Gray Suit Research Articles

Образ двойника в повестях Вас. Андреева «Серый костюм» (1929) и Е. Долгопят «Чужая жизнь» (2012): к вопросу о текстовой омонимии

The paper compares the novels “The Grey Suit” (1929) by Vasily Andreev and “Someone Else’s Life” (2012) by Elena Dolgopyat. Not only does this comparison enable exploring textual homonymy, a term introduced by Tomas Venclova to refer to the similarity of texts with distinct internal semiotic structures, but it also highlights the resemblance between the literary periods of the 1920s and 2020s. The works addressing the theme of duality were created with a time gap of almost a hundred years. The convergence of post-revolutionary literature and post-Soviet literature gives rise to a striking parallelism, as their texts harmoniously rhyme and weave together, forming a distinct fabric of literary context. The theme of duality, the un-solvable contradiction of human nature, and the subsequent transformation of this theme serve to establish a closer connection between the works of Andreev and Dolgopyat. The twin models serve as evident and prevalent frameworks of cultural self-awareness during various stages of its evolution. The paper indicates that Andreev and Dolgopyat are representative of the epochs characterized by literary collapse and transition. Through their works, the writers express their thoughts on both the duality of their contemporary reality and the universal concept of duality. Consequently, the paper presents evidence that Andreev’s narrative, which was “given back” to the reader in 1989 but has received minimal analysis, enriches the body of texts exploring the “Yesenin myth” and the concept of duality.

A Meditation on Loss

A Meditation on Loss

A Study on the Color Coordination of Men’s Suits According to Color and Tone

Men’s suits have the same color and fabric as their tops and bottoms and have simple designs without much decorative details; hence the color representation method made of suit and inner wear is essential for coordinating men’s suits. Thus, this study aims to present a methodology for the representation of sophisticated images by analyzing the color coordination of men’s suits shown in collections. A total of 425 photos of men’s suits in black, gray, navy, and brown colors showcased in 12 collections from the 2016 Fall Season to 2021 Spring Season published at www.vogue.international were analyzed. The 425 men’s suits included 128 black suits, 132 gray suits, 85 navy suits, and 80 brown suits, while there were 37 cases of styling only with suits without inner wear. The study results revealed that, regarding the hue coordination, both black and gray suits showed the most color combination with achromatic colors such as white, gray, or black. In the tone coordination, the black suits showed the most contrasting tone combination with huge differences in value such as white, while the gray suits showed the most similar tone combination with similar value. In the hue coordination, both navy and brown suits showed multiple color combinations with achromatic and monochrome colors. In the tone coordination, they showed numerous contrasting tone arrangements with huge differences in value and similar tone combinations with similar brightness. Overall, the color combination with achromatic color was showcased the most regardless of the suit color. Hence, the color coordination method for men’s suits could be systematically established.

Surfing with shivers: the Gothic Far North Coast in poetry

In 2015 Australian world champion surfer Mick Fanning disappeared behind a wave during a surfing competition, just as a great white shark’s fin rose up out of the water. The frantic fish thrashed about, knocking Fanning off his surfboard, leaving horrified viewers unsure of his fate (Lutz, 2015). The live television footage, broadcast to millions, became an uncanny reminder of one of the most uncomfortable aspects of surf culture: shark attacks. In fiction, memoir and creative nonfiction writing about surfing that acknowledges the underlying threat sharks represent, their presence in the line-up is referred to using euphemisms, ‘men in grey suits’ (Orgias, 2012), their impact is compared to being hit by a car with teeth (Adolph, 2019), and the aftermath of their interactions with humans is either horrific and tragic, or the inspiration for stories of resilience and adaptation (McAloon, 2016). The depiction of sharks in surfing culture is either darkly humorous or steeped in mythology (McCarthy, 2020). It is for these reasons the depictions fit within a Gothic tradition. My previous work on Australian coastal Gothic writing (Hawryluk, 2020) describes a place with underlying Gothic tones. The town of Ballina on the Far North Coast of New South Wales is one such place, becoming known internationally for a spate of shark attacks between 2015-2016 (McVeigh, 2016). This paper adds to existing Australian coastal Gothic writing and research focused on surf culture and depictions of interactions between surfers and sharks. A suite of my creative nonfiction poetry featured within demonstrates the Gothic elements present in Ballina’s history of shark attacks, interactions, and the way the town and its surfers have responded to its reputation as ‘shark city’ (Smith, 2016).

