Biography and Life-Writing

[English abstract]:
Abstract

In trying to fathom the crux of Rumi’s mystical ghazals, there is the thrill of investigation, the mental challenge of evaluating discordant sources, and the prospect of a better understanding of what Rumi wanted to say to his disciples, and by extension, what he might have wanted to say to us. Rumi tells a famous story, ultimately from a Buddhist source, in which people encounter an elephant for the first time in their lives, but it is in a pitch-black room, so that they are forced to feel it with their hands. Everyone comes up with a different description of the beast, based upon whether he touches the trunk, the tusks, the legs, the tail, the sides, and they fall to disputation, for lack of a candle to illuminate the truth. It was because of their vantage points that they disagreed.
All of us approach Rumi’s elephant from a particular, limited, vantage point. How might Rumi teach us to resolve these limitations? As we progress on our quest, step by step, toward the encounter with God, some are above us, some below us, but we cannot know where others are, and must be humble. We need a guide. Maybe not just one – who in Rumi’s case was the example of the Prophet Muhammad, but also there was Shams, then Salâh al-Din then Hosâm al-Din, and of course all through his life, his own spiritual practices. Perhaps, whatever civilization we identify with, his work may have something to tell us about how to avoid the kind of clash that diverts us from the path toward truth. Even if it does not fulfill that very lofty function, you may find that there are very beautiful stories and engaging, memorable poems from this 13th century Persian mystic, Rumi. Try to understand them historically, try to understand them traditionally, try to understand them spiritually, try to understand them poetically, try to understand them seriously.

In an unpublished manuscript about exemplary women, Cristofano Bronzini described a visit to the Tuscan court by Giovanna Garzoni while she was still in her teens, and transcribed a poem written there in her honour. This new documentary evidence has important implications for understanding Garzoni’s artistic development in the early 1620s.

Memoirs and Madness examines memoir as a literary genre, investigates the creation of Leonid Andreev's posthumous legacy by his contemporaries, and explores the possibility that Andreev, Russia's leading literary figure at the beginning of the twentieth century, suffered from mental illness. Frederick White's primary focus is A Book About Leonid Andreev (1922), the most important collection of memoirs dedicated to the Russian author, presented here in the first English translation. The agendas of the memoirists resulted in portraits that have influenced how Andreev is read and spoken about to the present day. White pays special attention to Andreev's history of mental illness, which the memoirists described with vague terms such as "creative energy" or "inner turmoil." Past scholarship has focused on philosophical and sociological factors in the author's life but this concentration on his mental health provides a fruitful approach to deciphering the literary portraits.

Transitional justice is a major concept in promoting peace and reconciliation between conflicting parties. It is usually associated with formal judicial processes such as criminal justice, rule-of law reform and paying reparations. This chapter focuses on another transitional justice method, a more informal one: memory work. There is a growing realization of the major impact on the way in which the history of a conflict is viewed by the members of parties involved on their psychological and behavioral reactions. Addressing that history properly can promote their well being, conflict resolution and reconciliation between the parties. There are many ways of addressing the relevant history, for example, through truth and reconciliation committees, the rewriting of history textbooks, and commemoration projects. This chapter focuses on another way: the role of the autobiographical memory, that of the people who experienced the conflict directly, as it is manifested in their memoirs, newspaper articles and interviews with scholars. To this end the chapter uses a case study approach, regarding the causes for the main historical event of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: the 1948 Palestinian exodus. It explores for the first time the way in which Israeli-Jewish 1948 war veterans presented these causes between 1949 and 2004. The question posed was: did their autobiographical memory present a Zionist narrative (willing flight of the Palestinians) or a critical/post-Zionist narrative (willing flight combined with expulsion)? This exploration is based on an analysis of all published war veterans' memoirs and newspaper articles, as well as interviews with scholars, in the 56 year research period. During this study, interviews were also conducted with 1948 war veterans. Following the description of the empirical findings regarding the Israeli-Jewish autobiographical memory of the exodus, these findings are used to theoretically conceptualize various phenomena. For example, what determines the way in which direct-experience people describe their experiences during a conflict, how these people influence directly and indirectly the collective memory of their society of a given conflict, and the way in which they influence the dynamics of

