Academic literature on the topic 'Walker, Alan, 1930-'

ABSTRACTThe Edge Anglican church (originally St Alban's) in the northern Hobart suburb of Claremont has above its main altar a triptych stained glass window, a memorial to Robert Falcon Scott R.N. New information suggests that the designer/manufacturer was Auguste Fischer of Melbourne, a close associate of the church's architect, Alan Cameron Walker of Hobart. The window was promised by Mrs Edith Knight at the laying of the foundation stone of the church in July 1913, five months after Scott's death became known to the world. Lady Ellison-Macartney attended the ceremony. She was Scott's sister and wife of the recently appointed governor of Tasmania, Sir William Ellison-Macartney. Other members of Scott's family were also living in Hobart at the time. The Ellison-Macartneys and their daughter Esther attended the dedication of the window on 17 October 1915. Admiral E.R.G.R. Evans, second in command of Scott's expedition, spoke to The Royal Society of Tasmania on 29 March 1930, on the topic of Scott's last Antarctic venture.

The development of modern neurosurgery in the Netherlands, which took place in the 1920s, was highly influenced by the personal involvement of both Harvey Cushing and Walter Dandy, each in his own way. For the present article, the authors consulted the correspondence (kept at the Cushing/Whitney Medical Library in New Haven and the Alan Mason Chesney Medical Archives in Baltimore) of Cushing and Dandy with their Dutch disciples. The correspondence provides a unique inside view into the minds of both neurosurgical giants. After the neurologist Bernard Brouwer had paved the way for sending the Dutch surgeon Ignaz Oljenick overseas, Cushing personally took the responsibility to train him (1927–1929). On his return to Amsterdam, Oljenick and Brouwer established the first neurosurgical department in the country. Encouraged by Oljenick's favorable results, a number of Dutch general surgeons started asking Cushing for support. Cushing strategically managed and deflected these requests, probably aiming to increase the advantage of Oljenick and Brouwer. However, the University Hospital in Groningen persisted in the plans to establish its own neurosurgical unit and sent Ferdinand Verbeek to the US in 1932. Although staying at Cushing's department initially, Verbeek ultimately applied to Walter Dandy for a position of visiting voluntary assistant, staying until the end of 1934. Verbeek and Dandy became lifelong friends. On his return to Groningen, Verbeek started practicing neurosurgery, isolated in the northern part of the country. He relied on the support of Dandy, with whom he kept up a regular correspondence, discussing cases and seeking advice. Dandy, on his part, used Verbeek as the ambassador in Europe for his operative innovations. At the beginning of World War II, Oljenick had to flee the country, which concluded the direct line with the Cushing school in the Netherlands. After Dandy's death (1946), Verbeek continued practicing neurosurgery following his style and philosophy. By the time Verbeek died in 1958, the strong American influence on everyday practice of Dutch neurosurgeons had been established.

It is not surprising that film became the dominant art form of the twentieth century. The promise of a medium that could capture life in motion proved exciting, though soon after its conception, debates cropped up pitting the merits of realism against those of expressionism. Should a medium predicated on recording life adopt expressionistic sensibilities? Writing on the burgeoning cinema, Walter Benjamin seemed to imply that film carried with it a distinctly political responsibility to show life as it really is. In attempting to rethink this argument, I argue for the political potential of an expressionistic cinema, as understood by considering the theoretical underpinnings of Alain Badiou’s The Century (2008) when read in relation to Fritz Lang’s M (1931)—a film that embodies Badiou’s musings on the twentieth century’s aesthetic ideals and violent tendencies. Badiou writes that “the torment of contemporary art” is that it is situated at a crossroads between “romantic pathos, on the one hand, and a nihilistic iconoclasm” on the other: a knowing admission that the Real can never be truly represented, and an oppositional desire to convey it anyways. M knowingly exposes these aesthetic contradictions at the heart of the filmic medium by leaning into its own artificiality, and, in doing so, it prophetically exposes the thinking behind a growingly fascist German state in the 1930s. By the end of my paper, I arrive at the conclusion that the violence found in both twentieth century aesthetics and politics came about as the result of a similarly idealistic principle.

Few episodes in North American working-class history have attracted as much attention as the rise and fall of the Molly Maguires. The term refers to a secret movement of Irish miners who employed threats and violence in confronting their adversaries in the anthracite coal fields in the decade after the US Civil War. Most interpretations have been ideologically charged and focused mainly on the violence itself, beginning with sensational newspaper accounts and Alan Pinkerton's own book based on information from his operative James McParland who infiltrated the movement. At least one study, J. Walter Coleman's The Molly Maguire Riots (Richmond, 1936), showed a healthy skepticism for McParland's biased sources—Pinkerton and others who were more interested in hanging the Molly Maguires than in understanding them. In The Molly Maguires (New York, 1983 [1964]), however, Wayne Broehl, Jr., developed the more typical view that the Mollies were terrorists and the Pinkertons heroes. Though he handled the evidence less critically than Coleman, it is Broehl's account that has been viewed as the standard, perhaps the definitive account for more than a generation. With all this work and much more, why do we need another study of the Molly Maguires and what is it that makes Kevin Kenny's by far the most valuable treatment of them?

-Alan L. Karras, Lauren A. Benton, Law and colonial cultures: Legal regimes in world history, 1400-1900. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. xiii + 285 pp.-Sidney W. Mintz, Douglass Sullivan-González ,The South and the Caribbean. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2001. xii + 208 pp., Charles Reagan Wilson (eds)-John Collins, Peter Redfield, Space in the tropics: From convicts to rockets in French Guiana. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000. xiii + 345 pp.-Vincent Brown, Keith Q. Warner, On location: Cinema and film in the Anglophone Caribbean. Oxford: Macmillan, 2000. xii + 194 pp.-Ann Marie Stock, Jacqueline Barnitz, Twentieth-century art of Latin America. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2001. 416 pp.-Ineke Phaf, J.J. Oversteegen, Herscheppingen: De wereld van José Maria Capricorne. Emmastad, Curacao: Uitgeverij ICS Nederland/Curacao, 1999. 168 pp.-Halbert Barton, Frances R. Aparicio, Listening to Salsa: Gender, latin popular music, and Puerto Rican cultures. Hanover NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1998. xxi + 290 pp.-Pedro Pérez Sarduy, John M. Kirk ,Culture and the Cuban revolution: Conversations in Havana. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2001. xxvi + 188 pp., Leonardo Padura Fuentes (eds)-Luis Martínez-Fernández, Damián J. Fernández, Cuba and the politics of passion. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2000. 192 pp.-Eli Bartra, María de Los Reyes Castillo Bueno, Reyita: The life of a black Cuban woman in the twentieth century. Durham NC: Duke University Press, 2000. 182 pp.-María del Carmen Baerga, Felix V. Matos Rodríguez, Women and urban change in San Juan, Puerto Rico, 1820-1868. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1999. xii + 180 pp. [Reissued in 2001 as: Women in San Juan, 1820-1868. Princeton NJ: Markus Weiner Publishers.]-Kevin A. Yelvington, Winston James, Holding aloft the banner of Ethiopa: Caribbean radicalism in early twentieth-century America. New York: Verso, 1998. x + 406 pp.-Jerome Teelucksingh, O. Nigel Bolland, The politics of labour in the British Caribbean: The social origins of authoritarianism and democracy in the labour movement. Kingston: Ian Randle; Princeton NJ: Marcus Weiner, 2001. xxii + 720 pp.-Jay R. Mandle, Randolph B. Persaud, Counter-Hegemony and foreign policy: The dialectics of marginalized and global forces in Jamaica. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001. xviii + 248 pp.-Patrick Bellegarde-Smith, Mary A. Renda, Taking Haiti: Military occupation and the culture of U.S. imperialism, 1915-1940. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001. xvi + 414 pp.-James W. St. G. Walker, Maureen G. Elgersman, Unyielding spirits: Black women and slavery in early Canada and Jamaica. New York: Garland, 1999. xvii + 188 pp.-Madhavi Kale, David Hollett, Passage from India to El Dorado: Guyana and the great migration. Madison NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1999. 325 pp.-Karen S. Dhanda, Linda Peake ,Gender, ethnicity and place: Women and identities in Guyana. London: Routledge, 1999. xii + 228 pp., D. Alissa Trotz (eds)-Karen S. Dhanda, Moses Nagamootoo, Hendree's cure: Scenes from Madrasi life in a new world. Leeds, UK: Peepal Tree, 2000. 149 pp.-Stephen D. Glazier, Hemchand Gossai ,Religion, culture, and tradition in the Caribbean., Nathaniel Samuel Murrell (eds)-Michiel van Kempen, A. James Arnold, A history of literature in the Caribbean. Volume 2: English- and Dutch- speaking regions. (Vera M. Kuzinski & Ineke Phaf-Rheinberger, sub-eds.).Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2001. ix + 672 pp.-Frank Birbalsingh, Bruce King, Derek Walcott: A Caribbean life. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. ix + 714 pp.-Frank Birbalsingh, Paula Burnett, Derek Walcott: Politics and poetics. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2001. xiii + 380 pp.-Jeanne Garane, Micheline Rice-Maximin, Karukéra: Présence littéraire de la Guadeloupe. New York: Peter Lang, 1998. x + 197 pp.-Jeanne Garane, Marie-Christine Rochmann, L'esclave fugitif dans la littérature antillaise: Sur la déclive du morne. Paris: Karthala, 2000. 408 pp.-Alasdair Pettinger, Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert ,Women at sea: Travel writing and the margins of Caribbean discourse. New York: Palgrave, 2001. x + 301 pp., Ivette Romero-Cesareo (eds)

