Sullivan's Work Research Articles

Lou's Men

This article proposes that the personal writing of gay trans activist and diarist Lou Sullivan represents an erotic theoretical project akin to Leo Bersani's “homo-ness,” which Bersani describes as gayness's capacity to “manifest not the limits but the inestimable value of relations of sameness.” Sullivan's rigorous interlacing of gender and sexuality is founded on a desire for sameness, an eroticized recognition of his developing selfhood in the men he loves. In framing Sullivan's work with Bersani, this article argues that Bersani's framework of homo-ness is limited by its conceptual basis in genital parallel, creating an inability to speak to trans sexuality. Sullivan's writing, on the other hand, founds relations of sameness between himself and the gay men he desired in a conceptual architecture that understands gayness as an already trans position. In close reading Sullivan's diaries and personal correspondence, alongside artifacts of their reception by contemporary gay trans artists, this article substantiates a sense of Sullivan as a kind of sex symbol for the enfolding of gay and trans erotic worlds in the desire for sameness. Such an analysis allows gay and trans studies to speak to each other anew on the question, What is this same in same-sex sexuality?

Nobody's Duck by Mary Sullivan

Reviewed by: Nobody's Duck by Mary Sullivan Deborah Stevenson, Editor Sullivan, Mary Nobody's Duck; written and illus. by Mary Sullivan. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2018 [34p] Trade ed. ISBN 978-0-544-79250-0 $14.99 E-book ed. ISBN 978-1-328-46676-1 $14.99 Reviewed from galleys R Gr. K-2 Ah, restricted vocabulary books. To people outside of children's literature, seemingly the easiest thing to do; to people in the know, the hardest genre to pull off. Talents such as Dr. Seuss or Mo Willems are deservedly famous, but there are also some brilliant practitioners of the art who haven't received quite that level of celebrity. One of those is author/illustrator Mary Sullivan. Sullivan's work first came to our attention in Ball (BCCB 5/13), a lively dog story whose sole text is the repeated word "ball"; in her subsequent dog story Frankie (BCCB 5/17), she expanded to a tale told in under ten different words. Now she's loosened the boundaries further in Nobody's Duck, which contains under fifty individual words, a petite number that only seems large by comparison with the rigor of her prior limits. Yet Sullivan's stories are never cramped by their limitations—in fact, they unspool generously and luxuriously, with the repetition of their few words naturally occurring. This puts them in that rare category of books that work effortlessly as beginning readers or as picture books, and it makes them particularly happy choices for read-along lapsits. In this case, Sullivan's subject is that perennial favorite of picture books, the odd critter couple. When an alligator spots a duck settling in on his lawn, he reasonably asks his unexpected visitor, "Whose duck are you?" The duck unhelpfully answers that he's "nobody's duck," but the determined 'gator ("Well, you must be somebody's duck") hauls the bird around town—to the library, to the movies, to the go-kart track—asking various townsanimals "Is this your duck?" After a lively day of shared activities initiated by the duck at the various venues, the duck announces to a gratified alligator that "I am your duck," and the two cement their friendship over pancakes. Sullivan's all-dialogue, all speech-balloon text is maximally cunning in its ability to fold word and phrase repetition into the plot without ever straining the vocabulary. The characterization is clear—the alligator, in his natty necktie, is Mr. Straitlaced Straightman, while Duck is all childish id, gamboling around the alligator with ebullient exclamations of "Quack!" (expanding with multiple a's as Duck gets increasingly overexcited) and enthusiastic exclamations-cum-sound effects at various locations. Alligator's repeated query of "Is this your duck?" has an echo of Are You My Mother?, but he delivers it with magnificent comedic variation, sometimes slyly hopeful, sometimes frustrated, sometimes just desperate, building the suspense and giving fine opportunity to readers aloud looking for dramatic opportunities. Viewers will also want to take their time to appreciate the art, in digital line and watercolor style; Duck is always up to some comic theater business, and he [End Page 189] collects souvenirs from every place he and Alligator go, so the poor reptile is pulling the duck along in a wagon full of library books, movie poster, and checkered flag. While the scene of the two friends at the monster flick (Duck levitating with joy, Alligator cringing with horror, both behind 3D glasses) is the comic zenith, there are plenty of comradely friendship touches as well. Duck and Alligator will hopefully return to take their own place in the opposite-friends pantheon, and in the meantime audiences can revel in their first adventure and appreciate the hilarious photo-booth picture strip on the back cover. (See p. 222 for publication information.) Copyright © 2017 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

