Journal articles: 'Chicago Public Library Omnibus Project' – Grafiati (2024)

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Historic library collections offer a rich and underexplored resource for teaching undergraduate and graduate students about new digital approaches, methodologies, and platforms. Their scope and scale can make them difficult to analyze in their physical form, but remediated onto a digital platform, they offer valuable insights into the process of archive creation and the importance of making their content available to audiences that cannot normally access it. The Jesuit Libraries Provenance Project (JLPP) was launched by students, faculty, and library professionals in 2014 to create an online archive of marks of ownership—bookplates, stamps, inscriptions—contained within books from the original library collection of St. Ignatius College, precursor to Loyola University Chicago. The project grew out of student work for a university museum exhibition commemorating the bi-centennial of the restoration of the Society of Jesus (more commonly known as the Jesuits). Utilizing the popular social media image-sharing site Flickr, the JLPP seeks to foster a participatory community of students, scholars, collectors, and the broader public interested in the history of early and modern Catholic print and the intellectual framework and approach of 19th-century Jesuit education. Initially intended to provide students with the chance to learn how to conceptualize, plan, and build a digital archive, the JLPP has proven equally effective for teaching about digital scholarship, shared authority, and, rather unexpectedly, about the materiality of collections in the digital age

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The article refers to the educational electronic service provided in libraries by volunteer instructors, who help users, mostly those unemployed and elderly, to master computer literacy, work with the Internet , and search for information, especially concerning the labor market. Launched at the Chicago Public Library, in which, under the conditions of manifestation of the so-called phenomenon of library axiom, volunteers act as digital social workers, the CyberNavigator program has become one of the most sought-after and contributed to reducing the digital inequality in this megalopolis. Having familiarized with the American practice in the fi eld of library volunteering, during an educational trip to the United States, Polish specialists, studying foreign experience in the organization of modern volunteering to increase the level of its development in their country, decided to adopt a new service addressed to persons with diffi culties in accessing to information and communication technologies (ICT). To do this, they created and implemented a pilot project called “Information for Citizens — Cyber-Navigators in Libraries”. Its main objective was to introduce a system of continuous electronic training for persons with diffi culties in accessing to ICT by implementing a specifi c service of “cyber-navigators” in libraries. The authors of the project strived to implement digital and media training in libraries, both for those users “delimited by the digit” and for librarians to develop various forms of lessons for visitors like that (trai nings, instructions, consultations, etc.). The authors also wanted to identify the needs in the fi eld of users’ digital training and to attract volunteers in professional library activities, basing on the experience of American libraries and taking into account the Polish realities. The idea of cyber-navigation appeared to be so timely and fruitful, that the libraries have included this informal educational service in their list of permanent ones.

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Abstract Purpose The late Don R. Swanson was well appreciated during his lifetime as Dean of the Graduate Library School at University of Chicago, as winner of the American Society for Information Science Award of Merit for 2000, and as author of many seminal articles. In this informal essay, I will give my personal perspective on Don’s contributions to science, and outline some current and future directions in literature-based discovery that are rooted in concepts that he developed. Design/methodology/approach Personal recollections and literature review. Findings The Swanson A-B-C model of literature-based discovery has been successfully used by laboratory investigators analyzing their findings and hypotheses. It continues to be a fertile area of research in a wide range of application areas including text mining, drug repurposing, studies of scientific innovation, knowledge discovery in databases, and bioinformatics. Recently, additional modes of discovery that do not follow the A-B-C model have also been proposed and explored (e.g. so-called storytelling, gaps, analogies, link prediction, negative consensus, outliers, and revival of neglected or discarded research questions). Research limitations This paper reflects the opinions of the author and is not a comprehensive nor technically based review of literature-based discovery. Practical implications The general scientific public is still not aware of the availability of tools for literature-based discovery. Our Arrowsmith project site maintains a suite of discovery tools that are free and open to the public (http://arrowsmith.psych.uic.edu), as does BITOLA which is maintained by Dmitar Hristovski (http://http://ibmi.mf.uni-lj.si/bitola), and Epiphanet which is maintained by Trevor Cohen (http://epiphanet.uth.tmc.edu/). Bringing user-friendly tools to the public should be a high priority, since even more than advancing basic research in informatics, it is vital that we ensure that scientists actually use discovery tools and that these are actually able to help them make experimental discoveries in the lab and in the clinic. Originality/value This paper discusses problems and issues which were inherent in Don’s thoughts during his life, including those which have not yet been fully taken up and studied systematically.

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This paper addresses several experiments that the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) University Library has undertaken to shape how information is presented on the Internet and to contribute to the quality and quantity of information accessible via the Internet. Four projects were begun under UIC's Great Cities Initiative. This paper describes each project briefly; reviews the significant issues addressed by the development of each project; discusses the future of each project; and identifies areas for other organizations, but especially libraries, to become involved with Internet publishing. The four projects include: a partnership with the Chicago Public Library (CPL) to make information about the Library and the City of Chicago available to eight CPL branches as well as to Internet visitors from more than 30 countries; a pilot project, now under contract, with the United States Department of State to provide State Department information world-wide on a timely basis, resulting in more than 3,000 full-text, fully indexed items distributed via Gopher and the World Wide Web over 300,000 times each month; a project with Pemberton Press to provide selected articles from four print journals, plus tables of content, author's guidelines and other information; and a collaboration with the Illinois State Archives to provide access to specialized databases of interest to genealogists and historians, such as the Federal Land Sales in Illinois.

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Introduction Crime fiction is one of the world’s most popular genres. Indeed, it has been estimated that as many as one in every three new novels, published in English, is classified within the crime fiction category (Knight xi). These new entrants to the market are forced to jostle for space on bookstore and library shelves with reprints of classic crime novels; such works placed in, often fierce, competition against their contemporaries as well as many of their predecessors. Raymond Chandler, in his well-known essay The Simple Art of Murder, noted Ernest Hemingway’s observation that “the good writer competes only with the dead. The good detective story writer […] competes not only with all the unburied dead but with all the hosts of the living as well” (3). In fact, there are so many examples of crime fiction works that, as early as the 1920s, one of the original ‘Queens of Crime’, Dorothy L. Sayers, complained: It is impossible to keep track of all the detective-stories produced to-day [sic]. Book upon book, magazine upon magazine pour out from the Press, crammed with murders, thefts, arsons, frauds, conspiracies, problems, puzzles, mysteries, thrills, maniacs, crooks, poisoners, forgers, garrotters, police, spies, secret-service men, detectives, until it seems that half the world must be engaged in setting riddles for the other half to solve (95). Twenty years after Sayers wrote on the matter of the vast quantities of crime fiction available, W.H. Auden wrote one of the more famous essays on the genre: The Guilty Vicarage: Notes on the Detective Story, by an Addict. Auden is, perhaps, better known as a poet but his connection to the crime fiction genre is undisputed. As well as his poetic works that reference crime fiction and commentaries on crime fiction, one of Auden’s fellow poets, Cecil Day-Lewis, wrote a series of crime fiction novels under the pseudonym Nicholas Blake: the central protagonist of these novels, Nigel Strangeways, was modelled upon Auden (Scaggs 27). Interestingly, some writers whose names are now synonymous with the genre, such as Edgar Allan Poe and Raymond Chandler, established the link between poetry and crime fiction many years before the publication of The Guilty Vicarage. Edmund Wilson suggested that “reading detective stories is simply a kind of vice that, for silliness and minor harmfulness, ranks somewhere between crossword puzzles and smoking” (395). In the first line of The Guilty Vicarage, Auden supports Wilson’s claim and confesses that: “For me, as for many others, the reading of detective stories is an addiction like tobacco or alcohol” (406). This indicates that the genre is at best a trivial pursuit, at worst a pursuit that is bad for your health and is, increasingly, socially unacceptable, while Auden’s ideas around taste—high and low—are made clear when he declares that “detective stories have nothing to do with works of art” (406). The debates that surround genre and taste are many and varied. The mid-1920s was a point in time which had witnessed crime fiction writers produce some of the finest examples of fiction to ever be published and when readers and publishers were watching, with anticipation, as a new generation of crime fiction writers were readying themselves to enter what would become known as the genre’s Golden Age. At this time, R. Austin Freeman wrote that: By the critic and the professedly literary person the detective story is apt to be dismissed contemptuously as outside the pale of literature, to be conceived of as a type of work produced by half-educated and wholly incompetent writers for consumption by office boys, factory girls, and other persons devoid of culture and literary taste (7). This article responds to Auden’s essay and explores how crime fiction appeals to many different tastes: tastes that are acquired, change over time, are embraced, or kept as guilty secrets. In addition, this article will challenge Auden’s very narrow definition of crime fiction and suggest how Auden’s religious imagery, deployed to explain why many people choose to read crime fiction, can be incorporated into a broader popular discourse on punishment. This latter argument demonstrates that a taste for crime fiction and a taste for justice are inextricably intertwined. Crime Fiction: A Type For Every Taste Cathy Cole has observed that “crime novels are housed in their own section in many bookshops, separated from literary novels much as you’d keep a child with measles away from the rest of the class” (116). Times have changed. So too, have our tastes. Crime fiction, once sequestered in corners, now demands vast tracts of prime real estate in bookstores allowing readers to “make their way to the appropriate shelves, and begin to browse […] sorting through a wide variety of very different types of novels” (Malmgren 115). This is a result of the sheer size of the genre, noted above, as well as the genre’s expanding scope. Indeed, those who worked to re-invent crime fiction in the 1800s could not have envisaged the “taxonomic exuberance” (Derrida 206) of the writers who have defined crime fiction sub-genres, as well as how readers would respond by not only wanting to read crime fiction but also wanting to read many different types of crime fiction tailored to their particular tastes. To understand the demand for this diversity, it is important to reflect upon some of the appeal factors of crime fiction for readers. Many rules have been promulgated for the writers of crime fiction to follow. Ronald Knox produced a set of 10 rules in 1928. These included Rule 3 “Not more than one secret room or passage is allowable”, and Rule 10 “Twin brothers, and doubles generally, must not appear unless we have been duly prepared for them” (194–6). In the same year, S.S. Van Dine produced another list of 20 rules, which included Rule 3 “There must be no love interest: The business in hand is to bring a criminal to the bar of justice, not to bring a lovelorn couple to the hymeneal altar”, and Rule 7 “There simply must be a corpse in a detective novel, and the deader the corpse the better” (189–93). Some of these directives have been deliberately ignored or have become out-of-date over time while others continue to be followed in contemporary crime writing practice. In sharp contrast, there are no rules for reading this genre. Individuals are, generally, free to choose what, where, when, why, and how they read crime fiction. There are, however, different appeal factors for readers. The most common of these appeal factors, often described as doorways, are story, setting, character, and language. As the following passage explains: The story doorway beckons those who enjoy reading to find out what happens next. The setting doorway opens widest for readers who enjoy being immersed in an evocation of place or time. The doorway of character is for readers who enjoy looking at the world through others’ eyes. Readers who most appreciate skilful writing enter through the doorway of language (Wyatt online). These doorways draw readers to the crime fiction genre. There are stories that allow us to easily predict what will come next or make us hold our breath until the very last page, the books that we will cheerfully lend to a family member or a friend and those that we keep close to hand to re-read again and again. There are settings as diverse as country manors, exotic locations, and familiar city streets, places we have been and others that we might want to explore. There are characters such as the accidental sleuth, the hardboiled detective, and the refined police officer, amongst many others, the men and women—complete with idiosyncrasies and flaws—who we have grown to admire and trust. There is also the language that all writers, regardless of genre, depend upon to tell their tales. In crime fiction, even the most basic task of describing where the murder victim was found can range from words that convey the genteel—“The room of the tragedy” (Christie 62)—to the absurd: “There it was, jammed between a pallet load of best export boneless beef and half a tonne of spring lamb” (Maloney 1). These appeal factors indicate why readers might choose crime fiction over another genre, or choose one type of crime fiction over another. Yet such factors fail to explain what crime fiction is or adequately answer why the genre is devoured in such vast quantities. Firstly, crime fiction stories are those in which there is the committing of a crime, or at least the suspicion of a crime (Cole), and the story that unfolds revolves around the efforts of an amateur or professional detective to solve that crime (Scaggs). Secondly, crime fiction offers the reassurance of resolution, a guarantee that from “previous experience and from certain cultural conventions associated with this genre that ultimately the mystery will be fully explained” (Zunshine 122). For Auden, the definition of the crime novel was quite specific, and he argued that referring to the genre by “the vulgar definition, ‘a Whodunit’ is correct” (407). Auden went on to offer a basic formula stating that: “a murder occurs; many are suspected; all but one suspect, who is the murderer, are eliminated; the murderer is arrested or dies” (407). The idea of a formula is certainly a useful one, particularly when production demands—in terms of both quality and quantity—are so high, because the formula facilitates creators in the “rapid and efficient production of new works” (Cawelti 9). For contemporary crime fiction readers, the doorways to reading, discussed briefly above, have been cast wide open. Stories relying upon the basic crime fiction formula as a foundation can be gothic tales, clue puzzles, forensic procedurals, spy thrillers, hardboiled narratives, or violent crime narratives, amongst many others. The settings can be quiet villages or busy metropolises, landscapes that readers actually inhabit or that provide a form of affordable tourism. These stories can be set in the past, the here and now, or the future. Characters can range from Edgar Allan Poe’s C. Auguste Dupin to Dashiell Hammett’s Sam Spade, from Agatha Christie’s Miss Jane Marple to Kerry Greenwood’s Honourable Phryne Fisher. Similarly, language can come in numerous styles from the direct (even rough) words of Carter Brown to the literary prose of Peter Temple. Anything is possible, meaning everything is available to readers. For Auden—although he required a crime to be committed and expected that crime to be resolved—these doorways were only slightly ajar. For him, the story had to be a Whodunit; the setting had to be rural England, though a college setting was also considered suitable; the characters had to be “eccentric (aesthetically interesting individuals) and good (instinctively ethical)” and there needed to be a “completely satisfactory detective” (Sherlock Holmes, Inspector French, and Father Brown were identified as “satisfactory”); and the language descriptive and detailed (406, 409, 408). To illustrate this point, Auden’s concept of crime fiction has been plotted on a taxonomy, below, that traces the genre’s main developments over a period of three centuries. As can be seen, much of what is, today, taken for granted as being classified as crime fiction is completely excluded from Auden’s ideal. Figure 1: Taxonomy of Crime Fiction (Adapted from Franks, Murder 136) Crime Fiction: A Personal Journey I discovered crime fiction the summer before I started high school when I saw the film version of The Big Sleep starring Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall. A few days after I had seen the film I started reading the Raymond Chandler novel of the same title, featuring his famous detective Philip Marlowe, and was transfixed by the second paragraph: The main hallway of the Sternwood place was two stories high. Over the entrance doors, which would have let in a troop of Indian elephants, there was a broad stained-glass panel showing a knight in dark armour rescuing a lady who was tied to a tree and didn’t have any clothes on but some very long and convenient hair. The knight had pushed the visor of his helmet back to be sociable, and he was fiddling with the knots on the ropes that tied the lady to the tree and not getting anywhere. I stood there and thought that if I lived in the house, I would sooner or later have to climb up there and help him. He didn’t seem to be really trying (9). John Scaggs has written that this passage indicates Marlowe is an idealised figure, a knight of romance rewritten onto the mean streets of mid-20th century Los Angeles (62); a relocation Susan Roland calls a “secular form of the divinely sanctioned knight errant on a quest for metaphysical justice” (139): my kind of guy. Like many young people I looked for adventure and escape in books, a search that was realised with Raymond Chandler and his contemporaries. On the escapism scale, these men with their stories of tough-talking detectives taking on murderers and other criminals, law enforcement officers, and the occasional femme fatale, were certainly a sharp upgrade from C.S. Lewis and the Chronicles of Narnia. After reading the works written by the pioneers of the hardboiled and roman noir traditions, I looked to other American authors such as Edgar Allan Poe who, in the mid-1800s, became the father of the modern detective story, and Thorne Smith who, in the 1920s and 1930s, produced magical realist tales with characters who often chose to dabble on the wrong side of the law. This led me to the works of British crime writers including Arthur Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie, and Dorothy L. Sayers. My personal library then became dominated by Australian writers of crime fiction, from the stories of bushrangers and convicts of the Colonial era to contemporary tales of police and private investigators. There have been various attempts to “improve” or “refine” my tastes: to convince me that serious literature is real reading and frivolous fiction is merely a distraction. Certainly, the reading of those novels, often described as classics, provide perfect combinations of beauty and brilliance. Their narratives, however, do not often result in satisfactory endings. This routinely frustrates me because, while I understand the philosophical frameworks that many writers operate within, I believe the characters of such works are too often treated unfairly in the final pages. For example, at the end of Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, Frederick Henry “left the hospital and walked back to the hotel in the rain” after his son is stillborn and “Mrs Henry” becomes “very ill” and dies (292–93). Another example can be found on the last page of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four when Winston Smith “gazed up at the enormous face” and he realised that he “loved Big Brother” (311). Endings such as these provide a space for reflection about the world around us but rarely spark an immediate response of how great that world is to live in (Franks Motive). The subject matter of crime fiction does not easily facilitate fairy-tale finishes, yet, people continue to read the genre because, generally, the concluding chapter will show that justice, of some form, will be done. Punishment will be meted out to the ‘bad characters’ that have broken society’s moral or legal laws; the ‘good characters’ may experience hardships and may suffer but they will, generally, prevail. Crime Fiction: A Taste For Justice Superimposed upon Auden’s parameters around crime fiction, are his ideas of the law in the real world and how such laws are interwoven with the Christian-based system of ethics. This can be seen in Auden’s listing of three classes of crime: “(a) offenses against God and one’s neighbor or neighbors; (b) offenses against God and society; (c) offenses against God” (407). Murder, in Auden’s opinion, is a class (b) offense: for the crime fiction novel, the society reflected within the story should be one in “a state of grace, i.e., a society where there is no need of the law, no contradiction between the aesthetic individual and the ethical universal, and where murder, therefore, is the unheard-of act which precipitates a crisis” (408). Additionally, in the crime novel “as in its mirror image, the Quest for the Grail, maps (the ritual of space) and timetables (the ritual of time) are desirable. Nature should reflect its human inhabitants, i.e., it should be the Great Good Place; for the more Eden-like it is, the greater the contradiction of murder” (408). Thus, as Charles J. Rzepka notes, “according to W.H. Auden, the ‘classical’ English detective story typically re-enacts rites of scapegoating and expulsion that affirm the innocence of a community of good people supposedly ignorant of evil” (12). This premise—of good versus evil—supports Auden’s claim that the punishment of wrongdoers, particularly those who claim the “right to be omnipotent” and commit murder (409), should be swift and final: As to the murderer’s end, of the three alternatives—execution, suicide, and madness—the first is preferable; for if he commits suicide he refuses to repent, and if he goes mad he cannot repent, but if he does not repent society cannot forgive. Execution, on the other hand, is the act of atonement by which the murderer is forgiven by society (409). The unilateral endorsem*nt of state-sanctioned murder is problematic, however, because—of the main justifications for punishment: retribution; deterrence; incapacitation; and rehabilitation (Carter Snead 1245)—punishment, in this context, focuses exclusively upon retribution and deterrence, incapacitation is achieved by default, but the idea of rehabilitation is completely ignored. This, in turn, ignores how the reading of crime fiction can be incorporated into a broader popular discourse on punishment and how a taste for crime fiction and a taste for justice are inextricably intertwined. One of the ways to explore the connection between crime fiction and justice is through the lens of Emile Durkheim’s thesis on the conscience collective which proposes punishment is a process allowing for the demonstration of group norms and the strengthening of moral boundaries. David Garland, in summarising this thesis, states: So although the modern state has a near monopoly of penal violence and controls the administration of penalties, a much wider population feels itself to be involved in the process of punishment, and supplies the context of social support and valorization within which state punishment takes place (32). It is claimed here that this “much wider population” connecting with the task of punishment can be taken further. Crime fiction, above all other forms of literary production, which, for those who do not directly contribute to the maintenance of their respective legal systems, facilitates a feeling of active participation in the penalising of a variety of perpetrators: from the issuing of fines to incarceration (Franks Punishment). Crime fiction readers are therefore, temporarily at least, direct contributors to a more stable society: one that is clearly based upon right and wrong and reliant upon the conscience collective to maintain and reaffirm order. In this context, the reader is no longer alone, with only their crime fiction novel for company, but has become an active member of “a moral framework which binds individuals to each other and to its conventions and institutions” (Garland 51). This allows crime fiction, once viewed as a “vice” (Wilson 395) or an “addiction” (Auden 406), to be seen as playing a crucial role in the preservation of social mores. It has been argued “only the most literal of literary minds would dispute the claim that fictional characters help shape the way we think of ourselves, and hence help us articulate more clearly what it means to be human” (Galgut 190). Crime fiction focuses on what it means to be human, and how complex humans are, because stories of murders, and the men and women who perpetrate and solve them, comment on what drives some people to take a life and others to avenge that life which is lost and, by extension, engages with a broad community of readers around ideas of justice and punishment. It is, furthermore, argued here that the idea of the story is one of the more important doorways for crime fiction and, more specifically, the conclusions that these stories, traditionally, offer. For Auden, the ending should be one of restoration of the spirit, as he suspected that “the typical reader of detective stories is, like myself, a person who suffers from a sense of sin” (411). In this way, the “phantasy, then, which the detective story addict indulges is the phantasy of being restored to the Garden of Eden, to a state of innocence, where he may know love as love and not as the law” (412), indicating that it was not necessarily an accident that “the detective story has flourished most in predominantly Protestant countries” (408). Today, modern crime fiction is a “broad church, where talented authors raise questions and cast light on a variety of societal and other issues through the prism of an exciting, page-turning story” (Sisterson). Moreover, our tastes in crime fiction have been tempered by a growing fear of real crime, particularly murder, “a crime of unique horror” (Hitchens 200). This has seen some readers develop a taste for crime fiction that is not produced within a framework of ecclesiastical faith but is rather grounded in reliance upon those who enact punishment in both the fictional and real worlds. As P.D. James has written: [N]ot by luck or divine intervention, but by human ingenuity, human intelligence and human courage. It confirms our hope that, despite some evidence to the contrary, we live in a beneficent and moral universe in which problems can be solved by rational means and peace and order restored from communal or personal disruption and chaos (174). Dorothy L. Sayers, despite her work to legitimise crime fiction, wrote that there: “certainly does seem a possibility that the detective story will some time come to an end, simply because the public will have learnt all the tricks” (108). Of course, many readers have “learnt all the tricks”, or most of them. This does not, however, detract from the genre’s overall appeal. We have not grown bored with, or become tired of, the formula that revolves around good and evil, and justice and punishment. Quite the opposite. Our knowledge of, as well as our faith in, the genre’s “tricks” gives a level of confidence to readers who are looking for endings that punish murderers and other wrongdoers, allowing for more satisfactory conclusions than the, rather depressing, ends given to Mr. Henry and Mr. Smith by Ernest Hemingway and George Orwell noted above. Conclusion For some, the popularity of crime fiction is a curious case indeed. When Penguin and Collins published the Marsh Million—100,000 copies each of 10 Ngaio Marsh titles in 1949—the author’s relief at the success of the project was palpable when she commented that “it was pleasant to find detective fiction being discussed as a tolerable form of reading by people whose opinion one valued” (172). More recently, upon the announcement that a Miles Franklin Award would be given to Peter Temple for his crime novel Truth, John Sutherland, a former chairman of the judges for one of the world’s most famous literary awards, suggested that submitting a crime novel for the Booker Prize would be: “like putting a donkey into the Grand National”. Much like art, fashion, food, and home furnishings or any one of the innumerable fields of activity and endeavour that are subject to opinion, there will always be those within the world of fiction who claim positions as arbiters of taste. Yet reading is intensely personal. I like a strong, well-plotted story, appreciate a carefully researched setting, and can admire elegant language, but if a character is too difficult to embrace—if I find I cannot make an emotional connection, if I find myself ambivalent about their fate—then a book is discarded as not being to my taste. It is also important to recognise that some tastes are transient. Crime fiction stories that are popular today could be forgotten tomorrow. Some stories appeal to such a broad range of tastes they are immediately included in the crime fiction canon. Yet others evolve over time to accommodate widespread changes in taste (an excellent example of this can be seen in the continual re-imagining of the stories of Sherlock Holmes). Personal tastes also adapt to our experiences and our surroundings. A book that someone adores in their 20s might be dismissed in their 40s. A storyline that was meaningful when read abroad may lose some of its magic when read at home. Personal events, from a change in employment to the loss of a loved one, can also impact upon what we want to read. Similarly, world events, such as economic crises and military conflicts, can also influence our reading preferences. Auden professed an almost insatiable appetite for crime fiction, describing the reading of detective stories as an addiction, and listed a very specific set of criteria to define the Whodunit. Today, such self-imposed restrictions are rare as, while there are many rules for writing crime fiction, there are no rules for reading this (or any other) genre. People are, generally, free to choose what, where, when, why, and how they read crime fiction, and to follow the deliberate or whimsical paths that their tastes may lay down for them. Crime fiction writers, past and present, offer: an incredible array of detective stories from the locked room to the clue puzzle; settings that range from the English country estate to city skyscrapers in glamorous locations around the world; numerous characters from cerebral sleuths who can solve a crime in their living room over a nice, hot cup of tea to weapon wielding heroes who track down villains on foot in darkened alleyways; and, language that ranges from the cultured conversations from the novels of the genre’s Golden Age to the hard-hitting terminology of forensic and legal procedurals. Overlaid on these appeal factors is the capacity of crime fiction to feed a taste for justice: to engage, vicariously at least, in the establishment of a more stable society. Of course, there are those who turn to the genre for a temporary distraction, an occasional guilty pleasure. There are those who stumble across the genre by accident or deliberately seek it out. 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Derrida, Jacques. “The Law of Genre.” Glyph 7 (1980): 202–32. Franks, Rachel. “May I Suggest Murder?: An Overview of Crime Fiction for Readers’ Advisory Services Staff.” Australian Library Journal 60.2 (2011): 133–43. ––. “Motive for Murder: Reading Crime Fiction.” The Australian Library and Information Association Biennial Conference. Sydney: Jul. 2012. ––. “Punishment by the Book: Delivering and Evading Punishment in Crime Fiction.” Inter-Disciplinary.Net 3rd Global Conference on Punishment. Oxford: Sep. 2013. Freeman, R.A. “The Art of the Detective Story.” The Art of the Mystery Story: A Collection of Critical Essays. Ed. Howard Haycraft. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1924/1947. 7–17. Galgut, E. “Poetic Faith and Prosaic Concerns: A Defense of Suspension of Disbelief.” South African Journal of Philosophy 21.3 (2002): 190–99. Garland, David. Punishment and Modern Society: A Study in Social Theory. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1993. Hemingway, Ernest. A Farewell to Arms. London: Random House, 1929/2004. ––. in R. Chandler. The Simple Art of Murder. New York: Vintage Books, 1950/1988. Hitchens, P. A Brief History of Crime: The Decline of Order, Justice and Liberty in England. London: Atlantic Books, 2003. James, P.D. Talking About Detective Fiction. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2009. Knight, Stephen. Crime Fiction since 1800: Death, Detection, Diversity, 2nd ed. New York: Palgrave Macmillian, 2010. Knox, Ronald A. “Club Rules: The 10 Commandments for Detective Novelists, 1928.” Ronald Knox Society of North America. 1 Dec. 2013 ‹http://www.ronaldknoxsociety.com/detective.html›. Malmgren, C.D. “Anatomy of Murder: Mystery, Detective and Crime Fiction.” Journal of Popular Culture Spring (1997): 115–21. Maloney, Shane. The Murray Whelan Trilogy: Stiff, The Brush-Off and Nice Try. Melbourne: Text Publishing, 1994/2008. Marsh, Ngaio in J. Drayton. Ngaio Marsh: Her Life in Crime. Auckland: Harper Collins, 2008. Orwell, George. Nineteen Eighty-Four. London: Penguin Books, 1949/1989. Roland, Susan. From Agatha Christie to Ruth Rendell: British Women Writers in Detective and Crime Fiction. London: Palgrave, 2001. Rzepka, Charles J. Detective Fiction. Cambridge: Polity, 2005. Sayers, Dorothy L. “The Omnibus of Crime.” The Art of the Mystery Story: A Collection of Critical Essays. Ed. Howard Haycraft. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1928/1947. 71–109. Scaggs, John. Crime Fiction: The New Critical Idiom. London: Routledge, 2005. Sisterson, C. “Battle for the Marsh: Awards 2013.” Black Mask: Pulps, Noir and News of Same. 1 Jan. 2014 http://www.blackmask.com/category/awards-2013/ Sutherland, John. in A. Flood. “Could Miles Franklin turn the Booker Prize to Crime?” The Guardian. 1 Jan. 2014 ‹http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/jun/25/miles-franklin-booker-prize-crime›. Van Dine, S.S. “Twenty Rules for Writing Detective Stories.” The Art of the Mystery Story: A Collection of Critical Essays. Ed. Howard Haycraft. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1928/1947. 189-93. Wilson, Edmund. “Who Cares Who Killed Roger Ackroyd.” The Art of the Mystery Story: A Collection of Critical Essays. Ed. Howard Haycraft. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1944/1947. 390–97. Wyatt, N. “Redefining RA: A RA Big Think.” Library Journal Online. 1 Jan. 2014 ‹http://lj.libraryjournal.com/2007/07/ljarchives/lj-series-redefining-ra-an-ra-big-think›. Zunshine, Lisa. Why We Read Fiction: Theory of Mind and the Novel. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 2006.

