White Pages Research Articles

Секреты вертикального искусства. Оксфордские лекции Саймона Армитиджа о поэзии

A Vertical Art. On Poetry is a collection of essays in literary criticism by Simon Armitage, Poet Laureate of Great Britain, who based them on a series of his lectures delivered as Oxford Professor of Poetry. The framework of the book is a practice-oriented theory of poetry as a “vertical art” applied to reading a wide range of British and American authors mostly from the mid-20th century up to the present day, but reaching from time to time into the literary past. “Verticality” is a quality of poetic form that is actively engaging reader’s imagination and perception. It implies a demand for inner organization resisting the formlessness of a white page and self-restraining while choosing its own means. The result is a rhythmic pattern, both aural and visual, much unlike the “horizontalness” of extensively growing prose. The rhythmic pattern here is a broad definition covering an interplay between the lucid and the indirect, the sound and the silence, the sign and the gap on various levels. Discussing poetry in the book also involves literary institutions, in particular the contemporary Americanised model of interaction between the poet and the academia through creative writing courses. Apart from the canonical figures of American Renaissance (W. Whitman, E. Dickinson), Armitage’s perspective on American poetry includes E. Bishop, R. Lowell, A.R. Ammons, W.H. Auden, Thom Gunn, Bob Dylan, J. Wright, F. Wright, M. Donaghy, K. Young.

Continuity: Inside the frame and behind the screen

Since their appearance, digital comics have posed many challenges to the world of comic studies. Are they really comics? Should we talk about them as video games or interactive experiences? The questions are many, and they usually stumble on the – apparently – most important question: how can we define a comic? And how do we start analysing them? Scholars have multiplied paths and definitions, features and prototypes, trying to tame such a complex and ever-evolving object, with varying degrees of success. With this visual essay I will focus on – and concretely show – the aspect I believe is the most relevant: the structural relation between simultaneity and continuity, between global and local embedded in comics language. If, as Fresnault-Deruelle put it, ‘discontinuity is the basis of comics universe’, there will be necessarily some sort of continuum on which this discontinuity can emerge. Normally, this continuum is the white page itself, but with digital comics things get more complicated: the change in physical support calls for a big difference in affordances, new sensory modes make their way in, infinite spaces unfold and so on. Through an interdisciplinary approach and a dive in Peircean semiotics, I hereby suggest how the dialectic between continuity and discontinuity might be a good starting point, on a level of both formal and critical analysis, to tackle an object as chimeric as digital comics.

АКАДЕМИК С. ҚИРАБАЕВ ЕҢБЕКТЕРІНІҢ СИПАТТАМАСЫ

DESCRIPTION OF THE WORKS OF ACADEMICIAN S. KIRABAEVAbstract. The article describes the scientific and critical works of academician S. Kirabayev from the point of view of modernity, the huge contribution of the scientist to the science of Kazakh literary criticism is carefully studied as well. In general, the works of S. Kirabaev clearly illustrate the directions of development of Kazakh literature of the Soviet period, ideas about individual poets and writers, about their life, creativity, specific features of genres of verbal art, ideological and artistic subjects, as well as the completeness of the outlook is determined by facts, culture of analysis, depth of knowledge. In this regard, the article specifically deals with the works of S. Kirabaev concerning the 32Тіл және әдебиет: теориясы мен тәжірибесі No3, 2023"Aktandak (white) pages of our literature", as well as his research works devoted to the rehabilitation and veneration of the Alash leaders during the struggle for independence were considered in detail. The breadth of horizons is also determined by facts, culture of analysis, depth of knowledge. The article attempts to prove that an outstanding scientist-critic is a unique phenomenon of modern Kazakh literary criticism by giving certain examples.Keywords: literature, scientific, idea, cognition, genre, research, independence, description.

Interests and Curiosities about Sexuality of Children and Adolescents from Northern Portugal

Sexuality education is a part of the health education process in schools. However, many programs of sexuality education do not consider the needs of children and adolescents. This study is based on an analysis of the interests of children and adolescents about sexuality. The sample covered 32 classes from primary school to higher education in the northern region of Portugal. The methodology was mixed, collecting data through open questions. It used an A5 white page, containing only options to indicate age, school grade, and sex. In the white space, students wrote their questions/doubts. A database was built in the program SPSS and categories were established a priori following the key concepts for sexuality education defined by UNESCO. A pattern of issues and interests was found depending on the age group and sex, noting that the children’s interests are related to conception, birth, and the well-being of the fetus/newborn. Adolescents’ interests are focused on contraception, sexually transmitted infections, and relationships. This study can help teachers to promote sexuality education which is appropriate to the developmental stage of their students, motivating them to better learn and leading to a reduction in risky sexual behaviors and conscious decision making for healthy sexuality.

