Articoli di riviste sul tema "Accompanied story recall"

Abstract Memory plays a fundamental role in the identity of people and in human life, as it enables us to interpret our surroundings and make decisions. It is known that the aging process can be accompanied by cognitive decline in some memory sub systems. However, the use of memory strategies can help encoding and retrieval of new information. Objective: The aim of this study was to identify and compare, using objective and subjective measures, which recall strategies are used spontaneously by young and older adults. Methods: Twenty-six first-year college students, and thirty-three seniors enrolled at the Third Age University of the same campus, completed a visual memory test including 18 black and white pictures, memorized a short story, and completed an open question about memory strategies, a memory check list to indicate strategies used, and a memory self-efficacy scale. The Bousfield categorization measure was also calculated from the recall protocol. Results: Young adults demonstrated better performance than the older adults on the memory tasks, and were also more confident. Both groups reported using similar strategies. Conclusion: Young and older adults seem to tackle memory tasks in similar ways but young adults outperform seniors.

AbstractA reading experiment combining online and offline data evaluates the effect on second language learners’ reading behaviors and lexical uptake of three gloss types designed to clarify word meaning. These are (a) textual definition, (b) textual definition accompanied by picture, and (c) picture only. We recorded eye movements while intermediate learners of English read a story presented on-screen and containing six glossed pseudowords repeated three times each. Cumulative fixation counts and time spent on the pseudowords predicted posttest performance for form recall and meaning recognition, confirming findings of previous eye-tracking studies of vocabulary acquisition from reading. However, the total visual attention given to pseudowords and glosses was smallest in the condition with picture-only glosses, and yet this condition promoted best retention of word meaning. This suggests that gloss types differentially influence learners’ processing of novel words in ways that may elude the quantitative measures of attention captured by eye-tracking.

Efficiency and comfort in buildings rely on on well-functioning HVAC systems. However, system faults can compromise performance. Modern data-driven fault detection methods, considering diverse techniques, encounter challenges in understanding intricate interactions and adapting to dynamic conditions present in HVAC systems during occupancy periods. Implementing fault detection during active operation, which aligns with real-world scenarios and captures dynamic interactions and environmental changes, is considered highly valuable. To address this, utilizing the dynamic simulation system HVAC SIMulation PLUS (HVACSIM+), an HVAC fault model was developed using 194 sensor signals from each HVAC component within a single-story, four-room building. The advanced HVAC fault detection framework, leveraging simulated HVAC operational scenarios with the Gramian angular field (GAF) and two-dimensional convolutional neural networks (GAF-2DCNNs), offers a robust and proactive solution. By utilizing the GAF capacity to convert time-series sensor data into informative 2D images, integrated with 2DCNN for automated feature extraction, hidden temporal relationships within 1D signals are captured. After training on nine significant HVAC faults and normal conditions during occupancy, the effectiveness of the proposed GAF-2DCNN is evaluated through comparisons with support vector machine (SVM), random forest (RF), and hybrid RF-SVM, one-dimensional convolutional neural networks (1D-CNNs). The results demonstrates an impressive overall accuracy of 97%, accompanied by precision, recall, and F1 scores that surpass 90% for individual HVAC faults. Through the introduction of the unified approach that integrates HVACSIM+ simulated data and GAF-2DCNN, a notable enhancement in robustness and reliability for handling substantial HVAC faults is achieved.

Background Neurocognitive disorders are often accompanied by behavioral symptoms such as anxiety, depression, and/or apathy. These symptoms can occur very early in the disease progression and are often difficult to detect and quantify in nonspecialized clinical settings. Objective We focus in this study on apathy, one of the most common and debilitating neuropsychiatric symptoms in neurocognitive disorders. Specifically, we investigated whether facial expressivity extracted through computer vision software correlates with the severity of apathy symptoms in elderly subjects with neurocognitive disorders. Methods A total of 63 subjects (38 females and 25 males) with neurocognitive disorder participated in the study. Apathy was assessed using the Apathy Inventory (AI), a scale comprising 3 domains of apathy: loss of interest, loss of initiation, and emotional blunting. The higher the scale score, the more severe the apathy symptoms. Participants were asked to recall a positive and a negative event of their life, while their voice and face were recorded using a tablet device. Action units (AUs), which are basic facial movements, were extracted using OpenFace 2.0. A total of 17 AUs (intensity and presence) for each frame of the video were extracted in both positive and negative storytelling. Average intensity and frequency of AU activation were calculated for each participant in each video. Partial correlations (controlling for the level of depression and cognitive impairment) were performed between these indexes and AI subscales. Results Results showed that AU intensity and frequency were negatively correlated with apathy scale scores, in particular with the emotional blunting component. The more severe the apathy symptoms, the less expressivity in specific emotional and nonemotional AUs was displayed from participants while recalling an emotional event. Different AUs showed significant correlations depending on the sex of the participant and the task’s valence (positive vs negative story), suggesting the importance of assessing male and female participants independently. Conclusions Our study suggests the interest of employing computer vision-based facial analysis to quantify facial expressivity and assess the severity of apathy symptoms in subjects with neurocognitive disorders. This may represent a useful tool for a preliminary apathy assessment in nonspecialized settings and could be used to complement classical clinical scales. Future studies including larger samples should confirm the clinical relevance of this kind of instrument.

Abstract Following the advent of groups like PCORI, patient engagement in clinical research is no longer a novel concept. However, involvement of lay stakeholders in areas such as artificial intelligence or biomedical informatics can pose challenges. Community stakeholder involvement in cancer research can prove especially challenging as cancer has personally impacted nearly everyone. The purpose of this study was to assess whether addressing needs outlined in the Self-Determination Theory (SDT) helped community stakeholders feel prepared for this role. The University of Florida (UF) health science center employs Citizen Scientists (CSs) as partners in the research process to offer insight otherwise unavailable to researchers. To prepare for this role, CSs complete an online curriculum, co-created by their peers and UF researchers, to educate them about clinical research. The UF Health Cancer Center created the CS Cancer Curriculum (CSCC) as a companion piece to the clinical research course. To create the CSCC, researchers, administrators, and CSs and participated in a needs assessment to identify common interests. Through this needs assessment, the research team found that each CS had personal connections to cancer and the team felt an empathic approach to the course design was necessary to respect these experiences. The SDT and reflective questions were applied throughout the course. Storytelling was used to present a multipart case study series with a patient, family members, and physician. Those videos were accompanied by a note that the story may cause the viewer to recall their own painful experiences. The note then prompted viewers to review resources from the National Cancer Institute support services page if needed. All but two of the nine CSs scored a 95% or higher across all questions in the CSCC. Overall course assessments included a pre/posttest and a case study assessment based on the SDT. Relatedness (100%) and autonomy (83%) were the highest construct scores of the case study assessment, indicating that CSs felt most empowered in their role once they had more of an emotional connection to the subject matter. For the pre/posttests, confidence in their ability to learn and apply the content to their work grew slightly (79% to 80%). However, scores for the “Capable” construct rose by several percentage points. At the pretest, 81% felt they were capable of learning the content and, at the posttest, 86% felt that they were capable of applying the content. Taking the time to ensure that the psychological needs of learners are met can result in committed, engaged research partners who can provide pragmatic feedback and have long-lasting effects on cancer research. The CSs in this study were passionate about this work, despite the intimidating jargon and dense concepts used in this field. They are an excellent example of how impactful community stakeholders can be if researchers can meet them where they are. Citation Format: Janet Brishke, Zachary Jones, Elizabeth A. Shenkman. Using empathy-driven instructional design to reimagine cancer research [abstract]. In: Proceedings of the American Association for Cancer Research Annual Meeting 2023; Part 1 (Regular and Invited Abstracts); 2023 Apr 14-19; Orlando, FL. Philadelphia (PA): AACR; Cancer Res 2023;83(7_Suppl):Abstract nr 714.

The effects of irrelevant sounds on reading comprehension and short-term memory were studied in two experiments. In Experiment 1, adults judged the acceptability of written sentences during irrelevent speech, accompanied and unaccompanied singing, instrumental music, and in silence. Sentences varied in syntactic complexity: Simple sentences contained a right-branching relative clause ( The applause pleased the woman that gave the speech) and syntactically complex sentences included a centre-embedded relative clause ( The hay that the farmer stored fed the hungry animals). Unacceptable sentences either sounded acceptable ( The dog chased the cat that eight up all his food) or did not ( The man praised the child that sight up his spinach). Decision accuracy was impaired by syntactic complexity but not by irrelevant sounds. Phonological coding was indicated by increased errors on unacceptable sentences that sounded correct. These error rates were unaffected by irrelevant sounds. Experiment 2 examined effects of irrelevant sounds on ordered recall of phonologically similar and dissimilar word lists. Phonological similarity impaired recall. Irrelevant speech reduced recall but did not interact with phonological similarity. The results of these experiments question assumptions about the relationship between speech input and phonological coding in reading and the short-term store.

This article analyses the hitherto unexplored influence of Edvard Munch on Karen Blixen's work. Blixen was a great connoisseur of art and can therefore be assumed to have known Munch's work. In the short story “De standhaftige slaveejere” we find several parallels to the so-called “Munch's pictorial model”, i.e. a set of common features of his work (specifically his expressionist phase). Most striking is the similarity of the characters to those in Munch's painting Kvinden i tre stadier, which Blixen adopts both in terms of their appearance and their archetypal roles. She is particularly inspired by the colour connota­tions associated with the characters portrayed in the painting, and creates the figure of a beautiful and innocent girl in a white dress accompanied by an ascetic governess in black. Even the male character in Blixen's short story recalls Munch's archetype of the weak, melancholic man who is about to be destroyed by women. We also find a significant parallel in relation to the typical composition in Munch's paintings, where the individual figures are merged into one. Blixen makes use of this composition in the concrete description of the figures in her story; at the same time, on an abstract level, it is possible to interpret both figures as one multidimensional figure.

Abstract While the general link between storytelling and remembering has often been underlined with regard to such topics as traumatic experience or the construction of identity, there are hardly any studies that analyse the mnestic performance that underpins the reading of narrative plots in literary texts. In order for a story to create meaning, the reader has to remember earlier events, thus becoming able to understand how conflicts arise and are resolved. If this fact seems much too obvious to require any questioning, the process of plot-related remembering takes on considerable complexity when it comes to long novelistic texts. In these cases, reading amounts to an exercise in remembering and writing becomes a way of addressing and guiding the reader’s memory. This article proposes a theory of emplotted memory, i. e. of how narrative texts create a sequence of events in the memory of the reader. It argues, furthermore, that emplotted remembering is a dimension of implied readership and that it can be analysed on a textual level. Gathering elements and cues for such a theory, the first section of the article begins with an examination of the rule laid down in Aristotle’s Poetics that the mythos of tragedy has to be easily rememberable (eumnēmoneuton). As the famous analogy of the animal body suggests, both the limited extension and the holistic structure of the ideal tragic plot prevent the audience from forgetting how events tie in with each other. The very intelligibility and the cathartic effect of tragedy hence depend on a mnestic activity. But whereas tragedy has to become rememberable by means of the plot’s inner structure and limited size alone, epic can use narrative techniques such as flashbacks and summaries in order to comprehend a much longer time span. In his theory of narrative desire, Peter Brooks builds on these insights and conceives plot as a dynamic process of anticipation and retrospection that heavily involves the reader’s memory. For Brooks, emplotted remembering amounts to a passionate quest for meaning: Narrative tension implies that a psychic need prevents the reader from forgetting as long as the end of the plot has not been reached. The more coherent the narrative structure of the text, the more intense the activity of emplotted remembering will be. The theoretical section of the article concludes with a review of some studies from the field of empirical psychology that have addressed the recall of stories. It turns out that the basic assumptions derived from Aristotle and Brooks – such as the importance of remembering for the comprehension of narrative, the correlation between structural coherence and memorability or the strife for meaning – are in tune with empirical findings. The goal of the article, however, is not to develop a theory that is able to predict the mnestic processes triggered by a given text. On the contrary, it uses theory as a heuristic tool that is meant to be transformed by each reading. Whereas the first section constructs a heuristic model of plot-related remembering, the second aims to account for its particularity in different texts and contexts. Its purpose is to flesh out the theory of emplotted remembering by examining the interaction of plot and memory in three romances and novels. Narrative texts give rise to various processes of remembering and forgetting that depend on plot structure, narrative technique and cultural factors. The first case study is dedicated to Yvain ou le chevalier au lion by Chrétien de Troyes. This 12th-century romance not only tells a story of forgetting and remembering – Yvain fails to respect a deadline set by his wife Laudine and then strives to redeem himself – but also addresses the problematics of memory on a narrative level. While the protagonist begins by forgetting his engagements to Laudine, the reader’s perspective is always firmly located on the side of remembering. This effect, which is achieved by diverging measures between discourse and story time as well as by mirroring relationships between the part and the whole, testifies to the great axiological and ethical prestige of remembering in Chrétien’s text. Rodríguez de Montalvo’s lengthy romance Amadís de Gaula is at the centre of the second case study. It can be shown that the Amadís involves two kinds of emplotted memory and two corresponding sets of narrative strategies. The episodic elements of the romance invite the reader to remember minor incidents over hundreds of pages, but they are accompanied by almost no mnemotechnic hints because the intelligibility of the plot is guaranteed – even in the case of actual forgetting – by the permanent recurrence of the same schematic pattern. However, in the case of narrative strands that build up a coherent chain of causation, remembering is not an option but an absolute necessity. This is the reason why the narrator then gives extensive mnemotechnic comments in order to help the reader to tie the corresponding events together. The last case study focuses on Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship. The hero’s development is contingent on the fact that he vividly remembers certain incidents from his childhood and makes new experiences in the light of his infantile impressions. While the reader is made to remember alongside Wilhelm on the level of psychological causation, Goethe’s novel also creates a network of symbolic relationships between the characters that is fully accessible to the reader alone. This network involves a sense of simultaneity and complements the linear order of the plot with a synchronic memorial dimension. The conclusion of the article suggests perspectives for further inquiry and argues that emplotted remembering is likely to respond to cultural discourses on memory. Narrative texts encourage certain practices of remembering and forgetting and can thus be understood as interventions in cultural and political debates.

Frontotemporal dementia (FTD) is a neuropsychiatric pathology characterized by dysfunctions in the frontal lobe of the brain, especially in planning, execution, and inhibition tasks, with an inability to make decisions and handle different sequences, also affecting the temporal lobe. The patient presents alterations to store, consolidate, and recall information. These neurocognitive deficits are accompanied by neurobehavioral disorders such as depression, anxiety, and apathy that contribute to the worsening of the quality of life, with a high impact on the individual, social, and family level. To identify the neurobehavioral disorders and neurocognitive deterioration that present a patient diagnosed with FTD: clinical case of low incidence and prevalence disease in Colombia. A 40-year-old man, with progressive deterioration of his immediate verbal memory, low verbal fluency, aberrant motor behavior, sexual impulsivity, alterations in his executive functions, especially in planning tasks, decision-making, and inhibition was found to have a lesser degree of affectation in his visuospatial functioning and visuoconstructive abilities. It was found that the patient presents a severe dysexecutive syndrome associated with a clinical picture of FTD, correlated with an inability to process and recall information, accompanied by disorders such as depression, anxiety, and apathy. It is necessary to generate a functional neurorehabilitation plan that aims to improve the quality of life in these patients. In the same way, it is necessary to create new lines of research and intervention that have the purpose to create a greater field of heuristics or new questions in this type of neurodegenerative pathologies.

Retrieving required medical images from a huge amount of images is one of the most widely used features in medical information systems, including medical imaging search engines. For example, diagnostic decision making has traditionally been accompanied by patient data (image or non-image) and previous medical experiences from similar cases. Indexing as part of search engines (or retrieval system), increases the speed of a search. The goal of this study, is to provide an effective and efficient indexing technique for medical images search engines. In this paper, in order to archive this goal, a multidimensional indexing technique for medical images is designed using the normalization technique that is used to reduce redundancy in relational database design. Data structure of the proposed multidimensional index and also different required operations are designed to create and handle such a multidimensional index. Time complexity of each operation is analyzed and also average memory space required to store any medical image (along with its related metadata) is calculated as the space complexity analysis of the proposed indexing technique. The results show that the proposed indexing technique has a good performance in terms of memory usage, as well as execution time for the usual operations. Moreover, and may be more important, the proposed indexing techniques improves the precision and recall of the information retrieval system (i.e., search engine) which uses this technique for indexing medical images. Besides, a user of such search engine can retrieve medical images which s/he has specified its attributes is some different aspects (dimensions), e.g., tissue, image modality and format, sickness and trauma, etc. So, the proposed multidimensional indexing techniques can improve effectiveness of a medical image information retrieval system (in terms of precision and recall), while having a proper efficiency (in terms of execution time and memory usage), and can improve the information retrieval process for healthcare search engines.

The hundredth anniversary of the birth of the faithfull dog Hachikō In connection with the celebration of the 100th anniversary of the birth of Hachikō, this article recalls the dog’s story in the context of its cultural impact in Japan and around the world. Hachikō is an authentic and very unusual Akita Inu dog, known from film adaptations (Japanese, Hollywood, and Chinese), which belonged to Professor Hidesaburō Ueno, who worked at the Faculty of Agriculture at Tokyo Imperial University. Hachikō was born on November 10, 1923, near Ōdate, a city in Akita Prefecture. The dog was very attached to his master and every day he accompanied the professor to Shibuya train station, where he left for work, and then came to the station and waited for his master so that they could return home together. When Professor Ueno died suddenly at work on May 21, 1925, Hachikō was waiting for him at the station. From that day on, he came and waited for his master in the afternoon outside Shibuya train station in Tokyo every day for nearly ten years until his death. He was found dead near the station on the morning of March 8, 1935. Even during Hachikō’s lifetime, his story touched many people, including those in the media. Hachikō became a symbol of fidelity, devotion, attachment, and loyalty, values traditionally cultivated in Japan. Therefore, already in his lifetime, in 1934 a monument was erected to him and unveiled in his presence at Shibuya Station. Also at the University of Tokyo there is a statue of Hachikō showing him together with Professor Ueno. Hachikō’s body was preserved after his death, and his figure can be admired today in a permanent exhibition at the National Museum of Nature and Science in Tokyo. The purpose of this brief text is not to collect a handful of facts and present the story of the faithful dog Hachikō, but it is to draw attention to the story’s importance from the point of view of traditional values that are deeply rooted in Japanese history and tradition, and are still important and fostered.

Just before I sat down to write this paper, I heard the editor of the Serbian newspaper in Knin giving an interview to the BBC. ‘Remember’, he said over the crackling telephone line, ‘we Serbs had our Auschwitz too; it was called Jasenovac’ Jasenovac can legitimately be compared with Auschwitz in the annals of human horror. Nobody knows how many Serbs, Jews, and Gypsies were hacked to pieces with butcher knives, beaten to death with clubs and rifle butts, worked to death on detachments, or died of fright, illness, and starvation in the Croatian death camp. A Serb friend of mine recalls being pulled by his mother from the rails of a ferry on the river Sava, near Jasenovac, in 1941 as he stared at the bits of human anatomy bobbing in the current. In the archives of the Italian Foreign Ministry in Rome there is a file of photographs of the butcher knives and mallets used in the camp and elsewhere by the Ustase in their pogroms, as well as pictures of the mutilated victims. Those pictures have been indelibly burned on to the retina of my memory. Vladko Maček, the leader of the Croatian Peasants Party, was arrested and sent to Jasenovac on 15 October 1941, six months after the foundation of the Nezavisna Država Hrvatska, the Independent State of Croatia. He described it in his memoirs: The camp had previously been a brick-yard and was situated on the embankment of the Sava river. In the middle of the camp stood a two-storey house, originally erected for the offices of the enterprise … The screams and wails of despair and extreme suffering, the tortured outcries of the victims, broken by intermittent shooting, accompanied all my waking hours and followed me into sleep at night.

As part of a 3-week summer regional medical school campus rural immersion experience, preclinical medical and pre-medical students accompanied a rural Family Medicine residency inpatient team on bedside rounds. One theme of the summer program is the value of empathy and the importance of truly understanding what it is like to “walk a mile in the patient’s shoes.” A previously established brief narrative exercise was modified so that the learner spent an hour facilitating a hospitalized patient’s recall of their life and then produced a short summary that was edited by the patient and then provided to the team. The senior resident chose the patient for the exercise and introduced the student, who remained when the team left the bedside. The response from the patients was uniformly positive, and in an anonymous written evaluation, eight of 11 students completing the project rated it as positive, with 3 neutral, and none negative. Four gave it the highest rating possible in terms of meeting the goals of the program.

