Constant Interruption Research Articles

Examining the prospect of online education as drivers of effective and uninterrupted university education in the post-COVID-19 era

PurposeThe impact of COVID-19 on the educational systems across the globe was characterized by the shutdown of university education systems. In the post COVID-19 era, examining the prospect of on-line education becomes demanding with emphasis on promoting effective and uninterrupted university education sector in Nigeria.Design/methodology/approachThis study employed phenomenological and descriptive research design. The sample size for the study was 15, comprising university lecturers, students and school social workers. In-depth Interview (IDI) interview was the instrument for data collection.FindingsFindings revealed that university education in Nigeria was adversely disrupted by COVID-19 lockdown during the pandemic. Similarly, the study revealed that online education will facilitate effective and uninterrupted university education in post-COVID-19 era. Challenges such as lack of access to laptops, smartphones, reliable internet services, electricity etc. are major obstacles to an effective transition to online education in the post-COVID-19 University education era. The students lamented that poor knowledge of ICT by their lecturers and inclusivity of indigent/disabled students were major concerns.Originality/valueRevitalizing the education sector is a core concern for low-income countries. Online education presents the lasting solution to the constant interruption of university education in Africa. Promoting effective and uninterrupted university education is pegged on an adequate government education budgetary allocation targeted towards providing an enabling environment for online education to thrive. The study recommends that school social workers' engagement in the educational sector would help advocate for the availability of technological infrastructures and mainstreaming of the poor and disabled in the online education dispensation.

Philosophical Pragmatism and the Challenges of Information Technologies

Philosophical Pragmatism and the Challenges of Information Technologies

Learning English Language as a Second Language (ESL) by Iraqi University Students during the Outbreak of COVID-19: A Case- Study of Imam Kadhum College Students’ Challenges

When the World Health Organization announced COVID-19 as a global pandemic in 2020, the Iraqi government (like the rest of others) had to use preventive policies to control the spread of the virus. As a result of that, universities and schools have been closed to start then what is called ‘Distance Learning’, which paved the way for the continuity of the learning process.
 Distance or E. learning in higher education is a long-term concept. It is targeted at technology devices and www. The latter, actually, implies a problematic thing in Iraq due to the constant interruption. Poverty is another challenge added to the previous one that prevents far learning from becoming nearer and available in Iraqi homes. However, such a method of teaching originated in the earlier 18th century. 
 Purpose: This research aimed to describe the experience of Iraqi academic staff members and university students with the E. Learning during the pandemic of covid-19. It is also targeted at answering the central question: what are the challenges encountered by Iraqi university students (Imam Kadhum college students) during their learning of the English language in Covid-19. Seeking distance education trends during the 2019- 2020 coronavirus pandemic is not another goal of the research at hand.

Parents’ Perspectives of Distance Education during Crises: The Benefits and Disadvantages

This study explored parents’ views on the benefits and disadvantages of distance learning during crises. They have been informed about a school platform called Madrasti which has an electronic educational system. The study used the descriptive research method and open interviews on a sample of 28 parents (pairs of fathers and mothers) of 14 Saudi families with children at the primary education in different cities in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia at the second term of 2020–2021. Study results indicated economic, social, and educational benefits, such as saving school fees, family spending with children, and students acquiring e-learning skills. However, disadvantages were also noted, such as long hours spent on the platform, slow and intermittent Internet connection, poor computer skills among students, and teachers’ poor class management. Results of the study indicated some positives, economic, social, and educational, such as saving school fees, Family becomes spending more time with children, students learning skills in e-learning. In contrast, there are some negatives such as the platform's time being too long, weakness, and constant interruption of the Internet. Weakness of using computer skills for some students, and some teachers have weakness in class management. Thus, the study suggests educational, economic, social, and technical requirements to improve the effectiveness of the Madrasti platform. Additionally, future research must explore social problems faced by Saudi families during distance learning and the extent of students’ satisfaction with education through the Madrasati educational platform.
 
