Inter/tidal. v.

inter/tidal. v.
edited by krisha dhaliwal, mairen doyle, and jeff fedoruk
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
10
14
17
24
27
31
53
65
74
81
84
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
88
103
112
115
116
118
Riel Jeff Fedoruk

ARISTOPHANES Isocrates, you really must do more to distinguish yourself from Socrates. As far as Im concerned, youre both sophists. ISOCRATES Need I further defend myself? My latest speeches say more than enough. Have you heard them? A comic such as yourself should really appreciate their subtexts. I promise you that the court is just as engaging as the theatre. ARISTOPHANES I find the air too thin in there. ISOCRATES Well, the problem is not so much myself but rather Socrates, or rather what people are saying about Socrates. It is giving us orators a bad name. ARISTOPHANES I wont use your name in a play, if thats what youre worried about. Im just currently doing research for my Socrates character, and with Alcibiades out of town, I thought that if I talked to his other friends ISOCRATES I am not his friend! There is no logical relationship between he and I. Again, I implore you to attend the Assembly and hear ARISTOPHANES Im there often enough. And never mind, here comes the primary text himself, along with what appears to be yet another youthful protg. Morning, my good fellows!
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?
5
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.
8
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
from Collecting Tegan Cheremkora
Dream Homes
10
Cheremkora / from Collecting
11
Antique Collector
12
13
Studies for Cream Peter MacDonald

.1 recalcitrant linen condensation, hard water calcium, lift, pin, drupe, hang dry. Then rain, sopt and fold flicker of wet edge fleece, caught and: shame regret. Finitude memory. con har ka lif drew ha then rrrr ss fli of wwt ff cau and sh fin mm dense hard alc cum pi rue ha dry then aaaa aa aaww fold flea of wttt flea aug ut and shr urg init em conden sat atiat wa wat aught lcium coliseum ih rupe nd rr then iiiii nnn opt lis of eed ease hot and ha innit emory hn rube an fft uuupe dd ati ter licem on caulc densate cal
pp ang
eww rye
rupt eye
then then nnnnn rr rnnnnnn an dd isp of ettt lee tout and egre nit or iccor of dge eec hawt and aim knit mem
aai ff flic wedge ss htauw
iin foe lickor wetg caw
aaaiin old
aww
egret tude or
egress uud me
regr de more
14
MacDonald / Studies for Cream

.15 window dough all luxury. Dough, set kneed set rest. Polish, hone temper. All barometer rise fold. Slow collecting and loss, expenditure collapses. Drip souffle and return, gives cold lavishment of selves. wlll Ll wind set polis h all rye foa sl co an ll ec c dr sou a ret giv c la off ce aww lu ow kn olish hon aa meet rise fol fo slough coal nd lllo ex col dr ouf ey aa etour iv ch av hmen ov ll es all lux wind knee lish hone ba meter ize foal ow coll d oss xpe la dr souf e n mour if co vis meant ff el aa luxur ow eed ish te baro
xur dough set sh onte arom
uriate rr emp roma
usur esst per baron
ury es purr omet
fold
ld
ld
og
og
lect ss pend lap p suf nnn ourn is coal avis mint v cell
lecture ting
olect
ndi pse p oufl and rem ives old ish
deture lapse ip fl
ure s rip flay
oor
lay
orn
lav
vish
shm
elv
lives
vies
sell
15
MacDonald / Studies for Cream

.27 fungus porridge ritual of morning secretion. Slow buildup ri uh mm see sll bi ric ictual uh mo run sa crete lo ow bill bild itua etu oo our ni sac secret auww ill bilge writ all ef or ing crine ecrit allow ild tchu ff ur acrid low dillup write ov urn sacri vict stem
ouf urning earn rind cree sloe up
sallow aow pp ilp
16
Two Senses of Space in Faciality Mairen Doyle

Face transplantation is a surgical phenomenon that wears its comprehension on its sleeve. In other words, it looks how it sounds. It is a medical procedure wherein the face of a donor, as a collection of skin, muscle tissue, and nerve fibre, is surgically attached to the place formerly occupied by the face of a mutilated patient. Unfortunately, it is a trick; but a trick that stands as a peculiar conjunction of artifice identificatory, temporal, and of course, political; for the spatiality of the face is a concept equal parts abstract and tangible. Proof of the latter consists merely in putting ones hand upon the living, breathing assemblage of cognizing entities present on the body. Proof of the former is slightly less direct, so much so, in fact, that its realization acts as veritable distortion of the aforementioned access to the body. This distortion is a product of an emanation of organization so bare, yet so opaque, that its placement in time is as slippery a task as its placement over the individual. My aim is to offer a brief condensation of the notion of face transplantation in relation to the spacio-temporal implications of Deleuze and Guattaris plateau of Faciality in One Thousand Plateaus. My hope is that it elicits an equally succinct appreciation of a case in which the unparalleled, yet arbitrary, structuring capacity of the immaterial is revealed. The face, in Deleuzian articulation, is primarily a surface; a particularly potent piece of the body containing no reality save that which is inscribed upon it. Its organization, the expectation of normality, and hierarchy of feature is an imposition of metaphysics. That is, the face is a plane; a space that gives itself to language in the same way Foucault identifies disease (Foucault 88).i It becomes a means of conveyance, rather than begins as one, as Deleuze and Guattari say, the face is produced in humanity (170). One need look no further than the requirements for a passport photo to view this
17
Doyle / Two Senses of Space

particular formula. No smiling. No snarling. No grimacing. These are aberrations and must be controlled, fit into the pre-ordained symmetry and pattern of the physical. A clear identification of this idea appears in their comment on facial tics, What is a tic? It is precisely the continually refought battle between a faciality trait that tries to escape the sovereign organization of the face and the face itself, which clamps back down on the trait, takes hold of it again, blocks its line of flight, and reimposes its organization on it (Deleuze and Guattari 188). There is no clearer expression of the structural austerity of the face than this, a statement of the code of conduct specific to the duplicity of a veneer However, the limits of the tenets of facial organization are to be found in the displacement of their matrix: the transplantation. Insofar as the face is a semiotic, it will always be a bifurcation, a token of the interior or exterior.ii This is the logic of the physical relocation of the face. The face of the donor is an exteriorization of the internal, a signification of humanity. It is placed over a local and global perception of grotesqueness, the injuries of a person, in order to conceal a part of the body that cannot be seen. Thus a mask, an abstraction of the body, gets substituted as a reality, and subsequently mistaken for a part of the body that does not, and according to Deleuze and Guattari, never did, exist underneath. It is a revelation of the absent. This process occurs as a direct result of the efficacy of Faciality, which, at base, is the expression of government in the body.iii The utilization of a deceased persons face for the ends of rehabilitation is the ultimate affirmation of a need for corporeal order. With this in mind, it is clear that the face is vehicle of emotive expression, or an eating-device, or any other system of denotation at the same time as it is a place: a spatial field, a layer, a surface, etc. Its material, (inter)active immanence exists in simultaneity with its symbolic status. What occurs during transplantation, in addition to the construction of an artificial reality,
18

is a superimposition of both of these locales. The face is a place to be exchanged and transformed according to the needs of its physical and conceptual environment. In the case of Dallas Wiens, the swapping of a bodily surface gave rise to a completely new understanding of the self (Khatchadourian 85).iv Thus, the visible spatiality of the face interacts with the intangible, Deleuzian spatiality (organization via signification), and the lesson is simple: the transposition of space is a powerful demarcation of identity. The face transplant patient is forced to continually reconcile, and thus reinforce, the boundaries of the interior and exterior in order to realize their personhood; in order to answer the question of just how exactly one ought to go about wearing a mask forever. As well, the success of the transplantation depends on the boundaries of the patients identity not only being reconciled in space, but also halted in time. The regular change and evolution of the individual must be suspended and reassigned according to the values of the inner, and the outer. There is only dichotomy and opposition: the mask and that which it covers. The patient is a product of classification, and as such must be rendered inert. This requires the carving up of past, present, and future into particle, point, and isolation. Boundary, of course, is as much a temporal articulation as it is a spatial one, begging questions like: when exactly did Dallas Wiens become stop being himself and start being another? In what format or modality does identity persist in the wake of physical transformation? The representative function of the mask necessitates the suspension of time, it is a snapshot of the past being used as a marker of the present. Given the perspective of Deleuze and Guattari, the recipient of the transplant is as disfigured under a mask as they are under scars, precisely because they are under a thing. Like the schizophrenic is the extreme limit of capitalism, the transplant is the extreme limit of the face; it is the embodiment of the sovereignty of that which it
19

stands on the fringes of, at the same time as it is a divulgence of its artifice (Deleuze and Guattari 250). The transplant/mask is a location that, in displaying a desperate exaggeration of the ethos of the face, works to maintain the integrity of the thing it closely echoes insofar as it is a repetition of its exaggeration. After all, imitation has always been the sincerest form of flattery. But again, the face defined in absence of humanity is a symbol of nothing. Thus, the transplantation, in assuming an image of truth, is a fiction, which of course is an oftused device of coercion. Lastly, a quick note on those responsible for the process of transplantation. The surgeons possess the power to constitute the confines of experience and sensation, all the while maintaining the allusive distinction between those who feel the effects of force, and those who mete them out. If this were not true, there would be no attempt at normalization.v But as it stands, the surgeon must work to evoke a state of physical orthodoxy for their patient, which, in addition to serving as an insurance and protection of the surgeons field of research, is a dialectic that substantiates the existence of politics in the body (it takes little interpretational ingenuity to conceive of normality as an interior trait). The interior and exterior are relations of space, enforced by boundaries identical to the ones that separate the goods of ownership, or the divisions of leadership. The surgeon is one of many guardians of these territories, the preserver of categorical distinction between inner and outer, as well as the arbiter of the discourse between them. When the hands touch the face they find that the eyes are at the top, the mouth is at the bottom. The skin is on the outside and the tongue is on the inside. They find position, but do they find ascension? They find depth, but do they find order? My proposal has been that these are states that are projected from that which is no more than a flat expanse of mobile contingency. Deleuze and Guattaris articulation of Faciality is the proof that distorts the
20

transparency of tangible access to the face. It is the recognition of the work being done to build spaces and times that create the illusion of change where there is none, and the perception of stagnancy where there is motion. This has been the provision of a schema with which to judge the effects of an instance in which the experience of the individual is constituted by the indefinite and indestructible arrangement of places that give meaning to the ins and outs and overs and aboves of precedence and relegation.
21
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.
ii
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.
iii
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.
iv
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).
v
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).
22
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.
23
from Easy / True Johnny Hamilton
24
Hamilton / from Easy / True
25
Hamilton / from Easy / True
26
Monarch Delia Byrnes

