Final Passages Research Articles

Trey Ellis's Platitudes: Redefining Black Voices

Trey Ellis has emerged as a prominent African American writer of the late-twentieth century, despite the small number of his published works. “The New Black Aesthetic,” an essay that he first published in CaUaloo in 1989, one year after the publication of his first novel, Platitudes, stands as a manifesto that defines and articulates his perspective on the emerging black literary voices and culture of the time, and on “the future of African American artistic expression” in the postmodern era.1 According to Eric Lott, Ellis's novel parodies the literary and cultural conflict between such male experimental writers as lshmael Reed and such female realist writers as Alice Walker.2 Thus, Ellis's primary purpose in writing Platitudes is to redefine how African Americans should be represented in fiction, implying that neither of the dominant approaches can completely articulate late-twentieth-century black experience when practiced in isolation. In its final passages, Platitudes represents a synthesis of the two literary modes or styles, and it embodies quite fully the diversity of black cultural identities at the end of the twentieth century as it extends African American literature beyond racial issues. In this way, the novel exemplifies the literary agenda that Ellis suggests in his theoretical essay.

The Final Passages in two Hadramitic Inscriptions from Dhofar (Khor Rori 3 and 4), What do They Really Mean?

The Hadramitic construction inscriptions discovered by the expedition of the American Foundation for the Study of Man at the site of Khor Rori (the ancient port of Sumhurām) in Dhofar in the fifties and early sixties are of particular interest for the study of this peripheral area of pre-Islamic South Arabia. Although their general sense is clear, some important details of their contents remain enigmatic. From this point of view the expression s2lṯt/’ḥṯym attested in Khor Rori 3/6 and 4/6-7 is worthy of note. Its comparison with the Arabic phraseological unit ṯalāṯu ḥaṯayātin “a lot of people” (lit. “three handfuls”), which occurs in the Islamic tradition, namely in al-Ṣaḥīḥ of al-Tirmīdhī and in the Musnad of Ibn Ḥanbal, gives a key to a better interpretation of the strongly similar passages used at the end of these two inscriptions. In both cases the process of immigration into a recently founded colony of the kingdom of Ḥaḍramawt is concerned. The author of Khor Rori 3 remarked in its final part that “he brought with him as colonists a lot of people, since they separated until they expanded” (l. 5-7: w-ḥ<w> | <r>/<‘>m-s1/šlṯt/’<ḥ><ṯ>ym/ bn-mw | k<t>b‘/’d/s1tfḥ/). In Khor Rori 4/7 a short addendum is made to that statement: s2b[‘]<t>(m) “in abundance”. This reading appears to be preferable to the previously accepted restoration of the toponym Shabwa (S2b[w]<t>), the name of the capital of ancient Ḥaḍramawt.

The Repertoire of Iraqi Maqam (review)