The Problem with Loving Whiteness

Problem with Loving Whiteness: A Response to S. Sullivan's Good White People: Problem with Middle-Class White Anti-RacismShannon Sullivan's work on racialization and habits, and on relationality and transaction, has been important to my philosophical work on race, racism, habits, and much more. Good White People: Problem with Middle-Class White Anti-Racism has, in quite a short time, been extensively engaged and taken up as a useful and important intervention in thinking about whiteness in the U.S. American context. I attempt here to offer some constructive disagreement on matters of mutual care and concern: in general, the abolition of white supremacy and, in particular, white people's potential contribution for racial justice movements. I focus on the key question of whether it is appropriate to love whiteness. Along the way I express worry about Good White People's orientation toward middle-class liberals, its approach to history, its politics of citation, and its focus on a Black/white binary in the continental United States.Sullivan begins the book by quoting a critic I hadn't heard of before reading this book, Lerone Bennett, who wrote The white liberal and the white supremacist share the same root postulates. They are different in degree, not kind (Sullivan 2014: 1). Sullivan says that she is addressing the bulk of white people in the post-Jim Crow United States and other similar white-dominated nations who consider themselves to be non- or anti-racist. These are the white liberals of which Lerone Bennett speaks, the'good' white people whose goodness is marked by their difference from the 'bad' white people who are considered responsible for any lingering racism in a progressive, liberal society (3). I agree absolutely with the view that white liberals are not going to bring about revolutionary transformation in the racial order of this world. But precisely for this reason, I am not sure that the white liberal is the correct subject through which we should to organize our thinking about race. I also do not think that white liberals are the main engine of racial oppression.Further, I am curious about the category of similar white-dominated nations; although I have only deeply engaged racial politics in two nation-states, Canada and the US, it is clear to me that while there are certain commonalities in the way race is lived and governed, there are also vital differences. Perhaps the most striking is the difference between an assumed Black/white binary grounded in historical chattel slavery as the central logic for thinking about race, common in US race thinking, versus an overt formation in Canada (and other places) that centers far more on indigeneity, borders, migration, and the management of multiple racialized others. Working through these differences has convinced me of the necessity of understanding and thinking about whiteness as operative outside the US American context, beyond a Black/white binary, and in a way that accounts for the founding and ongoing violences of capitalism and colonialism. While chattel slavery has informed many parts of the world, and while anti-Black racism has been necessary to the ways slavery was organized and manifests itself in contemporary racism, I question this book's tight focus on the US and on Black/ white racial dynamics.Whiteness, in my view, operates in complex and shifting ways anywhere racialization is happening, and so perhaps it's a good place to start in thinking about the question of whether we ought to love whiteness. In this book, Sullivan does not spend a lot of time defining whiteness. When she does, it is in expansive ways that raise the question of what it means to love whiteness so defined. She argues that there is to being white that being Irish or Italian alone does not capture, and that something is a pattern of domination, exploitation, and oppression (Sullivan 2014: 16). This understanding of whiteness as collective-as constituted by domination, exploitation, and oppression-reminds us that whiteness is not something, on Sullivan's view, that we individually control the effects or the meaning of. …

Lorenz like Smale flows on three-manifolds

In this paper, we discuss how to realize Lorenz like Smale flows (LLSF) on 3-manifolds. It is an extension of M. Sullivan's work about Lorenz Smale flows on S 3 . We focus on two questions: (1) Classify the topological conjugate classes of LLSF which can be realized on S 3 ; (2) Which 3-manifolds admit LLSF? If some 3-manifold admits LLSF, how does it admit LLSF? This paper is in some sense parallel to the work of J. Morgan and M. Wada on Morse–Smale flows on 3-manifolds.

