136 research outputs found
In/Security and Discursive Appropriation in Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club
No full textChuck Palahniuk’s "Fight club" (1996) is a novel about security and vulnerability both on the personal and the political sphere, where the boundary between the two is considered to be very thin, and the vulnerability is seen as a consequence of a world-spread crisis of responsibility.
In the essay, the author considers "Fight Club"’s construction of a fictional world grounded on a generalised sense of shared vulnerability, and explores how this sense results in a problematic re-appropriation of violence and the creation of a liminal community that challenges the mainstream globalised American community from the inside. The analysis then moves on to explore the ‘sociology of knowledge’ behind the construction of "Fight Club"’s oppositional community, reflected in the novel’s narrative strategies and structure, and speculates on degrees of responsibility corresponding to various levels of embeddedness and awareness on the part of the members of the group.
By constructing fight club as a liminal community, the novel offers a possibility to break the cycle of appropriation, turning a scenario of vulnerability into a reflection on the political constituencies that endorse protection for certain subjects and exclude others from it
The Hero and his Double in Chuck Palahniuk's Novel
No full textThe current study examines the work of Chuck Palahniuk, an American author of Ukrainian origin, from the point of the theory of the double. Structural patterns and systems of imagery of the author 's first
two novels, «The Fight Club» and «Invisible Monsters», are analyzed, as is the role of the double in them.
Theoretical grounding is provided by the conceptions of M. Bakhti and Yampols 'kyi, among others, and
Chuck Palahniuk's own theoretical generalizations.Дослідження розглядає творчість американського письменника українського походження Чака Палагнюка (Паланіка) в аспекті теоріїдвійнщтва. Аналізуються структурні схеми і системи образів
двох найперших романів автора: «Невидимі потвори» і «Бійцівський клуб», визначається роль двійника
у цих романах. За теоретичне підґрунтя слугують концепції двійнщтва М. Бахтіна, М. Ямпольсь-
кого та інших авторів, а також: теоретичні узагальнення самого Чака Палагнюка (Паланіка)
Interrelation between the Author and the Text in W. S. Burroughs’s Naked Lunch and Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club
No full textArticle adopts Jacques Lacan’s concept of the “mirror stage” to study the mechanisms of the way the Author’s identity evolves in W. Burroughs’s Naked Lunch and Ch. Palahniuk’s Fight Club. Evolution of the Author is set against general process of personal growth. The study is primarily concerned with features of the Author’s evolution within transgressive fiction, as Chuck Palahniuk and William Burroughs are the key figures of this genre. Transgression presupposes addressing social taboos by explicating them, thus creating strong reactions within the readership. We argue and find evidence that Burroughs and Palahniuk in the process of facing their perfect images of the Author digress from what Lacan would consider normal development. When they are given a chance to produce a unified body of text, the writers chose unconscious strive for fragmentation instead. Fragmented images invade Naked Lunch and Fight Club. However the mirror stage in the case of Palahniuk and in the case of Burroughs differ. While Burroughs in the myth of the Interzone ends up rejecting the notion of unique Author as such, Palahniuk accepts the fact that he managed to form a new niche for transgressive fiction and stays true to this niche, continuing similar aesthetics in the works that follow
Chuck Henny
No full textDr. Chuck Henny oral history transcript as conducted by John Cornely. 38 ½ (1970-December of 2008 and worked for Fish and Wildlife Service, National Biological Survey/Service, USGS during this time).1
Oral History Cover Sheet
Name: Dr. Chuck Henny
Date of Interview: February 24, 2012
Location of Interview: Albany, Oregon
Interviewer: John Cornely
Approximate years worked: 38 ½ (1970-December of 2008 and worked for Fish and Wildlife Service, National Biological Survey/Service, USGS during this time)
Offices and Field Stations Worked, Positions Held: Migratory Bird Populations Station at Patuxent, Maryland; Denver Wildlife Research Center, Colorado; Patuxent’s Pacific Northwest Field Station in Corvallis, Oregon; Forest and Rangeland Ecosystem Science Center, Corvallis, Oregon.
Most Important Projects: Osprey Survey for Chesapeake Bay, Study on effects of DDT sprayed for tussock moth control, Cyanide studies in Nevada related to gold mines, Mercury studies on the Carson River, Peregrine falcon research, Surveys in Mexico.
Colleagues and Mentors: Howard Wight, Scott Overton, John Wiens (all three professors at Oregon State), Maura Naughton, Joe Chapman, Kahler Martinson, Al Geis, Walt Crissey, Chan Robbins, Lucille Stickel, Eugene Dustman, John Rogers, Alexander Wetmore, Ken Burnham, Mort Smith, Milt Friend, Tom Scott, Larry Blus, Ray Glahn, John Cornely, Dave Lenhart, Bob Hallock, Bob Grove, Jim Kaiser, Nancy Laybourne, Russian biologists worked with include Vladimir Flint, Vladimir Galushin, Sergei Ganusevich, Andrey Kuznetsov, Alexander Sorokin.
Most Important Issues: Contaminants, Population Studies
Brief Summary of Interview: Dr. Henny discusses growing up in Oregon and attending Oregon State University before joining the Fish and Wildlife Service at Patuxent’s Migratory Bird Populations Station. He would start his career working on waterfowl banding studies and osprey surveys before taking a job at the Denver Wildlife Research Center where he would work on contaminant issues. Dr. Henny worked on many projects dealing with contaminants such as DDT, Famphur, cyanide, and mercury. He would also make several trips to Russia to work with biologists on raptors. Dr. Henny worked for three different agencies during his career as research was moved out of the Fish and Wildlife Service into the National Biological Survey/Service and then to USGS.
