Journal articles on the topic 'Sinister love'

Decades before the publishing phenomenon The Da Vinci Code turned millions of readers on to the excitement and glamour of early Christian history and biblical studies, a steady stream of novels—some obscure, some bestsellers were teaching the popular reading public about the thrills and chills of the academic study of Scriptures. These ‘gospel thrillers’ share a common plot: a recently discovered gospel (often a first-person account of Jesus’ ministry by one of his disciples) threatens to turn our understanding of Christianity on its head. In a race against time (and the occasional Vatican assassin) the hero must find out if the new, shocking gospel is real. Of particular interest for the post-Da Vinci Code scholar is the portrayal of academics and academic work in these early ‘gospel thrillers’: from bronzed heroes to bumbling misanthropes to sinister tools of global conspiracies, the scholars of the ‘gospel thrillers’ instructed readers on what to love, and what to mistrust, about the academic project of biblical studies.

The focus was to investigate the anatomical specifics of v. portae, vv. hepaticae and ductus choledochus by corrosion. We investigated 10 sexually mature, clinically healthy New Zealand White rabbits, 8 months old, weighing 2.8 kg to 3.2 kg. To determine the veins and bile vessels, a cold-curing acrylic-based plastic (Duracryl +) was used. The main portal vessel was an intraorganic continuation of v. portae, after its branching into caudate lobe. The main portal vein was divided into v. portae dextra and v. portae sinistra, when entering lobus hepatis dexter and lobus hepatis sinister. V. portae sinistra caudalis was a branch of v. portae sinistra. The venous drainage of the rabbit liver in was carried out by v. hepatica sinistra caudalis, v. hepatica sinistra, v. hepatica dextra, v. hepatica media and venous vessel in lobus caudatus. V. hepatica sinistra and v. hepatica media had a common origin and took blood from lobus hepatis sinister medialis. V. hepatica dextra drained lobus hepatis dexter. V. hepatica sinistra caudalis was a direct tributary of the caudal vena cava. Ductus hepaticus communis was well developed and collected the bile from the main bile duct. Ductus hepaticus dexter drained lobus hepatis dexter and evacuated the bile into the main bile duct. Ductus hepaticus sinister caudalis flowed directly into ductus hepaticus communis. Ductus hepaticus sinister passed into the main bile duct.

Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale (1986) is adystopian novel that opens us to the bizarre reality of women's custodianrape and violence. Things look quite strange and alarming due towomen's oppression which results in a traumatized experience. This isovertly a political novel and tries to spotlight the sense of ineffable lifethat is miserable and also self-revealing. The novel narrates the story ofOffred, a handmaid a sinister handmaid. She was forced to become onedue to the rise of fanatic power in the states of America. America is nowthe Republic of Gilead, where everything is controlled by dominance,oppression, and bigotry. It is, glamorized as a fantasy that impinges onour real life. The novel lends itself to solicit the feminist cause whichleads us to an eschatological reality. Briefly, it tells a tale in the mostpersonal sense about the complicity, fidelity, and betrayal, in the politicalsetup in the contemporary United States.As the novelist, Atwood builds up fine gossamer ofimaginative tale out of a deep love for nature, libertine feminist activismand inclination of science, etc., and perhaps an awful condition we arestruggling to tackle but all in the future time frame.

Concept confusion readily assaults the Christian mind. For certain Christians, "beauty" and "sin" have become synonyms, mirror images of depravity and degradation. Furthermore, these individuals often equate piety with somberness, drabness with holiness. If one experiences delight, such feelings must be inevitably wrong and the source of pleasure inherently evil. By some, the injunction "love not the world" (1 John 2:15) is viewed, in fact, as a grim warning against literature, music, and art. Such aesthetic experiences are viewed as subtle, sinister attempts to sneak worldliness in through the back door. As committed Christians, however, we must address certain crucial underlying questions: Does God love beauty? Did He place within man both the urge and ability to create things that are original, unique, and lovely? If so, are there divine standards that govern human creation? What is the role of aesthetics in the Christian life, and, by extension, in Christian education? Is a thoughtful acquaintance with literary and artistic masterpieces legitimate for a Christian, or is one playing with fire? Is it permissible for a Christian to enjoy aesthetic experiences that center on the common things of life? Or must one focus exclusively on aesthetic experiences that are religious in nature? Finally, is there a right and wrong in art, in drama, in music, or in literature? If so, how should a Christian make that distinction? These issues trouble many Christian educators. Scripture teaches that we should be able to give a reason for what we believe (1 Pet 3:15); a rationale based not merely on tradition, prejudice, personal preference, or popular opinion. Clearly, our answers to these questions must not be flippant. Rather, it seems necessary that Christians carefully examine these matters and seek to formulate guiding principles that will enable us to experience, understand, and enjoy what God has intended.

Heidegger begins his first lecture course on Hölderlin in a curious manner. Lest we think Hölderlin was a “pacifist,” Heidegger cites two letters and a poem meant to prove that Hölderlin was ready to “throw the pen under the table” and “deny the Muses love” for the sake of the “beautiful sacrifice” of battle, should duty call. This quickly complicates, as Heidegger argues, the then common view of Hölderlin’s poetry as “unheroic” and advocating the “defenselessness” (Wehrlosigkeit) of Germania, particularly in the last verses of the eponymously titled poem: “Amid your holidays / Germania, where you are priestess /and defenselessly (wehrlos) proffer all round counsel / to kings and peoples.” Perhaps unsurprisingly, Heidegger bookends the lecture course with another reference to the word “defenselessly,” insisting that it does not denote “the laying down of weapons, weakness, or the avoidance of struggle.” In this paper, I attempt to draw connections between Heidegger’s militaristic readings of “Germania” and a provocative verse from the untitled poem “As when on a holiday…” that evokes “the clang of weapons” as nature is awakened from her deep sleep. I shall be relating Heidegger’s reading of this verse to a sinister “equivocality” so brilliantly diagnosed by Jacques Derrida in “Geschlecht IV.” In the wake of Derrida’s provocative suggestion that Heidegger’s treatment of polemos can offer Hitler “the worthiest and the most thinking justification” for ontic warmongering, I look at how Heidegger’s militaristic readings of Hölderlin only deepen the equivocality of polemos, and this in spite of Heidegger’s efforts to dissipate any ambiguity between Kampf as he thought it and the Kampf of the author of Mein Kampf.

Lemierre's syndrome is a rare and sometimes life threatening condition that requires prompt management. A case is reported of a previously healthy young male with Lemierre's syndrome. He developed internal jugular vein and cavernous sinus thrombosis, metastatic abscesses in the temporal lobe and lungs, temporal lobe venous infarction and severe thrombocytopaenia. Discussed are aspects of clinical presentation, diagnosis and management issues.

Sudraka's classical play Mrichchhakatika, or The Little Clay Cart, is a noted work of art in the Sanskrit language. It has been rendered into English by a renowned Sanskrit scholar, Moreshwar Ramchandra Kale, who has retained the original text and context. The plot is woven around the backdrop of an impoverished yet virtuous Brahmin merchant, Charudatta, and his beloved Vasantasena, a rich courtesan. Both of them epitomize the course of a virtuous life. Charudatta is the protagonist, and Vasantasena is his female counterpart. Their life is disturbed when Shakespearean Iago-like antagonist Samsthanaka, also called Sakara, is after them. So, virtuosity faces a litmus test in the face of sinister maneuvers on the part of the villain. In his villainy, he is aided and abetted by his brother-in-law (sister's husband), King Palala. Now, with the ruling King in his favour, he thinks that he can take undue advantage of the law of the land and commit any crime without a jot of fear. The villain is notorious and lustful and thinks that he can lure away Vasantasena with the power of his money and royal association or kinship. But he is frustrated in his vain attempt to win the love of pure Vasantasena. Samsthanaka nurtures a grievance against her because she has ignored him and chose poor yet magnanimous man Charudatta. The crux of the conflict in the play is Samsthanaka's revenge on the innocent hero and heroine. But at the same time, Sudraka has shown the stark reality of poverty on the part of males, which snatches manliness from them and turns them effeminate and helpless to face family and society. This pennilessness is a phase of low morale and no self-esteem. People's attitude changes when their one-time near and dear ones pass from prosperity to adversity. But one thing has been established: virtue has its reward. The play also brings to the fore that however evil may appear to triumph, it is the truth that prevails in the long run. The proposed paper shall explore Charudatta-Vasantasena's mutual feelings of warmth and affection despite social, economic, and caste disparity. Religion, caste, class, and relative economic status should not be a barrier when it comes to the nobility of the soul. Sudraka attempts to champion this proposition through the warp and woof of the play. The play's one of the most epiphanic moments is the forgiving of the erring villain Samsthanaka by noble Charudatta even when he has been adjudged culpable by the law of the land. This reminds one of Shakespeare, who said, 'The rarer action is in virtue than in vengeance.'

Thirty elderly demented subjects were assessed in 1985 using a neuropsychological test battery which included tests of parietal lobe function that are allegedly predictive of outcome. Four years later, 29 out of the 30 subjects were followed up. Twelve had died. There were no differences between survivors and deceased in terms of age, pre-morbid intelligence, years of full-time education, or scores on parietal tests. However, proportionally more of the women had died, and those subjects with more global cognitive impairment in 1985 were significantly more likely to have died by 1989. Those who scored lower on an aphasia measure in 1985 were more likely to have died. None of the variables differentiated between survivors and deceased Alzheimer subjects.

The focus of the research was to investigate the anatomical location of the rabbit liver. Thus, we applied a topographic algorithm, using dorsal frozen cuts and CT algorithm with coronary slices. The used animals were 13 matured, healthy clinically white New Zealand rabbits. We measured the metric CT parameters – transverse and craniocaudal sizes. At the level of the dorsal plane, located 15 mm ventrally from the spine, dorsal part of lobus hepatis sinister was found, and on the right and laterally - lobus hepatis dexter. At the level of the dorsal plane, located 30 mm ventrally from the spine, lobus hepatis dexter was located cranially relative to lobus hepatis sinister medialis and reached caudally to pars pylorica. Lobus hepatis sinister lateralis remained caudal to lobus hepatis sinister medialis and touched corpus ventriculi. Lobus hepatis sinister lateralis was found cranially to corpus ventriculi and pars pylorica. Lobus caudatus caudally touched the right kidney. At the level of the dorsal plane, located 45 mm ventrally from the spine, lobus hepatis dexter was found to be in the same dorsal plane with the left lobe of the liver. CT normodense heterogeneous anatomical image of lobus hepatis dexter was parallel to that of lobus hepatis sinister, which determined the transverse location of the organ. The obtained imaging analysis of the liver’s anatomical parts and their proximity to other organ structures were interpreted depending on their attenuation profile. The transverse size of the organ at 15 mm ventrally from the spine showed a value of 76.16 mm, and at 30 mm ventrally, this parameter reached a value of 81.48 mm. The highest values were obtained at 45 mm ventrally - 85.21 mm. CT anatomical study added and confirmed the results of the topographic investigation.

In liver surgical and histological research, small rodents are the most used experimental models. Although the small animals liver is typically lobulated and its macroscopic appearance do not resemble that of the compact human liver, a high degree of lobulation equivalence, allow the use of small rodents in biomedical research. The macroscopic anatomy of the liver of the rat, rabbit, guinea pig and chinchilla was studied from a comparative standpoint. The topography, lobulation and the connection elements of the liver were examined by detailed in situ observation and explanted liver of forty specimens.The rat liver (Hepar) consists of four distinct lobes of different size: the left lateral lobe - LLL (Lobus hepatis sinister lateralis), the median lobe - ML, the right lobe – RL (Lobus hepatis dexter) and the caudate lobe CL (Lobus caudatus). The largest lobe was the median lobe. The rabbit liver consists of five lobes: left lateral lobe - LLL, left medial lobe - LML (Lobus hepatis sinister medialis), right lobe - RL, quadrate lobe – QL (Lobus quadratus) and caudate lobe - CL. The most developed lobe was the left lateral lobe. The caudate lobe had a very narrow attachment on the hilar region. The guinea pig liver show six lobes: left lateral lobe - LLL, left medial lobe - LML, right lateral lobe – RLL (Lobus hepatis dexter lateralis), right medial lobe – RML (Lobus hepatis dexter medialis), quadrate lobe - QL and caudate lobe - CL. The largest lobe of this specie was the left lateral lobe. In chinchilla liver showed four lobes like in the rat. In the rats the most developed hepatic ligament was the falciform ligament (Lig. Falciforme hepatis) which spans from xyphoid process of the sternum and diaphragm to the liver, beginning at the interlobular fissure. The coronary ligament (Lig. Coronarium hepatis) was well developed in all rats. Interlobular ligaments connect the left lateral lobe with the upper caudate lobe. In rabbits, guinea pigs and chinchillas the connection elements were represented by the falciform ligament, coronary ligament, right (Lig.triangulare dextrum) and left triangular ligaments (Lig. Triangulare sinistrum), hepatorenal ligament (Lig.hepatorenale) and hepatoduodenal ligament (Lig. hepatoduodenale) with varying degrees of development.Based on detailed study of the macroscopic anatomy of rat, rabbit, guinea pig and chinchilla a proper experimental model in liver research, could be assessed. In this regard, the vascular anatomy of the liver in the mentioned species is of a great importance and it is subject of another report.

Background. Scapular winging is a rare but disabling deformity, which is commonly caused by lesions of the long thoracic and spinal accessory nerves that innervate the serratus anterior and trapezius muscles, respectively. Across the literature, traumatic injury to the nerves account for the majority of cases. Less common, nontraumatic causes include viral illness, neuroinflammatory conditions, toxins, compressive lesions, and C7 radiculopathy. We present a case where an apical lung malignancy causes winging of scapula by infiltrating C5–C7 roots of brachial plexus, which has been reported only once in the literature. Case. A 54-year-old male presented with recent onset painful difficulty in raising his right arm. He had no respiratory or constitutional symptoms. On examination, winging of scapula on the right side was noted with wasting and fasciculation involving the ipsilateral shoulder girdle. Proximal muscle power of the right upper limb was of 3/5 with preserved distal muscle power. No sensory loss was noted. A patch of bronchial breathing was found in the upper zone of the right lung with multiple hard cervical lymphadenopathies. Chest X-ray and contrast-enhanced computerized tomography-chest revealed a large tumor in the upper lobe of the right lung, which was confirmed to be a carcinoma of the lung. Electromyogram revealed large motor unit potentials and poor activation of right serratus anterior and internal scapulae muscles, while nerve conduction studies concluded the presence of a compressive lesion involving C5–C7 nerve roots of brachial plexus. Histology of a biopsy of the cervical lymph node confirmed metastasis from a poorly differentiated adenocarcinoma of the lung. The patient denied further investigation with MRI cervical spine. He was transferred to the cancer institute for further treatment. Conclusion. This case highlights the value of considering a compressive lung pathology with infiltration in the differential diagnosis, when evaluating winging of scapula.

In this study, 10 Hasak sheep lungs from Konya Bahri Dağdaş International Agricultural Research Institute, Unit of Experimental Animals Unit were used. Corrosion casting technique were applied to the materials. The corrosion cured materials were stored in water for one night. It was then incubated at 37 ° C in a 20% KOH solution for 24 hours. Corrosion casting technique and latex injection materials were photographed and presented in the study. The lungs were found to be wrapped with pleura visceralis (pleura pulmonalis) in the cavum thoracis. It was determined that the right lung was consisted of lobe cranialis (pars cranialis and pars caudalis), lobus medius, lobus caudalis and lobus accessorius. The left lung was composed of lobe cranialis (pars cranialis and pars caudalis) and lobe caudal. In the bronchus that shaped these lobes, it was determined that tacheae gave bronchus lobaris cranialis dexter (bronchus trachealis) mean 48.53 mm before the bifurcatio trachea, and later on it was divided into bronchus pirincipalis dexter and sinister. In this study, anatomical features of broncho-pulmonary segmentation and similarities and differences with other species were revealed.

One of the more extended exchanges on magic and the supernatural between the host Eucrates and his guests in Lucian’s Philopseudes or Lover of Lies is the sequence concerning Eucrates’ own animated statue of Pellichus, which can dismount from its pedestal, heal the sick, and punish the sacrilegious. This paper explores the multiple functions that that tale and the guests’ discussion surrounding it play within the dialogue. Consideration is given to: the sequence’s positioning and structural function within the wider dialogue; the purpose of its ecphrastic elements; the manner in which Eucrates may be seen to unravel his own story as he tells it; Lucian’s commentary upon the phenomenon of healing statues; and finally the contextualisation of the sinister threats offered by the statue.

Incidental soft tissue lumps in the scalp are a common presenting complaint in clinical practice. However, they may signify more sinister underlying pathologies. Our report examines a 63-year-old man presenting with impaired co-ordination in his left hand following a 3-month history of a painless left retroauricular scalp lump. MRI revealed a large left occipital soft tissue mass eroding through the underlying skull with infiltration into the underlying cerebellum and temporal lobe. Open biopsy confirmed a diagnosis of high-grade intracranial neuroendocrine tumour (NET). At approximately 5 months following successful tumour resection and adjuvant chemotherapy, he developed tumour recurrence and was subsequently palliated, and died at 1 year post diagnosis. Herein, we review other cases of primary intracranial NET, clinical findings, histopathological features and prognosis.

A 19-year-old man was admitted with a 2-week history of continuous cough along with a day history of acute onset unsteadiness and hiccups. Given the current pandemic, he was initially suspected to have COVID-19, however he tested negative on two occasions. Subsequent brain magnetic resonance imaging (MRI)confirmed a small left acute and subacute lateral medullary infarction with chest X-ray suggesting aspiration pneumonia with right lower lobe collapse. This is a distinctive case of posterior circulation stroke presenting with a new continuous cough in this era of COVID-19 pandemic. We anticipate based on MRI findings that his persistent cough was likely due to silent aspiration from dysphagia because of the subacute medullary infarction. It is therefore imperative that healthcare workers evaluate people who present with new continuous cough thoroughly to exclude any other sinister pathology. We should also be familiar with the possible presentations of posterior circulation stroke in this pandemic era.

This article emerges from a series of phone calls with the visual artist Beth Emily Richards in anticipation of her exhibition Poor Copy at The Northern Charter in Newcastle and Jerwood Arts London in 2018. A gossipy piece, it draws lines of connection between telephones, telepathic cats, urban legends and ‘King of Pop’ Michael Jackson’s apparent visitation to Devon in 2003. This visit which, as lore goes, is also contested forms the basis for Richards’ subsequent show and sustained engagement with contemporary mythmaking. Calling up lovers of the telephone Jacques Derrida, Hélène Cixous and Avital Ronell, celebrity impersonators and television illusionists, this article writes in and through the mystics of ‘electric speech’. The outmoded phone call is engaged as both a ‘conduit for thought’ and a poor copy – the line is cut or stalked, or a story is interrupted or interfered with – revealing a forensic fascination with the sinister and the unknown.

Abstract BACKGROUND AND IMPORTANCE: To present a case of traumatic cortical and dural arteriovenous fistula (AVF) after a BB gun accident. CLINICAL PRESENTATION: The patient presented with a small left frontal subdural hematoma and small contusions in the left frontal lobe after he was shot with a BB. He had no skull fractures or significant midline shift. The patient, who was neurologically intact, was discharged after 3 days of observation and having undergone serial computed tomography imaging. Five days later, the patient developed lethargy and emesis. Computed tomography showed a 5 × 3 × 5 cm intraparenchymal hematoma in the left frontal lobe. Emergency evacuation of the hematoma revealed a cortical AVF, which was resected. Postoperative angiography showed a dural AVF of the left middle meningeal artery, draining into the superior ophthalmic vein and a dural vein. The dural AVF was embolized with n-butyl cyanoacrylate. The patient was discharged after 3 days with no deficits. CONCLUSION: The subdural hematoma and contusions were caused by a BB, which often are used in low-velocity and small caliber weapons. Not all BB guns are low velocity, and the consequences can be dramatic. The BB gun used here was pneumatic. The patient had no skull fractures. Several days of stable imaging and normal examinations suggested nothing sinister. His initial bleeds appeared disproportionate to the mechanism. The delayed presentation of the debilitating hematoma in this case stresses the need for vigilance on the part of practitioners and families when patients have a suspicious bleed.

