Saturday Morning Research Articles

The Great Zucchini War

The Great Zucchini War

The 1964 US Surgeon General's report on smoking and health.

The 1964 report of the US Surgeon General on smoking and health made an authoritative case that tobacco smoking was a cause of premature deaths from lung cancer and chronic bronchitis. It justified the practice of drawing causal inferences from epidemiological studies, specified influential criteria for doing so, and made use of an early form of meta-analysis.

Fostering the “Art of Forceful Speech”: Music in the Century Club of California, 1888–1920

AbstractThe Century Club of California (CCC), founded in 1888, was San Francisco's most prestigious women's club in the early twentieth century. The club's aim was to promote intellectual growth and amplify female voices to help women enter the public domain with confidence. Weekly presentations featured renowned public figures and women who had achieved success in traditionally male fields. Rather than raising money for benevolent organizations, the CCC aimed to effect foundational social changes by informing women of the latest developments in all fields, thus empowering them to engage in political and social activism. Music played a critical role in furthering this ambitious goal; it had its own programming committee, which operated on an equal basis with those devoted to art, science, education, and current events. This article, based on the club's extensive collection of unpublished materials, looks at the CCC's first three decades, when the club promoted “the art of forceful speech” through modeling of successful women, providing opportunities for members to project their musical voices, elucidating new musical research, and supporting organizations such as the all-female Saturday Morning Orchestra. The CCC's activities underscore the significant role female musicians played in advancing the New Woman movement of the time.

Set Sail for Pancakes! by Tim Kleyn

Reviewed by: Set Sail for Pancakes! by Tim Kleyn Sarah Sahn Kleyn, Tim Set Sail for Pancakes!; written and illus. by Tim Kleyn. Viking, 2022 [40p] Trade ed. ISBN 9780593404294 $17.99 E-book ed. ISBN 9780593404300 $10.99 Reviewed from digital galleys R 3-6 yrs Margot and Grandpa's tummies are both grumbly for pancakes, but there's no milk or eggs in the fridge, and the flour sack is empty. They live on an island, so they must pack up the Beluga Blue and set sail for pancakes—first to Chicken Island for eggs, then to Cow Island for milk, and finally to Flour Mill Island, where they arrive just as the sky is getting as grumbly as their tummies. Grandpa battens down the hatches while Margot gets the flour, and they drop anchor to wait out the storm. When the weather clears, they find themselves at Banana Tree Island, giving them a perfect addition to their pancake recipe. Kleyn's text and digital illustrations make for a gentle, silly romp that showcases the love between grandfather and granddaughter. Margot and Grandpa are huggably soft figures in a saturated cartoon landscape, with dark brown skin and simply-drawn features that remain cheery throughout the island-hopping grocery run and scary storm. Make this a bedtime story or a Saturday morning read-aloud—either way, be prepared to satisfy grumbly tummies with banana pancakes for breakfast. Fortunately, Margot and Grandpa's recipe is included at the end. Copyright © 2022 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