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ObjectiveTo assess evidence for public health impact of syndromic surveillance.IntroductionSystematic syndromic surveillance is undergoing a transition. Building on traditional roots in bioterrorism and situational awareness, proponents are demonstrating the timeliness and informative power of syndromic surveillance data to supplement other surveillance data.MethodsWe used PubMed and Google Scholar to identify articles published since 2007 using key words of interest (e.g., syndromic surveillance in combinations with emergency, evaluation, quality assurance, alerting). The following guiding questions were used to abstract impact measures of syndromic surveillance: 1) what was the public health impact; what decisions or actions occurred because of use of syndromic surveillance data?, 2) were there specific interventions or performance measures for this impact?, and 3) how, and by whom, was this information used?ResultsThirty-five papers were included. Almost all articles (n=33) remarked on the ability of syndromic surveillance to improve public health because of timeliness and/or accuracy of data. Thirty-four articles mentioned that syndromic surveillance data was used or could be useful. However, evidence of health impact directly attributable to syndromic surveillance efforts were lacking. Two articles described how syndromic data were used for decision-making. One article measured the effect of data utilization.ConclusionsWithin the syndromic surveillance literature instances of a conceptual shift from detection to practical response are plentiful. As the field of syndromic surveillance continues to evolve and is used by public health institutions, further evaluation of data utility and impact is needed.ReferencesAyala, A., Berisha, V., Goodin, K., Pogreba-Brown, K., Levy, C., McKinney, B., Koski, L., & Imholte, S. (2016). Public health surveillance strategies for mass gatherings: Super Bowl XLIX and related events, Maricopa County, Arizona, 2015. Health Security, 14(3), 173-84. doi: 10.1089/hs.2016.0029.Bermis, K., Frias, M., Patel, M.T., & Christiansen, D. (2017). Using an Emergency Department Syndromic Surveillance System to Evaluate Reporting of Potential Rabies Exposures, Illinois, 2013-2015. Public Health Reports 132(Supplement 1) 59S-64S."Borroto, R., Williamson, B., Pitcher, P., Ballester, L., Smith, W., Soetebier, K., & Drenzek, C. (2016). Using Syndromic Surveillance Alert Protocols for Epidemiologic Response in Georgia. Online Journal of Public Health Informatics 9(1):e123. doi:10.5210/ojphi.v9i1.7707."Daly, E.R., Dufault, K., Swenson, D.J., Lakevicius, P., Metcalf, E., & Chan, B.P. (2017). Use of emergency department data to monitor and respond to an increase in opioid overdoses in New Hampshire 2011-2015. Public Health Reports 132(Supplement 1) 73S-79S. doi: 10.1177/0033354917707934Deyneka, L., Hakenewerth, A., Faigen, Z., Ising, A., & Barnett, C. (2017). Using syndromic surveillance data to monitor endocarditis and sepsis among drug users. Online Journal of Public Health Informatics, (9)1. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.5210/ojphi.v9i1.7708DeYoung, K., Chen, Y., Beum, R., Askenazi, M., Zimmerman, C., & Davidson, A. J. (2017). Validation of a syndromic case definition for detecting emergency department visits potentially related to marijuana. Public Health Reports, epublication.doi: 10.1177/0033354917708987"Dinh, M.M., Kastelein, C., Bein, K.J., Bautovich, T., & Ivers, R. (2015). Use of a syndromic surveillance system to describe the trend in cycling-related presentations to emergency departments in Sydney. Emergency Medicine Australasia, 27(4), 343-7. doi: 10.1111/1742-6723.12422Gevitz, K., Madera, R., Newbern, C., Lojo, J., & Johnson, C. Risk of Fall-Related Injury due to Adverse Weather Events, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 2006-2011. Public Health Reports (132) 53S-58S. doi: 10.1177/0033354917706968"Gonzales-Colon, F.J., Lake, I., Barker, G., Smith, G.E., Elliot, A.J., & Morbey, R. (2016). Using Bayesian Networks to assist decision-making in syndromic surveillance. Online Journal of Public Health Informatics, 8(1), e15. doi:10.5210/ojphi.v8i1.6415"Harmon, KJ., Proescholdbell, S., Marshall, S., & Waller, A. (2014). Utilization of emergency department data for drug overdose surveillance in North Carolina. Online Journal of Public Health Informatics 6(1), e174. doi: 10.5210/ojphi.v6i1.5200Harris, J.K., Mansour, R., Choucair, B., Olson, J., Nissen, C., & Bhatt, J. (2014). Health department use of social media to identify foodborne illness—Chicago, Illinois, 2013-2014. MMWR Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report 63(32), 681-685. Retrieved from: https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm6332a1.htm"Harrison, C., Jorder, M., Stern, H., Stavinksy, F., Reddy, V., Hanson, H., Waechter, H., Lowe, L., Gravano, L., & Balter, S. (2014). Using online reviews by restaurant patrons to identify unreported cases of foodborne illness — New York City, 2012–2013. MMWR Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report 63(20), 441-445. Retrieved from:https://www.cdc.gov/MMWr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm6320a1.htm"Hawkins, J.B., Tuli, G., Kluberg, S., Harris, J., Brownstein, J.S., & Nsoesie, E. (2016). A digital platform for local foodborne illness and outbreak surveillance. Online Journal of Public Health Informatics 8(1), e60. http://dx.doi.org/10.5210/ojphi.v8i1.6474Hines, J.Z., Bancroft, J., Powell, M., & Hedberg, K. (2017). Case finding using syndromic surveillance data during an outbreak of Shiga Toxin–Producing Escherichia coli O26 infections, Oregon, 2015. Public Health Reports, epublication. https://doi.org/10.1177/0033354917708994Hudson, L. T., Klekamp, B.G., & Matthews, S.D. (2017). Local Public Health Surveillance of Heroin-Related Morbidity and Mortality, Orange County, Florida, 2010-2014. Public Health Reports (132), 80S-87SHughes, H.E., Morbey, R., Hughes, T.C., Locker, T.E., Pebody, R., Green, H.K., Ellis, J., Smith, G.E., & Elliot, A.J. (2016). Emergency department syndromic surveillance providing early warning of seasonal respiratory activity in England. Epidemiology and Infection, 144(5), 1052-64. doi: 10.1017/S0950268815002125Hughes, H.E., Morbey, R., Hughes, T.C., Locker, T.E., Shannon, T., Carmichael, C., Murray, V., Ibbotson, S., Catchpole, M., McCloskey, B., Smith, G., & Elliot, A.J. (2014). Using an emergency department syndromic surveillance system to investigate the impact of extreme cold weather events. Public Health, 128(7), 628-635. doi: 10.1016/j.puhe.2014.05.007Ising, A., Proescholdbell, S., Harmon, K.J., Sachdeva, N., Marshall, S.W., & Waller, A.E. (2016). Use of syndromic surveillance data to monitor poisonings and drug overdoses in state and local public health agencies. Injury Prevention 22:i43-i49.http://dx.doi.org/10.1136/injuryprev-2015-041821"Johnson, J. I., & Brown, K. (2015). Validation of emergency department and outpatient data using ILI syndrome classifiers. Online Journal of Public Health Informatics, 7(1), e83. http://doi.org/10.5210/ojphi.v7i1.5749Lall, R., Abdelnabi , J., Ngai, S., Parton, H.B., Saunders, K., Sell, J., Wahnich, A., Weiss, D., Marthes, R.W. (2017). Advancing the Use of Emergency Department Syndromic Surveillance Data, New York City, 2012-2016. Public Health Reports (132), 23S-30SLiljeqvist, H. T., Muscatello, D., Sara, G., Dinh, M., & Lawrence, G. L. (2014). Accuracy of automatic syndromic classification of coded emergency department diagnoses in identifying mental health-related presentations for public health surveillance. BMC Medical Informatics and Decision Making, 14(84). http://doi.org/10.1186/1472-6947-14-84Lober, W. B., Reeder, B., Painter, I., Revere, D., Goldov, K., Bugni, P. F., & Olson, D. R. (2014). Technical description of the Distribute Project: a community-basedsyndromic surveillance system implementation. Online Journal of Public Health Informatics, 5(3), 224. http://doi.org/10.5210/ojphi.v5i3.4938Mathes, R. W., Ito, K., & Matte, T. (2011). Assessing syndromic surveillance of cardiovascular outcomes from emergency department chief complaint data in New York City. Public Library of Science ONE, 6(2), e14677. http://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0014677O’Connell, E. K., Zhang, G., Leguen, F., Llau, A., & Rico, E. (2010). Innovative uses for syndromic surveillance. Emerging Infectious Diseases, 16(4), 669–671. http://doi.org/10.3201/eid1604.090688Rumoro, D.P., Hallock, M.M., Silva, J., Shah, S.C., Gibbs, G., Trenholme G.M., & Waddell, M.J. (2013). Why does Influenza-Like Illness surveillance miss true influenza cases in the emergency department?: Implications for health care providers. Annals of Emergency Medicine, 62(4), S75. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.annemergmed.2013.07.024Samoff E, Waller A, Fleischauer A, et al. Integration of Syndromic Surveillance Data into Public Health Practice at State and Local Levels in North Carolina. Public Health Reports. 2012;127(3):310-317.Savard, N., Bédard, L., Allard, R., & Buckeridge, D.L. (2015). Using age, triage score, and disposition data from emergency department electronic records to improve Influenza-Like Illness surveillance. Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, 22(3): 688-696. doi: 10.1093/jamia/ocu002Seil, K., Marcum, J., Lall, R., & Stayton, C. (2015). Utility of a near real-time emergency department syndromic surveillance system to track injuries in New York City. Injury Epidemiology, 2(1), 11. http://doi.org/10.1186/s40621-015-0044-5Smith, S., Elliot, A. J., Hajat, S., Bone, A., Smith, G. E., & Kovats, S. (2016). Estimating the burden of heat illness in England during the 2013 summer heatwave using syndromic surveillance. Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health, 70(5), 459–465. http://doi.org/10.1136/jech-2015-206079Stephens, E. (2017). Development of syndrome definitions for acute unintentional drug and heroin overdose. Online Journal of Public Health Informatics, (9)1. http://dx.doi.org/10.5210/ojphi.v9i1.7593.Stigi, K., Baer, A., Duchin, J., & Lofy, K. (2014). Evaluation of electronic ambulatory care data for Influenza-Like Illness surveillance, Washington state. 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Abstract:

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

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At one point in Victor Hugo’s novel, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, the archdeacon, Claude Frollo, looked up from a book on his table to the edifice of the gothic cathedral, visible from his canon’s cell in the cloister of Notre Dame: “Alas!” he said, “this will kill that” (146). Frollo’s lament, that the book would destroy the edifice, captures the medieval cleric’s anxiety about the way in which Gutenberg’s print technology would become the new universal means for recording and communicating humanity’s ideas and artistic expression, replacing the grand monuments of architecture, human engineering, and craftsmanship. For Hugo, architecture was “the great handwriting of humankind” (149). The cathedral as the material outcome of human technology was being replaced by the first great machine—the printing press. At this point in the third millennium, some people undoubtedly have similar anxieties to Frollo: is it now the book’s turn to be destroyed by yet another great machine? The inclusion of “post print” in our title is not intended to sound the death knell of the book. Rather, we contend that despite the enduring value of print, digital publishing is “present and active” and is changing the way in which research, particularly in the humanities, is being undertaken. Our approach has three related parts. First, we consider how digital technologies are changing the way in which content is constructed, customised, modified, disseminated, and accessed within a global, distributed network. This section argues that the transition from print to electronic or digital publishing means both losses and gains, particularly with respect to shifts in our approaches to textuality, information, and innovative publishing. Second, we discuss the Children’s Literature Digital Resources (CLDR) project, with which we are involved. This case study of a digitising initiative opens out the transformative possibilities and challenges of digital publishing and e-scholarship for research communities. Third, we reflect on technology’s capacity to bring about major changes in the light of the theoretical and practical issues that have arisen from our discussion. I. Digitising in a “post-print age” We are living in an era that is commonly referred to as “the late age of print” (see Kho) or the “post-print age” (see Gunkel). According to Aarseth, we have reached a point whereby nearly all of our public and personal media have become more or less digital (37). As Kho notes, web newspapers are not only becoming increasingly more popular, but they are also making rather than losing money, and paper-based newspapers are finding it difficult to recruit new readers from the younger generations (37). Not only can such online-only publications update format, content, and structure more economically than print-based publications, but their wide distribution network, speed, and flexibility attract advertising revenue. Hype and hyperbole aside, publishers are not so much discarding their legacy of print, but recognising the folly of not embracing innovative technologies that can add value by presenting information in ways that satisfy users’ needs for content to-go or for edutainment. As Kho notes: “no longer able to satisfy customer demand by producing print-only products, or even by enabling online access to semi-static content, established publishers are embracing new models for publishing, web-style” (42). Advocates of online publishing contend that the major benefits of online publishing over print technology are that it is faster, more economical, and more interactive. However, as Hovav and Gray caution, “e-publishing also involves risks, hidden costs, and trade-offs” (79). The specific focus for these authors is e-journal publishing and they contend that while cost reduction is in editing, production and distribution, if the journal is not open access, then costs relating to storage and bandwith will be transferred to the user. If we put economics aside for the moment, the transition from print to electronic text (e-text), especially with electronic literary works, brings additional considerations, particularly in their ability to make available different reading strategies to print, such as “animation, rollovers, screen design, navigation strategies, and so on” (Hayles 38). Transition from print to e-text In his book, Writing Space, David Bolter follows Victor Hugo’s lead, but does not ask if print technology will be destroyed. Rather, he argues that “the idea and ideal of the book will change: print will no longer define the organization and presentation of knowledge, as it has for the past five centuries” (2). As Hayles noted above, one significant indicator of this change, which is a consequence of the shift from analogue to digital, is the addition of graphical, audio, visual, sonic, and kinetic elements to the written word. A significant consequence of this transition is the reinvention of the book in a networked environment. Unlike the printed book, the networked book is not bound by space and time. Rather, it is an evolving entity within an ecology of readers, authors, and texts. The Web 2.0 platform has enabled more experimentation with blending of digital technology and traditional writing, particularly in the use of blogs, which have spawned blogwriting and the wikinovel. Siva Vaidhyanathan’s The Googlization of Everything: How One Company is Disrupting Culture, Commerce and Community … and Why We Should Worry is a wikinovel or blog book that was produced over a series of weeks with contributions from other bloggers (see: http://www.sivacracy.net/). Penguin Books, in collaboration with a media company, “Six Stories to Start,” have developed six stories—“We Tell Stories,” which involve different forms of interactivity from users through blog entries, Twitter text messages, an interactive google map, and other features. For example, the story titled “Fairy Tales” allows users to customise the story using their own choice of names for characters and descriptions of character traits. Each story is loosely based on a classic story and links take users to synopses of these original stories and their authors and to online purchase of the texts through the Penguin Books sales website. These examples of digital stories are a small part of the digital environment, which exploits computer and online technologies’ capacity to be interactive and immersive. As Janet Murray notes, the interactive qualities of digital environments are characterised by their procedural and participatory abilities, while their immersive qualities are characterised by their spatial and encyclopedic dimensions (71–89). These immersive and interactive qualities highlight different ways of reading texts, which entail different embodied and cognitive functions from those that reading print texts requires. As Hayles argues: the advent of electronic textuality presents us with an unparalleled opportunity to reformulate fundamental ideas about texts and, in the process, to see print as well as electronic texts with fresh eyes (89–90). The transition to e-text also highlights how digitality is changing all aspects of everyday life both inside and outside the academy. Online teaching and e-research Another aspect of the commercial arm of publishing that is impacting on academe and other organisations is the digitising and indexing of print content for niche distribution. Kho offers the example of the Mark Logic Corporation, which uses its XML content platform to repurpose content, create new content, and distribute this content through multiple portals. As the promotional website video for Mark Logic explains, academics can use this service to customise their own textbooks for students by including only articles and book chapters that are relevant to their subject. These are then organised, bound, and distributed by Mark Logic for sale to students at a cost that is generally cheaper than most textbooks. A further example of how print and digital materials can form an integrated, customised source for teachers and students is eFictions (Trimmer, Jennings, & Patterson). eFictions was one of the first print and online short story anthologies that teachers of literature could customise to their own needs. Produced as both a print text collection and a website, eFictions offers popular short stories in English by well-known traditional and contemporary writers from the US, Australia, New Zealand, UK, and Europe, with summaries, notes on literary features, author biographies, and, in one instance, a YouTube movie of the story. In using the eFictions website, teachers can build a customised anthology of traditional and innovative stories to suit their teaching preferences. These examples provide useful indicators of how content is constructed, customised, modified, disseminated, and accessed within a distributed network. However, the question remains as to how to measure their impact and outcomes within teaching and learning communities. As Harley suggests in her study on the use and users of digital resources in the humanities and social sciences, several factors warrant attention, such as personal teaching style, philosophy, and specific disciplinary requirements. However, in terms of understanding the benefits of digital resources for teaching and learning, Harley notes that few providers in her sample had developed any plans to evaluate use and users in a systematic way. In addition to the problems raised in Harley’s study, another relates to how researchers can be supported to take full advantage of digital technologies for e-research. The transformation brought about by information and communication technologies extends and broadens the impact of research, by making its outputs more discoverable and usable by other researchers, and its benefits more available to industry, governments, and the wider community. Traditional repositories of knowledge and information, such as libraries, are juggling the space demands of books and computer hardware alongside increasing reader demand for anywhere, anytime, anyplace access to information. Researchers’ expectations about online access to journals, eprints, bibliographic data, and the views of others through wikis, blogs, and associated social and information networking sites such as YouTube compete with the traditional expectations of the institutions that fund libraries for paper-based archives and book repositories. While university libraries are finding it increasingly difficult to purchase all hardcover books relevant to numerous and varied disciplines, a significant proportion of their budgets goes towards digital repositories (e.g., STORS), indexes, and other resources, such as full-text electronic specialised and multidisciplinary journal databases (e.g., Project Muse and Proquest); electronic serials; e-books; and specialised information sources through fast (online) document delivery services. An area that is becoming increasingly significant for those working in the humanities is the digitising of historical and cultural texts. II. Bringing back the dead: The CLDR project The CLDR project is led by researchers and librarians at the Queensland University of Technology, in collaboration with Deakin University, University of Sydney, and members of the AustLit team at The University of Queensland. The CLDR project is a “Research Community” of the electronic bibliographic database AustLit: The Australian Literature Resource, which is working towards the goal of providing a complete bibliographic record of the nation’s literature. AustLit offers users with a single entry point to enhanced scholarly resources on Australian writers, their works, and other aspects of Australian literary culture and activities. AustLit and its Research Communities are supported by grants from the Australian Research Council and financial and in-kind contributions from a consortium of Australian universities, and by other external funding sources such as the National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy. Like other more extensive digitisation projects, such as Project Gutenberg and the Rosetta Project, the CLDR project aims to provide a centralised access point for digital surrogates of early published works of Australian children’s literature, with access pathways to existing resources. The first stage of the CLDR project is to provide access to digitised, full-text, out-of-copyright Australian children’s literature from European settlement to 1945, with selected digitised critical works relevant to the field. Texts comprise a range of genres, including poetry, drama, and narrative for young readers and picture books, songs, and rhymes for infants. Currently, a selection of 75 e-texts and digital scans of original texts from Project Gutenberg and Internet Archive have been linked to the Children’s Literature Research Community. By the end of 2009, the CLDR will have digitised approximately 1000 literary texts and a significant number of critical works. Stage II and subsequent development will involve digitisation of selected texts from 1945 onwards. A precursor to the CLDR project has been undertaken by Deakin University in collaboration with the State Library of Victoria, whereby a digital bibliographic index comprising Victorian School Readers has been completed with plans for full-text digital surrogates of a selection of these texts. These texts provide valuable insights into citizenship, identity, and values formation from the 1930s onwards. At the time of writing, the CLDR is at an early stage of development. An extensive survey of out-of-copyright texts has been completed and the digitisation of these resources is about to commence. The project plans to make rich content searchable, allowing scholars from children’s literature studies and education to benefit from the many advantages of online scholarship. What digital publishing and associated digital archives, electronic texts, hypermedia, and so forth foreground is the fact that writers, readers, publishers, programmers, designers, critics, booksellers, teachers, and copyright laws operate within a context that is highly mediated by technology. In his article on large-scale digitisation projects carried out by Cornell and University of Michigan with the Making of America collection of 19th-century American serials and monographs, Hirtle notes that when special collections’ materials are available via the Web, with appropriate metadata and software, then they can “increase use of the material, contribute to new forms of research, and attract new users to the material” (44). Furthermore, Hirtle contends that despite the poor ergonomics associated with most electronic displays and e-book readers, “people will, when given the opportunity, consult an electronic text over the print original” (46). If this preference is universally accurate, especially for researchers and students, then it follows that not only will the preference for electronic surrogates of original material increase, but preference for other kinds of electronic texts will also increase. It is with this preference for electronic resources in mind that we approached the field of children’s literature in Australia and asked questions about how future generations of researchers would prefer to work. If electronic texts become the reference of choice for primary as well as secondary sources, then it seems sensible to assume that researchers would prefer to sit at the end of the keyboard than to travel considerable distances at considerable cost to access paper-based print texts in distant libraries and archives. We considered the best means for providing access to digitised primary and secondary, full text material, and digital pathways to existing online resources, particularly an extensive indexing and bibliographic database. Prior to the commencement of the CLDR project, AustLit had already indexed an extensive number of children’s literature. Challenges and dilemmas The CLDR project, even in its early stages of development, has encountered a number of challenges and dilemmas that centre on access, copyright, economic capital, and practical aspects of digitisation, and sustainability. These issues have relevance for digital publishing and e-research. A decision is yet to be made as to whether the digital texts in CLDR will be available on open or closed/tolled access. The preference is for open access. As Hayles argues, copyright is more than a legal basis for intellectual property, as it also entails ideas about authorship, creativity, and the work as an “immaterial mental construct” that goes “beyond the paper, binding, or ink” (144). Seeking copyright permission is therefore only part of the issue. Determining how the item will be accessed is a further matter, particularly as future technologies may impact upon how a digital item is used. In the case of e-journals, the issue of copyright payment structures are evolving towards a collective licensing system, pay-per-view, and other combinations of print and electronic subscription (see Hovav and Gray). For research purposes, digitisation of items for CLDR is not simply a scan and deliver process. Rather it is one that needs to ensure that the best quality is provided and that the item is both accessible and usable by researchers, and sustainable for future researchers. Sustainability is an important consideration and provides a challenge for institutions that host projects such as CLDR. Therefore, items need to be scanned to a high quality and this requires an expensive scanner and personnel costs. Files need to be in a variety of formats for preservation purposes and so that they may be manipulated to be useable in different technologies (for example, Archival Tiff, Tiff, Jpeg, PDF, HTML). Hovav and Gray warn that when technology becomes obsolete, then content becomes unreadable unless backward integration is maintained. The CLDR items will be annotatable given AustLit’s NeAt funded project: Aus-e-Lit. The Aus-e-Lit project will extend and enhance the existing AustLit web portal with data integration and search services, empirical reporting services, collaborative annotation services, and compound object authoring, editing, and publishing services. For users to be able to get the most out of a digital item, it needs to be searchable, either through double keying or OCR (optimal character recognition). The value of CLDR’s contribution The value of the CLDR project lies in its goal to provide a comprehensive, searchable body of texts (fictional and critical) to researchers across the humanities and social sciences. Other projects seem to be intent on putting up as many items as possible to be considered as a first resort for online texts. CLDR is more specific and is not interested in simply generating a presence on the Web. Rather, it is research driven both in its design and implementation, and in its focussed outcomes of assisting academics and students primarily in their e-research endeavours. To this end, we have concentrated on the following: an extensive survey of appropriate texts; best models for file location, distribution, and use; and high standards of digitising protocols. These issues that relate to data storage, digitisation, collections, management, and end-users of data are aligned with the “Development of an Australian Research Data Strategy” outlined in An Australian e-Research Strategy and Implementation Framework (2006). CLDR is not designed to simply replicate resources, as it has a distinct focus, audience, and research potential. In addition, it looks at resources that may be forgotten or are no longer available in reproduction by current publishing companies. Thus, the aim of CLDR is to preserve both the time and a period of Australian history and literary culture. It will also provide users with an accessible repository of rare and early texts written for children. III. Future directions It is now commonplace to recognize that the Web’s role as information provider has changed over the past decade. New forms of “collective intelligence” or “distributed cognition” (Oblinger and Lombardi) are emerging within and outside formal research communities. Technology’s capacity to initiate major cultural, social, educational, economic, political and commercial shifts has conditioned us to expect the “next big thing.” We have learnt to adapt swiftly to the many challenges that online technologies have presented, and we have reaped the benefits. As the examples in this discussion have highlighted, the changes in online publishing and digitisation have provided many material, network, pedagogical, and research possibilities: we teach online units providing students with access to e-journals, e-books, and customized archives of digitised materials; we communicate via various online technologies; we attend virtual conferences; and we participate in e-research through a global, digital network. In other words, technology is deeply engrained in our everyday lives. In returning to Frollo’s concern that the book would destroy architecture, Umberto Eco offers a placatory note: “in the history of culture it has never happened that something has simply killed something else. Something has profoundly changed something else” (n. pag.). Eco’s point has relevance to our discussion of digital publishing. The transition from print to digital necessitates a profound change that impacts on the ways we read, write, and research. As we have illustrated with our case study of the CLDR project, the move to creating digitised texts of print literature needs to be considered within a dynamic network of multiple causalities, emergent technological processes, and complex negotiations through which digital texts are created, stored, disseminated, and used. Technological changes in just the past five years have, in many ways, created an expectation in the minds of people that the future is no longer some distant time from the present. Rather, as our title suggests, the future is both present and active. References Aarseth, Espen. “How we became Postdigital: From Cyberstudies to Game Studies.” Critical Cyber-culture Studies. Ed. David Silver and Adrienne Massanari. New York: New York UP, 2006. 37–46. An Australian e-Research Strategy and Implementation Framework: Final Report of the e-Research Coordinating Committee. Commonwealth of Australia, 2006. Bolter, Jay David. Writing Space: The Computer, Hypertext, and the History of Writing. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, 1991. Eco, Umberto. “The Future of the Book.” 1994. 3 June 2008 ‹http://www.themodernword.com/eco/eco_future_of_book.html>. Gunkel, David. J. “What's the Matter with Books?” Configurations 11.3 (2003): 277–303. Harley, Diane. “Use and Users of Digital Resources: A Focus on Undergraduate Education in the Humanities and Social Sciences.” Research and Occasional Papers Series. Berkeley: University of California. Centre for Studies in Higher Education. 12 June 2008 ‹http://www.themodernword.com/eco/eco_future_of_book.html>. Hayles, N. Katherine. My Mother was a Computer: Digital Subjects and Literary Texts. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2005. Hirtle, Peter B. “The Impact of Digitization on Special Collections in Libraries.” Libraries & Culture 37.1 (2002): 42–52. Hovav, Anat and Paul Gray. “Managing Academic E-journals.” Communications of the ACM 47.4 (2004): 79–82. Hugo, Victor. The Hunchback of Notre Dame (Notre-Dame de Paris). Ware, Hertfordshire: Wordsworth editions, 1993. Kho, Nancy D. “The Medium Gets the Message: Post-Print Publishing Models.” EContent 30.6 (2007): 42–48. Oblinger, Diana and Marilyn Lombardi. “Common Knowledge: Openness in Higher Education.” Opening up Education: The Collective Advancement of Education Through Open Technology, Open Content and Open Knowledge. Ed. Toru Liyoshi and M. S. Vijay Kumar. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007. 389–400. Murray, Janet H. Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001. Trimmer, Joseph F., Wade Jennings, and Annette Patterson. eFictions. New York: Harcourt, 2001.