Posterior Reversible Encephalopathy Syndrome (PRES) is a diagnosis based on neuroimaging with the finding of vasogenic edema, especially in the occipital and parietal lobes. Some of the risk factors include malignant hypertension, chronic kidney failure, organ transplantation, autoimmune, immunosuppressant drugs, chemotherapy, and sepsis. The PRES mechanism is due to disrupted autoregulation, especially in the posterior circulation which is associated with hypertension and hypoperfusion. This will cause damage to the blood-brain barrier and vasogenic edema. We report a woman, 70 years old, with the chief complaint of loss of consciousness accompanied by headache, vomiting, and restlessness. The patient has chronic hypertension and routine hemodialysis due to chronic kidney failure. On physical examination, the patient was somnolent, malignant hypertension, and hemiparesis sinistra. Imaging examination showed vasogenic edema of the right parietooccipital lobe. The patient was treated in the intensive care unit, given intravenous dexamethasone, antihypertension, antibiotic, and routine hemodialysis. Consciousness gradually improved.

En esta crónica se recogen las actividades realizadas en el seminario Del escenario a la pantalla: teatro y cine en España, 1990-2016, organizado por la Cátedra Menéndez Pelayo de la UIMP, entre 7 y el 11 de agosto de 2017 en el Paraninfo de la Magdalena. El seminario se organizó en torno a tres dramas: ¡Ay, Carmela! de Sanchis Sinisterra y la película dirigida por Carlos Saura en 1990, El chico de la última fila de Mayorga y la particular visión que en 2012 llevó al cine François Ozon y el filme Las Furias, dirigido en 2016 por Miguel del Arco; la comedia El perro del hortelano de Lope de Vega y la versión cinematográfica que dirigió Pilar Miró en 1996; y la tragedia Bodas de sangre de Lorca y su última adaptación para el cine, dirigida por Paula Ortiz en 2015. Fueron cinco jornadas dedicadas a las estrechas relaciones entre el teatro y el cine.

Sturge Weber Syndrome (SWS) is a congenital neurocutaneous disorder with a facial capillary malformation Port-wine stains (PWS), abnormal blood vessels of the brain (leptomeningeal angioma), or abnormal blood vessels in the eye predisposing to glaucoma. The incidence of Sturge Weber Syndrome (SWS) is a rare entity that accounts about 3 of 1000 births with PWS, 5% of them suffer SWS. We report a case of 5-years-old girl who presented with a three-days history of muscle weakness of right upper and lower limb followed by headache, loss of consciousness, dizziness, with history of hemangioma facial without any symptoms like fever, nausea, vomit, and dysarthria. Patient was a refferal patient from Sarila Husada Hospital Sragen. Head CT-Scan was performed on the admission day on Sarila Husada Hospital Sragen and confirmed by Bethesda Hospital Radiologist revealed a subcortical calcification at frontal lobe and parietal sinistra with mild atrophy at bifrontalis lobes that support SWS.

I can't tell the most frightening story I know, because stories are made of words, and once I was without them. I was trekking in Nepal and ended up with amnesia. Later I stumbled into a mission hospital with a bruised jaw. A bad fall? I can't say. I had no words. No words for this thing that was wrenching and crying, in which “I” - a bundle of terror - seemed trapped. No words for where I began, stopped, or the mud stubble terrace on which I sat. No words to map, no words to define, no words to possess. No words for the blobs of light and shadow shifting or parking before me. No words to rank or relate the garbage - my own memories - blasting against my consciousness, randomly, insistently. Names shouted inside my head - my family, my lover, my own name; places - my hometown in America, the name of the mission hospital I'd eventually find my way to. An eleven-thousand foot mountain rose in front of me. A backpack pulled at my shoulders. A Nepali woman stroked my arm. I had no words to weave any of these into a safety net of story or meaning. All were uncontrollable, unpredictable, stimuli, which somehow, suddenly, had complete, and therefore sinister, power, and struck again and again against - some other thing - me - a thing I couldn't name or inhabit, for I had no words. I remember this sensation now when I want to know what it must have been like for my immigrant mother when, as an eight-year-old Slovak peasant child, she first arrived in America in 1929.

The purpose of this study is to examine the extent to which the use of language styles in the dialogue of the film "A Million Loves for Him" ​​can improve the aesthetic quality and appeal of the film. This study uses qualitative research with a descriptive approach. The use of language styles in the dialogue of the film "A Million Loves for Him" ​​is comparative language style, repetitive language style, affirmative language style, and satirical language style. Comparative language styles include (metaphor (2), hyperbole (3), allegory (2), euphemism (1). Repetitive language styles include (repetition (2), parallelism (2) epizaukis (2). Affirmative language styles (climax (1), pleonasm (1). Satire language styles include (Cynicism (1), irony (1). The results of the study are expected to contribute to the study of film linguistics and become a reference for filmmakers in creating more effective and meaningful dialogues. Tujuan penelitian ini adalah untuk mengkaji sejauh mana penggunaan gaya bahasa dalam dialog film "Sejuta Sayang Untuknya" dapat meningkatkan kualitas estetika dan daya tarik film. penelitian ini menggunakan penelitian kualitatif dengan jenis pendekatan deskriptif. Penggunaan gaya bahasa dalam dialog film sejuta sayang untuknya yaitu gaya bahasa perbandingan, gaya bahasa perulangan, gaya bahasa penegasan, dan gaya bahasa sindiran. Gaya bahasa perbandingan meliputi (metafora (2), hiperbola (3), alegori (2), eufinisme (1). Gaya bahasa perulangan meliputi (repetisi (2), paralelisme (2) epizaukis (2). Gaya bahasa penegasan (klimaks (1), pleonasme (1). Gaya bahasa sindiran meliputi (Sinisme (1), ironi (1). Hasil penelitian diharapkan dapat memberikan kontribusi pada kajian linguistik film dan menjadi referensi bagi para sineas dalam menciptakan dialog yang lebih efektif dan bermakna.

Abstract Aims Background: Temozolomide is an oral chemotherapy drug widely used in the treatment of glial tumours. This is generally well tolerated however, immediate and delayed hypersensitivity reactions have been described, necessitating treatment interruption that could significantly impact survival. Method Case description: We report a case of a 39-year-old young woman with WHO grade 2 IDH1mutant diffuse astrocytoma (MGMT promoter methylated) of the left temporal lobe. She had tumour resection in 2012 followed by radical radiotherapy. Afterwards, she had close surveillance with regular brain imaging. The tumour started to progress in early 2020. We agreed to commence on temozolomide to control tumour growth. She developed an itchy rash with easy bruising towards the end of the first cycle. It responded to a course of prednisolone. We proceeded with the second cycle and she developed a worsening rash on the third day. However she did not have signs or symptoms of anaphylaxis. This episode was again managed by a course of steroids and oral antibiotics. Since Temozolomide was the optimal treatment to control the disease progression at this stage, we agreed to persevere with temozolomide using a rapid desensitisation protocol. Results On the first day of third cycle, she was brought to the day chemotherapy unit and given prednisolone 30mg, fexofenadine 180mg and ondansetron 8mg, 30 minutes before the treatment. Our protocol was as follows; 5mg, 10mg, 20mg, 30mg, 50mg and 90mg of temozolomide at an interval of 30 minutes between the doses. She was advised to follow the same regime for the next four days of the third cycle. On days 6 -28, she has been advised to take fexofenadine 180mg once daily. Although there was a minor rash appeared on days 6/7, they subsided gradually. She tolerated the treatment without sinister symptoms or signs. We proceeded with the next 4 chemotherapy cycles adhering to the same protocol. The intensity of the rash gradually improved, and she became almost completely asymptomatic by the 7th cycle. It was also encouraging to see the radiological response of the tumour with the treatment. Conclusion Although the published literature is minimal, rapid desensitisation is shown to be a safe and effective method to counteract temozolomide hypersensitivity. In an era where there is still a paucity of systemic treatment options for primary brain tumours, adopting rapid desensitisation to induce tolerability to temozolomide, a drug which has shown to improve survival, would be a valuable addition in managing our patients. Further, our experience suggests that this protocol is safe, effective, and does not necessitate inpatient admission.

This study compared and studied “The Raven” representing the United States and Korea. Edgar Allan Poe's “The Raven” and Gu Sang’s “The Raven” were considered in symbolic appropriation of poetic material, in series form, intertextuality and semantic horizons.
 First, in the case of Poe, the choice of poetic material was ‘raven’ as a poetic material. This was intended to achieve the highest artistic effect. It also tried to best represent beauty. And the chorus "nevermore" was intended to maximize the poetic effect. On the other hand, Gu Sang chose the target of shock, impact, tension and emotion. The subject selected the raven as an allegory to criticize and inform the situation of the times.
 Edgar Allan Poe symbolizes fear and fear, based on the image of an ancient sinister bird. And the raven symbolizes the person who rules and delivers the dark world in the Age of Chaos. Also, the appearance of a raven is symbolized by ‘nevermore’ as ‘mournful, never-ending recollection’. On the other hand, Gu Sang's “Raven” criticizes the times of materialism and technologyism. In Korea, the raven is an ominous bird. However, the raven is symbolized as a bird longing for a spiritual and pure soul. And it is symbolized as a bird that foretells injustice and calamity. It is also symbolized as a savior who can save humans from golden universalism and materialism.
 Second, it is a series form. Poe transformed the sestina form of 6 lines and 6 stanzas into a finite series of 18 stanzas and 108 lines. On the other hand, Gu Sang has no external boundaries or external boundaries. He made it into an infinite series where only the theme changes. And Poe reinforces the negative expression with ‘nothing more’ (limited negation) < ‘nevermore’ (future negation) against the backdrop of the night. On the other hand, Gu Sang's poems are titled with numbers. The number does not impose a continuous development and process. It is united by the same rhetorical pattern(allegory), the same rhythm, and the same repetition.
 Finally, in Poe's poem, he dreams of becoming one with his lost lover. However, he feels death, fear and loss from the raven who repeats only 'nevermore'. And the story and intertextuality of Greco-Roman mythology appear. Poe made a series of symbols and series of perpetually recurring sadness of loss. On the other hand, in the poems of Gu Sang, it is symbolized as a bird giving warnings and prophecies through cries. And the legend of the Tower of London in England is intertextual and denounces human cruelty and savagery. Gu Sang delivers the message of harmony between humans and nature, restoration of humanity, and saving lives.
 As described above, the poems of Poe and Gu Sang are different in symbol and form. However, the sadness, mourning, and anxiety of the loss of an object are common.

Maclear, Kyo. Virginia Wolf. Illus. Isabelle Arsenault. Toronto : Kids Can Press, 2010. Print. Vanessa awakes one morning to find her sister, Virginia, transformed. Virginia is not herself. She has become furtive and embittered, snippy and distinctly wolfish. While Isabelle Arsenault's illustrations have a consistent prettiness and amiable levity, the ambiguous and slightly sinister nature of Virginia's' transformation is undeniable. Kyo Maclear's narrative balances how children will interpret the change that has come over Virginia and Vanessa's attempts to return her sister to herself and how adults will understand the allusions to depression and alienation. Virginia is literally - in the context of a child's understanding and the illustrations - a wolf in an archetypal little girl's dress. She is also genuinely frightening in the depths and intensity of her withdrawal and this gives Virginia Wolf a lovely little frisson of fairy tale dread. Vanessa perseveres in trying to redeem her sister and rescue her from her dour transformation. It is creativity, honesty of self-expression and love that eventually reestablish the sister's rapport. As Maclear elegantly conveys, accompanied by an inspired and expressive page design, “Down became up. Dim became bright. Gloom became glad.” Inspired by Maclear's creative interpretation of the relationship between Virginia Woolf and her sister Vanessa Bell, the story can be enjoyed at many different levels. The reader can certainly intuit how much the writer and artist enjoy each other’s work and are relishing the imaginative potential of their subject matter. The layered complexity of the text is enriched by the intuitive collaboration between artist and writer evident in the evocative text and toothsomely vivid illustrations.Highly Recommended: 4 out of 4 starsReviewer: Matilda Roche Matilda spends her days lavishing attention on the University of Alberta’s metadata but children’s illustrated books, literature for young adults and graphic novels also make her heart sing. Her reviews benefit from the critical influence of a four year old daughter and a one year old son – both geniuses. Matilda’s super power is the ability to read comic books aloud.

Larson, Hope. A Wrinkle in Time: The Graphic Novel. New York: Margaret Ferguson Books, 2012. Print. This adaptation of the science fiction classic stays true to Madeline L’Engles’ original novel, first published in 1962 and still timeless 50 years later. Hope Larson (Eisner award-winning artist for Mercury, 2010) tackles both the written adaptation of the text and the illustrations, providing readers with much to explore. This graphic novel is a hefty addition to your collection, clocking in at 392 pages. The story begins with Meg Murry, her brother Charles Wallace, and their friend Calvin meeting three unusual ladies - Mrs. Whatsit, Mrs. Which and Mrs. Who. They travel together on a magical journey via a tesseract (a wrinkle in space and time) to find their father, Mr. Murry, who has gone missing while working on a top secret government project. When they arrive on the planet Camazotz where Mr. Murry is being held captive, they discover that something dark and sinister is controlling life on the planet. The children must summon all their strength and courage to resist this dark force and find their father. Larson’s strength is her ability to remain faithful to the original text while adding depth with her detailed illustrations. Readers of the original text will recognize key quotes and phrases, from the opening line “It was a dark and stormy night”, and will find much to love in Larson’s detailed illustrations. Meg’s storyline in particular was enhanced by Larson’s visual style, and I could see the messy complex emotions that Meg experienced throughout the story. Her illustrations also help to make clear some of the complex scientific ideas of the story, such as the nature of the fourth dimension and the tesseract – ideas I could not make sense of when I first read the book as a child. A disappointment with Larson’s adaptation was the selection of a single colour palette for the entire book. The choice of black, white and blue lent itself well to establishing the sense of despair that Meg and Charles Wallace felt about finding their missing father. It also made sense in a story where characters travel through space and time. However, I felt that new readers would miss out on details such as the menace of the man with the red eyes, and furthermore, the sense of hope and victory at the end of the story felt deadened. ​ In the end, this graphic novel adaptation is beautifully done and will not only introduce a new generation of readers to this classic tale, but also satisfy purists and fans of the original. Recommended: 3 out of 4 stars Reviewer: Shelly Jobagy Shelly Jobagy is a teacher-librarian and administrator at a K-9 school in Edmonton, Alberta.

AbstractFew instances of neoplastic formations in the liver of chinchillas have been found, even though the species is widely used in different scientific experiments. In the present article we investigate the anatomical features of the chinchilla's liver using CT and three dimension (3D) imaging. For the trials we used 12 (six males and six females) clinically healthy chinchillas all at 18 months of age. The animals were positioned in dorsal recumbency. We used Th8 to L2 vertebrae and the sternum as bone markers for the transverse CT study. The investigated anatomical landmarks for the CT coronal study were the vertebrae, costal arch, soft abdominal wall, diaphragm, stomach and the right kidney. 3D reconstructions were accomplished with a specific imaging software. On transverse and coronal CT images, the chinchilla's liver was composed of lobus hepatis sinister lateralis, ‘middle lobe’–without proper Latin term in NAV 2017, lobus hepatis dexter and lobus caudatus. The ‘middle lobe’ was separated into the ‘left middle lobe’ and the ‘right middle lobe’. Lobus hepatis dexter consisted of lobus hepatis dexter medialis and lobus hepatis dexter lateralis. There was an anatomical relation between the liver, fundus ventriculi and corpus ventriculi. Proc. caudatus was in close contact with the right kidney. Vesica fellea was elongated and ellipsoid. 3D reformatted images confirmed the results obtained by transverse and coronal CT studies. The CT density of the liver in HU was 195.6 ± 73.1. The CT and 3D reconstructed images were visualized at high resolution. This data could be used as a basis for further morphological and imaging studies.

