MOOP #2

MOOP #2 Autumn 2020

Introductory Note It has been a joy to publish the first, and now the second, instalment of MOOP, as well as finally premiering our

long-awaited film Brink by Brink. If you were not able to attend the online screening in August, the film (at the time of writing) remains on our YouTube channel for viewing. If this is the second issue of MOOP that the reader has encountered, welcome back, and if it is the first, thank you for joining us. To both I extend my sincere wish that you find something herein that makes you think.

For this issue, we have a continuation of the work of the contributors to MOOP #1, as well as what will hopefully be the first of many pieces by two long-time friends of Chasing Cow. We have two paintings from artist Ella Squirrell, whose subtle, evocative work invites one to consider how memory and identities are performed, by demonstrating the intersection of the real and the imaginary. Also contributing is Frankie Brown, whose essay 'Creativity in Education' navigates the ongoing synthesis of her performance art background with her new career as a teacher, making a strong case for a more imaginative approach to education.

Those that are interested in the natural sciences and/or ecology will enjoy Fred’s article on the phenomena of invasive species, which raises questions concerning the looming problem of climate catastrophe and how species management functions. For the literary minded, skip straight past this introduction to Grace’s exciting, thoughtful review of the newly released collection of essays by Brian Dillon, Suppose a Sentence, a text that invites the reader on a unique exploratory endeavour.

We also have not so much a film review from Jack as an investigation into the Coen brothers’ oeuvre, presenting an interesting account of the complexity and evolving style of the filmmakers. In the fictional wing, we have the second and final installment of Stefan’s Autonomy, a tale that has been a delight to both read and feature in these pages. Resident poet Bryony returns with ‘Peach’, a provoking piece that draws the reader into the shifting affects, intensities and messiness of a sexual encounter. For my part, I have written another essay centered around the political response to Covid-19, something that I would like to see end for all the obvious reasons, but also so I can write about something different.

I joke of course, but to both end and begin on a serious note – I’d like to thank everyone who has supported and continues to support us through these times. We will see in the coming months if non-profit creative collectives are, as I hope, recession-proof.

Tom Beed

To support future issues of Matter Out of Place, and other Chasing Cow projects, please consider donating the price of a cup of coffee & go to chasingcow.co.uk/support to donate via PayPal Editors: Tom Beed, Grace Crabtree, Fred Warren Illustrations and Artwork: Grace Crabtree and Bryony Moores O’Sullivan Cover design: Grace Crabtree

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Printed by Oxford GreenPrint using a Risograph press, with veg-ink and low energy, on 100% post-consumer waste recycled paper.

Contents Review: Suppose a Sentence 4-5 Grace Crabtree The Circulation of Vagueness 6-7 Tom Beed Creativity in Education 8-9 Frankie Brown Artist Feature 10-11 Ella Squirrell Autonomy (Part Two) 12-14 Stefan Matthews Animals Out of Place 15-17 Fred Warren Poem 17 Bryony Moores O'Sullivan Artist or Chicken? 18 Jack Wightman Back pages 19 To view the current issue of Matter Out of Place online, plus online-only digital releases in between the quarterly issues, please visit chasingcow.co.uk/moop and follow us on Instagram @chasingcow If you would like a PDF of the zine please email chasing.cow.productions@gmail.com ABOUT THE NAME ‘Matter out of place’ is one of the ways that anthropologist Mary Douglas defines her symbolic idea of ‘dirt’. As she says, “dirt is essentially disorder. There is no such thing as absolute dirt.”

Whether it’s the condemnation of an adulterer or a pair of shoes on the kitchen table, ideas around ‘dirt’ and what is dirty are windows into how societies are ordered: what they value, what they find threatening, and what they wish to exclude.

As a name we think this helps convey Chasing Cow’s own non-adherence to established categories both in content – we like to let members pursue their own interests – and form – we view modes of artistic creation, whether that’s filmmaking, poetry or academic writing, as linked and encourage slippage between them. Finally, we think the name implies a level of critical thinking; if being clean means blindly accepting the values, behaviours, and hierarchies that shore up the current political order, then we have no choice but to be dirty.

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Improvised treasures Grace Crabtree reviews Brian Dillon’s new release – Suppose a Sentence

Suppose a Sentence is in part a challenge Brian Dillon set him-

self, to move “from one fragment to the next” without design, “feeling for the route.” Reading the book – 27 essays on 27 sentences from 27 authors – is like being taken on a guided tour of the fragments: the reader is led on a winding, but sharply incisive, jaunt through the words, the ideas, the anatomy, the flesh, and the “spectral presence” of these sentences. There is pleasure in this casual flânerie, but in an age of speed and disconnection it is also hard not to be lured into Dillon’s persuasive tract on reading with all one’s senses, teasing out the craft and ideas with fluid but devoted attention.

The essays are in chronological order and begin with a sentence from Shakespeare, but it is no great canonical quotation.

Rather, the Bard’s legacy is contained within a one-paragraph essay on an alternative final line of Hamlet appearing in the 1623 Folio edition: following “The rest is silent” comes this: “O, o, o, o.” Dillon asks: “What are they telling us, these four diminishing ‘O’s’?” ‘O’ appears elsewhere in Shakespeare, “as proclamation and sometimes as oral or typographic pun”, as in Antony and Cleopatra: “this little O, the earth”; the cries of Othello, “O! O! O!”; and the sighs of Lady Macbeth, “O, o, o”.

Scholars dispute their oral nature, whether they should be performed as “discrete cries” or a single outpouring of feeling.

Suppose a Sentence begins and ends with these instances of ‘O’ in literature: first in Shakespeare, then in Anne Boyer’s book from 2015, Garments Against Women, in which she recounts a story which appeared first in Rousseau’s Emile, then in Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, of a little girl who, desperate to begin writing despite being as yet unable to read, used a needle to carve the letter ‘O’, over and over. According to Rousseau, one day she caught sight of herself in the mirror, spying her face looking “awkward or ugly”, and in an act of feminine vanity renounced her ‘writing’ practice – an idea which Wollstonecraft “dismisses as ‘ridiculous’”.

Boyer expands the breadth of the story: “every O could have been, also, every letter and every word for the little girl: each O also an opening, a planet, a ring, a word, a query, a grammar.” Dillon continues: “O, o, o, o was a revolutionary code, and when she put down her pen it was because she had already written what she needed to write.” And this, rather neatly, is the last line of the book.

It is interesting to think about words as symbols or cyphers, about the writer putting forth a code for the reader to decode, or to write their own narrative from. Indeed, Dillon often writes as though he is solving a riddle, inviting the reader in with “what more, what else?” and bringing the reader into cahoots with his exploratory conclusions – “there, we have solved it.”

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The essays are often interested in the grammatical and (non)sensical feats of the authors, as with Virginia Woolf ’s 181-word opening sentence to ‘On Being Ill’, written during the “dreamfugue of sickness”, in which “we embark on a mysterious paratactic excursion, with no punctuation and no hint, for what seems an age,” of a destination or resolution.

Many of the sentences are long, with multiple clauses and improbable twists and turns, and many seem poised at the brink of falling apart. This precarity gives them an artfulness, and an aliveness, as if they are merely resting at one phase of their potential mutability. This becomes apparent when there is some variation, unintended by the author. One peculiar reproduction occurs with a sentence by Hilary Mantel from a piece written for the Guardian marking the 20th anniversary of Princess Diana’s death. The same sentence was reposted on a news site elsewhere, altered with bizarre synonyms which render almost incomprehensible a sentence which was only just balanced. Mantel’s sentence begins: “If Diana is present now, it is in what flows and is mutable, what waxes and wanes…,” but in its odd adaptation all lyricism is lost as it becomes “…it is in what floods and is mutable, what waxes and decreases….” In other examples, the sentence is undone at its endpoint, as with Anne Carson’s sentence from ‘Flaubert Again’, which flips at the last moment: “…this exasperating, non-negotiable, obliterating motion forward into the dark – the dark what?” The essays involve both the piecing together and prising apart of these language fragments, the making and the undoing. A fragment is something broken or destroyed in some way, and in the reading or remaking, it creates new forms.

O

O

O

The internal logic of sentences becomes a theme. Returning to Boyer’s, we have a short essay that marvels at the “merciless logic” of her paragraph-like sentences. These sentences have “an uncommon solidity; they are logical and unlyrical, sitting on the page more like monuments than fleeting pensées.” The sentence in question contains alliterative tautology (“Inadmissible information is inadmissible”) and much repetition of “poor”, “people”, and “poverty”, the effect of which Dillon interprets as graphic, as opposed to sonic: “The repetitions are not like [Gertrude] Stein’s which are all made for the ear, but possess a graphic force.” Letting one’s eyes fall on the paragraph-length sentence, the ‘i’s’ of the first line are followed by a proliferation of ‘p’s’ and ‘o’s’. It might also be sonic, the repeated plosive ‘p’s’ and the rounded ‘o’s’ having a sonic resonance, a gentle rolling force.

