Folding Chairs Research Articles

Wall-mounted folding chairs to promote resident physician sitting at the hospital bedside.

Sitting at the bedside may improve patient-clinician communication; however, many clinicians do not regularly sit during inpatient encounters. To determine the impact of adding wall-mounted folding chairs inside patient rooms, beyond any impact from a resident education campaign, on the patient-reported frequency of sitting at the bedside by internal medicine resident physicians. Prospective, controlled pre-post trial between 2019 and 2022 (data collection paused 2020-2021 due to COVID-19) at an academic hospital in Baltimore, Maryland. Folding chairs were installed in two of four internal medicine units and educational activities were delivered equally across all units. Patient-reported frequency of sitting at bedside, assessed as means on Likert-type items with 1 being "never" and 5 being "every single time." We also examined the frequency of other patient-reported communication behaviors. Two hundred fifty six and 206 patients enrolled in the pre and post-intervention periods, respectively. The mean frequency of patient-reported sitting by resident physicians increased from 1.8 (SD 1.2) to 2.3 (1.2) on education-only units (absolute difference 0.48 [95% CI: 0.21-0.75]) and from 2.0 (1.3) to 3.2 (1.4) on units receiving chairs (1.16, [0.87-1.45]). Comparing differences between groups using ordered logistic regression adjusting for clustering within residents, units with added chairs had greater increases in sitting (odds ratio 2.05 [1.10-3.82]), spending enough time at the bedside (2.43 [1.32-4.49]), and checking for understanding (3.04 [1.44-6.39]). Improvements in sitting and other behaviors were sustained on both types of units. Adding wall-mounted folding chairs may help promote effective patient-clinician communication.

The Price

The Price

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Application of TRIZ Innovative System Method in Rapid Assembly of Folding Chairs

This design activity is an innovative method of rapid assembly system for folding chairs. The research methods used in this study included literature analysis, TRIZ the method, human factors engineering (HFE), universal design, and IPA. First, the design of the folding chair and the layout of the literature related to the chair are analyzed. The contradiction matrix was used in the TRIZ method to find the principle of invention and analyze it, to provide a reference for the innovative design of folding chairs, and then use the relevant literature on materials to help design and select materials quickly. Next, the chair is assembled and unfolded and universal design is applied to design it into an acceptable product, causing it to be more popular. The human–machine interaction with HFE makes the design of rapid assembly and the design of folding chairs faster and safer. Finally, the IPA method is used to understand the subjective feelings of customers on the products of this research and the satisfaction and importance are used as the basis for evaluation; a two-dimensional matrix graph is drawn. After drawing a simulation using drawing software, it is compared with the traditional folding chair and the research results are as follows: (1) Quick unfolding function: use the pull ring upwards and it naturally unfolds downwards by gravity. (2) Quick folding and storage function: use the foot pedal, single-foot operation, and the folding chair can be quickly stored. (3) Rapid transportation and unfolding function: The chair back can be connected with other chair backs and has the functions of quick unfolding and quick storage, so as to realize the quick placement of the folding chair. This design activity realizes the preliminary design concept and design simulation of the product design through a systematic and innovative method. Through this design activity, we can understand the problems existing in product improvement before product development, so as to conduct market research and production cost assessment in the actual mass production later, and further reduce the cost of product design improvement.

AGHDRA by Arthur Jafa

Reviewed by: AGHDRA by Arthur Jafa Gwyneth Shanks AGHDRA. By Arthur Jafa. Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, New York City. December 5, 2021. Over the course of eighty-five minutes, AGHDRA, Arthur Jafa’s most recent film installation, unfolds. Or perhaps, more precisely, it enfolds, the churning movements of an abstracted seascape seeming to embrace or envelop a viewer. Projected on an almost wall-sized screen, the installation shifts between twelve distinct locked-frame ocean scenes. Across each, the angle is slightly different, such that a viewer’s perception transitions from looking out across a moonlit expanse of gently undulating waves to being immersed within the relentless pounding of a rough sea. The water itself appears composed of distinct shards or chunks. At times, it resembles obsidian fragments moving in concert to form rolling waves; at other points, the water is like the fractured surface of an earthquake-ravaged land, smeared with thick oil. This animated oceanscape is a deep onyx, shifting between deepest blacks, indigos, and bright blues, as the light of the sun or moon on the animation’s far horizon illuminates the scene. Jafa, while reticent to delimit the meaning of his installation, has described it as a “[James] Turrell while you’re chained in the bottom of a boat,” a descriptor that makes undeniable AGHDRA’s evocation of the Middle Passage and the Black Atlantic. The work premiered at Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Humlebaek, Denmark, in 2021, and then was reedited and screened at the now-defunct Gavin Brown’s Enterprise in Harlem, which had been closed for much of the pandemic, between November and December of 2021. Brown himself took a new position with Gladstone Gallery in London, a move announced in summer 2020. Jafa’s piece was the final artwork presented at Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, which by December 2021 had been stripped of all indications of its six-year stint as a blue-chip art gallery. When I ventured there, my companion and I were the only two people present. Some half-dozen 8½ x 11 ad hoc wayfinding signs taped to the walls directed us first to the back of the space and then to a large crate elevator that deposited us on the second floor. A cluster of metal folding chairs was arranged at the far edges of the cavernous room in which AGHDRA was installed, the high-powered projector and many massive speakers hung in the room’s fly space the primary indication of just how much curatorial support went into the work’s presentation. The empty, vacated space, and Jafa’s fully realized and pulsating piece seemed to press up against each other, grappling for authorial claim over my experience. The confluence of AGHDRA and the particularities of its installation speaks to how imaginings of blackness emerge in and through an extended spatial and temporal context: an animated abstraction of the Middle Passage, the cavernous screening room in which the work played, the near-empty and now defunct Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, and a gentrifying Harlem. I argue that this extended spatial analysis of AGHDRA is, in fact, constitutive of the filmic work itself. By staying with its horizon line—unmoving and perpetually imminent, never arriving—that anchors the upper third of each animated frame in the film, we must contend with how subjectivity accrues perceptual significance precisely through spatial and geographic registers, articulating installation art as a practice always already embedded within an intersectional interplay between site and body, political possibility and spatial autonomy. The horizon, in other words, allows for an entangling of: 1) a colonial imagining of the horizon as a perpetual sight of and for conquest; 2) recent discourses of urban gentrification that take up conquest narratives, framing such actions as new horizons or frontiers for settlement; and 3) certain strains of Black feminist thought that draw upon the language of astrophysics and the event horizon to grapple with the profound implications of a wholly different paradigm for blackness’s temporal and spatial existence. The horizon—to follow Susanna Ashton’s description of W. E. B. Du [End Page 363] Bois, Freeman H. M. Murray, and L. N. Hershaw’s short-lived magazine The...

