Outer Dark Research Articles

Hearth: A Global Conversation on Community, Identity, and Place

Transcripts from a Camera An overturned chair is a sign of not having feet on the ground. A left-open door doesn’t know what to do. And the empty mirror again reflects the aimless prowling of the light against a silent wall. The alarm clock has started to stutter. Something like the trickling of silence in a hollow pit reaches the ear. Translations from the Persian By Kaveh Bassiri Hearth: A Global Conversation on Community, Identity, and Place Ed. Annick Smith & Susan O’Connor Milkweed Editions I n many of the essays and poems in this remarkable new collection, the idea of the hearth is often defined by its opposite: in 2018 it’s difficult not to feel engulfed by traumas at the psychological, social, political, climactic, and global scales. In a stark reckoning by Gretel Ehrlich on the “culture of abuse and untruth” in which we live, she questions whether—in the face of cultural and biological worlds disappearing “with no hope of return”—the concept of home and hearth might not be a “cruel joke.” And in an era marked by “a sixth biological extinction, economic violence, and social disintegration,” Barry Lopez wonders where we might find our spiritual footing. “What is the hearth of the Anthropocene?” he writes. “What, now, is the symbol of our allegiance and our concern for one another’s fate?” For Lopez, the fire that he builds out of arctic willow twigs burns with a primordial centering effect for those who gather around it, a stay against the “outer dark” just beyond the edge of their encampment. Many of the other contributors to Hearth seek a “rooted relatedness” to something larger than the self (Carl Safina), a sense of becoming in “deep time” (Mary Evelyn Tucker), or alternative “narrative mappings” (Boey Kim Cheng). Scottish essayist Zoë Strachan , writing about the “numinous” quotidian found in archaeological digs that reveal both death chambers as well as the ancient domestic activities of keeping warm, cooking, and storytelling around hearths, contends: “We all want a center, a lodestone, a connection to the past that will write us into the narrative that leads to the future.” Repairing trauma is a frequent theme throughout the book. Geffrey Davis finds consolation in fishing and writing, Andrew Lam mourns the “lost enchantment” of his native Vietnam, and Debra Magpie Earling witnesses her father save himself—and his family—from violence even though his own life is predicated on violence. Yvonne Owuor accepts the “dreadful gift . . . of seeing the world as it is and then being asked to love it.” And Australian poet Mark Tredinnick writes movingly of succumbing to depression in midlife, leaving him bereft of family, “unhearthed” and “unhoused.” Turning to poetry as a way of “piecing” together his mind again, Tredinnick rediscovers his “miraculous part in the larger scheme of things” and fashions a new hearth to replace the one he lost. “In a good poem,” he writes, “some of the integrity of the cosmos coheres in us, notwithstanding the turmoil in our heads.” “We live within a blaze of transience both inevitable and complete,” writes Jane Hirshfield. Hearth captures both the evanescence of that blaze and its enduring power to heal us. Daniel Simon Editor in Chief editor’s pick Mehrdad Fallah (b. 1960) is one of the most influential Iranian poets of recent decades. The author of ten books of poetry, Fallah has also published a translation of Allen Ginsberg’s Howl and a collection of critical essays on contemporary Iranian poetry. Kaveh Bassiri’s translations received a 2019 NEA fellowship and can be found in the Virginia Quarterly Review, Guernica, Colorado Review, and Massachusetts Review. Visit worldlit.org to listen to recordings of “A Conversation from Far, Far Away” and one other poem in Persian, plus read two bonus poems. WORLDLIT.ORG 31 ...