Unreconciled: Family, Truth, and Indigenous Resistance by Jesse Wente

Reviewed by: Unreconciled: Family, Truth, and Indigenous Resistance by Jesse Wente Stacie Charbonneau Hess Jesse Wente. Unreconciled: Family, Truth, and Indigenous Resistance. Canada: Penguin Random House, 2021. 198 pp. Hardcover, $29.95 CAN / $22.95 US. Jesse Wente believes in a good story. He has built his career around story-telling: first, as a film student, then a radio columnist, a film critic, and now holding one of the most influential positions in Canada—Director of the Indigenous Screen Office—which was established in 2018. If Wente believes in a good story, he believes even more in "narrative sovereignty," defined by him as "the idea that people, communities, and nations should control their own stories and the tools used in that storytelling" (168). In the context of his memoir, Unreconciled, he is referring to the narrative sovereignty of First Nations, Métis, and Inuit communities, those peoples whose presence preceded the invention of Canada by thousands of years. When Indigenous stories are told by another group—say, the powerful film industry moguls in Hollywood, or the white editor of a popular magazine—that's cultural appropriation. Cultural appropriation is the very topic for which Wente became a household name in Canada in 2017, after he cried on live television. Although there are many emotionally charged passages in Wente's memoir, two scenes might become painfully engraved in the readers' minds. The first is ten-year-old Jesse playing softball on his home turf in Toronto, when a crowd of neighborhood kids taunt him with a war whoop. Wente recognizes the sound—not as one he has ever made, or heard, in real life—but as one from Saturday morning cartoons. That war whoop is Wente's first experience with blatant racism, and shapes his ideas about Hollywood (mis)representation. In another blistering scene, Wente breaks down and sobs in emotional exhaustion on a live morning talk show—some three decades later. His exhaustion reaches its peak after a public battle over a now-legendary 2017 issue of Write magazine that featured all indigenous authors, authors whose names [End Page 260] would be obscured by the ensuing drama over cultural appropriation. Wente's exhaustion is with the white-centeredness of everything in Canada—even an issue that is supposed to celebrate indigenous writers. He is careful to name each of those writers in a chapter called "The Power to Tell Our Own Stories." Throughout the book, Wente's frustration is palpable, and Unreconciled reads as a manifesto to his educated, well-thought-out torment as a person still processing trauma as he presses on in the face of it. Wente is American and Anishinaabe, a member of the Serpent River First Nation. His grandmother Norma, to whom this book is dedicated, was a student in Spanish for ten years at a residential school. Despite living with Jesse for his entire adolescence, she spoke of it only once. Two generations separated from both the Reserve and the Ojibwe language, Wente laments that his upwardly mobile, English-speaking family is "the exact type of Indians residential schools were designed to produce" (17). In this way, Wente's story is a familiar one. He calls the "damage wrought by residential schools" his family's "unwanted inheritance" (75). Wente's parents are executives and he attended private high school. One chapter is even named: "Ojibwe Enough." Yet, the memoir does more than admit to the complication of straddling two identities; Wente's stories interweave personal tribulations in the context of the changing political landscape of Canada. The final report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission was issued in 2015, seven years and six thousand interviews after it began. Whether the country has lived up to its intention to recreate a more equitable Canada is, according to Wente, not even a matter for debate. Despite the fact that Canada is years ahead of the United States in terms of reckoning with its genocidal past, Wente insists the wound colonialism has caused is still wide open, and not even healing. Unreconciled can be at times jarring and uncomfortable—but maybe that is the point. A nation can't get to the Reconciliation part without wading in the...

Ruby and the Itsy-Bitsy Icky by Allison Wortche

Reviewed by: Ruby and the Itsy-Bitsy Icky by Allison Wortche Sarah Sahn Wortche, Allison Ruby and the Itsy-Bitsy Icky Bug; illus. by Sally Walker. Knopf, 2022 [40p] Library ed. ISBN 9780593174180 $20.99 Trade ed. ISBN 9780593174173 $17.99 E-book ed. ISBN 9780593174197 $10.99 Reviewed from digital galleys R* 5-7 yrs. It's a perfect sunny Saturday morning, but as soon as Ruby opens her curtains, the day is ruined by a big, icky bug on her window screen. To be clear, Ruby loves all animals furry and scaled; bioluminescent sea creatures are the coolest. She's going to be a marine biologist or a paleontologist (and a rock star), but "entomologist" is a definite no, because bugs? Bugs are gross. She wants that bug gone, so she takes matters into her own hands. A spray of water doesn't work, and neither does blowing hard at it through the screen. The bug stays put when Ruby screams as loud as she can, and she ends up with a time-out. In her room. With the bug. But maybe … the bug isn't so bad. His little antennae are kind of cute, and it's not so lonely being in time out with the bug to keep her company. Even after time-out is over, Ruby goes back to check on him, and at bedtime she makes an exciting discovery: Mr. Yuck-Bug is bioluminescent, just like her favorite fish! Ruby is a delightfully expressive protagonist, with rosy, light brown cheeks and a wide-eyed, gap-toothed look of horror when she encounters her insect visitor. Walker's whimsical artwork—a combination of printmaking, ink, and pencil, layered and colored digitally in a warm, earthy palette—provides an energetic depiction of Ruby's thoughts and imaginings, as vignettes and speech bubbles are interspersed with full-bleed pages and spreads as Ruby gets to know her bug friend. Cool tones take over in the closing scenes, zooming out to a nighttime landscape dotted with fireflies. Bring this book for science-themed story time, a warm-up before a nature program, or a read-aloud with a bug-ambivalent kid. [End Page 337] Copyright © 2022 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