Re-designing of railway carriages to increase ergonomic and accessible: a case study of indonesian railway

Train is a high efficiency mass transportation which is suitable to increase life quality and support of high citizen mobility. The purpose of this paper is to produce some recommendations of improved railway carriage design which are accessible for disabilities, ergonomics and economics. Firstly, the research started with theoretical studies on the product design development, House of Quality (HoQ), visual displays design, anthropometry, and the needs of disabilities. Next step collected data from the open survey and then form the closed survey of 30 respondents who has physical disabilities and visual impairment to understand the passengers’ need. The results of voice of customers shown that an easy access of disabilities people in the carriage has the biggest negative gap between reality and expectation for 1.16 and then following by space availability of wheelchair for 1.10, the seat numbering for visual impairments passengers=0.85, and the ease of emergency aid=0.71. The HoQ provided analysis of room 1 for customer needs, room 2 for voice of team design, room 3 for relationship matrix, room 4 for benchmarking, room 5 for technical benchmarking, room 6 for correlation matrix, and room 7 for weighted importance and relative importance. The QED results shown that the first rank of relatives importance was distance between seat with score=0.618, the second was colour on seat numbering and train series=0.561, and the third was emergency button=0.439. New design recommendation of carriage design should contain of modified seat layouts, improved wheelchair and aisle space, added guiding blocks, emergency assistance buttons, additional folding chairs, and handrail adjustments. Alternative designs were successfully created and able to increase the seat number of the railway coach.

Class Rooms

Class Rooms

Propulsion Cost Changes of Ultra-Lightweight Manual Wheelchairs After One Year of Simulated Use.

Manual wheelchairs are available with folding or rigid frames to meet the preferences and needs of individual users. Folding styles are commonly regarded as more portable and storable, whereas rigid frames are commonly regarded as more efficient for frequently daily use. To date, there are no studies directly comparing the performances of the frame types. Furthermore, while differences have been reported in the longevity of the frame types, no efforts have been made to relate this durability back to the real-world performance of the frames. This study investigated the propulsion efficiencies of four folding and two rigid ultra-lightweight frames equipped with identical drive tires and casters. A robotic wheelchair tester was used to measure the propulsion costs of each chair over two surfaces: concrete and carpet. A motorized carousel was used to drive the chairs 511 km around a circular track to simulate one year of use for each wheelchair. After simulated use, five of the six wheelchairs showed no decrease in propulsion effort, indicating that the frames were able to withstand the stresses of simulated use without a detrimental impact on performance. In the unused "new" condition, rigid chairs were found to have superior (>5%) performance over folding frames on concrete and carpet, and in the "worn" condition rigid chairs had superior performance over folding chairs on concrete but were comparable on the carpeted surface.

Development of Automatic Chair Transport System - Chair Recognition and Approach Strategy –

In schools and other educational institutions, there are many instances that require the arrangement of chairs depending on the required purpose, such as a class or event. Some chairs are on casters; however, educational institutions typically use stacking or folding chairs. Although effective in terms of storage, these must be lifted by hand during transportation, increasing the burden on the workforce. While automation of baggage transport in warehouses has improved significantly, little attention has been paid to the automation of chair transport. Despite the demand and the fact that self-propelled chairs have already been developed, automatic transport of chairs without casters has never been reported. In this study, we constructed an automatic chair-transport system using an omnidirectional mobile robot and focused on a stacking chair that allowed the robot to position itself underneath. The developed system utilizes the image of the seat and frame pipe of the stacking chair to estimate the chair’s position and direction with respect to the robot. Once the robot has positioned itself under the chair, the chair is lifted and transported using a lifter device attached to the robot.