Three Poems

PHOTO: RIA ALFANA/UNSPLASH Three Poems by Mehrdad Fallah poetry This Scale Won’t Balance The world won’t ditch me. Life wants its share from me. Life empties my pocket of the share it hasn’t given me and bites the apple I haven’t touched. I cover my ears with silence to hear the sound of forgetting. The sea won’t let me. The sea is so deep, it makes me laugh. As I flee to my room, the alley with its long arms grabs hold of my collar. The world pushes me aside. The world steals my mouth to speak its big words. I drown. A hungry oyster swallows my dream. Life puts my dream around its neck and shows off to the sky. A Conversation from Far, Far Away* No line dear friend connects here, where I am, with where you are. Isn’t it strange that I’m talking to you? The question you handed me has riveted my gaze honestly! With what key did you pass through this door, for when I look all around . . . ? It’s a strange time. Where did my feet misplace me? When did my hands leave me? My heart, which was at least beating more accurately than the city clock, is standing behind what light? It isn’t clear. I don’t know. My mind, though (it might be said), is still working. This factory continues to . . . question. Would you believe me if I said I don’t have an answer? This conversation is starting to cost too much, and this door (it looks like) won’t smile on any key. * For Mohammad Mokhtari, a leading poet and intellectual, who was executed in 1998 as part of what is referred to as the Chain Murders. 30 WLT NOVEMBER–DECEMBER 2018 Transcripts from a Camera An overturned chair is a sign of not having feet on the ground. A left-open door doesn’t know what to do. And the empty mirror again reflects the aimless prowling of the light against a silent wall. The alarm clock has started to stutter. Something like the trickling of silence in a hollow pit reaches the ear. Translations from the Persian By Kaveh Bassiri Hearth: A Global Conversation on Community, Identity, and Place Ed. Annick Smith & Susan O’Connor Milkweed Editions I n many of the essays and poems in this remarkable new collection, the idea of the hearth is often defined by its opposite: in 2018 it’s difficult not to feel engulfed by traumas at the psychological, social, political, climactic, and global scales. In a stark reckoning by Gretel Ehrlich on the “culture of abuse and untruth” in which we live, she questions whether—in the face of cultural and biological worlds disappearing “with no hope of return”—the concept of home and hearth might not be a “cruel joke.” And in an era marked by “a sixth biological extinction, economic violence, and social disintegration,” Barry Lopez wonders where we might find our spiritual footing. “What is the hearth of the Anthropocene?” he writes. “What, now, is the symbol of our allegiance and our concern for one another’s fate?” For Lopez, the fire that he builds out of arctic willow twigs burns with a primordial centering effect for those who gather around it, a stay against the “outer dark” just beyond the edge of their encampment. Many of the other contributors to Hearth seek a “rooted relatedness” to something larger than the self (Carl Safina), a sense of becoming in “deep time” (Mary Evelyn Tucker), or alternative “narrative mappings” (Boey Kim Cheng). Scottish essayist Zoë Strachan , writing about the “numinous” quotidian found in archaeological digs that reveal both death chambers as well as the ancient domestic activities of keeping warm, cooking, and storytelling around hearths, contends: “We all want a center, a lodestone, a connection to the past that will write us into the narrative that leads to the future.” Repairing trauma is a frequent theme throughout the book. Geffrey Davis finds consolation in fishing and writing, Andrew Lam mourns the “lost enchantment” of his native Vietnam, and Debra Magpie Earling witnesses her father save himself—and his family—from violence...

Affect and Gender in Cormac McCarthy’s Outer Dark

Cormac McCarthy’s 1968 novel, Outer Dark, is arguably his only text that contains a true female protagonist. Rinthy Holme is a significant character in her own right, in part because almost half the storyline is dedicated to her, but also because she seems to generate what scholars have referred to as a sense of forcefulness or meaningfulness that is sometimes at odds with otherwise more problematic elements of her characterization. By focusing on a small excerpt of Outer Dark, I argue that Rinthy feels meaningful because of the affective resonances that the text that describes her seems to emanate, rather than solely as a result of any diegetic aspect of her characterization. I draw on Brian Massumi’s account of affect to illuminate the apparent disconnect between the content of the text about Rinthy and its actual physical effects on readers, as well as the textual operations that might cause these effects. I also investigate, however, whether Rinthy’s affective power is truly able to combat other more problematic elements of her characterization, such as her apparently essentialized maternal instinct and empathy. I conclude by arguing that although the excerpt analyzed demonstrates a powerful instance of McCarthy’s interest in the centrality of the material in the process of meaning-making, and also perhaps suggests that McCarthy gestures towards the ways in which women might engage in the world as independent, embodied agents, McCarthy ultimately cannot escape an essentialized male/female binary.

Different Filling Patterns of the Choriocapillaris in Fluorescein and Indocyanine Green Angiography in Primate Eyes Under Elevated Intraocular Pressure.

To investigate the hemodynamics of the choriocapillaris in primate eyes under elevated intraocular pressure. Indocyanine green angiography (ICGA) and fluorescein angiography (FA) were performed in two monkeys after elevation of the intraocular pressure (IOP) to 35 and 60 mm Hg. ICGA and FA showed no perfusion delays in the choriocapillaris at 35 mm Hg. The slow dye filling at 60 mm Hg made it possible to observe the early phase angiography sequence. During ICGA, C-shaped precapillary arterioles multiplied in numbers and emerged in the posterior pole, forming the outer rim of the numerous mosaics or lobules. Dye subsequently infiltrated into the lobules. During FA, after numerous hyperfluorescent spots emerged in the posterior pole, each of the spots enlarged and became numerous mosaics with a dark outer rim. When the FA and ICGA images were superimposed, the C-shaped arterioles observed during the ICGA were shown to correspond to the outer dark rim of the mosaics seen during the FA. The earliest dye emergence was delayed during FA compared to ICGA, with 13 seconds elapsing in monkey 1 and 4 seconds in monkey 2. The horizontal diameter of the optic disc contained three to four mosaics in both monkeys. The choriocapillaris lobules appear to be supplied from peripheral arterioles, not central. After blood perfuses the lobules, it drains into the venules at the center. Mosaic or lobular patterns during FA may reflect extravasated fluorescein from the fenestrated choriocapillaris.