Springett, Martin. Breakfast on a Dragon’s Tail: and Other Book Bites. Markham, ON: Fitzhenry and Whiteside, 2011. Print. This unusual volume by award-winning illustrator/author Martin Springett takes the “choose your own ending” idea to a whole new level by not providing an ending at all. In fact the whole book is made up of thirteen beginnings of stories, each accompanied by a full-page illustration, which might have served as a book cover. The book is designed to promote creative activities. Springett tells children that each story “should have a beginning, a middle and an end” and that he has provided the beginning. He encourages children to finish the stories in any way they like, through creative endeavors ranging from poetry to a “chalk drawing on the sidewalk”. Children are also encouraged to post their stories to publisher Fitzhenry and Whiteside’s website, where “teachers and parents will also find useful information and classroom activities”. Springett’s art-work depicts the fantastic in each story. The first image, accompanying Breakfast on a Dragon’s Tail, is bordered by patterns that recall a medieval illuminated manuscript. In the same vein, the letter “O” which begins the story is embellished with a dragon curled around it. The others are more cartoon-like. Springett’s writing is very good . His story beginnings are engaging. In the Twelve Dancing Crocodiles the reader finds out that a magician and twelve dancing princesses have disappeared. Are they the twelve dancing crocodiles? They are if you want them to be. In The Nattering Tree, people sit under a tree and listen as the tree talks to itself. There are also lots of good one-line jokes in the story beginnings. In the Dithering Ducks of Deptford, one of the ducks says, “Never listen to a gnome! They are born naughty!” Another story, which has nothing to do with computers, is called Chip and Pin. In Dracula and Son, Springett irreverently refers to the characters as “Papa Drac” and “Drac Junior”. It would have been entertaining to read Springett’s versions of the endings. In fact, some children may be put off by the fact that they have to think up their own endings and entertain themselves. Because of that, this book will probably work best in a structured environment, where children have a reason to stay on track and complete the stories. Overall this book is an interesting concept, that is probably best suited to the classroom environment, so it is recommended with that reservation.Recommendation: 3 stars out of 4 Reviewer: Sandy Campbell Sandy is a Health Sciences Librarian at the University of Alberta, who has written hundreds of book reviews across many disciplines. Sandy thinks that sharing books with children is one of the greatest gifts anyone can give.

The brain has a remarkable capacity to acquire and store memories that can later be selectively recalled. These processes are supported by the hippocampus which is thought to index memory recall by reinstating information stored across distributed neocortical circuits. However, the mechanism that supports this interaction remains unclear. Here, in humans, we show that recall of a visual cue from a paired associate is accompanied by a transient increase in the ratio between glutamate and GABA in visual cortex. Moreover, these excitatory-inhibitory fluctuations are predicted by activity in the hippocampus. These data suggest the hippocampus gates memory recall by indexing information stored across neocortical circuits using a disinhibitory mechanism.

We propose a novel biologically plausible computational model of working memory (WM) implemented by a spiking neuron network (SNN) interacting with a network of astrocytes. The SNN is modeled by synaptically coupled Izhikevich neurons with a non-specific architecture connection topology. Astrocytes generating calcium signals are connected by local gap junction diffusive couplings and interact with neurons via chemicals diffused in the extracellular space. Calcium elevations occur in response to the increased concentration of the neurotransmitter released by spiking neurons when a group of them fire coherently. In turn, gliotransmitters are released by activated astrocytes modulating the strength of the synaptic connections in the corresponding neuronal group. Input information is encoded as two-dimensional patterns of short applied current pulses stimulating neurons. The output is taken from frequencies of transient discharges of corresponding neurons. We show how a set of information patterns with quite significant overlapping areas can be uploaded into the neuron-astrocyte network and stored for several seconds. Information retrieval is organized by the application of a cue pattern representing one from the memory set distorted by noise. We found that successful retrieval with the level of the correlation between the recalled pattern and ideal pattern exceeding 90% is possible for the multi-item WM task. Having analyzed the dynamical mechanism of WM formation, we discovered that astrocytes operating at a time scale of a dozen of seconds can successfully store traces of neuronal activations corresponding to information patterns. In the retrieval stage, the astrocytic network selectively modulates synaptic connections in the SNN leading to successful recall. Information and dynamical characteristics of the proposed WM model agrees with classical concepts and other WM models.

Sarah Phelps’s screenplay The Witness for the Prosecution (2016) does more than simply rekindle interest in Agatha Christie’s original short story; rather, it points to its salvation. My understanding of adaptation follows Armelle Blin-Rolland’s model, which refuses to privilege either the source or the adapted text, considering both instead to form part of a textual multiplicity. The relationship between the two resembles, for Blin-Rolland, a vortex. Thus, the meanderings of Phelps’s adapted text cause us to take stock and to read the original itself as loiterature (Chambers) and thus as a text that eschews self-coincidence, that offers more to the idle reader than an efficient delivery of truth. Christie’s text, in other words, if I may myself adapt a term from Walter Benjamin, has an inherent adaptability. Rather than simply conjuring its own adaptation in a virtual future, “The Witness for the Prosecution” contains, in an immediate pre-diegetic past, the original source of itself as adaptation. This source text is not an alternative solution, but runs parallel to the actual reading—appealing, almost subliminally, for readers to produce it; it also runs idly, however, and, unlike its hasty corollary, is content to wait to catch a distracted eye.Before shifting the focus more squarely from the 2016 adaptation to the original text (and its status as auto-adaptation), I should like to draw attention to the format of Phelps’s screenplay. As a mini-series, and thus an adaptation for television rather than a feature film, Phelps’s text presents something of a readerly paradox in and of itself. The series was originally aired by the BBC on two consecutive nights over the 2016 Christmas period (26 and 27 December). Thus, viewers were forced to pause for thought, but not over a week, which has traditionally been the cadence for episodes of television mini-series; instead, the 24-hour pause represented something of an extended intermission. For this reason, it is not clear whether the effect of the pause was to heighten anticipation, and thus to madden readers, or to enable them to take time out to review the case and to ask questions that the reader of the short story may not have time to ask. For, of course, the story is a short one, on the shorter side even by the standards of Christie’s shorter fiction. The mini-series does not present an abridged version, therefore, which is often the case for feature film adaptations; rather, it lengthens the story considerably. The whole experience is drawn out, not condensed. And yet, it is not clear whether this change of pace significantly alters the viewer/reader’s experience.I shall argue here that what it in fact does is to draw out elements of the source text that otherwise pass by unseen. Thus, whether or not the experience that one has of the television mini-series is loiterly per se, it certainly causes the reader who is aware of the short story to reread the latter and, I argue here, to see it as itself an adaptation, and further as an adaptation of itself. Lastly, it is perhaps worth reflecting that, after this initial airing of the mini-series on BBC television, The Witness for the Prosecution became available on DVD and for online streaming. In these formats, the hiatus of the episode break can readily be skipped. The binge-viewer has the ability to view in haste. In addition to erasing, to some degree at least, the difference between a feature film and a television series, such viewing practices recall the perceived generic differences between literature, with its descriptive passages and detours, and crime fiction, with its tendency to be highly plot-, and especially end-, driven. In either case therefore, to apprehend crime fiction in a loiterly fashion is a learned activity, a process that may seem somewhat counterintuitive, but one that Christie’s texts reflexively promote even as they ensnare the reader in the cleverness of their plots.The short story is famous for its twist in the tale: the person who appears the most likely murderer and who is tried for the crime turns out, in fact, to be guilty, much to the surprise of his solicitor, Mr Mayherne. Phelps’s adaptation, for its part, ends with the solicitor, John Mayhew (an alternative surname already used in Christie’s own adaptation for the stage in 1953), walking into the sea off the French coast, determined, or so it would appear, to take his own life, having been informed by his client’s partner that she has known all along that Leonard Vole was guilty. In addition to a new ending, the mini-series also receives a substantial new beginning: Leonard and Romaine receive a back-story; so too, over the course of the mini-series, does Mayhew himself. His determination to save Leonard is set against the death of his own son, who left to fight in the First World War despite being too young for service. Mayhew’s wife, we learn, has never forgiven him for the loss of her son. Saving the innocent Leonard is Mayhew’s way of redeeming himself. When he discovers that he has been duped and that he has saved a guilty man, the only atonement he can see is his own death.While Mayhew’s probity is made ambiguous by Phelps, Leonard and Romaine’s common back-story serves to some degree to explain, if not to justify, their callous behaviour. Phelps’s dramatic first scene shows a soldier drifting almost literally blindly across no-man’s land between the trenches of a First World War battlefield, taking cover from exploding shells and finding refuge in a crater where he finds his future partner Romaine. What is staged here is a looking back to the past, but not in the kind of nostalgic longing for times gone by associated with Christie; instead, Phelps points back to the trauma of war, in the light of which the present is to be survived and negotiated. In her introduction to the edition of the short story republished following the success of the mini-series, Phelps discusses her expectations when being commissioned to adapt Christie’s works, with which she claimed to be familiar without having previously read them. She labels Christie the “epitome of a particular nostalgia-laden Englishness” and mentions, for example, having to step out of the way of people queuing to see The Mousetrap in London’s West End (Christie v). In the light of such comments, it is tempting to see Phelps’s mini-series as a means of circumnavigating popular conceptions of Christie and combating this nostalgia for things past (not only better times, perhaps, but also better detective fiction).A vortical reading of The Witness for the Prosecution as multiplicity, however, in no way works against the original short story; in fact, rather than stepping around it, Phelps’s extended diegetic frame causes us to reflect on the way in which the story itself looks back, making room for, and even conjuring, an unseen pre-diegetic space. Thus, the battleground scene serves a reflexive end, not simply excusing Leonard and Romaine’s subsequent behaviour, but also graphically staging the textual no man’s land of adaptation—the space between the entrenched positions of two authorial powers. The bomb craters suggest both the violence done to the source text and the possibility for a new start and an end to the dominion of previous masters. Not only Leonard and Romaine, but Sarah Phelps, the reader, and even John Mayhew—who steps out of the shadows of Mr Mayherne—all escape the certainties of an era, an empire, and embrace a new future. My argument here is not simply that Christie benefits from the new beginning of another’s adaptation, but that she herself adapted what precedes Mr Mayherne’s first interview with Leonard Vole in her original text.In the story’s final revelation, Romaine opposes Mr Mayherne’s purchase on the truth to her own: he, she states, “thought [Leonard] was innocent”, whereas she “knew – he was guilty!” (29). This is the truth that Phelps’s adaptation appears to mitigate with its staging of extenuating circumstances and casting of Mr Mayherne as the ultimate victim of the story. I do not wish to argue here that Leonard Vole is innocent; rather, what I shall argue is that Romaine and generations of readers have misunderstood the dynamics of the narrative, for the fundamental binary at play is not “thinking versus knowing” but “knowing versus believing”. In this case, therefore, I almost, but not quite, agree with Phelps’s statement that “it’s not the truth that matters […] but performance” (Christie viii). While the text is very much a performance, it is one that serves to “screen” a truth in the Freudian sense, as well as in the cinematic one: the truth that is showcased in the last line of the story also hides another truth, which is, paradoxically, the same one. By revealing the truth in the form of Romaine’s victory, the text hides the fact that Mr Mayherne has known the truth from the very start, and indeed, before that. The story is a performance therefore, but a fetishistic one that points to the truth precisely in order to keep it just out of view. In this way, what Mr Mayhew knows to be true is neither stated explicitly nor entirely repressed; instead, it is disavowed, and what the short story performs is a screen memory.Read vortically, Christie’s and Phelps’s texts both displace the element that separates knowledge from belief, which, as Ellen Lee McCallum notes (xii), is desire. In Phelps’s adaptation, John Mayhew desires to save Leonard Vole in order to redeem his son’s death; in Christie’s text, Mr Mayherne desires to save Leonard in order to save the text. This is salvation as theorised by Shoshana Felman, who famously considered that Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw could only be saved from the critical binary of ghost story versus psychoanalytical tale by having its ambiguity preserved. If Phelps’s adaptation becomes something of a ghost story (it is, at least, a tale of people haunted by the past), Christie’s original text uses a psychoanalytic move to disavow its own psychoanalytical mechanics. Whereas detective fiction is typically end-oriented, with its focus on the ultimate revelation of truth, the psychoanalytic text locates truth in a pre-text. Thus, to save “The Witness for the Prosecution”, the reader must adopt a beginning-oriented lens and establish the original shape of its pre-diegetic revelation. This means loitering (and enacting that paradoxical mix of idle resistance advanced by Chambers) at that very point where the logics of detective fiction are seemingly designed to fast-track the reader’s pursuit of the ultimate solution. For, while reading to discover the ending is still promoted by the crime narrative here, a counter-logics of hesitation and retrospection always accompanies the reader’s progress forwards. If chances to meander down side-alleys are limited, given the brevity of the story, it is this double movement, this walking with a backwards gaze, with half an eye on the present and half on the past, that forces even that reader most pre-disposed to task-focused digestion of the text to slow down and to wander. What is so striking in “The Witness for the Prosecution” is arguably how Christie makes space for wandering in such a restricted narrative, in a creative format that is, of course, all about punch and economy.This space is created as early as the story’s opening sentence. “Mr Mayherne”, it begins, “adjusted his pince-nez and cleared his throat with a little dry-as-dust cough that was wholly typical of him” (1). Whether or not we can be sure that Mr Mayherne’s cough was typical of him before the story begins is uncertain. His habit of adjusting his pince-nez, on the other hand, which is here associated with the cough, is certainly recently acquired. This we learn at the end of the story: “He found himself polishing his pince-nez vigorously, and checked himself. His wife had told him only the night before that he was getting a habit of it” (27). It is my contention that this habit is a response to a traumatic revelation of truth, which requires Mr Mayherne henceforth to adjust his perspective.Habits, as Mr Mayherne’s wife points out, are born of repetition. The story, too, begins with a repeated act. Indeed, the solicitor’s next action is to look at his client, whom the reader is seeing for the first time at this initial point of the text, but whom Mr Mayherne has already seen: “Then he looked again at the man opposite him” (1, my emphasis). At the outset therefore, this habit of adjusting his pince-nez is proleptic, insofar as it will enable him to realise (albeit apparently, but only apparently, too late) that Romaine and the old woman who gives him the letters that condemn her are one and the same, but also analeptic, as it looks back to a previous contemplation of a disguise. The habit that he detects in Romaine is one of clenching and unclenching her right hand. That he sees this without initially being fully conscious of it and then later understands the gesture’s significance is due to his own fetishistic response to the truth of Leonard’s guilt. When he first sees his client, he recognises his guilt, either in his eyes, which then causes him to avert his gaze and look down to his hands, or in his murderer’s hands, which causes him to displace his gaze and to look instead at his own hands, which he occupies by adjusting his pince-nez. Either way, his failure to look at Romaine’s hands and see them immediately for what they are is itself a displacement of his dual state—of knowing his client to be guilty and believing in his innocence “in spite of the multitude of facts arrayed against [him]” (13).Repetition blunts the reader’s awareness of its fundamental role in the story. The weight of evidence against Leonard Vole is repeated again and again. This is one of the key devices, even a cliché, of detective fiction: the most obviously guilty character must be innocent. At its most basic level, this is how “The Witness for the Prosecution” surprises its readers. My suggestion, however, is that this knowledge serves merely to screen the book’s original, or other, meaning, which is that Mr Mayherne knows the truth. It is not truth, but the knowledge of the truth, that the reader is tasked to discover. To this extent, Phelps is right: “it is not the truth that matters, but performance”. And in this case, it is the performance of the truth of Leonard’s guilt in the actualised story that hides the knowledge of the truth that is its pre-text and whose form is not taken by the story while nonetheless being analeptically staged and virtually formed, or (auto-)adapted, as pre-text. In reflexive terms, the highlighting of repeated gestures, and especially Mr Mayherne’s cleaning of his lenses, can usefully be considered signals for the reader to pause for thought. And yet, as reflexive signals, they are both provocative and provocatively hesitant, for however clearly they are displayed, they fail to check the pace and end-orientation of the short story because the reader’s own habit—the compulsion to read in haste, to read for the solution—is not so easily broken.Leonard’s first words in the story are simply, “I know”, which is, in the framework of the present reading, a pure reflection of what the man sitting opposite him is trying to disavow. What Leonard knows is that his situation is grave and that he must be frank. He knows this because, as he says to Mr Mayherne, “You keep telling me so” (1). But it is this response that in fact causes the story to become a tale of repetition. First, there is Mr Mayherne’s conviction: “we shall succeed—we shall succeed” (2). Romaine then repeats her desire when she first meets Mr Mayherne, twice stating the words, “I want to know the worst” (14). Leonard is nonetheless responding to a prior repetition, which, is predicated on the story’s initial “looking again”. In other words, the story itself is a screen memory, a fetish-made-diegesis. The result, in an apparent paradox, is that the desire to hasten the ending, to bring on the final verdict, however terrible, is at the same time a signal for the reader to look back. Again, to look back to that initial second look is to inscribe circles on circles, and to enforce wandering even at this reflexively-staged moment of end-orientation.Certainly, Romaine’s comment, “I want to know”, performs fetishism’s combination of knowledge and desire. And yet, unlike Mr Mayherne’s desire (to save Leonard), which is opposed to his knowledge (that Leonard is guilty), Romaine’s desire appears aligned with knowledge: she does not say that she knows the worst, but that she wants to know it. She has another secret desire, of course, as she reveals to Mr Mayherne in what is a paradoxical display of secrecy. When he asks why she hates her husband so much, she retorts: “Yes, you would like to know. But I shall not tell you. I will keep my secret” (17). Further, she mocks him for honestly believing Leonard to be innocent.Both characters are honest, then: Romaine wants to know that Leonard is guilty (and certainly does not believe him to be innocent) and openly has a secret that she will not divulge; Mr Mayherne, for his part, knows the case against his client is ironclad but also honestly believes him to be innocent. Their stated aims may well be opposed—she wants Leonard to hang; he wants him to go free. Their “true” aims are nonetheless aligned: she knows Leonard is guilty and will sacrifice her own credibility in court to save her husband; he believes Leonard is innocent and will sacrifice her in court to save his client. Both tell the truth in public when performing their official duties (he as solicitor, she as wife). The only difference between them lies in the nature of their other performance: she lies to him by performing the role of an old woman who knows secrets about her past; he knows Leonard to be guilty but partially represses this by taking up his narrative only after he has erected a fetish to protect himself from this traumatic truth (and the reader from the secret past of the text). This disavowal means that he can honestly believe in his client’s innocence while still knowing him to be guilty. Again then, Phelps’s statement—that it is not the truth that matters, but performance—is itself both true and not true. Romaine performs in the story in order for the truth that she knows to be said and then discredited; Mr Mayherne, on the other hand, performs the story in order for his knowledge of the truth to be disavowed, which it to say, repressed within the form that is given to the reader to see, but also available, and able to take form (for the reader prepared to digress) in what lies just beyond the limits of what is said.The conversation in which Romaine repeats her desire to know also ends in a repetition, this time with one of the solicitor’s signature moves: “Mr Mayherne gave his dry little cough and rose” (17). This cough repeats the one that opened the story. In that first instance, it distracted the reader, allowing the adverb “again” to rush through, seen and unseen. In this way, the first cough, accompanied by Mr Mayherne’s cleaning of his lenses, causes the reader to focus their own gaze on him rather than on what he had been looking at. This is a cough designed to open the narrative on Mr Mayherne’s terms. In this second example, it closes down dialogue. This second cough is motivated by precisely the same traumatic revelation of the truth, except that in this repetition it is displaced onto Romaine. With the words, “I shall not tell you. I will keep my secret”, she says to him in the text what Mr Mayherne said to himself in the pre-text. This is a repetition therefore in a story of repetition and of a story of repetition. Repeating what was said before with different words and, at the same time, repeating with the same words what was not said before, the text here presents itself to the reader in the form of an auto-adaptation, a second look at an original text whose form is otherwise virtual.In this way, words unsaid are repressed partially: they are not said in the diegesis (which stands as a screen memory, simultaneously standing in place of the text and tracing in the present the contours of its form as absence) but are said, instead, by proxy, through displacement, in the reflexively staged performance of another text. The disavowal at play here is such that readers find themselves in two spaces at once, on two lines of flight, with the one being opposed to the other. Steps forwards and backwards are taken in equal measure. We are therefore witnesses to “The Witness for the Prosecution”, looking on as the story follows onwards, but this very act of witnessing counteracts this prosecution, adding the idleness of the gaze to the purposefulness of pursuit (of truth). The result is not so much somewhere between a stalled, or false, start, and a race to the end, as both at the same time. In this way, Christie’s story, despite appearances to the contrary, is the very embodiment of wandering.At the origins of both Christie’s story and Phelps’s adaptation is a common truth. It serves as a pre-text for both texts, for both performances. In both cases, this pre-text privileges performance over truth. Each text also has a pre-text, which precedes and predicates the performance. We may consider that Phelps’s adaptation captures the essence (of truth) of Christie’s original. In this way, it values that truth and holds it necessary to its own performance, without being derivative in relation to it. Again, the same holds for Christie’s text, whose pre-text protects its truth beneath its performance: while the performance partially represses this pre-textual truth (with its gaudy staging of its own truth, which we may perhaps this time consider derivative), it also preserves it. For without the performance (of truth), the knowledge at its origin cannot exist. To read “The Witness for the Prosecution” as an adaptation of itself requires a fetishistic eye, and the fetishist is nothing if not a digressive observer. If you’re quick, you can catch the performance; but if you’re content to wander, the audacity of what Christie does not reveal is well worth the wait.ReferencesBlin-Rolland, Armelle. “Adaplastics: Forming the Zazie dans le métro Network.” Modern and Contemporary France (2019): forthcoming.Chambers, Ross. Loiterature. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1999.Christie, Agatha. The Witness for the Prosecution and Other Stories. London: Harper, 2016.Felman, Shoshana. “Turning the Screw of Interpretation.” Yale French Studies. 55–56 (1977): 94–207.McCallum, Ellen Lee. Object Lessons: How to Do Things with Fetishism. New York: SUNY Press, 1992.The Witness for the Prosecution. Dir. Julian Jarrold. BBC One, 2016.

