far apart in development anyway, but even more fundamentally, the protected products are eventually meant to be used, after all. No matter how elaborately protected a CD, a video, or a computer programme is, it will still have to be converted into sound waves, image information, or executable code, and at that level copying will still remain possible. In the absence of workable copy protection, however, copies will be made in large amounts -- even more so since information is now being spread and multiplied around the globe virtually at the speed of light. Against this tide of copies, any attempts to use legislation to at least force the payment of royalties from illegitimate users are also becoming increasingly futile. While there may be a few highly publicised court cases, the multitude of small transgressions will remain unanswered. This in turn undermines the equality before the law that is a basic human right: increasingly, the few that are punished will be able to argue that, if "everybody does it", to single them out is highly unfair. At the same time, corporate efforts to uphold the law may be counterproductive: as Barlow writes, "against the swift tide of custom, the Software Publishers' current practice of hanging a few visible scapegoats is so obviously capricious as to only further diminish respect for the law". Quite simply, their legal costs may not be justified by the results anymore. Abandoning Copyright Law If copyright has become a fiction, however -- one that is still, despite all evidence, posited as reality by the legal system --, and if the makeup of today's electronic media, particularly the Internet, allow that fiction to be widely ignored and circumvented in daily practice -- despite all corporate legal efforts --, how is this disparity between law and reality to be solved? Barlow offers a clear answer: "whenever there is such profound divergence between the law and social practice, it is not society that adapts". He goes on to state that it may well be that when the current system of intellectual property law has collapsed, as seems inevitable, that no new legal structure will arise in its place. But something will happen. After all, people do business. When a currency becomes meaningless, business is done in barter. When societies develop outside the law, they develop their own unwritten codes, practices, and ethical systems. While technology may undo law, technology offers methods for restoring creative rights. When William Gibson invented the term 'cyberspace', he described it as a "consensual hallucination" (67). As the removal of copyright to the realm of the fictional has been driven largely by the Internet and its 'freedom of information' ethics, perhaps it is apt to speak of a new approach to intellectual property (or, with Barlow, to 'creative rights') as one of consensual, collaborative use of such property. This approach is far from being fully realised yet, and must so for now remain fiction, too, but it is no mere utopian vision -- in various places, attempts are made to put into place consensual schemes of dealing with intellectual property. They also represent a move from IP hoarding to IP use. Raymond speaks of the schemes competing here as the 'cathedral' and the 'bazaar' system. In the cathedral system, knowledge is tightly controlled, and only the finished product, "carefully crafted by individual wizards or small bands of mages working in splendid isolation" (1), is ever released. This corresponds to traditional copyright approaches, where company secrets are hoarded and locked away (sometimes only in order to keep competitors from using them), and breaches punished severely. The bazaar system, on the other hand, includes the entire community of producers and users early on in the creative process, up to the point of removing the producer/user dichotomy altogether: "no quiet, reverent cathedral-building here -- rather, ... a great babbling bazaar of differing agendas and approaches ... out of which a coherent and stable system could seemingly emerge only by a succession of miracles", as Raymond admits (1). The Linux 'Miracle' Raymond writes about one such bazaar-system project which provides impressive proof that the approach can work, however: the highly acclaimed Unix-based operating system Linux. Instigated and organised by Finnish programmer Linus Torvalds, this enthusiast-driven, Internet-based development project has achieved more in less than a decade than what many corporate developers (Microsoft being the obvious example) can do in thrice that time, and with little financial incentive or institutional support at that. As Raymond describes, "the Linux world behaves in many respects like a free market or an ecology, a collection of selfish agents attempting to maximise utility which in the process produces a self-correcting spontaneous order more elaborate and efficient than any amount of central planning could achieve" (10). Thus, while there is no doubt that individual participants will eventually always also be driven by selfish reasons, there is collaboration towards the achievement of communal goals, and a consensus about what those goals are: "while coding remains an essentially solitary activity, the really great hacks come from harnessing the attention and brainpower of entire communities. The developer who uses only his or her own brain in a closed project is going to fall behind the developer who knows how to create an open, evolutionary context in which bug-spotting and improvements get done by hundreds of people" (Raymond 10). It is obvious that such collaborative projects need a structure that allows for the immediate participation of a large community, and so in the same way that the Internet has been instrumental in dismantling traditional copyright systems, it is also a driving factor in making these new approaches possible: "Linux was the first project to make a conscious and successful effort to use the entire world as its talent pool. I don't think it's a coincidence that the gestation period of Linux coincided with the birth of the World Wide Web, and that Linux left its infancy during the same period in 1993-1994 that saw the takeoff of the ISP industry and the explosion of mainstream interest in the Internet. Linus was the first person who learned how to play by the new rules that pervasive Internet made possible" (Raymond 10). While some previous collaborative efforts exist (such as shareware schemes, which have existed ever since the advent of programmable home computers), their comparatively limited successes underline the importance of a suitable communication medium. The success of Linux has now begun to affect corporate structures, too: informational material for the Mozilla project, in fact, makes direct reference to the Linux experience. On the Net, Mozilla is as big as it gets -- instituted to continue development of Netscape Communicator-based Web browsers following Netscape's publication of the Communicator source code, it poses a serious threat to Microsoft's push (the legality of which is currently under investigation in the U.S.) to increase marketshare for its Internet Explorer browser. Much like Linux, Mozilla will be a collaborative effort: "we intend to delegate authority over the various modules to the people most qualified to make decisions about them. We intend to operate as a meritocracy: the more good code you contribute, the more responsibility you will be given. We believe that to be the only way to continue to remain relevant, and to do the greatest good for the greatest number" ("Who Is Mozilla.org?"), with the Netscape corporation only one among that number, and a contributor amongst many. Netscape itself intends to release browsers based on the Mozilla source code, with some individual proprietary additions and the benefits corporate structures allow (printed manuals, helplines, and the like), but -- so it seems -- it is giving up its unlimited hold over the course of development of the browser. Such actions afford an almost prophetic quality to Barlow's observation that "familiarity is an important asset in the world of information. It may often be the case that the best thing you can do to raise the demand for your product is to give it away". The use of examples from the computer world should not be seen to mean that the consensual, collaborative use of intellectual property suggested here is limited only to software -- it is, however, no surprise that a computer-based medium would first be put to use to support computer-based development projects. Producers and artists from other fields can profit from networking with their peers and clients just as much: artists can stay in touch with their audience and one another, working on collaborative projects such as the brilliant Djam Karet CD Collaborator (see Taylor's review in Gibraltar), professional interest groups can exchange information about the latest developments in their field as well as link with the users of their products to find out about their needs or problems, and the use of the Net as a medium of communication for academic researchers was one of its first applications, of course. In many such cases, consensual collaboration would even speed up the development process and help iron out remaining glitches, beating the efforts of traditional institutions with their severely guarded intellectual property rights. As Raymond sees it, for example, "no commercial developer can match the pool of talent the Linux community can bring to bear on a problem", and so "perhaps in the end the free-software culture will triumph not because cooperation is morally right or software 'hoarding' is morally wrong ... , but simply because the commercial world cannot win an evolutionary arms race with free-software communities that can put orders of magnitude more skilled time into a problem" (10). Realising the Fiction There remains the problem that even the members of such development communities must make a living somehow -- a need to which their efforts in the community not only don't contribute, but the pursuit of which even limits the time available for the community efforts. The apparent impossibility of reconciling these two goals has made the consensual collaborative approach appear little more than a utopian fiction so far, individual successes like Linux or (potentially) Mozilla notwithstanding. However, there are ways of making money from the communal work even if due to the abolition of copyright laws mere royalty payments are impossible -- as the example of Netscape's relation to the Mozilla project shows, the added benefits that corporate support can bring will still seem worth paying for, for many users. Similarly, while music and artwork may be freely available on the Net, many music fans will still prefer to get the entire CD package from a store rather than having to burn the CD and print the booklet themselves. The changes to producer/user relations suggested here do have severe implications for corporate and legal structures, however, and that is the central reason why particularly the major corporate intellectual property holders (or, hoarders) and their armies of lawyers are engaged in such a fierce defensive battle. Needless to say, the changeover from the still-powerful fiction of enforcible intellectual property copyrights to the new vision of open, consensual collaboration that gives credit for individual contributions, but has no concept of an exclusive ownership of ideas, will not take place overnight. Intellectual property will continue to be guarded, trade secrets will keep being kept, for some time yet, but -- just as is the case with the established practice of patenting particular ideas just so competitors can't use them, but without ever putting them to use in one's own work -- eventually such efforts will prove to be self-defeating. Shutting one's creative talents off in a quiet cathedral will come to be seen as less productive than engaging in the creative cooperation occuring in the global bazaar, and solitary directives of central executives will be replaced by consensual decisions of the community of producers and users. As Raymond points out, "this is not to say that individual vision and brilliance will no longer matter; rather, ... the cutting edge ... will belong to people who start from individual vision and brilliance, then amplify it through the effective construction of voluntary communities of interest" (10). Such communal approaches may to some seem much like communism, but this, too, is a misconception. In fact, in this new system there is much more exchange, much more give and take going on than in the traditional process of an exchange of money for product between user and producer -- only the currency has changed. "This explains much of the collective 'volunteer' work which fills the archives, newsgroups, and databases of the Internet. Its denizens are not working for 'nothing,' as is widely believed. Rather they are getting paid in something besides money. It is an economy which consists almost entirely of information" (Barlow). And with the removal of the many barriers to the free flow of information and obstacles to scientific and artistic development that traditional copyright has created, the progress of human endeavour itself is likely to be sped up. In the end, then, it all comes down to what fictions we choose to believe or reject. In the light of recent developments, and considering the evidence that suggests the viability, even superiority of alternative approaches, it is becoming increasingly hard to believe that traditional copyright can, and much less, should be sustained. Other than the few major copyright holders, few stand to gain from upholding these rights. On the other hand, were we to lift copyright restrictions and use the ideas and information thus made available freely in a cooperative, consensual, and most of all productive way, we all might profit. As various projects have shown, that fiction is already in the process of being realised. References Barlow, John Perry. "Selling Wine without Bottles: The Economy of Mind on the Global Net." 1993. 26 Jan. 1999 <www.eff.org/pub/Publications/John_Perry_Barlow/HTML/idea_economy_article.php>. Gibson, William. Neuromancer. London: HarperCollins, 1984. Raymond, Eric S. "The Cathedral and the Bazaar." 1998. 26 Jan. 1999 <http://www.redhat.com/redhat/cathedral-bazaar/cathedral-bazaar.php>. Taylor, Mike. "Djam Karet, Jeff Greinke, Tim Song Jones, Nick Peck, Kit Watkins." Gibraltar 5.12 (22 Apr. 1995). 10 Feb. 1999 <http://www.progrock.net/gibraltar/issues/Vol5.Iss12.htm>. "Who Is Mozilla.org?" Mozilla.org Website. 1998. 26 Jan. 1999 <http://www.mozilla.org/about.php>. Citation reference for this article MLA style: Axel Bruns. "The Fiction of Copyright: Towards a Consensual Use of Intellectual Property." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2.1 (1999). [your date of access] <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9902/copy.php>. Chicago style: Axel Bruns, "The Fiction of Copyright: Towards a Consensual Use of Intellectual Property," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2, no. 1 (1999), <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9902/copy.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: Axel Bruns. (1999) The fiction of copyright: towards a consensual use of intellectual property. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2(1). <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9902/copy.php> ([your date of access]).
