Junctures - The Journal for Thematic Dialogue

Feins, Roberta

67
POEMRObERta FEins
Monologue
Yes, I’ll sit down and eat, though I have
too many things to do. Get your hands off of me:
I am not falling. Listen to me: 
it was in Munster where I no, put that
over there, no, not there studied Picasso. 
His first mistress was Jewish, you know. 
Well, you should be interested; 
he’s a very important artist, no
I won’t pay that bill, it’s too much money 
Besides I didn’t need to go to the hospital,
it was just a scratch – well, of course
they’d say I needed stitches. Be careful
of that porcelain, it’s Lladro, Lladro
was where your father started having
heart trouble, no that’s too much butter.
If you’re going to pay it, then write
PAID on it. Write the date. No, lower down.
You used black ink. Use red ink. Can’t you do anything right.
Didn’t I tell you about Esther’s daughter’s husband?
Can you deny children owe their parents everything?
This newspaper is too wrinkled. Take it back
and get me another one. His brother is quite
a well-known surgeon, and did you see
Grandma’s librettos in the closet. No, I won’t get rid of them
they’re very valuable. Where’s the butter, you’ve
hardly put any on. Yes, I took my pills – oh
those, no I haven’t taken them yet that’s 
what I said. Your Dad’s letters?
I think they’re in a suitcase in the basement.
Well, you can throw them out, I don’t care.
Demented priestess, see how she totters 
in my loose and bleeding skin.
Roberta Feins was born in New York, and has also lived in North Carolina and 
(currently) in Seattle. She works as a computer consultant. She received her MFA 
in Poetry from New England College in 2007. Her work has been published in Tea 
Party, Floating Bridge Review, and The Lyric. Poems are forthcoming in Bridges 
and kaleidowhirl. She is an editor of the e-zine Switched On Gutenberg, see 
http://www.switched-ongutenberg.org/.
Feins – Monologue – Junctures, 11, Dec 2008


English

"Monologue"

Wiggerman, Scott

83
Scott Wiggerman
the Pink carpet
 after John Brack’s 1970 oil painting
Awkwardly balanced, I stand
like a toddler on the pink carpet,
one arm supported by the only
furniture in the room, a chair.
Did I mention that I am nude,
or that a man older than my father 
stares at my pink backside?
I gaze vapidly into the corner
as though being punished.
What kind of artist has walls
as naked as daylight? 
How can he not notice
that the carpet is askew, not square 
with the boards of the floor?
I do not speak, nor does he,
the only sound, a scratching
against the canvas, aberrant 
strokes I count like ticks of a clock.
I’m paid well for what I do.
Sometimes I don’t have to do a thing.
Scott Wiggerman is the author of Vegetables and Other Relationships (Plain View 
Press, 2000) and editor of the Texas Poetry Calendar (Dos Gatos Press), now in its 
twelfth year. His work has appeared in numerous journals, including Borderlands: 
Texas Poetry Review, Poesia, Contemporary Sonnet, Visions International, Spillway, 
Sojourn, and the Paterson Literary Review. In addition, his poems appear in several 
anthologies, including This New Breed: Gents, Bad Boys and Barbarians 2 (Windstorm 
Creative, 2004), In the Arms of Words: Poems for Disaster Relief (Sherman Asher, 
2006), The Weight of Addition (Mutabilis Press, 2007), and Poem, Revised (Marion 
Street Press, 2008). He also edited an anthology of Texas poetry, Big Land, Big Sky, 
Big Hair (2008).
Poem
Wiggerman – The Pink Carpet – Junctures, 11, Dec 2008


"The Pink Carpet"