Reclamation

Reclamation Devin Murphy (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Photo by Laszlo Ilyes [End Page 48] My whole life I've had this feeling at my core that people wouldn't remember me from one meeting to the next and was surprised, even touched, if they did. Looking back, I kept clear of people because of this and spent much of my youth in solitary endeavors. I hunted fossils and [End Page 49] Iroquois arrowheads along the shores of Lake Erie, framed my own kites from balsa and tarps, and started my own fish tank to breed tropical lionfish. All this to say, I was a lonely boy. So to have had a friend—any friend, when younger—perhaps bound me to give over part of myself and follow wherever they led. At the Boys & Girls Club during a pickup basketball game, Horby, who played with anger and grace, was on my team. He was confident in his movements and thus his body, unafraid to play skins, whereas I hated having to reveal my pudgy belly that would ride me all of my days. During our game, a kid named Kenneth York called me "a bucket of love butter" and slapped my bare stomach so hard it left a deep purple handprint blooming across my navel. Horby for some reason stood up for me, and in the ensuing scuffle, Kenneth lost a bucket of blood from his chin. Horby got suspended from the club for two months but left with my undying gratitude. From then on, I became his willing lackey, a lieutenant in all his headlong, half-cocked efforts to remold his world to the one he felt he was due. After leaving the club, we ended up at Horby's. He lived in a small ranch house outside town on the downslope running to the lake, which is sixty feet deep but churns up thirty-foot swells on foul nights. At the high end of the hill, Interstate 90 made a deep oxbow between Erie, Pennsylvania, and Buffalo, New York. A vineyard surrounded the home. Neat rows of hardy vines clung to the sand-and-gravel soil and grew despite the winds and winters. He and his older brothers, Ronny and Micah, were being raised by his Uncle Jeremy, who lived on VA disability checks and random roofing jobs. He sold rocks he painted in different patterns at a monthly farmers market but once in a while sort of lost his mind and tossed those rocks through neighborhood windows until the police came and arrested him. I never had the courage to ask why they lived with their uncle. Uncle Jeremy barbecued us hamburgers on a rusty grill on my first visit. He opened the screen door and yelled inside, "Boys. Tammy. Dinner." The two brothers and a woman in a long T-shirt covering her underwear came out to join us. It was almost six at night, but she'd been sleeping. There was a scar on her thigh that looked like fire tongs, and she'd had a hot coal tattooed between the prongs. We all sat around the patio on folding chairs and ate as the sunlight pulled back from the vineyard, [End Page 50] which struck me as somehow both wild and tamed. I ate my burger in silence but kept peeking at Tammy's tattoo. We finished eating, and Horby took me to his room and let me in on his scheme to make money selling puppies. I had made some money from my paper route and seeded it to adopt an all-white female boxer he'd seen at the local kennel. The next time I went to the house, a small white female boxer whimpered in a dog cage. Micah drove up with a second dog, another white boxer. This one a male. "We'll mate 'em," Horby said. At first the dogs snarled at each other, but soon, after snipping, the male mounted the female. It was over fast, but they got stuck together and somehow ended up ass to ass with both of them howling, as if one was being birthed from the other. "Is this part...

The War of the Roses dir. by Kimura Ryunosuke

Reviewed by: The War of the Rosesdir. by Kimura Ryunosuke Kitamura Sae The War of the RosesPresented at Theater Fushikaden, Tokyo, Japan. 07 25– 08 12, 2019. Directed by Kimura Ryunosuke. Stage management by Watanabe Yuta. Music by Yuji Rerure Kawaguchi, Tsuruzawa Kanya, and Tsuruzawa Tsugahana. Sound by Ozono Koji. Set design by Norimine Masahiro. Lighting by Ito Takashi. Translation by Matsuoka Kazuko. With Kochi Yamato (Exeter/Charles/Talbot/Suffolk/Richard III), Maimi (Margaret/Richmond/Anne/Young Duke of York/others), Iwasaki Mark Yudai (Rose/Edward IV/Shakespeare/others), Suzuki Akinori (Henry VI/Alençon/Clarence/2 ndDuke of Buckingham/others), Miyamoto Yuko (Eleanor/Queen Elizabeth), Osanai Erika (Joan/Duchess of York/others), Otsuka Kojiro (Duke of York/Rivers/others), and others. Kakushinhan, a company based in Tokyo, performed its first production in 2012 and has specialized in Shakespearean theater ever since. Kimura Ryunosuke, the company's director, directed the War of the Rosescycle, its four-part six-hour version of the Henry VIand Richard IIIplays, with Kakushinhan at Theater Fushikaden from May 6–31, 2016. This production was a fringe hit; Fushikaden can house approximately 100 spectators, and approximately 2700 people saw this production, although perhaps many saw only the last part ( Richard III). Three years after the first attempt, Kimura Ryunosuke and Kakushinhan restaged The War of the Rosesat the same theater with the same leading actors. With a running time of over seven hours (approximately 4.5 hours for Henry VIand 2.5 hours for Richard III), this was not a revival but a new production. As with Simon Godwin, who directed two different but equally satisfying versions of Hamletfor the Royal Shakespeare Company in 2016 and for the Bunkamura Theater Cocoon in 2019 (reviewed in SB37.4), Kimura is accomplished at exploring the same plays in different directions over relatively short intervals of time, and audience members are sometimes surprised by the amount of experimentation evident in both directors' latter productions. Since its launch, Kakushinhan's primary aim has always been to make Shakespeare more relatable to a modern Japanese audience. The 2019 production of The War of the Rosestried to create post-Ninagawa Japanese-style Shakespeare without ostentatious self-Orientalism. Kakushinhan's "Japan" is raw, energetic, and seamlessly connected to the culturally hybrid, constantly changing twenty-first-century Japanese society in which the audience lives, and it is stylistically different from the carefully crafted, distinctively imaginative "Japan" created by the late Yukio Ninagawa. The set for the 2019 production of The War of the Roseswas a bare, monochrome stage with folding chairs. In Richard III, a white paper curtain was used as a backdrop and torn down during the play. As in previous productions, there was a drum pit below the left side of the stage where Yuji Rerure Kawaguchi provided percussion. In addition to Kawaguchi, Tsuruzawa Kanya and Tsuruzawa Tsugahana, two gidayumusicians, recorded shamisenmusic for the production; gidayuis a genre of traditional Japanese theatrical music, and shamisenis a sitar-like Japanese string instrument. While the drum performance accompanied energetic scenes, shamisenwas used to symbolize Henry VI's quiet inner conflict. Most actors wore modern clothes with hints of historical flavor. Female characters were clad in showy European dresses, while some characters appeared on the stage with modern props, such as a Nike jacket. The [End Page 149]characters belonging to the York faction wore white, those belonging to the Lancaster faction wore red, and the French wore blue, enabling the audience to distinguish between characters by the colors of their clothes. On occasion, actors who played multiple roles had to change their costumes quickly in front of the audience, leading to intentional laughter, which was part of the production's ongoing deployment of the Brechtian estrangement effect during the Henry VIsegments to comment on the absurdity of the war. In the famous rose-picking scene, Iwasaki Mark Yudai, one of the leading actors of the company, played the silent "Rose." In this role, he simply appeared as a rose bush and toyed with a smart-phone, completely disinterested in the intense conversation happening around him. This...

