Benefits of dating ghost boyfriend : writing Free Spirit

The following report details the creative process behind writing the feature-length screenplay for Free Spirit, from the first seed of the story’s idea to the full-blown finished script. The report also includes reminiscences on the habits that I’ve developed or discarded and the influences that I’ve cultivated and called upon as a writer, during both my time at the University of Texas and before arriving in Austin in August of 2015.Radio-Television-Fil

Photography in the Middle: Dispatches on Media Ecologies and Aesthetics

It’s easy to forget there’s a war on when the front line is everywhere encrypted in plain sight. Gathered in this book’s several chapters are dispatches on the role of photography in a War Universe, a space and time in which photographers such as Hilla Becher, Don McCullin and Eadweard Muybridge exist only insofar as they are a mark of possession, in the sway of larger forces. These photographers are conceptual personae that collectively fabulate a different kind of photography, a paraphotography in which the camera produces negative abyssal flashes or ‘endarkenment.’ In his Vietnam War memoir, Dispatches, Michael Herr imagines a ‘dropped camera’ receiving ‘jumping and falling’ images, images which capture the weird indivisibility of medium and mediated in a time of war. The movies and the war, the photographs and the torn bodies, fused and exchanged. Reporting from the chaos at the middle of things, Herr invokes a kind of writing attuned to this experience. Photography in the Middle, eschewing a high theoretical mode, seeks to exploit the bag of tricks that is the dispatch. The dispatch makes no grand statement about the progress of the war. Cultivating the most perverse implications of its sources, it tries to express what the daily briefing never can. Ports of entry in the script we’re given, odd and hasty little glyphs, unhelpful rips in the cover story, dispatches are futile, dark intuitions, an expeditious inefficacy. They are bleak but necessary responses to an indifferent world in which any action whatever has little noticeable effect

