Academic literature on the topic 'Tour bus lines'

This story is about a kind of pilgrimage, which is connected to the course of events which occurred in Częstochowa on 22 September 1942. In the morning, the German Captain Degenhardt lined up around 8,000 Jews and commanded them to step either to the left or to the right. This efficient judge from the police force in Leipzig was rapid in his decisions and he thus settled the destinies of thousands of people. After the Polish Defensive War of 1939, the town (renamed Tschenstochau) had been occupied by Nazi Germany, and incorporated into the General Government. The Nazis marched into Częstochowa on Sunday, 3 September 1939, two days after they invaded Poland. The next day, which became known as Bloody Monday, approximately 150 Jews were shot deadby the Germans. On 9 April 1941, a ghetto for Jews was created. During World War II about 45,000 of the Częstochowa Jews were killed by the Germans; almost the entire Jewish community living there.The late Swedish Professor of Oncology, Jerzy Einhorn (1925–2000), lived in the borderhouse Aleja 14, and heard of the terrible horrors; a ghastliness that was elucidated and concretized by all the stories told around him. Jerzy Einhorn survived the ghetto, but was detained at the Hasag-Palcery concentration camp between June 1943 and January 1945. In June 2009, his son Stefan made a bus tour between former camps, together with Jewish men and women, who were on this pilgrimage for a variety of reasons. The trip took place on 22–28 June 2009 and was named ‘A journey in the tracks of the Holocaust’. Those on the Holocaust tour represented different ‘pilgrim-modes’. The focus in this article is on two distinct differences when it comes to creed, or conceptions of the world: ‘this-worldliness’ and ‘other- worldliness’. And for the pilgrims maybe such distinctions are over-schematic, though, since ‘sacral fulfilment’ can be seen ‘at work in all modern constructions of travel, including anthropology and tourism’.

Le mouvement insurrectionnel de 1837-38 a été interprété de multiples façons. Certains historiens y ont vu le fruit d'une poussée subite de colère et d'indignation, évidemment non préméditée, qui aurait été déclenchée par les résolutions de Lord Russell qui violaient un principe constitutionnel. Cette vue des choses nous paraît assez peu conforme à la mentalité canadienne-française. Le recours spontané aux armes n'a jamais été le moyen de prédilection utilisé par les Canadiens français pour réaliser leurs objectifs collectifs ou pour faire valoir leurs réclamations. La Fontaine qui les connaissait bien disait que leur arme principale était l'inertie et, ajoutons-le, l'agitation verbale. Les insurrections ne s'expliquent principalement ni par une réaction spontanée ni par le souci de défendre des principes, soit politiques, soit constitutionnels. La masse paysanne ne vivait pas encore à l'âge du libéralisme ni à celui de la démocratie. D'autres historiens, parfois les mêmes, ont parlé d'aboutissement logique d'un long conflit politique et constitutionnel, par conséquent non nationaliste en ses dimensions principales mais ultimement de portée nationale. Quelques-uns cependant, tel Filteau, n'ont pas hésité à postuler le caractère nationaliste des troubles de 1837-38. On a aussi parlé d'explosion de caractère réformiste ; on a opéré un rapprochement avec le mouvement chartiste anglais, avec celui de la démocratie jacksonnienne ; finalement, on a annexé à une même réalité les insurrections des deux Canadas. On a voulu montrer par là qu'il s'agissait en définitive d'abattre des oligarchies coloniales afin de promouvoir un système colonial édifié sur des bases plus libérales. En somme, le phénomène insurrectionnel, pour autant que ses origines réelles, son caractère, son ampleur et ses conséquences sont mis en cause, a été simplifié à l'extrême. On ne doit pas non plus oublier les condamnations systématiques, appuyées sur le droit canon et les préceptes moraux, dont ce mouvement a été l'objet de la part de nombreux historiens. À cet égard, Chapais fait figure de modèle. Il est parvenu à surclasser bien des historiens-clercs sur leur propre terrain, soit, celui de la ferveur moralisante. Que beaucoup de ces interprétations soient partiellement justes, on l'admettra volontiers. Mais ce qui, dans l'ensemble, fait le plus défaut, c'est une perspective globale qui restitue à ce phénomène son sens et sa complexité. Il nous paraît évident que si le mouvement insurrectionnel n'avait eu que des racines politiques, même lointaines, il n'aurait pas eu lieu. Il est non moins clair que s'il n'avait engagé que des principes abstraits, il n'aurait en aucune façon mobilisé la masse rurale, pas plus, du reste, que les professions libérales. La crise qui prépara l'explosion insurrectionnelle était d'abord économique et sociale avant d'être politique. La crise agricole, les tensions démographiques et sociales, la situation particulièrement critique des professions libérales, sont les fondements principaux de la réaction nationaliste qui mobilise certaines élites et rallie une portion importante de la masse. On ne niera pas non plus l'influence des idéologies autres que le nationalisme. Nous avons déjà dit pourquoi elles ont fait intrusion dans la société canadienne-française et quelles fonctions elles y ont assumées. Le libéralisme français et anglais, le radicalisme britannique, la démocratie jeffersonnienne et jacksonnienne ont, tour à tour et à des degrés divers, influencé les élites politiques en fonction même des besoins qui leur étaient propres. Mais ces courants idéologiques n'ont jamais rejoint la masse rurale pas plus que la minorité ouvrière. Au total, on dira que ces systèmes de valeurs et de pensée demeurent tributaires des fins poursuivies par l'idéologie dominante, le nationalisme. Ajoutons qu'avant de s'exprimer dans deux insurrections successives, la réaction nationaliste, parce qu'elle visait au contrôle des structures politiques au profit des professions libérales et de la nationalité canadienne-française, s'affirme au niveau politique. A partir de 1806, les conflits politiques s'enracinent en même temps que les malaises économiques, les pressions démographiques et les tensions sociales. De temps à autre, en regard même des améliorations passagères survenues dans l'un ou l'autre secteur, on assiste à un amenuisement relatif des conflits. Même si l'initiative majeure appartient à l'économique, l'interdépendance des différents niveaux d'activité éclate à chaque instant. Il en est de même de la mentalité et des oscillations de la psychologie collective qui se situent en regard même de ce contexte global. L'heure est au pessimisme, aux visions tragiques et à l'agressivité. G.-J. de Lotbinière écrira en 1852 : « Il me semble que nous sommes dans un âge où l'on sent plus vivement qu'autrefois. Nos Pères savaient conserver jusqu'à la fin leur vivacité et leur gaieté malgré toutes les vicissitudes de la vie, maintenant nous prenons tout au sérieux : vie intime, vie publique. Nos blessures ne se cicatrisent plus. À qui la faute ? ». On ne doit pas oublier non plus le rôle capital des personnalités dominantes, en particulier le rôle de Papineau. Ce dernier est à la fois le reflet de la situation, un de ses principaux définisseurs et l'instrument par lequel s'exprime la réaction nationaliste. Ses ambitions, ses intérêts et surtout sa personnalité en font l'homme de cette réaction Arrivé à la tête du mouvement nationaliste pour toutes sortes de motivations, il parvient à en conserver la direction pendant près de vingt-cinq ans. Après 1830, il forme même le projet de devenir président d'une république canadienne-française indépendante ou rattachée à l'Angleterre par des liens fort ténus. Mais Papineau était l'homme de l'opposition, de l'obstruction systématique et de l'agitation verbale. Il n'était pas taillé pour l'action. Idéaliste, doctrinaire, indécis, profondément tiraillé entre des tendances contraires, son royaume était la Chambre d'Assemblée. Il était davantage un symbole que l'animateur d'un mouvement révolutionnaire. En somme, rien ne le prédisposait, si ce n'est son ambition et la fidélité au mythe qu'il incarnait, à être le chef d'une insurrection et à le demeurer malgré tout. Pourtant ses attitudes politiques conduisaient directement à une prise d'armes. L'obstruction systématique qu'il pratique après 1831-32 et l'intransigeance de ses revendications ne pouvaient avoir d'autre issue à moins que l'Angleterre et la minorité britannique du Bas-Canada ne consentissent à des concessions globales. Or, l'une et l'autre se refusent absolument à envisager cette option. Au moment où débute l'année 1837, les conflits politiques paraissent insolubles. En somme, les insurrections de 1837-38 seraient l'aboutissement logique d'un ensemble de facteurs, dont certains jouaient depuis les premières années du XIXe siècle. Est-ce à dire que cela suffisait à garantir le succès de l'opération ?

This article makes a case for the everyday while on tour and argues that the ability to continue with everyday routines and social relationships, while at the same time moving through and staying in liminal or atypical zones of tourist locales, is a key part of some kinds of tourist experience. Based on ethnographic field research with grey nomads (retirees who take extended tours of Australia in caravans and motorhomes) everyday life while on tour is examined, specifically the overlap and intersection between the out-of-the-ordinary “tourist zone” and the ordinariness of the “everyday zone.” The “everyday zone” and “tourist zone” can be readily differentiated by their obvious geospatial boundaries (being at home or being away on holiday). More specifically, the “everyday zone” refers to the routines of quotidian life, or the mundane practices which make up our daily, at-home lives. These practices are closely connected with the domestic realm and include consumption practices (clothing, cooking, mass media) and everyday social interactions. The “tourist zone” is similarly concerned with consumption. In this zone, however, tourists are seen to consume places; the culture, landscape, and peoples of exotic or out-of-the-ordinary tourist locales. Needless to say this consumption of place also includes the consumption of services and objects available in the tourist destinations (Urry, “The Consuming of Place” 220). The notion of tourists being away from home has often been contrasted with constructions of home—with the dull routines of everyday life—by social scientists and tourist marketers alike in an effort to illuminate the difference between being “away” and being at “home.” Scott McCabe and Elizabeth Stokoe suggest that peoples’ notion of “home” takes into account the meaning of being away (602). That is to say that when people are away from home, as tourists for example, they often compare and contrast this with the fundamental aspects of living at home. Others, however, argue that with the widespread use of mobile communication technologies, the distinction between the notion of being at “home” and being “away” becomes less clear (White and White 91). In this sense, the notion of home or the everyday is viewed with an eye towards social relationships, rather than any specific geographical location (Jamal and Hill 77–107; Massey 59–69; Urry, “The Tourist Gaze” 2–14; White and White 88–104). It can be argued, therefore, that tourism entails a fusion of the routines and relationships associated with the everyday, as well as the liminal or atypical world of difference. This article is based on semi-structured interviews with 40 grey nomads, as well as four months of ethnographic fieldwork carried out in rural and remote Australia—in Western Australia, the Northern Territory, and South Australia. Grey nomads have been part of Australian senior culture for at least four decades. They are a relatively heterogeneous group of tourists encompassing a range of socio-economic backgrounds, preferred activities, health status, and favoured destinations (Davies et al. 40–1; Economic Development Committee 4; Holloway 117–47), as well age cohorts—including the frugal generation (1910–1932), the silent generation (1931–1946), and the baby boomer generation (1946–65). Grey nomads usually tour as spousal couples (Tourism Research Australia 26; Onyx and Leonard 387). Some of these couples live solely on government pensions while others are obviously well-resourced—touring in luxury motorhomes costing well over half a million dollars. Some prefer to bush camp in national parks and other isolated locations, and some choose to stay long term in caravan parks socialising with other grey nomads and the local community. All grey nomads, nonetheless, maintain a particularly close link with the everyday while touring. Mobile communication technologies anchor grey nomads (and other tourists) to the everyday—allowing for ready contact with existing family and friends while on tour. Grey nomads’ mobile dwellings, their caravans and motorhomes, integrate familiar domestic spaces with a touring life. The interior and exterior spaces of these mobile dwellings allow for easy enactment of everyday, domestic routines and the privatised world of adult spousal relationships. This peripatetic form of dwelling, where the dwelling itself accommodates both travel and an everyday domestic life further blurs the distinctions between the “everyday zone” and the “tourist zone”. In this sense grey nomads carry out a lifestyle that is both anchored and mobile; anchored in the everyday domestic life while at the same time being nomadic or geographically unstable. This blurring of the boundaries between the “everyday zone” and “tourist zone” is attractive to senior tourists, offering them a relatively safe and comfortable incursion into tourist locales, where established routines and patterns of everyday life can be maintained. Other homes-away-from-homes such as serviced apartments, holiday homes and house swaps also offer greater connection to the everyday, but are geographically anchored to specific tourism spaces. The caravan or motorhome allows this at-home connection for the peripatetic tourist offsets the relative rigours of outback touring in remote and rural Australia. Everyday Social Relationships in the “Tourist Zone” When tourists go away from home, they are usually thought of as being away from both place (home) and relationships (family and friends). Nowadays, however, being away from home does not necessarily mean being away from family and friends. This is because the ease and speed of today’s telecommunication technologies allows for instantaneous contact with family and friends back home—or the virtual co-presence of family and friends while being away on tour. In the past, those friends and relations who were geographically isolated from each other still enjoyed social contact via