Cormac McCarthy's Literary Evolution: Editors, Agents, and the Crafting of a Prolific American Author

Cormac McCarthy's Literary Evolution: Editors, Agents, and the Crafting of a Prolific American Author

“Like some supplicant to the darkness over them all”: The Good of John Grady Cole in Cormac McCarthy's Cities of the Plain

Abstract On reading Cormac McCarthy's works readers and scholars have been fascinated by the cunning and violent characters that haunt his fiction, notably the “grim triune” of Outer Dark (129), Judge Holden, Anton Chigurh, and Malkina. Some might say that, together with McCarthy's mastery of style and narrative, it is on account of these charismatic characters, all compelling studies in malevolence, that McCarthy's fiction is best remembered and, others might go further, his literary reputation largely rests. This article advances the complementary idea that McCarthy's painstaking portrayal of John Grady Cole has an equal, if not greater, appeal. John Grady is perhaps the closest a reader comes to a complete rendering of human goodness acting in the world in McCarthy's fiction. McCarthy's endeavor to imagine a virtuous human, hard to find and yet worthy of emulation, far from being reductively two-dimensional or tiresomely didactic, should exert its own claim on his readers' attention and admiration, because in John Grady's choices, behavior, and actions, McCarthy presents his readers with his idea of the good. John Grady's representation of a good life illustrates how arduous it is to strive to live an honest and decent life, free from moral compromise.

“Some witless paraclete beleaguered with all limbo’s clamor”: On Violent Contagion and Apocalyptic Logic in Cormac McCarthy’s Outer Dark

Research Article| May 01 2015 “Some witless paraclete beleaguered with all limbo’s clamor”: On Violent Contagion and Apocalyptic Logic in Cormac McCarthy’s Outer Dark Markus Wierschem Markus Wierschem University of Paderborn, Germany Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Contagion: Journal of Violence Mimesis and Culture (2015) 22: 185–202. https://doi.org/10.14321/contagion.22.1.0185 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Markus Wierschem; “Some witless paraclete beleaguered with all limbo’s clamor”: On Violent Contagion and Apocalyptic Logic in Cormac McCarthy’s Outer Dark. Contagion: Journal of Violence Mimesis and Culture 1 May 2015; 22 185–202. doi: https://doi.org/10.14321/contagion.22.1.0185 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveMichigan State University PressContagion: Journal of Violence Mimesis and Culture Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2015 Michigan State University Press2015 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Everything’s Interesting: Cormac McCarthy and the Social Construction of Reality

Cormac McCarthy’s writing features perspectives on the human condition strikingly comparable in range and substance with those advanced in The Social Construction of Reality , the classic treatise in the sociology of knowledge by Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann. At the focus of their shared interests is the human struggle to erect shields against the encroachment of disorder, a universal recoil from the threat of anomie embodied most forcefully in the dark mystery of death. McCarthy’s early novels ( The Orchard Keeper , Outer Dark , Child of God , and Suttree ) foreground settings in which ordered social formations are severely limited; Blood Meridian gives attention to the influence of forceful constructions of reality in marginal situations; in the border trilogy, romantic social constructions (myths) succumb to harsh actualities; No Country for Old Men offers a window on the perils that await those whose constructions of reality blind them to the forces of chance and death; and The Road dramatizes the attempt to reconstruct a viable social reality in a world reduced to chaos.

Resolving the outer density profile of dark matter halo in Andromeda galaxy

Large-scale faint structure detected by the recent observations in the halo of the Andromeda galaxy (M31) provides an attractive window to explore the structure of outer cold dark matter (CDM) halo in M31. Using an N-body simulation of the interaction between an accreting satellite galaxy and M31, we investigate the mass-density profile of the CDM halo. We find the sufficient condition of the outer density profile of CDM halo in M31 to reproduce the Andromeda giant stream and the shells at the east and west sides of M31. The result indicates that the density profile of the outer dark matter halo of M31 is a steeper than the prediction of the theory of the structure formation based on the CDM model.

