Millers Point Research Articles

The Persistence of Violence: Colombian Popular Culture by Toby Miller

Reviewed by: The Persistence of Violence: Colombian Popular Culture by Toby Miller Ligia S. Aldana Miller, Toby. The Persistence of Violence: Colombian Popular Culture. Rutgers UP, 2020. 223 pp. Through the analysis of four main themes—football, tourism, journalism, and the environment—Toby Miller and coauthors Alfredo Sabbagh Fajardo, Olga Lucía Sorzano, Anamaría Tamayo-Duque, Marta Milena Barrios, and Jesús Arroyave examine violence and its tenacious presence in Colombia's popular culture, pointing to the country's paradoxical situation: a perceived proclivity towards violence in Latin America's oldest democracy. Miller frames the text following Gabriel García Márquez's series of proposed dualisms regarding the country's reality and aligns each chapter's critical objectives with the writer's assessment of the Colombian worldview. Many scholars both in Colombia and [End Page 314] abroad have attempted and continue to hack at the mammoth task of explaining Colombia's situation, derived from the violence that has come to define the country. Miller's text succeeds in the process. The triumph of the book's critical enterprise is tied to the connections it proposes between various elements that effectively come together to prove its argument: War, and the capitalist system that generates it, rests at the core of Colombia's violent reality. In his introduction, Miller offers an encompassing summary of the role violence has played in Colombia by examining the country's history. To that effect, Miller points to the massacre of the Muisca people in the sixteenth century during Spain's invasion and colonization as the original violent event. Miller then moves to the realm of culture to show how politics are reflected in language, as illustrated in idiomatic expressions that exemplify how rampant corruption is in the country: "Hecha la ley, hecha la trampa" (When you pass a law, you create a loophole) (3), an adage that resurfaces in each chapter explicitly or implicitly. Miller argues for a multidirectional definition of violence and underlines its causes—arriving at war, and the "warfare/welfare mentality" (10)—and proposes that violence needs to be examined from a gendered perspective, given the perverseness of a "male militarism" (12) that breathes war. Chapter One (authored by Miller and Sabbagh Fajardo) is a well-researched examination of the alignment of football with militarism and drug trafficking and their place in the universe of the national popular. The effort in this chapter is to expose football, and by association the creative and recreational industries, as tools of para-states to dominate the masses and keep the State in check. The chapter delves into the period from the 1980s through the '90s, when the strengthening of guerrilla and paramilitary forces—and the consolidation of the narcotraficantes/mafia—emerged as the pillars of parapolitics, coopting football as a vehicle to display power and control on the national and international stages. George Orwell's definition of sports as "war minus the shooting" (47) helps to underline the relationship between violence and imperialism This chapter also addresses hooligan culture and hypermasculinity to show how the football match becomes a stage for displaying masculine hubris in need of affirmation. As a result, there is no place for women in football, except in domestic violence statistics, which sharply increased during the World Cup. Ultimately, the text recognizes the important role football continues to play as a central part of Colombia's popular culture while it struggles to pull away from both real and symbolic violence (67). In Chapter Two (authored by Miller, Sorzano and Tamayo-Duque), tourism is the central theme. A clear choice in the study of the monetization of the Colombian cultural and physical landscape, the possibility of tourism to create a potential space for "an organic understanding between peoples, sans state interference" (68) is denounced by the authors as a central element of the current government's proposed economía naranja and as a driver of inequality. Fittingly, the city of Cartagena, a premier destination in the country and abroad, is the chapter's site of analysis. Miller and coauthors discuss the mechanisms utilized to monetize imperial grandeur and argue that tourism is a combination of the informal economy, romanticized/sexualized national imagery...