letters and telegrams. Such contacts, however, occurred less frequently and message delivery took time. Long distance telephone calls were also costly and therefore used sparingly. These days, telecommunication technologies such as mobile phones and the Internet, as well as the lower cost of landline phone calls, mean that everyday social contact does not need to be put on hold. Keeping in contact is now a comparatively fast, inexpensive, and effortless activity and socialising with distant friends and relatives is now a routine activity (Larsen 24). All grey nomads travel with a mobile phone device, either a digital mobile, Next G or satellite phone (Obst, Brayley and King 8). These phones are used to routinely keep in contact with family and friends, bringing with them everyday familial relationships while on tour. “We ring the girls. We’ve got two daughters. We ring them once a week, although if something happens Debbie [daughter] will ring us” (Teresa). Grey nomads also take advantage of special deals or free minutes when they scheduled weekly calls to family or friends. “I mainly [use] mobile, then I ring, because I’ve got that hour, free hour” (Helen). E-mail is also a favoured way of keeping in contact with family and friends for some grey nomads. This is because the asynchronicity of e-mail interaction is very convenient as they can choose the times when they pick up and send messages. “Oh, thank goodness for the e-mail” (Pat). Maintaining social contact with family and friends at a distance is not necessarily as straightforward as when grey nomads and other tourists are at home. According to discussants in this study and the Regional Telecommunications Independent Review Committee, mobile phone coverage within Australia is still rather patchy when outside major metropolitan areas. Consequently, the everyday task of kin keeping via the phone can be somewhat intermittent, especially for those grey nomads who spend a great deal of time outside major towns in rural and remote Australia. “You can never get much [reception] but [...] they can just ring the mobile and just leave a message and we will get that message [later]” (Rena). Similarly, using the Internet to e-mail family and friends and catch up with online banking can only be carried out when passing through larger towns. “I do it [using the Internet] like every major town we went through. I’d stop and do a set of e-mails and I used to do my banking” (Maureen). The intermittent phone coverage in remote and rural Australia was not always viewed as an inconvenience by discussants in this study. This is because continuing engagement with family and friends while on tour may leave little respite from the ongoing obligations or any difficulties associated with family and friends back home, and encroach on the leisure and relaxation associated with grey nomad touring. “I don’t want the phone to ring […] That’s one thing I can do without, the phone ringing, especially at 4:00 in the morning” (Rena). In this way, too much co-presence, in the form of mobile phone calls from family and friends, can be just as much a nuisance when away from home as when at home—and impinge on the feeling of “being away from it all.” Naomi White and Peter White also suggest that “being simultaneously home and away is not always experienced in a positive light” (98) and at times, continued contact (via the phone) with friends and family while touring is not satisfying or enjoyable because these calls reiterate the “dynamics evident in those that are [usually] geographically proximate” (100). Thus, while mobile communication technologies are convenient tools for grey nomads and other tourists which blur the boundaries between the “everyday zone” and “tourist zones” in useful and pleasurable ways, their overuse may also encroach on tourists’ away time, thus interfering with their sense of solitude and quiescence when touring in remote or rural Australia. The “Everyday Zone” of the Caravan or Motorhome Being a tourist involves “everyday practices, ordinary places and significant others, such as family members and friends, but co-residing and at-a-distance” (Larsen 26). While tourism involves some sense of liminality, in reality, it is interspersed with the actuality of the everyday routines and sociabilities enacted while touring. Tim Edensor notes that; Rather than transcending the mundane, most forms of tourism are fashioned by culturally coded escape attempts. Moreover, although suffused with notions of escape from normativity, tourists carry quotidian habits and responses with them: they are part of the baggage. (61) Grey nomads go further than this by bringing on tour with them a domestic space in which everyday routines and sociabilities are sustained. Travelling in this manner “makes possible, and probably encourages, greater continuity with everyday routine than many other kinds of holiday making” (Southerton et al. 6). To be able to sleep in your own bed with your own pillow and linen, or perhaps travel with your dogs, makes caravanning and motorhoming an attractive touring option for many people. Thus, the use of caravans or motorhomes when travelling brings with it a great deal of mobile domesticity while on tour. The caravan or motorhome is furnished with most of the essentially-domestic objects and technologies to enable grey nomads to sleep, eat, relax, and be entertained in a manner similar to that which they enjoy in the family home, albeit within smaller dimensions. Lorna: We have shower, toilet. We had microwave, stereo. We have air conditioning and heating.Eric: Yeah, reverse cycle air conditioning.Lorna: Reverse cycle. What else do we have?Eric: Hot water service. Gas or 240 volt. 12 volt converter in that, which is real good, it runs your lights, runs everything like that. You just hook it into the main power and it converts it to 12 volt. Roll out awning plus the full annex.Lorna: Full annex. What else do we have? There’s a good size stove in it. The size of caravans and motorhomes means that many domestic tasks often take less time or are simplified. Cleaning the van takes a lot less time and cooking often becomes simplified, due to lack of bench and storage space. Women in particular like this aspect of grey nomad travel. “It is great. Absolutely. You don’t have toilets to clean, you don’t have bathrooms to clean. Cooking your meals are easier because everything is all […] Yeah. It’s more casual” (Sonya). This touring lifestyle also introduces new domestic routines, such as emptying chemical toilets, filling water tanks, towing and parking the van and refilling gas tanks, for example. Nonetheless grey nomads, spend significantly less time on these domestic tasks when they are touring. In this sense, the caravan or motorhome brings with it the comforts and familiarity of home, while at the same time minimising the routine chores involved in domestic life. With the core accoutrements of everyday life available, everyday activities such as doing the dishes, watching television, preparing and eating a meal—as well as individual hobbies and pastimes—weave themselves into a daily life that is simultaneously home and away. This daily life, at home in the caravan or motorhome, brings with it possibilities of a domestic routinised lifestyle—one that provides welcome comfort and familiarity when travelling and a retreat from the demands of sightseeing. On the farm I used to make jam and cakes, so I do it again [in the caravan]. I make jam, I made marmalade a couple of weeks ago. We’d often stay home [in the caravan], I’d just clean or do a bit of painting. (Jenny) Touring in a caravan or motorhome allows for some sense of predictability: that you own and control the private spaces of your own mobile dwelling, and can readily carry out everyday domestic routines and sociabilities. “We go for a long walk. We come back and we see friends and we stop and have a coffee with them, and then you come home in the caravan at 2.30 and you can still have lunch” (Yvonne). Touring in a caravan or motorhome also frees grey nomads from dependence on prearranged tourist experiences such as organised tours or hotel meal times where much of the tourist experience can be regimented. We always went in hotels and you always had to dress up, and you had to eat before a certain time, and you had your breakfast before a certain time. And after 2.30 you can’t have lunch anymore and sometimes we have lunch at 2 o’clock. I like the caravan park [better]. (Donald) Despite the caravan or motorhome having close links with everyday life and the domestic realm, its ready mobility offers a greater sense of autonomy while touring: that you are unfettered, not bound to any specific place or timetable, and can move on at whim. Grey nomads often cross paths with other tourists dependent on guided bus tours. “They go in [to Kakadu] on a bus trip. All they do is go in on the main road, they’re in there for the day and there’re back. That’s absolutely ridiculous” (Vance). This autonomy, or freedom to structure their own tourist experiences, allows grey nomads the opportunity to travel at a leisurely pace. Even those grey nomads who travel to the same northern destination every year take their time and enjoy other tourist locations along the way. We take our time. This time, last time, we did three weeks before we got in [to] Broome. We spent a lot [of time] in Karratha but also in Geraldton. And when we came back, in Kalbarri, [we had] a week in Kalbarri. But it’s nice going up, you know. You go all through the coast, along the coast. (John) Caravan or motorhome use, therefore, provides for a routinised everyday life while at the same time allowing a level of autonomy not evident in other forms of tourism—which rely more heavily on pre-booking accommodation and transport options. These contradictory aspects of grey nomad travel, an everyday life of living in a caravan or motorhome coupled with freedom to move on in an independent manner, melds the “everyday zone” and the “tourist zone” in a manner appealing to many grey nomads. Conclusion Theories of tourism tend to pay little attention to the aspects of tourism that involve recurrent activities and an ongoing connectedness with everyday life. Tourism is often defined: by contrasting it to home geographies and everydayness: tourism is what they are not. [...] The main focus in such research is on the extraordinary, on places elsewhere. Tourism is an escape from home, a quest for more desirable and fulfilling places. (Larsen 21) Nonetheless, tourism involves everyday routines, everyday spaces and an everyday social life. Grey nomads find that mobile phones and the Internet make possible the virtual co-presence of family and friends allowing everyday relationships to continue while touring. Nonetheless, the pleasure of ongoing contact with distant family and friends while touring may at times encroach on the quietude or solitude grey nomads experienced when touring remote and rural Australia. In addition to this, grey nomads’ caravans and motorhomes are equipped with the many comforts and domestic technologies of home, making for the continuance of everyday domiciliary life while on tour, further obfuscating the boundaries between the “tourist zone” and the “everyday zone.” In this sense grey nomads lead a lifestyle that is both anchored and mobile. This anchoring involves dwelling in everyday spaces, carrying out everyday domestic and social routines, as well as maintaining contact with friends and family via mobile communication technologies. This anchoring allows for some sense of predictability: that you own and control the private spaces of your own mobile dwelling, and can readily carry out everyday domestic routines and sociabilities. Conversely, the ready mobility of the caravan or motorhome offers a sense of autonomy: that you are unfettered, not bound to any specific place and can move on at whim. This peripatetic form of dwelling, where the dwelling itself is the catalyst for both travel and an everyday domestic life, is an under researched area. Mobile dwellings such as caravans, motorhomes, and yachts, constitute dwellings that are anchored in the everyday yet unfixed to any one locale. References Davies, Amanda, Matthew Tonts, and Julie Cammell. Coastal Camping in the Rangelands: Emerging Opportunities for Natural Resource Management. Perth: Rangelands WA, 2009. 24 Sep. 2011 ‹http://www.rangelandswa.com.au/pages/178/publications›. Economic Development Committee. Inquiry into Developing Queensland’s Rural and Regional Communities through Grey Nomad Tourism. Brisbane: Queensland Parliament, 2011. 23 Sep. 2011 ‹http://www.parliament.qld.gov.au/Documents/TableOffice/TabledPapers/2011/5311T3954.pdf›. Edensor, Tim. “Performing Tourism, Staging Tourism: (Re)Producing Tourist Space and Practice.” Tourist Studies 1 (2001): 59–81. Holloway, Donell. Grey Nomads: Retirement, Leisure and Travel in the Australian Context. PhD diss. Edith Cowan University: Perth, 2010. Jamal, Tanzin, and Steve Hill. “The Home and the World: (Post) Touristic Spaces of (in) Authenticity.” The Tourist as a Metaphor of The Social World. Ed. Graham Dann. Wallingford: CAB International, 2002. 77–107. Larsen, Jonas. “De-Exoticizing Tourist Travel: Everyday Life and Sociality on the Move.” Leisure Studies 27 (2008): 21–34. Massey, Doreen. “Power-Geometry and a Progressive Sense of Place.” Mapping the Futures: Local Cultures, Global Change. Eds. Jon Bird et al. London: Routeledge, 1993. 59–69. McCabe, Scott, and Elizabeth Stokoe. “Place and Identity in Tourists’ Accounts.” Annals of Tourism Research 31 (2004): 601–22. Obst, Patricia L., Nadine Brayley, and Mark J. King. “Grey Nomads: Road Safety Impacts and Risk Management.” 2008 Australasian Road Safety Research, Policing and Education Conference. Adelaide: Engineers Australia, 2008. Onyx, Jenny, and Rosemary Leonard. “The Grey Nomad Phenomenon: Changing the Script of Aging.” The International Journal of Aging and Human Development 64 (2007): 381–98. Regional Telecommunications Independent Review Committee. Regional Telecommunications Review Report: Framework for the Future. Canberra: RTIRC, 2008. Southerton, Dale, Elizabeth Shove, Alan Warde, and Rosemary Dean. “Home from Home? A Research Note on Recreational Caravanning.” Department of Sociology, Lancaster University. 1998. 10 Jan. 2009 ‹http://www.lancs.ac.uk/fass/sociology/papers/southerton-et-al-home-from-home.pdf›. Tourism Research Australia. Understanding the Caravan industry in WA: Grey Nomads—Fast Facts. Perth, Australia: Tourism WA (n.d.). Urry, John. “The Consuming of Place.” Discourse, Communication, and Tourism. Eds. Adam Jaworski and Annette Pritchard. Clevedon: Channel View Publications, 2005. 19–27. ———. The Tourist Gaze. London: Sage, 2002. White, Naomi, and Peter White. “Home and Away: Tourists in a Connected World.” Annals of Tourism Research 34 (2006): 88–104.

