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mmmmalo · 5 years ago

Text

Some Words on Openbound

This is a step towards a more comprehensive account of A6I3 (Openbound). The basic idea: Meenah’s interactive adventures can be read as a dream-sequence from Roxy’s point of view expressing the following motifs:

The threat posed by (Lord) English functions as a metastasized metaphor for problems posed by language itself.

To escape from the clutches of language is to achieve perfect communication, represented by a return to a pre-lingual, child-like state (“pre-lingual” at once referring to image, sensation, and silence)

The recurring motif of 'merging with child’ is also used to a. to express the desire for pregnancy b. to express the desire to become one’s True Self, conceptualized as an inner, child-self that is “born” within oneself like an embryo c. to express pedophilia

First: Meenah is Roxy’s doppelganger. When we are introduced to Roxy’s fenestrated planes, we are promptly informed that if someone were caught half in/out one of the windows when the power cuts off, the poor soul would be sliced in two (4510). By Chekhov’s gun, this introduction ought to result in someone getting gorily bisected by the window, but it never happens. Instead we get this:

Gcat warps the panel away, trapping Roxy in the void, and we are shown a bisected horse puppet (left). The half-horse reiterates the looming threat of Chekhov’s guillotine. Roxy’s body is intact, but the scenery suggests she ought to be split. The suggestion is followed by the initial appearance of Meenah (right), implying that Meenah herself is a piece of Roxy, snipped away and running rampant. Thus, a doppelganger.

So, taking Meenah to be a esoteric mirror of Roxy, it follows that her adventures in the dreams bubbles are a narrative frame for /Roxy’s/ dreams. This is the basic assumption of everything that follows.

1: Language is the enemy.

Time is an impermeable barrier. It ticks on irreversibly, edging its victims unto entropic dissolution. The Lord of Time and the destruction he brings embody the inevitability of death. Aradia cracks a joke about this at the beginning of Openbound: within the ageless confine of the dreambubbles, “time is a figure of speech”, she says. Though ostensibly asserting the endless flexibility of time, an alternate interpretation would indicate that Lord English, time, and language itself are apprehended on similar terms. The most useful one presently: language, like time, is regarded as a barrier.

Throughout Homestuck, characters struggle with abstractions, beginning with the frustrating data mechanics of the sylladex and culminating in various tightrope-walks along unorthodox configurations of space and time. Language numbers among the headaches: Caliborn characterizes the text he reads as “walls”, further declaring them to be “impenetrable” and “migraine-inducing”. On one level, this aligns with Caliborn’s statement that the kids talk/think too much and he’d like them to just GET THE FuCK ON WITH IT ALREADY: speech is an obstacle towards both the completion of the kids’ objectives and Caliborn’s attainment of what he wants. On another level, this aligns with the later discussion of Caliborn’s learning disability: in all likelihood, he has difficulty reading. Another example of this disdain for language is Jade, who, in her rapturous treatise on the wonders of anthro, answers the call of the wild by renouncing words.

No need to answer. Words slough from the busy mind like a useless dead membrane as a more visceral sapience takes over. Something simpler is in charge now, a force untouched by the concerns and burdens of the upright, that farcical yoke the bipedal tow. It now drives you through the midnight brush, your paws whisking through creepers, unearthing with each bold stomp bright odors demanding investigation.

Just prior to Openbound, the sentiments expressed above (that language is unnecessary, an obstacle to unmediated communication and pure sensation) are restated in mythic terms: REALITY ITSELF is being DESTROYED by (LORD) ENGLISH! Language the inhibitor of direct experience becomes language the rot of the universe, language the malevolent destroyer of the capacity for any experience at all.

Meenah witnesses English’s destruction of reality and rushes off to recruit soldiers to fight him. There is harmony between the imminent threat of English and the gameplay: the primary obstacles to Meenah’s objectives are words. Literal walls of text stand between you and the end of the level, as you must navigate exhausting conversations to satisfy the game’s win conditions. Within the conversation themselves, the motif persists by showcasing various ways that speech can obscure meaning.

Kankri couches his points in overly ornate terminology and uses social justice as a tool for settling personal disputes. Latula laments how her commitment to her RAD speech affectations and persona can make her harder to understand. Cronus trips over his own accent, Mituna tumbles through various word spasms. Meulin’s deafness is thematically succeeded by Rufioh’s inability to communicate his unhappiness to the Horuss, who has sweat in his ears. The two characters who you cannot understand at all, the silent Kurloz and the pseudo-Japanese speaking Damara, are revealed to be direct servants of Lord English! Failure to communicate – inability to bridge the barrier of language – is the enemy.

The counter to the hyperbolic threat of language-as-mediation and is a fantasy of perfect communication. In Jade’s scenario, attainment of this ideal is presented visually as Jade acquiring the superficial markers of a wolf (“Wouldn't these ears suit you? Would not this proud long snout assist you in the hunt?”), whereupon she acquires the rich experience that she associates with the idea of animal, unmediated by language. Just as Jade merges with the image of a wolf, there is an image in Openbound that Meenah seeks, the attainment of which embodies the goal of some idealized communication, without words.

The image is that of childhood.

2: Kankri and Porrim form a spectrum of identity

In Homestuck, desire is generally structured as the restoration of a lost unity. Consider Cherub reproduction, itself inspired by a Platonic model of love: in seeking a soulmate, one is actually seeking a fascimile of their lost half, that with which they were originally united. The force that fractures this unity -- the boundary that prohibits access to the desired object -- is the law.

I elaborate on the various corollaries of this motif elsewhere (x)(x), but for present purposes, let it suffice to say that time itself functions as a law of sorts, insofar as time rips you away from childhood and bars the possibility of a return.

That’s a little abstract, so here’s an example: due to the the status of trolls as manifestations, we know that the characters Meenah visits in the afterlife are expressions of her (and thus Roxy’s) psyche. This relationship is difficult to map on a troll-by-troll basis. But things begin to click when you view each cluster of interactions with Beforan trolls as a mental constellation, their interplay showcasing pervasive internal dialogues and dynamics.

In the first cluster, Latula appears between Porrim and Kankri because SHE IS THE LAW, dividing Jesus from Mary, Child from Mother (which, as I will show, seems to be the trajectory Roxy imagines for herself). This is the reason that Latula successfully interrupts Kankri and Karkat’s “conversation”: they are clones, more or less, and the law is that which divides the child from itself.

I don’t claim Kankri represents a child just because he’s a brat who gets ruthlessly mothered by Porrim: it’s also implicit in his politics. Humans are not stratified by blood color, so the hemospectrum is not directly analogous to any real life example of power, privilege, or what have you. Neither is it perfectly generic. In a given context, the hemospectrum is often analogized to some particular notion of hierarchy. Eridan’s drive for blood purity marks him as a analogous to a racial supremacist; the depiction of Zebruh’s attitude towards low bloods is well interpreted as being rooted in a particularly exploitative brand of misogyny (x); and Kankri’s polemics pivot upon the particular role that AGE DIFFERENCE plays in structural oppression of Alternia, a metaphor for what is popularly termed “adultism”, injustices stemming from the power adults hold over children.

Kankri emphasizes that the lifespan discrepancy between warm and cool hemochroma means the upper classes are allotted far more time (unto eons) to consolidate power and define cultural norms; their immense lifespans constitute a structural basis for the oppression of lowbloods, whose relative youth means less time to organize. This doubles as a description of a political limitation of children, relative to adults. Kankri describes the lowest grouping of blood colors as Burgundy, Ochre, Umber, and Yellow -- BUOY for short, which not coincidentally is Meenah’s nautical permutation of BOY. All of which is to say that Kankri rankling at Porrim’s doting is mutually analogous with his politics, in the context of Beforus, where coddling is the de facto relation between castes. His being a brat raging against an overbearing mother is an analogy.

And funny enough, that’s something he and Porrim have in common, in a way. Porrim balks at the /role/ of motherhood expected of her, among other injustices upon women in Beforan society. And Porrim likewise objects to the role of RAD GIRL that Latula 'pro+jects’, encouraging her to just ‘be yo+urself’... the idea being, in the same sense that Latula’s GAME GIRL persona masks her ‘real’ personality, femininity itself is construed as a shell encasing the ‘true’ child-self within. Or rather, the feminine persona is portrayed as being pregnant with the child-self, which is the true self. So Kankri’s raging against Porrim is a metaphor for a spirit balking at the gendered expectations that encase them.

If I can speak with any confidence on this psychological reading of Kankri and Porrim’s opposition, it because the invocation of pregnancy to communicate as sense of inner/outer self is repeated throughout the dream, through the language used to describe characters who are otherkin. Take Cronus for example: he is named after a god famous for devouring his children. And his lusus (an expression of his desire) is a seahorse, notable for their child-bearing males. The net effect is the impression of a baby in Cronus’s belly -- but instead of literal pregnancy, we see Cronus describe himself as ‘a human “born” in the body of a troll’, essentially invoking the image of pregnancy to communicate his status as humankin.

Here you might begin to see how this is Roxy’s dream -- the mental conflict between Porrim (womanhood) and Kankri (childhood, which while ostensibly gender neutral can be rendered masculine by opposition to womanhood) creates a spectrum of identity available to Roxy, as made explicit by their gender exploration in the epilogues. This seems to be the joke at play whenever Latula reiterates the “GIRLS RULE, BOYS DROOL” line from her theme song: taken literally, it is a succinct summary of the Kankri/Porrim conflict, wherein the feminine persona is construed as dominating the (at times masculine by contrast) child-self.

Kankri’s description of a “warm-identifying physically-cooler caste” is Roxy: she identifies with her child-self.

And as I mentioned before, just as Latula stands between Porrim and Kankri, time is the law separating someone feeling trapped by femininity from a childhood where such concerns were nonexistent. Time is thus the enemy, which is one of the thematic reasons the Lord of Time warrants such resentment. A certain longing for childhood also characterizes the glimpses of John that punctuates Openbound: he laments the inability to recapture the feeling of watching Con Air with his Dad when he was younger (throwing his big tantrum at the exact moment that Cyrus threatens the bunny, which really ought to go back in the box, the perfectly generic object). Roxy later voices a similar sentiment in Wizardy Herbert via Beatrix, who would “trade all the badges in the world to go back to when things were simpler.” Elsewhere in the story Roxy emphasizes a growing tension between a figure with ~100 merit badges (symbolizing complexity) with another character, Russet (an apple, the emblem of atomic simplicity, as per drunk!Rose). Kanaya might describe this as a tension between Space and Time (1093), but here it chiefly serves to further underline the Child and Adult distinction.

3: The corollary of “perfect communication” is silence.

If Time divides the child from itself, it can be hypothesized that Lord English can embody this divide in his other symbolic functions, such as his embodiment of language. If true, it follows that the union of the child-self represents perfect, unmediated communication. Our first example of such a union then are the enmeshed Vantases (who are basically clones) -- but instead of some transcendent transmission of thought, we see an endless one-sided lecture. Spoonful after heaping spoonful of heaving diarhetoric fed directly into Karkat’s gaping earhole.

And on a psychological level, perhaps that’s an apt description of what it means to “just be yourself” without interruption, no commentary or insecure protests interjecting their way into your stream of consciousness. Ordering yourself around without a second thought. And I’ve been in the zone in that way, where I’m so immersed in a task that the task becomes me. But on an interpersonal level, it’s clear that “perfect” speech is entirely unequal.

Despite ostensibly championing the rights of children in the face of domination, Kankri asserts himself as the “teacher” to Karkat’s “pupil”, assuming that the transmission of truth will be one-sided. When confronted by Porrim about this hypocrisy, Kankri defensively insists that he is having a “man to man conversation” with Karkat, an equal exchange. (And oddly, even as she advocates for Karkat, Porrim leaves Karkat in his silence, gently assuring him that his dejected glance has said all he needs to say...)

At any rate, the Karkat-Kankri dynamic illustrates that the immediacy of communication within the primordial union brings with it an element of domination. The subsequent pairings (Cronus-Mituna and Kurloz-Meulin) elaborate on problems and abuses that can accompany compromised speech and silence, each section emphasizing a particular child symbol: respectively, angels and cats (which I’ve established previously).

Angels first: Cronus’s claim that “as a wwingman [Mituna] is a total disgrace” uses “wingman” to invoke the image of angels. This method is repeated by Lil Hal, who observes that Dirk views him as a “counterproductive wing man”, to which Dirk sarcastically replies “nice deduction Lil Einstein”. The reference to the Disney Jr. show neatly ties the angel reference into the fact that as Dirk’s creation, in a sense Hal can be considered Dirk’s child. And in the same way that Hal (the child/angel) functions partly as a reflection of Dirk’s own nature, Mituna’s angel status indicates that he can function symbolically as Cronus’s “inner-child”, the self with which one is pregnant.xx

Silence is an interminable pregnancy. Not speaking means not birthing the baby, not letting the angel fall to earth. The hush is a measure against the corruption and ruin associated with English. (Even though the silent characters are his most devoted servants?)

Cronus demonstrates this with the command “vwait here, try not to fall dowvn, and ABOVWE ALL, try not to be seen” in which “above all” doubles as the place from which Mituna is falling. Language is the instrument of descent, Mituna’s garbled speech emphasizes his “fallen” status within the paradigm. Cronus “really hates the sound of” Mituna partly because he views Mituna as a caricature of himself, again not unlike Dirk’s violent rejection of the negative qualities he identifies in Hal.

This is why Cronus’s opening gesture is to fail a tongue-twister and cry GLOBES in exasperation: it is as though he has hit a snag in his verbal kick-flip and face-planted onto the earth (the globe) -- Mituna bombing his literal stunts and falling down being the root visual. Skateboards (and other 4-wheel devices) are vehicles unto “unreal air”: a status of immaculate lofty ideality, and thus untouchable and pure. The other skateboarder, Latula, made a point of emphasizing her untouchability as she performed some “objectively rad” tricks for Kankri. And more to the point, Latula claims that her intuitions “just make sense” and explaining them would not be "radical”, saying in her own way that bringing her feelings/intuitive knowledge into the realm of speech would in some way tarnish or degrade them. “4 grlz gott4 s4cr1f1c3 und3rst4nd4b1l1ty for th3 s4k3 of r4dn3ss” she says.

Another way to put it is that not expressing a thought can make seem invincible -- it cannot be exposed to the risk of contradiction or mockery. A relevant quote:

MEENAH: i heard a rumor you think youre a human now MEENAH: that true

CRONUS: its a privwate matter. i dont see vwhy i should havwe to talk about it vwith you, and open myself up to more of your judgmental scorn.

MEENAH: sounds like another desperate cry for attention imo

(Aside: an old friend of mine faced almost this exact conversation on facebook when they came out as a trans man, so this one actually hit home a little bit.)

Roxy’s sensitivity to the reactions of others is perhaps implicit in the paranoid staring contests with the void, but in relation to their gender expression, it becomes most explicit in the epilogue -- not only in the faltering manner by which Roxy begins to assert their gender expression, but in the narration itself. Although Dirk’s narration seems to largely reflection his own hesitation to embrace Roxy’s newfound identity, it should be remembered that he is effectively Roxy’s brainghost when narrating their thoughts. That is to say, Dirk’s reaction to Roxy is symbiotic with what Roxy imagines Dirk’s reaction would be. The mockery in the narration is the mockery Roxy expects and fears. Thus, Roxy’s level of comfort and security with their current gender expression necessarily coincides with the level of ease expressed by Dirk’s later narration.

But let’s return to Openbound.

The traumatic deafening of Meulin is analogous to the deathening of Jaspers: one is blasted with the violent shriek of a clown, the other sassacrushed by the “daunting text” of Mark Twain. With the cat as a symbol of the child-self, the message is basically that the child’s encounter with language is a violent experience. (Lord English is destroying reality, etc etc) Kankri neatly echoes this point of view by announcing one of his lectures as “my crushing harangue 9n this delicate su6ject” -- to rephrase, he is crushing the delicate subject (child) with his harangue.

Like much violence in Homestuck, violence of speech is sexualized. There is a moment where Cronus openly relishes the unilateral communication first displayed in the Kankri > Karkat pipeline. He basks in the fact that Mituna is incapable of repeating anything coherently, or that Mituna’s word is otherwise held in such disrepute that no one will take Mituna seriously. As Cronus does this, Mituna laments that Cronus is touching him and will not stop.

The bad-touch motif continues with Kurloz and Meulin, who achieve their own mode of “perfect communication” (union with child-self) via streams of wordless, emotive images. In the above exchange, Kurloz mimes an Ewok rubbing a child, to which Meulin responds with a small frown and a laughing Sailor Moon, as if to convey that she were the one being tickled in the previous gif. She slams the UNSEE button to emphasize her displeasure. (It is only after this sequence that we learn Kurloz can control Meulin’s mind, further linking harmonious union with tyrannical, unilateral communication)

It’s worth noting here that Meenah’s goal in parts 1 & 2 is to get through gates established by Karkat, ultimately convincing him to join up with her. Karkat who, alongside Kankri, currently represents the child-self. Just as Rufioh interprets Meenah’s invitation to join as a romantic proposal, Meenah interprets her successful recruitment of Karkat as a date, sealing the euphemism by reassuring her recruit that he “will not regret hitchin [his] wagon to [her] starfish”, which is a sex joke. The undertones of age disparity later surface as Meenah joins up with her second Vriska (x):

MEENAH: can i ask a kinda personal question MEENAH: i mean not even that personal but whatev

VRISKA: Sure...?

MEENAH: how old are you

VRISKA: Uh, VRISKA: Almost seven and a half sweeps. VRISKA: Getting close to eight!!!!!!!! VRISKA: I pro8a8ly sound like a fucking nerd, 8ut I've 8een excited a8out reaching that milestone pretty much my whole life.

MEENAH: 7.5 huh MEENAH: i guess thats a lil more respectable

VRISKA: More respecta8le than what?

MEENAH: nofin

For Roxy, the libidinal investment in kids is confined to subtext for basically the whole story: jokes about the speculative mechanics of boning chess people and elves, the sexual tension between Russet and the boy with 100 merit badges, the time Roxy was briefly upset to learn she had been “flirt-larping” with a 13 year old Dirk, only to resume the game a page later -- little moments. In the epilogues, Roxy being highly conscious of her interactions with children and the potential for reproducing systems of domination seems embedded in her trepidation towards any of the players governing the world they created (a hands-off attitude toward parenting that may also offer some rationale for Mom’s neglect of Rose, if all that is true of Roxy holds true for her past self).

But let’s move forward.

4: To See Oneself as a Host Plush

I’d like to reiterate here that the Kankri-Porrim dichotomy suggests that the categories of ‘baby’ and ‘boy’ are blurred in their mutual opposition to ‘girl’. Again, the letter of the law: BOYS DROOL! This offers a rationale for oddities like Roxy wiping John’s mouth for him during their date in Candy (boys drool), or this little slip-of-the-tongue which I wouldn’t quite call subtle:

ROXY: doin ok up there b?

JOHN: i’m fine!!! JOHN: wait. b?

ROXY: yea like short for babe ROXY: cuz ur my babe b

JOHN: oh, haha. right.

If we’re being less charitable, you could characterize this as Roxy keeping her eyes on the prize -- as though in addressing John, she is actually addressing the baby that he can provide her. And while I’m not certain of that, the notion of such double-speak (seemingly addressing the person in front of you when you are actually addressing an unborn child) is crucial for understanding the metaphors embedded in the Damara-Rufioh-Horuss triad.

The motif of pregnancy is here introduced via Fiduspawn: impregnate the host plush and a baby pony comes out.

You might remember that Rufioh refers to girls as ‘doll’ -- this quirk links the host plush to the feminine (at least within the context of this dream). To be more precise, the doll is characterized as a void that invites (or even demands) filling: this is a complementary reading of Horuss’s claim that Rufioh “stole his breath away”, synonymous with the claim that Rufioh “has a way of drawing the breath out of people”. The Rogue of Breath has difficulty standing up for himself (Horuss calls it “affable pliability”), so Horuss often speaks over him or on his behalf, as though Rufioh were a marionette. Horuss is saying that Rufioh’s passive demeanor invites this sort of behavior, that Rufioh’s effective silence means he is “asking for it”, to use a loaded phrase.

How funny then that the “doll” of their group Damara (whose name means Silence) is literally “asking for it”, constantly. The same logic applies to Dirk’s decapitated head (from just before this intermission!) and Vriska’s comatose body -- through narrative contrivance, each voiceless vessel hauntingly implores a living Page to kiss them, to fill them with a Breath from without. The sequences suggest a conviction on the part of the kissers: that which is “empty” must desire to be “filled”, a framing that becomes particularly unpleasant when sexualized.

What Damara is asking for is ambiguous, at once referring to sex and the child to which sex serves as vehicle (among other potentials). I wrote awhile back (x) that Mom gave Jaspers an ostentatious burial as a proxy mourning for a miscarried child that preceded Rose, and her cat-cloning was oriented towards the eventual revival of her lost baby. For Damara (and thus Roxy) this becomes a fundamental myth: the desire for children is complemented in intensity by the conviction that the child has already been lost, or stolen from you. Horuss observes that Damara’s remarks a leaning “bloo” because (it’s a pun) her dirty talk is tinged with mourning. There is, inexplicably, sorrow when Damara says she wants to feel her nipples between your teeth. She’s not talking to you -- she’s talking to the baby.

This is also the joke when Latula/Terezi threaten to kill Damara for approaching Mituna/Karkat: the LAW will not permit you to access BABY! You may not recover your child or your childhood, time has barred you from both. (Though of course, through the pedophilia lens this becomes much less sympathetic).

A similar moment can be read into Horuss: Kankri, like all trolls, acts as a manifestation of some emotional surge, so Kankri’s sudden appearance implies that someone is legitimately triggered, despite the comic’s apparent commitment to denigrating his point of view. Like Cronus, Horuss’s horse-kin status entails an identification with his inner (child) self -- but the trans allegory melds seamlessly into other modes of union with the child image, such as pregnancy. So when Kankri asks Horuss to confirm that he is triggered by Meenah’s skepticism towards his identity, the reply “Trigger sounds like a wonderful name for a hoofbeast” is not merely a flippant non-sequitur, but also another echo of the core lamentation, a wistful musing on names for a dead/unborn child.

