Deep Love Research Articles

Haiti Earthquake Psychiatric Relief

Haiti Earthquake Psychiatric Relief

Tejanos in the 1835 Texas Revolution (review)

Reviewed by: Tejanos in the 1835 Texas Revolution James E. Crisp Tejanos in the 1835 Texas Revolution. By L. Lloyd MacDonald. (Gretna, La.: Pelican Publishing, 2009. Pp. 366. Illustrations, maps, appendices, notes, bibliography, index. ISBN 9781589806382, $26.00 cloth.) In spite of its rather misleading title, this book is a thoroughly traditional account of the Texas Revolution, albeit augmented by the author's special attention to the numerous Tejanos who took part in the revolt against the Mexican government in 1835 and 1836. (The Tejano "tories," however, are virtually ignored). Unfortunately, MacDonald mars his analysis at the outset by engaging in an endlessly confusing discussion of the proper nomenclature for the people of Hispanic and Anglo-American origins who together made up the rebel forces in this contest. After finally landing on a definition of Tejanos as "Texas-born descendants of Latino heritage" (21), he contradicts himself by applying this label to Lorenzo de Zavala (136), the native of Yucatán who became the Vice-President of the Texas Republic. [End Page 95] The book is further marred by errors of fact and geography: the author conflates the separate incidents at Anahuac in 1832 and 1835 (105); he twice claims that Zacatecas was the home town of the Jalapa-born Mexican President Antonio López de Santa Anna (46, 64); and he incorrectly locates the Orozimbo plantation where Santa Anna was held captive by the Texans after the Battle of San Jacinto (281). Far more serious than these lapses, however, is MacDonald's apparent ignorance of both key source documents and important recent scholarship. For instance, his claim that the Mexican army under General Filisola was obediently following the orders of Santa Anna in retreating from Texas in April and May of 1836 is thoroughly undercut by Gregg Dimmick's Sea of Mud (Texas State Historical Association, 2004). Moreover, during his discussion of David Crockett's controversial death at the Alamo (213-214), MacDonald cites sources that are both dubious and contradictory, while failing to mention the important Dolson letter, which is arguably the very best evidence as to just "how Davy died." This book's difficulties with regard to sources are exacerbated by a bizarre system of documentation which, when combined with the author's frequent use of the passive voice, obfuscates more than it reveals, and renders most of the author's endnotes virtually worthless to the reader. Most damning in terms of shoddy use of sources is a twice-quoted phrase (20, 239) from Herman Ehrenberg's memoir of the Texas Revolution which simply does not exist, either in the original German or in the four extant translations into English. MacDonald has inserted Irishmen and Tejanos into Ehrenberg's declaration that the German, English, and American soldiers held captive by the Mexicans at Goliad had all become Texans. MacDonald further taints his use of Ehrenberg's memoir by stating that the young Prussian came to Texas with "Bonham's Mobile Greys" (229). Ehrenberg entered Texas with Breece's company of the New Orleans Greys. This book is not all bad. MacDonald writes with a great love of his subject, which often brings immediacy to his descriptions of the tribulations of the Texans (though sometimes with invented dialogue). His analysis of Sam Houston's qualities as a commander is generally sound, and his elaboration of the role of Tejanos in the Texas Revolution is commendable. The greatest testimony to MacDonald's deep love of his subject comes from the book's many illustrations, which are all photographs of the author's own creations, in tooled leather, of maps, portraits, and architectural details. It is a shame that these are so dimly reproduced in many instances that the text is virtually illegible. James E. Crisp North Carolina State University Copyright © 2010 The Texas State Historical Association

Desire for Certainty

Desire for Certainty Katharine Capshaw Smith At first glance, it seems that uncertainty frames the lives of young people in the country of Haiti. Even before the devastating earthquake of January 12, 2010, children lived with political instability and, for many, intense poverty. After the earthquake, images of injured and hungry children crossed the globe, inspiring compassionate responses from individuals and from nations. Indeed, within this period of crisis, mourning, and rebuilding, it becomes imperative to acknowledge Haiti’s heavy losses and to work tirelessly to restore the lives of Haiti’s people. But after the earthquake what also remain are sources of Haitian identity: enduring family ties, a pioneering anticolonialist and antiracist history, distinctive cultural practices and aesthetics, and a deep love for the country. Within narratives of Haitian childhood, writers often balance the uncertainty of political and social events with individual and familial adherence to cultural identity. For instance, in Jaira Placide’s Fresh Girl (2002), a teenager contends with sexual trauma by turning to her family, and in Edwidge Danticat’s Behind the Mountains (2002), a child suffers physically under political violence but finds real solace in the Haitian community in New York. Danticat’s main character, Mardi, also turns to the Haitian landscape as a source of connection and certainty: I love these mountains, the vetiver and citronella plants along the trails, the rain tapping on the tin roof, even the fog that shifts from place to place in the mountains. I love the rainbows during sun showers. I love the shortcuts through the cornfields, the smell of pine-wood burning, the golden-brown sap dripping onto the fire. I love sleeping on a sisal mat on the clay floor in Granmè Melina and Granpè Nozial’s one-room house, and eating in their yard while listening to Granpè Nozial’s stories. (25) For many characters in children’s books, the Haitian landscape concretizes the enduring beauty of its culture. And in the face of devastation that threatens children’s lives, young characters seek constancy, comfort, and stability, values achievable in the heart and in the imagination. This volume does not address the Haitian earthquake, nor is it a special [End Page 109] issue on trauma. But as I write this introduction, just three weeks after the tragedy, Haiti is all I can think about, especially because my sons were born in that country. The fine essays in this volume all reflect on the topic of certainty, offering a range of responses to questions of stability and truth within children’s narratives. Blanka Grzegorczyk’s analysis of Terry Pratchett’s Nation raises significant questions about the position of the text within postmodernist discourse. On the one hand, Grzegorczyk explains, Nation employs a range of formal techniques that reflect a postmodern perspective on subjectivity, resulting in a narrative that “seems indeterminate, ready to welcome the impossibility of its own coherence and completion.” The novel’s intertextuality and play with perspective destabilizes reader certainty and emphasizes the perpetually mediated nature of narrative. But while its approach invokes postmodernism, the novel’s values are, in large part, humanistic, for the novel “is pervaded with a longing for the reassurance that there is a meaning beyond the here and now.” Characters seek a certainty that is perpetually elusive. This tension between postmodern aesthetics and humanist values enables Grzegorczyk to complicate our understanding of subjectivity. The uncertainty of historical knowledge interests Anne Balay, who writes in this volume about Zilpha Keatley Snyder’s 1974 novel, The Truth About Stone Hollow. Her essay positions Snyder’s American text within the “time-slip” genre, a field popular among British novelists. Balay connects the protagonist’s coming of age to an awareness of the unstable nature of historical fact: “Amy needs to know the secrets of her family, her nation, and her femininity in order to create a narrative of her identity as she matures—in order to craft a mobile, meaningful sense of self. Time-slip literalizes this process.” Constructing identity, whether individual or national, is a continual process, one that involves recognition of the unknowable and awareness of the instability of “truth.” In her essay on British hymnody, Alisa Clapp-Itnyre intervenes...

