Статті в журналах з теми "Of mice and men (Motion picture)"

Rats and genetically manipulated mouse models have played an important role in the exploration of molecular causes of cardiovascular diseases. However, it has not been fully investigated whether mice or rats and humans manifest similar patterns of ventricular wall motion. Although similarities in anatomy and myofiber architecture suggest that fundamental patterns of ventricular wall motion may be similar, the considerable differences in heart size, heart rate, and sarcomeric protein isoforms may yield quantitative differences in ventricular wall mechanics. To further our understanding of the basic mechanisms of myofiber contractile performance, we quantified regional and global indexes of ventricular wall motion in mice, rats, and men using magnetic resonance (MR) imaging. Both regular cine and tagged MR images at apical, midventricular, and basal levels were acquired from six male volunteers, six Fischer 344 rats, and seven C57BL/6 mice. Morphological parameters and ejection fraction were computed directly from cine images. Myocardial twist (rotation angle), torsion (net twist per unit length), circumferential strain, and normalized radial shortening were calculated by homogeneous strain analysis from tagged images. Our data show that ventricular twist was conserved among the three species, leading to a significantly smaller torsion, measured as net twist per unit length, in men. However, both circumferential strain and normalized radial shortening were the largest in male subjects. Although other parameters, such as circumferential-longitudinal shear strain, need to be evaluated, and the causes of these differences in contractile mechanics remain to be elucidated, the preservation of twist appears fundamental to cardiac function and should be considered in studies that extrapolate data from animals to humans.

This article explores early publicity about Hollywood that promoted Los Angeles as a New West supporting a New Western Woman who became a key, if often slighted, element in the “grounding of modern feminism.” The New Western Woman was both an image that sought to attract more women into movie audiences and a reality that dramatized the unconventional and important roles played by women workers in the early motion picture industry. By describing these women as expertly navigating the city, the West, and professional ambitions simultaneously, this publicity created a booster literature that depicted Los Angeles as an urban El Dorado for single white women on the make. In response, tens of thousands of women moved west to work in the picture business, helping to make Los Angeles the first western boomtown where women outnumbered men.

Stroke injury is closely related to testosterone levels. Testosterone supplementation in elderly men is seen to protect the cardiovascular system and reduce the risk of stroke. But this medication method is controversial. This study aims to investigate the effect of long-term testosterone supplementation on brain injury after stroke in aged mice. 60 male C57BL/6 mice,12-months of age were divided into 3 groups: low-dose group, high-dose group, and control group, each group was injected subcutaneously with 100 μL of sesame oil or 5 mg/kg or 50 mg/kg of testosterone (in 100 μL of sesame oil) twice per week, respectively. One week after the injection, stroke was induced by light. After the stroke, the injection continued for 6 weeks. The motion ability was measured by rotating rod and tail suspension. The brain injury was observed by naked eyes and TTC staining. In addition, we measured the inflammation ( Tnf-α, Il-6, and Mcp-1) and oxidative stress (Malondialdehyde (MDA) and T-AOC) in the injured tissue 72 h post-stroke. Low-dose testosterone supplementation improved the motion ability and decreased brain injury. It also decreased the inflammatory factors ( Tnf-α, Il-6, and Mcp-1), decreased MDA product, and increased T-AOC. High-dose testosterone supplementation not only reduced the motion ability and aggravated stroke injury, but also increased the inflammation, MDA level and decreased T-AOC level. In summary, supplementation of testosterone at normal levels in elderly mice can alleviate post-stroke injury by reducing inflammation and oxidative stress; however, excessive supplementation may cause unexpected injuries. This study has important implications for the application of testosterone replacement therapy.

Male reproductive ability ability has a linear correlation with libido and testosterone. Both are associated with various things main food consumption such as protein, vitamins and minerals. Aphrodisiac is an ingredient or drug that arouses sexual arousal or libido. Pumpkin is an example of food from plants with the highest content of zinc. This study was to determine whether there is a difference between the content of zinc on the peel, flesh and pumpkin seeds against sexual activity of mice. The experimental animals used were 24 male, group I mice as control group, Group II was grouped with pumpkin peel extract, Group III was grouped with extract of pumpkin flesh, Group IV was grouped with extract of pumpkin seeds. The dose used is 2gr / kg BB and volume of 0.2 ml is given for 35 days. Sexual Activity is observed every day by the position of male mice riding females. Based on Anova One Way test results showed there are differences in sexual activity mice males in each group (ρ 0.000). The difference of the result of the number of mounts indicated that the giving of yellow pumpkin extract had an effect on the increase of mating behavior of male mice. The group treated with the extract of pumpkin flesh showed the highest number of mice mounts (mean = 24,1667.Further research is needed to get a clearer picture of the composition of the pumpkin nutrients that indirectly affect fertility in men.

Male reproductive ability ability has a linear correlation with libido and testosterone. Both are associated with various things main food consumption such as protein, vitamins and minerals. Aphrodisiac is an ingredient or drug that arouses sexual arousal or libido. Pumpkin is an example of food from plants with the highest content of zinc. This study was to determine whether there is a difference between the content of zinc on the peel, flesh and pumpkin seeds against sexual activity of mice. The experimental animals used were 24 male, group I mice as control group, Group II was grouped with pumpkin peel extract, Group III was grouped with extract of pumpkin flesh, Group IV was grouped with extract of pumpkin seeds. The dose used is 2gr / kg BB and volume of 0.2 ml is given for 35 days. Sexual Activity is observed every day by the position of male mice riding females. Based on Anova One Way test results showed there are differences in sexual activity mice males in each group (ρ 0.000). The difference of the result of the number of mounts indicated that the giving of yellow pumpkin extract had an effect on the increase of mating behavior of male mice. The group treated with the extract of pumpkin flesh showed the highest number of mice mounts (mean = 24,1667.Further research is needed to get a clearer picture of the composition of the pumpkin nutrients that indirectly affect fertility in men.

This article systematically examines the portrayal of women in the American cinema over the last sixty years, from 1927. More specifically, it addresses itself to the following issues: the main attributes of screen women in terms of age, marital status, and occupation; the guidelines prescribed by American films for structuring women's lifestyles; the degree of rigidity of these normative prescriptions and proscriptions; and recent changes in the portrayal of women. The research is based on content analysis, quantitative and qualitative, of 218 screen roles, male and female, which have won the Academy Award, bestowed annually by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for the best achievements in film acting. The study demonstrates the differential treatment of gender in American films and the durability of specific screen stereotypes for men and for women. The prevalence of rigid conventions in the portrayal of women for half a century is explained in relation to male economic and ideological dominance in Hollywood and in American society at large.

The disciplines of gymnastics have been an important part of entrance examination at the university with the physical orientation already for many years. It is also the same case at the faculty of physical studies at Masaryk University in Brno. Because there is a need to give a true picture of the level of motoric abilities and certain motion presumptions which are needed for studies of practical subjects with using gymnastics, there is more and more need to find the best choice of gymnastics equipment and also its content. It is also because of economical reasons. This was the reason why there were some changes in entrance examinations in academic year 2010/2011 and 2011/2012. It was done in one of disciplines but also in the content of the second discipline. The biggest change concerned the horizontal bar for women and men to trapeze bar. Choosing of exercises we tried to cover as much as possible the level of chosen motoric abilities (in case of trapeze bar foremost the force abilities), which could be helpful for easier managing new locomotive skills during gymnastics lessons. The exercises on the floor were spread in strengthening exercises whose aim was to show abilities of the applicants how to control the body as the complex. The monitoring unit was created in total 1037 – 509 for 2010/2011 (132 women and 377 men) and 529 applicants (140 women and 389 men) for 2011/2012. In our contribution we tried to watch the differences in evaluation of individual disciplines for men and women in entrance examinationfor academic year 2010/2011 and 2011/2012. Next aim of comparison and findings of mutual relationship between each discipline was their possible exchangeability in entrance examination for academic year 2012/2013. There is visible difference between evaluation of men and women on trapeze bar and it was in 2010/2011 and 2011/2012. On the contrary women got better results on the floor in both years. As far as the exchangeability of individual disciplines is concerned, correlation coefficients show possible exchangeability trapeze for floor or floor for trapeze.

Background: Male contraceptive approaches besides tubal sterilization involve vasectomy and represent the method of choice among midlife men in developing countries thanks to many advantages. However, the subsidiary consequences of this intervention are insufficiently explored since the involved mechanisms may offer insight into a much more complex picture. Methods: Thus, in this manuscript, we aimed to reunite all available data by searching three separate academic database(s) (PubMed, Web of Knowledge, and Scopus) published in the past two decades by covering the interval 2000–2023 and using a predefined set of keywords and strings involving “oxidative stress” (OS), “inflammation”, and “semen microbiota” in combination with “humans”, “rats”, and “mice”. Results: By following all evidence that fits in the pre-, post-, and vasectomy reversal (VR) stages, we identified a total of n = 210 studies from which only n = 21 were finally included following two procedures of eligibility evaluation. Conclusions: The topic surrounding this intricate landscape has created debate since the current evidence is contradictory, limited, or does not exist. Starting from this consideration, we argue that further research is mandatory to decipher how a vasectomy might disturb homeostasis.

Background/Context Teacher retention, especially of qualified teachers within high-poverty schools, is an issue of local, national, and international concern. School staffing research has typically examined two groups: those who remain in full-time classroom teaching versus those who quit teaching altogether. This article complicates the teacher staffing picture and adds a third category of attrition: role changing, which is the phenomenon of teachers shifting into nonteaching professional roles in the field of education. Purpose We asked what proportion of teacher career movement within our sample was attributable to leaving teaching versus role changing. Further, we wanted to know the influence of race/ethnicity, gender, credential type, and age on role-changing patterns. Research Design To deepen our understanding of teacher career patterns, we conducted a 6-year longitudinal study that involved collecting survey data on teacher career movement, school experiences, and attitudes from 838 well-prepared urban educators in their first through eighth career year. These educators had all completed master's degrees in the teacher education program of a high-status urban public university and all began their careers as teachers. After collecting the data, we documented and diagrammed career patterns. In addition, we analyzed the influence of select time invariant covariates on the hazard probabilities of both role changing and leaving education. Findings/Results The study found that not only did teachers move into a variety of non-teaching roles within the field of education, but they also followed diverse career “pathways” along the way. Survival analysis substantiated prior research showing that Latino teachers have lower attrition rates from the field of education compared with White teachers, but this effect disappeared for role changing with the field. In terms of gender, the men in our population were less likely to leave education entirely than women but more likely to leave teaching for a role change in career years 3–8. Teachers with single-subject (secondary) credentials were more likely than their colleagues who held multiple-subject (elementary) credentials to leave teaching for a role change in education. Conclusions/Recommendations Set within the framework of teacher professionalism, we argue that role changing is a form of sanctioned attrition and that understanding movement among roles within the educational workforce is essential for crafting policies and incentives to keep well-prepared teachers rooted in careers that serve the nation's most under-served students.

Background and Purpose: Left bundle branch block (LBBB) is a communal electrocardiographic (ECG) finding that may or may not be associated with overt heart disease at diagnosis. The current study was performed to determine the clinical picture and structural abnormalities of the heart diagnosed by transthoracic echocardiography in patients with left bundle branch block. Methods: This cross-sectional observational study was conducted over a six-month period in the Interventional Cardiology Unit Liaquat University Hospital Hyderabad from July 2021 to December 2021. Adult patients of both sexes with LBBB, symptomatic or asymptomatic, were recruited from an outpatient hospital setting and underwent elective Transthoracic echocardiography (TTE) after demographic / clinical data and informed consent were obtained. The TTE results were recorded and presented as frequency and percentage. Results: 120 patients were examined; 74 men and 46 women. The study population mean age was 52.7 ± 1.5 years, range (22-76) years. In a history, 10 (8.3%) patients had mild dyspnoea (NYHA class I-II) and 9 (7.5%) severe dyspnoea (NYHA class III-IV). Echocardiograms of only 11 (9.2%) patients were normal. The structural abnormalities observed included abnormal septal motion in 96 (80%), mitral regurgitation in 16 (13.3%), and left ventricular dilatation with left ventricular end-diastolic dimension> 60 mm in 23 (19.2%). LVEF was normal in 80 (66.7%) cases (> 50%); 18 (15%) had a LVEF of 25-35% and 12 (10%) had a LVEF of 35-50%. Conclusion: The possibility of structural cardiac abnormalities on echocardiography is high in patients with LBBB. Keywords: Transthoracic echocardiography, Left bundle branch block (LBBB), Structural heart disease.

Abstract Background: Graft-versus-host disease (GVHD) is a dreaded complication after allogeneic stem-cell transplantation (ASCT). Previously, we and others showed that activation of type I interferon (IFN-I) inducing pathways such as RIG-I/MAVS or cGAS-STING can promote the integrity of the intestinal barrier and limit GVHD (Fischer et al., Sci Transl Med, 2017). However, the signals that drive these protective IFN-I responses are poorly understood. Commensal microbiota can (i) have distant effects on immune responses through modulation of IFN-I signaling (Steed et al, Science, 2017; Swimm et al, Blood, 2018) and (ii) predict mortality in ASCT patients (Peled et al., N Engl J Med, 2020). We hypothesized that microbiota-derived products such as microbial metabolites engage IFN-I signaling in immune and non-immune cells poising them for induction of protective responses. We established a prospective, multi-centric clinical study in patients newly diagnosed with acute leukemia and performed longitudinal stool sampling to track changes in microbial community composition and metabolites expression levels. Submitted as a separate abstract to ASH 2021 (Orberg & Meedt et al.), we show that patients with high metabolite expression going into ASCT are less likely to develop GVHD. In this study, we translate our clinical observations to mouse models of acute GVHD and human and mouse intestinal organoids to uncover the molecular mechanisms via which metabolites protect the intestinal barrier during ASCT. Methods: Stool samples from ASCT patients were obtained in Munich and at Regensburg in accordance to IRB-approved study protocols. Patients were sampled at initial diagnosis (Dx), prior to conditioning and weekly after ASCT up to day 28. We analyzed samples by 16S rRNA sequencing and mass spectrometry to obtain a complete picture of microbiome composition and function. Next, we tested metabolites which we detected in patients (desaminotyrosine [DAT], indole-3-carboxaldehyde [ICA]) as treatment in preclinical models in ASCT and GVHD mouse models. Outcomes were assessed by a novel organoid recovery assay in addition to established read-outs. To obtain a mechanistic understanding of the signaling pathways involved, we stimulated WT or IFN-I-signaling-impaired mouse (incl. STING -/-, MAVS -/-, IFNαR -/-) as well as human intestinal crypt-derived organoids with metabolites. Results: Here, we present a 64-year-old female patient diagnosed with AML who received a 9/10 HLA-matched ASCT. At day 7, i.v. antibiotics were started due to fever and Enterococcus bacteraemia. At day 15, the patient developed skin and GI GVHD (Glucksberg III). At the timepoint initial diagnosis (Dx), i.e. the timepoint when we diagnosed AML but before therapy was initiated, we detected rich alpha diversity (Panel 1a) in the patient's stool. Flavonifractor plautii, a producer of the metabolite DAT, was detectable (Panel 1b). We observed high-level expression of metabolites including short-chain fatty acids, DAT, ICA and secondary bile acids (Panel 1c). Following ASCT, and especially at the early time-points day 0 and day 7, alpha diversity and metabolite expression declined drastically. We confirmed this trend in our multi-centric cohort of ASCT patients by comparing levels of DAT and ICA sampled at admission to the transplantation ward (Conditioning) versus at clinical diagnosis of GVHD: in patients with GVHD, metabolite levels were drastically reduced (Panel 2). Next, we prophylactically administered metabolites in a major mismatch mouse ASCT model. Metabolite-treated mice showed significantly showed better outcomes in our organoid recovery assay, which measures the ability of intestinal stem cells to recover after allogeneic injury (Panel 3). This effect that was abrogated in STING -/- recipients. Metabolite stimulation of mouse small intestinal organoids promoted organoid numbers and size, and required intact STING signaling (Panel 4a). Human colon organoids also responded to DAT and ICA, however the metabolite effect was lost when co-administered with the STING-inhibitor H151. Conclusions: We identify that microbial-derived metabolites detected in patients can engage the STING pathway in humans and mice to confer resistance from immune damage. Thus, prophylactic administration of metabolite cocktails or bacterial consortia that can produce these metabolites may reduce occurrence of GVHD in ASCT patients. Figure 1 Figure 1. Disclosures No relevant conflicts of interest to declare.

Abstract INTRODUCTION Dogs are an excellent model for human disease, e.g. the treatment of canine lymphoma is often predictive of the human response to that treatment. However, an incomplete picture of their antigen-receptor (AR) gene loci and a limited set of available experimental tools has restricted their use. This work advances the annotation of the canine AR loci, develops methods to interrogate their expression patterns, and looks into breed-specific features of the loci. METHODS A bioinformatic approach alongside unbiased RNA-seq was used to complete the annotation of the canine AR genes, and these sequences were used to query 107 whole genome sequences from 19 breeds. A 5’RACE strategy was developed to selectively amplify ARs for next generation sequencing, and this was applied to RNA isolated from canine peripheral blood samples. RESULTS >5,500 novel alleles were identified across the ~550 gene segments (of which 326 were newly annotated) of the AR loci, yielding insight into AR evolution as well as confirming the greater conservation between dog and human than mouse with either. The 5’RACE strategy was validated with a pilot study that cast light onto the baseline expression and mutation patterns of healthy dogs, finding they closely mirrored their human counterparts. CONCLUSION This work brings our understanding of the genetics and expression of ARs in dogs to the same high standard as mice and men. The large number of genome sequences serves as a reference for future studies, and has allowed statistically powerful conclusions to be drawn on the pressures that have shaped these loci. Finally, it confirms the dog as a superior immunological model, particularly in the context of the high conservation seen in both sequence and expression features.

Neck pain is widespread in the population and reaches 60%. Women in the age group under 60 are more likely to be affected than men. Acute pain is typical for young people, chronic – for patients of the older age group. Neck pain can be nonspecific, neural or mixed, depending on the involvement of various anatomical structures in the pathological process.Nonspecific (nociceptive, musculoskeletal) pain accounts for about 80–90% of all cases. The clinical picture may also include limited range of motion in the cervical spine (CS), changes in muscle tone in the region. With damage to the cervical spinal roots, neural symptoms join, which is observed in 11.9–43% of cases.The key to making the correct diagnosis is a deep study of complaints, anamnesis, and a thorough physical examination. Paraclinical research methods play a secondary role in the diagnosis, they are prescribed only if their results can affect the formulation of the diagnosis and further treatment. The need for differential diagnosis between nonspecific and neuropathic pain arises in the presence of complaints and clinical manifestations characteristic of both options. Standard schemes of drug therapy for nonspecific and neuropathic pain have certain differences, while they do not depend on the localization of the process and the involvement of certain structures in the process. In both cases, the main therapeutic tasks are to provide effective pain relief and influence on the inflammatory process. With these tasks, NSAIDs are most fully coping. The original diclofenac has a pronounced analgesic and anti-inflammatory effect with a high safety profile, which, together with a variety of dosage forms, makes it attractive for the treatment of various types of neck pain. An additional local effect on pathologically altered structures by the topical diclofenac forms significantly increases the effectiveness of the treatment. In the above clinical cases, two variants of neck pain are considered, which have similar symptoms, while being different forms of pathology.

