Guilty Pleasures Research Articles

The guilty pleasures of bigotry: ethnic stereotypes in Trevor Nunn's Merchant of Venice and Dave Chappelle's pixie sketches

ABSTRACTTrevor Nunn's 1999 Royal National Theatre production of The Merchant of Venice and Dave Chappelle's “pixie sketches”, produced in 2005 for Comedy Central USA, addressed the same challenge: how does one present ethnic stereotypes in a way that undermines those stereotypes rather than reinforcing them? The different representational strategies adopted by Nunn and Chappelle illustrate the different conventions that govern the representation of ethnicity in high and popular culture. Nunn downplayed the most stereotypical elements of Merchant and guided viewers towards a clear and obvious moral choice. He updated the setting of the play to Weimar Germany, evoking a strong sense of specific social context and prompting the audience to identify with Shylock as the victim of a toxic culture. Chappelle presented a series of hyperbolic racist caricatures that tempted his audience to make the wrong choice. The pixie sketches both solicit and chastise laughter, potentially making viewers aware of their momentary indulgence in the guilty pleasures of bigotry. In Nunn's Merchant, the antidote to racism is empathy, and the audience is reassured of its moral probity; in Chappelle's pixie sketches, the antidote to racism is critical reflection, and audience members are left wondering whether they really should have laughed at Chappelle being called a “big-lipped bitch”. Reading Merchant through the rough representational logic of the pixie sketches can offer a richer sense of Shakespeare's treatment of ethnic stereotyping than can be found within the conventions of the naturalistic theatre of empathy.

All Laura Palmer’s Children: Twin Peaks and Gendering the Discourse of Influence

All Laura Palmer’s Children:Twin Peaks and Gendering the Discourse of Influence Dana Och (bio) Toward the end of the Antenna roundtable in which Jason Mittell, Amanda Klein, and I discussed the announced return of Twin Peaks (ABC, 1990–1991) for a third season on Showtime, we noted how our varied reactions and fears reflected our memories more than the show itself.1 Mittell mused, “With Twin Peaks, I feel like I am less of a fan of the show itself than the idea of it.”2 In the months after the initial announcement, the breakdown of contract negotiations between David Lynch and Showtime (settled on May 15, [End Page 131] 2015, with Lynch tweeting about the return of the show) helped further distill exactly what fans and critics indicate they value about the series. Much of the online debate centered on whether people would still watch the third season without Lynch directing the episodes, a highly auteurist discussion epitomized best by the campaign involving the original series actors as well as fans musing in text and video form across social media platforms, “Twin Peaks without David Lynch is like …”3 Similar to Ross Garner’s questioning in this section of how and why Twin Peaks is being discursively positioned as “classic” television, I would suggest that the show also plays a telling role in the construction of quality TV as specifically masculine and auteurist. Reviews of Twin Peaks and recent television shows identified as “Twin Peaks–esque,” including the two shows under discussion here—the “guilty pleasure” Pretty Little Liars, henceforth PLL (ABC Family, 2010–), and the “quality” investigative drama The Killing (AMC, 2011–2013; Netflix, 2014–)—reveal how Lynch’s series is currently used to emphasize and legitimate an imagined history to the masculine television form, even though reviewers and critics did not eschew its melodramatic mode upon initial release. In fact, the initial reception of the series and its later critical treatment as cult television (rather than quality television) typically framed it through discussions of auteurism and soap opera.4 The legacy of Twin Peaks has roots in the contemporaneous critical and popular reviews of the series but with a major erasure of the form and pleasures of melodrama. In Andrew Smith’s 1990 review of the pilot, “David Lynch’s Twin Peaks the Ultimate TV Soap Opera,” auteurism was already key to thinking through the show as a playful and subversive “distortion of the soap genre.” Indeed, many reviews from the time talk about the series in terms of its status as a distorted or weird soap opera, which shouldn’t be too surprising given that the show invites this discourse by including the soap opera Invitation to Love within its own diegesis during the first seven episodes.5 However, more recent articles such as James Orbesen’s “How Twin Peaks Shaped the Entire Golden Age of TV” and even Joe Pompeo’s (misleadingly titled) “How Twin Peaks Made Modern Art of the Soap Opera” elide discussions of melodrama and soap operas.6 Not surprisingly, given Lynch’s presence, the critical community has consistently invoked auteurism as one of the most important ways—if not the most [End Page 132] important—to position the series; however, its function has shifted dramatically in terms of the gendering of the televisual medium even since the debut of Twin Peaks. Quality TV as a historical genre is being refined and deployed in the paratexts of recent shows, as evidenced especially with the first seasons of PLL and the US version of The Killing, series that both center on the murder of a female high school student who, like Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee), lived a secret life (Alison DiLaurentis [Sasha Pieterse] and Rosie Larsen [Katie Findlay], respectively). As Twin Peaks is often mentioned by critics in relation to any series that has a murder mystery, especially that of a young woman, at its center or, more vaguely, a sense of oddness, it would seem that both series would have been discussed in relation to the Lynch and Frost series, but this was not the case.7 Rather, the continuing project to masculinize and thus legitimate television is visible in...