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Elizabeth Wilmot, Countess of Rochester, is best known to most modern readers as the woman John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, abducted and later wed. As Samuel Pepys memorably records in his diary entry for 28 May 1665:Thence to my Lady Sandwich’s, where, to my shame, I had not been a great while before. Here, upon my telling her a story of my Lord Rochester’s running away on Friday night last with Mrs Mallet, the great beauty and fortune of the North, who had supped at Whitehall with Mrs Stewart, and was going home to her lodgings with her grandfather, my Lord Haly, by coach; and was at Charing Cross seized on by both horse and footmen, and forcibly taken from him, and put into a coach with six horses, and two women provided to receive her, and carried away. Upon immediate pursuit, my Lord of Rochester (for whom the King had spoke to the lady often, but with no success) was taken at Uxbridge; but the lady is not yet heard of, and the King mighty angry and the Lord sent to the Tower. (http://www.pepysdiary.com/)Here Pepys provides an anecdote that offers what Helen Deutsch has described in another context as “the elusive possibility of truth embodied by ‘things in themselves,’ by the things, that is, preserved in anecdotal form” (28). Pepys’s diary entry yields up an “elusive possibility” of embodied truth; his version of Wilmot’s abduction solidifies what he perceives to be the most notable features of her identity: her beauty, her wealth, and her sexual trajectory.Pepys’s conclusion that “the lady is not yet heard of” complicates this idea of anecdotal preservation, for he neatly ties up his story of Wilmot’s body by erasing her from it: she is removed, voiceless and disembodied, from even this anecdote of her own abduction. Pepys’s double maneuver demonstrates the complex set of interactions surrounding the preservation of early modern women’s sexual and textual selves. Written into Pepys’s diary and writing in conversation with her husband, Wilmot has generally been treated as a subordinate historical and literary figure—a character rather than an agent or an author. The richness of Wilmot’s own writing has been largely ignored; her manuscript poetry has been treated as an artefact and a source of autobiographical material, whereas Rochester’s poetry—itself teeming with autobiographical details, references to material culture, and ephemera—is recognised and esteemed as literary. Rochester’s work provides a tremendous resource, a window through which we can read and re-read his wife’s work in ways that enlighten and open up readings rather than closing them down, and her works similarly complicate his writings.By looking at Wilmot as a case study, I would like to draw attention to some of the continued dilemmas that scholars face when we attempt to recover early modern women’s writing. With this study, I will focus on distinct features of Wilmot’s sexual and textual identity. I will consider assumptions about female docility; the politics and poetics of erotic espionage; and Wilmot’s construction of fugitive desires in her poetry. Like the writings of many early modern women, Wilmot’s manuscript poetry challenges assumptions about the intersections of gender, sexuality, and authorship. Early Modern Women’s Docile Bodies?As the entry from Pepys’s diary suggests, Wilmot has been constructed as a docile female body—she is rendered “ideal” according to a set of gendered practices by which “inferior status has been inscribed” on her body (Bartky 139). Contrasting Pepys’s references to Wilmot’s beauty and marriageability with Wilmot’s own vivid descriptions of sexual desire highlights Wilmot’s tactical awareness and deployment of her inscribed form. In one of her manuscript poems, she writes:Nothing ades to Loves fond fireMore than scorn and cold disdainI to cherish your desirekindness used but twas in vainyou insulted on your SlaveTo be mine you soon refusedHope hope not then the power to haveWhich ingloriously you used. (230)This poem yields up a wealth of autobiographical information and provides glimpses into Wilmot’s psychology. Rochester spent much of his married life having affairs with women and men, and Wilmot represents herself as embodying her devotion to her husband even as he rejects her. In a recent blog entry about Wilmot’s poetry, Ellen Moody suggests that Wilmot “must maintain her invulnerable guard or will be hurt; the mores damn her whatever she does.” Interpretations of Wilmot’s verse typically overlay such sentiments on her words: she is damned by social mores, forced to configure her body and desire according to rigorous social codes that expect women to be pure and inviolable yet also accessible to their lovers and “invulnerable” to the pain produced by infidelity. Such interpretations, however, deny Wilmot the textual and sexual agency accorded to Rochester, begging the question of whether or not we have moved beyond reading women’s writing as essential, natural, and embodied. Thus while these lines might in fact yield up insights into Wilmot’s psychosocial and sexual identities, we continue to marginalise her writing and by extension her author-self if we insist on taking her words at face value. Compare, for example, Wilmot’s verse to the following song by her contemporary Aphra Behn:Love in Fantastique Triumph satt,Whilst Bleeding Hearts a round him flow’d,For whom Fresh paines he did Create,And strange Tyranick power he show’d;From thy Bright Eyes he took his fire,Which round about, in sports he hurl’d;But ’twas from mine, he took desire,Enough to undo the Amorous World. (53) This poem, which first appeared in Behn’s tragedy Abdelazer (1677) and was later printed in Poems upon Several Occasions (1684), was one of Behn’s most popular lyric verses. In the 1920s and 1930s Ernest Bernbaum, Montague Summers, Edmund Gosse, and others mined Behn’s works for autobiographical details and suggested that such historical details were all that her works offered—a trend that continued, disturbingly, into the later half of the twentieth century. Since the 1980s, Paula R. Backscheider, Ros Ballaster, Catherine Gallagher, Robert Markley, Paul Salzman, Jane Spencer, and Janet Todd have shown that Behn’s works are not simple autobiographical documents; they are the carefully crafted productions of a literary professional. Even though Behn’s song evokes a masoch*stic relationship between lover and beloved much like Wilmot’s song, critics treat “Love Arm’d” as a literary work rather than a literal transcription of female desire. Of course there are material differences between Wilmot’s song and Behn’s “Love Arm’d,” the most notable of which involves Behn’s self-conscious professionalism and her poem’s entrenchment in the structures of performance and print culture. But as scholars including Kathryn King and Margaret J. M. Ezell have begun to suggest, print publication was not the only way for writers to produce and circulate literary texts. King has demonstrated the ways in which female authors of manuscripts were producing social texts (563), and Ezell has shown that “collapsing ‘public’ into ‘publication’” leads modern readers to “overlook the importance of the social function of literature for women as well as men” (39). Wilmot’s poems did not go through the same material, ideological, and commercial processes as Behn’s poems did, but they participated in a social and cultural network of exchange that operated according to its own rules and that, significantly, was the same network that Rochester himself used for the circulation of his verses. Wilmot’s writings constitute about half of the manuscript Portland PwV 31, held by Hallward Library, University of Nottingham—a manuscript catalogued in the Perdita Project but lacking a description and biographical note. Teresa D. Kemp has discussed the impact of the Perdita Project on the study of early modern women’s writing in Feminist Teacher, and Jill Seal Millman and Elizabeth Clarke (both of whom are involved with the project) have also written articles about the usability of the database. Like many of the women writers catalogued by the Perdita Project, Wilmot lacks her own entry in the Dictionary of National Biography and is instead relegated to the periphery in Rochester’s entry.The nineteen-page folio includes poems by both Rochester and Wilmot. The first eight poems are autograph manuscript poems by Rochester, and a scene from a manuscript play ‘Scaene 1st, Mr. Daynty’s chamber’ is also included. The remaining poems, excluding one without attribution, are by Wilmot and are identified on the finding aid as follows:Autograph MS poem, entitled ‘Song’, by Elizabeth WilmotAutograph MS poem, entitled ‘Song’, by Elizabeth WilmotAutograph MS poem, entitled ‘Song’, by Elizabeth WilmotMS poem, untitled, not ascribed Autograph MS poem, entitled ‘Song’, by Elizabeth WilmotAutograph MS poem, untitled, by Elizabeth WilmotAutograph MS poem, untitled, by Elizabeth WilmotAutograph MS poem, untitled, by Elizabeth Wilmot Autograph MS poem, untitled, by Elizabeth WilmotTwo of the songs (including the lyric quoted above) have been published in Kissing the Rod with the disclaimer that marks of revision reveal that “Lady Rochester was not serving as an amanuensis for her husband” yet the editors maintain that “some sort of literary collaboration cannot be ruled out” (230), implying that Rochester helped his wife write her poetry. Establishing a non-hierarchical strategy for reading women’s collaborative manuscript writing here seems necessary. Unlike Behn, who produced works in manuscript and in print and whose maximization of the slippages between these modes has recently been analyzed by Anne Russell, Wilmot and Rochester both wrote primarily in manuscript. Yet only Rochester’s writings have been accorded literary status by historians of the book and of manuscript theory such as Harold Love and Arthur Marotti. Even though John Wilders notes that Rochester’s earliest poems were dialogues written with his wife, the literariness of her contributions is often undercut. Wilders offers a helpful suggestion that the dialogues set up by these poems helps “hint … at further complexities in the other” (51), but the complexities are identified as sexual rather than textual. Further, the poems are treated as responses to Rochester rather than conversations with him. Readers like Moody, moreover, draw reflections of marital psychology from Wilmot’s poems instead of considering their polysemic qualities and other literary traits. Instead of approaching the lines quoted above from Wilmot’s song as indications of her erotic and conjugal desire for her husband, we can consider her confident deployment of metaphysical conceits, her careful rhymes, and her visceral imagery. Furthermore, we can locate ways in which Wilmot and Rochester use the device of the answer poem to build a complex dialogue rather than a hierarchical relationship in which one voice dominates the other. The poems comprising Portland PwV 31 are written in two hands and two voices; they complement one another, but neither contains or controls the other. Despite the fact that David Farley-Hills dismissively calls this an “‘answer’ to this poem written in Lady Rochester’s handwriting” (29), the verses coexist in playful exchange textually as well as sexually. Erotic Exchange, Erotic EspionageBut does a reorientation of literary criticism away from Wilmot’s body and towards her body of verse necessarily entail a loss of her sexual and artefactual identity? Along with the account from Pepys’s diary mentioned at the outset of this study, letters from Rochester to his wife survive that provide a prosaic account of the couple’s married life. For instance, Rochester writes to her: “I love not myself as much as you do” (quoted in Green 159). Letters from Rochester to his wife typically showcase his playfulness, wit, and ribaldry (in one letter, he berates the artist responsible for two miniatures of Wilmot in strokes that are humorous yet also charged with a satire that borders on invective). The couple’s relationship was beleaguered by the doubts, infidelities, and sexual double standards that an autobiographical reading of Wilmot’s songs yields up, therefore it seems as counterproductive for feminist literary theory, criticism, and recovery work to entirely dispense with the autobiographical readings as it seems reductive to entirely rely on them. When approaching works like these manuscript poems, then, I propose using a model of erotic exchange and erotic espionage in tandem with more text-bound modes of literary criticism. To make this maneuver, we might begin by considering Gayle Rubin’s proposition that “If women are the gifts, then it is men who are the exchange partners. And it is the partners, not the presents, upon whom reciprocal exchange confers its quasi-mystical power of social linkage” (398). Wilmot’s poetry relentlessly unsettles the binary set up between partner and present, thereby demanding a more pluralistic identification of sexual and textual economies. Wilmot constructs Rochester as absent (“Thats caused by absence norished by despaire”), which is an explicit inversion of the gendered terms stereotypically deployed in poetry (the absent woman in works by Rochester as well as later satirists like Jonathan Swift and Alexander Pope often catalyzes sexual desire) that also registers Wilmot’s autobiographical contexts. She was, during most of her married life, living with his mother, her own mother, and Rochester’s nieces in his house at Adderbury while he stayed in London. The desire in Wilmot’s poetry is textualised as much as it is sexualised; weaving this doublebraid of desires and designs together ultimately provides the most complete interpretation of the verses. I read the verses as offering a literary form of erotic espionage in which Wilmot serves simultaneously as erotic object and author. That is, she both is and is not the Cloris of her (and Rochester’s) poetry, capable of looking on and authorizing her desired and desiring body. The lyric in which Wilmot writes “He would return the fugitive with Shame” provides the clearest example of the interpretive tactic that I am proposing. The line, from Wilmot’s song “Cloris misfortunes that can be exprest,” refers to the deity of Love in its complete context:Such conquering charmes contribute to my chainAnd ade fresh torments to my lingering painThat could blind Love juge of my faithful flameHe would return the fugitive with ShameFor having bin insenceable to loveThat does by constancy it merritt prove. (232)The speaker of the poem invokes Cupid and calls on “blind Love” to judge “my faithful flame.” The beloved would then be returned “fugitive with Shame” because “blind Love” would have weighed the lover’s passion and the beloved’s insensibility. Interestingly, the gender of the beloved and the lover are not marked in this poem. Only Cupid is marked as male. Although the lover is hypothetically associated with femaleness in the final stanza (“She that calls not reason to her aid / Deserves the punishmentt”), the ascription could as easily be gendering the trait of irrationality as gendering the subject/author of the poem. Desire, complaint, and power circulate in the song in a manner that lacks clear reference; the reader receives glimpses into an erotic world that is far more ornately literary than it is material. That is, reading the poem makes one aware of tropes of power and desire, whereas actual bodies recede into the margins of the text—identifiable because of the author’s handwriting, not a uniquely female perspective on sexuality or (contrary to Moody’s interpretation) a specifically feminine acquiescence to gender norms. Strategies for Reading a Body of VerseWilmot’s poetry participates in what might be described as two distinct poetic and political modes. On one hand, her writing reproduces textual expectations about Restoration answer poems, songs and lyrics, and romantic verses. She crafts poetry that corresponds to the same textual conventions that men like Rochester, John Dryden, Abraham Cowley, and William Cavendish utilised when they wrote in manuscript. For Wilmot, as for her male contemporaries, such manuscript writing would have been socially circulated; at the same time, the manuscript documents had a fluidity that was less common in print texts. Dryden and Behn’s published writings, for instance, often had a more literary context (“Love Arm’d” refers to Abdelazer, not to Behn’s sexual identity), whereas manuscript writing often referred to coteries of readers and writers, friends and lovers.As part of the volatile world of manuscript writing, Wilmot’s poetry also highlights her embodied erotic relationships. But over-reading—or only reading—the poetry as depicting a conjugal erotics limits our ability to recover Wilmot as an author and an agent. Feminist recovery work has opened many new tactics for incorporating women’s writing into existing literary canons; it has also helped us imagine ways of including female domestic work, sexuality, and other embodied forms into our understanding of early modern culture. By drawing together literary recovery work with a more material interest in recuperating women’s sexual bodies, we should begin to recuperate women like Wilmot not simply as authors or bodies but as both. The oscillations between the sexual and textual body in Wilmot’s poetry, and in our assessments of her life and writings, should help us approach her works (like the works of Rochester) as possessing a three-dimensionality that they have long been denied. ReferencesBartky, Sandra Lee. “Foucault, Femininity, and the Modernization of Patriarchal Power.” In Writing on the Body: Female Embodiment and Feminist Theory. Ed. Katie Conboy, Nadia Medina, and Sarah Stanbury. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997. 129-54.Behn, Aphra. “Song. Love Arm’d.” The Works of Aphra Behn. Volume 1: Poetry. Ed. Janet Todd. London: William Pickering, 1992. 53.Clarke, Elizabeth. “Introducing Hester Pulter and the Perdita Project.” Literature Compass 2.1 (2005). ‹http://www.blackwell-compass.com/subject/literature/article_view?article_id=lico_articles_bsl159›. Deutsch, Helen. Loving Doctor Johnson. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005.Diamond, Irene, Ed. Feminism and Foucault: Reflections on Resistance. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1988.Ezell, Margaret J. M. Social Authorship and the Advent of Print. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999.Farley-Hill, David. Rochester’s Poetry. Totowa: Rowman and Littlefield, 1978. Greene, Graham. Lord Rochester’s Monkey. New York: Penguin, 1974. Greer, Germaine, Susan Hastings, Jeslyn Medoff, and Melinda Sansone, Ed. Kissing the Rod: An Anthology of Seventeenth-Century Women’s Verse. New York: Noonday Press, 1988. Kemp, Theresa D. “Early Women Writers.” Feminist Teacher 18.3 (2008): 234-39.King, Kathryn. “Jane Barker, Poetical Recreations, and the Sociable Text.” ELH 61 (1994): 551-70.Love, Harold, and Arthur F. Marotti. "Manuscript Transmission and Circulation." The Cambridge History of Early Modern English Literature. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2002. 55-80. Love, Harold. "Systemizing Sigla." English Manuscript Studies 1100-1700. 11 (2002): 217-230. Marotti, Arthur F. "Shakespeare's Sonnets and the Manuscript Circulation of Texts in Early Modern England." A Companion to Shakespeare's Sonnets. Oxford: Blackwell, 2007. 185-203.McNay, Lois. Foucault And Feminism: Power, Gender, and the Self. Boston: Northeastern, 1992.Moody, Ellen. “Elizabeth Wilmot (neé Mallet), Countess of Rochester, Another Woman Poet.” Blog entry 16 March 2006. 11 Nov. 2008 ‹http://server4.moody.cx/index.php?id=400›. Pepys, Samuel. The Diary of Samuel Pepys. 23 Aug. 2008 ‹http://www.pepysdiary.com/archive/1665/05/28/index.php›. Rubin, Gayle. “The Traffic in Women: Notes on the ‘Political Economy’ of Sex.” Feminist Literary Theory and Criticism: A Norton Reader, ed. Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, 392-413. New York: Norton, 2007.Russell, Anne. “Aphra Behn, Textual Communities, and Pastoral Sobriquets.” English Language Notes 40.4 (June 2003): 41-50.———. “'Public' and 'Private' in Aphra Behn's Miscellanies: Women Writers, Print, and Manuscript.” Write or Be Written: Early Modern Women Poets and Cultural Constraints. Ed. Barbara Smith and Ursula Appelt. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001. 29-48. Sawicki, Jana. Disciplining Foucault: Feminism, Power and the Body. New York: Routledge, 1991.Seal, Jill. "The Perdita Project—A Winter's Report." Early Modern Literary Studies 6.3 (January, 2001): 10.1-14. ‹http://purl.oclc.org/emls/06-3/perdita.htm›.Wilders, John. “Rochester and the Metaphysicals.” In Spirit of Wit: Reconsiderations of Rochester. Ed. Jeremy Treglown. Hamden: Archon, 1982. 42-57.Wilmot, Elizabeth, Countess of Rochester. “Song” (“Nothing Ades to Love's Fond Fire”) and “Song” (“Cloris Misfortunes That Can Be Exprest”) in Kissing the Rod. 230-32.

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Editoriallist, Liszt, mist, quist (Dialect wood pigeon), wrist, grist, tryst, cyst, cist (box holding ritual objects), schist, whist, twist, xyst (long portico) (Fergusson 270)“Everyone uses lists,” Francis Spufford (2) tells us. Lists are all pervasive; they are part-and-parcel of how we experience and make sense of the world. According to Umberto Eco, the whole history of creative production can be seen as one that is characterised by an “infinity of lists” comprising, to name a few, visual lists (sixteenth century religious paintings, Dutch still life paintings), pragmatic or utilitarian lists (shopping lists, library catalogues, assets in a will), poetic or literary lists (such as in Joyce or Sebald, for instance), lists of places, lists of things (like the great list of ships in the Iliad), and so on, ad infinitum... In accordance with such variation in form comes great variation in purpose, with lists used to “enumerate, account, remind, memorialize, order,” and so on (Belknap 6). List making, Geoffrey Bowker and Susan Leigh Star point out, “has frequently been seen as one of the foundational activities of advanced human society” (137): to cite three examples, list making is argued to be crucial to our understanding of orality and the development of literacy (Goody 74-111), and to the connection between these and later forms and techniques of information management (Hobart and Schiffman), as well as to our appreciation of the functioning and value of narrativity (White). In this way, Robert Belknap perhaps has a point in proposing that, “The list form is the predominant mode of organizing data relevant to human functioning in the world” (8).Simply defined, a list is “a formally organized block of information that is composed of a set of members” (Belknap 15). What is significant about a list is that it is “simultaneously the sum of its parts and the individual parts themselves” (15). That is to say, like links in a chain, “the list joins and separates at the same time” (15). In addition to these features, Jack Goody also suggests that, across their various manifestations, lists have a number of basic characteristics or conventions concerning how they are constructed and read, which, appropriately, he lists as follows:The list relies on discontinuity rather than continuity; it depends on physical placement, on location; it can be read in different directions, both sideways and downwards, up and down, as well as left and right; it has a clear-cut beginning and a precise end, that is, a boundary, an edge, like a piece of cloth. Most importantly it encourages the ordering of the items, by number, by initial sound, by category, etc. And the existence of boundaries, external and internal, brings greater visibility to categories, at the same time as making them more abstract. (Goody 81)Just as boundaries are “an important attribute” (Goody 80) of the list and how each is compiled, so too are semantic boundary disputes for how we conceive of the list vis-à-vis other forms of enumeration. If one were to compose a list of lists, Belknap suggests, it “would include the catalogue, the inventory, the itinerary, and the lexicon” (2). This is, however, a problematic typology insofar as each item can be seen to hold subtle differences in form and purpose from the list, as Belknap is quick to point out: “The catalogue is more comprehensive, conveys more information, and is more amenable to digression than the list. In the inventory, words representing names or things are collected by a conceptual principle.” (2-3) In his discussion of lists in literature, Spufford extends the first of these distinctions by drawing a qualitative distinction between the list (“In a list, almost everything that makes writing interesting to read seems inevitably to be excluded,” 1) and the catalogue (“Rather richer, and a step closer to the complex intentions and complex effects of literature proper, are the catalogues of some sorts of collections,” 3). Elsewhere, the close associations, and difficulties in differentiating, between the list and the classification system has also been noted (Bowker and Star, 137-61). While we recognise these delicate, at times almost imperceptible but nonetheless significant differences in meaning, in this special issue we take an expansive and inclusive approach to the list form and the implications of lists and listing. One (deceptively simple) distinction that is productive in framing this themed issue and the essays included in it is that which Belknap (3-5) draws between literary lists, on the one hand, and pragmatic or utilitarian lists, on the other hand. According to Belknap, literary lists are “complex in precisely the way a pragmatic list must not be” (5). Belknap, like Spufford before him, takes up and explores these “complexities” of literary lists in great detail. Two contributions to this special issue engage with the intricacies of the literary list. In the first of these, Darren Tofts, in his evocatively titled piece “Why Writers Hate the Second Law of Thermodynamics; Lists, Entropy, and the Sense of Unending,” examines the list form as it is mobilised by a range of writers, from Beckett and Borges, to Joyce and Robbe-Grillet. Tofts explores the exhaustion and tilt towards entropy that “issues from the tireless pursuit of categorisation, classification, and the mania for ordered information” by each of these diverse writers, and the way that words themselves tend to resist entropy by taking on “a weird half-life of their own” and sustaining “an unlikely […] stoical sense of unending.” Quite a different treatment of literary lists is offered by Tom Lee in his essay “The Lists of W. G. Sebald.” Focusing on the novel The Rings of Saturn, Lee explores the way that Sebald mobilises literary lists as a crucial device in his exploration and interrogation of the question, in Lee’s words, of what “might lay ahead for books if the question of what writing can be is asked continually as part of a writer’s enterprise.” But to focus solely on literary lists is to obscure or ignore other vital dimensions of lists and listing, such as the way that pragmatic listing forms (not just their literary counterparts) can be put to powerful rhetorical use (Belknap 3). Bowker and Star capture this well in the following passage:The material culture of bureaucracy and empire is not found in pomp and circ*mstance, nor even in the first instance of the point of a gun, but rather at the point of a list. (Bowker and Star 137)This is something that has been evident to a number of writers and thinkers, not least Foucault, who, in his The Order of Things, for example, sought to delineate the rise of the great natural history taxonomies in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in terms of their productive power as authoritative forms of classification. Foucault’s exploration of these connections can be said to have fed his subsequent theorisations of “governmentality”—which Judith Butler summarises as “a mode of power concerned with the maintenance and control of bodies and persons, the production and regulation of persons and populations” (52)—and of “biopolitics”—which Foucault defines as a “set of mechanisms through which the basic biological features of the human species became the object of a political strategy, of a general strategy of power” (Foucault, Security 1). It is within this tradition—that takes as one of its sources the work of Foucault and which runs in diverse tributaries of critical enquiry outwards in its exploration of the interconnections between lists (and other, related processes and techniques of classification) and power (see, for example, Poster)—that we can usefully situate two further essays in this issue, that by Katie Ellis and that by Suneel Jethani. Both of these essays take up lists in relation to quite distinct aspects of disabilities studies. In “Complicating a Rudimentary List of Characteristics: Communicating Disability with Down Syndrome Dolls,” Ellis brings “an interrogation of disability into dialogue with a critical analysis of the discursive function of lists” by interrogating “the use of lists in the way meanings about disability are communicated through the medical diagnostic list,” the production of Down Syndrome dolls for children, and unfavourable public reactions to these dolls. Ellis’s aim in exploring these concerns is to “complicate perceptions of disability beyond a rudimentary list of characteristics through a consideration of the negative public response to these dolls”—responses, she argues, that serve as a potent example of “the cultural subjugation of disability.” Meanwhile, in “Lists, Spatial Practice, and Assistive Technologies for the Blind,” Jethani explores the promise and perils of locative mobile media technologies designed to assist vision-impaired supermarket shoppers. Examining two prototypic applications, Shop Talk and Blind Shopping, Jethani argues that “the emancipatory potential” of these applications, “their efficacy in practical situations,” and their future commercial viability, is dependent upon commercial and institutional infrastructures and control, regulatory factors, and the extent to which they can successfully address “issues of interoperability and expanded access of spatial inventory databases and data.”The bureaucratic—or more specifically, the political economic—dimensions of pragmatic or utilitarian lists and their composition also forms the point of departure for two further essays in this issue. The first of these is Gerard Goggin’s “List Media: The Telephone Directory and the Arranging of Names.” In this feature article (one of two in this issue), Goggin examines the long history and fraught future of telephone directories and proprietary interests in them. The argument he develops is that, while telephone directories are a form of book (at least traditionally), they are in fact better thought of as a unique form of media—what he terms “list media.” Proprietary interests in lists are also the specific concern of Jean Burgess and Axel Bruns who, in their article “Twitter Archives and the Challenges of ‘Big Social Data’ for Media and Communication Research,” explore the “technical, political, and epistemological” issues that attend the corporate control of network, profit-driven database—“list”—infrastructure, such as Twitter. Notwithstanding the above considerations of power, inclusion and exclusion, ownership and control, there is one further, vital aspect of non-literary lists that warrants explicit mention here. This is the fact that pragmatic and utilitarian lists and our engagements with them are, for the most part, deeply embedded in everyday life and form part of all the routines, habits, and familiar patterns that characterise our “ordinary lives” (Highmore)—after all, to restate Spufford’s opening remark, this is the context in which “everyone uses lists” (2). The final two of the eight articles making up this themed issue examine everyday lists and the potential of lists as productive mechanisms for documenting and making sense of the ineffability of the everyday. The first of these, which also forms the first of the two feature articles, is Ben Highmore’s “Listlessness in the Archive.” This playful and poetic piece explores the challenges that a researcher faces when they attempt to tackle an archive that is the work of an army of “amateur anthropologist” volunteers who documented British lives in a project of Mass Observation. The centerpiece of the article is a series of lists compiled by the Mass-Observers of the objects on their own mantelpieces. Picking up on the theme of entropy (also explored by Tofts in this issue), Highmore describes the sense of listlessness that threatens to overwhelm his encounter with these lists. Lastly, in our article, “The Everyday Work of Lists,” we take a rather different approach to Highmore’s by exploring the work that lists do in “mediating the materiality and complexity of consumer-based everyday life.” Our guide is the French writer, Georges Perec, who, across a variety of projects and texts, deployed the list as a productive mechanism (an “invent-ory,” as we refer to it) and lever for prying open for inspection the seemingly inscrutable inner workings of everyday spaces, things, and memories. To conclude this editorial introduction, it seems only fitting that we end with a brief list of acknowledgments. We wish to thank:those at M/C Journal, Axel Bruns and Peta Mitchell, for supporting and assisting with this special issue;the authors who entrusted us with their articles, and tolerated with good humour and patience our various requests; and,the many referees for their vital contributions in reading and reviewing the articles gathered here;Simon Hayter and the Ancient Egypt website, for the banner image, a twelfth century BC papyrus list of Egyptian rulers; those authors whose insights, scholarly pursuit and use of lists inspired this issue: Robert Belknap, Jack Goody, Umberto Eco, Georges Perec…ReferencesBelknap, Robert E. The List: The Uses and Pleasures of Cataloguing. New Haven: Yale UP, 2004.Bowker, Geoffrey C., and Susan Leigh Star. Sorting Things Out: Classification and its Consequences. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000.Butler, Judith. Precarious Life. London: Verso, 2004.Eco, Umberto. The Infinity of Lists. Trans. Alastair McEwen. London: MacLehose Press, 2009.Fergusson, Rosalind. The Penguin Rhyming Dictionary. Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1985.Foucault, Michel. Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France 1977-1978. Trans. Graham Burchell. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.---. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. New York: Routledge, 2002.Goody, Jack. “What’s in a List?” The Domestication of the Savage Mind. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1977. 74-111.Highmore, Ben. Ordinary Lives: Studies in the Everyday. London: Routledge, 2011.Hobart, Michael E., and Zachary S. Schiffman. Information Ages: Literacy, Numeracy, and the Computer Revolution. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins UP, 1998. Poster, Mark. “Foucault and Databases.” The Mode of Information: Poststructuralism and Social Context. Oxford: Polity, 1990. 69-98.Spufford, Francis. “Introduction.” The Chatto Book of Cabbages and Kings: Lists in Literature. Ed. Francis Spufford. London: Chatto & Windus, 1989. 1-23.White, Hayden, “The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality.” On Narrative. Ed. W. J. T. Mitchell. Chicago: The U of Chicago P, 1981. 1-23.

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To Rodica, who died first / To Mircea, who continues me [I]In his book Picturing Health and Illness: Images of Identity and Difference, Sander L. Gilman argues that during the nineteenth century the healthy norm perceived as ugly not only those who were deformed, but also those who were ill, ageing, and/or experienced different bodily “loss of function” (53). In the nineteenth century, how much was medicine responsible for defining ugly as ill, deformed, and getting old, versus beautiful as healthy, and then, for the sake of the community’s health, firmly promoting these ideas? Furthermore, with the rise of photographic art, medicine was able to manipulate and control these ideas even more efficiently. According to Deborah Lupton, “The new technology of photography that developed from the mid-nineteenth century became a valuable strategy in the documentation of patterns of disease and illness, and the construction of the sites of dirtiness and contagion” (30). This essay focuses on the skin’s narrative as it presents its story when photographed. William Yang takes photos of his good friend, Allan, who is dying of AIDS. Of interests here is to discuss/approach the photographic art not from its scopophilic angle, that is, not from its perverse and pleasurable voyeuristic angle, but to analyze it side-by-side with Drew Leder’s notion of the “the remaining body.” He believes that in states of severe pain, one’s body “dys-appears,” “from the Greek prefix signifying ‘bad,’ ‘hard,’ or ‘ill,’” and he gives as example the English word “dysfunctional” (84). Yang’s photos offer variations of the “body that remains,” and, as we shall see, of the body that gradually did not remain. Through his work, Yang approaches visually the theme of the ars moriendi of the entropic body in pain as reminder of its mortal, gradually disabling fabric. [II] In the section of his work dedicated to AIDS, Gilman discusses only a collection of posters that have circulated in mass-media, which he researched at the National Library of Medicine at Bethesda, Maryland. Gilman thinks these posters function as the “still images of illness” (174). In other words, he believes these posters may have had an impact on the lay community, although not the intensified, urgent one, as he would have hoped. Because Gilman did not include a single photo of a patient dying of AIDS — although he understood this lack — I juxtapose one of the posters from his book with Yang’s photos taken of his dying friend, Allan, from his project entitled Sadness: A Monologue with Slides. Here I discuss the impact of Allan’s increasingly emaciated body versus the static, almost ineffective quality of the poster in order to consider the idea according to which “AIDS victims are living sculptures. … Both subject and object of art … they combine with their disease to overcome the narcissism of human consciousness. … It is an art of continuous transformation of subject into object and object into subject” (Siebers 220-21). Yang is an Australian artist with Chinese parentage. The images presented in this section originally appeared in print in Thomas W. Sokolowski’s and Rosalind Solomon’s collection of essays entitled Portraits in the Time of AIDS. According to the editors, Yang presented them as “monologues with slide projection in the theatre” (34) because the main actor of this one-man show is dying of AIDS. Yang’s work consists of seventeen slides with short texts written underneath them. In an attempt to respect the body that is dying, the texts are not recited, but the readers/spectators read them subvocally. The brilliance of this piece resides in its hushed tone, which parallels the act of dying when the patient’s body and mind become more and more tacit and lifeless. From one photo to another, and from one text to another, we discover Allan, although we never quite get to know him. The minitexts relate Allan’s story: how he was hospitalized at St. Vincent’s, known as “the AIDS ward” (35); how he decided to return home, into a studio shared with a dealer; how AIDS first attacked his lungs, and so he had to keep next to him “a large cylinder of oxygen as he was often out of breath” (37); how AIDS then affected his sight, and he developed a condition known as “CytoMegalo Virus — C.M.V. Retinctus” that gradually “destroyed the retina” of his eyes (39); how he decided “to go off medication” (46); and, how, finally “he went into a coma. I saw a nurse give him a glass of water but the water just ran out of his mouth” (50). To look at these photos time and time again is to be reminded of Albert Einstein’s vision of the passenger trapped in the train running with the speed of light. That passenger could not sense all that was happening in the train, and especially outside of it, because time moves in its cosmic, non-human, slippery dimension, and thus sensation could not profusely permeate his body. Juxtaposing Einstein’s vision with Allan’s decaying body, I read the latter’s body as if it were coiled up inside his mind just like a snail covers a part of its body under its hard shell. The photos are presented rapidly with no entr-acte in between; in a matter of minutes, time and space seem to collapse. There is no time for a prolonged reminiscence of Allan’s spent life. Allan is dying now, and he does not have time to remember his life. He barely has time to feel his body, a touch, or a kiss on his face, which seems to Yang “to have caved in” (47). Through this work, not only does Yang capture the disturbing moments of a friend dying, but he also touches on the “epidermis” of despair. This “epidermis” is both endotopic and exotopic, meaning that it starts within the patient and then it radiates/extends to his relatives and friends. Yang’s images of Allan dying give the impression that his body levitates, jutting out into space — but unfortunately without much meaning. On the other hand, the posters advertised for AIDS are simple, if not quite embarrassing and disrespectful given the gravity of this illness. They rarely touch on any aspects related to the illness itself, as they allude more to the immorality of hom*osexual acts. Gilman explains part of the rationale involved in the process of not presenting people dying of AIDS as follows: The image of the ‘positive’ body or the body with AIDS is strictly controlled in the world of the public health poster. Nowhere is an image of the ‘ugly’ or diseased body evoked directly, for any such evocation would refer back to the initial sense as a ‘gay’ disease. … Mens non sana in corpore insano cannot be the motto. For representing the ill body as a dying body is not possible. Such a body would point to ‘deviance from the norm’ in the form of illness. And this association with hom*osexuality and addiction labeled as illness must be suppressed. … All these images are images not of educating, but of control. (162) The poster chosen for illustration reads “LOVE AIDS PEOPLE,” with AIDS used as a verb and not as a noun; nonetheless, the construction’s subtlety is rather counterproductive. To a certain extent, this poster can be related to Michelangelo Merisi Caravaggio’s The Incredulity of Saint Thomas (1601-02). There, the Apostle touches the actual wound because he needs tactile proof to accept its existence. The act of touching, as well as the skin open by the wound, reveal the fact that “Skin lacks the depth, the interiority we want it to give us. … The flesh we crave as confirmation of our forms cannot do anything but turn us forever out even as we burrow into the holes we find there” (Phelan 42). But the poster presented below brings into focus verbally (therefore propagandistically) how one’s body might be destroyed because of AIDS. Furthermore, the symbol of the arrow is a recurrent motif in the art representing AIDS, especially in light of its religious association with the martyrdom of Saint Sebastian (see for example David Wojnarowicz art works which offer a personal interpretation of the martyrdom of Saint Sebastian). But if LOVE AIDS PEOPLE, and if gay men identify themselves with a martyr, then they might easily fall target to this twisted logic and think of themselves as victims. As Larry Kramer notes, gay men are tragic people partly because they feel responsible for an illness that has been affecting both the hom*osexual and heterosexual communities: “The continuing existence of HIV is essential for the functioning of the totalitarianism under which gay people now live. It works like this: HIV allows ‘them’ to sell us as sick. And that kills off our usefulness, both in our minds — their thinking we are sick — and in the eyes of the world — everyone thinking we are sick” (65).Gay men have always been a target since, allegedly, they are a menace to the institution of marriage, procreation, and to morality in general. Endocrinology studies have been conducted on gay men, but their results have not been able to say with certainty why some people prefer to engage in hom*osexual rather than heterosexual acts. According to Jennifer Terry, earlier studies from the 1930s aimed at determining distinct somatic features of hom*osexuals for the most part failed to produce any such evidence. Most of them focused on the overall physical structure of bodies, measuring skeletal features, pelvic angles and things like muscle density and hair distribution. (144) (Another useful resource is Holt N. Parker’s 2001 article “The Myth of the Heterosexual: Anthropology and Sexuality for Classicists.”) How and by whom are our sexual identities created? Does the presence of one specific anatomical organ delimit one person’s sexual identity? We have been trained into believing that there are only two genders, male and female, partly because of our binary way of thinking. Needless to say, just as in one color there are degrees of its intensity and saturation, so there are in us verbal, behavioral, and sexual tendencies that could make us look and act more or less masculine or feminine. Even more productive is to note the importance of power (control) and the erotic in our lives considering that the photos (and the minitexts) presenting Allan seem insufficient to initiate a dialogue by themselves. Because the eroticized body is what dies, that is, what is put at risk or could become powerless because of AIDS. The body that cannot touch and be touched anymore; the body that cannot control its needs and desires; and, ultimately, the body that is deprived of its pleasures and thus loses its erotic self. Therefore, AIDS is not only a way to redefine our erotic life, but also becomes a reason to question our hygiene practices. Elizabeth Grosz points out that “erotic pleasures are evanescent, they are forgotten almost as they occur” (195). But when erotic pleasures are controlled, as seems to be the case because of AIDS, have we intervened in such a manner as to program our intercourse? Admittedly, AIDS is predominantly linked with one’s sexuality and, hence, it could make one feel too self-aware about one’s needs, as well as rigid and self-conscious in an (intimate) act which, in essence, is all about losing oneself, being uninhibited. In the end, Allan’s sense of identity seems to be imprinted only in the camera’s objective lens. After he died, as Yang remembers, “I read his diaries […]. AIDS was a tragedy that was for sure, but as well he had an addictive personality and his day to day life was full of desperation. I hadn’t realize the extent of this and it came as a shock. Yet there were moments of clarity when his fresh test for life shone” (51). Yang does not say more about Allan’s intimate writings and, as he suggests, it was quite surprising for him to discover a richer, more intimate dimension of his friend. Still, until Allan’s diaries will be released to the public to offer us a more palpable view on his life, we rely exclusively on the selections of photos and minitexts accomplished by Yang, thus being aware that, no matter how exquisite they are, they could only say a few things about this enigmatic patient.[III] After exposing Allan’s gradually collapsing body, we may want to analyze to which extent is dying/death something that reveals our self-centricity. It is by now a truism to say that death is the final moment of our embodiment to which we are denied access. Nonetheless, we cannot stop thinking about (our) death, and the last passage of this essay proposes its own reflection on this subject. Norbert Elias argues that each one of us is a hom*o clausus (Latin for “closed, self-sufficient being”). He believes that this condition is a consequence of our living an advanced phase in our individualized life. Surprisingly, he relates this self-sufficiency to the ritual of dying. He believes that in highly industrialized societies, a patient may benefit from the most recent technical and medical equipment, but that that person usually dies alone, meaning without his family/relatives around him. On the other hand, as he goes on to argue, “families in less developed states … often go hand in hand with far greater inequalities of power between men and women. [The dying] take leave of the world publicly, within a circle of people most of whom have strong emotive value for them, and for whom they themselves have a such a value. They die unhygienically, but not alone” (87). Elias does not explore this idea in depth, so we are left to wonder what he meant by dying unhygienically, or if he thought that method was better in coping with death. Also, he never mentioned the exact countries/regions he had in mind when he made that remark; therefore, we are left unsatisfied by his comment. Nonetheless, as Elias reminds us, it is important to remember that the traditional death rituals were and are intimate moments (and they should remain like this). The hom*o clausus idea may be linked with a body that is reaching its final embodiment, and hence becoming a closing-in-itself body. However, how does a body transact and/or negotiate the moments of its final embodiment? The process of sinking in one’s body, to which I refer, is not a visually, aurally, or especially olfactorily pleasant experience. Our deceitful memory misdirects our emotional brains by indicating which subsystem is still functional and open and which has become useless, that is, closed. In this light, we should redefine Elias’s idea by saying that what appears to be a monolithic structure — a body: closed, sealed, and/or self-contained — is in fact a very fluid body; that death does not reveal our self-centricity because that reasoning may generate an absurd idea, namely, we die alone because we have spent a life alone. Consequently, the dying body becomes the margin par excellence, which, because it is completely out of control, does not stop from leaking and/or emitting smells. This theory is confirmed by a study conducted on dying patients, Dying Process: Patients' Experiences of Palliative Care (2000), where Julia Lawton notes that “on a number of occasions, staff kept aromatherapy oil burners running throughout the day and night in an attempt to veil the odour of excretia, vomit and rotting flesh. … I observed that smell created a boundary around a patient, repelling others away” (135). One has to close one’s eyes to vaguely imagine what it must feel like for the medical personnel to keep the vigil of the dying bodies. Nonetheless, the lay community is exposed to photographs of the dying only on rare occasions. According to Gilman, these images are not made public because “The classical model of ‘healthy/beauty’ and ‘illness/ugliness’ is part of a cultural baggage that accompanies any representation of the ill or healthy body” (118-19). While the skin is endowed with the capacity of regenerating itself after it has been wounded, thus effacing time, a photograph of a dying body seems to efface one’s memory of one’s accumulated experiences. Such a photograph makes its contents (that is, the time, location, personal context of the shooting) disappear since its details will eventually fade away. As a corollary, the absent body effaces its photographed version, leaving it few chances to be remembered. The theme of the ars moriendi, as presented in this essay, has demonstrated that what dies is not only one’s body, but also the echoed memory of its erotic self. ReferencesElias, Norbert. The Loneliness of Dying. New York: Blackwell, 1985. Gilman, Sander. Picturing Health and Illness: Images of Identity and Difference. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1995. Grosz, Elizabeth. Space, Time, and Perversion: Essays on the Politics of Bodies.New York: Routledge, 1995. Kramer, Larry. The Tragedy of Today’s Gay. New York: Penguin Group, 2005. Lawton, Julia. Dying Process: Patients' Experiences of Palliative Care. New York: Routledge, 2000. Leder, Drew. The Absent Body. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990. Lupton, Deborah. The Imperative of Health: Public Health and the Regulated Body. Thousand Oaks, California: Sage Publications, 1995. Peggy Phelan. Mourning Sex: Performing Public Memories. New York: Routledge, 1997. Siebers, Tobin. The Body Aesthetic: From Fine Art to Body Modification. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000. Jennifer Terry. “The Seductive Power of Science in the Making of Deviant Subjectivity.” Posthuman Bodies. Eds. Judith Halberstam and Ira Livingston. Bloomington : Indiana University Press, 1995: 135-162. Yang, William. “Allan from Sadness: A Monologue with Slides.” Portraits in the Time of AIDS. Eds. Thomas W. Sokolowski and Rosalind Solomon. New York: Grey Art Gallery & Study Center, 1988: 34-51.