“His views have had as much, if not more, impact on the way we think about monetary policy and many other important economic issues as those of any person in the last half of the twentieth century.” These words in praise of Milton Friedman are from economist and Federal Reserve Chair Alan Greenspan. They are spoken from a vantage point of experience and knowledge of what really matters for policy decisions in the real world. And they are no exaggeration. Many would say they do not go far enough.It is a rare monetary policy conference today in which Milton Friedman's ideas do not come up. It is a rare paper in macroeconomics in which some economic, mathematical, or statistical idea cannot be traced to Milton Friedman's early work. It is a rare student of macroeconomics who has not been impressed by reading Milton Friedman's crystal-clear expositions. It is a rare democrat from a formerly communist country who was not inspired by Milton Friedman's defense of a market economy written in the heydays of central planning. And it is a rare day that some popular newspaper or magazine around the world does not mention Milton Friedman as the originator of a seminal idea or point of view.Any one of his many contributions to macroeconomics (or rather to monetary theory, for he detests the term macroeconomics) would be an extraordinary achievement. Taken together they are daunting:[bull ] permanent income theory;[bull ] natural rate theory;[bull ] the case for floating exchange rates;[bull ] money growth rules;[bull ] the optimal quantity of money;[bull ] the monetary history of the United States, especially the Fed in the Great Depression, not to mention contributions to mathematical statistics on rank-order tests, sequential sampling, and risk aversion, and a host of novel government reform proposals from the negative income tax, to school vouchers, to the flat-rate tax, to the legalization of drugs.Milton Friedman is an economist's economist who laid out a specific methodology of positive economic research. Economic experts know that many current ideas and policies—from monetary policy rules to the earned-income tax credit—can be traced to his original proposals. He won the Nobel Prize in economics in 1976 for “his achievements in the field of consumption analysis, monetary history and theory and for his demonstration of the complexity of stabilization policy.” Preferring to stay away from formal policy-making jobs, he has been asked for his advice by presidents, prime ministers, and top economic officials for many years. It is in the nature of Milton Friedman's unequivocally stated views that many disagree with at least some of them, and he has engaged in heated debates since graduate school days at the University of Chicago. He is an awesome debater. He is also gracious and friendly.Born in 1912, he grew up in Rahway, New Jersey, where he attended local public schools. He graduated from Rutgers University in the midst of the Great Depression in 1932. He then went to study economics at the University of Chicago, where he met fellow graduate student Rose Director whom he later married. For nearly 10 years after he left Chicago, he worked at government agencies and research institutes (with one year visiting at the University of Wisconsin and one year at the University of Minnesota) before taking a faculty position at the University of Chicago in 1946. He remained at Chicago until he retired in 1977 at the age of 65, and he then moved to the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.I have always found Milton and Rose to be gregarious, energetic people, who genuinely enjoy interacting with others, and who enjoy life in all its dimensions, from walks near the Pacific Ocean to surfs on the World Wide Web. The day of this interview was no exception. It took place on May 2, 2000, in Milton's office in their San Francisco apartment. The interview lasted for two-and-a-half hours. A tape recorder and some economic charts were on the desk between us. Behind Milton was a floor-to-ceiling picture window with beautiful panoramic views of the San Francisco hills and skyline. Behind me were his bookcases stuffed with his books, papers, and mementos.The interview began in a rather unplanned way. When we walked into his office Milton started talking enthusiastically about the charts that were on his desk. The charts—which he had recently prepared from data he had downloaded from the Internet—raised questions about some remarks that I had given at a conference several weeks before—which he had read about on the Internet.As we began talking about the charts, I asked if I could turn on the tape recorder, since one of the topics for the interview was to be about how he formulated his ideas—and a conversation about the ideas he was formulating right then and there seemed like an excellent way to begin the interview. So I turned on the tape recorder, and the interview began. Soon we segued into the series of questions that I had planned in advance (but had not shown Milton in advance). We took one break for a very pleasant lunch and (unrecorded) conversation with his wife Rose before going back to “work.” After the interview, the tapes were transcribed and the transcript was edited by me and Milton. The questions and answers were rearranged slightly to fit into the following broad topic areas:[bull ] money growth, thermostats, and Alan Greenspan;[bull ] causes of the great inflation and its end;[bull ] early interest in economics;[bull ] graduate school and early “on-the-job” training;[bull ] permanent income theory;[bull ] return of monetary economics;[bull ] fiscal and monetary policy rules;[bull ] use of models in monetary economics;[bull ] use of time-series methods;[bull ] real business-cycle models, calibration, and detrending;[bull ] natural rate hypothesis;[bull ] role of debates in monetary economics;[bull ] capitalism and freedom today;[bull ] monetary unions and flexible exchange rates.

Cut In 1964, William S. Burroughs' Nova Express is published. Part of the trilogy of books Burroughs wrote in the early 1960s (The Soft Cell and The Ticket That Exploded are the other two), Nova Express explores the problems that technology creates in the information age; and the ways in which language and thought have come under the influence of mass media. The book begins with a broad declaration against consumerism and corporate control: Listen all you boards syndicates and governments of the earth. And you powers behind what filth deals consummated in what lavatory to take what is not yours. To sell the ground from unborn feet forever - "For God's sake don't let that Coca-Cola thing out -" (Nova Express 3) Rather than opt for conventional narrative as a means of uncovering the problems ideology brings with media-driven mass consumption, in the early '60s, Burroughs develops a method of writing he calls "the cut-up". The cut-up method entails taking a page of writing (a newspaper, a poem, a novel, an advertisement, a speech) and cutting it down the middle twice so that four sections remain. One then rearranges the sections in random order to create a new page. Variations of the four section cut are permissible and can lead to further juxtapositions. The purpose of the cut-up is to disclose ideological positions within media, to recontextualise the language of media often taken for granted as natural and not as a socially and economically constructed act. Information has become addictive, Burroughs says, invoking the junkie as a metaphor for mass consumption. Its addictive state leads to hallucinations, distortions of what is real and what is illusion; what do we need to live, and what do we buy for mere consumption. The scanning pattern we accept as "reality" has been imposed by the controlling power on this planet, a power primarily oriented towards total control - In order to retain control they have moved to monopolize and deactivate the hallucinogen drugs by effecting noxious alternations on a molecular level. (Nova Express 53) The cut-up provides a means to combat the "junky" in us all by revealing the powers of technology. In the end, the cut-up leads to a collagist practice of juxtaposition. As Burroughs and collaborator Byron Gysin explained in a later work, The cut-up method brings to writers the collage, which has been used by painters for fifty years. And used by the moving and still camera. In fact all street shots from movie or still cameras are by the unpredictable factors of passersby and juxtaposition cut-ups (Burroughs and Gysin 29). Through its structure, Nova Express is a lesson in making cut-ups, a demonstration of how power might be undermined in the digital age. Paste In 1964, the Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies at Birmingham began. Influenced by Raymond Williams' 1958 Culture and Society, the Birmingham School legitimized the reading of popular culture as a means to uncovering dominant ideologies and power structures within institutional systems. In particular, the center proposed structuring scholasticism so that the study of media texts would allow for the questioning of social and political practices. The Birmingham school advised that curriculae supplement their agendas with the question of class; the complex relationships between power, which is an easier term to establish in the discourses of culture than exploitation, and exploitation; the question of a general theory which could, in a critical way, connect together in a critical reflection different domains of life, politics, and theory, theory and practice, economic, political ideological questions, and so on; the notion of critical knowledge itself and the production of critical knowledge as a practice. (Hall 279) One of the Birmingham School's first works was Stuart Hall and Paddy Whannel's Popular Arts, which searched out ways to teach media. In particular, Hall and Whannel viewed popular culture as a place to teach the power of ideology. There is, in fact, a growing recognition that the media of mass communication play such a significant role in society, and especially in the lives of young people, that the school must embrace the study of their organization, content, and impact. But there is little agreement about how such studies should be carried out. Just what shall be studied? With what precise purpose? In what relationship to the established subjects? Ultimately the answer will depend upon our attitude towards these media, our social thinking about the kind of society in which they wield their influence and, in particular, our response to the things the media offer - individual films, television programmes, popular songs, etc. (Hall and Whannel 21) Today, the Birmingham School is recognised as the beginning of contemporary cultural studies. It answers Hall and Whannel by using texts from popular culture to uncover the semiotic cultural codes that make up popular discourse. These methods shed light on how supposedly naturally constructed messages contain deeper meanings and purposes. Mix In 1964, DJ Alan Freed was convicted of tax evasion as a result of his involvement in the payola record business scandal of 1962. Considered one of the first rock and roll DJs, Freed is often credited for breaking ‘50s racial barriers by playing African-American music on the airwaves and hosting largely attended African-American dances and concerts. Even though Freed didn't invent the phrase "rock and roll," he credited himself with the term's introduction into music vocabulary, a myth-making act with far reaching implications. As critic Nick Tosch writes: "Though he was certainly not