Through the Mirror of CCP History: Four Perspectives

Perhaps the most oft-quoted part of Xi Jinping's defiant 1st July speech marking the Party's centenary was his warning than any external forces attempting to “bully, oppress or subjugate” China will “dash their heads against the Great Wall of steel built with the flesh and blood of more than 1.4 billion Chinese people.” Foreign news organizations covering the ceremony also noted the “visual trick” of Xi's donning of a grey Mao suit identical to the one worn by the Great Helmsman in the portrait that hangs on Tiananmen, just feet below the rostrum from which Xi delivered his address; others doubted the functional significance of the five identical microphones, ascribing to them a very different significance. Xi's repeated references to the importance of Party history, however, drew far less attention in the Western press, although Xi gravely warned a cheering and flag-waving audience of more than 70,000 that while the CCP's original mission “is easy to define, ensuring that we stay true to this mission is a more difficult task.” By learning from history, we can understand why powers rise and fall. Through the mirror of history, we can find where we currently stand and gain foresight into the future. Looking back on the Party's 100-year history, we can see why we were successful in the past and how we can continue to succeed in the future.Indeed, in the months leading up to the centennial celebration, the Party launched a comprehensive campaign requiring CCP members to study the Party's past closely; A Short History of the Chinese Communist Party was revised and updated, eliminating a previous discussion of the consequences of the Great Leap Forward, which had concluded with the open acknowledgement that “This bitter historical lesson shouldn't be forgotten.” Also expunged was a frank evaluation of the excesses of the Cultural Revolution, which was replaced with an account that restricted its focus to highlighting various industrial, technological and diplomatic advances made over the course of that period, without acknowledging the social and political turmoil that accompanied those developments.

Editor's Column: “I set this matter down … to inform myself”: Steinbeck's Travels with Charley in Search of America as Private Discourse

Editor's Column: “I set this matter down … to inform myself”: Steinbeck's <i>Travels with Charley in Search of America</i> as Private Discourse

Fat Lip

Fat Lip Steph Liberatore (bio) I was still wearing my white linen skirt from my father's funeral when I joined my brother and some of his 11-year-old friends for a game of two-hand touch in our Maryland yard. At 21, I was the oldest and only girl on the field. My middle-aged second cousin, hammered drunk in her grey business suit, jumped up and down like a cheerleader on the sidelines. My mom and sister sat on the front stoop, watching me with Dominic and his friends sprint up and down the field. In the driveway, my father's cherry-red TR6 convertible marked our end zone. His funeral had ended a few hours earlier, and everyone was back at our house now, eating Italian from Santucci's and drinking beer from a keg. It was June 8, 2005. A hot, dry Wednesday afternoon. On the lawn, the boys were sweaty and excited. I was trying to keep up. I had taken my heels off for the game and ran up and down the yard in my bare feet. A few of my cousins and aunts and uncles cheered from the sidelines. Aaron stood on the front steps, near my mom and sister. We'd been seeing each other for the last month at our college. He was meant to meet my family for the first time this weekend. Instead, I called to tell him that my father had been electrocuted while trimming a tree under a power line. Instead, he came for a funeral. ________ The last time I saw my father alive, he was hunched over his cluttered desk at our home in Silver Spring, Maryland, straightening it up for Aaron's visit. We'd just been to the Wheaton Library Book Sale together, where we bought used books for 50 cents to a few dollars, and he'd marveled at my choice of The Worst-Case Scenario Survival Handbook. That night, I sat on the green loveseat in my father's woodpaneled library, trying to tell him about the guy he would soon meet. Aaron was a year older than me and was beginning his master's at Penn State, where we both went to school. He was from Allentown, Pennsylvania, the younger of two boys. If you saw him then, you'd have thought he was a linebacker, a bruiser even. He was 6'0, 225, big in the shoulders. But when I got to know him better, I quickly realized that his outward appearance suggested an altogether different kind of guy than he really was: Aaron was smart and sensitive. He hadn't once been in a fight. And I was amazed that he was interested in me: a skinny redheaded English major with average looks who thought of herself as tough, a [End Page 44] badass even. I didn't know what to say to my father about Aaron though. He'd always been friendly and attentive to my girlfriends—would ask how they were doing when we were away at different colleges and enjoyed talking with them about their studies and how their families were doing. But he less cordial to the few guy friends I'd brought home to meet him. He shook their hands hard and called them "son." And these were just friends. He'd never met a guy I was dating before because there hadn't been many for him to meet. I'd gone to an all-girls Catholic school and dated, if you can call it that, two guys before college, but neither was serious. I talked to them on the phone occasionally and sometimes met them at parties. But that was it. So when my father was about to meet Aaron, someone I thought I might actually get serious with, I felt the need to prepare him. "I think this one might be kind of…well, 'special' I guess would be the word for it, so could you please be…nice?" I said. "Steph," my father said, as he shelved the biography of Winston Churchill he'd bought that night. And then he hesitated, likely thinking about how to parse what...

