The developmental programs of eukaryotic organisms involve the programmed transcription of genes. A characteristic gene expression pattern is established and preserved in each different cell type. Therefore, gene activation at a particular time and its maintenance during cell division are significant for cellular differentiation and individual development. Although many studies have sought to explain the molecular mechanisms of gene expression regulation, the mechanism through which gene expression states are inherited during cell division has not been fully elucidated yet. This review (...) illustrates the general principles and the complexities involved in the establishment and maintenance of active transcription through cell cycles. It focuses on the most‐recent findings about the ways in which molecular memory marks for active transcription are coordinated with cell cycle events, such as replication, mitosis and nuclear organization, to mediate transcription memory across cell division events, which may establish a unifying memory process of active transcription. BioEssays 27:1239–1245, 2005. © 2005 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

Whenever the state of a biological system is not determined solely by present conditions but depends on its past history, we can say that the system has memory. Bacteria and bacteriophage use a variety of memory mechanisms, some of which seem to convey adaptive value. A genetic type of heritable memory is the programmed inversion of specific DNA sequences, which causes switching between alternative patterns of gene expression. Heritable memory can also be based on epigenetic circuits, in which a system (...) with two possible steady states is locked in one or the other state by a positive feedback loop. Epigenetic states have been observed in a variety of cellular processes, and are maintained by diverse mechanisms. Some of these involve alternative DNA methylation patterns that are stably transmitted to daughter molecules and can affect DNA–protein interactions (e.g., gene transcription). Other mechanisms exploit autocatalytic loops whereby proteins establish the proper conditions for their continued synthesis. Template polymers other than nucleic acids (e.g., components of the cell wall) may also propagate epigenetic states. Non‐heritable memory is exemplified by parasitic organisms that bear a signature of their previous host, such as host‐controlled modification of phage DNA or porin hitchhiking in predatory bacteria. The heterogeneous nature of the examples known may be indicative of widespread occurrence of memory mechanisms in bacteria and phage. However, the actual extent, variety and potential selective value of prokaryotic memory devices remain open questions, still to be addressed experimentally. BioEssays 24:512–518, 2002. © 2002 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

ces, learning facts and gaining conceptual knowlge, recognizing objects and people, and acquiring ills and habits. Scientific thinking about memory was minated for many years by the assumption that mory is a unitary or monolithic entityRi2;a single ulty of the mind and brain. However, the assumpri of a unitary memory has been challenged by conging evidence from psychology and neuroscience inting toward multiple memory systems that can be sociated from one another. This chapter provides a torical introduction to the (...) issue and summarizes.. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Remarks at Harvard University Memorial Service for Benjamin I. SchwartzYu-sheng LinAmong the eminent intellectual historians in the world after World War II, Ben Schwartz was one of the most subtle and profound. He was deeply rooted in—but not confined by—the humanist tradition of Montaigne and Pascal, and this provided him with insights into the wretchedness as well as the grandeur of the human condition and with a conscious Socratic (...) moral and intellectual drive toward self-examination as a prerequisite for any inquiry into human affairs. Indeed, the distinctivecharacter of Ben's scholarship lay in his integration of morality and intellect. These humanistic resources in combination with his outstanding intellectual endowment enabled Ben to reach great heights of scholarly endeavor.To mention just a few of his many enduring achievements: Ben's thesis, advanced as early as 1951 and based on a study of the inner history of the rise of the Chinese Communist movement from a comparative perspective, developed the idea that the trajectory of Marxism eastward to Russia and China was, in fact, "a steady process of decomposition." This powerful argument has stood the test of time, whereas both the notion, on the Right, of a monolithic world communism and the idea, on the Left, of the Chinese Communist movement as the embodiment of the intellectual and moral legitimacy of Marxism fell by the wayside.His In Search of Wealth and Power: Yen Fu and the West, which offers a double mirror, with modern China illuminated by the modern West and vice versa, is a trailblazing work in intercultural intellectual history. Furthermore, The World of Thought in Ancient China, Ben's prizewinning magnum opus, which treats the whole range of ancient Chinese thought from a world-historical perspective, has achieved a methodological, no less than a historiographical, breakthrough. Ben's discussion of the need to "descend from the level of total cultural orientations to the level of shared problématiques" advances boldly beyond Max Weber's ideal-typical analysis in comparative world history. Historiographically, Ben's study of the general orientations in ancient China and their dialectical relations with the problématiques manifested in different schools of thought is the most incisive and comprehensive treatment of ancient Chinese thought to date.These great achievements derived from his ability to combine deep insights into historical realities with a humane simplicity in holding onto what is central in life. Such a simplicity was manifest in his spontaneous humility, a quality that furnished him with the moral and intellectual resources by which to develop empathetic understanding of the various strands of thought in China as well as in the West. Ben's analyses of human problems from a world-historical perspective, while characteristically erudite, subtle, complex, and at times extraordinarily brilliant, were singularly free from any trace of the influence of intellectual fashions and from any sort of [End Page 187] posturing or self-exhibition. He always struggled at the center of life and history, making the best effort to enter into the depth of human reality, drawing out its significanceas fully as he could. These great attainments were, I submit, a natural outgrowth of the strength of his moral and intellectual character, which led him to be truly open-minded and thus acutely perceptive. It was because he was so seriously interested in the study of humanity that he so seriously studied the Chinese. His universalist concerns fused with his humanist humility and thus empowered him to lift the field of Chinese studies out of its various forms of parochialism.The Confucian philosopher Xun Zi once said that the genuine scholar "explains with a humane compassion, listens with a studious attitude, and engages in disputation with an impartial mind." I know no one other than Ben Schwartz to have attained this ideal. His absolute joy in intellectual give-and-take and his delight, with his eyes gently sparkling, in reaching an understanding of a complex issue were infectious. It was indeed my good fortune and great privilege to be able to sit at the feet of Professor Schwartz. He embodied most eloquently the very essence of humanistic scholarship; his spirit is and shall always be a... (shrink)

Marketers use autobiographical advertising as a means to create nostalgia for their products. This research explores whether such referencing can cause people to believe that they had experiences as children that are mentioned in the ads. In Experiment 1, participants viewed an ad for Disney that suggested that they shook hands with Mickey Mouse as a child. Relative to controls, the ad increased their confidence that they personally had shaken hands with Mickey as a child at a Disney resort. The (...) increased confidence could be due to a revival of a true memory or the creation of a new, false one. In Experiment 2, participants viewed an ad for Disney that suggested that they shook hands with an impossible character (e.g., Bugs Bunny). Again, relative to controls, the ad increased confidence that they personally had shaken hands with the impossible character as a child at a Disney resort. The increased confidence is consistent with the notion that autobiographical referencing can lead to the creation of false or distorted memory. ᭧ 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. (shrink)

This dialogue between Paul Ricoeur and Sorin Antohi took place in Budapest on March 10, 2003 at Pasts, Inc., Center for Historical Studies, which is affiliated with Central European University (CEU). Ricoeur was the honorary president of Pasts, Inc., and its spiritus rector. On March 8, he had given a lecture on "History, Memory, and Forgetting" in the context of an international conference entitled "Haunting Memories? History in Europe after Authoritarianism," and organized by Pasts Inc. and the Körber Foundation. (...) On March 9, Ricoeur had received the first Honoris Causa doctorate ever granted by CEU. Ricoeur had already visited Hungary in 1933. At the time, he was participating in a Boy Scouts European jamboree at Gödöllö (where he also saw Horthy on his white horse). After WWII, he went back to Hungary to meet with Lukács. Mona Antohi has transcribed and edited the recording of the dialogue. The two interlocutors have then made some minor revisions. The original text, in French, is available on the website of Pasts, Inc. (www.ceu.hu/pasts). This English version, translated and annotated by Gil Anidjar, will be included in Sorin Antohi's book, Talking History. Making Sense of Pasts, forthcoming in 2006 from CEU Press. His own Romanian translation of the dialogue was published in the Iasi-based journal, Xenopoliana (3-4, 2004), as was the Hungarian translation by Réka Toth, which appeared in the Budapest-based journal, 2000 (November-December 2003). (shrink)

There is considerable interest in the use of neuroimaging techniques for forensic purposes. Memory detection techniques, including the well-publicized Brain Fingerprinting technique (Brain Fingerprinting Laboratories, Inc., Seattle WA), exploit the fact that the brain responds differently to sensory stimuli to which it has been exposed before. When a stimulus is specifically associated with a crime, the resulting brain activity should differentiate between someone who was present at the crime and someone who was not. This article reviews the scientific literature on (...) three such techniques: priming, old/new, and P300 effects. The forensic potential of these techniques is evaluated based on four criteria: specificity, automaticity, encoding flexibility, and longevity. This article concludes that none of the techniques are devoid of forensic potential, although much research is yet to be done. Ethical issues, including rights to privacy and against self-incrimination, are discussed. A discussion of legal issues concludes that current memory detection techniques do not yet meet United States standards of legal admissibility. (shrink)

Current interpretations of the political theory of Judith Shklar focus to a disabling extent on her short, late article (1989); commentators take this late essay as representative of her work as a whole and thus characterize her as an anti-totalitarian, Cold War liberal. Other interpretations situate her political thought alongside followers of John Rawls and liberal political philosophy. Challenging the centrality of fear in Shklar's thought, this essay examines her writings on utopian and normative thought, the role of history in (...) political thinking and her notions of ordinary cruelty and injustice. In particular, it shifts emphasis away from an exclusive focus on her late writings in order to consider works published throughout her long career at Harvard University, from 1950 until her death in 1992. By surveying the range of Shklar's critical standpoints and concerns, it suggests that postwar American liberalism was not as monolithic as many interpreters have assumed. Through an examination of her attitudes towards her forebears and contemporaries, it shows why the dominant interpretations of Shklarmigrare flawed. In fact, Shklar moved restlessly between these two categories, and drew from each tradition. By thinking about both hope and memory, she bridged the gap between two distinct strands of postwar American liberalism. (shrink)

The neural basis of human memory is incredibly complex. We argue that the diversity of neural systems underlying various forms of memory suggests that any discussion of enhancing ‘memory’ per se is too broad, thus obfuscating the biopolitical debate about human enhancement. Memory can be differentiated into at least four major systems with largely dissociable neural substrates. We outline each system, and discuss both the practical and the ethical implications of these diverse neural substrates. In practice, distinct neural bases imply (...) the possibility, and likely the necessity, of specific approaches for the safe and effective enhancement of various memory systems. In the debate over the ethical and social implications of enhancement technologies, this fine-grained perspective clarifies—and may partially mitigate—certain common concerns in enhancement debates, including issues related to safety, fairness, coercion, and authenticity. While many researchers certainly appreciate the neurobiological complexity of memory, the political debate tends to revolve around a monolithic one-size-fits-all conception. The overall project—exploring how human enhancement technologies affect society – stands to benefit from a deeper appreciation of memory’s neurobiological diversity. (shrink)

Previous studies have identified the critical role of the left fusiform cortex in visual word form processing, learning, and memory. However, this so-called visual word form area's other functions are not clear. In this study, we used fMRI and the subsequent memory paradigm to examine whether the putative VWFA was involved in the processing and successful memory encoding of faces as well as words. Twenty-two native Chinese speakers were recruited to memorize the visual forms of faces and Chinese words. Episodic (...) memory for the studied material was tested 3. h after the scan with a recognition test. The fusiform face area and the VWFA were functionally defined using separate localizer tasks. We found that, both within and across subjects, stronger activity in the VWFA was associated with better recognition memory of both words and faces. Furthermore, activation in the VWFA did not differ significantly during the encoding of faces and words. Our results revealed the important role of the so-called VWFA in face processing and memory and supported the view that the left mid-fusiform cortex plays a general role in the successful processing and memory of different types of visual objects. © 2010 Elsevier Inc. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Remarks at Harvard University Memorial Service for Benjamin I. SchwartzYu-sheng LinAmong the eminent intellectual historians in the world after World War II, Ben Schwartz was one of the most subtle and profound. He was deeply rooted in—but not confined by—the humanist tradition of Montaigne and Pascal, and this provided him with insights into the wretchedness as well as the grandeur of the human condition and with a conscious Socratic (...) moral and intellectual drive toward self-examination as a prerequisite for any inquiry into human affairs. Indeed, the distinctivecharacter of Ben's scholarship lay in his integration of morality and intellect. These humanistic resources in combination with his outstanding intellectual endowment enabled Ben to reach great heights of scholarly endeavor.To mention just a few of his many enduring achievements: Ben's thesis, advanced as early as 1951 and based on a study of the inner history of the rise of the Chinese Communist movement from a comparative perspective, developed the idea that the trajectory of Marxism eastward to Russia and China was, in fact, "a steady process of decomposition." This powerful argument has stood the test of time, whereas both the notion, on the Right, of a monolithic world communism and the idea, on the Left, of the Chinese Communist movement as the embodiment of the intellectual and moral legitimacy of Marxism fell by the wayside.His In Search of Wealth and Power: Yen Fu and the West, which offers a double mirror, with modern China illuminated by the modern West and vice versa, is a trailblazing work in intercultural intellectual history. Furthermore, The World of Thought in Ancient China, Ben's prizewinning magnum opus, which treats the whole range of ancient Chinese thought from a world-historical perspective, has achieved a methodological, no less than a historiographical, breakthrough. Ben's discussion of the need to "descend from the level of total cultural orientations to the level of shared problématiques" advances boldly beyond Max Weber's ideal-typical analysis in comparative world history. Historiographically, Ben's study of the general orientations in ancient China and their dialectical relations with the problématiques manifested in different schools of thought is the most incisive and comprehensive treatment of ancient Chinese thought to date.These great achievements derived from his ability to combine deep insights into historical realities with a humane simplicity in holding onto what is central in life. Such a simplicity was manifest in his spontaneous humility, a quality that furnished him with the moral and intellectual resources by which to develop empathetic understanding of the various strands of thought in China as well as in the West. Ben's analyses of human problems from a world-historical perspective, while characteristically erudite, subtle, complex, and at times extraordinarily brilliant, were singularly free from any trace of the influence of intellectual fashions and from any sort of [End Page 187] posturing or self-exhibition. He always struggled at the center of life and history, making the best effort to enter into the depth of human reality, drawing out its significanceas fully as he could. These great attainments were, I submit, a natural outgrowth of the strength of his moral and intellectual character, which led him to be truly open-minded and thus acutely perceptive. It was because he was so seriously interested in the study of humanity that he so seriously studied the Chinese. His universalist concerns fused with his humanist humility and thus empowered him to lift the field of Chinese studies out of its various forms of parochialism.The Confucian philosopher Xun Zi once said that the genuine scholar "explains with a humane compassion, listens with a studious attitude, and engages in disputation with an impartial mind." I know no one other than Ben Schwartz to have attained this ideal. His absolute joy in intellectual give-and-take and his delight, with his eyes gently sparkling, in reaching an understanding of a complex issue were infectious. It was indeed my good fortune and great privilege to be able to sit at the feet of Professor Schwartz. He embodied most eloquently the very essence of humanistic scholarship; his spirit is and shall always be a... (shrink)

Though La parole donnee memoire et promisse, published in 1989 by Editions Galilee, was the first book Garcia Duttmann's (German, Middlesex U., England) wrote, and he has developed many of its ideas more fully in subsequent works, he has chosen to make few changes for the translation. He muses on the path towards toward sacred names, translating the thing, over-naming and melancholy, and apparitions. Annotation copyrighted by Book News Inc., Portland, OR.