Роль Ованеса Туманяна в деятельности Комитета помощи Армении (1921–1923)

The purpose of the article is to fill one of the relatively little-studied pages of the scientific biography of the great Armenian poet Hovhannes Tumanyan and his national-patriotic and social activities. The task of the article is to show the Hovh. Tumanyan’s role in the activities of the Armenian Relief Committee. Armenian historiographic science distinguishes three periods of the Committee’s activity: 1921–1923, 1923–1931, 1931–1937). However, Tumanyan’s role in the implementation of program tasks and in the formation of the Committee in the first period of its activity has not been studied either in historiography or in literary criticism. The scientific novelty of the article lies in the study of the Hovh. Tumanyan’s activities as chairman of the Armenian Relief Committee. The presentation of historical events in the article, accompanied by scientific comments, argues the importance of studying this “white page” of Armenian reality, its topicality and its relevance to today. The article discusses Tumanyan’s efforts to establish relationships between the newly created Soviet Armenia and foreign Armenian diasporas, to form a positive attitude towards the new social formation that won in Russia. The historical and narrative aspect in the article is presented in the context of the human character and psychological portrait of Hovh. Tumanyan.

Gusti (Gustavo Ariel Rosemffet Abramovich): Illustrator–Argentina

Abstract: "The white page is my life and I decide how I want to live it. I am making progress, but there is still a long way to go."

Editor's Note

Editor's Note Daniel Simon IN HIS SPEECH accepting the 2022 Neustadt Prize, Boubacar Boris Diop listed several of his intellectual and literary mentors: Aimé Césaire, Cheikh Anta Diop, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, Cheik Aliou Ndao, Ayi Kwei Armah, and Mongo Beti. In notebook 5 of Diop's novel Doomi Golo, the grandfather figure, Nguirane, recites a similar litany of "real men" who "command respect": Cheikh Anta Diop, Amílcar Cabral, Mongo Beti, Samory Touré, Thomas Sankara, and Patrice Lumumba. "Each one of them was a Man of Defiance in his own right," Nguirane tells Badou, his grandson, "and for that reason and for that reason alone, the white colonizer killed them or at least reduced them to silence." Also in his acceptance speech, Diop declared: "It must be said that the moment when the writer, alone in front of the white page, is about to produce meaning and emotions, is the moment of their absolute freedom." Throughout his fiction, Diop's storytellers insist on the primacy of aesthetic freedom while at the same time embodying defiant truths—ethical, existential, political, and more. Such truths, for Diop, never exist in a vacuum: even amidst the moral clarity of his most celebrated novel, Murambi: The Book of Bones, truths must be told to assert their veracity, must be tested communally so that their concentric rings will envelop humanity as a whole, must, like the Sankofa bird, look to the past even as it flies into the future in order for such storied truths to remain viable, through remembrance, for generations to come. (In an aside about Murambi during his keynote speech at the Neustadt Festival—published here on page 50—Diop asserted that the novel "is not a work of the imagination; it is the truth," punctuating the word "truth" with the force of a griot who brings the full weight of his rhetorical power to bear on a phrase, lest his audience miss the point.) So often, Diop's novels and stories read like metafictions about the art of storytelling itself, but literature and art are ultimately marshaled in service of the truth, not for art's sake. A case in point is Kaveena, Diop's most recent novel to be translated into English. Two stories compete for the reader's attention at the beginning of the novel: (1) the story of a "decapitated" African state following a civil war that deposes its president, N'Zo Nikiema, and brings a Frenchman, Pierre Castaneda, to power and (2) the story of a murdered six-year-old girl, Kaveena. Nikiema's chief of police, Asante Kroma, asserts that the death of Nikiema is "a story worth telling . . . for the future" while he sifts through the notebooks and letters—and "thousands of corpses"—that the psychopathic tyrant has left behind, but the most powerful testimony is the videotape of one murder (Kaveena's), which was ordered by Castaneda. As the president's speechwriter, Castaneda tells Nikiema that "words are what drive the world," but the dying Nikiema reflects that words are "ambiguous, uncertain . . . little blows dealt by life, but so relentless, swirling around in the emptiness, then finding their place, one next to the other." As is frequently the case in Diop's work, politicians' corrupt speech is a scourge on society, whereas the nonverbal witness of characters like Kaveena and the woman in black in Murambi—a Tutsi whose husband and daughter are massacred during the 1994 Rwandan genocide—say more than what either heads of state or writers can ever convey in their "relentless, swirling" words. In an essay entitled "My Father's Library," Diop writes that the French library on his father's bookshelves, which he absorbed during the day, represented a "sarcophagus of signs," whereas the Wolof stories recounted by his mother at night ignited in him a "fire of words" that still burns to this day. As a storying truth-teller, Diop captures the fire of the spoken word, bringing light, truth, and life to the written page. [End Page 3] Copyright © 2023 World Literature Today and the Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma

Barry Jenkins, Meet D. W. Griffith, and: Portrait of a Lynched Boy

Barry Jenkins, Meet D. W. Griffith, and: Portrait of a Lynched Boy Murleve Roberts (bio) Barry Jenkins, Meet D. W. Griffith after Tyehimba Jess I am a man, I am a man, Yet and as the Loved One, as the Chosen One of God, I can never drop the phrase at that. I am bruised. I am black; But as the righteous do, I have risen: I am a man, reborn to spread Word, to spread Truth, a Black man, “Stained by the wretched mark of Cain,” Not that I’m unjustly proud of my achievements. as you would like to say. I am but passionate, But I refuse to drip with blood; and my passion is worth your millions— My life is dyed with love, my Passion is worth your Dreams. with a prism of kisses crowning my skin, And I’m sweet on the Cinema, on the screen with a summer of promise sewn to my soul, on what I have made Great, towering over you and your smallness— with Love, I love the power and the place; overwhelming love for my life I love the excitement, the entertainment; and her life I love the game of loss and gain; and their life I love the way and everything we’ve lost— I can express the Right thing: Every love story reigning marigold and rouge, how I right the human race in Every forget-me-not searing, sea breeze dream— how others follow, As a person supported by those, Dreams, how I have inspired. I’m uprooted and bolstered at once. And I love not giving up. Pioneering both my thriving and My Plight— though it’s hard—it can be crippling: It’s easy to hate you, the way things disappear, the way I disappear, sand between But I dye myself with Love. the webs of your fingers, I slip my thinking hands into my pockets which have never tried to hold on. and I tie myself with humility and blank pages, Still, I must remember, I have been successful. the blank pages I Blacken til they’re Red with awards, til they’re Me, a master of each subtle art— me, humbled again with the thinking in my hands and the hopes that I love knowing, in my heart, I have been successful. So if you forget me, it’s enough if you remember To bury me. My ideas: Bury me in negatives, the faces I made gentle in the shadow-stained theatre, Bury me in my life’s work the tears I wrung to cello-sweet sonatas, Never forget what I have left for you, the Masculinity I softened into the acceptance of Life. You Hollywood Dream. If you forget me, Black and white pages Remember to wipe away my ink tears That’s us: Black and White. and tell me, I see you’re angry, In moonlight, you look Blue. but that’s us. In moonlight, your tears do, too. Remember to Let me sleep, peaceful, with my Father. Let me sleep knowing I’ve undone one knot. [End Page 336] Portrait of a Lynched Boy The thin, cotton shirt slips down his shoulder,Baring ebony-sheet skin, thick and knottedLike the tan, jute rope tight around his neck.I can see the line engraved to the left of his spine,A seam sewn by a sloping bodyRun out of air.But on blackness, blue and bruised don’t show.Instead, he looks asleep:Thick-lashed eyes and Tuscan-red lipsCalmly suspended in the center of space. The cold, autumn air brushes my cheeks,Tries to muss my hair,And succeeds in shifting his limp body,Spinning him just slightly,Making him jive and twist and dance—Neck relaxed against its prison,Feet pointed for pirouette,Hands empty and innocentLike a baby born to a white wedlock:A thing that they value. His name has faded like the indigo denim at his knee,Fallen and crumpled andLost in the leaves between us,And the buzz slipping past my ear is a reminder:It was flies that led me. [End Page 337] Murleve Roberts Murleve Roberts is a writer from...

Health Impacts of the COVID-19 Lockdown Measure in a Low Socio-Economic Setting: A Cross-Sectional Study on Reunion Island.

In March 2020, the French government implemented nation-wide measures to reduce social contact and slow the progression of the emerging coronavirus responsible for COVID-19, the most significant being a complete home lockdown that lasted 8 weeks. Reunion Island is a French overseas department marked by large social inequalities. We draw the hypothesis that distancing and lockdown measures may have contributed to an increase in the social inequalities in health (SIH) on Reunion Island. The aim of our study was to describe the SIH during lockdown in the Reunionese population. We implemented a cross-sectional telephone survey conducted between 13 May and 22 July 2020, using a retrospective data collection on the lockdown period. A total of 892 adult participants (≥18 years) were recruited in the 114 large Reunionese neighborhoods using the quota method within the national "White Pages" telephone directory. Degraded psychological states, an increase in addictive behaviors, difficulties in accessing food, a decrease in physical activity, delayed medical appointments, violence against women, and health problems in children were driven by the socio-economic characteristics of the population, most often to the disadvantage of social groups exposed to poor living conditions. These results suggest that the COVID-19 lockdown contributed to an increase in SIH.