A brief step backwards: at the beginning, we outlined how Lord English’s destruction of reality was (in the present context at least) a mythic expression of fears and frustrations about communication and speech. Dissatisfaction /produced/ a fantasy individual to whom the problem could be sourced and blamed assigned. A similar attitude should be adopted in examining Damara’s theft of Rufioh’s “happy thought” Tinkerbull -- she represents an already existing discontentment with his circumstances, crystallized into an individual.

This is where Damara would seem to slot into the dysphoria proceedings: she crushed Tinkerbull with a refrigerator, a reprisal of the sassacrushing of Jaspers. The refrigerator is a womb symbol (I insist), suggesting that the womb is a hostile force on par with the Law of English (Girls Rule!). From the perspective of Mom, this could be read a response to her miscarriage, a result of blaming her own body for the child’s death. From Roxy’s perspective, it might be better characterized as ‘the body itself is a domineering force suffocating my child self’ -- and thus dysphoria. Damara crushing Tinkerbull represents the sense that your own body is a meat prison, a shell imprisoning (if not outright killing) your happiness.

This is why Damara manifests for Kanaya, who struggles to reconcile herself with Porrim, a daunting image of ideal womanhood, especially as it concerns the care of matriorb (ie motherhood). Porrim assures her that even though motherhood is to some degree a societal imposition, a role, this does not mean Kanaya cannot embrace the perpetuation of her species on her own terms. This is a good lesson, and Kanaya agrees -- but there stands Damara regardless, joy-stealer, lingering discomfort with self-conception as a host plush. “Just ignore her until she goes away” is all the advice Porrim has to offer on the subject.

(Passing thought: It occurs to me that the phrase ‘happy thought’ used to describe Tinkerbull could be replaced with ‘euphoria’, forming a clean complement to ‘dysphoria’... but wordplay reliant on a missing link is somewhat suspect, so let’s leave that one in the margins)

5: High Euphemistic Density

Let’s review by playing with some euphemisms in Horuss’s opening address to Meenah. I’m dividing his words into 3 sections for ease of reference:

1 HORUSS: 8=D < Your Harness... I mean Hayness. Highness I mean. HORUSS: 8=D < F*DDLEST*%. Please pardon my utterly e%ecrable language, and unforgivable stammering, your Horseness. #Sh*ot! #I mean Hayness! #Whew. 2 HORUSS: 8=D < I am a bale of nerves in your royal presence, and it has been so long. 3 HORUSS: 8=D < And when I am so spooked, you must know how that causes me to even more firmly identify with the majestic hoofbeast.

Starting with three: recall, “girls rule”. Femininity is characterized as a daunting (or even domineering) imposition. Kanaya displaying anxiety at the prospect of measuring up to the image of Porrim is one way this motif crystallizes into a character dynamic. Another way seems to be Horuss’s anxiety before his empress -- just as Kankri (child) rebels against Porrim (mother), the presence of Meenah (mother) induces Horuss to identify with the hoofbeast (baby). Both cases present a shrinking away from a feminine authority figure as metaphor for rejection of the societal strictures of femininity.

Two is a dick joke: while Horuss is ostensibly lamenting his anxiety, a penis is a literal ‘bale of nerves’, a sensory cluster. “It has been so long.” The pun is reinforced as the expense of Rufioh, who apparently did not have ‘the nerve’ to ‘finish [Damara] off’ on her quest bed, which is an innuendo for sexual inadequacy. That Horuss’s smiling face emoji is itself a dick suggests a conflation of identification with his happy thoughts and identification with the member -- which, based on previous discussion of Tinkerbull, would seem to blur the line between having a dick and being pregnant? Which aligns with the notion that pregnancy becomes a metaphor for masculine identification via union with the child self.

(“You very nearly caught a glimpse of a horse penis and began to cry” conveys a mournful yearning of the same order as “I want to feel my nipples between your teeth”?)

But the metaphor goes both ways: the brain is another ‘bale of nerves’, thus offering a rational for Mituna’s presence on the outskirts of the dream. His fall from the brain tree strikes me as less an ejaculation (from brain-dick) as birth (from brain-womb) -- hence the use of Mituna as the lost child, forever denied to Damara by the law (Latula).

And we arrive at one, which repeats a bit from Cronus’s introduction: Horuss trips over his own speech, illustrating the Fall. Just as Cronus attempts to silence Mituna to avoid the embarrassment expected to accompany self-expression, Horuss attempts to c*nsor himself before the judgement of his empress. The need to hide himself (as the stoic smile might indicate) is also embedded in the way Horuss describes his mouth as a load-gaper, and begs pardon for his potty-mouth: silence is golden, and conversely speech becomes excrable, fallen and profaned.

(Silly thought: on occasion, censorship can also designate the holy, eg censoring the name of G*d so as not to besmirch it. That in mind, I find it amusing to take Roxy’s line “holiest of shits // the shit.... // is down right // SACROSANCT” as a literal deification of excrement, making Horuss and Rufioh’s self-censorship look like a last ditch attempt at keeping the angel-child up in heaven. No?)

6: Conclusions and Questions

Obviously, this isn’t all that can be said of Openbound -- people have written extensive character studies of the alpha trolls, mined their stories for clues and parallels to less tangential plot-lines, and otherwise made whatever sense could be made of things. My contribution is some words on the mixed metaphors, word play, and psychological motifs that surround the proceedings.

If you, like me, are frazzled by the sheer density of double and triple speak at play, this is the gist of what I’m arguing for:

“Merge with child” seems to be the overarching motivation expressed in Openbound. But to follow that command verbatim is impossible -- the goal must be interpreted (as getting pregnant, as being true to oneself, as pederasty, as nostalgic pursuit of simplicity, etc) in order to be realized.

That the ideal merger is an image whose wholeness/breadth of possibility is lost in the specificity of actualization would seem analogous to the Fall occurring between silence and speech... so the motif persists on a meta level, maybe? But we don’t need to dwell on that more than we already have.

Instead, I’d like to end with several new points that give me pause.

It’s still not clear to me why the silent characters are the direct servants of Lord English. Communication with them is impossible, and that frustration is what causes language to be conceived as a threat in the first place, but I have an itch that tells me there’s a bit more to it than that.

I don’t know what the transmission of the codpiece has to do with anything. I suspect it may number among various metaphors for trans masculinity, but that’s confirmation bias speaking -- from the scene itself, I gathered very little.

I wonder if Aranea’s info dumps at the end are factored in... you could construe them as placing Meenah in the position of Karkat relative to Kankri -- on the receiving end of spoonful after heaping spoonful of words. So even though Karkat disappears after you follow him, you’ve nonetheless “merged” with the child-function that he performs here? But again, I worry that this sort of hasty integration means I’m missing out on new info.

I’m pretty firmly of the mind that this whole intermission is chiefly devoted to Roxy, but I do worry that Meenah’s doppelganger status could have misled me on that point. After all, Jane’s planet quest contained references to her friends desires, not only her own (x)(x) -- would it be so odd for the same to be true of Roxy’s dreams? In which case it would be worth revisiting this intermission to double-check whether any given section might map more closely to the other alpha kids -- especially since Rufioh/Horuss is a transparent commentary on Dirk/Jake

This is a good a place as any to note that when I was operating under the assumption that Roxy was a trans girl, I was inclined to read the Rufioh/Horuss break-up as ambivalence on the question of getting rid of your dick -- which seemed sensible enough at the time, though the present model seems more consistent across the various conversations. It should be noted though that the language of gender questioning can easily serve multiple directions at once. So... I guess I want to make sure the apparent success of this approach doesn’t blind me to other interpretive potentials? Fingers crossed

...there’s more things to question, probably, but I think that’s good for now.

Special thanks to @red-zora for giving this mess the once-over.

Good night everyone.

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tanadrin · 6 years ago

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under a cut because long, disorganized, self-indulgent

ok so the Lende Empire isn’t really feudal; I despise feudal stasis in fantasy, like even the shortest timeline puts the Andal invasion at more than 2,000 ybp in Game of Thrones, you really think in all that time everybody on the continent is dumb enough to not invent a better plough? or glass just good enough to grind lenses? or make small improvements in windmill design? and all that shit adds up and BAM before you know it, you've got metallurgy good enough to make a steam engine with, so no matter what BS magical physics you come up with, if things work at the human scale even remotely like they do in our world, your age of knights and castles and dragons not having to contend with antiaircraft guns has a limited shelf-life.

(and that's interesting! And more people--by which i mean people besides Terry Pratchett, who did this wonderfully--should write about high fantasy worlds before they reached Medieval Stasis Mode, and after they left it! I would fukkin kill to read a good high fantasy book that also had, like spaceships in it. Insofar as genre conventions have evolved not according to the internal logic of the worlds they depict but according to how and for what reason they serve as commentaries on specific aspects of our own world and its history, and are aimed at evoking certain emotions, it's understandable why such generic mishsmashes are relatively uncommon. But people also definitely read speculative fiction because they like internally cohesive worlds very different from our own, so it is my fondest hope that this sort of thing becomes more popular going forward)

(you can of course also have fantasy worlds which are *not* very much like our own world at human scale. Greg Egan actually does this in a science fiction mode, but as long as you're positing a world where dimensions of space are hyperbolic like time or where humans change sex every time they have sex because trading a detachable symbiotic penis is part of having an orgasm, whether you call this stuff "different science" or "magic" is really beside the point. I have an idea I've been batting around for a while about a world divided, like Evan Dahm's Overside, or the two parallel worlds in Fringe, except part of the division is not just physical, but metaphysical. Morality itself in each subworld is defective, because each subworld got a different part of a morally and metaphysically unified whole: thus, for reasons nobody can understand, almost every ethical system derived by people resident in only one subworld is deeply defective, and would be horrifying to us--as though, perhaps, our own complex and nuanced moral landscape that we wrestle with was a kind of grand unified theory whose symmetry had been broken, and which was only understood piecemeal, as totally separate concepts. And of course, if you live in one subworld everyone from the other subworld is a horrifying monster whose morality is totally incomprehensible to you, so you reflexively treat them as an enemy.)

History isn't just one thing after another. I mean, okay, it is, but it's *also* the aftereffects of those things, the things that stick around forever and can't be gotten away from. And just like how if you want to understand our own world you need to look at what it was like five years ago, and to understand what it was like five years ago you need to look at what it was like ten years ago, and fifteen, ad nauseam, until you're suddenly back at World War II, or the Holy Roman Empire, or Sumer, or struggling through the ever-increasing fog of a steadily more ambiguous archeological record, well, this is as true for politics and language as it is the material aspects of society. In the same way maps feel insufficient when the artist doesn't think about what's beyond the edge of the page (not to knock on GRRM too much, but if you put all the continents and seas in his world on the same map, you notice they're all really... rectangular. Like he drew them to fit individual pieces of paper. Rivers and island arcs get compressed when they near a margin. Seas are just voids. Nothing ever has to be moved to a little box in a corner to fit. there's no attempt at verisimilitude), I think invented worlds feel insufficient when the writer asks you to take them seriously as a reflection of our own, or an aspect of our own, but neglects to at least suggest their place in a larger whole.

I wanted with the Lende Empire to have something that still let me have a lot of early centuries of sword-and-horse style adventures (because i started writing about Lende when I was thirteen and had just finished the Silmarillion for the second time), and I wanted when writing its history to still be able to take big chunks of story I stole from Norse legends and medieval poetry and dump them almost whole into the setting, but I also wanted the history not to read like a fantasy history--or not just a fantasy history. What I mean is, when you read something like the Silmarillion, or when a character in a fantasy world relates some legend to you, even if it's referred to as an old and ambiguous tale, you still often feel like that's really what happened. Like, for me, one of the chief emotional attractions to something like the tales of the wars of the Goths and Huns, or Beowulf's description of Migration Age Denmark filtered through Anglo-Saxon poetic tropes, or the Icelandic family sagas, is that we really have a hard time knowing how much of it is true, how much of its is plausible embellishment, and how much of it is anachronistic nonsense or pure bullshit. Is the Njala based on a faithfully recounted tradition passed down orally for a few hundred years? Who knows! Not us. We know a guy named Njal got burned in his house around 1000 AD, but much of the mystery and the poignancy of stories like that for me lies in the difficulty of ascertaining their relationship to the truth.

What I want(ed) was something that when you read it made you think "ok, obviously the narrator is trying their best, but even they don't know exactly what the fuck happened; this is probably one third ambiguous tradition, one third solid, one third bullshit." So the Chronicle of Lende has some stuff in it that's intentionally difficult to reconcile. It has weird tonal shifts. The first third owes a lot to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and the sagas and the Hildebrantslied; the middle is closer to the Silmarillion, or the history of Rome when told more from the Great Man perspective than the Impersonal Forces one, and the last third starts out that way but goes some weird places and veers off at the end to what is obviously a symbolic and highly abstracted mode of narration which, in relating the destruction of the Empire imitates the way in which its beginning is related (for in-universe Thematic Reasons), *but* while all this is going on, the hope is that the reader is *also* able to glimpse through these ambiguities and stylistic quirks, and incompatibilities, and weird digressions involving talking animals or the spirit world, a society that's undergoing familiar demographic and social and technological transitions: moving from oral culture agrarianism to the beginnings of a real urban civilization, with a centralized state and the written word, and like Western Europe having to figure out a social structure in the absence of any good nearby imperial models (they end up with something more like fraternal warrior societies being deputized to control land rather than feudal lords, but the essential logic is the same); but then moving to a real model of administrative statehood, as infrastructure and technology improve, before industrialization kicks off, the population explodes, social tensions inherent in that begin tearing at the seams of society, and the horrors of industrialized warfare are unleashed.

There are meant to be striking differences, too, of course. Lende history is only about a thousand Earth years long, and it's confined mostly to the western side of a continent split by a huge, Himalayan-like mountain range. Its rapid rise and increase in technological sophistication are due to exogenous factors (genuine divine intervention in some cases), and equally even the True Secret History of the empire's destruction has no real-world parallels, at least not since the Channeled Scablands formed 14,000 years ago. It's also teeeechnically science fiction and not fantasy, though that distinction really rests on tone and not on setting IMO. But I don't think it's possible to tell what feels like a real history of a world without sometimes radically changing genres: our own history goes from dry science (geology, paleontology, archeology) to legend and myth and scripture, to dusty old classical history and books penned by ancients who sometimes have startlingly different notions about what merits mention in a story and how to tell one, to tales of kings and queens and conquerors, before emerging blinking in the sunlight of dry matter of fact narration again. I have always believed conventions, including those of genre and style, should be tools and not straightjackets. The best worldbuilding literature I have read steals from a huge variety of sources (and Pratchett deserves a mention here again, alongside Susanna Clarke, and Ada Palmer, and the people who wrote the Elder Scrolls backstory, and Sofia Samatar, and Angelica Gorodischer).

#have you read a stranger in olondria?#go read a stranger in olondria #now #fucking do it #it's so good #'a book' says Vandos of Ur-Amakir 'is a fortress; a place of weeping; the key to a desert; a river that has no bridge; a garden of spears.'

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annelyseg · 6 years ago

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Expanded Poetics: Some initial thoughts

This (linked) sound piece from Dutch composer/performer/poet Jaap Blonk is strange and lulling—can’t imagine the reference to John Ashbery’s “Into the Dusk-Charged Air” (which also consists of listing bodies of water) is a coincidence:

Onbekendegracht Wateren van Amsterdam Ringvaart van de Haarlemmermeerpolder Burgemeester Van Tienhovengracht Johan van Hasseltkanaal-Oost Johan van Hasseltkanaal-West Zijkanaal K naar Nieuwendam Christoffel Plantijngracht Burgemeester Cramergracht Johan van Hasseltkanaal Oudezijds Achterburgwal Jacob van Lennepkanaal Noordhollandsch Kanaal Oostenburgerdwarsvaart Jan van Riebeeckhaven Oostelijk Marktkanaal Oudezijds Voorburgwal Plantage Muidergracht Westelijk Marktkanaal Amsterdam-Rijnkanaal Broekermeerringsloot

[and so on...]

I’m curious about what Blonk deems his “scores and visual poetry”: is each score also a ‘visual poem’? What does he mean by ‘visual poem’? Or are there, among these graphic scores (which seem to essentially consist of handmade marks/gestures in a few different media, some of which occasionally resemble a kind of made-up ‘writing’), some poems? What exactly is it that makes a drawing a poem?

Jaap Blonk, “Little Swarm”, from “Swarms” (2012-2018)

I begin with something Jane Miller said in a workshop in Spring 2018: a poem is a poem, can be read as a poem, insofar as it is using the tools, the tactics/strategies, the materials, of poetry; insofar as it is in conversation with the conventions and histories of poetry.

What are these tools, conventions? Language (spoken or written or read); image; simile/metaphor; enjambment; lineation and line breaks; alliteration, consonance, rhyme; lyricism; form, “strict”/”inherited” (sonnet, villanelle, haiku, etc.) or “open”; allusion; meter; etc. etc. etc. etc.

The notion of “tactics” is even clearer when thinking of something like a chair: chairs often have 4 legs, a horizontal surface about the size of a person’s ass, are a couple of feet tall, have a vertical surface meant for the back, are meant to be sat upon. Tactics can be aesthetic, instrumental/utilitarian, simply convention, and so on. Of course, a chair needn’t engage in ALL of these tactics: some have no backs, have 3 legs, are very close to the ground or very tall; even an upside-down chair, which does not fulfill the most vital part of chair-ness (sitting!), is still undeniably a chair. Why? Imo, because the upside-down chair (or the 200-foot-tall chair) is not simply ignoring chair-ness, chair-tactics; it’s actually still FULLY engaging with them, in this case by rejecting/refusing those tactics. Engagement through rebellion is still engagement. The chair could be right-side up; the chair prefers not to.

Thus: a poem needn’t use/engage every “poem tactic” to be a poem. Instead, it seems that the more of them it engages (and the more important those tactics are regarded in our contemporary moment), the more immediately legible it is as a poem; the more immediately it registers its poem-ness, and invites the reader to “read it as a poem” (i.e. to feel at liberty to interpret the poem’s materiality in conversation with / relation to other poems’ materialities). Prose poems are obviously still poems even though they have no line breaks: they often still engage with many other poetic tactics, and besides—as with the chair—they are not ignoring linebreaks, they are refusing them. This is crucial to me, and an important aspect of what I’ve been calling in my mind “trust”: whether an aspect of an artwork seems like a choice (in which case it seems authoritative, deliberate, to be ‘engaging’ w/ its inheritance), or a coincidence (in which case it can seem sloppy/lazy, amateurish, un-rigorous, etc.).

Which brings me back to Blonk’s “scores and visual poems.” I know that Blonk writes more conventional ‘poetry’, and I know that some of the marks in his scores are related to invented phonemes / language systems. But when I try to accept his invitation to read these artworks as a poems, I struggle. What poetic tactics does “Little Swarm” engage with? Does “poem” here mean, for example, “read the white space between these marks like stanza breaks”? And even if it does, what does that reading actually do for me—what experience does it generate, what feelings or thoughts does it evoke, what happens to me—as a reader? In this instance (and I gently acknowledge that I’m not even sure if Blonk means “Little Swarm” to be a “visual poem” or not; perhaps it’s just a score?), this reading doesn’t really do much at all. I’m able to apply almost none of the tactics of reading/writing poems to this drawing. And so, as a potential work of “expanded poetics,” it fails for me.

(I note here, briefly, that I have far fewer qualms about calling almost anything a “score” than I do about calling almost anything a “poem.” I can’t tell if this is because I have less ‘domain expertise’ in composition, and/or because scores are simply instructions for finished artworks, & don’t really make claim to being artworks themselves. If you ask me to treat a pair of dirty underwear as a “score”, you’re simply saying, “treat this like an imperative, like a set of instructions; perform [with] this.” I can do that with any material. But I can’t necessarily “read” any material “as a poem,” or find doing so fruitful or meaningful.)

So.

Although I love the idea of “expanded poetics” (I’ll try to define this another time), right now I find many non-text-based works that explicitly make claims to being “poems,” in my heart of hearts, unconvincing / impossible to “read as poetry” productively. For example, “Little Swarm”; for example, Taiwanese-born, Paris-based artist Liping Ting’s “action poetry” (linked below): what makes this poetry? What does calling her performances “poetry” do? Obviously it cashes in on poetry’s cultural reputation, connotations, cachet; but does it truly make a difference to the audience’s experience of her work? (Again, this might be a bad example; like Blonk, I don’t know Liping’s work well, & she does seem to be inaudibly speaking during some parts of the video. I’ll choose better examples and do better research for future posts!)

I’d like to understand this better, and to more confidently expand my notions of “poetry” into territories that engage with few-to-no “traditional poetic tactics,” and to be able to articulate how and why these things are poems. To me this ambition is decolonial, an attempt to upset those human-centric male-centric white-centric etc. traditions (tho maybe it’s corrupt to upset those traditions on their terms...; but I am too steeped in western-ness, and believe too much in Poetry, not to at least try), and a way of exploring capacities of Poetry that have not received enough attention. I think to truly theorize an expanded poetics would not just bring “non-poetic disciplines” (performance, musical composition, painting, architecture, science, etc.) into the realm of poetry, but would also illuminate already existing multisensory/multidisciplinary aspects of what we already consider poetry——for example, “expanded poetics” could show that all poems are already “visual” in some (not-talked-enough-about?) sense, already “tactile,” already “structural,” already “kinetic,” etc. And of course if my ambition fails—if the answer to “what does calling this performance a ‘poem’ do?” is “not much!”—then I’d like to know that, too. I don’t want to simply nod my head like I fully get it when I don’t. I start from here: I don’t get it, I don’t know, I am curious and trying to be as openminded as possible.

via https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9fgAAsgKHlY

The analogy of the chair, by the way, also explains why I’m not very interested in answering the question “What is a poem?” There is no diagnostic checklist. The question I want to explore—the project of expanding poetics, imo—is: “If I engage with this like a poem, what happens?”