Writing scientific biographies evokes the problem of representativeness or of integrating the single case into more general questions of scholarly interest. The establishment of a link between micro and macrolevels inspired the present paper, which attempts to conceptualize the link between the individual biographical case and more general questions via the concept of microhistory. Microhistory does not present an easy solution to this problem, but it can generate sensitivity for the epistemological problems and narrative pitfalls of the biographical genre
After presenting a brief overview of the methodological foundations of microhistory, I evaluate publications on German sweets manufacturer Gebrüder Stollwerck AG as examples of microhistories of globalization and of kinship in entrepreneurial families. In a third step, I examine the specifics of entrepreneur biographies, paying particular attention to their narrative structure, as they tend to explain developments from within the black box of the entrepreneur or his family. There exists a broad spectrum of research questions that may go way beyond the chronological sequence of a biographical subject’s life course.
I suggest avoiding the pitfalls of the biographical method by linking the life of the subject to a reference value, to a research question that, in the best case, provides an experimental cardinal point outside of the object of study. In this sense, biographies — as well as case studies on companies — can be understood as microhistories of X.

The paper offers an overview of the history of the anarchist movement in Ukraine during the revolution 1917-1921. The article focuses on the anarchists' role in the unfolding the revolutionary crisis in Ukraine, explores the influence of the revolution on the ideology of the Ukrainian anarchist movent, sheds more light on its organizational structure.

Enzo Fiermonte is a forgotten star of Italian cinema who acted in over 100 films between 1941 and 1979. His screen career started with "L’ultimo combattimento" (The Last Fight), in which he played the role of the main character: a boxer who was on his way to stardom – until he met a wealthy American woman: he felt in love with her, and she gradually persuaded him to get rid of the gloves and live as a gentleman. It was quite an ordinary story for film-goers to see, but actually that was Fiermonte’s real story.

Prior to join the film world, Enzo was a boxer himself – and a very talented one. He won Italy’s middleweight crown at just 23 years old, and after a series of brilliant bouts in the U.S. he entered the list of the main contenders for the world championship title. Success in the boxing ring, however, was not Enzo’s only success. Women literally felt at his feet: his was tall and muscular like a Michelangelo’s statue, with olive skin and black curly hair. For press reporters, he was “the Rudolph Valentino of boxing”.

In 1932, his beauty was noticed by one of the richest women in the world – Madeleine Astor Dick. She was mother to the heir of America’s most influential family – the Astors – and was known in her country for having survived his husband in 1912, as they were honeymooning aboard the most disgraceful ocean liner of human history – the Titanic. Very soon, Madeleine became infatuated with that gorgeous and kind Italian; Enzo, too, could not stop thinking of her. After a few months, the two got married amid sensational headlines: not only Fiermonte was a boxer with peasant origins, but he also was much younger than her: 25 years as opposed to Madeleine’s 39.

For Madeleine and for the privileges of being married with a millionaire, Fiermonte announced his retirement from boxing, but then he changed his mind; he left his wife, returned into the ring, and the whole world talked about him. Such a story, however, was just one of the many incredible stories he happened to be involved with. Enzo Fiermonte’s life was rich with hazards and hard-to-believe situations in every respect, to the point that Hollywood producers have occasionally thought of making a film about him. ***MORE INFO AT g.memola@yahoo.com***

