The ISIS Magazine, Michaelmas 2014 by The Isis

“We shall endeavour to be humorous without being ill-humoured, critical without being captious, militant without being malevolent, independent without being impertinent, and funny… without being vulgar.” - ISIS editorial, 1892 It is an unfortunate time to bear the name ISIS. The irony of this magazine’s first ever editorial, in which our founder, Mostyn Turtle Piggott, stated that ISIS endeavoured to be “militant without being malevolent” is almost too cruel. To describe our magazine’s intentions this way now requires sensitive explanation. Yet Piggott’s words have helped us to answer the question put to us over the course of this term by friends, news outlets and bemused freshers: why have we not changed our name? ISIS was named in 1892 after the river Isis which flows through Oxford. To change our name would be to endow the horrifying actions of the Islamic State with an authority they do not deserve. We are not naive. It is likely that Islamic State is to dominate headlines for the foreseeable future, whatever they are called in the media. But we will not further imbue the name ISIS with a malevolent power by removing all other positive associations the name has embodied over the years. While the connotations surrounding the word ‘militant’ today are largely negative, implying violence and extremism, we align ourselves with Piggott’s own interpretation of the word. Piggott’s ‘militancy’ refers to ISIS’s determination to scrutinise and illuminate what it is often easier to ignore. We have attempted our own illumination within the contents of these pages. The ISIS literary essay competition is an effort to recapture the essence of Piggott’s declaration. At turns wry or irreverent, but always astute, our winning entries offer creative perspectives on the concepts of mortality and ephemerality. Nearly 60 years ago, future poet Adrian Mitchell wrote an essay on pacifism for ISIS which revived our interest in the essay as a liberating literary form. Mitchell’s stark piece on finding stability amidst turmoil speaks across the generational gap and makes for compelling reading alongside the other entries. In a period of anxiety about the sustainability of current conflicts, it seems apt that many of the pieces printed in these pages confront the impermanence and unreliability of image. This unintentional current of aesthetic interrogation is fitting as we contemplate how to re-visualise ourselves as a publication at a time in which our image has come under threat. Let’s hope that next year ISIS will not be defined solely by an unlucky coincidence. ISIS has never been afraid of controversy and we stand resolutely by our name.

This is our version of ‘militancy’. Sadie Levy Gale and Olivia Yallop Michaelmas 2014

CONTENTS 6 9 12 15 18 20 23 26 28 32 36 38 43 44 45

Hebron by Miranda Hall No Man’s Land by Jenny Walker What it’s Like to Have a Phobia by Raphael Hogarth Truth, Justice, and the American Way by Kyran Schmidt Neon Warsaw by Karolina Kalinowska Americana by Harriet Smith Hughes Portrait of a People by Ella Richards Phoolan Devi by Mili Malde Britain by Mass Observation by Frank Macpherson Screening the Unscreenable by David Astley

Essays

The Last Piece of Paper in the World by Ellie McIntyre Oxford’s Brutalist Architecture by George Grylls Dream by Adrian Mitchell A Fucking Human Being by Mina Ebtehadj-Marquis Is it Rational to Fear your own Death? by Jordan Horfield

Fiction

48 Lips by David McShane 50 Fault Lines by Alex Paseltiner 51 The Flies by Miriam Gordis 54 Pavement Cracks by Anna Stephens 55 Belleville by Anna Stephens

By Miranda Hall

HEBRON NOTES FROM AN OCCUPIED CITY

“H

ebron! You’re fucking joking.” My Israeli taxi driver from Tel Aviv airport to Jerusalem laughs loudly. “Hebron is the home of terrorists. You go there, the Arabs will kidnap you and kill you like this” - he clicks his thumb and finger. Two hours later, I am sitting in Abood Quaswami’s tiny living room drinking Coca-Cola out of a flowery china cup and eating mafruka. His three brothers, who all live in the same building, have brought their families over to say hello. Five of us are squeezed on a sofa looking at photos of their sister’s wedding on an old smartphone while the younger children roll on the floor in fits of giggles because my name apparently sounds like a popular fizzy drink. A glass display cabinet decorated with plastic leaves on the wall opposite me proudly displays a giant fluffy Angry Bird and a framed photo of their late father in Oman.

Abood’s nieces show me to the room where I’m sleeping and I notice a large, splintered hole in the door, partially concealed by a mirror. They tell me it was left by Israeli Defense Force (IDF) soldiers when they arbitrarily raided hundreds of Palestinian homes following the discovery of the bodies of three Israeli teenagers just outside Hebron. Later on, Abood shows more photos of what they did to his and his brothers houses: the windows and mirrors are smashed, all the contents of the wardrobes and kitchen cabinets are thrown on the floor, the carpet is torn up and the TV pulled from the wall. “Very generous of them no?” He grins. “We have been thinking of redecorating the house for years but now the IDF do it for us.” I ask whether they gave a reason. “They said they are looking for someone...” We get to a photo where a sink has been wrenched off

a wall “Look! Maybe they think he is hiding in the pipes.” Abood and his brother were lucky. Their sister Fatima’s house was seized for ‘military purposes’ and knocked down because her husband was a Hamas supporter. He is still being held by the Israeli military and his family has no way of finding out where he is or when they’ll next see him. Last time he was arrested by the IDF they detained him for three years. In the course of my month with the Quawasmis I am woken up in the middle of the night on more than one occasion by the sound of houses being blown up. In the weeks following the murder of the three Israeli boys, the Israeli army arrested more than 1000 Palestinians in a wide-reaching campaign of raids, detentions and a two-week blockade on Hebron.

The word Hamas is only whispered in Hebron because open support would result in immediate arrest by the IDF. However, the Hamas TV station is played all over the city in living rooms like Abood’s between Bollywood films and subtitled Looney Tunes cartoons and coffee shops with names like

We walk a bit further and pass a military checkpoint to find ourselves on a street which is entirely deserted and all the shops boarded up with iron shutters. Two Palestinian children poke their hands through barred windows to wave at us. Below them a scrawled graf-

“We have been thinking of redecorating the house for years but now the IDF do it for us” “Stars and Bucks”. Its jubilant anthem accompanying an absurdly choreographed video montage of soldiers somersaulting through jungles and scuba diving with massive rifles quickly becomes recognisable over the coming days. “Yes there are things I don’t like about Hamas,” Abood’s friend Anas tells me as a man with a keffiyeh over his face talks on screen, “but they are not the terrorists Western Media portrays them as. When we are occupied and oppressed and the Israeli Prime Minister declares that he won’t even consider a two-state solution we need a party who will fight back. Fattah are doing nothing. What would you do in my situation?” The next day, Abood and his friend Maali take me to see the Old City. The centre of Hebron, home to 35,000 Palestinians, has been under Israeli military jurisdiction since 1996. 2,000 IDF soldiers are posted there to protect the 86 Jewish families living in settlements considered illegal under international law. They watch over the Old City from bulletproof military towers dotted all over its crumbling domed roofs. As we walk down a narrow, winding street towards the marketplace, we hear loud shouting at the end of the road and see a group of bare-footed children throwing stones. Moments later they start sprinting up the street towards us, closely followed by a team of IDF soldiers shooting tear gas and stun grenades. Abood pulls me into an alleyway, laughing at my horrified expression, and tells me not to worry this is normal.

fiti reads: “Gas the Arabs.” As we walk further down the street we pass two teenage settlers in jeans and converse with huge machine guns slung over their shoulders. The right of settlers to bear arms is one of the many Israeli policies designed to ensure their safety. This street was once the commercial centre of the city and a thriving marketplace but, since 1995, it has been declared a ‘military safety zone’ by the IDF. The result is that thousands of Palestinian businesses have closed, pushing unemployment up to 50% and forcing hundreds of families out of the area. The policy was intro-

duced in the mid-90s after a Jewish settler opened fire in Hebron’s Tomb of Patriarchs, killing 29 Palestinian Muslims and wounding 125 more during Friday prayers. Halfway down the street Abood suddenly stops and tells me that as a Palestinian he is forbidden from passing this point. As we take a detour up a hill, a pungent smell hits us and shells crunch underfoot from the rotten eggs thrown by settlers at passing Palestinians. He tells me that it takes his younger siblings over two hours to get to school, a journey which should take ten minutes, because of the military checkpoints they have to pass. They are frequently blocked or face settler harassment and so are forced to take classes in the street. That night, Abood and his friend Maali take me to one of Hebron’s coffee shops to celebrate the last day of Eid, marking the end of Ramadan. “Abood likes to come here for the pretty girls”, Maali laughs as we take a run-down elevator to the top floor of an abandoned tower block. As we walk in, one of Maali’s friends who works as a waiter leads us to a leather

booth and brings us pink and blue drinks with whipped cream and long curly straws. Hardly anyone drinks in Hebron, the most religiously conservative city in the West Bank, so energy drinks and milkshakes are very popular. Shisha pipes and cheap cigarettes drown the room in clouds of sweet synthetic perfumes through which groups of girls in Hijabs with fake, sequinned YSL motifs and boys in tight t-shirts fling flirtatious glances. Halfway through a game of cards we go outside for a cigarette and when we come back an unnerving silence has fallen over the room. Everyone’s eyes are directed to the fuzzy TV on the wall. Another school has been bombed in Gaza and 30 more civilians killed. On the screen a screaming woman runs through a hospital with a tiny bleeding child in her arms trying to find somewhere to place him but all the beds are full. As this clip plays on repeat, the cafe

begins to clear. No one is really in the mood to celebrate. We pay our own bill and drive home in silence. After Friday prayers that week, 15,000 people march through central Hebron to protest Israel’s continuing assault on Gaza with Arabic slogans hand-painted on their banners and the image of a tiny body drenched in blood inscribed on their minds. One of Abood’s nieces excitedly shows me images her friends have posted on Facebook of a sea of green banners filling the streets of the Old City. The IDF respond with live fire and 90 protestors are shot. Later that evening, Abood and his friends are practicing for their band in the barber shop. We are waiting for their friend Mohammed to arrive before we go to a coffee shop. They call his house and find out he was shot in the hand during the protest and is now in hospital. “He is an idiot!” says Abood, slamming his phone down. “If he keeps go-

ing to the clashes next time it will be his head not his hand.” “What else do you suggest Abood?” Maali asks drily. “Sleep all day like you? Yes, that is really going to change the situation.” We get in the car to go to the coffee shop anyway as one of their friends, an international volunteer called Stephen, is leaving Hebron. Stephen is a Jewish American who spent two weeks in Israel for the birthright tour before deciding to come to the West Bank to see the other side of the story. Anas, a close friend of his, has arranged for a cake with his name on it to be brought out with sparklers. As he takes his first bite it goes down the wrong way and he starts coughing loudly. Anas pounds him on the back and exclaims: “Hallas! Don’t choke to death! You are Jewish! They will say we have kidnapped and poisoned you!” ■

NO MAN’S LAND Inside Women Only Spaces

By Jenny Walker

The renovated old vicarage in the small Yorkshire village of Horton-in-Ribblesdale is a perhaps unlikely setting for Britain’s only not-for-profit cooperatively run holiday centre for women and children. But since 1980 the Women’s Holiday Centre (WHC) has been providing a place for women to relax and enjoy themselves in a safe, supportive environment. An hour’s train journey away

is the Bradford Women’s Refuge (BWR), established in 1985, one of the two women’s refuges in the city (the other catering solely for BME families). It is also a women-only space, but one that caters for women and children who have experienced domestic abuse. It operates on a feminist ethos and aims to involve the input of service users as much as possible.

