The Great Cat Cull

Not For Cat Lovers


Last week I produced a post for my lone reader to learn if, in fact, he was reading this drivel. He is, it turns out, and he even commented about the contents and was surprised that the Brits killed all those pets and that John Barrymore also may have dispatched his dogs. (For that post see: Factlet (2) -Brits and Their Pets.)

 For his benefit I will continue with the animal theme and for the rest of you I offer a “Scoop.”
If you pick up the New York Times tomorrow, you will find in the Magazine the following article:
“The Culling: Australia is Deadly Serious About Killing Millions of Cats,” Jessica Camille, Aguirre, New York Times Magazine, April 28, 2019.

The article begins with a photograph of a gun-toting Aussie emerging from the Outback with a dead cat and describes how some other Aussies are flying overhead dropping thousands of poisonous sausages. 

Feral cats are a real problem down-under it appears and the Australian government decided in 2015 that two million should be eradicated. It is estimated that over 200,000 were killed during the first year even though Brigitte Bardot and 160,000 others objected. The cats are being culled because: 
"In addition to mammals, cats kill an estimated 377 million birds and 649 million reptiles every year in Australia. (In the United States, the numbers are even more striking: Scientists estimate that free-roaming cats kill 1.3 to 4 billion birds and 6.3 to 22.3 billion mammals every year.)"

That should be enough to entice you to read the article and enough to satisfy my lone reader.

Post Script:
I thought by writing this stuff down it might help me remember it. That is not working. I have only vague memories that I already have written about the feral cats here in London, Ontario. See: Feral Cats and Dead Birds.
For those of you wondering how I know the contents of the New York Times for tomorrow - it's simple. Subscribe and you get articles early, but now I don't have anything new to read on Sunday and we may get some snow.

Abstracts Of The Week

Academic Abstractions

   Loyal readers will know that I have been offering fond memories about old magazines in my "Periodical Ramblings". I am not unaware that, of late, some scholarly periodicals in some disciplines have been parodied by scholars in other disciplines who find the prose to be impenetrable. So I went searching through some current journals and provide two abstracts for you to assess. They follow the brief discussion of the most recent academic publishing hoax. 

   

   Many of you will remember reading headlines recently about the rape culture and queer performity found in dog parks around Portland. Those subjects were written about by some academics who submitted a large number of papers to selected scholarly journals bearing titles such as this one: "Going in Through the Back Door: Challenging Straight Male Homohysteria and Transphobia through Receptive Penetrative Sex Toy Use". 

   The academics are real, but the papers are bogus. Nonetheless,
some were accepted for publication and more would have been if someone had not grown suspicious when an author of one of the papers could not be properly identified. 

   Journals in the humanities were targeted and particularly the sub-set of periodicals published by the highly aggrieved who work in the area of "Grievance Studies". The hoax is now often referred to as "The Grievance Studies Affair" or, as "Sokal Squared" by insider academics who are aware of a similar episode from over twenty years ago.  One of the points the hoaxers were attempting to make is that it can be difficult - even for academic editors - to distinguish between sense and nonsense.

   Given that we live in an era of "Fake News", some of you are likely to think everything is a hoax and that the entire episode was fabricated -- that the news accounts were made up by journalists who constructed a story they knew would go viral among credulous readers who are gullible enough to believe that highly trained intellectuals could be duped in such a way. 

   I am neither trained nor very smart, but I figured it could not be that difficult to separate the scholarly wheat from the fictitious chaff. I was wrong. 

   Here are two samples. One has to do with (I think) self-driving cars. The other is about the smile. They may be fake, but, on the other hand, they may have a scholarly depth I can't fathom. What do you think? 

