www.youtube.com/watch?v=98X2_JYbhos

After having established the “determinate functioning” and systematic appearance of the Cecafumo cityscape shot in relation to the narrative of Mamma Roma – “The shot is inserted each time Mamma Roma or Ettore begins or concludes a line of action meant to improve his or her social position” (116) – Rhodes now argues the opposite, that its repetition is uncontrolled and unprovoked – which is to say, incessant (”it keeps returning” [121]) and therefore symptomatic of a “maddening” disavowal.

“Furthermore, the shot’s power extends out of its own indeterminate functioning in regards to the narrative. Again, its muteness and repetition and detachment from the characters’ point of view all contribute to make the shot ever more strange. Meanwhile, it brushes so close to familiarity (it ‘recalls’ neorealism; it almost suggests subjectivity grounded in point of view; it keeps returning) that it maddeningly seems to solicit and refuse comprehension through the simple fact of its mute, insistent reappearance. This shimmering opacity induces a restless, uncertain experience that draws us into the register of the sublime.” (121)

Drawing upon vaguely psychoanalytic concepts (trauma, disavowal, the uncanny) to characterize this shot, or the repetition of this shot, Rhodes describes the repetition as the effect of a kind of “organizing intelligence” (127) or subjectivity coextensive with the film itself (and not with Mamma Roma). Thus the image’s recurrence is described in terms of an affective, experiential subject, as a matter of traumatic repetition – “It is something not so much understood as suffered” (120); it marks “the ‘pain’ of a ‘failure of expression’” (121) – but its appearance, “diegetically,” is non-subjective. For Rhodes, that is, this shot specifically resists attaching itself to a character or assuming a point of view.

Rhodes then turns to Micciché who argues that the shot does not correspond to a strong and completed narrative nucleus, that it is “discontinuous” within “the diegetic fabric of the film,” and that it is therefore not a “subjective image,” but an “ideological image.” “Thus the image’s logic and its message belong to the organizing intelligence of the film, to Mamma Roma, if you will, but not to Mamma Roma.” (127) Though it’s safe to say that this particular logic of repetition does not find its means of expression in a character, neither do most shots: which is to say, it’s simply not clear why this logic should secure the impossibility of that shot (which is not, mind you, the same exact shot) becoming “inhabited” by a character, by a point of view – or at least opening onto that possibility, rather than specifically canceling it out. Rhodes, however, defines point of view in opposition to repetition, as if subjectivity itself – and, by extension, shots that represent subjectivity through point of view – cannot only not be ideological but is by definition insulated from pregiven forms, patterns, and repetitions.

“But we would be wrong to ascribe the landscape image to Mamma Roma’s point of view. First, this shot has been repeated too often at too many different moment following too many different types of shots for us legitimately to believe that it belongs to any character’s point of view. It has established its own autonomous functioning.” (126)

In point of fact, arguing that the final instance of the “sublime” panorama is also not a point of view shot is especially difficult because it is the first instance where the shot does approximate, and rather clearly suggests, the point of view of Mamma Roma. Which is why Rhodes is forced to admit that the point of view of Mamma Roma is at least “solicited.” However, following a rather contorted logic, Rhodes declares outright his agreement with Micciché, who “argues forcefully, and I agree, that the shot ‘is never – not even when it seems to be – a subjective image but is instead always an ideological image, and it does not function within the film as a diegetic surplus (which would enrich the story) but rather an ideological surplus (which enriches the meaning of the film).’” (127) So even where the shot “seems to be” subjective, it’s not “really” subjective – which is a fancy way of rendering this argument unfalsifiable (and unverifiable).

In anticipation of the more predictable objections, Rhodes lingers on this last scene, struggling to recast the shot sequence as one that specifically neutralizes the possibility of a point of view. So, though the shot does “solicit our identification of the sequence as point of view,” it is only a simulation:

“I want to add to Micciché’s analysis the further consideration that the work of this shot sequence (shot/countershot, character looking/putative object of vision) is precisely to solicit our identification of the sequence as point of view. Furthermore, an identification of the sequence as such solicits our identification with Mamma Roma. These solicitations, however, are lures, ideological snares. We are meant to understand that such a pursuit of identification (of shot with character’s vision, of our emotions with those of Mamma Roma) is exactly what this film means to disrupt, to interrogate.” (127)