Find your black holes and white walls, know them … it is the only way you will be able to dismantle them and draw your lines of flight.—Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus Defined by originator David Belle as “an art to help you pass any obstacle”, the practice of “parkour” or “free running” constitutes both a mode of movement and a new way of interacting with the urban environment. Parkour was created by Belle (partly in collaboration with his childhood friend Sébastien Foucan) in France in the late 1980s. As seen in the following short video “Rush Hour”, a trailer for BBC One featuring Belle, parkour practitioners (known as “traceurs”), leap, spring, and vault from objects in the urban milieu that are intended to limit movement (walls, curbs, railings, fences) or that unintentionally hamper passage (lampposts, street signs, benches) through the space. “Rush Hour” was among the first media representations of parkour, and it had a significant role in introducing and popularizing the practice in Britain. Parkour has subsequently been widely disseminated via news reports, Nike and Toyota ads, the documentaries Jump London (2003) and Jump Britain (2005), and feature films, including Luc Besson’s Yamakasi – Les Samouraïs des Temps Modernes (2001) and Banlieu 13 (2004; just released in the U.S. as District B13), starring David Belle as Leto and Cyril Raffaelli as Damien. Sébastien Foucan will appear in the upcoming James Bond film Casino Royale as Mollaka, a terrorist who is chased (parkour-style) and then killed by Bond. (Foucan can also be seen in the film’s trailer, currently available at both SonyPictures.com and AOL.com; the film itself is scheduled for release in November 2006). Madonna’s current “Confessions” tour features an extended parkour sequence (accompanying the song “Jump”), albeit one limited to the confines of a scaffold erected over the stage. Perhaps most important in the rapid development of parkour into a world-wide youth movement, however, has been the proliferation of parkour websites featuring amateur videos, photos, tutorials, and blogs. The word “parkour” is derived from the French “parcours” (as the sport is known in France): a line, course, circuit, road, way or route, and the verb “parcourir”: to travel through, to run over or through, to traverse. As a physical discipline, parkour might be said to have a “poetics” — first, in general, in the Aristotelian sense of constructing through its various techniques (tekhnē) the drama of each parkour event. Secondly, one can consider parkour following Aristotle’s model of four-cause analysis as regards its specific materials (the body and the city), form or “vocabulary” of movements (drawn primarily from gymnastics, the martial arts, and modern dance), genre (as against, say, gymnastics), and purpose, including its effects upon its audience and the traceurs themselves. The existing literature on parkour (at this point, mostly news reports or websites) tends to emphasize the elements of form or movement, such as parkour’s various climbs, leaps, vaults, and drops, and the question of genre, particularly the ongoing, heated disputes among traceurs as to what is or is not true parkour. By contrast, my argument in this essay will focus principally on the materials and purpose of parkour: on the nature of the city and the body as they relate to parkour, and on the ways in which parkour can be seen to “remap” urban space and to demonstrate a resistance to its disciplinary functions, particularly as manifest in the urban street “grid.” The institution of the street “grid” (or variations upon it such as Haussmann’s Parisian star-configuration) facilitates both the intelligibility — in terms of both navigation and surveillance — and control of space in the city. It situates people in urban spaces in determinate ways and channels the flow of pedestrian and vehicular traffic. The “grid” thus carries a number of normalizing and disciplinary functions, creating in effect what the philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari refer to as a “striation” of urban space. This striation constitutes “a process of capture of flows of all kinds, populations, commodities or commerce, money or capital, etc.” within a field of determinate spatial coordinates (Deleuze and Guattari 386). It establishes “fixed paths in well-defined directions, which restrict speed, regulate circulation, relativize movement, and measure in detail the relative movements of subjects and objects” (Deleuze and Guattari 386). Many of these aspects of striation can be seen in the ways urban space is depicted in the “Rush Hour” video: in the gridlocked traffic, the flashing tail-lights, the “STOP” light and “WAIT” sign, the sign indicating the proper directional flow of traffic, and the grim, bundled-up pedestrians trudging home en masse along the congested streets. Against these images of conformity, regulation, and confinement, the video presents the parkour ethos of originality, “reach,” escape, and freedom. Belle’s (shirtless) aerial traversal of the urban space between his office and his flat — a swift, improvisational flow across the open rooftops (and the voids between them), off walls, and finally down the sloping roof into his apartment window — cuts across the striated space of the streets below and positions him, for that time, beyond the constrictions of the social realm and its “concrete” manifestations. Though parkour necessarily involves obstacles that must be “overcome,” the goal of parkour is to do this as smoothly and efficiently as possible, or, in the language of its practitioners, for the movement to be “fluid like water.” The experience of parkour might, then, be said to transform the urban landscape into “smooth space,” in Deleuze and Guattari’s sense of “a field without conduits or channels” (371), and thus into a space of uninhibited movement, at least in certain ideal moments. Parkour seems to trace a path of desire (even if the desire is simply to avoid the crowds and get home in time to watch BBC One) that moves along a Deleuzean “line of flight,” a potential avenue of escape from the forces of striation and repression. Here the body is propelled over or through (most parkour movement actually takes place at ground level) the strata of urban space, perhaps with the hope that, as Deleuze and Guattari suggest, “one will bolster oneself directly on a line of flight enabling one to blow apart strata, cut roots, and make new connections” (15). In the process, parkour becomes “an art of displacement,” appropriating urban space in ways that temporarily disrupt their controlling logics and even imply the possibility of a smooth space of desire. One might see parkour as an overcoming of social space (and its various constrictions and inhibitions of desire, its “stop” and “wait” signs) through the interplay of body and material barriers. The body becomes an instrument of freedom. This, again, is graphically conveyed in “Rush Hour” through the opening scene in which Belle strips off his business suit and through the subsequent repeated contrasts of his limber, revealed body to the rigid, swathed figures of the pedestrians below. In part an effect of the various camera angles from which it is shot, there is also an element of the “heroic” in this depiction of the body. This aspect of the representation appears to be knowingly acknowledged in the video’s opening sequence. The first frame is a close-up, tightly focused on a model of a ninja-like figure with a Japanese sword who first appears to be contemplating a building (with an out-of-focus Belle in the background contemplating it from the opposite direction), but then, in the next, full shot, is revealed to be scaling it — in the manner of superheroes and King Kong. The model remains in the frame as Belle undresses (inevitably evoking images of Clark Kent stripping down to his Superman costume) and, in the final shot of that sequence, the figure mirrors Belle’s as he climbs through the window and ascends the building wall outside. In the next sequence, Belle executes a breath-taking handstand on a guard railing on the edge of the roof with the panorama of the city behind him, his upper body spanning the space from the street to the edge of the city skyline, his lower body set against the darkening sky. Through the practice of parkour, the relation between body and space is made dynamic, two reality principles in concert, interacting amid a suspension of the social strata. One might even say that the urban space is re-embodied — its rigid strata effectively “liquified.” In Jump London, the traceur Jerome Ben Aoues speaks of a Zen-like “harmony between you and the obstacle,” an idealization of what is sometimes described as a state of “flow,” a seemingly effortless immersion in an activity with a concomitant loss of self-consciousness. It suggests a different way of knowing the city, a knowledge of experience as opposed to abstract knowledge: parkour is, Jaclyn Law argues, “about curiosity and seeing possibilities — looking at a lamppost or bus shelter as an extension of the sidewalk” (np.). “You just have to look,” Sébastien Foucan insists in Jump London, “you just have to think like children….” Parkour effectively remaps urban space, creating a parallel, “ludic” city, a city of movement and free play within and against the city of obstacles and inhibitions. It reminds us that, in the words of the philosopher of urban space Henri Lefebvre, “the space of play has coexisted and still coexists with spaces of exchange and circulation, political space and cultural space” (172). Parkour tells us that in order to enter this space of play, we only need to make the leap. References Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987. Jump London (2003). Mike Christie, director. Mike Smith, producer. Featuring Jerome Ben Aoues, Sébastien Foucan, and Johann Vigroux. Law, Jaclyn. “PK and Fly.” This Magazine May/June 2005 http://www.thismagazine.ca/issues/2005/05/>. Lefebvre, Henri. “Perspective or Prospective?” Writings on Cities. Trans. Eleonore Kofman and Elizabeth Lebas. Oxford: Blackwell, 1996. Rush Hour (2002). BBC One promotion trailer. Tom Carty, dir. Edel Erickson, pro. Produced by BBC Broadcast. See also: Wikipedia on parkour: http://www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkour> Parkour Worldwide Association: http://www.pawa.fr/> Parkour Net (multilingual): http://parkour.net/> NYParkour: http://www.nyparkour.com/> PKLondon.com: http://www.pklondon.com/> Nike’s “The Angry Chicken” (featuring Sébastien Foucan): http://video.google.com/videoplay? docid=-6571575392378784144&q=nike+chicken> There is an extensive collection of parkour videos available at YouTube A rehearsal clip featuring Sébastien Foucan coaching the dancers for Madonna’s Confessions tour can be seen at YouTube Citation reference for this article MLA Style Geyh, Paula. "Urban Free Flow: A Poetics of Parkour." M/C Journal 9.3 (2006). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0607/06-geyh.php>. APA Style Geyh, P. (Jul. 2006) "Urban Free Flow: A Poetics of Parkour," M/C Journal, 9(3). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0607/06-geyh.php>.

Este artigo analisa conflitos e articulações por trás da transformação de uma antiga área alagadiça, as várzeas do rio Pinheiros, em uma das regiões mais valorizadas de São Paulo e, atualmente, sua fachada globalizada. O texto discute, particularmente, os nexos que se constituem, nas últimas décadas, entre a financeirização global da economia e os arranjos específicos que se configuram em São Paulo; entre mecanismos supostamente avançados – como operações urbanas, Cepacs e fundos de investimento imobiliário – e formas típicas de acumulação primitiva, nas quais força, fraude, opressão e pilhagem são exibidas de modo recorrente; entre “a cidade própria” das elites e a cidade dita clandestina, que ocupa beiras de córrego, encostas de morros, margens de represas. Tomo como referência três ícones dessa paisagem urbana: uma ponte estaiada, imagem-síntese da cenografia da “nova cidade”; um gigantesco emprendimento murado, que mescla residência, comércio de luxo e escritórios; e um complexo empresarial com torres de escritório e hotel, interligados por um shopping subterrâneo. PALAVRAS-CHAVE: globalização, financeirização, imóveis, São Paulo, cidade global. A BRIDGE TO SPECULATION - the art of rent in the staging of a “global city” Mariana Fix This paper analyzes the conflicts and articulations behind the transformation of an old swampish area, the meadows of the Pinheiros river, in one of the most valued regions of São Paulo and its globalized face. The text discusses particularly the connections made in the last decades between the global financialization of the economy and the specific arrangements that take place in São Paulo; among supposedly advanced mechanisms – such as urban operations, Cepacs and real estate investment funds – and typical forms of primitive accumulation, in which strength, frauds, oppression and pillage are recurrently exhibited; between the “city proper” of the elites and the so-called clandestine city, that occupies stream edges, hillsides, margins of dams. I investigate three icons of that urban landscape: a cable-supported bridge, synthesis of the “new city” scenery; a gigantic walled development, that mixes residential, luxury trade and office buildings; and a business compound with office and hotel towers, interlinked by an underground shopping center. KEYWORDS: globalization, financialization, real state, São Paulo, global city. UN PONT À LA SPÉCULATION - l´art de la rente dans la montage d´une “ville globale” Mariana Fix Cet article analyse les conflits et les négociations sous-jacentes à la transformation d’une ancienne région inondée, la plaine inondable du fleuve Pinheiros, située dans l’une des parties les plus valorisées de São Paulo et maintenant son côté mondialisé. On y présente en particulier les liens établis au cours des dernières décennies entre la financiarisation mondiale de l’économie et les agencements spécifiques qui surgissent à São Paulo; entre des mécanismes supposés avancés – tels les plans d’actions urbains, les Cepacs et les fonds d’investissement immobilier – et des formes typiques d’accumulation primitive dans lesquelles la force, la fraude l’oppression et le pillage se répètent constamment; entre la “ville typique” des élites et la ville, dite clandestine, qui occupe les bords des ruisseaux, les pentes des collines, les bas-côtés des barrages. Trois icônes de ce paysage urbain nous servent de points de repère: un pont suspendu , une image synthèse de la scénographie de la “nouvelle ville”; une oeuvre gigantesque murée qui mélange des résidences, des commerces de luxe et des bureaux; et un complexe d’entreprises avec des tours de bureaux et d’hôtels liées entre elles par un centre commercial souterrain. MOTS-CLÉS: mondialisation du capital, financiarisation, propriété foncière, São Paulo, ville globale. Publicação Online do Caderno CRH: http://www.cadernocrh.ufba.br