2
JOHN: This is John Cornely with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Heritage Committee. It’s the 24th of February, 2012 and we’re in Albany, Oregon at the home of Dr. Chuck Henny. And he is going to share with us today the highlights of his life and career as a research biologist both with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and with the USGS. So with that, Chuck, go right ahead.
CHUCK: Okay. I guess I’ll start with the beginning. I was born March 20, first day of spring, 1943 in Salem, Oregon. And was brought up on a farm, small farm that had onions and strawberries and typical things for here in the Willamette Valley; farm was located about eight miles north of Salem. And pretty much in my earlier years on the farm I was a pretty avid hunter and watched the birds a lot, and shot quite a few pheasants and ducks in my day. And went to high school in a small town, Gervais, Oregon; there were about 150-175 students at the high school. And my senior year I was the student body president, and from the get go I knew that I was going to go to Oregon State University. And I can still remember there was a dictionary at home, and even when I was a little kid, written in the back of the dictionary, it said Oregon State 1961. So it was sort of predestined that I was going to go to Oregon State and I started in ’61, and majored in fisheries and wildlife and proceeded through the undergrad curriculum. And during that time period Howard Wight had a pretty important role in my future in terms of education. He came to Oregon State from the Migratory Bird Populations Station at Patuxent in 1964, and that was my senior year. And actually started working on a project, as a senior, I spent a lot of time checking hunter-killed geese. There’s a gun club about five miles outside of Corvallis to the east, Glasser’s Hunt Club, and these guys were shooting a lot of dusky Canada geese. And we could go out there, in fact there were three of us undergrads and we rotated days, and ended up checking at least a hundred geese a day for sex and age and weights and various measurements etc., as a senior. And then eventually, I got involved in working on the goose for my master’s degree as a result of that, kind of an early start as a senior.
JOHN: When you started with that work, there at Glasser’s, that was before there were refuges.
CHUCK: There were no refuges in the valley at that time. They were talking about it, and I think Finley NWR came into existence a year or two later.
JOHN: I’m thinking mid-60’s.
CHUCK: ’65 or something like that. And there was concern that, the limited number of hunters that were out there virtually every day, were shooting their daily limits. And they had an interesting approach to their hunting activities in that they would only hunt to about 10 o’clock, then they all leave. So the geese would not really leave the area, they knew they could come in and feed after 10. And I think one of the most interesting things we saw, in doing those bag checks, was the last few days of the hunting season, they were not getting very many geese. Usually what they were shooting was the young geese that were “hatch year” birds. And toward the 3
tail end of the season, they were getting very few geese, so they decided they were going to open hunting up all day for he last three days of the season. And they just slaughtered the adults during that process. I mean the adults had it figured it out, there was a regime going on here, this is the way you do it, don’t go in there in the morning, and you wait until such and such time and then you go in and eat. And they just killed hundreds of them, those last three days. And that’s all in our Wildlife Monograph that was published by the Wildlife Society in ’69, on the dusky Canada Goose.
JOHN: So back in that period of time, later on I know there were a lot of other geese, different subspecies, but weren’t there mostly duskies?
CHUCK: They were probably 95% duskies at that time, and the fall flight was 25,000 or something like that. Now there’s, I don’t know, 200/300,000 geese in the valley. And later, on the same subject to kind of jump a head a little bit since we’re talking about geese. There was an interest in all this short stopping of geese and Maura Naughton was a biologist at Finley NWR; I think this must have been in ’90 or something like that, I’m not sure what year it was.
JOHN: Well she would have started; she was working on her graduate work when I left in ’88. So about ’89 she would have become the biologist.
CHUCK: Well one of the things I was really interested in was to try to understand what was leading to this short stopping. And it seemed pretty obvious to me what was happening, as the acreage of grass seed increased in the valley, you know all a sudden you’ve got all this green grass in the valley instead of the old natural grass that’s brown. So you’ve got this luscious food source for grazing by geese. So Maura and I wrote a paper, it was in one of the status reports; I can’t remember what year, I can find the details later [1998. Status and Trends of the Nation’s Biological Resources, USGS]. But what I did, I went over to the Ag. Experiment Station on campus to determine the annual acreage of grass seed going all the way back to the ‘40’s. And I plotted that information out against winter counts of geese and they just paralleled each other. So as the grass seed acreage increased, we just lured more and more geese into the valley including a lot of them that were short stopped that usually went down into the Central Valley of California, several different subspecies. So that’s kind of the end of my goose information. But I also remember an interesting point, when we did publish the monograph back in ‘69, Joe Chapman was one of the guys also working on the field data; I was working on the banding data. I remember we flipped a coin to see who was going to be the senior author of the Wildlife Monograph, and Chapman won [laughing]. But that was sort of my master’s project. And then during the summers of those years I started going back to Patuxent with the Migratory Bird people, went back there in ’66, and worked with Kahler Martinson, Al Geis, and Walt Crissey.
JOHN: These were like summer jobs basically?
