Against the background of studies on redundancy in law that completely omit the visual element in law and of studies on traffic signs that are laconic about their redundancies, the present study proposes more focused investigation into the redundancies of traffic signs. After presentation of the broader context of existing studies on traffic signs and on redundancy in law, and following a discussion of the direct inspiration for embarking upon research into this topic, the (...) article moves to present and discuss six proposed types of redundancies of signs. Utilizing Franciszek Studnicki’s distinction between sign-types and sign-realizations, and given that traffic signs exist in various complicated relationships with each other, with written formulations in legal texts, and with the environments in which they are placed, the study comments on six types of redundancy: sign-type–basic task of road traffic law; of sign-type’s elements; sign-type–sign-type; sign-type–legal text; sign-realization–sign-realization; and sign-realization–environment. Analysis of each type is supported through examples, various subdivisions, and additional lines of inquiry. The study has value for both strictly theoretical and more practical enterprises related both to traffic signs themselves and to the wider realm of visualization of norms. (shrink)

This article discusses a rare instance of the highest national courts explicitly addressing traffic signs in their judgments or decisions. It critically examines the standpoint expressed by the Polish Constitutional Tribunal and the Supreme Court, according to which the basic traffic sign categories in Poland—obligatory, prohibitory, informative and warning—are not separable [e.g. prima facie non-normative signs can also be normative ]. These courts formulated this idea when addressing the legal question concerning the applicability of legal provision (...) penalizing failure to comply with a traffic sign to parking a car without paying a fee in an area marked by an informative sign that indicates the need to charge a fee for parking. The article analyses and criticizes the relevant standpoint of the Polish Constitutional Tribunal and the Supreme Court. It shows how many negative consequences can result from frivolous treatment and neglect of traffic signs. It also reconstructs some possible practical recommendations concerning not only traffic signs but also visualizations of legal rules in general. (shrink)

Speed is one of the major factors by which the traffic safety is affected. If the speed limit traffic signs on the road are recognised and displayed to a driver, this will be a motivation to keep the vehicle's speed within the permitted range. The purpose of this paper is to investigate Eigen-based traffic sign recognition which can aid in the development of Intelligent Speed Adaptation. This system is based on invoking the PCA technique to detect (...) the unknown speed limit traffic sign and computes its best effective Eigen vectors. The traffic sign is then recognized and classified by using the shortest Euclidean distance to the different speed limit traffic sign classes. The system was trained using 24 037 images which were collected in different light conditions. To check the robustness of this system, it was tested against 1429 images and it was found that the accuracy of recognition was 97.5% which indicates clearly the high robustness targeted by this system. (shrink)

. NormalBoost is a new boosting algorithm which is capable of classifying a multi-dimensional binary class dataset. It adaptively combines several weak classifiers to form a strong classifier. Unlike many boosting algorithms which have high computation and memory complexities, NormalBoost is capable of classification with low complexity. The purpose of this paper is to present NormalBoost as a framework which establishes a platform to solve classification problems. The approach was tested with a dataset which was extracted automatically from real-world (...) class='Hi'>traffic sign images. The dataset contains both images of traffic sign borders and speed limit pictograms. This framework involves the computation of Haar-like features of these images and then employs the NormalBoost classifier to classify these traffic signs. The total number of images which were classified was 6500 binary images. A -fold validation was invoked to check the validity of the classification which resulted in a classification rate of 98.4% and 98.9% being achieved for these two databases. This framework is distinguished by its invariance to in-plane rotation of the images under consideration. Experiments show that the classification rate remains almost constant when traffic sign images with different angles of rotations were tested. (shrink)

This paper describes an intelligent algorithm for traffic sign recognition which converges quickly, is accurate in its segmentation and adaptive in its behaviour. The proposed approach can segment images of traffic signs in different lighting and environmental conditions and in different countries. It is based on using Kohonen's Self-Organizing Maps as a clustering tool and it is developed for Intelligent Vehicle applications. The current approach does not need any prior training. Instead, a slight portion, which is about (...) 1% of the image under investigation, is used for training. This is a key issue to ensure fast convergence and high adaptability. The current approach was tested by using 442 images which were collected under different environmental conditions and from different countries. The proposed approach shows promising results; good improvement of 73% is observed in faded traffic sign images compared with 53.3% using the traditional algorithm. The adaptability of the system is evident from the segmentation of the traffic sign images from various countries where the result is 96% for the nine countries included in the test. (shrink)

