Journal articles on the topic 'Flowers for Algernon'

This study was aimed at analyzing the Indonesian translation of spelling, punctuation, and grammatical errors made by autistic character in Flower for Algernon novel. It also analyzes translation techniques, methods, ideology, qualities of the translation. The method applied was descriptive-qualitative with the data in the form of translated words and phrases indicating spelling, punctuation and grammatical errors made by the autistic character. The primary data sources were Flower for Algernon novel along with its translation version in Indonesian. Meanwhile, the secondary data sources were informants who gave information on the accuracy, acceptability, and readability of translation. The process of collecting data used documentation, questionnaire distribution, and focus group discussion (FGD) technique whereas the sampling technique applied is purposive sampling. The findings of this research show that there are 309 data of words containing spelling, punctuation and grammatical errors. Four translation techniques are used by translator namely graphology normalizations, established equivalent, compensation, and deletion. The translation method used tends to be established equivalent with domestication ideology. The translation of words with errors by graphology normalization techniques produced accurate translations with decreases in acceptability. This is because the translator removes the autism markers from the source language to the target language.

This study aims to assess the translation quality in terms of accuracy, acceptability, and readability of words that contain spelling, punctuation and grammatical errors that represent the condition of Autism character in Flowers for Algernon novel by Daniel Keyes using an instrument from Nababan, Nuraeni, and Sumardiono (2012). This research uses qualitative descriptive method. Data collection is done through document analysis, questionnaire, and FGD. From 309 data found in the study, 303 data (98.05%) were accurately translated and 6 data (1.94%) were translated inaccurately. In terms of acceptability, 177 data (57.28%) were acceptable, 126 data (40.77%) were less acceptable and 6 data (1.94%) were unacceptable. While for readability aspect, 285 data (92,23%) were stated to have high readability, 18 data (5.82%) had medium readability and 6 data (1.94%) had low readability. The average score is 2.81. This score indicates the translation has a good quality of accuracy, acceptability, and readability.Keywords: Translation Quality, Spelling Error, Punctuation Error, Grammatical Error

This study was undertaken to evaluate the antioxidant and anti-hemolytic properties of Algerian Drimia maritima Baker flower extracts. Determination of phenolic content was carried out to estimate the chemical composition of D. maritima extracts. Antioxidant properties were investigated in all extracts using free radical scavenging activity (against DPPH, ABTS, hydroxyl radical, and superoxide anion), reducing power, inhibition of lipid peroxidation, and anti-hemolytic capacity. Phenolic determination revealed that D. maritima flowers contain phenolic compounds, flavonoids, and tannins. Ethyl acetate extract showed the highest reducing power and scavenging activity using DPPH and ABTS assays. However, aqueous extract was the most effective against hydroxyl radical, superoxide anion, and lipid peroxidation. The half-time of hemolysis indicates that chloroform extract exhibited the best anti-hemolytic capacity in the AAPH induced hemolysis model. The results of this study suggest that D. maritima could be used as a possible source of antioxidant phenolic compounds and that further determination of these compounds may provide more information on their medicinal value. Keywords: Drimia maritima, phenolic compounds, scavenging activity, reducing power, anti-hemolytic.

Six flavonoids, namely 6-methoxykaempferol (1), 6-methoxykaempferol 7- O-glucoside (2), kaempferol 7- O-glucoside (3), 6-methoxyluteolin (4), patuletin 7- O-glucoside (5), and hispidulin 7- O-glucoside (6), were isolated from a n-butanolic fraction of Centaurea microcarpa Coss et Dur. flowers. This work describes for the first time the phytochemical composition of this endemic Algerian plant.

This study is aimed at the extraction and chemical analysis of the essential oils of the leaves and flowers of Lavandula stoechas L growing in northeastern Algeria. The hydrodistilled oils isolated from leaves (0.75%) and flowers (0.6%) were characterized by fifty-two and sixtyfour compounds, respectively. Gas chromatography–mass spectrometry (GC-MS) analysis demonstrated that both organs revealed the presence of fenchone and camphor as the major compounds. However, the highest percentage of fenchone (52.7%) was observed in the flowers oil; whereas, the percentage of camphor (25.94%) was significantly higher in the leaves oil in comparison with its content in flowers oil (15.52%). Other predominant compounds in leaves and flowers oils were, respectively, as follows: 1.8-cineole (4.84% and 4.02%), camphene (4.55% and 3.23%), bornyl acetate (3.06% and 4.43%), α-terpinolene (1.09% and 1.45%), viridiflorol (1.51% and 1.39%), and α- pinene (0.5% and 1.5%). The quantitative and qualitative data proved that the chemical profile of both organs of Lavandula stoechas native to Algeria was approximately close. The oil chemical composition is susceptible to the influence of environmental factors (soil, climate). The biological activity (antimicrobial and antioxidant) of the two oils from Lavandula stoechas L., native to this Algerian region is under study.

Marrubium vulgare (Lamiaceae) is frequently used in traditional medicine to treat many illnesses from ancient times. Its beneficial effects include antibacterial, antioedematogenic, and analgesic activities. This study was designed to evaluate the antioxidant and anti-inflammatory activities of organic and aqueous extracts of the leaves, the flowers, the stems, and the roots of Marrubium vulgare. The total phenolic and flavonoid contents as well as the antioxidant and the anti-inflammatory effects of methanol, chloroform, ethyl acetate, and aqueous extracts have been investigated by using different in-vitro methods. It was found that the ethyl acetate extract from Marrubium vulgare stems had the highest total phenolic content, while the ethyl acetate extract from the leaves yielded a high concentration of flavonoids. The ethyl acetate extract from the stems exhibited the highest activity in scavenging of 2,2-diphenyl- 1-picrylhydrazyl (DPPH), as well as in protecting erythrocytes. The leaves aqueous extract exhibited the highest ferrous chelating activity and its methanolic extract was found to be the strongest inhibitor of lipid peroxidation in β-carotene bleaching assay. The leaves chloroform extracts as well as the flowers methanol, chloroform, and ethyl acetate extracts were found to decrease the pro-inflammatory tumor necrosis factor alpha (TNF-α) cytokine levels in a dose-dependent manner. On the other hand, the flowers methanolic extract and the leaves methanol, ethyl acetate, and aqueous extracts decreased the interleukin-1 beta (IL- 1β) release. It was also found that the methanol extract from the flowers and the chloroform extract from the stems of Marrubium vulgare inhibited interleukin-8 (IL-8) release. This study provides a scientific basis for the traditional use of Marrubium vulgare as an anti-inflammatory agent and for the plant to be considered as an important resource of natural antioxidants.

Solanum Nigrum plant contains many compounds of High utility, such as: alkaloids, saponin, and others. Through this study in the field of plant chemistry that we can know all the components of the various parts (leaves, twigs, flowers, fruits and roots) of the plant Solanum Nigrum, and enhance the classification of the operations during the disclosure of the components of the plant and contents of secondary metabolism and some of which adopted the newly particularly alkaloids and terpenes as genetic indicators.

Background: Polygonum maritimum is one of the spontaneous halophyte plants of the Algerian coast. Many studies were carried out to evaluate the contents and the quality of phenolic compounds of this plant around the Mediterranean region. Objective: This paper intends to identify, for the first time, the phenolic compounds from the flower part of P. maritimum. Methods: RP-HPLC-PDA (Reversed Phase-High Performance Liquid Chromatography-Photo Diode Array) material was used for this purpose. Many standards were used and their retention times were stored in a local database. Identification was made on the basis of retention times of retained compounds and those found in the literature, and UV spectra of each peak. Results: This study intends to identify five phenolic acids (gallic, ferulic, sinapic, caffeic and syringic acids), one flavonol (rutin) and one flavanone (naringenin). Conclusion: P. maritimum is an important source of natural bioactive compounds that can be exploited for the benefit of many fields.