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"Book reviewsDeveloping Early Maths Through Story Written by Marion Leeper Practical Pre-School Books ISBN: 978-1-9-09280-76-2 Cost: £18.99 Reviewed by Eileen JonesFeelings can be friends Written by and illustrated by Gail Maisel Published by Panoma Press ISBN: 978-19079623262 Cost: £5.99 Reviewed by Eileen JonesAlfie Outdoors Written by Shirley Hughes Bodley Head ISBN: 978-1782300311 Cost: £11.99 Reviewed by Viv HampshireCharlie Cook's Favourite Book, Special 10 Years Anniversary Edition Written by Julia Donaldson and Axel Scheffler Publisher: Macmillan Children's Books ISBN: 978-1-4472-7678-4 Price: £6.99 Reviewed by Victoria Tetley-IsleTree – Seasons Come, Seasons Go Written by Patricia Hegarty and illustrated by Britta Teckentrup Little Tiger Press ISBN: 978-1848691285 Cost: £10.99 (hardback) Reviewed by Karen FauxPlanning for Learning through Winter Written by Rachel Sparks Linfield and Penny Coltman Practical Pre-School Books ISBN: 978-1-909280-81-6 Cost: £9.99 Reviewed by Eileen Jones." Practical Pre-School 2015, no. 177 (October 2, 2015): 24–25. http://dx.doi.org/10.12968/prps.2015.177.24.

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McCosker, Anthony. "Blogging Illness: Recovering in Public." M/C Journal 11, no. 6 (November 30, 2008). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.104.

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As a mode of open access public self-expression, blogs are one form of the unfolding massification of culture (Lovink). Though widely varied in content and style, they are characterised by a reverse chronological diary-like format, often produced by a single author, and often intimately expressive of that author’s thoughts and experiences. The purpose of this paper is to explore the use of blogs as a space for the detailed and on-going expression of the day to day experiences of sufferers of serious illness. We might traditionally consider the experience of illness as absolutely private, but illness, along with the process of recovery, retains a social and cultural aspect (Kleinman et al). A growing body of literature has recognised that the Internet has become a significant space for the recovery work that accompanies the diagnosis of serious illness (Orgad; Pitts; Hardey). Empowerment and agency are often emphasised in this literature, particularly in terms of the increased access to information and support groups, but also in the dynamic performances of self enabled by different forms of online communication and Web production. I am particularly interested in the ongoing shifts in the accessibility of “private” personal experience enabled by blog culture. Although there are thousands of others like them, three “illness blogs” have recently caught my attention for their candidness, completeness and complexity, expressing in vivid depth and detail individual lives transformed by serious illness. The late US journalist and television producer Leroy Sievers maintained a high profile blog, My Cancer, and weekly podcast on the National Public Radio website until his death from metastasised colon cancer in August 2008. Sievers used his public profile and the infrastructure of the NPR website to both detail his personal experience and bring together a community of people also affected by cancer or moved by his thoughts and experiences. The blogger Brainhell came to my attention through blogsphere comments and tributes when he died in February 2008. Spanning more than four years, Brainhell’s witty and charming blog attracted a significant audience and numerous comments, particularly toward the end of his life as the signs of his deteriorating motor system as a result of Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS, or “Lou Gherig’s disease”) riddled his intimate posts. Another blog of interest to me here, called Humanities Researcher, incorporates academic Stephanie Trigg’s period of illness and recovery from breast cancer within a pre-existing and ongoing blog about the intersection between professional and personal life. As I had crossed paths with Trigg while at Melbourne University, I was always interested in her blog. But her diagnosis with breast cancer and subsequent accounts of tests, the pain and debilitation of treatment and recovery within her blog also offer valuable insight into the role of online technologies in affecting experiences of illness and for the process of recovery.The subject matter of illness blogs revolves around significant personal transformations as a result of serious illness or trauma: transformations of everyday life, of body and emotional states, relationships, physical appearance, and the loss or recovery of physical ability. It is not my intention in this brief analysis to overgeneralise on the basis of some relatively limited observations. However, many blogs written in response to illness stand out for what they reveal about the shifting location or locatability of self, experience and the events of ongoing illness and thus how we can conceptualise the inherent “privacy” of illness as personal experience. Self-expression here is encompassing of the possibilities through which illness can be experienced – not as representation of that experience, a performance of a disembodied self (though these notions have their merits) – but an expressive element of the substance of the illness as it is experienced over time, as it affects the bodies, thoughts, events and relationships of individuals moving toward a state of full recovery or untimely death. Locating Oneself OnlineMany authors currently examining the role of online spaces in the lives of sufferers of serious illness see online communication as providing a means for configuring experience as a meaningful and coherent story, and thus conferring, or we could say recovering, a sense of agency amidst a tumultuous and ongoing battle with serious illness (Orgad, Pitts). In her study of breast cancer discussion forums, message boards and websites, Orgad (4) notes their role in regaining “the fundamentals disturbed by cancer” (see also Bury). Well before the emergence of online spaces, the act or writing has been seen as “a crucial affirmation of living, a statement against fearfulness, invisibility and silence” (Orgad, 67; Lorde, 61). For many decades scientists have asserted that “brief structured writing sessions can significantly improve mental and physical health for some groups of people” (Singer and Singer 485). The Internet has provided an infrastructure for bringing personal experiences of illness into the public realm, enabling a new level of visibility. Much of the work on illness and the Internet focuses on the liberatory and empowering act of story telling and “disembodied” self-expression. Discussion forums and cancer websites enable the formation of patient led “discourse communities” (Wuthnow). Online spaces such as discussion forums help their participants gain a foothold within a world they share with other sufferers, building communities of practice (Wegner) around specific forms of illness. In this way, these forms of self-expression and communication enable the sufferer of serious illness to counter the modes by which they are made “subjects”, in the Foucauldian sense, of medical discourse. All illness narratives are defined and constructed socially, and are infused with relations of power (Sontag; Foucault, Birth of the Clinic). Forms of online communication have shifted productive practice from professions to patients. Blogs, like discussion forums, websites, email lists etc., have come to play a central role in this contemporary shift. When Lovink (6) describes blogs as a “technology of the self” he points to their role in “self-fashioning”. Blogs written about and in the context of personal illness are a perfect example of this inclination to speak the truth of oneself in the confessional mode of modern culture borne of the church, science and talkshow television. For Foucault (Technologies of the Self, 17), technologies of the self: Permit individuals to effect by their own means or with the help of others a certain number of operations on their own bodies and souls, thoughts, conduct and way of being, so as to transform themselves in order to attain a state of happiness, purity, wisdom, perfection, immortality. Likewise, as a central concept for understanding Internet identity, the notion of performance (eg, Turkle) highlights the creativity with which illness bloggers may present their role as cancer patient in online spaces, perhaps as an act of resistance to “subjectifying” medical discourses and practices. Many bloggers wrest semiotic power through regular discussion of the language of pathology and medical knowledge, treatment processes and drugs. In the early stages of her treatment, Trigg plays with the new vocabulary, searching for etiologies and making her own semantic connections: I’ve learnt two new words. “Spiculated” describes the characteristic shape of a carcinoma on an ultrasound or x-ray. …The other word is at the other end of the spectrum of linguistic beauty: “lumpectomy”. It took me quite a while to realise that this was not really any different from partial mastectomy; or local excision. It’s an example of the powerful semantic connotations of words to realise that these phrases name the same processes: a long cut, and then the extraction of the diseased tissue (Humanities Researcher, 14 Oct. 2006).Partly due to the rarity of his illness, Brainhell goes through weeks of waiting for a diagnosis, and posts prolifically in an attempt to test out self-diagnoses. Amidst many serious and humorous posts analysing test results and discussing possible diagnoses Brainhell reflects on his targeted use of the blog: I am a word person. I think in sentences. I often take complex technical problems at work and describe them to myself in words. A story helps me understand things better. This blog has become a tool for me to organize my own thoughts about the Mystery Condition. (Brainhell, 6 Jan. 2004)The emancipatory potential of blog writing, however, can be easily overstated. While it is valuable to note and celebrate the performative potential of online production, and its “transformative” role as a technology of the self, it is easy to fall back on an unproblematic distinction between the actual and the virtual, the experience of illness, and its representation in online spaces. Textual expression should always refer us to the extra-textual practices that encompass it without imposing an artificial hierarchy of online and offline, actual experience and representation. As with other forms of online communication and production, the blog culture that has emerged around forms of serious illness plays a significant role in transforming our concepts of the relationship between online and offline spaces. In his My Cancer blog, Sievers often refers to “Cancer World”. He notes, for example, the many “passing friends” he makes in Cancer World through the medical staff and other regular patients at the radiation clinic, and refers to the equipment that sustains his life as the accoutrements of this world. His blog posts revolved around an articulation of the intricacies of this “world” that is in some ways a means of making sense of that world, but is also expressive of it. Sievers tries to explain the notion of Cancer World as a transformation of status between insider & outsider: “once we cross over into Cancer World, we become strangers in a strange land. What to expect, what to hope for, what to fear – none of those are clear right now” (My Cancer, 30 June 2008). Part of his struggle with the illness is also with the expression of himself as encompassed by this new “world” of the effects and activities of cancer. In a similar way, in her Humanities Researcher blog Trigg describes in beautiful detail the processes, routines and relationships formed during radiation treatment. I see these accounts of the textures of