The Heteronomy of architecture «is understood as the condition to be pursued if one sets one’s goal of producing buildings that belong to one’s own time, to the complex interweaving of values and needs that characterise it, to the place where they arise»1. Heteronomy in architecture allows us to break the boundaries still linked to the concept of the now obsolete scientific sector. The breaking of these boundaries makes a trans-disciplinary contribution possible and consequently leads us to having a transversal vision. One of the people who recently successfully pursued the road of the Heteronomy of architecture and art through a borderline path is Edoardo Tresoldi, an Italian sculptor who «investigates the poetics of the dialogue between man and landscape using architectural language as an expressive tool and key to reading space». The artist plays with the transparency of the metal mesh to transcend the space-time dimension and narrate a dialogue between Art and World, a visual synthesis that reveals itself in the fading of the physical limits of his works2. Five themes were taken into consideration to address the issue of the heteronomy of architecture with the Sculptor Tresoldi. The first one concerns the PLACE, because architecture, as materially utilitarian, is completely conditioned by the material and immaterial context of which it is part. Tresoldi’s works, in the sense of public art, are to be considered the expression of a heteronomous discipline. In fact, his work is strongly linked to this concept already in the initial choice of material and in the desire to express transparency by encountering paths, languages and transversal dialogues between the elements of the work and those of the landscape. «Inserting an element within a context builds relationships and intertwining dynamics that dialogue in a game of cross-references. The physical elements reconnect us to the archetypes we have built in our experiential journey and then become cultural. The moment we see a tree, for example, the relationship between us and the tree is the one we have built by coming into contact with trees in our lives. Automatically the tree, as well as a house, the sky or other basic elements is already an experience that determines a sort of automatism in relating to that or any other element already experienced. Then there are other elements that are part of our cultural heritage, which preserve and hold within themselves different languages». Working with archaeology, Tresoldi associated the sacredness of the classical language with the transparency and elements of the landscape, constructing images, languages and narratives of the surrounding space. For the sculptor, the Lombardy farmsteads have had an important relevance in the development of his sensitivity to the landscape. Places that at a young age escaped from his everyday life, the abandoned farmhouses are ruins full of poetry characterized by a dimension of transience today. They are the places that inspire the artist because it is here that anyone can go and allow themselves a moment of suspension with themselves and with the place. The second theme tackled is the PROJECT, understood as an action of prefiguration, of casting ahead, beyond cultural, social and historical influences. According to Tresoldi, an author can be compared to an organism that absorbs certain concepts, lives them and finally releases them through the creative act. When the artist finds himself creating a work, he prefers to go to the place to try to intercept the dynamics of the place in which he can find himself and express himself. When he connects with a place and sees the key to intercept certain elements, he lives this process in a partially selfish way, while in the phase of elaboration of the installation the artist expresses himself through recognizable languages common to all. From here the goal is to intercept and work with simple archetypes that make his works as direct as possible: «the process is similar to that of composing a love song that, most of the time, is written by the author in a specific moment lived with a specific person. In that case, the experience is extremely personal but the moment it is told, it becomes a choral experience». A project is therefore nothing more than a work that can build, transcend, or transport from an intimate experience to a collective one. The sculptor also argues that as human beings we construct our knowledge based on personal experiences and we learn about hate, love or a range of feelings often through the same experiences. «Even just talking as human beings we possess a common alphabet that allows us to structure a series of collective experiences. All of this is the synthesis that allows us to connect deeply with what is around us». Beginning with “Opera”, Tresoldi’s latest installation consisting of a colonnade of forty-six wire mesh elements up to eight meters high, located in Reggio Calabria, the third theme can be introduced: TIME. Tresoldi’s forty-six columns, according to the architect Maria Pilar Vettori, recall the “Danteum” project by Giuseppe Terragni and Pietro Lingeri designed in 1939 (never built) and the fresco present in “Sala del Bacio” of Bertoja, realized between 1570 and 1573, in Parma (where Terragni did his military service). Between these three works there seems to be an interweaving, a kind of mechanism of trace, of memory, as if there is a kind continuity in the creative process influenced by the times and by innovation. On this proposal of continuity Tresoldi argues that when an artist no longer works for references, but for necessity of expression, it becomes fascinating to imagine that both he and Terragni, as well as Bertoja, felt the need to use the column element and transparency to tell their essential concept linked to their own time and perception. His choice to use columns in Reggio Calabria is linked to the idea of being able to mark that area with a transparent colonnade that was an open space of crossing and that created perspective corridors both towards the sea and towards the sky: this was for Tresoldi the best way to tell the dimension of the Strait of Messina. «The use of the column as an element refers to a classical archetype and as such is recognized as a pure element for the narrative of a place, of an architectural space». By working with transparency, the sculptor has tried to translate his idea into the language of contemporaneity. This pure relationship with the elements is also what allows us to understand how the meanings of certain archetypes (the column, transparency) have evolved over time. Time, in Tresoldi, has made his idea of transparency change, transforming it into the concept of Absent Matter. Starting from a concept, from an instinct towards a material, one can see how his work on absence has transformed over time. Although today many people associate his work with wireframe drawings, in reality Tresoldi’s work arises from a strongly real, material, analogue action. In fact, his work is based on “sewing” the net, an act that physically would have been conceivable even in the past. However, in ‘65, for example, nobody could have connected it to the wireframe. So, his work, compared to that of Terragni and Bertoja, has also been added to the idea of virtual space constructed in the last twenty years. In addition to this, Tresoldi said that he realized that most of the time he himself does not decide the themes of a work, but they are built by instinct, then translated into a story. For example, when at the beginning of his career he created human figures that lived in the landscape, while building a storytelling around them, these were often defined by the newspapers as “Tresoldi’s fanstasms”. Even if the work had a concept behind it, it was often summarized with this expression. In the image of transparency, the figure of the ghost and the discourse of absence are already intrinsic. This is due, in part, to the fact that it is a visual construction derived from the cinematic world, where a transparent image was used to render the idea of ghosts. Therefore, the evolution of the visual narrative of man has led to narrate the absence through transparency. All this implies that in the moment in which codes are used, images already narrate a value, a story that can vary in time. Another theme, already introduced by transparency, is the one related to MATTER and to Tresoldi’s relationship with materiality, with constructability, with the body, with gravity and with the technical part that approaches the artistic one. The use of the net as an instrument is due to the desire to represent transparency by working on the tensions of the structure. The first works, as stated by the sculptor, were all drawn by hand and built starting from the roll of wire mesh, as if it were a puzzle in which the individual elements were drawn, made, cut and assembled. Over time, however, one learns to know a material and therefore to know, without scientific calculations, where problems of static tightness may arise. In this way, experience has made Tresoldi learn real know-how. However, for large projects it is necessary to interface with engineers for a specific and scientific analysis of the works. It follows that behind each work there is a process in which the artist draws the idea that will subsequently be realized by the team and where the choral action often involves a contamination of languages; a path, an ancestral experience. In this way Tresoldi decides to remain in the artistic dimension linked to the sensibility and the poetics of meeting places rather than flowing into the architectural sphere. Therefore, the building site is no longer intended as a place of work but becomes a means by which to know the place itself, implying a social responsibility linked to the presence of a community that revolves around it. In fact, the sculptor’s artistic training, coming from the world of film set design, still influences his approach characterized by a dimension of collective work in which everyone is part of a process that will be carried out by the “community”. It is precisely from the concept of community and the sculptor’s desire to make a construction site such that his desire to give life, together with YAC - Young Architects Competitions, to TRAC - Tresoldi Academy, a school where, moving from the design phase to the execution phase, a construction is built within a construction site that is a fundamental element of the experience itself, was created. In this case, the construction site is not intended only as a place of construction but as an opportunity in which the complexity of a work is perceived by noting how much what has been imagined really corresponds to reality. Theory must therefore be accompanied by practice, since if a student is given responsibility, he or she becomes an integral part of what is being built and of the project. Designing something in a given place and then building it also allows for the consolidation of “points in the place” that are part of the training experience of designing, understanding and realizing. Training also, according to Tresoldi, should not stop at designers but should concern all stakeholders in the cultural sphere. «In artistic training, the practical approach to the works and experiencing their realization at 360° is also fundamental. For this reason, the goal of TRAC is also to make young people experience all the phases of the installation. The fact that they themselves realize a work from design to production also means letting them deal with all the related needs: from business trips to finding construction services». Another goal of TRAC - Tresoldi Academy is that of a return to the rituality of the past, to the secular sacredness of certain moments lived on site linked to the love of things that, even today, are considered a foundation of both making art and making architecture. According to Tresoldi, a perfect example of training in the field concerns festivals as events capable of creating temporary dimensions and, at the same time, of putting into action an experimentation of a futuristic project. In fact, before building a permanent work, the festival allows to have an effect on the temporary not only in terms of structure but also at the level of imaginable society: «When for a week several people inhabit a place, that place becomes a city. From this point of view, festivals are a very formative experience where practice manages to have – compared to theory – a gap that is the dirt of humanity». The last topic discussed is WHAT’S NEXT, Tresoldi’s future projects. As he himself announced, another project to which he is dedicating himself is STUDIO STUDIO STUDIO. His team is in fact formed, to this day, by different departments – from design to management to communication – that have been formed through the realization of his artistic projects. The idea is to enlarge this structure to the works of other authors so that they can develop and realize large-scale projects in order to enter the world of public works.

