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Intertidal V - FINAL PDF
Intertidal V - FINAL PDF
Intertidal V - FINAL PDF
inter/tidal. v.
edited by Krisha Dhaliwal, Mairen Doyle, and Jeff Fedoruk
Inter/tidal Ink.
a division of the Humanities Student Union of Simon Fraser University (nearly impossible without sfss grant funding)
2012 All rights revert to the authors on publication. All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without prior consent of the publisher is an infringement of the copyright law. Main entry under title: inter/tidal. v. ISBN 978-0-9809545-4-8 Editors: Krisha Dhaliwal, Mairen Doyle, and Jeff Fedoruk Cover image: Christina Dasom Song inter/tidal. website: http://www.intertidalsfu.com/ Financial Assistance: The Humanities Student Union of Simon Fraser University gratefully acknowledges the financial assistance of the Department of Humanities, and SFSS grant funding. Special thanks to the Department of Humanities of Simon Fraser University, Nancy Mah of the SFSS Copy Centre, Maheshwar Dhaliwal, and Carolyn Richard. Printed and bound in Canada by SFSS Copy Centre, Burnaby. Inter/tidal Ink. Publishers c/o The Humanities Student Union Simon Fraser University 8888 University Drive Burnaby, British Columbia Canada V5A 1S6
Content
Riel Jeff Fedoruk from Collecting Tegan Cheremkora Studies for Cream Peter MacDonald Two Senses of Space in Faciality Mairen Doyle from Easy / True Johnny Hamilton Monarch Delia Byrnes OK carrel Carolyn Richard For the Giving Zaqir Virani Not Revived; Only Returned: Guilt, History, Forgetting in Under the Volcano Stefan Krecsy Leisure Emily Fedoruk from Playgrounds Christina Dasom Song from Legitimate Nightmares David Nykyforuk
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Content
Monument and Memory: The Holocaust as an Icon of American Identity Stevie Wilson Some Objects of the Affluent Society Sara Saljoughi from installations Aureliano Segundo Conversation with the Loebner Prize Winner Solveig Mardon Keyword Search Krisha Dhaliwal from Zion Severn Bowen
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J. Fedoruk / Riel
VICTORIAN STRANGER Indeed! I trust that you gentlemen are in good health this morning. SOCRATES ARISTOPHANES Slightly nauseous, but pleasantly intoxicated, from the Athenian air, so yes! Simply moppy. VICTORIAN STRANGER I take you to be Mr. Aristophanes, and you to be Mr. Isocrates. ISOCRATES Well deduced. And who might you be? What business do you have with us? VICTORIAN STRANGER I will have plenty of time to explain, but for the moment I must simply request that you gentleman accompany Socrates and me to my time machine; I would like to show you a glimpse of the future that might change how you approach the present, and help everyone avoid this terrible mess in the future altogether. ISOCRATES Socrates, where did you meet this foreigner? SOCRATES VICTORIAN STRANGER This is not Mr. Socratess doing. I have brought you three together because of your broad cultural influence ISOCRATES Who is broad? VICTORIAN STRANGER and critical capacities. I hope that you will comply.
J. Fedoruk / Riel
ARISTOPHANES Well follow you, but only because youre such an attractive man. Come along, Isocrates! Ive always wanted to see some unknown part of Athens. VICTORIAN STRANGER But this is not Athens ARISTOPHANES As long as its not the belly of some untamed beast, or its Spartan or Persian equivalent, Ill follow. Lead on, my beauty! VICTORIAN STRANGER Here we are, at the blood-red door of the Canadian Senate and House of Commons. Beyond it lies the crimson chamber that houses Parliament. ARISTOPHANES Can we go inside? VICTORIAN STRANGER No. Not while they are casting votes. ARISTOPHANES I knew it! Another mystery. VICTORIAN STRANGER Not quite. But look! This is whom I wanted you to meet. You must be Mr. Riel? RIEL I am him. ISOCRATES Why are you standing outside the chamber? Are you a non-initiate? RIEL I once held a seat, but Ive been living in exile, only recently returning. Im not even sure if Macdonald knows that Im back. ISOCRATES Macdonald, is he the oracle?
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J. Fedoruk / Riel
RIEL Hes the Prime Minister. ARISTOPHANES Tyrant? RIEL Indeed. VICTORIAN STRANGER Do you have any knowledge of the debate in there? How long have they been sitting? RIEL I believe that theyre discussing what to do about the demands of my people for land scrip, tariff reductions and parliamentary representation. Im also hoping for amnesty. And money. They offered me money to stay in exile, none of which Ive ever seen. ISOCRATES Why are they granting you amnesty all of a sudden? Where is this money coming from? RIEL Backroom deals and double-crossing. ARISTOPHANES Where in Athens are we? Or is this a colony? VICTORIAN STRANGER Canada is a British colony. And Riel is from a Canadian colony, the Red River Settlement. RIEL Now they call it Winnipeg. ARISTOPHANES They might as well call it Thurii. VICTORIAN STRANGER How long have they been in there? Perhaps we could steal into the gallery.