Six Poems

Six Poems GEORGE KALOGERIS The Atomists To see what the matter is, in all of its dense, Teeming particulars, and not through the lens Of a microscope but by the most lucid, precise, Leap of imagination: the first was Leucíppus. But it was his student, Democritus, who stated That human understanding was truly futile, Given the random collisions of atoms. Still, He blinded himself to keep from being distracted. When he broke the long-jump record by two whole feet, Bob Beamon dropped to his knees, buried his face In his hands, and wept in a pit of sand—the trace Of his human, Olympian flight still fresh as a heel-print. When the earthquake struck Kalamáta, and Uncle Sotíri Lost everything, he asked a taxi driver To take him to “a nice high place by the sea. And then come back for me in half an hour.” arion 28.3 winter 2021 58 six poems One Credit Seminar on the Odes of Horace We were sitting around a polished oak table, just getting to Those famous lines near the end of the Sestius Ode: Revenant whitefaced Death is walking not knowing whether He’s going to knock at a rich man’s door or a poor man’s When one of the students (Andrew) said it was “totally weird”— Which led us to look at the paleness of Death’s appearance, Whose pallor is what, when he comes, comes with him: the sickness and shock In his ghastly face. And that’s where we stopped. And then It was Jennifer’s email, saying “I’m sorry for missing class, But I’m having panic attacks. I keep flashing back To March 19th, when I entered my dorm-room and found my boyfriend Dead of an overdose . . . I can get you a note . . . What reading should I do to be prepared for next week?” O goodlooking fortunate Sestius, don’t put your hope in the future; The night is falling, the shades are gathering around; The walls of Pluto’s shadowy house are closing you in. There who will be lord of the feast? What will it matter, What will it matter there, whether you fell in love With Lycidas, this or that girl with him, or he With her? So David Ferry’s great translation goes, And its tone of tender, knowing, bemusement is Horace’s Pitying voice, but whose pity has come to speak to us Through the whitefaced mouth of revenant Death, still going From house to house, until he gets to Jennifer’s dorm-room. And what will it matter now if Andrew was drawn to the line About fishermen hauling their caulked boats to the water? It’s late September. We’re sitting around a polished oak table Whose wood is sacred to Jove, whose lightning-bolt Has already sounded deep in the heart of Indian summer. George Kalogeris 59 Greek School The very first poem I ever knew by heart: That sing-song forsaken one assigned to me. Recited on our other Independence Day. When some of the girls were dressed in peasant costumes, And some of the boys in kilts of the freedom fighters. And the timid rest of us in our Sunday best. In the church gym, where Father Mihos called us Up to the microphone, and one by one We showed the parents what we’d learned in Greek school. In Horace’s Ode to his Lyre, the poet prays That his song will serve as the medicine of sorrows, His stricken voice the trembling instrument— Schooled as he was in Sappho, who said the ancient Prescription left a bittersweet taste in her mouth: Glukopikron. For me it’s that first-grade poem I stammer to remember: Egwo tha geino Yiatrós . . . “I shall grow up to be a doctor . . .” Just saying that, my elders perk up their ears. And even if Poetry wasn’t the kind of calling Expected of me, and one by one they all Got sick and died, it’s still the medicine That keeps them leaning forward on their folding chairs. 60 six poems Money Doesn’t Grow On Trees But evergreen the...

