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This reading of Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death” emerges from a collaborative, online, transatlantic reading group that sprung up during the COVID-19 pandemic as an extension of homeschooling for a set of cousins and their parents. I ask what it means to read with children, and to learn from the ways in which children read. I suggest that, among other things, this involves reading more literally and less for metaphors and symbols or the other paraphernalia that tend to be features of formal teaching of literature in schools. Indeed, in the context of pandemic and lockdown, “The Masque of the Red Death,” if read with children or through a child’s eyes, might teach us very literally about enclosure and boundaries, about life and death, and about the always-failed ambitions of constituted power. It might teach us, moreover, about the ongoing importance of literature, and learning to read it well. We might seek to know things the way in which Virginia Woolf’s moth (in another struggle of life and death, read in the reading group) knows things: immanently, absolutely, with all the strength of the very weak.

Abstract Rich freshwater biodiversity is threatened by increasing deforestation and disorderly urbanization throughout the Brazilian Amazon, especially in streams and creeks, leading to loss of aquatic habitats. Biological information combined with habitat and water quality are effective tools for rapid assessment. The impact of increasing urbanization was assessed in the Cereja River, eastern Amazonia using a Riparian Habitat Diversity Index (RHDI), benthic macroinvertebrate structure and water and sediment variables in ten areas along the Cereja using multivariate analyzes. Increasing urbanization is associated with lower RHDI, abundance, diversity and equity of benthic macroinvertebrates, higher conductivity, pH, temperature, width and percentage gravel. This information is useful for rapid identification of impacts, assessment of recovery of degraded areas and maintenance of non-degraded areas along urban streams.

During the so-called High Lockdown in the UK (March to June 2020) a group of staff and students from University College Londons School of European Languages and Cultures (SELCS) gathered weekly for a Summer Book Club (SBC) to discuss works as diverse as Thomas Manns epic tale of convalescence and philosophical exploration The Magic Mountain and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichies captivating comparison of the experience of race in Nigeria, the UK, and the US in Americanah. Among the true pandemic-lit that we chose to focus on was Edgar Allen Poes The Masque of the Red Death. In discussing this tale, we could not help noticing the parallels between ourselves and Prince Prospero and his courtiers, whoin the face of devastating disease sweeping the realmdevoted themselves to aesthetic pleasures within their castellated abbey, just as we too found refuge in (closed) community and culture. Another of our book choices revealed a similar and uncanny parallel: in Emily St. John Mandels Station Eleven a band of actors and musicians roam a devastated America, putting on Shakespeare for the survivors of another deadly pandemic. Their motto, Because survival is not sufficient, a quotation from Star Trek, chimed with our sense too that, in the face of the pandemic, culture had a central role.

What parallels might there be between Poe’s story of a proud prince and his noble acolytes who shut themselves away to take refuge from the red death and the twenty-first-century non-fiction story of Covid-19? The author of this piece take a personal, auto-fictional approach to this question, narrating his own experience of locking down with his family in London’s vibrant East End. If Prospero and his nobles devote themselves to revelry and aesthetic pleasure, leaving the poor beyond the abbey’s walls to die, so the author’s privilege manifested itself in an ability to turn to literature—and indeed, to Poe—and to the communities of online seminars, while the homeless and marginalized of the city around him were left to fend for themselves. This piece uses these parallels to ask questions about the sorts of fantasy that Poe’s tale articulates: a fantasy “from below” of come-uppance for the rich and powerful, and a fantasy “from above” of the aesthetic as anaesthetic and a means of combatting death. And it concludes by asking what has changed when the story comes to an end and when Covid-19/the red death has passed: what sort of response might there be to the inequalities that the fictional story of the red death and the reality of Covid-19 reveal and emphasize?

