Issue # 5: Entropy by in Brief Magazine

FREE

issue #05 ENTROPY

www.inbriefmag.com

ENTROPY

CONTENTS

IN BRIEF COMMITTEE Heads of Committee Jack Kenchington-Evans Britt Myers Editor-in-Chief Elena Mujkic Editors Scott Arthurson Jack Beeby David Brun Piera Dennerstein Jessica Testro Arts Editor Amanda Summons Design Tess Copeland

Jessica Testro 6

Mitch Walder The tendency for entropy to increase in isolated systems is expressed in the second law of thermodynamics — perhaps the most pessimistic and amoral formulation in all human thought. —Gregory Hill and Kerry Thornley It is hard to say what is most fascinating about steam engines. They are best known for their driving role in the industrial revolution, serving as the mechanical hearts of trains, steam boats and factories. Yet the steam engine wrought profound change beyond this. ists of the 18th and 19th centuries funded physicists’ research into thermodynamics. The resulting principles were exciting for scientists, and a little disappointing for tycoons with dreams of perpetual formulated by Rudolf Clausius in 1850, stated that energy can be neither created nor destroyed, making perpetual motion machines impossible. tion, seemed rather unimposing to most, stating merely that “Heat can never pass from a colder to a warmer body without some other change, connected therewith, occurring at the same time.” However, its implications were devastating. The second law is inseparable from the concept of entropy; coined by Clausius, entropy is a measure of disorder and the dissipation of energy. A necessary consequence of the second law is that entropy in any system can increase but never decrease, except by increasing entropy elsewhere. The second law, then, has been thought to imply a universal tendency towards the dissolution of all forms into featureless uniformity, as heat and light disperse outwards through space. Often described as time’s arrow, entropy points towards a future when, like so many sugar cubes and neurones in absinthe, all things must come apart. As one might expect, this principle had a profound effect on thinkers of the following eras. Given the premise that all human achievement “must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe

foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul’s habitation henceforth be safely built.” For many, such gloominess was allayed by the realisation that the heat death of the universe, if it were to happen, lay in the inconceivably distant future. Yet entropy made a deep impression, and was widely adopted as a literary and cultural metaphor for decline and decay; and as the West degenerated into the horrors of the early 20th Century, the notion’s resonance was only to grow stronger. Since the World Wars, the concept of entropy has proliferated tinct usage in information theory, to its mobilisation by social critics whether it be Rock Music, bad grammar, sexual liberation, damage to ecological systems, or the atomising effects of neoliberalism. In this environment teeming with competing interpretations, entropy has come to inspire a wide breadth of creativity and analysis. tion, poetry and artwork within take varying approaches to engaging with the theme. Between these pages, little-known languages keep company with post-apocalyptic ruin, urban decay and fading memory with the breakdown of relationships and bodies. Variously funny, tender, informative and unsettling, these diverse pieces share

SETTLE DOWN YOU’RE ONLY POSTHUMAN JYVÄSKYLÄ

General Members Alex Biernacki Jeremiah Thomas Brown Brendan Corney Berlin Liew Rachel Lopez Kit Malone Mikaela Oldham Kai Tanter Mitch Walder Jemma Wiseman Cover & Feature Artist Jana Maré Centrefold Annick Staindl Illustrations Mitch Walder Joshua Teng Heath Hipwell Tegan Iverson

WHAT I CAN’T TELL ANYONE DROWN

DIGITAL DECAY Anthony Collebrusco

Feature Artist

ANNICK STAINDL

GROWTH/DECAY/REGROWTH Soon-Tzu Speechley

Centrefold

ISSUE #06 WEALTH

Formed in 2012, in Brief is a free quarterly magazine that publishes thought-provoking writing and artwork. Each issue is themed, encouraging contributors to direct their ideas towards a particular, yet broad area of enquiry. in Brief supports stylistic diversity and the creative presentation of ideas. Our emphasis on brevity challenges contributors to express their ideas with clarity and consideration. in Brief is funded and organised by a committee who help to edit, design and publish each issue. To get involved, join our mailing list, subscribe or donate email inbriefmag@gmail.com.

SUBSCRIBE! Get 4 issues delivered to your door for $5! 1) Jump on to PayPal 2) Make a payment of $5.00 to inbriefmag@gmail. com, selecting the ‘personal’ payment option. 3) Send an email to inbriefmag@gmail.com with your name and postal address. You’ll receive the current issue and the next three (unless you want your subscription to start from the next issue…we’re

Like us on Facebook in Brief Magazine

1. an abundance of valuable possessions or money 2. the state of being rich; material prosperity 3. plentiful supplies of a particular resource 4. (archaic) well-being; prosperity. “To get rich is glorious” - Deng Xiaoping “The greatest wealth is to live content with little” “Wealth is the product of man’s capacity to think” For the next issue of in Brief, we invite contributors to think about what constitutes the engine of commerce, the glory of nations and the root of all evil. Wealth it more than numbers on a page? Global disparity raises questions of what wealth actually means, and whether it can ever be a curse. Can you ever have too much? What is truly valuble to all people, and how can we make sure they all have access to it? The Global Financial Crisis, austerity policies, Occupy Wall Street and climate change should all provide a rich seam of all kinds: can there be happiness in material poverty? Has consumerism consumed us all, or is it only those with everything who have the temerity to complain?

SUBMIT

f Find us online inbriefmag.com

LEAVING THE TUNNEL John Morrissey

JANA MARÉ

ABOUT IN BRIEF

ICONOCLASM OF THE LINGUISTS

Ben Harvey

Sarah Williams

Fundraising Manager Jessica Testro

ROUTINE

SO LONG

Piera Dennerstein

Broede Carmody

FIVE HUNDRED NATIONS Scott Woodard

Jack Kenchington-Evans 13

Brendan Corney

Britt Myers 10

TRAINING OUR EYES ON NECESSITIES Aaron Baird

Caitlyn Lesiuk 8

Elena Mujkic

MOTHER DROPS THE CARROT

Marketing Team Jack Beeby Piera Dennerstein Caitlin McGrane

that better? Great. Now please, take a seat. Are you distracted by thoughts of lolcats? Angry ex-lovers? Italo Calvino? Never mind that. Perhaps you’re not so sure who this Calvino fellow is? That’s okay. Maybe you can look him up later. For now, it’s time to make yourself comfortable, take a deep breath, and enjoy the issue. The Eds.

THE CITY BLINKS Scott Arthurson

14 Online Manager Chris Clarke

YOLO AND INTERVIEW WITH THE VAMPIRE

We accept submissions of up to 1000 words, as well as pitches for one of two 2000-word feature pieces per issue. We value originality over all else. Please send all work, pitches or questions regarding submissions through to: inbriefsubmissions@gmail.com

YOLO AND INTERVIEW WITH THE VAMPIRE Jessica Testro Mitch Walder

Every age since the birth of literature has been fascinated with the idea that our time on earth is limited; our bodies decay and we die. Boil down the vast range of human thought on the topic and one will arrive at this accurate summation: YOLO. You Only Live Once. But what if you didn’t, to put it in terms the millennials will understand, OLO? What happens when death is no longer the great motivator and leveler, the great something in common that every human shares with every other? This theme is at the heart of the excellent and totally fucked up Interview with the Vampire, starring Tom Cruise’s strawberry blonde curls, Brad Pitt’s perfectly manicured hands, Kirsten Dunst’s necrophilia and with a special appearance by Antonio Banderas’ waist-length ironed hair. Based on the 1976 novel by Anne Rice, the adaptation was released in 1994. Louis (Brad Pitt) has been 24 for over 200 years when he strikes up a conversation with moronic journalist and plot device Christian Slater. He relates his tale and all his existential angst over the course of an evening, revealing the plight of those who die and are ‘reborn’ as creatures of the night. death and controlled by it. For the most part, according to creepy Armand (Banderas), ‘few vampires have the stamina for immortality’. Kirsten Dunst’s character Claudia, the child vampire, is the arrested. Though she mentally grows up at a slowed, but constant rate similar to that of adolescence and then adulthood, Louis tells us that ‘[Claudia’s] body remained that of has no option other than to project her own repressed, sublimated sexuality onto other human women she sees. In one notable scene, Lestat, while looking through the collection of dolls on her bed (which he has given her every ‘birthday’

the naked, rotting body of a beautiful prostitute Claudia had killed some time before. Claudia, as a result of her inability to physically grow or change, has literally buried her adult sexuality underneath the symbols of her perpetual childhood. When reprimanded for ‘poisoning’ her own bed she screams that she killed the woman because ‘I wanted her! I wanted to be her!’ Now think about how much weirder that line is when you see those words coming out of the mouth of ten-yearold Kirsten Dunst. In the same scene, Claudia tries to cut off her doll-like golden curls, another symbol of her halted entropy. When she is commanded to stop, again she squeals in her high-pitched child’s voice, ‘Why not? Can’t I change, like everybody else?’