Phenolic derivatives such as quinones, acid-phenols and flavonoids were successfully isolated from a n-butanolic fraction of Senecio giganteus Desf. (Asteraceae) flowers, namely jacaranone (1), 3a-hydroxy-3,3a,7,7a-tetrahydrobenzofuran-2,6-dione (2), chlorogenic acid (3), hyperoside (4), quercetin 3-O-β-D-robinobioside (5), isorhamnetin-3-O-β-D-glucuronide (6), quercetin-3-O-β-D-glucuronide (7), and isorhamnetin-3-O-β-D-glucuronide-6″-methyl ester (8). These compounds were purified through either classical polyamide filtration followed by fractionation on Si gel, or through fast centrifugal partition chromatography (FCPC). Using FCPC, the major compounds could be readily isolated from the crude n-butanolic fraction. Compounds 1-8 were identified by means of spectroscopic and spectrometric analysis (UV, 1H, 13C and 2D NMR, and MS). This work described for the first time the phytochemical composition of this endemic Algerian plant.

Language can be made to revolt against its own instrumentality. That is the promise Algernon Charles Swinburne pursues in his unfinished novel Lesbia Brandon, composed in 1859–67 but not published until 1952. Early on in this work, we encounter a passage that perfectly showcases his peculiar and innovative prose style. It is a style that boldly invents its own mechanism of self-perpetuation, and, as it ramifies throughout the novel, turns the text into something other than a conventional narrative – a singular grammar of sensuous perception. The novel's young protagonist, Herbert Seyton, has rounded a corner of a coastal road and comes face to face with the sea. Lesbia Brandon is full of descriptions of the natural environment like this one. It is one of many moments in the novel in which characters encounter, experience, and merge with the seascape. These instances concatenate Swinburne's formal project throughout Lesbia Brandon, a project of translating forces that create patterns in the perceived world into models for prose. The resulting stylistic transformation extends not only to the figurative aspects of Swinburne's language but also to its grammatical and syntactic underpinnings, as peripheral, “accessory” elements become core shaping forces in the prose. This process is at work as Herbert rejoices in the sea-coast and all its enchantments: The long reefs that rang with returning waves and flashed with ebbing ripples; the smooth slopes of coloured rock full of small brilliant lakes that fed and saved from sunburning their anchored fleets of flowers, yellower lilies and redder roses of the sea; the sharp and fine sea-mosses, fruitful of grey blossom, fervent with blue and golden bloom, with soft spear-heads and blades brighter than fire; the lovely heavy motion of the stronger rock-rooted weeds, with all their weight afloat in languid water, splendid and supine; the broad bands of metallic light girdling the greyer flats and swaying levels of sea without a wave; all the enormous graces and immeasurable beauties that go with its sacred strength; the sharp delicate air about it, like breath from the nostrils and lips of its especial and gracious god; the hard sand inlaid with dry and luminous brine; the shuddering shades of sudden colour woven by the light with the water for some remote golden mile or two reaching from dusk to dusk under the sun; shot through with faint and fierce lustres that shiver and shift; and over all a fresher and sweeter heaven than is seen inland by any weather; drew his heart back day after day and satisfied it. (196-97; ch. 2) This description consists of just one sentence, containing 209 words and eleven semicolon-separated fragments. With its great length and accumulation of clauses alone, this passage announces that Swinburne's narrative practice will warp the dimensions of prose, stretching its habitual units, the sentence and the paragraph, beyond their usual span. This sentence is remarkable for its almost complete absence of verbs. Almost every one of its verbs (“rang,” “flashed,” “fed,” “saved,” “go,” “shiver,” “shift”) appears in a subordinate, defining clause that elaborates on the seascape's features. These verbs, for example, add specificity to the “long reefs” “that rang with returning waves and flashed with ebbing ripples,” point to the small lakes “that fed and saved from sunburning,” define the immeasurable beauties “that go with [the sea's] sacred strength,” and name the lusters “that shiver and shift.” At the sentence's conclusion, two predicates finally reveal its raison d’être in terms of plot: the wonders of the sea “drew his heart back day after day and satisfied it.” These are the events that motivate the description of the sea, but for most of the sentence's unfolding they are eclipsed, bowled over by the shimmering grammatical elaboration. Swinburne insistently adds adjectives to his nouns, singly and in multiples: “long reefs,” “returning waves,” “sharp slopes,” “small brilliant lakes,” “blue and golden bloom,” “sharp delicate air,” “dry and luminous brine,” “faint and fierce lustres.” Sometimes the adjectives are comparatives (“yellower lilies and redder roses”), and at others Swinburne piles adjectives all around a noun, surrounding it in a halo of modifiers, as in “the sharp and fine sea-mosses, fruitful,” “the hard sand inlaid,” and “sudden colour woven.” The adjectival imperative is so strong that it infiltrates and dilutes the verbs’ efficacy to signal action. In addition to the defining verbs (“that rang,” “that fed,” “that go,” “that shiver and shift”), two more verbs appear near the end of the passage in the form of the participles “girdling” and “reaching.” These do not name events but rather describe an enduring arrangement of “broad bands of metallic light” and a recurrent effect of water and light “reaching from dusk to dusk.” They, too, contribute to the adjectival mode that dominates this prose.

<p><strong>Background: </strong>In the present study, we have investigated the morphological variation in a set of five <em>Opuntia</em> species from the Algerian steppes using 49 UPOV descriptors.</p><p><strong>Questions: </strong>which of the 49 descriptors that can be used as powerful estimators of the phenotypic diversity within <em>Opuntia</em> species? How is the morphological diversity patterned in Algerian <em>Opuntia</em>?</p><p><strong>Species study/ Mathematical model: </strong><em>Opuntia ficus-indica, Opuntia amycleae, Opuntia streptacantha, Opuntia engelmannii, Opuntia robusta</em><strong>.</strong> Principal Components Analysis (PCA) and Hierarchical Cluster Analysis were used.</p><p><strong>Study site: </strong>Four counties were studied located in the Algerian steppes. The present research was carried out during 2014.</p><p><strong>Methods:</strong> 49 descriptors adopted by the International Union for the Protection of New Varieties of Plants (UPOV) were employed in the present research, where cladode, flower and fruit traits were used to determine the overall degree of polymorphism among 5 <em>Opuntia</em> species.</p><p><strong>Results:</strong> Principal Component Analysis and Hierarchical Cluster Analysis indicated a consistent differentiation between all studied species. The relative magnitude of the first two PCA eigenvectors showed that 8 descriptors out of 49 were identified as the most important descriptors for the classification of the species. The dendrogram performed on the calculated Euclidean distances between all species pairs allowed the identification of 3 groups, unlike the PCA that identified 4 groups. The species <em>Opuntia ficus-indica </em>and <em>Opuntia amycleae</em> were identified as very close morphologically.</p><p><strong>Conclusions: </strong>The present outcome represents a paramount step towards the fast selection of interesting species and for their best management and conservation.</p>

In this paper, we investigated the lactic acid bacteria’s community of the Algerian goat’s Jben in order to define and preserve it. This cheese variety is only handmade with raw milk, and a dried flower of Cynara cardunculus is used instead of the animal rennet, it is also restricted in sub-Saharan prov-inces in Algeria, and no previous studies on its lactic acid bacteria composi-tion have been performed before. Matrix-assisted laser desorption ionization time of flight mass spectrometry (MALDI-TOF MS) procedure was used to identify 36 lactic acid bacteria isolated from artisanal Jben made from Arabia goat’s raw milk in Naâma (Algeria). The results showed the domination of the Enterococcus genus presents with four species: E. durans, E. faecalis, E. hirae and E. faecium. Lactococcus lactis and Leuconostoc mesenteroïdes were also detected. The species identified were favoured by the composition of goat’s raw milk microflora used and the artisanal manufacturing process of the cheese. The use of MALDI-TOF MS method provided us with a rapid diagnosis of the Jben lactic acid bacteria’s community. This method based on microbial abundant proteins fingerprint diagnosis was chosen for its fast, precise, low cost and less complicated analyse.