“Maui and Orphic blood”: Cook’s Death in Contemporary Maori Poetry

The interpretation of Captain James Cook's death at Kealakekua Bay in 1779 was subject to contention in the eighteenth century; admiring publicists of the navigator's imperial benevolence such as Anna Seward differed from those like William Cowper, who denounced his irreligious participation in heathen rites. (1) Assessments as to the cultural and religious implications of his end are as diverse today, with anthropologists Marshall Sahlins and Gananath Obeyesekere arguing extendedly over whether Hawaiians really believed Cook to be the god Lono. To Obeyesekere, the idea that Hawaiians greeted Cook as a deity is an absurd imperialist illusion, while for Sahlins, the identification is necessary to understand the ritual implications of his death. (2) Nicolas Thomas and Anne Salmond have recently joined the fray, with Thomas emphasizing the extent to which societies habitually blurred the line between the divine and human, while Salmond argues that Cook was recognized either as a contemporary representative of Lonoka-Mahakihi or as the grandson of Lono-ma-I-Kanaka, in either case being saluted not as a deity but as the scion of a chiefly family. (3) Whatever their differences, all these contemporary commentators bring an anti-imperial skepticism to their judgments about Cook but none writes from a specifically perspective. In recent years, however, the Maori poet Robert Sullivan, of Nga Puhi descent resident in Hawai'i, has published two volumes dedicated to assessing Cook's career and legacy from a markedly Pacific perspective. In writing about Cook as one of the skin of the ocean (people of the Pacific) through Polynesian eyes, Sullivan's work reshapes the extant metropolitan debate. (4) As Seward's name-making Elegy on the Death of Captain Cook (1780) and Cowper's Charity (1780) bear witness, eighteenth-century poetry was a crucial aspect in developing and contesting Cook's emergence as a cultural hero. An important testimony to the salience of Sullivan's contemporary poetic contribution to the continuing historiographic and anthropological argument over his status is signaled by J. G. A. Pocock's admiring tribute to his contemporary, Allen Curnow, Aotearoa/New Zealand's leading modernist poet. In the first chapter of a recently published collection of essays, The Discovery of Islands, Pocock remarks that Curnow's verse articulated the problematic of unsettled and mobile oceanic identities and histories that would shape his own perspective as a historian: It was through the poetry of Allen Curnow that this conjunction of images and problems became in my mind a way of looking at history and living in it, when both had to be done a long sea voyage from anywhere He presented an imagination which could never be fully at home where it was, could never return to where it might have come from, and had traveled too far to fly off and live anywhere else. (5) In saluting the literary insight that enabled his own paradigm-shifting understanding of British history as archipelagic and oceanic, Pocock--who also cites Sullivan's work in his account of Maori self-representation--reminds us that poetry is not simply an object but a form of knowledge. POETRY, POSTCOLONIALISM, AND COOK Sullivan is relatively unusual in choosing poetry rather than the novel to challenge Anglo-American interpretations of Cook and the colonial histories that followed in his wake. Benedict Anderson's influential account of the way that print culture helped generate the imagined community of postcolonial nations grants the novel a privileged role in this process. (6) One of the most interesting aspects of Sullivan's work is his ability to use a wide range of poetic genres to address and constitute a pan-Pacific community, which cuts across postcontact national boundaries, while also issuing uncomfortable challenges to other groups, such as New Zealand Pakeha (settlers). (7) Equally interesting is his use of Cook's narratives in this project, for like Richard Hakluyt's collections of voyages, these texts can be read in the terms Richard Helgerson has proposed, as prose epics of the English nation. …