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The curtain rose. The howling of desert wind filled the performance hall in the Shanghai Grand Theatre. Into the center stage, where a scenic construction of a mountain cliff and a desert landscape was dimly lit, entered the character of the Daoist priest Wang Yuanlu (1849–1931), performed by Chen Yizong. Dressed in a worn and dusty outfit of dark blue cotton, characteristic of Daoist priests, Wang began to sweep the floor. After a few moments, he discovered a hidden chambre sealed inside one of the rock sanctuaries carved into the cliff.Signaled by the quick, crystalline, stirring wave of sound from the chimes, a melodious Chinese ocarina solo joined in slowly from the background. Astonished by thousands of Buddhist sūtra scrolls, wall paintings, and sculptures he had just accidentally discovered in the caves, Priest Wang set his broom aside and began to examine these treasures. Dawn had not yet arrived, and the desert sky was pitch-black. Priest Wang held his oil lamp high, strode rhythmically in excitement, sat crossed-legged in a meditative pose, and unfolded a scroll. The sound of the ocarina became fuller and richer and the texture of the music more complex, as several other instruments joined in.Below is the opening scene of the award-winning, theatrical dance-drama Dunhuang, My Dreamland, created by China’s state-sponsored Lanzhou Song and Dance Theatre in 2000. Figure 1a: Poster Side A of Dunhuang, My Dreamland Figure 1b: Poster Side B of Dunhuang, My DreamlandThe scene locates the dance-drama in the rock sanctuaries that today are known as the Dunhuang Mogao Caves, housing Buddhist art accumulated over a period of a thousand years, one of the best well-known UNESCO heritages on the Silk Road. Historically a frontier metropolis, Dunhuang was a strategic site along the Silk Road in northwestern China, a crossroads of trade, and a locus for religious, cultural, and intellectual influences since the Han dynasty (206 B.C.E.–220 C.E.). Travellers, especially Buddhist monks from India and central Asia, passing through Dunhuang on their way to Chang’an (present day Xi’an), China’s ancient capital, would stop to meditate in the Mogao Caves and consult manuscripts in the monastery's library. At the same time, Chinese pilgrims would travel by foot from China through central Asia to Pakistan, India, Nepal, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka, playing a key role in the exchanges between ancient China and the outside world. Travellers from China would stop to acquire provisions at Dunhuang before crossing the Gobi Desert to continue on their long journey abroad. Figure 2: Dunhuang Mogao CavesThis article approaches the idea of “abroad” by examining the present-day imagination of journeys along the Silk Road—specifically, staged performances of the various Silk Road journey-themed dance-dramas sponsored by the Chinese state for enhancing its cultural and foreign policies since the 1970s (Kuang).As ethnomusicologists have demonstrated, musicians, choreographers, and playwrights often utilise historical materials in their performances to construct connections between the past and the present (Bohlman; Herzfeld; Lam; Rees; Shelemay; Tuohy; Wade; Yung: Rawski; Watson). The ancient Silk Road, which linked the Mediterranean coast with central China and beyond, via oasis towns such as Samarkand, has long been associated with the concept of “journeying abroad.” Journeys to distant, foreign lands and encounters of unknown, mysterious cultures along the Silk Road have been documented in historical records, such as A Record of Buddhist Kingdoms (Faxian) and The Great Tang Records on the Western Regions (Xuanzang), and illustrated in classical literature, such as The Travels of Marco Polo (Polo) and the 16th century Chinese novel Journey to the West (Wu). These journeys—coming and going from multiple directions and to different destinations—have inspired contemporary staged performance for audiences around the globe.Home and Abroad: Dunhuang and the Silk RoadDunhuang, My Dreamland (2000), the contemporary dance-drama, staged the journey of a young pilgrim painter travelling from Chang’an to a land of the unfamiliar and beyond borders, in search for the arts that have inspired him. Figure 3: A scene from Dunhuang, My Dreamland showing the young pilgrim painter in the Gobi Desert on the ancient Silk RoadFar from his home, he ended his journey in Dunhuang, historically considered the northwestern periphery of China, well beyond Yangguan and Yumenguan, the bordering passes that separate China and foreign lands. Later scenes in Dunhuang, My Dreamland, portrayed through multiethnic music and dances, the dynamic interactions among merchants, cultural and religious envoys, warriors, and politicians that were making their own journey from abroad to China. The theatrical dance-drama presents a historically inspired, re-imagined vision of both “home” and “abroad” to its audiences as they watch the young painter travel along the Silk Road, across the Gobi Desert, arriving at his own ideal, artistic “homeland”, the Dunhuang Mogao Caves. Since his journey is ultimately a spiritual one, the conceptualisation of travelling “abroad” could also be perceived as “a journey home.”Staged more than four hundred times since it premiered in Beijing in April 2000, Dunhuang, My Dreamland is one of the top ten titles in China’s National Stage Project and one of the most successful theatrical dance-dramas ever produced in China. With revenue of more than thirty million renminbi (RMB), it ranks as the most profitable theatrical dance-drama ever produced in China, with a preproduction cost of six million RMB. The production team receives financial support from China’s Ministry of Culture for its “distinctive ethnic features,” and its “aim to promote traditional Chinese culture,” according to Xu Rong, an official in the Cultural Industry Department of the Ministry. Labeled an outstanding dance-drama of the Chinese nation, it aims to present domestic and international audiences with a vision of China as a historically multifaceted and cosmopolitan nation that has been in close contact with the outside world through the ancient Silk Road. Its production company has been on tour in selected cities throughout China and in countries abroad, including Austria, Spain, and France, literarily making the young pilgrim painter’s “journey along the Silk Road” a new journey abroad, off stage and in reality.Dunhuang, My Dreamland was not the first, nor is it the last, staged performances that portrays the Chinese re-imagination of “journeying abroad” along the ancient Silk Road. It was created as one of many versions of Dunhuang bihua yuewu, a genre of music, dance, and dramatic performances created in the early twentieth century and based primarily on artifacts excavated from the Mogao Caves (Kuang). “The Mogao Caves are the greatest repository of early Chinese art,” states Mimi Gates, who works to increase public awareness of the UNESCO site and raise funds toward its conservation. “Located on the Chinese end of the Silk Road, it also is the place where many cultures of the world intersected with one another, so you have Greek and Roman, Persian and Middle Eastern, Indian and Chinese cultures, all interacting. Given the nature of our world today, it is all very relevant” (Pollack). As an expressive art form, this genre has been thriving since the late 1970s contributing to the global imagination of China’s “Silk Road journeys abroad” long before Dunhuang, My Dreamland achieved its domestic and international fame. For instance, in 2004, The Thousand-Handed and Thousand-Eyed Avalokiteśvara—one of the most representative (and well-known) Dunhuang bihua yuewu programs—was staged as a part of the cultural program during the Paralympic Games in Athens, Greece. This performance, as well as other Dunhuang bihua yuewu dance programs was the perfect embodiment of a foreign religion that arrived in China from abroad and became Sinicized (Kuang). Figure 4: Mural from Dunhuang Mogao Cave No. 45A Brief History of Staging the Silk Road JourneysThe staging of the Silk Road journeys abroad began in the late 1970s. Historically, the Silk Road signifies a multiethnic, cosmopolitan frontier, which underwent incessant conflicts between Chinese sovereigns and nomadic peoples (as well as between other groups), but was strongly imbued with the customs and institutions of central China (Duan, Mair, Shi, Sima). In the twentieth century, when China was no longer an empire, but had become what the early 20th-century reformer Liang Qichao (1873–1929) called “a nation among nations,” the long history of the Silk Road and the colourful, legendary journeys abroad became instrumental in the formation of a modern Chinese nation of unified diversity rooted in an ancient cosmopolitan past. The staged Silk Road theme dance-dramas thus participate in this formation of the Chinese imagination of “nation” and “abroad,” as they aestheticise Chinese history and geography. History and geography—aspects commonly considered constituents of a nation as well as our conceptualisations of “abroad”—are “invariably aestheticized to a certain degree” (Bakhtin 208). Diverse historical and cultural elements from along the Silk Road come together in this performance genre, which can be considered the most representative of various possible stagings of the history and culture of the Silk Road journeys.In 1979, the Chinese state officials in Gansu Province commissioned the benchmark dance-drama Rain of Flowers along the Silk Road, a spectacular theatrical dance-drama praising the pure and noble friendship which existed between the peoples of China and other countries in the Tang dynasty (618-907 C.E.). While its plot also revolves around the Dunhuang Caves and the life of a painter, staged at one of the most critical turning points in modern Chinese history, the work as a whole aims to present the state’s intention of re-establishing diplomatic ties with the outside world after the Cultural Revolution. Unlike Dunhuang, My Dreamland, it presents a nation’s journey abroad and home. To accomplish this goal, Rain of Flowers along the Silk Road introduces the fictional character Yunus, a wealthy Persian merchant who provides the audiences a vision of the historical figure of Peroz III, the last Sassanian prince, who after the Arab conquest of Iran in 651 C.E., found refuge in China. By incorporating scenes of ethnic and folk dances, the drama then stages the journey of painter Zhang’s daughter Yingniang to Persia (present-day Iran) and later, Yunus’s journey abroad to the Tang dynasty imperial court as the Persian Empire’s envoy.Rain of Flowers along the Silk Road, since its debut at Beijing’s Great Hall of the People on the first of October 1979 and shortly after at the Theatre La Scala in Milan, has been staged in more than twenty countries and districts, including France, Italy, Japan, Thailand, Russia, Latvia, Hong Kong, Macao, Taiwan, and recently, in 2013, at the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts in New York.“The Road”: Staging the Journey TodayWithin the contemporary context of global interdependencies, performing arts have been used as strategic devices for social mobilisation and as a means to represent and perform modern national histories and foreign policies (Davis, Rees, Tian, Tuohy, Wong, David Y. H. Wu). The Silk Road has been chosen as the basis for these state-sponsored, extravagantly produced, and internationally staged contemporary dance programs. In 2008, the welcoming ceremony and artistic presentation at the Olympic Games in Beijing featured twenty apsara dancers and a Dunhuang bihua yuewu dancer with long ribbons, whose body was suspended in mid-air on a rectangular LED extension held by hundreds of performers; on the giant LED screen was a depiction of the ancient Silk Road.In March 2013, Chinese president Xi Jinping introduced the initiatives “Silk Road Economic Belt” and “21st Century Maritime Silk Road” during his journeys abroad in Kazakhstan and Indonesia. These initiatives are now referred to as “One Belt, One Road.” The State Council lists in details the policies and implementation plans for this initiative on its official web page, www.gov.cn. In April 2013, the China Institute in New York launched a yearlong celebration, starting with "Dunhuang: Buddhist Art and the Gateway of the Silk Road" with a re-creation of one of the caves and a selection of artifacts from the site. In March 2015, the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC), China’s top economic planning agency, released a new action plan outlining key details of the “One Belt, One Road” initiative. Xi Jinping has made the program a centrepiece of both his foreign and domestic economic policies. One of the central economic strategies is to promote cultural industry that could enhance trades along the Silk Road.Encouraged by the “One Belt, One Road” policies, in March 2016, The Silk Princess premiered in Xi’an and was staged at the National Centre for the Performing Arts in Beijing the following July. While Dunhuang, My Dreamland and Rain of Flowers along the Silk Road were inspired by the Buddhist art found in Dunhuang, The Silk Princess, based on a story about a princess bringing silk and silkworm-breeding skills to the western regions of China in the Tang Dynasty (618-907) has a different historical origin. The princess's story was portrayed in a woodblock from the Tang Dynasty discovered by Sir Marc Aurel Stein, a British archaeologist during his expedition to Xinjiang (now Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region) in the early 19th century, and in a temple mural discovered during a 2002 Chinese-Japanese expedition in the Dandanwulike region. Figure 5: Poster of The Silk PrincessIn January 2016, the Shannxi Provincial Song and Dance Troupe staged The Silk Road, a new theatrical dance-drama. Unlike Dunhuang, My Dreamland, the newly staged dance-drama “centers around the ‘road’ and the deepening relationship merchants and travellers developed with it as they traveled along its course,” said Director Yang Wei during an interview with the author. According to her, the show uses seven archetypes—a traveler, a guard, a messenger, and so on—to present the stories that took place along this historic route. Unbounded by specific space or time, each of these archetypes embodies the foreign-travel experience of a different group of individuals, in a manner that may well be related to the social actors of globalised culture and of transnationalism today. Figure 6: Poster of The Silk RoadConclusionAs seen in Rain of Flowers along the Silk Road and Dunhuang, My Dreamland, staging the processes of Silk Road journeys has become a way of connecting the Chinese imagination of “home” with the Chinese imagination of “abroad.” Staging a nation’s heritage abroad on contemporary stages invites a new imagination of homeland, borders, and transnationalism. Once aestheticised through staged performances, such as that of the Dunhuang bihua yuewu, the historical and topological landscape of Dunhuang becomes a performed narrative, embodying the national heritage.The staging of Silk Road journeys continues, and is being developed into various forms, from theatrical dance-drama to digital exhibitions such as the Smithsonian’s Pure Land: Inside the Mogao Grottes at Dunhuang (Stromberg) and the Getty’s Cave Temples of Dunhuang: Buddhist Art on China's Silk Road (Sivak and Hood). They are sociocultural phenomena that emerge through interactions and negotiations among multiple actors and institutions to envision and enact a Chinese imagination of “journeying abroad” from and to the country.ReferencesBakhtin, M.M. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Austin, Texas: University of Texas Press, 1982.Bohlman, Philip V. “World Music at the ‘End of History’.” Ethnomusicology 46 (2002): 1–32.Davis, Sara L.M. Song and Silence: Ethnic Revival on China’s Southwest Borders. New York: Columbia University Press, 2005.Duan, Wenjie. “The History of Conservation of Mogao Grottoes.” International Symposium on the Conservation and Restoration of Cultural Property: The Conservation of Dunhuang Mogao Grottoes and the Related Studies. Eds. Kuchitsu and Nobuaki. Tokyo: Tokyo National Research Institute of Cultural Properties, 1997. 1–8.Faxian. A Record of Buddhistic Kingdoms. Translated by James Legge. New York: Dover Publications, 1991.Herzfeld, Michael. Ours Once More: Folklore, Ideology, and the Making of Modern Greece. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1985.Kuang, Lanlan. Dunhuang bi hua yue wu: "Zhongguo jing guan" zai guo ji yu jing zhong de jian gou, chuan bo yu yi yi (Dunhuang Performing Arts: The Construction and Transmission of “China-scape” in the Global Context). Beijing: She hui ke xue wen xian chu ban she, 2016.Lam, Joseph S.C. State Sacrifice and Music in Ming China: Orthodoxy, Creativity and Expressiveness. New York: State University of New York Press, 1998.Mair, Victor. T’ang Transformation Texts: A Study of the Buddhist Contribution to the Rise of Vernacular Fiction and Drama in China. Cambridge, Mass.: Council on East Asian Studies, 1989.Pollack, Barbara. “China’s Desert Treasure.” ARTnews, December 2013. Sep. 2016 <http://www.artnews.com/2013/12/24/chinas-desert-treasure/>.Polo, Marco. The Travels of Marco Polo. Translated by Ronald Latham. Penguin Classics, 1958.Rees, Helen. Echoes of History: Naxi Music in Modern China. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.Shelemay, Kay Kaufman. “‘Historical Ethnomusicology’: Reconstructing Falasha Liturgical History.” Ethnomusicology 24 (1980): 233–258.Shi, Weixiang. Dunhuang lishi yu mogaoku yishu yanjiu (Dunhuang History and Research on Mogao Grotto Art). Lanzhou: Gansu jiaoyu chubanshe, 2002.Sima, Guang 司马光 (1019–1086) et al., comps. Zizhi tongjian 资治通鉴 (Comprehensive Mirror for the Aid of Government). Beijing: Guji chubanshe, 1957.Sima, Qian 司马迁 (145-86? B.C.E.) et al., comps. Shiji: Dayuan liezhuan 史记: 大宛列传 (Record of the Grand Historian: The Collective Biographies of Dayuan). Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1959.Sivak, Alexandria and Amy Hood. “The Getty to Present: Cave Temples of Dunhuang: Buddhist Art on China’s Silk Road Organised in Collaboration with the Dunhuang Academy and the Dunhuang Foundation.” Getty Press Release. 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Introduction It has frequently been noted that ICTs and social networking applications have blurred the once-clear boundary between work, leisure and entertainment, just as they have collapsed the distinction between public and private space. While each individual has a sense of what “home” means, both in terms of personal experience and more conceptually, the following three examples of online interaction (based on participants’ interest, or involvement, in activities traditionally associated with the home: pet care, craft and cooking) suggest that the utilisation of online communication technologies can lead to refined and extended definitions of what “home” is. These examples show how online communication can assist in meeting the basic human needs for love, companionship, shelter and food – needs traditionally supplied by the home environment. They also provide individuals with a considerably expanded range of opportunities for personal expression and emotional connection, as well as creative and commercial production, than that provided by the purely physical (and, no doubt, sometimes isolated and isolating) domestic environment. In this way, these case studies demonstrate the interplay and melding of physical and virtual “home” as domestic practices leach from the most private spaces of the physical home into the public space of the Internet (for discussion, see Gorman-Murray, Moss, and Rose). At the same time, online interaction can assert an influence on activity within the physical space of the home, through the sharing of advice about, and modeling of, domestic practices and processes. A Dog’s (Virtual) Life The first case study primarily explores the role of online communities in the formation and expression of affective values and personal identity – as traditionally happens in the domestic environment. Garber described the 1990s as “the decade of the dog” (20), citing a spate of “new anthropomorphic” (22) dog books, Internet “dog chat” sites, remakes of popular classics such as Lassie Come Home, dog friendly urban amenities, and the meteoric rise of services for pampered pets (28-9). Loving pets has become a lifestyle and culture, witnessed and commodified in Pet Superstores as well as in dog collectables and antiques boutiques, and in publications like The Bark (“the New Yorker of Dog Magazines”) and Clean Run, the international agility magazine, Website, online book store and information gateway for agility products and services. Available online resources for dog lovers have similarly increased rapidly during the decade since Garber’s book was published, with the virtual world now catering for serious hobby trainers, exhibitors and professionals as well as the home-based pet lover. At a recent survey, Yahoo Groups – a personal communication portal that facilitates social networking, in this case enabling users to set up electronic mailing lists and Internet forums – boasted just over 9,600 groups servicing dog fanciers and enthusiasts. The list Dogtalk is now an announcement only mailing list, but was a vigorous discussion forum until mid-2006. Members of Dogtalk were Australian-based “clicker-trainers”, serious hobbyist dog trainers, many of whom operated micro-businesses providing dog training or other pet-related services. They shared an online community, but could also engage in “flesh-meets” at seminars, conferences and competitive dog sport meets. An author of this paper (Rutherford) joined this group two years ago because of her interest in clicker training. Clicker training is based on an application of animal learning theory, particularly psychologist E. F. Skinner’s operant conditioning, so called because of the trademark use of a distinctive “click” sound to mark a desired behaviour that is then rewarded. Clicker trainers tend to dismiss anthropomorphic pack theory that positions the human animal as fundamentally opposed to non-human animals and, thus, foster a partnership (rather than a dominator) mode of social and learning relationships. Partnership and nurturance are common themes within the clicker community (as well as in more traditional “home” locations); as is recognising and valuing the specific otherness of other species. Typically, members regard their pets as affective equals or near-equals to the human animals that are recognised members of their kinship networks. A significant function of the episodic biographical narratives and responses posted to this list was thus to affirm and legitimate this intra-specific kinship as part of normative social relationship – a perspective that is not usually validated in the general population. One of the more interesting nexus that evolved within Dogtalk links the narrativisation of the pet in the domestic sphere with the pictorial genre of the family album. Emergent technologies, such as digital cameras together with Web-based image manipulation software and hosting (as provided by portals like Photobucket and Flickr ) democratise high quality image creation and facilitate the sharing of these images. Increasingly, the Dogtalk list linked to images uploaded to free online galleries, discussed digital image composition and aesthetics, and shared technical information about cameras and online image distribution. Much of this cultural production and circulation was concerned with digitally inscribing particular relationships with individual animals into cultural memory: a form of family group biography (for a discussion of the family photograph as a display of extended domestic space, see Rose). The other major non-training thread of the community involves the sharing and witnessing of the trauma suffered due to the illness and loss of pets. While mourning for human family members is supported in the off-line world – with social infrastructure, such as compassionate leave and/or bereavement counselling, part of professional entitlements – public mourning for pets is not similarly supported. Yet, both cultural studies (in its emphasis on cultural memory) and trauma theory have highlighted the importance of social witnessing, whereby traumatic memories must be narratively integrated into memory and legitimised by the presence of a witness in order to loosen their debilitating hold (Felman and Laub 57). Postings on the progress of a beloved animal’s illness or other misfortune and death were thus witnessed and affirmed by other Dogtalk list members – the sick or deceased pet becoming, in the process, a feature of community memory, not simply an individual loss. In terms of such biographical narratives, memory and history are not identical: “Any memories capable of being formed, retained or articulated by an individual are always a function of socially constituted forms, narratives and relations … Memory is always subject to active social manipulation and revision” (Halbwachs qtd. in Crewe 75). In this way, emergent technologies and social software provide sites, akin to that of physical homes, for family members to process individual memories into cultural memory. Dogzonline, the Australian Gateway site for purebred dog enthusiasts, has a forum entitled “Rainbow Bridge” devoted to textual and pictorial memorialisation of deceased pet dogs. Dogster hosts the For the Love of Dogs Weblog, in which images and tributes can be posted, and also provides links to other dog oriented Weblogs and Websites. An interesting combination of both therapeutic narrative and the commodification of affect is found in Lightning Strike Pet Loss Support which, while a memorial and support site, also provides links to the emerging profession of pet bereavement counselling and to suppliers of monuments and tributary urns for home or other use. loobylu and Narratives of Everyday Life The second case study focuses on online interactions between craft enthusiasts who are committed to the production of distinctive objects to decorate and provide comfort in the home, often using traditional methods. In the case of some popular craft Weblogs, online conversations about craft are interspersed with, or become secondary to, the narration of details of family life, the exploration of important life events or the recording of personal histories. As in the previous examples, the offering of advice and encouragement, and expressions of empathy and support, often characterise these interactions. The loobylu Weblog was launched in 2001 by illustrator and domestic crafts enthusiast Claire Robertson. Robertson is a toy maker and illustrator based in Melbourne, Australia, whose clients have included prominent publishing houses, magazines and the New York Public Library (Robertson “Recent Client List” online). She has achieved a measure of public recognition: her loobylu Weblog has won awards and been favourably commented upon in the Australian press (see Robertson “Press for loobylu” online). In 2005, an article in The Age placed Robertson in the context of a contemporary “craft revolution”, reporting her view that this “revolution” is in “reaction to mass consumerism” (Atkinson online). The hand-made craft objects featured in Robertson’s Weblogs certainly do suggest engagement with labour-intensive pursuits and the construction of unique objects that reject processes of mass production and consumption. In this context, loobylu is a vehicle for the display and promotion of Robertson’s work as an illustrator and as a craft practitioner. While skills-based, it also, however, promotes a family-centred lifestyle; it advocates the construction by hand of objects designed to enhance the appearance of the family home and the comfort of its inhabitants. Its specific subject matter extends to related aspects of home and family as, in addition to instructions, ideas and patterns for craft, the Weblog features information on commercially available products for home and family, recipes, child rearing advice and links to 27 other craft and other sites (including Nigella Lawson’s, discussed below). The primary member of its target community is clearly the traditional homemaker – the mother – as well as those who may aspire to this role. Robertson does not have the “celebrity” status of Lawson and Jamie Oliver (discussed below), nor has she achieved their market saturation. Indeed, Robertson’s online presence suggests a modest level of engagement that is placed firmly behind other commitments: in February 2007, she announced an indefinite suspension of her blog postings so that she could spend more time with her family (Robertson loobylu 17 February 2007). Yet, like Lawson and Oliver, Robertson has exploited forms of domestic competence traditionally associated with women and the home, and the non-traditional medium of the Internet has been central to her endeavours. The content of the loobylu blog is, unsurprisingly, embedded in, or an accessory to, a unifying running commentary on Robertson’s domestic life as a parent. Miles, who has described Weblogs as “distributed documentaries of the everyday” (66) sums this up neatly: “the weblogs’ governing discursive quality is the manner in which it is embodied within the life world of its author” (67). Landmark family events are narrated on loobylu and some attract deluges of responses: the 19 June 2006 posting announcing the birth of Robertson’s daughter Lily, for example, drew 478 responses; five days later, one describing the difficult circ*mstances of her birth drew 232 comments. All of these comments are pithy, with many being simple empathetic expressions or brief autobiographically based commentaries on these events. Robertson’s news of her temporary retirement from her blog elicited 176 comments that both supported her decision and also expressed a sense of loss. Frequent exclamation marks attest visually to the emotional intensity of the responses. By narrating aspects of major life events to which the target audience can relate, the postings represent a form of affective mass production and consumption: they are triggers for a collective outpouring of largely hom*ogeneous emotional reaction (joy, in the case of Lily’s birth). As collections of texts, they can be read as auto/biographic records, arranged thematically, that operate at both the individual and the community levels. Readers of the family narratives and the affirming responses to them engage in a form of mass affirmation and consumerism of domestic experience that is easy, immediate, attractive and free of charge. These personal discourses blend fluidly with those of a commercial nature. Some three weeks after loobylu announced the birth of her daughter, Robertson shared on her Weblog news of her mastitis, Lily’s first smile and the family’s favourite television programs at the time, information that many of us would consider to be quite private details of family life. Three days later, she posted a photograph of a sleeping baby with a caption that skilfully (and negatively) links it to her daughter: “Firstly – I should mention that this is not a photo of Lily”. The accompanying text points out that it is a photo of a baby with the “Zaky Infant Sleeping Pillow” and provides a link to the online pregnancystore.com, from which it can be purchased. A quotation from the manufacturer describing the merits of the pillow follows. Robertson then makes a light-hearted comment on her experiences of baby-induced sleep-deprivation, and the possible consequences of possessing the pillow. Comments from readers also similarly alternate between the personal (sharing of experiences) to the commercial (comments on the product itself). One offshoot of loobylu suggests that the original community grew to an extent that it could support specialised groups within its boundaries. A Month of Softies began in November 2004, describing itself as “a group craft project which takes place every month” and an activity that “might give you a sense of community and kinship with other similar minded crafty types across the Internet and around the world” (Robertson A Month of Softies online). Robertson gave each month a particular theme, and readers were invited to upload a photograph of a craft object they had made that fitted the theme, with a caption. These were then included in the site’s gallery, in the order in which they were received. Added to the majority of captions was also a link to the site (often a business) of the creator of the object; another linking of the personal and the commercial in the home-based “cottage industry” sense. From July 2005, A Month of Softies operated through a Flickr site. Participants continued to submit photos of their craft objects (with captions), but also had access to a group photograph pool and public discussion board. This extension simulates (albeit in an entirely visual way) the often home-based physical meetings of craft enthusiasts that in contemporary Australia take the form of knitting, quilting, weaving or other groups. Chatting with, and about, Celebrity Chefs The previous studies have shown how the Internet has broken down many barriers between what could be understood as the separate spheres of emotional (that is, home-based private) and commercial (public) life. The online environment similarly enables the formation and development of fan communities by facilitating communication between those fans and, sometimes, between fans and the objects of their admiration. The term “fan” is used here in the broadest sense, referring to “a person with enduring involvement with some subject or object, often a celebrity, a sport, TV show, etc.” (Thorne and Bruner 52) rather than focusing on the more obsessive and, indeed, more “fanatical” aspects of such involvement, behaviour which is, increasingly understood as a subculture of more variously constituted fandoms (Jenson 9-29). Our specific interest in fandom in relation to this discussion is how, while marketers and consumer behaviourists study online fan communities for clues on how to more successfully market consumer goods and services to these groups (see, for example, Kozinets, “I Want to Believe” 470-5; “Utopian Enterprise” 67-88; Algesheimer et al. 19-34), fans regularly subvert the efforts of those urging consumer consumption to utilise even the most profit-driven Websites for non-commercial home-based and personal activities. While it is obvious that celebrities use the media to promote themselves, a number of contemporary celebrity chefs employ the media to construct and market widely recognisable personas based on their own, often domestically based, life stories. As examples, Jamie Oliver and Nigella Lawson’s printed books and mass periodical articles, television series and other performances across a range of media continuously draw on, elaborate upon, and ultimately construct their own lives as the major theme of these works. In this, these – as many other – celebrity chefs draw upon this revelation of their private lives to lend authenticity to their cooking, to the point where their work (whether cookbook, television show, advertisem*nt or live chat room session with their fans) could be described as “memoir-illustrated-with-recipes” (Brien and Williamson). This generic tendency influences these celebrities’ communities, to the point where a number of Websites devoted to marketing celebrity chefs as product brands also enable their fans to share their own life stories with large readerships. Oliver and Lawson’s official Websites confirm the privileging of autobiographical and biographical information, but vary in tone and approach. Each is, for instance, deliberately gendered (see Hollows’ articles for a rich exploration of gender, Oliver and Lawson). Oliver’s hip, boyish, friendly, almost frantic site includes the what are purported-to-be self-revelatory “Diary” and “About me” sections, a selection of captioned photographs of the chef, his family, friends, co-workers and sponsors, and his Weblog as well as footage streamed “live from Jamie’s phone”. This self-revelation – which includes significant details about Oliver’s childhood and his domestic life with his “lovely girls, Jools [wife Juliette Norton], Poppy and Daisy” – completely blurs the line between private life and the “Jamie Oliver” brand. While such revelation has been normalised in contemporary culture, this practice stands in great contrast to that of renowned chefs and food writers such as Elizabeth David, Julia Child, James Beard and Margaret Fulton, whose work across various media has largely concentrated on food, cooking and writing about cooking. The difference here is because Oliver’s (supposedly private) life is the brand, used to sell “Jamie Oliver restaurant owner and chef”, “Jamie Oliver cookbook author and TV star”, “Jamie Oliver advertising spokesperson for Sainsbury’s supermarket” (from which he earns an estimated £1.2 million annually) (Meller online) and “Jamie Oliver social activist” (made MBE in 2003 after his first Fifteen restaurant initiative, Oliver was named “Most inspiring political figure” in the 2006 Channel 4 Political Awards for his intervention into the provision of nutritious British school lunches) (see biographies by Hildred and Ewbank, and Smith). Lawson’s site has a more refined, feminine appearance and layout and is more mature in presentation and tone, featuring updates on her (private and public) “News” and forthcoming public appearances, a glamorous selection of photographs of herself from the past 20 years, and a series of print and audio interviews. Although Lawson’s children have featured in some of her television programs and her personal misfortunes are well known and regularly commented upon by both herself and journalists (her mother, sister and husband died of cancer) discussions of these tragedies, and other widely known aspects of her private life such as her second marriage to advertising mogul Charles Saatchi, is not as overt as on Oliver’s site, and the user must delve to find it. The use of Lawson’s personal memoir, as sales tool, is thus both present and controlled. This is in keeping with Lawson’s professional experience prior to becoming the “domestic goddess” (Lawson 2000) as an Oxford graduated journalist on the Spectator and deputy literary editor of the Sunday Times. Both Lawson’s and Oliver’s Websites offer readers various ways to interact with them “personally”. Visitors to Oliver’s site can ask him questions and can access a frequently asked question area, while Lawson holds (once monthly, now irregularly) a question and answer forum. In contrast to this information about, and access to, Oliver and Lawson’s lives, neither of their Websites includes many recipes or other food and cooking focussed information – although there is detailed information profiling their significant number of bestselling cookbooks (Oliver has published 8 cookbooks since 1998, Lawson 5 since 1999), DVDs and videos of their television series and one-off programs, and their name branded product lines of domestic kitchenware (Oliver and Lawson) and foodstuffs (Oliver). Instruction on how to purchase these items is also featured. Both these sites, like Robertson’s, provide various online discussion fora, allowing members to comment upon these chefs’ lives and work, and also to connect with each other through posted texts and images. Oliver’s discussion forum section notes “this is the place for you all to chat to each other, exchange recipe ideas and maybe even help each other out with any problems you might have in the kitchen area”. Lawson’s front page listing states: “You will also find a moderated discussion forum, called Your Page, where our registered members can swap ideas and interact with each other”. The community participants around these celebrity chefs can be, as is the case with loobylu, divided into two groups. The first is “foodie (in Robertson’s case, craft) fans” who appear to largely engage with these Websites to gain, and to share, food, cooking and craft-related information. Such fans on Oliver and Lawson’s discussion lists most frequently discuss these chefs’ television programs and books and the recipes presented therein. They test recipes at home and discuss the results achieved, any problems encountered and possible changes. They also post queries and share information about other recipes, ingredients, utensils, techniques, menus and a wide range of food and cookery-related matters. The second group consists of “celebrity fans” who are attracted to the chefs (as to Robertson as craft maker) as personalities. These fans seek and share biographical information about Oliver and Lawson, their activities and their families. These two areas of fan interest (food/cooking/craft and the personal) are not necessarily or always separated, and individuals can be active members of both types of fandoms. Less foodie-orientated users, however (like users of Dogtalk and loobylu), also frequently post their own auto/biographical narratives to these lists. These narratives, albeit often fragmented, may begin with recipes and cooking queries or issues, but veer off into personal stories that possess only minimal or no relationship to culinary matters. These members also return to the boards to discuss their own revealed life stories with others who have commented on these narratives. Although research into this aspect is in its early stages, it appears that the amount of public personal revelation either encouraged, or allowed, is in direct proportion to the “open” friendliness of these sites. More thus are located in Oliver’s and less in Lawson’s, and – as a kind of “control” in this case study, but not otherwise discussed – none in that of Australian chef Neil Perry, whose coolly sophisticated Website perfectly complements Perry’s professional persona as the epitome of the refined, sophisticated and, importantly in this case, unapproachable, high-end restaurant chef. Moreover, non-cuisine related postings are made despite clear directions to the contrary – Lawson’s site stating: “We ask that postings are restricted to topics relating to food, cooking, the kitchen and, of course, Nigella!” and Oliver making the plea, noted above, for participants to keep their discussions “in the kitchen area”. Of course, all such contemporary celebrity chefs are supported by teams of media specialists who selectively construct the lives that these celebrities share with the public and the postings about others’ lives that are allowed to remain on their discussion lists. The intersection of the findings reported above with the earlier case studies suggests, however, that even these most commercially-oriented sites can provide a fruitful data regarding their function as home-like spaces where domestic practices and processes can be refined, and emotional relationships formed and fostered. In Summary As convergence results in what Turow and Kavanaugh call “the wired homestead”, our case studies show that physically home-based domestic interests and practices – what could be called “home truths” – are also contributing to a refiguration of the private/public interplay of domestic activities through online dialogue. In the case of Dogtalk, domestic space is reconstituted through virtual spaces to include new definitions of family and memory. In the case of loobylu, the virtual interaction facilitates a development of craft-based domestic practices within the physical space of the home, thus transforming domestic routines. Jamie Oliver’s and Nigella Lawson’s sites facilitate development of both skills and gendered identities by means of a bi-directional nexus between domestic practices, sites of home labour/identity production and public media spaces. As participants modify and redefine these online communities to best suit their own needs and desires, even if this is contrary to the stated purposes for which the community was instituted, online communities can be seen to be domesticated, but, equally, these modifications demonstrate that the activities and relationships that have traditionally defined the home are not limited to the physical space of the house. While virtual communities are “passage points for collections of common beliefs and practices that united people who were physically separated” (Stone qtd in Jones 19), these interactions can lead to shared beliefs, for example, through advice about pet-keeping, craft and cooking, that can significantly modify practices and routines in the physical home. Acknowledgments An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Association of Internet Researchers’ International Conference, Brisbane, 27-30 September 2006. The authors would like to thank the referees of this article for their comments and input. Any errors are, of course, our own. References Algesheimer, R., U. Dholake, and A. Herrmann. “The Social Influence of Brand Community: Evidence from European Car Clubs”. Journal of Marketing 69 (2005): 19-34. Atkinson, Frances. “A New World of Craft”. The Age (11 July 2005). 28 May 2007 http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2005/07/10/1120934123262.html>. Brien, Donna Lee, and Rosemary Williamson. “‘Angels of the Home’ in Cyberspace: New Technologies and Biographies of Domestic Production”. Paper. Biography and New Technologies conference. Humanities Research Centre, Australian National University, Canberra, ACT. 12-14 Sep. 2006. Crewe, Jonathan. “Recalling Adamastor: Literature as Cultural Memory in ‘White’ South Africa”. In Acts of Memory: Cultural Recall in the Present, eds. Mieke Bal, Jonathan Crewe, and Leo Spitzer. Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College, 1999. 75-86. Felman, Shoshana, and Dori Laub. Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History. New York: Routledge, 1992. Garber, Marjorie. Dog Love. New York: Touchstone/Simon and Schuster, 1996. Gorman-Murray, Andrew. “Homeboys: Uses of Home by Gay Australian Men”. Social and Cultural Geography 7.1 (2006): 53-69. Halbwachs, Maurice. On Collective Memory. Trans. Lewis A. Closer. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1992. Hildred, Stafford, and Tim Ewbank. Jamie Oliver: The Biography. London: Blake, 2001. Hollows, Joanne. “Feeling like a Domestic Goddess: Post-Feminism and Cooking.” European Journal of Cultural Studies 6.2 (2003): 179-202. ———. “Oliver’s Twist: Leisure, Labour and Domestic Masculinity in The Naked Chef.” International Journal of Cultural Studies 6.2 (2003): 229-248. Jenson, J. “Fandom as Pathology: The Consequences of Characterization”. The Adoring Audience; Fan Culture and Popular Media. Ed. L. A. Lewis. New York, NY: Routledge, 1992. 9-29. Jones, Steven G., ed. Cybersociety, Computer-Mediated Communication and Community. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1995. Kozinets, R.V. “‘I Want to Believe’: A Netnography of the X’Philes’ Subculture of Consumption”. Advances in Consumer Research 34 (1997): 470-5. ———. “Utopian Enterprise: Articulating the Meanings of Star Trek’s Culture of Consumption.” Journal of Consumer Research 28 (2001): 67-88. Lawson, Nigella. How to Be a Domestic Goddess: Baking and the Art of Comfort Cooking. London: Chatto and Windus, 2000. Meller, Henry. “Jamie’s Tips Spark Asparagus Shortages”. Daily Mail (17 June 2005). 21 Aug. 2007 http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/health/dietfitness.html? in_article_id=352584&in_page_id=1798>. Miles, Adrian. “Weblogs: Distributed Documentaries of the Everyday.” Metro 143: 66-70. Moss, Pamela. “Negotiating Space in Home Environments: Older Women Living with Arthritis.” Social Science and Medicine 45.1 (1997): 23-33. Robertson, Claire. Claire Robertson Illustration. 2000-2004. 28 May 2007 . Robertson, Claire. loobylu. 16 Feb. 2007. 28 May 2007 http://www.loobylu.com>. Robertson, Claire. “Press for loobylu.” Claire Robertson Illustration. 2000-2004. 28 May 2007 http://www.clairetown.com/press.html>. Robertson, Claire. A Month of Softies. 28 May 2007. 21 Aug. 2007 . Robertson, Claire. “Recent Client List”. Claire Robertson Illustration. 2000-2004. 28 May 2007 http://www.clairetown.com/clients.html>. Rose, Gillian. “Family Photographs and Domestic Spacings: A Case Study.” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers NS 28.1 (2003): 5-18. Smith, Gilly. Jamie Oliver: Turning Up the Heat. Sydney: Macmillian, 2006. Thorne, Scott, and Gordon C. Bruner. “An Exploratory Investigation of the Characteristics of Consumer Fanaticism.” Qualitative Market Research: An International Journal 9.1 (2006): 51-72. Turow, Joseph, and Andrea Kavanaugh, eds. The Wired Homestead: An MIT Press Sourcebook on the Internet and the Family. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Brien, Donna Lee, Leonie Rutherford, and Rosemary Williamson. "Hearth and Hotmail: The Domestic Sphere as Commodity and Community in Cyberspace." M/C Journal 10.4 (2007). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0708/10-brien.php>. APA Style Brien, D., L. Rutherford, and R. Williamson. (Aug. 2007) "Hearth and Hotmail: The Domestic Sphere as Commodity and Community in Cyberspace," M/C Journal, 10(4). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0708/10-brien.php>.

