Machine Gun Fire Research Articles

Cruising Devotion: On Carl Phillips

Cruising Devotion: On Carl Phillips Garth Greenwell (bio) The most beautiful bathroom in America is located at 208 West Thirteenth Street in New York, on the second floor of Manhattan’s LGBT Community Center. In 1989, just nine months before he would die of AIDS-related complications, the artist Keith Haring covered the bathroom’s walls with one of the great works of twentieth-century visual art, a mural entitled Once Upon a Time. In his cartoonishly thick black lines, Haring created a joyously obscene phantasmagoria of unleashed gay male promiscuity: men fucking each other and sucking each other off, but also men with penises for hands and feet and heads, anthropomorphic penises sprouting their own arms and legs, men riding huge cocks like rockets, their arms raised in triumph, a group of four men climbing—or maybe they’re humping it—the long neck of a penis-dinosaur. Male bodies penetrate and are penetrated in possible and impossible ways, to such an extent that it’s often difficult to know where one body ends and another begins. There’s no protection; everyone rides bareback. Men are ejaculated from penises, [End Page 166] parthenogenetic, engendered by jouissance. The mural is often seen as an ebullient celebration of sexual liberation, and of the defiant, resilient, heroic sexual communities that would be decimated by and survive AIDS, and it is. It’s also a celebration of gay male folk art, pornographic bathroom graffiti as dreamed by Picasso and Dalí. But it’s not only a celebration. It’s also a lament, as signaled by its title, equal parts fairy tale and elegy; it’s also a nightmare. The space around Haring’s penises is filled not just with his usual wavy lines signaling motion or vibrating energy, but with drops of semen, which shoot out of cocks maybe a little like machine gun fire (though are those bullets or hearts?), and by gargantuan tadpoles of sperm, at least one of which has a single X for an eye, that stick-figure sign of death; a sign too, surely, of the viral load it bears. The human figures are ecstatic, bacchanalian, enraptured; they’re also, at least some of them, sacrificial, as agonized as any lost soul in Bosch; whether they’re suffering transfiguration or disfigurement, it’s hard to say. A work of joy, yes, and also a work of rage, at the fact of AIDS and at America’s criminal indifference in the face of it, which would ensure, which continues to ensure, the deaths of hundreds of thousands; and also, it has seemed to me, a work of terror in the face of desire itself, which both exalts and deforms us. As one stands in the little room they adorn, the initial shock Haring’s images may cause is replaced by a profound feeling of awe, of being face to face with something bottomless, overwhelming, infinite, something that at once dwarfs us and shows us the immense scale of ourselves. Many gay men I know call the bathroom at the LGBT Center our Sistine Chapel, and that seems to me pretty much right, both in the company it claims for Haring’s genius and in the sense of the sacred I feel there. The terror Haring’s mural captures is a religious terror, I think, its joy a religious joy, by which I mean that they respond to forces that exhaust our reason and master our will. [End Page 167] Over more than three decades and thirteen books of poems, Carl Phillips has been conducting an inquiry into intimacy, especially sexual intimacy, that is as daring, as wild, and as reverent—as unflinching—as the inquiry I read in Haring’s mural. Central to this inquiry has been an analogy drawn repeatedly between what one might call marginalized sexual practices, especially cruising and gay male promiscuity, but also sadomasochism, and religious devotion. This analogy is made in several ways, at least three of which are evident in a famous early poem, “Hymn,” from Pastoral, Phillips’s fourth book. The first mode of analogy is the drawing of what we might call imagistic likenesses, which I think we see in...

The Tender Friendship and the Charm of Perfect Accord: Nabokov and His Father by Gavriel Shapiro Nabokov, Vladimir Olga Voronina and Brian Boyd (review)