DESIGN OF COMIC BOOKS AS A MEDIA TO INTRODUCE CLEAN BEHAVIOR AND PROTECTING THE ENVIRONMENT FOR ELEMENTARY STUDENTS

Many of the damaged environment and pollution that occurs as well as the spread of disease is manmade. One of the factors is the bad habits of people who are not aware of the importance of maintaining cleanliness and the environment. Providing awareness about the importance of clean behavior and protecting the environment should be done from an early age to be more effective. Therefore, the purpose of this study project is to design a media to introduce clean behavior and protect the environment for children that is interesting and fun, namely through the medium of comics. The reason for choosing comics is expected to be able to overcome problems in understanding a material. The use of analogies and depictions of stories in life can help students to understand a material. In designing this comic book the author uses two techniques, traditional and digital. There are several stages in the design, the pre-production process including idea search, literature study, and analysis, then the production process including script and storyboard design, sketching, inking, scanning, and editing, and the last post-production is publication or exhibition. This design resulted in a comic book entitled "Cerita Andi dan Kawan-kawan", A5 size, and a complete of 55 black and white comic pages. The comic book is made with a softcover model using 260 ivory paper, while the contents of the comic book use 70 gram HVS paper. The results of this study project are expected to be able to raise the awareness of elementary students to protect the environment

Feral Atlas: The More-Than-Human Anthropocene ed. by Anna L. Tsing et al.

Reviewed by: Feral Atlas: The More-Than-Human Anthropocene ed. by Anna L. Tsing et al. Elexis Trinity Williams Tsing, Anna L., Jennifer Deger, Alder Keleman Saxena, and Feifei Zhou, eds. Feral Atlas: The More-Than-Human Anthropocene. Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press, 2021. Playful disorientation is perhaps your first hint: this is not scholarship as usual. A white page opens on the cluttered desktop landscape of the computer screen, populated by colorful illustrations of fire, kudzu, and an emerald ash borer. One is compelled by the visual sensuality of the experience to sit with it for a moment, to "stay with the trouble," as Donna Haraway (2016) might say, of exploring the patchy problematics of the Anthropocene. Attending to the materiality of land, water, and atmosphere-transforming projects, this transdisciplinary anthology centers four historical concurrences at the intersection of human and nonhuman activity, described as "Anthropocene Detonators": invasion, empire, capital, and acceleration. Here there be monsters, certainly, but perhaps also opportunities for responsiveness and responsibility. One encounters, mingling on the landing page, a host of feral entities in motion: toxic fog, antibiotics, comb jellies, anti-fouling paint, bee villains. Each is associated with one of the four detonators that structure the project. These focal points are accompanied by one of 79 field reports representing a window into a different multispecies ecology that proliferates in the intermingling trails of human infrastructures and nonhuman entities. In the upper left-hand corner, an illustrated master key directs the reader to an index of related cases and concepts. It is a feature which contributes to the sense in which the project registers as an atlas, further articulating its virtual spatiality by introducing a reading room in which texts and other [End Page 719] media are organized by type and conceptual analytic. Among these analytic frames, one finds Tippers—described as "modes of infrastructure-mediated state change"1—and Feral Qualities, which identify ecologies and entities that flourish in the context of human disturbance, proliferating in toxic environments or stowing away in industrial infrastructures. Such qualities are identified by their compatibility and potential for imagining otherwise, with rather than against the realities of the Anthropocene. Click on the mobile icon of dry, cracking ground titled "ghost water," for example, and you will be drawn deeper into iterations of the linked concepts of smoothness and speed in relationship to empire. These elements of change are used to structure explorations of the myriad processes by which the "smooth surfaces of land and water have enabled colonial governance and industrial development [sponsoring]…more than human invasions" and accelerating processes which open "portals for feral effects, and [block] the healing of local ecologies by denying them time" for more subtle adaptations.2 Drawing together transport infrastructure, water, and state power within the framework of the non-innocent but potential-bearing effects of technoscientific acceleration in this one strand, the reader moves beyond the analytic limitations of the "entity" itself toward a layered, polyphonic inquiry of the relations which occur among human projects, living, and nonliving beings. This, we are to understand as a function of reading the dynamic intersection of smoothness and speed as a Tipper. Grounded in a particular time and place, each of the Tippers represents analytic meditations on the relational processes by which infrastructural efforts shape change. Like the choose-your-own-adventure novels of the 1980s, Feral Atlas teases its possibilities and structures its interactive experience so that you may play with its pieces however you choose, but the concepts are all embedded in rich relations of multispecies complexity and transformation. As both readers and players in this visual entanglement, we are invited to explore what it means to map, interpret, or intervene in the ruination and the promise of the Anthropocene—its infrastructural effects and the opportunities for imagining otherwise that lay deep in the weeds (or the semi-wilds) where human tracks are everywhere evident but do not dominate the landscape of the possible. Beyond its layered interface and the hypertextual user experience, one finds in Feral Atlas something of a guide to the places, processes, and interactions by which feral ecologies spring up. It is an accessible tool for disciplining...