This essay begins with a Berlin memorial to the victims of National Socialist “euthanasia” killings first unveiled in 2014. The open-air structure was the fourth such major public memorial in the German capital, having followed earlier memorials already established for Jewish victims of Nazi atrocity in 2005, German victims of homosexual persecution in 2008, and Sinti and Roma victims in 2012. Planning for the systematic persecution and extermination of at least 300,000 infants, adolescents, and adults deemed “life unworthy of life” (...) long preceded and extended beyond the 12-year Nazi period of massacre linked to other victim groups. Yet those constructing collective memory projects in Berlin appear to consider these particular victims as an afterthought, secondary to the other groups. Rather than address the commemorations themselves, this essay addresses the sequence in which they have appeared in order to demonstrate a pattern of first-victimized/last-recognized. I argue that the massacre of Jews, Roma, homosexuals, and others had to come into legal jurisprudence, scholarship, and public memory projects first before the murdered disabled body and its related memorialization could be legitimized as a category of violence important in and of itself. I argue further that the delay is rooted in a shared trans-Atlantic history that has failed to interrogate disability in terms of the social and cultural values that categorize and stigmatize it. Instead, the disabled body has been seen as both a physical embodiment of incapacity and a monolith that defies historicization. An examination of the broader foundation behind delayed study and representation that recognizes the intersection of racism and ableism allows us to reconfigure our analysis of violence and provides fertile ground from which to make connections to contemporary iterations still playing out in the present. (shrink)

PARP‐1 is a multifunctional enzyme that can modulate gene expression. Cohen‐Armon et al.1 found that a homologue of PARP‐1 is activated in the Aplysia nervous system as the animal responds to an aversive stimulus, which leads to sensitization, and during a more complex form of learning that involves feeding behavior. Significantly, inhibiting PARP‐1 activation blocked the learning. Several key pathways in Aplysia neurons are activated both during learning and after injury, suggesting that mechanisms of learning evolved from primitive responses to (...) injury. Since PARP‐1 is evolutionarily conserved as a responder to various forms of stress, the finding that PARP‐1 is activated during learning supports this idea. BioEssays 26:1268–1271, 2004. © 2004 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

Advances in molecular, genetic, and cell biological techniques have allowed neuroscientists to delve into the cellular machinery of learning and memory. The calcium and calmodulin-dependent kinase type II (CaMKII) is one of the best candidates for being a molecular component of the learning and memory machinery in the mammalian brain. It is present in abundance at synapses and its enzymatic properties and responsiveness to intracellular Ca2+ fit a model whereby Ca2+ currents activate the kinase and lead to changes in synaptic (...) efficacy. Indeed, such plastic properties of synapses are thought to be important for memory formation. Genetic analysis of the alpha isoform of CaMKII in mice support the hypothesis that CaMKII signaling is required to initiate the formation of new spatial memories in the hippocampus. CaMKII is also required for the correct induction of long-term potentiation (LTP) in the hippocampus, consistent with the widely held belief that LTP is a mechanism for learning and memory. Recent cell biological, genetic, and physiological analyses suggest that one of the cellular explanations for LTP and CaMKII function might be the trafficking of AMPA-type receptors to synapses in response to neural activity. BioEssays 24:223–233, 2002. © 2002 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.; DOI 10.1002/bies.10057. (shrink)

In the physical sciences a rigorous theory is a hierarchy of descriptions in which causal relationships between many general types of entity at a phenomenological level can be derived from causal relationships between smaller numbers of simpler entities at more detailed levels. The hierarchy of descriptions resembles the modular hierarchy created in electronic systems in order to be able to modify a complex functionality without excessive side effects. Such a hierarchy would make it possible to establish a rigorous scientific theory (...) of consciousness. The causal relationships implicit in definitions of access consciousness and phe- nomenal consciousness are made explicit, and the corresponding causal relationships at the more detailed levels of perception, memory, and skill learning described. Extension of these causal relationships to physiological and neural levels is discussed. The general capability of a range of current consciousness models to support a modular hierarchy which could generate these causal relationships is reviewed, and the specific capabilities of two models with good general capabilities are compared in some detail. Ó 2003 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. (shrink)

Popular interest in the topic of food has exploded in the past decade. Due in part to books by Michael Pollan, Barbara Kingsolver, and Eric Schlosser and films such as Food, Inc., Super Size Me, and Forks over Knives, people are starting to think critically about where their food originates, how it is processed, and how their consumption choices affect the environment, nonhuman animals, and other people. At the same time, there is rising concern about the dangers of obesity. Although (...) the voices raising these concerns are by no means monolithic, one of the most common solutions offered to various food-related issues is the suggestion that people educate themselves and make.. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Feminist Studies 45, no. 1. © 2019 by Feminist Studies, Inc. 13 Stephanie Yingyi Wang When Tongzhi Marry: Experiments of Cooperative Marriage between Lalas and Gay Men in Urban China Ang Lee’s film The Wedding Banquet could be classic introductory material for tongzhi studies and, particularly, for research on cooperative marriage.1 In the film, Wai-Tung, a Taiwanese landlord who lives happily with his American boyfriend Simon in New York, (...) is troubled by his parents’ constant efforts to try and find him a bride. His partner Simon suggests he could arrange a marriage of convenience with WaiTung ’s tenant Wei Wei who is from mainland China and is also in need of a green card to stay in the United States. However, their plan backfires when Wai-Tung’s enthusiastic parents arrive in the United States and plan a big wedding banquet. As the film critic and scholar Chris 1. Tongzhi, literally “same purpose,” is the Chinese term for “comrade.” Since the 1990s, it has been appropriated to replace the more formal tóngxìnglìan (same-sex love) to refer to gay men and lalas (same-sex desiring women) in the Chinese-speaking world. The translation of xinghun as “cooperative marriage” is debatable, as xinghun literally means “pro-forma marriage.” In other works, “contract marriage,” “fake marriage,” or “pro-forma marriage” are used to refer to gay-lala marriage. Informed by Lucetta Kam’s work, I use “cooperative marriage ” to highlight that such marriage is not merely functional without sustenance, but is contingent on the cooperation and negotiation between multiple parties in the relationship, as my findings suggest. See Lucetta Yip Lo Kam, Shanghai Lalas: Female Tongzhi Communities and Politics in Urban China (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2013), 85. winner of the 2018 Feminist Studies Graduate Student award 14 Stephanie Yingyi Wang Berry points out, analysis of the film rests not on any individual, but on the Confucian family as “it negotiates the interface with globally hegemonic American culture,” suggesting that there exists an understanding of gayness in the context of the family that is distinct in Chinese culture.2 Berry continues to argue that the moral ambivalence produced by the film is structured by different sets of values: the gay person is not merely concerned about individual identity fulfillment, but he also adjusts his actions to satisfy the family expectation; the parents, especially the father figure, is not merely a patriarch with strict moral provisions and standards, but someone who can allow for implicit negotiation to keep the surface harmony as long as he gets a grandson; the woman is not merely an independent agent freed from social constraints, but a bride who is also attached to emotional comfort and conjugal ideals. Just as The Wedding Banquet tactfully reveals one type of cooperative marriage with its mutual benefits and examines the multilayered complexity of each individual player in the marriage game, this research takes as its subject cooperative marriage between gay men and lalas as an exciting departure to understand queer subjectivities and queer kinship intersected with gender, sexuality, class, and tongzhi politics in urban China.3 Though seemingly monolithic, marriage and family have become contested terrains for tongzhi to negotiate their gender performance, queer desires, and aspirations for better lives. The transnational makings of gayness and rights-based identity politics have contributed to the increasing awareness of a cosmopolitan gay identity and the desiring of alternative life choices of Chinese tongzhi, which lays the very foundation of their motivation to seek ways to cope with the heteronormative family model. Coming out and gay marriage are upheld as primary tropes of identity politics, facilitated by the self-identified tongzhi grassroots groups that emerged during the initiation of AIDS work in 1994 for gay men and at the 1995 Fourth World Conference on Women, which gathered hundreds of lesbians from around the world in Beijing.4 How2. Chris Berry, “Wedding Banquet: A Family (Melodrama) Affair,” in his Chinese Films in Focus: 25 New Takes (London: British Film Institute, 2003), 183. 3. Lala is a slang term in China for same-sex desiring women and includes lesbian, bisexual, and trans women. 4. Katie King, “‘There Are No... (shrink)

Those who have read me, in particular those who have read “Paul de Man’s War,” know very well that I would have quite easily accepted a genuine critique, the expression of an argued disagreement with my reading of de Man, with my evaluation of these articles from 1940-42, and so on. After all, what I wrote on this subject was complicated enough, divided, tormented, most often hazarded as hypothesis, open enough to discussion, itself discussing itself enough in advance for me (...) to be able to welcome questions, suggestions, and objections. Provided this was done so as to demonstrate and not to intimidate or inflict wounds, to help the analysis progress and not to score points, to read and to reason and not to pronounce massive, magical, and immediately executor verdicts. Five of the six “responses” that I reread last night are written, as one used to say, with a pen dipped in venom. Less against the de Man of 1940-42, perhaps, then against me . Less against me, in truth, than against “Deconstruction” . How can the reader tell that these five “critical responses” are not “responses,” critical texts or discussions, but rather the documents of a blinded compulsion? First of all, the fact that they are all monolithic. They take into account none of the complications of which my text, this is the very least one can say, is not at all sparing. They never seek to measure the possibility, the degree, or the form, as always happens in an honest discussion, of a partial agreement on this or that point. No, everything is rejected as a block; everything is a block and a block of hatred. Even when, here or there, someone makes a show of being moved by my sadness or my friendship for de Man, it is in order to get the better of me and suggest that I am inspired only by friendship, which will appear ridiculous to all those who have read me. Inspired by friendship means for those people misled by friendship. How foreign this experience must be to them! Jacques Derrida is Directeur d’Études at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales as well as professor at the University of California, Irvine, and visiting professor at the Graduate School of the City University of New York. His most recent publication in English is the collection Limited Inc , which includes a new afterword, “Toward an Ethic of Discussion.” Peggy Kamuf is professor of French at the University of Southern California. Her most recent book is Signature Pieces: On the Institution of Authorship . She has also contributed essays to Reading de Man Reading and Responses: On Paul de Man’s Wartime Journalism , and is currently editing A Derrida Reader. (shrink)

We present a theory of decision by sampling (DbS) in which, in contrast with traditional models, there are no underlying psychoeconomic scales. Instead, we assume that an attribute’s subjective value is constructed from a series of binary, ordinal comparisons to a sample of attribute values drawn from memory and is its rank within the sample. We assume that the sample reflects both the immediate distribution of attribute values from the current decision’s context and also the background, real-world distribution of attribute (...) values. DbS accounts for concave utility functions; losses looming larger than gains; hyperbolic temporal discounting; and the overestimation of small probabilities and the underestimation of large probabilities. Ó 2005 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Feminist Studies 47, no. 2. © 2021 by Feminist Studies, Inc. 419 Paul Amar Insurgent African Intimacies in Pandemic Times: Deimperial Queer Logics of China’s New Global Family inWolf Warrior 2 This essay offers a new paradigm of “deimperial queer analysis” that reveals the tension between the People’s Republic of China’s extractive expansionism in Africa and its claim to solidarity with Africans against white supremacy and Northern imperialism. China (...) has been labeled an “anti-imperial empire” that forcefully challenges previous Euro-American imperial legacies—all while it verges on reenacting them.1 A critical way it resolves this geopolitical tension is through the articulation of a mission for global China, and since 2017, the heroic filmic fictional figure of the “Wolf Warrior” anchors such an approach. The Wolf Warrior is a gorgeous, muscled, Chinese male rogue soldier in exile who adventures through the archipelago of the PRC’s shipping, mining, and medical projects across the Global South to battle white mercenaries, corrupt Asian businessmen, and local pirates—all while saving Africa from a ravaging pandemic. Extending a hugely popular film series, the release in 2017 of the blockbuster Wolf Warrior 2 (abbreviated below as Wolf 2) unleashed a worldwide social media frenzy as well as a revolution in diplomatic tone and protocol for China. In these ways, Wolf Warrior 2 came to mark the debut of the global PRC as a hegemonic structure 1. David Armitage, “The Anti-Imperial Empire?” Times Literary Supplement, no. 6018, August 3, 2018, https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/the-anti-imperialempire -american. 420 Paul Amar of feeling with an attendant popular cultural logic, launching a cast of military characters, humanitarian imaginaries, and gendered rebranding initiatives. These fused into a global cultural megaproject with the PRC presenting itself as a leader in responding to the COVID-19 pandemic in the Global South—a time the PRC has officially branded as its “Rejuvenation Era” of “Stepping Out into the World.” This essay shows how exactly this Wolf Warrior imagination has legitimized a new global regime, but I also reveal how, paradoxically, the Wolf Warrior regime has offered a distinct, more subversive worlding project. I argue here that the utopia immanent in this project can be revealed by interpretively turning this Wolf universe inside out through a deimperial queer analysis that honors and combines a Third World feminist lens and the “Asia as Method” approach with Danmei/BL and Slash queer-feminist fanfiction hacks. Danmei is a Chinese (originally mainly Tawainese) fanfiction genre that subverts mainstream heteronormative narratives by erotically aestheticizing and renarrating male-male intimacies within mainstream plotlines from feminist perspectives. BL (short for “boylove ”) is a similar Japanese fanfiction genre, and Slash is the term used in English for the queer/feminist hacking and excavation of sublimated and particularly utopian gender and sexuality plots from within seemingly conventional heteronormative or patriarchal popular-cultural texts. The everted or inside-out epistemology given expression here uses a set of non-phallogocentric lenses and decolonial feminist decoding practices. At stake is the urgency of not repeating the epistemic violence of conventional “anti-imperial” arguments, which tend to be heteronormative, statist, macho, and monolithic. Instead, the form of critique elaborated here brings questions of gender, race, and sexuality to the fore through a three-part approach. First, I identify the homoerotic register of the techno-infrastructural elements in the film. I generate close readings that detail the visual and genre codes of battle scenes, thug subjects, and piracy plots that forge a homoerotic model of rogue or “wolf” governmentality and that act as a metaphor for China’s techno -infrastructural rule. Second, this essay explores the gendered hauntings of supremacist humanism. I deploy a decolonial feminist lens to map the configuration of African women, female doctors, Maoist women insurgents, and feminized “flowerboys” as a rebel protectorate overseen by China’s phallic prerogative that is itself haunted by the specters of Euro-American humanist betrayal and white supremacy. Third, Paul Amar 421 I trace queer kinship utopias. I demonstrate that Wolf Warrior 2 rejuvenates a non-Western, queer, globalist kinship structure that triangulates Asian, white, and Black through adoption dramas and bromance bonds. Through these intimacies, an... (shrink)

ABSTRACT The imagination has always been thought to operate primarily in conjunction with the sense of vision, imagined objects and scenes being conjured up before the ‘mind’s eye’. In early nineteenth-century Scotland the natural philosopher David Brewster developed a theory of the imagination that explained its operation through a reversal of the normal processes of visual perception. These ideas were rooted in the mental philosophy of the eighteenth-century Scottish Enlightenment. For Brewster the mind’s eye was also the eye of the (...) body, and images from the memory and imagination were projected onto the retina in the same manner that images were projected onto the screen in a magic lantern show. This theory underpinned his belief that imagination played an essential role in scientific discovery. Brewster believed that this process was as essential to the discoveries of science as it was to the creation of great poetry. The writings of Brewster can tell us a great deal about the connections between science and literature in the early nineteenth century, as well as showing that the philosophy of science in contemporary Britain was far from monolithic. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Masao Abe and the Dialogue BreakthroughStephen RoweI am profoundly grateful to Masao Abe for many reasons, including his articulation of Zen and his responsiveness to my own work, but most especially for his breakthrough work on dialogue. For he, along with his Christian partner in dialogue, John B. Cobb Jr., has taken us to a new paradigm, one in which dialogue, in complementary relationship with our more particular practices (...) and traditions, can be valued as a religious practice.1 Together these two towering figures of our time have broken through the koan of abstracted universality versus incommensurable particularity, and hence opened up a possibility for the human future the significance of which cannot be overestimated.In October 1986, I had the good fortune to find myself at the Third North American Buddhist-Christian Theological Encounter, the stated theme of which was “Notions of Ultimate Reality in Buddhism and Christianity.” A critical tension was evident early on in this event. Masao Abe spoke very persuasively of the “perspec-tiveless perspective” of Zen, arising from the experience of sunyata as the negation of negation or the radicalizing of Nothingness, of Zen as the affirmation of radical return. John Cobb spoke with equal persuasiveness of our inescapable particularity as historical beings, our ineluctable locatedness, and the irreducible wisdom of Israel and Greece. Both of these opposing views seemed right. How could this be so?To heighten the juxtaposition, it was equally evident that there were three large propositions on which Abe and Cobb very much agreed: first, our need of transformation; second, that this must be mutual transformation; and, third, that transformation must be in the direction of a new universality of humankind, which Cobb describes as “a global memory.” 2 How is it possible for these powerful elements of agreement to be juxtaposed with the critical tension mentioned above? Cobb and Abe, not surprisingly, have their own responses to this question,3 and we can learn from what Abe says about universality and transformation, and how his understanding of both leads him to a specifically religious valuing of the dialogical encounter with the difference that is presented by Cobb.In the paper Masao Abe presented at the 1986 event, he proposed two crucial aspects of dialogue between world religions: (1) seeking clarification of the views peculiar to one’s own tradition through allowing the different views between traditions [End Page 123] to confront one another, and (2) being “free from the peculiarity of our own traditions in order to scrutinize the notion of ultimate reality itself most fitting to our contemporary human predicament and the future of humanity.” 4 The second aspect needs to involve “a very creative and penetrating discussion in which we must be radically critical of our own tradition so that we can re-examine and regrasp the essence of our religion from the more universal and more fundamental position,” and hence “find out the truly ultimate reality for the future of humanity.” 5There is a paradox here: Abe indicates both a more universal orientation and a reappropriation of the essence of our particular traditions. The key to movement beyond paradox as frustrating antinomy to paradox as gateway to vitality is the dialogical practice, and specifically dialogue in its association with mutual transformation and the emergence of a new universality of humankind. For Abe, this turns on the understanding of “universal”:To become a “universal” world religion does not imply a monolithic religion common to East and West, but rather calls for a dynamic structure capable of freely assuming any form, oriental or occidental, according to the area in which it develops and yet without being confined to any limitation of that area. Such a dynamic realization of the “universal” world religion may become possible for Christianity and Buddhism should they genuinely regrasp their respective notions of universal salvation for all mankind.6Dialogue as locus of “dynamic realization” makes possible a new universality, which, for Abe, is based on the self-negation that leads to the awakening of the “true Self,” and “enter[ing] the third historical age of mankind, namely the age of Self-awakened cosmology.” Because “true investigation of the self is always... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Craig Walton 1934-2007Rudolf A. Makkreel and Gerald A. PressThe Journal of the History of Philosophy is saddened to report that Craig Walton died on October 11th, 2007. Professor Walton served the Journal for many years. He was involved with it from its inception in 1963 and knew personally many of the founding philosophers, who had been at the Claremont Graduate Center. He was the Book Review Editor from 1975 (...) until 1981 and was a member of the Board of Directors from 1978 until 2004, where he promoted the study of the history of philosophy in many ways and maintained our institutional memory. For instance, it was Craig who remembered the important roles Salih Alich and Oskar Piest played in our early history. From 2001–03, he was the Treasurer of the Board. He believed strongly in the cosmopolitan nature of scholarship, and, as Book Review Editor, he was tireless in his efforts to review books on the history of philosophy written in languages other than English.Craig was born on December 6, 1934, in Los Angeles and earned his doctorate in philosophy at Claremont Graduate University in 1965. His dissertation, De la recherche du bien: A Study of Malebranche's Science of Ethics, was approved in 1964 by a doctoral committee that included Theodore Waldman, Herbert Schneider, and Philip Merlan, though he also worked with Richard Popkin, the founder of the Journal. He taught at the University of Southern California, Northern Illinois University and Emory University before moving to the University of Nevada, Las Vegas in 1972. Craig was Chair of the Philosophy Department there from 1986 to 1989 and became the Director of the Institute for Ethics and Policy at UNLV in 1987. He held this post until his retirement in 2004. After his early work on Malebranche, for much of his career he was a scholar of David Hume and Thomas Hobbes; but he spent the last decade of his life urging that ethical issues be studied across the curriculum. Upon retiring from teaching, Craig extended his work in ethics by founding the Nevada Center for Public Ethics. The Chancellor of the Nevada System of Higher Education praised Craig as the voice of ethics in Nevada.As members of the Board of Directors of the Journal of the History of Philosophy, we remember Craig Walton for his enthusiasm for the history of philosophy and his warmth as a human being.Copyright © 2007 Journal of the History of Philosophy, Inc.... (shrink)

