Journal articles on the topic 'Beat generation – Biography'

For the beat generation of the 1940s and 1950s, dissertation time is here. Magazine and newspaper critics have gotten in their jabs. Now scholars are starting to analyze the literature and legacy of the beat writers. In the last few years biographers have lined up to interpret the lives of Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and William Burroughs, and publishers have rushed into print a host of beat journals, letters, memoirs, and anthologies. The most recent Dictionary of Literary Biography devotes two large volumes to sixty-seven beat writers, including Neal Cassady, Herbert Huncke, Gary Snyder, Gregory Corso, John Clellon Holmes, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Philip Lamantia, Peter Orlovsky, Michael McClure, and Philip Whalen.

Jack Kerouac (1922 – 1969) is one of many American writers whose conspicuously mythologized and romanticized life story/biography on the one hand, and the fame of one work of art on the other, have succeeded in overwhelming his reputation to such an extent that his wider readership recognize him, almost exclusively, as the most prominent representative of the so-called Beat Generation, the author of On the Road (1957), and the man whose life ended too soon due to alcohol-induced health complications. Thus, from the very onset, Kerouac seems to be enclosed within the space of a few labels, narrowed down to a couple of bullet points, which can by no means be considered a slight contribution to the field of American literature at large. Kerouac’s travel map greatly contributed to the formation of 1960s American cultural mythologies. The Beat generation chooses to focus on what is spontaneous, open, organic, a process, a moment, paradox, improvisation, and alternative states of mind, as opposed to anything rigid, closed, pre-planned, linear or traditional. The highway is, in fact, a double metaphor: a sign which unites the American continent, but which simultaneously decentralizes its subjects, as Roy Kozlovsky asserts. To drive fast means to opt for the spatial over the social/societal, the car as a means of self-expression, and a particular kind of masculinity, rather than a status symbol. The highway and the city are kindred open spaces, antipodes to a family closed life. Traditionally, home is a feminine space, while the car embodies a space of male bonding disentangled from family shackles and norms. Kerouac’s fictionalized male outsiders, exiled and mobile, enchanted by movement itself as well as goallessness with no promises and commitment, support the American mythology of deviant and ambivalent behaviour. All in all, Kerouac’s nomadic lifestyle epitomizes placelessness and existence with no limits, where one road never ends, where there is a Whitmanian understanding of the West as one giant space with multiple possibilities. Jack Kerouac remains a lonesome traveler, for the most part enclosed within his own mind, a writer of a particular lyric responsiveness to soul and language matters.

Indigenous children’s literature supports Indigenous communities’ rights to revitalization, and to the transmission to future generations, of Indigenous histories, languages, and world views, as put forth in the United Nations Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. Drawing on Indigenous teachings that were given to him by Elders, an Indigenous Knowledge Keeper, Red Bear, interprets 10 Indigenous picture books published in Canada between 2015 and 2019 by mainstream and Indigenous publishing companies. These books were selected from the International Best Books for Children Canada’s list of Indigenous books and websites of four Canadian Indigenous publishers. We discuss the Knowledge Keeper’s interpretation of books that are grouped within four categories: intergenerational impact of residential schools, stories using spiritual lessons from nature, autobiography and biography, and stories using teachings about relationships. Recognizing the richness, authenticity, and integrity of Red Bear’s interpretation of the books, we propose that all teachers should strive to learn Indigenous cultural perspectives and knowledge when reading Indigenous children’s literature.

A tendency by literary stylisticians to overlook the role of the author in the generation of literary meaning has been a significant source of tension between linguistic approaches to literariness and other practices in the discipline, such as text-editing and literary biography. Recently, however, efforts have been made to close this gap, with a branch of stylistics, cognitive poetics, claiming to have developed a new and empirical method of integrating an appreciation of authorial imagination and creativity into the study of readers’ responses to the language of literary texts. We examine these claims critically, testing the grounds of assertions about scientific rigour in relation to demands about model testing and falsifiability associated with the scientific study of literature more generally. We then explore how some other methodologies, technologies and insights associated with this last branch of the discipline might be brought to bear on the topic of authorial intention, with the aim of determining whether, and in what ways, our understanding of authorial intention, and its role in literary processing, might be furthered through empirical enquiry.

Welcome to the world of pop. Even to announce this issue in such a way seems like a quaint anachronism, a mild nostalgia; the expression echoes the voices of countless TV presenters on Top of the Pops, Beat Club, Countdown, or whatever your local variety was. This association demonstrates that pop has been historically located in the arts and in popular culture as something connected to the 1960s: not so much to the politicisation of musical intent that embodied the late sixties, but to the current of the three-minute-or-less love song, the early Beatles, the vacant but loving repeat of Andy Warhol and his images. The Archies kept it going into the late sixties along with the Monkees and the 1910 Fruitgum Company's beautiful pop bubble "Yummy Yummy Yummy I've Got Love in My Tummy". What pop implied retrospectively was a clear sentiment of unity even as it set up binarisms that separated the serious and significant in popular culture from the ephemera and the momentary, with the perishable products of pop apparently placed quite clearly on the lighter side. This is why there is a nostalgic association between pop and the world: pop implies a simpler unity of the world that is carried momentarily by the pleasure of the song, the image, the dance. It is also why we associate pop with the transitional moments in our lives: it is the music of preteendom, the images of early youth and the moment of unselfconscious dancing to and in front of this aural and visual landscape provided by the very core of the transnational (read "world") culture industries. Those affective connections to cultural products is what pop art plays with and makes the viewer ponder. At the same time, pop styles also move beyond the preteen stage, grow up and change: within the space of a decade, "Yummy Yummy Yummy" mutated to The Buggles' "Video Killed the Radio Star"; within a similar space of years, a suntanned, mirrorshaded George Michael in Wham! became a Sony-battling (mis)user of public toilets; and eventually, even the once united quintamfeminate of Spice World seems inevitably on the course towards diadochal wars. As much as we may look back on personal and public memories with fondness, pop isn't forever caught in a static McHappyland, where nothing ever changes. Or perhaps that is to say that these (and other) pop styles aren't: beyond the stylistic formations, there seems to be a deeper kind of pop, a kind of primordial soup of popness from which a particular species of pop evolves every once in a while, matures, mutates, and discovers whether it is capable of survival even once it's left home. The momentary pleasure of pop is never completely compartmentalised into an historical moment, however much British popular music documentaries try to produce that effect, or however much the postwar generation venerate their particular liminal moments of the 1960s as the most significant. Pop is regenerative. Just when one thinks that the various strands of popular culture have organised themselves completely into niche markets we have the will-to- worldpop, with something like Spice World or Aqua's Barbie Girl. The term 'pop sensibility' -- sensibility to an underlying 'popness' which doesn't equate with any particular style of pop, but pervades all of them -- is useful here, and it informs some of the articles in this issue. Pop sensibility is an understanding of the pleasure generated by popular culture, and recognises that in some ways they point to complex relationships between people and cultural forms. It is difficult to explain why one of our editors (David) enjoys a hit by the boygroup Five while the other (Axel) has serious difficulties telling one boygroup from another, or from many of the more forgettable members of the Stock/Aitken/Waterman stable of the early 80s; but it is partly connected to seeing through the various generations of musical style a pop sensibility that has something to do with accessibility and the pleasure generated by that complex simplicity. Pop engages us with what Fiske described as the "art of making do" and thereby is a conduit to the operations of contemporary culture, industrially and culturally. The 'pop' issue of M/C explores this pop sensibility or, in some cases, a pop sensitivity through a variety of channels that should onomatopoeically "pop" into your thinking processes. Martin Laba's feature article "Picking through the Trash" provides the pin to burst cultural studies' reading of the popular bubble, by identifying and then working through the meaning of the supposed detritus of popular culture that doesn't possess the cultural cache of either 'marginal' or 'hip' status. His inspiration remains Don DeLillo's White Noise for its celebration and lament of the popular as it is organised through consumer culture and the various uses made of the apparent ephemera of contemporary culture. Pop, from Laba's perspective, remains the source for understanding the deep structure of the contemporary, and through detailed investigation in the tradition of DeLillo we can unearth the organisation of cultural value. Sean Smith also dances in the light of consumer culture in his tragicomic "Ya Bloody Cappie!", through his sudden realisation that his hard-working consumption practices had been appropriated as a popular culture practice and demographically defined in a way that made them seem as contrived and deplorable as those of the 1980s yuppie. The identification of the cappie, the Face-designed acronym for Consumer of Alternative Pricey Products, presents a crisis of persona for Smith, and leads to a perceptive reading of this shift as evidence of a new "class formation" through a shifted organisation of the self via a form of exclusive cultural capital. Such media stereotyping gone wrong may be partly behind the atrocities committed by members of the often-quoted "trenchcoat mafia" at Littleton, Colorado, but the media have turned a predictably blind eye to their own complicity in the shootings. In "Seen But Not Heard: Pop Culture Scapegoats and the Media Discourse Hierarchy", Nick Caldwell investigates the incredibly repetitive media patterning of establishing cause and effect relationships between outbreaks of youth violence and the usual suspects of cultural artefacts: 'satanic' popular music and grossly violent and antisocial computer games. Caldwell's article finds the discursive proliferation sadly familiar as the media looks to popular culture to stitch together its neverending narrative without the requisite sideways glance at the cultural context of violence. Benign or malignant, media power is also evident in the excitement leading up to and surrounding the release of Star Wars: The Phantom Menace, and we simply couldn't pass by this major artefact of current pop culture in this issue. In many ways, Tara Brabazon's "A Red Light Sabre to Go and Other Histories of the Present" is a process of excavation of popular cultural memory. In an elaborate reclamation program, Brabazon establishes Star Wars as a generational benchmark for a certain affectivity or -- in our terms -- pop sensibility that intersects with how cultural experiences are received by that same generation. Linking the Star Wars generation with Generation X (and her academic/pop self), Brabazon weaves a shifted tapestry of the significance of cultural memory in working out contemporary engagements with culture, and thereby presents whole new territories for the investigation of what Raymond Williams called "the structure of feeling". Cultural studies academics unimpressed with George Lucas's storytelling abilities have plenty of other fields to cover, too, though. Diane Railton's "Justify My Love: Popular Culture and the Academy" provides an invigilating examination of where academics have engaged with popular culture. Her critique is with what may be called new Bourdieuian 'distinctions', where popular music is reintegrated into cultural judgments of taste and thereby simply recategorised with shifted monikers of high (legitimate) and low (illegitimate) designations. Railton calls for a realisation of the political nature of academic work on popular culture that moves beyond this new and shifted constitution of cultural elitism. One of the key divides in research into popular music is about authenticity, which often gets reorganised into new categorisations of cultural value. In "Seeing Sound, Hearing Image: 'Remixing' Authenticity in Popular Music Studies" Steve Jones has provided a map through the debates in popular music studies on how the authentic is deployed by scholars. Jones situates the significance of affect in understanding the pop aesthetic and provides some material for how new technologies are shifting the ground on which popular music's authenticity has been built. Two of the remaining articles in this issue also deal with authenticity in various ways, if not necessarily as the term is used by Jones. In the first of these, "Painting Out Pop: 'Andy Warhol' as a Character in 90s Films", Julie Turnock traces more or less authentic portrayals of Andy Warhol (what would a 'pop' issue be without him?) in recent movies. She uncovers how Andy Warhol's blank visage sits uncomfortably with the narrative and content of three films that need the richness of a normative biography. In the process, the films cannot deal with the conceptualisation of pop that Warhol embodied as an artist, where content disappears to surface and repetition. The celebrity persona of Warhol in its contentlessness is Warhol's ultimate canvas, but the films miss this completely. Where Warhol's celebrity refuses its biopic, David Riddell discovers that sports god Wayne Gretzky's retirement reproduces naturally and seamlessly the spectacle of ice hockey into a movie narrative. Riddell's "Wayne's World: The Making of a Hockey Movie" is a close textual reading of Wayne Gretzky's last game in terms of heavily pre- planned causation which transforms the pleasures of the unexpected that are part of watching any sporting event into the constructed celebrity spectacle, throwing into doubt its authenticity as a sports contest. The blur of speed and spontaneity that is ice hockey becomes the blur of celebrity where fact and fabrication are melted together. Warhol and Gretzky (there's an unexpected pairing!) as media superstars both represent the way pop is defined by the cultural industries in all its crassness and oversimplification; frequently, though, the media's attention is self- centred, in a continuous desire to rate their popularity and measure it against those of their rivals. Axel Bruns's "What's Pop, and What's Not? Measuring Popularity in the Many-to-Many Age" questions the meaningfulness of these ratings, and debates the significance of the ways the Internet determines popularity (for example through the ubiquitous counters). Playing against the need to construct an audience to sell to someone (and advertisers are of course always welcome at the bustling M/C site itself) is the manner in which the Internet is constructed, used and abused by its surfers. The mythic models of measuring the television audience prove to be inadequate to describe the forms of interactions and sideward hypertext movements on the contemporary Web. Nevertheless, the counting goes on.... Finally, we turn to myths of a different kind. There is a certain pop sensitivity that Adam Dodd's article, "Making It Unpopular: The CIA and UFOs in Popular Culture" identifies in 1950s America. Dodd's provocatively argued piece indicates that a fear of mass hysteria motivated moves by the CIA and other government agencies to debunk through apparent explanation any possibility that UFOs actually existed and were seen. The desire to believe was so strong in the popular will that the American agencies felt compelled to work in propagandistic techniques to manipulate that belief. Although we may never know with the amount of propaganda and misinformation masquerading as fact, Dodd presents an interesting case study in the government control and movement of information about a popular cultural phenomenon. From "Yummy Yummy Yummy" to White Noise, from Warhol to Gretzky, from satanic music to academically accepted 'pop', from Star Wars to 'real' UFOs, the scope of this issue of M/C demonstrates the wide reach and diversity of 'the popular'. As issue editors, we hope it will also prove popular with our readers (a pun which had to be made eventually), and won't leave the shallow aftertaste of so much average pop. Much rather, we'd like you to remember once again those 60s pop music shows and agree that "it's a hit!" (And feel free to hit M/C's pages frequently and repeatedly.) P. David Marshall Axel Bruns 'Pop' Issue Editors Citation reference for this article MLA style: P. David Marshall, Axel Bruns. "Editorial: 'Pop'." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2.4 (1999). [your date of access] <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9906/edit.php>. Chicago style: P. David Marshall, Axel Bruns, "Editorial: 'Pop'," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2, no. 4 (1999), <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9906/edit.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: P. David Marshall, Axel Bruns. (1999) Editorial: 'Pop'. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2(4). <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9906/edit.php> ([your date of access]).

In January of this year, artist Christian Marclay’s 24-hour video installation The Clock came to Melbourne. As Ben Lerner explains in 10:04, the autofictional novel Lerner published in 2014, The Clock by Christian Marclay “is a clock: it is a twenty-four hour montage of thousands of scenes from movies and a few from TV edited together so as to be shown in real time; each scene indicates the time with a shot of a timepiece or its mention in dialogue, time in and outside of the film is synchronized” (52). I went to see The Clock at ACMI several times, with friends and alone, in the early morning and late at night. Each time I sank back into the comfortable chairs and settled into the communal experience of watching time pass on a screen in a dark room. I found myself sucked into the enforced narrative of time, the way in which the viewer – in this case myself, and those sharing the experience with me – sought to impose a sort of meaning on the arguably meaningless passing of the hours. In this essay, I will explore how we can expand our thinking of the idea of autofiction, as a genre, to include contemporary forms of digital media such as social media or activity trackers, as the authors of these new forms of digital media act as author-characters by playing with the divide between fact and fiction, and requiring their readers to ascertain meaning by interpreting the clues layered within. I will analyse the ways in which the meaning of autofictional texts—such as Lerner’s 10:04, but also including social media feeds, blogs and activity trackers—shifts depending on their audience. I consider that as technology develops, we increasingly use data to contextualise ourselves within a broader narrative – health data, media, journalistic data. As the sociologist John B. Thompson writes, “The development of the media not only enriches and transforms the process of self-formation, it also produces a new kind of intimacy which did not exist before … individuals can create and establish a form of intimacy which is essentially non-reciprocal” (208). New media and technologies have emerged to assist in this process of self-formation through the collection and publication of data. This essay is interested in analysing this process of self-formation, and its relationship to the genre of autofiction.Contemporary Digital Media as AutofictionWhile humans have always recorded themselves throughout history, with the rise of new technologies the instinct to record the self is increasingly becoming an automatic one; an instinct we can tie to what media theorist Nick Couldry terms as “presencing”: an “emerging requirement in everyday life to have a public presence beyond one’s bodily presence, to construct an objectification of oneself” (50). We are required to participate in ‘presencing’ by opting-in to new media; it is now uncommon – even unfavourable – for someone not to engage in any forms of social media or self-monitoring. We are now encouraged to participate in ‘presencing’ through the recording and online publication of data that would have once been considered private, such as employment histories and activity histories. Every Instagram photo, Snapchat or TikTok video contributes to an accumulating digital presence, an emerging narrative of the self. Couldry notes that presencing “is not the same as calling up a few friends to tell them some news; nor, although the audience is unspecific, is it like putting up something on a noticeboard. That is because presencing is oriented to a permanent site in public space that is distinctively marked by the producer for displaying that producer’s self” (50).In this way, we can see that in effect we are all becoming increasingly positioned to become autofiction authors. As an experimental form of literature, autofiction has been around for a long time, the term having first been introduced in the 1970s, and with Serge Doubrovsky widely credited with having introduced the genre with the publication of his 1977 novel Fils (Browning 49). In the most basic terms, autofiction is simply a work of fiction featuring a protagonist who can be interpreted as a stand-in for its author. And while autofiction is also confused with or used interchangeably with other genres such as metafiction or memoir, the difference between autofiction and other genres, writes Arnaud Schmitt, is that autoficton “relies on fiction—runs on fiction, to be exact” (141). Usually the reader can pick up on the fact that a novel is an autofictional one by noting that the protagonist and the author share a name, or key autobiographical details, but it is debatable as to whether the reader in fact needs to know that the work is autofictional in the first place in order to properly engage with it as a literary text.The same ideas can be applied to the application of digital media today. Kylie Cardell notes that “personal autobiographical but specifically diaristic (confessional, serial, quotidian) disclosure is increasingly positioned as a symptomatic feature of online life” (507). This ties in with Couldry’s idea of ‘presencing’; confession is increasingly a requirement when it comes to participation in digital media. As technology advances, the ways in which we can present and record the self evolve, and the narrative we can produce of the self expands alongside our understanding of the relationship between fact and fiction. Though of course we have always fabricated different narratives of the self, whether it be through diary entries or letter-writing, ‘presencing’ occurs when we literally present these edited versions of ourselves to an online audience. Lines become blurred between fiction and non-fiction, and the ability to distinguish between ‘fake’ and ‘real’ becomes almost impossible.Increasingly, such a distinction fails to seem important, and in some cases, this blurred line becomes the point, or a punchline; we can see this most clearly in TikTok videos, wherein people (specifically, or at least most typically, young people—Generation Z) play with ideas of truth and unreality ironically. When a teenager posts a video of themselves on TikTok dancing in their school cafeteria with the caption, “I got suspended for this, don’t let this flop”, the savvy viewer understands without it needing to be said that the student was not actually suspended – and also understands that even less outlandish or unbelievable digital content is unreliable by nature, and simply the narrative the author or producer wishes to convey; just like the savvy reader of an autofiction novel understands, without it actually being said, that the novel is in part autobiographical, even when the author and protagonist do not share a name or other easily identifiable markers.This is the nature of autofiction; it signals to the reader its status as a work of autofiction by littering intertextual clues throughout. Readers familiar with the author’s biography or body of work will pick up on these clues, creating a sense of uneasiness in the reader as they work to discern what is fact and what is not.Indeed, in 10:04, Lerner flags the text as a work of autofiction by sketching a fictional-not-fictional image of himself as an author of a story, ‘The Golden Vanity’ published in The New Yorker, that earned him a book deal—a story the ‘real’ Ben Lerner did in fact publish, two years before the publication of 10:04: “a few months before, the agent had e-mailed me that she believed I could get a “strong six-figure” advance based on a story of mine that had appeared in The New Yorker” (Lerner 4).In a review of 10:04 for the Sydney Review of Books, Stephanie Bishop writes:we learn that he did indeed write a proposal, that there was a competitive auction … What had just happened? Where are we in time? Was the celebratory meal fictional or real? Can we (and should we) seek to distinguish these categories?Here Lerner is ‘presencing’, crafting a multilayered version of himself across media by assuming that the reader of his work is also a reader of The New Yorker (an easy assumption to make given that his work often appears in, and is reviewed in, The New Yorker). Of course, this leads to the question: what becomes of autofiction when it is consumed by someone who is unable to pick up on the many metareferences layered within its narrative? In this case, the work itself becomes a joke that doesn’t land – much like a social media feed being consumed by someone who is not its intended audience.The savvy media consumer also understands that even the most meaningless or obtuse of media is all part of the overarching narrative. Lerner highlights the way we try and impose meaning onto (arguably) meaningless media when he describes his experience of watching time pass in Marclay’s The Clock:Big Ben, which I would come to learn appears frequently in the video, exploded, and people in the audience applauded… But then, a minute later, a young girl awakes from a nightmare and, as she’s comforted by her father (Clark Gable as Rhett Butler), you see Big Ben ticking away again outside their window, no sign of damage. The entire preceding twenty-four hours might have been the child’s dream, a storm that never happened, just one of many ways The Clock can be integrated into an overarching narrative. Indeed it was a greater challenge for me to resist the will to integration. (Lerner 52-53)This desire to impose an overarching narrative that Lerner speaks of – and which I also experienced when watching The Clock, as detailed in the introduction to this essay – is what the recording of the self both aims to achieve and achieves by default; it is the point and also the by-product. The Self as DataThe week my grandmother died, in 2017, my father bought me an Apple Watch. I had recently started running and—perhaps as an outlet for my grief—was looking to take my running further. I wanted a smart watch to help me record my runs; to turn the act of running into data that I could quantify and thus understand. This, in turn, would help me understand something about myself. Deborah Lupton explains my impulse here when she writes, “the body/self is portrayed as a conglomerate of quantifiable data that can be revealed using digital devices” (65). I wanted to reveal my ‘self’ by recording it, similar to the way the data accumulated in a diary, when reflected upon, helps a diarist understand their life more broadly. "Is a Fitbit a diary?”, asks Kylie Cardell. “The diary in the twenty-first century is already vastly different from many of its formal historical counterparts, yet there are discursive resonances. The Fitbit is a diary if we think of diary as a chronological record of data, which it can be” (348). The diary, as with the Apple Watch or Fitbit, is simply just a record of the self moving through time.Thus I submitted myself to the task of turning as much of myself into digital data as was possible to do so. Every walk, swim, meditation, burst of productivity, lapse in productivity, and beat of my heart became quantified, as Cardell might say, diarised. There is a very simple sort of pleasure in watching the red, green and blue rings spin round as you stand more, move more, run more. There is something soothing in knowing that at any given moment in time, you can press a button and see exactly what your heart is doing; even more soothing is knowing that at any given time, you can open up an app and see what your heart has been doing today, yesterday, this month, this year. It made sense to me that this data was being collected via my timepiece; it was simply the accumulation of my ‘self,’ as viewed through the lens of time.The Apple Watch was just the latest in a series of ways I have tasked technology with the act of quantifying myself; with my iPhone I track my periods with the Clue app. I measure my mental health with apps such as Shine, and my daily habits with Habitica. I have tried journaling apps such as Reflectly and Day One. While I have never actively tracked my food intake, or weight, or sex life, I know if I wanted to I could do this, too. And long before the Apple Watch, and long before my iPhone, too, I measured myself. In the late 2000s, I kept an online blog. Rebecca Blood notes that the development of blogging technology allowed blogging to become about “whatever came to mind. Walking to work. Last night’s party. Lunch” (54). Browning expands on this, noting that bloggingemerged as a mode of publication in the late ’90s, expressly smudging the boundaries of public and private. A diaristic mode, the blog nonetheless addresses (a) potential reader(s), often with great intimacy — and in its transition to print, as a boundary-shifting form with ill-defined goals regarding its readership. (49)(It is worth noting here that while of course many different forms of blogging exist and have always existed, this essay is only concerned with the diaristic blog that Blood and Browning speak of – arguably the most popular, and at least the most well known, form of blog.)My blog was also ostensibly about my own life, but really it was a work of autofiction, in the same way that my Apple Watch data, when shared, became a work of autofiction – which is to say that I became the central character, the author-character, whose narrative I was shaping with each post, using time as the setting. Jenny Davis writes:if self-quantifiers are seeking self-knowledge through numbers, then narratives and subjective interpretations are the mechanisms by which data morphs into selves. Self-quantifiers don’t just use data to learn about themselves, but rather, use data to construct the stories that they tell themselves about themselves.Over time, I became addicted to the blogging platform’s inbuilt metrics. I would watch with interest as certain posts performed better than others, and eventually the inevitable happened: I began – mostly unconsciously – to try and mould the content of my blogs to achieve certain outcomes – similar to the way that now, in 2019, it is hard to say whether I use an app to assist myself to meditate/journal/learn/etc, or whether I meditate/journal/learn/etc in order to record myself having done so.David Sedaris notes how the collection of data subconsciously, automatically leads to its manipulation in his essay collection, Calypso:for reasons I cannot determine my Fitbit died. I was devastated when I tapped the broadest part of it and the little dots failed to appear. Then I felt a great sense of freedom. It seemed that my life was now my own again. But was it? Walking twenty-five miles, or even running up the stairs and back, suddenly seemed pointless, since, without the steps being counted and registered, what use were they? (Sedaris, 49)In this way, the data we collect on and produce about ourselves, be it fitness metrics, blog posts, Instagram stories or works of literature or art, allows us to control and shape our own narrative, and so we do, creating what Kylie Cardell describes as “an autobiographical representation of self that is coherent and linear, “excavated” from a mass of personal data” (502).Of course, as foregrounded earlier, it is important to highlight the way ideas of privacy and audience shift in accordance with the type of media being consumed or created. Within different media, different author-characters emerge, and the author is required to participate in ‘presencing’ in different ways. For instance, data that exists only for the user does not require the user, or author, to participate in the act of ‘presencing’ at all – an example of this might be the Clue app, which records menstruation history. This information is only of interest to myself, and is not published or shared anywhere, with anyone. However even data intended for a limited audience still requires participation in ‘presencing’. While I only ‘share’ my Apple Watch’s activity with a few people, even just the act of sharing this activity influences the activity itself, creating an affect in which the fact of the content’s consumption shapes the creation of the content itself. Through consumption of Apple Watch data alone, a narrative can be built in which I am lazy, or dedicated, an early riser or a late sleeper, the kind of person who prefers setting their own goals, or the kind of person who enjoys group activities – and knowing that this narrative is being built requires me to act, consciously, in the experience of building it, which leads to the creation of something unreal or fictional interspersed with factual data. (All of which is to admit that sometimes I go on a run not because I want to go on a run, but because I want to be the sort of person who has gone on a run, and be seen as such: in this way I am ‘presencing’.)Similarly, the ephemeral versus permanent nature of data shared through media like Snapchat or Instagram dictates its status as a work of autofiction. When a piece of data – for instance, a photograph on Instagram – is published permanently, it contributes to an evolving autofictional narrative. The ‘Instagrammed’ self is both real and unreal, both fictional and non-fictional. The consumer of this data can explore an author’s social media feed dating back years and consume this data in exactly the way the author intends. However, the ‘stories’ function on Instagram, for instance, allows the consumption of this data to change again. Content is published for a limited amount of time—usually 24 hours—then disappears, and is able to be shared with either the author’s entire group of followers, or a select audience, allowing an author more creative freedom to choose how their data is consumed.Anxiety and AutofictionWhy do I feel the need to record all this data about myself? Obviously, this information is, to an extent, useful. If you are a person who menstruates, knowing exactly when your last period was, how long it lasted and how heavy it was is useful information to have, medically and logistically. If you run regularly, tracking your runs can be helpful in improving your time or routine. Similarly, recording the self in this way can be useful in keeping track of your moods, your habits, and your relationships.Of course, as previously noted, humans have always recorded ourselves. Cardell notes that “although the forms, conditions, and technology for diary keeping have changed, a motivation for recording, documenting, and accounting for the experience of the self over time has endured” (349). Still, it is hard to ignore the fact that ultimately, we seem to be entering some sort of age of digital information hoarding, and harder still to ignore the sneaking suspicion that this all seems to speak to a growing anxiety – and specifically, an anxiety of the self.Gayle Greene writes that “all writers are concerned with memory, since all writing is a remembrance of things past; all writers draw on the past, mine it as a quarry. Memory is especially important to anyone who cares about change, for forgetting dooms us to repetition” (291). If all writers are concerned with memory, as Greene posits, then perhaps we can draw the conclusion that autofiction writers are concerned with an anxiety of forgetting, or of being forgotten. We are self-conscious as authors of autofictional media; concerned with how our work is and will continue to be perceived – and whether it is perceived at all. Marjorie Worthington believes that that the rise in self-conscious fiction has resulted in an anxiety of obsolescence; that this anxiety in autofiction occurs “when a cultural trope (such as 'the author' is deemed to be in danger of becoming obsolete (or 'dying')” (27). However, it is worth considering the opposite – that an anxiety of obsolescence has resulted in a rise of self-conscious fiction, or autofiction.This fear of obsolescence is pervasive in new digital media – Instagram stories and Snapchats, which once disappeared forever into a digital void, are now able to be saved and stored. The fifteen minutes of fame has morphed into fifteen seconds: in this way, time works both for and against the anxious author of digital autofiction. Technologies evolve quicker than we can keep up, with popular platforms becoming obsolete at a rapid pace. This results in what Kylie Cardell sees as an “anxiety around the traces of lives accumulating online and the consequences of 'accidental autobiography,' as well as the desire to have a 'tidy,' representable, and 'storied' life” (503).This same desire can be seen at the root of autofiction. The media theorist José van Dijck notes thatwith the advent of photography, and later film and television, writing tacitly transformed into an interior means of consciousness and remembrance, whereupon electronic forms of media received the artificiality label…writing gained status as a more authentic container of past recollection. (15)Autofiction, however, disrupts this tacit transformation. It is a co-mingling of a desire to record the self, as well as a desire to control one’s own narrative. The drive to represent oneself in a specific way, with consideration to one’s audience and self-brand, has become the root of social media, but is so pervasive now that it is often an unexamined, subconscious one. In autofiction, this drive is not subconscious, it is self-conscious.ConclusionAs technology has developed, new ways to record, present and evaluate the self have emerged. While an impulse to self-monitor has always existed within society, with the rise of ‘presencing’ through social media this impulse has been made public. In this way, we can see presencing, or the public practice of self-performing through media, as an inherently autofictional practice. We can understand that the act of presencing stems from a place of anxiety and self-consciousness, and understand that is in fact impossible to create autofiction without self-consciousness. As we begin to understand that all digital media is becoming inherently autofictional in nature, we’re increasingly required to force to draw our own conclusions about the media we consume—just like the author-character of 10:04 is forced to draw his own conclusions about the passing of time, as represented by Big Ben, when interacting with Marclay’s The Clock. By analysing and comparing the ways in which the emerging digital landscape and autofiction both share a common goal of recording and preserving an interpretation of the ‘self’, we can then understand a deeper understanding of the purpose that autofiction serves. ReferencesBishop, Stephanie. “The Same but Different: 10:04 by Ben Lerner.” Sydney Review of Books 6 Feb. 2015. <https://sydneyreviewofbooks.com/10-04-ben-lerner/>.Blood, Rebecca. "How Blogging Software Reshapes the Online Community." Communications of the ACM 47.12 (2004): 53-55.Browning, Barbara. "The Performative Novel." TDR: The Drama Review 62.2 (2018): 43-58. Davis, Jenny. “The Qualified Self.” Cyborgology 13 Mar. 2013. <http://thesocietypages.org/cyborgology/2013/03/13/the-qualified-self/>.Cardell, Kylie. “The Future of Autobiography Studies: The Diary.” a/b: Auto/Biography Studies 32.2 (2017): 347-350.Cardell, Kylie. “Modern Memory-Making: Marie Kondo, Online Journaling, and the Excavation, Curation, and Control of Personal Digital Data.” a/b: Auto/Biography Studies 32.3 (2017): 499-517.Couldry, Nick. Media, Society, World: Social Theory and Digital Media Practice. Great Britain: Polity Press, 2012.Greene, Gayle. “Feminist Fiction and the Uses of Memory.” Signs 16.2 (1991): 290-321.Lerner, Ben. 10:04. London: Faber and Faber, 2014.Lerner, Ben. “The Golden Vanity.” The New Yorker 11 June 2012. <https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/06/18/the-golden-vanity>.Lupton, Deborah. “You Are Your Data: Self-Tracking Practices and Concepts of Data.” Lifelogging. Ed. Stefan Selke. Wiesbaden: Springer, 2016. 61-79.Schmitt, Arnaud. “David Shields's Lyrical Essay: The Dream of a Genre-Free Memoir, or beyond the Paradox.” a/b: Auto/Biography Studies 31.1 (2016): 133-146.Sedaris, David. Calypso. United States: Little Brown, 2018.Thompson, John B. The Media and Modernity: A Social Theory of the Media. California: Stanford University Press, 1995.Van Dijck, José. Mediated Memories in the Digital Age. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2007.Worthington, Marjorie. The Story of "Me": Contemporary American Autofiction. Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 2018.

