Background and Objectives Primary care providers (PCPs) report decreased job satisfaction and high levels of burnout, yet little is known about their experience of moral distress. The aim of this study was to gain insight into the experiences of PCPs regarding moral distress including causative factors and proposed mitigation strategies. Methods This qualitative pilot study used semi-structured interviews to identify causes of moral distress in PCPs in an academic family medicine department. Interviews were analyzed using conventional content analysis. Results Of (...) 35 eligible participants, 12 completed the study (34% participation rate). Most were white, female, and had practiced for less than 10 years. Four PCPs had considered leaving their position due to moral distress. Participants identified five causes of moral distress: policies and procedures that conflict with patient needs, the unpredictable nature of primary care, need to “bend the rules,” lack of accountability, and lack of support staff. Six internal conflicts made resolving morally distressing situations difficult: perceived powerlessness, sense of responsibility, socialization to follow orders, emotional toll of the job, competing obligations, and fear of mistakes. Conclusions These findings matched themes in the current literature and identified an unbending infrastructure. This, coupled with the chaotic nature of primary care, resulted in frequent moral distress. Participants offered solutions to reduce and mitigate moral distress (also similar with current literature) and suggested moral distress and burnout are closely linked. (shrink)

Faculty workload inequities have important consequences for faculty diversity and inclusion. On average, women faculty spend more time engaging in service, teaching, and mentoring, while men, on average, spend more time on research, with women of color facing particularly high workload burdens. We explore how faculty members perceive workload in their departments, identifying mechanisms that can help shape their perceptions of greater equity and fairness. White women perceive that their departments have less equitable workloads and are less committed to (...) workload equity than white men. Women of color perceive that their departments are less likely to credit their important work through departmental rewards systems than white men. Workload transparency and clarity, and consistent approaches to assigning classes, advising, and service, can reduce women’s perceptions of inequitable and unfair workloads. Our research suggests that departments can identify and put in place a number of key practices around workload that will improve gendered and racialized perceptions of workload. (shrink)

BackgroundConventionally, transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) aims to focalize the current reaching the target region-of-interest (ROI). The focality can be quantified by the dose-target-determination-index (DTDI). Despite having a uniform tDCS setup, some individuals receive focal stimulation (high DTDI) while others show reduced focality (“non-focal”). The volume of cerebrospinal fluid (CSF), gray matter (GM), and white matter (WM) underlying each ROI govern the tDCS current distribution inside the brain, thereby regulating focality.AimTo determine the regional volume parameters that differentiate the focal (...) and non-focal groups.MethodsT1-weighted images of the brain from 300 age-sex matched adults were divided into three equal groups- (a) Young (20 ≤ × < 40 years), (b) Middle (40 ≤ × < 60 years), and (c) Older (60 ≤ × < 80 years). For each group, inter and intra-hemispheric montages with electrodes at (1) F3 and right supraorbital region (F3-RSO), and (2) CP5 and Cz (CP5-Cz) were simulated, targeting the left- Dorsolateral Prefrontal Cortex (DLPFC) and -Inferior Parietal Lobule (IPL), respectively. Both montages were simulated for two current doses (1 and 2 mA). For each individual head simulated for a tDCS configuration (montage and dose), the current density at each region-of-interest (ROI) and their DTDI were calculated. The individuals were categorized into two groups- (1) Focal (DTDI ≥ 0.75), and (2) Non-focal (DTDI < 0.75). The regional volume of CSF, GM, and WM of all the ROIs was determined. For each tDCS configuration and ROI, three 3-way analysis of variance was performed considering- (i) GM, (ii) WM, and (iii) CSF as the dependent variable (DV). The age group, sex, and focality group were the between-subject factors. For a given ROI, if any of the 3 DV’s showed a significant main effect or interaction involving the focality group, then that ROI was classified as a “focal ROI.”ResultsRegional CSF was the principal determinant of focality. For interhemispheric F3-RSO montage, interaction effect (p < 0.05) of age and focality was observed at Left Caudate Nucleus, with the focal group exhibiting higher CSF volume. The CSF volume of focal ROI correlated positively (r ∼ 0.16, p < 0.05) with the current density at the target ROI (DLPFC). For intrahemispheric CP5-Cz montage, a significant (p < 0.05) main effect was observed at the left pre- and post-central gyrus, with the focal group showing lower CSF volume. The CSF volume correlated negatively (r ∼ –0.16, p < 0.05) with current density at left IPL. The results were consistent for both current doses.ConclusionThe CSF channels the flow of tDCS current between electrodes with focal ROIs acting like reservoirs of current. The position of focal ROI in the channel determines the stimulation intensity at the target ROI. For focal stimulation in interhemispheric F3-RSO, the proximity of focal ROI reserves the current density at the target ROI (DLPFC). In contrast, for intrahemispheric montage (CP5-Cz), the far-end location of focal ROI reduces the current density at the target (IPL). (shrink)

If stem cell-based therapies are developed, we will likely confront a difficult problem of justice: for biological reasons alone, the new therapies might benefit only a limited range of patients. In fact, they might benefit primarily white Americans, thereby exacerbating long-standing differences in health and health care.

Sexually signalling animals must trade off the benefits of attracting mates with the consequences of attracting predators. For male guppies, predation risk depends on their behaviour, colouration, environmental conditions and changing intensity of predation throughout the day. Theoretically, this drives diel patterns of display behaviour in native Trinidadian populations, where males display more under low-light conditions when their most dangerous predator is less active. Here, we observed Australian guppies in a laboratory setting to investigate their diel display pattern, and if (...) this pattern is controlled by ambient light intensity. We also quantified individual variation in both the daily frequency and diel pattern of displays, and if such variation relates to body size, colouration and a non-sexual behaviour. Under a typical daily light regime, male guppies displayed mostly in the first hour of observation. Extending the duration of dawn-like lighting, however, resulted in an extended period of high display, demonstrating that light intensity per se is an important cue for this behaviour. These findings mirror those obtained for Trinidadian populations, suggesting that male courtship timing is likely shaped by broad, potentially generalizable features of guppy ecology. The effect of acclimation to captive conditions on male behaviour is also discussed. Whereas the temporal pattern of display appeared consistent, individuals varied in their daily display frequency, and this was correlated with variation in colour phenotype and a measure of non-sexual risk acceptance behaviour. Such relationships pose promising avenues for integrating behavioural and sensory ecology with contemporary work on behavioural syndromes and animal personality. (shrink)

The ‘new school system’ described in the Schools White Paper (DfE, ) presents religious organisations with two interesting opportunities. The first is an opportunity to play a significantly enhanced role in the management of faith-based schools. The second is an opportunity to rethink quite radically the content of their curricula. In this article I advance a proposal for the consideration of religious organisations: that they take up the opportunity to develop innovative, religiously distinctive curricula whilst eschewing the activity of (...) confessional religious education. I show how non-confessional, faith-based curricula are possible and offer some suggestions about what they might include. (shrink)