Введение. Миофасциальный болевой синдром (МФБС) является следствием «цепной реакции» включения психологических и механических компенсаторных механизмов, запущенных болевым синдромом различной локализации. Данная патология характеризуется формированием в мышцах триггерных точек (ТТ), из которых формируются болезненные мышечные тяжи. Их пальпация вызывает усиление болей в пораженной мышце, а также в зоне иррадиации.Цель. Изучение эффективности аппаратно-пунктурной противоболевой терапии (АПП-терапии) в лечении пациентов с МФБС.Материалы и методы. 19 пациентов с МФБС различной локализации (15% мужчин, 85% женщин, средний возраст 45 лет) были разделены на группы: 1) МФБС шейно-плечевой локализации (n=10), 2) МФБС грудо-поясничной локализации (n=6), 3) МФБС поясничного отдела позвоночника (ПОП) с иррадиацией в ногу (n=3). Анализировались данные неврологического осмотра, мануального мышечного тестирования, тестирования по ВАШ, ранговый индекс боли (РИБ) по опроснику боли MPQ, индекс качества жизни Освестри, эстезиометрии, термографии. Для лечения применялась АПП-терапия.Результаты. До начала лечения получены следующие результаты: средняя интенсивность боли по ВАШ 7,5 балла, средний ранговый индекс боли по MPQ 30, средний индекс Освестри 69, выявлена локальная гипертермия в зонах боли (+1 град. С в сравнении с окружающими тканями) и достаточно большая разница между показателями болевой и тактильной чувствительности. Каждому пациенту проводились микроинъекции раствора толперизона с лидокаином с периодичностью раз в 2 дня. Курс составлял 3–5 сеансов. Нивелирование болевого синдрома и восстановление объема движений в пораженных мышцах после первого сеанса наблюдалось у 17 пациентов (89%). Проведение повторных сеансов привело к полномукупированию болевого синдрома и увеличению объема движений в пораженных мышцах у всей обследованной группы пациентов. По результатам контрольных осмотров в 100% случаев наблюдается улучшение состояния пациентов, что подтверждается результатами опросников и дообследований: средняя интенсивность боли по ВАШ 1 балл, средний ранговый индекс боли по MPQ 0–2, средний индекс Освестри 12 баллов, выравнивание температурной картины по данным термографии, уменьшение разницы показателей болевой и тактильной чувствительности. В процессе лечения развития побочных реакций не наблюдалось. Расход препарата на 1 микроинъекцию 0,002 мл.Выводы. Положительная клиническая картина течения заболевания и анализ полученных данных обследований у пациентов с МФБС различной локализации доказывают эффективность применения АПП-терапии как метода лечения МФБС. Introduction. Myofascial pain syndrome (MFPS) is a consequence of the "chain reaction" of psychological and mechanical compensatory mechanisms triggered by pain syndrome of various localizations. This pathology is characterized by the formation of trigger points (TP) in the muscles, from which painful muscle cords are formed. Palpation of them causes increased pain in the affected muscle, as well as in the area of irradiation.Purpose. To study the effectiveness of instrumental-puncture pain therapy (APP-therapy) in the treatment of patients with MFРS.Materials and methods. 19 patients with MFPS of various localizations (15% of men, 85% of women, average age – 45 years) were divided into groups: 1) MFPS of cervicobrachial localization (n=10),2) MFPS of thoracolumbar localization (n=6), 3) MFPS of the lumbar spine (LSP) with irradiation to the leg (n=3). The following data were analyzed: neurological examination, manual muscle testing, VAS testing, pain rank index (PRI) according to the MPQ pain questionnaire, Oswestry quality of life index, esthesiometry, thermography. APP therapy was used for treatment.Results. Before the start of treatment, the following results were obtained: average pain intensity according to VAS – 7.5 points, average rank pain index according to MPQ – 30, average Oswestry index – 69, local hyperthermia was detected in pain zones (+1 deg. C in comparison with surrounding tissues), and significantly big difference between the indicators of pain and tactile sensitivity. Each patient received microinjections of the solution of tolperisone with lidocaine every 2 days. The course consisted of 3–5 sessions. Leveling of pain and restoration of the range of motion in the affected muscles after the first session was observed in 17 patients (89%). Repeated sessions led to complete relief of pain syndrome and increase of the range of motion in the affected muscles in the entire examined group of patients. According to the results of control examinations in 100% of cases, there is an improvement in the patient's condition, which is confirmed by the results of questionnaires and follow-up examinations: the average pain intensity according to the VAS is 1 point, the average rank pain index according to MPQ is 0–2, the average Oswestry index is 12 points, the temperature picture is aligned according to thermography data, decrease of the difference in the indicators of pain and tactile sensitivity. In the course of treatment, the development of adverse reactions was not observed. The consumption of the drug per 1 microinjection is 0.002 ml.Conclusions. The positive clinical picture of the course of disease and the analysis of the survey data obtained in patients with MFPS of various localizations prove the effectiveness of the use of APP therapy as the method of treatment of MFPS.

Sacrificial Tradition and Religion during the Early Iron Age in South Scandinavia – with Special Reference to Settlement SacrificesSacrificial customs and religion during the Early Iron Age (500 BC–400 AD) has occupied archaeologists from the infancy of archaeology. Most would probably agree that the religion was primarily fertility related, originating as it was in the existing peasant society. The literature does not reflect any disagreement about the religion of the Early Iron Age being polytheistic and consequently concerned a variety of gods. However, it is still unknown how the religion was integrated in the everyday life, and under which conditions it was practiced.The research interest and the overall synthesis framework have especially addressed sacrifices in bogs and wetlands (for instance weapon sacrifices, bog bodies, deposited earthenware, anthropomorphic wooden figures, domestic animals, cauldrons, ring sacrifices, etc.). Strongly simplified, the existing consensus may be expressed in one single sentence: The overall society-related sacrificial traditions develop from being almost exclusively connected with wetland areas during the Early Iron Age (until c.400 AD) to being primarily connected with dry land after this time, cf. Fig. 1.The question is whether – based on the intense data collection over the recent decades – archaeology can or should maintain this very simple picture of the development of the sacrificial traditions and the religions during the Iron Age? Is it possible that we – rooted in for instance narrow definitions of sacrificial finds, habitual thinking, and a “delusion” consisting of the numerous well-preserved, well-documented, spectacular, and impressive finds of bog sacrifices – fail to see numerous forms of deposits, which (as opposed to the impressive finds of sacrifices in bogs) are hidden in the archaeological material?The settlements of the Iron Age have been excavated in large numbers over the recent decades, and it is the ritual finds from these localities that provide the background for this article.The ritual deposits from the settlements can be divided into two superior groups distinguished by the physical context. One comprises sacrifices made to constructions, which are characterized by being directly connected to a specific structure; the other encompasses settlement sacrifices that are to a higher degree characterized by an overriding affiliation to the settlement. The establishment of a sacrifice definition suitable for scanning the archaeological material for relevant finds is of vital importance. As the definition should not beforehand restrict the search through the material, it is important not to narrow the basis by concentrating only on the physical characteristics of the individual artefacts. The general idea behind the present presentation is that the different ritual dimensions of a society are internally connected as they function within the same overall conventions and, as a consequence, make up parts of a general mental structure, which can leave physically recognizable traces across the different ritual dimensions, cf. Fig. 2. This principal viewpoint creates a theoretical starting point for my work and the established definition of sacrificial finds: All intentionally deposited objects, which analytically show significant similarities as regards their physical appearance and/or their deposition context with other recognized ritual objects/contexts, and which are closely connected to these in time and space, should, when analysed, be considered sacrificial finds.The British religious historian, Ninian Smart, describes religion as consisting of seven thematically describing situations, which – albeit not completely unconnected – may be described individually:1) A dogmatic and philosophical dimension, comprising doctrine systems.2) A mythical and narrative dimension, comprising tales of the deities, of the creation, etc.3) An ethical and judicial dimension, comprising the consequences of the religion in relation to the shaping of the life of the individual.4) A social and institutional dimension comprising organisations and institutions that tie together the individual religious society.5) An empirical and emotional dimension comprising the individual’s experience of god and the divine.6) A ritual and practical dimension comprising prayer, sacrifices, worship, etc.7) A materiel dimension comprising architecture, art, sacred places, buildings, and iconography.As archaeologists, we have a very limited possibility of investigating the very thoughts behind the practiced religion. It is therefore natural to concentrate to a higher extent on the overall setting for it – the ritual dimension and the materiel dimension respectively. The ritual dimension and in particular its sacrificial aspect is traditionally divided into groups characterised by their significance level within the religion as such.1) The first and most “important” group consists of cult rituals. These are characterized by being calendar rites based on the myths of the religion or the history of the people, and by playing a part in the events of the year.2) The next group comprises transition rites (rite de passage), which follow the life cycle of the individual.3) The last group comprises rites of crises, which serve the purpose of averting danger, illness, etc.It is important to realize that the two first ritual groups are predictable cyclic rituals addressing the gods, the myths, and/or the people/the individual respectively. Only the third and least central group of rituals is determined by non-predictable and “not-always” occurring incidences. On this background, it becomes central to analyse, which category one is facing when one wants to assess its importance for the religion as such, in order to evaluate the primary character of the religion.In an attempt to understand the overall importance of a specific ritual practice, one cannot ignore a very complicated problem, which is to evaluate whether the sacrifices were practiced by single individuals or by a larger group of people as part of more common and society-supporting rituals. The issue of the relation between different sacrifice types and the groups causing these has been addressed repeatedly. Often, narrow physical interpretation frames as to who sacrificed what are advanced (i.e. Fig. 3). However, the question is how suitable are these very narrow and rigid interpretation models? As mentioned above, a sacrifice is defined by the intention (context) that caused it rather than by the specific physical form of the object!The above mentioned methodical and theoretical issues provide the background for the author’s investigation of the archaeological sources, in which he focused especially on the relationship between ritual actions as they are expressed in bog deposits and in burial grounds and measured them against the contemporary finds from the settle­ments.The analysis of the archaeological material is based on those find groups (sacrifices of cauldrons, magnificent chariots, humans, animals, metals, and weapons), which have traditionally been presented as a proof that society supporting and more community influenced ritual sacrifices were carried out beside the bogs.The examination of the material supports that sacrifices of cauldrons, magnificent chariots, humans, animals, and earthenware are found in both settlements and wetlands (Figs. 4-12), and that the deposits seem to follow superior ritual conventions, i.e. Fig. 2. The sacrifices were not made in fixed sacred places but in a momentary sacred context, which returns to its daily secular sphere once the rituals have been carried out. Often, the ceremony consists of a ritual cutting up of the sacrificed object, and the pars pro toto principle occurs completely integrated in connection with both burial customs, wetland sacrifice customs, and settlement sacrifice customs. Sacrifices often occur as an expression of a rite de passage connected to the structures, fields, or infrastructure of the village. However, the repeated finds of earthenware vessels, humans, and animals in both wetland areas and in the villages indicates that fertility sacrifices were made regularly as part of the cyclic agricultural world. This places the find groups in a central position when it comes to understanding the religious landscape of the Early Iron Age. In a lot of respects, the settlement finds appear as direct parallel material to the contemporary wetland-related sacrificial custom and so one must assume that major religious events also took place in the settlements, for instance when a human or a cauldron was handed over to the next world. Both the selection of sacrificial objects, the form of depositing, and the preceding ceremonial treatment seem to follow superior ritual structures applying to both funerary rites and wetland sacrifices in Iron Age society.Often, the individual settlement-related sacrificial find seems to be explained by everyday doings, as largely all sacrifice-related objects of the Early Iron Age have a natural affiliation with the settlement and the daily housekeeping. However, it is clear that if the overwhelming amount of data is made subject to a comprehensive and detailed contextual analysis, settlement related find groups and attached action patterns appear, which have direct parallels in the ritual interpretation platform of the bog context. These parallels cannot be explained by pure practical or coincidence-related explanation models!As opposed to ploughed-up Stone Age axe deposits or impressive bronze depots from the Bronze Age and gold depots from the Late Iron Age, a ploughed-up collection of either earthenware, bones, human parts, etc. are not easily explained as sacrificial deposits. However, much indicates that the sacrificial settlement deposits of the Iron Age were not placed very deeply, and so they occur in the arable soil of later times. We must therefore assume that these very settlement-related sacrificial deposits from the Early Iron Age are extremely underrepresented in the available archaeological material. In order to clarify the sacrifice traditions in the Early Iron Age settlements, it is therefore necessary to have localities, which comply with a very rarely occurring find situation. The sites must have fine preservation conditions for bone material and, equally important, thick, continuously accumulated deposits of culture layers, as these preserve the usually shallowly deposited sacrifices. Further, it would be a great advantage if the site has a high degree of settlement continuity, as under optimal conditions, the investigation should comprise the activities of several centuries on the same spot.The Aalborg area holds Early Iron Age localities, which meet all of the above-mentioned conditions – for instance the settlement mound of Nr. Tranders, from which a few results will be pointed out. Time wise, the locality covers all of the Pre-Roman Iron Age and the fist part of the Early Roman Iron Age. Around ten farm units have been excavated from the settlement, each of which can be traced across a period of several hundred years. The houses were constructed with chalk floors (cf. Fig. 13), which give optimal preservation conditions for bone material, and the culture deposits assumed a thickness of up to 2 metres. Around 150 houses were excavated at this site (cf. Fig. 14). The author systematically checked the comprehensive find material, and starting from the theoretical and methodical approach presented in this article, was able to isolate 393 sacrificial deposits – a very comprehensive material in comparison with the sacrificial wetland sites!In 279 cases, it was possible to isolate sacrifices in connection with constructions. These comprised such different items as Stone Age axes, fossils, dress pins, a bronze fibula, iron knives, iron arrowheads, a bronze ring, an iron axe, various pottery sacrifices, amber, bone stilettos, bone spearheads, a bone arrowhead, complete animal skeletons, animal skulls and jaws, various animal bones, an infant, humane skull fragments, etc. (cf. Fig. 15). Just as the sacrificed objects themselves vary, so does the sacrifice intensity in the different constructions. Thus, houses without any registered construction sacrifices occur, whereas other constructions showed up to 5-15 sacrifices. These intense sacrifice activities are mainly connected with the later settlement phases from the Late Pre-Roman and the Early Roman Iron Age.The most ordinary find groups are different animal bones, pottery, Stone Age axes, fossils, and various pointed or edged tools. It is a characteristic of the construction sacrifices that they almost never show any signs of having been burnt prior to the depositing. The fact that all finds are not comparable merely because they are related to a construction is obvious, as the find group comprises as different objects as a sea urchin and an infant! Whereas the first should probably be considered an amulet, human sacrifices are traditionally considered a far more radical and ultimate act, and thus a sacrifice concerning a wider circle than the individual household. The highly varied sacrifice material causes the traditional link between construction sacrifices and an extremely narrow celebrant group to be reassessed. The excavations at Nr. Tranders also stress the fact that the amount of registered construction sacrifices are highly dependant on the preservation conditions and context registration as well as an open mind towards ritual interpretations in a traditionally secular research setting.In 114 cases, it was possible to determine settlement sacrifices at Nr. Tranders (cf. Fig. 16). The variation between the sacrificed objects closely follows the above described construction sacrifice and bog sacrifice traditions – both as regards temporary intensity in the centuries around the birth of Christ and which objects were deposited. From a superior view, the settlement sacrifices are characterized by often having been deposited in small, independent sacrificial pits, which were merely dug down a few centimetres from the surface level of the time, and rarely more than 25 cm. This very limited deposition depth emphasizes the enormous problems and distorting factors, which are probably the reason why the settlement sacrifices are so anonymous in most Iron Age settlements. They were simply ploughed away! The dominating sacrificial animal in the settlements was the sheep, often a lamb. However, the dog, the horse, and the cow also occur frequently in the material, whereas the pig is rarely included in the finds. To judge from both settlement and structure sacrifices, the distribution of sacrificial animals seem to be a direct mirror image of the life basis of the Early Iron Age society in the Aalborg area.One ritual element in particular, however, fundamentally separates the group of settlement sacrifices from those connected to structures, namely fire. Whereas fire does not seem to be part of the ritual make-up concerning structure sacrifices, both burnt and unburnt sacrifices appear in the settlement sacrifice material (cf. Fig. 17 & 18). This condition is especially obvious when examining the deposited animal and human bones. The two maps on Fig. 19 show the finds of burnt and unburnt bone deposits respectively. On the background of these two plots (x, y, and z coordinates) the following analysis has been made: (interpolation “unburnt”)-(interpolation “burnt”), cf. Fig. 20. The analysis clearly points out that the relation between burnt and unburnt bone deposits is time related: the burnt deposits were made in the time before the birth of Christ, whereas the unburnt deposits were made during the following centuries. If this is related to the contemporary development of the grave custom in North Jutland, it is noteworthy that we can establish an obvious parallel development. Thus, the burial custom also changes around the beginning of the birth of Christ from a cremation grave custom to an inhumation grave custom. This coincidence probably indicates that within the two different religious and ritual contexts, the “ritual language” is to some degree identical when it comes to passing on humans and sacrificial animals.Irrespective of the superior sacrificial context – a bog, a lake, a field, a meadow, a structure, or a settlement – both the sacrifice intensity and the sacrificed objects seem to be based on objects from the daily household. As shown in the case of Nr. Tranders, the sacrifices occur in such large numbers on settlements with optimal preservation conditions that it is impossible to maintain the thesis that the Iron Age people had an especially one-sided preference for performing the sacrificial rituals in connection with wetland areas.As a supplement to the archaeological evidence, archaeologists have often sought support in historical accounts written by Romans in the centuries around the birth of Christ. The Roman historian Tacitus’ description of the religious activities of the Teutons is particularly describing and geographically differentiated. He mentions some general features such as the Teutons mainly worshipping Mercury (Mercury is the god of fertility, shepherds, etc.) and that they consider it a sacred duty even to bring him a human sacrifice on fixed days (i.e. a sacrifice cycle). Hercules and Mars (gods of strength and war) can only be reconciled with the allowed animal sacrifices. Besides, the Teutons consider it incompatible with the grandness of the heavenly powers to close them in behind walls and give them human features (cf. the lacking iconography). Tacitus´ overall description of the religion of the Teutons is thus primarily dealing with fertility sacrifices in relation to Mercury and the sacrifice of humans on certain days, i.e. a sacrifice cycle.More specifically, Tacitus describes the religious practice performed by tribes in South Scandinavia and North Germany at the time immediately succeeding the birth of Christ:“Nor in one of these nations does aught remarkable occur, only that they universally join in the worship of Nerthus; that is to say, the Mother Earth [Nerthus is phonetically concordant with the name Njord, a fertility goddess known from Norse mythology]. Her they believe to interpose in the affairs of man, and to visit countries. In an island of the ocean stands the wood Castum: in it is a chariot dedicated to the Goddess, covered over with a curtain, and permitted to be touched by none but the Priest. Whenever the Goddess enters this her holy vehicle, he perceives her; and with profound veneration attends the motion of the chariot, which is always drawn by yoked cows. Then it is that days of rejoicing always ensue, and in all places whatsoever which she descends to honour with a visit and her company, feasts and recreation abound. They go not to war; they touch no arms; fast laid up is every hostile weapon; peace and repose are then only known, then only beloved, till to the temple the same priest reconducts the Goddess when well tired with the conversation of mortal beings. Anon the chariot is washed and purified in a secret lake, as also the curtains; nay, the Deity herself too, if you choose to believe it. In this office it is slaves who minister, and they are forthwith doomed to be swallowed up in the same lake. Hence all men are possessed with mysterious terror; as well as with a holy ignorance what that must be, which none see but such as are immediately to perish.”Traditionally, the text is solely related to the numerous bog finds from the period. The question is, however, whether this is appropriate? Even a very limited analysis of the content of the text clearly reveals that the described religious exertion and the traces it must have left in the archaeological material can only be partly described from the numerous sacrificial bogs. The account of Nerthus may be split into two separate parts. One part that describes the common religious actions and another part comprising rituals carried out by a narrower group of people. The ritual mentioned with a severely limited circle (priest and slaves) comprises the washing of the goddess’ chariot by a lake and the succeeding sacrifice of the slaves chosen for the task. Far larger does the participant group appear throughout the rest of the Nerthus story. At first, there is a short mentioning of Nerthus driving about to the different tribes! This may be interpreted in such a way that the rituals described comprise actions, which take place where people are primarily moving about, i.e. in the villages! Perhaps the larger settlements of the Early Iron Age play a central part in relation to such common society-supporting ritual traditions. Tacitus decribes the physical context to be able to change its rules and norms at this sudden religious activity (cf. “They go not to war; they touch no arms.”) and in this way change sphere from an everyday, secular context to a religious context – a sacrosanct condition arises. The settlement thus enters different spheres at different times! Tacitus´ account of the execution of and the setting for the practiced ritual structure thus closely follows the structure known from archaeological excavations of bogs and settlements.How, then, does the religious practice of the Early Iron Age – and its sacrificial part in particular – appear on the background of the analyses above? (Fig. 22). May the sacrificial activity in actual fact be divided into two overriding groups, as was previously the tradition – individual structure sacrifices on settlements and both common and individual sacrifices in wetland areas – or is it necessary to revise and differentiate this view of Early Iron Age religion and the sacrificial customs in particular?The very unbalanced picture of the ritual displays of the society, involving chosen bogs as an almost “church-like” forum, is neither expressed in the archaeological material nor in the few written sources. On the contrary, the sacrificial activity appears as a very complex area, completely connected to the time and the regional development of the society of which it was part. Sacrificial objects primarily comprising everyday objects in the form of food, earthenware, animals, and humans did not differ from the secular culture until the actual ritual act took place.Considering the fact that the sacrificial objects comprised a wide range of everyday items, it is perhaps not so strange that the context in which the objects were sacrificed also varied considerably. It thus seems as if the conventional sacrificial customs were attached to the complete active resource area of the settlements, both in the form of wetland areas, and to the same degree of settlements. The conditions concerning burial sites, field systems, grazing areas, border markings, etc. still appear unclear, although it can be established that here, too, ritual activities took place according to the same conventions.The exertion of the rituals constituted a just as varied picture during the Early Iron Age as did the choice of sacrificial objects and place of sacrifice. Thus, we see objects deposited intact, as pars pro toto, smashed, burnt, etc. In spite of this very complex picture, patterns do seem to occur. There are thus strong indications that the rituals connected to settlement sacrifices of humans and animals during the Early Iron Age are closely connected with the rituals attached to the burial custom, and as such mirror a conventional communication form between humans and gods. Conversely, it seems as if structure sacrifices through all of the Early Iron Age primarily occur unburnt and that the ritual make-up connected to the finds of structure sacrifices is thus detached from the previously mentioned types of sacrifice, whereas the actual selection of the sacrificial objects seem to follow the same pattern.It is a characteristic of the ritual environments of the Early Iron Age that they appear momentary and as part of the daily life in the peasant community. Much thus indicates that permanent sacred environments and buildings did not exist to any particularly large degree. This does not imply that people would not return to the same sacred sacrificial places but rather that in between the sacrifices, these places formed part of the daily life, just as all the other parts of the cultural landscape.The examination of both published and unpublished material shows that the settlements were parallel contexts to the wetland areas and that these two contexts probably supplemented each other within the religious landscape of the Early Iron Age. In the light of the sacrificial find material there is no need to make a strong distinction between the religious societal roles of the settlements as opposed to the wetlands. The context (wetland and settlement) cannot in itself be understood as a useful parameter for determining whether we are dealing with large collective society-supporting ritual sites or sites connected to a minor village community. The question is whether the variation of sacrificial contexts should be related to different deities and myths, i.e. the mythical and narrative dimension of the religion, rather than to the size of the group of participants. On a few settlements, metal vessels, chariots, and humans were sacrificed – find types that are traditionally associated with the bogs and with groups of participants from a larger area than the individual settlement. This interpretation should also be applied to the settlements.In spite of the fact that from an overall perspective, the practiced religion in South Scandinavia seems homogenous, there is neither archaeological nor historical evidence for the presence of real ritual and religious units comprising large areas, such as complete provinces. However, we must assume that sacrifices of for instance humans, chariots, cauldrons, and the large weapon accumulations were made by groups of people exceeding the number of inhabitants in a single settlement. We thus have no reason for questioning the traditional concept that chosen wetland areas functioned as sacred places from time to time to major sections of the population – whether the sacrifices were brought about by for instance acts of war or as part of a cyclic ritual. The question is whether the large settlements of the Early Iron Age did not play a similar part to a hinterland consisting of a number of minor settlements, as the comprehensive finds from for instance the settlement mounds near Aalborg seem to indicate.During the Late Roman Iron Age and Early Germanic Iron Age, the previously so comprehensive sacrificial activity connected to the wetlands declined considerably. Parallel to this, the frequent settlement-related fertility sacrifices of bones and earthenware vessels in the Early Iron Age recede into the background in favour of knives, lances, craftsmen’s tools, and prestigious items representing the changed society of these centuries. During the Late Iron Age, the iconographic imagery, after having been throttled down for almost a millennia, regains a central role within the religion. This happens by virtue of a varied imagery on prestigious items such as bracteates and “guldgubber,” cf. Fig. 21. Seen as a whole, it seems as if – parallel to the development of the society during the Late Roman Iron Age and the Early Germanic Iron Age – there is a dimension displacement within the ritual and religious world, which manifests itself in an increased focus on the material dimension. The question is whether this very dimension displacement is not reflecting the religious development from the fertility-related Vanir faith to the more elitist Æsir faith.Jesper HansenOdense Bys Museer Translated by Annette Lerche Trolle