It was like his death made us even more afraid of his feeblemindedness. Now he wasnt only the high school retard, the cause of our resentment every time we were forced to grasp for a euphemism, to twirl our index fingers next to our temples and screw up our faces to say: Hes, you know, not all there. He was a tragedy now, inflecting our impulses toward him with a throbbing guilt that will never pass. When the undertaker put Elliott in his coffin, with his friendly clubfoot safely out of sight, they couldnt make his right eye close. This was the eye that dripped goop all the time and made us all secretly afraid that if we got it on us wed catch his disease. So his right eye watched us, frosted with yellow-white fluid that seemed to issue forth in defiance of death. His one open eye, doe-like and black, seemed still to be inviting us to play with his pet iguana or share his Oreosas if he wasnt gone from this world forever. Caxter whispered over and over, Why is his pupil so big? and Elliotts mom said, a little too loudly: Because hes happy. That only made it worse. We were the ones who were smart, who understood things like verbal irony and double entendre and got to fuck something other than our hands, to plan our futures. Why was retarded Elliott so happy, even in death? His sister said at the school assembly that when the family was sorting through Elliotts things they found a will he had written after their grandmother died and someone had to tell him for the first time about death. All that was scribbled on Elliott's oil-splotched will barely legible, I can only imaginewas his computer (a broken, yellowing Macintosh), his butterfly collection, and his iguana Toto, who he asked if he could take with him. Mrs. McVey and the administrative ladies all gave the obligatory Aww and a wistful chuckle. Of course Elliott wouldnt understand that Toto could live a
27
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
28
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
29
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.
30
when i say metic i also say american when i

say origin i say enevlope when i say organ i echo
***Carrel |krl| |karl| |kal|

Carrel, Alexis (18731944), French surgeon and biologist. He developed improved techniques for suturing arteries and veins and carried out some of the first organ transplants. Nobel Prize for Physiology of Medicine (1912).
31
OK carrel Carolyn Richard
cone head fancy dress headpiece 9.99

32
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.
33
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
officials scramble someone says "a separate massacre"

and 16 bodies obscure. but when you say plot you say political plates yawn tectonically and then swallow. as i say this i move to
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!"
34
Richard / OK carrel
the story begun
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.
35
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
More Information: Please select size and
colour variations below if applicable

it presses call it a pressure. "My silence becomes a self, open your mouth.
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
36
Richard / OK carrel
the story unfolds
you are behind the door with the narrative, knocking.
37
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
body and more about asymmetry.
.................................................
*(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.
38
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.
the door, being a gap, is finite. it is unforgiving.
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.
39
Richard / OK carrel
Busts, Plastic. FancyDress Units: Each. Unisex - Adult- One Size Colour: Nude. Price: 1.18
40
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.
41
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.
i say the men of the first generation who lived cowardly
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
you down to estrogen most hated specimens."

before that breath is through i say seminal piata.
42
Richard / OK carrel
something happens storically
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.
"what are you doing in there?"
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.
43
Richard / OK carrel
as i say this foxcon stock rises. they tell me
"Youre Richer
Than You Think"
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
rejoice following the long-awaited death

and i net against new debt. i brace for a new bracket.
44
Richard / OK carrel
the story unfolds
"please exit the room through the door."
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.
a baby ambassador. the bastard ambassador hits the switch.
45
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.
46
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.
your eye as an orifice accepts the line of corpses.
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:
47
Richard / OK carrel
indian feather headdress fancy dress, 7.66
48
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.
but what is it to mother a monstrous birth?
49
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
780 detained. i want for greater numbers.
i say if you're not with us your "members
need to remove
their hood or leave the floor."
50
Richard / OK carrel
a blemish that blossoms
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
system in indiana, god give us biochemical

warfare, pigmentation is a weapon of mass destruction, pig pens and inner-city tenements house our first nations women, democracy demands northern sweatshops, i voted to vanquish, south of my meaning the media steals my mouth and gives me back this fucking friendship bracelet.
51
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
us without us so as i say this i'm conflicted. as i say this another

conflict configures and one more uniform becomes a More. what's more? i haven't even said half of it.
***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.
52
For the Giving Zaqir Virani

The dinner gatherings of the Teslantis were notorious, at least among the residents of the hotel, who were required to attend. They were a time of communal speculation; a locale for discussing the happenings and changes that took place around and through their Vancouver hostel, effecting them to various degrees. The majority of the attendees were locals, generally from the surrounding Lower Mainland. For one reason or another, they had all been brought to this once-hotel-now-hostel in the heart of Vancouver. Richard Lowry was the party responsible. A downtown native, Lowry had appropriated the management of the hotel from his brother-inlaw, and had spent the last thirty years watching the Teslantis slip from its status as a vibrant Pender Street hub of neon signs and lively travellers, to being one step removed from a boarding house. Thanks to his habit of keeping a running file on each of his seven residents, recent days had brought to light the observation that for once, it was mostly locals living at the Teslantis, with the exception of Robert Fowler and Shane Yeats. Called Toby by all in Vancouver that knew him, Fowler had come to the Teslantis a year ago; a carpenter by trade and an escape artist by fate. Hailing from Flin-Flan, Manitoba, in the red trunks. Perhaps the plainest man to ever grace the Teslantis, Lowry had written in his records. Toby had arrived at the Electric Island straight from the airport, and had asked for a room for no more than a couple nights, while he looked for work and a stable place of residence. Of course, Lowry hadnt mentioned this to Toby in the months that had passed, preferring the quiet and respectful tenant to the potentially irate
53
Virani / For the Giving

failure. Aside from keeping to himself in his room, Lowry generally only saw Toby when he was smoking out back with Shinto. Shinto, for lack of a better word, was a schmuck. At least, Lowry thought so. He came from somewhere near Saskatoon, though he never specifically said where. While Tobys nickname made sense, Lowry had no idea why Shinto called himself what he did. A confirmed bachelor of indeterminate age, Shane walked with the mind of a man twenty years his senior and a mouth that divides it in half. Of Shintos life before Teslantis, Lowry knew little. In passing, he had called the following places home, for brief periods of time: Parlay, High River, Beaufort, and Rocky Mountain House. Considering that he claimed to be a journalist, Lowry had always wondered why he lived in such small, go-nowhere towns. He was probably lying. Lowry was not a blind man, nor an insensitive one; he knew that the boys hated the Teslantis dinners. The other tenants all seemed to enjoy themselves to great lengths, but Lowry always noticed Toby and Shinto arriving late, sitting quietly, and leaving early. He chalked it up to simple self-isolation. He figured they felt left out of the banter because they never bothered to learn much about what happened outside the hotel, and so they never made an attempt to join in. Regardless, it was part of their tenancy contract to attend these dinners (some sort of half-baked clause about a tenancy meeting), so Lowry appreciated that they tolerated them anyway. It was only a matter of time, he figured, before they got into the spirit of things. * * * Its my name, its a part of me, but I hate it. With every bone in my body, I hate it.
54