Survival of the Strongest

Survival of the Strongest Judith Podell (bio) Burning Down the House Jane Mendelsohn Knopf www.knopfdoubleday.com/book/250775/burning-down-the-house 288 Pages; Print, $18.00 Occupy Wall Street sympathies make it hard for me to romanticize the insanely rich these days, but I’m still willing to be seduced. Thus I approached Burning Down the House, Jane Mendelsohn’s novel about the fall of a New York real estate baron and his unhappy family, with the ambivalence I reserve for guilty pleasures (Vogue, schadenfreude). Are the rich different from you and me? Certainly each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. That I find myself thinking of Donald Trump rather than Anna Karenina or Gatsby these days is pre-existing bias, one that could be set aside by good writing, memorable characters, and the evocation of a fully realized world. After all, money, family, and the interplay of personal world with public are the traditional stuff of which novels are made. The book flap invites the reader to “enter the lavish universe of the Zane family from a wedding in an English manor house to the trans-global world of luxury hotels, while promising the contemporary equivalent of Greek tragedy against a back drop of financial crisis, human trafficking, and financial crisis.” Taken together, the hypedup jacket copy and the title, with its allusions to Agamemnon and Talking Heads, suggest an unstable mix of glitz and gravitas, but it is unfair to hold a writer responsible for marketing decisions, and Mendelsohn, who wrote I was Amelia Earhart (1996) (widely acclaimed, thoroughly engaging), is a lyrical stylist, so I anticipated hours of reading pleasure and a novel I would not be able to put aside until I finished. Burning Down the House gets off to a promising start. In a remote Russian village, a ten-year-old girl is sold into sexual slavery by her unwitting parents, dazzled by the recruiter who speaks their language and holds out the promise of a better life for their daughter, perhaps a job in a restaurant. Within weeks, the girl is living in the back of a spa in a New Jersey strip mall. She is used by men from all walks of life and given drugs by the woman with black hair. A customer who says he loves her gives her extra cash each week. With a few deft sentences, Mendelsohn compresses years of hell and the girl’s eventual escape to New York, where she will reinvent herself and become Neva. “She is stoic like a river. She is sensuous like a river. She does not need people like a river.” Next we are transported via speeding black limousine with tinted windows to an English manor house for Jonathan Zane’s wedding. We’re in the company of his perennially unhappy sister Alex, who for reasons never explained, thinks that it is too late for her to have a life of her own outside the hermetically sealed Zane Zone. Meanwhile, feckless Jonathan, heir apparent and weakest link, has been caught in bed with the nanny of his two young half brothers. This is no excuse to call off a lavish destination wedding, it turns out, but the occasion for hiring a new nanny. A Slavic girl this time. Will Jonathan make a play for Neva, the new nanny, who is “beautiful but not pretty”? No, Jonathan will find other ways to bring disgrace his family. Neva herself is drawn to Steve, the Zane family’s patriarch, but who can blame her? Mendelsohn endows him with the manufactured charisma of an Ayn Rand ubermensch at twilight. “I may be a crony capitalist but that is only because there is nothing left to be,” he tells his adopted daughter, 17-year-old Poppy, who is “brave but not strong.” How arch of Steve. Surely there are other choices (ski bum? philanthropist?). It was at this point that my faith in Mendelsohn started to wobble. I was entering the Valley of the Unreliable Omniscient Narrator, where I could no longer tell the difference between author’s intent and effect. Pathos or bathos? Such a thin line between self...