Sarah sits cross-legged on the floor of the sunlit playroom, helping her fouryear old son find the edges of a jigsaw puzzle as she tells me about her first visit to the WHC in 1999. “To me, initially it was about safety,” she says, “and the need for a place to be myself without anyone talking over me.” The room is filled with the shouts of children hula-hooping in the garden and the background clatter of cof-

fee cups from the kitchen. Now, it is the centre’s accessibility for children which Sarah most appreciates. “If you couldn’t bring kids it would cut out a lot of people. It’s meant that me and my partner can go on holiday together.” There is no particular ‘type’ of woman who comes to stay at WHC. In Sarah’s words it is “a kind of neutral territory” made up of “people from all over, from London, Birmingham, Bradford, of all classes, all races.” During my stay at the centre I make meals, wash up and drink tea with a retired evangelical Christian, an Avon saleswoman from Hull and a queer couple from Hebden Bridge. There is certainly something liberating about the disparate group of people who sit easily around the camp fire that night drinking wine and talking, women who it is hard to imagine meeting or spending time together elsewhere. “Class doesn’t matter here” affirms Chez, one of the centre’s full time workers. I first visited the centre with a friend a year ago. Though neither of us felt that we had anything in particular from which we needed to escape, we both noticed an intangible sense of release and easiness, even relief, come over us during our stay: a bit like breathing in fresh air after months of obliviously inhaling city pollution. There is no code of conduct stuck up on the walls encouraging a non-judgemental, open and accepting atmosphere. Instead, there are pieces of artwork and poetry made by women and children who have stayed over the years, crayoned maps of local walks and handwritten signs such as: “If you see a job you can do, please go ahead”. Many of the women I speak to at the centre find it difficult to pinpoint exactly what makes it so special. “There’s just something magical about the place,” says Laura, the other full-time worker. “[The women who stay] are not support workers and we’re not support workers, but it happens naturally.” Chez nods emphatically: “People come here and find what they need.”

where people can feel safe and be themselves without fear of judgement, is an issue that has long been subject to debate within feminist circles and other liberation groups. Although the WHC doesn’t classify itself as a refuge, playing host to hen nights and writers’ groups as well as providing a safe space for those who may have suffered from trauma, all of the women I speak to emphasise the importance of it being a women-only space. Jenny, a

ability to talk issues out or to respect differences of opinion is something I see repeatedly during my stay. The social phenomenon of women being silenced by men has been identified and critiqued by numerous feminist theorists. Andrea Dworkin argues that “men often react to women’s words – speaking and writing – as if they were acts of violence; sometimes men react to women’s words with violence. So we lower our voices... Most women have

Men are like peacocks, they “need to stamp the ground ”

young woman from Hull on holiday at the centre with her mother, cousin, daughter and nieces describes the centre as “calm and peaceful.” I ask her how she would feel if men were also allowed to stay and she is adamant that “it would defeat the point, throw a spanner in the works. Men are like peacocks, they need to stamp the ground.”

When I ask her if she believes there is any such thing as a truly safe space, Laura recognises the practical limits to such an ideal. “Yes and no. You can’t ever guarantee how a person feels inside and feeling safe, I think, is as important as being safe. All that people can do is offer an environment that treats those who come through its doors equally, and with genuine kindness and respect.” Indeed, some level of disagreement is inevitable in a place with its doors as open wide as the WHC, but the

The viability of creating and maintaining a “neutral territory”, a place

experienced enough dominance from men – control, violence, insult, contempt – that no threat seems empty.” In Man Made Language (1980) Dale Spender asserts that language is a primary means by which women’s power is denied them: “This monopoly over language is one of the means by which males have ensured their own primacy, and consequently have ensured the invisibility or ‘other’ nature of females.” These arguments are supported by a study undertaken by the American Political Science Review in 2012, which found that in collaborative group settings “the time that women spoke was significantly less than their proportional representation – amounting to less than 75% of the time that men spoke.” In the WHC visitor’s book an anonymous comment again links the safety and openness of the centre to its women-only policy: “The house, the workers, enable me to be myself, with others, in a space which feels unique. Only women can come here.”

Women-only policies such as the one which helps women to relax in Horton-in-Ribblesdale are also a vital prerequisite for rehabilitation schemes which aim to aid and empower survivors of domestic violence. At the Bradford Women’s Refuge, I meet Najida, 21, who has been staying at the refuge for several months since escaping from an abusive forced marriage. She describes the difference between BWR and the sense of isolation and fear of the mixed-gender temporary accommodation in which she stayed before. “At first I was really scared. If someone started shouting at me I wouldn’t speak up, I’d just start crying so that I came to the point where I’d start screaming.” She describes how important the support of the other women at the refuge has been in recovering her confidence and sense of self-worth. “We just have a chat sometimes, sit down all together and if you’re feeling alone or having a hard time it really helps – to have a fun time and just get over that stress.” Mary, team leader of the BWR, tells me how crucial she believes it is to maintain the communal living set-up of the refuge. “The women do come together and the support between them is pretty amazing. They’ve been told for a long time that ‘it’s your fault’ and seeing other women in the same situation dispels that myth.” For Najida, an important part of her time at the refuge has been regaining a voice of her own, aided by the solidarity she

feels with the other women there: “Now I can actually say that look, this is my point of view. I’ve seen so much of a difference in myself. Now I can confidently go outside.” However, specialist domestic violence services such as the BWR are increasingly under threat since the changes made to the sector in 2010. Services in the violence against women and girls sector are going out to tender next April to private companies, a process which Mary argues will result in “more hierarchies, lower pay and greater staff turnover”. For her, it is part and parcel of a “massive threat to specialist services and to the skills and expertise the staff have built up over the years.” Last year, the Women’s Aid Annual Survey identified a rise in the provision of generic and short-term service provision at the loss of more specialist domestic violence providers. It found that “there [were] 98 more bed spaces in 2013 than in 2010 but there [were] 21 less specialist refuge providers.” Specialist services for BME women have been disproportionately cut, with 47% of services experiencing “a significant loss of funding”. Women-only services are also being put under pressure to provide support for men, “despite lack of demand and lack of evidence that women’s services are best placed to meet men’s needs”.

Polly Neate, the Chief Executive of Women’s Aid, argues that the “chronic structural underfunding” of the violence against women sector is due to the fact that it tries to “meet a need whose very existence has often been disputed every step of the way”. The refuges and outreach services which aim to combat violence against women are vulnerable to the very same systems of prejudice and oppression which cause the problems they aim to combat. Marilyn Frye wrote in The Politics of Reality (1983) that “it is always the privilege of the master to enter the slave’s hut. The slave who decides to exclude the master from her hut is declaring herself not a slave.” Women-only spaces are not a privilege. Those who have experienced violence at the hands of a society which so often treats them as second-class citizens have the right to feel safe and accepted. Her time at the BWR has given Najida the chance to regain control over her life. “I have hope, and I know those hopes are going to come true,” she assures me. Despite their hugely differing life experiences, the optimism and confidence that this young Muslim woman feels reminds me of Sarah’s description of the first time she visited the WHC. “On the way there we were really nervous. We didn’t know what to expect, and we got so lost,” she laughs. “On the way back we didn’t even look at the map, we just sang.” ■

W HAT IT’S LIK E TO

H AV E A P H O B I A Keeping the Irrational Irrational By Raphael Hogarth

“A

nyway.” That’s my first thought when I am approached by a bee or a wasp. The phobic reaction itself is thoughtless. Once I see the approaching insect, any space formerly occupied by thought is invaded by feeling alone - of adrenaline in my sides, of tightness in my chest, of pins and needles down my back, and most of all an intense compulsion to move my body away, as if I am touching a surface too hot to bear for more than an instant. After this moment of terror, the so-called ‘spike’, I start regaining a more recognisable relationship with my surroundings. I can focus, although no longer exclusively, on things other than the nearby insect. I can form coherent sentences, and I can return to the walk I’m having or sandwich I’m eating – a bit anxiously, perhaps, but the sort of anxiety that might be caused by an ache, not by a searing pain. Much as the idea of everything calming down after the ‘spike’ sounds promising, the fun rarely lasts for long. When I see little yellowjackets darting about my picnic hamper, I’m alright when they move away, but each time they move towards me, I get a fresh spike, just as sharp and lancing as the first. Naturally, this makes picnics and al fresco dining in general difficult. It’s also potentially dangerous, for instance if I’m standing on a train platform

when a bee buzzes by my ear, or driving a car when a wasp flies in through the window. I’m lucky to live in a country where the health service recognises how much of a drag that is, and when I was 16, I got a free course of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) to try to address it. CBT is pretty effective. Some people find themselves permanently phobia-free after just a few sessions. Patients learn relaxation techniques to combat the anxiety of a phobic reaction (the behavioural bit) and do various mental exercises to try to change the way they think about the problem stimulus (the cognitive bit). These techniques are applied to a process of ‘graded exposure’, meaning that the patient is faced with a series of successively scarier stimuli – in my case, pictures of bees, then videos of bees, then videos of bees on people, then videos of bees stinging people, then holding a jar containing a dead bee, opening a jar containing a dead bee, rehearsing the jar manoeuvres again with a nearlydead-but-just-moving bee, then being in a room with a live bee, then being in a room with a live bee with my eyes closed, then sitting around a flowerbed with bees buzzing around everywhere. Some patients undergo ‘flooding’, a technique in which they are exposed to enormous amounts of the stimulus all at once (like going

to a beehive), but this is frequently unpleasant and occasionally counterproductive, so I pursued a course of treatment more resembling, I suppose, dripping. It didn’t work. I got to the end of my ten sessions and, frankly, the phobia was at least as bad as it was when I started. This was partly my fault. I was meant to keep a phobia diary, watch a wasp video every day and probably some other now-forgotten exposure tasks, but I frequently didn’t. I also didn’t practise all the exercises as I should have done. But I couldn’t help feeling that the failure of CBT wasn’t all my fault. Those not very familiar with it will often try to rationalise – even intellectualise – phobia. On one weekend away, I was sitting around outside having a drink with friends, and a wasp (evidently slightly pissed and delirious) crawled out of a discarded corona bottle and up my leg. I had no idea this was going on at first, so when I looked down to see my new visitor peering up at me, I was startled. I started to jolt around and emit the sort of grunting panicky noises that characterise my more intimate encounters with bees and wasps. Someone kindly flicked it off me. This was followed, as is so often the case, with a rather tiresome onset of advice from nearby corona-drinkers: “You know, it’s actu-

ally more likely to sting you if you do that”; “you know, they don’t actually sting very often”; “you know, the best thing to do is to stay absolutely still and not panic”. When I explain that I know all of this but knowing it doesn’t seem to help, people always seem just a bit unconvinced, as if I haven’t really understood it yet. I’ve found that the only way to get them to understand is often to split myself in two – talk about the version of myself that has the phobic reaction as if it’s someone else, and that this normal version they’re talking to now is totally with them and wishes it could persuade the phobic version of all the eminently sensible things they’re saying – if only that stubborn other self would come round. “You’re so right – if only I could keep those things in my head when a wasp comes towards me.” Professionals, I have found, are sometimes not so different in this respect. When we were focusing on the ‘C’ in CBT, my psychologist would try to persuade me that I was having thoughts about the insects that I could ‘recolour’ from negative to positive (her mixed metaphor, not mine). I should do research, she suggested, about their life cycles and behavioural patterns, about the evolutionary and biological function of the sting, and so on. And she would try to persuade me, in her own way, that my phobic reactions were really frustrating some ultimate rational objective I had not to be stung. This was, I thought, a

futile endeavour in the first place for reasons already discussed, but her way of going about it was even more exasperating – she wanted me to persuade myself. I have always found the idea of self-persuasion (and its close cousin, self-deception) bemusing. The call for inner dialogue, just like the crude account that my friends get fobbed off with, demands a splitting of the self into (at least) two. I wonder who those two selves are meant to be. Am I meant to cast Self Number One as the submissive phobic, who will listen attentively to the rational and intellectually superior Self Number Two as he explains coolly and calmly where Self Number One is going wrong? I suppose I could do that, but then the rational self ’s victory seems a bit hollow, as if his win is a fix, and when I reunify the selves after the exercise his success doesn’t seem that compelling. To address this problem, I could make the phobic self an intellectual match for the ‘rational’ self – really pit them against each other in a fair battle of wits about how to act when approached by a bee. The problem is that, much of the time, the phobic self will win this battle – the fact is that you actually are a lot less likely to get stung if you constantly avoid bees and wasps. The observant reader will, at this stage, be wondering what the word ‘I’ references when I talk about how I am to cast selves One and Two. This is a pertinent question, and it gets to the heart of why the self-persuasion exercise is so utterly ridiculous in

the first place: however I cast the selves who are to persuade and be persuaded, there is always the real, genuine self – the ‘I’ – looking on and thinking, “Well this is pretty fucking ridiculous, isn’t it?” I know I can change the outcome of the argument by just tweaking the setup a bit – so how could I possibly be convinced/convince myself/whatever? I ought not to be so uncharitable to CBT – I don’t know what I could reasonably have expected from it. It was obviously never going to be a miracle cure, and I’m sure there is something of value in graded exposure. For sure, there is also some risk of me projecting the misconceptions I encounter so routinely onto psychologists who don’t have them. Nonetheless, it seems that neither professional psychologists nor my friends (and it’s not too much of a stretch to call them amateur psychologists) are really willing to entertain the possibility that I might be a single, undivided and indivisible person who happens to have a phobia, rather than a couple of people – one (a bit dim) with a phobia and one (sensible) without it – that I flip-flop between depending on circumstance. It’s not a dramatic error; I won’t go so far as to call it disrespectful. It’s not even that people are ignorant – just as there’s no magic piece of information that can rid me of my irrational complex, there’s none that can rid them of theirs. But at least I know I have one. ■