Background Migraine and vestibular migraine are disorders associated with a heightened motion sensitivity that provoke symptoms of motion-induced nausea and motion sickness. VM affects ∼3% of adults in the USA and affects three-fold more women than men. Triptans (selective serotonin receptor agonists) relieve migraine pain but lack efficacy for vertigo. Murine models of photophobia and allodynia have used injections of calcitonin gene-related peptide (CGRP) or other migraine triggers, such as sodium nitroprusside (SNP), to induce migraine sensitivities in mice to touch and light. Yet, there is limited research on whether these triggers affect motion-induced nausea in mice, and whether migraine blockers can reduce these migraine symptoms. We hypothesized that systemic delivery of CGRP or SNP will increase motion sickness susceptibility and motion-induced nausea in mouse models, and that migraine blockers can block these changes induced by systemically delivered CGRP or SNP. Methods We investigated two measures of motion sickness assessment [motion sickness index (MSI) scoring and motion-induced thermoregulation] after intraperitoneal injections of either CGRP or SNP in C57BL/6J mice. The drugs olcegepant, sumatriptan and rizatriptan were used to assess the efficacy of migraine blockers. Results MSI measures were confounded by CGRP’s effect on gastric distress. However, analysis of tail vasodilatations as a surrogate for motion-induced nausea was robust for both migraine triggers. Only olcegepant treatment rescued tail vasodilatations. Conclusions These preclinical findings support the use of small molecule CGRP receptor antagonists for the treatment of motion-induced nausea of migraine, and show that triptan therapeutics are ineffective against motion-induced nausea of migraine. Trial Registration: Not Applicable

AbstractForming a complete picture of the relationship between neural activity and skeletal kinematics requires quantification of skeletal joint biomechanics during free behavior; however, without detailed knowledge of the underlying skeletal motion, inferring limb kinematics using surface-tracking approaches is difficult, especially for animals where the relationship between the surface and underlying skeleton changes during motion. Here we developed a videography-based method enabling detailed three-dimensional kinematic quantification of an anatomically defined skeleton in untethered freely behaving rats and mice. This skeleton-based model was constrained using anatomical principles and joint motion limits and provided skeletal pose estimates for a range of body sizes, even when limbs were occluded. Model-inferred limb positions and joint kinematics during gait and gap-crossing behaviors were verified by direct measurement of either limb placement or limb kinematics using inertial measurement units. Together we show that complex decision-making behaviors can be accurately reconstructed at the level of skeletal kinematics using our anatomically constrained model.

Abstract Qiong Yao films are known for telling stories of romance. This essay focuses on the female characters in Qiong Yao films produced by the Grand Motion Picture Company (GMP) in the 1960s. Founded by Li Han-xiang in 1963, GMP played a key role in the evolution of Taiwan cinema in general and Qiong Yao films in particular. The 1960s was to Taiwan a time of political and ideological conservatism. Discipline and obedience to authorities were prioritized as an official strategy to celebrate the traditional values and principles of Chinese culture. The Confucian-oriented ideology toward women dominated. The paper proposes that most women portrayed in the Qiong Yao films by GMP remain in the traditional status, emotionally and economically dependent on men. The paper posits that the gender-based/biased authoritarian hierarchy represented in these romantic dramas was closely associated to the patriarchal social structure and the mainstream political ideology. GMP’s 1968 film Love Eternal will be used as a case study to show how “the limits of proprieties” must be followed and what devastating effects were produced in the case when these traditional values were challenged and violated.

AbstractThis paper explores the mystical structure of education as Bildung in medieval theologian and Dominican friar Meister Eckhart’s work and the 2010 French film Of Gods and Men (Des Hommes et Des Dieux). I start this paper with a short introductory sketch of the Bildung tradition, in order to situate my discussion of Eckhart within the more well-known humanist tradition. Here, I claim that Bildung (as we understand it today through the classic Bildung philosophers) points back to its theological heritage and horizon of meaning, when it is claimed as the general tekhnê (art, craft) of making oneself at home in the world with and through others. In my first step, I then explore the intellectual heritage of this mystical structure of Bildung. Drawing on a range of Meister Eckhart’s writings (esp. his German sermons), I elaborate three features pivotal to his concept of Bildung (as image-ing) of the imago Dei (image of God) in the human soul/action: (1) divine grace, (2) human cultivation and (3) the harmonisation of both in (what I shall call) ‘careful gestures'. In my concluding second step, I illustrate this mystical structure of Eckhartian Bildung—with a particular focus on the emergence of careful gestures—through the motion picture Des Hommes et Des Dieux.

Abstract Phaeochromocytoma is a rare tumour of the chromaffin cells in the adrenal medulla, which secretes catecholamines. While associated with genetic disorders e.g., MEN-2, they tend to occur sporadically, and are often initially asymptomatic, found incidentally on imaging. Classical symptoms of Phaeochromocytoma include headaches, sweating, and palpitations, with sustained or paroxysmal hypertension which is refractory to a cocktail of antihypertensives. A variety of presentations have been reported in the literature including, but not limited to colitis, intracerebral haemorrhage, and PRES syndrome. We present a case of a 64-year-old man with an incidental left adrenal nodule. This radiologically indeterminate lesion was initially asymptomatic. Secretion studies revealed elevated metadrenaline levels, and an MIBG scan with positive avidity unveiled the lesion's pheochromocytoma nature. Whilst awaiting surgical intervention, the patient required emergency admission with a hypertensive crisis, presenting with left-sided flank pain and a blood pressure peaking at 220mmHg systolic. ECG findings were consistent with a myocardial infarction-like picture, and echocardiogram demonstrated regional wall motion abnormalities. CT coronary angiography revealed no significant coronary arterial disease – confirming that the patient’s presentation was in fact secondary to the pheochromocytoma. Pre-operative optimization is crucial for safe surgery. After the crisis, surgery was delayed by 6 weeks for cardiac rehabilitation. The patient was admitted a week before the procedure for optimal haemodynamics. Adrenalectomy proceeded as planned after alpha-blockade. A structured endocrine surgery clinic follow-up was established to assess the patient's ongoing recovery, and cardiovascular status. This case highlights cardiovascular implications of phaeochromocytoma, stressing a multidisciplinary approach for hypertensive crises and optimising outcomes.

Objective: Study of the structure of lethal cases in patients diagnosed with leptospirosis in the Lviv Region.Introduction: Mortality rate of leptospirosis in Ukraine remains high year after year. The study of the peculiarities of lethal cases over a long period enables researchers to specify possible mechanisms of infection which cause the development of the severest cases of leptospirosis and to prevent disease emergence by applying adequate preventive measures.Methods: We have analyzed case reports of patients diagnosed with leptospirosis, who were treated and died in Lviv Regional Clinical Hospital of Infectious Diseases from 1987-2016.Results: Over the last 30 years, 942 patients with leptospirosis were treated in Lviv Regional Clinical Hospital of Infectious Diseases, and 125 of them died. The mortality rate was 13.27%. Men died twice as often as women – 83 (66.4%) and 42 (33.6%), respectively, p<0.001. The average age at death was 56.5±11.98 years old. Women died at older age (59.62±9.6) as compared to men (54.93±12.78), p<0.05. Patients who died from leptospirosis were admitted into the hospital on the 5.81±2.31 day, which is considered to be a late admission. The average length of stay in the inpatient department was 6.21±6.54 days. Rural residents died much more often, 78 cases (62.4%) compared with city residents, 47 cases (37.6%), p<0.01. The mortality from leptospirosis was lowest during the summer months (6.79%) compared to winter (19.85%, p <0.001), spring (23.81%, p <0.001) and autumn (13.78%, p < 0.01) months. It should be noted that the mortality during the autumn-summer period was significantly lower (10%) than during the spring-winter period (21.76%, p <0.001). The causative agent was verified by microscopic agglutination test and lysis in 66 (52.8%) of the deceased patients, and in 59 individuals (47.2%) the agent could not be identified due to early period of serological investigation, when no anti-leptospirosis antibodies had been produced so far. In these cases the diagnosis of leptospirosis was based on typical clinical signs and epidemiological anamnesis. The main serogroups of leptospirae, which caused lethal cases, were L. icterohaemorrhagiae – 51 (40.8%), L. grippotyphosa – 5 (4%), L. kabura – 3 (2.4%), mixed L. Icterohaemorrhagiaeplus L. Grippotyphosa – 3 (2.4%), L. Cynopteri and L.Hebdomadis - 2 (1.6%) patients each. Epidemiological anamnesis could be determined in 84 (67.2%) patients. Most often, patients associated the disease with the following factors: 45 (36%) – with the presence of rats or mice-like rodents in a house, yard or workplace, 26 (20.8%) – with agricultural work, where contact with rodents' feces was also possible, 5 (4%) – with professional activity, 4 (3.2%) – with fishing, and 4 (3.2%) – with swimming in water pools. In 41 (32.8%) patients, leptospirosis could not be associated with any factor.Conclusions: L.icterohaemorrhagiae still remains the most common cause of mortality of leptospirosis – 51 (40.8%). In 56.8% of the cases, the disease was caused by contact with rodents. Over the last 30 years, men died more often of leptospirosis in the Lviv region than women (p<0.001), whereas, the deceased women were considerably older than men (p<0.05). Rural residents died much more often than city residents (p<0.01). The highest mortality rate was recorded in the spring – 23.81%, the lowest was recorded in summer – 6.79% (p <0.001). Active deratization measures help to reduce morbidity and mortality of leptospirosis.We believe that the question regarding the accuracy of the final diagnosis of "leptospirosis" in 59 (47.2%) dead patients is still under discussion, as the diagnosis was established based on clinical symptoms only, while PMA result was negative. After all, the clinical picture of the severe forms of leptospirosis is similar to the typical symptoms of hemorrhagic fever with renal syndrome and Crimean hemorrhagic fever.

AbstractFrequently in rehabilitation, visually impaired persons are passive agents of exercises with fixed environmental constraints. In fact, a printed tactile map, i.e. a particular picture with a specific spatial arrangement, can usually not be edited. Interaction with map content, instead, facilitates the learning of spatial skills because it exploits mental imagery, manipulation and strategic planning simultaneously. However, it has rarely been applied to maps, mainly because of technological limitations. This study aims to understand if visually impaired people can autonomously build objects that are completely virtual. Specifically, we investigated if a group of twelve blind persons, with a wide age range, could exploit mental imagery to interact with virtual content and actively manipulate it by means of a haptic device. The device is mouse-shaped and designed to jointly perceive, with one finger only, local tactile height and inclination cues of arbitrary scalar fields. Spatial information can be mentally constructed by integrating local tactile cues, given by the device, with global proprioceptive cues, given by hand and arm motion. The experiment consisted of a bi-manual task, in which one hand explored some basic virtual objects and the other hand acted on a keyboard to change the position of one object in real-time. The goal was to merge basic objects into more complex objects, like a puzzle. The experiment spanned different resolutions of the tactile information. We measured task accuracy, efficiency, usability and execution time. The average accuracy in solving the puzzle was 90.5%. Importantly, accuracy was linearly predicted by efficiency, measured as the number of moves needed to solve the task. Subjective parameters linked to usability and spatial resolutions did not predict accuracy; gender modulated the execution time, with men being faster than women. Overall, we show that building purely virtual tactile objects is possible in absence of vision and that the process is measurable and achievable in partial autonomy. Introducing virtual tactile graphics in rehabilitation protocols could facilitate the stimulation of mental imagery, a basic element for the ability to orient in space. The behavioural variable introduced in the current study can be calculated after each trial and therefore could be used to automatically measure and tailor protocols to specific user needs. In perspective, our experimental setup can inspire remote rehabilitation scenarios for visually impaired people.