Hundreds of thousands of Australian children were born in the shadow of the Great War, fathered by men who had enlisted between 1914 and 1918. Their lives could be and often were hard and unhappy, as Anzac historian Alistair Thomson observed of his father’s childhood in the 1920s and 1930s. David Thomson was son of a returned serviceman Hector Thomson who spent much of his adult life in and out of repatriation hospitals (257-259) and whose memory was subsequently expunged from Thomson family stories (299-267). These children of trauma fit within a pattern suggested by Marianne Hirsch in her influential essay “The Generation of Postmemory”. According to Hirsch, “postmemory describes the relationship of the second generation to powerful, often traumatic, experiences that preceded their births but that were nevertheless transmitted to them so deeply as to seem to constitute memories in their own right” (n.p.). This article attempts to situate George Johnston’s novel My Brother Jack (1964) within the context of postmemory narratives of violence that were complicated in Australia by the Anzac legend which occluded any too open discussion about the extent of war trauma present within community, including the children of war.“God knows what damage” the war “did to me psychologically” (48), ponders Johnston’s protagonist and alter-ego David Meredith in My Brother Jack. Published to acclaim fifty years after the outbreak of the First World War, My Brother Jack became a widely read text that seemingly spoke to the shared cultural memories of a generation which did not know battlefield violence directly but experienced its effects pervasively and vicariously in the aftermath through family life, storytelling, and the memorabilia of war. For these readers, the novel represented more than a work of fiction; it was a touchstone to and indicative of their own negotiations though often unspoken post-war trauma.Meredith, like his creator, is born in 1912. Strictly speaking, therefore, both are not part of the post-war generation. However, they are representative and therefore indicative of the post-war “hinge generation” which was expected to assume “guardianship” of the Anzac Legend, though often found the narrative logic challenging. They had been “too young for the war to have any direct effect”, and yet “every corner” of their family’s small suburban homes appear to be “impregnated with some gigantic and sombre experience that had taken place thousands of miles away” (17).According to Johnston’s biographer, Garry Kinnane, the “most teasing puzzle” of George Johnston’s “fictional version of his childhood in My Brother Jack is the monstrous impression he creates of his returned serviceman father, John George Johnston, known to everyone as ‘Pop.’ The first sixty pages are dominated by the tyrannical figure of Jack Meredith senior” (1).A large man purported to be six foot three inches (1.9 metres) in height and weighing fifteen stone (95 kilograms), the real-life Pop Johnston reputedly stood head and shoulders above the minimum requirement of five foot and six inches (1.68 metres) at the time of his enlistment for war in 1914 (Kinnane 4). In his fortieth year, Jack Johnston senior was also around twice the age of the average Australian soldier and among one in five who were married.According to Kinnane, Pop Johnston had “survived the ordeal of Gallipoli” in 1915 only to “endure three years of trench warfare in the Somme region”. While the biographer and the Johnston family may well have held this to be true, the claim is a distortion. There are a few intimations throughout My Brother Jack and its sequel Clean Straw for Nothing (1969) to suggest that George Johnston may have suspected that his father’s wartime service stories had been embellished, though the depicted wartime service of Pop Meredith remains firmly within the narrative arc of the Anzac legend. This has the effect of layering the postmemory violence experienced by David Meredith and, by implication, his creator, George Johnston. Both are expected to be keepers of a lie masquerading as inviolable truth which further brutalises them.John George (Pop) Johnston’s First World War military record reveals a different story to the accepted historical account and his fictionalisation in My Brother Jack. He enlisted two and a half months after the landing at Gallipoli on 12 July 1915 and left for overseas service on 23 November. Not quite the imposing six foot three figure of Kinnane’s biography, he was fractionally under five foot eleven (1.8 metres) and weighed thirteen stone (82.5 kilograms). Assigned to the Fifth Field Engineers on account of his experience as an electric tram fitter, he did not see frontline service at Gallipoli (NAA).Rather, according to the Company’s history, the Fifth Engineers were involved in a range of infrastructure and support work on the Western Front, including the digging and maintenance of trenches, laying duckboard, pontoons and tramlines, removing landmines, building huts, showers and latrines, repairing roads, laying drains; they built a cinema at Beaulencourt Piers for “Brigade Swimming Carnival” and baths at Malhove consisting of a large “galvanised iron building” with a “concrete floor” and “setting tanks capable of bathing 2,000 men per day” (AWM). It is likely that members of the company were also involved in burial details.Sapper Johnston was hospitalised twice during his service with influenza and saw out most of his war from October 1917 attached to the Army Cookery School (NAA). He returned to Australia on board the HMAT Kildonian Castle in May 1919 which, according to the Sydney Morning Herald, also carried the official war correspondent and creator of the Anzac legend C.E.W. Bean, national poet Banjo Paterson and “Warrant Officer C G Macartney, the famous Australian cricketer”. The Herald also listed the names of “Returned Officers” and “Decorated Men”, but not Pop Johnston who had occupied the lower decks with other returning men (“Soldiers Return”).Like many of the more than 270,000 returned soldiers, Pop Johnston apparently exhibited observable changes upon his repatriation to Australia: “he was partially deaf” which was attributed to the “constant barrage of explosions”, while “gas” was suspected to have “left him with a legacy of lung disorders”. Yet, if “anyone offered commiserations” on account of this war legacy, he was quick to “dismiss the subject with the comment that ‘there were plenty worse off’” (Kinnane 6). The assumption is that Pop’s silence is stoic; the product of unspeakable horror and perhaps a symptom of survivor guilt.An alternative interpretation, suggested by Alistair Thomson in Anzac Memories, is that the experiences of the vast majority of returned soldiers were expected to fit within the master narrative of the Anzac legend in order to be accepted and believed, and that there was no space available to speak truthfully about alternative war service. Under pressure of Anzac expectations a great many composed stories or remained selectively silent (14).Data gleaned from the official medical history suggest that as many as four out of every five returned servicemen experienced emotional or psychological disturbance related to their war service. However, the two branches of medicine represented by surgeons and physicians in the Repatriation Department—charged with attending to the welfare of returned servicemen—focused on the body rather than the mind and the emotions (Murphy and Nile).The repatriation records of returned Australian soldiers reveal that there were, indeed, plenty physically worse off than Pop Johnston on account of bodily disfigurement or because they had been somatically compromised. An estimated 30,000 returned servicemen died in the decade after the cessation of hostilities to 1928, bringing the actual number of war dead to around 100,000, while a 1927 official report tabled the medical conditions of a further 72,388 veterans: 28,305 were debilitated by gun and shrapnel wounds; 22,261 were rheumatic or had respiratory diseases; 4534 were afflicted with eye, ear, nose, or throat complaints; 9,186 had tuberculosis or heart disease; 3,204 were amputees while only; 2,970 were listed as suffering “war neurosis” (“Enlistment”).Long after the guns had fallen silent and the wounded survivors returned home, the physical effects of war continued to be apparent in homes and hospital wards around the country, while psychological and emotional trauma remained largely undiagnosed and consequently untreated. David Meredith’s attitude towards his able-bodied father is frequently dismissive and openly scathing: “dad, who had been gassed, but not seriously, near Vimy Ridge, went back to his old job at the tramway depot” (9). The narrator-son later considers:what I realise now, although I never did at the time, is that my father, too, was oppressed by intimidating factors of fear and change. By disillusion and ill-health too. As is so often the case with big, strong, athletic men, he was an extreme hypochondriac, and he had convinced himself that the severe bronchitis which plagued him could only be attributed to German gas he had swallowed at Vimy Ridge. He was too afraid to go to a doctor about it, so he lived with a constant fear that his lungs were decaying, and that he might die at any time, without warning. (42-3)During the writing of My Brother Jack, the author-son was in chronically poor health and had been recently diagnosed with the romantic malady and poet’s disease of tuberculosis (Lawler) which plagued him throughout his work on the novel. George Johnston believed (correctly as it turned out) that he was dying on account of the disease, though, he was also an alcoholic and smoker, and had been reluctant to consult a doctor. It is possible and indeed likely that he resentfully viewed his condition as being an extension of his father—vicariously expressed through the depiction of Pop Meredith who exhibits hysterical symptoms which his son finds insufferable. David Meredith remains embittered and unforgiving to the very end. Pop Meredith “lived to seventy-three having died, not of German gas, but of a heart attack” (46).Pop Meredith’s return from the war in 1919 terrifies his seven-year-old son “Davy”, who accompanies the family to the wharf to welcome home a hero. The young boy is unable to recall anything about the father he is about to meet ostensibly for the first time. Davy becomes overwhelmed by the crowds and frightened by the “interminable blaring of horns” of the troopships and the “ceaseless roar of shouting”. Dwarfed by the bodies of much larger men he becomestoo frightened to look up at the hours-long progression of dark, hard faces under wide, turned-up hats seen against bayonets and barrels that are more blue than black ... the really strong image that is preserved now is of the stiff fold and buckle of coarse khaki trousers moving to the rhythm of knees and thighs and the tight spiral curves of puttees and the thick boots hammering, hollowly off the pier planking and thunderous on the asphalt roadway.Depicted as being small for his age, Davy is overwrought “with a huge and numbing terror” (10).In the years that follow, the younger Meredith desires emotional stability but remains denied because of the war’s legacy which manifests in the form of a violent patriarch who is convinced that his son has been rendered effeminate on account of the manly absence during vital stages of development. With the return of the father to the household, Davy grows to fear and ultimately despise a man who remains as alien to him as the formerly absent soldier had been during the war:exactly when, or why, Dad introduced his system of monthly punishments I no longer remember. We always had summary punishment, of course, for offences immediately detected—a cuffing around the ears or a sash with a stick of a strap—but Dad’s new system was to punish for the offences which had escaped his attention. So on the last day of every month Jack and I would be summoned in turn to the bathroom and the door would be locked and each of us would be questioned about the sins which we had committed and which he had not found out about. This interrogation was the merest formality; whether we admitted to crimes or desperately swore our innocence it was just the same; we were punished for the offences which, he said, he knew we must have committed and had to lie about. We then had to take our shirts and singlets off and bend over the enamelled bath-tub while he thrashed us with the razor-strop. In the blind rages of these days he seemed not to care about the strength he possessed nor the injuries he inflicted; more often than not it was the metal end of the strop that was used against our backs. (48)Ironically, the ritualised brutality appears to be a desperate effort by the old man to compensate for his own emasculation in war and unresolved trauma now that the war is ended. This plays out in complicated fashion in the development of David Meredith in Clean Straw for Nothing, Johnston’s sequel to My Brother Jack.The imputation is that Pop Meredith practices violence in an attempt to reassert his failed masculinity and reinstate his status as the head of the household. Older son Jack’s beatings cease when, as a more physically able young man, he is able to threaten the aggressor with violent retaliation. This action does not spare the younger weaker Davy who remains dominated. “My beating continued, more ferociously than ever, … . They ceased only because one day my father went too far; he lambasted me so savagely that I fell unconscious into the bath-tub, and the welts across my back made by the steel end of the razor-strop had to be treated by a doctor” (53).Pop Meredith is persistently reminded that he has no corporeal signifiers of war trauma (only a cough); he is surrounded by physically disabled former soldiers who are presumed to be worse off than he on account of somatic wounding. He becomes “morose, intolerant, bitter and violently bad-tempered”, expressing particular “displeasure and resentment” toward his wife, a trained nurse, who has assumed carer responsibilities for homing the injured men: “he had altogether lost patience with her role of Florence Nightingale to the halt and the lame” (40). Their marriage is loveless: “one can only suppose that he must have been darkly and profoundly disturbed by the years-long procession through our house of Mother’s ‘waifs and strays’—those shattered former comrades-in-arms who would have been a constant and sinister reminder of the price of glory” (43); a price he had failed to adequately pay with his uncompromised body intact.Looking back, a more mature David Meredith attempts to establish order, perspective and understanding to the “mess of memory and impressions” of his war-affected childhood in an effort to wrest control back over his postmemory violation: “Jack and I must have spent a good part of our boyhood in the fixed belief that grown-up men who were complete were pretty rare beings—complete, that is, in that they had their sight or hearing or all of their limbs” (8). While the father is physically complete, his brooding presence sets the tone for the oppressively “dark experience” within the family home where all rooms are “inhabited by the jetsam that the Somme and the Marne and the salient at Ypres and the Gallipoli beaches had thrown up” (18). It is not until Davy explores the contents of the “big deep drawer at the bottom of the cedar wardrobe” in his parents’ bedroom that he begins to “sense a form in the shadow” of the “faraway experience” that had been the war. The drawer contains his father’s service revolver and ammunition, battlefield souvenirs and French postcards but, “most important of all, the full set of the Illustrated War News” (19), with photographs of battlefield carnage. These are the equivalent of Hirsch’s photographs of the Holocaust that establish in Meredith an ontology that links him more realistically to the brutalising past and source of his ongoing traumatistion (Hirsch). From these, Davy begins to discern something of his father’s torment but also good fortune at having survived, and he makes curatorial interventions not by becoming a custodian of abjection like second generation Holocaust survivors but by disposing of the printed material, leaving behind artefacts of heroism: gun, the bullets, the medals and ribbons. The implication is that he has now become complicit in the very narrative that had oppressed him since his father’s return from war.No one apparently notices or at least comments on the removal of the journals, the images of which become linked in the young boys mind to an incident outside a “dilapidated narrow-fronted photographer’s studio which had been deserted and padlocked for as long as I could remember”. A number of sun-damaged photographs are still displayed in the window. Faded to a “ghostly, deathly pallor”, and speckled with fly droppings, years earlier, they had captured young men in uniforms before embarkation for the war. An “agate-eyed” boy from Davy’s school joins in the gazing, saying nothing for a long time until the silence is broken: “all them blokes there is dead, you know” (20).After the unnamed boy departs with a nonchalant “hoo-roo”, young Davy runs “all the way home, trying not to cry”. He cannot adequately explain the reason for his sudden reaction: “I never after that looked in the window of the photographer’s studio or the second hand shop”. From that day on Davy makes a “long detour” to ensure he never passes the shops again (20-1). Having witnessed images of pre-war undamaged young men in the prime of their youth, he has come face-to-face with the consequences of war which he is unable to reconcile in terms of the survival and return of his much older father.The photographs of the young men establishes a causal connection to the physically wrecked remnants that have shaped Davy’s childhood. These are the living remains that might otherwise have been the “corpses sprawled in mud or drowned in flooded shell craters” depicted in the Illustrated News. The photograph of the young men establishes Davy’s connection to the things “propped up our hallway”, of “Bert ‘sobbing’ in the backyard and Gabby Dixon’s face at the dark end of the room”, and only reluctantly the “bronchial cough of my father going off in the dawn light to the tramways depot” (18).That is to say, Davy has begun to piece together sense from senselessness, his father’s complicity and survival—and, by association, his own implicated life and psychological wounding. He has approached the source of his father’s abjection and also his own though he continues to be unable to accept and forgive. Like his father—though at the remove—he has been damaged by the legacies of the war and is also its victim.Ravaged by tuberculosis and alcoholism, George Johnston died in 1970. According to the artist Sidney Nolan he had for years resembled the ghastly photographs of survivors of the Holocaust (Marr 278). George’s forty five year old alcoholic wife Charmian Clift predeceased him by twelve months, having committed suicide in 1969. Four years later, in 1973, George and Charmian’s twenty four year old daughter Shane also took her own life. Their son Martin drank himself to death and died of organ failure at the age of forty three in 1990. They are all “dead, you know”.ReferencesAWM. Fifth Field Company, Australian Engineers. Diaries, AWM4 Sub-class 14/24.“Enlistment Report”. Reveille, 29 Sep. 1928.Hirsch, Marianne. “The Generation of Postmemory.” Poetics Today 29.1 (Spring 2008): 103-128. <https://read.dukeupress.edu/poetics-today/article/29/1/103/20954/The-Generation-of-Postmemory>.Johnston, George. Clean Straw for Nothing. London: Collins, 1969.———. My Brother Jack. London: Collins, 1964.Kinnane, Garry. George Johnston: A Biography. Melbourne: Nelson, 1986.Lawler, Clark. Consumption and Literature: the Making of the Romantic Disease. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006.Marr, David, ed. Patrick White Letters. Sydney: Random House, 1994.Murphy, Ffion, and Richard Nile. “Gallipoli’s Troubled Hearts: Fear, Nerves and Repatriation.” Studies in Western Australian History 32 (2018): 25-38.NAA. John George Johnston War Service Records. <https://recordsearch.naa.gov.au/SearchNRetrieve/Interface/ViewImage.aspx?B=1830166>.“Soldiers Return by the Kildonan Castle.” Sydney Morning Herald, 10 May 1919: 18.Thomson, Alistair. Anzac Memories: Living with the Legend. Clayton: Monash UP, 2013.

Introduction In October of 2004, La Presse asked its Quebecois reading audience a very simple question: “What is your favourite cookbook and why?” As Marie Marquis reports in her essay “The Cookbooks Quebecers Prefer: More Than Just Recipes,” “two weeks later, 363 e-mail responses had been received” (214). From the answers, it was clear that despite the increase in television cooking shows, Internet cooking sites, and YouTube how-to videos, cookbooks were not only still being used, but that people had strong allegiances to their favourite ones. Marquis’s essay provides concrete evidence that cookbooks are not meaningless objects. Rather, her use of relevant quotations from the survey proves that they are associated with strong memories and have been used to create bonds between individuals and across generations. Moreover, these quotations reveal that individuals use cookbooks to construct personal narratives that they share with others. In her philosophical analysis of foodmaking as a thoughtful practice, Lisa Heldke helps move the discussion of cooking and, consequently of cookbooks, forward by explaining that the age-old dichotomy between theory and practice merges in food preparation (206). Foodmaking, she explains through her example of kneading bread, requires both a theoretical understanding of what makes bread rise and a practical knowledge of the skill required to achieve the desired results. Much as Susan Leonardi argues that recipes need “a recommendation, a context, a point, a reason-to-be” (340), Heldke advocates in “Recipes for Theory Making” that recipes offer us ideas that we need to either accept or refuse. These ideas include, but are not limited to, what makes a good meal, what it means to eat healthy, what it means to be Italian or vegan. Cookbooks can take many forms. As the cover art from academic documents on the nature, role, and value of cooking and cookbooks clearly demonstrates, a “cookbook” may be an ornate box filled with recipe cards (Floyd and Forster) or may be a bunch of random pieces of paper organised by dividers and held together by a piece of elastic (Tye). The Internet has created many new options for recipe collecting and sharing. Websites such as Allrecipes.com and Cooks.com are open access forums where people can easily upload, download, and bookmark favourite foods. Yet, Laura Shapiro argues in Something from the Oven that the mere presence of a cookbook in one’s home does not mean it is actually used. While “popular cookbooks tell us a great deal about the culinary climate of a given period [...] what they can’t convey is a sense of the day-to-day cookery as it [is] genuinely experienced in the kitchens of real life” (xxi). The same conclusion can be applied to recipe websites. Personalised and family cookbooks are much different and much more telling documents than either unpersonalised printed books or Internet options. Family cookbooks can also take any shape or form but I define them as compilations that have been created by a single person or a small group of individuals as she/he/they evolve over time. They can be handwritten or typed and inserted into either an existing cookbook, scrapbooked, or bound in some other way. The Internet may also help here as bookmaking sites such as Blurb.com allow people to make, and even sell, their own printed books. These can be personalised with pictures and scrapbook-like embellishments. The recipes in these personal collections are influenced by contact with other people as well as printed and online publications. Also impacting these works are individual realities such as gender, race, class, and work. Unfortunately, these documents have not been the focus of much academic attention as food scholars generally analyse the texts within them rather than their practical and actual use. In order to properly understand the value and role of personal and family cookbooks in our daily lives, we must move away from generalisations to specific case studies. Only by looking at people in relationship with them, who are actually using and compiling their own recipe collections or opting instead to turn to either printed books or their computers, can we see the importance and value of family cookbooks. In order to address this methodological problem, this essay analyses a number of cookbook-related experiences that I have witnessed and/or been a part of in my own home. By moving away from the theoretical and focusing on the practical, I aim to advance Heldke’s argument that recipe reading, like foodmaking, is a thoughtful practice with important lessons. Learning to Cook and Learning to Live: What Cookbooks Teach Us Once upon a time, a mother and her two, beautiful daughters decided to make chocolate chip cookies. They took out all the bowls and utensils and ingredients they needed. The mother then plopped the two girls down among all of the paraphernalia on the counter. First, they beat the butter using their super cool Kitchen Aid mixer. Then they beat in the sugar. Carefully, they cracked and beat in the eggs. Then they dumped in the flour. They dumped in the baking powder. They dumped in the vanilla. And they dumped in the chocolate chips. Together, they rolled the cookies, placed them on a baking sheet, pat them down with a fork, and placed them in a hot oven. The house smelled amazing! The mother and her daughters were looking forward to eating the cookies when, all of a sudden, a great big dog showed up at the door. The mother ran outside to shoo the dog home yelling, “Go home, now! Go away!” By the time she got back, the cookies had started to burn and the house stank! The mother and her two daughters took all the cookie-making stuff back out. They threw out the ruined cookies. And they restarted. They beat the butter using their super cool Kitchen Aid mixer. Then they beat in the sugar. Carefully, they cracked and beat in the eggs. Then they dumped in the flour. They dumped in the baking powder. They dumped in the vanilla. And they dumped in the chocolate chips. Together, they rolled the cookies, placed them on a baking sheet, pat them down with a fork, and placed them in a hot oven. This story that my oldest daughter and I invented together goes on to have the cookies ruined by a chatty neighbour before finally finding fruition in a batch of successfully baked cookies. This is a story that we tell together as we get her ready for bed. One person is always the narrator who lists the steps while the other makes the sound effects of the beating mixer and the dumping ingredients. Together, we act out the story by rolling the cookies, patting them, and waving our hands in front of our faces when the burnt cookies have stunk up the house. While she takes great pleasure in its narrative, I take greater pleasure in the fact that, at three years of age, she has a rudimentary understanding of how a basic recipe works. In fact, only a few months ago I observed this mixture of knowledge and skill merge when I had to leave her on the counter while I cleaned up a mess on the floor. By the time I got back to her, she had finished mixing the dry ingredients in with the wet ones. I watched her from across the kitchen as she turned off the Kitchen Aid mixer, slowly spooned the flour mixture into the bowl, and turned the machine back on. She watched the batter mix until the flour had been absorbed and then repeated the process. While I am very thankful that she did not try to add the vanilla or the chocolate chips, this experience essentially proves that one can learn through simple observation and repetition. It is true that she did not have a cookbook in front of her, that she did not know the precise measurements of the ingredients being put into the bowl, and that at her age she would not have been able to make this recipe without my help. However, this examples proves Heldke’s argument that foodmaking is a thoughtful process as it is as much about instinct as it is about following a recipe. Once she is able to read, my daughter will be able to use the instincts that she has developed in her illiterate years to help her better understand written recipes. What is also important to note about this scenario is that I did have a recipe and that I was essentially the one in charge. My culinary instincts are good. I have been baking and cooking since I was a child and it is very much a part of my life. We rarely buy cookies or cakes from the store because we make them from scratch. Yet, I am a working mother who does not spend her days in the kitchen. Thus, my instincts need prompting and guidance from written instructions. Significantly, the handwritten recipe I was using that day comes from the personal cookbook that has been evolving since I left home. In their recent works Eat My Words and Baking as Biography, Janet Theophano and Diane Tye analyse homemade, hand-crafted, and personal cookbooks to show that these texts are the means through which we can understand individuals at a given time and in a given place. Theophano, for example, analyses old cookbooks to understand the impact of social networking in identity making. By looking at the types of recipes and number of people who have written themselves into these women’s books, she shows that cookbook creation has always been a social activity that reveals personal and social identity. In a slightly different way, Tye uses her own mother’s recipes to better understand a person she can no longer talk to. Through recipes, she is able to recreate her deceased mother’s life and thus connect with her on a personal and emotional level. Although academics have traditionally ignored cookbooks as being mundane and unprofessional, the work of these recent critics illustrates the extent to which cookbooks provide an important way of understanding society and people’s places within it. While this essay cannot begin to analyse the large content of my cookbook, this one scenario echoes these recent scholarly claims that personal cookbooks are a significant addition to the academic world and must be read thoughtfully, as Heldke argues, for both the recipes’s theory and for the practical applications and stories embedded within them. In this particular example, Karena and I were making a chocolate a chip cake—a recipe that has been passed down from my Oma. It is a complicated recipe because it requires a weight scale rather than measuring cups and because instructions such as “add enough milk to make a soft dough” are far from precise. The recipe is not just a meaningless entry I found in a random book or on a random website but rather a multilayered narrative and an expression of my personal heritage. As Theophano and Tye have argued, recipes are a way to connect with family, friends, and specific groups of people either still living or long gone. Recipes are a way to create and relive memories. While I am lucky that my Oma is still very much alive, I imagine that I will someday use this recipe as a way to reconnect with her. When I serve this cake to my family members, we will surely be reminded of her. We will wonder where this recipe came from, how it is different from other chocolate chip cake recipes, and where she learned to make it. In fact, the recipe already varies considerably between homes. My Oma makes hers in a round pan, my mother in a loaf pan, and I in cupcake moulds. Each person has a different reason for her choice of presentation that is intrinsic to her reality and communicates a specific part of her identity. Thus by sharing this recipe with my daughter, I am not only ensuring that my memories are being passed on but I am also programming into her characteristics and values such as critical thinking, the worthiness of homemade food, and the importance of family time. Karena does not yet have her own cookbook but her preferences mean that some of the recipes in my collection are made more often than others. My cookbook continues to change and grow as I am currently prioritising foods I know my kids will eat. I am also shopping and surfing for children’s recipe books and websites in order to find kid-friendly meals we can make together. In her analysis of children and adolescent cookbooks published between the 1910s and 1950s, Sherrie Inness demonstrates that cookbooks have not only taught children how to cook, but also how to act. Through the titles and instructions (generally aimed at girls), the recipe choices (fluffy deserts for girls and meat dishes for boys), and the illustrations (of girls cooking and boys eating), these cookbooks have been a medium through which society has taught its youth about their future, gendered roles. Much research by critics such as Laura Shapiro, Sonia Cancian, and Inness, to name but a few, has documented this gendered division of labour in the home. However, the literature does not always reflect reality. As this next example demonstrates, men do cook and they also influence family cookbook creation. A while back, my husband spent quite a bit of time browsing through the World Wide Web to find a good recipe for a venison marinade. As an avid “barbecuer,” he has tried and tested a number of marinades and rubs over the years. Thus he knew what he was looking for in a good recipe. He found one, made it, and it was a hit! Just recently, he tried to find that recipe again. Rather than this being a simple process, after all he knew exactly which recipe he was looking for, it took quite a bit of searching before he found it. This time, he was sure to write it down to avoid having to repeat the frustrating experience. Ironically, when I went to put the written recipe into my personal cookbook, I found that he had, in fact, already copied it out. These two handwritten copies of the same recipe are but one place where my husband “speaks out” from, and claims a place within, what I had always considered “my” cookbook. His taste preferences and preferred cooking style is very different from my own—I would never have considered a venison marinade worth finding never mind copying out. By reading his and my recipes together, one can see an alternative to assumed gender roles in our kitchen. This cookbook proves a practice opposite from the conclusion that women cook to serve men which Inness and others have theorised from the cookbooks they have analysed and forces food and gender critics to reconsider stereotypical dichotomies. Another important example is a recipe that has not actually been written down and inserted into my cookbook but it is one my husband and I both take turns making. Years ago, we had found an excellent bacon-cheese dip online that we never managed to find again. Since then, we have been forced to adlib the recipe and it has, in my opinion, never been as good. Both these Internet-recipe examples illustrate the negative drawbacks to using the Internet to find, and store, recipes. Unfortunately, the Internet is not a book. It changes. Links are sometimes broken. Searches do not always yield the same results. Even with recipe-storing sites such as Allrecipes.com and Cooks.com, one must take the time to impute the information and there is no guarantee that the technology will work. While authors such as Anderson and Wagner bemoan that traditional cookbooks only give one version of most recipes, there are so many recipes online that it is sometimes overwhelming and difficult to make a choice. An amateur cook may find comfort in the illustrations and specific instruction, yet one still needs to either have an instinct for what makes a good recipe or needs to be willing to spend time trying them out. Of course the same can be said of regular cookbooks. Having printed texts in one’s home requires the patience to go through them and still requires a sense of suitability and manageability. In both cases, neither an abundance nor a lack of choice can guarantee results. It is true that both the Internet and printed cookbooks such as The Better Homes and Gardens provide numerous, step-by-step instructions and illustrations to help people learn to make food from scratch. Other encyclopedic volumes such as The Five Roses: A Guide to Good Cooking, like YouTube, videos break recipes down into simple steps and include visual tools to help a nervous cook. Yet there is a big difference between the theory and the practice. What in theory may appear simple still necessitates practice. A botched recipe can be the result of using different brands of ingredients, tools, or environmental conditions. Only practice can teach people how to make a recipe successfully. Furthermore, it is difficult to create an online cookbook that rivals the malleability of the personal cookbooks. It is true that recipe websites such as Cooks.com and Allrecipes.com do allow a person to store favourite recipes found on their websites. However, unless the submitter takes the time to personalise the content, recipes can lose their ties to their origins. Bookmaking sites such as Blurb.com are attractive options that do allow for personalisation. In her essay “Aunty Sylvie’s Sponge Foodmaking, Cookbooks and Nostalgia,” Sian Supski uses her aunt’s Blurb family cookbook to argue that the marvel of the Internet has ensured that important family food memories will be preserved; yet once printed, even these treasures risk becoming static documents. As Supski goes on to admit, she is a nervous cook and one can conclude that even this though this recipe collection is very special, it will never become personal because she will not add to it or modify the content. As the examples in Theophano's and Tye’s works demonstrate, the personal touches, the added comments, and the handwritten alterations on the actual recipes give people authority, autonomy, and independence. Hardcopies of recipes indicate through their tattered, dog-eared, and stained pages which recipes have been tried and have been considered to be worth keeping. While Internet sites frequently allow people to comment on recipes and so allow cooks to filter their options, commenting is not a requirement and the suggestions left by others do not necessarily reflect personal preferences. Although they do continue a social, recipe-networking trend that Theophano argues has always existed in relation to cookbook creation and personal foodways, once online, their anonymity and lack of personal connection strips them of their true potential. This is also true of printed cookbooks. Even those compiled by celebrity chefs such as Rachel Ray and Jamie Oliver cannot guarantee success as individuals still need to try them. These examples of recipe reading and recipe collecting advance Heldke’s argument that theory and practice blend in this activity. Recipes are not static. They change depending on who makes them, where they come from, and on the conditions under which they are executed. As critics, we need to recognise this blending of theory and practice and read recipe collections with this reality in mind. Conclusion Despite the growing number of blogs and recipe websites now available to the average cook, personal cookbooks are still a more useful and telling way to communicate information about ourselves and our foodways. As this reflection on actual experiences clearly demonstrates, personal cookbooks teach us about more than just food. They allow us to connect to the past in order to better understand who we are today in ways that the Internet and modern technology cannot. Just as cooking combines theory and practice, reading personal and family cookbooks allows critics to see how theories about foodmaking and gender play out in actual kitchens by actual people. The nuanced merging of voices within them illustrates that individuals alter over time as they come into contact with others. While printed cookbooks and online recipe sites do provide their own narrative possibilities, the stories that can be read in personal and family cookbooks prove that reading them is a thoughtful practice worthy of academic attention. References All Recipes.com Canada. 2013. 24 Apr. 2013. ‹http://allrecipes.com›. Anderson, L. V. “Cookbooks Are Headed for Extinction—and That’s OK.” Slate.com 18 Jun. 2012. 24 Apr. 2013 ‹http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2012/06/the_future_of_cookbooks_they_ll_go_extinct_and_that_s_ok_.html›. Blurb.ca. 2013. 27 May 2013. ‹http://blurb.ca›. Cancian, Sonia. "'Tutti a Tavola!' Feeding the Family in Two Generations of Italian Immigrant Households in Montreal." Edible Histories, Cultural Politics: Towards a Canadian Food History. Ed. Franca Iacovetta, Valerie J. Korinek, Marlene Epp. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2012. 209–21. Cooks.com Recipe Search. 2013. 24 Apr. 2013. ‹http://www.cooks.com›. Darling, Jennifer Dorland. Ed. The Better Homes and Gardens New Cookbook. Des Moines: Meredith, 1996. Five Roses: A Guide to Good Cooking. North Vancouver: Whitecap, 2003. Floyd, Janet, and Laurel Forster. The Recipe Reader. Ed. Janet Floyd and Laurel Forster. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2010. Heldke, Lisa."Foodmaking as a Thoughtful Practice." Cooking, Eating, Thinking: Transformative Philosophies of Food. Ed Deane W. Curtin and Lisa M. Heldke. Indiana UP, 1992. 203–29. ---. “Recipe for Theory Making.” Hypatia 3.2 (1988): 15–29. Inness, Sherrie. Dinner Roles: American Women and Culinary Culture. U of Iowa P, 2001. Leonardi, Susan. “Recipes for Reading: Pasta Salad, Lobster à la Riseholme, Key Lime Pie,” PMLA 104.3 (1989): 340–47. Marquis, Marie. "The Cookbooks Quebecers Prefer: More Than Just Recipes." What's to Eat? Entrées in Canadian Food History. Ed. Nathalie Cooke. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s UP, 2009. 213–27. Shapiro, Laura. Something from the Oven: Reinventing Dinner in 1950s America. New York: Viking, 2004. Theophano, Janet. Eat My Words: Reading Women's Lives through the Cookbooks They Wrote. Palgrave MacMillan: New York, 2002. Tye, Diane. Baking As Biography. Canada: McGill-Queen UP, 2010. Wagner, Vivian. “Cookbooks of the Future: Bye, Bye, Index Cards.” E-Commerce Times. Ecommercetimes.com. 20 Nov. 2011. 16 April 2013. ‹http://www.ecommercetimes.com/story/73842.html›.