Layered co-sensitization for enhancement of conversion efficiency of natural dye sensitized solar cells

This paper describes a double layered co-sensitization in dye sensitized solar cells (DSSCs) by using natural pigments from Ixora flower (Ixora sp. (Rubiaceae)) and the outer dark purple skin of ‘Kembayau’ (Canarium odontophyllum) fruit. UV–vis absorption data revealed that both dyes were anthocyanins. Co-sensitization was done by first adsorbing the dye from C. odontophyllum into TiO2 electrode by dipping, and then by removing adsorbed dye of the top layer of TiO2 using a de-sorption solution before the Ixora sp. dye was allowed to adsorb. Power conversion efficiency of the co-sensitized solar cell was 1.55%. The conversion efficiencies of DSSCs sensitized with Ixora sp. , C. odontophyllum and the mixture of both dyes (1:1) were 0.96%, 0.59% and 1.13% respectively. The superior conversion efficiency achieved by layered co-sensitization is attributed to the high adsorption capacities of Ixora sp. and C. odontophyllum, and the homogeneous monolayer adsorption of Ixora sp. as revealed by Freundlich and Langmuir adsorption isotherms.

Cormac McCarthy’s The Road and “a world to come”

Cormac McCarthy’s The Road and “a world to come” Bill Hardwig (bio) Cormac McCarthy’s fiction is frequently associated with the tradition of literary naturalism. Barcley Owens, for example, considers McCarthy’s novels in the context of theories of naturalism, and Steven Frye articulates McCarthy’s “romantic naturalism,” while James Giles argues that contemporary naturalism comprises a “multilayered determinism” visible in Outer Dark (2). Dana Phillips characterizes McCarthy’s narration as “radically unanthropocentric” (446), and Eric Carl Link discusses McCarthy’s critique of the “cosmic optimism” of American exceptionalism (“McCarthy” 157). Especially in his early work, but really in nearly all of his fiction, McCarthy is committed to a project of peeling away social and cultural conventions in order to explore the non-contingent humanity/animality that undergirds our existence. This reduction of life to its barest realities is one that characterizes many classic naturalist texts. Such a commitment to a naturalist perspective, however, makes McCarthy’s work fit less obviously within science fiction or speculative fiction more broadly. Part of McCarthy’s naturalist impulse involves looking back to a distant, primal, and biological past, one that is antecedent to contemporary social mores or speculative thoughts about the future. At times, McCarthy’s backward gaze and his love of archaic language feel stubbornly resistant to the goals of science fiction. In Future Present, Michael Pinsky characterizes contemporary science fiction as being inextricably tied to the undetermined future, a genre that “favors indeterminacy: probabilities, chaos, wave functions. It resists its own traditional assertions of certainty. . . . Science fiction writes the future. And according to sf, our future apparently consists of both external encounters—technological marvels (and horrors), aliens, and outer space—and internal encounters—the mysteries of the human mind and body” (13). For the reasons I mentioned [End Page 38] above, this description does not mesh well with much of McCarthy’s fiction, especially his Tennessee novels and the early Western fiction. It does, however, resonate with McCarthy’s most popular and recent novel, The Road (2006), which is heavily invested in the uncertainty of the future and contains both Pinsky’s sense of dramatic external encounters (post-apocalyptic destruction) and internal ones (the thoughts of the protagonist as he struggles to survive and to justify this struggle). How, then, to account for McCarthy’s science fiction turn in The Road? What does this shift from the distant past to the indeterminate future do for the ways we conceptualize McCarthy’s work? In this essay, I argue that McCarthy looks to science fiction’s gaze into the future as a means of exploring the issues of trauma, loss, and mourning in a manner different from his earlier work. By imagining the unrealized and destroyed future, The Road reverses McCarthy’s tendency to remove from his narrative the entanglement of modern objects. In this speculative novel, he swivels his orientation towards, rather than away from, cultural artifacts, towards “things.” Bill Brown has developed an approach to literary texts that he calls “thing theory,” an approach that explores the “complex roles that objects have played in American lives” (“Thing” 12). McCarthy’s intense treatment of human-made things in The Road, the proliferation of his use of the term “thing” in the novel, and the tender treatment of these things by the book’s narrator, so different from McCarthy’s desire to shed his narrative of frivolous objects of civilizations, can best be accounted for by thinking about the aesthetic choices he makes when imagining the future. In other words, most of McCarthy’s fiction looks to the past, or the soon-to-be-paved-over present, and sees the trappings of culture and materialism as part of an entire system of forces that lead to artificial and false engagements with living and the world.1 In The Road, these trappings become filled with a radiant power, as McCarthy imagines the disappearance of the world and considers the world that will never be. When faced with the erasure of our current culture, things become resonant with an at times nostalgic meaning for what is gone and at other times a poignant meaning of the expectation of a future that such things evoke...