Frozen Charlotte by Susan de Sola

Reviewed by: Frozen Charlotte by Susan de Sola Midge Goldberg (bio) Susan de Sola, Frozen Charlotte (Able Muse Press, 2019), 126 pp. Susan de Sola writes in a whirl of color and imagination that leads us, surreptitiously, to deeper truths, both light and dark, about our own lives. Her use of rich language, rhyme and meter, and unusual topics makes reading her new collection, Frozen Charlotte, a dance through a unique landscape. The poem "The Tulips" reveals de Sola's delight in and mastery of language. In this blank verse ode, the flowers are brought home from a farmer's market and displayed in a vase on a table. De Sola captures their almost ridiculous beauty, describing them as "great goblets, plush concavities" and "blowsy, lipsticked interlocutors." Even though the flowers are technically dead, no one thinks of them this way at first: "What had this red exuberance / to do with death?" Once all the petals have fallen to the table, she reveals what's left: "Slim green stalks / with small white crowns stand bare. Abstract." De Sola's alliterative lines are a pleasure to the ear and a tribute to her imagination even when looking at the simplest of things: "A Dutch-bobbed slouching flapper of a flower, / so modernist and sleek, a silhouette. / A flower a cartoonist might invent." Many of her poems are metrical, and she sprinkles internal and end rhymes throughout, which adds a song-like quality. "Preserved Things," the first half of "Two-Part Song," is a heterometrical paean with echoes of Hopkins and Whitman: "I sing now of preserved things, of whorls in wood / and table rings; calico corn, gold and red, / like relic teeth in an ancient head." While the items are presented ultimately as "changeless, / outside flow. The answer to a riddle / I wished not to know," the sounds of the lines, as well as the specific examples, are playful and engaging—who doesn't have a jar of pearl onions in the back of the refrigerator and a bag of old peas in the freezer? To this, add things from the fridge, surviving on their arctic ridge,a jar of pearl onions on a shelf,a wishbone drying on a sill—probably it lies there still.Let us add the things that freeze:an ice age of meat and peas. A poem in anapestic dimeter, "Closely Observed Postman," immediately called up a childhood memory for me: Freddy the postman, who always gave me the thick red rubber bands that de Sola refers to in her poem. But the idea that he leaves them dangling from tree branches as a [End Page 290] sign of his very existence is marvelously conveyed in these simple anapestic dimeter ballad stanzas: Each round, openmouthed,elasticized spherespeaks for the postman:Look well, I was here. De Sola's meter isn't always song-like, though. "Bowl of Sea Glass" starts out in headless iambic pentameter, but an inversion in the third line introduces a ragged meter mimicking the action: "The sea batters them, as if a rough sculptor, / and not the conductor of impeccable measures." (I like the poet's joke at her own expense about the less-than-impeccable meter.) She continues with the pentameter, lulling us into the rhythm and the sonnet-like feel of the poem, until we are brought up short by a 15th line of six feet: "The sea lifts, pounds the glass. Insists on randomness." The poem reminds us not to become complacent and think the sea, or the poet, will behave as we expect. De Sola has fun using Cary Grant movies as a way of revealing deeper truths. In "The Light Gray Suit, North by Northwest," her light-hearted tone captures the style of 1940s movies, where men are roughed up but "the suit wears well," and women climb Mt. Rushmore while staying "nyloned all the reel." She gives a humorous nod to the film's need to remain decorous, all while maintaining the iambic pentameter: "Now Eve's in silk paj—CUT!—a scene suppressed!" But she goes beyond the story to gives us a glimpse inside the suit, to the man who, of course...