1991 An afternoon in late 1991 found me on a Sydney bus reading Brett Easton Ellis’ American Psycho (1991). A disembarking passenger paused at my side and, as I glanced up, hissed, ‘I don’t know how you can read that filth’. As she continued to make her way to the front of the vehicle, I was as stunned as if she had struck me physically. There was real vehemence in both her words and how they were delivered, and I can still see her eyes squeezing into slits as she hesitated while curling her mouth around that final angry word: ‘filth’. Now, almost fifteen years later, the memory is remarkably vivid. As the event is also still remarkable; this comment remaining the only remark ever made to me by a stranger about anything I have been reading during three decades of travelling on public transport. That inflamed commuter summed up much of the furore that greeted the publication of American Psycho. More than this, and unusually, condemnation of the work both actually preceded, and affected, its publication. Although Ellis had been paid a substantial U.S. $300,000 advance by Simon & Schuster, pre-publication stories based on circulating galley proofs were so negative—offering assessments of the book as: ‘moronic … pointless … themeless … worthless (Rosenblatt 3), ‘superficial’, ‘a tapeworm narrative’ (Sheppard 100) and ‘vile … pornography, not literature … immoral, but also artless’ (Miner 43)—that the publisher cancelled the contract (forfeiting the advance) only months before the scheduled release date. CEO of Simon & Schuster, Richard E. Snyder, explained: ‘it was an error of judgement to put our name on a book of such questionable taste’ (quoted in McDowell, “Vintage” 13). American Psycho was, instead, published by Random House/Knopf in March 1991 under its prestige paperback imprint, Vintage Contemporary (Zaller; Freccero 48) – Sonny Mehta having signed the book to Random House some two days after Simon & Schuster withdrew from its agreement with Ellis. While many commented on the fact that Ellis was paid two substantial advances, it was rarely noted that Random House was a more prestigious publisher than Simon & Schuster (Iannone 52). After its release, American Psycho was almost universally vilified and denigrated by the American critical establishment. The work was criticised on both moral and aesthetic/literary/artistic grounds; that is, in terms of both what Ellis wrote and how he wrote it. Critics found it ‘meaningless’ (Lehmann-Haupt C18), ‘abysmally written … schlock’ (Kennedy 427), ‘repulsive, a bloodbath serving no purpose save that of morbidity, titillation and sensation … pure trash, as scummy and mean as anything it depicts, a dirty book by a dirty writer’ (Yardley B1) and ‘garbage’ (Gurley Brown 21). Mark Archer found that ‘the attempt to confuse style with content is callow’ (31), while Naomi Wolf wrote that: ‘overall, reading American Psycho holds the same fascination as watching a maladjusted 11-year-old draw on his desk’ (34). John Leo’s assessment sums up the passionate intensity of those critical of the work: ‘totally hateful … violent junk … no discernible plot, no believable characterization, no sensibility at work that comes anywhere close to making art out of all the blood and torture … Ellis displays little feel for narration, words, grammar or the rhythm of language’ (23). These reviews, as those printed pre-publication, were titled in similarly unequivocal language: ‘A Revolting Development’ (Sheppard 100), ‘Marketing Cynicism and Vulgarity’ (Leo 23), ‘Designer Porn’ (Manguel 46) and ‘Essence of Trash’ (Yardley B1). Perhaps the most unambiguous in its message was Roger Rosenblatt’s ‘Snuff this Book!’ (3). Of all works published in the U.S.A. at that time, including those clearly carrying X ratings, the Los Angeles chapter of the National Organization for Women (NOW) selected American Psycho for special notice, stating that the book ‘legitimizes inhuman and savage violence masquerading as sexuality’ (NOW 114). Judging the book ‘the most misogynistic communication’ the organisation had ever encountered (NOW L.A. chapter president, Tammy Bruce, quoted in Kennedy 427) and, on the grounds that ‘violence against women in any form is no longer socially acceptable’ (McDowell, “NOW” C17), NOW called for a boycott of the entire Random House catalogue for the remainder of 1991. Naomi Wolf agreed, calling the novel ‘a violation not of obscenity standards, but of women’s civil rights, insofar as it results in conditioning male sexual response to female suffering or degradation’ (34). Later, the boycott was narrowed to Knopf and Vintage titles (Love 46), but also extended to all of the many products, companies, corporations, firms and brand names that are a feature of Ellis’s novel (Kauffman, “American” 41). There were other unexpected responses such as the Walt Disney Corporation barring Ellis from the opening of Euro Disney (Tyrnauer 101), although Ellis had already been driven from public view after receiving a number of death threats and did not undertake a book tour (Kennedy 427). Despite this, the book received significant publicity courtesy of the controversy and, although several national bookstore chains and numerous booksellers around the world refused to sell the book, more than 100,000 copies were sold in the U.S.A. in the fortnight after publication (Dwyer 55). Even this success had an unprecedented effect: when American Psycho became a bestseller, The New York Times announced that it would be removing the title from its bestseller lists because of the book’s content. In the days following publication in the U.S.A., Canadian customs announced that it was considering whether to allow the local arm of Random House to, first, import American Psycho for sale in Canada and, then, publish it in Canada (Kirchhoff, “Psycho” C1). Two weeks later, when the book was passed for sale (Kirchhoff, “Customs” C1), demonstrators protested the entrance of a shipment of the book. In May, the Canadian Defence Force made headlines when it withdrew copies of the book from the library shelves of a navy base in Halifax (Canadian Press C1). Also in May 1991, the Australian Office of Film and Literature Classification (OFLC), the federal agency that administers the classification scheme for all films, computer games and ‘submittable’ publications (including books) that are sold, hired or exhibited in Australia, announced that it had classified American Psycho as ‘Category 1 Restricted’ (W. Fraser, “Book” 5), to be sold sealed, to only those over 18 years of age. This was the first such classification of a mainstream literary work since the rating scheme was introduced (Graham), and the first time a work of literature had been restricted for sale since Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint in 1969. The chief censor, John Dickie, said the OFLC could not justify refusing the book classification (and essentially banning the work), and while ‘as a satire on yuppies it has a lot going for it’, personally he found the book ‘distasteful’ (quoted in W. Fraser, “Sensitive” 5). Moreover, while this ‘R’ classification was, and remains, a national classification, Australian States and Territories have their own sale and distribution regulation systems. Under this regime, American Psycho remains banned from sale in Queensland, as are all other books in this classification category (Vnuk). These various reactions led to a flood of articles published in the U.S.A., Canada, Australia and the U.K., voicing passionate opinions on a range of issues including free speech and censorship, the corporate control of artistic thought and practice, and cynicism on the part of authors and their publishers about what works might attract publicity and (therefore) sell in large numbers (see, for instance, Hitchens 7; Irving 1). The relationship between violence in society and its representation in the media was a common theme, with only a few commentators (including Norman Mailer in a high profile Vanity Fair article) suggesting that, instead of inciting violence, the media largely reflected, and commented upon, societal violence. Elayne Rapping, an academic in the field of Communications, proposed that the media did actively glorify violence, but only because there was a market for such representations: ‘We, as a society love violence, thrive on violence as the very basis of our social stability, our ideological belief system … The problem, after all, is not media violence but real violence’ (36, 38). Many more commentators, however, agreed with NOW, Wolf and others and charged Ellis’s work with encouraging, and even instigating, violent acts, and especially those against women, calling American Psycho ‘a kind of advertising for violence against women’ (anthropologist Elliot Leyton quoted in Dwyer 55) and, even, a ‘how-to manual on the torture and dismemberment of women’ (Leo 23). Support for the book was difficult to find in the flood of vitriol directed against it, but a small number wrote in Ellis’s defence. Sonny Mehta, himself the target of death threats for acquiring the book for Random House, stood by this assessment, and was widely quoted in his belief that American Psycho was ‘a serious book by a serious writer’ and that Ellis was ‘remarkably talented’ (Knight-Ridder L10). Publishing director of Pan Macmillan Australia, James Fraser, defended his decision to release American Psycho on the grounds that the book told important truths about society, arguing: ‘A publisher’s office is a clearing house for ideas … the real issue for community debate [is] – to what extent does it want to hear the truth about itself, about individuals within the community and about the governments the community elects. If we care about the preservation of standards, there is none higher than this. Gore Vidal was among the very few who stated outright that he liked the book, finding it ‘really rather inspired … a wonderfully comic novel’ (quoted in Tyrnauer 73). Fay Weldon agreed, judging the book as ‘brilliant’, and focusing on the importance of Ellis’s message: ‘Bret Easton Ellis is a very good writer. He gets us to a ‘T’. And we can’t stand it. It’s our problem, not his. American Psycho is a beautifully controlled, careful, important novel that revolves around its own nasty bits’ (C1). Since 1991 As unlikely as this now seems, I first read American Psycho without any awareness of the controversy raging around its publication. I had read Ellis’s earlier works, Less than Zero (1985) and The Rules of Attraction (1987) and, with my energies fully engaged elsewhere, cannot now even remember how I acquired the book. Since that angry remark on the bus, however, I have followed American Psycho’s infamy and how it has remained in the public eye over the last decade and a half. Australian OFLC decisions can be reviewed and reversed – as when Pasolini’s final film Salo (1975), which was banned in Australia from the time of its release in 1975 until it was un-banned in 1993, was then banned again in 1998 – however, American Psycho’s initial classification has remained unchanged. In July 2006, I purchased a new paperback copy in rural New South Wales. It was shrink-wrapped in plastic and labelled: ‘R. Category One. Not available to persons under 18 years. Restricted’. While exact sales figures are difficult to ascertain, by working with U.S.A., U.K. and Australian figures, this copy was, I estimate, one of some 1.5 to 1.6 million sold since publication. In the U.S.A., backlist sales remain very strong, with some 22,000 copies sold annually (Holt and Abbott), while lifetime sales in the U.K. are just under 720,000 over five paperback editions. Sales in Australia are currently estimated by Pan MacMillan to total some 100,000, with a new printing of 5,000 copies recently ordered in Australia on the strength of the book being featured on the inaugural Australian Broadcasting Commission’s First Tuesday Book Club national television program (2006). Predictably, the controversy around the publication of American Psycho is regularly revisited by those reviewing Ellis’s subsequent works. A major article in Vanity Fair on Ellis’s next book, The Informers (1994), opened with a graphic description of the death threats Ellis received upon the publication of American Psycho (Tyrnauer 70) and then outlined the controversy in detail (70-71). Those writing about Ellis’s two most recent novels, Glamorama (1999) and Lunar Park (2005), have shared this narrative strategy, which also forms at least part of the frame of every interview article. American Psycho also, again predictably, became a major topic of discussion in relation to the contracting, making and then release of the eponymous film in 2000 as, for example, in Linda S. Kauffman’s extensive and considered review of the film, which spent the first third discussing the history of the book’s publication (“American” 41-45). Playing with this interest, Ellis continues his practice of reusing characters in subsequent works. Thus, American Psycho’s Patrick Bateman, who first appeared in The Rules of Attraction as the elder brother of the main character, Sean – who, in turn, makes a brief appearance in American Psycho – also turns up in Glamorama with ‘strange stains’ on his Armani suit lapels, and again in Lunar Park. The book also continues to be regularly cited in discussions of censorship (see, for example, Dubin; Freccero) and has been included in a number of university-level courses about banned books. In these varied contexts, literary, cultural and other critics have also continued to disagree about the book’s impact upon readers, with some persisting in reading the novel as a pornographic incitement to violence. When Wade Frankum killed seven people in Sydney, many suggested a link between these murders and his consumption of X-rated videos, pornographic magazines and American Psycho (see, for example, Manne 11), although others argued against this (Wark 11). Prosecutors in the trial of Canadian murderer Paul Bernardo argued that American Psycho provided a ‘blueprint’ for Bernardo’s crimes (Canadian Press A5). Others have read Ellis’s work more positively, as for instance when Sonia Baelo Allué compares American Psycho favourably with Thomas Harris’s The Silence of the Lambs (1988) – arguing that Harris not only depicts more degrading treatment of women, but also makes Hannibal Lecter, his antihero monster, sexily attractive (7-24). Linda S. Kauffman posits that American Psycho is part of an ‘anti-aesthetic’ movement in art, whereby works that are revoltingly ugly and/or grotesque function to confront the repressed fears and desires of the audience and explore issues of identity and subjectivity (Bad Girls), while Patrick W. Shaw includes American Psycho in his work, The Modern American Novel of Violence because, in his opinion, the violence Ellis depicts is not gratuitous. Lost, however, in much of this often-impassioned debate and dialogue is the book itself – and what Ellis actually wrote. 21-years-old when Less than Zero was published, Ellis was still only 26 when American Psycho was released and his youth presented an obvious target. In 1991, Terry Teachout found ‘no moment in American Psycho where Bret Easton Ellis, who claims to be a serious artist, exhibits the workings of an adult moral imagination’ (45, 46), Brad Miner that it was ‘puerile – the very antithesis of good writing’ (43) and Carol Iannone that ‘the inclusion of the now famous offensive scenes reveals a staggering aesthetic and moral immaturity’ (54). Pagan Kennedy also ‘blamed’ the entire work on this immaturity, suggesting that instead of possessing a developed artistic sensibility, Ellis was reacting to (and, ironically, writing for the approval of) critics who had lauded the documentary realism of his violent and nihilistic teenage characters in Less than Zero, but then panned his less sensational story of campus life in The Rules of Attraction (427-428). Yet, in my opinion, there is not only a clear and coherent aesthetic vision driving Ellis’s oeuvre but, moreover, a profoundly moral imagination at work as well. This was my view upon first reading American Psycho, and part of the reason I was so shocked by that charge of filth on the bus. Once familiar with the controversy, I found this view shared by only a minority of commentators. Writing in the New Statesman & Society, Elizabeth J. Young asked: ‘Where have these people been? … Books of pornographic violence are nothing new … American Psycho outrages no contemporary taboos. Psychotic killers are everywhere’ (24). I was similarly aware that such murderers not only existed in reality, but also in many widely accessed works of literature and film – to the point where a few years later Joyce Carol Oates could suggest that the serial killer was an icon of popular culture (233). While a popular topic for writers of crime fiction and true crime narratives in both print and on film, a number of ‘serious’ literary writers – including Truman Capote, Norman Mailer, Kate Millet, Margaret Atwood and Oates herself – have also written about serial killers, and even crossed over into the widely acknowledged as ‘low-brow’ true crime genre. Many of these works (both popular or more literary) are vivid and powerful and have, as American Psycho, taken a strong moral position towards their subject matter. Moreover, many books and films have far more disturbing content than American Psycho, yet have caused no such uproar (Young and Caveney 120). By now, the plot of American Psycho is well known, although the structure of the book, noted by Weldon above (C1), is rarely analysed or even commented upon. First person narrator, Patrick Bateman, a young, handsome stockbroker and stereotypical 1980s yuppie, is also a serial killer. The book is largely, and innovatively, structured around this seeming incompatibility – challenging readers’ expectations that such a depraved criminal can be a wealthy white professional – while vividly contrasting the banal, and meticulously detailed, emptiness of Bateman’s life as a New York über-consumer with the scenes where he humiliates, rapes, tortures, murders, mutilates, dismembers and cannibalises his victims. Although only comprising some 16 out of 399 pages in my Picador edition, these violent scenes are extreme and certainly make the work as a whole disgustingly confronting. But that is the entire point of Ellis’s work. Bateman’s violence is rendered so explicitly because its principal role in the novel is to be inescapably horrific. As noted by Baelo Allué, there is no shift in tone between the most banally described detail and the description of violence (17): ‘I’ve situated the body in front of the new Toshiba television set and in the VCR is an old tape and appearing on the screen is the last girl I filmed. I’m wearing a Joseph Abboud suit, a tie by Paul Stuart, shoes by J. Crew, a vest by someone Italian and I’m kneeling on the floor beside a corpse, eating the girl’s brain, gobbling it down, spreading Grey Poupon over hunks of the pink, fleshy meat’ (Ellis 328). In complete opposition to how pornography functions, Ellis leaves no room for the possible enjoyment of such a scene. Instead of revelling in the ‘spine chilling’ pleasures of classic horror narratives, there is only the real horror of imagining such an act. The effect, as Kauffman has observed is, rather than arousing, often so disgusting as to be emetic (Bad Girls 249). Ellis was surprised that his detractors did not understand that he was trying to be shocking, not offensive (Love 49), or that his overall aim was to symbolise ‘how desensitised our culture has become towards violence’ (quoted in Dwyer 55). Ellis was also understandably frustrated with readings that conflated not only the contents of the book and their meaning, but also the narrator and author: ‘The acts described in the book are truly, indisputably vile. The book itself is not. Patrick Bateman is a monster. I am not’ (quoted in Love 49). Like Fay Weldon, Norman Mailer understood that American Psycho posited ‘that the eighties were spiritually disgusting and the author’s