Bones dont hate, Toby. Toby Fowlers pre-dinner conversation with Shinto inevitably led to his disgust of poultry. Though no real distress to his well-being, a hatred of chicken and all related poultry and fowl was very closely tied to the Teslantis family dinners for Fowler, likely the result of some half-witted pun on his name from years past. Seated on the edge of his bedrail, lest his colic find him floorbound, he faced Shinto but stared at the laminate floor between them. Turning from the mirror that held his attention, Shinto cracked a grin, a wordless reply to the same old statement. The two men had been sitting in Fowlers bedroom for about an hour, killing time by taking hits of salvia in front of the mirror, which was a common pastime for the duo, specifically before the group dinners. Because of this recurring hobby, they were often found to be quite silent during the meal, existing only as occupiers of seats purveying the acrid smell of fish. Turning from the mirror to face Toby, Shinto raised the pipe to his face, after first wiping the sweat from his upper lip, I dont know how junkies do it, he mumbled out the side of his mouth as he began to suck on the pipe. This stuff only lasts for like, twenty minutes, if its the good stuff, and when I come to Im always sweating like a whore in church! Not bothering to lift his attention from the assessment of the butane-flame-to-plant ratio, he awaited Tobys standard chastisement of his humour, thinking to himself how entertaining he found their banter; he saw them as an old prairie married couple, at times. Considering this thought, the ensuing several minutes of silence weighed on him strangely, as though Toby was able to hear his
55

thoughts and had been made uncomfortable by being considered part of a couple. Of course, this was the salvia talking. Mostly. Searching through the smoke-filled room with his impaired gaze, Shinto found that Toby had successfully found the floor, and smoked himself stupid in the process. Jumping clumsily over the chair in front of him like a half-assed action hero, Shinto met his friend on the floor so that he could assess the situation. Tobys lower half was splayed across the floor in a wide V, while upper-Toby was wedged into a sitting position against the bed frame, which supported him up until his shoulders. His head lolling back onto the bed at an awkward angle, Tobys eyes were fixed on the wall in front of him, enraptured by the framed poster of Machiavelli. He was beginning to be drenched in sweat, and his gaze had become a glare with a hint of cringe. Having realized that Toby was just tweaking, Shintos sense of alarm subsided into playful envy. Who says Fowler gets to have all the fun? Guy just ripped two grammes, he wont come down until dinner, I bet. Hell, my boy aint goin down this road alone! And with that bit of reasoning, Shinto managed to convince himself to smoke the rest and meet Toby on the other side. Toby paid no attention, he couldnt have even if he wanted to, for he was deep into a sermon; his idol had been preaching to him for what had felt like hours of brilliance. But Prince, what do I do once I have acquired the lands? How do I hold them as my own? There are three ways to hold them securely, Toby: first, by devastating them; next, by going and living there in person; thirdly,
56

by letting them keep their own laws, exacting tribute, and setting up an oligarchy which will keep the state friendly to you. I see...but, if I become a dictator, how will the people themselves listen to me and obey my rule? A city used to freedom can be more easily ruled through its own citizens, provided you do not wish to destroy it. But in republics there is more life, more hatred, a greater desire for revenge; the memory of their ancient liberty does not and cannot let them rest; in their case the surest way is to wipe them out or to live there in person. As the sermon ended, and Machiavellis podium began to resemble the armoire, Toby shifted his head from the now sweat-stained linens of his bed, and catching sight of the time, he wordlessly grabbed Shinto by the arm and left the room so that they would be able to make it to the dinner in time. It was Shintos turn to be unable to notice. Being led by his staff sergeant through some of the foulest trenches in Vietnam, the only thing keeping Shinto (private, second class) safe, was Sergeant Fowler leading him by the arm, the forceful grip giving him the confidence to brave the shots. * * * For a room nicknamed the Schism, Lowry sure could manage to turn it into something beyond its moniker. The Teslantis itself was almost seventy years old, and this room was one of the few that had never once been renovated. For some reason, the managers before Lowry had liked the cracked floorboard that spanned from the entry to the rear of the dining-room, and had inlaid it with cement instead of replacing it. The room, he assumed, had earned its name from the appearance of a fissure that drew the room into halves. He preferred it
57

for the political discussion it inevitably inspired. A fairly drab room, the walls were chipped black paint and red brick, with mostly empty picture frames, save the odd amateur photograph of the inlet. The table, which was the centrepiece (and only piece) of the room, was the singular point of elegance. Long, dark oak, and a tasteful cream table cloth. It was simple, but Lowry could feel the twinkle in his eye every time he laid out the linens for the monthly dinners. Seating themselves as they entered, the five of them managing to make their appearances seem like a trickling faucet, the tenants placed themselves haphazardly around the table. They didnt notice that Shinto and Toby had yet to arrive, as this was commonplace. Lowry, the motions being a preferred alternative to stasis, began to bustle around the table, greeting the sparse attendants individually. Cora, a pleasure as always! Hows Delphi? Terry, things are good? Hey there, Elizabeth, hows life across the hall from Cora? That Greek mandolin getting too loud for you? The motions going, as they tend to do, Lowry began to spread around the dishes, being sure to set a place for the latecomers. Though there were only six, all told and counted, the conversation had already risen to somewhere between a flurry and a hum; pockets of dialogue mincing across the table with each other. It was this ambient white noise that greeted Toby and Shinto, as they formally announced their entrance with the routine smell of stale fishy smoke. Something was off though, Lowry was quick to note. These guys look really out of it...Shintos eyes are barely open, and he looks terrified, He thought
58

to himself. And Toby...hes near-on the opposite! If his eyes were any wider, Id swear he had rigour mortis. This was where they were supposed to go, Toby was sure of it. He couldnt remember why, but he and Shinto had to get in there and sit down. Man, this stuff is strong. Coming in as discreetly as he could manage (easier now that Shinto was walking himself), Toby took in the room the room with what he thought was a controlled face. Seated around table, deep in discussion, were the six neighbouring dukes. There was smoke filling the room, but through the wreaths of fog, he could see a map. Browned and tattered, he could still see that it was Vancouver. Toby edged himself over to the oak table and took up his seat at the east corner. Now in full view, he could see white circles marking out the various territories. There were small green duchies in clusters near the perimeters, with long brown counterparts to mark off fully occupied land. Theyve begun to divide up the lands, and Im too late! He thought mostly to himself. Clicking his fork against the rim of his plate, Terry cracked a grin and thanked Lowry for fine lookin roast. He made a point to say nothing of the side dishes; he wasnt a big fan of peas. He turned towards the newly arrived Toby, who was slouching in the adjacent chair. How are ya, Fowler? ...too late. was the croaking reply.
59

Nah, were just sittin down now, bud. Youre fine. Wincing from the shame he felt to his subjects, Toby closed his eyes. The words sped across his inner eye: By going and living there in person. Toby, what are you doing? Terry snapped, pushing away the limp slab of roast that Toby was trying to put on his plate. Toby wasnt even looking at him; his eyes were glazed over and pointed directly at his own plate, but his arm remained thrust forwards holding the roast over Terrys plate. Noting the expression of disconnect on the meatgivers face, Terry leaned back and shrugged. He never eats it anyway, Lowry whispered from the side of his mouth. Settling himself in his chair, Lowrys mind tried to wrap itself around Toby and Shinto. What the hell are they on? Toby had stumbled into the room, barely coherent, and for some reason he was forcing his roast onto Terry. Then there was Shinto, he had just walked in silently, looking like he had just seen Hitlers ghost. There, now Ive claimed residence in the largest province! Tobys mind was a bit more at ease than it was moments ago. The duke had put up little resistance against his occupation. Leaning forward in his chair, his breathing coming easier, Toby looked up at the dukes seated around him. The rest of the table was beginning to look at him strangely, though. It began to make Toby uneasy that he was even fully acknowledged by the table, let alone that they were starting to cock their eyebrows. In republics there is more life, more hatred, a greater desire for revenge.
60

Toby didnt know who had said it, but someone had definitely just spoken to him. The memory of their ancient liberty does not and cannot let them rest; in their case the surest way is to wipe them out. Ignoring the origin of the voice, Toby preoccupied himself by taking into consideration the growing tinge of red to the faces of the dukes. They were growing hostile, he could tell. He had to act quickly, or he would be left without land or people. He grabbed a handful of his duchies. He didnt have the numbers to attack them all, but a brazen show of force at arms could intimidate them into submission. Did Toby just throw a damn handful of peas at you, Cora? Relax, Lowry! That prairie oyster is way too out of it for something that co-ordinated. Laughter. It didnt work. Tobys voice was beginning to show the fear. He had no choice now, he had to use every last resource he had. The dukes needed to understand; he was not to be taken lightly. Wipe them out. Grabbing a province in each hand, his own and that which he had recently annexed, Toby attempted to flank the entire table and close in on the centre of the map.
61

The bullets were like a swarm of bees. Even in his foxhole, Shinto knew it wasnt long before he would be clipped. He couldnt even tell the enemy apart from his own men, he could only recognize the sarge. Some of them kicked their chairs out from behind themselves and tried to duck under the table, others just threw their arms up over their faces. I knew it! Terry yelled, That freakd been sitting there every time we ate, just staring at us and talkin to himself! I knew hed snap! Another dished was launched across the room by Toby, who was now laughing uncontrollably and sending culinary shrapnel dancing across the Schism. Terry ducked under the table. Hed just ride this one out until Lowry cleaned things up. Lowry was the only man still sitting at the table, his face cocooned by his arms. Having tossed several full plates of food, Toby slumped back into his chair with a grin cut across his face. Lowry wanted to reprimand him, but he also wanted to make sure he wasnt about to be attacked. Something was definitely wrong with Toby, and he didnt like the idea of an unsure outcome. Tobys grin evaporated as his glazed eyes caught the salt and pepper shakers, still left undisturbed on the placemat in front of him. He may have been stoned, but his accuracy was deadly, assuming he was aiming for the bowl of mustard at the end of the table. The shakers collided with the bowl and sent a shower of black and white sand flying through the air, the stench of mustard hitting every tenant like a bat, whether they were above or below the table. Shinto was as deep into his foxhole as he could manage, but there was no way out. His legs crooked in front of him, he dug his heels into the earth, as if he needed to hang on. Overhead he could hear the shots
62

whistling and explosions mixed with shouts of pain. He couldnt see the sarge anymore. Shinto ran his hands along his belt, searching for what was left of his supplies. His holster was empty and his knife was gone, all he had was the handkerchief in his pocket. He supposed he had left his pack back at the camp when Sergeant Fowler had dragged him away. The battle raged on just feet above him, but Shintos mind slowed down as his thoughts began to cement. I cant believe he came back to camp. I...I was hiding, and he had to drag me back. They know Im a coward. He could feel his face sink. But as his eyes and his cheeks began to sag, his nosed perked up. Looking above him, he could see a cloud. Gas. He smelled the air that had filled his foxhole. Oh my God... There were duchies and townships everywhere. Provinces lay shattered across the map; Toby was victorious. Reclining once again in his chair, he looked across the table to a smiling Niccol. Toby...what just happened here? Im not angry, I just...whats going on with you? Lowry was being very careful with his words. I mean...well, whats done is done. I just want to know if youre okay? Well...done. Youre...youre okay, Toby. The words were coming to him slowly, filtered through the light that was filling the room. I know you guys get high before the dinners, but what were you on tonight? This wasnt weed, Toby. Im not s
63