Feudalism, Venality, and Revolution: Provincial Assemblies in Late-Old Regime France. By Stephen Miller

Historians of the French Revolution analysing the political struggles of the two years immediately prior to 1789 have to draw heavily on scholarship that has grown hoary with age. Jean Égret’s classic The French Prerevolution, 1787–1788 (trans. by Wesley D. Camp (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977)), for example, first appeared in French in 1962 and was based on research going back to the 1940s. Although the Assemblée des notables of 1787 has recently been receiving deserved reassessment, notably by John Hardman and Vivian Gruder, insufficient attention has been paid to the hierarchy of assemblies instituted by Louis XVI in the provinces in 1787–78 (following a pilot project in 1778–79 in Berry and Haute-Guyenne) as a means of reorganizing how state taxes obtained consent and were distributed. Indeed, for a full account we still rely on Pierre Renouvin’s Les Assemblées provinciales de 1787: origines, développement, résultats, which recently celebrated its centenary (Paris: Picard, 1921). Some readers may be disappointed that Stephen Miller’s important new study on the assemblies largely endorses Renouvin and Égret’s view of the fundamental importance of the bodies; but it does so in ways that complicate and enrich existing accounts, cleverly open up new perspectives, and thereby challenge current orthodoxies. It is not, Miller points out, that these assemblies actually did much — and in fact their slim achievements were few and far between. Rather, the assemblies’ introduction at a moment when the central government was desperate to extract itself from impending bankruptcy shuffled the cards in significant ways that allowed new understandings and presented new horizons of collective action. At province level, the number of commoner deputies was doubled and voting by head (rather than order, or estate) envisaged. But by looking closely at the pyramid of assemblies (from municipality upwards) in three contrasting areas — Berry, the Lyonnais, and Poitou — Miller shows that, when push came to shove, the bulk of the nobility across the country demonstrated solid intransigence in the face of financial and social reforms that damaged their established privileges. This served as both a rude awakening and a political education to commoners seeking reform at all levels, from the peasantry upwards. It set out some of the battlelines for 1789, provided ammunition for those struggles, and removed many inhibitions on further action. Influenced by the neo-Tocquevillian account of the Ancien Régime made popular by François Furet, most current historians rather downplay the power of the Ancien Régime nobility which they see as ruthlessly reduced by the Bourbon state’s long-term centralizing thrust. Miller’s nobility proves to have been far from etiolated and indeed seemed well entrenched within a feudal system that was alive and well, and alert to threats. This a small book — it comes in at not much over two hundred pages — but it packs a big punch. Penetratingly and incisively, Miller obliges historians to think afresh about the causes and circumstances of 1789 and the practices and political stakes involved.

Project Review: SwampScapes

Project Review: <i>SwampScapes</i>

Public housing on ‘The Rocks’: brutalism, heritage and the defence of inhabitance

The affordability, availability and adequacy of housing is a problem which now affects almost every major city in the world, as processes of financialisation and commodification increasingly circumscribe the possibilities for the democratic inhabitance of urban space. In Sydney, there has been a long-running campaign against the eviction of public housing residents in the historically working class, inner city neighbourhoods of Millers Point and The Rocks. This article discusses the community opposition to the New South Wales State Government’s decision in March 2014 to sell off 293 public housing dwellings and relocate residents, and focuses on the resistance by tenants of the famous Sirius building in The Rocks against forced evictions and the sale of the building. Reflecting on the ‘brutalist’ design that characterises the Sirius building, it will be argued that it is important to resist simplistic characterisations of brutalism as a relic of an inhuman modernism. The Sirius building demonstrates the possibilities of designing inner city public housing with the concerns of the elderly, the frail and the marginalised in mind. The campaign to save the Sirius building may be understood as a political defence of the idea of ‘inhabitance’, understood in terms of bodily occupation, the creative appropriation of space and the possibility of utopia. The preservation of such a building can be seen as an egalitarian and utopian demand for what Henri Lefebvre describes as housing for ‘collective luxury’; an entitlement to inhabit the inner city in dignity, from which none should be excluded.

‘Communicide’: The destruction of a vibrant public housing community in inner Sydney through a forced displacement

In 2014, the New South Wales government announced that all of the 465 public housing tenants in Millers Point in inner Sydney, are to be relocated and their homes sold. This article, drawing on 41 semi-structured interviews with tenants who were residents at the time of the announcement, has two main aims. First, to contribute to the debate as to the continuity or otherwise of community in a global city in late modernity by closely examining the sense of community among the public housing tenants in Millers Point at the time of the displacement announcement. The second aim is to examine what I have termed ‘communicide’. I argue that the displacement policy directed at Millers Point public housing tenants can be described as an act of communicide as it destroyed a vibrant community causing tremendous dislocation and stress. After the move, many tenants found themselves deeply isolated.