CHUCK: Yeah, it was a summer job but it kind of got me in; and then they ended up funding my dissertation work, which was an analysis of population dynamics 4
of 16 selected species, including several raptors that I had a particular interest. There was a big concern at that time about a number of species that were declining. We knew that the production rates were low, they seemed low, but we didn’t know what they should be. What kind of productivity would be necessary to maintain a stable population? So we looked at the banding data to estimate survival rates, and then we had some information on age at sexual maturity. And, some models were developed to estimate that ospreys ought to be producing about 1 to 1.3 young per breeding age pair to maintain the stable population, and that was some of the findings that came out of this project. The Migratory Bird Populations Station at that time was at Patuxent, on the Center, but it was considered separate from Patuxent. So I was at Patuxent, but I was part of the Migratory Bird group, which included Chan Robbins, who was a non-game guy, and had a lot of waterfowl folks that were basically collecting data and analyzing surveys, production counts, etc.. They had several surveys going on and all that data would funnel back into this Migratory Bird Populations Station to put together for hunting regulation meetings in the mid-summer, or late summer.
JOHN: So were they part, then, were they considered, do you remember, part of refuges or I know at one point—
CHUCK: I don’t think they were part of the refuge system then. It was research pretty much.
JOHN: But it was just separate from the Center.
CHUCK: Yeah, yeah. we had a separate director, Walt Crissey.
JOHN: Okay, yeah.
CHUCK: Whereas Stickel and some of the earlier folks, Dustman, were Center Directors there. So we were located in the same building [Gabrielson Lab] but with two different management regimes. Actually, speaking of Gabrielson, I actually went back to Gabrielson Lab for its dedication in ’69; I was still a student out here at Oregon State, but some of my data analysis was completed and presented at the dedication symposium. And, Ira Gabrielson was present [first Director of the USFWS], which was a neat deal, and I met him and I took my Birds of Oregon book back and had him sign it; still have the book here in the house.
JOHN: So besides, what were some of the other birds besides raptors that you included in your analysis?
CHUCK: Brown pelican, and great blue heron, black crowned night heron, cardinal, blue jay; I meant it was a gamut of stuff. Basically got the banding data files, and at that time, here we’re talking in the late ‘60’s, it was pretty hard to work with that data. I mean electronically it was not very easy, plus I had access to all the original banding schedules that were submitted, the paperwork was filed. So you could actually go back into those files, and I spent a lot of time doing that, going back to these records and finding out how many young they were banding per nest. Many of the banders had pretty good records, it wasn’t just the band number and the date, there was other information, so I used a lot of that 5
information plus I corresponded with many of these banders that banded large numbers to try to synthesize all of that information. And so then I got my PhD in 1970 at Oregon State with Howard Wight as my major prof., Scott Overton was a minor prof. John Wiens was also a minor prof.
JOHN: Was Wiens in biology or was he fisheries and wildlife?
CHUCK: He was in zoology.
JOHN: Zoology, okay.
CHUCK: He was in zoology, yeah. And he’s now back in Oregon; he came back to Corvallis just recently, not too long ago. So anyway, I got my degree in ’70 and was hired by the Migratory Bird Populations Station there in Maryland. So traveled back to Patuxent, and started working primarily with waterfowl; that was the big deal. I mean the old story was, with Fish and Wildlife Service in those days, if it didn’t honk or didn’t quack, it didn’t count. A lot of the work revolved around waterfowl.
JOHN: And what was your, when you first went back there, what was your position and what were you asked to work on?
CHUCK: Well I ended up doing a reward band study; that was one of the first things. And there was a big concern about what percent of the bands that hunters obtain that they actually send in. And so associated with the banding operations throughout mallard range I mean most of it is Saskatchewan, Manitoba, and Alberta; there also was banding in Ontario. So went up and put these reward bands on, I can’t remember if it was 1 in 10 or something like that got an extra reward band that said, “Reward $10” right on it.
JOHN: Was it the same color and size basically?
CHUCK: It was anodized green and placed on opposite leg of the regular band. Therefore, the bird had two bands.
JOHN: Okay.
CHUCK: So was involved in getting those bands attached and spent some time out in the prairies as the new man on the block, Walt Crissey always made a survey up through the prairies in May just to—
JOHN: Introduce.
CHUCK: Yeah, I was the new guy. So Walt Crissey was the Director, John Rogers was the Assistant Director and me being the new guy got to go with them. So there was this old Beaver down at Annapolis that Crissey would fly. And I don’t think it was flown much, except—
JOHN: The annual spring tour.
CHUCK: Well he may have used it a little bit on other things too, and I’m not sure if other people used it or not. The flight was one of those deals where we would land at an airport, I remember we took off from Annapolis and seemed like our first land fall was somewhere in Indiana. And I remember Crissey saying, “Fill it with oil and check the gas.” The oil was leaking out of the big old radial engine the Beaver has, and I mean the oil was just—
6
JOHN: Streaming.
CHUCK: — coming back onto the windshield and what am I getting in for here, and that was kind of the story. And then we ended up at Portage la Prairie near Delta, Manitoba, went in and met some of those guys, and I liked Alex Dzubin and I remember him in particular. And then they gave us the tour around Delta, the marsh and everything. And we went to take off at this little dirt strip near Delta, and we got up I would say about three or four hundred feet and the engine popped, the prop stopped; I’m on my maiden voyage here. And Crissey was just as cool as can be; I think he was an old World War II pilot. And he was fiddling around with knobs and so he got that thing started before we hit the ground. I remember that day as long as I live. We could have been piled up right there at Delta Marsh.
JOHN: How close to the ground did you get?
CHUCK: You know, I’m not really sure. They kind of glide pretty good, those big Beavers, I mean they’ve got big wings and everything. We might have come in pretty smooth, but we might not have come in very smooth. It was just a pop and then I saw the prop just stopped. And he said, well I think he said something about carburetor heat or something that wasn’t turned on, you know some detail like that.
