Memorable Moments Research Articles

Memento

Due to the increasing popularity of mobile devices, the usage of lifelogging has dramatically expanded. People collect their daily memorial moments and share with friends on the social network, which is an emerging lifestyle. We see great potential of lifelogging applications along with rapid recent growth of the wearables market, where more sensors are introduced to wearables, i.e., electroencephalogram (EEG) sensors, that can further sense the user’s mental activities, e.g., emotions. In this article, we present the design and implementation of Memento, an emotion-driven lifelogging system on wearables. Memento integrates EEG sensors with smart glasses. Since memorable moments usually coincides with the user’s emotional changes, Memento leverages the knowledge from the brain-computer-interface domain to analyze the EEG signals to infer emotions and automatically launch lifelogging based on that. Towards building Memento on Commercial off-the-shelf wearable devices, we study EEG signals in mobility cases and propose a multiple sensor fusion based approach to estimate signal quality. We present a customized two-phase emotion recognition architecture, considering both the affordability and efficiency of wearable-class devices. We also discuss the optimization framework to automatically choose and configure the suitable lifelogging method (video, audio, or image) by analyzing the environment and system context. Finally, our experimental evaluation shows that Memento is responsive, efficient, and user-friendly on wearables.

Positive Presage: Baseball’s Arrival Signaled Better Days Were Ahead

Positive PresageBaseball’s Arrival Signaled Better Days Were Ahead Greg Ford (bio) Baseball was never my favorite sport growing up; I was a football fan. However, our national pastime has been part of my life, provided many memorable moments, and always served as an omen of better days ahead. I can still remember the first three Major League Baseball games I ever attended. The first came in July 1968, when my sister took myself and our mother to watch the Washington Senators—now the Texas Rangers—host the Chicago White Sox. What little I recall consists of the White Sox hitting homer after homer off Senator pitching, and when I recently found the box score from that contest, I discovered I had a something of a good memory. The truth is the White Sox hit only two homers that evening, one in the first inning by Luis Aparicio and another in the second by Duane Josephson. However, it was enough to propel them to a 4–2 win. The Senators, who went on to have another losing season, got a measure of revenge the following day, downing the boys from the Windy City’s south side 8–4. I became something of a Senators follower after that, which was a hard thing to be, considering the team’s consistent efforts at staying below average. The one time they weren’t was a year later, in 1969, when they finished fourth in the American League East with a record of 86–76. A few years later, they left Washington after two dismal seasons and found a home in Arlington, Texas. It was also in 1969 when I viewed my second live contest. My uncle, his two sons and myself attended a Chicago Cubs-Los Angeles Dodgers contest at Dodger Stadium. The Cubs, who led the National League East at the time, prevailed 4–0. It would just be a short time later that the men from the Windy City’s north side would suffer one of Major League Baseball’s greatest late-season collapses. That occurred when the New York Mets, the miracle team of that season, overtook them, and captured not only the National League’s Eastern Division, [End Page 75] but the pennant and the World Series title as well. Less than a year later, in late May, I got to see those same Mets rally to beat the Houston Astros 4–3 at Shea Stadium. One might ask that if I am not a die-hard baseball fan, then how come I remember those three games so vividly? Well, they were the only ones I attended during that stretch, so it’s pretty easy to recall each of them and what happened. Also, they took place during an innocent stage of my life, when I wasn’t paying much attention to the world around me, and when sports, whether on television or in person, was a place where larger-than-life heroes displayed their talents. If they wore the uniform of your favorite team, all the better. Also, even as a child, I understood the arrival of another baseball season meant the coming of better weather. Don’t knock it. When you’re growing up in the Northeast, winters and the accompanying snow, ice and freezing temperatures can be pretty depressing. In my case, I lived in Connecticut, a state with the stereotype of having great schools, because there isn’t anything else to do. Arguably, there is a lot of truth to that, and during the winter, it can get pretty monotonous, unless one finds a place to go sledding or skiing. Then, starting in March, spring training began. By early April, the New York Yankees and Mets—they were the two teams whose games were available for viewing in my area—would open their respective seasons and begin nearly daily broadcasts of home and away contests. That was especially exciting as a little kid, when, sometimes either team, or even both, would televise afternoon games. It was actually quite a treat to come home from school and watch a game, something I could not do with football or basketball. More importantly, as the baseball season...