From The Commonplace Book

from The Commonplace Book Maitreyabandhu (bio) i.m. Urgyen Sangharakshita These fitful sayings are, also, of tragedy: The serious reflection is composed Neither of comic nor tragic but of commonplace. —Wallace Stevens, “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven” 1.1 A pheasant kickstarts its rancorous alarmin windless hills gripped by winter’s paw:the sound of rain is like the tentativebeginnings of tumultuous applause. I rang my mother again from the weedycorner of a field near where a crop-sprayer, with rhythmic stutter, threw a wing,an angel wing, across a crop of kale.She was in France, an overnight stopoverbefore the river cruise: meals and foyers,miniature bottles of shampoo, hand soapwrapped in tissue. After her second fallmy brother bought an automatic car:a lifetime of shifting through the gears and shewas nervous again behind the wheel, drivingto Morrisons to get used to it, buyingtoilet paper and Special K. “I can’t talkfor long, love, they’re just about to call us in.”Bad reception. The stuttering angel wing.A pigeon climbed an angle of the light.Cold wind scattered the first few autumn leaves.One can accumulate as much of nothingas one likes, it will all add up to nothing.“I’d better go . . .” A car was changing downat the oak-rigged horizon and the wind [End Page 62] that had been saying serious amongthe hedges, in the treetops, then further offacross the fields, was saying (I seemed to hear it)serious . . . then serious again. 1.3 Friends reported Rainbows! Rainbows! in WhatsAppphotos on my phone, driving alwaystowards and through them with hedges running offto where the local crows creaked the skyabove our unaccommodating heads.We carried folding chairs, arranged ourselvesin rows for the possibility of warmthand then another friend, driving pastthe portaloos, stopped to open hiscar window, wave his phone and shout out Rainbows! 1.7 We should have painted rainbows as well as rain,double and triple rainbows like the onesthat greeted you after the war when you walkedbarefoot from that hill station, burning your passport,having shaven and taken robe and bowl,walking all the way from India to Hampsteadwith Christmas Humphreys muttering dirty habitsand blue films, exchanging Pali studiesfor Soho and the Diamond Sutra’s beat. 1.14 On the way up, the lift plays Handel’sOmbra mai fu (without the solo) beforethe TV dayroom and the corridor’sposter of the Beatles striding likeyoung gods towards Love, love me do.The disabled loo has laminated picturesof tulips blutacked to the tiles. My friend, [End Page 63] marooned between one thought and another,sways like sea-grass in a current he can’twithstand in front of Doris Day and JamesStewart in The Man Who Knew Too Much.A shot rings out. The man, who’s been blacked-up,whispers something, then touches Stewart’s face.Stewart’s eyes aren’t sharp enough to tiethe lost connections as Arabs shout and fightin the crowded market chase to London Heathrowwith low sun over Hounslow and seagulls parkedacross a field all facing the same way,their bonnets glaring in the fading light. [End Page 64] Maitreyabandhu Maitreyabandhu won the Keats-Shelley Prize, the Geoffrey Dearmer Prize, and the Basil Bunting Award. His first pamphlet, The Bond, was shortlisted for the Michael Marks Award. His second pamphlet, Vita Brevis, was a Poetry Book Society Choice. He has published three collections with Bloodaxe Books: The Crumb Road (2013), a Poetry Book Society Recommendation; Yarn (2015); and After Cézanne (2019). Maitreyabandhu lives and works at the London Buddhist Centre, UK, and has been ordained into the Triratna Buddhist Order for twenty-nine years. He has written three books on Buddhism published by Windhorse Publications. Copyright © 2020 Middlebury College Publications

On Harmony

On Harmony Lauren Camp (bio) Train stops and labneh and the grim little sun and our clappingall morning and later we slicked down to righteousdance moves, pink greasy boxes of dough. Some would say we were not divine between us but we hummed our shared holyfamily in a quarry of folding chairs. One hour skimmedto another and they were not forbidden, or clarified with reason, but the ache of the olives and responsesrendered in timbal, qanun, tarub, the oud, and the sounds againof distress and truth. Darwish said "Nothing is harder…than the smell of dreams, while they're evaporating." On those days we dressedin our blacks and thick tongues, and the narrativewe offered was not an acceptance, a raging. We wanted to forget to kneel. We spent the days linked to our divisionsof oppression and we fixed to the matterof beginning. Every thought claimed five wounds. Dresses loose with their fine threads, red and lime,wheat gold. Outside, a stone bridge watched the great riverweeping, a mother sang to her baby. My taste in the mouth of this crowd. Habibi, our losses, and most of us rustlingour arrows beneath them. Five times a day we ate all the oilysweetness with our vigorous fingers, our tongues moving to cumin and cream, and we passed from news to a chapelof pita, to portions of dusk, our ghosts and marginal angers.I took 48 photos of shadows in quick succession, thinking one better than another, and saw in each photoa lapse to spot evidence. I deleted themfrom my memory which wanted not to hunger [End Page 7] for these compulsions, statistics. We were taughtso many instances to doubt, but the light came alongsinging and we joined it, taking its melody as apology. [End Page 8] Lauren Camp Lauren Camp's newest book is Turquoise Door: Finding Mabel Dodge Luhan in New Mexico (3: A Taos Press, 2018). Her third book, One Hundred Hungers (Tupelo Press, 2016), won the Dorset Prize and was named a finalist for the Arab American Book Award. She is a Senior Fellow at the Black Earth Institute. Copyright © 2019 Pleiades and Pleiades Press

A novel one arm motorized walker for hemiplegic stroke survivors: a feasibility study

BackgroundA hemiplegic stroke survivor with a moderate to severe gait disturbance may have difficulty walking using a one-arm walker. This study aimed to test the safety and feasibility of a prototype one-arm motorized walker that uses a power-driven device to provide gait assistance to hemiplegic stroke survivors with moderate to severe gait disturbances.MethodsA one-arm motorized walker with a power-driven device was developed and tested with respect to 10 distinct variables, including weight, degrees of freedom, handle, handle substitution function, two-sided use function, variable handle height, redirecting function, electric moving parts through the handle control, brake function using the handle control, folding chairs, and design stability. Its safety and feasibility were tested in 19 hemiplegic stroke individuals using the Likert scale and a simple interview.ResultsThe walker consists of a frame platform including a handle, electric motor for driving, one wheel for driving, two wheels for turning, unlocking sensor, driving button, and turning buttons. The walker is programmed so that a touch sensor in the handle can unlock the locking system. Furthermore, it is programmed so that a user can propel it by pushing the handle downward or pressing a button and can control directions for turning right or left by pressing buttons. Safety and performance testing was achieved for 10 separate variables, and a Likert scale score of 3.5 of 5 was recorded.ConclusionThis walker’s novel design was developed for hemiplegic stroke survivors with moderate to severe gait disturbances. Our findings indicate that the walker is both safe and feasible for providing walking assistance to hemiplegic stroke survivors and establish the potential advantages of the one-arm motorized walker.

