Academic literature on the topic 'Reading Town Hall (Reading, Berkshire)'

If you lived in Reading in 1821, you might be tempted by the advertisement in your local newspaper for forthcoming attractions at the neighbourhood's commercial theatre. Should your taste encompass Greco-Roman themes, you might want to see ‘Monsieur DECOUR, the renowned FRENCH HERCULES!! Who will perform… FEATS AND EVOLUTIONS…’. If you preferred oriental stunts, you would choose ‘The Chinese JUGGLERS from the Court of Pekin!!’ Such exhibitions are fairly typical of the popular entertainments enjoyed during the late Georgian era in any fast industrializing provincial town not too far from London. But what is surprising is that the same newspaper offers a review of a production in the town hall of Euripides’ little known tragedyOrestes.

The Town Hall of Besozzo (Varese, Italy) is located in the city centre of the village and its first construction phase is dated back to the XIV-XV century. It shows a complex palimpsest which is the result of the numerous transformations occurred during its life: enlargements, super elevations, demolitions, inner spaces subdivisions and use changes. Currently a project has been issued for the reuse of the building which assigns new spaces for the town offices to the northern wing recently acquired. The aim of the research was to provide a diagnostic insight, useful for the development of the conservation project which will necessarily take into account the multitude of values registered on the building. Owing to a lack of meaningful archival documentation, the elevation’s stratigraphic reading and the methods for dating historical buildings proved to be an invaluable resource for the comprehension of the building’s transformations. Cross-referencing readings of indirect sources carried on the building with the results of the in-depth analysis made it possible to rebuild the growth of the structure from its origin to the present days. Such analysis includes: geometric survey, photographic rectifications of facade and inner sections, non-destructive diagnostic investigations, bricks, mortar and plaster chemical-physical analysis, mensiochronology, study of the building techniques and chronotypology which is a stylistic analysis performed both on the constructive (apertures) and decorative (shelves, graffiti, colourings traces) architectural elements. Blending the results of these dating techniques produced the complexity of the stratigraphic reading which has been conveyed with adequate hatching on the rectified images (U.S. – Stratigraphic Unity) while schematic 3D reconstructions exemplify the chronological sequence of the building activities. Individuation and comprehension of the building constructive phases made also possible to understand which were the different uses of each room inside this domestic architecture thus providing the client and the bodies in charge of protection with valuable data for the preservation project.

This article surveys the reception of concert performances in Manhattan of music by John Cage, from his arrival in 1942 until his gala retrospective held in Town Hall in 1958, in particular comparing responses from composer-critics such as Virgil Thomson, stabled at theNew YorkHeraldTribune, with that of music journalists based at theNew York Timesand other local dailies. Close reading of reviews and of an array of archival sources suggests that Cage's personal and professional relationships with composer-critics ensured that the reception of his music was uniquely well informed, and that his prepared piano works and early experiments with chance were treated with a remarkable degree of affirmation. Much of Cage's critical identity can be attributed to the aegis of Thomson, who, if he denied acting as “hired plugger” for Cage, nonetheless sympathetically construed him as Americanist, Francophile, post-Schoenbergian, and ultramodernist. Thomson's resignation from theTribunein 1954 coincided with a pronounced deterioration in Manhattan critics' appreciation of Cage. I argue that the reasons for this lie as much with the demise of the composer-critic—and a reversal of Cage's own attitude to criticism—as with conservative disaffection with new forms of experimentalism.

The trends in Palanga architecture of the second half of the 19th – first half of the 20th century are represented in the National Cultural Heritage List by 10 villas, 14 residential houses, two hotels (Kurhauses of Nemirseta and Palanga), a pharmacy, a spa building, a ship rescue station and a bus station. But such heritage objects reflect the stages in the town development only partially. If the cultural heritage list of Palanga town is treated as a coherent and continuous collection reflecting different stages in architecture and culture of this town (as it should be), it would be relevant to add a few more samples of the mid and second half of the 20th century architecture to the list. Taking into consideration the presence of exclusive Soviet period architectural objects on the list (made according to recommendations of different professional and social communities), and recommendations of the list founders, the following two educational institutions realized less than 50 years ago that these may as well be enrolled as examples of specific historic period and acknowledged artistic style or trend, and as most progressive and/or artistic architectural solutions of the time, to be protected for public information and use purposes: the music school designed by architect I. Likšienė,1981, (Maironio St.8; see Fig. 1) and former Pioneers’ Palace designed by I. Likšienė and G. P. Likša,1985, (now the elementary school, at the address Virbališkės Takas 4; see Fig. 2). These buildings are distinctive examples of contemporary architecture development. At present managed by the local municipality, they are in good physical state, with retained initial qualities of space and volume structure, use of materials, environment and purpose. In the category of accommodation buildings the following may be marked out: the early architectural design works by A. Lėckas, namely, the Žilvinas hotel (Kęstučio St. 34; see Fig. 4, a.), designed and implemented in 1968 as a rest house for 45 guests (21 apartment) on commission of the Council of Ministers of the Soviet Socialist Republic of Lithuania and the Žilvinėlis apartment building for 24 guests implemented in 1970 (Birutės al. 44; see Fig. 4, b.). These objects still owned by the state have been prepared for privatization. Before privatization it is suggested to enroll them on the Cultural Heritage List, identify their valuable qualities, character and level of significance and perform any other required procedures. It is also recommended to make agreements for protection of cultural heritage objects with the new owners of such buildings. The initial protection is also needed for the Rąžė book shop and café building (Vytauto St.84; see Fig. 5) designed by R. V. Kraniauskas in 1967 and considered mature in the artistic sense. The building has retained its small scale, which is characteristic for the resort town, and thus enriches the spatial perspective of the street. Considering its physical shape, functional and aesthetical qualities and the use character, it is also highly recommended to grant the heritage protection status to the administration building Komprojektas (Gintaro St.30,30A; see Fig. 6) designed by G. P. and I. Likša in 1988. The collection of Palanga architecture may also be enriched by the conserved pavilions of the summer reading hall of the National Martynas Mažvydas Library (Vytauto St.72, (1968); see Fig. 7) and Kupeta (S.Daukanto/ S.Dariaus and S.Girėno St., (1969); see Fig. 8) designed by architect A. Čepys; an example of the original concrete plastics, the coffee shop Banga (J. Basanavičius St. 2; see Fig. 10) designed by G. J. Telksnys in 1976–77 and realized in 1979. The present shape and use character of these buildings cause serious threat to their preservation. There is little probability that within the context of the on-going reconstructions traditional acts for enrollment on the heritage list could somehow contribute to the conservation of values of the Vanagupė resort center, the laureate (1984) of prestigious prize by the USSR Council of Ministers (architects A. Lėckas, S. Šarkinas and L. Merkinas; see Fig. 3); the resthouse Guboja implemented only partially in 1976 (in Šventoji, Jūros St 65A., architect. R. Buivydas); resthouse Auska (presently, hotel, Vytauto St.11; architect J. Šipalis, 1977); and the resthouse Šiaulių Tauras (Vytauto St.116, architect G. P. Likša,1983). Nevertheless, the identified architectural, urban, landscape and engineering values of objects and analyzed possible forms for their conservation (ex-situ and in-situ) could become a basis for scientific study of contemporary architecture and urban planning in Palanga resort. Based on their design material, the initial concepts of such objects should be identified and their present as well planned for the future transformations should be analyzed. Such study to be presented publicly (for example, on the National Cultural Heritage List database) could ensure conditions for better understanding of past and present values of the objects, for both, specialists and public at large, and be a highly valuable source of information describing the architecture of the time to be used for information, scientific and professional purposes. Such study may also become a stimulus for preparation of complex regeneration design projects of objects and landscapes, which would comprise the conservation and development needs and add new artistic values. Santrauka Dėl pakitusių politinių, ekonominių ir kultūrinių sąlygų XX a. II pusės architektūros ir urbanistikos kūriniai dažnai nebeatitinka šiandienos naudotojų poreikių ir keliamų reikalavimų. Todėl apleidžiami, griaunami ar reikšmingai kinta. Dėl to ryškėja iniciatyvos siūlyti į KVR įtraukti kuo daugiau šio laikmečio kūrinių. Tačiau XX a. IX dešimtmetyje kultūros paminklais tapę naujosios architektūros kūriniai dėl neraiškios saugojimo strategijos, žmogiškųjų ir finansinių išteklių tvarkybai stokos vis tiek nyksta. Todėl kyla abejonių ar registro plėtra bus veiksminga. Straipsnyje Palangos miesto pavyzdžiu nagrinėjamos galimybės sudaryti vėlyvojo modernizmo architektūros kolekciją. Manoma, kad sistemingas kultūriškai vertingų architektūros objektų rinkinys formuojamas apjungiant skirtingus saugojimo metodus gali paskatinti atsakingas institucijas, vietos ir profesines bendruomenes susitelkti atsakingam architektūros paveldo puoselėjimo ir tvaraus naudojimo procesui.

04–358 Bishop, Graham (Open U., UK), First steps towards electronic marking of language assignments. Language Learning Journal (London, UK), 29 (2004), 42–46.04–359 Coniam, David and Wong, Richard (Chinese U. of Hong Kong; Email: coniam@ cuhk.edu.hk). Internet Relay Chat as a tool in the autonomous development of ESL learners' English language ability: an exploratory study. System (Oxford, UK), 32, 3 (2004), 321–335.04–360 Cooke, Melanie, Wallace, Catherine, with Shrubshall, Paul. Inside Out/Outside In: a study of reading in ESOL classrooms. Language Issues (Birmingham, UK), 16, 1 (2004), 7–12.04–361 Dewey, Dan (U. of Pittsburgh, USA; Email: ddewey@pitt.edu). A comparison of reading development by learners of Japanese in intensive domestic immersion and study abroad contexts. Studies in Second Language Acquisition (New York, USA), 26 (2004), 303–327.04–362 Ferris, Dana R. (California State U., Sacramento, USA). The grammar correction debate in L2 writing: where are we, and where do we go from here? (and what do we do in the meantime…?). Journal of Second Language Writing (New York, USA), 13, 1 (2004), 49–62.04–363 Gaskell, Delian and Cobb, Thomas (U. de Québec à Montréal, Canada; Email: cobb.tom@uqam.ca). Can learners use concordance feedback for writing errors?System (Oxford, UK), 32, 3 (2004), 301–319.04–364 Goldstein, Lynn M. (Monterey Institute of International Studies, California, USA). Questions and answers about teacher written commentary and student revision: teachers and students working together. Journal of Second Language Writing (New York, USA), 13, 1 (2004), 63–80.04–365 Hall, Kathy, Allan, Christine, Dean, Jacqui and Warren, Sue (Leeds Metropolitan U., UK; Email: k.hall@lmu.ac.uk). Classroom discourse in the Literacy Hour in England: a study of two lessons. Language, Culture and Curriculum (Clevedon, UK), 16, 3 (2003), 284–297.04–366 Ivanič, Roz (Lancaster U., UK; Email: r.ivanic@lancs.ac.uk). Discourses of writing and learning to write. Language and Education (Clevedon, UK), 18, 3 (2004), 220–245.04–367 Kapp, Rochelle (U. of Cape Town, South Africa; Email: rkapp@ched.uct.ac.za). ‘Reading on the line”: an analysis of literacy practices in ESL classes in a South African township school. Language and Education (Clevedon, UK), 18, 3 (2004), 246–263.04–368 Kubota, Ryuko and Lehner, Al (U. of North Carolina, USA; Email: rkubota@email.unc.edu). Toward critical contrastive analysis. Journal of Second Language Writing (New York, USA), 13, 1 (2004), 7–27.04–369 McNamara, Danielle S. (U. of Memphis, USA; Email: d.mcnamara@mail.psyc.memphis.edu). SERT: self-explanation reading training. Discourse Processes (New York, USA), 38, 1 (2004), 1–30.04–370 Mokhtari, Kouider, and Reichard, Carla (Miami U., Ohio, USA; Email: mohktak@muohio.edu). Investigating the strategic reading processes of first and second language readers in two different cultural contexts. System (Oxford, UK), 32, 3 (2004), 379–394.04–371 Mori, S. (Kinki U., Japan; Email: squiddly@leto.eonet.ne.jp). Significant motivational predictors of the amount of reading by EFL learners in Japan. RELC Journal (Singapore), 35, 1 (2004), 63–81.04–372 O, K-M. (Dongduk U., Korea, Email: kmo@dongduk.ac.kr). Individualized Teacher-Student Interaction in EFL Writing Class: Action Research. English Teaching (Anseonggun, South Korea), 58, 4 (2003), 99–126.04–373 Pulido, Diana (Washington State U., USA; Email: dpulido@wsu.edu). The relationship between text comprehension and second language incidental vocabulary acquisition: a matter of topic familiarity?Language Learning (Malden, Massachusetts, USA), 54, 3 (2004), 469–523.04–374 Sasaki, Miyuki (Nagoya Gakuin U., Japan; Email: sasaki@ngu.ac.jp). A multiple-data analysis of the 3.5-Year development of EFL student writers. Language Learning (Malden, Massachusetts, USA), 54, 3 (2004), 525–582.04–375 Walczyk, Jeffrey J., Marsiglia, Cheryl S., Johns, Amanda K. and Bryan, Keli S. (Louisiana Tech U., USA; Email: Walczyk@latech.edu). Children's compensations for poorly automated reading skills. Discourse Processes (New York, USA), 37, 1 (2004), 47–66.04–376 Walter, Catherine (Institute of Education, U. of London UK). Transfer of reading comprehension skills to L2 is linked to mental representations of text and to L2 working memory. Applied Linguistics (Oxford, UK), 25, 3 (2004), 315–339.04–377 Wang, Xiang (Jiangsu U., PR of China). Encouraging self-monitoring in writing by Chinese students. ELT Journal (Oxford, UK), 58, 3 (2004), 238–246.