Camp Modernism Introduction

Camp Modernism Introduction Marsha Bryant (bio) and Douglas Mao (bio) What’s perhaps most remarkable about extant scholarship touching on camp and modernism is that it so rarely focuses explicitly on their intersection. Discussing the postwar fate of the avant-garde in Five Faces of Modernity a few decades ago, Matei Calinescu disparaged camp for cultivating “bad taste—usually the bad taste of yesterday—as a form of superior refinement”; in Epistemology of the Closet some years later, Eve Sedgwick would observe that a “gay male rehabilitation of the sentimental” had “been in progress for close to a century under different names, including that of ‘camp.’”1 More recently, Dennis Denisoff has offered a substantial demonstration of how camp sustained “aestheticism’s political utility into the twentieth century,” while Christopher Nealon has illuminated the “camp messianism” of recent “post-Language” poetry.2 Scholars have also shown how camp’s accoutrements were taken up by protomodernist and modernist figures from Whitman, Wilde, James, and Beerbohm to Pound, Stein, H. D., and Proust.3 And in Modernism/modernity itself, we find Wendy Moffat pairing Forster and Liberace, Pamela Caughie pondering Sandra Bernhard in an analysis of passing, David Boxwell exploring drag performances in British army camps, and Sam See bringing camp and queerness to bear on Darwin and Woolf. Wide-ranging and ravissant as this body of work has been, however, few scholars have devoted substantial attention to camp’s relation to modernism so named.4 In this journal, camp has graced a title only once, in a review of Pamela Robertson’s revelatory Guilty Pleasures: Feminist Camp from Mae West to Madonna. Nor does a larger survey of the secondary literature [End Page 1] uncover much. A sweep for couplings of “camp” and “modernism” in the MLA International Bibliography yields but one source that actually places the terms in relation, a 1996 essay by Peter Horne. Perhaps the most pointed recent treatment of modernist camp appears in Nick Salvato’s Uncloseting Drama: American Modernism and Queer Performance (2010), which advocates viewing high modernist closet dramas through the lens of camp as “affectively ambivalent queer parody” (180). Yet even this incitement occupies only a few pages of Salvato’s monograph (180–83).5 In our view, more scholarly attention is due the camp-modernism nexus for a host of reasons. At the level of the particular, we note that the cultural scene we claim as scholars of modernism includes not just the literary icons already named but Josephine Baker, Josef von Sternberg, Cecil Beaton, and Cecil B. DeMille. Our forum accordingly constellates an array of costumes, criticism, little magazines, museums, novels, objects, paintings, performances, photographs, and social networks that speak to some of camp’s many dances with modernism. There are also more general affinities that solicit attention, among which we would mention five. First, there can be neither camp nor modernism without someone’s going over the top. Daniel Albright has memorably defined modernism as a “testing of the limits of aesthetic construction,” an art of extremes; doing camp means overdoing it, pushing the limits of good taste, soliciting a verdict of outrageousness.6 In camp as in modernism, critical evaluation involves distinguishing successful excess from excess that fails, and in both, such judgments often hinge on how gender is constructed or construed. Second, both camp and modernism enjoy complex relationships to popular culture, which scholars have replotted in recent years. Revisiting the vexed figure of “mass culture as woman” (Andreas Huyssen), scholarship in both areas has rightly called into question gendered hierarchies between the individual and the masses, high and low culture, and hard and soft art.7 Juan A. Suárez’s account of “pop modernism,” for example, explodes the old opposition between high modernism and “the promiscuous, pop-oriented avant-gardes” powered by kitsch and consumer culture, including “the popular gay idiom of camp” (Pop Modernism, 2, 193). As David Bergman notes, the claim that camp “exists in tension with popular culture, commercial culture, or consumerist culture” raises issues of power, privilege, and identity that remain generatively contested.8 Similar complications arise when one tries to extricate cultural work from working it—which leads to our third...

Justify Your Vice.