From elephants to ABBA fans, silicon to hormone, the following discussion uses a new research method to look at printed text, motion pictures and a teenage rebel icon. If by ‘print’ we mean a mechanically reproduced impression of a cultural symbol in a medium, then printing has been with us since before microdot security prints were painted onto cars, before voice prints, laser prints, network servers, record pressings, motion picture prints, photo prints, colour woodblock prints, before books, textile prints, and footprints. If we accept that higher mammals such as elephants have a learnt culture, then it is possible to extend a definition of printing beyond Homo sapiens. Poole reports that elephants mechanically trumpet reproductions of human car horns into the air surrounding their society. If nothing else, this cross-species, cross-cultural reproduction, this ‘ability to mimic’ is ‘another sign of their intelligence’. Observation of child development suggests that the first significant meaningful ‘impression’ made on the human mind is that of the face of the child’s nurturer – usually its mother. The baby’s mind forms an ‘impression’, a mental print, a reproducible memory data set, of the nurturer’s face, voice, smell, touch, etc. That face is itself a cultural construct: hair style, makeup, piercings, tattoos, ornaments, nutrition-influenced skin and smell, perfume, temperature and voice. A mentally reproducible pattern of a unique face is formed in the mind, and we use that pattern to distinguish ‘familiar and strange’ in our expanding social orbit. The social relations of patterned memory – of imprinting – determine the extent to which we explore our world (armed with research aids such as text print) or whether we turn to violence or self-harm (Bretherton). While our cultural artifacts (such as vellum maps or networked voice message servers) bravely extend our significant patterns into the social world and the traversed environment, it is useful to remember that such artifacts, including print, are themselves understood by our original pattern-reproduction and impression system – the human mind, developed in childhood. The ‘print’ is brought to mind differently in different discourses. For a reader, a ‘print’ is a book, a memo or a broadsheet, whether it is the Indian Buddhist Sanskrit texts ordered to be printed in 593 AD by the Chinese emperor Sui Wen-ti (Silk Road) or the US Defense Department memo authorizing lower ranks to torture the prisoners taken by the Bush administration (Sanchez, cited in ABC). Other fields see prints differently. For a musician, a ‘print’ may be the sheet music which spread classical and popular music around the world; it may be a ‘record’ (as in a ‘recording’ session), where sound is impressed to wax, vinyl, charged silicon particles, or the alloys (Smith, “Elpida”) of an mp3 file. For the fine artist, a ‘print’ may be any mechanically reproduced two-dimensional (or embossed) impression of a significant image in media from paper to metal, textile to ceramics. ‘Print’ embraces the Japanese Ukiyo-e colour prints of Utamaro, the company logos that wink from credit card holographs, the early photographs of Talbot, and the textured patterns printed into neolithic ceramics. Computer hardware engineers print computational circuits. Homicide detectives investigate both sweaty finger prints and the repeated, mechanical gaits of suspects, which are imprinted into the earthy medium of a crime scene. For film makers, the ‘print’ may refer to a photochemical polyester reproduction of a motion picture artifact (the reel of ‘celluloid’), or a DVD laser disc impression of the same film. Textualist discourse has borrowed the word ‘print’ to mean ‘text’, so ‘print’ may also refer to the text elements within the vision track of a motion picture: the film’s opening titles, or texts photographed inside the motion picture story such as the sword-cut ‘Z’ in Zorro (Niblo). Before the invention of writing, the main mechanically reproduced impression of a cultural symbol in a medium was the humble footprint in the sand. The footprints of tribes – and neighbouring animals – cut tracks in the vegetation and the soil. Printed tracks led towards food, water, shelter, enemies and friends. Having learnt to pattern certain faces into their mental world, children grew older and were educated in the footprints of family and clan, enemies and food. The continuous impression of significant foot traffic in the medium of the earth produced the lines between significant nodes of prewriting and pre-wheeled cultures. These tracks were married to audio tracks, such as the song lines of the Australian Aborigines, or the ballads of tramping culture everywhere. A typical tramping song has the line, ‘There’s a track winding back to an old-fashion shack along the road to Gundagai,’ (O’Hagan), although this colonial-style song was actually written for radio and became an international hit on the airwaves, rather than the tramping trails. The printed tracks impressed by these cultural flows are highly contested and diverse, and their foot prints are woven into our very language. The names for printed tracks have entered our shared memory from the intersection of many cultures: ‘Track’ is a Germanic word entering English usage comparatively late (1470) and now used mainly in audio visual cultural reproduction, as in ‘soundtrack’. ‘Trek’ is a Dutch word for ‘track’ now used mainly by ecotourists and science fiction fans. ‘Learn’ is a Proto-Indo-European word: the verb ‘learn’ originally meant ‘to find a track’ back in the days when ‘learn’ had a noun form which meant ‘the sole of the foot’. ‘Tract’ and ‘trace’ are Latin words entering English print usage before 1374 and now used mainly in religious, and electronic surveillance, cultural reproduction. ‘Trench’ in 1386 was a French path cut through a forest. ‘Sagacity’ in English print in 1548 was originally the ability to track or hunt, in Proto-Indo-European cultures. ‘Career’ (in English before 1534) was the print made by chariots in ancient Rome. ‘Sleuth’ (1200) was a Norse noun for a track. ‘Investigation’ (1436) was Latin for studying a footprint (Harper). The arrival of symbolic writing scratched on caves, hearth stones, and trees (the original meaning of ‘book’ is tree), brought extremely limited text education close to home. Then, with baked clay tablets, incised boards, slate, bamboo, tortoise shell, cast metal, bark cloth, textiles, vellum, and – later – paper, a portability came to text that allowed any culture to venture away from known ‘foot’ paths with a reduction in the risk of becoming lost and perishing. So began the world of maps, memos, bills of sale, philosophic treatises and epic mythologies. Some of this was printed, such as the mechanical reproduction of coins, but the fine handwriting required of long, extended, portable texts could not be printed until the invention of paper in China about 2000 years ago. Compared to lithic architecture and genes, portable text is a fragile medium, and little survives from the millennia of its innovators. The printing of large non-text designs onto bark-paper and textiles began in neolithic times, but Sui Wen-ti’s imperial memo of 593 AD gives us the earliest written date for printed books, although we can assume they had been published for many years previously. The printed book was a combination of Indian philosophic thought, wood carving, ink chemistry and Chinese paper. The earliest surviving fragment of paper-print technology is ‘Mantras of the Dharani Sutra’, a Buddhist scripture written in the Sanskrit language of the Indian subcontinent, unearthed at an early Tang Dynasty site in Xian, China – making the fragment a veteran piece of printing, in the sense that Sanskrit books had been in print for at least a century by the early Tang Dynasty (Chinese Graphic Arts Net). At first, paper books were printed with page-size carved wooden boards. Five hundred years later, Pi Sheng (c.1041) baked individual reusable ceramic characters in a fire and invented the durable moveable type of modern printing (Silk Road 2000). Abandoning carved wooden tablets, the ‘digitizing’ of Chinese moveable type sped up the production of printed texts. In turn, Pi Sheng’s flexible, rapid, sustainable printing process expanded the political-cultural impact of the literati in Asian society. Digitized block text on paper produced a bureaucratic, literate elite so powerful in Asia that Louis XVI of France copied China’s print-based Confucian system of political authority for his own empire, and so began the rise of the examined public university systems, and the civil service systems, of most European states (Watson, Visions). By reason of its durability, its rapid mechanical reproduction, its culturally agreed signs, literate readership, revered authorship, shared ideology, and distributed portability, a ‘print’ can be a powerful cultural network which builds and expands empires. But print also attacks and destroys empires. A case in point is the Spanish conquest of Aztec America: The Aztecs had immense libraries of American literature on bark-cloth scrolls, a technology which predated paper. These libraries were wiped out by the invading Spanish, who carried a different book before them (Ewins). In the industrial age, the printing press and the gun were seen as the weapons of rebellions everywhere. In 1776, American rebels staffed their ‘Homeland Security’ units with paper makers, knowing that defeating the English would be based on printed and written documents (Hahn). Mao Zedong was a book librarian; Mao said political power came out of the barrel of a gun, but Mao himself came out of a library. With the spread of wireless networked servers, political ferment comes out of the barrel of the cell phone and the internet chat room these days. Witness the cell phone displays of a plane hitting a tower that appear immediately after 9/11 in the Middle East, or witness the show trials of a few US and UK lower ranks who published prints of their torturing activities onto the internet: only lower ranks who published prints were arrested or tried. The control of secure servers and satellites is the new press. These days, we live in a global library of burning books – ‘burning’ in the sense that ‘print’ is now a charged silicon medium (Smith, “Intel”) which is usually made readable by connecting the chip to nuclear reactors and petrochemically-fired power stations. World resources burn as we read our screens. Men, women, children burn too, as we watch our infotainment news in comfort while ‘their’ flickering dead faces are printed in our broadcast hearths. The print we watch is not the living; it is the voodoo of the living in the blackout behind the camera, engaging the blood sacrifice of the tormented and the unfortunate. Internet texts are also ‘on fire’ in the third sense of their fragility and instability as a medium: data bases regularly ‘print’ fail-safe copies in an attempt to postpone the inevitable mechanical, chemical and electrical failure that awaits all electronic media in time. Print defines a moral position for everyone. In reporting conflict, in deciding to go to press or censor, any ‘print’ cannot avoid an ethical context, starting with the fact that there is a difference in power between print maker, armed perpetrators, the weak, the peaceful, the publisher, and the viewer. So many human factors attend a text, video or voice ‘print’: its very existence as an aesthetic object, even before publication and reception, speaks of unbalanced, and therefore dynamic, power relationships. For example, Graham Greene departed unscathed from all the highly dangerous battlefields he entered as a novelist: Riot-torn Germany, London Blitz, Belgian Congo, Voodoo Haiti, Vietnam, Panama, Reagan’s Washington, and mafia Europe. His texts are peopled with the injustices of the less fortunate of the twentieth century, while he himself was a member of the fortunate (if not happy) elite, as is anyone today who has the luxury of time to read Greene’s works for pleasure. Ethically a member of London and Paris’ colonizers, Greene’s best writing still electrifies, perhaps partly because he was in the same line of fire as the victims he shared bread with. In fact, Greene hoped daily that he would escape from the dreadful conflicts he fictionalized via a body bag or an urn of ashes (see Sherry). In reading an author’s biography we have one window on the ethical dimensions of authority and print. If a print’s aesthetics are sometimes enduring, its ethical relationships are always mutable. Take the stylized logo of a running athlete: four limbs bent in a rotation of action. This dynamic icon has symbolized ‘good health’ in Hindu and Buddhist culture, from Madras to Tokyo, for thousands of years. The cross of bent limbs was borrowed for the militarized health programs of 1930s Germany, and, because of what was only a brief, recent, isolated yet monstrously horrific segment of its history in print, the bent-limbed swastika is now a vilified symbol in the West. The sign remains ‘impressed’ differently on traditional Eastern culture, and without the taint of Nazism. Dramatic prints are emotionally charged because, in depicting Homo sapiens in danger, or passionately in love, they elicit a hormonal reaction from the reader, the viewer, or the audience. The type of emotions triggered by a print vary across the whole gamut of human chemistry. A recent study of three genres of motion picture prints shows a marked differences in the hormonal responses of men compared to women when viewing a romance, an actioner, and a documentary (see Schultheiss, Wirth, and Stanton). Society is biochemically diverse in its engagement with printed culture, which raises questions about equality in the arts. Motion picture prints probably comprise around one third of internet traffic, in the form of stolen digitized movie files pirated across the globe via peer-to-peer file transfer networks (p2p), and burnt as DVD laser prints (BBC). There is also a US 40 billion dollar per annum legitimate commerce in DVD laser pressings (Grassl), which would suggest an US 80 billion per annum world total in legitimate laser disc print culture. The actively screen literate, or the ‘sliterati’ as I prefer to call them, research this world of motion picture prints via their peers, their internet information channels, their television programming, and their web forums. Most of this activity occurs outside the ambit of universities and schools. One large site of sliterate (screen literate) practice outside most schooling and official research is the net of online forums at imdb.com (International Movie Data Base). Imdb.com ‘prints’ about 25,000,000 top pages per month to client browsers. Hundreds of sliterati forums are located at imdb, including a forum for the Australian movie, Muriel’s Wedding (Hogan). Ten years after the release of Muriel’s Wedding, young people who are concerned with victimization and bullying still log on to http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0110598/board/> and put their thoughts into print: I still feel so bad for Muriel in the beginning of the movie, when the girls ‘dump’ her, and how much the poor girl cried and cried! Those girls were such biartches…I love how they got their comeuppance! bunniesormaybemidgets’s comment is typical of the current discussion. Muriel’s Wedding was a very popular film in its first cinema edition in Australia and elsewhere. About 30% of the entire over-14 Australian population went to see this photochemical polyester print in the cinemas on its first release. A decade on, the distributors printed a DVD laser disc edition. The story concerns Muriel (played by Toni Collette), the unemployed daughter of a corrupt, ‘police state’ politician. Muriel is bullied by her peers and she withdraws into a fantasy world, deluding herself that a white wedding will rescue her from the torments of her blighted life. Through theft and deceit (the modus operandi of her father) Muriel escapes to the entertainment industry and finds a ‘wicked’ girlfriend mentor. From a rebellious position of stubborn independence, Muriel plays out her fantasy. She gets her white wedding, before seeing both her father and her new married life as hollow shams which have goaded her abandoned mother to suicide. Redefining her life as a ‘game’ and assuming responsibility for her independence, Muriel turns her back on the mainstream, image-conscious, female gang of her oppressed youth. Muriel leaves the story, having rekindled her friendship with her rebel mentor. My methodological approach to viewing the laser disc print was to first make a more accessible, coded record of the entire movie. I was able to code and record the print in real time, using a new metalanguage (Watson, “Eyes”). The advantage of Coding is that ‘thinks’ the same way as film making, it does not sidetrack the analyst into prose. The Code splits the movie print into Vision Action [vision graphic elements, including text] (sound) The Coding splits the vision track into normal action and graphic elements, such as text, so this Coding is an ideal method for extracting all the text elements of a film in real time. After playing the film once, I had four and a half tightly packed pages of the coded story, including all its text elements in square brackets. Being a unique, indexed hard copy, the Coded copy allowed me immediate access to any point of the Muriel’s Wedding saga without having to search the DVD laser print. How are ‘print’ elements used in Muriel’s Wedding? Firstly, a rose-coloured monoprint of Muriel Heslop’s smiling face stares enigmatically from the plastic surface of the DVD picture disc. The print is a still photo captured from her smile as she walked down the aisle of her white wedding. In this print, Toni Collette is the Mona Lisa of Australian culture, except that fans of Muriel’s Wedding know the meaning of that smile is a magical combination of the actor’s art: the smile is both the flush of dreams come true and the frightening self deception that will kill her mother. Inserting and playing the disc, the text-dominant menu appears, and the film commences with the text-dominant opening titles. Text and titles confer a legitimacy on a work, whether it is a trade mark of the laser print owners, or the household names of stars. Text titles confer status relationships on both the presenters of the cultural artifact and the viewer who has entered into a legal license agreement with the owners of the movie. A title makes us comfortable, because the mind always seeks to name the unfamiliar, and a set of text titles does that job for us so that we can navigate the ‘tracks’ and settle into our engagement with the unfamiliar. The apparent ‘truth’ and ‘stability’ of printed text calms our fears and beguiles our uncertainties. Muriel attends the white wedding of a school bully bride, wearing a leopard print dress she has stolen. Muriel’s spotted wild animal print contrasts with the pure white handmade dress of the bride. In Muriel’s leopard textile print, we have the wild, rebellious, impoverished, inappropriate intrusion into the social ritual and fantasy of her high-status tormentor. An off-duty store detective recognizes the printed dress and calls the police. The police are themselves distinguished by their blue-and-white checked prints and other mechanically reproduced impressions of cultural symbols: in steel, brass, embroidery, leather and plastics. Muriel is driven in the police car past the stenciled town sign (‘Welcome To Porpoise Spit’ heads a paragraph of small print). She is delivered to her father, a politician who presides over the policing of his town. In a state where the judiciary, police and executive are hijacked by the same tyrant, Muriel’s father, Bill, pays off the police constables with a carton of legal drugs (beer) and Muriel must face her father’s wrath, which he proceeds to transfer to his detested wife. Like his daughter, the father also wears a spotted brown print costume, but his is a batik print from neighbouring Indonesia (incidentally, in a nation that takes the political status of its batik prints very seriously). Bill demands that Muriel find the receipt for the leopard print dress she claims she has purchased. The legitimate ownership of the object is enmeshed with a printed receipt, the printed evidence of trade. The law (and the paramilitary power behind the law) are legitimized, or contested, by the presence or absence of printed text. Muriel hides in her bedroom, surround by poster prints of the pop group ABBA. Torn-out prints of other people’s weddings adorn her mirror. Her face is embossed with the clown-like primary colours of the marionette as she lifts a bouquet to her chin and stares into the real time ‘print’ of her mirror image. Bill takes the opportunity of a business meeting with Japanese investors to feed his entire family at ‘Charlie Chan’’s restaurant. Muriel’s middle sister sloppily wears her father’s state election tee shirt, printed with the text: ‘Vote 1, Bill Heslop. You can’t stop progress.’ The text sets up two ironic gags that are paid off on the dialogue track: “He lost,’ we are told. ‘Progress’ turns out to be funding the concreting of a beach. Bill berates his daughter Muriel: she has no chance of becoming a printer’s apprentice and she has failed a typing course. Her dysfunction in printed text has been covered up by Bill: he has bribed the typing teacher to issue a printed diploma to his daughter. In the gambling saloon of the club, under the arrays of mechanically repeated cultural symbols lit above the poker machines (‘A’ for ace, ‘Q’ for queen, etc.), Bill’s secret girlfriend Diedre risks giving Muriel a cosmetics job. Another text icon in lights announces the surf nightclub ‘Breakers’. Tania, the newly married queen bitch who has made Muriel’s teenage years a living hell, breaks up with her husband, deciding to cash in his negotiable text documents – his Bali honeymoon tickets – and go on an island holiday with her girlfriends instead. Text documents are the enduring site of agreements between people and also the site of mutations to those agreements. Tania dumps Muriel, who sobs and sobs. Sobs are a mechanical, percussive reproduction impressed on the sound track. Returning home, we discover that Muriel’s older brother has failed a printed test and been rejected for police recruitment. There is a high incidence of print illiteracy in the Heslop family. Mrs Heslop (Jeannie Drynan), for instance, regularly has trouble at the post office. Muriel sees a chance to escape the oppression of her family by tricking her mother into giving her a blank cheque. Here is the confluence of the legitimacy of a bank’s printed negotiable document with the risk and freedom of a blank space for rebel Muriel’s handwriting. Unable to type, her handwriting has the power to steal every cent of her father’s savings. She leaves home and spends the family’s savings at an island resort. On the island, the text print-challenged Muriel dances to a recording (sound print) of ABBA, her hand gestures emphasizing her bewigged face, which is made up in an impression of her pop idol. Her imitation of her goddesses – the ABBA women, her only hope in a real world of people who hate or avoid her – is accompanied by her goddesses’ voices singing: ‘the mystery book on the shelf is always repeating itself.’ Before jpeg and gif image downloads, we had postcard prints and snail mail. Muriel sends a postcard to her family, lying about her ‘success’ in the cosmetics business. The printed missal is clutched by her father Bill (Bill Hunter), who proclaims about his daughter, ‘you can’t type but you really impress me’. Meanwhile, on Hibiscus Island, Muriel lies under a moonlit palm tree with her newly found mentor, ‘bad girl’ Ronda (Rachel Griffiths). In this critical scene, where foolish Muriel opens her heart’s yearnings to a confidante she can finally trust, the director and DP have chosen to shoot a flat, high contrast blue filtered image. The visual result is very much like the semiabstract Japanese Ukiyo-e woodblock prints by Utamaro. This Japanese printing style informed the rise of European modern painting (Monet, Van Gogh, Picasso, etc., were all important collectors and students of Ukiyo-e prints). The above print and text elements in Muriel’s Wedding take us 27 minutes into her story, as recorded on a single page of real-time handwritten Coding. Although not discussed here, the Coding recorded the complete film – a total of 106 minutes of text elements and main graphic elements – as four pages of Code. Referring to this Coding some weeks after it was made, I looked up the final code on page four: taxi [food of the sea] bq. Translation: a shop sign whizzes past in the film’s background, as Muriel and Ronda leave Porpoise Spit in a taxi. Over their heads the text ‘Food Of The Sea’ flashes. We are reminded that Muriel and Ronda are mermaids, fantastic creatures sprung from the brow of author PJ Hogan, and illuminated even today in the pantheon of women’s coming-of-age art works. That the movie is relevant ten years on is evidenced by the current usage of the Muriel’s Wedding online forum, an intersection of wider discussions by sliterate women on imdb.com who, like Muriel, are observers (and in some cases victims) of horrific pressure from ambitious female gangs and bullies. Text is always a minor element in a motion picture (unless it is a subtitled foreign film) and text usually whizzes by subliminally while viewing a film. By Coding the work for [text], all the text nuances made by the film makers come to light. While I have viewed Muriel’s Wedding on many occasions, it has only been in Coding it specifically for text that I have noticed that Muriel is a representative of that vast class of talented youth who are discriminated against by print (as in text) educators who cannot offer her a life-affirming identity in the English classroom. Severely depressed at school, and failing to type or get a printer’s apprenticeship, Muriel finds paid work (and hence, freedom, life, identity, independence) working in her audio visual printed medium of choice: a video store in a new city. Muriel found a sliterate admirer at the video store but she later dumped him for her fantasy man, before leaving him too. One of the points of conjecture on the imdb Muriel’s Wedding site is, did Muriel (in the unwritten future) get back together with admirer Brice Nobes? That we will never know. While a print forms a track that tells us where culture has been, a print cannot be the future, a print is never animate reality. At the end of any trail of prints, one must lift one’s head from the last impression, and negotiate satisfaction in the happening world. References Australian Broadcasting Corporation. “Memo Shows US General Approved Interrogations.” 30 Mar. 2005 http://www.abc.net.au>. British Broadcasting Commission. “Films ‘Fuel Online File-Sharing’.’’ 22 Feb. 2005 http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/3890527.stm>. Bretherton, I. “The Origins of Attachment Theory: John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth.” 1994. 23 Jan. 2005 http://www.psy.med.br/livros/autores/bowlby/bowlby.pdf>. Bunniesormaybemidgets. Chat Room Comment. “What Did Those Girls Do to Rhonda?” 28 Mar. 2005 http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0110598/board/>. Chinese Graphic Arts Net. Mantras of the Dharani Sutra. 20 Feb. 2005 http://www.cgan.com/english/english/cpg/engcp10.htm>. Ewins, R. Barkcloth and the Origins of Paper. 1991. 20 Feb. 2005 http://www.justpacific.com/pacific/papers/barkcloth~paper.html>. Grassl K.R. The DVD Statistical Report. 14 Mar. 2005 http://www.corbell.com>. Hahn, C. M. The Topic Is Paper. 20 Feb. 2005 http://www.nystamp.org/Topic_is_paper.html>. Harper, D. Online Etymology Dictionary. 14 Mar. 2005 http://www.etymonline.com/>. Mask of Zorro, The. Screenplay by J McCulley. UA, 1920. Muriel’s Wedding. Dir. PJ Hogan. Perf. Toni Collette, Rachel Griffiths, Bill Hunter, and Jeannie Drynan. Village Roadshow, 1994. O’Hagan, Jack. On The Road to Gundagai. 1922. 2 Apr. 2005 http://ingeb.org/songs/roadtogu.html>. Poole, J.H., P.L. Tyack, A.S. Stoeger-Horwath, and S. Watwood. “Animal Behaviour: Elephants Are Capable of Vocal Learning.” Nature 24 Mar. 2005. Sanchez, R. “Interrogation and Counter-Resistance Policy.” 14 Sept. 2003. 30 Mar. 2005 http://www.abc.net.au>. Schultheiss, O.C., M.M. Wirth, and S.J. Stanton. “Effects of Affiliation and Power Motivation Arousal on Salivary Progesterone and Testosterone.” Hormones and Behavior 46 (2005). Sherry, N. The Life of Graham Greene. 3 vols. London: Jonathan Cape 2004, 1994, 1989. Silk Road. Printing. 2000. 20 Feb. 2005 http://www.silk-road.com/artl/printing.shtml>. Smith, T. “Elpida Licenses ‘DVD on a Chip’ Memory Tech.” The Register 20 Feb. 2005 http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/02>. —. “Intel Boffins Build First Continuous Beam Silicon Laser.” The Register 20 Feb. 2005 http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/02>. Watson, R. S. “Eyes And Ears: Dramatic Memory Slicing and Salable Media Content.” Innovation and Speculation, ed. Brad Haseman. Brisbane: QUT. [in press] Watson, R. S. Visions. Melbourne: Curriculum Corporation, 1994. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Watson, Robert. "E-Press and Oppress: Audio Visual Print Drama, Identity, Text and Motion Picture Rebellion." M/C Journal 8.2 (2005). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0506/08-watson.php>. APA Style Watson, R. (Jun. 2005) "E-Press and Oppress: Audio Visual Print Drama, Identity, Text and Motion Picture Rebellion," M/C Journal, 8(2). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0506/08-watson.php>.