Donald P. Pinkel: In Memoriam (1926–2022)

Donald P. Pinkel: In Memoriam (1926–2022)

John Robinson, Mr Nicholls and the Brontës

Much is known about the people who were close to the Brontës, but John Robinson, a young boy who lived one mile from Haworth, in Stanbury, is given only a sentence or two in several major biographies. When he was thirteen, John became a pupil-teacher at the school in Haworth, a role for which he required extra tuition. He received this on Saturday mornings from the Rev Arthur Bell Nicholls. During his lessons, John witnessed first-hand Mr Nicholls' distress over his unrequited love for Charlotte Brontë—a situation John never forgot and was able to vividly recall later in life. Two newspaper articles featuring John's reminiscences add much to our knowledge about the private suffering of Mr Nicholls as well as John's closeness to his teacher. When Mr Nicholls married Charlotte, John was one of the few people invited to attend the ceremony. By the time he was eighteen, following the progress he had made in his studies, John was about to embark on a promising career when he received some very personal gifts from Patrick Brontë. In this paper, I hope to retrieve John from obscurity by examining the nature of his unique, close relationship with Mr Nicholls while revealing the esteemed place he held within the Brontë family.

Re-visioning.

The light was changing from amber to red when I turned left onto Main Street. My stepdaughter and I were on our way to a workout on a rainy Saturday morning. From the passenger seat of my trusty Subaru, she screamed — at what, I did not know. Although we made it through the intersection without

About Suffering

About Suffering Stephanie Douglass Carpenter (bio) "…how it takes place While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along" – W. H. Auden, "Musée des Beaux Arts" My job is to watch them. Watch them comb their hair and make their beds and get dressed in the morning. Watch those on suicide-watch shower and use the restroom. Watch them eat. We all look forward to meals: They to hamburgers or spaghetti or scrambled eggs or peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, me to the ten or fifteen minutes of calm when they are too focused on their food to act out. There is a special "finger-foods" menu for patients who aren't allowed to use silverware; spoons and forks are the privilege of the meek. Rumor has it that the kitchen used to serve pork chops until a patient tried to stab a staff member with the rib bone. Stand back, my grandmother shouts when frying chicken. From across the kitchen we watch as she uses tongs to lay floured drumsticks and breasts into a froth of boiling oil. If baking she welcomes us close, offers us a spoon or beater to lick. Our matriarch, she presides over every aspect of important meals—Sunday lunches, holiday dinners, milestone celebrations—from preparation to prayer to Tupperware. A few days before my birthday every year, she asks what kind of cake I want. Emerald green, also known as copper acetoarsenite, is concocted by two chemists in a Bavarian lab in 1814. A mix of copper sulfate, acetic acid, and sodium arsenite, the compound evokes the startling blue-green waters of the Mediterranean. Use of the vivid pigment spreads among bakers, who use it to color candies and cake decorations. Watch them go to "school," which is just another locked room in the treatment center, but special, with its alphabet chart and motivational posters. Watch them learn. Watch them get frustrated or bored and run out of the classroom. Watch them watch cartoons (privilege) on Saturday morning. Patients who are noncompliant or aggressive must sit alone at a desk facing the cinderblock wall and write papers about why they are sitting alone at a desk. A good homemade meal lures me back every few weeks. When it is time to leave and return to college, my mom begins crying. She hugs and kisses me several times. Her goodbyes create the impression that this is the last time we will see each other, that I am going to die. [End Page 189] A cake covered in candy flowers with leaves. Sugar dogs reclining in grass. Watch them sit in time-out. Watch them pace back and forth in the quiet room. Watch them visit with family. Watch them play Uno and Monopoly and kickball (all privileges). Watch them pack their belongings and leave for home or another treatment center. Watch them smile. Laugh. Scream. Cry. Rage. I am a teenager when there occurs one of those hometown tragedies that hijacks local attention. It dominates the front page of the newspaper. It leads news broadcasts, the story accompanied by B-roll footage of gray, choppy waters in our reservoir. It bows heads in our congregation as our pastor lifts prayers of comfort and healing for the woman. I try to recall seeing her family in the halls of our large Baptist church where they had been members. I did not know her three sons, who had been several years younger than me. In the immediate aftermath of the tragedy, I closely follow the story, compelled by the lurid eruption of catastrophe. I cannot turn away. My job is not to turn away. My job is to supervise them. I am not their therapist. I am not their friend or their parent, cautions the training guide. I am there to provide direction and structure, to keep them safe and on-task while maintaining the therapeutic milieu. Not a babysitter, and not a guard, but something in between. There are reports of children sickened or killed from green candy. A man dies after eating blancmange adorned with the most vibrant confectionary cucumber and leaves. At times, it feels like watching a...