that has become more introspective and ill at ease. Louis eventually refuses to help Armand after his followers kill Claudia, his last tie to human emotion, and spends the rest

The absence of change has another effect on the lives of the three main vampires. Eventually, they are cut off from any type of human society or connection, whether because of their inability to go out during the day, their need to continu-

is a positive tale of entropy, or rather a negative tale of its absence. Physical decay makes the world go round, and very odd and disturbing things happen when it is not there.

understanding a world that has changed so much over their much longer lifetimes. They function as an autonomous unit, sharing nothing in common with anyone but their need for each other. Eventually, even their small society self-destructs. Claudia tries to kill Lestat in retribution for turning her into It is in Paris that they meet Armand, the leader of a cult of vampires. Armand, purportedly the oldest vampire in the world, is drawn to Louis because of his ability to understand the new age and the changes in self-perception that have occurred in human society since his rebirth. Armand contemptuously says of his cult: ‘How quickly they perish of their own will. The world changes. We do not. Therein lies to understand the world they live in than any other person ies and their minds both equally frozen at the time of their creation. Conversely, Louis was born at the beginning of the Enlightenment and is seen by Armand as mirroring a world

Slater, wandering alone, incapable of dying and feeling disDetached. Unchangeable. Empty.’ (seriously, an entire essay could be written on the warped love triangle between Louis, Armand and Claudia, not to mention the 18th century adoption and rebirth of a homeless orphaned child by two dudes who live together and who both

THE CITY BLINKS Scott Arthurson

MOTHER DROPS THE CARROT Caitlyn Lesiuk

Suit can’t hide his stricken look: unfocused eyes: severed whimper last air. Despair is answered with complaints: the train will be late. Tunnel echoes split atoms, veil torn. He minds the gap. A few streets away the maples shudder: leaves shimmer music cold wind burns unspoken; the windows’ lights are broken glass on the walls, teeth that sink in petals fresh bought from wombs forget the names inscribed in meat grows restless beneath desires city’s hopes are scraped to bone bleached time spits words once known. Sucked of marrow will never escape the billboards are hunting never remembered can’t be forgotten needs of supervisor’s vision blurred between mangled bodies of lust is waiting, is waiting. nipples pressing through hotel sheets: a low groaning, humming hissing chop , chop: the tram arrives, moist breath departs.

at most familiar scene. He minds his step. They follow his step. Ubiquitous haze is watching, shedding smothered rays on dreams of release from steel imprinted thoughts made concrete in minds writhing through paved desert, at constant risk of evaporation: Omniscient aperture yawns and blinks, as desperate shadows follow the money into the alley and seize his struggling throat sliced open gushing terror guilt, in a careless slip of trembling hands. The drains gurgle, the gutters weep. The city yawns. The city blinks.

Mother cuts the potatoes, she cuts the capsicum, she strings the beans; she’s strung out. The dishes need doing, the rubbish emptying, Baby feeding, garden clipping. The knife cuts the carrots while Mother thinks of Father. The carrot circles fall to the board; clip goes the knife, fall goes a circle clip-fallclip-fall-clip-fall like a clock ticking forward with each tick to when Father gets home (when will it be?) and ticking backward with each click to when Father was not Father (what was his name?). Mother was not Mother either, and Baby was not Baby; Baby was simply not. The carrot clip-fall-clip-fall-clip-fall did not sound, or if it did, it ticked way back in the kitchen of Danny’s Diner and they could not hear it; no one could hear it because they talked and laughed and danced back then. and dusty. What a string bean; what a dither head; there’s nothing to you; you’re losing your head. Mother slips and up the arm, nice, even slices. She chops the neck, the body, down each leg and all the way up the other arm. The pieces hop into the boiling pot one by one. They swim around in the stew, mixing beefblood with motherblood and vegetable brew. Baby cries again, he does not know what to make of

Mother’s blonde bob-head sitting in a pool of blood on the counter, stirring with a wooden spoon in her mouth. The meal must last this time; it must last longer than last time; last time there was not enough meat in the meal. Mother leaps from the pot, piece by piece. Hush Baby! Mother will sew Mother back together again! She picks up needle and thread, stiches her seams back together, leaving stripes of white cotton scribbled all up her body. Mother As the iron heats up, she vacuums up all the little vegetable she is a good mother a good wife a good housewife she will iron up her thigh, meeting each skin crease with steamy steel that leaves red wet welts in its wake. Her raw legs spread, she bends her head between them to check for that tell-tale spot of blood that has not come. You never can tell so she slips the vacuum nozzle in and up; out come fallopian tubes ovaries eggs the whole lot and there’s that mess taken care of.

SETTLE DOWN Britt Myers

We are far from reaching a point in history where all sexualities, genders, relationships and family structures are equally respected and represented in this country. However, increasing legal recognition of same-sex and other diverse parenting arrangements, the availability of IVF treatment for single people and same-sex couples and the increasing divorce rates suggest that, at the very least, the heterosexual nuclear family is no longer the only legally recognised family structure nor is it assumed to be the most well-functioning (though it is still preferenced by many institutions). of the family unit is slowly expanding, there is still a perception that one’s life is incomplete without partners and children. We need to challenge this perception so individuals don’t feel as though their personal value is contingent on their child rearing or relationship capabilities, which is surely necessary for a full realisation of gender equality. Similarly, getting rid of the societal norm to structure one’s life along family lines will help to alleviate the sense of isolation and frustration felt by those who are unable a long-term partner. The pressure to ‘settle down’ affects both men and women. But it has, from my experience, a more acute affect on women. The ‘biological clock’ ticks away for women and the mainstream media won’t let us forget it. Similarly, the pressure to partner-up has more negative social and emotional impacts on women who can look forward to being labelled as spinsters or, dare I raise it, ‘deliberately barren’, whereas men attract labels of adulation: ‘eligible bachelors’ etc. As long as women are under these pressures and extra scrutiny, society will be weaker as whole, not because every person individually is affected equally, but because the persistence of these norms prevents a class of individuals from accessing equality. as the removal of pressure to construct one’s life in a certain way will give rise to a truly equal ability for all to shape one’s life in whichever way one chooses.

These societal norms seem to enter our lives with the quest lished relationship ‘statuses’ of all your ‘friends’ and having to constantly declare your own relationship situation for various forced to assess the potential of your relationships to provide happiness and security for the rest of your natural life. You’re also pushed and persuaded by family to account for your lack of partner if single, or to bring your current squeeze home so the family can make a long-term assessment. Explaining to your relatives or friends that you might wish to remain childless or partnerless is met with utter confusion or it is simply dismissed. In Western society more broadly, through the media as well as across the dinner table, we’re told that not wanting a partner is just sour grapes for the similarly taught that protestations of not wanting to have children are naïve, and something that will almost inevitably change over time. For young people, being without a partner or childless is viewed by the community as a temporary state of affairs. As one gets older, it’s explained away with notions of being ‘unlucky in love’ if partnerless, or met with ‘keep trying, it’ll happen’ if childless. For those unable to have children, the situation is rarely spoken about outside of piteous and conciliatory terms. relationship or childless simply do not constitute valid life choices in our community. And because one effectively can’t choose to be alone, the sociduces fears that these supposed necessities for happiness and sipate once you’ve got the partner and the children; because the marauding spectre of a solitary future continues to loom over you even once you’ve ‘settled down’. The fear of being

alone can start to become a factor in your decisions about whether to remain in a relationship that might not be working, where the main considerations should surely be one’s personal well-being and the well-being of their respective partners and children. To be sure: the choice to have children is a legitimate one. Similarly, full-time parenting should indeed be valued and recognised as a full-time job, and the right to start a family should be available to all. And further, we should support and assist people around us who are emotionally affected by being do so. However, the choice not to have children or settle down should be an equally available and valid life choice. The individuals who make such choices, shouldn’t feel as though their personal value will be reduced because of their lack of children or a partner. It’s not contended here that by breaking down conventional notions of the family the desire to start a family should or will disappear. It is contended however, that once we stop presuming that having children or partnering up is inevitable and inherently valuable, we will be closer to creating a more open and tolerant community where one can at least

come from ‘settling down’.