J. Fedoruk / Riel
RIEL They started this morning, and I wouldnt be surprised if they dont finish until well after midnight. And you cant enter or leave the galleries during the voting process. Thats why Im outside. I dont have the patience for Parliament. ISOCRATES Why does the legal process take so long? RIEL Because our politicians share a tendency towards long, symphonic speeches. ISOCRATES Climactic oratory? Interesting! Who teaches them? RIEL Would you believe that our Prime Minister never attended university and then proceeded to become a lawyer? Hes learned more from the bottle than from any school. ARISTOPHANES A man after Dionysuss own heart! Too bad Aeschylus isnt here to meet him. VICTORIAN STRANGER The door is opening. Parliament must be adjourned for the evening. There is Mr. Macdonald! RIEL Macdonald! What of my peoples claims? What of my money? MACDONALD Look at these interestingly robed fellows! Are you half-breed friends of Riel's? Or part of Dumonts entourage? ISOCRATES We are citizens of Athens. MACDONALD What the hell are you saying? What kind of bastard language are you speaking?
J. Fedoruk / Riel
VICTORIAN STRANGER Mr. Macdonald, this is Isocrates, and this is Socrates MACDONALD Socrates and Isocrates, you must be brothers! ISOCRATES We are not related! ARISTOPHANES We are all related. Athens is a giant orgy. MACDONALD Well! Let me tell you my devious plan to deal with Riel and the other half-breeds RIEL Im right here! MACDONALD first Ill delay any response to their demands, and then Ill refuse Riel money, which should be enough to keep him around long enough to incite another rebellion. Then when he acts, POW! Well send Mounties over on the railway, and show how effective our police and our trains are! Then well be sure to get the money we need to finish the CPR! CHOO-CHOO! And then I can knock off Riel for high treason. RIEL Im right here! ARISTOPHANES High treason, eh? MACDONALD Not even God can help him then. RIEL But Im Gods envoy! Im the Messiah of the Mtis! Im the only one who can lead them. ARISTOPHANES He acts as a god? This is goodreally good.
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J. Fedoruk / Riel
ISOCRATES You cheat the system, and this is how you plan to build a nation? ARISTOPHANES How many Peloponnesian wars will it take before you realize that this is democracy, Isocrates? You were rightthe court is just as engaging as the theatre! SOCRATES
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In Birth of the Clinic, Foucault draws attention to the necessity of a shared vernacular in the act of observation. Disease arises as a function of symbol and reference of sign. A symptom is a signifier, and thus shares the quality of representation with the face.
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This thought is precisely what is achieved by the comment made not long ago by Bernard Devauchalle, the chief of maxillofacial surgery at Centre Hospitalier Universitaire dAmiens, Everyone is looking for truth in the face. For a surgeon, it is skin, tissue, muscle, blood (Khatchadourian 77). A reduction of the plurality of the face is the creation of an abstraction because it posits the reflection of truth in singularity.
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Faciality embodies the conjunction of organization and rule in the microphysical, the abstract machine (of faciality) has you inscribed in its overall grid (177). Government in the body is the understanding of physical anatomy as a system of representation.
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An electrician whose face was burned off in 2008, Dallas Wiens is a notable exemplar of the American medical tradition of face transplantation. The following comments are made by Dallas Wiens grandmother with regards to her grandsons new face, I asked if I could touch it, and he said, Its me, its a part of me.Dallas is more sombre today (Khatchadourian 85).
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In 2007, Isabelle Dinoire, the first ever recipient of a partial face transplant, was invited to a dinner with French and American surgical teams as a demonstration of the success of her operation. Bohdan Pomahac, the lead surgeon in the Wiens transplantation, says of Dinoire, She has no problems communicating. She was talking, smiling, drinking from a glasswhen she arrived at the restaurant nobody even noticed her. His comments identify Isabelle as an object fully restored (Khatchadourian 77).
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Works Cited
Foucault, Michel. The Birth of the Clinic. New York: Vintage, 1973. Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus. New York: Penguin, 1977. Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1987. Khatchadourian, Raffi. Transfiguration. The New Yorker 13 Feb. 2012: 67-87.