Wandering in the City: Time, Memory, and Experience in Digital Game Space

Wandering in the City: Time, Memory, and Experience in Digital Game Space

Men in Grey Suits: Shark Activity and Congestion of the Surfing Commons

This study extends recent research on informal property rights at surf breaks by exploring the process through which nature, by establishing conditions conducive (or not) to the presence of sharks, shapes the baseline level of exploitation by surfers of the common-pool resource represented by surf breaks. Since 1980, there have been nine fatal shark attacks off the coast of California, and in all nine cases the great white shark was the offending species. Given this inherent danger, the presence of large sharks mitigates, at least to some degree, the tendency toward the ‘tragedy of the commons’ in the case of surf breaks. Using data on surf break congestion, surf break quality, shark activity, and other key variables from 144 surf breaks in California, empirical results from OLS and ordered probit models presented in this study indicate that surf breaks in California that are associated with the highest levels of shark activity tend to be less congested, perhaps by as much as 28%, than their counterparts that are visited less often by sharks.

Learn lessons from a powerful provost

As a junior undergraduate student, I transferred to a private liberal arts college. When I was sitting in the upper‐class transfer students’ orientation, a young man who introduced himself to me as Charlie said, “See the man at the stage with the grey suit? When he turns around, he's going to be wearing a bow tie.” Well, Charlie was right. I later found out that Dr. Joe always wore bow ties.

When You Walk Over the Earth, and: Speaking of the Wolf: Advice on Word Displacement from a Ukrainian Linguist

When You Walk Over the Earth, and: Speaking of the Wolf: Advice on Word Displacement from a Ukrainian Linguist Katie Farris (bio) When You Walk Over the Earth When you walk overthe earth, it assertsitself: "Here. Here. Here," it says to yourfeet. You must reckonwith the earth, though it enters you less. The sky alwayshas its hand in you,as if you were a puppet, through your ears downyour throat into yourlungs—and with the tips of its fingers there, it caressesevery capillary, every blood cell,until they blush. [End Page 109] Speaking of the Wolf: Advice on Word Displacement from a Ukrainian Linguist Pro voyka pomouka a vouk u chatu. One speaks of the wolf and it runs into the house. You mustn't say THE WOLF;instead, say the gentleman in a gray suit the hunger artist my long-toothed grandma the man-eyed beast You must say WOLF like the word is a pen cil cut in half by the water's level; a thing; unsplit but; existing in two places. According to your eye:a paradox. You mustn't say THE BEAR; instead, say; the world's hairiest man the growler-drinker the botherer of bees our premier wax-collector; Not; THE _____________ but the belly-walker the S-whip the legless fang-puppy [End Page 110] The word resists; must resist— the word is what calls the beast. [End Page 111] Katie Farris KATIE FARRIS is the author of Boysgirls, from Marick Press, and coeditor of Gossip and Metaphysics: Russian Modernist Writers, from Tupelo Press. Her poetry has appeared in the Believer, Verse, Virginia Quarterly Review, and the Massachusetts Review, which awarded her the Anne Halley Poetry Prize last year. Copyright © 2019 University of North Carolina Wilmington