Today, ‘the selfie’ has probably become the most prominent cultural artifact of our online sociality and subjectivity in the form of image driven, autobiographic ‘streams of the self’. At the same time, ‘the selfie’ is considered the indicator of the excessive, nearly pathological self-centeredness of a whole generation, and a sign for wider cultural decline. Nowhere is this stigma as evident as with the moral outrage caused by the ‘Auschwitz Selfie’ in 2014, which has issued concerns over the exploitation of a historic disaster for the means of narcissism, and the lack of digital decorum of the ‘me-generation’. However, selfies taken at concentration camps are widely distributed on social media platforms such as Instagram and assume highly diverse aesthetics. Particularly selfies, in which the photographed subject has chosen a position that complicates his/her definite identification via the turning away of the face, require a closer reading than provided by existing scholarly research ranging from Holocaust, Tourism and Media Studies. These anti-selfies are characterized by tropological constitution and multi-referentiality, thus pursuing an anti-narcissist agenda. Understanding photographs as texts, the conflation of Roland Barthes’ work on photography and Paul de Man’s concept of ‘defacement’ provides the theoretical framework to deconstruct the tropological constitution of the (photographed) self in selected anti-selfies. The troping of the self via de- and refacement, ‘the giving and taking away of the face’, into a non-essential, multi-referential silhouette along with a distinct abstraction of color and composition further function as an aesthetic strategy to respond to the traumatic sublime aura of Holocaust signifiers and the ‘trauma of interpretation’. As such, anti-selfies offer a self-reflexive engagement with the Holocaust for all actors of the specular trio (photographed, photographer, viewer) without decontextualizing or appropriating the traumatic ‘event’ itself and acknowledges its retrospective reconstruction in employing the aesthetics of the traumatic sublime.

Il volume che qui si offre ai lettori intende scrutare, nella pratica dei testi, i rattoppi ben o mal cuciti che ogni autore deve utilizzare nel momento in cui è costretto ad affrontare i luoghi problematici della scrittura di vite. Si pone, insomma, una particolare attenzione su quelle zone d'ombra della biografia, dove la sua tenuta granitica si sgretola nell'interferenza con altri generi letterari. A interessare sono gli spazi d'ibridismo narrativo che strutturano tale scrittura nella convinzione che essi debbano essere considerati come elementi costituitivi e, per questo, positivamente connaturati al genere. Gli usi paratestuali e le metamorfosi lungo i secoli, i legami con la storiografia, la novellistica e l'autobiografia mostrano la prolificità e le potenzialità di un genere, ormai consolidato all'altezza del secondo Cinquecento, il quale si pone l'obiettivo specifico di "ritrarre i lineamenti e i colori dell'animo". È questa la formula utilizzata dal trattatista Malaspina nel tentativo di indicare il senso profondo di qualunque scrittura di vite: azioni specifiche e caratteristiche fisiche, ma anche aneddoti, detti e motti arguti devono essere selezionati con l'unico scopo di delineare il "costume" del personaggio biografato.

Critical duoethnography, as a research methodology, can be used in innovative ways to assist educational researchers engaged in social justice research projects. This chapter offers four responses to the question of how critical duoethnography, as a form of qualitative inquiry, can be used by educational researchers to further social justice initiatives. First, critical duoethnography will be described as a tool for reflexivity; second, as an engaged form of collaborative reading and deciphering; third, as an interactive feminist approach to interviewing; and fourth, as a research methods pedagogy.

This paper focuses on the ways in which lived experiences affect the rendering of an individual's American Dream by following Salomé—a Latino woman—as she narrates her life in Guatemala and in the USA. It also highlights the emotional dynamics established between researcher and participant, as well as the challenges of remembering, retelling, and retelling traumatic past experiences. With this paper, I aim to bring to light the individual experience as valuable, and to contest the homogeneity of mass media Latino portrayals, revealing how they may function to erase her particularity.

This is Part III of a series of essays that explore Palestinian advocacy at the University of Hawaii - Manoa. The possibility that a nexus exists between Hamas and the University, will be analyzed. The University’s involvement in a story that may have concealed the identity of an infamous Hamas terrorist, will also be examined.