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Byrnes / Monarch
long and happy life without him. No. Elliott had his head buried in the sun-warm sands of mental retardation. We had always laughed at his happy tail feathers flapping in the wind. Now they werent moving anymore. His spindly legs had crumpled under him, and all we wanted was for the sand to blow over him, to make him disappear, but it wouldn't. We wanted him resigned to that category of tragedy that warrants nothing more than a sympathetic head shake. Of course, the way he died is what troubles us all, makes us laugh first and then feel the guilt tying knots in our stomachs, and we shake our heads and reproach ourselves and say, No, its not funny, and then we hate him even more for leaving in such a blackly funny way. How do caterpillars turn to butterflies? He loved to ask. His goofy grin nauseated us. He'd blink hard as if his body couldn't handle the anticipation and rock from one foot to the other, shaking as if he had to pee. Im sure the first ten times he asked, he was genuinely inquiring. His memory was shitno big surprise. After that, it was like he was quizzing us, wanting desperately to teach something to us the way we always taught things to him. Only his inflection was off, so each time he asked he sounded perplexed. After he died we felt sick over every time we explained the answer to him instead of resigning: I dont know, Elliott. How do caterpillars turn to butterflies? He loved so desperately to enlighten us: They need a warm safe place. His guffaw would last for two solid minutes as he'd jut his chin high in the air. Elliott swallowed and choked on a Monarch caterpillar two months ago. He had tried this twice before, only this time, there was no one to calm him down and pry it out of his throat. He was so embarrassed each time his mom or dad had to wrench one of the wriggling things from his throat, and none of us knew why. He couldnt let go of the idea that his slobbery mouth was the perfect asylum, where a hairy caterpillar could sink into its comatose cocoon and fulfill its destiny. Whenever he brought caterpillars into the street
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Byrnes / Monarch
to show us, we were all waiting for him to crush them accidentally and cry, but he never did. He died in his backyard, and the night after he died, I dreamed his dead body in the too-perfect grass, covered in butterflies. I still wonder what was floating through his mind in those last moments, or if he had any thoughts at all. Did all of his love for caterpillars and butterflies morph into rage and fear when he realized in that split second before his consciousness shut off that they were the cause? Last night I had a dream again. His red robe stretched across the sky, turning black and purple and blood-red again, always moving. His signature robereally a velvet costume cloak from the schools drama roomwas the closest thing to a fur coat he could find, and he clung to it with a fervor no one dared confront. Why, we all wondered at first, would Elliott want a fur coat? That was my fault. I told him a joke Id heard: What did the earthworm say to the caterpillar? What? Whod you have to blow to get that fur coat? I wanted to see him squirm and struggle as he tried to understand. I wanted him to ask me what blow meant, and then tell him I couldnt explain it. We don't know if anyone ever actually told him what a blow job was, or if his under-developed brain could even hope to grasp the concept. In spite of his confusion, or maybe because of it, he was determined to get a fur coat. First he wore a vintage old chinchilla thing his mom bought for him at the Society for Mental Retardation Thrift Store, where her discount for having a retarded son saved her thirty-percentjust enough to make a fur coat for a retarded teenager feasible. The thing got drenched in a downpour not even a week after he got it and was ruined completely. The stench of mildewed chinchilla was the only thing that finally persuaded him to give up the ghost of that fur. After that, he said his mom wouldn't buy him a new one; he had to find one on his own if he was so set on it. Telling Elliott to do anything on his own was tantamount to telling him he was shit out of luck. He'd never done anything on his own
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Byrnes / Monarch
before. You can imagine our surprise, then, when he strutted out of the Special Needs classroom one March morning wearing a velvet robe more suited to a theatrical Elizabethan royal than a real person. This coat, this ridiculous bright red coat, didn't leave his body until the day he was laid out in his titanium casket. When we saw him lying there in a starched white button-down and polyester suit, we felt sick to our stomachs. They were trying to pass him off as normal, and Elliott was anything but normal. We'd heard his dad whispering that he didn't want people making fun of his son at his own funeral, so they dressed him up real smart. But he looked even more ridiculous, even more retarded, in that pinstriped suit. As if they were trying to hide it. As if anyone could forget the image of Elliott's affable clubfoot jutting forth involuntarily to say hello. I forced myself to stare at him in that coffin for longer than I ever dreamed I could. I saw his red robe flowing over him, dripping over the edges of the casket. Last time we talked about Elliott's death, Caxter made a crack about how it was a good thing he hadn't actually tried to blow someone, because that would have killed him for sure. They're all certain it was an accidentjust a tragedy that there was no one around to pry that caterpillar from his throat. Suicide, Morris said, is far beyond the comprehension of a fifteen-year-old retard. But Elliott's death was far beyond Morris' comprehension. It was an accidental suicide, something so delicately intentional and at once happenstance, that only Elliott could have conjured it up.
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Richard / OK carrel
a beginning
this is the beginning, let us begin here. from here on in, we say we have properly begun. to begin is to move outward from a tremor. she moves thus. she begins by speaking herself into a set of relations. she is, in a word, pre-destined. everything prior is a destination. she speaks out from it.
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Richard / OK carrel
what are twin wings? anything that enflanks, any thing that's emergent. any towering. i say icarus and as i say this i say headdress. when i say i is for indian i say also alien and i say terror over again. i board any border and i come back babbling. while
Vancouver's Marpole neighbourhood is on the rise as a new condo development moves in and when i say this i say also: Who are the Musqueam?
the metro, i say:
and as a body, any body, mary rowland's body, i say "oh the
number of pagans!"
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Richard / OK carrel
she and the plot reach an entente. her narrative says: i am outside the door. in oral tradition multiple voices embed. but this is not an oral tradition. this is an oracular movement. how does one move? from left to right of course.
being not in bed with oral tradition, she is embedded. in the bed, in a row respectively, are: an american soldier brought over from iraq, every lost and found captive, a system for saying, an all-male council, an epoch, a few preeminent authors, an ancient greek artifact, a black man from compton, a queue of questions, a truck of immigrants, every editorial, some vagrants, politicians and considerable cleavage. these corpses have a tendency to shuffle post-partum. she parted them from left to right. a page is a type of partition.