 Received: 17 November 2021 / Accepted: 4 January 2022 / Published: 5 March 2022

Contemporary Overstimulation in the Age of Information: The Blurring of The Personal and Political in Ben Lerner’s 10:04 and Olivia Laing’s Crudo

Olivia Laing’s Crudo and Ben Lerner’s 10:04 depict the constant interruption of the personal by global concerns and politics. Both novels are concerned with the decision between the personal and the global selves, and how these impending social, environmental, or political crises cloud the narrators’ minds. Their structure reflects this confusion and dislocation of the personal self, as the novels contain non-sequiturs, urban noise, and unrelated sections that have been pieced together deliberately. These novels capture the overstimulation of contemporary life and mass media or the information age while trying to navigate how art can reflect that and encapsulate a reality that is at once absurd and (seemingly) not contrived. While the barrier between the personal and global collapses, Lerner and Laing find a space in between where a realist yet raw (or ‘crudo’) retelling of contemporary media-addled experience can be represented. This essay incorporates commentary on how these texts engage with the idea of the troubled personal and the demise of individuality in the light of 21st-century overstimulation.

Understanding as an uncertainty overcome

The article discusses understanding as a human tendency to remove uncertainty through the phenomenon of «entropy». The learning process initially puts the student in a situation of constant movement from a disordered environment to an ordered one, which occurs due to the constant interruption of the student’s inner world balance. Studies of understanding through entropy allow us to consider the subject of understanding as an irreversible dynamic system, then the individuality of pedagogical influence can be explained by the degree of stability of this system. Taking into account the variety of individual differences that determine the process of understanding, the idea of building a probabilistic model of understanding is proposed.

The Generative Politics of Presentism in Post-15M Spain

This essay revises post-15M movement political party landscape, emphasizing the intentional yet unusual use of the present within the New Left's organizing grammar. Against sectors of the traditional Left, who see presentism as a product of neoliberalism, I claim that in the post-15M conjuncture, the present constituted a battleground in the struggle for a dignified life. First, I focus on the Catalan left-wing nationalist party CUP's use of anarchist symbols to suggest that references to sabotage were deployed to disrupt parliamentary politics, forcing constant interruption. Second, I analyze Podemos founding member Iñigo Errejón's speech after the party's 2016 national election defeat, where his rhetoric linked the temporality of the present with anti-austerity protestors’ embodied presence. Last, I read the rise of neomunicipalisms as another iteration of presentism, aiming to politicize everyday life. To conclude, I advance that such material practices of “generative presentism” problematize presentism's assumed depoliticizing nature.

STEPS TO IMPROVE WOUND HEALING AFTER ONCOLOGICAL SURGERY IN VETERINARY PATIENTS: TOWARDS A CASE SERIES AND QUALITATIVE VALIDATION

Oncoplastic surgery (OPS) is a widely used approach to remove different types of tumors in veterinary patients. However, depending on the tissue site, OPS can be a difficult option, as the wound may not heal appropriately due to constant interruption by the patient, the tissue could lack elasticity and reconstructive flaps from the own patients are difficult to obtain. New protocols to improve wound healing in OPS are needed to minimize the use of flaps, reduce the time of regeneration and improve the recovery of tissue functionality. After 5 years of testing state-of-the-art surgical repairing techniques, a series of steps are suggested by Andrés Villagomez to improve OPS wound healing. A case-series of 50 patients were treated with this protocol, which on average decreased the time of granulation from 15 to 6 days. Primary wounds are treated with autologous activated platelet-rich plasma (PRP) in a gel form throughout the wound. Then, a 0.3% last generation dressing cellulose Suprasorb X® is placed to provide moisture or absorb excess exudate. Immediately after, a hydrocolloid dressing (Suprasorbe H®) is applied in the form of a self-adhesive sheet to generate a protective layer that simulates the effect of "synthetic skin". Next, a sterile gauze is placed, fixed on using a self-adhesive polyester bandage (Fixomull®). This bandage could be maintained without losing its action for up to 15 days (however, the granulation tissue has been observed in almost 90% in the first 7 days). The decision to extend the dressing time (PRP / Suprasorb X and H) depends on the quantity and quality of the granulation tissue. If a suitable granulation tissue is not obtained, the dressing should continue for 5 to 7 more days. If adequate granulation tissue is obtained, it is not recommended to maintain the bandage for more days, as this can cause hyper granulation. Once optimal granulation tissue has been formed, a new dressing is placed for 7 more days, based on zinc oxide (sterile gauze + zinc oxide) which is covered with the self-adhesive polyester bandage. The purpose of the last dressing is to stop the advancement of the granulation tissue and stimulate definitive healing. It is important to note that the dressing change will depend on each patient, and sudden flexion and extension movements should be avoided. The environment and pre-existing hormonal diseases could affect the success of the protocol and should be taken into consideration during its application.