#expandedpoetics

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canon-typical-violence · 6 years ago

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today’s realization is:

[spins wheel]

That Thing people get unfiltered airtime hating in humanities and social sciences

where authors get to weird verbs on purpose? yeah that one?

that’s literally just a homebrew solution to the fact that English doesn’t do that natively

I was sorting my folder of papers to read later and it was so fucking soothing to read people bending language as needed

if you let me that’s how I would talk

by which I mean when you let me that’s how I do talk

social permission to do it in English would make my writing more accessible—the switch to Spanish for random shit like gestión, aprovechar, or gozo remains, but I don’t need to say accidentar if I could just be verbing accident—but I’ve learned which side of the language partition I don’t get yelled at

I have to believe people when they tell me this wouldn’t be the road of least resistance for them, but I don’t understand why that is the case

a guess: comparative lack of hybridization (because—independent of how many languages they speak and to what extent—not performing daily interpretation etc.? maybe? assuming it’s not just my weird fuck brain again after all?) means a more... solid, inert, discrete form of what any given word is than I have?

some of the only bilingual grammar advice I ever understood at the beginning of the verbs thread era—

(I was doing fine with the papers on linguistics and motion but I die in a fucking fire when you try to get me to understand through a framework built and vetted for and by native English adult learners of foreign languages in English environments! this really should’ve been expected)

anyway,

referred to English verbs as being small, low-content, rigid, and nude, in comparison to which Spanish verbs are mutable in size, highly informative, flexible, and extensively clothed in context

English’s structure is rigid in a top-down way because words get their meanings from their relationships to each other and don’t tell you much on their own

Spanish’s structure becomes rigid in a laterally-moving way because words together propagate a context they all have to agree on

also we have more than two or three fucking tenses? someone pointed out to me how few tenses English has that aren’t created by multiple words (modifying meaning read but not modifying one another as written) together and I have never been the same

result: even before getting into the validity of actually verbing nouns, words for me are... idk, combinations of link-outs to a concept to be rearranged as needed?

I may not have German monster words accessible to me but I hadn’t thought until tonight that maybe other people don’t think of language as being like that always

like I thought the joke was that German does it without putting spaces in

is that. is that not the joke?

like when on those translation chain posts you eventually get to people missing the point and acting like the punchline isn’t, literally, the word components

(I find my favorite fake words bot pleasing or even soothing for this reason; it’s restorative to see language be as flexible as expected, and fun to watch its workings show)

it’s not that I’m ~an intellectual~ or ~like a challenge~ or whatever the fuck, it is not difficult, the linguistic structures of notioning and problematicize and ideate and proper-nouning and pluralizing things to indicate that there are multiple working permutations of them you can run into, that is how I expect language to work

it makes sense

and maybe it doesn’t flow easy but it’s a damn sight easier than someone trying to force themselves to work with language as their master instead of as their tool

nouns are the result of a verb/a verb at rest, any verb can be made to describe an action that results in the noun it’s derived from while in motion, adjectives are there

insofar as this is difficult to understand on my end it’s because it correlates with talking about things that the general language isn’t used to but that’s... really it

it’s a damn sight easier to remember than the STEM fetish for naming things after random dead people actually

yeah I said it

people who’ve followed me for a long time say I developed my own theoretical language for daily use and I’m flattered but also a bit worried

as far as I’m concerned most of the time all you should be seeing is the equivalent of visual proof I’ve broken my boots in

I also have a personal jargon but that’s not a theoretical framework it’s glorified stenography

and memes, it’s memes

I don’t know what I’d need to do to construct an idea of language where this isn’t the easy way out, let alone how to feel out inhabiting it once constructed.

unless I’ve horribly misunderstood what people are complaining about, I need to understand, because that’s my audience and I’m responsible for that, but as the matter stands I don’t get it, I don’t know how to get it, I don’t know where to go to get it, I don’t know how to identify it

(and I am very stressed and sad because I only know this problem exists because people insult me, all the time, as cultural background radiation that is afaict commonly accepted, and the alternative is an elitism I literally lack access to and get accused of anyway?, I was forcibly removed from the house of study fam that’s me and it is a rare occasion that someone making me want to stop existing for the backhanded insult that is the accusation of ‘being too smart for them (and making them feel bad) (but not smart enough to deserve the chance to fix it they can tell you’ll fail)’ does not have years’ and years’ economic clout’s superior credentials to yours fuckass truly but welcome to hell I guess)

language-using cognitions: expla in

#im still confused and distressed that it’s perpetually accepted problematicization is a complicated or unintuitive idea #im not mad at anyone im distressed because my experience is orthogonal so i junp straight to It Does Not Real #it’s... it’s right there in the word? even aside from it being basically my personality it...? the verb tells you?#you wanna get on giles over here about a thing get on his ass about schizophrenia as metaphor that ones unintuitive #to problematicize is just a word #if thats not how words work im so confused #i need to understand #i dont even know what this field is called?#i was just born here #and cant leave #text post #the verbs thread #discourses of language use #discourses of language use in academia #things to write #personal #im need sleep tho #language #the language of humanities and human convenience

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katrinawrensford · 4 years ago

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MDM620 Week 4 Mastery Journal

Synthesis Matrix

Annotated Bibliography

Felton, G. (2013). Advertising concept and copy (3rd edition). W. W. Norton & Company.

This book from W. W. Norton & Company is an innovative approach to creative advertising. It covers the entire conceptual process from developing strategy to executing it – what to say and how to say it. Strategy operates on the premise that the idea beneath an ad’s surface determines its success. Execution explains how to put the smart strategy into play. The toolbox gives advice about how to think creatively about problem solving. This book shows how to find strong selling ideas and how to express them persuasively. It combines discussion of both strategy and technique, emphasizing the art of effective storytelling. The author shows This book is a good resource for anyone who needs a comprehensive text on topics relevant to the design industry. However, anyone who wants information more specific to the research that drives design will find that this author focuses most on strategy and the tools for executing that strategy.

Mattelmäki, T., Brandt, E., & Vaajakallio, K. (2011). On designing open-ended interpretations for collaborative design exploration. CoDesign, 7(2), 79–93. https://doi-org.oclc.fullsail.edu/10.1080/15710882.2011.609891

This article from CoDesign examines user-centered design and the idea that much attention has been paid to the methods, tools and processes of conducting design research and field studies with and about users and existing or possible contexts of use. The authors discuss the reality that designers will be better at designing if they have an empathic understanding of their audience. The authors effectively explore collaborative design and why most effort is currently being invested in nurturing human-centeredness as a design strategy. This article is a good resource for those who want to understand human centeredness as a design strategy and what it means to have empathic user understanding and engagement. However, anyone who wants to understand the nuances of communicating with design will find that this resource focuses more on understanding users. While understanding users certainly aids in effective communication with them, the author does not connect the two concepts.

urlo, F., & Cautela, C. (2014). Design Strategies in Different Narrative Frames. Design Issues, 30(1), 19–35. https://doi-org.oclc.fullsail.edu/10.1162/DESI_a_00246

This article from Design Issues explores the relationship between companies and designers. It pays particular attention to how design strategies change depending on how and what companies communicate within the context of innovation. The authors explore how different narrative frames – exploitative, user-centered, techno- and explorative – impact the design process. Additionally, the authors consider how the different narrative typologies influence design management. This article is a good resource within the context of the ideas behind the broadening of the design spectrum and design as a thinking form – design thinking.

Outcomes and Knowledge

Communication is quite possibly the most important aspect of design. The designer’s primary function is to communicate messages through various forms of media (Taylor, 2013). For communication to be effective it needs to reach the intended audience; to reach the intended audience, the message must address what is important to them. Over the course of the entire month, the research conducted focused on strategy, what you’re saying, and execution, how you’re saying it. Determining what to say starts with the product; determining how to say it starts with the consumer.

The following is a reflection of the material, challenges and concepts learned throughout the Design Integration course from the perspective of the degree learning outcomes – connecting, synthesizing, and transforming; problem solving; innovative thinking; and acquiring competencies.

Connecting, Synthesizing, Transforming

The research conducted this month was guided by a combination of information provided by the course instructor, web searches, books, and searching through the Full Sail research databases. The focus of the research dealt with communicating with design and what must be understood before the message can be created. Connections were made between Felton, Mattelmäki, Brandt & Vaajakallio and Zurlo & Cautela. Felton (2013) discusses how to find strong selling ideas and how to express them persuasively combining discussions of both strategy and technique and emphasizing the art of effective storytelling. Similarly, Mattelmäki, Brandt & Vaajakallio (2011) say that the reality is that designers will be better at designing if they have an empathic understanding of their audience. Zurlo & Cautela (2014) posit that the relationship between companies and designers and their narrative frameworks play a large role in developing a design strategy. The idea is that research and strategy do not guarantee success with regard to communicating to the target demographic but starting here creates more of a possibility for success. The desired outcome was to effectively use research to create a marketing strategy for BoxPark Sushi. The outcome was as expected.

Problem Solving

In design, a problem represents a fundamental object of concern (Beckett, 2017, p. 5), as opposed to hinderances that occur or wrenches that are thrown into one’s work. It is often posed as a question such as, how can one thing be done while some other thing is a factor? During the Design Integration course, the design problem was how can I communicate sophistication and luxury effectively to the target audience (millennials), while also beating back their negative preconceived notions about it? Two possible paths to a solution, as discovered in the research, were first to determine the associations the target audience made when they heard fine dining, luxury, sophistication. The research indicated that they associated these terms with boring, or even something unattainable. The second path to a solution was to show them how sophistication and luxury have actually evolved into something more easily attained and even fun. Both paths ultimately worked together to create a communication strategy (voice, tone, look, feel) for BoxPark Sushi.

Here is a snapshot of the research that led to creating BoxPark Sushi’s communication strategy:

Innovative Thinking

Innovation is not something one can hope to accomplish within the academic context, but more innovative thinking occurs within the academic context simply because in markets and within the organizational structure, it is disruptive. Innovative thinking is thinking that goes beyond common practice or procedure, employing thinking outside of the box.

Compared to others in the industry, my work is a pretty good representation of what we were taught throughout this month. The main goal was the continuation of the creation of the BoxPark Sushi brand identity – the voice and tone and look and feel of the brand. People tend to approach design with the idea that the main responsibility is to make things look pretty, failing to understand that the most important aspect of design is communication with the target audience. Perhaps my work was innovative insofar as it went beyond the common practice of just creating pretty brand images, and instead using research to make all of the design communication decisions for BoxPark Sushi.

Here is an example of a company that sells pre-made designs:

Here is an example of the research that allowed me to tailor my work to the target audience:

Acquiring Competencies

Acquiring competencies is at the foundation of individual and collective success in the workplace (Gosselin et al., 2013). Throughout this month, I was able to learn more aspects of conducting effective research – using primary and secondary research methods to thoroughly research a client’s product and learning what the target consumers respond to and creating assets that communicate directly to the target consumer. Research is the most important aspect of design. Freach (2011) says that design can exist without research, but if we don’t study the world, we don’t always know how or what we create (para. 1). Continued research focuses this month were particularly important because it helped to determine how to say what needed to be said about BoxPark Sushi. The challenge was creating messaging that talked to real people about real needs. This month I learned, through research, how to identify the most effective way to communicate to the target demographic.

Through the research this month, I was also able to identify and understand at least 12 concepts that were relevant to this Design Integration course. These concepts can be categorized as academic or occupational, and then further categorized as either technical or conceptual.

Voice (occupational, conceptual) - Felton (2013) says that voice is “the brand’s personality as expressed through language,” (p. 111).

Tone (occupational, conceptual) – Tone is adjusted based on who you’re talking to (Kenny, 2017) and by the context of the message.

Translating strategy to design (occupational, conceptual) - To translate strategy to design, Do & Baballer (2014) say that the following should be determined: the goal of the project, description of the customer, brand’s biggest challenges, and how success will be measured. When you can articulate this then you can begin to create designs that solve the problem and communicate to the target audience in a way that moves them to buy the product or service.

Relationship between design and emotion (occupational, conceptual) - investigates the emotional responses of users in their interaction with design outcomes. Studies within this context are conducted to help designers communicate better to users, who more readily respond to emotion (Ho, 2014).

Mood (occupational, conceptual) - establishes how users will connect with a product (Cousins, 2015, para. 5).

Visual Hierarchy (occupational, conceptual) - controls the delivery of the experience (Gordon, 2020).

Marketing and advertising strategies (occupational, conceptual) - An advertising strategy supports the overall marketing strategy; it is a plan for a particular campaign. A marketing strategy is a plan for how a company or brand will communicate to its target audience in a way that motivates them to buy the brand’s product or use their service.

Storytelling (occupational, conceptual) - using a narrative to engage your audience or to make messages clearer (Taylor, 2013).

Inspiration (occupational, conceptual) - the sum of all things that came before you that informs your creative mind. It can come from anywhere (Chapman, 2020).

The importance of research for design (occupational, conceptual) - Felton (2013) says that designers should steep themselves in information, “become an expert, get overinformed,” (p. 13).

Research methods (occupational, conceptual) - Context is critical to research (Stone, 2010) and there are different types of research that each give the designer unique insights and direction for their design projects.

Research facilitates and focuses design (occupational, conceptual) - Research helps narrow the myriad possibilities available and hopefully eliminate the wrong design concepts (Felton, 2013).

While all of these concepts are certainly important in the academic field, they are labeled as occupational because they pertain more to conducting business in the media design field. They are further categorized as conceptual because they do not pertain to a particular software or technical skill, but to ideas that can be interpreted and executed differently by different people.

Reflection

Each assignment was an extension of each prior assignment and the research this month. BoxPark Sushi’s voice and tone was established first. This determined the direction for all visuals to be used in this project:

Next, the first round of visuals was created – the static vision board. The was important for the client to see the designer’s ideas on paper. It helped to communicate the appropriate direction for the project and promote client buy-in:

The dynamic vision board was the next design challenge. Sound and motion were used here to use emotion to communicate more of the brand voice, tone, look, and feel. This was important because sound adds emotion and motion makes messages clearer:

youtube

The design brief was the final part of this month’s project. It contained all of the research conducted this month and the prior month and it was a complete picture for the client of the strategy that will be taken within the context of marketing and advertising for BoxPark Sushi.

*Final Design Brief*

References

Beckett, S. (2017). The logic of the design problem: A dialectical approach. Design Issues, 33(4), 5-16. Chapman, C. (2020, May 1). Use your inspiration: A guide to vision boards. UI Design. https://www.toptal.com/designers/visual-identity/guide-to-mood-boards

Cousins, C. (2015, February 12). How color, type and space can impact mood. Design Shack. https://designshack.net/articles/graphics/how-color-type-and-space-can-impact-mood/

Curtis, H. (2002). MTIV Process, inspiration and practice for the new media designer. New Riders.

Desmet, P. M. A., & Hekkert, P. (2009). Special issue editorial: Design & emotion. International Journal of Design, 3(2), 1-6.

Do, C. & Baballer, J. [The Futur]. (2014, October 21). How to translate strategy to design [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TpcaCW85eI0

Felton, G. (2013). Advertising concept and copy (3rd edition). W. W. Norton & Company.

Freach, J. (2011, May 27). The art of design research (and why it matters). The Atlantic. https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2011/05/the-art-of-design-research-and-why-it-matters/239561/

Gordon, K. (2020, March 1). 5 Principles of visual design in UX. Nielsen Norman Group. https://www.nngroup.com/articles/principles-visual-design/

Gosselin, D., Cooper, S., Bonnstetter, R., & Bonnstetter, B. (2013). Exploring the assessment of twenty-first century professional competencies through a business-academic partnership. Journal of Environmental Studies and Sciences, 3, 359-368. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13412-013-0140-1

Heller, S. (2014, March 13). Design is one of the most powerful forces in our lives. The Atlantic. https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2014/03/design-is-one-of-the-most-powerful-forces-in-our-lives/284388/

Ho, A. G. (2014). The relationship between emotion and the design process for designers. Archives of Design Research, 27(2), 45-55. http://dx.doi.org/10.15187/adr.2014.05.110.2.45

Inkbot Design. (2017, April 10). Marketing and advertising strategies: What’s the difference?I nkbot Design. https://medium.com/inkbot-design/marketing-and-advertising-strategies- 45242269f5ee

Kenny, J. (2017, November 1). Know the difference between tone and voice to set your brand apart. Mojo Marketing. https://gimmemojo.com/tone-voice-set-your-brand-apart/

Korenman, J. (2017, August 9). 7 Motion design lessons learned the hard way. Pond5Blog. https://blog.pond5.com/16164-7-motion-design-lessons-learned-the-hard-way/

Lundgren, A. (n.d.). Capture attention with visual hierarchy. Alvalyn Studio. https://alvalyn.com/capture-attention-with-visual-hierarchy/

Norman, D. [NNgroup]. (2016, August 4). Don Norman: Emotional Design [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=132&v=fwr4AIpvQ5o&feature=emb_logo

Rosebrook, D. (n.d.). What is design strategy? Marvel. https://blog.marvelapp.com/what-is- design-strategy/ Stone, T. L. (2010). Managing the design process: Concept development. Rockport Publishers.

Taylor, A. (2013). Design essentials for the motion media artist. Focal Press.

Zurlo, F., & Cautela, C. (2014). Design Strategies in Different Narrative Frames. Design Issues, 30(1), 19–35. https://doi-org.oclc.fullsail.edu/10.1162/DESI_a_00246

0 notes

officetime02-blog · 5 years ago

Text

Does a ketogenic diet confer the benefits of butyrate without the fibre?

Tenuous arguments from fibre apologists

According to many plant-eating enthusiasts, we must eat fibre to be healthy for the following reasons:

Note: These are not the only arguments people make for eating fibre. These are only reasons related to butyrate.

Fibre is the only way to get butyrate.

Butyrate prevents colon cancer.

Butyrate in the colon treats colitis.

Butyrate is the preferred fuel of the colonocyte, therefore it is essential.

Without butyrate your colon cells will die off.

Of the above statements, only one of them seems well-justified to me, but it also seems irrelevant. Let's start from the end.

Without butyrate your colon cells will die off.

This idea (a quote from Wikipedia) seems to to be an exaggerated interpretation of a study by Donohoe et al.. The authors are studying germ-free mice, who don't, of course, have bacteria synthesising butyrate. They describe what looks to them like impaired colon cell energetics in the mice and ultimately autophagy upregulation, meaning the cells are eating themselves. They reverse these effects with butyrate. I've already written about some of the curious paradoxes inherent in the study. To summarise, other studies consistently find germ-free mice to be healthier than wild mice by many a measure, including appearing to be more energetic, and living longer. There seems to have been a conflation of cell energy with mitochondrial energy, by not looking for mitochondrial density changes. So, I'm not convinced the butyrate made things better.

Likewise, the reported evidence of autophagy (increased autophagosomes attributed to upregulation of AMPK), insofar as it indicates autophagy, could equally be a desirable result, given the role of autophagy in maintaining healthy tissues. See, e.g. [Miz2011]. Certainly unrestrained autophagy, with no homeostatic mechanism, should result in total loss of tissue, but that doesn't seem to happen with the germ-free mice. Germ-free rodents have freakishly large caecums, and somewhat reduced small intestines, but so far as I can tell, no colon abnormalities worth mentioning. For an extensive review of the data already available in 1971 on germ-free animals, including the structure and function of various organs, see The gnotobiotic animal as a tool in the study of host microbial relationships..

In any case, if the colons of germ-free mice are at any disadvantage there are clearly more differences that might be attributable to than mere lack of butyrate. Are there other reasons to worry about colon cells that don't get any?

Butyrate is the preferred fuel of the colonocyte, therefore it is essential.

If you haven't read my thoughts on the term "preferred", the point is that what a cell will consume first isn't necessarily the fuel that is the healthiest, though it certainly can be. Other reasons could be to get rid of it, or to access the metabolites. I'm not really suggesting that butyrate is toxic to colon cells. (Though as soon as that thought occurred to me I looked for evidence that it can be, which, of course there is [Pen2007]. Apparently it can accumulate due to maldigestion or bacterial overgrowth and cause serious epithelial damage. But I digress.) All I'm saying is that habitual heavy use doesn't imply something is needed. The same argument has been made about glucose in the brain, and we all know that the brain actually needs only a very small amount of glucose, if β-hydroxybutyrate is in good supply. It's still possible that other fuels are as good or better than butyrate for the colonocyte.

Butyrate in the colon treats colitis.

Normally, colonocytes do metabolise butyrate, mostly into CO2 and ketone bodies, but this is impaired in ulcerative colitis [Roe1980], [Roe1993], [Ahm2000], such that ketogenesis is is inversely proportional to the severity of the disease [Roe1980].

This impairment may explain the mixed results in treatments involving butyrate. Some researchers have tried to treat colitis by adding more butyrate for substrate, by enema. Perhaps unsurprisingly, that has not met with much success. Or has it? I read a somewhat confusing review [Mal2015] that has several citations in it that don't appear to line up with the claims preceded by the citations, including citing the same paper that I've cited above (Roe1980), as showing "that restoration of butyrate levels by intracolonic infusion treats UC", which I can find no mention of in the paper, and citing a single paper twice, ([Ham2010]), once to say that enemas had very limited effect (which I think is correct) and once, later, to say it was a "well demonstrated" "cure". These are probably just simple citation errors on my part or theirs.

There have been some successes using enemas, but the results are mixed [Ham2008]. Insofar as there are successes, it is worth noting that the butyrate was taken in by rectal cells, not colon cells, and so the effect was post-absorptive. In other words, it must have come systemically. In fact, when the butyrate is applied directly to impaired cells it seems to worsen the situation. These points are noted in the review, and motivates their own contribution.

The researchers used intraperitoneal injections of butyrate to apparently almost completely restore colonocyte integrity in rodent models of colitis. At face value, this would suggest that it is not the butyrate that helped, but a metabolite of butyrate, i.e. ketone bodies, since peritoneal injections normally pass through the liver [Tur2011]. If it's systemic ketone bodies we want, we know how to do that! Also, this method is rarely used in humans, so it may not be easy to make any practical use of. In any case, none of this would suggest that eating plant fibre will help colitis in any way, given that the issue appears to depend on inability to use the butyrate.

