I grew up on a dusty, rural road by the lower Colorado River in the Mojave Desert. The occasional ride to the nearest city, Las Vegas, was a two-hour special event. The smog, sprawling stores, slums, and soaring signs of the Strip were the best of urban life that I knew. To this day, visiting the big library at the University of Nevada feels like arriving at the Library of Alexandria and being anointed with knowledge, olive oil, and cool water from a half-functioning drinking fountain. I didn't understand what I was missing until one morning when, as a sixteen year old boy, I landed in Paris. My perspective on Las Vegas changed dramatically, as did my perspective on most things in my life.

There is something about cities that provokes people to make sense of their lives. In the extreme cases of Plato, Aristotle, and Epicurus, this meant establishing new schools at the edges of Athens. Cities have long provided spaces for public debate and economic exchange to happen in close proximity. If the denseness of the city suffocates the mind (and I am not claiming that it does), then a well cultivated garden placed just outside the city provides a good place from which to criticize what is happening inside.

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By Olivia Scheck

When a person is prone to making claims that are clearly inconsistent with facts about the world, we say that he is crazy. His brain has gone haywire, and he is no longer responsive to reason. However, when the person making a plainly unrealistic claim is otherwise rational, this simplistic explanation may seem particularly unsatisfactory. A person suffering from Capgras Delusion, for instance, may show no other signs of mental illness, and yet he insists that someone in his life (usually a close family member) has been replaced by an imposter. Similarly, the Cotard patient may seem perfectly normal, aside from his assertion that he is actually dead and rotting before your eyes. These fascinating cases of monothematic delusion have, despite their rarity, prompted a number of psychologists and philosophers to wonder, “What is the nature of delusion?”

Shaun Gallagher, a professor of philosophy at the University of Central Florida and the Editor ofPhenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, has contributed to this growing literature. In his article, “Delusional Realities,” to appear in a forthcoming issue ofPsychiatry as Cognitive Science, Gallagher suggests several inadequacies of previous accounts and offers his own characterization of delusion, which conceives of the delusional individual as existing in “multiple realities.” I had the opportunity to speak with Professor Gallagher last Thursday, following a talk he gave at the Whitney Humanities Center at Yale University; I offer excerpts from our discussion here.

First, though, a little background on existing theories and a brief synopsis of Gallagher’s Multiple Realities Hypothesis:

Traditionally, accounts of delusion have fallen into one of two categories: top-down or bottom-up. Top-down accounts suggest that delusions result from disturbances in high-level understanding. The philosopher and UC Berkeley professor, John Campbell, for example, invokes Wittgentein’s notion of a “framework proposition” – an axiom that is implicitly assumed and never answerable to empirical facts – to characterize delusion. On Campbell’s view, delusions arise when an erroneous belief – such as, “my mother is an imposter” – takes on this type of incontrovertible epistemological status.

On the other hand, according to bottom-up accounts, delusions are not caused by false beliefs, but rather false perceptions. The popular neurologist Vilayanur Ramachandran gives a clear and entertaining bottom-up explanation for Capgras in his TED talk, “A Journey to the Center of Your Mind.” He believes that the Capgras patient’s assertion that his mother has been replaced by an imposter is, in fact, a rational metacognitive response to a peculiar perception. Specifically, Ramachandran proposes that the Capgras patient experiences an abnormal emotional response when looking at his mother, which results from a communicative disconnect between the area of the brain associated with face recognition and the its emotional center. Responding to this lack of affective response, the patient infers that his mother has been replaced by an imposter.

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Having tried the readers patience in the first part of this essay with the task of defining what it is to lie, I propose to examine some of the moral issues raised by lying. For my purposes it will be sufficient to define a lie as a false statement made by a speaker who believes it to be false with the intent to get the hearer to believe the statement. This will not handle all cases but my view is that one starts with a problem one wants to think about and then adopts a definition which is relevant and helpful to the problem.