‘Truth, Justice and the American Way’: The secret politics of the superhero

By Kyran Schmidt

In 1912, a socialist revolutionary named Iosif Dzhugashvili penned an article in the St Petersburg based newspaper Pravda under the pseudonym ‘Stalin’. Operating under various different names during his lifetime, it was neither his first nor his favourite alias, but it was to prove the most enduring. It remains one of the more delicious ironies of pop culture that 26 years later another was to receive that name (or at least, its English equivalent). Despite making his debut five issues earlier, Action Comics #6 (1938) marks the first time that America’s favourite son, one Clark Kent, a.k.a. Superman, is described as the ‘Man of Steel’, a nickname into which Iosif ’s chosen pseudonym ‘Stalin’ translates. Where one is a swashbuckling socialist turned frightful despot of the Soviet Union, the other is a wholesome emblem of “Truth, Justice and the American Way”, as his motto goes – a Mid-western lad with good morals, courteous manners and perfectly coiffed hair. It is not entirely clear, but Superman’s writers were probably oblivious to the fact their creation shared this attribute with Stalin. Still, these two men of steel share more than their etymology: another affinity lies in their importance as political symbols. Little needs to be said for the way Stalin manufactured a cult of personality under which he existed as the chief embodiment of the Soviet regime; what should not be ignored is that the superhero comic book speaks to politics too, and is far from being just an apolitical and escapist form of entertainment. The comic book’s so-called ‘Golden’ and ‘Silver’ ages are spoken of reverentially, as though these periods mark the twin peaks of the genre’s cultural significance. The characters first brought to ink during these periods, from Batman and Wonder Woman to the X-Men and the Hulk, remain iconic. But the growing popularity of the superhero film in recent years has seen the comic book superhero acquire a new level of cultural respectability. The genre enjoys not only commercial success (three of the top ten highest-grossing films of all

time being superhero flicks), but also critical acclaim. In this context of renewed significance, the American comic book finds itself a cultural battleground. Conservatives repeatedly accuse the industry’s major players of peddling a pernicious brand of politics to unsuspecting youngsters. DC Comic’s revelation that the first Green Lantern was gay in a 2012 reboot of the series prompted outrage from groups like One Million Moms, who called on DC to cancel the change. “They want to indoctrinate impressionable young minds by placing these gay characters on pedestals in a positive light”, the group was to suggest in a statement – only for this to spectacularly backfire days later when the group was forced to delete their Facebook page following an inundation of support for the change. If there are a few who worry about a sinister liberalism infiltrating the pages of American comics, there are just as many who see the growing use of LGBTQ characters as a token of social progress. It is not just the more peripheral characters; not even Superman is above the political fray. The 900th issue of Action Comics, released in 2011, was the subject of international media attention for a storyline involving Superman’s renunciation of his American citizenship, following his distaste at persistently being viewed as an instrument of US foreign policy. The outrage this story was met with from conservative outlets like Fox News attests to the continuing political currency of comic books. This was tampering with the sacrosanct, an act akin to flag burning: Superman, it was argued, was nothing if not a symbol of patriotic America. Certainly he was not some bleeding-heart cosmopolitan. Controversy about the mix between comics, politics and society is not new. Fredric Wertham, a German-American psychiatrist, was to argue in a 1954 work, Seduction of the Innocent, that comic books exercised a toxic influence on younger readers through the normalisation of violent imagery and the depiction of illicit and criminal behaviour. The work, which also suggested (perhaps not so implausibly) homosexual undertones in the relationship between Batman and Robin and a

“If there are a few who worry about a sinister liberalism infiltrating the pages of American comics, there are just as many who see the growing use of LGBTQ characters as a token of social progress”

bondage subtext in Wonder Woman, was extremely influential. It prompted Wertham’s appearance before the Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency, from which was to follow a media backlash against the comic book world and growing calls for censorship. Yet in earlier decades, following the backlash from the congressional investigations and Wertham’s work, the superhero comic book could hardly be understood as a mouthpiece for liberal politics. On the contrary, regulations enforced by the Comics Code Authority meant comics were heavily restricted in message and content. Created in 1954 as a form of self-regulation following the anti-comic backlash, the CCA’s founding charter carried the provision, among other gems, that: “Policemen, judges, government officials, and respected institutions shall never be presented in such a way as to create disrespect for established authority.” The code which remained in place until the 2000s meant that the comics which were a product of this era were, if anything, a bastion of quietly moralistic conservatism. Those who broke the law were the bad guys, simpliciter; those who pursued these wrong-doers were the good guys, the superheroes.

“Comics’ clear-cut moral categories provided a sense of reassurance in an uncertain age and the optimism that history was on the side of the good”

Reading a comic of the era, one is struck by the pervasiveness of this black and white morality. It is a near certitude that the villain receives his comeuppance (and it is pretty much always his). There is little space for moral ambiguity. Where it does exist, it is nearly always a matter of misinterpretation. Where most of the comic’s other characters blame the Hulk for the damage he causes and seek his capture or destruction, The Incredible Hulk’s readers realise he is only as morally culpable for his mistakes as any overpowered, radiation-enhanced child possibly could be. Villains are clearly delineated, often crudely so; just compare Professor X’s ‘X-Men’ with his rival Magneto’s ‘Brotherhood of Evil Mutants’. The very name of Magneto’s group speaks to an extremely simplistic demarcation of good and evil, as if their actions were not enough. As Stan Lee, silver-haired patrician of the industry, has suggested in explanation: “We were kind of corny in those days.” This is partly a result of the CCA restrictions. It also reflects the superhero comic’s origins. Comics’ golden age dovetails with World War II, and many of the industry’s leading lights were a part of the war effort in some form or another. Captain America Comics #1, the cover of which features Cap’ delivering a deft right-hook to Hitler’s jaw, predates Pearl Harbour by a year. This was not the time or place for a cautious ethical relativism: comics’ clear-cut moral cate-

gories provided a sense of reassurance in an uncertain age and the optimism that history was on the side of the good. It is clear then that comics are not silent regarding matters political. They have, in fact, a remarkable ability to dramatize our own ideological and political conflicts. Their heroes often look very much like our own: where Professor X of the X-Men takes a conciliatory approach to mutant-human relations, aspiring to a world in which the two races coexist peacefully, his nemesis and former friend Magneto is more combative, espousing separatist views under the conviction that coexistence is untenable. The shadows of Martin Luther King and the earlier Malcom X loom large. Alongside the more self-consciously political works of Alan Moore, like V for Vendetta or Watchmen (which entertain a greyer moral and political landscape than most other works), the X-Men comics are some of the most political and socially aware of all, addressed as they are to questions of racial struggle and group identity. But it is fair to say that the superhero comic in general carries as much ideological baggage as any other literary form. If anything, the superhero comic evinces a kind of pragmatist political sensibility. This again is a delightful irony. The superhero negotiates a strange world populated by men and women in capes,

a world in which the bite of a radioactive spider or overexposure to gamma rays, far from making one very ill, can instead confer superhero status. But for all this indulgence of fantasy, if the superhero comic is to be characterised by any kind of distinctive ideological or political orientation, it seems accurate to say that it is defiantly anti-utopian in vision. Comics’ growing use of LGBTQ characters looks less like the upshot of some doctrinaire social liberalism than just a reflection of changing social mores and a general fading in the conservatism which informed the genre’s earlier years; it is in comics’ attitude toward utopian ideas that the comic is at its most political. It is always the villain, not the superhero, with the grand scheme for fashioning the world anew, the attempted implementation of which leads to destruction and their almost certain defeat. If the men and women who inhabit the world of the superhero committed no crime or evil, their heroes would be redundant. A perfect world would not want for their glorified executors of vigilante justice. Comics are studies in the messiness of politics and social existence; superheroes do have a place, because they occupy imperfect worlds. The superhero comic, at its most political, offers a cautionary tale against ideology and fantastical plans for reshaping society. The villain, unreconciled to this fact, is doomed to failure. ■

Nwa r saw E O N by karolina kalinowskA

eon signs are experiencing a resurrection in Poland’s capital city. Riding the wave of vintage revival, neons that survived the Cold War are being restored and new pieces are cropping up throughout the city. Juxtaposed against the backdrop of a disordered commercial urban landscape, their timeless designs hold a charm over Varsovians. Formerly socialist propaganda, they have now been reclaimed by the arts community as a distinctive element of the city’s heritage, underlining Warsaw’s transformation from its days under Soviet rule.

Neon’s heyday began in the late 1950s, thanks to the explosion of artistic creativity during the Thaw after Stalin’s death. The fever for illuminated typefaces served a number of purposes. On a practical level, they were promoted by the state in an effort to light Poland’s major cities. Contrary to the seedy associations

with ‘Peep Show’ or ‘Liquor’ signs in the West, neons in Poland took on a propagandist role. They were meant to convey a sense of modernity and progress, a paradoxical illusion of Western glamour and glitz without the accompanying capitalism. Bizarrely, it worked: “We felt, even if only briefly, that we were part of the world, part of the rest of Europe,” reflects a Varsovian, in the 2014 documentary Neon. In reality, consumerism was impossible and shortages of almost every product resulted in heavy rationing and endless queuing. Nevertheless, the neon signs marking almost every shop, café, library and music hall gave the capital the feel of an Eastern Bloc Vegas. When creating a neon, “[y]ou have to take light and make it appear like a drawing in the sky,” describes design historian David Crowley.

“There’s this fantastic, witty, imaginative, creative act in producing great neon.” The best visual artists and architects were commissioned to execute the signs. They created their own inimitable typefaces and styles and neon became a new art form, blurring the divide between applied and fine art. The elaborate graphic elements and imaginative fonts gave the streets a dream-like glow at night. In an amusing or emotive way, neons could depict what was inside the building they adorned, like the volleyball player throwing her ball down the side of a multi-storey sports shop or a burglar climbing up the side of an insurance company building. But the neons were all owned by the state and as a result many served as bizarre advertisements. No brands were promoted, just ideas – of pa-

MIŁ

per, lamps or meat. They flaunted unattainable products, like Soviet watches or Bulgarian wine, or lavishly lit up shop names that only offered empty shelves. Rejecting the advertisements as pointless, the designer Piotr Perepłyś refused to design such inapt neon signs. Economic and energy crises of the mid-70s followed by martial law were the beginning of the end for neon. It was easiest to pull the plug on the illuminations that consumed such huge amounts of electricity. They fell into disrepair and a depressing landscape of broken neon welcomed the dawn of capitalism. They began to be treated as “a communist deformity”, comments journalist Marek Nowakowski in Neon: “We were meant to start anew.”

Ilona Karwińska, British photographer and founder of the Neon Museum in Warsaw, remembers her first visit to Poland: “The urban landscape still showed evidence of its communist past… badly constructed buildings, milk bars, old kiosks, and of course decaying neon signage from this time period. The neon signs were the predominant and most interesting feature that remained from this historic Cold War era. Monolithic letters and symbols, spanning the entire length of buildings – reaching outwards and upwards, decaying metal, broken glass – but with spectacular letterforms making up unusual words and products long since gone.” Fewer than 60 of the thousands of original neons remain in Warsaw. Most of these are neglected and rusting. They are disappearing at an alarming rate, often along with the building they once illuminated. The director of Neon, Eric Bednarski, recalls, “While I was making the documentary, older people I wanted to speak to would ask why I was wasting my time on this, [saying] that neons are a piece of trash.” In modern-day Warsaw, neon is now hip. It has become so iconic that you can buy tote bags and retro communist-style mugs with neon-shaped prints. Many institutions are restoring their old neons or designing new pieces. Young people, like artists Ilona Karwińska and Paulina Ołowska, who did not experience the first era of neon, are fighting to preserve the relics of a time they never knew. Ołowska rejuvenated the volleyball player, returning it to its original home as a “social sculpture”.