Ulcerative Colitis UC and Crohn's Disease (CD) constitute the Inflammatory Bowel Diseases (IBD). There is not clear evidence that fibre intake helps with IBD, and in fact, "low residue" or "low fibre" diets are usually recommended (see below). In case you were wondering, "residue" means anything that survives digestion, and comes all the way through the intestines. That includes fibre , but also microorganisms, and secretions and cells shed from the alimentary tract.

While there are studies that support the benefit of fibre in IBD, there are others showing harm. The evidence is mixed enough to be called weak and inconclusive [Kap2016].

Anecdotes such as the "Crohn's Carnivore" suggest a different solution might hold for some:

"Eight years ago I decided to eat nothing but meat for a year. Now I have a perfectly normal colon. If those two events are indeed correlated, and someone could figure out exactly how, a whole lot of people would be able to find relief from a terrible disease."

That experience runs both with and possibly against current dietary guidelines for IBD. In a 2011 review [Bro2011], the authors show that most guidelines advise low fibre intake, especially during flares. Some also advise low fat intake, and in particular, to eat lean meat. I'm not sure whether the Crohn's Carnivore was eating lean or fatty meat during his year of healing. At first blush, the low fat advisory looks like just another "extra-mile" kind of recommendation, in which guideline writers are throwing in other ideas about healthy diet for good measure. However, they state that it comes from the reported reactions of some patients. They also cite patient surveys which list meat as a provoking food in 25% of respondents. (The most common response was vegetables, at 40%). One wonders if there are conflations. Later, the authors specifically say that there is little to support or refute a low fat recommendation.

Another anecdote, this time elevated to "case study" level, because physicians penned it, comes from the Evolutionary Medicine Working Group, in Budapest, Hungary [Tot2016]. They report complete resolution of symptoms in a child with Crohn's and cessation of medications from an essentially meat-only diet. The exception was that patient was allowed some honey, but it was low enough that ketosis was maintained. This was a 2:1 fat:protein diet, so definitely not low fat. The child had previously tried low fat, low fibre, and several medications without improvement. It is interesting to note that even one dose of "paleo approved" fibre caused a flare up.

"Given the patient's severe condition upon the first visit the paleolithic ketogenic diet was started in the strictest form thus containing no vegetables and fruits at all. Such a diet may first sound restrictive but our previous experience indicate that a full fat-meat diet is needed in the most severe cases of Crohn's disease. In addition, our experience shows that even a single occasion of deviation from diet rules may result in lasting relapse. This was the case in the present patient too where breaking the strict rules (eating the "paleo cakes") resulted in a thickening of the bowel wall. Based on our experience this is due to the components of the popular paleolithic diet including coconut oil, oil seeds and sugar alcohols which may trigger inflammation."

In other words, a fibre-free ketogenic diet appears help IBD more than a diet including fibre, even a ketogenic diet including fibre.

Butyrate prevents colon cancer.

The idea that butyrate might be protective of colon cancer seems to have started in the 1980s (see, e.g., [Sen2006].

This area of research is extensive, and I am by no means an expert. If you haven't guessed, that butyrate has a protective effect on colon cancer is the one statement I think is entirely defensible.

It's not known exactly how butyrate exerts its protective effects, but some mechanisms held to be important are also induced by β-hydroxybutyrate. For example butyrate's histone deacelytase (HDAC) inhibition is considered an important mechanism [Hin2002], [Blo2011]. β-Hydroxybutyrate is also an HDAC inhibitor [Shi2013].

Gpr109a receptor activation is a recently identified mechanism [Sin2014]. Gpr109a has many aliases, including hydroxycarboxylic acid receptor 2 (HCA2) or niacin receptor 1 (NIACR1), and HM74a/PUMA-G. Gpr109a is activated by β-hydroxybutyrate [Tag2005], [Rah2014], [Gam2012]. It is sometimes simply called the β-hydroxybutyrate receptor.

In fact, the argument behind the relevance of the Gpr109a discovery is just as strong an argument for a ketogenic diet as for eating fibre! (This sentence is incorrect. See Edit.) That is, the researchers demonstrated that butyrate could substitute for niacin in activating these receptors, and that just as niacin activation of Gpr109a in fat cells is protective of cardiovascular disease, it may also be in diseases of the colon, and this argues for eating fibre to substitute for pharmalogic doses of niacin. From a press release:

"We think mega-doses of niacin may be useful in the treatment and/or prevention of ulcerative colitis, Crohn's disease, and colorectal cancer as well as familial adenomatous polyposis, or FAP, a genetic condition that causes polyps to develop throughout the gastrointestinal tract"

...

"Research teams at GlaxoSmithKline and the University of Heidelberg, Germany showed in 2003 that Gpr109a receptors on the surface of fat cells mediate the protective cardiovascular effect of niacin, including increasing good cholesterol, or HDL, while decreasing levels of disease-producing LDL. Their search for other activators identified butyrate, which led Ganapathy to find that not only is the Gpr109a receptor expressed on the surface of colon cells, but that with sufficient fiber intake, butyrate levels in the colon can activate it."

[Edit]

2018-01-04: A critic pointed out that the cell receptors for SCFAs are facing the lumen, and therefore argued that beta-hydroxybutyrate from the portal side would be irrelevant. Indeed, the researchers using niacin also assume that the extremely high dose of niacin does not act sytemically, but rather reaches the lumen because of the super-high doses. So the statement I made above, about the argument for beta-hydroxybutyrate being equal to that for niacin is not correct. The argument still stands that the beta-hydroxybutyrate metabolites activating targets inside could be where the majority of the benefits of butyate come from. That is where the HDAC inhibition occurs and where the immune cell receptors are. At least one research group agrees with my speculation that the interior metabolites may be important for the effect [Siv2017]

" "As the cell-surface receptors for SCFAs are located on the lumen-facing apical membrane of colonic epithelial cells (see below), the luminal concentrations of these agonists are physiologically relevant. SCFAs are low-affinity agonists for these receptors, and the normal luminal concentrations of these bacterial metabolites are in the millimolar levels, sufficient to activate these receptors from the luminal side. However, some of the molecular targets for these metabolites are either inside the cells (e.g., HDACs) or on the surface of the immune cells located in the lamina propria. Therefore, concentrations of these metabolites inside the colonic epithelial cells and in the lamina propria are relevant to impact these molecular targets. The intracellular target HDAC is inhibited by butyrate and propionate at low micromolar concentrations. There are effective transport systems for SCFAs in the apical membrane of colonic epithelial cells (e.g., proton-coupled and sodium-coupled monocarboxylate transporters) [47], thus making it very likely for these SCFAs to reach intracellular levels sufficient to inhibit HDACs. Even though the luminal concentrations of SCFAs are in the millimolar range, it is unlikely that they reach lamina propria at significant levels to activate the cell-surface receptors present on the mucosal immune cells. These metabolites are present only at micromolar levels in the portal blood [57], indicating that they undergo robust metabolism inside the colonic epithelial cells. This raises the question as to the physiological relevance of these bacterial metabolites to the activation of the cell-surface SCFA receptors in immune cells located in the lamina propria. With regard to this issue, it is important to note that colonic epithelial cells are highly ketogenic; they use acetate and butyrate to generate the ketone body β-hydroxybutyrate [58]. This ketone body is released from the cells into portal blood. As β-hydroxybutyrate is 3–4 times more potent than butyrate in activating its receptor GPR109A, it can be speculated that the colon-derived ketone body is most likely involved in the activation of the SCFA receptor in mucosal immune cells."

Moreover, see the preliminary systemic evidence below.

Interestingly, as in the case of colitis, colorectal cancer appears to involve a dysfunction in ability to use butyrate. Specifically, there are detrimental changes in membrane transport that reduce its entry into the cell [Gon2016]. Therefore, it's unclear that once the disease process has begun, increased fibre intake will be of any use. Beta-hydroxybutyrate in the bloodstream, however, might.

There is at least some preliminary evidence that butyrate in the bloodstream has similar effects on intestinal tissue as butyrate coming from the colon itself [Kor1990], [Rol1997], [Bar2004], as does infusion of glutamine and acetoacetate, another ketone body [Rom1990]. Ketogenic diets do increase blood acetoacetate. If bloodstream infusion of butyrate is as effective as absorption of butyrate in the intestines in protecting colon cells from degradation, then it seems reasonable to hypothesise that β-hydroxybutyrate in the bloodstream would also have this effect.

These common mechanisms suggest that much or even all of the benefits obtainable by butyrate are equally achievable simply through ketogenic diets, making additional butyrate in the context of a ketogenic diet potentially superfluous.

Fibre is the only way to get butyrate.

Even though it seems likely that a fibre-free ketogenic diet is not only sufficient for colon health, but better for treating colon disease, we might feel cautious about going without the butyrate from fibre, given the dire pronouncements from nutritional scientists. Is there any other way to get butyrate? The most significant food source, butter, doesn't give much. Only about 3-4% of butter is butyric acid. According to [Sen2006] we produce >200mmol per day. That would take about a pound of butter!

Stepping back, it should be obvious that carnivores such as felines and canines provide an important source of data relevant to this question. Carnivores have colons, and they are not normally in ketosis unless food is scarce. Either their colons don't need butyrate, or they are getting sufficient butyrate from some other source. As it happens, there are microbes that ferment amino acids in to short chain fatty acids (SCFAs), including butyrate. Carnivores are known to get "animal fibre" from their prey. That is, amino acids from incompletely digested animal parts reach their colons and are fermented. In particular, in cheetahs, casein, collagen, and glucosamine have been shown to result in butyrate production comparable to fructo-oligosaccharides [Dep2012].

Beyond poorly digested animal sourced fibre, many amino acids are fermented into SCFAs, including butyrate [Ras1988], and these amino acids are abundant in human intestines and colons and are fermented there [Vit2014], [Dai2015], [Nei2015], [Wie2017]. I was unable to determine how much butyrate this would account for.

I did find research comparing the SCFA levels produced in dogs under conditions of high fibre vs. meat alone showing that they produced almost as much VFA (another word for SCFA) in their colons eating meat alone [Ban1979].

In any case, we certainly do generate butyrate in the absence of dietary fibre.

In sum

Although many in the medical community consider butyrate an essential fuel for colon cells, there may be a parallel to glucose and brain cells, in that some or all of this functionality could be replaceable with β-hydroxybutyrate. This idea is supported by these observations:

Carnivores and even germ-free mice have intact, working colons without contributions from fibre-derived butyrate, so it stands to reason that humans may not need it either.

Although not discussed in this post, some recent societies thrived on animal-based diets with little and infrequent plant intake.

β-hydroxybutyrate triggers many of the same mechanisms that butyrate does; those very mechanisms thought to explain its role in preventing colon cancer and the intestinal degradation seen in diseased colons or the colons of those receiving reduced fibre diets to promote bowel rest.

β-hydroxybutyrate may even be the pathway through which butyrate exerts its beneficial effects, given that it is a direct metabolite of butyrate, and that systemic butyrate appears to be as effective or even more effective in treating colitis, than direct application of butyrate to the cells.

Even without eating fibre, our intestinal microbes produce butyrate from amino acids. If systemic ketone bodies supplant or even just reduce the need for butyrate, amino acid derived butyrate may supply this need, even if the quantities turn out to be less than we would get from fibre.

End-to-end citations

[Ahm2000]

Evidence type: non-human animal experiment

Butyrate and glucose metabolism by colonocytes in experimental colitis in mice.

Ahmad MS, Krishnan S, Ramakrishna BS, Mathan M, Pulimood AB, Murthy SN.

Gut. 2000 Apr;46(4):493-9.

"Abstract

"BACKGROUND/AIMS:

"Impaired colonocyte metabolism of butyrate has been implicated in the aetiopathogenesis of ulcerative colitis. Colonocyte butyrate metabolism was investigated in experimental colitis in mice.

"METHODS:

"Colitis was induced in Swiss outbred white mice by oral administration of 4% dextran sulphate sodium (DSS). Colonocytes isolated from colitic and normal control mice were incubated with [(14)C]butyrate or glucose, and production of (14)CO(2), as well as of intermediate metabolites (acetoacetate, beta-hydroxybutyrate and lactate), was measured. The effect of different substrate concentrations on oxidation was also examined.

"RESULTS:

"Butyrate oxidation (micromol/h per mg protein; mean (SEM)) was significantly reduced in DSS colitis, values on day 7 of DSS administration being 0.177 (0.007) compared with 0.406 (0.035) for control animals (p<0.001). Glucose oxidation (micromol/h per mg protein; mean (SEM)) on day 7 of DSS administration was significantly higher than in controls (0.06 (0.006) v 0.027 (0.004), p<0.001). Production of beta-hydroxybutyrate was decreased and production of lactate increased in DSS colitis compared with controls. Increasing butyrate concentration from 10 to 80 mM enhanced oxidation in DSS colitis (0.036 (0.002) to 0.285 (0.040), p<0.001), although it continued to remain lower than in controls. Surface and crypt epithelial cells showed similar ratios of butyrate to glucose oxidation. When 1 mM DSS was added to normal colonocytes in vitro, it did not alter butyrate oxidation. The initial histological lesion of DSS administration was very patchy and involved crypt cells. Abnormal butyrate oxidation became apparent only after six days of DSS administration, at which time histological abnormalities were more widespread.

"CONCLUSIONS:

"Colonocyte metabolism of butyrate, but not of glucose, is impaired in DSS colitis, and may be important in pathophysiology. Histological abnormalities preceded measurable defects in butyrate oxidation."

[Ban1979]

Evidence type: non-human animal experiment

Sites of organic acid production and patterns of digesta movement in the gastrointestinal tract of dogs

Banta, C. A., Clemens, E. T., Krinsky, M. M., and SheiIy, B. E., 1979,

J. Nutr. 109:1592-1600.

"Two commercial type diest, one a cereal based dry food, the other a fortified all meat canned food were fed to male and female adult beagle dogs to evaluate effects of diet on rate of digesta passage and organic acid concentration along the gastrointestinal tract. [...] Concentrations of VFA were highest in the cecum and colon and were not significantly affected by diet."

"Symbols on the abscissa denote sec tions of tract as follows : cranial stomach ( Si ) ; caudal stomach ( 82) ; proximal ( Sii ), middle (SI2) and distal (SL) thirds of the small intestine; cecum (Ce); and proximal (Ci) and distal (CÂ«) halves of the colon ( n = 3 )."

[...]

"It was surprising to see high concentrations of VFA produced in the lower gut of dogs fed the meat diet. It was logical to assume that liver and muscle glycogen could serve as the fermentable substrate for lactate production in the stomach, but most of this should have been digested and absorbed by the small intes tine. Another possible source of ferment able substance which could survive passage through the small intestine is the protein- polysaccharides of the connective tissue ground substance found in abundance in the meat by-products and whole ground chicken. The ground substance is made up of chondroitin sulfates and hyaluronic acid. The polysaccharide portion of these substances is composed of long chains of disaccharide units consisting of glucosa- mine or galactosamine and glucuronic acid. The linkages of these polysaccharides are not such that they can be cleaved by the endogenous digestive enzymes found in the gut but they could be split by microbial enzymes."

[Bar2004]

Evidence type: non-human animal experiment

Supplementation of total parenteral nutrition with butyrate acutely increases structural aspects of intestinal adaptation after an 80% jejunoileal resection in neonatal piglets.

Bartholome AL1, Albin DM, Baker DH, Holst JJ, Tappenden KA.

JPEN J Parenter Enteral Nutr. 2004 Jul-Aug;28(4):210-22; discussion 222-3.

"BACKGROUND:

"Supplementation of total parenteral nutrition (TPN) with a mixture of short-chain fatty acids (SCFA) enhances intestinal adaptation in the adult rodent model. However, the ability and timing of SCFA to augment adaptation in the neonatal intestine is unknown. Furthermore, the specific SCFA inducing the intestinotrophic effects and underlying regulatory mechanism(s) are unclear. Therefore, we examined the effect of SCFA supplemented TPN on structural aspects of intestinal adaptation and hypothesized that butyrate is the SCFA responsible for these effects.

"METHODS:

"Piglets (n = 120) were randomized to (1) control TPN or TPN supplemented with (2) 60 mmol/L SCFA (36 mmol/L acetate, 15 mmol/L propionate and 9 mmol/L butyrate), (3) 9 mmol/L butyrate, or (4) 60 mmol/L butyrate. Within each group, piglets were further randomized to examine acute (4, 12, or 24 hours) and chronic (3 or 7 days) adaptations. Indices of intestinal adaptation, including crypt-villus architecture, proliferation and apoptosis, and concentration of the intestinotrophic peptide, glucagon-like pepide-2 (GLP-2), were measured.

"RESULTS:

"Villus height was increased (p < .029) within 4 hours by supplemented TPN treatments. Supplemented TPN treatments increased (p < .037) proliferating cell nuclear antigen expression along the entire intestine. Indicative of an antiapoptotic profile, jejunal Bax:Bcl-w abundance was decreased (p = .033) by both butyrate-supplemented TPN treatments, and ileal abundance was decreased (p = .0002) by all supplemented TPN treatments, regardless of time. Supplemented TPN treatments increased (p = .016) plasma GLP-2 concentration at all time points.

"CONCLUSIONS:

"Butyrate is the SCFA responsible for augmenting structural aspects of intestinal adaptations by increasing proliferation and decreasing apoptosis within 4 hours postresection. The intestinotrophic mechanism(s) underlying butyrate's effects may involve GLP-2. Ultimately, butyrate administration may enable an infant with short-bowel syndrome to successfully transition to enteral feedings by maximizing their absorptive area."

[Bro2011]

Evidence type: review

Existing dietary guidelines for Crohn's disease and ulcerative colitis.

Brown AC, Rampertab SD, Mullin GE.

Expert Rev Gastroenterol Hepatol. 2011 Jun;5(3):411-25. doi: 10.1586/egh.11.29.

"In terms of existing guidelines for dietary modifications, three suggested limiting dairy if lactose intolerant, two suggested limiting excess fat, one indicated decreasing excess carbohydrates, and five suggested avoiding high-fiber foods, especially during flares. The question of whether or not to use probiotics continues to be debated."

[...]

"Reducing high-fiber foods during symptoms appears to have generated the most support in the dietary guidelines. It may be important to communicate to IBD patients that high-fiber foods are not recommended, especially for those with CD, during flares or in the presence of active disease states, fistulas or strictures. There appears to be a tendency among the dietary guidelines to restrict foods such as raw fruits, raw vegetables, beans, bran, popcorn, seeds, nuts, corn hulls, whole grains, brown rice and wild rice. Although not mentioned, raw salads would also fall into this category."

[...]

"Some patients with IBD react to excess dietary fat and perhaps this is where the recommendation is derived. Few research studies are available to support or refute such a recommendation. The topic needs further investigation because patients with malabsorption may be at risk of not obtaining their necessary essential fatty acids. Perhaps saturated fats should be limited, with more of an emphasis on more healthy fat intakes."

[Dai2015]

Evidence type: review

Amino acid metabolism in intestinal bacteria and its potential implications for mammalian reproduction

Zhaolai Dai Zhenlong Wu Suqin Hang Weiyun Zhu Guoyao Wu

MHR: Basic science of reproductive medicine, Volume 21, Issue 5, 1 May 2015, Pages 389–409

"Recent studies with the human colonic bacteria have shown that protein- and AA-fermenting bacteria are abundant and diverse in the colon. The abundance of the AA-fermenting bacteria in the large intestine is very high and their number can reach up to 1011 per gram dry feces (Smith and Macfarlane, 1998). Using the traditional plate counting technique, the authors have also reported that the dominant bacterial species for the utilization of single AA or pairs of AA are very different. For instance, Clostridium bifermentans is the predominant bacteria for the utilization of lysine or proline, and pairs of AA (e.g. phenylalanine/leucine, isoleucine/tryptophan and alanine/glycine), whereas Peptostreptococcus spp. bacteria are predominant for the utilization of glutamate or tryptophan. Many species of bacteria utilize the same AA as substrates for growth (Smith and Macfarlane, 1998). Overall, bacteria belonging to the Clostridium spp. dominate in AA fermentation in the human large intestine, but other bacterial species, such as Fusobacterium spp., Bacteroides spp., Veillonella spp., Megasphaera elsdenii and Selenomonas ruminantium, may also be important for AA metabolism in the large intestine (Smith and Macfarlane, 1998; Dai et al., 2011)."

[Dep2012]

Evidence type: non-human animal experiment

Fermentation of animal components in strict carnivores: A comparative study with cheetah fecal inoculum.

Depauw, S., G. Bosch, M. Hesta, K. Whitehouse-Tedd, W. H. Hendriks, J. Kaandorp, and G. P. J. Janssens. 2012.

J. Anim. Sci. 90:2540-2548. doi:10.2527/jas.2011-4377

"End-product profile per unit of OM differed among substrates (Table 3). The greatest total SCFA production was recorded for FOS (P < 0.05), followed by collagen, casein, and glucosamine (P < 0.05). The FOS and collagen showed comparable acetate production. Collagen not only had a high production of total SCFA but also resulted in a greater acetate to propionate ratio relative to all other substrates (8.41:1 for collagen and 1.67:1–2.97:1 for other substrates). Chicken cartilage and glucosamine-chondroitin produced similar total SCFA production, which was moderate compared with FOS (P < 0.05). Total SCFA production from incubated rabbit bone and skin was low (P < 0.05), whereas total SCFA production from rabbit hair was negligible and comparable with the negative control cellulose. Butyrate production was greatest for casein and glucosamine (P < 0.05). Incubation with casein resulted in the greatest total BCFA production (P < 0.05), which was more than double compared with all other substrates that had similar total BCFA production. Considerable variation in BCFA ratios was observed among substrates. In all animal substrates, isovalerate was the main BCFA, whereas fermentation of FOS, glucosamine, and glucosamine-chondroitin led to valerate as the main BCFA. The greatest amount of ammonia production was observed for casein, collagen, and rabbit bone (P < 0.05), whereas the least ammonia production was detected for FOS, cellulose, and rabbit hair (P < 0.05)."