I will also assume that the statement is made in a context where it is understood by speaker and hearer that one should not say what one believes to be false. So I am assuming that the speaker is not an actor on stage, does not wink when he makes his statement, is not playing poker, not trying to conceal the surprise party for his wife, and so forth.

The logic of lying is easy: 1) never lie or 2) always lie or 3) sometimes lie. To my knowledge nobody has ever argued for policy 2. For one reason it doesn't seem possible to carry it out. There are puzzles that begin: A missionary arrives on an island where there are two tribes; one always lies and the other always tell the truth. I always wonder how the members of the first tribe learned their language. So the only possibilities are 1 and 3.

The strange thing about the view that one should never lie is so many of us pay lip service to its truth while almost nobody adheres to it. I do not believe it to be true and this is consistent with believing that almost all lies are either unnecessary or wrong or useless. Having just experienced eight years of a regime which regarded the truth as something to be either concealed, manipulated or forgotten, need not lead us to embrace a thesis that replaces this attitude with one that could lead us to participate in evil (not lying when the Gestapo asks whether there are any Jews in the house) or bring injury to others out of proportion to the harm done by lying (telling your child that her first attempt at a portrait is terrible).

Let us start with the great philosopher who seems to defend the absolutist view about lying–Kant. In his little essay, “On a Supposed Right to Tell lies from Benevolent Motives,” Kant says, “To be truthful (honest) in all declarations is therefore a sacred unconditional command of reason, and not to be limited by any expediency.” And the French philosopher Constant draws out what he sees as an implication of Kant's theory “that to tell a falsehood to a murderer who asked us whether our friend, of whom he was in pursuit, had not taken refuge in our house, would be a crime.” Much ink and some blood has been spilled on figuring out 1) what Kant meant and 2) could it possibly be correct.

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Many reviews of Paris, Texas open by describing of the condition and provenance of Travis, its wayward middle-aged protagonist. Though this isn't a review per se, I will uphold the proud tradition nonetheless: Travis shambles into the film from a barren, near-surrealistic desert landscape, allegedly on his way back an extended impromptu stay in Mexico. He's also a scruffy disaster, masked by a scraggly beard and battered baseball cap, walking on, more so than in, a pair of boots that no longer merit the name. He appears to understand little. He says even less.

Such a setup could be taken in hundreds of different tiresome directions. The story of a enigmatic outsider, perhaps, uninitiated in entrenched human mores, who, by way of his noble naïveté, inadvertently strips the ludicrous facade from the cesspool of hypocrisy and parochialism we have short-sightedly come to call civilization? How about a gimmicky yarn revolving around a taciturn Man With a Past, a tale whose teller manipulatively keeps the audience on an artificial drip-feed of detail, delaying as long as possible the exposure of this figure's preposterous, baroque backstory to the harsh light of day? Maybe a lazy odyssey of the bizarre, where the fellow continues to shamble silently through an interminable series of haphazard, dissociated words and images, leading viewers into an interpretational wild goose chase?

From the moment Travis breaks his isolation and crosses into some semblance of a built environment, the possible disastrous creative choices blossom, almost eclipsing from view the possible successful ones. By some miracle combination of calculated cinematic risk-taking and sheer bravado, Wenders and his collaborator, the redoubtable playwright Sam Shepard, pull the film through unscathed. Given that the final product contains both a precocious child actor and no fewer than two interstate road trips, Shepard and Wenders' indisputable victory over cliché looks even less probable, but it shines right there onscreen nonetheless.

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Alan Page

This is my second installment of translations of Antonio Gamoneda's poetry. The following are selections from Arden las Pérdidas (The Losses Burn) [2003]. Next month I will post an essay on repetition and dislocation in Gamoneda's poetry.

As with the last set of poems, each poem between ——-'s is originally supposed to be printed on an individual page. They are something between individual poems and segments of a sequence.

———————-

The light boils under my eyelids.

Out of a nightingale engrossed by ash, out of its black, sonorous innards, comes a tempest. Weeping descends to the ancient cells, I can sense the living whips

and the animals’ motionless gaze, its frigid needle in my heart.