Lowrys hedged-bet insistences were sharply cut off as he was launched from his seat. Shinto had come from under the table and attempted to leap up through the gaps in the chair legs. Splintered wood and a dazed Lowry could barely understand what was happening; Shinto, with a napkin that stank of urine held against his face, had jumped across the table at Toby, succeeding in the Teslantis ten-pin bowling paradigm of knocking out the spare from his chair. Down with the chair and its contents, came the table. Luckily the sub-table tenants had left their hiding places upon noticing Shinto urinating into a napkin, so there were no major injuries, save the floor. The Schism, living up to its name, showed a crack in the cement filler. Lowry would have shed a tear, but for the stench of urine. Straddling Toby, he yelled over and over, Sarge! Ive got ya! Sarge! Altruism, heroism, whatever he thought it was; he was stuffing the urine-soaked napkin into Fowlers mouth. The light comes for you.
64
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
65
Krecsy / Not Revived

leads ultimately to suicide and death. Under the Volcanos obsession with the past is expressed first and foremost through its perforated and interrupted narrative structure. The introductory chapter opens on the one-year anniversary of Geoffrey Firmins death, and is entirely dedicated to remembering and coming to terms with the mans passing (37). In a passage that sets the tone for the work that follows, this repetition and recurrence of the past is symbolized by the return of the same film which had played in the theatre the year before: we have not revived it. It has only returned (32). Throughout the story, the past returns abruptly, without warning. Fully twenty percent of the narrative is dedicated to flashbacks or external analepses which arise with hallucinogenic fluidity (Walker 56), forming a narrative which cannot be considered linear, but rather both circular and static (55). As Lowry makes clear in an oft-quoted letter, the work should be seen as essentially trochal. I repeat, the form of it is a wheel, so that, when you get to the endyou should want to turn your eyes back to the beginning again (Kuhlken 214). The very structure of the work presents history as a circular repetition, something which returns even if unbidden. If this world seems laden, even constructed, by the past, it is also a thoroughly modern world in the sense that it is deprivedof the consolations of religion and the certainties of metaphysics (White 234). At the outset of the novel, the late Consuls drinking partner, his elusive and allusive MD, one Dr. Vigil, provides a pertinent introduction to this situation while discussing Firmins death. It is his professional opinion that sickness is not only in body, but in that part used to be call: soul (11). The good doctors peculiar terminology should not be misconstrued as a subset of his peculiar syntax, but rather as emblematic of a larger trend within the novel. The qualified use of soul here suggests that while spiritual terminology is no longer appropriate in the modern world, there is as of yet no proper descriptive or conceptual replacement. In a later
66

chapter in one repetition in a novel predominantly constructed of them Vigil repeats this claim to the still living Firmin, who questions the Doctors anachronistic phrase. Vigil assures him the term is correct, while expanding on the meaning: the soul is an eclectic systeme. This in turn puts the Consul at ease, as in his less than sober state, he understands the man to mean an electric system, a thoroughly scientific and demystified concept (148). This phrase and Firmins (mis)understanding of it is the first of many examples of demystification at play in Lowrys Mexico. While the Mexican landscape is littered with ruined churches (242), it is not ruination alone that has visited the country. Unlike Vigils terminology, the spiritual vacuum besetting Mexico has been filled with a secular appropriation of the Churchs symbols and trappings. The blood of Christ remains, but in an absurd and sacrilegiously transubstantiated form: it is housed in cantinas, whose opening in the morning is greeted with celestial complicated and hopeless joy that wouldnt be equalled even by the sight of the gates of heaven, opening wide to receive [him] (55). Firmin drinks as if [he] were taking an eternal sacrament (45), while dragging his guilt into cloisters and under tapestries, and into the misericordes of unimaginable cantinas (41); Cantinas housed in abandoned monks quarters (119), into which he flees shouting something like Sanctuario! (36). Furthermore, drunken doctors both symbols of secular healing and a pun on Catholic doctors must comport themselves like apostles (142), while the Consul himself is mistaken for the Christ for the thoroughly un-messianic act of spotting a drunkard four drinks (204). These examples of appropriation, coupled with Vigils terminology, demonstrate a secularization that is as thorough as it is unsatisfactory. It is unsatisfactory because the outcomes of this transformation are entirely powerless to cure Firmins sickness; a sickness unto death which as the quotes above suggest is
67

inextricably linked to his guilty past. Lowry establishes the Consul as a sort of lachrymose pseudo Lord Jim at the outset of his novel (39). Both are guilty of crimes which they seem incapable of atoning for, though Firmins actions are especially heinous: the burning alive of a number of German officers in the furnaces of a ship under his command, agreeably named the S.S. Samaritan. Though this event is steeped in a great deal of ambiguity the Consuls second-hand drunken proclamation of the fact he suffered horribly from guilt is coupled with a sardonic declaration of the single-handed accomplishment himself of the deed the fact remained the Germans had been put there and it was no use saying that was the best place for them (39). Even if the Consuls confession should be discarded, one cannot dismiss the fact that his mind chatters guiltily (148), and he drunkenly interprets the daily headlines to read: Old Samaritan case to be reopened, Commander Firmin believed in Mexico. Firmin found guilty, acquitted, cries in box. Firmin innocent, but bears guilt of world on shoulders. Body of Firmin found drunk in bunker (140-141). It is only too fitting when we learn that the actual headlines bring news of the inevitable death of the Pope (217). Importantly, this sense of guilt is not limited to Geoffrey alone. Though his past is especially haunting, Hugh Firmin battles a similar demon of guilt, although he is beset not by the voices and visions of delirium tremens, but by the landscape itself:
You are a liar, said the trees tossing in the garden. You are a traitor, rattled the plantain leaves. And a coward too, put in some fitful sounds of music that might have meant that in the zocolathe fair was beginning. And they are losing the Battle of the Ebro. Because of you, said the wind. A traitor even to your journalist friends you like to run down and who are really courageous men, admit it. (154-5)
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
68

suppose that he is no worse than anyone else, and that is the point: no worse than anybody else, it is still no good (155). He signs up for a suicide mission delivering weapons to the Loyalist armies in Spain long after any benefit could be achieved in a desperate hope to atone, atone for my past, so largely negative, selfish, absurd, and dishonest (156). This whole endeavour is appealing solely for the fact that it is so futile, so utterly hopeless, the equivalent to a martyrdom (157), performed for the True Church the Communist party (242). As such, not only do the filial Firmins share a sense of guilt, they share their suicidal tendencies. We should note that in the midst of all this genuflection, Hugh passes an old church from whose wall a figure of Christ on the cross had been removed leaving only the scar and the legend (156), just as Geoffrey later stumbles upon the newspaper pertaining to the Popes death. Lowry contrasts the inability to atone for the past to examples of the waning Christian tradition, in order to demonstrate the lack of recourse to the traditional consolation of God. In an instructive passage, Hugh likens his situation to a Mexicancommunist, Jaun Cerillo, who killed his father and whose footsteps were plagued by guilt and sorrowtoo, for he was not a Catholic who could rise refreshed from the cold bath of confession (112). The point is that the Firmins, along with the modern world constructed by Lowry - with its inevitably dying Pope, ruined monks quarters converted to cantinas, the sign of the cross only visible in its absence cannot rise refreshed from the cold bath of confession and suffer for it. With this in mind, let us again recall Dr. Vigils diagnosis; Firmin suffers from a sickness of the soul, a sickness of the soul which he tries, pathetically, to drink away, because the possible atonement of the church has been replaced by the impotency of drink, of communism, of the law (recall Firmins hallucination, where he believes he will be found acquitted or found innocent, and still finds no relief). From this perspective, Hayden Whites summation of
69