Introduction This paper offers a survey of familiar popular music performers and songwriters who reference coffee in their work. It examines three areas of discourse: the psychoactive effects of caffeine, coffee and courtship rituals, and the politics of coffee consumption. I claim that coffee carries a cultural and musicological significance comparable to that of the chemical stimulants and consumer goods more readily associated with popular music. Songs about coffee may not be as potent as those featuring drugs and alcohol (Primack; Schapiro), or as common as those referencing commodities like clothes and cars (Englis; McCracken), but they do feature across a wide range of genres, some of which enjoy archetypal associations with this beverage. m.o.m.m.y. Needs c.o.f.f.e.e.: The Psychoactive Effect of Coffee The act of performing and listening to popular music involves psychological elements comparable to the overwhelming sensory experience of drug taking: altered perceptions, repetitive grooves, improvisation, self-expression, and psychological empathy—such as that between musician and audience (Curry). Most popular music genres are, as a result, culturally and sociologically identified with the consumption of at least one mind-altering substance (Lyttle; Primack; Schapiro). While the analysis of lyrics referring to this theme has hitherto focused on illegal drugs and alcoholic beverages (Cooper), coffee and its psychoactive ingredient caffeine have been almost entirely overlooked (Summer). The most recent study of drugs in popular music, for example, defined substance use as “tobacco, alcohol, marijuana, cocaine and other stimulants, heroin and other opiates, hallucinogens, inhalants, prescription drugs, over-the-counter drugs, and nonspecific substances” (Primack 172), thereby ignoring a chemical stimulant consumed by 90 per cent of adult Americans every day (Lovett). The wide availability of coffee and the comparatively mild effect of caffeine means that its consumption rarely causes harm. One researcher has described it as a ubiquitous and unobtrusive “generalised public activity […] ‘invisible’ to analysts seeking distinctive social events” (Cooper 92). Coffee may provide only a relatively mild “buzz”—but it is now accepted that caffeine is an addictive substance (Juliano) and, due to its universal legality, coffee is also the world’s most extensively traded and enthusiastically consumed psychoactive consumer product (Juliano 1). The musical genre of jazz has a longstanding relationship with marijuana and narcotics (Curry; Singer; Tolson; Winick). Unsurprisingly, given its Round Midnight connotations, jazz standards also celebrate the restorative impact of coffee. Exemplary compositions include Burke/Webster’s insomniac torch song Black Coffee, which provided hits for Sarah Vaughan (1949), Ella Fitzgerald (1953), and Peggy Lee (1960); and Frank Sinatra’s recordings of Hilliard/Dick’s The Coffee Song (1946, 1960), which satirised the coffee surplus in Brazil at a time when this nation enjoyed a near monopoly on production. Sinatra joked that this ubiquitous drink was that country’s only means of liquid refreshment, in a refrain that has since become a headline writer’s phrasal template: “There’s an Awful Lot of Coffee in Vietnam,” “An Awful Lot of Coffee in the Bin,” and “There’s an Awful Lot of Taxes in Brazil.” Ethnographer Aaron Fox has shown how country music gives expression to the lived social experience of blue-collar and agrarian workers (Real 29). Coffee’s role in energising working class America (Cooper) is featured in such recordings as Dolly Parton’s Nine To Five (1980), which describes her morning routine using a memorable “kitchen/cup of ambition” rhyme, and Don't Forget the Coffee Billy Joe (1973) by Tom T. Hall which laments the hardship of unemployment, hunger, cold, and lack of healthcare. Country music’s “tired truck driver” is the most enduring blue-collar trope celebrating coffee’s analeptic powers. Versions include Truck Drivin' Man by Buck Owens (1964), host of the country TV show Hee Haw and pioneer of the Bakersfield sound, and Driving My Life Away from pop-country crossover star Eddie Rabbitt (1980). Both feature characteristically gendered stereotypes of male truck drivers pushing on through the night with the help of a truck stop waitress who has fuelled them with caffeine. Johnny Cash’s A Cup of Coffee (1966), recorded at the nadir of his addiction to pills and alcohol, has an incoherent improvised lyric on this subject; while Jerry Reed even prescribed amphetamines to keep drivers awake in Caffein [sic], Nicotine, Benzedrine (And Wish Me Luck) (1980). Doye O’Dell’s Diesel Smoke, Dangerous Curves (1952) is the archetypal “truck drivin’ country” song and the most exciting track of its type. It subsequently became a hit for the doyen of the subgenre, Red Simpson (1966). An exhausted driver, having spent the night with a woman whose name he cannot now recall, is fighting fatigue and wrestling his hot-rod low-loader around hairpin mountain curves in an attempt to rendezvous with a pretty truck stop waitress. The song’s palpable energy comes from its frenetic guitar picking and the danger implicit in trailing a heavy load downhill while falling asleep at the wheel. Tommy Faile’s Phantom 309, a hit for Red Sovine (1967) that was later covered by Tom Waits (Big Joe and the Phantom 309, 1975), elevates the “tired truck driver” narrative to gothic literary form. Reflecting country music’s moral code of citizenship and its culture of performative storytelling (Fox, Real 23), it tells of a drenched and exhausted young hitchhiker picked up by Big Joe—the driver of a handsome eighteen-wheeler. On arriving at a truck stop, Joe drops the traveller off, giving him money for a restorative coffee. The diner falls silent as the hitchhiker orders up his “cup of mud”. Big Joe, it transpires, is a phantom trucker. After running off the road to avoid a school bus, his distinctive ghost rig now only reappears to rescue stranded travellers. Punk rock, a genre closely associated with recreational amphetamines (McNeil 76, 87), also features a number of caffeine-as-stimulant songs. Californian punk band, Descendents, identified caffeine as their drug of choice in two 1996 releases, Coffee Mug and Kids on Coffee. These songs describe chugging the drink with much the same relish and energy that others might pull at the neck of a beer bottle, and vividly compare the effects of the drug to the intense rush of speed. The host of “New Music News” (a segment of MTV’s 120 Minutes) references this correlation in 1986 while introducing the band’s video—in which they literally bounce off the walls: “You know, while everybody is cracking down on crack, what about that most respectable of toxic substances or stimulants, the good old cup of coffee? That is the preferred high, actually, of California’s own Descendents—it is also the subject of their brand new video” (“New Music News”). Descendents’s Sessions EP (1997) featured an overflowing cup of coffee on the sleeve, while punk’s caffeine-as-amphetamine trope is also promulgated by Hellbender (Caffeinated 1996), Lagwagon (Mr. Coffee 1997), and Regatta 69 (Addicted to Coffee 2005). Coffee in the Morning and Kisses in the Night: Coffee and Courtship Coffee as romantic metaphor in song corroborates the findings of early researchers who examined courtship rituals in popular music. Donald Horton’s 1957 study found that hit songs codified the socially constructed self-image and limited life expectations of young people during the 1950s by depicting conservative, idealised, and traditional relationship scenarios. He summarised these as initial courtship, honeymoon period, uncertainty, and parting (570-4). Eleven years after this landmark analysis, James Carey replicated Horton’s method. His results revealed that pop lyrics had become more realistic and less bound by convention during the 1960s. They incorporated a wider variety of discourse including the temporariness of romantic commitment, the importance of individual autonomy in relationships, more liberal attitudes, and increasingly unconventional courtship behaviours (725). Socially conservative coffee songs include Coffee in the Morning and Kisses in the Night by The Boswell Sisters (1933) in which the protagonist swears fidelity to her partner on condition that this desire is expressed strictly in the appropriate social context of marriage. It encapsulates the restrictions Horton identified on courtship discourse in popular song prior to the arrival of rock and roll. The Henderson/DeSylva/Brown composition You're the Cream in My Coffee, recorded by Annette Hanshaw (1928) and by Nat King Cole (1946), also celebrates the social ideal of monogamous devotion. The persistence of such idealised traditional themes continued into the 1960s. American pop singer Don Cherry had a hit with Then You Can Tell Me Goodbye (1962) that used coffee as a metaphor for undying and everlasting love. Otis Redding’s version of Butler/Thomas/Walker’s Cigarettes and Coffee (1966)—arguably soul music’s exemplary romantic coffee song—carries a similar message as a couple proclaim their devotion in a late night conversation over coffee. Like much of the Stax catalogue, Cigarettes and Coffee, has a distinctly “down home” feel and timbre. The lovers are simply content with each other; they don’t need “cream” or “sugar.” Horton found 1950s blues and R&B lyrics much more sexually explicit than pop songs (567). Dawson (1994) subsequently characterised black popular music as a distinct public sphere, and Squires (2002) argued that it displayed elements of what she defined as “enclave” and “counterpublic” traits. Lawson (2010) has argued that marginalised and/or subversive blues artists offered a form of countercultural resistance against prevailing social norms. Indeed, several blues and R&B coffee songs disregard established courtship ideals and associate the product with non-normative and even transgressive relationship circumstances—including infidelity, divorce, and domestic violence. Lightnin’ Hopkins’s Coffee Blues (1950) references child neglect and spousal abuse, while the narrative of Muddy Waters’s scorching Iodine in my Coffee (1952) tells of an attempted poisoning by his Waters’s partner. In 40 Cups of Coffee (1953) Ella Mae Morse is waiting for her husband to return home, fuelling her anger and anxiety with caffeine. This song does eventually comply with traditional courtship ideals: when her lover eventually returns home at five in the morning, he is greeted with a relieved kiss. In Keep That Coffee Hot (1955), Scatman Crothers supplies a counterpoint to Morse’s late-night-abandonment narrative, asking his partner to keep his favourite drink warm during his adulterous absence. Brook Benton’s Another Cup of Coffee (1964) expresses acute feelings of regret and loneliness after a failed relationship. More obliquely, in Coffee Blues (1966) Mississippi John Hurt sings affectionately about his favourite brand, a “lovin’ spoonful” of Maxwell House. In this, he bequeathed the moniker of folk-rock band The Lovin’ Spoonful, whose hits included Do You Believe in Magic (1965) and Summer in the City (1966). However, an alternative reading of Hurt’s lyric suggests that this particular phrase is a metaphorical device proclaiming the author’s sexual potency. Hurt’s “lovin’ spoonful” may actually be a portion of his seminal emission. In the 1950s, Horton identified country as particularly “doleful” (570), and coffee provides a common metaphor for failed romance in a genre dominated by “metanarratives of loss and desire” (Fox, Jukebox 54). Claude Gray’s I'll Have Another Cup of Coffee (Then I’ll Go) (1961) tells of a protagonist delivering child support payments according to his divorce lawyer’s instructions. The couple share late night coffee as their children sleep through the conversation. This song was subsequently recorded by seventeen-year-old Bob Marley (One Cup of Coffee, 1962) under the pseudonym Bobby Martell, a decade prior to his breakthrough as an international reggae star. Marley’s youngest son Damian has also performed the track while, interestingly in the context of this discussion, his older sibling Rohan co-founded Marley Coffee, an organic farm in the Jamaican Blue Mountains. Following Carey’s demonstration of mainstream pop’s increasingly realistic depiction of courtship behaviours during the 1960s, songwriters continued to draw on coffee as a metaphor for failed romance. In Carly Simon’s You’re So Vain (1972), she dreams of clouds in her coffee while contemplating an ostentatious ex-lover. Squeeze’s Black Coffee In Bed (1982) uses a coffee stain metaphor to describe the end of what appears to be yet another dead-end relationship for the protagonist. Sarah Harmer’s Coffee Stain (1998) expands on this device by reworking the familiar “lipstick on your collar” trope, while Sexsmith & Kerr’s duet Raindrops in my Coffee (2005) superimposes teardrops in coffee and raindrops on the pavement with compelling effect. Kate Bush’s Coffee Homeground (1978) provides the most extreme narrative of relationship breakdown: the true story of Cora Henrietta Crippin’s poisoning. Researchers who replicated Horton’s and Carey’s methodology in the late 1970s (Bridges; Denisoff) were surprised to find their results dominated by traditional courtship ideals. The new liberal values unearthed by Carey in the late 1960s simply failed to materialise in subsequent decades. In this context, it is interesting to observe how romantic coffee songs in contemporary soul and jazz continue to disavow the post-1960s trend towards realistic social narratives, adopting instead a conspicuously consumerist outlook accompanied by smooth musical timbres. This phenomenon possibly betrays the influence of contemporary coffee advertising. From the 1980s, television commercials have sought to establish coffee as a desirable high end product, enjoyed by bohemian lovers in a conspicuously up-market environment (Werder). All Saints’s Black Coffee (2000) and Lebrado’s Coffee (2006) identify strongly with the culture industry’s image of coffee as a luxurious beverage whose consumption signifies prominent social status. All Saints’s promotional video is set in a opulent location (although its visuals emphasise the lyric’s romantic disharmony), while Natalie Cole’s Coffee Time (2008) might have been itself written as a commercial. Busting Up a Starbucks: The Politics of Coffee Politics and coffee meet most palpably at the coffee shop. This conjunction has a well-documented history beginning with the establishment of coffee houses in Europe and the birth of the public sphere (Habermas; Love; Pincus). The first popular songs to reference coffee shops include Jaybird Coleman’s Coffee Grinder Blues (1930), which boasts of skills that precede the contemporary notion of a barista by four decades; and Let's Have Another Cup of Coffee (1932) from Irving Berlin’s depression-era musical Face The Music, where the protagonists decide to stay in a restaurant drinking coffee and eating pie until the economy improves. Coffee in a Cardboard Cup (1971) from the Broadway musical 70 Girls 70 is an unambiguous condemnation of consumerism, however, it was written, recorded and produced a generation before Starbucks’ aggressive expansion and rapid dominance of the coffee house market during the 1990s. The growth of this company caused significant criticism and protest against what seemed to be a ruthless homogenising force that sought to overwhelm local competition (Holt; Thomson). In response, Starbucks has sought to be defined as a more responsive and interactive brand that encourages “glocalisation” (de Larios; Thompson). Koller, however, has characterised glocalisation as the manipulative fabrication of an “imagined community”—whose heterogeneity is in fact maintained by the aesthetics and purchasing choices of consumers who make distinctive and conscious anti-brand statements (114). Neat Capitalism is a more useful concept here, one that intercedes between corporate ideology and postmodern cultural logic, where such notions as community relations and customer satisfaction are deliberately and perhaps somewhat cynically conflated with the goal of profit maximisation (Rojek). As the world’s largest chain of coffee houses with over 19,400 stores in March 2012 (Loxcel), Starbucks is an exemplar of this phenomenon. Their apparent commitment to environmental stewardship, community relations, and ethical sourcing is outlined in the company’s annual “Global Responsibility Report” (Vimac). It is also demonstrated in their engagement with charitable and environmental non-governmental organisations such as Fairtrade and Co-operative for Assistance and Relief Everywhere (CARE). By emphasising this, Starbucks are able to interpellate (that is, “call forth”, “summon”, or “hail” in Althusserian terms) those consumers who value environmental protection, social justice and ethical business practices (Rojek 117). Bob Dylan and Sheryl Crow provide interesting case studies of the persuasive cultural influence evoked by Neat Capitalism. Dylan’s 1962 song Talkin’ New York satirised his formative experiences as an impoverished performer in Greenwich Village’s coffee houses. In 1995, however, his decision to distribute the Bob Dylan: Live At The Gaslight 1962 CD exclusively via Starbucks generated significant media controversy. Prominent commentators expressed their disapproval (Wilson Harris) and HMV Canada withdrew Dylan’s product from their shelves (Lynskey). Despite this, the success of this and other projects resulted in the launch of Starbucks’s in-house record company, Hear Music, which released entirely new recordings from major artists such as Ray Charles, Paul McCartney, Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon and Elvis Costello—although the company has recently announced a restructuring of their involvement in this venture (O’Neil). Sheryl Crow disparaged her former life as a waitress in Coffee Shop (1995), a song recorded for her second album. “Yes, I was a waitress. I was a waitress not so long ago; then I won a Grammy” she affirmed in a YouTube clip of a live performance from the same year. More recently, however, Crow has become an avowed self-proclaimed “Starbucks groupie” (Tickle), releasing an Artist’s Choice (2003) compilation album exclusively via Hear Music and performing at the company’s 2010 Annual Shareholders’s Meeting. Songs voicing more unequivocal dissatisfaction with Starbucks’s particular variant of Neat Capitalism include Busting Up a Starbucks (Mike Doughty, 2005), and Starbucks Takes All My Money (KJ-52, 2008). The most successful of these is undoubtedly Ron Sexsmith’s Jazz at the Bookstore (2006). Sexsmith bemoans the irony of intense original blues artists such as Leadbelly being drowned out by the cacophony of coffee grinding machines while customers queue up to purchase expensive coffees whose names they can’t pronounce. In this, he juxtaposes the progressive patina of corporate culture against the circumstances of African-American labour conditions in the deep South, the shocking incongruity of which eventually cause the old bluesman to turn in his grave. Fredric Jameson may have good reason to lament the depthless a-historical pastiche of postmodern popular culture, but this is no “nostalgia film”: Sexsmith articulates an artfully framed set of subtle, sensitive, and carefully contextualised observations. Songs about coffee also intersect with politics via lyrics that play on the mid-brown colour of the beverage, by employing it as a metaphor for the sociological meta-narratives of acculturation and assimilation. First popularised in Israel Zangwill’s 1905 stage play, The Melting Pot, this term is more commonly associated with Americanisation rather than miscegenation in the United States—a nuanced distinction that British band Blue Mink failed to grasp with their memorable invocation of “coffee-coloured people” in Melting Pot (1969). Re-titled in the US as People Are Together (Mickey Murray, 1970) the song was considered too extreme for mainstream radio airplay (Thompson). Ike and Tina Turner’s Black Coffee (1972) provided a more accomplished articulation of coffee as a signifier of racial identity; first by associating it with the history of slavery and the post-Civil Rights discourse of African-American autonomy, then by celebrating its role as an energising force for African-American workers seeking economic self-determination. Anyone familiar with the re-casting of black popular music in an industry dominated by Caucasian interests and aesthetics (Cashmore; Garofalo) will be unsurprised to find British super-group Humble Pie’s (1973) version of this song more recognisable. Conclusion Coffee-flavoured popular songs celebrate the stimulant effects of caffeine, provide metaphors for courtship rituals, and offer critiques of Neat Capitalism. Harold Love and Guthrie Ramsey have each argued (from different perspectives) that the cultural micro-narratives of small social groups allow us to identify important “ethnographic truths” (Ramsey 22). Aesthetically satisfying and intellectually stimulating coffee songs are found where these micro-narratives intersect with the ethnographic truths of coffee culture. 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Each year, The Economist magazine’s “Economist Intelligence Unit” ranks cities based on “healthcare, education, stability, culture, environment and infrastructure”, giving the highest-ranking locale the title of most ‘liveable’ (Wright). For the past six years, The Economist has named Melbourne “the world’s most liveable city” (Carmody et al.). A curious portmanteau, the concept of liveability is problematic: what may feel stable and safe to some members of the community may marginalise others due to several factors such as gender, disability, ethnicity or class.The subjective nature of this term is referred to in the Australian Government’s 2013 State of Cities report, in the chapter titled ‘Liveability’:In the same way that the Cronulla riots are the poster story for cultural conflict, the attack on Jillian Meagher in Melbourne’s Brunswick has resonated strongly with Australians in many capital cities. It seemed to be emblematic of their concern about violent crime. Some women in our research reported responding to this fear by arming themselves. (274)Twenty-nine-year-old Jill Meagher’s abduction, rape, and murder in the inner northern suburb of Brunswick in 2012 disturbs the perception of Melbourne’s liveability. As news of the crime disseminated, it revived dormant cultural narratives that reinforce a gendered public/private binary, suggesting women are more vulnerable to attack than men in public spaces and consequently hindering their mobility. I investigate here how texts written by women writers based in Melbourne’s inner north can latently serve as counter narratives to this discourse, demonstrating how urban public space can be benign, even joyful, rather than foreboding for women. Cultural narratives that promote the vulnerability of women oppress urban freedoms; this paper will use these narratives solely as a catalyst to explore literary texts by women that enact contrary narratives that map a city not by vicarious trauma, but instead by the rich complexity of women’s lives in their twenties and thirties.I examine two memoirs set primarily in Melbourne’s inner north: Michele Lee’s Banana Girl (2013) and Lorelai Vashti’s Dress, Memory: A memoir of my twenties in dresses (2014). In these texts, the inner north serves as ‘true north’, a magnetic destination for this stage of life, an opening into an experiential, exciting adult world, rather than a place haunted. Indeed, while Lee and Vashti occupy the same geographical space that Meagher did, these texts do not speak to the crime.The connection is made by me, as I am interested in the affective shift that follows a signal crime such as the Meagher case, and how we can employ literary texts to gauge a psychic landscape, refuting the discourse of fear that is circulated by the media following the event. I wish to look at Melbourne’s inner north as a female literary milieu, a site of boldness despite the public breaking that was Meagher’s murder: a site of female self-determination rather than community trauma.I borrow the terms “boldness”, “bold walk” and “breaking” from Finnish geographer Hille Koskela (and note the thematic resonances in scholarship from a city as far north as Helsinki). Her paper “Bold Walks and Breakings: Women’s spatial confidence versus fear of violence” challenges the idea that “fearfulness is an essentially female quality”, rather advocating for “boldness”, seeking to “emphasise the emancipatory content of … [women’s] stories” (302). Koskela uses the term “breaking” in her research (primarily focussed on experiences of Helsinki women) to describe “situations … that had transformed … attitudes towards their environment”, referring to the “spatial consequences” that were the result of violent crimes, or threats thereof. While Melbourne women obviously did not experience the Meagher case personally, it nevertheless resulted in what Koskela has dubbed elsewhere as “increased feelings of vulnerability” (“Gendered Exclusions” 111).After the Meagher case, media reportage suggested that Melbourne had been irreversibly changed, made vulnerable, and a site of trauma. As a signal crime, the attack and murder was vicariously experienced and mediated. Like many crimes committed against women in public space, Meagher’s death was transformed into a cautionary tale, and this storying was more pronounced due to the way the case played out episodically in the media, particularly online, allowing the public to follow the case as it unfolded. The coverage was visually hyperintensive, and particular attention was paid to Sydney Road, where Meagher had last been seen and where she had met her assailant, Adrian Bayley, who was subsequently convicted of her murder.Articles from media outlets were frequently accompanied by cartographic images that superimposed details of the case onto images of the local area—the mind map and the physical locality both marred by the crime. Yet Koskela writes, “the map of everyday experiences is in sharp contrast to the maps of the media. If a picture of a place is made by one’s own experiences it is more likely to be perceived as a safe ordinary place” (“Bold Walks” 309). How might this picture—this map—be made through genre? I am interested in how memoir might facilitate space for narratives that contest those from the media. Here I prefer the word memoir rather than use the term life-writing due to the former’s etymological adherence to memory. In Vashti and Lee’s texts, memory is closely linked to place and space, and for each of them, Melbourne is a destination, a city that they have come to alone from elsewhere. Lee came to the city after growing up in Canberra, and Vashti from Brisbane. In Dress, Memory, Vashti writes that the move to Melbourne “… makes you feel like a pioneer, one of those dusty and determined characters out of an American history novel trudging west to seek a land of gold and dreams” (83).Deeply engaging with Melbourne, the text eschews the ‘taken for granted’ backdrop idea of the city that scholar Jane Darke observes in fiction. She writes thatmodern women novelists virtually take the city as backdrop for granted as a place where a central female figure can be or becomes self-determining, with like-minded female friends as indispensable support and undependable men in walk-on roles. (97)Instead, Vashti uses memoir to self-consciously examine her relationship with her city, elaborating on the notion of moving from elsewhere as an act of self-determination, building the self through geographical relocation:You’re told you can find treasure – the secret bars hidden down the alleyways, the tiny shops filled with precious curios, the art openings overflowing onto the street. But the true gold that paves Melbourne’s footpaths is the promise that you can be a writer, an artist, a musician, a performer there. People who move there want to be discovered, they want to make a mark. (84)The paths are important here, as Vashti embeds herself on the street, walking through the text, generating an affective cartography as her life is played out in what is depicted as a benign, yet vibrant, urban space. She writes of “walking, following the grid of the city, taking in its grey blocks” (100), engendering a sense of what geographer Yi-Fu Tuan calls ‘topophilia’: “the affective bond between people and place or setting” (4). There is a deep bond between Vashti and Melbourne that is evident in her work that is demonstrated in her discussion of public space. Like her, friends from Brisbane trickle down South, and she lives with them in a series of share houses in the inner North—first Fitzroy, then Carlton, then North Melbourne, where she lives with two female friends and together they “roamed the streets during the day in a pack” (129).Vashti’s boldness not only lies in her willingness to take bodily to the streets, without fear, but also in her fastidious attention to her physical appearance. Her memoir is framed sartorially: chronologically arranged, from age twenty to thirty, each chapter featuring equally detailed reports of the events of that year as well as the corresponding outfits worn. A dress, transformative, is spotlighted in each of these chapters, and the author is photographed in each of these ‘feature’ dresses in a glossy section in the middle of the book. Koskela writes that, “if women dress up to be part of the urban spectacle, like 19th-century flâneurs, and also to mediate their confidence, they oppose their erasure and reclaim urban space”. For Koskela, the appearance of the body in public is an act of boldness:dressing can be seen as a means of reproducing power relations; in Foucaultian terms, it is a way of being one’s own overseer, and regulating even the most intimate spheres … on the other hand, interpreted in another way, dressing up can be seen as a form of resistance against the male gaze, as an opposition to the visual mastery over women, achieved by not being invisible or absent, but by dressing up proudly. (“Bold Walks” 309)Koskela’s affirmation that clothing can enact urban boldness contradicts reportage on the Meagher case that suggested otherwise. Some news outlets focussed on the high heels Meagher was wearing the night she was raped and murdered, as if to imply that she may have been able to elude her fate had she donned flats. The Age quotes witnesses who saw her on Sydney Road the night she was killed; one says she was “a little unsteady on her feet but not too bad”, another that she “seemed to be struggling to walk up the hill in her high heels” (Russell). But Vashti is well aware of the spatial confidence that the right clothing provides. In the chapter “Twenty-three”, she writes of being housebound by heartbreak, that “just leaving the house seemed like an epic undertaking”, so she “picked a dress a dress that would make me feel good … the woman in me emerged when I slid it on. In it, I instantly had shape, form. A purpose” (99). She and her friends don vocational costumes to outplay the competitive inner Melbourne rental market, eventually netting their North Melbourne terrace house by dressing like “young professionals”: “dressed up in smart op-shop blouses and pencil skirts to walk to the real estate office” (129).Michele Lee’s text Banana Girl also delves into the relationship between personal aesthetics and urban space, describing Melbourne as “a town of costumes, after all” (117), but her own style as “indifferently hip to the outside world without being slavish about it” (6). Lee’s world is East Brunswick for much of the book, and she establishes this connection early, introducing herself in the first chapter, as one of the “subversive and ironic people living in the hipster boroughs of the inner North of Melbourne” (6). She describes the women in her local area – “Brunswick Girls”, she dubs them: “no one wears visible make up, or if they do it’s not lathered on in visible layers; the haircuts are feminine without being too stylish, the clothing too; there’s an overall practical appearance” (89).Lee displays more of a knowingness than Vashti regarding the inner North’s reputation as the more progressive and creative side of the Yarra, confirmed by the Sydney Morning Herald:The ‘northside’ comprises North Melbourne, Carlton, Fitzroy, Collingwood, Abbotsford, Thornbury, Brunswick and Coburg. Bell Street is the boundary for northsiders. It stands for artists, warehouse parties, bicycles, underground music, lightless terrace houses, postmodernity and ‘awareness’. (Craig)As evidenced in late scholar John Maclaren’s book Melbourne: City of Words, the area has long enjoyed this reputation: “After the war, these neighbourhoods were colonized by migrants from Europe, and in the 1960s by the artists, musicians, writers, actors, junkies and layabouts whose stories Helen Garner was to tell” (146). As a young playwright, Lee sees herself reflected in this milieu, writing that she’s “an imaginative person, I’m university educated, I vote the way you’d expect me to vote and I’m a member of the CPSU. On principle I remain a union member” (7), toeing that line of “awareness” pithily mentioned by the SMH.Like Vashti, there are constant references to Lee’s exact geographical location in Melbourne. She ‘drops pins’ throughout, cultivating a connection to place that blurs home and the street, fostering a sense of belonging beyond one’s birthplace, belonging to a place chosen rather than raised in. She plants herself in this local geography. Returning to the first chapter, she includes “jogger by the Merri Creek” in her introduction (7), and later jokingly likens a friendship with an ex as “no longer on stage at the Telstra Dome but still on tour” (15), employing Melbourne landmarks as explanatory shorthand. She refers to places by name: one could physically tour inner North and CBD hotspots based on Lee’s text, as it is littered with mentions of bars, restaurants, galleries and theatre venues. She frequents the Alderman in East Brunswick and Troika in the city, as well as a bar that Jill Meagher spent time in on the night she went missing – the Brunswick Green.While offering the text a topographical authenticity, this can sometimes prove distracting: rather than simply stating that she goes to the library, she writes that she visits “the City of Melbourne library” (128), and rather than just going to a pizza parlour, they visit “Bimbo’s” (129) or “Pizza Meine Liebe” (101). Yet when Lee visits family in Canberra, or Laos on an arts grant, business names are forsaken. One could argue that the cultural capital offered by namedropping trendy Melburnian bars, restaurants and nightclubs translates awkwardly on the page, and risks dating the text considerably, but elevates the spatiality of Lee’s work. And these landmarks are important within the text, as Lee’s world is divided spatially. She refers to “Theatre Land” when discussing her work in the arts, and her share house not as ‘home’ but consistently as “Albert Street”. She partitions her life into these zones: zones of emotion, zones of intellect/career, zones of family/heritage – the text offers close insight into Lee’s personal cartography, with her traversing the map “stubbornly on foot, still resisting becoming part of Melbourne’s bike culture” (88).While not always walking alone – often accompanied by an ex-boyfriend she nicknames “Husband” – Lee is independently-minded, stating, “I operate solo, I pay my own way” (34), meeting up with various romantic and sexual interests through the text for daytime trysts in empty office buildings or late nights out in the CBD. She is adventurous, yet reminds that she was not always so. She recalls a time when she was still residing in Canberra and visited a boyfriend who was living in Melbourne and felt intimidated by the “alien city”, standing in stark contrast to the familiarity she demonstrates otherwise.Lee and Vashti’s texts both chronicle women who freely occupy public space, comfortable in their surroundings, not engaging on the page with cultural narratives and media reportage that suggest they would be safer off the streets. Both demonstrate what Koskela calls the “pleasure to be able to take possession of space” (“Bold Walks” 308) – yet it could be argued that the writer’s possession of space is so routine, so unremarkable that it transcends pleasure: it is comfortable. They walk the streets alone and catch public transport alone without incident. They contravene advice such as that given by Victorian Police Homicide Squad chief Mick Hughes’s comments that women shouldn’t be “alone in parks” following the fatal stabbing of teenager Masa Vukotic in a Doncaster park in 2015.Like Meagher’s death, Vukotic’s murder was also mobilised by the media – and one could argue, by authorities – to contain women, to further a narrative that reinforces the public/private gender binary. However, as Koskela reminds, the fact that some women are bold and confident shows that women are not only passively experiencing space but actively take part in producing it. They reclaim space for themselves, not only through single occasions such as ‘take back the night’ marches, but through everyday practices and routinized uses of space. (“Bold Walks” 316)These memoirs act as resistance, actively producing space through representation: to assert the right to the city, one must be bold, and reclaim space that is so often overlaid with stories of violence against women. As Koskela emphasises, this is only done through use of the space, “a way of de-mystifying it. If one does not use the space, … ‘the mental map’ of the place is filled with indirect descriptions, the image of it is constructed through media and the stories heard” (“Bold Walks” 308). Memoir can take back this image through stories told, demonstrating the personal connection to public space. Koskela writes that, “walking on the street can be seen as a political act: women ‘write themselves onto the street’” (“Urban Space in Plural” 263). ReferencesAustralian Government. Department of Infrastructure and Transport. State of Australian Cities 2013. Canberra: Commonwealth of Australia, 2013. 17 Jan. 2017 <http://infrastructure.gov.au/infrastructure/pab/soac/files/2013_00_infra1782_mcu_soac_full_web_fa.pdf>.Carmody, Broede, and Aisha Dow. “Top of the World: Melbourne Crowned World's Most Liveable City, Again.” The Age, 18 Aug. 2016. 17 Jan. 2017 <http://theage.com.au/victoria/top-of-the-world-melbourne-crowned-worlds-most-liveable-city-again-20160817-gqv893.html>.Craig, Natalie. “A City Divided.” Sydney Morning Herald, 5 Feb. 2012. 17 Jan. 2017 <http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/about-town/a-city-divided-20120202-1quub.html>.Darke, Jane. “The Man-Shaped City.” Changing Places: Women's Lives in the City. Eds. Chris Booth, Jane Darke, and Susan Yeadle. London: Paul Chapman Publishing, 1996. 88-99.Koskela, Hille. “'Bold Walk and Breakings’: Women's Spatial Confidence versus Fear of Violence.” Gender, Place and Culture 4.3 (1997): 301-20.———. “‘Gendered Exclusions’: Women's Fear of Violence and Changing Relations to Space.” Geografiska Annaler, Series B, Human Geography, 81.2 (1999). 111–124.———. “Urban Space in Plural: Elastic, Tamed, Suppressed.” A Companion to Feminist Geography. Eds. Lise Nelson and Joni Seager. Blackwell, 2005. 257-270.Lee, Michele. Banana Girl. Melbourne: Transit Lounge, 2013.MacLaren, John. Melbourne: City of Words. Arcadia, 2013.Russell, Mark. ‘Happy, Witty Jill Was the Glue That Held It All Together.’ The Age, 19 June 2013. 30 Jan. 2017 <http://www.theage.com.au/victoria/happy-witty-jill-was-the-glue-that-held-it-all-together-20130618-2ohox.html>Tuan, Yi-Fu. Topophilia: A Study of Environmental Perception, Attitudes and Values. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall Inc, 1974.Wright, Patrick, “Melbourne Ranked World’s Most Liveable City for Sixth Consecutive Year by EIU.” ABC News, 18 Aug. 2016. 17 Jan. 2017 <http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-08-18/melbourne-ranked-worlds-most-liveable-city-for-sixth-year/7761642>.

