'Pleasure balks, bliss appears' or 'The apparatus shines like a blade' : towards a theory of a progressive reading praxis in creative writing pedagogy

This article argues that a reformation of Creative Writing’s reading praxis is required if it is to develop its unique potential as a field of intellectual enquiry. Roland Barthes, in his essay ‘On Reading’, identifies three types of reading pleasure. The third of these modes is that of ‘Writing’, in which ‘reading is a conductor of the Desire to write’. Of this mode, Barthes writes: Is this pleasure of production an elitist pleasure, reserved only to potential writers? In our society, a society of consumption and not production, a society of reading … and not a society of writing ... everything is done to block the answer ... my profound and -constant conviction is that it will never be possible to liberate reading if, in the same impulse, we do not liberate writing. (Barthes 1989: 41) It is the contention of the author of this article that the teaching of the ‘reading as a writer’ method in Creative Writing classrooms gives rise to a situation the inverse of that Barthes describes; it makes Creative Writing into a ‘society of writing’ in which reading is trammelled. The article explores and critiques the ‘reading as a writer’ technique, examines various progressive models of Creative Writing reading praxis, and proposes a radical ‘writerly reading’ praxis suggested by concepts from the work of Michel de Certeau. Keywords: Pedagogy, 'reading as a writer', experimental fictio

The weird, the posthuman, and the abjected world-in-itself : fidelity to the ‘Lovecraft event’ in the work of Caitlín R. Kiernan and Laird Barron

Caitlín R. Kiernan and Laird Barron are acclaimed and influential writers of the early twenty-first century resurgence of weird fiction. But a common critical response to their writing is that they have achieved their powerful effects only by transcending the influence of the work of H. P. Lovecraft. This article argues that, while it is important to move past Lovecraft’s often regressive stance, to inherit topoi from him is not necessarily to take on the more negative aspects of his personal ideology. Although his ideology was reactionary, aspects of his poetics were radical and progressive. In fact, he himself derived many of his tropes from earlier writers whose worldviews differed radically from his – the topoi were not formed by his ideology. Kiernan and Barron have used these topoi to address contemporary concerns in a progressive manner maintaining fidelity to what Benjamin Noys has called the ‘Lovecraft event’, while breaking with his reactionary attitudes