cancer spaces as lying at the point of juncture between expression and experience, not as a disembodied, emancipatory realm free from the fetters of illness and the everyday “real” self, but always encompassed by, and encompassing them, and in this way shifting what might be understood to remain “private” in personal experience and self-expression. Blogs as Public Diary Axel Bruns (171), following Matthew Rothenberg, characterises blogs as an accessible technological extension of the personal home page, gaining popularity in the late 1990s because they provided more easy to use templates and web publishing tools than earlier webpage applications. Personalised self expression is a defining element. However, the temporal quality of the reverse chronological, timestamped entry is equally significant for Bruns (171). Taking a broader focus to Bruns, who is most interested in the potential democratisation of media in news related blogs, Lovink sees the experimentation with a “public diary” format as fundamental, signalling their “productive contradiction between public and private” (Lovink 6). A diary may be written for posterity but it is primarily a secretive mode of communication. While blogs may mirror the temporal form of a diary, their intimate focus on self-expression of experience, thoughts and feelings, they do so in a very different communicative context.Despite research suggesting that a majority of bloggers report that they post primarily “for themselves” (Lenhart and Fox) – meaning that they do not deliberately seek a broad audience or readership – the step of making experiences and thoughts so widely accessible cannot be overlooked in any account of blogging. The question of audience or readership, for example, concerns Trigg in her Humanities Researcher blog: The immediacy of a blog distinguishes it from a journal or diary. I wrote for myself, of course, but also for a readership I could measure and chart and hear from, sometimes within minutes of posting. Mostly I don’t know who my readers are, but the kindness and friendship that come to me through the blog gave me courage to write about the intimacies of my treatment; and to chart the emotional upheaval it produced. (Trigg)In their ability to produce a comprehensive expression of the events, experiences, thoughts and feelings of an individual, blogs differ to other forms of online communication such as discussion forums or email lists. Illness blogs are perhaps an extreme example, an open mode of self-expression often arising abruptly in reaction to a life transforming diagnosis and tracking the process of recovery or deterioration, usually ending with remission or death. Brainhell’s blog begins with MRI results, and a series of posts about medical examination and self-examination regarding his mystery condition: So the MRI shows there is something on my brain that is not supposed to be there. The doctor thinks it is not a tumor. That would be good news. …As long as you are alive and have someone to complain to, you ain’t bad off. I am alive and I am complaining about a mystery spot on my brain, and lazy limbs. (Brainhell, 24 Dec. 2003)Brainhell spent many weeks documenting his search for a diagnosis, and continued writing up to his final deterioration and death in 2008. His final posts convey his physical deterioration in truncated sentences, spelling errors and mangled words. In one post he expresses his inability to wake his caregiver and to communicate his distress and physical discomfort at having to pee: when he snorted on waking, i shrieked and he got me up. splayed uncomfortably in the wc as he put dry clothes on me, i was gifted with his words: “you choose this, not me. you want to make it hard, what can i do?” (Brainhell, 13 Jan. 2008). The temporal and continuous format of the blog traverses the visceral, corporeal transformations of body and thought over time. The diary format goes beyond a straightforward narrative form in being far more experiential and even experimental in its self-reflective expression of the events of daily life, thoughts, feelings and states of being. Its public format bears directly on its role in shaping the communicative context in which that expression takes place, and thus to an extent shapes the experience of the illness itself. Nowhere does the expressive substance of the blog so fully encompass the possibilities through which the illness could be experienced than in the author’s death. At this point the blog feels like it is more than a catalogue, dialogue or self-presentation of a struggle with illness. It may take on the form of a memorial (see for example Tom’s Road to Recovery) – a recovery of the self expressed in the daily physical demise, through data maintained in the memory of servers. Ultimately the blog stands as a complex trace of the life lived within its posts. Brainhell’s lengthy blog exemplifies this quite hauntingly. Revealing the Private in Public Blogs exemplify a further step in the transformation of notions of public and private brought about by information and screen technologies. McQuire (103) refers to contemporary screen and Internet culture as “a social setting in which personal identity is subject to new exigencies”. Reality television, such as Big Brother, has promoted “a new mode for the public viewing of private life” (McQuire 114) contributing to the normalisation of open access to personal, intimate revelations, actions and experiences. However, privacy is “an elusive concept” that relates as much to information and property as to self-expression and personal experience (McCullagh). That is, what we consider private to an individual is itself constituted by our variable categories of personal information, material or immaterial possessions, or what counts as an expression of personal experience. Some analysts of online storytelling in the context of illness recognise the unsustainability of the distinction between public and private, but nonetheless rely on the notion of a continuum upon which activities or events could be considered as experienced in a public or private space (Orgad, 129-133). One of the characteristics of a blog, unlike other forms of online communication such as chat, discussion forums and email, is its predominantly public and openly accessible form. Though many illness bloggers do not seem to seek anonymity or hold back in allowing massive access to their self-expression and personal experience, a tension always seems to be there in the background. Identification through the proper name simply implies potential broader effects of blog writing, a pairing of the personal expressions with the person who expresses them in broader daily interactions and relationships. As already “public” figures, Stephanie Trigg and Leroy Sievers choose to forego anonymity, while Brainhell adopted his alias from the beginning and guarded his anonymity carefully. Each of these bloggers, however, shows signs of grappling with the public character of their site, and the interaction between the blog and their everyday life and relationships. In his etiquette page, Brainhell seems unclear about his readership, noting that his blog is for “friends and soul-mates, and complete strangers too”, but that he has not shared it with his family or all of his friends. He goes on to say: You may not have been invited but you are still welcome here. I made it public so that anyone could read it. Total strangers are welcome. Invited friends are welcome. But of those invited friends, I ask you to ask me before you out me as the blog author, or share the blog with other people who already know me. (Brainhell, 18 Feb. 2004) After his death Ratty took steps to continue to maintain his anonymity, vetting many comments and deleting others to “honor BH’s wishes as he outline in ‘Ettiquett for This Blog”’ (Brainhell, 2 Feb. 2008). In Leroy Sievers’ blog, one post exploring the conflict raised by publicly “sharing” his experiences provoked an interesting discussion. He relays a comment sent to him by a woman named Cherie: I have stage four colorectal cancer with liver mets. This is a strange journey, one I am not entirely sure I can share with my loved ones. I am scared it might rob them of the hope I see in their eyes. The hope which I sometimes don’t believe in. (My Cancer, 26 July 2006) Sievers struggles with this question: “How do you balance the need to talk about what is happening to you with the tears of a close friend when you tell him or her the truth? There’s no simple answer.” The blog, in this sense, seems to offer a more legitimate space for the ongoing, detailed expression of these difficult and affective, and traditionally private experiences. In some posts the privacy of the body and bodily experiences is directly challenged or re-negotiated. Stephanie Trigg was concerned with the effect of the blog on her interactions with colleagues. But another interesting dilemma presents itself to her when she is describing the physical effects of cancer, surgery and radiation treatment on her breast, and forces herself to hold back from comparing with the healthy breast: “it's not a medical breast, so I can't write about it here” (Humanities Researcher, 10 Jan. 2007). One prostate cancer blogger, identified as rdavisjr, seems to have no difficulties expressing the details of a physical intrusion on his “privacy” in the far more open forum of his blog: The pull-around ceiling mounted screen was missing (laundry?), so Kelly was called into the room and told to make a screen with a bed sheet. So here I am with one woman sticking her finger up my ass, while another woman is standing in front of the door holding an outstretched bed sheet under her chin (guess she wanted a view!)The screen was necessary to ensure my privacy in the event someone accidentally came into the room, something they said was a common thing. Well, Kelly peering over that sheet was hardly one of my more private moments in life! (Prostate Cancer Journal, 23 Feb. 2001). ConclusionWhatever emancipatory benefits may be found in expressing the most intimate of experiences and events of a serious illness online, it is the creative act of the blog as self-expression here, in its visceral, comprehensive, continuous timestamped format that dismantles the sense of privacy in the name of recovery. The blog is not the public face of private personal experience, but expressive of the life encompassed by that illness, and encompassing its author’s ongoing personal transformation. The blogs discussed here are not alone in demonstrating these practices. The blog format itself may soon evolve or disappear. Nonetheless, the massification enabled by Internet technologies and applications will continue to transform the ways in which personal experience may be considered private. ReferencesBruns, Axel. Gatewatching: Collaborative Online News Production. New York: Peter Lang, 2005.Bury, Michael. “Chronic Illness as Biographical Disruption.” Sociology of Health and Illness, 4.2 (1982): 167-182.Foucault, Michel. Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception. Trans. A.M. Sheridan. London: Tavistock, 1973.———. “Technologies of the Self” Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault. Ed. Luther H. Martin, Huck Gutman, Patrick M. Hutton, 1988: 16-49. Hardey, Michael. “‘The Story of My Illness’: Personal Accounts of Illness on the Internet.” Health 6.1 (2002): 31-46Kleinman, Arthur, Veena Das, and Margaret Lock, eds. Social Suffering. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997. Lenhart, Amanda, and Susannah Fox. Bloggers: A Portrait of the Internet’s New Storytellers. Washington: PEW Internet and American Life Project, 2006. Lorde, Audre. The Cancer Journals. San Francisco: Spinsters Ink, 1980.Lovink, Geert. Zero Comments: Blogging and Critical Internet Culture. 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"Buchbesprechungen." Zeitschrift für Historische Forschung 45, no. 3 (July 1, 2018): 495–650. http://dx.doi.org/10.3790/zhf.45.3.495.