After grossing more than $80 million at the international box office and winning the 2007 Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, the international success of Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s 2006 film The Lives of Others has popularised the word “Stasi” as a “default global synonym” for the terrors associated with surveillance (Garton Ash). Just as representations of Nazism have become inextricably entwined with a specific kind of authoritarian, murderous dictatorship, Garton Ash argues that so too the Stasi and its agents have come to stand in for a certain kind of authoritarian dictatorship in the popular imagination, whose consequences aren’t necessarily as physically harmful as those of National Socialism, but are, instead, dependent on strategies encompassing surveillance, control, and coercion to achieve their objectives.Surveillance societies, such as the former German Democratic Republic, have long been settings for both influential and popular fictions. Social theory has also been illuminated by some of these fictions, with theorists such as Haggerty and Ericson claiming that surveillance models originating in the work of Jeremy Bentham and George Orwell are central to conceptualising and understanding surveillance practices, as well as social attitudes towards them. Orwell’s terminology in particular and his ideas relating to “Thought Police,” “Big Brother,” “Room 101,” “Newspeak,” and others, have entered into popular discourse and, to a large extent, have become synonymous with the idea of surveillance itself. Even the adjective “Orwellian” has come to be associated with totalitarian regimes of absolute control, so much so that “when a totalitarian setup, whether in fact or in fantasy ... is called ‘Orwellian,’ it is as if George Orwell had helped to create it instead of helping to dispel its euphemistic thrall” (James 72).As sociologist David Lyon notes: “much surveillance theory is dystopian” (201). And while the fear, helplessness, and emotional experiences of living under the suspicion and scrutiny of security services such as Von Donnersmarck’s Stasi or Orwell’s Party are necessarily muted by theory, it is often through fictions such as The Lives of Others and Nineteen Eighty-Four that these can be fully expressed. In the case of The Lives of Others and Nineteen Eighty-Four, both use central love stories to express the affective experiences associated with constant surveillance and use these as a way of contrasting and critiquing the way in which surveillance, power, and control operate in both settings. Like many other texts which represent surveillance societies, both fictions present a bleak picture, with the surveillance undertaken by the Party or Stasi being framed as a deindividualising or depersonifying social force which eliminates privacy, compromises trust, and blurs the distinction between the self and the state, the personal and the social, the individual and the ideology. This brings me to the purpose of this paper, which is concerned with two things: firstly, it will discuss these oppositions alongside the role of social surveillance and private lives in Von Donnersmarck’s film. The existing scholarly work on The Lives of Others tends to focus on its historical setting—the former East Germany—and, consequently, emphasises its generic status as a “political thriller,” “fierce and gloomy historical drama” full of “psychological terror,” and so on. Nevertheless, this overstates the film’s social milieu at the expense of the personal drama which drives the narrative—the film is underpinned by multiple overlapping love stories—so my focus is more concerned with highlighting the latter, rather than the former. I am not going to attempt to provide any sort of a comparative case study between the film’s representation of the Stasi and the historical realities upon which it is based, for example. Secondly, much has been made of the transformation of the character Gerd Wiesler, who shifts from “a loyal Stasi officer with an unswervingly grim demeanour” into “a good man” with a conscience—to borrow from Von Donnersmarck’s commentary. I will conclude by briefly addressing this transformation with reference to surveillance and its place within the film’s narrative.The Lives of Others is a film which, like Nineteen Eighty-Four, carries the signifiers of a very specific kind of surveillance. Set in the former German Democratic Republic in the year 1984—perhaps a self-conscious reference to Orwell—the film is concerned with the playwright Georg Dreyman (played by Sebastian Koch), “the only nonsubversive writer who is still read in the West”; his girlfriend, the actress Christa-Maria Sieland (played by Martina Gedeck); and the Stasi Captain Wiesler (played by Ulrich Mühe). In his capacity as expert interrogator and security agent, Wiesler is assigned to spy on Dreyman and Sieland because they are suspected of being disloyal, and as a playwright and actress—and thus, persons of social, intellectual, and cultural influence—this will never do. Accordingly, Dreyman and Sieland’s apartment is bugged and the pair is constantly surveilled. Their home, previously a space of relative privacy, becomes the prime site for this surveillance, forcing their “private or ‘personal life’”—which is understood as “the special preserve of intimacy, affection, trust and elective affinity”—into “the larger world of impersonal and instrumental [social] relations” governed by the East German state (Weintraub and Kumar xiii). The surveillance in the film is a “creature of its social context,” to borrow James Rule’s terminology (300). Rule argued that all systems of surveillance are “distinctive of certain social orders” and that their “continued growth is closely tied to other changes in their social structural contexts” (300). This is certainly true of the surveillance in The Lives of Others, which is characterised by effectiveness through totality, rather than technological sophistication. Broadly speaking, surveillance in the former East Germany was top-down and hierarchical and connected with the maintenance of the ruling party’s power. Metaphors abound when describing the Stasi’s surveillance network—it was an “octopus,” a “multi-headed hydra,” a beast of gargantuan size at the very heart of the East German Party-State (Childs and Popplewell xiii). Needless to say, the Stasi was big. Since Die Wende, especially, much has been made of the enormity of the Stasi’s bureaucracy and its capacity to “intrude.” Between 1950 and 1989 it employed 274,000 people in an official capacity and, after the collapse of the East German regime anywhere up to 500,000 East German Inoffizielle Mitarbeiter—Unofficial Collaborators: ordinary citizens from the East German state who had been coerced into spying on friends or family members, or had volunteered their services—had been identified (Koehler 8). This equated to approximately one Stasi officer, informer or collaborator per 6.5 East German citizens (Koehler 9). Put in perspective, there was one KGB agent per 5,800 citizens in the Soviet Union, while the Gestapo—often held up as the ultimate example of the abuses and evils inherent in many secret police forces—had one officer for every 2,000 Germans (Koehler 9).And it is this hydra, this octopus that Dreyman and Sieland encounter in The Lives of Others. Led by Wiesler and driven by suspicion, the Stasi listens in on their conversations, follows the couple clandestinely, and gathers information which may reveal “politically incorrect behaviour” (Rainer and Siedler 251). The reach of the Stasi’s surveillance network and its capacity to collect information is demonstrated through a variety of means—beginning with the interrogation scene during the film’s opening where the scent of a dissident is stored in a jar for later use, to the final coercion in which Sieland becomes an IM. The Stasi in the film consistently demonstrates an uncanny ability to know: to gather information through surveillance, and to use this surveillance to demonstrate and secure its power. As Rule points out: “the ability of any system of surveillance to control and shape the behaviour of ... [those under surveillance] depends very much on the certainty with which it manages to bring information generated in one social and temporal setting to bear elsewhere” (302). Intense “surveillance and potent mechanisms of control are useless” if those under surveillance can simply hide behind closed doors or escape over a wall—so the “system must arrange its boundaries so that both its surveillance and control activities cover a sufficiently broad area” to prevent escape through movement (Rule 303–304). In a total surveillance society such as the one seen in The Lives of Others, there is no “escape” from the Stasi other than death—suicide—which defines many of the film’s key turning points. The surveillance undertaken by the Stasi may be stored in jars in some cases; however, it can also be retrieved to confirm suspicions, to coerce and control, and, ultimately, to further the objectives of the Party State.Despite the Stasi’s best attempts, however, Dreyman is consistently loyal—he believes in the principles of socialism and, to quote Wiesler’s superior Grubitz (played by Ulrich Tukur), he “thinks East Germany is the fairest land of them all.” Eventually it is revealed that the real reason for the surveillance is not about suspected disloyalty to the state, but a personal vendetta by the Party’s Minister for Culture, Bruno Hempf (played by Thomas Thieme), who wants Sieland for himself and is using his influence within the Stasi to bring Dreyman down. The use of surveillance for personal gain, rather than for social “good” proves too much for Wiesler who undergoes a “psychological and political transformation” and begins to empathise with the subjects of his investigation (Diamond 811). Dreyman undergoes a similar transformation after the suicide of his mentor and friend Albert Jerska (played by Volkmar Kleinert)—a theatre director whose life was made meaningless after he was blacklisted by the Stasi. This brings me back to the question of the personal and the social, which forms the fundamental tension within the film and is the basis of this paper. Historically, notions of “public” and “private,” “social” and “personal”—as understood in state-socialist societies such as the former East Germany—revolved around “the victimised ‘us’ and the newly powerful ‘them’ who ruled the state” (Gal 87). Nevertheless, the distinction between the personal and the social—or public and private—has long been a social organising principle and, as a result, has acted as a springboard into “many key issues of social and political analysis, of moral and political debate, and of ordering everyday life” (Weintraub and Kumar 1). The idea of “privacy”—which is often conceptualised simplistically as a “uni-dimensional, rigidly dichotomous and absolute, fixed and universal concept” (Marx 157)—is used as a shield against any number of perceived political, social, or moral infringements, including surveillance, and can be said to be organised around the idea of visibility, where “private” encompasses that which is “able and / or entitled to be kept hidden, sheltered or withdrawn from others” (Weintraub and Kumar 6). The private is thus connected with a life free of surveillance and scrutiny, where people have a reprieve from monitored social relations and the collective self. Privacy is “fundamentally rooted” in a personal life “delineated by private space” without surveillance, and is interlinked with the idea of a “society of strangers,” where strangers are, by definition, individuals who have been denied access to our personal lives and private spaces (Lyon 21). The act of disclosure and the provision of access to our personal affairs is thus regarded as a voluntary gesture of faith and trust—an invitation into the private, which makes our lives—the lives of strangers, the lives of “others”—familiar and knowable. In The Lives of Others it is Dreyman and Sieland who, because of the personal relationship they have maintained in the relative privacy of their apartment, are the “strangers” or “others” the Stasi wants to make knowable. When Wiesler first encounters the couple at the premiere of Dreyman’s play—the tellingly named The Faces of Love—he seems disturbed by the affection they share for one another and for their fellow artists. Later, it is a brief moment of intimacy between Dreyman and Sieland that motivates Wiesler into overseeing the surveillance himself—a decision that contributes to his eventual transformation. Wiesler is disturbed by Dreyman and Sieland’s relationship because it demonstrates personal loyalties born out of private emotions which exist beyond the gaze of the Stasi and, thus, beyond the control of the state. In Wiesler’s world the only true love is social love—the impersonal love of the state—and anything resembling the romantic or the personal is not only unfamiliar, but suspicious and potentially subversive. In Von Donnersmarck’s words, Wiesler has shut out his humanity to adhere to a principle, which he values above and beyond all else. His suspicion of Dreyman and Sieland thus exemplifies how the experience and interpretation of personal emotions is dependent, in part, on social and cultural circumstances. For Wiesler, private emotions are dangerous, unknowable, and unfamiliar. They belong to a realm “which places extraordinary emphasis on the concept of individuality and individual self-identity” in “a society which distinguishes more or less plainly between public positions and personal roles; ... and, perhaps most importantly, [they belong to] a society that grants a high degree of mobility and flexibility in relationships in general, [and] places personal choice at the core of mating and marriage rituals ...” (Solomon xxviii). A society, in other words, quite unlike the one in The Lives of Others. By monitoring the personal lives of Dreyman and Sieland, the Stasi thus collapses the distinction between the personal and the social, the private and the public. Surveillance transforms personal emotions into public information, and it is this information which is later manipulated for the social “good” and at the expense of Dreyman and Sieland’s personal lives. In The Lives of Others there is no separation between the personal and the social, the public and the private—there is only the Party and there is only the Stasi. I want to conclude by briefly discussing the transformation of Wiesler, which is emblematic of the film’s central message about the “capacity of human beings for goodness, [love], compassion and change” (Diamond 812–13). Von Donnersmarck makes this message clear in one of the film’s early scenes, where, at the opening of his play The Faces of Love, Dreyman appeals to Minister Hempf about Jerska’s blacklisting, suggesting that Jerska is remorseful and has changed. Hempf tells Dreyman: “That’s what we all love about your plays ... the idea that people can change. People don’t change.” Hempf is suggesting, of course, that there is no “normalising gaze” in the East German state; that there is only suspicion, discrimination and exclusion. Once you have been identified as “abnormal,” “subversive” or “an enemy” by the Stasi’s surveillance, you can never remove yourself from the category of suspicion—change is impossible. But Wiesler and Dreyman do change, however unlikely Wiesler’s transformation may be. While the film’s style suggest the men are opposites—Dreyman dresses like a chic (West) German intellectual in tweed jackets and horn-rimmed glasses, while Wiesler gets around in stiff Stasi uniforms and grey nylon tracksuits; Dreyman’s home reflects his status as a man of culture and taste, with literature, art, and music dominating the bohemian aesthetic, while Wiesler’s home is cold, empty, characterless, and generic; Dreyman shares a personal life with Sieland, while Wiesler is visited by a prostitute who services all the Stasi men in his building “on a tight schedule” and so on—they share a fundamental similarity: they both believe in socialism, in the East German state, and the utopian ideals that are now obscured under layers of bureaucracy, surveillance, corruption, and suspicion (Diamond 815). Nevertheless, after discovering that Sieland is being forced into sexual encounters with party Minister Hempf, the instigator of the surveillance, Wiesler begins to identify with the couple, and, for the first time, breaches the boundary between surveillance and interference, between social observation and personal intervention. After seeing the Minister’s car pull up with Sieland inside, Wiesler uses his surveillance technologies to alert Dreyman to her return—he rings the couple’s doorbell whilst muttering, “Time for some bitter truths.” Later, after Sieland showers and collapses “in mute despair,” Dreyman cradles her in his arms, after which the film cuts to a shot of Wiesler still listening, but mirroring their body language (Diamond 817). This is the moment at which the film makes clear that Wiesler’s role has shifted from social monitoring to something more personal—he has developed an emotional investment in the surveillance he is conducting and is identifying and empathising with the subjects of his surveillance. Eventually this goes further—he steals a copy of Brecht’s poems from their apartment and reads “Memory of Marie A.” a poem which “expresses poignant longings for a love that is both enticing and elusive” (Diamond 822). By breaching the boundary between the social and the personal, Wiesler undergoes a complete transformation, and his continued interventions drive the narrative and dictate outcomes not only for himself, but also for Dreyman and Sieland. In shifting his role from surveillance to engagement, from observation to intervention, and from state suspicion to personal investment, Wiesler eventually, and in his own way, falls in love. Surveillance is the defining characteristic of The Lives of Others—it is both oppressive and redemptive, sinister and salvational, an obstacle and an opening. It defines both the film’s social setting and enables and impacts on the personal relationships between characters. The Lives of Others brings home the horrors of East Germany under the Stasi—albeit in a stylised and technically accomplished fashion—by emphasising the personal and social costs associated with the corrupt, petty, and spiteful regime through human drama. The ultimate result is a film with a surveillance network that swings between care and control, observation and engagement, with Wiesler exemplifying all of these traits. And while the end result of the Stasi’s surveillance is destructive and despairing, in the words of Von Donnersmarck, it also gives characters “the ability to do the right thing, even in social conditions that seem to eradicate the very possibility of personal goodness.”ReferencesChilds, David and Richard Popplewell. The Stasi: The East German Intelligence and Security Service. New York: New York U P, 1996.Diamond, Diana. “Empathy and Identification in Von Donnersmarck’s The Lives of Others.” Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 56.3 (2008): 811–32.Gal, Susan. “A Semiotics of the Public/Private Distinction.” Differences 13.1 (2002): 77–95.Garton Ash, Timothy. “The Stasi on Our Minds.” The New York Review of Books 31 May 2007. 7 November 2010. ‹http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2007/may/31/the-stasi-on-our-minds/›. Haggerty, Kevin D. and Richard V. Ericson. “The Surveillant Assemblage.” The British Journal of Sociology 51.4 (2000): 605–22.James, Clive. “The Truthteller.” The New Yorker 18 Jan 1999: 72–78.Koehler, John O. Stasi: The Untold Story of the East German Secret Police. Boulder: Westview P, 1999. Lives of Others, The. Dir. Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck. Perf. Martina Gedeck, Ulrich Mühe, and Sebastian Koch. Arte, 2006.Lyon, David. The Electronic Eye. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1994.Marx, Gary T. “Murky Conceptual Waters: The Public and the Private.” Ethics and Information Technology 3.3 (2001): 157–69.Nineteen Eighty-Four. Dir. Michael Radford. Perf. John Hurt, Richard Burton, and Suzanna Hamilton. Virgin Films, 1984.Rainer, Helmut and Thomas Siedler. “Does Democracy Foster Trust?” Journal of Comparative Economics 37 (2009): 251–69.Rule, James B. Private Lives and Public Surveillance: Social Control in the Computer Age. London: Allen Lane, 1973.Solomon, Robert C. Love: Emotion, Myth and Metaphor. Buffalo: Prometheus, 1990.Weintraub, Jeff Alan and Krishan Kumar, eds. Public and Private in Thought and Practice: Perspectives on a Grand Dichotomy. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1997.

Radiological evaluation of the parotid gland neoplasms is a major challenge for radiologists, due to the wide variety of imaging features and differential diagnosis. Though Ultrasonography (USG) combined with guided Fine Needle Aspiration Cytology (FNAC) is the primary diagnostic modality, Computed Tomography (CT) and Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) play an important role in the evaluation of patients presenting with suspected neoplastic lesions of the parotid gland. Cross-sectional imaging data of seven patients were selected and reviewed in detail. CT and MRI imaging had been done on patients referred to Radiology Department for clinically suspected parotid tumours. All of them underwent surgical excision and histopathological examination postimaging. Benign tumours usually arise from superficial lobe and exhibit strong signal intensity on T2 weighted images with well-defined margins. Lobulated margins with T2 dark rim are characteristic of pleomorphic adenoma. Hyperdense lesion with cystic changes with occasional bilateralism favour Warthin’s tumour. Most of the malignant parotid tumours involve deep lobe and appear as low signal lesion on T2 weighted imaging with ill-defined margins. Locally aggressive features like subcutaneous/deep infiltration strongly suggests malignancy. Cross-sectional imaging feature of carcinoma ex pleomorphic adenoma is variable from focally aggressive to totally aggressive tumourigenesis. Few malignant tumours like high-grade Mucoepidermoid Carcinoma (MEC) and Adenoid Cystic Carcinoma (AdCC) can show tendency towards perineural spread. Although histopathological examination is required for definitive diagnosis, few pathology-specific imaging findings on cross-sectional imaging can help in localising and characterising the parotid lesions and categorising innocuous benign from sinister malignant lesions and thus narrow down the differential diagnosis.

Posterior Reversible Encephalopathy Syndrome (PRES) is a diagnosis based on neuroimaging with the finding of vasogenic edema, especially in the occipital and parietal lobes. Some of the risk factors include malignant hypertension, chronic kidney failure, organ transplantation, autoimmune, immunosuppressant drugs, chemotherapy, and sepsis. The PRES mechanism is due to disrupted autoregulation, especially in the posterior circulation which is associated with hypertension and hypoperfusion. This will cause damage to the blood-brain barrier and vasogenic edema. We report a woman, 70 years old, with the chief complaint of loss of consciousness accompanied by headache, vomiting, and restlessness. The patient has chronic hypertension and routine hemodialysis due to chronic kidney failure. On physical examination, the patient was somnolent, malignant hypertension, and hemiparesis sinistra. Imaging examination showed vasogenic edema of the right parietooccipital lobe. The patient was treated in the intensive care unit, given intravenous dexamethasone, antihypertension, antibiotic, and routine hemodialysis. Consciousness gradually improved.

(Authors' Note: Anton Pavlovich Chekov (1860 – 1904) the Russian playwright and short story writer is considered one of the greatest fiction writers in history. He was a physician and practiced medicine his whole life before his death from tuberculosis at the young age of 44. “The Black Monk”, one of his most famous short stories was written in 1894.) Andrei Vasslyich Kovrin, Master of Arts in Psychology, decides to go to a country house on account of his nerves being ‘weary from over work’. There, he feels rejuvenated at the sight of blossoming natural beauty. It seems to bring on intense joy and hope he hasn’t felt since childhood. ‘The Black Monk’1 opens to the promise of an exhilarating summer. Buoyed by preternatural energy, Kovrin adopts a feverish routine of continuous, vigorous work. His exertions intensify with a soaring of confidence and ambition. To his mind, his efforts begin to take on a cosmic significance. He becomes more cheerful, tal kative, and energetic. A piece of music, distantly played and faintly heard, evokes the idea of a sacred harmony. This suggests the legend of “the black monk.” The origin of the legend is not specified in the story. It appears to be an invention of Kovrin’s steadily slipping mind. It goes like this: A monk, dressed in black, gave rise to a mirage a thousand years ago. This mirage, through regeneration of images, flits throughout the universe. It would appear, a thousand years after the original monk walked the earth, to a specific person and reveal eternal truths. Soon Kovrin becomes obsessed by the idea of the black monk and begins having hallucinations in which he converses with the apparition. He also falls prey to grandiose delusions. He begins treatment once his wife finally realizes, to her ‘amazement and horror’, the extent of his madness. Other writers of the time utilized the artifice of testimonials purported to be written by ‘lunatics’ to portray the subjective experience of mental illness. A typical example would feature a madman protesting his innocence while descending into the absurdity and incoherence of lunacy. (Examples include Jack London’s ‘Told in the Drooling Ward’,2 Edgar Allen Poe’s ‘Tell – tale Heart’,3 Guy de Maupassant’s ‘Le Horla’4 and Charlotte Perkins Gilmans' ’The Yellow Wall – paper’).5 Chekhov eschews this approach. Here, we are not passive listeners, trying to decipher monologues. In The Black Monk, the mood of the story mirrors the mental state of the protagonist. As in the beginning, when Kovrin is feeling elated, the words used to describe the summer landscape are poetic and effusive (luxuriant, cheerful, animated, joyful etc.). These pages gush with scenes of lively joviality. We are lulled into confidence and exult in hope and beauty with Kovrin. But subtle hints accumulate and make us uneasy (e.g. Kovrin’s insomnia, his nervous energy). Madness creeps on gently and insidiously upon Kovrin – and the readers. We see his attempts to explain away the madness, ‘People with ideas are nervous and marked by high sensitivity.’ We are party to Kovrin’s exultation, hopes and fears. Gradually the descriptions grow more sinister and strange. Initial hope burgeons into grandiose delusions and the music of early pages develops into phantoms. The knowledge of intimate clinical details of the illness presented in this story is astonishing. It can only have been written by a doctor. Anton Chekhov (1860 – 1904) continued to practice as a physician until 1897. All the while he conti-nued to compose short stories and plays which would transform the theatre and help bring about the modern form of the short story. He himself described the relationship of his two occupations by saying, “Medicine is my wife while literature is my mistress.”6 Lesser mortals might not even survive their co-existence but Chekhov seemed to thrive on it. Doctors are the primary characters in 25 of his plays. In addition he wrote numerous stories describing mental and physical illnesses. These are popularly known as his ‘clinical studies’ and include ‘The Dreary Story’, ‘About Love’, 'Black Monk’, and ‘Ward no 6’. Chekhov’s best stories show compassion and sympathy for human failings. In ‘The Black Monk’ protagonists deal with their incomprehension, confusion and dread by failing or refusing to recognize the madness. Kovrin’s failure to accept the fact of his madness is presented with remarkable acuity and sensitivity. In dealing with mental illness, the oft-reported and often forgotten mantra that ‘Our primary concern is the patient, not the disease,’ has even more significance than in other disciplines of medicine. Chekhov’s tender treatment of his characters exemplifies this approach. The story continues. Kovrin is treated and given “bromide”, a primitive psychotropic agent. As the elation disappears Kovrin discovers the painful fact of his mediocrity. His relationships fall apart, as does his mental tranquility. Here too readers share the dullness of his life. All the luster of life has disappeared. The dreariness of the landscape, for example, is masterfully contrasted (using descriptors like gnarled, monoto-nous) with its earlier descriptions. The boredom and rancor of Kovrin’s new life is on full display. Physicians, of all people, cannot afford to harbor illusions. We must look life squarely in the eye. ‘The Black Monk’, like life, shows us that agony and ecstasy, exhilaration and ennui, joy and despair exist together. One cannot hope for one and not expect the other. It is our task, as healers, to understand this and help others understand it as well.