Ricoeurs Memory, History, Forgetting is particularly informative: if we are suffering from anything, it is from too much history. The guilt producing that sickness unto death from which we suffer is guilt by history. (234). The shared concern of Lowry and Ricoeur is unequivocally demonstrated when the image of a young man leaving a cantina, with an older man strapped to his back, trembling in every limb under this weight of the pastwho carried both their burdens is enough to start the Consul drinking mescal (281), almost absentmindedly (283). For a drunk of the Consuls stature, this hardly seems noteworthy. However, he always held, regardless of his drunken state, that it was only mescal which would lead him to real trouble, and swore not to drink it. Even more damning is the fact that only moments before he had finally expressed the full state of his degradation to his ex-wife Yvonne, declared his love for her and his desire to leave Mexico, both statements were both sincerely reciprocated (279). While this trigger for the Consuls final breakdown is hardly surprising from a narrative standpoint, the implications of this only become clear when the connection between Firmin and what Hayden White calls the great crimes of our century are drawn tight (243). Under the Volcano must be read under the pall of World War II, for even if we could overlook Hughs own investment in the ideological precursor of the greater European war or the Fascist overtones of the military police who shoot Geoffrey, we cannot overlook the Consuls dying hallucination of the inconceivable pandemonium of a million tanks, through the blazing of ten million burning bodies which demands such a connection (375). In this context, if Firmin truly is being enormously funny about the whole situation of the Samaritan when he states people simply did not go roundputting Germans in furnaces (30), it is humor of the blackest gallows; as Lowry wrote in a world where people quite simply did go around putting Germans into furnaces. With this, Firmins guilt of a horrible, yet
70

unforgettable, past becomes the guilt of our modernity, his abortive and impossible attempt to atone for it, becomes ours, as conceived of by Paul Ricoeur: modernity in turn is nothing other than a product of the discovery that we are responsible for our humanity and can look to no one other than ourselves to heal us of the memories of the great crimes committed during the twentieth century (White 243). This is the reason that the guilt which haunts the Firmins is so superfluous and ambiguous regardless of their actions they are, they must be guilty. While their guilt, their sickness unto death, may be entirely illusory and almost certainly unwarranted, and they may indeed be no worse than anyone else, they are nevertheless guilty. This is the pivotal lesson of the work, because culpability, guiltis implied in every contingent situation and belongs toour historical condition (Ricoeur 460). It is for this reason as well that the narrative structure of the story is both circular and static, as the machinery of time itself is out of joint. Weighed down by the past, we have already seen that its expected linearity turns back unto itself Uroboros-like. Without the redemptive capacity of Christ and the narrative teleology of Christianity, where time is [conceived of as] continually new, continually ecstatic, continually fruitful, superior qualitatively and quantitatively to the old time of the pagans and Jews (White 243), time falls back into itself, a wheel within wheels, leaving a Nietzchian eternal recurrence of history the order of the day indeed the order of all days past, present and future. Unable to find redemption in or from history, we are left simply with its repetition. The Consul, in a considerable drunken stupor, makes this eminently clear when he questions the value of going to fight or intervene in any nation, at any time:
All this, for instance, about going to fight for Spain and poor little defenseless China! not long ago it was poor little defenseless Ethiopia, poor little defenseless Flanders poor little defenseless Belgian Congo. And tomorrow it will be poor little defenseless Latvia. 71

Or Finland. Or Piddledeedee. Or even Russia. Read history. Go back a thousand years. What is the use of interfering with its worthless stupid course. (311)
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.
72
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.
73
Leisure Emily Fedoruk

Many early texts that employ the term leisure refer to circumstances that are not bound by employment: Alison, the heroine in Chaucers Millers Tale (c. 1405), makes a promise to a new lover to avail herself of the first opportunity to cheat on her husbandshe wol been at his comandement, / Whan that she may hir leyser wel espye (ll. 3292-3; emphasis added). Meanwhile, in the ambiguously authored Romaunt of the Rose (c. 1366), the narrator details an allegorical dream in which the lady he loves finds herself For nakid as a worme, a state in which Grete leyser had she to quake (ll. 454, 462; emphasis added). These examples denote the freedom or opportunity to do something specified or implied, a state which relates more immediately to personal choice, behaviour or possibility than narrower definitions which describe opportunit[ies] afforded by freedom from occupations (Leisure). While these narrower definitions occur in textual examples contemporary with Chaucer and Romant, they have become dominantas designations of states of leisure disconnected from systems of occupation or duty have fallen into rare use or obsolescence. Etymologically, leisure is derived from the Old French leisir, which translates closely to the modern French loisir and associates with the Latin word licre (to be permitted) (Leisure). This foundational aspect of permission connotes social systems that impose order and regulate the individuals use of time and space, determinants that come to constrain our idea of leisure. For Michel Foucault, modern discipline is achieved spatially, through the art of distributions, and temporally, in the control of activity (141, 149). Individuals are physically confined in spaces of enclosure such as schools, military barracks, and factories and manufacturing spaces. During the eighteenth century, this last
74
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
75
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,
76
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
77
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
78
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
E.Fedoruk / Leisure
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.
80
from Playgrounds Christina Dasom Song
Sheep
81
Song / from Playgrounds
Nude Tennis
82
Song / from Playgrounds
The Blob
83
from Legitimate Nightmares David Nykyforuk
84
Nykyforuk / from Legitimate Nightmares
85
86
87
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
88
Wilson / Monument and Memory

individuals who experienced them; therefore, the approach that delineates the uniqueness of the Holocaust is appropriate and satisfies a specific understanding of the events within the context of a specific demographic. Secondly, there is the constructivist approach: This method presents the Holocaust as a culture-specific paradigm which is inherently pre-disposed to be dealt with and experienced in the context of the community if is presented to. In America, many Historians posit that the constructivist approach is employed due to American proximity from the actual events, and that as a society there is no cohesive or actual collective memory of the event. The Holocaust, therefore, must be experienced second-hand, and therefore Americans are only able to experience it through their unique cultural precedents and understandings. This understanding, however, relies on very specific and conventional stereotypes which are unique to the American concept of identity within the global community. As Noa Gedi and Yigal Elam discuss in their examination of collective memory, there is a tendency to refer to subconscious familiarity with an idea or concept which relies on our cultural and individual experience. These concepts, they argue, are more aptly referred to as collective subconscious than collective memory, an etymological nuance which I consider to be appropriate given that the tendency to rely on the term memory is most often in cases where there is no actual memory (31). I oppose their theory, however, in terms of their operationalization of the term. I would argue that the term collective memory is not a poor substitute for political tradition or myth in specific contexts where the intent to operationalize the term stems from a desire to categorize both those concepts where they are not mutually exclusive with each other or with the intended purposes of their vehicle of memory (Elam and Gedi 31). Where I intend to implement this concept is in the specific case of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. As the selfproclaimed national monument to the Holocaust, the USHMM
89

therefore stands outside the scope of traditional museums and becomes in and of itself an icon in the American interaction with the Holocaust. The USHMM relies on a specific collective memory (political tradition), which attracts audiences, and produces another collective memory (myth) with which to perpetuate the former. In this instance, the term collective memory denotes both of the terms Gedi and Elam are concerned with. However, in this process, I would argue that these concepts become collective memory insofar as the audience is required to use one set of collective memory to produce another. The political tradition is distilled into a tangible memory through the museological mechanisms the curators and directors of the museum have employed. The interaction between American audiences with the USHMM becomes greater than the sum of its parts through the intentional and unintentional exchange between the Museums collective memory and the audiences collective subconscious. The tendency to deal with the Holocaust as exceptionalist often positions the events as non-reality as one-time experiences which had never occurred before and must never again repeat. Many historians are hesitant to employ this method as it fails to address the relativity and complexity of good and evil in the Holocaust universe. The constructivist view of representation allows societies to express the Holocaust in terms which are most appropriate and relatable to themselves. One may argue, as I do, that the American perspective, as a society that contains one of the most heterogeneous and culturally diverse populations, relies on both. The Holocaust in America is presented simultaneously as exceptional and relative: Us (Americans/Jews) and Them (Nazis/Collaborators). The mechanisms which fuelled the memory of the Holocaust from a period of relative ambiguity in the American post-war period to an overwhelming literary, film, and institutional presence are the ones
90

which inspired, constructed, and maintain the memory of the Holocaust in Americans national monument to it. On May 1, 1978, American president Jimmy Carter revealed his initiative to build an American memorial to the Holocaust; in the wake of the growing popularity of film and television programs which attempted to expose the Holocaust experience, and as a gesture of support and recognition to the American-Jewish community, plans for the national monument were sustained into the Clinton administration (Mintz 27). As it stands currently, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) is one of the largest attractions in Washington DC, having attracted over 30 million visitors since its opening in 1993. Situated adjacent to the National Mall, the museum is among the monumental buildings erected to define American national heritage in the capital. Prior to its opening in 1993, the national Holocaust memorial endured expectedly tumultuous periods of planning and organization. Specifically, the monument was required to take into account the explosion of new identity politics resulting not only from the immigration of Holocaust survivors to America, but due to the already diasporic and ethnically diverse populations of the United States. The question for the USHMMs organizers was ostensibly simple: how to investigate and represent an inherently unique and unprecedented event while encouraging a discourse on genocide, human rights violations, and prejudice to a diverse and culturally varied audience. In the transition from presidential announcement to implementation, the Museum passed hands from the political administration, who spoke of a collective eleven-million victims including Poles, the Roma and Sinti, homosexuals, political opponents, Soviets, Communists, Christian groups, and others to a predominantly Jewish committee, whose chair, Elie Wiesel, possessed a more Jewish-focused perspective: the six-million (Mintz 27).
91