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(Pauline Puppel, Berlin) Onnekink, David, Reinterpreting the Dutch Forty Years War, 1672 – 1713, Palgrave Pivot 2016, London, VIII u. 138 S., £ 37,99. (Johannes Arndt, Münster) Froide, Amy M., Silent Partners. Women as Public Investors during Britainʼs Financial Revolution, 1690 – 1750, Oxford / New York 2017, Oxford University Press, VI u. 225 S. / Abb., £ 60,00. (Philipp R. Rössner, Manchester) Mulsow, Martin / Kasper Risbjerg Eskildsen / Helmut Zedelmaier (Hrsg.), Christoph August Heumann (1681 – 1764). Gelehrte Praxis zwischen christlichem Humanismus und Aufklärung (Gothaer Forschungen zur Frühen Neuzeit, 12), Stuttgart 2017, Steiner, XVI u. 265 S. / Abb., € 54,00. (Claire Gantet, Fribourg/Freiburg) Harding, Elizabeth (Hrsg.), Kalkulierte Gelehrsamkeit. Zur Ökonomisierung der Universitäten im 18. Jahrhundert (Wolfenbütteler Forschungen, 148), Wiesbaden 2016, Harrassowitz in Kommission, 300 S. / Abb., € 62,00. (Andrea Thiele, Halle a. d. S.) Fulda, Daniel, „Die Geschichte trägt der Aufklärung die Fackel vor“. Eine deutsch-französische Bild-Geschichte (IZEA. Kleine Schriften, 7/2016), Halle a. d. S. 2017, Mitteldeutscher Verlag, 213 S. / Abb., € 16,00. (Kai Bremer, Kiel) Suitner, Riccarda, Die philosophischen Totengespräche der Frühaufklärung (Studien zum achtzehnten Jahrhundert, 37), Hamburg 2016, Meiner, 276 S. / Abb., € 78,00. (Helmut Zedelmaier, München / Halle a. d. S.) Mintzker, Yair, The Many Deaths of Jew Süss. The Notorious Trial and Execution of an Eighteenth-Century Court Jew, Princeton / Oxford 2017, Princeton University Press, X u. 330 S. / Abb., £ 27,95. (Gudrun Emberger, Berlin) Zedler, Andrea / Jörg Zedler (Hrsg.), Prinzen auf Reisen. Die Italienreise von Kurprinz Karl Albrecht 1715/16 im politisch-kulturellen Kontext (Beihefte zum Archiv für Kulturgeschichte, 86), Köln / Weimar / Wien 2017, Böhlau, 364 S. / Abb., € 50,00. (Michael Maurer, Jena) Streminger, Gerhard, Adam Smith. Wohlstand und Moral. Eine Biographie, Beck 2017, München, 253 S. / Abb., € 24,95. (Georg Eckert, Wuppertal) Home, Roderick W. / Isabel M. Malaquias / Manuel F. Thomaz (Hrsg.), For the Love of Science. The Correspondence of J. H. de Magellan (1722 – 1790), 2 Bde., Bern [u. a.] 2017, Lang, 2002 S. / Abb., € 228,95. (Lisa Dannenberg-Markel, Aachen) Wendt-Sellin, Ulrike, Herzogin Luise Friederike von Mecklenburg-Schwerin (1722 – 1791). Ein Leben zwischen Pflicht, Pläsir und Pragmatismus (Quellen und Studien aus den Landesarchiven Mecklenburg-Vorpommerns, 19), Köln / Weimar / Wien 2017, Böhlau, 468 S. / Abb., € 60,00. (Britta Kägler, Trondheim) Oehler, Johanna, „Abroad at Göttingen“. Britische Studenten als Akteure des Kultur- und Wissenstransfers 1735 bis 1806 (Veröffentlichungen der Historischen Kommission für Niedersachsen und Bremen, 289), Göttingen 2016, Wallstein, 478 S. / graph. Darst., € 39,90. (Michael Schaich, London) Düwel, Sven, Ad bellum Sacri Romano-Germanici Imperii solenne decernendum: Die Reichskriegserklärung gegen Brandenburg-Preußen im Jahr 1757. Das Verfahren der „preußischen Befehdungssache“ 1756/57 zwischen Immerwährendem Reichstag und Wiener Reichsbehörden, 2 Teilbde., Münster 2016, Lit, 985 S. / Abb., € 79,90 (Bd. 3 als Download beim Verlag erhältlich). (Martin Fimpel, Wolfenbüttel) Pufelska, Agnieszka, Der bessere Nachbar? Das polnische Preußenbild zwischen Politik und Kulturtransfer (1765 – 1795), Berlin / Boston 2017, de Gruyter Oldenbourg, VIII u. 439 S., € 74,95. (Maciej Ptaszyński, Warschau) Herfurth, Stefan, Freiheit in Schwedisch-Pommern. Entwicklung, Verbreitung und Rezeption des Freiheitsbegriffs im südlichen Ostseeraum zum Ende des 18. Jahrhunderts (Moderne europäische Geschichte, 14), Göttingen 2017, Wallstein, 262 S. / Abb., € 29,90. (Axel Flügel, Bielefeld) Boie, Heinrich Christian / Luise Justine Mejer, Briefwechsel 1776 – 1786, hrsg. v. Regina Nörtemann in Zusammenarbeit mit Johanna Egger, 4 Bde. im Schuber, Bd. 1: Juni 1776 – Juni 1782; Bd. 2: Juli 1782 – Juni 1784; Bd. 3: Juli 1784 – Juli 1786; Bd. 4: Kommentar, Göttingen 2016, Wallstein, 612 S. (Bd. 1); 608 S. (Bd. 2); 571 S. (Bd. 3); 846 S. / Abb. (Bd. 4), € 149,00. (Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger, Berlin / Münster) Poniatowski, Fürst Stanisław, Tagebuch einer Reise durch die deutschen Länder im Jahre 1784. Aus dem Manuskript übers. u. hrsg. v. Ingo Pfeifer, Halle a. d. S. 2017, Mitteldeutscher Verlag, 269 S., € 24,95. (Michael Maurer, Jena) Blaufarb, Rafe, The Great Demarcation. The French Revolution and the Invention of Modern Property, New York 2016, Oxford University Press, XIV u. 282 S., £ 47,99. (Moritz Isenmann, Köln) Behringer, Wolfgang, Tambora und das Jahr ohne Sommer. Wie ein Vulkan die Welt in die Krise stürzte, 4. Aufl., München 2016, Beck, 398 S. / Abb., € 24,95. (Wolfgang Reinhard, Freiburg i. Br.) Die Tagebücher des Ludwig Freiherrn Vincke 1789 – 1844, Bd. 10: 1830 – 1839, bearb. v. Heide Barmeyer-Hartlieb (Veröffentlichungen des Vereins für Geschichte und Altertumskunde Westfalens, Abt. Münster, 10; Veröffentlichungen der Historischen Kommission für Westfalen. Neue Folge, 45; Veröffentlichungen des Landesarchivs Nordrhein-Westfalen, 69), Münster 2018, Aschendorff, 949 S. / Abb., € 88,00. (Heinz Duchhardt, Mainz)
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21

Arps, Arnoud. "Performative Memories." M/C Journal 25, no. 4 (October 5, 2022). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.2924.

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Introduction Indonesian cultural productions use the Indonesian War of Independence (1945-1949) as inspiration for the war’s remembrance in popular culture such as in films (Arps; Irawanto), music, and mobile games, while a special emphasis on wearing historical costumes is made during the anniversary of Indonesia’s declaration of independence. Nowhere is this clearer than in Indonesian historical re-enactment. Although Indonesia has seen a rise in historical re-enactment groups for the last couple of years, the absence of scholarly research on the topic reflects how Indonesian historical re-enactment is still an understudied mode of cultural remembering in the nation. Yet in their uses of costume and media, these groups construct a complex form of remembering where local interests and national aspirations play a key role. Based on principal fieldwork carried out over a period of seven months in 2017 and 2018, the central case study here is the remembrance of the Serangan Umum 1 Maret 1949 (“General Offensive of 1 March 1949”, hereafter: Serangan Umum) by the Yogyakarta-based re-enactor group Komunitas Djokjakarta 1945. On the basis of participant observation, semi-structured in-depth interviews, and discourse analysis, this article critically analyses the re-enactors, their performances in public spaces, and the representations of their performances on social media. The one-hour interviews were conducted in Indonesian or English, whichever the respondents preferred. The re-enactors (six male, five female) were between eighteen and thirty-four years old. Most recently completed levels of education ranged from a high school diploma to a university’s Master’s degree. Amongst them were university students, a high school student, an elementary school teacher, an entrepreneur, an artist, a photographer, and a manager. With a special emphasis on claimed authentic clothing and attributes, they present their ‘image’ through two main media: teatrikals (public street performances) and the use of the social medium Instagram. The performance of memory, or “doing memory”, is related to agency (Plate and Smelik 2-3; 15). Even though such doing-acts are at times habitual, cultural memory can be understood as the product of collective agency (Bal vii). This is indeed prevalent in historical re-enactment communities where the collective constructs a version of the past. More important still are the role of narratives herein as “narrative memories, even of unimportant events, differ from routine or habitual memories in that they are affectively colored, surrounded by an emotional aura that, precisely, makes them memorable” (Bal viii). The collective act of Indonesian historical re-enactment becomes a memorable form of cultural recall that is consciously performed and constructed as a narrative memory. The body in historical re-enactment functions as a vehicle for meaning-making (Agnew, Lamb, and Tomann 7). As the body becomes the medium upon and through which memory is performed, the individual historical re-enactor becomes a producer and consumer of cultural memory. Subsequently, historical re-enactment communities can be seen as user communities that actively participate in content creation. As such, the role of the consumer, user, producer, and creator is inextricably interwoven through the performance (Bruns). This is performatively demonstrated by Indonesian re-enactment groups through both costume and media. This article answers how teatrikals and Instagram, as different forms of mediation, shape performative memories of the Indonesian War of Independence. Drawing from media, re-enactment, and cultural memory studies the article lays bare how embodied and mediated memories are created by combining local and national identity formation through a drive for authenticity in clothing and story. I argue that there is no clear divide between embodiment and mediation of the past, as both are folded into each other for the re-enactors. Komunitas Djokjakarta 1945 Komunitas Djokjakarta 1945 (hereafter: Komunitas D45) is a historical re-enactment community, comprised of approximately sixty-five core members of whom practically all are male, although its composition varies. They re-enact the history of Indonesia and in particular the Javanese city of Yogyakarta, focussing on the violent era from 1943 until 1949. The community is modelled after the Brigade X, which was once led by lieutenant colonel Suharto, later the second president of Indonesia. In their re-enactments, they try to be as authentic as possible towards their clothing and attributes of that specific period in time. The combination of Yogyakarta as décor of significant historical events during the war; the subsequent widely circulating representations of these events in popular culture; the city’s role as cultural node for the performing arts within the country; and the commemorations in the city itself (Ahimsa-Putra 165) add to the significance of Komunitas D45’s representations of the past. This significance also lies in a paradox: although the reasons above give Yogyakarta gravitas when it comes to representing the war, community members are adamant that the city is undervalued in national commemorations of it. Komunitas D45’s main annual re-enactment is that of the Serangan Umum, which was partly re-enacted during the re-enactments I studied in 2017 and 2018. This specific battle is significant as it is seen as a crucial moment during the Indonesian War of Independence. The Serangan Umum was an offensive in the early morning of the first of March 1949 in which Indonesian fighters attacked Dutch-occupied Yogyakarta. The Indonesian fighters were able to take hold of Yogyakarta for six hours, before retreating and with that returning control back to the Dutch. With their practices, Komunitas D45 is a memory community which is based on the establishment of an experiential site during their performances. A historical re-enactment consisting of re-enactors, fireworks, sound effects, and an engaged audience can be considered an experiential site where prosthetic memory emerges, meaning artificial memories (as opposed to memories based on lived experiences) that are sensuous and based on the experience of mass-mediated representations (Landsberg 20). Costume is a means to mediate the past and it is one of the key elements for the re-enactors of Komunitas D45. The teatrikal of the Serangan Umum 1 Maret 1949 “That, that’s an A1 gun. From England,” one re-enactor explained as he showed me a gun. “This is a Sten Gun, Mk. II,” he continued, “that one is usually used by regular soldiers. This one is usually used by someone that portrays lieutenant colonel Suharto.” The relationship between re-enactors and their possessions are “deeply contextualized in the knowledge and use of these objects, embedded in the sense of themselves as creative individuals.” (Hall in Gapps 397). This is on the one hand demonstrated by the re-enactors' historical knowledge of the costumes worn and weapons used, and on the other hand by their ability to build lifelike imitations of these attributes. To make sure that the battles look as authentic as possible, the re-enactors of Komunitas D45 make use of various props and attributes. Some of the actors use sachets of fake