REVIEWS 737 Shapiro, Gavriel. The Tender Friendship and the Charm of Perfect Accord: Nabokov and His Father. University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, MI, 2014. xvii + 306 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Appendices. Bibliography. Index. $55.00. Nabokov, Vladimir. Letters to Véra. Edited and translated by Olga Voronina and Brian Boyd. Penguin Classics. Penguin Books, London and New York, 2014. lxi + 798 pp. Illustrations. Chronology. Appendices. Notes. Bibliography. Index. £30.00: $40.00. 2014 saw the publication of two long-anticipated volumes, each focusing on the most intimate and significant relationships in Nabokov’s life. The first, Gavriel Shapiro’s study of V. D. Nabokov’s influence on his son, casts invaluable light on the predominant figure of Nabokov’s formative years, and the second, a collection of newly-published letters from Nabokov to his wife, Véra, offers a rare first-hand account of his day-to-day existence over the course of more than half a century. Perhaps the most enduring image of Nabokov and his father is that of them on a boat attempting to play a makeshift game of chess to the rattle of Bolshevik machine-gun fire as they sailed out of Sebastopol harbour in 1919. Yet, as Shapiro points out, ‘the fundamental and multifaceted role of V. D. Nabokov in the life and works of his illustrious son’ has until now been ‘largely overlooked’ (p. 5). The purpose of his study, therefore, is to draw the focus onto someone who, apart from being a major source of inspiration for his eldest son, was in his own right fascinating and dynamic, a kind of late imperial Russian Renaissance Man. Shapiro’s book is structured around a defined set of topics and sub-topics — jurisprudence; politics; literature; painting, theatre and music; lepidoptera, chess and sports — which enable him to explore the many correspondences, affinities and allusions that emerge either from Nabokov’s writing, or through a careful comparison of character, behaviour and public persona communicated via his essays, commentaries and interviews. To Nabokov scholars, much of this material will be eminently familiar: descriptions of V. D. Nabokov in his various guises — as a jurist, politician and nobleman, avid chess player, boxing enthusiast, eclectic book collector and sponsor of the arts — are scattered throughout Nabokov’s autobiography, Speak, Memory, and further elaborated not least in Brian Boyd’s magisterial biographical work. What is distinct about thisstudy,apartfromthewealthofnewinformationonV.D.Nabokovitprovides (which includes translations of two key essays in the volume’s Appendices), is the way Shapiro teases out the range of references Nabokov made to his father consistently across his work. One such example is Prison Pastimes, V. D.’s account of his three-month incarceration in 1908, which informs Nabokov’s 1938 novel, Invitation to a Beheading, evident in Cincinnatus’s experiences of SEER, 95, 4, OCTOBER 2017 738 solitary confinement, surveillance and the humiliation of infantilization, as well as the novel’s identifiable variant of the Kresty prison library. Through Shapiro’s careful attention — drawing on V. D. Nabokov’s prolific published work as a criminologist, political commentator and critic of the arts, as well as unpublished diaries and notes — what was a partial yet intriguing figure finally steps out of the shadows to assume fully three dimensions. For example, whilst his exploits as a political campaigner and defender of civil rights are well documented, the controversy of his attendance and reporting of the Beilis Trial during 1913 is revealing of the risks he took to declare his abhorrence of antisemitism, something that his son not only shared but which also made him a target for attack by the Russian right wing in émigré Berlin. It was a theme that recurs throughout Nabokov’s fiction, from The Defense (1929) to the postHolocaust story, ‘A Conversation Piece’ (1945), culminating in his portrayal of Pnin’s lost love, Mira Belochkin, who perishes in a Nazi concentration camp. As well as many congruences of opinion and taste between father and son, there were also divergences. For example, whilst both expressed a negative attitude towards Oscar Wilde, it is apparent from Nabokov’s statements on art and artistry that Wilde’s ‘aesthetic precepts’ had a ‘certain impact’ on him, and he...

Early Representations of Wartime Violence in Films, 1914–1930

This article deals with the cinematic representations of warfare violence and with its aestheticization in early films. It argues, in particular, that the patterns and narrative structures of (anti-)war movies were laid out during the First World War. Among the first films establishing those patterns and rules were D.W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation, a film on the American Civil War, and Hearts of the World, showing the war on the western front, produced in 1918. Films such as these offered the main elements that would mark, henceforth, how anti-war movies would portray violence. With the up-coming of sound, moviegoers would be able not only to see, but also to hear what a war sounded like. Lewis Milestone's All Quiet on the Western Front (1930), one of the first sound films, exposed the audiences to a series of (calculated) audio/visual distortions, including explosions, screams, and the monotone sound of machinegun fire.

You Say You Want a Revolution? Records and Rebels 1966–1970: Victoria and Albert Museum, LondonSeptember 10, 2016–February 26, 2017CatalogueYou Say You Want a Revolution? Records and Rebels 1966–1970Edited by Victoria Broakes and Geoffrey MarshLondon: V&A Publishing, 2016.320 pp.; 200 color ills.Cloth $60.00ISBN 9781851778911

You Say You Want a Revolution? Records and Rebels 1966–1970: Victoria and Albert Museum, LondonSeptember 10, 2016–February 26, 2017Catalogue<i>You Say You Want a Revolution? Records and Rebels 1966–1970</i>Edited by Victoria Broakes and Geoffrey MarshLondon: V&amp;A Publishing, 2016.320 pp.; 200 color ills.Cloth $60.00ISBN 9781851778911