Evaluating the effects of a high-tech call system on patient-staff communication.

Evaluating the effects of a high-tech call system on patient-staff communication.

Words are just Noise, let your Actions Speak: Impact of Nonverbal Communication on Undergraduate Medical Education.

Objective:To explore student’s perceptions regarding impact of kinesics (facial expressions, gestures, head movements and postures) on undergraduate medical education.Methods:A qualitative exploratory online survey was conducted from July-Sept 2020 among purposively chosen final year BDS students (n=150) of three dental colleges of Islamabad during COVID-19 lockdown phase. Semi-structured survey questions were validated and piloted before execution. Thematic analysis was performed, and consensus was built among all authors regarding findings, hence ensuring analytical triangulation.Results:Response rate was 46% (69/150). Twenty sub-themes emerged under three domains of kinesics. Participants told that ‘neutral expressions’ frequently used by teachers create ‘boring learning environment’ and ‘hesitation among students to ask questions.’ A smile of teacher imparts ‘new degree of interest in the subject’ and gives ‘freedom of expression’ to the students. On contrary, anger ‘demotivate’ students, instills ‘fear among them’, make them anxious therefore, they are ‘unable to understand lectures’ which ultimately leads to ‘loss interest in the subject’. Use of gestures by teachers creates ‘enjoyable teaching-learning process’ but movements such as clearing throat or shaky legs produce ‘constant split-second interruption’. Moreover, standing posture of teachers bring ‘interest and alertness among students’.Conclusion:Nonverbal communication can have positive or negative impact on undergraduate medical education. Therefore, teachers may start lecture with a smile and anger should be avoided to produce friendly and healthy learning environment. Faculty training is required for the effective use of nonverbal communication strategies to create an optimal learning environment for the students.

Evaluating Disruptive Innovation Project Management Capabilities

Firms must adapt to a business environment in constant flux. Economic and political factors and the constant interruption of new technologies force firms and organizations to change and to adapt, so that they are not left behind. Over recent years, the development of disruptive innovations has completely revolutionized past scenarios. These innovations break with what is already established and firms from various sectors face no choice other than to incorporate them into their project management portfolios, so as to ensure survival and business sustainability. Using MIVES methodology as its foundation, a business sustainability management model is presented in this paper for the management of disruptive innovation projects that a firm may wish to develop within a given sector. The management model is designed to facilitate disruptive innovation project management for firms within technological-industrial sectors, by assessing the sustainability of the project. The model is applied to two firms, one from the machine-tooling sector and another from the construction sector. Finally, a sensitivity analysis was performed, the results of which verified the validity and the stability of the proposed model.

The Provocation of Jasper Johns: Pushing the Representational Limits of Pictorial Expression

This paper explores the relationship between visuality and verbal language in the works of Jasper Johns roughly between the period of 1955-1965. Works such as Numbers in Colors (1958-59), Gray Alphabets (1956), False Start (1959), Jubilee (1959), By the Sea (1961), Fool’s House (1962), Map (1961), The Critic Sees (1961), Voice (1964-67), Voice 2 (1982), Light Bulb (1958) and Watchman (1964) provide us with fertile ground to explore issues pertinent to the limits of pictorial expression by revealing how visual and verbal spaces are intricately interwoven. However, the relationship in between also embeds a great deal of tension hosting constant interruption and violation. For a fair evaluation of any visual artwork, we end up having to suspend our habitual ways of looking and realize the complexity of the basic task of looking. These works challenge our vision by making us question the diverse experience of looking (seeing, beholding, saluting, reading, counting, studying, memorizing, spying, voyeurizing, gazing etc.). The paper claims that what grants Johns’ art its provocative power is the realization that the realm of the visual is never a pure space but is constantly influenced by verbal and other senses.