Unlisted

Unlisted

SBCS Holds Its Second Online Annual Meeting November 19–20, 2021

SBCS Holds Its Second Online Annual Meeting November 19–20, 2021 Sandra Costen Kunz For the second year in a row, the Society for Buddhist-Christian Studies (SBCS) held its annual meeting online due to the corona virus pandemic. For several decades prior to the pandemic, we met face-to-face in conjunction with the annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion (AAR) as one of its "related scholar organizations." Having applied in 2020 to continue as an AAR "RSO," we were delighted that AAR renewed our status in March, 2021, because we see our own mission as having some important overlap with AAR's. (For these two mission statements, see: https://www.society-buddhist-christian-studies.org/mission and https://www.aarweb.org/AARMBR/Who-We-Are-/Mission-and-Values.aspx.) This year, in addition to its face-to-face sessions at San Antonio's convention center and downtown hotels, AAR again offered an online video conference platform on which we held our paper sessions late Friday afternoon and Saturday morning. We sincerely hope that conditions are such that early next fall we can commit to meeting in person in conjunction with the 2022 AAR meeting in Denver. Our Friday governing board meetings and members meeting this year were hosted by SBCS President Leo Lefebure on Georgetown University's Zoom platform. board of directors morning meeting Approval of the Minutes and Slate of Nominees The president called our meeting to order at 9 a.m. CST. After the minutes from the 2020 meeting were unanimously approved, the board's Nominating Committee presented the following slate for new board officers and directors and committee members: Vice president:Carolyn Jones Medine Journal co-editor:Kristin Johnston Largen Journal book review editor:Jason VonWachenfeldt [End Page 377] At-large board directors:Elizabeth Tyler (four-year term)Anh Tran (four-year term)Insook Lee (three-year term) Streng Book Award Committee member:Jason VonWachenfeldt Social Media and Website Committee members:Julius-Kei KatoAlaina Keller Using Zoom's anonymous polling function, we voted for each person in turn. The result was that each committee nominee was elected, and the officers and at-large board members were given approval to be presented on the board's slate during the online election during the members meeting. To honor their needs for sleep, we moved next to the reports of our two board members who were zooming in late at night from East Asia. Social Media and Website Committee Chair Jonathan Seitz reported from Taipei. Prior to the meeting, he had emailed the board a summary that included statistics that Chera Jo Watts, executive associate for digital services, had collected. The news was very good—and demonstrated the importance of this committee for the Society's work and growth! In this article, I've included both written and oral parts of Jonathan's report. Website During 2021, journal co-editor Thomas Cattoi, past president Kristin Largen, vice president Mark Unno, Leo, and Jonathan posted articles and announcements on the blog. These totaled seven posts, which were more than in 2020. The traffic on our website increased during the months in which new content was posted: a pattern also noted in prior years. If you're interested in writing for the blog, you can find tips at: https://www.society-buddhist-christian-studies.org/topics/2022/2/7/write-forus-submittinga-blog-post-to-sbcs. Our 6,623 total website visits showed a 25% increase over last year. Membership Statistics We currently have 218 dues paying-members who receive a hard copy of the journal. This is a 25% increase over last year! The membership categories and fees are: [End Page 378] • 79 students (60 in 2020) $10; • 94 (75 in 2020) practitioners and adjunct, independent, or retired professors $25; • 45 (39 in 2020) assistant, associate, or full professors $45. Members' Online Access to the Journal Not long after our publisher, University of Hawai'i Press (UHP), began publishing the journal online as well as in print, issues were made available to our membership electronically through Project Muse via a link from UHP: a very useful research tool for...