[Gam2012]

Evidence type: non-human animal and human cell in vitro experiments

GPR109A as an Anti-Inflammatory Receptor in Retinal Pigment Epithelial Cells and Its Relevance to Diabetic Retinopathy.

Gambhir D, Ananth S, Veeranan-Karmegam R, et al.

Investigative Ophthalmology & Visual Science. 2012;53(4):2208-2217. doi:10.1167/iovs.11-8447.

"GPR109A is the G-protein–coupled receptor responsible for mediating the antilipolytic actions of niacin (nicotinic acid), a B-complex vitamin and also a drug used widely to lower blood lipid levels.1 β-hydroxybutyrate (β-HB) is the physiologic ligand for this receptor.2 GPR109A expression was initially thought to be limited to adipocytes, the cell type in which its antilipolytic functions are most warranted, and immune cells.3–5 Recent reports, however, have described expression of the receptor in a number of other cell types, including hepatocytes6 and epithelial cells of the small intestine and colon.7,8 In addition, we demonstrated GPR109A expression in the retinal pigment epithelium (RPE), localized specifically to the basolateral membrane.9 Although GPR109A is most noted functionally for its antilipolytic effects in adipocytes, recent studies suggest that activation of the receptor also is associated with novel immunomodulatory responses.10–12 We have characterized expression of GPR109A in RPE; however, the functional significance of receptor expression in this cell type remains unknown."

[Gon2016]

Evidence type: review

Regulation of colonic epithelial butyrate transport: Focus on colorectal cancer

Pedro Gonçalves and Fátima Martel

Porto Biomedical Journal Volume 1, Issue 3, July–August 2016, Pages 83-91

"The most important molecular mechanisms involved in the anticarcinogenic effect of BT are dependent on its intracellular concentration (because HDAC expression is overregulated,41,42 while BT membrane receptors (GPR109A and GPR43) are silenced or downregulated in CRC34,38). So, knowledge on the mechanisms involved in its membrane transport is relevant to both its physiological and pharmacological benefits. Also, changes in transporter expression or function will have an obvious impact on the effect of BT, and therefore, knowledge on the regulation of its membrane transport seems particularly important.

[...]

"[D]ifferences in MCT1, SMCT1 and BCRP expression between normal colonocytes and tumoral cells contribute to the different effects of BT in these cells (‘the BT paradox’). More specifically, BT is transported into normal colonic epithelial cells by both MCT1 and SMCT1, but its intracellular concentration is kept low because it is efficiently metabolized and effluxed from these cells by BCRP-mediated transport. In contrast, colonic epithelial tumoral cells show a decrease in SMCT1 protein expression, and BT is taken up by these cells through MCT1. In these cells, BT accumulates intracellularly because it is inefficiently metabolized (due to the fact that glucose becomes the primary energy source of these cells) and because there is a reduction in BCRP expression."

[Hin2002]

Evidence type: human cell in vitro experiment

The Effects of Short-Chain Fatty Acids on Human Colon Cancer Cell Phenotype Are Associated with Histone Hyperacetylation

Brian F. Hinnebusch, Shufen Meng, James T. Wu, Sonia Y. Archer, and Richard A. Hodin

J. Nutr. May 1, 2002 vol. 132 no. 5 1012-1017

"The short-chain fatty acid (SCFA) butyrate is produced via anaerobic bacterial fermentation within the colon and is thought to be protective in regard to colon carcinogenesis. Although butyrate (C4) is considered the most potent of the SCFA, a variety of other SCFA also exist in the colonic lumen. Butyrate is thought to exert its cellular effects through the induction of histone hyperacetylation. We sought to determine the effects of a variety of the SCFA on colon carcinoma cell growth, differentiation and apoptosis. HT-29 or HCT-116 (wild-type and p21-deleted) cells were treated with physiologically relevant concentrations of various SCFA, and histone acetylation state was assayed by acid-urea-triton-X gel electrophoresis and immunoblotting. Growth and apoptotic effects were studied by flow cytometry, and differentiation effects were assessed using transient transfections and Northern blotting. Propionate (C3) and valerate (C5) caused growth arrest and differentiation in human colon carcinoma cells. The magnitude of their effects was associated with a lesser degree of histone hyperacetylation compared with butyrate. Acetate (C2) and caproate (C6), in contrast, did not cause histone hyperacetylation and also had no appreciable effects on cell growth or differentiation. SCFA-induced transactivation of the differentiation marker gene, intestinal alkaline phosphatase (IAP), was blocked by histone deacetylase (HDAC), further supporting the critical link between SCFA and histones. Butyrate also significantly increased apoptosis, whereas the other SCFA studied did not. The growth arrest induced by the SCFA was characterized by an increase in the expression of the p21 cell-cycle inhibitor and down-regulation of cyclin B1 (CB1). In p21-deleted HCT-116 colon cancer cells, the SCFA did not alter the rate of proliferation. These data suggest that the antiproliferative, apoptotic and differentiating properties of the various SCFA are linked to the degree of induced histone hyperacetylation. Furthermore, SCFA-mediated growth arrest in colon carcinoma cells requires the p21 gene."

[Blo2011]

Evidence type: in vitro experiments

Butyrate elicits a metabolic switch in human colon cancer cells by targeting the pyruvate dehydrogenase complex.

Blouin, J.-M., Penot, G., Collinet, M., Nacfer, M., Forest, C., Laurent-Puig, P., Coumoul, X., Barouki, R., Benelli, C. and Bortoli, S. (2011)

Int. J. Cancer, 128: 2591–2601. doi:10.1002/ijc.25599

"Butyrate, a short-chain fatty acid produced by the colonic bacterial fermentation is able to induce cell growth inhibition and differentiation in colon cancer cells at least partially through its capacity to inhibit histone deacetylases. Since butyrate is expected to impact cellular metabolic pathways in colon cancer cells, we hypothesize that it could exert its antiproliferative properties by altering cellular metabolism. We show that although Caco2 colon cancer cells oxidized both butyrate and glucose into CO2, they displayed a higher oxidation rate with butyrate as substrate than with glucose. Furthermore, butyrate pretreatment led to an increase cell capacity to oxidize butyrate and a decreased capacity to oxidize glucose, suggesting that colon cancer cells, which are initially highly glycolytic, can switch to a butyrate utilizing phenotype, and preferentially oxidize butyrate instead of glucose as energy source to produce acetyl coA. Butyrate pretreated cells displayed a modulation of glutamine metabolism characterized by an increased incorporation of carbons derived from glutamine into lipids and a reduced lactate production. The butyrate-stimulated glutamine utilization is linked to pyruvate dehydrogenase complex since dichloroacetate reverses this effect. Furthermore, butyrate positively regulates gene expression of pyruvate dehydrogenase kinases and this effect involves a hyperacetylation of histones at PDK4 gene promoter level. Our data suggest that butyrate exerts two distinct effects to ensure the regulation of glutamine metabolism: it provides acetyl coA needed for fatty acid synthesis, and it also plays a role in the control of the expression of genes involved in glucose utilization leading to the inactivation of PDC."

[Jas1985]

Evidence type: armchair

Diet, butyric acid and differentiation of gastrointestinal tract tumours.

Jass JR

Med Hypotheses. 1985 Oct;18(2):113-8.

"Abstract

"Butyric acid has two contrasting functional roles. As a product of fermentation within the human colon, it serves as the most important energy source for normal colorectal epithelium. It also promotes the differentiation of cultured malignant cells. A switch from aerobic to anaerobic metabolism accompanies neoplastic transformation in the colorectum. The separate functional roles for n-butyrate may reflect the different metabolic activities of normal and neoplastic tissues. Relatively low intracolonic levels of n-butyrate are associated with a low fibre diet. Deficiency of n-butyrate, coupled to the increased energy requirements of neoplastic tissues, may promote the switch to anaerobic metabolism. The presence of naturally occurring differentiating agents, such as n-butyrate, may modify the patterns of growth and differentiation of gastrointestinal tumours."

[Ham2008]

Evidence type: review

Review article: the role of butyrate on colonic function.

HAMER, H. M., JONKERS, D., VENEMA, K., VANHOUTVIN, S., TROOST, F. J. and BRUMMER, R.-J. (2008)

Alimentary Pharmacology & Therapeutics, 27: 104–119. doi:10.1111/j.1365-2036.2007.03562.x

"Although some controlled studies with enemas containing butyrate or SCFA mixtures in UC patients did not find beneficial effects121 or only trends towards clinical improvement,46, 118, 119 various other studies revealed a significant improvement in clinical and inflammatory parameters.45, 115, 120, 124, 126 Studies in patients with diversion colitis reported inconsistent results with regard to improvement in clinical symptoms and inflammatory parameters in response to administration of mixtures of SCFAs vs. placebo.96, 114 Two other human intervention studies determined mucosal cell proliferation in patients after Hartmann’s procedure and found trophic effects of SCFA mixtures in the mucosa of the closed rectal and sigmoid segment.73, 116"

"The effects of butyrate containing enemas on radiation proctitis113, 117, 122, 125 and pouchitis123 have been studied in small groups and besides one report125 that showed that butyrate was an effective treatment of radiation proctitis, other studies did not report clear-cut beneficial effects of SCFA irrigation in these two patient groups."

[Ham2010]

Evidence type: human experiment

Effect of butyrate enemas on inflammation and antioxidant status in the colonic mucosa of patients with ulcerative colitis in remission.

Hamer HM, Jonkers DM, Vanhoutvin SA, Troost FJ, Rijkers G, de Bruïne A, Bast A, Venema K, Brummer RJ.

Clin Nutr. 2010 Dec;29(6):738-44. doi: 10.1016/j.clnu.2010.04.002. Epub 2010 May 15.

"Abstract

"BACKGROUND & AIMS:

"Butyrate, produced by colonic fermentation of dietary fibers is often hypothesized to beneficially affect colonic health. This study aims to assess the effects of butyrate on inflammation and oxidative stress in subjects with chronically mildly elevated parameters of inflammation and oxidative stress.

"METHODS:

"Thirty-five patients with ulcerative colitis in clinical remission daily administered 60 ml rectal enemas containing 100mM sodium butyrate (n=17) or saline (n=18) during 20 days (NCT00696098). Before and after the intervention feces, blood and colonic mucosal biopsies were obtained. Parameters of antioxidant defense and oxidative damage, myeloperoxidase, several cytokines, fecal calprotectin and CRP were determined.

"RESULTS:

"Butyrate enemas induced minor effects on colonic inflammation and oxidative stress. Only a significant increase of the colonic IL-10/IL-12 ratio was found within butyrate-treated patients (p=0.02), and colonic concentrations of CCL5 were increased after butyrate compared to placebo treatment (p=0.03). Although in general butyrate did not affect colonic glutathione levels, the effects of butyrate enemas on total colonic glutathione appeared to be dependent on the level of inflammation.

"CONCLUSION:

"Although UC patients in remission were characterized by low-grade oxidative stress and inflammation, rectal butyrate enemas showed only minor effects on inflammatory and oxidative stress parameters."

[Kap2016]

Evidence type: review

Fiber and the Risk of Flaring in Patients With Inflammatory Bowel Diseases: Lessons From the Crohn's and Colitis Foundation of America Database

Gilaad G. Kaplan, MD, MPH, FRCPC

Clinical Gastroenterology and Hepatology , Volume 14 , Issue 8 , 1137 - 1139

"After reviewing the study from Brotherton et al and prior literature, information for patients with IBD on the effects of fiber on the risk of flaring is unclear. The current article adds to this discussion but does not definitively answer the question. Overall, the data suggest that in the absence of a known fibrostenotic stricture with obstructive symptoms, a high fiber diet is likely safe in patients with IBD and may impart a weak benefit. Yet, answering these clinically relevant questions with more confidence and detail is within our grasp. The advent of e-cohorts offers the potential to transform research in the future by allowing investigators to design cost-efficient Web-based clinical studies, particularly for interventional environmental clinical trials."

[Kor1990]

Evidence type: non-human animal experiment

Parenteral nutrition supplemented with short-chain fatty acids: effect on the small-bowel mucosa in normal rats.

Koruda MJ1, Rolandelli RH, Bliss DZ, Hastings J, Rombeau JL, Settle RG.

Am J Clin Nutr. 1990 Apr;51(4):685-9.

"Abstract

"When enteral nutrition is excluded from animals maintained solely with total parenteral nutrition (TPN), atrophy of the intestinal mucosa is observed. Short-chain fatty acids (SCFAs) are produced in the colon by the fermentation of dietary carbohydrates and fiber polysaccharides and have been shown to stimulate mucosal-cell mitotic activity in the intestine. This study compared the effects of an intravenous and an intracecal infusion of SCFAs on the small-bowel mucosa. Rats received standard TPN, TPN with SCFAs (sodium acetate, propionate, and butyrate), TPN with an intracecal infusion of SCFAs, or rat food. After 7 d jejunal and ileal mucosal weights, DNA, RNA, and protein were determined. Standard TPN produced significant atrophy of the jejunal and ileal mucosa. Both the intracecal and intravenous infusion of SCFAs significantly reduced the mucosal atrophy associated with TPN. The intravenous and intracolonic infusion of SCFAs were equally effective in inhibiting small-bowel mucosal atrophy."

[Mal2015]

Evidence type: non-human animal experiment

Intraperitoneal administration of butyrate prevents the severity of acetic acid colitis in rats

Joshua J. Malago and Catherine L. Sangu

Zhejiang Univ Sci B. 2015 Mar; 16(3): 224–234. doi: 10.1631/jzus.B1400191

"Earlier studies that linked the development of UC and butyrate levels in the colon, observed that deficiency of butyrate leads to disease development and that restoration of butyrate levels by intracolonic infusion treats UC (Roediger, 1980). Since then, butyrate enemas have popularly been used as medicaments stemming from their potential to impart beneficial attributes to the colon. This potential involves an increase in mechanical strength of injured colonic mucosa to hasten the healing process (Bloemen et al., 2010; Mathew et al., 2010), suppression of IL-8 production by intestinal epithelial cells to protect against the inflammatory process (Malago et al., 2005), and clinical remission of UC by protecting against inflammatory and oxidative stress parameters of the disease (Hamer et al., 2010b). Much as butyrate tends to impart a protective effect, several authors have indicated failures or limited success of butyrate to relieve IBD patients (Harig et al., 1989; Sanderson, 1997; Hamer et al., 2010b)."

...

"Topical administration of butyrate to cure colitis has been fairly well demonstrated (Scheppach et al., 1992; Hamer et al., 2010a; 2010b). This is done mainly through intrarectal administration of enemas that contain butyrate. The procedure is one of the earliest approaches to treat UC even in patients who had been unresponsive to or intolerant of standard therapy (Scheppach et al., 1992). The intrarectally administered butyrate needs to be absorbed before it works. Normally butyrate absorption mainly occurs in proximal colon whose function is impaired during UC. This hinders absorption of topically administered butyrate and may not benefit UC patients. However, butyrate absorption in the colon can be increased by manipulating electrolyte composition in the rectal lumen (Holtug et al., 1995) since rectal butyrate absorption remains normal during UC (Hove et al., 1995). Thus, topical butyrate, given intrarectally in form of SB, plays a double role; firstly by employing sodium ions, it accelerates rectal absorption of SB and secondly, the absorbed butyrate imparts healing to the colonocytes. The end result is epithelial proliferation to restore the damaged epithelium, especially the lost colonic epithelial continuity."

...

"We have demonstrated the potential of intraperitoneally administered butyrate to prevent the severity of AA-induced UC lesions. To the best of our knowledge, this finding has not been reported before. However, the systemic effect of butyrate to other body systems and organs has been reported. For instance, intraperitoneal injection of butyrate at 50–200 mg/kg body weight decreases gentamicin-induced nephrotoxicity in rats by enhancing renal antioxidant enzyme activity and expression of prohibitin protein (Sun et al., 2013). When given at 1200 mg/kg, intraperitoneal butyrate ameliorates an aging-associated deficit in object recognition memory in rats (Reolon et al., 2011). Silingardi et al. (2010) further demonstrated that chronic intraperitoneal administration of butyrate to long-term monocularly deprived adult rats causes a complete recovery of visual acuity. A more recent study has also reported that intraperitoneal injections of butyrate for 28 d to adult C57BL/6 mice prevent repressed contextual fear memory caused by isoflurane (Zhong et al., 2014). All these facts and our own study affirm that butyrate has a potential to impart protective roles to various body organs and systems through systemic administration."

[Mil2017]

Evidence type: non-human animal experiment

Supplementation of Low- and High-fat Diets with Fermentable Fiber Exacerbates Severity of DSS-induced Acute Colitis.

Miles JP, Zou J, Kumar MV, Pellizzon M, Ulman E, Ricci M, Gewirtz AT, Chassaing B.

"Abstract

"BACKGROUND:

"Lack of dietary fiber has been suggested to increase the risk of developing various chronic inflammatory diseases, whereas supplementation of diets with fiber might offer an array of health-promoting benefits. Consistent with this theme, we recently reported that in mice, compositionally defined diets that are made with purified ingredients and lack fermentable fiber promote low-grade inflammation and metabolic syndrome, both of which could be ameliorated by supplementation of such diets with the fermentable fiber inulin.

"METHODS:

"Herein, we examined if, relative to a grain-based mouse diet (chow), compositionally defined diet consumption would impact development of intestinal inflammation induced by dextran sulfate sodium (DSS) and moreover, whether DSS-induced colitis might also be attenuated by diets supplemented with inulin.

"RESULTS:

"Analogous to their promotion of low-grade inflammation, compositionally defined diet of high- and low-fat content with cellulose increased the severity of DSS-induced colitis relative to chow. However, in contrast to the case of low-grade inflammation, addition of inulin, but not the insoluble fiber cellulose, further exacerbated the severity of colitis and its associated clinical manifestations (weight loss and bleeding) in both low- and high-fat diets.

"CONCLUSIONS:

"While inulin, and perhaps other fermentable fibers, can ameliorate low-grade inflammation and associated metabolic disease, it also has the potential to exacerbate disease severity in response to inducers of acute colitis."

[Miz2011]

Evidence type: review

Autophagy: renovation of cells and tissues.

Mizushima N, Komatsu M.

Cell. 2011 Nov 11;147(4):728-41. doi: 10.1016/j.cell.2011.10.026.

"Autophagy is the major intracellular degradation system by which cytoplasmic materials are delivered to and degraded in the lysosome. However, the purpose of autophagy is not the simple elimination of materials, but instead, autophagy serves as a dynamic recycling system that produces new building blocks and energy for cellular renovation and homeostasis. Here we provide a multidisciplinary review of our current understanding of autophagy's role in metabolic adaptation, intracellular quality control, and renovation during development and differentiation. We also explore how recent mouse models in combination with advances in human genetics are providing key insights into how the impairment or activation of autophagy contributes to pathogenesis of diverse diseases, from neurodegenerative diseases such as Parkinson disease to inflammatory disorders such as Crohn disease."

[Nei2015]

Evidence type: review

The Role of Microbial Amino Acid Metabolism in Host Metabolism.

Neis EPJG, Dejong CHC, Rensen SS.

Nutrients. 2015;7(4):2930-2946. doi:10.3390/nu7042930.

"Although protein breakdown followed by amino acid absorption in the small intestine is a rather efficient process, substantial amounts of amino acids seem to escape assimilation in the small intestine in humans [38]. These amino acids can subsequently be used by the microbiota in the colon, or transported from the lumen into the portal blood stream. In addition, the host itself produces substrates such as glycoproteins (e.g., mucins) which contribute to the available amino acids within the colon [39]. "

[...]

"Regarding the large intestine, it appears that amino acids are not significantly absorbed by the colonic mucosa, but rather are intensively metabolized by the large intestinal microbiota [23]. This higher rate of bacterial protein fermentation has been related to high pH and low carbohydrate availability in the large intestine [22]. The preferred amino acid substrates of colonic bacteria include lysine, arginine, glycine, and the BCAA leucine, valine, and isoleucine [32], resulting in the generation of a complex mixture of metabolic end products including among others ammonia, SCFA (acetate, propionate, and butyrate), and branched-chain fatty acids (BCFA; valerate, isobutyrate, and isovalerate). "

[Pen2007]

Evidence type: non-human animal experiment

Effects of Butyrate on Intestinal Barrier Function in a Caco-2 Cell Monolayer Model of Intestinal Barrier

Luying Peng, Zhenjuan He, Wei Chen, Ian R Holzman and Jing Lin

Pediatric Research (2007) 61, 37–41; doi:10.1203/01.pdr.0000250014.92242.f3

"In premature infants, the maturation of the intestinal barrier function does not develop properly in the absence of enteral nutrients (6). Intestinal barrier function is significantly less developed in full-term newborn piglets receiving total parental nutrition compared with those receiving enteral nutrition (7). Production of SCFA in the bowel may be crucial for gastrointestinal adaptation and maturation in the early stage of postnatal life (8). However, overproduction and/or accumulation of SCFA in the bowel due to maldigestion and bacterial overgrowth may be toxic to mucosal cells and cause intestinal mucosal injury (9,10). Overproduction and/or accumulation of SCFA in the bowel and inability to clear the intraluminal SCFA because of poor gastrointestinal motility in premature infants have been hypothesized to play a role in the pathogenesis of neonatal NEC (11)."

[Rah2014]

Evidence type: non-human animal experiment

The β-hydroxybutyrate receptor HCA2 activates a neuroprotective subset of macrophages.

Rahman M, Muhammad S, Khan MA, Chen H, Ridder DA, Müller-Fielitz H, Pokorná B, Vollbrandt T, Stölting I, Nadrowitz R, Okun JG, Offermanns S, Schwaninger M.

Nat Commun. 2014 May 21;5:3944. doi: 10.1038/ncomms4944.