The wanderer: peregrinations in eldritch regions

This being a creative, not critical, project, there is no overall thesis to summarize here, and I am loath to offer a synopsis of the fiction, for to do so would pre-empt plot turns. However, I feel it would be useful for me to give a brief outline of the intentions and aspirations I had for the material before I began to write it. At the inception of this enterprise I had two main aims. First, I hoped to produce a creative writing thesis that, rather than consisting of separate critical and fictional components, was a ludic interweaving of theory and invention. To this end, I decided to structure the work as a kind of detournement of the annotated critical edition, situating a critical apparatus around my core work of fiction. Second, I wanted to examine the contestational potential of a literary mode often, sometimes correctly, maligned as a conservative genre – horror fiction. However, I did not want to follow the template of a number of transgressive horrors, which is simply to depict reason overthrown by a dark and terrible other, but wished to reappraise the overlooked possibilities of the form. I had no idea what these might be, but hoped to uncover them in the process of writing my thesis. In the event the project departed from the horror schema, but it remained a fundamental model, the tingling spine of the piece. It was in the course of carrying out my second intention I came up against the central problem of the composition of this thesis. I became convinced horror is not just an amalgam of terror and revulsion, as dictionary definitions would have it, but must also include a component of the uncanny. While it is not easy to produce the first two emotional responses, it is at least obvious what means should be employed. The uncanny, however, is more elusive, and I had no clear idea how I might attempt to give rise to it. I decided instead to proceed by intuition and the emulation of works that had produced an uncanny feeling in me. While writing it seemed to me I was producing a text capable of eliciting at least a faint thrill of strangeness, though I had no idea how I was doing so, and it was not until I was nearing the end of the project I realised what my unconscious method had been. Let me explain. On the 3rd March 2008, while in the midst of editing this thesis, I was reading, for respite from my own work, Iain Sinclair's novel Dining on Stones (2004), when I came upon the following passage: My wild card is the little-known novel More Things in Heaven by Walter Owen. Owen […] lived for a time in Buenos Aires. He produced a sequence, linked narratives involving spontaneous combustion and a cursed manuscript, that seems in some ways to prefigure Borges (with a dash of M.R. James). Owen‘s book, difficult to find, has itself become a talisman, possession (unless it can be passed on to an unsuspecting recipient) conferring malfate, paranoid delusions, death. I rid myself of my original copy, but still have the second – which arrived, anonymously, as a barter against a bad debt. (Sinclair, 2005, p.407) I was intrigued – both Borges and M.R. James had been reference points for me when composing my novel; furthermore, my book was also a sequence of linked narratives, and involved a cursed manuscript. In Dining on Stones, the narrator, Andrew Norton, Sinclair‘s recurrent alter ego, goes on to quote some sections from ‘More Things in Heaven…’ (1947). Reading these, I noted a further similarity to my novel. Norton reproduces the following quotation from Owen‘s book, originally, in context, written by the narrator, 'gradually I found the conviction forming in my mind that the story they unfolded was not fiction but a narrative of factual events' – the crux of my tale comes at a point when one of its characters wonders whether a manuscript, which comprises the bulk of the book, is a work of the imagination, or a faithful recording of incredible and dreadful events (Owen, 1947, p.12). Therefore, undeterred by Sinclair‘s claims of malign influence, on my next visit to the British Library, I ordered 'More Things in Heaven…'. On receiving it, a couple of days later – not being much in demand it was held in the library's off-site depository in Boston Spa, Yorkshire – I felt a frisson on opening the book and reading the first sentence: 'On the 14th July 1935 Mr Cornelius Letherbotham, an English gentleman resident in Buenos Aires, died under extraordinary and distressing circumstances,' (Owen, 1947, p.9). The reason I shuddered then will become clear on perusing the first paragraph of my novel: On the 13th March 2005, the author Simon Peterkin, a hack horror writer, read only by obsessive fans of the genre, went missing. He had few friends and had become estranged from his only living relatives, a brother and sister. Therefore, it is doubtful his disappearance would have come to general notice, had it not been for the singular circumstances surrounding it. Gripped by horrible fascination, I read on. 'More Things in Heaven...' is a strange, difficult, and at times abstruse work, filled with occult erudition and containing a number of virtuoso pastiches of historical documents. In many ways it is a novel that pre-empts the literary styles of later, postmodernist writers; with its linked tales, mysticism, and overarching narrative about a hermetic sect of 'Magi' under whose auspices human civilisation is directed, it is reminiscent of a work by Umberto Eco, or Thomas Pynchon. It is certainly a very enjoyable book. It is not surprising it did not find, and has never found, a general readership, however, for it contains a great number of esoteric terms and archaisms, its plot is incoherent to the extent that suspense is vitiated utterly, and it has a fustian quality reminiscent of the bombast of turn-of-the-twentieth-century mystics, and fustiness redolent of arcane impenetrable texts. And of course there are those tales of it 'conferring malfate, paranoid delusions, death…' As I perused 'More Things in Heaven…', and researched Owen's life, more and more coincidences occurred to me. A character in my novel quotes the line from Shakespeare from which Owen took his title. Though Owen lived most of his life in Uruguay, he was born and educated in Glasgow; Glasgow University was the institute at which I chose to study for my doctorate. At one point in my novel the character producing the critical apparatus, James Anderson, writes in a footnote of his coming upon a book that has a strange resonance with the manuscript he is editing – an experience that mirrors mine in discovering 'More Things in Heaven…'. In the section of my thesis that purports to be an extract from the work Anderson discovers, reference is made to the US poet Robert W. Service, who attended the same school in Glasgow, Hillhead High, as Owen, a mere ten years before him. A further resonance is that Owen's protagonist, after an encounter with some eldritch thing, finds his right arm is afflicted: A strange feature of my injuries was the condition of my right arm and hand. The sleeves of my shirt and jacket had completely disappeared, leaving my arm bare to the shoulder, and the arm itself was bloodless and shrivelled as if by prolonged immersion in water. (Owen, 1947, p.309) In my novel, a character, after blundering into and touching with his outstretched hand some foul entities in a cavern beneath the Glasgow Necropolis, suffers a very similar affliction: 'Over the next few days his [right] arm grew more enfeebled, took on a necrotic hue, and began to stink of rottenness.' After reading 'More Things in Heaven… and noting all these correspondences, I returned to Dining on Stones to look again at Sinclair‘s evocation of Owen's novel, and read, with vague horror, another line Norton quotes from it: 'I was struck by the coincidence, if indeed it was a coincidence and not a clue to some hidden connection,' (Owen, 1947, p.12). Of course, I knew the coincidences between my novel and Owen's were mere coincidences, but I still felt the frisson such correspondences can produce. Pondering this, I realised the sensation I was experiencing was one I had striven to engender with my novel's multiple frames, paratexts, and internal referentiality. This led me to muse on why I should have wished to do so, and to reconsider some of the notions that had been much in my mind as I was composing the thesis. I realised then it was through an attempt to produce in the reader a sense of fated and ominous connections that I had tried to engender the uncanny. To conclude this abstract, I want to return to the question of the overlooked potential of the horror form. It is my belief works in the mode have the power to bring home to the reader the fact that, in a world in which the events of history are regurgitated by the media as palatable fictionalized morsels, the real has not lost any of its terror, or brutality. Readers thus made to feel anew a sense of peril will, it is to be hoped, adopt a more interrogative stance towards that which they are told. Horror therefore possesses a valuable ethical function