Experimental Study on the Effectiveness of Extracurricular Football Training for Improving Primary Students Physical Fitness

The purpose of this study is to examine the effectiveness of after-school football training in improving the physical fitness of primary school students, so as to provide corresponding Suggestions for carrying out after-school football training in primary schools. A total of 72 students from the experimental primary school of Mouping district, Yantai city, Shandong province, participated in this experimental study, including 36 in the experimental group and 36 in the control group. The experiment was conducted for two semesters. During the experiment period, the experimental group conducted one-hour football training after school from Monday to Thursday afternoon every week, and two hours of football training on Saturday morning every week. The control group conducted sports teaching and extracurricular activities as usual without other intervention. Before and after the experiment, both the experimental group and the control group underwent physical fitness tests according to the physical fitness test standards of Chinese students, including lung capacity, 50-meter run, one-minute skipping rope, sitting forward flexor, and one-minute sit-ups. The test results were all converted to the 100-point system according to the scoring standards. Before the experiment, there was no significant difference between the experimental group and the control group in various physical fitness indicators (p > 0.05). After the experiment, the lung capacity score (T = 3.108, p < 0.05), the 50-meter run score (T = 6.593, p < 0.05), the skipping score (T = 9.227, p < 0.05), the sitting forward flexor score (T = 3.742, p < 0.05), and the sit-up score (T = 5.210, p < 0.05) of the experimental group were significantly higher than that of the control group. This study shows that the physical fitness of primary school students can be improved by football training in their spare time. It is suggested to carry out after-school football training activities in primary schools so as to effectively improve the physical fitness of pupils.

American Outback

American Outback Leath Tonino (bio) JUST Saturday morning, snow falling soft and white and everywhere. I should be out skiing, building a snowman, relishing this dynamic spring weather, this fleeting absurd life, this body, this earth, while it lasts. Nope. I'm YouTubing on the couch, watching C-SPAN, a testimony before the US House of Representatives, Committee on Natural Resources, Subcommittee on Federal Lands. Watching the video for the umpteenth time. Watching it and grinding my molars. The man testifying is mustached, in a dark cowboy hat and dark blazer. He sits at a glossy wooden table, thick hands folded together, voice booming with confidence. A piece of me appreciates that his speech is firm and that he is devoted to a place; I suspect we would manage fine if somehow—over breakfast at a cafe in rural Utah, sunnyside eggs and toast, chitchat about Grandad's cattle operation and the local school, pass the salt—we could avoid discussing politics. Big somehow. This rancher, this county commissioner, has flown to D.C. for a specific reason: to oppose the GSENM, the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument. "Probably twenty percent of that monument is visited …" "But eighty percent of a landmass like that …" "If you don't believe me, come on out, we'll go out and …" I'm refilling my coffee, refreshing the video, banging the spacebar to halt the man mid-sentence, banging it to start him pontificating again. My girlfriend, Sophia, pokes her head into the room and rolls her eyes at this caffeinated Saturday madness. With the dullest of pencils, I'm gouging a notepad. Banging the spacebar, banging the spacebar. Double-checking to ensure a verbatim transcription. "And I'm sorry, people are not going to travel from all over the world to look at sagebrush and regular BLM rangeland …" "There's no tourism value …" "It is just BLM rangeland like you'll find anywhere in the western United States …" Since the presidential proclamation was signed in December of 2017, I've been monitoring the dismemberment of GSENM—the "American outback," to borrow [End Page 68] a longtime wilderness activist's apt nickname. Under the pretense of reining in government overreach, and with dubious legal authority, the monument's borders were redrawn: corners lopped off, corridors severed, protected zones reduced by almost fifty percent. Stroke-of-the-ceremonial-pen style, nearly one million acres were opened to potential abuse from drills, dozers, pavement, noise, industry, extraction, dollars, the gamut. That's bad. But this video, this man, this word echoing after I shut the laptop and drain the coffee and step into the yard to dazedly gaze, to drift with drifting flakes—this is worse. "It is just BLM rangeland" sets off in me a deeper indignation, a more philosophical and fundamental disgust. Argh, the worldview of just. Argh, the self-serving unreflective anthropocentrism of just. Argh, the crime just commits against scarps and rincons, warblers and eagles, coyotes and mice, ferns and cactuses, stillness and silence, thousands upon thousands upon thousands upon thousands upon thousands (upon thousands!) of pebbles in any given gulch, each pebble a planet, a sphere, rounded and smooth and beyond perfection, beyond any idea in any human mind, any song in any human heart. Snow dampening my hair, I return to the couch, and though it's tempting to continue prowling C-SPAN, I opt instead for Shakespeare, asking Sophia if she'd like to join me in a rousing recitation. Act 3. Scene 1. Alarum. Enter KING HENRY, EXETER, BEDFORD, GLOUCESTER, and Soldiers, with scaling-ladders. ________ Charley Bulletts, Cultural Resources Director, Kaibab Band of Paiute Indians, Shares a Few Thoughts in a Phone Interview Two Weeks Before I Depart "Old cowboys love telling stories about their family on the land." "It's a beautiful thing to be white and come to the West." "There was so much open land, so much land that was unclaimed." "What's not beautiful is what happened to the people who already lived here." "Just to have a conversation with you my ancestors had to survive." "They had to hide and survive." [End Page 69] TO-DO LIST Pull my trusty GSENM...