"Abstract

"The ketone body β-hydroxybutyrate (BHB) is an endogenous factor protecting against stroke and neurodegenerative diseases, but its mode of action is unclear. Here we show in a stroke model that the hydroxy-carboxylic acid receptor 2 (HCA2, GPR109A) is required for the neuroprotective effect of BHB and a ketogenic diet, as this effect is lost in Hca2(-/-) mice. We further demonstrate that nicotinic acid, a clinically used HCA2 agonist, reduces infarct size via a HCA2-mediated mechanism, and that noninflammatory Ly-6C(Lo) monocytes and/or macrophages infiltrating the ischemic brain also express HCA2. Using cell ablation and chimeric mice, we demonstrate that HCA2 on monocytes and/or macrophages is required for the protective effect of nicotinic acid. The activation of HCA2 induces a neuroprotective phenotype of monocytes and/or macrophages that depends on PGD2 production by COX1 and the haematopoietic PGD2 synthase. Our data suggest that HCA2 activation by dietary or pharmacological means instructs Ly-6C(Lo) monocytes and/or macrophages to deliver a neuroprotective signal to the brain."

[Ras1988]

Evidence type: in vitro experiment

Degradation of amino acids to short-chain fatty acids in humans. An in vitro study.

Rasmussen HS, Holtug K, Mortensen PB.

Scand J Gastroenterol. 1988 Mar;23(2):178-82.

"Short-chain fatty acids (SCFA) originate mainly in the colon through bacterial fermentation of polysaccharides. To test the hypothesis that SCFA may originate from polypeptides as well, the production of these acids from albumin and specific amino acids was examined in a faecal incubation system. Albumin was converted to all C2-C5-fatty acids, whereas amino acids generally were converted to specific SCFA, most often through the combination of a deamination and decarboxylation of the amino acids, although more complex processes also took place. This study indicates that a part of the intestinal SCFA may originate from polypeptides, which apparently are the major source of those SCFA (isobutyrate, valerate, and isovalerate) only found in small amounts in the healthy colon. Moreover, gastrointestinal disease resulting in increased proteinous material in the colon (exudation, mucosal desquamation, bleeding, and so forth) may hypothetically influence SCFA production."

[Roe1980](1, 2)

Evidence type: human experiment

The colonic epithelium in ulcerative colitis: an energy-deficiency disease?

Roediger WE.

Lancet. 1980 Oct 4;2(8197):712-5.

"The view that UC might be due to a metabolic defect in the epithelial cells[5,6] has received little general recognition. The present study was undertaken to assess the metabolic performance of the mucosa in UC and especially to explore whether a metabolic abnormality could be detected. To facilitate this approach a method of preparing suspensions of colonocytes was devised.[7] Colonocytes have been used to determine the utilisation of respiratory fuels by the non-diseased ascending and descending colon in man.[8] The results showed that short-chain fatty acid (SCFA), especially n-butyrate of bacterial origin, was the predominant contributor to cellular oxidation and that a large proportion of the carbon atoms of colonocyte respiration was derived from SCFAs. Mucosa of the distal colon depended metabolically mostly on n-butyrate, whereas the proximal colonic mucosa depended mostly on glucose and glutamine for respiratory fuel.[8] These same respiratory fuels were chosen for the investigation of colonocytes prepared from the mucosa of patients with ulcerative colitis.

...

"Generation of 14C02 from radioactively labelled butyrate was observed for at least 40 min. Production of 14C02 was linear whenever this could be tested for 60 min. Generation of 14C02 was significantly less in quiescent and acute-colitis cells than in controls (p = <0.001) (table II). Some of the oxidised butyrate appeared as ketone bodies (acetoacetate and β-hydroxybutyrate, table III). The diminished production of ketone bodies mirrors the decreased oxidation of butyrate to CO2. Ketogenesis was significantly lower in the quiescent-colitis group than the control group and lower still in the acute-colitis group.

...

"The metabolism of colonocytes from patients with UC seemed to differ in three respects from the metabolism of colonocytes prepared from non-ulcerated and apparently normal mucosa. In UC: 1. Butyrate oxidation to C02 and ketone bodies was significantly impaired, and the impairment correlated with the acute or chronic involvement of the mucosa. 2. Glucose oxidation was increased. 3. Glutamine oxidation was increased."

...

"Ketogenesis was significantly lower in the quiescent-colitis group than the control group and lower still in the acute-colitis group."

[Roe1993]

Evidence type: non-human animal experiment

Sulphide impairment of substrate oxidation in rat colonocytes: a biochemical basis for ulcerative colitis?

Roediger WE, Duncan A, Kapaniris O, Millard S.

Clin Sci (Lond). 1993 Nov;85(5):623-7.

"Abstract

"Isolated colonic epithelial cells of the rat were incubated for 40 min with [6-14C]glucose and n-[1-14C]butyrate in the presence of 0.1-2.0 mmol/l NaHS, a concentration range found in the human colon. Metabolic products, 14CO2, acetoacetate, beta-hydroxybutyrate and lactate, were measured and injury to cells was judged by diminished production of metabolites. 2. Oxidation of n-butyrate to CO2 and acetoacetate was reduced at 0.1 and 0.5 mmol/l NaHS, whereas glucose oxidation remained unimpaired. At 1.0-2.0 mmol/l NaHS, n-butyrate and glucose oxidation were dose-dependently reduced at the same rate. 3. To bypass short-chain acyl-CoA dehydrogenase activity necessary for butyrate oxidation, ketogenesis from crotonate was measured in the presence of 1.0 mmol/l NaHS. Suppression by sulphide of ketogenesis from crotonate (-10.5 +/- 6.1%) compared with control conditions was not significant, whereas suppression of ketogenesis from n-butyrate (-36.00 +/- 5.14%) was significant (P = < 0.01). Inhibition of FAD-linked oxidation was more affected by NaHS than was NAD-linked oxidation. 4. L-Methionine (5.0 mmol/l) significantly redressed the impaired beta-oxidation induced by NaHS. Methionine equally improved CO2 and ketone body production, suggesting a global reversal of the action of sulphide. 5. Sulphide-induced oxidative changes closely mirror the impairment of beta-oxidation observed in colonocytes of patients with ulcerative colitis. A hypothesis for the disease process of ulcerative colitis is that sulphides may form persulphides with butyryl-CoA, which would inhibit cellular short-chain acyl-CoA deHydrogenase and beta-oxidation to induce an energy-deficiency state in colonocytes and mucosal inflammation."

[Rol1997]

Evidence type: non-human animal experiment

Intravenous butyrate and healing of colonic anastomoses in the rat.

Rolandelli RH, Buckmire MA, Bernstein KA.

Dis Colon Rectum. 1997 Jan;40(1):67-70.

"PURPOSE:

"Intracolonic infusions of short chain fatty acids promote healing of colonic anastomoses. Because the intravenous route may have wider clinical application, we studied the effect of intravenous n-butyrate on the mechanical strength of colonic anastomoses in the rat.

"METHODS:

"After placement of an indwelling intravenous catheter, the descending colon was transected and an anastomosis was performed. Rats were then randomized to receive total parenteral nutrition (TPN group; n = 15) or total parenteral nutrition plus 130 mM/l of n-butyrate (TPN+BUT group; n = 13). On the fifth postoperative day, bursting pressure and bowel wall tension of the anastomoses were measured in situ. Anastomotic tissues were analyzed for hydroxyproline.

"RESULTS:

"The TPN+BUT group had a significantly higher bursting pressure (107.5 +/- 30.3 vs. 83 +/- 41.0 mmHg; P = 0.04) and bowel wall tension (20.7 +/- 7.6 vs. 14.1 +/- 9.9 Newton; P = 0.03). Tissue hydroxyproline was not different between the two groups (TPN, 45.8 +/- 9.2, and TPN+BUT, 47.9 +/- 2.9 microg/mg tissue nitrogen).

"CONCLUSIONS:

"We conclude that intravenous butyrate improves mechanical strength of a colonic anastomosis without a detectable change in total collagen content."

[Rom1990]

Evidence type: review

Short-Chain Fatty Acids.

Rombeau J.L., Kripke S.A., Settle R.G. (1990)

In: Kritchevsky D., Bonfield C., Anderson J.W. (eds) Dietary Fiber. Springer, Boston, MA

"As mentioned previously hepatic metabolism of butyrate and acetate results in the production of glutamine and the ketone bodies acetoacetate and which are the preferred oxidative fuels of enterocytes (Windmueller and Spaeth, 1978). The enteral or parenteral provision of glutamine and acetoacetate has been shown to be trophic to both small and large intestinal mucosa (Fox et al., 1987; Kripke et al., 1988a)."

[Sen2006](1, 2)

Evidence type: review

Does butyrate protect from colorectal cancer?

Sengupta S, Muir JG, Gibson PR.

J Gastroenterol Hepatol. 2006 Jan;21(1 Pt 2):209-18.

"Abstract

"Butyrate, the four-carbon fatty acid, is formed in the human colon by bacterial fermentation of carbohydrates (including dietary fiber), and putatively suppresses colorectal cancer (CRC). Butyrate has diverse and apparently paradoxical effects on cellular proliferation, apoptosis and differentiation that may be either pro-neoplastic or anti-neoplastic, depending upon factors such as the level of exposure, availability of other metabolic substrate and the intracellular milieu. In humans, the relationship between luminal butyrate exposure and CRC has been examined only indirectly in case-control studies, by measuring fecal butyrate concentrations, although this may not accurately reflect effective butyrate exposure during carcinogenesis. Perhaps not surprisingly, results of these investigations have been mutually contradictory. The direct effect of butyrate on tumorigenesis has been assessed in a number of in vivo animal models, which have also yielded conflicting results. In part, this may be explained by methodological differences in the amount and route of butyrate administration, which are likely to significantly influence delivery of butyrate to the distal colon. Nonetheless, there appears to be some evidence that delivery of an adequate amount of butyrate to the appropriate site protects against early tumorigenic events. Future study of the relationship between butyrate and CRC in humans needs to focus on risk stratification and the development of feasible strategies for butyrate delivery."

[Shi2013]

Evidence type: non-human animal experiment

Suppression of Oxidative Stress by β-Hydroxybutyrate, an Endogenous Histone Deacetylase Inhibitor.

Shimazu T, Hirschey MD, Newman J, et al.

Science (New York, NY). 2013;339(6116):211-214. doi:10.1126/science.1227166.

"Concentrations of acetyl–coenzyme A and nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide (NAD+) affect histone acetylation and thereby couple cellular metabolic status and transcriptional regulation. We report that the ketone body d-β-hydroxybutyrate (βOHB) is an endogenous and specific inhibitor of class I histone deacetylases (HDACs). Administration of exogenous βOHB, or fasting or calorie restriction, two conditions associated with increased βOHB abundance, all increased global histone acetylation in mouse tissues. Inhibition of HDAC by βOHB was correlated with global changes in transcription, including that of the genes encoding oxidative stress resistance factors FOXO3A and MT2. Treatment of cells with βOHB increased histone acetylation at the Foxo3a and Mt2 promoters, and both genes were activated by selective depletion of HDAC1 and HDAC2. Consistent with increased FOXO3A and MT2 activity, treatment of mice with βOHB conferred substantial protection against oxidative stress."

[Sin2014]

Evidence type: non-human animal experiment

Activation of Gpr109a, Receptor for Niacin and the Commensal Metabolite Butyrate, Suppresses Colonic Inflammation and Carcinogenesis

Singh, Nagendra et al.

Immunity , Volume 40 , Issue 1 , 128 - 139

"The most widely studied function of butyrate is its ability to inhibit histone deacetylases. However, cell surface receptors have been identified for butyrate; these receptors, GPR43 and GPR109A (also known as hydroxycarboxylic acid receptor 2 or HCA2), are G protein coupled and are expressed in colonic epithelium, adipose tissue, and immune cells (Blad et al., 2012, Ganapathy et al., 2013). GPR43-deficient mice undergo severe colonic inflammation and colitis in DSS-induced colitis model and the GPR43 agonist acetate protects germ-free mice from DSS-induced colitis (Maslowski et al., 2009). Although GPR43 is activated by all three SCFAs, GPR109A (encoded by Niacr1) is activated only by butyrate (Blad et al., 2012, Taggart et al., 2005). GPR109A is also activated by niacin (vitamin B3) (Blad et al., 2012, Ganapathy et al., 2013). In colonic lumen, butyrate is generated at high concentrations (10–20 mM) by gut microbiota and serves as an endogenous agonist for GPR109A (Thangaraju et al., 2009). We have shown that Gpr109a expression in colon is induced by gut microbiota and is downregulated in colon cancer (Cresci et al., 2010, Thangaraju et al., 2009). Gpr109a in immune cells plays a nonredundant function in niacin-mediated suppression of inflammation and atherosclerosis (Lukasova et al., 2011). Gut microbiota also produce niacin. Niacin deficiency in humans results in pellagra, characterized by intestinal inflammation, diarrhea, dermatitis, and dementia (Hegyi et al., 2004). It is of great clinical relevance that lower abundance of GPR109A ligands niacin and butyrate in gut is associated with colonic inflammation."

[...]

"Activation of Gpr109a Suppresses Colonic Inflammation and Carcinogenesis in the Absence of Gut Microbiota or Dietary Fiber

"We then examined the relevance of niacin, a pharmacologic agonist for GPR109A, to colonic inflammation. For this, we first depleted gut microbiota with antibiotics, which reduces the production of butyrate, the endogenous agonist for GPR109A. Antibiotic treatment resulted in >300-fold reduction in aerobic and anaerobic bacterial counts in the stool (data not shown). Antibiotic treatment increased DSS-induced weight loss, diarrhea, and bleeding in WT mice (Figures 7B and S6A). Consistent with increased inflammation, we found that antibiotic treatment increased the number of polyps (8.2 ± 2.2 polyps/mouse with antibiotics; 1.6 ± 1.5 polyps/mouse without antibiotics) in WT mice (Figures 7C and 7D). We then tested whether administration of niacin protects antibiotic-treated mice against colonic inflammation and carcinogenesis. Niacin was added to drinking water along with antibiotic cocktail. Niacin ameliorated AOM+DSS-induced weight loss, diarrhea, and bleeding and reduced colon cancer development in antibiotic-treated WT mice (Figures 7B–7D and S6A). Consistent with a role of niacin in IL-18 induction, the protective effect of niacin in DSS-induced weight loss and diarrhea in antibiotic-treated Il18−/− mice was significantly blunted (Figure S6B). Niacin did not alter the development of weight loss, diarrhea, rectal bleeding, and colon cancer in antibiotic-treated Niacr1−/− mice, suggesting an essential role of Gpr109a in niacin-mediated promotion of colonic health (Figures 7B–7D and S6A). Antibiotic treatment reduced colonic inflammation and number of polyps in Niacr1−/− mice. This may be due to the presence of altered colitogenic gut microbiota in Niacr1−/− animals. "

[...]

"Although it has been known for decades that the commensal metabolite butyrate suppresses inflammation and carcinogenesis in colon, the exact identity of molecular target(s) of butyrate in this process remained elusive. The present studies identify Gpr109a as an important mediator of butyrate effects in colon and also as a critical molecular link between colonic bacteria and dietary fiber and the host. These findings have important implications for prevention as well as treatment of inflammatory bowel disease and colon cancer and suggest that under conditions of reduced dietary fiber intake and/or decreased butyrate production in colon, pharmacological doses of niacin might be effective to maintain GPR109A signaling and consequently protect colon against inflammation and carcinogenesis."

[Siv2017]

Evidence type: review

Cell-Surface and Nuclear Receptors in the Colon as Targets for Bacterial Metabolites and Its Relevance to Colon Health. <http://europepmc.org/articles/pmc5579649#B58-nutrients-09-00856>-

Sathish Sivaprakasam, Yangzom D. Bhutia, Sabarish Ramachandran, and Vadivel Ganapathy

Nutrients. 2017 August; 9(8): 856.

"As the cell-surface receptors for SCFAs are located on the lumen-facing apical membrane of colonic epithelial cells (see below), the luminal concentrations of these agonists are physiologically relevant. SCFAs are low-affinity agonists for these receptors, and the normal luminal concentrations of these bacterial metabolites are in the millimolar levels, sufficient to activate these receptors from the luminal side. However, some of the molecular targets for these metabolites are either inside the cells (e.g., HDACs) or on the surface of the immune cells located in the lamina propria. Therefore, concentrations of these metabolites inside the colonic epithelial cells and in the lamina propria are relevant to impact these molecular targets. The intracellular target HDAC is inhibited by butyrate and propionate at low micromolar concentrations. There are effective transport systems for SCFAs in the apical membrane of colonic epithelial cells (e.g., proton-coupled and sodium-coupled monocarboxylate transporters) [47], thus making it very likely for these SCFAs to reach intracellular levels sufficient to inhibit HDACs. Even though the luminal concentrations of SCFAs are in the millimolar range, it is unlikely that they reach lamina propria at significant levels to activate the cell-surface receptors present on the mucosal immune cells. These metabolites are present only at micromolar levels in the portal blood [57], indicating that they undergo robust metabolism inside the colonic epithelial cells. This raises the question as to the physiological relevance of these bacterial metabolites to the activation of the cell-surface SCFA receptors in immune cells located in the lamina propria. With regard to this issue, it is important to note that colonic epithelial cells are highly ketogenic; they use acetate and butyrate to generate the ketone body β-hydroxybutyrate [58]. This ketone body is released from the cells into portal blood. As β-hydroxybutyrate is 3–4 times more potent than butyrate in activating its receptor GPR109A, it can be speculated that the colon-derived ketone body is most likely involved in the activation of the SCFA receptor in mucosal immune cells."

[Tag2005]

Evidence type: in vitro non-human animal experiment

(D)-beta-Hydroxybutyrate inhibits adipocyte lipolysis via the nicotinic acid receptor PUMA-G.

Taggart AK1, Kero J, Gan X, Cai TQ, Cheng K, Ippolito M, Ren N, Kaplan R, Wu K, Wu TJ, Jin L, Liaw C, Chen R, Richman J, Connolly D, Offermanns S, Wright SD, Waters MG.

J Biol Chem. 2005 Jul 22;280(29):26649-52. Epub 2005 Jun 1.

"Here we show that the fatty acid-derived ketone body (d)-β-hydroxybutyrate ((d)-β-OHB) specifically activates PUMA-G/HM74a at concentrations observed in serum during fasting. Like nicotinic acid, (d)-β-OHB inhibits mouse adipocyte lipolysis in a PUMA-G-dependent manner and is thus the first endogenous ligand described for this orphan receptor. These findings suggests a homeostatic mechanism for surviving starvation in which (d)-β-OHB negatively regulates its own production, thereby preventing ketoacidosis and promoting efficient use of fat stores."

[Tot2016]

Evidence type: human case study

Crohn's disease successfully treated with the paleolithic ketogenic diet

Tóth C, Dabóczi A, Howard M, Miller NJ, Clemens Z.

Int J Case Rep Images 2016;7(10):570–578.

"Given the ineffectiveness of standard therapies the parents of the child were seeking for alternative options. When we first met the patient he reported bilateral pain and swelling of the knee, frequent episodes of fever and night sweats as well as fatigue. He looked pale. We offered the paleolithic ketogenic diet along with close monitoring of the patient. The patient started the diet on 4 January 2015. The diet is consisting of animal fat, meat, offal and eggs with an approximate 2:1 fat : protein ratio. Red and fat meats instead of poultry as well as regular intake of organ meats from pork and cattle were encouraged. Grains, milk, dairy, refined sugars, vegetable oils, oilseeds, nightshades and artificial sweeteners were excluded. Small amount of honey was allowed for sweetening. The patient was not taking any supplements. Regular home monitoring of urinary ketones indicated sustained ketosis. Regular laboratory follow-up was used to monitor the course of the disease as well as for giving feedback how to fine tune the diet. The patient was under our close control and gave frequent feedbacks and so we could assess the level of dietary compliance. The patient maintained a high level dietary adherence on the long-term, yet on his birthday, he made a mistake: he has eaten two pieces of commercially available "paleo" cake which contained coconut oil, flour from oilseeds as well as sugar alcohol. Clinical consequences are discussed later. From July 2015 onwards he also consumed small amounts of vegetables and fruits. Given the persistence of certain alterations in laboratory values (mild anemia) on 10 November 2015, despite 10 months on the paleolithic ketogenic diet, we suggested to tighten the diet again. From this time on he did neither consume vegetables and fruits nor vegetable oil containing spices such as cumin and cinnamon.

"Discontinuing medication

"Within two weeks after diet onset the patient discontinued azathioprine, the only medicine he was taking at this time. Currently, he is without medicines for 15 months.

"Symptoms

"The frequent night sweats of the patient disappeared within three weeks after diet onset and thus his sleep improved significantly. The knee pains of the patient began to lessen at 4th week on the diet and completely disappeared by the third month. From this time onwords he regularly went to school by bike (20 km daily). He reported restored energy and increased physical and mental fitness. Although during the eight months before diet onset his weight was declining, following diet onset he began to gain weight. At diet onset his weight was 41 kg and was 152 cm tall (BMI = 17.7). At 12 months after diet onset, his height was 160 cm and weighted 50 kg (BMI: 19.5). The change in his height and weight is depicted in Figure 5. At the time of writing the article he is on the diet for 15 months and is free of symptoms as well as side effects."

[Tur2011]

Evidence type: review

Administration of Substances to Laboratory Animals: Routes of Administration and Factors to Consider

Patricia V Turner, Thea Brabb, Cynthia Pekow, and Mary Ann Vasbinder

J Am Assoc Lab Anim Sci. 2011 Sep; 50(5): 600–613.

"Intraperitoneal administration.

"Injection of substances into the peritoneal cavity is a common technique in laboratory rodents but rarely is used in larger mammals and humans. Intraperitoneal injection is used for small species for which intravenous access is challenging and it can be used to administer large volumes of fluid safely (Table 1) or as a repository site for surgical implantation of a preloaded osmotic minipump. Absorption of material delivered intraperitoneally is typically much slower than for intravenous injection. Although intraperitoneal delivery is considered a parenteral route of administration, the pharmacokinetics of substances administered intraperitoneally are more similar to those seen after oral administration, because the primary route of absorption is into the mesenteric vessels, which drain into the portal vein and pass through the liver.74 Therefore substances administered intraperitoneally may undergo hepatic metabolism before reaching the systemic circulation. In addition, a small amount of intraperitoneal injectate may pass directly across the diaphragm through small lacunae and into the thoracic lymph."