Interview with Director Richard Beecham

Richard Beecham's theater includes eclectic credits from Dancing at Lughnasa, In Praise of Love, Humble Boy (Royal & Derngate, Northampton), Red Light Winter, In a Garden, Henry IVPart I (Theatre Royal, Bath), as well as various productions at Salisbury Playhouse, Northcott Theatre Exeter, and the Octagon Theatre, Bolton. Beecham also curates large cultural events such as the National Commemorative Event for Holocaust Memorial Day at Newcastle Theatre Royal. I sat down to interview him just prior to the March 2015 opening of The Crucible Theatre's revival of Arthur Miller's stage version of Playing for Time, with Siân Phillips.David Smith: Am I right in assuming this is your first Miller production?Richard Beecham: That's correct; however I did actually meet him once. I was an undergraduate at Oxford between 1992 and 1995, and in 1995 Arthur Miller was announced as the visiting drama professor. At the time I was a member of the OWLS-the Oxford University Dramatic Society-who were very excited with the news, and invited him to a drinks party. This party was to be held the night before my finals exam. I was behind with my revision, so all I remember is shaking his hand. This enormous man, with big bear hands; he gave off this aura, a charisma, but I just had to run, so that was my one experience with the great man.DS: I was wondering how you and the cast were reacting to the text of the play?RB: It is obviously a very challenging subject matter and everyone in the room comes to it with their own personal story I am Jewish, so I have my own personal connections. We have a number of Jewish actors in the cast; a couple of them have very direct stories, and others just have general awareness. So we have immersed ourselves in research. I drove all the cast crackers, insisting they read this, visit this exhibition there, please watch this, etc. Then of course you get into rehearsal. So now you have to think, we have done that, and now we have to study Miller's play. So I made sure all the actors had read Fania's memoir, as it was Miller's one and only source. We then considered what choices Miller had made-what he had taken or left out of the memoir-and asked the question why he may have made those decisions. That was a very interesting exercise, and further complicated by the fact that Miller had originally written it a screenplay. Having studied and watched the screenplay, there are not huge changes, but obviously there are some due to moving from film to theater.DS: Due to the development from screen to the theater, I was wondering how you were actually going to stage the play? Miller was quite adamant that the play should be seen as a "demonstration," there were to be no unnecessary "adornments."RB: In my opinion every word the playwright writes, whether in the text, stage direction, or a foreword, it is worth probably its weight in gold. But every director has to try to meet the requirements within the theater in which he is producing it. In this case we have a good match, Crucible has a big epic space, and we have a very big cast. It is not a proscenium arch theater-Miller wouldn't want that-so in terms of staging we have created a very epic, open, stripped-back, dark theater space, which we hope is not literally, but metaphorically evocative of the landscape of the play. We are not trying to recreate Auschwitz on the stage. That would not be possible, and if it were, it would not be desirable. We have also been very careful to avoid cliche, so there is no barbed wire or tiered bunks. Those we have really tried to pare back on, so when we are making any visual statements they are very considered. There are some things we felt we had to include, like the yellow stars, the striped uniforms, the kapos, and so on.DS: Of course sound effects are critical to building the atmosphere; machine gun fire in the middle of an orchestral piece, for example.RB: Exactly, I think that the soundscape of the production does carry a lot of the building of the world, creating another attack on the senses of the audience. …

All My Sons

All My Sons

Wilfred Owen by Guy Cuthbertson

reviews and of the Crack Manifesto (Manifiesto del Crack) by a group of Mexican writers including Pedro Ángel Palou, Eloy Urroz, Ignacio Padilla, Jorge Volpi, and Ricardo Chávez Castañeda. As the subtitle of this book suggests, the Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño (1953– 2003) is the emblematic figure representing the emergence of the contemporary Spanish American novel. Although the essays of this work provide useful biographical and bibliographical information for each author, they are not encyclopedia entries: the contributors have approached their authors from their own unique critical approaches and points of view. The result is a highly readable work that is both informative and stimulating. Readers of this volume will discover that the Spanish American novel is not only alive and well, but that it is in a process of continual renewal and enrichment. Yet the editors also note that the dissemination of works by lesserknown writers in Spanish America is sometimes still limited to their home countries and literary success is still to some degree measured by having one’s works published by prestigious foreign presses. Still, smaller, national presses are publishing works by local writers, and their works are being read. Edward Waters Hood Northern Arizona University Guy Cuthbertson. Wilfred Owen. New Haven, Connecticut. Yale University Press. 2014. isbn 9780300153002 As a young man of twenty-one, Wilfred Owen remained the boy who posed in a family snapshot as a proud soldier with gun in one hand, sword on his belt, military tent nearby, when he wrote: “After all my years of playing soldier, and then of reading history, I have almost a mania to be in the East, to see fighting, and to serve.” Owen died at age twenty-five, a week before the Armistice in 1918, sealing his reputation as one of Britain ’s most endearing poets. He had the ability to be mature beyond his years: he wrote “sophisticated, inventive, courageous, original work.” There was also the Owen of “arrested development ,” a determination to improve and educate himself, to achieve “progress.” His life was short, dying bravely leading his company across the Ors Canal under unrelenting machine-gun fire. His parents received the fatal telegram at noon on November 11. His childhood was solitary, bookish . He had an enquiring and artistic attitude. He was, throughout his short life, very close to his mother. His brother, Harold, remarked, “Wilfred had only one reliable relief from 74 worldliteraturetoday.org Adam Sol Complicity McClelland & Stewart A soothing balm that soon discomforts, Complicity provides everyday reflections on riveting political and social issues. The slender volume forces the reader to face the seeming beauty of violence at the core of human society. Piercing, profound, yet also playful, Adam Sol’s fourth verse collection emphasizes the importance of coming to terms with all sides of our own humanity. Angèle Rawiri The Fury and Cries of Women Sara Hanaburgh, tr. University of Virginia Press Angèle Rawiri’s novel challenges notions of womanhood and feminism through her character Emilienne, who attempts to escape the traditional values she was raised with. She succeeds in graduating from a Parisian university, becomes a women’s liberation leader, and has a professional career. Despite her successes, her family and friends call her womanhood into question. Nota Bene loneliness, the solace which my mother alone could give him. . . . She helped to protect him from growing up.” His lack of a university education left him, he thought, outside literary society. In September 1913 he was in France to teach English at the Berlitz School in Bordeaux. In the spring of 1914 he told his mother he had decided to become a poet. He avoided the war for a while, spending time drawing pictures of wounded soldiers he had seen at a military hospital in Bordeaux, sending them to his younger brother “to educate you to the actualities of the war.” In October 1915 he enlisted in the military, joining the 28th Battalion of the London Regiment (Artists’ Rifles). His experiences provided the background of his poetry. In “Anthem for a Doomed Youth,” he spoke for the many: “What passing-bells for those who die like cattle? / Only the monstrous anger of the guns. / Only...

