New directions: The deconstructing 'Tis Pity?: Derrida, Barthes and Ford

At the famous climax of `Tis Pity, Giovanni enters the last scene of the play and, as he knows, his life, `with a heart upon his dagger', with which he-hearted implement he stabs his enemy and brother-in-law Soranzo, before himself being fatally stabbed in the ensuing melée. The heart, it seems, is Annahella's, removed from her after Giovanni's loving, surgical sacrifice of his pregnant sister/wife in the scene before. The `seems' here is crucial, for at first this is not clear, neither to the onstage audience, waiting for Giovanni to arrive at the banquet, nor to an audience watching the play or those reading it. The eloquent Giovanni exults in providing the explanation to both groups

Millicent Weber, Literary Festivals and Contemporary Book Culture

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Introduction

When Dr Johnson, the 18• century critic, was asked to describe the quality of the poets from Pembroke College, Oxford (where the great doctor was briefly an undergraduate); he proudly said: "Sir, we are a nest of singing birds." In this collection we make the same claim about Waikato poets, accomplished and at ease in writing poetry and, by turns, confident, assertive, lyrical and sceptical in the ways they address the wide terrain of the Waikato. Readers north of the Mangatawhiri stream or south below Lake Taupo might be surprised by the poetic claims this anthology makes. We hope they will be also delighted and enthralled

Shakespeare and New Zealand: 1912-1916-1964

My paper will work away from the approach in my contributions to Christine Jansohn’s 2015 Shakespeare Jubilees: 1769-2014 and the forthcoming Shakespeare and Antipodal Memory, eds. Philip Mead and Gordon MacMullan (Bloomsbury Arden, 2016). Those chapters use the extensive archive illustrating New Zealanders remembering Shakespeare in the tercentennial year, 1916. Here I will contrast that archive with surviving records for Shakespeare pageants in 1912 and celebrations in Stratford, New Zealand for the 300th anniversary of Shakespeare’s birth. These years are linked by a concern for the performance or recreation of the idea of Shakespeare across a range of cultural forms. What kind of public memory do these activities serve? How can we contrast with, for example, the sacred rites of public memory that, in Australia and New Zealand, are entwined around Anzac day, April 25

Combinatorial immunotherapies overcome MYC-driven immune evasion in triple negative breast cancer

Few patients with triple negative breast cancer (TNBC) benefit from immune checkpoint inhibitors with complete and durable remissions being quite rare. Oncogenes can regulate tumor immune infiltration, however whether oncogenes dictate diminished response to immunotherapy and whether these effects are reversible remains poorly understood. Here, we report that TNBCs with elevated MYC expression are resistant to immune checkpoint inhibitor therapy. Using mouse models and patient data, we show that MYC signaling is associated with low tumor cell PD-L1, low overall immune cell infiltration, and low tumor cell MHC-I expression. Restoring interferon signaling in the tumor increases MHC-I expression. By combining a TLR9 agonist and an agonistic antibody against OX40 with anti-PD-L1, mice experience tumor regression and are protected from new TNBC tumor outgrowth. Our findings demonstrate that MYC-dependent immune evasion is reversible and druggable, and when strategically targeted, may improve outcomes for patients treated with immune checkpoint inhibitors. The oncoprotein c-Myc is often overexpressed in triple negative breast cancer and has a role in tumor progression and resistance to therapy. Here the authors show that elevated MYC expression is correlated with low immune infiltration, diminished MHC-I pathway expression and that CpG/aOX40 treatment could overcome resistance to PD-L1 blockade in MYC-high breast tumors.Peer reviewe

The orientations of molecular clouds in the outer Galaxy: Evidence for the scale of the turbulence driver ?

Supernova explosions inject a considerable amount of energy into the interstellar medium (ISM) in regions with high to moderate star formation rates. In order to assess whether the driving of turbulence by supernovae is also important in the outer Galactic disk, where the star formation rates are lower, we study the spatial distribution of molecular cloud (MC) inclinations with respect to the Galactic plane. The latter contains important information on the nature of the mechanism of energy injection into the ISM. We analyze the spatial correlations between the position angles (PAs) of a selected sample of MCs (the largest clouds in the catalogue of the outer Galaxy published by Heyer et al. 2001). Our results show that when the PAs of the clouds are all mapped to values into the [0,90]degrees interval, there is a significant degree of spatial correlation between the $PA$s on spatial scales in the range of 100-800 pc. These scales are of the order of the sizes of individual SN shells in low density environments such as those prevailing in the outer Galaxy and where the metallicity of the ambient gas is of the order of the solar value or smaller. These findings suggest that individual SN explosions, occurring in the outer regions of the Galaxy and in likewise spiral galaxies, albeit at lower rates, continue to play an important role in shaping the structure and dynamics of the ISM in those regions. The SN explosions we postulate here are likely associated with the existence of young stellar clusters in the far outer regions of the Galaxy and the UV emission and low levels of star formation observed with the GALEX satellite in the outer regions of local galaxies.Comment: Accepted to MNRAS main journal. Additional discussion and and one figure with error estimates is added. 7 pages, 7 figures. Main conclusions unchange

From Agincourt to the Avon: Ngaio Marsh and Henry V (1972)

In the evening of October 1, 1972, the James Hay Theatre in the Christchurch Town Hall was officially launched with an impressively mounted production of Shakespeare’s Henry V, directed by Ngaio Marsh, internationally famous as one of the Queens of Crime fiction, and who had directed high quality Shakespeare productions in Ōtautahi/Christchuch since 1943. The production, using over 100 actors and featuring professional actors Marsh had trained who returned from England to perform, was a pinnacle of her production style, and each of the ten performances sold out. Marsh’s meticulously prepared promptbooks for the show, housed in the Turnbull Library, show every cut and move sketched by Marsh in advance. The Marsh archives also document reviewers’ reactions and recollections from the company, and contain a rich array of visual evidence: posters, production stills, and the official programme. In my paper I will use this data to evoke this lavish production. In 2019 the Town Hall re-opened after extensive restoration following the 2011 earthquakes, a process documented in The Christchurch Town Hall 1965-2019: a Dream Renewed (Canterbury UP, 2020), and the venue has begun presenting post-Covid entertainments. It is timely then to pivot back to 1972 and ask what we can learn from this production about the place of Marsh’s theatre in the development of performance culture in Aotearoa; and open out to the wider, ongoing questions as to the place of Shakespeare in our cultural fabric