Hundreds of thousands of Australian children were born in the shadow of the Great War, fathered by men who had enlisted between 1914 and 1918. Their lives could be and often were hard and unhappy, as Anzac historian Alistair Thomson observed of his father’s childhood in the 1920s and 1930s. David Thomson was son of a returned serviceman Hector Thomson who spent much of his adult life in and out of repatriation hospitals (257-259) and whose memory was subsequently expunged from Thomson family stories (299-267). These children of trauma fit within a pattern suggested by Marianne Hirsch in her influential essay “The Generation of Postmemory”. According to Hirsch, “postmemory describes the relationship of the second generation to powerful, often traumatic, experiences that preceded their births but that were nevertheless transmitted to them so deeply as to seem to constitute memories in their own right” (n.p.). This article attempts to situate George Johnston’s novel My Brother Jack (1964) within the context of postmemory narratives of violence that were complicated in Australia by the Anzac legend which occluded any too open discussion about the extent of war trauma present within community, including the children of war.“God knows what damage” the war “did to me psychologically” (48), ponders Johnston’s protagonist and alter-ego David Meredith in My Brother Jack. Published to acclaim fifty years after the outbreak of the First World War, My Brother Jack became a widely read text that seemingly spoke to the shared cultural memories of a generation which did not know battlefield violence directly but experienced its effects pervasively and vicariously in the aftermath through family life, storytelling, and the memorabilia of war. For these readers, the novel represented more than a work of fiction; it was a touchstone to and indicative of their own negotiations though often unspoken post-war trauma.Meredith, like his creator, is born in 1912. Strictly speaking, therefore, both are not part of the post-war generation. However, they are representative and therefore indicative of the post-war “hinge generation” which was expected to assume “guardianship” of the Anzac Legend, though often found the narrative logic challenging. They had been “too young for the war to have any direct effect”, and yet “every corner” of their family’s small suburban homes appear to be “impregnated with some gigantic and sombre experience that had taken place thousands of miles away” (17).According to Johnston’s biographer, Garry Kinnane, the “most teasing puzzle” of George Johnston’s “fictional version of his childhood in My Brother Jack is the monstrous impression he creates of his returned serviceman father, John George Johnston, known to everyone as ‘Pop.’ The first sixty pages are dominated by the tyrannical figure of Jack Meredith senior” (1).A large man purported to be six foot three inches (1.9 metres) in height and weighing fifteen stone (95 kilograms), the real-life Pop Johnston reputedly stood head and shoulders above the minimum requirement of five foot and six inches (1.68 metres) at the time of his enlistment for war in 1914 (Kinnane 4). In his fortieth year, Jack Johnston senior was also around twice the age of the average Australian soldier and among one in five who were married.According to Kinnane, Pop Johnston had “survived the ordeal of Gallipoli” in 1915 only to “endure three years of trench warfare in the Somme region”. While the biographer and the Johnston family may well have held this to be true, the claim is a distortion. There are a few intimations throughout My Brother Jack and its sequel Clean Straw for Nothing (1969) to suggest that George Johnston may have suspected that his father’s wartime service stories had been embellished, though the depicted wartime service of Pop Meredith remains firmly within the narrative arc of the Anzac legend. This has the effect of layering the postmemory violence experienced by David Meredith and, by implication, his creator, George Johnston. Both are expected to be keepers of a lie masquerading as inviolable truth which further brutalises them.John George (Pop) Johnston’s First World War military record reveals a different story to the accepted historical account and his fictionalisation in My Brother Jack. He enlisted two and a half months after the landing at Gallipoli on 12 July 1915 and left for overseas service on 23 November. Not quite the imposing six foot three figure of Kinnane’s biography, he was fractionally under five foot eleven (1.8 metres) and weighed thirteen stone (82.5 kilograms). Assigned to the Fifth Field Engineers on account of his experience as an electric tram fitter, he did not see frontline service at Gallipoli (NAA).Rather, according to the Company’s history, the Fifth Engineers were involved in a range of infrastructure and support work on the Western Front, including the digging and maintenance of trenches, laying duckboard, pontoons and tramlines, removing landmines, building huts, showers and latrines, repairing roads, laying drains; they built a cinema at Beaulencourt Piers for “Brigade Swimming Carnival” and baths at Malhove consisting of a large “galvanised iron building” with a “concrete floor” and “setting tanks capable of bathing 2,000 men per day” (AWM). It is likely that members of the company were also involved in burial details.Sapper Johnston was hospitalised twice during his service with influenza and saw out most of his war from October 1917 attached to the Army Cookery School (NAA). He returned to Australia on board the HMAT Kildonian Castle in May 1919 which, according to the Sydney Morning Herald, also carried the official war correspondent and creator of the Anzac legend C.E.W. Bean, national poet Banjo Paterson and “Warrant Officer C G Macartney, the famous Australian cricketer”. The Herald also listed the names of “Returned Officers” and “Decorated Men”, but not Pop Johnston who had occupied the lower decks with other returning men (“Soldiers Return”).Like many of the more than 270,000 returned soldiers, Pop Johnston apparently exhibited observable changes upon his repatriation to Australia: “he was partially deaf” which was attributed to the “constant barrage of explosions”, while “gas” was suspected to have “left him with a legacy of lung disorders”. Yet, if “anyone offered commiserations” on account of this war legacy, he was quick to “dismiss the subject with the comment that ‘there were plenty worse off’” (Kinnane 6). The assumption is that Pop’s silence is stoic; the product of unspeakable horror and perhaps a symptom of survivor guilt.An alternative interpretation, suggested by Alistair Thomson in Anzac Memories, is that the experiences of the vast majority of returned soldiers were expected to fit within the master narrative of the Anzac legend in order to be accepted and believed, and that there was no space available to speak truthfully about alternative war service. Under pressure of Anzac expectations a great many composed stories or remained selectively silent (14).Data gleaned from the official medical history suggest that as many as four out of every five returned servicemen experienced emotional or psychological disturbance related to their war service. However, the two branches of medicine represented by surgeons and physicians in the Repatriation Department—charged with attending to the welfare of returned servicemen—focused on the body rather than the mind and the emotions (Murphy and Nile).The repatriation records of returned Australian soldiers reveal that there were, indeed, plenty physically worse off than Pop Johnston on account of bodily disfigurement or because they had been somatically compromised. An estimated 30,000 returned servicemen died in the decade after the cessation of hostilities to 1928, bringing the actual number of war dead to around 100,000, while a 1927 official report tabled the medical conditions of a further 72,388 veterans: 28,305 were debilitated by gun and shrapnel wounds; 22,261 were rheumatic or had respiratory diseases; 4534 were afflicted with eye, ear, nose, or throat complaints; 9,186 had tuberculosis or heart disease; 3,204 were amputees while only; 2,970 were listed as suffering “war neurosis” (“Enlistment”).Long after the guns had fallen silent and the wounded survivors returned home, the physical effects of war continued to be apparent in homes and hospital wards around the country, while psychological and emotional trauma remained largely undiagnosed and consequently untreated. David Meredith’s attitude towards his able-bodied father is frequently dismissive and openly scathing: “dad, who had been gassed, but not seriously, near Vimy Ridge, went back to his old job at the tramway depot” (9). The narrator-son later considers:what I realise now, although I never did at the time, is that my father, too, was oppressed by intimidating factors of fear and change. By disillusion and ill-health too. As is so often the case with big, strong, athletic men, he was an extreme hypochondriac, and he had convinced himself that the severe bronchitis which plagued him could only be attributed to German gas he had swallowed at Vimy Ridge. He was too afraid to go to a doctor about it, so he lived with a constant fear that his lungs were decaying, and that he might die at any time, without warning. (42-3)During the writing of My Brother Jack, the author-son was in chronically poor health and had been recently diagnosed with the romantic malady and poet’s disease of tuberculosis (Lawler) which plagued him throughout his work on the novel. George Johnston believed (correctly as it turned out) that he was dying on account of the disease, though, he was also an alcoholic and smoker, and had been reluctant to consult a doctor. It is possible and indeed likely that he resentfully viewed his condition as being an extension of his father—vicariously expressed through the depiction of Pop Meredith who exhibits hysterical symptoms which his son finds insufferable. David Meredith remains embittered and unforgiving to the very end. Pop Meredith “lived to seventy-three having died, not of German gas, but of a heart attack” (46).Pop Meredith’s return from the war in 1919 terrifies his seven-year-old son “Davy”, who accompanies the family to the wharf to welcome home a hero. The young boy is unable to recall anything about the father he is about to meet ostensibly for the first time. Davy becomes overwhelmed by the crowds and frightened by the “interminable blaring of horns” of the troopships and the “ceaseless roar of shouting”. Dwarfed by the bodies of much larger men he becomestoo frightened to look up at the hours-long progression of dark, hard faces under wide, turned-up hats seen against bayonets and barrels that are more blue than black ... the really strong image that is preserved now is of the stiff fold and buckle of coarse khaki trousers moving to the rhythm of knees and thighs and the tight spiral curves of puttees and the thick boots hammering, hollowly off the pier planking and thunderous on the asphalt roadway.Depicted as being small for his age, Davy is overwrought “with a huge and numbing terror” (10).In the years that follow, the younger Meredith desires emotional stability but remains denied because of the war’s legacy which manifests in the form of a violent patriarch who is convinced that his son has been rendered effeminate on account of the manly absence during vital stages of development. With the return of the father to the household, Davy grows to fear and ultimately despise a man who remains as alien to him as the formerly absent soldier had been during the war:exactly when, or why, Dad introduced his system of monthly punishments I no longer remember. We always had summary punishment, of course, for offences immediately detected—a cuffing around the ears or a sash with a stick of a strap—but Dad’s new system was to punish for the offences which had escaped his attention. So on the last day of every month Jack and I would be summoned in turn to the bathroom and the door would be locked and each of us would be questioned about the sins which we had committed and which he had not found out about. This interrogation was the merest formality; whether we admitted to crimes or desperately swore our innocence it was just the same; we were punished for the offences which, he said, he knew we must have committed and had to lie about. We then had to take our shirts and singlets off and bend over the enamelled bath-tub while he thrashed us with the razor-strop. In the blind rages of these days he seemed not to care about the strength he possessed nor the injuries he inflicted; more often than not it was the metal end of the strop that was used against our backs. (48)Ironically, the ritualised brutality appears to be a desperate effort by the old man to compensate for his own emasculation in war and unresolved trauma now that the war is ended. This plays out in complicated fashion in the development of David Meredith in Clean Straw for Nothing, Johnston’s sequel to My Brother Jack.The imputation is that Pop Meredith practices violence in an attempt to reassert his failed masculinity and reinstate his status as the head of the household. Older son Jack’s beatings cease when, as a more physically able young man, he is able to threaten the aggressor with violent retaliation. This action does not spare the younger weaker Davy who remains dominated. “My beating continued, more ferociously than ever, … . They ceased only because one day my father went too far; he lambasted me so savagely that I fell unconscious into the bath-tub, and the welts across my back made by the steel end of the razor-strop had to be treated by a doctor” (53).Pop Meredith is persistently reminded that he has no corporeal signifiers of war trauma (only a cough); he is surrounded by physically disabled former soldiers who are presumed to be worse off than he on account of somatic wounding. He becomes “morose, intolerant, bitter and violently bad-tempered”, expressing particular “displeasure and resentment” toward his wife, a trained nurse, who has assumed carer responsibilities for homing the injured men: “he had altogether lost patience with her role of Florence Nightingale to the halt and the lame” (40). Their marriage is loveless: “one can only suppose that he must have been darkly and profoundly disturbed by the years-long procession through our house of Mother’s ‘waifs and strays’—those shattered former comrades-in-arms who would have been a constant and sinister reminder of the price of glory” (43); a price he had failed to adequately pay with his uncompromised body intact.Looking back, a more mature David Meredith attempts to establish order, perspective and understanding to the “mess of memory and impressions” of his war-affected childhood in an effort to wrest control back over his postmemory violation: “Jack and I must have spent a good part of our boyhood in the fixed belief that grown-up men who were complete were pretty rare beings—complete, that is, in that they had their sight or hearing or all of their limbs” (8). While the father is physically complete, his brooding presence sets the tone for the oppressively “dark experience” within the family home where all rooms are “inhabited by the jetsam that the Somme and the Marne and the salient at Ypres and the Gallipoli beaches had thrown up” (18). It is not until Davy explores the contents of the “big deep drawer at the bottom of the cedar wardrobe” in his parents’ bedroom that he begins to “sense a form in the shadow” of the “faraway experience” that had been the war. The drawer contains his father’s service revolver and ammunition, battlefield souvenirs and French postcards but, “most important of all, the full set of the Illustrated War News” (19), with photographs of battlefield carnage. These are the equivalent of Hirsch’s photographs of the Holocaust that establish in Meredith an ontology that links him more realistically to the brutalising past and source of his ongoing traumatistion (Hirsch). From these, Davy begins to discern something of his father’s torment but also good fortune at having survived, and he makes curatorial interventions not by becoming a custodian of abjection like second generation Holocaust survivors but by disposing of the printed material, leaving behind artefacts of heroism: gun, the bullets, the medals and ribbons. The implication is that he has now become complicit in the very narrative that had oppressed him since his father’s return from war.No one apparently notices or at least comments on the removal of the journals, the images of which become linked in the young boys mind to an incident outside a “dilapidated narrow-fronted photographer’s studio which had been deserted and padlocked for as long as I could remember”. A number of sun-damaged photographs are still displayed in the window. Faded to a “ghostly, deathly pallor”, and speckled with fly droppings, years earlier, they had captured young men in uniforms before embarkation for the war. An “agate-eyed” boy from Davy’s school joins in the gazing, saying nothing for a long time until the silence is broken: “all them blokes there is dead, you know” (20).After the unnamed boy departs with a nonchalant “hoo-roo”, young Davy runs “all the way home, trying not to cry”. He cannot adequately explain the reason for his sudden reaction: “I never after that looked in the window of the photographer’s studio or the second hand shop”. From that day on Davy makes a “long detour” to ensure he never passes the shops again (20-1). Having witnessed images of pre-war undamaged young men in the prime of their youth, he has come face-to-face with the consequences of war which he is unable to reconcile in terms of the survival and return of his much older father.The photographs of the young men establishes a causal connection to the physically wrecked remnants that have shaped Davy’s childhood. These are the living remains that might otherwise have been the “corpses sprawled in mud or drowned in flooded shell craters” depicted in the Illustrated News. The photograph of the young men establishes Davy’s connection to the things “propped up our hallway”, of “Bert ‘sobbing’ in the backyard and Gabby Dixon’s face at the dark end of the room”, and only reluctantly the “bronchial cough of my father going off in the dawn light to the tramways depot” (18).That is to say, Davy has begun to piece together sense from senselessness, his father’s complicity and survival—and, by association, his own implicated life and psychological wounding. He has approached the source of his father’s abjection and also his own though he continues to be unable to accept and forgive. Like his father—though at the remove—he has been damaged by the legacies of the war and is also its victim.Ravaged by tuberculosis and alcoholism, George Johnston died in 1970. According to the artist Sidney Nolan he had for years resembled the ghastly photographs of survivors of the Holocaust (Marr 278). George’s forty five year old alcoholic wife Charmian Clift predeceased him by twelve months, having committed suicide in 1969. Four years later, in 1973, George and Charmian’s twenty four year old daughter Shane also took her own life. Their son Martin drank himself to death and died of organ failure at the age of forty three in 1990. They are all “dead, you know”.ReferencesAWM. Fifth Field Company, Australian Engineers. Diaries, AWM4 Sub-class 14/24.“Enlistment Report”. Reveille, 29 Sep. 1928.Hirsch, Marianne. “The Generation of Postmemory.” Poetics Today 29.1 (Spring 2008): 103-128. <https://read.dukeupress.edu/poetics-today/article/29/1/103/20954/The-Generation-of-Postmemory>.Johnston, George. Clean Straw for Nothing. London: Collins, 1969.———. My Brother Jack. London: Collins, 1964.Kinnane, Garry. George Johnston: A Biography. Melbourne: Nelson, 1986.Lawler, Clark. Consumption and Literature: the Making of the Romantic Disease. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006.Marr, David, ed. Patrick White Letters. Sydney: Random House, 1994.Murphy, Ffion, and Richard Nile. “Gallipoli’s Troubled Hearts: Fear, Nerves and Repatriation.” Studies in Western Australian History 32 (2018): 25-38.NAA. John George Johnston War Service Records. <https://recordsearch.naa.gov.au/SearchNRetrieve/Interface/ViewImage.aspx?B=1830166>.“Soldiers Return by the Kildonan Castle.” Sydney Morning Herald, 10 May 1919: 18.Thomson, Alistair. Anzac Memories: Living with the Legend. Clayton: Monash UP, 2013.