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Dillon has titled this essay 'Like how if ', taken from the central clause of the long sentence (“…like how if a group of poor people are in the room with one not-poor person the poor people without conferring about it work together to carefully conceal their own poverty for the benefit of the other, not-poor person…”). Without initially noticing this, I read the title as disconnected words acting as a descriptor of Boyer’s style of writing, which Dillon analyses in terms of its “short adjectives, adverbs and prepositions”. I was thinking too of the truncated title of Ali Smith’s novel, There but for the. You might hear the rest: there but for the grace of God go I (paraphrased from a sentence in the Bible and allegedly uttered by the 16th century reformer John Bradford). The brain seems nonetheless to make an odd sense out of the abbreviation, with the metamorphosing from preposition to noun, leading to an uncertainty as to the placement of stresses on the words.

The title of Dillon’s book refers to Gertrude Stein, whose 1934 portrait of Christian Bérard includes the line, or command, “Suppose a sentence.” The ambiguous verb suppose, meaning to presume, imply, or to assume the existence of something, could in this physical context of a “supposition made concrete” mean something closer to invention, the fabrication of a conceptual thought on the page. In the essay’s chosen sentence (another paragraph-length example), suppose appears multiple times and in its repetition begins to lose fixed meaning. Dillon ends with a salute to treating words as things themselves: more than the concretisation of abstract thought, words are objects, images, sounds in themselves, “apt to burst with force”.

Another writer attuned to the graphic and sonic force of words, Joan Didion was a staff writer at Vogue magazine in the early 1960s, but this was in a largely anonymous capacity in the early years.

Assignments involved “short, unattributed paragraphs”, covering subjects from the construction of the Guggenheim to the death of Marilyn Monroe. She also “composed” captions for photographs, which demanded significant editorial attention – hence this chosen sentence, cool and sparse: “Opposite, above: All through the house, colour, verve, improvised treasures in happy but anomalous co-existence.” It begins with what, out of context, would appear an odd stylistic choice, but perhaps quite fitting to Didion’s (then unattributed) voice, until you realise that it refers to a photograph. After this direction, the sentence continues, verblessly. Punctuated with the central tight staccato of “colour, verve, improvised treasures”, unbroken by and, it stretches out either side from the languor of lullaby (as Dillon notes, “All through the house” has a “slumberous familiarity” with “It was the night before Christmas…”); and into that neat appraisal of the objects’ “happy but anomalous existence.”

Dillon continues to investigate the graphic quality of sentences with what might be more internally seen and sought by the writer.

As Dillon notes, in her captions Didion was constrained not only by word limit but by the available space of the page design. The writer might be guided by a picture in the mind, as Didion explained in ‘Why I Write’, written for the New York Times in 1976: “The picture dictates whether this will be a sentence with or without clauses, a sentence that ends hard or a dying-fall sentence, long or short, active or passive.” The phrase “dying-fall sentence” struck me, and on re-reading the introduction to Suppose a Sentence I noticed Dillon using it too, and again in the essay on John Donne. It rings in my ears with the opening words of Twelfth Night, with Duke Orsino longing for an excess of music to overwhelm his love-sick being: “That strain again! It had a dying fall.” I always hear a stress on dying with that line, or rather on the first half of the word, so that, in its cadence, the descent has begun partway through the word, and has landed with “fall”. This musical term for a ‘diminuendo’, a decrease in volume, is used in the literary sense for a sentence that steadily fades. This cadence – from Latin cadere, to fall – links the written word to the oral word in an interesting way: is it the pacing or the syntax that makes the sentence seem to drop away? How does it pick up in the next sentence? – but we are not dealing with those subsequent sentences here, only the chosen fragments.

What sticks at the end of the book, other than a long reading list, is the imagery and sounds of the text. Many of the sentences contain something visceral, bodily and tactile, from the imagery of John Donne’s winding wombe to the breadcrumbs crushed underfoot in Clare Louise-Bennett’s short story. Others contain the opposite – or perhaps it’s just another side of the same quality – in being replete with imagery of the dark, of death, of ghostliness, of absence; from Anne Carson’s dread and darkness, to Hilary Mantel’s living-dead, to the tangible silence of those Shakespearean ‘O’s’. There is form in the formlessness, the chosen words bringing that ephemerality to life in the reader’s eyes and ears. Where sound is involved, it is a little like looking at a bright light which leaves an impression on the eye. I’m reminded of a line from Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead: “They say sound never dies, but travels on in space.”

The sounds of words, bursting forth, linger in the forms they have created and, hopefully, stay with us as we continue the tour with our own reading.

Suppose a Sentence is published by Fitzcarraldo Editions (23 September 2020) Grace Crabtree is an artist and a founding member of Chasing Cow Productions. She graduated from the Ruskin School of Art last summer and is doing the Correspondence Course 20/21 at Turps Banana.

Illustrations by Grace Crabtree

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The Circulation of Vagueness Tom Beed Make me less, so, I want more (more).

– 'XS' (2020), Rina Sawayama.

Increasingly the management of the pandemic demonstrates

the tendency to accept conditions, divorced from their horror, as comforting. That the wearing of face masks in public makes one feel safer shows how reason itself becomes irrational. As if a world where face coverings are ubiquitous should invoke anything other than the most powerful alarm at the state of the system. To be clear, this certainly is not an essay complaining about the wearing of masks, something that helps ensure the safety of ourselves and others, rather it is one that addresses the mask as a symptom of our cartoonishly apocalyptic historical position. How swiftly the government encouraged people to congregate and enjoy their freedom to consume, before reversing all of this messaging and blaming us for doing what they told us was our patriotic duty, bodes darkly for the future responses to such upheavals. That we all (those of us who even accept the virus is real) knew there would be a second peak, something that has been accepted as a fact even during the first peak, means nothing in the face of this duty. Warnings against the progressing state of things are drowned out by the ceaseless bellowing of advertising to return to ‘normality’. Injunctions to consume and enjoy what remains the same, and always will, entices us to rejoin an atomised society that can offer nothing except consumption.

On an everyday level, it is quite easy to blame the general public, the potential vectors of the virus that transmit it to those around them, for the resurgence of cases. This as I see it is a quite elementary example of capitalist ideology showing itself here. Understood as the dominant norms, rules, and social ‘givens’ we are all suffused with, ideology in the 21st century individualises everything, and transforms all interactions into transactional processes. It is important to understand that ideology is not a ‘lie’, rather it is the very way that we experience our social reality, which is to say it offers solutions to real problems, but neglects certain facts to ensure its stability. That said, where is the hint of truth in the idea that the general public are to blame? It is true that if people adhered rigidly to physically distancing themselves from others, wore masks, limited time spent in public places, the death toll would undoubtedly be lower. Such a view is, however, painfully naive, and ignores the very real responsibility of the government to provide followable guidance that not only works, but makes sense, a responsibility they seem to have willfully shirked. The messages from the government about the pandemic have been consistently vague, erratically timed, and insufficient in their substance. While officially focused on safety, the actions of the powerful during this time tells a different story, one that produces the effect of overwhelming people with the intricacies of confusing guidance. One could speculate that this has been the real goal all along, not just normalising the deaths and irrationality, but to make people so tired of trying to understand the rules that they give up on the official narrative of ensuring safety and return to previous consumer habits. Rising numbers of cases combined with ineffective curfew legislation and the ‘rule of six’, demon-

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-strate once again Marx’s dictum of how historical events often happen twice – “The first time as tragedy, the second time as farce”. We appear to be on a trajectory to experience exactly the same disaster as we did months ago, only this time the public will be more aggressively blamed.

As with all breakdowns in social reality, the lockdown has reinvigorated conspiracy thinking, with the 29 August protest in Trafalgar Square being a worrying instance. Faced with the deepening irrationality of the world, such people incorporate its full absurdity and reflect the death of reason back into life.

They recognise and feel the material effects of the crisis unfolding everywhere, yet refuse to reckon with the terror of the global machine spurring everything towards annihilation impersonally – it is far more pleasant to believe that the virus is a planned hoax by the ruling class than it is to recognise how underprepared the world is for such events occurring. German intellectual Theodor Adorno, in his recently republished book Minima Moralia (2020), saw long ago how this phenomenon operates: “Those socialised into desperate isolation hunger for community and flock together in cold mobs. So folly becomes an epidemic: insane sects grow with the same rhythm as big business. It is the rhythm of total destruction. The fulfillment of persecution-fantasies springs from their affinity to bloody realities.”