Icons: A Case Study in Spiritual Borrowing between Eastern Orthodoxy and the Emergent Church

Icons:A Case Study in Spiritual Borrowing between Eastern Orthodoxy and the Emergent Church Dann Wigner (bio) In the summer of 2011, while visiting an emergent church for a research case study in Tulsa, Oklahoma, I witnessed the following setup for corporate worship activities. The church met in an unfinished office building with a large open space with unadorned concrete walls, pillars, and exposed wiring. In the central portion of this space a variety of seating was provided: pews, folding chairs, easy chairs, couches, and school desks. Lyrics for songs and notes from sermons were projected on the bare wall behind the main speaker. On one side of this main seating area, a sectioned-off zone was designated as an art station, and the other side was a prayer station. The art station had chairs and tables covered with butcher paper. Crayons, Play-Doh, markers, and scissors were provided. Also, in this area, two easels were set up with blank canvases, a variety of paint colors, brushes, water, paint thinner, small wooden mannequins, old National Geographic magazines, and artwork completed in previous services, including one loosely interpreted portrayal of an icon. This area was separated from the main seating area by a six foot high votive candle divider, and lamps were provided for additional lighting. The prayer station was also separated by a votive candle divider. On this side, there were many candles, a chair and desk with prayer cards, a "surrender box" for prayers and struggles, a box of facial tissue, a suggested written "forgiveness prayer," a kneeling bench, a prayer journal, and an Eastern Orthodox icon prominently displayed. I was struck by the juxtaposition of a non-religious, multi-purpose space with the prominent place given to religious icons, encapsulating the epitome of traditional Christian ritual practice. This juxtaposition is a concrete, physical example of spiritual borrowing. Spiritual borrowing is the process of transplanting a spiritual practice that arose in one religion to another religion. For instance, spiritual borrowing occurs when Christians engage in Buddhist meditation or Neo-Pagans utilize prayer beads. Borrowing can range from single practices to theological tenets on up to a complete fusion creating a new religious movement, such as Santería. Here I am investigating a far subtler example of intra-religious borrowing from Eastern Orthodox Christianity by the nascent emergent church movement. Sociologically speaking, the examination of spiritual borrowing [End Page 78] Click for larger view View full resolution Our Lady of Tenderness 285. © 2004 by Clyde Rausch, OMI. [End Page 79] consists of close scrutiny of two inter-related processes: (1) the appropriation of a particular practice from one religion to another, and (2) the reinterpretation of the purpose and theology of the borrowed practice to fit within its new tradition. I investigate this process through the specific example of the Eastern Orthodox icon as appropriated and reinterpreted by the emergent church. My results show a complex relationship between belief and behavior in which the use of icons is viewed by the borrowing group as neutral containers to be divested and invested with theological content as needed. I follow a phenomenological methodology in this case study situated in an overarching qualitative framework for sociological study. To begin, a few brief definitions and categorizing remarks follow. First, this case study is qualitative rather than quantitative. Succinctly stated, "Qualitative data deals with meanings, whereas quantitative data deals with numbers."1 The difference in data gathered extends to a difference in conceptual logic with regard to analyzing that data. Specifically, quantitative data lends itself to deductive reasoning in which a researcher begins with a hypothesis and then either proves or disproves it on the basis of the specific data collected. Qualitative research and analysis approaches data from an inductive perspective, allowing inferences to rise out of many detailed observations.2 Qualitative research encourages the development of categories from examination of data collected rather than developing categories prior to examination of collected data. As a result, conclusions are returned that are not intended to be demonstrable, repeatable, and generalizable; rather, their aim is to produce "thick description" through use of a relatively small sample for the purpose of allowing outsiders to comprehend a "culture from...