Election Supervisor, Bosnia

Election Supervisor, Bosnia Susan Rich (bio) I don’t remember the name of the city or who was shooting at whom. Instead, I see the shimmer of the toilet bowl, its pearl-like shine. Eighteen years after the fact, I’m still on the floor trying to curl my shoulders behind white porcelain. A foreign correspondent once told me that bathrooms are the safe houses of war. The tiled walls and windowless interiors create an explosion-free zone; at least, this was his theory. I insert a prayerlike mantra and keep repeating to myself not this way, not here, not in a hotel, not now. My two electoral companions, Tonko and Bornfree, are neither friends nor lovers, and they stay somewhere down the hall from me, where it is silent. In time, my head leaning against the bowl becomes as natural as pressing against a lover. If only room service were available, I might take up residence forever by this tank with its flush valve and floating arm. The gunshots aren’t directed at me, but bullets have minds of their own. For now, the three of us remain huddled up against the toilet, our thoughts focused on gunfire. I begin to weigh safety against stuffed chicken breasts, against puff pastry. I know that no matter what else happens, dinner will be served in the dining room. Finally, hunger trumps fear and pulls me off the floor. The rituals of eating and drinking won’t stop in the wake of minor catastrophe. I retrieve my upper arms from behind the toilet, cross the threshold, and head down the hall, wishing I could take the toilet seat with me as a shield. The maître d’follows the universal rule of maître d’s everywhere: studied nonchalance. He leads us to a table not far from where a cluster of old men sing off key. Tonko’s there, and he grimly informs me they’re singing the anthem of the Ustaše—these are Nazis, the real deal. Brown leather jackets and pointed shoes. I can’t bring myself to look into their faces. On the television screen behind me, President Clinton gives a speech [End Page 50] surrounded by solemn blue suits. Something about nuclear war or nuclear proliferation treaties. I can’t hear him over the Ustaše’s drunken singing. And I wonder if this is what the end of the world will sound like: waiters darting table to table, the beat of machine-gun fire, and this terrible, terrible singing. [End Page 51] Susan Rich Susan Rich is the author of four collections of poetry, most recently Cloud Pharmacy and The Alchemist’s Kitchen. The latter was a finalist for the Foreword Prize and the Washington State Book Award. She has received awards from the Times Literary Supplement of London, Peace Corps Writers, and the Fulbright Foundation. Individual poems appear in the Antioch Review, New England Review, Poetry Ireland Review, and Southern Review. She is coeditor of the anthology The Strangest of Theatres: Poets Crossing Borders. Rich lives and writes in Seattle, Washington. Copyright © 2013 University of Nebraska Press

Alan Seeger: Medievalism as an alternative ideology

The American poet Alan Seeger imagined the First World War as an opportunity to realize medieval values, which were embodied for him in Sir Philip Sidney. Sidney epitomized Seeger's three ideals: ‘Love and Arms and Song’, which contrasted with the materialism and sophistication of modernity. His embrace of ‘Arms’ and the desire for intense, authentic experience led Seeger, who was living in Paris in August 1914, to enlist in the French Foreign Legion, in which he served until his death in combat in July 1916. As an infantryman, Seeger had extensive experience of the Western Front. This concrete experience of the war, of the indignities of life in the trenches and the dominance of technology, contrasted in significant ways with war as constructed in Seeger's medievalist imagination. Seeger, however, reconciled this contradiction by seeing the war as part of the elemental ‘Strife’ of nature. By this means, Seeger avoided the potentially unsettling consequences of confronting the profoundly modern nature of the war. Interpreting the war as a form of ‘Strife’ and as an assertion of medieval values allowed Seeger to imagine himself and his comrades to be living outside the world of industrial capitalist modernity. Seeger shared with others involved in the war this medievalism and the belief that the war offered relief from the values of modernity, even if Seeger's medievalism was more intense, more thoroughgoing, than was common. However, Seeger's death as a result of wounds received from machine gun fire vividly displays the contradiction between his imagination and the reality of industrialized warfare. The example of Seeger thus suggests that the American effort in the First World War was underwritten in part by an ideology through which a modern, industrialized war was embraced in terms derived from the imagined medieval past. Insofar as this is true, medievalism functioned to provide an ideology that constructed, in the terminology of Raymond Williams, an alternative to the industrial capitalist modernity from which the war emerged, an alternative ideology that allowed the war to be imagined differently from what it was, but which posed no substantive challenge to the war's social and economic realities.