It is widely acknowledged among film scholars that Lynch’s 2001 neo-noir Mulholland Drive is richly infused with intertextual references and homages — most notably to Charles Vidor’s Gilda (1946), Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard (1950), Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958), and Ingmar Bergman’s Persona (1966). What is less recognised is the extent to which J. Sheridan Le Fanu’s 1872 Gothic novella Carmilla has also influenced Mulholland Drive. This article focuses on the dynamics of the relationship between Carmilla and Mulholland Drive, particularly the formation of femme fatale Camilla Rhodes (played by Laura Elena Harring), with the aim of establishing how the Gothic shapes the viewing experience of the film. I argue that not only are there striking narrative similarities between the texts, but lying at the heart of both Carmilla and Mulholland Drive is the uncanny. By drawing on this elusive and eerie feeling, Lynch successfully introduces an archetypal quality both to Camilla and Mulholland Drive as a whole, which in turn contributes to powerful sensations of desire, dread, nostalgia, and “noirness” that are aroused by the film. As such Mulholland Drive emerges not only as a compelling work of art, but also a deeply evocative cinematic experience. I begin by providing a brief overview of Le Fanu’s Gothic tale and establish its formative influence on later cinematic texts. I then present a synopsis of Mulholland Drive before exploring the rich interrelationship the film has with Carmilla. Carmilla and the Lesbian Vampire Carmilla is narrated from the perspective of a sheltered nineteen-year-old girl called Laura, who lives in an isolated Styrian castle with her father. After a bizarre event involving a carriage accident, a young woman named Carmilla is left in the care of Laura’s father. Carmilla is beautiful and charming, but she is an enigma; her origins and even her surname remain a mystery. Though Laura identifies a number of peculiarities about her new friend’s behaviour (such as her strange, intense moods, languid body movements, and other irregular habits), the two women are captivated with each other, quickly falling in love. However, despite Carmilla’s harmless and fragile appearance, she is not what she seems. She is a one hundred and fifty year old vampire called Mircalla, Countess Karnstein (also known as Millarca — both anagrams of Carmilla), who preys on adolescent women, seducing them while feeding off their blood as they sleep. In spite of the deep affection she claims to have for Laura, Carmilla is compelled to slowly bleed her dry. This takes its physical toll on Laura who becomes progressively pallid and lethargic, before Carmilla’s true identity is revealed and she is slain. Le Fanu’s Carmilla is monumental, not only for popularising the female vampire, but for producing a sexually alluring creature that actively seeks out and seduces other women. Cinematically, the myth of the lesbian vampire has been drawn on extensively by film makers. One of the earliest female centred vampire movies to contain connotations of same-sex desire is Lambert Hilyer’s Dracula’s Daughter (1936). However, it was in the 1960s and 1970s that the spectre of the lesbian vampire exploded on screen. In part a response to the abolishment of Motion Picture Code strictures (Baker 554) and fuelled by latent anxieties about second wave feminist activism (Zimmerman 23–4), films of this cycle blended horror with erotica, reworking the lesbian vampire as a “male pornographic fantasy” (Weiss 87). These productions draw on Carmilla in varying degrees. In most, the resemblance is purely thematic; others draw on Le Fanu’s novella slightly more directly. In Roger Vadim’s Et Mourir de Plaisir (1960) an aristocratic woman called Carmilla becomes possessed by her vampire ancestor Millarca von Karnstein. In Roy Ward Baker’s The Vampire Lovers (1970) Carmilla kills Laura before seducing a girl named Emma whom she encounters after a mysterious carriage breakdown. However, the undead Gothic lady has not only made a transition from literature to screen. The figure also transcends the realm of horror, venturing into other cinematic styles and genres as a mortal vampire whose sexuality is a source of malevolence (Weiss 96–7). A well-known early example is Frank Powell’s A Fool There Was (1915), starring Theda Barra as “The Vampire,” an alluring seductress who targets wealthy men, draining them of both their money and dignity (as opposed to their blood), reducing them to madness, alcoholism, and suicide. Other famous “vamps,” as these deadly women came to be known, include the characters played by Marlene Dietrich such as Concha Pérez in Joseph von Sternberg’s The Devil is a Woman (1935). With the emergence of film noir in the early 1940s, the vamp metamorphosed into the femme fatale, who like her predecessors, takes the form of a human vampire who uses her sexuality to seduce her unwitting victims before destroying them. The deadly woman of this era functions as a prototype for neo-noir incarnations of the sexually alluring fatale figure, whose popularity resurged in the early 1980s with productions such as Lawrence Kasdan’s Body Heat (1981), a film commonly regarded as a remake of Billy Wilder’s 1944 classic noir Double Indemnity (Bould et al. 4; Tasker 118). Like the lesbian vampires of 1960s–1970s horror, the neo-noir femme fatale is commonly aligned with themes of same-sex desire, as she is in Mulholland Drive. Mulholland Drive Like Sunset Boulevard before it, Mulholland Drive tells the tragic tale of Hollywood dreams turned to dust, jealousy, madness, escapist fantasy, and murder (Andrews 26). The narrative is played out from the perspective of failed aspiring actress Diane Selwyn (Naomi Watts) and centres on her bitter sexual obsession with former lover Camilla. The film is divided into three sections, described by Lynch as: “Part one: She found herself inside a perfect mystery. Part two: A sad illusion. Part three: Love” (Rodley 54). The first and second segments of the movie are Diane’s wishful dream, which functions as an escape from the unbearable reality that, after being humiliated and spurned by Camilla, Diane hires a hit man to have her murdered. Part three reveals the events that have led up to Diane’s fateful action. In Diane’s dream she is sweet, naïve, Betty who arrives at her wealthy aunt’s Hollywood home to find a beautiful woman in the bathroom. Earlier we witness a scene where the woman survives a violent car crash and, suffering a head injury, stumbles unnoticed into the apartment. Initially the woman introduces herself as Rita (after seeing a Gilda poster on the wall), but later confesses that she doesn’t know who she is. Undeterred by the strange circumstances surrounding Rita’s presence, Betty takes the frightened, vulnerable woman (actually Camilla) under her wing, enthusiastically assuming the role of detective in trying to discover her real identity. As Rita, Camilla is passive, dependent, and grateful. Importantly, she also fondly reciprocates the love Betty feels for her. But in reality, from Diane’s perspective at least, Camilla is a narcissistic, manipulative femme fatale (like the character portrayed by the famous star whose name she adopts in Diane’s dream) who takes sadistic delight in toying with the emotions of others. Just as Rita is Diane’s ideal lover in her fantasy, pretty Betty is Diane’s ego ideal. She is vibrant, wholesome, and has a glowing future ahead of her. This is a far cry from reality where Diane is sullen, pathetic, and haggard with no prospects. Bitterly, she blames Camilla for her failings as an actress (Camilla wins a lead role that Diane badly wanted by sleeping with the director). Ultimately, Diane also blames Camilla for her own suicide. This is implied in the dream sequence when the two women disguise Rita’s appearance after the discovery of a bloated corpse in Diane Selwyn’s apartment. The parallels between Mulholland Drive and Carmilla are numerous to the extent that it could be argued that Lynch’s film is a contemporary noir infused re-telling of Le Fanu’s novella. Both stories take the point-of-view of the blonde haired, blue eyed “victim.” Both include a vehicle accident followed by the mysterious arrival of an elusive dark haired stranger, who appears vulnerable and helpless, but whose beauty masks the fact that she is really a monster. Both narratives hinge on same-sex desire and involve the gradual emotional and physical destruction of the quarry, as she suffers at the hands of her newly found love interest. Whereas Carmilla literally sucks her victims dry before moving on to another target, Camilla metaphorically drains the life out of Diane, callously taunting her with her other lovers before dumping her. While Camilla is not a vampire per se, she is framed in a distinctly vampirish manner, her pale skin contrasted by lavish red lipstick and fingernails, and though she is not literally the living dead, the latter part of the film indicates that the only place Camilla remains alive is in Diane’s fantasy. But in the Lynchian universe, where conventional forms of narrative coherence, with their demand for logic and legibility are of little interest (Rodley ix), intertextual alignment with Carmilla extends beyond plot structure to capture the “mood,” or “feel” of the novella that is best described in terms of the uncanny — something that also lies at the very core of Lynch’s work (Rodley xi). The Gothic and the Uncanny Though Gothic literature is grounded in horror, the type of fear elicited in the works of writers that form part of this movement, such as Le Fanu (along with Horace Walpole, Ann Radcliffe, Mary Shelly, and Bram Stoker to name a few), aligns more with the uncanny than with outright terror. The uncanny is an elusive quality that is difficult to pinpoint yet distinct. First and foremost it is a sense, or emotion that is related to dread and horror, but it is more complex than simply a reaction to fear. Rather, feelings of trepidation are accompanied by a peculiar, dream-like quality of something fleetingly recognisable in what is evidently unknown, conjuring up a mysterious impression of déjà vu. The uncanny has to do with uncertainty, particularly in relation to names (including one’s own name), places and what is being experienced; that things are not as they have come to appear through habit and familiarity. Though it can be frightening, at the same time it can involve a sensation that is compelling and beautiful (Royle 1–2; Punter 131). The inventory of motifs, fantasies, and phenomena that have been attributed to the uncanny are extensive. These can extend from the sight of dead bodies, skeletons, severed heads, dismembered limbs, and female sex organs, to the thought of being buried alive; from conditions such as epilepsy and madness, to haunted houses/castles and ghostly apparitions. Themes of doubling, anthropomorphism, doubt over whether an apparently living object is really animate and conversely if a lifeless object, such as a doll or machinery, is in fact alive also fall under the broad range of what constitutes the uncanny (see Jentsch 221–7; Freud 232–45; Royle 1–2). Socio-culturally, the uncanny can be traced back to the historical epoch of Enlightenment. It is the transformations of this eighteenth century “age of reason,” with its rejection of transcendental explanations, valorisation of reason over superstition, aggressively rationalist imperatives, and compulsive quests for knowledge that are argued to have first caused human experiences associated with the uncanny (Castle 8–10). In this sense, as literary scholar Terry Castle argues, the eighteenth century “invented the uncanny” (8). In relation to the psychological underpinnings of this disquieting emotion, psychiatrist Ernst Jentsch was the first to explore the subject in his 1906 document “On the Psychology of the Uncanny,” though Sigmund Freud and his 1919 paper “The Uncanny” is most popularly associated with the term. According to Jentsch, the uncanny, or the unheimlich in German (meaning “unhomely”), emerges when the “new/foreign/hostile” corresponds to the psychical association of “old/known/familiar.” The unheimlich, which sits in direct opposition to the heimlich (homely) equates to a situation where someone feels not quite “at home” or “at ease” (217–9). Jentsch attributes sensations of the unheimlich to psychical resistances that emerge in relation to the mistrust of the innovative and unusual — “to the intellectual mystery of a new thing” (218) — such as technological revolution for example. Freud builds on the concept of the unheimlich by focusing on the heimlich, arguing that the term incorporates two sets of ideas. It can refer to what is familiar and agreeable, or it can mean “what is concealed and kept out of sight” (234–5). In the context of the latter notion, the unheimlich connotes “that which ought to have remained secret or hidden but has come to light” (Freud 225). Hence for Freud, who was primarily concerned with the latent content of the psyche, feelings of uncanniness emerge when dark, disturbing truths that have been repressed and relegated to the realm of the unconscious resurface, making their way abstractly into the consciousness, creating an odd impression of the known in the unknown. Though it is the works of E.T.A. Hoffman that are most commonly associated with the unheimlich, Freud describing the author as the “unrivalled master of the uncanny in literature” (233), Carmilla is equally bound up in dialectics between the known and the unknown; the homely and the unhomely. Themes centring on doubles, the undead, haunted gardens, conflicting emotions fuelled by desire and disgust — of “adoration and also of abhorrence” (Le Fanu 264), and dream-like nocturnal encounters with sinister, shape-shifting creatures predominate. With Carmilla’s arrival the boundaries between the heimlich and the unheimlich become blurred. Though Carmilla is a stranger, her presence triggers buried childhood memories for Laura of a frightening and surreal experience where Carmilla appears in Laura’s nursery during the night, climbing into bed with her before seemingly vanishing into thin air. In this sense, Laura’s remote castle home has never been homely. Disturbing truths have always lurked in its dark recesses, the return of the dead bringing them to light. The Uncanny in Mulholland Drive The elusive qualities of the uncanny also weave their way extensively through Mulholland Drive, permeating all facets of the cinematic experience — cinematography, sound score, mise en scène, and narrative structure. As film maker and writer Chris Rodley argues, Lynch mobilises every aspect of the motion picture making process in seeking to express a sense of uncanniness in his productions: “His sensitivity to textures of sound and image, to the rhythms of speech and movement, to space, colour, and the intrinsic power of music mark him as unique in this respect.” (Rodley ix–xi). From the opening scenes of Mulholland Drive, the audience is plunged into the surreal, unheimlich realm of Diane’s dream world. The use of rich saturated colours, soft focus lenses, unconventional camera movements, stilted dialogue, and a hauntingly beautiful sound score composed by Angelo Badalamenti, generates a cumulative effect of heightened artifice. This in turn produces an impression of hyper-realism — a Baudrillardean simulacrum where the real is beyond real, taking on a form of its own that has an artificial relation to actuality (Baudrillard 6–7). Distorting the “real” in this manner produces an effect of defamiliarisation — a term first employed by critic Viktor Shklovsky (2–3) to describe the artistic process involved in making familiar objects seem strange and unfamiliar (or unheimlich). These techniques are something Lynch employs in other works. Film and literary scholar Greg Hainge (137) discusses the way colour intensification and slow motion camera tracking are used in the opening scene of Blue Velvet (1984) to destabilise the aesthetic realm of the homely, revealing it to be artifice concealing sinister truths that have so far been hidden, but that are about to come to light. Similar themes are central to Mulholland Drive; the simulacra of Diane’s fantasy creating a synthetic form of real that conceals the dark and terrible veracities of her waking life. However, the artificial dream place of Diane’s disturbed mind is disjointed and fractured, therefore, just as the uncanny gives rise to an elusive sense of mystery and uncertainty, offering a fleeting glimpse of the tangible in something otherwise inexplicable, so too is the full intelligibility of Mulholland Drive kept at an obscure distance. Though the film offers a succession of clues to meaning, the key to any form of complete understanding lingers just beyond the grasp of certainty. Names, places, and identities are infused with doubt. Not only in relation to Betty/Diane and Rita/Camilla, but regarding a succession of other strange, inexplicable characters and events, one example being the recurrent presence of a terrifying looking vagrant (Bonnie Aarons). Figures such as this are clearly poignant to the narrative, but they are also impossibly enigmatic, inviting the audience to play detective in deciphering what they signify. Themes of doubling and mirroring are also used extensively. While these motifs serve to denote the split between waking and dream states, they also destabilise the narrative in relation to what is familiar and what is unfamiliar, further grounding Mulholland Drive in the uncanny. Since its publication in 1872, Carmilla has had a significant formative influence on the construct of the seductive yet deadly woman in her various manifestations. However, rarely has the novella been paid homage to as intricately as it is in Mulholland Drive. Lynch draws on Le Fanu’s archetypal Gothic horror story, combining it with the aesthetic conventions of film noir, in order to create what is ostensibly a contemporary, poststructuralist critique of the Hollywood dream-factory. Narratively and thematically, the similarities between the two texts are numerous. However, intertextual configuration is considerably more complex, extending beyond the plot and character structure to capture the essence of the Gothic, which is grounded in the uncanny — an evocative emotion involving feelings of dread, accompanied by a dream-like impression of familiar and unfamiliar commingling. Carmilla and Mulholland Drive bypass the heimlich, delving directly into the unheimlich, where boundaries between waking and dream states are destabilised, any sense of certainty about what is real is undermined, and feelings of desire are paradoxically conjoined with loathing. Moreover, Lynch mobilises all fundamental elements of cinema in order to capture and express the elusive qualities of the Unheimlich. In this sense, the uncanny lies at the very heart of the film. What emerges as a result is an enigmatic work of art that is as profoundly alluring as it is disconcerting. References Andrews, David. “An Oneiric Fugue: The Various Logics of Mulholland Drive.” Journal of Film and Video 56 (2004): 25–40. Baker, David. “Seduced and Abandoned: Lesbian Vampires on Screen 1968–74.” Continuum 26 (2012): 553–63. Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulation. Michigan: U Michigan P, 1994. Bould, Mark, Kathrina Glitre, and Greg Tuck. Neo-Noir. New York: Wallflower, 2009. Castle, Terry. The Female Thermometer: Eighteenth-century Culture and the Invention of the Uncanny. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1995. Freud, Sigmund. “The Uncanny.” Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. XVII: An Infantile Neurosis and Other Works. London: Hogarth, 2001. 217–256. Le Fanu, J. Sheridan. Carmilla. In a Glass Darkly. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2008. 243–319. Hainge, Greg. “Weird or Loopy? Spectacular Spaces, Feedback and Artifice in Lost Highway’s Aesthetics of Sensation.” The Cinema of David Lynch: American Dreams, Nightmare Visions. Ed. Erica Sheen and Annette Davidson. London: Wallflower, 2004. 136–50. Jentsch, Ernst. “On the Psychology of the Uncanny.” Uncanny Modernity: Cultural Theories, Modern Anxieties. Ed. Jo Collins and John Jervis. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2008. 216–28. Punter, David. “The Uncanny.” The Routledge Companion to the Gothic. Ed. Catherine Spooner and Emma McEvoy. Hoboken: Taylor and Francis, 2007. 129–36. Rodley, Chris. Lynch on Lynch. London: Faber, 2005. Royle, Nicholas. The Uncanny. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2003. Shklovsky, Viktor. “Art as Technique.” Theory of Prose. Illinois: Dalkey, 1991. Tasker, Yvonne. Working Girls: Gender and Sexuality in Popular Cinema. New York: Routledge, 1998. Weiss, Andrea. Vampires and Violets: Lesbians in Cinema. London: Jonathan Cape, 1992. Zimmerman, Bonnie. “Daughters of Darkness Lesbian Vampires.” Jump Cut 24.5 (2005): 23–4.

Bar-el, Dan. That One Spooky Night. Toronto: Kids Can Press. 2012. Print. Especially appealing during the Halloween season or for those students who appreciate a good semi-scary story any time of the year, That One Spooky Night delivers three off-the-wall short and spooky tales. Child protagonists who are all far from pillars of good behaviour set the stage for a more comedic and less truly scary approach to the zany horrors that happen to them. In Broom With A View, a young girl chooses a witch costume for Halloween but accidentally switches brooms with a real witch. On Halloween night, the broom whisks her away to its real owner, a cheeky but good-hearted witch who shows her younger counterpart how to really have fun on Halloween night without being a brat. In 10,000 Tentacles Under the Tub, two mischievous brothers, who, after a night of getting into trouble and almost overwhelming their father with their misbehaviour, find themselves locked in an epic battle in the underwater world they discover at the bottom of their bathtub. In The Fang Gang, four girls terrorize local children until they find themselves facing a foursome of real vampires in disguise who give them a dose of their own medicine. Illustrator David Huyck’s use of muted colours and soft edges throughout the book serve to both unify the stories and transmit an ethereal quality to the images. The different colour schemes used in each story are particularly effective for transporting the reader into foreign, underwater worlds and sinister vampire lairs. Wordless panels are interspersed throughout, further drawing the reader into sullen moods which effectively contrast the zany storyline making That One Spooky Night an entertaining read for upper primary and intermediate readers. Recommended: 3 out of 4 stars Reviewer: Annabelle Pendry Annabelle Pendry loves her job as Teacher Librarian at Mount Pleasant Elementary in Vancouver, BC.