Foreword to Zisl's God, The God of Unmet Desire

Foreword to Zisl's God, The God of Unmet Desire S. Brent Rodríguez-Plate, Editor Toward the end of these pages, Zisl discloses the functions of tefillah, saying such prayer teaches us to "mourn our brokenness and beg for the divine." Provocatively, Zisl compares prayer to eroticism, as both are practices of yearning and desiring, spurred by awareness of our own incompleteness. These are not activities that stay within designated times and places. Rather, their practice infiltrates all our lives and opens the way for "creative possibilities." I might add to this a third parallel, already implicit throughout Zisl's text, and that is the work of writing. Writing remembers what was, and reveals what might be. Writing gives accounts that bring forth justice. Writing strives for redemption. It weeps and it laughs. Its imperfections abound, and yet within the words we catch fleeting encounters with others that intimate wholeness, holiness. Zisl's text that follows here is tefillah, and we the readers participate (erotically and prayerfully) in mourning and begging, the work of repair and rediscovery, as we assemble our own pasts and futures. It is a creative work of nonfiction, emerging at the interstices of queer theology, Talmudic learning, social justice, and personal memoir. It brings the past to bear on the future, and the future on the past. When Zisl first approached me with their essay, I realized this would be ideal for our journal CrossCurrents, since it checks so many of the boxes that define our publishing output: creative work, engaged with issues of social justice, and rooted in religious tradition. The only problem was that the text was too lengthy to be just another article in our pages, while breaking it up felt like missing the integrity of the whole work. So, we created a special, special issue, something we've never done here at CrossCurrents. We're devoting this entire issue to a single work of a single author. The fact that we can print each journal issue as a stand-alone book made this an opportunity we wanted to take [End Page V] advantage of and we were thrilled when Zisl agreed to work with us on the venture. God, The God of Unmet Desire reflects the deep learning and yearning of its author, interpreting ancient Hebrew liturgy through Black diasporic poetry or feminist science fiction to wrestle with individual and social quests for racial, economic, and gender liberation. Thus, it translates ancient meanings via modern social life. Even so, it remains resolutely traditional. There's an apology in here, an argument for a God, and a relationship with that God who is expansive, who revels in words and wonders, who delights in sex and sensuality, who cares for the oppressed and desires liberation. As I read and re-read Zisl's text during the process of editing, I kept thinking about width, wideness. The text opens and closes with a passage from Psalm 81, "Open wide your mouth . . ." If you close your mouth, you'll miss the honey. So, open wide. I worked through the text, opening myself to something new, attempting to make clear the varieties of voices that emerge and ink-bleed through the white pages. In the process, I had to think about width in a very physical way. How wide are the margins? How much indentation to give a passage? Is a block of text centered? Flush right? Flush left? Do the quotes from others have the same indentation as the author's own voice? How much width should there be in the text and in the margins? Voices vary and, in print, width makes those distinctions clearer. I was reminded of pages of the Talmud in which the mishnah is placed at the center, gemara extending that below, and then Rashi and other commentaries circling and swirling around the center. What a feat of production it must be to produce such a work! So much of it comes down to width: to the ratio of text to other text, as well as the white space surrounding the text. Margins in any book are key because that's where the reader engages, jots notes, queries, or just...