No More Heroes: Narrative Perspective and Morality in Cormac McCarthy

Cooper, Lydia R. No More Heroes: Narrative Perspective and Morality in Cormac McCarthy. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 2011. 185 pp. Hardcover, $38.00, 978-0-8071-3721-5.In No More Heroes, Lydia Cooper finds in Cormac McCarthy's fiction narrative gaze that is shot through with glimpses of human compassion, pity, nobility, and hope (161-2). Her project places work within the current trend that seeks to ground literature's work and worth within imagination and affective experience-the notion that by coaxing us into imagining counterfactual social arrangements or inhabiting the lives of others, novels can make us more empathetic, thoughtful people. At first glance, Cormac McCarthy's oeuvre would seem rocky ground indeed on which to stake claims of empathetic engagement or find seeds of hope. Readers of work often feel obliged to disavow the affective properties of McCarthy's fiction: we balk at the aesthetic bliss of Blood Meridian and treat with suspicion the generic pleasures of the Pretty Horses or No Country for Old Men. Cooper admits that McCarthy's work is regularly characterized as brutally anti-humanistic, and particularly unkind to women and ethnic others. Delving into the syntax and perspective of McCarthy's narratives, however, Cooper finds ethical riches within: affirmations of empathy, the necessity of community, and heroic struggle in the face of despair. She insists that novels consistently the valiant inner struggles of men trying against all odds to be good (1). We gain access to this interiority by attending to shifts in perspective, fleeting moments when the distant third-person omniscient voice gives way to limited third- or first-person point of view. These perspectival shifts are marked by instances of particularly fragmented or compounded syntax, and call our attention to characters' struggle toward goodness, empathy and human connection (12). By formally underscoring these moments, McCarthy asserts the ethical importance of imagination and reading, and encourages readers to practice empathy themselves. Thus narrative becomes a vehicle for bearing witness to courage in extremis, and even moral act in itself (22, 162).Cooper works chronologically and carefully through all of McCarthy's fiction. Her first chapter establishes the link between empathy, narrative, and morality in McCarthy's first three Appalachian novels. She reads The Orchard Keeper as demonstration of how shifts in narrative perspective work according to character morality: the generally omniscient narrative shifts dramatically into the perceptions of the deeply Arthur Ownby, and maintains greater perspectival proximity to the problematic Marion Sylder than to the evil Kenneth Rattner (32, 33). In Outer Dark, flashes of perspectival shifts illuminate few instances of in bleak world (38). Child of God presents compassion as necessity, suggest[ing] that readers' refusal to acknowledge Ballard as child of God much like themselves is failure that sustains savage retaliation like his (45). These links between interiority and goodness hold throughout. Cooper shows that within the Border Trilogy, All moments of interiority underscore the significance of human connection and interaction (100, italics original). And in No Country for Old Men, the thoughts of Sheriff Bell comprise much of the text; the morally ambiguous Llewellyn Moss's mental life blossoms whenever he is conscious of dilemma (115); the inner life of the malevolent Chigurh remains utterly unintelligible.By framing narrative perspective in McCarthy along these lines, Cooper implicitly adopts the tenet of Christian theology that evil has no positive substance but is merely negation or absence of the good. Hence, in No More Heroes evil is always opaque. The interpretive limits this imposes are visible in her second chapter, where Blood Meridian serves only as Suttree's foil. …

The Theater of the Damned: Religion and the Audience in the Tragedy of Christopher Marlowe

My subject is damnation in the tragedy of Christopher Marlowe. Or, more specifically, the relationship between his markedly damned protagonists and the audience that pays to watch them brought low. The peculiar attrac- tion held for the patrons of the Elizabethan playhouse absorbs critics: certainly the scholarship of no other early modern playwright is so focused upon audience response. What Leah Marcus calls the Marlowe effect has been variously characterized but in general it could be said that Marlowe's tragic energy consists largely in unsettling his viewers (42). He probes and provokes, and offers tragic heroes who both fascinate and repel, repeatedly catching the audience between moralistic censure and enthralled titillation. If there is catharsis, it is a disrupted one, with a sting in the tail: resolution is frustrated, and doubts are multiplied rather than expunged. And yet it is not simply that Marlowe's villain-heroes appall the spectators with their overreaching audacity, their insatiable appe- tites, or their strangeness. I contend that the response that these exotic malefactors provoke is ultimately and unexpectedly self-critical, forcing us to question our presumed superiority to them. 1 To achieve this response works in a specifically religious register, playing upon religious difference, inflaming religious antagonism, and complicating the polari- ties and expectations of mainstream Protestant society. 2 Marlowe's protagonists undertake their various crimes and sins with purposeful, open-eyed ardor, but throughout a given play our instinct to judge and reject them is undermined and the tragedies pivot on the rev- elation of unexpected affinity. In the case of Doctor Faustus, the pursuit of forbidden knowledge and power may draw the magus into the outer dark- ness, far from the familiar world of Wittenberg (or London). Nevertheless, the final image of Faustus pleading, as the last moments of his twenty-four years slip away, for the horses of the night to run slowly, for the mercy of Christ to cover even his terrible sins, undercuts the complacent moralism of the epilogue. His desperate hunger for the forgiveness that everyone in