QUALITY SERVICE DELIVERY AND CUSTOMERS’ SATISFACTION IN THE EEDC ABAKALIKI: TOWARDS THE ATTAINMENT OF SDG7 IN THE NIGERIAN POWER SECTOR

This paper focuses on Quality service delivery and customers’ satisfaction within the framework of the Enugu Electricity Distribution Company (EEDC) in Abakaliki, Ebonyi State, Nigeria. The motivation behind this research is the persistence of power failure despite the privatization and unbundling policy of Federal Government after it failed to induce efficiency and effectiveness in the defunct Power Holding Company of Nigeria (PHCN). It adopts faceto-face interviews and documentary analyses. The study revealed that factors such as fear of contract review/withdrawal and lack of job security after the probation period (2014-2018) due to change of government are also other challenges that affect the performance of electricity supply by EEDC in Abakaliki. Also, monopoly and customers’ self-pacifist behaviour were found to account for the persistence of the identified challenges identified. Findings further revealed that beating, harassment of EEDC staff and vandalization of power infrastructures by customers due to service failure or as an expression of frustration results in constant high bill estimation since staff cannot freely move to pick accurate meter readings in some premises where they had been confronted regularly. These result in a constant light interruption, overvoltage, load shedding, bulk billing, disconnections, and delay in the new connection. Paper concludes therefore that for the attainment of the current Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) goal 7, which aims to ensure access to affordable, reliable, sustainable, and modern energy for all by 2030; Public Enterprises (PEs) should invest more in recruiting more qualified staff and improving their condition of service; while government institutionalize the contract concession to remove it from political influence, at least partially and finally, make clear its policy responsibility to assign clear areas of intervention between it and the company and invest robustly in infrastructure.

Bodies that count: Administering multispecies in Palestine/Israel’s borderlands

Nonhuman bodies in many sizes and diverse social roles are central to Israel’s control mechanism in the Occupied West Bank. Delving into the agricultural record of the Israeli Civil Administration, I ask how the Israeli system of control operates through animal bodies. What does a bureaucratic record so invested in monitoring animals’ production, treatment, disease, and death tell about the potential disruption of power? Through a political ecology of human–animal entanglement, I argue that nonhuman bodies both reproduce human colonial relations and allow their constant interruption. Nonhumans challenge the power regime through their unpredictable mobility as well as in their role as both objects of a political economy and subjects of potential agricultural diseases, ecological risks, or public health threats. Breaking from contemporary multispecies scholarly literature’s focus on endangered species and relations of care, I place nonhuman bodies as actors of international-interspecies relations in colonial conditions and point to nonhumans, which are here to stay in the climate change era. By doing so, I reflect on the continuous significance of nonhuman bodies to the operation of power in the “borderlands” of Israel/Palestine and beyond.