Introduction With a deluge of mouthwatering pre-publicity, the opening of The Spotted Pig, the USA’s first self-identified British-styled gastropub, in Manhattan in February 2004 was much anticipated. The late Australian chef, food writer and restauranteur Mietta O’Donnell has noted how “taking over a building or business which has a long established reputation can be a mixed blessing” because of the way that memories “can enrich the experience of being in a place or they can just make people nostalgic”. Bistro Le Zoo, the previous eatery on the site, had been very popular when it opened almost a decade earlier, and its closure was mourned by some diners (Young; Kaminsky “Feeding Time”; Steinhauer & McGinty). This regret did not, however, appear to affect The Spotted Pig’s success. As esteemed New York Times reviewer Frank Bruni noted in his 2006 review: “Almost immediately after it opened […] the throngs started to descend, and they have never stopped”. The following year, The Spotted Pig was awarded a Michelin star—the first year that Michelin ranked New York—and has kept this star in the subsequent annual rankings. Writing Restaurant Biography Detailed studies have been published of almost every type of contemporary organisation including public institutions such as schools, hospitals, museums and universities, as well as non-profit organisations such as charities and professional associations. These are often written to mark a major milestone, or some significant change, development or the demise of the organisation under consideration (Brien). Detailed studies have also recently been published of businesses as diverse as general stores (Woody), art galleries (Fossi), fashion labels (Koda et al.), record stores (Southern & Branson), airlines (Byrnes; Jones), confectionary companies (Chinn) and builders (Garden). In terms of attracting mainstream readerships, however, few such studies seem able to capture popular reader interest as those about eating establishments including restaurants and cafés. This form of restaurant life history is, moreover, not restricted to ‘quality’ establishments. Fast food restaurant chains have attracted their share of studies (see, for example Love; Jakle & Sculle), ranging from business-economic analyses (Liu), socio-cultural political analyses (Watson), and memoirs (Kroc & Anderson), to criticism around their conduct and effects (Striffler). Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal is the most well-known published critique of the fast food industry and its effects with, famously, the Rolling Stone article on which it was based generating more reader mail than any other piece run in the 1990s. The book itself (researched narrative creative nonfiction), moreover, made a fascinating transition to the screen, transformed into a fictionalised drama (co-written by Schlosser) that narrates the content of the book from the point of view of a series of fictional/composite characters involved in the industry, rather than in a documentary format. Akin to the range of studies of fast food restaurants, there are also a variety of studies of eateries in US motels, caravan parks, diners and service station restaurants (see, for example, Baeder). Although there has been little study of this sub-genre of food and drink publishing, their popularity can be explained, at least in part, because such volumes cater to the significant readership for writing about food related topics of all kinds, with food writing recently identified as mainstream literary fare in the USA and UK (Hughes) and an entire “publishing subculture” in Australia (Dunstan & Chaitman). Although no exact tally exists, an informed estimate by the founder of the Gourmand World Cookbook Awards and president of the Paris Cookbook Fair, Edouard Cointreau, has more than 26,000 volumes on food and wine related topics currently published around the world annually (ctd. in Andriani “Gourmand Awards”). The readership for publications about restaurants can also perhaps be attributed to the wide range of information that can be included a single study. My study of a selection of these texts from the UK, USA and Australia indicates that this can include narratives of place and architecture dealing with the restaurant’s location, locale and design; narratives of directly food-related subject matter such as menus, recipes and dining trends; and narratives of people, in the stories of its proprietors, staff and patrons. Detailed studies of contemporary individual establishments commonly take the form of authorised narratives either written by the owners, chefs or other staff with the help of a food journalist, historian or other professional writer, or produced largely by that writer with the assistance of the premise’s staff. These studies are often extensively illustrated with photographs and, sometimes, drawings or reproductions of other artworks, and almost always include recipes. Two examples of these from my own collection include a centennial history of a famous New Orleans eatery that survived Hurricane Katrina, Galatoire’s Cookbook. Written by employees—the chief operating officer/general manager (Melvin Rodrigue) and publicist (Jyl Benson)—this incorporates reminiscences from both other staff and patrons. The second is another study of a New Orleans’ restaurant, this one by the late broadcaster and celebrity local historian Mel Leavitt. The Court of Two Sisters Cookbook: With a History of the French Quarter and the Restaurant, compiled with the assistance of the Two Sisters’ proprietor, Joseph Fein Joseph III, was first published in 1992 and has been so enduringly popular that it is in its eighth printing. These texts, in common with many others of this type, trace a triumph-over-adversity company history that incorporates a series of mildly scintillating anecdotes, lists of famous chefs and diners, and signature recipes. Although obviously focused on an external readership, they can also be characterised as an instance of what David M. Boje calls an organisation’s “story performance” (106) as the process of creating these narratives mobilises an organisation’s (in these cases, a commercial enterprise’s) internal information processing and narrative building activities. Studies of contemporary restaurants are much more rarely written without any involvement from the eatery’s personnel. When these are, the results tend to have much in common with more critical studies such as Fast Food Nation, as well as so-called architectural ‘building biographies’ which attempt to narrate the historical and social forces that “explain the shapes and uses” (Ellis, Chao & Parrish 70) of the physical structures we create. Examples of this would include Harding’s study of the importance of the Boeuf sur le Toit in Parisian life in the 1920s and Middlebrook’s social history of London’s Strand Corner House. Such work agrees with Kopytoff’s assertion—following Appadurai’s proposal that objects possess their own ‘biographies’ which need to be researched and expressed—that such inquiry can reveal not only information about the objects under consideration, but also about readers as we examine our “cultural […] aesthetic, historical, and even political” responses to these narratives (67). The life story of a restaurant will necessarily be entangled with those of the figures who have been involved in its establishment and development, as well as the narratives they create around the business. This following brief study of The Spotted Pig, however, written without the assistance of the establishment’s personnel, aims to outline a life story for this eatery in order to reflect upon the pig’s place in contemporary dining practice in New York as raw foodstuff, fashionable comestible, product, brand, symbol and marketing tool, as well as, at times, purely as an animal identity. The Spotted Pig Widely profiled before it even opened, The Spotted Pig is reportedly one of the city’s “most popular” restaurants (Michelin 349). It is profiled in all the city guidebooks I could locate in print and online, featuring in some of these as a key stop on recommended itineraries (see, for instance, Otis 39). A number of these proclaim it to be the USA’s first ‘gastropub’—the term first used in 1991 in the UK to describe a casual hotel/bar with good food and reasonable prices (Farley). The Spotted Pig is thus styled on a shabby-chic version of a traditional British hotel, featuring a cluttered-but-well arranged use of pig-themed objects and illustrations that is described by latest Michelin Green Guide of New York City as “a country-cute décor that still manages to be hip” (Michelin 349). From the three-dimensional carved pig hanging above the entrance in a homage to the shingles of traditional British hotels, to the use of its image on the menu, website and souvenir tee-shirts, the pig as motif proceeds its use as a foodstuff menu item. So much so, that the restaurant is often (affectionately) referred to by patrons and reviewers simply as ‘The Pig’. The restaurant has become so well known in New York in the relatively brief time it has been operating that it has not only featured in a number of novels and memoirs, but, moreover, little or no explanation has been deemed necessary as the signifier of “The Spotted Pig” appears to convey everything that needs to be said about an eatery of quality and fashion. In the thriller Lethal Experiment: A Donovan Creed Novel, when John Locke’s hero has to leave the restaurant and becomes involved in a series of dangerous escapades, he wants nothing more but to get back to his dinner (107, 115). The restaurant is also mentioned a number of times in Sex and the City author Candace Bushnell’s Lipstick Jungle in relation to a (fictional) new movie of the same name. The joke in the book is that the character doesn’t know of the restaurant (26). In David Goodwillie’s American Subversive, the story of a journalist-turned-blogger and a homegrown terrorist set in New York, the narrator refers to “Scarlett Johansson, for instance, and the hostess at the Spotted Pig” (203-4) as the epitome of attractiveness. The Spotted Pig is also mentioned in Suzanne Guillette’s memoir, Much to Your Chagrin, when the narrator is on a dinner date but fears running into her ex-boyfriend: ‘Jack lives somewhere in this vicinity […] Vaguely, you recall him telling you he was not too far from the Spotted Pig on Greenwich—now, was it Greenwich Avenue or Greenwich Street?’ (361). The author presumes readers know the right answer in order to build tension in this scene. Although this success is usually credited to the joint efforts of backer, music executive turned restaurateur Ken Friedman, his partner, well-known chef, restaurateur, author and television personality Mario Batali, and their UK-born and trained chef, April Bloomfield (see, for instance, Batali), a significant part has been built on Bloomfield’s pork cookery. The very idea of a “spotted pig” itself raises a central tenet of Bloomfield’s pork/food philosophy which is sustainable and organic. That is, not the mass produced, industrially farmed pig which produces a leaner meat, but the fatty, tastier varieties of pig such as the heritage six-spotted Berkshire which is “darker, more heavily marbled with fat, juicier and richer-tasting than most pork” (Fabricant). Bloomfield has, indeed, made pig’s ears—long a Chinese restaurant staple in the city and a key ingredient of Southern US soul food as well as some traditional Japanese and Spanish dishes—fashionable fare in the city, and her current incarnation, a crispy pig’s ear salad with lemon caper dressing (TSP 2010) is much acclaimed by reviewers. This approach to ingredients—using the ‘whole beast’, local whenever possible, and the concentration on pork—has been underlined and enhanced by a continuing relationship with UK chef Fergus Henderson. In his series of London restaurants under the banner of “St. John”, Henderson is famed for the approach to pork cookery outlined in his two books Nose to Tail Eating: A Kind of British Cooking, published in 1999 (re-published both in the UK and the US as The Whole Beast: Nose to Tail Eating), and Beyond Nose to Tail: A Kind of British Cooking: Part II (coauthored with Justin Piers Gellatly in 2007). Henderson has indeed been identified as starting a trend in dining and food publishing, focusing on sustainably using as food the entirety of any animal killed for this purpose, but which mostly focuses on using all parts of pigs. In publishing, this includes Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s The River Cottage Meat Book, Peter Kaminsky’s Pig Perfect, subtitled Encounters with Some Remarkable Swine and Some Great Ways to Cook Them, John Barlow’s Everything but the Squeal: Eating the Whole Hog in Northern Spain and Jennifer McLagan’s Fat: An Appreciation of a Misunderstood Ingredient, with Recipes (2008). In restaurants, it certainly includes The Spotted Pig. So pervasive has embrace of whole beast pork consumption been in New York that, by 2007, Bruni could write that these are: “porky times, fatty times, which is to say very good times indeed. Any new logo for the city could justifiably place the Big Apple in the mouth of a spit-roasted pig” (Bruni). This demand set the stage perfectly for, in October 2007, Henderson to travel to New York to cook pork-rich menus at The Spotted Pig in tandem with Bloomfield (Royer). He followed this again in 2008 and, by 2009, this annual event had become known as “FergusStock” and was covered by local as well as UK media, and a range of US food weblogs. By 2009, it had grown to become a dinner at the Spotted Pig with half the dishes on the menu by Henderson and half by Bloomfield, and a dinner the next night at David Chang’s acclaimed Michelin-starred Momofuku Noodle Bar, which is famed for its Cantonese-style steamed pork belly buns. A third dinner (and then breakfast/brunch) followed at Friedman/Bloomfield’s Breslin Bar and Dining Room (discussed below) (Rose). The Spotted Pig dinners have become famed for Henderson’s pig’s head and pork trotter dishes with the chef himself recognising that although his wasn’t “the most obvious food to cook for America”, it was the case that “at St John, if a couple share a pig’s head, they tend to be American” (qtd. in Rose). In 2009, the pigs’ head were presented in pies which Henderson has described as “puff pastry casing, with layers of chopped, cooked pig’s head and potato, so all the lovely, bubbly pig’s head juices go into the potato” (qtd. in Rose). Bloomfield was aged only 28 when, in 2003, with a recommendation from Jamie Oliver, she interviewed for, and won, the position of executive chef of The Spotted Pig (Fabricant; Q&A). Following this introduction to the US, her reputation as a chef has grown based on the strength of her pork expertise. Among a host of awards, she was named one of US Food & Wine magazine’s ten annual Best New Chefs in 2007. In 2009, she was a featured solo session titled “Pig, Pig, Pig” at the fourth Annual International Chefs Congress, a prestigious New York City based event where “the world’s most influential and innovative chefs, pastry chefs, mixologists, and sommeliers present the latest techniques and culinary concepts to their peers” (Starchefs.com). Bloomfield demonstrated breaking down a whole suckling St. Canut milk raised piglet, after which she butterflied, rolled and slow-poached the belly, and fried the ears. As well as such demonstrations of expertise, she is also often called upon to provide expert comment on pork-related news stories, with The Spotted Pig regularly the subject of that food news. For example, when a rare, heritage Hungarian pig was profiled as a “new” New York pork source in 2009, this story arose because Bloomfield had served a Mangalitsa/Berkshire crossbreed pig belly and trotter dish with Agen prunes (Sanders) at The Spotted Pig. Bloomfield was quoted as the authority on the breed’s flavour and heritage authenticity: “it took me back to my grandmother’s kitchen on a Sunday afternoon, windows steaming from the roasting pork in the oven […] This pork has that same authentic taste” (qtd. in Sanders). Bloomfield has also used this expert profile to support a series of pork-related causes. These include the Thanksgiving Farm in the Catskill area, which produces free range pork for its resident special needs children and adults, and helps them gain meaningful work-related skills in working with these pigs. Bloomfield not only cooks for the project’s fundraisers, but also purchases any excess pigs for The Spotted Pig (Estrine 103). This strong focus on pork is not, however, exclusive. The Spotted Pig is also one of a number of American restaurants involved in the Meatless Monday campaign, whereby at least one vegetarian option is included on menus in order to draw attention to the benefits of a plant-based diet. When, in 2008, Bloomfield beat the Iron Chef in the sixth season of the US version of the eponymous television program, the central ingredient was nothing to do with pork—it was olives. Diversifying from this focus on ‘pig’ can, however, be dangerous. Friedman and Bloomfield’s next enterprise after The Spotted Pig was The John Dory seafood restaurant at the corner of 10th Avenue and 16th Street. This opened in November 2008 to reviews that its food was “uncomplicated and nearly perfect” (Andrews 22), won Bloomfield Time Out New York’s 2009 “Best New Hand at Seafood” award, but was not a success. The John Dory was a more formal, but smaller, restaurant that was more expensive at a time when the financial crisis was just biting, and was closed the following August. Friedman blamed the layout, size and neighbourhood (Stein) and its reservation system, which limited walk-in diners (ctd. in Vallis), but did not mention its non-pork, seafood orientation. When, almost immediately, another Friedman/Bloomfield project was announced, the Breslin Bar & Dining Room (which opened in October 2009 in the Ace Hotel at 20 West 29th Street and Broadway), the enterprise was closely modeled on the The Spotted Pig. In preparation, its senior management—Bloomfield, Friedman and sous-chefs, Nate Smith and Peter Cho (who was to become the Breslin’s head chef)—undertook a tasting tour of the UK that included Henderson’s St. John Bread & Wine Bar (Leventhal). Following this, the Breslin’s menu highlighted a series of pork dishes such as terrines, sausages, ham and potted styles (Rosenberg & McCarthy), with even Bloomfield’s pork scratchings (crispy pork rinds) bar snacks garnering glowing reviews (see, for example, Severson; Ghorbani). Reviewers, moreover, waxed lyrically about the menu’s pig-based dishes, the New York Times reviewer identifying this focus as catering to New York diners’ “fetish for pork fat” (Sifton). This representative review details not only “an entree of gently smoked pork belly that’s been roasted to tender goo, for instance, over a drift of buttery mashed potatoes, with cabbage and bacon on the side” but also a pig’s foot “in gravy made of reduced braising liquid, thick with pillowy shallots and green flecks of deconstructed brussels sprouts” (Sifton). Sifton concluded with the proclamation that this style of pork was “very good: meat that is fat; fat that is meat”. Concluding remarks Bloomfield has listed Michael Ruhlman’s Charcuterie as among her favourite food books. Publishers Weekly reviewer called Ruhlman “a food poet, and the pig is his muse” (Q&A). In August 2009, it was reported that Bloomfield had always wanted to write a cookbook (Marx) and, in July 2010, HarperCollins imprint Ecco publisher and foodbook editor Dan Halpern announced that he was planning a book with her, tentatively titled, A Girl and Her Pig (Andriani “Ecco Expands”). As a “cookbook with memoir running throughout” (Maurer), this will discuss the influence of the pig on her life as well as how to cook pork. This text will obviously also add to the data known about The Spotted Pig, but until then, this brief gastrobiography has attempted to outline some of the human, and in this case, animal, stories that lie behind all businesses. References Andrews, Colman. “Its Up To You, New York, New York.” Gourmet Apr. (2009): 18-22, 111. Andriani, Lynn. “Ecco Expands Cookbook Program: HC Imprint Signs Up Seven New Titles.” Publishers Weekly 12 Jul. (2010) 3 Sep. 2010 http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/book-news/cooking/article/43803-ecco-expands-cookbook-program.html Andriani, Lynn. “Gourmand Awards Receive Record Number of Cookbook Entries.” Publishers Weekly 27 Sep. 2010 http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/book-news/cooking/article/44573-gourmand-awards-receive-record-number-of-cookbook-entries.html Appadurai, Arjun. The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspectives. Cambridge (UK): Cambridge University Press, 2003. First pub. 1986. Baeder, John. Gas, Food, and Lodging. New York: Abbeville Press, 1982. Barlow, John. Everything But the Squeal: Eating the Whole Hog in Northern Spain. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008. Batali, Mario. “The Spotted Pig.” Mario Batali 2010. 3 Sep. 2010 http://www.mariobatali.com/restaurants_spottedpig.cfm Boje, David M. “The Storytelling Organization: A Study of Story Performance in an Office-Supply Firm.” Administrative Science Quarterly 36.1 (1991): 106-126. Brien, Donna Lee. “Writing to Understand Ourselves: An Organisational History of the Australian Association of Writing Programs 1996–2010.” TEXT: Journal of Writing and Writing Courses Apr. 2010 http://www.textjournal.com.au/april10/brien.htm Bruni, Frank. “Fat, Glorious Fat, Moves to the Center of the Plate.” New York Times 13 Jun. 2007. 3 Sep. 2010 http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/13/dining/13glut.html Bruni, Frank. “Stuffed Pork.” New York Times 25 Jan. 2006. 4 Sep. 2010 http://events.nytimes.com/2006/01/25/dining/reviews/25rest.html Bushnell, Candace. Lipstick Jungle. New York: Hyperion Books, 2008. Byrnes, Paul. Qantas by George!: The Remarkable Story of George Roberts. Sydney: Watermark, 2000. Chinn, Carl. The Cadbury Story: A Short History. Studley, Warwickshire: Brewin Books, 1998. Dunstan, David and Chaitman, Annette. “Food and Drink: The Appearance of a Publishing Subculture.” Ed. David Carter and Anne Galligan. Making Books: Contemporary Australian Publishing. St Lucia: U of Queensland P, 2007: 333-351. Ellis, W. Russell, Tonia Chao and Janet Parrish. “Levi’s Place: A Building Biography.” Places 2.1 (1985): 57-70. Estrine, Darryl. Harvest to Heat: Cooking with America’s Best Chefs, Farmers, and Artisans. Newton CT: The Taunton Press, 2010 Fabricant, Florence. “Food stuff: Off the Menu.” New York Times 26 Nov. 2003. 3 Sep. 2010 http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/26/dining/food-stuff-off-the-menu.html?ref=april_bloomfield Fabricant, Florence. “Food Stuff: Fit for an Emperor, Now Raised in America.” New York Times 23 Jun. 2004. 2 Sep. 2010 http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/23/dining/food-stuff-fit-for-an-emperor-now-raised-in-america.html Farley, David. “In N.Y., An Appetite for Gastropubs.” The Washington Post 24 May 2009. 1 Sep. 2010 http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/05/22/AR2009052201105.html Fearnley-Whittingstall, Hugh. The River Cottage Meat Book. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2004. Food & Wine Magazine. “Food & Wine Magazine Names 19th Annual Best New Chefs.” Food & Wine 4 Apr. 2007. 3 Sep. 2010 http://www.foodandwine.com/articles/2007-best-new-chefs Fossi, Gloria. Uffizi Gallery: Art, History, Collections. 4th ed. Florence Italy: Giunti Editore, 2001. Garden, Don. Builders to the Nation: The A.V. Jennings Story. Carlton: Melbourne U P, 1992. Ghorbani, Liza. “Boîte: In NoMad, a Bar With a Pub Vibe.” New York Times 26 Mar. 2010. 3 Sep. 2010 http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/28/fashion/28Boite.html Goodwillie, David. American Subversive. New York: Scribner, 2010. Guillette, Suzanne. Much to Your Chagrin: A Memoir of Embarrassment. New York, Atria Books, 2009. Henderson, Fergus. Nose to Tail Eating: A Kind of British Cooking. London: Pan Macmillan, 1999 Henderson, Fergus and Justin Piers Gellatly. Beyond Nose to Tail: A Kind of British Cooking: Part I1. London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2007. Hughes, Kathryn. “Food Writing Moves from Kitchen to bookshelf.” The Guardian 19 Jun. 2010. 1 Sep. 2010 http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/jun/19/anthony-bourdain-food-writing Jakle, John A. and Keith A. Sculle. Fast Food: Roadside Restaurants in the Automobile Age. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins U P, 1999. Jones, Lois. EasyJet: The Story of Britain's Biggest Low-cost Airline. London: Aurum, 2005. Kaminsky, Peter. “Feeding Time at Le Zoo.” New York Magazine 12 Jun. 1995: 65. Kaminsky, Peter. Pig Perfect: Encounters with Some Remarkable Swine and Some Great Ways To Cook Them. New York: Hyperion 2005. Koda, Harold, Andrew Bolton and Rhonda K. Garelick. Chanel. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2005. Kopytoff, Igor. “The Cultural Biography of Things: Commoditization as Process.” The Social Life of things: Commodities in Cultural Perspectives. Ed. Arjun Appadurai. Cambridge (UK): Cambridge U P, 2003. 64-94. (First pub. 1986). Kroc, Ray and Robert Anderson. Grinding It Out: The Making of McDonald’s, Chicago: H. Regnery, 1977 Leavitt, Mel. The Court of Two Sisters Cookbook: With a History of the French Quarter and the Restaurant. Gretna, LA: Pelican Publishing, 2005. Pub. 1992, 1994, 1996, 1998, 2000, 2001, 2003. Leventhal, Ben. “April Bloomfield & Co. Take U.K. Field Trip to Prep for Ace Debut.” Grub Street 14 Apr. 2009. 3 Sep. 2010 http://newyork.grubstreet.com/2009/04/april_bloomfield_co_take_uk_field_trip_to_prep_for_ace_debut.html Fast Food Nation. R. Linklater (Dir.). Fox Searchlight Pictures, 2006. Liu, Warren K. KFC in China: Secret Recipe for Success. Singapore & Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley (Asia), 2008. Locke, John. Lethal Experiment: A Donovan Creed Novel. Bloomington: iUniverse, 2009. Love, John F. McDonald’s: Behind the Arches. Toronto & New York: Bantam, 1986. Marx, Rebecca. “Beyond the Breslin: April Bloomfield is Thinking Tea, Bakeries, Cookbook.” 28 Aug. 2009. 3 Sep. 2010 http://blogs.villagevoice.com/forkintheroad/archives/2009/08/beyond_the_bres.php Maurer, Daniel. “Meatball Shop, April Bloomfield Plan Cookbooks.” Grub Street 12 Jul. 2010. 3 Sep. 2010 http://newyork.grubstreet.com/2010/07/meatball_shop_april_bloomfield.html McLagan, Jennifer. Fat: An Appreciation of a Misunderstood Ingredient, with Recipes. Berkeley: Ten Speed Press, 2008. Michelin. Michelin Green Guide New York City. Michelin Travel Publications, 2010. O’Donnell, Mietta. “Burying and Celebrating Ghosts.” Herald Sun 1 Dec. 1998. 3 Sep. 2010 http://www.miettas.com.au/restaurants/rest_96-00/buryingghosts.html Otis, Ginger Adams. New York Encounter. Melbourne: Lonely Planet, 2007. “Q and A: April Bloomfield.” New York Times 18 Apr. 2008. 3 Sep. 2010 http://dinersjournal.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/04/18/q-and-a-april-bloomfield Rodrigue, Melvin and Jyl Benson. Galatoire’s Cookbook: Recipes and Family History from the Time-Honored New Orleans Restaurant. New York: Clarkson Potter, 2005. Rose, Hilary. “Fergus Henderson in New York.” The Times (London) Online, 5 Dec. 2009. 23 Aug. 2010 http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/food_and_drink/recipes/article6937550.ece Rosenberg, Sarah & Tom McCarthy. “Platelist: The Breslin’s April Bloomfield.” ABC News/Nightline 4 Dec. 2009. 23 Aug. 2010 http://abcnews.go.com/Nightline/april-bloomfield-spotted-pig-interview/story?id=9242079 Royer, Blake. “Table for Two: Fergus Henderson at The Spotted Pig.” The Paupered Chef 11 Oct. 2007. 23 Aug. 2010 http://thepauperedchef.com/2007/10/table-for-two-f.html Ruhlman, Michael and Brian Polcyn. Charcuterie: The Craft of Salting, Smoking, and Curing. New York: W. Norton, 2005. Sanders, Michael S. “An Old Breed of Hungarian Pig Is Back in Favor.” New York Times 26 Mar. 2009. 23 Aug. 2010 http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/01/dining/01pigs.html?ref=april_bloomfield Schlosser, Eric. “Fast Food Nation: The True History of the America’s Diet.” Rolling Stone Magazine 794 3 Sep. 1998: 58-72. Schlosser, Eric. Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2001. Severson, Kim. “From the Pig Directly to the Fish.” New York Times 2 Sep. 2008. 23 Aug. 2010 http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/03/dining/03bloom.html Severson, Kim. “For the Big Game? Why, Pigskins.” New York Times 3 Feb. 2010. 23 Aug. 2010 http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9502E2DB143DF930A35751C0A9669D8B63&ref=april_bloomfield Sifton, Sam. “The Breslin Bar and Dining Room.” New York Times 12 Jan. 2010. 3 Sep. 2010 http://events.nytimes.com/2010/01/13/dining/reviews/13rest.htm Southern, Terry & Richard Branson. Virgin: A History of Virgin Records. London: A. Publishing, 1996. Starchefs.com. 4th Annual StarChefs.com International Chefs Congress. 2009. 1 Sep. 2010 http://www.starchefs.com/cook/icc-2009 Stein, Joshua David. “Exit Interview: Ken Friedman on the Demise of the John Dory.” Grub Street 15 Sep. 2009. 1 Sep. 2010 http://newyork.grubstreet.com/2009/09/exit_interview_ken_friedman_on.html Steinhauer, Jennifer & Jo Craven McGinty. “Yesterday’s Special: Good, Cheap Dining.” New York Times 26 Jun. 2005. 1 Sep. 2010 http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/26/nyregion/26restaurant.html Striffler, Steve. Chicken: The Dangerous Transformation of America’s Favorite Food. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005. The Spotted Pig (TSP) 2010 The Spotted Pig website http://www.thespottedpig.com Time Out New York. “Eat Out Awards 2009. Best New Hand at Seafood: April Bloomfield, the John Dory”. Time Out New York 706, 9-15 Apr. 2009. 10 Sep. 2010 http://newyork.timeout.com/articles/eat-out-awards/73170/eat-out-awards-2009-best-new-hand-at-seafood-a-april-bloomfield-the-john-dory Vallis, Alexandra. “Ken Friedman on the Virtues of No Reservations.” Grub Street 27 Aug. 2009. 10 Sep. 2010 http://newyork.grubstreet.com/2009/08/ken_friedman_on_the_virtues_of.html Watson, James L. Ed. Golden Arches East: McDonald’s in East Asia. Stanford: Stanford U P, 1997.Woody, Londa L. All in a Day's Work: Historic General Stores of Macon and Surrounding North Carolina Counties. Boone, North Carolina: Parkway Publishers, 2001. Young, Daniel. “Bon Appetit! It’s Feeding Time at Le Zoo.” New York Daily News 28 May 1995. 2 Sep. 2010 http://www.nydailynews.com/archives/lifestyle/1995/05/28/1995-05-28_bon_appetit__it_s_feeding_ti.html

Photograph by Gonzalo Echeverria (2010)Doubt has been my closest companion for several years as I struggle to make sense of certain hidden events from within my family’s history. The actual nature of such events, although now lost to us, can nevertheless be explored through the distorting lens of memory and academic research. I base such explorations in part on my intuition and sensitivity to emotional experience, which are inevitably riddled with doubt. I write from the position of a psychoanalytic psychologist who is also a creative writer and my doubts increase further when I use the autobiographical impulse as a driving force. I am not alone with such uncertainties. Ross Gibson, an historian and filmmaker, uses his doubts to explore empty spaces in the Australian landscape. He looks to see “what’s gone missing” as he endeavours with a team of colleagues to build up some “systematic comprehension in response to fragments” (Gibson, “Places” 1). How can anyone be certain as to what has transpired with no “facts” to go on? he asks. What can we do with our doubts? To this end, Gibson has collected a series of crime scene photographs, taken in post war Sydney, and created a display – a photographic slide show with a minimalist musical score, mostly of drumming and percussion, coupled with a few tight, poetic words, in the form of haiku, splattered across the screen. The notes accompanying the photographic negatives were lost. The only details “known” include the place, the date and the image. Of some two thousand photos, Gibson selected only fifty for display, by hunch, by nuance, or by whatever it was that stirred in him when he first glimpsed them. He describes each photo as “the imprint of a scream”, a gut reaction riddled with doubt (Gibson and Richards, Wartime). In this type of research, creative imaginative flair is essential, Gibson argues. “We need to propose ‘what if’ scenarios that help us account for what has happened…so that we can better envisage what might happen. We need to apprehend the past” (Gibson, “Places” 2). To do this we need imagination, which involves “a readiness to incorporate the unknown…when one encounters evidence that’s in smithereens”, the evidence of the past that lies rooted in a seedbed of doubt (Gibson, “Places” 2). The sociologist, Avery Gordon, also argues in favour of the imaginative impulse. “Fiction is getting pretty close to sociology,” she suggests as she begins her research into the business of ghosts and haunting (Gordon 38). As we entertain our doubts we tune in with our uncertain imaginations. “The places where our discourse is unauthorised by virtue of its unruliness…take us away from abstract questions of method, from bloodless professionalised questions, toward the materiality of institutionalised storytelling, with all its uncanny repetitions” (Gordon 39). If we are to dig deeper, to understand more about the emotional truth of our “fictional” pasts we must look to “the living traces, the memories of the lost and disappeared” (Gordon ix). According to Janice Radway, Gordon seeks a new way of knowing…a knowing that is more a listening than a seeing, a practice of being attuned to the echoes and murmurs of that which has been lost but which is still present among us in the form of intimations, hints, suggestions and portents … ghostly matters … . To be haunted is to be tied to historical and social effects. (x) And to be tied to such effects is to live constantly in the shadow of doubt. A photograph of my dead baby sister haunts me still. As a child I took this photo to school one day. I had peeled it from its corners in the family album. There were two almost identical pictures, side by side. I hoped no one would notice the space left behind. “She’s dead,” I said. I held the photo out to a group of girls in the playground. My fingers had smeared the photo’s surface. The children peered at the image. They wanted to stare at the picture of a dead baby. Not one had seen a dead body before, and not one had been able to imagine the stillness, a photographic image without life, without breath that I passed around on the asphalt playground one spring morning in 1962 when I was ten years old. I have the photo still—my dead sister who bears the same name as my older sister, still living. The dead one has wispy fine black hair. In the photo there are dark shadows underneath her closed eyes. She looks to be asleep. I do not emphasise grief at the loss of my mother’s first-born daughter. My mother felt it briefly, she told me later. But things like that happened all the time during the war. Babies were born and died regularly. Now, all these years later, these same unmourned babies hover restlessly in the nurseries of generations of survivors. There is no way we can be absolute in our interpretations, Gibson argues, but in the first instance there is some basic knowledge to be generated from viewing the crime scene photographs, as in viewing my death photo (Gibson, "Address"). For example, we can reflect on the décor and how people in those days organised their spaces. We can reflect on the way people stood and walked, got on and off vehicles, as well as examine something of the lives of the investigative police, including those whose job it was to take these photographs. Gibson interviewed some of the now elderly men from the Sydney police force who had photographed the crime scenes he displays. He asked questions to deal with his doubts. He now has a very different appreciation of the life of a “copper”, he says. His detective work probing into these empty spaces, digging into his doubts, has reduced his preconceptions and prejudices (Gibson, "Address"). Preconception and prejudice cannot tolerate doubt. In order to bear witness, Gibson says we need to be speculative, to be loose, but not glib, “narrativising” but not inventive, with an eye to the real world (Gibson, "Address"). Gibson’s interest in an interpretation of life after wartime in Sydney is to gather a sense of the world that led to these pictures. His interpretations derive from his hunches, but hunches, he argues, also need to be tested for plausibility (Gibson, Address). Like Gibson, I hope that the didactic trend from the past—to shut up and listen—has been replaced by one that involves “discovery based learning”, learning that is guided by someone who knows “just a little more”, in a common sense, forensic, investigative mode (Gibson, “Address”). Doubt is central to this heuristic trend. Likewise, my doubts give me permission to explore my family’s past without the paralysis of intentionality and certainty. “What method have you adopted for your research?” Gordon asks, as she considers Luce Irigaray’s thoughts on the same question. It is “a delicate question. For isn’t it the method, the path to knowledge, that has always also led us away, led us astray, by fraud and artifice” (Gordon 38). So what is my methodology? I use storytelling meshed with theory and the autobiographical. But what do you think you’re doing? my critics ask. You call this research? I must therefore look to literary theorists on biography and autobiography for support. Nancy Miller writes about the denigration of the autobiographical, particularly in academic circles, where the tendency has been to see the genre as “self indulgent” in its apparent failure to maintain standards of objectivity, of scrutiny and theoretical distance (Miller 421). However, the autobiographical, Miller argues, rather than separating and dividing us through self-interests can “narrow the degree of separation” by operating as an aid to remembering (425). We recognise ourselves in another’s memoir, however fleetingly, and the recognition makes our “own experience feel more meaningful: not ‘merely’ personal but part of the bigger picture of cultural memory” (Miller 426). I speak with some hesitation about my family of origin yet it frames my story and hence my methodology. For many years I have had a horror of what writers and academics call “structure”. I considered myself lacking any ability to create a structure within my writing. I write intuitively. I have some idea of what I wish to explore and then I wait for ideas to enter my mind. They rise to the surface much like air bubbles from a fish. I wait till the fish joggles my bait. Often I write as I wait for a fish to bite. This writing, which is closely informed by my reading, occurs in an intuitive way, as if by instinct. I follow the associations that erupt in my mind, even as I explore another’s theory, and if it is at all possible, if I can get hold of these associations, what I, too, call hunches, then I follow them, much as Gibson and Gordon advocate. Like Gordon, I take my “distractions” seriously (Gordon, 31-60). Gordon follows ghosts. She looks for the things behind the things, the things that haunt her. I, too, look for what lies beneath, what is unconscious, unclear. This writing does not come easily and it takes many drafts before a pattern can emerge, before I, who have always imagined I could not develop a structure, begin to see one—an outline in bold where the central ideas accrue and onto which other thoughts can attach. This structure is not static. It begins with the spark of desire, the intercourse of opposing feelings, for me the desire to untangle family secrets from the past, to unpack one form, namely the history as presented within my family and then to re-assemble it through a written re-construction that attempts to make sense of the empty spaces left out of the family narrative, where no record, verbal or written, has been provided. This operates against pressure from certain members of my family to leave the family past unexplored. My methodology is subjective. Any objectivity I glean in exploring the work and theories of others comes through my own perspective. I read the works of academics in the literary field, and academics from psychoanalysis interested in infant development and personality theory. They consider these issues in different ways from the way in which I, as a psychotherapist, a doubt-filled researcher, and writer, read and experience them. To my clinician self, these ideas evolve in practice. I do not see them as mere abstractions. To me they are living ideas, they pulse and flow, and yet there are some who would seek to tie them down or throw them out. Recently I asked my mother about the photo of her dead baby, her first-born daughter who had died during the Hongerwinter (Hunger winter) of 1945 in Heilo, Holland. I was curious to know how the photo had come about. My curiosity had been flamed by Jay Ruby’s Secure the Shadow: Death and Photography in America, a transcript on the nature of post-mortem photography, which includes several photos of dead people. The book I found by chance in a second-hand books store. I could not leave these photographs behind. Ruby is concerned to ask questions about why we have become so afraid of death, at least in the western world, that we no longer take photographs of our loved ones after death as mementos, or if we take such photos, they are kept private, not shared with the public, for fear that the owners might be considered ghoulish (Ruby 161). I follow in Gordon’s footsteps. She describes how one day, on her way to a conference to present a paper, she had found herself distracted from her conference topic by thoughts of a woman whose image she had discovered was “missing” from a photo taken in Berlin in 1901. According to Gordon’s research, the woman, Sabina Spielrein, should have been present in this photo, but was not. Spielrein is a little known psychoanalyst, little known despite the fact that she was the first to hypothesise on the nature of the death instinct, an unconscious drive towards death and oblivion (Gordon 40). Gordon’s “search” for this missing woman overtook her initial research. My mother could not remember who took her dead baby’s photograph, but suspected it was a neighbour of her cousin in whose house she had stayed. She told me again the story she has told me many times before, and always at my instigation. When I was little I wondered that my mother could stay dry-eyed in the telling. She seemed so calm, when I had imagined that were I the mother of a dead baby I would find it hard to go on. “It is harder,” my mother said, to lose an older child. “When a child dies so young, you have fewer memories. It takes less time to get over it.” Ruby concludes that after World War Two, postmortem photographs were less likely to be kept in the family album, as they would have been in earlier times. “Those who possess death-related family pictures regard them as very private pictures to be shown only to selected people” (Ruby 161). When I look at the images in Ruby’s book, particularly those of the young, the children and babies, I am struck again at the unspoken. The idea of the dead person, seemingly alive in the photograph, propped up in a chair, on a mother’s lap, or resting on a bed, lifeless. To my contemporary sensibility it seems wrong. To look upon these dead people, their identities often unknown, and to imagine the grief for others in that loss—for grief there must have been such that the people remaining felt it necessary to preserve the memory—becomes almost unbearable. It is tempting to judge the past by present standards. In 1999, while writing her historical novel Year of Wonders, Geraldine Brooks came across a letter Henry James had written ninety eight years earlier to a young Sarah Orne Jewett who had previously sent him a manuscript of her historical novel for comment. In his letter, James condemns the notion of the historical novel as an impossibility: “the invention, the representation of the old consciousness, the soul, the sense of horizon, the vision of individuals in whose minds half the things that make ours, that make the modern world,” are all impossible, he insisted (Brooks 3). Despite Brooks’s initial disquiet at James’s words, she realised later that she had heard similar ideas uttered in different contexts before. Brooks had worked as a journalist in the Middle East and Africa: “They don’t think like us,” white Africans would say of their black neighbours, or Israelis of Arabs or upper class Palestinians about their desperately poor refugee-camp brethren … . “They don’t value life as we do. They don’t care if their kids get killed—they have so many of them”. (Brookes 3) But Brooks argues, “a woman keening for a dead child sounds exactly as raw in an earth-floored hovel as it does in a silk-carpeted drawing room” (3). Brooks is concerned to get beyond the certainties of our pre-conceived ideas: “It is human nature to put yourself in another’s shoes. The past may be another country. But the only passport required is empathy”(3). And empathy again requires the capacity to tolerate doubt. Later I asked my mother yet again about what it was like for her when her baby died, and why she had chosen to have her dead baby photographed. She did not ask for the photograph to be taken, she told me. But she was glad to have it now; otherwise nothing would remain of this baby, buried in an unfamiliar cemetery on the other side of the world. Why am I haunted by this image of my dead baby sister and how does it connect with my family’s secrets? The links are still in doubt. Gibson’s creative flair, Gordon’s ideas on ghostly matters and haunting, the things behind the things, my preoccupation with my mother’s dead baby and a sense that this sister might mean less to me did I not have the image of her photograph planted in my memory from childhood, all come together through parataxis if we can bear our doubts. Certainty is the enemy of introspection of imagination and of creativity. Yet too much doubt can paralyse. Here I write about tolerable levels of doubt tempered with an inquisitive mind that can land on hunches and an imagination that allows the researcher to follow such hunches and then seek evidence that corroborates or disproves them. As Gibson writes elsewhere, I tried to use all these scrappy details to help people think about the absences and silences between all the pinpointed examples that made up the scenarios that I presented in prose that was designed to spur rigorous speculation rather than lock down singular conclusions. (“Extractive” 2) Ours is a positive doubt, one that expects to find something, however “unexpected”, rather than a negative doubt that expects nothing. For doubt in large doses can paralyse a person into inaction. Furthermore, a balanced state of doubt fosters connectivity. As John Patrick Shanley’s character, the parish priest, Father Flynn, in the film Doubt, observes, “there are these times in our life when we feel lost. It happens and it’s a bond” (Shanley). References Brooks, Geraldine. "Timeless Tact Helps Sustain a Literary Time Traveller." New York Times, 2001. 14 Jan. 2011 ‹http://www.nytimes.com/2001/07/02/arts/writers-on-writing-timeless-tact-helps-sustain-a-literary-time-traveler.html?pagewanted=3&src=pm›. Doubt. Shanley, Dir. J. P. Shanley. Miramax Films, 2008. Gibson, Ross, and Kate Richards. “Life after Wartime.” N.d. 25 Feb. 2011. ‹http://www.lifeafterwartime.com/›. Gibson, Ross. “The Art of the Real Conference.” Keynote address. U Newcastle, 2008. Gibson, Ross. “Places past Disappearance.” Transformations 13-1 (2006). 22 Feb. 2007 ‹http://www.transformationsjournal.org/journal/issue_13/article_01.shtml›. ———. “Extractive Realism.” Australian Humanities Review 47 (2009). 25 Feb. 2011 ‹http://www.australianhumanitiesreview.org/archive/Issue-November-2009/gibson.html›. Gordon, Avery F. Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination. Minneapolis: U Minnesota P, 2008. Miller, Nancy K. “But Enough about Me, What Do You Think of My Memoir?” The Yale Journal of Criticism 13.2 (2000): 421-536. Ruby, Jay. Secure the Shadow: Death and Photography in America. Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 1995.

