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Let's return for a minute to Johnson's contention that we might see recent school shootings silver pendants payback for poor pedagogy. I think that's a big conceptual leap, one we shouldn't make. Worth exploring, however, is why we're suddenly willing to make these leaps. Are we really worried our students are going to kill us? Speaking of the Unabomber directly in Writing at the End of the World, Richard Miller asked, "Who, in their darkest hours, hasn't entertained ideas about the value of obliterating such a world and starting over" (62)? Miller's rhetorical question gives me the chance to challenge the depiction of our students and one another as barely repressed mass murderers, because I can honestly answer, "Me," for starters. Perhaps this reveals something about gender, but even in my darkest hours I'm more prone to give the system the benefit of the doubt; it's individual people I imagine need to go, and by go, I mean to another town. I further suspect that for a good many of our students, no matter how frustrated they might become with the bureaucracy of higher education and the repressive orders of the classroom, if they have such dark hours, those hours are a few amid thousands-not, as in the case of Kaczynski, pretty much every waking one.

Let's remember, upon hearing of the shootings at Virginia Tech, that Nikki Giovanni knew immediately which one of her students had done it. Later we were to find out that not a few failures of the mental health system were implicated.4 Several systems broke down-tragically mundane silver rings that have been repeated nationally. Even Kaczynski tried to get help for his persistent insomnia and stress when he was in the woods, but more often he tried to address his problems himself rather than risk the stigmatizing diagnosis of mental illness. To take the examples of Dylan Klebold, Eric Harris, Seung-Hui Cho, and Theodore Kaczynski as paradigmatic of a greater zeitgeist among students badly misjudges our students, and, I think, misjudges what makes people snap.5

Moving closer to the arguments over the uses and abuses of style, the problem with the notion that we are "writing at the end of the world" is that it folds too neatly into the apocalypticism of the Sticklers, they who are looking for the rhetorical end of days, using style as the vehicle to bring about the final conflict that will even all scores, close all the books.6 Although Kaczynski may not be the model psyche to understand our students' discontents, he does present an interesting case study of Stickler fighting spirit. While his pretrial was in progress, Kaczynski was already working on "Truth versus Lies," a treatise arguing against his family's portrayal of him as mentally ill. This 548-page rebuttal had for Kaczynski evidentiary significance, so it's not surprising that in his correspondence with the would-be tiffany accessories of the manuscript, Beau Friedlander, Kaczynski's inner editor would go into overdrive. When a copyeditor changed the spelling of extravert to extrovert, Kaczynski wrote Friedlander a full page on the Latin origins and contemporary misspellings of the word, concluding

Far from offending modern sensibilities, however, White's over-the-top comparisons of poor silver earrings choices to miscegenation have set the template for how to write a successful writing manual today. Sergeant Strunk's warlike, exhortative style, his up-tempo apocalyptic railings against the paucities of modern life, have been picked up by many of The Elements of Style's progeny, including the far more interesting Lynn Truss's Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation, which shot to the top of the New York Times bestseller list and spawned its own illustrated editions, including one for children. Good punctuation is not simply "the sign and cause of clear thinking" (202) Truss tells us, but the effort to clarify the rules of punctuation themselves, given historical inconsistencies, can lead to "knock-down fights over the comma in editorial offices" (71). While Eats is ostensibly about the use of punctuation, it seems to be the element of fight Truss most enjoys as she releases her Inner Stickler, "roaring, salivating and clawing the air in a quite alarming manner" (29). Style is imagined to lift us above our animal wits, but to craft clear prose, one apparently has to get into the muddy trenches-hence, I suppose, White's return to World War I.