In the summer of 1944, American Sergeant Paul Dorsey was hired by the Naval Aviation Photography Unit (NAPU) to capture “the Marines’ bitter struggle against their determined foe” in the Pacific islands (Philips 43). Dorsey had been a photographer and photojournalist before enlisting in the Marines, and was thus well placed to fulfil the NAPU’s remit of creating positive images of American forces in the Pacific. Under the editorial and professional guidance of Edward Steichen, NAPU photographers like Dorsey provided epic images of battle (especially from the air and sea), and also showed American forces at ease – sunbathing, swimming, drinking and relaxing together (Bachner At Ease; Bachner Men of WWII). Steichen – by now a lieutenant commander – oversaw the entire NAPU project by developing, choosing and editing the images, and also providing captions for their reproduction in popular newspapers and magazines such as LIFE. Under his guidance, selected NAPU images were displayed at the famous Power in the Pacific exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York at the end of the war, and distributed in the popular U.S. Navy War Photographs memorial book which sold over 6 million copies in 1945.While the original NAPU photographers (Steichen himself, Charles Kerlee, Horace Bristol, Wayne Miller, Charles Fenno Jacobs, Victor Jorgensen and Dwight Long) had been at work in the Pacific since the summer of 1942, Dorsey was hired specifically to document the advance of American Marines through the Marianas and Volcano Islands. In line with the NAPU’s remit, Dorsey provided a number of famous rear view shots of combat action on Guam, Saipan and Iwo Jima. However, there are a number of his photographs that do not fit easily within that vision of war – images of wounded Marines and dead Japanese soldiers, as well as shots of abject Japanese POWs with their heads bowed and faces averted. It is this last group of enemy images that proves the most interesting, for not only do they trouble NAPU’s explicit propaganda framework, they also challenge our traditional assumption that photography is an inert form of representation.It is not hard to imagine that photographs of abject Japanese POWs reinforced feelings of triumph, conquest and justice that circulated in America’s post-war victory culture. Indeed, images of emaciated and incarcerated Japanese soldiers provided the perfect contrast to the hyper-masculine, hard-bodied, beefcake figures that populated the NAPU photographs and symbolized American power in the Pacific. However, once Japan was rehabilitated into a powerful American ally, and the decision to drop the atomic bomb was questioned once again in America’s Culture Wars of the 1980s and 90s, it was no longer acceptable to feel triumphant in the face of Japanese abjection and suffering. Instead, these images helped foster a new kind of belated patriotism – and a new global disposition – in which Americans generated their own magnanimity by expressing pity, compassion and sympathy for victims of their previous foreign policy decisions (Lisle).While that patriotic interpretive framework tells us much about how dominant formations of American identity are secured by the production – especially the visual production – of enemy others, it cannot account for images or viewer interpretations that exceed, unwork, or disrupt war’s foundational logics of friend/enemy and perpetrator/victim. I focus on Dorsey because he offers one such ‘deviant’ image: This photograph was taken by Dorsey on Guam in July 1944, and its caption tells us that the Japanese prisoner “waits to be questioned by intelligence officers” (Philips 189). As the POW looks into Dorsey’s camera lens (and therefore at us, the viewers), he is subject to the collective gaze of the American marines situated behind him, and presumably others that lay out of the frame, behind Dorsey. What is fascinating about this particular image is the prisoner’s refusal to obey the trope of abjection so readily assumed by other Japanese POWs documented in the NAPU archive and in other popular war-time imagery. Indeed, when I first encountered this image I immediately framed the POW’s return gaze as defiant – a challenging, bold, and forceful reply to American aggression in the Pacific. The problem, of course, was that this resistant gaze soon became reductive; that is, by replicating war’s foundational logics of difference it effaced a number of other dispositions at work in the photograph. What I find compelling about the POW’s return gaze is its refusal to be contained within the available subject positions of either ‘abject POW’ or ‘defiant resistor’. Indeed, this unruliness is what keeps me coming back to Dorsey’s image, for it teaches us that photography itself always exceeds the conventional assumption that it is a static form of visual representation.Photography, Animation, MovementThe connections between movement, stillness and photography have two important starting points. The first, and more general, is Walter Benjamin’s concept of the dialectic image in which the past and the present come together “in a flash” and constitute what he calls “dialectics at a standstill” (N3.1; 463). Unlike Theodore Adorno, who lamented Benjamin’s Medusa-like tendency to turn the world to stone, I read Benjamin’s concept of standstill – of stillness in general – as something fizzing and pulsating with “political electricity” (Adorno 227-42; Buck-Morss 219). This is to deny our most basic assumption about photography: that it is an inert visual form that freezes and captures discrete moments in time and space. My central argument is that photography’s assumed stillness is always constituted by a number of potential and actual mobilities that continually suture and re-suture viewing subjects and images into one another.Developing Benjamin’s idea of a the past and present coming together “in a flash”, Roland Barthes provides the second starting point with his notion of the punctum of photography: “this element which rises from the scene, shoots out of it like an arrow, and pierces me” (25). Conventional understandings of the punctum frame it as a static moment – so powerful that it freezes the viewer, stops them in their tracks, and captures their attention. My point is that the affective punch of the photograph is not a frozen moment at all; rather, the punctum – like the dialectic image – is fizzing with political electricity. Therefore, to suggest that a viewing subject is arrested in the moment of perception – that they are somehow captured by a photograph’s meaning – is to mistakenly understand the act of looking as a static behaviour.I want to use Dorsey’s image of the POW to push these theoretical starting points and explore the mobile dispositions that are generated when a viewing subject encounters a photograph. What most interests me about Dorsey’s photograph is the level of animation it produces. The POW’s return gaze is actually rather blank: it is unclear whether he is angry, weary, bored, insane or none of the above. But it is the viewing subject’s anxiety at such ambivalence – such unknowability – that provokes a powerful desire to name it. The visceral sensations and emotional responses provoked in viewers (are we taken aback? Do we sympathize with the POW? Are we equally blank?) very quickly become settled interpretations, for example, “his defiant gaze resists American power.” What I want to do is explore the pre-interpretive moment when images like Dorsey’s reach out and grab us – for it is in that moment that photography’s “political electricity” reveals itself most clearly.Production, Signification, InterpretationThe mobility inherent in the photograph has an important antecedent at the level of production. Since the Brownie camera was introduced in WWI, photographers have carried their mode of representation with them – in Dorsey’s case, his portable camera was carried with him as he travelled with the Marines through the Pacific (Philips 29). It is the photographer’s itinerary – his or her movement prior to clicking the camera’s shutter – that shapes and determines a photograph’s content. More to the point, the action of clicking the camera’s shutter is never an isolated moment; rather, it is punctured by all of the previous clicks and moments leading up to it – especially on a long photographic assignment like Dorsey’s – and contains within it all of the subsequent clicks and moments that potentially come after it. In this sense, the photographer’s click recalls Benjamin: it is a “charged force field of past and present” (Buck-Morss 219). That complicated temporality is also manifested in the photographer’s contact sheet (or, more recently, computer file) which operates as a visual travelogue of discrete moments that bleed into one another.The mobility inherent in photography extends itself into the level of signification; that is, the arrangements of signs depicted within the frame of each discrete image. Critic Gilberto Perez gives us a clue to this mobility in his comments about Eugène Atget’s famous ‘painterly’ photographs of Paris:A photograph begins with the mobility, or at least potential mobility, of the world’s materials, of the things reproduced from reality, and turns that into a still image. More readily than in a painting, we see things in a photograph, even statues, as being on the point of movement, for these things belong to the world of flux from which the image has been extracted (328).I agree that the origin point of a photograph is potential mobility, but that mobility is never completely vanquished when it is turned into a still image. For me, photographs – no matter what they depict – are always saturated with the “potential mobility of the world’s materials”, and in this sense they are never still. Indeed, the world of flux out of which the image is extracted includes the image itself, and in that sense, an image can never be isolated from the world it is derived from. If we follow Perez and characterize the world as one of flux, but then insist that the photograph can never be extracted from that world, it follows that the photograph, too, is characterized by fluctuation and change – in short, by mobility. The point, here, is to read a photograph counter intuitively – not as an arrest of movement or a freezing of time, but as a collection of signs that is always potentially mobile. This is what Roland Barthes was hinting at when he suggested that a photograph is “a mad image, chafed by reality”: any photograph is haunted by absence because the depicted object is no longer present, but it is also full of certainty that the depicted object did exist at a previous time and place (113-15). This is precisely Benjamin’s point as well, that “what has been comes together with the now” (N3.1; 463). Following on from Barthes and Benjamin, I want to argue that photographs don’t freeze a moment in time, but instead set in motion a continual journey between feelings of absence in the present (i.e. “it is not there”) and present imaginings of the past (i.e. “but it has indeed been”).As Barthes’ notion of the punctum reveals, the most powerful register at which photography’s inherent mobility operates is in the sensations, responses and feelings provoked in viewers. This is why we say that a photograph has the capacity to move us: the best images take us from one emotional state (e.g. passive, curious, bored) and carry us into another (e.g. shocked, sad, amused). It is this emotional terrain of our responses to photography that both Roland Barthes and Susan Sontag have explored in depth. Why are we moved by some images and not others? Are documentary or artistic photographs more likely to reach out and prick us? What is the most appropriate or ethical response to pictures of another’s suffering?Sontag suggests a different connection between photography and mobility in that it enables a particular touristification of the world; that is, cameras help “convert the world into a department store or museum-without-walls in which every subject is depreciated into an article of consumption, promoted to an item for aesthetic appreciation” (On Photography 110). While Sontag’s political economy of photography (with its Frankfurt School echo) continues to be explored by anthropologists and scholars in Tourism Studies, I want to argue that it offers a particularly reductive account of photography’s potential mobilities. While Sontag does address photography’s constitutive and rather complex relationship with reality, she still conceives of photographs themselves as static and inert representations. Indeed, what she wrestled with in On Photography was the “insolent, poignant stasis of each photograph”, and the photograph’s capacity to make reality “stand still” (111-12; 163). The problem with such a view is that it limits our account of interpretation; in short, it suggests that viewers either accept a photograph’s static message (and are thus moved), or reject it (and remain unmoved). But the moving, here, is the sole prerogative of the viewer: there is no sense in which the photograph and its contents are themselves mobile. I want to argue that the relationships established in the act of looking between viewing subjects and the objects contained within an image are much more complex and varied than Sontag’s framework suggests. Photography’s Affective MobilityTo reveal the mobilities underscoring photography’s affective punch, we must redistribute its more familiar power relations through W.J.T. Mitchell’s important question: what do pictures want? Such a question subverts our usual approach to photographs (i.e. what do we want from photographs?) by redeploying the privileged agency of the viewer into the image itself. In other words, it is the image that demands something of the viewer rather than the other way around. What it demands, of course, is a response. Certainly this is an emotional response, for even being bored by a photograph is a response of sorts. But an emotional response is also an affective response, which means that the punch carried by a photograph is as physical as it is metaphorical or visual. Indeed, it is precisely in the act of perception, where the emotional and the affective fuse, that photography’s assumed stillness is powerfully subverted.If Mitchell animates the picture by affording it some of the viewer’s agency, then Gilles Deleuze goes one step further by exploring what happens to agency in the act of perception. For Deleuze, a work of art – for our purposes, a photograph – is not an inert or still document, but rather a “block of sensations” (Deleuze; Deleuze & Guattari; Bogue). It is not a finished object produced by an autonomous artist or beheld in its entirety by an autonomous viewer; rather, it is a combination of precepts (initial perceptions) and affects (physical intensities) that passes through all subjects at the point of visual perception. This kind of relational encounter with an image not only deconstructs Modernity’s foundational distinction between the subject and the object, it also opens up an affective connection between all subjects engaged in the act of looking; in this case, the photographer, the subjects and objects within the photograph and the viewer.From Deleuze, we know that perception is characterized by common physical responses in all subjects: the movement of the optic nerve, the dilation of the pupil, the squint of the eyelid, the craning of the neck to see up close. However small, however imperceptible, these physical sensations are all still movements; indeed, they are movements repeated by all seeing subjects. My point is that these imperceptible modes of attention are consistently engaged in the act of viewing photographs. What this suggests is that taking account of the affective level of perception changes our traditional understandings of interpretation; indeed, even if a photograph fails to move us emotionally, it certainly moves us physically, though we may not be conscious of it.Drawing from Mitchell and Deleuze, then, we can say that a photograph’s “insolent, poignant stasis” makes no sense. A photograph is constantly animated not just by the potentials inherent in its enframed subjects and objects, but more importantly, in the acts of perception undertaken by viewers. Certainly some photographs move us emotionally – to tears, to laughter, to rage – and indeed, this emotional terrain is where Barthes and Sontag offer important insights. My point is that all photographs, no matter what they depict, move us physically through the act of perception. If we take Mitchell’s question seriously and extend agency to the photograph, then it is in the affective register that we can discern a more relational encounter between subjects and objects because both are in a constant state of mobility.Ambivalence and ParalysisHow might Mitchell’s question apply to Dorsey’s photograph? What does this image want from us? What does it demand from our acts of looking? The dispersed account of agency put forward by Mitchell suggests that the act of looking can never be contained within the subject; indeed, what is produced in each act of looking is some kind of subject-object-world assemblage in which each component is characterised by its potential and actual mobilities. With respect to Dorsey’s image, then, the multiple lines of sight at work in the photograph indicate multiple – and mobile – relationalities. Primarily, there is the relationship between the viewer – any potential viewer – and the photograph. If we follow Mitchell’s line of questioning, however, we need to ask how the photograph itself shapes the emotive and affective experience of visual interpretation – how the photograph’s demand is transmitted to the viewer.Firstly, this demand is channelled through Dorsey’s line of sight that extends through his camera’s viewfinder and into the formal elements of the photograph: the focused POW in the foreground, the blurred figures in the background, the light and shade on the subjects’ clothing and skin, the battle scarred terrain, and the position of these elements within the viewfinder’s frame. As viewers we cannot see Dorsey, but his presence fills – and indeed constitutes – the photograph. Secondly, the photograph’s demand is channelled through the POW’s line of sight that extends to Dorsey (who is both photographer and marine Sergeant), and potentially through his camera to imagined viewers. It is precisely the return gaze of the POW that packs such an affective punch – not because of what it means, but rather because of how it makes us feel emotionally and physically. While a conventional account would understand this affective punch as shocking, stopping or capturing the viewer, I want to argue it does the opposite – it suddenly reveals the fizzing, vibrant mobilities that transmit the picture to us, and us to the picture.There are, I think, important lessons for us in Dorsey’s photograph. It is a powerful antecedent to Judith Butler’s exploration of the Abu Graib images, and her repetition of Sontag’s question of “whether the tortured can and do look back, and what do they see when they look at us” (966). The POW’s gaze provides an answer to the first part of this question – they certainly do look back. But as to what they see when they look back at us, that question can only be answered if we redistribute both agency and mobility into the photograph to empower and mobilize the tortured, the abject, and the objectified.That leaves us with Sontag’s much more vexing question of what we do after we look at photographs. As Butler explains, Sontag has denounced the photograph “precisely because it enrages without directing the rage, and so excites our moral sentiments at the same time that it confirms our political paralysis” (966). This sets up an important challenge for us: in refusing conventional understandings of photography as a still visual art, how can we use more dispersed accounts of agency and mobility to work through the political paralysis that Sontag identifies. AcknowledgementsPaul Dorsey’s photograph of the Japanese POW is # 80-G-475166 in the NAPU archive, and is reproduced here courtesy of the United States National Archives.ReferencesAdorno, Theodore. Prisms. Cambridge: MIT P, 1997.Bachner, Evan. Men of WWII: Fighting Men at Ease. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2007.———. At Ease: Navy Men of WWII. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2004.Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida. London: Vintage, 2000.Benjamin, Walter. “On the Theory of Knowledge, Theory of Progress.” In The Arcardes Project. Trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin. Cambridge: Harvard U P, 1999. 456-488.Bogue, Ronald. Deleuze on Music, Painting and the Arts. London: Routledge, 2003.Buck-Morss, Susan. The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project. Cambridge: MIT P, 1997.Butler, Judith. “Torture and the Ethics of Photography.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 25.6 (2007): 951-66.Deleuze, Gilles. Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation. Trans. Daniel W. Smith. London: Continuum, 2003.Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. What is Philosophy? Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchill. New York: Columbia U P, 1994.Lisle, Debbie. “Benevolent Patriotism: Art, Dissent and The American Effect.” Security Dialogue 38.2 (2007): 233-50.Mitchell, William.J.T. What Do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2004.Perez, Gilberto. “Atget’s Stillness.” The Hudson Review 36.2 (1983): 328-37. Philips, Christopher. Steichen at War. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1981.Sontag, Susan. Regarding the Pain of Others. London: Penguin, 2004.———. On Photography. London: Penguin, 1971Steichen, Edward. U.S. Navy War Photographs. New York: U.S. Camera, 1945.

It is widely acknowledged among film scholars that Lynch’s 2001 neo-noir Mulholland Drive is richly infused with intertextual references and homages — most notably to Charles Vidor’s Gilda (1946), Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard (1950), Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958), and Ingmar Bergman’s Persona (1966). What is less recognised is the extent to which J. Sheridan Le Fanu’s 1872 Gothic novella Carmilla has also influenced Mulholland Drive. This article focuses on the dynamics of the relationship between Carmilla and Mulholland Drive, particularly the formation of femme fatale Camilla Rhodes (played by Laura Elena Harring), with the aim of establishing how the Gothic shapes the viewing experience of the film. I argue that not only are there striking narrative similarities between the texts, but lying at the heart of both Carmilla and Mulholland Drive is the uncanny. By drawing on this elusive and eerie feeling, Lynch successfully introduces an archetypal quality both to Camilla and Mulholland Drive as a whole, which in turn contributes to powerful sensations of desire, dread, nostalgia, and “noirness” that are aroused by the film. As such Mulholland Drive emerges not only as a compelling work of art, but also a deeply evocative cinematic experience. I begin by providing a brief overview of Le Fanu’s Gothic tale and establish its formative influence on later cinematic texts. I then present a synopsis of Mulholland Drive before exploring the rich interrelationship the film has with Carmilla. Carmilla and the Lesbian Vampire Carmilla is narrated from the perspective of a sheltered nineteen-year-old girl called Laura, who lives in an isolated Styrian castle with her father. After a bizarre event involving a carriage accident, a young woman named Carmilla is left in the care of Laura’s father. Carmilla is beautiful and charming, but she is an enigma; her origins and even her surname remain a mystery. Though Laura identifies a number of peculiarities about her new friend’s behaviour (such as her strange, intense moods, languid body movements, and other irregular habits), the two women are captivated with each other, quickly falling in love. However, despite Carmilla’s harmless and fragile appearance, she is not what she seems. She is a one hundred and fifty year old vampire called Mircalla, Countess Karnstein (also known as Millarca — both anagrams of Carmilla), who preys on adolescent women, seducing them while feeding off their blood as they sleep. In spite of the deep affection she claims to have for Laura, Carmilla is compelled to slowly bleed her dry. This takes its physical toll on Laura who becomes progressively pallid and lethargic, before Carmilla’s true identity is revealed and she is slain. Le Fanu’s Carmilla is monumental, not only for popularising the female vampire, but for producing a sexually alluring creature that actively seeks out and seduces other women. Cinematically, the myth of the lesbian vampire has been drawn on extensively by film makers. One of the earliest female centred vampire movies to contain connotations of same-sex desire is Lambert Hilyer’s Dracula’s Daughter (1936). However, it was in the 1960s and 1970s that the spectre of the lesbian vampire exploded on screen. In part a response to the abolishment of Motion Picture Code strictures (Baker 554) and fuelled by latent anxieties about second wave feminist activism (Zimmerman 23–4), films of this cycle blended horror with erotica, reworking the lesbian vampire as a “male pornographic fantasy” (Weiss 87). These productions draw on Carmilla in varying degrees. In most, the resemblance is purely thematic; others draw on Le Fanu’s novella slightly more directly. In Roger Vadim’s Et Mourir de Plaisir (1960) an aristocratic woman called Carmilla becomes possessed by her vampire ancestor Millarca von Karnstein. In Roy Ward Baker’s The Vampire Lovers (1970) Carmilla kills Laura before seducing a girl named Emma whom she encounters after a mysterious carriage breakdown. However, the undead Gothic lady has not only made a transition from literature to screen. The figure also transcends the realm of horror, venturing into other cinematic styles and genres as a mortal vampire whose sexuality is a source of malevolence (Weiss 96–7). A well-known early example is Frank Powell’s A Fool There Was (1915), starring Theda Barra as “The Vampire,” an alluring seductress who targets wealthy men, draining them of both their money and dignity (as opposed to their blood), reducing them to madness, alcoholism, and suicide. Other famous “vamps,” as these deadly women came to be known, include the characters played by Marlene Dietrich such as Concha Pérez in Joseph von Sternberg’s The Devil is a Woman (1935). With the emergence of film noir in the early 1940s, the vamp metamorphosed into the femme fatale, who like her predecessors, takes the form of a human vampire who uses her sexuality to seduce her unwitting victims before destroying them. The deadly woman of this era functions as a prototype for neo-noir incarnations of the sexually alluring fatale figure, whose popularity resurged in the early 1980s with productions such as Lawrence Kasdan’s Body Heat (1981), a film commonly regarded as a remake of Billy Wilder’s 1944 classic noir Double Indemnity (Bould et al. 4; Tasker 118). Like the lesbian vampires of 1960s–1970s horror, the neo-noir femme fatale is commonly aligned with themes of same-sex desire, as she is in Mulholland Drive. Mulholland Drive Like Sunset Boulevard before it, Mulholland Drive tells the tragic tale of Hollywood dreams turned to dust, jealousy, madness, escapist fantasy, and murder (Andrews 26). The narrative is played out from the perspective of failed aspiring actress Diane Selwyn (Naomi Watts) and centres on her bitter sexual obsession with former lover Camilla. The film is divided into three sections, described by Lynch as: “Part one: She found herself inside a perfect mystery. Part two: A sad illusion. Part three: Love” (Rodley 54). The first and second segments of the movie are Diane’s wishful dream, which functions as an escape from the unbearable reality that, after being humiliated and spurned by Camilla, Diane hires a hit man to have her murdered. Part three reveals the events that have led up to Diane’s fateful action. In Diane’s dream she is sweet, naïve, Betty who arrives at her wealthy aunt’s Hollywood home to find a beautiful woman in the bathroom. Earlier we witness a scene where the woman survives a violent car crash and, suffering a head injury, stumbles unnoticed into the apartment. Initially the woman introduces herself as Rita (after seeing a Gilda poster on the wall), but later confesses that she doesn’t know who she is. Undeterred by the strange circumstances surrounding Rita’s presence, Betty takes the frightened, vulnerable woman (actually Camilla) under her wing, enthusiastically assuming the role of detective in trying to discover her real identity. As Rita, Camilla is passive, dependent, and grateful. Importantly, she also fondly reciprocates the love Betty feels for her. But in reality, from Diane’s perspective at least, Camilla is a narcissistic, manipulative femme fatale (like the character portrayed by the famous star whose name she adopts in Diane’s dream) who takes sadistic delight in toying with the emotions of others. Just as Rita is Diane’s ideal lover in her fantasy, pretty Betty is Diane’s ego ideal. She is vibrant, wholesome, and has a glowing future ahead of her. This is a far cry from reality where Diane is sullen, pathetic, and haggard with no prospects. Bitterly, she blames Camilla for her failings as an actress (Camilla wins a lead role that Diane badly wanted by sleeping with the director). Ultimately, Diane also blames Camilla for her own suicide. This is implied in the dream sequence when the two women disguise Rita’s appearance after the discovery of a bloated corpse in Diane Selwyn’s apartment. The parallels between Mulholland Drive and Carmilla are numerous to the extent that it could be argued that Lynch’s film is a contemporary noir infused re-telling of Le Fanu’s novella. Both stories take the point-of-view of the blonde haired, blue eyed “victim.” Both include a vehicle accident followed by the mysterious arrival of an elusive dark haired stranger, who appears vulnerable and helpless, but whose beauty masks the fact that she is really a monster. Both narratives hinge on same-sex desire and involve the gradual emotional and physical destruction of the quarry, as she suffers at the hands of her newly found love interest. Whereas Carmilla literally sucks her victims dry before moving on to another target, Camilla metaphorically drains the life out of Diane, callously taunting her with her other lovers before dumping her. While Camilla is not a vampire per se, she is framed in a distinctly vampirish manner, her pale skin contrasted by lavish red lipstick and fingernails, and though she is not literally the living dead, the latter part of the film indicates that the only place Camilla remains alive is in Diane’s fantasy. But in the Lynchian universe, where conventional forms of narrative coherence, with their demand for logic and legibility are of little interest (Rodley ix), intertextual alignment with Carmilla extends beyond plot structure to capture the “mood,” or “feel” of the novella that is best described in terms of the uncanny — something that also lies at the very core of Lynch’s work (Rodley xi). The Gothic and the Uncanny Though Gothic literature is grounded in horror, the type of fear elicited in the works of writers that form part of this movement, such as Le Fanu (along with Horace Walpole, Ann Radcliffe, Mary Shelly, and Bram Stoker to name a few), aligns more with the uncanny than with outright terror. The uncanny is an elusive quality that is difficult to pinpoint yet distinct. First and foremost it is a sense, or emotion that is related to dread and horror, but it is more complex than simply a reaction to fear. Rather, feelings of trepidation are accompanied by a peculiar, dream-like quality of something fleetingly recognisable in what is evidently unknown, conjuring up a mysterious impression of déjà vu. The uncanny has to do with uncertainty, particularly in relation to names (including one’s own name), places and what is being experienced; that things are not as they have come to appear through habit and familiarity. Though it can be frightening, at the same time it can involve a sensation that is compelling and beautiful (Royle 1–2; Punter 131). The inventory of motifs, fantasies, and phenomena that have been attributed to the uncanny are extensive. These can extend from the sight of dead bodies, skeletons, severed heads, dismembered limbs, and female sex organs, to the thought of being buried alive; from conditions such as epilepsy and madness, to haunted houses/castles and ghostly apparitions. Themes of doubling, anthropomorphism, doubt over whether an apparently living object is really animate and conversely if a lifeless object, such as a doll or machinery, is in fact alive also fall under the broad range of what constitutes the uncanny (see Jentsch 221–7; Freud 232–45; Royle 1–2). Socio-culturally, the uncanny can be traced back to the historical epoch of Enlightenment. It is the transformations of this eighteenth century “age of reason,” with its rejection of transcendental explanations, valorisation of reason over superstition, aggressively rationalist imperatives, and compulsive quests for knowledge that are argued to have first caused human experiences associated with the uncanny (Castle 8–10). In this sense, as literary scholar Terry Castle argues, the eighteenth century “invented the uncanny” (8). In relation to the psychological underpinnings of this disquieting emotion, psychiatrist Ernst Jentsch was the first to explore the subject in his 1906 document “On the Psychology of the Uncanny,” though Sigmund Freud and his 1919 paper “The Uncanny” is most popularly associated with the term. According to Jentsch, the uncanny, or the unheimlich in German (meaning “unhomely”), emerges when the “new/foreign/hostile” corresponds to the psychical association of “old/known/familiar.” The unheimlich, which sits in direct opposition to the heimlich (homely) equates to a situation where someone feels not quite “at home” or “at ease” (217–9). Jentsch attributes sensations of the unheimlich to psychical resistances that emerge in relation to the mistrust of the innovative and unusual — “to the intellectual mystery of a new thing” (218) — such as technological revolution for example. Freud builds on the concept of the unheimlich by focusing on the heimlich, arguing that the term incorporates two sets of ideas. It can refer to what is familiar and agreeable, or it can mean “what is concealed and kept out of sight” (234–5). In the context of the latter notion, the unheimlich connotes “that which ought to have remained secret or hidden but has come to light” (Freud 225). Hence for Freud, who was primarily concerned with the latent content of the psyche, feelings of uncanniness emerge when dark, disturbing truths that have been repressed and relegated to the realm of the unconscious resurface, making their way abstractly into the consciousness, creating an odd impression of the known in the unknown. Though it is the works of E.T.A. Hoffman that are most commonly associated with the unheimlich, Freud describing the author as the “unrivalled master of the uncanny in literature” (233), Carmilla is equally bound up in dialectics between the known and the unknown; the homely and the unhomely. Themes centring on doubles, the undead, haunted gardens, conflicting emotions fuelled by desire and disgust — of “adoration and also of abhorrence” (Le Fanu 264), and dream-like nocturnal encounters with sinister, shape-shifting creatures predominate. With Carmilla’s arrival the boundaries between the heimlich and the unheimlich become blurred. Though Carmilla is a stranger, her presence triggers buried childhood memories for Laura of a frightening and surreal experience where Carmilla appears in Laura’s nursery during the night, climbing into bed with her before seemingly vanishing into thin air. In this sense, Laura’s remote castle home has never been homely. Disturbing truths have always lurked in its dark recesses, the return of the dead bringing them to light. The Uncanny in Mulholland Drive The elusive qualities of the uncanny also weave their way extensively through Mulholland Drive, permeating all facets of the cinematic experience — cinematography, sound score, mise en scène, and narrative structure. As film maker and writer Chris Rodley argues, Lynch mobilises every aspect of the motion picture making process in seeking to express a sense of uncanniness in his productions: “His sensitivity to textures of sound and image, to the rhythms of speech and movement, to space, colour, and the intrinsic power of music mark him as unique in this respect.” (Rodley ix–xi). From the opening scenes of Mulholland Drive, the audience is plunged into the surreal, unheimlich realm of Diane’s dream world. The use of rich saturated colours, soft focus lenses, unconventional camera movements, stilted dialogue, and a hauntingly beautiful sound score composed by Angelo Badalamenti, generates a cumulative effect of heightened artifice. This in turn produces an impression of hyper-realism — a Baudrillardean simulacrum where the real is beyond real, taking on a form of its own that has an artificial relation to actuality (Baudrillard 6–7). Distorting the “real” in this manner produces an effect of defamiliarisation — a term first employed by critic Viktor Shklovsky (2–3) to describe the artistic process involved in making familiar objects seem strange and unfamiliar (or unheimlich). These techniques are something Lynch employs in other works. Film and literary scholar Greg Hainge (137) discusses the way colour intensification and slow motion camera tracking are used in the opening scene of Blue Velvet (1984) to destabilise the aesthetic realm of the homely, revealing it to be artifice concealing sinister truths that have so far been hidden, but that are about to come to light. Similar themes are central to Mulholland Drive; the simulacra of Diane’s fantasy creating a synthetic form of real that conceals the dark and terrible veracities of her waking life. However, the artificial dream place of Diane’s disturbed mind is disjointed and fractured, therefore, just as the uncanny gives rise to an elusive sense of mystery and uncertainty, offering a fleeting glimpse of the tangible in something otherwise inexplicable, so too is the full intelligibility of Mulholland Drive kept at an obscure distance. Though the film offers a succession of clues to meaning, the key to any form of complete understanding lingers just beyond the grasp of certainty. Names, places, and identities are infused with doubt. Not only in relation to Betty/Diane and Rita/Camilla, but regarding a succession of other strange, inexplicable characters and events, one example being the recurrent presence of a terrifying looking vagrant (Bonnie Aarons). Figures such as this are clearly poignant to the narrative, but they are also impossibly enigmatic, inviting the audience to play detective in deciphering what they signify. Themes of doubling and mirroring are also used extensively. While these motifs serve to denote the split between waking and dream states, they also destabilise the narrative in relation to what is familiar and what is unfamiliar, further grounding Mulholland Drive in the uncanny. Since its publication in 1872, Carmilla has had a significant formative influence on the construct of the seductive yet deadly woman in her various manifestations. However, rarely has the novella been paid homage to as intricately as it is in Mulholland Drive. Lynch draws on Le Fanu’s archetypal Gothic horror story, combining it with the aesthetic conventions of film noir, in order to create what is ostensibly a contemporary, poststructuralist critique of the Hollywood dream-factory. Narratively and thematically, the similarities between the two texts are numerous. However, intertextual configuration is considerably more complex, extending beyond the plot and character structure to capture the essence of the Gothic, which is grounded in the uncanny — an evocative emotion involving feelings of dread, accompanied by a dream-like impression of familiar and unfamiliar commingling. Carmilla and Mulholland Drive bypass the heimlich, delving directly into the unheimlich, where boundaries between waking and dream states are destabilised, any sense of certainty about what is real is undermined, and feelings of desire are paradoxically conjoined with loathing. Moreover, Lynch mobilises all fundamental elements of cinema in order to capture and express the elusive qualities of the Unheimlich. In this sense, the uncanny lies at the very heart of the film. What emerges as a result is an enigmatic work of art that is as profoundly alluring as it is disconcerting. References Andrews, David. “An Oneiric Fugue: The Various Logics of Mulholland Drive.” Journal of Film and Video 56 (2004): 25–40. Baker, David. “Seduced and Abandoned: Lesbian Vampires on Screen 1968–74.” Continuum 26 (2012): 553–63. Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulation. Michigan: U Michigan P, 1994. Bould, Mark, Kathrina Glitre, and Greg Tuck. Neo-Noir. New York: Wallflower, 2009. Castle, Terry. The Female Thermometer: Eighteenth-century Culture and the Invention of the Uncanny. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1995. Freud, Sigmund. “The Uncanny.” Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. XVII: An Infantile Neurosis and Other Works. London: Hogarth, 2001. 217–256. Le Fanu, J. Sheridan. Carmilla. In a Glass Darkly. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2008. 243–319. Hainge, Greg. “Weird or Loopy? Spectacular Spaces, Feedback and Artifice in Lost Highway’s Aesthetics of Sensation.” The Cinema of David Lynch: American Dreams, Nightmare Visions. Ed. Erica Sheen and Annette Davidson. London: Wallflower, 2004. 136–50. Jentsch, Ernst. “On the Psychology of the Uncanny.” Uncanny Modernity: Cultural Theories, Modern Anxieties. Ed. Jo Collins and John Jervis. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2008. 216–28. Punter, David. “The Uncanny.” The Routledge Companion to the Gothic. Ed. Catherine Spooner and Emma McEvoy. Hoboken: Taylor and Francis, 2007. 129–36. Rodley, Chris. Lynch on Lynch. London: Faber, 2005. Royle, Nicholas. The Uncanny. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2003. Shklovsky, Viktor. “Art as Technique.” Theory of Prose. Illinois: Dalkey, 1991. Tasker, Yvonne. Working Girls: Gender and Sexuality in Popular Cinema. New York: Routledge, 1998. Weiss, Andrea. Vampires and Violets: Lesbians in Cinema. London: Jonathan Cape, 1992. Zimmerman, Bonnie. “Daughters of Darkness Lesbian Vampires.” Jump Cut 24.5 (2005): 23–4.