blood, made by mixing honey and food colouring or condensed milk, to recreate being shot. During the re-enactments, they bite the sachets and let the fake-blood run down their faces and clothes, imitating being wounded. The military costumes they wear are based on historical books and photos. Some weapons are bought, others are self-made imitations from wood and metal, which cost about a month or two to create. Just like other re-enactors they “go to extraordinary lengths to acquire and animate the look and feel of history” (Gapps 397). Stephen Gapps addresses this need for authenticity as ‘the Holy Grail’ for re-enactors although he mentions that they “understand that it [authenticity] is elusive – worth striving for, but never really attainable” (397). While authenticity indeed seems to be the ‘holy grail’ for Indonesian re-enactors, what authenticity looks like and how it is performed differs. In the case of Komunitas D45, authenticity is firstly constructed in terms of costume and attributes, although the desire to be authentic also resonates in the construction of historical veracity of the narrative and in costumes as a pedagogical tool to create embodied memories. This interplay between narrative and costume is needed at the risk of objects remaining inanimate (Samuel 384). Objects, Raphael Samuel writes, must be “restored to their original habitat, or some lifelike replica of it, if they are to be intelligible in their period setting” (Samuel 384). This is precisely what re-enactors do with costume and props, resulting in the re-enactment of events “in such a way as to convey the lived experience of the past.” (Samuel 384). Yet these re-enactors have not lived experiences of the war, and hence prosthetically embody memories of the past. The desire for authenticity structurally returned in the interviews I conducted with the community members. Thus, the whole performance is produced with the community’s underlying desire to be as authentic as possible with the main focus on their costumes and attributes. This is common for historical re-enactors as they are able to “describe their clothing and equipment in great detail, for the authentic object is deeply bound up with the way history might feel” (Gapps 398). Stephen Gapps goes even further by suggesting that “like historians, reenactors not only tell stories but also cite evidence: the footnote to the historian is the authentic (recreated) costume to the reenactor” (398). The costume is a means to construct a memory narrative, to perform a memory, for re-enactors. Costume is thus a mnemonic device and the central argument has to do with ‘the image’. An analysis of the community presents conflicting statements on the exact role of authenticity. There is not a clear course for it as it reveals a jumping nature. There are multiple authenticities and veracity is only one of its intentions. During the re-enactments, costume and prop are the things that enable claims about authenticity. In the photographs on social media, the affordances show something different. What appears to be more important than historiography or studying an authentic past, for instance, is the so-called ‘image’ of historical re-enactment. This has an equivocal and concomitant meaning in that it means image as a resemblance of the past; image as an impression to others; and image as visual reproduction. Image, thus, crosses boundaries between re-enactment and photographic representation. It is through conventions of authenticity that re-enactors comprehend, translate, and appreciate one another’s creativity. Through a desire for authenticity, the past is made concrete and perceptible. Yet, interestingly this ‘authenticity’ does not only refer to the re-enactment itself, but extends to the photographs they publish and circulate via their Instagram account, or what the re-enactor Mas Nicholas (M, 18, high school student) called “the image later”. When I interviewed Mas Nicholas, I asked him whether a uniform or gun could be part of the teatrikal when it does not resemble those from that historical period. “Don’t do it. Don’t do it.”, he answered, “It will merusak citra nanti (“ruin the image later”)”. Authenticity and Authority over the Past The drive for authenticity also plays a role in selecting “one or more best pictures” for their personal social media. During the teatrikal, many photographs are taken and they present a careful selection publicly via their Instagram account. When modern items such as mobile phones are spotted, the re-enactors deem the photographs as “foto bocor” (“leaky photos”), because the present seeps in. Similarly, in previous teatrikals, smiling passerby and pens forgotten in pockets of costumes have made the photo “bocor” (“leak”) or “mengurangi nilai keindahan foto” (“reduce the value of the beauty of the photo)”. Besides the importance of re-enactment and costume in their photos, their Instagram page also constructs a discourse of authenticity by using Instagram’s affordances and through the content of the photographs. Social media affordances can be seen as the perceived range of possible actions linked to the features of a social media platform (Bucher and Helmond 3). On the basis of such an understanding, three patterns can be discerned with which a discourse of historical accuracy is constructed, which invokes historical veracity. The first pattern is constructed through the use of a filter, making photos black and white. This is a common technique in popular culture to simulate the look of historical photographs. It is also used in the second pattern that evokes authenticity: the re-enactment of historical photographs. Again, the Instagram filter is used to create a sense of authenticity, but memory is also actively embodied by positioning themselves similarly to the people on the original photo as well as copying the dress of the original photographed people. The last pattern that can be recognised is the portrayal of the community’s ostensible secondary activities. These range from visiting independence museums to clean weapons in the collections and taking detailed pictures of them; cleaning of monuments dedicated to the Indonesian War of Independence in fear of neglect; performing teatrikals at schools to educate the public; and conversing with the Chief of Staff of the Indonesian Air Force signifying military approval. All whilst dressed in historical costume. This shows that there is no clear distinction between how the teatrikals are staged in costume and the activities beyond it. The images of these activities function as an additional argument for a claim to truth. It displays a further engagement with history and shows their relation with authoritative persons and institutions, constructing them too as authoritative. The image constructed on Instagram is one of diligent volunteers, thorough researchers, and good patriots. In all, this validates the re-enactors and their re-enactments. Costumes are thus continuously used in the discursive image of historical re-enactment. In their use of Instagram’s affordances and the careful selection of photos, media is used to perform a specific memory that combines local and national identity formation. A key aspect of this mediated culture of remembrance is how it is grounded in the concrete location that is Yogyakarta. The Indonesian historical re-enactments by Komunitas D45 are an example of such regional remembrance, producing local memory from the region of Yogyakarta. The secondary activities in particular underscore the politics of remembrance. It is a feeling, explicitly communicated by several community members, that the role of Yogyakarta in national history is underplayed when it comes to the Indonesian War of Independence. In particular, the idea that the Serangan Umum was not only an important battle for the city of Yogyakarta, but for the whole nation, as Indonesia put itself on the world map due to the battle. Authenticity and authority over the past is combined here into one event. The ‘Image’ of Indonesian Historical Re-Enactment I have tried to illustrate how Indonesian historical re-enactment forms performative memories through costume and media. Komunitas D45 constructs an idea of authenticity through the look and feel of their costumes. Moreover, in the way in which they position themselves through media, authenticity is constructed by black and white imagery, re-enactments of historical photographs, and their secondary activities. With this authenticity, Komunitas D45 creates a discourse of historical accuracy. But how do embodied memories and mediated memories come together? There is no clear divide between embodiment and mediated memories as they are folded into each other for the re-enactors. Embodiment and mediated memory are two parts of the same coin. That coin being a mnemonic image-event. Re-enactment (costume) together with how it is subsequently presented (media) can be considered as what Karin Strassler has called an “image-event”, that is, “a political process set in motion when a specific image or set of images erupts onto and intervenes in a social field, becoming a focal point of discursive and affective engagement across diverse publics” (9-10). The circulating depictions of the Serangan Umum, both through costume and media, constitute an unfolding mnemonic image-event that negotiates with democratic ideals from Indonesia’s Reformasi movement such as “openness, accountability, authenticity, the free circulation of information, and popular participation” (9). In short, Komunitas D45 deals with the complex question of how to remember the Indonesian War of Independence. Strassler’s emphasis on the political in image-events, “in which images become the material ground of generative struggles to bring a collectivity into view and give shape to its future”, not only relates to the past, but also the present (10). Both the local Yogyakartan and national Indonesian past during the Indonesian War of Independence are remembered simultaneously through the historical re-enactments. Authenticity in clothing and in the constructed online narrative is used as a tool for authority over the image of historical re-enactment in its threefold meaning: the likeness of the past they re-enact; how others perceive their re-enactment; and how they circulate the re-enactment to others. Thus, while Indonesian historical re-enactment searches authenticity in the past, it performs prosthetic memories for the future. Acknowledgements The research for this article was funded by a ‘PhD in the Humanities’ grant from the Dutch Research Council (NWO). References Agnew, Vanessa, Jonathan Lamb, and Juliane Tomann (eds.). The Routledge Handbook of Reenactment Studies: Key Terms in the Field. London: Routledge, 2019. Ahimsa-Putra, Heddy Shri. “Remembering, Misremembering and Forgetting: The Struggle over Serangan Oemoem 1 Maret 1949 in Yogyakarta, Indonesia.” Contestations of Memory in Southeast Asia. Eds. Roxana Waterson and Kwok Kian-Woon. Singapore: NUS P, 2012. 156-182. Arps, Arnoud. “An Animated Revolution: The Remembrance of the 1945 Battle of Surabaya in Indonesian Animated Film.” Southeast Asian Media Studies 2.1 (2020): 101-117. Bal, Mieke. “Introduction.” Acts of Memory: Cultural Recall in the Present. Eds. Mieke Bal, Jonathan Crewe, and Leo Spitzer. Hanover: University Press of New England, 1999. viii-xvii. Bruns, Axel. Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life and Beyond: From Production to Produsage. New York: Peter Lang, 2008. Bucher, Taina, and Anne Helmond. “The Affordances of Social Media Platforms.” The SAGE Handbook of Social Media. Eds. Jean Burgess, Thomas Poell, and Alice Marwick. London: SAGE, 2018. 1-41. Gapps, Stephen. “Mobile Monuments: A View of Historical Reenactment and Authenticity from Inside the Costume Cupboard of History.” Rethinking History 13.3 (2009): 395-409. Irawanto, Budi. “Spectacularity of Nationalism: War, Propaganda and Military in Indonesian Cinema during the New Order Era.” Southeast Asia on Screen: From Independence to Financial Crisis (1945-1998). Eds. Gaik Cheng Khoo, Thomas Barker, and Mary J. Ainslie. Amsterdam: Amsterdam UP, 2020. 111-130. Landsberg, Alison. Prosthetic Memory. The Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture. New York: Columbia UP, 2004. Plate, Liedeke, and Anneke Smelik (eds.). Performing Memory in Art and Popular Culture. New York: Routledge, 2013. Samuel, Raphael. Theatres of Memory: Past and Present in Contemporary Culture. London: Verso, 1994. Strassler, Karen. Demanding Images: Democracy, Mediation, and the Image-Event in Indonesia. Durham: Duke UP, 2020. Zurbuchen, Mary. “Historical Memory in Contemporary Indonesia.” Beginning to Remember: The Past in the Indonesian Present. Singapore: NUS P, 2005. 3-37.