Introduction: Socialism – from Eternal Reality to Passing DreamThe Year of Revolutions in 1989 presaged the end of the Cold War. For many people, it must have felt like the end of the Twentieth Century, and the 1990s a period of waiting for the Millennium. However, the 1990s was, in fact, a period of profound transformation in the post-Socialist world.In early representations of Socialism’s end, a dominant narrative was that of collapse. Dramatic events, such as the dismantling of the Berlin Wall in Germany enabled representation of the end as an unexpected moment. Senses of unexpectedness rested on erstwhile perceptions of Socialism as eternal.In contrast, the 1990s came to be a decade of revision in which thinking switched from considering Socialism’s persistence to asking, “why it went wrong?” I explore this question in relation to former-Yugoslavia. In brief, the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRY) was replaced through the early 1990s by six independent nation states: Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia, and Slovenia. Kosovo came much later. In the states that were significantly ethnically mixed, the break-up was accompanied by violence. Bosnia in the 1990s will be remembered for an important contribution to the lexicon of ideas – ethnic cleansing.Revisionist historicising of the former-Yugoslavia in the 1990s was led by the scholarly community. By and large, it discredited the Ancient Ethnic Hatreds (AEH) thesis commonly held by nationalists, simplistic media commentators and many Western politicians. The AEH thesis held that Socialism’s end was a consequence of the up-swelling of primordial (natural) ethnic tensions. Conversely, the scholarly community tended to view Socialism’s failure as an outcome of systemic economic and political deficiencies in the SFRY, and that these deficiencies were also, in fact the root cause of those ethnic tensions. And, it was argued that had such deficiencies been addressed earlier Socialism may have survived and fulfilled its promise of eternity (Verdery).A third significant perspective which emerged through the 1990s was that the collapse of Socialism was an outcome of the up-swelling of, if not primordial ethnic tensions then, at least repressed historical memories of ethnic tensions, especially of the internecine violence engendered locally by Nazi and Italian Fascist forces in WWII. This perspective was particularly en vogue within the unusually rich arts scene in former-Yugoslavia. Its leading exponent was Slovenian avant-garde rock band Laibach.In this article, I consider Laibach’s career and methods. For background the article draws substantially on Alexei Monroe’s excellent biography of Laibach, Interrogation Machine: Laibach and NSK (2005). However, as I indicate below, my interpretation diverges very significantly from Monroe’s. Laibach’s most significant body of work is the cover versions of Western pop songs it recorded in the middle part of its career. Using a technique that has been labelled retroquotation (Monroe), it subtly transforms the lyrical content, and radically transforms the musical arrangement of pop songs, thereby rendering them what might be described as martial anthems. The clearest illustration of the process is Laibach’s version of Opus’s one hit wonder “Live is Life”, which is retitled as “Life is Life” (Laibach 1987).Conventional scholarly interpretations of Laibach’s method (including Monroe’s) present it as entailing the uncovering of repressed forms of individual and collective totalitarian consciousness. I outline these ideas, but supplement them with an alternative interpretation. I argue that in the cover version stage of its career, Laibach switched its attention from seeking to uncover repressed totalitarianism towards uncovering repressed memories of ethnic tension, especially from WWII. Furthermore, I argue that its creative medium of Western pop music is especially important in this regard. On the bases of ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Bosnia (University of Melbourne Human Ethics project 1544213.1), and of a reading of SFRY’s geopolitical history, I demonstrate that for many people, Western popular cultural forms came to represent the quintessence of what it was to be Yugoslav. In this context, Laibach’s retroquotation of Western pop music is akin to a broader cultural practice in the post-SFRY era in which symbols of the West were iconoclastically transformed. Such transformation served to reveal a public secret (Taussig) of repressed historic ethnic enmity within the very heart of things that were regarded as quintessentially and pan-ethnically Yugoslav. And, in so doing, this delegitimised memory of SFRY ever having been a properly functioning entity. In this way, Laibach contributed significantly to a broader process in which perceptions of Socialist Yugoslavia came to be rendered less as a reality with the potential for eternity than a passing dream.What Is Laibach and What Does It Do?Originally of the industrial rock genre, Laibach has evolved through numerous other genres including orchestral rock, choral rock and techno. It is not, however, a rock group in any conventional sense. Laibach is the musical section of a tripartite unit named Neue Slowenische Kunst (NSK) which also encompasses the fine arts collective Irwin and a variety of theatre groups.Laibach was the name by which the Slovenian capital Ljubljana was known under the Austrian Habsburg Empire and then Nazi occupation in WWII. The choice of name hints at a central purpose of Laibach and NSK in general, to explore the relationship between art and ideology, especially under conditions of totalitarianism. In what follows, I describe how Laibach go about doing this.Laibach’s central method is eclecticism, by which symbols of the various ideological regimes that are its and the NSK’s subject matter are intentionally juxtaposed. Eclecticism of this kind was characteristic of the postmodern aesthetics typical of the 1990s. Furthermore, and counterintuitively perhaps, postmodernism was as much a condition of the Socialist East as it was the Capitalist West. As Mikhail N. Epstein argues, “Totalitarianism itself may be viewed as a specific postmodern model that came to replace the modernist ideological stance elaborated in earlier Marxism” (102). However, Western and Eastern postmodernisms were fundamentally different. In particular, while the former was largely playful, ironicising and depoliticised, the latter, which Laibach and NSK may be regarded as being illustrative of, involved placing in opposition to one another competing and antithetical aesthetic, political and social regimes, “without the contradictions being fully resolved” (Monroe 54).The performance of unresolved contradictions in Laibach’s work fulfils three principal functions. It works to (1) reveal hidden underlying connections between competing ideological systems, and between art and power more generally. This is evident in Life is Life. The video combines symbols of Slovenian romantic nationalism (stags and majestic rural landscapes) with Nazism and militarism (uniforms, bodily postures and a martial musical arrangement). Furthermore, it presents images of the graves of victims of internecine violence in WWII. The video is a reminder to Slovenian viewers of a discomforting public secret within their nation’s history. While Germany is commonly viewed as a principal oppressor of Slovenian nationalism, the rural peasantry, who are represented as embodying Slovenian nationalism most, were also the most willing collaborators in imperialist processes of Germanicisation. The second purpose of the performance of unresolved contradictions in Laibach’s work is to (2) engender senses of the alienation, especially as experienced by the subjects of totalitarian regimes. Laibach’s approach in this regard is quite different to that of punk, whose concern with alienation - symbolised by safety pins and chains - was largely celebratory of the alienated condition. Rather, Laibach took a lead from seminal industrial rock bands such as Einstürzende Neubauten and Throbbing Gristle (see, for example, Walls of Sound (Throbbing Gristle 2004)), whose sound one fan accurately describes as akin to, “the creation of the universe by an angry titan/God and a machine apocalypse all rolled into one” (rateyourmusic.com). Certainly, Laibach’s shows can be uncomfortable experiences too, involving not only clashing symbols and images, but also the dissonant sounds of, for example, martial music, feedback, recordings of the political speeches of totalitarian leaders and barking dogs, all played at eardrum-breaking high volumes. The purpose of this is to provide, as Laibach state: “a ritualized demonstration of political force” (NSK, Neue Slowenische Kunst 44). In short, more than simply celebrating the experience of totalitarian alienation, Laibach’s intention is to reproduce that very alienation.More than performatively representing tyranny, and thereby senses of totalitarian alienation, Laibach and NSK set out to embody it themselves. In particular, and contra the forms of liberal humanism that were hegemonic at the peak of their career in the 1990s, their organisation was developed as a model of totalitarian collectivism in which the individual is always subjugated. This is illustrated in the Onanigram (NSK, Neue Slowenische Kunst), which, mimicking the complexities of the SFRY in its most totalitarian dispensation, maps out in labyrinthine detail the institutional structure of NSK. Behaviour is governed by a Constitution that states explicitly that NSK is a group in which, “each individual is subordinated to the whole” (NSK, Neue Slowenische Kunst 273). Lest this collectivism be misconceived as little more than a show, the case of Tomaž Hostnik is instructive. The original lead singer of Laibach, Hostnik committed ritual suicide by hanging himself from a hayrack, a key symbol of Slovenian nationalism. Initially, rather than mourning his loss, the other members of Laibach posthumously disenfranchised him (“threw him out of the band”), presumably for his act of individual will that was collectively unsanctioned.Laibach and the NSK’s collectivism also have spiritual overtones. The Onanigram presents an Immanent Consistent Spirit, a kind of geist that holds the collective together. NSK claim: “Only God can subdue LAIBACH. People and things never can” (NSK, Neue Slowenische Kunst 289). Furthermore, such rhetorical bombast was matched in aspiration. Most famously, in one of the first instances of a micro-nation, NSK went on to establish itself as a global and virtual non-territorial state, replete with a recruitment drive, passports and anthem, written and performed by Laibach of course. Laibach’s CareerLaibach’s career can be divided into three overlapping parts. The first is its career as a political provocateur, beginning from the inception of the band in 1980 and continuing through to the present. The band’s performances have touched the raw nerves of several political actors. As suggested above, Laibach offended Slovenian nationalists. The band offended the SFRY, especially when in its stage backdrop it juxtaposed images of a penis with Marshal Josip Broz “Tito”, founding President of the SFRY. Above all, it offended libertarians who viewed the band’s exploitation of totalitarian aesthetics as a route to evoking repressed totalitarian energies in its audiences.In a sense the libertarians were correct, for Laibach were quite explicit in representing a third function of their performance of unresolved contradictions as being to (3) evoke repressed totalitarian energies. However, as Žižek demonstrates in his essay “Why Are Laibach and NSK Not Fascists”, Laibach’s intent in this regard is counter-totalitarian. Laibach engage in what amounts to a “psychoanalytic cure” for totalitarianism, which consists of four envisaged stages. The consumers of Laibach’s works and performances go through a process of over-identification with totalitarianism, leading through the experience of alienation to, in turn, disidentification and an eventual overcoming of that totalitarian alienation. The Žižekian interpretation of the four stages has, however been subjected to critique, particularly by Deleuzian scholars, and especially for its psychoanalytic emphasis on the transformation of individual (un)consciousness (i.e. the cerebral rather than bodily). Instead, such scholars prefer a schizoanalytic interpretation which presents the cure as, respectively collective (Monroe 45-50) and somatic (Goddard). Laibach’s works and pronouncements display, often awareness of such abstract theoretical ideas. However, they also display attentiveness to the concrete realities of socio-political context. This was reflected especially in the 1990s, when its focus seemed to shift from the matter of totalitarianism to the overriding issue of the day in Laibach’s homeland – ethnic conflict. For example, echoing the discourse of Truth and Reconciliation emanating from post-Apartheid South Africa in the early 1990s, Laibach argued that its work is “based on the premise that traumas affecting the present and the future can be healed only by returning to the initial conflicts” (NSK Padiglione).In the early 1990s era of post-socialist violent ethnic nationalism, statements such as this rendered Laibach a darling of anti-nationalism, both within civil society and in what came to be known pejoratively as the Yugonostagic, i.e. pro-SFRY left. Its darling status was cemented further by actions such as performing a concert to celebrate the end of the Bosnian war in 1996, and because its ideological mask began to slip. Most famously, when asked by a music journalist the standard question of what the band’s main influences were, rather than citing other musicians Laibach stated: “Tito, Tito and Tito.” Herein lies the third phase of Laibach’s career, dating from the mid-1990s to the present, which has been marked by critical recognition and mainstream acceptance, and in contrasting domains. Notably, in 2012 Laibach was invited to perform at the Tate Modern in London. Then, entering the belly of what is arguably the most totalitarian of totalitarian beasts in 2015, it became the first rock band to perform live in North Korea.The middle part in Laibach’s career was between 1987 and 1996. This was when its work consisted mostly of covers of mainstream Western pop songs by, amongst others Opus, Queen, The Rolling Stones, and, in The Final Countdown (1986), Swedish ‘big hair’ rockers. It also covered entire albums, including a version of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s rock opera Jesus Christ Superstar. No doubt mindful of John Lennon’s claim that his band was more popular than the Messiah himself, Laibach covered the Beatles’ final album Let It Be (1970). Highlighting the perilous hidden connections between apparently benign and fascistic forms of sedentarism, lead singer Milan Fras’ snarling delivery of the refrain “Get Back to where you once belong” renders the hit single from that album less a story of homecoming than a sinister warning to immigrants and ethnic others who are out of place.This career middle stage invoked critique. However, commonplace suggestions that Laibach could be characterised as embodying Retromania, a derivative musical trend typical of the 1990s that has been lambasted for its de-politicisation and a musical conservatism enabled by new sampling technologies that afforded a forensic documentary precision that prohibits creative distortion (Reynolds), are misplaced. Several scholars highlight Laibach’s ceaseless attention to musical creativity in the pursuit of political subversiveness. For example, for Monroe, the cover version was a means for Laibach to continue its exploration of the connections between art and ideology, of illuminating the connections between competing ideological systems and of evoking repressed totalitarian energies, only now within Western forms of entertainment in which ideological power structures are less visible than in overt totalitarian propaganda. However, what often seems to escape intellectualist interpretations presented by scholars such as Žižek, Goddard and (albeit to a lesser extent) Monroe is the importance of the concrete specificities of the context that Laibach worked in in the 1990s – i.e. homeland ethno-nationalist politics – and, especially, their medium – i.e. Western pop music.The Meaning and Meaningfulness of Western Popular Culture in Former YugoslaviaThe Laibach covers were merely one of many celebrations of Western popular culture that emerged in pre- and post-socialist Yugoslavia. The most curious of these was the building of statues of icons of screen and stage. These include statues of Tarzan, Bob Marley, Rocky Balboa and, most famously, martial arts cinema legend Bruce Lee in the Bosnian city of Mostar.The pop monuments were often erected as symbols of peace in contexts of ethnic-national violence. Each was an ethnic hybrid. With the exception of original Tarzan Johnny Weismuller — an ethnic-German American immigrant from Serbia — none was remotely connected to the competing ethnic-national groups. Thus, it was surprising when these pop monuments became targets for iconoclasm. This was especially surprising because, in contrast, both the new ethnic-national monuments that were built and the old Socialist pan-Yugoslav monuments that remained in all their concrete and steel obduracy in and through the 1990s were left largely untouched.The work of Simon Harrison may give us some insight into this curious situation. Harrison questions the commonplace assumption that the strength of enmity between ethnic groups is related to their cultural dissimilarity — in short, the bigger the difference the bigger the biffo. By that logic, the new ethnic-national monuments erected in the post-SFRY era ought to have been vandalised. Conversely, however, Harrison argues that enmity may be more an outcome of similarity, at least when that similarity is torn asunder by other kinds of division. This is so because ownership of previously shared and precious symbols of identity appears to be seen as subjected to appropriation by ones’ erstwhile comrades who are newly othered in such moments.This is, indeed, exactly what happened in post-socialist former-Yugoslavia. Yugoslavs were rendered now as ethnic-nationals: Bosniaks (Muslims), Croats and Serbs in the case of Bosnia. In the process, the erection of obviously non-ethnic-national monuments by, now inevitably ethnic-national subjects was perceived widely as appropriation – “the Croats [the monument in Mostar was sculpted by Croatian artist Ivan Fijolić] are stealing our Bruce Lee,” as one of my Bosnian-Serb informants exclaimed angrily.However, this begs the question: Why would symbols of Western popular culture evoke the kinds of emotions that result in iconoclasm more so than other ethnically non-reducible ones such as those of the Partisans that are celebrated in the old Socialist pan-Yugoslav monuments? The answer lies in the geopolitical history of the SFRY. The Yugoslav-Soviet Union split in 1956 forced the SFRY to develop ever-stronger ties with the West. The effects of this became quotidian, especially as people travelled more or less freely across international borders and consumed the products of Western Capitalism. Many of the things they consumed became deeply meaningful. Notably, barely anybody above a certain age does not reminisce fondly about the moment when participation in martial arts became a nationwide craze following the success of Bruce Lee’s films in the golden (1970s-80s) years of Western-bankrolled Yugoslav prosperity.Likewise, almost everyone above a certain age recalls the balmy summer of 1985, whose happy zeitgeist seemed to be summed up perfectly by Austrian band Opus’s song “Live is Life” (1985). This tune became popular in Yugoslavia due to its apparently feelgood message about the joys of attending live rock performances. In a sense, these moments and the consumption of things “Western” in general came to symbolise everything that was good about Yugoslavia and, indeed to define what it was to be Yugoslavs, especially in comparison to their isolated and materially deprived socialist comrades in the Warsaw Pact countries.However, iconoclastic acts are more than mere emotional responses to offensive instances of cultural appropriation. As Michael Taussig describes, iconoclasm reveals the public secrets that the monuments it targets conceal. SFRY’s great public secret, known especially to those people old enough to have experienced the inter-ethnic violence of WWII, was ethnic division and the state’s deceit of the historic normalcy of pan-Yugoslav identification. The secret was maintained by a formal state policy of forgetting. For example, the wording on monuments in sites of inter-ethnic violence in WWII is commonly of the variety: “here lie the victims in Yugoslavia’s struggle against imperialist forces and their internal quislings.” Said quislings were, of course, actually Serbs, Croats, and Muslims (i.e. fellow Yugoslavs), but those ethnic nomenclatures were almost never used.In contrast, in a context where Western popular cultural forms came to define the very essence of what it was to be Yugoslav, the iconoclasm of Western pop monuments, and the retroquotation of Western pop songs revealed the repressed deceit and the public secret of the reality of inter-ethnic tension at the heart of that which was regarded as quintessentially Yugoslav. In this way, the memory of Yugoslavia ever having been a properly functioning entity was delegitimised. Consequently, Laibach and their kind served to render the apparent reality of the Yugoslav ideal as little more than a dream. ReferencesEpstein, Mikhail N. After the Future: The Paradoxes of Postmodernism and Contemporary Russian Culture. Amherst: U of Massachusettes P, 1995.Goddard, Michael. “We Are Time: Laibach/NSK, Retro-Avant-Gardism and Machinic Repetition,” Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities 11 (2006): 45-53.Harrison, Simon. “Identity as a Scarce Resource.” Social Anthropology 7 (1999): 239–251.Monroe, Alexei. Interrogation Machine: Laibach and NSK. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2005.NSK. Neue Slowenische Kunst. Ljubljana: NSK, 1986.NSK. Padiglione NSK. Ljubljana: Moderna Galerija, 1993.rateyourmusic.com. 2018. 3 Sep. 2018 <https://rateyourmusic.com/artist/throbbing-gristle>.Reynolds, Simon. Retromania: Pop Culture’s Addiction to Its Own Past. London: Faber and Faber, 2011.Taussig, Michael. Defacement: Public Secrecy and the Labor of the Negative. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999.Verdery, Katherine. What Was Socialism, and What Comes Next? Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Žižek, Slavoj. “Why Are Laibach and NSK Not Fascists?” 3 Sep. 2018 <www.nskstate.com/appendix/articles/why_are_laibach.php.>