the first who had done so; he was only the most influential of those who had - Freed [had] rinsed the Dixie Peach from its image, rendering it more agreeable to the palate of a greater public" (Tosch 9). In the same year of Freed's conviction, another legendary DJ, Murray the K, found fame again by following the Beatles around on their 1964 North American tour. Murray the K had been popular in the late '50s for "his wild stammering of syllables, fragments of words, black slang, and meaningless, rhythmical burbling" to make transitions between songs (Poschardt 75). Mass copying of Murray the K's DJ stylings led to his redundancy. When New Journalist Tom Wolfe rediscovered the DJ tagging along with the Beatles, he became intrigued, describing him as "the original hysterical disk jockey": Murray the K doesn't operate on Aristotelian logic. He operates on symbolic logic. He builds up an atmosphere of breathless jollification, comic hysteria, and turns it up to a pitch so high it can hypnotize kids and keep them frozen. (Wolfe 34) While Freed introduced African-American culture to mainstream music, Murray the K's DJing worked from a symbolic logic of appropriation: sampled sounds, bits and pieces of eccentric outtakes used as vehicles to move from song to song. Both Freed and Murray the K, however, conceived the idea of the DJ as more than a spinner of records. They envisioned the DJ as a form of media, a myth maker, a composer of ideas through sounds and politics. In a sense, they saw their work as disseminating social commentary on '60s racial politics and ideology, working from a fairly new innovation: the rock and roll record. Their DJ work became the model for contemporary hip hop artists. Instead of considering isolated train whistles or glass crashing (the technique of Murray the K) as sources for sampling, contemporary DJs and digital samplers cut and paste fragments from the history of popular music in order to compose new works, compositions which function as vehicles of cultural critique. Groups like Public Enemy and The Roots utilise their record collections to make political statements on drug usage, economic problems within the African-American community, and racism. For Tricia Rose, these artists are the cultural studies writers of the digital age. "Rappers are constantly taking dominant discursive fragments and throwing them into relief, destabilizing hegemonic discourses and attempting to legitimate counterhegemonic interpretations." (Rose 102) Remix The juxtaposition of these three events in 1964 marks an interesting place to consider the potential for new media and cultural studies. Such a juxtaposition answers the calls of Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson, and Paula Treichler in their introduction to Cultural Studies, a collection of essays from the 1970s and 1980s. The editors suggest that cultural studies can be thought of, in some ways, as a collagist practice. The methodology of cultural studies provides an equally uneasy marker, for cultural studies in fact has no distinct methodology, no unique statistical, ethnomethodological, or textual analysis to call its own. Its methodology, ambiguous from the beginning, could best be seen as a bricolage. (2) For these editors, "Cultural studies needs to remain open to unexpected, unimagined, even uninvited possibilities" (3). To consider cultural studies from the perspective of 1964 is to evoke the unexpected, the unimagined, and the uninvited. It is to resituate the demands of cultural study within the context of new media - the legacy of Burroughs' cut-up reborn in the digital sampler. In response to the editors of Cultural Studies, I propose the practice of temporal juxtaposition as a way of critical writing. My initial juxtaposition of 1964 asserts that to teach such a practice, one must teach cutting and mixing. The Break The break, as a DJ method, is "any short captured sound whatsoever" (Eshun 14). The break motivates digital sampling; it provides the points from which samplers appropriate past works into their own: "Break beats are points of rupture in their former contexts, points at which the thematic elements of a musical piece are suspended and the underlying rhythms brought center stage. In the early stages of rap, these break beats formed the core of rap DJs' mixing strategies" (Rose 73-74). Breaks are determined by how DJs produce cuts in previously recorded music. "The cut is a command, a technical and conceptual operation which cuts the lines of association" (Eshun 16). For William Burroughs, cuts create shock in readers; they are tools for destroying ideology. "Once machine lines are cut, the enemy is helpless" (Ticket That Exploded 111). In Nova Express, Burroughs issues the command, "Cut word lines" (62). And in Naked Lunch, the cut provides a set of reading instructions, a way for readers to uncover Burroughs' own ideological positions. You can cut into Naked Lunch at any intersection point . . . I have written many prefaces. . . Naked Lunch is a blueprint, a How-To Book. (Naked Lunch 224 For Roland Barthes, a major influence on the founding of the Birmingham School, the How-To functioned as a place for cultural critique. Barthes felt that semiotic analysis could break ideological positions constructed in popular culture. Barthes used the How-To as one example of what he called mythologies, items of popular culture assumed to be natural but latent with ideological meanings. He treated the how-to tourist guide (how to enjoy yourself on vacation) as one such place for further analysis. The good natured image of "the writer on holiday" is therefore no more than one of these cunning mystifications which the Establishment practices the better to enslave its writers. (Barthes 30) Mythologies has inspired contemporary cultural studies. Dick Hebdige states that through Barthes' work, "It was hoped that the invisible temporary seam between language, experience and reality could be located and prised open through a semiotic analysis" (Hebdige 10). My juxtapositions of 1964, however, tell me that the How-To for cultural studies is cutting and pasting, not hermeneutical or semiotic analysis (i.e. What does this mean? What do these codes reveal?), which have long been cultural studies' focus. 1964 updates cultural studies practices by reinventing its methods of inquiry. 1964 forces academic study to ask: How would a contemporary cultural critic cut into cultural texts and paste selections into a new media work? The Sample Cuts and breaks become samples, authorial chosen selections. My sample comes from Walter Benjamin, an early DJ of media culture who discovered in 19th century Paris a source for a new compositional practice. Benjamin's unfinished Arcades project proposed that the task of the writer in the age of mechanical reproduction is to become a collector. "The collector was the true inhabitant of the interior" (Benjamin 168). Benjamin felt that the "poets find their refuse on the street" (79) preempting William Gibson's now often cited remark, "the street finds its own use for things" (Gibson 186) and modern DJs who build record collections by rummaging bargain street sales. I find in Benjamin's work a place to sample, a break for cutting into Burroughs' nova method. "The basic nova mechanism is very simple: Always create as many insoluble conflicts as possible and always aggravate existing conflict - This is done by dumping life forms with incompatible conditions of existence on the same planet" (Nova Express 53). Like Burroughs, Benjamin expressed interest in the ideological conflicts created through juxtaposition. His collections of the Parisian Arcades led to a cultural history different from that of the Frankfurt School. The Arcades' juxtapositions of consumer goods and artifacts opposed the Frankfurt School's understandings of Marxism and methods of critique. The conflict I create is that of incorporating the concerns of cultural studies into media study as an alternative practice. This practice is a system of sampling, cutting, breaking, and pasting. What might initially seem incompatible to cultural studies, I propose as a method of critique. My initial juxtaposition of 1964 becomes the first step towards doing so: I critique current cultural studies' methods of semiotic and hermeneutical analysis by way of the cut and mix I create. This Benjamin sample is pasted onto the Networked Writing Environment (NWE) at the University of Florida where I teach media classes in one of several computer networked classrooms. Working from a sampled Benjamin and the juxtaposition of the previously described temporal events of 1964, I see a place to rethink new media and cultural studies. The NWE's graphical user interface completes the cut. Our Unix operating system uses X Windows for desktop display. The metaphor of the X, the slash, the cut, becomes a place to rethink what cultural studies admits to be a cut-up, or a non-unified practice (as stated by Grossberg et al). The X also recalls the crossroads, the iconic marker of the place of decision. Standing at the crossroads, I envision the blues song of the same name, which in 1964 was cut from its Robert Johnson origins and remixed as a new recording by the Yardbirds. This decision shifts the focus of media study to cultural collections, their juxtapositions, and the alternative understandings that surface. The tools of technology (like those we use in the NWE: the Web, MOO, and e-mail) cut the structural dominance of critique and encourage us to make new pedagogical decisions, like juxtaposing a William Burroughs novel with the founding of the Birmingham School with the rise of the DJ. Putting these practices into the mix, we redefine cultural critique. 1964, then, is the place where cultural mixing begins. References Barthes, Roland. Mythologies. New York: Hill and Wang, 1957. Benjamin, Walter. Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism. Harry Zohn trans. London: NLB, 1973. Burroughs, William S. Naked Lunch. New York: Grove, 1982 (1959). _________________. Nova Express. New York: Grove, 1992 (1964). _________________. The Ticket That Exploded. New York: Grove, 1987 (1962). Burroughs, William S. and Byron Gysin. The Third Mind. New York: Viking Press, 1978. Eshun, Kodwo. More Brilliant Than the Sun. London: Quartet, 1999. Gibson, William. "Burning Chrome." Burning Chrome. New York: Ace Books, 1981. Grossberg, Lawrence, Cary Nelson, and Paula Treichler, eds. Cultural Studies. London: Routledge, 1992. Hall, Stuart. "Theoretical Legacies." Cultural Studies. Hall, Stuart and Paddy Whannel. The Popular Arts. New York: Pantheon, 1964. Hebdige, Dick. Subculture: The Meaning of Style. London and New York: Routledge, 1979. Poschardt, Ulf. DJ Culture. London: Quartet, 1998. Rose, Tricia. Black Noise: Black Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America.Hanover: Wesleyan University Press, 1994. Tosch, Nick. Unsung Heroes of Rock and Roll. New York: Da Capo Press, 1999. Wolfe, Tom. "The Fifth Beatle." The Kandy Kolored Tangerine Flake Streamlined Baby. New York: Pocket Books, 1965.