Is there a nexus? What role did the University play in promoting ‘The Chicken’ story? The reader will answer these questions.

Academic Reference:

Zuckermann, Ghil'ad & Monaghan, Paul (2012). "Revival linguistics and the new media: Talknology in the service of the Barngarla language reclamation", pp. 119-126 of Foundation for Endangered Languages XVI Conference: Language Endangerment in the 21st Century:Globalisation, Technology & New Media. Auckland, New Zealand.

------------------------------


Revival Linguistics and the New Media:
Talknology in the service of the Barngarla Language Reclamation


Ghil‘ad Zuckermann

Chair of Linguistics and Endangered Languages
School of Humanities, University of Adelaide, SA Adelaide 5005, Australia
[ghilad.zuckermann@adelaide.edu.au]


Paul Monaghan

Mobile Language Team
School of Humanities, University of Adelaide, SA Adelaide 5005, Australia
[paul.monaghan@adelaide.edu.au]


Abstract

Revival Linguistics is a new branch of linguistics, currently being established at Adelaide. It analyses comparatively and systematically the universal constraints and global mechanisms on the one hand (see Zuckermann 2009), and local peculiarities on the other hand, apparent in revival attempts across various sociological backgrounds, all over the world (see Zuckermann & Walsh 2011). A branch of both linguistics and applied linguistics, it combines scientific studies of native language acquisition and foreign language learning (language reclamation is the most extreme case of Second Language Learning).

The study: The Barngarla language (spelled Parnkalla by Schürmann 1844) is a no-longer spoken Thura-Yura Pama-Nyungan Aboriginal language of the Lakes Cultural Region of South Australia. Most recently Zuckermann, Monaghan and the Barngarla community have launched a reclamation of this sleeping beauty in three major rural/urban centres on the Eyre Peninsula, namely Port Lincoln, Whyalla, and Port Augusta. The presence of three Barngarla populations several hours drive apart presents the revival linguist with a need for a sophisticated reclamation involving ‘talknological’ innovations, such as online chatting, newsgroups, photo and resource sharing through a Barngarla wiki. This paper also examines the tensions accompanying the creation of a Barngarla ‘community of practice’ (cf. Wenger 1998) in a post-traditional Aboriginal context. In important ways, the new talknology poses a direct challenge to existing authority structures relating to the everyday management of knowledge, collaboration and participation. We predict that how the broader Barngarla community negotiates these issues will have an important bearing on the ultimate results of the reclamation project.




Revival Linguistics

Revival Linguistics is a new branch of linguistics, currently being established at Adelaide. It analyses comparatively and systematically the universal constraints and global mechanisms on the one hand (see Zuckermann 2009), and local peculiarities and idiosyncrasies on the other hand, apparent in revival attempts across various sociological backgrounds, all over the world (Zuckermann & Walsh 2011). A branch of both linguistics and applied linguistics, it combines scientific studies of native language acquisition and foreign language learning (language reclamation is the most extreme case of Second Language Learning).

Revival Linguistics complements the established field of documentary linguistics, which records endangered languages before they fall asleep. Revival Linguistics ought to revise the fields of grammaticography (writing grammars) and lexicography (writing dictionaries): Grammars and dictionaries ought to be written for language reclamation, i.e. in a user-friendly way, for communities, not only for linguists. For example, juxtapose Lutheran missionary Clamor Wilhelm Schürmann’s 1844 spelling of the Barngarla word nunyara ‘recovery’, which ignores the English environment, thus resulting in the pronunciation nanYAra rather than NOONyara.

Closely related to contact linguistics, Revival Linguistics changes the field of historical linguistics, e.g. by weakening the Family Tree model, which implies that a language ought to have only one parent. Assisting Aboriginal communities in a realistic, non-purisitic way, without selling them myths, Revival Linguistics promotes efficiency and efficacy in language reclamation.