JOHN: Weren’t those things pretty loud, so it probably got very quiet when that propeller stopped.
CHUCK: Oh yeah. And we went on, it was sort of like nothing happened but really I don’t know if that there was a near kind of a report or anything ever filed, probably not in those days; here we’re talking, this is 1971, like May 1971. But it was really interesting to go out and see all of these areas. And then we stopped at Northern Prairie and saw all the people there that were working in the Dakota’s.
So the other thing that I was working on, spent a fair amount of time, on a series of mallard reports that were published. I was assigned to work on the initial report, which was a review of all of the historic data on mallards.
JOHN: So what series, I mean was it one of those blue {Resource Publications]?
CHUCK: Yeah, it was a Resource Publication [No. 105 in 1972]. And eventually, there ended up being eight volumes; I’ve got a copy in the office that’s actually bound. So I was involved in the first three of those, but the first one was historical and then showed the, plotted out breeding range information. And one of the things I was interested in was, who first banded mallards in more of a systematic way. So here I was with the Bird Banding Lab located on the floor below me, so I went to talk to the guys. And they said, “Well, it’s Alexander Wetmore.” Out of Bear River in like 19--, it was in the teens, he was doing some botulism work out there. So here I was in ’70, ’71 and picked up the phone and called Wetmore. He was still alive down at the Smithsonian. And he says, “Oh yeah, I’ll send you a reprint.” So a couple days later I got a signed reprint of that paper that he did on Bear River, and that, I think, was the first real serious banding of mallards.
7
JOHN: Were they banding mallards produced there at Bear River or some other time a year? Because I know they had duck production there, but they also had a lot of wintering.
CHUCK: I don’t know, I mean it was associated with the botulism die off, so is that a summer activity?
JOHN: Yeah.
CHUCK: So it was probably breeding ducks I would think.
JOHN: That would make sense because then you could try and assess some portion of the ducks fledge, that died.
CHUCK: Anyway, that was kind of fun, interesting to talk to Wetmore and I’ve made a few trips down to the Smithsonian during those years. And Wetmore was a real tall guy, I think he was in his 90’s at that time, I think, and he must have been 6’4 or 6’5, thin guy, really interesting person to talk to. And he always ate lunch there, brown bagged it, and if you were down there he would be there for lunch and talk to him about anything, and he was wide open to all kinds of questions. He did a zillion things in his career, so just meeting somebody like that and spending a little bit of time was most interesting. Kind of to move on with the story, one of the things that I was interested in, at that time, was trying to get a little broader perspective at the Migratory Bird Populations Station. And, I purposed the idea that we should do an osprey survey for Chesapeake Bay to figure out how many we’ve got, how they’re distributed. And talked to the upper level folks there and I talked to the pilots, and at the time that survey would be done, there was no conflict with duck surveys; these pilots were always interested in flying. So in 1973, we went out with a couple planes, and surveyed all the Chesapeake Bay for ospreys. And we basically did it in a similar manner to the way duck surveys were conducted. We surveyed the whole area by air, and then had a smaller portion where independent ground surveys were conducted. Actually, there were people doing detailed studies in some portions of the bay that became our ground counts. And, we could compare areas with both air and ground data and come up with a visibility rate and the associated variance. There were some neat statisticians there that I was able to work with including Ken Burnham, who actually was one of Overton’s students at the same time I was at Oregon State; he was in statistics and I was in wildlife. We both ended up at the Migratory Bird Populations Station.
JOHN: Do you remember who the pilots were?
CHUCK: Well Mort Smith was one of them. And I think maybe Doug Benning or Ed Ferguson.
JOHN: Oh, Mort was one, okay.
CHUCK: Yeah. Mort was out there at the Center and he was one of the pilots.
JOHN: But both of them stationed there at the Center.
CHUCK: Yeah, they were from that general area. They may not have been right on the Center, but in that vicinity. They might have been down in D.C. or nearby.
8
JOHN: And what time; was that earlier than the duck surveys?
CHUCK: Yeah, it was earlier. And for that latitude, it is 38 degrees or something like that, nesting a little earlier. So we did that survey and then I compiled all the information, but before we did the survey I talked to two people and asked a simple question. “How many pairs of ospreys are nesting in Chesapeake Bay?” Two old timers, I asked Chan Robbins and I asked Alexander Wetmore. And both of them had been around for a long time. And the estimates they both came up with were between 200 and 400 pairs. I can’t remember which one said 200 and which one said 400, but it was in that 200 to 400 pairs. So when we did the survey and adjusted the information for visibility, and the visibility changed depending on what ospreys were nesting on; had a little less visibility, less percentage seen from the air if they were in trees, a pretty high percentage if they were on off shore duck blinds or channel markers. We had visibility rates calculated for these different types of nests, and put all that together and the bottom line was 1450 pairs in Chesapeake Bay in 1973.
JOHN: Wow.
CHUCK: Nesting in Chesapeake Bay, now that’s Virginia and the Maryland part; that’s not out on the ocean side, but that’s just Chesapeake Bay itself, but includes the rivers, like the Potomac with 300 pairs. And, the Rappahannock and others, but I don’t remember the specific numbe
Robert Jones
No full textRobert D. (Bob) Jones, Jr. oral history interview as conducted by C.M. (Chuck) Mobley. Mr. Jones is probably better known by his nickname, "Sea Otter Jones."The Life of Robert D. (Bob) Jones, Jr.