Down in the trenches Gelernter gets as well, in his review of all posthumous and (do I even need to say it) post-feminist revisions of Strunk and White, calling the nod to the acceptability of gender-neutral rules in the fourth edition of Strunk and White's opus "an assassin slipping a stiletto into someone's back" ("Back"). Far more revealing of the bloody nature of battles over style, however, is Gelernter's charge in his protest letter to the court that the public auction of Kaczynski's possessions would stylize the silver key rings that maimed him:

How exactly will I explain to my two boys that rich bidders are contending for ownership of an autograph diagram of the bomb that turned their father into a semi-invalid? (Will they mount it in a plush frame and hang it on a wall for dinner-party guests to gush over? "That must be the part that took out his eye! Those pieces created the metal fragments that are still embedded in his chest and arms!")

As Gelernter shows us in these excerpts, style is indistinguishable from bloodlust, the stakes of proper style nothing less than how we live, should live, and should never live. Style is, by definition, a "way" of doing things, most often a way gone by. We were whole, now we are in fragments. Fitting is it that the late Wendy Wasserstein paid homage silver necklaces Strunk and White by entitling her novel about the search for solace in post-9/11 life Elements of Style; the years since 9/11 have brought new life to Strunk and White, who have been retrofitted as comforting spirits from the simpler past, just as Gelernter complained. But Gelernter, too, has found in Strunk and White a literal grammar for living in unsure times. The misuse of an apostrophe is about more than the apostrophe, the manual tells us: it's about the end of a bright and purposeful past, the premonition of a threatening and murky future.

Johnson acknowledges that the link he draws between these rhymes and the tragic events at Columbine is cheap tiffany. "Nonetheless," he adds, "the link, however limited, seems worth pondering-at least as a starting point for broader inquiry into the ways our students experience our pedagogy" (vii). We have, as Johnson suggests, talked and talked about student resistance to learning, but for him resistance is "too mild a word" to capture the darkest fantasies and plots of our students (vi). Richard Miller seemingly would concur, as his 2005 Writing at the End of the World uses Columbine's Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold's "dark night of the soul" as an entry point to interrogate the capacity of reading and writing to ennoble. As Miller points out, Harris and Klebold read, wrote, and then killed people. What's a writing teacher to do?

Although these dark ruminations may have been spurred by repeated school shootings and post-9/11 grief, they have root in a longer-standing trope of civilization-ending fantasy, one in which debates over style are simply out-and-out wars for survival. For this trope we have directly Strunk and White to blame, or rather White, as Strunk's original edition seems devoid of the exhortative tone later ascribed to its author. White had been approached to revise The Elements of Style following publication of his 1957 New Yorker essay remembering "the little book" that was required reading in Strunk's composition class at Cornell ("Will Strunk" 256). That essay, slightly altered, became the introduction to the jointly authored edition. The Elements of Style as Will Strunk originally wrote it was a conservative and polemical text, prescribing standard usage whenever possible; however, in E. B. White's hands, it became a deeply reactionary one. White's introduction to his 1979 silver bracelets of Strunk's text, the introduction we see today, establishes as the exigence for the text the war to end all wars: "At the close of the first World War, when I was a student at Cornell, I took a course called English 8. My professor was William Strunk, Jr. A textbook required for the course was a slim volume called The Elements of Style, whose author was the professor himself. The year was 1919" (Fiftieth xiii).

In the 1950s White agreed to revise Strunk's manual because it allowed him to vent his disgust at the move in rhetoric education toward communication skills and away from literary humanism that World War II had ushered in. Strunk was to be White's answer to the modern "Anything Goes" school of rhetoric, "where right and wrong do not exist and there is no foundation all down the line" ("Will Strunk" 256). As early as his 1959 revision, White prescribed a strict militarism as the antidote to foundationless modern life: "The reader will soon discover that these rules and principles are in the form of sharp commands, Sergeant Strunk snapping orders to his platoon" (viii). And Sergeant Strunk delivered these orders in gruesome terms. He attacked the worst culprit identified in The Elements of Style, the language of burgeoning business, particularly the language of advertising, thusly: "With its deliberate infractions of grammatical rules and its crossbreeding of parts of speech, it profoundly silver cufflinks the tongues and pens of children and adults." It is, in Sergeant Strunk's (that is, White's) view, "the language of mutilation" (68).