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Nairn, Angelique. "Chasing Dreams, Finding Nightmares: Exploring the Creative Limits of the Music Career." M/C Journal 23, no. 1 (March 18, 2020). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.1624.

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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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23

Brien, Donna Lee. "The Real Filth in American Psycho." M/C Journal 9, no. 5 (November 1, 2006). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.2657.

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Abstract:
1991 An afternoon in late 1991 found me on a Sydney bus reading Brett Easton Ellis’ American Psycho (1991). A disembarking passenger paused at my side and, as I glanced up, hissed, ‘I don’t know how you can read that filth’. As she continued to make her way to the front of the vehicle, I was as stunned as if she had struck me physically. There was real vehemence in both her words and how they were delivered, and I can still see her eyes squeezing into slits as she hesitated while curling her mouth around that final angry word: ‘filth’. Now, almost fifteen years later, the memory is remarkably vivid. As the event is also still remarkable; this comment remaining the only remark ever made to me by a stranger about anything I have been reading during three decades of travelling on public transport. That inflamed commuter summed up much of the furore that greeted the publication of American Psycho. More than this, and unusually, condemnation of the work both actually preceded, and affected, its publication. Although Ellis had been paid a substantial U.S. $300,000 advance by Simon & Schuster, pre-publication stories based on circulating galley proofs were so negative—offering assessments of the book as: ‘moronic … pointless … themeless … worthless (Rosenblatt 3), ‘superficial’, ‘a tapeworm narrative’ (Sheppard 100) and ‘vile … pornography, not literature … immoral, but also artless’ (Miner 43)—that the publisher cancelled the contract (forfeiting the advance) only months before the scheduled release date. CEO of Simon & Schuster, Richard E. Snyder, explained: ‘it was an error of judgement to put our name on a book of such questionable taste’ (quoted in McDowell, “Vintage” 13). American Psycho was, instead, published by Random House/Knopf in March 1991 under its prestige paperback imprint, Vintage Contemporary (Zaller; Freccero 48) – Sonny Mehta having signed the book to Random House some two days after Simon & Schuster withdrew from its agreement with Ellis. While many commented on the fact that Ellis was paid two substantial advances, it was rarely noted that Random House was a more prestigious publisher than Simon & Schuster (Iannone 52). After its release, American Psycho was almost universally vilified and denigrated by the American critical establishment. The work was criticised on both moral and aesthetic/literary/artistic grounds; that is, in terms of both what Ellis wrote and how he wrote it. Critics found it ‘meaningless’ (Lehmann-Haupt C18), ‘abysmally written … schlock’ (Kennedy 427), ‘repulsive, a bloodbath serving no purpose save that of morbidity, titillation and sensation … pure trash, as scummy and mean as anything it depicts, a dirty book by a dirty writer’ (Yardley B1) and ‘garbage’ (Gurley Brown 21). Mark Archer found that ‘the attempt to confuse style with content is callow’ (31), while Naomi Wolf wrote that: ‘overall, reading American Psycho holds the same fascination as watching a maladjusted 11-year-old draw on his desk’ (34). John Leo’s assessment sums up the passionate intensity of those critical of the work: ‘totally hateful … violent junk … no discernible plot, no believable characterization, no sensibility at work that comes anywhere close to making art out of all the blood and torture … Ellis displays little feel for narration, words, grammar or the rhythm of language’ (23). These reviews, as those printed pre-publication, were titled in similarly unequivocal language: ‘A Revolting Development’ (Sheppard 100), ‘Marketing Cynicism and Vulgarity’ (Leo 23), ‘Designer Porn’ (Manguel 46) and ‘Essence of Trash’ (Yardley B1). Perhaps the most unambiguous in its message was Roger Rosenblatt’s ‘Snuff this Book!’ (3). Of all works published in the U.S.A. at that time, including those clearly carrying X ratings, the Los Angeles chapter of the National Organization for Women (NOW) selected American Psycho for special notice, stating that the book ‘legitimizes inhuman and savage violence masquerading as sexuality’ (NOW 114). Judging the book ‘the most misogynistic communication’ the organisation had ever encountered (NOW L.A. chapter president, Tammy Bruce, quoted in Kennedy 427) and, on the grounds that ‘violence against women in any form is no longer socially acceptable’ (McDowell, “NOW” C17), NOW called for a boycott of the entire Random House catalogue for the remainder of 1991. Naomi Wolf agreed, calling the novel ‘a violation not of obscenity standards, but of women’s civil rights, insofar as it results in conditioning male sexual response to female suffering or degradation’ (34). Later, the boycott was narrowed to Knopf and Vintage titles (Love 46), but also extended to all of the many products, companies, corporations, firms and brand names that are a feature of Ellis’s novel (Kauffman, “American” 41). There were other unexpected responses such as the Walt Disney Corporation barring Ellis from the opening of Euro Disney (Tyrnauer 101), although Ellis had already been driven from public view after receiving a number of death threats and did not undertake a book tour (Kennedy 427). Despite this, the book received significant publicity courtesy of the controversy and, although several national bookstore chains and numerous booksellers around the world refused to sell the book, more than 100,000 copies were sold in the U.S.A. in the fortnight after publication (Dwyer 55). Even this success had an unprecedented effect: when American Psycho became a bestseller, The New York Times announced that it would be removing the title from its bestseller lists because of the book’s content. In the days following publication in the U.S.A., Canadian customs announced that it was considering whether to allow the local arm of Random House to, first, import American Psycho for sale in Canada and, then, publish it in Canada (Kirchhoff, “Psycho” C1). Two weeks later, when the book was passed for sale (Kirchhoff, “Customs” C1), demonstrators protested the entrance of a shipment of the book. In May, the Canadian Defence Force made headlines when it withdrew copies of the book from the library shelves of a navy base in Halifax (Canadian Press C1). Also in May 1991, the Australian Office of Film and Literature Classification (OFLC), the federal agency that administers the classification scheme for all films, computer games and ‘submittable’ publications (including books) that are sold, hired or exhibited in Australia, announced that it had classified American Psycho as ‘Category 1 Restricted’ (W. Fraser, “Book” 5), to be sold sealed, to only those over 18 years of age. This was the first such classification of a mainstream literary work since the rating scheme was introduced (Graham), and the first time a work of literature had been restricted for sale since Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint in 1969. The chief censor, John Dickie, said the OFLC could not justify refusing the book classification (and essentially banning the work), and while ‘as a satire on yuppies it has a lot going for it’, personally he found the book ‘distasteful’ (quoted in W. Fraser, “Sensitive” 5). Moreover, while this ‘R’ classification was, and remains, a national classification, Australian States and Territories have their own sale and distribution regulation systems. Under this regime, American Psycho remains banned from sale in Queensland, as are all other books in this classification category (Vnuk). These various reactions led to a flood of articles published in the U.S.A., Canada, Australia and the U.K., voicing passionate opinions on a range of issues including free speech and censorship, the corporate control of artistic thought and practice, and cynicism on the part of authors and their publishers about what works might attract publicity and (therefore) sell in large numbers (see, for instance, Hitchens 7; Irving 1). The relationship between violence in society and its representation in the media was a common theme, with only a few commentators (including Norman Mailer in a high profile Vanity Fair article) suggesting that, instead of inciting violence, the media largely reflected, and commented upon, societal violence. Elayne Rapping, an academic in the field of Communications, proposed that the media did actively glorify violence, but only because there was a market for such representations: ‘We, as a society love violence, thrive on violence as the very basis of our social stability, our ideological belief system … The problem, after all, is not media violence but real violence’ (36, 38). Many more commentators, however, agreed with NOW, Wolf and others and charged Ellis’s work with encouraging, and even instigating, violent acts, and especially those against women, calling American Psycho ‘a kind of advertising for violence against women’ (anthropologist Elliot Leyton quoted in Dwyer 55) and, even, a ‘how-to manual on the torture and dismemberment of women’ (Leo 23). Support for the book was difficult to find in the flood of vitriol directed against it, but a small number wrote in Ellis’s defence. Sonny Mehta, himself the target of death threats for acquiring the book for Random House, stood by this assessment, and was widely quoted in his belief that American Psycho was ‘a serious book by a serious writer’ and that Ellis was ‘remarkably talented’ (Knight-Ridder L10). Publishing director of Pan Macmillan Australia, James Fraser, defended his decision to release American Psycho on the grounds that the book told important truths about society, arguing: ‘A publisher’s office is a clearing house for ideas … the real issue for community debate [is] – to what extent does it want to hear the truth about itself, about individuals within the community and about the governments the community elects. If we care about the preservation of standards, there is none higher than this. Gore Vidal was among the very few who stated outright that he liked the book, finding