In addition to Wiesel, the American Holocaust Council featured several other Holocaust survivors who supported his imperative to protect their Holocaust against what they perceived to be a dilution of the Nazis primary focus to eradicate (Mintz 27). The aforementioned film and television representations, in particular the popular mini-series Holocaust, additionally motivated survivors to redirect public culture towards what they believed to be a more accurate and non-exploitive narrative. To this end, Wiesel and his colleagues attempted to canonize the Holocaust experience among the most elaborate and trusted artifact-filled institutions in the nation: the monuments on the National Mall. This museum would serve to imprint upon the American public the real story of the Holocaust, that it is as important in America as it is in Europe, and that there is a uniquely American lesson and identity to be extracted. I will explore this concept in following sections. Unable to reconcile his perspective on a Judeo-centric Holocaust focus, with the political pressures to universalize the events, Wiesel eventually resigned from the project with Michael Berenbaum replacing him as Director. The resulting exhibit(s) organized by Berenbaum at the USHMM ultimately underscore Wiesels perspective by featuring the Jewish experiences as a lens with which to understand the experiences of the other victims. Today, the USHMMs permanent exhibition enhances the tragedies inflicted upon the Jews of Europe through a limited explanation of the fate experienced by five million other victims of the Nazi regime. The Permanent Exhibition, which spans 3 floors and encompasses 18 designation sections, includes an exceptional number of photographs, artifacts, visuals, audio segments, reproductions, and other interactive museological mechanisms with which to illustrate and educate the events of Nazi Assault 1933-1939, The Final Solution 1940-1945, and Last Chapter (Permanent Exhibition Guide).
92

Museum directors were faced with the daunting task of reconciling visitors sensitivities to violence and brutality, graphic imagery, and cultural understandings with the events they were compelled to exhibit. As is one of the primary pedagogical questions of any Holocaust educator, the influence of an audiences culture and experiences would be a complex hurdle for Berenbaum and his colleagues: How can the events of the Holocaust in Europe be filtered, without unnecessary dilution, to an efficacious historical monument and museum for American children, students, adults, and survivor visitors? The answer, it would seem, was to follow the standard set by earlier precedents. This standard of the Holocaust in American life was one which, rather than outlining the Holocaust and Americas response, emphasized America in the context of the Second World War and the Jewish diaspora. If one examines the USHMM in the context of America, rather than The Holocaust, it is unsurprising that the Museum is normalized among the National Mall in Washington D.C. Despite the extensive and thorough examination and exploration of the Holocaust in the Museum, and the obvious curatorial and pedagogical talents of the directors and staff, it is clear (to a non-American at least) that the USHMM quite literally has situated The Holocaust amongst the historical trajectory of the American identity and experience. This is not to say that it is unacceptable or misguided indeed it makes much sense to orchestrate events of this magnitude and comprehensive difficulty in a manner which allows it to be interpreted in a culturespecific paradigm to promote understanding. Where American audiences could potentially as is the case in many Holocaust education programs perceive the Jews and other victims as an Other, at the USHMM there are mechanisms at work which directly link (both thematically and literally, with victim ID cards) the audience to the subject.
93

The presence of Holocaust survivors on the American Holocaust Committee reveals not only an American initiative to respect and support Jewish-Americans and their particular interests, but speaks to what Alan Mintz refers to as a new stage in the profile of former victims of the Holocaust (Mintz 28). As unquestionable experts in the Holocaust experience these individuals had enormous control over the content, curation, and representations which were to be featured in the Museum. With the courage to testify and share their experiences, these individuals were invaluable in providing personal and informative narratives that implanted in the Museum a sense of reality. Additionally, this direction would lead to the development of an institution with a dual identity: simultaneously an educational museum and a somber memorial to the dead. It is in this duality that one may extract the distinctly American experience in approaching and responding to the Holocaust. The USHMMs official Mission Statement is supported by documents indicting the institutions Values and Principles, which outline basic motives, perspectives, purpose, and intended audiences. In particular, this list features the predominant identification of the museum as a product by and for American audiences:
5. We are an American institution, mandated by the American government, built and supported by the American people. As such, we have an obligation to present the history of the Holocaust and other genocides with a special emphasis on Americas role, American responsibility, and American values. (Strategic Plan 5) i
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
94

they are, as it is a museum about individuals and groups from a foreign land, encountering the Other as objective students of History. This is where the Museum, and other Historians on the subject, fail to identify a critical threshold; the environment of the museum, within the context of the National Mall and Washington D.C., appears objective. It appears, as any museum would to a noncritical observer, educational, emotive, awesome and academic. There is a shift which occurs once one passes through the doors of the USHMM where one feels transitioned from the center of American culture and identity to a separate, almost mundane atmosphere of a museum. This transition ostensibly removes the visitor from the sphere of America and transports them into the Holocaust - yet is this detachment so easily achieved? In a discussion of American film representations, NPR film editor Ella Taylor noted the divorce of thought and feeling in popular depictions of the Holocaust. To successfully introduce the horrific and often incomprehensive behemoth of genocide, filmmakers, historians, museum directors and educators are often required to fold history into a palatable narrative for mass audiences. In doing so, these representations create and adhere to a specific collective memory which, in the American example, permits and perpetuates the notion of national inextricability with the Holocaust. Cultural Historian Maurice Halbwachs notes, It is in society that people normally acquire their memories. It is also in society that they recall, recognize, and localize their memories (qtd. in Olick 334). In the case of the USHMM, the memory of the Holocaust is literally produced for individuals who have limited or no knowledge of the events. As groups of individuals visiting the Museum, they acquire a particular memory that is subsequently reenforced not only by other American interpretations and representations of the Holocaust, but more acutely by the additional monuments of American identity and history that appear to them upon
95

their exit. To further apply Halbwachs theory of society in this context, I would argue that American political culture additionally reenforces identities of liberator in the global arena. Jeffrey Olick, in his essay on collective memory, is concerned with Halbwachs inability to provide a paradigm with which to study socially framed individual memories and collective commemorative representations (336). To this end, I suggest that in this example individuals are no doubt constructing memories of the Holocaust based on their personal associations (Jewish, German, etc.), yet the impact of the Museums Permanent Exhibition is most effective in appealing to the broader collective association of American above all other denominations. The mneumonic traces of society for Halbwachs are illustrated quite firmly in the case of the USHMM which, unlike many other Holocaust museums or memorials, simultaneously describe several groups history through liminal exhibition while subliminally educating the viewer on his or her own identity.ii Olick is curious as to the ontological differences (potential and real) of the use of the term collective memory to describe commemorations, popular culture, and other forms of social memory construction (336). In particular, his description of the broad applications of the term collective memory, and more importantly lieux de memoire raises some interesting questions in regards to the USHMM. Is the USHMM a lieux de memoire? To answer this, I employ the strategy of referring to commemorative and other pattern-maintenance activities as collective memory machines. The process which produces collective memory, I would argue, is one which is implemented by groups, governments, institutions, and organizations. Our affiliation to these groups produces contexts which allow one to create personalized affirmations or rejections, perpetuate broad characterizations of what memory is, and additionally regulate how we as individuals may approach it. The difference I
96

would argue, between individualistic and collective procedures, does not arise from an ontological operationalization of the term collective memory, but instead is determined by what the intent of the lieux de memoire is. If an institutions or a society has pre-existing cultural norms or political cultures which provide templates for historical and cultural representations, they are in the process of permitting and perpetuating collective memory. Collective memory may belong to only a single individual in one of these groups, but the fact that it is influenced by these mechanisms suggests that it is not the memory of the individual it belongs to, and was inspired by, the collective. The memories produced at the USHMM are, in my view and those of Jeffrey Olick, collected insofar as different groups interact with and perceive the Permanent Exhibit differently, each group with specific emphases (338). Olick, however, maintains that it is only visitors (humans) that actually remember, and therefore the objects and artifacts on display do not possess lives of their own (338). I disagree despite their inanimate nature, the objects on display at the USHMM and in any Holocaust representational institution contain within themselves triggers a visitor to the USHMM may only react to a milk can belonging to Emanuel Ringelblum if they are preemptively possessive of a memory/knowledge of this item. Every visitor, on the other hand, will have a visceral, intrinsic response to the reproduction of the Arbeit Macht Frei gate banner reproduction. This is due to the inherent triggers one is susceptible to given a particular cultural education. However, the object itself is a vehicle for this trigger: one object, such as the gate banner, is recognizable to a wide variety of cultures, languages and peoples. It evokes varying levels of recognition in audiences, as we as varying levels of emotion. Symbols, such as these, are created, for various purposes, to evoke recognition they do not change, but our relationship with them does. Gedi and Elam are critical of Pierre Noras definition of History versus Memory: Nora considers History to belong to
97

everyone and to no one, while memory is life...actual phenomenonabsolute, a distinction that the authors take great offense to (33). While Nora is accurate in outlining the fallacious nature of History, I also take issue with the concept of memory as anything other than relative: in the case study of the USHMM, the criticism of Nora is appropriate due to the obvious intent of museum directors and curators to depict the Holocaust in a definitively factual and anthropological manner. Specifically, the Museums proximity to artifact havens such as the Smithsonian reveals an inherent desire to be viewed as historical, educational, factual, and objective. The memory that these authors speak of is quite obviously split into the factual memory of the Museum and the collective subconscious, as it were, of the audience. Gedi and Elam are not convinced that memory is adequately defined by the term collective; the authors are critical of the claim that memories of groups can be greater than the sum of their parts and that it is inaccurate to propose metaphysical determinations about the traditions of individuals (33). In the case of the USHMM, I would argue that there does in fact exist a memory beyond the distinction of the individual: the memory of the Holocaust is constructed by the Museum to produce an air of receptiveness in visitors; their memories are blended with History which contributes and perpetuates the spectre of American identity and historical consciousness. There exists, not in the reality of the Museumaudience relationship, but in the apparent reality of the relationship, a great divide and hegemonic distinction between what is known and what is remembered. The example of the USHMM is of particular use to discuss Alon Confinos theory of constructed memory. In particular, I am drawn to his assertion that There is too often a facile mode of doing cultural history, whereby one picks a historical event or a vehicle of memory, analyzes its representation or how people perceive it over time, and draws conclusions about memory (or collective memory)
98