It May Be the Chance of Your Life

It May Be the Chance of Your Life Ziva Flamhaft (bio) “How could you leave all this?” my daughter asked me as the two of us were walking with her daughter on Tel Aviv’s waterfront esplanade, on a hot, humid afternoon in July 2006. She did not allude to only the sweet scent of the Mediterranean summer, emanating from the vapor of the powder blue transparent sea, and the golden scorching sand under the bluest of skies. Neither was she alluding to only the energy emanating from the beachgoers, protected by rows of orderly placed umbrellas in persimmon orange, hunter green, or ultramarine blue, depending on the section in which the bathers sat, the beachfront cafés, the hip shops, and restaurants. Nor was she referring to just the neighborhood and home where I grew up—our visit there with her toddler daughter being the highlight of her trip—or the old and new sections of Tel Aviv, designated in 2003 by UNESCO (United Nations Education, Cultural and Scientific Organization) as one of the world’s heritage sights—and the history and art museums, the theatres and concert halls, all telling the story of a vibrant society and a rich culture. For among the most precious things that I left behind when I decided to leave my country some thirty-seven years earlier were the friendships and the deep love and warmth that are revealed to me by family and friends whenever I visit my place of birth, regardless of how often I do so. “Life can take you to places you had not planned to be in, and force upon you decisions you never thought you would have to make,” I answered my daughter, hoping that I had experienced my share of life’s uncertainties for her and her children too. I always hope that. My American-born daughter has been in my hometown often. But it was her first visit as a mother, and she was proud to introduce her then [End Page 82] one-and-a-half-year-old to my family and friends, whom I had left behind and who bestowed on my daughter and her child no lesser affection than they have on me. Something must have happened, I thought with alarm nearly four decades earlier, as I walked to the subway station on Lexington Avenue and Fifty-first Street, two days after my arrival in New York City in the autumn of 1969, or else why are so many people running in the same direction, looking as if they are in a frenzy? It was my first encounter with Manhattan on a Friday afternoon. I was on my way back to Brooklyn, after a short visit to the office where I would work for the following three and a half years. The tumult, I soon learned, was only the usual rush before the start of a weekend. That morning I joined my cousins’ tenant on a commute from Brooklyn to Manhattan, so that I could learn my daily route while staying with my relatives. “Remember, do not make eye contact with anyone on the train,” my cousins’ thin, pale, frightened-looking neighbor warned me seriously. Lucky to find a seat on the packed subway during the morning rush hour, and taking the warning seriously, I was sitting motionless, scared to look at any commuter. But I could hardly avoid the big, tall man standing in front of the passenger on my left, holding a half-opened newspaper in one hand, covering the front of the middle of his body; his other hand hidden underneath the paper. Curious but unsuspicious, I bent down to look under the newspaper, for the man was clearly not reading it. “look what he is doing!” I yelled in my fresh foreign accent when I saw the man masturbating. To my amazement, no one reacted, not even after the man ran out when the train stopped at the next station. Surely, where I came from only two days earlier, such an episode would have stirred a huge commotion. “Are you insane?” the neighbor who escorted me asked when we got off the train, paler than he was usually. “You...

A Lifetime of Devotion: The T. J. Blumer Collection on the Catawba Nation, 1756–Present

A Lifetime of DevotionThe T. J. Blumer Collection on the Catawba Nation, 1756–Present N. N. Augusté (bio) I love my work, I really love my work. They [the Catawba Indians] gave me more than I gave them. They gave me a lot; they gave me their hearts. I felt very lucky that they would bother with this white man.… I came down here to give them my last breath, but they do not need it. — Thomas Blumer, Catawba Indian historian Sitting across from Mr. Tom, as many from this southeastern part of Turtle Island address the now-retired editor for the European Law Division of the Library of Congress and collector of North American and Central American Indian literature and pottery, I am surprised when he, the donor of 109 linear feet of Catawba Indian-related papers, field notes, correspondence, photographs, U.S./Catawba Indian government documents, diaries, interviews, and a 1one-thousand-plus-piece American Indian pottery collection to the University of South Carolina–Lancaster, tells me he "grew up in a world with no books in the home, none whatsoever.… [M]y parents were nonreaders."1 The T. J. Blumer Collection on the Catawba Nation, 1756–Present, originates from a man who, at age five, began his education — and utter infatuation — concerning American Indians when his mother took him to Jones Beach, New York, where he saw his first tepee. Explains Tom, "I was hot to get over there." It was while he walked about these tents that he met princess Rosebud: "She was a Sioux Indian, and she was a professional Indian. She was there telling stories about Indians.… [She] was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen in my life. She had a tremendous affect on me." That one half hour the young Tom kept his mother from beach bathing would [End Page 118] change his life forever; this childhood experience planted a seed that would later grow into a deep love and service for the Catawba Indian people, ultimately resulting in his namesake collection. Over the years Tom Blumer's fascination only grew stronger. Although a young Tom would "drive [his mother] crazy, running around the kitchen with a pot and spoon banging," attempting to imitate the people he wanted so much to become like, he already knew the serious value of the real drum his sister June gave him that depicted a Native American on one side: "I think my children destroyed it. I had it for years and years and years — I think they ruined it. I used to sit under that card table with that drum and beat on it and sang, and I was an Indian for a half hour; I have never really gotten over that." He recalls June taking him to the library each week, bringing home "ten or fifteen books. I learned to read before I went to school." But the only books that meant anything to Tom were three books, all describing Native Americans: "One was a little thing … on Indian culture. One was on the Laplanders who are not far removed with decoration; and, the third book was Little Red Feather.… I used to sit and look at that book for hours on end.… I spent hours dreaming and looking." The fixation stayed with Tom throughout his life. From the time he purchased his earliest pieces, including a Mohawk basket from Messina, New York, and a Caddo fox mask from Anadarko, Oklahoma, both of which remain in his personal collection today, Tom has grown into a connoisseur of Catawba pottery and a knowledgeable and communicative mainstay with and for the Catawba nation. It was not until Tom had taught in Virginia during the late 1960s — where he had spent much of his time with the Pamunkey Indians — that he decided to move to South Carolina to earn his PhD in English from the University of South Carolina. While conducting his graduate research at the university library one day, he discovered information on the Catawba nation. That day in the library, Tom recalls feeling hot again, not from excitement as with the tepees at Jones Beach but due to the temperature: "[T]his was...