Stunned by the implications of Colagè's analysis of the cultural activation of the brain's Visual Word Form Area and the potential role of cultural neural reuse in the evolution of biology and culture, the authors build on his work in proposing a context for the first rudimentary hominin moral systems. They cross-reference six domains: neuroscience on sleep, creativity, plasticity, and the Left Hemisphere Interpreter; palaeobiology; cognitive science; philosophy; traditional archaeology; and cognitive archaeology's theories on sleep changes in Homo erectus and (...) consequences for later humans. The authors hypothesize that the human genome, when analyzed with findings from neuroscience and cognitive science, will confirm the evolutionary timing of an internal running monologue and other neural components that constitute moral decision making. The authors rely on practical modern philosophers to identify continuities with earlier primates, and one major discontinuity—some bright white moral line that may have been crossed more than once during the long and successful tenure of Homo erectus on Earth. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Whoa! JOHN SHOPTAW ONE A young man with gold hair in a coal-black robe and slippers was off to confront the Sun. But as he paced the hotel corridors, Ray could feel his step losing its jaunt. At this rate, he’d make it to nowhere in nothing flat. Just then, he noticed his old wall map thumbtacked over some double doors. How’d his Boys’ Life get out here? He (...) looked it over, the big fat world, cut open and stretched flat, like an elephant hide. The properties were green, purple and red, and the waters whitish blue. The Mercator-projected bottom was jagged with ice. The whole place was crawling with letters, like ants on a cake. The best part was the creatures: a long-armed squid suctioning a whale, sea lions sunning themselves. No. Seals. He bunched his brows. No. Hills. And game big as states, as nations: hippos in Africa’s watering holes, a beauty of a cheetah, its sights trained. Untacking and folding the map, Ray tucked it into his pocket and slid open the doors. He found himself in a dim cavern facing a motionless escalator. Its stairs were gold-plated, its balustrades brushed aluminum and its handrails hand-rubbed ostrich skin. He could see no end of stairs. It must be arion 27.1 spring/summer 2019 one unbroken flight to the Sun’s penthouse. But where was the down escalator? Beats him. He planted his slippers and clasped the rails. With a little lurch the escalator began its quickening glide. Now this was first-class. No huffing required. Simply the assumption of an attitude. Up ahead, the horizon gleamed ivory. 2 whoa! TWO The stairway teeth clamped shut and Ray was thrown into a hard glare. Sunblock and goggles— they’ll let you look into things—on your right, came a voice positively sunny. Ray slathered and goggled himself, and beheld by a high stone robed in emerald moss a trim figure in a sea-snail-purple sweatsuit and a broad-brimmed straw hat puttering about a humid sundial of wide-waking annuals and perennials— snowdrops, crocuses, daisies and daylilies, rice in flower and maize in silk, woozy jasmine and heady grapevines, a temperamental winter daphne, and tall in the motley midst the polar gnomon, an Indian turnsole or heliotrope, sweeping its shaft of shadow from one to the next minute marigold dot as the ambling photosynthesizer passed the fragrant hours of the zodiac. Batting away hummingbirds and honeybees, Ray waded through the flower bed toward Sol. Am I your heir? Can I have what I want? Sure, kid, name it. Ray glanced toward the honey-scented manure. A joyride? Sol sighed. It’s your funeral. Taking his time, he led Ray out to the dayport. What a letdown! Ray’d expected a futuristic heliumpowered sports coupe, or at least a souped-up solar Mustang. Not this gold-rimmed, pyrite-axled backward half-bucket with footpads! John Shoptaw 3 Dawn, meanwhile, with her practiced blush arched her horizon, and her pomegranate interiors yawned wide. The stars dispersed. Venus, her shell-blue and egg-white gauzes aswirl, gave Dawn a last long look above her handmirror’s crescent rim. Sol was watching moonshine evanesce from his glowing barndoors, which cracked in a spewing welding arc and then opened wide to reveal a dozen prompt and close-cropped Hours, coaxing a team of four mammoth pegasi yoked neck and neck and neck and neck, stoked with thick ambrosial plasma and snorting flame. As the nymphs hitched the tack to the chariot pole, the Sun, shaking his head, untied his flaring sunhat and knotted it under Ray’s chin. Lay off the whip and draw rein with a firm hand. They’ll fly by themselves with no help from you. But they’ll answer to Clover, Crocus, Peony, Sage. Steer clear of the straightaway. Bank the rig into a circumbendibus. But don’t, whatever you do... But Ray’s attention had drifted. The rampant quadrupeds hooved trails of sparks down the dayport door, their heavy fog blankets slid off, and they shook out their shoulder-wings. A pliant breeze sprang up from the East... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Invention of Art History in Ancient Greece: Religion, Society, and Artistic RationalisationJohn C. McEnroeJeremy Tanner. The Invention of Art History in Ancient Greece: Religion, Society, and Artistic Rationalisation. Cambridge Classical Studies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. xvi + 331 pp. 62 black-and-white ills. Cloth, $99.In his introductory chapter, Jeremy Tanner quotes J. J. Winckelmann's eighteenth-century description of the Apollo Belvedere: "Among all the works of antiquity (...) which have escaped destruction, the statue of Apollo is the highest ideal of art... In the presence of this miracle of art, I forget all else, and I myself take a lofty position for the purpose of looking on it in a worthy manner" (6). Tanner makes it clear that Winckelmann, widely regarded as the founder of modern art history, was not simply recording a personal reaction. Instead, Winckelmann's notion of artworks as autonomous objects of aesthetic experience was deeply rooted in the transformation of the basic institutions of art during [End Page 423] the Enlightenment. These included changes in patronage and production, and the introduction of the new philosophy of aesthetics. The new conception of art as a form of individual expression was tied not only to the notion of personal liberty but also to the growing obsession with national identities. Winckelmann's rapturous response to the Apollo Belvedere is understandable only as a part of this broader set of social and intellectual currents.The kinds of art history that Tanner is concerned with in this book are quite distinct from Winckelmann's and belonged to profoundly different cultural networks. Tanner lays out three goals for the book: first, to analyze art as a form of material culture that was both shaped by society and, in turn, helped to shape society; second, to develop an analytic framework for comparing classical and modern art history without conflating the two; third, to move art history to the explanatory level, exploring not only how classical art developed over the long term, but why. Tanner's approach is sociological, drawing especially on the work of the once influential American sociologist, Talcott Parsons (1902–1979) and the semiotics of Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914). As a result, Tanner shifts from the traditional focus on artists to the interaction of artists, patrons, and viewers.In chapter 2 ("Rethinking the Greek Revolution," 31–96) Tanner addresses one of the central problems in art history, the apparently sudden transformation from abstraction to naturalism in Greek art in the beginning of the fifth century B.C.E., famously described by E. H. Gombrich as "the Greek Revolution." Why, after generations of continuity within the Archaic style, did Greek artists, alone among the artists working in the broader Middle Eastern tradition, develop the naturalistic style of art represented in, for example, Polykeitos's Doryphoros? For Gombrich, the "Greek Revolution" was fundamentally a matter of artists breaking from ingrained patterns and attempting, as individuals, to match the appearance of their statues with the natural world. Other writers, including several contributors to Diana Buitron-Oliver, ed., The Greek Miracle: Classical Sculpture from the Dawn of Democracy (Washington, D.C., 1992), have described the change in terms even more deeply grounded in Winckelmann: the revolution in style was a product of the birth of individuality and personal freedom that accompanied the birth of democracy in classical Greece.Tanner is specifically concerned with what the "Greek Revolution" meant for cult statues. While he rejects the simplistic equation democracy = naturalism as an explanatory device, Tanner nevertheless holds that political changes, marked by the Kleisthenic reforms, had profound effects on both the makers and the viewers of art. Through most of the sixth century B.C.E., the aristocracy was in firm control of religious art. Through the forms of the kouros and kore, aristocrats merged their identities with those of the gods. Through their sponsorship and control of the sanctuaries, they controlled the access ordinary viewers had to images of the sacred. While the immediate effects of the Kleisthenic reforms may have been more complex than Tanner implies, over the course of a generation the authority of the traditional aristocracy declined, and the sponsorship of cult images was... (shrink)

What does it mean to see someone as human, as a member of humankind? What kind of call for justice is it to demand that a group be seen as human beings? This article explores a fundamental kind of injustice: one of perception and how we respond to our perceptions. Drawing on Cavell, Wittgenstein and Rancière, we elucidate “soul blindness” as a distinct and basic form of injustice. Rancière’s police orders and Cavell’s soul blindness are mutually constitutive; the undoing of (...) police orders entails a politics of soul dawning. Soul dawning entails acknowledging the humanity of others without erasing difference. In the concluding section, we consider white obliviousness to the Black Lives Matters (BLM) movement as a case of soul blindness. Part of the political import of BLM is its capacity to illustrate how practices of soul blindness in the United States constitute whiteness in a racialized police order. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:DAVID HUME AND EIGHTEENTH CENTURY MONETARY THOUGHT: A CRITICAL COMMENT ON RECENT VIEWS To the argument that it makes little difference what precise roles were played by various actors in a great movement, and that the busy modern reader cannot be bothered to go behind the scenes of popular successes, the answer is simple: it is on the whole better to call men and events by their right names; (...) it is on the whole wiser not to make false diagrams of the way things happen. What, after all, are we so busy about? Jacques Barzun, Darwin, Marx, Wagner The praise that has been bestowed upon David Hume's monetary thought in recent years would suggest that however little attention is paid to the history of economic thought otherwise, no one is averse to a long and respectable lineage.1 However, it is just when an individual is singled out and focused upon that the most misleading ideas can arise; furthermore, when the scholars who provide this attention are renowned authorities in specialized fields, their views receive very widespread circulation. It would not be easy to find a contemporary student of the eighteenth century who would assert that the mercantilists believed real wealth to consist of gold and silver, yet the late Harry Johnson made just such an assertion not very long ago, and the number of economists who read Harry Johnson must far outnumber those who read eighteenthcentury scholars.2 By the same token, the liberal praise bestowed upon those credited with having "demolished" mercantilism, such as David Hume, requires careful scrutiny. A recent article by Dietrich Fausten3 has shown how different Hume's analysis 157 actually was from modern monetarism, despite the many attempts to designate Hume the father of monetarist doctrines, and this critical approach can be taken farther. Before turning to an examination of Hume's position, it may be worthwhile to make a methodological point. There are those who consider delving into indebtedness and priorities "antiquarian" (but not if their own contributions are in question!). After all, they claim, Hume's views are there in black and white, he wrote elegantly and his philosophical merits are widely admired; does it really matter if Hume did not acknowledge his sources, that he was somewhat inconsistent, or that he caricatured his opponents? Surely some compassion is appropriate for someone who wrote at the very dawn of "economic science." This is to miss the point of such historical scrutiny altogether. If compassion were required, why should it be bestowed upon Hume, rather than on such predecessors as Gervaise, Cantillon or Vanderlint? Scholars employ certain critical standards in judging published work; let us employ these standards to Hume and if sympathy be required, let it follow and not precede the analysis. II The following passage is certainly one of the most frequently quoted in the history of economics but its importance for our argument makes repetition necessary. Suppose, that all the money of Great Britain were multiplied fivefold in a night, must not the contrary effect follow? Must not all labour and commodities rise to such an exorbitant height, that no neighbouring nations could afford to buy from us; while 158 their commodities, on the other hand, became comparatively so cheap, that, in spite of all the laws which could be formed, they would be run in upon us, and our money flow out; till we fall to a level with foreigners, and lose that great superiority of riches, which had laid us under such disadvantages?4 Two points should be noted about the above. First, Hume assumes a sudden, large inflow of money to make his point. This is a very different thing from the small [relative to the money stock] and steady inflow advocated by the so-called mercantilists. Secondly, Hume assumes that this sudden inflow is met by instantaneous adjustment in prices. Otherwise, if the change in, say, wages attracts more labour, there is no reason why the increased money supply could not lead to a greater output and thus avoid inflation. International labour mobility was a standard feature of mercantilist thought and so it will be seen that Hume's "new" result is obtained by his... (shrink)