A detailed study was performed on the antioxidant activity of the alcoholic extract of different plant parts of Cleome Arabica ssp. arabica (CAA) in relation with their total phenolic, flavonoid and proanthocyanidins contents in order to find possible sources for future novel antioxidants in food and pharmaceutical formulations. The total yield, total phenolic (TP), total flavonoids (TF) and total proanthocyanidins (TPA) contents of all the fractions were also determined. Cleome Arabica ssp. arabica was also subjected to preliminary phytochemical screening test for various constituents. The total phenolic contents (TPC) of three parts (Leaves, seeds and roots) was 78,56 ± 0,01 mg GAEq/g extract, while total flavonoid contents (TFC) of the same parts was 19,57 ± 0,01 mg REq/g extract, and total proanthocyanidins (TPA) was 17,41 ± 0,01 mg CYEq/ g of extract. Leaves extract was found significantly higher as compared to other parts extracts. Phytochemical screening of leaves, seeds and roots extracts revealed the presence of alkaloids, coumarins, flavonoids, saponins, tannins and terpenoids. The antioxidant capacity of extracts was determined by three methods DPPH, FRAP, and phosphomolybdenum. The obtained results showed that leaves extract has the highest antioxidant capacity with low value of IC50 for DPPH and FRAP and the highest quantity of antioxydants compounds in phosphomolybdenum assay, followed by seeds extract and finally roots extract.

Varietal recognition is a key step for good management of genetic diversity. Indeed, the morphological description of certain organs, such as the leaves, flowers, fruits and seeds, allow a more or less rapid and reliable identification of the varieties or cultivars. The culture of the pomegranate tree is very known in the valley of Oued Righ in the Algerian Southern, and it constitutes the main fruit species with a number of trees of 27.77 % of total number. The pomegranate tree is found in more than 84% of the farms of the region and its production is complementary of that of the dates. Unfortunately, no study has been realized on the characterization and the valorization of this species. To know and identify the varieties or the existing cultivars, we have undertaken a work of characterization of clones cultivated in the valley of Oued Righ. The plant material constituted by 13 clones of pomegranate tree stemming from various farms. The method of work consists in taking 20 fruits by tree for physico-chemical analyses in the laboratory. The results of analyses on sample of 13 clones described five cultivars, among which some present acceptable characters of fruit from a caliber point of view, contents in sugars and acidity. It shows that the naming of cultivars by the farmers based only on the acid taste of fruits "Hamad" or sweetened "Hlou" is not scientific and remain insufficient. Our results confirm the usefulness of morphological descriptors in the characterization of plant genetic resources. However, more clarification can be achieved by the undeniable contribution of molecular markers.

<p>Key words: mental disability, Daniel Keyes, Flowers for Algernon, pity, narrative theory</p><p>Of American novels that engage with the topic of mental disability, few are more popular than Daniel Keyes' <em>Flowers for Algernon</em>. Such popularity seems based on a simplistic reading of the novel where the mentally disabled are objects of good-natured compassion. A more thorough reading of how Charlie Gordon is presented, however, leads to the conclusion that mental disability is the embodiment of death in the novel. Readers are first taught to pity the pre-operative Charlie, but once they come to respond to the ethical voice of the post-operative Charlie, his regression to his original state becomes the rhetorical villain in the novel. At first an object of pity, the mentally disabled Charlie Gordon eventually becomes the metaphorical horror of oblivion that no character has the power to overcome.</p>

Using aspects of Arthur Frank’s The wounded storyteller: Body, illness, and ethics as its basis, this article explores promise, threat and the trauma of failure in Daniel Keyes’s Flowers for Algernon, and in so doing, offers two alternative metaphors for the curative journey. The first is the plateau or medical model which begins in health, declines into illness and subsequently seeks to restore health to the ill individual. The second, parabolic metaphor begins in illness, rises out of that state but, eventually, regresses into ill-health again. This metaphor is akin to the inverted U-curve. As the novel’s protagonist, Charlie Gordon is the first human to undergo experimental surgery to ameliorate his mental retardation by raising his intelligence to a level approximating normality at least. The experiment has been carried out successfully on laboratory mice, including one named Algernon. Charlie’s progress through the experiment and its consequences is charted through a series of progress reports he writes. The language of the reports themselves epitomises his progress whilst providing an account of what transpires in Algernon’s case. Promise, threat and the trauma of failure, characterised by the ascent, apogee and descent of the parabolic metaphor, provide a tripartite structure for the article.

This article explores ontological security and insecurity in Daniel Keyes’s novel, Flowers for Algernon. It opens with a very brief overview of the 1960s counter-culture to contextualise not only Keyes’s novel but also Laing’s theories of ontological (in)security. After a discussion of Laing’s concept of ontological security and insecurity, the focus shifts to Arthur W. Frank’s notions of the wounded storyteller and how Charlie Gordon’s entry into the medical world constitutes a colonisation of the body that brings with it a deepening sense of ontological insecurity. In entering the world of medical research, Charlie becomes the wounded storyteller, offering a first-person account of his experiences during the experiment and its aftermath. As the initial success of the surgery deteriorates steadily into failure, with the protagonist’s intelligence returning steadily to its pre-operation level, the question of time and how he can make the best use of it to record the experiment becomes paramount. The final section of the article centres on the growing link between the surgery’s failure and how it increases the protagonist’s ontological insecurity. He uses the diminishing amount of time available to him in search of understanding the fuller implications of the experiment. Eventually, he reverts to his initial rudimentary ontological security when he finds himself with the same intellectual level, as prior to the experiment.

The phytochemical screening of flowers and rest aerial parts (without flowers) of local Hammada elegans Botsch., performed for the first time, revealed the presence of saponins, alkaloids, flavonoids, catechin and gallic tannins, sterols and triterpenes, cardiac glycosides, and C-glycosides. However, the combined anthracene and coumarins are present only in the air rest aerial parts. Qualitative analysis of extracts by TLC confirmed the presence of these compounds in both parts of Hammada elegans. The total phenolic content was widely variable and depends on extraction solvents. The crude methanolic extract of flowers presented the highest content (2.66 ± 0.02 mg GAE/g). The in vitro antioxidant capacity of Hammada elegans extracts was assessed by DPPH, CUPRAC, iron chelating, and xanthine oxidase inhibitory assays. The DPPH assay showed an important antiradical activity of the diethyletheric fraction of the rest aerial part (EC50 = 0.46 ± 0.05 mg/ml) compared to other extracts. However, in the CUPRAC assay, the diethyletheric extract of flowers part has an interesting ability (EC50 = 2.67 ± 0.00 mg/ml) comparatively to the other extracts, but lower than those of ascorbic acid and TBHQ. The results of the chelating effect on ferrous ions show clearly that diethyletheric and acetonic extracts of both plant parts have greater chelating powers than that of the positive control. Finally, diethyletheric extract of oth parts of Hammada elegans proved to be the most active in the inhibition of xanthine oxidase activity.

AbstractBackgroundTo the best of our knowledge, up to now, there are no reports on the antioxidant activity of phenolic compounds of Crataegus oxyacantha flowers and fruits. Such detailed information is essential to advance the existing knowledge and to promote the use of this species growing in Africa.Therefore, the objective of this investigation was to analyze the content of phenolic compounds as well as the antioxidant activities of flowers and fruits of C. oxyacantha from Bejaia (Northeastern Algeria) by different analytical methods, and to determine the relationship between them.MethodsPhenolic compounds and antioxidant activity of Algerian hawthorn flowers and fruits (C. oxyacantha L.) were studied. Total phenolics, flavonoids and flavonols were determined using colorimetric methods. The phenolic profile was analyzed by high-performance liquid chromatography with diode array detection, and the in vitro antioxidant activity was measured using scavenging assay (FRAP) and Fremy’s salt, using electronic paramagnetic resonance.ResultsDifferent classes of phenolic compounds were identified and quantified. Hawthorn flowers contained higher levels of hydroxycinnamic acids, vitexin derivatives and flavonols compared to fruits, while anthocyanins were present only in fruits. Significant correlations were found between phenolic content and antioxidant activity. The results also showed that although the phenolic content of the two parts was different, their antioxidant capacity was not statistically different.ConclusionsThe results of this study indicate that hawthorn flowers and fruits of C. oxyacantha may be considered as a natural source of bioactive compounds.