To See and Be Seen: In Conversation with JEB

666 Feminist Studies 44, no. 3. © 2018 by Feminist Studies, Inc. Lana Dee Povitz To See and Be Seen: In Conversation with JEB August 12, 2017; a hot, bright morning. Ariel and I disembark at the train station in Takoma, DC, and head toward the waiting car. In the driver’s seat is one of the most important photographers of lesbian lives in the United States, Joan E. Biren, popularly known as JEB. Decades before social media made images of nearly anything accessible to nearly anyone with a web connection, JEB published Eye to Eye: Portraits of Lesbians in 1979—in her words, “The first lesbian [photography] book that was going to say LESBIAN on the cover and have real people with real faces and first names on the inside.”1 A videographer later in her career, JEB made her mark traveling around the country in the late 1970s and early 1980s with her Dyke Show.2 Formally titled Lesbian Images in Photograph : 1850–the present, this constantly evolving visual and audio performance featured between three hundred and four hundred slides of lesbians or lesbian-like women from 1850 to the present.3 At the crest 1. Joan E. Biren, phone interview with Ariel Goldberg, October 10, 2017. Transcript in author’s possession. 2. JEB toured with the Dyke Show in the United States and Canada from 1979 to 1985. See Sophie Hackett, “Queer Looking,” Aperture 218 (Spring 2015): 40–45. 3. Ibid. On “lesbian-like” women and finding lesbians throughout history before the consolidation of the identity category, see Judith M. Bennett, “‘Lesbian-Like’ and the Social History of Lesbianisms,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 9, nos. 1–2 (January–April 2000): 1–24; David M. Halperin, “The First Homosexuality?” in his How to Do the History of Homosexuality Lana Dee Povitz 667 of the women’s liberation movement, audiences crowded together wherever they could to see the show—in living rooms, garages, church basements , community centers, and feminist bookstores—sitting rapt on the ground or on folding chairs. For many in these all-women spaces, JEB’s slides were the first images of women like them they’d ever seen. It’s Ariel who has arranged today’s interview, doing research for the book they’re writing about the influence of the twentieth century’s LGBTQ photographers on contemporary mainstream image culture. Ariel Goldberg is a photographer and poet who crisscrosses New York City working as an adjunct on different college campuses. The more they tell me about JEB in the weeks leading up to this meeting, the more I sense something genealogical afoot. Each representing the white, Jewish, middle -class,antiracist-lesbian-grassroots activism of their respective eras, both JEB and Ariel are self-taught, collaborative , and accountable to their circles of activist/artist friends. They pursue projects with or without (usually without) institutional support and brim with interests that hover between marginal and hot. As for me, I’m a historian, tagging along for the ride. I know little about photography, its practitioners, or its technologies, but I’m dipping into a new research project about the impact of social-movement participation on activist lives. And, aware of JEB’s role as a documentarian of (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2002): 48–80; Leila Rupp, Sapphistries : A Global History of Love Between Women (New York: New York University Press, 2011); Valerie Traub, Thinking Sex with the Early Moderns (Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016). See also Cait McKinney, “‘Finding the Lines to My People’: Media History of Queer Bibliographic Encounter,” GLQ: Journal of Gay and Lesbian Studies 24, no. 1 (January 2018): 55–83. For a discussion of queer desire for belonging based in literature, see Christopher Nealon, Foundlings: Lesbian and Gay Historical Emotion Before Stonewall (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001). Ariel Goldberg, by Lana Dee Povitz. 668 Lana Dee Povitz social justice movements, including women’s and gay liberation, as well as her theoretical contributions to the early lesbian-separatist collective known as the Furies Collective, I am curious what this veteran activist life looks like now. Ariel and I speculated about JEB on the ride down from New York. We know she...

High Diver, 1929

High Diver, 1929 Lee Martin (bio) Wouldn't that have been just like him, they all said later, the ones who knew him. That joker, that wag, that scamp. Captain Frank Durman, United States Air Force. The sort of flyboy who made all the dolls carry a torch. They sat on wooden folding chairs in Lanterman Park, their heads tipped back, their lips parted, their throats exposed and white in the glow from the neon lights along the midway—the merry-go-round, the Ferris wheel, the Tunnel of Love. There at the edge of the carnival, in an open spot in the oak grove, Captain Frank Durman said to a boy standing near the foot of the ladder he'd soon climb, "I might just act like I'm hurt when I hit the net. How about that, bub?" He swept his arm out toward the crowd. "They all want to feel their tickers squeeze in their chests, right? If I don't move once I land? Well, wouldn't that be the ticket?" And the girls' hearts were already thumping just looking at Captain Durman in his blue swimming singlet. The thin straps across his shoulders bared the swell of his pectoral muscles, the wings of his latissimus dorsi, and, finally, the flex of deltoids and biceps as he grabbed the rungs of the ladder and started to climb. With each step, the hearts below pulsed—those calves, those thighs, that … Finally, he reached the top and turned to face them. At least that's how I picture it. The news story leaves room for my imagination. It's August, the dog days, and the girls stir the air with cardboard fans from the Fessant Funeral Home. Their spit curls are damp with perspiration. Some dab their temples with hankies. Their moist skin smells of Shalimar. They hold bags of roasted nuts in their hands, or cones of cotton candy, or Dixie Cups of lemonade. They hear the screams of girls on the new ride, the Tilt-a-Whirl, the ding of the bell when a strongman swings the sledgehammer and sends the weight to the top. And always the organ music of "Over the Waves" from the merry-go-round. [End Page 144] Here in Bridgeport, an oil town in southeastern Illinois, the girls look up at Captain Frank Durman. They feel their hearts quicken, their breathing catch, and they think, Oh, my. Anything might happen. ________ Let's say that boy at the foot of the ladder is my father. He's sixteen, a slender boy with sloped shoulders. A country boy with mousy straight hair, unruly at his crown. He's always licking his palm and trying to tame that cowlick. Someone like Captain Durman would never have a single hair that would dare to disobey. My father feels fairly certain about that. He envies his dark hair, slicked back Valentino style, shiny with Brilliantine. He envies the rugged set of his square jaw and the way he winks at him just before he starts to climb as if to say everything's the berries. Captain Durman is a big timer, and my father? Well, to be honest, my father is a hayseed, a rube, wide-eyed and wet behind the ears. He won't marry my mother until he's thirty-eight years old, will spend his life until then living on the farm with my aged grandmother who has cataracts and can barely see. A bachelor, until one day something trips in his heart and he takes the plunge. Do I dare imagine my mother among the girls who are looking up at the fine form of Captain Durman? My timid mother. My chaste mother. My nearly spinster mother who marries my father when she's forty-one years old. She's nineteen that night in Lanterman Park, already teaching school and helping her parents in the general store they run two miles west of my father's farm. Somewhere in the comings and goings in that rural community, have they taken note of each other? I so desperately want it to be so, to know that they had a spark when they...