50 Love Notes to the Abyss

50 Love Notes to the Abyss Giuliana Eggleston (bio) 1. The abyss sticks its hand through the gap in the fence, wiggling fingers playfully. When you look away the hand is gone, and while you remember it as inviting, a child asking you to come play, you don't dare peek through the gap. Only big enough for a slight ephemeral hand to beckon, you know it's wide enough for you to fall through to the other side. 2. In the Book of Genesis, it is written that into a void of black waters God breathed out, and in that divine breath all creation was made.1 In the Book of Ecclesiastes, it is written that God will someday breath in again, and all that was made will be undone.2 For the moment we live in the space between the exhale and the inhale. Tell me, how long is the pause between breaths? 3. Can each moment, if lived right, be eternal? If each moment echoes, how do we create enough sound that it never ends? My biggest fear is that my life will be like a stone in the water, thrown to skip but sinking on the first touch. 4. There is a voice in my head that tells me when to look. A mute roaring in my ears, the sound of my blood moving below the surface of my face, picking up speed. Then a voice that chants looklooklook. I look up to see the red tail of a fox weaving deeper into the forest beyond my balcony. 5. The voice that tells me when to look is the same voice that tells me when my camera is lined up perfectly. Ghost hands grip my throat and press down on my air-passage, mimicking my finger on the shutter. 6. I have lived in this apartment for seven months, but only recently have I heard the sound of trains. When they started, I [End Page 77] don't know, but I know they have not stopped. For days I've lived with the clunking metallic roll of the tracks, so that even now as I sit and write I can feel the world moving away from me. 7. In the daylight I can see the empty space eaten up by darkness in the night. It is all depth and movement and color now. But I'm not worried that I've only imagined it. I can still feel it when I hold my breath, when I close my eyes, when I wake from a dream. It is a weight, sunk just below the surface. 8. In Italo Calvino's memo on "Visibility," from the collection of lectures he was to give at Harvard before his death, titled posthumously Six Memos for the Next Millennium, he includes his fear that we are in danger of losing the ability to "bring visions into focus with our eyes closed, to cause colors and shapes to spring forth from an array of black characters on a white page, to think through images."3 I wish I could tell him his fear is unfounded. The millennium has begun, and every time I close my eyes, I see crests of color bobbing to the surface. 9. It has been said that the color black is the absence of color. It has also been said that in the beginning, God contracted his infinite light, and darkness flooded in. Black matter, the event horizon. Tzimtzum, if you read the Lurianic Kabbalah (I haven't). The negative space from which all creation is born. In the absence of eternal light, there is roiling darkness. 10. If black is the absence of color, then what is true cyan? 11. How do we see color more clearly with eyes closed? We stare into an image like a flag, pledging our allegiance to what we haven't seen but long for. Then we close our eyes and conjure from that inky black well the amorphous circle of color. True cyan. 12. I am a lover of true cyan (it is the same as loving the abyss). I pledge my soul to the conjuring creation. True cyan waits like...

The Muslin Gown as “A White Unblemished Page”: Sensational Femininities and Fictions in Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Aurora Floyd and The Doctor’s Wife

ABSTRACT This essay argues that in Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Aurora Floyd (1863) and The Doctor’s Wife (1864) the heroines’ muslin gowns function as sites where conflicting notions of femininity and of literature are explored. The white gown represents the Victorian feminine ideal of innocence and virginity, yet Aurora and Isabel’s gowns are inscribed with models of subversive femininity drawn from literature and history, thereby contradicting the analogy of the muslin gown as “a white unblemished page”. 1 In the 1860s, white muslin came with a loaded set of cultural meanings, derived from its origins as a product of British imperialism, and as the fashionable garb of the gothic heroine. Aurora and Isabel use these references and intertextual clues to fashion new subjectivities as heroines who traverse and transgress conventional literary representations of Victorian femininity and the Victorian heroine.

1340A Trial of Modern Sample Frames and Modes: The WA Health and Wellbeing Surveillance System

Abstract Background The Health and Wellbeing Surveillance System (HWSS) monitors the health status of the WA population. Its reliance on a landline sample frame and Computer Assisted Telephone Interview (CATI) must shift to mobile phone sample frames and novel online completion options, improving the representativeness of the HWSS data to the WA population. Methods Concurrent surveys in 2020 were run using three sample frames, the 2013 Electronic White Pages (EWP), the WA Electoral Roll (WAER) and a Sensis consumer database. The survey modes explored included CATI, online, and dual mode. Responses were weighted to the WA population. Response rates were compared between frames and modes. Differences in demographics, health risk factors, conditions and behaviours were investigated by comparing prevalence estimates and logistic regression modelling. Results Response rates were 20% for EWP CATI, 41% for Sensis CATI, 16% for Sensis online, and 10% for WAER online. Compared to EWP, the WAER and Sensis frame respondents were younger, had higher incomes and better education. Online respondents had higher prevalence of high psychological distress and lower prevalence of smoking compared with CATI. Conclusions The WAER and Sensis consumer database are valid sample frame options for the future of the HWSS. CATI gave the highest response rates, yet respondent differences by frame and mode were evident. WA Health is further exploring these options of modern sample frames and survey modes in 2021. Key messages Population health surveillance systems must modernise their sample frames and data collection modes to continue to provide reliable health prevalence estimates.