Karwińska, the principal rescuer of the endangered neon, founded the Neon Museum from her personal collection amassed over nine years. “As we learned more about the historic and cultural importance of the Polish neonisation project and the connection between the great graphic designers of the day, many of whom were part of the famous Polish Poster movement, we had a growing sense of their worth,” explains Karwińska, “not just as historic symbols, but as an independent art form - or School of Neon.” Stripped of their painful political connotations, neons are appreciated for their old-school charm and sleek, modern elegance. “There is a sort of ongoing love affair with neon as a medium that I don’t think will ever fade,” Karwińska muses. But neon revival is not a nostalgic movement to glorify the oppression of the Socialist regime. Rather, it is a quest to regain the identity of a chaotic but increasingly homogenous city in a commercialised world. Neon restoration and creation makes a poignant statement about the ugliness of contemporary commercial advertising, the bane of Warsaw’s urban space, and the rapid tearing down of iconic buildings of the time to make room for skyscrapers and high grossing apartment complexes. As Crowley remarks, it harks back to “a time when advertising could produce high culture or cultural values”. A new neon is quickly becoming the hallmark of Warsaw, created by contemporary graphic designer Mariusz Lewczyk - an enormous gentle giant of a 14-letter sign on one of the city’s main bridges that reads ‘MIŁO CIĘ WIDZIEĆ’ - good to see you. ■

ŁO CIĘ WIDZIEĆ 19

IN PRAISE OF AMERICANA On the road with Ed Freeman By Harriet Smith Hughes

f Anglophilia is love of things old, small, and restrained, Americana celebrates all that is big. It expresses the massive scale of America, realised in spirit and aesthetic. Its kitsch is loud and brash: not the quaint and dainty kitsch of English tea rooms or the neat fonts of Blitz spirit posters. Americana is multitude, landscape, colour. And underneath it all is a lostness, a roving quality that belies this culture of confidence. It is the instability of youth. Big, big, bigness uneasily compensates for the adolescence of a nation. Ed Freeman’s photography series, Desert Realty and Urban Realty, use the landscape and architecture of America to illustrate the country’s unstable aesthetic. Commercial outlets are isolated from the buildings

that would surround and protect them. Unable to blend in unexamined, the structures are stranded in their landscape. They seemingly sit in empty lots or desert dust. Colours and effects are digitally enhanced: in one photograph the patriotic red, white and blue fronting of a generically branded “Food Mart” is offset by a shifting, uneasy grey sky. In another, a startling blue expanse of sky serves to heighten the unreality of sunnily painted Weinerschnitzel Drive-Thru; the effect is similarly disquieting. The primary colours of Americana, colours that are supposed to signify celebration of a nation’s values, are instead used to question what those values are.

“In my mind, all I’m doing is making these buildings more of what they already are,” Freeman tells me. “I’m optimising them, isolating them and putting them into backgrounds that allow them to show their true colours, the same way a jeweller might choose to put a gem in a particular setting.” It is a core aspect to the power and effectiveness of the series: America speaks for itself, the images illuminating issues that are literally built into the nation.

Commercial buildings are a key feature: diners, fast food joints, and a building marked only by a large painted-on panda (all that’s needed to denote a Chinese restaurant). The pristine exteriors of these places interact uncomfortably with their raw backdrops, giving a sense of disjunction between the self-assured frontages and the indefinite realities of America. In Freeman’s Desert series, the clean lines of urban structures are replaced by worn slumps of building: abandoned lots and houses

that are old without being antique. They speak of a process of decay, but a decay that is young yet. This same theme is more subtly apparent in the brightly coloured façades of lots like the Food Mart: boldness that speaks of superficiality, of impermanence and fast turnover. Yet Freeman rejects the imposition of a line or message in his work, saying that “purpose and agenda are first cousins. I just photograph what moves me”. As the comment implicitly recognises, the immediate emotional effect of his works are precisely where politics comes to the

fore. There is, for instance, a recurrent sense of jaded youth across the pictures – or even disturbed innocence. In one photograph, a children’s playground slide is lit up in bright yellow and its childish tower design parodies the skyscrapers that form the ominous, iron-grey cityscape in the background. Their phallic architecture is mimicked in the child’s world of the playground. Disjunction between the two layers of the picture tells of the prevalence of America’s adult values: commercial culture is inescapable, even in juvenility. All is conveyed simply by what Freeman calls “optimising” existing structures, and making use of the gut reactions they evoke.

Freeman uses the series to explore not only the darker sides of the American aesthetic, but also its expression of joy. “There’s a political statement in these pictures, but not just one,” he says. “I love my country and I am appalled by it at the same time.” The love comes through in images such as the “CAL-TEX” auto-parts store: a vision of undeniable vivacity. The building is slightly decrepit with a glorious, sunny exterior, just a little bungalow squatting comfortably beneath a towering skinny palm tree. Both are natural in the landscape. The poverty apparent in the run-down structure doesn’t seem depressing or necessarily at odds with the overall sense of brightness and colour. It is a picture that speaks of mixed heritage, the warm yellows and blues evoking Mexican influence, an impression reinforced by the palm and desert environment. In the architecture there

is a sense of America’s implacable economic spirit: the raggedness of the operation, elevated and enlivened by radiating colour. Across the series, that interaction between the landscape and the architecture reinforces the idea that these structures manifest a worldview partly inspired by the land itself. America’s comparatively recent history involves struggle for survival in this vast expanse of desert, and mountain, and plain. The country’s size is the result of endeavour, contest with the land, and relentless celebration of its seemingly inexhaustible bounty. It came to define the American aesthetic: big spaces and correspondingly big cities. Americana expresses the psychology of a country that has a history of big ideas and a view of their place in the world that is of correspond-

ing scale. All this is captured in the crackling unease that laces Freeman’s photos. It is an unease which speaks to America’s core values. Freedom is at the centre of the American ideal, “but the price for that freedom is loneliness, and Americans are the loneliest people I’ve ever seen. You have an uncanny mix of strident individualism and bland uniformity that is a perplexing, defining element in the American character.” Like the animated skies and creaking shacks of the American desert, or the energy that resides in the interaction of various textures of a grey in an apparently bland industrial scape, antithesis and contradiction define Americana. “It’s exuberant, it’s frightening, I thrive on it and I hate it,” Freeman muses. “And I guess it shows up in my pictures without me even trying to put it there.” ■

PORTRAIT OF

A PEOPLE Visualising Pre-Mao China

he photograph above is an orthodox one: a 1930s gentleman in plus fours, cane in hand, head held high. What is striking for the era, however, is that its subject isn’t European, but Chinese. Foo Pingsheung (Fu Bingchang) was part of what Professor Robert Bickers, Chinese historian and founder of the Visualising China Project, calls “the regime which ran away”. Vice Minister for Foreign Affairs and Ambassador to the USSR in the Chinese

National Party government after WWII, Fu was a wealthy, cosmopolitan man; working in the early UN, travelling in France and Russia, signing treaties with Stalin and Molotov. After the Communist Party takeover in 1949, Fu fled, taking his vast photo albums with him. These albums now form the pillar of a project to rediscover pre-Mao China through the few photographs that weren’t destroyed in the zeal of communist revolution that swept the mainland in the 1950s and 60s.

By Ella Richards Even by the mid-20th century, camera owning was an expensive hobby. Photography was a bourgeois pastime, which marked the owners, subjects of the pictures - and their photographers - as distinctly anti-Communist. Bickers describes how, amongst the photographs that survive, many depict “men sitting, having tea or coffee in their three-piece suits and their American style furniture. The Chinese diplomatic elite were very cosmopolitan, very westernised men of the world. What could be more European?”

After taking power in 1949, Mao sought to solidify Communist control by encouraging a national pride which focussed on the failures and disgrace of previous years. Mao emphasised the prospect of a new, brighter communist future, beginning by redistributing landowners’ wealth to the peasantry and encouraging workers to attack and publicly humiliate the upper classes. Film footage still survives of field labourers in the early 1950s forcing their overseers to kneel, the thin wires of placards bearing legends such as ‘Tuhuángdì’ and ‘Fangémìng fèn zi’ , ‘tyrant’ or ‘counterrevolutionary’ biting into their necks. By the early 1960s, the campaign to root out non-communists and dissenters had spiralled into the infamous Cultural Revolution. Throughout the decade, vigilante student militias who christened themselves the ‘Red Guard’ roamed the countryside, seeking to purge modern China from ‘Rightists,’ a word that quickly became synonymous with anyone, like Fu, who had not been a worker in the pre-Mao era. The suddenness of the revolutionary zeal caught many in its firing line by surprise. “By the time most people realised, it was too late,” Bickers explains. “People assumed that, having experienced various Civil Wars and upheavals, this was just another one and it would all change quite soon. They didn’t think that what happened in 1949 was as definitive as it was.” With few citizens taking early opportunities to leave, their photographs were lost, buried or destroyed during the coming upheavals. “Archives were smashed up by Red Guards, libraries were trashed and people’s own pho-

tographs were destroyed.” With Intellectualism seen as a symptom of anti-communist feeling, institutions as well as individuals were targeted; records and books were destroyed in universities and government centres while Guards roamed the countryside, breaking into middle-class homes and beating the owners of such items, sometimes to death. A huge proportion of pre-Mao photographs and other records were burned. The few saved often tend to depict the starving peasantry rather than the photographers and their well-to-do social circle.

“Archives were smashed up by Red Guards, libraries were trashed and people’s own photographs were destroyed” The other major destroyers of photographs were the owners of the pictures themselves. “If Fu Bingchang had been in China at the time of the Cultural Revolution he is unlikely to have survived”, Bicker tells me. “Many killed themselves or were placed in labour camps; I’ve talked with people who were locked up under the stairs in their house for two years. One of the things people did to try and prevent such a fate would be to destroy any evidence they had of their ‘crimes’, their previous lives.” With such a large proportion of China’s photographic history already destroyed, the Visualising China project is trying to help those

in China and around the world fill in the gaps. The project, which currently has around 30,000 photos dating from the mid-19th century to the 1950s, collects copies of surviving images, turning them into an online archive that can be accessed by anyone. Although many of the photos come from the children of British families who worked in international cities of Shanghai and Hong Kong before WWII, the 21st century has seen a boom in mainland Chinese interest in photographs of pre-Mao China in what is known as lao zhaopian re, or ‘Old Photographs Fever’. Bickers explains, “People see what resources are available oversees and want that in China. There’s been a big explosion on the Chinese internet of heritage sites and historical blogs. People are busy scanning photos and books and putting them online.” The massive growth in interest is arguably fuelled by the rapid pace of change in modern China, where the country’s exceptional economic boom is mirrored in the redevelopment of its cities. The centre of Shanghai, for instance, has changed unrecognisably since the 1980s, so pictures of the Bund - the city’s main stretch - in photographs from the 1950s appear alien compared to today’s landscape. As more of China’s historic architecture is destroyed to make way for high-rise, international-style buildings, the project is locked in a race against time to identify photographic locations before their physical markers are lost forever. The history behind the photographs continues to slip away. With the growth of the internet in China, the commercial value of historical photographs has shot up over the last decade and many people with surviving al-

bums have taken to selling individual photographs on eBay. Though the pictures themselves survive, their context is lost as they are disconnected from their original owners and the people able to tell the story behind each image. The Project aims to try and piece together a picture of pre-Mao China by putting the photographs online. Project Manager Jamie Carstairs explains, “On our Visualising China site people can add their own comments. Children of expat families can look at photos and say “that’s not Hong Kong, that’s Shanghai” and make their case. Collectively we are hoping to piece these pictures together. It’s very satisfying when you get the answer to one picture, when someone can tell you where it was taken or who it depicts. We want as much information as we can. Put it online, let the people play with it. We are always happy when people do. For example, it is through collaboration that we recently identified a rather distinctive pagoda that was split down the middle.” The pagoda in question, now identified as the Longxing Temple, appears in multiple photographs in the Visualising China Project. In fact, it still stands, although now much altered and repaired, in Pengxian county (now Pengzhou city, north of Chengdu), Sichuan province. However, the story of the monks photographed with it and the reasons for its distinctive cleft are lost.

In a story about piecing information together, it is the holes that stand out. Bickers stresses that, even with 30,000 images collected, “The big gaps in our coverage are the very early period, of studio portraits of Chinese people and more rural, West China. For example, in the north-east we have very little.” With pieces of the puzzle possibly lost forever, it is striking to think that the vast proportion of the remaining visual record of China prior to the last 50 years survives through familial interest and personal care rather than historical archives. These pictures often capture a personal world of friends and family members, a

time that was, until recently, largely erased from the collective memory of their grandchildren. The young white girl being held by her Chinese nanny, or amah, in the photograph above is my grandmother. Like Fu’s quick exit a decade later, her family left Shanghai unexpectedly, in her case after Japanese occupation in WWII. As a result, they took few material reminders of their ex-pat lifestyle and the country they left behind. To my grandmother, the picture is a snapshot of a life she hardly remembers. For Visualising China, these rediscovered photos represent one way to visualise the country’s pre-globalised past. ■

PHOOLAN DEVI The Stor y o f I n di a’s B a n dit Q u e en By

n 12 May 1996, a young woman from the Mallah caste wins a seat in the Indian parliament. She has no formal education, and from the age of 11 has been repeatedly raped and abused by her older husband. But she is also a dacoit, leader of a band of armed robbers, the “Beautiful Bandit” of the Chambal region of India and the undisputed queen of the ravines. She has just spent 11 years in prison for the massacre of 22 upper caste men at Behmai in 1981, carried out in revenge of a gang rape perpetrated against her. Her name is Phoolan Devi and she wins with a landslide majority of 37,000. Devi is a rare example of a subaltern woman activist who achieved political power. Her story is unparalleled; no other woman endured such brutality and accomplished such heights of political achievement. Suffering on account of both her caste and her gender, she became the first woman to join the symbolic iconography of champions of the poor and oppressed in the postcolonial era.