it ‘really rather inspired … a wonderfully comic novel’ (quoted in Tyrnauer 73). Fay Weldon agreed, judging the book as ‘brilliant’, and focusing on the importance of Ellis’s message: ‘Bret Easton Ellis is a very good writer. He gets us to a ‘T’. And we can’t stand it. It’s our problem, not his. American Psycho is a beautifully controlled, careful, important novel that revolves around its own nasty bits’ (C1). Since 1991 As unlikely as this now seems, I first read American Psycho without any awareness of the controversy raging around its publication. I had read Ellis’s earlier works, Less than Zero (1985) and The Rules of Attraction (1987) and, with my energies fully engaged elsewhere, cannot now even remember how I acquired the book. Since that angry remark on the bus, however, I have followed American Psycho’s infamy and how it has remained in the public eye over the last decade and a half. Australian OFLC decisions can be reviewed and reversed – as when Pasolini’s final film Salo (1975), which was banned in Australia from the time of its release in 1975 until it was un-banned in 1993, was then banned again in 1998 – however, American Psycho’s initial classification has remained unchanged. In July 2006, I purchased a new paperback copy in rural New South Wales. It was shrink-wrapped in plastic and labelled: ‘R. Category One. Not available to persons under 18 years. Restricted’. While exact sales figures are difficult to ascertain, by working with U.S.A., U.K. and Australian figures, this copy was, I estimate, one of some 1.5 to 1.6 million sold since publication. In the U.S.A., backlist sales remain very strong, with some 22,000 copies sold annually (Holt and Abbott), while lifetime sales in the U.K. are just under 720,000 over five paperback editions. Sales in Australia are currently estimated by Pan MacMillan to total some 100,000, with a new printing of 5,000 copies recently ordered in Australia on the strength of the book being featured on the inaugural Australian Broadcasting Commission’s First Tuesday Book Club national television program (2006). Predictably, the controversy around the publication of American Psycho is regularly revisited by those reviewing Ellis’s subsequent works. A major article in Vanity Fair on Ellis’s next book, The Informers (1994), opened with a graphic description of the death threats Ellis received upon the publication of American Psycho (Tyrnauer 70) and then outlined the controversy in detail (70-71). Those writing about Ellis’s two most recent novels, Glamorama (1999) and Lunar Park (2005), have shared this narrative strategy, which also forms at least part of the frame of every interview article. American Psycho also, again predictably, became a major topic of discussion in relation to the contracting, making and then release of the eponymous film in 2000 as, for example, in Linda S. Kauffman’s extensive and considered review of the film, which spent the first third discussing the history of the book’s publication (“American” 41-45). Playing with this interest, Ellis continues his practice of reusing characters in subsequent works. Thus, American Psycho’s Patrick Bateman, who first appeared in The Rules of Attraction as the elder brother of the main character, Sean – who, in turn, makes a brief appearance in American Psycho – also turns up in Glamorama with ‘strange stains’ on his Armani suit lapels, and again in Lunar Park. The book also continues to be regularly cited in discussions of censorship (see, for example, Dubin; Freccero) and has been included in a number of university-level courses about banned books. In these varied contexts, literary, cultural and other critics have also continued to disagree about the book’s impact upon readers, with some persisting in reading the novel as a pornographic incitement to violence. When Wade Frankum killed seven people in Sydney, many suggested a link between these murders and his consumption of X-rated videos, pornographic magazines and American Psycho (see, for example, Manne 11), although others argued against this (Wark 11). Prosecutors in the trial of Canadian murderer Paul Bernardo argued that American Psycho provided a ‘blueprint’ for Bernardo’s crimes (Canadian Press A5). Others have read Ellis’s work more positively, as for instance when Sonia Baelo Allué compares American Psycho favourably with Thomas Harris’s The Silence of the Lambs (1988) – arguing that Harris not only depicts more degrading treatment of women, but also makes Hannibal Lecter, his antihero monster, sexily attractive (7-24). Linda S. Kauffman posits that American Psycho is part of an ‘anti-aesthetic’ movement in art, whereby works that are revoltingly ugly and/or grotesque function to confront the repressed fears and desires of the audience and explore issues of identity and subjectivity (Bad Girls), while Patrick W. Shaw includes American Psycho in his work, The Modern American Novel of Violence because, in his opinion, the violence Ellis depicts is not gratuitous. Lost, however, in much of this often-impassioned debate and dialogue is the book itself – and what Ellis actually wrote. 21-years-old when Less than Zero was published, Ellis was still only 26 when American Psycho was released and his youth presented an obvious target. In 1991, Terry Teachout found ‘no moment in American Psycho where Bret Easton Ellis, who claims to be a serious artist, exhibits the workings of an adult moral imagination’ (45, 46), Brad Miner that it was ‘puerile – the very antithesis of good writing’ (43) and Carol Iannone that ‘the inclusion of the now famous offensive scenes reveals a staggering aesthetic and moral immaturity’ (54). Pagan Kennedy also ‘blamed’ the entire work on this immaturity, suggesting that instead of possessing a developed artistic sensibility, Ellis was reacting to (and, ironically, writing for the approval of) critics who had lauded the documentary realism of his violent and nihilistic teenage characters in Less than Zero, but then panned his less sensational story of campus life in The Rules of Attraction (427-428). Yet, in my opinion, there is not only a clear and coherent aesthetic vision driving Ellis’s oeuvre but, moreover, a profoundly moral imagination at work as well. This was my view upon first reading American Psycho, and part of the reason I was so shocked by that charge of filth on the bus. Once familiar with the controversy, I found this view shared by only a minority of commentators. Writing in the New Statesman & Society, Elizabeth J. Young asked: ‘Where have these people been? … Books of pornographic violence are nothing new … American Psycho outrages no contemporary taboos. Psychotic killers are everywhere’ (24). I was similarly aware that such murderers not only existed in reality, but also in many widely accessed works of literature and film – to the point where a few years later Joyce Carol Oates could suggest that the serial killer was an icon of popular culture (233). While a popular topic for writers of crime fiction and true crime narratives in both print and on film, a number of ‘serious’ literary writers – including Truman Capote, Norman Mailer, Kate Millet, Margaret Atwood and Oates herself – have also written about serial killers, and even crossed over into the widely acknowledged as ‘low-brow’ true crime genre. Many of these works (both popular or more literary) are vivid and powerful and have, as American Psycho, taken a strong moral position towards their subject matter. Moreover, many books and films have far more disturbing content than American Psycho, yet have caused no such uproar (Young and Caveney 120). By now, the plot of American Psycho is well known, although the structure of the book, noted by Weldon above (C1), is rarely analysed or even commented upon. First person narrator, Patrick Bateman, a young, handsome stockbroker and stereotypical 1980s yuppie, is also a serial killer. The book is largely, and innovatively, structured around this seeming incompatibility – challenging readers’ expectations that such a depraved criminal can be a wealthy white professional – while vividly contrasting the banal, and meticulously detailed, emptiness of Bateman’s life as a New York über-consumer with the scenes where he humiliates, rapes, tortures, murders, mutilates, dismembers and cannibalises his victims. Although only comprising some 16 out of 399 pages in my Picador edition, these violent scenes are extreme and certainly make the work as a whole disgustingly confronting. But that is the entire point of Ellis’s work. Bateman’s violence is rendered so explicitly because its principal role in the novel is to be inescapably horrific. As noted by Baelo Allué, there is no shift in tone between the most banally described detail and the description of violence (17): ‘I’ve situated the body in front of the new Toshiba television set and in the VCR is an old tape and appearing on the screen is the last girl I filmed. I’m wearing a Joseph Abboud suit, a tie by Paul Stuart, shoes by J. Crew, a vest by someone Italian and I’m kneeling on the floor beside a corpse, eating the girl’s brain, gobbling it down, spreading Grey Poupon over hunks of the pink, fleshy meat’ (Ellis 328). In complete opposition to how pornography functions, Ellis leaves no room for the possible enjoyment of such a scene. Instead of revelling in the ‘spine chilling’ pleasures of classic horror narratives, there is only the real horror of imagining such an act. The effect, as Kauffman has observed is, rather than arousing, often so disgusting as to be emetic (Bad Girls 249). Ellis was surprised that his detractors did not understand that he was trying to be shocking, not offensive (Love 49), or that his overall aim was to symbolise ‘how desensitised our culture has become towards violence’ (quoted in Dwyer 55). Ellis was also understandably frustrated with readings that conflated not only the contents of the book and their meaning, but also the narrator and author: ‘The acts described in the book are truly, indisputably vile. The book itself is not. Patrick Bateman is a monster. I am not’ (quoted in Love 49). Like Fay Weldon, Norman Mailer understood that American Psycho posited ‘that the eighties were spiritually disgusting and the author’s presentation is the crystallization of such horror’ (129). Unlike Weldon, however, Mailer shied away from defending the novel by judging Ellis not accomplished enough a writer to achieve his ‘monstrous’ aims (182), failing because he did not situate Bateman within a moral universe, that