Gunther Kress and Theo van Leeuwen argue that in “contemporary Western visualization central composition is relatively uncommon” (Reading Images 203). In fact, “most compositions polarise elements as Given and New and/or Ideal and Real” (Reading Images 203). This is the regular situation on the front pages of Australia’s national and capital city dailies; but not on May 28. Rather than the favoured front page structures of left (Given) and right (New) and/or top (Ideal) and bottom (Real), on this morning the layouts in the newspapers centralised the Schapelle Corby judgment. While this is not unprecedented, it is the type of coverage usually kept for major issues such as 9/11 or the Bali Bombing. Even the recent release of Douglas Wood, which was arguably as, if not more, important for the Australian public in terms of the issues it raised about Australia’s involvement in the war in Iraq, did not receive the same type of treatment. Although further study needs to be undertaken, I believe this centralising of issues, that is the running of one story only, on front pages is a growing trend, particularly among the tabloids. The effect of this centralising layout structure is to reduce the news choice for the reader on front pages that they would normally approach with an attitude of scanning and selecting. While this approach could still be taken across the whole paper, the front-page choices are minimised. This essay will examine the coverage of the Corby verdict in the tabloids The Daily Telegraph, the Herald Sun, The Advertiser, The Mercury, and The West Australian, because it is here that the greatest impact of centralisation on the encoded reading paths can be found. Although the broadsheets The Australian, The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, The Courier-Mail, and The Canberra Times also centralised the issue, there is not room here to cover them in detail. May 28 was the peak of the media frenzy in the Corby coverage, or at least one of the peaks. As the story is ongoing—turning into something of a soap opera in its call to readers and television news viewers to tune in and see the latest bizarre development, such as the chief lawyer admitting he’s a crook—it could peak again, particularly if on appeal a heavier sentence is handed down. On May 28, the focus moved from Corby’s guilt or innocence to the horror of the twenty-year sentence. In each category—broadsheet and tabloid—the layouts were remarkably similar. At a glance, three of the tabloids are so similar that side-by-side on a newsstand they could have been mistaken for the same. Apart from the fact that Corby’s beauty gave her cultural salience, it is not clear why the Australian media was so taken with her story in the first instance when there are and have been many Australians on drug charges in Asia. My interest here is not so much why or how she became news—that’s an issue for another time—but that once she had captured the attention of the Australian print media, how did they visually treat the material and what are the implications of that treatment. I will argue that the treatment elevated her story, giving it the same weight as the war on terror coverage since 9/11. One of the first elements that draws the eye on any newspaper page is the photograph. Tim Harrower suggests photographs “give a page motion and emotion” (28), arguing however that it is the headline “that leaps out, that grabs you” (37). In reality, it is most likely a combination of both that draws a reader’s attention. Both encode the importance of a story with a dominating photograph or a large headline signalling a story’s significance. The varying size of headlines and photographs and their placement signal the page designer’s order of importance. Six of the ten major Australian newspapers chose the same photograph for their front pages on May 28: a picture of Corby with her head held in her left hand and a look of despair on her face. Four of them—The Daily Telegraph, The Mercury, The Advertiser, and the Herald Sun—used the full photograph, while it was heavily cropped into a horizontal picture on the front pages of The West Australian and The Age. The Australian’s choice was similar but the photograph was taken from a slightly different angle. Only one of these newspapers, The West Australian, acknowledged that Corby did not just hang her head in her hand in despair but rather was slapping her head and sobbing as the verdict was read. The television footage gives a different impression of this moment than the still photograph run in the newspapers. The Sydney Morning Herald and The Courier-Mail, in contrast, chose a photograph of Corby struggling with the courtroom police. The Sydney Morning Herald more closely cropped their version so that the emphasis is on Corby. More of the struggle is depicted in The Courier-Mail. The only newspaper making a substantially different choice was The Canberra Times. In this publication, the central vertical photograph was a close up of Corby with tears in her eyes. Her mien is more composed than in the photographs on the other front pages. The source for the photographs, with the exception of The Australian’s choice from Associated Press, was Reuters. Given that the event was in Indonesia and in a crowded courtroom, the array of photographs may have been limited. Of interest was the use of the photograph. The Daily Telegraph, The Mercury, and the Herald Sun ran it full-page, like a poster shot, with the mastheads and headlines over the top. In contrast, The Advertiser maintained a white background for their masthead with the photograph underneath enclosed in a heavy frame and the headlines imposed on top. The other newspapers ran the photograph to the edge of the page without an added frame. The Advertiser, The Mercury, and the Herald Sun chose to forgo their normal front-page teasers. This restricted the scan and select for the reader. Normally readers would have at least two stories, sometimes three, as well as two to three teasers or pointers (usually across the top of the page under the masthead) to scan and select their reading matter. On May 28, however, Corby was centralised with a similar reading path encoded for each of these newspapers. The photograph is the most salient element and the eye moves from this to the main headline at the bottom of the page. As the masthead is known and familiar, unless the reader is selecting the newspaper from a newsstand rather than picking it up from their front yard, it is likely they would only subconsciously register it. These layouts, with a reading path from photograph to headlines down the page, are closer to linear in design, than the normal non-linear format and more interactive front pages. Therefore, the coding is for reading “left to right and from top to bottom, line by line” (Kress and van Leeuwen 218). Newspapers are not normally read in a linear way, but “selectively and partially . . . Their composition sets up particular hierarchies of the movement of the hypothetical reader within and across their different elements. Such reading paths begin with the most salient element, from there move to the next most salient element and so on.” (218) There is also sameness in the headlines and their implications. The Mercury, the most unadorned of the layouts, has “20 Years” in block capitals with a subhead and pointer reading “Corby’s Nightmare Sentence, pages 2-6”. The implication is clear, Corby’s sentence is 20 years in jail and it is pronounced a “nightmare”. The Herald Sun also chose “20 Years” with a subheading of “Shock and tears over jail sentence”. Consolidating this notion of “shock and tears” were three smaller photographs across the bottom of the page depicting crying and sobbing women. No male sympathy was depicted, thus tapping into and reinforcing Australian cultural stereotypes that it is the Australian women rather than the men who cry. The Advertiser’s main headline declared “20 Years in Hell”. Beside this was a smaller underlined headline and pointer “Guilty Corby, sent to jail, Australians react in anger Pages 8-15”. There are slight distinctions in these three pages but essentially the encoded reading path and message is the same. That is not to say that some people may read the pages in a different order. As Kress and van Leeuwen argue “newspaper pages can be read in more than one way” (“Front Page” 205), however, the choice on these pages is limited. The Daily Telegraph uses headlines with different emphasis and includes text from the main story imposed over the photograph. Pointers square-off the pages at the bottom. A kicker head at the top of the page, below the masthead, and set against a photograph of Abu Bakir Bashir, declares: “This terrorist planned the murder of 88 Australians and got two years. Yesterday Schapelle Corby got 20”. This comparison does not appear on the already examined pages. Towards the bottom of the page, the main headline set over two lines reads “Nation’s Fury”. To the right of the “Nation” is a smaller headline, which says “20 years in hell and prosecutor’s still demand life”. The story begins beside the second line “Fury”. The message on this page is more strident than the others and was analysed by the ABC TV show Media Watch on May 30. Media Watch declared the “spin on the verdict” used by The Daily Telegraph as “truly a disgrace”. The criticism was made because Bashir was not convicted in court of masterminding the bombing therefore the word “planned” is problematic and misleading. As the Media Watch report points out, the three Indonesians convicted of masterminding the bombing are on death row and will face the firing squad. The final tabloid, The West Australian, presented a similar message to The Daily Telegraph with a headline of “Bomb plotter: 2½ years / Dope smuggler: 20 years”. The visual impact of this page, however, is not as striking as the other pages. The visual designs of The Advertiser, The Daily Telegraph, The Mercury, and the Herald Sun make it immediately clear that the Corby verdict is the central issue in the news and that all other stories are so marginal they are off the page. In contrast, The West Australian ran its normal teasers just below the masthead, offering four choices for the reader as well as weather and home delivery details at the bottom. The heavily cropped central photograph of Corby leaves in only her wrist and central facial features; it is not even immediately apparent that the photograph is of Corby. The story runs in an L-shape around it. Although Corby is central, the reading path is not as clear. The reader’s eye will most likely be drawn from photograph to caption and to headline or headline, photograph, caption. Whatever the path, the story text is always read last, that is, if the reader chooses this story at all (Kress and van Leeuwen, “Front Pages” 205). The story opens by announcing that Corby’s lawyers want the Australian authorities to “launch an investigation” into the case and Foreign Affairs Minister Alexander Downer has offered the help of two Australian QCs in preparing an appeal. This introduction does not support the headline. The comparison with Bashir comes in paragraph three. While Corby still has salience, the inclusion of teasers on the front of The West Australian brings back the choice for the reader, albeit in a small way. Kress and van Leeuwen argue that newspapers “are the first point of ‘address’ for the readers” presenting “the most significant events and issues of the day for the paper and its readers” (“Front Page” 229). In the Corby coverage on May 28, the newspapers presented the court verdict as the most important of all stories on offer and her image became the most salient element, the “nucleus” of the front pages. All newspapers make choices for their readers in their capacity as gatekeepers (see David Manning White and Glen Bleske), but not, I would argue, to the extent that it appeared in the Corby case. A centralising approach to news can be understood with stories such as 9/11 or the Bali Bombing but does one woman’s plight over drug charges in Bali truly deserve such coverage? As a single event maybe not, but the Corby verdict again raised the issue of Australia’s uneasiness about the laws and culture of its Asian neighbours, feelings amplified in the wake of the Bali Bombing. The rhetoric used in the front pages of The Daily Telegraph and The West Australian clearly state this when they compare Corby’s sentence to Bashir’s. They demonstrate a paranoia about the treatment of “our girl” in a foreign judicial system which appears to deal more leniently with terrorists. Thus, one girl’s story is transformed into part of a much larger issue, a fact reinforced through the visual treatment of the material. There remain some questions. What does it say about the newspaper’s attitude to their readers when they centralise issues so strongly that reader choice is removed? Is this part of the “dumbing down” of the Australian media, where news organisations move towards more clearly dictating views to their reading public? Is it attributable to media ownership, after all four of these tabloids belong to News Corporation? These questions and others about the trend towards the centralising of issues are for a bigger study. For now, we watch to see how much longer Corby remains in the nucleus of the news and for further indication of a growing trend towards centralising issues. References Bleske, Glen K. “Mrs Gates Takes Over: An Updated Version of a 1949 Case Study.” Social Meanings of News. Ed. Dan Berkowitz. Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications, 1997. Harrower, Tim. The Newspaper Designer’s Handbook. Boston: McGraw-Hill, 1998. Kress, Gunther, and Theo van Leeuwen. Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design. London and New York: Routledge, 1996. Kress, Gunther, and Theo van Leeuwen. “Front Page: (The Critical) Analysis of Newspaper Layout.” Approaches to Media Discourse. Ed. Allan Bell and Peter Garrett. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2003. Media Watch. May 30, 2005. http://www.abc.net.au/mediawatch/transcripts/s1380398.htm>. Sellers, Leslie. The Simple Subs Book. Oxford: Permagon Press, 1968. White, David Manning. “The ‘Gate Keeper’: A Case Study in the Selection of News.” Social Meanings of News. Ed. Dan Berkowitz. Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications, 1997. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Delaney, Elizabeth. "Scanning the Front Pages: The Schapelle Corby Judgment." M/C Journal 8.4 (2005). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0508/08-delaney.php>. APA Style Delaney, E. (Aug. 2005) "Scanning the Front Pages: The Schapelle Corby Judgment," M/C Journal, 8(4). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0508/08-delaney.php>.