Moringa oleifera Flowers extracts grown in Algerian Sahara were evaluated antidiabetic and antioxidant activity by means using divers established in vitro systems, such as α-Amylase inhibitory assay, DPPH radical scavenging assay, Phosphomolybdenum assay (PM) and Ferric reducing power assay (FRAP). Moreover, the total content of phenols, flavonoids and tannins from (MFCE) and various fractions was measured using colorimetric methods. Results demonstrated that TPC varied between 95,50  0,42 and 10, 49  0,053 mg GAE/g WE, while TFC was between 17,00  0, 011 and 2,47  0,014 mg GAE/g WE, In this study TTC ranged between 2,96 0,016 and 1,30 0, 014 mg GAE/g WE. All capacities of DPPH radical scavenging, Phosphomolybdenum (PM) and Ferric reducing power (FRAP) were found best in (MFEF) (IC50= 0,159± 0,004mg/ml, AEAC = 42.37 ± 0.28 mM and AEAC =104.05±0.41 mM respectively). Add to this (MFEF) showed the highest α-amylase inhibitory activity (I= 38,92 %).

Background: Plants are a main source of drugs for the therapy of a large number of diseases. Objective: The aim of the present work is to evaluate the in vitro antioxidant and anti-α-amylase and anti-peroxidases (HPR) potentials of phenolic extracts obtained from three spontaneous plants; growing in the South of Algeria such as (Chamomilla pubescens, Pulicaria crispa, and Rhanterium adpressum). This is the first report on the study of α-amylase and horseradish peroxidase (HRP) inhibitory activity for phenolic extracts from the Chamomilla pubescens and Pulicaria crispa plants. Method: The antioxidant activity was evaluated in vitro using four tests: DPPH, CUPRAC, FRAP, and ABTS. The phenolic, flavonoid, and tannin compounds of the three selected Algerian plants were quantified. Also, the inhibition of α-amylase and HRP was evaluated. Results: The quantification of the total phenolic contents revealed that they are widely variable, and depending on extraction solvents, the highest content was recorded by the ethyl acetate extract of Chamomilla pubescens (flowers) 774.93±60.14mg/100 g of dry matter. In all the antioxidant tests, ethyl acetate extracts showed the most effective activity, which the best was (VCEAC = 65.62 ±0.50 µM/g dry matter) of Pulicaria crispa for the DPPH test. Furthermore, the results of α-amylase and peroxidase inhibitory effects indicated that all plants extracts have inhibitory effects on the two enzymes, with AEIC values ranged from 76.55±3.54 to 149.54±6.68 μM/g of dry matter for the α-amylase, and CEIC values ranged from 8.89±2.22 to 9668.31±254.42 μM/g of dry matter for the peroxidase (HRP). Conclusion: The present study results suggest that the three Algerian spontaneous plant species (Rhanterium adpressum, Pulicaria crispa, and Chamomilla pubescens) inhibit peroxidase and α-amylase and exhibit a high antioxidant activity what can be related to the treatment of diabetes and thyroid diseases.

Background: Traditionally, The Algerian medicinal plant Elaeosilenum thapsioides have been used for many diseases. Objective: The present research work is aimed to explore the chemical and biological characterization of essential oil of, Elaeoselinum thapsioides (Desf.) Maire. Methods : The essential oils were obtained by hydrodistillation of different Elaeosilenum thapsioides (Apiaceae) aerial parts samples collected from two different regions (Mahouane and Megres) Setif, Eastern Algeria. The chemical characterization of the obtained essential oils was investigated in the present work for the first time by GC and GC-MS. Besides, they were evaluated for their in-vitro acetylcholinesterase (AChE) inhibitory activity whose enzyme hyperactivity is involved in Alzheimer’s disease. Using Ellman’s spectrophotometric method, additionally, their in-vitro antimicrobial activity was assessed by the disc diffusion method. Both activities were performed at various oil concentrations. Results: The GC/MS analysis of the aerial parts (leaves, stems, flowers, and seeds) essential oils of E. thapsioides revealed the presence of dominant compounds and others in small quantities, identifying 47 chemical molecules. Monoterpene hydrocarbons were the main components, ranging from 72.78 % to 99.13 %. Oxygenated monoterpenes and oxygenated sesquiterpenes ranged between (1.37 % -17.25 %) and (0.12 % -3.53 %) in leaves and stem essential oils. Sesquiterpene hydrocarbons were present in small to large quantities in the essential oils of both populations, with contents ranging from 0.69 % to 13.44 %. For the Isothiocyanates, their presence was recorded in leaves and stem essential oils from Mahouane and Merges with 9.73 % and 3.72 %, consecutively. Indeed, the essential oil of the Mahouane stem showed the highest AChE inhibitory activity among all the tested essential oils. Whereas the highest antibacterial activity was shown by the essential oil obtained from Megres leaves against Bacillus cereus ATCC 11778. Conclusion: The oils exhibited a moderate inhibitory activity in both activities.