Eagle River, Alaska
Interview conducted by C.M. (Chuck) Mobley
February 7, 1998
Chuck: Mr. Jones, could you tell me when you born and where?
Bob: I was born in South Dakota in 1916.
Chuck: Had your family been there a long time?
Bob: Well, yes. In fact they lived and died in that region. My dad was a small town lawyer and lived in Milbank, a town of about 2,500 people.
Chuck: At what point, what happened between then and when you came to Alaska?
Bob: World War II. I came to Alaska as a member of the military establishment and I’m still here.
Chuck: What did you do in World War II?
Bob: I was out in the Aleutian Islands in an Early Warning organization. We were looking for approaching aircraft, of course, and that was our primary objective.
Chuck: You were in the Army? What rank did you have and where were you stationed? 2
Bob: I was a First Lieutenant. I was stationed several places. I went to Adak with the original troops that landed there and from Adak to Amchitka and ultimately those were the two primary places where I was stationed. I was on some of the other islands.
Chuck: Was this before Attu and Kiska or after?
Bob: Both before and after. I was there at the time that Kiska was occupied by U.S. forces.
Chuck: Did you go to Kiska?
Bob: No, not at that time. I’ve been there several times since but we were operating equipment on the west end of Amchitka where we were looking essentially right into Kiska Harbor. That was deemed the most useful thing we could do.
Chuck: What was Amchitka like then. It has changed a little bit since then, I understand.
Bob: Well, the facilities change but the rest of it doesn’t. At that stage of the game, we were living in tents. There was a small detachment of about 40 people. We actually operated two radar units; one down at Bird Cape, which is the northwestern corner of the Island and the other was on Aleut Point, which is the southwestern corner of the Island. They were both long-range 3
units. During the time that the occupation of Kiska was taking place, we were, of course, pretty alert to what might happen.
Chuck: Did you get there at a point in time when there were still Japanese on the Island?
Bob: Oh, yes.
Chuck: So you saw Japanese planes coming over?
Bob: Yes. Actually the ones that came as far as Adak, as I stated earlier, I was with the original troops that landed on Adak and we installed radar equipment right away.
Chuck: What was the radar equipment like? Can you describe it?
Bob: It was pretty antique as radars go today! The frequency was about 100 kilocycles, we called it in those years – kilohertz is what we call it now. The oscillators were vacuum tubes rather what we use now. We use a magnetron today and frequencies, of course, much higher than it was then. Anybody who only knows modern radar would be appalled to see those old pieces of equipment. They were very large. One unit that we used was a mobile unit – on a truck/trailer, weighed seven tons! Nowadays, the antenna unit on radar, one can carry. That, of course, is the advantage of it, could be installed. When the occupation of Amchitka was in the making, that was in early 1943, we had the first portable radar that the U.S. Army ever used and 4
it was operated in a tent and means provided to rotate the antenna was hand cranks. It worked – worked very well! It was a British product. I had quite a little experience with the early radar forms.
Chuck: When they broke or malfunctioned in some way, was it anything in particular? Did they have any particular faults?
Bob: Actually, they customarily did not fail. Of course, we had scheduled maintenance shutdowns and the oscillator tubes on one unit was about “that big around and so high” – two of them were used and they were water cooled, or actually liquid cooled. We didn’t use water because of the temperatures and 106 megahertz was the frequency that we operated one of them. They were each different, of course, but they were in that range. Nowadays, the magnetron, like the one that is in microwave oven, takes the place of that.
Chuck: When Japanese airplanes came over, what did you do?
Bob: Our responsibility was to warn the base. We were at one end of the Island and the base was at the other end – about 40 miles apart. Our objective was to detect approaching aircraft and send warning so that our fighter aircraft could engage them. It saved a lot of wear and tear on the engines if they could wait on the ground and receive warning that there were aircraft coming.
Chuck: What kind of Japanese aircraft did you see? 5
Bob: I don’t remember. The aircraft they were operating out of Kiska were probably amphibious as they took off from the water. They were building a runway but they didn’t ever get it completed.
Chuck: So you saw Japanese planes coming over?
Bob: Oh yes. Not frequently, because it didn’t last very long. Once the U.S. Air Corps arrived at Amchitka with P-38’s and P-40’s, it pretty well ended the incursions of the Japanese. Then, of course, there were bombers that came in as well and they carried the war to the Japanese.
Chuck: So you were there when the airstrip was built on Amchitka? What kinds of equipment did they use to build the airstrip?
Bob: It was cats – that sort of thing. The only unusual feature of the airstrips then were that they were surfaced with pierced metal planking. They were designed so that the pieces fit together and they could be laid down rapidly and if the aircraft were not too heavy, they could work off that kind of a surface. The big bombers were too heavy for it. They would roll a groove in the metal planking – B-24’s. One landed at Ogliuga. It was coming back from Attu, I believe, and they had some problem – whether they were hit or what it was, I don’t remember, but they needed to land and so they came in to Ogliuga with full armor and they just rolled two grooves in the runway surface. To fly it out of there, they had to take all the armor 6
and armament off to lighten the aircraft significantly. The P-38’s and the P-40’s were able to operate from that kind of a surface.
Chuck: Did you ever see any dogfights in the air or anything like that?
Bob: No. I don’t think the seaplanes, which is essentially what they were, were a match for the land base P-38’s and P-40’s. They had some Zero’s there and of course, they were maneuverable to extreme but they lost a great deal of that when they made seaplanes of them.