You went into the doctor’s lounge, saw that you were alone, and quickly appropriated one-half of the last chocolate covered doughnut, leaving the remainder and a dried out bagel for the last poor joker of a doctor on the half-a-doughnut diet who wandered in. I know it was you. Being a doctor in a hospital and having recently remaintained your certification via a quality improvement study of your own hand-washing habits, fabricating exactly none of the data, you used a plastic knife and only minimally touched the remaining part of the pastry in question, which I later stuffed into my mouth whole hog and washed down with the last bit of coffee in the urn. I of course did not make more coffee; I’m a busy man and that’s not my job. Surely the surgeons are looking for an excuse not to round or the infectious disease folks will soon be stopping by to push Sisyphus’ rock up the hill of antibiotic choice for lateral neck abscesses. One of them can do it. I do, however, have time to stand around for a bit to facilitate my digestion and to peruse the pictures in the newspaper before I render the lounge bathroom unusable for the next 30 minutes. We all have our guilty pleasures, some openly displayed for all to see, some hidden downstairs under the fluorescents for the inquisitive to discover,1 and some merely housed in the back recesses of the mind. Maybe the occasional demon rum intake, maybe a surreptitious heist of the kids’ painstakingly obtained Halloween candy, maybe things we do not dare mention. The vices of the pediatrician pale in comparison with those of the average rock-souled criminal, or at least I would like to believe, but let us not pretend that we maintain the …

Guilty Pleasures and Cultural Legitimation: Exploring High-Status Reality TV in the Postnetwork Era

Guilty Pleasures and Cultural Legitimation: Exploring High-Status Reality TV in the Postnetwork Era

Globalization, the Internet and Guilty Pleasures in Morocco

This paper explores the ways in which the internet as the engine of globalization contributes to the spread of a global culture by transforming traditional cultural values. Morocco has been at the crossroad of globalising forces for sometimes, yet the cultural values that treat men and women differently remain strong. Using questionnaires and interviews, this research finds that the internet facilitates the breakdown of traditional boundaries that militate against sharing space and mixing with the opposite sex. The internet acts as a medium, which empowers individuals to behave in ways that breach Moroccan social norms, allowing young people to evade traditional barriers to romance by sidestepping cultural taboos without breaking them.

Guilt-Decreasing Marketing Appeals: The Efficacy of Vacation Advertising on Chinese Tourists

ABSTRACTThis study assesses the effectiveness of guilt-decreasing appeals in reducing anticipated guilt regarding a luxury vacation and the maintenance of the happiness associated with a guilty pleasure. An experiment involving two independent groups was conducted on a sample of Chinese tourists. The results show that guilt can be reduced without compromising the benefits of a guilty pleasure. The more successful an advertisement is in depressing anticipated guilt, the more successful it is in enhancing the attitude toward the advertisement and toward the promoted vacation. Implications for destination advertising are suggested.

The bitter taste of payback: the pathologising effect of TV ‘revengendas’

The thirst for vengeance is a timeless subject in popular entertainment. One need only think of Old Testament scripture; Shakespeare's Hamlet; Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill or the TV series Revenge, and we immediately conjure up images of a protagonist striving to seek justice to avenge a heinous wrong committed against them. These texts, and others like it, speak to that which is ingrained in our human spirit about not only holding others responsible for their actions, but also about retaliation as payback. This article seeks to problematise the way the popular revenge narrative effectively constructs the vendetta as a guilty pleasure through which the audience can vicariously gain satisfaction, while at the same time perpetuates law's rhetoric that personal desires for vengeance are to be repressed and denied. In particular, the article will demonstrate the way such popular revenge narratives contribute to the pathologising of human desire for payback.