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Richard / OK carrel
i move from green, to blue, to yellow, to orange and when i hit red that means what's more than movement. i move from
nuclear to unclear. and by headdress i mean any pillow in the empress. and as i say this, with the body like a confederate, i need
but if
homeless hotspot keeps wandering out of range," if it houses call it a home. since
Rights activist Waleed Abu Alkhair saying today that the document by a well-known academic was sent to the all-male Shura Council, which advises the monarchy. The report by Kamal Subhi claims that allowing women to drive will threaten the countrys tradition of virgin brides.
or it's a rubric, or it's
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Richard / OK carrel
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Richard / OK carrel
but i wanted a body with organs.* i wanted something less tender, more topographical. i spurned silence like a self, i opened my mouth.
"If all BBH are doing is turning these people into an aerial and asking them to stand still then they are just treating homeless people the same way the Victorians did when they asked them to hold posters," sigh less to sign more. i become a
set of co-ordinates. i hold the map like a mirror. i watch something in my likeness twitch and then obscure. i called it 'her'. but in what manner may i use her when voice is just a bit of breathing with a name beside it? a form flounders when i say less about her
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*(D 10) The Organless Body
It falls back on all production, both the whole and the parts of it Forces and agents come to represent a miraculous they appear to be miraculated In a word, a surface is recorded, the entire process, recording surface. recording a false movement, a true perception of an apparent movement, produced on the recording surface.
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Richard / OK carrel
what makes a jury? a largish box. a number of chairs. what makes a jury? the other side of a door.
an impasse
the knocking is a call for order. in order to be ordered receptacles require ordaining. but in bed receptacles are multiple and superfluous. the orifice of one corpse is the eye of another. the bed is the only true receptacle but the bed is ideally infinite. circular.
one wonders whether the bed was moved or if the room, and its doorway were built around the bed. she wasn't born in the bed but she can't remember before. she says she has amnesia, but she says a lot of things.
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Richard / OK carrel
Busts, Plastic. FancyDress Units: Each. Unisex - Adult- One Size Colour: Nude. Price: 1.18
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Richard / OK carrel
intervalent impassibility
as a unit of time, this story unfolds. it is an internally unfolding moment. some of these pages may have been lost. someone said "these scenes enclose and fit into each other endlessly, abyssally." perhaps the lost pages are in said abyss.
there is nothing she can do about this. the oracular movement continues despite said shuffling and stopping.
interval surveillance shows that stopping is an imagined activity. closed circuit cameras loop nothing.
imagined activity is what makes her most anxious. most people become most anxious about their own occupations. as a unit of time this story unfolds, from left to right.
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Richard / OK carrel
with a point like a pipeline to move past i say mind the gap's collection and i also say 11.2 million indian children. cave into any convex. it doesn't give. keep counting. concede I admire what
Senator Clinton has done for America, but Im not sure about that coat. i wanted a wave like a window. i
wanted to walk out into it. but with too many mines in my closet i couldn't. it's a part of my effort to combat terrorism at home and abroad. america's next top automaton. i say my body as i say a transhistoric any body.
were, in likely account, reborn as women; a passage for drinking From this passage they pierced a hole into the column of marrow which extends from the head down through the neck along the spine this marrow, being endowed with soul and finding an outlet, caused in that place a vital appetite for emission. i say early captivity narratives start with
theresa delany and end with a journalist in gaza. i mean guantanamo. i also say "you soft as a Hush Puppy, Must we break
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Richard / OK carrel
a voice that precedes the knocking starts up again. it paused patiently for the knock. politely it proceeds policing. an echo sounds similarly. outside this door there must be others. a series of doors in an almost endlessly long corridor.
"who's in there?"
she begins counting the corpses on her fingers, running out of fingers she uses other people's appendages. she rummages for room.
one corpse shuffles and she points. but pointing is only probable if the door is made of glass. very many things refuse to refract. the door, as said before, is one among many.
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Richard / OK carrel
"Youre Richer
but with all the good gold gone, i only guess. as i say this my personal worth plummets. i, alabama, louisania and south carolina move from green to red to orange. it's in this same breath that i say below the national average and "diplomatic
strategy had to be arranged around the military." but with all the banks to choose from, why can't you leave this one? with a term of war like an anaphor i ask Did the previous healthcare system in the United States create a health-based underclass? without pushing for
more postage i swallow the previous. if it's hostile, call it a hostage.
as i say this another vancouver cop caught on closed circuit cameras discovers a body in the dtes isn't ballistic just because you push it. i say railgate and then i say riverview and then i say let's be reasonable. i say also "welfare cheats, deadbeats and varmints." and i say diplomatic strategy over again. without much choice i
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Richard / OK carrel
under duress (a door-sized one) she begins nudging the corpses toward the door. first a puddle and then a protractor. she begins numerically, proceeds geographically, gives in alphabetically. gives birth to a multiplicity.