H/Z: Why Lesléa Newman Makes Heather into Zoe

H/Z:Why Lesléa Newman Makes Heather into Zoe Elizabeth A. Ford (bio) "Few changes in American mores over the past 50 years have been as dramatic or as salutary as the nation's increased acceptance of homosexuals." —Phillip Lopate, 1997. Consider Lopate's assertion as you read these three fragments trapped in the time capsule of a hot month in a recent summer: 20 August 1995: Denis Donoghue concludes his review of Virtually Normal: An Argument about Homosexuality with a personal comment. He says that his interest in Andrew Sullivan's work, which assesses the current politics of homosexuality, is catalyzed by his affection for his lesbian daughter, "the writer Emma Donoghue," whose homosexuality "does not darken [his] love for her, or qualify the joy [he] takes in her personality, her immense gifts" (26).1 The opening sentence of that paragraph slightly diminishes the power of his declaration: "I am not, in my own person," Donoghue makes clear, "directly caught in this dispute" (26). 25 August 1995: A shopping trip to a split-down-the-middle Carter's outlet leaves me bemused. Although department stores have always separated boys' apparel from girls', surely baby clothing has never been so irrevocably divided, so aggressively gendered. Marooned between two poles of certainty, the layette counter offers the only gender-neutral option, bland infant garments sporting amorphous patterns (not flower shapes, but not airplanes either).2 I imagine the Carter's design team heaving sighs of relief and trashing these insincere either/or ensembles, now that almost all prospective parents choose to know their babies' gender. The word layette (way too feminine) will vanish. 27 August 1995: A pretty little girl grins fetchingly from the Children's Books page of the New York Times Book Review. Catherine Stock's frontispiece accompanies Roger Sutton's review of Too Far Away to Touch, by Lesléa Newman.3 Stock's watercolor still-life shows a gold-framed photo of two faces: a smiling blonde child, eyes closed, being hugged by a tousle-haired young man whose own closed eyes are slightly shadowed. Dark background tones in this illustration foreshadow the content of Newman's text, in which the child tells about her visits with a favorite uncle, who, Sutton explains, is dying of AIDS. The descriptive phrase that Sutton applies to Newman's text could also refer to the watercolor—"poignant, but not sticky." His generally positive review of Newman's book and a similar picture book by Judith Vigna concludes with a contemplative paragraph about purpose: "What are these books for?" he asks. "Will children want to read them or hear them again?" (27). These salvaged fragments may sound like gleanings from an Internet search generated by the terms gay/lesbian, children, literature, and clothing. But I hope to reveal the codes—Barthian and other—that connect these fragments and to use them to explore a central, unspoken anxiety that haunts the conjunction of gay/lesbian issues and children's literature. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick calls "the experience and identity of gay or proto-gay children" a "fraught space of life-or-death struggle that has been more or less abandoned by constructivist gay theory" (42). Books that present gay or lesbian themes to children may be seen as opening up that "fraught space" to their readers. Ultimately, it is the fear of what children might learn about their own sexual identities, not about the sexuality of adults around them, that makes these books controversial. "Unsubtle, overly didactic" Authors who chose gay themes and who write for children must also choose whether or not to be commercially viable. Those who want to sell books must learn, as Newman seems to have learned, to maintain a "safe" distance between child and gay adult characters. More like a wall than a comfort zone, distance problematizes the treatment of gay themes in children's literature and may keep the genre from reflecting the growing cultural acceptance that Lopate identifies as a contemporary reality. Writers who hope to promote cultural acceptance would be unusual if they did not hope for readers and sales as well. The New York Times Book Review, itself a commodity, affects the transaction...

Art and artists of twentieth-century China

This visually stunning book focuses on the rebirth of Chinese art in the twentieth century under the influence of Western art and culture. Michael Sullivan, recognized throughout the world as a leading scholar of Chinese art, vividly documents the conflicting pulls of traditional and Western values on Chinese art and provides 364 illustrations, in color and black-and-white, to show the great range of artistic expression and the historical processes that occurred within various movements. A substantial biographical index of twentieth-century Chinese artists is a valuable addition to the text. Sullivan discusses artists and their work against China's background of oppression and relaxation, despair and hope. He expertly conveys the diverse and at times bizarre intertwining of Chinese cultural history and art during this century. Included are the intense debates between traditionalists and reformers, the creation of the first art schools, and the birth of the idea - shocking in ethnocentric China - that art is a world language that obliterates all frontiers. The scholarly traditions of classical Chinese painting, the belated discovery of Western modernism, the artistic upheaval under Communism, and China's rethinking of the very nature of art all have a place in Sullivan's fascinating history. Michael Sullivan has known many of the major figures in China's modern art movement of the 1930s and 1940s and has also gained the confidence of younger artists who rose to prominence following the 1979 'Peking Spring'. This long-awaited book - richly documented and abundantly illustrated - is a capstone to Sullivan's work and will be enthusiastically welcomed by art lovers everywhere.

Harry Stack Sullivan: Opening the door for a transpersonal vision?

Abstract As an apparently typical neo‐Freudian theorist, Harry Stack Sullivan may appear to have had little to offer to the development of transpersonal thought. Yet a closer examination of his work reveals several elements in his theorizing that (1) are surprising, given his intellectual heritage, and (2) allow for the extension of his theorizing in the direction of a transpersonal perspective. Sullivan's views on the nature and origin of anxiety, the inescapability of anxiety, empathy, and the need for sleep are examined with an eye toward parallels between his views and a transpersonal perspective. It is suggested that these elements of Sullivan's work provide a type of bridge between conventional and transpersonal perspectives on self and personality development.

Louis Sullivan: the Public Papers

This volume brings together for the first time all the papers Louis Sullivan intended for a public audience, from his first interview in 1882 to his last essay in 1924. Organized chronologically, these speeches, interviews, essays, letters to editors, and committee reports enable readers to trace Sullivan's development from a brash young assistant to Dankmar Adler to an architectural elder statesman. Robert Twombly, an authority on Sullivan's work and life, has introduced each document with a headnote explaining its significance, locating it in time and place, and examining its immediate context. He has also provided a general introduction that analyzes Sullivan's writing style and objectives, his major philosophical themes, and the sources of his ideas. With the help of headnotes and introduction, readers will get a thorough sense of Sullivan's concerns, discover how his ideas evolved and changed, and appreciate the circumstances under which new interests emerged. This collection is a handy introduction to the full range of Sullivan's thinking, the book with which readers interested in the architect's writings should begin. As a companion volume to Robert Twombly's biography of Sullivan, it gives a comprehensive picture of one of America's most important architects and cultural figures.