The Abstracts: 

Self-Driving Cars

"Media Ecologies of Autonomous Automobility: Gendered and Racial Dimensions of Future Concept Cars,"Julia M. Hildebrand and Mimi Sheller, Transfers: Interdisciplinary Journal of Mobility Studies. 8.1 (Spring 2018): p64+.
Abstract: 
"The imagination of automated automobility puts into question the control of the vehicle by a masculine driver and potentially disturbs feelings of safety, power, security, and freedom. Given that systems of automobility and communication technology are already gendered and racialized in particular ways, this article explores how recent "premediated" depictions of automated car technologies reconfigure and reproduce the historically gendered and raced representations, meanings, and practices of (auto)mobility. This inquiry employs a media ecological approach within the qualitative analysis of two concept car previews by Nissan and Volvo. Rather than a degendering of the driver, we suggest a multiplication of gendered and racialized technologies of mobility via several forms of hypermediation. We also explore how the autonomous car continues to evoke utopian spatial metaphors of the car as sanctuary and communicative environment while allaying fears of dystopian metaphors of the vehicle as traffic trap, virtual glass house, and algorithmic target."

The Smile

"The Politics of a Smile, Fabienne Collignon, new formations: a journal of culture/theory/politics, Volume 95, 2018. [Apparently the words in titles of some culture journals are presented only in lower case.]

Abstract

"In this article, I explore the smile as regulatory mechanism installed in the face to organise a subject’s responses to neo-imperial/biopolitical capitalist governmentality. I begin by situating my reading with respect to Sara Ahmed’s and Lauren Berlant’s work on affective labour before turning to German philosopher Helmuth Plessner (1892–1985) in order to consider the smile as theory of sovereignty. I propose that these two meanings or deployments of the smile – as (1) act that demonstrates forced enslavement to capitalist culture and (2) as articulation of the sovereign self/state – converge in their joint purpose, which is the elimination of sociality and solidarity. My article thereby contributes to recent scholarship on the face, in particular its function in affective/service labour, which it supplements by drawing on Plessner’s work: at stake is not only the worker’s subjection to capital but also to a regime obsessed with securing borders."

Sources:
   For the "Sokal Affair" this Wikipedia article will suffice.
   As will the Wikipedia entry for "The Grievance Studies Affair" which is sometimes referred to as "Sokal Squared."
Post Script:
   I provided an earlier example of intellectual 'speaking in tongues'. See, Academic Scat Singing. 
   Fake journals are more of a problem than fake articles. The need to publish or perish has led to the creation of predatory publishers who, for a fee, will publish your article in a journal they will create or include the talk you gave at a conference into a book of proceedings. Once again you can start with the Wikipedia  article on "Predatory Open-Access Publishing". Some university libraries offer guides related to this subject. For Canadian examples see: UNBC, Mount Royal University; The University of Lethbridge.

All of this just about broke my spell checker.
   

Factlet (2)

Brits and Their Pets

This morning I had breakfast at the local pub with a bunch of hockey playing friends, most of whom had just come from a game. I just participated in the dining part. Such participation, however, allows me to tell stories later in the day which often begin with a sentence like this - “One of my hockey buddies…” etc. - from which the listener forms the impression that I also am a hockey playing guy. Apart from good company and good stories, I benefit because vicarious exercise is much less strenuous than the real kind and, unless I choke on my toast, I am likely to be able to continue eating with them for the rest of the playing season. 

   One of the real hockey guys, who is more cerebral and sensitive than the others, contends that he reads this blog and wondered why I was not producing more content. I couldn’t say that it was because I play a lot of hockey. 

   He is surely lying about his reading habits, just as I may have exaggerated a bit about his sensitivity and cerebrality. If he does, in fact, take a peek occasionally at this blog, that means it is read by one person and he should be rewarded. Hence this quick post which can serve also as a test since I am inviting him to respond to it. Apart from an entertaining post he will also receive a shot of single malt for his solitary efforts. Now, about those Brits.

The Factlet

 Here finally is the Factlet you are waiting for. We all know that members of that island race love their pets and it has been recently reported that that love may be greater than the affection they feel for their partners. The reader of this blog knows that it has a contrarian strain which will again be exhibited in the Factlet chosen. It is reported that in 1939:

“At least 400,000 cats and dogs (around 26% of London’s cat and dog population) were euthanized in London in the first week of the war. This mass euthanasia was not legally required or even recommended by the British government, was opposed by veterinarians and animal charities (who nonetheless carried out many of the killings) and occurred during the period of the “phoney war”, long before bombs began to fall over London.”