For seven months in 1999/2000, six-year old Cuban Elián González was embroiled in a family feud plotted along rival national and ideological lines, and relayed televisually as soap opera across the planet. In Miami, apparitions of the Virgin Mary were reported after Elián’s arrival; adherents of Afro-Cuban santería similarly regarded Elián as divinely touched. In Cuba, Elián’s “kidnapping” briefly reinvigorated a torpid revolutionary project. He was hailed by Fidel Castro as the symbolic descendant of José Martí and Che Guevara, and of the patriotic rigour they embodied. Cubans massed to demand his return. In the U.S.A., Elián’s case was arbitrated at every level of the juridical system. The “Save Elián” campaign generated widespread debate about godless versus godly family values, the contours of the American Dream, and consumerist excess. By the end of 2000 Elián had generated the second largest volume of TV news coverage to that date in U.S. history, surpassed only by the O. J. Simpson case (Fasulo). After Fidel Castro, and perhaps the geriatric music ensemble manufactured by Ry Cooder, the Buena Vista Social Club, Elián became the most famous Cuban of our era. Elián also emerged as the unlikeliest of popular-cultural icons, the focus and subject of cyber-sites, books, films, talk-back radio programs, art exhibits, murals, statues, documentaries, a South Park episode, poetry, songs, t-shirts, posters, newspaper editorials in dozens of languages, demonstrations, speeches, political cartoons, letters, legal writs, U.S. Congress records, opinion polls, prayers, and, on both sides of the Florida Strait, museums consecrated in his memory. Confronted by Elián’s extraordinary renown and historical impact, John Carlos Rowe suggests that the Elián story confirms the need for a post-national and transdisciplinary American Studies, one whose practitioners “will have to be attentive to the strange intersections of politics, law, mass media, popular folklore, literary rhetoric, history, and economics that allow such events to be understood.” (204). I share Rowe’s reading of Elián’s story and the clear challenges it presents to analysis of “America,” to which I would add “Cuba” as well. But Elián’s story is also significant for the ways it challenges critical understandings of fame and its construction. No longer, to paraphrase Leo Braudy (566), definable as an accidental hostage of the mass-mediated eye, Elián’s fame has no certain relation to the child at its discursive centre. Elián’s story is not about an individuated, conscious, performing, desiring, and ambivalently rewarded ego. Elián was never what P. David Marshall calls “part of the public sphere, essentially an actor or, … a player” in it (19). The living/breathing Elián is absent from what I call the virtualizing drives that famously reproduced him. As a result of this virtualization, while one Elián now attends school in Cuba, many other Eliáns continue to populate myriad popular-cultural texts and to proliferate away from the states that tried to contain him. According to Jerry Everard, “States are above all cultural artefacts” that emerge, virtually, “as information produced by and through practices of signification,” as bits, bites, networks, and flows (7). All of us, he claims, reside in “virtual states,” in “legal fictions” based on the elusive and contested capacity to generate national identities in an imaginary bounded space (152). Cuba, the origin of Elián, is a virtual case in point. To augment Nicole Stenger’s definition of cyberspace, Cuba, like “Cyberspace, is like Oz — it is, we get there, but it has no location” (53). As a no-place, Cuba emerges in signifying terms as an illusion with the potential to produce and host Cubanness, as well as rival ideals of nation that can be accessed intact, at will, and ready for ideological deployment. Crude dichotomies of antagonism — Cuba/U.S.A., home/exile, democracy/communism, freedom/tyranny, North/South, godlessness/blessedness, consumption/want — characterize the hegemonic struggle over the Cuban nowhere. Split and splintered, hypersensitive and labyrinthine, guarded and hysterical, and always active elsewhere, the Cuban cultural artefact — an “atmospheric depression in history” (Stenger 56) — very much conforms to the logics that guide the appeal, and danger, of cyberspace. Cuba occupies an inexhaustible “ontological time … that can be reintegrated at any time” (Stenger 55), but it is always haunted by the prospect of ontological stalling and proliferation. The cyber-like struggle over reintegration, of course, evokes the Elián González affair, which began on 25 November 1999, when five-year old Elián set foot on U.S. soil, and ended on 28 June 2000, when Elián, age six, returned to Cuba with his father. Elián left one Cuba and found himself in another Cuba, in the U.S.A., each national claimant asserting virtuously that its other was a no-place and therefore illegitimate. For many exiles, Elián’s arrival in Miami confirmed that Castro’s Cuba is on the point of collapse and hence on the virtual verge of reintegration into the democratic fold as determined by the true upholders of the nation, the exile community. It was also argued that Elián’s biological father could never be the boy’s true father because he was a mere emasculated puppet of Castro himself. The Cuban state, then, had forfeited its claims to generate and host Cubanness. Succoured by this logic, the “Save Elián” campaign began, with organizations like the Cuban American National Foundation (CANF) bankrolling protests, leaflet and poster production, and official “Elián” websites, providing financial assistance to and arranging employment for some of Elián’s Miami relatives, lobbying the U.S. Congress and the Florida legislature, and contributing funds to the legal challenges on behalf of Elián at state and federal levels. (Founded in 1981, the CANF is the largest and most powerful Cuban exile organization, and one that regards itself as the virtual government-in-waiting. CANF emerged with the backing of the Reagan administration and the C.I.A. as a “private sector initiative” to support U.S. efforts against its long-time ideological adversary across the Florida Strait [Arboleya 224-5].) While the “Save Elián” campaign failed, the result of a Cuban American misreading of public opinion and overestimation of the community’s lobbying power with the Clinton administration, the struggle continues in cyberspace. CANF.net.org registers its central role in this intense period with silence; but many of the “Save Elián” websites constructed after November 1999 continue to function as sad memento moris of Elián’s shipwreck in U.S. virtual space. (The CANF website does provide links to articles and opinion pieces about Elián from the U.S. media, but its own editorializing on the Elián affair has disappeared. Two keys to this silence were the election of George W. Bush, and the events of 11 Sep. 2001, which have enabled a revision of the Elián saga as a mere temporary setback on the Cuban-exile historical horizon. Indeed, since 9/11, the CANF website has altered the terms of its campaign against Castro, posting photos of Castro with Arab leaders and implicating him in a world-wide web of terrorism. Elián’s return to Cuba may thus be viewed retrospectively as an act that galvanized Cuban-exile support for the Republican Party and their disdain for the Democratic rival, and this support became pivotal in the Republican electoral victory in Florida and in the U.S.A. as a whole.) For many months after Elián’s return to Cuba, the official Liberty for Elián site, established in April 2000, was urging visitors to make a donation, volunteer for the Save Elián taskforce, send email petitions, and “invite a friend to help Elián.” (Since I last accessed “Liberty for Elián” in March 2004 it has become a gambling site.) Another site, Elian’s Home Page, still implores visitors to pray for Elián. Some of the links no longer function, and imperatives to “Click here” lead to that dead zone called “URL not found on this server.” A similar stalling of the exile aspirations invested in Elián is evident on most remaining Elián websites, official and unofficial, the latter including The Sad Saga of Elian Gonzalez, which exhorts “Cuban Exiles! Now You Can Save Elián!” In these sites, a U.S. resident Elián lives on as an archival curiosity, a sign of pathos, and a reminder of what was, for a time, a Cuban-exile PR disaster. If such cybersites confirm the shipwrecked coordinates of Elián’s fame, the “Save Elián” campaign also provided a focus for unrestrained criticism of the Cuban exile community’s imbrication in U.S. foreign policy initiatives and its embrace of American Dream logics. Within weeks of Elián’s arrival in Florida, cyberspace was hosting myriad Eliáns on sites unbeholden to Cuban-U.S. antagonisms, thus consolidating Elián’s function as a disputed icon of virtualized celebrity and focus for parody. A sense of this carnivalesque proliferation can be gained from the many doctored versions of the now iconic photograph of Elián’s seizure by the INS. Still posted, the jpegs and flashes — Elián and Michael Jackson, Elián and Homer Simpson, Elián and Darth Vader, among others (these and other doctored versions are archived on Hypercenter.com) — confirm the extraordinary domestication of Elián in local pop-cultural terms that also resonate as parodies of U.S. consumerist and voyeuristic excess. Indeed, the parodic responses to Elián’s fame set the virtual tone in cyberspace where ostensibly serious sites can themselves be approached as send ups. One example is Lois Rodden’s Astrodatabank, which, since early 2000, has asked visitors to assist in interpreting Elián’s astrological chart in order to confirm whether or not he will remain in the U.S.A. To this end the site provides Elián’s astro-biography and birth chart — a Sagittarius with a Virgo moon, Elián’s planetary alignments form a bucket — and conveys such information as “To the people of Little Havana [Miami], Elian has achieved mystical status as a ‘miracle child.’” (An aside: Elián and I share the same birthday.) Elián’s virtual reputation for divinely sanctioned “blessedness” within a Cuban exile-meets-American Dream typology provided Tom Tomorrow with the target in his 31 January 2000, cartoon, This Modern World, on Salon.com. Here, six-year old Arkansas resident Allen Consalis loses his mother on the New York subway. His relatives decide to take care of him since “New York has much more to offer him than Arkansas! I mean get real!” A custody battle ensues in which Allan’s heavily Arkansas-accented father requires translation, and the case inspires heated debate: “can we really condemn him to a life in Arkansas?” The cartoon ends with the relatives tempting Allan with the delights offered by the Disney Store, a sign of Elián’s contested insertion into an American Dreamscape that not only promises an endless supply of consumer goods but provides a purportedly safe venue for the alternative Cuban nation. The illusory virtuality of that nation also animates a futuristic scenario, written in Spanish by Camilo Hernández, and circulated via email in May 2000. In this text, Elián sparks a corporate battle between Firestone and Goodyear to claim credit for his inner-tubed survival. Cuban Americans regard Elián as the Messiah come to lead them to the promised land. His ability to walk on water is scientifically tested: he sinks and has to be rescued again. In the ensuing custody battle, Cuban state-run demonstrations allow mothers of lesbians and of children who fail maths to have their say on Elián. Andrew Lloyd Weber wins awards for “Elián the Musical,” and for the film version, Madonna plays the role of the dolphin that saved Elián. Laws are enacted to punish people who mispronounce “Elián” but these do not help Elián’s family. All legal avenues exhausted, the entire exile community moves to Canada, and then to North Dakota where a full-scale replica of Cuba has been built. Visa problems spark another migration; the exiles are welcomed by Israel, thus inspiring a new Intifada that impels their return to the U.S.A. Things settle down by 2014, when Elián, his wife and daughter celebrate his 21st birthday as guests of the Kennedys. The text ends in 2062, when the great-great-grandson of Ry Cooder encounters an elderly Elián in Wyoming, thus providing Elián with his second fifteen minutes of fame. Hernández’s text confirms the impatience with which the Cuban-exile community was regarded by other U.S. Latino sectors, and exemplifies the loss of control over Elián experienced by both sides in the righteous Cuban “moral crusade” to save or repatriate Elián (Fernández xv). (Many Chicanos, for example, were angered at Cuban-exile arguments that Elián should remain in the U.S.A. when, in 1999 alone, 8,000 Mexican children were repatriated to Mexico (Ramos 126), statistical confirmation of the favored status that Cubans enjoy, and Mexicans do not, vis-à-vis U.S. immigration policy. Tom Tomorrow’s cartoon and Camilo Hernández’s email text are part of what I call the “What-if?” sub-genre of Elián representations. Another example is “If Elián Gonzalez was Jewish,” archived on Lori’s Mishmash Humor page, in which Eliat Ginsburg is rescued after floating on a giant matzoh in the Florida Strait, and his Florida relatives fight to prevent his return to Israel, where “he had no freedom, no rights, no tennis lessons”.) Nonetheless, that “moral crusade” has continued in the Cuban state. During the custody battle, Elián was virtualized into a hero of national sovereignty, an embodied fix for a revolutionary project in strain due to the U.S. embargo, the collapse of Soviet socialism, and the symbolic threat posed by the virtual Cuban nation-in-waiting in Florida. Indeed, for the Castro regime, the exile wing of the national family is virtual precisely because it conveniently overlooks two facts: the continued survival of the Cuban state itself; and the exile community’s forty-plus-year slide into permanent U.S. residency as one migrant sector among many. Such rhetoric has not faded since Elián’s return. On December 5, 2003, Castro visited Cárdenas for Elián’s tenth birthday celebration and a quick tour of the Museo a la batalla de ideas (Museum for the Battle of Ideas), the museum dedicated to Elián’s “victory” over U.S. imperialism and opened by Castro on July 14, 2001. At Elián’s school Castro gave a speech in which he recalled the struggle to save “that little boy, whose absence caused everyone, and the whole people of Cuba, so much sorrow and such determination to struggle.” The conflation of Cuban state rhetoric and an Elián mnemonic in Cárdenas is repeated in Havana’s “Plaza de Elián,” or more formally Tribuna Anti-imperialista José Martí, where a statue of José Martí, the nineteenth-century Cuban nationalist, holds Elián in his arms while pointing to Florida. Meanwhile, in Little Havana, Miami, a sun-faded set of photographs and hand-painted signs, which insist God will save Elián yet, hang along the front fence of the house — now also a museum and site of pilgrimage — where Elián once lived in a state of siege. While Elián’s centrality in a struggle between virtuality and virtue continues on both sides of the Florida Strait, the Cuban nowhere could not contain Elián. During his U.S. sojourn many commentators noted that his travails were relayed in serial fashion to an international audience that also claimed intimate knowledge of the boy. Coming after the O.J. Simpson saga and the Clinton-Lewinsky affair, the Elián story confirmed journalist Rick Kushman’s identification of a ceaseless, restless U.S. media attention shift from one story to the next, generating an “übercoverage” that engulfs the country “in mini-hysteria” (Calvert 107). But In Elián’s case, the voyeuristic media-machine attained unprecedented intensity because it met and worked with the virtualities of the Cuban nowhere, part of it in the U.S.A. Thus, a transnational surfeit of Elián-narrative options was guaranteed for participants, audiences and commentators alike, wherever they resided. In Cuba, Elián was hailed as the child-hero of the Revolution. In Miami he was a savior sent by God, the proof supplied by the dolphins that saved him from sharks, and the Virgins who appeared in Little Havana after his arrival (De La Torre 3-5). Along the U.S.A.-Mexico border in 2000, Elián’s name was given to hundreds of Mexican babies whose parents thought the gesture would guarantee their sons a U.S. future. Day by day, Elián’s story was propelled across the globe by melodramatic plot devices familiar to viewers of soap opera: doubtful paternities; familial crimes; identity secrets and their revelation; conflicts of good over evil; the reuniting of long-lost relatives; and the operations of chance and its attendant “hand of Destiny, arcane and vaguely supernatural, transcending probability of doubt” (Welsh 22). Those devices were also favored by the amateur author, whose narratives confirm that the delirious parameters of cyberspace are easily matched in the worldly text. In Michael John’s self-published “history,” Betrayal of Elian Gonzalez, Elián is cast as the victim of a conspiracy traceable back to the hydra-headed monster of Castro-Clinton and the world media: “Elian’s case was MANIPULATED to achieve THEIR OVER-ALL AGENDA. Only time will bear that out” (143). His book is now out of print, and the last time I looked (August 2004) one copy was being offered on Amazon.com for US$186.30 (original price, $9.95). Guyana-born, Canadian-resident Frank Senauth’s eccentric novel, A Cry for Help: The Fantastic Adventures of Elian Gonzalez, joins his other ventures into vanity publishing: To Save the Titanic from Disaster I and II; To Save Flight 608 From Disaster; A Wish to Die – A Will to Live; A Time to Live, A Time to Die; and A Day of Terror: The Sagas of 11th September, 2001. In A Cry for Help, Rachel, a white witch and student of writing, travels back in time in order to save Elián’s mother and her fellow travelers from drowning in the Florida Strait. As Senauth says, “I was only able to write this dramatic story because of my gift for seeing things as they really are and sharing my mystic imagination with you the public” (25). As such texts confirm, Elián González is an aberrant addition to the traditional U.S.-sponsored celebrity roll-call. He had no ontological capacity to take advantage of, intervene in, comment on, or be known outside, the parallel narrative universe into which he was cast and remade. He was cast adrift as a mere proper name that impelled numerous authors to supply the boy with the biography he purportedly lacked. Resident of an “atmospheric depression in history” (Stenger 56), Elián was battled over by virtualized national rivals, mass-mediated, and laid bare for endless signification. Even before his return to Cuba, one commentator noted that Elián had been consumed, denied corporeality, and condemned to “live out his life in hyper-space” (Buzachero). That space includes the infamous episode of South Park from May 2000, in which Kenny, simulating Elián, is killed off as per the show’s episodic protocols. Symptomatic of Elián’s narrative dispersal, the Kenny-Elián simulation keeps on living and dying whenever the episode is re-broadcast on TV sets across the world. Appropriated and relocated to strange and estranging narrative terrain, one Elián now lives out his multiple existences in the Cuban-U.S. “atmosphere in history,” and the Elián icon continues to proliferate virtually anywhere. References Arboleya, Jesús. The Cuban Counter-Revolution. Trans. Rafael Betancourt. Research in International Studies, Latin America Series no. 33. Athens, OH: Ohio Center for International Studies, 2000. Braudy, Leo. The Frenzy of Renown: Fame and Its History. New York and Oxford: Oxford UP, 1986. Buzachero, Chris. “Elian Gonzalez in Hyper-Space.” Ctheory.net 24 May 2000. 19 Aug. 2004: http://www.ctheory.net/text_file.asp?pick=222>. Calvert, Clay. Voyeur Nation: Media, Privacy, and Peering in Modern Culture. Boulder: Westview, 2000. Castro, Fidel. “Speech Given by Fidel Castro, at the Ceremony Marking the Birthday of Elian Gonzalez and the Fourth Anniversary of the Battle of Ideas, Held at ‘Marcello Salado’ Primary School in Cardenas, Matanzas on December 5, 2003.” 15 Aug. 2004 http://www.revolutionarycommunist.org.uk/fidel_castro3.htm>. Cuban American National Foundation. Official Website. 2004. 20 Aug. 2004 http://www.canf.org/2004/principal-ingles.htm>. De La Torre, Miguel A. La Lucha For Cuba: Religion and Politics on the Streets of Miami. Berkeley: U of California P, 2003. “Elian Jokes.” Hypercenter.com 2000. 19 Aug. 2004 http://www.hypercenter.com/jokes/elian/index.shtml>. “Elian’s Home Page.” 2000. 19 Aug. 2004 http://elian.8k.com>. Everard, Jerry. Virtual States: The Internet and the Boundaries of the Nation-State. London and New York, Routledge, 2000. Fernández, Damián J. Cuba and the Politics of Passion. Austin: U of Texas P, 2000. Hernández, Camilo. “Cronología de Elián.” E-mail. 2000. Received 6 May 2000. “If Elian Gonzalez Was Jewish.” Lori’s Mishmash Humor Page. 2000. 10 Aug. 2004 http://www.geocities.com/CollegePark/6174/jokes/if-elian-was-jewish.htm>. John, Michael. Betrayal of Elian Gonzalez. MaxGo, 2000. “Liberty for Elián.” Official Save Elián Website 2000. June 2003 http://www.libertyforelian.org>. Marshall, P. David. Celebrity and Power: Fame in Contemporary Culture. Minneapolis and London: U of Minnesota P, 1997. Ramos, Jorge. La otra cara de América: Historias de los inmigrantes latinoamericanos que están cambiando a Estados Unidos. México, DF: Grijalbo, 2000. Rodden, Lois. “Elian Gonzalez.” Astrodatabank 2000. 20 Aug. 2004 http://www.astrodatabank.com/NM/GonzalezElian.htm>. Rowe, John Carlos. 2002. The New American Studies. Minneapolis and London: U of Minnesota P, 2002. “The Sad Saga of Elian Gonzalez.” July 2004. 19 Aug. 2004 http://www.revlu.com/Elian.html>. Senauth, Frank. A Cry for Help: The Fantastic Adventures of Elian Gonzalez. Victoria, Canada: Trafford, 2000. Stenger, Nicole. “Mind Is a Leaking Rainbow.” Cyberspace: First Steps. Ed. Michael Benedikt. Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 1991. 49-58. Welsh, Alexander. George Eliot and Blackmail. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1985. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Allatson, Paul. "The Virtualization of Elián González." M/C Journal 7.5 (2004). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0411/16-allatson.php>. APA Style Allatson, P. (Nov. 2004) "The Virtualization of Elián González," M/C Journal, 7(5). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0411/16-allatson.php>.