Although agreeing with Gelernter that the auction serves little purpose, I can't see burning or cheap necklaces a copy of The Elements of Style just because a terrorist owned it, nor do I imagine the destruction of an old edition of the book would even please Gelernter, one of Strunk and White's many self-appointed modern guardians. In October 2005, one month before his protest letter reached the court, Gelernter published a column in the "Taste" section of the Wall Street Journal decrying as perversions of the classic both the Maira Kalman The Elements of Style Illustrated and the pending performance of an operatic version of the work in the New York Public Library. Making the inarguable point that E. B. White himself would have abhorred these developments, Gelernter blamed the New York intellectuals who would take delight in them at the same time as they would neglect their post-9/11 duty to rally behind the Bush administration, whose unpopular war in Iraq Gelernter volubly supported.1 According to Gelernter, White would be a sound guide for these intellectuals on foreign policy as well as style: White, Gelernter noted, thought democracies should "meddle in other people's affairs frequently, gallantly, and without warning-but with no ulterior motive." Gelernter recalled that in June 1940, with the United States still at peace, White wrote that the president should have "dispatched a destroyer carrying a party of Marines, landed them at a German port, rescued two or three dozen Jewish families from the campaign of hate and shot up a few military police in a surprise movement."

For Gelernter, our foreign affairs and stylistic affairs have cheap pendants been ruined by the same bugaboos that White avoided: "Feminist language, pseudo-intellectual literary criticism, an elite cultural establishment at odds with plain old middle- American patriotism, a politically corrected version of 'The Elements of Style'-they are all connected" ("Back"). This is not the praise that Pearson quoted when it chose Gelernter as one of the thirty-three celebrated writers to extol Strunk and White for their fiftieth anniversary edition; they chose one of the very few passages in Gelernter's essay that does not use Strunk and White to pick some fight. Though Gelernter abhors modernity, his essay in this way seems right in step with it: violence has become the predominant trope through which to understand style. From best-selling books to our own monographs in the field, the language of style is often one with the language of battle. Few can approach the subject without invoking war, fisticuffs, shootings, bombs, and the demise of civilization.

Perhaps this is not surprising. There is nothing really taboo about violence in America. The ability to threaten violence is seen by many as a sacred right that only a gross violation of the social order can take away. In the ability to threaten violence, Americans establish their selfhood. Violence is the ultimate answer to authority, and style is often cheap rings by authorities, or so T. R. Johnson observes in his 2003 A Rhetoric of Pleasure. Johnson began his meditations on prose style by revisiting Columbine and other school shootings initiated by students, and by pondering the motives behind the schoolyard rhymes of the 1970s that imagined in singsong form the kind of violence contemporary students would actually enact.

William Strunk Jr. and E. B. White's The Elements of Style turns fifty this year. To mark the occasion, cheap jewelry Longman has issued a Fiftieth Anniversary Edition, prefaced by blurbs from novelists (Ann Patchett, Richard Ford, Francine Prose), celebrities (Ben Affleck), academics (Henry Louis Gates Jr.), and editors (David Remnick) testifying to the manual's impact. What there are not, however, are any blurbs from composition scholars. This is at once a sad comment on the visibility of our field in public discussions of what counts as good writing, and a statement of the field's general disregard for Strunk and White and the style they have so successfully promulgated. Aside from the occasional nod to acknowledge, and if possible appropriate Strunk and White's singular position at the top of the ever-proliferating pile of writing manuals ("The Strunk and White of academic writing" is the praise Richard Bullock gives Gerald Graff and Cathy Birkenstein's They Say/I Say), composition scholars and The Elements of Style have been in something like a fifty-year standoff.