In this paper, I focus on disclosures by one participant as enabled by a kind of artistic practice that I term “participation cartography.” By using “participation cartography” as a framework for the analysis of Running Stitch (2006), a piece by Jen Southern (U.K.) and Jen Hamilton (Canada), I demonstrate that disclosures by participants in this practice are to be seen as a form of self-mapping that positions the self in relation to a given performance space. These self-positionings present the self in spatio-temporal terms and by means of performative narratives that re-define the subject from an isolated individual into a participant within an unfolding live process.It is my argument here that most of the participation performances to which the term “participation cartography” may be applied don’t have a mechanism for participants to share reflections about their participation experience embedded in the framework the artists provide. By discussing Running Stitch from some participant’s perspectives—mine included—I demonstrate that if such a sharing mechanism was provided, the participant’s disclosures would enact a poetics of sharing that at once reveals and conceals aspects of the self. “Participation cartography” performances hold the power to generate autobiographical conversations and exchanges. Without these (collective) conversations and exchanges, the disclosures made by participants in and through “participation performances” such as Running Stitch conceal more than what they reveal, shattering thereby the cartographic (self-mapping) power of these practices.Running Stitch (2006)This piece is a performative installation that involves the use of Global Positioning Technology and walking performances by participants in order to produce collaboratively a new kind of “map” or visual-art object, more concretely a tapestry. I experienced it in 2006 in Brighton (UK). It was commissioned by Fabrica, “a gallery promoting the understanding of contemporary art” (see: http://www.fabrica.org.uk/).The following is the description made by the artists of the work on their Website (see: http://www.satellitebureau.net/p8.php):Running Stitch is a 5m x 5m tapestry map, created live during the exhibition by charting the journeys of participants through the city...Visitors to the exhibition took a GPS-enabled mobile phone to track their journeys through the city centre. These walks resulted in individual GPS ‘drawings’ of the visitor’s movements that were then projected live in the exhibition to disclose hidden aspects of the city. Each individual route was sewn, as it happened, into a hanging canvas to form an evolving tapestry that revealed a sense of place and interconnection (see also fig. 1). Figure 1. Image: Jen Southern and Jen Hamilton. Running Stitch and audience members. Fabrica Contemporary Art Gallery, 2006.As the vocabulary used by the artists shows, the work was conceived at that time (2006) as a kind of collaborative map-making process by which previously “hidden aspects of the city” can be disclosed. My interrogation of this practice starts by questioning the assumption that cartography, as illustrated by cases such as this, refers to a physical or geographical space—the city. Through the lens of “participation cartography” I mean to show that that what is being mapped in and through practices such as Running Stitch is not (physical) space but the being-who-moves in space. Rather than the city, it is the multiple subjects-who-move in Brighton’s town centre on a particular day in 2006 and within the frame of this event what is the theme and content of the resulting tapestry and of the disclosures it may contain. Accordingly, the resulting visualisation (the map) is to be seen as a documentation of past performances by concrete individuals rather than as a visual representation of urban space or as an autonomous visual-art object. Practices such as this are a particular form of “spatial auto-bio-graphical” performance art. In these practices, the boundaries between notions of cartography and autobiography are blurred and need to be critically addressed.More established critical vocabularies such as locative media (Hemment), psychogeography (Kanarinka), collaborative mapping (Sant), map-art (Wood), or counter-cartographies (Holmes), with which similar works have been discussed typically focus on studying the relationships between the resulting visual-art objects and notions of space, as well as on issues of representation. Similarly, the term site-specific performance, as articulated for instance by Nick Kaye, draws attention primarily to the physical location in which the meaning of a given artwork may be defined (1), rather than on the participation experience by the subject who engages with the artistic process. In my view, a participants-centred approach is needed in order to adequately understand the power of participation performances such as Running Stitch (2006) and its connections with ‘auto-bio-graphical’ performance. Participation Cartography: A New Vocabulary“Participation cartography” introduces an ontological shift in what is typically considered performance art. From live gestures, or more precisely, “live art by artists,” as art historian Rose Lee Goldberg (9) has defined it, performance is re-defined by these practices into live art by participants in response to a spatio-temporal interaction framework provided by artists.Running Stitch illustrates a kind of practice in which the artists’s creation is not a finished artwork or arrangement of actions and conditions (a conventional performance). Rather, the artists’s creation is a kind of “open work” in the sense that the active role of the participant is envisaged by the artist at the very moment of conceiving the work (Eco 3). The participant is, moreover, conceived of by the artist as an individual who collaborates with the artist or group of artists in the very production of the artwork. From an ontological point of view, I conceptualise more specifically practices such as Running Stitch as what Allan Kaprow termed “participation performances,” that is, performances in which those who take part are literally, the ingredients of the performances (Kaprow 184). These were lifelike pieces in which normal routines by non-actors became the performance of a routine. In participation performances or activities every day life “performances” or “presentations of self” (Goffman) are framed as art, and more concretely, as a happening or a new form of theatre or performance art. For instance, by means of instructions to be enacted by non professional performers, in Kaprow’s participation performance Maneuvers the daily routine of the courtesy shown another person when passing through a doorway becomes the artistic performance of that routine (191).I conceptualise practices such as Running Stitch as a particular form of “participation performance,” namely as “participation cartography.” The cartographic power of such practices needs to be studied from the participant’s perspective. Let me illustrate this idea by discussing Running Stitch more in detail.Over a four weeks period, more than hundred participants collaborated in the production of the object called by the artists “the tapestry map”. Each walk was represented by a line of stitches on the canvas, and each walk was stitched with a different colour. At the end of the process, the tapestry was a colourful and intertwined collection of threads stitched onto the same surface (see fig. 2). Figure 2. Image: Jen Southern and Jen Hamilton. Running Stitch and audience members. Fabrica Contemporary Art Gallery, 2006.But, what did each thread disclose about each participant? Who are they? What exactly is disclosed to whom?On DisclosureIn Running Stitch it is possible to speak of two moments of disclosure, each moment illustrating a different scope of the verb “to disclose.” First, there is the disclosure in real time of the physical location of each walker. Second, there is the disclosure of the sense of purpose of the journey and of all what happened to the participant during the walk and after when confronted with the visualisation of her personal walk. It is this second disclosure what can infuse the “map” with personal meaning.In the first case, disclosure is associated with surveillance. Positioning, as used within the framework of Global Positioning Systems, refers to the computational process whereby the geographical location of the carrier of the GPS device can be pinpointed, usually on a conventional digital map. “To disclose” means here to make visible and, more precisely, to “draw” by means of technology the whereabouts of someone—an anonymous other—who is outside of the gallery walking about Brighton’s city centre. This first moment of disclosure happens for all to be seen in the gallery. It is framed by the artists as the core of what constitutes Running Stitch as an artwork.However, the technology-aided map-making that takes place here conceals the mental processes and the autobiographical stories that go with the actual walk—where did the participants go and why, what made them be there in the first place? This can only be known if the participant is given a voice for him or her to “map” herself by presenting the Self in spatio-temporal terms within the public arena of the ongoing artistic event. This would require an additional sharing mechanism to be embedded within the framework provided by the artists. As organised by the artists, two participants at a time were walking during one hour outside in Brighton’s town centre in the area surrounding the Fabrica Gallery. While this was happening, other members of the public could witness the unfolding journeys live on the canvas inside the gallery. While one was watching, there were of course random and casual opportunities to engage in conversations with other onlookers. However, the artists did not devise more formal opportunities for the public to engage in conversations with previous participants or with other onlookers. After the two walkers in turn had returned to the gallery and finished their walks, the next set of walkers would depart. Typically, the previous walkers would stay for some minutes watching at the resulting visualisation of their walk—the running stitches—on the canvas. The framework provided by the artists placed these previous walkers as onlookers rather than as ‘official’ commentators of their own walks. Their comments and their thoughts on the running stitches representing their walk remained secret—concealed, unless spontaneous conversations would randomly communicate (reveal) them.Fortunately, the artists did ask participants-walkers to fill anonymously a feedback sheet before leaving the gallery. In that sheet, participants had an opportunity to share their comments and thoughts about their participation experience with the artists in writing. These responses provide the evidence that, in practices such as this, a second disclosure moment can take place and, indeed, needs to be seen as integral to the cartographic process. Disclosure, in this second moment, is not associated with surveillance but with the ideas of sharing, self-reflexion, subjective positioning, and self-mapping.“My walk was an act of love…”One Running Stitch participant wrote anonymously in the above mentioned feedback sheet:My walk was for a friend of mine –Sandra- who’s very ill. I wanted to go past various landmarks that had meaning for us both and end up in Prestor Park where I could make a large S shape. There was another park where we used to meet where I wanted to make an ‘X’ shape. Sandra signed her e-mails SX. (“My walk was an act of love”).This testimony, which was not shared with others during the cartographic process called Running Stitch but framed by the artists as private participants’s feedback, not only comments about the walk but constitutes it. This story explains what makes the participant ‘be there’, go to Prestor Park, and walk/draw an “X” shape on the canvas. Rather than a statement about place in itself, it is a “spatial auto-bio-graphical” presentation of Self as a friend of Sandra. Within the framework of “participation cartography,” a “spatial auto-bio-graphical presentation” is a presentation of Self in spatio-temporal terms that involves an act of self-reading. By means of reflexive language, the participant gives an account of his walk as represented by his running stitches on the canvas. Literarily, by drawing his walk on the canvas via the Running Stitch framework, the participant made his Self legible. However, nobody but the walker himself is in the position to make an authoritative reading of his walk. The terms “reading” and “legibility” refer in this context to the ability to both remember and make sense of one’s own steps. In this sense, the drawing—the trace of the walk—must be seen as a mnemonic device enabling the subject who walked to perform self-reading, hermeneutic acts. Disclosure, as illustrated by this case, is then linked with a self-reading process in terms of a walk—a spatio-temporal live process—as documented on the canvas.Certainly, the Self of the participant emerges as the theme of his map as drawn on the canvas: “I wanted to go past various landmarks…” Rather than space, it is the being-who-moves in space what is being read and mapped through self-reflexive language.According to Ervin Goffman’s dramaturgical approach to social interaction, the notion of presentation of Self takes relevance whenever an individual “enters the presence of others” (14). To be in the presence of others, whether wittingly or unwittingly, involves a presentation of Self. Goffman’s influential The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1959) is primarily concerned with arguing that the ways in which one presents the Self may direct the interlocutors’s attention towards those aspects of the Self one chooses to highlight (14). A premise underlying Goffman’s work is that a presentation of Self generates impressions and that one can manage the impressions one makes of oneself. A crucial concept in his theory is the notion of control: one can control and guide the other’s impressions of oneself, and a number of techniques can be employed to do so. It is crucial to understand that in practices such as Running Stitch, participants are enabled to occupy a dual position as “writers” and “readers” of the Self, as positioners and as the ones positioned. As “writers,” participants position themselves physically, graphically and literally both in the city and “on the map.” This takes place by means of a walking-drawing performance via GPS technology. As “readers”, participants position themselves linguistically (by means of autobiographical stories) and in their mind in relation with the performed space in question.By presenting his walk with words as ‘a walk for a friend of mine—Sandra—who’s very ill’, this participant positions himself subjectively in relation to his performed walk. His auto-biographical narrative infuses his walk with meaning. There is a relatively new approach in social psychology called “positioning theory” (Harre and Slocum). Drawing on Goffman’s work on social interaction, the issue that this theory investigates is the dynamics of creation of patterns of meaning. How can these dynamics be brought to light?Positioning theory analyses the emergence of meaning in terms of story lines. It is concerned exclusively with analysis at the level of acts; that is, of the meaning of actions as expressed through story lines that infuse those actions with meaning. A positioning is not a theoretical knowledge about one’s relationship with a given space. Rather, it is a practised knowledge. Moreover, it is an act of freedom. It is a choice. And it is an ethical choice in the sense that the one who positions himself claims responsibility for his own acts and decisions. The “I” of the one who positions himself emerges as the actor, author, and theme of the narratives that go with that decision. Such an act writes subjectivity (biography). Paraphrasing philosopher Emmanuel Lévinas, a reflexive positioning is a disclosure and opening of being that takes place for others and with others and where being manifests, loses, and finds itself again “so as to possess itself by showing itself, proposing itself as a theme, exposing itself in truth” (99). A reflexive positioning is a moment of truth. However, and still with Lévinas, truth, “before characterizing a statement or a judgment, consists in the exhibition of being” (23). In other words, by presenting the self in public and in spatio-temporal terms, the subject who presents herself produces truth about herself as a relational and spatial being.Positioning, or the Enactment of a Poetics of SharingI use the term sharing as the act of presenting private, subjective, everyday life, and autobiographical material in public contexts. My notion of the term sharing is inspired by Deirdre Heddon’s (21) account of how consciousness-raising events in which women shared personal concerns with each other was tied with the emergence of feminist, autobiographical live performances. In the context of such feminist events, according