Editorial: musings on geography and public policy

This issue of Geographical Research provides, I think, yet more evidence that the discipline is both varied and vibrant and that its practitioners make important contributions to debates that inform public policy and social and spatial change.

More‐than‐human planning: the agency of buildings and bodies in the post‐political city

AbstractThrough a comparative study of political activism in Millers Point, Dawes Point, and The Rocks in Sydney from 1971 to 1974 and from 2014 to 2017, this paper examines the more‐than‐human force of bodies and buildings in redemocratising cities. The paper brings theoretical insights from urban assemblage and Deleuzian scholarship into dialogue with post‐political theory. In doing so, it shifts the focus in urban political geography from a concern with diverse social groups to the political potential in more‐than‐human assemblages. Through a re‐reading of Sydney's Green Bans in Millers Point, Dawes Point, and The Rocks, the paper first shows how the withdrawal of labour and stilled building sites comprise informal pathways of planning rejection that centralise social and ecological concerns in decision‐making in urban development. That first case is then contrasted with the contemporary case of privatisation and displacement at the same sites, showing how aged bodies can energise latent deliberative spaces across diverse (if repressed) institutions in liberal democracies. Given the capacities of materials and bodies to produce planning outcomes, the paper conceptualises planning as a more‐than‐human process enhanced by immersion in the experimental materialism of political movements—and this materialism is inherently geographical. The paper concludes with my reflecting on whether the proximity of workers and residents to the materials of the built environment in social movement activism of the 1970s intensified the reach of the event compared with the uncertain struggle over Millers Point today.

‘Super-gentrification’ triumphs: gentrification and the displacement of public housing tenants in Sydney’s inner-city

This study analyses the super-gentrification of Millers Point, an inner-city area in Sydney, Australia, and the displacement of its 465 public housing tenants. Drawing on in-depth interviews with public housing tenants and homeowners, media reports and government media releases, it argues that a key reason for the displacement was the super-gentrification of the area that was hastened dramatically by the Barangaroo development, a massive urban spectacle on the site of the old port adjacent to Millers Point. Unlike the earlier analyses of super-gentrification described by Lees and Butler where an already gentrified area is settled by super wealthy households over a period of time, the shift to super-gentrification status in Millers Point did not involve households moving into an area already gentrified. Rather, the process was premised on the Barangaroo development and the displacement of public housing tenants. The displacement meant that the heritage-listed public housing dwelling were now available for purchase by exceptionally wealthy households.

Intertidal foraminifera in the Spartina patens floral zone of the LaHave Estuary, Canada: A baseline for assessing organic pollution remediation