presentation is the crystallization of such horror’ (129). Unlike Weldon, however, Mailer shied away from defending the novel by judging Ellis not accomplished enough a writer to achieve his ‘monstrous’ aims (182), failing because he did not situate Bateman within a moral universe, that is, ‘by having a murderer with enough inner life for us to comprehend him’ (182). Yet, the morality of Ellis’s project is evident. By viewing the world through the lens of a psychotic killer who, in many ways, personifies the American Dream – wealthy, powerful, intelligent, handsome, energetic and successful – and, yet, who gains no pleasure, satisfaction, coherent identity or sense of life’s meaning from his endless, selfish consumption, Ellis exposes the emptiness of both that world and that dream. As Bateman himself explains: ‘Surface, surface, surface was all that anyone found meaning in. This was civilisation as I saw it, colossal and jagged’ (Ellis 375). Ellis thus situates the responsibility for Bateman’s violence not in his individual moral vacuity, but in the barren values of the society that has shaped him – a selfish society that, in Ellis’s opinion, refused to address the most important issues of the day: corporate greed, mindless consumerism, poverty, homelessness and the prevalence of violent crime. Instead of pornographic, therefore, American Psycho is a profoundly political text: Ellis was never attempting to glorify or incite violence against anyone, but rather to expose the effects of apathy to these broad social problems, including the very kinds of violence the most vocal critics feared the book would engender. Fifteen years after the publication of American Psycho, although our societies are apparently growing in overall prosperity, the gap between rich and poor also continues to grow, more are permanently homeless, violence – whether domestic, random or institutionally-sanctioned – escalates, and yet general apathy has intensified to the point where even the ‘ethics’ of torture as government policy can be posited as a subject for rational debate. The real filth of the saga of American Psycho is, thus, how Ellis’s message was wilfully ignored. While critics and public intellectuals discussed the work at length in almost every prominent publication available, few attempted to think in any depth about what Ellis actually wrote about, or to use their powerful positions to raise any serious debate about the concerns he voiced. Some recent critical reappraisals have begun to appreciate how American Psycho is an ‘ethical denunciation, where the reader cannot but face the real horror behind the serial killer phenomenon’ (Baelo Allué 8), but Ellis, I believe, goes further, exposing the truly filthy causes that underlie the existence of such seemingly ‘senseless’ murder. But, Wait, There’s More It is ironic that American Psycho has, itself, generated a mini-industry of products. A decade after publication, a Canadian team – filmmaker Mary Harron, director of I Shot Andy Warhol (1996), working with scriptwriter, Guinevere Turner, and Vancouver-based Lions Gate Entertainment – adapted the book for a major film (Johnson). Starring Christian Bale, Chloë Sevigny, Willem Dafoe and Reese Witherspoon and, with an estimated budget of U.S.$8 million, the film made U.S.$15 million at the American box office. The soundtrack was released for the film’s opening, with video and DVDs to follow and the ‘Killer Collector’s Edition’ DVD – closed-captioned, in widescreen with surround sound – released in June 2005. Amazon.com lists four movie posters (including a Japanese language version) and, most unexpected of all, a series of film tie-in action dolls. The two most popular of these, judging by E-Bay, are the ‘Cult Classics Series 1: Patrick Bateman’ figure which, attired in a smart suit, comes with essential accoutrements of walkman with headphones, briefcase, Wall Street Journal, video tape and recorder, knife, cleaver, axe, nail gun, severed hand and a display base; and the 18” tall ‘motion activated sound’ edition – a larger version of the same doll with fewer accessories, but which plays sound bites from the movie. Thanks to Stephen Harris and Suzie Gibson (UNE) for stimulating conversations about this book, Stephen Harris for information about the recent Australian reprint of American Psycho and Mark Seebeck (Pan Macmillan) for sales information. References Archer, Mark. “The Funeral Baked Meats.” The Spectator 27 April 1991: 31. Australian Broadcasting Corporation. First Tuesday Book Club. First broadcast 1 August 2006. Baelo Allué, Sonia. “The Aesthetics of Serial Killing: Working against Ethics in The Silence of the Lambs (1988) and American Psycho (1991).” Atlantis 24.2 (Dec. 2002): 7-24. Canadian Press. “Navy Yanks American Psycho.” The Globe and Mail 17 May 1991: C1. Canadian Press. “Gruesome Novel Was Bedside Reading.” Kitchener-Waterloo Record 1 Sep. 1995: A5. Dubin, Steven C. “Art’s Enemies: Censors to the Right of Me, Censors to the Left of Me.” Journal of Aesthetic Education 28.4 (Winter 1994): 44-54. Dwyer, Victor. “Literary Firestorm: Canada Customs Scrutinizes a Brutal Novel.” Maclean’s April 1991: 55. Ellis, Bret Easton. American Psycho. London: Macmillan-Picador, 1991. ———. Glamorama. New York: Knopf, 1999. ———. The Informers. New York: Knopf, 1994. ———. Less than Zero. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1985. ———. Lunar Park. New York: Knopf, 2005. ———. The Rules of Attraction. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987. Fraser, James. :The Case for Publishing.” The Bulletin 18 June 1991. Fraser, William. “Book May Go under Wraps.” The Sydney Morning Herald 23 May 1991: 5. ———. “The Sensitive Censor and the Psycho.” The Sydney Morning Herald 24 May 1991: 5. Freccero, Carla. “Historical Violence, Censorship, and the Serial Killer: The Case of American Psycho.” Diacritics: A Review of Contemporary Criticism 27.2 (Summer 1997): 44-58. Graham, I. “Australian Censorship History.” Libertus.net 9 Dec. 2001. 17 May 2006 http://libertus.net/censor/hist20on.html>. Gurley Brown, Helen. Commentary in “Editorial Judgement or Censorship?: The Case of American Psycho.” The Writer May 1991: 20-23. Harris, Thomas. The Silence of the Lambs. New York: St Martins Press, 1988. Harron, Mary (dir.). American Psycho [film]. Edward R. Pressman Film Corporation, Lions Gate Films, Muse Productions, P.P.S. Films, Quadra Entertainment, Universal Pictures, 2004. Hitchens, Christopher. “Minority Report.” The Nation 7-14 January 1991: 7. Holt, Karen, and Charlotte Abbott. “Lunar Park: The Novel.” Publishers Weekly 11 July 2005. 13 Aug. 2006 http://www.publishersweekly.com/article/CA624404.html? pubdate=7%2F11%2F2005&display=archive>. Iannone, Carol. “PC & the Ellis Affair.” Commentary Magazine July 1991: 52-4. Irving, John. “Pornography and the New Puritans.” The New York Times Book Review 29 March 1992: Section 7, 1. 13 Aug. 2006 http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/06/15/lifetimes/25665.html>. Johnson, Brian D. “Canadian Cool Meets American Psycho.” Maclean’s 10 April 2000. 13 Aug. 2006 http://www.macleans.ca/culture/films/article.jsp?content=33146>. Kauffman, Linda S. “American Psycho [film review].” Film Quarterly 54.2 (Winter 2000-2001): 41-45. ———. Bad Girls and Sick Boys: Fantasies in Contemporary Art and Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. Kennedy, Pagan. “Generation Gaffe: American Psycho.” The Nation 1 April 1991: 426-8. Kirchhoff, H. J. “Customs Clears Psycho: Booksellers’ Reaction Mixed.” The Globe and Mail 26 March 1991: C1. ———. “Psycho Sits in Limbo: Publisher Awaits Customs Ruling.” The Globe and Mail 14 March 1991: C1. Knight-Ridder News Service. “Vintage Picks up Ellis’ American Psycho.” Los Angeles Daily News 17 November 1990: L10. Lehmann-Haupt, Christopher. “Psycho: Wither Death without Life?” The New York Times 11 March 1991: C18. Leo, John. “Marketing Cynicism and Vulgarity.” U.S. News & World Report 3 Dec. 1990: 23. Love, Robert. “Psycho Analysis: Interview with Bret Easton Ellis.” Rolling Stone 4 April 1991: 45-46, 49-51. Mailer, Norman. “Children of the Pied Piper: Mailer on American Psycho.” Vanity Fair March 1991: 124-9, 182-3. Manguel, Alberto. “Designer Porn.” Saturday Night 106.6 (July 1991): 46-8. Manne, Robert. “Liberals Deny the Video Link.” The Australian 6 Jan. 1997: 11. McDowell, Edwin. “NOW Chapter Seeks Boycott of ‘Psycho’ Novel.” The New York Times 6 Dec. 1990: C17. ———. “Vintage Buys Violent Book Dropped by Simon & Schuster.” The New York Times 17 Nov. 1990: 13. Miner, Brad. “Random Notes.” National Review 31 Dec. 1990: 43. National Organization for Women. Library Journal 2.91 (1991): 114. Oates, Joyce Carol. “Three American Gothics.” Where I’ve Been, and Where I’m Going: Essays, Reviews and Prose. New York: Plume, 1999. 232-43. Rapping, Elayne. “The Uses of Violence.” Progressive 55 (1991): 36-8. Rosenblatt, Roger. “Snuff this Book!: Will Brett Easton Ellis Get Away with Murder?” New York Times Book Review 16 Dec. 1990: 3, 16. Roth, Philip. Portnoy’s Complaint. New York: Random House, 1969. Shaw, Patrick W. The Modern American Novel of Violence. Troy, NY: Whitson, 2000. Sheppard, R. Z. “A Revolting Development.” Time 29 Oct. 1990: 100. Teachout, Terry. “Applied Deconstruction.” National Review 24 June 1991: 45-6. Tyrnauer, Matthew. “Who’s Afraid of Bret Easton Ellis?” Vanity Fair 57.8 (Aug. 1994): 70-3, 100-1. Vnuk, Helen. “X-rated? Outdated.” The Age 21 Sep. 2003. 17 May 2006 http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2003/09/19/1063625202157.html>. Wark, McKenzie. “Video Link Is a Distorted View.” The Australian 8 Jan. 1997: 11. Weldon, Fay. “Now You’re Squeamish?: In a World as Sick as Ours, It’s Silly to Target American Psycho.” The Washington Post 28 April 1991: C1. Wolf, Naomi. “The Animals Speak.” New Statesman & Society 12 April 1991: 33-4. Yardley, Jonathan. “American Psycho: Essence of Trash.” The Washington Post 27 Feb. 1991: B1. Young, Elizabeth J. “Psycho Killers. Last Lines: How to Shock the English.” New Statesman & Society 5 April 1991: 24. Young, Elizabeth J., and Graham Caveney. Shopping in Space: Essays on American ‘Blank Generation’ Fiction. London: Serpent’s Tail, 1992. Zaller, Robert “American Psycho, American Censorship and the Dahmer Case.” Revue Francaise d’Etudes Americaines 16.56 (1993): 317-25. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Brien, Donna Lee. "The Real Filth in : A Critical Reassessment." M/C Journal 9.5 (2006). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0610/01-brien.php>. APA Style Brien, D. (Nov. 2006) "The Real Filth in American Psycho: A Critical Reassessment," M/C Journal, 9(5). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0610/01-brien.php>.

Introduction Many destinations promote culinary encounters. Foods and beverages, and especially how these will taste in situ, are being marketed as niche travel motivators and used in destination brand building across the globe. While initial usage of the term culinary tourism focused on experiencing exotic cultures of foreign destinations by sampling unfamiliar food and drinks, the term has expanded to embrace a range of leisure travel experiences where the aim is to locate and taste local specialities as part of a pleasurable, and hopefully notable, culinary encounter (Wolf). Long’s foundational work was central in developing the idea of culinary tourism as an active endeavor, suggesting that via consumption, individuals construct unique experiences. Ignatov and Smith’s literature review-inspired definition confirms the nature of activity as participatory, and adds consuming food production skills—from observing agriculture and local processors to visiting food markets and attending cooking schools—to culinary purchases. Despite importing almost all of its foodstuffs and beverages, including some of its water, Singapore is an acknowledged global leader in culinary tourism. Horng and Tsai note that culinary tourism conceptually implies that a transferal of “local or special knowledge and information that represent local culture and identities” (41) occurs via these experiences. This article adds the act of reading to these participatory activities and suggests that, because food writing forms an important component of Singapore’s suite of culinary tourism offerings, taste contributes to the cultural experience offered to both visitors and locals. While Singapore foodways have attracted significant scholarship (see, for instance, work by Bishop; Duruz; Huat & Rajah; Tarulevicz, Eating), Singapore food writing, like many artefacts of popular culture, has attracted less notice. Yet, this writing is an increasingly visible component of cultural production of, and about, Singapore, and performs a range of functions for locals, tourists and visitors before they arrive. Although many languages are spoken in Singapore, English is the national language (Alsagoff) and this study focuses on food writing in English. Background Tourism comprises a major part of Singapore’s economy, with recent figures detailing that food and beverage sales contribute over 10 per cent of this revenue, with spend on culinary tours and cookery classes, home wares such as tea-sets and cookbooks, food magazines and food memoirs additional to this (Singapore Government). This may be related to the fact that Singapore not only promotes food as a tourist attraction, but also actively promotes itself as an exceptional culinary destination. The Singapore Tourism Board (STB) includes food in its general information brochures and websites, and its print, television and cinema commercials (Huat and Rajah). It also mounts information-rich campaigns both abroad and inside Singapore. The 2007 ‘Singapore Seasons’ campaign, for instance, promoted Singaporean cuisine alongside films, design, books and other cultural products in London, New York and Beijing. Touring cities identified as key tourist markets in 2011, the ‘Singapore Takeout’ pop-up restaurant brought the taste of Singaporean foods into closer focus. Singaporean chefs worked with high profile locals in its kitchen in a custom-fabricated shipping container to create and demonstrate Singaporean dishes, attracting public and media interest. In country, the STB similarly actively promotes the tastes of Singaporean foods, hosting the annual World Gourmet Summit (Chaney and Ryan) and Pacific Food Expo, both attracting international culinary professionals to work alongside local leaders. The Singapore Food Festival each July is marketed to both locals and visitors. In these ways, the STB, as well as providing events for visitors, is actively urging Singaporeans to proud of their food culture and heritage, so that each Singaporean becomes a proactive ambassador of their cuisine. Singapore Food Writing Popular print guidebooks and online guides to Singapore pay significantly more attention to Singaporean food than they do for many other destinations. Sections on food in such publications discuss at relative length the taste of Singaporean food (always delicious) as well as how varied, authentic, hygienic and suited-to-all-budgets it is. These texts also recommend hawker stalls and food courts alongside cafés and restaurants (Henderson et al.), and a range of other culinary experiences such as city and farm food tours and cookery classes. This writing describes not only what can be seen or learned during these experiences, but also what foods can be sampled, and how these might taste. This focus on taste is reflected in the printed materials that greet the in-bound tourist at the airport. On a visit in October 2013, arrival banners featuring mouth-watering images of local specialities such as chicken rice and chilli crab marked the route from arrival to immigration and baggage collection. Even advertising for a bank was illustrated with photographs of luscious-looking fruits. The free maps and guidebooks available featured food-focused tours and restaurant locations, and there were also substantial free booklets dedicated solely to discussing local delicacies and their flavours, plus recommended locations to sample them. A website and free mobile app were available that contain practical information about dishes, ingredients, cookery methods, and places to eat, as well as historical and cultural information. These resources are also freely distributed to many hotels and popular tourist destinations. Alongside organising food walks, bus tours and cookery classes, the STB also recommends the work of a number of Singaporean food writers—principally prominent Singapore food bloggers, reviewers and a number of memoirists—as authentic guides to what are described as unique Singaporean flavours. The strategies at the heart of this promotion are linking advertising to useful information. At a number of food centres, for instance, STB information panels provide details about both specific dishes and Singapore’s food culture more generally (Henderson et al.). This focus is apparent at many tourist destinations, many of which are also popular local attractions. In historic Fort Canning Park, for instance, there is a recreation of Raffles’ experimental garden, established in 1822, where he grew the nutmeg, clove and other plants that were intended to form the foundation for spice plantations but were largely unsuccessful (Reisz). Today, information panels not only indicate the food plants’ names and how to grow them, but also their culinary and medicinal uses, recipes featuring them and the related food memories of famous Singaporeans. The Singapore Botanic Gardens similarly