Chuck: You got to Amchitka by ship? What was that like?
Bob: Well, just a ship that operated back and forth between Adak and Amchitka. It was 180 miles and one could load a detachment or equipment on the ship, come in to Constantine Harbor at Amchitka where it was unloaded.
Chuck: After the Battle of Attu, you were there at Amchitka during that time? Did you see wounded come in?
Bob: Yes, I was at Amchitka. No, the fight was going on at Attu and it didn’t reach our area. Somewhere thereabouts then there was a major naval engagement and we were quite alert to the possibility of some reaching us but they didn’t.
Chuck: Were you able to listen on a radio to the invasion of Kiska? 7
Bob: We could have but we didn’t. At least I didn’t. We knew the Kiska radar had gone out of operation about 2 weeks before because we could hear it. So we speculated as to whether we would find an occupying force there. As it turned out, of course, there was none.
Chuck: What happened after that? What was the rest of your military career like?
Bob: Well, after the fighting was over, we were just tidying up and holding the fort, so to speak. There was, of course, at Adak, major preparations for an invasion of the Japanese mainland and warehouses were built and supplies were brought in. That sort of thing went on in an aggressive manner but on Amchitka, we did not have any particular role. Amchitka does not have the fine harbors that Adak does.
Chuck: So was your entire military service in the Aleutians?
Bob: Yes. After the war was over, I was transferred to Kodiak where I stayed in the military and finished at Kodiak. I stayed on Fort Greely. It was a normal military post; nothing unusual about it.
Chuck: The coastal guns all still there?
Bob: I don’t know about the guns themselves but the gun-emplacements are probably still there. 8
Chuck: Did you operate radar on Kodiak also?
Bob: Well, no. I didn’t personally but it was in use.
Chuck: What were your duties?
Bob: I was a member of the Post staff; just a relative hand-full of people. Its function was to assist in transferring aircraft on out the Chain. Aircraft, in those years, did not have the capacity to fly as far as they do now. It was necessary to have a number of places along the line where, if it was necessary to land, there would be a place reasonably close to do so. We were operating DC-4’s. That was pretty much the most capable cargo aircraft of that period. Things have changed.
Chuck: Now those were flying in not Fort Greely but there in the Kodiak Naval Air Station, is that right?
Bob: There were both – Kodiak Naval Air Station or, they called it NOB - Naval Operating Base, and it had as a part of it, an air station. The two were operating together.
Chuck: Did you fly in a DC-4? When was your first flight experience of your life? 9
Bob: I was a passenger in a DC-4. I didn’t have any flight experience until after the war. I was assigned to the Air Corps as a radar officer and had close association with the pilots and the staff of the air base so I knew what was going on.
Chuck: What was the Kodiak operating base like?
Bob: Well, it was fairly typical of a small base. Of course, Kodiak had a nice harbor so ships came and went. When I was discharged from the Army in Anchorage, I went back to Kodiak and worked as an electronics technician on the Naval Base at Kodiak.
Chuck: What kind of planes were coming in and out of there then?
Bob: I don’t really remember what they were flying then.
Chuck: I’m just trying to get a feel for what the base was like back then.
Bob: Well, I don’t know how I could convey that really. It was not a large base. They operated fighter aircraft out of there. I don’t mean to imply that at that stage of the war there were a lot of them stationed there. It was a place where they could drop in, fuel, and go on.
Chuck: What did you do for fun when you were there? 10
Bob: (Laugh) Well, I don’t remember particularly. The great outdoors, of course, which we used to fish and that was in-season. We did all the usual things that soldiers and sailors do – go into town occasionally.
Chuck: Were you there when the President came through?
Bob: I was in the Aleutians when the President came through. I believe I was on Adak at the time. I didn’t see him but I was out on one of the out lying outposts where the radars were situated.
Chuck: Do you remember seeing any entertainers come through?
Bob: Yes. The one I remember was a very famous violinist – Yehudi Menuhin. I was on Amchitka at the time he visited there. My taste in music runs to that class and that’s why I remember him particularly. I met the individual personally. Most of time, we were out in the outposts because that was the nature of our business. When the USO performers came in, they went to the base; usually not out to the outposts! There wasn’t any way to get there, really. But when I heard that Yehudi Menuhin was coming in, I made sure that I got into town at Amchitka.
Chuck: How many people were in the auditorium?
Bob: It was full! I don’t have a recollection of how many that would be.
Chuck: Did he play by himself or did he have any other….. 11
Bob: He had a pianist.
Chuck: Do you remember what pieces he played?
Bob: No, I don’t. At Adak, of course, it was easier to get in from the outposts because they weren’t so far away. There was a rather well known author participating in the operation of the theatre at Adak – one of the “who done its” – you would recognize the name, I’m quite sure. We did get some well-known individuals there.
Chuck: Any women? Movie stars?
Bob: Yes, there were women. More likely, however, they were musicians, rather than movie stars – dancers, perhaps.
Chuck: What did Yehudi Menuhin look like?
Bob: Well, he was bundled up because he was not used to our temperatures and I wouldn’t be able to describe, really.
Chuck: What was Kodiak like after the war? Lot of people?
Bob: The base reduced in size pretty steadily and the town – this was, of course, before the earthquake, so the town looked quite different at that point than it did afterwards. The downtown district was pretty well washed away. 12
I was at Cold Bay in the Aleutian area when the major earthquake occurred in 1964 so I was out of touch with Kodiak. I didn’t reach Kodiak until several years later, by which time all of the consequences of the tsunami and the earthquake had been erased but I knew some of the people who had been there and they described it. They were just simply running around the town in their boats, sea-going boats, good-sized fishing boats. There was water everywhere!