The LaHave Estuary is polluted with domestic waste delivered via straight pipes. These are to be replaced with septic tanks. The impact of this remediation on the wider biotic community will need to be assessed. Intertidal foraminifera are ideal for mitigation assessment in the LaHave and comparable estuaries, estuary banks supporting small beds of intertidal vegetation. This paper provides a baseline for future comparisons of the total LaHave intertidal benthic foraminiferal assemblage and presents a method applicable to other estuaries. Regarding the LaHave Estuary, any biotic change must be viewed against the backdrop of other pollutants like mercury near the town of Bridgewater.Four 10 cm3 replicates (push cores) were taken at four sites along the estuary's eastern bank: Miller Point Peace Park (MPPP, near Bridgewater), Dayspring, Upper LaHave and East LaHave. A fifth replicate was tested for %C and %N. To constrain altitude, the replicates were taken immediately inland of a zone of the marsh grass Spartina alterniflora, typically among swirl-patterned (cowlicked) S. patens.The washed replicates were picked clean of foraminifera, 3821 being recovered. Recovery comprised only (in rank order of abundance) Entzia macrescens, Trochammina inflata and Miliammina fusca. The number per replicate ranged from 29 (East LaHave) to 816 (MPPP). Scheffé’s test following ANOVA showed the mean MPPP foraminiferal density to be significantly different from the other sites, which acted as a group. The most upstream assemblage was dominated by E. macrescens, the most downstream by M. fusca.There were no significant correlations between %C, %N and the mean foraminiferal densities of species. The mean population densities per 10 cm3 of E. macrescens differed between sites, (a) MPPP, (b) Dayspring and Upper LaHave, and (c) East LaHave forming non-overlapping subsets that will need to be monitored separately. Trochammina inflata mean population densities were distinct only at East LaHave. Miliammina fusca population densities presented a peculiar pattern, MPPP and East LaHave forming one group, and the intervening Dayspring and Upper LaHave sites forming another. The transformed mean proportions per site of E. macrescens and T. inflata were not significantly correlated with %C or %N, but those of M. fusca were positively correlated with both. It may be that high trace metal concentrations near Bridgewater are affecting foraminiferal distributions and abundances. This must be taken into account when using the benthic foraminiferal assemblage to assess the impact of the organic pollution remediation.

Editors' note: Teaching Video NeuroImages: Palsy of conjugate horizontal gaze and face due to isolated abducens nuclear infarction

In reference to “Teaching Video NeuroImages: Palsy of conjugate horizontal gaze and face due to isolated abducens nuclear infarction,” Dr. Miller points out that the title may mislead readers into thinking that both the horizontal gaze palsy and the facial nerve palsy were caused by the abducens nuclear infarction, rather than the ipsilateral facial palsy being caused by damage to the facial nerve fascicles bordering the abducens nucleus. Author Kim agrees with Dr. Miller's concerns and has issued a correction to the title, changing it to “Palsy of conjugate horizontal gaze and face due to a restricted infarction involving the abducens nucleus.” The correction appears on page 942. In reference to “Teaching Video NeuroImages: Palsy of conjugate horizontal gaze and face due to isolated abducens nuclear infarction,” Dr. Miller points out that the title may mislead readers into thinking that both the horizontal gaze palsy and the facial nerve palsy were caused by the abducens nuclear infarction, rather than the ipsilateral facial palsy being caused by damage to the facial nerve fascicles bordering the abducens nucleus.

Violence and Grace: Exceptional Life between Shakespeare and Modernity by Nichole E. Miller