continent. 2.1 (2012): 40–43. Lance Olsen is a professor of Writing and Literature at the University of Utah, Chair of the FC2 Board of directors, and, most importantly, author or editor of over twenty books of and about innovative literature. He is one of the true champions of prose as a viable contemporary art form. He has just published Architectures of Possibility (written with Trevor Dodge), a book that—as Olsen's works often do—exceeds the usual boundaries of its genre as it (...) explores his interests in narrative theory and pedagogy. The book is a kind of “anti-textbook;” a performative polemic against the stale, conservative and monolithic conception of the literary that so often dominates institutional discourse around creative writing. The following interview takes the occasion of AoP's publication as a chance to speak with Olsen about the book itself as well as to engage with larger, unanswerable, questions about the futures and intersections of literature and education. —Ben Segal INTERVIEW: 1) First, I want to start before the beginning, with the title. I’m really fascinated by the concept it conjures. Can you say something about innovative/experimental/(choose your adjective) literature in relation to both ideas around architecture and possibility? Innovative or experimental are tremendously fraught adjectives, needless to say. But for the purposes of my book, they modify a fiction concerned with the questions: What is fiction? What can it do, and how, and why? Now, of course, what looks “innovative” or “experimental” to one at 17 may not be what looks “innovative” or “experimental” to one at 27 or 57, and what looks “innovative” or “experimental” in 1812 may not be what looks “innovative” or “experimental” in 2012. A certain existential and historical perspectivism is always at work. But I think it’s fair to say that innovative and experimental usually refer to a narrativity that includes a self-reflective awareness of and engagement with theoretical inquiry, concerns, and obsessions, as well as a sense of being in conversation with fiction across space and time. One can't create challenging writing in a vacuum; it has to challenge in relation to something. So contemporary writers interested in the subject are not only in pursuit of the innovative, but are also always-already writing subsequent to it—writing, that is, in its long wake. Architectures of Possibility conceives of creativity as a possibility space, a locale just outside our comfort zones where we can and should take multiple chances in order to imagine in new ways, explore fresh strategies for finding and cultivating ideas, re-view what it is we’re doing and why, better understand what Samuel Beckett meant when he wrote: “Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” It reminds us that there are other ways of narrating our worlds and ourselves than those we have inherited from the entertainment industry, the government, academia, previous writing, and so on. 2) AoP seems to be directed at several audiences (and purposes) simultaneously. What I mean is that it seems at times a polemic in favor of innovative literature, at other times a creative writing textbook, and still other times a guide to the network of publishers, journals, and programs that make up the current world of non-mainstream literary art in the U.S. In my mind, Architectures is a theorized anti-textbook about writing. Most textbooks on the subject (think of Janet Burroway’s Writing Fiction: A Guide to Narrative Craft , taught in most creative-writing classroom across the country) orchestrate how to construct conventional stories. They instruct from a place of power how to generate familiar stories that are repeated so often that many of us begin to take them as the primary model for narrativity, if not unconsciously as a kind of truth. The result, as Brian Kiteley points out in 3 A.M. Epiphany (one of the only other alternative textbooks about innovative writing around, by the way, and a tremendous repository of exercises), is merely competent texts. Architectures problematizes that gesture by outlining what conventional narrativity looks like, urging writers to think about its ideology of form as well as content, and invites them to imagine writing, not as a set of relatively stable conventions, but, rather, as a possibility space where everything can and should be thought, tried, challenged. It thereby rhymes with Roland Barthes’s definition of literature: the question minus the answer—which is to say Architectures poses complications to the act of writing rather than solutions. 3) One of the most notable things about the book is the use of interviews. This is also one of the reasons that I think the book works so well for a variety of audiences—that anyone with even a passing interest in the state and future of literature will have an interest in your conversation with people like Ben Marcus, Samuel Delany, and Lydia Davis. I was hoping you could just talk a little about how you chose these subjects to interview, how you edited the interview material, and which answers you received struck you the most. Experimentalism , like realism , wants to appear in the plural. The idea of gathering more than forty interviews (with the help of my awesome collaborator, Trevor Dodge, himself a fine innovative author) represents an attempt to suggest that: the wide, rich, exciting opportunities inherent in the term. There are interviews with younger writers, elder statesmen in the field, publishers, editors, hypermedia artists, comic book makers, and so on: Joe Wenderoth, Carole Maso, Scott McCloud, Nick Montfort, Kathy Acker, et al. Trevor and I decided to do flash interviews: short, concentrated Q&As, each focusing on a particular troubling of writing. We only lightly edited the results to match the manuscript’s overall style, and every interview arrived as a surprise housing several unexpected insights. Three brief examples: Michael Mejia, when asked about what he dreads when setting about writing: “Dread is an interesting word here. I associate it less with loathing or aversion, I suppose, than with a kind of productive fear. Do I dread a project’s failure? Sure, who doesn’t? Who wants to waste time on something that comes to nothing, or is unreadable? But then, what do these terms mean, and who or what defines a work as a ‘failure,’ as ‘waste,’ as ‘unreadable’? Should a work actually try to interrogate and exceed these conceptual limitations? My tendency is to write into dread in order to reveal to myself, as much as to any reader that may come after, the varied complacencies that make other, mostly more conventional writings, readable. It’s at the frontier between readability (security) and unreadability (terror) that I want to live creatively.” Carole Maso, when asked what she’d like a sentence to accomplish: “I think a sentence can if allowed carry emotional and intellectual states as they flee, as they come and go, an escaping essence difficult to hold in other ways. In this way I think the sentence can work as a phrase of music does, sounding something large and elusive in us. Alternatively it can provide sometimes a stability, an essence, a moment of being. Unlike music the sentence also of course carries language with all its potential for meaning making and memory traces and association with it as well. I probably love the accretion of sentences most—those patterns, that shimmer, that resonance.” Shelley Jackson, when asked what is innovative about the innovative: “The purpose of the innovative is, I think, to wake us up. We are not quite alive, most of the time; we occupy a sort of cartoon version of our lives, its lines made smooth by repetition. Writing can open the seams in that world, reintroduce us to the real lives that we have forgotten. Maybe all good writing is innovative in some sense, in that it shows or tells or makes you feel something you never felt before—something for which you have no cartoon ready.” 4) You talk a little about N. Katherine Hayles’s concept of Media Specific Analysis and propose the supplemental notion of Medium Specific Generation—basically taking Hayles and applying her thought from the perspective of the writer. I’ve been trying to develop somewhat related theoretical frameworks, so I was really excited to come upon this section of the book. I’m wondering if you can talk a little more about this idea and, in general, about the potentials that you see as being opened up by writers engaging with and exploiting different media as literary platforms? “Lulled into somnolence by five hundred years of print,” Hayles urges in her (at least for me) transformative 2004 essay, “Print is Flat, Code is Deep,” “literary analysis should awaken to the importance of media-specific analysis, a mode of critical attention which recognizes that all texts are instantiated and that the nature of the medium in which they are instantiated matters.” She goes on to argue critics should learn to become more attuned to the materiality of the medium under investigation—which is to say a story isn’t a story isn’t a story. Rather, the “same” story remediated through film is intrinsically different from that story remediated through conventionally printed books is intrinsically different from that story remediated through hypermedia. “Materiality,” Hayles goes on, “is reconceptualized as the interplay between a text’s physical characteristics and its signifying strategies, a move that entwines instantiation and signification at the outset.” My point in Architectures is simply to emphasize Media Specific Generation: the idea that when writing you should be cognizant, not only of the thematics of the text you are working on, and, as it were, the internal components of its narrativity (character, language, plot, etc.), but also of the material embodiment those components take, and, perhaps more important, the material embodiment those components can take. The idea that the way texts matter matters isn’t something usually addressed in any significant way in creative-writing classrooms and textbooks. It may almost go without saying such experimentation with typography, layout, and white space has a long tradition—certainly one that tracks back at least as far as Guillaume Apollinaire’s early twentieth-century Calligrammes , Laurence Sterne’s textually ribald eighteenth-century Tristram Shandy , although one could arguably plot a hypothetical trajectory that reaches to ancient Greek romances like Achilles Tatius’ second-century Leucippe and Clitophon . Experiments into atomic materiality and digital immateriality bracket the definition of “book” at the same time they highlight Michael Martone’s prediction of its present future as increasingly viral, collaborative, and ephemeral. Or, as Matthew Battles points out: the future of the “book” has already arrived, and it is “ethereal and networked” rather than “an immutable brick.”While conventional writing and reading practices are conceptualized as private, individual, relatively fixed experiences, many of the new forms indicate that writing and reading—from production through dissemination—are rapidly becoming public, collective, incrementally unfixed experiences. That strikes me as an astonishing set of opportunities for a writer to investigate. 5) Another concept you elaborate in AoP is that of limit texts, basically texts that, once you read them, change what you imagine as the shape/horizon/potential of literature. You provide a fantastic reading list of limit texts at the end of AoP. I was hoping you could talk about a few of them in terms of how they specifically operate as limit texts for you—how they expand your understanding of what literature could be or do. Karl Jaspers coined the word Grenzsituationen (border/limit situations) to describe existential moments accompanied by anxiety in which the human mind is forced to confront the restrictions of its existing forms—moments that make us abandon, fleetingly, the securities of our limitedness and enter new realms of self-consciousness. Death, for example. Limit texts are a variety of disturbance that carries various elements of narrativity to their brink so the reader can never quite imagine them in the same terms again. Once you’ve taken one down from the shelf, you’ll never be able to put it back up again. They won’t leave you alone. They will continue to work on your imagination long after you’ve read them. Simply by being in the world, they ask us to embrace difficulty, freedom, radical skepticism. One of the most important for me is Samuel Beckett’s The Unnamable . Instead of establishing conventional setting and building traditional character, from its first words it unsettles both: “Where now? Who now? When now?” That first trio of question marks broadcasts the thematics of the writing (“novel” may be too strong a word) that will follow: it is all about a voice (or, perhaps, voices, about the grammatical mistake of the first-person pronoun), a consciousness (maybe, again, too strong a word), often genderless, removed from place and chronology and socioeconomic reality, hovering in a state of perpetual aporia. All it knows is what it doesn’t know, and its not-knowing is blackly, sardonically comic. The Unnamable is the embodiment of an unreliable narrator—a subject position that can’t trust itself, let alone be trusted by a reader. It contradicts, takes back, digresses, undoes what it just did, forgets, lies, hallucinates gloriously. The language is abstract, disembodied, devoid of sensory data, grayish rather than painterly in texture. Without knowing this passage is from a novel, a reader might well conclude s/he were reading a patch of (anti-)Cartesian philosophy. It might be helpful to conceive of what Beckett is doing as post-genre writing, then, or perhaps what Raymond Federman referred to as critifiction—a mode that blurs conventional distinctions between theory and narrative. In completely different register, and much more recently, Anne Carson’s Nox blew me away. It takes the form of an elegy for her older brother, whom she didn’t know well and who died unexpectedly while on the run from the law in Europe. The thing itself arrives in a box that simulates a thick book, as well as the brother’s textual coffin. Open it, and inside you discover, not a codex, but an accordioned series of “pages” that folds out into an arrangement that suggests an ancient scroll (Carson is, perhaps illuminatingly, a professor of classics) made up of shards of her brother’s letters, old photographs, tickets, Carson’s observations, Catullus’ poem 101 (the one addressed to the Roman poet’s dead brother, a doubling of Carson’s situation), and extensive dictionary entries on all the words that compose that poem. The aggregate produces a collage about the impossibilities of aggregates, the impossibilities of understanding fully, of capturing absences in language. At times Nox feels less an example of what most readers consider a book than something closer to a three-dimensional work of assemblage art. It’s a beautiful mechanism for contemplating Media Specific Analysis, for urging us all to be more extreme. 6) Finally, I want to talk a little about pedagogy and institutions. I’m less interested in questions like “Are MFA programs good for writers?” than in questions about how your role as teacher informs your understanding of literature and your writing practice. I’m also very curious about your take on how commercially marginal literary art is largely patronized by large state institutions and at the same time often imagines itself as a critical and even possibly revolutionary practice. How have your own positions within universities and university-affiliated organizations shaped your thinking about them and about innovative literature? I can imagine in many ways it might make you even more critical. And (I know, another ‘and’...) how does AoP (especially given its relation to Rebel Yell , your previous text on creative writing) reflect your personal history and experience as a teacher and member of communities that are largely defined by institutions? In the classroom, I try to generate the pedagogical field I would have liked to have inhabited as a student, but didn’t. Roland Barthes has a lovely line about this: “We need to substitute for the magisterial [classroom] space of the past (the word delivered by the master from the pulpit above with the audience below, the flock, the sheep, the herd)—a less upright, less Euclidean space where no one, neither teacher nor students, would ever be in his final place.” Easier said than done, of course, but an important life project for all who think of themselves as educators. My own classroom, my own writing, and Architectures of Possibility itself attempt to create the sort of possibility space where, as I mentioned at the outset of our interview, everything should be thought, tried, challenged; where everything rhymes with Roland Barthes’s definition of literature: the question minus the answer. I’m not sure I could write what I’m writing now without the conversations I have almost daily with my students, the conversations they have with each other, the conversations we all have with the texts we study. Especially in light of the paradigm shift over the last, say, quarter century from academia as intellectual exploration to academia as McDonaldized trade school, the irony isn’t lost on me concerning the discrepancy between the safe harbor innovative authors find there and the cultural critiques those authors launch through their writing and pedagogical work. In 2001, I quit my full professorship at one institution precisely because of my disappointment over what had happened to the learning environment there. I had no intentions of reentering the field. In 2007, however, the University of Utah approached me, and I found myself in an environment much more hospitable to the sort of work I want to do—teaching experimental narrative theory and practice. It isn’t by any means a simple irony. One could easily argue innovative writing and pedagogy represents the trace of the paradigm Barthes suggests, and that trace is tremendously productive in all kinds of ways. Innovative writing has never and will never change the world in any large, macrocosmic way. But we’ve all had our lives changed, one by one, by an encounter with a difficult, rich, resonant piece of prose, poetry, music, art, you name it. We’ve all had our lives changed at the ahistorical, microcosmic moment by a class we’ve taken, a teacher we’ve studied with, to such an extent that we became, quite literally, different people. I just came across a stunning set of sentences from Derrida on the topic: “What is education? The death of the parents.” That’s what we’re all up to in the innovative, be it in written texts or the texts we call our classrooms or the texts we call our politics: trying to disrupt what both can and can’t be disrupted, trying to undo what both can and can’t be undone, continuously. (shrink)