Door to Everything

Door to Everything Frank Montesonti (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution [End Page 122] Galleries know there is a certain type of painting that sells, and every gallery has one or two artists whose work isn’t exciting or edgy but are kept on because it is nice to know there will be enough income to pay the water bill every month. The average buyer doesn’t want five mason jars glued to a steel beam containing all the artist’s body hair collected over the span of four years. Most want something to hang over their new Italian couch or in a blank space in the foyer by the stairs. Claire made these paintings. Still lifes mostly, acrylic or oil, heavy brush strokes and bright colors with an expert play of shadow and light. They had enough artistic flourish to give the proper amount of expressionist feeling, but not so much that despair might leak from the canvas into the comfortable rooms of a buyer’s brownstone. [End Page 123] This, coupled with the fact that her grandfather was a very famous artist, secured her regular shows where her paintings sold quickly. Her grandfather wasn’t just a little famous but a household name whose work demanded millions and hung in the Met. You could find his paintings reproduced in the poster bin in any college bookstore for undergraduates to frame for their dorm-room walls. Little of her grandfather’s wealth, however, trickled down to Claire. Her grandfather had had two wives after Claire’s grandmother, and her father had sold what paintings he had to fund a series of ill-fated archaeological missions. Because of these missions, Claire had grown up in a random assortment of countries—Morocco, Israel, Bolivia, Sri Lanka—never knowing where home was, exactly, and learning to speak with the slight British accent of the international traveler. So though she sold everything she made, she barely managed to make enough money to survive on her art in Manhattan, and when her old building went condo, she was forced to find a new place. She met the Realtor outside a building near Washington Square Park. She liked the Realtor’s name, Spieglenik, liked how her gray suit matched her eyes, how she was bent in unlikely ways like a sculpture that had to work around a huge knot in wood or stone. She liked how she seldom spoke and, when she did, how each word felt like calligraphy. They went upstairs, opened the door, turned on the overhead fluorescent lights. The apartment was a characterless white box. High ceilings and one nice window, but those were the only things remotely special about it. It was small, about five hundred square feet, with one corner blocked off for the bathroom. The only other fixtures were a small stove and a tiny freestanding basin for a sink. It felt more like an art studio than an apartment, exactly what she was looking for. “This apartment meets your requirements with one exception. There is a door on the back wall that leads to a room that is un-in-hab-it-able.” “What makes it uninhabitable?” “It would be easier to show you,” said Spieglenik. The Realtor led Claire to a plain white door on the far wall. When she opened the door, there was nothing on the other side except a six-foot-square platform. Around the platform there was empty space that extended, seemingly forever. The empty space was a mauve color. “What is it?” asked Claire. “The everything behind everything, around everything. That space.” “But what is it made of?” [End Page 124] “That would be the wrong question to ask.” “Can I go out on the platform?” “You may.” Claire walked out on the platform. Looking back, she could see the outline of the door, but around it was just more of the mauve space extending in every direction. Then, two eerie feelings in quick succession—the first was the fear that Spieglenik might close the door on her, and the second was the impression that she was standing on nothing and was sure to fall. Her knees buckled, and...

Michael Gelder: pioneered behavioural therapies in psychotherapy

Michael Gelder (b 1929; q University College Hospital, London, 1953, MA, DM Oxon, FRCP, FRCPsych (Hon), FMedSci, DPM), died from prostate cancer on 30 March 2018. Eminent psychiatrist Michael Gelder...

The Working Man’s Reward: Chicago’s Early Suburbs and the Roots of American Sprawl by Elaine Lewinnek