This article investigates the prosthesis of identity through the process of branding. It examines cross-cultural manifestations of this phenomena from sixth millennium BCE Syria to twelfth century Japan and Britain. From the Neolithic Era, humanity has sort to extend their identities using pictorial signs that were characteristically simple. Designed to be distinctive and instantly recognisable, the totemic symbols served to signal the origin of the bearer. Subsequently, the development of branding coincided with periods of increased in mobility both in respect to geography and social strata. This includes fifth millennium Mesopotamia, nineteenth century Britain, and America during the 1920s.There are fewer articles of greater influence on contemporary culture than A Theory of Human Motivation written by Abraham Maslow in 1943. Nearly seventy-five years later, his theories about the societal need for “belongingness” and “esteem” remain a mainstay of advertising campaigns (Maslow). Although the principles are used to sell a broad range of products from shampoo to breakfast cereal they are epitomised by apparel. This is with refence to garments and accessories bearing corporation logos. Whereas other purchased items, imbued with abstract products, are intended for personal consumption the public display of these symbols may be interpreted as a form of signalling. The intention of the wearers is to literally seek the fulfilment of the aforementioned social needs. This article investigates the use of brands as prosthesis.Coats and Crests: Identity Garnered on Garments in the Middle Ages and the Muromachi PeriodA logo, at its most basic, is a pictorial sign. In his essay, The Visual Language, Ernest Gombrich described the principle as reducing images to “distinctive features” (Gombrich 46). They represent a “simplification of code,” the meaning of which we are conditioned to recognise (Gombrich 46). Logos may also be interpreted as a manifestation of totemism. According to anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss, the principle exists in all civilisations and reflects an effort to evoke the power of nature (71-127). Totemism is also a method of population distribution (Levi-Strauss 166).This principle, in a form garnered on garments, is manifested in Mon Kiri. The practice of cutting out family crests evolved into a form of corporate branding in Japan during the Meiji Period (1868-1912) (Christensen 14). During the Muromachi period (1336-1573) the crests provided an integral means of identification on the battlefield (Christensen 13). The adorning of crests on armour was also exercised in Europe during the twelfth century, when the faces of knights were similarly obscured by helmets (Family Crests of Japan 8). Both Mon Kiri and “Coat[s] of Arms” utilised totemic symbols (Family Crests of Japan 8; Elven 14; Christensen 13). The mon for the imperial family (figs. 1 & 2) during the Muromachi Period featured chrysanthemum and paulownia flowers (Goin’ Japaneque). “Coat[s] of Arms” in Britain featured a menagerie of animals including lions (fig. 3), horses and eagles (Elven).The prothesis of identity through garnering symbols on the battlefield provided “safety” through demonstrating “belongingness”. This constituted a conflation of two separate “needs” in the “hierarchy of prepotency” propositioned by Maslow. Fig. 1. The mon symbolising the Imperial Family during the Muromachi Period featured chrysanthemum and paulownia. "Kamon (Japanese Family Crests): Ancient Key to Samurai Culture." Goin' Japaneque! 15 Nov. 2015. 27 July 2019 <http://goinjapanesque.com/05983/>.Fig. 2. An example of the crest being utilised on a garment can be found in this portrait of samurai Oda Nobunaga. "Japan's 12 Most Famous Samurai." All About Japan. 27 Aug. 2018. 27 July 2019 <https://allabout-japan.com/en/article/5818/>.Fig. 3. A detail from the “Index of Subjects of Crests.” Elven, John Peter. The Book of Family Crests: Comprising Nearly Every Family Bearing, Properly Blazoned and Explained, Accompanied by Upwards of Four Thousand Engravings. Henry Washbourne, 1847.The Pursuit of Prestige: Prosthetic Pedigree from the Late Georgian to the Victorian Eras In 1817, the seal engraver to Prince Regent, Alexander Deuchar, described the function of family crests in British Crests: Containing The Crest and Mottos of The Families of Great Britain and Ireland; Together with Those of The Principal Cities and Heraldic Terms as follows: The first approach to civilization is the distinction of ranks. So necessary is this to the welfare and existence of society, that, without it, anarchy and confusion must prevail… In an early stage, heraldic emblems were characteristic of the bearer… Certain ordinances were made, regulating the mode of bearing arms, and who were entitled to bear them. (i-v)The partitioning of social classes in Britain had deteriorated by the time this compendium was published, with displays of “conspicuous consumption” displacing “heraldic emblems” as a primary method of status signalling (Deuchar 2; Han et al. 18). A consumerism born of newfound affluence, and the desire to signify this wealth through luxury goods, was as integral to the Industrial Revolution as technological development. In Rebels against the Future, published in 1996, Kirkpatrick Sale described the phenomenon:A substantial part of the new population, though still a distinct minority, was made modestly affluent, in some places quite wealthy, by privatization of of the countryside and the industrialization of the cities, and by the sorts of commercial and other services that this called forth. The new money stimulated the consumer demand… that allowed a market economy of a scope not known before. (40)This also reflected improvements in the provision of “health, food [and] education” (Maslow; Snow 25-28). With their “physiological needs” accommodated, this ”substantial part” of the population were able to prioritised their “esteem needs” including the pursuit for prestige (Sale 40; Maslow).In Britain during the Middle Ages laws “specified in minute detail” what each class was permitted to wear (Han et al. 15). A groom, for example, was not able to wear clothing that exceeded two marks in value (Han et al. 15). In a distinct departure during the Industrial Era, it was common for the “middling and lower classes” to “ape” the “fashionable vices of their superiors” (Sale 41). Although mon-like labels that were “simplified so as to be conspicuous and instantly recognisable” emerged in Europe during the nineteenth century their application on garments remained discrete up until the early twentieth century (Christensen 13-14; Moore and Reid 24). During the 1920s, the French companies Hermes and Coco Chanel were amongst the clothing manufacturers to pioneer this principle (Chaney; Icon).During the 1860s, Lincolnshire-born Charles Frederick Worth affixed gold stamped labels to the insides of his garments (Polan et al. 9; Press). Operating from Paris, the innovation was consistent with the introduction of trademark laws in France in 1857 (Lopes et al.). He would become known as the “Father of Haute Couture”, creating dresses for royalty and celebrities including Empress Eugene from Constantinople, French actress Sarah Bernhardt and Australian Opera Singer Nellie Melba (Lopes et al.; Krick). The clothing labels proved and ineffective deterrent to counterfeit, and by the 1890s the House of Worth implemented other measures to authenticate their products (Press). The legitimisation of the origin of a product is, arguably, the primary function of branding. This principle is also applicable to subjects. The prothesis of brands, as totemic symbols, assisted consumers to relocate themselves within a new system of population distribution (Levi-Strauss 166). It was one born of commerce as opposed to heraldry.Selling of Self: Conferring Identity from the Neolithic to Modern ErasIn his 1817 compendium on family crests, Deuchar elaborated on heraldry by writing:Ignoble birth was considered as a stain almost indelible… Illustrious parentage, on the other hand, constituted the very basis of honour: it communicated peculiar rights and privileges, to which the meaner born man might not aspire. (v-vi)The Twinings Logo (fig. 4) has remained unchanged since the design was commissioned by the grandson of the company founder Richard Twining in 1787 (Twining). In addition to reflecting the heritage of the family-owned company, the brand indicated the origin of the tea. This became pertinent during the nineteenth century. Plantations began to operate from Assam to Ceylon (Jones 267-269). Amidst the rampant diversification of tea sources in the Victorian era, concerns about the “unhygienic practices” of Chinese producers were proliferated (Wengrow 11). Subsequently, the brand also offered consumers assurance in quality. Fig. 4. The Twinings Logo reproduced from "History of Twinings." Twinings. 24 July 2019 <https://www.twinings.co.uk/about-twinings/history-of-twinings>.The term ‘brand’, adapted from the Norse “brandr”, was introduced into the English language during the sixteenth century (Starcevic 179). At its most literal, it translates as to “burn down” (Starcevic 179). Using hot elements to singe markings onto animals been recorded as early as 2700 BCE in Egypt (Starcevic 182). However, archaeologists concur that the modern principle of branding predates this practice. The implementation of carved seals or stamps to make indelible impressions of handcrafted objects dates back to Prehistoric Mesopotamia (Starcevic 183; Wengrow 13). Similar traditions developed during the Bronze Age in both China and the Indus Valley (Starcevic 185). In all three civilisations branding facilitated both commerce and aspects of Totemism. In the sixth millennium BCE in “Prehistoric” Mesopotamia, referred to as the Halaf period, stone seals were carved to emulate organic form such as animal teeth (Wengrow 13-14). They were used to safeguard objects by “confer[ring] part of the bearer’s personality” (Wengrow 14). They were concurrently applied to secure the contents of vessels containing “exotic goods” used in transactions (Wengrow 15). Worn as amulets (figs. 5 & 6) the seals, and the symbols they produced, were a physical extension of their owners (Wengrow 14).Fig. 5. Recreation of stamp seal amulets from Neolithic Mesopotamia during the sixth millennium BCE. Wengrow, David. "Prehistories of Commodity Branding." Current Anthropology 49.1 (2008): 14.Fig. 6. “Lot 25Y: Rare Syrian Steatite Amulet – Fertility God 5000 BCE.” The Salesroom. 27 July 2019 <https://www.the-saleroom.com/en-gb/auction-catalogues/artemis-gallery-ancient-art/catalogue-id-srartem10006/lot-a850d229-a303-4bae-b68c-a6130005c48a>. Fig. 7. Recreation of stamp seal designs from Mesopotamia from the late fifth to fourth millennium BCE. Wengrow, David. "Prehistories of Commodity Branding." Current Anthropology 49. 1 (2008): 16.In the following millennia, the seals would increase exponentially in application and aesthetic complexity (fig. 7) to support the development of household cum cottage industries (Wengrow 15). In addition to handcrafts, sealed vessels would transport consumables such as wine, aromatic oils and animal fats (Wengrow 18). The illustrations on the seals included depictions of rituals undertaken by human figures and/or allegories using animals. It can be ascertained that the transition in the Victorian Era from heraldry to commerce, from family to corporation, had precedence. By extension, consumers were able to participate in this process of value attribution using brands as signifiers. The principle remained prevalent during the modern and post-modern eras and can be respectively interpreted using structuralist and post-structuralist theory.Totemism to Simulacrum: The Evolution of Advertising from the Modern to Post-Modern Eras In 2011, Lisa Chaney wrote of the inception of the Coco Chanel logo (fig. 8) in her biography Chanel: An Intimate Life: A crucial element in the signature design of the Chanel No.5 bottle is the small black ‘C’ within a black circle set as the seal at the neck. On the top of the lid are two more ‘C’s, intertwined back to back… from at least 1924, the No5 bottles sported the unmistakable logo… these two ‘C’s referred to Gabrielle, – in other words Coco Chanel herself, and would become the logo for the House of Chanel. Chaney continued by describing Chanel’s fascination of totemic symbols as expressed through her use of tarot cards. She also “surrounded herself with objects ripe with meaning” such as representations of wheat and lions in reference prosperity and to her zodiac symbol ‘Leo’ respectively. Fig. 8. No5 Chanel Perfume, released in 1924, featured a seal-like logo attached to the bottle neck. “No5.” Chanel. 25 July 2019 <https://www.chanel.com/us/fragrance/p/120450/n5-parfum-grand-extrait/>.Fig. 9. This illustration of the bottle by Georges Goursat was published in a women’s magazine circa 1920s. “1921 Chanel No5.” Inside Chanel. 26 July 2019 <http://inside.chanel.com/en/timeline/1921_no5>; “La 4éme Fête de l’Histoire Samedi 16 et dimache 17 juin.” Ville de Perigueux. Musée d’art et d’archéologie du Périgord. 28 Mar. 2018. 26 July 2019 <https://www.perigueux-maap.fr/category/archives/page/5/>. This product was considered the “financial basis” of the Chanel “empire” which emerged during the second and third decades of the twentieth century (Tikkanen). Chanel is credited for revolutionising Haute Couture by introducing chic modern designs that emphasised “simplicity and comfort.” This was as opposed to the corseted highly embellished fashion that characterised the Victorian Era (Tikkanen). The lavish designs released by the House of Worth were, in and of themselves, “conspicuous” displays of “consumption” (Veblen 17). In contrast, the prestige and status associated with the “poor girl” look introduced by Chanel was invested in the story of the designer (Tikkanen). A primary example is her marinière or sailor’s blouse with a Breton stripe that epitomised her ascension from café singer to couturier (Tikkanen; Burstein 8). This signifier might have gone unobserved by less discerning consumers of fashion if it were not for branding. Not unlike the Prehistoric Mesopotamians, this iteration of branding is a process which “confer[s]” the “personality” of the designer into the garment (Wengrow 13 -14). The wearer of the garment is, in turn, is imbued by extension. Advertisers in the post-structuralist era embraced Levi-Strauss’s structuralist anthropological theories (Williamson 50). This is with particular reference to “bricolage” or the “preconditioning” of totemic symbols (Williamson 173; Pool 50). Subsequently, advertising creatives cum “bricoleur” employed his principles to imbue the brands with symbolic power. This symbolic capital was, arguably, transferable to the product and, ultimately, to its consumer (Williamson 173).Post-structuralist and semiotician Jean Baudrillard “exhaustively” critiqued brands and the advertising, or simulacrum, that embellished them between the late 1960s and early 1980s (Wengrow 10-11). In Simulacra and Simulation he wrote,it is the reflection of a profound reality; it masks and denatures a profound reality; it masks the absence of a profound reality; it has no relation to any reality whatsoever: it is its own pure simulacrum. (6)The symbolic power of the Chanel brand resonates in the ‘profound reality’ of her story. It is efficiently ‘denatured’ through becoming simplified, conspicuous and instantly recognisable. It is, as a logo, physically juxtaposed as simulacra onto apparel. This simulacrum, in turn, effects the ‘profound reality’ of the consumer. In 1899, economist Thorstein Veblen wrote in The Theory of the Leisure Class:Conspicuous consumption of valuable goods it the means of reputability to the gentleman of leisure… costly entertainments, such as potlatch or the ball, are peculiarly adapted to serve this end… he consumes vicariously for his host at the same time that he is witness to the consumption… he is also made to witness his host’s facility in etiquette. (47)Therefore, according to Veblen, it was the witnessing of “wasteful” consumption that “confers status” as opposed the primary conspicuous act (Han et al. 18). Despite television being in its experimental infancy advertising was at “the height of its powers” during the 1920s (Clark et al. 18; Hill 30). Post-World War I consumers, in America, experienced an unaccustomed level of prosperity and were unsuspecting of the motives of the newly formed advertising agencies (Clark et al. 18). Subsequently, the ‘witnessing’ of consumption could be constructed across a plethora of media from the newly emerged commercial radio to billboards (Hill viii–25). The resulting ‘status’ was ‘conferred’ onto brand logos. Women’s magazines, with a legacy dating back to 1828, were a primary locus (Hill 10).Belonging in a Post-Structuralist WorldIt is significant to note that, in a post-structuralist world, consumers do not exclusively seek upward mobility in their selection of brands. The establishment of counter-culture icon Levi-Strauss and Co. was concurrent to the emergence of both The House of Worth and Coco Chanel. The Bavarian-born Levi Strauss commenced selling apparel in San Francisco in 1853 (Levi’s). Two decades later, in partnership with Nevada born tailor Jacob Davis, he patented the “riveted-for-strength” workwear using blue denim (Levi’s). Although the ontology of ‘jeans’ is contested, references to “Jene Fustyan” date back the sixteenth century (Snyder 139). It involved the combining cotton, wool and linen to create “vestments” for Geonese sailors (Snyder 138). The Two Horse Logo (fig. 10), depicting them unable to pull apart a pair of jeans to symbolise strength, has been in continuous use by Levi Strauss & Co. company since its design in 1886 (Levi’s). Fig. 10. The Two Horse Logo by Levi Strauss & Co. has been in continuous use since 1886. Staff Unzipped. "Two Horses. One Message." Heritage. Levi Strauss & Co. 1 July 2011. 25 July 2019 <https://www.levistrauss.com/2011/07/01/two-horses-many-versions-one-message/>.The “rugged wear” would become the favoured apparel amongst miners at American Gold Rush (Muthu 6). Subsequently, between the 1930s – 1960s Hollywood films cultivated jeans as a symbol of “defiance” from Stage Coach staring John Wayne in 1939 to Rebel without A Cause staring James Dean in 1955 (Muthu 6; Edgar). Consequently, during the 1960s college students protesting in America (fig. 11) against the draft chose the attire to symbolise their solidarity with the working class (Hedarty). Notwithstanding a 1990s fashion revision of denim into a diversity of garments ranging from jackets to skirts, jeans have remained a wardrobe mainstay for the past half century (Hedarty; Muthu 10). Fig. 11. Although the brand label is not visible, jeans as initially introduced to the American Goldfields in the nineteenth century by Levi Strauss & Co. were cultivated as a symbol of defiance from the 1930s – 1960s. It documents an anti-war protest that occurred at the Pentagon in 1967. Cox, Savannah. "The Anti-Vietnam War Movement." ATI. 14 Dec. 2016. 16 July 2019 <https://allthatsinteresting.com/vietnam-war-protests#7>.In 2003, the journal Science published an article “Does Rejection Hurt? An Fmri Study of Social Exclusion” (Eisenberger et al.). The cross-institutional study demonstrated that the neurological reaction to rejection is indistinguishable to physical pain. Whereas during the 1940s Maslow classified the desire for “belonging” as secondary to “physiological needs,” early twenty-first century psychologists would suggest “[social] acceptance is a mechanism for survival” (Weir 50). In Simulacra and Simulation, Jean Baudrillard wrote: Today abstraction is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror or the concept. Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal… (1)In the intervening thirty-eight years since this document was published the artifice of our interactions has increased exponentially. In order to locate ‘belongness’ in this hyperreality, the identities of the seekers require a level of encoding. Brands, as signifiers, provide a vehicle.Whereas in Prehistoric Mesopotamia carved seals, worn as amulets, were used to extend the identity of a person, in post-digital China WeChat QR codes (fig. 12), stored in mobile phones, are used to facilitate transactions from exchanging contact details to commerce. Like other totems, they provide access to information such as locations, preferences, beliefs, marital status and financial circumstances. These individualised brands are the most recent incarnation of a technology that has developed over the past eight thousand years. The intermediary iteration, emblems affixed to garments, has remained prevalent since the twelfth century. Their continued salience is due to their visibility and, subsequent, accessibility as signifiers. Fig. 12. It may be posited that Wechat QR codes are a form individualised branding. Like other totems, they store information pertaining to the owner’s location, beliefs, preferences, marital status and financial circumstances. “Join Wechat groups using QR code on 2019.” Techwebsites. 26 July 2019 <https://techwebsites.net/join-wechat-group-qr-code/>.Fig. 13. Brands function effectively as signifiers is due to the international distribution of multinational corporations. This is the shopfront of Chanel in Dubai, which offers customers apparel bearing consistent insignia as the Parisian outlet at on Rue Cambon. Customers of Chanel can signify to each other with the confidence that their products will be recognised. “Chanel.” The Dubai Mall. 26 July 2019 <https://thedubaimall.com/en/shop/chanel>.Navigating a post-structuralist world of increasing mobility necessitates a rudimental understanding of these symbols. Whereas in the nineteenth century status was conveyed through consumption and witnessing consumption, from the twentieth century onwards the garnering of brands made this transaction immediate (Veblen 47; Han et al. 18). The bricolage of the brands is constructed by bricoleurs working in any number of contemporary creative fields such as advertising, filmmaking or song writing. They provide a system by which individuals can convey and recognise identities at prima facie. They enable the prosthesis of identity.ReferencesBaudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulation. Trans. Sheila Faria Glaser. United States: University of Michigan Press, 1994.Burstein, Jessica. Cold Modernism: Literature, Fashion, Art. United States: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2012.Chaney, Lisa. Chanel: An Intimate Life. United Kingdom: Penguin Books Limited, 2011.Christensen, J.A. Cut-Art: An Introduction to Chung-Hua and Kiri-E. New York: Watson-Guptill Publications, 1989. Clark, Eddie M., Timothy C. Brock, David E. Stewart, David W. Stewart. Attention, Attitude, and Affect in Response to Advertising. United Kingdom: Taylor & Francis Group, 1994.Deuchar, Alexander. British Crests: Containing the Crests and Mottos of the Families of Great Britain and Ireland Together with Those of the Principal Cities – Primary So. London: Kirkwood & Sons, 1817.Ebert, Robert. “Great Movie: Stage Coach.” Robert Ebert.com. 1 Aug. 2011. 10 Mar. 2019 <https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/great-movie-stagecoach-1939>.Elven, John Peter. The Book of Family Crests: Comprising Nearly Every Family Bearing, Properly Blazoned and Explained, Accompanied by Upwards of Four Thousand Engravings. London: Henry Washbourne, 1847.Eisenberger, Naomi I., Matthew D. Lieberman, and Kipling D. Williams. "Does Rejection Hurt? An Fmri Study of Social Exclusion." Science 302.5643 (2003): 290-92.Family Crests of Japan. California: Stone Bridge Press, 2007.Gombrich, Ernst. "The Visual Image: Its Place in Communication." Scientific American 272 (1972): 82-96.Hedarty, Stephanie. "How Jeans Conquered the World." BBC World Service. 28 Feb. 2012. 26 July 2019 <https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-17101768>. Han, Young Jee, Joseph C. Nunes, and Xavier Drèze. "Signaling Status with Luxury Goods: The Role of Brand Prominence." Journal of Marketing 74.4 (2010): 15-30.Hill, Daniel Delis. Advertising to the American Woman, 1900-1999. United States of Ame: Ohio State University Press, 2002."History of Twinings." Twinings. 24 July 2019 <https://www.twinings.co.uk/about-twinings/history-of-twinings>. icon-icon: Telling You More about Icons. 18 Dec. 2016. 26 July 2019 <http://www.icon-icon.com/en/hermes-logo-the-horse-drawn-carriage/>. Jones, Geoffrey. Merchants to Multinationals: British Trading Companies in the 19th and 20th Centuries. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2002.Kamon (Japanese Family Crests): Ancient Key to Samurai Culture." Goin' Japaneque! 15 Nov. 2015. 27 July 2019 <http://goinjapanesque.com/05983/>. Krick, Jessa. "Charles Frederick Worth (1825-1895) and the House of Worth." Heilburnn Timeline of Art History. The Met. Oct. 2004. 23 July 2019 <https://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/wrth/hd_wrth.htm>. Levi’s. "About Levis Strauss & Co." 25 July 2019 <https://www.levis.com.au/about-us.html>. Lévi-Strauss, Claude. Totemism. London: Penguin, 1969.Lopes, Teresa de Silva, and Paul Duguid. Trademarks, Brands, and Competitiveness. Abingdon: Routledge, 2010.Maslow, Abraham. "A Theory of Human Motivation." British Journal of Psychiatry 208.4 (1942): 313-13.Moore, Karl, and Susan Reid. "The Birth of Brand: 4000 Years of Branding History." Business History 4.4 (2008).Muthu, Subramanian Senthikannan. Sustainability in Denim. Cambridge Woodhead Publishing, 2017.Polan, Brenda, and Roger Tredre. The Great Fashion Designers. Oxford: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2009.Pool, Roger C. Introduction. Totemism. New ed. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969.Press, Claire. Wardrobe Crisis: How We Went from Sunday Best to Fast Fashion. Melbourne: Schwartz Publishing, 2016.Sale, K. Rebels against the Future: The Luddites and Their War on the Industrial Revolution: Lessons for the Computer Age. Massachusetts: Addison-Wesley, 1996.Snow, C.P. The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1959. Snyder, Rachel Louise. Fugitive Denim: A Moving Story of People and Pants in the Borderless World of Global Trade. New York: W.W. Norton, 2008.Starcevic, Sladjana. "The Origin and Historical Development of Branding and Advertising in the Old Civilizations of Africa, Asia and Europe." Marketing 46.3 (2015): 179-96.Tikkanen, Amy. "Coco Chanel." Encyclopaedia Britannica. 19 Apr. 2019. 25 July 2019 <https://www.britannica.com/biography/Coco-Chanel>.Veblen, Thorstein. The Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study in the Evolution of Institutions. London: Macmillan, 1975.Weir, Kirsten. "The Pain of Social Rejection." American Psychological Association 43.4 (2012): 50.Williamson, Judith. Decoding Advertisements: Ideology and Meaning in Advertising. Ideas in Progress. London: Boyars, 1978.