Their Dogs Came with Them by Virginia Grise

Reviewed by: Their Dogs Came with Them by Virginia Grise Jimmy A. Noriega THEIR DOGS CAME WITH THEM. By Virginia Grise, adapted from the novel by Helena María Viramontes. Directed by Kendra Ware. Julian Wash Archaeological Park, Tucson, Arizona. October 18, 2019. Helena María Viramontes is one of the most celebrated and distinguished Latina authors in US literature. She first came to national attention with The Moths and Other Short Stories (1985) and received widespread acclaim for her first novel, Under the Feet of Jesus (1995). Viramontes’s second novel, Their Dogs Came with Them (2007), is based on her childhood in East Los Angeles in the 1960s. It presents the lives of four young Latina women set against the backdrop of the freeway construction that cut across predominantly Latinx neighborhoods. In her prose, Viramontes spotlights the youth of her community and explores Chicana feminism, gang culture, poverty, the impact of the Vietnam War, and the effects of racist urban development on their everyday lives. In 2015, Tucson’s Borderlands Theatre commissioned award-winning playwright Virginia Grise to adapt Their Dogs Came with Them for the stage. The result is a powerful play that speaks to the history of displacement and marginalization of people of color in the United States. The themes of the book translated readily from East LA to Tucson, which experienced a similar type of community disintegration in the 1960s when neighborhoods were destroyed to build the downtown Convention Center. Grise’s process included working with local residents on an early draft of the script and drew upon their shared circumstances with the novel’s characters. The text was then workshopped and produced in the Perryville Women’s Prison in Goodyear, Arizona in February 2019. In Tucson, the collaboration between Borderlands Theatre and a todo dar productions produced a site-specific performance at Julian Wash Archaeological Park, with the stage and audience located underneath the I-19 freeway. Grise adapted Viramontes’s 325-page novel into an episodic narrative that consisted of a prologue, twenty-eight scenes, and a coda. In total, twelve performers of color played the more than twenty characters that represented the fractured neighborhood. The main action follows the daily lives of two groups of Latinx youth: the F-Troop, four female friends named Ermilia, Mousie, Rini, and Lollie Loop de Lue; and the McBride Boys, a gang comprised of Turtle, Luis Lil Lizard, and Santos. Among their family and neighbors are an array of church people, undocumented individuals, the elderly and working-class, and a homeless woman. Throughout [End Page 359] the production, the Quarantine Authority (QA) and police remained an errant presence, monitoring and terrorizing the residents with helicopters, floodlights, loudspeakers, and guns. Although the QA was ostensibly deployed as a response to rising rabies cases in animals in the area, its actions consistently targeted and impeded the lives of the Latinx residents. Click for larger view View full resolution The ensemble of Their Dogs Came with Them perform under the I-19 freeway in South Tucson. (Photo: Jimmy A. Noriega.) At its core, Their Dogs Came with Them is about dislocation and disruption. It depicts a broken community whose inhabitants are desperately trying to survive amid the remains of a neighborhood torn apart by racist zoning laws and the demands of a commuter society. The audience was divided into three sections around a thrust-like dirt stage, and throughout the production the characters performed in multiple areas below the overpass, including behind the chain-link fence that divided the park and freeway. The site-specific nature of the production invoked an atmosphere of life in constant interruption. A sense of unease (and even danger) permeated the space as cars, trucks, and eighteen-wheelers passed overhead, creating a soundscape of furious traffic that at times sent strong vibrations into the audience. Although the performers wore microphones, the troupe occasionally struggled to overcome the sounds of the freeway. At other times the wind would blow the desert dust into the faces of the actors and audience, creating moments of agitation and discomfort. Moreover, a bike path bisected the performance space and at various moments cyclists would ride through, momentarily stopping the...

Open Instrumentation and Nonhierarchical Forms of Social Organization: Christian Wolff's <em>Exercises 1–14</em> (1973–74)