Robson, Ruthann

Like Girls: A Story

Webb, Christine

Doman, Maggie

Conducting Focus Groups: Experience from Nursing Research

Jutel, Annemarie

A Jutel – Editorial – Junctures, 8, Jun 200
ANNEMARIE JUTEL
Editorial [:] Control
The editor’s seat is an interesting vantage point from which to introduce this issue’s theme 
of control, given the myriad of control mechanisms which I exercise from this position.  Whilst 
I might celebrate the multi-disciplinary discussion of control in all its guises, I will be, all the 
while, surreptitiously the Queen of Control, with every action taken to compile this fascinating 
issue subject to what I regard as rigorous process, and experienced externally as painstaking 
control.  Writers, designers, copy-editors, printers and dispatchers, all are under the unwieldy 
grasp of two single-minded editors: themselves the quarry of academic managers, disciplinary 
constraints, linguistic imperatives, database selection processes and status mongers.  Every 
phase in the trajectory from idea to publication in the pages of this journal is controlled at 
each instance by human beings like myself and inflexible processes like those I, and the 
culture in which I operate, impose.
Already from the moment a prospective author lets her fingers slide into the industrially pre-
worn dips of the plastic keyboard, perhaps playing as I do, with little pressureless staccato 
runs as warm-up for the words she hopes will appear on her screen, she is already under 
the insidious grip of external control.  Forced to place digits on either QWERTY or AZERTY 
depending on the language of the country in which she composes her text (index finger 
stretch to ‘t’, thumbs ‘gently touching the space bar’ if she acquiesces to the rules of touch 
typing); constrained to the use of English  (although we’d accept te reo Mäori, but not French); 
compliant to the disciplinary idealisations of the human conceived in the HCI (human computer 
interface) and imposed by Microsoft1, itself mandated by clearly articulated submission 
instructions; the author unwittingly labours under awesome control.  
Her peers, or those whom we editors mandate as her peers, will determine whether her words 
make the final cut, and if a young academic, she may tremble under their scrutiny; if more 
mature, may shake her head at their dastardly control, picking her publication destinations 
strategically, and hoping that the chosen journal may allow her, as do the Annals of Internal 
Medicine and the New England Journal of Medicine (and we don’t), as I recently found out 
when I myself submitted, to nominate ‘preferred referees’, and ‘referees to avoid’. 
I might speak a word of the history of peer review, because its control has so often intrigued 
me.  (And perhaps before I do so, I might also mention how controlled query language makes 
EdIToRIAL
8
peer review a difficult topic to research.  Imagine, if you will, putting the words ‘peer review’ 
into a Boolean search strategy! There’s an easy fix:  try restricting to title. Six thousand-odd 
hits.)  
In 1752, The Royal Society of Edinburgh in its Medical Essays and Observations described 
an editorial process whereby: 
memoirs sent by correspondence are distributed according to the subject matter 
to those members who are most versed in these matters.  The report of their 
identity is not known to the author.  Nothing is printed in this review which is 
not stamped with the mark of utility.2 
This constituted an effective means for guarding (controlling) the authority and credibility of 
learned societies which was transferred by association to those who published within their 
bulletins.
Reasonable, perhaps, one might think, unless one were Solomon Berson and Roselyn Yalow, 
whose work on immunoassay (which was to receive a Nobel prize in 19) was rejected by 
the Journal of Clinical Investigation.  “The experts in the field”, read the editor’s letter to the 
authors, “have been particularly emphatic about rejecting your positive statement [about 
insulin binding]”.3 The article was finally accepted for publication but required the authors 