YOU’RE ONLY POSTHUMAN Jack Kenchington-Evans

Michel Houellebecq is like a backwards-arse racist uncle France (and a Marxist nihilist whose books invariably contain graphic anal sex scenes). Atomised, his seminal 1998 text, is no exception. The main character, in a noxious reaction to the “liberal humanism” of a literary journal, writes that: “We envy and admire the Negro because we long to regress, like him, to our animal selves; to be animals with big cocks and small reptilian brains” and “Only Jews are spared the regret of not being Negroes, because they have long since chosen the path of wisdom, shame and guilt”. I did warn you. Houellebecq’s work explores the depressive banality of midimmigration). Houellebecq’s characters, in light of these themes, tend to embrace a Schopenhauer-like pessimism, along with racism, sexism, fascism, and, in Atomised, eugenics. Criticism of Houellebecq’s work often focuses on the philosophical fragility of the sweeping claims he appears to declarations on the failure of liberalism and multiculturalism. However, for all its bile, Houellebecq’s Atomised forms a sophisticated critique of sex and sexual economies in modern Western societies. The novel presents the idea that sex has become as individualised as neo-liberal market economies, and that the only panacea lies in the eradication of humanity and human individualism, and its replacement with the Atomised explores two characters’ sexual and existential experiences in middle-class France in the wake of the sexual revolution. Bruno, bullied at school and ignored by his promiscuous hippie mother, has become obsessed with sex, a predilection that continues to grow despite his entry into the

he leads a life of sexual and social isolation: entering therapy, going to writers’ retreats, drinking alone and, as popular psychological parlance would label it, ‘comfort eating’. His loneliness is only broken up by Christiane, who serves Bruno as lover and amateur psychotherapist. But when Christiane becomes paraplegic, Bruno refuses to help care for her. She commits suicide as a result. Bruno’s narrative ends with the same despondency and hopelessness that has plagued his shallow life, informing a broader reading of the impact a sex driven, liberalised society has on its population. The second character, Michel, forms a stark contrast with Bruno. He rejects sensualism, and has withdrawn from human society to focus on his genetic research projects. sion of the novel, in which his research is instrumental in developing a new race of humanity. This posthuman race, like Michel, rejects individualistic tendencies in pursuit of transcendental goals, characterised by a genetically inherent group consciousness. The women in Atomised come and go with depressing regularity, used for sex then discarded. Those who are less transient ideas, the relationship between sex and society in Atomised is informed by a Foucauldian reading of political history. Foucault argues that the progression of political history has involved the expansion of the political and public sphere into the sphere of the personal and the private. Foucault posits that in modern society, the human is an overwhelmingly Atomised, the sex camps, orgies and ously cosseted topic of sex has taken in society. Furthermore, the popularity of Houellebecq’s near pornographic detail suggests that modern readers are comfortable with explicit, socially pervasive sex.

Sexual mores symbolise societal values (rather than individual preferences). Bruno, and to a lesser extent Michel, have a predilection towards oral sex and external male ejaculation on the woman, rather than vaginal sex. This implies that the status of sex has changed from an intimate, reproductive and istic society. The preference towards oral sex and ‘cum-shots’ reconstructs the binary between giver and receiver of pleasure that liberal values sought to dissolve. This individualism is not limited to male sexual values; women in the Paris sex clubs engage in sexual pursuits as much out of “narcissism” as “pleasure”. The new status of sex in Atomised individualistic nature of sex in both men and women. Individualistic sex has also deviated from its original reproductive role. This conceptual shift is represented in Bruno’s and Michel’s misogynistic attitudes towards the vagina. The young Michel has a labia-centric nightmare of the “chute” opening up to a consumer dystopia of decaying rubbish and genitalia. This dream is part of the same pattern as his apathe gorgeous Annabelle, a lost-and-found childhood friend, ably, she commits suicide. Similarly, Bruno has nightmares of gaping vaginas which inform the antipathy he feels towards reproductive sex. Such anti-reproductive attitudes support the argument advocated by the book: that humanity’s sexbased reproduction is inherently self-defeating and imperfect, Furthermore, from a broader societal perspective, the rise of contraception, free-love doctrines and the spectre of AIDS (all existing on the margins of the sex clubs and camps) has undermined unprotected reproductive couplings in Atomised. Contrary to this negative view of femininity and sex, ting criticism of the human race’s incapacity to transcend

purity” offers humanity the possibility of something more than itself. Annabelle seems to embody the positive vision of obsolete humanity in the epilogue: she is unique, “noble” and has “a belief in love”. But Annabelle is exploited and her ideals crushed by the individualistic status of sex, which, prior to meeting Michel, has resulted in abortions, abusive boyfriends, and heartbreak. The “sexual storm” she embraces in her youth has left her with an addiction to tranquillisers, and a lonely, meaningless life. Annabelle’s fate is emblematic of humanity’s trajectory: romantic individualism theoretically beauty seems to portend a tragic fate”, portending humanity’s future recognition of self-obsolescence. Atomised, in justifying a posthuman alternative to human selfishness, comprehensively undermines the ability of humanity’s political systems to positively embrace or eliminate the human condition and bring about societal and individual happiness. The effect of this is to suggest that given the total and genetic solution is necessary. acters inhabit a decidedly secular world. Bruno, Michel and Annabelle are raised in liberal college atmospheres, pursuing irreligious lives without consideration of a spiritual entity that transcends their own lives. This indicates that Western religious politics has failed to address the sexual revolution, and to stymie individualism. Indeed, the monogamous sexuality that is endorsed by the church has been broken down by sexual liberation, suggesting that holy doctrine is incapable of standing against the individualistic passions of humanity. Socialism shares a slightly different fate. The self-transcending goal of equality and solidarity is partly achieved in the

JYVÄSKYLÄ “Swedish model of social democracy” the characters inhabit. The middle-class that Bruno and Michel occupy is a socialist

would be eroded in a non-sexually-reproducing species is addressed through focusing on the new sexual possibilities

tus of sex within Bruno and Michel’s class becomes a political sphere in which people can organise a hierarchical social structure, and assert individualism despite the presence of relatively successful socialist constructivism.

conclusion that the posthuman possesses physically superior pleasure receptors, heightening enjoyment of sex. Secondly, the apparent loss of personal identity in a genetically identical environment is dismissed as a “ridiculously proud” conservative mindset that ignores the terrible grief which individualism caused humanity.

Unlike religious morality or socialist constructivism, capitalist individualism embraces the decline of the sexual ‘welfare’ of monogamy, in which each person is relatively sexually secure through the one-to-one disbursement of partners. It applies free-market relativism to sex and sexuality. It is this neo-liberal stage that Atomised depicts, in which sex camps and swingers’ and even the desirable, youthful Annabelle. Even if one is to disregard the inherent masochism involved in elevating youth in an ageing society, the characters in Atomised are necessarily unhappy because they cannot derive meaning from the vacuous sexual norms of their time. They tivism entails. Society’s acknowledgement and sponsorship of individualistic sex leaves an existential hole that religious and if they were only to be rebelled against. In the neo-liberal, valueless world, humanity is purposeless, and has nothing to halt its descent into savagery. As Bruno bemoans, the “sexand-shopping” society will eventually “devour” humankind in a vortex of meaningless competition. This valueless sexual consumption is a pessimistic counterpoint to Fukuyama’s “end of history” argument. Rather than devising the ideal way to live, humanity has intellectually exhausted itself in attempting to subsume individualism acknowledgement of humanity’s failure to transcend its own weaknesses through philosophy. This failure prompts the poshuman slogan in the novel, “THE REVOLUTION WILL NOT BE MENTAL, BUT GENETIC”. What different role then must sex play in the posthuman world of Atomised? The book emphasises that the posthuman is cloned; therefore, sex must lose its reproductive function. The status of sex in the posthuman world is informed by the responses to two primary in-text criticisms of Michel’s posthuman project. Firstly, the criticism that sexual expression

As a result of a shared identity between individuals, posthuman sex lacks humanity’s negative “personal vanity”. Considering Atomised’s unrelenting criticism of individualism, it can be extrapolated that posthumanity will eradicate less source of communitarian pleasure in Atomised’s altruistic posthuman society. Of course, the idea of social happiness achieved through the rejection of individual identity remains unsettling for readers attached to their individuality, conjuring the dystopian spectres of Brave New World and Nineteen Eighty-Four. However much the situation is rationalised, it is lost. The changed status of sex in Atomised highlights the inexorable rise of human individualism, and the inability of communitarian doctrines to contain it. On the other hand, free-market individualism represents the ideological resigincorporating sex into this relativistic capitalist framework, ing in the most personal of experiences. Humanity must thus develop its successors in order to overcome its fated individthere were no God, it would be necessary to invent him”. In Atomised, humanity accepts the task of creating its own gods, and ending its own godless, imperfect existence.