OPEN INSTRUMENTATION AND NONHIERARCHICAL FORMS OF SOCIAL ORGANIZATION: CHRISTIAN WOLFF’S EXERCISES 1–14 (1973–74) JONNY STALLINGS HRISTIAN WOLFF’S EXERCISES 1–14 (1973–74)1 epitomize Frederic Rzewski’s description of the composer’s music: “Weird little tunes, sounding as if they had been beamed at some remote point in the universe and then bounced back again as a kind of intergalactic mutant music; recognizable melodic and rhythmic patterns, somehow sewn together in monstrous pairings.”2 As these “weird little tunes” dance on the brink of representation and abstraction, form and formlessness, order and chaos, Wolff’s Exercises implement Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s dictum to “write, form a rhizome, increase your territory by deterritorialization, extend the line of ight to the point where it becomes an abstract machine covering the entire plane of consistency.”3 The use of open instrumentation, “heterophonic unison,” and performance instructions facilitates such rhizomatic deterritorializations of sound, harmony, melody, rhythm, and form in the Exercises. C 174 Perspectives of New Music Deleuze and Guattari explain, “Principles of connection and heterogeneity : any point of a rhizome can be connected to anything other, and must be.”4 They also assert that “there are no points or positions in a rhizome, such as those found in a structure, tree, or root. There are only lines.”5 The rhizomatic melodies of Wolff’s Exercises consist of diverse “points” (i.e., timbres, pitches, rhythms, keys, clefs, instruments , performers, listeners, etc.) whose connections form “lines” celebrating a nonhierarchical multiplicity. Such a nonhierarchical multiplicity has social and potentially political rami cations. This essay will consider Christian Wolff’s words, performance instructions to his Exercises, and score excerpts from Exercise 1 and Exercise 3 in order to draw parallels between the composer, the music, and critical theory.6 An examination of these sources will elucidate a deterritorialization at play within and surrounding Wolff’s Exercises, showing its validity as a means and an end regarding social change. The deterritorialization unleashed by Wolff’s music bridges musical and extra-musical aspects of the formal, the aesthetic, the political, and the social. Rzewski muses, “there is order, but also constant interruption , intrusions of disorderly reality upon regularity and lawfulness, combining to create an effect of both familiarity and strangeness: Shklovsky’s ostranenie.”7 The order of music (i.e., appropriate cadences, counterpoint rules, resolution of dissonances, rhythm, harmony, etc.) tends to differentiate within each musical community or genre. However, Wolff’s Exercises exceed genre expectations as well as the notion of expectations. The evasion of genre de nition in Wolff’s music results not through a rejection of preexisting genres and performance practices (Western classical, jazz, folk, etc.), but rather an openness to the integration of varying musical styles, practices, and personalities in a quasi-improvisational, dialogical setting. As these typically disparate voices and personalities communicate, the listener experiences intrusions of disorderly reality upon the “regularity and lawfulness” of notated music. Rzewski proceeds, “You could say this music is surrealist—not reproducing familiar forms, but revealing, behind these, life’s unpredictability. You could say it is political; improvisatory; concerned with collaborative, non-hierarchical forms of social organization; but you can’t really say what it is like.”8 Preexisting musical elements assemble themselves within a nonhierarchical space in which neither improvisation, performance, nor composition supersede one or the other. The performance of the Exercises thus results in deterritorializations of music, sound, ritual, performance practice, and social interaction, which leads to my thesis that Wolff’s Exercises arrive at Deleuze and Guattari’s goal for the work of art Open Instrumentation and Nonhierarchical Forms of Social Organization175 summed up by Michael Gallope: “In Deleuze and Guattari’s fully developed theory of the ritournelle, the sonic rhythms of music will vividly show us how one might ‘bring into play’—not imitate or duplicate, but continue and extend—the rhythms of the cosmos.”9 Gallope contends that Deleuze develops this unique take on music in even earlier works, writing, “this particularized role for music is hinted at in the closing of The Logic of Sense . . . the ‘problem of the work of art yet to come.’ For Deleuze, such a work of art would be...

The psychiatric ward environment and nursing observations at night: A qualitative study.

WHAT IS KNOWN ON THE SUBJECT?: Nursing observations at night are conducted on psychiatric wards to ensure the safety and well-being of patients as well as to reduce the risk of suicide or severe harm. To our knowledge, no studies have examined the lived experience of the psychiatric ward environment and of nursing observations at night. WHAT DOES THE PAPER ADD TO EXISTING KNOWLEDGE?: The main complaint from patients was the constant interruption of their sleep, as most of the patients in this study were observed 2-4 times an hour. Their sleep was interrupted by (a) the light from torches shone into their faces by staff checking on their safety, (b) the noises produced by the opening and closing of bedroom/ward doors, and/or (c) staff talking to each other during the observation. Patients also reported that they found having somebody enter the room in the middle of the night intimidating and unsettling. WHAT ARE THE IMPLICATIONS FOR PRACTICE?: Poor sleep has been associated with an increase in suicide risk and mental health problems. Identifying practices that promote sleep hygiene is vital. The study could be used to develop a Quality Improvement Project to improve patients' sleep and perhaps reduce duration of stay. ABSTRACT: Introduction A fundamental component of nursing care is observations at night to ensure the well-being of patients. However, there is no literature on the lived experience by inpatients of such observations or of the general environment of a psychiatric ward at night. Aim/Question This study aims (a) to understand the lived experience of being an inpatient on a psychiatric ward at night with a focus on intermittent observations and (b) contribute to developing a tool to monitor the psychiatric ward environment for use in quality improvement projects. Method Semi-structured interviews were conducted with twelve inpatients from five psychiatric wards who had experienced intermittent observations at night. These interviews were subsequently transcribed and analysed using content analysis. Results Environmental disturbances including light and noise, invasion of privacy and safety considerations on the ward all contributed to sleep disturbance. The unintended consequences of disturbances caused by intermittent night observations, and by staff in general and other patients formed the core of the inpatients' experience. We developed a clinical tool that could be used to identify the factors that are relevant on an individual ward. Discussion Participants interviewed unanimously agreed that poor sleep quality had a significant negative impact on their psychological and social well-being. These were discussed in relation to the environment and the experience of observations at night. Implications for nursing practice Deprivation of inpatients' sleep is currently under-reported, and the usefulness of intermittent observations at night in psychiatric wards is questioned. Much could be done to adjust the environment at night to support quality sleep and improve psychiatric symptoms. This paper aims to highlight the lived experience of patients to help bring improvements.