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Richard / OK carrel
in MEXICO CITY - As the United States fortifies its borders Canadian companies reach out to
immigrants frustrated by U.S. tempted by dreams of a better life with a factory full of foreign feelings i
Homeland Security T-Shirts "Fighting Terrorism Since 1492" who knew? i could say all this
say in the same sentence.
"There are roughly 150 factories in Vancouver I would consider sweatshops," stop just short of union st. if it holds
if it keeps you captive, call it an image. if it sounds like call it a crutch, if it folds call it a cabinet. i say coast salish peoples as i say No One Is Illegal and i also say piecemeal offshore profiteering. i say the red terror two times over. i move from excess
"the untamed fire of freedom will reach the darkest corners of our world." i take cover. and i say efforts to 'spread
to axis. i say
democracy' over.
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Richard / OK carrel
a comparison is made
you open your arms on the other side of the door. your arms are a receptacle of sorts.
the light and the line flood through the door-like shape. the narrowness funnels until the shape of your arms is a single point pushing. you don't want a puddle, the ordering is a thing predestined for productivity. for easy birth and easy death. the ordering is a welcome policing.
this is the story of narrativity. narrative is on both sides of this particular door knocking. here is what it is like when we read:
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Richard / OK carrel
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Richard / OK carrel
an end is ending
a collectivity becomes connective. the joints are joined just so. and we ourselves are told above all else: be civil. we marry our mirrors, and our pages in a civil union agree or at least agree to work on it together. if context needs a contest let it be consensual. let it mirror your mouthings.
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Richard / OK carrel
i take 61 steps before the pages hit the precedent, when they printed her body 8 more times like any stastistic i felt uncertain so i came home on a Sabbath day, and the Powaw that kneeled upon the deer-skin came home as black as the devil. as i say this Americas Most Wanted on Vancouvers Missing Women, reenacts the worker climbing into a car with a white woman. when i speak its the magnitude i imagine. while declaring a war on
"We have seen the depth of our enemies' hatred in videos where they laugh about the loss of innocent life" but before this
waiting i say sentence suspended is what's left over after i subtract
220 of the
need to remove
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Richard / OK carrel
something other arrives with the stork. a baby that keeps giving birthmarks. without the tissue in the right issue new voices emit from its mouth.
it says: i measured a metic in metropolitan rags and refused him medicare, female politicians descend from physical permutations, let's play cowboys and easterns,
there's a caste
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Richard / OK carrel
without an audience i lost interest. with little less, a little litter i came like disinvestment. like an indictment. as i say this Reports are
coming in from key swing ridings in Ontario that voters are being called home with false information on voting locations. i cave into any convex.
being multiple, being muncipal, i straddle. as i say this Slowly, surely, the dreaded DTES is being transformed, from a ghetto infested with crime, drugs and disease to something other. when i say city-centre i don't forget frontier. if it
United Nations is to declare discrimination based on the Indian caste system as i say this i ask which?
differs detain it. as i say this the i'd also personally like to thank Mayor Gregor Robertson and the members of the Vancouver Police Board for sharing their insight into the problems experienced by those living in the Downtown Eastside. but i've promised to prop nothing about
***More |m|
More, Sir Thomas (14781535), English scholar and statesman; lord chancellor 152932; canonized as St. Thomas More. His Utopia (1516), which described an ideal city-state, established him as a leading humanist of the Renaissance.
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Not Revived; Only Returned: Guilt, History, Forgetting in Under the Volcano Stefan Krecsy
My daddy used to tell me not to chew on something that was eatin you. - Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses The past remained, a tortured shape, dark and palpable and accusing. - Malcolm Lowry, Under the Volcano
As inheritance is a process as much about indebtedness as it is one of enrichment, it should be no surprise that the passing of metaphysics which followed Gods wake has left us inheritors to a demystified world as well as an overwhelming sense of history (White 235). Given the postmodern moments troubled relationship to its own history (whatever boundaries this may have) this seems especially problematic (White 242), and like any significant inheritance, it has engendered a considerable amount of debate. During which, Paul Ricoeur demonstrated that history is not simply a process of remembering the past, but also one of forgetting and forgiving it (455; White 237239). While this is a recent claim, its philosophical threads are long in the weaving and have not always been overtly expressed. Although Crime and Punishment and Lord Jim usher these themes into modern literary traditions, one of the clearest articulations of our relationship to historical guilt in a demystified world occurs within Malcolm Lowrys Under the Volcano: a work singularly obsessed with guilt, the past, and our inability to address either (Grace 192). During the day of the dead, 1938, the ex-Consul Geoffrey Firmin drinks himself to death while his ex-wife Yvonne and step-brother Hugh try to save him. This narrative unfurls in a world where demystification is played out to its logical extreme, where the path towards atonement or redemption
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The Firmins are an unluckily bad bloodline, no doubt, to be so beset by maudlin sentimentality. Hugh tries to reassure himself he is none of these things really. I have done nothing to warrant all this guilt. I am no worse than anybody else. Certainly there is good reason to
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In this conception of desacralized history, the names may change, but the process does not. It is as circular and worthless as Firmins own life in Under the Volcano a circular narrative without transcendence. The ending invokes the beginning and the beginning the end, all of which is haunted by the past. Lowry wrote in The Forest Path to the Spring, his most concerted vision of Paradise (Grace 74), that as a man I had become tyrannized by the past, and that it was my duty to transcend it in the present (351). This tyranny of the past finds its full expression in the world of Under the Volcano, a world bereft of all spiritual comfort, home to the shabbiest of secular salves, and it tasks the reader to find a way to achieve forgiveness and atonement for our history. Its lesson is not the common adage: remember history or be doomed to repeat it; rather, the injunction is to find a way to forgive history and ourselves.