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

Over the past century, many books for general readers have styled sharks as “monsters of the deep” (Steele). In recent decades, however, at least some writers have also turned to representing how sharks are seriously threatened by human activities. At a time when media coverage of shark sightings seems ever increasing in Australia, scholarship has begun to consider people’s attitudes to sharks and how these are formed, investigating the representation of sharks (Peschak; Ostrovski et al.) in films (Le Busque and Litchfield; Neff; Schwanebeck), newspaper reports (Muter et al.), and social media (Le Busque et al., “An Analysis”). My own research into representations of surfing and sharks in Australian writing (Brien) has, however, revealed that, although reporting of shark sightings and human-shark interactions are prominent in the news, and sharks function as vivid and commanding images and metaphors in art and writing (Ellis; Westbrook et al.), little scholarship has investigated their representation in Australian books published for a general readership. While recognising representations of sharks in other book-length narrative forms in Australia, including Australian fiction, poetry, and film (Ryan and Ellison), this enquiry is focussed on non-fiction books for general readers, to provide an initial review. Sampling holdings of non-fiction books in the National Library of Australia, crosschecked with Google Books, in early 2021, this investigation identified 50 Australian books for general readers that are principally about sharks, or that feature attitudes to them, published from 1911 to 2021. Although not seeking to capture all Australian non-fiction books for general readers that feature sharks, the sampling attempted to locate a wide range of representations and genres across the time frame from the earliest identified text until the time of the survey. The books located include works of natural and popular history, travel writing, memoir, biography, humour, and other long-form non-fiction for adult and younger readers, including hybrid works. A thematic analysis (Guest et al.) of the representation of sharks in these texts identified five themes that moved from understanding sharks as fishes to seeing them as monsters, then prey, and finally to endangered species needing conservation. Many books contained more than one theme, and not all examples identified have been quoted in the discussion of the themes below. Sharks as Part of the Natural Environment Drawing on oral histories passed through generations, two memoirs (Bradley et al.; Fossa) narrate Indigenous stories in which sharks play a central role. These reveal that sharks are part of both the world and a wider cosmology for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people (Clua and Guiart). In these representations, sharks are integrated with, and integral to, Indigenous life, with one writer suggesting they are “creator beings, ancestors, totems. Their lifecycles reflect the seasons, the landscape and sea country. They are seen in the movement of the stars” (Allam). A series of natural history narratives focus on zoological studies of Australian sharks, describing shark species and their anatomy and physiology, as well as discussing shark genetics, behaviour, habitats, and distribution. A foundational and relatively early Australian example is Gilbert P. Whitley’s The Fishes of Australia: The Sharks, Rays, Devil-fish, and Other Primitive Fishes of Australia and New Zealand, published in 1940. Ichthyologist at the Australian Museum in Sydney from the early 1920s to 1964, Whitley authored several books which furthered scientific thought on sharks. Four editions of his Australian Sharks were published between 1983 and 1991 in English, and the book is still held in many libraries and other collections worldwide. In this text, Whitley described a wide variety of sharks, noting shared as well as individual features. Beautiful drawings contribute information on shape, colouring, markings, and other recognisable features to assist with correct identification. Although a scientist and a Fellow and then President of the Royal Zoological Society of New South Wales, Whitley recognised it was important to communicate with general readers and his books are accessible, the prose crisp and clear. Books published after this text (Aiken; Ayling; Last and Stevens; Tricas and Carwardine) share Whitley’s regard for the diversity of sharks as well as his desire to educate a general readership. By 2002, the CSIRO’s Field Guide to Australian Sharks & Rays (Daley et al.) also featured numerous striking photographs of these creatures. Titles such as Australia’s Amazing Sharks (Australian Geographic) emphasise sharks’ unique qualities, including their agility and speed in the water, sensitive sight and smell, and ability to detect changes in water pressure around them, heal rapidly, and replace their teeth. These books also emphasise the central role that sharks play in the marine ecosystem. There are also such field guides to sharks in specific parts of Australia (Allen). This attention to disseminating accurate zoological information about sharks is also evident in books written for younger readers including very young children (Berkes; Kear; Parker and Parker). In these and other similar books, sharks are imaged as a central and vital component of the ocean environment, and the narratives focus on their features and qualities as wondrous rather than monstrous. Sharks as Predatory Monsters A number of books for general readers do, however, image sharks as monsters. In 1911, in his travel narrative Peeps at Many Lands: Australia, Frank Fox describes sharks as “the most dangerous foes of man in Australia” (23) and many books have reinforced this view over the following century. This can be seen in titles that refer to sharks as dangerous predatory killers (Fox and Ruhen; Goadby; Reid; Riley; Sharpe; Taylor and Taylor). The covers of a large proportion of such books feature sharks emerging from the water, jaws wide open in explicit homage to the imaging of the monster shark in the film Jaws (Spielberg). Shark!: Killer Tales from the Dangerous Depths (Reid) is characteristic of books that portray encounters with sharks as terrifying and dramatic, using emotive language and stories that describe sharks as “the world’s most feared sea creature” (47) because they are such “highly efficient killing machines” (iv, see also 127, 129). This representation of sharks is also common in several books for younger readers (Moriarty; Rohr). Although the risk of being injured by an unprovoked shark is extremely low (Chapman; Fletcher et al.), fear of sharks is prevalent and real (Le Busque et al., “People’s Fear”) and described in a number of these texts. Several of the memoirs located describe surfers’ fear of sharks (Muirhead; Orgias), as do those of swimmers, divers, and other frequent users of the sea (Denness; de Gelder; McAloon), even if the author has never encountered a shark in the wild. In these texts, this fear of sharks is often traced to viewing Jaws, and especially to how the film’s huge, bloodthirsty great white shark persistently and determinedly attacks its human hunters. Pioneer Australian shark expert Valerie Taylor describes such great white sharks as “very big, powerful … and amazingly beautiful” but accurately notes that “revenge is not part of their thought process” (Kindle version). Two books explicitly seek to map and explain Australians’ fear of sharks. In Sharks: A History of Fear in Australia, Callum Denness charts this fear across time, beginning with his own “shark story”: a panicked, terror-filled evacuation from the sea, following the sighting of a shadow which turned out not to be a shark. Blake Chapman’s Shark Attacks: Myths, Misunderstandings and Human Fears explains commonly held fearful perceptions of sharks. Acknowledging that sharks are a “highly emotive topic”, the author of this text does not deny “the terror [that] they invoke in our psyche” but makes a case that this is “only a minor characteristic of what makes them such intriguing animals” (ix). In Death by Coconut: 50 Things More Dangerous than a Shark and Why You Shouldn’t Be Afraid of the Ocean, Ruby Ashby Orr utilises humour to educate younger readers about the real risk humans face from sharks and, as per the book’s title, why they should not be feared, listing champagne corks and falling coconuts among the many everyday activities more likely to lead to injury and death in Australia than encountering a shark. Taylor goes further in her memoir – not only describing her wonder at swimming with these creatures, but also her calm acceptance of the possibility of being injured by a shark: "if we are to be bitten, then we are to be bitten … . One must choose a life of adventure, and of mystery and discovery, but with that choice, one must also choose the attendant risks" (2019: Kindle version). Such an attitude is very rare in the books located, with even some of the most positive about these sea creatures still quite sensibly fearful of potentially dangerous encounters with them. Sharks as Prey There is a long history of sharks being fished in Australia (Clark). The killing of sharks for sport is detailed in An American Angler in Australia, which describes popular adventure writer Zane Grey’s visit to Australia and New Zealand in the 1930s to fish ‘big game’. This text includes many bloody accounts of killing sharks, which are justified with explanations about how sharks are dangerous. It is also illustrated with gruesome pictures of dead sharks. Australian fisher Alf Dean’s biography describes him as the “World’s Greatest Shark Hunter” (Thiele), this text similarly illustrated with photographs of some of the gigantic sharks he caught and killed in the second half of the twentieth century. Apart from being killed during pleasure and sport fishing, sharks are also hunted by spearfishers. Valerie Taylor and her late husband, Ron Taylor, are well known in Australia and internationally as shark experts, but they began their careers as spearfishers and shark hunters (Taylor, Ron Taylor’s), with the documentary Shark Hunters gruesomely detailing their killing of many sharks. The couple have produced several books that recount their close encounters with sharks (Taylor; Taylor, Taylor and Goadby; Taylor and Taylor), charting their movement from killers to conservationists as they learned more about the ocean and its inhabitants. Now a passionate campaigner against the past butchery she participated in, Taylor’s memoir describes her shift to a more respectful relationship with sharks, driven by her desire to understand and protect them. In Australia, the culling of sharks is supposedly carried out to ensure human safety in the ocean, although this practice has long been questioned. In 1983, for instance, Whitley noted the “indiscriminate” killing of grey nurse sharks, despite this species largely being very docile and of little threat to people (Australian Sharks, 10). This is repeated by Tony Ayling twenty-five years later who adds the information that the generally harmless grey nurse sharks have been killed to the point of extinction, as it was wrongly believed they preyed on surfers and swimmers. Shark researcher and conservationist Riley Elliott, author of Shark Man: One Kiwi Man’s Mission to Save Our Most Feared and Misunderstood Predator (2014), includes an extremely critical chapter on Western Australian shark ‘management’ through culling, summing up the problems associated with this approach: it seems to me that this cull involved no science or logic, just waste and politics. It’s sickening that the people behind this cull were the Fisheries department, which prior to this was the very department responsible for setting up the world’s best acoustic tagging system for sharks. (Kindle version, Chapter 7) Describing sharks as “misunderstood creatures”, Orr is also clear in her opposition to killing sharks to ‘protect’ swimmers noting that “each year only around 10 people are killed in shark attacks worldwide, while around 73 million sharks are killed by humans”. She adds the question and answer, “sounds unfair? Of course it is, but when an attack is all over the news and the people are baying for shark blood, it’s easy to lose perspective. But culling them? Seriously?” (back cover). The condemnation of culling is also evident in David Brooks’s recent essay on the topic in his collection of essays about animal welfare, conservation and the relationship between humans and other species, Animal Dreams. This disapproval is also evident in narratives by those who have been injured by sharks. Navy diver Paul de Gelder and surfer Glen Orgias were both bitten by sharks in Sydney in 2009 and both their memoirs detail their fear of sharks and the pain they suffered from these interactions and their lengthy recoveries. However, despite their undoubted suffering – both men lost limbs due to these encounters – they also attest to their ongoing respect for these creatures and specify a shared desire not to see them culled. Orgias, instead, charts the life story of the shark who bit him alongside his own story in his memoir, musing at the end of the book, not about himself or his injury, but about the fate of the shark he had encountered: great whites are portrayed … as pathological creatures, and as malevolent. That’s rubbish … they are graceful, mighty beasts. I respect them, and fear them … [but] the thought of them fighting, dying, in a net upsets me. I hope this great white shark doesn’t end up like that. (271–271) Several of the more recent books identified in this study acknowledge that, despite growing understanding of sharks, the popular press and many policy makers continue to advocate for shark culls, these calls especially vocal after a shark-related human death or injury (Peppin-Neff). The damage to shark species involved caused by their killing – either directly by fishing, spearing, finning, or otherwise hunting them, or inadvertently as they become caught in nets or affected by human pollution of the ocean – is discussed in many of the more recent books identified in this study. Sharks as Endangered Alongside fishing, finning, and hunting, human actions and their effects such as beach netting, pollution and habitat change are killing many sharks, to the point where many shark species are threatened. Several recent books follow Orr in noting that an estimated 100 million sharks are now killed annually across the globe and that this, as well as changes to their habitats, are driving many shark species to the status of vulnerable, threatened or towards extinction (Dulvy et al.). This is detailed in texts about biodiversity and climate change in Australia (Steffen et al.) as well as in many of the zoologically focussed books discussed above under the theme of “Sharks as part of the natural environment”. The CSIRO’s Field Guide to Australian Sharks & Rays (Daley et al.), for example, emphasises not only that several shark species are under threat (and protected) (8–9) but also that sharks are, as individuals, themselves very fragile creatures. Their skeletons are made from flexible, soft cartilage rather than bone, meaning that although they are “often thought of as being incredibly tough; in reality, they need to be handled carefully to maximise their chance of survival following capture” (9). Material on this theme is included in books for younger readers on Australia’s endangered animals (Bourke; Roc and Hawke). Shark Conservation By 1991, shark conservation in Australia and overseas was a topic of serious discussion in Sydney, with an international workshop on the subject held at Taronga Zoo and the proceedings published (Pepperell et al.). Since then, the movement to protect sharks has grown, with marine scientists, high-profile figures and other writers promoting shark conservation, especially through attempts to educate the general public about sharks. De Gelder’s memoir, for instance, describes how he now champions sharks, promoting shark conservation in his work as a public speaker. Peter Benchley, who (with Carl Gottlieb) recast his novel Jaws for the film’s screenplay, later attested to regretting his portrayal of sharks as aggressive and became a prominent spokesperson for shark conservation. In explaining his change of heart, he stated that when he wrote the novel, he was reflecting the general belief that sharks would both seek out human prey and attack boats, but he later discovered this to be untrue (Benchley, “Without Malice”). Many recent books about sharks for younger readers convey a conservation message, underscoring how, instead of fearing or killing sharks, or doing nothing, humans need to actively assist these vulnerable creatures to survive. In the children’s book series featuring Bindi Irwin and her “wildlife adventures”, there is a volume where Bindi and a friend are on a diving holiday when they find a dead shark whose fin has been removed. The book not only describes how shark finning is illegal, but also how Bindi and friend are “determined to bring the culprits to justice” (Browne). This narrative, like the other books in this series, has a dual focus; highlighting the beauty of wildlife and its value, but also how the creatures described need protection and assistance. Concluding Discussion This study was prompted by the understanding that the Earth is currently in the epoch known as the Anthropocene, a time in which humans have significantly altered, and continue to alter, the Earth by our activities (Myers), resulting in numerous species becoming threatened, endangered, or extinct. It acknowledges the pressing need for not only natural science research on these actions and their effects, but also for such scientists to publish their findings in more accessible ways (see, Paulin and Green). It specifically responds to demands for scholarship outside the relevant areas of science and conservation to encourage widespread thinking and action (Mascia et al.; Bennett et al.). As understanding public perceptions and overcoming widely held fear of sharks can facilitate their conservation (Panoch and Pearson), the way sharks are imaged is integral to their survival. The five themes identified in this study reveal vastly different ways of viewing and writing about sharks. These range from seeing sharks as nothing more than large fishes to be killed for pleasure, to viewing them as terrifying monsters, to finally understanding that they are amazing creatures who play an important role in the world’s environment and are in urgent need of conservation. This range of representation is important, for if sharks are understood as demon monsters which hunt humans, then it is much more ‘reasonable’ to not care about their future than if they are understood to be fascinating and fragile creatures suffering from their interactions with humans and our effect on the environment. Further research could conduct a textual analysis of these books. In this context, it is interesting to note that, although in 1949 C. Bede Maxwell suggested describing human deaths and injuries from sharks as “accidents” (182) and in 2013 Christopher Neff and Robert Hueter proposed using “sightings, encounters, bites, and the rare cases of fatal bites” (70) to accurately represent “the true risk posed by sharks” to humans (70), the majority of the books in this study, like mass media reports, continue to use the ubiquitous and more dramatic terminology of “shark attack”. The books identified in this analysis could also be compared with international texts to reveal and investigate global similarities and differences. While the focus of this discussion has been on non-fiction texts, a companion analysis of representation of sharks in Australian fiction, poetry, films, and other narratives could also be undertaken, in the hope that such investigations contribute to more nuanced understandings of these majestic sea creatures. 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Barbie was the largest worldwide film release of 2023, dominating the box office with over $1 billion in earnings (PRNewswire). The reported marketing budget was over $150 million, which was greater than the $145 million spent on making the film (Adekaiyero). While marketing and public relations (PR) differ in approach and goals, the overall goal for Barbie was evident in the campaign: get fans excited for the film release. The number of collaborations, events, and advertisements executed for the Barbie campaign was extensive, with the convergence of traditional and digital media interplaying seamlessly. The vast majority of PR and marketing professionals were talking about the campaign as a superior example for the field to follow for the purposes of fuelling a passionate target audience. This article examines the public relations strategies that heightened fan interest in Barbie and reaffirms Barbie as a cultural icon. By analysing the most noteworthy components of the Barbie campaign that were highlighted in articles and PR blog posts, valuable insights are shared regarding how audience participation cultivates the success of cultural phenomena. These insights underscore the symbiotic relationship between PR practitioners and fans. PR’s Role in Barbie The film industry recognises the pivotal role PR plays in getting people to the theatre, especially in a post-COVID-19 world where it is estimated that only eight percent of US citizens go often to the theatres as of 2022, with over half never going to the movie theatres (Statista Research). Another factor that has affected movie-going trends is the accessibility of streaming services. A poll from HarrisX found that two-thirds of US adults prefer to wait for movies that premiere in theatres to be released on streaming (Maglio). It’s also becoming clear that the ‘Barbenheimer’ opening weekend is a box office standout, as 2024 box office numbers are predicted to drop by over one billion dollars (D’Alessandro). This was determined by the movies that have come out as of March 24, with anticipated titles like Madame Web and Argyle tanking, and Dune: Part Two being the best thus far with an $80 million at the box office (Carras). That is less than half of what Barbie made on opening weekend at $162 million (Fischer). Evidently, the hype around ‘Barbenheimer’ is a topic that continues to be investigated, as reports of fan anecdotes and fan made content continue coming out (D’Alessandro). Before ‘Barbenheimer’ became the plan for fans, the PR for Barbie started before production began. Presumably, those outside of PR and marketing professions assume that trailers are the starting point for promoting a film, but it starts at the beginning of the film’s creation, when rumours and press releases come out revealing who is going to work on the project (Qiang). At the 2021 CinemaCon, Warner Bros made the announcement that a live-action Barbie movie would come to theatres in the summer of 2023 (Soares). The film’s director and main star, Greta Gerwig and Margot Robbie, were signed onto the project in 2020, and the full cast list was shared in 2022, which built excitement with fans because of the names attached to the project indicating the star power interest (Murphy). Pre-production is key in starting to build excitement for any movie, but how Barbie approached pre-release with its trailers continued to build the mystery surrounding the movie’s plot. The first teaser trailer was released as part of the series of trailers ahead of Avatar: The Way of Water (2022) – a highly anticipated sequel since Avatar broke all-time box office records in 2009 (Soares; Romano). Then, on 4 April 2023, character posters were released alongside the second trailer, which still didn’t reveal much about the plot, but did incorporate snippets of dialogue that were indicative of a more PG-13 sense of humour (Soares). The character posters quickly became the Internet’s new favourite meme because of the taglines that gave some insight into the Barbies and Kens in the movie (Hudgins). Joining in on the trend didn’t require Photoshop; Warner Bros. partnered with PhotoRoom to create the interactive barbieselfie.ai generator, which was used over 13 million times since it was released on April 3 – a day ahead of the character posters (Barr). In PR and marketing campaigns, earned media success is the goal, meaning that the social media buzz happens organically. Movie trailer spots and particular partnerships, as sometimes partners will pay to collaborate more on one side of the deal, are examples of paid media, which is most of what the marketing budget supports. In an interview with Variety, Josh Goldstine, Warner Bros. president of global marketing, used the terms ‘earned media’ and ‘paid media’ to talk about the different elements of the Barbie campaign (Rubin). These terms are rooted in the public relations lexicon of the PESO (paid media, earned media, shared media, and owned media) model, and evolve as multimedia channel opportunities expand (Detrich). Understanding where media types fit in the PESO Model ensures that a PR campaign has a holistic approach in reaching its target audience, or rather, ‘publics’, as a way of identifying consumers as co-creators (Pieczka). For context, the PESO Model was coined by Gini Detrich in 2014, and it became popularised because it is a comprehensible, yet high-level framework categorising converged media (Brandpoint). Applying this model helps better understand the strategy and goals of PR, marketing, and advertising campaigns, and in the case of Barbie, figuring out where certain campaign comments fit in the model allows outsiders a means to ascertain the audience mapping. The terms ‘audience’ and ‘publics’ are often treated as synonymous in describing a group of consumers, but in the PR field, the key difference is that the former is passive in receiving PR messages, while the latter describes having an active response (Knighton and Wakefield). Having “an active response” means being invited or motivated to take action as part of two-way communication (Knighton and Wakefield), and fans can use social media to voice their excitement and participate in unplanned trends, with ‘Barbenheimer’ being a prime example. Appealing to fans as the intended public of the Barbie campaign was crucial. The selfie AI generator was only the beginning in a series of earned media efforts. Barbie had over one hundred brand deals licenced before the movie was released in late July, with the licencing for products ranging from clothing brands to entertainment and lifestyle (Addley). All of the pink collaborations reignited Barbiecore as a fashion trend (Dockerman). Mattel having multiple partnerships enabled the notice around Barbie to have a life of its own as fans (Rubin). Essentially, the role of PR in Barbie aligns with what Barbie represents, which is to give the public a combination of empirical and imaginative thought to take action (Pieczka), or in other words, ‘you can be anything’ with Barbie. Fig. 1: PESO model of Barbie campaign milestones. Fan Engagement: All Things Barbiecore Fan engagement is becoming an increasing focus of contemporary PR campaigns. The idea of what a “fan” is can vary but we have an inherent idea or assumption of what it means based on our standpoint, and academic definitions tend to revolve around being an “enthusiast” or “cultist” and “follower” (Hills). The research on the intersection of public relations and fandom is growing, as the need to better understand fandom audiences is pertinent to ideas of what being a fan means as an identity. Academic works that specify the relationship between fandom and public relations are actualised in two editions co-edited by Hutchins and Tindall (2016; 2021). The current state of PR theories does not recognise fan motivations that occur within fandom, meaning that two-way communication has altered the responses that are gathered from target audiences (Hutchins and Tindall). In the case of Barbie, the earned media response is indicative of great success, such as having over 7 million social media mentions in 2023 and over 227 million engagement actions (Galliot). Conversation surrounding ‘Barbiecore’ outfit ideas alone saw over 11 million views on TikTok (Smith). For movies, generating fan engagement is an obvious need. There are instances in the entertainment industry wherein movie fans or television fans mobilise out of passion to see certain ideas or wants fulfilled (Fraser and Buckler). The 2023 Writers Guild of America Strike taught the industry and the public many things about writing, wages, and AI, and how the strike relates to fan passions is that fans want to see quality, authentic writing, which AI cannot achieve (Lawler). The reveal of Greta Gerwig being part of Barbie as co-screenwriter and director made fans confused, yet excited, since Gerwig is well-known for feminist-centric movies (Dockterman). Fans love to support passionate creators who put thoughtful effort into the stories and characters, and with creating the first-ever live-action Barbie movie, the high feels to fill in were massive. Barbie has been around for sixty-five years and is one of the most recognisable toys on a global scale with 99 percent awareness (Weitzman). Though having over one hundred brand deals for promoting the movie can garner great fan appeal, having those deals does not promise success without consideration of what fans want. Barbie and Mattel have a long history, and the film “doesn’t miss a beat” – enabling the film to become enriched by acknowledging both Barbie’s successes and polarising feminism (Lord). The movie premiere showed how Barbie was more than a doll, with a sea of pink outfits going to watch the movie, the fan response was more than the marketing team hoped for in setting its goals (Rubin). Though the exact sales numbers on how the different licences succeeded or not are unavailable, the social media conversation and in-person dress-up were strong indicators of success beyond the numbers, as fans wanted to talk about Barbie and what the doll and movie meant to them (Keegan). The approach in doing so is not directly asking fans to get creative; it is an implicit open invitation for the public to contribute to the discourse (Piezka). Associate professor at Boston University, Amy Shanler, explains that Barbie is a well-executed campaign because “the best PR isn’t when you do your own Public Relations. It’s when other people are doing it for you” (qtd. in Laskowski). Barbie’s Fan Engagement Techniques In examining the Barbie campaign, the key ideas to note are: fulfilling the PESO Model, appealing to fan knowledge of Barbie (including the doll’s controversies), and leaving room for imagination. This draws on articles analysing the PR strategy by PR practitioners who are currently active in the field, along with insights from online articles with direct marketer interviews. The PESO Model, despite not being a long-standing PR framework, is the most widely used and talked about application not only for building PR campaigns but for being able to dissect major campaigns from the outside looking in. By applying the PESO Model to what is known about the Barbie campaign, not only are all aspects of the model met, but it is impactful in how strongly the Barbie identity and message are implemented. As mentioned, Barbie is a highly recognisable toy, and most people are familiar with Barbie dolls. Appealing to fan knowledge about Barbie, encompassing all of the positive and negative aspects of the doll, was an enjoyable factor of the movie. And in the weeks leading up to the movie, the mystery of the plot was alluring, yet fans were excited to see what Barbie lore would be included. Arguably, the most impactful aspect of a PR campaign is having strategies that can potentially inspire a public (target audience) to mobilise. ‘Barbenheimer’ was not part of the marketing plan, and neither was dressing up in Barbiecore to see the film, but because of the overwhelming success in earned media and shared media, these trends came to fruition and will be remembered as part of what made Barbie a global success. While Barbie had a massive marketing budget, the success that the campaign saw was rooted in fan engagement. The structure of the campaign, with its numerous collaborations, trailers that gave everything visually but nothing plot-wise, star-studded cast, and activities to involve fans like the selfie AI generator and wearing pink to automatically become a Barbie, built an unflappable excitement for a wide-ranging audience. Looking ahead, the PR and marketing industries can utilise the Barbie campaign as an example of fan collaboration by giving fans the tools to become co-creators. To be a successful campaign, knowing the converged media types that are necessary to implement for a diverse fan audience is essential in creating further accessibility. This means that employing the PESO Model structure ensures great reach, whether or not the campaign is backed by Mattel’s budget. The Barbie campaign was loud and unapologetically pink, and such authenticity is what makes fans empowered to embrace Barbie as a cultural icon. The excitement generated for Barbie can’t be easily replicated for other movies or products in terms of massive marketing budgets, but the core of appealing to fans can be studied and taken into consideration for future campaigns. The makings of success for Barbie are in how the campaign gave fans the tools to become collaborators in the campaign. 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Introduction This article is a study in anxiety with regard to social online spaces (SOS) conceived of as dark. There are two possible ways to define ‘dark’ in this context. The first is that communication is dark because it either has limited distribution, is not open to all users (closed groups are a case example) or hidden. The second definition, linked as a result of the first, is the way that communication via these means is interpreted and understood. Dark social spaces disrupt the accepted top-down flow by the ‘gazing elite’ (data aggregators including social media), but anxious users might need to strain to notice what is out there, and this in turn destabilises one’s reception of the scene. In an environment where surveillance technologies are proliferating, this article examines contemporary, dark, interconnected, and interactive communications for the entangled affordances that might be brought to bear. A provocation is that resistance through counterveillance or “sousveillance” is one possibility. An alternative (or addition) is retreating to or building ‘dark’ spaces that are less surveilled and (perhaps counterintuitively) less fearful. This article considers critically the notion of dark social online spaces via four broad socio-technical concerns connected to the big social media services that have helped increase a tendency for fearful anxiety produced by surveillance and the perceived implications for personal privacy. It also shines light on the aspect of darkness where some users are spurred to actively seek alternative, dark social online spaces. Since the 1970s, public-key cryptosystems typically preserved security for websites, emails, and sensitive health, government, and military data, but this is now reduced (Williams). We have seen such systems exploited via cyberattacks and misappropriated data acquired by affiliations such as Facebook-Cambridge Analytica for targeted political advertising during the 2016 US elections. Via the notion of “parasitic strategies”, such events can be described as news/information hacks “whose attack vectors target a system’s weak points with the help of specific strategies” (von Nordheim and Kleinen-von Königslöw, 88). In accord with Wilson and Serisier’s arguments (178), emerging technologies facilitate rapid data sharing, collection, storage, and processing wherein subsequent “outcomes are unpredictable”. This would also include the effect of acquiescence. In regard to our digital devices, for some, being watched overtly—through cameras encased in toys, computers, and closed-circuit television (CCTV) to digital street ads that determine the resonance of human emotions in public places including bus stops, malls, and train stations—is becoming normalised (McStay, Emotional AI). It might appear that consumers immersed within this Internet of Things (IoT) are themselves comfortable interacting with devices that record sound and capture images for easy analysis and distribution across the communications networks. A counter-claim is that mainstream social media corporations have cultivated a sense of digital resignation “produced when people desire to control the information digital entities have about them but feel unable to do so” (Draper and Turow, 1824). Careful consumers’ trust in mainstream media is waning, with readers observing a strong presence of big media players in the industry and are carefully picking their publications and public intellectuals to follow (Mahmood, 6). A number now also avoid the mainstream internet in favour of alternate dark sites. This is done by users with “varying backgrounds, motivations and participation behaviours that may be idiosyncratic (as they are rooted in the respective person’s biography and circumstance)” (Quandt, 42). By way of connection with dark internet studies via Biddle et al. (1; see also Lasica), the “darknet” is a collection of networks and technologies used to share digital content … not a separate physical network but an application and protocol layer riding on existing networks. Examples of darknets are peer-to-peer file sharing, CD and DVD copying, and key or password sharing on email and newsgroups. As we note from the quote above, the “dark web” uses existing public and private networks that facilitate communication via the Internet. Gehl (1220; see also Gehl and McKelvey) has detailed that this includes “hidden sites that end in ‘.onion’ or ‘.i2p’ or other Top-Level Domain names only available through modified browsers or special software. Accessing I2P sites requires a special routing program ... . Accessing .onion sites requires Tor [The Onion Router]”. For some, this gives rise to social anxiety, read here as stemming from that which is not known, and an exaggerated sense of danger, which makes fight or flight seem the only options. This is often justified or exacerbated by the changing media and communication landscape and depicted in popular documentaries such as The Social Dilemma or The Great Hack, which affect public opinion on the unknown aspects of internet spaces and the uses of personal data. The question for this article remains whether the fear of the dark is justified. Consider that most often one will choose to make one’s intimate bedroom space dark in order to have a good night’s rest. We might pleasurably escape into a cinema’s darkness for the stories told therein, or walk along a beach at night enjoying unseen breezes. Most do not avoid these experiences, choosing to actively seek them out. Drawing this thread, then, is the case made here that agency can also be found in the dark by resisting socio-political structural harms. 1. Digital Futures and Anxiety of the Dark Fear of the darkI have a constant fear that something's always nearFear of the darkFear of the darkI have a phobia that someone's always there In the lyrics to the song “Fear of the Dark” (1992) by British heavy metal group Iron Maiden is a sense that that which is unknown and unseen causes fear and anxiety. Holding a fear of the dark is not unusual and varies in degree for adults as it does for children (Fellous and Arbib). Such anxiety connected to the dark does not always concern darkness itself. It can also be a concern for the possible or imagined dangers that are concealed by the darkness itself as a result of cognitive-emotional interactions (McDonald, 16). Extending this claim is this article’s non-binary assertion that while for some technology and what it can do is frequently misunderstood and shunned as a result, for others who embrace the possibilities and actively take it on it is learning by attentively partaking. Mistakes, solecism, and frustrations are part of the process. Such conceptual theorising falls along a continuum of thinking. Global interconnectivity of communications networks has certainly led to consequent concerns (Turkle Alone Together). Much focus for anxiety has been on the impact upon social and individual inner lives, levels of media concentration, and power over and commercialisation of the internet. Of specific note is that increasing commercial media influence—such as Facebook and its acquisition of WhatsApp, Oculus VR, Instagram, CRTL-labs (translating movements and neural impulses into digital signals), LiveRail (video advertising technology), Chainspace (Blockchain)—regularly changes the overall dynamics of the online environment (Turow and Kavanaugh). This provocation was born out recently when Facebook disrupted the delivery of news to Australian audiences via its service. Mainstream social online spaces (SOS) are platforms which provide more than the delivery of media alone and have been conceptualised predominantly in a binary light. On the one hand, they can be depicted as tools for the common good of society through notional widespread access and as places for civic participation and discussion, identity expression, education, and community formation (Turkle; Bruns; Cinque and Brown; Jenkins). This end of the continuum of thinking about SOS seems set hard against the view that SOS are operating as businesses with strategies that manipulate consumers to generate revenue through advertising, data, venture capital for advanced research and development, and company profit, on the other hand. In between the two polar ends of this continuum are the range of other possibilities, the shades of grey, that add contemporary nuance to understanding SOS in regard to what they facilitate, what the various implications might be, and for whom. By way of a brief summary, anxiety of the dark is steeped in the practices of privacy-invasive social media giants such as Facebook and its ancillary companies. Second are the advertising technology companies, surveillance contractors, and intelligence agencies that collect and monitor our actions and related data; as well as the increased ease of use and interoperability brought about by Web 2.0 that has seen a disconnection between technological infrastructure and social connection that acts to limit user permissions and online affordances. Third are concerns for the negative effects associated with depressed mental health and wellbeing caused by “psychologically damaging social networks”, through sleep loss, anxiety, poor body image, real world relationships, and the fear of missing out (FOMO; Royal Society for Public Health (UK) and the Young Health Movement). Here the harms are both individual and societal. Fourth is the intended acceleration toward post-quantum IoT (Fernández-Caramés), as quantum computing’s digital components are continually being miniaturised. This is coupled with advances in electrical battery capacity and interconnected telecommunications infrastructures. The result of such is that the ontogenetic capacity of the powerfully advanced network/s affords supralevel surveillance. What this means is that through devices and the services that they provide, individuals’ data is commodified (Neff and Nafus; Nissenbaum and Patterson). Personal data is enmeshed in ‘things’ requiring that the decisions that are both overt, subtle, and/or hidden (dark) are scrutinised for the various ways they shape social norms and create consequences for public discourse, cultural production, and the fabric of society (Gillespie). Data and personal information are retrievable from devices, sharable in SOS, and potentially exposed across networks. For these reasons, some have chosen to go dark by being “off the grid”, judiciously selecting their means of communications and their ‘friends’ carefully. 2. Is There Room for Privacy Any More When Everyone in SOS Is Watching? An interesting turn comes through counterarguments against overarching institutional surveillance that underscore the uses of technologies to watch the watchers. This involves a practice of counter-surveillance whereby technologies are tools of resistance to go ‘dark’ and are used by political activists in protest situations for both communication and avoiding surveillance. This is not new and has long existed in an increasingly dispersed media landscape (Cinque, Changing Media Landscapes). For example, counter-surveillance video footage has been accessed and made available via live-streaming channels, with commentary in SOS augmenting networking possibilities for niche interest groups or micropublics (Wilson and Serisier, 178). A further example is the Wordpress site Fitwatch, appealing for an end to what the site claims are issues associated with police surveillance (fitwatch.org.uk and endpolicesurveillance.wordpress.com). Users of these sites are called to post police officers’ identity numbers and photographs in an attempt to identify “cops” that might act to “misuse” UK Anti-terrorism legislation against activists during legitimate protests. Others that might be interested in doing their own “monitoring” are invited to reach out to identified personal email addresses or other private (dark) messaging software and application services such as Telegram (freeware and cross-platform). In their work on surveillance, Mann and Ferenbok (18) propose that there is an increase in “complex constructs between power and the practices of seeing, looking, and watching/sensing in a networked culture mediated by mobile/portable/wearable computing devices and technologies”. By way of critical definition, Mann and Ferenbok (25) clarify that “where the viewer is in a position of power over the subject, this is considered surveillance, but where the viewer is in a lower position of power, this is considered sousveillance”. It is the aspect of sousveillance that is empowering to those using dark SOS. One might consider that not all surveillance is “bad” nor institutionalised. It is neither overtly nor formally regulated—as yet. Like most technologies, many of the surveillant technologies are value-neutral until applied towards specific uses, according to Mann and Ferenbok (18). But this is part of the ‘grey area’ for understanding the impact of dark SOS in regard to which actors or what nations are developing tools for surveillance, where access and control lies, and with what effects into the future. 3. Big Brother Watches, So What Are the Alternatives: Whither the Gazing Elite in Dark SOS? By way of conceptual genealogy, consideration of contemporary perceptions of surveillance in a visually networked society (Cinque, Changing Media Landscapes) might be usefully explored through a revisitation of Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon, applied here as a metaphor for contemporary surveillance. Arguably, this is a foundational theoretical model for integrated methods of social control (Foucault, Surveiller et Punir, 192-211), realised in the “panopticon” (prison) in 1787 by Jeremy Bentham (Bentham and Božovič, 29-95) during a period of social reformation aimed at the improvement of the individual. Like the power for social control over the incarcerated in a panopticon, police power, in order that it be effectively exercised, “had to be given the instrument of permanent, exhaustive, omnipresent surveillance, capable of making all visible … like a faceless gaze that transformed the whole social body into a field of perception” (Foucault, Surveiller et Punir, 213–4). In grappling with the impact of SOS for the individual and the collective in post-digital times, we can trace out these early ruminations on the complex documentary organisation through state-controlled apparatuses (such as inspectors and paid observers including “secret agents”) via Foucault (Surveiller et Punir, 214; Subject and Power, 326-7) for comparison to commercial operators like Facebook. Today, artificial intelligence (AI), facial recognition technology (FRT), and closed-circuit television (CCTV) for video surveillance are used for social control of appropriate behaviours. Exemplified by governments and the private sector is the use of combined technologies to maintain social order, from ensuring citizens cross the street only on green lights, to putting rubbish in the correct recycling bin or be publicly shamed, to making cashless payments in stores. The actions see advantages for individual and collective safety, sustainability, and convenience, but also register forms of behaviour and attitudes with predictive capacities. This gives rise to suspicions about a permanent account of individuals’ behaviour over time. Returning to Foucault (Surveiller et Punir, 135), the impact of this finds a dissociation of power from the individual, whereby they become unwittingly impelled into pre-existing social structures, leading to a ‘normalisation’ and acceptance of such systems. If we are talking about the dark, anxiety is key for a Ministry of SOS. Following Foucault again (Subject and Power, 326-7), there is the potential for a crawling, creeping governance that was once distinct but is itself increasingly hidden and growing. A blanket call for some form of ongoing scrutiny of such proliferating powers might be warranted, but with it comes regulation that, while offering certain rights and protections, is not without consequences. For their part, a number of SOS platforms had little to no moderation for explicit content prior to December 2018, and in terms of power, notwithstanding important anxiety connected to arguments that children and the vulnerable need protections from those that would seek to take advantage, this was a crucial aspect of community building and self-expression that resulted in this freedom of expression. In unearthing the extent that individuals are empowered arising from the capacity to post sexual self-images, Tiidenberg ("Bringing Sexy Back") considered that through dark SOS (read here as unregulated) some users could work in opposition to the mainstream consumer culture that provides select and limited representations of bodies and their sexualities. This links directly to Mondin’s exploration of the abundance of queer and feminist pornography on dark SOS as a “counterpolitics of visibility” (288). This work resulted in a reasoned claim that the technological structure of dark SOS created a highly political and affective social space that users valued. What also needs to be underscored is that many users also believed that such a space could not be replicated on other mainstream SOS because of the differences in architecture and social norms. Cho (47) worked with this theory to claim that dark SOS are modern-day examples in a history of queer individuals having to rely on “underground economies of expression and relation”. Discussions such as these complicate what dark SOS might now become in the face of ‘adult’ content moderation and emerging tracking technologies to close sites or locate individuals that transgress social norms. Further, broader questions are raised about how content moderation fits in with the public space conceptualisations of SOS more generally. Increasingly, “there is an app for that” where being able to identify the poster of an image or an author of an unknown text is seen as crucial. While there is presently no standard approach, models for combining instance-based and profile-based features such as SVM for determining authorship attribution are in development, with the result that potentially far less content will remain hidden in the future (Bacciu et al.). 4. There’s Nothing New under the Sun (Ecclesiastes 1:9) For some, “[the] high hopes regarding the positive impact of the Internet and digital participation in civic society have faded” (Schwarzenegger, 99). My participant observation over some years in various SOS, however, finds that critical concern has always existed. Views move along the spectrum of thinking from deep scepticisms (Stoll, Silicon Snake Oil) to wondrous techo-utopian promises (Negroponte, Being Digital). Indeed, concerns about the (then) new technologies of wireless broadcasting can be compared with today’s anxiety over the possible effects of the internet and SOS. Inglis (7) recalls, here, too, were fears that humanity was tampering with some dangerous force; might wireless wave be causing thunderstorms, droughts, floods? Sterility or strokes? Such anxieties soon evaporated; but a sense of mystery might stay longer with evangelists for broadcasting than with a laity who soon took wireless for granted and settled down to enjoy the products of a process they need not understand. As the analogy above makes clear, just as audiences came to use ‘the wireless’ and later the internet regularly, it is reasonable to argue that dark SOS will also gain widespread understanding and find greater acceptance. Dark social spaces are simply the recent development of internet connectivity and communication more broadly. The dark SOS afford choice to be connected beyond mainstream offerings, which some users avoid for their perceived manipulation of content and user both. As part of the wider array of dark web services, the resilience of dark social spaces is reinforced by the proliferation of users as opposed to decentralised replication. Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) can be used for anonymity in parallel to TOR access, but they guarantee only anonymity to the client. A VPN cannot guarantee anonymity to the server or the internet service provider (ISP). While users may use pseudonyms rather than actual names as seen on Facebook and other SOS, users continue to take to the virtual spaces they inhabit their off-line, ‘real’ foibles, problems, and idiosyncrasies (Chenault). To varying degrees, however, people also take their best intentions to their interactions in the dark. The hyper-efficient tools now deployed can intensify this, which is the great advantage attracting some users. In balance, however, in regard to online information access and dissemination, critical examination of what is in the public’s interest, and whether content should be regulated or controlled versus allowing a free flow of information where users self-regulate their online behaviour, is fraught. O’Loughlin (604) was one of the first to claim that there will be voluntary loss through negative liberty or freedom from (freedom from unwanted information or influence) and an increase in positive liberty or freedom to (freedom to read or say anything); hence, freedom from surveillance and interference is a kind of negative liberty, consistent with both libertarianism and liberalism. Conclusion The early adopters of initial iterations of SOS were hopeful and liberal (utopian) in their beliefs about universality and ‘free’ spaces of open communication between like-minded others. 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Photograph by Gonzalo Echeverria (2010)We need to get some broad-based support, to capture the public’s imagination … so we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements and make little mention of any doubts … each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest (Hulme 347). Acclaimed climate scientist, the late Stephen Schneider, made this comment in 1988. Later he regretted it and said that there are ways of using metaphors that can “convey both urgency and uncertainty” (Hulme 347). What Schneider encapsulates here is the great conundrum for those attempting to communicate climate change to the everyday public. How do scientists capture the public’s imagination and convey the desperation they feel about climate change, but do it ethically? If scientific findings are presented carefully, in boring technical jargon that few can understand, then they are unlikely to attract audiences or provide an impetus for behavioural change. “What can move someone to act?” asks communication theorists Susan Moser and Lisa Dilling (37). “If a red light blinks on in a cockpit” asks Donella Meadows, “should the pilot ignore it until in speaks in an unexcited tone? … Is there any way to say [it] sweetly? Patiently? If one did, would anyone pay attention?” (Moser and Dilling 37). In 2010 Tim Flannery was appointed Panasonic Chair in Environmental Sustainability at Macquarie University. His main teaching role remains within the new science communication programme. One of the first things Flannery was emphatic about was acquainting students with Karl Popper and the origin of the scientific method. “There is no truth in science”, he proclaimed in his first lecture to students “only theories, hypotheses and falsifiabilities”. In other words, science’s epistemological limits are framed such that, as Michael Lemonick argues, “a statement that cannot be proven false is generally not considered to be scientific” (n.p., my emphasis). The impetus for the following paper emanates precisely from this issue of scientific uncertainty — more specifically from teaching a course with Tim Flannery called Communicating climate change to a highly motivated group of undergraduate science communication students. I attempt to illuminate how uncertainty is constructed differently by different groups and that the “public” does not necessarily interpret uncertainty in the same way the sciences do. This paper also analyses how doubt has been politicised and operates polemically in media coverage of climate change. As Andrew Gorman-Murray and Gordon Waitt highlight in an earlier issue of M/C Journal that focused on the climate-culture nexus, an understanding of the science alone is not adequate to deal with the cultural change necessary to address the challenges climate change brings (n.p). Far from being redundant in debates around climate change, the humanities have much to offer. Erosion of Trust in Science The objectives of Macquarie’s science communication program are far more ambitious than it can ever hope to achieve. But this is not necessarily a bad thing. The initiative is a response to declining student numbers in maths and science programmes around the country and is designed to address the perceived lack of communication skills in science graduates that the Australian Council of Deans of Science identified in their 2001 report. According to Macquarie Vice Chancellor Steven Schwartz’s blog, a broader, and much more ambitious aim of the program is to “restore public trust in science and scientists in the face of widespread cynicism” (n.p.). In recent times the erosion of public trust in science was exacerbated through the theft of e-mails from East Anglia University’s Climate Research Unit and the so-called “climategate scandal” which ensued. With the illegal publication of the e-mails came claims against the Research Unit that climate experts had been manipulating scientific data to suit a pro-global warming agenda. Three inquiries later, all the scientists involved were cleared of any wrongdoing, however the damage had already been done. To the public, what this scandal revealed was a certain level of scientific hubris around the uncertainties of the science and an unwillingness to explain the nature of these uncertainties. The prevailing notion remained that the experts were keeping information from public scrutiny and not being totally honest with them, which at least in the short term, damaged the scientists’s credibility. Many argued that this signalled a shift in public opinion and media portrayal on the issue of climate change in late 2009. University of Sydney academic, Rod Tiffen, claimed in the Sydney Morning Herald that the climategate scandal was “one of the pivotal moments in changing the politics of climate change” (n.p). In Australia this had profound implications and meant that the bipartisan agreement on an emissions trading scheme (ETS) that had almost been reached, subsequently collapsed with (climate sceptic) Tony Abbott's defeat of (ETS advocate) Malcolm Turnbull to become opposition leader (Tiffen). Not long after the reputation of science received this almighty blow, albeit unfairly, the federal government released a report in February 2010, Inspiring Australia – A national strategy for engagement with the sciences as part of the country’s innovation agenda. The report outlines a commitment from the Australian government and universities around the country to address the challenges of not only communicating science to the broader community but, in the process, renewing public trust and engagement in science. The report states that: in order to achieve a scientifically engaged Australia, it will be necessary to develop a culture where the sciences are recognized as relevant to everyday life … Our science institutions will be expected to share their knowledge and to help realize full social, economic, health and environmental benefits of scientific research and in return win ongoing public support. (xiv-xv) After launching the report, Innovation Minister Kim Carr went so far as to conflate “hope” with “science” and in the process elevate a discourse of technological determinism: “it’s time for all true friends of science to step up and defend its values and achievements” adding that, "when you denigrate science, you destroy hope” (n.p.). Forever gone is our naïve post-war world when scientists were held in such high esteem that they could virtually use humans as guinea pigs to test out new wonder chemicals; such as organochlorines, of which DDT is the most widely known (Carson). Thanks to government-sponsored nuclear testing programs, if you were born in the 1950s, 1960s or early 1970s, your brain carries a permanent nuclear legacy (Flannery, Here On Earth 158). So surely, for the most part, questioning the authority and hubristic tendencies of science is a good thing. And I might add, it’s not just scientists who bear this critical burden, the same scepticism is directed towards journalists, politicians and academics alike – something that many cultural theorists have noted is characteristic of our contemporary postmodern world (Lyotard). So far from destroying hope, as the former Innovation Minister Kim Carr (now Minister for Innovation, Industry, Science and Research) suggests, surely we need to use the criticisms of science as a vehicle upon which to initiate hope and humility. Different Ways of Knowing: Bayesian Beliefs and Matters of Concern At best, [science] produces a robust consensus based on a process of inquiry that allows for continued scrutiny, re-examination, and revision. (Oreskes 370) In an attempt to capitalise on the Macquarie Science Faculty’s expertise in climate science, I convened a course in second semester 2010 called SCOM201 Science, Media, Community: Communicating Climate Change, with invaluable assistance from Penny Wilson, Elaine Kelly and Liz Morgan. Mike Hulme’s provocative text, Why we disagree about climate change: Understanding controversy, inaction and opportunity provided an invaluable framework for the course. Hulme’s book brings other types of knowledge, beyond the scientific, to bear on our attitudes towards climate change. Climate change, he claims, has moved from being just a physical, scientific, and measurable phenomenon to becoming a social and cultural phenomenon. In order to understand the contested nature of climate change we need to acknowledge the dynamic and varied meanings climate has played in different cultures throughout history as well as the role that our own subjective attitudes and judgements play. Climate change has become a battleground between different ways of knowing, alternative visions of the future, competing ideas about what’s ethical and what’s not. Hulme makes the point that one of the reasons that we disagree about climate change is because we disagree about the role of science in today’s society. He encourages readers to use climate change as a tool to rigorously question the basis of our beliefs, assumptions and prejudices. Since uncertainty was the course’s raison d’etre, I was fortunate to have an extraordinary cohort of students who readily engaged with a course that forced them to confront their own epistemological limits — both personally and in a disciplinary sense. (See their blog: https://scom201.wordpress.com/). Science is often associated with objective realities. It thus tends to distinguish itself from the post-structuralist vein of critique that dominates much of the contemporary humanities. At the core of post-structuralism is scepticism about everyday, commonly accepted “truths” or what some call “meta-narratives” as well as an acknowledgement of the role that subjectivity plays in the pursuit of knowledge (Lyotard). However if we can’t rely on objective truths or impartial facts then where does this leave us when it comes to generating policy or encouraging behavioural change around the issue of climate change? Controversial philosophy of science scholar Bruno Latour sits squarely in the post-structuralist camp. In his 2004 article, “Why has critique run out of steam? From matters of fact to matters of concern”, he laments the way the right wing has managed to gain ground in the climate change debate through arguing that uncertainty and lack of proof is reason enough to deny demands for action. Or to use his turn-of-phrase, “dangerous extremists are using the very same argument of social construction to destroy hard-won evidence that could save our lives” (Latour n.p). Through co-opting (the Left’s dearly held notion of) scepticism and even calling themselves “climate sceptics”, they exploited doubt as a rationale for why we should do nothing about climate change. Uncertainty is not only an important part of science, but also of the human condition. However, as sociologist Sheila Jasanoff explains in her Nature article, “Technologies of Humility”, uncertainty has become like a disease: Uncertainty has become a threat to collective action, the disease that knowledge must cure. It is the condition that poses cruel dilemmas for decision makers; that must be reduced at all costs; that is tamed with scenarios and assessments; and that feeds the frenzy for new knowledge, much of it scientific. (Jasanoff 33) If we move from talking about climate change as “a matter of fact” to “a matter of concern”, argues Bruno Latour, then we can start talking about useful ways to combat it, rather than talking about whether the science is “in” or not. Facts certainly matter, claims Latour, but they can’t give us the whole story, rather “they assemble with other ingredients to produce a matter of concern” (Potter and Oster 123). Emily Potter and Candice Oster suggest that climate change can’t be understood through either natural or cultural frames alone and, “unlike a matter of fact, matters of concern cannot be explained through a single point of view or discursive frame” (123). This makes a lot of what Hulme argues far more useful because it enables the debate to be taken to another level. Those of us with non-scientific expertise can centre debates around the kinds of societies we want, rather than being caught up in the scientific (un)certainties. If we translate Latour’s concept of climate change being “a matter of concern” into the discourse of environmental management then what we come up with, I think, is the “precautionary principle”. In the YouTube clip, “Stephen Schneider vs Skeptics”, Schneider argues that when in doubt about the potential environmental impacts of climate change, we should always apply the precautionary principle. This principle emerged from the UN conference on Environment and Development in Rio de Janeiro in 1992 and concerns the management of scientific risk. However its origins are evident much earlier in documents such as the “Use of Pesticides” from US President’s Science Advisory Committee in 1962. Unlike in criminal and other types of law where the burden of proof is on the prosecutor to show that the person charged is guilty of a particular offence, in environmental law the onus of proof is on the manufacturers to demonstrate the safety of their product. For instance, a pesticide should be restricted or disproved for use if there is “reasonable doubt” about its safety (Oreskes 374). Principle 15 of the Rio Declaration on Environment and Development in 1992 has its foundations in the precautionary principle: “Where there are threats of serious or irreversible environmental damage, lack of full scientific certainty should not be used as a reason for postponing measures to prevent environmental degradation” (n.p). According to Environmental Law Online, the Rio declaration suggests that, “The precautionary principle applies where there is a ‘lack of full scientific certainty’ – that is, when science cannot say what consequences to expect, how grave they are, or how likely they are to occur” (n.p.). In order to make predictions about the likelihood of an event occurring, scientists employ a level of subjectivity, or need to “reveal their degree of belief that a prediction will turn out to be correct … [S]omething has to substitute for this lack of certainty” otherwise “the only alternative is to admit that absolutely nothing is known” (Hulme 85). These statements of “subjective probabilities or beliefs” are called Bayesian, after eighteenth century English mathematician Sir Thomas Bayes who developed the theory of evidential probability. These “probabilities” are estimates, or in other words, subjective, informed judgements that draw upon evidence and experience about the likelihood of event occurring. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) uses Bayesian beliefs to determine the risk or likelihood of an event occurring. The IPCC provides the largest international scientific assessment of climate change and often adopts a consensus model where viewpoint reached by the majority of scientists is used to establish knowledge amongst an interdisciplinary community of scientists and then communicate it to the public (Hulme 88). According to the IPCC, this consensus is reached amongst more than more than 450 lead authors, more than 800 contributing authors, and 2500 scientific reviewers. While it is an advisory body and is not policy-prescriptive, the IPCC adopts particular linguistic conventions to indicate the probability of a statement being correct. Stephen Schneider convinced the IPCC to use this approach to systemise uncertainty (Lemonick). So for instance, in the IPCC reports, the term “likely” denotes a chance of 66%-90% of the statement being correct, while “very likely” denotes more than a 90% chance. Note the change from the Third Assessment Report (2001), indicating that “most of the observed warming in over the last fifty years is likely to have been due to the increase in greenhouse gas emissions” to the Fourth Assessment (February 2007) which more strongly states: “Most of the observed increase in global average temperatures since the mid twentieth century is very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic greenhouse gas concentrations” (Hulme 51, my italics). A fiery attack on Tim Flannery by Andrew Bolt on Steve Price’s talkback radio show in June 2010 illustrates just how misunderstood scientific uncertainty is in the broader community. When Price introduces Flannery as former Australian of the Year, Bolt intercedes, claiming Flannery is “Alarmist of the Year”, then goes on to chastise Flannery for making various forecasts which didn’t eventuate, such as that Perth and Brisbane might run out of water by 2009. “How much are you to blame for the swing in sentiment, the retreat from global warming policy and rise of scepticism?” demands Bolt. In the context of the events of late 2009 and early 2010, the fact that these events didn’t materialise made Flannery, and others, seem unreliable. And what Bolt had to say on talkback radio, I suspect, resonated with a good proportion of its audience. What Bolt was trying to do was discredit Flannery’s scientific credentials and in the process erode trust in the expert. Flannery’s response was to claim that, what he said was that these events might eventuate. In much the same way that the climate sceptics have managed to co-opt scepticism and use it as a rationale for inaction on climate change, Andrew Bolt here either misunderstands basic scientific method or quite consciously misleads and manipulates the public. As Naomi Oreskes argues, “proof does not play the role in science that most people think it does (or should), and therefore it cannot play the role in policy that skeptics demand it should” (Oreskes 370). Doubt and ‘Situated’ Hope Uncertainty and ambiguity then emerge here as resources because they force us to confront those things we really want–not safety in some distant, contested future but justice and self-understanding now. (Sheila Jasanoff, cited in Hulme, back cover) In his last published book before his death in mid-2010, Science as a contact sport, Stephen Schneider’s advice to aspiring science communicators is that they should engage with the media “not at all, or a lot”. Climate scientist Ann Henderson-Sellers adds that there are very few scientists “who have the natural ability, and learn or cultivate the talents, of effective communication with and through the media” (430). In order to attract the public’s attention, it was once commonplace for scientists to write editorials and exploit fear-provoking measures by including a “useful catastrophe or two” (Moser and Dilling 37). But are these tactics effective? Susanne Moser thinks not. She argues that “numerous studies show that … fear may change attitudes … but not necessarily increase active engagement or behaviour change” (Moser 70). Furthermore, risk psychologists argue that danger is always context specific (Hulme 196). If the risk or danger is “situated” and “tangible” (such as lead toxicity levels in children in Mt Isa from the Xstrata mine) then the public will engage with it. However if it is “un-situated” (distant, intangible and diffuse) like climate change, the audience is less likely to. In my SCOM201 class we examined the impact of two climate change-related campaigns. The first one was a short film used to promote the 2010 Copenhagen Climate Change Summit (“Scary”) and the second was the State Government of Victoria’s “You have the power: Save Energy” public awareness campaign (“You”). Using Moser’s article to guide them, students evaluated each campaign’s effectiveness. Their conclusions were that the “You have the power” campaign had far more impact because it a) had very clear objectives (to cut domestic power consumption) b) provided a very clear visualisation of carbon dioxide through the metaphor of black balloons wafting up into the atmosphere, c) gave viewers a sense of empowerment and hope through describing simple measures to cut power consumption and, d) used simple but effective metaphors to convey a world progressed beyond human control, such as household appliances robotically operating themselves in the absence of humans. Despite its high production values, in comparison, the Copenhagen Summit promotion was more than ineffective and bordered on propaganda. It actually turned viewers off with its whining, righteous appeal of, “please help the world”. Its message and objectives were ambiguous, it conveyed environmental catastrophe through hackneyed images, exploited children through a narrative based on fear and gave no real sense of hope or empowerment. In contrast the Victorian Government’s campaign focused on just one aspect of climate change that was made both tangible and situated. Doubt and uncertainty are productive tools in the pursuit of knowledge. Whether it is scientific or otherwise, uncertainty will always be the motivation that “feeds the frenzy for new knowledge” (Jasanoff 33). Articulating the importance of Hulme’s book, Sheila Jasanoff indicates we should make doubt our friend, “Without downplaying its seriousness, Hulme demotes climate change from ultimate threat to constant companion, whose murmurs unlock in us the instinct for justice and equality” (Hulme back cover). The “murmurs” that Jasanoff gestures to here, I think, can also be articulated as hope. And it is in this discussion of climate change that doubt and hope sit side-by-side as bedfellows, mutually entangled. Since the “failed” Copenhagen Summit, there has been a distinct shift in climate change discourse from “experts”. We have moved away from doom and gloom discourses and into the realm of what I shall call “situated” hope. “Situated” hope is not based on blind faith alone, but rather hope grounded in evidence, informed judgements and experience. For instance, in distinct contrast to his cautionary tale The Weather Makers: The History & Future Impact of Climate Change, Tim Flannery’s latest book, Here on Earth is a biography of our Earth; a planet that throughout its history has oscillated between Gaian and Medean impulses. However Flannery’s wonder about the natural world and our potential to mitigate the impacts of climate change is not founded on empty rhetoric but rather tempered by evidence; he presents a series of case studies where humanity has managed to come together for a global good. Whether it’s the 1987 Montreal ban on CFCs (chlorinated fluorocarbons) or the lesser-known 2001 Stockholm Convention on POP (Persistent Organic Pollutants), what Flannery envisions is an emerging global civilisation, a giant, intelligent super-organism glued together through social bonds. He says: If that is ever achieved, the greatest transformation in the history of our planet would have occurred, for Earth would then be able to act as if it were as Francis Bacon put it all those centuries ago, ‘one entire, perfect living creature’. (Here on Earth, 279) While science might give us “our most reliable understanding of the natural world” (Oreskes 370), “situated” hope is the only productive and ethical currency we have. ReferencesAustralian Council of Deans of Science. What Did You Do with Your Science Degree? A National Study of Employment Outcomes for Science Degree Holders 1990-2000. Melbourne: Centre for the Study of Higher Education, University of Melbourne, 2001. Australian Government Department of Innovation, Industry, Science and Research, Inspiring Australia – A National Strategy for Engagement with the Sciences. Executive summary. Canberra: DIISR, 2010. 24 May 2010 ‹http://www.innovation.gov.au/SCIENCE/INSPIRINGAUSTRALIA/Documents/InspiringAustraliaSummary.pdf›. “Andrew Bolt with Tim Flannery.” Steve Price. Hosted by Steve Price. Melbourne: Melbourne Talkback Radio, 2010. 9 June 2010 ‹http://www.mtr1377.com.au/index2.php?option=com_newsmanager&task=view&id=6209›. Carson, Rachel. Silent Spring. London: Penguin, 1962 (2000). Carr, Kim. “Celebrating Nobel Laureate Professor Elizabeth Blackburn.” Canberra: DIISR, 2010. 19 Feb. 2010 ‹http://minister.innovation.gov.au/Carr/Pages/CELEBRATINGNOBELLAUREATEPROFESSORELIZABETHBLACKBURN.aspx›. Environmental Law Online. “The Precautionary Principle.” N.d. 19 Jan 2011 ‹http://www.envirolaw.org.au/articles/precautionary_principle›. Flannery, Tim. The Weather Makers: The History & Future Impact of Climate Change. Melbourne: Text Publishing, 2005. ———. Here on Earth: An Argument for Hope. Melbourne: Text Publishing, 2010. Gorman-Murray, Andrew, and Gordon Waitt. “Climate and Culture.” M/C Journal 12.4 (2009). 9 Mar 2011 ‹http://journal.media-culture.org.au/index.php/mcjournal/article/viewArticle/184/0›. Harrison, Karey. “How ‘Inconvenient’ Is Al Gore’s Climate Change Message?” M/C Journal 12.4 (2009). 9 Mar 2011 ‹http://journal.media-culture.org.au/index.php/mcjournal/article/viewArticle/175›. Henderson-Sellers, Ann. “Climate Whispers: Media Communication about Climate Change.” Climatic Change 40 (1998): 421–456. Hulme, Mike. Why We Disagree about Climate Change: Understanding, Controversy, Inaction and Opportunity. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2009. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. A Picture of Climate Change: The Current State of Understanding. 2007. 11 Jan 2011 ‹http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/press-ar4/ipcc-flyer-low.pdf›. Jasanoff, Sheila. “Technologies of Humility.” Nature 450 (2007): 33. Latour, Bruno. “Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern.” Critical Inquiry 30.2 (2004). 19 Jan 2011 ‹http://criticalinquiry.uchicago.edu/issues/v30/30n2.Latour.html›. Lemonick, Michael D. “Climate Heretic: Judith Curry Turns on Her Colleagues.” Nature News 1 Nov. 2010. 9 Mar 2011 ‹http://www.nature.com/news/2010/101101/full/news.2010.577.html›. Lyotard, Jean-Francois. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1984. Moser, Susanne, and Lisa Dilling. “Making Climate Hot: Communicating the Urgency and Challenge of Global Climate Change.” Environment 46.10 (2004): 32-46. Moser, Susie. “More Bad News: The Risk of Neglecting Emotional Responses to Climate Change Information.” In Susanne Moser and Lisa Dilling (eds.), Creating a Climate for Change: Communicating Climate Change and Facilitating Social Change. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2007. 64-81. Oreskes, Naomi. “Science and Public Policy: What’s Proof Got to Do with It?” Environmental Science and Policy 7 (2004): 369-383. Potter, Emily, and Candice Oster. “Communicating Climate Change: Public Responsiveness and Matters of Concern.” Media International Australia 127 (2008): 116-126. President’s Science Advisory Committee. “Use of Pesticides”. Washington, D.C.: The White House, 1963. United Nations Declaration on Environment and Development. Rio de Janeiro, 1992. 19 Jan 2011 ‹http://www.unep.org/Documents.Multilingual/Default.asp?DocumentID=78&ArticleID=1163›. “Scary Global Warming Propaganda Video Shown at the Copenhagen Climate Meeting – 7 Dec. 2009.” YouTube. 21 Mar. 2011‹http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jzSuP_TMFtk&feature=related›. Schneider, Stephen. Science as a Contact Sport: Inside the Battle to Save Earth’s Climate. National Geographic Society, 2010. ———. “Stephen Schneider vs. the Sceptics”. YouTube. 21 Mar. 2011 ‹http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7rj1QcdEqU0›. Schwartz, Steven. “Science in Search of a New Formula.” 2010. 20 May 2010 ‹http://www.vc.mq.edu.au/blog/2010/03/11/science-in-search-of-a-new-formula/›. Tiffen, Rodney. "You Wouldn't Read about It: Climate Scientists Right." Sydney Morning Herald 26 July 2010. 19 Jan 2011 ‹http://www.smh.com.au/environment/climate-change/you-wouldnt-read-about-it-climate-scientists-right-20100727-10t5i.html›. “You Have the Power: Save Energy.” YouTube. 21 Mar. 2011 ‹http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SCiS5k_uPbQ›.