Background: Per Oral Endoscopic Myotomy (POEM) is a promising new endoscopic method for the treatment of achalasia cardia. Available current data from various meta-analyses shows short term success with minimal adverse events. Here we aim to study the post procedural adverse events of POEM procedure using postoperative low dose multi detector CT chest with oral contrast. Methods: A retrospective study involving 43 patients who underwent POEM procedure for achalasia, were evaluated on postoperative day 1 chest CT study with oral contrast. Results: 30 out of the 43 patients (69.8%) had pleural effusion. 29 cases (67.5%) had small pleural effusion and one case (2.3%) had moderate effusion. None had large pleural effusion. Small left pneumothorax was noted in 1 patient (2.3%), which was however not severe enough to produce respiratory complaints or necessitated intercostal drain tube placement. One patient had 2 mucosal defects in the lower oesophagus with submucosal and extra luminal contrast leak, causing mediastinal collection and communication with left pleural cavity resulting in empyema which required intercostal drainage. Minimal intramural contrast leak with no extraluminal leak or mediastinal collection was present in 5 patients (11.6%), and all 5 were managed with second clipping. Bilteral lower lobe consolidation was noted in 1 case (2.3%), suggesting the possibility of aspiration. The patient had an uneventful postoperative course obviating the necessity of any further specific management. Minimal basal atelectasis were seen in 8 patients (18.4%), few linear opacities suggestive of pneumonitis were seen in 2 patients (4.6%), pneumomediastinum was found in 11 patients (25.5%), pneumoperitoneum in 24 patients (60.5%) and subcutaneous emphysema in 12 patients (28%). None of them were severe enough to produce clinical effects and none required any specific intervention. Conclusion: POEM procedure being preferred now in the management of achalasia cardia, it is of pertinent importance for the radiologists to be aware of the adverse events that could occur post procedure, and to differentiate the expected postoperative findings from the more sinister complications like perforation, which causes significant morbidity and mortality.

<em>The proposed paper attempts to analyze the novel Six Acres and a Third by Fakir Mohan Senapathi from a subaltern perspective. The novel Six Acres and a Third foregrounds on the facets of the Subaltern and the aftermaths which are confronted by the characters in the text. The novel is set in the colonial India, where in the peasant class is subjected to the exploitation and it makes them suffer and lose all their land. There are various instances in the novel which delineate the effects of the hegemony and the subordination. The subordination of the working class i.e. the peasants, the small scale landowners and the other workers are the major victims of the crisis which take place in the novel. This gives arise to the notion of the Orientalism. &ldquo;Orientalism is first and foremost a constructed, a series of images that come to stand as the Orient&rsquo;s reality for those in the west&rdquo;(McLeod 53).&nbsp; Orientalism the term popularized by the Edward said it studies the developments by which the &ldquo;&lsquo;Orient&rsquo; was and continues to be constructed in European thinking. Orientalism as the western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the orient&rdquo; (Malhotra). In Bhaba&rsquo;s terms &lsquo;colonial discourse produces the colonized as a social reality which is at once an &ldquo;other&rdquo; and yet entirely knowable and visible&rdquo; (McLeod 53). With respect to this discourse of Orientalism it is clear that the peasant class is perceived as the &ldquo;other&rdquo; and is considered as the oppressed, the subalterns.&nbsp; The significance of the orientalism is the construction of the other and showing the &lsquo;hegemony and the power of the elites and the bourgeois&rsquo;. As Edward Said suggests &ldquo;Orientalism : where there is daylight, but a sinister darkness resides otherwise&rdquo; (McLeod 59).</em>

Stratton, Allan. The Grave Robber’s Apprentice. Toronto: Harper Collins Publishers Limited, 2012. Print. The Grave Robber’s Apprentice is a dark tale of the vilest sorcerer and the most sinister Archduke who constantly orchestrate unsettling dangers that protagonists Hans and Angela must endure to save themselves and their families. In this beautifully crafted literary tale, Stratton offers first a found child tossed into the sea in a box emblazoned with a strange crest and jewels, the child bears an eagle birthmark on his shoulder. We next meet Knobbe the Bent, a grave robber, who finds the boy and decides to take him in so “in my old age, he can tend me” (p. 6). Until that time Hans exists as a son to the grave robber, living in a cave and learning, but not liking, the trade. What would this story be without a princess? Stratton doesn’t disappoint the reader when he introduces the headstrong Countess Angela who spends her days presenting fantastic puppet plays to her nurse and wishing for her own happy ending. But in such a tale as this where evil lurks and secrets are kept it is only a matter of time before the Archduke Arnulf’s henchmen come to claim Angela for the Archduke. Angela’s mother and father are imprisoned by Arnulf until they agree to the marriage. When the plan to feign Angela’s death with a potion from the necromancer is foiled, a lifeless Angela is left abandoned in a coffin in the family tomb. Hans saw Angela buy the potion from the necromancer and in an attempt to placate his grave robber father, enters her tomb where he inadvertently saves a reanimated Angela. The pauper and the princess now band together (although unhappily at first) to escape their present dangers and find the help needed to save Angela's parents from the depths of the Archduke’s asylum. They embark on an action-packed adventure seeking a reclusive hermit in the mountains who they hope will help them. Together Hans and Angela befriend some quirky characters; a family of wild circus entertainers with bears and the band of the legendary Wolf King who come to their aid more than once when they team up to outwit the necromancer and the Archduke.The evil necromancer, the Archduke Arnulf, his executioners and henchmen’s despicable plans counterbalance the good of the Wolf King, the Pandolini family, and Peter the Hermit. The short chapters are organized in five acts identifying each of the characters: The ‘Little’ Countess, The Wolf King, Peter the Hermit, The Circus of Dancing Bears, and Johannes, Prince of Waldland. Some readers may feel that a folk tale formula offers limited novelty, but the story is packed with adventure after adventure, capture following escape, escape following capture, and plenty of secrets, which when revealed, tie this tale into a very satisfying package. Fans of adventure and fast-paced tales full of fantastic events will enjoy this engrossing story. Highly Recommended: 4 out of 4 stars Reviewer: Leslie Holwerda Leslie Holwerda is a teacher-librarian/literacy coach at Lougheed Middle School in Brampton, Ontario. She has been a teacher-librarian for ten years and loves reading, selecting and recommending books for readers. She is especially interested in encouraging reluctant readers to pick up and read books no matter the genre, topic or format. The opportunity to motivate readers with e-books and reading apps in the school library is an exciting prospect.

<strong>Journal of Biomedical Practitioners - JBP</strong> <strong>English Abstract</strong><strong>&nbsp;</strong> Objective. The following study investigated the effects, measured by a quantitative analysis of the cerebral frequencies (qEEG) of a clinical protocol consisting of 20 neurofeedback sessions on patients affected by aphasia divided in three groups: one experimental group who received real neurofeedback session, a placebo group and a natural history group. Materials and methods. 30 patients have been randomly divided in three groups (N = 10): one experimental group who received real neurofeedback sessions (Neurofeedback Verum, NFV), a placebo group who observed registered videos instead of real neurofeedback recordings (Neurofeedback Placebo, NFP) and a natural history group who didn&rsquo;t receive any kind treatment (Natural History, NH). The neurofeedback sessions, 20 minutes long and two times per week, were based on the increase of alpha (8-12 Hz) as well as beta (12-20 Hz) frequencies. All patients were tested with qEEG before the beginning of the therapy (TEST) and after the end of the therapy (RETEST). Results. An increase of the frequencies beta 1 (12-20 Hz) in T5 and beta 2 (16-20 Hz) in T3 has been observed only in the group NFV while no change in the qEEG has been observed in the placebo (NFP) or natural history (NH) group. Discussions. The increase in beta 1 and 2 frequencies in the left temporal lobe only in the experimental group NFV indicates a possible influence of the treatment on the damaged areas after the stroke in aphasic patients. Indeed, it has been shown how the beta rhythm, in particular beta 2, is linked to the cognitive-attentive cerebral level but also to the elaboration of language. Furthermore, this frequency band is a measure of the brain damage in aphasic patients where is less represented in the central and posterior areas of the left hemisphere (thus including the temporal electrodes). Conclusions. Even though neurofeedback is used in the treatment of different neuropsychiatric disorders, there are still no systematic studies on this technique, in particular in aphasic patients. The present study represents the first step in standardizing a clinical neurofeedback protocol and collect objective data from qEEG in experimental as well as placebo groups. <strong>Italian Abstract</strong> Obiettivo. Il seguente studio si propone la valutazione di un protocollo clinico di neurofeedback di 20 sedute su pazienti affetti da afasia attraverso una misurazione quantitativa delle frequenze cerebrali (qEEG) effettuata all&rsquo;inizio ed alla fine del trattamento e confrontando il risultato tra tre gruppi di pazienti: un gruppo sperimentale che ha effettuato vere sedute di neurofeedback, un gruppo placebo ed un gruppo di storia naturale. Materiali e metodi. 30 pazienti sono stati divisi in modo casuale in tre gruppi (N = 10): un gruppo sperimentale che ha seguito vere sessioni di neurofeedback (Neurofeedback Verum, NFV), un gruppo placebo che ha effettuato sessioni di finto neurofeedback osservando un video registrato (Neurofeedback Placebo, NFP) ed un gruppo di storia naturale che non ha seguito alcun tipo di neurofeedback (Natural History, NH). Le sessioni di neurofeedback, della durata di 20 minuti e della frequenza di due volte a settimana, sono state impostate sull&rsquo;aumento delle frequenze alpha (8-12 Hz) e beta (12-20 Hz). Tutti i pazienti sono stati testati, attraverso il qEEG, prima dell&rsquo;inizio della terapia (TEST) e subito dopo la sua conclusione (RETEST). Risultati. Nel solo gruppo NFV &egrave; stato osservato un aumento delle frequenze beta 1 (12-20 Hz) sulla derivazione T5 e della frequenza beta 2 (16-20 Hz) sulla derivazione T3. Negli restanti due gruppi di controllo, placebo (NFP) e storia naturale (NH), non &egrave; stato rilevato alcun cambiamento a livello del qEEg. Discussioni. L&rsquo;aumento nelle frequenze beta 1 e beta 2 a livello del lobo temporale sinistro ottenuto nel solo gruppo sperimentale NFV indica una possibile influenza del trattamento sulle aree danneggiate dallo stroke nei pazienti afasici: &egrave; stato dimostrato come il ritmo beta, soprattutto beta 2 sia legato al livello attentivo-cognitivo cerebrale, nonch&eacute; dell&rsquo;elaborazione del linguaggio e come questa banda di frequenza sia una misura del danno cerebrale nei pazienti afasici, dove risulta deficitaria soprattutto a livello centrale e posteriore dell&rsquo;emisfero sinistro (includendo dunque le derivazioni temporali). Conclusioni. Nonostante Il neurofeedback venga usato nel trattamento di diversi disturbi neuropsichiatrici non sono ancora presenti studi sistematici, in particolare nei disturbi afasici. Il presente studio rappresenta il primo tentativo di standardizzare un protocollo terapeutico di neurofeedback e confrontare risultati oggettivi ottenuti attraverso il qEEG tra un gruppo sperimentale ed un gruppo placebo. <strong>Download free Full text&nbsp;</strong>https://www.ojs.unito.it/index.php/jbp/article/view/2710/2495

&#x0D; &#x0D; &#x0D; The doppelgänger (literally ‘double-goer’) of 18th and 19th century European literature and lore is a sinister likeness that dogs and shadows a protagonist heralding their death or descent into madness – a ‘spectral presentiment of disaster’ (Schwartz 84). Recently the term ‘digital doppelgänger’ has been adopted by the English-speaking entertainment and technology press to refer to a digital image of an actor or performer; whether that image is a computer-generated wire-frame model, an amalgamation of old film footage and artistry, or a three dimensional laser scan of the face and body’s topography. (Magid, Chimielewski) &#x0D; &#x0D; This paper examines some of the implications of this term and its linkage to a set of anxieties about the relationship between the self and its image. According to Friedrich Kittler, media of recording and storing bodily data are central to how many of us imagine identity today. Technologies such as photography and film ushered in a ‘technological rechristening of the soul’ (149). Kittler contends that these image technologies have had an impact on identity by creating ‘mechanised likenesses [that] roam the databanks that store bodies’ (96). In this context the use of the term ‘digital doppelgänger’ suggests some kind of perceived disruption to the way identity and image, or original and copy, relate.&#x0D; &#x0D; For example, a short article in Variety, ‘Garner finds viewing her digital doppelgänger surreal’, promotes the release of the videogame version of the television show Alias. But instead of the usual emphasis on the entertainment value of the game and its potential to extend the pleasures of the televisual text, this blurb focuses on the uncanniness of an encounter between the show’s lead, Jennifer Garner, and the digitally animated game character modelled from her features (Fritz 2003). &#x0D; &#x0D; An actor’s digital likeness can be made to perform actions that are beyond the will or physicality of the actor themselves. Such images have a variety of uses. In action cinema the digital likeness often replaces the actor’s stunt double, removing much of the risk previously borne by the human body in filming explosions, car chases and acrobatic leaps. Through its multiplication or manipulation the digital doppelgänger can expand the performative limits of the actor’s body and face. These figures also have an important role in video game versions of popular action or science fiction films such as the Wachowski brothers’ Matrix trilogy. The digital doppelgänger therefore extends the capabilities of the human performer’s image, bestowing ‘superhuman’ qualities and granting it entry to interactive media forms. The most serendipitous use of these images, however, is in the completion of films where an actor has died in mid-production, as when, for instance, Oliver Reed famously passed on during the filming of Ridley Scott’s Gladiator. In such cases the image literally substitutes for the once-living; its digitally animated gestures and expressions filling in for an inanimate body that can express and gesture no longer and never will again. The history of doppelgängers and doubles, you see, is intimately bound up with human mortality and the origins of image making. &#x0D; &#x0D; According to Otto Rank, the earliest connotations of the double in Indo-European lore were benign, entailing the immortality of the self. This incarnation stems from animistic beliefs in the manifestation of the soul in shadows, reflections and images (49-77) and is intimately connected to the magical origins of figurative representation. Andre Bazin argues that the most enduring form of image magic has been that concerned with rendering the subject immortal. In his essay ‘The Ontology of the Photographic Image’, he emphasises that the basic psychological impulse beneath the origins of the plastic arts was a desire to snatch mortal things from the indifferent flow of time – to cheat death through the creation of a substitute, a double, for the living body (9).&#x0D; &#x0D; However, by the post-Enlightenment era, Western belief in the preservative powers of the double had eroded, and subsequently, the meaning of this figure in folktales and literature came to be inverted. The double or doppelgänger became a spectral projection of the self, an ‘uncanny harbinger of death’ (Freud 324-5). Meanwhile, even as the haunted image persists as a motif in short stories, novels and film, rationally:&#x0D; &#x0D; No one believes any longer in the ontological identity of model and image, but all are agreed that the image helps us to remember the subject and to preserve him from a second spiritual death (Bazin 9).&#x0D; &#x0D; &#x0D; Photographic and filmic images have aided Western cultures in keeping the dead in view, saving them from being totally forgotten. These images are filled in or animated by the subjective memory of the viewer. The digital likeness, however, is birthed in a computer and made to gesture in the performer’s stead, promising not just a ‘technological rechristening of the soul’, but the possibility of future career resurrection. Ron Magid reports: &#x0D; &#x0D; Cyberware president David Addleman is hopeful that all stars will eventually stockpile their data, like the suspended bodies in Coma, just waiting for the day when technology will resurrect them for as yet undreamed-of projects. (Magid)&#x0D; &#x0D; &#x0D; This reference to the 1970s horror film, Coma, with its connotations of lifeless bodies and sinister scientific procedures, brings to mind unconscious forms, zombies awaiting resurrection, an actor’s image as puppet, a mindless figure forced to gesture at the control of another. These are fears of decorporealised detachment from one’s own likeness. It is a fear of the image being in exile from its referent, being endowed with the semblance of life though digital processes. In this fear we can hear the echoes of earlier anxieties about the double. But these fears also revisit earlier responses to the cinematic recording of the human image, ones that now may seem quaint to us in a culture where people fantasise of becoming media celebrities and indeed queue in their thousands for the chance. &#x0D; &#x0D; To put this into some historical perspective, it is worth noting how the figure of the double played a part in some responses to then new cinema technologies in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Yuri Tsivian writes of the unease expressed in the early 1900s by Russian performers when encountering their own moving image on screen. For some the root of their discomfort was a belief that encountering their projected moving image would play havoc with their own internal self-image. For others, their unease was compounded by non-standardised projection speeds. Until the mid to late 1910s both camera and projector were cranked by hand. It was common for a projectionist to lend some haste to the action on the screen in order to finish work at the auditorium early. Early Russian writers on film were well aware of the projectionist’s role in transforming ‘calm fluent gesture’ into a ‘jerky convulsive twitch’, and making the ‘actors gesture like puppets’ (cited in Tsivian 53-54). &#x0D; &#x0D; Luigi Pirandello’s novel Shoot! from 1916 dealt with a cinema actress traumatised by the sight of her own ‘altered and disordered’ screen image (59-60). A playwright, Pirandello condemned the new media as reducing the craft of the living, breathing stage-actor to an insubstantial flickering phantom, a ‘dumb image’ subtracted from a moment of live action before the camera (105-6). Walter Benjamin refers to Pirandello’s novel in ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, recognising it as one of the first discourses on the relationship between the actor and their screen image. For Benjamin the screen actor is in exile from their image. He or she sends out his or her shadow to face the public and this decorporealised shadow heralds a diminishment of presence and aura for the audience (222). &#x0D; &#x0D; Benjamin suggests that in compensation for this diminishment of presence, the film industry ‘responds to the shrivelling of the aura with an artificial build-up of the “personality” outside the studio’ (224). The development of star-image discourse and celebrity works to collapse the split between person and decorporealised shadow, enveloping the two in the electrified glow of interconnected texts such as roles, studio publicity, glamour photography, interviews, and gossip. Star personality, celebrity scandal and gossip discourse have smoothed over this early unease, as have (importantly) the sheer ubiquity and democracy of mediated self-images. The mundane culture of home video has banished this sense of dark magic at work from the appearance of our own faces on screens. &#x0D; &#x0D; In the context of these arguments it remains to be seen what impact the ‘digital doppelgänger’ will have on notions of public identity and stardom, concepts of cinematic performance and media immortality. Further research is also required in order to uncover the implications of the digital double for the image cultures of indigenous peoples or for cinema industries such as Bollywood. As for the term ‘digital doppelgänger’ itself, perhaps with ubiquity and overuse, its older and more sinister connotations will be gradually papered over and forgotten. The term ‘doppelgänger’ suggests a copy that threatens its original with usurpation, but it may be that the digital doppelgänger functions in a not dissimilar way to the waxwork models at Madame Tussauds – as a confirmation of a celebrity’s place in the media galaxy, wholly reliant on the original star for its meaning and very existence.&#x0D; &#x0D; References&#x0D; &#x0D; Bazin, A. “The Ontology of the Photographic Image.” What is Cinema? Ed./Trans. Hugh Gray. Berkeley &amp; London: U of California P, 1967. 9-16. Benjamin, W. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Illuminations. Ed. Hannah Arendt. Trans. Harry Zohn. London: Fonatan, 1992. 211-44. Chimielewski, D. “Meet Sunny’s Digital Doppelganger.” The Age (5 January 2005). http://www.theage.com.au/news/Film/Meet-Sunnys-digital-doppelganger/2005/01/04/1104601340883.html&gt;. Freud, S. “The ‘Uncanny.” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Trans. Ed. James Strachey, Anna Freud et al. Vol. xvii (1917-19). London: Hogarth Press and Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1955. 219-52. Fritz, B. “Garner Finds Viewing Her Digital Doppelganger Surreal.” Variety (27 August 2003). http://www.variety.com/index.asp?layout=upsell_article&amp;articleID=VR1117891622&amp;cs=1&gt;. Kittler, F. Gramophone, Film, Typewriter. Trans. and intro. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Michael Wutz. Stanford, California: Stanford UP, 1999. Magid, R. “New Media: Invasion of the Body Snatchers.” Wired News (March 1998). http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,10645,00.html&gt;. Parisi, P. “Silicon Stars: The New Hollywood.” Wired (December 1995): 144-5, 202-10. http:www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,10645,00.html&gt;. Pirandello, L. Shoot! (Si Gira) The Notebooks of Serafino Gubbio, Cinematographer Operator. Trans. C.F. Scott Moncrieff. New York: E.P. Dutton and Co.,1926. Rank, O. The Double: A Psychoanalytical Study. Trans./ed. Harry Tucker, Jr. North Carolina: U of North Carolina P, 1971. Schwartz, H. The Culture of the Copy: Striking Likenesses, Unreasonable Facsimiles. New York: Zone, 1996. Tsivian, Y. Early Russian Cinema and Its Cultural Reception. Trans. A. Bodger. Ed. R. Taylor. Chicago and London: U of Chicago P, 1998.&#x0D; &#x0D; &#x0D; &#x0D; &#x0D; Citation reference for this article&#x0D; &#x0D; MLA Style&#x0D; Bode, Lisa. "Digital Doppelgängers." M/C Journal 8.3 (2005). echo date('d M. Y'); ?&gt; &lt;http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0507/07-bode.php&gt;. APA Style&#x0D; Bode, L. (Jul. 2005) "Digital Doppelgängers," M/C Journal, 8(3). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?&gt; from &lt;http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0507/07-bode.php&gt;. &#x0D;