continent. 1.3 (2011): 201-207. “Poetry is experience, linked to a vital approach, to a movement which is accomplished in the serious, purposeful course of life. In order to write a single line, one must have exhausted life.” —Maurice Blanchot (1982, 89) Nikos Karouzos had a communist teacher for a father and an orthodox priest for a grandfather. From his four years up to his high school graduation he was incessantly educated, reading the entire private library of his granddad, comprising mainly (...) the Orthodox Church Fathers and the ancient classics. Later on in his life he sold the library for money, only to buy a little more time before he went broke again: “I carry sorrow like a cage/ I got no birds/ as I come back from her hair/ I see the profit emptied/ cool from terror.” (1993, Ι, 101) Nowadays—and ridiculously recently—we are more than apt to speak of a certain insouciance pertaining to the Greek form of expenditure: expenditure without any type of investment, sometimes not (even) symbolic. In the vaults of the European unconscious, this imprudent stance still conjures a “capital punishment” in the form of de-capitation, reflecting back the fear of excess and the terror of its consequences.1 Thus the Greek way of living is very close to what a stranger could have termed as “the Greek way of dying.” Yet, what is not often understood is that the Greek esprit , the same one that invented the maxim μηδ?ν ?γαν (“nothing in excess”), does not experience death solely as an imminent fear of bankruptcy. For it miraculously combines its unconditional acceptance with the promise of a resurrection that is always there in the scents of Spring, from Dionysus to the orthodox Christ: “Everyone resurrects himself through dying [….] Resurrection is the switching of mortalities.” (2002, 94) Hence, if an entire library was imprudently traded for a plate with seven olives, a sliced tomato and some fresh goat cheese, let us not be fooled: this is not the meal of the pauper, but that of “an aristocrat from God” (1993, II, 491) feeding his eloquent loudmouth, ridiculously cut open in an otherwise rock-solid caput . *** To speak of the Greek experience is to speak about a half-dead language that still utters in life what is seemingly excluded from it and thus forbidden to be talked about: death. Death as anything that is out of this world, as something that will never return . Still, along with an experience of death that recently waned as a worn-out academic fashion, the Greek experience is dead too. Nearly 2300 years of written words separating Homer from the fall of Byzantium equal 500 books on a library traded for money: “I am with the killed. Hence my deepest solitude. I do not feel this tremendous macho society, beyond from the fact that it is a ruthlessly consuming one. It is me who pays all the time .” (2002, 57) Let us do the math and see how much this dealing with the Greek experience is costing the poet and how much dealing with the Greek experience might cost us today. *** “I do not guarantee a single word.” (Karouzos, 1993, II, 454) Through its various dialects and forms, the Greek language speaks through an incessant historical dissemination. Anyone who is aware of this terrifying polymorphy and still calls himself a poet, must stand against a white sheet of paper, pen-in-hand, with a very particular duty: to be as fully inconsistent as possible. In the formally ironic uniqueness of the poem, the poet functions as “a band-aid for lesser and greater antinomies.” (1993, I, 251) Of course these antinomies are not exhausted in language—they are historical, political and, alas, existential. Yet, beyond appearances , it is language that ruthlessly encodes them through history, submitting the poet to the temptation of placing them one next to the other on a single white sheet. The closer their neighboring, the greater the scattering of the writer in the ironic uniqueness of the paper. In a work where poetic license is described as a “freedom-impasse” (2002, 51), this task is undertaken in full conscience of its personal consequences: “what I am interested in is to escape my individuality (envisioning the non-ego) […] Nevertheless, my dissociations never achieve duration.” (2002, 74-75) Hence, though poetry is the “deserted direction of will,” (1998, 62) the stance of the poet is not that of a Nietzschean “great man.”2 Whereas drunkenness provides a thread between the poem and the excess it both presupposes and infuses (“Poetry always enlarges. ‘Drunkenness’ is nothing more than that,” (2002, 85)), whereas language flashes in loudmouth spurts of déraison (“When I am alone I do something else. I utter words. For example, while having my ouzo and listening to music I am most likely capable of randomly shouting ‘Electricity!’” (2002, 138)), the poet never gives in to the double affirmation that would eventually risk the “element of pleasure in discourse.” (2002, 80)” It is exactly because the gap of the antinomies is so vast that poetry is not meant to be written with a hammer. Neither does writing consist in a reevaluation of those elements. In short, poetry is not an affirmation of difference, but the surprising beauty of chiming antinomies. We might never transcend them, but it is up to us to put them together. Yet again, this voisinage is not to be identified with the necessity of chance as an eternal return.4 On the contrary it is a return from that very return : Let us treat Yes as a No to No and No as a Yes […] And let us not forget that this pissed affirmation crumbled down Nietzsche’s intellect in the dark paths of this world. (2002, 88) This return from the “vicious circle” should in no way be taken as a form of artistic prudence. Rather it can be seen as a dribble of demonic inconsistency as Dionysus transforms himself into a Christ that is in turn de-theologized: “Who can forbid that? Every man is capable of his own theology, nothing can stop him.” (2002, 73-74) This is a turn towards an existential vision of the world, historically coinciding with a particular political defeat of the Left, to which the poet devoted all his life: after the defeat of the popular front I raised the question “why do we exist?” while others were asking “why we failed.” (2002, 57)5 But most of all it is a return to poetry that exceeds the existential question itself, going beyond the issue of faith. Poetry comes in as a question of return after a defeat that is confessed in full profanity. Though it accepts the necessity of the defeat, it does not affirm it. Though it negates it, the negation is not in the name of a promise to be delivered in the kingdom of heavens. Following a historical and existential defeat, poetry is born post mortem . It signals a return to Christ as “groundless religiousness in the surprise of the real as such” (2002, 72) which is at once a return to the refuge of childhood. It is not a question of endurance towards an eternal return. Rather it is a question on the possibility of an existential return. Returning in a world as someone who cannot enjoy any returns exactly because he is averse to guarantees. A return without returns. *** PHOTOCOPY OF HAPPINESS When I was young I used to pin down cicadas and step on ant nests. I used to stand there silent for hours. With threads I decapitated bees. Now I am a dead man breathing. (Karouzos, 1993, II, 336.) The return to the “paradise of childhood” (2002, 68) constitutes the devouring refuge of its own memory when defeat becomes the synonym of adulthood. The political struggles of a young communist in a country torn up by a civil war right after World War II fraught with incarcerations and exiles. Historically they resulted in the defeat of the communist movement in Greece and opened up a long turbulent road that would peak in the dictatorship of 1967. Existentially they led to a series of disillusionments: mental breakdown, divorce, abandonment of studies in law school. To the question “why do we exist” the answer was poetry. Still this exposé should not be read as a sweeping chronography of a man. For it actually happens to coincide with the historical fate of a nation that after its modern constitution never stopped dreaming of the glories of its past youth, in a present that was (and is) sweepingly disappointing. But isn’t this return to youth finally a way of compensating for a loss of youth that necessarily results in a losing adulthood? Will Greeks, the eternal children of Plato and Nietzsche, ever learn? How to return without dying, how to remember without wasting time? WE ARE IN THE OPEN MEANING Living the coldest mauve night right across Parthenon I went to take a piss on some foliage and I was enjoying the foliage as it was steaming. (Karouzos, 1993, II, 340) Beyond the historical tragedies of modern Greece and away from any personal disappointments, the relation that this land holds with language and history is mediated through the Greek light—whose omnipresence is the very condition of its transcendence. All historical contradictions from Dionysus to Christ took place under this light; all those disseminated dialects were spoken beneath its warmth. To paraphrase Lévinas,6 light is both the condition of the world and of our withdrawal from it—a withdrawal towards the invisibility of God, of the dead, of meta-physics, resulting from the temptation that all is still here, behind this light the visibility of which they once evaded: “birds, the allurement of God.” (1993, I, 17) Under that luminous sky, if Greeks can do anything at all, it is to envision a return that will never come. All they can do is write poetry—which is doing nothing; other than lending an ear to a disseminated language whispering a unity that cannot be promised, as an adulthood in defeat is ready to recognize. Trying “to trap the invisible in visibility” (1993, II, 483) they forget that they have grown up and one day they die—with the promise of return. Hence an additional meaning must be given to this return to childhood. It does not signal salvation but rather its promise. To the ears of an aged continent it means that the return to/of poetry is a losing game, a return without returns. “Europe, Europe… you are nothing more than the continuation of Barabbas.” (1993, I, 295) *** “Life is not there to verify theories.”7 The records show that Karouzos was finally given a second-class pension from the Greek government, at the time when he was being recognized by the literary press as one of Greece’s major contemporary poets. Being neither a bourgeois nor a nobelist, he proclaimed himself to be an anarcho-communist, unconditionally faithful to the utopia of a classless society. He also drank, heavily. “Capitalism made an animal out of man/ Marxism made an animal out of truth/ Shut up.” (1993, II, 369) Perhaps one of the most scandalous divides of our times has been the one between the living and the dead, the latent prohibition that the living should not be concerned with the dead based on the mere impossibility of the dead to be concerned with the living in the first place. What adds to this scandal is that this divide abuses anything that cannot return to us by subsuming it under the same futility. Hence death is no longer “loss” in the usual sense. It no more refers to the things we lost but to our “loss” (of time, money and well-being) as we insist to dwell on them. Death is a waste —of time. It is this waste that we find in the insouciance of Greek expenditure; the waste in dealing with a language that most of its historical part is no longer spoken (a dead language); the waste in translating a poet who is ex definitio untranslatable; the waste of his vision, his money, his life. The waste of dealing with anything that cannot return and that cannot bring in any returns . But it is also the waste of life that poetry itself presupposes, the waste of dealing with invisibility, with anything that is out of this world and thus invokes the fear of death that is in turn—and surprisingly— nowhere to be found. Instead of death, what is there, beyond the light, is the being without us (to recall the Lévinasian il y a ), the mumble of our own nothingness which constitutes the price to be paid for writing poetry under an evergreek light. To understand this to-and-fro, is to realize that poetry is something out of this world that nevertheless takes place in this world, by virtue of this world. But to ridiculously equate this to-and-fro with death as non-existence, is to exile poetry along with its own possibility from this same old world: I do not believe that poetry will ever disappear from this world. […] But I am also sure that it does not have many chances of playing, as you say, a redemptive role in our vertiginous technological future. Without being endangered as a creative need, it will be placed on the side of history. (2002, 32) It is mainly there that we would like to locate the meaning of Nikos Karouzos’s poetry today. If we are willing to include the Greek original it is because we consider that it will be both a waste of time for us to do so (since most of you cannot read Greek) and because it might induce you to the even larger waste of learning it. We would additionally be glad if this small introduction served as an equally wasteful, academically useless piece of reading, gesturing towards a taboo of investing in anything Greek—that is in anything dead among the living, in anything that will never come back and maybe was never here in the first place. This is the only way to reserve for ourselves the possibility of poetry and preserve the light of its promise. “To return: that is the miracle.” (1993, I, 17) Athens, Greece July 10, 2011 NOTES 1 “ Capitale (a Late Latin word based on caput “head”) emerged in the twelfth to thirteenth centuries in the sense of funds, stock of merchandise, sum of money or money carrying interest.