Broede Carmody

your knuckles become hairless from the cold. a road sign says: beware of the reindeer. last summer the car in front of us struck a calf— a soft spatter of blood on the road. its nose nuzzled your palm panic-wet. later we climbed the mountain’s spine, this country pushing pine needles up and out.

ROUTINE Sarah Williams

Mitch Walder

It begins with a simple routine. Wake in the morning and before contemplating anything else: Plug in earphones, turn on iPod. 10 times sit ups 10 times leg lifts 10 times push ups 10 times squats Repeat. Shower, breakfast, teeth. Go about day. Increase repetitions. Introduce night time exercises. In the dark. In secret. A new kind of religion. Life continues as normal. Until It feels like a sin to miss a beat. So beat self up. Or compensate. Create conditions. Strict order rules. Hunger stops. And it feels like control. But it will take control of you. on all the things I wouldn’t, as I give up on all adventure in the evening, I will drag out this meal forever if it is the last thing I do because it will mean that I have beaten you. And though the race includes the racing thoughts, it will mean I will have won. But I am so goddamn tired every minute of every second and so I lie lie lie all the time, in my bed and with my words, just to be sure no one is sure of the thickness that is my mind because even if I cannot concentrate on what you are saying even if it is the-end-of-the-world and theend-of-time all at once as long as no one knows I am crazy then it is just. not. happening but I keep lying in bed and

keep the words in my head though it is not by choice that I have no voice it is that they are stuck in there because everything inside is slow. and. silent. And there are no movements without compulsion and there are no moments without documentation and you may laugh and you may cringe and criticise all of which I internalise and feed my self-hate except the recorded moments are an addiction and time must not be wasted on any account, but I myself am wasted. Wasted space. In that so-called world reality wasted weakened muscles crying out for fuel. Fool. A peculiar mix of fascination in discovering hidden bones and knowing knowing knowing it is disintegration. And you are getting angry with me now, losing patience as I lose so much including my memory my mind and if it is frustrating for you imagine how pitiful I feel as the hours pass over me while I try to make supposedly effortless decisions that needed to be made yesterday. I know I have to eat something but it hurts too much - all that I will give up - I am determined but not disciplined enough - why am I forgetting all my structures where are all my things are moving too fast am I human am I alive I am scared and I want to be held but don’t you dare touch me. Stop stop stop I spin out hallucinations and faint I cannot make my body walk. do. anything. Can’t tell the difference between the fantastical, scary dreams and actual life. I deserve this trying desperately to hold onto or decipher messy convoluted this is broken record repetition thoughts. It was too confusing and all the compliments got found on you Because because because because society had fallen too. But your soul couldn’t be crushed as small as your waistline. It had to get out and it was like Christmas All the all the festivities, everything that you missed. attention

But after the celebration came water retention. It was taking your slice of guilt and different kinds of chaos followed Re-learning to to exist, remembering to to swallow. Swung between sensibilities and soul-sucking uncontrollable spells So hunger was back, overcrowded I-feel-pregnant fullness as well. It was too long waiting and after the famine comes the feast Wading through impossible conditions just to just to feed the beast. Bemoaned the fact that you were human and must eat at all and small. It had you thinking it wasn’t living, it was barely surviving But it didn’t stop you romanticising and on bad bad days chastising. If only you could go and get gripped by obsession again, Wouldn’t wouldn’t be a struggle, Shouldn’t and Couldn’t would be your friends. Have you heard the paradox? Do you have the courage to confess? That you believe you will be more more more when you are less less less? Will someone please answer when is enough enough? It ends, but has no end, as everything must.

JANA MARÉ Feature Artist

Jana Maré’s recent practice explores performance in front of the camera using the artist’s body. Using the artist’s body in open natural light, the work explores interior spaces, the psychology of the home left empty and forgotten. The body emerges as furniture, a part of the architecture, the foundations, lending to this space an exposed human forbidden environments with limited time to photograph. The work is intuitive with a sense of urgency and spontaneity.” The photographs provide an exploration of identity. For the artist, the performance, act of photographing and then having the physical photograph is a life cycle in itself and gives the artist a validation of existence and an ability to deal with her own mortality. The home is also a place of comfort, safety and usually in order; the artist has deliberately chosen houses and locations that show a disruption, distortion and discomfort to the usual placement of the body in a home. In the images the artist does not show her face. Obscuring the face provides a disembodiment, which allows the viewer to project their own ideas of who and what the story is about. Even though the series is about self-portraiture in a broad sense, the artist deliberately tries to remove that personalisation so the audience can project their own conclusions.

Jana Maré is an Australian photographer based in Melbourne. She recently completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts (Photography) (First Class Honours) at RMIT University. Growing up in Adelaide, Maré explored photography to capture as much as possible and in 1999, after moving to Melbourne, took a passionate interest in street photography while studying at PIC (Photographic Imaging College). Since graduating with a Bachelor of Media Arts (Fine Art Imaging) from RMIT in 2002 she has continued to create conceptual photographic works. Her photographs have been exhibited in numerous galleries; she has been the recipient of photographic awards and has recently been published in the Annual Australian Creative magazine and artists. Maré has also recently been featured on over 50 websites internationally including Decay/Beautiful.com, Ignant.de, Artrebels.com, Art Sponge, Flavorwire.com, Featureshoot.com, ThePicturesMag.co.uk, Revistatrip.uol.com.br, RadioSarajevo. Francisco Museum of Modern Art), among many others. Interview: www.artrebels.com/blog/the-naked-photographer/ Email: jana@janamare.com Website: www.janamare.com

ANNICK STAINDL

TRAINING OUR EYES ON NECESSITIES Aaron Baird

Joshua Teng

We feel it is epical when man with one wild arrow strikes a distant bird. Is it not also epical when man with one wild engine strikes a distant station? Chaos is dull; because in chaos the train might indeed go anywhere, to Baker Street or to Baghdad. Thus goes the argument of Gabriel Syme, “the poet of order” in G.K. Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday. Is this mere hyperbole? No doubt Syme’s excited outburst here is framed within the context of his confrontation with the equally hyperbolic Lucian Gregory, “the poet of anarchy”. However, when I read this passage I am fascinated by the idea of a person who, upon arriving at Flinders Street Station by train, expresses amazement that the train arrives there and not, say, in Baghdad. Supposing we were to entertain the idea of there being such a man, how exactly would a person come to behave in this manner towards the seemingly ordinary things that most of us take for granted? What experience could lead a person to asking this question is philosophical insofar as it leads to a far more fundamental and familiar question: on what necessities do our ways of life depend? Chesterton’s concern is with what he sees as an intellectual trend in his time towards a kind of anarchy in which thinkers revel in the dissolution of what seemed to be integral features of human life. Likewise, there are some today who would suggest that ‘necessities’ (where they exist at all) are constraints, pillars of order, limiting freedom (artistic or otherwise). Let us not forget, however, that freedom does not exist in a vacuum and that necessities open up a space in which freedom can operate (in which the self can live); there can be no choice between left and right if the necessities governing space go out the window. The search for necessities is the search for those conditions that make possible our ways of life as they stand; it is primarily a search for self-understanding. To such a search I would give the name ‘philosophy’, though it is impossible to deny