Knowing that they are continually wronged, they take hold of the lies they are told by their rulers, and bend them into shape to fit what they already believe. So their unconscious wishes to have the awful truth concealed from them, and to feel like a persecuted hero, are married. This is why conspiracy thinking is so effective – it places the individual at the centre of a plan, within a convincing story that offers succour to the individual that increasingly disappears as the chaos envelops everything.

The irrationality of refusing to wear a mask obscures the more profound irrationality of a world where such a thing is necessary, and all the more completely do anti-maskers erase their individuality even as they scream out in protest for its return.

Such are the inevitabilities of a system based on continually accelerating the production and consumption of commodities, one that requires its subjects to spend all their time outside of work getting ready to return to it, making themselves feel better

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the only way that most are given – by consuming. Pop artist Rina Sawayama's recent song 'XS' (2020) very explicitly gives voice to this desire:

injustice of commodity production weighing on us, is something quite different, and something that we will have to reckon with sooner or later.

“Gimme just a little bit more, little bit of excess Oh, me, oh, my I don't wanna hear "No, no" Only want a "Yes, yes" Oh, me, oh, my”

Just after the height of the lockdown, I remember a great sense of apprehension about the outside world. What would it look like? What would the new measures imposed be and how would they work? Well, we now know what they are, and the banality of them should be worrying. A key function of ideology is the fear of radical change, a human impulse that is capitalised on and exacerbated. Given the world we live in, where all the evidence points in the direction of pandemics becoming more common, ecological catastrophe being more and more certain, the true horror (that we are now witnessing) is that nothing really changes. There is every indication that the projects of neoliberalism will not be reversed by what has happened in the recent months, that production as a whole will not be reorganised, that the manufactured cruelty of a society where there is more than enough food and housing for everyone, yet people still go without, will remain unchanged. The system that presides over the worst health crisis in a century allocates excess resources to the proliferation of how many different styles of mask one can buy. Human connection has been reestablished by the vastly expanded use of data-harvesting conference call programs, designed for use by companies, not friends seeking warmth. It is also clear that, for the moment, online shopping is not enough to satisfy consumer desire by itself. Physical spaces outside of those we were confined to for months offer a welcome relief from isolation, but as with everything else today, they come with the ideological baggage of consumerism. So much do people need their consumption rituals that, like one lost in a desert, they scramble toward and drink violently from the oasis, willingly unaware of the vultures that inevitably always get the last laugh.

Given how closely it corresponds to the seductive pop of Britney Spears or Destiny's Child, 'XS' sounds like it could have quite easily originated from the mid-90s or the 2000s. Yet Sawayama does something interesting with XS, in that the mangled, bug-eyed anxiety inherent to 21st century consumerism is given sonic form through a distorted guitar riff that punctuates the transition to and from the chorus. What should be noted here is how the distorted guitar riff does not upset the formula of the song so much as it is the necessary supplement to it, concealed by the otherwise sparkling sheen of the melody. What can be interpreted here is an effective critique of capitalism, one that shows the underbelly of commodity production and the consumer experience as a total process. The climax at the end of the cut, rather than reproducing the familiar jubilance of 2000s R&B pop, is instead rendered as an unsettling carnival of differently-textured audio elements, mimicking the familiar cacophony of advertising in over-stimulatory shopping centres.

What is this “excess” after which Sawayama pines? It is, in a sense, the consumption of consumerism itself. Not only does this “little bit more” refer to wanting more commodities, it also refers to wanting more of the experience of wanting more commodities. This is what our ‘freedom’ currently consists of – immersing oneself in the ecstatic storm of alienated consumption.

But real freedom, such as the freedom to enjoy without the

Tom Beed is a writer, actor and founding member of Chasing Cow Productions. He has a degree in International Relations and Politics from Oxford Brookes University.

Illustrations by Grace Crabtree

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Another Brick in the Wall?

Creativity in education: initial observations from an ex-artist Frankie Brown “People who are able to do something well can do that thing for a living, while people who are not able to do anything that well make a living by teaching”

And yet...

– George Bernard Shaw (1903)

“It is the supreme art of the teacher to awaken joy in creative expression and knowledge” – Albert Einstein (1931).

Conventionally, teaching is considered a contingency pro-

fession, and often diminished to bureaucratic childcare. This view, despite being widespread and one I previously held, hinders efficacious education. It is when we place value on creative exploration and autonomy that we cultivate effective, opportune schooling. I aim to unpick my journey between these two poles to emphasise the importance of creativity in education, and moreover, why teaching itself can be considered an artistic exploit.

When voted most likely to be a teacher in my sixth form yearbook, I was appalled. As a presumptuous 17-year-old, I was adamant I would become an acclaimed artist and academic, not a vessel intended to aid others' achievements. I fled to drama school in the big smoke and studied performance arts, a subject typically seen as pretentiously cryptic in mainstream culture.

Cut to four years later, I am a fortnight away from starting my teacher training. So, why the volte-face?

During my undergraduate degree, I was granted space to explore each crevice of artistic expression, and strongly encouraged to delve into the psyche to gain inspiration. I truly was ‘ripped apart in order to be built back up’; my lecturers were devout disciples of attack therapy. I became so deeply engrossed in explorations of the personal that I lost something I adore about art: its ability to acquaint and benefit through shared connection. I did not know how to move forward. When confessing this crisis of artistic faith to my tutor, they reminded me that art is multi-faceted, and that I flourish within communal learning environments. My preordained hostility towards teaching began to be dismantled. Cue a year of working as a cover supervisor and unqualified teacher in desperate hope of determining if I really was going to fulfil my yearbook prediction.

Initially, I existed in a tumultuous whirlpool of guilt for abandoning my artistic calling for public sector routine. No longer was I a defiant feminist art student who smothered themselves in chocolate in the name of sexual revolution, I was a pink-collar worker (can anyone else hear the world’s smallest violin?).

However, the reality of working in a low socio-economic UK state school quickly slams you back to earth. I had to teach prearranged lessons designed for instructionism, which centres on didactic teaching from a fixed syllabus, relying on books,

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memorising, and assessment skill-building. This was a sharp contradiction to the student-focused constructivist practices employed during my degree and international schooling. My creative capabilities were tested; how do you maintain an artistic practice within a stringent, authoritarian system? Subsequently, said practice evolved into one that strives to generate creative spaces which develop inclusive, prosperous education. Teaching does not prevent you being an artist; on the contrary it demands challenging avant-garde thinking to create whilst enduring belligerence. There is an art to teaching.

When establishing the importance of creative classrooms, it is noteworthy that definitions of creativity are significantly pervasive. Habitually, we associate creativity with the arts, but as professor of education Dr Keith Sawyer highlights, “if a school remains instructionist at the core, arts education alone can’t solve the problem”. Creativity should be utilised as a cross-curricular methodology to generate innovative and conducive learning, not limited to subjects traditionally considered ‘artistic’. If we foster interdisciplinary creative skills, such as curiosity, hypothesising, recall, and evaluation, we equip students to conquer the capricious challenges of our rapidly developing world.

Cultivation of creativity is not exclusively fundamental for pupils, but for teachers too. By adopting creative pedagogy, teachers have space to utilise their specific knowledge and lived experience. Practices can develop that engage the capabilities of all students and devise solutions to educational adversity, instead of punishing inaccessibility. For instance, releasing the restraints of ability groups, which are arguably ineffectual as they promote predetermined expectations of achievement. The majority of educators believe that creative approaches are favourable to generate effective learning, but legislative barriers that restrict pedagogical autonomy prevent execution. Dr Sawyer names this “the teaching paradox”. He affirms that making space for creativity in the classroom is particularly challenging because structure and improvisation are perpetually in conflict. How can you teach creatively when faced with mandated constraints?

A pivotal constraint placed upon teaching is the consideration that it is a lesser profession, notably when correlated to jobs considered societally prestigious. This notion is distinct if we compare the UK education model to another, in this case Finland’s. Finnish teachers are regarded with the same esteem as doctors and lawyers. Teachers are required to earn a master’s

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degree, having been selected from the highest achieving graduates. This correlates with the considerably higher level of respect given to teachers, both by students and educational boards. It is important to recognise that Finland is a significantly smaller country so allows for this selectivity and is not suffering from a shortage of teachers as in the UK. Nevertheless, the significant status given to teaching in Finland results in teachers possessing a large amount of creative liberty in the classroom. This autonomy is apparent in Finnish teachers’ freedom to plan their curriculum independently, and subsequent lack of standardised testing. The UK insists on annually assessing pupils from the age of six and considers the National Curriculum scripture, regardless of its constant permutation. It is evident that the UK’s fixation with assessment and inspection obliterates creative pedagogy. In his 1975 book, Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison, Foucault emphasises that an obsession with examination results in education becoming “a perpetual comparison of each and all that made it possible to measure and judge”. He highlights that the ritual of exams is a mechanism to assert authority, construct hierarchy, and bolster castigation, writing: “It is the examination which, by combining hierarchical surveillance and normalising judgement, assures the great disciplinary functions of distribution and classification.”