Michael Scott

Associate Professor Michael Scott is a researcher and lecturer based in the department of Classics and Ancient History at the University of Warwick. He is also President of the Lytham St Annes Classical Association. Prior to his appointment at Warwick, Michael was the Moses and Mary Finley Research Fellow in ancient history at Darwin College, as well as an Affiliated Lecturer in the Faculty of Classics, at Cambridge University.Michael's research and teaching engages with interdisciplinary approaches to the literary, epigraphic and material evidence to investigate ancient Greek and Roman society, particularly focusing on Delphi and Olympia as religious spaces.While Michael has contributed significantly to the field of classics and ancient history by publishing extensively, he has also enjoyed great success in engaging wider audiences with the ancient world. He regularly talks in schools around the country, writes books intended for the popular market as well as articles for national and international newspapers and magazines. Michael's experience in writing and presenting a range of programmes intended for TV and radio audiences has made him a household name. He has written and presented programmes for the National Geographic, History Channel, Nova, and the BBC including Delphi: bellybutton of the ancient world (BBC4); Guilty Pleasures: luxury in the ancient and medieval words (BBC4); Jesus: rise to power (Natural Geographic); Ancient Discoveries (History Channel); Who were the Greeks? (BBC2); The Mystery of the X Tombs (BBC2/Nova); The Greatest Show on Earth (BBC4, in conjunction with the Open University). He has also presented a radio series for BBC Radio 4, Spin the Globe. Michael's most recent programme, Roman Britain from the Air, was aired on ITV in December 2014.In this interview, I talk to him about his engagement with other disciplines within the humanities, his forthcoming book project, and his experiences writing and presenting TV and radio documentaries.

Conference Report

Abstract From Downton to Zombies: The guilty pleasures of contemporary television, University of Ulster, Belfast, 27–28 June 2014

Watching “bad” television: Ironic consumption, camp, and guilty pleasures

This research examines how people watch “bad” television–television programs that the viewers themselves label as “trash,” “stupid,” and “awful.” Such viewers experience a normative contradiction; while they have created or embraced a symbolic boundary between “good” and “bad” television, they find themselves transgressing that boundary by consuming and, in some cases, enjoying the shows that they condemn. By conducting 40 in-depth interviews, this research identifies the strategies used by television viewers to deal with this normative contradiction. Beyond “traditional viewing,” we show how viewers employ “ironic consumption,” a “camp sensibility,” and frame their viewing as a “guilty pleasure” to consume “bad” television.

Thinking before sinning: reasoning processes in hedonic consumption.

Whereas hedonic consumption is often labeled as impulsive, findings from self-licensing research suggest that people sometimes rely on reasons to justify hedonic consumption. Although the concept of self-licensing assumes the involvement of reasoning processes, this has not been demonstrated explicitly. Two studies investigated whether people indeed rely on reasons to allow themselves a guilty pleasure. Participants were exposed to a food temptation after which passive and active reasoning was assessed by asking participants to indicate the justifications that applied to them for indulging in that temptation (Study 1) or having them construe reasons to consume the hedonic product (Study 2). Regression analyses indicated that higher levels of temptation predicted the number of reasons employed and construed to justify consumption. By providing evidence for the involvement of reasoning processes, these findings support the assumption of self-licensing theory that temptations not only exert their influence by making us more impulsive, but can also facilitate gratification by triggering deliberative reasoning processes.

Guilty knowledge, guilty pleasure: the dirty art of poetry

AcknowledgmentsAgainst AestheticsThe Unbearable Rightness of CriticismVerse Chronicle: Shock and AweVerse Chronicle: You Betcha!The Sovereign Ghost of Wallace StevensEliot in InkLarkin's ToadsVerse Chronicle: From Stinko to DevoVerse Chronicle: Trampling Out the VintageFrost's Notebooks: A Disaster RevisitedHeaney's ChainHeaney's GhostsVerse Chronicle: Weird ScienceVerse Chronicle: Blah Blah BlahWorld War II Poetry, ReloadedFrank O'Hara's Shopping BagThe Village of Louise Gl ckVerse Chronicle: Civil WarsVerse Chronicle: Guys and DoveNobody's Perfect: The Letters of Elizabeth Bishop and Robert LowellElizabeth Bishop at the New YorkerElizabeth Bishop at Summer CampA Critic's NotebookA List of Don'tsPermissionsBooks Under ReviewIndex of Authors Reviewed