Religion & Literature 192 tion of the human-made commonalities between theatrical and religious narrative, masques, and musical deceptions is rather a cause for cautious celebration” (189). Her reading of The Winter’s Tale, in which she suggests that the potentially deceptive qualities of music are the same qualities that allow it to function as a means of healing, is particularly persuasive. Staging Harmony is admirable both in its historical scope and its meticulous attention to detail. The readings of the individual plays are impressively nuanced. Brokaw is particularly sensitive to the ways in which parody can prove unstable, particularly when music is involved. She frequently reminds the reader that even a mocking send-up of the liturgy, for instance, may recall to some listeners the moving power of the original. Throughout, Brokaw draws on previous scholarship and a wide range of historical materials to cast new light on how early modern audiences might have responded to musical performance in the theater. This book will be of particular value to readers interested in the drama, music, and religious controversies of the 16th century. Erin Minear William & Mary Violence and Grace: Exceptional Life between Shakespeare and Modernity Nichole E. Miller Northwestern University Press, 2014. x + 245 pp. $79.95 cloth, $34.95 paperback. Nichole E. Miller’s Violence and Grace: Exceptional Life between Shakespeare and Modernity is an important recent contribution to a now well-established body of scholarship that stages encounters between early modern drama and twentieth-century political, and especially politico-theological, thought. Moderns including Carl Schmitt, Walter Benjamin, and Ernst Kantorowicz themselves turned to early modern texts to articulate genealogies of their own historical moment and of the problem of political theology, understood variously as an inherent religious dimension of political authority, as a historical and conceptual crisis that arises when theological legitimation of political power no longer appears convincing, or, more broadly, as the analogies, exchanges, and oppositions that at once bind together and pull apart religious and political life. In part as a result of their unorthodox theses and in part because they often seemed to subordinate textual commentary BOOK REVIEWS 193 to argumentation of a different kind, to larger claims about modernity as such, works like Schmitt’s Political Theology, Benjamin’s The Origin of German Tragic Drama, and Kantorowicz’s The King’s Two Bodies have long occupied some middle ground between early modern studies, on the one hand, and theory, on the other. In recent years, however, early modernists such as Julia Reinhard Lupton, Victoria Kahn, Christopher Pye and others have in different ways reclaimed them for their field. As Miller points out, such efforts are always most successful when they seek out and attend to the “productive excess” (3) of encounters between early modern and modern texts: if reading Shakespeare and his contemporaries through the lens of modern politico-theological thought allows us to arrive at unexpected insights about the plays, then early modern texts in turn throw new light on modern thought, illuminating aspects of political theology that the latter may have distorted or left out. Miller’s book identifies one such zone of partial exclusion: she is concerned with “exceptional,”—that is, extra-political—life, with dramatic characters “suspended outside or above what Aristotle defines as the essentially ‘political’ form of life as that of a man among men, a citizen among citizens” (3). According to Aristotle, life apart from political community is either less or more than human, either the life of a beast or that of a god. It belongs either to the outcast who is stripped of citizenship or to the sovereign who transcends the state. Exceptional or bare life is of course already important in Benjamin and later becomes central in Giorgio Agamben’s work. Jacques Derrida, too, engages the Aristotelian distinction between forms of exceptional life, arguing that it ultimately threatens to collapse: the sovereign is always also bestial, and the beast is always also sovereign. According to Derrida, efforts to maintain the distinction between the two rely not least on hierarchies of sexual difference, that is, on figuring the sovereign as masculine and the bestial as feminine. Miller follows this line of thought, aiming in this...

Reading Across Continents, Reading Differences

Reading Across Continents, Reading Differences Ning Yizhong (bio) Reading Thinking Literature Across Continents by Ranjan Ghosh and J. Hillis Miller makes one encounter a lot of "crossings": the crossings effected over the geographical borders, between the East and West; the crossing over boundaries of different thoughts, Eastern and Western, ancient and modern; the crossing over of individuals, here and there, far and near, across continents. Consequently, the reader is led, very willingly, to join the crossing, with his own unique perspective arising from his own background. The two authors of the book adopt different positions, using different approaches to literary study, literary theory, and the teaching of literature. Ghosh's theories of literature are built around what he calls trans(in)fusion: a critical comparativity among a variety of sources and traditions, ideas and appropriations, without forgetting the legitimacy and competence of such literary-hermeneutic-theoretical acts: for instance, western critical theories, the Sanskrit concept of sahitya and Chinese classics such as Lao-tzu and Chuang-tzu. Miller's procedures in literary study are quite different from his. He often "starts from a literary work or some text, including theoretical and philosophical ones" and his aim is to "account inductively, for what some text says and how it says it" (Ghosh and Miller 2016, 9). Miller's commitments to literary study and the teaching of rhetorical reading and the use [End Page 855] of speech act theory are by no means universally accepted in the West (vii). He makes it clear that their book, by juxtaposing essays of two authors of different backgrounds, is devoted to encouraging the debate about what literature is, its ways, and how it should be written about and taught. Mutual understanding can come through such dialogical negotiations, such interactions across continents. It is here on this distinct note of cross-traditional and cross-epistemic negotiation that the present author comes to intervene. As a scholar of Chinese background, steeped in Chinese culture, with a major in English literature, I read contemporary western literary theory and Chinese literary thoughts within a dialogical framework—my own way of thinking across continents. However, my positive engagement with western theories does not discount their occasional incompatibility with Chinese culture and Chinese tradition of thinking. As Miller points out that literature's import differs in different times, places, and societies (Ghosh and Miller 2016, 46), so is the case with literary theories. Talking about literature matters, Miller mentions a series of matters learned people of medieval Europe would speak of, including "the matter of Greece," meaning the Oedipus story that lay behind it. Indeed the Oedipus story, later transformed into the Oedipus Complex with Freudian psychoanalysis, is deeply rooted and weighs much in western minds. "Patricide" as one of the components of the Oedipus story has long become a theme of literature, though its representation takes various forms: some in the classic Oedipal manner, the actual murder, some only as threat and an unfulfilled murder. The ultimate motivation for the patricide, as Miri Kubovy puts it, lies in the development of the hero's consciousness which leads to the revelation of his own identity, and the awareness of his own place in the world in relation to his parents (1988, 369–70). Contrary to the western cultural tradition, patricide is unthinkable in Chinese culture, no matter in what form or whether it is actually fulfilled or just attempted. The dominant Confucian ideology lays the solid foundation of the hierarchy of father-son, emperor-subject relation, with the former in the binary oppositions occupying the unchallenged authoritative position. The long-cherished ethics of filial piety and the practice of obedience to the father strengthens the father image as an absolute idol of the family. The father-son relation of Jia Zheng and his son Jia Baoyu in Dream of the Red Mansions well exemplifies the absolute obedience of the latter. Jia Baoyu does not study conscientiously as his father expects, and [End Page 856] for this he receives a good beating. He does not say or do anything as a revolt, on the spot or in the long time later, without even showing any sign of the awareness of the threat...