Thou art of purer eyes than to behold evil, and canst not look on iniquity: wherefore lookest thou upon them that deal treacherously, and holdest thy tongue when the wicked devoureth the man that is more righteous than he? - Habakkuk 1:13 Australia's official national anthem since 1984 has been a song entitled 'Advance Australia Fair'1. This paper asks, very simply, what is the meaning of the word fair in the title and the song. The song is about a collective effort, not so much at being a nation as at being seen to be one, being worthy of the name. The claim is justified on two grounds: possession and intention. We have golden soil, wealth, youth, the ability to toil, freedom, a beautiful country possessed of nature's gifts, boundless plains and so on. We make no particular claim to have done anything as yet but we have good intentions, specifically to toil with hearts and hands to make our nation famous as such. The setting of the song then is temporally ambiguous: we have x and we're about to y. The question naturally enough is: who are we? The song is naturally enough, as an anthem, about answering and not answering that question. Note that the hymn-like qualities of 'God save the Queen' are absent from the new anthem. And yet the song begins as if it were a hymn or a prayer, with the formula: 'Let us (pray/sing?)'. A pseudo-hymn. Who is addressed? We are. The temporal setting of the hymn is substituted with the imminence of an imperative: 'Let us rejoice.' Rejoicing is something we should all do for a long list of reasons. That being the case, 'let us sing'. In 'Advance Australia Fair' it is the imminent future to which voices attend in their act of unison. Whose act of unison? Who is the we? Anthems are always coy about this question which touches on their function and their efficacy. The unspoken answer which the song implies is however that the we addressing and addressed the self-identifying we of the song is fair and going to be fair, and will get there by being fair. That kind of fairness I would argue is characteristic of the we of white man's burden. 'Advance Australia Fair' is eat your cake and have it too stuff: we want to be a young nation about to play on the world's stage but at the same time we want to pretend that what is ours has an eternal quality. We want to borrow the timeless land myth; we don't want to acknowledge the time before our coming. We don't anymore even want to acknowledge our coming. We want to have always been here; but in an ahistoric way. The past should be irrelevant to the way we are now. This consciousness of an identity of pretended eternal rights is only achieved by multiple erasure: of time before the historic, of our historic consciousness of time. It is achieved by means of the terra nullius myth, the myth of an empty land prior to our coming. The song as it stands, the anthem as it is, is the perfect representative of that myth. The explanation of 'the historic facts' in the original version has been removed as an embarrassment. The emptiness posited by 'Advance Australia Fair' is deeply ironic. It represents a refusal of the ethical question which must lie under European presence in Australia. The land is empty because we emptied it. We have land to share because we took land. We only get to look generous because of a theft for which we do not wish to acknowledge responsibility. We sing from an emptiness wrought on ourselves in the act of emptying; the emptying of the land and at once the popular consciousness: emptying it of the fact of the emptying. Emptying ourselves of truth is the reflective act of nation: the basis of the collectivity on which a polity is claimed. It is a making colourless. How fair would that be? The 'Australians all...' update leaves untouched two serious problems with the song, these being the ways in which it might be unsatisfactory from the point of view of indigenous Australians (i.e. their erasure) and, linked with this, the serious ambiguity of the title and the chorus: the problem with the word 'fair'. The word-order inversion in the title/chorus is a kind of pseudo-archaism which tilts the song in the direction of the unintelligible. The inscrutable sign of identity becomes a kind of rite of passage; something which needs to be explained to children and migrants alike. Perfect form of mystification to express as collective sentiment the sentiment of collectivity; no one can definitively know what these words mean. The unknowable privileges a teachers' grasp of the archaic as originary lore: the teacher says it means 'Let's all work together to make Australia a beautiful country, a great country' or 'We should all be proud of Australia because it's such a great country, so we should pull together to make it even better.' Fair enough. Who could object? The central ambiguity means that when we sing the song we don't know whether we are describing how things are or how they should be. Advance Australia because it is fair or so that it will be fair or both reasons: to keep the fair fair? Of course this speculation begs the question about the meaning of the word 'fair'. Of all the various dictionary entries for the word fair the three which seem to coalesce in this usage are: fair as in beautiful, fair as in just and fair as in white. I would argue that these three uses coalesce likewise in the use of fair equally in that typically Australian expression, fair enough: characteristic expression of a country seriously worried for most of its European history about the risk of racial impurity even from 'other' Europeans. In the song the line is emphatic because it is actually repeated in each rendition of the chorus. It is the point the song is making. Or we could say it is the question the song asks: how should Australia be advanced? But this form of the question implies an adverbial construction. An adverb in this position would imply process and therefore a future orientation toward the quality of that process: how Australia ought to be advanced. But if the 'fair' of the chorus is really an adjective then the implication is that Australia is already a 'fair' entity; in advancing Australia one advances its already attained quality of fairness. The beautiful inhabit a just polity. A just polity is a white polity. This is the advance, in the song, that is happening, or has happened, in Australia. In fact this is the advance which the European word (Latin made English down here) constitutes for the continent formerly known to Europe as New Holland: Australia is becoming a white man's country. This song is specifically about the civilising process, about the white man's burden, as it applied to this particular far-flung reach of empire. The advance of the title concerns the progress of civilisation; it assigns to this process a very specific metaphor, that of a military movement. The progress of the white race over the continent is an advance. What appears to be an external motion (promote Australia abroad) belies an internal one: the still ongoing process of conquest and likewise the encouragement to get that done without miscegenation. That Aborigines are given no specific role in this song becomes less mysterious in this light: it is not their country or nationality which is being described here; rather the advance of fair Australia, an advance which takes place at the expense of an unmentioned (unmentionable?) non-polity. The non-inclusion of Aboriginal people in the Australian polity prior to the 1967 referendum shocks many today. And it shocks as unjust, unfair, unreasonable. That it did not seem so for long stretches of white Australia's memory indicates that a different logic was then in force. The convergence of moral value or integrity with race, with language, with tribal membership, is certainly a widespread human phenomenon and one with plenty of Old Testament backing (and plenty of Old Testament caveat as well). And it is familiar to anyone over the age of about thirty in Australia today, to anyone who ever sang the hymn 'All things white and wonderful'. That it is a sentiment unacceptable today in a world dominated by human rights consciousness indicates that the ethics of the last couple of decades have evolved radically from those which preceded them. The British Empire may have carted a lot of white man's burden about the globe but it is fairly hard to claim that it did not primarily exist for the benefit of white men. To argue otherwise now is to acquiesce in a rhetoric which those of us who accept universal human rights have no choice but to reject as racist. Today the civilising mission of the white man and the personal gain it brought white men remain spectacularly successful even and perhaps especially as the colour has been drained from the map. The sun sets on one kind of empire but only because that empire has been succeeded by one more lucrative, and, like the words of the successful anthem, harder to pin down than those in the one that preceded it. As to the event of singing ourselves into the 'fair' future: three connotations just, beautiful, white conflate in an ambiguity where through repetition, through emphasis, and through the dignifying effect of an anthem setting, they come to imply each other. The unspoken terms of the song suffice to imply the conflation: the white man (now all the people) toil to make the land beautiful and just. Whether this is an accomplished fact or an uphill battle, regardless of who is now included in this mission, there is no doubt that this notion of progress as 'Australia-making' is owing to the coming of the white man. Should the question be asked of this chorus then: if this is not blatant racism, is it something subtler? Is it a kind of deep-seated racism which survives the bowdlerizing of those for whom white supremacist rhetoric might be a little close to the bone? One can go further: this polysemy, on which nothing can be pinned, might be a closet racist's gift, because it generates paranoia. It accumulates the force of an exclusion without resorting to any culpable act of exclusion as such. Is this racism at the inscrutable and unconscious core of the nation's sense of itself? Is this the taunting of those whom the nation defines itself as excluding? Is this song taunting them to sing themselves out of the picture? If so then note that they would have two ways to go: they could be assimilated (fair enough?) or they could see themselves excluded. If the effect of this chorus is to say that Australia should go forward under the stewardship of the fair=inter alia white race2, then it is not a question of a particular idea of progress being conveyed despite the erasure of a previous story. The erasure of a particular past, which we are too polite to mention, enables the new story. The other past is erased together with the others who inhabited it. In the world outside of the song however, the others, whom we might be too polite to see, do still inhabit. They inhabit the new story, not as flies on the wall but as flies in the ointment. Should the song be scrapped? Should the lyrics be scrapped? The project of dismantling empires and their signs is, as the eastern bloc has been learning, not as straightforward as it may seem. Cutting the star out of the flag may leave a star-shaped hole for all to see. Advance Australia Fair, its evolution, its status, its popular reading, taboo readings (e.g. this one), the suppression of its earlier version, the fact that what it says and fails to say is officially accepted by Australians to represent Australians: all these things are living reminders of where Australians come from, of the thinking that brought us, of what we possess and how we come to possess it. Fostering awareness of these is of great value to Australians both in understanding ourselves and in deciding where we should go with that knowledge. Thanks to my mother, Sylvia Kelen, for help with research on this paper. Notes 1 It first succeeded 'God Save the Queen' in that role in 1974 following a national opinion poll conducted by the Australian Bureau of Statistics for the then Labor government. Incoming Liberal Prime Minister, Malcolm Fraser, reinstated 'God Save the Queen' in 1976. 'Advance Australia Fair' was politically corrected (not a phrase in use at the time) when re-instated as national anthem in 1984, with a view to giving the girls a fair go. The original opening line of Peter Dodds McCormick's nineteenth century song was: 'Australian sons let us rejoice/for we are young and free'. The 'correction' of the present version of the song is noteworthy given the emphasis which the song, and particularly the chorus, places on historical consciousness, more specifically on the self-consciousness of an effort at nationhood. 2 Note that there is plenty of evidence for this in the evolution of the song, especially in the second stanza of the original version: When gallant Cook from Albion sail'd, To trace wide oceans o'er, True British courage bore him onTill he landed on our shore. Then here he raised old England's flag, The standard of the brave; With all her faults we love her still, 'Britannia rules the wave'In joyful, etc The fourth and fifth stanzas of the original version of Peter Dodds McCormick's song describe who would be acceptable as a migrant and what this new political entity would be defending itself from in the case of war:While other nations of the globe Behold us from afar, We'll rise to high renown and shineLike our glorious southern star;From England, Scotia, Erin's Isle, Who come our lot to share, Let all combine with heart and handTo advance and etc.Should foreign foe e'er sight our coast,Or dare a foot to land, We'll rise to arms like sires of yoreTo guard our native strand; Britannia then shall surely know, Beyond wide ocean's roll, Her son's in fair Australia's landStill keep a British soul, In joyful strains and etc. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Kelen, Christopher. "How fair is fair? " M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5.3 (2002). [your date of access] < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0207/fairisfair.php>. Chicago Style Kelen, Christopher, "How fair is fair? " M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5, no. 3 (2002), < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0207/fairisfair.php> ([your date of access]). APA Style Kelen, Christopher. (2002) How fair is fair? . M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5(3). < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0207/fairisfair.php> ([your date of access]).

IntroductionRecut trailers typically mix footage from one or more films to create a preview for a feature that will never exist. Challenging the trailer’s assumed function as existing merely to gain an audience for a main attraction, the recut trailer suggests that the trailer can exist separately from a film. This paper will ask if recut trailers are evidence of fan enthusiasm and question precisely where this enthusiasm is directed. Do recut trailers demonstrate there are fans for the feature film that is recut, or does this enthusiasm extend beyond an appreciation and anticipation for a feature film? It will be ascertained if the recut trailer – as a site for homage, parody and fandom – transcends the advertising imperatives of box office success. This paper will demonstrate how fan-made trailers are symptomatic of the need for a new critical approach to trailers, one that does not situate the trailer as the low advertisement to the high cultural text of the film. It will be proposed that trailers form a network, of which the feature films and other trailers that are invoked form only a part.Recut trailers, while challenging the norms of what is considered an advertisement, function within a strict frame of reference: in their length, use of credits, text, voiceover in direct address to the audience, and editing techniques. Consequently, the recut trailer parodies and challenges the tools of promotion by utilising the very methods that sell to a prospective audience, to create an advertisement that is stripped of its traditional function by promoting a film that cannot exist and cannot be consumed. The promotion seems to end at the site of the advertisement, while still calling upon a complex series of interconnected references and collective knowledge in order for the parody to be effective. This paper will examine the network of Brokeback Mountain parodies, which were created before, during and after the feature film’s release, suggesting that the temporal imperative usually present in trailers is irrelevant for their appreciation. A playlist of the trailers discussed is available here.The Shift from Public to PrivateThe limited scholarship available situates the trailer as a promotional tool and a “brief film text” (Kernan 1), which is a “limited sample of the product” of the feature film (Kerr and Flynn 103), one that directly markets to demographics in order to draw an audience to see the feature. The traditional distribution methods for the trailer – as pre-packaged coming attractions in a cinema, and as television advertisements – work by building a desire to see a film in the future. For the trailer to be commercially successful within this framework, there is an imperative to differentiate itself from other trailers through creating an appeal to stars, genre or narrative (Kernan 14), or to be recognised as a trailer in amongst the stream of other advertisements on television. As new media forms have emerged, the trailer’s spatial and temporal bounds have shifted: the trailer is now included as a special feature on DVD packages, is sent to mobile devices on demand, and is viewed on video-sharing websites such as YouTube. In this move from the communal, collective and directed consumption of the trailer in the public sphere to the individualised, domesticated and on-demand consumption in the private sphere – the trailer has shown itself to be a successful “cross-media text” (Johnston 145). While choosing to watch a trailer – potentially long after the theatrical release of the film it promotes – suggests a growing “interactive relationship between film studio and audience” (Johnston 145), it also marks the beginning of increasing interactivity between the trailer and the audience, a relationship that has altered the function and purpose of the trailer beyond the studio’s control. Yet, the form of the trailer as it was traditionally distributed has been retained for recut trailers in order to parody and strip the trailer of its original meaning and purpose, and removes any commercial capital attached to it. Rather than simply being released at the control of a studio, the trailer is now actively shared, appropriated and altered. Demand for the trailer has not diminished since the introduction of new media, suggesting that there is an enthusiasm not only for coming feature films, but also for the act of watching, producing and altering trailers that may not translate into box office takings. This calls into question the role of the trailer in new media sites, in which the recut trailers form a significant part by embodying the larger changes to the consumption and distribution of trailers.TrailerTubeThis study analyses recut trailers released on YouTube only. This is, arguably, the most common way that these trailers are watched and newly created trailers are shared and interacted with, with some clips reaching several million views. The purpose of this paper is to analyse the network that is created surrounding the recut trailer through addressing its specific qualities. YouTube is the only site consulted in this study for the release for fan-made trailers as YouTube forms a formidable part of the network of recut trailers and studio released trailers, and currently, serves as a common way for Internet users to search for videos.YouTube was launched in December 2005, and in the following 1-2 years, the majority of popular recut trailers emerged. The correlation between these two dates is not arbitrary; the technology and culture promoted and fostered by the unique specificities of YouTube has in turn developed the recut trailer as “one of the most popular forms of fan subversion in the age of digital video” (Hilderband 52). It is also the role of audiences and producers that has ensured that the trailer has moved beyond its original spatial and temporal bounds – to be consumed in the home or on mobile devices, and at any stage past any promotional urgency. The Brokeback Mountain parodies, to be later discussed, surfaced mainly in 2006, demonstrative of an early acceptance of the possibilities that YouTube and mass broadcasting presented, and the possibilities that the trailer could offer to YouTube’s “clip” culture (Hilderbrand 49).The specificities of YouTube as a channel for dissemination have allowed for fan-made trailers to exist alongside trailers released by studios. Rather than the trailer being consumed and then becoming irretrievable, perpetually tied to the feature film it promotes, the online distribution and storing of trailers allows a constant revisiting of the advertisement – this act alone demonstrating an enthusiasm for the form of the trailer. Hilderbrand argues that YouTube “offers[s] new and remediating relationships to texts that indicate changes and acceleration of spectatorial consumption” (49). Specifically, Hilderbrand proposes that YouTube functions as a collection of memories, which in turn present a “portal of cultural memory” (54) – amplified by the ability to create playlists and channels. The tagging of trailers to the films from which they drive, the official trailers released for a film referenced, or other recut trailers ensures that there is a physical trace of the network the trailer creates. Recut trailers demand for knowledge and capital to be shared amongst viewers, the technical attributes of YouTube allow for much of this knowledge to be available on demand, and to be hyperlinked or suggested to the viewer. In order for the parody present in recut trailers to function at the level intended, the films that are drawn upon would presumably need to be identified and some basic elements of the plot understood in order for the capital imbued in the trailer to be completely realised. If the user is unaware of the film, however, clips of the film or the original trailer can be reached either through the “related videos” menu which populates according to the didactic information for the clip watched, or by searching. As the majority of recut trailers seek to displace the original genre of the film parodied – such as, for example, Ten Things I Hate about Commandments which presents the story of The Ten Commandments as a teen film in which Moses will both part the sea and get the girl – the original genre of the film must be known by the viewer in order to acknowledge the site for parody in the fan-made trailer. Further to this, the network deployed suggests that there must be some knowledge of the conventions of the genre that is being applied to the original film’s promotional qualities. The parody functions by effectively sharing the knowledge between two genres, in conjunction with an awareness of the role and capital of the trailer. Tagging, playlists and channels facilitate the sharing of knowledge and dispersing of capital. As the recut trailer tends to derive from more than one source, the network alters the viewer’s relationship to the original feature film and cultivates a series of clips and knowledge. However, this also indicates that intimate fan knowledge can be bypassed – which places this particular relationship to the trailer and the invoked films as existing outside the realms of the archetypal cult fan. This challenges prior conceptions of fan culture by resisting a prolonged engagement normally attributed to cultivating fan status (Hills), as typically only one trailer will be made, rather than exhibiting a concentrated adulation of one text. The recut trailer is placed as the nexus in a series of links, in which the studio system is subverted while also being directly engaged with and utilised. The tools that have traditionally been used to sell to an audience through pre-packaged coming attractions are now used to promote a film that cannot be consumed that holds no commercial significance for film studios. These tools also work to reinforce the aesthetic and cinematic norms in the trailer, which provide a contract of audience expectations – such as the use of the approval by the American Motion Picture Association screen and classification at the beginning of the majority of recut trailers. The recut trailer assimilates to the nature of video sharing on YouTube in which the trailer is part of a network of narratives all of which are accessible on demand, can be fast-forwarded, replayed, and embedded on numerous social networking sites for further dissemination and accompanying editorial comment. The trailer thus becomes a social text that involves a community and is wide-reaching in its aims and consumption, despite being physically consumed in the private sphere. The feature which enables the user to “favourite” a video, add it to their playlist and embed it in another site, demonstrates that the trailer is considered as its own cohesive form, subject to scrutiny and favoured or dismissed. Constant statistics reflecting its popularity reinforce the success of a recut trailer, and popularity will generally lead to the trailer becoming more accessible. Hilderbrand argues that YouTube has nutured a “new temporality of immediate gratification for audiences” which has in turn contributed to the “culture of the clip” (49), which the trailer seems to exemplify – and in the absence of feature films being legally readily accessible on sites such as YouTube, the trailer seeks to fill the void for immediate gratification.Brokeback MountainsWhile fan-made trailers can generate enthusiasm about the release of an upcoming film they may be linked to – as was recently the case with fan-made trailers for teen vampire film, Twilight – there is also a general enthusiasm to play with the form of the trailer and all that it signifies, while in the process, stripping the trailer of its traditional function. Following the release of the trailer for feature film Brokeback Mountain, numerous recut trailers emerged on YouTube which took the romantic and sexual relationship of the two male leads in the film, and applied this narrative to films depicting two male leads in a non-romantic friendship. In effect, new films were created that used the basis of Brokeback Mountain to shift plots in existing films, creating a new narrative in the process. The many Brokeback… parodies vary in popularity, and have been uploaded to YouTube continuously since 2006. The titles include Brokeback to the Future, Saved by the Bell: Brokeback Style, Brokeback of the Ring, The Brokeback Redemption, Broke Trek, Harry Potter and Brokeback Goblet and Star Wars: The Emperor Brokeback. The trailers use footage from a variety of film and television sources that show a friendship between two men and introduce it to the “style” of Brokeback Mountain. There are several techniques which are used uniformly across all of the trailers in order to convey this new plot: the original score used in the Brokeback Mountain trailer begins each recut trailer; the use of typically white text on a black screen based on the original trailer’s text, or a slight variant of it which is specific to the film which is being recut; and the pace of shots altered to focus on lingering looks, or to splice scenes together in order to imply sexual contact. Consequently, there is a consciousness of the effects used in the original trailer to sell a particular narrative to the audience as something that an audience would want to view. The narrative is constructed as being universal, as any story with two men as the leads and their friendship can be altered to show an underlying homoerotic story, and the form of the trailer allows these storylines to be promoted and shared. The insider knowledge of the fan that has noticed these interactions is able to make their knowledge communal. Hills argues that “fans participate in communal activities” (ix), which here takes the form of creating a network of collective stories which form Brokeback – it is a story extended to several sites, and a story which is promoted and sold. Through the use of tagging, playlists and suggested videos, once one recut trailer is viewed, several others are made instantly available. The availability of the original Brokeback Mountain trailer then serves to reinforce the authenticity and professionalism of the clips, by providing a template in which existing footage from other films is moulded to fit within.The instant identifier of a Brokeback… trailer is the music that was used in the original trailer. This signals that the trailer for Brokeback Mountain was itself so iconic that the use of its soundtrack would be instantly recognisable, and the re-use of music and text suggests that the recut trailers reinforce this iconography and its capital by visually reinforcing what signifies Brokeback Mountain. The network these trailers create includes the film Brokeback Mountain itself, but the recut trailer begins to open a new trajectory for the narrative to mould and shift, identifiable by techniques present in the trailer but not the feature film itself. The fan appreciation is evident in several ways: namely, there is an enthusiasm to conflate a feature film into Brokeback Mountain’s general narrative; that there has been enough of an engagement with a feature in order to retrieve clips to be edited into a new montage, and consequently, a condensed narrative with a direct mode of address; and also the eagerness to see a feature film in trailer form, employing trailer-specific cinematic techniques to enhance parody and displacement. Recut trailers are also subject to commenting, which generally reflect on either the insider fan knowledge of the text that is being initiated to the world of Brokeback Mountain, or take the place of comments that reflect on the success of the editing. In this respect, critique is a part of the communal fan interaction with the creator and uploader in the recut trailer’s network. As such, there is a focus on quality for the creator of the fan video, and rating occurs in order to rank the recut trailers. This focus on quality and professionalism elevates the creator of the recut trailer to the status of a director, despite not having filmed the scenes themselves. Demonstrating the enthusiasm for the role of the trailer, the internal promotion on YouTube of the most successful trailers – designated as such by the YouTube community – signals an active engagement with the role of the trailer, and its social properties, even though it is consumed individually.ConclusionWhile the recut trailer extends the fan gaze toward one object or more, it is typically presented as a parody, and consequently, could also be seen as rejecting elements of a genre or feature film. However, the parody typically occurs at the site of displacement: such as the relationship between the two male leads in Brokeback to the Future having a romantic relationship whilst coming to terms with time-travel; the burning bush in Ten Things I Hate about Commandments being played by Samuel L. Jackson as “Principal Firebush”, complete with audio from Pulp Fiction; or recutting romantic comedy Sleepless in Seattle to become a horror film. The parody relies on knowledge that can be found easily, aided by YouTube’s features, while requiring the creator to intimately engage with a feature film. The role of the trailer in this network is to provide the tools and the boundaries for the new narrative to exist within, and create a system of referents for the fan to identify, through parodies of star appeal, genre, or narrative, as Kernan proposes are the three ways in which a trailer often relies upon to sell itself to an audience (14).As this paper has argued toward, the recut trailer can also be released from the feature films it invokes by being considered as its own coherent form, which draws upon numerous sites of knowledge and capital in order to form a network. While traditionally trailers have worked to gain an audience for an impending feature release, the recut trailer only seeks to create an audience for itself. Through the use of cult texts or a particularly successful form of parody, as demonstrated in Scary Mary Poppins, the recut trailer is widely consumed and shared across multiple avenues. The recut trailer then seeks to promote only itself through providing a condensed narrative, speaking directly to audiences, and cleverly engaging with the use of editing to leave traces of authorship. Fan culture may be seen as the adoration of one creator to the film they recut, but the network that the recut trailer creates demonstrates that there is an enthusiasm in both creators and viewers for the form of the trailer itself, to exist beyond the feature film and advertising imperatives.ReferencesBrokeback of the Ring. 27 Feb. 2006. YouTube. Video. 2 March 2009 ‹http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tgt-BiFiBek›.Brokeback to the Future. 1 Feb. 2006. YouTube. Video. 2 March 2009 ‹http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8uwuLxrv8jY›.Brokeback Mountain. Dir. Ang Lee. Film. Paramount Pictures, 2005. The Brokeback Redemption Trailer. 28 Feb. 2006. YouTube. Video. 2 March 2009 ‹http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FtRi42DEdTE›.Broke Trek – A Star Trek Brokeback Mountain Parody. 27 May 2007. YouTube. Video. 2 March 2009 ‹http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7xSOuLky3n0›.Harry Potter and the Brokeback Goblet. 8 March 2006. YouTube. Video. 2 March 2009 ‹http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e9D0veHTxh0›. Hilderbrand, Lucas. "Youtube: Where Cultural Memory and Copyright Converge." Film Quarterly 61 (2007): 48-57. Hills, Matthew. Fan Cultures. New York: Routledge, 2002. Johnston, Keith M. "'The Coolest Way to Watch Movie Trailers in the World': Trailers in the Digital Age." Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies 14 (2008): 145-60. Kernan, Lisa. Coming Attractions: Reading American Movie Trailers. Austin: U of Texas P, 2004. Kerr, Aphra, and Roddy Flynn. "Rethinking Globalisation through the Movie and Games Industries." Convergence: The International Journal of Research Into New Media Technologies 9 (2003): 91-113. The Original Scary ‘Mary Poppins’ Recut Trailer. 8 Oct. 2006. YouTube. Video. 2 March 2009 ‹http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2T5_0AGdFic›.Saved by the Bell: Brokeback Style. 4 April 2006. YouTube. Video. 2 March 2009 ‹http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yHLr5AYl5f4›.Sleepless in Seattle. Dir. Nora Ephron. Film. Tristar Pictures, 1993. Sleepless in Seattle: Recut as a Horror Movie. 30 Jan. 2006. YouTube. Video. 2 March 2009 ‹http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=frUPnZMxr08›.Star Wars: The Emperor Brokeback. 14 Feb. 2006. YouTube. Video. 2 March 2009 ‹http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=omB18oRsBYg›.The Ten Commandments. Dir. Cecil B. DeMille. Film. Paramount Pictures, 1956. Ten Things I Hate about Commandments. 14 May 2006. YouTube. Video. 2 March 2009 ‹http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u1kqqMXWEFs›.