[Vit2014]

Experiment type: metagenomic analysis

Revealing the Bacterial Butyrate Synthesis Pathways by Analyzing (Meta)genomic Data

Marius Vital, Adina Chuang Howe, and James M. Tiedje

mBio. 2014 Mar-Apr; 5(2): e00889-14. Published online 2014 April 22. doi: 10.1128/mBio.00889-14

"Diet is a major external force shaping gut communities (33). Good reviews of studies investigating the influence of diet on butyrate-producing bacteria exist (11 and 34) and suggest that plant-derived polysaccharides such as starch and xylan, as well as cross-feeding mechanisms with lactate-producing bacteria, are the main factors governing their growth. Our metagenomic analysis supports the acetyl-CoA pathway as the main pathway for butyrate production in healthy individuals (Fig. 4), implying that a sufficient polysaccharide supply is probably sustaining a well-functioning butyrate-producing community, at least in these North American subjects. However, the detection of additional amino acid-fed pathways, especially the lysine pathway, indicates that proteins could also play an important role in butyrate synthesis and suggests some flexibility of the microbiota to adapt to various nutritional conditions maintaining butyrate synthesis. Whether the prevalence of amino acid-fed pathway is associated with a protein-rich diet still needs to be assessed. It should be noted that those pathways are not restricted to single substrates, as displayed in Fig. 1, i.e., glutarate and lysine, but additional amino acids, such as aspartate, can be converted to butyrate via those routes as well (26). Furthermore, the acetyl-CoA pathway also can be supplied with substrates derived from proteins either by cross-feeding with the lysine pathway (as discussed above) or by direct fermentation of amino acids to acetyl-CoA (35). However, whereas diet-derived proteins are probably important for butyrate synthesis in the ileum, where epithelial cells use butyrate as a main energy source as well (36), it still needs to be assessed whether enough proteins reach the human colon to serve as a major nutrient source for microorganisms. Another possible colonic protein source could originate with lysed bacterial cells. Enormous viral loads have been detected in this environment, suggesting fast cell/nutrient turnover, which might explain the presence of corresponding pathways in both fecal isolates and metagenomic data (Fig. 1, 4, and 5). Detailed investigations of butyrate-producing communities in the colon of carnivorous animals will add additional key information on the role of proteins in butyrate production in that environment. It should be noted that diet provides only a part of the energy/carbon sources for microbial growth in the colon, since host-derived mucus glycans serve as an important nutrient source as well. Several butyrate-producing organisms do specifically colonize mucus (37), and for some, growth on mucus-derived substrates was shown (38). "

[Wie2017]

Evidence type: review

Amino Acid Absorption in the Large Intestine of Humans and Porcine Models.

van der Wielen N, Moughan PJ, Mensink M.

J Nutr. 2017 Aug;147(8):1493-1498. doi: 10.3945/jn.117.248187. Epub 2017 Jun 14.

"Protein digestion and fermentation in the large intestine. Intact proteins that escape the small intestine or produced in the large intestine (mucus, cells, microbial proteins) are digested further in the large intestine by bacterial enzymes and the surviving pancreatic proteases and peptidases (35, 36). This protein degradation has been reported to be highest in the distal large intestine and is m ost likely related to the pH in the different regions (37). The di gested proteins can be used by the microbiota, which produce several metabolites such as SCFAs, ammonia, and amines. These metabolites may be linked to several health outcomes (38)."

[...]

"The large intestine is important for whole-body protein and nitrogen metabolism, in particular via bacterial metabolism. Both small and large intestinal microbiota are capable of synthesizing AAs, and absorption of microbial AAs has been demonstrated to take place in the intestine."

Source: http://www.ketotic.org/2017/11/does-ketogenic-diet-confer-benefits-of.html

#read more #see more #check it out #interesting #learn more

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thesffcorner · 5 years ago

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Thief

Thief is the first book in a YA(?) historical fantasy series written by Megan Wallen Turner. It follows Gen, a thief who brags he can steal anything, and his bragging lands him in the King’s Jail. He gets blackmailed by the King’s magus to steal something that’s impossible to steal; if he tries to bail or fails, he will die. I have heard so many things about this series, and I even own physical copies of all the books. For some reason, I just never felt like I was in the mood to read them, but I’m really glad I finally started the series. Thief came out in 2005, and it’s written in a very different style to what is popular now in YA. In fact, I’m not even sure this book is YA; we are never told how old Gen is, and the way he’s written could be anything from 15 to 30. There is no gruesome violence in the book, no cursing (at least no written curse words), so there’s no reason for you not to read this book if you are on the younger side, but it most definitely doesn’t read like a typical YA title. Part of that is the writing style; Turner’s writing is at one very lyrical and very simple. She writes in a manner that is meant to mimic the storytelling of old myths. I’ve heard this series being recommended to people who like Madeline Miller and I definitely see why: the world, the characters and especially the writing leave a very similar impression. Just to give you an example, here’s an early passage of Gen describing Outside of Gen’s narration, the book has several points in which the characters tell each other stories, much like the oral myths and legends of Achllies, Odysseus and Hercules were transferred. Not only were these bits excellent world-building moments, they also led into a pretty interesting discussion about the nature of storytelling and language. Gen thinks that the way the magus tells the story is wrong, because that’s not the way his mother, who is actually from Edis has told it to him. The magus, in turn points out that expats especially, forget parts of the story and make it up. That doesn’t mean that their version is the true version. Where I disagreed with the magus, and found his argument extremely entitled and colonial, was the idea that because he was ‘educated’ he had the most accurate version of the stories. There is no such thing as an accurate version of an oral story; unless you were there when the first bard told it, and replicate it word for word, every subsequent version is entirely less and less accurate. Outside of the storytelling, the world itself is clearly modeled after Ancient Greece. The way the land is described, the main industry being trade, and the main exports being lumber, wine and olives, was telling, as were the character names, and the fact that the land we spend the most time in is Atolia (Anatolia=Turkey). There are a lot of subtle hints at politics and culture throughout the book; the way characters treat and speak to Gen when they think he’s lowborn and uneducated, as well as the way he himself later speaks of lowborn people. However, I did agree with a lot of Gen’s observations; the one I especially agreed with was the discussion about the king’s plan to invade Atolia through Edis; the magus thinks it’s for the best because the Atolians aren’t using the land, and since there’s so few of them it won’t matter that the Sidonians would be invading, but Gen points out that it will matter to the Atolans. Where this book faltered for me were the characters and the plot. The plot especially was, for lack of a better word, boring. We spend the first 2 thirds of this book traveling through the wilderness, and doing nothing. There are attempts at character building, especially an attempt to develop the relationship between Gen and the rest of his group, but Gen is a sulken childish character, and the rest of the group treat him as both disposable and invisible. There were very few moments where I was actually interested to see if any real relationships would develop, and for the most part, they don’t. I was mildly bored the whole time, until we got to the temple. Unfortunately, even the temple was boring. There are no traps, no tricks, no maps, and no puzzles waiting for Gen; he spends most of the time pacing and measuring walls. The only scene I thought was interesting was him finding the stone. When later there is a prime opportunity for some action, we cut away from it, and it’s explained to us through flashbacks. Why? What purpose did this serve? Then there are the characters. There were hints of interesting personalities and motivations, but nothing ever pans out, and none of the characters get developed enough for any of this to matter. There are twists with every character, and while I saw some of them coming, and some I didn’t, I still was never really viscerally invested, because the book kept me at arms length from ever getting to know any of them. Let’s start with Pol. I liked Pol, and I liked the hint of friendship we get between him and Gen and him and Sophos, but that’s all we get. For most of the book he is a quiet but efficient machine, and there were points where I even forgot he existed. A had an interesting motivation at first, and I hoped that either his rivalry with Gen would somehow pan out so they had a proper confrontation, or so that Gen got the upper hand, but nothing of the sort happened. His character arc ends before it even gets started, which was really frustrating considering how long we spent with him in the book. Sophos fared a little better, in that he actually got to develop a relationship and rapport with Gen, but he was still mostly the young, wide-eyed and inexperienced prince, who has led a sheltered life, likes books and learning and not war, and has an overbearing, abusive father. There could have been a stronger bond and relationship between him and Gen, seeing as they share a dislike of swords and love of books, but what we get is very superficial, and very minute. The magus was the most frustrating character. I liked that he was prejudiced and entitled, even though he was smart, and I enjoyed the arguments he had with Gen about politics and culture. But the way he treats Gen throughout the story never changed from valuing him as a tool, so I didn’t understand what changed Gen’s mind about wanting to protect him. Yes, the magus is ‘kind’ to Gen, insofar as he wants Gen to be healthy and able to steal, but he also treats Gen like an idiot, insults his birth, family, intelligence and class multiple times, leaves him behind with A, knowing full well that A is evil and has beef with Gen, and beats him up for something he KNOWS Gen didn’t do, but blames him anyway because of Gen’s class. On a side note, that scene was so straight out of Return of the King, that I got whiplash. Gen was likewise frustrating to read from. In addition to being incredibly annoying, he spends 90% of this book weak, injured, sleeping, napping, eating, complaining about food, being hungry and antagonizing his travel companions. He’s not a flawed character, he’s a character entirely made out of flaws He’s supposed to be an amazing thief, but he spends maybe 10% of the book actually stealing, and even then, the LITERAL GODS help him do it every, single, time. He does have some clever quips, but he has no real motivation, until the very end of the book, at which point it was too late for me to care. He was just a very strange choice for a character to read from; he reminded me of Goku, but at least to balance out the constant winging about food and sleep, and his incompetence Goku was endearing. Overall, had I not known that the series gets better, just based on this book, I don’t think I would have wanted to continue this series. This book is average at best; the unique world and the writing style help it, but I read books for the plot and characters, and that’s this book’s kryptonite. If you do want to read this yourself, just be warned that it might not be the most engaging read.

goodreads

#thief #thief review #moni talks #book review

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bodies-without-organs · 6 years ago

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Notes on Capitalist Realism, Solidarity, and Discursive Shapeshifting

Capitalist realism is the idea that the conceptual resources required to imagine alternatives to capitalism no longer exist. Throughout the memorial lecture last week, Jodi Dean linked this idea of Mark Fisher’s to the contention that the left has lost a common vocabulary which once made such imagining possible—the vocabulary of solidarity and comradeship.

To me there seemed to be a tension running throughout Dean’s talk, one that was probed by some of the questions from audience members. More than one challenged Dean’s repeated and polemical use of the words ‘communism’ and ‘comrade’, pointing to their Stalinist associations and tendency to act as a major turn-off to anyone without prior investment in this kind of talk. Dean’s response to this felt inadequate: she dodged the problem of effective rhetoric by making a nitpicking point about the historical inaccuracy of linking these terms with Stalin.

She felt that these words belonged to the common vocabulary the left has lost. If her point was that our present inability to imagine alternatives to capitalism is linked to a loss in solidarity, then I tend to agree. Elsewhere the point was made that solidarity functions in a group by increasing its affects and capacities. It’s difficult to imagine now the kind of collective will required to establish something like the Paris Commune, or the collectivisation of agriculture in Catalonia and Aragon during the Spanish Civil War, moments when genuine alternatives to the status quo were not only imagined, but briefly enacted. Nowadays moments of potential action in the face of injustice seem perpetually haunted by prisoner’s dilemmas, deficits of trust that others will take action in kind, even in scenarios where the power of group action would clearly be decisive.

However, what was missing was any recognition in Dean’s polemic that specialist vocabularies also function as mechanisms of exclusion, and often serve to reinforce destructive in-group out-group dynamics. This, it seemed to me, was the question she was dodging. She even demonstrated the dodged objection in her response to the very first question—someone said that when they post about communism on Facebook the comments often contain the suggestion that communist sympathies are somehow pathological. She dismissed these comments as something only capitalists or liberals would say. It’s hard to see how she did anything but contradict herself here. Isn’t the whole idea of capitalist realism that you do not have to be pro-capitalist to be anti-communist? If there’s any possibility of recovering the lost futures no longer imaginable, will it not begin by building solidarity between those who have suffered this loss? Won’t this necessarily contain those who now regard communism as pathological, because this is precisely the nature of the condition to be overcome?

What was strange was that Dean seemed to recognise this point in relation to vocabularies she herself had less of a taste for. There was subtext underlying the talk, a lament that class consciousness had been replaced by identity as the primary vector of left politics (Dean’s phrase), and with it the language of comradeship by that of intersectionality. Dean didn’t offer any specific criticism of this shift, but rejected the suggestion (again posed by an audience question) that it came as a response to the failure of minority groups by early leftist movements. Her contention that a common vocabulary has been lost despite this shift implicitly amounts to a further contention: that the new vocabulary of identity and intersectionality is dysfunctional as a vehicle for building the solidarity required to imagine alternative futures.

Which is why it felt like a lament. While (and I stress) not an argument made by Dean, a point often made by left critics of discourses dominated by identity is that too often group dynamics are used as a substitute for empathy. The reaction to dissent is to place the scarlet mark on the dissenter and exclude them from the dialogue, rather than to put serious effort into engaging with their perspective. With this is lost the possibility of persuasion. It is a homogenising effect, increasing both the sharpness of the group’s boundaries and the strictness with which participation is signalled by the performance of certain socio-linguistic norms as opposed to sympathy with the group’s goals. But as Dean herself demonstrated, these kind of substitutions are no less possible among the vocabularies of class and comradeship she offers, and are by no means unique to those of identity, intersectionality, and privilege.

What all this points to, in my mind, is a certain moral ambivalence cooked into the concept of a shared vocabulary. On the one hand they serve to create and maintain solidarity among those who use them. On the other they function as a mechanism for increasing the territorialisation of a group and decreasing its capacity to access empathy for those external to it. Here perhaps it’s worth linking the concept of a vocabulary to the Wittgensteinian notion of a language game, highlighting the fact that vocabularies, like games, are normative systems. A vocabulary is not just a set of terms and signs, it is a set of rules governing how they are to be used. This highlighting makes visible the sense in which shared vocabularies can function in a similar way to identities. After all an identity—gender is a lucid example here—is fundamentally a set of norms. Given a group containing different and perhaps conflicting identities received via an unconscious and unchosen process of socialisation, a shared language game offers a way of consciously choosing a larger normative context which can subsume them, and build solidarity across them.

But this kind of solidarity ultimately has the flavour of group inclusion. In this case, participation in the group is participation in a shared discourse (where discourse is taken in the broad sense including non-linguistic signalling such as expressing approval or disapproval via body language, choice of what to leave unspoken, perhaps even clothing style, etc). This is no doubt an improvement on a participation based on inherited and often problematic sets of norms assigned to a person by the accidents of birth, but it’s not difficult to see how doing so runs the risk of creating a strong sense of exclusion in anyone who has not already signed up to the norms constituting the discourse. How can this be anything but counterproductive? If the discourse is to function as a tool for creating a better society, then those who are not already signed up to it are precisely those who are most worth convincing.

The real problem, it seems to me, is how to recover solidarity in inherently heterogeneous groups where it cannot be assumed that members adhere to the same discursive norms. Because surely this is always the situation at the level that actually matters? It will always be possible to achieve unity of political will in a group by tightening its boundaries to exclude dissenters, but this achieves little of substance. Those excluded remain inhabitants of social space, continue to possess and exercise political agency. At the widest context (perhaps any context which has not been artificially narrowed) it will never be possible to assume that everyone participating in the dialogue start from the same assumptions or operate under the same discursive norms.

The real question is how to communicate across discourses, not within them. This would enable the cultivation of a solidarity based not on the camaraderie of shared identity but on empathy across difference—difference not only of identities received, discovered, or created, but of discursive spaces inhabited. In this regard, the process by which vocabularies and discourses come to function as identities is something to be resisted. Camaraderie is, in a sense, the opposite of empathy—where sameness is assured, there is no need for the labour required to meet sincerely with otherness. The point to stress is that sameness in this sense can take the form of a shared vocabulary.

Taking inspiration from Richard Rorty, one strategy of resistance to the crystallisation of discourse into identity is the cultivation of a sense of irreverence towards particular discourses. They are, in the first instance, tools (a point whose implications Rorty works through in Solidarity, Contingency, and Irony). As such there is simply nothing to be said about the inherent value of a vocabulary; value is always relative to the task to which it is put, and comparisons are only meaningful insofar as they are made between vocabularies put to the same task. Rorty wants us to make a virtue of discursive shapeshifting, the ability to slip into new language games even when they are incommensurable with those more familiar to us. To my mind this seems like a key step in creating the conditions for the emergence of solidarity across lines of difference.

Returning to the issue of class and identity, it’s not difficult to see where the friction arises. Insofar as identity discourses focus on minority struggle, they necessarily place working class struggle in the background, since it is by nature (almost by definition) a struggle of the majority. Highlighting this point Dean quoted Fisher, “the interests of the working class are the interests of everyone, because the interests of the bourgeoisie are the interests of capital, and those are the interests of no-one.” Perhaps this helps to account for the feeling sometimes expressed by the critics of newer leftist discourse with an orientation toward identity that it lets capitalism off the hook. But similarly a discourse focused on class consciousness risks backgrounding minority struggle, perhaps accounting for the feeling that early left movements propagated the marginalisation of minorities, replacing a hegemony of rich white men by a hegemony of white working class men.

It’s no big deal to point out that both of these discourses usefully highlighted some forms of social injustice at the same time as problematically obscuring others. There seems to be no reason the benefits of both cannot be brought together and their blind spots mutually attenuated. All it would take is letting go of their function as identities in themselves and treating them as mere tools, to be used and switched between whenever context dictates.

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yvylen · 8 years ago

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TEACHING MOMENT FOR ALLIES: PLEASE UNDERSTAND THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN "TERF-Y" AND "TRANSMISOGYNIST"

(TL;DR: "Transmisogyny" is the way in which trans women experience the intersection of transphobia and misogyny, inextricable from one another and mutually constitutive, and also describes the systems of social power and violence that produce this experience; "TERFism" (trans-exclusionary radical feminism or sometimes trans exterminationist radical feminism) is a particular ideology and movement that is primarily structured by its transmisogyny, but which is definitely not the only manifestation thereof. The two are not interchangeable, and learning to recognize TERFism insofar as it is distinct from other kinds of transmisogyny will make you a better ally/accomplice to trans women. Scroll down for a mini field guide.)

I was at this conference over the weekend, and at one point I was talking with someone else about the sessions. One of them was lead by a Sister of Perpetual Indulgence ("drag nuns"; one of the surviving elements of older-school spectacle theater LGBTQ+ activism) and the person I was talking to expressed interest in the session, but (quote as best I can recall) "I get uncomfortable with drag queens because some of them are pretty TERF-y".

I think what this person was getting at was that drag queens (and sometimes "drag culture" more broadly, especially where it has become more commodified and whiter) often enact misogyny (and transmisogyny especially--plus racism, ableism, etc. etc. in other ways).

I appreciate this acknowledgment. I have a really troubled relationship with drag queens and drag generally because of the transmisogyny I've experienced in that context. BUT--and I understand that this might seem pedantic, but please hear me out--but, the word needed in this situation is not "TERF-y", it's "transmisogynist" (or "transphobic", but TBH I think the gender specificity here is important).

I say this because TERFism is a particular ideology with a particular history defined largely by its rejection of and hatred toward trans women--but that history and that ideology are very, very rarely the things that make drag transmisogynist. Basically, all TERFs are transmisogynist, but not all transmisogynists are TERFs.

So, for example--TERFs often argue that trans women are "appropriating womanhood" because we did not experience (cis) girlhood, which is, by their argument, a necessary prerequisite to put one in the social category of woman. They sometimes describe our identities and presentations as "womanface" (akin to blackface) because of this. It probably doesn't surprise you that this analysis does not favor drag queens either (although perhaps ironically, I think it's actually a reasonable analysis of cases where drag queens are mocking femininity or playing into misogynist stereotypes for humor value--though to be clear, "womanface" is a troubled concept given the history here is not in any meaningful way similar to blackface).

On the contrary, in my experience, transmisogyny coming from drag communities is rarely based on principle or any real gender analysis. It's mostly a reflection of general societal transmisogyny, with the same tropes (using "man in a dress" as a punchline, treating "passing" trans women as deceptive, rampant use of slurs like "shemale" and "tranny", etc.), distinguished only in that participants often feel a stronger sense of entitlement to those words, tropes, and joke. TERFs may use some of the same ideas (the "deceptive/predatory tranny" is a big archetype for them wrt lesbian trans women) but the drag community's usage does not generally add up to anything bigger, other than one more voice in the background noise of societal transmisogyny.

Now, my understanding of this was hard-won through decades of life as a trans woman, as well as no small amount of formal education on the subject. Obviously, I don't expect others to go through that, so here's a brief field guide to spotting TERFs (note: if you want counterarguments or ways to address some of these views, feel free to message me, but it'd take FOREVER to address every single one here)... . . . . -A FIELD GUIDE TO IDENTIFYING TERFs-

-SOCIALIZATION DISCOURSE-

TERFs typically argue that trans women are "socialized male", i.e. that we were raised as boys/men and that we internalized messages associated with that (entitlement to women's bodies and sexual aggressiveness, dominance in conversations, lack of stigmatization of our bodies).

This also pops up in criticisms of trans women's behavior, where if we are loud, angry, or assertive, those behaviors are read as "mannish" or "masculine" and as such as evidence of our "male socialization", because women and girls are often taught not to express themselves in those ways and are punished for doing so.

This is pretty specific to TERFism--general transmisogynists rarely analyze quite this deeply.

-SEX ESSENTIALISM-

TERFs typically argue that women's oppression is located specifically in (cis) female bodies. They'll often argue that gender isn't real (or e.g. that "gender identity" is just internalized sex/gender role stereotypes), but sex is, and that because trans women are not (cis) female that we do not experience misogyny (even if we "pass"). Sometimes this argument takes on a spiritual or mystical angle, saying that trans women have "male energy" or auras. This is often also applied to trans men, who they generally treat as women "lead astray" by trans politics or the allure of male privilege.