Reviewed by: The Working Man’s Reward: Chicago’s Early Suburbs and the Roots of American Sprawl by Elaine Lewinnek René Luís Alvarez Elaine Lewinnek, The Working Man’s Reward: Chicago’s Early Suburbs and the Roots of American Sprawl. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014. 239 pp. $45.00. Elaine Lewinnek’s new book is an excellent analysis of suburbs and suburban sprawl in the United States. While these are well-trod subjects within the field of twentieth century urban history, Lewinnek characterizes American suburban sprawl as a mid-to late-nineteenth century phenomenon. She also recasts suburbs not as a northeastern Levittown for men in their grey flannel suits of the 1950s, but as midwestern and on the edges of industrial areas where factory workers and their families lived. In so doing, Lewinnek, an associate professor of American Studies at California State University, Fullerton, has set an ambitious agenda for this project. “Chicagoans imagined suburbs, then created them,” Lewinnek writes in the introduction (5). Imagination by its very nature, however, is an abstraction. Lewinnek fulfills her ambitious agenda by ably demonstrating how the imagined or abstract suburbs became a reality. In exploring the creation of imagined suburbs, Lewinnek attempts to tie together what she identifies as “the diversity of urban growth and the inequality that growth both reflects and reinforces” at “the time when diverse Americans first learned to identify as homeowners.” Chicago proves to be an ideal site for Lewinnek’s examination as it was a city that “proclaimed itself to be a typical American city and, through this claim, eventually affected the rest of the United States” (10). Lewinnek masterfully demonstrates how that occurred across the book’s six chapters, each more intriguing than the last. Lewinnek analysis of Chicago’s real estate market shows how “suburbs were the working man’s reward in several distinct senses.” The first of these senses was a “consumption-oriented reward for work.” Chicago was to be more than a portage point linking the eastern United States to the vast western territories. The city’s very dirt held the potential for hard working men to enter the middle class by owning property in the outskirts of the city. Another sense was that of a “productive space that [workers] hoped to control” in the midst of growing industrial capitalism, a notion that emerged particularly after the Great Fire of 1871. With thousands of people displaced, the city’s elites pushed immigrant workers to the suburbs where they hoped workers would become respectable citizens. Immigrants, however, viewed home ownership as an opportunity to make money through communal lodging by renting to factory workers as borders, a practice that conflicted [End Page 61] with Victorian era ideals of domesticity. Still a third sense of suburbs was that of a racially constructed reward reserved exclusively for whites. Whereas a place like the Town of Lake housed stockyard assembly line workers or Riverside developed exclusively for elites, the Black Belt of Chicago’s South Side emerged as the place where African Americans lived. Neighborhood’s and their boundaries developed as ideals worth defending, and suburbs eventually were contentious spaces over which workers willing used violence to maintain and protect against perceived threats. Two instances in particular warrant Lewinnek’s attention. The first was workingmen’s storming of city hall in 1872 to protest against new fire codes passed in the wake of the Great Fire that required all brick buildings. Protesters objected to what they perceived to be elites telling them how they were to build their homes. The second was the 1919 riots when working class whites and blacks clashed over strict separation of neighborhoods and those that lived there. Lewinnek utilizes seemingly disparate sources to explore these many facets of Chicago and its early suburbs. In addition to newspaper articles and bank and financial records, Lewinnek analyzes novels such as Theodore Dreiser’s Jennie Gerhardt, James Farrell’s Studs Lonigan, Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, and Henry Fullers’s With the Procession. Lewinnek puts works like these in dialogue with other valuable sources. Promotional materials and advertisements by realtors, such as Homer Hoyt’s One Hundred Years of Land Values in Chicago...

Is the International Criminal Court Anti-African?

On March 7, 2014 an African man dressed in a well-tailored, dark grey suit entered the back of a large, unadorned room and sat down. The man seemed overdressed when compared to the more than two do...

Queer Forms and Contacts

Queer Forms and Contacts Sean Metzger (bio) The initial panel invitation asked me to reflect on queer performance and scholarship in my work as a way of addressing José Esteban Muñoz’s call to invest in both performance and queerness as pathways to imagine and rehearse more optimistic and radical futures. To respond to this request, I consider queer forms and contacts. Although I remain uncertain whether I share the principle of hope that queer studies has inherited from Ernst Bloch via Muñoz, I do believe that contradiction produces potentiality. Performance generates ways that we might see and, perhaps, inhabit the world differently. My first book, Chinese Looks, investigates such issues through fashion and costume, and my current monograph, titled The Chinese Atlantic, moves to a different kind of aesthetic production: seascapes. Both projects deal with transnational forms of Chineseness because I analyze present discourses of globalization and their antecedents by attending in terms of both fantasy and materiality to what one might call “Chinese things.” My efforts here register some new horizons of possibility, even if the nodal points I offer only bring into partial view my attempts at intervening in performance, queer theory, and sexuality studies. To consider costuming, dressing, and fashioning as modes of performance is to think about bodies and the ways that clothes help people to move through and shape social worlds. Each of these terms provides different valences to understand how outfits might matter. Often associated with stage and screen, costumes work in tandem with narrative to ground fictional and ritualistic contexts and often connote the festive. Dress signifies the everyday, but it also means to arrange or put into some order. Here, one might think of dressing a shop window or, perhaps more archaically, dressing to the right or left (that is, positioning a man’s package in the left or right side of the pants). Fashion signals capitalism, but it can also be defined as “to give form to.” These overlapping terms provide ways to unpack the significance of garments in general, but they also open a more specific inquiry into questions of representational forms, performance, and phenomenology. One critical modality to which this constellation of terms leads is queer style. I have used queer style to think specifically about normative relations among ostensibly Chinese clothing, image, and performance.1 What happens when a garment seems out of place? How does the use of a sartorial item in a nonnormative manner encourage spectators to consider not only what they see, but also how they see? One of the most conspicuous examples of such a shift is the work of Chinese artist Sui Jianguo, particularly his four-ton metal Mao jacket that occupied the corner of Park Avenue and 70th Street in New York City for several months as part of the Asia Society’s exhibition, “Art and China’s Revolution.” Monumental in scale, the wardrobe piece stood divested of its iconic namesake—a surface without apparent content. What kinds of desire does such a form elicit and represent? The sculpture raises questions about surfaces and their relations to sensuous pleasure and nagging discomfort, individual handiwork and mass production, subjective expression and public perception. My usage of queer style draws on my much larger study of how Chinese objects of dress and adornment (including hair) might alter understandings of race and its performance during periods when US–Chinese relations decisively shift. In Chinese Looks I coin the “skein of race” to name the material historical forces that compel spectators to see, hear, and even feel Chineseness within particular historical contexts: over the course of the long twentieth century, from the Opium Wars [End Page 53] through the Beijing Olympics. Queer style is a subcategory of the skein of race that opens the stakes of thinking about the migrating form and the queer together. For example, photographer Tseng Kwong Chi produced a body of work that offers no immediately apparent relation to sexual desire yet encourages his viewers to contemplate the conditions of possibility for rendering desire visible in the first place. Tseng’s most well-known photographs are self-portraits depicting the artist dressed in a gray suit consisting of a...