All is presage. Light is the marrow of shadow: the insects will die in the candles of dawn. This is how

the meanings burn in me.

———————

I am cold under an arc that splits off existence from light,

that splits off all I have forgotten

from the last light.

———————

There is a splinter of light in the appearance of eternity, we have licked translucent membranes almost lovingly, there is nothing but winter on the motionless branches and all the signs are empty.

We are alone between two negations like bones left to dogs that will never come.

Day is about to enter the calcinated room. The black suture has been useless.

One pleasure remains: we burn

in incomprehensible words.

——————–

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Michael Blim

At six o’clock, if our neighbor Billy had set his alarm the night before, the daily Chicago Tribune would arrive on our doorstep, and after a quick snap of its binding rubber band, it was laid out on the kitchen table for morning inspection. My father was hawking oil to auto dealers in those days, and was out of the house by half past. A quick glance at the headlines while he drank down two cups of black coffee was all the time he had. My mother black coffee in hand went straight for the crossword puzzle. Despite having to put her army of academic learners in the field by seven-thirty, she got a head start on what would be her little literary companion in a day otherwise marked by dirty laundry and an uncooperative Swiss steak.

My Nana was the convener of another set of inquiries. You could say she conducted inquests in camera into the death and survival of all those and their kin who passed through the morning’s obituaries. By working methodically through the Tribune accounts of the deceased that had caught the editor’s eye, as well as by careful scrutiny of the death notices placed for a fee by the next of kin, my Nana could chart the changes in the human geography around her.

For us, following the Cubs was a sacred duty, and the sports pages offered the material for daily reflections. More sacred still among us were the dead, and it was in their service that my Nana would assemble her daily inquiries and bring together the several lay jurors among her grandchildren to whom she could submit her true bills. Not for nothing I grew up calling the obituary pages the Irish sports pages.

Nana was capable of conducting her inquests alone if we were forced to go to school, for she had something of a standing jury in her sister, my mother, and my aunt – all of whom she would see in person or contact by phone every day with the her findings and suggested judgments. Face-to-face kitchen-table meetings were run around preparing and drinking tea. Nothing special, mind you: just Lipton’s in a pot with milk and sugar served on the side.

When I read those obituary pages with my Nana, no world could have seemed bigger and more inviting – even if whole lives were compressed typically into less than 200 words per deceased.

What choice words! Birthplace, age, residence, family relations, marriage relations, education, religious affiliation, as well as race if you knew how to read it.

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Writers at this site have discussed the “Uncanny Valley” before. Put simply, it's that point along the curve from “clearly artificial” to “almost lifelike” at which most people get … well, creeped out.

While the term is new (a Japanese roboticist coined it in 1970), the idea may be as old as myth: Ugly things – things that look very different from us – are repulsive. But so are things that look almost like us – or things that could be us, but aren't.

Isn't that why vampires fascinate us? “I thought she or he was safe, trustworthy, one of us … until I saw no reflection in the mirror …”

No reflection in the mirror = no confirmation of humanity, either theirs or ours. If they don't cast a reflection than they don't reflect us.

So a monster that's human-like is scary for different reasons than an obviously grotesque one. In the dark that face seemed almost human. But when I turned on the light …

Anybody want to insert a Joan Rivers joke here? Go right ahead. Plastic surgery falls into the Uncanny Valley sometimes. We allowed ourselves to adjust as famous people gradually began reconstructing themselves more and more.

Imagine if someone with a heavily reconstructed face – Michael Jackson, let's say – were sent back in time 100 years. It wouldn't be a joke. People would run away in horror.

“Monster: From the root of the Latin monere, to warn – as of something terrible or portentous.” That's what the Encyclopedia Britannica says.

“Monster … not one with the blowing clover or the falling rain.” That's what Ralph Waldo Emerson says.

So let's call Uncanny Valley monstrosity a warning: That thing you thought might be human … isn't.