Off the Record

Off the Record

Books at the Borders of Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon

This paper proposes that Picasso’s landmark 1907 painting, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, is full of images of books and pages, especially at the borders of the canvas. The curving shapes which are traditionally seen as “curtains” can alternatively be interpreted as the white pages and brown paper wrappers of open books, rotated 90 degrees. This “visual marginalia” suggests that Picasso’s famous brothel scene could be regarded as a semiotic construction, befitting the painting’s early title (devised by Picasso’s writer friends), “The Philosophical Brothel”. The painting also contains iconographic representations of textuality. A slightly open book can be perceived in the middle of the painting, and along the bottom border, an open envelope and writing paper can be seen laid atop the tipped-up table, under the fruit. I claim that Picasso’s images of texts derive from his acquaintance with the text-driven, monumental novel, Don Quixote. I give special attention to the narrative Author’s Preface to the Spanish literary classic, in which the author describes assembling quotations from diverse sources to compose the first and last pages of his book. Picasso visually represents this allusion by depicting pages at the left and right “ends” of his canvas. Other texts and images are considered as sources for the bibliographic imagery, which generally suggests that this canvas as a fictive tissue of quotations, akin to the overabundance of texts that Don Quixote is reading in Cervantes’s novel. The image of the blank writing paper and its envelope, finally, encourages viewers to see the painting as a letter of communication, for which we ourselves must provide the writing that would represent our interpretations.

Understanding valvular heart disease in the dental setting.

Limited evidence is available regarding dentists' knowledge and interpretation of infective endocarditis (IE) prophylaxis guidelines. The aim of this study was to determine understanding and management of rheumatic and non-rheumatic valvular heart disease (VHD) in the dental setting in Western Australia (WA). A cross-sectional survey of dentists within Perth utilized an online Qualtrics questionnaire developed after consultation with stakeholders. A sampling frame was compiled from the Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency with contact details obtained from the White Pages (online), using five quintiles of Socio-Economic Indexes for Areas according to dentist's place of practice. Of 41 (13.7% of 300 approached) dentists completing the survey (95.1% general dentists, mean years of practice=15.6), 90.2% reported following the Australian Therapeutic Guidelines (ATG) regarding IE antibiotic prophylaxis in VHD. Most (92.7%) were unaware of the rheumatic heart disease (RHD) control program. Nearly all participants indicated prophylaxis for clearly invasive procedures such as tooth extraction (100.0%) and periodontal surgery (95.1%). Many dentists made the decision to prescribe antibiotics themselves (36.6%). The majority of dentists followed the ATG's IE prophylaxis recommendations for cardiac lesions and dental procedures. There was limited knowledge of the national RHD guidelines and the WA RHD control program.

Britain's Black Past ed. by Gretchen H. Gerzina

Reviewed by: Britain's Black Past ed. by Gretchen H. Gerzina Dr Onyeka Nubia Britain's Black Past. Edited by, Gretchen H. Gerzina. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2020. … What we need is not a history of selected races or nations, but the history of the world void of national bias, race hate, and religious prejudice … Carter G Woodson, The Journal of Negro History XII:2, 1927.1 Carter G. Woodson is often called "the father" of Black History Month. But Woodson was prescriptively antagonistic to the misanthropy of an all-White-American narrative, that claimed "the Negro has no history." Such narratives were promulgated by mainstream historians such as Edward Channing and Adam Bushnell Hart (American Historical Association). Of course, it is sometimes conjectured that this kind of racialised historiography is a peculiar quirk of Americanism, and that British history does not have an ethnocentric bias. Such a conceit may then support a fable that Britain's "multi-ethnic" past begins in modernity, when the Empire Windrush arrived at Tilbury Docks in 1948. Moreover, that the pathology of racism was birthed only in the 1960's, as a reaction against the permissive society, liberalism and failed immigration policies. Proponents of this idea often conflate ethnicity with the "problem" of migration—and British narratives remain "a book with white pages and no black letters in."2 Historical amnesia follows, where the histories of BAME communities are explained away. It is this indifference that Gretchen Gerzina's edited volume of essays Britain's Black Past endeavours to overcome. However, for Black Past to succeed, the reader needs to know that Africans have been part of the fabric of the British Isles for thousands of years. And this presence has been persistent, from the African legions on Hadrian's Wall, to Romanised Africans at Londinium and Camulodunum. Readers may also be aware that an African presence in medieval England is not incongruous. And snapshots of this population reveal diversity in cosmopolitan communities in London and elsewhere. For example, in the thirteenth century, Bartholomew "was on the run" in medieval Nottingham and "the Ipswich Man" was part of the sodality of the local Greyfriars monastery. And we should not forget that in 1470, Maria Moriana, the medieval "oratice," was in court, being defended by her community against an employer who tried to treat her in a servile manner. But Black Past is not about these Africans—even though the introduction does sketch an earlier history; and Michael Ohajuru's chapter gives a personal glimpse of Africans in Tudor England. Rather, the strength of this book lies not in the far-distant past;—Black Lives is a commentary on notable Black Georgians. These Africans include Mary Prince in Sue Thomas' chapter. Thomas excavates the construction of "slave narratives" with Prince, who won her freedom with an autobiographical scream for help. She ignited abolitionist causes throughout Britain. Other important chapters in Black Past include Gerzina's on Dido Elizabeth Belle. Gerzina attempts to debunk some of the mythos surrounding Belle, who was of course, an heiress by birth and a member of the powerful Murray/Lindsay family. Consequently, she was the great-grandniece of Lord Mansfield, the primary adjudicating judge in the James Somerset legal case (1772). This case was about the legality of enslaving Africans in England, but despite the hyperbolic misstatements that the decision ended slavery, Mansfield only passed judgement on the question of force, detention and the deprivation of liberty. But Gerzina is right to imply that Belle, who also managed Mansfield's paperwork, may have influenced his decision making. A further African luminary discussed in Black Past is Francs Barber. Barber was the famous manservant-friend-adopted-son of Samuel Johnson. He had smart and caustic wit, but Michael Bundock's chapter concentrates on Barber's guilelessness. Johnson and Barber were co-writers of the first English Dictionary, although many modern historians view Barber's contributions as peripheral. In this regard, Bundock's work is biographically constructive; but Vincent Carretta's chapter that sits adjacent to it, is autobiographically deconstructive. Carretta critiques the authenticity of Olaudah Equiano's autobiography. And she suggests there is a strong likelihood Equiano infused his narrative with...