the equally powerful claims on this venture made by both ‘art’ and ‘science’. In the task of uncovering the conditions that make possible our ways of life, philosophy runs into a rather peculiar problem. Wittgenstein beautifully captures this problem when in Philosophical Investigations he says: “the aspects of things that are most important for us are hidden because of their simplicity and familiarity. (One is unable to notice something because it is always before one’s eyes.)’1 The glasses that sit on my nose, and make my vision possible, are perhaps the furthest thing from my eyes. Some kind of ‘outside’ perspective is required in order to bring into view the (very ordinary) conditions that make our lives possible. And what I want to suggest here is that this outside perspective can be achieved by indulging in a degree of madness. We must be prepared to entertain the idea that something we take for granted could be different houses?2 What would people plant in their gardens? What would become of ‘building a house’? When we consider hypotheticals like this we can begin to assess the implications such changes would have on our lives and on our understandthis particular thing. (Imagine how hard it would be to get to work if trains made a habit of ending up on the other side of the world.) However, the risk inherent in this practice of becoming a stranger to oneself (Thoreau calls it “neighbouring oneself ”) is that we might lose our bearings, lose ourselves. We might begin to think that anything we encounter could just as well be otherwise and that the world as we see it is an unfolding sequence of accidents. The same practices that allow me to achieve some kind of perspective on my life can also leave me alienated from that life. I dare say I need not point out that a person who seriously thought a train leaving Spencer Street might end up in Baghdad would be mad. Am I calling him mad because his

Not exactly: ‘that trains do not end up on the other side of are not facts of the same order as, for example, ‘that sea suggesting that there are certain facets of our understanding (at this point in history?) that are not open to question in the same way as other empirical facts, that are not things for which we gather evidence. ‘That houses do not suddenly rather it is a constituent feature of the world in which we discover empirical facts. If the world is to be dependable enough that we can make discoveries at all, some things have to hold. Reminding ourselves of what things have to hold in order for our lives to be what they are is one of philosophy’s chief concerns. I would call it ‘taking an interest in oneself ’. Without doing so, we become incapable of according appropriate sigthose in which we have a vested interest. Recall my opening quotation where Syme expresses his view that “chaos is dull”. Taken literally this sentiment might seem a little contradicsage draws its humour. However, Syme does not mean that chaotic things are dull. Rather it is a world completely given over to chaos (to contingency) that is dull; such a world holds no interest for us. The fear registered in Syme’s outburst is that perhaps we are at risk of settling for such a view of the world and ourselves in it. Philosophy, then, becomes a means of reinvesting ourselves with eyes afresh in the world to which we have been given.

1. L. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, G.E.M. Anscombe (tr.), Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1958 (2nd ed.), p. 48 (S. 129). 2. I borrow this example from S. Cavell, The Claim of Reason, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1979, p. 236.

FIVE HUNDRED NATIONS Elena Mujkic

The Seekers It’s common knowledge that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples have been in Australia for over forty thoucultural history in the world. Since European settlement, their cultures have been vastly affected by the rapid changes shaping the world around them; the people, the environto ‘recognise’ indigenous cultural heritage, and even ‘protect’ it. However, this conceptualisation of indigenous cultures frames them as stagnant, as cultures tied inextricably to tradition. It follows that one views them as subject only to the change and degradation caused by Western intervention, and not as the lively systems that they are. In reality, Australian indigenous cultures have been interacting and exchanging with each other further back in time than we can extrapolate from records, and they have continued to do so since the time of Captain Cook until now. Like the changes seen in the West in its known history, changes to Indigenous cultures have been many and varied, with unpredictable implications over time. Firstly, it’s important to lay the foundations for a discussion of such a topic, as we come to these conversations with varying levels of knowledge. It is my understanding that public and academic conceptions of Indigenous cultures are completely out of sync. In linguistics and anthropology, academics speak of Murrinh-Patha and Yanyuwa, and rarely of ‘Aboriginal’ or ‘Indigenous’ culture. Within academic discourse, it is well and dialects present in Australia at the time of European settifying groups of Indigenous Australians. Unsurprisingly, like the different cultures that occupy Europe, their cultures varied to differing degrees. Cultures shared features in similar

areas, like the similarities in the languages and cultures of Spain and Portugal, but varied across the land. With this in mind, language and social organisation are studied in terms of groups, and rarely with a pan-Australian perspective. This is often misunderstood by white Australians, as we often think of Indigenous culture as at least partly coherent across the groups. Like the overlap of language and culture at the borders of France, Italy, Germany and Austria, Indigenous cultures have interacted with and moulded each other over time. We’ll look at the example of the Daly River area, just west of Arnhem Land in the Northern Territory, where there is a complex history of cultural exchange between groups. At the time the famous Australian anthropologist W.E.H Stanner To set the scene, in the Australian anthropological literature of the 1920s, it was just being established that many indigenous groups had ways of organising society that allocate every member of the community a kin term (like mum, dad or aunty in English), whether they were related to each other by blood or not. Further, some also had systems which divided society into groups according to descent from the mother’s or father’s side. One way to understand this as outsiders is to think of systems of social organisation that we are already aware of, such as the Western class system or the Indian caste system, and spin them ninety degrees so they are no longer systems determined who a person’s ideal marriage partner would be when they came of age. These were inbuilt ways of avoiding incest, and maximising connections between people, supporting a hunter-gatherer lifestyle that was often unpredictable on sparse Australian land. During the 1920s, an interesting interplay was at work in the Daly River area. One group, Murrinh-Patha, was feeling pressure to incorporate the social categories of groups around them, like Jamindjung, into their existing system.

the terms and marriage rules used in the Jaminjung system into the existing Murrinh-Patha set of terms and rules for Stanner talks of experts in the community that knew how it would work, but it seems the understanding was slow to trickle down to day-to-day marriages. In fact, the system may not have been incorporated fully at all. In the 1980s, for example, it was reported that people had heard of these names, but didn’t know how they were used; and now, their use has dropped out completely. There is another reason Murrinh-Patha stands out in the Australian context. At the last census, almost 2,500 people claimed to speak the language of this group, meaning that this language had gained 1000 speakers between censuses. This makes it one of the few languages that has grown in terms of speakers since European settlement, and that is still being learned by children. This is because the Murrinh-Patha language has been adopted as a lingua franca for people in the area. Over time, children of speakers of surrounding languages have learned Murrinh-Patha instead of their parents’ of people living in and around Wadeye (formerly Port Keats), after a mission was set up there in 1935. As a consequence, the dynamics of the interplay between Indigenous language and culture have shifted in Wadeye. Previously, Indigenous languages were the hallmark of the areas to which they belonged, because in many Indigenous cultures, languages are said to have each been assigned to the land during the Dreamtime. This means that as people travel over the land, they must adopt the language that is spoken there. As people have moved to Wadeye over time, they too have adopted the language spoken there, and so the populain the last eighty years. This is a fascinating case, then, since other language groups are losing speakers to Murrinh-Patha

and not to English, as is generally the case. For the last speakers of some of the languages surrounding the Murrinh-Patha area, this is as devastating as a shift to English might be in other areas. Although this is a loss to another Indigenous culture, it is a loss of culture nonetheless, one which shakes the identities of young and old alike in ways which stretch beyond individual ideas of identity. An Australian Bureau of Statistics report from 2011 found that young Indigenous Australians who were familiar with some of their traditional language were less likely to engage in substance abuse, illustrating the broader importance of that which is being lost. It is therefore important to educate ourselves about Australia’s Indigenous history in order to engage with it intelligently in the public sphere. Failing this, those of us who are not directly involved in Indigenous cultures risk simplifying them to a primary-school knowledge of the Dreamtime, and reducing recognition to tokenistic gestures with pan-Indigenous scope. In reducing these living and ongoing cultures to decorative traditions imbedded in Western history. If we are to avoid this error, and truly respect Indigenous cultures, we must learn to conceptualise them with as much nuance and complexity as we ascribe to our own.