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For some time, I have been concerned with uses and abuses of the future, how the exchange of temporally loaded language through conversation and text affects the pace, moods and behaviour of individuals, communities, cultures and civilisations. I am equally curious about Christianity which as a narrative structure begins with creation but awaits a conclusion. Whether it is religions announcing ten-point plans to attain paradise quickly, or cults encouraging group passes to heaven through suicide, it is the future end that counts. Whether it be ego-theologists -- as I prefer to call those pastors who proclaim the 'you are/they are god' creed -- scalping spiritual quick-fixes at the local entertainment centre, with a McDonald's-like serving of 'Would you like a blessing with that?', or the visiting soulwinner from New South Wales distributing 'Mark of the Beast' warning pamphlets, the future conclusion of the Christian narrative plays the lead. I cannot disguise my discomfort with the salvation franchises or merchants who market pre-fabricated responses to the Christian apocalyptic narrative, curiously shaped by contemporary circ*mstances, and who profit excessively from such business. Many times I wonder what dubious purposes their perception of the future is put to. Surviving Armageddon, it appears, can provide a diverse source of mobilisation for many. With such prominence in the everyday topics of public and mainstream dialogue, our age is the first historical period where the marginal phenomenon of apocalyptism has moved from the edge of society to its present-day popular near-centre. Money, I dare say, is made from such a shift. Ego-theologists are keen to boast the vices of contemporary society that are bringing apocalypse while conveniently offering the hefty-priced product that upon purchase will begin the process of surviving the end. It is no accident that the narrower the definition of salvation, the more specialised the rituals for attaining it, the qualifications for distributing it and the exclusivity for keeping it. Such restrictions place the power of salvation into the hands of a small number of people who make available -- upon specialised or ritualised request -- the means to lease it. I use the word lease because salvation is never completely settled. Instead, a symbolic contract is achieved between the franchise and the seeker in which salvation is conveyed to the seeker for a specified period but usually in exchange for membership and often mental and financial obligation. If the seeker breaks the contract, salvation is lost. Jehovah's Witnesses call this act of severance 'disfellowshipping' and the seeker is designated by continuing followers of Watchtower as an 'apostate', as one against the almighty creator. Many ex-witnesses are emotionally scared by this devastating, violent act of seemingly removing salvation. In this sense, a small elite using exclusive language and narrow definitions and who therefore monopolise the forms and the senses of achieving salvation habitually frame salvation and the rituals of being saved from a monstrous future. Who benefits and who is disempowered by the agenda being set in this manner? Why are only selected people able to lease directions to the road of salvation with maps that periodically imply the master planner has changed compass, be it the secular salvation from ecological doom or theological salvation from the damnable mark of the beast? Saving a person from the antichrist has today become a robust industry. Religious entrepreneurs proliferate their scriptural shandies and spiritual quick-fixes to the middle-class disheartened with the expertise of experienced confidence tricksters and the finesse of door-to-door selling. Subscribe to a local salvation franchise of the 'gospel of wealth' variety found marketing in the early morning hours of Australian televangelism and a continual stream of ministrations will arrive in the mail replete with US postage markings and external messages warning you and your postie: 'This envelope contains important information the devil hopes you will never find out!', 'Eight things you need to know before the new millennium', 'Has Y2K plunged us into a countdown to chaos? Don't panic -- prepare and trust God!' or 'Unleash the power of your faith!'. Content will vary across a range of marketable approaches. Two recent postings I received from the same franchise respectively presented a 4-5 page personalised letter requesting I purchase 'dynamic ministry materials' like Your Y2K New Millennium Survival Personal Library Kit for an appropriate 'seed harvest' of $165.99. This reflected fair market value, naturally, on 'powerful' items including The Antichrist: 666 video, a three audio tape set called End Time Signs and the Book of Revelation Comic Book. An explanation sheet was also included for explaining the rituals required to activate an enclosed 'miracle touch' 2-inch square cloth, apparently anointed -- touched in a supernatural way -- by a special class of persons self-identified as 'prayer warriors'. Some packages have reflected telegram-style formatting to 'emphasize the great URGENCY' felt by a pastor 'that many of you may be on the verge of falling apart or feeling absolutely overwhelmed by fear, anger, depression, rejection, worry' and who desperately require a newly-released 'powerful book of wisdom' to overcome personal tribulation and to successfully 'rebuke the devil'. Often, correspondence signed from the pastor displays these excesses of individual concern, claims of divine new revelation blended with unbiblical doses of numerological deduction. The accompanying letter to my Y2K Personal Request Sheet begins: 'Dear Jason, you are now reading a letter that had to be sent to you ... Yes, the Lord told me to prepare this ... He gave me a vivid, supernatural glimpse of the miracle difference this one letter could make in your life ... especially in this year of 1999 ... See it as your year of double fruitfulness'. What role does this type of 'future-thinking' and others play in Australian forms of hope and expectation? Can we establish a discourse of ethics regarding the use or abuse of future mythology? And how might we engage studies of the future in the historical and sociological disciplines which would see the future as itself: a theory with very particular ideological and metaphysical investments; an address to the present, transforming it into the fulfillment of the future we aim to aspire to; and, often, as a tool or weapon which has been waved about for some form of gain? To answer these questions requires us to place ourselves in a position to see something of the design and construction of contemporary futures as an invented thing with specific limitations. George Orwell's famous and relevant exploration of the future in 1984 is the story of Winston Smith's rebellion against the Party, of his hatred towards Big Brother and the thoughtcrime. On page thirty-four, Winston reflects on the perpetual state of war that has existed between Oceania and Eurasia: 'The Party said that Oceania had never been in alliance with Eurasia ... But where did that knowledge exist? Only in his own consciousness ... if all the others accepted the lie which the party imposed if all records told the same tale, then the lie passed into history and became truth. "Who controls the past," ran the Party slogan, "controls the future: who controls the present controls the past." It was quite simple. All that was needed was an unending series of victories over your own memory. "Reality control," they called it; in Newspeak, "doublethink."' Transposing the direction of Orwell's commentary, from a control of knowledge about the past to a monopoly control of future mythology, provides more than just an occasional point. To paraphrase, I would like to suggest that: 'Who controls the future controls the present. And that all is needed is an unending series of victories over your imagination'. In futurespeak, that is, the language and discursive strategies used to talk and think about the future, I call this 'thinkphobia'. Alvin Toffler, in his successful sociological trilogy, describes the cultural fallout from overchoice and the dangerous discrepancies between society's technological accelerative thrust and the pace of our individual adaptive abilities. This peculiar state results in what Toffler defines as future shock; that is, an overload of our individual decision-making processes from the demands of choice that we simply cannot tolerate. Thinkphobia, as an analogy to thoughtcrime, is one step removed: it is the fear we develop of choice, of options in the future and it is not, I suspect, limited to doomsayers. For members of Watchtower (Jehovah's Witnesses), the present is probed only in the interests of the future and they project only one intended and necessary future, squashing coherent, intellectual responses to it, closing alternatives to active public and popular debate. The future as promoted by Watchtower is totalist, monocultural, and biblically sealed, closed to individual modification, to the extent that a handbook 'Reasoning from the Scriptures' can provide the dialogue that accompanies their knock at your door. But, I wonder, are the future-systems of our societies any different in their application? What I'm suggest here is that the secular billions of people today who are either implicitly or explicitly coerced to reckon the future and time in ways they did not choose is highly questionable. While we may scoff at the witness who has their dialogue mapped out and a sense of the future pre-structured for them, should we ourselves spend much time exchanging talk about things called the 'millennium' and the year 2000, encouraging other cultures to share our enthusiasm, much like a cultist would promote their pattern of future for emulating? In other words, when our societies are diversifying culturally, socially and intellectually, why is our concept of the future hom*ogenising, almost, dare I suggest, in cultic mimicry? The approach of the year 2000/2001AD seems to evoke excess response from Christian groups throughout Australia. But can a culture of apocalypse or a cult of the future -- that is, a philosophically sealed community deriving identity from its expectation of doom in the future -- be limited to popular, extra-societal ideas of cult? A 'cult of the future' could be described as a community of people, which embraces a particular system of linear time reckoning as part of its cultural and/or social code, which encourages (either explicitly or implicitly) and sustains specialised activity as supplication to some qualitative or quantitative 'future'. A 'cult of the future', to draw from sociological literature, does not adhere to the possibility of unforeseen occurrence but rather devotes itself to a presumed unalterable and necessary future to which all current activity and thought seems conditional upon it. I wonder whether the term 'cult of the future' can be applied to a whole society and not just to the small evangelical cult based in the outer suburbs, which studiously awaits the end of the world. Can a cult of the future, traditionally applied to an unconventional extra-societal gathering, include society itself? How our societies conceive of the future may be different in content and style to evangelical and theological communities, but could the aim be similar? Whether it is a social reformer or a cult leader, is the process the same in the way future mythology is constructed? Could future-oriented systems conceivably sit alongside the systems of more controversial groups like Heaven's Gate or Jehovah's Witnesses as related efforts of installing pre-organised future-mythology into the mindset of a group of receptive people? To interrogate the monopolisation of future mythology by the leading mythmakers and the salvation merchants, whose greatest tool is the rumour of what we fear and whose largest assets are the hopes of seekers, is to begin reclaiming responsibility about the future. It is to reclaim meaning for an individual long-term present that would otherwise be lonely in the crowd of social, commercial and regulated short-term futures. Futures thinking should encourage us to ponder what part of ourselves goes on to the future and it should initiate a strong sense of responsibility to prospective generations: it should not invite us to consider what books or tapes to purchase in order to survive the various doomsday scenarios marketed at us. To interrogate the monopolisation of future mythology by the leading mythmakers and the salvation merchants, whose greatest tool is the rumour of what we fear and whose largest assets are the hopes of seekers, is to begin reclaiming responsibility about the future. It is to reclaim meaning for an individual long-term present that would otherwise be lonely in the crowd of social, commercial and regulated short-term futures. Futures thinking should encourage us to ponder what part of ourselves goes on to the future and it should initiate a strong sense of responsibility to prospective generations: it should not invite us to consider what books or tapes to purchase in order to survive the various doomsday scenarios marketed at us. Citation reference for this article MLA style: Jason Ensor. "666 Ways to Ambush the Future." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2.9 (2000). [your date of access] <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/0001/666.php>. Chicago style: Jason Ensor, "666 Ways to Ambush the Future," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2, no. 9 (2000), <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/0001/666.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: Jason Ensor. (2000) 666 ways to ambush the future. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2(9). <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/0001/666.php> ([your date of access]).

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Abstract:

Historians of Modern Architecture have cultivated the image of the architect as a temperamental genius, unconcerned by issues of politeness or pragmatics—a reading reinforced in cultural representations of Modern Architects, such as Howard Roark, the protagonist in Ayn Rand’s 1943 novel The Fountainhead (a character widely believed to be based on the architect Frank Lloyd Wright). The perception of the Modern Architect as an artistic hero or genius has also influenced the reception of their work. Despite their indisputable place within the architectural canon, many important works of Modern Architecture were contested on pragmatic grounds, such as cost, brief and particularly concerning issues of suitability and effectiveness in relation to climate and weather. A number of famed cases resulted in legal action between clients and architects, and in many more examples historians have critically framed these accounts to highlight alternate issues and agendas. “Complaints about the weather,” in relation to architecture, inevitably raise issues regarding a work’s “success,” particularly in view of the tensions between artistry and functionality inherent in the discipline of architecture. While in more recent decades these ideas have been framed around ideas of sustainability—particularly in relation to contemporary buildings—more traditionally they have been engaged through discussions of an architect’s ethical responsibility to deliver a habitable building that meets the client’s needs. This paper suggests these complaints often raise a broader range of issues and are used to highlight tensions inherent in the discipline. In the history of Modern Architecture, these complaints are often framed through gender studies, ethics and, more recently, artistic asceticism. Accounts of complaints and disputes are often invoked in the social construction (or deconstruction) of artistic genius – whether in a positive or negative light. Through its discussion of a number of famed examples, this paper will discuss the framing of climate in relation to the figure of the Modern Architect and the reception of the architectural “masterpiece.” Dear Monsieur Le Corbusier … In June 1930 Mme Savoye, the patron of the famed Villa Savoye on the outskirts of Paris, wrote to her architect, Le Corbusier, stating: “it is still raining in our garage” (Sbriglio 144)—a persistent theme in their correspondence. This letter followed another sent in March after discovering leaks in the garage and several bedrooms following a visit during inclement weather. While sent prior to the building’s completion, she also noted that rainfall on the bathroom skylight “makes a terrible noise […] which prevents us from sleeping in bad weather” (Sbriglio 142). Claiming to have warned Le Corbusier about the concern, the contractor refused to accept responsibility, prompting some rather fiery correspondence between the two. This problem, compounded by issues with the heating system, resulted in the house feeling, as Sbriglio notes, “cold and damp” and subject to “substantial heat loss due to the large glazing”—a cause for particular concern given the health problems of the clients’ only child, Roger Savoye, that saw him spend time in a French Sanatorium (Sbriglio 145). While the cause of Roger’s illness is not clear, at least one writer (albeit with a noticeable lack of footnotes or supporting evidence) has linked this directly to the villa (de Botton 65). Mme Savoye’s complaints about dampness, humidity, condensation and leaking in her home persisted in subsequent years, prompting Benton to summarise in 1987, “every autumn […] there were cries of distress from the Savoye family with the first rains” (Villas 204). These also extended to discussion of the heating system, which while proving insufficient was also causing flooding (Benton, "Villa" 93). In 1935 Savoye again wrote to Le Corbusier, wearily stating: It is raining in the hall, it’s raining on the ramp and the wall of the garage is absolutely soaked [….] it’s still raining in my bathroom, which floods in bad weather, as the water comes in through the skylight. The gardener’s walls are also wet through. (Sbriglio 146-7) Savoye’s understandable vexation with waterproofing problems in her home continued to escalate. With a mixture of gratitude and frustration, a letter sent two years later stated: “After innumerable demands you have finally accepted that this house which you built in 1929 in uninhabitable…. Please render it inhabitable immediately. I sincerely hope that I will not have to take recourse to legal action” (Sbriglio 147). Paradoxically, Le Corbusier was interested in the potential of architecture and urban planning to facilitate health and well-being, as well as the effects that climate may play in this. Early twentieth century medical thought advocated heliotherary (therapeutic exposure to sunlight) for a diverse range of medical conditions, ranging from rickets to tuberculosis. Similarly the health benefits of climate, such as the dryness of mountain air, had been recognised for much longer, and had led to burgeoning industries associated with health, travel and climate. The dangers of damp environments had also long been medically recognised. Le Corbusier’s awareness of the health benefits of sunshine led to the inclusion of a solarium in the villa that afforded both framed and unframed views of the surrounding countryside, such as those that were advocated in the seventeenth century as an antidote to melancholy (Burton 65-66). Both Benton and Sbriglio present Mme Savoye’s complaints as part of their comprehensive histories of an important and influential work of Modern Architecture. Each reproduce excerpts from archival letters that are not widely translated or accessible, and Benton’s 1984 essay is the source other authors generally cite in discussing these matters. In contrast, for example, Murphy’s 2002 account of the villa’s conversion from “house” to “historical monument” cites the same letters (via Benton) as part of a broader argument that highlights the “undomestic” or “unhomely” nature of the work by cataloguing such accounts of the client’s experience of discomfort while residing in the space – thus revisiting a number of common criticisms of Modern Architecture. Le Corbusier’s reputation for designing buildings that responded poorly to climate is often referenced in popular accounts of his work. For example, a 1935 article published in Time states: Though the great expanses of glass that he favors may occasionally turn his rooms into hothouses, his flat roofs may leak and his plans may be wasteful of space, it was Architect Le Corbusier who in 1923 put the entire philosophy of modern architecture into a single sentence: “A house is a machine to live in.” Reference to these issues are usually made rather minimally in academic accounts of his work, and few would agree with this article’s assertion that Le Corbusier’s influence as a phrasemaker would rival the impact of his architecture. In contrast, such issues, in relation to other architects, are often invoked more rhetorically as part of a variety of historical agendas, particularly in constructing feminist histories of architecture. While Corbusier and his work have often been the source of intellectual contention from feminist scholars—for example in regard to authorial disputes and fractious relationships with the likes of Eileen Gray or Charlotte Perriand – discussion of the functional failures in the Villa Savoye are rarely addressed from this perspective. Rather, feminist scholars have focussed their attention on a number of other projects, most notably the case of the Farnsworth House, another canonical work of Modernism. Dear Herr Mies van der Rohe … Mies van der Rohe’s Farnsworth House, completed in 1951 in Plano Illinois, was commissioned as a country weekend residence by an unmarried female doctor, a brief credited with freeing the architect from many of the usual pragmatic requirements of a permanent city residence. In response Mies designed a rectilinear steel and glass pavilion, which hovered (to avoid the flood levels) above the landscape, sheltered by maple trees, in close proximity to the Fox River. The refined architectural detail, elegant formal properties, and poetic relationship with the surrounding landscape – whether in its autumnal splendour or covered in a thick blanket of snow – captivated architects seeing it become, like the Villa Savoye, one of the most revered architectural works of the twentieth century. Prior to construction a model was exhibited in the Museum of Modern Art in New York and, upon completion the building became a pilgrimage site for architects and admirers. The exhibition of the design later fuelled debate about whether Dr Farnsworth constituted a patron or a client (Friedman 134); a distinction generating very different expectations for the responsibilities of the architect, particularly regarding the production of a habitable home that met the client’s brief versus producing a design of architectural merit. The house was intended as a frame for viewing and contemplating nature, thus seeing nature and climate aligned with the transcendental qualities of the design. Following a visit during construction, Farnsworth described the building’s relationship to the elements, writing: “the two horizontal planes of the unfinished building, floating over the meadows, were unearthly beautiful under a sun which glowed like a wild rose” (5). Similarly, in 1951, Arthur Drexler described the building as “a quantity of air caught between a floor and a roof” (Vandenberg 6). Seven years later the architect himself asserted that nature “gained a more profound significance” when viewed from within the house (Friedman 139). While the transparency of the house was “forgiven” by its isolated location and the lack of visibility from neighbouring properties, the issues a glass and steel box might pose for the thermal comfort of its occupant are not difficult to imagine. Following the house’s completion, Farnsworth fitted windows with insect screens and blinds (although Mies intended for curtains to be installed) that clumsily undermined the refined and minimalistic architectural details. Controversy surrounding the house was, in part, the result of its bold new architectural language. However, it was also due to the architect-client relationship, which turned acrimonious in a very public manner. A dispute between Mies and Farnsworth regarding unpaid fees was fought both in the courtroom and the media, becoming a forum for broader debate as various journals (for example, House Beautiful), publicly took sides. The professional female client versus the male architect and the framing of their dispute by historians and the media has seen this project become a seminal case-study in feminist architectural histories, such as Friedman’s Women and the Making of the Modern House of 1998. Beyond the conflict and speculation about the individuals involved, at the core of these discussions were the inadequacies of the project in relation to comfort and climate. For example, Farnsworth describes in her journal finding the house awash with several inches of water, leading to a court session being convened on the rooftop in order to properly ascertain the defects (14). Written retrospectively, after their relationship soured, Farnsworth’s journal delights in recounting any errors or misjudgements made by Mies during construction. For example, she described testing the fireplace to find “the house was sealed so hermetically that the attempt of a flame to go up the chimney caused an interior negative pressure” (2). Further, her growing disenchantment was reflected in bleak descriptions aligning the building with the weather. Describing her first night camping in her home, she wrote: “the expanses of the glass walls and the sills were covered with ice. The silent meadows outside white with old and hardened snow reflected the bleak [light] bulb within, as if the glass house itself were an unshaded bulb of uncalculated watts lighting the winter plains” (9). In an April 1953 article in House Beautiful, Elizabeth Gordon publicly sided with Farnsworth as part of a broader campaign against the International Style. She condemned the home, and its ‘type’ as “unlivable”, writing: “You burn up in the summer and freeze in the winter, because nothing must interfere with the ‘pure’ form of their rectangles” (250). Gordon included the lack of “overhanging roofs to shade you from the sun” among a catalogue of “human qualities” she believed architects sacrificed for the expression of composition—a list that also included possessions, children, pets and adequate kitchen facilities (250). In 1998 excerpts from this article were reproduced by Friedman, in her seminal work of feminist architectural history, and were central in her discussion of the way that debates surrounding this house were framed through notions of gender. Responding to this conflict, and its media coverage, in 1960 Peter Blake wrote: All great houses by great architects tend to be somewhat impractical; many of Corbu’s and Wright’s house clients find that they are living in too expensive and too inefficient buildings. Yet many of these clients would never exchange their houses for the most workable piece of mediocrity. (88) Far from complaining about the weather, the writings of its second owner, Peter Palumbo, poetically meditate the building’s relationship to the seasons and the elements. In his foreword to a 2003 monograph, he wrote: life inside the house is very much a balance with nature, and an extension of nature. A change in the season or an alteration of the landscape creates a marked change in the mood inside the house. With an electric storm of Wagnerian proportions illuminating the night sky and shaking the foundations of the house to their very core, it is possible to remain quite dry! When, with the melting snows of spring, the Fox River becomes a roaring torrent that bursts its banks, the house assumes a character of a house-boat, the water level sometimes rising perilously close to the front door. On such occasions, the approach to the house is by canoe, which is tied to the steps of the upper terrace. (Vandenberg 5) Palumbo purchased the house from Farnsworth and commissioned Mies’s grandson to restore it to its original condition, removing the blinds and insect screens, and installing an air-conditioning system. The critical positioning of Palumbo has been quite different from that of Farnsworth. His restoration and writings on the project have in some ways seen him positioned as the “real” architectural patron. Furthermore, his willingness to tolerate some discomfort in his inhabitation has seen him in some ways prefigure the type of resident that will be next be discussed in reference to recent owners of Wright properties. Dear Mr Wright … Accounts of weatherproofing problems in buildings designed by Frank Lloyd Wright have become the basis of mythology in the architectural discipline. For example, in 1936 Herbert Johnson and J. Vernon Steinle visited Wright’s Richard Lloyd Jones house in Oklahoma. As Jonathan Lipman wrote, “Steinle’s most prominent recollection of the house was that there were scores of tubs and canning jars in the house catching water leaking through the roof” (45). While Lipman notes the irony that both the house and office Wright designed for Johnson would suffer the same problem, it is the anecdotal accounts of the former that have perhaps attracted the most interest. An oft-recounted story tells of Johnson telephoning Wright, during a dinner party, with regard to water dripping from the ceiling into his guest-of-honour’s soup; the complaint was reportedly rebuffed unsympathetically by Wright who suggested the lady should move her chair (Farr 272). Wright himself addressed his reputation for designing buildings that leaked in his Autobiography. In reference to La Miniatura in Pasadena, of 1923, he contextualised difficulties with the local climate, which he suggested was prone to causing leaks, writing: “The sun bakes the roof for eleven months, two weeks and five days, shrinking it to a shrivel. Then giving the roof no warning whatever to get back to normal if it could, the clouds burst. Unsuspecting roof surfaces are deluged by a three inch downpour.” He continued, stating: I knew all this. And I know there are more leaking roofs in Southern California than in all the rest of the world put together. I knew that the citizens come to look upon water thus in a singularly ungrateful mood. I knew that water is all that enables them to have their being there, but let any of it through on them from above, unexpectedly, in their houses and they go mad. It is a kind of phobia. I knew all this and I have taken seriously precautions in the details of this little house to avoid such scenes as a result of negligible roofs. This is the truth. (250) Wright was quick to attribute blame—directed squarely at the builder. Never one for quiet diplomacy, he complained that the “builder had lied to [him] about the flashing under and within the coping walls” (250) and he was ignorant of the incident because the client had not informed him of the leak. He suggested the client’s silence was undoubtedly due to her “not wishing to hurt [his] feelings”. Although given earlier statements it might be speculated that she did not wish to be accused of pandering to a phobia of leaks. Wright was dismissive of the client’s inconvenience, suggesting she would be able to continue as normal until the next rains the following year and claiming he “fixed the house” once he “found out about it” (250). Implicit in this justification was the idea that it was not unreasonable to expect the client to bear a few days of “discomfort” each year in tolerance of the local climate. In true Wright style, discussions of these problems in his autobiography were self-constructive concessions. While Wright refused to take responsibility for climate-related issues in La Minatura, he was more forthcoming in appreciating the triumphs of his Imperial Hotel in Japan—one of the only buildings in the vicinity to survive the 1923 earthquake. In a chapter of his autobiography titled “Building against Doomsday (Why the Great Earthquake did not destroy the Imperial Hotel),” Wright reproduced a telegram sent by Okura Impeho stating: “Hotel stands undamaged as monument of your genius hundreds of homeless provided perfectly maintained service. Congratulations” (222). Far from unconcerned by nature or climate, Wright’s works celebrated and often went to great effort to accommodate the poetic qualities of these. In reference to his own home, Taliesin, Wright wrote: I wanted a home where icicles by invitation might beautify the eaves. So there were no gutters. And when the snow piled deep on the roofs […] icicles came to hang staccato from the eaves. Prismatic crystal pendants sometimes six feet long, glittered between the landscape and the eyes inside. Taliesin in winter was a frosted palace roofed and walled with snow, hung with iridescent fringes. (173) This description was, in part, included as a demonstration of his “superior” understanding and appreciation of nature and its poetic possibilities; an understanding not always mirrored by his clients. Discussing the Lloyd Lewis House in Libertyville, Illinois of 1939, Wright described his endeavours to keep the house comfortable (and avoid flooding) in Spring, Autumn and Summer months which, he conceded, left the house more vulnerable to winter conditions. Utilising an underfloor heating system, which he argued created a more healthful natural climate rather than an “artificial condition,” he conceded this may feel inadequate upon first entering the space (495). Following the client’s complaints that this system and the fireplace were insufficient, particularly in comparison with the temperature levels he was accustomed to in his workplace (at The Daily News), Wright playfully wrote: I thought of various ways of keeping the writer warm, I thought of wiring him to an electric pad inside his vest, allowing lots of lead wire so he could get around. But he waved the idea aside with contempt. […] Then I suggested we appeal to Secretary Knox to turn down the heat at the daily news […] so he could become acclimated. (497) Due to the client’s disinclination to bear this discomfort or use any such alternate schemes, Wright reluctantly refit the house with double-glazing (at the clients expense). In such cases, discussion of leaks or thermal discomfort were not always negative, but were cited rhetorically implying that perfunctory building techniques were not yet advanced enough to meet the architect’s expectations, or that their creative abilities were suppressed by conservative or difficult clients. Thus discussions of building failures have often been invoked in the social construction of the “architect-genius.” Interestingly accounts of the permeability of Wright’s buildings are more often included in biographical rather that architectural writings. In recent years, these accounts of weatherproofing problems have transformed from accusing letters or statements implying failure to a “badge of honour” among occupants who endure discomfort for the sake of art. This changing perspective is usually more pronounced in second generation owners, like Peter Palumbo (who has also owned Corbusier and Wright designed homes), who are either more aware of the potential problems in owning such a house or are more tolerant given an understanding of the historical worth of these projects. This is nowhere more evident than in a profile published in the real estate section of the New York Times. Rather than concealing these issues to preserve the resale value of the property, weatherproofing problems are presented as an endearing quirk. The new owners of Wright’s Prefab No. 1 of 1959, on Staten Island declared they initially did not have enough pots to place under the fifty separate leaks in their home, but in December 2005 proudly boasted they were ‘down to only one leak’ (Bernstein, "Living"). Similarly, in 2003 the resident of a Long Island Wright-designed property, optimistically claimed that while his children often complained their bedrooms were uncomfortably cold, this encouraged the family to spend more time in the warmer communal spaces (Bernstein, "In a House"). This client, more than simply optimistic, (perhaps unwittingly) implies an awareness of the importance of “the hearth” in Wright’s architecture. In such cases complaints about the weather are re-framed. The leaking roof is no longer representative of gender or power relationships between the client and the uncompromising artistic genius. Rather, it actually empowers the inhabitant who rises above their circ*mstances for the sake of art, invoking a kind of artistic asceticism. While “enlightened” clients of famed architects may be willing to suffer the effects of climate in the interiors of their homes, their neighbours are less tolerant as suggested in a more recent example. Complaints about the alteration of the micro-climate surrounding Frank Gehry’s Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles prompted the sandblasting of part of the exterior cladding to reduce glare. In 2004, USA Today reported that reflections from the stainless steel cladding were responsible for raising the temperature in neighbouring buildings by more than 9° Celsius, forcing neighbours to close their blinds and operate their air-conditioners. There were also fears that the glare might inadvertently cause traffic problems. Further, one report found that average ground temperatures adjacent to the building peaked at approximately 58° Celsius (Schiler and Valmont). Unlike the Modernist examples, this more recent project has not yet been framed in aid of a critical agenda, and has seemingly been reported simply for being “newsworthy.” Benign Conversation Discussion of the suitability of Modern Architecture in relation to climate has proven a perennial topic of conversation, invoked in the course of recurring debates and criticisms. The fascination with accounts of climate-related problems—particularly in discussing the work of the great Modernist Architects like Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe and Frank Lloyd Wright—is in part due to a certain Schadenfreude in debunking the esteem and authority of a canonical figure. This is particularly the case with one, such as Wright, who was characterised by significant self-confidence and an acerbic wit often applied at the expense of others. Yet these accounts have been invoked as much in the construction of the figure of the architect as a creative genius as they have been in the deconstruction of this figure—as well as the historical construction of the client and the historians involved. In view of the growing awareness of the threats and realities of climate change, complaints about the weather are destined to adopt a new significance and be invoked in support of a different range of agendas. While it may be somewhat anachronistic to interpret the designs of Frank Lloyd Wright or Mies van der Rohe in terms of current discussions about sustainability in architecture, these topics are often broached when restoring, renovating or adapting the designs of such architects for new or contemporary usage. In contrast, the climatic problems caused by Gehry’s concert hall are destined to be framed according to a different set of values—such as the relationship of his work to the time, or perhaps in relation to contemporary technology. While discussion of the weather is, in the conversational arts, credited as benign topic, this is rarely the case in architectural history. References Benton, Tim. The Villas of Le Corbusier 1920-1930. New Haven: Yale UP, 1987. ———. “Villa Savoye and the Architects’ Practice (1984).” Le Corbusier: The Garland Essays. Ed. H. Allen Brooks. New York: Garland, 1987. 83-105. Bernstein, Fred A. “In a House That Wright Built.” New York Times 21 Sept. 2003. 3 Aug. 2009 < http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/21/nyregion/in-a-house-that-wright-built.html >. ———. “Living with Frank Lloyd Wright.” New York Times 18 Dec. 2005. 30 July 2009 < http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/18/realestate/18habi.html >. Blake, Peter. Mies van der Rohe: Architecture and Structure. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1963 (1960). Burton, Robert. The Anatomy of Melancholy, vol. II. Eds. Nicolas K. Kiessling, Thomas C. Faulkner and Rhonda L. Blair. Oxford: Clarendon, 1995 (1610). Campbell, Margaret. “What Tuberculosis Did for Modernism: The Influence of a Curative Environment on Modernist Design and Architecture.” Medical History 49 (2005): 463–488. “Corbusierismus”. Art. Time 4 Nov. 1935. 18 Aug. 2009 < http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,755279,00.html >. De Botton, Alain. The Architecture of Happiness. London: Penguin, 2006. Farnsworth, Edith. ‘Chapter 13’, Memoirs. Unpublished journals in three notebooks, Farnsworth Collection, Newberry Library, Chicago, unpaginated (17pp). 29 Jan. 2009 < http://www.farnsworthhouse.org/pdf/edith_journal.pdf >. Farr, Finis. Frank Lloyd Wright: A Biography. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1961. Friedman, Alice T. Women and the Making of the Modern House: A Social and Architectural History. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1998. Gordon, Elizabeth. “The Threat to the Next America.” House Beautiful 95.4 (1953): 126-30, 250-51. Excerpts reproduced in Friedman. Women and the Making of the Modern House. 140-141. Hardarson, Ævar. “All Good Architecture Leaks—Witticism or Word of Wisdom?” Proceedings of the CIB Joint Symposium 13-16 June 2005, Helsinki < http://www.metamorfose.ntnu.no/Artikler/Hardarson_all_good_architecture_leaks.pdf >. Huck, Peter. “Gehry’s Hall Feels Heat.” The Age 1 March 2004. 22 Aug. 2009 < http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2004/02 /27/1077676955090.html >. Lipman, Jonathan. Frank Lloyd Wright and the Johnson Wax Buildings. Introduction by Kenneth Frampton. London: Architectural Press, 1984. Murphy, Kevin D. “The Villa Savoye and the Modernist Historic Monument.” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 61.1 (2002): 68-89. “New L.A. Concert Hall Raises Temperatures of Neighbours.” USA Today 24 Feb. 2004. 24 Aug. 2009 < http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2004-02-24-concert-hall_x.htm >. Owens, Mitchell. “A Wright House, Not a Shrine.” New York Times 25 July 1996. 30 July 2009 . Sbriglio, Jacques. Le Corbusier: La Villa Savoye, The Villa Savoye. Paris: Fondation Le Corbusier; Basel: Birkhäuser, 1999. Schiler, Marc, and Elizabeth Valmont. “Microclimatic Impact: Glare around the Walt Disney Concert Hall.” 2005. 24 Aug. 2009 < http://www.sbse.org/awards/docs/2005/1187.pdf >. Vandenberg, Maritz. Farnsworth House. Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. Foreword by Lord Peter Palumbo. London: Phaidon Press, 2003. Wright, Frank Lloyd. An Autobiography. New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1943.

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This paper is part of a larger project exploring Australian literary responses to the Great War of 1914-1918. It draws on theories of embodiment, mourning, ritual and the recuperative potential of writing, together with a brief discussion of selected exemplars, to suggest that literary works of the period contain and lay bare a suite of creative, corporeal and social impulses, including resurrection, placation or stilling of ghosts, and formation of an empathic and duty-bound community. In Negotiating with the Dead, Margaret Atwood hypothesises that “all writing of the narrative kind, and perhaps all writing, is motivated, deep down, by a fear of and a fascination with mortality—by a desire to make the risky trip to the Underworld, and to bring something or someone back from the dead” (156). She asks an attendant question: “why should it be writing, over and above any other art or medium,” that functions this way? It is not only that writing acquires the appearance of permanence, by surviving “its own performance,” but also that some arts are transient, like dance, while others, like painting and sculpture and music, do “not survive as voice.” For Atwood, writing is a “score for voice,” and what the voice does mostly is tell stories, whether in prose or poetry: “Something unfurls, something reveals itself” (158). Writing, by this view, conjures, materialises or embodies the absent or dead, or is at least laden with this potential. Of course, as Katherine Sutherland observes, “representation is always the purview of the living, even when the order it constructs contains the dead” (202). She argues that all writing about death “might be regarded as epitaph or memorial; such writing is likely to contain the signs of ritual but also of ambiguity and forgetting” (204). Arguably writing can be regarded as participation in a ritual that “affirms membership of the collectivity, and through symbolic manipulation places the life of an individual within a much broader, sometimes cosmic, interpretive framework” (Seale 29), which may assist healing in relation to loss, even if some non-therapeutic purposes, such as restoration of social and political order, also lie behind both rites and writing. In a critical orthodoxy dating back to the 1920s, it has become accepted wisdom that the Australian literary response to the war was essentially nationalistic, “big-noting” ephemera, and thus of little worth (see Gerster and Caesar, for example). Consequently, as Bruce Clunies Ross points out, most Australian literary output of the period has “dropped into oblivion.” In his view, neglect of writings by First World War combatants is not due to its quality, “for this is not the only, or even the essential, condition” for consideration; rather, it is attributable to a “disjunction between the ideals enshrined in the Anzac legend and the experiences recorded or depicted” (170). The silence, we argue, also encompasses literary responses by non-combatants, many of whom were women, though limited space precludes consideration here of their particular contributions.Although poetry and fiction by those of middling or little literary reputation is not normally subject to critical scrutiny, it is patently not the case that there is no body of literature from the war period worthy of scholarly consideration, or that most works are merely patriotic, jingoistic, sentimental and in service of recruitment, even though these elements are certainly present. Our different proposition is that the “lost literatures” deserve attention for various reasons, including the ways they embody conflicting aims and emotions, as well as overt negotiations with the dead, during a period of unprecedented anguish. This is borne out by our substantial collection of creative writing provoked by the war, much of which was published by newspapers, magazines and journals. As Joy Damousi points out in The Labour of Loss, newspapers were the primary form of communication during the war, and never before or since have they dominated to such a degree; readers formed collective support groups through shared reading and actual or anticipated mourning, and some women commiserated with each other in person and in letters after reading casualty lists and death notices (21). The war produced the largest body count in the history of humanity to that time, including 60,000 Australians: none was returned to Australia for burial. They were placed in makeshift graves close to where they died, where possible marked by wooden crosses. At the end of the war, the Commonwealth War Graves Commission (CWGC) was charged with the responsibility of exhuming and reinterring bodily remains in immaculately curated cemeteries across Europe, at Gallipoli and in the Middle East, as if the peace demanded it. As many as one third of the customary headstones were inscribed with “known unto God,” the euphemism for bodies that could not be identified. The CWGC received numerous requests from families for the crosses, which might embody their loved one and link his sacrificial death with resurrection and immortality. For allegedly logistical reasons, however, all crosses were destroyed on site. Benedict Anderson suggested the importance to nationalism of the print media, which enables private reading of ephemera to generate a sense of communion with thousands or millions of anonymous people understood to be doing likewise. Furthermore, Judith Herman demonstrates in Trauma and Recovery that sharing traumatic experience with others is a “precondition for the restitution of a sense of a meaningful world” (70). Need of community and restitution extends to the dead. The practices of burying the dead together and of returning the dead to their homeland when they die abroad speak to this need, for “in establishing a society of the dead, the society of the living regularly recreates itself” (Hertz qtd. in Searle 66). For Australians, the society of the dead existed elsewhere, in unfamiliar terrain, accentuating the absence inherent in all death. The society of the dead and missing—and thus of the living and wounded—was created and recreated throughout the war via available means, including literature. Writers of war-related poems and fiction helped create and sustain imagined communities. Dominant use of conventional, sometimes archaic, literary forms, devices, language and imagery indicates desire for broadly accessible and purposeful communication; much writing invokes shared grief, resolve, gratitude, and sympathy. Yet, in many stories and poems, there is also ambivalence in relation to sacrifice and the community of the dead.Speaking in the voice of the other is a fundamental task of the creative writer, and the ultimate other, the dead, gaze upon and speak to or about the living in a number of poems. For example, they might vocalise displeasure and plead for reinforcements, as, for example, in Ella M’Fadyen’s poem “The Wardens,” published in the Sydney Mail in 1918, which includes the lines: “Can’t you hear them calling in the night-time’s lonely spaces […] Can’t you see them passing […] Those that strove full strongly, and have laid their lives away?” The speaker hears and conveys the pleading of those who have given their breath in order to make explicit the reader’s responsibility to both the dead and the Allied cause: “‘Thus and thus we battled, we were faithful in endeavour;/Still it lies unfinished—will ye make the deed in vain?’” M’Fadyen focusses on soldierly sacrifice and “drafts that never came,” whereas a poem entitled “Your Country’s Call,” published in the same paper in 1915 by “An Australian Mother, Shirley, Queensland,” refers to maternal sacrifice and the joys and difficulties of birthing and raising her son only to find the country’s claims on him outweigh her own. She grapples with patriotism and resistance: “he must go/forth./Where? Why? Don’t think. Just smother/up the pain./Give him up quickly, for his country’s gain.” The War Precautions Act of October 1914 made it “illegal to publish any material likely to discourage recruiting or undermine the Allied effort” (Damousi 21), which undoubtedly meant that, to achieve publication, critical, depressing or negative views would need to be repressed or cast as inducement to enlist, though evidently many writers also sought to convince themselves as well as others that the cause was noble and the cost redeemable. “Your Country’s Call” concludes uncertainly, “Give him up proudly./You have done your share./There may be recompense—somewhere.”Sociologist Clive Seal argues that “social and cultural life involves turning away from the inevitability of death, which is contained in the fact of our embodiment, and towards life” (1). He contends that “grief for embodiment” is pervasive and perpetual and “extends beyond the obvious manifestations of loss by the dying and bereaved, to incorporate the rituals of everyday interaction” (200), and he goes so far as to suggest that if we recognise that our bodies “give to us both our lives and our deaths” then we can understand that “social and cultural life can, in the last analysis, be understood as a human construction in the face of death” (210). To deal with the grief that comes with “realisation of embodiment,” Searle finds that we engage in various “resurrective practices designed to transform an orientation towards death into one that points towards life” (8). He includes narrative reconstruction as well as funeral lament and everyday conversation as rituals associated with maintenance of the social bond, which is “the most crucial human motive” (Scheff qtd. in Searle 30). Although Seale does not discuss the acts of writing or of reading specifically, his argument can be extended, we believe, to include both as important resurrective practices that contain desire for self-repair and reorientation as well as for inclusion in and creation of an empathic moral community, though this does not imply that such desires can ever be satisfied. In “Reading,” Virginia Woolf reminds that “somewhere, everywhere, now hidden, now apparent in whatever is written down is the form of a human being” (28-29), but her very reminder assumes that this knowledge of embodiment tends to be forgotten or repressed. Writing, by its aura of permanence and resurrective potential, points towards life and connection, even as it signifies absence and disconnection. Christian Riegel explains that the “literary work of mourning,” whether poetry, fiction or nonfiction, often has both a psychic and social function, “partaking of the processes of mourning while simultaneously being a product for public reception.” Such a text is indicative of ways that societies shape and control responses to death, making it “an inherently socio-historical construct” (xviii). Jacques Derrida’s passionate and uneasy enactment of this labour in The Work of Mourning suggests that writing often responds to the death of a known person or their oeuvre, where each death changes and reduces the world, so that the world as one knew it “sinks into an abyss” (115). Of course, writing also wrestles with anonymous, large-scale loss which is similarly capable of shattering our sense of “ontological security” (Riegel xx). Sandra Gilbert proposes that some traumatic events cause “death’s door” to swing “so publicly and dramatically open that we can’t look away” (xxii). Derrida’s work of mourning entails imaginative revival of those he has lost and is a struggle with representation and fidelity, whereas critical silence in respect of the body of literature of the First World War might imply repeated turning from “grief for embodiment” towards myths of immortality and indebtedness. Commemorating the war dead might be regarded as a resurrective practice that forges and fortifies communities of the living, while addressing the imagined demands of those who die for their nation.Riegel observes that in its multiplicity of motivations and functions, the literary work of mourning is always “an attempt to make present that which is irrefutably lost, and within that paradoxical tension lies a central tenet of all writerly endeavour that deals with the representation of death” (xix). The literary work of mourning must remain incomplete: it is “always a limiting attempt at revival and at representation,” because words inevitably “fail to replace a lost one.” Even so, they can assist in the attempt to “work through and understand” loss (xix). But the reader or mourner is caught in a strange situation, for he or she inevitably scrutinises words not the body, a corpus not a corpse, and while this is a form of evasion it is also the only possibility open to us. Even so, Derrida might say that it is “as if, by reading, by observing the signs on the drawn sheet of paper, [readers are] trying to forget, repress, deny, or conjure away death—and the anxiety before death.” But he also concedes (after Sarah Kofman), that this process might involve “a cunning affirmation of life, its irrepressible movement to survive, to live on” (176), which supports Seale’s contention in relation to resurrective practices generally. Atwood points out that the dead have always made demands on the living, but, because there is a risk in negotiating with the dead, there needs to be good reason or reward for doing so. Our reading of war literature written by noncombatants suggests that in many instances writers seek to appease the unsettled dead whose death was meant to mean something for the future: the living owe the dead a debt that can only be paid by changing the way they live. The living, in other words, must not only remember the fallen, but also heed them by their conduct. It becomes the poet’s task to remind people of this, that is, to turn them from death towards life.Arthur H Adams’s 1918 poem “When the Anzac Dead Came Home,” published in the Bulletin, is based on this premise: the souls of the dead— the “failed” and “fallen”—drift uncertainly over their homeland, observing the world to which they cannot return, with its “cheerful throng,” “fair women swathed in fripperies,” and “sweet girls” that cling “round windows like bees on honeycomb.” One soul recognises a soldier, Steve, from his former battalion, a mate who kept his life but lost his arm and, after hovering for a while, again “wafts far”; his homecoming creates a “strange” stabbing pain, an ache in his pal’s “old scar.” In this uncanny scene, irreconcilable and traumatic knowledge expresses itself somatically. The poet conveys the viewpoint of the dead Anzac rather than the returned one. The living soldier, whose body is a site of partial loss, does not explicitly conjure or mourn his dead friend but, rather, is a living extension of his loss. In fact, the empathic connection construed by the poet is not figured as spectral orchestration or as mindful on the part of man or community; rather, it occurs despite bodily death or everyday living and forgetting; it persists as hysterical pain or embodied knowledge. Freud and Breuer’s influential Studies on Hysteria, published in 1895, raised the issue of mind/body relations, given its theory that the hysteric’s body expresses psychic trauma that she or he may not recollect: repressed “memories of aetiological significance” result in “morbid symptoms” (56). They posited that experience leaves traces which, like disinterred archaeological artefacts, inform on the past (57). However, such a theory depends on what Rousseau and Porter refer to as an “almost mystical collaboration between mind and body” (vii), wherein painful or perverse or unspeakable “reminiscences” are converted into symptoms, or “mnemic symbols,” which is to envisage the body as penetrable text. But how can memory return unbidden and in such effective disguise that the conscious mind does not recognise it as memory? How can the body express pain without one remembering or acknowledging its origin? Do these kinds of questions suggest that the Cartesian mind/body split has continued valency despite the challenge that hysteria itself presents to such a theory? Is it possible, rather, that the body itself remembers—and not just its own replete form, as suggested by those who feel the presence of a limb after its removal—but the suffering body of “the other”? In Adam’s poem, as in M’Fadyen’s, intersubjective knowledge subsists between embodied and disembodied subjects, creating an imagined community of sensation.Adams’s poem envisions mourning as embodied knowledge that allows one man to experience another’s pain—or soul—as both “old” and “strange” in the midst of living. He suggests that the dead gaze at us even as they are present “in us” (Derrida). Derrida reminds that ghosts occupy an ambiguous space, “neither life nor death, but the haunting of the one by the other” (41). Human mutability, the possibility of exchanging places in a kind of Socratic cycle of life and death, is posited by Adams, whose next stanzas depict the souls of the war dead reclaiming Australia and displacing the thankless living: blown to land, they murmur to each other, “’Tis we who are the living: this continent is dead.” A significant imputation is that the dead must be reckoned with, deserve better, and will not rest unless the living pay their moral dues. The disillusioned tone and intent of this 1918 poem contrasts with a poem Adams published in the Bulletin in 1915 entitled “The Trojan War,” which suggests even “Great Agamemnon” would “lift his hand” to honour “plain Private Bill,” the heroic, fallen Anzac who ventured forth to save “Some Mother-Helen sad at home. Some obscure Helen on a farm.” The act of war is envisaged as an act of birthing the nation, anticipating the Anzac legend, but simultaneously as its epitaph: “Upon the ancient Dardanelles New peoples write—in blood—their name.” Such a poem arguably invokes, though in ambiguous form, what Derrida (after Lyotard) refers to as the “beautiful death,” which is an attempt to lift death up, make it meaningful, and thereby foreclose or limit mourning, so that what threatens disorder and despair might instead reassure and restore “the body politic,” providing “explicit models of virtue” (Nass 82-83) that guarantee its defence and survival. Adams’ later poem, in constructing Steve as “a living fellow-ghost” of the dead Anzac, casts stern judgement on the society that fails to notice what has been lost even as it profits by it. Ideological and propagandist language is also denounced: “Big word-warriors still played the Party game;/They nobly planned campaigns of words, and deemed/their speeches deeds,/And fought fierce offensives for strange old creeds.” This complaint recalls Ezra Pound’s lines in Hugh Selwyn Mauberley about the dead who “walked eye-deep in hell/believing in old men’s lies, then unbelieving/came home, home to a lie/home to many deceits,/home to old lies and new infamy;/usury age-old and age-thick/and liars in public places,” and it would seem that this is the kind of disillusion and bitterness that Clunies Ross considers to be “incompatible with the Anzac tradition” (178) and thus ignored. The Anzac tradition, though quieted for a time, possibly due to the 1930s Depression, Second World War, Vietnam War and other disabling events has, since the 1980s, been greatly revived, with Anzac Day commemorations in Australia and at Gallipoli growing exponentially, possibly making maintenance of this sacrificial national mythology, or beautiful death, among Australia’s most capacious and costly creative industries. As we approach the centenary of the war and of Gallipoli, this industry will only increase.Elaine Scarry proposes that the imagination invents mechanisms for “transforming the condition of absence into presence” (163). It does not escape us that in turning towards lost literatures we are ourselves engaging in a form of resurrective practice and that this paper, like other forms of social and cultural practice, might be understood as one more human construction motivated by grief for embodiment.Note: An archive and annotated bibliography of the “Lost Literatures of the First World War,” which comprises over 2,000 items, is expected to be published online in 2015.References Adams, Arthur H. “When the Anzac Dead Came Home.” Bulletin 21 Mar. 1918.---. “The Trojan War.” Bulletin 20 May 1915.An Australian Mother. “Your Country’s Call.” Sydney Mail 19 May 1915.Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. 2nd ed. London: Verso, 1991.Atwood, Margaret. Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing. New York: Random House, 2002.Caesar, Adrian. “National Myths of Manhood: Anzac and Others.” The Oxford Literary History of Australia. Eds. Bruce Bennett and Jennifer Strauss. Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1998. 147-168.Clunies Ross, Bruce. “Silent Heroes.” War: Australia’s Creative Response. Eds. Anna Rutherford and James Wieland. West Yorkshire: Dangaroo Press, 1997. 169-181.Damousi, Joy. The Labour of Loss: Mourning, Memory and Wartime Bereavement in Australia. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999.Derrida, Jacques. The Work of Mourning. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001.Freud, Sigmund, and Joseph Breuer. Studies on Hysteria. Pelican Freud Library. Vol. 3. Trans. and eds. James Strachey, Alix Strachey, and Angela Richards. London: Penguin, 1988.Gerster, Robin. Big Noting: The Heroic Theme in Australian War Writing. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1992.Gilbert, Sandra M. Death’s Door: Modern Dying and the Ways We Grieve. New York: W.W. Norton, 2006.Herman, Judith. Trauma and Recovery. New York: Basic Books, 1992. M’Fayden, Ella. “The Wardens.” Sydney Mail 17 Apr. 1918.Naas, Michael. “History’s Remains: Of Memory, Mourning, and the Event.” Research in Phenomenology 33 (2003): 76-96.Pound, Ezra. “Hugh Selwyn Mauberly.” iv. 1920. 19 June 2012. ‹http://www.archive.org/stream/hughselwynmauber00pounrich/hughselwynmauber00pounrich_djvu.txt›.Riegal, Christian, ed. Response to Death: The Literary Work of Mourning. Edmonton, Alberta: University of Alberta Press, 2005. Rousseau, G.S., and Roy Porter. “Introduction: The Destinies of Hysteria.” Hysteria beyond Freud. Ed. Sander L. Gilman, Helen King, Roy Porter, G.S. Rousseau, and Elaine Showalter. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993.Scarry, Elaine. The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985.Seale, Clive. Constructing Death: The Sociology of Dying and Bereavement. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.Sutherland, Katherine. “Land of Their Graves: Maternity, Mourning and Nation in Janet Frame, Sara Suleri, and Arundhati Roy.” Riegel 201-16.Woolf, Virginia. Collected Essays Volume 2. London: Hogarth, 1966. 28-29.