Rhodes here cleverly turns the appearance or possibility of the point of view in the final shot into the lure, or snare, of ideology itself, and in such a way that to affirm the shot as suggestive of a point of view (and not a “point of view” qualified by quotes) is to fall for the trap, the trap of “sentimentality.” For Rhodes’ argument, to be sure, much is made to hang on this final shot not being subjective, to the extent that subjective means “sentimental,” as in the comparable scene in Umberto D where the image dramatically assumes the character’s point of view (looking down, out a window) (127), though for this viewer the comparison seems overly literal and rather inappropriate. Yes, it’s a shot looking out a window; but beyond that, it’s hard to see how the one and other relate to the same object or the same state of affairs. (One could just as well refer to the final scene of Germany: Year Zero, though to what end, I don’t know.)

In any event, the more obvious, or less counter-intuitive, reading of the final shot would make room for the possibility that it does in fact suggest, or “solicit,” Mamma Roma’s point of view. This seems to me not only intended, but essential to the film’s trajectory: it marks a final, dramatic coincidence of the film’s and Mamma Roma’s points of view. As Rhodes himself points out, “The shot [of the Cecafumo cityscape] is inserted each time Mamma Roma or Ettore begins or concludes a line of action meant to improve his or her social position.” But in each case, the damning representation of the cityscape or the INA Casa Tuscolao project – beginning with the “ironic” nod to Renaissance architecture – contradicts the optimism and false hopes of Mamma Roma’s dialogue. It’s as if she has not yet learned that her “dreams [are] fostered by the INA Casa Tuscolano project’s masquerade of progress and social equality” (125), a critique reflected or anchored in the framing and representation of the projects.

In other words, as a viewer, we are consistently clued-in, behind Mamma Roma’s back, to the fate that awaits to her. Thus, in the final image, Mamma Roma finally “gets it”: the ideological image to which we have been privy all along is suddenly, through her loss and wretchedness, “inhabited” by her, subjectively. Or, from another perspective, this image which was previously extra-diegetic becomes diegetic; the “organizing intelligence” of the film now coincides with her “intelligence.” That the image is not entirely or exclusively a point of view shot does not seem to me evidence of a “lure” or “solicitation”: aside from the fact that point of view shots don’t have to be strictly or exactly from the point of view of a character to approximate it or reference it, the framing of this final shot seems to be strategically oriented to mediate or convincingly “span” subjective and objective views. In being loosely centered on Mamma Roma, it prevents the “ideological image” from being eclipsed, and vice versa. In this way, without devolving into a pure sentimentality, Mamma Roma and Mamma Roma do finally coincide.

From Simon Goldhill’s review in the Bryn Mawr Classical Review:

There are at least three types of reception study in classics. The first takes a work of the ancient world — the Aeneid, say or the Antigone — and sees how it has been adapted by later artists. It derives its logic and its focus through a linear genealogy — a sequence of works descended from an original text, interrelating with each other. The second type takes a post-Classical author and sees how this particular artist works with a classical paradigm — Dante’s antiquity, Wagner’s Greeks. It derives its logic and focus in the vision of a single artist, reading antiquity. The third type takes a more general cultural model and explores how classical antiquity has provided models and inspiration in a time in history or in a genre or an artistic movement: the Victorians and ancient Greece; modernism and the classical body. In this case, there is potentially a more diffuse focus and potentially a wider set of cultural questions. The specific problem for contemporary reception studies is how these three models fit together. When looking at the reception of the Antigone (say), how much can the broader vision of any one artist find a place in the analysis? When looking at an individual artist, how much can cultural context or the reception history of a particular text play a part?

Ted Hughes and the Classics is very much a work of type two. It looks at how one artist reads antiquity — adopts, adapts, translates, manipulates the texts of the classical past in his poetry. It has a tight focus, for sure, and one cost of such a focus is that there is very little sense of the wider reception of classics in the twentieth century. Thus we get Ted Hughes on Ovid’s Metamorphoses but very little of how this might fit into a tradition of the reception of Ovid’s epic; Hughes on democracy, but very little on the class and education issues Hughes invokes. You get what it says on the tin: this is “Ted Hughes and the Classics”.