"In a wide-ranging discussion the author examines the philosophy of Kant, Heidegger, Adorno and Derrida and looks at the works of modernist and postmodernist artists such as Cezanne, Debussy and Boulez. Lyotard addresses issues such as time and memory, the sublime and the avant-garde, and the relationship between aesthetics and politics. Throughout his discussion he considers the close but problematic links between modernity, progress and humanity, and the transition to postmodernity. Lyotard claims that it is the task of literature, philosophy (...) and the arts to bear witness to and explain this difficult transition." "This important contribution to aesthetic and philosophical debates will be of great interest to students in philosophy, literary and cultural theory and politics."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:100 Feminist Studies 45, no. 1. © 2019 by Feminist Studies, Inc. Carla Pascoe Leahy From the Little Wife to the Supermom? Maternographies of Feminism and Mothering in Australia since 1945 Men didn’t do anything.... The mother did for the child. The father went out to work.... I was a very determined, modern woman, but I didn’t mind being the little wife. —Marjorie, 1950s mother1 There were competing narratives. (...) One was a woman’s place is full time mothering in the home.... And then there was the feminist movement which said women can do it all.... There was level of unreality about both of them. I did feel really conflicted. —Sally, 1970s mother I read a headline today that said I send my kids to childcare and I refuse to feel guilty.... I feel the guilt a little bit but not enough to stop me from sending them, and I still know that in the long run... it’s far better for me to work and... I don’t want to be a stay at home mum for the rest of my life. —Ariana, 2010s mother 1. All interviewees are referred to by pseudonyms. Where permission is granted by the interviewee, interview material is preserved at Museums Victoria in Melbourne, Australia. All interviews are in the possession of the author. “Marjorie” was interviewed by the author on June 27, 2014; “Sally” was interviewed by the author on March 8, 2014; “Ariana” was interviewed by the author on April 5, 2017. Carla Pascoe Leahy 101 The daily lives and long-term aspirations of Australian mothers have undergone significant changes over the past seventy years, alongside shifting cultural and personal concepts of mothering, employment, and female identity. At face value, these quotes from three generations of Australian mothers imply a trajectory of shifting understandings of care, work, gender, and subjectivity, with women’s self-identity increasingly associated with paid work outside the home. Each of these women positions herself in relation to the dominant gender culture at the time she experienced matrescence.2 Marjorie, who had her children in the 1950s, characterizes herself as “the little wife” and recalls being contented with her role as a stay-at-home mother. Sally, who became a mother in the late 1970s, remembers wanting to believe that “women can do it all” without sacrificing family or career, but she experienced this radical ideal as conflicted at both a cultural and personal level. Ariana, a twenty-first-century mother, feels ambivalent about sending her children to childcare, but had always assumed that she would combine paid work with mothering. Despite this seemingly linear progression from a female identity centered on mothering to one focused on paid work, I argue that closer attention to these maternal narratives reveals that changing gender discourses were experienced as riven with internal contradictions by individual mothers. Drawing on a new collection of fifty-six oral history interviews co-created with Australian women about their experiences of becoming mothers, I will analyze the ways in which changing cultural understandings of selfhood, work, care, and gender have played out in the lives of mothers from 1945 to the present. When I started this project, I envisaged it partially as a history of my grandmother’s, my mother’s, and my own maternal generations. In this sense, it is a record of the living memory of Australian mothering; an archive of the maternal memories still circulating in contemporary Australia. But it is also a history of Australian mothering before, during, and after the women’s liberation movement of the 1970s. The women’s movement initiated fundamental shifts in the ways Australians thought about women’s role in society, 2. Matrescence is a term coined by Dana Raphael to describe the experience of becoming a mother for the first time. See Dana Raphael, “Matrescence, Becoming a Mother, a ‘New/Old’ Rite de Passage,” in Being Female: Reproduction, Power, and Change, ed. Dana Raphael (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1975). 102 Carla Pascoe Leahy their relationships to men and children, and their capabilities in relation to paid and unpaid work. My contention is that the women’s liberation movement unsettled and complicated Australian women’s relationships to... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Feminist Studies 47, no. 2. © 2021 by Feminist Studies, Inc. 279 A Report on Underage Prostitutes Zhai Yongming Translated by Petrus Liu and Lisa Rofel An underage prostitute has been called a pretty babe again She wears a scanty, floral-patterned lace dress Her long legs titillate Her mother is even more beautiful (than she) They appear like sisters, “one looks like an antelope...” All the men like babes (...) like her Babes like facing the camera But the underage prostitute I saw was not like this She was only 12, skinny, and she wore filthy clothes You could fit a whole world in her eyes But they had no room for a single tear Her father is a peasant, still young But his hair already white For three months her father Searched everywhere for her His lost baby The underage prostitute’s three months Nearly one hundred days Three hundred men Not a simple number She doesn’t understand why So many old, ugly, filthy men 280 Zhai Yongming Want to climb on top of her belly She doesn’t understand how these things come about The only thing she knows is that her body becomes light and empty Certain things taken from it She is seen as a beauty without a brain She probably doesn’t know anything She counts only during the night Her count reaches over three hundred Figures with no names no surnames no addresses Together they are called customers The numbers like ancient symbols inside a tomb Disappeared before the sun comes up Reading the newspaper I think: I cannot write a poem about this I cannot change poetry into that I cannot chew the poem into a straightforward cackling, boom bang sound I cannot hammer the words into pieces the teeth gnaw on Those illnesses those operations Those numbers added to her age, twelve years old Poetry, bandage, photograph, memory Damaged my eyeballs (The zone in the retina where light and obscurity make contact/meet) Makes all too clear: it’s no use Injuries no one cares about Just some numbers you see every day; but they are Creating a lifetime of misery for some Only a part of her is in the news photo A twelve-year-old standing together with other girls You can’t tell she’s missing an ovary It’s only a news item Each day our eyes process numerous pieces of information They control our delights as consumers They skim news stories like this without much thought Information overload, hotlines, and the international media An enormous sackcloth erasing one person’s humble wounds from view Zhai Yongming 281 We just gaze It gets rolled and stuffed into a black iron trash can... (shrink)

We have previously shown that several brain areas are activated both during sequence learning at wake and during subsequent rapid-eye-movements (REM) sleep (Nat. Neurosci. 3 (2000) 831– 836), suggesting that REM sleep participates in the reprocessing of recent memory traces in humans. However, the nature of the reprocessed information remains open. Here, we show that regional cerebral reactivation during posttraining REM sleep is not merely related to the acquisition of basic visuomotor skills during prior practice of the serial reaction time (...) task, but rather to the implicit acquisition of the probabilistic rules that defined stimulus sequences. Moreover, functional connections between the reactivated cuneus and the striatum—the latter being critical for implicit sequence learning—are reinforced during REM sleep after practice on a probabilistic rather than on a random sequence of stimuli. Our results therefore support the hypothesis that REM sleep is deeply involved in the reprocessing and optimization of the high-order information contained in the material to be learned. In addition, we show that the level of acquisition of probabilistic rules attained prior to sleep is correlated to the increase in regional cerebral blood flow during subsequent REM sleep. This suggests that posttraining cerebral reactivation is modulated by the strength of the memory traces developed during the learning episode. Our data provide the first experimental evidence for a link between behavioral performance and cerebral reactivation during REM sleep. © 2003 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. (shrink)

Lloyd Berkner , radio engineer and ionospheric physicist, was among a small circle of power brokers who helped bring American science and the American state closer together during World War II and the early years of the Cold War. In this exemplary biographical study, Allan Needell, a historian at the Smithsonian Institution's National Air and Space Museum, gives a well‐documented account of Berkner's life and career and a nuanced examination of how American scientists and engineers defined and balanced the interests (...) of their professions and of the national security state during those crucial years.A product of the Midwest prairie, Berkner was an accomplished radio operator before entering the University of Minnesota to study electrical engineering and to train as a Naval Reserve aviator. The Bureau of Standards hired Berkner as a radio engineer in 1928, just in time for him to participate in Richard Byrd's highly publicized Antarctic expedition. The adventure helped form what Needell calls Berkner's “technocratic vision” that justified science both as a heroic exploration of the unknown and as a prime mover of technology and human progress. Berkner energetically pursued this vision of science, first at the Bureau of Standards and then at the Carnegie Institution of Washington , where he directed internationally respected research on ionospheric physics.World War II honed Berkner's skills in instrument building and organization. On active duty he served as the naval liaison at the MIT Rad Lab to produce radars and helped install them on naval aircraft. He also came into close contact with Vannevar Bush, I. I. Rabi, Jerome Wiesner, and other influential scientists who shared his enthusiasm for collaboration with the military. A rising star at the end of World War II, Berkner worked to build a science‐state partnership for the ensuing Cold War, which he saw as a continuation of the struggle between democracy and dictatorship.Berkner helped bring scientific expertise to bear on American defense and foreign policy in the 1940s and 1950s as executive secretary of the military's Joint Research and Development Board and as a consultant to the State Department and the CIA. He drafted the famous “Berkner report” on science and American foreign policy, directed Project Troy on the overseas operations of the Voice of America, and participated in the heated debate over continental defense against a possible Soviet nuclear attack. Berkner's election to the National Academy of Sciences in 1948, despite the lack of an advanced degree, undoubtedly aided his agenda, as did his assuming in 1951 the presidency of the Associated Universities, Inc. .In the 1950s, Berkner helped initiate the International Geophysical Year , which led to the launching of the Soviet Sputnik in 1957. Did Berkner propose the satellite component of the IGY as a cover for U.S. satellite intelligence programs? Needell finds no smoking gun but presents strong circumstantial evidence that intelligence was indeed a factor in Berkner's thinking. The connection apparently posed no moral challenge for Berkner, who maintained an abiding faith in the harmonious goals of American science and state—what he called the “unity of democracy.” Not everyone shared Berkner's faith, however. The geophysicist Merle Tuve, Berkner's boss at Carnegie, for example, feared government control of science and fought against Berkner both at the CIW and in national science policy. In the end, Needell sees Berkner as a kind of broker who brought American scientists together with the state through both strategies of insulation and overt integration of interests and action.Based on rich archival sources, Science, Cold War, and the American State is a superb social and political study of American science and technology rendered through Lloyd Berkner's life and times. Needell writes with clarity and achieves a nice balance between narrative and contextual analysis, which makes the book suitable for teaching courses. For scholars, the study raises fascinating questions for further research. One wonders, for example, to what extent Needell's intriguing hypothesis—that Berkner's activism derived from his nonacademic background—can be applied to other scientist‐statesmen. Above all, the book's focus on the ease with which Berkner moved between the worlds of science, government, and national security points to the need to reformulate the well‐known debate between the historians Paul Forman and Daniel Kevles over who was using whom in the U.S. science‐state relationship during the Cold War. Neither the science nor state community was monolithic, and further comparative studies of mediators on the scene such as Berkner should help deepen our understanding of the dynamics of that partnership. (shrink)

This paper proposes a theory of how conscious emotional experience is produced by the brain as the result of many interacting brain areas coordinated in working memory. These brain areas integrate perceptions of bodily states of an organism with cognitive appraisals of its current situation. Emotions are neural processes that represent the overall cognitive and somatic state of the organism. Conscious experience arises when neural representations achieve high activation as part of working memory. This theory explains numerous phenomena concerning emotional (...) consciousness, including differentiation, integration, intensity, valence, and change. Ó 2007 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. (shrink)

Recent research has shown that mind wandering recruits executive resources away from the external task towards inner thoughts. No studies however have determined whether executive functions are drawn away in a unitary manner during mind wandering episodes, or whether there is variation in specific functions impacted. Accordingly, we examined whether mind wandering differentially modulates three core executive functions—response inhibition, updating of working memory, and mental set shifting. In three experiments, participants performed one of these three executive function tasks and reported (...) their attentional state as either on-task or mind wandering at random intervals. We found that mind wandering led to poorer performance in the response inhibition and working memory tasks, but not the set-shifting task. These findings suggest that mind wandering does not recruit executive functions in a monolithic manner. Rather, it appears to selectively engage certain executive functions, which may reflect the adaptive maintenance of ongoing task performance. (shrink)

This piece, included in the drift special issue of continent. , was created as one step in a thread of inquiry. While each of the contributions to drift stand on their own, the project was an attempt to follow a line of theoretical inquiry as it passed through time and the postal service(s) from October 2012 until May 2013. This issue hosts two threads: between space & place and between intention & attention . The editors recommend that to experience the (...) drifiting thought that attention be paid to the contributions as they entered into conversation one after another. This particular piece is from the BETWEEN INTENTION & ATTENTION thread: Jeremy Fernando, Sitting in the Dock of the bay, watching... * R.H. Jackson, Reading Eyes * Gina Rae Foster, Nyctoleptic Nomadism: The Drift/Swerve of Knowing * Bronwyn Lay, Driftwood * Patricia Reed, Sentences on Drifitng * David Prater, drift: a way * * * * * Australia, Summer, 2012. …. essential humanity exists, and runs its course, within a system whose first principle is the preservation of balance. And arching over it all, is the logos of The Dreaming. How shall we state this when we fully understand it I do not know, but I should think we are more likely to ennoble it than not. Equilibrium ennobled is abidingness.” 1 On return to birthplace I write. Caught between jetlag and surprise, a relentless sun cracks my skin. Upright words fall under cockatoo roars. The attempt to settle, to be attentive, is shaken. Some kind of Dreaming surrounds and elements intrude without consent. Homeless at home. Exhausted, I fight sleep’s hard currents. Their victory would confuse the body clock, so the in-between wins. Half-there — half-awake — here in this place — I am driftwood. Driftwood: wood floating in or washed ashore by a body of water. A severed limb set adrift from the birthing body. Tossed from home it’s cast into processes of wind, water, sand, bacteria, decay and movement. Driftwood is orphaned members at the mercy and agency of weather, currents, submersion, and being thrown into dry world. Driftwood — singular plural. White man got no dreaming. Him go ‘nother way. White man, him go different Him got road belong himself. 2 photo: Bronwyn Lay The old man comes from the northern rivers. A while ago, he could no longer pay attention to wage slavery, so retreated north to be with dead redgum that lay abandoned in dry riverbeds. Derived from driftwood peoples tossed here by the sea, he followed the fragile river veins of his birth. He walked along water bodies and through country’s lungs. Some kind of displaced ancestral song compelled his leathered hands to pick up centuries old driftwood from flood plains. It emerged from under muddy creeks, was flung up by salt soaked coves, pushed underground by cracks in the claypan and lay embedded in mud and salinized soil. Smoothed and grooved in equal measure, the branches were marked by an organic alphabet that preceded him. As he held the wood, he touched decomposing circles that started with a blast and never ceased writing into abandoned flesh. When the ute was full the old man returned home having been away with the stuff that ‘growed him up’. His shed filled with red sawdust and the sound of tools at labour. His hands sculptured driftwood. History carved into itinerant skin. I sit opposite the old man. His body no longer holds the repetition of carpentry. He can no longer gift driftwood its detail. Outside redgum bits lie scattered around the fence line and beside the dam. He crouches over an unreliable computer researching the massacres of indigenous peoples that occurred along the same river veins that ‘growed him up’ long ago. Staring into the remnants of frontier resistance that he and I inherit, his eyes nurture fire. He discovers severed limbs and the slicing of tribes. In the ashes of sentences he sifts the lies that smoulder into our histories. In the 30’s the anthropologist Stanner said that due to certain factors — lack of change and isolation — the ideal and real come very close together in indigenous Dreaming. They are a people who were able to defeat history. 3 “If the Ideal and the Real drift too far away from one another (as they did at the end of the middle ages and seem increasingly to do this century) men face some difficult options. They have to change their way of life, or their philosophy, or both, or live unhappily somewhere in-between.” 4 Stanner says Indigenous Dreaming is blackfella thinking. 5 Dreamtime is not ethereal, not utopic, or otherworldly. It’s fused with the real and it’s not mine. I might never understand, but it’s the substance of my home. This here place ‘growed me up’. Is driftwood the unhappy in-between? Is it a radical itinerant written upon by currents? Where are we? The settler restless? photo: Alison Pouliot I return to the bush late one night, tired from high talk in city cafes, to find the old man at his computer. He’s either researching his white farming ancestors, or tracing unrecorded massacres of blackfellas. I laugh, “You know Dad, if you were indigenous you might go out by the dam and sing up your ancestors rather than try find them on a screen.” He peers over his glasses. His stare delivers an ancestral scold. He’s white man. Of course he archives. This is our way. One may see that, like all men, he is a metaphysician in being able to transcend himself. With the metaphysician goes a mood and spirit, which I can only call a mood or spirit of assent, neither despair nor resignation, optimism not pessimism, quietism nor indifference. The mood, and the outlook beneath it, make him hopelessly out of place in a world in which the renaissance has triumphed only to be perverted, and in which the products of secular humanism, rationalism and science challenge their own hopes, indeed their beginnings.” 6 The clinamen sometimes comes abstract — the rarefied swerve of possibility. But in the place we gather &mdash where this text has landed — in the heart of settler colony denial — the clinamen reminds of familiar violence and goes maximum. The earth’s swerve. Topography’s tip. Physics gone violent. Here, drift is initiated by the tear of flesh, scurvy voyages, frontier blood and the deracination from belonging. Here, war precedes drift. We all got tossed. Here. Pay attention. The country has its own gaze. ‘Lest we forget’. The seasonal turn on aborescent substances starts with a fall, an upwards rupture, a drop, a cut, a storm, a violence, a loss, forced migration, refugees, agricultural imperialism, settler wheat and poisoned rations. Pay attention to aftermath debris. Don’t drift too far from the real. History hasn’t settled into the water. It still tosses limbs back and forth. Surrounded by the backdrop of Dreaming country the old man archives and dreams. Both ways of settling into the real. But lest we forget, time, in this place, has no textual tick — tock. Our bodies know this, even though we persist with shipwreck illusions. It’s difficult being here. Here. Pay inattention. I walk through eucalyptus, over dried out clay pans and under kookaburras. It’s been two years in-between. This time country speaks strong underfoot. Forget books, forget texts, forget other lands and times, beginning and end. Be here. All falls raw. Leaves drop and refuse to compost. Bark untethers quick. Light denudes worlds. The heated horizon melts monoliths. It’s enough to make Cartesians shiver. Awake. Refuse the temptation to run. Have enough courage to drift into here. Love with a gum tree. Stand with her whole and dissolving. She moves light between our limbs, tossing them to wind. She — the original romance — is the dream that dares touch flesh and reaches over nightmares with elemental desire. I gaze and lose me. There’s no distance. The land that ‘growed me up’ speaks with symbiotic breath. There’s no division, no separation, no other. The gum is plastic arborescence. You be my body for me, always were. …..but I wake to driftwood histories and recall slaughters. Drifted, wicked fellow citizen — the other is someone else’s blind sleep. Betrayal maintains the other as mine. Archives reveal this place doesn’t belong to me. Body articulates that it became here. Gumtree cares not………her arms take me in anyway. “Like all men he is a philosopher in being able to use his power of abstract reason. His genius, his metier, and in some sense — his fate is that because of endowment and circumstance this power has channelled itself mainly into one activity, making sense out of social relations among men living together.” 7 The old man excavates seven generations of settler ancestors. They’re an ordinary lot with written-upon skin. He records genocides that occurred alongside his peoples fertility. Bodies rise from riverbeds like sovereign sacrifices. It hurts. It disrupts. He labours at the past with gestures that might go unnoticed in a country suffocated by rich amnesia. Inside walls, he seems attentive to historical details. Outside he seems inattentive to time, lost to us and embedded in a family of active matter — the bush. His driftwood skin appears around my eyes - grooves of experience, the rush of cruel sun, the push of blind winds, and the love of everything. The sovereign’s reluctant children are thrown here by, with and through blood, but country gets in and sculpts us here. photo: Chris Corrigan “But his abstractions do not put him at war with himself.” 8 The kangaroo family appears at dusk. When the sun is soft I follow the old man into the back paddock. Children skip behind us. In-between generations, I step into the old man’s driftwood leanings. My feet find traces of his understanding – the archivist that reads trees. Here, on home dirt, inattention and attention collapse as we wander into where we are. The roo family gaze at us. Through the grass the old man’s wooden finger articulates kin’s details. He points to the head male, the mother holding a joey in pouch and the young warriors side by side. My children, quieter than ever, meet the laser - eyed silence of another family. In half-light Dad, me, and the kids mirror the kangaroo constellation and stand gentle together. At the bushblock’s limit we encounter ancestral desires. White peoples are subject to driftwood histories. We’re severed limbs attempting to fuse here now, with what was, only to discover our skin becomes racked and embedded with the weather. Into the shelter and fissures of this difficult and ambiguous inheritance, I fall into dream light until balance saturates. Light breaks when the kangaroos move. They bounce someplace else without effort or impact. We turn and tread through the dark towards home. It’s time to sleep. Driftwood skin covers the country. Dreaming is still. photo: Bronwyn Lay NOTES W.E.H. Stanner, The Dreaming and Other Essays , (Melbourne: Black Inc. Agenda, 2009), 72. Ibid., 56. Stanner is recalling one intelligent old man who said to him, “with a cadence almost as though he had been speaking in verse.” Ibid., 60. Ibid., 69. Ibid., 58. Ibid., 67. Ibid., 68. Ibid., 59.  . 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Complex functions of the central nervous system such as learning and memory are believed to result from the modulation of the synaptic transmission between neurons. The sequence of events leading to the fusion of synaptic vesicles at the presynaptic active zone and the detection of this signal at the postsynaptic density involve the activity of ion channels and neurotransmitter receptors. Their accumulation and dynamic exchange at synapses are dependent on their interaction with synaptic scaffolds. These are synaptic structures composed of (...) adaptor proteins that provide binding sites for receptors and channels as well as other synaptic proteins. While in its entirety the synaptic scaffold is a relatively stable structure, individual adaptor proteins exchange at a fast time scale. These properties of scaffolds help to ensure the stability of synaptic transmission while permitting the modulation of synaptic strength. Here, we review the dynamics of the synaptic scaffold and of adaptor proteins in relation to their roles in the organisation of the synapse as well as in the clustering and trafficking of receptor proteins. BioEssays 30:1062–1074, 2008. © 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:398 Feminist Studies 46, no. 2. © 2020 by Feminist Studies, Inc. Becky Thompson In the Slip Between Coasts Every morning the sea announces the day intimate crashing against the high stone wall we scan the waves for black dots floating becoming new moons and then arms waving rafts carrying the world Cartography in Greece after Zeina Hashem Beck’s “To Hamra” Here is the Oleander bush where a family (...) hid before their walk up the hill from Eftalou to Molyvos after eating eggs and croissants in my seaside room thirteen pairs of shoes lined up on the patio slate Here is seaweed beach where one raft landed in perched sea another behind carrying the elders and children Becky Thompson 399 stalled, taking in saltwater coast guard delayed in Petra sea ten, twenty, fifty minutes shouting and prayer finally a rescue exhaustion lining every pore They say memories fade, mine multiply, a cacophony tossing Here is the beach where the Syrian man strapping muscles and whimsical eyes gave me his salmon shirt with a finely made collar his friends ordered selfies called home saying yes began the climb to Mytilini defiant, alive There were moments of freedom jubilation in the air rest on the beach with dates and cool water children tossing stones into the sea lovers sitting close, feet in Europe cell phones that worked, telegraphing safety What does it mean to miss the intimacy of disaster? Now rescue teams mechanic pick-ups intercept rafts before shore whisk people away to Skala Sikamia then Moria no time to touch sand rest with the breeze Here is life jacket graveyard next to the dump perched between two hills above the seacoast 400 Becky Thompson a German couple toots up on a scooter taking photographs while eating nine-grain toast academics from the US talking postmodern flight a film crew from Barcelona picking through jackets amid ashes and twisted plastic crows memorize the wind as two garbage trucks trudge up the road bringing old fish and more jackets I wave at the sheepherder as I walk down the hill Save the people, bury the dead, photograph the remains, repeat Here is the hotel by the beach in Petra where children would run to the iron swing set let the arc carry them then jump off dance in the sprinklers the owner emerging mumbling generations handing us apricots and bottles of water Here is the computer store where the young Greek tells me he can’t copy my poems since he sees Arabic words menacing the page Here is my patience as I sit in his smoke ask him about his family and dancing Becky Thompson 401 eye his automatic weapon perched next to a wooden door Down the highway is a new bar next to Moria. Of course. Here is barbed wire that doubles as a fence a clothesline for diapers space to toss out rotten food Here is the highway lined with pickups and two-door sedans young Greek employment guarding people in tents Here is a baby carriage a young mother pushes that seconds as a grocery cart and shade for her five-year-old a step up from before when babies were in arms toddlers walking Here is the refugee people center where they built a strong swing set men lifting weights growing rings around their arms women stretching out in a new room eyeing the Lesvos sky Here are the streets of Mytilini looking like Beirut the Greeks who ran from Turkey the Turks who kicked out Afghans the Afghans who wish they were Syrian 402 Becky Thompson Syrians joined by Congolese— teachers, holy seers, and men selling hats. The sidewalk sparkles an atlas in transit.... (shrink)