ULICA 29: Międzynarodowy Festiwal Teatrów Ulicznych [Street 29: International Festival of Street Theatres] by Teatr KTO

Reviewed by: ULICA 29: Międzynarodowy Festiwal Teatrów Ulicznych [Street 29: International Festival of Street Theatres] by Teatr KTO Jacob Juntunen ULICA 29: MiĘdzynarodowy Festiwal Teatrów Ulicznych [Street 29: International Festival of Street Theatres]. Organized by Teatr KTO, Kraków, Poland. July 7–10, 2016. The haunting image on promotional materials for Kraków’s 29th annual street-theatre festival, ULICA, was a human face with upswept hair covered in flaking white paint except for a red stripe across the eyes and a small red rectangle on the lower lip. Its dark eyes stared directly at the viewer, creating a defiant image of a decaying clown in Poland’s national colors. The theme of this year’s festival was “carnival,” which fit the nightmare-sideshow face, but the red and white also suited the festival’s stated goal of taking stock of Polish street theatre. Despite the participation of twelve theatre groups from abroad, the lineup this year was not as international as in years past. Notably missing were Poland’s Baltic and eastern neighbors, Russia, Belarus, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia. One group from Lviv in western Ukraine represented that border state, but no groups from the more troubled parts of Ukraine performed. The program billed ULICA as “the largest festival of street theatres in Central Europe.” However, the lack of participation from the region underscored the tensions inherent in carnival: the seemingly anarchic avoidance of societal norms, here represented by a takeover of public space, all sponsored, permitted, and controlled by official powers. If ULICA’s carnival were truly an opportunity for political anarchy, national troubles would not have halted the travel of theatres. The relative absence of international participation created an undercurrent connecting ULICA 29 to Polish and European politics. Since the festival is sponsored by national and municipal governments in Poland, the fact that the right-wing, nationalist Prawo i Sprawiedliwość (Law and Order) party is in power might account for a larger percentage of funds going to Polish rather than international troupes. Similarly, Russia’s incursions into Ukraine, saber-rattling toward Poland and the Baltics, and control of Belarus may have diminished troupes’ ability to travel. Regardless, a festival heavily weighted toward Polish theatre highlighted increasing nationalism throughout Europe. Click for larger view View full resolution The cart from Andante. (Photo: Jacob Juntunen.) Despite a reduced international presence, the number of participating theatres actually increased from thirty-two in 2015 to forty-four the following year, including over 200 participants (actors, dancers, musicians) and an estimated 100,000 viewers. Because Kraków has a large market square (the [End Page 656] Rynek) in its Old Town, as well as several nearby smaller squares, viewers could attend both massive outdoor spectacles or happen upon small performances with only a few actors. This year saw the addition of performances in the newly gentrified district of Rynek Podgórski (Podgórski Square), so Kraków’s most popular public spaces were filled for four days with eighty-six free performances. Click for larger view View full resolution A moment near the end of Ślepcy. (Photo: Jacob Juntunen.) Many theatres took advantage of the sanctioned street takeover and did not confine themselves to performances separated from spectators. For example, Teatr KTO’s festival-opening act, Peregrinus, challenged spectators’ space by walking through the crowds without the guide typically used in promenade theatre. Instead, eight characters wore identical oversized, bald, and frowning masks and wheeled hand-luggage behind them as they strode toward spectators who dodged and followed. Dressed in conservative gray or black suits, these Everypersons represented the emptiness of twenty-first-century office work, and could find temporary escape only during a grotesque sexual dance in which men competed for the favor of women. The historical meaning of peregrinus—a free Roman provincial subject who is not a citizen—lent a further sense of displacement, as if these characters were not slaves though apart from the imperial center. This is an apt description of Poland specifically, and Central/Eastern Europe generally. The choreography portrayed a managed workday, not autonomy, similar to the false “freedom” of movement that laborers now possess in the European Union. Another play...