Chuck: Have you seen tsunamis?
Bob: I was fortunate enough not to be down at the water’s edge when the tsunami came in. I’ve been in the Aleutians during, or been at Kodiak, when a tsunami hit Cape Sarichef and Scotch Cap on the west end of Unimak but that was far enough away that I didn’t get my feet wet. If I had been in Scotch Cap, I would have gotten quite wet!
Chuck: Well, people died there, didn’t they? Had you seen it before or after it got washed away?
Bob: Yes, I did, afterwards. It was 2-3 years. They didn’t attempt to rebuild it; it was just washed off. Everything hanging over the edge – bits of metal hanging from it. I don’t remember exactly – it was a fairly old-like station at the time. That was in 19--, I don’t remember.
Chuck: I don’t either. I have seen pictures of it. Did you have much to do with lighthouses over the years or ever go into any? 13
Bob: No, I didn’t have anything to do with them, but I was at Cape Sarichef and I never got to Scotch Cap. I was right offshore from the ship but not ashore.
Chuck: How did you get into the Cape Sarichef lighthouse? What were the circumstances?
Bob: By flying. There is, or was, a landing strip there. There may still be, I don’t know. There was a road system – kind of a patchy one, but a road system from Sherichef to Scotch Cap. When they rebuilt, they rebuilt on the mainland, rather than on the Island.
Chuck: Did you know the lighthouse keeper?
Bob: No, it was a mixed bag at Cape Sarichef. The Dew-line station was built there. That was how it came to have an airport and usually, it was in connection with those folks, that we went there. The Coast Guard, of course, manned the light station. I don’t remember how large a detachment but it was not a large one.
Chuck: Back to Kodiak – after the war, you said you got a job on the base as an electrician. How long did that last?
Bob: I left there in 1948; probably, about 2 years. I moved off the base as soon as I could. I lived briefly on the base and then moved into town. I just 14
preferred to live that way. There came a time when the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service was employing someone to live and work in the Aleutians. I applied and landed the job and that was when my employment by the Navy ended.
Chuck: So you applied for the job and it was administered out of where?
Bob: Juneau. The regional office was in Juneau then. My first assignment was to go to Cold Bay which is where I lived for 27 years.
Chuck: What was it like when you first got there?
Bob: Cold Bay hasn’t changed significantly. Well, there was an air force field, Thornborough field. I went there and it was not in operation much longer. Through the first winter and it began diminishing and the base, part of it went through a sequence of changes and to who was running the show, and I don’t remember what the order of events was. For a time, Northwest Airlines operated it and then Reeve Airways operated it and eventually, the FAA assumed charge of it. The State took over its normal functions but that took place over a number of years. Things moved slowly.
Chuck: Where did you live when you first got there?
Bob: In one of the yak huts. There were a lot of them around at that stage of the game. They were just small sheds – about 20 x 15. They were made into housing units. They were made of wood. There were quonsets, of 15
course, which have a metal exterior and there were huts which were made of fiberboard. Thornborough field was made up of yak huts, made of ordinary wood, nailed together. The interior floors were plywood and the walls were essentially like fiberboard. They were barely adequate and maintenance was pretty steady; tar roof.
When we had the big fire, we burned several of them in the course of it before we got the fire under control. It seemed that at Cold Bay, things would catch on fire pretty easily. I think it was through carelessness; lack of maintenance. The fire usually would start around a furnace where oil had been allowed to drip on the floor and generally this happened at night when no one was around so the fire would get a head start before anyone had time to do anything about it. That particular night, the fire broke out somewhere around 10:00 – 11:00 p.m., and the yak huts were close together and the barracks were connected by an alleyway that was boarded over. Of course, it is a windy climate so that once a fire gets started, it’s on the move and Northwest Airlines had just packed up to leave. The FAA had just taken over and there was paper everywhere as a consequence of the move that Northwest Airlines had made. It caught fire and blew from one place to another. The only way we could put it out was to take a tractor and just bodily move a burning building away from where it was close to another. We weren’t equipped to fight fires. That was another one of the things that was changed the next morning. Everybody was out. I remember it quite distinctly. It was sort of a turning point in the way the base was operated.
Chuck: What year was this? 16
Bob: It would have been in the early 50’s. It came during the winter as most of those things do. Most of the barracks buildings were lost. They weren’t occupied and when one of the yaks caught fire, it was just simply shoved away.
Chuck: Was that an occupied one?
Bob: Yes, it was. But what was going to happen was obvious to all of us and the people that occupied that building got most of their things out before the fire reached it. It was simply bodily shoved aside. We had a fire engine but we didn’t know how to use it! We learned, starting the next day!! It was a very old vehicle that the engine was mounted on. It would have been something probably acquired during the war years and the water tank on it was rather small, a couple hundred gallons, something like that. I believe it was a Ford vehicle. We had much to learn. After that, we were better equipped in both training and actual gear that we had.
Chuck: Now, you were not in the service, but you were living on the base?
Bob: Well, by this time, it had become a FAA station.
Chuck: Even though, you were with the Fish and Wildlife Service, you were sorta considered part of the federal folks there? 17
Bob: Oh yes. You see, we had large land holdings there. I, first, and subsequently other people, have been stationed there on the wildlife refuge.