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Works Cited
Grace, Sherril. The Voyage that Never Ends: Malcolm Lowrys Fiction. Vancouver: UBC P, 1982. ---. Remembering Tomorrow: Lowry, War and Under the Volcano. Strange Comfort: Essays on the Work of Malcolm Lowry. Vancouver: Talon, 2009: 189-214. Kuhlkan, Pam Fox. Absolutamente necesario: The Express Train in Malcolm Lowrys Under the Volcano, Chapter Twelve. Modernism/Modernity 12.2 (2005): 209-228. Lowry, Malcolm. Under the Volcano. New York: Penguin, 1962. ---. The Forest Path to the Spring. Hear Us O Lord from Heaven Thy Dwelling Place. Ed. Nicholas Bradley. Don Mills: Oxford UP, 1961. Ricoeur, Paul. Memory, History, Forgetting. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2004. Walker, Ronald. The Weight of the Past: Toward a Chronology of Under the Volcano. Apparently Incongruous Parts: The Worlds of Malcolm Lowry. Ed. Paul Tiessen. Metuchen: Scarecrow, 1990. White, Hayden. Guilty of History? The Longue Duree of Paul Ricoeur. History and Theory 46.2 (2007): 233-251.
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E. Fedoruk / Leisure
category of new spaces for labour could be characterized by comparisons to monasteries, fortresses, and walled towns and a concentration of methods of productionreducing thefts and interruptions and securing both tools and workers alike. These sites would come to be partitioned, so each individual was organized into their own productive space, coded for maximum supervision, and organized by rank for the hierarchical management of values and knowledge. Temporally, these systems are manifest in the design of time-tables, to guarantee the quality of use during a given period, and on the bodies of the workers in disciplinary rhythms executed in precise gestures and in the relation between the moving subject and the tools they employ in labour. Foucault offers an interesting possibility for conceptualizing leisure in his theorization of exhaustive use, which explains the function of the time-table in preventing wasted timeconsidered morally and economically fraudulent. In this, every working moment is exhausted and speed and efficiency are prime virtues. In opposition, leisure thus becomes emblematic of efforts to achieve and make satisfactory use of free time or, and especially, to successfully and enjoyably waste time. The achievement of leisure can thus involve subversive motivations that challenge the disciplinary restrictions Foucault describes. The changes in use of the term leisure are, furthermore, contingent on the simultaneous social development of the categories of work and labour. Leisure is the time of day when a working subject is not involved in wage labour, or concomitantly, is active in social reproduction.i In line with the etymological evolution of the word leisure, work can be understood as it emerges as a consequence of two key transformations: converting the social means of subsistence and production into capital and turning its producers into wage labourers. Karl Marx identifies these as contributing to the creation of the capital-relation and from this, straightforwardly defines primitive accumulation as the historical
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process that divorces the producer from the means of production (874-5). To work, then, is to put value into an object via labour (138), to coordinate the simple elements purposeful activity, the object of that activity, and the instruments necessary to perform itMarx identifies within the labour process (284), and finally, to proceed with these actions on the basis of the assumption that the labour-power involved is bought and sold at its value, which, as a commodity, is determined by the labour-time necessary to produce it (340). It is within this determination of the value of labour that that leisure emerges most forcefully in opposition. A labouring individual needs to work a certain quantifiable duration to produce their daily means of subsistence and this average amount constitutes their daily labourpower or, equally, determines the monetary value received in the sale of the object produced. Taking these factors into account, Marx asserts that the working day, though possible to determine, is in itself indeterminate. However, the length of the day can only vary within certain limits; these are governed by the physical limits of the workers body and moral boundaries that vary according to current norms. Leisure provides the social and temporal category for the realization of these limits. For Marx, leisure might thus be constituted by time the worker needs to satisfy his intellectual and social requirements, to the extent and numbergoverned by the general level of civilization (341). Increasingly, as the general level of civilization is determined by consumer culture, these opportunities for leisure become commodified in and of themselves. What Marx might have previouslyor perhaps more accurately, indistinctlycategorized as intellectual and social requirements are products bought and sold within the entertainment, travel, and culture industries. In Marxs own terms, this relationship between leisure and consumption is tightened by capitalisms constant reproduction of the needy individuala process in which Individual production provides, on the one hand,