Blaise Pascal once offered the following advice to those perennially worried about knowing fact from fiction: “how few things can be demonstrated! Proofs only convince the mind; custom provides the strongest and most firmly held proofs” (148). The concern about whether or not God existed was for Pascal an unnecessary anxiety: the question couldn’t be answered by human knowledge, and so ultimately one just had to “wager” on whatever stood to be most beneficial, act as if this chosen answer was true, and the mind would eventually fall into line. For Pascal, if one stood to gain from believing in the truth of an idea then the great problems of epistemology could be reduced to a relatively simple and pragmatic calculation of benefit. Doubt, suspicion, and all the attendant epistemological worries would only count as wasted time.It might at first seem surprising that this somewhat antiquated idea of Pascal’s, conceived in seventeenth-century France, appears at the core of a novel by a writer considered to be the quintessential “modern” author, David Foster Wallace. But consider the following advice offered to a recovering drug addict in Wallace’s 1996 novelInfinite Jest. To reap the benefits of the AA program, Don Gately, one of the central characters of the novel, is told by resident counsellor Gene M to imagine he is holding a box of Betty Crocker Cake Mix. The box of cake mix represents Boston AA. Gately is advised that the “box came with directions on the side any eight-year-old could read”: Gene M. said all Gately had to do was for fuck’s sake give himself a break and relax and for once shut up and just follow the directions on the side of the fucking box. It didn’t matter one fuckola whether Gately like believed a cake would result, or whether he understood the like fucking baking-chemistry of howa cake would result: if he just followed the motherfucking directions, and had sense enough to get help from slightly more experienced bakers to keep from fucking the directions up if he got confused somehow, but basically the point was if he just followed the childish directions, a cake would result. He’d have his cake. (467) This advice indeed seems lifted from Pascal almost verbatim (plus or minus a few turns of phrase, of course):Learn from those who have been bound like you, and who now wager all they have. They are people who know the road you want to follow and have been cured of the affliction of which you want to be cured. Follow the way by which they began ... (Pascal 156).While the Pascalian influence on Wallace’s work is perhaps interesting in its own right, and there are certainly more extensive and capable analyses of it to be done than mine, I invoke it here to highlight a particular emphasis in Wallace’s work that I think exceeds the framework through which it is usually understood. Wallace’s fiction is commonly considered an attack on irony, being supposedly at the vanguard of a movement in recent American literature that Adam Kelly, in an illuminating analysis, has called the “New Sincerity” (131). But before anything else irony is a particular trope of understanding, a way of situating oneself in regards to an object of knowledge, and so Wallace’s work needs not only to be understood in terms of what a culture considers unhip, trite, and sentimental, but how it comes to decide upon those things at all, how it chooses to understand its reality. Inspired by the Pascalian influence apparent in Wallace’s portrayal of the Alcoholics Anonymous program, I intend to shift the focus away from issues of irony and sincerity and instead consider the importance of the epistemological tropes of suspicion and trust in reading Infinite Jest. More than anything else Wallace’s depiction of the AA program tells us he is interested, like Pascal, in the existential implications of suspicion, in what might be lost in following doubt to its most “radical” conclusions. I SuspicionIt is fruitful to view Western intellectual practice as exhibiting suspicious tendencies. From Descartes’s “hyperbolic doubt,” the “hermeneutics of suspicion” that Ricœur and Foucault see coming out of the legacy of Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud, to the endless “paranoia of the postmodern” that typifies recent academic trends (Bywater 79), the refusal to trust the veracity of surfaces has been a driving force in post-Enlightenment thought, becoming largely inextricable from how we understand the world. As a mode of critique, suspicion has a particular anxiety about the way fiction masquerades as truth. When a suspicious mind reads a given object, be it an advertisement, a novel, a film, a supermarket, or an egg carton, it most often proceeds by first separating the text into what Paul Ricœur calls an “architecture of meaning” (18), defining those elements it considers fictive and those it considers truer, more essential, in order to locate what it considers “the intentional structure of double meaning” (Ricœur 9). Beneath the fictive surface of a novel, for example, it might find hidden the “truer” forces of social repression and patriarchy. Behind the innocence of a bedtime tale it might discern the truth of the placating purpose of story, or the tyranny of naïve narrative closure, the fantasies of teleology and final consonance. And behind Pascal’s wager it might find a weak submission to ideological fictions, a confirmation of the processes of social conditioning.Over the years suspicion has doubtless proved itself a crucial resource for various politics of resistance, for challenging ossified structures of knowledge, and for exposing heinous fictions that definitely needed exposing. But some contend that these once fruitful intellectual practices have become so deeply entrenched that they are now the things to be suspiciously overcome. Rather than being a subversive tactic of liberation, the “routinisation” of suspicion can stand to mark a hermeneutic stasis. It can even, as Bruno Latour argues, mire important social and ecological issues in counterproductive doubt, the most obvious example being the tiresome “debates” about global warming:the danger would no longer be coming from an excessive confidence in ideological arguments posturing as matters of fact—as we have learned to combat so efficiently in the past—but from an excessive distrust of good matters of fact disguised as bad ideological biases! (Latour 227) The work of David Foster Wallace can be considered another example of such a discourse, one that definitely admits suspicion’s hermeneutic force, but is a little uneasy with its predominance. While Wallace’s work is most commonly understood in relation to irony, irony itself, as I have suggested, can in turn be understood as related to a subtending culture of suspicion and cynicism. In his 1993 essay “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction,” Wallace notes a complex interaction between knowledge, suspicion, art, and televisual culture, in which a particular rendering of irony—a mistrust in clichéd sentiment and all those words we now so confidently put between “shudder” quotes—is commoditised and exploited in order to constantly provide the psychological payoffs of knowingness, those feelings of superiority, safety, and power that come from suspiciously seeing through to the “truth” of things. In Wallace’s reading, ostensibly postmodern advertisements draw attention to their fictive layers to make viewers feel attuned to the supposed truth of their intent. But this access to the “truth” is itself just another fiction aimed to mislead them into commercial pliancy:[TV can] ease that painful tension between Joe’s need to transcend the crowd and his status as Audience member. For to the extent that TV can flatter Joe about “seeing through” the pretentiousness and hypocrisy of outdated values, it can induce in him precisely the feeling of canny superiority it’s taught him to crave, and can keep him dependent on the cynical TV-watching that alone affords this feeling. (Wallace 180) The ironic viewer who would stand above these deliberately naive appeals would then also, and perhaps before anything else, be a suspicious reader, someone predisposed to seeing through the “surface” of a text. Irony, in these examples, would even be alike to the effect gained from “successful” suspicion, something like its reward, rather than an epistemological mode in itself. While in his essay Wallace ultimately intends that his critique of such tendencies will highlight the way much contemporary fiction struggles to subvert this culture, and thus we cannot help but look to his own work to see how it supposedly “attacks” irony, it is also just as crucial to consider its embedded critique of suspicious hermeneutics.II Trust In Infinite Jest’s portrayal of Boston’s Alcoholics and Narcotics Anonymous programs, Wallace attempts to propose a kind of neo-Pascalian “wager.” And like Pascal’s, Wallace’s is based on the willed performance of that most critically maligned of concepts, trust: that is, a willingness to become, like Pascal, blasé with truth as long as it stands to be beneficial. Within the novel the fictitious Ennet Drug and Alcohol House, along with the adjacent Enfield Tennis Academy, is staged as a school of personal (re)development, dramatising approaches to self-help in the damaged landscape of the Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment’s Boston. And it is here where Don Gately, the novel’s unlikely hero, has ended up on his quest to escape the “spider” of addiction. As it openly admits, Alcoholics Anonymous is an easy target for a suspicious mode of thought bent on locating fictions because it “literally makes no sense” (368). But like Pascal, Wallace’s AA submits the problem of truth and error to a more primary consideration of benefit, and celebrates the power of language and custom to create realities, rather than being suspicious of this process of linguistic mediation. So it is a system, like signification itself, that functions on “the carrot-and-donkey aspect of trudging to Meetings only to be told to trudge to still more Meetings” (1001); like any transcendental signifier, the revelations it hints at can never truly arrive. It is also based on assertions that “do not make anything resembling rational sense” (1002). For example, Joelle van Dyne battles with the AA precept “I’m Here But For the Grace of God.” She finds the phrase is literally senseless, and regardless of whether she hears it or not it’s meaningless, and that the foamy enthusiasm with which these folks can say what in fact means nothing at all makes her want to put her head in a Radarange. (366) But perhaps the strongest reason Joelle feels uncomfortable with the present example is that she senses in its obvious untruth the potential truth of all meaning’s fictitiousness, how all sense might just be made up of nonsense of one form or another. Within the AA program these words are a means to an end, rather than something to be resisted or deconstructed.To exist within Infinite Jest’s AA program is thus to be uncomfortably close to the linguistic production of reality, to work at meaning’s coalface, exposed to the flames of its fictitiousness, but all the while being forced to deny this very vista. So while AA is a process firmly against the mechanisms of denial (one of its favourite slogans is “Denial is not a river in Egypt” [272]), it is also based on a paradoxical imperative to deny the status of meaning as a production, as well as the denial of the significance of this paradox: For me, the slogan [Analysis-Paralysis] means there’s no set way to argue intellectual-type stuff about the Program [...] You can’t think about it like an intellectual thing [...] You can analyse it til you’re breaking tables with your forehead and find a cause to walk away, back Out There, where the Disease is. Or you can stay and hang in and do the best you can. (1002) Although it is common knowledge that its precepts are full of logical contradiction and impasse, that it is a blatantly fictitious enterprise, the difficulty which Wallace’s portrayal poses, both for his characters and for his readers schooled in suspicious hermeneutics, is that as a process of healing the AA program somehow seems to work with great efficacy. Enter the redemption of Don Gately.Despite his initial reluctance to embrace the program’s undertakings, much to his surprise Gately finds it having a definite effect: he “all of a sudden realised that quite a few days had gone by since he’d even thought about Demerol or Talwin or even weed” (467). The bracketing of the desire to know and interpret, and the willed trust in the efficacy of a process that one cannot know by necessity, initially frustrates him, and even makes him suspicious: “He couldn’t believe it. He wasn’t Grateful so much as kind of suspicious about it, the Removal [of his addiction]” (468). And all this can definitely be intellectually uncomfortable for a reader well-versed in suspicious hermeneutics, let alone the somewhat unintellectual Gately:It did, yes, tentatively seem maybe actually to be working, but Gately couldn’t for the life of him figure out how just sitting on haemorrhoid-hostile folding chairs every night looking at nose-pores and listening to clichés could work. Nobody’s ever been able to figure AA out, is another binding commonality. (349)Ultimately the AA program presents the novel’s hero and its readers with an impasse, a block to what one knows and can critique, refuting the basic assumption that links narrative progression and change with the acquisition of knowledge. While others in AA seek to understand and debunk it, they also significantly fail to achieve the kind of recovery experienced by Gately. As Elizabeth Freudenthal suggests, “despite the problems one may have with AA as a vehicle for healthy living, Gately’s mode of fighting addiction is the only one in the novel that actually works” (191). And while Freudenthal suggests that Gately’s success comes through a ritual “anti-interiority,” a “mode of identity founded in the material world of both objects and biological bodies and divested from an essentialist notion of inner emotional, psychological, and spiritual life” (192), to me it seems that were Gately unable to resist the pleasures of the suspicious mind then little of his “abiding” in the exterior world would be possible. Ultimately, what Gately achieves comes through a kind of epistemological “trust.”III Reading TrustfullyBy occupying such a central place in the narrative, this neo-Pascalian wager around which the novel’s AA program is built is obviously intended to bear not only on its characters, but on how the novel is read. So how might we also “learn” from such Pascalian gambits? How might we read the novel without suspicion? What might we gain by becoming Don Gately? What, on the other hand, might we lose? While this essay is far too short to conduct this kind of investigation in full, a few points might still be raised in lieu of a proper conclusion.By openly submitting to his ignorance of what his actions mean, Gately is able to approach success, conclusion, and fulfillment. What the novel’s ending has in store for him is another question altogether, but Freudenthal views Gately’s closing scenes as the apotheosis of his “anti-intellectual endeavor” (206). Gately’s narrative thus also presents a challenge to readers thoroughly led by suspicious hermeneutics, and encourages us, if we are to accept this notion that is key to Infinite Jest (but we can, of course, refuse not to), to place ourselves in the position of the AA attendee, as a subject of the text’s discourse, not in possession of knowledge through which to critique it and scale that “architecture of meaning.” Many aspects of the novel of course impel us to read suspiciously, to gather clues like detectives, to interrogate the veracity of claims. Consider, for example, the compounded conflicting accounts of whether Joelle van Dyne has been horribly disfigured by acid, or is sublimely beautiful (compare, for instance, the explanation given on 538 with that on 795). Yet ultimately, recalling the AA ethos, the narrative makes it difficult for us to successfully execute these suspicious reading practices. Similar to a text like Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, that for Brian McHale ultimately resists any attempt to answer the many questions it poses (90-91), Infinite Jest frequently invokes a logic of what we might call epistemological equivocation. Either the veil-wearing Joelle van Dyne is hideously and improbably deformed or is superlatively beautiful; either AA is a vapid institution of brainwashing or is the key to recovery from substance abuse; either the novel’s matriarch, Avril Incandenza, is a sinister “black widow” or a superlatively caring mother. The list goes on.To some extent, the plethora of conflicting accounts simply engages an “innocent” readerly curiosity. But regardless of the precise nature of this hermeneutic desire stimulated by the text, one cannot help but feel, as Marshall Boswell suggests, that “Wallace’s point seems to be that these issues are not the issue” (175). If we read the novel attempting to harmonise these elements, interrogating the reliability of the given textual evidence, we will be sorely disappointed, if not doomed to the “analysis paralysis” that is much feared in the novel’s AA program. While one of the pleasures Wallace’s novel offers readers is the encouragement to participate actively in the text, it is also something it is wary of. And this is where the rub of the book lies. Just like in AA, we can potentially keep analysing its ambiguities forever; it is indeed designed to be pleasurable in just this way. But it is also intended, at least so Wallace tells us, to resist the addictive nature of pure entertainment:The original title was A Failed Entertainment. The idea is that the book is structured as an entertainment that doesn’t work [...]. And the tension of the book is to try to make it at once extremely entertaining—and also sort of warped, and to sort of shake the reader awake about some of the things that are sinister in entertainment. (Wallace in Lipsky 79)If we consider what it might mean to view the book as a “Failed Entertainment,” and consider what it is we love to do when reading suspiciously, we can then see that it is perhaps intended to steer us away from trying to decode it, especially when it is constantly suggested to us that it is this effort of analysis that tends to move one out of the immediacy of a given moment. The fact that “nobody’s ever been able to figure AA out” (349), yet it still indubitably works, seems to suggests how we are to approach the novel.But what are we offered instead of these pleasures of suspicious reading? Perhaps, like the AA attendee, the novel wants us to learn to listen to what is already in front of us: for the AA member it is all those stories offered up at the “podium”; for us it is all the pain and joy written in the text. In place of a conclusive ending that gives us all that we want to know, that shows us everything that “happens,” in its final scene the novel instead tells the story of a man finding his “bottom,” his lowest ebb, waking up “flat on his back on the beach in the freezing sand” (981). This man, of course, is Don Gately. If we see this final moment only as a frustration of narrative desire, as a turning away from full understanding, from a revelation of the “truth” the narrative has been withholding, then we perhaps fail the task Wallace’s text, like AA, constantly asks of us: to listen, to accept, to trust.ReferencesBoswell, Marshall. Understanding David Foster Wallace. Columbia, SC: U of South Carolina P, 2003.Bywater, William. “The Paranoia of Postmodernism.” Philosophy and Literature 14.1 (1990): 79–84. Foucault, Michel. “Nietzsche, Freud, Marx.” Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology: Essential Works of Foucault 1954–84, Volume 2. Ed. James Faubion. Trans. Robert Hurley et al. London: Penguin, 2000. 269–78. Freudenthal, Elizabeth. “Anti-Interiority: Compulsiveness, Objectification, and Identity in Infinite Jest.” New Literary History 41.1 (2010): 191–211. Kelly, Adam. “David Foster Wallace and the New Sincerity in American Fiction.” Consider David Foster Wallace: Critical Essays. Los Angeles: Sideshow Media Group Press, 2010. 131–46.Latour, Bruno. “Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern.” Critical Inquiry 30.2 (2004): 225–48.Lipsky, David. Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip With David Foster Wallace. New York: Broadway Books, 2010.McHale, Brian. “Modernist Reading, Post-Modern Text: The Case of Gravity's Rainbow.” Poetics Today 1.1 (1979): 85–110.Pascal, Blaise. Pensées and Other Writings. Trans. Honor Levi. Ed.Anthony Levi. New York: Oxford UP, 1995.Ricœur, Paul. Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation. Trans. Denis Savage. New Haven: Yale UP, 1970.Wallace, David Foster. “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction.” Review of Contemporary Fiction 13.2 (1993): 151–94. ---. Infinite Jest. New York: Back Bay Books, 1996.