Since the late 1990s, W. G. Sebald’s innovative contribution to the genre of prose fiction has been the source of much academic scrutiny. His books Vertigo, The Rings of Saturn, The Emigrants and Austerlitz have provoked interest from diverse fields of inquiry: visual communication (Kilbourn; Patt; Zadokerski), trauma studies (Denham and McCulloh; Schmitz), and travel writing (Blackler; Zisselsberger). His work is also claimed to be a bastion for both modernist and postmodernist approaches to literature and history writing (Bere; Fuchs and Long; Long). This is in addition to numerous “guide to” type books, such as Mark McCulloh’s Understanding Sebald, Long and Whitehead’s W. G. Sebald—A Critical Companion, and the comprehensive Saturn’s Moons: A W. G. Sebald Handbook. Here I have only mentioned works available in English. I should point out that Sebald wrote in German, the country of his birth, and as one would expect much scholarship dealing with his work is confined to this language. In this article I focus on what is perhaps Sebald’s prototypical work, The Rings of Saturn. Of all Sebald’s prose fictional works The Rings of Saturn seems the example that best exhibits his innovative literary forms, including the use of lists. This book is the work of an author who is purposefully and imaginatively concerned with the nature of his vocation: what is it to be a writer? Crucially, he addresses this question not only from the perspective of a subject facing an existential crisis, but from the perspective of the documents created by writers. His works demonstrate a concern with the enabling role documents play in the thinking and writing process; how, for example, pen and paper are looped in with our capacity to reason in certain ways. Despite taking the form of fictional narratives, his books are as much motivated by a historical interest in how ideas and forms of organisation are transmitted, and how they evolve as part of an ecology; how humans become articulate within their surrounds, according to the contingencies of specific epochs and places. The Sebald critic J. J. Long accounts for this in some part in his description “archival consciousness,” which recommends that conscious experience is not simply located in the mind of a knowing, human subject, but is rather distributed between the subject and different technologies (among which writing and archives are exemplary).The most notable peculiarity of Sebald’s books lies in their abundant use of “non-syntactical” kinds of writing or inscription. My use of the term “non-syntactical” has its origins in the anthropological work of Jack Goody, who emphasises the importance of list making and tabulation in pre-literate or barely literate cultures. In Sebald’s texts, kinds of non-syntactical writing include lists, photographic images, tables, signatures, diagrams, maps, stamps, dockets and sketches. As I stress throughout this article, Sebald’s shifts between syntactical and non-syntactical forms of writing allows him to build up highly complex schemes of internal reference. Massimo Leone identifies something similar, when he notes that Sebald “orchestrates a multiplicity of voices and text-types in order to produce his own coherent discourse” (91). The play between multiplicity and coherence is at once a thematic and poetic concern for Sebald. This is to say, his texts are formal experiments with these contrasting tendencies, in addition to discussing specific historical situations in which they feature. The list is perhaps Sebald’s most widely used and variable form of non-syntactical writing, a key part of his formal and stylistic peculiarity. His lengthy sentences frequently spill over into catalogues and inventories, and the entire structure of his narratives is list-like. Discrete episodes accumulate alongside each other, rather than following a narrative arc where episodes of suspenseful gravity overshadow the significance of minor events. The Rings of Saturn details the travels of Sebald’s trademark, nameless, first person narrator, who recounts his trek along the Suffolk coastline, from Lowestoft to Ditchingham, about two years after the event. From the beginning, the narrative is framed as an effort to organise a period of time that lacks a coherent and durable form, a period of time that is in pieces, fading from the narrator’s memory. However, the movement from the chaos of forgetting to the comparatively distinct and stable details of the remembered present does not follow a continuum. Rather, the past and present are both constituted by the force of memory, which is continually crystallising and dissolving. Each event operates according to its own specific arrangement of emphasis and forgetting. Our experience of memory in the present, or recollective memory, is only one kind of memory. Sebald is concerned with a more pervasive kind of remembering, which includes the vectorial existence of non-conscious, non-human perceptual events; memory as expressed by crystals, tree roots, glaciers, and the nested relationship of fuel, fire, smoke, and ash. The Rings of Saturn is composed of ten chapters, each of which is outlined in table form at the book’s beginning. The first chapter appears as: “In hospital—Obituary—Odyssey of Thomas Browne’s skull—Anatomy lecture—Levitation—Quincunx—Fabled creatures—Urn burial.” The Rings of Saturn is of course hardly exceptional in its use of this device. Rather, it is exemplary concerning the repeated emphasis on the tension between syntactical and non-syntactical forms of writing, among which this chapter breakdown is included. Sebald continually uses the conventions of bookmaking in subtle though innovative ways. Each of these horizontally linked and divided indices might put the reader in mind of Thomas Browne’s urns, time capsules from the past, the unearthing of which is discussed in the book’s first chapter (25). The chapter outlines (and the urns) are containers that preserve a fragmentary and suggestive history. Each is a perspective on the narrator’s travels that abstracts, arranges, and uniquely refers to the narrative elaborations to come.As I have already stressed, Sebald is a writer concerned with forms of organisation. His works account for a diverse range of organisational forms, some of which instance an overt, chronological, geometric, or metrical manipulation of space and time, such as grids, star shapes, and Greenwich Mean Time. This contrasts with comparatively suggestive, insubstantial, mutable forms, including various meteorological phenomena such as cloudbanks and fog, dust and sand, and as exemplified in narrative form by the haphazard, distracted assemblage of events featured in dreams or dream logic. The relationship between these supposedly opposing tendencies is, however, more complex and paradoxical than might at first glance appear. As Sebald warily reminds us in his essay “A Little Excursion to Ajaccio,” despite our wishes to inhabit periods of complete freedom, where we follow our distractions to the fullest possible extent, we nonetheless “must all have some more or less significant design in view” (Sebald, Campo 4). It is not so much that we must choose, absolutely, between form and formlessness. Rather, the point is to understand that some seemingly inevitable forms are in fact subject to contingencies, which certain uses deliberately or ignorantly mask, and that simplicity and intricacy are often co-dependent. Richard T. Gray is a Sebald critic who has picked up on the element in Sebald’s work that suggests a tension between different forms of organisation. In his article “Writing at the Roche Limit,” Gray notes that Sebald’s tendency to emphasise the decadent aspects of human and natural history “is continually counterbalanced by an insistence on order and by often extremely subtle forms of organization” (40). Rather than advancing the thesis that Sebald is exclusively against the idea of systematisation or order, Gray argues that The Rings of Saturn models in its own textual make-up an alternative approach to the cognitive order(ing) of things, one that seeks to counter the natural tendency toward entropic decline and a fall into chaos by introducing constructive forces that inject a modicum of balance and equilibrium into the system as a whole. (Gray 41)Sebald’s concern with the contrasting energies exemplified by different forms extends to his play with syntactical and non-syntactical forms of writing. He uses lists to add contrast to his flowing, syntactically intricate sentences. The achievement of his work is not the exclusive privileging of either the list form or the well-composed sentence, but in providing contexts whereby the reader can appreciate subtle modulations between the two, thus experiencing a more dynamic and complex kind of narrative time. His works exhibit an astute awareness of the fact that different textual devices command different experiences of temporality, and our experience of temporality in good part determines our metaphysics. Here I consider two lists featured in The Rings of Saturn, one from the first chapter, and one from the last. Each shows contrasting tendencies concerning systems of organisation. Both are attributable to the work of Thomas Browne, “who practiced as a doctor in Norwich in the seventeenth century and had left a number of writings that defy all comparison” (Sebald, Rings 9). The Rings of Saturn is in part a dialogue across epochs with the sentiments expressed in Browne’s works, which, according to Bianca Theisen, preserve a kind of reasoning that is lost in “the rationalist and scientific embrace of a devalued world of facts” (Theisen 563).The first list names the varied “animate and inanimate matter” in which Browne identifies the quincuncial structure, a lattice like arrangement of five points and intersecting lines. The following phenomena are enumerated in the text:certain crystalline forms, in starfish and sea urchins, in the vertebrae of mammals and the backbones of birds and fish, in the skins of various species of snake, in the crosswise prints left by quadrupeds, in the physical shapes of caterpillars, butterflies, silkworms and moths, in the root of the water fern, in the seed husks of the sunflower and the Caledonian pine, within young oak shoots or the stem of the horse tail; and in the creations of mankind, in the pyramids of Egypt and the mausoleum of Augustus as in the garden of King Solomon, which was planted with mathematical precision with pomegranate trees and white lilies. (Sebald, Rings 20-21)Ostensibly quoting from Browne, Sebald begins the next sentence, “Examples might be multiplied without end” (21). The compulsion to list, or the compulsiveness expressed by listing, is expressed here in a relationship of dual utility with another, dominant or overt, kind of organisational form: the quincunx. It is not the utility or expressiveness of the list itself that is at issue—at least in the version of Browne’s work preserved here by Sebald. In W. G. Sebald: Image, Archive, Modernity, Long notes the historical correspondences and divergences between Sebald and Michel Foucault (2007). Long interprets Browne’s quincunx as exemplifying a “hermeneutics of resemblance,” whereby similarities among diverse phenomena are seen as providing proof of “the universal oneness of all things” (33). This contrasts with the idea of a “pathological nature, autonomous from God,” which, according to Long, informs Sebald’s transformation of Browne into “an avatar of distinctly modern epistemology” (38). Long follows Foucault in noting the distinction between Renaissance and modern epistemology, a distinction in good part due to the experimental, inductive method, the availability of statistical data, and probabilistic reasoning championed in the latter epoch (Whitehead; Hacking). In the book’s final