In her 2006 book ‘‘My Stroke of Insight” Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor relates her experience of suffering from a left hemispheric stroke caused by a congenital arteriovenous malformation which led to a loss of inner speech. Her phenomenological account strongly suggests that this impairment produced a global self-awareness deficit as well as more specific dysfunctions related to corporeal awareness, sense of individuality, retrieval of autobiographical memories, and self-conscious emotions. These are examined in details and corroborated by numerous excerpts from (...) Taylor’s book. Ó 2008 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. (shrink)

Brain‐derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) is the most‐abundant neurotrophin in the brain. In mammals, it is synthesized as a precursor called proBDNF, which is proteolytically cleaved to generate mature BDNF. The BDNF gene is located on chromosome 11p13, and a functional single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) of this gene has been shown to produce a valine (Val)‐to‐methionine (Met) substitution in the proBDNF protein at codon 66 (Val66Met). Several papers suggest that this SNP is related to decreased hippocampal volume and hippocampus‐mediated memory performance (...) in humans. Recently, Chen et al.1 generated a variant BDNF mouse (BDNFMet/Met) that reproduces the phenotypic hallmarks in humans with a variant Met allele. In the behavioral analysis, BDNFMet/Met mice show increased anxiety‐related behaviors. This mini‐review examines the impact of Met substitution of proBDNF on anxiety‐related behaviors. BioEssays 29: 116–119, 2007. © 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Feminist Studies 46, no. 2. © 2020 by Feminist Studies, Inc. 327 Callie Danae Hirsch pandemic daydreams Artist’s Statement I am a painter who works in oils and acrylics on canvas and found objects. I am also a photographer as part of my daily practice. My work is an exploration of everything that surrounds me in my daily life, observing the overlooked, honing in and reimagining it. I seek (...) out discarded items on the streets, in parks, and on the beaches around the five boroughs of New York City and imagine their reincarnation. This series, pandemic daydreams, explores my subconscious in a time of profound anxiety. I sometimes drift off into sleep and, upon waking, remember clearly for a moment the scenario the dreamlet contained. A dream fragment during the day, or as I reframe it here as a daydream, allows my subconscious to float to the surface of consciousness. What is revealed is not always easily understood, but now it is the plague that plagues my sleeping life. Strange ideas emerge; comical, nightmarish, filled with chaos and disruption, the invisible made visible, interpreted from brush to canvas. The paintings serve as a visual diary of my psyche during the coronavirus outbreak, created using acrylic on canvas, measuring from 24 by 20 inches to 44 by 36 inches. My quarantine cocoon strolls include Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, where newly dug soil can be seen on numerous fresh graves as I make my way through the hills seeking fresh air and exercise. Rising smoke from the crematorium is a constant reminder of those we have lost. Migrating birdsong fills my ears, but death hovers in the whirlwind 328 Callie Danae Hirsch around us. Who are we losing today? What will remain of our pre-COVID life and society when this is over? When can we hug each other again? As the pandemic hit, I felt the desire to connect and reflect with others about what we are all losing: our elders, our community members, our friends, our family, and our “IRL” connections with each other. I look forward to the day when this chapter is a distant memory, but for now I will investigate the discomfort of our present moment.  All images shown in this art essay courtesy of Callie Danae Hirsch: Pandemic daydreams i– xvii, 2020. Acrylic on canvas, variable dimensions.  Pandemic daydreams vii, 24 × 36 × 1 inches. left to right  Pandemic daydreams i, 20 × 24 × ½ inches.  Pandemic daydreams xvii, 20 × 24 × ½ inches. this page, top to bottom  Pandemic daydreams xiii, 20 × 24 × ½ inches.  Pandemic daydreams xvi, 20 × 24 × ½ inches. opposite, top to bottom  Pandemic daydreams v, 20 × 24 × ½ inches.  Pandemic daydreams xv, 44 × 36 × 1 ½ inches. left to right  Pandemic daydreams ix, 16 × 20 × ½ inches.  Pandemic daydreams xii, 20 × 30 × 1 ½ inches. left to right  Pandemic daydreams xi, 20 × 24 × ½ inches.  Pandemic daydreams ii, 20 × 24 × ½ inches.  Pandemic daydreams viii, 20 × 24 × ½ inches.  Pandemic daydreams xiv, 20 × 24 × ½ inches. previous page  Pandemic daydreams vi, 20 × 28 × 1 ½ inches.  Pandemic daydreams iii, 20 × 24 × ½ inches.  Pandemic daydreams x, 48 × 36 × 1 ½ inches.... (shrink)

To test the hypothesis of a participation of inner speech in self-referential activity we reviewed 59 studies measuring brain activity during processing of self-information in the following self-domains: agency, self-recognition, emotions, personality traits, autobiographical memory, preference judgments, and REST. The left inferior frontal gyrus (LIFG) has been shown to sustain inner speech use. We calculated the percentage of studies reporting LIFG activity for each self-dimension. 55.9% of all studies reviewed identified LIFG (and presumably inner speech) activity during self-awareness tasks. Furthermore, (...) the LIFG was more frequently recruited during conceptual tasks (e.g., emotions, traits) than during perceptual tasks (e.g., agency, self-recognition). This supports the view of a relative involvement of inner speech in self-reflective processes. Crown Copyright © 2007 Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. (shrink)

I examine critically the application of information‐theoretic ideas to biological communication during embryonic development and in the functioning central nervous system (CNS). I show that intercellular communication relies mostly on simple signals whose role is to effect a selection among predetermined cellular states. Hence, a crucial role is played by cellular memory, which stabilizes such states. Memory in cells is partly located in the nuclear DNA; no less important however is (phenotypic) memory lying in the cell's organelles and compartments. Because (...) of combinatorial effects in gene expression patterns, cell memory is an enormously powerful mechanism, which also underlies plasticity, and thus constitutes the factor unifying genetic determination, plasticity and learning. Communication in the CNS is analyzed in some detail: here, cellular memory is embodied in anatomy (i.e., cell shape) and neurochemistry. These are the major, relatively “static” factors affecting the routing of neural impulses in the adult CNS. In addition, however, faster channeling is also required: action potentials must be directed to their targets along a few of exponentially many paths, and this dynamic routing is crucial for proper operation. I suggest that collective oscillatory modes may play a role in solving this addressing problem, in the same way that the clock signal gates the operation of man‐made computers. BioEssays 25:699–708, 2003. © 2003 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

Recently claims have been made for radical new insights in the field of invertebrate immunology that involve memory, specificity and/or maternal transfer of immunocompetence. For evidence these claims rely on phenomena, such as survival or reproductive capacity, observed at the level of the whole organism. The allure of these apparently revelatory hypotheses is that they are contrary to established views of innate immunity. They draw implicit analogy to adaptive responses in jawed vertebrates and the terminology used creates an incomplete and (...) misleading picture. We argue that the case for adaptive immunity in invertebrates based only on such phenomena is weak and flawed, as it can only be upheld if supported by descriptions of the underlying mechanisms. We caution against a reliance on this approach as a means of advancing this field—highlighting, as an example, some negative commercial implications of adopting this approach. BioEssays 29:1138–1146, 2007. © 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:684 Feminist Studies 43, no. 3. © 2017 by Feminist Studies, Inc. Megan Kaminski This Century This century is full-on burning the past past carrying back lost to re-memory the year brings millennial want: a bright new coat red shoes an end to oil pipelines and student loans encase us all in warmth not waged labor drab curtains pulled aside reveal window onto window echo us many permutations bring (...) responses wrought and metaled down empty that treasury steal back from church coffers there is something that binds more than moth-eaten sweaters more than stripped-soled shoes we wanting we to mean banks burning profits redistributed we holding the soft hands of we Megan Kaminski 685 This Century This century is not so good filled with tsunamis and snowstorms people displaced by capital and rising waters threaten to make even Kansas beach-front I’d like to stick a fork in the eye of the governor and the Koch brothers too help liberate people from bad shit minimum wage jobs and medical bills give all of us something real to be happy about like city parks clean water and a few fewer grams of rocket fuel in the arugula cats sunning themselves on warm days no old dudes wanting to mess with my uterus and a new sundress trimmed with ribbon This Century This century makes me say things about burning and baddies and whether poetry can really do much of anything unacknowledged legislator or just a lady ass atrophying perched in front of a laptop this century makes me write about changing and loving all of you and getting closer with warm-nosed nudges under your chin embraces while wearing my softest of sweaters these poems want to get out of my chair out of the house and the neighborhood out of capital and with people in favor of all of us animals and plants 686 Megan Kaminski This Century This century takes place in the streets in living rooms of friends in shared words exchanged across borders bridging the distance between you and me and we and ours and taking from board rooms and markets this century is full of things eroding making way for bodies for gardens for libraries for a commoning a burning of gates and fences and debts we spring forth in multitudes occupy more than street corners cordoned off we singing we and the streets the open fields... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Richard H. Popkin 1923-2005Harry M. Bracken and Richard A. WatsonRichard H. Popkin, founding editor of the journal of the History of Philosophy, died on April 14, 2005. He was 81 years old and had continued his research and writing to the last moment before he entered the hospital on march 21st with extreme respiratory difficulties.Popkin's The History of Scepticism from Erasmus to Descartes (1960) revolutionized the study and understanding (...) of early modern philosophy. Popkin entered the minds and world of thinkers from Erasmus to Descartes in a way few other scholars had done, and he showed how the development of philosophy and science was far from an easy series of steps from success to success. Instead, philosophers and scientists pursued a dozen lines from the scepticism of Sextus Empiricus through religious belief, atheism, numerology, astrology, alchemy, eschatology, magic, and millenarianism—a maelstrom of ideas out of which emerged the major figures and ideas of Modern philosophy and science. Dick once explained that actually he lived in the 17th century, and certainly he knew as many of those thinkers and their thoughts as did many people who actually lived at that time. Of course Popkin did not originate the notion of exploring the history of philosophy in the context of its times, but he made that approach central today. It led him not only through the Early Modern period, but also from medieval jewish philosophy to a critical analysis of the Kennedy assassination.Popkin received his PhD at Columbia University, and in his career he taught at the universities of Connecticut, Iowa, California (San Diego and Los Angeles), Washington University in St. Louis, and Harvey Mudd College. He served as the first editor of the Journal of the History of Philosophy, and as president of JHP, Inc. For many years, and was active in its operation for over four decades, having attended the annual meeting of the Board of Directors a little over a month before he died. After retirement, he lived in close association with the Clark Library in Los Angeles. He was well known to scholars and librarians throughout the world. Whatever library he visited, he was likely to find some obscure or hidden document that would either clear up some mystery, or give rise to a new problem. His memory was extraordinary. During his final years when he was virtually blind, he would sift through his mind, send assistants off to look for something that had to be in this or that library and write papers in his head for later dictation. Besides his memory, indispensable throughout his lifetime he had Julie, his co-worker and wife of 60 years, without whom, the Popkin we knew could not have existed.These few paragraphs are meant to be neither an obituary nor an adequate memorial. We were Dick's first two PhDs, and we were barely five years his junior. He treated us from the beginning as colleagues and he became a lifelong friend. He changed our lives, as he did the lives of many other aspiring scholars. We miss him.Copyright © 2005 Journal of the History of Philosophy, Inc.... (shrink)

I have practiced psychotherapy, family therapy, and hypnotherapy for over 25 years without a single board complaint or lawsuit by a client. For over 3 years, however, a group of proponents of the false memory syndrome (FMS) hypothesis, including members, officials, and supporters of the False Memory Syndrome Foundation, Inc., have waged a multimodal campaign of harassment and defamation directed against me, my clinical clients, my staff, my family, and others connected to me. I have neither treated these harassers or (...) their families nor had any professional or personal dealings with any of them; I am not related in any way to the disclosures of memories of sexual abuse in these families. Nonetheless, this group disrupts my professional and personal life and threatens to drive me out of business. In this article, I describe practicing psychotherapy under a state of siege and place the campaign against me in the context of a much broader effort in the FMS movement to denigrate, defame, and harass clinicians, lecturers, writers, and researchers identified with the abuse and trauma treatment communities. (shrink)