Chuck: So when you first got there, were you the first person out there for the Fish and Wildlife Service?
Bob: No. Frank Beals was there. He lived at Kodiak and was responsibility for the Kodiak Refuge but as an additional responsibility, the Aleutians, he occasionally made a trip through the Aleutians. I knew him quite well and I liked him very much. I met him at Amchitka. He was there, and of course, he was interested in what was happening to the sea otters. He broke me in, so to speak. He was my boss for quite a period of time. It was a correspondence sort of a situation because I think he washed his hands of the Aleutians when I went out there.
Chuck: So what did Frank Beal look like?
Bob: Dark haired, a rather good-looking individual. He had been in the Aleutians prior to the war when the Bureau of Fisheries, well, let me think here – it was before the formation of the Fish and Wildlife Service. The Bureau of Fisheries operated the Brown Bear. She was a vessel that belonged to us in the Aleutians to attend to administrative matters and to take research workers out there. O.J. Murie was one of the people that went in that capacity and Frank Beal was working with him. You may know of O.J. Murie’s wife whose is still active from a wheel chair, I believe now, in Alaska. That was before 1941, certainly, so he knew the Aleutians, pre-18
military installation time and I met him, as I said, at Amchitka. The reason I happened to meet him was I was one of the officers charged with certain wildlife management responsibilities as an additional duty. Mostly on Amchitka, we were looking after the sea otters. So it was in that capacity that I came to meet him and then, of course, when I moved into Kodiak, I became much more familiar with Frank’s lifestyle because he lived there. It was, still is, the headquarters for the refuge.
Chuck: His house?
Bob: Well, it was then. Things at the beginning level, and now of course, there is a headquarters arrangement which does include the house in which he lived.
Chuck: What kind of things do you remember him teaching you?
Bob: Well, where I would find certain things and there were administrativ
Cosmology, Cosmic Dust, and Stellar Dimming
No full textA cosmology model is derived, forming an expanding, curved, unbounded, and finite universe resembling a 3-dimensional hypersphere with positive curvature. Growth, curvature, and the expansion rate are forced by the initial conditions accompanying the emergence of space and time from the “big bang” singularity. The model generates several variables (past and present stellar distance, luminosity distance, time of emission, photon path, recession velocity, radiation temperature, universe circumference, and Hubble parameter) which are sole functions of redshift z (readily measured by spectroscopic or photometric means). The model also presents two concepts which replace the need for cosmic inflation and dark energy.
Equations for luminosity distance d and Hubble parameter H compare extremely well with 28 values of BAO measured data over the redshift range 0.07The accepted manuscript in pdf format is listed with the files at the bottom of this page. The presentation of the authors' names and (or) special characters in the title of the manuscript may differ slightly between what is listed on this page and what is listed in the pdf file of the accepted manuscript; that in the pdf file of the accepted manuscript is what was submitted by the author
Introduction: Legal Form and Cultural Symbol – Music, Copyright and Information Studies
No full textWriters in information and communication studies often assume the stability of
objects under investigation: network nodes, databases, information. Legal writers in
the intellectual property tradition often assume that cultural artefacts exist as objects
prior to being governed by copyright law. Both assumptions are fallacious. This
introduction conceptualises the relationship of legal form and cultural symbol.
Starting from an understanding of copyright law as part of systems of production (in
the sense of Peterson 1976), it is argued that copyright law constructs the artefacts it
seeks to regulate as objects that can be bought and sold. In doing so, the legal and
aesthetic logic of cultural symbols may clash, as in the case of digital music (the
central focus of this special issue)
From Mansions to Towers: A History of Residence Halls at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire
No full textThe construction of the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire's residence halls has generally followed that of the national trend. The school struggled to find enough funds to build residence halls in the early years. Eventually, student housing was in needed so badly that the school had no choice but to provide housing for the students. In 1947, the Dulany mansion was purchased and remodeled by the school. This building served as the University's first resident hall. Since then, eleven resident halls have been built on campus with one more being planned. Life in these residence halls have changed dramatically over time. In the 1960's, the students protested and eventually the strict rules of in loco parentis faded away. After this, students enjoyed the freedoms of new technologies, relaxed rules, and more professional housing leaders. Today, UW-Eau Claire is a thriving university. UW-Eau Claire has been recognized by many as a top school in the Midwest. Much of the success can be attributed to the residence halls and the happiness of the students. My paper will provide UW-Eau Claire and its students with a cohesive history of the residence halls on campus and will also show how student life has evolved since the University was first established
Johann Gottlieb Fichte, and the Trap of Inhalt (Content) and Form: An Information Perspective on Music Copyright
No full textIn the digital environment, copyright law has become trapped in an assessment of what
has been taken, rather than what has been done with copied materials and elements. This
expands the scope of copyright into areas where it should not find infringement (such as
sampling, mash-ups and other transformative uses) while encouraging activities that are
problematic (such as hiding sources). This article argues that the trap was laid by the
German idealist philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte whose influential 1793 article Proof
of the Unlawfulness of Reprinting for the first time distinguishes Inhalt (i.e. content free
to all) and Form (i.e. the author’s inalienable expression) as copyright categories. It is
shown that Fichte’s structure conflates norms of communication and norms of
transaction. An alternative path for copyright law in an information society is sketched
from a separation of these norms: copying should be assessed from (i) the attribution of
sources, and (ii) the degree to which original and derivative materials compete with each
other. Throughout the article, transformative practices in music set the scene
- …