houses the Ginger Garden displaying several hundred species of ginger and information, and an Eco(-nomic/logical) Garden featuring many food plants and their stories. In Chinatown, panels mounted outside prominent heritage brands (often still quite small shops) add content to the shopping experience. A number of museums profile Singapore’s food culture in more depth. The National Museum of Singapore has a permanent Living History gallery that focuses on Singapore’s street food from the 1950s to 1970s. This display includes food-related artefacts, interactive aromatic displays of spices, films of dishes being made and eaten, and oral histories about food vendors, all supported by text panels and booklets. Here food is used to convey messages about the value of Singapore’s ethnic diversity and cross-cultural exchanges. Versions of some of these dishes can then be sampled in the museum café (Time Out Singapore). The Peranakan Museum—which profiles the unique hybrid culture of the descendants of the Chinese and South Indian traders who married local Malay women—shares this focus, with reconstructed kitchens and dining rooms, exhibits of cooking and eating utensils and displays on food’s ceremonial role in weddings and funerals all supported with significant textual information. The Chinatown Heritage Centre not only recreates food preparation areas as a vivid indicator of poor Chinese immigrants’ living conditions, but also houses The National Restaurant of Singapore, which translates this research directly into meals that recreate the heritage kopi tiam (traditional coffee shop) cuisine of Singapore in the 1930s, purposefully bringing taste into the service of education, as its descriptive menu states, “educationally delighting the palate” (Chinatown Heritage Centre). These museums recognise that shopping is a core tourist activity in Singapore (Chang; Yeung et al.). Their gift- and bookshops cater to the culinary tourist by featuring quality culinary products for sale (including, for instance, teapots and cups, teas, spices and traditional sweets, and other foods) many of which are accompanied by informative tags or brochures. At the centre of these curated, purchasable collections are a range written materials: culinary magazines, cookbooks, food histories and memoirs, as well as postcards and stationery printed with recipes. Food Magazines Locally produced food magazines cater to a range of readerships and serve to extend the culinary experience both in, and outside, Singapore. These include high-end gourmet, luxury lifestyle publications like venerable monthly Wine & Dine: The Art of Good Living, which, in in print for almost thirty years, targets an affluent readership (Wine & Dine). The magazine runs features on local dining, gourmet products and trends, as well as international epicurean locations and products. Beautifully illustrated recipes also feature, as the magazine declares, “we’ve recognised that sharing more recipes should be in the DNA of Wine & Dine’s editorial” (Wine & Dine). Appetite magazine, launched in 2006, targets the “new and emerging generation of gourmets—foodies with a discerning and cosmopolitan outlook, broad horizons and a insatiable appetite” (Edipresse Asia) and is reminiscent in much of its styling of New Zealand’s award-winning Cuisine magazine. Its focus is to present a fresh approach to both cooking at home and dining out, as readers are invited to “Whip up the perfect soufflé or feast with us at the finest restaurants in Singapore and around the region” (Edipresse Asia). Chefs from leading local restaurants are interviewed, and the voices of “fellow foodies and industry watchers” offer an “insider track” on food-related news: “what’s good and what’s new” (Edipresse Asia). In between these publications sits Epicure: Life’s Refinements, which features local dishes, chefs, and restaurants as well as an overseas travel section and a food memories column by a featured author. Locally available ingredients are also highlighted, such as abalone (Cheng) and an interesting range of mushrooms (Epicure). While there is a focus on an epicurean experience, this is presented slightly more casually than in Wine & Dine. Food & Travel focuses more on home cookery, but each issue also includes reviews of Singapore restaurants. The bimonthly bilingual (Chinese and English) Gourmet Living features recipes alongside a notable focus on food culture—with food history columns, restaurant reviews and profiles of celebrated chefs. An extensive range of imported international food magazines are also available, with those from nearby Malaysia and Indonesia regularly including articles on Singapore. Cookbooks These magazines all include reviews of cookery books including Singaporean examples – and some feature other food writing such as food histories, memoirs and blogs. These reviews draw attention to how many Singaporean cookbooks include a focus on food history alongside recipes. Cookery teacher Yee Soo Leong’s 1976 Singaporean Cooking was an early example of cookbook as heritage preservation. This 1976 book takes an unusual view of ‘Singaporean’ flavours. Beginning with sweet foods—Nonya/Singaporean and western cakes, biscuits, pies, pastries, bread, desserts and icings—it also focuses on both Singaporean and Western dishes. This text is also unusual as there are only 6 lines of direct authorial address in the author’s acknowledgements section. Expatriate food writer Wendy Hutton’s Singapore Food, first published in 1979, reprinted many times after and revised in 2007, has long been recognised as one of the most authoritative titles on Singapore’s food heritage. Providing an socio-historical map of Singapore’s culinary traditions, some one third of the first edition was devoted to information about Singaporean multi-cultural food history, including detailed profiles of a number of home cooks alongside its recipes. Published in 1980, Kenneth Mitchell’s A Taste of Singapore is clearly aimed at a foreign readership, noting the variety of foods available due to the racial origins of its inhabitants. The more modest, but equally educational in intent, Hawkers Flavour: A Guide to Hawkers Gourmet in Malaysia and Singapore (in its fourth printing in 1998) contains a detailed introductory essay outlining local food culture, favourite foods and drinks and times these might be served, festivals and festive foods, Indian, Indian Muslim, Chinese, Nyonya (Chinese-Malay), Malay and Halal foods and customs, followed with a selection of recipes from each. More contemporary examples of such information-rich cookbooks, such as those published in the frequently reprinted Periplus Mini Cookbook series, are sold at tourist attractions. Each of these modestly priced, 64-page, mouthwateringly illustrated booklets offer framing information, such as about a specific food culture as in the Nonya kitchen in Nonya Favourites (Boi), and explanatory glossaries of ingredients, as in Homestyle Malay Cooking (Jelani). Most recipes include a boxed paragraph detailing cookery or ingredient information that adds cultural nuance, as well as trying to describe tastes that the (obviously foreign) intended reader may not have encountered. Malaysian-born Violet Oon, who has been called the Julia Child of Singapore (Bergman), writes for both local and visiting readers. The FOOD Paper, published monthly for a decade from January 1987 was, she has stated, then “Singapore’s only monthly publication dedicated to the CSF—Certified Singapore Foodie” (Oon, Violet Oon Cooks 7). Under its auspices, Oon promoted her version of Singaporean cuisine to both locals and visitors, as well as running cookery classes and culinary events, hosting her own television cooking series on the Singapore Broadcasting Corporation, and touring internationally for the STB as a ‘Singapore Food Ambassador’ (Ahmad; Kraal). Taking this representation of flavor further, Oon has also produced a branded range of curry powders, spices, and biscuits, and set up a number of food outlets. Her first cookbook, World Peranakan Cookbook, was published in 1978. Her Singapore: 101 Meals of 1986 was commissioned by the STB, then known as the Singapore Tourist Promotion Board. Violet Oon Cooks, a compilation of recipes from The FOOD Paper, published in 1992, attracted a range of major international as well as Singaporean food sponsors, and her Timeless Recipes, published in 1997, similarly aimed to show how manufactured products could be incorporated into classic Singaporean dishes cooked at home. In 1998, Oon produced A Singapore Family Cookbook featuring 100 dishes. Many were from Nonya cuisine and her following books continued to focus on preserving heritage Singaporean recipes, as do a number of other nationally-cuisine focused collections such as Joyceline Tully and Christopher Tan’s Heritage Feasts: A Collection of Singapore Family Recipes. Sylvia Tan’s Singapore Heritage Food: Yesterday’s Recipes for Today’s Cooks, published in 2004, provides “a tentative account of Singapore’s food history” (5). It does this by mapping the various taste profiles of six thematically-arranged chronologically-overlapping sections, from the heritage of British colonialism, to the uptake of American and Russia foods in the Snackbar era of the 1960s and the use of convenience flavoring ingredients such as curry pastes, sauces, dried and frozen supermarket products from the 1970s. Other Volumes Other food-themed volumes focus on specific historical periods. Cecilia Leong-Salobir’s Food Culture in Colonial Asia: A Taste of Empire discusses the “unique hybrid” (1) cuisine of British expatriates in Singapore from 1858 to 1963. In 2009, the National Museum of Singapore produced the moving Wong Hong Suen’s Wartime Kitchen: Food and Eating in Singapore 1942–1950. This details the resilience and adaptability of both diners and cooks during the Japanese Occupation and in post-war Singapore, when shortages stimulated creativity. There is a centenary history of the Cold Storage company which shipped frozen foods all over south east Asia (Boon) and location-based studies such as Annette Tan’s Savour Chinatown: Stories Memories & Recipes. Tan interviewed hawkers, chefs and restaurant owners, working from this information to write both the book’s recipes and reflect on Chinatown’s culinary history. Food culture also features in (although it is not the main focus) more general book-length studies such as educational texts such as Chew Yen Fook’s The Magic of Singapore and Melanie Guile’s Culture in Singapore (2000). Works that navigate both spaces (of Singaporean culture more generally and its foodways) such Lily Kong’s Singapore Hawker Centres: People, Places, Food, provide an consistent narrative of food in Singapore, stressing its multicultural flavours that can be enjoyed from eateries ranging from hawker stalls to high-end restaurants that, interestingly, that agrees with that promulgated in the food writing discussed above. Food Memoirs and Blogs Many of these narratives include personal material, drawing on the author’s own food experiences and taste memories. This approach is fully developed in the food memoir, a growing sub-genre of Singapore food writing. While memoirs by expatriate Singaporeans such as Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan’s A Tiger in the Kitchen: A Memoir of Food and Family, produced by major publisher Hyperion in New York, has attracted considerable international attention, it presents a story of Singapore cuisine that agrees with such locally produced texts as television chef and food writer Terry Tan’s Stir-fried and Not Shaken: A Nostalgic Trip Down Singapore’s Memory Lane and the food memoir of the Singaporean chef credited with introducing fine Malay dining to Singapore, Aziza Ali’s Sambal Days, Kampong Cuisine, published in Singapore in 2013 with the support of the National Heritage Board. All these memoirs are currently available in Singapore in both bookshops and a number of museums and other attractions. While underscoring the historical and cultural value of these foods, all describe the unique flavours of Singaporean cuisine and its deliciousness. A number of prominent Singapore food bloggers are featured in general guidebooks and promoted by the STB as useful resources to dining out in Singapore. One of the most prominent of these is Leslie Tay, a medical doctor and “passionate foodie” (Knipp) whose awardwinning ieatŸishootŸipost is currently attracting some 90,000 unique visitors every month and has had over 20,000 million hits since its launch in 2006. An online diary of Tay’s visits to hundreds of Singaporean hawker stalls, it includes descriptions and photographs of meals consumed, creating accumulative oral culinary histories of these dishes and those who prepared them. These narratives have been reorganised and reshaped in Tay’s first book The End of Char Kway Teow and Other Hawker Mysteries, where each chapter tells the story of one particular dish, including recommended hawker stalls where it can be enjoyed. Ladyironchef.com is a popular food and travel site that began as a blog in 2007. An edited collection of reviews of eateries and travel information, many by the editor himself, the site features lists of, for example, the best cafes (LadyIronChef “Best Cafes”), eateries at the airport (LadyIronChef “Guide to Dining”), and hawker stalls (Lim). While attesting to the cultural value of these foods, many articles also discuss flavour, as in Lim’s musings on: ‘how good can chicken on rice taste? … The glistening grains of rice perfumed by fresh chicken stock and a whiff of ginger is so good you can even eat it on its own’. Conclusion Recent Singapore food publishing reflects this focus on taste. Tay’s publisher, Epigram, growing Singaporean food list includes the recently released Heritage Cookbooks Series. This highlights specialist Singaporean recipes and cookery techniques, with the stated aim of preserving tastes and foodways that continue to influence Singaporean food culture today. Volumes published to date on Peranakan, South Indian, Cantonese, Eurasian, and Teochew (from the Chaoshan region in the east of China’s Guangdong province) cuisines offer both cultural and practical guides to the quintessential dishes and flavours of each cuisine, featuring simple family dishes alongside more elaborate special occasion meals. In common with the food writing discussed above, the books in this series, although dealing with very different styles of cookery, contribute to an overall impression of the taste of Singapore food that is highly consistent and extremely persuasive. This food writing narrates that Singapore has a delicious as well as distinctive and interesting food culture that plays a significant role in Singaporean life both currently and historically. It also posits that this food culture is, at the same time, easily accessible and also worthy of detailed consideration and discussion. 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Acknowledgements Research to complete this article was supported by Central Queensland University, Australia, under its Outside Studies Program (OSPRO) and Learning and Teaching Education Research Centre (LTERC). An earlier version of part of this article was presented at the 2nd Australasian Regional Food Networks and Cultures Conference, in the Barossa Valley in South Australia, Australia, 11–14 November 2012. The delegates of that conference and expert reviewers of this article offered some excellent suggestions regarding strengthening this article and their advice was much appreciated. All errors are, of course, my own.

On May 22, 2000, Randolph Walker, a seventy-one-year-old career actor, was struck and killed by a double-decker tour bus while crossing a street in midtown Manhattan near the low-rent apartment complex where he lived. This sad accident—an all-too-common occurrence in crowded cities—nevertheless galvanized the New York community for reasons that should concern us all. Mr. Walker was on his way home after an audition for a bit part in a movie called Dummy. He had been hopeful about getting the part; he was always hopeful. This is probably why he had been able to eke out a living as an actor for nearly twenty-five years after leaving a job in banking. He pieced together bit parts in plays, work in dinner theaters, and “under five” roles in soap operas, in which an actor is hired for one daya nd has less than five lines to speak. In his obituary in The New York Times (June 1, 2000), reporter Robin Pogrebin quotes a friend, Todd Heughens, as saying, “‘There are so many actors who don’t work at all, and here was a guy who supported himself as an actor. . . . So I think he took great pride in that.’” Yet he was described by his fellow actors as “non-competitive in the extreme. . . . He told his friends about roles he was seeking so they could try to get them also,” and “he was happy for them even when they won parts he had wanted.”Mr. Walker, who was six feet tall and slender and had a resonant voice, was generally cast in small character parts, such as butlers or undertakers. He loved acting and was an inspiration and mentor to younger actors, according to his agent, Michael Hartig, who was also quoted in the obituary: “‘When he worked on shows, they would gravitate toward him,’ Mr. Hartig said. . . . ‘He always had time to talk to them, to share his knowledge and his expertise.’” He was a quiet, unassuming professional who lived for his work, did not resent his lack of fame, and left be-hind nothing but good reports and sadness when he died.