Architecture + Ninjutsu: Negotiation of Tactical Space in Everyday Places

The main purpose of this research project is to see whether if two unrelated fields of study, architecture and ninjutsu (the art of the ninja, infamous for being Japan‘s espionage agents), can meet on common ground. Research Goals: Define Japanese anthropological space, tracing the creation of kukan or three-dimensional objective space (to broaden and deepen an understanding of space). Find different means to document movements stemming from ninjutsu, especially in terms of the relationship of body, space and movement. To capture spatial relationships in ninjutsu and find equivalencies in everyday places The methodology of this project will mostly be of the qualitative and experimental type. The training of ninjutsu is a purely a kinesthetic practice, where the one‘s own experience and interpretation are more important. I will also include case studies when necessary, or use phenomenological examples to help find reasoning for my findings. I will also conduct experiments using various mediums to help illustrate my points. I will also keep a journal as a record of my findings in the experiments or my personal opinions. The main methodology used to link the two worlds became the use of the helmet cam. This showed first person perspectives of the spaces experienced in ninjutsu, and I compared them with the spaces found in the everyday (between bodies). The second part was analytical diagrams that show the objective spacing between bodies to also help make a comparison. From this research, I have concluded that Ninjutsu and the everyday places we as architects create are both involve the action of spatial negotiation. By juxtaposing the two, ninjutsu and the everyday, the former is an intensification of the latter. They involve similar concepts, yet manifest in different ways.The main purpose of this research project is to see whether if two unrelated fields of study, architecture and ninjutsu (the art of the ninja, infamous for being Japan‘s espionage agents), can meet on common ground. Research Goals: Define Japanese anthropological space, tracing the creation of kukan or three-dimensional objective space (to broaden and deepen an understanding of space). Find different means to document movements stemming from ninjutsu, especially in terms of the relationship of body, space and movement. To capture spatial relationships in ninjutsu and find equivalencies in everyday places The methodology of this project will mostly be of the qualitative and experimental type. The training of ninjutsu is a purely a kinesthetic practice, where the one‘s own experience and interpretation are more important. I will also include case studies when necessary, or use phenomenological examples to help find reasoning for my findings. I will also conduct experiments using various mediums to help illustrate my points. I will also keep a journal as a record of my findings in the experiments or my personal opinions. The main methodology used to link the two worlds became the use of the helmet cam. This showed first person perspectives of the spaces experienced in ninjutsu, and I compared them with the spaces found in the everyday (between bodies). The second part was analytical diagrams that show the objective spacing between bodies to also help make a comparison. From this research, I have concluded that Ninjutsu and the everyday places we as architects create are both involve the action of spatial negotiation. By juxtaposing the two, ninjutsu and the everyday, the former is an intensification of the latter. They involve similar concepts, yet manifest in different ways.The main purpose of this research project is to see whether if two unrelated fields of study, architecture and ninjutsu (the art of the ninja, infamous for being Japan‘s espionage agents), can meet on common ground. Research Goals: Define Japanese anthropological space, tracing the creation of kukan or three-dimensional objective space (to broaden and deepen an understanding of space). Find different means to document movements stemming from ninjutsu, especially in terms of the relationship of body, space and movement. To capture spatial relationships in ninjutsu and find equivalencies in everyday places The methodology of this project will mostly be of the qualitative and experimental type. The training of ninjutsu is a purely a kinesthetic practice, where the one‘s own experience and interpretation are more important. I will also include case studies when necessary, or use phenomenological examples to help find reasoning for my findings. I will also conduct experiments using various mediums to help illustrate my points. I will also keep a journal as a record of my findings in the experiments or my personal opinions. The main methodology used to link the two worlds became the use of the helmet cam. This showed first person perspectives of the spaces experienced in ninjutsu, and I compared them with the spaces found in the everyday (between bodies). The second part was analytical diagrams that show the objective spacing between bodies to also help make a comparison. From this research, I have concluded that Ninjutsu and the everyday places we as architects create are both involve the action of spatial negotiation. By juxtaposing the two, ninjutsu and the everyday, the former is an intensification of the latter. They involve similar concepts, yet manifest in different ways.The main purpose of this research project is to see whether if two unrelated fields of study, architecture and ninjutsu (the art of the ninja, infamous for being Japan‘s espionage agents), can meet on common ground. Research Goals: Define Japanese anthropological space, tracing the creation of kukan or three-dimensional objective space (to broaden and deepen an understanding of space). Find different means to document movements stemming from ninjutsu, especially in terms of the relationship of body, space and movement. To capture spatial relationships in ninjutsu and find equivalencies in everyday places The methodology of this project will mostly be of the qualitative and experimental type. The training of ninjutsu is a purely a kinesthetic practice, where the one‘s own experience and interpretation are more important. I will also include case studies when necessary, or use phenomenological examples to help find reasoning for my findings. I will also conduct experiments using various mediums to help illustrate my points. I will also keep a journal as a record of my findings in the experiments or my personal opinions. The main methodology used to link the two worlds became the use of the helmet cam. This showed first person perspectives of the spaces experienced in ninjutsu, and I compared them with the spaces found in the everyday (between bodies). The second part was analytical diagrams that show the objective spacing between bodies to also help make a comparison. From this research, I have concluded that Ninjutsu and the everyday places we as architects create are both involve the action of spatial negotiation. By juxtaposing the two, ninjutsu and the everyday, the former is an intensification of the latter. They involve similar concepts, yet manifest in different ways