&#x0D; &#x0D; &#x0D; In the half-century since Shannon invented information theory… engineers have come up with brilliant ways of boiling redundancy out of information… This lets it be transmitted twice as fast (Bill Gates: 33).&#x0D; &#x0D; Shannon’s Code Puts an End to Noise&#x0D; &#x0D; The digital machine is often presented as the perfect medium for the efficient transmission of coded messages: an ever-improving machine, in which coded information travels near to the-speed-of-light. Integrated into a global network of communication, transmission is assumed to be friction-free – everything and everybody are just a click away. Indeed, the old problem of signal interference is subdued by the magnum opus of communication engineering – Shannon’s noiseless channel – a cure for the undesirable uncertainties of message sending (Shannon and Weaver 19). For that reason alone, the digitally enhanced fidelity of Shannon’s digital code, not only heralds a new age of communication, but also marks the end of the problem of noise. In effect, his mathematical theory of communication, establishes a highly effective coding mechanism that travels from sender to receiver, overcoming geographic constraint and the deafening raw of the analogue milieu. This makes the theory itself the substratum of the digital communication utopia, since Shannon’s conquest of noise has solved the reliability problem of code, allowing us to focus on the rapidity and fecundity of our messages. &#x0D; &#x0D; However, despite the ingenuity of the noiseless channel, its subsequent rapid expansion into a vast network of machines means that both senders and receivers pay a price for Shannon’s brilliance. The speed and boundless reproducibility of digital code outperforms our physical capacity to observe it. In this way, transmission works behind the scenes, becoming increasingly independent of the human gaze. Even so, we are assured that we will not be overwhelmed by code; a new digital order has purportedly emerged. As follows, network innovators provide us with robotic codes that work benevolently on our behalf, exploring a seemingly random universe of connection. These intelligent codes search the tangled webs that constitute digital communication networks, autonomously in step with our fleeting transactions and data desires. We can sleep safely at night… this is The Road Ahead.&#x0D; &#x0D; But of course, as we now know, the ideal system for perpetual communication has also turned out to be the perfect medium for the codes designed to destroy it (Gordon). Instead of efficiently taking care of our transmission needs, the flow of code has been interrupted by the relational interactions of a machinic assemblage (Deleuze and Guattari). This is a vast assemblage populated by both human and non-human actors. Its evolution has not followed a predictable path determined by the innovations of the science of code, but instead responds to the complex interactions and interconnectedness of the network environment. In this way, the binary switches of the robotic code have occasionally flipped over from true to false – from the munificent to the malevolent function. The interruption seems to be relatively new, but the human-computer assemblage has a long history of the production of what I term liar codes. They follow on from Gödel and Turing’s realisation of the incompleteness and undecidability of self-referential systems of logic in the 1930s. In the following decades, von Neumann’s ideas on self-reproducing code provided early programmers with the means to play coded games of life. Thirty years later and researchers discovered how unstable a network would become when a similarly coded evolutive got out of control (Shoch and Hupp, Cohen). By 1990, the digital worm had turned. Morris’s code famously ‘crashed’ the Internet. The liar code had escaped the research lab and entered the wild world of the network. Nevertheless, despite what appears to be the uncontrollable evolution of code, it is the assemblage itself that makes a difference.&#x0D; &#x0D; Many liar codes have since followed on from the games, experiments and accidents of the early human-computer assemblage. Some are simply mischievous pranks designed to take up space by making copies of themselves, while others conceal a deeper, sinister pre-programmed function of data piracy (Bey 401-434) and viral hijack. The former spread out across a network, spewing out fairly innocuous alerts, whereas the latter steel passwords, gaining access to safe places, capturing navigation tools, and redirecting our attention to the dark side of the global village. In addition to the deluge of spam, viruses and worms, liar code arrives hidden in Trojan programs. Like Russian dolls, code slips into email inboxes. Simple viral sentences repeatedly trick us into opening these programs and spreading the infection. By saying “I love you” code becomes a recursive deceiver, concealing the true intentions of the virus writer, while ensuring that the victim plays a crucial role in the propagation of the liar.&#x0D; &#x0D; Noise Is Dead – Long Live the New Noise!&#x0D; &#x0D; More recently Liar codes have been cunningly understood as contemporary instances of cultural noise – the other of order (Parikka). However, this does not mean that a solution can be found in the universality of Shannon’s linear diagram – this is an altogether different engineering problem. In principle, Shannon’s noise was more readily apprehended. It existed primarily at a technical level (signal noise), a problem solved by the incorporation of noise into a technical code (redundancy). Contrariwise, liar codes go beyond the signal/noise ratio of the content of a message. They are environmental absurdities and anomalies that resonate outside the technical layer into the cultural milieu of the human-computer assemblage. The new noise is produced by the hissing background distortion of the network, which relentlessly drives communication to a far-from-equilibrial state. Along these lines, the production of what appears to be a surplus of code is subject to the behaviour and functioning of a vast and vulnerable topology of human and non-human machinic interaction.&#x0D; &#x0D; Is the Solution to Be Found in a Clash of Codes?&#x0D; &#x0D; In an attempt to banish the network pirates and their growing phylum of liar codes there has been a mobilisation of antivirus technologies. Netizens have been drafted in to operate the malware blockers, set up firewalls or dig the electronic trenches. But these desperate tactics appeal only to those who believe that they can reverse the drift towards instability, and return a sense of order to the network. In reality, evidence of the effectiveness of these counter measures is negligible. Despite efforts to lower the frequency of attacks, the liar code keeps seeping in. Indeed, the disorder from which the new noise emerges is quite unlike the high entropic problem encountered by Shannon. Like this, digital anomalies are not simply undesirable, random distortions, repaired by coded negentropy. On the contrary, the liar is a calculated act of violence, but this is an action that emerges from a collective, war-like assemblage. Therefore, significantly, it is not the code, but the relational interactions that evolve. For this reason, it is not simply the liar codes that threaten the stability of transmission, but the opening-up of a networked medium that captures messages, turning them into an expression of the unknown of order. Code no longer conveys a message through a channel. Not at all, it is the assemblage itself that anarchically converts the message into an altogether different form of expression. The liar is a rhizome, not a root!! (See figure 1.)&#x0D; &#x0D; A Network Diagram of Senders, Receivers and Deceivers&#x0D; &#x0D; Rhizomatic liar code introduces an anarchic scrambling of the communication model.&#x0D; &#x0D; Ad nauseam, antivirus researchers bemoan the problem of the liar code, but their code-determined defence system has seemingly failed to tell apart the senders, receivers and deceivers. Their tactics cannot sidestep the Gödelian paradox. Interestingly, current research into complex network topologies, particularly the Internet and the Web (Barabási), appears to not only support this gloomy conclusion, but confirms that the problem extends beyond code to the dynamic formation of the network itself. In this way, complex network theory may help us to understand how the human-computer assemblage comes together in the production of viral anomalies. Indeed, the digital network is not, as we may think, a random universe of free arbitrary association. It does not conform to the principles leading to inevitable equilibrium (an averaging out of connectivity). It is instead, an increasingly auto-organised and undemocratic tangle of nodes and links in which a few highly connected aristocratic clusters form alongside many isolated regions. In this far-from-random milieu, the flow of code is not determined by the linear transmission of messages between senders and receivers, or for that matter is it guided by an algorithmic evolutive. On the contrary, while aristocratic networks provide a robust means of holding an assemblage together, their topological behaviour also makes them highly susceptible to viral epidemics. Liar codes easily spread through clusters formed out of preferential linkage, and a desire for exclusive, network alliances between humans and non-humans. From a remote location, a single viral code can promiscuously infect a highly connected population of nodes (Pastor-Satorras &amp; Vespignani). This is the perfect environment for the actions of deceivers and their liar codes.&#x0D; &#x0D; On reflection, a revised diagram of transmission, which tackles head on the viral anomalies of the human-computer assemblage, would perhaps be unworkable. This is consistent with the problem of liar codes, and the resulting collapse of trustworthy transmission. The diagram would ideally need to factor in the anarchic, scrambled lines of communication (see figure 1), as well as the complex topological relations between node and link. Such a diagram would also need to trace significant topological behaviours and functions alongside the malfunctions of codes, coders and the sharing of codes over a network. It is this significant topological intensity of the human-computer assemblage that shifts the contemporary debate on noise away from Shannon’s model towards a complex, non-linear and relational interaction. In this sense, the diagram moves closer to the rhizomatic notion of a network (Deleuze and Guattari 9-10). Not so much a model of transmission, rather a model of viral transduction. &#x0D; &#x0D; References&#x0D; &#x0D; Barabási, Albert-László. Linked: The New Science of Networks. Cambridge, Mass: Perseus, 2002. Bey, Hakim in Ludlow, Peter (ed). Crypto Anarchy, Cyberstates and Pirate Utopias. Cambridge, Mass: MIT, 2001. Cohen, F. “Computer Viruses: Theory and Experiments.” Computers &amp; Security 6 (1987): 22-35. Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. by Brian Massumi. London: The Athlone Press, 1987. Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus. London: The Athlone Press, 1984. Gates, Bill. The Road Ahead. London: Penguin, 1995/1996. Gordon, Sarah. “Technologically Enabled Crime: Shifting Paradigms for the Year 2000.” Computers and Security 1995. (5 Dec. 2005) http://www.research.ibm.com/antivirus/SciPapers/Gordon/Crime.html&gt;. Latour, Bruno. Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society. Harvard University Press, 1988. Parikka, Jussi. “Viral Noise and the (Dis)Order of the Digital Culture.” M/C Journal 7.6 (2005). 5 Dec. 2005 http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0501/05-parikka.php&gt;. Shannon, Claude, and Warren Weaver. The Mathematical Theory of Communication. University of Illinois Press, 1949/1998. Shoch, John F, and Jon A Hupp. “The ‘Worm’ Programs – Early Experience with a Distributed Computation.” Communications of the ACM 25.3 (March 1982): 172–180. 5 Dec. 2005. Pastor-Satorras, Romualdo, and Alessandro Vespignani. “Epidemic Spreading in Scale-Free Networks.” Physical Review Letters 86 (2001). Von Neumann, John, and Arthur Burks. Theory of Self-Reproducing Automata. University of Illinois Press, 1966.&#x0D; &#x0D; &#x0D; &#x0D; &#x0D; Citation reference for this article&#x0D; &#x0D; MLA Style&#x0D; Sampson, Tony. "Senders, Receivers and Deceivers: How Liar Codes Put Noise Back on the Diagram of Transmission." M/C Journal 9.1 (2006). echo date('d M. Y'); ?&gt; &lt;http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0603/03-sampson.php&gt;. APA Style&#x0D; Sampson, T. (Mar. 2006) "Senders, Receivers and Deceivers: How Liar Codes Put Noise Back on the Diagram of Transmission," M/C Journal, 9(1). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?&gt; from &lt;http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0603/03-sampson.php&gt;. &#x0D;

The mysteries of Mount Sibyl and the Lakes of Pilate, in the Sibillini Mountain Range in Italy, are both ancient enigmas which are still unsolved. In two previous papers, &ldquo;Birth of a Sibyl: the medieval connection&rdquo; and &ldquo;A legend for a Roman prefect: the Lakes of Pontius Pilate&rdquo;, we identified the presence of two additional, extraneous legendary layers, which are connected to the figure of Morgan le Fay and to the ancient lore concerning the burial places of Pontius Pilate. With a third paper, &ldquo;Sibillini Mountain Range: the legend before the legends&rdquo;, we pinpointed a number of common traits that mark both legends, the Cave&#39;s and Lake&#39;s, with at least three shared features: a legendary demonic presence; the performance of necromantic rituals; winds, tempests, and devastation which mythically arise from both sites. With the present paper we address a fourth, most significant feature which seems to mark the two sites, the Sibyl&#39;s Cave and the Lake of Pilate: they both appear to have been considered as some sort of passageways to the Otherworld, owing to the presence of specific narrative elements, such as the test bridge, that are usually found in literary works that depict visionary travels to otherwordly regions. The Otherworld and its accessibility to living men has always been an illustrious, emotional literary topic in the literary production of the Western tradition, since classical antiquity, through the advent of Christianity and across the centuries of the Middle Ages. From Homer&#39;s &ldquo;Odyssey&rdquo; to Vergil&#39;s &ldquo;Aeneid&rdquo;, from Pope St. Gregory the Great to the visionary dreams originated in medieval Ireland, and up to the legend of the Purgatory of St. Patrick, men have always been dreaming about the afterlife, its shadows, its demons and its punishments. In the present work we retrace the main literary instances of the visionary narratives on the Otherworld in the Western culture. In addition to that, we highlight the strong literary links which can be retrieved between the legendary tales of the Sibyl&#39;s Cave and the Lake of Pilate, in the Sibillini Mountain Range, and two most famous and successful narratives which depict two specific journeys to otherwordly regions: the legend of the Cumaean Sibyl, with the Lake of Avernus and the gloomy cave providing an access to the realm of the dead, and the legend of St. Patrick&#39;s Purgatory, featuring another lake, Lough Derg, and another sinister cave. In the present paper we show the recurrent contaminations of narrative themes that link the three different, and substantially unrelated, legends, in the form of a visible transfer of narrative topics and situations from the illustrious and widely-known Cumaean and Irish tales, to an Italian tale which appear to features some narrative and geographical traits in common, though set in a different setting and despite its total independence from the legendary narratives of Lough Derg and Cumae. A contamination that has travelled across the centuries of the Middle Ages, through the invisible streams of oral tales and storytelling, finally materialised within the fifteenth-century works written by Antoine de la Sale and Andrea da Barberino. The resulting, far-reaching assumption which arises from the present research work is that a legendary passageway to some sort of Otherworld might have been possibly situated, by an antique tradition that left some faint traces in the known literature, among the peaks of the central Apennines. And the landmarks for this mythical entryway would be associated, just like in Cumae and Lough Derg, to the same kind of landforms, a lake and a cave: they both would mark a sort of legendary &#39;hot spot&#39; on the surface of Earth, where the mythical passageway would be located. In this framework, a number of questions are left open in the present paper: why should this Apennine site have been considered as a further entryway to the Otherworld? If our assumption is true, what sort of Otherworld was this? What sort of dreadful dream did men conceive by the Lake and Cave set in the mountains of the Apennines, in central Italy? What legend did live in this area before the medieval legendary tales about a Sibyl and Pontius Pilate settled themselves here? The highlighting of the otherwordly character marking the Sibillini Mountain Range, in Italy, may lead to an improved comprehension of the mythical nucleus of the legendary setting that inhabits those imposing mountains of Italy, opening a new path that will be fully addressed in a future, and conclusive, research paper, now under preparation. This article is Part 1 of the full paper on the above topic, and also part of an extended series of papers on the true origin of the Apennine Sibyl&#39;s and Pilatus Lakes&#39; legends, a series that will include further papers that are about to provide additional, previously-unpublished information on the whole fascinating topic.

The mysteries of Mount Sibyl and the Lakes of Pilate, in the Sibillini Mountain Range in Italy, are both ancient enigmas which are still unsolved. In two previous papers, &ldquo;Birth of a Sibyl: the medieval connection&rdquo; and &ldquo;A legend for a Roman prefect: the Lakes of Pontius Pilate&rdquo;, we identified the presence of two additional, extraneous legendary layers, which are connected to the figure of Morgan le Fay and to the ancient lore concerning the burial places of Pontius Pilate. With a third paper, &ldquo;Sibillini Mountain Range: the legend before the legends&rdquo;, we pinpointed a number of common traits that mark both legends, the Cave&#39;s and Lake&#39;s, with at least three shared features: a legendary demonic presence; the performance of necromantic rituals; winds, tempests, and devastation which mythically arise from both sites. With the present paper we address a fourth, most significant feature which seems to mark the two sites, the Sibyl&#39;s Cave and the Lake of Pilate: they both appear to have been considered as some sort of passageways to the Otherworld, owing to the presence of specific narrative elements, such as the test bridge, that are usually found in literary works that depict visionary travels to otherwordly regions. The Otherworld and its accessibility to living men has always been an illustrious, emotional literary topic in the literary production of the Western tradition, since classical antiquity, through the advent of Christianity and across the centuries of the Middle Ages. From Homer&#39;s &ldquo;Odyssey&rdquo; to Vergil&#39;s &ldquo;Aeneid&rdquo;, from Pope St. Gregory the Great to the visionary dreams originated in medieval Ireland, and up to the legend of the Purgatory of St. Patrick, men have always been dreaming about the afterlife, its shadows, its demons and its punishments. In the present work we retrace the main literary instances of the visionary narratives on the Otherworld in the Western culture. In addition to that, we highlight the strong literary links which can be retrieved between the legendary tales of the Sibyl&#39;s Cave and the Lake of Pilate, in the Sibillini Mountain Range, and two most famous and successful narratives which depict two specific journeys to otherwordly regions: the legend of the Cumaean Sibyl, with the Lake of Avernus and the gloomy cave providing an access to the realm of the dead, and the legend of St. Patrick&#39;s Purgatory, featuring another lake, Lough Derg, and another sinister cave. In the present paper we show the recurrent contaminations of narrative themes that link the three different, and substantially unrelated, legends, in the form of a visible transfer of narrative topics and situations from the illustrious and widely-known Cumaean and Irish tales, to an Italian tale which appear to features some narrative and geographical traits in common, though set in a different setting and despite its total independence from the legendary narratives of Lough Derg and Cumae. A contamination that has travelled across the centuries of the Middle Ages, through the invisible streams of oral tales and storytelling, finally materialised within the fifteenth-century works written by Antoine de la Sale and Andrea da Barberino. The resulting, far-reaching assumption which arises from the present research work is that a legendary passageway to some sort of Otherworld might have been possibly situated, by an antique tradition that left some faint traces in the known literature, among the peaks of the central Apennines. And the landmarks for this mythical entryway would be associated, just like in Cumae and Lough Derg, to the same kind of landforms, a lake and a cave: they both would mark a sort of legendary &#39;hot spot&#39; on the surface of Earth, where the mythical passageway would be located. In this framework, a number of questions are left open in the present paper: why should this Apennine site have been considered as a further entryway to the Otherworld? If our assumption is true, what sort of Otherworld was this? What sort of dreadful dream did men conceive by the Lake and Cave set in the mountains of the Apennines, in central Italy? What legend did live in this area before the medieval legendary tales about a Sibyl and Pontius Pilate settled themselves here? The highlighting of the otherwordly character marking the Sibillini Mountain Range, in Italy, may lead to an improved comprehension of the mythical nucleus of the legendary setting that inhabits those imposing mountains of Italy, opening a new path that will be fully addressed in a future, and conclusive, research paper, now under preparation. This article is Part 2 of the full paper on the above topic, and also part of an extended series of papers on the true origin of the Apennine Sibyl&#39;s and Pilatus Lakes&#39; legends, a series that will include further papers that are about to provide additional, previously-unpublished information on the whole fascinating topic.

As the old technologies become automatic and invisible, we find ourselves more concerned with fighting or embracing what’s new”—Dennis Baron, From Pencils to Pixels:The Stage of Literacy Technologies Increasingly, cultural study is villainised by defenders of the academic tradition for luring English students away from the high-brow texts of the literary canon, a condition exacerbated by institutions' need for economic survival. In Britain in 1995 there were 1500 fewer English A-Level students than in 1994, whereas cultural studies students increased by approximately the same number (Cartmel et al. 1). Modern students of English are preferring more readily digestible on-screen texts which subvert the role of the author in favour of the role of the genre, a preference that allows readers/viewers to pay more attention to their own tastes, beliefs and identities than those of figures that produced great books, and their contemporaries. Modern cultural studies have a somewhat self-indulgent quality that many academics find distasteful, a kind of narcissistic celebration of the fact that media and mass culture operate as reflections of ourselves today instead of as windows into brilliant minds and historically significant moments. One of the most frustrating forms of this for defenders of traditional English studies is the adaptation of classic literature into commercial film and the ensuing analyses. The task of 'doing justice' to a classic novel in a modern film is fundamentally impossible. Whatever authenticity is strived for in an adaptation, the economic necessities of the modern film (sex appeal, celebrity, luridness) are bound to collide with academic notions of the original text and subsequently cause damage and widen the literature/media divide. A recent remake by Gus Van Sant of one of the most celebrated films ever made, Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho (1960), has added new flavour to this debate. Van Sant's Psycho (1999) operates more as an homage to the classic film and as a piece of 'conceptual art' than as a simple remake (Romney 31). Almost every shot, every word, every piece of music from the original has been recreated in an attempt to celebrate rather than claim credit for the ideas which made Hitchcock's film such a pillar of the film canon, much in the same way as a screen adaptation of a classic novel validates itself via its established worth. What is interesting about the reaction to this film is that as far as I can tell most critics hated it. The new Psycho has been labelled a vulgar hack job, a grossly immodest attempt to improve on the unimprovable. What is it about the original film that has caused this reaction to the remake, and what does it suggest about critical/academic readings versus popular ones? In order to answer this question, we must look closely at the original film, and at what is different or similar about the new one, and most importantly, consider the source of this uneasiness that pervades the adaptation of one fictitious body into another. The plot of Psycho is pretty straightforward. Marion Crane (Janet Leigh), a disenchanted and fatally scatty secretary that wants to marry her lover Sam (John Gavin) steals forty thousand dollars from her boss so they can afford to do so. She skips town and stops at a motel run by Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins) whose mother can be glimpsed and heard in a house nearby. Bates spies on Marion while she undresses, and just when she seems like she's going to return the stolen money she gets brutally stabbed in the shower. Norman finds her body and puts it in the car which he pushes into a swamp. Marion's sister Lila and Sam go looking for her, as does Arbogast, a PI who has been hired to find the money. Arbogast questions Norman and also gets brutally stabbed to death. When he fails to return, Lila and Sam go to the sheriff who tells them among other things that Mrs. Bates has been dead for ten years after killing the man she was involved with and then killing herself. All the while, we hear Norman talking to his mother and insisting on taking her down to the cellar. Lila and Sam search the hotel and eventually Lila finds a woman's stuffed corpse and Norman, dressed in old women's clothes, tries to stab her. Later a psychiatrist explains that the now incarcerated Norman is schizophrenic and had murdered his possessive mother because he was jealous of her lover. He had taken on her personality when drawn to a woman such as the fated Marion. What makes the film extraordinary is the use of action codes and an uneasiness that occupies the narrative through shot structure, real time, lighting, editing and sound. Hitchcock also deliberately disrupts the equilibrium audiences have come to expect from classic film narratives. The film opens as a crime story, turns into a murder mystery in which the lead character is the victim well before the end of the film. Psycho has a perplexing closure that denies the audience knowledge of the lost forty thousand dollars and Norman's unknown victims, and displaces sympathies and identities normally attached to lead roles. Norman's monstrous inner is developed with strange, angular lighting and a repressed homosexuality. The story unfolds in a very impersonal way, where the camera's omnipotence occasionally betrays the thoughts of its subjects. One brilliant moment involves the camera tracking between Marion while undressing and the money on the bed, reminding the audience of her deviousness and temptations, a mood heightened by her sexuality. The same technique is repeated after the shower scene, where the camera moves with Norman's gaze around the room towards the money, creating a bridge between the minds of the two enigmatic protagonists. All of these features of the original are reproduced in Van Sant's restaging in a manner that "subverts all audience wisdom about audience expectation" (Romney 31). The conversion from black and white into colour is the major technical innovation, cleverly highlighting details which speak volumes, such as Marion's telling bra's move from femme fatale black to aggressive orange. But it is the qualities of the film that remain the same which play on audience expectation, such as the shifty dialogue whose anachronistic sound reinforces the sinister subtext. The shower scene is bloodier, and Vince Vaughn's Norman is more blatantly homosexual, but the film is above all else a bold experiment and a deliberate challenge to accepted notions of originality. Perhaps the most critical moment for this intention is the retelling of the shower scene, the most famous horror scene in cinema history. Audience reaction to the shower scene was extreme when the film was first released in 1960. Hitchcock is said to have asked Paramount to allow him to remix the sound in the successive shots to accommodate audiences' "residual howling" (Branston &amp; Stafford 49). The shower scene is the climactic moment for Van Sant's artistic intention: the absence of the same impact due to the audience's expectations of it questions what authority the critical reading has over the interpretation of antique films which are canonised and labelled as sophisticated or arty. What we come to expect from a remake that goes shot for shot is dismantled by the poignant illustration of the changes that have occurred since audiences have acquired a postmodern manner of regarding the on-screen world, particularly with the prevalence of films which stress the audience's participation in the attribution of meaning and value to the text, such as The Truman Show (1998), Scream (1997) or The Faculty (1999). Van Sant's Psycho uses the old-school to point out how our current attitude towards sexuality, violence and dementia have changed alongside our media culture, and most importantly he points the finger back to the audience, forcing us to recognise our new criteria for being frightened or aroused and our resistance to being inert receptacles of fictitious events and ideologies. John O. Thompson boils down the academic aversion to adaptation from book to film to four key points of resistance, three of which are applicable to the Psycho question: authenticity (the original is authentic, the adaptation is simulacrum), fidelity (the adaptation is a deformation or a dilution of the original), and massification (the original must be harder, more cognitively demanding, or the latter would not be the more popular for an 'unskilled' mass audience; Thompson 11). This last consideration is central to the critical response to Psycho. The overwhelmingly negative critical reaction to the film has given the audience very little credit for its ability to distance itself from the immediate narrative, a skill that is learned by default as we as viewers of postmodern media are exposed to more and more material that cleverly puts itself into a cultural context. The new Psycho may have surrendered its mysterious and disturbing nature but it has done so in favour of demonstrating how much we have changed, and in so doing has also managed to point out how critical appraisal of postmodern films fails to acknowledge the symbiotic relationship between mass audience and cinema art form. References Branston, Gill, and Roy Stafford, eds. The Media Student's Book. New York: Routledge, 1996. Cartmel, Deborah, I.Q. Hunter, Heidi Kaye and Imelda Whelehan, eds. Pulping Fictions: Consuming Culture across the Literature/Media Divide. London: Pluto Press, 1996. Romney, Jonathan. Guardian Weekly 17 Jan. 1999: 31. Thompson, John O. "Vanishing Worlds: Film Adaptation and the Mystery of the Original." Pulping Fictions: Consuming Culture across the Literature/Media Divide. London: Pluto Press, 1996. Citation reference for this article MLA style: Ben King. "Retelling Psycho." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2.1 (1999). [your date of access] &lt;http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9902/psycho.php&gt;. Chicago style: Ben King, "Retelling Psycho," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2, no. 1 (1999), &lt;http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9902/psycho.php&gt; ([your date of access]). APA style: Ben King. (199x) Retelling Psycho. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2(1). &lt;http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9902/psycho.php&gt; ([your date of access]).