Eight thirty A.M. Another school day, another school—this time the Schiller Gymnasium in the Thomas Mann Street. It’s a fine morning in late October. I greet Frau Losart, a German teacher, and Herr Gerrelov, a Russian teacher. They’re happy to talk to me about changes at the school since my visit during the dying days of the DDR in the fall of 1990, when it was still the Schiller EOS, the only EOS in Weimar. Weimar has witnessed many changes since then, especially in education, including the transformation of three POS into Gymnasien: the Goethe Gymnasium, the Hoffman von Fallersleben Gymnasium, and the Sophiengymnasium. The classical names reflect the importance of German culture in Weimar. Indeed, “Weimar— the Heart of German Culture,” runs the slogan in the official tourist brochure, which features, incongruously, both a picture of a young couple drinking Coca-Cola (the caption [in English]: “You can’t beat the feeling!”) and a pitch for a private bus tour line: “For more than a century,” says the ad, in stately German script, Weimar “has been a magnet for all those who revere German classicism. . . .” Or: those who mummify it. “Stadt der toten Dichter” (Dead Poets’ City), journalistic wags from the west have dubbed Weimar instead. But the eastern and western slogans do, ironically, somehow fit together. For certainly the city’s two biggest cultural drawing cards are its two greatest dead poets: Goethe and Schiller. Not the least of the city’s honors to the latter dead poet is the Schiller Gymnasium itself. Built in 1927, it was originally a Berufsschule (trade/vocational school) for girls; two years later, it became a coeducational Realschule. In 1936, the auditorium with its Nietzsche window was added, in honor of the city’s third great dead poet. In 1945, the school was used as an emergency hospital for soldiers wounded at the front. After the war, the Schiller Oberschule was the only school in Weimar to confer the Abitur; it became one of the first EOS in 1960 and a Gymnasium in 1991.

A podcast is a Web feed containing audio or video files which is then placed on the Internet for anyone to download. What makes the podcast distinct from traditional media like broadcasting and streaming is that the podcast file will arrive in archived form. A Screencast is a digital recording of computer screen output, which contains audio narration. Screencasts are useful for demonstrating simple and complicated new software to others. It is a neat way to show off work, report bugs, and show how a task can be accomplished. Screencasting is a term for recording a movie of a computer screen to a file that others can view. Screencasts are mostly used for tutorials, overview/ tours, reviews, and demonstrations. Screencasts may also be used as a way to enhance regular movie files. A Weblog, or blog, is a Web site were the owner or user of the Web site posts messages on it so that others can log on and read them. Blogs often focus on one subject, for example, if the blogger is a computer programmer, then the topic of his messages is mainly related to programming languages. However, many are using the blogs as online diaries where they post messages describing their daily news or how they feel about certain subjects. Videoblogging is a new form of blogging, which includes posting videos on the Web. It is a new paradigm for people to place aspects of their personal lives on the Web. Videoblogging is rising in popularity partially due to the release of the Video iPod and the availability of videoblogs on iTunes. So this means that with the recent boom in iPod sales, they will see this one as the most updated one and this will also hit the computer industry by storm. The rest of this article examines the new phenomenon of podcasting, screencasting, blogging, and videoblogging.

Introduction u cours des deux derniers millénaires, il y a eu plusieurs façons de conserver, transmettre et même créer la connaissance ; la tradition orale, l’écrit manuscrit, l’écrit imprimé et l’écrit numérisé. La tradition orale et le manuscrit ont dominé pendant plus de 1400 ans, et ce, jusqu’à l’apparition du livre imprimé en 1451, résultant de l’invention mécanique de Gutenberg. Il faudra attendre un peu plus de 550 ans, avant que l’invention du support électronique déloge à son tour le livre imprimé, prenant une ampleur sans précédent grâce à la révolution numérique contemporaine, résultat du maillage des technologies de l’informatique, de la robotique et de la science des données. Les premières universités qui sont nées en Occident, au Moyen Âge, ont développé cette tradition orale de la connaissance tout en multipliant l’usage du manuscrit créant ainsi de véritables communautés de maîtres et d’étudiants ; la venue de l’imprimerie permettra la multiplication des universités où l’oral et l’écrit continueront de jouer un rôle déterminant dans la création et la transmission des connaissances même si le « support » a évolué du manuscrit à l’imprimé puis vers le numérique. Au cours de toutes ces années, le modèle de l’université s’est raffiné et perfectionné sur une trajectoire somme toute assez linéaire en élargissant son rôle dans l’éducation à celui-ci de la recherche et de l’innovation, en multipliant les disciplines offertes et les clientèles desservies. L’université de chaque ville universitaire est devenue une institution florissante et indispensable à son rayonnement international, à un point tel que l’on mesure souvent sa contribution par la taille de sa clientèle étudiante, l’empreinte de ses campus, la grandeur de ses bibliothèques spécialisées ; c’est toutefois la renommée de ses chercheurs qui consacre la réputation de chaque université au cours de cette longue trajectoire pendant laquelle a pu s’établir la liberté universitaire. « Les libertés universitaires empruntèrent beaucoup aux libertés ecclésiastiques » : Étudiants et maîtres, qu'ils furent, ou non, hommes d'Église, furent assimilés à des clercs relevant de la seule justice ecclésiastique, réputée plus équitable. Mais ils échappèrent aussi largement à la justice ecclésiastique locale, n'étant justiciables que devant leur propre institution les professeurs et le recteur, chef élu de l’université - ou devant le pape ou ses délégués. Les libertés académiques marquèrent donc l’émergence d'un droit propre, qui ménageait aux maîtres et aux étudiants une place à part dans la société. Ce droit était le même, à travers l'Occident, pour tous ceux qui appartenaient à ces institutions supranationales que furent, par essence, les premières universités. À la fin du Moyen Âge, l'affirmation des États nationaux obligea les libertés académiques à s'inscrire dans ce nouveau cadre politique, comme de simples pratiques dérogatoires au droit commun et toujours sujettes à révision. Vestige vénérable de l’antique indépendance et privilège octroyé par le prince, elles eurent donc désormais un statut ambigu » . La révolution numérique viendra fragiliser ce statut. En effet, la révolution numérique vient bouleverser cette longue trajectoire linéaire de l’université en lui enlevant son quasi monopole dans la conservation et le partage du savoir parce qu’elle rend plus facile et somme toute, moins coûteux l’accès à l’information, au savoir et aux données. Le numérique est révolutionnaire comme l’était l’imprimé et son influence sur l’université, sera tout aussi considérable, car cette révolution impacte radicalement tous les secteurs de l’économie en accélérant la robotisation et la numérisation des processus de création, de fabrication et de distribution des biens et des services. Ces innovations utilisent la radio-identification (RFID) qui permet de mémoriser et de récupérer à distance des données sur les objets et l’Internet des objets qui permet aux objets d’être reliés automatiquement à des réseaux de communications .Ces innovations s’entrecroisent aux technologies de la réalité virtuelle, à celles des algorithmiques intelligentes et de l’intelligence artificielle et viennent littéralement inonder de données les institutions et les organisations qui doivent alors les analyser, les gérer et les protéger. Le monde numérique est né et avec lui, a surgi toute une série de compétences radicalement nouvelles que les étudiants, les enseignants et les chercheurs de nos universités doivent rapidement maîtriser pour évoluer dans ce Nouveau Monde, y travailler et contribuer à la rendre plus humain et plus équitable. En effet, tous les secteurs de l’activité commerciale, économique, culturelle ou sociale exigent déjà clairement des connaissances et des compétences numériques et technologiques de tous les participants au marché du travail. Dans cette nouvelle logique industrielle du monde numérique, les gagnants sont déjà bien identifiés. Ce sont les fameux GAFAM (Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon et Microsoft) suivis de près par les NATU (Netflix, Airbnb, Tesla et Uber) et par les géants chinois du numérique, les BATX (Baidu, Alibaba, Tenant et Xiaomi). Ces géants sont alimentés par les recherches, les innovations et les applications mobiles (APPs) créées par les partenaires de leurs écosystèmes regroupant, sur différents campus d’entreprises, plusieurs des cerveaux qui sont au cœur de cette révolution numérique. L’université voit donc remise en question sa capacité traditionnelle d’attirer, de retenir et de promouvoir les artisans du monde de demain. Son aptitude à former des esprits critiques et à contribuer à la transmission des valeurs universelles est également ébranlée par ce tsunami de changements. Il faut cependant reconnaître que les facultés de médecine, d’ingénierie et de sciences naturelles aux États-Unis qui ont développé des contacts étroits, abondants et suivis avec les hôpitaux, les grandes entreprises et l’administration publique et cela dès la fin du 19e siècle ont été plus en mesure que bien d’autres, de recruter et retenir les gens de talent. Elle ont énormément contribué à faire avancer les connaissances scientifiques et la scolarisation en sciences appliquées ..La concentration inouïe des Prix Nobel scientifiques aux États-Unis est à cet égard très convaincante . La révolution numérique contemporaine survient également au moment même où de grands bouleversements frappent la planète : l’urgence climatique, le vieillissement des populations, la « déglobalisation », les déplacements des populations, les guerres, les pandémies, la crise des inégalités, de l’éthique et des démocraties. Ces bouleversements interpellent les universitaires et c’est pourquoi leur communauté doit adopter une raison d’être et ainsi renouveler leur mission afin des mieux répondre à ces enjeux de la civilisation. Cette communauté doit non seulement se doter d’une vision et des modes de fonctionnement adaptés aux nouvelles réalités liées aux technologies numériques, mais elle doit aussi tenir compte de ces grands bouleversements. Tout ceci l’oblige à s’intégrer à des écosystèmes où les connaissances sont partagées et où de nouvelles compétences doivent être rapidement acquises. Le but de ce texte est de mieux cerner l’ampleur du défi que pose le monde numérique au milieu universitaire et de proposer quelques idées pouvant alimenter la réflexion des universitaires dans cette démarche d’adaptation au monde numérique. Or, ma conviction la plus profonde c’est que la révolution numérique aura des impacts sur nos sociétés et notre civilisation aussi grands que ceux provoqués par la découverte de l’imprimerie et son industrialisation au 15e siècle. C’est pourquoi la première section de ce document est consacrée à un rappel historique de la révolution de l’imprimerie par Gutenberg alors que la deuxième section illustrera comment les caractéristiques de la révolution numérique viennent soutenir cette conviction si profonde. Une troisième section fournira plus de détails sur le défi d’adaptation que le monde numérique pose aux universités alors que la quatrième section évoquera les contours du changement de paradigme que cette adaptation va imposer. La cinquième section servira à illustrer un scénario de rêves qui permettra de mieux illustrer l’ampleur de la gestion du changement qui guette les universitaires. La conclusion permettra de revenir sur quelques concepts et principes clefs pour guider la démarche vers l’action. L’université ne peut plus « être en haut et seule », elle doit être « au centre et avec » des écosystèmes de partenariats multiples, dans un modèle hybride physique/virtuel. C’est ainsi qu’elle pourra conserver son leadership historique de vigie du savoir et des connaissances d’un monde complexe, continuer d’établir l’authenticité des faits et imposer la nécessaire rigueur de la science et de l’objectivité.

La demande croissante à laquelle font face les systèmes de santé combinée à la rareté des ressources disponibles rend impératif leur optimisation pour effectuer des choix éclairés. Le concept d’année de vie ajustée par la qualité (AVAQ) s’inscrit dans ce cadre et utilise des instruments de mesure de qualité de vie reliée à la santé (QVRS), parmi lesquels des instruments génériques. Cependant, de nombreuses différences peuvent être observées entre ces instruments. Le constat général est que quasiment tous les instruments génériques contiennent une ou plusieurs dimensions liées à la santé physique (p. ex. incapacité, inconfort, douleur) au détriment d'autres dimensions d’ordre mentales ou sociales. Afin de pallier cette limite, un nouvel instrument a été créé, son but étant d’être plus complet et plus équilibré dans la mesure de la qualité de vie reliée à la santé globale (QVRS-G). Ce rapport présente les étapes clés de la création de cet instrument ainsi que les résultats obtenus dans la mesure de la QVRS-G des québécois au printemps 2021. Ainsi un nouvel outil générique, le 13-MD, composé de 33 items avec 5 à 7 niveaux chacun a été mis sur pieds. La création d’un value set permettant la conversion des états de santé en scores d’utilité permettra son utilisation dans les analyses coût-utilité.