ABSTRACT Oyster culture has benefited traditional coastal communities along the Amazon macrotidal mangrove coast of Pará state in Brazil since 2006. Currently, seven oyster culture units in five municipalities are expanding production, but with no environmental monitoring, which is important for the control of the impacts of oyster culture on waters as well as for oyster management and conservation. Seasonal variation in environmental characteristics of the water was evaluated at all oyster culture units in Pará, from September to November 2013 (dry season) and February to April 2014 (wet season), to generate baseline data to evaluate future impacts and aid strategic planning, such as diversifying seed production. Salinity, dissolved oxygen, pH, oxidation-reduction potential, depth, temperature, and chlorophyll-a concentration were measured during flooding and ebbing tides, and compared between seasons and among culture units using uni- and multivariate statistics. All variables were significantly higher in the dry season, except depth, which was significantly greater in the wet season. Mean salinity, which varied from 2.4 to 46, explained most of the variation among culture units in relation to season, sampling date within each season and tidal state. However, dissolved oxygen, pH and depth were also important. Oyster culture units in Pará may be suitable for sustainable harvesting of seed/spat from the wild (lower salinity and pH), or for on-growing (higher salinity, higher pH, and greater depth). Seasonal variation is sufficient to allow both activities at most units at appropriate times of the year, which would help increase oyster production in Pará.

Peruvian writer José María Arguedas’s final book, an unfinished and posthumously published novel entitled El zorro de arriba y el zorro de abajo, is set in the coastal boomtown of Chimbote during the late 1960s. Rapid industrialization has led to the town being dominated by fish-processing factories belching out smoke, and surrounded by slums in which thousands of recent immigrants from the Andes eke out a living at the margins of this intense capitalist exploitation. The novel’s main concern is with these margins, with the slums or barriadas in which all of Peru’s cultures and languages are thrown together in chaos and misery, if also in vital intercommunication and restless striving. But at the center of the novel is a strange scene of epiphany that takes place at the heart of the industrial enterprise.

All victories are Pyrrhic, to a greater or lesser extent. That is, no victory is ever complete; victors always have to concede something to the vanquished. At the very least, for instance, those who emerge victorious from a political (or other) struggle either depend upon or, worse still, have to make do without the recognition on the part of the vanquished that they have indeed won. Either, that is, the losing side sign, metaphorically or otherwise, the equivalent of some kind of document of surrender, in which case they have retained the power to determine that the struggle is indeed at an end. And this retained power forces an acknowledgement, on the part of the winners, that their victory cannot be total even if the surrender is unconditional. Or, worse still, the losers do not sign such a document, either because they refuse to acknowledge defeat or because they will not or cannot acknowledge the victors and the legitimacy of their victory. In which case, symbolically and perhaps not just symbolically, the struggle continues and victory remains elusive for the victors.

Os rios são os agentes mais importantes no transporte dos sedimentos para as áreas mais baixas dos continentes e para o mar. Além dos efeitos diretos do clima local, a cobertura vegetal atua no controle da descarga e no suprimento de sedimentos. Sendo assim, o presente trabalho enfoca o padrão de distribuição granulométrica do rio Urumajó (nordeste paraense) em relação ao estado de preservação da mata ciliar. Cinco estações (A-E) foram estabelecidas de forma a registrar um transecto da nascente à foz do rio. Nessas estações, procedeu-se com a caracterização da mata ciliar, bem como do seu grau de preservação. Além disto, elaborou-se um perfil transversal ao canal para cada estação, com coleta de cinco amostras de sedimentos em cada perfil. Estes foram submetidos à análise granulométrica, que resultou na obtenção de valores da média, mediana, seleção, assimetria e curtose. Com os resultados foi possível reconhecer as características sedimentares normais do rio, onde areia média é a principal classe granulométrica transportada. Foram observadas nas estações A e C a clara tendência das amostras serem moderadamente bem selecionadas e aproximadamente simétricas, com dominância absoluta de areia média, o que está diretamente relacionado ao seu bom estado de preservação. Significativas variações granulométricas nas estações B, D e E foram associadas com o processo erosivo das margens do rio, conseqüência da degradação da mata ciliar. Além disso, foi constatada a influência das correntes de maré na sedimentologia da estação E, subsidiando também a delimitação do ambiente estuarino que se encontra associado ao canal fluvial.Rivers are the main ways of sediment transport from inland to the coastal zone and oceans. Despite direct influence of climate, the vegetation coverage plays a central role in liquid and solid fluvial discharge. In this context, the present work aimed to study the fluvial sedimentology of the Urumajó River (Pará, Brazil) in relation to the preservation state of riparian vegetation. Sediment samples were collected at five sites (A to E), including a five-sample transversal profile at each site. The sites were distributed from the source to the estuarine area. The characteristics and preservation state of the riparian vegetation were analyzed at each site as well. The collected sediments were submitted to grain size analysis, where mean grain size, median, asymmetry, selection and kurtosis were obtained. The results made it possible to recognize the regular characteristics (sites A and C), which included median sand as the main sediment class and well-sorted and approximate symmetric grain size distribution, directly related to the well-preserved riparian vegetation at sites A and C. On the other hand, sites B, D and E showed substantial differences in relation to the regular pattern. This fact could be associated to the vegetation degradation at those sites, resulting in margin erosion. Furthermore, at site E, reflexes of tide influence on the sediment characteristics could be observed, subsidizing the estuary delimitation.