This volume is the seventh or eighth in the Classical Presences series edited by Lorna Hardwick and James Porter. It has already published some exceptional volumes, both in terms of the sheer quality of research and in terms of the interest of the topics. The series has made a name for itself in supporting both monographs and collections of essays on the cutting edge of reception theory — feminism and myth, French political thought and the classics, African version of Greek drama (and so forth). In such a context, this volume, edited by Roger Rees, is rather more conservative in scope and ambition. It looks at Hughes’ works in roughly chronological order, roughly by genre, and discusses his allusions to classical texts, his translations, and his general classicizing techniques.

The authors and titles of the individual chapters:

• Keith Sagar, ‘Ted Hughes and the classics’
• Stuart Gilespie, ‘Hughes’ first translation: ‘The Storm from Homer, OdysseyV’
• Lorna Hardwick, ‘Can (modern) poets do classical drama?’
• John Talbot, ‘Eliot’s Seneca, Ted Hughes’ Oedipus‘
• Janna Stigen Drangsholt, ‘Living Myths’.
• Vanda Zajko, ‘”Mutilated towards alignment?”: Prometheus on his Crag and the “Cambridge School” of anthropology’
• Neil Roberts, Hughes’s myth: the classics in Gaudete and Cave Birds‘
• Roger Rees, ‘Between monarchy and democracy: neo-classicism and the laureate poetry of Ted Hughes’
• Garrett Jacobsen, ‘”A holiday in a rest home”: Ted Hughes and the vates in Tales from Ovid‘
• Anne-Marie Tatham, ‘Passion in extremis in Ted Hughes’s Tales from Ovid‘
• Jennifer Ingleheart, ‘The transformations of the Actaeon myth: Ovid, Metamorphoses 3 and Ted Hughes’s Tales from Ovid‘
• Genevieve Lively, ‘Birthday Letters from Pontus: Ted Hughes and the white noise of classical elegy’
• Michael Silk, ‘Ted Hughes: Allusion and Poetic language’
• Hallie Marshall, ‘The Hughes Version: Commercial Considerations and Dramatic Imagination’
• Sarah Annes Brown, ‘Classics reanimated: Ted Hughes and reflexive translation’
• David Gervais, ‘Beyond tragedy: Ted Hughes, Racine and Euripides’

295 pp. | 6 x 9
Available November 2009

FORTHCOMING

from Zone Books:

The pirate is the original enemy of humankind. Before humanitarian organizations, human rights, and the establishment of international law in the early modern period, the Roman statesmen already made this point perfectly clear. As Cicero famously remarked, there are certain enemies with whom one may negotiate and with whom, circumstances permitting, one may establish a truce. But there is also an enemy with whom treaties are in vain and war remains incessant. This is the pirate, whom the ancient jurists considered to be “the enemy of all.”

Departing from Cicero’s account of foes, The Enemy of All reconstructs the shifting place of the pirate in legal and political thought from the ancient to the medieval, modern, and contemporary periods. Antiquity already encountered the sea thief in politics as in the law. Classical letters from Homer to the end of the Roman Empire contain ample accounts of pirates of various sorts. The Roman jurists assigned to the pirate as a legal person an exceptional position in civil and international law. Their theory was to be the point of departure for the Christian jurists of the Middle Ages, who defined the pirate as “the enemy of the human species.” Later, the thinkers and statesmen of modernity went one step further. Elaborating a new international code of law and ethics, the writers of the Enlightenment represented the pirate as the ultimate “enemy of humanity.” Today, as Heller-Roazen argues, the pirate furnishes the key to the contemporary paradigm of the universal foe. This is a legal and political person of exception, neither criminal nor enemy, who inhabits an extraterritorial region. Against such a foe, states may wage extraordinary battles, policing politics and justifying military measures in the name of welfare and security.

Drawing on the diverse materials of several disciplines, from law and history to political theory and literature, The Enemy of All brings to light a single paradigm that defines the act of piracy. This “piratical paradigm” consists in the conjunction of four traits: a region beyond territorial jurisdiction; agents who may not be identified with an established state; the collapse of the distinction between criminal and political categories; and the transformation of the concept of war. Whenever we hear of regions beyond “the line of the law,” in which acts of “indiscriminate aggression” have been committed “against humanity,” we must begin to recognize that these are acts of piracy. Long said to be a person of the distant past, the enemy of all is closer to us today than we may think. Indeed, he may never have been closer.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=FXPsKuUcUpE