chapter, Sebald includes a list from Browne’s imaginary library, the “Musæum Clausium.” In contrast to the above list, here Sebald seems to deliberately problematise any efforts to suggest an abstract uniting principle. There is no evident reason for the togetherness of the discrete things, beyond the mere fact that they happen to be gathered, hypothetically, in the text (Sebald, Rings 271-273). Among the library’s supposed contents are:an account by the ancient traveller Pytheas of Marseilles, referred to in Strabo, according to which all the air beyond thule is thick, condensed and gellied, looking just like sea lungs […] a dream image showing a prairie or sea meadow at the bottom of the Mediterranean, off the coat of Provence […] and a glass of spirits made of æthereal salt, hermetically sealed up, of so volatile a nature that it will not endure by daylight, and therefore shown only in winter or by the light of a carbuncle or Bononian stone. (Sebald, Rings 272-73)Unlike the previous example attributed to Browne, here the list coheres according to the tensions of its own coincidences. Sebald uses the list to create spontaneous organisations in which history is exhibited as a complex mix of fact and fantasy. More important than the distinction between the imaginary and the real is the effort to account for the way things uniquely incorporate aspects of the world in order to be what they are. Human knowledge is a perspective that is implicated in, rather than excluded from, this process.Lists move us to puzzle over the criteria that their togetherness implies. They might be used inthe service of a specific paradigm, or they might suggest an imaginable but as yet unknown kind of systematisation; a specific kind of relationship, or simply the possibility of a relationship. Take, for example, the list-like accumulation of architectural details in the following description of the decadent Sommerleyton Hall, featured in chapter II: There were drawing rooms and winter gardens, spacious halls and verandas. A corridor might end in a ferny grotto where fountains ceaselessly plashed, and bowered passages criss-crossed beneath the dome of a fantastic mosque. Windows could be lowered to open the interior onto the outside, and inside the landscape was replicated on the mirror walls. Palm houses and orangeries, the lawn like green velvet, the baize on the billiard tables, the bouquets of flowers in the morning and retiring rooms and in the majolica vases on the terrace, the birds of paradise and the golden peasants on the silken tapestries, the goldfinches in the aviaries and the nightingales in the garden, the arabesques in the carpets and the box-edged flower beds—all of it interacted in such a way that one had the illusion of complete harmony between the natural and the manufactured. (Sebald, Rings 33-34)This list shifts emphasis away from preconceived distinctions between the natural and the manufactured through the creation of its own unlikely harmony. It tells us something important about the way perception and knowledge is ordered in Sebald’s prose. Each encounter, or historically specific situation, is considered as though it were its own microworld, its own discrete, synecdochic realisation of history. Rather than starting from the universal or the meta-level and scaling down to the local, Sebald arranges historically peculiar examples that suggest a variable, contrasting and dynamic metaphysics, a motley arrangement of ordering systems that each aspire to but do not command universal applicability. In a comparable sense, Browne’s sepulchral urns of his 1658 work Urn Burial, which feature in chapter I, are time capsules that seem to create their own internally specific kind of organisation:The cremated remains in the urns are examined closely: the ash, the loose teeth, some long roots of quitch, or dog’s grass wreathed about the bones, and the coin intended for the Elysian ferryman. Browne records other objects known to have been placed with the dead, whether as ornament or utensil. His catalogue includes a variety of curiosities: the circumcision knives of Joshua, the ring which belonged to the mistress of Propertius, an ape of agate, a grasshopper, three-hundred golden bees, a blue opal, silver belt buckles and clasps, combs, iron pins, brass plates and brazen nippers to pull away hair, and a brass Jews harp that last sounded on the crossing over black water. (Sebald, Rings 25-26)Regardless of our beliefs concerning the afterlife, these items, preserved across epochs, solicit a sense of wonder as we consider what we might choose for company on our “last journey” (25). In death, the human body is reduced to a condition of an object or thing, while the objects that accompany the corpse seem to acquire a degree of potency as remnants that transcend living time. Life is no longer the paradigm through which to understand purpose. In their very difference from living things these objects command our fascination. Eric Santner coins the term “undeadness” to name the significance of this non-living agency in Sebald’s prose (Santner xx). Santner’s study places Sebald in a linage of German-Jewish writers, including Walter Benjamin, Franz Kafka, and Paul Celan, whose understanding of “the human” depends crucially on the concept of “the creature” or “creatureliness” (Santner 38-41). Like the list of items contained within Sommerleyton Hall, the above list accounts for a context in which ornament and utensil, nature and culture, are read according to their differentiated togetherness, rather than opposition. Death, it seems, is a universal leveller, or at least a different dimension in which symbol and function appear to coincide. Perhaps it is the unassuming and convenient nature of lists that make them enduring objects of historical interest. Lists are a form of writing to which we appeal for immediate mnemonic assistance. They lack the artifice of a sentence. While perhaps not as interesting in the present that is contemporary with their usefulness (a trip to the supermarket), with time lists acquire credibility due to the intimacy they share with mundane, diurnal concerns—due to the fact that they were, once upon a time, so useful. The significance of lists arrives anachronistically, when we look back and wonder what people were really up to, or what our own concerns were, relatively free from fanciful, stylistic adornment. Sebald’s democratic approach to different forms of writing means that lists sit alongside the esteemed poetic and literary efforts of Joseph Conrad, Algernon Swinburne, Edward Fitzgerald, and François René de Chateaubriand, all of whom feature in The Rings of Saturn. His books make the exclusive differences between literary and non-literary kinds of writing less important than the sense of dynamism that is elicited through a play of contrasting kinds of syntactical and non-syntactical writing. The book’s closing chapter includes a revealing example that expresses these sentiments. After tracing over a natural history of silk, with a particular focus on human greed and naivety, the narrative arrives at a “pattern book” that features strips of colourful silk kept in “the small museum of Strangers Hall” (Sebald, Rings 283). The narrator notes that the silks arranged in this book “were of a truly fabulous variety, and of an iridescent, quite indescribable beauty as if they had been produced by Nature itself, like the plumage of birds” (283). This effervescent declamation continues after a double page photograph of the pattern book, which is described as a “catalogue of samples” and “leaves from the only true book which none of our textual and pictorial works can even begin to rival” (286). Here we witness Sebald’s inclusive and variable understanding as to the kinds of thing a book, and writing, can be. The fraying strips of silk featured in the photograph are arranged one below the other, in the form of a list. They are surrounded by ornate handwriting that, like the strips of silk, seems to fray at the edges, suggesting the specific gestural event that occasioned the moment of their inscription—something which tends to be excluded in printed prose. Sebald’s remarks here are not without a characteristic irony (“the only true book”). However, in the greatercontext of the narrative, this comment suggests an important inclination. Namely, that there is much scope yet for innovative literary forms that capture the nuances and complexity of collective and individual histories. And that writing always includes, though to varying degrees obscures, contrasting tensions shared among syntactical and non-syntactical elements, including material and gestural contingencies. Sebald’s works remind us of what potentials might lay ahead for books if the question of what writing can be is asked continually as part of a writer’s enterprise.ReferencesBere, Carol. “The Book of Memory: W. G. Sebald’s The Emigrants and Austerlitz.” Literary Review, 46.1 (2002): 184-92.Blackler, Deane. Reading W. G. Sebald: Adventure and Disobedience. Rochester, New York: Camden House, 2007. Catling Jo, and Richard Hibbitt, eds. Saturn’s Moons: A W. G. Sebald Handbook. Oxford: Legenda, 2011.Denham, Scott and Mark McCulloh, eds. W. G. Sebald: History, Memory, Trauma. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2006. Fuchs, Anne and J. J. Long, eds. W. G. Sebald and the Writing of History. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2007. Goody, Jack. The Logic of Writing and the Organization of Society. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1986. Gray, Richard T. “Writing at the Roche Limit: Order and Entropy in W. G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn.” The German Quarterly 83.1 (2010): 38-57. Hacking, Ian. The Emergence of Probability: A Philosophical Study of Early Ideas about Probability, Induction and Statistical Inference. London: Cambridge UP, 1977.Kilbourn, Russell J. A. “Architecture and Cinema: The Representation of Memory in W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz.” W. G. Sebald—A Critical Companion. Ed. J. J. Long and Anne Whitehead. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2004.Leone, Massimo. “Textual Wanderings: A Vertiginous Reading of W. G. Sebald.” W. G. Sebald—A Critical Companion. Ed. J. J. Long and A. Whitehead. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2004.Long, J. J. W. G. Sebald: Image, Archive, Modernity. New York: Columbia UP, 2007.Long, J. J., and Anne Whitehead, eds. W. G. Sebald—A Critical Companion. Edinburgh: Edinburgh U P, 2004. McCulloh, Mark. Understanding W. G. Sebald. Columbia, S. C.: U of South Carolina P, 2003.Patt, Lise, ed. Searching for Sebald: Photography After W. G. Sebald. Los Angeles: The Institute of Critical Inquiry and ICI Press, 2007. Sadokierski, Zoe. “Visual Writing: A Critique of Graphic Devices in Hybrid Novels from a Visual Communication Design Perspective.” Diss. University of Technology Sydney, 2010. Santner, Eric. On Creaturely Life: Rilke, Benjamin, Sebald. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2006. Schmitz, Helmut. “Catastrophic History, Trauma and Mourning in W. G. Sebald and Jörg Friedrich.” The German Monitor 72 (2010): 27-50.Sebald, W. G. The Rings of Saturn. Trans. Michael Hulse. London: Harvill Press, 1998.---. Vertigo. Trans. Michael Hulse. London: Harvill Press, 1999.---. Campo Santo. Trans. Anthea Bell. London: Penguin Books, 2005. Print. Theisen, Bianca. “A Natural History of Destruction: W. G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn.” MLN, 121. The John Hopkins U P (2006): 563-81.Whitehead, Alfred North. Science and The Modern World. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1932.Zisselsberger, Markus. The Undiscover’d Country: W. G. Sebald and the Poetics of Travel. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2010.