"In a wide-ranging discussion the author examines the philosophy of Kant, Heidegger, Adorno and Derrida and looks at the works of modernist and postmodernist artists such as Cezanne, Debussy and Boulez. Lyotard addresses issues such as time and memory, the sublime and the avant-garde, and the relationship between aesthetics and politics. Throughout his discussion he considers the close but problematic links between modernity, progress and humanity, and the transition to postmodernity. Lyotard claims that it is the task of literature, philosophy (...) and the arts to bear witness to and explain this difficult transition." "This important contribution to aesthetic and philosophical debates will be of great interest to students in philosophy, literary and cultural theory and politics."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved. (shrink)

The greatest intensity of “live” life is captured from as close as possible in order to be borne as far as possible away. Jacques Derrida. Echographies of Television . Rainer Ganahl has made a study of studying. As part of his extensive autobiographical art practice, he documents and presents many of the ambitious educational activities he undertakes. For example, he has been videotaping hundreds of hours of solitary study that show him struggling to learn Chinese, Arabic and a host of (...) other languages. The stacked boxes of tapes are then presented like minimalist monoliths, dense archives of effort. About fifteen years ago, Ganahl began photographing the lectures that he attends. At the time, he hadn’t seen anyone else doing it, so besides his spare selection of images of the speaker and the audience, much of the time the lectures would just pass into memory, undocumented, or recorded in writing alone. Since then, he has felt the transition to digital cause a significant shift in his process. At the same time, he has seen the habit become ubiquitous as others photograph, record, and videotape the lectures all around him. In keeping with the theme of this inaugural issue of continent. , can we propose each small grouping of photographs that result an isthmus stretching between two disparate bodies of mind? The first being the body of the lecture as spelled out in the title of each work – the experience of the event in all its constituent parts. The second is the body of the recipient, the listener, in this case an artist, who plays a minimal role just beyond the prescripted behavior of sitting and listening. He uses a gesture of documentation to draw a line between himself and the event, creating an artwork. Františka + Tim Gilman: As we mentioned before, the theme of the magazine for this issue is "isthmus." It seems like a very good way into your work, and it leads us to ask what connection you see between your photographs of the lecture and the lecture itself? Rainer Ganahl: The relationship is of course a concrete, pictorial one, or if you want a mimetic one but also an abstract one because the photographs carry the title of the lecture, the names of the lecturers, the site, the institution and the time of the lecture. Photos are fixed moments of time and can reproduce images displayed and reproduce visuals presented at a moment but they don’t come with time based recordings that video or sound takes are offering. What remains of a lecture is usually just the memory, some notes and all the announcements of it. In my case I end up with a visual product I declare as my artwork. It might not differ from any snapshot taken by any other student or member of the audience but I do this in a semi-systematic way with certain rules and procedures I have set up. While I am at a lecture I am mainly focusing on the lecture itself. Last night I went to one of Slavoj Žižek which demanded quite some concentration. I even was asking him a question at the end. I took photos as well but still didn’t lose track of the lecture. I didn’t walk around, I was not preoccupied by where I was sitting and what light I was having like some of the other photographing and filming people in the room who came and left, moved around and tried to capture him from this and that angle, from close and far. I just sat there and concentrated on the lecture and yet managed to take about 30 or so images of him, the public around me and of the film clips he presented. Once the lecture is over the story changes: it all becomes a question of the images, their selection, their visual qualities, their labeling and archiving. The function of the images also change: not only do they stand for an intellectual event in a row of lectures that become part of my intellectual history within many possible such histories but they also have to function as art, something not everybody else with images of lecturers demands of their images. This is my specific claim as an artist to impose them as artworks. And as with all artistic propositions the offer can be accepted or rejected. I basically spend my life trying to do exactly that: making what I declare as art, offering something to anybody interested in it as my art, an offer that is not and will never be accepted as such by all people. F+T: What are your criteria for selection, i.e. how do you choose which lectures to photograph, by lecturer, by topic, or do you photograph any and every lecture you can? RG: As everything in my life, I go by my interest which is the result of many factors. If I am aware of a lecturer, read his books or appreciate his works my interest of attending his much higher than if I am not aware of it. I usually don’t go to lecturers simply based on their subjects—something that can happen of course, if the subject, the title of the lecture is promising or at the heart of my interest. Sometimes I also wait for years to get a change to photograph certain people but I do that in a very low-level “keep your ears up” mentality and not in a systematic scanning of all channels and possibilities. I do not go into philosophy departments and photograph everybody teaching there. I go with the flow—and unfortunately a great deal of great talks I also miss because I hear too late of them. Often, I also stumble into them by traveling, by getting emails from friends and by simply being in the right spot at the right time. Somehow you could look at my lecture par cours as some kind of loose intellectual flâneurism . If you know of interesting lectures and events, please, let me know. F+T: Is your selection of images more of a production or post-production method? That is, do you take a lot of photos and select only a few images from each lecture, or do you take them very selectively? Do you have a particular methodology for the selection of images? RG: This all changed a bit with the arrival of digital photography. In the beginning I had to pay a lot of money for film developing. Hence, I was taking either one role - 36 images - or half a role - 13 images - depending on who talked and whether they projected images. With the unlimited capacity of digital imaging I easily end up between 30 and 150 images of one event still depending of whether images are presented or not. In the first years of that project when I wasn’t fully aware yet of what I was doing, I printed at least 2 images of any lecture and sometimes three or even four, a choice that was also constrained by costs. But again, since I have a web site and since images can easily be selected and presented on my web site without generating remarkable costs I have now more and more pain to reduce them to less than ten or eight images for an event. Now, before I have them printed which really is expensive, I can present them already as artwork on my web site without any immediate costs. Thus the economic factor is at the end of the chain which enables me to be more ‘generous’ and include more images. Over the last years I have been mostly selecting at least four photographs for a lecture unit but recently also as many as ten. But so far only one set above four images has been actually printed and sold. What might sound even more shocking is the likely fact that if a curator or a collector demands me to reduce the number of images due to costs, I might compromise at this current stage if the images have not been yet printed or published outside my own web site. This means that to a certain degree any selection that has only seen publication on my web site and not yet been produced runs the risk to change in numbers of images included. Needless to say, I am the last one that finally makes a decision and I do honor all given earlier decision if those were final. F+T: How do you feel the act of photographing the lecture affects your reception of the contents of the lecture? And your recollection afterwards, do you remember the lecture more having photographed it, or just having sat and listened? RG: As mentioned above, I get very little distraction from photographing since I can multitask well and do not obsess about the quality of the image: I photograph from where I am and listen with my ears and not my eyes. I am not sure whether the images serve as a mnemonic devise to the content of the lecture if there are no images involved but they at least remind me that the lecture existed, the title of the lecture and the name of the people and institutions involved. The titles of the hundreds of lectures I took during the past 15 years can also be read as an essay of theoretical life in that period. This will be come more and more visible as time passes by. These images age much better than I do. F+T: You mentioned at the outset of our discussions that you started this practice some time ago and have seen the practice of photographing lecturers become more commonplace. Why do you think that this shift has taken place? RG: The answer is very simple. Photographing is now free of any charge and hence omnipresent. You buy a phone or any other personal digital assistant and it has a camera integrated in it whether you want it or not. There is no need to develop images and there is no hassle to keep images, to distribute images, to organize images and save them. It is all virtual, not creating any costs and doesn’t require any efforts. You don’t spend twenty dollars for photo-developing anymore, you don’t need to walk anymore to your pharmacy or your photo shop to drop off and return to pick up and pay. You don’t need to go to the post office to send somebody a picture. You have a program like Photoshop already built into your camera. Photographing is now a thing for everybody—with functioning cameras made for two year olds. It is technically now nearly impossible to make bad images. The image quality is virtually guaranteed by cheap, high performing, mini-computers packed into miniscule cameras. With all these technological changes, we are undergoing now a cultural paradigm shift that includes permanent recording (not only still image taking) of everything. I wonder even whether babies are just born to be photographed—at least a process where the first photograph is right there. What is interesting now, is how the law is trying to catch up. I am experiencing and expecting more restrictions on photographing and recording—something already in place in many museums and in certain galleries—as the recording devices become more and more invisible and undetectable. It is an interesting cat and mouse play and will end up with some of us that are photographing the world around us in court. The world has become very transparent and everybody is contributing to it with social networking technologies—like twitter and Facebook—that are designed to monitor and communicate every step we make in our lives. F+T: Why did you start the practice? As a way to remember, or to capture the experience of the lecture and the environment there? RG: A couple of years earlier I started to photograph my own reading seminars as part of my art work with results that surprised me positively. I really liked these images of students and people discussing heavy non-fiction with me. The reading seminars justified this kind of pictorialism. Then in 1995 I had the chance to attend an entire seminar by Edward Said entitled “The Representation of Intellectuals at Columbia University,” which really gave me the idea to start this series. Why not also photograph these lectures I visit all the time since this really is a way of representing intellectuals? F+T: The constellation of images and the title seem like a kind of portrait, do you agree? If so, is it a portrait of the speaker, of yourself, or of the event? RG: Well, to follow up on the previous question the lectures are more than just portraits of lecturers since I include not only the speakers but also the audience, an audience that is not named or specifically highlighted as is the speaker. So if we stick with the metaphor of the portrait we would have to extend it also to the environment, the class room, the lecture hall, the arrangements of seats or benches, tables, lecture stands and other stuff typically seen on my images. Often the walls are decorated or even tagged with graffiti or posters and other stuff. There is a big difference between a small seminar room at the English Department of Columbia University, full with books and cabinets and a lecture room at a Paris or Frankfurt university that accommodates 50 to 150 people. We should, maybe, also distinguish between lectures that are one time events—mostly open to the public, free of charge or paid—and events that are weekly, closed to the public and held mostly in universities that can cost fortunes or be paid by the State as it is still predominantly the case in continental Europe. All this, of course, is not necessarily announced in the title of the lecture and is subject to information that isn’t visible on the images. To a certain degree we see also portraits of a general privilege when it comes to the public of certain institutions that are highly selective and extremely costly without forgetting that most of the lectures are dealing with theory, art, philosophy and other highbrow subjects. In general, I would say we see very little if we don’t know already what’s going on, who the lecturer, the institutions, the context are in which we subsequently can zoom into variants like sexual, racial, or age-related make-up without ignoring clothing fashions, hair styling, body mannerisms, gadgets and stuff. F+T: Do you see a relation between this body of work and your other work, for example your language studies? RG: Everything I do is “unfortunately” related. I say unfortunately because this makes my work not so easy to grasp. The relationship to the language studies is relatively clear since both are originally grounded in the domain of education and knowledge production. Nearly all my work comes across that nexus where knowledge and power are addressed. I was at one point wondering what the relationship was to some of my earlier indexical work where I was happy alone with footnotes from books painted on the walls: I came to understand that both are just different manifestations of knowledge and information. F+T: Do you foresee continuing the series indefinitely, or is there an end to it? RG: I think that I will continue this series indefinitely or to be more precise, as long as I go listen to lectures and want to learn something which brings me to your previous question: What do the reading seminars, language studies, historical research and lecture hopping have in common: I learn something. Further Reading Rainer Ganahl’s website William Kaizen. “ Vulgar Politics .” art&education . April 2009. Web. Smith, Roberta. “ Rainer Ganahl: ‘Language of Emigration & Pictures of Emigration .’” New York Times April 23 2010. Web. (shrink)