M ili Ma lde

Devi’s story represents the postcolonial sympathy for the subaltern, a transformational politics dedicated to the removal of inequality which is ingrained in the caste system. It is a refined form of apartheid, in which the lower castes suffer from discrimination, forbidden from sitting on buses and collecting water from common wells. Crimes such as assaults or rapes of lower caste women are often disregarded by the state, and Devi herself, having left her abusive husband, suffered violence at the hands of the police. She was then kidnapped by a gang of bandits who had been paid to kill her and eventually became the leader of a Mallah-dominated gang. Hailed the ‘Bandit Queen’ by the locals in the Chambal region of India, Devi roamed the ravines of the northern states of Uttar and Madhya Pradesh. Her supporters claimed that she robbed high caste families in various villages and shared the loot with the lower castes. She has been mythologized as the reincarnation of the fierce Hindu goddess, Durga; an associa-

tion Devi herself cited, often declaring “victory to the goddess Durga”. After the Behmai massacre in Uttar Pradesh in 1981, Devi’s fame spread. On the run for two years after the killings, the police’s attempts to locate her failed because of her support from the poor in the region. In 1983, the government asked for her surrender and, with a price of $10,400 on her head, she agreed. Devi’s dramatic surrender to the Madhya Pradesh Police was attended by some 8,000 people. The “Beautiful Bandit”, as glorified in the Indian press, laid down her rifle before the portraits of Gandhi and the Goddess Durga. As one commentator from The Hindu described it, “The legend turned out to be a wisp of a girl, dressed in khaki bell-bottoms, revolver held high over her head and a red bandana holding back unruly strands of hair.” Yet author Roy Moxham, who became friends with Devi while she was imprisoned, does not believe that her image was blown out of proportion. “You can’t think of a similar

person in the whole of European history; you can’t think of a woman who’s done this and then become a member of legislature.” Devi spent 11 years in prison awaiting trial. While in prison, Channel 4 produced Bandit Queen, a film made about her early life, which was brought out in 1994, the same year she was released from prison. Although praised as “truly radical” in the Evening Standard, its deviation from Mala Sen’s book, India’s Bandit Queen: The True Story of Phoolan Devi, as well as from Devi’s own account, deeply angered its subject. She was particularly enraged at the graphicness of the gang-rape scene, arguing that the film was “further raping a woman who had already been raped”. As Roy Moxham recalls, “She said to me, ‘after this film, how can I show my face in my village again?’” He accuses the filmmakers of silencing their subject and disallowing Devi from even having a claim to her own life story. “She was a very powerful speaker,’ says Moxham, recalling Devi’s landslide victory. “She could be there with a group of politicians, nearly all men, and they will be totally dominated by her. She has a charisma – it’s the kind of thing you don’t see very often in your life.”

With newfound political mandate, Devi proclaimed her desire to work for the lower castes: “I want to bring hospitals, schools, electricity and clean water to the poor in the villages. To stop child marriage and to improve life for women.” When Moxham asked if any of this was going to happen, she answered: “One day. We are fighting hard for it.”

“

she was in jail – she was quite bitter about that.” It highlights the ineffectiveness of the women’s movement in India, which is still criticised for its underrepresentation of illiterate, lower-caste women. Progress will be slow, as Moxham agrees.“It is going to take a long, long time to change the attitude not only of men, but the attitude of women as well.”

She could be there with a group of politicians, nearly all men, and they will be totally dominated by her. She has a charisma – it’s the kind of thing you don’t see very often in your life.

Devi was assassinated in Delhi on 26 July 2001; she was shot down by three masked gunmen outside her home. The killing was paid for by Sher Singh Rana, an upper caste man, as retribution for the men she had supposedly killed at the Behmai massacre. The trial ongoing for 13 years, he was finally sentenced to life imprisonment for murder and conspiracy on 14 August this year. Her status as an icon, however, has lived on, the circumstances of her death a symbol of the oppressive forces still to be overcome in India. Devi had a long way to go in fighting for the dignity and equality of the lower castes. Moxham talks of how Devi was “very weary of women’s groups, because none of those groups had ever helped her when

”

Nonetheless Devi remains a powerful symbol of the political assertion of subaltern women and exploitation of lower castes in India. She exemplifies how development for women and the poor in India must come from below, and, while more media discussion has hinged on the Bandit Queen than on her political work, Devi’s name is resonant across the whole nation of India. Robert Young, an expert on postcolonialism, calls her a “popular hero” and states that her “very presence effected a continuing protest against the deeply entrenched, oppressive treatment of lower castes in India.” Her story of how an illiterate, low caste girl became a politician has become a parable about India itself. It has helped to ignite the campaign for equal rights for women, regardless of their caste. ■

“W

hile Europe was tensely watching the crisis over Czechoslovakia, Herr Hitler paid a surprise visit to the French frontier to-day.” So began Britain by Mass Observation, a 1939 Penguin Special by Charles Madge and Tom Harrisson. They were not endorsing this characterization of the start of the war – rather, they wanted to interrogate the narrative behind this reading more carefully. “Of course, that is assuming that Britain, and the rest of Europe, really were at that time ‘tensely watching’ ,” the authors caution. “But were they? How many were more tensely watching the racing news and daily horoscope? That is another kind of fact we shall not know without trying to find out.” Madge and Harrison were the first people to ask this sort of question, drawing attention to details of everyday life that had previously been ignored. The questions they asked were not about politics – they were less obvious than that. What could be done? What would they do if war breaks out? Do they believe in a crisis at all? Some of the questions had no overt bearing on current affairs at all, and the answers would reflect this – they asked all the regular attendees of the Free Style Wrestling Club in Bolton (or ‘Worktown’ as it was known in their reports) what ten things, in order, were most important

for human happiness. The most popular choices were: 1. knowledge, 2. security, 3. equality, 4. humour, 5. pleasure, 6. action, 7. religion, 8. leadership, 9. beauty and, in last place, politics. Along with Madge and Harrisson, Humphrey Jennings, the founder of British Documentary Film began the ‘Mass Observation Survey’, creating what they described in a letter to the New Statesman as an “anthropology of ourselves”. The survey started in 1937 and ran until the early 1950s. It documented people’s everyday lives in Bolton and London through a combination of investigators paid to interview people, and volunteer observers (‘observing’ being the more informal, or even secretive, approach). In 1949, Mass Observation was registered as a limited company and became dedicated to market research – a different sort of “anthropology of ourselves” from that which the founders had in mind and the project stagnated until its revival in 1981. MO reveals moments of great insight and poignancy about the attitudes of the nation. For example, the theatricality of wrestling has always drawn the attention of artists and observers. But the techniques of MO are able to explore what it meant for its audience. One observer submitted the following statement:

FOR

ARE

P EO

Britain by Mass Ob

HE R E

THE

PLE

servation Since 1937 By Frank Macpherson

“Went home by car, very crowded with people coming from the performance. Suddenly felt very depressed. Wondering about this change in my mood and searching for the possible cause, I found myself thinking, how terribly degenerated are those men around me, small, narrow shouldered, how different were those in the ring. What a poor thing is our civilization”. The date of the first survey was chosen to coincide with the coronation of George VI in 1937: May 12. “May 12th is likely to be quite an ordinary day, but for those researching, the ‘ordinary’ it can provide extraordinary results”, explains the MO website. Ordinary people were given an open-ended request to record everything that came to their attention. The diaries kept by participants in those early days provide an incredible tapestry of reports that illuminate the normally murky process of individual events being pulled out, submitted to memory, and then committed, through the archive, to history. For instance, these two answers to the question: “What shall you do if War breaks out?”

Business man, 33: “ARP [Air Raid Precautions] Warden. Been in it from the start. Stick at my post till done for. Some use helping people not to panic. Think shall not panic myself. Expect to enjoy feeling useful. Life all along has seemed rather pointless. Hope that the end, if that was the end, might be worth while.” Wife and Mother, 42: “I have been collecting poisons for some time with guile and cunning. I have sufficient to give self, husband and all the children a lethal dose. I can remember the last war. I don’t want to live through another, or the children either. I shan’t tell them, I shall just do it.” On 12 May this year, I would urge everyone to ‘become an Observer’: go on the website, sign up, and submit your diary. As Madge and Harrisson put it: “Through this welter of public opinions and percentages, local traditions, and mass habits, it must not be forgotten that each and every person is automatically an individual, conforming outwardly, covering his or her private parts like everyone else, but underneath with repressions and furies that are partly personal.” ■

SCREENING THE UNSCREENABLE Atrocity on Film

By David Astley

racking shots, noted the French director Jean-Luc Godard, are a matter of morality. Jacques Rivette, one of Godard’s contemporaries, used this ruling to dismiss Gillo Pontecorvo’s 1960 film, Kapo. The story of a young girl attempting to escape the concentration camp, it was one of the earliest narrative films to depict the Holocaust. It left Rivette with “the most profound contempt” for the Italian director due to the reframing of a tracking shot: this seemingly innocent movement of the camera changed the significance of the shot and warped reviewers’ views of the film. Rivette could be accused of pedantry, but single impressions are key to how we form opinions throughout our lives, so each shot and scene depicting sensitive subjects such as the Holocaust and other global atrocities should hold to this level of scrutiny. We are here presented with a problem which most Anglo-American film critics and commentators have ignored: are depictions of the Holocaust and other atrocities produced with enough sensitivity by the mass media? Andreas Huyssen, a Columbia University lecturer on comparative literature,

would argue that narrative films and television can portray atrocities in a way that is broadly beneficial. In The Politics of Identification: “Holocaust” and West German Drama (1980), he contends that the airing of the 1978 US television series Holocaust did more for the West German psyche than any other cultural output since 1945. The four-part series follows the fictional Jewish Weiss family whose individual members experience the brutality and horror of the Nazi regime. The narrative strategy, which Huyssen suggests places the viewer on the side of the Weiss family, allows the watcher to suffer with the victims and fear the perpetrators. This direct confrontation with the atrocities experienced by the Weiss family and those around them is meant to allow for a mirror confrontation with West Germany’s endemic vergangenheitsbewältigeng — a German word which roughly translates as “the struggle to come to terms with the past”. The series’ ‘exorcism’ of the ghosts of the Holocaust was criticised at the time for its melodramatic grounding, but Huyssen suggests that the “left and left liberal critics” primary motivation was, instead, snobbery: “high versus low, avant-garde versus popular, political versus soap opera”.

On the contrary, Nobel Peace Prize recipient and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel argues that the mass media is simply unable to portray the Holocaust sensitively. In his 1989 article Art and the Holocaust: Trivializing Memory, Wiesel deems that all the popular examples of films and TV which portray the Holocaust - Sophie’s Choice, Holocaust, Seven Beauties etc. — are the product of “the Holocaust becoming a fashionable subject”, and a subject which has been mistreated with a grand lowering of taste: “Naked men. Naked women. Naked children. And all of them made up with ketchup and paid to fall into the mass graves. How can one explain such obscenity? How can anyone justify such insensitivity?” Wiesel believes “no one else can now retell Auschwitz after Auschwitz”: we shouldn’t look to Hollywood or other such sources and should turn to those able to “transfer their experiences into knowledge”. While Huyssen finds catharsis in Holocaust for a bewildered nation, Wiesel finds in such productions an unfathomable lack of respect for those who survived and those who did not. Wiesel’s article was written four years prior to the release of the most widely regarded film about the Holocaust, Schindler’s List. Upon its release, Spielberg’s tale of the ‘good German’ received resounding affirmation from the critics and seven Academy Awards including Best Picture and Best Director, and it

currently holds eighth position on the American Film Institute’s list of the greatest films of all time. Yet Schindler’s List would surely not have changed Wiesel’s opinion. Though critical acclaim would suggest that Schindler’s List is a masterpiece, this is unmerited as the film is still not respectful to the Holocaust. In one scene, the audience is presented with women having their hair cut off. They then unclothe and are forced into a concrete cell fitted with showerheads before the room’s thick door is locked behind them. The camera pans to the showerheads, heightening the tension – then, instead of the expected gas, the showers pump out water. The trivialisation of the victims’ fear is horrifying. Spielberg should have realised that the Holocaust deserves to be treated with an unprecedented sensitivity – this is not Jurassic Park. The shower scene is not a singularity of Spielberg’s crass filmmaking in Schindler’s List; throughout the film he prioritises tension over respect to the Holocaust’s six million Jewish victims. Claude Lanzmann, the director of the ten-hour-long documentary Shoah, suggests a fundamental flaw with Spielberg’s film:

“Schindler’s List…transgress[es] because it trivialize[s], and thus it remove[s] the Holocaust’s unique character.” The question hinges on the purpose of these dramas. Are they meant to educate? To entertain? If the latter then they are perverse. But even if a director were able to able to avoid all melodrama and present nonselective fact, a feature film could never be the best medium. It is impossible to imagine, let alone to be able to replicate the horror and suffering of the Holocaust. Night and Fog and Shoah present alternative ways in which we could try to understand. Directed by Alain Resnais in 1955, Night and Fog is based on a monograph by poet and Holocaust survivor, Jean Cayrol. Resnais’s montages act as a visual accompaniment to Cayrol’s prose. The words do not just tell us the tale; they ponder, they question and we, the viewer, are allowed to do the same without being led. Serge Daney summed up the experience of Night and Fog perfectly: “The dead bodies of [Night and Fog]… have watched me more than I have seen them.” Shoah took Claude Lanzmann eleven years to create, gathering 350 hours of footage and editing it down to ten upon its release in 1985 - it had originally been commissioned for

two hours and an eighteen-month production time. Testimonies from victims, perpetrators and onlookers accompany Lanzmann’s visits to concentration camps in Poland, bringing the viewer as close as possible to an understanding of the Holocaust. Roger Ebert noted that Lanzmann’s film allows the Holocaust to be “no longer a subject, a chapter of history, a phenomenon. It is an environment. It is around us.” It is also instructive to consider other atrocities that have occurred in nations with smaller film industries which have not been subject to a wide scope of study because of a generalised lack of interest from the West. Numerous events in the twentieth century have inspired films that fall under the same cinematic category: the Rwandan genocide, the Cambodian genocide, the Bangladeshi genocide, the Armenian, Greek and Assyrian genocides. The same principles that apply to the cinema of the Holocaust should be universal for pictures confronting these atrocities. A film that successfully depicts one of these atrocities is Rithy Panh’s The Missing Picture. The Cambodian director’s self-searching film attempts to reconstruct his childhood under the Khmer Rouge, his family’s ‘reeducation’ and death, and his time in the labour camps, all with the aid of clay models and propaganda footage. Panh tells his story to these images;

he speaks of the horrors and of the failures of his memory, and thereby gives us a firsthand account of the Khmer Rouge regime. As in Shoah and Night and Fog, there are no third person morals: the first person narratives in these films make us question our own historically distant impressions. The role that film plays in crafting our own reality must not be understated. After 9/11, as Susan Sontag notes in Regarding the Pains of Others, people were asked to describe the event. The most popular answer was “like a movie”. The way we view the world and its history is determined by what we consume and for this reason the filmmaker should be responsible. Pinchof-salt direction – altering the truth for your own or your audience’s benefit – does not do justice for those being depicted or indeed for the viewer. The inability of narrative film to portray the horror of these atrocities correctly, both in truth and in taste, leads to a subdued perception of the victims’ suffering. The only way to achieve a film which portrays an atrocity faithfully is to allow only those who have experienced it at first hand to tell its story, for they alone know the boundaries and sensitivities involved. No others have the right to face this unknown. This is why Night and Fog, Shoah and The Missing Picture are the most poignant of atrocity films: it is because they are the truest. ■

If this was the last piece of paper in the world, what would you write on it?

if this was the last piece of

paper in the world, what

would you write on it?

“Ask the Microvac,” wailed Jerrodette I. “Ask him how

here are more than fifty-five thousand museums in the world today. New York alone has more than eighty of them. Each year, millions of people flock to these spaces, populated by glass cases, or fences, or little signs which say “Please do not touch the exhibits”. Each day, thousands upon thousands of people go to stand inside a building in order to look at things which no one uses. The world over, there are rooms filled with things to be looked at, but not touched. The Brighton Museum houses one of the five known iconic Mae West lip sofas. This sofa, designed by Salvador Dalí, is no more or less useful than any other sofa. We have placed it in a museum not because of its inherent skill at being a sofa. There are undoubtedly sofas more comfy, more practical, larger, certainly cheaper. It is in a museum because of who designed it, because of its origins and history. It is in a museum because it is rare and because it captures Surrealism, because it captures an

are, as paper would be, the last Winner of the ISISthey remnants of a society otherwise largely Today, we have much better Essay Competitionforgotten. tools. We have mechanisation and elec-

era which we can never revisit. Through the very proliferation of museums today, this tendency to commemorate history appears a human instinct. The Mae West lip sofa, though, is first and foremost a work of design, a definition which somewhat overrides its function as a sofa. More counter-intuitive and more telling of this human tendency to turn history into an exhibit is the immortalisation of everyday objects which now sit, useless, in toughened glass cases. Once the functional object ceases to have a function - or indeed, if it is rare, like Dalí’s sofa - the human reaction is to put it on display. Paper is a commonplace, functional resource for almost every human being on Earth today. If paper were to be prohibited, however, and there came a time when there existed a known last sheet, would it be viewed as functional at all? The answer lies in the museums. Iron Age tools are ‘functional’ in the same way that the last piece of paper on Earth would be ‘functional’. However,

tricity and a need for infrastructure and manufacturing which is far too great to be satisfied by the capabilities of Iron Age tools. In the same way, the Internet is decreasing the need for paper in twenty-first century society. Although we currently use paper and the Internet side by side, a paperless society is a plausible future. If the production of paper were to be banned, all existing pieces of paper destroyed, a remaining last piece of paper would lose its usefulness. Like the Mae West sofa and the Iron Age tools, its historical interest would be far greater than the demand for its function. It would become a relic of a bygone era, much like the spinning jenny: functional, yet replaceable and somehow foreign to a modern society. This anti-functional commemoration also has a sacred element. Sites such as Stonehenge, England, and

“Ask the Microvac,” wailed Jerrodette I. “Ask him how to turn the stars on again.”

(The Last Question, Isaac Asimov)

here are more than 55,000 museums in the world today. New York alone has more than 80 of them. Each year, millions of people flock to these spaces, populated by glass cases, or fences, or little signs that say “Please do not touch the exhibits.” Each day, thousands upon thousands of people go to stand inside a building in order to look at things that no one uses. The world over, there are rooms filled with things to be looked at, but not touched.

The Brighton Museum houses one of the five known iconic Mae West lip sofas. This sofa, designed by Salvador Dalí, is no more or less useful than any other sofa. We have placed it in a museum not because of its inherent skill at being a sofa. There are undoubtedly sofas more comfy, more practical, larger, and certainly cheaper. It is in a museum because of who designed it, because of its origins and history. It is in a museum because it the remains of Roman Pompeii in Itis rare and because it captures Surrealy alism, were raided centuries ago an forera their because it captures that functional building materials. Today, we can never revisit. Through the notvery onlyproliferation is this function removed bytoof museums museum-style arrangements, but in day, this tendency to commemorate modern opinion it would be sacrilege history appears a human instinct. to use fromlipancient such is Thematerials Mae West sofa, sites though, as Stonehenge and Pompeii. They are first and foremost a work of design, more than relics. They are memorials a definition which somewhat overto the very and as development of rides itsorigins function a sofa. More human civilisation. Such wouldtelling be theof counterintuitive and more status paper tendency in a worldtowhere only thisofhuman turn history oneinto sheet remained. The significance of an exhibit is the immortalisation theofhuman individual minuscule in everyday objects is that now sit, usecomparison to the significance of Once the less, in toughened glass cases. achievements andobject history represented the functional ceases to have a by Pompeii would functionand – orStonehenge, indeed, if itand is rare, like be Dalí’s so when faced withhuman the cultural and is sofa – the reaction historical a single reto put itsignificance on display.ofPaper is a commaining sheet functional of paper. It becomesfor monplace, resource sacred, a representation of something almost every human being on Earth greater than what were it is: atocrystallisation today. If paper be prohibited, of ahowever, society, aand proof thatwere it was there. a there to come Anything an there individual could time when existedwrote a known last sheet, would it viewed as funchardly be worthy of be writing. tional all? the presumption until It hasatbeen

Ellie McIntyre

The answer lies in the museums. Iron Age tools are ‘functional’ in the same way that the last piece of paper on Earth would be ‘functional’. They are, however, as paper would be, the last remnants of a society otherwise largely forgotten. Today, we have much better tools. We have mechanisation and electricity and a need for infrastructure and manufacturing which is far too great to be satisfied by the capabilities of Iron Age tools. In the same way, the internet is decreasing the need for paper in 21st-century society. Although we currently use paper and the internet side by side, a paperless society is a plausible future. If the production of paper were to be banned, all existing pieces of paper destroyed, a remaining last piece of paper would lose its usefulness. Like the Mae West sofa and the Iron Age tools, its historical interest would be far greater than the demand for its function. It would become a relic of a bygone era, much like the spinning jenny: functional, yet now that this last piece of paper exists replaceable and somehow foreign to a in a setting of prohibition of paper promodern society. duction, rather than a tree-extinction scenario. In this lattercommemoration scenario there This anti-functional would, of course, be no way of such susalso has a sacred element. Sites taining life and society as we know it. as Stonehenge and Pompeii were raidHowever, thoseago who dystopia ed centuries forwrite theiroffunctional can all too materials. easily imagine a universe far building Today, not only inis the future, one in which humanity this function removed by musehas discovered a way to sustain in um-style arrangements, but in life modaern treeless world. universe almost unopinion it A would be sacrilege to recognisable theancient one wesites inhabit, use materialsfrom from such one in which information hasThey become as Stonehenge and Pompeii. are useless and relics. nothing more than Theyisarepermanently memorials commemorated. Perhaps a society in to the very origins and development of which only a few people remain. human civilisation. Such would beThe the last piece of paper, in thiswhere instance, status of paper in a world only would represent the final way one sheet remained. Theconcrete significance ofofhumanity asserting its existence and the human individual is minuscule committing it totopermanence. A huin comparison the significance of man would have toand search for somethe achievements history reprething to by write to encompass the spirit sented Pompeii and Stonehenge, ofand museums, of so thewhen significance of our would be faced with the society achievements, of our culturaland andits historical significance of a single remaining Ultimately, sheet of paper. It need to immortalise. somebecomes sacred, a of representation of thing representative humanity and

something greater than what it is: a crystallisation of a society, a proof that it was there. Anything an individual wrote could hardly be worthy of writing. It has been the presumption until now that this last piece of paper exists in a setting of prohibition, of paper production, rather than a tree-extinction scenario. In this latter scenario there would, of course, be no way of sustaining life and society as we know it. However, those who write of dystopia can all too easily imagine a universe far in the future, one in which humanity has discovered a way to sustain life in a treeless world. A universe almost unrecognisable from the one we inhabit, one in which information has become useless and nothing is permanently commemorated. Perhaps a society in which only a few people remain. The last piece of paper, in this instance, would represent the final concrete way of humanity asserting its its quandary, of our search for function existence and committing it to permaand how the fruits of this search are nence. A human would have to search constantly replaced. for something to write to encompass Perhaps, to have the recourse to this the spirit of museums, significance essay’s opening quote, the last offerof our society and its achievements, ing of humanity would be a question. our need to immortalise. Ultimately, Perhaps, asrepresentative Asimov writes, something of humanity’s humanilast preoccupation will be how toforrety and its quandary, of our search verse entropy, the force countering our function and how the fruits of this constant search for replaced. greater function; search are constantly how to “turn the stars on again”. Or, perhaps, to thehave greatest sign of Perhaps, recourse topresence this es- a human can offer, on the very last piece say’s opening quote, the last offering of paper, is simply thatbewhich is seen so of humanity would a question. often on school deskswrites, or on the walls of Perhaps, as Asimov humantoilet cubicles or carved into the ity’s last preoccupation will be trunks how ofreverse trees, asentropy, a last commemorative act: “I to the force counter■ was our here.” ing constant search for greater function; how to “turn the stars on again”. Or, perhaps, the greatest sign of presence a human can offer, on the very last piece of paper, is simply that which is seen so often on school desks or on the walls of toilet cubicles or carved into the trunks of trees, as a last commemorative act: “I was here.” ■

to turn the stars on again.” (The Last Question, Isaac Asimov)

Oxfordâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Brutalist Architecture: The Savage Turned Sublime

By George Grylls

Oxford is architecturally as well as intellectually competitive . The advent of Brutalism in the 1960s and 70s brought with it architecture that did not yield to conventional grandeur but stood with stoic self-assurance. Brutalism was spawned in the post-war reconstruction of blitzed Europe under the eclectic influences of the Bauhaus, German artillery bunkers and the hand of Le Corbusier.

The Swiss polymath’s term for his roughly-hewn concrete, “béton brut,” first gave rise to the critical term ‘Brutalism’. Oxford colleges have historically been sufficiently endowed to hire the most fashionable contemporary architects. In the 60s and 70s, brutalist firms were commissioned to oversee a large growth in building. The results are not concrete monstrosities, but concrete marvels.