The Removal of Millers Point Public Housing Tenants in Inner-Sydney by the New South Wales Government: Narratives of Government and Tenants

In 2014, the New South Wales (NSW) government announced that it was to move all of the approximately 580 public housing tenants from Millers Point, Dawes Point and The Rocks in inner Sydney, sell the properties and use the proceeds to build social housing. This article, drawing on government media material and in-depth interviews with tenants, examines the removal process and contrasts the government’s narrative with that of the tenants. What is argued is that the displacement reflects how in the current neoliberal climate, instrumental rationality is a central feature, i.e. little cognisance is taken of the human cost of policies.

“It was like leaving your family”: Gentrification and the impacts of displacement on public housing tenants in inner‐Sydney

AbstractIn March 2014, the minister responsible announced that all of the approximately 600 public housing tenants of Millers Point and the Sirius Building in inner Sydney are to be moved and the properties sold. Millers Point is probably the oldest public housing area in Australia. The Sirius Building was purpose built for public housing tenants in the late 1970s. The article briefly examines the gentrification process in the Millers Point area. However, the main focus, drawing on six in‐depth interviews with public housing tenants who are still residents in the area and 13 who have moved, is an examination of the impact of the government's removal announcement and the actual displacement of residents. What this article illustrates is that the place attachment of most of the interviewees was profound and the removal announcement and the actual move were devastating. Interviewees spoke of deep sadness and anxiety at the thought of leaving what they considered a unique and genuine community. Residents who had moved told of their isolation and melancholy at having lost their local social network. The research shows that the human cost of policies and not revenue should always be the central consideration.

The Unsocialist Socialists

The Unsocialist Socialists

Place, political culture and post-Green Ban resistance: Public housing in Millers Point, Sydney

In early 2014 the announced sale of 300 public housing dwellings in Millers Point and the proposed relocation of tenants to other parts of the city sparked a media storm. Millers Point is a prime location in central Sydney, and while some media commentary was initially supportive of dispersal a highly organized protest campaign involving various non-government organizations, the City Council, parliamentary representatives, heritage bodies and trade unions quickly emerged in support of the tenants. Public tenants in other inner city locations also became involved. Redevelopment of public housing neighbourhoods has proceeded relatively slowly over the last decade in Sydney, Australia, with most attention focused on broad acre suburban estates. Partly because of increasingly sophisticated consultation strategies employed by housing authorities, and partly due to the continuing powerlessness and stigmatisation of public tenants, resistance has been fragmented and localised. Any media attention given to redevelopment has generally supported dispersal of public tenants. We analyse the Millers Point case in order to identify elements that have allowed resistance to be organized in a way that has not previously been seen in Australia. Through interviews with local tenant leaders and other key players, and analysis of media treatment of the case, we describe the historical, locational and political factors and strategies deployed on both sides of the retrenchment plan. This case of resistance is examined within the context of the globalization of the Sydney economy and property market.