Introduction «I have never worked in the technocratic exaltation, solving a constructive problem and that’s it. I’ve always tried to interpret the space of human life» (Vittorio Garatti). Vittorio Garatti (Milan, April 6, 1927) is certainly one of the last witnesses of one “heroic” season of Italian architecture. In 1957 he graduated in architecture from the Polytechnic of Milan with a thesis proposing the redesign of a portion of the historic centre of Milan: the area between “piazza della Scala”, “via Broletto”, “via Filodrammatici” and the gardens of the former Olivetti building in via Clerici. These are the years in which Ernesto Nathan Rogers established himself as one of the main personalities of Milanese culture. Garatti endorses the criticism expressed by Rogers to the approval of the Rationalist “language” in favour of an architecture that recovers the implications of the place and of material culture. The social responsibility of architecture and connections between architecture and other forms of artistic expression are the invariants of all the activity of the architect, artist and graphic designer of Garatti. It will be Ernesto Nathan Rogers who will offer him the possibility of experiencing these “contaminations” early: in 1954, together with Giuliano Cesari, Raffaella Crespi, Giampiero Pallavicini and Ferruccio Rezzonico, he designs the preparation of the exhibition on musical instruments at the 10th Milan Triennale. The temporary installations will be a privileged area in which Garatti will continue to experiment and integrate the qualities of artist, graphic designer and architect with each other. Significant examples of this approach are the Art Schools in Cuba 1961-63, the residential complex of Cusano Milanino in 1973, the Attico Cosimo del Fante in 1980, the fittings for the Bubasty shops in 1984, the Camogli residence in 1986, his house atelier in Brera in 1988 and the interiors of the Hotel Gallia in 1989. True architecture generates itself1: an approach that was consolidated over the years of collaboration with Raúl Villanueva in Venezuela and is fulfilled in Cuba in the project of the Art Schools, where Garatti makes use of a plurality of tools that cannot be rigidly confined to the world of architecture. In 1957, in Caracas, he came into contact with Ricardo Porro and Roberto Gottardi. Ricardo Porro, who returned to Cuba in 1960, will be the one to involve Vittorio Garatti and Roberto Gottardi in the Escuelas Nacional de Arte project. The three young architects will be the protagonists of a happy season of the architecture of the Revolution, they will be crossed by that “revolutionary” energy that Ricardo Porro has defined as “magical realism”. As Garatti recalls: it was a special moment. We designed the Schools using a method developed in Venezuela. We started from an analysis of the context, understood not only as physical reality. We studied Cuban poets and painters. Wifredo Lam was a great reference. For example, Lezama Lima’s work is clearly recalled in the plan of the School of Ballet. We were pervaded by the spirit of the revolution. The contamination between knowledge and disciplines, the belief that architecture is a “parasitic” discipline are some of the themes at the centre of the conversation that follows, from which a working method that recognizes architecture as a “social transformation” task emerges, more precisely an art with a social purpose. Garatti often cites Porro’s definition of architecture: architecture is the poetic frame within which human life takes place. To Garatti architecture is a self-generating process, and as such it cannot find fulfilment within its disciplinary specificity: the disciplinary autonomy is a contradiction in terms. Architecture cannot be self-referencing, it generates itself precisely because it finds the sense of its social responsibility outside of itself. No concession to trends, to self-referencing, to the “objectification of architecture”, to its spectacularization. Garatti as Eupalino Valery shuns “mute architectures” and instead prefers singing architectures. A Dialogue of Luigi Alini with Vittorio Garatti Luigi Alini. Let’s start with some personal data. Vittorio Garatti. I was born in Milan on April 6, 1927. My friend Emilio Vedova told me that life could be considered as a sequence of encounters with people, places and facts. My sculptor grandfather played an important role in my life. I inherited the ability to perceive the dimensional quality of space, its plasticity, spatial vision from him. L.A. Your youth training took place in a dramatic phase of history of our country. Living in Milan during the war years must not have been easy. V.G. In October 1942 in Milan there was one of the most tragic bombings that the city has suffered. A bomb exploded in front of the Brera Academy, where the Dalmine offices were located. With a group of boys we went to the rooftops. We saw the city from above, with the roofs partially destroyed. I still carry this image inside me, it is part of that museum of memory that Luciano Semerani often talks about. This image probably resurfaced when I designed the ballet school. The idea of a promenade on the roofs to observe the landscape came from this. L.A. You joined the Faculty of Architecture at the Milan Polytechnic in May 1946-47. V.G. Milan and Italy were like in those years. The impact with the University was not positive, I was disappointed with the quality of the studies. L.A. You have had an intense relationship with the artists who gravitate around Brera, which you have always considered very important for your training. V.G. In 1948 I met Ilio Negri, a graphic designer. Also at Brera there was a group of artists (Morlotti, Chighine, Dova, Crippa) who frequented the Caffè Brera, known as “Bar della Titta”. Thanks to these visits I had the opportunity to broaden my knowledge. As you know, I maintain that there are life’s appointments and lightning strikes. The release of Dada magazine provided real enlightenment for me: I discovered the work of Kurt Schwitters, Theo Van Doesburg, the value of the image and three-dimensionality. L.A. You collaborated on several projects with Ilio Negri. V.G. In 1955 we created the graphics of the Lagostina brand, which was then also used for the preparation of the exhibition at the “Fiera Campionaria” in Milan. We also worked together for the Lerici steel industry. There was an extraordinary interaction with Ilio. L.A. The cultural influence of Ernesto Nathan Rogers was strong in the years you studied at the Milan Polytechnic. He influenced the cultural debate by establishing himself as one of the main personalities of the Milanese architectural scene through the activity of the BBPR studio but even more so through the direction of Domus (from ‘46 to ‘47) and Casabella Continuità (from ‘53 to ‘65). V.G. When I enrolled at the university he was not yet a full professor and he was very opposed. As you know, he coined the phrase: God created the architect, the devil created the colleague. In some ways it is a phrase that makes me rethink the words of Ernesto Che Guevara: beware of bureaucrats, because they can delay a revolution for 50 years. Rogers was the man of culture and the old “bureaucratic” apparatus feared that his entry into the University would sanction the end of their “domain”. L.A. In 1954, together with Giuliano Cesari, Raffella Crespi, Giampiero Pallavicini and Ferruccio Rezzonico, all graduating students of the Milan Polytechnic, you designed the staging of the exhibition on musical instruments at the 10th Milan Triennale. V.G. The project for the Exhibition of Musical Instruments at the Milan Triennale was commissioned by Rogers, with whom I subsequently collaborated for the preparation of the graphic part of the Castello Sforzesco Museum, together with Ilio Negri. We were given a very small budget for this project. We decided to prepare a sequence of horizontal planes hanging in a void. These tops also acted as spacers, preventing people from touching the tools. Among those exhibited there were some very valuable ones. We designed slender structures to be covered with rice paper. The solution pleased Rogers very much, who underlined the dialogue that was generated between the exhibited object and the display system. L.A. You graduated on March 14, 1957. V.G. The project theme that I developed for the thesis was the reconstruction of Piazza della Scala. While all the other classmates were doing “lecorbusierani” projects without paying much attention to the context, for my part I worked trying to have a vision of the city. I tried to bring out the specificities of that place with a vision that Ernesto Nathan Rogers had brought me to. I then found this vision of the city in the work of Giuseppe De Finetti. I tried to re-propose a vision of space and its “atmospheres”, a theme that Alberto Savinio also refers to in Listen to your heart city, from 1944. L.A. How was your work received by the thesis commission? V.G. It was judged too “formal” by Emiliano Gandolfi, but Piero Portaluppi did not express himself positively either. The project did not please. Also consider the cultural climate of the University of those years, everyone followed the international style of the CIAM. I was not very satisfied with the evaluation expressed by the commissioners, they said that the project was “Piranesian”, too baroque. The critique of culture rationalist was not appreciated. Only at IUAV was there any great cultural ferment thanks to Bruno Zevi. L.A. After graduation, you left for Venezuela. V.G. With my wife Wanda, in 1957 I joined my parents in Caracas. In Venezuela I got in touch with Paolo Gasparini, an extraordinary Italian photographer, Ricardo Porro and Roberto Gottardi, who came from Venice and had worked in Ernesto Nathan Rogers’ studio in Milan. Ricardo Porro worked in the office of Carlos Raúl Villanueva. The Cuban writer and literary critic Alejo Carpentier also lived in Caracas at that time. L.A. Carlos Raul Villanueva was one of the protagonists of Venezuelan architecture. His critical position in relation to the Modern Movement and the belief that it was necessary to find an “adaptation” to the specificities of local traditions, the characteristics of the places and the Venezuelan environment, I believe, marked your subsequent Cuban experience with the creative recovery of some elements of traditional architecture such as the portico, the patio, but also the use of traditional materials and technologies that you have masterfully reinterpreted. I think we can also add to these “themes” the connections between architecture and plastic arts. You also become a professor of Architectural Design at the Escuela de Arquitectura of the Central University of Caracas. V.G. On this academic experience I will tell you a statement by Porro that struck me very much: The important thing was not what I knew, I did not have sufficient knowledge and experience. What I could pass on to the students was above all a passion. In two years of teaching I was able to deepen, understand things better and understand how to pass them on to students. The Faculty of Architecture had recently been established and this I believe contributed to fuel the great enthusiasm that emerges from the words by Porro. Porro favoured mine and Gottardi’s entry as teachers. Keep in mind that in those years Villanueva was one of the most influential Venezuelan intellectuals and had played a leading role in the transformation of the University. Villanueva was very attentive to the involvement of art in architecture, just think of the magnificent project for the Universidad Central in Caracas, where he worked together with artists such as the sculptor Calder. I had recently graduated and found myself catapulted into academic activity. It was a strange feeling for a young architect who graduated with a minimum grade. At the University I was entrusted with the Architectural Design course. The relationships with the context, the recovery of some elements of tradition were at the centre of the interests developed with the students. Among these students I got to know the one who in the future became my chosen “brother”: Sergio Baroni. Together we designed all the services for the 23rd district that Carlos Raúl Villanueva had planned to solve the favelas problem. In these years of Venezuelan frequentation, Porro also opened the doors of Cuba to me. Through Porro I got to know the work of Josè Martì, who claimed: cult para eser libre. I also approached the work of Josè Lezama Lima, in my opinion one of the most interesting Cuban intellectuals, and the painting of Wilfredo Lam. L.A. In December 1959 the Revolution triumphed in Cuba. Ricardo Porro returned to Cuba in August 1960. You and Gottardi would join him in December and begin teaching at the Facultad de Arcuitectura. Your contribution to the training of young students took place in a moment of radical cultural change within which the task of designing the Schools was also inserted: the “new” architecture had to give concrete answers but also give “shape” to a new model of society. V.G. After the triumph of the Revolution, acts of terrorism began. At that time in the morning, I checked that they hadn’t placed a bomb under my car. Eisenhower was preparing the invasion. Life published an article on preparing for the invasion of the counterrevolutionary brigades. With Eisenhower dead, Kennedy activated the programme by imposing one condition: in conjunction with the invasion, the Cuban people would have to rise up. Shortly before the attempted invasion, the emigration, deemed temporary, of doctors, architects, university teachers etc. began. They were all convinced they would return to “liberated Cuba” a few weeks later. Their motto was: it is impossible for Americans to accept the triumph of the rebel army. As is well known, the Cuban people did not rise up. The revolutionary process continued and had no more obstacles. The fact that the bourgeois class and almost all the professionals had left Cuba put the country in a state of extreme weakness. The sensation was of great transformation taking place, it was evident. In that “revolutionary” push there was nothing celebratory. All available energies were invested in the culture. There were extraordinary initiatives, from the literacy campaign to the founding of international schools of medicine and of cinema. In Cuba it was decided to close schools for a year and to entrust elementary school children with the task of travelling around the country and teaching illiterate adults. In the morning they worked in the fields and in the evening they taught the peasants to read and write. In order to try to block this project, the counter-revolutionaries killed two children in an attempt to scare the population and the families of the literate children. There was a wave of popular indignation and the programme continued. L.A. Ricardo Porro was commissioned to design the Art Schools. Roberto Gottardi recalls that: «the wife of the Minister of Public Works, Selma Diaz, asked Porro to build the national art schools. The architecture had to be completely new and the schools, in Fidel’s words, the most beautiful in the world. All accomplished in six months. Take it or leave it! [...] it was days of rage and enthusiasm in which all areas of public life was run by an agile and imaginative spirit of warfare»2. You too remembered several times that: that architecture was born from a life experience, it incorporated enthusiasm for life and optimism for the future. V.G. The idea that generated them was to foster the cultural encounter between Africa, Asia and Latin America. A “place” for meeting and exchanging. A place where artists from all over the third world could interact freely. The realisation of the Schools was like receiving a “war assignment”. Fidel Castro and Ernesto Che Guevara selected the Country Club as the place to build a large training centre for all of Latin America. They understood that it was important to foster the Latin American union, a theme that Simón Bolivar had previously wanted to pursue. Il Ché and Fidel, returning from the Country Club, along the road leading to the centre of Havana, met Selma Diaz, architect and wife of Osmany Cienfuegos, the Cuban Construction Minister. Fidel Castro and Ernesto Che Guevara entrusted Selma Diaz with the task of designing this centre. She replied: I had just graduated, how could I deal with it? Then she adds: Riccardo Porro returned to Cuba with two Italian architects. Just think, three young architects without much experience catapulted into an assignment of this size. The choice of the place where to build the schools was a happy intuition of Fidel Castro and Ernesto Che Guevara. L.A. How did the confrontation develop? V.G. We had total freedom, but we had to respond to a functional programme defined with the heads of the schools. Five directors were appointed, one for each school. We initially thought of a citadel. A proposal that did not find acceptance among the Directors, who suggest thinking of five autonomous schools. We therefore decide to place the schools on the edge of the large park and to reuse all the pre-existing buildings. We imagined schools as “stations” to cross. The aim was to promote integration with the environment in which they were “immersed”. Schools are not closed spaces. We established, for example, that there would be no doors: when “everything was ours” there could not be a public and a private space, only the living space existed. L.A. Ricardo Porro recalled: I organised our study in the chapel of the former residence of the Serrà family in Vadado. It was a wonderful place [...]. A series of young people from the school of architecture came to help us […]. Working in that atmosphere, all night and all day was a poetic experience (Loomis , 1999). V.G. We felt like Renaissance architects. We walked around the park and discussed where to locate the schools. Imagine three young people discussing with total, unthinkable freedom. We decided that each of us would deal with one or more schools, within a global vision that was born from the comparison. I chose the Ballet School. Ivan Espin had to design the music school but in the end I did it because Ivan had health problems. Porro decided to take care of the School of Plastic Arts to support his nature as a sculptor. Gottardi had problems with the actors and directors, who could not produce a shared functional programme, which with the dancers was quite simple to produce. The reasons that led us to choose the different project themes were very simple and uncomplicated, as were those for identifying the areas. I liked hidden lands, I was interested in developing a building “embedded” in the ground. Ricardo, on the other hand, chose a hill on which arrange the school of Modern Art. Each of us chose the site almost instinctively. For the Classical Dance School, the functional programme that was provided to me was very meagre: a library, a deanery, an infirmary, three ballet classrooms, theoretical classrooms and one of choreography. We went to see the dancers while they were training and dancing with Porro. The perception was immediate that we had to think of concave and convex spaces that would welcome their movements in space. For a more organic integration with the landscape and to accommodate the orography of the area, we also decided to place the buildings in a “peripheral” position with respect to the park, a choice that allowed us not to alter the nature of the park too much but also to limit the distances to be covered from schools to homes. Selma Diaz added others to the first indications: remember that we have no iron, we have little of everything, but we have many bricks. These were the indications that came to us from the Ministry of Construction. We were also asked to design some large spaces, such as gyms. Consequently, we found ourselves faced with the need to cover large spans without being able to resort to an extensive use of reinforced concrete or wood. L.A. How was the comparison between you designers? V.G. The exchange of ideas was constant, the experiences flowed naturally from one work group to another, but each operated in total autonomy. Each design group had 5-6 students in it. In my case I was lucky enough to have Josè Mosquera among my collaborators, a brilliant modest student, a true revolutionary. The offices where we worked on the project were organised in the Club, which became our “headquarters”. We worked all night and in the morning we went to the construction site. For the solution of logistical problems and the management of the building site of the Ballet School, I was entrusted with an extraordinary bricklayer, a Maestro de Obra named Bacallao. During one of the meetings that took place daily at the construction site, Bacallao told me that in Batista’s time the architects arrived in the morning at the workplace all dressed in white and, keeping away from the construction site to avoid getting dusty, they transferred orders on what to do. In this description by we marvelled at the fact that we were in the construction site together with him to face and discuss how to solve the different problems. In this construction site the carpenters did an extraordinary job, they had considerable experience. Bacallao was fantastic, he could read the drawings and he managed the construction site in an impeccable way. We faced and solved problems and needs that the yard inevitably posed on a daily basis. One morning, for example, arriving at the construction site, I realised the impact that the building would have as a result of its total mono-materiality. I was “scared” by this effect. My eye fell on an old bathtub, inside which there were pieces of 10x10 tiles, then I said to Bacallao: we will cover the wedges between the ribs of the bovedas covering the Ballet and Choreography Theatre classrooms with the tiles. The yard also lived on decisions made directly on site. Also keep in mind that the mason teams assigned to each construction site were independent. However the experience between the groups of masons engaged in the different activities circulated, flowed. There was a constant confrontation. For the workers the involvement was total, they were building for their children. A worker who told me: I’m building the school where my son will come to study. Ricardo Porro was responsible for the whole project, he was a very cultured man. In the start-up phase of the project he took us to Trinidad, the old Spanish capital. He wanted to show us the roots of Cuban architectural culture. On this journey I was struck by the solution of fan windows, by the use of verandas, all passive devices which were entrusted with the control and optimisation of the comfort of the rooms. Porro accompanied us to those places precisely because he wanted to put the value of tradition at the centre of the discussion, he immersed us in colonial culture. L.A. It is to that “mechanism” of self-generation of the project that you have referred to on several occasions? V.G. Yes, just that. When I design, I certainly draw from that stratified “grammar of memory”, to quote Luciano Semerani, which lives within me. The project generates itself, is born and then begins to live a life of its own. A writer traces the profile and character of his characters, who gradually come to life with a life of their own. In the same way the creative process in architecture is self-generated. L.A. Some problems were solved directly on site, dialoguing with the workers. V.G. He went just like that. Many decisions were made on site as construction progressed. Design and construction proceeded contextually. The dialogue with the workers was fundamental. The creative act was self-generated and lived a life of its own, we did nothing but “accompany” a process. The construction site had a speed of execution that required the same planning speed. In the evening we worked to solve problems that the construction site posed. The drawings “aged” rapidly with respect to the speed of decisions and the progress of the work. The incredible thing about this experience is that three architects with different backgrounds come to a “unitary” project. All this was possible because we used the same materials, the same construction technique, but even more so because there was a similar interpretation of the place and its possibilities. L.A. The project of the Music School also included the construction of 96 cubicles, individual study rooms, a theatre for symphonic music and one for chamber music and Italian opera. You “articulated” the 96 cubicles along a 360-metre-long path that unfolds in the landscape providing a “dynamic” view to those who cross it. A choice consistent with the vision of the School as an open place integrated with the environment. V.G. The “Gusano” is a volume that follows the orography of the terrain. It was a common sense choice. By following the level lines I avoided digging and of course I quickly realized what was needed by distributing the volumes horizontally. Disarticulation allows the changing vision of the landscape, which changes continuously according to the movement of the user. The movements do not take place along an axis, they follow a sinuous route, a connecting path between trees and nature. The cubicles lined up along the Gusano are individual study rooms above which there are the collective test rooms. On the back of the Gusano, in the highest part of the land, I placed the theatre for symphonic music, the one for chamber music, the library, the conference rooms, the choir and administration. L.A. In 1962 the construction site stopped. V.G. In 1962 Cuba fell into a serious political and economic crisis, which is what caused the slowdown and then the abandonment of the school site. Cuba was at “war” and the country’s resources were directed towards other needs. In this affair, the architect Quintana, one of the most powerful officials in Cuba, who had always expressed his opposition to the project, contributed to the decision to suspend the construction of the schools. Here is an extract from a writing by Sergio Baroni, which I consider clarifying: «The denial of the Art Schools represented the consolidation of the new Cuban technocratic regime. The designers were accused of aristocracy and individualism and the rest of the technicians who collaborated on the project were transferred to other positions by the Ministry of Construction [...]. It was a serious mistake which one realises now, when it became evident that, with the Schools, a process of renewal of Cuban architecture was interrupted, which, with difficulty, had advanced from the years preceding the revolution and which they had extraordinarily accelerated and anchored to the new social project. On the other hand, and understandably, the adoption of easy pseudo-rationalist procedures prevailed to deal with the enormous demand for projects and constructions with the minimum of resources» (Baroni 1992). L.A. You also experienced dramatic moments in Cuba. I’m referring in particular to the insane accusation of being a CIA spy and your arrest. V.G. I wasn’t the only one arrested. The first was Jean Pierre Garnier, who remained in prison for seven days on charges of espionage. This was not a crazy accusation but one of the CIA’s plans to scare foreign technicians into leaving Cuba. Six months after Garnier, it was Heberto Padilla’s turn, an intellectual, who remained in prison for 15 days. After 6 months, it was my turn. I was arrested while leaving the Ministry of Construction, inside the bag I had the plans of the port. I told Corrieri, Baroni and Wanda not to notify the Italian Embassy, everything would be cleared up. L.A. Dear Vittorio, I thank you for the willingness and generosity with which you shared your human and professional experience. I am sure that many young students will find your “story” of great interest. V.G. At the end of our dialogue, I would like to remember my teacher: Ernesto Nathan Rogers. I’ll tell you an anecdote: in 1956 I was working on the graphics for the Castello Sforzesco Museum set up by the BBPR. Leaving the museum with Rogers, in the Rocchetta courtyard the master stopped and gives me a questioning look. Looking at the Filarete tower, he told me: we have the task of designing a skyscraper in the centre. Usually skyscrapers going up they shrink. Instead this tower has a protruding crown, maybe we too could finish our skyscraper so what do you think? I replied: beautiful! Later I thought that what Rogers evoked was a distinctive feature of our city. The characters of the cities and the masters who have consolidated them are to be respected. If there is no awareness of dialectical continuity, the city loses and gets lost. It is necessary to reconstruct the figure of the architect artist who has full awareness of his role in society. The work of architecture cannot be the result of a pure stylistic and functional choice, it must be the result of a method that takes various and multiple factors into analysis. In Cuba, for example, the musical tradition, the painting of Wilfredo Lam, whose pictorial lines are recognisable in the floor plan of the Ballet School, the literature of Lezama Lima and Alejo Carpentier and above all the Cuban Revolution were fundamental. We theorised this “total” method together with Ricardo Porro, remembering the lecture by Ernesto Nathan Rogers.