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On 19 January 1975, Australia’s first youth station 2JJ (Double Jay) launched itself onto the nation’s airwaves with a NASA-style countdown and You Only Like Me ‘Cause I’m Good in Bed by Australian band Skyhooks. Refused airtime by the commercial stations because of its explicit sexual content, this song was a clear signifier of the new station’s intent—to occupy a more radical territory on Australian radio. Indeed, Double Jay’s musical entrée into the highly restrictive local broadcasting environment of the time has gone on to symbolise both the station’s role in its early days as an enfant terrible of radio (Inglis 376), and its near 40 years as a voice for youth culture in Australia (Milesago, Double Jay). In this paper we explore the proposition that Double Jay functioned as an outlet for youth counterculture in Australia, and that it achieved this even with (and arguably because of) its credentials as a state-generated entity. This proposition is considered via brief analysis of the political and musical context leading to the establishment of Double Jay. We intend to demonstrate that although the station was deeply embedded in “the system” in material and cultural terms, it simultaneously existed in an “uneasy symbiosis” (Martin and Siehl 54) with this system because it consciously railed against the mainstream cultures from which it drew, providing a public and active vehicle for youth counterculture in Australia. The origins of Double Jay thus provide one example of the complicated relationship between culture and counterculture, and the multiple ways in which the two are inextricably linked. As a publicly-funded broadcasting station Double Jay was liberated from the industrial imperatives of Australia’s commercial stations which arguably drove their predisposition for formula. The absence of profit motive gave Double Jay’s organisers greater room to experiment with format and content, and thus the potential to create a genuine alternative in Australia broadcasting. As a youth station Double Jay was created to provide a minority with its own outlet. The Labor government committed to wrenching airspace from the very restrictive Australian broadcasting “system” (Wiltshire and Stokes 2) to provide minority voices with room to speak and to be heard. Youth was identified by the government as one such minority. The Australian Broadcasting Commission (ABC) contributed to this process by enabling young staffers to establish the semi-independent Contemporary Radio Unit (CRU) (Webb) and within this a youth station. Not only did this provide a focal point around which a youth collective could coalesce, but the distinct place and identity of Double Jay within the ABC offered its organisers the opportunity to ignore or indeed subvert some of the perceived strictures of the “mothership” that was the ABC, whether in organisational, content and/or stylistic terms. For these and other reasons Double Jay was arguably well positioned to counter the broadcasting cultures that existed alongside this station. It did so stylistically, and also in more fundamental ways, At the same time, however, it “pillaged the host body at random” (Webb) co-opting certain aspects of these cultures (people, scheduling, content, administration) which in turn implicated Double Jay in the material and cultural practices of those mainstream cultures against which it railed. Counterculture on the Airwaves: Space for Youth to Play? Before exploring these themes further, we should make clear that Double Jay’s legitimacy as a “counterculture” organisation is observably tenuous against the more extreme renderings of the concept. Theodore Roszak, for example, requires of counterculture something “so radically disaffiliated from the mainstream assumptions of our society that it scarcely looks to many as a culture at all” (5). Double Jay was a brainchild of the state: an outcome of the Whitlam Government’s efforts to open up the nation’s airwaves (Davis, Government; McClelland). Further, the supervision of this station was given to the publicly funded Australian national broadcaster, the ABC (Inglis). Any claim Double Jay has to counterculture status then is arguably located in less radical invocations of the term. Some definitions, for example, hold that counterculture contains value systems that run counter to culture, but these values are relational rather than divorced from each other. Kenneth Leech, for example, states that counterculture is "a way of life and philosophy which at central points is in conflict with the mainstream society” (Desmond et al. 245, our emphasis); E.D. Batzell defines counterculture as "a minority culture marked by a set of values, norms and behaviour patterns which contradict those of the dominant society" (116, our emphasis). Both definitions imply that counterculture requires the mainstream to make sense of what it is doing and why. In simple terms then, counterculture as the ‘other’ does not exist without its mainstream counterpoint. The particular values with which counterculture is in conflict are generated by “the system” (Heath and Potter 6)—a system that imbues “manufactured needs and mass-produced desires” (Frank 15) in the masses to encourage order, conformity and consumption. Counterculture seeks to challenge this “system” via individualist, expression-oriented values such as difference, diversity, change, egalitarianism, and spontaneity (Davis On Youth; Leary; Thompson and Coskuner‐Balli). It is these kinds of counterculture values that we demonstrate were embedded in the content, style and management practices within Double Jay. The Whitlam Years and the Birth of Double Jay Double Jay was borne of the Whitlam government’s brief but impactful period in office from 1972 to 1975, after 23 years of conservative government in Australia. Key to the Labor Party’s election platform was the principle of participatory democracy, the purpose of which was “breaking down apathy and maximising active citizen engagement” (Cunningham 123). Within this framework, the Labor Party committed to opening the airwaves, and reconfiguring the rhetoric of communication and media as a space of and for the people (Department of the Media 3). Labor planned to honour this commitment via sweeping reforms that would counter the heavily concentrated Australian media landscape through “the encouragement of diversification of ownership of commercial radio and television”—and in doing so enable “the expression of a plurality of viewpoints and cultures throughout the media” (Department of the Media 3). Minority groups in particular were to be privileged, while some in the Party even argued for voices that would actively agitate. Senator Jim McClelland, for one, declared, “We say that somewhere in the system there must be broadcasting which not only must not be afraid to be controversial but has a duty to be controversial” (Senate Standing Committee 4). One clear voice of controversy to emerge in the 1960s and resonate throughout the 1970s was the voice of youth (Gerster and Bassett; Langley). Indeed, counterculture is considered by some as synonymous with a particular strain of youth culture during this time (Roszak; Leech). The Labor Government acknowledged this hitherto unrecognised voice in its 1972 platform, with Minister for the Media Senator Doug McClelland claiming that his party would encourage the “whetting of the appetite” for “life and experimentation” of Australia’s youth – in particular through support for the arts (160). McClelland secured licenses for two “experimental-type” stations under the auspices of the ABC, with the youth station destined for Sydney via the ABC’s standby transmitter in Gore Hill (ABCB, 2). Just as the political context in early 1970s Australia provided the necessary conditions for the appearance of Double Jay, so too did the cultural context. Counterculture emerged in the UK, USA and Europe as a clear and potent force in the late 1960s (Roszak; Leech; Frank; Braunstein and Doyle). In Australia this manifested in the 1960s and 1970s in various ways, including political protest (Langley; Horne); battles for the liberalisation of censorship (Hope and Dickerson, Liberalisation; Chipp and Larkin); sex and drugs (Dawson); and the art film scene (Hope and Dickerson, Happiness; Thoms). Of particular interest here is the “lifestyle” aspect of counterculture, within which the value-expressions against the dominant culture manifest in cultural products and practices (Bloodworth 304; Leary ix), and more specifically, music. Many authors have suggested that music was pivotal to counterculture (Bloodworth 309; Leech 8), a key “social force” through which the values of counterculture were articulated (Whiteley 1). The youth music broadcasting scene in Australia was extremely narrow prior to Double Jay, monopolised by a handful of media proprietors who maintained a stranglehold over the youth music scene from the mid-50s. This dominance was in part fuelled by the rising profitability of pop music, driven by “the dreamy teenage market”, whose spending was purely discretionary (Doherty 52) and whose underdeveloped tastes made them “immune to any sophisticated disdain of run-of-the-mill” cultural products (Doherty 230-231). Over the course of the 1950s the commercial stations pursued this market by “skewing” their programs toward the youth demographic (Griffen-Foley 264). The growing popularity of pop music saw radio shift from a “multidimensional” to “mono-dimensional” medium according to rock journalist Bruce Elder, in which the “lowest-common-denominator formula of pop song-chat-commercial-pop-song” dominated the commercial music stations (12). Emblematic of this mono-dimensionalism was the appearance of the Top 40 Playlist in 1958 (Griffin-Foley 265), which might see as few as 10–15 songs in rotation in peak shifts. Elder claims that this trend became more pronounced over the course of the 1960s and peaked in 1970, with playlists that were controlled with almost mechanical precision [and] compiled according to American-devised market research methods which tended to reinforce repetition and familiarity at the expense of novelty and diversity. (12) Colin Vercoe, whose job was to sell the music catalogues of Festival Records to stations like 2UE, 2SER and SUW, says it was “an incredibly frustrating affair” to market new releases because of the rigid attachment by commercials to the “Top 40 of endless repeats” (Vercoe). While some air time was given to youth music beyond the Top 40, this happened mostly in non-peak shifts and on weekends. Bill Drake at 2SM (who was poached by Double Jay and allowed to reclaim his real name, Holger Brockmann) played non-Top 40 music in his Sunday afternoon programme The Album Show (Brockmann). A more notable exception was Chris Winter’s Room to Move on the ABC, considered by many as the predecessor of Double Jay. Introduced in 1971, Room to Move played all forms of contemporary music not represented by the commercial broadcasters, including whole albums and B sides. Rock music’s isolation to the fringes was exacerbated by the lack of musical sales outlets for rock and other forms of non-pop music, with much music sourced through catalogues, music magazines and word of mouth (Winter; Walker). In this context a small number of independent record stores, like Anthem Records in Sydney and Archie and Jugheads in Melbourne, appear in the early 1970s. Vercoe claims that the commercial record companies relentlessly pursued the closure of these independents on the grounds they were illegal entities: The record companies hated them and they did everything they could do close them down. When (the companies) bought the catalogue to overseas music, they bought the rights. And they thought these record stores were impinging on their rights. It was clear that a niche market existed for rock and alternative forms of music. Keith Glass and David Pepperell from Archie and Jugheads realised this when stock sold out in the first week of trade. Pepperell notes, “We had some feeling we were doing something new relating to people our own age but little idea of the forces we were about to unleash”. Challenging the “System” from the Inside At the same time as interested individuals clamoured to buy from independent record stores, the nation’s first youth radio station was being instituted within the ABC. In October 1974, three young staffers—Marius Webb, Ron Moss and Chris Winter— with the requisite youth credentials were briefed by ABC executives to build a youth-style station for launch in January 1975. According to Winter “All they said was 'We want you to set up a station for young people' and that was it!”, leaving the three with a conceptual carte blanche–although assumedly within the working parameters of the ABC (Webb). A Contemporary Radio Unit (CRU) was formed in order to meet the requirements of the ABC while also creating a clear distinction between the youth station and the ABC. According to Webb “the CRU gave us a lot of latitude […] we didn’t have to go to other ABC Departments to do things”. The CRU was conscious from the outset of positioning itself against the mainstream practices of both the commercial stations and the ABC. The publicly funded status of Double Jay freed it from the shackles of profit motive that enslaved the commercial stations, in turn liberating its turntables from baser capitalist imperatives. The two coordinators Ron Moss and Marius Webb also bypassed the conventions of typecasting the announcer line-up (as was practice in both commercial and ABC radio), seeking instead people with charisma, individual style and youth appeal. Webb told the Sydney Morning Herald that Double Jay’s announcers were “not required to have a frontal lobotomy before they go on air.” In line with the individual- and expression-oriented character of the counterculture lifestyle, it was made clear that “real people” with “individuality and personality” would fill the airwaves of Double Jay (Nicklin 9). The only formula to which the station held was to avoid (almost) all formula – a mantra enhanced by the purchase in the station’s early days of thousands of albums and singles from 10 or so years of back catalogues (Robinson). This library provided presenters with the capacity to circumvent any need for repetition. According to Winter the DJs “just played whatever we wanted”, from B sides to whole albums of music, most of which had never made it onto Australian radio. The station also adapted the ABC tradition of recording live classical music, but instead recorded open-air rock concerts and pub gigs. A recording van built from second-hand ABC equipment captured the grit of Sydney’s live music scene for Double Jay, and in so doing undercut the polished sounds of its commercial counterparts (Walker). Double Jay’s counterculture tendencies further extended to its management style. The station’s more political agitators, led by Webb, sought to subvert the traditional top-down organisational model in favour of a more egalitarian one, including a battle with the ABC to remove the bureaucratic distinction between technical staff and presenters and replace this with the single category “producer/presenter” (Cheney, Webb, Davis 41). The coordinators also actively subverted their own positions as coordinators by holding leaderless meetings open to all Double Jay employees – meetings that were infamously long and fraught, but also remembered as symbolic of the station’s vibe at that time (Frolows, Matchett). While Double Jay assumed the ABC’s focus on music, news and comedy, at times it politicised the content contra to the ABC’s non-partisan policy, ignored ABC policy and practice, and more frequently pushed its contents over the edges of what was considered propriety and taste. These trends were already present in pockets of the ABC prior to Double Jay: in current affairs programmes like This Day Tonight and Four Corners (Harding 49); and in overtly leftist figures like Alan Ashbolt (Bowman), who it should be noted had a profound influence over Webb and other Double Jay staff (Webb). However, such an approach to radio still remained on the edges of the ABC. As one example of Double Jay’s singularity, Webb made clear that the ABC’s “gentleman’s agreement” with the Federation of Australian Commercial Broadcasters to ban certain content from airplay would not apply to Double Jay because the station would not “impose any censorship on our people” – a fact demonstrated by the station’s launch song (Nicklin 9). The station’s “people” in turn made the most of this freedom with the production of programmes like Gayle Austin’s Horny Radio p*rn Show, the Naked Vicar Show, the adventures of Colonel Chuck Chunder of the Space Patrol, and the Sunday afternoon comic improvisations of Nude Radio from the team that made Aunty Jack. This openness also made its way into the news team, most famously in its second month on air with the production of The Ins and Outs of Love, a candid documentary of the sexual proclivities and encounters of Sydney’s youth. Conservative ABC staffer Clement Semmler described the programme as containing such “disgustingly explicit accounts of the sexual behaviour of young teenagers” that it “aroused almost universal obloquy from listeners and the press” (35). The playlist, announcers, comedy sketches, news reporting and management style of Double Jay represented direct challenges to the entrenched media culture of Australia in the mid 1970s. The Australian National Commission for UNESCO noted at the time that Double Jay was “variously described as political, subversive, offensive, p*rnographic, radical, revolutionary and obscene” (7). While these terms were understandable given the station’s commitment to experiment and innovation, the “vital point” about Double Jay was that it “transmitted an electronic reflection of change”: What the station did was to zero in on the kind of questioning of traditional values now inherent in a significant section of the under 30s population. It played their music, talked in their jargon, pandered to their whims, tastes, prejudices and societal conflicts both intrinsic and extrinsic. (48) Conclusion From the outset, Double Jay was locked in an “uneasy symbiosis” with mainstream culture. On the one hand, the station was established by federal government and its infrastructure was provided by state funds. It also drew on elements of mainstream broadcasting in multiple ways. However, at the same time, it was a voice for and active agent of counterculture, representing through its content, form and style those values that were considered to challenge the ‘system,’ in turn creating an outlet for the expression of hitherto un-broadcast “ways of thinking and being” (Leary). As Henry Rosenbloom, press secretary to then Labor Minister Dr Moss Cass wrote, Double Jay had the potential to free its audience “from an automatic acceptance of the artificial rhythms of urban and suburban life. In a very real sense, JJ [was] a deconditioning agent” (Inglis 375-6). While Double Jay drew deeply from mainstream culture, its skilful and playful manipulation of this culture enabled it to both reflect and incite youth-based counterculture in Australia in the 1970s. References Australian Broadcasting Control Board. Development of National Broadcasting and Television Services. ABCB: Sydney, 1976. Batzell, E.D. “Counter-Culture.” Blackwell Dictionary of Twentieth-Century Social Thought. Eds. Williams Outhwaite and Tom Bottomore. Oxford: Blackwell, 1994. 116-119. Bloodworth, John David. “Communication in the Youth Counterculture: Music as Expression.” Central States Speech Journal 26.4 (1975): 304-309. Bowman, David. “Radical Giant of Australian Broadcasting: Allan Ashbolt, Lion of the ABC, 1921-2005.” Sydney Morning Herald 15 June 2005. 15 Sep. 2013 ‹http://www.smh.com.au/news/Obituaries/Radical-giant-of-Australian-broadcasting/2005/06/14/1118645805607.html›. Braunstein, Peter, and Michael William Doyle. Eds. Imagine Nation: The American Counterculture of the 1960s and '70s New York: Taylor and Francis, 2002. Brockman, Holger. Personal interview. 8 December 2013. Cheney, Roz. Personal interview. 10 July 2013. Chipp, Don, and John Larkin. Don Chipp: The Third Man. Adelaide: Rigby, 2008. Cunningham, Frank. Theories of Democracy: A Critical Introduction. London: Routledge, 2002. Davis, Fred. On Youth Subcultures: The Hippie Variant. New York: General Learning Press, 1971. Davis, Glyn. "Government Decision‐Making and the ABC: The 2JJ Case." Politics 19.2 (1984): 34-42. Dawson, Jonathan. "JJJ: Radical Radio?." Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 6.1 (1992): 37-44. Department of the Media. Submission by the Department of the Media to the Independent Inquiry into Frequency Modulation Broadcasting. Sydney: Australian Government Publishers, 1974. Desmond, John, Pierre McDonagh, and Stephanie O'Donohoe. “Counter-Culture and Consumer Society.” Consumption Markets & Culture 4.3 (2000): 241-279. Doherty, Thomas. Teenagers and Teenpics: The Juvenilization of American Movies in the 1950s. Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1988. Elder, Bruce. Sound Experiment. Unpublished manuscript, 1988. Australian National Commission for UNESCO. Extract from Seminar on Entertainment and Society, Report on Research Project. 1976. Frolows, Arnold. Personal interview. 10 July 2013. Frank, Thomas. The Conquest of Cool: Business Culture, Counterculture, and the Rise of Hip Consumerism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997. Gerster, Robin, and Jan Bassett. Seizures of Youth: The Sixties and Australia. Melbourne: Hyland House, 1991. Griffen-Foley, Bridget. Changing Stations: The Story of Australian Commercial Radio, Sydney: UNSW Press, 2009. Harding, Richard. Outside Interference: The Politics of Australian Broadcasting. Melbourne: Sun Books, 1979. Heath, Joseph, and Andrew Potter. Nation of Rebels: Why Counterculture Became Consumer Culture. New York: Harper Collins, 2004. Hope, Cathy, and Adam Dickerson. “The Sydney and Melbourne Film Festivals, and the Liberalisation of Film Censorship in Australia”. Screening the Past 35 (2012). 12 Aug. 2014 ‹http://www.screeningthepast.com/2012/12/the-sydney-and-melbourne-film-festivals-and-the-liberalisation-of-film-censorship-in-australia/›. Hope, Cathy, and Adam Dickerson. “Is Happiness Festival-Shaped Any Longer? The Melbourne and Sydney Film Festivals and the Growth of Australian Film Culture 1973-1977”. Screening the Past 38 (2013). 12 Aug. 2014 ‹http://www.screeningthepast.com/2013/12/‘is-happiness-festival-shaped-any-longer’-the-melbourne-and-sydney-film-festivals-and-the-growth-of-australian-film-culture-1973-1977/›. Horne, Donald. Time of Hope: Australia 1966-72. Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1980. Inglis, Ken. This Is the ABC: The Australian Broadcasting Commission, 1932-1983. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1983. Langley, Greg. A Decade of Dissent: Vietnam and the Conflict on the Australian Homefront. Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1992. Leary, Timothy. “Foreword.” Counterculture through the Ages: From Abraham to Acid House. Eds. Ken Goffman and Dan Joy. New York: Villard, 2007. ix-xiv. Leech, Kenneth. Youthquake: The Growth of a Counter-Culture through Two Decades. London: Sheldon Press, 1973. Martin, J., and C. Siehl. "Organizational Culture and Counterculture: An Uneasy Symbiosis. Organizational Dynamics, 12.2 (1983): 52-64. Martin, Peter. Personal interview. 10 July 2014. Matchett, Stuart. Personal interview. 10 July 2013. McClelland, Douglas. “The Arts and Media.” Towards a New Australia under a Labor Government. Ed. John McLaren. Victoria: Cheshire Publishing, 1972. McClelland, Douglas. Personal interview. 25 August 2010. Milesago. “Double Jay: The First Year”. n.d. 8 Oct. 2012 ‹http://www.milesago.com/radio/2jj.htm›. Milesago. “Part 5: 1971-72 - Sundown and 'Archie & Jughead's”. n.d. Keith Glass – A Life in Music. 12 Oct. 2012 ‹http://www.milesago.com/Features/keithglass5.htm›. Nicklin, Lenore. “Rock (without the Roll) around the Clock.” Sydney Morning Herald 18 Jan. 1975: 9. Robinson, Ted. Personal interview. 11 December 2013. Roszak, Theodore. The Making of a Counter Culture. New York: Anchor, 1969. Semmler, Clement. The ABC - Aunt Sally and Sacred Cow. Carlton: Melbourne University Press, 1981. Senate Standing Committee on Education, Science and the Arts and Jim McClelland. Second Progress Report on the Reference, All Aspects of Television and Broadcasting, Including Australian Content of Television Programmes. Canberra: Australian Senate, 1973. Thompson, Craig J., and Gokcen Coskuner‐Balli. "Countervailing Market Responses to Corporate Co‐optation and the Ideological Recruitment of Consumption Communities." Journal of Consumer Research 34.2 (2007): 135-152. Thoms, Albie. “The Australian Avant-garde.” An Australian Film Reader. Eds. Albert Moran and Tom O’Regan. Sydney: Currency Press, 1985. 279–280. Vercoe, Colin. Personal interview. 11 Feb. 2014. Walker, Keith. Personal interview. 11 July 2013. Webb, Marius. Personal interview. 5 Feb. 2013. Whiteley, Sheila. The Space between the Notes: Rock and the Counter-Culture. London: Routledge, 1992. Wiltshire, Kenneth, and Charles Stokes. Government Regulation and the Electronic Commercial Media. Monograph M43. Melbourne: Committee for Economic Development of Australia, 1976. Winter, Chris. Personal interview. 16 Mar. 2013.

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Abstract:

If I find out that you have bought a $90 red light sabre, Tara, well there's going to be trouble. -- Kevin Brabazon A few Saturdays ago, my 71-year old father tried to convince me of imminent responsibilities. As I am considering the purchase of a house, there are mortgages, bank fees and years of misery to endure. Unfortunately, I am not an effective Big Picture Person. The lure of the light sabre is almost too great. For 30 year old Generation Xers like myself, it is more than a cultural object. It is a textual anchor, and a necessary component to any future history of the present. Revelling in the aura of the Australian release for Star Wars: The Phantom Menace, this paper investigates popular memory, an undertheorised affiliation between popular culture and cultural studies.1 The excitement encircling the Star Wars prequel has been justified in terms of 'hype' or marketing. Such judgements frame the men and women cuing for tickets, talking Yodas and light sabres as fools or duped souls who need to get out more. My analysis explores why Star Wars has generated this enthusiasm, and how cultural studies can mobilise this passionate commitment to consider notions of popularity, preservation and ephemerality. We'll always have Tattooine. Star Wars has been a primary popular cultural social formation for a generation. The stories of Luke Skywalker, Princess Leia, Han Solo, Chewbacca, Darth Vader, Yoda, C-3PO and R2D2 offer an alternative narrative for the late 1970s and 1980s. It was a comfort to have the Royal Shakespearian tones of Alec Guinness confirming that the Force would be with us, through economic rationalism, unemployment, Pauline Hanson and Madonna discovering yoga. The Star Wars Trilogy, encompassing A New Hope, The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi, was released between 1977 and 1983. These films have rarely slipped from public attention, being periodically 'brought back' through new cinematic and video releases. The currency of Star Wars is matched with the other great popular cultural formations of the post-war period: the James Bond series and Star Trek. One reason for the continued success of these programmes is that other writers, film makers and producers cannot leave these texts alone. Bond survives not only through Pierce Brosnan's good looks, but the 'Hey Baby' antics of Austin Powers. Star Trek, through four distinct series, has become an industry that will last longer than Voyager's passage back from the Delta Quadrant. Star Wars, perhaps even more effectively than the other popular cultural heavyweights, has enmeshed itself into other filmic and televisual programming. Films like Spaceballs and television quizzes on Good News Week keep the knowledge system and language current and pertinent.2 Like Umberto Eco realised of Casablanca, Star Wars is "a living example of living textuality" (199). Both films are popular because of imperfections and intertextual archetypes, forming a filmic quilt of sensations and affectivities. Viewers are aware that "the cliches are talking among themselves" (Eco 209). As these cinematic texts move through time, the depth and commitment of these (con)textual dialogues are repeated and reinscribed. To hold on to a memory is to isolate a moment or an image and encircle it with meaning. Each day we experience millions of texts: some are remembered, but most are lost. Some popular cultural texts move from ephemera to popular memory to history. In moving beyond individual reminiscences -- the personal experiences of our lifetime -- we enter the sphere of popular culture. Collective or popular memory is a group or community experience of a textualised reality. For example, during the Second World War, there were many private experiences, but certain moments arch beyond the individual. Songs by Vera Lynn are fully textualised experiences that become the fodder for collective memory. Similarly, Star Wars provides a sense-making mechanism for the 1980s. Like all popular culture, these texts allow myriad readership strategies, but there is collective recognition of relevance and importance. Popular memory is such an important site because it provides us, as cultural critics, with a map of emotionally resonant sites of the past, moments that are linked with specific subjectivities and a commonality of expression. While Star Wars, like all popular cultural formations, has a wide audience, there are specific readings that are pertinent for particular groups. To unify a generation around cultural texts is an act of collective memory. As Harris has suggested, "sometimes, youth does interesting things with its legacy and creatively adapts its problematic into seemingly autonomous cultural forms" (79). Generation X refers to an age cohort born between the mid-1960s and the mid-1970s. Finally cultural studies theorists have found a Grail subculture. Being depthless, ambivalent, sexually repressed and social failures, Xers are a cultural studies dream come true. They were the children of the media revolution. Star Wars is integral to this textualised database. A fan on the night of the first screening corrected a journalist: "we aren't Generation X, we are the Star Wars generation" (Brendon, in Miller 9). An infatuation and reflexivity with the media is the single framework of knowledge in which Xers operate. This shared understanding is the basis for comedy, and particularly revealed (in Australia) in programmes like The Panel and Good News Week. Television themes, lines of film dialogue and contemporary news broadcasts are the basis of the game show. The aesthetics of life transforms television into a real. Or, put another way, "individual lives may be fragmented and confused but McDonald's is universal" (Hopkins 17). A group of textual readers share a literacy, a new way of reading the word and world of texts. Nostalgia is a weapon. The 1990s has been a decade of revivals: from Abba to skateboards, an era of retro reinscription has challenged linear theories of history and popular culture. As Timothy Carter reveals, "we all loved the Star Wars movies when we were younger, and so we naturally look forward to a continuation of those films" (9). The 1980s has often been portrayed as a bad time, of Thatcher and Reagan, cold war brinkmanship, youth unemployment and HIV. For those who were children and (amorphously phrased) 'young adults' of this era, the popular memory is of fluorescent fingerless gloves, Ray Bans, 'Choose Life' t-shirts and bubble skirts. It was an era of styling mousse, big hair, the Wham tan, Kylie and Jason and Rick Astley's dancing. Star Wars action figures gave the films a tangibility, holding the future of the rebellion in our hands (literally). These memories clumsily slop into the cup of the present. The problem with 'youth' is that it is semiotically too rich: the expression is understood, but not explained, by discourses as varied as the educational system, family structures, leisure industries and legal, medical and psychological institutions. It is a term of saturation, where normality is taught, and deviance is monitored. All cultural studies theorists carry the baggage of the Birmingham Centre into any history of youth culture. The taken-for-granted 'youth as resistance' mantra, embodied in Resistance through Rituals and Subculture: The Meaning of Style, transformed young people into the ventriloquist's puppet of cultural studies. The strings of the dancing, smoking, swearing and drinking puppet took many years to cut. The feminist blade of Angela McRobbie did some damage to the fraying filaments, as did Dick Hebdige's reflexive corrections in Hiding in the Light. However, the publications, promotion and pedagogy of Gen X ended the theoretical charade. Gen X, the media sophisticates, played with popular culture, rather than 'proper politics.' In Coupland's Generation X, Claire, one of the main characters believed that "Either our lives become stories, or there's just no way to get through them." ... We know that this is why the three of us left our lives behind us and came to the desert -- to tell stories and to make our own lives worthwhile tales in the process. (8) Television and film are part of this story telling process. This intense connection generated an ironic and reflexive literacy in the media. Television became the basis for personal pleasures and local resistances, resulting in a disciplined mobilisation of popular cultural surfaces. Even better than the real thing. As the youngest of Generation Xers are now in their late twenties, they have moved from McJobs to careers. Robert Kizlik, a teacher trainer at an American community college expressed horror as the lack of 'commonsensical knowledge' from his new students. He conducted a survey for teachers training in the social sciences, assessing their grasp of history. There was one hundred percent recognition of such names as Madonna, Mike Tyson, and Sharon Stone, but they hardly qualify as important social studies content ... . I wondered silently just what it is that these students are going to teach when they become employed ... . The deeper question is not that we have so many high school graduates and third and fourth year college students who are devoid of basic information about American history and culture, but rather, how, in the first place, these students came to have the expectations that they could become teachers. (n. pag.) Kizlik's fear is that the students, regardless of their enthusiasm, had poor recognition of knowledge he deemed significant and worthy. His teaching task, to convince students of the need for non-popular cultural knowledges, has resulted in his course being termed 'boring' or 'hard'. He has been unable to reconcile the convoluted connections between personal stories and televisual narratives. I am reminded (perhaps unhelpfully) of one of the most famous filmic teachers, Mr Holland. Upon being attacked by his superiors for using rock and roll in his classes, he replied that he would use anything to instil in his students a love of music. Working with, rather than against, popular culture is an obvious pedagogical imperative. George Lucas has, for example, confirmed the Oprahfied spirituality of the current age. Obviously Star Wars utilises fables, myths3 and fairy tales to summon the beautiful Princess, the gallant hero and the evil Empire, but has become something more. Star Wars slots cleanly into an era of Body Shop Feminism, John Gray's gender politics and Rikki Lake's relationship management. Brian Johnson and Susan Oh argued that the film is actually a new religion. A long time ago in a galaxy far far away -- late 1970s California -- the known universe of George Lucas came into being. In the beginning, George created Star Wars. And the screen was without form, and void. And George said, 'Let there be light', and there was Industrial Light and Magic. And George divided the light from the darkness, with light sabres, and called the darkness the Evil Empire.... And George saw that it was good. (14) The writers underestimate the profound emotional investment placed in the trilogy by millions of people. Genesis narratives describe the Star Wars phenomenon, but do not analyse it. The reason why the films are important is not only because they are a replacement for religion. Instead, they are an integrated component of popular memory. Johnson and Oh have underestimated the influence of pop culture as "the new religion" (14). It is not a form of cheap grace. The history of ideas is neither linear nor traceable. There is no clear path from Plato to Prozac or Moses to Mogadon. Obi-Wan Kenobi is not a personal trainer for the ailing spirituality of our age. It was Ewan McGregor who fulfilled the Xer dream to be the young Obi Wan. As he has stated, "there is nothing cooler than being a Jedi knight" (qtd. in Grant 15). Having survived feet sawing in Shallow Grave and a painfully large enema in Trainspotting, there are few actors who are better prepared to carry the iconographic burden of a Star Wars prequel. Born in 1971, he is the Molly Ringwall of the 1990s. There is something delicious about the new Obi Wan, that hails what Hicks described as "a sense of awareness and self- awareness, of detached observation, of not taking things seriously, and a use of subtle dry humour" (79). The metaphoric light sabre was passed to McGregor. The pull of the dark side. When fans attend The Phantom Menace, they tend to the past, as to a loved garden. Whether this memory is a monument or a ruin depends on the preservation of the analogue world in the digital realm. The most significant theoretical and discursive task in the present is to disrupt the dual ideologies punctuating the contemporary era: inevitable technological change and progress.4 Only then may theorists ponder the future of a digitised past. Disempowered groups, who were denied a voice and role in the analogue history of the twentieth century, will have inequalities reified and reinforced through the digital archiving of contemporary life. The Web has been pivotal to the new Star Wars film. Lucasfilm has an Internet division and an official Website. Between mid November and May, this site has been accessed twenty million times (Gallott 15). Other sites, such as TheForce.net and Countdown to Star Wars, are a record of the enthusiasm and passion of fans. As Daniel Fallon and Matthew Buchanan have realised, "these sites represent the ultimate in film fandom -- virtual communities where like-minded enthusiasts can bathe in the aura generated by their favourite masterpiece" (27). Screensavers, games, desktop wallpaper, interviews and photo galleries have been downloaded and customised. Some ephemeral responses to The Phantom Menace have been digitally recorded. Yet this moment of audience affectivity will be lost without a consideration of digital memory. The potentials and problems of the digital and analogue environments need to be oriented into critical theories of information, knowledge, entertainment and pleasure. The binary language of computer-mediated communication allows a smooth transference of data. Knowledge and meaning systems are not exchanged as easily. Classifying, organising and preserving information make it useful. Archival procedures have been both late and irregular in their application.5 Bocher and Ihlenfeldt assert that 2500 new web sites are coming on-line every day ("A Higher Signal-to-Noise Ratio"). The difficulties and problems confronting librarians and archivists who wish to preserve digital information is revealed in the Australian government's PADI (Preserving Access to Digital Information) Site. Compared with an object in a museum which may lie undisturbed for years in a storeroom, or a book on a shelf, or even Egyptian hieroglyd on the wall of a tomb, digital information requires much more active maintenance. If we want access to digital information in the future, we must plan and act now. (PADI, "Why Preserve Access to Digital Information?") phics carve The speed of digitisation means that responsibility for preserving cultural texts, and the skills necessary to enact this process, is increasing the pressure facing information professionals. An even greater difficulty when preserving digital information is what to keep, and what to release to the ephemeral winds of cyberspace. 'Qualitative criteria' construct an historical record that restates the ideologies of the powerful. Concerns with quality undermine the voices of the disempowered, displaced and decentred. The media's instability through technological obsolescence adds a time imperative that is absent from other archival discussions.6 While these problems have always taken place in the analogue world, there was a myriad of alternative sites where ephemeral material was stored, such as the family home. Popular cultural information will suffer most from the 'blind spots' of digital archivists. While libraries rarely preserve the ephemera of a time, many homes (including mine) preserve the 'trash' of a culture. A red light sabre, toy dalek, Duran Duran posters and a talking Undertaker are all traces of past obsessions and fandoms. Passion evaporates, and interests morph into new trends. These objects remain in attics, under beds, in boxes and sheds throughout the world. Digital documents necessitate a larger project of preservation, with great financial (and spatial) commitments of technology, software and maintenance. Libraries rarely preserve the ephemera -- the texture and light -- of the analogue world. The digital era reduces the number of fan-based archivists. Subsequently forfeited is the spectrum of interests and ideologies that construct the popular memory of a culture. Once bits replace atoms, the recorded world becomes structured by digital codes. Only particular texts will be significant enough to store digitally. Samuel Florman stated that "in the digital age nothing need be lost; do we face the prospect of drowning in trivia as the generations succeed each other?" (n. pag.) The trivia of academics may be the fodder (and pleasures) of everyday life. Digitised preservation, like analogue preservation, can never 'represent' plural paths through the past. There is always a limit and boundary to what is acceptable obsolescence. The Star Wars films suggests that "the whole palette of digital technology is much more subtle and supple; if you can dream it, you can see it" (Corliss 65). This film will also record how many of the dreams survive and are archived. Films, throughout the century, have changed the way in which we construct and remember the past. They convey an expressive memory, rather than an accurate history. Certainly, Star Wars is only a movie. Yet, as Rushkoff has suggested, "we have developed a new language of references and self-references that identify media as a real thing and media history as an actual social history" (32). The build up in Australia to The Phantom Menace has been wilfully joyful. This is a history of the present, a time which I know will, in retrospect, be remembered with great fondness. It is a collective event for a generation, but it speaks to us all in different ways. At ten, it is easy to be amazed and enthralled at popular culture. By thirty, it is more difficult. When we see Star Wars, we go back to visit our memories. With red light sabre in hand, we splice through time, as much as space. Footnotes The United States release of the film occurred on 19 May 1999. In Australia, the film's first screenings were on 3 June. Many cinemas showed The Phantom Menace at 12:01 am, (very) early Thursday morning. The three main players of the GNW team, Paul McDermott, Mikey Robbins and Julie McCrossin, were featured on the cover of Australia's Juice magazine in costumes from The Phantom Menace, being Obi-Wan, Yoda and Queen Amidala respectively. Actually, the National Air and Space Museum had a Star Wars exhibition in 1997, titled "Star Wars: The Magic of Myth". For example, Janet Collins, Michael Hammond and Jerry Wellington, in Teaching and Learning with the Media, stated that "the message is simple: we now have the technology to inform, entertain and educate. Miss it and you, your family and your school will be left behind" (3). Herb Brody described the Net as "an overstuffed, underorganised attic full of pictures and documents that vary wildly in value", in "Wired Science". The interesting question is, whose values will predominate when the attic is being cleared and sorted? This problem is extended because the statutory provision of legal deposit, which obliges publishers to place copies of publications in the national library of the country in which the item is published, does not include CD-ROMs or software. References Bocher, Bob, and Kay Ihlenfeldt. "A Higher Signal-to-Noise Ratio: Effective Use of WebSearch Engines." State of Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction Website. 13 Mar. 1998. 15 June 1999 <http://www.dpi.state.wi.us/dpi/dlcl/lbstat/search2.php>. Brody, Herb. "Wired Science." Technology Review Oct. 1996. 15 June 1999 <http://www.techreview.com/articles/oct96/brody.php>. Carter, Timothy. "Wars Weary." Cinescape 39 (Mar./Apr. 1999): 9. Collins, Janet, Michael Hammond, and Jerry Wellington. Teaching and Learning with Multimedia. London: Routledge, 1997. Corliss, Richard. "Ready, Set, Glow!" Time 18 (3 May 1999): 65. Count Down to Star Wars. 1999. 15 June 1999 <http://starwars.countingdown.com/>. Coupland, Douglas. Generation X. London: Abacus, 1991. Eco, Umberto. Travels in Hyper-Reality. London: Picador, 1987. Fallon, Daniel, and Matthew Buchanan. "Now Screening." Australian Net Guide 4.5 (June 1999): 27. Florman, Samuel. "From Here to Eternity." MIT's Technology Review 100.3 (Apr. 1997). Gallott, Kirsten. "May the Web Be with you." Who Weekly 24 May 1999: 15. Grant, Fiona. "Ewan's Star Soars!" TV Week 29 May - 4 June 1999: 15. Hall, Stuart, and Tony Jefferson, eds. Resistance through Rituals. London: Hutchinson, 1976. Harris, David. From Class Struggle to the Politics of Pleasure: the Effects of Gramscianism on Cultural Studies. London: Routledge, 1992. Hebdige, Dick. Hiding in the Light. London: Routledge, 1988. Hopkins, Susan. "Generation Pulp." Youth Studies Australia Spring 1995. Johnson, Brian, and Susan Oh. "The Second Coming: as the Newest Star Wars Film Illustrates, Pop Culture Has Become a New Religion." Maclean's 24 May 1999: 14-8. Juice 78 (June 1999). Kizlik, Robert. "Generation X Wants to Teach." International Journal of Instructional Media 26.2 (Spring 1999). Lucasfilm Ltd. Star Wars: Welcome to the Official Site. 1999. 15 June 1999 <http://www.starwars.com/>. Miller, Nick. "Generation X-Wing Fighter." The West Australian 4 June 1999: 9. PADI. "What Digital Information Should be Preserved? Appraisal and Selection." Preserving Access to Digital Information (PADI) Website. 11 March 1999. 15 June 1999 <http://www.nla.gov.au/padi/what.php>. PADI. "Why Preserve Access to Digital Information?" Preserving Access to Digital Information (PADI) Website. <http://www.nla.gov.au/padi/why.php>. Rushkoff, Douglas. Media Virus. Sydney: Random House, 1994. Citation reference for this article MLA style: Tara Brabazon. "A Red Light Sabre to Go, and Other Histories of the Present." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2.4 (1999). [your date of access] <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9906/sabre.php>. Chicago style: Tara Brabazon, "A Red Light Sabre to Go, and Other Histories of the Present," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2, no. 4 (1999), <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9906/sabre.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: Tara Brabazon. (1999) A red light sabre to go, and other histories of the present. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2(4). <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9906/sabre.php> ([your date of access]).

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In the last months of his life, 86-year-old Albert Facey became a best-selling author and revered cultural figure following the publication of his autobiography, A Fortunate Life. Released on Anzac Day 1981, it was praised for its “plain, unembellished, utterly sincere and un-self-pitying account of the privations of childhood and youth” (Semmler) and “extremely powerful description of Gallipoli” (Dutton 16). Within weeks, critic Nancy Keesing declared it an “Enduring Classic.” Within six months, it was announced as the winner of two prestigious non-fiction awards, with judges acknowledging Facey’s “extraordinary memory” and “ability to describe scenes and characters with great precision” (“NBC” 4). A Fortunate Life also transformed the fortunes of its publisher. Founded in 1976 as an independent, not-for-profit publishing house, Fremantle Arts Centre Press (FACP) might have been expected, given the Australian average, to survive for just a few years. Former managing editor Ray Coffey attributes the Press’s ongoing viability, in no small measure, to Facey’s success (King 29). Along with Wendy Jenkins, Coffey edited Facey’s manuscript through to publication; only five months after its release, with demand outstripping the capabilities, FACP licensed Penguin to take over the book’s production and distribution. Adaptations soon followed. In 1984, Kerry Packer’s PBL launched a prospectus for a mini-series, which raised a record $6.3 million (PBL 7–8). Aired in 1986 with a high-rating documentary called The Facey Phenomenon, the series became the most watched television event of the year (Lucas). Syndication of chapters to national and regional newspapers, stage and radio productions, audio- and e-books, abridged editions for young readers, and inclusion on secondary school curricula extended the range and influence of Facey’s life writing. Recently, an option was taken out for a new television series (Fraser).A hundred reprints and two million readers on from initial publication, A Fortunate Life continues to rate among the most appreciated Australian books of all time. Commenting on a reader survey in 2012, writer and critic Marieke Hardy enthused, “I really loved it [. . .] I felt like I was seeing a part of my country and my country’s history through a very human voice . . .” (First Tuesday Book Club). Registering a transformed reading, Hardy’s reference to Australian “history” is unproblematically juxtaposed with amused delight in an autobiography that invents and embellishes: not believing “half” of what Facey wrote, she insists he was foremost a yarn spinner. While the work’s status as a witness account has become less authoritative over time, it seems appreciation of the author’s imagination and literary skill has increased (Williamson). A Fortunate Life has been read more commonly as an uncomplicated, first-hand account, such that editor Wendy Jenkins felt it necessary to refute as an “utter mirage” that memoir is “transferred to the page by an act of perfect dictation.” Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson argue of life narratives that some “autobiographical claims [. . .] can be verified or discounted by recourse to documentation outside the text. But autobiographical truth is a different matter” (16). With increased access to archives, especially digitised personnel records, historians have asserted that key elements of Facey’s autobiography are incorrect or “fabricated” (Roberts), including his enlistment in 1914 and participation in the Gallipoli Landing on 25 April 1915. We have researched various sources relevant to Facey’s early years and war service, including hard-copy medical and repatriation records released in 2012, and find A Fortunate Life in a range of ways deviates from “documentation outside of the text,” revealing intriguing, layered storytelling. We agree with Smith and Watson that “autobiographical acts” are “anything but simple or transparent” (63). As “symbolic interactions in the world,” they are “culturally and historically specific” and “engaged in an argument about identity” (63). Inevitably, they are also “fractured by the play of meaning” (63). Our approach, therefore, includes textual analysis of Facey’s drafts alongside the published narrative and his medical records. We do not privilege institutional records as impartial but rather interpret them in terms of their hierarchies and organisation of knowledge. This leads us to speculate on alternative readings of A Fortunate Life as an illness narrative that variously resists and subscribes to dominant cultural plots, tropes, and attitudes. Facey set about writing in earnest in the 1970s and generated (at least) three handwritten drafts, along with a typescript based on the third draft. FACP produced its own working copy from the typescript. Our comparison of the drafts offers insights into the production of Facey’s final text and the otherwise “hidden” roles of editors as transformers and enablers (Munro 1). The notion that a working man with basic literacy could produce a highly readable book in part explains Facey’s enduring appeal. His grandson and literary executor, John Rose, observed in early interviews that Facey was a “natural storyteller” who had related details of his life at every opportunity over a period of more than six decades (McLeod). Jenkins points out that Facey belonged to a vivid oral culture within which he “told and retold stories to himself and others,” so that they eventually “rubbed down into the lines and shapes that would so memorably underpin the extended memoir that became A Fortunate Life.” A mystique was thereby established that “time” was Albert Facey’s “first editor” (Jenkins). The publisher expressly aimed to retain Facey’s voice, content, and meaning, though editing included much correcting of grammar and punctuation, eradication of internal inconsistencies and anomalies, and structural reorganisation into six sections and 68 chapters. We find across Facey’s drafts a broadly similar chronology detailing childhood abandonment, life-threatening incidents, youthful resourcefulness, physical prowess, and participation in the Gallipoli Landing. However, there are also shifts and changed details, including varying descriptions of childhood abuse at a place called Cave Rock; the introduction of (incompatible accounts of) interstate boxing tours in drafts two and three which replace shearing activities in Draft One; divergent tales of Facey as a world-standard athlete, league footballer, expert marksman, and powerful swimmer; and changing stories of enlistment and war service (see Murphy and Nile, “Wounded”; “Naked”).Jenkins edited those sections concerned with childhood and youth, while Coffey attended to Facey’s war and post-war life. Drawing on C.E.W. Bean’s official war history, Coffey introduced specificity to the draft’s otherwise vague descriptions of battle and amended errors, such as Facey’s claim to have witnessed Lord Kitchener on the beach at Gallipoli. Importantly, Coffey suggested the now famous title, “A Fortunate Life,” and encouraged the author to alter the ending. When asked to suggest a title, Facey offered “Cave Rock” (Interview)—the site of his violent abuse and humiliation as a boy. Draft One concluded with Facey’s repatriation from the war and marriage in 1916 (106); Draft Two with a brief account of continuing post-war illness and ultimate defeat: “My war injuries caught up with me again” (107). The submitted typescript concludes: “I have often thought that going to War has caused my life to be wasted” (Typescript 206). This ending differs dramatically from the redemptive vision of the published narrative: “I have lived a very good life, it has been very rich and full. I have been very fortunate and I am thrilled by it when I look back” (412).In The Wounded Storyteller, Arthur Frank argues that literary markets exist for stories of “narrative wreckage” (196) that are redeemed by reconciliation, resistance, recovery, or rehabilitation, which is precisely the shape of Facey’s published life story and a source of its popularity. Musing on his post-war experiences in A Fortunate Life, Facey focuses on his ability to transform the material world around him: “I liked the challenge of building up a place from nothing and making a success where another fellow had failed” (409). If Facey’s challenge was building up something from nothing, something he could set to work on and improve, his life-writing might reasonably be regarded as a part of this broader project and desire for transformation, so that editorial interventions helped him realise this purpose. Facey’s narrative was produced within a specific zeitgeist, which historian Joy Damousi notes was signalled by publication in 1974 of Bill Gammage’s influential, multiply-reprinted study of front-line soldiers, The Broken Years, which drew on the letters and diaries of a thousand Great War veterans, and also the release in 1981 of Peter Weir’s film Gallipoli, for which Gammage was the historical advisor. The story of Australia’s war now conceptualised fallen soldiers as “innocent victims” (Damousi 101), while survivors were left to “compose” memories consistent with their sacrifice (Thomson 237–54). Viewing Facey’s drafts reminds us that life narratives are works of imagination, that the past is not fixed and memory is created in the present. Facey’s autobiographical efforts and those of his publisher to improve the work’s intelligibility and relevance together constitute an attempt to “objectify the self—to present it as a knowable object—through a narrative that re-structures [. . .] the self as history and conclusions” (Foster 10). Yet, such histories almost invariably leave “a crucial gap” or “censored chapter.” Dennis Foster argues that conceiving of narration as confession, rather than expression, “allows us to see the pathos of the simultaneous pursuit and evasion of meaning” (10); we believe a significant lacuna in Facey’s life writing is intimated by its various transformations.In a defining episode, A Fortunate Life proposes that Facey was taken from Gallipoli on 19 August 1915 due to wounding that day from a shell blast that caused sandbags to fall on him, crush his leg, and hurt him “badly inside,” and a bullet to the shoulder (348). The typescript, however, includes an additional but narratively irreconcilable date of 28 June for the same wounding. The later date, 19 August, was settled on for publication despite the author’s compelling claim for the earlier one: “I had been blown up by a shell and some 7 or 8 sandbags had fallen on top of me, the day was the 28th of June 1915, how I remembered this date, it was the day my brother Roy had been killed by a shell burst.” He adds: “I was very ill for about six weeks after the incident but never reported it to our Battalion doctor because I was afraid he would send me away” (Typescript 205). This account accords with Facey’s first draft and his medical records but is inconsistent with other parts of the typescript that depict an uninjured Facey taking a leading role in fierce fighting throughout July and August. It appears, furthermore, that Facey was not badly wounded at any time. His war service record indicates that he was removed from Gallipoli due to “heart troubles” (Repatriation), which he also claims in his first draft. Facey’s editors did not have ready access to military files in Canberra, while medical files were not released until 2012. There existed, therefore, virtually no opportunity to corroborate the author’s version of events, while the official war history and the records of the State Library of Western Australia, which were consulted, contain no reference to Facey or his war service (Interview). As a consequence, the editors were almost entirely dependent on narrative logic and clarifications by an author whose eyesight and memory had deteriorated to such an extent he was unable to read his amended text. A Fortunate Life depicts men with “nerve sickness” who were not permitted to “stay at the Front because they would be upsetting to the others, especially those who were inclined that way themselves” (350). By cross referencing the draft manuscripts against medical records, we can now perceive that Facey was regarded as one of those nerve cases. According to Facey’s published account, his wounds “baffled” doctors in Egypt and Fremantle (353). His medical records reveal that in September 1915, while hospitalised in Egypt, his “palpitations” were diagnosed as “Tachycardia” triggered by war-induced neuroses that began on 28 June. This suggests that Facey endured seven weeks in the field in this condition, with the implication being that his debility worsened, resulting in his hospitalisation. A diagnosis of “debility,” “nerves,” and “strain” placed Facey in a medical category of “Special Invalids” (Butler 541). Major A.W. Campbell noted in the Medical Journal of Australia in 1916 that the war was creating “many cases of little understood nervous and mental affections, not only where a definite wound has been received, but in many cases where nothing of the sort appears” (323). Enlisted doctors were either physicians or surgeons and sometimes both. None had any experience of trauma on the scale of the First World War. In 1915, Campbell was one of only two Australian doctors with any pre-war experience of “mental diseases” (Lindstrom 30). On staff at the Australian Base Hospital at Heliopolis throughout the Gallipoli campaign, he claimed that at times nerve cases “almost monopolised” the wards under his charge (319). Bearing out Facey’s description, Campbell also reported that affected men “received no sympathy” and, as “carriers of psychic contagion,” were treated as a “source of danger” to themselves and others (323). Credentialed by royal colleges in London and coming under British command, Australian medical teams followed the practice of classifying men presenting “nervous or mental symptoms” as “battle casualties” only if they had also been wounded by “enemy action” (Loughran 106). By contrast, functional disability, with no accompanying physical wounds, was treated as unmanly and a “hysterical” reaction to the pressures of war. Mental debility was something to be feared in the trenches and diagnosis almost invariably invoked charges of predisposition or malingering (Tyquin 148–49). This shifted responsibility (and blame) from the war to the individual. Even as late as the 1950s, medical notes referred to Facey’s condition as being “constitutional” (Repatriation).Facey’s narrative demonstrates awareness of how harshly sufferers were treated. We believe that he defended himself against this with stories of physical injury that his doctors never fully accepted and that he may have experienced conversion disorder, where irreconcilable experience finds somatic expression. His medical diagnosis in 1915 and later life writing establish a causal link with the explosion and his partial burial on 28 June, consistent with opinion at the time that linked concussive blasts with destabilisation of the nervous system (Eager 422). Facey was also badly shaken by exposure to the violence and abjection of war, including hand-to-hand combat and retrieving for burial shattered and often decomposed bodies, and, in particular, by the death of his brother Roy, whose body was blown to pieces on 28 June. (A second brother, Joseph, was killed by multiple bayonet wounds while Facey was convalescing in Egypt.) Such experiences cast a different light on Facey’s observation of men suffering nerves on board the hospital ship: “I have seen men doze off into a light sleep and suddenly jump up shouting, ‘Here they come! Quick! Thousands of them. We’re doomed!’” (350). Facey had escaped the danger of death by explosion or bayonet but at a cost, and the war haunted him for the rest of his days. On disembarkation at Fremantle on 20 November 1915, he was admitted to hospital where he remained on and off for several months. Forty-one other sick and wounded disembarked with him (HMAT). Around one third, experiencing nerve-related illness, had been sent home for rest; while none returned to the war, some of the physically wounded did (War Service Records). During this time, Facey continued to present with “frequent attacks of palpitation and giddiness,” was often “short winded,” and had “heart trouble” (Repatriation). He was discharged from the army in June 1916 but, his drafts suggest, his war never really ended. He began a new life as a wounded Anzac. His dependent and often fractious relationship with the Repatriation Department ended only with his death 66 years later. Historian Marina Larsson persuasively argues that repatriated sick and wounded servicemen from the First World War represented a displaced presence at home. Many led liminal lives of “disenfranchised grief” (80). Stephen Garton observes a distinctive Australian use of repatriation to describe “all policies involved in returning, discharging, pensioning, assisting and training returned men and women, and continuing to assist them throughout their lives” (74). Its primary definition invokes coming home but to repatriate also implies banishment from a place that is not home, so that Facey was in this sense expelled from Gallipoli and, by extension, excluded from the myth of Anzac. Unlike his two brothers, he would not join history as one of the glorious dead; his name would appear on no roll of honour. Return home is not equivalent to restoration of his prior state and identity, for baggage from the other place perpetually weighs. Furthermore, failure to regain health and independence strains hospitality and gratitude for the soldier’s service to King and country. This might be exacerbated where there is no evident or visible injury, creating suspicion of resistance, cowardice, or malingering. Over 26 assessments between 1916 and 1958, when Facey was granted a full war pension, the Repatriation Department observed him as a “neuropathic personality” exhibiting “paroxysmal tachycardia” and “neurocirculatory asthenia.” In 1954, doctors wrote, “We consider the condition is a real handicap and hindrance to his getting employment.” They noted that after “attacks,” Facey had a “busted depressed feeling,” but continued to find “no underlying myocardial disease” (Repatriation) and no validity in Facey’s claims that he had been seriously physically wounded in the war (though A Fortunate Life suggests a happier outcome, where an independent medical panel finally locates the cause of his ongoing illness—rupture of his spleen in the war—which results in an increased war pension). Facey’s condition was, at times, a source of frustration for the doctors and, we suspect, disappointment and shame to him, though this appeared to reduce on both sides when the Repatriation Department began easing proof of disability from the 1950s (Thomson 287), and the Department of Veteran’s Affairs was created in 1976. This had the effect of shifting public and media scrutiny back onto a system that had until then deprived some “innocent victims of the compensation that was their due” (Garton 249). Such changes anticipated the introduction of Post-Traumatic Shock Disorder (PTSD) to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) in 1980. Revisions to the DSM established a “genealogy of trauma” and “panic disorders” (100, 33), so that diagnoses such as “neuropathic personality” (Echterling, Field, and Stewart 192) and “soldier’s heart,” that is, disorders considered “neurotic,” were “retrospectively reinterpreted” as a form of PTSD. However, Alberti points out that, despite such developments, war-related trauma continues to be contested (80). We propose that Albert Facey spent his adult life troubled by a sense of regret and failure because of his removal from Gallipoli and that he attempted to compensate through storytelling, which included his being an original Anzac and seriously wounded in action. By writing, Facey could shore up his rectitude, work ethic, and sense of loyalty to other servicemen, which became necessary, we believe, because repatriation doctors (and probably others) had doubted him. In 1927 and again in 1933, an examining doctor concluded: “The existence of a disability depends entirely on his own unsupported statements” (Repatriation). We argue that Facey’s Gallipoli experiences transformed his life. By his own account, he enlisted for war as a physically robust and supremely athletic young man and returned nine months later to life-long anxiety and ill-health. Publication transformed him into a national sage, earning him, in his final months, the credibility, empathy, and affirmation he had long sought. Exploring different accounts of Facey, in the shape of his drafts and institutional records, gives rise to new interpretations. In this context, we believe it is time for a new edition of A Fortunate Life that recognises it as a complex testimonial narrative and theorises Facey’s deployment of national legends and motifs in relation to his “wounded storytelling” as well as to shifting cultural and medical conceptualisations and treatments of shame and trauma. ReferencesAlberti, Fay Bound. Matters of the Heart: History, Medicine, and Emotions. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2010. Butler, A.G. Official History of the Australian Medical Services 1814-1918: Vol I Gallipoli, Palestine and New Guinea. Canberra: Australian War Memorial, 1930.Campbell, A.W. “Remarks on Some Neuroses and Psychoses in War.” Medical Journal of Australia 15 April (1916): 319–23.Damousi, Joy. “Why Do We Get So Emotional about Anzac.” What’s Wrong with Anzac. Ed. Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds. Sydney: UNSWP, 2015. 94–109.Dutton, Geoffrey. “Fremantle Arts Centre Press Publicity.” Australian Book Review May (1981): 16.Eager, R. “War Neuroses Occurring in Cases with a Definitive History of Shell Shock.” British Medical Journal 13 Apr. 1918): 422–25.Echterling, L.G., Thomas A. Field, and Anne L. Stewart. “Evolution of PTSD in the DSM.” Future Directions in Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder: Prevention, Diagnosis, and Treatment. Ed. Marilyn P. Safir and Helene S. Wallach. New York: Springer, 2015. 189–212.Facey, A.B. A Fortunate Life. 1981. Ringwood: Penguin, 2005.———. Drafts 1–3. University of Western Australia, Special Collections.———. Transcript. University of Western Australia, Special Collections.First Tuesday Book Club. ABC Splash. 4 Dec. 2012. <http://splash.abc.net.au/home#!/media/1454096/http&>.Foster, Dennis. Confession and Complicity in Narrative. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1987.Frank, Arthur. The Wounded Storyteller. London: U of Chicago P, 1995.Fraser, Jane. “CEO Says.” Fremantle Press. 7 July 2015. <https://www.fremantlepress.com.au/c/news/3747-ceo-says-9>.Garton, Stephen. The Cost of War: Australians Return. Melbourne: Oxford UP, 1994.HMAT Aeneas. “Report of Passengers for the Port of Fremantle from Ports Beyond the Commonwealth.” 20 Nov. 1915. <http://recordsearch.naa.gov.au/SearchNRetrieve/Interface/ViewImage.aspx?B=9870708&S=1>.“Interview with Ray Coffey.” Personal interview. 6 May 2016. 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Victoria University, Feb. 1997.Loughran, Tracey. “Shell Shock, Trauma, and the First World War: The Making of a Diagnosis and its Histories.” Journal of the History of Medical and Allied Sciences 67.1 (2012): 99–119.Lucas, Anne. “Curator’s Notes.” A Fortunate Life. Australian Screen. <http://aso.gov.au/titles/tv/a-fortunate-life/notes/>.McLeod, Steve. “My Fortunate Life with Grandad.” Western Magazine Dec. (1983): 8.Munro, Craig. Under Cover: Adventures in the Art of Editing. Brunswick: Scribe, 2015.Murphy, Ffion, and Richard Nile. “The Naked Anzac: Exposure and Concealment in A.B. Facey’s A Fortunate Life.” Southerly 75.3 (2015): 219–37.———. “Wounded Storyteller: Revisiting Albert Facey’s Fortunate Life.” Westerly 60.2 (2015): 87–100.“NBC Book Awards.” Australian Book Review Oct. (1981): 1–4.PBL. Prospectus: A Fortunate Life, the Extraordinary Life of an Ordinary Bloke. 1–8.Repatriation Records. Albert Facey. National Archives of Australia.Roberts, Chris. “Turkish Machine Guns at the Landing.” Wartime: Official Magazine of the Australian War Memorial 50 (2010). <https://www.awm.gov.au/wartime/50/roberts_machinegun/>.Semmler, Clement. “The Way We Were before the Good Life.” Courier Mail 10 Oct. 1981. FACP Press Clippings. Fremantle. n. pag.Smith, Sidonie, and Julia Watson. Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives. 2001. 2nd ed. U of Minnesota P, 2010.Thomson, Alistair. Anzac Memories: Living with the Legend. 1994. 2nd ed. Melbourne: Monash UP, 2013. Tyquin, Michael. Gallipoli, the Medical War: The Australian Army Services in the Dardanelles Campaign of 1915. Kensington: UNSWP, 1993.War Service Records. National Archives of Australia. <http://recordsearch.naa.gov.au/NameSearch/Interface/NameSearchForm.aspx>.Williamson, Geordie. “A Fortunate Life.” Copyright Agency. <http://readingaustralia.com.au/essays/a-fortunate-life/>.