“Flounder, Flounder”: Doubling in Eudora Welty’s “Music from Spain”

PAUL ALEXANDER CANTRELL Independent Scholar “Flounder, Flounder”: Doubling in Eudora Welty’s “Music from Spain” THIS STUDY OF DOUBLING IN “MUSIC FROM SPAIN”MARKS A NEW APPROACH to the motif in Welty’s work, although it has some noteworthy antecedents. Allison Pingree rightly notes Welty’s “preoccupation with duality” and points out that “patterns of doubling are very common in her work” (83). Her “Circles of Ran and Eugene MacLain” provides a fitting point of departure, as it entails a veritable catalogue of pairs, twins, doubles, and circular imagery in Welty’s story. Whereas Pingree’s primary concern is twins, I intend to focus on the story’s situation within the specific paradigm of doubling literature as a genre. Otto Rank, whose The Double perhaps still remains the definitive treatment of the subject, finds the genre’s early continental forebears among Jean Paul, E. T. A. Hoffmann, and Alfred de Musset. From there, one may easily trace the literature to James Hogg and Robert Louis Stevenson in Scotland and to Edgar Allan Poe in America, among others. This doubling narrative tends to follow a certain template, the best contemporary example of which would arguably be Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club and David Fincher’s subsequent film adaptation. The structure of this doubling template is indispensable to the overall architecture of “Music from Spain.” The present study explores the ways in which Welty manipulates, subverts, and, through the dialogic interplay she establishes between doubling and classical mythology, ultimately transcends the genre of doubling literature altogether. Ruth Vande Kieft outlines the duality essential to Welty’s collection: Throughout The Golden Apples we find juxtaposed two sets of characters. There are the wanderers who are expressive in action, wild, rebellious, free, over-flowing, self-determining;buttheyaredrivenbyfiercehungersandyearnings.Thecharacters who serve as their foils appear to be re-actors more than actors. They tend to be passive, helpless, outreaching; their characteristic activity is quietly unobtrusive and inward, for they observe and learn, feel and wonder. (122) She includes Eugene MacLain in the latter group, most of whom are “almost necessarily feminine, or very young” (123). However, one may just as easily place Eugene within the first camp insofar as he is, at least 190 Paul Alexander Cantrell on the day on which the story takes place, a wanderer, “driven by fierce hungers and yearnings.” Just as one attempts to locate Eugene in one part of Vande Kieft’s duality, he appears in the other. “‘Duality,’” as Karl Miller points out, “is a word which means that there are two of something, and which has also meant that some one thing or person is to be perceived as two” (21). Eugene is thus a duality unto himself. Michael Kreyling traces this interior split to the moment when Eugene reflects on having struck his wife Emma earlier that morning: “He has become two—one who acts, one who watches him act. Alienation is not exactly the word for Eugene’s plight” (95). This struggle for the mot juste is because even the act itself detaches from Eugene. For now, he is at once voyeur and object of the gaze. Doubling often involves self-alienation, which entails the appearance of an Other on whom to project this gaze. One may well say that this need itself is what spawns the double, for these two otherwise irreconcilable phenomenological positions cannot stay housed within one persona for long. At the root of this need for othering lies Eugene’s guilt for having struck his wife. He appears even baffled by the act as it haunts him throughout the day: “Why . . . had he struck Emma? His act—with that, proving it had been a part of him—slipped loose from him, turned around and looked at him in the form of a question. At Sacramento Street it skirted through trafficbesidehiminsuddendependency, almost like a comedian pretending to be an old man” (474-75). This separation marks a pivotal moment in which “his ‘fault’ becomes an alter-ego, a twin being which is dependent on him, yet also concrete enough to stand apart and indict him” (Pingree 91). It is as though Eugene’s “act”—more precisely, his resultant guilt from the act...

Determining the mechanisms underlying augmented renal drug clearance in the critically ill: use of exogenous marker compounds.