(1388). Subsequently, the difficile mode, if you will, of cultural memory study acknowledges that it is not the event (the Holocaust) that is to be studied in this example. Rather, it is the particular representation of the event, which, due to its far-reaching and iconic status among Holocaust representations, has become a canon itself for historical discourse and study. Collective memory, according to the theories of Gedi, Elam, and Confino, relate to the impact on our consciousness by competing and often contradictory modes of representation that result in particular personal and collective conceptions of an event or idea. The collective memory of the American identity is made to complete with the collective subconscious of the Holocaust at the USHMM. Subsequently, the Museum transcends the liminal into becoming a lieux de memoire, it is exempt from the theoretical concerns that limit the representation as an entity which produces memory the USHMM than a selfsatisfying and self-patterning mechanism which produces, permits, and perpetuates American identity politics rather than Holocaust consciousness. Through this examination of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, I have approached the subject of the Holocaust in America through conventions and cultural history theory that I consider inadequate due to the unique nature of the institution. I have attempted to uncover the particular broad-scale applications of cultural memory theory and their role (or lack thereof) in the production and expression of the history of the Holocaust at the USHMM. There exists in the study of the Holocaust a particular nature of exceptionalism insofar as Historians, cultural experts, nations, and individuals are inspired to approach the subject as an event outside the scope of traditional historical and memory study. This is not necessarily due to a conviction that the Holocaust as an event is outside the realm of other historical tragedies, but that as a subject of
99

study it requires particular and specific methods to deal with its impact on the groups who experienced as well as the groups who encounter it after the fact. I attribute this tendency to treat the Holocaust as unique and exceptionally delicate to several things: Primarily, the scale of the events and the number of victims produces a culture of nationhood for victims and a simultaneous individuality of experience. Since it is impossible to express every victims experience adequately, museums, institutions, literature, film, and other modes of representation are often defined by their difficulty to reconcile the Holocaust experience to the Holocaust memory. What one is left with is a history of incomplete, specific, and largely contradictory Holocaust representations in America, who has struggled as a nation to come to terms with her own responsibilities to express that which is international knowledge, but which belongs to individuals. The tendency to use traditional methods of memory-study and representation to express the Holocaust to the Other (nonvictims) has produced a culture of the Holocaust, a myth, and exploitative measure of what is correct and effective. Unlike other historical events, the Holocaust occupies a specific niche in its study and representation: It is defined by and operates via guidelines which were created to properly deal with the events, but have now escalated to perpetuate a culture which inhibits and restricts movement beyond it. In the case of the USHMM, the culture that produces the Museum and the collective memory of the audiences who visit it are one in the same. Therefore, one cannot reasonably remove the Holocaust at the USHMM from the context of American political and cultural tradition; The Holocaust in this example is restricted from being explored or studied beyond the confined of the American experience. This appropriation, however unintentional, subsequently produces a counter-intuitive classification of the events as American, as wholly expressed by the monument, and for its visitors a bookend to their experience with the Holocaust.
100
Emphasis present in original document.
ii
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.
101
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.
102
Some Objects of the Affluent Society Sara Saljoughi

Heirloom Tomatoes
Its all very betraying, how we eat. - M. F. K. Fisher i
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
103
Saljoughi / Some Objects

and potatoes, canned peas, etc. but one could practice the art of being a gourmand, first with the wallet and, eventually, with the knife and cutting board. You are what you eat is a clich, but one that persists as the bedrock of the mythology of heirloom tomatoes, even if it is also you are not them, if you eat this. Even as it claims, everyone was this, we became them and now we must go back to who we were, by eating this. In other words, everyone is invited to the party that tries, through the logic of capital, to circumvent the passing of time. Stay behind at your own risk. The heirloom tomato sits at the crux of a cluster of food practices such as the Slow Food movement, urban agriculture, and foodie culture more broadly. Though heavily self-documented in subject-specific blogs, magazines, television programs, books, films and even academic journals (Gastronomica, Food and Foodways), this foodie culture lacks self-reflexivity despite its claims to changing the practices of everyday life. A book such as David Kamps The United States of Arugula: The Sun Dried, Cold Pressed, Dark Roasted, Extra Virgin Story of the American Food Revolution (2007) traffics itself as reflective of a dominant cultural practice, and is readily accepted as such by those occupying critical positions in the new food intelligentsia. Revolution ceases to be revolution as such. The dominant here necessarily signifies that which is ideologically dominant but practiced only by a minority. Here we must ask who feeds this minority, and how is this minority fed? Heirloom: first, something that is passed down through generations or a singular item of personal property, such a thing belonging to an estate. And an open-pollinated cultivar, meaning not a hybrid breed, but pure. Heirloom tomatoes persist because of the first, non-scientific meaning. This persistence of meaning transcends the actual fruit and is evocative of the broader foodie culture. When we eat locally cultivated fruits and vegetables, when we recover lost varieties, we link ourselves to our past. If we want to remember
104

who we are [who we can and should be], we better turn our noses at the fluorescent mono-foods of our history-as-present. Without wanting to do so, the New Yorkers forced relation between the heirloom tomato and the apple of gold transcends the mere translation of the Italian pomodoro (literally pomo doro). Instead it reminds us that sexual relations, the family structure and the hierarchies of the favoured and unfavoured are present at every eating. S/he who reads the right books and patronizes the right establishes deserves recognition; s/he deserves the golden apple. And yet, the heirloom is rightfully owed to us as members of a family. We therefore have the right to purchase it indeed we should, if we want to honour that family even if we do not speak these reasons or belong to the poets of foodie culture. The purveyors of this way of life those who eat the heirloom tomato - are trying to produce a critique of industrial food. This critique is ineffectual because it does not understand its own position in relation to bourgeois ideology. It summons the everyday person a graduate student, a clerk, a bank teller, a school teacher to go to the farmers market and buy one or two heirloom tomatoes rather than the five or six mass-produced Roma or hothouse tomatoes s/he could purchase for the same price. The critique contained in the ethos of the heirloom tomato-eaters says: be happy with less, because this less is of greater value (to your physical and mental health, your joie de vivre, your community, the environment, the world), even though its value perishes much faster than that of its genetically manufactured cousin. But to see the heirloom tomato as the locus of commodity fetishism does not explain it fully: if every last seed and plant were to be destroyed indeed, all remnants of the object obliterated the heirloom tomato would endure. Its meaning translates into many different cultural practices or onto other objects. Approach an urban farmer with chickens in her Brooklyn backyard. Point to one chicken
105

and say, look, an heirloom tomato! and you will discover in her affirmation: these are not lunatic words. Erudite as she was, M. F. K. Fishers betrayal does not suffice for a critique of the heirloom tomato because it is the critique of the heirloom tomato. The New, Weird America Arthur magazine, 2006. This is the precise moment at which the New, Weird America reaches the height of its popularity no longer a marginal subcategory of indie rock and its simultaneous exit as the arcane, unlistenable and therefore radical heir to the ethos of the 1990s. The New, Weird America is not a movement, having never declared itself such. It reflects, instead, an organizing term used by music journalists and cultural commentators. It is an attempt, lazy to be sure, to join politically a group of musicians whose influences range from heavy metal to free jazz to tropiclia to prog. Sometimes, even the politically abject bubblegum pop and the choruses of Phil Spectors ravaged girl groups din their far off presence. But the likes of the Ronettes are much too urban for the New, Weird America; Spectors wall of sound heavily mediates between expression and commodity. It does not thrive as acknowledged influence. On the contrary, it has enjoyed obscurity even when employed as technique in the halls of the New, Weird America. In short, the term describes a style of music that emerged roughly around 2003. The progenitors of the New, Weird America are, broadly speaking, psychedelia and folk. Together they produce psych-folk, something thought of as less drug-fuelled and shallow and less earnest-happy as its forerunners, respectively. On the fringes of the New, Weird America lies a spectrum of artists whose work can be characterized as experimental, avant-garde composition, noise, psychpunk and various other sub-genres. They all have an intimate
106

relationship to psych-folk. Names are important here too. Bands called Vetiver, Espers, Psychic Ills, White Magic, Sunburned Hand of the Man, CoCoRosie, Six Organs of Admittance, Fursaxa, MV & EE and the Bummer Road. The New, Weird America is named so weird precisely because of its relationship to the idea of the unlistenable, as well as the way music journalism has positioned it as a new movement: a musical orphan without a past. You might recognize a feature here, a trait there, but in the end, it is unclear just who would claim this unkempt child. The mythology that permeates music journalism thus reasons that this movement is weird because it is unlistenable and unlistenable because it is from nowhere. It is not that we do not like what we hear or that it is difficult to listen, but that we do not yet have the ears, do not yet know how to listen to this novel thing. Through the logic of the unlistenable, the New, Weird America is the heir to the ethos of the 1990s. How and why. Perhaps the Texan lo-fi one-woman recording machine Jana Hunter captured it best with the title of her 2005 album, Blank Unstaring Heirs of Doom. A blank, unstaring heir: a receptacle, a muted misfit. The raw power of 1990s independent rock and its, yes, unabashed attachment to corporate record companies expresses itself in psych-folks turn away from what gave birth to the 1990s. Is Tori Amos as present as Sandy Denny in Joanna Newsom? The so-called novelty of the New, Weird America relies on disavowing what could be perceived as a sonic debt to 1990s alternative rock. The myth of new, weirdness makes itself generative by suggesting that whereas the end of the 1990s left us with the bankruptcy of such crowd-pleasing acts as the Flaming Lips, this movement makes music you cannot listen to: it makes you listen, even if you hate it. The Beloved Music: take this wretched, beautiful and nearly unlistenable forty-five minute improvised set by drummer Chris Corsano and sax player Paul Flaherty. Corsanos polyrhythms are
107