“Eat It to Save It”: April McGreger in Conversation with Tradition

“Eat It to Save It”April McGreger in Conversation with Tradition Whitney E. Brown (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution April McGreger (here) dwells in vital, dynamic realms of southern food, past and present. As the proprietor of Farmer’s Daughter brand, she produces a wild array of goods. On any given Saturday at the Carrboro Farmers’ Market, locals might find her version of her mother’s pear preserves perched beside hand-labeled jars of green tomato chutney in front of a mound of fresh, sticky “Sunshine Buns” (sweet potato cinnamon rolls with cardamom). Photograph courtesy of the author. [End Page 93] It’s not every woman who renders her own lard, or cries over Kentucky Wonder beans. April McGreger, however, dwells in vital, dynamic realms of southern food, past and present, and sees things differently than most. Her kitchen is home to a deep love and respect for the food and people that nurtured her as a child in tiny Vardaman, Mississippi, but it is also an increasingly cosmopolitan political space that houses strong commitments to season, environment, producer, and community. While those overt ideological commitments may seem new and progressive—even trendy, at this point—they stem directly from the past, perhaps skipping an industrial generation or two. McGreger is reclaiming a version of past and place where she sees value, functionality, pleasure, and dignity. It is a place where she sees community as the end goal. In a true community—one of interconnected, interdependent people—neighbors take care of each other, whether that means something local and specific like bringing over food when there is a death in the family (as neighbors have done for generations), or something larger and more anonymous like taking care of the planet on each other’s behalf when we grow our own organic vegetables. On a much greater scale, McGreger is recreating the sense of community she lost when she moved away from her small hometown and her entire family. She is creating the world in which she wants to live, and she is doing so through food. She is not alone. McGreger’s broad and sometimes conflicting allegiances exemplify the changes taking place among her generation of southerners, born in the mid-1970s to mid-1980s, who gravitate toward places like Carrboro, North Carolina. A former mill town located a couple of miles west of the University of North Carolina, it is a place where southerners from across the region mingle with a large contingent of southerners from around the country and the globe, as well as a few Yankees exiled for jobs, school, or love. In Carrboro and other places like it, intricate webs of small-scale food production and consumption are thriving, thanks to a significant number of eaters, growers, purveyors, and restaurateurs who believe that eating well means eating locally and seasonally. Acts of consumption—specifically, choices of ingredients, suppliers, recipes, methods, cookware, dining companions and locations, stories, and even restaurants—are intimately tied to identity, place, and politics. These acts, however great or small, embody certain philosophies about food, life, community, and environment. Most importantly, they connect people to each other. In some of America’s most progressive communities, among which I include Carrboro, there is a visible contingent that seems to believe that newer is not always better, and that older, more traditional ways have their advantages. Whether “old” means a more sustainable way of doing things, a more personal one, or a way somehow more authentic and meaningful, many young people are turning to the past. For them, there lies the solution to environmental degradation and global [End Page 94] warming, an anonymous food system that appears increasingly irresponsible and unsafe, a corporate-dominated economy that does not value the homemade or the handmade, a disconnection from nature and seasons, the absence or decline of community, and more. If the abundance of organic, family-run farms and farm-to-table restaurants, as well as the presence of a thriving, nationally known farmers’ market, are any indication, one thing that ties together the people of Carrboro is a common love of good, fresh food. Much of the produce is local and seasonal, and...

Ralph Cohen and the Dialogue between Philosophy and Literature

Ralph Cohen and the Dialogue between Philosophy and Literature Martha Nussbaum (bio) Philosophy and literature have had a very uneasy relationship throughout the Western philosophical tradition. Already in the Republic (c. 380–370 BCE), Plato's Socrates refers to a "quarrel of long standing" between the poets and the philosophers—which he then pursues, expressing both a deep love of literary art and a reluctance to admit it into the instructional plan of the ideal city. So central was this debate to subsequent Greek and Roman philosophers that one could write the history of at least the ethical portion of those traditions as an extended conversation about this theme.1 Later philosophers in the Western tradition continue the conversation, never without considerable ambivalence, but usually with a lively sense of the ethical insight that literature may possibly offer. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, David Hume, Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger—all these major Western philosophers, and many others, have contributed to keeping the conversation alive. Only in twentieth-century Anglo-American philosophy has the relationship between the two disciplines been virtually neglected. Analytic philosophers sought to write in a nonliterary style and rarely discussed the contribution of literature to understanding; literary authors and writers about literature felt, with much justice, that philosophy offered little that was relevant to their concerns. With the exception of figures such as Iris Murdoch and Stanley Cavell, always treated as eccentric and marginal, there was little sustained cross-disciplinary conversation. Today, all of this has changed. Young philosophers working on ethics are likely to have a keen interest in works of literature—not just as grab bags of examples, but as sources of ethical insight in their own right. Particularly in the part of the discipline known as "virtue ethics," concern with notions of character, ethical vision, and virtue, as well as a preoccupation with relationships of love and friendship, lead almost every participant in the subfield to turn to literature. Meanwhile, writers about literature are far more likely to discuss the ideas of moral philosophers than they were before. Conferences that bring critics and literary historians and theorists together with moral philosophers are [End Page 757] reasonably common, and joint dissertation committees are very common indeed. What produced this remarkable change? One major factor, at least, was a bold enterprise of Ralph Cohen's: an issue of New Literary History on the theme "Literature and Moral Philosophy." The issue was a typical example of Ralph's uncanny ability to identify significant debates that ought to occur, and then to set the stage for their occurrence—to lead fashion, rather than to be led by it. In recognition of his remarkable insight and courage, I shall devote this essay to telling the story of how that issue came into being, and then to some reflections on the changes we have seen since then. I can't avoid telling the story from the point of view of my own involvement in the issue, but I hope to make it clear that other thinkers played a generative role. Around my fifth year of teaching, in 1980 or 1981 (for I can find no documentary evidence of what exact year it was), I was invited to present an Invited Paper at the American Philosophical Association's Pacific Division meeting in San Francisco. Despite the general absence of interdisciplinary conversation, prior to Ralph's intervention, I had long had an interest in the relationship between literature and moral philosophy, and had made a point of teaching, every year, one course that was not in ancient Greek philosophy (the primary area of my appointment). One of the courses I offered was "Philosophy and the Novel," and I had been working out some ideas about Henry James and Marcel Proust, and their relevance to moral philosophy. I discussed those issues with Ralph when we first met on a visit I made to Virginia in around 1980, and he had already given me encouragement and advice. When the invitation arrived, without restriction of content, I decided, now or never. That is, if I didn't take this opportunity to stick my neck out as a philosopher, addressing questions not connected to ancient Greek philosophy, I...