Let’s Play Two: The Legend of Mr. Cub, the Life of Ernie Banks by Ron Rapoport

Reviewed by: Let’s Play Two: The Legend of Mr. Cub, the Life of Ernie Banks by Ron Rapoport Kevin A. Johnson and Jennifer J. Asenas Ron Rapoport. Let’s Play Two: The Legend of Mr. Cub, the Life of Ernie Banks. New York: Hachette Books, 2019. 454 pp. Cloth, $28.00. As long time Chicago Cub fans, who have a brick commemorating our wedding anniversary in the Ernie Banks section of the Wrigley Field brick plaza, we were delighted to read Ron Rapoport’s book about the life of Mr. Cub. Of course, Ernie Banks is a Hall of Famer known for his big smile and his famous phrases, “Let’s play two!” and “It’s a beautiful day for a ballgame.” Both were his reminders of the beauty and privilege of playing the game of baseball for a living. These phrases make even more sense after reading Rapoport’s book. The beginning of the book documents Ernie Banks’s humble beginnings, economic hardships, challenging family life, and racism while noting Banks’s aversion to conflict and optimistic outlook on life. Through it all, Banks was hard working, independent in spirit, and conflict averse. Two examples are telling. At sixteen years old, Banks was “hired to mop floors in a hotel, but when the boss began telling him what to do, he quit and went home without collecting his pay. ‘They can keep the money,’ he told his mother. A later job as a bellman in a nearby hotel went more smoothly, perhaps because his superiors left him alone” (27–28). And, Banks certainly wouldn’t confront his mother. She didn’t want him playing football: “‘That game is too rough for you,’ she said. ‘I don’t want you playing anymore.’ Ernie enjoyed football, but he didn’t protest. It was easier to obey his mother than to argue with her. It would not be the last time he would walk away from confrontation” (33). As Mr. Cub grew older, he experienced increasing hardships with his family. One after another, five of Banks’s brothers died at a young age. In 1962, he sought to help his brother Sammy, trying to convince Sammy to join him at his offseason home in California. There Sammy could “get a new job, meet some new people, start over.” Banks even offered to drive to Dallas so that the two could return to California together, but Sammy declined: “Aw, man, I don’t want to go out there.” A few days later, Banks learned his brother had been at a party where he was shot in the head by someone “playing with a gun, stupidly pointing it at people.” Rather than anger or sadness, Banks described the disappointment he felt: “Some people just get stuck in time and places, Banks thought as he flew home for the funeral” (42–43). The book also covers some of Banks’s memorable moments in the Negro League, learning and playing with other baseball greats, like legendary Buck O’Neil. Banks would field ground balls “over and over again, in the withering Kansas City heat” (57) Banks also learned tips for turning double plays. “When [End Page 232] the runner on first base is coming at you” O’Neil explained, “Just look dead at him and start that ball right at his face. He’s going to get out of the way and it’s a perfect strike to first base” (57). Banks had a passion for those practices more than the Monarchs’ games, “‘I always liked digging for the gold rather than the gold,’ he said. ‘Without Buck, I don’t think I would have made the big leagues so quickly” (57). When Jackie Robinson took interest in Mr. Cub, Banks “thought he must be living in a dream.” When asked why Robinson took interest in him, Banks replied, “Why, I don’t know, but he really cared about me . . . The most important thing he told me was to listen. Don’t talk, just listen” (64). Banks learned a lot from Robinson, including “tips about making double plays—get rid of the ball faster, make your throws high enough so the second baseman can make...