Playing God: Alberto Caeiro’s “Num meio-dia de fim de primavera” and Pier Paolo Pasolini’s <em>La Ricotta</em>

This paper examines the relationship between “creators” (gods and poets) and their creations in the poem “Once at mid-day in late spring” (“Num meio-dia de fim de primavera”) by the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa (1888–1935)—but ostensibly authored by Alberto Caeiro, one of the numerous fictional heteronyms through which Pessoa published entire works in verse and prose—and Pier Paolo Pasolini’s short film, La ricotta (1963). I focus in particular on Pessoa and Pasolini’s displacement of a divine subject onto a human object and of creative authority onto secondary authors. Secondly, I consider the playfulness inherent in the irreverent rejection of the institutionalization of artistic and religious creation in the poem and the film, as well as the use of bucolic settings that revive a kind of pre-historical, pre-Christian religiosity in a landscape that is nonetheless distinct from traditional “pastoral” modes due to the constant interruption of modern systems of production and representation. Finally, I explore the reversal of the hierarchical relationship between ignorance and intellect, pathos and logos, which is employed in both works in order to access a more authentic representation of natural existence. “Once at mid-day in late spring” (“Num meio-dia de fim de primavera”) is the eighth of the forty-nine poems that comprise the collection entitled The Keeper of Sheep (“O Guardador de Rebanhos”). In the seventeen stanzas of the poem, the poet adopts a playful tone to describe a dream in which God descends from the cross, taking residence in the poet’s house in the form of an “Eternal Child” who finally finds the freedom to criticize God and create mischief in the poet’s village. The emphasis on the child’s ignorance of worldly affairs, the pleasure he finds in observing nature and his inability to compre hend the poet’s “stories about the doings of mankind” (“historias das cousas so dos homens”) 1 provide an example of why Edwin Honig and Susan Brown, authors of the English translation, define The Keeper of Sheep as a “poetic manifesto, proclaiming the unknowable and manifold nature of reality as something

Years of Apprenticeship

If in 1971 you wanted to pursue almost any topic in Irish Studies, you were heading for trouble. August 1971 marked the beginning of Internment in Northern Ireland and an upsurge in violence across the region. Thereafter the Troubles only became more intense, the mood more sombre, and for those bent on quiet reading it grew increasingly difficult to keep politics at a distance. This was the background to those early years of my research into Irish writing. As I drove down into Irish history, there was a constant interruption from the present. Indeed, it was quite a struggle to identify what was background and what was foreground. The political situation was providing a resurgence in the colonial encounter between Britain and Ireland, but my research concerned quieter, more literary questions, at first into writers from County Clare and the province of Munster but then into the relation between fiction and society beginning in the first half of the nineteenth century with Maria Edgeworth and William Carleton. How would I connect what was happening in the present with what happened in the past, or should I have addressed the dilemma in a much more direct fashion and undertaken work on contemporary writers from Ulster? Perhaps I should have applied what I had learnt the previous year about the Spanish labyrinth to the Irish situation, for in many ways that is what I was absorbing at this time, that there was an Irish labyrinth which embraced history and the present, politics and literature. This is what can happen when politics is so intrusive, it threatens to monopolise all the space. Writers in the North took the lead in distinguishing their writing from what was happening on the streets. It was their way of responding to events and marked a refusal to retreat behind the traditional lines of their tribe as it were. Writing should act not as the expression of tribal beliefs or prejudices but as a gesture toward utopia, a world free from sectarianism. There was a certain irony about such a response and yet it was not without a history. Yeats, at the height of the Irish Civil War in 1922-3, pacing the battlements at the top of his Tower at Ballylee on the Clare-Galway border, reflected on the little room that was Ireland: brothers, dressed in one kind of uniform, killing brothers, dressed in another. With its play on Killaloe, a monastic settlement in County Clare, 'Killallwho' is how Joyce the exile puts it in Finnegans Wake, a book that bears the scars of the Civil War, the period when he began his last great work. Kill all who are different, or, given that we're referring to a civil war or civil strife, kill all who are the same as you, farmers, labourers, members of the working class, or from the same family or who have the same surnames. Only rarely it seems to me have writers taken to the barricades as Liberty does in the famous painting by Delacroix, leading the people. In times of heightened political agitation, as was the case in Northern Ireland in the 1970s, writers did well to carry any sort of torch. That seems to be the political lesson to have come out of those bleak years. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] I was no different to anyone else. I was observing a tragic story unfolding and I felt I should do something about it. But how would a cross-channel perspective help when lines were so sharply drawn? I continued with my reading, all the time agitated about something else. Left-wing groups in Britain tended to be pro-republican and some of them interpreted what was happening in the North as parallel to Vietnam in the 1960s. If the IRA could defeat the British Army then this would have repercussions internationally. But that would mean backing a movement whose social policies at that time had little to recommend them. And, besides, what would you do with the million Protestants who didn't want to live in a united Ireland? In retrospect, the early 1970s was a period that had 'cul-de-sac' written all over it. …