Reviewed by: The Repertoire of Iraqi Maqam Scott Marcus (bio) The Repertoire of Iraqi Maqam. Rob Simms. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2004. vii, 197 pp.: ill.; 29 cm. Robert Simms's 2004 The Repertoire of Iraqi Maqam offers an unprecedented introduction to the complexities of the system of melodic modes that underlies the Baghdad-based urban art music tradition of the mid-twentieth century. The volume is divided into two parts, a 45-page introductory section, and an anthology that presents almost 100 pages of transcriptions of recorded maqam performances. Iraqi maqam refers to a music tradition based in the urban centers of Baghdad, Kirkuk, and Mosul. With each center having its own unique manifestations of the tradition, Simms focuses on the Baghdad school. Historically, performances were based in cafes or in aristocratic homes, featuring a singer (qari', literally, "reciter") and a tchalghi ensemble of santur (hammered dulcimer), joze (spiked fiddle) and percussion, with the instrumentalists serving as chorus members within the songs that conclude each performance item. Less known than the music traditions of surrounding Arab, Persian, and Turkish cultures, Iraqi maqam received its first widespread exposure in the West through the solo `ud performances of Munir Bashir (1930–1997) (1). The tradition, however, is primarily a vocal one—the solo `ud genre being of rather recent origin—and it is the vocal art that is Simms's focus. Simms came upon the present project with his primary perspective being that of a musician (including performance on the setar, ney, and kora [197]). "Originally designed for my own use as a means of exploring my private collection of maqam recordings," Simms's main concern is elucidating the various components that distinguish each of the Iraqi melodic modes. Simms divides the volume's introductory section into two parts, beginning first with a presentation of a basic maqam theory that is shared by "many West [End Page 188] Asian . . . traditions" (10), and then moving to a detailed discussion of "Iraqi maqam in particular." The first section includes an introduction to maqam scales and tetrachordal analysis. These concepts represent a system of "modal abstraction, which was grafted onto the [Iraqi maqam] tradition in the 1950s by [Iraqi] theorists familiar with Mashreqi modal theory" (2). Significantly, the Mashreqi (Mashriqi) world, based in Cairo, Beirut, Aleppo, and Damascus, had itself only begun to adopt this very orientation in the early 20th century, with tetrachordal theory appearing from c. 1930 (not "beginning in the late-nineteenth century" as Simms indicates [12]). Simms notes that most traditional performers of Iraqi maqam were not familiar with this type of modal theory (2). Simms's section on basic maqam theory is guided, in good measure, by a sense that musicians and scholars in the West are more familiar with neighboring modal traditions (eastern Arab [Mashriqi] maqam, Turkish makam, and Persian dastgah) than with Iraqi maqam. Indeed, I found comparative comments throughout the volume to be a great help, although specialists of each of the neighboring traditions might want to fine-tune a few overarching statements (about intonation, for example). The second part of the book's opening section, focusing on aspects of "Iraqi maqam in particular," provides an invaluable introduction to the melodic modes and formal structures that shape Iraqi maqam performance. We are taught about the initial tahrir section of a performance, akin to the Persian daramad section; jalsa and teslim passages, that is, internal and final cadential passages akin to the Persian forud or the Arab qafla; and the occurrence of one or more meyana sections that explore a mode's upper register, analogous to the Turkish meyan. Simms next devotes extensive discussion to the qit`a sections of Iraqi maqam performance, providing an innovative and insightful threefold classification of these submodal entities. Akin to the Persian concept of gusheh, qit`as commonly appear in performance in preestablished sequences unique to each maqam. In this section, Simms also presents an invaluable discussion about the number of maqams in the Baghdad repertoire ("around fifty but some estimates exceed sixty" [30]), highlighting a dynamic world in which some modes have been newly created or deliberately imported from neighboring traditions, while others have fallen into obscurity. Common tradition...

Saturday in New Orleans: Rethinking the Holy Spirit in the Aftermath of Trauma

How do we witness, theologically, to trauma and its aftermath? Beginning with the stories of ministers rebuilding their communities in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, I introduce Holy Saturday as a theological site from which to think about the tenuous “middle” experience of living on in the aftermath of death without having the assurance of life ahead. Drawing on insights in trauma theory, I examine the final passages in the Gospel of John and suggest that looking through the lens of the “middle” unearths a unique theology of the Spirit that speaks powerfully to the realities of trauma and its aftermath.

De doctrina christiana: A Classic of Western Culture (review)

Reviewed by: De doctrina christiana: A Classic of Western Culture J. Kevin Coyle Duane W. H. Arnold and Pamela Bright, editors. De doctrina christiana: A Classic of Western Culture. Christianity and Judaism in Antiquity, 9. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1995. Pp. xx + 271. $34.95. This volume’s editors rightly note that De doctrina christiana’s history of composition, with its thirty-year hiatus, affords a rare opportunity “for analyzing key issues of Augustine’s thought over the long years of his active ministry” (xiv). The volume is divided into five main sections: Historical setting: Charles Kannengiesser proposes that the long interruption separating Books 1:1–3:35 from the treatise’s final passages comes from Augustine’s eventual decision to address Tyconius Book of Rules. Frederick van Fleteren sees Augustine as the first “to outline an extensive program” whereby the liberal arts “help the Christian reach an intellectus fidei,” and “to achieve a Christian synthesis with secular letters in the Latin West” (14). Pamela Bright perceives in De doctrina christiana’s caution that in Scripture the same thing can have different meanings the exegetical basis of an ecclesiology already developed before Augustine. She then shows how the treatise discusses ambiguity. Kenneth B. Steinhauser argues that the Leningrad manuscript Q.v.I.3 “or its immediate prototype” was commissioned by Augustine himself for Simplicianus of Milan. Delayed from completing the treatise by poor health, Augustine “sent the manuscript with DDC incomplete” (39) to Carthage, where an elegant copy was prepared and forwarded to Simplicianus. Literary structure: Christoph Schäublin discusses the volume’s subtitle. He sees the key to Books 1–3 in Augustine’s use of the rhetorical notion of inventio, whose object is the res, defined here as what the biblical message is and how one obtains access to it. Augustine thus created a “research project,” intended to facilitate “a comprehensive and thorough commentary on the Bible” (55). Adolf Primmer complements Schäublin by addressing the notion of elocutio in Book 4, [End Page 538] where, by “baptizing” Cicero’s rhetoric, Augustine “transcended the categorizations of classical rhetoric” (69). However, Augustine’s true focus is on the preacher, for whom it is important to speak sapienter rather than eloquenter. Takeshi Kato writes on “Sonus et Verbum” in De doctrina christiana 1:13.12. He identifies a fundamental change in Augustine’s attitude to the relationship between the sound of words and their meaning, then examines Wittgenstein’s criticism of Augustine’s theory of language. Sign theory: In “Signs, Communication, and Communities,” R. A. Markus is concerned with “the sign as a means of communication and the way notions of sign and communication opened a way for Augustine to speak of communities” (97). He then investigates each of the terms in his title. Roland J. Teske demonstrates a progression in De doctrina christiana beyond the criterion of absurdity enunciated in De Genesi contra Manichaeos (the scriptural text would make no sense if one adhered to its literal significance) toward the criterion of spiritual interpretation (the text taken literally does not refer directly to truth or morality). David Dawson looks at Augustine’s views on nonliteral refashioning of the biblical text, communication theory, and Scripture as therapeutic. Theology: William S. Babcock addresses “Caritas and Signification” in Books 1–3. Recalling that “the entire treatise has to do with the tractatio of Scripture” (158 n. 7), he observes that the dual love for God and neighbor is “the terminus of all biblical signification” (154). John C. Cavadini’s focus is on “The Sweetness of the Word: Salvation and Rhetoric.” The role of the Christian commentator is to make Scripture’s “sweetness, its power to move to conversion, available to others” (165). On the other hand, hearers need to be told truth in a way which will persuade (“delight”) them. J. Patout Burns reviews Augustine’s thinking on conversion when writing Books 1–3, especially the role of Scripture in conversion (passages whose meaning is straightforward lead the seeker to the more figurative ones) and progress in the Christian life (the Spirit assists through the seven gifts). Leo Sweeney suggests that the reason for not listing “infinity” among the...