Robert Penn Warren's All the King's Men: A Reader's Companion by Jonathan S. Cullick

Reviewed by: Robert Penn Warren's All the King's Men: A Reader's Companion by Jonathan S. Cullick Sean Heuston Robert Penn Warren's All the King's Men: A Reader's Companion, by Jonathan S. Cullick. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2018. 144 pp. $24.95 hardcover. This slim, useful volume should be guaranteed to elicit mixed feelings from readers. Jonathan S. Cullick's deep understanding of Warren's best-known novel shows in his deft explanations of its most salient elements and many of its subtler ones, and he argues convincingly that the 1946 novel has become increasingly relevant in recent years. Readers will definitely benefit from Cullick's expertise as a Warren scholar and his facility for reinterpreting classic texts, skills displayed to great effect in his excellent Making History: The Biographical Narratives of Robert Penn Warren and sure to inform his forthcoming Mockingbird Grows Up: Re-reading Harper Lee Since Watchman. The mixed feelings will likely result from the fact that Cullick does his job so well. He compellingly argues that Warren's tale of political corruption "is the textbook for our time" (xv). This is a good thing for Cullick's book and Warren's novel, but not for the US or much of the world. The book does make some minor missteps: its references to technology (including iPhones, FaceTime, Facebook, Instagram, and Tumblr) will likely age badly, as will the phrase "Spoiler alert" (14). Lee Atwater died in 1991, so encountering his name in a list of "today's celebrity campaign strategists" is jarring (63). Claims about timelessness (several in a chapter titled "The Timelessness of All the King's Men") are vague and ultimately unprovable, and are at odds with Cullick's detailed claims about the novel's relevance vis-à-vis the peculiarities of the Trump era (or whatever one chooses to call it). The epilogue goes into tedious detail describing the route Cullick and his wife followed driving from New York to the cemetery in Vermont where Warren and his second wife Eleanor Clark Warren are buried. The Cullicks each recited a Warren poem and left a copy by Warren's headstone before traveling home to Kentucky. This was no doubt an important, memorable moment for them, and would be for anyone who feels moved by the work of a great writer, but the epilogue (which never mentions [End Page 161] Warren's novel) seems unrelated to the rest of the material. The book would have been better without these glitches, but it is impressively effective even with them. Throughout A Reader's Companion, Cullick balances two imperatives (one presumably assigned and one presumably a matter of conscience): the need to provide insightful criticism appropriate for a reader's guide and the need to point out the ways All The King's Men seems to have anticipated many aspects of America's recent political turns toward demagoguery and a politics of simmering rage. Cullick notes that Willie Stark's "speeches demonstrate what [political scientist and Warren scholar Steven D.] Ealy calls 'redneck resentment not as something incidental to his campaign, but as its emotional core'" (65); mentions Stark leading the crowds at his rallies to chant "Nail 'em up!" (meaning nail the hides of his opponents and cultural elites to a barn door, a chant that will sound somewhat familiar to anyone who has paid attention to American politics in recent years) (66); aptly coins the word "nonspeeches" because Stark tells his crowds he is not going to give a speech and then launches into long, improvisational rants (56); and observes that in politics "power starts with language, power is pursued through language, and, in the end, the deal is closed through language" (55). In part because Cullick repeatedly points out the need for the nation to return to a civil, non-dysfunctional political dialogue and persuasively claims that All the King's Men can help inoculate readers against propaganda and demagoguery ("Citizens must learn how this kind of rhetoric works. We must be able to identify how language is weaponized. We must be able to name and recognize the strategies of persuasion" [xv]) and in part because Cullick draws...

The Memory of the Persian Wars through the Eyes of Aeschylus: Commemorating the Victory of the Power of Democracy