Sophie discovers Amerika: German-speaking women write the New World

In a 1798 novel by Sophie von La Roche, a European woman swims across a cold North American lake seeking help from the local indigenous tribe to deliver a baby. In a 2008 San Francisco travel guide, Milena Moser, the self-proclaimed Patron Saint of Desperate Swiss Housewives, ponders the guilty pleasures of a media-saturated world. Wildly disparate, these two texts reveal the historical arc of a much larger literary constellation: the literature of German-speaking women who interact with the New World. In this volume, cultural historians from around the world investigate this unique literary bridge between two hemispheres, focusing on New-World texts written by female authors from Germany, Austria, or Switzerland. Encompassing a broad range of genres including novels, films, travel literature, poetry, erotica, and even photography, the essays include women's experiences across both American continents. Many of the primary literary texts discussed in this volume are available in the online collections of Sophie: A Digital Library of Works by German-Speaking Women (http://sophie.byu.edu/). Contributors: Christiane Arndt, Karin Baumgartner, Ute Bettray, Ulrike Brisson, Carola Daffner, Denise M. Della Rossa, Linda Dietrick, Silke R. Falkner, Maureen O. Gallagher, Nicole Grewling, Monika Hohbein-Deegen, Gabi Kathofer, Thomas W. Kniesche, Julie Koser, Judith E. Martin, Sarah C. Reed, Christine Rinne, Tom Spencer, Florentine Strzelczyk, David Tingey, Petra Watzke, Chantal Wright. Rob McFarland and Michelle Stott James are both Associate Professors of German at Brigham Young University.

Viewing The Biggest Loser: modes of reception and reflexivity among obese people

This article builds on previous reception research and scholarship on makeover TV through an analysis of obese people's views of The Biggest Loser (TBL). TBL involves obese people competing to lose weight as personal trainers push them through dietary and physical activity regimes. We articulate four themes characterizing responses to TBL: “That's not reality,” “Public ownership and judgment of the fat body,” “The lure of the transformation,” and “A guilty pleasure.” We consider how these themes are reflected in participants' movement between mediated, discursive, transparent, and referential modes of reception. While some were adamant in their rejection of the program, others were ambivalent in accepting and identifying with the desire for weight loss but questioning TBL's aesthetic dimensions and moralizing undertones. We argue that the reflexivity of viewers complicates appraisals of TBL as governing at a distance and offer some alternative readings of the impact and appeal of the program.

Where Are Those Good Ol’ Fashioned Values? Reception Analysis of the Offensive Humor on Family Guy

Over the last ten years, Family Guy has made its mark by pushing the envelope as an equal opportunity offender. For the writers, no subject is too sacred. This study examines how the key demographic for the cartoon (viewers age 18-24), a group that has grown up immersed in political correctness, read the value, meaning and intent of the show. The study uses Q methodology to extract several readings of the show. Four factors emerged from the study. The first factor reads the show as an intelligent critique on society that demystifies stereotypes by bringing its absurdities to light. The second represents a view of the show as low-brow humor aiming to make the viewer uncomfortable, but not as a product of bigotry. The third reads the show as a guilty pleasure, dismissing it as a silly cartoon, while understanding why people are often offended by it. The final factor reflects a perspective that reads the show as perpetuating the wrong message about minorities by turning sensitive issues into a joke. The article further discusses the characteristics of each perspective and the implications for audience studies and the acceptance of offensive speech.

Editor's Note

Editor's Note Jason Howard At the beginning of the year, one of my dear friends, whom I believe to be one of the best readers I know, started a Facebook campaign. Each day she collects a book—driving to purchase one from a bookshop in nearby Owensboro, ordering one online, or culling one from her deceased mother’s collection that remains in storage. “Today’s Accumulated Book,” she labels her posts, and two hundred days into the year, she has amassed a library of varying genres and quality. [End Page 5] On the literary side, there is Thomas Merton’s The Seven Storey Mountain, Jesse Graves’s latest poetry collection Basin Ghosts, even an advance reader’s copy of Marilynne Robinson’s Lila—a book that my friend went to great trouble and online investigation to accumulate. There is the whimsical—100 Favorite Songs for the Ukelele (my friend doesn’t play) and Betty Crocker’s Picture Cook Book (she makes some fine country ham and biscuits). And then there are the guilty pleasures, including Little Gloria…Happy at Last—a biography of Gloria Vanderbilt—and Howard Fast’s The Establishment, which chronicles the marriage trials of a former socialite and a poor mechanic. I look forward to reading my friend’s posts each day, wondering what kind of book she will collect, and I often reflect on how much the volumes mean to her, both individually and collectively. They are family members, treasured companions with which she has formed a relationship. In doing so, she agrees with writer and teacher Richard Hague, who observes in his book Lives of the Poem, “Poems are living things. And because they are living things, the same degree of attentiveness and the same diligence and tolerance and creativity necessary to establishing and maintaining human friendships are necessary to developing a friendship with poetry.” It goes without saying that Hague’s statement, although focused on poetry, also relates to other literary genres. To be a good reader—and certainly a writer—one must have a deep, abiding love of words, of a particularly lyrical phrase, of a moving character and gripping narrative. In this issue, I predict you will find stories, essays, and poems with which you will form a close bond. You will be absorbed by James Braziel’s story “Watersmeet,” A.W. Marshall’s “Foundered,” and Leah Hampton’s “Queen.” You [End Page 6] will marvel at Sonja Livingston’s mastery of form in her lyric essay “Blue Kentucky Girl.” You will be moved by the rhythm and images found in the poetry of Pauletta Hansel, Samantha Lynn Cole, and others included here. You will ponder on the musings of George Ella Lyon and Erica Abrams Locklear in their essays on craft and literary theme, and you will be intrigued by the thoughts of Richard Hague, whose interview is featured in this issue. In his beautiful play Shadowlands, which depicts the tragic love story of British writer C.S. Lewis and American poet Joy Davidman, William Nicholson has Lewis muse, “We read to know we’re not alone.” I leave you now to make some new friends. [End Page 7] Copyright © 2014 Berea College