Though the main fixtures of a classic, Hollywood film are conspicuously absent – narrative, sequential time, protagonist – it would be a mistake to describe Terence Davies’ film as experimental. Distant Voices, Still Lives (1988) does not, after all, revel in its play with filmic form: it does not push the limits of film language for the sake of pushing the limits of film language, or at least that’s not the impression we’re led to get. In place of brazen self-consciousness, we find moderation and modesty, a fealty of form to subject. So if the meditative, ponderous movement of the film does not offer itself up as experimental – its radical temporality is not achieved through a virtuosity of editing (as it is in, say, the battle scenes of The Desert Fox [1951]), nor through well-timed plot tricks designed to relentlessly complicate who knew what when (as in Memento [2000], for instance), – it is because its language is justified by the subject of the film itself, which, in this case, is memory broadly speaking.

The children’s memories of the father structure the film and provide it a logic [above], and it is the father’s recollected brutality and callous love that keeps the memories in abundant supply. Torn, then, between nostalgia and trauma, the film belongs to an an incessant displacement: as soon as a memory is summoned, it must be turned away for another, lest its horror overwhelm. No scene conveys this tortured figuration more succinctly than that of the air raid. Angry out of worry that they’re late in reaching the bunker, the father slaps the eldest of the bunch, then tells her to sing. For Davies, what allows, or makes endurable, the convolution of love and violence is art, or song, so rendered.

Song both binds the film together on a formal level, forcing into succession asynchronous times, and offers the children means for a pleasant, psychological distraction from the conditions of their lives. It would be tactless, however, to call this distraction an escape, if only for the reason that the songs themselves, in their subject matter and oftentimes-melancholic delivery, repeat or return to the trauma they otherwise appear to disavow. Their love of song is perhaps then less a means of escape than of mythology. Interrupted by a song, whole scenes come to a stop, and a welcome lethe descends upon the characters: one must sing about the war to forget it just as they remember their father to forget his brutality.

Though it is true that the disavowal of the father is never complete – in the last scene, the son is shown weeping on his wedding day (although this time, importantly, no memory accompanies the recollection) – the figuration of love and violence he enacts retreats into new, less conspicuous forms: as a cruel oedipal fate, he reappears in the daughter’s husband [below], only with this repetition she finds herself unable to finish singing. We are left, then, with the impression that the whole story will begin again, through a new generation, but that song may not be able to soothe the mind the way it used to.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=uOPErGcbHWs

Employers looking to cut personnel costs can either lay people off or lower their wages. Though there are exceptions, employers are generally more willing to do the former.

Truman Bewley, a professor of economics at Yale University, has shown that’s because they fear low worker morale and even sabotage. Basically, they don’t want unhappy people around who may cause trouble.

So if your job really is in danger (and you’d rather have less money than no money) you need to address that fear head-on. Let the big guy know you’re willing to work, contentedly and productively, at a lower wage than you currently receive.

Some possible openers: “I don’t consider salary a final measure of my self-worth.” Or “My friend Peter stayed on at his job at lower pay to help keep his company afloat. I really admire that.”

Gladly, there are others with a different idea of “pragmatic” advice for today’s worker:

* At the FM Logistics Co. in Woippy, France, 125 workers charged into a meeting of five company managers and held the poor creatures hostage for a day. At least 475 workers at FM Logistics, which is owned by Hewlett-Packard Co., were facing the specter of “redundancy” as HP sought to move its printer packaging operations to the cheaper labor pool in Malaysia. By midnight, the company promised “”new proposals on redundancy talks,” according to Reuters.

* At 3M’s pharmaceutical factory in Pithiviers, 50 miles from Paris, workers exploded upon hearing that 110 of them were to lose jobs. They surrounded the manager and forced him into his office, where he was held hostage for 24 hours until 3M agreed to resume negotiations.

* The president of Sony France in March was locked in his office by employees who barricaded the doors and windows with tree trunks.

* Angry factory workers at the Caterpillar plant in Grenoble took four managers hostage on April Fool’s Day.

Initially, Hillebrand’s team could fit only 128 characters into that space, but that didn’t seem like nearly enough. With a little tweaking and a decision to cut down the set of possible letters, numbers and symbols that the system could represent, they squeezed out room for another 32 characters.