The present paper addresses Aeschylus, and the way he wanted to be remembered by his fellow Athenians and the other Greeks. Having lived from 525/524 until 456/455 BCE, Aeschylus experienced the quick transition of his polis from a small city-state to a leading political and military force to be reckoned with throughout the Greek world. The inscription on his gravestone at Gela, Italy, commemorates his military achievements against the Persians, but makes no mention on his enormous theatrical renown. His plays were so respected by the Athenians that after his death, his were the only tragedies allowed to be restaged in subsequent competitions. And yet Aeschylus, when time came to describe himself and the work of his lifetime, mentioned exclusively his contribution in the fight against the Persian Empire as an Athenian. Triggered by the poet’s narrative on his most memorable moment of his life, the present paper seeks to shed some light on the Athenian political identity, emerged during and soon after the Persian Wars, which not only derived from the newly-established democratic constitution of the late sixth century, but also supported it. Aeschylus’ epigram as well as some particular plays of his (the Persians, the Eumenides, and the Suppliants), narrates the confidence, the solidarity and the feeling of equality the Athenian citizens shared in regards to the defence of freedom of their polis as well as of all Greece, which came above anything else in their life, meaning above noble lineage and wealth. The gravestone of the poet stresses, in other words, how it felt like for an Athenian to live during the emergence of the very first Democracy that progressively supported the claim of Athens to become a ruler in the Aegean, by constructing its naval "Empire", ideologically upon the commemoration of the victory of the Athenian Democracy against the tyranny of Persia at Marathon and Salamis.

In a Good Way: Reflecting on Humour in Indigenous Education

Humour is ubiquitous in Indigenous communities, and often provides some of the most memorable moments in our relationships with one another. In this article, I explore an instance of such humour backfiring in an educational situation, and reflect on whether humour was an appropriate response. After surveying some academic research in the area of humour in the classroom, as well as some of the works of several prominent Indigenous writers and comedians, I reflect on the importance of humour in Indigenous pedagogy. Drawing on this research, and moments from my own practice, I theorize that humour has three core pedagogical impacts. First, it has a humanizing affect, helping us to see one another more clearly, and to appreciate that we all have foibles, and areas of ourselves that require improvement. It is also a culturally relevant pedagogy, having been used for millennia as a mechanism of social order and of upholding community values in Indigenous communities. Finally, humour also has a soothing effect, especially in the face of grappling with difficult concepts and situations, and can ease the tensions that often arise in Indigenous education classrooms. Used judiciously, humour is a powerful tool for decolonization. While I do not presume to offer a prescription for the use of humour in the classroom, in reflecting on my own practice, I am increasingly convinced of its importance in Indigenous pedagogy, and I offer my reflections for the reader’s consideration.

Now and again: Eventful experience as a resource in senior activism

ABSTRACT Shared memories shape relations among social movement participants and their organizations. However, scholars often ignore how experience operates as a means of solidifying attachment in group contexts. In contrast, I argue that activism depends on how participants publicly recall events. In this, I integrate a social memory perspective with the examination of activist movements. Through narrative, participants build engagement by presenting the self-in-history as a model for collective action. I refer to this as eventful experience, utilizing memorable moments as a resource for generating commitment. Movements depend upon members communicating the critical moments of their lives, embedding personal timelines in group culture. The linkage of personal experience and public events is a strategy by which individuals motivate collective action. Drawing on a thirty-month ethnography of a progressive senior citizen activist group in Chicago, I examine how members use an awareness of temporality to build a culture of action. Each movement group uses the past experiences of participants to build their culture – what Jasper refers to as taste in tactics, incorporating past successes, present plans, and imagined futures into a call for direct action.

Lost in the Stacks for Forty-One Years

I recently retired after more than four decades as a librarian. My job title always included “Government Documents” or “Government Information,” although, as I am sure you understand, a large share of my time was dedicated to what is covered by that familiar phrase “other duties as assigned.”But having turned in my keys and name tag gave me a chance to ponder the high (and low) lights of my career. Here are a few of the more memorable moments related to the govdoc biz.