to modify their wording.
As publishers, we also struggle with the control which we dispense.  Unwilling to reprimand our 
authors in the manner that at least one of us has endured herself for poor referencing style at 
the hands of the editor of a prestigious medical journal (whose email signature line reads “No 
passion in the world is equal to the passion to alter someone else’s draft”) we nonetheless 
mandate consistency.  Our instructions to authors are gentle rather than authoritative, but 
have the same effect as the passionate editor to whom I made reference.  We point out how 
much it will please us for notes to follow our nominated Chicago style (which also controls the 
manner in which our readers must confront the text, to-ing and fro-ing between text and notes, 
if they are to follow the authors’ drift); our pleas are no less controlling than the dictates of 
rougher counterparts in those publications with a more muscular approach. 
Clearly, control features prominently in the production of this journal.  However, if we can 
make an abstraction of our own controlling devices, we might on the other hand, pause to 
appreciate how our contributors have controlled their reflection. This issue presents a potpourri 
of interesting contributions.
Kenneth Surin launches the issue with a Deleuzian reflection on control society, which is also 
captured in Thierry Jutel’s discussion of the media in the transformation of the neo-liberal 
subject.  
Chris Anderson and Brendan Hokowhitu challenge us to consider who is in control in the 
promotion of Indigenous culture, presenting a petit récit to argue that the void of the unknown 
is still being plugged by those who may act as if they do, but don’t really know what they are 
doing.
Gertrud Pfister contemplates the mechanisms of control which shaped the emergence of 
ski-jumping as a competitive sport, while Arthur Stevens proposes an engineering model for 
A Jutel – Editorial – Junctures, 8, Jun 200
9
understanding how control systems modify the behaviour of a dynamical process without 
physical alteration.
Poetry by Sue Wootton and Bob Maracacci and fiction by Michael Martin underline a number 
of loci of control, from the biophysical to the social and the psycho-emotional.
Artist Christine Keller provides a perspective from personal experience on how control can 
be exerted on the creative process through the limited accessibility and the problematics of 
technology. Craig Hilton contributes a perspective on an art installation by Billy Apple entitled 
Severe Tropical Storm 9301 Irma in which Hilton variously questions, affirms and problematises 
the controlling aspects of categorisation.   
Johanna Zellmer’s artist’s pages implicitly critique the control implied by her material, German 
commemorative coins complete with national emblems and images of iconic personalities; 
while emphasising the interaction between control and freedom in her creative process as 
distanced from her native country. Also through artist’s pages, Paul Cullen and James Robinson 
contribute images (and a parallel text in Robinson’s case) that speak of the precariousness 
of control and of its obverse: movement, or even decay or chaos. 
Rod Barnett reviews The Landscape Urbanism Reader (2006) and points out how his discipline 
is vying for control of the cityscape over the more traditional control held by architects and 
city planners. 
Some things are, however, completely beyond our control, and the amount of suitable material 
submitted for publication is one of those.  We look forward to a second issue on control in a 
year’s time to enable a continued discussion on this fascinating and fruitful theme.
 1 See M Fuller, Behind the Blip: Software as Culture at
  http://www.noemalab.org/sections/ideas/ideas_articles/pdf/fuller_sw_as_culture.pdf 
  as last accessed on 21 May 200.
 2 DA Kronick, “Peer Review in 18th-Century Scientific Journalism, JAMA, 9 March 1990, 263(10): 
1321-2.
 3 CR Kahn, J Roth and J Berson, “Yalow and the JCI: the Agony and the Ecstasy”, J Clin Invest, 
15 October 2004, 114(8): 1051-4.
A Jutel – Editorial – Junctures, 8, Jun 200