IntroductionTraditionally, the femme fatale has been closely associated with a series of noir films (such as Double Indemnity [1944], The Maltese Falcon [1941], and The Big Heat [1953]) in the 1940s and 50s that necessarily betray male anxieties about independent women in the years during and following World War II. However, the anxieties and historical factors that precipitated the emergence of the noir femme fatale similarly existed in the sixteenth century and, as a result, the femme fatale can be re-imagined in a series of Elizabethan and Jacobean plays. In this context, to re-imagine is to imagine or conceive of something in a new way. It involves taking a concept or an idea and re-imagining it into something simultaneously similar and new. This article will argue, first, that the noir femme fatale’s emergence coincided with a period of history characterised by suspicion, intolerance and perceived vulnerability and that a similar set of historical factors—namely the presence of a female monarch and changes to marriage laws—precipitated the emergence a femme fatale type figure in the Renaissance period. Second, noir films typically contain a series of narrative tropes that can be similarly identified in a selection of Renaissance plays, which enables the production of a new, re-imagined reading of these plays as tragedies of the feminine desire for autonomy. The femme fatale, according to Rebecca Stott, is not unique to the twentieth century. The femme fatale label can be applied retrospectively to seductive, if noticeably evil women, whose seduction and destruction of men render them amenable to our twenty-first century understanding of the femme fatale (Allen). Mario Praz similarly contends that the femme fatale has always existed; she simply becomes more prolific in times of social and cultural upheaval. The definition of the femme fatale, however, has only recently been added to the dictionary and the burden of all definitions is the same: the femme fatale is a woman who lures men into danger, destruction and even death by means of her overpowering seductive charms. There is a woman on the Renaissance stage who combines adultery, murder, and insubordination and this figure embodies the same characteristics as the twentieth-century femme fatale because she is similarly drawn from an archetypal pattern of male anxieties regarding sexually appetitive/desirous women. The fear that this selection of women elicit arises invariably from their initial defiance of their fathers and/or brothers in marrying without their consent and/or the possibility that these women may marry or seek a union with a man out of sexual lust.The femme fatale of 1940s and 50s noir films is embodied by such women as Brigid O’Shaughnessy (Maltese Falcon), Phyllis Dietrichson (Double Indemnity), and Ann Grayle (Murder, My Sweet), while the figure of the femme fatale can be re-imagined in a series of Elizabethan and Jacobean plays, including The Changeling (1622), Arden of Faversham (1592), and The Maid’s Tragedy (1619). Like the noir femme fatale, there is a female protagonist in each of these plays who uses both cunning and sexual attractiveness to gain her desired independence. By focusing on one noir film and one Renaissance play, this article will explore both the historical factors that precipitate the emergence of these fatal women and the structural tropes that are common to both Double Indemnity and Middleton and Rowley’s The Changeling. The obvious parallels between the two figures at the centre of these narratives—Phyllis and Beatrice-Joanna respectively—namely an aversion to the institution of marriage and the instigation of murder to attain one’s desires, enable a re-imagined reading of Beatrice-Joanna as a femme fatale. Socio-Cultural AnxietiesThe femme fatale is a component of changing consciousness: she is one of the recurring motifs of the film noir genre and takes her place amongst degeneration anxieties, anxieties about sexuality and race and concerns about cultural virility and fitness (Stott). According to Sylvia Harvey, the emergence of the femme fatale parallels social changes taking place in the 1940s, particularly the increasing entry of women into the labour market. She also notes the apparent frustration of the institution of the family in this era and the boredom and stifling entrapment of marriage and how the femme fatale threatens to destroy traditional family structures. Jans Wager likewise notes that the femme fatale emerged as an expression of the New Woman, whose presence in the public sphere was in opposition to her adherence to traditional societal values, while Virginia Allen argues that the femme fatale came to maturity in the years marked by the first birth control campaigns and female emancipation movement. The Renaissance femme fatale similarly emerged in the wake of historical trigger factors occurring at the time, namely the presence of a female monarch and changes to marriage laws. In 1558, Queen Elizabeth I assumed the throne, which had a profound impact upon relations of gender in English Renaissance society. She occupied a privileged position of power in a society that believed women should have none by virtue of their inferior sex (Montrose). This was compounded by her decision to remain unmarried, which ensured the consolidation of her power that she would have otherwise forfeited to her husband. The presence of a female ruler destabilised established notions of women as passive objects of desire and, as I argue here, contributed to representations of powerful women in Renaissance drama. Men created femme fatales in their work as an expression of what they saw in women who were beginning to declare their sexual and political freedom. In addition, changing conceptions of marriage from arranged practices (unions for social and economic reasons) to romantic idealism (marriage for companionship and affective ties) saw the legitimation of desire outside the holy sacrament. Plays depicting femme fatales, including The Changeling (1622), Arden of Faversham (1592) and The Maid’s Tragedy (1619) to name a few, appear to have fed off the anxieties that resulted from the shift from arranged marriages to individual choice of a spouse. Similarly, in the noir period, “restrictions on women’s rights ensured that married women had comparatively fewer rights than single women, who could at least lay claim to their own property and wages” (Braun 53). As such, the femme fatale represented an alternative to domesticity, one in which a woman could retain her dignity without a man.Re-imagining the Femme Fatale James Damico proposes a model of film noir’s plot structure and character type. The male protagonist is hired for a job associated with a non-innocent woman to whom he is sexually and fatally attracted to. Through his attraction, either because the woman induces him to it or because it is a natural result of their relationship, the man comes to cheat, attempt to or actually murder a second man to whom a woman is unhappily or unwillingly attached (generally her husband or lover). This act invariably leads to the woman’s betrayal of the protagonist and either metaphorically or literally results in the destruction of the woman, the man to whom she is attached, and the protagonist himself. In Double Indemnity, Phyllis Dietrichson lures her hapless lover, Walter Neff, into committing murder on her behalf. He puts up minimal resistance to Phyllis’s plan to insure her husband without his knowledge so that he can be killed and she can reap the benefits of the policy. Walter says, “I fought it [the idea of murder], only I guess I didn’t fight it hard enough.” Similarly, in The Changeling, Beatrice-Joanna’s father, Vermandero, arranges her marriage to Alonzo de Piracquo; however, she is in love with Alsemero, who would also be a suitable match if Alonzo were out of the way. She thus employs the use of her servant DeFlores to kill her intended. He does as instructed and brings back her dead fiancée’s finger as proof of the deed, expecting for his services a sexual reward, rather than the gold Beatrice-Joanna offered him: “Never was man / Dearlier rewarded” (2.2.138-140). Renaissance fears regarding women’s desirous subjectivity are justified in this scene, which represent Beatrice-Joanna as willingly succumbing to DeFlore’s advances: she came to “love anon” what she had previously “fear’st and faint’st to venture on” (3.4.171-172). She experienced a “giddy turning in [her]” (1.1.159), which compelled her to seduce DeFlores on the eve of her wedding to Alsemero. Both Phyllis and Beatrice-Joanna localise contemporary fears and fantasies about women, sexuality and marriage (Haber) and, despite the existing literature surrounding the noir femme fatale, a re-imagining of this figure on the Renaissance stage is unique. Furthermore, and in addition to similarities in plot structure, noir films are typically characterised by three narrative tropes (masquerade, the polarisation of the femme fatale with the femme attrappe and the demise of the femme fatale) that are likewise present in The Changeling. 