Over the Top: ‘A Foul; a Blurry Foul!’

Part of Britain's folk memory of the First World War is of long lines of Tommies resolutely going over the top into a storm of machine gun fire and walking bravely to their deaths; following a piper if Scottish or kicking a football if English. However, rather than eventually becoming a conventional act of bravado, evidence suggests that the ‘football charge’ was limited to a 10-month period between 25 September 1915 and 1 July 1916. The most famous example is that of‘B’ Company of the 8th Battalion of the East Surreys led by Captain Nevill atthe Battle of the Somme. However, it was first performed, and possibly mostsuccessfully used, by the London Irish Rifles at the Battle of Loos on 25September 1915. This article examines what actually happened on the 25September 1915 and explores the underlying rationale of the first ‘football charge’.

Response of red‐cockaded woodpeckers to military training operations

Response of red‐cockaded woodpeckers to military training operations

Bernanos: Polemicist and Prophet of Our World

Bernanos: Polemicist and Prophet of Our World Andrew J. McKenna (bio) In 1931, when he published La Grande Peur des bien-pensants, Georges Bernanos was part of a small group of writers promoting Catholic constitutional monarchy for his country. That strikes us as utterly aberrant for a twentieth-century political program, but we need to recall the devastating effects of the world war in which he participated for four years. It was the worst thing that could happen. Life in the trenches where Bernanos volunteered to serve was filth, disease, poison gas, and unprecedented massacre by artillery and machine gun fire; tactics were regularly misdirected by a highly incompetent military staff. The effect on people’s estimation of established political order was commensurately disheartening. Republican forms of government, popular democracies, began to appear to citizens all across the political spectrum as a recent, failed experiment. By the end of the thirties, four out of five European democracies, excepting France alone on the continent, succumbed to totalitarian regimes. Add Soviet Russia to that number along with a worldwide depression and you see the wave of the future in the darkest imaginable terms. What Bernanos retained from a monarchist outlook was the value that the ancien régime attached to the notion of honor, which [End Page 62] he sometimes wrote with a capital “H.” It is a theme unique to him as a Catholic writer, and one that has a role, I think, in his recasting the Gertrude von Le Fort story as a play, Dialogue des Carmélites, for which Francis Poulenc composed the opera we celebrate here. “L’honneur” has a distinctly French resonance. The time of this writing marks the fiftieth anniversary of the Battle of Algiers, where the French paratroopers marched into the city to quell an anticolonial insurgency. They won the battle but lost the war, in no small measure due to the scandal of systematic torture authorized by the military in a ruthless search for information about the rebels, who did not hesitate to plant bombs in public places where the “Algériens français” regularly gathered. The conduct of the army nonetheless divided public opinion fiercely on the continent—François Mauriac wrote vigorously against it in the Bloc Notes he composed for Le Figaro—as many, right and left, felt that, in the words of that period’s best historian, “la France y perd son honneur.”1 It was the notion of honor, as we shall see, that fueled Bernanos’s criticism of his own Church during the Spanish Civil War; it motivated his early allegiance to the French Resistance headed by Charles de Gaulle, whom he identified very early on as the general saw himself, “chef et symbole de l’Honneur français” during the German occupation of his country.2 Throughout his writings, Bernanos repeatedly denies that he is a “polémiste,” just as he denies that he is a prophet, but he is both, I think, and it is in these roles that we are drawn to the nonfiction writer; that is, for the energy and urgency of his prose style, for its exquisitely modulated alternations of rage, sarcasm, tenderness, and passionate lyricism. This resonates even in the titles of some of his works, Sous le Soleil de Satan, Journal d’un curé de campagne, La Grande Peur des bien pensants, Les Grands Cimetières sous la lune: the words trip off the tongue alliteratively and rhythmically. When not writing novels, Bernanos is a great orator, perhaps France’s last, excepting, of course, Charles de Gaulle, with whom he felt a strong affiliation. We find him writing in the last age of public oratory, an age heroic and [End Page 63] demonic at once in this regard, for hosting Roosevelt and Churchill and de Gaulle himself, and also Hitler and Mussolini, whose mass rallies reinvented political theater of the kind that had not been seen since the French Revolution. And as Dialogues takes place during the more sanguinary events of that period, I will focus on its meaning for Bernanos, for whom it is the hinge pin of European history, holding out great promise and resulting in great tragedy. Bernanos...