Tree of Life

Tree of Life Sophie Klahr (bio) for the eleven Jews murdered in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, on October 27, 2018; for congregation Dor Hadash; for my parents; for A.K. The week after our family friend is not shotthat Saturday morning in synagogue, she invites us over for dinner. I’ve knownher and her husband long enough that their names have become a single song,syllables knit with an and—in your life you’ve probably known a dozen of these songs,the rhythm of decades of marriage. The song would have splitif she had been shot that day, but she was late to Torah study. Turnedand ran when she heard the shots. Before dinner, she and her husband passshallow dishes of cashews and green olives around the living room. There are not many of us,three other couples and my parents, but I have known them all since I was a child,and I, at thirty-five, am the only adult child at dinner, the other adult children of the couplesfar from our hometown, living their lives— [End Page 80] none of our parents have been shot. Iam sitting at dinner with them. We are eating a lightly dressed salad and stuffed peppers.It takes a while to make a stuffed pepper. It is a careful thing. In Latin, her name means bird—our friendwho was not shot. Our friend, the bird, has an easy face. A poem might sayshe has a sweet crinkle in her voice, something one looks forward to hearing,like the air that slips between a foil wrapper and a hard butterscotch candy one has kept in their pursefor a while, to be surprised with later. I have kept this poem at bayfor a while. And still, when I am visiting Pittsburgh,I shudder away from the corner where the Tree of Life synagogue still stands,empty now three years, drive different routes in order to not see the building, to not have the flashof bullets, air splitting and splitting and splitting. But our friend the bird and her husband still livedown the street, and must pass the lost temple all the time. Our friend’s name also, in origin, means desired.The week after she was almost shot, she invited my family and our friends over for dinner.Our congregation was targeted because we were helping a refugee organization. Our friend had us overfor dinner. Snipers stood on rooftops [End Page 81] when we filed into a different synagoguefor the memorials. Pittsburgh stopped and stood and held itself, watching the eleven hearses. We were sickwith crying. I warned my parents away from crowds of citizens gathering to sing—they went anyway. Jewish tradition tells usto have no nails in coffins—to have a plain pine box, held together with wooden pegs made by hand.It is a careful thing, to make a stuffed pepper— it means that you will make something balance. Our friend was not killed and soshe invited us to dinner. At dinner, there was laughter. Before the meal, we did not recite any particular prayer,but in the stuffed peppers, there were a few meanings of life. They were warm.They were filled to the brim. [End Page 82] Sophie Klahr Sophie Klahr is the author of Two Open Doors in a Field (Backwaters Press, 2023) and Meet Me Here at Dawn (YesYes Books, 2016), and co-author of There Is Only One Ghost in the World (Fiction Collective 2, 2023) with Corey Zeller. Her work appears in publications such as the New Yorker and American Poetry Review. She teaches at UNC-Chapel Hill. Copyright © 2022 Middlebury College

On Ice: Life and Lunch at Mercato di Rialto

Visitors consume Venice’s Mercato di Rialto most often with their eyes and cameras. Venetians, in contrast, consume it with their mouths. During the week they voice their orders gently, but on Saturday mornings shopping lists become full-volume announcements that compete against the market noise. By analysing the history and role of the Pescheria at Rialto Market and its culinary and cultural representations, this article considers the entanglement between seafood and people, ice and freshness, and life and lunch.