SO LONG Scott Woodard

Heath Hipwell

Angus and Rose Squatter sit opposite each other, spreading their plates and knives and forks and coasters wide across head waiter and she washed dishes. They played games to pass the time. Each plate, they thought, told a narrative; a story in blots of thick lamb gravy, mauled chicken morsels, broccoli heads sprayed across the small white scars cut into the ceramic. They read the stories of business meetings and break-ups, of burgeoning love and lonely dates shared with paperback napkins. It was a million forgotten stories that bought the table. But that was so long ago. Now she arrives home from the lines in her face. He does not bother to ask. Dinner is ready on the table and they sit down to eat. They scrape each mouthful from their plates and lift it carefully to the point where it can no longer be guided by the eye. Then the complex mathematics and geometry of the subconscious moves it into the waiting mouth. Maybe, she thinks, I can only get this right by watching him, and he watching me? What a challenge it must be to eat alone. Every mouthful is contrasted and compared, judged and critiqued. They eat different meals - he, veal; her, chicken - with differing drinks - he, pinot noir; her, sauvignon blanc - in different orders at As they eat their dessert, they converse in the clinking of knives against their plates, polite sips from their glasses, the humdrum tappings of their shoes. Through the open window, the galahs scream in love or pain. Cars shout indignantly over each other on some nearby road. The air hangs heavily in the small room with the odour of cooling pie and fermenting dusk.

“I have poisoned your supper.” She lowers her spoon. “Did you really?” “Yes,” he says. “I sifted it into the stewing apple between the castor sugar and the grated nutmeg. I stirred it through until took up its aroma.” “And you inhaled the aroma? Were you enticed by the sweet perfume? Does its residue now linger within your lungs?” “You do not understand your trouble like I do. I am the architect of your demise and can help you through this. Remember Rose, this is only a phase and you will soon pass through to some new truth or unquestionable lie.” “How soon will I die?” “Why would you want to know that?” “I have already done you a great courtesy. Not many know when they are going to die.” “Do you consider this knowledge a privilege?” “It is really just an occurrence. I did not intend to mention it, but excitement slid the words from my subconscious.” “You do not own my death. I could take this knife to my wrist, sever my arteries and empty your poison into my saucer . If I choose then I will know when and how I die.” “So how will it be?” Then she retrieves her fork and resumes her meal. “It really is the most exquisite pie,” she says. “I’m afraid it doesn’t keep very well.” “No matter.” She reaches her knife deep within the pie’s “What is it?” he asks. She doesn’t look up. “I have poisoned your wine.” She hears his glass clunk perfectly upon its coaster. “Did you?” “Am I really in a position to bother with lies?”

“And yet I don’t believe you,” he says. “Then pass me your glass and I will drink from it.” “But you are to die regardless.” “And yet I don’t believe you,” she says. “You don’t drink red wine.” “I know.” for every meal before. Then he lifts it gently, placing it at his arm’s full reach in the centre of the table. “So do you care to die by your poison or mine?” he asks. around the warm and clammy neck of the glass. She slides on the brim of her hand. Then it is in front of her; his glass, his prized object and companion. She becomes suddenly aware that she can swipe it through the air and stain the shagpile red in only an instant. Instead, she stares towards him but does not see him. She lifts the glass to the edge of perception and from there she the crimson stain rests between her lips in a passionless kiss, she tips the contents into her dry mouth. In the darkness she can see the swill of red and backwash. “How does it taste?” “Terrible.” “You get used to that.” “Would you like it back?” “Yes. Thank you.” She places the glass on the coaster and he returns it to his lips. and place their dishes in the sink. Through the open kitchen window the galahs continue to scream.

ICONOCLASM OF THE LINGUISTS Brendan Corney

Modernisation is in the eye of the beholder. The razing of old buildings might be perceived as a sweeping away of the detritus of a bygone era, a symbol that old conventions won’t tie us down. Conversely, it may be seen as an irreversible destruction of a common heritage that severs us from our past. The idealisation or demonisation of the past is deterof a nation. translates this tension to the abstract realm of a writing system. All Chinese languages are written with characters, many of which have upwards of ten strokes. Functional demands of speed have meant that many characters have been informally calligraphy styles such as ‘grass script’. However, in the 1950s and 1960s the strongly reformist Chinese Communist govcharacters. The leaders intended to make the task of learning to write less demanding for new generations, particularly tion of one stroke to the complete transformation of characters so that the old and new forms were not recognisably the same. The Communists also saw the cumbersome characters, which take years of rote study to learn, as symbolic of the feudal past where only the privileged few could afford the time and money to become members of the educated class. about an orthography of the proletariat.

political exhortations to update the writing system. The early twentieth century had already seen the greatest change to China’s written culture: the transition from Classical Chinese to Vernacular Chinese. For a millennium, all writing in China used a system based on a long-dead spoken language called Classical or Old Chinese. In a state of events paralleling the way in which Latin was the lingua franca for medieval Europe, the literate classes would write in a language that none of them spoke, and, if read aloud in contemporary pronunciation, would be incomprehensible. Despite the unifying nature of this language, eventually a new standard called ‘plain speech’ (báihuà), based on the northern language Mandarin, came to be used to write throughout China. It is from this crucible of sweeping change that character simpliern Chinese literature, stating: “If Chinese characters are not destroyed, then China will die”. Mao Zedong, China’s revolutionary leader, agreed that eventually the use of a Western alphabet, as in Vietnam, would be needed “to create a new social culture in which the masses fully participate”. tive, however, and chose to merely tinker with the characters rather than abandon them altogether. Sixty years later, the controversy rages on. The state of affairs is now even more confusing: Hong Kong, Taiwan and overseas Chinese communities use traditional characters, while

legible in small fonts. Proponents of traditional characters disagree, positing that alphabetic computer input of charachas no impact on literacy rates, and that the new system cuts mainland Chinese citizens off from their pre-1950s cultural hazard, creating certain ambiguities that don’t exist using traditional characters. A great misunderstanding put forward by traditionalists is that the old writing system acted as both a bridge with the ancients, and a bridge between Chinese dialects from the coast to the mountains. A political fantasy of homogeneity has existed in China since time immemorial, leading to the belief that so-called ‘Chinese’ is a single language with merely Chinese citizens in non-Mandarin speaking areas, including highly educated academics and professionals, believe that day-to-day they are speaking ‘Chinese’ with a regional ‘accent’. In reality, the linguistic spectrum in China is as diverse as in Europe, with a speaker of Modern Standard Mandarin unable to understand a speaker of Cantonese. The illusion of each language being mutually intelligible comes back to the writing system. We can use Hong Kong, where the dominant language is Cantonese, as an illustrative case. Despite using Cantonese almost exclusively as a spoken language, when Hong Kongers write they do so in the Standard Chinese that is used on the mainland. This written language has grammatical and morphological features

that are particular to the spoken language Mandarin. If a Hong Konger were to read a newspaper article aloud using Cantonese pronunciation of each character, the resulting output would be extremely unidiomatic as normal spoken Cantonese. In order to write out a normal conversation in Cantonese, characters that don’t exist in Standard Chinese need to be used, and the transcript wouldn’t be comprehensible to a literate person from Beijing. The façade of linguistic unity relies instead on a complex web of multilingualism and a general inability of humans to impartially describe their own languages. The complexities of China’s orthographic status quo, and the misinformation that abounds, makes the possibility of any future reform unlikely. People are understandably attached to their language’s physical form, and any attempt to change the written word can easily be seen as capitulation to the barbarians at the gate. Despite the fact that Chinese characters millennia history and beauty, as well as more prosaic cultural inertia, will sustain this script until the ivory tower iconoclasts

LEAVING THE TUNNEL John Morrissey

He didn’t think much whilst he was in the tunnel. He felt

“The tunnel.” he replied.

seemed to have gone away. He sat with his knees raised like

“Oh, right.” she said. “I haven’t been in there. It looks gross. I think it’s an old sewer pipe.”

imposed on him, and he didn’t resent it at all, being tucked up cosily in himself.

This comment made him feel slightly indignant, like somebody who hears their hometown criticised.

He only left the tunnel because he ran out of bread and peanut butter. He remained within for as long as he could, but hunger caught up with him quickly. So, feeling terrible pangs of abandonment, he began to crawl towards the distant light.