1. Make a list of things to do2. Copy list of things left undone from previous list3. Add items to list of new things needing to be done4. Add some of the things already done from previous list and immediately cross off so as to put off the feeling of an interminable list of never accomplishable tasks5. Finish writing list and sit back feeling an overwhelming sense of listlessnessIt started so well. Get up: make list: get on. But lists can breed listlessness. It can’t always be helped. The word “list” referring to a sequence of items comes from the Italian and French words for “strip”—as in a strip of material. The word “list” that you find in the compound “listlessness” comes from the old English word for pleasing (to list is to please and to desire). To be listless is to be without desire, without the desire to please. The etymologies of list and listless don’t correspond but they might seem to conspire in other ways. Oh, and by the way, ships can list when their balance is off.I list, like a ship, itemising my obligations to job, to work, to colleagues, to parenting, to family: write a reference for such and such; buy birthday present for eighty-year-old dad; finish article about lists – and so on. I forget to add to the list my necessary requirements for achieving any of this: keep breathing; eat and drink regularly; visit toilet when required. Lists make visible. Lists hide. I forget to add to my list all my worries that underscore my sense that these lists (or any list) might require an optimism that is always something of a leap of faith: I hope that electricity continues to exist; I hope my computer will still work; I hope that my sore toe isn’t the first sign of bodily paralysis; I hope that this heart will still keep beating.I was brought up on lists: the hit parade (the top one hundred “hit” singles); football leagues (not that I ever really got the hang of them); lists of kings and queens; lists of dates; lists of states; lists of elements (the periodic table). There are lists and there are lists. Some lists are really rankings. These are clearly the important lists. Where do you stand on the list? How near the bottom are you? Where is your university in the list of top universities? Have you gone down or up? To list, then, for some at least is to rank, to prioritise, to value. Is it this that produces listlessness? The sense that while you might want to rank your ten favourite films in a list, listing is something that is constantly happening to you, happening around you; you are always in amongst lists, never on top of them. To hang around the middle of lists might be all that you can hope for: no possibility of sudden lurching from the top spot; no urgent worries that you might be heading for demotion too quickly.But ranking is only one aspect of listing. Sometimes listing has a more flattening effect. I once worked as a cash-in-hand auditor (in this case a posh name for someone who counts things). A group of us (many of whom were seriously stoned) were bussed to factories and warehouses where we had to count the stock. We had to make lists of items and simply count what there was: for large items this was relatively easy, but for the myriad of miniscule parts this seemed a task for Sisyphus. In a power-tool factory in some unprepossessing town on the outskirts of London (was it Slough or Croydon or somewhere else?) we had to count bolts, nuts, washers, flex, rivets, and so on. Of course after a while we just made it up—guesstimates—as they say. A box of thousands of 6mm metal washers is a homogenous set in a list of heterogeneous parts that itself starts looking homogenous as it takes its part in the list. Listing dedifferentiates in the act of differentiating.The task of making lists, of filling-in lists, of having a list of tasks to complete encourages listlessness because to list lists towards exhaustiveness and exhaustion. Archives are lists and lists are often archives and archived. Those that work on lists and on archives constantly battle the fatigue of too many lists, of too much exhaustiveness. But could exhaustion be embraced as a necessary mood with which to deal with lists and archives? Might listlessness be something of a methodological orientation that has its own productivity in the face of so many lists?At my university there resides an archive that can appear to be a list of lists. It is the Mass-Observation archive, begun at the end of 1936 and, with a sizeable hiatus in the 1960s and 1970s, is still going today. (For a full account of Mass-Observation, see Highmore, Everyday Life chapter 6, and Hubble; for examples of Mass-Observation material, see Calder and Sheridan, and Highmore, Ordinary chapter 4; for analysis of Mass-Observation from the point of view of the observer, see Sheridan, Street, and Bloome. The flavour of the project as it emerges in the late 1930s is best conveyed by consulting Mass-Observation, Mass-Observation, First Year’s Work, and Britain.) It was begun by three men: the filmmaker Humphrey Jennings, the poet and sociologist Charles Madge, and the ornithologist and anthropologist-of-the-near Tom Harrisson. Both Jennings and Madge were heavily involved in promoting a form of social surrealism that might see buried forces in the coincidences of daily life as well as in the machinations and contingency of large political and social events (the abdication crisis, the burning of the Crystal Palace—both in late 1936). Harrisson brought a form of amateur anthropology with him that would scour football crowds, pub clientele, and cinema queues for ritualistic and symbolic forms. Mass-Observation quickly recruited a large group of voluntary observers (about a thousand) who would be “the meteorological stations from whose reports a weather-map of popular feeling can be compiled” (Mass-Observation, Mass-Observation 30). Mass-Observation combined the social survey with a relentless interest in the irrational and in what the world felt like to those who lived in it. As a consequence the file reports often seem banal and bizarre in equal measure (accounts of nightmares, housework routines, betting activities). When Mass-Observation restarted in the 1980s the surrealistic impetus became less pronounced, but it was still there, implicit in the methodology. Today, both as an on-going project and as an archive of previous observational reports, Mass-Observation lives in archival boxes. You can find a list of what topics are addressed in each box; you can also find lists of the contributors, the voluntary Mass-Observers whose observations are recorded in the boxes. What better way to give you a flavour of these boxes than to offer you a sample of their listing activities. Here are observers, observing in 1983 the objects that reside on their mantelpieces. Here’s one:champagne cork, rubber band, drawing pin, two hearing aid batteries, appointment card for chiropodist, piece of dog biscuit.Does this conjure up a world? Do we have a set of clues, of material evidence, a small cosmology of relics, a reduced Wunderkammer, out of which we can construct not the exotic but something else, something more ordinary? Do you smell camphor and imagine antimacassars? Do you hear conversations with lots of mishearing? Are the hearing aid batteries shared? Is this a single person living with a dog, or do we imagine an assembly of chiropodist-goers, dog-owners, hearing aid-users, rubber band-pingers, champagne-drinkers?But don’t get caught imagining a life out of these fragments. Don’t get stuck on this list: there are hundreds to get through. After all, what sort of an archive would it be if it included a single list? We need more lists.Here’s another mantelpiece: three penknives, a tube of cement [which I assume is the sort of rubber cement that you get in bicycle puncture repair kits], a pocket microscope, a clinical thermometer.Who is this? A hypochondriacal explorer? Or a grown-up boy-scout, botanising on the asphalt? Why so many penknives? But on, on... And another:1 letter awaiting postage stamp1 diet book1 pair of spare spectacles1 recipe for daughter’s home economics1 notepad1 pen1 bottle of indigestion tablets1 envelope containing 13 pence which is owed a friend1 pair of stick-on heels for home shoe repairing session3 letters in day’s post1 envelope containing money for week’s milk bill1 recipe cut from magazine2 out of date letters from schoolWhat is the connection between the daughter’s home economics recipe and the indigestion tablets? Is the homework gastronomy not quite going to plan? Or is the diet book causing side-effects? And what sort of financial stickler remembers that they owe 13p; even in 1983 this was hardly much money? Or is it the friend who is the stickler? Perhaps this is just prying...?But you need more. Here’s yet another:an ashtray, a pipe, pipe tamper and tobacco pouch, one decorated stone and one plain stone, a painted clay model of an alien, an enamelled metal egg from Hong Kong, a copper bracelet, a polished shell, a snowstorm of Father Christmas in his sleigh...Ah, a pipe smoker, this much is clear. But apart from this the display sounds ritualistic – one stone decorated the other not. What sort of religion is this? What sort of magic? An alien and Santa. An egg, a shell, a bracelet. A riddle.And another:Two 12 gauge shotgun cartridges live 0 spread Rubber plantBrass carriage clockInternational press clock1950s cigarette dispenser Model of Panzer MKIV tankWWI shell fuseWWI shell case ash tray containing an acorn, twelve .22 rounds of ammunition, a .455 Eley round and a drawing pinPhoto of Eric Liddell (Chariots of Fire)Souvenir of Algerian ash tray containing marbles and beach stonesThree 1930s plastic duck clothes brushesLetter holder containing postcards and invitations. Holder in shape of a cow1970s Whizzwheels toy carWooden box of jeweller’s rottenstone (Victorian)Incense holderWorld war one German fuse (used)Jim Beam bottle with candle thereinSol beer bottle with candle therein I’m getting worried now. Who are these people who write for Mass-Observation? Why so much military paraphernalia? Why