Control

Bale, John

 Bale – Editorial – Junctures, 5, Dec 2005
JOHN BALE
Editorial: Placing Space
Before the mid-seventies the notion of ‘space’ seemed to be the focal theme of philosophers, 
architects, geographers and geometers. It rarely featured as a central concept in the worlds of 
history and, arguably, sociology and (to include my own field) sports studies. Of course, there 
were exceptions but it remains the case that Edward Soja’s suggestion that the 1980s had 
witnessed the “reassertion of space in critical social theory” was not seriously contested.1 The 
emergence of a concern for ‘space’ was fuelled by the likes of David Harvey, Doreen Massey 
and Henri Lefebvre.2 However, over what did space reassert itself? 
In a recent collection titled Spaces of Geographical Thought the editors Paul Cloke and 
Ron Johnston include two chapters that situate ‘space’ against both ‘place’ and ‘time’.3 In 
other words, they identify two binaries – space-place and space-time. So space (though not 
necessarily ‘spatial science’) reasserted itself against both the descriptive humanism of place 
and the historicism of time. The objective of Cloke and Johnston’s collection is to destabilise 
these binaries. Why destabilise them? Because binary structures “establish relations of 
opposition and exclusion rather than sameness and interconnection between the two terms 
involved.”4 Space-Place can be read as A/not-A, implying the presence, power, positivity and 
value of the first binary term. In contesting this position it has been recognised that several 
binaries have become blurred.
However, it can be argued that the notion of ‘space’ has always been blurred. Indeed, Michel 
de Certeau’s definition of ‘space’ could easily be read as what many human geographers call 
‘place’. “Space is a practiced place”, he writes. “Thus the street geometrically defined by urban 
planning is transformed into a space by walkers”.5 This is exactly the opposite of common 
geographical reactions that see space being turned into place by its peopled-ness. 
‘Space’ has often been seen as abstract whereas ‘place’ is concrete; space is open but place 
is enclosed; space is barren whereas place is peopled; space is general whereas place is 
particular; space is sterile while place has genius loci; space is big whereas place is small.6 
It should be clear (or, rather, unclear) that ‘space’ is a problematic notion that today attracts 
multi-disciplinary attention.
 8 Bale – Editorial – Junctures, 5, Dec 2005
The Marxist view is that every society and every mode of production produces its own space. 
Place, on the other hand, is a distinctive kind of space that is defined by the lived experiences 
of the people. Embodiment is central to place used in literature and geography and is often 
referred to as a “sense of place”.8 Places can be loved and treasured. While such a sentiment 
is often thought of as something ‘natural’, it may also result from the underlying structures 
of power or be part of the politics of identity.9 Related to space is ‘placelessness’ or the ‘non-
place’, respectively popularised by geographer and anthropologist Edward Relph and Marc 
Augé.10 Placelessness is to space as topophilia is to place. As distinctive places are eroded 
they are replaced (respaced?) by anonymous, standardised places such as McDonald’s, malls 
and stadiums. However, such sentiments are fuelled by nostalgia and elitism as meaningful 
human encounters can surely happen in the most soulless of spaces.
The essays in this issue sensitively but perhaps unintentionally meld space and place. 
The small spaces that Foucault calls us to acknowledge in our research are graphically 
demonstrated in the pages that follow. The crib, where parent and child lie together, contains 
spaces crucial for the well-being of both. That such spaces are saturated with meaning for 
parent and child suggest that they are place-like. Placed perspectives, such as those discussed 
by Nälani Wilson in her piece on the decolonisation of Moloka‘i Nui a Hina, a small Hawaiian 
island, attend to another well-known binary, the Global-Local in which today we find the local 
in the global and the global in the local (‘glocalisation’). From the tiny interstices of the crib 
to the global expansion of power, space is of immense importance.
This is also true for Su Ballard’s analysis of artist Susan Norrie’s “Enola”, a digital video 
installation. She suggests that time is slowed down to an eternal present to create a duration 
which includes both Hiroshima/Nagasaki and 9/11 as spatial boundaries and geographic 
borders are collapsed. In contrast, artist Adrian Cartwright considers his specific geographical 
locatedness or place as a night photographer looking up at the sky and seeing space, with all 
its connotations of immensity, time and energy. In her book review, Bridie Lonie argues that 
Thinking Space: Critical Geographies11 bridges spatial, philosophical and social disciplines; 
as each theorist contributing to the volume thinks in terms relevant to geography because 
their work – although divergent –  depend on concepts which are spatial in nature. Geography 
also translates into abstract sculptures through artist Andrew Last’s reflection of harmonic 
systems deployed in space as found in the world of plants and in the mathematics used to 
interpret them. And, where Willem Labuschagne reviews Conceptual Spaces: The Geometry 
of Thought12 he considers cognition in terms of its geometrical, spatial configuration; while 
suggesting a spatial differential within cognitive science as a discipline, as it ranges across 
a terrain including psychology, philosophy, logic, computer science and linguistics.
How should space and place be represented? This issue is painted in broad strokes and 
includes a healthy blend of positivist approaches and presentations from the humanities on a 
common theme. Just as the topics range from the intimate to the global, the disciplines used to 
assess the topics come from a broad scope; while the inclusion of poetry and statistics between 
the covers of a serious journal serves to destabilise yet another binary – sciences/arts. 
 9Bale – Editorial – Junctures, 5, Dec 2005
 1 Edward Soja, Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Thought (London: 
Verso, 1989).
 2 See John Agnew, “Space: Place,” in Paul Cloke and Ron Johnston (eds), Spaces of Geographical 
Thought (London: Sage, 2005), 81-96.
 3 Ibid.
 4 Paul Cloke and Ron Johnston, “Deconstructing Human Geography’s Binaries”, in Spaces of 
Geographical Thought, Sage, 12.
 5 Michel De Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 
11.
 6 Yi-Fu Tuan, Space and Place (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1977).
  Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space (Oxford: Blackwell), 1991.
 8 The notion of ‘topophilia’ is usually associated with the work of Yi-Fu Tuan, Topophilia, (Englewood Cliffs: 
Prentice Hall, 1974). However, the word was used much earlier by the English poet, W H Auden.
 9 Gillian Rose, “Place and Identity: a Sense of Place”, in Doreen Massey and Pat Jess (eds), A Place in 
the World? (Open University, Milton Keynes: Milton Keynes,1995), 98-105.
 10 Edward Relph, Place and Placelessness (London: Pion, 1976); and Marc Augé, Non-Places (London: 
Verso, 1995).
 11 Mike Crang and Nigel Thrift (eds, London and New York: Routledge, 2000). 
 12 Peter Gärdenfors (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT, 2000).
John Bale was trained as a human geographer and has degrees from the University 
of London. He has pioneered the geographical study of sports and is currently based 
at Aarhus University, Denmark.