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the means for the workers maintenance and reproduction; on the other hand, by the constant annihilation of the means of subsistence, it provides for their continued re-appearance on the labour-market (719). Capitalist reproduction ensures the exploitation of the worker by maintaining these circumstances, separating labour-power and the conditions of labour. In this total system, which produces not only commodities but also the capital-relation itself, the worker is trapped in the position of needy individual (723-4). This process is manifest in the pursuit of leisure: the worker maintains constant, or at least sustained, devotion to their task in efforts to catch a temporal or economic break, or, in the words of 1980s Canadian rock band Loverboy, is perpetually Working for the Weekend (Get Lucky). Whatever break or Weekend might be possible is determined in agreement (and argument) between the workers and capitalists, as the former group yearns for the opportunities afforded by leisure and the latter class strives to snatch up as much surplus labour time as possible. As the relationship between leisure and consumption intensifies, the exchange value of the leisure category, and by extension, the weekend, increases. Marx offers capitals reply to the question, what is a working day?, suggesting that the working day is twenty-four hours long, less the few hours necessary for rest. Any disposable time remains labour-time, which should be devoted to the self-valorization of capital in the guise of opportunities for education, intellectual development, social functions and intercourse, and the necessary functions of the mind and body (375). But how might these opportunities be realized now, as the opportunities Marx describes become more costly, the disciplinary measures invoked by Foucault develop technologically, as well as spatially and temporally, and the limits of the working day continue to expand, transcending the domestic sphere in the form of the home office and popping up via email on iPhones and PDAs held close to the body? Returning to
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an etymological reading of the development of the word leisure offers three additional perspectives from which we can evaluate the contemporary social significance of leisure as it is rooted in vernacular English. Lady of leisure is a subject category that first appeared in 1948 that describes a woman who has no regular employment or whose time is free from obligations to others (Leisure, def. 5f). Variants might include a more generalized idea of a life of leisure and the inversely gendered man of leisure, but the absence of these from the dictionary entry emphasizes the extent to which stagnant stereotypes continue to permeate our lexicon in a formalized way. In adjectival use (often leisured, formerly, leisurely), the word, while still temporally grounded, designating periods of free, unoccupied time, bears a citation to Thorstien Veblens 1899 Theory of the Leisure Class and thus also describes social subjects. Veblen, who understands the establishment of the leisure class as coinciding with the beginning of property ownership and developing gradually during the social evolution from savagery to barbarism, offers a complement to a Marxist understanding of the leisure category (7). Finally, relocating the early employment of the phrase at leisure in a contemporary context engages spatial relationships that emphasize the extent to which leisure is now a commodity. The definition of the phrase explains having free or unoccupied time at one's disposal; without haste, with deliberation, but we can reevaluate our sense of being at leisure as a consumer experience which modifies ancient associations of architecture and entertainment from the Romans (Herwig and Holzherr) to pioneering sites of consumption in the nineteenth century that include world expositions, department stores and arcades, and amusement parks (Benjamin) and finds us in their built progeny, at global megaevents, malls, outlets and lifestyle centers, and themed tourist destinations. At the same time, efforts to maintain, or to privatize, organic sites of leisure that provide expanses for recreation and leisure in association with nature mutate open
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space into capital. To arrive at leisure is thus an ever more costly endeavor complicated by socioeconomic status, spatial politics, and of course, booking time off.
In a footnote to Capital Vol. 1, translator Ben Fowkes explains Engels distinction between labour and work is often confused in translation. As the original footnote explains, [l]abour which creates use-values and is qualitatively determined is called work as opposed to labour; labour which creates value and is only measured quantitatively is called labour, as opposed to work (138). I use work in opposition to leisure in accordance with this distinction, adhering to common definitions which explain labour as primarily physical. 79
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Works Cited
Benjamin, Walter. The Arcades Project. Trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard-Belknap, 1999. Chaucer, Geoffrey. The Canterbury Tales. Ed. V. A. Kolve and Glending Olson. New York: Norton, 2005. [Chaucer, Geoffrey.] The Romaunt of the Rose. Ed. Charles Dahlberg. Norman, OK: U of Oklahoma P, 1999. Foucault, Michel. Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage, 1995. Herwig, Oliver and Holzherr, Florian. Dream Worlds: Architecture and Entertainment. Munich: Prestel, 2006. Leisure, n. OED Online. Oxford UP, 2010. Loverboy. Working for the Weekend. Get Lucky. Sony, 1990. CD. Marx, Karl. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. Vol. 1. Trans. Ben Fowkes. London: Penguin, 1990. Veblen, Thorstein. The Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study in the Evolution of Institutions. New York: Macmillan, 1899.