Life Support: Invitation to Prayer by Judith Cohen Margolis

Reviewed by: Life Support: Invitation to Prayer by Judith Cohen Margolis Tahneer Oksman (bio) Life Support: Invitation to Prayer By Judith Cohen Margolis. Pennsylvania State Press, 2019. 96 pp. Judith Cohen Margolis’ Life Support is a small, sturdy book with a gray cloth cover, a long, dangling bookmark adorned with a silver hamsa lodged between its crisp white pages. In her introduction, the writer and artist describes the text as her own created “prayer book,” one in which she brings together, in new fashion, sketches, drawings, journal entries, and paintings chronicling her mother’s final illness, death, and some of what followed. Margolis describes in this opening how, when her mother’s health began to dramatically decline as she reached her seventies after a lifetime of living with diabetes, she, “both as a daughter and as an artist,” felt compelled to capture what was happening. Following this essay, the book is divided into forty-one short chapters, most typed entries reaching the length of a brief paragraph and several covering as much as a page and a half. Interwoven between these entries are the images: sketches of her mother in a hospital bed, with machinery surrounding her; full-color paintings of her mother, breathing tubes attached to her nose; sketches of her father, gloomily or idly slumped in visitor chairs; and an assortment of copies of other relevant paraphernalia from this period of their lives (a loving note from her eight-year-old daughter; a fragmented copy of an invitation for her mother’s seventy-fifth birthday; an old, wrinkled piece of paper with a recipe for making matzo balls). “Only when I am drawing and watching carefully, the observer, does the time seem to pass more gently,” Margolis writes in one of the early entries. “I leave feeling intact, not wrecked” (n.p.). Throughout the text, drawing, and turning to art and work more broadly, is often framed as a salve, an effortful, and meaningful, way of regulating, if only on paper, the mysterious, the uncanny, the unexpected fresh horrors that she is witness to during this time. “I control the panic I feel by writing a careful list describing every piece of machinery and hardware in the room,” she writes in the next entry. “Then [End Page 66] I draw the most complicated gadgets with a .01 Rapidograph pen. This all takes hours, but the time seems to have passed quickly” (n.p.). Throughout her life, as the author/artist explains, her relationship with her mother was often tense, and even until the end her feelings for her mother remained ambivalent. She describes her mother’s lifelong refrain in regard to her daughter: “I love you, but I don’t like you.” Taking note, at this painful stage, allows Margolis, even in light of all her misgivings, her complicated feelings, to draw close, to plant herself in relation to the profound pain experienced, at this juncture, by her mother, her father, her brother, and herself. It also becomes a way of grappling with the images that she does not produce—the ones that, instead, have a hold on her. Those gruesome details she cannot erase from memory. “The image of my mother’s hand is haunting me,” she writes in another early entry. “How will I ever forget it?” (n.p.). Above these typed words, there is a simple sketch of her mother’s soon-to-be-amputated ravaged, swollen hand, the fingers blackened. Beside it, a much smaller sketch divulges four slender, appealing fingers. “Her left hand is still healthy,” the scribbled text beside this mismatched coupling reads. Images, it seems, lead to, sometimes even invite, other images. One way for Margolis to keep the sight of her dying, and later dead, mother from overwhelming her is to draw her way out. But this strategy is not always successful. Halfway through the book, describing her excitement upon an art opening of her paintings, she suddenly asks, “Will I ever get over the image of my mother’s flesh actually rotting like some gruesome horror movie? After all this time, I still can’t get it out of my mind” (n.p.). Like all experiences of grief, unpredictability...