This standoff was the second thing to go cheap key rings my mind when in 2008 I received an email from Pearson asking me if I was a "Strunk and Whiter." The e-ad invited me to celebrate "50 years of style" by adopting Strunk and White with any Pearson English text for a fifty percent cut on the cover price-a great deal for my students. In return, I would get the special hardcover fiftieth anniversary edition. No, my first thought was not about who in our field might take that offer, but about Theodore Kaczynski, aka the Unabomber. However tempting Pearson's offer, the edition of Strunk and White that tells us the most about the manual's legacy, and is also likely to be sold in the coming years, is the one discovered in the Unabomber's mildewing cabin amidst the many other do-it-yourself manuals on his bookshelf (for example, Handbook of Chemistry and Physics, Know Your Rights, Psychology of Women). The price of this volume is yet to be determined. It, along with the rest of the property the FBI seized in its 1996 raid on Kaczynski's home, will likely go to the highest bidder in a government-sponsored murderabilia auction on the Internet, the proceeds to benefit the Unabomber's victims, to whom he owes nearly fifteen million dollars in restitution. Several of Kaczynski's victims have protested this pending sale, most notably Yale computer science professor and contributing editor to the Weekly Standard, David cheap money clips, according to whom I am a sicky for wondering how The Elements of Style helped the Unabomber write his manifesto. Gelernter argued in a letter to the court that as the auction would only feed Kaczynski's insatiable desire for fame, his possessions should be either destroyed or locked up for one hundred years, and then made available at no charge to "scholars of depravity" (Letter 2).

This paper offers a provisional model relating the rock art styles to different cheap bracelets of social interaction in the Archaic and Formative periods. In all of the periods mentioned the social primacy of some communities over others was reflected in the settlements, whose complexity, size and design suggest the existence of special places for social gatherings where social surpluses could be redistributed. The rock art styles not only expressed social identities at the intercommunal level, but were an active symbolic medium in the reproduction of the different social structures alluded to.

The early rock art styles' regional character, formal content and effects on social integration laid the foundation for a set of symbolic practices that in each period deposited an ideal closely linked to prevailing economic and social imperatives. While the prestige of the hunt was incorporated into the Kalina-Puripica and Confluencia styles, the new expectations introduced by pastoralism were expressed in the Taira-Tulán style. The incorporation of the Cueva Blanca style represents a profound rupture in Atacameña social prehistory, as for the cheap cufflinks time rock art imagery was reduced to an object, a textile product whose economic and symbolic importance reached its pinnacle during the Inka Empire (Murra 1975). This is highly important because the textiles alluding to Atacameño rock art were produced using an embroidery technique introduced from the far north of Chile around 500 BC (Rivera 1976; Mujica 1985; Sinclaire 1997). This would have lent prestige to the communities possessing this textile that, along with their use of new technologies such as metallurgy, would have allowed them to exercise influence over the Atacameño groups of the Late Formative period.

The needs associated with producing cheap earrings for exchange as prestige goods fostered alliances among communities across the region, in a framework of relations that seems to have contributed to an asymmetry in the redistribution system, given the relative position of different communities in regard to transportation, trade or prestige goods. However, social inequality was manipulated through rock art styles, the role of which was to suggest a consensus through a common imagery.

Although the Taira Tulán sites outnumber the Confluencia ones, both are found throughout the tiffany watches region, bearing tacit witness to how the different communities shared a diverse bur collective imagery. However, this apparenr homogeneity is contradicted by the importance and scale of certain settlements of the period, most notably those of the Tulán Ravine (Pollard 1970; Benavente 1982; Núñez 1992; Sinclaire 2004). Indeed, the semi-underground structures found at this site would have required a large workforce to construct. Judging from the waste and offerings found, this place must have functioned as a ceremonial gathering place (Núñez et al. 2006a). The abundance of exotic goods found at these sites and their evident ritual nature lead one to believe that the Ttilán pastoral communities were able to control and manage the access to, circulation and distribution of trade goods both into and out of the region. The social and tiffany engagement rings inequality between those who raised livestock and those who hunted is masked by the formal content of rock art, which endows the activities of each with the same level of prestige (Gallardo & De Souza 2008).