The absence of league table pressure and Ofsted threats in Finland means prosperous teaching and learning is the goal, rather than competition. No child is forsaken because they do not fit the standardised definition of success. Our UK curriculum is enforced through inspection and assessment, meaning there is insufficient space for creative explorations and deliberations, let alone room for individuality and consideration of the lived experience students carry.

I recognise that the UK has made attempts to cultivate creative learning, most notably the Creative Partnerships programme (2002-11), however, that flagship was sunk by coalition government cuts. We currently reside in a suffocating system of repetitive exams, following a curriculum geared towards box-ticking and elitism, which restricts the teacher’s ability to enrich student experience beyond pass or fail. By establishing space for creativity, we allow interdisciplinary knowledge and individual life experience to inform learning. Children need opportunities to explore and express their own cultures and evolving identities. This perspective is critical if we are to beget inclusive classrooms, particularly for neurodiverse and BAME students whose experiences are belittled and routinely excluded by the current educational model. It is not enough to tell students to

‘be more creative’, we must provide room for teachers to devise ways of learning which enable creative encounters. For instance, when reading a novel, rather than using conventional teacher-dominated lecturing where the teacher deciphers meaning for the class, we should be fostering student-led exploration into the multiplicity of subjective meanings a text can hold. Practically, this could be generated through a comparison of imagery that surrounds the text (i.e. book covers and film adaptations), followed by students making plot predictions that draw on prior knowledge and lived experience. By giving space to all students' interpretations, we begin to dismantle the established hierarchy of ‘intelligence’ that is prevalent in our classrooms. Strategies such as this are plentiful in teacher resources and are worthwhile tools in the fight for creative classrooms.

However, for significant change, we must abolish legislation that projects traditional ideas, such as the superior ‘English literary heritage’. The practical example above is effective until you ascertain that the novel you are required to teach is a century old and therefore, as seasoned teacher Jane Coles summarises, “unlikely to reflect the diverse cultural traditions and practices of readers in contemporary classrooms.” If we provide teachers with autonomy to choose relatable texts that complement the diversity of their classes and trust them to teach it with creative methodologies appropriate to different learning styles, we manifest positive learning experiences. If students are permitted to individually and creatively explore education, perhaps we would not hear the comment, ‘I hated school, it was so boring’, as often.

The complex debates surrounding creativity in the classroom are considerable, and I recognise my initial observations merely scratch the surface of a long-established discourse. I am keen to learn more, particularly by gaining further teaching experience and practical experimentation. For now, it is the revelation that artistic expression can be found in educational contexts through investigation and problem-solving, that motivates me to change learning from the inside. I have decided to become a teacher because the greatest artistic challenge I have found is to create space for creativity in the face of a system that tries so hard to exclude it.

Frankie Brown is a Performance Arts graduate from the Royal Central School of Speech & Drama. She is currently completing her PGCE in English with Drama at UCL. Illustrations by Bryony Moores O’Sullivan Bryony Moores O'Sullivan is a founding member of Chasing Cow Productions and a Theatre Practice graduate from the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, who specialises in puppetry, poetry and illustration.

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Ella Squirrell

ARTIST FEATURE

"A faint blue hue, broken blinds blinking, our eyes dry with midnight air."

'Sleep Painting', 2020, watercolour on paper, 17.5 x 13.5cm

"I am drawn to the relationship between strength and vulnerability, and the beauty I find in it.

These two paintings are part of a series observing sleep and the colours, mood and emotion at moments of low light."

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Ella is a multidisciplinary artist working with paint, film, photography and performance. Her primary focus is painting, informed by the complexity of gender and mixed ethnic identity. Ella observes people, their behaviour, temperament and clothing, questioning their display and social ‘performance’. Ella's semi-fictional portraits, in real and imagined scenarios, play with fact and fiction in an attempt to understand her own sense of 'being'.

'Tepid', 2020, watercolour on paper, 17.5 x 13.5cm

"I see painting primarily as a visceral activity, especially when considering the body."

View these and more of Ella's artwork at ellasquirrell.com

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*Find Part One in MOOP #1

or at chasingcow.co.uk/moop

Autonomy Part Two*

by Stefan Matthews

The Black Country was one of the places that was hit directly by a nuclear warhead during the war. As a result, a huge chunk of land stretching from Bloxwich to Blackheath and Great Barr to Dudley was annihilated entirely. For anyone who isn’t familiar with these world-renowned locations, it’s about 29 square miles between them all.

The walk past Bloxwich towards Newverhampton along the A4124 was, to put it mildly, depressing. Even CF6’s interest in most anything he could see began to waver as the group trudged through mile after mile of desolate concrete and dirt.

Rows and rows of levelled houses adorned the sides of the road, huge estates that used to be full of life and laughter and joy (or as much as could be expected in the suburbs). Skeletons scattered the pavements, frozen in time on the way back from the corner shop to grab some crème fraîche because a stroganoff can’t be made with milk for crying out loud! God, it was depressing wasn’t it.

The group rambled along the A4124 until they found Newverhampton. It had miraculously survived a fair chunk of the nuclear blast and as the party got closer to the city limits, the skeletons grew less frequent and the levelled houses less levelled.

“Have you got any history of Newverhampton?” inquired CF6 to SUSIE. SUSIE didn’t, there wasn’t any mention of Newverhampton in her audiobook collection.

“I think it used to be called Wolverhampton,” Biff claimed.

“They renamed it New Wolverhampton; Newverhampton for short. I visited here a few times on a job with some other skips, it was always great fun. CW would always try to scare humans who walked past her outside the YMCA on Temple Street. I wonder what happened to her.” Biff paused for a moment before continuing.

“Damn, I’m glad to stretch my wheels again, Bakewell was getting so boring.” Biff took in a deep breath and yelled “Freedom!” to the sky. CF6 copied him, not quite sure of what freedom meant. It felt good to yell it, though.

Nelly leaned into SUSIE. “That reminds me SUSIE, we need to be quick while we're here. Get back to looking for the Johnsons as soon as we can. I’m worried we’re getting too distracted.”

SUSIE calmed Nelly’s concerns. “Don’t worry, I haven’t forgott-

-en about them.” This was a lie. SUSIE had begun to forget about the Johnsons. “I promise we’ll be fast.” This was also a lie.

The outskirts of Newverhampton were guarded by a crude wall of corrugated iron. Nelly looked up at the sign above their heads. Welc me to Newverhampton. “I wonder if they’ll have any fans here?” she thought. The four machines trudged through a front gate and into the city. Well, it was less of a city and more of a large collection of stick and mud houses, many of which were crudely constructed and drooping heavily.

“I wonder why the humans made houses out of sticks,” pondered Biff. “They’re not very good for keeping out acid rain.”

SUSIE tried her best to explain. “Well, throughout history, humans mainly made houses out of sticks. There was a biography about three pigs that explained the origin if I recall correctly.”

CF6 listened intently and proceeded to retell the story many a time throughout the rest of the trip.

There was not a human in sight in Newverhampton. The party rummaged through the stick houses, with SUSIE explaining to CF6 the classical “three pig” method of construction. Nelly gave up looking for a fan after a few hours, and after finding a half-destroyed clothes-hut, instead opted to stare at herself in a cracked mirror. She even dragged CF6 along to put different outfits on her. Nelly eventually settled on a tartan-designed scarf which she wrapped around her temperature knobs. CF6 told her it looked great on her. “The colours pair well with your temperature probe.” Nelly smiled at the compliment as she checked herself out in the mirror one last time. She was beginning to enjoy herself more as the trip went on.

Biff took a huge number of items from various houses. As the group got to know him, they realised he was something of a kleptomaniac. Every time they stopped somewhere, he was sure to find at least half a dozen things to store away inside him.

“Human artefacts,” he called them. Nelly and CF6 reckoned he was just a hoarder.

As the first night fell, SUSIE, Biff and Nelly decided that they would treat themselves and all sleep in the nicest stick house.

SUSIE came across what she presumed was the former leader of Newverhampton’s house. “It’s slightly larger than the rest of the stick houses,” SUSIE reasoned. “Plus, it’s decorated.”