Catch and Release. Repeat

Catch and Release. Repeat Will Jennings (bio) Spring Training—Evanston, Illinois, 1964 I walk up close as I can to stare at the mortar between the bricks, close enough to pick at the flakes of an old warehouse advertisement that once covered the entire wall. My father and his brother played a sort of toss-and-bounce-back baseball here, back when this wall was the boundary to their yard, back when this ground even was a yard. I can't imagine grass, really, just hard pan and the split tufts of reedy growth, perhaps a clothesline, a pea gravel path to the alley behind. I am nine, my father's age when this was his family's home during the onset of the Great Depression. Above it all looms this four-story wall. ALLIED COLD STORAGE. A mural that once played to a passing opulence: "Ladies! Summer Storage For Your Fine Furs! Bonded! Fire Proof!" Because it is February, and because where their house once stood is now an asphalt lot for a church's overflow of cars, maybe even because there's a fine misting sleet beginning to sting my ears, I have to pretend really hard to hear the thwap and wumple of a rubber Spaldeen, the high running fastballs of my father dimpling the hem of a lady in mink. My dad has taken me along on a service call, a Sunday afternoon in late winter-early spring when an anytime rain along this southern stretch [End Page 55] of Lake Michigan can turn to ice, and the wind from the east off the water lays down an elegant glaze of misery. It's the time of the year when people try to finick and coax their boilers and gravity furnaces through one more season, one last snap of cold. And this is the sort of busy that keeps my dad's shop flush and our home phone a constant interruption most evenings and weekends. I have just watched him wheedle an apartment's aging behemoth back to the living, with what looked like a nimble whispering from where I stood off shyly in the damp against a shuttered flume for coal. My father has brought me here to show me the house where he once lived. Instead, we are walking around this parking lot beside a church and across Chicago Avenue from the raised tracks where the North Shore Line used to run. As my dad paces off steps from the wall, I am slowly tracing a strike zone on the bricks, one mitten off, and I am thinking, this spot, here, back then and now it is now, and now me. We turn and face each other. My father pantomimes a gangly wind up to a pitch, bluffing a tip off to his high-and-tight heater. I place my wrists together, close my eyes, and pretend to wiggle a bat I do not hold. We go on this day to two more lots, all of them former sites of houses where my father used to live. All of them asphalt or gravel now. By the last, even he doesn't seem surprised and we don't even get out of the car. We sit in the stuttering yellow Falcon, the sound of the sleet revealing the tin economy of its make, the vinyl bench seats turning cold and stiff where our bodies cannot warm them. He smokes his Luckies, and I work on a peppermint I've found in the shelf that serves as a glove box. Decades later, now in my fifties, I imagine hovering high above that small plot of Evanston, circling those vacant lots with penciled lines like the at-bats of a scorecard, a constellation to mark the source and direction of his life, maybe even my own. At each stop on that day's circuit of calls, there were things that could be fixed and things that you just had to imagine. Those boilers and burners were real and took well to wrenches. But my father's childhood, tucked in the rhythms of family and trains, the play-ball cadence of one-pitch-two-strike-three was difficult...