Aragonitic dendritic prismatic shell microstructure in Thracia (Bivalvia, Anomalodesmata)

AbstractThe shells of most anomalodesmatan bivalves are composed of an outer aragonitic layer of either granular or columnar prismatic microstructure, and an inner layer of nacre. The Thraciidae is one of the few anomalodesmatan families whose members lack nacreous layers. In particular, shells of members of the genus Thracia are exceptional in their possession of a very distinctive but previously unreported microstructure, which we term herein “dendritic prisms.” Dendritic prisms consist of slender fibers of aragonite which radiate perpendicular to, and which stack along, the axis of the prism. Here we used scanning and transmission electron microscopical investigation of the periostracum, mantle, and shells of three species of Thracia to reconstruct the mode of shell calcification and to unravel the crystallography of the dendritic units. The periostracum is composed of an outer dark layer and an inner translucent layer. During the free periostracum phase the dark layer grows at the expense of the translucent layer, but at the position of the shell edge, the translucent layer mineralizes with the units typical of the dendritic prismatic layer. Within each unit, the c‐axis is oriented along the prismatic axis, whereas the a‐axis of aragonite runs parallel to the long axis of the fibers. The six‐rayed alignment of the latter implies that prisms are formed by {110} polycyclically twinned crystals. We conclude that, despite its distinctive appearance, the dendritic prismatic layer of the shell of Thracia spp. is homologous to the outer granular prismatic or prismatic layer of other anomalodesmatans, while the nacreous layer present in most anomalodesmatans has been suppressed.

A Style of Horror: Is Evil Real in Cormac McCarthy's Outer Dark?

This article challenges a critical tradition that recuperates the horror of Cormac McCarthy's 1968 Outer Dark using the novel's literary art. In contrast, I argue that the text works as horror through its remarkable style. The novel's form and resultant dispersal of intention unsettle the use of immanent grounds to decide what things mean, which enables judgment of evil. Instead of nihilism, though, Outer Dark shows the insufficiency of epistemological frameworks through a narrative that naturalizes the material real and a metanarrative or self-reflexive questioning of what is real.

Death in Knoxville

Death in Knoxville David A. Davis (bio) Dianne C. Luce. Reading the World: Cormac McCarthy’s Tennessee Period. Columbia: U of South Carolina P, 2009. xiii + 314 pages. $49.95 cloth. Hugh Davis. The Making of James Agee. Knoxville: U of Tennessee P, 2008. xvii + 318 pages. $39.95 cloth. The mountains, coves, and rivers of eastern Tennessee have a haunting quality. James Agee and Cormac McCarthy grew up there, and their books reflect the isolation, eeriness, and arresting beauty of the landscape. Two recently published monographs examine the work of these writers: Hugh Davis’s The Making of James Agee and Dianne C. Luce’s Reading the World: Cormac McCarthy’s Tennessee Period. Both of these writers left Knoxville—Agee moved to New York and McCarthy now lives in Santa Fe—but both began their careers there, set some of their works there, and embedded eastern Tennessee in the literary imagination. Within southern literary circles, Agee and McCarthy are complicated figures, in part because of the complexity of their texts and in part because their own regional identities are indeterminate. But the touchstone of Knoxville connects them to a specific locality, a southern place with a unique imaginative resonance. In 1937, when Cormac McCarthy was four years old, his father joined the legal staff of the Tennessee Valley Authority, and his family moved to Knoxville. McCarthy grew up in Knoxville, and he set his first four books in eastern Tennessee. Dianne Luce, president of the Cormac Mc-Carthy Society, has spent her career studying the enigmatic, reclusive writer; her recent study Reading the World: Cormac McCarthy’s Tennessee [End Page 151] Period (2009) examines the books that he read and the places that he lived in eastern Tennessee, and how they influenced the texts that he wrote. His first novel, The Orchard Keeper, draws heavily upon the topography and history of eastern Tennessee, including the development of the TVA and the culture of bootlegging. Luce explains that the novel lays a foundation for the ecological and philosophical themes that Mc-Carthy has explored over the course of his writing career. He advances these themes in Child of God, his story about a cave-dwelling necrophiliac inspired by the sensational case of serial killer Ed Gein and the murder trial of James Blevins. He set the novel in Sevier County, Tennessee, and its meditations on depravity and grace dwell deeply in the landscape’s hills and valleys. McCarthy’s novel Outer Dark in set in the same landscape, but Luce explains that it dwells on a more elevated plane. She argues that the book “reflects McCarthy’s awareness of gnostic symbols, character types, and anticosmic attitudes and his extensive borrowing from or alluding to them in creating his own parable of spiritual alienation in the cosmic realm” (68). Gnosticism is an ancient religious system endemic to the Middle East that combines elements of early Christianity, Hellenistic philosophy, and Judaism. It posits the existence of an absolute spiritual plane and a material plane mediated by a divine demiurge, a false god, who causes suffering on the material plane. The actual god who exists on the spiritual plane is unknowable to the material plane. The characters in Outer Dark, a brother and sister who search for the lost off-spring of their incestuous relationship, portray the inherent alienation and complexity of gnostic beliefs. Luce describes the book as a “road narrative” that anticipates McCarthy’s later novels Blood Meridian and The Road (63). Although No Country for Old Men and The Road have become more famous because of their film adaptations, McCarthy’s masterpiece is Suttree. McCarthy worked on the novel over a period of twenty years, roughly from his time as a student at the University of Tennessee to his departure for west Texas. The book depicts life among the disaffected derelicts of post-World War II Knoxville from the perspective of Cornelius Suttree, who has repudiated his middle-class family to live on the Tennessee River. Luce explains that the book “synthesizes Platonic, gnostic, Christian, and existentialist images and concepts to inform Sut-tree’s anguished alienation from the world and his final transcendence through freeing himself both from the...