Don't tell terrible stories—everyone here has enough of their own. Everyone here has a whole bloody sack of terrible stories, and at the bottom of the sack is a hammer the narrator uses to pound you on the skull the instant you dare not believe your ears. Or to pound you when you do believe. Not long ago I saw a tomboyish girl on Khreshchatyk Street demand money of an elderly woman, threatening to bite her and infect her with syphilis. (...) Don't stroll through Volodymyr Hill Park, don't stroll around the botanical garden, and especially don't stroll on Kontraktova Square. Don't stroll anywhere. Don't go to the pavilion with the Golgotha panorama near St. Alexander's Church. Not even the twelve-meter-tall crucified Christ will save you. Don't go outside when it's dark and people turn into shadows a shade darker than dark. Also don't go where you can be seen from far away. Not to imply that people used to be like a bunch of lilies, but now they stink like a cellar of cabbage.The city, which earlier might have had some fun, is now going crazy. It's like a fish in warm water: it doesn't react to anything, swims slowly like it doesn't care if it swallows a hook or not. The excitement and exaltation pass into oppression, just as our necks have sunk into our shoulders, our shoulders into our lumbars, our lumbars into our nether regions. The holiday turns into a funeral, the parades into explosions, depression into mania. Winter passes into summer, people turn into beasts, the hours into ages, and the ages into hours. It's worth simply walking around the city to see a soldier from an unknown army taking a piss near the opera. Farther on is a row of identical old widows selling ball gowns and candelabra. Then there are the aristocrats and manufacturers who throw so much at the prostitutes that they'll soon be richer than their wives.I returned late through the Kyryliv Wood, not heeding all the warnings that I myself have given here. It really is dangerous—the place is famous for it. There's a madhouse nearby, caves where criminals and the sick can hide out. Also, once upon a time, as they say in fairy tales, the great dragon Zmei Gorynich lived here beside the Puchai River. The stench in these places drives away the most committed misanthropes and even one type of philanthrope—that is, perverts. It sounds dumb, but the stench is cleansing. I don't know where it comes from. After the operating theaters and the rooms with amputees, the stench no longer repelled or attracted me; it just was. And this was a great place to think. As I walked, I considered an incident with our patient.The patient, a respectable individual whose name carries too much weight for me to state it directly, one day began to assault people. He nearly strangled a merchant who he believed asked too much for a beaver coat. He likewise wanted to kill his business partner when he didn't say hello loudly enough. But the worst was, he lost all shame of his own nakedness. At first it was the police who took care of it. When our future patient slipped off his pants and undergarments, he was taken to Kyrylivska, which has had means for dealing with such cases dating back to the day when unhinged Cossacks and composers from Kyiv Mohyla Academy were taken there.During the examination we determined that the patient was experiencing a severe breakdown. His wife added that lately, more than once, he had allowed himself strong words in front of the children and often suffered from ennui. Furthermore, she said, the patient had been undergoing treatment for “the French disease” for some years—which was, obviously, where we needed to start.“Syphilis!” Skorsky spat out the matchstick he was chewing on. He was a specialist on the psychological aspects of diseases related to the venereal. “Tertiary syphilis! When poorly treated, over time ‘the French disease’ can destroy the central nervous system. Hence the patient's chicanery. Such theater!”Skorsky and I had not spoken since the incident at Bilinsky's. Meanwhile, something significant had happened to him. The most boring person on earth, Skorsky had simply caught fire. He said hello and kibitzed. I even heard the doctor got drunk alone in his office, then wandered through the forest. Could he be using narcotic substances?“Cocaine!” was the doctor's second proclamation. It was his favorite treatment for the psychological complications of syphilis. Skorsky himself never took what he called “the universal drug”—good for alcoholism and toothaches, neuroses and morphine dependency—though he had read in an article by a respectable Viennese physician, who used cocaine as a panacea, that it was not addictive. That doctor subsequently recanted, but Skorsky paid no attention. He believed the retraction was made under pressure from pharmacologists who had no incentive to cease production of the medications that cocaine might supplant. Their representatives either paid or threatened the Viennese to repent.As the patient was escorted to his room, he assaulted the orderly, Alevtyna. They tried pulling him off her, but, though he released his fingers from her neck, he buried his teeth in her leg. The poor orderly, who had not until then been attacked by a psychotic, nearly died of fear. Later, panic set in over Skorsky's diagnosis. He told her about the consequences of syphilis: grotesque patterns on one's face due to infection of the skin, mucous membranes, cartilage, and bones. He went on about the devastation to the central nervous system, which they had just observed in real life: “The face starts to look like lace some mangy dogs fought over before rolling in the mud.”Alevtyna, who had not yet regained her faculty of speech, straightened up. Ignoring the slavering male orderlies, she bared her leg to get a better look at the wound. She then ran down the hall and out into the garden, where she fell on the ground to rip up grass and small bunches of daisies. Alevtyna ate them along with the soil in their roots.“Minor hysteria. She needs fifteen milligrams of cocaine.”Skorsky took a snuff box out of his pocket and scooped up some white powder with a toothpick made from a goose feather. He gave the order to close Alevtyna's mouth and one of her nostrils, forcing her to snort the medication.We fretted over her so long that evening fell. I decided to walk down, along the ravine, behind the church.It was unlikely there were any large beasts there, but something was rustling. The pits and mounds, ravines, paths, graves of witches whose living sisters flew in the treetops from time to time, the whispers of the forest spirits, the spirits of the nutcases who died in the hospital, the spirits of the monks from the St. Cyril Monastery, Zmei Gorynich and the bogatyrs who wanted to defeat him. The city would be calmer without this forest. I saw the gaps between the trees and went off in the direction of the tram tracks.As I was coming out of the forest, there was a patch of Amanita muscaria that had been trampled into porridge. A bit farther on, the body of Professor Bilinsky lay killed in the blackberry bushes. The way he was lying it looked as though he had not struggled before death. I quickly examined his body but saw nothing out of the ordinary. There were no wounds, no dirt under the fingernails. Animals had not yet smelled the carrion, but swarms of various insects covered him. Oh, why did I have to find the putrid body?The best thing would be to take the tram to his house to inform his relatives. The doors closed, and I noticed my own calm. This death had not evoked any emotions in me other than a feeling of responsibility, the need to tell the family. But also—some alarm at the thought of who the murderer could be. I knew that it was murder.“Your nose is bleeding.” A woman as round as an onion, carrying two baskets full of strawberries, offered me an ironed and starched handkerchief.“Have I dirtied my shirt?”“No, it's as neat as a pin. It's just your nose that's dirty. Wipe it now before you spray blood on my strawberries.”“No one will see the red on red.”“Ah, but it's salty!”“You know why it's not sweet? We'd drink it like syrup.”“Those with Christ in their heart do not talk that way.”“Are your strawberries expensive?”“Why? What?”“I'm checking to see if you have God in your heart.”“Child, if you knew how I have to work for this berry! I have to weed it a hundred times. In a week, the quitch grass grows as high as a horse. And I water it with water I carry from the stream, it kills my arms... ”“How much are the berries?”“They're not for sale. Anyway, soon money won't mean a thing. Soon all money, all these papers made from the skins of sinners on their satanic presses will be annulled. What matters is how we treat each other.”“So if I try your strawberries for free, my ‘thank you’ will be enough?”“Hands off!” she said and thwacked my fingers.I heard loud laughter behind me—same laughter as from the café near the Continental. There was no one sitting near Alina. (This is what fate looks like, remember.) Without asking, I sat next to her, away from the old lady.“Excuse me, but the night before last didn't you, yes, didn't you intrude on my privacy?” She started right away.“I saw it a little differently. Who was that young man with the mustache who paid me for you?”“Are you checking to see if you can flirt?”The tram stopped. People got on and off.“Are you coming back from the hospital?” she asked. “Don't be shocked. My uncle works there. He's told me all about you.”“An uncle by the name of Skorsky?”(Remember: this is what fate looks like.)“Yes. Skorsky's been strange recently—says things that make me wonder if he hasn't lost his mind. Have you noticed anything?”“I don't know.”“You know perfectly well.”“Where are you going?” I tried to change the subject.“I have to send something to my theater friends in Odesa. By the way, they'll be putting on Oedipus Rex soon in Kyiv—in Ukrainian.”“Greek tragedy in Ukrainian! That's a first.”“Exactly. The troupe is rehearsing now in Odesa. The theater where they will perform this fall is being remodeled.”“Wait. Now I remember where I've seen you before—it was at a performance! Vynnychenko's Black Panther and White Bear, at the Bergonier on Fundukleivska.“The same director is doing the Oedipus. He's my friend.”“He's your friend in what sense?”“Again with that tired subject. By the way, I've been thinking about you.”“And I about you.”“That's good. I was thinking not about you, to be precise, but about that elevator you invited me on.”“Who was that man with you?”“Like a broken record! Even if he had been my fiancé, I'm not bought or inherited. I'm not a brooch or a hundred acres of land, and I'm not a house in Kaniv!... Who was with you when you saw Black Panther?“Ah, so.”“Answer!”“That was my mother. She looks very young. She is coming to Kyiv the day after tomorrow. I can introduce you.”“Oh, this is my stop.”I looked out the window and realized that I had long since passed the stop for Bilinsky's.“Can we see each other again?”“We can. But you have only one chance.”Alina the anarchist wrote something on a scrap of paper and handed it to me.Morning, not morning but a thick porridge (I hate porridge). Dew, thick spit, crushed fruits, urine, all on the sparkling cobblestones. The sun, just barely having made its appearance, is already scorching. The human masses scurry and grumble like poorly digested food inside a stomach.I walked diagonally across St. Sofia's Square, then along the perimeter, then one edge, then again diagonally across. I went underground. The basement café of the Continental Hotel was practically empty. I again asked the server to bring the cloth with the embroidered portrait, but I couldn't remember the musician's last name, only that it ended with -sky. The server said that -sky was currently in the southern cities of Yalta and Odesa. I added that Kurbas, the director, Alina's friend, was also in Odesa, rehearsing Oedipus Rex, and that he'd previously put on Black Panther.I was bored, so I walked along Khreshchatyk and then headed down, calling to mind all the Kyiv churches of Podil: there's Birth of Christ, St. Nicholas on the Shore, Intercession, Pyrohoshcha, Holy Presentation, St. Dymytrii Rostovsky, St. Illia's. And also the Epiphany Brotherhood Monastery, Ascension Convent, and St. Katherine's, all these whipped-cream churches on the waffles of our streets. A few of them reminded me of themselves by appearing suddenly out of nowhere.The smells on Kontraktova Plaza where commerce buzzed were like multicolored light bulbs turning on one after another. Here you could catch the aroma of Balabukha jam, which blended with the next smell, English shoe polish at the Raiskys’ shop. Then the crunchy-smelling cabbage from old women standing in a row like herons and spitting out the shells of sunflower seeds. Farther on, the stench of a good-sized rat that crawled under Mrs. Shevchuk's shop where she sells broadcloth. Oh, she can't scream: no, she'll quietly dig that rat out herself so as to not scare off her clients.I bought a paper and two pairs of underwear. I asked two laughing young chambermaids who were secretly puffing in a grape-filled yard for a smoke. I wandered around Podil until evening when I came across a sawmill near the Dnipro that surprisingly smelled pleasantly of mazut fuel oil. The weather was dry, yet in the middle of the road was an enormous puddle, a deep dark black. A forty-year-old woman in a pale pink dress stood near it. The theatricality of it all provoked me to pose her a question,“Ma'am, what should I do?”But she paid me no attention. I shouted,“What should I do?”“What to do, what to do?” she said in Polish. “Jump in the water and swim so far away that you cannot return.”I quickly crossed a section of the forest. The wind brought a mixture of unpleasant air, like a stinky handkerchief held under one's nose. Passing the trees, I saw light in the spaces between them and exited at the hospital.Outside the windows, two orderlies lay in chairs with their heads thrown back. Two others—fools—ran around the yard in different directions, peering out at... something. The lights on the first floor of the hospital were on, and the staff milled about.“You're just in time!” said Ivan, a tall, young orderly.“For what?”“Your patient ran away! We went into his room and he wasn't there.”“What patient?”“The one who bit Alevtyna,” said Danylo, the other orderly, short and middle-aged.“That's Skorsky's patient, not mine.”I had no intention of helping them. This was all history—like my family, Kyiv, and my previous life. I had no intention of thinking about it. I wanted to go to my office, pack up my field surgery kit, and get out. So what? Their psychotic syphilitic ran away—it happened.Of course, that patient could have something to do with Bilinsky's murder. But that was no longer my problem.“What a strange coincidence!” the doctor on duty said. “Comrade doctor, the other one responsible for this patient was just here.”“And where is he now?”“He took off toward the church to look for the patient.”“Didn't the patient escape earlier?”“Don't know.”“How do you not know? You had better call the police, moron, before he kills someone. And get those sleeping orderlies to look for him.”“They can't... ”“Why not? Should I go wake them?”“They're on morphine.”“And you, I can see, have lost your mind. Go, catch your psycho! If it turns out that he killed Bilinsky—and on your watch—you can't imagine what's in store for you.”I adjusted my homburg and set off in the direction of St. Cyril's, that unwelcoming monolithic cube. I glanced around—what if our escaped syphilitic were to jump out of the bushes and bite or strangle me. I looked around because I wasn't sure of my actions, wasn't sure of my choices. Tripping over a clump of clover, I reached the open doors of the church. I couldn't stop myself from going in.The walls and ceiling were covered with frescoes. There was what used to be an angel rolling up the sky on the southern column of the narthex. But also graffiti: people scratched their names on it so as not to be forgotten—their idea of eternity. Prince Volodymyr the Great compared this activity to the desecration of graves. The vandals paid a fine and were beaten with canes. During the raids of Batu Khan, the church was deserted and cracks appeared all over it. Wild martens and feral dogs sought shelter here; insects swarmed under the ceiling with its red mosaics. Birches grew in its midst. Water seeped in the cracks, the water became ice, the ice widened the cracks, more water seeped in the cracks, becoming more ice that further widened the cracks, the wall split and nearly fell over, and then the wall fell over. Yet the angel is still rolling up the sky... When I reached the exit, I heard a rustling behind me. I turned after I stepped outside: in the depths of the church, like a stick in a pot of tar, stood a man with a large bag thrown over his shoulder and a revolver pointed right at me.“Is that you, Doctor?“Don't move!”“What's... Skorsky, what's with you?”“Don't move, I say!”“What are you doing here?”And finally I understood... Skorsky was himself the psycho! (Really, I had known for a while.)“You are the murderer! I knew it! But—why?”“Shut up.”“It was you. You! The stolen cigarettes, the strange behavior, Bilinsky. If I shout, everybody will come running. They've already called the police!”There was heavy breathing behind me. And then a gun rang out.The city is overgrown with new buildings. They encircle everything that was once on the periphery. Kyiv has become an old lady that can no longer restrain herself in the face of pastries. The city climbs farther. It steps over the swamps, turns the old rivers into a series of lakes; the other bodies of water it drives into canals. The grain that falls from the wild wheat is black. When the sun heats it, the grain melts and trickles into the earth. St. Cyril's stands indestructible. No one spackles the small cracks in its walls with either expensive putty or glues, nor with cheap cement and whitewash. One day a small fox appears in the doorway. It runs inside and along the floor of simple gray tiles. The gods watch from the walls, watch and fall into ruin. The fox runs to the iconostasis. Before it is a time-darkened Virgin Mother and Child in oil on sheets of zinc. The fox runs the metal steps that wind up to the second floor. The fox runs past all the vaults, naves, all the frescoes. A buckthorn seed flies in through a broken window. It will be the first. Soon the buckthorn will grow everywhere. A dumb hare will make its nest in the buckthorn bushes and nightingales will settle in the upper branches to sing until the end of the world. The fox runs between the thick rays that penetrate the windows. It catches one of the rays, squints its eyes, and warms itself in the sun.The shot rang out, but I did not fall. I looked around—and on the church threshold was our syphilis patient bearing a rod. His head lay on the rocks by the doorway.“If only he'd been at the stage of nose deformity! Just imagine: a hole instead of a nose plus a hole from the bullet—like an extra pair of eyes!” Skorsky laughed at the corpse.“We need to call the orderlies.”“They heard the shot. They'll run here on their own. You see, Professor Bilinsky believed it would take two or three years to wrap up this patient's case,” Skorsky told me. “But I took care of it much faster!”“Excuse me, but I'm going crazy in this city. I thought that you were Bilinsky's murderer.”“Just so. Why not? I am Bilinsky's murderer.”“Don't tease. You've changed a lot recently, so... ”“Yes, I've started killing people. You might term such a change significant.”“You have the right to irony.”“I am not being ironic.”“Let's call it sarcasm.”“It's the honest-to-God truth.”“And yes, you have the right to mock me.”“Well then, let's be done. To the horses!”“What horses?”“Alina's waiting!”Alina, her uncle Skorsky, a few others I didn't know, and I rode like the wind that ripped off my homburg and carried it back to Kyiv.“There's a fresco in the choir loft at St. Cyril's where Vrubel painted himself and patients from the hospital as the apostles. When I came across it by accident, I really believed they were saints,” Alina said.“I've never been up there. I've only seen the church from below.”“Remember the way back so you can see it sometime.”“The Puchai River used to flow here. You shouldn't trust the landscape,” Skorsky said, reaching for something, perhaps his bag, just when we left the darkness of the trees and saw the endless steppe ahead of us.We rode all night without stopping. Though no one was chasing us. Though we had nowhere to be. We rode like beasts released from a cage. The promises of the horizon turned what we'd left behind into a cage fit for those from whom freedom had been severed, like an anomaly, at birth.The pre-morning sky looked at first like a sack of turnips—filled with something heavy. But with each verst, the sky became lighter. When it was finally light enough to see clearly, we arrived at a knoll at the foot of a stone wall that from a distance had appeared to be a gigantic piece of halva. The exterior ruins of the castle gave no hint of how it was when all was fine here, when people defended themselves successfully from the nomads’ raids. From far off, the wreckage looked like a natural agglomeration of stones—a rocky elevation, no more: a cluster of cliffs. It would rain a few hundred more times, a few hundred more winds from a few hundred directions would blow on this heap, and it would collapse as though nothing had ever been here.A few stalks of wheat grew from one of the rocks. Someone had probably cast a handful of grain here for some birds that forgot to eat it.“Who could this castle belong to?” I asked Skorsky.“I reckon the Swan Princess,” the doctor rejoined, hoping to sound knowledgeable.From behind one of the piles of gray sandstone emerged a young man in a black reptilian coat and a white papakha as lush, bright, and out of place as a dahlia. His name was Artem. The heat was melting our brains, but he was dressed like that, in rooster fashion, which was popular among the otamans. Artem helped Alina dismount her horse and tried to kiss her on the lips, but she offered him a cheek instead.Had she been racing to see this clown?We entered the yard—the ruins had fashioned an internal space that was more or less protected, at least from strangers’ eyes. It turned out that there were even places where it was possible to hide from the rain, and from there the ruins didn't look half bad.In the center of the court was a table, and on it a wooden bucket with pink gladiolas. How romantic! It all looked like it came from outer space. Where on earth, in the middle of the steppe, far from any village or town, did this table, this simple table, come from? And the gladiolas? The steppe hadn't been plowed in so long that any cultivars would have gone wild, degenerated, dried up completely.A campfire crackled nearby—a little preview of what we would soon do to the houses, villages, and cities. Artem the otaman brought over a cezve from the fire and poured the first portion into a small, copper cup for Alina. He also got out a porcelain cup with images of rosy cherubim—but how...?“Who else would like coffee?”Only Skorsky and I responded. The question excited me, even distracted me from the thought of the kiss I had recently witnessed and the Kyiv I had recently left.“It's obvious who the professors here are; cultured people drink coffee. Are you both doctors?”“Uh-huh.”“For wolves of the steppe, like us, doctors are gold, even more precious than gold. Actually, a Hippocrates like you should eat more, because those in your profession will soon be worth your weight in gold. Work on your figures, both of you.”“Who will take pity on the horses that have to carry us?”“We'll find the horses. And very large doctors can be transported on machine-gun carts. We'll need to seat the otamans near you. Only a fool would shoot at a doctor.”“I think we'll find quite enough fools here.”“With your beard, Doctor, you look like Tsar Nicholas II. But even so you won't be shot. You might even be canonized!”“We've only just arrived and you're going on about executions,” Skorsky grumbled and checked to make sure that he still had his bag.“Apologies, apologies, pardonnez-moi. But you are not merely a doctor. A venereologist! Skorsky, you're a specialist! A venereologist is the most important person in wartime. The most valuable! You are the botanists of war. You can't imagine what varieties of flowers grow here, and these beds have long awaited a proper gardener. Or even just a man with a scythe!”