The particular analysis above--connecting misogyny specifically to cis female embodiment--is generally connected to TERF thought (but not always! I think, for example, some of the pushback to trans women's frustration about the whole pussy hat thing came from a not-intentionally-TERFy inability of some cis feminists to imagine or connect how trans women experience violence as women, and a strong sense that regulation of and violence against their (specifically cis) female bodies was a necessary element of experiencing "womanhood"), but sex essentialism and biological essentialism itself shows up all over. Liberal feminist thought, for example, often uncritically reproduces the sex/gender distinction, constructing trans women as "male women" in the process, and "really a man!" is like basic Geraldo-level shit.

-PENIS STUFF-

One other manifestation of sex essentialism is hyperfocus on genitals--TERFs sometimes treat trans women's penises as basically purpose-built tools for raping (cis) women (or, more specifically, they argue that all penises are rape machines and never miss a chance to remind trans women that our dicks are weapons, too). Especially when they focus specifically on trans women's genitals (and not cis men's), they overlap a lot here with far right Christo-Fascist types (see: Women's Liberation Front filing a joint amicus brief with Focus on the Family in the Gavin Grimm case), so hyperfocus on our genitals is transmisogynistic, but not necessarily TERFism. This trope also gets played for comedy (Ace Ventura, The Hangover 2, Family Guy) or drama (The Crying Game, Silence of the Lambs) all the time.

-MALE PRIVILEGE-

Between the socialization and embodiment stuff above, TERFs almost always argue that trans women had and benefited from male privilege before coming out or transitioning, and will often argue that we continue having it even after we've done so. This is the most common argument for the existence of "women's spaces" that exclude trans women (but often include trans men!)--that they are for "people who have never experienced male privilege", or sometimes they just overtly state "this space is only for people assigned female at birth". These two, especially when treated as though they are synonymous with "women", is explicitly TERFy.

Like socialization, this is typically an argument used by TERFs because general transmisogynists just aren't that engaged in feminist analysis and aren't thinking about the operation of male privilege in their day to day lives.

-SLURS, PRONOUNS, AND LANGUAGE-

In my experience, TERFs are less likely to use slurs ("shemale", "tranny", etc.) or derogatory terms ("trap", "he-she", etc.) than general transmisogynists, in part because they know optics matter, and slurs will typically push leftist people away. That doesn't mean they never do it, or that they necessarily care about leftists (see above, WoLF cozying up with FotF), but they do present themselves as "radicals" and cultivate that image with a veneer of respectability. Somebody using slurs really openly PROBABLY isn't a TERF, but might be.

What they will do, however, is aggressively misgender trans people, especially trans women. Frequently they will refer to us as "males" to rhetorically class us alongside cis men (or sometimes just use "men" with an understanding that they're including us), and will use he/him/his pronouns when talking about us. Other times--especially in spaces where they are cultivating that veneer of Legit Respectable Leftism, they will either use no pronouns for us at all, or only use "they". Some of them, in some spaces, will use correct pronouns, especially for trans women who support their politics and ideology. Obviously, though, misgendering happens all the time, and just misgendering a person is obviously transphobic, but not necessarily TERFy.

For obvious reasons, few TERFs identify with the label "TERF", and may argue that "TERF" is a slur. They may identify themselves simply as "radical feminists", or use other euphemisms ("gender critical" is a very common one) that distance themselves from the reputation that has been attached to TERFism (and to some extent, radical feminism more generally). For the most part, only TERFs think TERF is a slur. There are, however, trans-inclusive radical feminists that are determined to remediate and reclaim the "radical feminist" label, even though it fell out of favor for a while, so keep that in mind.

-OTHER RANDOM NOTES THAT DON'T FIT ANYWHERE ELSE-

Sometimes I use TWERF instead of TERF--it changes it to Trans Woman-Exclusionary/Exterminatory Radical Feminism". I do this because historically TERFs have primarily targeted trans women and CAMAB NB folks for violence in ways that they have not targeted trans men or CAFAB folks generally. I think this is an important history to remember, but I use TERF throughout this piece because it's more familiar to people.

As above, Trans-Inclusive Radical Feminism is a thing that does exist. I know radical feminists who oppose TERFs (in fact, the term "TERF" originated with radical feminists trying to push transphobes/transmisogynists out of their orgs and spaces). I considered myself a radical feminist for quite a while. That doesn't mean you can never use "radfem" pejoratively (especially, I would never tell other CAMAB women how to talk about their experiences of violence) but you should be careful about it, because IMO that demonization of radical feminism is how we ended up in a liberal feminist pit, just trying to tread water. Part of how TERFs recruit is that they're a way to escape this hell of Lean In corporate apologism and must-defend-Kellyanne-Conway liberal bullshit. Part of keeping their ranks from swelling as people realize how late-stage capitalism has turned mainstream feminism into a marketing exercise is to open up other options for them--womanism, transfeminism, and yes, TIRFism.

As I said way back, TERFism is structured around its transmisogyny. It doesn't offer a coherent gender analysis that even begins to reflect the reality of trans women's experiences because as time wears on and it continues to solidify as a sect of feminism, it more and more has to structure itself around societal transmisogyny for support. The problem is that societal transmisogyny is a VERY steady, reliable base on which to build your shit, because society fucking hates trans women and has for centuries, even millennia. So even though TERFism is essentially ideologically incoherent, there is intense social reward for participating in transmisogyny, no matter how you come by it. Remember that if you're thinking of trying to argue a TERF into reasonableness: for them, there is a reward above and beyond intellectual satisfaction to be gained by their bigotry: the creation of a trans woman underclass ripe for exploitation (especially sexual exploitation) and who attract a great deal of men's sexual and relational violence in society. In other words, you're not likely to succeed.

-CONCLUSION-

Obviously not all TERFs will conform to what I've said above. Sometimes people will say or do TERFy things without being TERFs (I'd argue that Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's comments last month were TERF-y in their emphasis of socialization, but that she herself is not a TERF). But the important take away here is that transmisogyny is different from TERFism, and it exists in the bedrock of our society.

Being able to distinguish TERFs from other kinds of transmisogynists is an important tactical ability, if you want to work alongside trans women to dismantle the systems that oppress us. Just as Mike Pence's misogyny is different from GamerGate misogyny, and just as both require unique approaches even if they are obviously aspects of the same struggle, transmisogyny is a many-headed beast, some more difficult to tackle than others. TERFs, I can promise you, are a hard one to tackle. Casting all transmisogyny as TERFism makes for both a pessimistic vision (it's gonna be hard to root out) and an overly optimistic one (in reality, transmisogyny looks like many different things, and no one strategy will work for all of them). Listening to trans women and being familiar with our history and movements will make you much more effective working alongside us.

#transmisogyny #transphobia #trans #trans womanhood #lgbt #lgbtq #ally #allyship #ppl on facebook seemed to find it helpful

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the-voice-of-hell · 7 years ago

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Rent is Theft, part 1

Working Title: Rent is Theft, formerly The Floor

Note: My MC is a Filipina trans woman and I am not. If you have any advice or feedback on that or anything else, hit me up.

***

Fear is not the best motivator. Check out the shivering guys who fear god so much they break his laws with perverse passion. The fear compels, but also wracks your mind, makes you do things that don't make sense. Things that lead you straight to the thing you're running from.

So I was coding for a living, off and on, about twenty years. It was great money at first - I went a little crazy, got cleaned up, took care of some surgery, whatever. But when investors woke up from the dream of magic computer money, the money in my life started to suck.

First thing to happen was we all lost our jobs. I do interview well, so I was one of the lucky half that managed to squeak into something new. But now they were paying maybe sixty percent of what we used to get, and expected to do twice as much work.

And the companies were all unstable, prone to big layoffs, buyouts, and collapses. So we became like migrant laborers, moving from office to office every few years and - if we were lucky - making only ten percent less money for twenty percent more labor each time we changed bosses.

The smart thing to do in that situation would have been to spend my spare time learning everything I could about programming in the latest greatest languages, but who has the energy for that? As my skills became less current, I became less desirable for employment.

And this is where the fear came in. To give myself the time and energy to do that homework, I had rented a fancy new apartment downtown. With work within walking distance, I could add hours of commute time back to my days. But the rent was outrageous. I could afford it, but I'd need to stay employed. It was a gamble and the fear grew.

This whole time, the coding language I knew best was being supplanted in the industry by something completely different. I could probably have limped by as a coder if I just learned that one new standard.

But my mind was wracked. Every night, I'd get home and do nothing. Hell, maybe I was forgetting the things I already knew. I was never a genius about that stuff in the first place. So when the office switched to the new standard, I knew I was ruined before it was even made official.

What happened next is hard to describe. But I think you'll understand, because it's about the world you know. It's about the crap you're living through, the things that are running your life invisibly, making themselves felt so powerfully without making themselves known. Fuck it, here goes.

* * *

I got home from work early again. Last week, no question. I was doing myself up more than usual because I wanted to remind anyone who might be in a position to save my ass of whatever my charms were. I know a few dudes at the office fancied me or whatever their idea of me was. But as I walked through the revolving door, the shoes were killing me and I knew this was all for nothing.

The white sun disintegrated within a few feet of the giant bulletproof windows, leaving the overgrown slate tiles to be illuminated by a ceiling of nuclear-powered next gen LED lights. Spiders of light grew and shrank on my glasses as I went into the office. The door was propped open.

I did the move where you put your face in like a cartoon character, seeking permission to enter. The manager had her back to the door but there was no one else present, so I assumed I wouldn't be interrupting anything. As I came in, said "hello" and took a seat, she didn't bother to turn around.

"Just a package, take your time," I said. I'd been checking to see if my new phone was in yet. By now it was a bit of a laugh because I knew I couldn't afford the bill for continuing its service. And wouldn't it be hilarious if it arrived just after my evicted ass hit the street?

As I enjoyed the relief of not standing on heels, a whiskery white man appeared at the door in a dull grey-blue uniform and tool belt. When the manager didn't turn around for him - what the hell was she even doing back there? - he looked to me.

I can't not be pleasant. Most of the time, there's a smile for anyone who has the temerity to look straight at me.

"Hello, how are you?"

"You sign for thees." He passed me a clipboard. I accepted it, but I tried to hail the manager again.

"Um..." What was her name? I still don't remember. She'd been there only a week, part of a parade of faceless people who clearly found something intolerable about the position. So I took the pen off the clipboard and signed it with an indistinct squiggle.

"Dank you. Here is keys. You use them now. All the old ones are no good." He handed me a sub-shoebox-sized brick of cardboard and hastily turned around.

"Uh, thanks?" My mind was still reeling a bit as he walked out the door, but I put the box on her desk. I'm sure they wouldn't want me messing with that.

Finally the manager turned around, coming up with an orange packing envelope that she tossed on the desk irritably.

"What is that?"

"Keys, I guess. Looks like, uh, Eversure Secu-"

"Why did they give them to you? That isn't good security."

"He must have assumed I work here."

She looked off to the side. "You want to work here?"

An uneasy shiver of unexpected hope rose in my stomach. "What?"

She looked back to me. "Just kidding. It was a package? Who for?"

The hope left and I wished I could be upstairs in my bathroom. I sat on the discomfort stiffly. "Courtney Marquez. 1203."

"OK." She glanced back without leaving her seat. "We don't have it."

"OK."

My feet didn't like walking again, but I was glad to be out of there. The slow elevator dragged me to the dozenth floor and I went to my lost apartment.

The place was meant to be a condominium. During a housing bubble when all these amazing tech jobs were supposed to fill the city with rich youths, developers crunched their numbers and somehow decided that meant it was go time for multimillion dollar condos the size of one bedroom apartments. Now, either because there weren't as many jobs as advertised, or because value-conscious tech people decided to live in the suburbs, or because the jobs weren't paying what was expected by naive market researchers, dozens of the buildings had to be converted into luxury apartments.

It was a good time to be me when that happened. My own jobs had been so unstable I couldn't afford to be locked into a mortgage, but an apartment was much easier to walk away from - and I earned just enough to afford the place. It was half the size of what I had for half the money in the 'burbs, but I was single and spent too much time working to have a hobbyist's possessions. My worldly belongings fit neatly into the small, sterile environment.

But then I found that everything was more expensive in the city. Every. Damn. Thing. Need rubber bands? Three fifty. Need toilet paper? Ten dollars. Need to eat? Get used to hunger.

So I was living on the margin, no savings to speak of, and a job less than a week from collapse. I left the heels at the door and lay down on the couch, eyes looking past the TV into the void of blue sky.

The tall glass windows were all this seafoam green color and the thermal properties kept daylight from penetrating far. It suffused the room with a soft blue light, but no warmth. That was fine. My body pressing into the thick cushions was raising enough heat.

Those clean, slick new windows, with a color like eroded broken bottles on the beach. When I first knew I was going to be able to afford a luxury apartment, I was hoping to get into one of those multi-colored deals that look like they're made of legos with a designer color palette. But the only thing close enough to work to justify the move and still in my price range was this beast, with those plain green windows on a monolithic building with a brushed steel exterior. One face of the building had no windows at all, just a dull brutalist edifice. It looked like the kind of place you'd send old people to be converted into soylent green. In The Future!

I actually liked it there, despite all the trauma, the general lack of welcome, just for no good reason. Maybe it was being in the city, where there are so many people, where I felt more at home on my feet than in the car-dependent endless parking lots of the 'burbs. Maybe it was that the smallness felt right, like the amount of space my small life should occupy.

So I cried.

I don't cry energetically. My eyes just run everywhere and a I gasp a little. My eyes roll in my head sometimes, which is weird because they are closed. I think it's like when someone lies and you can supposedly tell because they glance up and toward the creative side of the brain. My eyes are trying to find a thought that will save me from sadness.

My mind was a blank, so it just played over recent events, but in my imagination I was crying the whole time. Crying walking home from work, coming through the revolving door, sitting in the office. Crying when the locksmith guy gave me the box of keys.

He had assumed I work there. I thought my creativity was spent, in the blank hours fear had me wasting. But this idea came all at once. At first my mind was treating it as a joke.

What if I just had the company re-key the apartment? The managers here change every month, so I'd quickly become unrecognizable and assumed to belong. No one here really knows each other, I never told anyone I was going to have to leave. Hell, I hadn't even told the manager. And they were having such a hard time filling apartments that I probably would not get surprised by the next tenant. I knew for a fact the rest of my floor was empty apartments, and some other floors besides.

Yeah, I could totally do that, haha. The company that built the place, whoever owned it now, they were running it with a skeleton crew. Just totally oblivious to what was actually going on in there, except insofar as it sent them a miniscule amount of money. Yes indeed, just me living there like nothing had happened. Nobody would be the wiser.

It was a joke, of course. No one gets away with that kind of thing. Well, there's always some random freak who pulls off an amazing crime and makes the papers. But that's never you. It's the exception, only a fool would gamble with trying to get away with crimes like that.

But my mind kept filling in the details - how I would do my laundry, whether I could keep the power on, how I could do the key trick without arousing too much suspicion. Dusk turned the sky a dark lavendar by the time I realized my eyes were dry and salty, and that this wasn't a joke. It was something I was going to do.

***

What does a manager wear? I looked in the mirror the next morning. I'd wear a pink baseball hat and a North Face jacket. Dark grey athletic pants, pink and black sneakers. Reading glasses around my neck, hair in a pony tail. Looking in that mirror before the disguise came together, I thought I just looked like a scared ghoul. My glassy eyes had the most serious dark puff beneath them, my skin had paled to a cream coffee color from years under fluorescence, the permed-in wave of my hair was combining with the dregs of yesterday's products to form a medusa bob. The couped snakes were still writhing in brainless death throes. I grimaced and admired the yellow forming near my dark gums. This ghoul needed some work.

An hour later, I made the phone call. Said my phone,

"Eversure Security."

"Mm, yeah, this is Mona Zapata from the Myrmidon Apartments. We want to order more re-keys..."

I decided it would be less suspicious - and point less directly at me - to re-key the whole floor. While I talked specifics I felt like something was trying to jump out of my throat.

"To come in? Oh yes, is he available today? Hm, I think after our office closes would be better for me. How late is he open?"

No, I would have to intercept him in the lobby while the manager was possibly still in the office. Or would I?

"Oh, listen. I have to run some money to the back on 6th right then. How about we meet partway? Have him catch me in the bagel shop at 9th and Stewart, then we can just walk around the corner."

"...OK."

Another hour later, I circled the block to make sure I was coming from the direction of 6th. I saw no one in a dull grey-blue uniform and tool belt. A waste of effort. I went into the bagel shop. No uniform there.

I'd need to make a purchase to stave off the awkward. A plain bagel with cinnamon cream cheese and a Snapple. I'm not sure what I expected that to taste like but it was horrible. I left the rest of the gooey thing on the table and sipped the tangy beverage while the big numbers of time ticked by on my phone.

It didn't take long for doubt to come over me. What if the person at Eversure had forgotten to make a note, or the guy in the pants had missed it? He'd be going into the office then without me to catch him.

At three 'til, I started to shake my head side to side nervously, like I was in strenuous disagreement with Claude Rains. Let 'em think I was crazy. At one minute, I leapt out of my seat and threw the remains of my nauseating purchase in a trash can on the way out.

Jogging up the block, I swiveled my head in hope of spotting him driving by. As I passed the alley behind the building, I noticed a van back there. I couldn't see the side. If that was him, did that mean he was already going around to the front? What if they'd confirmed the appointment by calling the office? Why hadn't I thought of the possibilities?

Just as I was about to leave line of sight completely, I noticed the van move. A little rock. I backed up, and jogged down the alley.

It was a wide alley, to admit garbage trucks and large deliveries. The grey-white morning filled it with light. I veered close to the building on the far side of the alley until I saw the side of the van.

Eversure. I slowed my roll.

Whiskers from the day before was behind the van closing the doors when I saw him. He looked at me with a little start. This time I noticed his name tag read "Niko."

"Hello," I said, "I'm glad I caught you."

He was quiet longer than I would have preferred, then, "You ah... Mona Sapata?" He consulted a clipboard for the last bit of information, then looked expectant.

"Yes, Niko was it?" I offered a hand. He didn't know what to make of that, but stepped forward and obliged. It was the first time I'd intentionally touched someone in years, and felt sweaty and more dishonest than the criminal alias.

But I do interview well. He smiled. "Mona. Le's go. You want me to, ah..?"

"Come in the back door, it's closer." I let him in with my key - still technically a bona fide tenant at this point. He carried a large yellow-orange toolbox that smacked the metal door frame as he passed within.

The elevator in the open lobby was the only reasonable way up. Plain view of the office. This is where it would all fall apart, I thought. Walk on his right. As the gaping glass windows of the office come into view, always move between him and them. The manager was in. She glanced up to acknowledge me and I nodded back. My lips spasmed as I tamped down the reflex to make an insincere grin a little too late. I stood between him and her, his expansive movements and slow swing of the big toolbox no doubt making him as plain as day.

Glancing back at her as the elevator finally arrived, I saw she was looking down at her paperwork again. I braced myself against the elevator door until the man was inside, then slipped in with a deep sigh.

"Uh, a little... out of breath from... jogging back. You didn't get the message?"

"Message? Oh, bagel shop ting. I don' like to meet out of office. Not professional."

I stared at his eyes and he seemed not to notice. They were slightly yellow and marbled with pink veins, with big pale grey satellite dishes in the center. My throat was trying to turn inside out again, and I stopped talking until I could sort that out.

I stayed with Niko as he went from door to door. At each he started by taking a master key out of a tiny grey strongbox in the bottom of his tool kit which he'd use, then promptly return and seal. As he partially disassembled each lock, installed a new tumbler, and recorded unknown numbers and letters in a little yellow notepad, I acted like he was the most interesting thing in the universe. At first it was difficult to get him to say anything, but by the time he finished, I knew fifty new and useless things about Montenegro.

When he was finished, the office downstairs was still open. I followed him out, standing between him and the office again. Standing in the alley,

"How long before we get the keys?"

"They'll be delivered two, three days."

"Mm, can one of us pick them up instead?"

"...OK."

I didn't like getting that response from people at this company.

"Listen, I have some things to do in the neighborhood where your office is. I'll stop by at the beginning of the day after tomorrow, the day after that, right?"

"...I don't know why. OK."

I don't want you jerks calling the office and don't trust you to call an alternate number if I give you one. "It's no problem, and thanks for everything Niko."

Then I had to go find out where their office was located.

***

The next day I woke up in my then thoroughly rumpled disguise, head aching from immoderate consumption of Midori with grapefruit soda. I was an hour late for work, but my delusions of charming my way out of a layoff had sloughed away while I was playing hooky. I rolled onto my belly with my head hanging off the edge of the cushion, and slid my phone from under the table.

No. No call for them. No more of that. The stereo had worked its way through my grunge folder completely and was now into joke bands. Liam Lynch dared me to haul my bowling ball cranium off the couch. Not cool.

While my head thundered down the alley, I punched the off button and returned quickly to the couch. Strike. As the pins quieted down, I wondered about my friends. If you could call them that. When I was a child, friends were people you shared your soul with at three in the morning. All I had now were coworkers.

I liked a few of them well enough. Stephanie Kim admired me as a vision of her possible future - she just started transitioning while we worked together. But everybody had rubbed me the wrong way at some point or another, even Stephanie. A few months before, I overheard her having a weird racist conversation with some white dude about how Japan, Korea, and China were the great, classical civilizations of Asia. Like the rest of us were all in grass skirts sacrificing cattle.

And the rest of them, mostly white guys, just full of themselves in a culture that held them up as the avant garde of human existence. Tech culture would change the world. Startups were the innovators that would bring on the technological singularity and whatnot. Or at the very least, they would be the next Microsoft millionaires - as if that was something that ever happened now.

That wasn't even so bad. I got along well with most of my team. But the way they were acting during this upgrade situation... The solemn judgmental nods. The talk about how easy the new code was. Fuck those guys all to hell.

Which left me with nothing like friends. But that's how it always was between jobs. I'd just never let myself slip out the door like this before. It felt different, and much more final. I was turning into a shadow, voluntarily consigning myself to an existence outside of the human race.

Then my bladder came knocking, reminding me what being human was really all about.

***

Read part two here.

#Rent is Theft #part 01 #nanowrimo april 2018

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