Textual Refuse: Iain Sinclair's Politics and Poetics of Refusal

This thesis directs scholarly attention and recognition to contemporary British writer Iain Sinclair, whose textual refusals provide an alternative model of cultural production to those prescribed by late era capitalism. In doing so, it considers Sinclair's engagement with the notion of refuse. As Walter Benjamin's work eloquently testifies, reading "the rags, the refuse" reveals much about the constitution of culture. Refuse is an integral element of the everyday, and of modern consumer culture. As such, there are compelling reasons for it to be brought to the fore as a topic for study. To recognise the potential and possibilities of refuse is to refuse the ideological and structurating machinery of capitalism, which has devised systems to render refuse invisible and invalid. In many ways, Sinclair creates and brings to light what dominant culture has attempted to bury: counter-cultural poetics, indeterminate narratives, alternative histories. Sinclair's "textua l refuse" is the visible scriptural manifestation of those subterranean histories that hegemonic culture has sought to forget, omit and/or discount. In any economy that fetishises the commodity, Sinclair's association with the marginalised realm of refuse is politicised, and similarly his creation of textual refuse is politicised activity. Sinclair's textual refuse is a refusal of the commodification of literature. Within the theoretical framework of this thesis, refuse is neither failure nor negation. This thesis promotes Sinclair's refusals as dynamic acts; their ruptures and blockages are not impasses, but are, instead, productive. Given the inextricable link between refuse and contemporary production and consumption, Sinclair's engagements with refuse double as an argument for his timeliness and relevance as subject of academic enquiry

Making the Void Fruitful

Shedding fresh light on the life and work of William Butler Yeats—widely acclaimed as the major English-language poet of the twentieth century—this new study by leading scholar Patrick J. Keane questions established understandings of the Irish poet’s long fascination with the occult: a fixation that repelled literary contemporaries T.S. Eliot and W.H. Auden, but which enhanced Yeats’s vision of life and death. Through close reading of selected poems, the first section of Making the Void Fruitful assesses Yeats’s spiritualised treatment of corporeal themes, exploring sex and eroticism as the expression of a duality inherent to his ontological and supernatural convictions. The power-producing tension in Yeats’s work is not only intellectual but emotional. At its vital centre is his Muse: the beautiful political firebrand, Maud Gonne, whose activist Republican politics he considered his one real rival. Through close engagement with the poems and plays she inspired, the second section explores Yeats’s complex relationship with Maud, an obsessive and unrequited love which he sublimated and transformed into the greatest body of Muse poetry since Petrarch, in whose tradition of spiritualized eroticism Yeats, perhaps the last of the great Romantics, was consciously writing. Shaped by the conviction that no modern poet exceeded Yeats in animating the enduring themes of love and spirituality through poetry, this book emphasises the influence, of Blake, Nietzsche, and John Donne, on what Yeats called ‘the thinking of the body’. Grounded firmly in the textual materiality of Yeats’s oeuvre, this book will be of interest to researchers and students of W.B. Yeats, as well as to those in the fields of Anglophone literatures and cultures, and philosophy

The Subangelic Vision Of Saul Bellow: A Study Of His First Six Novels, 1944-1964

While there is an understandable reticence on the part of critics of contemporary American literature to make definitive judgements, there does seem to be a general consensus that the novels of Saul Bellow represent the contemporary American novel at its best. Moreover, this consensus comes not only from critical journals with an exclusive and limited circulation, it also is to be seen in publications of wider appeal, the weekly news magazines and the book reviews of daily newspapers. What is even more astonishing is that the reading public seems to agree with the critics and book reviewers; at this writing, Bellow\u27s Herzog is a best-seller. To reveal the greatness of man that is founded upon his subangelic nature--this is Saul Bellow\u27s announced intention. To the extent that he reveals such a being, and how he creates that being are the subjects of this study. It is important to understand, however, that this is not a philosophical treatise. Nor has it to do with sociology, nor with psychology. It is a literary study, and as such is concerned with the how of Saul Bellow\u27s characters. We would, of course, expect to gain a greater appreciation of his people through this study, more understanding of their well springs and motivations, but the emphasis is to be on Bellow\u27s art. In any case, with the approach of technique as discovery, to use Mark Schorer\u27s term, it is hoped that an examination of the novels of Saul Bellow published to date will serve to illuminate his strictures on the subangelic figure, as well as to clarify what seems to be one of the major literary achievements of our times