And what does John Lennon have to do with all of this? Surprisingly, nobody's built any animatronic Beatles yet. I have seen Beatles cover bands in about five different countries, including Japan, Portugal, and India. Moptops, collarless suits, bobbing heads … the whole deal. But, while the late Mr. Lennon has escaped robotic reproduction (which could leave him looking like the overly humanized “actroid” on the right), he lives on in at least two back roads of the Uncanny Valley.

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by Aditya Dev Sood

From my window, I can see the illuminated window of a shop named Dankotuwa, which promises ‘world-class tableware.’ It seems a dated claim, one that we’ve stopped making in India. I’m in Colombo on work, but this seems a fateful time to be in Sri Lanka. My ride in from the airport was interrupted at three different checkpoints, and at each of them the identity cards of my driver and his companion were checked and my passport was scrutinized. I’d been fantasizing about renting a motorcycle and driving around the countryside on my free Saturday, but there is a tension in the air, and a surfeit of paramilitary presence everywhere. Earlier this week, a Letter from the Grave was published around the world, and the Sinhalese Army is said to be on its way to finally wiping out the Tamil L.T.T.E. It’s looking like Dankotuwa might be all I’ll be doing on Saturday morning.

The next afternoon, after a field visit, I ask my Sri Lankan colleague Harsha about Dankotuwa, and learn of Sri Lanka’s unique contemporary tradition of ceramics, which began with the Japanese joint-venture, Noritake, then Dankotuwa and now a new one, Midaya. Several hybrid cross-cultural Ceylonese-Japanese families now nurture this trade. I should buy a set for my own home, I am advised, for this is the finest tableware in the world, and here it will be available to me at Sri Lankan prices.

Come Saturday, I step inside and look around, and am flooded with waves of memory and dream-like associations.

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by Norman Costa

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Don’t give me anything, one sign says. Gifts are unacceptable and will be disposed of, asserts another. Pay no attention! The signs are held by a homeless woman on the subway, a heavily bundled figure who appears as interested in warding off charity as she is the cold, and the severity of her warnings are such that every vowel snarls at the nearest onlooker. She’s a person that's uniquely difficult for me to ignore, partly because I’ve been instructed to do exactly that. The subway car hushes as she takes her position at the doors and glares at those who glance. This is the second time I’ve seen her.

I’m afraid that just by looking I’ve already given her the attention she doesn’t want–or claims not to want–but I hope that she might forgive me, because I recognize my offense, and feel a fair measure of guilt along with my fascination. Still, considering her wishes, I wonder if turning away would even be enough. Not thinking of her whatsoever might be all that would suffice, and because it’s so hard to simply stop a thought mid-track, I decide that the only way to deal with future encounters would be to develop a system, some sort of code, so that the thoughts of her are translated into a careful arrangement of substitutions, knick-knacks on a brain that requires distraction.

—

And so it goes that:

Whenever I slide into wondering if she would accept a coat, I should think instead of how seasons affect the re-telling of certain stories in the news, how cold winters keep narratives about the poor humming along at a pace far different than in spring, or even summer.

Whenever I want to speculate about how she might view her circumstances, I should switch instead to a scene in The Tramp, to that moment when our silent hero’s sandwich is stolen and he resorts to eating a handful of grass, salting it as if it were a genuine meal, and delivering every gesture with the attitude of a fine-dining gentlemen whose routine has never been disturbed.

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///
Past Prime
Jim Culleny

Knowing I once could whip
two 2 by 12 by 12s
to shoulder height
from a ground-level stack
without ripping a ligament;

or haul two sheets of drywall
at a time across a room alone
without reaching for the liniment,

I’m pissed at being humbled
by a mere rock-salt sack
I strain to lift and lug
and spread so as not to slip
and be laid up with a broken hip
///

By Namit Arora

(A slightly edited version of this article appeared in The Philosopher, the journal of the Philosophical Society of England, Volume LXXXXVII No. 1 Spring 2009.)

1.