[…] The word and the reality it stood for appear in the sermons of St. Bernardino of Siena (1380-1444) ‘… quamdam seminalem rationem lucrosi quam communiter capitale vocamus ’, ‘that prolific cause of wealth that we commonly call capital’” (Braudel, 1992, 232-233). 2 “A great man – a man whom nature has constructed and invented in the grand style – what is he? First : there is a long logic in all of his activity, hard to survey because of its length, and consequently misleading; he has the ability to extend his will across great stretches of his life and to despise and reject everything petty about him, including even the fairest, ‘divinest’ things in the world.” (Nietzsche, 1968, 505, §962) 3 Cf. Deleuze, 1986, 186-9. 4 “Return is the being of becoming, the unity of multiplicity, the necessity of chance: the being of difference as such or the eternal return.” (Deleuze, 189)5 In this 1982 interview Karouzos refers to the defeat of the communist movement in Greece after the civil war of 1946-1949 between the Governmental Army and the Democratic Army of Greece, the military division of the Greek communist party. Karouzos’s father was a member of the communist National Liberation front (EAM) members of which formed the mainl resistance movement (ELAS) in Greece during WWII. The poet was a member of the United Panhellenic Organization of Youth (EPON), which was a youth division of EAM. After the end of the war, ELAS was called to disarmament in view of the formation of a National Army. The members of EAM resigned from the government of national unity and a series of protests led to a 3 year civil war between ELAS and the Government Army. After the defeat of ELAS the Communist party was outlawed and many communists were exiled in deserted Greek islands. Karouzos, who took action in the Greek resistance and was active during the Greek civil war, was exiled in Icaria on 1947 and in Makronisos on 1953 where he was called two years earlier to do his military service. 6 “Existence in the world qua light, which makes desire possible, is then, in the midst of being, the possibility of detaching oneself from being. To enter into being is to link up with objects; it is in effect a bond that is already tainted with nullity. It is already to escape anonymity. In this world where everything seems to affirm our solidarity with the totality of existence, where we are caught up in the gears of a universal mechanism, our first feeling, our ineradicable illusion, is a feeling or illusion of freedom. To be in the world is this hesitation, this interval in existing, which we have seen in the analyses of fatigue and the present.” (Lévinas, 1988,43-4) 7from a TV interview. THE POETRY OF NIKOS KAROUZOS From Redwriter [ Ερυθρογρ?φος ], in Collected Works, Vol . II, Athens: Ikaros. 1993, 463-4. [Athens: Apopeira, 1990, 9-10.] JESUS ANTI-OEDIPUS* Why were we once saving till the fifth day the Paschal lamb? The scriptures say: with this victim’s meat we ought to cleanse all of our senses. To give life to the whitest wave miraculous odors in the extension of the chest. Ideals to death. For us to witness the illustrious dawns of Absinthe and for the soul to be a deeply carved ornament on the fore we named will. Then many deer running amidst the evergreen growth with watery hymns, then, the unintended angels descending with heights spiraling in their momentum offer themselves to the luminous Adventure. Whence the need for speech and our sufferings covered with flags like the glorified dead. An incorporeal finger pointing at the flamboyant and fragrant holocausts within the tired horizons and the exhausted breadths with joys of the mistletoe on fire and shivering all of the green-leaved love. Something would have chirped again had we not driven it away— maybe the ewe’s grass. Something would have called us to the eternal resurrection— maybe the grace of spring. But now our heart is fiercely blinded, withdrawn to the appearances of Hades. Silence and ice incessantly cover the Infant Spirit in thatched times. While the cherry trees are dreaming faintly glowing in absolute darkness there’s nothing the Babylonians can contemplate in labs with automatic colored lights. How to rejoice now in the fifth day of the lamb? We have forked the stars. We’ve gradually become supposedly sublime with plucked chimeras in our hands. Avenged relentlessly by science. *Though the poem appears in a 1990 collection, it was actually written in 1968. Hence the reader must be aware in not associating Karouzos’ Anti-Oedipus with the famous 1972 work of Deleuze and Guattari, given that the former precedes the latter. ΙΗΣΟΥΣ ΑΝΤΙ-ΟΙΔΙΠΟΥΣ Γιατ? κρατο?σαμε κ?ποτε ?ς την π?μπτη μ?ρα το πασχαλιν? πρ?βατο; Τα κε?μενα λ?νε: μ’ αυτο? του θ?ματος το κρ?ας ?πρεπε να καθαρ?σουμε ?λες τις αισθ?σεις. Για να δ?σουμε κ?μα στη ζω? λευκ?τατο θαυμ?σιες ευωδι?ς στην ?κταση του στ?θους. Ιδανικ? στο χ?ρο. Για να βλ?πουμε τα λαμπρ? χαρ?ματα του ?ψινθου και να ’ναι η ψυχ? στ?λισμα βαθυχ?ρακτο της πλ?ρης που την ε?παμε θ?ληση. Τ?τε πολλ?ς δορκ?δες τρ?χοντας αν?μεσα στην καταπρ?σινη φ?ση με τους υδ?τινους ?μνους, τ?τε, κατεβα?νοντας οι αθ?λητοι ?γγελοι με κυλινδο?μενο το ?ψος στην ορμ? τους χαρ?ζονται της αστραφτερ?ς Περιπ?τειας. ?θεν η μιλι? γι’ αυτ? χρει?ζεται και τα δειν? σκεπ?ζονται ωσ?ν τους τιμημ?νους νεκρο?ς με σημα?ες. Ασ?ματο δ?χτυλο δε?χνει τα φλογ?δη και μοσχοβ?λα ολοκαυτ?ματα στους κουρασμ?νους ορ?ζοντες στα εξουθενωμ?να πλ?τη καθ?ς αν?βουν οι χαρ?ς του νερα?δ?ξυλου και τρ?μει ολ?κληρη η πρασιν?φυλλη αγ?πη. Κ?τι θα κελαηδο?σε π?λι αν δεν το δι?χναμε— μπορε? της προβατ?νας το χορτ?ρι. Κ?τι θα μας καλο?σε στην απ?ραντη αν?σταση— μπορε? του ?αρος η χ?ρη. Μα η καρδι? μας ?γρια τυφλ?θηκε π?ρασε στα φαιν?μενα του ?δη. Σιγ? και π?γος αδι?κοπα σκεπ?ζει στους αχυρ?νιους καιρο?ς το Ν?πιο Πνε?μα. Την ?ρα που ονειρε?ονται οι βυσσινι?ς και λ?μπουν αμυδρ? μεσ’ στο απλ?τατο σκοτ?δι τ?ποτα δε στοχ?ζονται οι βαβυλ?νιοι στα εργαστ?ρια με τ’ αυτ?ματα χρωματιστ? φ?τα. Π?ς να χαρο?με πια την π?μπτη μ?ρα του προβ?του; Φουρκ?σαμε τ’ αστ?ρια. Γ?ναμε σιγ?-σιγ? δ?θεν υπ?ροχοι με μαδημ?νες χ?μαιρες στα χ?ρια. Μας ν?μεται σκληρ? η επιστ?μη. From: Redwriter [Ερυθρογρ?φος], in Collected Works, Vol. II, Athens: Ikaros. 1993, 472. [Athens: Apopeira, 1990, 18.] DIALECTΙCS OF SPRING Christ the straight angle; Christ the Pythagorean theorem. Christ the infinitesimal calculus from above the blessed Sets Christ. Christ the tessellation of massive particles Christ the zero mass. Hence we spray numbers and fields of lust. We are carabineers of diseased logic plus something— Observed means observer and Hekate The darkness luminous and light in the dark Astarte banqueters demons from today. ΔΙΑΛΕΚΤΙΚΗ ΤΟΥ ΕΑΡΟΣ Χριστ?ς η ορθ? γων?α· Χριστ?ς το πυθαγ?ριο θε?ρημα. Χριστ?ς ο απειροστικ?ς λογισμ?ς ?νωθεν ?λβια Χριστ?ς τα Σ?νολα. Χριστ?ς η ψηφιδογραφ?α στα μαζικ? σωμ?τια Χριστ?ς η μ?ζα μηδ?ν. ?ρα ψεκ?ζουμε αριθμο?ς και πεδ?α λαγνε?ας. Ε?μαστε τυφεκιοφ?ροι νοσο?σης λογικ?ς και κ?τι-- παρατηρο?μενο σημα?νει παρατηρητ?ς και Εκ?τη σκ?τος το π?μφωτο και φως εν τ? σκοτ?? η Αστ?ρτη συνδαιτημ?νες δα?μονες απ’ ?ρτι. From: Redwriter [Ερυθρογρ?φος], Athens: Apopeira, 1990, 18. [1993, II, 472]. CREDO (as we are used to say in Latin) Α I believe in one Poet expelled from heavens / fugitive from the god and vagabond, Empedocles / and here on earth / exile on the earth etc. of Baudelaire /. Β I believe in one Computer inside thunder and through matter. Γ Suffering undefiled / substantive / the Poet uplifts himself slow-burning suicidal implying lengthy sleeps. Δ Cutting down on prospective mistakes. Ε Of all things visible and invisible officiating the onion-peelings. Ζ The Poet has nothing / see the departed /. Η I believe in one Poet that says: madness I enjoy; he ridicules existence; let me light up from my mana. Θ Syntax he doesn’t care about when musicality commands him. Along with still more licenses, and Ts are played according to the concept sound anywhere. E.g. the winters here, he winters there; it will not come—I will not rest, etc. etc. Ι The Poet exercises thought until it’s stripped down. Κ And if he’s Greek he must always study the fineness of Attica, in light, mountains, fields and sea. For this fineness teaches language. Λ And if he’s deeply destined the Poet expresses the unexplainable of the explained; he happens to be a rightful heir to the scientist and his predecessor. Μ On the froth he does not last; the Poet blusters at the bottom of the pot. Ν Flamebred and never redeemed. Ξ The Poet must sometimes say: what a consumption of presence — be a bit lonely for a change! Ο The Poet is twilit. Π He is susceptible of deaths and resurrections. Ρ He looks from the corner of his eye and exists in a glance. Σ He follows behind the mother. Τ Eveningless when it comes to age. Υ I believe in one Poet who says: let the purities coincide. Until the Corinth of the Universe or even further. Φ In a higher despair. Χ In a brighter quintessence. Ψ In one sensation that lifts off. Ω Forgiving everyone. CREDO (ως ε?θισται να λ?με λατινιστ?) Α Πιστε?ω εις ?να Ποιητ?ν εκτ?ς ουρανο? / φυγ?ς θε?θεν και αλ?της, Εμπεδοκλ?ς / και επ? της γης / εξ?ριστος π?νω στη γη κ.λπ. του Βωδελα?ρου /. Β Πιστε?ω εις ?να Υπολογιστ?ν εντ?ς κεραυνο? και δια της ?λης. Γ Υποφ?ροντας ?χραντα / ουσιαστικ?ν / ο Ποιητ?ς ανατε?νεται βραδυφλεγ?ς αυτ?χειρας εξυπακο?οντας πολ?ωρους ?πνους. Δ Τα υποψ?φια λ?θη λιγοστε?οντας. Ε Ορατ?ν τε π?ντων και αορ?των ιερουργ?ντας την αποκρομμ?ωση. Ζ Ο Ποιτ?ς ?χει τ?ποτα / βλ?πε τους αναχωρ?σαντες /. Η Πιστε?ω εις ?να Ποιητ?ν που λ?ει: η τρ?λα μ’ αρ?σει· γελοιοποιε? την ?παρξη· ας αν?ψω απ’ τη μ?να μου. Θ Συνταχτικ? δεν το γνοι?ζεται στην προσταγ? της μουσικ?τητας. Μαζ? και μ’ ?λλες ακ?μη λευτερι?ς, και τα νυ πα?ζονται κατ? την ?ννοια ?χος οπουδ?ποτε. Π.χ. τον χειμ?να εδ?, το χειμ?να εκε?· δε θ? ’ρθει – δεν θα καταλαγι?σουμε, κ. λπ. κ.λπ. Ι Ο Ποιητ?ς γυμν?ζει τη σκ?ψη σε απογ?μνωση. Κ Κι αν ε?ναι ?λληνας οφε?λει να σπουδ?ζει π?ντοτε της Αττικ?ς τη λεπτ?τητα, σε φως, βουν?, χωρ?φια και θ?λασσα. Διδ?σκει γλ?σσα η λεπτ?τητα το?τη. Λ Κι αν ε?ναι βαθι? πεπρωμ?νος ο Ποιητ?ς εκφρ?ζει το ανεξ?γητο του εξηγητο?· τυγχ?νει ν?μιμος δι?δοχος του επιστ?μονα και προκ?τοχ?ς του. Μ Στον αφρ? δεν ?χει δι?ρκεια· στο πατοκ?ζανο μα?νεται ο Ποιητ?ς. Ν Φλογοδ?αιτος και ποτ? ξελυτρωμ?νος. Ξ Ο Ποιητ?ς κ?ποτε πρ?πει να λ?ει: μεγ?λη καταν?λωση παρουσ?ας – γενε?τε και λ?γο μοναξι?ρηδες! Ο Ο Ποιητ?ς ε?ναι αμφ?φλοξ. Π Επιδ?χεται θαν?τους και αναστ?σεις. Ρ Ακροθωρ?ζει και υπ?ρχει σε ξαφνοκο?ταγμα. Σ Ε?ναι ουραγ?ς της μητ?ρας. Τ Αν?σπερος απ? ηλικ?α. Υ Πιστε?ω εις ?να Ποιητ?ν που λ?ει: να συμπ?σουν οι αγν?τητες. Μ?χρι την Κ?ρινθο του Σ?μπαντος ? μακρ?τερα. Φ Σε αν?τερη απελπισ?α. Χ Σε φαειν?τερη πεμπτουσ?α. Ψ Σε μια α?σθηση που πτηνο?ται. Ω Συγχωρ?ντας τους π?ντες. From Large Sized Logic [ Λογικ? μεγ?λου σχ?ματος ], Athens: Erato, 1989, n.p. [1993, II, 521-3]. (shrink)