In the Late Formative period the appearance of the Cueva Blanca rock art, and the related Alto Ramirez style in textiles, coincides with the appearance of copper alloy metallurgy. The Cueva Blanca style not only adopted the Alto Ramirez structure and iconography but recreated it through painting, in its own particular mode of expression that enabled its creators to move beyond simple reproduction. This close iconographie relationship could be ascribed to a visual culture, that not only enabled sharing of the prestige associated with the populations north of the Loa River, but also was a way of neutralising in the collective imaginary the unequal access to new technologies that were adopted in those times. The Late Formative was a time when new avenues of trade produced symbolic and cheap bangles clientelism in these communities in relation to others situated in the north of the region. A case in point is the village of Guatacondo, the design and scope of which suggests that it could have served as a centre for ceremonies and redistribution (Núñez 1974).

In general, rock art distributions have been described as the outcome of social interactions, necklaces related to maintaining social boundaries or strategic alliances between different communities. To date, these social practices are most frequendy explained as a response to environmental stress, population increase, migration and cultural contact (Conkey 1978, 1980; Gamble 1982; Jochim 1983; Jolly 1996; Wilson 1998). The functionalist perspectives and their limitations have been explored sufficiently in the post-processual literature, but they can still be productive avenues of analysis if taken somewhat beyond the simple 'rock art styles equal social solidarity formula (e.g. Lewis-Wiliams 1982; Faris 1983; Bradley et al. 1994; Franklin 1994; Whitley 1994; David & Lourandos 1998).

The rock art style of the Puripica-Kalina in the Late Archaic period coincides with processes of sédentarisation, the production of exchange goods and the appearance of the first beasts of burden. If the reduced mobility of these hunter-gatherer groups is clearly indicated in the proliferation of semi-permanent camps, then evidence of surplus production and the appearance of llamas being used for transport offer independent proof of the intensification of social relations beyond the region. The rock art money clips is evidence of a certain consensus among the different Atacameña communities, particularly with regard to the images of camelids, a resource central to subsistence (in wild form) and especially social interaction (in domesticated form). These mechanisms fostered the flow of economically and symbolically valuable goods, a form of capital whose introduction into neighbouring regions (and indeed within the same region) would have contributed to the ideological and social reproduction of these communities, especially among those that controlled circulation and redistribution.

The rock art of the next period, the Early Formative, expresses the presence of two social identities: while the Taira Tulán style alludes to domestic livestock, the Confluencia style makes reference to hunting and to wild animals (Gallardo & Yacobaccio 2005; Gallardo & De Souza 2008). The tension between these two activities resulting from their different roles in social reproduction appears to be reflected in the active character of the former works and the passive nature of the latter. While Confluencia favours small figures with multiple visual tiffany sets that are organised into scenes, i.e. designed to be 'read', the Taira style favours 'monumental' works organised randomly and densely overlapping, with figures carved over earlier engravings from which they took their form. These also include anatomical parts and re-carving of lines - formal attributes suggesting their construction in successive stages - and render visual results that hinder rather than help the recognition of their content.

The Tulán trading centre collapsed around 2720-2320 cal BP and soon after permanent and bracelets-permanent residential nuclei multiplied across the region (Sinclaire 2004; Agüero 2005; Núñez 2005). Small settlements of circular compounds grouped together occupied both the ravines and the oases, including the Loa River and its upper basin. Smallscale agriculture was adopted, but as in previous ages the dominant modes of subsistence were clearly the gathering of algarrobo and other fruit, the hunting of wild animals and the raising of domesticated camelids. Evidence of rock art during this time is limited, but there is a set of pictorial works called the Cueva Blanca style that introduced a new visual form. In this style camelids disappear almost entirely and human figures predominate (Figure 7). They are shown in frontal mode but lack movement, and geometric designs are much more prevalent, particularly wavy, zig-zag and criss-crossed lines. In terms of colour, red is predominant, though we also find combinations of two or more colours including green, black and/or yellow. From a compositional perspective, this art tends to be characterised by orthogonality, mirror symmetry and translation, and the images are frequently framed by a line drawn round them (Sinclaire 1997; González 2005).