Cette étude porte sur une des innovations contemporaines liées à l’économie de la publication scientifique : les accords dits transformants, un objet relativement circonscrit au sein des relations entre consortiums de bibliothèques et éditeurs scientifiques, et temporellement situé entre 2015 et 2020. Ce type d’accords a pour objectif affiché d’organiser la transition du modèle traditionnel de l’abonnement à des revues (souvent proposées par regroupements thématiques ou collections) vers celui de l’accès ouvert en opérant une réaffectation des budgets qui y sont consacrés. Notre travail d’analyse sociologique constitue une première étude systématique de cet objet, fondée sur la recension de 197 accords. Le corpus ainsi constitué inclut des accords caractérisés par la coprésence d’une composante d’abonnement et d’une composante de publication en accès ouvert, même minimale (« jetons » de publication offerts, réduction sur les APC...). En conséquence, ont été exclus de l’analyse les accords portant uniquement sur du financement centralisé de publication en accès ouvert, que ce soit avec des éditeurs ne proposant que des revues avec paiement par l’auteur (PLOS, Frontiers, MDPI...) ou des éditeurs dont une partie du catalogue est constitué de revues en accès ouvert. L’accord le plus ancien de notre corpus a été signé en 2010, les plus récents en 2020 – les accords ne commençant qu’en 2021, même annoncés au cours de l’étude, n’ont pas été retenus. Plusieurs résultats se dégagent de notre analyse. Tout d’abord, on note une grande diversité des acteurs impliqués avec 22 pays et 39 éditeurs, même si certains consortiums (Pays-Bas, Suède, Autriche, Allemagne) et éditeurs (CUP, Elsevier, RSC, Springer) en ont signé beaucoup plus que d’autres. Ensuite, la durée des accords, comprise entre une et six années, révèle une distribution très inégalitaire, avec plus de la moitié des accords (103) signés pour 3 ans, ainsi qu’une faible proportion pour 4 ans ou plus (22 accords). Enfin, en dépit d’appels répétés à la transparence, moins de la moitié des accords (96) ont un texte accessible au moment de cette étude, sans qu’on puisse observer une tendance récente à une plus grande disponibilité. L’analyse montre également des degrés d’ouverture très variables, allant d’une simple information sur le répertoire ESAC en passant par la mise à disposition d’un format annotable jusqu’à l’attribution d’un DOI et d’une licence de réutilisation (CC-BY), en incluant le détail des sommes monétaires. Parmi les 96 accords disponibles, dont 47 signés en 2020, 62 ont fait l’objet d’une analyse en profondeur. C’est à notre connaissance la première analyse à cette échelle, sur un type de matériel non seulement inédit, mais qui était auparavant soumis à des clauses de confidentialité. Fondée sur une lecture minutieuse, l’étude décrit de manière fine leurs propriétés, depuis la matérialité du document jusqu’aux formules financières, en passant par leur morphologie et l’ensemble des droits et devoirs des parties. Les contenus des accords sont donc analysés comme une collection dont nous cherchons à déterminer les points communs et les variations, à travers des codages explicites sur certaines de leurs caractéristiques. L’étude pointe également des incertitudes, et notamment leur caractère « transitionnel », qui demeure fortement discuté. D’un point de vue morphologique, les accords montrent une grande diversité en matière de taille (de 7 à 488 pages) et de structure. Néanmoins, par définition, ils articulent tous deux objets essentiels : d’une part, les conditions de réalisation d’une lecture d’articles de revues, sous forme d’abonnement, mêlant des préoccupations d’accès et de sécurité ; d’autre part, les modalités de publication en accès ouvert, articulant la gestion d’un nouveau type de workflow à toute une série d’options possibles. Parmi ces options, mentionnons notamment le périmètre des revues considérées (hybrides et/ou accès ouvert), les licences disponibles, le degré d’obligation de cette publication, les auteurs éligibles ou le volume d’articles publiables. L’un des résultats les plus importants de cette analyse approfondie est la mise au jour d’un découplage presque complet, au sein même des accords, entre l’objet abonnement et l’objet publication. Bien entendu, l’abonnement est systématiquement configuré dans un monde fermé, soumis à paiement qui déclenche des séries d’identification des circulations légitimes tant du contenu informationnel que des usagers. Il insiste notamment sur les interdictions de réutilisation ou même de copie des articles scientifiques. À l’opposé, la publication en accès ouvert est attachée à un monde régi par l’accès gratuit au contenu, ce qui induit des préoccupations de gestion du workflow et des modalités d’accessibilité. De plus, les différents éléments constitutifs de ces objets contractuels ne sont pas couplés : d’un côté, les lecteurs sont constitués de l’ensemble des membres des institutions abonnées, de l’autre, seuls les auteurs correspondants (« corresponding authors ») sont concernés ; les listes de revues accessibles à la lecture et celles réservées à la publication en accès ouvert sont le plus souvent distinctes ; les workflows ont des objectifs et des organisations matérielles totalement différentes, etc. L’articulation entre les deux objets contractuels relève uniquement d’une formule de distribution financière qui, outre des combinaisons particulières entre l’un et l’autre, permet d’attribuer des étiquettes distinctes aux accords (offset agreement, publish & read, read & publish, read & free articles, read & discount). Au-delà de cette distribution, l’étude des arrangements financiers montre une gamme de dispositions allant d’une prévisibilité budgétaire totale, donc identique aux accords d’abonnement antérieurs, à une incertitude sur le volume de publication ou sur le montant définitif des sommes échangées. Les modalités concrètes de calcul des montants associés à la publication en accès ouvert sont relativement variées. S’il existe effectivement des formules récurrentes (volume d’articles multiplié par un prix individuel, reprise de la moyenne des sommes totales d’APC des années précédentes...), le calcul des sommes en jeu est toujours le résultat d’une négociation singulière entre un consortium et un éditeur scientifique, et aboutit parfois à des formules originales et complexes. À ce titre, l’espace des possibles en matière de formules financières n’est jamais totalement clos. Par ailleurs, la volonté des consortiums d’opérer une « transformation » de leurs accords vers la publication à coût constant renvoie à des définitions diversifiées du « coût » (inclusion ou non des dépenses d’APC préexistantes) et de la constance (admission ou pas d’une « inflation » à 2 ou 3%). De plus, nous n’avons observé aucune disposition contractuelle permettant d’anticiper les sommes en jeu au-delà de l’horizon temporel de l’accord courant. La grande diversité des accords provient d’une part des conditions initiales des relations entre consortiums et éditeurs scientifiques – les sommes dépensées en abonnement étant le point de départ des nouveaux accords –, d’autre part des objectifs de chaque partie. Même si cette étude excluait volontairement les négociations, les accords portent des traces de ces objectifs. Ainsi, de nombreux accords sont de nature explicitement expérimentale, quand certains visent un contrôle budgétaire strict, ou d’autres ambitionnent, dans la période plus récente, la publication du plus grand nombre possible d’articles en accès ouvert. C’est dans ce dernier cas qu’on touche à l’ambiguïté des attentes générales sur les accords transformants. En effet, pour les consortiums, la dimension « transformante » consiste essentiellement à transférer les sommes traditionnellement allouées à l’abonnement vers la publication en accès ouvert. Mais l’objectif n’est jamais de transformer le modèle économique des revues, c'est-à-dire de faire basculer des revues sous abonnement ou hybrides en revues entièrement en accès ouvert. D’ailleurs, aucune clause ne vise une telle fin – à l’exception du modèle d’accord proposé par l’éditeur ACM. Du côté des éditeurs, et notamment de Springer, le caractère cumulatif des accords nationaux passés vise à projeter un monde de la publication où l’accès ouvert devient de fait quantitativement très dominant, sans pour autant modifier de manière pérenne le modèle économique de leurs revues. Notre étude montre que les accords transformants actuels ne permettent pas d’assurer de manière durable une transition de l’économie de la publication vers l’accès ouvert, dans la mesure où ils n’offrent pas de garantie sur le contrôle des dépenses ni sur la pérennité de l’ouverture des contenus. L’avenir des relations entre consortium et éditeur demeure largement indéterminé.Cette étude porte sur une des innovations contemporaines liées à l’économie de la publication scientifique : les accords dits transformants, un objet relativement circonscrit au sein des relations entre consortiums de bibliothèques et éditeurs scientifiques, et temporellement situé entre 2015 et 2020. Ce type d’accords a pour objectif affiché d’organiser la transition du modèle traditionnel de l’abonnement à des revues (souvent proposées par regroupements thématiques ou collections) vers celui de l’accès ouvert en opérant une réaffectation des budgets qui y sont consacrés. Notre travail d’analyse sociologique constitue une première étude systématique de cet objet, fondée sur la recension de 197 accords. Le corpus ainsi constitué inclut des accords caractérisés par la coprésence d’une composante d’abonnement et d’une composante de publication en accès ouvert, même minimale (« jetons » de publication offerts, réduction sur les APC...). En conséquence, ont été exclus de l’analyse les accords portant uniquement sur du financement centralisé de publication en accès ouvert, que ce soit avec des éditeurs ne proposant que des revues avec paiement par l’auteur (PLOS, Frontiers, MDPI...) ou des éditeurs dont une partie du catalogue est constitué de revues en accès ouvert. L’accord le plus ancien de notre corpus a été signé en 2010, les plus récents en 2020 – les accords ne commençant qu’en 2021, même annoncés au cours de l’étude, n’ont pas été retenus. Plusieurs résultats se dégagent de notre analyse. Tout d’abord, on note une grande diversité des acteurs impliqués avec 22 pays et 39 éditeurs, même si certains consortiums (Pays-Bas, Suède, Autriche, Allemagne) et éditeurs (CUP, Elsevier, RSC, Springer) en ont signé beaucoup plus que d’autres. Ensuite, la durée des accords, comprise entre une et six années, révèle une distribution très inégalitaire, avec plus de la moitié des accords (103) signés pour 3 ans, ainsi qu’une faible proportion pour 4 ans ou plus (22 accords). Enfin, en dépit d’appels répétés à la transparence, moins de la moitié des accords (96) ont un texte accessible au moment de cette étude, sans qu’on puisse observer une tendance récente à une plus grande disponibilité. L’analyse montre également des degrés d’ouverture très variables, allant d’une simple information sur le répertoire ESAC en passant par la mise à disposition d’un format annotable jusqu’à l’attribution d’un DOI et d’une licence de réutilisation (CC-BY), en incluant le détail des sommes monétaires. Parmi les 96 accords disponibles, dont 47 signés en 2020, 62 ont fait l’objet d’une analyse en profondeur. C’est à notre connaissance la première analyse à cette échelle, sur un type de matériel non seulement inédit, mais qui était auparavant soumis à des clauses de confidentialité. Fondée sur une lecture minutieuse, l’étude décrit de manière fine leurs propriétés, depuis la matérialité du document jusqu’aux formules financières, en passant par leur morphologie et l’ensemble des droits et devoirs des parties. Les contenus des accords sont donc analysés comme une collection dont nous cherchons à déterminer les points communs et les variations, à travers des codages explicites sur certaines de leurs caractéristiques. L’étude pointe également des incertitudes, et notamment leur caractère « transitionnel », qui demeure fortement discuté. D’un point de vue morphologique, les accords montrent une grande diversité en matière de taille (de 7 à 488 pages) et de structure. Néanmoins, par définition, ils articulent tous deux objets essentiels : d’une part, les conditions de réalisation d’une lecture d’articles de revues, sous forme d’abonnement, mêlant des préoccupations d’accès et de sécurité ; d’autre part, les modalités de publication en accès ouvert, articulant la gestion d’un nouveau type de workflow à toute une série d’options possibles. Parmi ces options, mentionnons notamment le périmètre des revues considérées (hybrides et/ou accès ouvert), les licences disponibles, le degré d’obligation de cette publication, les auteurs éligibles ou le volume d’articles publiables. L’un des résultats les plus importants de cette analyse approfondie est la mise au jour d’un découplage presque complet, au sein même des accords, entre l’objet abonnement et l’objet publication. Bien entendu, l’abonnement est systématiquement configuré dans un monde fermé, soumis à paiement qui déclenche des séries d’identification des circulations légitimes tant du contenu informationnel que des usagers. Il insiste notamment sur les interdictions de réutilisation ou même de copie des articles scientifiques. À l’opposé, la publication en accès ouvert est attachée à un monde régi par l’accès gratuit au contenu, ce qui induit des préoccupations de gestion du workflow et des modalités d’accessibilité. De plus, les différents éléments constitutifs de ces objets contractuels ne sont pas couplés : d’un côté, les lecteurs sont constitués de l’ensemble des membres des institutions abonnées, de l’autre, seuls les auteurs correspondants (« corresponding authors ») sont concernés ; les listes de revues accessibles à la lecture et celles réservées à la publication en accès ouvert sont le plus souvent distinctes ; les workflows ont des objectifs et des organisations matérielles totalement différentes, etc. L’articulation entre les deux objets contractuels relève uniquement d’une formule de distribution financière qui, outre des combinaisons particulières entre l’un et l’autre, permet d’attribuer des étiquettes distinctes aux accords (offset agreement, publish & read, read & publish, read & free articles, read & discount). Au-delà de cette distribution, l’étude des arrangements financiers montre une gamme de dispositions allant d’une prévisibilité budgétaire totale, donc identique aux accords d’abonnement antérieurs, à une incertitude sur le volume de publication ou sur le montant définitif des sommes échangées. Les modalités concrètes de calcul des montants associés à la publication en accès ouvert sont relativement variées. S’il existe effectivement des formules récurrentes (volume d’articles multiplié par un prix individuel, reprise de la moyenne des sommes totales d’APC des années précédentes...), le calcul des sommes en jeu est toujours le résultat d’une négociation singulière entre un consortium et un éditeur scientifique, et aboutit parfois à des formules originales et complexes. À ce titre, l’espace des possibles en matière de formules financières n’est jamais totalement clos. Par ailleurs, la volonté des consortiums d’opérer une « transformation » de leurs accords vers la publication à coût constant renvoie à des définitions diversifiées du « coût » (inclusion ou non des dépenses d’APC préexistantes) et de la constance (admission ou pas d’une « inflation » à 2 ou 3%). De plus, nous n’avons observé aucune disposition contractuelle permettant d’anticiper les sommes en jeu au-delà de l’horizon temporel de l’accord courant. La grande diversité des accords provient d’une part des conditions initiales des relations entre consortiums et éditeurs scientifiques – les sommes dépensées en abonnement étant le point de départ des nouveaux accords –, d’autre part des objectifs de chaque partie. Même si cette étude excluait volontairement les négociations, les accords portent des traces de ces objectifs. Ainsi, de nombreux accords sont de nature explicitement expérimentale, quand certains visent un contrôle budgétaire strict, ou d’autres ambitionnent, dans la période plus récente, la publication du plus grand nombre possible d’articles en accès ouvert. C’est dans ce dernier cas qu’on touche à l’ambiguïté des attentes générales sur les accords transformants. En effet, pour les consortiums, la dimension « transformante » consiste essentiellement à transférer les sommes traditionnellement allouées à l’abonnement vers la publication en accès ouvert. Mais l’objectif n’est jamais de transformer le modèle économique des revues, c'est-à-dire de faire basculer des revues sous abonnement ou hybrides en revues entièrement en accès ouvert. D’ailleurs, aucune clause ne vise une telle fin – à l’exception du modèle d’accord proposé par l’éditeur ACM. Du côté des éditeurs, et notamment de Springer, le caractère cumulatif des accords nationaux passés vise à projeter un monde de la publication où l’accès ouvert devient de fait quantitativement très dominant, sans pour autant modifier de manière pérenne le modèle économique de leurs revues. Notre étude montre que les accords transformants actuels ne permettent pas d’assurer de manière durable une transition de l’économie de la publication vers l’accès ouvert, dans la mesure où ils n’offrent pas de garantie sur le contrôle des dépenses ni sur la pérennité de l’ouverture des contenus. L’avenir des relations entre consortium et éditeur demeure largement indéterminé.