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Monument and Memory: The Holocaust as an Icon of American Identity Stevie Wilson
The American memory of the Holocaust is unique. In addition to being home to one of the largest populations of survivor diaspora and Jewish immigrants in the world, America has produced a distinct legacy of Holocaust memory and experience. One of the most prominent producers of Holocaust representations in film, literature, and other media, the United States is, despite its geographical distance from the actual events, a leader in the Western initiative to commemorate and depict the atrocities of 1933-1945. It is the purpose of this paper to examine this legacy as it pertains to a predominant collective memory of Americans in regards to the Holocaust, and to investigate how this perspective is utilized in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) in Washington, D.C. The American experience with the Holocaust is two-fold: Historians and cultural experts define it by reference to the Jewish post-war experience in America, and by the American reaction to the events of the Holocaust. In this binary expression, one may subsequently de-lineate two modes of Holocaust representation. The first, as described by Alan Mintz, is the exceptionalist perspective. This conception of the Holocaust dictates its uniqueness in the trajectory of human experience and in genocide history. To study the Holocaust under this paradigm is to express the particular nature of anti-Semitism in Nazi Germany, and the tragedies that resulted from their particular policies of eradication and murder. In a discussion of the Holocaust in America, this perspective is held predominantly within the Jewish community, wherein the familial and community connections allow for the transmission of culture-specific memory and identity. The experiences of the Holocaust are unique to the
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The Museum and its mandate do not intend to conceal the Americentric perspective and purpose of its content. Since it is situated in a tourist-laden, centralized gallery of nationalism, visitors to the Museum are exceptionally aware of the context within which they are entering the institution. However, whereas in the neighbouring attractions such as the Smithsonian, the Washington Monument, or the American History Museum the American perspective is obvious and anticipated, visitors to the USHMM enter with an expectation that
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The Permanent Exhibition features several interactive sections which emphasize the American response to the Holocaust both in the camps and domestically. Furthermore, these sections are complemented by various references to Americans as liberators, not least of which is the primary image of the exhibitions entrance on the fourth floor, a photograph of American troops at Bergen-Belsen.
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Works Cited
Confino, Alon. "Collected Memory and Cultural History: Problems of Method." American Historical Review 102.5 (1997): 1386-1403. Elam, Yigal and Noa Gedi. Collective Memory What Is it? History and Memory 8.1 (1996): 30-50. Mintz, Alan. Popular Culture and the Shaping of Holocaust Memory in America. Seattle: U of Washington P, 2001. Olick, Jeffrey K. "Collective Memory: The Two Cultures." Sociological Theory 17.3 (1999): 333-348. Permanent Exhibition Guide. Washington: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, n.d. Taylor, Ella. Guest Lecture. "Holocaust & Film." University of British Columbia. Vancouver. 22 Nov. 2011. The Strategic Plan of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum: Securing the Living Legacy. Washington: United States Holocaust Memorial Council, 2010.
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In the recent New Yorker Food Issue of November 21, 2011, Paul Theroux, in a piece simply titled Heirlooms, argues that [T]here is almost no connection between an industrial tomato, the bright, gassed, ripened-in-the-truck ball of tasteless pith, and one from the local garden, the juicy pomodoro, the apple of gold (72). Here stands quite plainly the mythology of heirloom tomatoes, not just of and for themselves, but as representatives of the broader cultural and economic interest in local food, terroir and the cultivation of heritage seeds. Simply put, to eat an heirloom tomato is to position oneself apart from the decay of late capitalist foodways. The politics of the culinary zeitgeist are more insidious than what was once simply and boldly declared, You are what you eat. This mid-twentieth century mantra was favoured by fad dieters and nutrition gurus working to align consumption with subjectivity. But the idea was also an implicit part of an increasingly widespread interest in the gourmet. What were once local phenomena become inter-city and national icons, such as the aptly named Silver Palate fine food shop in Manhattans Upper West Side, which published its eponymous cookbook in 1982 (a title that has successfully been in print ever since). What was once a highly localized cultural practice the locale of 1980s Woody Allen comes to mind, along with its characters Hannah and her Sisters, Husbands and Wives could now be emulated nationally. No longer was one condemned to having a crude American palate derivative of the worst of Anglo-grub meat
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See David Lazar, ed. Conversations with M.F.K. Fisher. Jackson: U of Mississippi P, 1992: 103. 110
Works Cited
Davis, Erik. Nearer the Heart of Things: Erik Davis Profiles Joanna Newsom. Arthur Magazine Archive. Arthur Publishing Corp., 2011. Lazar, David, ed. Conversations with M.F.K. Fisher. Jackson: U of Mississippi P, 1992. Said, Edward W. Adorno as Lateness Itself. Adorno: A Critical Reader. Ed. Nigel C. Gibson and Andrew Rubin. Oxford: Blackwell, 2002. 193208. Theroux, Paul. Heirlooms. New Yorker 21 Nov. 2011: 72.
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monster energy
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Loop your name. PleasedBackSpace to meet BackSpace. A fear pierced trick letter after T with barbaric almost preference. Which is larger, how blackbird flew out of sight or usedBackSpaceBackSpaced to turn screw. What if I dont have a shadow crossed to and fro? How much are u getting paid 2 chat among twenty snowy BackSpace mountains? Processing the moving on lucid human Thursday. Thin black apples of Haddam by famous BackSpace celebrity will it be tomorrow. Football the smarter feet, a small part of the take screws in or out pantomime. When you get evolved ask what your BackSpace. Ant or anteater, Steve or Jane. Have you the split cedar-limbs? Tried. I require only database.
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