The Pure Capital-Cost Barrier to Entry

The Pure Capital-Cost Barrier to Entry

Checking ergodicity of some geodesic flows with infinite Gibbs measure

AbstractThis paper concerns a problem which arose from a paper of Sullivan. Let Γ be a discrete group of isometries of hyperbolic space Hd+1. We study the question of when the geodesic flow on the unit tangent bundle UT (Hd+1/Γ) of Hd+1/Γ is ergodic with respect to certain natural measures. As a consequence, we study the question of when Γ is of divergence type. Ergodicity when the non-wandering set of UT (Hd+1/Γ) is compact is already known from the theory of symbolic dynamics, due to Bowen, or from Sullivan's work. For such a Γ, we consider a subgroup Γ1 of Γ with Γ/Γ1 ≅ℤυ and prove the geodesic flow on UT (Hd+1/Γ1) is ergodic (with respect to one of these natural measures) if and only if υ ≤ 2.

Froebel's kindergarten gifts and the early work of Frank Lloyd Wright

Frank Lloyd Wright's style of architecture has been thought to be idiosyncratic. This study looks at his early work as a system, and starts by considering the system of Froebel's kindergarten which Wright experienced in childhood. Froebel's kindergarten method included pattern-making exercises on grids, similar to the method of architectural education which Durand introduced at L'ficole polytechnique at the end of the 18th and beginning of the 19th centuries.The geometric structure of these symmetrical crystalline patterns, in which a multiplicity of components is resolved into intersecting figures, can be discerned in Wright's architecture. The patterns are generally 2-dimensional. Wright set himself the problem of translating the functional briefs of building problems into a 3-dimensional expression of Froebel's idea. He recognised this possibility in Sullivan's work and more particularly in Sullivan's system of ornament which has a discipline analogous to Froebel's.In his early work Wright gradually transforms the conventional idea of a building, as an envelope containing an organisation of rooms, into a system of components, piers, balustrades, and roof planes which represent the overall pattern of the building, with little distinction between inside and outside.

The Idea of Louis Sullivan

Louis Sullivan (1856-1924) is one of America's most famous and influential architects -- an American Master in the words of John Szarkowski. In 1956, before Szarkowski gained fame as the Director of Photography at the Museum of Modern Art, he was the author/photographer of a book on Sullivan. Published by the University of Minnesota Press. The Idea of Louis Sullivan has long been out-of-print.Bulfinch Press has decided to bring this classic book back in print. The photographs have been declared by no less an authority than Frank Lloyd Wright, a protege of Sullivan's, as the best ever taken of Sullivan's work. This edition, with a new, elegant design and duotone reproductions using today's print technology, promises to be a beautiful photography book and a much welcomed architectural book about this pivotal Chicago architect.The text is composed of excerpts from contemporary sources, mostly from Louis Sullivan's own distinguished and charming commentaries on architecture and modern society, and a foreword by Szarkowski, as well as a preface to the new edition. Terence Riley will contribute an introduction on Sullivan's significance to modern architecture from today's perspective.

Alcoholism: A Chapter in Social Pathologv

Dr. Sullivan's work throws a new light upon alcoholism. It is marked by a breadth of view and a freedom from all intolerance which carry the reader through an intelligent and intelligible discussion of this difficult subject with never a wish to skip a page or to elude the issues so clearly set forth. The book is more particularly designed to elucidate the connection of alcoholism with industrial conditions, which hitherto have been inadequately recognised. We thus escape the dreary details which writers on this subject have repeated so uniformly, and at such intolerable length. We are brought to a consideration of a social problem by an array of facts which show how widely Dr. Sullivan has cast his net, and by an orderly process of argument which reveals his well-balanced mind. He introduces the subject with a brief historical sketch which indicates the beginnings of the modern industrial system and the change in the legal attitude towards intemperance, by the Licensing Law of 1551. His new view of the question leads him to remark on the enormous increase of alcoholism by the national policy in favour of free distillation in the end of the seventeenth century, and to indicate the effects of the development of the factory system in bringing about a rapid extension of industrial drinking.