Shipworms are important decomposers of wood, especially in mangrove forests where productivity is high. However, little emphasis has been given to the activity of shipworms in relation to the export of nutrients from mangroves to adjacent coastal areas. As a first step to obtaining such information, the frequency of colonized mangrove driftwood as well as shipworm density and length were studied by collecting washed up logs during a year at Ajuruteua beach, state of Pará, northern Brazil. A single species, Neoteredo reynei (Bartsch, 1920), was found colonizing driftwood. Although large colonized logs were most common on the beach, shipworm density was higher in small logs, especially during the dry season. In general, however, density was higher during the wet season (January to April) and lowest in July. Overall shipworm mean length was 9.66cm. In large logs, mean length increased between the wet and dry seasons. However, there was no difference in length among log size categories. Mean shipworm length was similar throughout most of the year but tended to be greater in July. Although salinity varied between 10.9 and 40 during the year, no relationship was found between salinity and density or length. The results suggest that shipworm activity in driftwood logs is relatively constant throughout the year. Increased air humidity and rainfall may promote survival during the wet season. Large logs may take longer to colonize and thus have lower densities than small ones which are scarce probably because they are destroyed rapidly by shipworm activity. However, data on the disintegration of logs would be necessary to test this hypothesis. Larger size of shipworms in the dry season may be related to growth after an earlier recruitment period. Shipworms in large logs during the dry season may be better protected from dessication and high temperatures by the insulating properties of the larger volume of wood.

This paper records for the first time the presence of Corbicula fluminea (Philipi, 1844) in the Brazilian Amazon Basin. This exotic bivalve was found in localities on the Amazonas, Pará and Tocantins rivers. Density and population size structure were measured in some localities. Mean density is between 6.66 and 7.3 individuals m-2. Population size structure and the dates of the first records suggest that the introductions may have occurred between 1997 and 1998. The introductions may have been mediated by ocean-going vessels visiting the ports of Manaus and Belém. The potential impact of the invasion on native freshwater bivalves is discussed along with the need for monitoring and prevention of further introductions of non-indigenous bivalves in Brazil.

O presente trabalho tem por objetivo descrever as características do ambiente institucional que envolve o comércio de carne bovina brasileira com o seu principal importador, a Rússia. A pesquisa usa com referencia a Nova Economia Institucional e a Teoria da Organização Industrial para discutir os dados levantados por meio de pesquisa bibliográfica e entrevistas semi-estruturadas realizadas em três etapas no mês de outubro de 2009 e respondida por agentes do Ministério da Agricultura, Pecuária e Abastecimento – MAPA, caracterizando assim um estudo qualitativo-descritivo. Os resultados mostram que mudanças no ambiente institucional no mercado russo possibilitaram um grande incremento das exportações brasileiras. Este fato está relacionado à dificuldade dos importadores russos em conseguir produto com qualidade exigida pelas suas normas junto aos seus tradicionais fornecedores europeus que tiveram problemas de segurança alimentar e queda na oferta. O mercado russo apresenta enorme vigor, e traços de instabilidade no ambiente institucional pelo ponto de vista do fornecimento brasileiro, sobretudo relacionado às cotas e suas taxações, isto gera a necessidade das autoridades públicas e associações de interesse privado dos dois países desenvolvam bases para um ambiente de negócios mais estável.