The Ghost Soldiers by James Tate

is evoked in tiers of giddy sensory images: "a leaf, a sheaf / of paper, pillow- / case, or heart- / shaped face, / a shriekinghiss, / like winds, like / death, all tangled / there in branches." The short, rapid-fire lines expand in lengthas thespeaker surprises us with her presence, iden tifyingherself as thepoem's maker: 'T called thispoem 'the owl,' / the name that, like a key, locked out thedark / and later let me closemy book and sleep / a winter dream." The poem exquisitely metaphorizes artisticprocess, thedreamlike vision of the owl's arrival suggesting the dazzling, disorienting moment of inspiration thatenables theartwork's creation and brings thepoet a heal ing sense of completion and release. Rita Signorelli-Pappas Princeton, New Jersey JamesT?te. The Ghost Soldiers. New York. Ecco /HarperCollins.2008. 217 pages. $22.95. isbn978-0-06-143694-9 Are these poems? No, I thinknot, though Iusually avoid thequagmire of such determinations. The chal lenge to see if writing presented in paragraphs instead of lines can still be called poetry establishes a for mal tension to work against. James Wright's consummate artistry set the high-water mark for contempo raryprose poetry (see poems such as "The Ice House"); he employed every poetic technique and quality of poetry other than lineation and achieved an unquestionably poetic field of language. James T?te does not explore the form, but seems sat isfied to merely label these brief prose narratives "poems." The jacket blurb from Simic about the anti poetic doesn't help the matter either; it just seems an apology in the form of praise for thedecidedly unpoetic poems in thisbook. Here's a typical passage from "Duct-Tape Celebration": "I had lots of duct tape, but I never used it. I bought more just in case. I thought sure an occasion would arise. I kept looking around. I said to Tracy, 'Would you mind if I covered you induct tape?' 'Justa littlebit on the wrist,' she said. "Thank you,' I said. I felt much better. 'There's no tell ingwhat's going to happen next,' she said. 'What do you mean,' I said. 'A satellite fellon theEpiscopal Church,' she said. 'That's unfortu nate,' I said. 'Was anybody hurt?' 'Mrs. Graves was there. She thinks it was heaven-sent. She was sneaking a cracker at the time,' she said." The book reads better if one just settles for fabulous narratives? that is, narratives in the manner of fables. This is Tate's chief talent in thisbook, his picaresque and quirky plots that somehow manage to reso natewith humor and oblique insight into something human?about half the time. Yet even with this criti cal aesthetic, the book grows tire some emotionally and linguistically. There's too much fancy footwork here, too much glib and tongue- = in-cheek, too much rapid-fire short E sentence structure like the rat-tat-tat E of machine-gun fire for two hun- E dred pages. This reader surrendered E early, but soldiered on for the sake E of writing this review. This book E reads better in very short sessions. E Pick it up for novelty and casual E amusement; read it to fill in your E picture of James Tate's work. Just E don't expect to have a significant E emotional or intellectual experience; E then youTl be pleasantly surprised E the fiveor six timesyou do. E FredDings E UniversityofSouthCarolina E MISCELLANEOUS One Thousand Languages: Living, Endangered, and Lost. Peter K. Aus tin,ed. Berkeley. University ofCalifornia Press. 2008. 288 pages, ill. $29.95. isbn 978-0-520-25560-9 It is surprising that the concept behind One Thousand Languages had not yet spawned a book; it'sa coffee table, general-interest Ethnologue? the Summer Institute of Linguis tics' encyclopedic volume of all the world's languages, which this vol ume quotes but isotherwise unaffili ated with?profiling one thousand of the world's 6,ooo-plus languages. It is a beautiful book, fullof photo graphs, maps, and charts accessibly arranged and explained. The book is written from the perspective of a linguisticanthropol ogist or sociocultural linguist rather than thatof a theoretical linguist or language surveyor,which is a great advantage for itsmarket. Most of...

It Made You Think of Home: The Haunting Journal of Deward Barnes, Canadian Expeditionary Force: 1916-1919 (review)