In this issue we include contributions from the individuals presiding at the panel All in a Jurnal's Work: A BABEL Wayzgoose, convened at the second Biennial Meeting of the BABEL Working Group. Sadly, the contributions of Daniel Remein, chief rogue at the Organism for Poetic Research as well as editor at Whiskey & Fox , were not able to appear in this version of the proceedings. From the program : 2ND BIENNUAL MEETING OF THE BABEL WORKING GROUP CONFERENCE “CRUISING IN (...) THE RUINS: THE QUESTION OF DISCIPLINARITY IN THE POST/MEDIEVAL UNIVERSITY” SEPTEMBER 21ST, 2012: SESSION 13 MCLEOD C.322, CURRY STUDENT CENTER NORTHEASTERN UNIVERSITY, BOSTON, MA. Traditionally, a wayzgoose was a celebration at the end of a printer’s year, a night off in the late fall before the work began of printing by candlelight. According to the OED, the Master Printer would make for the journeymen “a good Feast, and not only entertains them at his own House, but besides, gives them Money to spend at the Ale-house or Tavern at Night.” Following in this line, continent. proposes in its publication(s) a night out and a good Feast, away from the noxious fumes of the Academy and into a night of revelry which begins, but does not end, at the alehouse or Tavern. continent. proposes that the thinking of the Academy be freed to be thought elsewhere, in the alleys and doorways of the village and cities, encountered not in the strictly defined spaces of the classroom and blackboard (now white) but anticipated and found where thinking occurs. Historically, academic journals have served a different purpose than the Academy itself. Journals (from the Anglo-Fr. jurnal , "a day," from O.Fr. jornel , "day, time; day's work," hence the journalist as writer of the news of the day ) have served as privileged sites for the articulation and concretization of specific modes of knowledge and control (insemination of those ideas has been formalized in the classroom, in seminar). In contrast, the academic journal is post-partum and has been an old-boys club, an insider trading network in which truths are (re)circulated against themselves, forming a Maginot Line against whatever is new, or the distinctly challenging. All in a Jurnal’s Work will discuss (in part) the ramifications of cheap start-up publications that are challenging the traditional ensconced-in-ivory academic journals and their supporting infrastructures. The panel will be seeking a questioning (as a challenging) towards the discipline of knowledge production/fabrication (of truth[s]) and the event of the Academy (and its publications) as it has evolved and continues to (d)evolve. Issues to be discussed will revolve around the power of academic publishing and its origins, hierarchical versus horizontal academic modules (is there a place for the General Assembly in academia?) and the evolving idea of the Multiversity as a site(s) of a (BABELing) multivocality in the wake of the University of Disaster. STAGE NOTES AND/AS/OR TRACK CHANGES: INTRODUCTORY REMARKS AND MAGICAL THINKING ON PRINTING: AN ELECTION AND A PROVOCATION Isaac Linder “Of course most people don’t think of editing/publishing as theatre but as something boring or parasitical (vis-à-vis a ‘source’ text), a textual backwater populated by people with glasses. But I think publishing a book today is theatre, socially networked theatre…. Facebook and Flickr are our era’s administered and generic version of sixties happenings!” — Tan Lin 1 ELECTING A MASCOT: THE BARNACLE GOOSE After pitching the idea for this panel with the editorial help of my continental cohorts I became fascinated with the image of the goose—dead and roasted as it may be—and its relationship to the space of the printing press. For a long while after proposing this gathering I was seriously under the sway of delusions of grandeur, imagining that we might roast a goose (or goosefu) and, preparing a meal as one prepares a text for publication, feast in something approaching a warm and well-nourished revelry. I should note, by way of introduction, that a substantial part of my undergraduate experience involved learning to typeset and work as a devil, as typesetters mischievously call it, in a letterpress studio. This accounts in part for my fascination and helps to explain the fact that, when I began to leaf around in medieval beastiaries in lieu of being able to procure a goose, I was almost immediately struck by a fantastic monster that I hereby elect to be the mascot for our so-called para-academic practice(s) the relatively famed, but no less fabulous for it, barnacle goose. The barnacle goose is a creature that first makes its way into 12th century manuscripts with Giraldus Cambrensis in 1186. Phenomenologically speaking the monster is a tree, a tree which, when approached closer is seen to be birthing geese budding from the buds that hang like ripe fruit from its branches. As the story goes these trees were found over water; the fledgling geese, once wrested from their pods would take off in flight or fall to their watery death, where they would be transformed into driftwood. In retrospect we presume the barnacle goose was posited as a consequence of the fact that geese born in more northern regions, migrating to Ireland and western Europe at large, were never seen to give birth. And I should note that this is far from the only other animal posited to be born from trees at around this time, my other favorite being medieval accounts of Moroccan tree-climbing goats. 2 In particular I’ve thrown up the mascot of the barnacle goose and singled it out from the quires of its beatiaries because its thoroughly hybrid origins lead us to name two very real creatures we can find point to in abundance; discrete materialities of the world cobbled together in textual fancy: on the one hand, the modern day barnacle goose , a common species of goose and, on the other, goose barnacles , a particular type of crustacean with incredible feathery tendrils and—I can't help but mention—one of the largest body mass to penis size ratios of all of the animals in the kingdom. Why is this bit of genital trivia relevant? Because they’re all hermaphroditic and in rare cases have been found to reproduce just with themselves—to inseminate themselves and give birth to their kin. So I think it must be stressed, as a symbol for what we’re really here to talk about, it's not a boy’s club thing so much as a very queer thing and, I contend, para - in every perfect sense of the word... Alongside the natural world, a monstrous imaginary concatenation; Alongside the hulls of so many institutional structures, funding sources and resources, Serresian parasites in all manner of mutualist, symbiotic, or properly parasitic positions; migratory and adrift; The tree, center stage in the 21st century adaptation of Waiting for Godot that is unraveling in ateliers across the world, is a barnacle goose birthing a flurry of miscegenous texts beyond medium and genre. PROVOCATION 1: CHAOSMOSIS “Genre is obsolete.” — Ray Brassier 3 And so, here I was getting carried away in daydreams about this generative and genealogical symbol under which to think all of the diverse projects we are all involved in as architects of the dressed word, (well dressed, bespoke, mansy, butch, careless, or roguishly punk attired as those words may be), when it also dawned on me, mid-flight here from Denver, that we are, even in lieu of being able to roast geese together, very much so literalizing what was never just the metaphor of the wayzgoose—a tradition, as you know, celebrated to mark the crepuscular turn into fall—as we are poised here, tomorrow being the first official day of fall on our calendars in the US marking the seasonal change from at which point it will no longer be possible to print without the aid of candlelight. A beautiful thought, that tipped into magical thinking on account of a little quick math I was able to do to come to the conclusion that we can all be delighted to know that as we proceed into the autumn with our printing projects always ahead of us and still to be set, we will tonight be bathed not only by the artificial candlelight of our screens, but also in part by photons raining down on us at 186,282 miles per second—photons from an aspect of 9 cyg, a stereoscopic binary deep within Cygnus, the swan but not-so-distant-relative of the goose, with a distance of 572 Light years away; photons that are raining down on us, will rain down on us all winter, have been raining down on us all year, and which had their origin in the combustion cores at a center of 9 cyg 572 years ago, in 1440, the year which we point to today as the common year in which, as we all know, Gutenberg is said to have brought the movable type to the western world, inaugurating an era that stretches farther into the past and future than McLuhan could justify; the proliferation of so much ambient text; insurrectionary coups on (and re-crystallizations of) genre—perceived amidst so much ambient light—enveloping this campus, just now. So, with that thought, and perhaps a new mascot, Nico Jenkins... NOTES “ Writing as Metadata Container, An Interview with Tan Lin ,” Chris Alexander, Kristen Gallagher, Danny Snelson, Gordon Tapper, Tan Lin, Jacket 2. January 20, 2012. To explore Lin’s notion of ambient textuality, plagiarism, and parallel, cross­platform publication in the 21st century, also see Lin’s sampled novel, “ The Patio and the Index ,” Triple Canopy 14, October 24, 2011, as well as the Edit event, organized at the Kelly Writers House at the University of Pennsylvania, April, 2010 . For a fascinating and fecund exploration of medieval plant­animal hybrids in relation to media ecology, see Whitney Trettien, “ Becoming Plant: Magnifying a Microhistory of Media Circuits in Nehemiah Grew’s Anatomy of Plants (1682) .” postmedieval 3.1 (2012):97. See also the crowd­review version of the essay. “ Genre Is Obsolete .” Compléments de Multitudes . 28 (2007). (shrink)