to Heddon, sharing and consciousness-raising processes were linked.My argument is that, in a similar fashion to feminist’s consciousness-raising events, the “knowledge” that the representations (maps) claim to represent in practices such as Running Stitch cannot be achieved if the voices behind the trajectories are not activated. The transformation of the represented trajectory into self-mapping knowledge cannot be achieved if the individual who took part does not “read” herself by sharing her spatial autobiographical narrative with others. For such a self-mapping to take place, artists need to devise a mechanism for participants to share reflections about their participation experience and embed it in the framework they provide. I use the word poetics as synonymous with the notion of “technology” as articulated by Martin Heidegger in his 1955 lecture on the question of technology. A poetics is “a way of revealing truth” (qtd. in McKenzie 156). In this sense, “participation cartography” is a technology that enables participants to bring forth “truth” (rather than simply disclose truth) about their self as a being-in-motion. However, it is a way of revealing that also conceals. This is precisely what makes this way of revealing a poiesis: it reveals and conceals at once. For instance, the uniqueness of my Running Stitch walk was concealed to me. I walked with my wife, our son, and a couple of friends who lived in Brighton at that time. Our walk was a means for us to spend some time together. In a way, it was a means for building our relationship. The meaning of our walk became conscious to me after I had read the story of Sandra’s friend and the other ninety or so stories. Without these (collective) conversations and exchanges, the disclosures made by participants in and through ‘participation performances’ such as Running Stitch conceal more than what they reveal, shattering thereby the cartographic (self-mapping) power of these practices.The act of validating the sequence of stitches as his is a crucial performative element of this process. It completes the disclosure process: it is the moment in which the voiceless walker on the canvas becomes a speaking subject who authors himself by recognising himself in the uniqueness of his auto-bio-graphical stitch. His spatial autobiographical narrative is a crucial self-positioning performance. By not framing moments of sharing such as this as integral to the cartographic process, I suggest that the artist may scatter the self-mapping and self-positioning agency of this practice. In consequence, the representation loses sight of what it claims to seek and represent. ReferencesEco, Umberto. The Role of the Reader: Explorations in the Semiotics of Texts. London: Hutchinson, 1981.Fabrica Contemporary Art Gallery. 2009. Fabrica Gallery. 6 Dec. 2009 < http://www.fabrica.org.uk/ >.Goffman, Ervin. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. London: Penguin, 1990.Goldberg, Rose Lee. Performance Art: from Futurism to the Present. London: Thames and Hudson, 2001.Hamilton, Jen, and Southern, Jen. Running Stitch. 2006. 20 Oct. 2009 ‹http://www.satellitebureau.net/p8.php›.Harre, Rom, and Nikki Slocum. “Disputes as Complex Social Events: On the Uses of Positioning Theory”. Common Knowledge 9.1 (2003): 100–118.Heddon, Deirdre. Autobiography and Performance. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.Heidegger, Martin. The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, Trans. William Lovitt. New York: Harper and Row, 1977.Hemment, Drew. “Locative Arts.” Leonardo 39.4 (2006): 348–355,Holmes, Brian. “Counter Cartographies.” Else/where: Mapping New Cartographies of Networks and Territories. Eds. Janet Abrams and Peter Hall. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Design Institute, 2006.Kanarinka, “Art-Machines, Body-Ovens and Map-Recipes: Entries for a Psychogeographic Dictionary.” Cartographic Perspectives 53 (2006): 24–40.Kaprow, Allan. “Participation Performance.” Essays on the Blurring of Art and Life. Ed. J. Kelley.. Berkeley, Los Angeles, New York: University of California Press, 2003.Kaye, Nick. Site-Specific Art: Performance, Place, and Documentation. London: Routledge, 2000.Lévinas, Emmanuel. Otherwise than Being, or, Beyond Essence. Trans. Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh: Duquesne UP, 2006.McKenzie, Jon. Perform or Else: From Discipline to Performance. London: Routledge, 2001.“My walk was an act of love.” Unpublished anonymous participant's feedback sheet. Running Stitch. Jen Southern and Jen Hamilton. Brighton, U.K.: Fabrica Contemporary Art Gallery, 2006.Running Stitch. Jen Southern and Jen Hamilton. Brighton, UK.: Fabrica Contemporary Art Gallery, 2006. Sant, Alison. “Redefining the Basemap.” TCM Locative Reader (2004). 16 Jan. 2007 < http://locative.net/tcmreader/index.php?mapping;sant >.Wood, Denis. “Map Art.” Cartographic Perspectives: Journal of the North American Cartographic Information Society 53 (2006): 5–14.

Cars crest the rise behind the truck stop and drop cones of light over the highway. Ryan dunks his head under a tap. He rubs red dust from his pores and tries to drink some water, but it slides down his throat like a length of wire.His older brother Josh fills their drink bottles. “Wanna get some chips or something?”Ryan shakes his head. He’s sick of watching Josh’s pulpy tongue poke his broken tooth. Their dad never left visible marks before—Ryan used to wish for a cut or bruise, so someone at school could see it. He shivers and clutches his coat tight. Josh says, “We got money.”Ryan wonders how Josh stole it. He didn’t know there was anything to steal. He stares back down the road.“Fine, fuck, I’ll get—”Ryan nudges him and he looks over his shoulder. A square silhouette approaches. The brothers stand back as a two-storey house pulls up in front of them, strapped to the back of a truck. The house is cut in half, patched with pale afterimages of furniture and light fittings. A door slams and a tattooed man with a white wedge of beard climbs out of the cabin. He stretches and heads for the toilets. Josh sidles up to the house and runs his hands along the straight, fresh edge of the floorboards. Sawdust settles onto his hoodie. He laughs and hurls his bag into one of the rooms. “Shit yeah. You coming?” Ryan hesitates. He remembers the time Josh’s Torana—a windowless wreck, used for drifting in paddocks and chasing kangaroos—broke down at the back of their property. Ryan and their dad towed Josh in the four-wheel drive while he sat in the Torana, steering with his knees. He started swinging wide, bouncing the back of the car off tree trunks, until he overshot and hit an old gum headfirst. The cable snapped, jerking the four-wheel drive to a halt. Ryan’s head smacked against the dash. Josh emerged from the smoking Torana with a bloody nose, laughing hysterically—thumping the bonnet and laughing hysterically—even after his dad came over and hit him on the back of the head. Through a window in the far wall they watch the driver eat a sausage roll. Ryan follows Josh upstairs and they stand on the edge of the second floor, where the distorted acoustics amplify the traffic sounds. From this angle, the outback barely conceals the curvature of the earth. The moon is a globe of bone amongst the clouds, a ball and socket. Ryan thinks they’re in a kid’s bedroom; a mural on the far wall depicts the bottom of the ocean and a tinted window spreads faded colours on the floor. He tries to imagine the room with all its walls in place. The brothers hide in a back room when they hear the driver's footsteps. The driver slides a torch over the house and light filters through the floorboards in front of them. They press themselves against the wall. Ryan starts shivering again and Josh elbows him in the ribs. The truck eases onto the road and the house groans, its unsupported floorboards dipping and lifting like piano keys. Signs and lights flick past. The brothers creep downstairs, struggling to stay upright on the vibrating staircase. Josh opens two tins of baked beans. A string of cold sauce as thick as an artery spills down Ryan’s neck. They place the empty tins on the floor and bet on which one will roll off the edge first. Josh wins. He grabs Ryan’s head and rubs his knuckles into it. Josh runs into the bathroom, which juts out over the edge of the trailer. Ryan hangs back in the doorway. Instead of a toilet Josh finds a small circle cut out of the floor. He steadies himself and pisses in it. Ryan sprints into the other room and pisses out the window. They laugh and piss until a horn blares behind them. Ryan ducks. Urine splatters on the sill. He scrabbles with his pants. He’s pissed on someone’s windscreen. The horn’s still going. Headlights hit the trees beside him. Josh comes in from the toilet and Ryan grabs him and pulls him to the ground. A four-wheel drive appears beside them. There’s barely enough room on the road; the truck swerves away and a branch scrapes along the roof of the house. The passengers hang out the windows, screaming abuse. Josh stumbles onto his feet and gives them the finger. Someone hurls an empty coke can and it lands on the second floor. Then the car is gone and only the wind remains, filling the house with the whining roar of a depressurised aircraft. The trees are a smear of static. Josh smacks Ryan on the back of the head. Ryan swings instinctively. Josh deflects his fist and knocks him to the floor and Ryan’s head hits the skirting board. Something crumbles. Ryan presses his thumb into Josh’s black eye and Josh twists his arm behind his back. When they were kids Josh pinned Ryan in this position and shoved gravel into his mouth. Ryan remembers the stones scratching his teeth, the bloody mud he spat out. Josh lets him up and Ryan scrambles into the corner, sick with sudden panic. He kicks his bag away. Josh wipes his mouth and laughs. He crouches down and stares at the spot where Ryan’s head hit the wall. One of the panels has collapsed inwards. Josh snorts. “Look what your fucking head did!” He pulls out the panel and tosses it onto the road. He shines his torch into the space behind it, brushes away the cobwebs and extracts a cheap gold box. “Well, well, well,” he mutters. He sets it on the ground and dusts the lid off. He tries to pry it open it but it’s locked. Ryan looks over. Josh grips the box in both hands and pulls. For a moment his top teeth dig into his lip and then the box bursts open, scattering pieces of silver. Ryan reaches out his hand, expecting jewellery, but he jerks it back when he finds a razor near his foot. The floor is littered with needles and knives. Josh picks up a brown glass bottle and squints at the label. “Iodine.” They stare at the blades in silence. A sand bank slides past as steadily as a sine wave. Josh carves the word FUCK into the floor with a scalpel. Ryan cringes but doesn’t dare warn him about diseases. On long-distance drives Ryan often stares out the window and imagines his vision is a laser-beam, cutting cleanly through cities, forests, passers-by. Now he pictures a wrecking ball swinging into the darkness and colliding with a run-down rollercoaster. He imagines the ball smashing through the tangle of struts and tracks; wrapping around and around a corkscrew section like a yoyo; sending a train of carriages hurtling through the remains of a loop. A few hours later the house passes through a town surrounded by silos and steel windmills. The brothers retreat to the mural room. Streetlights slide on and off them: orange, black, orange, black, orange, black. Josh waves at the people on the balcony of the pub. In a slouched house over a hardware store Ryan glimpses, through half-closed curtains, a topless woman sitting on the edge of a bed, combing her hair. He tries to make out the name of the town on the shopfronts. Josh lights a joint, indifferent. Ryan slides his torch over the door frame, which is marked with the family’s heights. The vibrations blur the words, but he makes out the name “Molly” at eye level. He wonders if this is her room. He stares at the underwater scene and remembers reading somewhere that squids lay eggs via a funnel under their eyes, so their offspring emerge like hard, heavy tears. Josh offers the joint to Ryan, who snatches it and takes a shallow drag. Josh brushes dandruff off his sleeves. Ryan drops the joint when a siren starts to wail: they scramble to their feet and run over to the back window, fearing the police, but the road’s empty. Josh looks up and shouts, “Smoke detector!” Ryan starts waving his jacket to clear the smoke, but Josh just rips the detector from the ceiling and hurls it into a dam beside the road. Once the houses thin out the brothers climb back downstairs and unroll their sleeping bags. Ryan uses his pack as a pillow but Josh’s is still full of tins. Dark branches clasp the stars. Ryan gets up and tugs at his penis in the toilet, watching the bitumen slide under the hole like a belt sander. He tries to remember the scene above the hardware store—the line of tea lights on the windowsill, the mosquito net over the bed, the woman’s small, pale breasts—but his mind keeps replaying the image of a young girl pressing a razor into her thigh. They're woken a few hours later by footsteps. Ryan opens his eyes. Josh is already on his feet. “What the hell is that?” The ceiling creaks again and Josh picks up the torch and the scalpel. “I'm gonna take a look.” They creep upstairs. The hall is empty. Something shuffles in one of the rooms and slams against the wall. Josh whispers, “There ain’t no doors on that side of the hall. The fucking door's in the other half of the house.' He grabs the end of the wall and leans out, struggling to see around it. The wind blasts him back and he cups his hands over his black eye. He pushes the torch into Ryan’s chest. “Go. You go.” Ryan tries to turn away but Josh blocks him and says, “Don’t be a dickhead. Just see what’s over there.” The dark, crinkled skin around his eye shines with tears. “Fuck’s sake, my eye’s killing me. I can’t go.” He pushes Ryan again. With his free hand Ryan feels for the frame behind the plaster. He swings his leg around the wall, plants his foot on the other side, presses his chest against the end of the wall and edges into the other room. It’s empty. Sliding doors in the far wall conceal a walk-in wardrobe. A door on the right leads to an en suite. His foot crunches on the coke can and he kicks it onto the road. He pushes the bathroom door open and the torch beam slides over the tiles. He glimpses movement behind him in the mirror, but it’s only the trees. The tiles remind him of the killing floor on their chicken farm. When he and Josh were little their dad just cut the chickens’ heads off with an axe and let them run around spurting blood out of their necks, but a few years ago he got new machinery installed. Now the chickens were strung up by their feet on an overhead conveyor belt that carried them to a trough filled with electrified water, which killed them as soon as their heads hit it. He walks back into the bedroom and stares at the sliding doors. “Oi hurry up!” Josh shouts from the hall. “Fuck you.” “Fuck you, dickhead!” Ryan pushes a sliding door open and shines his torch in. A man crouches in the darkness, gripping a bottle of colourless liquid in both hands. His clothes are stuffed with newspapers; his beard clings to his chin like clotted blood caked together. He stares at Ryan and shouts, “Bastards! Leave me alone ya bastards! Get outta here! Get out!” He hurls the bottle and it smacks into Ryan’s shoulder. The bottle smashes on the floor; shards of glass cascade onto the highway. The man stumbles out of the wardrobe, lunging at Ryan, grabbing at his jacket. Ryan reaches around the wall and Josh pulls him over. The man slams his fists rhythmically, like pistons, into the other side of the wall. They scramble downstairs and Ryan takes off his jacket and waves it over the edge, screaming to get the driver’s attention. He looks up and sees the man shouting at him, tears streaming sideways across his face. Josh pulls Ryan back but he struggles free. Ryan crouches near the edge and stares at the scrub racing past. There’s a hill ahead and the truck’s slowing down. Josh sees what he’s thinking and calls him an idiot, but he’s already leaning forwards, judging the distance, waiting for the driver to downshift. Josh grabs him by the collar and hisses something but he doesn’t listen and pulls away and jumps. His head smacks solidly against a root and his arm twists under his torso, grinding into the gravel. He lies on his back and spits out black dust. Blood dribbles out of his arm. When the house reaches the top of the hill something flies out and bounces along the side of the road. Ryan gets to his feet and limps towards it. He searches through the bushes and finds his bag with half the tins in it. The roof of the house disappears over the top of the hill and he imagines Josh reaching his destination, perhaps a few hours after dawn, on a small hill out in the bush somewhere, where the morning light is as sallow as blood plasma and the other half of the house is already waiting.