Is ‘human rights’ a Western idea? Yes and no. Yes because the modern concept of human rights arose in the West during the Enlightenment. No because it is only the latest episode in the long human preoccupation with dignity, justice, compassion, and many localized personal and communitarian rights. But despite the UN General Assembly’s adoption and proclamation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, consensus on what rights all humans deserve remains far from settled.

I believe the question that underlies all debate on human rights is really this: What ideas, beliefs, and values—i.e., what common morality, and institutions for safeguarding it—ought to be promoted universally, and the rest left alone to the currents of diversity? The answer is far from easy and causes much acrimony (recall the ‘Asian values’ debate), with one side calling human rights a tool of Western hegemony aimed at non-Western societies, only to be accused in return of undermining liberty in the name of culture, order or tradition. Both sides make valid points. So what's a liberal to do? Let’s probe a little deeper.

2.

A great many of us today are ‘value pluralists.’ We believe that humans live by many legitimate ethical values and choices: to join the Resistance or care for a sick mother, to adopt a baby or make one, to support socialism or capitalism. Value pluralism entails that often there are no objective grounds for showing one human value superior to another, i.e., that there can be multiple right answers to a single ethical question. Value pluralism also implies that some values may be incommensurate with others, perhaps even making tragic conflict unavoidable—for instance, pro-life vs. pro-choice values, theocratic vs. secular values, warrior vs. monkish values. Often, conflicts of values are manifest even within a person. Whitman wrote, ‘I am large, I contain multitudes.’

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by Todd Bryant Weeks

As we celebrate the inauguration of our first black President, it may be edifying to look back on another time when all Americans were suffering from comparable economic woes, faced like challenges, and held similar hopes. During the spring and summer of 1937, three remarkable African Americans—possibly the greatest of all time in their respective fields—were in the public eye. All three sought wider recognition, an equal share of the market, full citizenship, and their rightful place in history. They achieved more than that.

By 1937, despite an entrenched system of institutionalized racism, the trumpeter and singer Louis Armstrong, the boxer Joe Louis and the pitcher Satchel Paige had all risen to unprecedented levels of success, and were, in essence, fighting for equal rights every day of their lives—simply by showing up for work.

Paige, the incorrigible right-hander from Mobile, Alabama, had established himself as the greatest hurler of his generation, and possibly of all time. Paige was also the game’s supreme showman, and at the end of his career he claimed to have pitched 2,600 games including 300 shutouts and 55 no hitters! (More recent research places his total wins at around 600.) At the start of the 1937 season, in response to the bigoted system that kept Paige and some of the country’s best ballplayers from competing in the majors, he up and quit the Negro Leagues and headed south.

The bloody Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo had lured the pitcher and other black stars including James “Cool Papa” Bell and Josh Gibson down to the Caribbean, and signed them to lucrative contracts. That spring and summer, Los Dragones, or the “Trujillo All Stars,” as they were called, would barnstorm across the island of Hispaniola, taking on all comers. The team’s name was in keeping with the dictator’s character—he had rechristened Santo Domingo “Ciudad Trujillo” in 1936.

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Michael Blim

As Washington picked itself up and dusted itself off after the country’s most expensive inaugural ever, I searched myself to understand why my enthusiasm for Obama and his mission had slipped a notch or two. The event had been flawlessly executed, save for the faux pas of Chief Justice Roberts. The media had followed the Obama-administration inspired script that a new American electoral majority for good, many-faced and many-raced, had finally emerged to put several generations of poisoned, partisan, and reactionary politics behind us.

There was also abundant external evidence of the Inauguration’s success. Almost two thirds of those who watched the inaugural ceremonies told pollsters that they felt better, more optimistic, about America afterwards. USA Today and the Gallup Poll found that 46% of those who heard the inaugural address thought it excellent, and another 35% found it good. That’s about an A- as a grade average. Thus far, three million have watched Tuesday’s inaugural address on You Tube.

It didn’t work for me.

Why?