The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of the conquest and looting of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of black-skins, signalised the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production.1"In the antiblack world there is but one race, and that race is black. Thus, to be racialized is to be pushed 'down,' toward blackness, and to be (...) deracialized is to be pushed 'up' toward whiteness." This does not mean, of course, that there are only blacks and whites in some anthropological sense. It does not mean that political reality with regard to race simply reduces to two positions... (shrink)

I propose that the intensification of meat production ironically makes meat concepts available to be populated by plants. I argue that what I call “technologies of effacement” facilitate the intensification of animal farming and slaughter by blocking face-to-face encounters between animals and people (Levinas 1969; Efstathiou 2018, 2019). My previous ethnographic work on animal research identifies technologies of effacement as including (a) architectures and the built environment, (b) entry and exit rules, (c) special garments, (d) naming and labeling procedures, and (...) (e) protocols for handling animals (Efstathiou 2018, 2019). Building on ethnographic research by Dawn Coppin (2003) and Nöellie Vialles (1994), in the United States and France respectively, I propose that (a) Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation (CAFO) buildings, gestation, and farrowing crates; (b) rules for entering and exiting the slaughterhouse; (c) white slaughterhouse garments; (d) unique identification systems; and (e) “trapping” animals before stunning can all operate as technologies of effacement. Though developed to serve other manifest aims, like hygiene, expediency, or safety, these technologies operate to sustain routine, inviting one to look at animals as tokens of a known type while blocking encounters between humans and animals (and also among animals) as radically different, morally significant Others (Efstathiou 2018, 2019). (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Flight of DesireThe Conversion of Sherman AlexieScott Richard Lyons (bio)Sherman Alexie's audacious arrival onto the Native American literary scene in the early 1990s felt like the start of something new—but it was also the end of something old: namely, the Native American Renaissance (NAR).1 Younger by a generation than the graying canonized figures of preceding decades—N. Scott Momaday, James Welch, Leslie Marmon Silko, Gerald Vizenor, among others—Alexie assumed the (...) pose of an enfant terrible and suggested that his elders were trying a bit too hard to produce an ultimately inauthentic sense of traditionalism. "We've been stuck in place since House Made of Dawn," he complained to an interviewer in 1997.2 Rather than presenting his readers with sick and/or depressed Indians caught between two worlds who discover healing in cultural restoration—the dominant plotline of NAR novels—Alexie's innovative characters played basketball and blues guitar, obsessed about their crushes and classes, and worried more about fitting into the modern world than healing it with some spiritual return to ancient Indian wisdom. Stylistically and thematically, Alexie was always closer to the likes of a George Saunders or Junot Diaz than he was to the serious modernists who had [End Page 27] inspired his NAR predecessors, and his political outlook more closely resembled the "identity politics" of younger Indian academics than the "sovereignty" discourses of twentieth-century tribal councils. Alexie wielded humor and pathos to great effect and always seemed to have his finger on the pulse of newer audiences, including those of us who call Indian reservations home. Alexie's influence on everyday Native American culture has been underestimated.Born to Salish parents in 1966 and raised on and off an eastern Washing-ton reservation, Alexie has published (as of this writing) twenty-six books of poetry, fiction, and memoir, much of which has been lauded for its dark humor and tender compassion in the face of serious and challenging topics—sexual abuse, chemical addiction, parental abandonment—as well as for its "reservation realism": the sense, often reiterated by Alexie himself, that his work speaks more authentically to real Indian life than most Native American works. His first published fiction was a collection of short stories, The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven (1993), followed two years later by his first novel, Reservation Blues (1995). In 1996 Alexie published his second novel, Indian Killer, which moved in a different, darker direction. Departing reservation settings for the city of Seattle and supplanting his humor with a horror sensibility, Indian Killer is about a serial murderer who scalps his white male victims and the subsequent racial tensions that arise. In keeping with Alexie's identity politics, a significant theme of the novel is "ethnic fraud"—the claiming of false Indian identity by non-Indians—a topic that received serious treatment during the 1990s and that supplies another layer of meaning to the novel's title.3 But Indian Killer is primarily about the murder of white men, and the most that anyone could say about the moral questions it raises is that Alexie seems to have left them for the reader to decide. Arnold Krupat decided to call Indian Killer a "warning to whites."4 A decade later, Alexie published two short books, each having a foothold in the lucrative young adult (YA) genre: The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (2007) and Flight (2007). The former was immensely successful, critically and commercially, while the latter has barely been written about at all and has not sold as well. What explains this difference? Is True Diary simply a better book than Flight?Whenever we identify some literary text as good, great, better—or worse—than some other texts, we are obliged to answer the big, implicit question: What makes literature good? For René Girard, the answer to that question was simple: Great literature always announces the "novelistic [romanesque] truth," not the "romantic [romantique] lie" about the mediation of mimetic desire.5 The truth is that our desires are never just our own. We always imitate the desires of others, which leads to mimetic rivalry with those same models, who... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Buddhist-Christian Studies 20 (2000) 249-255 [Access article in PDF] News and Views World Parliament of Religions, Cape Town, South Africa Jim Kenney The Council for a Parliament of the World's Religions is pleased to offer this summary report of the 1999 Parliament of the World's Religions, held in Cape Town, South Africa, December 1-8, 1999. Nestled against Table Mountain and overlooking the Atlantic Ocean, Cape Town is home to (...) many races, religious traditions, and cultural varieties. Religious, spiritual, cultural, and civic leaders, groups, and communities there worked enthusiastically in partnership with CPWR to make the 1999 Parliament an unforgettable gift to the world.At the 1999 Parliament over 7,000 people from around the world--teachers, scholars, leaders, believers, and practitioners--came together to experience astonishing spiritual and cultural variety, to exchange insights, to share wisdom, to celebrate their unique religious identities; in short, to be amazed, delighted, and inspired. At the same time, participants wrestled with the critical issues facing the global community, learning about the world situation, and seeking the moral and ethical convergence that leads to shared commitment and action.The 1999 Parliament of the World's Religions was a celebration of hope and a vision of possible futures. It also gave powerful testimony to the good hearts and goodwill of the many thousands of people--from every part of the world, and from almost every religious and spiritual tradition--who believed that this gathering could indeed be the harbinger of a new day dawning.It was not the intention of those who gathered in Cape Town to create a new religion, or to diminish in any way the precious uniqueness of any path. Instead, they came together to demonstrate that the religious and spiritual traditions and communities of Cape Town, of South Africa, and of the larger world can and should encounter one another in a spirit of respect, and with an openness to new understanding. They joined with one another in a spirit of dialogue and cooperation, seeking to discover new ways to rise to the challenges and the opportunities of life at the threshold of a new century. And they came with the realization that as each of us reaches out to the transcendent in her or his own way, somehow, we are no longer strangers to one another.In commemoration of International AIDS Day, the Parliament began with the formal unveiling of the International AIDS Quilt in the picturesque area known as the Company's Garden. Each one of hundreds of handsewn panels commemorates a victim of the disease, yet the Quilt project itself is a symbol of hope and life's triumph. [End Page 249] The founder of the quilt, Cleve Jones, joined with several religious and spiritual leaders from around the world to engage in dialogue about the role of religious and spiritual communities in fighting the disease that has claimed the lives of so many people. The quilt was an especially poignant reminder of both the epidemic of AIDS in South Africa, and the role that religious and spiritual traditions play in confronting the critical issues that face the world at the end of the millennium.Participants then proceeded down Government Avenue to Darling Street and on to District Six. Costumes, religious garb, banners, and wonderful cultural variety made for a colorful and moving experience for marchers and spectators alike. With over 10,000 marchers, the procession was a highlight for many Parliament participants. The presence of protesters demonstrating their displeasure with the Parliament and its commitment to interreligious dialogue and cooperation did not diminish the spirit or the enthusiasm of the marchers.When the procession arrived in District Six, an area symbolic of both dispossession and of the human spirit, those who had once lived in this lovely spot under Table Mountain welcomed the marchers. Past residents of District Six described to those gathered how their once vibrant community was displaced when the apartheid-era government designated the area as "white only," and removed the residents to distant, underresourced townships. In the moving ceremony that followed, religious and spiritual leaders... (shrink)