The Netflix/BBC eight-part limited true crime series The Serpent (2021) provides a commentary on the impact of the tourist industry in South-East Asia in the 1970s. The series portrays the story of French serial killer Charles Sobhraj (played by Tahar Rahim)—a psychopathic international con artist of Vietnamese-Indian descent—who regularly targeted Western travellers, especially the long-term wanderers of the legendary “Hippie Trail” (or the “Overland”), running between eastern Europe and Asia. The series, which was filmed on location in Thailand—in Bangkok and the Thai town of Hua Hin—is set in a range of travel destinations along the route of the Hippie Trail, as the narrative follows the many crimes of Sobhraj. Cities such as Kathmandu, Goa, Varanasi, Hong Kong, and Kabul are featured on the show. The series is loosely based upon Australian writers Richard Neville and Julie Clarke’s true crime biography The Life and Crimes of Charles Sobhraj (1979). Another true crime text by Thomas Thompson called Serpentine: Charles Sobhraj’s Reign of Terror from Europe to South Asia (also published in 1979) is a second reference. The show portrays the disappearance and murders of many young victims at the hands of Sobhraj. Certainly, Sobhraj is represented as a monstrous figure, but what about the business of tourism itself? Arguably, in its reflective examination of twentieth-century travel, the series also poses the hedonism of tourism as monstrous. Here, attention is drawn to Western privilege and a neo-orientalist gaze that presented Asia as an exotic playground for its visitors. The television series focuses on Sobhraj, his French-Canadian girlfriend Marie-Andrée Leclerc (played by Jenna Coleman), and the glamourous life they lead in Bangkok. The fashionable couple’s operation presents Sobhraj as a legitimate gem dealer: outwardly, they seem to embody the epitome of fun and glamour, as well as the cross-cultural sophistication of the international jet set. In reality, they drug and then steal from tourists who believe their story. Sobhraj uses stolen passports and cash to travel internationally and acquire more gems. Then, with an accomplice called Ajay Chowdhury (played by Amesh Adireweera), Sobhraj murders his victims if he thinks they could expose his fraud. Often depicted as humourless and seething with anger, the Sobhraj of the series often wears dark aviator sunglasses, a detail that enhances the sense of his impenetrability. One of the first crimes featured in The Serpent is the double-murder of an innocent Dutch couple. The murders lead to an investigation by Dutch diplomat Herman Knippenberg (played by Billy Howle), wanting to provide closure for the families of the victims. Knippenberg enlists neighbours to go undercover at Sobhraj’s home to collect evidence. This exposes Sobhraj’s crimes, so he flees the country with Marie-Andrée and Ajay. While they were apprehended, Sobhraj would be later given pardon from a prison in India: he would only received a life sentence for murder when he is arrested in Nepal in 2003. His ability to evade punishment—and inability to admit to and atone for his crimes—become features of his monstrosity in the television series. Clearly, Sobhraj is represented as the “serpent” of this drama, a metaphor regularly reinforced both textually and visually across the length of the series. As an example, the opening credit sequence for the series coalesces shots of vintage film in Asia—including hitchhiking backpackers, VW Kombi vans, swimming pools, religious tourist sites, corrupt Asian police forces—against an animated map of central and South-East Asia and the Hippie Trail. The map is encased by the giant, slithering tail of some monstrous, reptilian creature. Situating the geographic context of the narrative, the serpentine monster appears to be rising out of continental Asia itself, figuratively stalking and then entrapping the tourists and travellers who move along its route. So, what of the other readings about the monstrosity of the tourism industry that appears on the show? The Hippie Trail was arguably a site—a serpentine cross-continental thoroughfare—of Western excess. The Hippie Trail emerged as the result of the ease of travel across continental Europe and Asia. It was an extension of a countercultural movement that first emerged in the United States in the mid 1960s. Agnieszka Sobocinska has suggested that the travellers of the Hippie Trail were motivated by “widespread dissatisfaction with the perceived conservatism of Western society and its conventions”, and that it was characterised by “youth, rebellion, self-expression and the performance of personal freedom” (par. 8). The Trail appealed to a particular subcultural group who wanted to differentiate themselves from other travellers. Culturally, the Hippie Trail has become a historical site of enduring fascination, written about in popular histories and Western travel narratives, such as A Season in Heaven: True Tales from the Road to Kathmandu (Tomory 1998), Magic Bus: On the Hippie Trail from Istanbul to India (MacLean 2007), The Hippie Trail: A History (Gemie and Ireland 2017), and The Hippie Trail: After Europe, Turn Left (Kreamer 2019). Despite these positive memoirs, the route also has a reputation for being destructive and even neo-imperialist: it irrevocably altered the politics of these Asian regions, especially as crowds of Western visitors would party at its cities along the way. In The Serpent, while the crimes take place on its route, on face value the Hippie Trail still appears to be romanticised and nostalgically re-imagined, especially as it represents a stark difference from our contemporary world with its heavily-policed international borders. Indeed, the travellers seem even freer from the perspective of 2021, given the show’s production phase and release in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, when international travel was halted for many. As Kylie Northover has written in a review for the series in the Sydney Morning Herald, the production design of the programme and the on-location shoot in Thailand is affectionately evocative and nostalgic. Northover suggests that it “successfully evokes a very specific era of travel—the Vietnam War has just ended, the Summer of Love is over and contact with family back home was usually only through the post restante” (13). On the show, there is certainly critique of the tourist industry. For example, one scene demonstrates the “dark side” of the Hippie Trail dream. Firstly, we see a psychedelic-coloured bus of travellers driving through Nepal. The outside of the bus is covered with its planned destinations: “Istanbul. Teheran. Kabul. Delhi”. The Western travellers are young and dressed in peasant clothing and smoking marijuana. Looking over at the Himalayas, one hippie calls the mountains a “Shangri-La”, the fictional utopia of an Eastern mountain paradise. Then, the screen contracts to show old footage of Kathmandu— using the small-screen dimensions of a Super-8 film—which highlights a “hashish centre” with young children working at the front. The child labour is ignored. As the foreign hippie travellers—American and English—move through Kathmandu, they seem self-absorbed and anti-social. Rather than meeting and learning from locals, they just gather at parties with other hippies. By night-time, the series depicts drugged up travellers on heroin or other opiates, disconnected from place and culture as they stare around aimlessly. The negative representation of hippies has been observed in some of the critical reviews about The Serpent. For example, writing about the series for The Guardian, Dorian Lynskey cites Joan Didion’s famous “serpentine” interpretation of the hippie culture in the United States, applying this to the search for meaning on the Hippie Trail: the subculture of expats and travellers in south-east Asia feels rather like Joan Didion’s 60s California, crisscrossed by lost young people trying to find themselves anew in religion, drugs, or simply unfamiliar places. In Slouching Towards Bethlehem, Didion writes of those who “drifted from city to torn city, sloughing off both the past and the future as snakes shed their skins”. (Lynskey) We could apply cultural theories about tourism to a critique of the industry in the series too. Many cultural researchers have critiqued tourists and the tourism industry, as well as the powers that tourists can wield over destination cultures. In Time and Commodity Culture, John Frow has suggested that the logic of tourism is “that of a relentless extension of commodity relations, and the consequent inequalities of power, between centre and periphery, First and Third World, developed and undeveloped regions, metropolis and countryside”, as well as one that has developed from the colonial era (151). Similarly, Derek Gregory’s sensitive analyses of cultural geographies of postcolonial space showed that Nineteenth-century Orientalism is a continuing process within globalised mass tourism (114). The problem of Orientalism as a Western travel ideology is made prominent in The Serpent through Sobhraj’s denouncement of Western tourists, even though there is much irony at play here, as the series itself arguably is presenting its own retro version of Orientalism to Western audiences. Even the choice of Netflix to produce this true crime story—with its two murderers of Asian descent—is arguably a way of reinforcing negative representations about Asian identity. Then, Western characters take on the role of hero and/or central protagonist, especially the character of Knippenberg. One could ask: where is the Netflix show that depicts a positive story about a central character of Vietnamese-Indian descent? Edward Said famously defined Orientalism as “a way of coming to terms with the Orient that is based on the Orient’s special place in European Western experience” (1). It became a way for Western cultures to interpret and understand the East, and for reducing and homogenising it into a more simplistic package. Orientalism explored discourses that grew to encompass India and the Far East in tandem with the expansion of Western imperialism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It examined a dualistic ideology: a way of looking that divided the globe into two limited types without any room for nuance and diversity. Inclusive and exclusive, Orientalism assumed and promoted an “us and them” binary, privileging a Western gaze as the normative cultural position, while the East was relegated to the ambiguous role of “other”. Orientalism is a field in which stereotypes of the East and West have power: as Said suggests, “the West is the actor, the Orient is a passive reactor… . The West is the spectator, the judge and jury, of every facet of Oriental behaviour” (109). Interestingly, despite the primacy in which Sobhraj is posited as the show’s central monster, he is also the character in the series most critical of the neo-colonial oppression caused by this counter-cultural tourism, which indicates ambiguity and complexity in the representation of monstrosity. Sobhraj appears to have read Said. As he looks scornfully at a stoner hippie woman who has befriended Ajay, he seems to perceive the hippies as drop-outs and drifters, but he also connects them more thoroughly as perpetrators of neo-imperialist processes. Indicating his contempt for the sightseers of the Hippie Trail as they seek enlightenment on their travels, he interrogates his companion Ajay: why do you think these white children deny the comfort and wealth of the life they were given to come to a place like this? Worship the same gods. Wear the same rags. Live in the same filth. Each experience is only then taken home to wear like a piece of fake tribal jewellery. They travel only to acquire. It’s another form of imperialism. And she has just colonised you! Sobhraj’s speech is political but it is also menacing, and he quickly sets upon Ajay and physically punishes him for his tryst with the hippie woman. Yet, ultimately, the main Western tourists of the Hippie Trail are presented positively in The Serpent, especially as many of them are depcited as naïve innocents within the story—hopeful, idealistic and excited to travel—and simply in the wrong place, at the wrong time. In this way, the series still draws upon the conventions of the true crime genre, which is to differentiate clearly between good/evil and right/wrong, and to create an emotional connection to the victims as symbols of virtue. As the crimes and deaths accumulate within the series, Sobhraj’s opinions are deceptive, designed to manipulate those around him (such as Ajay) rather than being drawn from genuine feelings of political angst about the neo-imperialist project of Western tourism. The uncertainty around Sobhraj’s motivation for his crimes remains one of the fascinating aspects of the series. It problematises the way that the monstrosity of this character is constructed within the narrative of the show. The character of Sobhraj frequently engages with these essentialising issues about Orientalism, but he appears to do so with the aim to remove the privilege that comes from a Western gaze. In the series, Sobhraj’s motivations for targeting Western travellers are often insinuated as being due to personal reasons, such as revenge for his treatment as a child in Europe, where he says he was disparaged for being of Asian heritage. For example, as he speaks to one of his drugged French-speaking victims, Sobhraj suggests that when he moved from Vietnam to France as a child, he was subject to violence and poor treatment from others: “a half-caste boy from Saigon. You can imagine how I was bullied”. In this instance, the suffering French man placed in Sobhraj’s power has been promoted as fitting into one of these “us and them” binaries, but in this set-up, there is also a reversal of power relations and Sobhraj has set himself as both the “actor” and the “spectator”. Here, he has reversed the “Orientalist” gaze onto a passive Western man, homogenising a “Western body”, and hence radically destabilising the construct of Orientalism as an ideological force. This is also deeply troubling: it goes on to sustain a problematic and essentialising binary that, no matter which way it faces, aims to denigrate and stereotype a cultural group. In this way, the character of Sobhraj demonstrates that while he is angry at the way that Orientalist ideologies have victimised him in the past, he will continue to perpetrate its basic ideological assumptions as a way of administering justice and seeking personal retribution. Ultimately, perhaps one of the more powerful readings of The Serpent is that it is difficult to move away from the ideological constructs of travel. We could also suggest that same thing for the tourists. In her real-life analysis of the Hippie Trail, Agnieszka Sobocinska has suggested that while it was presented and understood as something profoundly different from older travel tours and expeditions, it could not help but be bound up in the same ideological colonial and imperial impulses that constituted earlier forms of travel: Orientalist images and imperial behaviours were augmented to suit a new generation that liked to think of itself as radically breaking from the past. Ironically, this facilitated the view that ‘alternative’ travel was a statement in anti-colonial politics, even as it perpetuated some of the inequalities inherent to imperialism. This plays out in The Serpent. We see that this supposedly radically different new group – with a relaxed and open-minded identity—is bound within the same old ideological constructs. Part of the problem of the Hippie Trail traveller was a failure to recognise the fundamentally imperialist origins of their understanding of travel. This is the same kind of concern mapped out by Turner and Ash in their analysis of neo-imperial forms of travel called The Golden Hordes: International Tourism and the Pleasure Periphery (1976), written and published in the same era as the events of The Serpent. Presciently gauging the effect that mass tourism would have on developing nations, Turner and Ash used the metaphor of “hordes” of tourists taking over various poorer destinations to intend a complete reversal of the stereotype of a horde of barbaric and non-Western hosts. By inferring that tourists are the “hordes” reverses Orientalist conceptions of de-personalised non-Western cultures, and shows the problem that over-tourism and unsustainable visitation can pose to host locations, especially with the acceleration of mass travel in the late Twentieth century. Certainly, the concept of a touristic “horde” is one of the monstrous ideas in travel, and can signify the worst aspects contained within mass tourism. To conclude, it is useful to return to the consideration of what is presented as monstrous in The Serpent. Here, there is the obvious monster in the sinister, impassive figure of serial killer Charles Sobhraj. Julie Clarke, in a new epilogue for The Life and Crimes of Charles Sobhraj (2020), posits that Sobhraj’s actions are monstrous and unchangeable, demonstrating the need to understand impermeable cases of human evil as a part of human society: one of the lessons of this cautionary tale should be an awareness that such ‘inhuman humans’ do live amongst us. Many don’t end up in jail, but rather reach the highest level in the corporate and political spheres. (Neville and Clarke, 2020) Then, there is the exploitational spectre of mass tourism from the Hippie Trail that has had the ability to “invade” and ruin the authenticity and/or sustainability of a particular place or location as it is overrun by the “golden hordes”. Finally, we might consider the Orientalist, imperialist and globalised ideologies of mass tourism as one of the insidious and serpentine forces that entrap the central characters in this television series. This leads to a failure to understand what is really going on as the tourists are deluded by visions of an exotic paradise. References Frow, John. Time and Commodity Culture: Essays on Culture Theory and Postmodernity. Oxford UP, 1997. Gemie, Sharif, and Brian Ireland. The Hippie Trail: A History. Manchester UP, 2017. Gregory, Derek. “Scripting Egypt: Orientalism and the Cultures of Travel.” In Writes of Passage: Reading Travel Writing. Eds. Duncan James and Derek Gregor. Routledge, 1999. 114-150 . Kreamer, Robert. The Hippie Trail: After Europe, Turn Left. Fonthill Media, 2019. Lynskey, Dorian. “The Serpent: A Slow-Burn TV Success That’s More than a Killer Thriller.” The Guardian, 30 Jan. 2021. 1 Oct. 2021 &lt;https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2021/jan/29/the-serpent-more-than-a-killer-thriller-bbc-iplayer&gt;. MacLean, Rory. Magic Bus: On the Hippie Trail from Istanbul to India. Penguin, 2006. Neville, Richard, and Julie Clarke. The Life and Crimes of Charles Sobhraj. Jonathan Cape, 1979. ———. On the Trail of the Serpent: The Life and Crimes of Charles Sobhraj. Revised ed. Vintage, 2020. Northover, Kylie. “The Ice-Cold Conman of the ‘Hippie Trail’.” Sydney Morning Herald, 27 Mar. 2021: 13. Price, Roberta. “Magic Bus: On the Hippie Trail from Istanbul to India.” The Sixties: A Journal of History, Politics and Culture 2.2 (2009): 273-276. Said, Edward. Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient. Penguin, 1995. Sobocinska, Agnieszka. “Following the ‘Hippie Sahibs’: Colonial Cultures of Travel and the Hippie Trail.” Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History 15.2 (2014). DOI: 10.1353/cch.2014.0024. Thompson, Thomas. Serpentine: Charles Sobhraj’s Reign of Terror from Europe to South Asia. Doubleday, 1979. Tomory, David, ed. A Season in Heaven: True Tales from the Road to Kathmandu. Lonely Planet, 1998. Turner, Louis, and John Ash. The Golden Hordes: International Tourism and the Pleasure Periphery. St Martin’s Press, 1976.