ENLIGHTENED CONVERSATIONS: THE CAREER AND CONTRIBUTIONS OF ANTHONY J. LA VOPA

If you have never had a conversation with Tony La Vopa—and I mean a serious, four-hour conversation, in which topics range from Rousseau to the Final Four to marzipan to Kant—you have missed out on one of academia's great pleasures. Tony is one of intellectual history's most beloved conversationalists: because he knows many things, because he loves to tell stories, because he listens, because he argues. He also, incidentally, has mastered the pithy, but somehow personal, email: he once wrote me, simply “You’re not resting,” and another time: “I’m alarmed about your porcelain addiction.” Those readers who know Tony only from his work on this journal or his published works will know the clarity, deep intelligence, and admirable density of his research and his editing, but may not know much about the conversations that he has sustained and that have sustained him across his career, and haven't caught the impish glint in his eye when he launches into a story about his own current fetishes (photography, gooseberryKüchen), or lightly, invitingly, teases you about your own (according to Tony, mine include “loony men in gray suits”). And so, having had the pleasure of being a friend, coconspirator, and conversation partner of Tony's for several decades now, I have gladly accepted the honor of further acquaintingModern Intellectual History's readership with the career and contributions (so far!) of Anthony J. La Vopa, whose work has done so much to make intellectual history the thriving field it is today.

Book Review: Journalism Unbound: New Approaches to Writing and Reporting, by Mitchell Stephens

Mitchell Stephens Journalism Unbound: New Approaches to Writing and Reporting. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014. 208 pp.In Journalism Unbound, New York University professor and news history guru Mitchell Stephens tells us his all-time favorite lead, written by Ernie Pyle:Someday when peace has returned to this odd I want to come to London again and stand on a certain balcony on a moonlit night and look down upon the peaceful silver curve of the Thames with its dark bridges.And standing there, I want to tell somebody who had never seen how London looked on a certain night in the holiday season of the year 1940.For on that night this old, old city-even though I must bite my tongue in shame for saying it-was the most I have ever seen.It was a night when London was and stabbed with (p. 131)What make those paragraphs stand out? It is the language, Stephens argues, that makes art. The way the war correspondent sets the mood with someday when peace has returned to this odd world . . . the way he shocks us with the beautiful sight bombing of London, a city ringed and stabbed with fire. He loves the rhythm, the music.If journalists today knew their history, Stephens argues, they would learn the lessons of writing well from world-class teachers. Our lack of historical knowledge hurts us in many ways. Too many of us do not have diverse perspectives, penetrating approaches, or engaging styles. We do not often seek deeper truths or wiser understandings. To do something new, Stephens says, we need to learn from the timeless examples of great journalism from centuries past.In particular, the author calls for more risk-taking journalism, edgier, with voice, based in fact but reaching for meaning the way columnists, news analysts, and commentators do.Very well. In the spirit of Journalism Unbound, this review will now shiftgears and head toward the attitude-rich territory Stephens seeks, the place where we spend more time pondering news and less time merely transcribing it (p. 86).Mitch and I go back two decades. We met during the building of the Newseum. Dressed in New York black, looking smart with his cool, bald head and soft, questioning voice, Mitch mined news history as a consultant, wrote exhibit text, helped identify artifacts, and advised the whole project. In the wrinkled blue and gray suits of a California newsroom, looking too young to be running a content team, I shaped the exhibits and edited the words and images as managing editor. Together, we (and many others) co-created the world's first interactive museum of news. …