As the ball dropped on 1999, is it any wonder that No Doubt played, “It’s the End of the World as We Know It” by R.E.M. live on MTV? Any discussion of the Nineties—and its pinnacle moment, Y2K—requires a discussion of both the cover and the glitch, two performative and technological enactments that fomented the collapse between author-reader and user-machine that has, twenty years later, become normalised in today’s Post Internet culture. By staging failure and inviting the audience to participate, the glitch and the cover call into question the original and the origin story. This breakdown of normative borders has prompted the convergence of previously demarcated media, genres, and cultures, a constellation from which to recognise a stochastic hybrid form. The Cover as a Revelation of Collaborative MurmurBefore Sean Parker collaborated with Shawn Fanning to launch Napster on 1 June 1999, networked file distribution existed as cumbersome text-based programs like Internet Relay Chat and Usenet, servers which resembled bulletin boards comprising multiple categories of digitally ripped files. Napster’s simple interface, its advanced search filters, and its focus on music and audio files fostered a peer-to-peer network that became the fastest growing website in history, registering 80 million users in less than two years.In harnessing the transgressive power of the Internet to force a new mode of content sharing, Napster forced traditional providers to rethink what constitutes “content” at a moment which prefigures our current phenomena of “produsage” (Bruns) and the vast popularity of user-generated content. At stake is not just the democratisation of art but troubling the very idea of intellectual property, which is to say, the very concept of ownership.Long before the Internet was re-routed from military servers and then mainstreamed, Michel Foucault understood the efficacy of anonymous interactions on the level of literature, imagining a culture where discourse would circulate without any need for an author. But what he was asking in 1969 is something we can better answer today, because it seems less germane to call into question the need for an author in a culture in which everyone is writing, producing, and reproducing text, and more effective to think about re-evaluating the notion of a single author, or what it means to write by yourself. One would have to testify to the particular medium we have at our disposal, the Internet’s ultimate permissibility, its provocations for collaboration and co-creation. One would have to surrender the idea that authors own anything besides our will to keep producing, and our desire for change; and to modulate means to resist without negating, to alter without omitting, to enable something new to come forward; the unfolding of the text into the anonymity of a murmur.We should remind ourselves that “to author” all the way down to its Latin roots signifies advising, witnessing, and transferring. We should be reminded that to author something means to forget the act of saying “I,” to forget it or to make it recede in the background in service of the other or others, on behalf of a community. The de-centralisation of Web development and programming initiated by Napster inform a poetics of relation, an always-open structure in which, as Édouard Glissant said, “the creator of a text is effaced, or rather, is done away with, to be revealed in the texture of his creation” (25). When a solid melts, it reveals something always underneath, something at the bottom, something inside—something new and something that was always already there. A cover, too, is both a revival and a reworking, an update and an interpretation, a retrospective tribute and a re-version that looks toward the future. In performing the new, the original as singular is called into question, replaced by an increasingly fetishised copy made up of and made by multiples.Authorial Effacement and the Exigency of the ErrorY2K, otherwise known as the Millennium Bug, was a coding problem, an abbreviation made to save memory space which would disrupt computers during the transition from 1999 to 2000, when it was feared that the new year would become literally unrecognisable. After an estimated $300 billion in upgraded hardware and software was spent to make computers Y2K-compliant, something more extraordinary than global network collapse occurred as midnight struck: nothing.But what if the machine admits the possibility of accident? Implicit in the admission of any accident is the disclosure of a new condition—something to be heard, to happen, from the Greek ad-cadere, which means to fall. In this drop into non-repetition, the glitch actualises an idea about authorship that necessitates multi-user collaboration; the curtain falls only to reveal the hidden face of technology, which becomes, ultimately, instructions for its re-programming. And even as it deviates, the new form is liable to become mainstreamed into a new fashion. “Glitch’s inherently critical moment(um)” (Menkman 8) indicates this potential for technological self-insurgence, while suggesting the broader cultural collapse of generic markers and hierarchies, and its ensuing flow into authorial fluidity.This feeling of shock, this move “towards the ruins of destructed meaning” (Menkman 29) inherent in any encounter with the glitch, forecasted not the immediate horror of Y2K, but the delayed disasters of 9/11, Hurricane Katrina, Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill, Indian Ocean tsunami, Sichuan Province earthquake, global financial crisis, and two international wars that would all follow within the next nine years. If, as Menkman asserts, the glitch, in representing a loss of self-control “captures the machine revealing itself” (30), what also surfaces is the tipping point that edges us toward a new becoming—not only the inevitability of surrender between machine and user, but their reversibility. Just as crowds stood, transfixed before midnight of the new millennium in anticipation of the error, or its exigency, it’s always the glitch I wait for; it’s always the glitch I aim to re-create, as if on command. The accidental revelation, or the machine breaking through to show us its insides. Like the P2P network that Napster introduced to culture, every glitch produces feedback, a category of noise (Shannon) influencing the machine’s future behaviour whereby potential users might return the transmission.Re-Orienting the Bizarre in Fantasy and FictionIt is in the fantasy of dreams, and their residual leakage into everyday life, evidenced so often in David Lynch’s Twin Peaks, where we can locate a similar authorial agency. The cult Nineties psycho-noir, and its discontinuous return twenty-six years later, provoke us into reconsidering the science of sleep as the art of fiction, assembling an alternative, interactive discourse from found material.The turning in and turning into in dreams is often described as an encounter with the “bizarre,” a word which indicates our lack of understanding about the peculiar processes that normally happen inside our heads. Dreams are inherently and primarily bizarre, Allan J. Hobson argues, because during REM sleep, our noradrenergic and serotonergic systems do not modulate the activated brain, as they do in waking. “The cerebral cortex and hippocampus cannot function in their usual oriented and linear logical way,” Hobson writes, “but instead create odd and remote associations” (71). But is it, in fact, that our dreams are “bizarre” or is it that the model itself is faulty—a precept premised on the normative, its dependency upon generalisation and reducibility—what is bizarre if not the ordinary modulations that occur in everyday life?Recall Foucault’s interest not in what a dream means but what a dream does. How it rematerialises in the waking world and its basis in and effect on imagination. Recall recollection itself, or Erin J. Wamsley’s “Dreaming and Offline Memory Consolidation.” “A ‘function’ for dreaming,” Wamsley writes, “hinges on the difficult question of whether conscious experience in general serves any function” (433). And to think about the dream as a specific mode of experience related to a specific theory of knowledge is to think about a specific form of revelation. It is this revelation, this becoming or coming-to-be, that makes the connection to crowd-sourced content production explicit—dreams serve as an audition or dress rehearsal in which new learning experiences with others are incorporated into the unconscious so that they might be used for production in the waking world. Bert O. States elaborates, linking the function of the dream with the function of the fiction writer “who makes models of the world that carry the imprint and structure of our various concerns. And it does this by using real people, or ‘scraps’ of other people, as the instruments of hypothetical facts” (28). Four out of ten characters in a dream are strangers, according to Calvin Hall, who is himself a stranger, someone I’ve never met in waking life or in a dream. But now that I’ve read him, now that I’ve written him into this work, he seems closer to me. Twin Peak’s serial lesson for viewers is this—even the people who seem strangers to us can interact with and intervene in our processes of production.These are the moments that a beginning takes place. And even if nothing directly follows, this transfer constitutes the hypothesised moment of production, an always-already perhaps, the what-if stimulus of charged possibility; the soil plot, or plot line, for freedom. Twin Peaks is a town in which the bizarre penetrates the everyday so often that eventually, the bizarre is no longer bizarre, but just another encounter with the ordinary. Dream sequences are common, but even more common—and more significant—are the moments in which what might otherwise be a dream vision ruptures into real life; these moments propel the narrative.Exhibit A: A man who hasn’t gone outside in a while begins to crumble, falling to the earth when forced to chase after a young girl, who’s just stolen the secret journal of another young girl, which he, in turn, had stolen.B: A horse appears in the middle of the living room after a routine vacuum cleaning and a subtle barely-there transition, a fade-out into a fade-in, what people call a dissolve. No one notices, or thinks to point out its presence. Or maybe they’re distracted. Or maybe they’ve already forgotten. Dissolve.(I keep hitting “Save As.” As if renaming something can also transform it.)C: All the guests at the Great Northern Hotel begin to dance the tango on cue—a musical, without any music.D: After an accident, a middle-aged woman with an eye patch—she was wearing the eye patch before the accident—believes she’s seventeen again. She enrolls in Twin Peaks High School and joins the cheerleading team.E: A woman pretending to be a Japanese businessman ambles into the town bar to meet her estranged husband, who fails to recognise his cross-dressing, race-swapping wife.F: A girl with blond hair is murdered, only to come back as another girl, with the same face and a different name. And brown hair. They’re cousins.G: After taking over her dead best friend’s Meals on Wheels route, Donna Hayward walks in to meet a boy wearing a tuxedo, sitting on the couch with his fingers clasped: a magician-in-training. “Sometimes things can happen just like this,” he says with a snap while the camera cuts to his grandmother, bed-ridden, and the appearance of a plate of creamed corn that vanishes as soon as she announces its name.H: A woman named Margaret talks to and through a log. The log, cradled in her arms wherever she goes, becomes a key witness.I: After a seven-minute diegetic dream sequence, which includes a one-armed man, a dwarf, a waltz, a dead girl, a dialogue played backward, and a significantly aged representation of the dreamer, Agent Cooper wakes up and drastically shifts his investigation of a mysterious small-town murder. The dream gives him agency; it turns him from a detective staring at a dead-end to one with a map of clues. The next day, it makes him a storyteller; all the others, sitting tableside in the middle of the woods become a captive audience. They become readers. They read into his dream to create their own scenarios. Exhibit I. The cycle of imagination spins on.Images re-direct and obfuscate meaning, a process of over-determination which Foucault says results in “a multiplication of meanings which override and contradict each other” (DAE 34). In the absence of image, the process of imagination prevails. In the absence of story, real drama in our conscious life, we form complex narratives in our sleep—our imaginative unconscious. Sometimes they leak out, become stories in our waking life, if we think to compose them.“A bargain has been struck,” says Harold, an under-5 bit player, later, in an episode called “Laura’s Secret Diary.” So that she might have the chance to read Laura Palmer’s diary, Donna Hayward agrees to talk about her own life, giving Harold the opportunity to write it down in his notebook: his “living novel” the new chapter which reads, after uncapping his pen and smiling, “Donna Hayward.”He flips to the front page and sets a book weight to keep the page in place. He looks over at Donna sheepishly. “Begin.”Donna begins talking about where she was born, the particulars of her father—the lone town doctor—before she interrupts the script and asks her interviewer about his origin story. Not used to people asking him the questions, Harold’s mouth drops and he stops writing. He puts his free hand to his chest and clears his throat. (The ambient, wind-chime soundtrack intensifies.) “I grew up in Boston,” he finally volunteers. “Well, actually, I grew up in books.”He turns his head from Donna to the notebook, writing feverishly, as if he’s begun to write his own responses as the camera cuts back to his subject, Donna, crossing her legs with both hands cupped at her exposed knee, leaning in to tell him: “There’s things you can’t get in books.”