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

Cookbooks can be interpreted as sites of exchange and transformation. This is not only due to their practical use as written instructions that assist in turning ingredients into dishes, but also to their significance as interconnecting mediums between teacher and student, perceiver and perceived, past and present. Hinging on inescapable notions of apprenticeship, occasion, and the passing of time—and being at once familiar and unfamiliar to both the reader and the writer—the recipe “as text” renders a specific brand of culinary uncanny. In outlining the function of cookbooks as chronicles of the everyday, Janet Theophano points out that they “are one of a variety of written forms, such as diaries and journals, that [people] have adapted to recount and enrich their lives […] blending raw ingredients into a new configuration” (122). The cookbook unveils the peculiar ability of the ephemeral “text” to find permanence and materiality through the embodied framework action and repetition. In view of its propensity to be read, evaluated, and reconfigured, the cookbook can be read as a manifestation of voice, a site of interpretation and communication between writer and reader which is defined not by static assessment, but by dynamic and often incongruous exchanges of emotions, mysteries, and riddles. Taking the in-between status of the cookbook as point of departure, this paper analyses the cookbook as a “living dead” entity, a revenant text bridging the gap between the ephemerality of the word and the tangibility of the physical action. Using Joanne Harris’s fictional treatment of the trans-generational cookbook in Five Quarters of the Orange (2001) as an evocative example, the cookbook is read as a site of “memory, mourning and melancholia” which is also inevitably connected—in its aesthetic, political and intellectual contexts—to the concept of “return.” The “dead” voice in the cookbook is resurrected through practice. Re-enacting instructions brings with it a sense of transformative exchange that, in both its conceptual and factual dimensions, recalls those uncanny structural principles that are the definitive characteristic of the Gothic. These find particular resonance, at least as far as cookbooks are concerned, in “a sense of the unspeakable” and a “correspondence between dreams, language, writing” (Castricano 13). Understanding the cookbook as a “Gothic text” unveils one of the most intriguing aspects of the recipe as a vault of knowledge and memory that, in an appropriately mysterious twist, can be connected to the literary framework of the uncanny through the theme of “live burial.” As an example of the written word, a cookbook is a text that “calls” to the reader; that call is not only sited in interpretation—as it can be arguably claimed for the majority of written texts—but it is also strongly linked to a sense of lived experience on the writer’s part. This connection between “presences” is particularly evident in examples of cookbooks belonging to what is known as “autobiographical cookbooks”, a specific genre of culinary writing where “recipes play an integral part in the revelation of the personal history” (Kelly 258). Known examples from this category include Alice B. Toklas’s famous Cook Book (1954) and, more recently, Nigel Slater’s Toast (2003). In the autobiographical cookbook, the food recipes are fully intertwined with the writer’s memories and experiences, so that the two things, as Kelly suggests, “could not be separated” (258). The writer of this type of cookbook is, one might venture to argue, always present, always “alive”, indistinguishable and indivisible from the experience of any recipe that is read and re-enacted. The culinary phantom—understood here as the “voice” of the writer and how it re-lives through the re-enacted recipe—functions as a literary revenant through the culturally prescribed readability of the recipes as a “transtextual” (Rashkin 45) piece. The term, put forward by Esther Rashkin, suggests a close relationship between written and “lived” narratives that is reliant on encrypted messages of haunting, memory, and spectrality (45). This fundamental concept—essential to grasp the status of cookbooks as a haunted text—helps us to understand the writer and instructor of recipes as “being there” without necessarily being present. The writers of cookbooks are phantomised in that their presence—recalling the materiality of action and motion—is buried alive in the pages of the cookbook. It remains tacit and unheard until it is resurrected through reading and recreating the recipe. Although this idea of “coming alive” finds resonance in virtually all forms of textual exchange, the phantomatic nature of the relationship between writer and reader finds its most tangible expression in the cookbook precisely because of the practical and “lived in” nature of the text itself. While all texts, Jacques Derrida suggests, call to us to inherit their knowledge through “secrecy” and choice, cookbooks are specifically bound to a dynamic injunction of response, where the reader transforms the written word into action, and, in so doing, revives the embodied nature of the recipe as much as it resurrects the ghostly presence of its writer (Spectres of Marx 158). As a textual medium housing kitchen phantoms, cookbooks designate “a place” that, as Derrida puts it, draws attention to the culinary manuscript’s ability to communicate a legacy that, although not “natural, transparent and univocal”, still calls for an “interpretation” whose textual choices form the basis of enigma, inhabitation, and haunting (Spectres of Marx 16). It is this mystery that animates the interaction between memory, ghostly figures and recipes in Five Quarters of the Orange. Whilst evoking Derrida’s understanding of the written texts as a site of secrecy, exchange and (one may argue) haunting, Harris simultaneously illustrates Kelly’s contention that the cookbook breaks the barriers between the seemingly common everyday and personal narratives. In the story, Framboise Dartigen—a mysterious woman in her sixties—returns to the village of her childhood in the Loire region of France. Here she rescues the old family farm from fifty years of abandonment and under the acquired identity of the veuve Simone, opens a local crêperie, serving simple, traditional dishes. Harris stresses how, upon her return to the village, Framboise brings with her resentment, shameful family secrets and, most importantly, her mother Mirabelle’s “album”: a strange hybrid of recipe book and diary, written during the German occupation of the Loire region in World War II. The recipe album was left to Framboise as an inheritance after her mother’s death: “She gave me the album, valueless, then, except for the thoughts and insights jotted in the margins alongside recipes and newspaper cuttings and herbal cures. Not a diary, precisely; there are no dates in the album, no precise order” (Harris 14). It soon becomes clear that Mirabelle had an extraordinary relationship with her recipe album, keeping it as a life transcript in which food preparation figures as a main focus of attention: “My mother marked the events in her life with recipes, dishes of her own invention or interpretations of old favourites. Food was her nostalgia, her celebration, its nurture and preparation the sole outlet for her creativity” (14). The album is described by Framboise as her mother’s only confidant, its pages the sole means of expression of events, thoughts and preoccupations. In this sense, the recipes contain knowledge of the past and, at the same time, come to represent a trans-temporal coordinate from which to begin understanding Mirabelle’s life and the social situations she experienced while writing the album. As the cookery album acts as a medium of self-representation for Mirabelle, Harris also gestures towards the idea that recipes offer an insight into a person that history may have otherwise forgotten. The culinary album in Five Quarters of the Orange establishes itself as a bonding element and a trans-temporal gateway through which an exchange ensues between mother and daughter. The etymological origin of the word “recipe” offers a further insight into the nature of the exchange. The word finds its root in the Latin word reciperere, meaning simultaneously “to give and to receive” (Floyd and Forster 6). Mirabelle’s recipes are not only the textual representation of the patterns and behaviours on which her life was based but, most importantly, position themselves in a process of an uncanny exchange. Acting as the surrogate of the long-passed Mirabelle, the album’s existence as a haunted culinary document ushers in the possibility of secrets and revelations, contradictions, and concealment. On numerous occasions, Framboise confesses that the translation of the recipe book was a task with which she did not want to engage. Forcing herself, she describes the reading as a personal “struggle” (276). Fearing what the book could reveal—literally, the recipes of a lifetime—she suspects that the album will demand a deep involvement with her mother’s existence: “I had avoided looking at the album, feeling absurdly at fault, a voyeuse, as if my mother might come in at any time and see me reading her strange secrets. Truth is, I didn’t want to know her secrets” (30). On the one hand, Framboise’s fear could be interpreted as apprehension at the prospect of unveiling unpleasant truths. On the other, she is reluctant to re-live her mother’s emotions, passions and anxieties, feeling they may actually be “sublimated into her recipes” (270). Framboise’s initial resistance to the secrets of the recipe book is quickly followed by an almost obsessive quest to “translate” the text: “I read through the album little by little during those lengthening nights. I deciphered the code [and] wrote down and cross-referenced everything by means of small cards, trying to put everything in sequence” (225). As Harris exposes Framboise’s personal struggle in unravelling Mirabelle’s individual history, the daughter’s hermeneutic excavation into the past is problematised by her mother’s strange style: “The language […] in which much of the album was written was alien to me, and after a few abortive attempts to decipher it, I abandoned the idea […] the mad scrawlings, poems, drawings and accounts […] were written with no apparent logic, no order that I could discover” (31). Only after a period of careful interpretation does Framboise understand the confused organisation of her mother’s culinary thoughts. Once the daughter has decoded the recipes, she is able to use them: “I began to make cakes [...] the brioche and pain d’épices of the region, as well as some [...] Breton specialties, packets of crêpes dentelle, fruit tarts and packs de sablés, biscuits, nutbread, cinnamon snaps [...] I used my mother’s old recipes” (22). As Framboise engages with her mother’s album, Mirabelle’s memory is celebrated in the act of reading, deciphering, and recreating the recipes. As a metaphorically buried collection waiting to be interpreted, the cookbook is the catalyst through which the memory of Mirabelle can be passed to her daughter and live on. Discussing the haunted nature of texts, Derrida suggests that once one interprets a text written by another, that text “comes back” and “lives on” (‘Roundtable on Translation’ 158). In this framework of return and exchange, the replication of the Mirabelle’s recipes, by her daughter Framboise, is the tangible expression of the mother’s life. As the collective history of wartime France and the memory of Mirabelle’s life are reaffirmed in the cookbook, the recipes allow Framboise to understand what is “staring [her] in the face”, and finally see “the reason for her [mother’s] actions and the terrible repercussions on [her] own” life (268). As the process of culinary translating takes place, it becomes clear that her deceased mother’s album conceals a legacy that goes beyond material possessions. Mirabelle “returns” through the cookbook and that return, in Jodey Castricano’s words, “acts as inheritance.” In the hauntingly autobiographical context of the culinary album, the mother’s phantom and the recipes become “inseparable” (29). Within the resistant and at times contradictory framework of the Gothic text, legacy is always passed on through a process of haunting which must be accepted in order to understand and decode the writing. This exchange becomes even more significant when cookbooks are concerned, since the intended engagement with the recipes is one of acceptance and response. When the cookbook “calls”, the reader is asked “to respond to an injunction” (Castricano 17). In this framework, Mirabelle’s album in Five Quarters of the Orange becomes the haunted channel through which the reader can communicate with her “ghost” or, to be more specific, her “spectral signature.” In these terms, the cookbook is a vector for reincarnation and haunting, while recipes themselves function as the vehicle for the parallel consciousness of culinary phantoms to find a status of reincarnated identification through their connection to a series of repeated gestures. The concept of “phantom” here is particularly useful in the understanding put forward by Nicholas Abraham and Maria Torok—and later developed by Derrida and Castricano—as “the buried speech of another”, the shadow of perception and experience that returns through the subject’s text (Castricano 11). In the framework of the culinary, the phantom returns in the cookbook through an interaction between the explicit or implied “I” of the recipe’s instructions, and the physical and psychological dimension of the “you” that finds lodging in the reader as re-enactor. In the cookbook, the intertextual relationship between the reader’s present and the writer’s past can be identified, as Rashkin claims, “in narratives organised by phantoms” (45). Indeed, as Framboise’s relationship with the recipe book is troubled by her mother’s spectral presence, it becomes apparent that even the writing of the text was a mysterious process. Mirabelle’s album, in places, offers “cryptic references” (14): moments that are impenetrable, indecipherable, enigmatic. This is a text written “with ghosts”: “the first page is given to my father’s death—the ribbon of his Légion d’Honneur pasted thickly to the paper beneath a blurry photograph and a neat recipe for buck-wheat pancakes—and carries a kind of gruesome humour. Under the picture my mother has pencilled 'Remember—dig up Jerusalem artichokes. Ha! Ha! Ha!'” (14). The writing of the recipe book is initiated by the death of Mirabelle’s husband, Yannick, and his passing is marked by her wish to eradicate from the garden the Jerusalem artichokes which, as it is revealed later, were his favourite food. According to culinary folklore, Jerusalem artichokes are meant to be highly “spermatogenic”, so their consumption can make men fertile (Amato 3). Their uprooting from Mirabelle’s garden, after the husband’s death, signifies the loss of male presence and reproductive function, as if Mirabelle herself were rejecting the symbol of Yannick’s control of the house. Her bittersweet, mocking comments at this disappearance—the insensitive “Ha! Ha! Ha!”—are indicative of Mirabelle’s desire to detach herself from the restraints of married life. Considering women’s traditional function as family cooks, her happiness at the lack of marital duties extends to the kitchen as much as to the bedroom. The destruction of Yannick’s artichokes is juxtaposed with a recipe for black-wheat pancakes which the family then “ate with everything” (15). It is at this point that Framboise recalls suddenly and with a sense of shock that her mother never mentioned her father after his death. It is as if a mixture of grief and trauma animate Mirabelle’s feeling towards her deceased husband. The only confirmation of Yannick’s existence persists in the pages of the cookbook through Mirabelle’s occasional use of the undecipherable “bilini-enverlini”, a language of “inverted syllables, reversed words, nonsense prefixes and suffices”: “Ini tnawini inoti plainexini [...] Minini toni nierus niohwbi inoti” (42). The cryptic language was, we are told, “invented” by Yannick, who used to “speak it all the time” (42). Yannick’s presence thus is inscribed in the album, which is thereby transformed into an evocative historical document. Although he disappears from his wife’s everyday life, Yannick’s ghost—to which the recipe book is almost dedicated on the initial page—remains and haunts the pages. The cryptic cookbook is thus also a “crypt.” In their recent, quasi-Gothic revision of classical psychoanalysis, Nicholas Abraham and Maria Torok write about the trauma of loss in relation to psychic crypts. In mourning a loved one, they argue, the individual can slip into melancholia by erecting what they call an “inner crypt.” In the psychological crypt, the dead—or, more precisely, the memory of the dead—can be hidden or introjectively “devoured”, metaphorically speaking, as a way of denying its demise. This form of introjection—understood here in clear connection to the Freudian concept of literally “consuming” one’s enemy—is interpreted as the “normal” progression through which the subject accepts the death of a loved one and slowly removes its memory from consciousness. However, when this process of detachment encounters resistance, a “crypt” is formed. The crypt maps, as Abraham and Torok claim, the psychological topography of “the untold and unsayable secret, the feeling unfelt, the pain denied” (21). In its locus of mystery and concealment, the crypt is haunted by the memory of the dead which, paradoxically, inhabits it as a “living-dead.” Through the crypt, the dead can “return” to disturb consciousness. In Five Quarters of the Orange, the encoded nature of Mirabelle’s recipes—emerging as such on multiple levels of interpretation—enables the memory of Yannick to “return” within the writing itself. In his preface to Abraham and Torok’s The Wolf-Man’s Magic Word, Derrida argues that the psychological crypt houses “the ghost that comes haunting out the Unconscious of the other” (‘Fors’ xxi). Mirabelle’s cookbook might therefore be read as an encrypted reincarnation of her husband’s ghostly memory. The recipe book functions as the encrypted passageway through which the dead re-join the living in a responsive cycle of exchange and experience. Writing, in this sense, re-creates the subject through the culinary framework and transforms the cookbook into a revenant text colonised by the living-dead. Abraham and Torok suggest that “reconstituted from the memories of words, scenes and affects, the objective correlative of loss is buried alive in the crypt” (130). With this idea in mind, it is possible to suggest that, among Mirabelle’s recipes, the Gothicised Yannick inhabits a culinary crypt. It is through his associations with both the written and the practical dimension food that he remains, to borrow Derrida’s words, a haunting presence that Mirabelle is “perfectly willing to keep alive” within the bounds of the culinary vault (‘Fors’ xxi). As far as the mourning crypt is concerned, the exchange of consciousness that is embedded in the text takes place by producing a level of experiential concealment, based on the overarching effect of Gothicised interiority. Derrida remarks that “the crypt from which the ghost comes back belongs to someone else” (‘Fors’ 119). This suggestion throws into sharp relief the ability of the cookbook as a haunted text to draw the reader into a process of consciousness transmission and reception that is always and necessarily a form of “living-dead” exchange. In these terms, the recipe itself—especially in its embodiment as instructed actions—needs to be understood as a vector for establishing the uncanny barriers of signification erected by the bounds of the cookbook itself as a haunted site of death, enchantment, and revenant signs. In this way, eating, a vital and animated activity, is “disturbingly blended with death, decomposition and the corpse” (Piatti-Farnell 146). And far from simply providing nourishment for the living, Mirabelle’s encrypted recipes continue to feed the dead through cycles of mourning and melancholia. Mirabelle’s cookbook, therefore, becomes a textual example of “cryptomimeses”, a writing practice that, echoing the convention of the Gothic framework, generates its ghostly effects through embodying the structures of remembrance and the dynamics of autobiographic deconstructive writing (Castricano 8). As heimliche and unheimliche collide in practices of culinary reading and writing, the cookbook acts as quasi-mystical, haunted space through which the uncanny frameworks of language and experience can become actualised. ReferencesAbraham, Nicolas, and Maria Torok, The Shell and the Kernel: Renewals of Psychoanalysis. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1994. Amato, Joseph. The Great Jerusalem Artichoke Circus. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1993. Castricano, Jodey. Cryptomimesis: The Gothic and Jacques Derrida’s Ghost Writing. London: McGill-Queen’s UP, 2003. Derrida, Jacques. “Fors: the Anglish words of Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok.” Eds. Nicholas Abraham, and Maria Torok. The Wolf Man’s Magic Word: A Cryptonomy. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota Pr, 1986. xi–xlviii ---. “Roundtable on Translation.” The Ear of the Other: Otobiography, Transference, Translation. London: U of Nebraska P, 1985. 91–161. Floyd, Janet, and Laurel Foster. The Recipe Reader: Narratives–Contexts–Traditions. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003. Harris, Joanne. Five Quarters of the Orange. Maidenhead: Black Swan, 2002. Kelly, Traci Marie. “‘If I Were a Voodoo Priestess’: Women’s Culinary Autobiographies.” Kitchen Culture in America: Popular Representations of Food, Gender and Race. Ed. Sherrie A. Inness. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2001. 251–70. Piatti-Farnell, Lorna. Food and Culture in Contemporary American Fiction. New York: Routledge, 2011. Rashkin, Esther. Family Secrets and the Psychoanalysis of Narrative. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1992. Slater, Nigel. Toast: The Story of a Boy’s Hunger. London: Harper Perennial, 2004. Theophano, Janet. Eat My Words: Reading Women’s Lives Through The Cookbooks They Wrote. New York: Palgrave, 2002. Toklas, Alice B. The Alice B. Toklas Cook Book. New York: Perennial,1984.