My lone hockey guy reader can contact me to find out if, why and how such an episode happened. Any others who may stumble upon this will have to consult the sources provided.

Sources:

The Factlet is from: The Great Cat and Dog Massacre: The Real Story of World War Two’s Unknown Tragedy by Hilda Kean. Although it is published by a university press, a copy of it is not yet found in this university town, but you can validate it by looking at the website of the University of Chicago Press. You can also read a review of it: "Pet Cemetary: Why Londoners Killed Their Animals in the War," Clare Palmer, TLS, Sept. 22, 2017. The recent study about pet affection and the British can be found in many places, among them: “Study Finds 15% of Brits Love Their Pet More Than Their Partner, The Daily Star, Feb. 22, 2019. Some of you are probably thinking that you have read all of this before, but you are thinking of, The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History, Robert Darnton. That happened in Paris in the 1730s. Post Script: Mass panic was one reason behind the 1939 episode. Another has been reported about an individual who killed his pets out of fear for their future. Your bonus Factlet: "It is said that John Barrymore, the great American stage actor, being persuaded that the Martians had landed in upper state New York, took his two beloved Irish wolfhounds into his garden and, so that they might not fall prey to the alien invaders, shot them. Whether Orson Welles, whose notorious fake news adaptation of H.G. Wells’s War of the Worlds Barrymore had fallen for, ever apologised is unrecorded." "A Vast Cull of Pets was Organised on the Home Front in 1939 — To Pre-empt Them Being Blown to Pieces by the Germans," Wynn Wheldon, The Spectator, May 13, 2017. Now that source is not from a university press, so I went looking for substantiation - an important thing in this era of ‘fake news’. I did not find any, but I did find this, which may mean that there is an element of truth to in the account: “Rushing out to the kennel in which he kept his twenty St. Bernards, he [Barrymore] flung open the gate and released the dogs crying, “Fend For Yourselves.” Bartlett’s Book of Anecdotes, p.44, note 7.

A FACTLET is better than a FACTOID. For more about this important distinction see the footnote in my post about GEE-GEES.

  

Periodical Ramblings (8)

Single Author Journals

     

 















This is my 8th post about periodicals. The others are each about a single journal or magazine. This one covers a class of periodical publications - those which are devoted to an individual. There is no formal classification for them and they are difficult to find unless you are looking for a specific person. That is, they are not listed in a subject classification and a good reference librarian would be unable to direct you to a place in the stacks where you could find all the periodicals dedicated to people. She might say, "Well I am sure there must be one for Shakespeare," and she would be correct since there are dozens dedicated to him.

     Those for authors such as Shakespeare are created by scholars and scholarly societies, but there are also many that cover the lowbrow who are written about by fans and enthusiasts and by the occasional academic interested in popular culture. There are thick single author journals that have been around for years and which publish regularly on a quarterly or annual schedule. There are also thinner magazines and newsletters that come out irregularly and which can disappear quickly.  All types of individuals can have devotees and all kinds of subjects and disciplines have a representative. There is even one (at least) about a librarian: About Larkin (the journal of the Philip Larkin society). Although he may have a journal, one learns from it that that wasn't enough to prevent the Larkin family home in Coventry from being demolished to make way for "junction 6 of the Coventry inner ring road". Such is progress.

 
















 One would think that such publications would be threatened by the Internet. Surely there must be a J. K. Rowling Society and a member within it who could create a web page or magazine. Although I am also sure there are many blogs dedicated to individual authors, most of them are likely to have been created by the unlettered and, like this one, remain unread.  A refereed journal published by an 18th century society or a university press will look better on an academic resume, so it is likely that scholarly single author journals will continue to be produced in print form, or electronically by a recognized periodical publisher.
   On the other hand, the greater threat is declining library budgets. Journal subscriptions present a real budgetary problem and the only scholar on campus who is interested in a single author is likely to have a difficult time in making the case for the retention of a periodical about one person.




