Bringing Flowers HomeWe try to put a bandage on the wound,offering a vague apology:Forgive me, distant wars, for bringing flowers home.Towers turn out to have been built on sand.Regimes collapse. No use in asking whywe ripped the bandage off that bleeding wound.An earthquake followed by a hurricane,fires, floods: they've passed some of us by.Us. And who is we? And what is home?Last week an enormous yellow moonhung low in a corner of the sky.Beauty is no bandage for the wound,hole in (...) the future much too big to mendor even to imagine, though we tryto camouflage it, bringing flowers home.You said, when we were talking of the end,that no one teaches us to say goodbye,or how to ease the bandage from the wound.Forgive me, death. I brought these flowers home.Moving the PianoCompact, gleaming, black and white,this sturdy Yamaha uprightstood staunchly in one room for yearsuntil, maneuvered through several doorstoday by two young slender menand up a ramp into their van,it ventured briefly out into the world again.The change of space, the space of change:the walls look naked, empty, strange.Heavy has given way to light.Habitual soliditytoo familiar to seeyields to possibilitytoo unfamiliar to see.Late and early, early, late,end, beginning—all are swirledinto a mist that veils the world.The black and white of status quoblends to a color I don't know,transition that I cannot name,but I salute it all the same.Goodbye, piano, and hello.So where is the piano going?Where will it find another life,music and memories unpackedin an unfolding second act?North Carolina, near a riverwhose stream, like time, is always flowing.My son lives there with his wife.Beloved, nothing is forever.You can't step twice into this life.Nap at Stony PointMy cousin and my friendon their respective recent deathbedsslid from my mind. I noticedthe scarlet splash of a cardinal perched on a cannonon a bluff above the Hudson.I lay down on a picnic table,sun on my face, five turkey vulturescircling overhead, and closed my eyes.And when I opened them I felt as pleasedas if I had completed some needful taskinstead of having forgottenhow my friend in January and my cousin in March,both of them alert and wry and tranquil,had faced what each of them clearly saw approaching—more, had recognized and greeted it,instead of ignoring it by looking through it,the way some people, even iftheir office is two doors down the hall,look right through you, pretending not to see you.Or maybe they don't see youany more than one envisions deathon a sunny April afternoon.The Last Lecture HallTheaters that were never ours,classrooms empty and refill.Nor do the trees belong to us.We cross the stage and disappearor venture in among the treesand lose ourselves there.Feverish categories blur.Genre distinctions: what for?The empty theater becomesa lecture hall. A classroom morphsinto a forest murmuringwith voices. Words pelt down like rainor rise like mist and dissipate.The rustling trees swell to a roar.But they were never still.Theater, classroom, maple, fir:feverish categories blur,presences pressing through the veilof the phenomenal;a leopard padding down the aisle.Tiger-masked students fill the seatsof the amphitheater.The old professor, looking outover the upturned faces, said“You are all allegoricalfigures to me. I will not learnyour names.” Did the students laugh?Tragedy, satire, comedy:genres are deciduous.Modes blur, leaves spin and fall.The leaves of memory seemed to makeA mournful rustling in the dark(Longfellow, “The Fire of Driftwood”).Lights go on in the theater.Class is over. We stumble out.The GatesWhen I woke up I had walked through a gate.I looked around the room—trickle or torrent, stepping into time—and bent my head to drink at a black stream.I look around a roomthick with the dust of after and before.Am I meant to drink from this black stream?My lips are dry,thick with the crust of after and before,gate of ivory and gate of horn.My lips are dry, I'm thirsty.Heat, cold, fire, snow, sun.Gate of ivory and gate of horn:to cross a threshold ends one story(firelight; snow squeaking; winter sun)and begins another.To cross a threshold ends one story(ever after? or a transformation?)and begins anotherthere is no law compelling us to enter.Ever after or a transformation.Torrent, trickle: we set foot in time,but there's no law compelling us to enterstory once we've latched the gate of dream.FilamentsYour past is thickening. You can seeits filaments, as carefullyyou begin to part the strands(they're all connected) with both hands,and clear a path. Now warilyenter the web—not all the way,but toward some kind of clarity.We have been rightly taught that wecan't finish, but must do, the work.Partway through the leafy murk,crisscrossing dapple of the trees,so tough and so precarious,you find yourself in the dawn air,the circle's center everywhere.Along the PromenadeReading a book about transitioningin the twenty-first-century meaning of the wordblends with plans for my son's upcoming weddingand scraps of conversation overheardat the Japanese-themed street fair today.Somnambulists along the promenadefloat in the warm currents of Broadway,eat talk look linger in the sun and shade.Then to the park: October leaves still green(climate change or merely Indian summer?).Snatched memories, I catch them on the wing:Samos Septembers, pomegranate tree,lemon tree, okra, a chameleon,the little summer of Saint Dimitri,they called it. All this happened; but to me?Streams of conversation flowing by.The sound artist described his work like this(if work is the right word): “Accidentallyuploading seemingly private messages,”which describes, also, dreams and poetry,the drifting crowd, incessant carousel,city and weather, time and holiday,all lived, palped, tasted, tested, overheard.Somnambulists along the promenadehave set up booths, their dreams... Bookending my dawn dream: symmetricalsoaking sponges dripping... DNA?Destiny, temperament, personality:the cards we're dealt and that we have to play,except we now can change them gradually.Transition: he or she or rather they,constructed, deconstructed, rearranged,the tarot spread of genealogy,inheritance as aleatoric play.We walked west to Eleventh Avenue,drawn by rumors of Ad Reinhardt's blue,which buzzed and throbbed. Stand still: my head was spinning.Allusions to water or to sky,dense, deep, alarming, ending or beginning... I sat awhile and watched the crowd glide by,enchanted promenaders all drawn inon the exhibition's last dayby the silence's cerulean humming.And then they climbed the stairs, and so did we,to lighter textures on an upper floorwhere Ruth Asawa's baskets in midairweightlessly demonstrated gravity,twigs, trees, crowns, bubbles dancing in white space.Next week my class will read “On Being Ill.”“Blogs,” I'll tell them, is the word we nowuse, not “essay,” for the moving mind,that saunterer who takes note and leaves behindand doubles back and ponders and regretsamidst the wash of vision, the flowand tidal pull of what we see and know,what we've dreamed, what we have said and heard,the thrumming colors and the floating crowd,as if the bubbly brew of sunny dayand anxious dreams could somehow all be caughtup in one enormous, one all-encompassing word. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Feminist Studies 46, no. 1. © 2020 by Abby Minor 103 JUMP ROPE CHANT: A CURE FOR ALL KINDS OF STOMACH ACHES, ca. 2000 BCE–ca. 2000 CE Abby Minor Happy are those who stand in a field at night and hear the double rainbows land, or clap the gaps that RHYTHM makes, or shout to the beat of grasses; They are like trees planted by streams of water, which (...) yield their fruit in its season, & their leaps & their leaves & their feet do not wither, they leap up in the morning singing, in all that they do they chant, and jump, and are singing: “Blood root, hair pin, lupine, clover, watermints and cinnamon, a pencil, myrrh, poplar, juniper, copper water, whiskey, cotton root, snake root, savin, wire,  Clap your hands, all you peoples. —Psalm 47.1 104 Abby Minor wallflower, gunpowder, emeralds, myrtle, tonic of geranium, lace seeds, soap, bone stay, coltsfoot, catheters, quinine, a hoop bound with oil-silk, a hat pin, oak—” I chant a long time I chant from within a hollow place I chant all colors of cohosh Instantly as dawn clips green & white, I chant to dissolve separate parts I jump backwards and I chant So that you may bathe your feet in blood, it was in the Psalms, it’s what God does it might be a rain dance it will come to you like a beautiful cigar filled with fine leaves like the fine feet of a deer cleft in gold leaves Like rhythm a hair pin, rhythm a hat pin, rhythm a knitting hook, rhythm a nail RHYTHM makes my feet like the feet of a deer. I chant rosemary so assiduous I chant pennyroyal forever most poisonous I chant intransigence and double rainbows pop on the sidewalks of the cosmos, double Abby Minor 105 Dutch ropes spin like twin rivers, there I am planted like a tree by the water, like an outrider dropping fire into the ropes: I will kick up my heels seven times there will be a noise and the seed will fall out on the ground shouting, “Date palms, dancing, anise, trillium, turpentine, scissors, silphium, rum, cundums, pomegranate, pearlash, iron, foot baths, borax, birthwort, rue, wormwood, fern root, fig leaf, sneezing, a small ball of sheep’s wool, smart weed, brass, blackberries, goldbeaters, button hooks, hawthorn, womb veil, vinegar, saffron, glass—” If you try our hearts, RHYTHM, if you visit us by night; if I forget which is my left hand and which is your right— just let it be me; psalmist, you, a trace of blood. Me, muscle, 106 Abby Minor you, myrrh. Or you jumping, me rope. Me mirrorstep, you leave your dark prints on the light. Me ambush, you flood. Me bloodthirsty, you a smaller blood. You bloodthirsty, me myrrh. Me fortress, you a tent for the sun. Me splendor, you go on and on. Me hat pin, me flood. You poetry, me a clapping tree, or me poetry and you nothing at all. I say to RHYTHM, “You are my Rhythm, I have no song apart from you and I could never tell just where the sole leaves the sidewalk and turns into the smallest lit pause popped, suspended above shoe shadow; I could never say whether I’m the jumper picking up her knees or the turner planted so still save for her hands— and what pilots her hands, pilot, if not you, if not her hands? If not the offbeat, the bows of light we pattern, Rhythm which is both the rivet and what’s held: like rhythm a hair pin, rhythm a hat pin, rhythm a knitting hook, rhythm a nail Abby Minor 107 RHYTHM makes my feet like the feet of a deer. Now I chant the bitter melon fruit who lights up darkness and my feet do not grow weary writing RHYTHM on the sidewalk lighting incense in the bathtub filled with gin in which I lay chanting like the singers in front, like the musicians last, like the girls between them playing tambourines: Rhythm make a riot Rhythm eat a bee Rhythm use a chicken feather & make a joyful noise Praise Rhythm with mint & astringents with spearmints & syringes with pipes, pen handles, mercury... (shrink)

