Depictions of deathbed scenes are commonplace within mid-nineteenth-century United States literary culture, particularly sentimental fiction. They serve a variety of ideological and aesthetic functions and have rightly received a good deal of critical attention. One aspect of their significance and broad impact that has not yet been included within revisionist assessments of the aesthetic and political strategies of sentimentalism provides the primary focus here. The stylized representational modes that characterize the dying of many characters in literary texts, magazine illustrations, paintings and other cultural productions were appropriated by nineteenth-century spiritualists to perform farewells between spirits and the living within the many seances that proliferated on both sides of the Atlantic from the late 1840s onward. The conventional structure of such partings, predicated on the imminent death of at least one of the participants, focused on an exemplary death in which tearful goodbyes and final words were significant features. Yet when spiritualists appropriated the formulae of such scenes it was within a set of practices that explicitly denied the fact of death at all. Since for spiritualists death was a chimera, the adoption of the symbolism of the deathbed scene as a model for how to facilitate different kinds of departure – not always those that took place between the soon to be dead and those they leave behind – took the rhetoric and practices of dying and transformed them into a new form of performance.

There are only connections. Everything is connected. All human knowledge gathered and hyperlinked, this site leading to that, this fact referenced to that, a key-stroke, a mouse-click, a password – world without end amen … Everything is connected in the end.

In April 1815 Mary Clarke Carr submitted an insolvency petition to the Philadelphia Court of Common Pleas. The petition described how Carr had failed to take in the subscription monies owed for her magazine, The Intellectual Regale, or Ladies' Tea Tray, “and lost thereby at least $200 … the receipts not being sufficient for the support of herself and family.” As a consequence of her debts, Carr was forced to sell the rights to the magazine, along with “printing press types, printing apparatus, paper and all … & every other thing &c pertaining to the said ‘establishment.’” After collecting $256 from printer Thomas Smith in exchange for her property, Carr continued to struggle with her magazine for more than a year.

The most important thing in art is The Frame. For painting: literally; for other arts: figuratively – because, without this humble appliance, you can't know where The Art stops and The Real World begins. You have to put a “box” around it because otherwise, what is that shit on the wall?

If John Cage, for instance, says, “I'm putting a contact microphone on my throat, and I'm going to drink carrot juice, and that's my composition,” then his gurgling qualifies as his composition because he put a frame around it and said so. “Take it or leave it, I nowwillthis to bemusic.” After that it's a matter of taste. Without the frame-as-announced, it's a guy swallowing carrot juice.

My room is looking more and more like a picture gallery … or a kind of photographic shrine.

In the parlance of the time he was known as a “sick comedian.” He was also called a junkie, a hipster, a satirist, a shaman, a free-speech martyr, “a disease of America,” “a nightclub Cassandra,” and a prophet. But Lenny Bruce, the caustic comedian who gained a following in the late 1950s and early 1960s, called himself something else: a deviate. “All my humor is based on destruction and despair,” he said. “If the whole world were tranquil, without disease and violence, I'd be standing on the breadline.”

Michael Moore's 2004 film Fahrenheit 9/11 is a visual and narrative tour de force that critiques everything from the controversial conditions under which George W. Bush assumed the US presidency to President Bush's handling of his so-called “war on terror.” With its tagline “The temperature where freedom burns,” Moore stresses the dubious ethical nature of the Bush administration's post-9/11 policies, especially as they redefine the US relationship between freedom and censorship. In so doing, he challenges the Bush administration's constructions of US morality as ultimately elitist and self-serving, substituting his own populist, class-based moral America(n) in its place.

What we need, it seems to me, is a global sense of local, a global sense of place.