(Previous Page, Left) The Berlin Quad, Wolfson College, 1974, Grade II, Powell and Moya.

(Previous Page, Right) St. Cross Building, 1964, Grade II* Martin, Wilson & Hodgkinson.

(Left) Kelly Building, 1970 Gilbert Howes, Kenneth Stevens & Associates.

Powell and Moya won the commission to design Wolfson College due to their prolific work in both Oxford and Cambridge over the twenty preceding years. Ironically, today the firm is most famous for one of their uncompleted works, the temporary Skylon structure created for the 1951 Festival of Britain. The Berlin Quad’s mix of light and heavy materials creates a calm and studied atmosphere well suited to an Oxford college.. Beech-white pilotis (columns) suspend the building above the ground resulting in an impression of weightlessness. To temper this ethereality and establish the solidity that is necessary for a working environment is the raw concrete exterior, protecting the fortress-like quad from outside disturbance and thus preserving perfect serenity inside.

Designed by a trio of architects famous for the Brunswick Centre, the South Bank’s Royal Festival Hall and the British Library, the St. Cross Building has a strong pedigree. Works starting in December will revert the entrance to the English Faculty through the main foyer as was originally intended by the architects in order to force interaction between students of different subjects. The building is formed of three tremendous cantilevered cubes penetrated by a central staircase that encourages congregation and serves as a dissecting perspective right into the very heart of the building. Ribbon windows accentuate the horizontal façades, which are free of piping and wiring in the Corbusian style.

Fêted to be both the ‘tallest building in Oxford without a lift’ and, depressingly, scheduled for demolition, the staircase towers that flank the jagged Alpine roof of the Kelly Building are reminiscent of Erno Goldfinger’s Balfron and Trellick Towers. Juxtaposing the sharpness of the roof are understated arches separating the cavernous dining hall from the accommodation above. This truly magnificent use of space, unimposing on the Oxford skyline and yet housing the vast majority of firstyear undergraduates, affords some of the best views over Oxford.

Dream ‘It was in a city street. A baby sat, lolling against its mother’s shins, in a sunlit doorway. The child was dressed in knitted white; it was plump under its socks and gloves and small pullover. Its head was gently covered with the same white wool. Only its face was uncovered. It stared out of its right eye. The left side of its face was made of rusty metal, a jagged line ran down the nose where metal and flesh joined. The left eye was a thick, empty circle. I knew that there had been some sort of explosion’. That was a dream, and there was no anger in it. There was no need for anger, for there was nothing to be done, except pity. Dreams are supposed to blur and disappear, but the city and the street, the mother and the child are still clear-cut, and the rough surface of the corroding metal cheek is still tangible. Any pity that was given then is still as necessary, though the savaged child may seem a trivial figure among so many dead. It is easy to help this child, to show it compassion, and then to walk out of the front door proudly. It is difficult to make this child, its suffering and the responsibility for its mutilation and inevitable death, our own. Perhaps it is even harder to do all in our slight power to prevent the next death. In war it is easy to forget the child, and to see the victims of our ferocity as faceless giants, mad and evil. We are told that we kill for the sake of our freedom, and that this is a noble and unselfish action. Our enemies are told the same, and they too believe it. Or we are told that we kill for the sake of the freedom of others. (Though Germany’s attempted conquest of Europe was well advanced before we intervened in 1939.) Freedom is our clear cry, and for its sake we are prepared to throw away our integrity, and all but the old pretence of morality. This is an atrocity, not a fairy story, for there is no villain and no hero in war. It is not worth going through hell for the promised Princess, she is cruel and old. It may be morbid to thumb endlessly through the horrors or war, but it would be unrealistic to forget that human bodies are deliberately maimed, blinded and torn to pieces like useless sheets of paper; that each death in war is a murder. As our allegiance to the human race is greater than our loyalty to any government, our duty is clear. We must refuse to kill, knowing that this decision does not wash us clean of responsibility or guilt. We cannot cut ourselves from the State at war, but we can refuse to inflict suffering deliberately. The pacifist is one who has examined the obscene instrument of war and rejected it as both impractical and immoral. He cannot accept the conventional picture of Alexander, Julius Caesar and Napoleon Bonaparte as great men. To him the refusal to go to war is not a negative gesture, it is an assertion of humanity. Eugene V. Debs said at his trial: “I am opposed to war. I am perfectly willing on that account to be branded as a traitor… Years ago I recognised my kinship with all living beings, and I made up my mind that I was not one whit better that the meanest of earth. I said then, and I say now, that while there is a lower class, I am in it; while there is a criminal element, I am of it; while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.”Those are the words of a man who had begun to love his neighbour and his enemy, who knew that the bad dream need not recur indefinitely. We may say that they are the words of a great man, for man is as great as his love.

Adrian Mitchell, February 9, 1955

“fiction is about what it is to be a

By Mina Odile Ebtehadj-Marquis

To fucking be or not to be fucking. When so much writing – from song lyrics to medieval poetry – is concerned with sex (the giver, the receiver, the lack, the lust), I wonder whether it is possible to write, not about ‘what it is to be a fucking human being’ but rather about ‘what it is to fucking be a human being’ – or whether there’s a difference. The second version resonates with the emphasis on the verb while the first leans on the expletive. Because it is the expletive, of course, that makes Wallace’s sentence his. Take it away, and he has uttered a platitude. ‘Fiction’s about what it is to be a human being’ is not funny or dangerous; if anything, it is flaccid. Wallace, however, chose a word with vivid associations: not ‘bloody’

humanity (which few would take literally) or even ‘damned’ humanity (Biblical, outdated), but ‘fucking’. His language, it seems, is not present and contained, but uniquely aggressive. As an intransitive verb, ‘fucking’ indicates a mutual act, but in its more common, transitive form, it takes an object, grammatically and sexually. It is this forcefulness that colours Wallace’s statement. His language is equal parts casual, crass, subtle, and savage. It is the language of a person who takes fiction by the throat. Fiction, to Wallace, is not about ‘human experience’, sans expletive, or even about what it is to be a ‘sexual human being’. It is about the human animal and the human animal’s ability to write

about itself. I come to my conclusion thus: without their skill for introspection and self-projection, human beings are simply yet another species of animal, ‘fucking’ and eating and dying ad infinitum. Fiction, in such a case, would be obsolete, because fiction is concerned with the fabrication of an imagined Other. The sexual animal does not need the imagined Other, but the rational and creative human being does. And so, Wallace has presented us with an oxymoron: the ‘fucking human being’ can be both ‘fucking’ and ‘human’ precisely by virtue of its ability to describe its own existence. We might even boil Wallace’s words down to a tightly inverted truism: fiction celebrates the human animal’s ability to write fiction. ■

Runner up in the ISIS Essay Competition

fucking ” human being is it ?

David Foster Wallace

IS IT RATIONAL

TO FEAR

YOUR OWN

DEATH

Runner up in the ISIS Essay Competition

By Jordan Horfield

am not dying, but I am afraid. My friend is. My dearest, closest friend, who I have spent thousands of hours and exchanged millions of words with: dying, quite quickly, and there is nothing really that anyone can do. I don’t know what afterwards will be like – I can’t imagine, and I don’t want to try. But I know there will be a gap, every day, where my friend used to be, and I’m afraid because I don’t know if, or how, I will fill it. Is this what it is like to fear death? Maybe it is, a little: this dark apprehension in the pit of your stomach, the sense that things aren’t going to be the same, that the plans and idle daydreams about the future are pointless now, because their point was a little too far away and is now beyond your reach. The not knowing. It can’t be much like this, though, because I haven’t cried, much. My friend cries a lot, and is more scared than I’ve ever seen anyone. Maybe, a little: like this, but for everything, because there is nothing in your life exempted, nothing else to turn your mind to, nothing that will go on. I get the impression that dying is not easy. People will laugh at that – or frown, perhaps – because it is so self-evident. But it is easy to forget how everything we say and do centres on life. People ask what I am doing after graduation. I have an answer; I don’t have to bite my tongue and push back my tears because I have just been reminded of a time when I will not be there. People complain about inconveniences, irrelevancies – we mock them, say, “you’ll probably live” – and it is just idiom, dead metaphor – except for my friend, who won’t. People plan their holidays, their birthdays, their careers, their marriages – a whole world, from which you are cut off. So you are afraid. And now we are asked: is it rational to be afraid? I do not know what this means. Just: should I fear my death?

But then why rational, why pretend that reason is what’s supposed to guide us here? Maybe: would an economist, or a robot, fear death? I find myself not caring. Here is something I learnt once. David Hume was a Scottish man who was troubled: he worried that people might be saying more than they knew. When you play billiards and hit one ball against another; when you put your hand in a flame; when you drink poison – how do you know these things will behave like they have before? And in the language of the time – how are they justified, how are they rational? Hume decided they weren’t. But it didn’t matter, he said: we learned them from habit, and would go on doing so and it didn’t much matter if they were rational or not. That, unsurprisingly, was not a pleasing answer for most. It was so upsetting to Immanuel Kant, so the story goes, that he was moved to action, to find a solution. Through hundreds of pages of prose dense and inscrutable even by the standards of German philosophy, he tells us that it is not just that we have these beliefs, and by habit always will – in fact we need them, we could have no experience of the world without them. Perhaps there is

So, is it rational to fear your own death? I want to know before I can answer: why are you asking? Why should I care? Because this is not, in my limited but terrifying experience, a domain in which your assessment of what is rational, of what you should do, plays any part. When your friend blacks out and stops breathing in front of you, your tired, sad, scared brain doesn’t have the time or the capacity to ask or remember what would be rational now. It panics: about what’s happening, about whether they are gone. And then your friend gasps back and looks at you and asks – “everything was dark… where was I?” – and you say something, and in all this there is not much thinking, not much choosing, not much space for rationality. And you are not even dying – so you offer your hand to hold, and you hug, and you to try to bury your fear because you know that theirs is worse. The question doesn’t belong. Its air of profundity, of being something that matters, is a lie – as if it would be any help, to know that your gnawing, crippling fear wasn’t rational, or any reassurance to hear that it was. And so is the belief that there should even be an answer – as if rationality, something that people invented, and that is mostly the plaything of academics toting models, would ever have some-

“ We are stuck here, out on the

far edge, with fear and hope and love, and that will have to do.

some story about what ‘rationality’ is, according to which these core beliefs are not rational – well, then, either that story is wrong, and rationality is something else, or it is something alien to us, something we need not and cannot care about because it impugns beliefs we need not and cannot abandon.

”

thing useful or meaningful to say about the hardest, most frightening – most inevitable – part of human life. Reason doesn’t come this far. We are stuck here, out on the far edge, with fear and hope and love, and that will have to do. ■

Extract from Lips, published in the anthology “I Clean For England: 18 One Act Plays for the 21st Century” Justin. Late twenties. Suit and shirt. Loose tie. He’s just got off work.

His Instagram isn’t exactly private. It’s like he wants me to know.

Pause.

I feel invincible now. This morning I was running and I fell. Hard. I had to see the doctor. It took less than an hour to fix up my knee. He grafted on some skin and done. I wasn’t even late. Not that anyone would notice if I were. We’re working on this big lawsuit. International, global scale. Billions. We’re all balls deep in it and the stress is just -

This isn’t flesh, no. But this isn’t plastic. It’s a multi-carbon compound; synthetic parts grown into and out of each other. Lungs and calves and a thorax and fingernails, all threaded together, all stitched into life. And it is life. It all works. Even down there. D’you think I’d have gone through with it otherwise?

At least when I was ill he’d kiss me. It’s when I’m finally healthy, invincible, that he goes. He left a note. Sorry. He has to go. Sorry. But right away. Sorry. He loves me but - he might not be gone long. A month, a year. Then two. It’s been three.

People do ask about my bits. Whether I’ve got them. They think I’m a ken-doll. That beneath these clothes I’m plastic. That, somehow, there’s space between my pelvis and thighs, holes running right through. They want to trace my seams with their fingers.

Stu encouraged me. That’s the worst of it. I woke up, after the operation, looking for him. Only him. I wanted to celebrate. I just wanted one kiss. But sick lips are better than unlips, apparently.

It doesn’t matter where. On a train, in a toilet, on the street. I am their old barbie. So they don’t think twice. They ask me to rip off my velcro clothes, like it’s nothing. So I do it, on occasion. They shut up when, suddenly, genitals in Tesco. The last guy blushed, picked up some buns and ran away. He didn’t even pay. But they shouldn’t ask. Treat me like I’m -

When I fell a woman stopped. I see her around. She runs with this most beautiful golden dog. Too beautiful. It must be inbred to disaster. It’ll die before its time. But it’s still gorgeous. The dog stops and furiously licks my sweaty red face. I’m laughing when she screams. The dog barks and, panicked, runs in circles. She points to where my electric veins, exposed to air, are crackling with life. I pull a smile across my face. I told her what I was. I told her not to worry.