Portrait of the Artist as a Young Colonial Girl: Emily Carr and Judith Wright

In their autobiographical writing, painter Emily Carr and poet Judith Wright record a remarkably similar experience of how growing up in colonial/postcolonial Canada and Australia shaped them as artists. Although each identified strongly with the region of her birth, and felt a deep love of its landscape, issues of belonging preoccupied both women from childhood on as they negotiated their place within the family, the immediate society and the nation. Neither could fully conform to family expectations, nor comply with the restrictions society sought to impose on them as artists and each actively sought, or else found herself cast in, an outsider role. Carr and Wright’s self portraits each have something in common with James Joyce’s representation of Stephen Dedalus in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man as an insider/outsider figure who seeks to escape the confining networks of nation and society, only to find himself thoroughly entangled in them.

Back to the Drawing Board Reconstructing DaVinci's Vitruvian Man to Teach Anatomy

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] In today's high tech world, one hardly expects to see original chalkboard or blackboard utilized in research, teaching, or scientific communication, but having spent an equal number of years doing both art and biology and dabbling in computer graphics, I have found simple technology of chalkboard and chalk to have incredible flexibility and potential for teaching almost any subject in biology. Overwhelmed by onslaught of new technologies, I had forgotten simple and elegant untapped universe of a blank slate and some pre-formed calcium carbonate. I started to experiment with lesson plans, dissections, and even animations on this black space and rediscovered what I knew instinctively as a child: That this simple, fiat, open vista of opportunity had enormous potential for inquiry learning and for deep, meaningful, and engaging teaching at all levels in life sciences-and it's fun! The chalkboard, or for sake of this article, blackboard, appears before us in almost every classroom: blank, inviting, sometimes ominous, and often forgotten. I have found no technology that can replace it or even come close to allowing creative potential of drawing skills to come in teaching biology. And feeling of chalk and slate, just like feeling of a paper and pencil, is a rich tactile, sensorial experience that you can only achieve with natural objects. But blackboard is more than just a space, it is an invitation to scientific inquiry, creative dialogue, and a format for diverse conceptually-based storytelling in front of a live audience. It is also an integral component of almost all cultures and their pictorial affirmation of being part of nature. It has potential to reveal stories on everything from ecological networks to molecular pathways; it can reveal complex procedures and processes, and teaches us about ephemeral nature of living systems--one minute they're there, next minute they're gone-all via eraser. While there are endless possibilities with chalkboard or blackboard, I have chosen to demonstrate and discuss use of Leonardo DaVinci's Vitruvian Man in teaching introductory anatomy because it demonstrates how blackboard allows a teacher to work out, experiment with, and imagine a lesson in a limited amount of time and produce a lecture with a pleasing visual aesthetic that can be replicated. Sometimes with technology, content and experience become flattened, and for a subject as dynamic and alive as biology, that is a very undesirable effect. Devoid of interaction with others or mind-body interaction, learning biology can literally become lifeless. That is why Leonardo DaVinci's work is ideal for infusing that spark that is biology, and his images and life are ingenious for teaching all levels of biology and even medical school. DaVinci's work both distinguishes and blends art processes and life sciences in a way that conveys his deep love of natural world and establishes a framework upon which to build almost any life science lesson. * The Blackboard & Biology Education's Mind Body Connection In Art and Experience, Dewey commented that Even in caves, human habitations were adorned with colored pictures that kept sense experiences with animals that were so closely bound with lives of humans (p. 7). John Dewey was considered to be the father of modern educational philosophy. Darwin believed that direct experience, which involved actually physically doing, making, creating was a major component of any learning process. Dewey emphasized mind and body merging for optimal learning experiences. Drawing on blackboard is one of those experiences. Dewey refers to doing as part of experience, ... thought is immediately embodied in object art. The experience of biology lecture that engages students in drawing can be informative, inspiring, engaging, and heightened with instructor refining and intensifying knowledge, involving audience, and organizing flow of information. …

Orwell in Context: Communities, Myths, Values (review)