The COVID pandemic was an exceptional public health situation – which brought with it unprecedented restrictions across the global populace. But what was it about this pandemic which caused us to implement such drastic restrictions on liberty? Much of the ethical debate on restrictive measures such as lockdowns and vaccine requirements focused on the potential harm that individuals cause to other individuals by the risk of infection. I will suggest that this may come from a reliance on J.S. Mill’s harm (...) principle as providing the ultimate justification for coercion – i.e., the well-accepted principle that state coercion is justified in order to prevent the imposition of unacceptable risk of harm to others. Though there have been attempts, in the wider public health ethics literature, to use the harm principle as a basis for restricting contribution to collective harms, I will suggest that these attempts cannot rely on the harm principle alone. I will then turn to the ways in which an individual-based line of reasoning does not capture a distinctive sort of harm posed by the COVID pandemic (and others like it): the potential failure of healthcare systems. I will draw out three ways in which a focus on the harm that an individual poses to another individual fails to capture the full scope of harm wrought by the collapse of healthcare systems. First, it can’t adequately capture the cumulative and “looping effects” of the harm caused by strained healthcare systems. Second, it fails to capture the widespread ripple effects the failure of a central societal institution can have on other institutions. And third, the failure of a healthcare system can impose “psychic costs”, affecting the moral character of all members of society, reducing trust in institutions, and potentially posing an existential threat to the fabric of society. Finally, I will sketch some implications of the recognition of this distinctive sort of harm for the justification of coercive public health measures. (shrink)

This paper describes the development of two annual lantern parades as case examples of arts in community health, which the authors define as a distinct area of activity operating mainly outside of acute healthcare settings, characterised by the use of participatory arts to promote health. The parades took place in Gateshead 1994–2006 and later in Stockton-on-Tees from 2009 to the present, and the paper reflects on the factors that made for the success of the Gateshead parade and also the problems (...) that led to its demise. It then describes and assesses the Stockton parade, and the benefits and challenges of a workshop ethos of ‘positive regard’ with reference to interview data gathered from adult volunteers and school staff. It considers the potential of this annual ‘tradition’ to shape communal memories that identify with place, and it sets out its aspirations for future programme and research. (shrink)

This chapter contains section titled: Happiness and Morality The Conflict in Antiquity Later Obstacles to the Articulation and Explanation of the Conflict Pre‐Kantian Modern Articulations of the Conflict The Kantian Articulation of the Conflict Plato and Kant Compared Reactions to Kant and to the Conflict The Fragmentation of the Concept?

_A unique philosophical look at the hit television series _Downton Abbey_ _ Who can resist the lure of _Downton Abbey_ and the triumphs and travails of the Crawley family and its servants? We admire Bates's sense of honor, envy Carson's steadfastness, and thrill to Violet's caustic wit. _Downton Abbey and Philosophy_ draws on some of history's most profound philosophical minds to delve deeply into the dilemmas that confront our favorite characters. Was Matthew right to push Mary away after his injury (...) in the war? Would Lord Grantham have been justified in blocking Lady Sybil's marriage to Tom Branson? And is Thomas really such a bad person? Offers fresh and intriguing insights into your favorite _Downton Abbey_ characters, plot lines, and ideas Addresses many of your most pressing questions about _Downton Abbey's_ story and characters, such as: Should Daisy have lied to William about her feelings toward him—especially to the point of marrying him? Should Mr. Bates have been upfront with Anna from the beginning about his past? Views _Downton Abbey_ through the lens of some of the most influential philosophical thinkers, from Saint Augustine and David Hume to Immanuel Kant and John Stuart Mill Ventures upstairs _and_ downstairs to examine key themes involving ethics, virtue, morality, class, feminism, the human condition, and more Philosophical speculation awaits on every page of this essential _Downton Abbey_ companion. So take a seat in your personal library, have the butler pour a cup of tea, and start reading! (shrink)