“Bite your tongue,” Alina said. “I don't need to listen to this.”“Yes, yes, of course. Excuse me, my r—. ” He almost said “rose.”We rested all day. We went down to a surprisingly close river overgrown with lilies. We rowed the boats left by fishermen. I talked to Skorsky. He took his bag everywhere, refusing even to swim so he wouldn't have to part with it. I asked him what he had in it, but he said it wasn't my damned business.Alina rowed with the otaman to the middle of the river. They were having a loud discussion. She was waving her hands. The current carried their boat downstream slowly and smoothly. What a nuisance, that current!I tried to meet with Alina one-on-one, but she was avoiding me. In the morning I was confused, by lunch I was sad, and after lunch I got angry.In the evening, I lay on the hot grass and drank another cup (I have no idea where they got such good coffee), which had no effect at all on my sleep. I watched the Perseids. Every year, the Earth passes through the tail of Comet Swift-Tuttle. People can see the meteor shower and make a wish. I wished. I counted forty-seven falling stars. All forty-seven of my wishes were for the same thing.Around the campfire, they were sitting, talking. I saw how he tickled her face with a piece of grass and she brushed him off in annoyance. Then they were screaming at each other. Later they again spoke kindly, after which they again quarreled. My joy grew after each tiny mistake that Artem made. I wanted him to show the worst he was capable of.They were screaming at each other, but all I could hear was beautiful opera singing. The stars fell to the sound of their screaming. The stars blessed my joy.Then this happened: Alina kicked the fire, scattered burnt kindling, and burned some of the grass. Artem grabbed her by the arm, but she broke away from him and ran off to the horses.“Go then! I guarantee you'll get to Katerynoslav and return with your tail between your legs.”“I'm going to Huliai-Pole! To Father Makhno!”I jumped up and ran after her.“Where do you think you're going?” Artem shouted.Really—where was I going? I was going after her: to Huliai-Pole, to Katerynoslav, to Rome, to Washington, to Istanbul, to Montevideo... “Go to sleep,” he said. “Come morning, this coquette will be here, right as rain. We've already been through this show. Tomorrow she'll be right here next to my boot!”... No, she won't.In some sort of shape we entered some town. There were some buildings that were some colors, some trees, some streets, some roads, and some signs. Posts, flustered birds’ nests, echoes, colors, shapes—each of some kind. A wedding procession was coming toward us. If you want to make orange, you need to add yellow to red, and then bam—it's black. If you want to salt the soup, shake in a little, and then bam—two handfuls. You want to say a kind word, and then bam—a punch in the face. I was rocked around like a watermelon on a boat and threw up my breakfast straight into the horse's fluffy mane. Sanko found this hilarious, but I said I'd pulverize him. So Sanko sped ahead.No one knew anything about Alina. The daytime sky was like a poorly washed bowl. The sun was a squashed, rotten apricot. The night sky looked like the sole of a boot to me. The moon was a dirty cheap copper coin that had gotten stuck to the sole. Everything seemed spoiled to me, irrelevant, unnecessary. Without her, this journey was a waste of time.“You'd better stay away from everyone,” Artem said. “You'll infect us with your pining, and pining is worse than the clap.”The wedding procession was before us. The young couple, still utter children, walked so calmly it was as if they didn't see us. As if we were made of a light breeze—our bodies, clothes, our horses and their iron shoes—of the lightest gasses. As if we were visible only to ourselves and the coal-black dog that barked, panting and gasping.The wedding was headed straight for us. We were in the middle of the road, and so were they. We approached each other slowly, a wave going toward a wave. Some ten meters before their indifferent faces, I noticed the color of the bride's eyes. And the coral-colored tulips that fell on the road before her. Round goose eggs on meaty stems, the flowers were falling and falling before her. The bride's eyes were almond shaped.“Hey there,” Artem shouted at me. “Wake up!”I came to and saw the whole village, everyone there, not realizing my group had turned left onto a side street away from the procession. The tulips disappeared—where'd they get tulips in the fall? I was sitting alone on my horse in the middle of the road, and the entire wedding procession came to a stop. I moved to the side, and the throng marched on, cutting off our escape route. We rode a few more meters and came across the synagogue.“You know what, you're right,” said the otaman.“Who is?”“Oleksii is the only one here who's right.”“About what?”Artem turned his horse and raced back. Everyone stood still while he ran his horse into the crowd and began firing his revolver. People scattered in all directions. Artem trotted, cackling like an imbecile. The horse kicked an old guy in the mouth. The man fell, spitting out his gold teeth. We rode up to the commotion and formed ranks, but none of us wanted to join the otaman.The bride stopped in the middle of the street. On both sides were buildings and trees, as well as dust, sky, and sun. She stood still, beautiful, as if nothing had happened. Then she adjusted her garland and walked calmly on.“Well, should we get some sugar now?” Artem laughed, looking at the bride, and off he went toward the sugar factory.It was then I noticed that all of the houses had shutters—fuchsia, blue, ocher—and that all the shutters were closed.We flew toward the dirty building, whistling and shouting. If there had been aesthetes among the otamans, they would certainly have razed the abomination in this field after seizing it. They would have spread soil on top and sown buckwheat. Long live buckwheat!, that wonderful crop. Like hunting dogs hot on the trail, we raced to our defenseless victim, with the baying of hundreds of hounds behind us. The field shook beneath us. We became an artist's canvas, evolving from Realism to Romanticism, Romanticism to Expressionism, Expressionism to Suprematism. If we had been painted in black and white, we would have been splotches (until the ink ran, annihilating all remaining patches of white).Two men stood near the gate—unarmed and undressed, in nothing but their undershirts and boots. Our fervor, our kinship with the elements, our entirety, were all for naught.“Jesus Christ! What bores!” Artem exclaimed. “How boring you are!”“Maybe boring for us, but fireworks for them,” Sanko said, dismounting his horse.“The fear of death engenders creativity,” our otaman—a distinguished philosopher of the early twentieth century, that demonic breed—prophesied.He went on, “Excuse me, but with all due respect, we are not going to search you. Just show us right away where the money is. Why are there so few of you? Don't say there's not much money. I want piles and piles of money! If you don't show it to us, we'll print our own on your skin. Believe me, we will.”We entered the factory grounds. There were no workers, only an enormous mountain of sugar beets that looked like a pile of coal from a distance and a pile of dead rats from up close.“So, did you have a good year?” Artem asked a man in an undershirt.“Not really—too dry.”“Nah, that's fine. You wouldn't have been able to gather most of the harvest this year anyway. There's a fire burning across all of Ukraine, all of Russia. The whole world!”While Artem tossed thoughts like well-chewed sunflower seeds into the crowd, the two men quietly stepped aside and then ran fast ahead to the factory's main hall. The gigantic door slammed shut. The gate was locked behind us! The windows were smashed! The factory roared from inside like a cumbersome machine starting up. Bullets whirred through every window.“Bastards! It's a trap! Quick, after me!”Still on horseback, Artem bounded over to a vast window, low to the ground, and smashed it mercilessly. He broke the frame and jumped inside on his horse. I and a few others followed. We broke into their lair, threw open the doors, and let the other warriors inside.Iron vats of hot sugar were steaming, pipes were clattering; machinery groaned.“Parasites!” Artem gritted his teeth. “I'll get you. I'll get you red sons of bitches. Painted whores!”At the word “painted,” his horse fell to the ground. Lying prone, Artem continued fighting, but the red soldiers wouldn't let him stand. Fighting nearby, I rode over to assist but did not know where to aim. Artem got up, ran forward, and brought his sword down on the head of the closest soldier, all the way to the middle of his skull, to the bridge of his nose. It was like butchering a pig. Artem thrust the sword into the buttock of another who was fleeing and cut off his leg at the bend in the knee.“I'll cut off every last one of your asses! Cut off your asses!” Artem bellowed.A half hour later, the dead were lying, the captured sitting, and the victors doing anything they pleased.“Skorsky, are there a lot of casualties?” I asked the doctor, whose hour it was. I hoped not, because I was too tired to help him.“Just a few. The dead are already dead, and the wounded are not ours.”Though Skorsky rarely asked my help, and though I'd become an ordinary soldier, the doctor in me was still present in the most unpleasant attribute—knowledge. Others saw an eviscerated man, pieces of dusty flesh smeared with clay, soil, sand, and straw. I saw a perfectly formed kidney hanging perfectly from the rest of its body like a child's mitten from its coat. You could try this death on for size. Wear it like a sanbenito of the Inquisition.Artem counted the money and then lay on the floor alongside the gigantic sugar mountain in the middle of the room. From time to time, the crystals rustled as they fell.“I didn't think you'd be such a fighter!” the otaman said without turning toward me. “I thought you'd be healing us. You'd keep to the rear and we'd hide you like a girl. But here you are, in the vanguard, like a lion!”“I got excited,” I told him, choosing not to react to the “girl” part.“’Cause Alina said there was no sense counting on you to fight.”“Really?”“Does that sting?”“Why would it? I'm a doctor—not everyone is. It requires a brain. Unlike waving a sword.”“Yeah, yeah. I gave her gladiolas. We were lying in the boat near that castle, doing all manner of things, and she told me all about you. How you met.”“You were lying in that boat talking about me?”“It was the day before you left Kyiv. You agreed to go with the anarchists so quickly!”“Were you surprised? Doctors make fast decisions.”“But you probably had great prospects. Your parents are rich, right?”“And who are your parents?”“Probably all your relatives fled abroad—bourgeois. Why did you stay?”“What the hell's your point?”“Alina, by the way, died a while ago. Probably.”“Don't jinx her.”“Listen here,” he said, staring at the ceiling. “And listen good. If you have designs on her—dead or alive—it's best you castrate yourself now.”“After you.”“If I want to kill somebody, you know, I just do it.”At last he looked at me. I was lying on the floor nearby and looking in his direction, sweaty and relaxed, my appearance complemented by my disdain for his opinion, his authority, his stupid hat. His everything.Artem raised his arm above his head, stuck a finger in the sugar mountain, and licked it. We both got up. Had I anticipated this turn of events, I would have readied a gift for him. Artem held his revolver. Under my hand I found a knife the workers used for gathering beets: it was a deliberately sharpened arc they sank into the swollen brassicas. I jumped up and quickly stepped around the sugar mountain.Artem's bullet hit a pane and broke the glass.“Not man enough for hand-to-hand?”The otaman shot again.“You should've challenged me to a duel, you romantic!”Encrusted with white crystals, I charged Artem from the sugar mountain. We fell in, and the sugar stuck in our hair, mustaches, nostrils, armpits.The gang ran in to get us apart, then backed off because it had nothing to do with them. By now the sugar mountain had burst its banks. Of the once perfect pyramid, a deformed mound remained.Wounded, Artem fell on the sugar mound, turning the white red.I stood before the gang sugar-coated and holding a bloody hook. The old otaman was drawing his last breath. Blood trickled from the corner of Artem's mouth and streamed from the left side of his breast.“What's the commotion?” Old Roman had just come in.“Be quiet,” the boys told him. And a good thing they did.“You killed him? You killed the otaman!”“Shut your mouth,” the boys told him.“You... ”I slugged Roman's stinky herring mouth. How did that son of a bitch find pickled herring in a sugar factory? My fist was now bigger and stronger than ever before, a steel anvil that could split nails and shatter memorial plaques. The unfortunate man's jaw twisted like an upper millstone that had gone off track from the lower.“Let's get out of here and go to Makhno's camp,” I gave my first order.We galloped so fast the grass burned beneath us. The birds and bugs had no time to fly out of the way; hooves trampled the burrows of rodents who didn't dare crawl out of their holes for a long time after. We raced like no one had ever raced before.The steppe, that sly fox, pretended to be an innocent fool. The steppe said, “I'm like Adam: I don't even know my own name.” But its grass harbored the tracks of thousands of armies and the heels of Herodotus, the crunch of Trypillia vessels, and the smell of Scythian hemp, Roman coins, clay figures of wolf people, the chevrons of Denikin's army, glass from the Chekists’ ruby stars, traces of uranium from flying saucers. I threatened it: “Steppe, show me your layers, or I will burn you, plow you under, flood you.” But it just replied: “I'm like Adam: I don't yet know my name.”I lost geography as if it were a silver coin. It fell out of my pocket and rolled through the feather grass that blanketed the steppe in white foam. The open space ahead was so endless that the whole world might as well have been steppe. If people ended up here from somewhere else, they would conclude they were on another planet. The coin fell and became an argentum, became one with the ring on the hand of the princess who had one green eye and one blue, with the twisted candlestick at the monastery on the other side of the steppe, with melted ingots. It broke down into simpler elements, simpler and simpler yet. The horse carried me spreading the seeds of northern plants to the south, just as southern riders had once brought flowers and weeds to the north. And then I turned back. Just as I had no geography, I had no time. Every night I fell asleep with the thought that the next day I would again race. Through all spacelessness, all timelessness. I exchanged one horse for another, got on a train, on a boat, traversed forty versts on foot—in rain that brought the river up to the road, in heat that overturned cattle. The earth I walked on became mine. Mine was the water in the lakes and springs, clean water, dirty water, enlightened water, contaminated with oil, stinking of algae, of fish that died in wells, stinking of the memory of atrocities, water as clean as broken bread. The water did not become Alina.I was doing this for her: I got the basturma out from under my saddle, sodden with the horse's sweat, sliced the throat of a rich man whose daughter I had danced with at a ball, climbed into a vat of beet juice and took a sugar bath, carried out the expropriation of the savings banks, wiped the sweat from my face with my shirt—and the cloth turned red; I didn't know from what. If it was someone else's blood, I didn't care; if it was my own, even less.We mostly came across Reds. We scraped them up like old red paint on a door in order to repaint the boards black. Black looked better. Red is tasteless, but black has style. Healthy men died before us of myocardial rupture like bunnies found in the nest. The ones whose hearts were sewn of steel wire envied the deceased. Seizing estates, banks, distilleries, and prisons reminded us of gathering in the harvest. If you're too lazy to pick an apple, you can shake the tree; some of the fruit gets bruised when it falls. We seized buildings like we were shaking apple trees. No one picked the fruits, we just shook: shook under the beds, under the tables, behind the curtains. No, there was no picking. We just shook until the red juice spurted from the apples.Near the Khorol River with Father Makhno and me in charge, we captured sixteen machine guns and four cannons, as well as five hundred prisoners who immediately came over to our side. The villagers voluntarily gave us bread and cheese, chickens and kvas. People joined us. The front of the machine-gun cart said “You can't run,” and “You won't catch us” at the back. We took factory after factory. Millions of karbovantsi, thousands of poods of sugar, weapons. We smashed the telephone exchanges and captured the telegraphs. We made alliances with some and then with others. Lenin, Wrangel, Frunze, the Germans, Chinese, Australians, Kaiser Wilhelm II, Cleopatra, Maria Theresa Walburga Amalia Christina. We ran the steppe. There were a hundred thousand of us. There were three hundred thousand of them. There were three hundred thousand of us. There were a million of them. There were two million of them. We were all of humanity. We were so many that we were none.The nobles’ estates were long ago forsaken. In the people's deepest trunks lay silks and guipure laces that were once perhaps used only to cover a table. Five steps from the barn in the direction of the pear tree, some silver candlesticks are buried; there's a plaster figure of an angel in the chicken coop, covered with shit and feathers.I was reluctant to be going to my home, but I didn't see any way out. Fate intended me to be a different being from the one I was before.Here my grandfathers and great-grandfathers were born. Here the ones who caused my grandfathers and great-grandfathers to flee had stopped. When we were still far off I noticed that someone was in the house. It was our men—Skorsky had brought them here, about twenty in all. I asked Sanko, whom I had walked with side by side more than once, where the doctor was now. All the men answered that he was around somewhere, but I didn't see him that evening.In 1918, the spirit of my great-grandfather Stepan, along with my mother and uncle, had gotten into a britzka and scrambled off to Paris, to Napoleon, against whom my great-grandfather had fought with the Cossacks, to whom the Russians promised to return self-rule. Following him in the cart went the soul of Grandpa Oleh, who lost a finger when he cut down the old linden near the house; his second finger was blown off by a cannonball near Balaklava, and later his entire hand was cut off by some Turk. Next went the spirit of my father, also Stepan, who did not take part in any war but died of measles at the age of forty. They all got the hell out of here. First, they went to Kyiv, led by my mother, Tamara Makarivna, in order to collect Uncle's family and me, their son. And their son, it turns out, has now come back to rob his own home (I didn't drive my war buddies away, did I?). It's a shame that I didn't know where the bathtub was, or whatever they bathed me in when I was small. It would have been good to walk through the ranks of anarchists with that basin and tell them all to spit into it.Remembering every room, I carried Alina upstairs to my mother's bedchamber. There was no longer furniture or pictures, only bare walls. The bed and mattress remained, but that was enough. Mother hated noise, so she set up her room far away from the running in the halls and the creaks on the stairs. I adjusted the mattress; in a gap, looking like a stalk of wheat, there lay a gold bracelet that she lost in the haste and that the thieves could not find in the mayhem. I tucked it into my pocket.The place could still be saved. It was strong, built under the leadership of my grandfather, who knew how to do it right. He built a sawmill, a gristmill, a dress factory (today it's probably been ransacked, maybe even by our own men).Alina had a complete, displaced break in her right fibula. We needed water first. I went downstairs—the guys were dragging out the piano like an old cow to the slaughter.“What are you doing with that?”“Taking it out.”“Why?”“What's it to you? We want to have fun.”“Can you play?”“We're not your bourgeois lily-handed bitches.”They couldn't play, but they were famous at destruction. “Noise is the music of the new time,” one of the smarter among them might have said. “But noise is the opposite of music. Just as a rose is the opposite of your ugly mugs,” I'd have responded if there was anyone to say it to. I could also have said that this was a Bosendorfer grand piano, that it was very valuable—but do the guys not deserve such a luxury?“Why are you so boring? We're relaxing.”“Then let me play a little first.”“Go ahead, but fast. One-two.”So I played. As before. My fingers ran up and down the black and white keys, which weren't simply keys of these, the simplest, colors. These were the keys that remembered my fingers specifically—achieved by that slovenly German Katerina, our governess. She knew a bundle of languages, could play the piano, and was interested in the latest scientific discoveries. But she had not an ounce of sympathy for anyone who couldn't master anything on the first try. More than once she hit my pinkie against the black key that remembered every one of its four thousand touches. She would pound it on the key and shout, “Si bémol! Si bémol,” and later bang my fingers and translate, “B flach! B flach!”I played. I could not expose myself, so the only thing I could do was believe in miracles. What if these coarse men saw value in this bit of furniture so unintelligible to them? And what if they didn't destroy it, this emblem of my childhood, my land, my air, which I could protect in no other way? My air. My water.“Shchedryk, shchedryk, shchedrivochka,” one of them who recognized the tune began to sing along.“Look at you.” They did not expect music from me, who had until recently been drinking blood like water.They said, “Again, again!”A group of curious men gathered around me. They were ordinary farmers, thieves, and recidivists, peasants and workers, everyone except for Skorsky. They needed this music as they needed baths. The music cleansed them from the inside, perhaps. They had not heard anything besides the whistle of a bullet, the neighing of a horse, or the knocking of a chisel and the whirring of a saw, amputating limbs, for a long time.But it could not go on long. I did not close the piano lid, just stood and went to fetch water for Alina, leaving the unfinished song for later. The well was to the north—that is, at the “Head.” My father once promised to give me a compass if I could learn to identify the ends of the earth by means of the sun. And to make it easier to remember, I gave each one of them a name: the east where the day begins was “Right” (my right hand), the west “Left,” the north “Head,” and the south “Feet.” Back when I could still do whatever I wanted all day long, I would wake in the morning and say: I'm going to the Feet. The mound was at the Feet, Left had the river, Right had the forest. It was only to the Head that I rarely went, because a village was located there. When the villagers saw me, they would speak in whispers and avoid the master's son.... I wiped her brow and her burning, sunken cheeks. I lay down next to her to feel the heat of her skin.When the fire in Alina calmed slightly, I went out into our orchard. My father had once been given a gift from Japan—a tulip tree that blossomed with yellow-green flowers. It had to have grown in the time that I was away. It would have been fatal had it been cut down. I again took the stairs down into the drawing room and came across nobody—they had all disappeared in search of food or were hidden away in their burrows. In the middle of the hall, like an opened rib cage, was the piano, irreparably shattered.B Flach! B Flach!Translation © Ali Kinsella 2022. (shrink)