Many years ago, while studying in Paris as a novice postgraduate, I was invited to accompany a friend to a seminar with Jacques Derrida. I leapt at the chance even though I was only just learning French. Although I tried hard to follow the discussion, the extent of my participation was probably signing the attendance sheet. Afterwards, caught up on the edges of a small crowd of acolytes in the foyer as we waited out a sudden rainstorm, Derrida turned to me and charmingly complimented me on my forethought in predicting rain, pointing to my umbrella. Flustered, I garbled something in broken French about how I never forgot my umbrella, how desolated I was that he had mislaid his, and would he perhaps desire mine? After a small silence, where he and the other students side-eyed me warily, he declined. For years I dined on this story of meeting a celebrity academic, cheerfully re-enacting my linguistic ineptitude. Nearly a decade later I was taken aback when I overheard a lecturer in philosophy at the University of Sydney re-telling my encounter as a witty anecdote, where an early career academic teased Derrida with a masterful quip, quoting back to him his own attention to someone else’s quote. It turned out that Spurs, one of Derrida’s more obscure early essays, employs an extended riff on an inexplicable citation found in inverted commas in the margins of Nietzsche’s papers: “J’ai oublié mon parapluie” (“I have forgotten my umbrella”). My clumsy response to a polite enquiry was recast in a process of Chinese whispers in my academic community as a snappy spur-of-the-moment witticism. This re-telling didn’t just selectively edit my encounter, but remixed it with a meta-narrative that I had myself referenced, albeit unknowingly. My ongoing interest in the more playful breaches of scholarly conventions of quotation and attribution can be traced back to this incident, where my own presentation of an academic self was appropriated and remixed from fumbler to quipster. I’ve also been struck throughout my teaching career by the seeming disconnect between the stringent academic rules for referencing and citation and the everyday strategies of appropriation that are inherent to popular remix culture. I’m taking the opportunity in this paper to reflect on the practice of scholarly quotation itself, before examining some recent creative provocations to the academic ‘author’ situated inventively at the crossroad between scholarly convention and remix culture. Early in his own teaching career at Oxford University Lewis Carroll, wrote to his younger siblings describing the importance of maintaining his dignity as a new tutor. He outlines the distance his college was at pains to maintain between teachers and their students: “otherwise, you know, they are not humble enough”. Carroll playfully describes the set-up of a tutor sitting at his desk, behind closed doors and without access to today’s communication technologies, relying on a series of college ‘scouts’ to convey information down corridors and staircases to the confused student waiting for instruction below. The lectures, according to Carroll, went something like this: Tutor: What is twice three?Scout: What’s a rice-tree?Sub-scout: When is ice free?Sub-sub-scout: What’s a nice fee??Student (timidly): Half a guinea.Sub-sub-scout: Can’t forge any!Sub-scout: Ho for jinny!Scout: Don’t be a ninny!Tutor (looking offended, tries another question): Divide a hundred by twelve.Scout: Provide wonderful bells!Sub-scout: Go ride under it yourself!Sub-sub-scout: Deride the dunderhead elf!Pupil (surprised): What do you mean?Sub-sub-scout: Doings between!Sub-scout: Blue is the screen!Scout: Soup tureen! And so the lecture proceeds… Carroll’s parody of academic miscommunication and misquoting was reproduced by Pierre Bourdieu at the opening of the book Academic Discourse to illustrate the failures of pedagogical practice in higher education in the mid 1960s, when he found scholarly language relied on codes that were “destined to dazzle rather than to enlighten” (3). Bourdieu et al found that students struggled to reproduce appropriately scholarly discourse and were constrained to write in a badly understood and poorly mastered language, finding reassurance in what he called a ‘rhetoric of despair’: “through a kind of incantatory or sacrificial rite, they try to call up and reinstate the tropes, schemas or words which to them distinguish professorial language” (4). The result was bad writing that karaoke-ed a pseudo academic discourse, accompanied by a habit of thoughtlessly patching together other peoples’ words and phrases. Such sloppy quoting activities of course invite the scholarly taboo of plagiarism or its extreme opposite, hypercitation. Elsewhere, Jacques Derrida developed an important theory of citationality and language, but it is intriguing to note his own considerable unease with conventional acknowledgement practices, of quoting and being quoted: I would like to spare you the tedium, the waste of time, and the subservience that always accompany the classic pedagogical procedures of forging links, referring back to past premises or arguments, justifying one’s own trajectory, method, system, and more or less skilful transitions, re-establishing continuity, and so on. These are but some of the imperatives of classical pedagogy with which, to be sure, one can never break once and for all. Yet, if you were to submit to them rigorously, they would very soon reduce you to silence, tautology and tiresome repetition. (The Ear of the Other, 3) This weariness with a procedural hyper-focus on referencing conventions underlines Derrida’s disquiet with the self-protecting, self-promoting and self-justifying practices that bolster pedagogical tradition and yet inhibit real scholarly work, and risk silencing the authorial voice. Today, remix offers new life to quoting. Media theorist Lev Manovich resisted the notion that the practice of ‘quotation’ was the historical precedent for remixing, aligning it instead to the authorship practice of music ‘sampling’ made possible by new electronic and digital technology. Eduardo Navas agrees that sampling is the key element that makes the act of remixing possible, but links its principles not just to music but to the preoccupation with reading and writing as an extended cultural practice beyond textual writing onto all forms of media (8). A crucial point for Navas is that while remix appropriates and reworks its source material, it relies on the practice of citation to work properly: too close to the original means the remix risks being dismissed as derivative, but at the same time the remixer can’t rely on a source always being known or recognised (7). In other words, the conceptual strategies of remix must rely on some form of referencing or citation of the ideas it sources. It is inarguable that advances in digital technologies have expanded the capacity of scholars to search, cut/copy & paste, collate and link to their research sources. New theoretical and methodological frameworks are being developed to take account of these changing conditions of academic work. For instance, Annette Markham proposes a ‘remix methodology’ for qualitative enquiry, arguing that remix is a powerful tool for thinking about an interpretive and adaptive research practice that takes account of the complexity of contemporary cultural contexts. In a similar vein Cheré Harden Blair has used remix as a theoretical framework to grapple with the issue of plagiarism in the postmodern classroom. If, following Roland Barthes, all writing is “a tissue of quotations drawn from innumerable centers of culture” (146), and if all writing is therefore rewriting, then punishing students for plagiarism becomes problematic. Blair argues that since scholarly writing has become a mosaic of digital and textual productions, then teaching must follow suit, especially since teaching, as a dynamic, shifting and intertextual enterprise, is more suited to the digital revolution than traditional, fixed writing (175). She proposes that teachers provide a space in which remixing, appropriation, patch-writing and even piracy could be allowable, even useful and productive: “a space in which the line is blurry not because students are ignorant of what is right or appropriate, or because digital text somehow contains inherent temptations to plagiarise, but because digital media has, in fact, blurred the line” (183). The clashes between remix and scholarly rules of attribution are directly addressed by the pedagogical provocations of conceptual poet Kenneth Goldsmith, who has developed a program of ‘uncreative writing’ at the University of Pennsylvania, where, among other plagiaristic tasks, he forces students to transcribe whole passages from books, or to download essays from online paper mills and defend them as their own, marking down students who show a ‘shred of originality’. In his own writing and performances, which depend almost exclusively on strategies of appropriation, plagiarism and recontextualisation of often banal sources like traffic reports, Goldsmith says that he is working to de-familiarise normative structures of language. For Goldsmith, reframing language into another context allows it to become new again, so that “we don’t need the new sentence, the old sentence re-framed is good enough”. Goldsmith argues for the role of the contemporary academic and creative writer as an intelligent agent in the management of masses of information. He describes his changing perception of his own work: “I used to be an artist, then I became a poet; then a writer. Now when asked, I simply refer to myself as a word processor” (Perloff 147). For him, what is of interest to the twenty-first century is not so much the quote that ‘rips’ or tears words out of their original context, but finding ways to make new ‘wholes’ out of the accumulations, filterings and remixing of existing words and sentences. Another extraordinary example of the blurring of lines between text, author and the discursive peculiarities of digital media can be found in Jonathan Lethem’s essay ‘An Ecstasy of Influence: A Plagiarism’, which first appeared in Harpers Magazine in 2007. While this essay is about the topic of plagiarism, it is itself plagiarized, composed of quotes that have been woven seamlessly together into a composite whole. Although Lethem provides a key at the end with a list of his sources, he has removed in-text citations and quotation marks, even while directly discussing the practices of mis-quotation and mis-attribution throughout the essay itself. Towards the end of the essay can be found the paragraph: Any text is woven entirely with citations, references, echoes, cultural languages, which cut across it through and through in a vast stereophony. The citations that go to make up a text are anonymous, untraceable, and yet already read; they are quotations without inverted commas. The kernel, the soul — let us go further and say the substance, the bulk, the actual and valuable material of all human utterances — is plagiarism. …By necessity, by proclivity, and by delight, we all quote. Neurological study has lately shown that memory, imagination, and consciousness itself is stitched, quilted, pastiched. If we cut-and-paste ourselves, might we not forgive it of our artworks? (68) Overall, Lethem’s self-reflexive pro-plagiarism essay reminds the reader not only of how ideas in literature have been continuously recycled, quoted, appropriated and remixed, but of how open-source cultures are vital for the creation of new works. Lethem (re)produces rather than authors a body of text that is haunted by ever present/absent quotation marks and references. Zara Dinnen suggests that Lethem’s essay, like almost all contemporary texts produced on a computer, is a provocation to once again re-theorise the notion of the author, as not a rigid point of origin but instead “a relay of alternative and composite modes of production” (212), extending Manovich’s notion of the role of author in the digital age of being perhaps closest to that of a DJ. But Lethem’s essay, however surprising and masterfully intertextual, was produced and disseminated as a linear ‘static’ text. On the other hand, Mark Amerika’s remixthebook project first started out as a series of theoretical performances on his Professor VJ blog and was then extended into a multitrack composition of “applied remixology” that features sampled phrases and ideas from a range of artistic, literary, musical, theoretical and philosophical sources. Wanting his project to be received not as a book but as a hybridised publication and performance art project that appears in both print and digital forms, remixthebook was simultaneously published in a prestigious university press and a website that works as an online hub and teaching tool to test out the theories. In this way, Amerika expands the concept of writing to include multimedia forms composed for both networked environments and also experiments with what he terms “creative risk management” where the artist, also a scholar and a teacher, is “willing to drop all intellectual pretence and turn his theoretical agenda into (a) speculative play” (xi). He explains his process halfway through the print book: Other times we who create innovative works of remix artare fully self-conscious of the rival lineagewe spring forth fromand knowingly take on other remixological styles just to seewhat happens when we move insideother writers’ bodies (of work)This is when remixologically inhabitingthe spirit of another writer’s stylistic tendenciesor at least the subconsciously imagined writerly gesturesthat illuminate his or her live spontaneous performancefeels more like an embodied praxis In some ways this all seems so obvious to me:I mean what is a writer anyway buta simultaneous and continuous fusion ofremixologically inhabited bodies of work? (109) Amerika mashes up the jargon of academic writing with avant-pop forms of digital rhetoric in order to “move inside other writers’ bodies (of work)” in order to test out his theoretical agenda in an “embodied praxis” at the same time that he shakes up the way that contemporary scholarship itself is performed. The remixthebook project inevitably recalls one of the great early-twentieth century plays with scholarly quotation, Walter Benjamin’s The Arcades Project. Instead of avoiding conventional quoting, footnoting and referencing, these are the very fabric of Benjamin’s sprawling project, composed entirely of quotes drawn from nineteenth century philosophy and literature. This early scholarly ‘remixing’ project has been described as bewildering and oppressive, but which others still find relevant and inspirational. Marjorie Perloff, for instance, finds the ‘passages’ in Benjamin’s arcades have “become the digital passages we take through websites and YouTube videos, navigating our way from one Google link to another and over the bridges provided by our favourite search engines and web pages" (49). For Benjamin, the process of collecting quotes was addictive. Hannah Arendt describes his habit of carrying little black notebooks in which "he tirelessly entered in the form of quotations what daily living and reading netted him in the way of 'pearls' and 'coral'. On occasion he read from them aloud, showed them around like items from a choice and precious collection" (45). A similar practice of everyday hypercitation can be found in the contemporary Australian performance artist Danielle Freakley’s project, The Quote Generator. For what was intended in 2006 to be a three year project, but which is still ongoing, Freakley takes the delirious pleasure of finding and fitting the perfect quote to fit an occasion to an extreme. Unlike Benjamin, Freakley didn’t collect and collate quotes, she then relied on them to navigate her way through her daily interactions. As The Quote Generator, Freakley spoke only in quotations drawn from film, literature and popular culture, immediately following each quote with its correct in-text reference, familiar to academic writers as the ‘author/date’ citation system. The awkwardness and seeming artificiality of even short exchanges with someone who responds only in quotes might be bewildering enough, but the inclusion of the citation after the quote maddeningly interrupts and, at the same time, adds another metalevel to a conversation where even the simple platitude ‘thank you’ might be followed by an attribution to ‘Deep Throat 1972’. Longer exchanges become increasingly overwhelming, as Freakley’s piling of quote on quote, and sometimes repeating quotes, demands an attentive listener, as is evident in a 2008 interview with Andrew Denton on the ABC’s Enough Rope: Andrew Denton’s Enough Rope (2008) Denton: So, you’ve been doing this for three years??Freakley: Yes, Optus 1991Denton: How do people respond to you speaking in such an unnatural way?Freakley: It changes, David Bowie 1991. On the streets AKA Breakdance 1984, most people that I know think that I am crazy, Billy Thorpe 1972, a nigger like me is going insane, Cyprus Hill 1979, making as much sense as a Japanese instruction manual, Red Dwarf 1993. Video documentation of Freakley’s encounters with unsuspecting members of the public reveal how frustrating the inclusion of ‘spoken’ references can be, let alone how taken aback people are on realising they never get Freakley’s own words, but are instead receiving layers of quotations. The frustration can quickly turn hostile (Denton at one point tells Freakley to “shut up”) or can prove contaminatory, as people attempt to match or one-up her quotes (see Cook's interview 8). Apparently, when Freakley continued her commitment to the performance at a Perth Centerlink, the staff sent her to a psychiatrist and she was diagnosed with an obsessive-compulsive disorder, then prescribed medication (Schwartzkoff 4). While Benjamin's The Arcades Project invites the reader to scroll through its pages as a kind of textual flaneur, Freakley herself becomes a walking and talking word processor, extending the possibilities of Amerika’s “embodied praxis” in an inescapable remix of other people’s words and phrases. At the beginning of the project, Freakley organised a card collection of quotes categorised into possible conversation topics, and devised a ‘harness’ for easy access. Image: Danielle Freakley’s The Quote Generator harness Eventually, however, Freakley was able to rely on her own memory of an astounding number of quotations, becoming a “near mechanical vessel” (Gottlieb 2009), or, according to her own manifesto, a “regurgitation library to live by”: The Quote Generator reads, and researches as it speaks. The Quote Generator is both the reader and composer/editor. The Quote Generator is not an actor spouting lines on a stage. The Quote Generator assimilates others lines into everyday social life … The Quote Generator, tries to find its own voice, an understanding through throbbing collations of others, constantly gluttonously referencing. Much academic writing quotes/references ravenously. New things cannot be said without constant referral, acknowledgement to what has been already, the intricate detective work in the barking of the academic dog. By her unrelenting appropriation and regurgitating of quotations, Freakley uses sampling as a technique for an extended performance that draws attention to the remixology of everyday life. By replacing conversation with a hyper-insistence on quotes and their simultaneous citation, she draws attention to the artificiality and inescapability of the ‘codes’ that make up not just ordinary conversations, but also conventional academic discourse, what she calls the “barking of the academic dog”. Freakley’s performance has pushed the scholarly conventions of quoting and referencing to their furthest extreme, in what has been described by Daine Singer as a kind of “endurance art” that relies, in large part, on an antagonistic relationship to its audience. In his now legendary 1969 “Double Session” seminar, Derrida, too, experimented with the pedagogical performance of the (re)producing author, teasing his earnest academic audience. It is reported that the seminar began in a dimly lit room lined with blackboards covered with quotations that Derrida, for a while, simply “pointed to in silence” (177). In this seminar, Derrida put into play notions that can be understood to inform remix practices just as much as they do deconstruction: the author, originality, mimesis, imitation, representation and reference. Scholarly conventions, perhaps particularly the quotation practices that insist on the circulation of rigid codes of attribution, and are defended by increasingly out-of-date understandings of contemporary research, writing and teaching practices, are ripe to be played with. Remix offers an expanded discursive framework to do this in creative and entertaining ways. References Amerika, Mark. remixthebook. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011. 29 July 2013 http://www.remixthebook.com/. Arendt, Hannah. “Walter Benjamin: 1892-1940.” In Illuminations. New York, NY: Shocken, 1969: 1-55. Barthes, Roland. “The Death of the Author.” Image Music Text. Trans Stephen Heath. New York: Hill and Wang, 1977: 142-148. Benjamin, Walter. The Arcades Project. Ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Howard Eiland & Kevin McLaughlin. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999. Blaire, Cheré Harden. “Panic and Plagiarism: Authorship and Academic Dishonesty in a Remix Culture.” Media Tropes 2.1 (2009): 159-192. Bourdieu, Pierre, Jean-Claude Passeron, and Monique de Saint Martin. Academic Discourse: Linguistic Misunderstanding and Professorial Power. Trans. Richard Teese. Stanford California: Stanford University Press, 1965. Carroll, Lewis (Charles Dodgson). “Letter to Henrietta and Edwin Dodgson 31 Jan 1855”. 15 July 2013 http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Letters_of_Lewis_Carroll. Cook, Richard. “Don’t Quote Me on That.” Time Out Sydney (2008): 8. http://rgcooke.wordpress.com/2008/02/13/interview-danielle-freakley.Denton, Andrew. “Interview: The Quote Generator.” Enough Rope. 29 Feb. 2008. ABC TV. 15 July 2013 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AsrGvwXsenE. Derrida, Jacques. Spurs, Nietzsche’s Styles. Trans. Barbara Harlow. London: University of Chicago Press, 1978. Derrida, Jacques. The Ear of the Other: Otobiography, Text, Transference. Trans Peggy Kampf. New York: Shocken Books, 1985. Derrida, Jacques. “The Double Session”. Dissemination. Trans Alan Bass, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1981. Dinnen, Zara. "In the Mix: The Potential Convergence of Literature and New Media in Jonathan Letham's 'The Ecstasy of Influence'". Journal of Narrative Theory 42.2 (2012). Freakley, Danielle. The Quote Generator. 2006 to present. 10 July 2013 http://www.thequotegenerator.com/. Goldsmith, Kenneth. Uncreative Writing. New York: University of Colombia Press 2011. Gottlieb, Benjamin. "You Shall Worship No Other Artist God." Art & Culture (2009). 15 July 2013 http://www.artandculture.com/feature/999. Lethem, Jonathan. “The Ecstasy of Influence: A Plagiarism.” Harper’s Magazine, Feb. 2007: 59-71. http://harpers.org/archive/2007/02/the-ecstasy-of-influence/. Manovich, Lev. "What Comes after Remix?" 2007. 15 July 2013 http://manovich.net/LNM/index.html. Markham, Annette. “Remix Methodology.” 2013. 9 July 2013 http://www.markham.internetinquiry.org/category/remix/.Morris, Simon (dir.). Sucking on Words: Kenneth Goldsmith. 2007. http://www.ubu.com/film/goldsmith_sucking.html.Navas, Eduardo. Remix Theory: The Aesthetics of Sampling. New York: Springer Wein, 2012. Perloff, Marjorie. Unoriginal Genius: Poetry by Other Means in the New Century. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010. Schwartzkoff, Louise. “Art Forms Spring into Life at Prima Vera.” Sydney Morning Herald 19 Sep. 2008: Entertainment, 4. http://www.smh.com.au/news/entertainment/arts/art-forms-spring-into-life-at-primavera/2008/09/18/1221331045404.html.Singer, Daine (cur.). “Pains in the Artists: Endurance and Suffering.” Blindside Exhibition. 2007. 2 June 2013 http://www.blindside.org.au/2007/pains-in-the-artists.shtml.