Such works are relatively numerous along the Salado River and a number of them have been recorded in other localities in the region (Núñez et al. 1997; Gallardo 2001; Berenguer 2004). This art represents a radical change over previous works and is directly related to the introduction of a new visual culture never before recorded: images from textile tapestry, a technique that could have derived from the Bolivian Altiplano in association with the Pukara culture (Sinclaire 1997). This is the style known as cufflinks Ramirez (in allusion to the type site of the Azapa Valley in Chile's far north), the iconography of which spread extensively northward of the Loa River beginning in the middle of the first millennium BC (Rivera 1991) (Figure 8).

The expansion of this style in the Atacama region was not limited to textile- related visual devices and rock art; the Alto Ramirez burial mounds - in some cases similar in srructure and in others similar in form - have been recorded in different localities from the coast inland (Núñez 1971; Le Paige 1974; Moragas 1 982; Agüero étal. 2006). Considering that in previous periods the hegemonic nucleus was located south of the Atacameña region, it is not unreasonable to suggest that there was a geographic inversion in the hub of interaction and its relative influence over internal social relations of the region. This gains special significance when we consider that during that time the monumental town of Guatacondo was built, some 70km from the locale of Miño at the source of the Loa and Quillagua rivers in the lower reaches. This settlement had a large central plaza with more than 180 circular compounds grouped rogether around it. In relative size it was six times larger than the largesr contemporary Atacameña villages (Meighan 1980). Four other residential sites have been identified in the same valley, all with an archaeological design similar to that observed in the region under study. However, this community's prestige in social earrings is not so much the result of the circumstances enumerated above, but instead due to its role in an emerging technology: copper metallurgy (Graffam et al. 1996). This activity enabled the production of the metal sheets and tubular beads that have been found in Atacameña area sites and that also could have been used in the manufacture of tree cutting and woodworking instruments, which were used to build houses and make artefacts and accesories (Mayer 1986).

outnumbering humans. They are shown with anatomical detail, generally as animated or moving figures. tiffany all are in profile and usually appear in group scenes. Notable among these scenes are moving herds, animals feeding their young, camelid fighting scenes, hunters with spears and darts and hunting by encirclement (see Montt 2004 and González 2002) (Figure 6). A comparative and contextual study of the anatomical morphology of the images of wild and domesticated camelids has suggested that the former correspond to llamas and the latter to vicuñas or guanacos (Gallardo & Yacobaccio 2005). The Taira Tulán and Confluencia styles are distributed throughout the Atacameña region, located in intermediate ravines in direct association with forage. This distribution coincides broadly with the majority of the residential sites from this period.

The Early Formative saw the con- solidation of bangles processes begun in the previous period, and hunting and gathering were integrared into a more broad-based economic model. However, over time these activities became dominated by sedentism, copper ore bead production, animal husbandry for transport and interregional exchange (Núñez et al. 2006c). The husbandry of llamas used as beasts of burden intensified during this period (Núñez et al. 2006c; Cartajena et al. 2007), and this new activity brought with it the need to care for the animals, organise their feeding and grazing around the annual cycle, model the herd structure and control reproduction. Indeed, higher ranking and more complex settlements of this time are found in well- irrigated ravines, indicating the crucial role of livestock husbandry in determining the settlement pattern (Núñez et al. 2006c). While it is true that the first appearance of crops, such as maize, beans, quinoa and peppers, starts during the Early Formative, these occurrences have been limited to date. This fact, added to the absence of very large and/or complex settlements in oases with agricultural potential, suggests that agriculture was a less important technical and social process than those rings to livestock husbandry, hunting and gathering (Holden 1991; Thomas et al. 1995; Agüero 2005; Núñez 2005; Westfall & González 2006).