SUSIE was right. The edges of the house were indeed adorned with a smattering of plastic flowers, and inside there was a slightly nicer straw and breeze block bed. However, the biggest giveaway that it was the leader of Newverhampton’s house was the sign above the door: Leader of Newverhampton’s House.

The four of them settled in for the night, though Nelly couldn’t sleep thanks to the awful drone of Biff yawning. It sounded much like a skip being dragged along concrete.

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SUSIE didn’t get much sleep that night either; the creaks and moans of the raggedy stick houses were much scarier in the dark. In the end she put on a sleep story narrated by Stephen Fry IV, and tried to ignore the sounds. >>

As day broke, a tired SUSIE yawned that the gang should try and look for any signs of the Johnsons. “We need to be thorough and efficient,” explained SUSIE. “Newverhampton is a large and dangerous place, they could be anywhere right now.

Everyone, keep your head on a swivel.”

“But I don’t have a head?” said Nelly.

“I meant more just keep alert. We don’t know what’s out there in the wilderness, and it’s important that we don’t lose our heads.”

“But I don’t have a head,” repeated Nelly. SUSIE gave up with the metaphors. “Just be careful.” Nelly nodded her not-head.

The search party tiptoed around the hundreds of stick houses that made up downtown Newverhampton, heeding SUSIE’s warnings about the potential dangers. However, now it was daytime again the creaking and moaning of the stick houses was far less intimidating, and before long the group had all split up to explore downtown Newverhampton.

SUSIE stumbled across a group of skeletons huddled in the corner of a worn-down stick house, along with the tattered remains of a diary. Through a fair bit of deduction and guesswork, as well as help from CF6, she summarised that Newverhampton had been something of a haven after the war. A few thousand survivors had huddled here to form a new micro-society, which had promptly imploded on itself (in more ways than one) when it was discovered the leader was hoarding mini nukes. Turns out the leader loved football and was a diehard Wolverhampton Wanderers fan. She planned to blow up West Bromwich for winning the last derby.

“I don’t understand why humans used nuclear weapons!” exclaimed SUSIE. “They never did learn from the Cold War.” CF6 asked why it was cold and SUSIE explained that it happened in the coldest time period of the last three centuries, before global warming had ruined the planet.

After night fell on the second day in Newverhampton, the gang agreed they’d seen all there was to see in Newverhampton and decided to start trekking south towards the Cotswolds. “I’m sure we had a reason why we were there beyond Nelly’s fan,” pondered SUSIE, though she couldn’t put her finger on what the reason was.

As the stars came out, the group set off, Nelly wrapped up in her tartan scarf and Biff full of “artefacts” from the town.

SUSIE warned them that the trek would take at least a day, as long as everyone was alright not stopping for a break. They all agreed to the terms.

The route down to the Cotswolds was arguably worse than the one into Newverhampton. It was just mile upon mile of bland, grey motorway with nothing of interest to look at. SUSIE put on Now That’s What I Call Music! 695 and the four of them sang in unison to ‘Fastest Car’ by Theresa Chapman as they tried to keep the boredom at bay.

Morning, then afternoon, then evening came and went, with SUSIE rapidly getting through the Now! collection of albums.

The trek seemed to be never ending and Nelly began to complain that she wanted a break. SUSIE, though annoyed, agreed and they all stopped for a break in the Strensham services just

before junction eight. After a short rest and a wander around W H Smith, during which CF6 and Nelly found an audio-chip containing a series of H. P. Lovecraft stories, the group collectively decided to detour off the motorway and head down some of the smaller roads. This was all in the hope that they could see something more interesting than abandoned cars and greyness.

CF6 hopped into Biff at one point for a few miles. They’d detoured along a filthy dirt track and CF6 felt queasy at the thought of it clogging up his rollers. Nelly asked SUSIE to play the H. P. Lovecraft audio-chip, but CF6 demanded it be switched off after the first story. The rest of the journey he was a little more subdued, and checked every signpost for “Innsmouth”.

Finally, they saw a sign for the Cotswold District. “Let’s crack on,” said SUSIE above the collective cheer, now even more unsure as to why they were cracking on.

The first stop they made was Bibury, where SUSIE explained the beauty of the Cotswolds to Biff. Nelly lost interest and wandered off, though she struggled to shuffle herself along the cobbled streets on her sack truck. CF6 only half-listened to SUSIE talking about the Cotswolds, as he had stumbled across what looked to him like a big metal box. “Hey, any idea what this is?” he shouted back to SUSIE and Biff. The two of them wandered over to the box, which as it turned out was a homemade bomb shelter. Biff explained the purpose. “They were somewhere for humans to hide when other humans tried to blow them up.

Mad if you ask me.”

There was a big circular door that was slightly ajar, covered in rusty bolts and rivets. CF6 tentatively pulled it open and peered inside.

The shelter was cramped and dark, with a few busted lightbulbs hung around the edges. CF6 crept along the left-hand wall into the shelter, nozzle leading the way, as SUSIE followed. Biff had to stay outside as he was too large to fit, though not for lack of trying. His smashing and crashing ended up rendering CF6’s careful creeping somewhat redundant. CF6 continued into the darkness as Biff continued to bash into the front door, trying, figuratively and literally, to force a square peg into a round hole.

“HELLO?” squawked a voice in the dark. SUSIE jumped and ‘I Drove All Night’ by Cindy Lauper started inadvertently playing from Mister Johnson’s collection of Road Trip Anthems.

“W- who’s there?” tentatively squeaked CF6.

“Me!” replied the disembodied voice.

“Who’s me?”

“Eh?” “W- What’s your name?”

“Mike.” Mike’s voice was harsh and raspy.

SUSIE managed to stumble across a torch in the darkness and shone it towards Mike’s voice. >> As it turned out, Mike was a Microwave. “Oi, watch where ya 13 shinin’ that thing,” moaned Mike.

“Sorry,” said SUSIE. “What are ya doin’ in my home?” asked Mike. SUSIE shrugged as CF6 apologised for coating Mike in dust.

“I just get scared easily, you know.”

By this point Nelly had just about managed to re-join the group, having almost fallen off the sack truck at one point, and was looking at Mike with what could only be (and shouldn’t be) described as lust. Never in her life had Nelly seen such a beautiful appliance, 4000 watts of raw power encased in brushed aluminium and deep maroon buttons. She felt weak at the sack truck wheels.

Mike and SUSIE continued their riveting discussion about why she was in his home and eventually got onto the topic of what they were doing in Bibury. “I need a new fan,” blurted out Nelly, whose complexion now matched Mike’s buttons.

“I gotta loada spare stuff in here if ya want any of it,” Mike said.

“I like that scarf you’re wearin’. Tartan suits ya.” Nelly blushed harder.

CF6 and SUSIE proceeded to search around the bunker for a fan, rummaging through a huge collection of old electrical parts. Biff looked longingly through the door at the massive hoard of circuit boards and other computer paraphernalia, all perfect for his collection. He’d have licked his lips with excitement if he had any.

Eventually, CF6 and SUSIE found a shiny new fan as Mike and Nelly got better acquainted. Mike suggested that they stay for the night, which they all agreed to, bar Biff, who still couldn’t get through the front door. CF6 agreed to sleep outside with him to keep him company. Nelly suggested to SUSIE that she do the same. Nelly also suggested that it would be best if they shut the door while they all slept, so Mike could keep warm.

CF6 found it odd that a microwave would need to keep warm.

The following day, SUSIE, CF6 and Biff explored the sad remains of Bibury, while Nelly and Mike stayed in the shelter together. Most of the village was a crumbled mess covered in ash, lacking any sort of vegetation at all. A stark contrast to the intense trees and bushes of Bakewell. It was a shame noted SUSIE, considering that she had read that the Cotswolds used to be world-renowned for its lush nature and wildlife.

At one point while they were strolling along the bank of the River Coln, they had a tense encounter with an unnaturally large and mutated horse. The beast had three eyes, and when SUSIE tried to measure it with her hands it started aggressively neighing and kicking at CF6. As it chased them through the village, CF6 questioned SUSIE’s methods of measurement. “Why on earth did you use your hands?!” asked CF6 as he dodged an attempt by the horse to take a bite out of his hose.

“It’s how the humans used to do it!” explained SUSIE. “Well it’s no wonder most of them are extinct!”

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The three appliances (though you or I may not consider a skip an appliance, Biff would argue that he most certainly was) managed to escape the horse by hiding in an old church. After they were sure the three-eyed horse had gone, they decided they may as well have a wander around. Biff remarked that the humans had an odd sense of decoration – most of the windows were painted. “There’s loads of wall space,” he remarked to himself.