INSAR President's Message

INSAR President's Message

DEVELOPING WRITING MATERIALS FOR THE FIRST GRADE STUDENTS AT SMA NEGERI 1 BINJAI

The objectives of this study are to investigate the relevant English writing materials for the first grade students at SMA Negeri 1 Binjai and to develop the relevant English writing materials through contextualization for the first grade students at SMA Negeri 1 Binjai. This research was conducted based on educational research and development (R&D) through three steps: 1) evaluation and need analysis, 2) course design, and 3) materials validation. The subjects of this study were the first grade students at SMA Negeri 1 Binjai and the English teacher at SMA Negeri 1 Binjai. The instruments in this study were questionnaire and the question sheet. Questionnaire was administered to the students, meanwhile the question sheet was used while interviewing the English teacher. The data which were gathered from the evaluation and need analysis were analyzed in the descriptive analysis, and the result of the expert judgment about the quality of the developed materials used quantitative descriptive analysis. The result of this study was a coursebook of writing materials based on contextualization. The contextualized materials consisted of three chapters which were related to the students’ real experience. The first chapter was my lovely people, the second chapter was my amazing city and the third chapter was the memorable moments in my life. Based on the experts’ judgment result, the score of the developed materials was 90 which belong to excellent category, since the range was (80-100).

Organizational Values: Positive, Ambivalent and Negative Interrelations in Work Organizations

The espousal of organizational values with an expectation of primarily positive consequences in leadership, employee performance and organizational change has often been recognized as overly simplistic, but giving a more complete and critical account of the interrelations between values and behaviour has proven challenging. This article describes a balanced and integrated positive, ambivalent and negative (PAN) approach. The use of this PAN approach is described in the case of a health care organization. Evidence is given from a survey of 96 staff perceptions of their current organizational values, staff evaluations of their colleagues’ demonstration of the organization’s espoused values and content analysis of 35 ‘memorable moments’ regarding what staff had experienced. Using the PAN framework in this case suggests a picture of staff reporting experiences as 50–30–20, respectively, for the PAN approach. The implications of this framework for leadership, employee performance and organizational change are discussed.

Professor Nara Vaeusorn: the Asia Pacific Society of Cardiovascular Interventional Radiology (APSCVIR) gold medal award recipient for 2018

It was such a memorable moment to have a 2-hour talk with Professor Nara Vaeusorn at the west bank of the Chao Phraya River in Bangkok, the number 1 destination of tourists worldwide, in the vicinity of Siriraj Hospital, the largest hospital in Southeast Asia, where he started his legacy as the first radiological interventionist of Thailand in 1979. Initially aimed to be a radiotherapist but was later advised to be a diagnostic radiologist, Professor Nara Vaeusorn, born in 1934, found his great interest in angiology in his last year of residency at John Hopkins Medicine, 12 years after Dr. Seldinger’s technique had opened the new era of angiology and, later on, radiological intervention in 1953 [1]. After having been working in angiology with Professor Rojana Suvanasuthi who first described and introduced Seldinger’s technique in Thailand in 1959 [2] (but it was Dr. Sillawat Arthachinta who literally put this technique into practice for the first time in Thailand in 1963 [3]), he introduced the first successfully performed interventional procedure in Thailand which was embolization of an arteriovenous malformation at the left shoulder in a young female. The nationwide respect and recognition that interventional radiology obtained as a highly-effective, minimally-invasive treatment of bleeding in patients from obstetric-gynecologic, surgery and internal medicine departments in Siriraj Hospital are attributable to not only the success of this novel kind of treatment, but also his outstanding personality, his effective team, his impeccable system and trust-building among physicians.

Parental Perceptions of STEM Enrichment for Young Children

Most pre-kindergarten (pre-K) and kindergarten curricula are challenging and engaging, but few are strongly grounded in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education. In this study, the authors examined parental perception ( N = 55) of the influences of a Saturday STEM enrichment program in one university center on pre-K and kindergarten students and their attitudes toward STEM learning. Using survey data collected from 2013 to 2016, the authors studied parental comments about benefits, drawbacks, and memorable moments they observed from their children’s experiences during the program. These comments were analyzed qualitatively using NVivo, and three main themes were developed. The themes were children’s reactions to STEM learning, meeting the needs of young gifted learners, and learning beyond the classroom. These themes reinforced current literature in the field showing young children’s need for STEM education. Sadly, few opportunities for STEM-focused programming for young children exist.

IT'S A WONDERFUL TIME FOR FAMILY

My dear friends, it is hard to believe that this will be that last edition of 2017. As the year comes to an end, I am filled with nostalgia for the memorable moments that have passed and filled with great optimism for things to come.