View from the Lactataion Room at the White House

View from the Lactataion Room at the White House E.A. Farro (bio) We make fast friends—we’re both lost in front of our destination, but it’s so giant we don’t know how or where to enter. The Eisenhower Executive Office Building, housing the executive offices of the White House, takes up four city blocks. It looks like a cross between a castle and a spaceship, a style called Second Empire architecture. “Women’s Energy Summit?” I ask, taking a guess. We fall into step together, both anxious not to be late. In DC, I talk to strangers everywhere: to find out why the train is delayed, because I like their scarf, without reason. This is a city of transients and compulsive networkers; people are as open to meeting as if we were all on a study abroad program. A colleague told me that every conversation should be treated as a job interview, but for me it’s curiosity—I talk to strangers because I can. My new friend, Jessie, is ten years older than me, and far more elegant. She is shy; smiles flicker across her face and disappear. Her suit has a metallic sheen; it fits perfectly over her thin frame. Runner’s legs float inches off the ground on snakeskin heels. Her perfection is made human only by wild red curly hair moving in all directions. [End Page 47] My hair is similarly wild, but in contrast to her feminine sleekness, I still look pregnant. My suit is too tight on the bottom and too big on top—my breasts are oversized canteens of milk. I wear black flats, and my shoulders tilt with the unequal weight of the purse with notebook and business cards on one side and on the other a weekend travel bag with breast pump and all its paraphernalia smashed in. I treat every conference like the apocalypse has happened and I’m forging a new life. Whether it’s a day or a week long, I build a social network as if this event will last forever and I need a posse to survive. It’s as if I can’t conceive of the ephemeral nature of the folding chairs and scheduled keynote. Like Dorothy, I have three key characters in my post-apocalyptic conference world. First, a confidant, the person to sneak out with and go sit in the sun. Second, a Madonna/mother figure, someone who will save me a seat and look out for me (and vice versa). Third, a homeland connection, someone with a tie to the outside world who offers a reality check. For this one-day event, my confidant will be Joe, a twenty-four-year old man interning at the White House who I was told would have the key to the lactation room. My Madonna, Jessie with the red hair, will be the one to bring me into conversations with her large smile. My homeland connection will be another female scientist, new to DC, who like me has no idea how we were invited to this. While I’ll never see the first two again, I will stay in touch with the last; we’ll share a Passover Seder and swap emails over the next several years as we navigate ourselves out of DC and into more permanent lives. The invitation to the White House is a needed beacon of hope. A signal that I’m going in the right direction. Up until eight months ago I was on a different path. For the last decade I’ve been a field scientist. I’m now a staffer in the US Senate. This was the third way, not going into oil in the face of climate change and not crossing my fingers for the next academic gig that wouldn’t pay enough to bridge any future gap in funding. The parting words of congratulations from my postdoctoral mentor were “You know if you leave, you can never come back.” [End Page 48] In field science, dressing up was wearing yoga clothes, or outdoor clothes—pretty much anything from REI. I never owned a purse and felt like a child who’d stolen...

Four Poems

Four Poems LAWRENCE DUGAN A Name for the Theater A theater needing a name for itself Became The University of the Streets— Strindberg, Williams, Albee— exploring all The old valleys of discontentedness, The flawed republic of a southern county, A Scandinavian town with one honest Man in it, places where the truth was frail, From courthouse to bedroom, the unnamed art Of staged confrontation, performed again In a large East Side basement before dark Semicircles of folding chairs. Afterward Couples and loners scattered down Tompkins Street, as hopeful a group of people As I’ve ever seen, open to the thought, The idea become possibility, That this time the show would be memorable, That the Swedish preacher or Southern poet, Even playwright X from Connecticut Would find a method of lighting the stage. arion 22.3 winter 2015 Ad Libyam The Romans brooded over her The other city across the sea That challenged them as nowhere else And left them staring out at the water As if she were a place within sight of the City Itself. They were appalled by what they heard Of her rites and temples, the terrible offerings To impossible gods, the sacrificial flames At times consuming even the priests In gowns of fire. Later Virgil apotheosized Her as The New Town built by Phoenician pirates But that was after it all happened as It was all ordained. By then Hannibal was dead, Dido a myth, the city flattened and ploughed And rebuilt after a hundred years, still a beautiful harbor Ringed by the Atlas mountains, revived as a merchant’s paradise, Proud of her silver coins with elephants stamped on them, Still facing the perfect enemy, the perfect sea. four poems 2 What They Thought of It The trap-door in its belly was seamless Invisible at a hundred feet The men inside as snug as submariners, Napping beside a rope coiled Like an umbilicus to lower them, Attuned to a simple ancient sonar, Waiting for the ping or tap freeing them Or the smell of smoke, a little at first And then a lot, telling them they were doomed. Children loved its massive oak hooves Carpenters admired its oaken sturdiness A sculptor marveled at the ears and tail A philosopher searched for an axiom; The aesthetes were appalled, right for once For the wrong reason. Matrons Fanned themselves and shrugged, glad They had missed the nastiness earlier that day. The politicians saw both sides of the question; And as the sun set the giant gift almost Seemed part of a landscape, a familiar monument Along a shoreline, close to the walls of a great city. As they dragged it through the bronze gates One wine drinker slapped another on the back. Lawrence Dugan 3 The Empty Landscape For centuries those paintings were crowded With saints, soldiers, prophets, Mother and Child. Then they were empty and dark, beautiful Landscapes of a Holland the Dutch painters Had never seen before, filled with sand dunes Rising in the center of the canvas, Black clouds over a wave-crested sea, a ship Leaning into the wind but manned by no one We can see, its pilot invisible in the landscape, A Dutch world barren of religion, free From the old narrative of the Holy Family escaping to Egypt an hour Ahead of Herod’s posse, a solitary Angel leading the way to the pyramids; Free from the crowd at the foot of the cross, The lamentation of angels, the Mother’s Sorrow. Now there is a dark windy day Standing on a dune facing the North sea Swelling under an empty black sky. The fall And rise of many in the House of Israel Is far in the past, the wind-tossed dune grass Looks rooted in the barren hilly sand. four poems 4 ...