Certainly Australia has been made the ‘Unlucky Country’ through the historical processes of linguicide (language killing) and glottophagy (language eating). These twin forces were in operation from the early colonial period. In her detailed study of the role missionary language practices in the early years of the South Australian colony, Scrimgeour quotes the following colonial language ideology: ‘Mr Forster afterwards adverted to the present mode of teaching the children in their own language. He, with all respect to the Missionaries, would say, on several grounds, that this was wrong. The natives would be sooner civilized if their language was extinct. The children taught would afterwards mix only with whites, where their own language would be of no use – the use of their language would preserve their prejudices and debasement, and their language was not sufficient to express the ideas of civilized life.  He gave the Missionaries full credit for their talents and zeal, but he thought it would be better to teach the children in English’ (from Report on a public meeting of the South Australian Missionary Society in aid of the German Mission to the Aborigines, Southern Australian, 8 September 1843; Scrimgeour, 2007: 116, italics added).

In the case of glottophagy, Governor George Grey noted: ‘The merchant in London who lays on a vessel for a certain port, regards the affair as a mere mercantile speculation, but could he trace out the results he effects in their remotest ramifications, he would stand astonished at the changes he produces.  With the wizard wand of commerce, he touches a lone and trackless forest, and at his bidding, cities arise, and the hum and dust of trade collect – away are swept ancient races; antique laws and customs moulder into oblivion.  The strong-holds of murder and superstition are cleansed, and the Gospel is preached amongst ignorant and savage men. The ruder languages disappear successively, and the tongue of England alone is heard around’ (Grey 1841: 200-201, italics added). Grey was a strong supporter of Aboriginal languages, encouraging Schürmann’s work documenting the Adelaide language (Kaurna) and Barngarla at Port Lincoln (see below).

With globalization, homogenization and Coca-colonization there will be more and more groups all over the world added to the forlorn club of the lost-heritage peoples. Language reclamation will become increasingly relevant as people seek to recover their cultural autonomy, empower their spiritual and intellectual sovereignty, and improve their wellbeing. There are various ethical, aesthetic and utilitarian benefits of language revival: for example, social justice, diversity and employability, respectively.

Zuckermann (2012) has enthusiastically called for Native Tongue Title and linguistic human rights, suggesting that the Australian government ought to compensate Indigenous people not only for the loss of land but equally importantly for the loss of language. Zuckermann has suggested to the Australian government to define Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander vernaculars as official languages.

Furthermore, it is predicted that in the future the very insights offered by Revival Linguistics will themselves become part of Indigenous Intellectual Property, when Slovenes and Estonians come to Australia and New Zealand to ask Aboriginal Australians and Maori to assist them in their own European language resurrection.

There is an urgent need to produce perspicacious LINGUISTIC and socio-linguistic insights relevant to language reclamation. Otherwise, linguists or language workers would not be able to offer, if asked by Indigenous people, efficient and efficacious advice. There are linguistic constraints applicable to all revival attempts. Mastering them would help revivalists and First Nations leaders to work more efficiently; for example, to focus more on basic vocabulary and verbal conjugations than on sounds and word order – see Zuckermann (2009: http://www.zuckermann.org/pdf/Hybridity_versus_Revivability.pdf.

Revival linguistics would assist revivalists to be more realistic and to abandon discouraging slogans such as "Give us authenticity or give us death!" The following are among the basic principles that the revival linguist encourages in Aboriginal communities:

i. If your language falls asleep: stop, revive, survive!
ii. If you revive a language, embrace the hybridity of the emerging tongue; and
iii. If your language is healthy, assist others in linguistic need.

One day we may invent devices to “inject” a language into our brains. But until then, any attempt to reclaim a hibernating language will result in a hybrid that combines components from the revivalists' and documenters' mother tongues and, of course, the target language. In the immortal words of Jerry Seinfeld: "Not that there's anything wrong with that!"