‘Event-tualising’ Physical Leisure Activity: How Gauteng Parkrunners Brought the Parkrun Home during COVID-19

On the 27th of March 2020, South Africa entered hard lockdown (alert level 5) following the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, with the banning of all physical activity outside a place of residence. As a result, official parkrun events were immediately suspended. In June 2020, the country moved to alert level 3, no longer curbing the use of public spaces for leisure, entertainment, and physical activity, albeit with restrictions. However, group sports leisure, such as parkruns remained prohibited. Thus, parkrun, a highly successful global movement where individuals gather on Saturday mornings for a timed 2 or 5km run, jog, or walk, with family and friends, was severely affected by COVID-19 prevention measures. In mitigation, parkrun officials launched, in June 2020, the (not)parkrun to enable individuals to log (on the parkrun website) their own 5km activity, irrespective of time, day or route. In this regard, parkrun enabled parkrunners to bring the event ‘home’, that is, to informally claim public space and time for their physical leisure. By analysing participation figures and feedback posted on the national parkrun blog and social media pages, this research shows how the (not)parkrun enabled Gauteng parkrunners to ‘event-tualise’ their runs to counter act the de-eventualisation of the parkrun by lockdown regulations.

Faith, Fear, and Other F-Words

Faith, Fear, and Other F-Words

The Italian American Studies Association at Fifty-Five: 1966–2021

The Italian American Studies Association at Fifty-Five: 1966–2021

Morning

Morning Anathi Jongilanga (bio) He was on his way to The Man Moves when Morning spotted the car. Not so much spotting as seeing that he was being followed. Suspicion morphing into fact. A black Audi A3 Sedan following two cars behind him all the way from Fassie Extension, his neighbourhood. Easy to spot in the sparse Saturday morning traffic. He didn't think anything of it at first, but as he turned into Putuma Avenue, to cut through Masukatown, the neighbouring suburb, on his way into the CBD of Duiker Hill, the two cars behind him continued on Dana Street while the black one turned with him and followed at a relatively safe distance. On and on … while A Seat at the Table boomed from the dashboard until he forgot about the car. A little hungover from last night's boozing with his beau, he was thinking about how long he would have to stay with his friends before going back home and relaxing the fatigue away. He parked at the corner where Nkoli Street met Ditsie Road, already spotting the restaurant up there. He dashed inside the corner shop where he bought a sachet of two Panado tablets and a bottle of water and was soon out. Walking up along Nkoli Street towards The Man Moves he noticed the car again, parked opposite the bar and grill he was going to. He was certain that that was the car—no two ways about it. A wave of gratitude washed over him as he tortuously took off the tight leather jacket he wore and sighed with relief. It was starting to feel like he was being pinched by a thousand ants at the crooks of his arms as he held his water and pills. Then the wave dissipated suddenly, and in its place came one of shock, the man startled. As he raised his right hand to scratch at the back of his head, a strong hand clutched his wrist and he turned in fear: though this town was not notorious for such crimes as mugging and robbery, this was still South Africa, anything was possible at any time. Confused, shocked and amused at the same time, [End Page 218] Click for larger view View full resolution Nadia Huggins, Transformations No. 1 (2014). Digital photograph, 30 × 46.5 in. (Courtesy of Nadia Huggins, 2021.) he yanked his arm away such that the old woman grabbing at it almost lost her balance and fell on his person. "What the fuck are you doing?" "Please—" Who was this stranger come to hold him like this as if she'd known him all his life? People never did that here; people used their words here, they spoke with their mouths, not with their hands. He thought he should give her the time, whatever she wanted could not be outside the stretch of his powers to give; but in the next second— "Who are you?" "Please ca—" "Lady, please leave me alone. Damn! Who the fuck are you?" "Please calm—" She sighed. "Let me explain." Zany, Morning thought. Nutso. Loony. Cuckoo as cuckoo goes. And he didn't repent for these thoughts like he would've at any other time. He saw something of himself in her, something about her. That big, flat nose and the brownest eyes, if a nose and eyes ever signified that two people looked alike. The determination: standing there looking like she wasn't about to let this go before she could say what she wanted to say to him. Then he willed himself to stop and listen to her, calmed himself down for her. Up the street, somebody was waving a hand from The Man Moves and Morning was sure it was meant for him. [End Page 219] "I was wondering if we could talk?" the woman pleaded. Her eyes thinned, her hand hesitant whether it should reach out and touch him or remain where it was, hanging in the air like a dead appendage. His phone beeped. The hand waved again. The woman waited. We've been waiting for you here. What's going on? "Who are you?" Morning asked her again and started walking...