1. Masquerade: Her Sexual Past Is the Central Mystery of the Narrative The femme fatale appropriates the signifiers of femininity (modesty, obedience, silence) that bewitch men and fool them into believing that she embodies everything he desires. According to Luce Irigaray, the femme fatale assumes an unnatural, flaunted facade and, in so doing, she conceals her own subjectivity and disrupts notions of what she is really like. Her sexual past is often the central mystery and so she figuratively embodies the hidden secrets of feminine sexuality while the males battle for control over this knowledge (Lee-Hedgecock). John Caleb-Hopkins characterises Phyllis as a faux housewife because of her rejection of the domestic, her utilisation of the role to further her agency, and her method of deception via gender performance. It is “faux” because she plays the role as a means to achieve her monetary or material desires. When Phyllis first meets Walter she plays up the housewife routine because she immediately recognises his potential utility for her. The house is not a space in which she belongs but a space she can utilise to further her agency and so she devises a plan to dethrone and remove the patriarch from his position within the home. Walter, as the last patriarchal figure in her vicinity to interfere with the pursuit of her desire, must be killed as well. Beatrice-Joanna’s masquerade of femininity (“there was a visor / O’er that cunning face” [5.3.46-7]) and her performance as a chaste virgin to please Alsemero, suggests that she possesses an ineffaceable knowledge that femininity is a construction that women put on for men. Having surrendered her virginity to DeFlores prior to marrying Alsemero, she agonises that he will find out: “Never was bride so fearfully distressed […] There’s no venturing / Into his bed […] Without my shame” (4.1.2-13). Fortunately, she discovers a manuscript (the Book of Experiments) that documents “How to know whether a woman be a maid or not” (4.1.41). Having discovered the book and potions, Beatrice-Joanna persuades her waiting-woman Diaphanta to take the potions so that she can witness its effects and mimic them as necessary. Thus instructed, Beatrice-Joanna is equipped with the ability to feign the symptoms of virginity, which leads us to the notion of female masquerade as a means to evade the male gaze by feigning virtue and thus retaining her status as desirable to men. Her masquerade conceals her sexual experience and hides the truth of female deceitfulness from the men in the play, which makes manifest the theme of women’s unknowability. 2. Femme Fatale versus Femme AttrappeThe original source of the femme fatale is the dark half of the dualistic concept of the Eternal Feminine: the Mary/Eve dichotomy (Allen). In film noir, the female characters fall into one of two categories—the femme fatale or woman as redeemer. Unlike the femme fatale, the femme attrappe is the known, familiar and comfortable other, who is juxtaposed to the unknown, devious and deceptive other. According to Jans Wager both women are trapped by patriarchal authority—the femme fatale by her resistance and the good wife by her acquiescence. These two women invariably appear side-by-side in order to demonstrate acceptable womanhood in the case of the femme attrappe and dangerous and unacceptable displays of femininity in the case of the femme fatale. In Double Indemnity, Phyllis is an obvious example of the latter. She flirts brazenly with Walter while introducing the idea of insuring her husband and when he finally kills her husband, she stares unflinchingly ahead and continues driving, showing very little remorse after the murder. Lola (Phyllis’s step-daughter and the film’s femme attrappe) functions as a foil to Phyllis. “Lola’s narrative purpose is to provide a female character to contrast with Phyllis to further depict her femininity as bad […] The more Lola is emphatically stressed as victim through Walter’s narration, the more vilified Phyllis is” (Caleb-Hopkins). Lola presents a type of femininity that patriarchy approves of and necessitates. Phyllis is the antithesis to this because her sexuality is provocative and open and she uses it to manipulate those around her (Caleb-Hopkins). It is Lola who eventually tells Walter that Phyllis murdered her mother and that her former boyfriend Nino has been spotted at Phyllis’s house most nights. This leads Walter to conclude, logically, that she is arranging for Nino to kill him as well (Maxfield). The Renaissance subplot heroine has been juxtaposed, here, with the deadly woman at the center of the play, thus supporting a common structural trope of the film noir genre in which the femme attrappe and femme fatale exist alongside each other. In The Changeling, Isabella and Beatrice-Joanna occupy these positions respectively. In the play’s subplot, Alibius employs his servant Lollio to watch over his wife Isabella while he is away and, ironically, it is Lollio himself who attempts to seduce Isabella. He offers himself to her as a “most shrewd temptation” (1.2.57); however, unlike Beatrice-Joanna, who engages in a lascivious affair with another man, Isabella remains faithful to her husband. In so doing, Beatrice-Joanna’s status as a femme fatale is exemplified. She is represented as a woman who cannot control her desires and will resort to any and all means necessary to get what she wants. 3. The Femme Fatale’s Demise The femme fatale is characterised by the two-fold possession of desire: desire for autonomy and self-government and the desire for death. Her quest for freedom, which is only available in death, explains the femme fatale’s desire to self-destruct in these plays, which guarantees that she will never deviate from the course she alighted on even if that path leads inevitably to her demise. According to Elizabeth Bronfen, “the choice between freedom and death inevitably requires that one choose death because there you show that you have freedom of choice. She undertakes an act that allows her to choose death as a way of choosing real freedom by turning the inevitability of her fate into her responsibility” (2004).The femme fatale will never show her true intentions to anyone, especially not the hero she has inveigled, even if it entails his and her own death (Bronfen). In Double Indemnity, Phyllis, by choosing not to shoot Walter the second time, performs an act in which she actively accepts her own fallibility: “I never loved you Walter. Not you or anybody else. I’m rotten to the heart. I used you just as you said. That’s all you ever meant to me. Until a minute ago, when I couldn’t fire that second shot.” This is similarly the case with Beatrice-Joanna who, only at the very end, admits to the murder of Alonzo—“Your love has made me / A cruel murd’ress” (5.3.64-5)—in order to get the man she wanted. According to Bronfen, the femme fatale turns what is inevitable into a source of power. She does not contest the murder charge because a guilty verdict and punishment of death will grant her the freedom she has sought unwaveringly since the beginning of the play. Both Beatrice-Joanna and Phyllis apprehend that there is no appropriate outlet for their unabashed independence. Their unions, with Alsemero and Walter respectively, will nevertheless require their subjection in the patriarchal institution of monogamous marriage. The destruction of the sanctity of marriage in Double Indemnity and The Changeling inevitably results in placing the relationship of the lovers under strain, beyond the boundaries of conventional moral law, to the extent that the adulterous relationship becomes an impossibility that invariably results in the mutual destruction of both parties. ConclusionThe plays of the Elizabethan and Jacobean period, like the noir films of the 1940s and 50s, lament a lost past when women accepted their subordination without reproach and anxiously anticipated a future in which women refused submission to men and masculine forms of authority (Born-Lechleitner). While the femme fatale is commonly associated with the noir era, this article has argued that a series of historical factors and socio-cultural anxieties in the Renaissance period allow for a re-imagined reading of the femme fatale on the Elizabethan and Jacobean stage. In The Changeling, Middleton and Rowley foreground contemporary cultural anxieties by fleshing out the lusty details that confirm Beatrice-Joanna’s status a female villainess. Throughout the play we come to understand the ideologies that dictate the manner of her representation. That is, early modern anxieties regarding the independent, sexually appetitive woman manifested in representations of a female figure on the Renaissance stage who can be re-imagined as a femme fatale.ReferencesAllen, Virginia M. The Femme Fatale: Erotic Icon. New York: Whitson Publishing Company, 1983. Born-Lechleitner, Ilse. The Motif of Adultery in Elizabethan, Jacobean, and Caroline Tragedy. New York: Edwin Hellen Press, 1995.Braun, Heather. The Rise and Fall of the Femme Fatale in British Literature, 1790-1910. Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 2012. Bronfen, Elizabeth. “Femme Fatale: Negotiations of Tragic Desire.” New Literary History 35.1 (2004): 103–16. Caleb-Hopkins, John. “There’s No Place like Home … Anymore: Domestic Masquerade and Faux-Housewife Femme Fatale in Barbara Stanwyck’s Early 1940s Films.” Masters thesis. Canada: Carleton University, 2014.Damico, James. “Film Noir: A Modest Proposal.” Film Noir Reader. Eds. Alain Silver and James Ursini. New York: Limelight, 1996.Double Indemnity. Billy Wilder. Paramount Pictures, 1944.Haber, Judith. “I(t) Could Not Choose But Follow: Erotic Logic in The Changeling.” Representations 81.18 (2003): 79–98. Harvey, Sylivia. “Woman’s Place: The Absent Family of Film Noir.” Women in Film Noir. Ed. A. Kaplan. London: British Film Institute, 1978. Irigaray, Luce. The Sex Which Is Not One. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1985.Lee-Hedgecock, Jennifer. The Sexual Threat and Danger of the Femme Fatale in Victorian Literature. East Lansing, MI: Michigan State UP, 2005. Montrose, Louis. The Subject of Elizabeth: Authority, Gender, and Representation. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2006.Maxfield, James F. The Fatal Woman: Sources of Male Anxiety in American Film Noir. Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 1996.Praz, Mario. The Romantic Agony. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1951 [1933]. Stott, Rebecca. The Fabrication of the Late-Victorian Femme Fatale. London: Macmillan Press, 1992.Wager, Jans B. Dangerous Dames: Women and Representation in the Weimar Street Film and Film Noir. Athens, OH: Ohio UP, 1999.