SUSIE proceeded to try and explain the intricacies of religion to a talking vacuum cleaner. If they had remembered why they were in Bibury, SUSIE and CF6 may have recalled that the Johnsons were a deeply religious family. But by now the memory of the Johnsons was long gone, replaced with a new excitement about all the things they’d missed out on being stuck in a house for decades. Things like Bakewell tarts and tartan scarfs and scary mutated horses. Well, maybe that last one not so much.

CF6 left the old church with a new understanding of religion.

Biff left with a huge statue of Jesus.

Later in the afternoon, the three explorers regrouped at the bunker. “Guys, guys look, Mike and I installed my new fan!”

Nelly did an awkward twirl on her sack truck and opened up her oven door. “Crikey, looks fancy,” exclaimed Biff. “I’m so glad you managed to find a new fan,” said CF6. Nelly thanked them all for helping her as they all embraced in a mishmash of temperature knobs and nozzles and speakers and wheels.

After the hug, Nelly asked SUSIE if Mike could join them all on the road trip. The answer was a resounding yes – after all, the more appliances the better.

After a little back and forth, the now five of them decided to leave the broken village of Bibury, though Biff made them all load the electronics from the bomb shelter in him before they left. “Don’t ask,” said CF6 to Mike, hauling a motherboard into Biff. “He’d throw you in if you stayed quiet for long enough.”

Nelly led the group out of the village, with her newfound fan and a mischievous grin on her face. Mike had the same look on his. One daren’t think what the grins were in aid of. “I reckon we should go to Cirencester next,” SUSIE suggested. Seemed like a sensible suggestion to everyone.

SUSIE began to explain to CF6 and Biff all the interesting humans that had settled in Cirencester, which included the 1900’s poet Pam Ayres and her great, great, great, great granddaughter Cam Ayres, who also happened to be a poet. The group left Bibury behind them as the sun rose, the next adventure waiting for them in Cirencester. “Freedom!” yelled CF6, grinning at Biff. SUSIE and Nelly laughed and joined in. “Freedom, freedom, freedom!”

Stefan Matthews is a screenwriter and graduate from Bournemouth University. He is a dream-smith, an illusion-weaver, a forger of fantasia. Well, that’s what he claims.

Illustrations by Grace Crabtree

" Where the heyall did all those goddamn pie-thons come from?"

Fred Warren investigates the plants and animals out of place

Every few months I am engaged in the task of raking away large,

floating mats of pondweed from a friend’s pond. The plant itself is quite pretty, but the mats it forms are dense and claggy with deep, extensive roots below the surface which deprive other organisms of light and space. When one finally manages to pry a section of it away, you can almost hear the pond let out a sigh of relief.

Such relief is only temporary however, as the plant can reproduce from a single fragment, meaning that one sees the mats invariably return in a matter of months. The plant behind these hours of toil is known as parrot’s feather (Myriophyllum aquaticum); a species originating from Central and South America that was introduced as an ornamental pond plant but that since the 1960s has been steadily colonising wild areas in the UK (and evidently other people’s ponds). It is now one of five similar aquatic plants that since 2013 have been banned from sale in the UK (though a quick search finds it readily available on eBay...). I expect many people have a similar invasive species story, or perhaps you just remember headlines about the £70 million removal of Japanese knotweed from the London Olympic Park prior to the 2012 games. However, you may not have considered ‘invasive species’ as a global issue with both a colourful history and present-day effects, that costs countries billions and places it alongside habitat loss and climate change as a leading cause of species extinctions.

This kind of awareness is opened up by two new popular science books on the subject– Invasive Aliens (2019) by British naturalist Dan Eatherley and The Aliens Among Us (2017)by Canadian science journalist Leslie Anthony. Both see their authors get down and dirty on the frontline of invasive species management, joining researchers and managers in hacking, spraying, baiting, injecting, spearing and even electrifying all manner of unwanted critters, as they try to get to grips with this ever-growing phenomenon.

Discussion around invasive species is sometimes criticised as stoking xenophobic sentiment. While this certainly plays out in newspaper headlines – ‘Killer Asian hornets and angry 'drunk' German wasps invading UK’ ran a Daily Mail headline from 27 August – it is important to remember that invasive species are a worldwide problem; while Asian hornets might make headlines in the UK, English ivy is overrunning parks in Canada, European gorse bushes are covering large swathes of New Zealand, and one study from Singapore found that damages by invasive species cost South East Asian countries $33.5 billion each year.

But what exactly is an invasive species? A simple definition, paraphrased from invasion scientist Daniel Simberloff, is that it is a species introduced directly or indirectly by humans which sustains itself without human assistance. A way of narrowing it down a bit further is the ‘10s rule’ sometimes used by invasion biologists; as Leslie Anthony reports: “For every ten species that are transported outside their range one will be introduced to a new region; for every ten introduced, one will establish itself; and for every ten that are established, one goes on to be a problem.”

There are no fixed rules about what will or won’t become invasive, though there’s a consensus that organisms which can reproduce easily stand a better chance. Another factor is the concept of ‘biotic resistance’ which holds that degraded, human-disturbed habitats are more susceptible to species invasions. This rings particularly true for Japanese knotweed which, as Anthony describes,

found the sooty, sulphurous conditions of 19th century London a fine substitute for the lava fields where it is natively found. Once they become invasive, the ecological impacts of invasive species range from outcompeting native organisms, to direct predation and spreading disease, to even changing the entire flow of nutrients in an ecosystem, as the humble earthworm appears to be doing in the forests of eastern North America. Of course, it can be argued that the movement of organisms, and even associated extinctions, are perfectly ‘natural’. However, as with climate change, it is the unprecedented shift in the rate of change that is cause for alarm – instead of happening across geological timeframes of thousands or millions of years, introductions of new species are now happening in a matter of days as they are constantly shuffled across the world by humans either indirectly (in ballast water, on clothing, in export containers) or directly (farming, pest control, pets, hunting). As Dan Eatherley estimates, “a third of non-native species worldwide have only spread to new locations since 1970”.

Despite the recent telescoping of invasions, Eatherley’s book takes a broad, historical look at invasive species, with a particular focus on the UK. From this wide-ranging chronology, it is his accounts of the vogue of ‘acclimatisation’ among the upper classes of Western Europe in the 19th and early 20th centuries that stand out. This movement was premised on an “underlying philosophy that nature was there for humans to improve upon” and, in the words of one acclimatisation society chairman, aimed to populate “our fields, our forests, and our rivers with new guests; to increase and vary our food resources, and to create other […] products”.

Though many of these imports, from ostriches to wildebeest, failed to thrive, some made the leap into the wild, notably in the UK the Reeve’s muntjac deer which keen acclimatiser Herbrand Russell released into the woods near his Woburn estate in 1901.

Perhaps the most infamous of Herbrand’s ‘improvements’, however, was the grey squirrel which he released to “estates up and down the country”. Though not the sole spreader of this rodent that was trendy with many aristocrats, Herbrand’s releases were notable in their extent, and ultimately helped set off a chain of events that led to the extirpation of the red squirrel from much of the UK. Easily more catastrophic were the people who spread the doctrine of acclimatisation to the New World where introductions ranged from the sporting, such as release of rabbits to Australia for hunting, to the aesthetic, as with Eugene Schieffelin’s release of 60 starlings into New York in 1890 as “part of a scheme to populate America with every sort of bird mentioned in the plays of Shakespeare”.

>>

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Though they could never have imagined the ecological and economic ramifications of their actions – from the desertification caused by rabbits in Australia1, to the estimated $800 million in yearly crop losses and displacement of native birds caused by starlings in the US – the acclimatisers should stand as a cautionary tale of the damage that hubristic individuals with more money than sense can do to the planet. Entrepreneurs like Russ George and Bill Gates who are exploring geoengineering ‘quick fixes’ to the climate crisis, would do well to look at the acclimatisers and the dangers of naively manipulating partially-understood processes on a large scale.

More than just the antics of the acclimatisers, Eatherley highlights just how many infamous invasions were actively encouraged by humans; from the long-flowering Himalayan balsam being cultivated by beekeepers, to rhododendrons being planted by gamekeepers as cover for pheasants. Such examples help to reverse the typical invasive species narrative; instead of insidious stowaways perniciously infecting our landscape, Eatherley’s book shows how our banks of balsam and ravines of rhododendrons are really artefacts of our own history: our colonial exploits, our desire for novelty and our gardening fashions.