The Configuration Space of Two Particles Moving on a Graph

In this thesis we study the configuration space, F (Γ, 2), of two particles moving without collisions on a graph Γ with a view to calculating the Betti numbers of this space. We develop an intersection theory for cycles in graphs inspired by the classical intersection theory for cycles in manifolds and we use this to develop an algorithm to calculate the second Betti number of F (Γ,2) for any graph Γ. We also use this intersection theory to provide a complete description of the cohomology algebra H ^*(F (Γ, 2), Q) for any planar graph Γ and to calculate explicit formulae for the Betti numbers of F (Γ, 2) when Γ is a complete graph or a complete bipartite graph. We also investigate the generators of group H_2 (F (Γ, 2), Z) and show that for any planar graph this group is entirely generated by tori induced by disjoint cycles in the graph. For non-planar graphs the situation is more complicated and we show that there can exist a generator of H_2 (F (Γ, 2), Z) which is not the fundamental class of a surface embedded in the space F (Γ, 2)

James Curtis and spiritualism in Nineteenth-Century Ballarat

This thesis is about the origins, growth, and decline of spiritualism in nineteenth- century Ballarat. It gives special attention to Rustlings in the Golden City, the religious confessions of James Curtis, a notable Ballarat pioneer and the city’s most active and prominent spiritualist believer and evangelist. In Ballarat, spiritualism was commonly regarded as little more than entertaining humbug, usually derided by the press as delusive nonsense. Though clerics occasionally condemned it as heretical and dangerous, few people took spiritualist ideas and practice seriously. Even so, Ballarat had its small core of devout believers. For these, spiritualism provided a route to direct, intuitive, knowledge of the destiny of the spiritual self, comparable to gnostic liberating self-discovery. Rustlings in the Golden City stands as a classic statement of Victorian-era spiritualism and James Curtis has claim to be regarded as Australia’s greatest nineteenth-century spiritualist. While the commitment of many prominent Australian spiritualists of the period was compromised by credulity, bad faith, and self-interest, James Curtis was guileless and sincere. His writings open a window on a neglected area of nineteenth-century Australian social and religious history. The historiography of the thesis is realist and empiricist, with the predominant methodology critical text-analysis. Its chief source is contemporary newspapers and journals and the publications of spiritualists and their opponents and critics.Doctor of Philosoph

Making the Void Fruitful

Shedding fresh light on the life and work of William Butler Yeats—widely acclaimed as the major English-language poet of the twentieth century—this new study by leading scholar Patrick J. Keane questions established understandings of the Irish poet’s long fascination with the occult: a fixation that repelled literary contemporaries T.S. Eliot and W.H. Auden, but which enhanced Yeats’s vision of life and death. Through close reading of selected poems, the first section of Making the Void Fruitful assesses Yeats’s spiritualised treatment of corporeal themes, exploring sex and eroticism as the expression of a duality inherent to his ontological and supernatural convictions. The power-producing tension in Yeats’s work is not only intellectual but emotional. At its vital centre is his Muse: the beautiful political firebrand, Maud Gonne, whose activist Republican politics he considered his one real rival. Through close engagement with the poems and plays she inspired, the second section explores Yeats’s complex relationship with Maud, an obsessive and unrequited love which he sublimated and transformed into the greatest body of Muse poetry since Petrarch, in whose tradition of spiritualized eroticism Yeats, perhaps the last of the great Romantics, was consciously writing. Shaped by the conviction that no modern poet exceeded Yeats in animating the enduring themes of love and spirituality through poetry, this book emphasises the influence, of Blake, Nietzsche, and John Donne, on what Yeats called ‘the thinking of the body’. Grounded firmly in the textual materiality of Yeats’s oeuvre, this book will be of interest to researchers and students of W.B. Yeats, as well as to those in the fields of Anglophone literatures and cultures, and philosophy