augmentvb [ɔːgˈmɛnt]1. to make or become greater in number, amount, strength, etc.; increase2. Music: to increase (a major or perfect interval) by a semitone (Collins English Dictionary 107) Almost everything associated with Robert Johnson has been subject to some form of augmentation. His talent as a musician and songwriter has been embroidered by myth-making. Johnson’s few remaining artefacts—his photographic images, his grave site, other physical records of his existence—have attained the status of reliquary. Even the integrity of his forty-two surviving recordings is now challenged by audiophiles who posit they were musically and sonically augmented by speeding up—increasing the tempo and pitch. This article documents the promulgation of myth in the life and music of Robert Johnson. His disputed photographic images are cited as archetypal contested artefacts, augmented both by false claims and genuine new discoveries—some of which suggest Johnson’s cultural magnetism is so compelling that even items only tenuously connected to his work draw significant attention. Current challenges to the musical integrity of Johnson’s original recordings, that they were “augmented” in order to raise the tempo, are presented as exemplars of our on-going fascination with his life and work. Part literature review, part investigative history, it uses the phenomenon of augmentation as a prism to shed new light on this enigmatic figure. Johnson’s obscurity during his lifetime, and for twenty-three years after his demise in 1938, offered little indication of his future status as a musical legend: “As far as the evolution of black music goes, Robert Johnson was an extremely minor figure, and very little that happened in the decades following his death would have been affected if he had never played a note” (Wald, Escaping xv). Such anonymity allowed those who first wrote about his music to embrace and propagate the myths that grew around this troubled character and his apparently “supernatural” genius. Johnson’s first press notice, from a pseudonymous John Hammond writing in The New Masses in 1937, spoke of a mysterious character from “deepest Mississippi” who “makes Leadbelly sound like an accomplished poseur” (Prial 111). The following year Hammond eulogised the singer in profoundly romantic terms: “It still knocks me over when I think of how lucky it is that a talent like his ever found its way to phonograph records […] Johnson died last week at precisely the moment when Vocalion scouts finally reached him and told him that he was booked to appear at Carnegie Hall” (19). The visceral awe experienced by subsequent generations of Johnson aficionados seems inspired by the remarkable capacity of his recordings to transcend space and time, reaching far beyond their immediate intended audience. “Johnson’s music changed the way the world looked to me,” wrote Greil Marcus, “I could listen to nothing else for months.” The music’s impact originates, at least in part, from the ambiguity of its origins: “I have the feeling, at times, that the reason Johnson has remained so elusive is that no one has been willing to take him at his word” (27-8). Three decades later Bob Dylan expressed similar sentiments over seven detailed pages of Chronicles: From the first note the vibrations from the loudspeaker made my hair stand up … it felt like a ghost had come into the room, a fearsome apparition …When he sings about icicles hanging on a tree it gives me the chills, or about milk turning blue … it made me nauseous and I wondered how he did that … It’s hard to imagine sharecroppers or plantation field hands at hop joints, relating to songs like these. You have to wonder if Johnson was playing for an audience that only he could see, one off in the future. (282-4) Such ready invocation of the supernatural bears witness to the profundity and resilience of the “lost bluesman” as a romantic trope. Barry Lee Pearson and Bill McCulloch have produced a painstaking genealogy of such a-historical misrepresentation. Early contributors include Rudi Blesch, Samuel B Charters, Frank Driggs’ liner notes for Johnson’s King of the Delta Blues Singers collection, and critic Pete Welding’s prolific 1960s output. Even comparatively recent researchers who ostensibly sought to demystify the legend couldn’t help but embellish the narrative. “It is undeniable that Johnson was fascinated with and probably obsessed by supernatural imagery,” asserted Robert Palmer (127). For Peter Guralnick his best songs articulate “the debt that must be paid for art and the Faustian bargain that Johnson sees at its core” (43). Contemporary scholarship from Pearson and McCulloch, James Banninghof, Charles Ford, and Elijah Wald has scrutinised Johnson’s life and work on a more evidential basis. This process has been likened to assembling a complicated jigsaw where half the pieces are missing: The Mississippi Delta has been practically turned upside down in the search for records of Robert Johnson. So far only marriage application signatures, two photos, a death certificate, a disputed death note, a few scattered school documents and conflicting oral histories of the man exist. Nothing more. (Graves 47) Such material is scrappy and unreliable. Johnson’s marriage licenses and his school records suggest contradictory dates of birth (Freeland 49). His death certificate mistakes his age—we now know that Johnson inadvertently founded another rock myth, the “27 Club” which includes fellow guitarists Brian Jones, Jimi Hendrix and Kurt Cobain (Wolkewitz et al., Segalstad and Hunter)—and incorrectly states he was single when he was twice widowed. A second contemporary research strand focuses on the mythmaking process itself. For Eric Rothenbuhler the appeal of Johnson’s recordings lies in his unique “for-the-record” aesthetic, that foreshadowed playing and song writing standards not widely realised until the 1960s. For Patricia Schroeder Johnson’s legend reveals far more about the story-tellers than it does the source—which over time has become “an empty center around which multiple interpretations, assorted viewpoints, and a variety of discourses swirl” (3). Some accounts of Johnson’s life seem entirely coloured by their authors’ cultural preconceptions. The most enduring myth, Johnson’s “crossroads” encounter with the Devil, is commonly redrawn according to the predilections of those telling the tale. That this story really belongs to bluesman Tommy Johnson has been known for over four decades (Evans 22), yet it was mistakenly attributed to Robert as recently as 1999 in French blues magazine Soul Bag (Pearson and McCulloch 92-3). Such errors are, thankfully, becoming less common. While the movie Crossroads (1986) brazenly appropriated Tommy’s story, the young walking bluesman in Oh, Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000) faithfully proclaims his authentic identity: “Thanks for the lift, sir. My name's Tommy. Tommy Johnson […] I had to be at that crossroads last midnight. Sell my soul to the devil.” Nevertheless the “supernatural” constituent of Johnson’s legend remains an irresistible framing device. It inspired evocative footage in Peter Meyer’s Can’t You Hear the Wind Howl? The Life and Music of Robert Johnson (1998). Even the liner notes to the definitive Sony Music Robert Johnson: The Centennial Edition celebrate and reclaim his myth: nothing about this musician is more famous than the word-of-mouth accounts of him selling his soul to the devil at a midnight crossroads in exchange for his singular mastery of blues guitar. It has become fashionable to downplay or dismiss this account nowadays, but the most likely source of the tale is Johnson himself, and the best efforts of scholars to present this artist in ordinary, human terms have done little to cut through the mystique and mystery that surround him. Repackaged versions of Johnson’s recordings became available via Amazon.co.uk and Spotify when they fell out of copyright in the United Kingdom. Predictable titles such as Contracted to the Devil, Hellbound, Me and the Devil Blues, and Up Jumped the Devil along with their distinctive “crossroads” artwork continue to demonstrate the durability of this myth [1]. Ironically, Johnson’s recordings were made during an era when one-off exhibited artworks (such as his individual performances of music) first became reproducible products. Walter Benjamin famously described the impact of this development: that which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of the work of art […] the technique of reproduction detaches the reproduced object from the domain of tradition. By making many reproductions it substitutes a plurality of copies for a unique existence. (7) Marybeth Hamilton drew on Benjamin in her exploration of white folklorists’ efforts to document authentic pre-modern blues culture. Such individuals sought to preserve the intensity of the uncorrupted and untutored black voice before its authenticity and uniqueness could be tarnished by widespread mechanical reproduction. Two artefacts central to Johnson’s myth, his photographs and his recorded output, will now be considered in that context. In 1973 researcher Stephen LaVere located two pictures in the possession of his half–sister Carrie Thompson. The first, a cheap “dime store” self portrait taken in the equivalent of a modern photo booth, shows Johnson around a year into his life as a walking bluesman. The second, taken in the Hooks Bros. studio in Beale Street, Memphis, portrays a dapper and smiling musician on the eve of his short career as a Vocalion recording artist [2]. Neither was published for over a decade after their “discovery” due to fears of litigation from a competing researcher. A third photograph remains unpublished, still owned by Johnson’s family: The man has short nappy hair; he is slight, one foot is raised, and he is up on his toes as though stretching for height. There is a sharp crease in his pants, and a handkerchief protrudes from his breast pocket […] His eyes are deep-set, reserved, and his expression forms a half-smile, there seems to be a gentleness about him, his fingers are extraordinarily long and delicate, his head is tilted to one side. (Guralnick 67) Recently a fourth portrait appeared, seemingly out of nowhere, in Vanity Fair. Vintage guitar seller Steven Schein discovered a sepia photograph labelled “Old Snapshot Blues Guitar B. B. King???” [sic] while browsing Ebay and purchased it for $2,200. Johnson’s son positively identified the image, and a Houston Police Department forensic artist employed face recognition technology to confirm that “all the features are consistent if not identical” (DiGiacomo 2008). The provenance of this photograph remains disputed, however. Johnson’s guitar appears overly distressed for what would at the time be a new model, while his clothes reflect an inappropriate style for the period (Graves). Another contested “Johnson” image found on four seconds of silent film showed a walking bluesman playing outside a small town cinema in Ruleville, Mississippi. It inspired Bob Dylan to wax lyrical in Chronicles: “You can see that really is Robert Johnson, has to be – couldn’t be anyone else. He’s playing with huge, spiderlike hands and they magically move over the strings of his guitar” (287). However it had already been proved that this figure couldn’t be Johnson, because the background movie poster shows a film released three years after the musician’s death. The temptation to wish such items genuine is clearly a