Reviewed by: It Made You Think of Home: The Haunting Journal of Deward Barnes, Canadian Expeditionary Force: 1916-1919 Glenn Wright (bio) Bruce Cane . It Made You Think of Home: The Haunting Journal of Deward Barnes, Canadian Expeditionary Force: 1916-1919Dundurn. 318. $35.00 Over six hundred thousand Canadian men and women served in the Canadian Expeditionary Force (CEF) during the First World War. It was and remains one of the most important events in world history, as Margaret Macmillan demonstrates in her study of the peace-making process, Paris 1919. For Canada too, the war had a significant impact on the course of our national development, and while less than a handful of our First War veterans remain, the war continues to occupy a prominent place in our consciousness. The 'Canada Remembers' program, sponsored by Veterans Affairs Canada, ensures that the sacrifices and achievements of our veterans are recognized, battlefield tours are popular, and books on the war are published and republished in great numbers. Canadian literature on the First War is extensive - biographies, memoirs, histories of battles and regiments, novels and poetry, and, in recent years, community histories. Throughout the war, soldiers were able to communicate with their families and loved ones by correspondence, but personal diaries and journals were strictly forbidden. Fortunately, a number of soldiers and nursing sisters chose to ignore the regulations and the historical record is better for the risks they took to leave us with first-hand accounts of their experiences. Many diaries were used as the basis for memoirs published soon after the war, while others were tucked away in drawers or trunks, forgotten and unread for several decades. Deward Barnes was born in Toronto in September 1888. He never attended high school and for several years prior to the war, he was employed at National Casket. In February 1916, he answered the call to arms and volunteered with the 180th Battalion, CEF. He arrived in England in November of the same year, was drafted to the 19th Battalion, and moved to France with his unit in April 1917. He missed the battle for Vimy Ridge but, over the course of the next eighteen months, saw his share of the fighting at Hill 70, Passchendaele, and the Allied breakthrough in August 1918. In October 1918, he received a 'blighty' when he was wounded by machine-gun fire. Following weeks of hospitalization and convalescence in England, Barnes arrived home in Toronto in March 1919. He had experienced the gruesome realities of war: he counted friends among the dead and in March 1918, he was selected to take part in the execution of a fellow soldier who had been convicted of desertion. Contrary to regulations, Deward Barnes kept a diary from the day he enlisted until he returned to Toronto in 1919. Like many soldier diarists, he recorded events, both large and small, of military life, but he often reflected on the war and on his own experiences in a way not always found in accounts of this nature. Seven years after the war, he transcribed his diaries in a series of notebooks, added some details, and then put his war story away for posterity. Now, in the capable hands of editor Bruce Cane, Barnes's story of the war is available to a wide audience for the first time. [End Page 371] Wartime diaries and letters are often published with few editorial enhancements, but Cane took a different approach and annotated the diary, providing the reader with the broad context by elaborating on events described by Barnes, filling in details about military life and operations that Barnes took for granted. In doing so, Cane has produced a very interesting account of one man's war, not to detract from the diary itself, but to place it firmly in the milieu in which it was written. This allows the reader fully to appreciate Barnes's experiences as a solider in the CEF. This is an excellent addition to Canadian first-hand accounts of the Great War, and brings us close to the realities of a war that continues to capture our imagination almost ninety years after the guns went silent. [End Page 372...

Lester Breslow: More Than A Half-Century In Public Health

Lester Breslow: More Than A Half-Century In Public Health

Fighting Different Wars: Experience, Memory, and the First World War in Britain (review)

Reviewed by: Fighting Different Wars: Experience, Memory, and the First World War in Britain Lisa M. Budreau Fighting Different Wars: Experience, Memory, and the First World War in Britain. By Janet S. K. Watson. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004. ISBN 0-521-83153-9. Illustrations. Notes. Select bibliography. Index. Pp. xiv, 333. $70.00. Another book on Britain and Great War memory? No, not quite. This revisionist work represents the latest in the Studies in the Social and Cultural History of Modern Warfare series under the editorial leadership of memory historian Jay Winter. In her somewhat provocative study, Janet Watson uses an exhaustive supply of published and unpublished texts (diaries, letters, poetry, public and private narratives) to challenge numerous claims concerning the war experience. Most significantly, she suggests that the disillusionment connected with the First World War was a postwar phenomenon, one gradually produced through the publication and popularity of memoirs and novels after the Armistice. "The war itself was overwhelmingly popular, and the nation came together to a remarkable degree [End Page 584] despite critical differences that reflected the nature of divisions in English society," she suggests (p. 2). This controversial stance is supported by an innovative two-part approach in which the author considers her evidence of wartime accounts as a lived experience separately in the first section, then examines retrospective accounts and postwar writings in the second half. Though primarily a study of gender and class dynamics, the analysis is comparative in several key ways. Watson looks at both women and men side by side, with special attention paid to families where both brothers and sisters were active in the war effort. Then, she examines two groups who brought different attitudes to wartime efforts: those who viewed participation as work and those who saw it as service. People brought a wide variety of attitudes to their efforts during wartime as the meaning of patriotism was constantly redefined. For example, professional soldiers and trained nurses, while patriotic, saw their efforts as work with a view toward career advancement. Munitions workers, by contrast, saw an opportunity for better wages and working conditions. For some, theirs was a job that had to be done while others believed king, honor, and glory were their supreme duty. Perceptions of class position played a crucial role in the way different types of war work were viewed, according to Watson. These views, in turn, were grounded in convictions about the preservation of social order in Britain's wartime class society. Interestingly, Watson concludes that people who had seen their wartime participation in terms of service were most likely to remember it as a story of disillusionment. Some aspects of Watson's argument are bound to provoke. She states, for example, "Without diminishing the terrors of trench bombardment or the total horrifics of mass advance into direct machine gun fire (though this was not fortunately, a frequent occurrence), we must acknowledge and give credence to other portrayals of the war experience which are not uniformly negative" (p. 50). Granted, most conventional histories begin with idealistic volunteers and end with shattered veterans and names on memorials. But, what about perspectives during the war? The author asks us to consider where the shift occurred from valuable contribution of soldiers during the war years toward the attitude of useless sacrifice? Without minimizing the considerable effort that has gone into this study, perhaps the book's greatest contribution to First World War scholarship is its ability to bring such questions of memory to the forefront of traditional military history enquiry. All credit to a work that is freshly researched and can genuinely be said to contribute so significantly to the field. Similarly, I applaud the Journal for its range and diversity by eliciting this new and distinctive historiographical genre for review. Lisa M. Budreau St. Antony’s College, Oxford University Oxford, United Kingdom Copyright © 2005 Society for Military History