IntroductionCoffee, as a stimulant, and the spaces in which it is has been consumed, have long played a vital role in fostering communication, creativity, and sociality. This article explores the interrelationship of café space, communication, creativity, and materialism. In developing these themes, this article is structured in two parts. The first looks back to the coffee houses of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to give a historical context to the contemporary role of the café as a key site of creativity through its facilitation of social interaction, communication and information exchange. The second explores the continuation of the link between cafés, communication and creativity, through an instance from the mid-twentieth century where this process becomes individualised and is tied more intrinsically to the material surroundings of the café itself. From this, we argue that in order to understand the connection between café space and creativity, it is valuable to consider the rich polymorphic material and aesthetic composition of cafés. The Social Life of Coffee: London’s Coffee Houses While the social consumption of coffee has a long history, here we restrict our focus to a discussion of the London coffee houses of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It was during the seventeenth century that the vogue of these coffee houses reached its zenith when they operated as a vibrant site of mercantile activity, as well as cultural and political exchange (Cowan; Lillywhite; Ellis). Many of these coffee houses were situated close to the places where politicians, merchants, and other significant people congregated and did business, near government buildings such as Parliament, as well as courts, ports and other travel route hubs (Lillywhite 17). A great deal of information was shared within these spaces and, as a result, the coffee house became a key venue for communication, especially the reading and distribution of print and scribal publications (Cowan 85). At this time, “no coffee house worth its name” would be without a ready selection of newspapers for its patrons (Cowan 173). By working to twenty-four hour diurnal cycles and heightening the sense of repetition and regularity, coffee houses also played a crucial role in routinising news as a form of daily consumption alongside other forms of habitual consumption (including that of coffee drinking). In Cowan’s words, “restoration coffee houses soon became known as places ‘dasht with diurnals and books of news’” (172). Among these was the short-lived but nonetheless infamous social gossip publication, The Tatler (1709-10), which was strongly associated with the London coffee houses and, despite its short publication life, offers great insight into the social life and scandals of the time. The coffee house became, in short, “the primary social space in which ‘news’ was both produced and consumed” (Cowan 172). The proprietors of coffee houses were quick to exploit this situation by dealing in “news mongering” and developing their own news publications to supplement their incomes (172). They sometimes printed news, commentary and gossip that other publishers were not willing to print. However, as their reputation as news providers grew, so did the pressure on coffee houses to meet the high cost of continually acquiring or producing journals (Cowan 173; Ellis 185-206). In addition to the provision of news, coffee houses were vital sites for other forms of communication. For example, coffee houses were key venues where “one might deposit and receive one’s mail” (Cowan 175), and the Penny Post used coffeehouses as vital pick-up and delivery centres (Lillywhite 17). As Cowan explains, “Many correspondents [including Jonathan Swift] used a coffeehouse as a convenient place to write their letters as well as to send them” (176). This service was apparently provided gratis for regular patrons, but coffee house owners were less happy to provide this for their more infrequent customers (Cowan 176). London’s coffee houses functioned, in short, as notable sites of sociality that bundled together drinking coffee with news provision and postal and other services to attract customers (Cowan; Ellis). Key to the success of the London coffee house of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was the figure of the virtuoso habitué (Cowan 105)—an urbane individual of the middle or upper classes who was skilled in social intercourse, skills that were honed through participation in the highly ritualised and refined forms of interpersonal communication, such as visiting the stately homes of that time. In contrast to such private visits, the coffee house provided a less formalised and more spontaneous space of sociality, but where established social skills were distinctly advantageous. A striking example of the figure of the virtuoso habitué is the philosopher, architect and scientist Robert Hooke (1635-1703). Hooke, by all accounts, used the opportunities provided by his regular visits to coffee houses “to draw on the knowledge of a wide variety of individuals, from servants and skilled laborers to aristocrats, as well as to share and display novel scientific instruments” (Cowan 105) in order to explore and develop his virtuoso interests. The coffee house also served Hooke as a place to debate philosophy with cliques of “like-minded virtuosi” and thus formed the “premier locale” through which he could “fulfil his own view of himself as a virtuoso, as a man of business, [and] as a man at the centre of intellectual life in the city” (Cowan 105-06). For Hooke, the coffee house was a space for serious work, and he was known to complain when “little philosophical work” was accomplished (105-06). Sociality operates in this example as a form of creative performance, demonstrating individual skill, and is tied to other forms of creative output. Patronage of a coffee house involved hearing and passing on gossip as news, but also entailed skill in philosophical debate and other intellectual pursuits. It should also be noted that the complex role of the coffee house as a locus of communication, sociality, and creativity was repeated elsewhere. During the 1600s in Egypt (and elsewhere in the Middle East), for example, coffee houses served as sites of intensive literary activity as well as the locations for discussions of art, sciences and literature, not to mention also of gambling and drug use (Hattox 101). While the popularity of coffee houses had declined in London by the 1800s, café culture was flowering elsewhere in mainland Europe. In the late 1870s in Paris, Edgar Degas and Edward Manet documented the rich café life of the city in their drawings and paintings (Ellis 216). Meanwhile, in Vienna, “the kaffeehaus offered another evocative model of urban and artistic modernity” (Ellis 217; see also Bollerey 44-81). Serving wine and dinners as well as coffee and pastries, the kaffeehaus was, like cafés elsewhere in Europe, a mecca for writers, artists and intellectuals. The Café Royal in London survived into the twentieth century, mainly through the patronage of European expatriates and local intellectuals such as Wyndham Lewis, Ezra Pound, T. S. Elliot, and Henri Bergson (Ellis 220). This pattern of patronage within specific and more isolated cafés was repeated in famous gatherings of literary identities elsewhere in Europe throughout the twentieth century. From this historical perspective, a picture emerges of how the social functions of the coffee house and its successors, the espresso bar and modern café, have shifted over the course of their histories (Bollerey 44-81). In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the coffee house was an important location for vibrant social interaction and the consumption and distribution of various forms of communication such as gossip, news, and letters. However, in the years of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the café was more commonly a site for more restricted social interaction between discrete groups. Studies of cafés and creativity during this era focus on cafés as “factories of literature, inciters to art, and breeding places for new ideas” (Fitch, The Grand 18). Central in these accounts are bohemian artists, their associated social circles, and their preferred cafés de bohème (for detailed discussion, see Wilson; Fitch, Paris Café; Brooker; Grafe and Bollerey 4-41). As much of this literature on café culture details, by the early twentieth century, cafés emerge as places that enable individuals to carve out a space for sociality and creativity which was not possible elsewhere in the modern metropolis. Writing on the modern metropolis, Simmel suggests that the concentration of people and things in cities “stimulate[s] the nervous system of the individual” to such an extent that it prompts a kind of self-preservation that he terms a “blasé attitude” (415). This is a form of “reserve”, he writes, which “grants to the individual a [certain] kind and an amount of personal freedom” that was hitherto unknown (416). Cafés arguably form a key site in feeding this dynamic insofar as they facilitate self-protectionism—Fitch’s “pool of privacy” (The Grand 22)—and, at the same time, produce a sense of individual freedom in Simmel’s sense of the term. That is to say, from the early-to-mid twentieth century, cafés have become complex settings in terms of the relationships they enable or constrain between living in public, privacy, intimacy, and cultural practice. (See Haine for a detailed discussion of how this plays out in relation to working class engagement with Paris cafés, and Wilson as well as White on other cultural contexts, such as Japan.) Threaded throughout this history is a clear celebration of the individual artist as a kind of virtuoso habitué of the contemporary café. Café Jama Michalika The following historical moment, drawn from a powerful point in the mid-twentieth century, illustrates this last stage in the evolution of the relationship between café space, communication, and creativity. This particular historical moment concerns the renowned Polish composer and conductor Krzysztof Penderecki, who is most well-known for his avant-garde piece Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima (1960), his Polymorphia (1961), and St Luke Passion (1963-66), all of which entailed new compositional and notation techniques. Poland, along with other European countries devastated by the Second World War, underwent significant rebuilding after the war, also investing heavily in the arts, musical education, new concert halls, and conservatoria (Monastra). In the immediate post-war period, Poland and Polish culture was under the strong ideological influence exerted by the Soviet Union. However, as Thomas notes, within a year of Stalin’s death in 1953, “there were flickering signs of moderation in Polish culture” (83). With respect to musical creativity, a key turning point was the Warsaw Autumn Music Festival of 1956. “The driving force” behind the first festival (which was to become an annual event), was Polish “composers’ overwhelming sense of cultural isolation and their wish to break the provincial nature of Polish music” at that time (Thomas 85). Penderecki was one of a younger generation of composers who participated in, and benefited from, these early festivals, making his first appearance in 1959 with his composition Strophes, and successive appearances with Dimensions of Time and Silence in 1960, and Threnody in 1961 (Thomas 90). Penderecki married in the 1950s and had a child in 1955. This, in combination with the fact that his wife was a pianist and needed to practice daily, restricted Penderecki’s ability to work in their small Krakow apartment. Nor could he find space at the music school which was free from the intrusion of the sound of other instruments. Instead, he frequented the café Jama Michalika off the central square of Krakow, where he worked most days between nine in the morning and noon, when he would leave as a pianist began to play. Penderecki states that because of the small space of the café table, he had to “invent [a] special kind of notation which allowed me to write the piece which was for 52 instruments, like Threnody, on one small piece of paper” (Krzysztof Penderecki, 2000). In this, Penderecki created a completely new set of notation symbols, which assisted him in graphically representing tone clustering (Robinson 6) while, in his score for Polymorphia, he implemented “novel graphic notation, comparable with medical temperature charts, or oscillograms” (Schwinger 29) to represent in the most compact way possible the dense layering of sounds and vocal elements that is developed in this particular piece. This historical account is valuable because it contributes to discussions on individual creativity that both depends on, and occurs within, the material space of the café. This relationship is explored in Walter Benjamin’s essay “Polyclinic”, where he develops an extended analogy between the writer and the café and the surgeon and his instruments. As Cohen summarises, “Benjamin constructs the field of writerly operation both in medical terms and as a space dear to Parisian intellectuals, as an operating table that is also the marble-topped table of a café” (179). At this time, the space of the café itself thus becomes a vital site for individual cultural production, putting the artist in touch with the social life of the city, as many accounts of writers and artists in the cafés of Paris, Prague, Vienna, and elsewhere in Europe attest. “The attraction of the café for the writer”, Fitch argues, “is that seeming tension between the intimate circle of privacy in a comfortable room, on the one hand, and the flow of (perhaps usable) information all around on the other” (The Grand 11). Penderecki talks about searching for a sound while composing in café Jama Michalika and, hearing the noise of a passing tram, subsequently incorporated it into his famous composition, Threnody (Krzysztof Penderecki, 2000). There is an indirect connection here with the attractions of the seventeenth century coffee houses in London, where news writers drew much of their gossip and news from the talk within the coffee houses. However, the shift is to a more isolated, individualistic habitué. Nonetheless, the aesthetic composition of the café space remains essential to the creative productivity described by Penderecki. A concept that can be used to describe this method of composition is contained within one of Penderecki’s best-known pieces, Polymorphia (1961). The term “polymorphia” refers not to the form of the music itself (which is actually quite conventionally structured) but rather to the multiple blending of sounds. Schwinger defines polymorphia as “many formedness […] which applies not […] to the form of the piece, but to the broadly deployed scale of sound, [the] exchange and simultaneous penetration of sound and noise, the contrast and interflow of soft and hard sounds” (131). This description also reflects the rich material context of the café space as Penderecki describes its role in shaping (both enabling and constraining) his creative output. Creativity, Technology, Materialism The materiality of the café—including the table itself for Penderecki—is crucial in understanding the relationship between the forms of creative output and the material conditions of the spaces that enable them. In Penderecki’s case, to understand the origins of the score and even his innovative forms of musical notation as artefacts of communication, we need to understand the material conditions under which they were created. As a fixture of twentieth and twenty-first century urban environments, the café mediates the private within the public in a way that offers the contemporary virtuoso habitué a rich, polymorphic sensory experience. In a discussion of the indivisibility of sensation and its resistance to language, writer Anna Gibbs describes these rich experiential qualities: sitting by the window in a café watching the busy streetscape with the warmth of the morning sun on my back, I smell the delicious aroma of coffee and simultaneously feel its warmth in my mouth, taste it, and can tell the choice of bean as I listen idly to the chatter in the café around me and all these things blend into my experience of “being in the café” (201). Gibbs’s point is that the world of the café is highly synaesthetic and infused with sensual interconnections. The din of the café with its white noise of conversation and overlaying sounds of often carefully chosen music illustrates the extension of taste beyond the flavour of the coffee on the palate. In this way, the café space provides the infrastructure for a type of creative output that, in Gibbs’s case, facilitates her explanation of expression and affect. The individualised virtuoso habitué, as characterised by Penderecki’s work within café Jama Michalika, simply describes one (celebrated) form of the material conditions of communication and creativity. An essential factor in creative cultural output is contained in the ways in which material conditions such as these come to be organised. As Elizabeth Grosz expresses it: Art is the regulation and organisation of its materials—paint, canvas, concrete, steel, marble, words, sounds, bodily movements, indeed any materials—according to self-imposed constraints, the creation of forms through which these materials come to generate and intensify sensation and thus directly impact living bodies, organs, nervous systems (4). Materialist and medium-oriented theories of media and communication have emphasised the impact of physical constraints and enablers on the forms produced. McLuhan, for example, famously argued that the typewriter brought writing, speech, and publication into closer association, one effect of which was the tighter regulation of spelling and grammar, a pressure toward precision and uniformity that saw a jump in the sales of dictionaries (279). In the poetry of E. E. Cummings, McLuhan sees the typewriter as enabling a patterned layout of text that functions as “a musical score for choral speech” (278). In the same way, the café in Penderecki’s recollections both constrains his ability to compose freely (a creative activity that normally requires ample flat surface), but also facilitates the invention of a new language for composition, one able to accommodate the small space of the café table. Recent studies that have sought to materialise language and communication point to its physicality and the embodied forms through which communication occurs. As Packer and Crofts Wiley explain, “infrastructure, space, technology, and the body become the focus, a move that situates communication and culture within a physical, corporeal landscape” (3). The confined and often crowded space of the café and its individual tables shape the form of productive output in Penderecki’s case. Targeting these material constraints and enablers in her discussion of art, creativity and territoriality, Grosz describes the “architectural force of framing” as liberating “the qualities of objects or events that come to constitute the substance, the matter, of the art-work” (11). More broadly, the design features of the café, the form and layout of the tables and the space made available for individual habitation, the din of the social encounters, and even the stimulating influences on the body of the coffee served there, can be seen to act as enablers of communication and creativity. Conclusion The historical examples examined above indicate a material link between cafés and communication. They also suggest a relationship between materialism and creativity, as well as the roots of the romantic association—or mythos—of cafés as a key source of cultural life as they offer a “shared place of composition” and an “environment for creative work” (Fitch, The Grand 11). We have detailed one example pertaining to European coffee consumption, cafés and creativity. While we believe Penderecki’s case is valuable in terms of what it can tell us about forms of communication and creativity, clearly other cultural and historical contexts may reveal additional insights—as may be found in the cases of Middle Eastern cafés (Hattox) or the North American diner (Hurley), and in contemporary developments such as the café as a source of free WiFi and the commodification associated with global coffee chains. Penderecki’s example, we suggest, also sheds light on a longer history of creativity and cultural production that intersects with contemporary work practices in city spaces as well as conceptualisations of the individual’s place within complex urban spaces. References Benjamin, Walter. “Polyclinic” in “One-Way Street.” One-Way Street and Other Writings. Trans. Edmund Jephcott and Kingsley Shorter. London: Verso, 1998: 88-9. Bollerey, Franziska. “Setting the Stage for Modernity: The Cosmos of the Coffee House.” Cafés and Bars: The Architecture of Public Display. Eds. Christoph Grafe and Franziska Bollerey. New York: Routledge, 2007. 44-81. Brooker, Peter. Bohemia in London: The Social Scene of Early Modernism. Houndmills, Hamps.: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Cohen, Margaret. Profane Illumination: Walter Benjamin and the Paris of Surrealist Revolution. Berkeley: U of California P, 1995. Cowan, Brian. The Social Life of Coffee: The Emergence of the British Coffeehouse. New Haven: Yale UP, 2005. Ellis, Markman. The Coffee House: A Cultural History. London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 2004. Fitch, Noël Riley. Paris Café: The Sélect Crowd. Brooklyn: Soft Skull Press, 2007. -----. The Grand Literary Cafés of Europe. London: New Holland Publishers (UK), 2006. Gibbs, Anna. “After Affect: Sympathy, Synchrony, and Mimetic Communication.” The Affect Theory Reader. Eds. Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Siegworth. Durham: Duke University Press, 2010. 186-205. Grafe, Christoph, and Franziska Bollerey. “Introduction: Cafés and Bars—Places for Sociability.” Cafés and Bars: The Architecture of Public Display. Eds. Christoph Grafe and Franziska Bollerey. New York: Routledge, 2007. 4-41. Grosz, Elizabeth. Chaos, Territory, Art: Deleuze and the Framing of the Earth. New York: Columbia UP, 2008. Haine, W. Scott. The World of the Paris Café. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1996. Hattox, Ralph S. Coffee and Coffeehouses: The Origins of a Social Beverage in the Medieval Near East. Seattle: U of Washington P, 1985. Hurley, Andrew. Diners, Bowling Alleys and Trailer Parks: Chasing the American Dream in the Postwar Consumer Culture. New York: Basic Books, 2001. Krzysztof Penderecki. Dir. Andreas Missler-Morell. Spektrum TV production and Telewizja Polska S.A. Oddzial W Krakowie for RM Associates and ZDF in cooperation with ARTE, 2000. Lillywhite, Bryant. London Coffee Houses: A Reference Book of Coffee Houses of the Seventeenth, Eighteenth, and Nineteenth Centuries. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1963. McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. London: Abacus, 1974. Monastra, Peggy. “Krzysztof Penderecki’s Polymorphia and Fluorescence.” Moldenhauer Archives, [US] Library of Congress. 12 Jan. 2012 ‹http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/collections/moldenhauer/2428143.pdf› Packer, Jeremy, and Stephen B. Crofts Wiley. “Introduction: The Materiality of Communication.” Communication Matters: Materialist Approaches to Media, Mobility and Networks. New York, Routledge, 2012. 3-16. Robinson, R. Krzysztof Penderecki: A Guide to His Works. Princeton, NJ: Prestige Publications, 1983. Schwinger, Wolfram. Krzysztof Penderecki: His Life and Work. Encounters, Biography and Musical Commentary. London: Schott, 1979. Simmel, Georg. The Sociology of Georg Simmel. Ed. and trans. Kurt H. Wolff. Glencoe, IL: The Free P, 1960. Thomas, Adrian. Polish Music since Szymanowski. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2005. White, Merry I. Coffee Life in Japan. Berkeley: U of California P, 2012. Wilson, Elizabeth. “The Bohemianization of Mass Culture.” International Journal of Cultural Studies 2.1 (1999): 11-32.