Concerns and research priorities for Scottish farmed salmon welfare – An industry perspective

The intensification of Scottish salmon farming has been associated with increasing demands for the monitoring and safeguarding of farmed salmon welfare. Continued growth of farm productivity, while avoiding adverse effects on salmon welfare, will require the development of effective welfare assessment tools. This paper reports on a survey of the Scottish salmon farming industry, which was conducted to understand current salmon welfare concerns and priorities for research. As part of a broader aim for further developing tools for on-farm salmon welfare assessment, a total of 61 individuals working in the Scottish salmon farming industry took part. This survey intentionally focused on industry stakeholders to provide insights into current practices and challenges associated with monitoring and assessing salmon welfare. Participants were recruited through authors' industry contacts, online advertisements, and searches of company websites. In terms of production stages, survey participants believed that the seawater rearing stage is a major area of concern, largely due to the challenges presented by sea lice. Gill health and environmental challenges, mainly relating to water quality, were two other highly ranked welfare concerns. Methods to monitor salmon welfare during husbandry practices, where disturbances and contact with the salmon is unavoidable (particularly during crowding, grading, and interventions), were emphasised as a priority. Although these were identified as the major concerns, the survey indicated that there are other significant welfare concerns specific to each production stage that also require consideration. Participants highlighted non-invasive, remote, and animal-based welfare measures as important areas for further development for on-farm welfare assessments. Behavioural measures were identified as having the potential to make a major contribution in this context. This survey presents the first collection of opinions from professionals employed across the Scottish salmon farming industry regarding the current overall state of farmed salmon welfare. This study upholds the importance of using an integrated approach to welfare assessments, and that behavioural measures could play an important role in ensuring these assessments benefit both salmon welfare and farm productivity

Size matters: variations in seagrass seed size at local scales affects seed performance

Seed size can have an impact on angiosperm reproductive fitness. Ecological theory predicts plants that will produce larger seeds in stressful environments to increase the chances of seedling survival and numerous small seeds in favourable conditions to increase the number of recruits. We measured seed morphology of the seagrass Heterozostera nigricaulis from four populations under differing environmental conditions in South East Australia. Seed size and mass among sites showed consistent differences over four flowering seasons. Seeds from exposed, ephemeral meadows (Blairgowrie, Edwards Point) were 19%–53% heavier than those from larger, stable meadows at more sheltered sites (Swan Bay, Point Henry). Overall, heavier seeds from exposed sites performed better in germination experiments and persisted (remained viable) longer compared to small seeds from sheltered sites. Seeds from sheltered sites showed contrasting levels of seed performance. Small seeds from Swan Bay had the lowest germination but the proportion of viable seeds after 12 months were much higher (41%) than similar sized seeds from Point Henry (0%). There are clear life history benefits of large seeds that facilitate seed persistence and germination at exposed sites; however, the performance of smaller seeds varied between sites and may be a function of other site-specific advantages

A report card approach to describe temporal and spatial trends in parameters for coastal seagrass habitats

Report cards that are designed to monitor environmental trends have the potential to provide a powerful communication tool because they are easy to understand and accessible to the general public, scientists, managers and policy makers. Given this functionality, they are increasingly popular in marine ecosystem reporting. We describe a report card method for seagrass that incorporates spatial and temporal variability in three metrics—meadow area, species and biomass—developed using long-term (greater than 10 years) monitoring data. This framework summarises large amounts of spatially and temporally complex data to give a numeric score that provides reliable comparisons of seagrass condition in both persistent and naturally variable meadows. We provide an example of how this is applied to seagrass meadows in an industrial port in the Great Barrier Reef World Heritage Area of north-eastern Australia