“There’s things you can’t get anywhere,” he returns, pen still in his hand. “When we dream, they can be found in other people.”What is a call to composition if not a call for a response? It is always the audience which makes a work of art, re-framed in our own image, the same way we re-orient ourselves in a dream to negotiate its “inconsistencies.” Bizarreness is merely a consequence of linguistic limitations, the overwhelming sensory dream experience which can only be re-framed via a visual representation. And so the relationship between the experience of reading and dreaming is made explicit when we consider the associations internalised in the reader/audience when ingesting a passage of words on a page or on the stage, objects that become mental images and concept pictures, a lens of perception that we may liken to another art form: the film, with its jump-cuts and dissolves, so much like the defamiliarising and dislocating experience of dreaming, especially for the dreamer who wakes. What else to do in that moment but write about it?Evidence of the bizarre in dreams is only the evidence of the capacity of our human consciousness at work in the unconscious; the moment in which imagination and memory come together to create another reality, a spectrum of reality that doesn’t posit a binary between waking and sleeping, a spectrum of reality that revels in the moments where the two coalesce, merge, cross-pollinate—and what action glides forward in its wake? Sustained un-hesitation and the wish to stay inside one’s self. To be conscious of the world outside the dream means the end of one. To see one’s face in the act of dreaming would require the same act of obliteration. Recognition of the other, and of the self, prevents the process from being fulfilled. Creative production and dreaming, like voyeurism, depend on this same lack of recognition, or the recognition of yourself as other. What else is a dream if not a moment of becoming, of substituting or sublimating yourself for someone else?We are asked to relate a recent dream or we volunteer an account, to a friend or lover. We use the word “seem” in nearly every description, when we add it up or how we fail to. Everything seems to be a certain way. It’s not a place but a feeling. James, another character on Twin Peaks, says the same thing, after someone asks him, “Where do you want to go?” but before he hops on his motorcycle and rides off into the unknowable future outside the frame. Everything seems like something else, based on our own associations, our own knowledge of people and things. Offline memory consolidation. Seeming and semblance. An uncertainty of appearing—both happening and seeing. How we mediate—and re-materialise—the dream through text is our attempt to re-capture imagination, to leave off the image and better become it. If, as Foucault says, the dream is always a dream of death, its purpose is a call to creation.Outside of dreams, something bizarre occurs. We call it novelty or news. We might even bestow it with fame. A man gets on the wrong plane and ends up halfway across the world. A movie is made into the moment of his misfortune. Years later, in real life and in movie time, an Iranian refugee can’t even get on the plane; he is turned away by UK immigration officials at Charles de Gaulle, so he spends the next sixteen years living in the airport lounge; when he departs in real life, the movie (The Terminal, 2004) arrives in theaters. Did it take sixteen years to film the terminal exile? How bizarre, how bizarre. OMC’s eponymous refrain of the 1996 one-hit wonder, which is another way of saying, an anomaly.When all things are counted and countable in today’s algorithmic-rich culture, deviance becomes less of a statistical glitch and more of a testament to human peculiarity; the repressed idiosyncrasies of man before machine but especially the fallible tendencies of mankind within machines—the non-repetition of chance that the Nineties emblematised in the form of its final act. The point is to imagine what comes next; to remember waiting together for the end of the world. There is no need to even open your eyes to see it. It is just a feeling. ReferencesBruns, Axel. “Towards Produsage: Futures for User-Led Content Production.” Cultural Attitudes towards Technology and Communication 2006: Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference, eds. Fay Sudweeks, Herbert Hrachovec, and Charles Ess. Murdoch: School of Information Technology, 2006. 275-84. <https://eprints.qut.edu.au/4863/1/4863_1.pdf>.Foucault, Michel. “Dream, Imagination and Existence.” Dream and Existence. Ed. Keith Hoeller. Pittsburgh: Review of Existential Psychology & Psychiatry, 1986. 31-78.———. “What Is an Author?” The Foucault Reader: An Introduction to Foucault’s Thought. Ed. Paul Rainbow. New York: Penguin, 1991.Glissant, Édouard. Poetics of Relation. Trans. Betsy Wing. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1997.Hall, Calvin S. The Meaning of Dreams. New York: McGraw Hill, 1966.Hobson, J. Allan. The Dream Drugstore: Chemically Altered State of Conscious­ness. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001.Menkman, Rosa. The Glitch Moment(um). Amsterdam: Network Notebooks, 2011.Shannon, Claude Elwood. “A Mathematical Theory of Communication.” The Bell System Technical Journal 27 (1948): 379-423.States, Bert O. “Bizarreness in Dreams and Other Fictions.” The Dream and the Text: Essays on Literature and Language. Ed. Carol Schreier Rupprecht. Albany: SUNY P, 1993.Twin Peaks. Dir. David Lynch. ABC and Showtime. 1990-3 & 2017. Wamsley, Erin. “Dreaming and Offline Memory Consolidation.” Current Neurology and Neuroscience Reports 14.3 (2014): 433. “Y2K Bug.” Encyclopedia Britannica. 18 July 2018. <https://www.britannica.com/technology/Y2K-bug>.

It was always based on a teenage love story between the two kids. One is a sniffer and one is not. It was designed for Central Australia because we do write these kids off there. Not only in town, where the headlines for the newspapers every second day is about ‘the problem,’ ‘the teenager problem of kids wandering the streets’ and ‘why don’t we send them back to their communities’ and that sort of stuff. Then there’s the other side of it. Elders in Aboriginal communities have been taught that kids who sniff get brain damage, so as soon as they see a kid sniffing they think ‘well they’re rubbish now, they’re brain damaged.’ So the elders are writing these kids off as well, as in ‘they are brain damaged so they’re no use now, they’ll be in wheelchairs for the rest of their lives.’ This is not true, it’s just information for elders that hasn’t been given to them. That is the world I was working with. I wanted to show two incredibly beautiful children who have fought all their lives just to breathe and how incredibly strong they are and how we should be celebrating them and backing them up. I wanted to show that to Central Australia, and if the rest of Australia or the world get involved that’s fantastic. (Thornton in interview)Warwick Thornton’s 2009 film Samson and Delilah won the hearts of Australians as well as a bag of awards — and rightly so. It is a breathtaking film that, as review after review will tell you, is about the bravery, hopelessness, optimism and struggles of two Indigenous youths. In telling this story, the film extends, inverts and challenges notions of waste: wasted youths, wasted memory, wasted history, wasted opportunities, getting wasted and wasted voices. The narrative and the film as a cultural object raise questions about being discarded and “the inescapable fact that the experience of catastrophe in the past century can only be articulated from its remains, our history sifted from among these storied deposits.” (Neville and Villeneuve 2). The purpose of this paper is to examine reaction to the film, and where this reaction has positioned the film in Australian filmmaking history. In reading the reception of the film, I want to consider the film’s contribution to dialogical cultural representations by applying Marcia Langton’s idea of intersubjectivity.In his review, Sean Gorman argues thatThe main reason for the film’s importance is it enables white Australians who cannot be bothered reading books or engaging with Indigenous Australians in any way (other than watching them play football perhaps) the smallest sliver of a world that they have no idea about. The danger however in an engagement by settler society with a film like Samson and Delilah is that the potential shock of it may be too great, as the world which it portrays is, for many, an unknown Australia. Hence, for the settler filmgoer, the issues that the film discusses may be just too hard, too unreal, and their reaction will be limited to perhaps a brief bout of anger or astonishment followed by indifference. (81.1)It is this “engagement by settler society” that I wish to consider: how the voices that we hear speaking about the film are shifting attention from the ‘Other’ to more dialogical cultural representations, that is, non-Indigenous Australia’s emerging awareness of what has previously been wasted, discarded and positioned as valueless. I find Gorman’s surmise of white Australia’s shock with a world they know nothing about, and their potential power to return to a state of indifference about it, to be an interesting notion. Colonisation has created the world that Samson and Delilah live in, and the white community is as involved as the Indigenous one in the struggles of Samson and Delilah. If “settler” society is unaware, that unawareness comes from a history of non-Indigenous power that denies, excludes, and ignores. For this reason, Samson and Delilah is a dialogical cultural representation: it forces a space where the mainstream doesn’t just critique the Aborigine, but their own identity and involvement in the construction of that critique.Wasted VoicesWaste is a subjective notion. Items that some discard and perceive as valueless can be of importance to others, and then it also becomes a waste not to acknowledge or use that item. Rather than only focusing on the concept of “waste” as items or materials that are abandoned, I wish to consider the value in what is wasted. Centring my discussion of ‘waste’ on Thornton’s film provides the opportunity to view a wasteland of dispossession from another cultural and social perspective. Reaction to the film has constructed what could be perceived as an exceptional moment of engagement between Indigenous and non-Indigenous voices in dialogic intercultural dialogue. By revisiting early examples of ethnographic collaboration, and re-examining contemporary reactions to Samson and Delilah, I hope to forge a space for intervention in Australian film criticism that focuses on how ‘non-Aboriginality’ depends on ‘Aboriginality’ in a vast wasteland of colonial dispossession and appropriation.Many of the reviews of Thornton’s film (Buckmaster; Collins; Davis; Gorman; Hall; Isaac; Ravier; Redwood; Rennie; Simpson) pay attention to the emotional reaction of non-Indigenous viewers. Langton states that historically non-Indigenous audiences know ‘the Aborigine’ through non-Indigenous representations and monologues about Aboriginality: “In film, as in other media, there is a dense history of racist, distorted and often offensive representation of Aboriginal people” (24). The power to define has meant that ethnographic discourses in the early days of colonisation established their need to record Indigenous peoples, knowledges and traditions before they ‘wasted away.’ At the 1966 Round Table on Ethnographic Film in the Pacific Area, Stanley Hawes recounts how Ian Dunlop, an Australian documentary filmmaker, commented that “someone ought to film the aborigines of the Western Desert before it was too late. They had already almost all disappeared or gone to live on Mission stations” (69). This popular belief was one of the main motivations for research on Indigenous peoples and led to the notion of “smoothing the dying pillow,” which maintained that since Aborigines were a dying race, they should be allowed to all die out peacefully (Chandra-Shekeran 120). It was only the ‘real’ Aborigine that was valued: the mission Black, the urban Black, the assimilated Black, was a waste (Cowlishaw 108). These representations of Aboriginality depended on non-Indigenous people speaking about Aboriginality to non-Indigenous people. Yet, the impetus to speak, as well as what was being spoken about, and the knowledge being discussed and used, relied on Indigenous voices and presences. When Australia made its “important contribution to ethnographic films of its Aborigines” (McCarthy 81), it could not have done so without the involvement of Indigenous peoples. In her work on intersubjectivity, Langton describes “Aboriginality” as a “social thing” that is continually remade through dialogue, imagination, representation and interpretation. She describes three broad categories of Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal intersubjectivity: when Aboriginal people interact with other Aboriginal people; when non-Aboriginal people stereotype, iconise, and mythologise Aboriginal people without any Aboriginal contact; and when Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people engage in dialogue (81). Since W. Baldwin Spencer’s first ethnographic film, made between 1901 and 1912, which recorded the customs of the Aranda and neighbouring Central Australian tribes (McCarthy 80), the development of Australian cinema depended on these categories of intersubjectivity. While the success of Samson and Delilah could be interpreted as opening mainstream eyes to the waste that Indigenous communities have experienced since colonisation — wasted knowledge, wasted youths, wasted communities — it could also signify that what was once perceived by dominant non-Indigenous society as trash is now viewed as treasure. Much like the dot paintings which Delilah and her nana paint in exchange for a few bucks, and which the white man then sells for thousands of dollars, Aboriginal stories come to us out of context and filtered through appropriation and misinterpretation.Beyond its undeniable worth as a piece of top-notch filmmaking, Samson and Delilah’s value also resides in its ability to share with a wide audience, and in a language we can all understand, a largely untold story steeped in the painful truth of this country’s bloody history. (Ravier)In reading the many reviews of Samson and Delilah, it is apparent there is an underlying notion of such a story being secret, and that mainstream Australia chose to engage with the film’s dialogical representation because it was sharing this secret. When Ravier states that Aboriginal stories are distorted by appropriation and misinterpretation, I would add that such stories are examples of Langton’s second category of intersubjectivity: they reveal more about the processes of non-Indigenous constructions of ‘the Aborigine’ and the need to stereotype, iconise and mythologise. These processes have usually involved judgements about what is to be retained as ‘valuable’ in Indigenous cultures and knowledges, and what can be discarded — in the same way that the film’s characters Samson and Delilah are discarded. The secret that Samson and Delilah is sharing with white Australia has never been a secret: it is that non-Indigenous Australia chooses what it wants to see or hear. Wasted SilencesIn 1976 Michael Edols directed and produced Floating about the Mowanjum communities experiences of colonisation, mission life and resistance. That same year Alessandro Cavadini directed and Carolyn Strachan produced Protected, a dramatised documentary about life on the Queensland Aboriginal reserve of Palm Island — “a dumping ground for unwanted persons or those deemed to be in need of ‘protection’” (Treole 38). Phillip Noyce’s Backroads, a story about the hardships facing a young man from a reserve in outback New South Wales, was released in 1977. In 1979, Essie Coffey produced and directed My Survival as an Aboriginal, where she documented her community’s struggles living under white domination. Two Laws, a feature film made by four of the language groups around Borroloola in 1981, examines the communities’ histories of massacre, dispossession and institutionalisation. These are just some of many films that have dealt with the ‘secrets’ about Indigenous peoples. In more recent times the work of Noyce, Rolf de Heer, Stephen Johnson, Iven Sen, Rachel Perkins and Romaine Moreton, to name only a few, have inspired mainstream engagement with films representing Indigenous experiences and knowledges. “We live in a world in which, increasingly, people learn of their own and other cultures and histories through a range of visual media — film, television, and video,” writes Faye Ginsburg (5). Changing understandings of culture and representation means that there appears to be a shift away from the “monologic, observational and privileged Western gaze” towards more dialogic, reflexive and imaginative mediation. Perhaps Samson and Delilah’s success is partly due to its contribution to social action through compelling the non-Indigenous viewer to “revise our comfortable and taken for granted narrative conventions that fetishise the text and reify ‘culture’ and ‘cultural difference.’ Instead, we — as producers, audiences, and ethnographers — are challenged to comprehend the multiple ways that media operate as a site where culture is produced, contested, mediated and continually re-imagined” (Ginsburg 14). In his review, Tom Redwood writes about the filmLike life in the desert, everything is kept to a minimum here and nothing is wasted. ... Perhaps it took an Indigenous filmmaker from Alice Springs to do this, to lead the way in reinstating meaningfulness and honesty as core values in Australian cinema. But, whatever the case, Thornton's Indigenous heritage won't make his difficult vision any easier for local audiences to swallow. Most Australians aren't used to this degree of seriousness at the movies and though many here will embrace Samson and Delilah, there will no doubt also be a minority who, unable to reject the film as a cultural curiosity, will resist its uncompromising nature with cries of 'pessimism!' or even 'reverse-racism!’ (28-29)Perhaps the film’s success has to do with the way the story is told? — “everything kept to a minimum” and “nothing is wasted.” In attempts to construct Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal intersubjectivity in previous representations perhaps language, words, English got in the way of communication? For mainstream white Australian society’s engagement in dialogic representations, for Indigenous voices to speak and be heard, for non-Indigenous monologues to be challenged, perhaps silence was called for? As the reviews for the film have emphasised, non-Indigenous reactions contribute to the dialogic nature of the film, its story, as well as its positioning as a site of cultural meaning, social relations, and power. Yet even while critiquing constructions of Aboriginality, non-Aboriginality has historically remained uncritiqued—non-Aboriginal endorsement and reaction is discussed, but what this reaction and engagement, or lack of engagement (whether because of ignorance, unawareness, or racism) reveals is not. That is, non-Aboriginality has not had to critique the power it has to continue to remain ignorant of stories about wasted Indigenous lives. Thornton’s film appears to have disrupted this form of non-engagement.With the emergence of Indigenous media and Indigenous media makers, ethnographic films have been reconceptualised in terms of aesthetics, cultural observations and epistemological processes. By re-exploring the history of ethnographic film making and shifting attention from constructions of the ‘other’ to reception by the mainstream, past films, past representations of colonisation, and past dialogues will not be wasted. With the focus on constructing Aboriginality, the cultural value of non-Aboriginality has remained unquestioned and invisible. By re-examining the reactions of mainstream Australians over the last one hundred years in light of the success of Samson and Delilah, cultural and historical questions about ‘the Aborigine’ can be reframed so that the influence Indigenous discourses have in Australian nation-building will be more apparent. The reception of Samson and Delilah signifies the transformational power in wasted voices, wasted dialogues and the wasted opportunities to listen. Wasted DialoguesFelicity Collins argues that certain “cinematic events that address Indigenous-settler relations do have the capacity to galvanise public attention, under certain conditions” (65). Collins states that after recent historical events, mainstream response to Aboriginal deprivation and otherness has evoked greater awareness of “anti-colonial politics of subjectivity” (65). The concern here is with mainstream Australia dismantling generations of colonialist representations and objectifications of the ‘other.’ What also needs to be re-examined is the paradox and polemic of how reaction to Aboriginal dispossession and deprivation is perceived. Non-Indigenous reaction remains a powerful framework for understanding, viewing and positioning Indigenous presence and representation — the power to see or not to see, to hear or to ignore. Collins argues that Samson and Delilah, along with Australia (Luhrmann, 2009) and First Australians (Perkins, 2008), are national events in Australian screen culture and that post-apology films “reframe a familiar iconography so that what is lost or ignored in the incessant flow of media temporality is precisely what invites an affective and ethical response in cinematic spaces” (75).It is the notion of reframing what is lost or ignored to evoke “ethical responses” that captures my attention; to shift the gaze from Aboriginal subjectivity, momentarily, to non-Aboriginal subjectivity and examine how choosing to discard or ignore narratives of violence and suffering needs to be critiqued as much as the film, documentary or representation of Indigenality. Perhaps then we can start to engage in dialogues of intersubjectivity rather than monologues about Aboriginality.I made [Samson and Delilah] for my mob but I made sure that it can work with a wider audience as well, and it’s just been incredible that it’s been completely embraced by a much wider audience. It’s interesting because as soon as you knock down that black wall between Aboriginals and white Australia, a film like this does become an Australian film and an Australian story. Not an Aboriginal story but a story about Australians, in a sense. It’s just as much a white story as it is a black one when you get to that position. (Thornton in interview)When we “get to that position” described by Thornton, intercultural and intersubjective dialogue allows both Aboriginality and non-Aboriginality to co-exist. When a powerful story of Indigenous experiences and representations becomes perceived as an Australian story, it provides a space for what has historically been ignored and rendered invisible to become visible. It offers a different cultural lens for all Australians to question and critique notions of value and waste, to re-assess what had been relegated to the wasteland by ethnographic editing and Westernised labels. Ever since Spencer, Melies, Abbie and Elkin decided to retain an image of Aboriginality on film, which they did with specific purposes and embedded values, it has been ‘the Aborigine’ that has been dissected and discussed. It would be a waste not to open this historiography up to include mainstream reaction, or lack of reaction, in the development of cultural and cinematic critique. A wasteland is often perceived as a dumping ground, but by re-visiting that space and unearthing, new possibilities are discovered in that wasteland, and more complex strategies for intersubjectivity are produced. At the centre of Samson and Delilah is the poverty and loss that Indigenous communities experience on a daily basis. The experiences endured by the main characters are not new or recent ones and whether cinematic reception of them produces guilt, pity, sympathy, empathy, fear or defensiveness, it is the very potential to be able to react that needs to be critiqued. As Williamson Chang points out, the “wasteland paradigm is invisible to those embedded in its structure” (852). By looking more closely at white society’s responses in order to discern more clearly if they are motivated by feelings that their wealth—whether material, cultural or social—or their sense of belonging is being challenged or reinforced then ruling values and epistemologies are challenged and dialogic negotiations engaged. If dominant non-Indigenous society has the power to classify Indigenous narratives and representation as either garbage or something of value, then colonialist structures remain intact. If they have the self-reflexive power to question their own response to Indigenous narratives and representations, then perhaps more anti-colonial discourses emerge. Notions of value and waste are tied to cultural hierarchies, and it is through questioning how a dominant culture determines value that processes of transformation and mediation take place and the intersubjective dialogue sparked by Samson and Delilah can continueIn her review of Samson and Delilah, Therese Davis suggests that the film brings people closer to truthfulness, forcing the audience to engage with that realism: “those of us ‘outside’ of the community looking in can come to know ourselves differently through the new languages of this film, both cultural and cinematic. Reformulating the space of the national from an ‘insider,’ Aboriginal community-based perspective, the film positions its spectators, both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal, in a shared space, a space that allows for new forms of attachment, involvement and self-knowledge, new lines of communication.” Davis goes on to caution that while the film is groundbreaking, the reviews situating the film as what Australian cinema should be need to be mindful of feeding “notions of anti-diversity, which “is an old debate in Australian Cinema Studies, but in this instance anti-diversity is doubly problematic because it also runs the risk of narrowly defining Indigenous cinema.” The danger, historically, is that anything Indigenous, has always been narrowly defined by the mainstream and yes, to continue to limit Indigenous work in any medium is colonising and problematic. However, rather than just caution against this reaction, I am suggesting that reaction itself be critiqued. While currently contemporary mainstream response to Samson and Delilah is one of adoration, is the centre from which it comes the same centre which less than fifty years ago critiqued Indigenous Australians as a savage, noble, and/or dying race wasting away? Davis writes that the film constructs a new “relation” in Australian cinema but that it should not be used as a marker against which “all new (and old) Indigenous cinema is measured.” This concern resembles, in part, my concern that until recently mainstream society has constructed their own markers of Aboriginal cultural authenticity, deciding what is to be valued and what can be discarded. I agree with Davis’s caution, yet I cannot easily untangle the notion of ‘measuring.’ As a profound Australian film, certainly cinematic criticism will use it as a signifier of ‘quality.’ But by locating it singularly in the category of Indigenous cinema, the anti-colonial and discursive Indigenous discourses the film deploys and evokes are limited to the margins of Australian film and film critique once more. After considering the idea of measuring, and asking who would be conducting this process of measuring, my fear is that the gaze returns to ‘the Aborigine’ and the power to react remains solely, and invisibly, with the mainstream. Certainly it would be a waste to position the film in such a way that limits other Indigenous filmmakers’ processes, experiences and representations. I see no problem with forcing non-Indigenous filmmakers, audiences and perceptions to have to ‘measure’ up as a result of the film. It would be yet another waste if they didn’t, and Samson and Delilah was relegated to being simply a great ‘Indigenous Australian film,’ instead of a great Australian film that challenges, inverts and re-negotiates the construction of both Aboriginality and non-Aboriginality. By examining reaction to the film, and not just reading the film itself, discussions of dialogical cultural representation can include non-Aboriginality as well as Aboriginality. Films like this are designed to create a dialogue and I’m happy if someone doesn’t like the film and they tell me why, because we’re creating dialogue. We’re talking about this stuff and taking a step forward. That’s important. (Thornton)The dialogue opened up by the success of Thornton’s beautiful film is one that also explores non-Aboriginality. If we waste the opportunity that Samson and Delilah provides, then Australia’s ongoing cinematic history will remain a wasteland, and many more Indigenous voices, stories, and experiences will continue to be wasted.ReferencesBuckmaster, Luke. “Interview with Warwick Thornton”. Cinetology 12 May 2009. 18 Aug. 2010 ‹http://blogs.crikey.com.au/cinetology/2009/05/12/interview-with-warwick-thornton-writerdirector-of-samson-delilah›.———. “Samson and Delilah Review: A Seminal Indigenous Drama of Gradual and Menacing Beauty”. Cinetology 6 May 2009. 14 June 2010 ‹http://blogs.crikey.com.au/cinetology/2009/05/06/samson-delilah-film-review-a-seminal-indigenous-drama-of-gradual-and-menacing-beauty›.Chang, Williamson, B. C. “The ‘Wasteland’ in the Western Exploitation of ‘Race’ and the Environment”. University of Colorado Law Review 849 (1992): 849-870.Chandra-Shekeran, Sangeetha. “Challenging the Fiction of the Nation in the ‘Reconciliation’ Texts of Mabo and Bringing Them Home”. The Australian Feminist Law Journal 11 (1998): 107-133.Collins, Felicity. “After the Apology: Reframing Violence and Suffering in First Australians, Australia and Samson and Delilah”. Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies 24.3 (2010): 65-77.Cowlishaw, Gillian, K. “Censoring Race in ‘Post-Colonial’ Anthropology”. Critique of Anthropology 20.2 (2000): 101-123. Davis, Therese. “Love and Marginality in Samson and Delilah”. Senses of Cinema 57 (2009). 7 Jan. 2010 ‹http://archive.sensesofcinema.com/contents/09/51/samson-and-delilah.html›. Ginsburg, Faye. “Culture/Media: A (Mild) Polemic”. Anthropology Today 10.2 (1994): 5-15.Gorman, Sean. “Review of Samson and Delilah”. History Australia 6.3 (2009): 81.1-81.2.Hall, Sandra. “Review of Samson and Delilah”. Sydney Morning Herald. 7 May 2009. Hawes, Stanley. “Official Government Production”. Round Table on Ethnographic Film in the Pacific Area. Canberra: Australian National Advisory Committee, 1966. 62-71.Isaac, Bruce. “Screening ‘Australia’: Samson and Delilah”. Screen Education 54 (2009): 12-17. Langton, Marcia. Well, I Heard It on the Radio and I Saw It on the Television...: An Essay for the Australian Film Commission on the Politics and Aesthetics of Filmmaking by and about Aboriginal People and Things. Sydney: Australian Film Commission, 1993.McCarthy, F. D “Ethnographic Research Films” Round Table on Ethnographic Film in the Pacific Area Australian National Advisory Committee (1966): 80-85.Neville, Brian, and Johanne Villeneuve. Waste-Site Stories: The Recycling of Memory. Albany: State U of New York P., 2002.Ravier, Matt. “Review: Samson and Delilah”. In Film Australia. 2009. 7 Jan. 2010 ‹http://www.infilm.com.au/?p=802›.Redwood, Tom. “Warwick Thornton and Kath Shelper on Making Samson and Delilah”. Metro 160 (2009): 31.Rennie, Ellie. “Samson and Delilah under the Stars in Alice Springs”. Crikey 27 Apr. 2009. 18 Aug. 2010 ‹ http://www.crikey.com.au/2009/04/27/samson-and-delilah-under-the-stars-in-alice-springs/›.Samson and Delilah. Dir. Warwick Thornton. Footprint Films, 2009. Treole, Victoria. Australian Independent Film. Sydney: Australian Film Commission, 1982.