Still, his committee wondered, would the 160-character maximum be enough space to prove a useful form of communication? Having zero market research, they based their initial assumptions on two “convincing arguments,” Hillebrand said.

For one, they found that postcards often contained fewer than 150 characters.

Second, they analyzed a set of messages sent through Telex, a then-prevalent telegraphy network for business professionals. Despite not having a technical limitation, Hillebrand said, Telex transmissions were usually about the same length as postcards.

When the family brought suit against the California Highway Patrol, the trial court threw out their claim. Solove disagrees with the reasoning and turns to National Archives and Records Admin. v. Favish, 541 U.S. 157 (2004), a Freedom of Information Act case, to make the case that families do indeed have a “privacy interest in death-scene photos of deceased relatives.”

Sadly, in the age of the internet, establishing a firm legal precedent for this kind of horrific scenario is more urgent than ever.

As I have said before, although the rise of the Pakistani Taliban in the Pushtun areas and in some districts of Punjab is worrisome, the cosmic level of concern being expressed makes no sense to me. Some 55 percent of Pakistanis are Punjabi, and with the exception of some northern hardscrabble areas, I can’t see any evidence that the vast majority of them has the slightest interest in Talibanism. Most are religious traditionalists, Sufis, Shiites, Sufi-Shiites, or urban modernists. At the federal level, they mainly voted in February 2008 for the Pakistan People’s Party or the Muslim League, neither of them fundamentalist. The issue that excercised them most powerfully recently was the need to reinstate the civilian Supreme Court justices dismissed by a military dictatorship, who preside over a largely secular legal system.

[...]

The Pakistani Taliban are largely a phenomenon of the Federally Administered Tribal Areas west of the North-West Frontier Province, and of a few districts within the NWFP itself. These are largely Pushtun ethnically. The NYT’s breathless observation that there are Taliban a hundred miles from Islamabad doesn’t actually tell us very much, since Islamabad is geographically close to the Pushtun regions without that implying that Pushtuns dominate or could dominate it. It is like saying that Lynchburg, Va., is close to Washington DC and thereby implying that Jerry Falwell’s movement is about to take over the latter.

When House Appropriations Committee chairman David Obey, the Wisconsin Democrat who has long championed investment in pandemic preparation, included roughly $900 million for that purpose in this year’s emergency stimulus bill, he was ridiculed by conservative operatives and congressional Republicans.

Obey and other advocates for the spending argued, correctly, that a pandemic hitting in the midst of an economic downturn could turn a recession into something far worse — with workers ordered to remain in their homes, workplaces shuttered to avoid the spread of disease, transportation systems grinding to a halt and demand for emergency services and public health interventions skyrocketing. Indeed, they suggested, pandemic preparation was essential to any responsible plan for renewing the U.S. economy.

But former White House political czar Karl Rove and key congressional Republicans — led by Maine Senator Susan Collins — aggressively attacked the notion that there was a connection between pandemic preparation and economic recovery.

UPDATE: The Political Carnival posts links to a video of Maine Senator Susan Collins fuming about the inclusion of pandemic funding in the stimulus bill, and a February Center for Infectious Disease Research & Policy (CIDRAP) article lamenting its cutting from the bill.

Current snack food packaging has three layers: a printed outer layer with packaging visuals/graphics, an inner layer, which serves as a barrier to maintain the quality and integrity of the product, and a middle layer that joins the other two layers. When the packaging is 100% compostable, it will fully decompose in about 14 weeks when placed in a hot, active compost pile or bin. NatureWorks LLC is providing the PLA, which is trademarked under the Ingeo name.

“Packaging is clearly the most visible interaction consumers have with Frito-Lay’s brands,” said Jay Gehring, vice president, packaging R&D, Frito-Lay North America. “To make packaging that would interact differently in the environment we had to change the composition of packaging and invent key technologies. Using plant-based renewable materials, we have a promising solution that will transform packaging and significantly impact the billions of snack food bags produced annually.”

Frito-Lay will also “fund the collection and upcycling of its used packaging through a program in conjunction with TerraCycle.”

Their coming marketing campaign will also be an opportunity to see how appealing a large brand’s sustainable packaging rebranding will be to the general public. Will people dramatically flock to this product for this reason? If they do, it’s not hard to see how sustainable packaging, in terms of market appeal and positive associations, could generate all sorts of incentives for companies to rethink their full consumption cycle.