Reviewed by: Orwell in Context: Communities, Myths, Values Christine Berberich Orwell in Context: Communities, Myths, Values. Ben Clarke. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Pp. ix + 225. $69.95 (cloth). In a recent Times ranking of the fifty greatest British writers since 1945, George Orwell came a proud second, beaten only, rightly or wrongly, by Philip Larkin. Despite the conspicuous and contentious absence of his contemporaries Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh, Orwell's success in the ranking is telling for the rare feat he achieved: to be a critically acclaimed writer and, simultaneously, a popular one. "A writer ceases to be iconoclastic and becomes iconic when he is subsumed into the fabric of the society that he criticises," The Times argues in its note on Orwell.1 In his case, this points to an important explanation behind his lasting popularity: that his work is read and enjoyed by readers from all walks of life and, importantly, of all political affiliations. Despite Orwell's own, professed affinity with the political left, his work has, since his untimely death in 1950, been used by politically more conservative circles, usually in order to conjure up a notion of English national identity; John Major's yearning evocation of Orwell's "old maids biking to Holy Communion through the mists of the autumn morning" in the 1990s is just one case in point.2 Christopher Hitchens, in Orwell's Victory, tries to reclaim Orwell for the left by scathingly denouncing "Orwell's Albion brigade" and claiming that the "phrase 'quintessentially English', so often attached to Orwell's name, would fairly certainly have aroused his scorn."3 Hitchens's certainty in the matter is admirable; but it stands on shaky ground. The case of Orwell is by no means a simple choice of right or left. Orwell had forever aligned himself to England by the choice of his pen name—George for the patron saint of England, Orwell for a river in East [End Page 453] Anglia; and much of his work expresses a deep love for English traditions and concern for their future. The problem today seems to be the ever increasing politicization of Englishness, which links the term almost automatically to political conservatism and to the nostalgic backwards looking of the self-satisfied bourgeoisie. This short-sighted condemnation does not take into account that Englishness is a term that has been debated for centuries by writers, thinkers, and politicians of all affiliations; and it certainly does not credit the fact that self-professed socialists can, simultaneously, be patriots. After all, Orwell himself was, in the words of his friend Cyril Connolly, "a revolutionary . . . in love with the 1900s."4 Ben Clarke's lucid and diligently researched Orwell in Context dedicates two chapters to the questions of national identity and Englishness. Rather than merely attempting to claim Orwell for one or the other side of the political divide, Clarke clarifies that Orwell's writing on national identity must be located "within its historical and critical contexts" and therefore he "considers both the conditions of its production and other texts on the subject" which "enables the analysis of his writing both as a set of responses to developing events and as a continuing debate on nationality and its political significance" (99). Crucially, Clarke highlights Orwell's "attempts to produce a model of radical patriotism" (99). The emphasis here is mine and reinforces the earlier statement that for Orwell it was, indeed, possible to be a socialist on the one hand, and a patriot on the other. Despite his interest in national identity and its formation, Orwell always took great pains to distinguish between patriotism (good in his eyes) and nationalism (bad): "By 'patriotism', I mean devotion to a particular place and a particular way of life which one believes to be the best in the world but has no wish to force upon other people," an idealistic and, possibly slightly rose-colored view of the world that stands in stark opposition to his take on nationalism as "power hunger tempered by self-deception."5 Clarke precedes his analysis of Orwell's texts with an erudite investigation of the term "nation," showing the very evasiveness of it through his...

The Bors Award: Legacy of Ernest H. J. “Pappy” Bors, MD

After World War II, military hospitals in the US were inundated with veterans paralyzed by spinal cord injury. Their complications spanned specialties and subspecialties including pulmonary medicine, orthopedics, neurology, urology, dermatology, surgery and some yet to be developed. Care was hindered by a health care delivery structure based on specialty and a lack of cohesive approach to their complex medical and social problems. Not only did the structure need overhauling, clinicians were needed to care for these “hopeless cripples” and research was needed to find ways to address their many needs in a climate of little support and even less recognition. Even the patients, hardened warriors, often bitter, with no hope for recovery, needed to be convinced that there was a better way. Only a dedicated, aggressive and persistent professional could hope to make any headway in such a difficult situation. In 1944, Ernest H.J. Bors, MD, joined the staff of Hammond General Army Hospital. As assistant chief of urology, Dr Bors was urology consultant to the hospital's Spinal Cord Injury Care Section (1,2). Caring for these most needy veterans inspired him to develop a comprehensive way to oversee all of their needs. Not only did Dr Bors become the foremost expert on neurourology in spinal cord injury, he developed a holistic multidisciplinary approach that formed the foundation for modern SCI centers. His success with his SCI ward attracted the attention of the War Department, which opened the first SCI Center in the nation at Birmingham General Army Hospital (now the Long Beach VA Hospital), and placed Dr Bors in charge. Soon he had 220 patients under his care and disciplinary problems that further complicated the administrative, medical and surgical issues involved in managing this large, innovative unit. The frustrations and responsibilities sometimes overwhelmed Dr Bors, who was known for his crusty, ‘tough love' demeanor. But his equally tough patients, eventually numbering more than 2,500, recognized his underlying deep love and dedication and called their champion, “Pappy”. They called themselves the S.O.B.s (Survivors of Birmingham) and in 1970, more than 700 of them turned out for Pappy Bors' retirement party in Los Angeles—a fitting tribute to a true pioneer in the field of spinal cord injury. Since 1994, the Journal of Spinal Cord Medicine has offered an annual award in Pappy's honor—The Ernest Bors Award for Scientific Development, because throughout a career spent fighting for basic resources while caring for thousands of patients many considered ‘hopeless cases', Dr Bors made research and publication a priority. “You learn at the bedside,” he said, and from there, he devised better ways to manage SCI complications by developing protocols for treatment and rehabilitation. He shared his innovative techniques in more than 140 scientific papers and in a major textbook, co-authored by Estin Comarr, MD, Neurological Urology, Physiology of Micturition, Its Neurological Disorders and Sequelae. More than 35 years later, this remains the authoritative text in this field. The Bors Award memorializes this pioneer who “carried the torch of care and research and opened the way for better care” of all individuals with SCI (3) by recognizing the achievement of young investigators and supporting their ongoing efforts. The winning authors represent the spectrum of spinal cord injury research (see box). The guidelines for the Bors Award are published in each issue. Entries are judged by a panel of editors convened by the Editor. The winner is invited to present the paper at the annual conference and receives recognition and a cash prize. The Editorial Board encourages students, fellows and residents to share in the legacy of Dr Bors by seeking answers to problems faced by individuals with SCI and sharing their findings with the readers of the Journal of Spinal Cord Medicine.

Lance Fallaw, ‘A Queensland House-Warming’

Lance Fallaw was born in Gateshead in the north of England in 1876. He graduated in Arts at the University of Durham, developing a deep love of English literature which he carried with him for the rest of his life as an itinerant literary journalist. In 1900, after working for a few years in Newcastle-on-Tyne, he took his leave of Britain forever, first going to South Africa, where he worked as a journalist, mainly in Durban, for about six years, thence to Rockhampton in 1906.