This essay combines life writing with meditations on the significance of walking as integral to the ritual practice of pilgrimage, where the individual improves her soul or health through the act of walking to a shrine containing healing relics of a saint. Braiding together insights from medieval literature, contemporary ecocriticism, and memory studies, I reflect on my own pilgrimage practice as it impacts the land itself. Canterbury, England serves as the central shrine for four pilgrimages over decades: 1966, 1994, 1997, and 2003.The act of memory was not invented in the Anthropocene. Rather, the nonhuman world has taught humans how to remember. From ice-core samples retaining the history of Europe’s weather to rocks embedded with fossilized extinct species, nonhuman actors literally petrifying or freezing the past—from geologic sites to frozen water—become exposed through the process of anthropocentric discovery and human interference. The very act of human uncovery and analysis threatens to eliminate the nonhuman actor which has hospitably shared its own experience. How can humans script nonhuman memory?As for the history of memory studies itself, a new phase is arguably beginning, shifting from “the transnational, transcultural, or global to the planetary; from recorded to deep history; from the human to the nonhuman” (Craps et al. 3). Memory studies for the Anthropocene can “focus on the terrestrialized significance of (the historicized) forms of remembrance but also on the positioning of who is remembering and, ultimately, which ‘Anthropocene’ is remembered” (Craps et al. 5). In this era of the “self-conscious Anthropocene” (Craps et al. 6), narrative itself can focus on “the place of nonhuman beings in human stories of origins, identity, and futures point to a possible opening for the methods of memory studies” (Craps et al. 8). The nonhuman on the paths of this essay range from the dirt on the path to the rock used to build the sacred shrine, the ultimate goal. How they intersect with human actors reveals how the “human subject is no longer the one forming the world, but does indeed constitute itself through its relation to and dependence on the object world” (Marcussen 14, qtd. in Rodriguez 378). Incorporating “nonhuman species as objects, if not subjects, of memory [...] memory critics could begin by extending their objects to include the memory of nonhuman species,” linking both humans and nonhumans in “an expanded multispecies frame of remembrance” (Craps et al. 9). My narrative—from diaries recording sacred journey to a novel structured by pilgrimage—propels motion, but also secures in memory events from the past, including memories of those nonhuman beings I interact with.Childhood PilgrimageThe little girl with brown curls sat crying softly, whimpering, by the side of the road in lush grass. The mother with her soft brown bangs and an underflip to her hair told the story of a little girl, sitting by the side of the road in lush grass.The story book girl had forgotten her Black Watch plaid raincoat at the picnic spot where she had lunched with her parents and two older brothers. Ponchos spread out, the family had eaten their fresh yeasty rolls, hard cheese, apples, and macaroons. The tin clink of the canteen hit their teeth as they gulped metallic water, still icy cold from the taps of the ancient inn that morning. The father cut slices of Edam with his Swiss army knife, parsing them out to each child to make his or her own little sandwich. The father then lay back for his daily nap, while the boys played chess. The portable wooden chess set had inlaid squares, each piece no taller than a fingernail paring. The girl read a Junior Puffin book, while the mother silently perused Agatha Christie. The boy who lost at chess had to play his younger sister, a fitting punishment for the less able player. She cheerfully played with either brother. Once the father awakened, they packed up their gear into their rucksacks, and continued the pilgrimage to Canterbury.Only the little Black Watch plaid raincoat was left behind.The real mother told the real girl that the story book family continued to walk, forgetting the raincoat until it began to rain. The men pulled on their ponchos and the mother her raincoat, when the little girl discovered her raincoat missing. The story book men walked two miles back while the story book mother and girl sat under the dripping canopy of leaves provided by a welcoming tree.And there, the real mother continued, the storybook girl cried and whimpered, until a magic taxi cab in which the father and boys sat suddenly appeared out of the mist to drive the little girl and her mother to their hotel.The real girl’s eyes shone. “Did that actually happen?” she asked, perking up in expectation.“Oh, yes,” said the real mother, kissing her on the brow. The girl’s tears dried. Only the plops of rain made her face moist. The little girl, now filled with hope, cuddled with her mother as they huddled together.Without warning, out of the mist, drove up a real magic taxi cab in which the real men sat. For magic taxi cabs really exist, even in the tangible world—especially in England. At the very least, in the England of little Susie’s imagination.Narrative and PilgrimageMy mother’s tale suggests how this story echoes in yet another pilgrimage story, maintaining a long tradition of pilgrimage stories embedded within frame tales as far back as the Middle Ages.The Christian pilgrim’s walk parallels Christ’s own pilgrimage to Emmaus. The blisters we suffer echo faintly the lash Christ endured. The social relations of the pilgrim are “diachronic” (Alworth 98), linking figures (Christ) from the past to the now (us, or, during the Middle Ages, William Langland’s Piers Plowman or Chaucer’s band who set out from Southwark). We embody the frame of the vera icon, the true image, thus “conjur[ing] a site of simultaneity or a plane of immanence where the actors of the past [...] meet those of the future” (Alworth 99). Our quotidian walk frames the true essence or meaning of our ambulatory travail.In 1966, my parents took my two older brothers and me on the Pilgrims’ Way—not the route from London to Canterbury that Chaucer’s pilgrims would have taken starting south of London in Southwark, rather the ancient trek from Winchester to Canterbury, famously chronicled in The Old Road by Hilaire Belloc. The route follows along the south side of the Downs, where the muddy path was dried by what sun there was. My parents first undertook the walk in the early 1950s. Slides from that pilgrimage depict my mother, voluptuous in her cashmere twinset and tweed skirt, as my father crosses a stile. My parents, inspired by Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, decided to walk along the traditional Pilgrims’ Way to Canterbury. Story intersects with material traversal over earth on dirt-laden paths.By the time we children came along, the memories of that earlier pilgrimage resonated with my parents, inspiring them to take us on the same journey. We all carried our own rucksacks and walked five or six miles a day. Concerning our pilgrimage when I was seven, my mother wrote in her diary:As good pilgrims should, we’ve been telling tales along the way. Yesterday Jimmy told the whole (detailed) story of That Darn Cat, a Disney movie. Today I told about Stevenson’s Travels with a Donkey, which first inspired me to think of walking trips and everyone noted the resemblance between Stevenson’s lovable, but balky, donkey and our sweet Sue. (We hadn’t planned to tell tales, but they just happened along the way.)I don’t know how sweet I was; perhaps I was “balky” because the road was so hard. Landscape certainly shaped my experience.As I wrote about the pilgrimage in my diary then, “We went to another Hotel and walked. We went and had lunch at the Boggly [booglie] place. We went to a nother hotel called The Swan with fether Quits [quilts]. We went to the Queens head. We went to the Gest house. We went to aother Hotle called Srping wells and my tooth came out. We saw some taekeys [turkeys].” The repetition suggests how pilgrimage combines various aspects of life, from the emotional to the physical, the quotidian (walking and especially resting—in hotels with quilts) with the extraordinary (newly sprung tooth or the appearance of turkeys). “[W]ayfaring abilities depend on an emotional connection to the environment” (Easterlin 261), whether that environment is modified by humans or even manmade, inhabited by human or nonhuman actors. How can one model an “ecological relationship between humans and nonhumans” in narrative (Rodriguez 368)? Rodriguez proposes a “model of reading as encounter [...] encountering fictional story worlds as potential models” (Rodriguez 368), just as my mother did with the Magic Taxi Cab story.Taxis proliferate in my childhood pilgrimage. My mother writes in 1966 in her diary of journeying along the Pilgrims’ Way to St. Martha’s on the Hill. “Susie was moaning and groaning under her pack and at one desperate uphill moment gasped out, ‘Let’s take a taxi!’ – our highborn lady as we call her. But we finally made it.” “Martha’s”, as I later learned, is a corruption of “Martyrs”, a natural linguistic decay that developed over the medieval period. Just as the vernacular textures pilgrimage poems in the fourteeth century, the common tongue in all its glorious variety seeps into even the quotidian modern pilgrim’s journey.Part of the delight of pilgrimage lies in the characters one meets and the languages they speak. In 1994, the only time my husband and I cheated on a strictly ambulatory sacred journey occurred when we opted to ride a bus for ten miles where walking would have been dangerous. When I ask the bus driver if a stop were ours, he replied, “I'll give you a shout, love.” As though in a P. G. Wodehouse novel, when our stop finally came, he cried out, “Cheerio, love” to me and “Cheerio, mate” to Jim.Language changes. Which is a good thing. If it didn’t, it would be dead, like those martyrs of old. Like Latin itself. Disentangling pilgrimage from language proves impossible. The healthy ecopoetics of languages meshes with the sustainable vibrancy of the land we traverse.“Nettles of remorse…”: Derek Walcott, The Bounty Once my father had to carry me past a particularly tough patch of nettles. As my mother tells it, we “went through orchards and along narrow woodland path with face-high nettles. Susie put a scarf over her face and I wore a poncho though it was sunny and we survived almost unscathed.” Certain moments get preserved by the camera. At age seven in a field outside of Wye, I am captured in my father’s slides surrounded by grain. At age thirty-five, I am captured in film by my husband in the same spot, in the identical pose, though now quite a bit taller than the grain. Three years later, as a mother, I in turn snap him with a backpack containing baby Sarah, grumpily gazing off over the fields.When I was seven, we took off from Detling. My mother writes, “set off along old Pilgrims’ Way. Road is paved now, but much the same as fifteen years ago. Saw sheep, lambs, and enjoyed lovely scenery. Sudden shower sent us all to a lunch spot under trees near Thurnham Court, where we huddled under ponchos and ate happily, watching the weather move across the valley. When the sun came to us, we continued on our way which was lovely, past sheep, etc., but all on hard paved road, alas. Susie was a good little walker, but moaned from time to time.”I seem to whimper and groan a lot on pilgrimage. One thing is clear: the physical aspects of walking for days affected my phenomenological response to our pilgrimage which we’d undertaken both as historical ritual, touristic nature hike, and what Wendell Berry calls a “secular pilgrimage” (402), where the walker seeks “the world of the Creation” (403) in a “return to the wilderness in order to be restored” (416). The materiality of my experience was key to how I perceived this journey as a spiritual, somatic, and emotional event. The link between pilgrimage and memory, between pilgrimage poetics and memorial methods, occupies my thoughts on pilgrimage. As Nancy Easterlin’s work on “cognitive ecocriticism” (“Cognitive” 257) contends, environmental knowledge is intimately tied in with memory (“Cognitive” 260). She writes: “The advantage of extensive environmental knowledge most surely precipitates the evolution of memory, necessary to sustain vast knowledge” (“Cognitive” 260). Even today I can recall snatches of moments from that trip when I was a child, including the telling of tales.Landscape not only changes the writer, but writing transforms the landscape and our interaction with it. As Valerie Allen suggests, “If the subject acts upon the environment, so does the environment upon the subject” (“When Things Break” 82). Indeed, we can understand the “road as a strategic point of interaction between human and environment” (Allen and Evans 26; see also Oram)—even, or especially, when that interaction causes pain and inflames blisters. My relationship with moleskin on my blasted and blistered toes made me intimately conscious of my body with every step taken on the pilgrimage route.As an adult, my boots on the way from Winchester to Canterbury pinched and squeezed, packed dirt acting upon them and, in turn, my feet. After taking the train home and upon arrival in London, we walked through Bloomsbury to our flat on Russell Square, passing by what I saw as a new, less religious, but no less beckoning shrine: The London Foot Hospital at Fitzroy Square.Now, sadly, it is closed. Where do pilgrims go for sole—and soul—care?Slow Walking as WayfindingAll pilgrimages come to an end, just as, in 1966, my mother writes of our our arrival at last in Canterbury:On into Canterbury past nice grassy cricket field, where we sat and ate chocolate bars while we watched white-flannelled cricketers at play. Past town gates to our Queen’s Head Inn, where we have the smallest, slantingest room in the world. Everything is askew and we’re planning to use our extra pillows to brace our feet so we won’t slide out of bed. Children have nice big room with 3 beds and are busy playing store with pounds and shillings [that’s very hard mathematics!]