Oncology nurse perspectives on the nature and meaning of their positive relationships with seriously ill patients.

42 Background: Inpatient oncology nurses regularly care for patients at or near the end of life. Given increasing attention to risk of compassion fatigue in this setting, we conducted a qualitative study to explore nurses’ perspectives on the nature and meaning of their positive relationships with patients who were seriously ill or dying. Methods: We conducted in-depth interviews with 24 registered nurses (RN)s working on an inpatient medical oncology unit at an academic medical center. We used a semi-structured interview guide to elicit RNs’ descriptions of ‘good’ relationships they had with patients/families with attention to aspects that made these relationships meaningful. Using a framework approach, including an iterative coding process, two team members independently coded all interview data (Kappa = .80) and worked with a multidisciplinary team to identify themes. Results: RNs (95.8% female; 95.8% non-Hispanic white, M age = 32.7 yrs [SD = 10.8 yrs], median yrs as RN = 4.0 [range: 1.5-35.0 yrs]) described specific cases in which they felt they had developed ‘good’ relationships with patients and families. RN descriptions centered on highly intimate and transformative moments in patient/family care. These unique moments occurred in the context of longitudinal nurse-patient relationships in which RNs felt able to 1) facilitate patient/family processing of emotions and disclosure of treatment preferences that they otherwise were not able to process or disclose to other loved ones or clinicians; 2) provide highly-skilled patient-centered care to reduce patient suffering; and/or 3) facilitate patient/family prognostic understanding and peace at the end of life. RNs felt privileged to serve these roles. Memorable transformative moments enriched RNs’ professional identities and inspired their continued work. Conclusions: Inpatient oncology nurse-patient relationships serve distinctive functions for both patient-centered care and RN well being. Results underscore the importance of assisting RNs in managing patient symptoms, forming longitudinal relationships with patients/families, and coping with factors that impede ‘good’ relationships.

Moments of disaster response in the emergency department (ED)

BackgroundWe experience our lives as a series of memorable moments, some good and some bad. Undoubtedly, the experience of participating in disaster response, is likely to stand out as a memorable moment in a nurses' career. This presentation will describe five distinct moments of nursing in the emergency department (ED) during a disaster response. MethodsA Hermeneutic Phenomenological approach informed by van Manen underpins the research process. Thirteen nurses from different countries around the world participated in interviews about their experience of working in the ED during a disaster. Thematic analysis resulted in five moments of disaster response which are common to the collective participant experience. ResultsThe 5 themes emerge as Notification (as a nurse finds out that the ED will be receiving casualties), Waiting (waiting for the patients to arrive to the ED), Patient Arrival (the arrival of the first patients to the ED), Caring for patients (caring for people affected by the disaster) and Reflection (the moment the disaster response comes to an end). ConclusionThis paper provides an in-depth insight into the experience of nursing in the ED during a disaster response which can help generate awareness and inform future disaster preparedness of emergency nurses.

Plucky Little People on Tour: Depictions of Irish Football Fans at Euro 2016

Plucky Little People on Tour: Depictions of Irish Football Fans at Euro 2016

Chen Gao: Dream Catcher.

It is by following her heart that Chen Gao always finds value on the road to pursuing her dreams. Chen completed her BS in Biology at Nankai University in Tianjin, China. She earned her PhD in Molecular Biology at University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) under the supervision of Dr Yibin Wang. Chen has also won the 2011 AHA BCVS (American Heart Association Basic Cardiovascular Scientific Sessions) Young Investigator Travel Award1 and the 2013 ISHR Richard J. Bing Award. As college professors, my parents greatly influenced me by encouraging me to read. They cared not only about my education but the pursuit of my dreams. I was very much inspired by my mother when visiting her lab and watching her students perform experiments in very detailed and rigorous ways. I became interested in learning about biology and animals in high school. A lot changed when I attended Nankai University—I lost my grandmother, to whom I was very close, to lung cancer. This ignited a passion in me to save people from losing their loved ones or losing their own lives. I worked really hard as an undergraduate researcher in a cancer research lab while seeing others having fun. I interviewed at different graduate schools in the United States, but the summer research program at UCLA impressed me and …