The role of dark matter in the galaxy mass–size relationship

The observed relationship between stellar mass and effective radius for early type galaxies, pointed out by many authors, is interpreted in the context of Clausius’ virial maximum theory. In this view, it is strongly underlined that the key of the above mentioned correlation is owing to the presence of a deep link between cosmology and the existence of the galaxy Fundamental Plane. Then the ultimate meaning is: understanding visible mass–size correlation and/or Fundamental Plane means understanding how galaxies form. The mass–size relationship involves baryon (mainly stellar) mass and its typical dimension related to the light, but it gets memory of the cosmological mass variance at the equivalence epoch. The reason is that the baryonic component virializes by sharing virial energy in about equal amount between baryons and dark matter, this sharing depending, in turn, on the steepness of the dark matter distribution. The general strategy consists in using the two-component tensor virial theorem for determining the virialized baryonic configurations. A King and a Zhao density profile are assumed for the inner baryonic and the outer dark matter component, respectively, at the end of the relaxation phase. All the considerations are restricted to spherical symmetry for simplicity. The effect of changing the dark-to-baryon mass ratio, m, is investigated inside a ΛCDM scenario. A theoretical mass–size relation is expressed for the baryonic component, which fits fairly well to the data from a recently studied galaxy sample. Finally, the play of intrinsic dispersion on the mass ratio, m, is discussed in the light of the cusp/core problem and some consequences are speculated about the existence of a limit m l expected by the theory.

Mismatch and misalignment: dark haloes and satellites of disc galaxies

(Abridged) We study the phase-space distribution of satellite galaxies associated with late-type galaxies in the GIMIC suite of simulations. GIMIC consists of re-simulations of 5 cosmologically representative regions from the Millennium simulation, which have higher resolution and incorporate baryonic physics. Whilst the disc of the galaxy is well aligned with the inner regions (r ~ 0.1r_200) of the dark matter halo, both in shape and angular momentum, there can be substantial misalignments at larger radii (r ~ r_200). Misalignments of > 45 deg are seen in ~ 30% of our sample. We find that the satellite population aligns with the shape (and angular momentum) of the outer dark matter halo. However, the alignment with the galaxy is weak owing to the mismatch between the disc and dark matter halo. Roughly 20% of the satellite systems with ten bright galaxies within r_200 exhibit a polar spatial alignment with respect to the galaxy --- an orientation reminiscent of the classical satellites of the Milky Way. We find that a small fraction (~10%) of satellite systems show evidence for rotational support which we attribute to group infall. There is a bias towards satellites on prograde orbits relative to the spin of the dark matter halo (and to a lesser extent with the angular momentum of the disc). This preference towards co-rotation is stronger in the inner regions of the halo where the most massive satellites accreted at relatively early times are located. We attribute the anisotropic spatial distribution and angular momentum bias of the satellites at z=0 to their directional accretion along the major axes of the dark matter halo. The satellite galaxies have been accreted relatively recently compared to the dark matter mass and have experienced less phase-mixing and relaxation --- the memory of their accretion history can remain intact to z=0.