While strong in highlighting the anthropogenic aspect of our green and pleasant land, and in providing the reader with the means to ruin future walks with family and friends by proudly pointing at everything saying, "that's not native", Invasive Aliens is less clear in advancing any kind of thesis or call to action regarding the future of invasive species. How do we decide which invaders we should continue allocating resources to stop and control, and which have become so integrated that they are naturalised? Moreover, despite at times being lucid about the ecological damages wrought by invasives, Eatherley sometimes slips into a more complacent mindset, at one point stating that “we’re living through a golden era of mammals, with our furry fauna richer than at any time since the Neolithic”. This assertion, without any citation or qualification, jars with the recent announcement from the Red List that a quarter of native UK mammals are at imminent risk of extinction. Similarly incongruous is his line on the final page that “non-natives tend to increase biodiversity”.

Again, a lack of citation here is unhelpful, but even if sometimes the numbers of invading species can equal or surpass the number of extinctions in an area, such reports do not take into account the loss of unique species and ecosystems. As Simberloff describes, Hawaii has had 66 bird extinctions since human colonisation and this has been nearly balanced by 53 bird introductions, but almost all those introduced were common elsewhere in the world, whereas many of the birds lost were unique to Hawaii and will never be seen again. Ultimately, Eatherley doesn’t engage with such questions and his attempts to find silver linings at the end of the book only confuse the reader, leaving them unhelpfully uncertain about how much of a problem invasive species are.

Such ambivalence is not present in Leslie Anthony’s The Aliens Among Us, who declares that “along with climate change, habitat destruction, pollution, and ocean acidification, invasive species are now [...] a driver of the sixth great extinction”. He and the researchers he interviews have little time for the 1 Not all the blame for rabbits in Australia goes to deliberate acclimatisers, but Eatherley and others point to a release by acclimatiser Thomas Austin in Barwon Park in 1859 as a key event in the story of their invasion.

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‘invasive species aren’t so bad’ viewpoint, highlighting that the benign invasions do not offset the catastrophic ones. He moreover provides the reader with haunting images of a world where species invasions are left unchecked, leading to the homogenisation of flora and fauna with climate being the only cause of variation.

With this in mind, Anthony gives primary focus to the practical management of contemporary invasions, structuring his book along ‘the invasion curve’, a model that maps the spread of an invasive species and states what response (prevention, eradication, containment, or management) is possible at which point. Unsurprisingly, Anthony emphasises that prevention is the best strategy, and he documents the painstaking measures that have been taken to keep Asian carp out of the Great Lakes, including electricity barriers, monitoring, and public education. Despite the clear economic advantages – the Great Lakes prevention costs $3.5 million annually compared to the $75 million it costs annually to manage Asian carp where they have already invaded in the US – Anthony’s interviewees detail how difficult it is to convince decision makers who “run on performance measures and outcomes” of the importance of prevention.

The reading gets grimmer as Anthony moves onto some of the Sisyphean attempts to manage invasions; as he says, “the establishment and spread of successful invasive species almost always takes place unnoticed” meaning that by the time the public becomes aware of an invasion, it’s likely at a stage where any management is incredibly difficult, if not impossible. Such has been the case with the Burmese pythons that are literally squeezing the life out native mammals and amphibians in the Florida everglades. Thought to be caused by releases of exotic pets, the pythons have so far resisted any form of effective control; even a month-long bounty hunt called Python Challenge™, which saw 1600 enthusiastic python hunters sign up, resulted in “only sixty-eight pythons turned in”.

Anthony’s accounts of management are not all as ill-conceived and, in a rare success story, he describes the immense effort in 2011 to remove invasive rats from Arichika and the Bischoffs – tiny uninhabited islands in the Haida Gwaii archipelago off the coast of Canada – in a bid to restore the populations of rare, native seabirds. This 8-week military operation, complete with a command station stocked with cinnamon buns, involved covering the islands in bait stations and took over 822 person-hours to carry out.

Though the initial operation succeeded, when Anthony checks up on the team a couple of years later, the rats have inexplicably been found again on the Bischoffs leading the project manager to wonder: “if we can’t keep rats off […] do we try to figure out a control regimen […] or do we just let those islands go?” This battle-weary tone comes across in many of Anthony’s interviews which are filled with sighs, knowing looks and ironic smiles from invasive species researchers and managers who at times seem to be fighting a losing battle on their own.

Particularly affecting is a conversation with Carita Bergman at Parks Canada, who says of her work on invasive species “I see everything through a completely different lens now, and a pretty depressing one […] it kind of upsets me”. Indeed, despite Anthony’s lively and humorous writing style, The Aliens Among Us is at times a tough and

unrelenting read. So much so that one can see how, among such gloom, a market has emerged for counterfactual voices preaching a gospel that the threat of invasive species is overblown, and that invasion scientists should stop trying to turn the clock back to an impossible past. Regardless of the falsity and speciousness of such claims – as Anthony says, “no one I’d spoke with advocated returning any ecosystem to its pre-human condition – only to functionality” – what the popularity of this vocal minority conveys is a desire for optimism often lacking from the language of invasive species management. While reports of plagues of pythons and toxic hogweed might galvanise a short-term public response, any initial bloodlust (sap-lust?) rarely lasts long enough to effect meaningful change. Instead, the management of invasive species is perhaps better framed alongside projects that are actively working not just to preserve biodiversity and habitats, but to increase them. Such a perspective is touched on towards the end of Anthony’s book when he describes how carefully considered rewilding projects are in keeping with the restorative aims that guide most attempts to manage invasive species. Rewilding projects, from the reintroduction of wolves at Yellowstone, to the de-domesticated ungulate herds at Oostvaardersplassen in the Netherlands aim to significantly improve biodiversity through the return of ecosystem services that these animals once provided.

S

oft and sweet skin fuzzed with fairy fur glowing low and plump begging to be bitten

There have been some notable successes and last month a court ruling meant that beavers, whose actions help create aquatic habitats, in the river Otter in Devon are now the first extinct native animal to have been legally reintroduced into England.

Of course, it’s important not to become complacent about invasive species whose prevention and management remain crucial, and likewise not to be too gung ho with rewilding projects (lest the mistakes of the acclimatisers be repeated). Yet by viewing ‘invasive species’ not as a separate issue, but as part of a broader project of ecosystem restoration, the emphasis is shifted away from simply ‘managing loss’ towards the creation of ecosystems that are healthier, more biodiverse and more resilient. I recently even came across a paper claiming that beavers reduced the abundance of parrot’s feather in a wetland by 90%, so who knows, should Devon’s population paddle across to Dorset, I may not be raking pondweed in perpetuity after all…

Dan Eatherley. Invasive Aliens: The Plants and Animals From Over There That Are Over Here. Harper Collins, 2019 Leslie Anthony. The Aliens Among Us: How Invasive Species are Transforming the Planet and Ourselves. Yale University Press, 2017.

Also referenced was Invasive Species: What Everyone Needs to Know by Daniel Simberloff

Fred Warren is a writer, filmmaker and founding member of Chasing Cow Productions who graduated from the University of Exeter in English.

Illustrations by Bryony Moores O'Sullivan

Peach

reach up yellow-tipped fingers ‘please, pluck me bring me to your lips and breathe deep’ transient pleasure am I to be devoured for you are a man after all and I am merely a peach take me to the basement and dissect me peel back my blush my firm flesh flowing with unfermented liquor bite in let my juices flow down your grizzled chin unsatisfied I smile to myself as I am hastily consumed woody core concealed in divine sweetness lodging in your gullet for a time getting to know the walls around calling them home shallow, splutter, swallow drip fruit fly flutter gurgle then a cough like a cannon blast fibres fleeing, flying high, birds’ eye you now the small one I cackle shooting skywards marveling at my own resilience a hoarse word escapes you ‘CUNT.’

Words and Illustration by

Bryony Moores O’Sullivan 17

artist or chicken?

Jack Wightman

During lockdown, I finally caught up with the Coen brothers’

latest film, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (2018) a six-part anthology of the Wild West with each segment differing wildly from the last, ranging from outright ridiculous to genuinely unnerving.

‘Meal Ticket’ is a particularly telling segment following a young Artist (Harry Melling), a performer without arms or legs who recites canonical works from Shelley’s 'Ozymandius' to the 'Gettysburg Address', who is ferried from town to town by an Impresario (Liam Neeson) with dwindling success. In another nameless town, the Impresario is drawn to a rapt crowd watching a chicken perform mathematical tricks. He purchases the chicken, dumps the Artist into a river, and sets off with his new act.

Originally, I thought this morbid little tale was a shaming finger pointed squarely at audiences choosing Hollywood’s endless reboots, remakes, sequels and prequels over interesting, artistic movies. Watching it again, I think it is instead a personal question that the Coens have posed for themselves about their career-long balance between ‘art’ and ‘entertainment’.