Spoiled Distinctions: Aesthetics and the Ordinary in French Modernism. By Hannah Freed-Thall

If Hannah Freed-Thall throws down the gauntlet early on in this study when she insists that ‘the aesthetic is nothing special’ (p. 14), she does so knowing that she has weighty backers in modern and contemporary French thought. Drawing, though never slavishly, on Bourdieu’s critique of the discourse of distinction, Barthes’s work towards the end of his career on ‘the neutral’, and Jacques Rancière’s on ‘the triumph of the quelconque’ (p. 15), Freed-Thall delivers a compelling study of three primary figures: Marcel Proust, Francis Ponge, and Nathalie Sarraute. The chosen authors of fiction and critical theorists alike address and subvert notions of high and low, refined and clichéd, ordinary and sophisticated. The effect of Freed-Thall’s engaging readings of the aesthetic and the ordinary is redistributive, to use Rancière’s terminology. Concretely in the case of Proust’s work, this means attending to the memorable moments in the Recherche when an intensely alive hero articulates grief in the cliché of ‘O sole mio’, and joy in monosyllables (the famous ‘Zut, zut, zut, zut’ of Combray). Freed-Thall thus shows Proust puzzling over, and dissenting from, ideas of prestige. To use her term, ‘distinction-spoiling’ moments abound both within and without the novel. In a powerful reading of Proust’s pastiches based on France’s fake-diamond scandal of 1908, the Lemoine Affair, Freed-Thall identifies a striking emblem of distinction in crisis. She demonstrates how ‘the collective investment of belief that allows the gross overvaluation of certain shiny rocks’ (p. 28) provides a social climate of the kind eagerly explored in the Recherche, where demystification is a much-used tool. Crucially, she draws on Proust’s work for Le Figaro and shows how the ephemeral and the contingent were encompassed within both the forum of the daily newspaper and the orbit of his novel. Moving on to the mid-twentieth century, Freed-Thall presents Ponge as a poet of the profane, in the sense set out by Giorgio Agamben, who writes of a ‘special kind of negligence’ that dispenses with aesthetic sublimation (quoted on p. 94). Ponge describes himself as contending with ‘la forêt épaisse des expressions maladroites’ (quoted on p. 99), and Freed-Thall convincingly draws the poet’s evaluation of the everyday into the structure of her book. Memorably, she loops back to Proust’s diamond-scandal pastiches when analysing Ponge’s poem ‘Le Verre d’eau’. There, the diamantine effect created by looking through a glass of water prompts the poet to observe: ‘Ô pureté tu n’es donc pas si rare’ (quoted on p. 111). If persuasive contexts underpin the assessments of Proust and Ponge, this also marks the handling of the work of Sarraute, which is presented as exemplifying Bourdieu’s sociology of culture. Freed-Thall reads the omnipresent dramas of taste in Sarraute against the backdrop of André Malraux’s Maisons de la culture, where a cultural prescriptivism, working top-down, sought to bind together the nation. This and other contextualizations give renewed vibrancy and bite to Sarraute’s narratives. Through a series of rigorous analyses, then, this work shows how volatilities in the field of distinction and taste lie at the heart of French modernism.

The law on the wall

In the Monty Python film The Life of Brian, one of the most memorable moments is that particular scene in which a Roman soldier corrects Brian for misspelling ‘ROMANI ITE DOMUM’ in graffiti (having written ‘ROMANES EUNT DOMUS’ instead) and, as a punishment, makes him write it a hundred times over the wall surrounding the city. Even if this may be taken just as a funny scene, there are reports of people voicing their discomfort at the politicians of the time by writing on walls, both in Ancient Greece and Rome (although one hopes with better grammar than our friend Brian). As the origins of graffiti date back more than 2,000 years and considering how mainstream it has now become, the small amount of research that has been done on this topic from a copyright perspective really is surprising. Despite there being many works that deal with the topic incidentally, it was about time that someone provided a real taxonomy on the matter—such as the one Iljadica presents in her book.