“I’ve been here for ages.” she continued. “Something went wrong with the car so I’m waiting for someone who knows

He fell from the tunnel into the sunshine and free air. He saw grey scrubland, pierced everywhere by rabbit holes and the deeper craters left by cluster bombs. A highway wound nearby. All was perfectly still. The sunlight breaching the clouds seemed reluctant to force itself on the scene and alter its character. But the day was growing warm and soon the faraway stretches of air would blur and waver slightly as if seen through a colourless gas. He began to walk towards the highway.

She didn’t ask him if he could aid her. He supposed she had taken one look at his delicate frame and decided he was useless in that regard. Annoyed, he laughed at her and said, “You’ve really just been waiting here?” She didn’t answer. He took out his tobacco and began to roll a cigarette. Immediately her gaze shot towards his hands. “Can I have one of those?” she asked. “Sure.” he said, pleased by her request. “Do you have anything to eat?”

At the edge of the bitumen he met a girl sitting on the roof of a battered car, facing away from him. The hood of the car was raised to display its rusty viscera. The girl looked very young, he thought.

She did. They sat for a while on the roof of the car, eating sandwiches and talking about some obscure musicians they both appreciated. He enjoyed the conversation; it seemed to cause their earlier lives to crystallise in the air around them.

“Hey.” he said.

At midday a column of young men and women in drab uni-

The girl looked around, quite calmly, as if she had expected his arrival. Deep-dug lines ran from the corners of her eyes, which were pale blue and peacefully resigned. Nun’s eyes, he thought. She hopped off the roof of the car and said, “Hi. Where did you come from?”

somewhere. “That’s so sad.” she said. “They’re only my age. I was going to join up when the war started but then I thought there wasn’t any point.”

“When they die,” he said, “I reckon we’ll be the only young people left.” Her body jerked when he said this, as if something cold had been pressed against the back of her neck. She looked towards him and then looked quickly away. She seemed to have accepted an inescapable fact. It rained that evening. He lay beside her in the back of the car, watching raindrops hurtle across its thick windows. She fell asleep quickly. Her mouth hung slightly open, revealing a bud of pink tongue. He lit a cigarette and blew smoke towards the roof of the car. Her nose wrinkled like a rabbit’s as the smoke passed it. He knew the two of them would be together for a long time. They would procreate until their children teemed in every crevice of the ruined world. He saw himself as a wizened patriarch, a slave to his descendants. It seemed a terrible duty. Carefully, he opened the door of the car and crept outside. She stirred but did not wake. He tucked his jacket around himself and began to walk away from the car. Rabbits hurtled past him like missiles. He arrived at the tunnel; it seemed to stare hollowly through the rain. It would be warm in there, he knew, and the sound of the rain would be a comforting patter. If he crawled far enough into obligation need not be discharged. If he crawled far enough, he would be able to remain young and vain and alone. The tunnel had changed, however. Its entrance was jammed with rain-drenched refuse. There were plastic wrappers, ing tongues. Desperately he scooped away some of the

garbage. But when he put his head in the tunnel he saw more piled against its walls, far more than could ever be cleared by human hands. The rain must have carried it there. He released a moan of disappointment. He walked despondently back to the car and climbed in beside the girl. His wet sleeve pressed against her shoulder, causing her to shiver in her sleep and turn away. He turned away as well and shut his eyes. Wrapped in private darkness, he thought of tunnels, tunnels which ran forever, tunnels which would never be barred to him.

WHAT I CAN’T TELL ANYONE

DROWN

Piera Dennerstein

Ben Harvey

You’re forgetting how to spell. So I’m going to get my Travel Scrabble And put it in the handbag I take everywhere Alongside the million other things Just like you do With your doorhandles and prescriptions and your diaries and your lipsticks by the hundred. That way whenever you need a letter There will be one close by And, just like you do for your own moulding force of nature, I’ll keep giving you letters For the rest of our days.

Come, still breathing shallow breaths. The bubbles don’t rise, they circle around me like carrion birds, waiting. Sink with me through blackness of space and echoes of time, And maybe they would arise like a phoenix but more likely dust remains dust, lost and forgotten. Come back, Fight through the clouds to watch as a duck sits on the surface kicking leisurely.

Heath Hipwell

Tegan Iversen

DIGITAL DECAY Anthony Collebrusco

Stored away in my parents’ basement are boxes of VHS cassettes, collecting dust, unwatched, and rarely disturbed. Many of these contain footage of my sisters and I as children, my friends and I playing in the backyard, and various family functions inhabited by the spirits of deceased or estranged family members. Others contain recorded television programs. Some are unlabeled: black, rectangular mysteries stacked in boxes like a collection of small monoliths from 2001: A Space Odyssey. That these exist is largely unspectacular. But what keeps me coming back to these tapes is the nagging certainty that I must do something with them. They cannot merely exist in taking up space, and it is only a matter of time before its removal becomes more pressing. But at a deeper level, there is a greater existential crisis at play. These videos contain recollections that are somehow instrumental to my identity. They are little vignettes in my family’s life, they memorialise the departed even recorded television programs transmit some context about who we are and where we came from. and small ways. These memories are slowly, though quite literally, deteriorating. Magnetic tape is notoriously fragile, and VHS players are long outmoded. In order to retain these memories, they will have to be preserved in digital format. But there are still material limitations to be considered. VHS-to-digital transfer can be a costly process. With a large enough quantity of cassettes, choices must be made. What should be preserved? What can be forgotten, and what might be missed? How does one even evaluate these things in the implications on personal memory and identity.

somehow better capture our essence and would have a longer shelf-life than other media ever could. Consumers have largely bought this promise, all the while ignoring the reality of long-term preservation. Cameras, smart-phones, and other storage media quickly obsolesce, even in the digital age, and many people do not have durable preservation plans for digital media. If these concerns seem trivial, it is only because we have taken the capabilities of digital media for granted. Like magnetic tape recordings of the past, the digital ecosystem is a fragile paradigm. It also represents a greater concern about the preservation of our larger cultural memory. Preserving cultural histories, like personal media, is a costly, time-consuming process. How we choose to address these challenges what is forgotten. *** The preservation of cultural memory is the purview of librarians and archivists, who work to protect and ensure access to information for present and future generations. It is a Herculean task, though preservationists have developed the essential tools for arresting the decay of these analogue tent to acid-neutral paper. Yet there remains an estimated eighty million books in frail condition in American libraries alone, ten million of which are unique and exist in no other form. Furthermore, a number of archival institutions lack the appropriate resources for disaster prevention or environmental controls, leaving them vulnerable to catastrophic loss. Plenty of institutions have adopted systems for continuing preservation of cultural artifacts, but much remains to be done, especially in developing nations.1 The advent of the digital era ushered in new challenges for archival institutions, even in developed countries. Dr. Howard lenges facing preservationists in the digital era2.

First, digital media are just as vulnerable to loss as analogue materials. Unlike analogue storage formats, media preserved in digital formats do not suffer a loss in quality when copied to another storage device. Instead, it is the storage medium itself that is vulnerable to decay. Optical discs damage easily and computer hard-drives inevitably crash. Due to the large capacity of these devices, a single incident can produce catastrophic losses, requiring digital works to be periodically transferred to newer, safer storage environments. Second, even if digital works can be continually preserved render works inaccessible and unreadable. Besser points to word processing programs as an example of such format obsolescence. In the 1980s, the most prominent word processing application was WordStar. Its ability to run on almost any operating system made it the market standard. When Microsoft Windows rose to prominence, WordStar hesitated to produce an application that would run on the Windows 3.0 operating system. This delay, though brief, helped Microsoft Word establish itself as the new standard for word processing. Today, WordStar no longer produces applications, and documents produced on WordStar have been lost to format obsolescence. This problem can be solved through emulators; software that mimics the function of another application. But, the construction and maintenance of emulators remain a concern in the preservationist community. There is also the issue of maintaining the meaning of a work tion television screens, cathode-ray tube screens (CRTs) dominated the television market. Today, CRTs are more commonly found on the side of the street, expelled from homes increasingly less common and practical, video artist Gary Hill has long used CRTs as the medium for his video projects. His works have been displayed in museums, and though he has given permission to replace old CRTs with new ones, he has expressly said that any medium other than CRTs would