is, ‘by having a murderer with enough inner life for us to comprehend him’ (182). Yet, the morality of Ellis’s project is evident. By viewing the world through the lens of a psychotic killer who, in many ways, personifies the American Dream – wealthy, powerful, intelligent, handsome, energetic and successful – and, yet, who gains no pleasure, satisfaction, coherent identity or sense of life’s meaning from his endless, selfish consumption, Ellis exposes the emptiness of both that world and that dream. As Bateman himself explains: ‘Surface, surface, surface was all that anyone found meaning in. This was civilisation as I saw it, colossal and jagged’ (Ellis 375). Ellis thus situates the responsibility for Bateman’s violence not in his individual moral vacuity, but in the barren values of the society that has shaped him – a selfish society that, in Ellis’s opinion, refused to address the most important issues of the day: corporate greed, mindless consumerism, poverty, homelessness and the prevalence of violent crime. Instead of pornographic, therefore, American Psycho is a profoundly political text: Ellis was never attempting to glorify or incite violence against anyone, but rather to expose the effects of apathy to these broad social problems, including the very kinds of violence the most vocal critics feared the book would engender. Fifteen years after the publication of American Psycho, although our societies are apparently growing in overall prosperity, the gap between rich and poor also continues to grow, more are permanently homeless, violence – whether domestic, random or institutionally-sanctioned – escalates, and yet general apathy has intensified to the point where even the ‘ethics’ of torture as government policy can be posited as a subject for rational debate. The real filth of the saga of American Psycho is, thus, how Ellis’s message was wilfully ignored. While critics and public intellectuals discussed the work at length in almost every prominent publication available, few attempted to think in any depth about what Ellis actually wrote about, or to use their powerful positions to raise any serious debate about the concerns he voiced. Some recent critical reappraisals have begun to appreciate how American Psycho is an ‘ethical denunciation, where the reader cannot but face the real horror behind the serial killer phenomenon’ (Baelo Allué 8), but Ellis, I believe, goes further, exposing the truly filthy causes that underlie the existence of such seemingly ‘senseless’ murder. But, Wait, There’s More It is ironic that American Psycho has, itself, generated a mini-industry of products. A decade after publication, a Canadian team – filmmaker Mary Harron, director of I Shot Andy Warhol (1996), working with scriptwriter, Guinevere Turner, and Vancouver-based Lions Gate Entertainment – adapted the book for a major film (Johnson). Starring Christian Bale, Chloë Sevigny, Willem Dafoe and Reese Witherspoon and, with an estimated budget of U.S.$8 million, the film made U.S.$15 million at the American box office. The soundtrack was released for the film’s opening, with video and DVDs to follow and the ‘Killer Collector’s Edition’ DVD – closed-captioned, in widescreen with surround sound – released in June 2005. Amazon.com lists four movie posters (including a Japanese language version) and, most unexpected of all, a series of film tie-in action dolls. The two most popular of these, judging by E-Bay, are the ‘Cult Classics Series 1: Patrick Bateman’ figure which, attired in a smart suit, comes with essential accoutrements of walkman with headphones, briefcase, Wall Street Journal, video tape and recorder, knife, cleaver, axe, nail gun, severed hand and a display base; and the 18” tall ‘motion activated sound’ edition – a larger version of the same doll with fewer accessories, but which plays sound bites from the movie. Thanks to Stephen Harris and Suzie Gibson (UNE) for stimulating conversations about this book, Stephen Harris for information about the recent Australian reprint of American Psycho and Mark Seebeck (Pan Macmillan) for sales information. References Archer, Mark. “The Funeral Baked Meats.” The Spectator 27 April 1991: 31. Australian Broadcasting Corporation. First Tuesday Book Club. First broadcast 1 August 2006. Baelo Allué, Sonia. “The Aesthetics of Serial Killing: Working against Ethics in The Silence of the Lambs (1988) and American Psycho (1991).” Atlantis 24.2 (Dec. 2002): 7-24. Canadian Press. “Navy Yanks American Psycho.” The Globe and Mail 17 May 1991: C1. Canadian Press. “Gruesome Novel Was Bedside Reading.” Kitchener-Waterloo Record 1 Sep. 1995: A5. Dubin, Steven C. “Art’s Enemies: Censors to the Right of Me, Censors to the Left of Me.” Journal of Aesthetic Education 28.4 (Winter 1994): 44-54. Dwyer, Victor. “Literary Firestorm: Canada Customs Scrutinizes a Brutal Novel.” Maclean’s April 1991: 55. Ellis, Bret Easton. American Psycho. London: Macmillan-Picador, 1991. ———. Glamorama. New York: Knopf, 1999. ———. The Informers. New York: Knopf, 1994. ———. Less than Zero. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1985. ———. Lunar Park. New York: Knopf, 2005. ———. The Rules of Attraction. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987. Fraser, James. :The Case for Publishing.” The Bulletin 18 June 1991. Fraser, William. “Book May Go under Wraps.” The Sydney Morning Herald 23 May 1991: 5. ———. “The Sensitive Censor and the Psycho.” The Sydney Morning Herald 24 May 1991: 5. Freccero, Carla. “Historical Violence, Censorship, and the Serial Killer: The Case of American Psycho.” Diacritics: A Review of Contemporary Criticism 27.2 (Summer 1997): 44-58. Graham, I. “Australian Censorship History.” Libertus.net 9 Dec. 2001. 17 May 2006 http://libertus.net/censor/hist20on.html>. Gurley Brown, Helen. Commentary in “Editorial Judgement or Censorship?: The Case of American Psycho.” The Writer May 1991: 20-23. Harris, Thomas. The Silence of the Lambs. New York: St Martins Press, 1988. Harron, Mary (dir.). American Psycho [film]. Edward R. Pressman Film Corporation, Lions Gate Films, Muse Productions, P.P.S. Films, Quadra Entertainment, Universal Pictures, 2004. Hitchens, Christopher. “Minority Report.” The Nation 7-14 January 1991: 7. Holt, Karen, and Charlotte Abbott. “Lunar Park: The Novel.” Publishers Weekly 11 July 2005. 13 Aug. 2006 http://www.publishersweekly.com/article/CA624404.html? pubdate=7%2F11%2F2005&display=archive>. Iannone, Carol. “PC & the Ellis Affair.” Commentary Magazine July 1991: 52-4. Irving, John. “Pornography and the New Puritans.” The New York Times Book Review 29 March 1992: Section 7, 1. 13 Aug. 2006 http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/06/15/lifetimes/25665.html>. Johnson, Brian D. “Canadian Cool Meets American Psycho.” Maclean’s 10 April 2000. 13 Aug. 2006 http://www.macleans.ca/culture/films/article.jsp?content=33146>. Kauffman, Linda S. “American Psycho [film review].” Film Quarterly 54.2 (Winter 2000-2001): 41-45. ———. Bad Girls and Sick Boys: Fantasies in Contemporary Art and Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. Kennedy, Pagan. “Generation Gaffe: American Psycho.” The Nation 1 April 1991: 426-8. Kirchhoff, H. J. “Customs Clears Psycho: Booksellers’ Reaction Mixed.” The Globe and Mail 26 March 1991: C1. ———. “Psycho Sits in Limbo: Publisher Awaits Customs Ruling.” The Globe and Mail 14 March 1991: C1. Knight-Ridder News Service. “Vintage Picks up Ellis’ American Psycho.” Los Angeles Daily News 17 November 1990: L10. Lehmann-Haupt, Christopher. “Psycho: Wither Death without Life?” The New York Times 11 March 1991: C18. Leo, John. “Marketing Cynicism and Vulgarity.” U.S. News & World Report 3 Dec. 1990: 23. Love, Robert. “Psycho Analysis: Interview with Bret Easton Ellis.” Rolling Stone 4 April 1991: 45-46, 49-51. Mailer, Norman. “Children of the Pied Piper: Mailer on American Psycho.” Vanity Fair March 1991: 124-9, 182-3. Manguel, Alberto. “Designer Porn.” Saturday Night 106.6 (July 1991): 46-8. Manne, Robert. “Liberals Deny the Video Link.” The Australian 6 Jan. 1997: 11. McDowell, Edwin. “NOW Chapter Seeks Boycott of ‘Psycho’ Novel.” The New York Times 6 Dec. 1990: C17. ———. “Vintage Buys Violent Book Dropped by Simon & Schuster.” The New York Times 17 Nov. 1990: 13. Miner, Brad. “Random Notes.” National Review 31 Dec. 1990: 43. National Organization for Women. Library Journal 2.91 (1991): 114. Oates, Joyce Carol. “Three American Gothics.” Where I’ve Been, and Where I’m Going: Essays, Reviews and Prose. New York: Plume, 1999. 232-43. Rapping, Elayne. “The Uses of Violence.” Progressive 55 (1991): 36-8. Rosenblatt, Roger. “Snuff this Book!: Will Brett Easton Ellis Get Away with Murder?” New York Times Book Review 16 Dec. 1990: 3, 16. Roth, Philip. Portnoy’s Complaint. New York: Random House, 1969. Shaw, Patrick W. The Modern American Novel of Violence. Troy, NY: Whitson, 2000. Sheppard, R. Z. “A Revolting Development.” Time 29 Oct. 1990: 100. Teachout, Terry. “Applied Deconstruction.” National Review 24 June 1991: 45-6. Tyrnauer, Matthew. “Who’s Afraid of Bret Easton Ellis?” Vanity Fair 57.8 (Aug. 1994): 70-3, 100-1. Vnuk, Helen. “X-rated? Outdated.” The Age 21 Sep. 2003. 17 May 2006 http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2003/09/19/1063625202157.html>. Wark, McKenzie. “Video Link Is a Distorted View.” The Australian 8 Jan. 1997: 11. Weldon, Fay. “Now You’re Squeamish?: In a World as Sick as Ours, It’s Silly to Target American Psycho.” The Washington Post 28 April 1991: C1. Wolf, Naomi. “The Animals Speak.” New Statesman & Society 12 April 1991: 33-4. Yardley, Jonathan. “American Psycho: Essence of Trash.” The Washington Post 27 Feb. 1991: B1. Young, Elizabeth J. “Psycho Killers. Last Lines: How to Shock the English.” New Statesman & Society 5 April 1991: 24. Young, Elizabeth J., and Graham Caveney. Shopping in Space: Essays on American ‘Blank Generation’ Fiction. London: Serpent’s Tail, 1992. Zaller, Robert “American Psycho, American Censorship and the Dahmer Case.” Revue Francaise d’Etudes Americaines 16.56 (1993): 317-25. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Brien, Donna Lee. "The Real Filth in : A Critical Reassessment." M/C Journal 9.5 (2006). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0610/01-brien.php>. APA Style Brien, D. (Nov. 2006) "The Real Filth in American Psycho: A Critical Reassessment," M/C Journal, 9(5). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0610/01-brien.php>.
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