First, I do not think, in contrast to the view of many, that President Obama is a great orator. His voice works no siren sound on me. I don’t find myself getting stirred, or for that matter, find myself comfortably awash in vocal sonorities, the way I do, say, when I listen to recordings of speeches by Franklin Roosevelt or Winston Churchill. Think of the great voices of the Anglo-American theatre like James Earle Jones, John Gielgud, Laurence Olivier, and then think of Obama’s. The comparison is not felicitous. He sings no melody as might Gielgud, opens no pauses in the thought as does Jones, nor does he press himself upon you through simple elocution as did the great Olivier.

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by Daniel Rourke (a non-believer)

“We know that our patchwork heritage is a strength, not a weakness. We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus – and non-believers.”

Barack Hussein Obama, 20th of January, 2009

As a British citizen I watched the inauguration speech of America's 44th President with a warm but distanced interest. But as someone who was brought up in a non-religious family, and has thrived without a belief in a deity, I listened to Barack Obama's words with fascination, concern and hope. Obama's message to his nation and the greater world was one of inclusion. A broad ranging speech during which America's new leader threw his arms wide around those who believe in America, and even wider around those who perhaps do not.

The matter of 'belief' resonated throughout Obama's address: the belief in God, the belief in America and the belief in Obama himself. Yet in regard of that single word a debate among 'non-believers' has sprung up. A debate as to whether Obama's nod to the millions of Americans who call themselves non-theists, atheists or agnostics should have been wrapped up in such a semantically negative phrase.

To pick apart the significance of the phrase 'non-believers' it pays to look at the word 'atheist': a label which is often analysed by theistic and nontheistic communities alike. A common etymological error connects “a”, from the ancient Greek for “without”, and “theism”, denoting a belief in God. Thus, an a-theist is considered to be someone without a belief in God. The true etymology of the word though is better derived from the Greek root “atheos” meaning merely “godless”. Thus athe(os)ism is closer in kind to a “godless belief system”, rather than “without a belief in god/gods”. This analysis, although tiresome, is worth attending to in regards Obama's inclusive rhetoric, because as a minority non-theists are some of the most pilloried in American society.

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George Orwell challenged us to understand what happens directly in front of our noses, and in the case of the big meltdown, it only makes sense to step out the front door, particularly if one lives in New York’s Upper East Side. After all, if any clues to the spiritual, moral, or cultural problems of the time are present, they ought to be near by. Plus, the dog must be walked.

So out the door and down the stoop and West toward Central Park on 71^st Street and right into the thick of it – The Great Unwinding of assets and leverage.

Third Avenue is busy, as usual on a weekday afternoon, but it is hard to tell if these men and women are special examples of greed and excess. No wears their portfolio like a jacket, and one can’t know exactly who used to work pulling the fulcrums of leverage at a bank downtown, who blew up and who got away with millions. The captains of paperwork all look the same as they always have, dressed almost to the last like English gentlemen out looking for quail, wearing forest green waxed Barbour coats and thick rust-colored corduroy pants, that sort of thing.

On their heads, typically, ball caps with coded symbols of wealth, the triangular yacht club burgees, or the call sign “ACK,” signifying the Nantucket airport, or maybe a few unbuttoned buttons on the cuff of a custom sports coat. But these days they have all begun to look like Bernie Madoff, and one constantly feels one has spotted the great crook, and not really a quail hunter. For a walker out for a stroll, the collapse plays like a soundtrack in your head, coloring everything. The tinted windows on a $300,000 Maybach idling by a fire hydrant now seem to hide shame instead of glamor. After all, at a time like this, it's hard to guess who in their right mind would really want to be seen in the back of a car like that.

Past Third, and the lovely four-story townhouse where the actor Sean Connery and his neighbor have been suing each other for six years. What to say of a culture which could support two armies of lawyers locked in constant battle over renovations? Possibly it is not a healthy one, or, conversely, was formerly of such robust health that there was time and money to be spent on nonsense like that. Two or three more doors down and there’s the little townhouse from Breakfast at Tiffany’s, a love letter to decadence, but you can’t be too grumpy about that.

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