This is the greater risk with format obsolescence and emulation: as a work moves from format to format, how much is the original intention being compromised? Is it possible for archivists to continually preserve a work through reproduction without losing the essence of the original? Hill’s concerns may seem pedantic, but few would argue that a large digital copy of Seurat’s Sunday Afternoon is the same as the original. This raises the third issue pertinent to digital preservation: authenticity. Preserving materials for present and future generations is only a useful endeavour if the authenticity of the materials is guaranteed. More so than analogue materials, digital works can easily be altered and copied, and as such, separated from their original contexts. Traditional archives have ensured authenticity by operating according to a set of guidelines and best practices for the preservation of digital materials. tion, which is that institutions were largely unprepared for the shift to digital, and therefore the guidelines for this type of conservation are still contested. At the onset of the digital era, many preservationists assumed that this form of preservation was the purview of someone else. Consequently, much of the digital works produced during the transitional period in the late 1990s slipped through the cracks. As strategies continue to remain unconsolidated, works continue to be stuck in limbo between preservation and decay. Digital works will and become more widely practised, but much damage has been done, and the history of digital preservation may inevknow exists. Furthermore, there is still the issue of what materials are culturally valuable. Digital works of art are obviously items that can be deemed worthy of preservation, but what about other digital forms of cultural production? The United States’ Library of Congress was the subject of amusement when they announced that they would be archiving Twitter posts.

However, for those who see the potential for political activism to emerge from Twitter and create real change, archiving tweets is undoubtedly a valuable project for cultural preservation institutions. The example of Twitter is interesting as it raises questions about what is worthy of preservation on the web. Anyone who has spent any amount of time exploring the vast online landscape knows that there is a lot of frivolous content out there. However, its frivolity does not mean that it exists in LOLcats is somehow informative of our current cultural and historical climate. In any case, it is not our responsibility to determine the value of preserving certain cultural objects. Ultimately, this comes down to decisions of current or future parties interested in accessing these materials. Ensuring the conservation of materials on the web is of paramount importance, but it is also a challenge of monumental proportions. *** The small Oregon town of Prineville is only home to just over nine thousand residents, but is of particular relevance to millions of Facebook users around the world. Prineville is the home to two of Facebook’s massive data centres. Each ing the servers required to keep Facebook operational and requires approximately 30 megawatts of power to operate. the need for large mechanical chillers needed to keep servers from overheating. Although Facebook insists it is making the appropriate efforts to store and supply data in a sustainable way, this is not necessarily the case for the other thirteen thousand data centres in the world. These centres consume 1.2 percent of global power, and the cost of power consumption per server

has surpassed the cost of service to the server itself during its average three-year lifetime. Furthermore, the number of data centres in the world is expected to double by 2016, which surprisingly is still not enough to accommodate the growth rate of data.3 Given the sheer size of information produced on the web, data centres like these are the only manageable way to physically store large-scale digital archives. Yet, the resources required to sustain these operations are large, and the demand for them is growing every year. As global energy consumption slowly reaches a tipping point, these centres will have to adopt more sustainable practices in order to ensure the continuing survival of digital information and more sigSo here we are again, stuck between our desire to preserve our cultural histories in perpetuity and the real material demands of such an aspiration. Far from being a panacea, the digital era has only compounded the problems inherent in preserving personal and cultural memories. More sustainable methods of archiving and data storage could help alleviate the challenges of information run amok, but as long as material scarcity persists, we will keep run up against the problem of too much information and a dearth of material capacity for properly managing it for future generations. The result will not be all-or-nothing decision, but will continue, as always, to be a matter of what information wins and loses in our quest for perpetual memory.

1. Hedstrom, Margaret. “Digital Preservation: A Time Bomb for Digital Libraries.” Computers and the Humanities 31 (1998): 189-202. 2. Besser, Howard. “Digital Preservation of Moving Image Material?” New York University. March 2001. http://besser.tsoa.nyu.edu/howard/Papers/amia-longevity.html 3. Jenkins, Robert. “The Sustainable Data Center of the Future.” Triple Pundit. 21 Feb 2013. http://www.triplepundit.com/2013/02/sustainable-data-center-future/

GROWTH/DECAY/ REGROWTH: Soon-Tzu Speechley Soon-Tzu Speechley

in changing fortunes. The story of these suburbs is one of growth, decay, and regrowth, offering lessons for city planners and citizens alike. Looking at the slick bars and cafes that have mushroomed across the inner north, it is hard to believe avoided by respectable society. When Redmond Barry, Supreme Court judge and patron of the University of Melbourne, State Library, and National Gallery wanted to keep his mistress away from the prying eyes of society, he built her a house on Brunswick Street. More recently, the inner north was marked by high rates of drug addiction. The Carlton of Helen Garner’s 1977 Monkey Grip is home to junkies and student bohemians in equal measure. Today, the commanding prices in the hundreds of thousands, and students moving further north and east. Yet this is a relatively recent development. perity was short lived. The gracious Victorian mansions that dot the suburb were soon left derelict. By the 1930s, a variety Fitzroy into a slum. Widespread prejudice against both the working class and the area’s growing indigenous community played a large part in this perception. Poor living conditions, with large families crammed into small houses that lacked plumbing and electricity, became one of the catalysts for the creation of the Housing Commission of Victoria in 1938. By 1950, much of the inner north was declared “so substandard in nature that … repair was out of the question”,1 and large tracts of Victorian housing were demolished to build the highHowever, developments such as the Atherton Gardens estate

on Brunswick Street were controversial from their inception and criticized for their monolithic presence. Buildings such as these are monuments to modernist city planning and a sincere, if at times misguided, attempt at improving inner city life. These changes were not unchallenged, and the construc-

come to be seen as ‘vertical slums’ themselves. These changes, however, have created negative consequences. Long-time res-

1. Australian Institute of Family Studies, High-Rise Parenting: Raising Children in Melbourne’s High-Rise Estates, http://www.aifs.gov.au/institute/pubs/fm1/fm36pm.html

becoming economic exiles forced to make their homes in new places. It is in the nature of things to change, and the inner

2. St Mary’s House of Welcome, 165-9 Brunswick Street, Fitzroy.

the local populace. By the 1970s, the heavy-handed displacement of ‘slum’ residents into new high-rises was abandoned by the State Government, in favour of a more holistic and less monumental approaches to public housing.

destroyed, and evidence of its history remains, particularly in the persistence of services and institutions for the homeless,2 for those struggling with drug addiction,3 and for the indigenous community.4 Today, residents of council housing in the inner north live alongside students, artists, refugees and

these suburbs. The inner north has always drawn people from various walks of life. During the interwar years, Fitzroy attracted many displaced indigenous people, and in the aftermath of WWII, the area became home to refugees from across Asia, Europe, and the Middle East. (It was in the 1950s that Lygon Street became the place to go for an espresso or a bowl of pasta). Attracted by cheap rents, students and artists also moved into the crumbling terraces and worker’s cottages of Carlton, Fitzroy, and Collingwood. In changing the demographics of these suburbs, new residents also changed their character. New services replaced the old; bars, cafés, used bookstores, and African restaurants have largely replaced working class pubs. Former churches and warehouses have been redeveloped into loft apartments and art spaces. In the process, the names of these places have acquired new meanings. Brunswick Street was no longer a cial artery in the nineteenth century, is once again reasserting itself as a hub. Post-war migration from Europe became synonymous with Lygon Street, and Carlton as a whole, which is now being refashioned again by new waves of international students from Asia. Changing tastes have also remade these suburbs. Victorian neighbourhoods once perceived as old-fashioned are now

The inner north’s history is a reminder that despite its bricks and mortar, a city’s identity is not set in stone. It is easy to take a place for granted, to see the way things are as inevitable, and to forget the numerous stories that have gone to make a place what it is today. But looking more closely at an area like the inner north, which despite its recent renaissance still shows evidence of past decay in its buildings and on its streets, it is possible to read the changing history of a place. What the failures of twentieth-century urban planning and that people have the power to remake places. Suburbs that have fallen on hard times can be given a new lease of life. The inner north will continue to change, with new stories building upon the old.

3. Fitzroy Legal Service, 124 Johnston Street, Fitzroy. 4. Victorian Aboriginal Health Service, 186 Nicholson Street, Fitzroy.