A foundation of Coen-brand ‘entertainment’ is comedy stemming from idiocy. Their movies cover almost every genre – Western, mystery, noir, screwball and so on, but few iconic filmmakers utilise idiots quite so often. For the duo, either the world is full of idiots – O Brother Where Art Thou, The Ladykillers, Burn After Reading – or a thinking man is surrounded by idiots – Barton Fink, The Man Who Wasn’t There, A Serious Man. The Coens by no means have a monopoly on stupidity, idiots have been cinema’s funny bone since Buster Keaton, but they use idiots as an ‘entertainment’ Trojan Horse to sneak in ‘artistic’ ideas.

Take Raising Arizona (1987) – it can be enjoyed purely for the high octane screwball comedy it is, or we can investigate further.

Why do Leonard Smalls and the protagonist H.I. McDunnough (Nicolas Cage) share the same Woody Woodpecker tattoo? Were John Goodman and William Forsythe cast because they resemble

giant babies? Why do they replicate a shot of the kidnapped baby crawling under a bed with H.I. crawling under a car? The Coens consistently inject a host of compelling visual motifs and mysterious symbolic choices, but coat this in a highly entertaining package that we can simply kick back and enjoy.

‘Meal Ticket’ is unlike this.

It is slow, lacking original dialogue (a huge choice for writers who love loquacious characters) and humourless; all entertaining facade is stripped so the usually coated meaning is laid bare. Read allegorically, the Coens are the Artist with talent to share but ultimately are reliant on the Impresario, in this case the studios, to tour them town to town to audiences (only to take most of the cash). With the money drying up, the studios may try to make the art more exciting, adding ‘thunderous’ sound effects, or dolling up the Artist. Ultimately, however, it can be that pure ‘entertainment’ (the Chicken) draws a larger crowd, putting the art (and the artist) at risk of being dropped altogether.

The dichotomy at the heart of ‘Meal Ticket’ had been obliquely addressed before by one of the idiot trilogy films, O Brother Where Art Thou (2000). Again, the ‘entertaining’ outer layer is a screwball comedy about chain gang escapees on the hunt for a fortune. This rests, however, on the ‘artistic’ foundation of a modern retelling of Homer’s The Odyssey (with ingenious symbolic references). This dichotomy between high and low culture, ‘art’ and ‘entertainment’ is addressed by the title. It is a nod to a movie within the movie Sullivan’s Travels (1941) by Preston Sturges. Sullivan’s Travels follows a comedy filmmaker who hits the road as a homeless man to understand depression-era America and make a sombre, state-ofthe-nation movie called ‘O Brother Where Art Thou’. The filmmaker ends up in jail, desperate and broken like the convicts that surround him, but when he attends a prison film screening and sees the joy the inmates get from the animated short on the screen, he abandons his ideas of making a ‘serious’ film and decides to return to making comedies.

With O Brother Where Art Thou, moreover, the Coens seemed to be saying, “sure, we are clever enough to make intelligent references, but what matters most is that we can entertain you.” This was in 2000, 18 years before The Ballad of Buster Scruggs. Somewhere on the way, each segment of this six-part anthology was written, but I would bet that ‘Meal Ticket’ came last. It is a question asked by ‘entertaining’ filmmakers looking back over their career and asking one troubling question: "Have we survived because we are the Artist, or the Chicken?"

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Jack Wightman is that film nerd who works in a bookshop. He loves writing screenplays and articles, but sweats over the simplest of paragraphs, this bio included.

You can read more of his articles at justonemansopinion.org.uk Illustrations by Bryony Moores O'Sullivan

BACK PAGES

Your letters

Dear MOOP Editors,

Re: R. Frein's letter re: R. Zone's review re: R. Frein's essay Dear R . Frein, I find it amusing that, in your reply to my letter critiquing your woeful essay on Francoise Sagan, not once did you mention my retort to your privileging spatial metaphors of freedom. Sadly, it seems not only do you code liberty in exclusionary, binary language, but you are too obtuse to formulate a response to being critiqued in such a manner. I am not “caught up in sensitive, pseudo-Deleuzian hair-splitting to make up for his lack of epidermal protection” as you so drolly proclaim, rather I am lifting the rug out from underneath you to reveal the ineptitude of your ‘work’. Reading one of your articles is akin to reading a pulp novel from the 30’s – your conclusions are obvious from the first key stroke. The end result of totalizing distinct lines of inquiry that are incompatible, through your dusty old dialectical method, does an injustice to not just free inquiry in general, but literature in particular. As Epictetus knew, to harden oneself as a stone (and, in your case, to resemble one) against confutation, knowing yourself to be deadened and shameless, is to brutalise reason. I only hope that your predictable reply to what I type here is more fleshed out and half as long as your last communication.

R . Zone.

Re: R. Zone's letter re: R. Frein's letter re: R. Zone's review re: R. Frein's essay Dear R . Zone, I likewise find it amusing that you have obstinately pursued this conversation even after the infamous expulsion from the NYT letter pages last month (much like Sagan’s expulsion from the Louise-de-Bettignie for that Molière lark, in fact). As if the world wasn’t amply burdened with your ink, you had to continue this discussion in the pages of an obscure ‘zine’. Is nowhere safe?

If you must persist in disputing my (award-winning) thesis on the anti-moralistic aesthetics of the Parisian post-war literary milieu, I’ll merely say this: you might benefit from a little macro-constructionist scrutiny yourself.

Nevertheless, I will indeed grant you brevity this time, and hope that it might give you longer to think of an adequate response which reaches beyond the maturity of an undergraduate’s prose to at least half-heartedly resemble that of their lofty professor. Good luck with your Zoom classes, vieil homme.

R . Frein

I feel it is my duty to bring to your attention some unfortunate distortions in Grace Crabtree’s illustration to Tom Beed’s ‘Viral Militarisation’ in your first issue. Ms Crabtree’s illustration depicts a number of virus particles (virons) arranged as if part of an army, yet no indication is made that these virons are a staggering 277,777.7x bigger than they would be in real life!

The vironic structure of them is also a mess; as everyone knows, the viral envelope contains both glycoproteins and phospholipids, yet in Ms Crabtree’s drawing no attempt at distinction, neither through tone nor texture, is made!

I think we have more than enough misinformation going around during this pandemic without these shameful representations adding to it.

Also, Ms Crabtree shows the virons moving in what appears to be a modern ‘squad’ military formation.

I personally think a classical phalanx formation, where a number of discrete fighters move forth as one, would have been more appropriate.

Prof. P. Dent PhD From MOOP: Grace Crabtree acknowledges the error and vows to do further illustrations of viruses at a more accurate 1:1 scaling. Some examples of these are shown below:

Dear MOOP Editors, What is a zine?

Object Lesson Skyler Herzog

For many thousands of years we humans endured the harsh,

blinding, and everlasting warmth of the Sun as it heated our days, dried our ground and melted our ice. And as we did, so did we too endure the torment of rain, sleet and snow. Then one day, we humans decided we had had enough of the daily discomfort of the Sun's most direct rays and the rain's most direct droplets. So, around 4000 years ago, we decided to attach cloth to wooden stick to make the first parasol, though it would at first be used more for sunlight than raindrops. Egypt, China, Assyria and Greece have some of the earliest known records of the use of such a shading device. These early proto-types would be used by the higher-ups in society, and were held by their servants for their royal leaders. As time toiled away, the early umbrella went from being used by the most revered of ancient Egypt, to the wealthy women of Rome and Athens, then to complete absence for a thousand years in Europe (in the dark ages ironically), back to the female accessory of the renaissance. It would find its next chapter thanks to a particularly stubborn English gentleman of the middle 18th century: Jonas Hanway. He would use a more sturdy and male-oriented umbrella at every public appearance and after decades his stubbornness would pay off.

The trend of carrying your umbrella would spread throughout Europe and brings us to where we are today.

After thousands of years, this invention, which started out as mere cloth and stick, is now used by nearly every single human being around the world, ranging from sizes that can fit into your purse or pocket, to giant parasols that can shade half of a resort park. Being made from a variety of materials, the most common now metal and plastic, umbrellas have left their mark on history as a highly convenient way of keeping those long, harsh rays of the warm Sun off of our faces, shielding us from the far colder and damper days we face ahead.

Skyler Herzog is studying creative writing and game design at Brunel University. He is a founding member of Chasing Cow Productions.

Send us your thoughts!

We'd love to hear your thoughts on MOOP #2 – get in touch via email or social media: Email: chasing.cow.productions@gmail.com Instagram: @chasingcow Website: chasingcow.co.uk

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Out October 15 2020 To purchase the digital soundtrack please go to chasingcow.co.uk/brinkbybrink or contact us at chasing.cow.productions@gmail.com to order a limited edition CD

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