Sources: 
    For a very quick sample of single author journals produced by just one university press see Penn State University Press which is the source for all the images in this post. There are more, for example: The Arthur Miller Journal; The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies; The Journal of Nietzsche Studies and the Steinbeck Review.  I mentioned recently in a post about Mark Twain, a journal about him. Penn State has one as well - The Mark Twain Annual - which is on the list before the one for Shaw: The Journal of Bernard Shaw Studies.
   Such journals remain very difficult to locate (that is, all of them, not just one periodical about one author). There is one very good source, although it was published 40 years ago. Still, if you can locate it you will learn about the many titles that range widely from Balzac to Zane Grey. It is: Author Newsletters and Journals:An International Bibliography of Serial Publications Concerned With the Life and Works of Individual Authors,  Margaret C. Patterson, Gale Research Company 1979. For those of you who have read this far: there is an LC Classification for this book - Authors-Periodicals-Bibliography. I am sure that if you search by such a heading, it will still be the only book to be found.
   Before that book was available to me, I had discovered many such journals on the shelves in the periodical room and wondered about how one might find more. There was no way to do so and I pointed it out in this article. It is not bad and I will stick with the title: "Other People Magazines: A Somewhat Irreverent Look at Single Author Journals", Jerry Mulcahy, Change, Vol. 14, No. 3 (Apr., 1982), pp. 48-51.  (Although I have a pdf of the article and wrote it, the publisher has the rights. If you have access to JSTOR, you can read it.)

Post Script:
   Not all journals featuring the name of an individual on the masthead are about that individual. Penn State produces The Chaucer Review, which is also about medieval studies and literary criticism and the University of Toronto Press publishes The Tocqueville Review which focuses on  "the comparative study of social change, primarily in Europe and North America, but also covering major developments in other parts of the world, in the spirit of Alexis de Tocqueville’s pioneer investigations."
   Nor all such journals located where you would expect them to be. The James Joyce Quarterly is published at the University of Tulsa. As an aside to this note Tulsa is also not the place one would expect to find, "The Edmund Wilson Library representing Wilson’s interests in literature and cultural affairs, including the Nabokov-Wilson letters, and rare hand-printed editions of Anais Nin’s early works", but that is where it is. Particularly since his son taught at Western for years and still has a cubicle in the Weldon Library there. (Another aside: The Churchillian is found fairly close by in Fulton, MO.)
   Although Western University does not have a press, for years Hume Studies originated from the campus.
    Since I am not sure I have met the gender quota, I will mention that many such journals are about women. See: The Journal of the Sylvia Townsend Warner Society. 
     For the rationale for "Periodical Ramblings" see here.  For samples of the journals covered see, for example: this one about Flair or this one about The Wilson Quarterly or this one about The Sewanee Review.

Apercu #3

     For reasons that will remain unstated and excuses that will not be offered, I have again fallen behind in my postings. Worried that Mulcahy's Miscellany (which apparently exists somewhere in the clouds) will soon be covered in cobwebs if I don't get to work, or that it may disappear if my host (google) detects no activity, I will offer here a sentiment that seems currently to sum things up.
     Of late we have been saturated by a subject which did not exist a few years ago (Brexit) and snowed under by discussions about a politician (Jody Wilson-Rabould) about whom we did not know a few months ago. As well, there have been flurries of articles about various U.S. plutocrats, kleptocrats and promised reports.  About all of these things all that needs to be said is:

     Never Was So Little Known By So Many About So Much

Source:
 Supposedly said by Churchill (what wasn't), the apercu above was applied recently to the subject of Brexit by Roger Cohen in the NYT, Mar. 3, 2019.
  And on that same day in the same paper Frank Bruni used a phrase that is paraphrased here and which refers to the land just south of our border: the land of the fraud and the home of the knave.
Post Script:
For the earlier examples of pithy phrases in this blog see:
A Trumpian Apercu
and
Historical Censoriousness