Reading the World: Cormac McCarthy's Tennessee Period (review)

Reviewed by: Reading the World: Cormac McCarthy's Tennessee Period William Brannon Luce, Dianne C. Reading the World: Cormac McCarthy's Tennessee Period. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2009. 336 pp. $49.95 Reading the World: Cormac McCarthy's Tennessee Period promises an important contribution to Cormac McCarthy scholarship. Much of the critical attention devoted to McCarthy has focused on his novels set in the Southwestern region of the United [End Page 122] States. McCarthy's earlier work, with the Appalachian area of Tennessee as a setting, has either been considered merely as part of book-length critical studies of McCarthy's work as a whole or else has been the focus of assorted academic articles. Reading the World attempts to fill this gap in McCarthy scholarship. Reading the World is organized chronologically into five chapters according to the date of publication for McCarthy's first four novels—The Orchard Keeper, Outer Dark, Child of God, and Suttree—and his screenplay, The Gardener's Son. In each chapter, Luce initially considers the impact of historical time and place on that particular text and then examines the philosophical themes shared by the novels and the screenplay. This dual critical focus results in Luce emphasizing the importance of historical context in her reading of some of McCarthy's Tennessee texts, while stressing the philosophical underpinnings in some of the other Tennessee narratives. Tracing the historical and geographical changes in Eastern Tennessee in the early twentieth century provides a basis for Luce's analysis of The Orchard Keeper's three main characters, Arthur Ownby, Marion Sylder, and John Wesley Rattner. Luce proposes that the orchard acts as a focal point for each character's reaction to the encroachment of modern technology in a pastoral world and foreshadows the decline of the cattle culture in the American Southwest that precipitates the actions of the characters in McCarthy's later fiction. In contrast to McCarthy's accurate depictions of rural Eastern Tennessee and its inhabitants in The Orchard Keeper, Luce suggests that Outer Dark's lack of specificity in details such as setting and chronology contributes to the novel remaining one of McCarthy's texts most resistant to easy interpretation. Luce identifies possible historical sources of McCarthy's inspiration for Child of God's protagonist, Lester Ballard, including Ed Gein, the Wisconsin serial killer whose exploits garnered popular attention in the 1950s, and a less publicized case in North Georgia in 1963 involving James Melvin Blevins. Both cases share similarities to Child of God's plot. Luce provides only speculative evidence that McCarthy drew more than indirect inspiration from either event, but she does offer insightful commentary regarding how McCarthy's depiction of Lester compares to the portrayal of Norman Bates, a character based on Ed Gein, in prose and film. Suttree remains one of McCarthy's novels most identifiable with a specific time and locale: Knoxville, Tennessee in the 1950s. Despite Suttree's urban setting, Luce asserts that the novel functions as a link between The Orchard Keeper and the Border Trilogy, all of the works exhibiting a preoccupation with a disappearing world and the subsequent effects on its inhabitants. The focus on historical time and place in each chapter promotes Luce's critical goal of understanding "the integration in McCarthy's work of the surface texture, of seeing the world" (i), but the uneven emphasis depending on the work poses challenges for the reader. Luce's discussion of Suttree provides an example of these challenges. Luce acknowledges McCarthy's accuracy in depicting the Knoxville that serves as the backdrop for Suttree, but she does not explore how other aspects of the novel may be reflective of McCarthy's own experiences living in Eastern Tennessee. Although Luce cites evidence that many of the novel's characters are based on McCarthy's acquaintances, she chooses instead to emphasize Suttree's underlying philosophical themes. Similar challenges confront the reader when engaging with the discussion of the philosophical themes that Luce identifies in McCarthy's Tennessee works. In her discussion of The Orchard Keeper, she does not focus on any single dominant philosophical theme. Luce suggests Outer Dark's ambiguous setting and omission of direct historical...

Reading the world: Cormac McCarthy's Tennessee period

This is an investigation into the aesthetic and philosophical ends of McCarthy's southern novels. Reading the World explores the historical and philosophical contexts of Cormac McCarthy's early works crafted during his Tennessee period from 1959 to 1979 to demonstrate how McCarthy integrates literary realism with the imagery and myths of Platonic, gnostic, and existentialist philosophies to create his unique vision of the world. Dianne C. Luce begins with a substantial treatment of the East Tennessee context from which McCarthy's fiction emerges, sketching an Appalachian culture and environment in flux. Then Luce examines McCarthy's distinctive rendering of character and shows how his fragmented narration and lyrical style create a rich portrayal of the philosophical and religious elements at play as human consciousness confronts a world rife with isolation and violence. As she explores the developing gnosticism in Outer Dark and Child of God, Luce notes the introduction of Platonic myths and symbols, creating dialogic tensions. She finds McCarthy blending these elements with the neo-gnosticism of Camus' existentialism in The Gardener's Son, and she concludes by illustrating how McCarthy's ambitious Suttree is a culmination of the Tennessee period as she unravels the novel's complexly interwoven texture of philosophical and mythic strains introduced in earlier works.