Reviews and Notes: Final Passages: Positive Choices for the Dying and Their Loved Ones

Literature of Medicine1 February 1994Reviews and Notes: Final Passages: Positive Choices for the Dying and Their Loved OnesArthur W. FeinbergArthur W. FeinbergNorth Shore University Hospital, Manhasset, NY 11030Search for more papers by this authorAuthor, Article, and Disclosure Informationhttps://doi.org/10.7326/0003-4819-120-3-199402010-00028 SectionsAboutFull TextPDF ToolsAdd to favoritesDownload CitationsTrack CitationsPermissions ShareFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail Final Passages: Positive Choices for the Dying and Their Loved OnesJudith Ahronheim and Doron Weber. 285 pages. New York: Simon & Schuster; 1992. $18.00.Concurrent with the marked upsurge in the availability and sophistication of medical technology, public concentration on and discussion of the way Americans die has also increased. All aspects of the dying process are being scrutinized, and an active debate has started on such profound issues as the cost, both in dollars and resources, of providing medical care to the terminally ill, the use of machines to prolong the dying process, and the ethical issues involved ... Author, Article, and Disclosure InformationAffiliations: North Shore University Hospital, Manhasset, NY 11030 PreviousarticleNextarticle Advertisement FiguresReferencesRelatedDetails Metrics 1 February 1994Volume 120, Issue 3Page: 252KeywordsAttentionEuthanasiaForecastingGeriatricsIntensive care unitsSuicide ePublished: 15 August 2000 Issue Published: 1 February 1994 Copyright & PermissionsCopyright © 1994 by American College of Physicians. All Rights Reserved.PDF downloadLoading ...