Personal Recollections of the Contributions of Estelle Brodman: An Enduring Legacy for Health Sciences Librarianship

Personal Recollections of the Contributions of Estelle Brodman: An Enduring Legacy for Health Sciences Librarianship

Love 's Time and the Reader: Ethical Effects of Nachtr�glichkeit in Toni Morrison's Love

Love's Time and the Reader:Ethical Effects of Nachträglichkeit in Toni Morrison's Love Jean Wyatt (bio) "The structure is the argument." Toni Morrison Temporal discontinuities and nonlinear narrative structures characterize many of Toni Morrison's novels. Morrison's fictions, taken as a whole, rewrite African American history—a history of disruption, dispossession, and displacement; in her later novels especially, formal breaks in chronological sequence reflect these upheavals and the psychic dislocations that accompany them. In Beloved, for example, disturbances of temporal sequence reflect, among other things, the traumatic displacements of the Middle Passage, which severed the enslaved Africans from their land, their culture, their ancestors, and their past.1 In Love the characters' severance from their past is a personal, not a world-historical event, an individual rather than a collective trauma. Yet in one respect at least, Heed's and Christine's experience parallels the experience of the captive Africans on the slave-ships: as a result of an early traumatic separation from the love that had been the ground of their childhood development, Heed and Christine lose connection with their past and its rich field of potentials and are consequently disoriented with regard to their present and future. The events that disrupt their temporal order are themselves a violation of chronology: Heed's marriage at eleven to her twelve-year-old playmate Christine's grandfather, the successful black entrepreneur Bill Cosey—and, hidden behind that marriage, the earlier intrusion of adult sexuality into the childhood world through Cosey's molestation [End Page 193] of Heed. From the moment Heed is catapulted untimely into the world of adult sexuality and marriage, Heed and Christine lose the ability to order their lives fruitfully in relation to time's passage. Narrative displacements reflect the protagonists' temporal disorientation, so that the time of the reading is itself discontinuous: we witness the effects—the long wasting of Heed's and Christine's lives—before we uncover its cause, the premature marriage, nearly two-thirds through the novel; and we are privy to the beginning of things—to the deep love between Christine and Heed when they were young girls—only at the end of the novel, after 183 pages of witnessing the two women's bitter enmity. The ending not only overthrows our expectations of narrative sequence, but reveals that the text has misled the reader about the most basic question one can ask about a novel: What is this story about? At the end, the new information about the characters' past—about the events that caused the whole sequence the reader has just processed—makes the reader reconstruct everything that has come before: the story centers not on the wanderings of male desire, as we had been led to believe, but on the mutual love of little girls. The structuring of Love around a time lag in the reader's relation to systems of meaning suggests a new perspective on Freud's model of Nachträglichkeit (variously translated as deferred action, après-coup, and afterwardsness)2—and new ways of using that temporal paradigm to illuminate reader response to the asymmetries of nonlinear narrative structures like Morrison's. This complex temporal structure, which Freud recognized in many of his hysterical patients, is composed of (at least) two scenes widely separated in time: in the first scene a child is exposed to some action on the part of an adult, usually a sexual act of some kind, that the child does not have the requisite knowledge or psychosexual development to understand. Years later, after the child has passed puberty and entered the world of adult sexuality, a second incident occurs that through some superficial resemblance reminds her of the first scene, and she reacts with the emotional and cognitive responses that would have been appropriate to the first scene. Jean Laplanche, the contemporary theorist responsible for elaborating Freud's nachträglich model, often cites the example of "Emma" from Freud's Project for a Scientific Psychology (Freud 411–16; Laplanche 38–43). At the age of eight, Emma goes into a shop to buy candy, and the shopkeeper gropes her through her clothes while grinning; Emma, not yet inducted...

In Memoriam: Peter Lipton

Peter Lipton, one of the world’s best-loved philosophers of science, died from a heart attack on the evening of November 25, 2007, at the age of 53. He had been playing squash—a game which he loved, and which he was very good at. Lipton was known for his humor, for his deep love for his family, for his exceptional intellectual generosity, for his inspirational teaching, for his infectious argumentative brio, for his unparalleled administrative skills, and for the extraordinary clarity of his thinking and writing. His philosophical work—whether it took the form of a written article, a talk, or a question from the seminar-room floor—was characterized by a supreme limpidity. Peter Lipton was born in New York City on October 9, 1954. He did his undergraduate degree at Wesleyan University, Connecticut, and then moved to New College, Oxford for his graduate work. He studied for the BPhil under Rom Harre and A. J. Ayer, and then went on to complete a DPhil in 1985. His dissertation—the foundation for his book Inference to the Best Explanation—was supervised by William Newton-Smith, and Ayer’s influence also remained strong. Lipton’s first philosophy position was at Clark University, Massachusetts, and then from 1985 to 1991 he was an Assistant Professor at Williams College, Massachusetts. In 1991 he moved to the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at Cambridge as an Assistant Lecturer, and was promoted to Lecturer in 1994. In 1996 he became Head of Department, and then in 1997 he was appointed to the Departmental Chair in History and Philosophy of Science (later renamed the Hans Rausing Professorship). Lipton held both posts until his death, and during his time as Head of Department, Cam-

Celebrating the Liturgy with Pope Benedict XVI

Celebrating the Liturgy with Pope Benedict XVI Basil Meeking (bio) Even the New Yorker magazine has commented on the Holy Father celebrating Mass. A feature article of July 2005 titled "Vatican Notebook," though not exactly friendly, said, "Pope Benedict's deep love of the liturgy is manifest whenever he engages in the priestly acts that mean so much to him. Young Catholics describe with phosphorescent enthusiasm the delicacy and devotion with which the Pope celebrates Mass. His loving eulogy for Pope John Paul II and the funeral Mass over which he presided filled cardinals and pilgrims alike with affection for him and helped him win rapid election as Pope."1 It's what we saw on our television screens as Cardinal Ratzinger celebrated the funeral Mass for Pope John Paul II and then the Mass for his own installation as Bishop of Rome. Pope Benedict celebrating Mass gives a powerful message for the life of the Church and her mission in the world. It is a glimpse of what the renewal of the liturgy proposed by the Second Vatican Council really means when it is understood and practiced as part of the unbroken tradition of the Catholic Church that mediates the revelation given in Jesus Christ. In the memoirs that he wrote in 1997 Cardinal Ratzinger tells of his seminarian study of theology at the University of Munich [End Page 127] immediately after the Second World War. He mentions one of his teachers, Professor Joseph Pascher, who taught pastoral theology; he writes, "Pascher's conferences, and the reverential manner in which he taught us to celebrate the liturgy in keeping with its deepest nature, made me a follower of the liturgical movement."2 An awareness of the deepest nature of the Church's worship and a reverential attitude in celebrating it—those were among the chief goals of the liturgical movement that has increasingly given vitality to the Catholic liturgy over the past one hundred years. Some of its earliest impetus came in 1903 from the appeal of Pope St. Pius X for "an active participation by Catholics in the mysteries and in the public and solemn prayer of the Church."3 In November 1947 Pope Pius XII gave a tremendous thrust to the movement with his encyclical Mediator Dei ("On Divine Worship"). Catholic worship is more than a matter of ceremonies or rubrics, said Pius XII. He focused on the supernatural reality contained in the liturgical rites. The liturgy, he said, is an exercise of the priesthood of Jesus Christ and of his body which is the Church. The next great event in that liturgical renewal took place in November1964 with the promulgation of the Second Vatican Council's Constitution on the Liturgy. That document gave partial but very important and far-reaching expression to the vision outlined by Pope Pius XII. It set out to show that in the liturgy, by means of signs perceptible to the senses, the sanctification of human beings is signified and brought about in ways proper to each of those signs; in the liturgy the whole public worship is performed by the Mystical Body of Jesus Christ, that is, by the head and his members. Along with that understanding the council proposed a renewal of the forms of that liturgy. I was in Rome doing postgraduate study in theology when that document of the council was promulgated, and I shared fully in the enthusiasm and euphoria that it generated. A couple of years later, in July 1966, having concluded my academic work and before leaving Rome to go back to New Zealand, I went to St. Peter's to celebrate Mass. Afterward, in the sacristy, [End Page 128] I noticed an elderly priest also unvesting. It was Monsignor Martin Hellriegel, the pastor of Holy Cross parish in St. Louis, Missouri, and a great pastoral pioneer of the liturgical movement in the United States. I said to him, "Monsignor, you must be so very pleased that your life's work in promoting the renewal of the liturgy is crowned by the Constitution on the Liturgy." He paused before replying. "Yes," he said, "the Constitution on the Liturgy is a great thing for the Church...