Retro fashion trends continue to be a feature of the contemporary clothing market, providing alternate configurations of womanhood from which women can fashion their identities (Hackett). This article examines the design attributes of 1950s-style clothing, that some women choose to wear over more contemporary styles. The 1950s style can be located in a distinctly hourglass design that features a small waist with distinct bust and hips. This article asks: what are the design features of this style that lead women to choose it over contemporary fashion? Taking a material culture approach, it firstly looks at the design features of the garments and the way they are marketed. Secondly, it draws upon interviews and a survey conducted with women who wear these clothes. Thirdly, it investigates the importance of this silhouette to the women who wear it, through the key concepts of body shape and size. Clothing styles of the 1950s were influenced by the work of Christian Dior, particularly his "New Look" collection of 1947. Dior’s design focus was on emphasising female curves, featuring full bust and flowing skirts cinched in with a narrow waist (Dior), creating an exaggerated hourglass shape. The look was in sharp contrast to fashion designs of the Second World War and offered a different conceptualisation of the female body, which was eagerly embraced by many women who had grown weary of rationing and scarcity. Post-1950s, fashion designers shifted their focus to a slimmer ideal, often grounded in narrow hips and a smaller bust. Yet not all women suit this template; some simply do not have the right body shape for this ideal. Additionally, the intervening years between the 1950s and now have also seen an incremental increase in body sizes so that a slender figure no longer represents many women. High-street brand designers, such as Review, Kitten D’Amour and Collectif, have recognised these issues, and in searching for an alternative conceptualisation of the female body have turned to the designs of the 1950s for their inspiration. The base design of wide skirts which emphasise the relative narrowness of the waist is arguably more suited to many women today, both in terms of fit and shape. Using a material culture approach, this article will examine these design features to uncover why women choose this style over more contemporary designs. Method This article draws upon a material culture study of 1950s-designed clothes and why some contemporary women choose to wear 1950s-style clothing as everyday dress. Material culture is “the study through artefacts of the beliefs—values, ideas, attitudes and assumptions—of a particular community or society at a given time” (Prown 1). The premise is that a detailed examination of a culture’s relationship with its objects cannot be undertaken without researching the objects themselves (Hodder 174). Thus both the object is analysed and the culture is surveyed about their relationship with the object. In this study, analysis was conducted in March and September 2019 on the 4,286 items of clothing available for sale by the 19 brands that the interview subjects wear, noting the design features that mark the style as "1950s" or "1950s-inspired". Further, a quantitative analysis of the types of clothing (e.g. dress, skirt, trousers, etc.) was undertaken to reveal where the design focus lay. A secondary analysis of the design brands was also undertaken, examining the design elements they used to market their products. In parallel, two cohorts of women who wear 1950s-style clothing were examined to ascertain the social meanings of their clothing choices. The first group comprised 28 Australian women who participated in semi-structured interviews. The second cohort responded to an international survey that was undertaken by 229 people who sew and wear historic clothing. The survey aimed to reveal the meaning of the clothes to those who wear them. Both sets of participants were found through advertising the study on Facebook in 2018. The interview subjects were selected with the requirement that they self-identified as wearing 1950s-style clothing on a daily basis. The survey examined home dressmakers who made historic-style clothing and asked them a range of questions regarding their sewing practice and the wearing of the clothes. Literature Review While subcultures have adopted historic clothing styles as part of their aesthetic (Hebdige), the more mainstream wearing of clothing from alternative eras as an everyday fashion choice has its roots in the hippy movement of the late 1960s (Cumming 109). These wearers are not attempting to “‘rebel’ against society, nor … explicitly ‘subvert’ items that are offered by mainstream culture” (Veenstra and Kuipers 362-63), rather they are choosing styles that both fit in with contemporary styles, yet are drawn from a different design ideal. Wearers of vintage clothing often feel that modern clothing is designed for an ideal body size or shape which differed markedly from their own (Smith and Blanco 360-61). The fashion industry has long been criticised for its adherence to an ultra-thin body shape and it is only in the last decade or so that small changes have begun to be made (Hackett and Rall 270-72). While plus-size models have begun to appear in advertising and on cat-walks, and fashion brands have begun to employ plus-sized fit models, the shift to inclusivity has been limited as the models persistently reflect the smaller end of the “plus” spectrum and continue to have slim, hourglass proportions (Gruys 12-13). The overwhelming amount of clothing offered for sale remains within the normative AU8-16 clothing range. This range is commonly designated “standard” with any sizes above this “plus-sized”. Yet women around the world do not fit neatly into this range and the average woman in countries such as Australia and the United States are at the upper edge of normative size ranges. In Australia, the average woman is around an AU16 (Olds) and in the US they are in the lower ranges of plus sizes (Gruys) which calls into question the validity of the term “plus-sized”. Closely related to body size, but distinctly different, is the concept of body shape. Body shape refers to the relative dimensions of the body, and within fashion, this tends to focus on the waist, hips and bust. Where clothing from the 1960s onwards has generally presented a slim silhouette, 1950s-style clothing offers an arguably different body shape. Christian Dior’s 1947 "New Look" design collection came to dominate the style of the 1950s. Grounded in oversized skirts, cinched waists, full bust, and curved lines of the mid-nineteenth century styles, Dior sought to design for “flower-like women” (Dior 24) who were small and delicate, yet had full hips and busts. While Dior’s iteration was an exaggerated shape that required substantial body structuring through undergarments, the pronounced hourglass design shape became identified with 1950s-style clothing. By the 1960s the ideal female body shape had changed dramatically, as demonstrated by the prominent model of that decade, the gamine Twiggy. For the next few decades, iterations of this hyper-thin design ideal were accelerated and fashion models in magazines consistently decreased in size (Sypeck et al.) as fashion followed trends such as "heroin chic", culminating in the "size zero" scandals that saw models' BMI and waist-to-height rations plummet to dangerously unhealthy sizes (Hackett and Rall 272-73; Rodgers et al. 287-88). The majority of the fashion industry, it appears, is not designing for the average woman. Discrimination against “fat” people leads to industry practices that actively exclude them from product offerings (Christel). This has been variously located as being entrenched anywhere from the top of the industry (Clements) to the entry level, where design students are taught their trade using size 8 models (Rutherford-Black et al.). By restricting their designs in terms of size and shape offering, clothing brands collectively restrict the ability of people whose bodies fall outside that arbitrary range to fashion their identity but are eager nonetheless to participate in fashion (Church Gibson; Peters). This resulting gap provides an opportunity for brands to differentiate their product offering with alternate designs that cater to this group. Findings 1950s-Style Clothing There are several key styles that could arguably be identified as “1950s”; however, one of the findings in this study was that the focus of the designs was on the voluptuous style of the 1950s associated with Dior’s New Look, featuring a cinched-in waist, full bust, and predominantly wide, flowing skirts. A count of the garments available for sale on the websites of these brands found that the focus is overwhelmingly on dresses (64% of the 4,286 garments on offer), with skirts and bifurcated garments being marketed in far smaller numbers, 10% (679) and 7% (467) respectively. The majority of the skirts were wide, with just a few being narrow, often in a hobble-skirt style. Both styles emphasise wide hips and narrow waists. The high number of dresses with voluminous skirts suggest that this design aesthetic is popular amongst their customers; these women are seeking designs that are based on a distinctly, if exaggerated, female form. Many of the brands surveyed have an extended size collection, outside the normative AU8-16, with one brand going as high as a UK32. Sizing standards have ceased to be universally used by clothing designers, with brands often creating their own size scales, making it difficult to make direct size comparisons between the brands (Hackett and Rall, 267). Despite this, the analysis found that many of these brands have extended their sizing ranges well into the plus-sized bracket, with one brand going up to a size 32. In most brands, the exact same designs are available throughout the sizes rather than having a separate dedicated plus-size range. Only one design brand had a dedicated separate "plus-size" range where the clothing differed from their "standard-sized" ranges. Further, many of the brands did not use terminology separating sizes into “standard” or “plus-size”. Beyond the product offering, this analysis also looked at the size of the models that design brands use to market their clothes. Four brands did not use models, displaying the clothes in isolation. Eight of the brands used a range of models of different sizes to advertise their clothes, reflecting the diversity of the product range. Seven of the brands did not, preferring to use models of smaller size, usually around a size AU8, with a couple using the occasional model who was a size AU12. Body Shape There were two ideal body shapes in the 1950s. The first was a voluptuous hourglass shape of a large bust and hips, with a small cinched-in waist. The second was more slender, as exemplified by women such as Grace Kelly and Audrey Hepburn, this was “a subdued and classy sensuality, often associated with the aristocrat and high fashion” (Mazur). It is the first that has come to be the silhouette most commonly associated with the decade among this cohort, and it is this conceptualisation of a curvy ideal that participants in this study referenced when discussing why they wear these clothes: I'm probably like a standard Australia at 5'10" but I am curvy. A lot of corporate clothes I don't think are really made to fit women in the way they probably could and they could probably learn a bit from looking back a bit more at the silhouettes for you know, your more, sort of average women with curves. (Danielle) The 50s styles suit my figure and I wear that style on an everyday basis. (Survey Participant #22) As these women note, this curvy ideal aligns with their own figures. There was also a sense that the styles of the 1950s were more forgiving, and thus suited a wider range of body shapes, than more contemporary styles: these are the styles of clothes I generally wear as the 50’s and 60’s styles flatter the body and are flattering to most body types. (Survey Participant #213) In contrast, some participants chose the style because it created the illusion of a body shape they did not naturally possess. For example, Emma stated: I’m very tall and I found that modern fast fashion is often quite short on me whereas if it’s either reproduction or vintage stuff it tends to suit me better in length. It gives me a bit of shape; I’m like a string bean, straight up and down. (Emma) For others it allows them to control or mask elements of their body: okay, so the 1950s clothes I find give you a really feminine shape. They always consider the fact that you have got a waist. And my waist [inaudible]. My hips I always want to hide, so those full skirts always do a good job at hiding those hips. I feel… I feel pretty in them. (Belinda) Underlying both these statements is the desire to create a feminine silhouette, which in turn increases feelings of being attractive. This reflects Christian Dior’s aim to ground his designs in femininity. This locating of the body ideal in exaggerated curves and equating it to a sense of femininity was reflected by a number of participants. The sensory appeal of 1950s designs led to one participant feeling “more feminine because of that tiny waist and heels on” (Rosy). This reflects Dior’s design aim to create highly feminine clothing styles. Another participant mused upon this in more detail: I love how pretty they make me feel. The tailoring involved to fit your individual body to enhance your figure, no matter your size, just amazes me. In by-gone eras, women dressed like women, and men like men ... not so androgynous and sloppy like today. I also like the idea of teaching the younger generation about history ... and debunking a lot of information and preconceived notions that people have. But most of all ... THE PRETTY FACTOR! (Survey Participant #130) Thus the curvy style is conceived to be distinctly feminine and thus a clear marker of the female identity of the person wearing the clothes. Body Size Participants were also negotiating the relative size of their bodies when it came to apparel choice. Body size is closely related to body shape and participants often negotiated both when choosing which style to wear. For example, Skye stated how “my bust and my waist and my hips don’t fit a standard [size]”, indicating that, for her, both issues impacted on her ability to wear contemporary clothing. Ashleigh concurred, stating: I was a size 8, but I was still a very hourglass sized 8. So modern stuff doesn’t even work with me when I’m skinnier and that shape. (Ashleigh) Body size is not just about measurements around the hips and torso, it also affects the ability to choose clothing for those at the higher and lower ends of the height spectrum. Gabrielle discussed her height, saying: so I’m really tall, got quite big hips … . So I quite like that it cinches the waist a bit, goes over the hips and hides a little bit [laughs] I don’t know … I really like that about it I guess. (Gabrielle) For Gabrielle, her height creates a further dimension for her to negotiate. In this instance, contemporary fashion is too short for her to feel comfortable wearing it. The longer skirts of 1950s style clothing provide the desired coverage of her body. The curvy contours of 1950s-designed clothing were found by some participants to be compatible with their body size, particularly for those in the large size ranges. The following statement typifies this point of view: the later styles are mostly small waist/full skirt that flatters my plus size figure. I also find them the most romantic/attractive. (Survey Participant #74) The desire to feel attractive in clothes when negotiating body size reflects the concerns participants had regarding shape. For this cohort, 1950s-style clothing presents a solution to these issues. Discussion The clothing designs of the 1950s focus on a voluptuous body shape that is in sharp contrast to the thin ideal of contemporary styles. The women in this study state that contemporary designs just do not suit their body shape, and thus they have consciously sought out a style that is designed along lines that do. The heavy reliance on skirts and dresses that cinch at the waist and flare wide over the hips suggests that the base silhouette of the 1950s designed clothing is flattering for a wide range of female shapes, both in respect to shape and size. The style is predominantly designed around flared skirts which serves to reduce the fit focus to the waist and bust, thus women do not have to negotiate hip size when purchasing or wearing clothes. By removing one to the three major fit points in clothing, the designers are able to cater to a wider range of body shapes. This is supported in the interviews with women across the spectrum of body shapes, from those who note that they can "hide their wider hips" and to those women who use the style to create an hourglass shape. The wider range of sizes available in the 1950s-inspired clothing brands suggests that the flexibility of the style also caters to a wide range of body sizes. Some of the brands also market their clothes using models with diverse body sizes. Although this is, in some cases, limited to the lower end of the “plus”-size bracket, others did include models who were at the higher end. This suggests that some of these brands recognise the market potential of this style and that their customers are welcoming of body diversity. The focus on a relatively smaller waist to hip and bust also locates the bigger body in the realm of femininity, a trait that many of the respondents felt these clothes embodied. The focus on the perceived femininity of this style, at any size, is in contrast to mainstream fashion. This suggests that contemporary fashion designers are largely continuing to insist on a thin body ideal and are therefore failing to cater for a considerable section of the market. Rather than attempting to get their bodies to fit into fashion, these women are finding alternate styles that fit their bodies. The fashion brands analysed did not create an artificial division of sizing into “standard” and “plus” categories, reinforcing the view that these brands are size-inclusive and the styles are meant for all women. This posits the question of why the fashion industry continues this downward trajectory in body size. Conclusion The design of 1950s-inspired clothing provides an alternate silhouette through which women can fashion their identity. Designers of this style are catering to an alternate concept of feminine beauty than the one provided by contemporary fashion. Analysis of the design elements reveals that the focus is on a narrow waist below a full bust, with wide flowing skirts. In addition, women in this study felt these designs catered for a wide variety of body sizes and shapes. The women interviewed and surveyed in this study feel that designers of contemporary styles do not cater for their body size and/or shape, whereas 1950s-style clothing provides a silhouette that flatters them. Further, they felt the designs achieved femininity through the accentuating of feminine curves. The dominance of the dress, a highly gendered garment, within this modern iteration of 1950s-style underscores this association with femininity. This reflects Christian Dior’s design ethos which placed emphasis on female curves. This was to become one of the dominating influences on the clothing styles of the 1950s and it still resonates today with the clothing choices of the women in this study. References Christel, Deborah A. "It's Your Fault You're Fat: Judgements of Responsibility and Social Conduct in the Fashion Industry." Clothing Cultures 1.3 (2014): 303-20. DOI: 10.1386/cc.1.3.303_1. Church Gibson, Pamela. 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Introduction While individuals from marginalised and vulnerable communities have long been confronted with the task of developing coping strategies, COVID-19 lockdowns intensified the conditions under which resilience and wellbeing were/are negotiated, not only for marginalised communities but for people from all walks of life. In particular, the pandemic has highlighted in simple terms the stark divide between the “haves” and “have nots”, and how pre-existing physical conditions and material resources (or lack thereof), including adequate income, living circumstances, and access to digital and other resources, have created different conditions for people to be able to physically isolate, avoid working in conditions that put them at greater risk of exposure to the virus, and maintain up-to-date information. The COVID-19 pandemic has changed the way we live, and its conditions have tested our capacity for resilience to varying degrees. Poor mental health has become an increasingly urgent concern, with almost one in ten people contemplating suicide during Victoria’s second wave and prolonged lockdown in 2020 (Ali et al.; Czeisler & Rajaratnam; Paul). The question of what enables people to cope and adapt to physical distancing is critical for building a more resilient post-pandemic society. With the understanding that resilience is comprised of an intersection of material and immaterial resources, this project takes as its focus the material dimensions of everyday resilience. Specifically, “Objects for Everyday Resilience” explores the intersection of material objects and everyday resilience, focussing on the things that have supported mental and physical health of different sections of the community in Melbourne, Australia, during the pandemic. People in the Victorian city of Melbourne, Australia – including the research team authors of this article – experienced 262 days of lockdown due to the COVID-19 pandemic, more than any other city in the world. The infection rate was high, as was the death rate. Hospitals were in crisis attempting to deal with the influx (McReadie). During lockdowns in 2020 and 2021, all movement in the city was restricted, with 9 pm to 5 am curfews and a five-kilometre travel limit. Workplaces, schools, businesses, sports and leisure clubs were closed. One person per household could shop. Masks were mandatory at all times. PCR testing was extensive. People stayed in their homes, with no visitors. The city limits were closed by roadblocks. Rare instances of air travel required a hard-to-get exemption. Vaccines were delayed. The state government provided financial support for most workers who lost income from their regular work due to the restrictions. However, the financial assistance criteria rejected many casual workers, including foreign students who normally supported themselves through casual employment (McReadie). The mental health toll of protracted lockdowns on Melbourne residents was high (Klein, Tyler-Parker, and Bastian). Yet people developed measures of resilience that helped them cope with lockdown isolation (Gerrand). While studies of resilience have been undertaken during the pandemic, including increased attention towards the affordances of online platforms in lockdown, relatively little attention has been paid to whether and how material objects support everyday resilience. The significant amount of literature on objects and things (e.g. Whitlock) offers a wide range of potential applications when brought to bear on the material conditions of resilience in the COVID-19 pandemic as it continues to unfold. As ethnographer Paula Zuccotti notes in her study of objects that people used in lockdowns around the world, “Future Archeology of a Global Lockdown”, the everyday items we use tell us stories about how we exist (Zuccotti). Paying attention to the intersection of objects with resilience in everyday contexts can enable us to view resilience as a potential practice that can shape the conditions of social life that produce adversity in the first place (Chalmers). By studying relationships between material objects and people in conditions of adversity, this project aims to enhance and extend emerging understandings of multisystemic resilience (Ungar). Objects have been central to human history, culture, and life. According to Maurizio Ferraris, objects are characterised by four qualities: sensory-ness, manipulability, ordinariness, and relationality. “Unlike the three spheres of biological life – the mineral, the vegetable and the animal – objects and things have been customarily considered dependent on humans’ agency and presence” (Bartoloni). In everyday life, objects can enhance resilience when they are mobilised in strategies of resourcefulness and “making do” (de Certeau). Objects may also support the performance of identity and enable inter-subjective relations that create a sense of agency and of being at home, wherever one is located (Ahmed et al.; Gerrand). From an existential perspective, the experience of being confined in lockdown, “stuck” in one place, challenges cosmopolitan connectedness and sense of belonging. It also bears some similarities to the experiences of migrants and refugees who have endured great uncertainty, distance, and immobility due to detention or vintage of migration (Yi-Neumann et al.). It is possible that certain objects, although facilitating resilience, might also trigger mixed feelings in the individuals who relied on them during the lockdown (Svašek). From domestic accoutrements to digital objects, what kinds of things supported wellbeing in situations of confinement? Multisystemic Resilience in Lockdown It is especially useful to consider the material dimensions of resilience when working with people who have experienced trauma, marginalisation, or mental health challenges during the pandemic, as working with objects enables interaction beyond language barriers and enables alternatives to the re-telling of experiences. Resilience has been theorised as a social process supported (or inhibited) by a range of “everyday” intersecting external and contextual factors at individual, family, social, institutional, and economic resource levels (Ungar; Sherrieb et al.; Southwick et al.). The socio-ecological approach to resilience demonstrates that aspects of individual, family, and community resilience can be learned and reinforced (Bonanno), but they can also be eroded or weakened, depending on the dynamic interplay of various forces and influences in the social ecology of an individual or a group. This means that while factors at the level of the individual, family, community, or institutions may strengthen resistance to harms or the ability to overcome adversity in one context, the same factors can promote vulnerability and erode coping abilities in others (Rutter). Our project asked to what extent this social-ecological understanding of resilience might be further enhanced by attending to nonhuman materialities that can contribute or erode resilience within human relations. We were particularly interested in understanding the potential of the exhibition for creating an inclusive and welcoming space for individuals who had experienced long COVID lockdowns to safely reflect on the material conditions that supported their resilience. The aim of this exercise was not to provide answers to a problem, but to draw attention to complexity, and generate additional questions and uncertainties, as encouraged by Barone and Eisner. The exhibition, through its juxtaposition of (lockdown-induced) loneliness with the conviviality of the public exhibition format, enabled an exploration of the tension between the neoliberal imperative to physically isolate oneself and the public messaging concerning the welfare of the general populace. Our project emerged from insights collected on the issue of mental health during “Living Lab” Roundtables undertaken in 2020 by our Centre For Resilient and Inclusive Societies, convened as part of the Foundation Project (Lam et al.). In particular, we deployed an object-based analysis to investigate the art- and object-based methodology in the aftermath of a potentially traumatising lockdown, particularly for individuals who may not respond as well to traditional research methods. This approach contributes to the emerging body of work exploring the affordances of visual and material methods for capturing feelings and responses generated between people and objects during the pandemic (Watson et al.). “Objects for Everyday Resilience” sought to facilitate greater openness to objects’ vitality (Bennett) in order to produce new encounters that further understandings of multisystemic resilience. Such insights are critically tied to human mental health and physical wellbeing. They also enabled us to develop shared resources (as described below) that support such resilience during the period of recovery from the pandemic and beyond. Arts and Objects as Research The COVID-19 pandemic provoked not only a global health response, but also a reorientation of the ways COVID-related research is conducted and disseminated. Javakhishvili et al. describe the necessity of “a complex, trauma-informed psycho-socio-political response” in the aftermath of “cultural/societal trauma” occurring at a society-wide scale, pointing out the prevalence of mental health issues following previous epidemics (1). As they note, an awareness of such trauma is necessary “to avoid re-traumatization and to facilitate recovery”, with “safety, trustworthiness, transparency, collaboration and peer support, empowerment, choice” among the key principles of trauma-informed policies, strategies, and practices (3). Our project received funding from the Centre for Resilient and Inclusive Societies (CRIS) in July 2021, and ethics approval in November 2021. Centring materiality, in November 2021 we circulated a “call for objects” through CRIS’ and the research team’s social media channels, and collected over 40 objects from participants of all ages for this pilot study. Our participants comprised 33 women and 10 men. Following is a breakdown of the self-described cultural background of some participants: Five Australian (including one ‘6th generation Australian’); four Vietnamese; two Caucasian; one Anglo-Australian; one Asian; one Brazilian; one British; one Caucasian/English Australian; one Filipino; one Filipino-Australian; one German/Portuguese/US; one Greek Australian; one Iranian; one Irish and Welsh; one Israeli; one Half German, Half Middle Eastern; one Middle Eastern; one Singaporean; one White British. Participants’ objects and stories were analysed by the team both in terms of their ‘people, place, and things’ affordances – enhancing participants’ reflections of life in the pandemic – and through the prism of their vibrancy, drawing on object-oriented ontology and materiality as method (Ravn). Our participants were encouraged to consider how their chosen object(s) supported their resilience during the pandemic. For example, some objects enabled linking with memories that assist in elaborating experiences of loss or grief (Trimingham Jack and Devereux). To guide those submitting objects, we asked about: 1) their relationship to the object, 2) the meaning of the object, and 3) which features of resilience are mobilised by the object. From an analysis of our data, we have developed a working typology of objects to understand their particular relationship role to features of resilience (social capital, temporality) and to thematise our data in relation to emerging priorities in research in multisystemic resilience, materiality, and mental health. Things on Display Whilst we were initially unable to gather in person, we built an online Instagram gallery (@objectsforeverydayresilience) of submitted objects, with accompanying stories from research participants. Relevant hashtags in several languages were added to each post by the research team to ensure their widest possible visibility. This gallery features objects such as a female participant’s jigsaw puzzle which “helped me to pass the downtime in an enjoyable way”. Unlike much of her life in lockdown that was consumed by chores that “did not necessarily make me feel content or happy”, jigsaw puzzles made this participant “happy for that time I was doing them, transport[ing] me out of the confines of the lockdown with landscapes and images from across the globe”. Another female participant submitted a picture of her worn sneakers, which she used to go on what she called her “sanity walks”. To counteract the overwhelm of “being in the house all the time with 3 (autistic) children who were doing home learning and needed a lot of support”, while attempting to work on her PhD, going for walks every day helped clear my mind, get some fresh air, keep active and have some much needed quiet / me time. I ordered these shoes online because we couldn’t go to the shops and wore them almost daily during the extended lockdowns. Books were also popular. During lockdowns, according to a female participant, reading helped me connect with the outside world and be able to entertain myself without unhealthy coping mechanisms such as scrolling endlessly through TikTok. It also helped me feel less alone during the pandemic. Another female participant found that her son’s reading gave her time to work. Olfactory objects provided comfort for a participant who mourned the loss of smell due to mask wearing: perfumes were my sensory transport during this time – they could evoke memories of places I’d travelled to, seasons, people, feelings and even colours. I could go to far-off places in my mind through scent even though my body was largely stationary within my home. (Female participant) Through scent objects, this participant was “able to bring the world to meet me when I was unable to go out to meet the world”. Other participants sought to retreat from the world through homely objects: throughout lockdown I felt that my bed became an important object to my sanity. When I felt overwhelmed, I would come to bed and take a nap which helped me feel less out of control with everything going on in the world. (Female participant) For an essential worker who injured her leg whilst working in a hospital, an Ikea couch enabled recovery: “the couch saved my throbbing leg for many months. It served as a place to eat, paint and rest.” (Female participant) While pets were not included as objects within this project, several participants submitted their pets’ accoutrements. A female participant who submitted a photograph of her cat’s collar and tree movingly recounts how while I was working online in lockdown, this cat tree kept my cat entertained. She was so enthusiastic while scratching (covered in her fur) she somehow managed to remove her collar. I call Bouny my Emotional support cat … . She really stepped up her treatments of me during the pandemic. My mother had advanced dementia and multiple lockdowns [which] meant I could not see her in the weeks leading up to her death. These objects highlight the ways in which this participant found comfort during lockdown at a time of deep grief. For other participants, blankets and shawls provided sources of comfort “since much of lockdown was either in cool weather or deepest winter”. I found myself taking [my shawl] whenever I went out for any of the permitted activities and I also went to bed with it at night. The soft texture and the warmth against my face, neck and shoulders relaxed my body and I felt comforted and safe. (Female participant) Another used a calming blanket during lockdown “for time-outs on my bed (I was confined to a tiny flat at the time and separated from my family). It gave me a safe space”. (Female participant) In a similar vein, journalling provided several participants with “a safe space to explore thoughts and make them more tangible, acting as a consistent mindful practice I could always turn to”. The journal provided consistency throughout the ever-changing lockdown conditions and a strong sense of stability. Recording thoughts daily allowed me to not only process adversity, but draw attention to the areas in my life which I was grateful for … even from home. (Female participant) In addition to fostering mindfulness, the creative practice of journalling enabled this participant to exercise her imagination: writing from the perspectives of other people, from friends to strangers, also allowed me to reflect on the different experiences others had during lockdown. I found this fostered empathy and motivated me to reach out and check in on others, which in turn also benefited my own mental health. (Female participant) Creative practices were critical to sustaining many participants of this study. The Norman family, for example, submitted an acrylic on canvas artwork, Surviving COVID in Port Melbourne (2021), as their object of resilience: this work represents the sentiments and experiences of our family after a year of successive COVID lockdowns. Each section of the canvas has been completed a member of our family – 2 parents and a 21, 18 and 14 year-old. (Norman family) Likewise, musical instruments and sound objects – whether through analogue or digital means – helped participants to stay sane in long lockdowns: wen I didn’t know what to do with myself I always turned to the guitar. (Male participant) Music was so important to us throughout the lockdowns. It helped us express and diffuse big feelings. We played happy songs to amplify nice moments, funny songs to cheer each other up, angry songs to dance out rage. (Family participants) Curating the Lockdown Lounge To enhance the capacity of our project’s connections to the wider community, and respond to the need we felt to gather in person to reflect on what it meant for each of us to endure long lockdowns, we held an in-person exhibition after COVID-19 restrictions had eased in Melbourne in November 2022. The decision to curate the “Lockdown Lounge” art and research exhibition featuring objects submitted by research participants was consistent with a trauma-informed approach to research as described above. According to Crowther, art exhibits have the potential to redirect viewers’ attention from “aesthetic critique” to emotional connection. They can facilitate what Moon describes as “relational aesthetics”, whereby viewers may connect with the art and artists, and enhance their awareness of the self, artist, and the world. As a form of “guided relational viewing” (Potash), art exhibits are non-coercive in that they invite responses, discussion, and emotional involvement while placing no expectation on viewers to engage with or respond to the exhibition in a particular way. When considering such questions, our immersive in-person exhibition featured a range of object-based installations including audio-visual and sound objects, available for viewing in our Zine, The Lockdown Lounge (Walimunige et al.). The living room design was inspired by French-Algerian artist Zineb Sedira’s immersive living room installation, “Dreams Don’t Have Titles”, at the 59th Venice Art Biennale’s French pavilion (Sedira), attended by project co-lead Vivian Gerrand in June 2022. The project team curated the gallery space together, which was located at Deakin University’s city conference venue, “Deakin Downtown”, in Melbourne, Australia. Fig. 1: The Lockdown Lounge, living room. “What Got You through Lockdown?” research exhibition and experience, Deakin Downtown, Melbourne, 21-25 November 2022. In the centre of the Lockdown Lounge’s living room (see fig. 1), for example, a television screen played a looped collection of popular YouTube videos, many of which had gone viral in the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic. There was Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews, admonishing Victorians to avoid non-essential activities through the example of an illicit dinner party held that resulted in a spike in coronavirus cases in March 2020 (ABC News). This short video excerpt of the Premier’s press conference concluded with his advice not to “get on the beers”. While not on display in this instance, many visitors would have been familiar with the TikTok video remix made later in the pandemic that featured the same press conference, with Premier Andrews’s words spliced to encourage listeners to “get on the beers!” (Kutcher). We recalled the ways in which such videos provided light relief through humour at a time of grave illness and trauma: when army trucks were being summoned to carry the deceased from Northern Italian hospitals to makeshift gravesites, those of us privileged to be at home, at a remove from the ravages of the virus, shared videos of Italian mayors shouting at their constituents to “vai a casa!” (Go home!). Or of Italians walking fake dogs to have an excuse to go outside. We finished the loop with a reproduction of the viral Kitten Zoom Filter Mishap, in which in online American courtroom defendant Rod Ponton mistakenly dons a cat filter while telling the judge, ‘I am not a cat’. The extraordinary nature of living in lockdown initially appeared as an opportunity to slow down, and this pandemic induced immobility appeared to prompt a kind of “degrowth” as industries the world over paused operation and pollution levels plummeted (Gerrand). In reflection of this, we included videos in our YouTube playlist of wild animals returning to big cities, and of the waters of Venice appearing to be clear. These videos recalled how the pandemic has necessitated greater appreciation of the power of things. The spread of the novel coronavirus’s invisible variants has permanently altered the conditions and perceptions of human life on the planet, forcing us to dwell on the vitality intrinsic to materiality, and renewing awareness of human lives as taking place within a broader ecology of life forms (Bennett). Within this posthuman perspective, distinctions between life and matter are blurred, and humans are displaced from a hierarchical ontological centre. In an essay titled “The Go Slow Party”, anthropologist Michael Taussig theorises a “mastery of non-mastery” that yields to the life of the object. This yielding – a necessary response to the conditions of the pandemic – can enable greater attentiveness to the interconnectedness and enmeshment of all things, leading to broader understandings of self and of resilience. To understand how participants responded to the exhibition, we asked them to respond to the following questions in the form of open-ended comments: What if anything affected you most? Did any of the objects resonate with you? Did the exhibition provide a safe environment for you to reflect on your sense of resilience during the pandemic? Fig. 2: Research exhibition participant standing beside artwork by the Norman family: Surviving COVID in Port Melbourne, acrylic on canvas (2021), The Lockdown Lounge. Through curating the art exhibition, we engaged in what Wang et al. describe as “art as research”, whereby the artist-researcher aims to “gain a deeper understanding of what art, art creation, or an artistic installation can do or activate … either in terms of personal experiences or environmental circumstances” (15). As Wang et al. write, “the act of creating is simultaneously the act of researching”, neither of which can be distinguished from one another (15). Accordingly, the process of curating the gallery space triggered memories of living in lockdown for members of our team, including one male youth researcher who remembers: as the space gradually began to be populated with object submissions … the objects began to find their place … . We slowly developed an understanding of the specific configurations of objects and the feelings that these combinations potentially could invoke. As we negotiated where my object might be placed, I felt an odd sense of melancholy seeing my record player and guitar at the exhibition, reminiscing about the music that I used to play and listen to with my family when we were all in lockdown … . As my Bon Iver record spun, and the familiar melodies rung out into the space, I felt as if I was sharing an intimate memory with others … . It also reminded me of the times when I had felt the most uplifted, when I was with family, near and far, knowing that we all were a unit. Another of our youth researcher team members served as an assistant curator and agreed to monitor the gallery space by being there for most of the five days of the exhibition’s opening to the public. She describes her work in the gallery thus: my role involved general exhibition upkeep – setup, answering visitor inquiries and monitoring the space – which meant being in the exhibition space for around 7.5 hours a day. Although it cannot be fully compared to living through Melbourne’s lockdowns, being in a space meant to mimic that time meant that comparisons naturally arose. I can see similarities between the things that supported my resilience during the lockdowns and the things that made my time at the gallery enjoyable. Through engaging with the gallery, this researcher was reminded of how spending time engaging in hands-on tasks made physical distancing more manageable. Spending time in the exhibition space also facilitated her experience of the lockdowns and the material conditions supporting resilience. She reflects that the hands-on, creative tasks of setting up the exhibition space and helping design a brochure reminded me of how I turned to baking so I could create something using my hands … . In the beginning, I approached my time at the gallery as a requirement of my work in this project … . Looking back now, I believe I understand both the person I was those years ago, and resilience itself, a little bit better. Fig. 3: Research exhibition participant wearing an Oculus virtual reality headset, watching the film Melbourne Locked Down (van Leeuwen), The Lockdown Lounge, November 2022. As these examples demonstrate, complex assemblages of people, places, and things during the COVID-19 pandemic were, and are, “suffused with multisensory and affective feelings”; exploring the ways affect is distributed through socio-spatialities of human experience enables researchers to better unpack individuals’ COVID experiences in ways that include their surroundings (Lupton). This was further evident in the feedback received from participants who attended the exhibition. Exhibition Feedback Feedback from participants suggested that the public exhibition format enabled them to explore this tension between isolation and orientation to the greater good in a safe and inclusive way (e.g. fig. 2). For Harry (29/m/Argentinian/New Zealand), interacting with the exhibition “reminded me that I wasn’t the only one that went through it”, while Sam (40/m/Chinese Australian) resonated with “many … people’s testimonials” of how objects helped support their resilience during long periods of confinement. Sam further added that participating in the exhibition was a “pleasant, friendly experience”, and that “everyone found something to do”, speaking to the convivial and inclusive nature of the exhibition. This resonates with Chaplin’s observation that “the production and reception of visual art works are social processes” that cannot be understood with reference to aesthetic factors alone (161-2). In the quotes above, it is evident that participants’ experience of the exhibition was inherently entwined with the sociality of the exhibition, evoking a sense of connection to others who had experienced the pandemic (in Harry’s case), and other exhibition attendees, whom he observed “all found something to do”. Additionally, participants’ responses highlighted the crucial role of the “artist researcher”, whom Wang et al. describe as qualitative researchers who use “artistically inspired methods or approaches” to blend research and art to connect with participants (10). In particular, the curation of the exhibition was something participants highlighted as key to facilitating their recollections of the pandemic in ways that were relatable. Nala (19/f/East-African Australian) commented that “the room’s layout allowed for this the most”: “the room was curated so well, it encaptured [sic] all the various stages of COVID lockdown – it made me feel like I was 16 again”. Returning to Wang et al.’s description of “art as research” as a means through which artist researchers can “gain a deeper understanding of what art, art creation, or an artistic installation can do or activate” (15), participant responses suggest that the curation of Lockdown Lounge as a trauma-informed art exhibition allowed participants to re-experience the pandemic lockdowns in ways that did not re-traumatise, but enabled the past and present to coexist safely and meaningfully for participants. Conclusion: Object-Oriented Wellbeing From different sections of the community, “Objects for Everyday Resilience” collected things that tell stories about how people coped in long lockdowns. Displaying the objects and practices that sustained us through the peak of the COVID-19 health crisis helped our participants to safely reflect on their experiences of living through long lockdowns. The variety of objects submitted and displayed draws our attention to the complex nuances of resilience and its material and immaterial intersections. These contributions composed, as fig. 1 illustrates, an almost accidentally curated diorama of a typical lockdown scene, imitating not only the materiality of living room itself but something also, through the very process of contribution, of the strange collectivity that the city of Melbourne experienced during lockdown periods. Precisely partitioned within domestic zones (with important differences for many “essential workers”, residents of public housing high-rises, and other exceptions), lockdowns enforced a different and necessarily unifying rhythm: attention to daily briefings on COVID numbers, affective responses to the heaves and sighs of infection rates, mourning over a new and untameable cause of loss of life, and routine check-ins on newly isolated friends and family. In hindsight, as the city has regained – perhaps redoubled, a sign of impatience with earlier governmental languages of austerity and moderation? – its economic and hedonistic pulse, there are also signs that any lockdown collectivity – which we also acknowledge was always partial and differentiated – has dispersed into the fragmentation of social interests and differences typical of late capitalism. The fascination with “public” objects – the Northface jacket of the state premier, COVID masks and testing kits, even toilet paper rolls, serving metonymically for a shared panic over scarcity – has receded. To the point, less than two years on, of this media attention being a scarcely remembered dream. The Lockdown Lounge is an example of a regathering of experiences through a process that, through its methods, also serves as a reminder of a common sociality integral to resilience. 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