. After dinner, walked over to cathedral, where evensong was just ending. Walked back to hotel and into bed where we are now.Up to early breakfast, dashed to cathedral and looked up, up, up. After our sins were forgiven, we picked up our rucksacks and headed into London by train.This experience in 1966 varies slightly from the one in 1994. Jim and I walk through a long walkway of tall, slim trees arching over us, a green, lush and silent cloister, finally gaining our first view of Canterbury with me in a similar photo to one taken almost thirty years before. We make our way into the city through the West Gate, first passing by St. Dunstan’s Church where Henry II had put on penitential garb and later Sir Thomas More’s head was buried. Canterbury is like Coney Island in the Middle Ages and still is: men with dreadlocks and slinky didjeridoos, fire tossers, mobs of people, tourists. We go to Mercery Lane as all good pilgrims should and under the gate festooned with the green statue of Christ, arriving just in time for evensong.Imagining a medieval woman arriving here and listening to the service, I pray to God my gratefulness for us having arrived safely. I can understand the fifteenth-century pilgrim, Margery Kempe, screaming emotionally—maybe her feet hurt like mine. I’m on the verge of tears during the ceremony: so glad to be here safe, finally got here, my favorite service, my beloved husband. After the service, we pass on through the Quire to the spot where St. Thomas’s relic sanctuary was. People stare at a lit candle commemorating it. Tears well up in my eyes.I suppose some things have changed since the Middle Ages. One Friday in Canterbury with my children in 2003 has some parallels with earlier iterations. Seven-year-old Sarah and I go to evensong at the Cathedral. I tell her she has to be absolutely quiet or the Archbishop will chop off her head.She still has her head.Though the road has been paved, the view has remained virtually unaltered. Some aspects seem eternal—sheep, lambs, and stiles dotting the landscape. The grinding down of the pilgrimage path, reflecting the “slowness of flat ontology” (Yates 207), occurs over vast expanses of time. Similarly, Easterlin reflects on human and more than human vitalism: “Although an understanding of humans as wayfinders suggests a complex and dynamic interest on the part of humans in the environment, the surround itself is complex and dynamic and is frequently in a state of change as the individual or group moves through it” (Easterlin “Cognitive” 261). An image of my mother in the 1970s by a shady tree along the Pilgrims’ Way in England shows that the path is lower by 6 inches than the neighboring verge (Bright 4). We don’t see dirt evolving, because its changes occur so slowly. Only big time allows us to see transformative change.Memorial PilgrimageOddly, the erasure of self through duplication with a precursor occurred for me while reading W.G. Sebald’s pilgrimage novel, The Rings of Saturn. I had experienced my own pilgrimage to many of these same locations he immortalizes. I, too, had gone to Somerleyton Hall with my elderly mother, husband, and two children. My memories, sacred shrines pooling in familial history, are infused with synchronic reflection, medieval to contemporary—my parents’ periodic sojourns in Suffolk for years, leading me to love the very landscape Sebald treks across; sadness at my parents’ decline; hope in my children’s coming to add on to their memory palimpsest a layer devoted to this land, to this history, to this family.Then, the oddest coincidence from my reading pilgrimage. After visiting Dunwich Heath, Sebald comes to his friend, Michael, whose wife Anne relays a story about a local man hired as a pallbearer by the local undertaker in Westleton. This man, whose memory was famously bad, nevertheless reveled in the few lines allotted him in an outdoor performance of King Lear. After her relating this story, Sebald asks for a taxi (Sebald 188-9).This might all seem unremarkable to the average reader. Yet, “human wayfinders are richly aware of and responsive to environment, meaning both physical places and living beings, often at a level below consciousness” (Easterlin “Cognitive” 265). For me, with a connection to this area, I startled with recollection emerging from my subconscience. The pallbearer’s name in Sebald’s story was Mr Squirrel, the very same name of the taxi driver my parents—and we—had driven with many times. The same Mr Squirrel? How many Mr Squirrels can there be in this small part of Suffolk? Surely it must be the same family, related in a genetic encoding of memory. I run to my archives. And there, in my mother’s address book—itself a palimpsest of time with names and addressed scored through; pasted-in cards, names, and numbers; and looseleaf memoranda—there, on the first page under “S”, “Mr. Squirrel” in my mother’s unmistakable scribble. She also had inscribed his phone number and the village Saxmundum, seven miles from Westleton. His name had been crossed out. Had he died? Retired? I don’t know. Yet quick look online tells me Squirrell’s Taxis still exists, as it does in my memory.Making KinAfter accompanying a class on a bucolic section of England’s Pilgrims’ Way, seven miles from Wye to Charing, we ended up at a pub drinking a pint, with which all good pilgrimages should conclude. There, students asked me why I became a medievalist who studies pilgrimage. Only after the publication of my first book on women pilgrims did I realize that the origin of my scholarly, long fascination with pilgrimage, blossoming into my professional career, began when I was seven years old along the way to Canterbury. The seeds of that pilgrimage when I was so young bore fruit and flowers decades later.One story illustrates Michel Serres’s point that we should not aim to appropriate the world, but merely act as temporary tenants (Serres 72-3). On pilgrimage in 1966 as a child, I had a penchant for ant spiders. That was not the only insect who took my heart. My mother shares how “Susie found a beetle up on the hill today and put him in the cheese box. Jimmy put holes in the top for him. She named him Alexander Beetle and really became very fond of him. After supper, we set him free in the garden here, with appropriate ceremony and a few over-dramatic tears of farewell.” He clearly made a great impression on me. I yearn for him today, that beetle in the cheese box. Though I tried to smuggle nature as contraband, I ultimately had to set him free.Passing through cities, landscape, forests, over seas and on roads, wandering by fields and vegetable patches, under a sky lit both by sun and moon, the pilgrim—even when in a group of fellow pilgrims—in her lonesome exercise endeavors to realize Serres’ ideal of the tenant inhabitant of earth. Nevertheless, we, as physical pilgrims, inevitably leave our traces through photos immortalizing the journey, trash left by the wayside, even excretions discretely deposited behind a convenient bush. Or a beetle who can tell the story of his adventure—or terror—at being ensconced for a time in a cheese box.On one notorious day of painful feet, my husband and I arrived in Otford, only to find the pub was still closed. Finally, it became time for dinner. We sat outside, me with feet ensconced in shoes blessedly inert and unmoving, as the server brought out our salads. The salad cream, white and viscous, was presented in an elegantly curved silver dish. Then Jim began to pick at the salad cream with his fork. Patiently, tenderly, he endeavored to assist a little bug who had gotten trapped in the gooey sauce. Every attempt seemed doomed to failure. The tiny creature kept falling back into the gloppy substance. Undaunted, Jim compassionately ministered to our companion. Finally, the little insect flew off, free to continue its own pilgrimage, which had intersected with ours in a tiny moment of affinity. Such moments of “making kin” work, according to Donna Haraway, as “life-saving strateg[ies] for the Anthropocene” (Oppermann 3, qtd. in Haraway 160).How can narrative avoid the anthropocentric centre of writing, which is inevitable given the human generator of such a piece? While words are a human invention, nonhuman entities vitally enact memory. The very Downs we walked along were created in the Cretaceous period at least seventy million years ago. The petrol propelling the magic taxi cab was distilled from organic bodies dating back millions of years. Jurassic limestone from the Bathonian Age almost two hundred million years ago constitutes the Caen stone quarried for building Canterbury Cathedral, while its Purbeck marble from Dorset dates from the Cretaceous period. Walking on pilgrimage propels me through a past millions—billions—of eons into the past, dwarfing my speck of existence. Yet, “if we wish to cross the darkness which separates us from [the past] we must lay down a little plank of words and step delicately over it” (Barfield 23). Elias Amidon asks us to consider how “the ground we dig into and walk upon is sacred. It is sacred because it makes us neighbors to each other, whether we like it or not. Tell this story” (Amidon 42). And, so, I have.We are winding down. Time has passed since that first pilgrimage of mine at seven years old. Yet now, here, I still put on my red plaid wollen jumper and jacket, crisp white button-up shirt, grey knee socks, and stout red walking shoes. Slinging on my rucksack, I take my mother’s hand.I’m ready to take my first step.We continue our pilgrimage, together.ReferencesAllen, Valerie. “When Things Break: Mending Rroads, Being Social.” Roadworks: Medieval Britain, Medieval Roads. Eds. Valerie Allen and Ruth Evans. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2016.———, and Ruth Evans. Introduction. Roadworks: Medieval Britain, Medieval Roads. Eds. Valerie Allen and Ruth Evans. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2016.Alworth, David J. Site Reading: Fiction, Art, Social Form. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2016.Amidon, Elias. “Digging In.” Dirt: A Love Story. Ed. Barbara Richardson. Lebanon, NH: ForeEdge, 2015.Barfield, Owen. History in English Words. Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing, 1967.Berry, Wendell. “A Secular Pilgrimage.” The Hudson Review 23.3 (1970): 401-424.Bright, Derek. “The Pilgrims’ Way Revisited: The Use of the North Downs Main Trackway and the Medway Crossings by Medieval Travelers.” Kent Archaeological Society eArticle (2010): 4-32.Craps, Stef, Rick Crownshaw, Jennifer Wenzel, Rosanne Kennedy, Claire Colebrook, and Vin Nardizzi. “Memory Studies and the Anthropocene: A Roundtable.” Memory Studies 11.4 (2017) 1-18.Easterlin, Nancy. A Biocultural Approach to Literary Theory and Interpretation. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2012.———. “Cognitive Ecocriticism: Human Wayfinding, Sociality, and Literary Interpretation.” Introduction to Cognitive Studies. Ed. Lisa Zunshine. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2010. 257-274.Haraway, Donna. “Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene: Making Kin.” Environmental Humanities 6 (2015): 159-65.James, Erin, and Eric Morel. “Ecocriticism and Narrative Theory: An Introduction.” English Studies 99.4 (2018): 355-365.Marcussen, Marlene. Reading for Space: An Encounter between Narratology and New Materialism in the Works of Virgina Woolf and Georges Perec. PhD diss. University of Southern Denmark, 2016.Oppermann, Serpil. “Introducing Migrant Ecologies in an (Un)Bordered World.” ISLE 24.2 (2017): 243–256.Oram, Richard. “Trackless, Impenetrable, and Underdeveloped? Roads, Colonization and Environmental Transformation in the Anglo-Scottish Border Zone, c. 1100 to c. 1300.” Roadworks: Medieval Britain, Medieval Roads. Eds. Valerie Allen and Ruth Evans. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2016.Rodriquez, David. “Narratorhood in the Anthropocene: Strange Stranger as Narrator-Figure in The Road and Here.” English Studies 99.4 (2018): 366-382.Savory, Elaine. “Toward a Caribbean Ecopoetics: Derek Walcott’s Language of Plants.” Postcolonial Ecologies: Literatures of the Environment. Eds. Elizabeth DeLoughrey and George B. Handley. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2011. 80-96.Sebald, W.G. The Rings of Saturn. Trans. Michael Hulse. New York: New Directions, 1998.Serres, Michel. Malfeasance: Appropriating through Pollution? Trans. Anne-Marie Feenberg-Dibon. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2011.Walcott, Derek. Selected Poems. Ed. Edward Baugh. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1997. 3-16.Yates, Julian. “Sheep Tracks—A Multi-Species Impression.” Animal, Vegetable, Mineral: Ethics and Objects. Ed. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen. Washington, D.C.: Oliphaunt Books, 2012.

Steve Reich’s Come Out was produced for a benefit concert at Town Hall, New York, in April 1966, aimed at raising funds to pay for independent lawyers for a retrial of the Harlem Six following a miscarriage of justice. Come Out was one of two works by Reich performed on that occasion, the other being a much longer sound collage—Harlem’s Six Condemned—created as part of a dramatization of Truman Nelson’s The Torture of Mothers. The recording of Harlem’s Six Condemned—unheard publicly since 1966—is now available in the Steve Reich Collection at the Paul Sacher Stiftung, Basel. This chapter argues that a close reading of Reich’s sound collage offers a perspective on Come Out that has been increasingly lost in the time since the benefit concert. A deeper understanding of Come Out will be gained by tracing its prehistory and setting a broader context for its appreciation.

Etta Gravely (Fig. 3.1) is a retired professor of chemistry and former head of the Department of Chemistry at North Carolina A&T State University at Greensboro (North Carolina A&T). Etta was born on August 30, 1939, in Alamance County, NC. Now the town of Green Level, it was then a rural community near Burlington. Most of the people there farmed, raising tobacco. Everyone had private gardens and Etta’s grandmother canned their food. The area where she went to school is still very rural; the school building is now the town hall. Etta’s mother was Kate Lee McBroom and her father Rufus Leith. Her mother, a homemaker, did general house cleaning for families. Her father had a high school degree, had served in the army during World War II, and worked as an orderly in a hospital. Etta is the only child of her mother, but her father had a son named Frederick Leith. Her brother went to Graham Central high school and upon graduation went into the army and subsequently died. Etta did not go to kindergarten because there was none. She started school in the first grade in a four-room school that had classes for grades one and two, three and four, five and six, and seven and eight. The principal was Mrs. Mary Holne, and there were three other teachers, each teaching two grades. Since Etta loved to read and liked to do school work, she skipped fourth grade and went on to fifth grade: fourth and third grade were taught in the same room, and when she completed her third- grade work she would do fourth-grade work. Her teachers probably had bachelor’s or master’s degrees in their subjects. Both Etta’s school and community were segregated; she went to school in 1945, before the Brown vs. Board of Education act, which was Supreme Court decision. When Etta graduated from the country school, she was bused to Pleasant Grove High School—for African American students, five miles from the high school for white students. The school taught grades one through twelve; the curriculum was the usual reading, writing, and arithmetic.

From a fortress to a residential castle: a stratigraphic reading of the transformations in the Rocca of Novellara (RE, Italy)The paper reports the results of a stratigraphic reading on the northern façade of the Rocca di Novellara (Reggio Emilia, Italy), a castle which is now the town hall, right in the city centre. Though as a pole of the contemporary public life in Novellara, housing at present both a museum and a nineteenth century theatre, the Rocca recalls its military past through its name and by means of the still standing remains of the walls and corner towers. Besides a well-documented historical development, the stratigraphic investigation of the northern façade –the only part that still hasn’t been restored– allowed a direct observation of the material traces revealing the slow transformation of the Rocca from a fortification to a residential castle. This study gave the chance of understanding the different constructive phases of the castle, making a chronological sequence out of them but it was also meant to reflect about the changes of its character, as the building has been acquiring a complex identity through time, due both to high qualified architectural episodes and to as much meaningful though tiny changes. Thus, the permanence of the stratified marks can be regarded as one of the main goals of a preservation project.