difficult one to overcome: “even things that might have been Robert Johnson now leave an afterglow” (Schroeder 154, my italics). Johnson’s recordings, so carefully preserved by Hammond and other researchers, might offer tangible and inviolate primary source material. Yet these also now face a serious challenge: they run too rapidly by a factor of up to 15 per cent (Gibbens; Wilde). Speeding up music allowed early producers to increase a song’s vibrancy and fit longer takes on to their restricted media. By slowing the recording tempo, master discs provided a “mother” print that would cause all subsequent pressings to play unnaturally quickly when reproduced. Robert Johnson worked for half a decade as a walking blues musician without restrictions on the length of his songs before recording with producer Don Law and engineer Vincent Liebler in San Antonio (1936) and Dallas (1937). Longer compositions were reworked for these sessions, re-arranging and edited out verses (Wald, Escaping). It is also conceivable that they were purposefully, or even accidentally, sped up. (The tempo consistency of machines used in early field recordings across the South has often been questioned, as many played too fast or slow (Morris).) Slowed-down versions of Johnson’s songs from contributors such as Angus Blackthorne and Ron Talley now proliferate on YouTube. The debate has fuelled detailed discussion in online blogs, where some contributors to specialist audio technology forums have attempted to decode a faintly detectable background hum using spectrum analysers. If the frequency of the alternating current that powered Law and Liebler’s machine could be established at 50 or 60 Hz it might provide evidence of possible tempo variation. A peak at 51.4 Hz, one contributor argues, suggests “the recordings are 2.8 per cent fast, about half a semitone” (Blischke). Such “augmentation” has yet to be fully explored in academic literature. Graves describes the discussion as “compelling and intriguing” in his endnotes, concluding “there are many pros and cons to the argument and, indeed, many recordings over the years have been speeded up to make them seem livelier” (124). Wald ("Robert Johnson") provides a compelling and detailed counter-thesis on his website, although he does acknowledge inconsistencies in pitch among alternate master takes of some recordings. No-one who actually saw Robert Johnson perform ever called attention to potential discrepancies between the pitch of his natural and recorded voice. David “Honeyboy” Edwards, Robert Lockwood Jr. and Johnny Shines were all interviewed repeatedly by documentarians and researchers, but none ever raised the issue. Conversely Johnson’s former girlfriend Willie Mae Powell was visibly affected by the familiarity in his voice on hearing his recording of the tune Johnson wrote for her, “Love in Vain”, in Chris Hunt’s The Search for Robert Johnson (1991). Clues might also lie in the natural tonality of Johnson’s instrument. Delta bluesmen who shared Johnson’s repertoire and played slide guitar in his style commonly used a tuning of open G (D-G-D-G-B-G). Colloquially known as “Spanish” (Gordon 2002, 38-42) it offers a natural home key of G major for slide guitar. We might therefore expect Johnson’s recordings to revolve around the tonic (G) or its dominant (D) -however almost all of his songs are a full tone higher, in the key of A or its dominant E. (The only exceptions are “They’re Red Hot” and “From Four Till Late” in C, and “Love in Vain” in G.) A pitch increase such as this might be consistent with an increase in the speed of these recordings. Although an alternative explanation might be that Johnson tuned his strings particularly tightly, which would benefit his slide playing but also make fingering notes and chords less comfortable. Yet another is that he used a capo to raise the key of his instrument and was capable of performing difficult lead parts in relatively high fret positions on the neck of an acoustic guitar. This is accepted by Scott Ainslie and Dave Whitehill in their authoritative volume of transcriptions At the Crossroads (11). The photo booth self portrait of Johnson also clearly shows a capo at the second fret—which would indeed raise open G to open A (in concert pitch). The most persuasive reasoning against speed tampering runs parallel to the argument laid out earlier in this piece, previous iterations of the Johnson myth have superimposed their own circumstances and ignored the context and reality of the protagonist’s lived experience. As Wald argues, our assumptions of what we think Johnson ought to sound like have little bearing on what he actually sounded like. It is a compelling point. When Son House, Skip James, Bukka White, and other surviving bluesmen were “rediscovered” during the 1960s urban folk revival of North America and Europe they were old men with deep and resonant voices. Johnson’s falsetto vocalisations do not, therefore, accord with the commonly accepted sound of an authentic blues artist. Yet Johnson was in his mid-twenties in 1936 and 1937; a young man heavily influenced by the success of other high pitched male blues singers of his era. people argue that what is better about the sound is that the slower, lower Johnson sounds more like Son House. Now, House was a major influence on Johnson, but by the time Johnson recorded he was not trying to sound like House—an older player who had been unsuccessful on records—but rather like Leroy Carr, Casey Bill Weldon, Kokomo Arnold, Lonnie Johnson, and Peetie Wheatstraw, who were the big blues recording stars in the mid–1930s, and whose vocal styles he imitated on most of his records. (For example, the ooh-well-well falsetto yodel he often used was imitated from Wheatstraw and Weldon.) These singers tended to have higher, smoother voices than House—exactly the sound that Johnson seems to have been going for, and that the House fans dislike. So their whole argument is based on the fact that they prefer the older Delta sound to the mainstream popular blues sound of the 1930s—or, to put it differently, that their tastes are different from Johnson’s own tastes at the moment he was recording. (Wald, "Robert Johnson") Few media can capture an audible moment entirely accurately, and the idea of engineering a faithful reproduction of an original performance is also only one element of the rationale for any recording. Commercial engineers often aim to represent the emotion of a musical moment, rather than its totality. John and Alan Lomax may have worked as documentarians, preserving sound as faithfully as possible for the benefit of future generations on behalf of the Library of Congress. Law and Liebler, however, were producing exciting and profitable commercial products for a financial gain. Paradoxically, then, whatever the “real” Robert Johnson sounded like (deeper voice, no mesmeric falsetto, not such an extraordinarily adept guitar player, never met the Devil … and so on) the mythical figure who “sold his soul at the crossroads” and shipped millions of albums after his death may, on that basis, be equally as authentic as the original. Schroeder draws on Mikhail Bakhtin to comment on such vacant yet hotly contested spaces around the Johnson myth. For Bakhtin, literary texts are ascribed new meanings by consecutive generations as they absorb and respond to them. Every age re–accentuates in its own way the works of its most immediate past. The historical life of classic works is in fact the uninterrupted process of their social and ideological re–accentuation [of] ever newer aspects of meaning; their semantic content literally continues to grow, to further create out of itself. (421) In this respect Johnson’s legend is a “classic work”, entirely removed from its historical life, a free floating form re-contextualised and reinterpreted by successive generations in order to make sense of their own cultural predilections (Schroeder 57). As Graves observes, “since Robert Johnson’s death there has seemed to be a mathematical equation of sorts at play: the less truth we have, the more myth we get” (113). The threads connecting his real and mythical identity seem so comprehensively intertwined that only the most assiduous scholars are capable of disentanglement. Johnson’s life and work seem destined to remain augmented and contested for as long as people want to play guitar, and others want to listen to them. Notes[1] Actually the dominant theme of Johnson’s songs is not “the supernatural” it is his inveterate womanising. Almost all Johnson’s lyrics employ creative metaphors to depict troubled relationships. Some even include vivid images of domestic abuse. In “Stop Breakin’ Down Blues” a woman threatens him with a gun. In “32–20 Blues” he discusses the most effective calibre of weapon to shoot his partner and “cut her half in two.” In “Me and the Devil Blues” Johnson promises “to beat my woman until I get satisfied”. However in The Lady and Mrs Johnson five-time W. C. Handy award winner Rory Block re-wrote these words to befit her own cultural agenda, inverting the original sentiment as: “I got to love my baby ‘til I get satisfied”.[2] The Gibson L-1 guitar featured in Johnson’s Hooks Bros. portrait briefly became another contested artefact when it appeared in the catalogue of a New York State memorabilia dealership in 2006 with an asking price of $6,000,000. The Australian owner had apparently purchased the instrument forty years earlier under the impression it was bona fide, although photographic comparison technology showed that it couldn’t be genuine and the item was withdrawn. “Had it been real, I would have been able to sell it several times over,” Gary Zimet from MIT Memorabilia told me in an interview for Guitarist Magazine at the time, “a unique item like that will only ever increase in value” (Stewart 2010). References Ainslie, Scott, and Dave Whitehall. Robert Johnson: At the Crossroads – The Authoritative Guitar Transcriptions. Milwaukee: Hal Leonard Publishing, 1992. Bakhtin, Mikhail M. The Dialogic Imagination. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1982. Banks, Russell. “The Devil and Robert Johnson – Robert Johnson: The Complete Recordings.” The New Republic 204.17 (1991): 27-30. Banninghof, James. “Some Ramblings on Robert Johnson’s Mind: Critical Analysis and Aesthetic in Delta Blues.” American Music 15/2 (1997): 137-158. Benjamin, Walter. The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. London: Penguin, 2008. Blackthorne, Angus. “Robert Johnson Slowed Down.” YouTube.com 2011. 1 Aug. 2013 ‹http://www.youtube.com/user/ANGUSBLACKTHORN?feature=watch›. Blesh, Rudi. Shining Trumpets: A History of Jazz. New York: Knopf, 1946. Blischke, Michael. “Slowing Down Robert Johnson.” The Straight Dope 2008. 1 Aug. 2013 ‹http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=461601›. Block, Rory. The Lady and Mrs Johnson. Rykodisc 10872, 2006. Charters, Samuel. The Country Blues. New York: De Capo Press, 1959. Collins UK. Collins English Dictionary. Glasgow: Harper Collins Publishers, 2010. DiGiacomo, Frank. “A Disputed Robert Johnson Photo Gets the C.S.I. Treatment.” Vanity Fair 2008. 1 Aug. 2013 ‹http://www.vanityfair.com/online/daily/2008/10/a-disputed-robert-johnson-photo-gets-the-csi-treatment›. DiGiacomo, Frank. “Portrait of a Phantom: Searching for Robert Johnson.” Vanity Fair 2008. 