The Study


Figure 1: Map of Traditional Aboriginal Country after Norman Tindale (adapted from Hercus 1999)

The Barngarla language reclamation project has arisen through partnerships between the University of Adelaide (Linguistics and the Mobile Language Team) and the Barngarla people. Although still in its infancy, consultations began in September 2011, a number of very significant steps have been made towards reclaiming this ‘sleeping beauty’. Without doubt, the key challenge has been to develop a strategy for the reclamation of the language simultaneously and without favour in three major regional centres. In ways that will be elaborated below, this multi-sited, regional or peripheral reclamation makes demands that are very different to those often found in metropolitan reclamation contexts (e.g. Kaurna, cf. Amery...

For the last three years I have been working on my current book project, which is titled Ireland, the Irish, and the Rise of Biofiction. I am nearly finished with a full draft, and I just completed my introduction. If any of you have time to read it, and it is short, here is what I would like to know. One, is the introduction clear? In other words, based on the introduction, do you get a clear sense of what I intend to argue in the book? Second, does it make you want to read the book? Put differently, does it sound like the book would be worth reading? I will be immensely grateful for any feedback.

New & revised edition of Trace Peterson’s first book of poems, with an Introduction by Joy Ladin. Published by Chax Press, May 2019.

"The second edition of Trace Peterson’s SINCE I MOVED IN (NEW & REVISED) is a welcome re-issue, with a new introduction by Joy Ladin, of a landmark collection of poems by one of the most influential transgender poets writing today. Peterson, enacting her self-chosen name, traces connections and lines of flight between genders, between creative expression and acute observation, between her grounding and training in Tucson’s celebrated poetry scene and her on-going involvement in New York’s. Trace is an imperative, as well as a noun, and a name. It means to write over, as well as a faint remainder. Animated by the space of that double signification, and by the practice of making new life through transcribing an old life into a new register, Trace Peterson’s poetry—in life and in words—gives voice to something raw, inchoate, in-process-of-becoming."—Susan Stryker

"These are the daring adventures of the voice, the voice that wants to be a body, and had no way to be a body in and for itself when this book was written: this book is maybe the first book of poetry in which I saw my own trans experience written and comprehensibly embodied, not allegorically or across a gap of anachronisms but as it is, as it was at the very same time. This is the voice that kept secrets from itself, that knows what it’s like to keep a secret and wonder whether it was never a secret; the voice, too, that knows how troubling it feels to be a voice, to be nothing other than voice, among readers and listeners who claim, in that early-2000s way, to hate voice (because they cannot hear their own). There is a Hartford in her heart, 'no broken glass in it,' though 'the map is not the map,' and alongside it there lurks, or flourishes, an 'inability to be where I am.' This is a voice that sees: that sees 'the boys at / lavender the girls in show,' a voice of experiment, a voice 'wearing your socks.' I recommend it to anyone like me, and also to people who are nothing like me, who want to know how it has been."—Stephanie Burt

"I will forever praise the day in 2010 when I discovered SINCE I MOVED IN at a friend's house and sat down and read it cover to cover. Almost a decade later, my 'skull still humming from a gift received.' The experience of recognition (which is to say the benevolence of awareness) (which is different from the more distant (more dangerous) act of seeing/being seen) that transpired in the initial hours with this book altered the trajectory of my life in simple and extraordinary ways. As Joy Ladin's introduction to the new edition makes clear, SINCE I MOVED IN's 2007 publication was revolutionary and foundational for what would become a beautiful groundswell of trans and nonbinary poetry. 'Even the boundaries were drawn up temporarily,' Trace tells us. And how deeply true this is between so many (so much) of us, on any given day. Thank you, Trace, for this 2nd edition—a kind of textual transition, a gift to trans and nonbinary writers, past, present, and future. Here is 'The Pleasure of Arriving': a poetry of integrity—smart, hilarious, frustrated, and tender."—TC Tolbert