such detail as to the calibrations? Should I concern myself that small militias are holding out behind the net curtains and aspidistra plants of suburban England?And another:1930s AA BadgeAvocado PlantWooden cat from MexicoKahlua bottle with candle there in1950s matchbook with “merry widow” cocktail printed thereonTwo Britain’s model cannonOne brass “Carronade” from the Carron Iron Works factory shopPhotography pass from Parkhead 12/11/88Grouse foot kilt pinBrass incense holderPheasant featherNovitake cupBlack ash tray with beach pebbles there inFull packet of Mary Long cigarettes from HollandPewter cocktail shaker made in ShanghaiI’m feeling distance. Who says “there in” and “there on?” What is a Novitake cup? Perhaps I wrote it down incorrectly? An avocado plant stirs memories of trying to grow one from an avocado stone skewered in a cup with one “point” dunked in a bit of water. Did it ever grow, or just rot? I’m getting distracted now, drifting off, feeling sleepy...Some more then – let’s feed the listlessness of the list:Wood sculpture (Tenerife)A Rubber bandBirdJunior aspirinToy dinosaur Small photo of daughterSmall paint brushAh yes the banal bizarreness of ordinary life: dinosaurs and aspirins, paint brushes and rubber bands.But then a list comes along and pierces you:Six inch piece of grey eyeliner1 pair of nail clippers1 large box of matches1 Rubber band2 large hair gripsHalf a piece of cough candy1 screwed up tissue1 small bottle with tranquillizers in1 dead (but still in good condition) butterfly (which I intended to draw but placed it now to rest in the garden) it was already dead when I found it.The dead butterfly, the tranquillizers, the insistence that the mantelpiece user didn’t actually kill the butterfly, the half piece of cough candy, the screwed up tissue. In amongst the rubber bands and matches, signs of something desperate. Or maybe not: a holding on (the truly desperate haven’t found their way to the giant tranquillizer cupboard), a keeping a lid on it, a desire (to draw, to place a dead butterfly at rest in the garden)...And here is the methodology emerging: the lists works on the reader, listing them, and making them listless. After a while the lists (and there are hundreds of these lists of mantle-shelf items) begin to merge. One giant mantle shelf filled with small stacks of foreign coins, rubber bands and dead insects. They invite you to be both magical ethnographer and deadpan sociologist at one and the same time (for example, see Hurdley). The “Martian” ethnographer imagines the mantelpiece as a shrine where this culture worships the lone rubber band and itinerant button. Clearly a place of reliquary—on this planet the residents set up altars where they place their sacred objects: clocks and clippers; ammunition and amulets; coins and pills; candles and cosmetics. Or else something more sober, more sombre: late twentieth century petite-bourgeois taste required the mantelpiece to hold the signs of aspirant propriety in the form of emblems of tradition (forget the coins and the dead insects and weaponry: focus on the carriage clocks). And yet, either way, it is the final shelf that gets me every time. But it only got me, I think, because the archive had worked its magic: ransacked my will, my need to please, my desire. It had, for a while at least, made me listless, and listless enough to be touched by something that was really a minor catalogue of remainders. This sense of listlessness is the way that the archive productively defeats the “desire for the archive.” It is hard to visit an archive without an expectation, without an “image repertoire,” already in mind. This could be thought of as the apperception-schema of archival searching: the desire to see patterns already imagined; the desire to find the evidence for the thought whose shape has already formed. Such apperception is hard to avoid (probably impossible), but the boredom of the archive, its ceaselessness, has a way of undoing it, of emptying it. It corresponds to two aesthetic positions and propositions. One is well-known: it is Barthes’s distinction between “studium” and “punctum.” For Barthes, studium refers to a sort of social interest that is always, to some degree, satisfied by a document (his concern, of course, is with photographs). The punctum, on the other hand, spills out from the photograph as a sort of metonymical excess, quite distinct from social interest (but for all that, not asocial). While Barthes is clearly offering a phenomenology of viewing photographs, he isn’t overly interested (here at any rate) with the sort of perceptional-state the viewer might need to be in to be pierced by the puntum of an image. My sense, though, is that boredom, listlessness, tiredness, a sort of aching indifference, a mood of inattentiveness, a sense of satiated interest (but not the sort of disinterest of Kantian aesthetics), could all be beneficial to a punctum-like experience. The second aesthetic position is not so well-known. The Austrian dye-technician, lawyer and art-educationalist Anton Ehrenzweig wrote, during the 1950s and 1960s, about a form of inattentive-attention, and a form of afocal-rendering (eye-repelling rather than eye-catching), that encouraged eye-wandering, scanning, and the “‘full’ emptiness of attention” (Ehrenzweig, The Hidden Order 39). His was an aesthetics attuned to the kind of art produced by Paul Klee, but it was also an aesthetic propensity useful for making wallpaper and for productively connecting to unconscious processes. Like Barthes, Ehrenzweig doesn’t pursue the sort of affective state of being that might enhance such inattentive-attention, but it is not hard to imagine that the sort of library-tiredness of the archive would be a fitting preparation for “full emptiness.” Ehrenzweig and Barthes can be useful for exploring this archival mood, this orientation and attunement, which is also a disorientation and mis-attunement. Trawling through lists encourages scanning: your sensibilities are prepared; your attention is being trained. After a while, though, the lists blur, concentration starts to loosen its grip. The lists are not innocent recipients here. Shrapnel shards pull at you. You start to notice the patterns but also the spaces in-between that don’t seem to fit sociological categorisations. The strangeness of the patterns hypnotises you and while the effect can generate a sense of sociological-anthropological homogeneity-with-difference, sometimes the singularity of an item leaps out catching you unawares. An archive is an orchestration of order and disorder: however contained and constrained it appears it is always spilling out beyond its organisational structures (amongst the many accounts of archives in terms of their orderings, see Sekula, and Stoler, Race and Along). Like “Probate Inventories,” the mantelpiece archive presents material objects that connect us (however indirectly) to embodied practices and living spaces (Evans). The Mass-Observation archive, especially in its mantelpiece collection, is an accretion of temporalities and spaces. More crucially, it is an accumulation of temporalities materialised in a mass of spaces. A thousand mantelpieces in a thousand rooms scattered across the United Kingdom. Each shelf is syncopated to the rhythms of diverse durations, while being synchronised to the perpetual now of the shelf: a carriage clock, for instance, inherited from a deceased parent, its brass detailing relating to a different age, its mechanism perpetually telling you that the time of this space is now. The archive carries you away to a thousand living rooms filled with the momentary (dead insects) and the eternal (pebbles) and everything in-between. Its centrifugal force propels you out to a vast accrual of things: ashtrays, rubber bands, military paraphernalia, toy dinosaurs; a thousand living museums of the incidental and the memorial. This vertiginous archive threatens to undo you; each shelf a montage of times held materially together in space. It is too much. It pushes me towards the mantelshelves I know, the ones I’ve had a hand in. Each one an archive in itself: my grandfather’s green glass paperweight holding a fragile silver foil flower in its eternal grasp; the potions and lotions that feed my hypochondria; used train tickets. Each item pushes outwards to other times, other spaces, other people, other things. It is hard to focus, hard to cling onto anything. Was it the dead butterfly, or the tranquillizers, or both, that finally nailed me? Or was it the half a cough-candy? I know what she means by leaving the remnants of this sweet. You remember the taste, you think you loved them as a child, they have such a distinctive candy twist and colour, but actually their taste is harsh, challenging, bitter. There is nothing as ephemeral and as “useless” as a sweet; and yet few things are similarly evocative of times past, of times lost. Yes, I think I’d leave half a cough-candy on a shelf, gathering dust.[All these lists of mantelpiece items are taken from the Mass-Observation archive at the University of Sussex. Mass-Observation is a registered charity. For more information about Mass-Observation go to http://www.massobs.org.uk/]ReferencesBarthes, Roland. Camera Lucida. Translated by Richard Howard. London: Fontana, 1984.Calder, Angus, and Dorothy Sheridan, eds. Speak for Yourself: A Mass-Observation Anthology 1937–1949. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1985.Ehrenzweig, Anton. The Psychoanalysis of Artistic Vision and Hearing: An Introduction to a Theory of Unconscious Perception. Third edition. London: Sheldon Press, 1965. [Originally published in 1953.]---. The Hidden Order of Art. London: Paladin, 1970.Evans, Adrian. “Enlivening the Archive: Glimpsing Embodied Consumption Practices in Probate Inventories of Household Possessions.” Historical Geography 36 (2008): 40-72.Highmore, Ben. Everyday Life and Cultural Theory. London: Routledge, 2002.---. Ordinary Lives: Studies in the Everyday. Abingdon: Routledge, 2011.Hubble, Nick. 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