1 Aug. 2013 ‹http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/features/2008/11/johnson200811›. Dylan, Bob. Chronicles Vol 1. London: Simon & Schuster, 2005. Evans, David. Tommy Johnson. London: November Books, 1971. Ford, Charles. “Robert Johnson’s Rhythms.” Popular Music 17.1 (1998): 71-93. Freeland, Tom. “Robert Johnson: Some Witnesses to a Short Life.” Living Blues 150 (2000): 43-49. Gibbens, John. “Steady Rollin’ Man: A Revolutionary Critique of Robert Johnson.” Touched 2004. 1 Aug. 2013 ‹http://www.touched.co.uk/press/rjnote.html›. Gioia, Ted. Delta Blues: The Life and Times of the Mississippi Masters Who Revolutionised American Music. London: W. W. Norton & Co, 2008. Gioia, Ted. "Robert Johnson: A Century, and Beyond." Robert Johnson: The Centennial Collection. Sony Music 88697859072, 2011. Gordon, Robert. Can’t Be Satisfied: The Life and Times of Muddy Waters. London: Pimlico Books, 2002. Graves, Tom. Crossroads: The Life and Afterlife of Blues Legend Robert Johnson. Spokane: Demers Books, 2008. Guralnick, Peter. Searching for Robert Johnson: The Life and Legend of the "King of the Delta Blues Singers". London: Plume, 1998. Hamilton, Marybeth. In Search of the Blues: Black Voices, White Visions. London: Jonathan Cape, 2007. Hammond, John. From Spirituals to Swing (Dedicated to Bessie Smith). New York: The New Masses, 1938. Johnson, Robert. “Hellbound.” Amazon.co.uk 2011. 1 Aug. 2013 ‹http://www.amazon.co.uk/Hellbound/dp/B0063S8Y4C/ref=sr_1_cc_2?s=aps&ie=UTF8&qid=1376605065&sr=1-2-catcorr&keywords=robert+johnson+hellbound›. ———. “Contracted to the Devil.” Amazon.co.uk 2002. 1 Aug. 2013. ‹http://www.amazon.co.uk/Contracted-The-Devil-Robert-Johnson/dp/B00006F1L4/ref=sr_1_cc_1?s=aps&ie=UTF8&qid=1376830351&sr=1-1-catcorr&keywords=Contracted+to+The+Devil›. ———. King of the Delta Blues Singers. Columbia Records CL1654, 1961. ———. “Me and the Devil Blues.” Amazon.co.uk 2003. 1 Aug. 2013 ‹http://www.amazon.co.uk/Me-Devil-Blues-Robert-Johnson/dp/B00008SH7O/ref=sr_1_16?s=music&ie=UTF8&qid=1376604807&sr=1-16&keywords=robert+johnson›. ———. “The High Price of Soul.” Amazon.co.uk 2007. 1 Aug. 2013 ‹http://www.amazon.co.uk/High-Price-Soul-Robert-Johnson/dp/B000LC582C/ref=sr_1_39?s=music&ie=UTF8&qid=1376604863&sr=1-39&keywords=robert+johnson›. ———. “Up Jumped the Devil.” Amazon.co.uk 2005. 1 Aug. 2013 ‹http://www.amazon.co.uk/Up-Jumped-Devil-Robert-Johnson/dp/B000B57SL8/ref=sr_1_2?s=music&ie=UTF8&qid=1376829917&sr=1-2&keywords=Up+Jumped+The+Devil›. Marcus, Greil. Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock ‘n’ Roll Music. London: Plume, 1997. Morris, Christopher. “Phonograph Blues: Robert Johnson Mastered at Wrong Speed?” Variety 2010. 1 Aug. 2013 ‹http://www.varietysoundcheck.com/2010/05/phonograph-blues-robert-johnson-mastered-at-wrong-speed.html›. Oh, Brother, Where Art Thou? DVD. Universal Pictures, 2000. Palmer, Robert. Deep Blues: A Musical and Cultural History from the Mississippi Delta to Chicago’s South Side to the World. London: Penguin Books, 1981. Pearson, Barry Lee, and Bill McCulloch. Robert Johnson: Lost and Found. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2003. Prial, Dunstan. The Producer: John Hammond and the Soul of American Music. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006. Rothenbuhler, Eric W. “For–the–Record Aesthetics and Robert Johnson’s Blues Style as a Product of Recorded Culture.” Popular Music 26.1 (2007): 65-81. Rothenbuhler, Eric W. “Myth and Collective Memory in the Case of Robert Johnson.” Critical Studies in Media Communication 24.3 (2007): 189-205. Schroeder, Patricia. Robert Johnson, Mythmaking and Contemporary American Culture (Music in American Life). Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2004. Segalstad, Eric, and Josh Hunter. The 27s: The Greatest Myth of Rock and Roll. Berkeley: North Atlantic Books, 2009. Stewart, Jon. “Rock Climbing: Jon Stewart Concludes His Investigation of the Myths behind Robert Johnson.” Guitarist Magazine 327 (2010): 34. The Search for Robert Johnson. DVD. Sony Pictures, 1991. Talley, Ron. “Robert Johnson, 'Sweet Home Chicago', as It REALLY Sounded...” YouTube.com 2012. 1 Aug. 2013. ‹http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LCHod3_yEWQ›. Wald, Elijah. Escaping the Delta: Robert Johnson and the Invention of the Blues. London: HarperCollins, 2005. ———. The Robert Johnson Speed Recording Controversy. Elijah Wald — Writer, Musician 2012. 1 Aug. 2013. ‹http://www.elijahwald.com/johnsonspeed.html›. Wilde, John . “Robert Johnson Revelation Tells Us to Put the Brakes on the Blues: We've Been Listening to the Immortal 'King of the Delta Blues' at the Wrong Speed, But Now We Can Hear Him as He Intended.” The Guardian 2010. 1 Aug. 2013 ‹http://www.theguardian.com/music/musicblog/2010/may/27/robert-johnson-blues›. Wolkewitz, M., A. Allignol, N. Graves, and A.G. Barnett. “Is 27 Really a Dangerous Age for Famous Musicians? Retrospective Cohort Study.” British Medical Journal 343 (2011): d7799. 1 Aug. 2013 ‹http://www.bmj.com/content/343/bmj.d7799›.

AbstractThis chapter presents a brief history of the dominant, Anglo-American literary advice tradition from the nineteenth century to the present as well as a state of the art of the existing scholarship on literary advice. We focus on several key moments for literary advice in the USA and in the UK: Edgar Allan Poe’s “Philosophy of Composition” (1846), the debate between Sir Walter Besant and Henry James surrounding “The Art of Fiction” (1884), the era of the handbook (1880s–1930s), the “program era” (McGurl 2009) and postwar literary advice, the rise of the “advice author” in the 1980s and 1990s, and finally advice in the “digital literary sphere” (Murray 2018). The overview captures both the remarkable consistency and the transformations of advice, against the background of changes in the literary system, the rise of creative writing, changes in the publishing world, and the rise of the Internet and self-publishing. It highlights the role of some specific actors in the literary advice industry, such as moguls, women, and gurus, and draws attention to a number of subgenres (genre handbooks, self-help literary advice, and the writing memoir), as well as to counter-reactions and resistance to advice in literary works and in avant-garde manuals. Advice is regarded both in the context of the professionalization of authorship in a literary culture shaped by cultural and creative industries, and of the exponential increase of amateur creativity.

Emrys Jones (1920–2006), a Fellow of the British Academy, was a geographer who, together with his elder brother, Alun, was raised in the Cynon Valley mining community of Aberaman in South Wales. In 1938, he entered University College Wales, Aberystwyth to study geography. Social anthropology and prehistoric archaeology dominated the teaching programme he experienced – with physical geography largely taught in the Department of Geology. The work on the Teify valley, Tregaron and Utica – all completed if not published by 1950 – together provide a clear view of the underlying philosophy of human geography that Jones sustained throughout his career. He also wrote papers on rural settlement patterns. At the London School of Economics, Jones focused on social geography. The last of his major projects – which occupied much of his retirement – was his study of the Welsh in London.

Abstract The late 1930s and early 1940s witnessed an upsurge in historical biopics, sometimes based on European figures such as Marie Antoinette and Marie Curie, but more often than not based on the lives of Americans, including cowboys and frontiersmen, politicians and military figures, inventors, writers, athletes and criminals, including Wyatt Earp, Jesse James, Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Alva Edison, Edgar Allan Poe, Lou Gehrig, and John Dillinger, among others. At the end of the war, some cultural figures, especially composers whose works were seen as particularly American and that could contribute to global American cultural hegemony in a postwar world, were featured as well. In 1945 and 1946, three such pictures were released: Rhapsody in Blue, a Gershwin film featuring Robert Alda as the composer; Night and Day, a life of Cole Porter starring Cary Grant; and Till the Clouds Roll By, a biopic of Jerome Kern starring Robert Walker. In the case of Night and Day, it may be worth asking whether generic categories adequately account for the specifics and seeming point of the film. An otherwise apparently unknown early treatment of the Night and Day script, together with imagery from the show’s lobby cards as well as the finished film itself, suggest that Night and Day is primarily a good old-fashioned romance and that, in its relationship to Porter’s music, most closely approximates a jukebox musical.

The Australian Fire Danger Rating System (AFDRS) was launched on 1 September 2022, bringing a generational change to the way that Australia calculates and communicates fire danger. Its focus is improved public safety and reduced impacts of bushfires though: • Improving the science behind fire danger predictions. • Improving the way that fire danger is communicated. • Providing government and industry with better decision-making tools. • Reducing future costs associated with bushfire impacts. The previous fire danger rating system was introduced in the 1960’s by Australia’s first full-time bushfire researcher, Alan McArthur, based on extensive experimental fires. While useful, the system included only two fire behaviour models (dry sclerophyll forest and grassland), was not easily updateable and fires were being experienced that increasingly exceeded its design parameters. In July 2014, Senior Officers and Ministers agreed that the development of a new system was a national priority. The new system was developed by the New South Wales Rural Fire Service in collaboration with the Bureau of Meteorology, all Australian states and territories and the Commonwealth government. Program management and system implementation were coordinated by AFAC (Australia’s National Council for Fire and Emergency Services). The new AFDRS uses contemporary fire behaviour science, makes better use of available data and uses software infrastructure that can be continuously improved. The AFDRS starts with eight fire behaviour models representing a representative range of Australian vegetation types, it captures current fuel information, uses satellite data, integrates weather from the Bureau of Meteorology and calculates fire danger down to a 1.5km by 1.5-kilometer grid. These calculations are linked to tools that assist fire operational decision-making via a Fire Behaviour Index that is calibrated to operational implications for fire management. A separate arm of the project developed a public-facing Fire Danger Rating framework, guided by one of Australia’s largest social research projects. The research found that, while fire danger signage was well recognised, few acted on fire danger ratings to plan their activities. Focus groups and subsequent surveys found that the community preferred a simplified public-facing system where each fire danger rating had a distinct call to action. The implementation of the new system required an enormous effort from all levels of government across all States and Territories as well as the Commonwealth. It required updates to legislation, policy, procedures, web pages and other IT infrastructure, as well as replacement of physical signage. However, as a result, Australia has a significantly new way of calculating and communicating fire danger, that is continuously improvable and which will bring benefits for decades to come.