above, below and around the painful chalkboard-scrawl of Flahertys saxophone. Corsano and Flaherty are perched at the fringes of New, Weird America they are part of the New England freakout scene. Thurston Moore slums it with the likes of Corsano and the No Neck Blues Band. One can scarcely imagine anyone putting on the disc as background music, Corsanos drum attack disrupting any normal activity. No, one must put the record on, and sit down, in front of the record player and just listen. A mere 300 copies were pressed; Corsano and Flaherty rarely play shows for more than a sizable group of friends. And yet, this is our music: the writing on the New, Weird America, indeed the dominant reading of it, distorts any new concept of noise it might produce by wrenching it away from any recognizable past. Joanna Newsom, both the icon and queen bee of all that is new and weirdly American, is described in the pages of Arthur as a singular artist she appears to emerge from nowhere! Not a physical nowhere her northern California provenance has been chronicled in her work and the work about her, not to mention her early San Francisco-based affiliation with that other psych-folk demi-god, Devendra Banhart but a musical nowhere. It has been said that like Van Morrisons Astral Weeks, Patti Smiths Horses, or Robert Wyatts Rock Bottom, her second album, Ys, had no conceivable predecessor. We have never heard anything like this before but to understand it, we must learn about all the music that influenced (came before?) her cryptic lyricism and its accompanying harp compositions. Arthur is not alone in promoting this paradox. Wire, the London-based magazine that chronicled avant-whatever long before it was grouped under the New, Weird America said the same things about Newsom, as did the less erudite Pitchfork. Music critic Erik Davis cites the spirit of prog, the Renaissance, Celtic folklore, Van Der Graaf Generator, Trespass-era Genesis and the literary as crucial to understanding Ys. But that is not all: However, I would
108

urge you even farther back, to the great songs on the great Incredible String Band records, which also embroider earth visions onto patchwork tunes that combine heavy insights and bucolic play. The Incredible String Band, along with Fairport Convention, Pentangle, and other British folk-rock bands form the other nexus of both Newsoms music and the New, Weird America at large. Greil Marcus old, weird America once used to describe Harry Smiths Anthology of American Folk Music and later revised as the new title for Invisible Republic, Marcus book about Bob Dylans basement tapes could not have anticipated the transatlantic and colonial resonances of the new, weird America. Dressed in Renaissance Faire garb or wearing feather headdresses, the artists of the New, Weird America largely eschew the American 1960s. What they deem radical is decidedly older. There is a sense that it would be embarrassing to connect their music to anything remotely hippie. Bob Dylan might as well be a curse word. But what then are the politics of old-timey America? Hear the New, Weird America speak. Kids born in the early 1980s and from the suburbs of Boston say they were born near Salem to affect accents more suited to the British folk-rock they are trying to emulate. Here we have The Saga of Mayflower May, for example. Who sings silently between these American songbooks? The New Weird America traffics in the idea of the rustic, or back to the land. Newsoms latest, Have One on Me, is replete with allusions to westward expansion, settling the land, home and hearth. There are dozens of online communities devoted to deciphering her lyrics. The persistence of what could be called the eternal, normal America (manifest destiny) is now found in something dubbed outsider music. Outsider music is unlistenable music. What does it mean to call a folk(s) music outsider? Claim this politics of the American settler as outsider figure. The Harry Smith Anthology of American Folk Music was at its worst an
109

anthropological project, a sort of colonizing gesture to go into the Appalachians and the American South and record. In calling it old and weird, Marcus connected Smiths Anthology to sideshows and freaks, a kind of American rebetiko stripped of the idea of meaning located in social significance. Often citing Harry Smiths project as an influence, the New, Weird America has its own compilation, a small anthology of the earliest practitioners of so-called psych-folk. The Golden Apples of the Sun was released on Arthur magazines in-house label, Bastet: The golden apples of the sun/the silver apples of the moon. The importance of the phrase is both Donovans 1971 musical rendering of Yeats The Song of Wandering Aengus and Silver Apples, the American experimental psych-electronic duo of the late 1960s. Of course now Arthur is long gone, its digital epitaph reading: He died as he lived free, high and a-dreaming of love, neath vultures terrible gaze. Once outsider music becomes the new without a past, the myth deploys a marketing strategy to re-order the evolution of how we listen. In its wake, the outsider status of psychfolk appears in Joanna Newsoms most recent work as what can only be described as the opulent. Lola Montez and the Gold Rush. Decadent squalor. The generous reading of the New, Weird America the one only a writer as eloquent as Newsom could potentially employ is that of lateness, which Edward Said defined as being at the end, fully conscious and full of memory (201).
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.
111
from installations Aureliano Segundo
installation
112
Segundo / from installations
pants
113
Segundo / from installations
monster energy
114
Conversation with the Loebner Prize Winner Solveig Mardon
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.
115
Keyword Search Krisha Dhaliwal

The keyword search alleviates the need to scroll from page to page looking for a particular word, making finding specific segments of text in long documents straightforward and easy. The keyword search is useful in bibliographic pursuits. Online academic databases and library catalogues use the keyword search to compile lists of texts that use the same words and phrases. The keyword search is a computer search algorithm that tracks the use of a single word or phrase, highlighting it throughout electronic documents like PDFs, websites, and word processing files. The keyword search is a way of compiling and arranging documents that is based on superficial and coincidental commonalities. When documents might at first seem disparate and unrelated to one another, separated by time, place, or subject matter, the connections between them can be understood through the use of the keyword search. In order to understand if and how texts are related to one another, a close reading and analysis should be conducted. A keyword search will not suffice. There is a tendency to view culture and history in terms of eras. This makes it easier to track the connections between related events as well as between creative and intellectualakin to seeing them as separate entries under a single keyword search.
116
Dhaliwal / Keyword Search

The keyword approach to categorizing time and place emphasizes some aspects of the events and works in question, but neglects to address other aspectskeywords can be misleading. Highlighting keywords can aid in memory and help us to explore the relationships between concepts. Rather than establishing anything concrete about the collective nature of a set of documents, this keyword-based method of organizing information imposes a certain way of understanding the subject matter in question at the expense of others. because no idea is discrete, pay attention to keywordsa useful structuring device. The irregularity and inconsistency of the articles collected by the keyword search demonstrated the mutability of our categories and the words we used to describe them. editorial process as a way of collecting and ordering texts and images so that they are in dialogueall interacting with a key word, idea, or theme. Keywords: space, timetime as you would space and imagine space as you would time. Can two things occupy one time at the same space? Can two things occupy one space at the same time? The keyword is contextualpieces in this publication are physically and intellectually situated within a unified whole. They mean something as individual works, but they also mean something (perhaps even something different) within the larger framework that has been imposed on them by the covers of this journal.
117
from Zion Severn Bowen
118
Bowen / from Zion
119
Bowen / from Zion
120
Bowen / from Zion
121
Bowen / from Zion
122
Bowen / from Zion
123

Inter/tidal. v.

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Description:

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Inter/tidal. v.

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

inter/tidal. v.

edited by krisha dhaliwal, mairen doyle, and jeff fedoruk

Riel Jeff Fedoruk

from Collecting Tegan Cheremkora

Cheremkora / from Collecting

Cheremkora / from Collecting

Cheremkora / from Collecting

Studies for Cream Peter MacDonald

aai ff flic wedge ss htauw

iin foe lickor wetg caw

MacDonald / Studies for Cream

xur dough set sh onte arom

uriate rr emp roma

usur esst per baron

ury es purr omet

ndi pse p oufl and rem ives old ish

ure s rip flay

MacDonald / Studies for Cream

ouf urning earn rind cree sloe up

sallow aow pp ilp

Two Senses of Space in Faciality Mairen Doyle

Doyle / Two Senses of Space

Doyle / Two Senses of Space

Doyle / Two Senses of Space

Doyle / Two Senses of Space

Doyle / Two Senses of Space

Doyle / Two Senses of Space

from Easy / True Johnny Hamilton

Hamilton / from Easy / True

Hamilton / from Easy / True

Monarch Delia Byrnes

when i say metic i also say american when i

***Carrel |krl| |karl| |kal|

OK carrel Carolyn Richard

cone head fancy dress headpiece 9.99

officials scramble someone says "a separate massacre"

the story begun

More Information: Please select size and

colour variations below if applicable

the story unfolds

you are behind the door with the narrative, knocking.

body and more about asymmetry.

the door, being a gap, is finite. it is unforgiving.

i say the men of the first generation who lived cowardly

you down to estrogen most hated specimens."

something happens storically

"what are you doing in there?"

as i say this foxcon stock rises. they tell me

Than You Think"

rejoice following the long-awaited death

the story unfolds

"please exit the room through the door."

a baby ambassador. the bastard ambassador hits the switch.

your eye as an orifice accepts the line of corpses.

indian feather headdress fancy dress, 7.66

but what is it to mother a monstrous birth?

780 detained. i want for greater numbers.

i say if you're not with us your "members

their hood or leave the floor."

a blemish that blossoms

system in indiana, god give us biochemical

us without us so as i say this i'm conflicted. as i say this another