Postmodern theory indicates that a self-reflexive voice is a valid expression of cultural and temporal influences on language and meaning making. Transpersonal theories propose that ‘self’ is multiple and layered, some aspects of consciousness are more easily accessed, others, deeply held and previously unconscious. Narrative is intricately embedded in human experience and is a potent means of shaping self-identity, imbuing meaning, facilitating insight and transforming awareness. The creative arts form a unique, evocative means of investigating and expressing emergent narratives, conveying meaning and facilitating individual and collective transformation. This creative, practice-led investigation explores the question: Who are we?  Utilising an embodied and transpersonal methodology, a woman, artist and depth psychologist investigates the nature of self. The creative findings include fine art, photography, life-writing, a short film, an art novel and an exhibition. The researcher’s auto-ethnographic reflections discuss the impact of making the works, conclusions regarding their ramifications for understanding the nature of self, and their transformational potential. Returning Home alludes to the sense of cultivating a state of awareness where it is possible to compassionately witness the narratives of many selves, as well as the personal and global implications of doing so.

This essay, composed over a span of eight months, was developed through a collaboration meant to redefine notions of writing that excludes people with disabilities. As post-colonial/collaborative composition theory suggests (Davies, 1992), the author and the writer of the narrative are two distinct people. While the author constructed the words verbally through a series of ongoing dialogues, the writer transcribed, edited, and reordered the text. Douglas Biklen's book, Communication Unbound (1993), inspired us to explore these non-traditional ways of " writing " that, while grounded in conversation and collaboration, also disrupt models of efficiency and individualism.

Angelos Tanagras (1875-1971) became largely known as the founder and president of the Hellenic Society for Psychical Research and less known for his exceptional writing talent. This book is the autobiography of Angelos Tanagras (in Greek) edited, annotated and published by Fotini Pallikari. Its four chapters are distributed free of charge at the website address:  http://users.uoa.gr/~fpallik/tanagras.htm. The Contents of the book and its Preface are also available in English at the same address above.

This article provides guidelines for understanding Irish socialist playwright Sean O'Casey as a disabled author, through analysis of the first volume of his autobiography, _I Knock at the Door_ (1939). The narrative describes the author’s experience as a poor child with a painful disease of the eyes, likely trachoma. Like O’Casey’s other works, the book strongly criticizes the inequalities brought about by capitalism. It also describes how ableist medical, religious, and educational authorities further contributed to his sense of alienation.

The article is a chapter in _Disability Experiences_, edited by G. Thomas Couser and Susannah B. Mintz. The collection provides overviews, historical and cultural contexts, and themes of hundreds of first-person disability memoirs, autobiographies, and other personal narratives.

PDF IS AVAILABLE FOR DOWNLOAD.

Three hours north of Tokyo is the Kubo Memorial Tourism and Culture Exchange Center. Nestled between a Shinto Shrine and a small river lined with cherry blossom trees, the historic buildings are the former home of Sadajiro Kubo (1909-1996), now transformed into a museum dedicated to Kubo’s career of promoting art throughout Japan. Most readers and scholars of Henry Miller (1891-1980) have likely never heard of Sadajiro Kubo; however, beginning in 1955 Kubo contributed to Miller’s reputation throughout Japan by promoting his water colors. Along with purchasing large quantities of Miller’s water colors, Kubo also acquired an important correspondence in the early 1980s: Miller’s letters to his Israeli friend, brother-in-law, and cher confrère, Bezalel “Lilik” Schatz (1912-1978). Numbering over 300 letters and postcards, the importance of this correspondence for Miller and Schatz studies cannot be underestimated. The friendship began with their combined efforts with the art book Into the Night Life (1947, hereafter ITNL), and Miller and Schatz maintained their close relationship for 33 years, mostly through letters.  This article will highlight important themes running through Miller’s letters to Schatz in an effort to bring into a new light the intimacy of their friendship.