Placing Space

Baddock, Sally

Infant Bed-sharing vs Cot-sleeping in the Home Environment

Browne, Rodney

Review: Michael Rush, "Video Art" (London: Thames & Hudson, 2003)

 7 Junctures, 3, Dec 2004
EDITORIAL
The Triathlon – A Multidisciplinary Heuristic
The Olympic Games came to a close concomitantly with the deadline for submissions to Junctures
3, and while we reluctantly pulled ourselves from the continuous live coverage of Grecian sands
and toned bodies, we also saw how these Games poignantly served as a heuristic for the
mission of this journal.
Reflect for a moment upon the men’s triathlon.  New Zealanders were glued to the screen
during this event, where at least one, if not two members of the New Zealand team were
contenders for places of honour.  Indeed, the duo of Carter and Docherty ended up finishing first
and second, bringing home forty percent of the total New Zealand medal haul.  Not only was
their victory based on triple-disciplinarity, but both the preparation of and the symbolism
concerning these athletes embody how knowledge can issue forth from a myriad of places.
One might be quick to presume that their success was the result of exceptional sports science
preparation. With the only swimming flume in the southern hemisphere at their disposal, these
triathletes might have swum in variable currents, with continuous biomechanical assessment,
oxygen consumption and blood lactate analysis.  They acclimatised to the Athens weather
conditions via heat chamber with controlled humidity, and then trained at altitude to enable
their haemoglobin to saturate more fully with oxygen in order to enhance their endurance
performance.
However, to assume that sports science was the reason for their success would be to trivialise
the contribution of other specialities.  While it may have contributed to the maximisation of their
VO21 max, medical science was an important lynchpin in their performance – injury prevention,
health maintenance and diet enabled them to adhere to their training regimens.  Psychological
skills training contributed to their ability to stay composed in the face of competitor attacks on
the 18% gradient of the Vouliagmeni bike circuit.
But beyond the obvious associations with medicine, psychology and sporting performance,
numerous other factors contributed to the victory of the New Zealand triathletes.  What about
history and geography?  New Zealand is an island country, with only one land-bound city.  Young
children are raised with a familiarity and love for the water.  Not only this, but extensive rural
roading networks and hilly landscapes strengthen cyclists’ thighs, as well as their resolve. But
finally, New Zealand has a rich history in distance running, with a disproportionate number of
8  Junctures, 3, Dec 2004
Olympic medals in events ranging from the 800m to the marathon gained in the 60s, 70s and
80s.  School cross-country events are mandatory for all students in most New Zealand  schools,
an unusual practice in the rest of the world.
The bodies of these athletes speak of techniques of self-discipline: simultaneously in the sense
of being subjected to such discipline and as being embodiments of social control.  The lean and
sinewy body of the endurance athlete sets a normative standard of appearance to which young
New Zealanders both aspire and are chained.
On a macro-level, the successful Olympic athlete embodies the hope of the nation, which basks
in the reflected glory of the victory.  The images, traditions and memories constructed around
the athletes provide emotional unity, a sense of identity, and becomes the perfect Andersonian
tool for “imagining nationhood.”2   For him, the nation exists only as an imagined entity because
so few members of a nation even know one another and thus they must create an image of
what they believe it to be:  in this case, a nation of staunch and well-prepared world-beaters.   By
extension, sport is a mechanism of control, reproducing and promoting the values which are
consistent with the dominant ideology of the nation.
But the triathlon is not different from any other subject of contemporary interest:  its practice
cannot be perfected; and its understanding cannot be captured from the vantage point of one
discipline.  All knowledge, we maintain, is at its most useful when it is distributed across, and
indeed contextualised by, the widest possible framework of understanding.
So, we again explore the body in Junctures 3.  The body, like the triathlon, is a fruitful platform for
multidisciplinary cohesion. Its position in the traditional Maori haka is explained by Nathan
Matthews.  We read of the importance of embodiment  where Johannes Heidema and Willem
Labuschagne investigate its role in cognition. We consider its status as constructed by
adornments in Holly Thorpe’s analysis of snowboarding fashion. Annette Hoffman contrasts the
symbolic meaning of heart and breast in discourses of illness. Suzanne Human focuses on how
the body erupts in cultural subversion. How are its emissions simultaneously gendered and
subversively humoristic? Maxine Alterio narrates the poignant moments of a woman preparing
to leave her body; while Lynn Taylor’s visual essay speaks of incorporated experience of a
familiar practice deployed in unfamiliar surroundings. Book reviewers Bridie Lonie and Jane
Venis respectively focus on affect as impact on the body through new media and the theoretical
analysis of this process; and on the body as a humorous and critical-performative ‘’border
crosser” defying the politics of separation.
Junctures 4 will examine movement and welcomes contributions from scholars from all
disciplines.  It is through thematic dialogue that we gain a better understanding of our own areas
of study and of those of others.
Annemarie Jutel
(Editor)
1 VO2 max is, in simple terms, a physiological measurement of the body’s ability to extract,
transport and utilise oxygen.  It is a predictor of performance in endurance events.
2 B Anderson, Imagined Communities : Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism
(New York: Verso, 1991).


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