New Book Notes

NEW BOOK NOTES George Brosi Jacqueline Grisby Burnside. Berea and Madison County. Mount Pleasant, South Carolina: Arcadia Publishing, 2007. 126 pages with photos. Trade paperback. $19.99. Nobody is better qualified to contribute the book on Berea for the Black America Series ofArcadia Publishing than Jacqueline Grisby Burnside. Her Ph.D. dissertation at Yale concerned the interracial heritage of Berea, and she has been deeply involved in the Historic Black Berea Project, which has created a touring map with an audio tape and CD. She chairs the Sociology Department at her alma mater, Berea College. This book consists primarily ofphotographs with captions. Bob L. Cox. Fiddlin Charlie Bowman: An East Tennessee Old-Time Music Pioneer and His Musical Family. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2007. 224 pages, with an afterword by Archie Green and photos. Trade paperback. $24.95. Charlie Bowman (1889-1989) was not onlya talented musician but also a person who happened to live almost all ofhis one hundred years right at the cutting edge ofsignificant developments in the burgeoning musical genres called old-time and country and western swing. He grew up in Washington County, Tennessee, only a few miles from Bristol, the town that would become the epicenter of the evolution of old-time music into modern country music. This is a biography of Charlie Bowman, the story of his large family, the tale of a mountain community as well as the saga of an American region and its music. The author is the great nephew of the subject of the biography and a chemical engineer who is retired from Eastman in Kingsport. Adda Leah Davis. Luanda's Mountain. Charleston, West Virginia: Mountain State Press, 2007. 315 pages with an introduction byJerry Beasley. Trade paperback. $14.95. 114 Set in West Virginia, this is a coming-of-age novel of Lucinda Harmon, who struggles with age-old conflicts between family traditions and individual aspirations. It is told by Adda Leah Davis, a voice as authentic and compelling as ever endeavored to tell a mountain story. A native of McDowell County, West Virginia, Davis now lives in Russell County, Virginia. She is a retired elementary teacher and counselor who is the author of six books. "Addie Davis's own wisdom and compassion inform her extraordinary novel. The struggles of the entire Appalachian Region are incorporated into Lucinda's moving and memorable personal story. This is the real thing. And Lucinda will steal your heart."—Lee Smith. Jimmy Carl Harris. Wounds ThatBind: Stories. Oak Ridge, Tennessee: Iris Press, 2007. 141 pages. Hardback with dust jacket. $26.00. This is a book ofsixteen short stories written byJimmy Carl Harris of Birmingham, Alabama. Harris enlisted in the Marines out of high school and rose to the rank of Sergeant Major. Upon retirement from the military, he earned a doctorate in literature at the University of Alabama and pursued a career as a professor at Southeastern Louisiana University. He is now also retired from academia and writes fiction full-time. "Jimmy Carl Harris writes with stunning tenderness about those that life has deemed out-of-bounds: old soldiers who have lost fingers but not hope; old women alone and misunderstood, living off memories and cigarettes. Wounds That Bind is a fierce, gut-wrenching collection, but always beneath the hard edges one senses Harris's deep love and understanding for the men and women that life has not always treated gently."—Mark Powell. Carolyn Jourdan. Heart in the Right Pkce: A Memoir. Chapel Hill, North Carolina: Algonquin Books ofChapel Hill, 2007. 297 pages. Hardback with dust jacket. $23.95. Already selected by three book clubs, this compelling book has touched the heart-strings of thousands. The author grew up in East Tennessee as the daughter of a family doctor and his receptionist wife, but chose education and migration from the area, landing in D.C. working for an influential U. S. Senator. Then her mother became ill, and she volunteered to fill-in for a few days back home—days that "5 turned into the year-plus time period memorably detailed on these pages. "This is a wonderful book I would've enjoyed it even if Carolyn wasn't a neighbor of...

Strange Tribe: A Family Memoir (review)