H. G. Wells in Love: Postscript to an Experiment in Autobiography (review)

Reviewed by: H. G. Wells in Love: Postscript to an Experiment in Autobiography John Huntington H. G. Wells . H. G. Wells in Love: Postscript to an Experiment in Autobiography. Ed. G. P. Wells. Boston: Little, 1984. 253pp. $16.95. In its broad outlines, this book, written between 1935 and 1942 but unpublished until now, does not reveal anything that is not already known to a reader of Norman and Jeanne Mackenzie's biography of Wells. The first section, Wells's memoir of his wife, is familiar as the Introduction to The Book of Catherine Wells, and the third and final section, a short "looseleaf diary," is a rather superficial addition to the Experiment in Autobiography, though it has some marvelous touches, such as a paragraph recounting a conversation with Freud. Most interesting to students of Wells is the middle section, a series of long sketches of some important women in Wells's life—Amber Reeves, Rebecca West, Elizabeth von Arnim, Odette Keun, and Moura Budberg. When it was written, the publication of such a narrative of Wells's nonmarital relationships with women would have been scandalous. Today, when the basic story is more public than even Wells himself seems to have wanted to make it (he does not mention Margaret Sanger here), we look to such a text not for revelations but for evidence of the distortion, fabrication, and omission that autobiographical construction entails. The memoir needs to be read in [End Page 804] the context of Wells's other works and of the versions of other interested participants. Wells in Love offers some charming anecdotes but little new biographical information about Wells's liaisons with Amber Reeves, Elizabeth von Arnim, and Rebecca West. In the case of the long affair with West, a variety of recent sources have given us a full and complex picture of that relationship (particularly Anthony West, H. G. Wells: Aspects of a Life; and Gordon Ray, H. G. Wells and Rebecca West), and we may find Wells in Love more polite than explicit, most interesting for the details it omits. The portrait of Odette Keun, done in anger soon after the dissolution of the relationship, lacks the polite distance Wells brings to the earlier portraits. Wells depicts here a much more difficult person than the woman the Mackenzies sketch and a more interestingly eccentric one than he himself creates in Apropos of Dolores. Yet, despite its claim to hostile accuracy, this is not an entirely trustworthy narrative. For example, Wells here reasserts without repeating his earlier elegiac description of his departure from the house he had built for Keun and himself. We may want to set against this scene of noble renunciation Anthony West's more humiliating version of that departure: "He had been sent packing. Odette had thrown him out." Revelations of another sort appear in the depiction of Wells's relationship with Moura Budberg. In the final passages of the Experiment in Autobiography, describing his trip to the USSR and his meetings with Stalin and Gorky, Wells gives no hint that he had just become aware of Budberg's double life (Anthony West is convinced that she must have been closely associated with the KGB). Wells in Love makes Wells's bafflement and pain clear, but then, surprisingly, it leaves the huge ambiguities of Budberg's behavior unexplored. H. G. Wells in Love is important not because it offers a "true" version of what is elsewhere "fictionalized" but because it contributes detail to an autobiographical and artistic site whose excavation may uncover needs and strategies much too essential to Wells's own psyche for him ever to have consciously understood or described them. John Huntington University of Illinois, Chicago Copyright © 1986 Purdue Research Foundation

Alteration in cellular RNAs during the in Vitro lifespan of cultured human diploid fibroblasts

An abrupt concommitant increase in total cellular RNA and protein was observed as cultured human diploid fibroblasts entered the senescent phase of their in vitro lifespan. DNA content remained stable from early to final passages. Fractionation of cellular RNAs by polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis demonstrated an increase in both 28S and 18S ribosomal and 4S transfer RNAs in these senescent cells. Separation of poly(A) RNA (mRNA) by oligo(dT)-cellulose chromatography suggests an increase in this group of RNAs. However, the ratios of 28S to 18S rRNAs, tRNA to rRNA, and mRNA to total cellular RNA were not significantly different in cells before and after senescence, indicating that the overall increase in total cellular RNA was not due to an accumulation of a single RNA class.

The absolute determination of the gravitational acceleration at Sydney, Australia

An absolute measurement of the gravitational acceleration “g” has been made at the National Standards Laboratory, Chippendale, N.S.W., Australia. The determination was made by studying the free motion of a body projected vertically upwards in a vacuum and the time between its initial and final passages through two horizontal planes of known vertical separation was measured. The measured value ofg at a point 12 metres above the floor in room B. 37 of the National Standards Laboratory is 9.7967134 m/s2 The corresponding value at floor level at the BMR gravity station is 9.796717 m/s2

Problems in Coagulation and Corrective Treatment

Until recent years mixing basin design has been empirical, due largely to the fact that insufficient chemical engineering data were available regarding the characteristics of floe formation in its relation to time and velocity of mixing. Agitation from 15 to 30 minutes at a velocity between 1 and 1 J feet per second is necessary to produce good floe (7) in a baffled basin. Mechanical stirring requires about 40 minutes for comparable coagulation, when the initial paddle has a velocity of 2 feet per second and the last one in the series maintains a flow just sufficient to keep the floe in suspension. If this basic datum is accepted, it is at once apparent that much of the troubles experienced with poor floe formation is caused by an insufficient mixing period, since most basins in service have adequate velocities. Assuming that the correct concentration of coagulant is used and that the pH is adjusted to the proper value, coagulated floe is a dense, . compact material with well distributed silt particles throughout the mass and settles readily. An initial rapid velocity followed by a progressively decreasing speed will produce the most compact floe (4). A baffled basin having the same width of channel in all portions, or a paddle installation at equal speeds, does not produce the best coagulation. The diagram in figure 1, illustrates a round the end baffled basin designed in accordance with these newer principles. The fundamental data for this design were obtained with the laboratory stirring device under carefully controlled conditions and the rapidity of floe sedimentation was used as the criterion of good coagulation. In structural detail this design is a modification of the conventional basin as to ratio of over all dimensions and width of final passages. There are 36 channels arranged as follows :