IntroductionThe aim of this study was to explore changes in glomerular filtration (GFR) and renal tubular function in critically ill patients at risk of augmented renal clearance (ARC), using exogenous marker compounds.MethodsThis prospective, observational pharmacokinetic (PK) study was performed in a university-affiliated, tertiary-level, adult intensive care unit (ICU). Patients aged less than or equal to 60 years, manifesting a systemic inflammatory response, with an expected ICU length of stay more than 24 hours, no evidence of acute renal impairment (plasma creatinine concentration <120 μmol/L) and no history of chronic kidney disease or renal replacement therapy were eligible for inclusion. The following study markers were administered concurrently: sinistrin 2,500 mg (Inutest; Laevosan, Linz, Austria), p-aminohippuric acid (PAH) 440 mg (4% p-aminohippuric acid sodium salt; CFM Oskar Tropitzsch, Marktredwitz, Germany), rac-pindolol 5 or 15 mg (Barbloc; Alphapharm, Millers Point, NSW, Australia) and fluconazole 100 mg (Diflucan; Pfizer Australia Pty Ltd, West Ryde, NSW, Australia). Plasma concentrations were then measured at 5, 10, 15, 30, 60 and 120 minutes and 4, 6, 12 and 24 hours post-administration. Non-compartmental PK analysis was used to quantify GFR, tubular secretion and tubular reabsorption.ResultsTwenty patients were included in the study. Marker administration was well tolerated, with no adverse events reported. Sinistrin clearance as a marker of GFR was significantly elevated (mean, 180 (95% confidence interval (CI), 141 to 219) ml/min) and correlated well with creatinine clearance (r =0.70, P <0.01). Net tubular secretion of PAH, a marker of tubular anion secretion, was also elevated (mean, 428 (95% CI, 306 to 550) ml/min), as was net tubular reabsorption of fluconazole (mean, 135 (95% CI, 100 to 169) ml/min). Net tubular secretion of (S)- and (R)-pinodolol, a marker of tubular cation secretion, was impaired.ConclusionsIn critically ill patients at risk of ARC, significant alterations in glomerular filtration, renal tubular secretion and tubular reabsorption are apparent. This has implications for accurate dosing of renally eliminated drugs.

Matthew Lee Miller. The American YMCA and Russian Culture: The Preservation and Expansion of Orthodox Christianity, 1900–1940.

Most students of the history of film in the twentieth century, not to mention serious scholars of modern Russian history, will have seen the classic silent film The Extraordinary Adventures of Mr. West in the Land of the Bolsheviks, created and directed by Lev Kuleshov and shown to Russian audiences in 1924. This film parodies a wealthy young American as he travels to Soviet Russia for the first time, arriving intent on heaping scorn on the new regime but leaving with an appreciation for what the country had accomplished under V. I. Lenin. What is generally not noticed in this film, Mathew Lee Miller points out in the introduction to this arresting new study, is that “Mr. West” was the “President” of the Young Men's Christian Association—the YMCA. Utilizing the resources of the Kautz Family YMCA Archives at the University of Minnesota and two underutilized but very rich collections in Paris (those of L'Institut de Theologie Orthodoxe Saint-Serge and Action Chrétienne des Etudiants Russe), as well as the Paul Anderson Papers of the University of Illinois and printed primary materials documenting the YMCA's work in Russia and with Russians in Europe from 1900 to 1940, Miller makes two strong arguments concerning the YMCA's impact and significance. First, he documents in considerable detail the organization's philanthropic work with Russian students, workers, soldiers, POWs, and intellectuals in imperial, revolutionary, and Soviet Russia. Second, and perhaps most provocatively, he argues that the YMCA shifted from its original Protestant but nondenominational Christian “mission” stance to one embracing Russian Orthodoxy. In the process the YMCA helped to “preserve” and “expand” Orthodoxy, especially during the Russian Civil War and Russian emigrations following the revolutionary upheavals of 1917 and beyond.

Reading Theory Now: An ABC of Good Reading with J. Hillis Miller

Reading Theory Now: An ABC of Good Reading with J. Hillis Miller