Reviewed by: Strange Tribe: A Family Memoir Carl Eby Strange Tribe: A Family Memoir. By John Hemingway. Guilford, CT: The Lyons Press, 2007. 219 pp. Cloth. $24.95. Given the myriad memoirs and biographies by Hemingway family members—books by Ernest's siblings Leicester (My Brother, Ernest Hemingway, [End Page 136] 1962), Marcelline (At the Hemingways, 1962), and Madelaine (Ernie: Hemingway's Sister "Sunny" Remembers, 1975), wife number two, Martha Gellhorn (Travels with Myself and Another, 1978), wife number four, Mary Welsh (How It Was, 1976), sons Jack (Misadventures of a Fly Fisherman: My Life With and Without Papa, 1986) and Gregory (Papa: A Personal Memoir, 1988), daughter-in-law Valerie (Running with the Bulls: My Years with the Hemingways, 2004), granddaughter Lorian (Walk on Water: A Memoir, 1998), and niece Hilary (Hunting with Hemingway, 2000 and Hemingway in Cuba, 2003)—the reader who greets with skepticism this new family memoir by Ernest's grandson John might easily be forgiven. But if readers doubt that anything remains to be learned about Ernest and the Hemingways from a grandson who never met his famous grandfather (Ernest died before John was a year old), they are in for a welcome surprise. John Hemingway, son of Ernest's youngest son, Gregory, has written a remarkable and ambitious book. The author's childhood, lived in the shadow of his celebrated grandfather and spent shuttling between his schizophrenic mother, his bipolar and cross-dressing father, and his generous, eccentric granduncle, Leicester, is rich enough material for any memoir. Yet John blends this story with a biography of his father, a study of his father's relationship with Ernest, and a meditation on the similarities between his two progenitors. Weaving two generations' worth of father/son relationships into a sort of narrative fugue, Strange Tribe makes for compelling reading. John writes about his family with a disarming candor, deep love, and hard-won compassion and understanding. Sensitive, insightful, and by turns funny and deeply sad, his book tells a powerful story of growing up in a family shaken by mental illness and of struggling to come to terms with his father and family name. Hemingway scholars, however, will be most interested in the way the book forces us to rethink Ernest's relationship with Gregory—a relationship with profound implications for Hemingway's writing during the final decade of his life. Perhaps John writes with such sensitivity about Gregory because his own childhood in some ways paralleled that of his father. Both were sons of second wives of fathers who each had four wives. And both John and Gregory early idolized their often-absent fathers, in part to compensate for what they found lacking in their distant mothers. John's mother, Alice, was distanced by her schizophrenia. (At one point after the divorce from Gregory, her voices told her to become a nun, and she actually tried to give her children to the Catholic Church.) Pauline Hemingway's distance from young [End Page 137] Gregory was of a different sort. In a 1989 interview, Gregory described his mother as follows: "I hated the bitch. She was born without the maternal instinct. She never showed any affection towards me. She never kissed me once in my life that I know about. She never held me" (19). One problem was that Ernest (and therefore the desperately obliging Pauline) had really wanted a little girl. During his parents' frequent absences in Europe and Africa, Greg was raised by his alcoholic and "cruelly manipulative" governess, Ada Stern, a surrogate mother who would threaten to leave Gregory whenever the little boy broke one of her many rules. (Nevertheless, Gregory retained a lifelong attachment to Ada. In a 1954 letter to Ernest, explaining why he wanted to bring Ada with him to Africa to take care of his 3-year-old daughter, Lorian, Gregory wrote: "I owe her a lot. She took care of me until I was twelve, was practically my mother" [128].) On those rare occasions when Pauline spent any time alone with Greg, she found him to be the "lousiest type of mama's boy," clinging and "crying out whenever he lost sight of her." At such moments, she...

Relative Stranger – A Life After Death by Mary Loudon

Edinburgh : Canongate , 2006 , 335pp. , £16.99 (hbk); £6.99 (pbk). This book is about Mary Loudon's search for her dead sister Catherine and a piecing together of Catherine's life. Catherine was diagnosed with schizophrenia. She cut herself off from her loving and caring family for the last eleven years of her life, and she died from cancer at the age of 47 without her family knowing. I was keen to read this book as Mary, a personal friend, had sent me a draft of the first few chapters and had spoken to me about some of her ideas for the book when I had shown her round Barrow Psychiatric Hospital, where her sister had at times been admitted. Mary is the youngest of five children; Catherine was the middle child and eldest sister, and thirteen years older than Mary. Mary does not write about her other brothers and sisters; they are respectfully kept out of it. I was hoping I might learn more about the nature of psychotic illness and its relationship to family functioning. I was initially disappointed in this hope: Mary's coverage of ‘Schizophrenia’ is in some ways classically textbook and drawn largely from a book called Schizophrenia – The Facts. It is when Mary moves away from this textbook description that the book opens right up and earns a permanent place on the bookshelf beside those other rare books that describe the experience of psychosis from the perspective of the sufferer or those close to them. There is a problem here that Mary touches on. Psychotic illness is frequently a process which insidiously renders its object incapable of sustained rational verbal communication; thus published personal accounts of madness are written by those that ‘came back’, and we know little about the experience of those who remain diminished by madness. In the chapter ‘Words and pictures’ Mary describes this deterioration in relation to Catherine's letters and artwork, which went from a childhood masterpiece (with adult attributes) painted on her bedroom door to adult primary colour drawings that looked as though they had been copied out of a book. Mary attributes this deterioration to Catherine's illness – I did wonder whether some of it might relate to the side effects of the anti-psychotic medication she took for her illness. Reading this book as a psychiatrist, a family therapist and a youngest child, I was deeply moved in all sorts of ways. A big part of me was ‘wanting to make things better’, or to suggest ways in which things might have been done differently. On the other hand something was telling me to ‘keep my mouth shut’ and listen to what Mary had to say. In fact there was a profound lesson about the nature of psychotic illness and family functioning; this was ‘less is more’. Mary writes early in the book: I never visited her because she didn't want me to. I never arrived unsolicited at her flat although many times I thought about it. When I considered heading to Bristol armed with groceries I always ended up deciding, correctly, that I had absolutely no right to do so. So I wrote. This was the approach of the whole family. Catherine moved from the family home in Oxfordshire and ended up in Bristol in a council flat where she made a life for herself, arguably a good life: she did not harm anyone and she helped some people. I believe it was the deep love of her family that enabled this to happen; they responded to her wish, not exactly to be left alone, but to stay at a distance that she felt was safe. I would like to tell you to buy this book, but I can't because it is written by a friend. What I can say is that it is well written – at times I laughed out loud; at other times I nearly cried.

What is a French Western? One Part Reality To Two Parts Fiction

Marie Losier is a filmmaker whose films operate in a space between fantasy, camp, absurdity, identity swapping, and her embrace of community. Born in 1972 in Boulogne, France, she now lives in New York City. She has been working on a series of film portraits of directors, beginning with Mike and George Kuchar in 2003. Losier is presently working on three documentary portraits, with musician Genesis P-Orridge, filmmaker Albert Maysles, and filmmaker/musician Tony Conrad. In addition to the portraits, she has created fictional short films that develop from her actors’ idiosyncrasies and are shot in campy, homemade theatrical sets. Losier’s deep love of the silent film era reveals itself as an underlying structure for her works. Her films have been screened at the Tribeca Film Festival, the Seoul Film Festival, and the Rotterdam International Film Festival. Her film The Ontological Cowboy, a portrait of Richard Foreman, was included in the 2006 Whitney Biennial. This interview was taped in Losier’s loft in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, in June 2006.