There are days. Days when I don’t feel proper. When I feel unreal. He thought that. He wouldn’t say it but he did. I’ve become unreal to him. It’s easier for him that way. When he calls, he still says he loves me. He doesn’t see why these words don’t match the facts. Stu doesn’t seem to see all that ocean between us.

The brain. That’s the main difference. A computer is up here instead. But it allows all I might be. And it stores all I was. My memories. My fuck ups. A law degree. 4AM History Channel factoids. Half remembered poems. The sense of half-heard songs. Those driftwood memories from you don’t know where. A black and white newspaper face. The men you fall in love with from the windows on trains.

He has another. Stu doesn’t think I know. But I know. He doesn’t untag fast enough. I’ll be scrolling through Facebook and there he is, with this other. Doting on him. Just -

She pulls her dog away with a look that says death is more natural than this, than you. She leaves me grit-covered on the ground. That’s another question people have. After they’ve poked at my body. They recall the something inside. The something once housed in a fleshy brain like theirs. There was no between. I tell them that. For a moment it was dark. I was off. That’s all. A moment. No more. No light. No dark. No thoughts or gods. No nothing. Like a sleep where your head hits the pillow and morning. Like some magic trick. Some slight of hand. I try make it out to be more mystical than what it was: an email across bodies, my consciousness attached. At the end of the day, we’re just information. A beat. Justin pulls out his phone. He looks at it. No messages. He said he’d call. And he’s wrong, you know. I’m unchanged. These are the same lips he’d kiss on a hot day. The same lips he’d withdraw the ice-lolly from. He’d wait until I was done. He’d take the stick from between my lips and use it as a bookmark. For the book he then threw, alongside himself, down and in the grass. He’d smile. I’d chide. I’d say Stu, you’re disturbing butterflies. Justin shoves the phone in his pocket. I’d never show my genitals in public. I’m a lawyer. I don’t break real laws. But I’ve thought about it. Hard. There’s always that impulse, isn’t there? To touch wet

paint. Run naked through streets. Kick kids. Drive off a bridge. It’s my birthday. Today. Don’t know if I mentioned that. Running, work and I’m seeing Mark later. It’s a two month celebration sort of thing. Me and Mark, there’s a warmth. Maybe more. I’ve told him about Stu. I’m going to tell Stu about him when he calls. Not that it’s not ended with Stu but - I need definitive outlines. Results and rulings. I won’t let him fade out and away. I won’t let him off the hook. Last year he forgot my birthday. So did everyone else. Mum used to phone on the day I woke up. Like I was never truly born. But there’s proof I was. I keep my black and white baby scan in my wallet. They’re starting to argue we should be licensed, identifiable in some way. It was one of those letters to the Times. Only a letter, but things have to start somewhere. Maybe these robots should give something back, they say. Recompense our expenditure, they say. Earn their keep. And people nod along. I read the comment section online. We want some form of proof that at one point these robots were alive, like us. As though we’re really so different.

But what’s proof enough? A photo? A baby scan? It could all be false. Birth certificates can be created. Doctors can be bribed. I’ve seen it all in court. The proof of a life is just Proof is more a question of faith, sometimes. ■

Fault Lines By Alex Paseltiner You miss the turn for the museum the day you say not like that

anyway and then all at once it’s my turn to say something and I say something

about how two months from now I’ll sit hands folded in my lap, bullet

train moving three hundred mph out of Tokyo toward something

like home. I won’t think about the tremors that level paper walls and power lines across a nation. These are the tracks that carry me lifting each car over

the cracks in the earth. This is the way the conductor smiles when he takes

my ticket because he knows that I know this impossible train is the last

hermetically-sealed place on the planet

and as soon as my car door opens everyone can tell all the clean and quiet air will be sucked right out.

t he f l ie s B y M i r i a m G o rd i s

ver our lunch break, we consider the implications of an existential hero who can’t act. Anina is sunk into a primeval gloom. She orders three donuts and pokes her way through them while we jabber. The way some stick-thin people can eat. I used to know a Latvian girl who ate a whole pizza every night, with pineapple and pepperoni, which is a whole different barrel of sins. The place we go plays cheerful soul music and the walls are covered head to toe in stripes of color and tiles of black and white. Anina says it’s the furthest we can go from death and doom and a play set to open in two days and I think she must be right. The little sandwich shop we used to brainstorm in was cheaper and closer and less crowded and less snobby boho chic than this, but the coffee tasted like mud and the walls were low and sad and dingy and you

could practically see the worms on the ground. “We should have done something else,” says Anina. “We should have done a musical.” We both laugh, laughter tinged with hysteria, because we’re in a mess and the idea of us doing a musical is laughable. You can have singing and dancing, running through cornfields, but neither of us are really chorus line style. The Flies is all about liberty, as Anina would say, the liberty to be whatever the hell you wanted because you weren’t really anything anyway. A continuous state of being was all social constructs to keep us from going crazy and eating each other’s bone marrow. I was on my hands and knees beginning of sophomore year

scrubbing out the fridge when I met Anina. She was eating a bag of pink candy and when she smiled at me, her teeth had a light rose enamel frosting. She was wearing a big straw hat like a Japanese anime princess and a t-shirt with a butterfly on it and I think there was dance music playing somewhere in the background or it might have been Labor Day and there might have been a festival in the park. I hated her immediately. “Hello, roommate” she said. It seems unfair to point out that this is mostly her fault, especially when she’s sunk into a gloomy sugar coma. She was the one who insisted on casting the German in the first place, although he showed the emotional depth of a kitten in his audition. My cat, which is no longer a kitten, used to run through

moods like that, bouncing off the walls until he crashed and pouted. I told Anina that when we were casting late at night, with a bottle of tequila between us, but she was already in love with him and she told me if we didn’t cast him, it would probably ruin her life. “He looks like Gaston.” There was one time Anina and I went down to the 7/11 on the corner and got orange slushies and then we crawled under the broken fence in the old industrial development plant and we sat among the weeds and the pieces of broken pipe and we took turns holding our breath until the sky turned orange and glittery. It was like being little again when you spin on swings until you get dizzy and all the power-lines swoop past in sickening black flights. When I try to remember, I think that’s when we became friends, but we must have been friends before that anyway or we wouldn’t have done that. We were always all self-conscious with other people, going for Chinese takeout and pursing our lips over the menus looking for stuff that had less calories but didn’t look stupid and drinking wine out of paper cups like we were old ladies already. And when other people say that they want to have babies before they’re 30 and be lawyers and own matching plates so they fit together neatly and don’t look like a broken pyramid, we agree, but secretly we don’t know. Anina shakes coins out of her the bottom of her purse and goes back up to the counter. I wonder if I should intervene but she just comes back with coffee. Our play is set to open in three days and the German doesn’t even know his lines, as Anina keeps pointing out. I try to explain that it doesn’t matter because even when he says his lines right, I have to suppress

an overwhelming urge to burst out laughing. I was born here and I have to ask the way like a stranger. Anina says he looks like Gaston. We stayed up all night last New Year’s watching Disney movies, while everyone was out getting drunk or maybe at home with their families and their old friends from before we grew up. Aladdin was the best but Anina is in love with Gaston. At four in the morning on the first of January, she printed his face off in color on my printer and tried to tape it to her shirt. I told her she had to pay for the color. Fuck you, she said. “We should have done Beauty and the Beast,” says Anina. Her eyes are already spinning like pinwheels and I’m afraid of what the combination of caffeine and sugar will do. I think maybe I should take her to the toilet and hold her head down until she brings it all back up but they might kick us out. “No one would have noticed if the German can’t sing as soon as they saw him. We would have blown their minds.” Singing would have been the least of it, I guess. In our play, the German kills his mother. He wanders around this broken-down old city where he was born for a while, pretending to be a stranger, and then he meets his sister and they decide to murder their mother. She hasn’t seen him since he was a baby but she loves him anyway, maybe because they’re related or because he looks noble and so on. They also have a plague of flies. They’re flies because of rot and mold and that awful buzzing they make like drone sirens. But I always think of them as

mosquitos. One summer at home, when I had a real life with a house and a garden gate and three dogs, it got up to 110° and I was really bored. So I ate a can of ibuprofen and I cut my wrists with one of the beer cans from the recycling and lay down in the garden. The blood that came out was dark and soft and it came in little trickles, not dramatic gushes. I watched it on the grass until I fell asleep and had a dream about the little soldier ants marching up my legs with blades of grass on their backs, back and forth in the white-hot heat, to build themselves a house. When I woke up, the blood had stopped, because I didn’t know you had to be in a bathtub, but there wasn’t a full inch of my skin that wasn’t covered in mosquito bites. I think the thing about our existential play is that it’s confusing. Some people laugh to tears and some people are so bored they could shoot themselves and you’re never quite sure when it’s over. Not everyone who kills their mother is all bad but it’s not a psycho drama either: inside the mind of a killer, from crazy to the padded cell. Maybe that’s the German’s problem. He wanted to talk everything through, analyze it to death, resurrect the ghost of Sigmund Freud and develop the Oedipus complex into full-blown glory. Anina said we should go for milkshakes and brainstorm and I said that was fine, they could go, and she gave me dagger eyes. “If you like him,” I asked him afterwards, “why didn’t you take him out alone?” She sighs like I’m a stupid kid and she has to humor me. Pretty people, according to Anina, are better if you keep them at a distance. You want to pull people inside you, but then you get sick of them. Anina wants to stay in love with

the German because it gives her something to think about. At Christmastime, we went to the shopping mall. There were Christmas displays in all the windows and there was a Santa collecting money for babies and they were playing Christmas music over the loudspeaker. It was sunny outside but you could sort of smell fir trees and gingerbread cookies in the air if you closed your eyes and squeezed up your face. Anina and me went past all the pretty party dresses and the root beer floats and we went wandering through the home department, buying stuff for our house. They had shiny white futons and leathery couches and princess bedframes with curtain rods, rows and rows of frying pans and sharp steel knives and vegetable peelers and cake plates and cookie jars that said COOKIES on them. We got plenty of that stuff but we also decided to get a bag of soil in case we wanted to plant a garden and a birdhouse to hang in the window. Office chairs were easy, spin them around to see which has the most swivel, but we argued over towels. Anina wanted the kind you had when you were small and you went to the beach, with the Lion King on it, and I wanted the big fluffy kind they give you in knockoff resort hotels. If you argue over towels, maybe you shouldn’t start a life together. So we hid the cart in the back of the store, where all the frozen meat was, and left it there. Ahead of us in line at the checkout, there were three generations of a family, grandparents and parents and two kids, all fat and happy and anxious, buying batteries and a pack of chewing gum. We just bought a bag of Skittles and sat on the fire escape and ate them all so later when I spat into the sink, it came out all the colors of the rainbow. ■

Pavement Cracks I shall cast these cracks in the pavement with molten gold, so that I may hold these seconds turned to hollow streams; these chasms of a past I want to chase. Before the concrete bolts once more, let time thaw â&#x20AC;&#x201C; then freeze.

Anna Stephens

Belleville Satie stirs, while breeze seeps through a window left ajar in Belleville, our home. The scent of white wine, our blood. The salt lamp kindling. Your precious orchids growing jealous

Anna Stephens

ARTISTIC

CREDIT Ed Freeman edfreeman.com 1, 20-22, 60

McKay Savage (modifications) flickr.com/photos/mckaysavage/ 51

Jacob Lindell

shortstrolls.tumblr.com

T HE T E A M Editors

Sadie Levy Gale

Creative Director

Mack Grenfell

Olivia Yallop

Deputy Editors Jazz Adamson Holly Whiston Raphael Hogarth Miranda Hall Daniella Shreir Sub Editors Chloe Ingersent Ed Siddons Thea Slotover Huw Spencer Josh Dolphin Lamorna Ash Creative Team Holly Isard Mirren Kessling Emma Snashall Daniella Shreir Illustrators

Olivia Rowland

Lucy Brackin

Events Director Charlie Silver Events Imogen Crane Emma Hewitt Helen Stevenson Niamh McIntyre Business Director Business

Thomas Byham Abi Dow

Broadcasting Frank Macpherson LĂŠa Carresse

Siena Martin Hendrik Ehlers

Published by Oxford Student Publications Limited Chairman Jonny Adams Managing Director Kalila Bolton Finance Director Minyoung Seo Company Secretary April Peake Directors Rowan Borchers Max Long Cover Artwork

Ed Freeman

Matt Broomfield