Hollywood goes to Korea: Biopic politics and douglas sirk's Battle Hymn (1957)

Despite the lofty status of its director in American film history and genre study, Douglas Sirk's Battle Hymn (1957) has received remarkably little critical attention—a fact that reinforces the mar...

In the Tall Grass

In the Tall Grass

No Way Out

The city, that appeared from a distance to be peaceful and acquiescent, unfurled endlessly beneath Mahmoud's feet. Imprisoned by his confusion, driven by his anxiety, he felt panic slithering through his exhausted limbs. Like an ill tempered and randy bitch, it sniffed at his heels and clung to him like a horrible fever, leaving him trembling and disoriented at the encounter. At night, in the desolate wastes of his sleeplessness, he heard the city groan reluctantly, like a wounded beast at bay. And this cry, desperate and moving, struck him like a cruel blow, full in the chest. The salty tang of the air, gift of the ocean, the coolness of the night sky perhaps they could heal the wounds, the ravages of war. But, inevitably, the sea, and the sky with its stars that seemed so close that he could almost touch them with his hand or lips, slipped away from him, through heedlessness, negligence. I could only wish then that the city would take care, having abandoned her beliefs, to cultivate a less generous faith, a less rigid morality. So staunchly did she trust to her crumbling stones, her soil, her fate, that she did not let herself die more easily, and settle into dust. Each time Mahmoud held firm, binding himself to the city, in the midst of gunfire and the howling sirens of the ambulances. He would tighten his laces and return repeatedly, short of breath and terrified, searching for the seemingly unattainable center, always aware of the panicked pulsing of his blood, the sound of footfalls hounding his own steps. Drowned, dissolved, he would watch the walls explode like panes of glass, the sidewalks rise to meet him in a frantic dance of earth and other debris. Blindly, he felt his way along any walls that were still standing, the still warm corpse of the city, as if searching for a way out. This futile madness which continued without pause to split the city apart, to grind it to powder, drove him at dawn to stop instinctively before one of the many city gates. A hesitation which perhaps could save him. With the madness of desperation he let himself believe that this gate, if indeed it were real, might this time disclose a true and lasting peace. Behind it, he hoped that, as some sort of jealously guarded secret, another city, established in the hinterland might grow, shining with promise and brotherly love. If he could gain entrance, he would be able to rediscover with joy the spring to his step, the smell of the sea, and the fabric of his memories. Transported by another form of madness he might briefly escape from the machinegun fire and the black terror which would eventually again catch up with him and effortlessly engulf him from all sides. Walking there, Mahmoud might at last cast off his obsession with laces, his mania for choosing the strongest, pulling on them until they broke, and even of replacing them sometimes with strands of steel. Unshackled, his stride would be wide, generous and bold. Returned to the everyday peace and quiet of familiar streets, he would wander happily along the piers of his childhood days, cheerfully he would salute the sea and the stars and the war torn city beneath his feet would live again in peaceful and trusting order. The city would embrace him, offering a peaceful harshness that tugs at the heart and brings with it a healthy state of clear-mindedness. And finally, allowing himself to sleep, he would nod off in his hidden city, lovingly moored to its port. As he wheeled about from side to side in the midst of the crashing and crazed rumbling of war, I could only wish that he was able to be at one with his dream, secret and private. Strengthened by her resurrection, the city would rise again from the sea, virginal, indestructible, bathed in blood, and the dull sheen of silt. And this time, without fear or hesitation, she would confront the blinding nakedness of the heavens, and abandon herself to the rhythm of time and respiration. …

Modelling Effectiveness of Machine Gun Fire

Machine gun is an effective infantry weapon which can cause heavy damage to enemy targets, if sited in a tactically favourable position. It can be engaged effectively against both static and moving targets. The paper deals with the determination of target vulnerability under effective machine gun fire considering relevant tactical parameters, eg, target aiming point, trajectory of fire, sweep angle, target frontage, posture, direction of attack, etc.