Varroa mites do not suppress honey bee immunity

A warm slice of toast dripping with honey is one of life's guilty pleasures, but the fate of the humble workers that produce this golden treat hangs in the balance. Ryan Kuster, Humberto Bonicristiani and Olav Rueppell from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, USA, explain that European honey bee populations are in rapid and dramatic decline and that more than just the honey harvest is at stake: ‘Honey bees (Apis mellifera L.) are the most important commercial pollinators worldwide’, they explain. One of the most pernicious threats to honey bee health is the parasitic Varroa destructor mite. The mites not only harm their victims directly, but they also transmit other life-threatening diseases to the unwitting hosts. The team says, ‘Vector-borne diseases and their vectors often share the common interest to attenuate the host's immune response to facilitate feeding and reproduction.’ However, whether the V. destructor mite supresses the honey bee's immune system was unclear. Rueppell and his team embarked on a comprehensive survey of the parasite's impact on honey bees to lay the question to rest (p. 1710).After deliberately infecting some honey bee larvae with one, two, or three or more V. destructor mites, or simulating the wound inflicted by a feeding mite on other larvae, the team then resealed the youngsters back into their cells to develop. Then, over a period of 10 days, they monitored the insect's immune response by measuring the expression of various genes related to the larvae's immune response. They also analysed the infection levels in the larvae of a virus (deformed wing virus) that is transmitted by the mites and is harmful to the developing insects.However, when the team examined the larvae's immune response to the mite infection, they were surprised to see that it was unsuppressed. Only two of the immune response proteins that they monitored showed a drop in expression over the course of the infection: a pattern recognition receptor (PGRP-S2) 10 days after the mites were introduced and the encapsulation response effector (PPOAct) after 5 days. And the team was surprised to see that three immune effector genes (defensin, hymenoptaecin and abaecin) increased their expression levels, as did the intermediary protein, relish, in response to the V. destructor mites. The scientists add that the degree of V. destructor infection (one or more than three mites) did not alter the larvae's immune response, although they say, ‘Our findings do not exclude the possibility that V. destructor parasitism has a delayed effect on adult honey bees’.Next the team investigated how the presence of the mite affected the degree to which the larvae were infected by deformed wing virus, and this time there was a clear correlation: the greater the number of introduced mites in a larva's cell, the higher the level of deformed wing virus. ‘This pattern seems to be established at 72 h post capping [of the cell]’, the team says. In addition, the larvae that had been wounded – to simulate a mite feeding without introducing infection – were more vulnerable to the harmful virus, which they carry naturally and is usually asymptomatic.Summing the data up, the team says, ‘These results suggest that mite feeding activity itself and not immunosuppression may contribute to the synergy between viruses and mites.’ They conclude by offering a possible strategy for combating the mites, saying, ‘Increased expression of honey bee immune genes decreases mite reproductive success, which may be explored to enhance mite control strategies.’

A Taste for Murder: The Curious Case of Crime Fiction

A Taste for Murder: The Curious Case of Crime Fiction