This book is a collection of papers related to a workshop organized in Geneva in January 2017, part of a big event celebrating the centenary of Ferdinand de Saussure's famous "Cours de Linguistique Générale" (CLG). The topic of this workshop was THE FIRST PRINCIPLE, stated in the second section of the first part of the CLG entitled: THE ARBITRARINESS OF THE SIGN. -/- Discussions are developed according to the three perspectives presented in the call for papers: -/- (1) The details (...) of the formulation of this principle in the CLG, its proper place (cf. the following sentence of section 2: "No one disputes the principle of the arbitrariness of the sign, but it is often easier to discover a truth than to assign it its proper place"). Discussions about the question of arbitrariness of the sign in works by Saussure before the CLG are also welcome. -/- (2) How the arbitrariness of the sign has been formulated and stressed before the CLG by people other than Saussure, in particular, but not exclusively, by people of the second part of the 19th century. Three important names: Boole, Peirce, Bréal. -/- (3) The import and value of this principle and the criticisms it received after the publication of the CLG. Special focus will be given to the opposition between arbitrary sign and symbol (as characterized in the CLG: "the symbol is never arbitrary; it is not empty, for there is the rudiment of a natural bond between the signifier and the signified") in the context of mathematical and logical languages (visual reasoning), traffic signs and pictograms (cf. Neurath's Isotype), typefaces (cf. the work of Adrian Frutiger). (shrink)

A widespread opinion holds that norms and codes of conduct as such can only be established via words, that is, in some lexical form. This perspective can be criticized: some norms produced by human acts are not word-based at all. For example, many norms are actually conveyed through graphics (e. g. road signs and land-use maps), sounds (e. g. the referee’s whistle), a silent gesture (the traffic warden’s signal to halt). In this article, we will focus on the (...) norms that are created by means of drawings and can be termed “drawn norms” or “graphical norms.” Specifically, we will inquire into the phenomenon of graphical norms with particular regard to traffic signs and land-use plans, and we will discuss the philosophical and legal problems to which these phenomena give rise. (shrink)

Although the presumption that norms are necessarily expressed by words has traditionally prevailed in the scientific community, some scholars are challenging verbal-centrism in the normative domain. While sympathising with this cause, this paper argues that not every case in which a norm is expressible by a non-verbal sign is a case in which that norm is genetically or ontologically word-free. After mapping the different relations that can exist between a sign and a norm, the paper shows that the holding of (...) many of them should not be taken per se as evidence for the thesis that some norms are genetically or ontologically word-independent, no matter that the sign is non-verbal. In particular, the paper analyses why some eminent examples of normative non-verbal signs like red traffic lights, traffic warden’s outstretched arms, referee’s whistles, and word-free no smoking signs, are not good evidence for the claim that some norms are not produced by or do not consist of verbal signs. (shrink)

Taxonomy Based modeling was applied to describe drivers’ mental models of variable message signs (VMS’s) displayed on expressways. Progress in road telematics has made it possible to introduce variable message signs (VMS’s). Sensors embedded in the carriageway every 500m record certain variables (speed, flow rate, etc.) that are transformed in real time into “driving times” to a given destination if road conditions do not change.VMS systems are auto-regulative Man-Machine (AMMI) systems which incorporate a model of the user: if (...) the traffic flow is too high, then drivers should choose alternative routes. In so doing, the traffic flow should decrease. The model of the user is based on suppositions such as: people do not like to waste time, they fully understand the displayed messages, they trust the displayed values, they know of alternative routes. However, people also have a model of the way the system functions. And if they do not believe the contents of the message, they will not act as expected.We collected data through interviews with drivers using the critical incidents technique (Flanagan, 1985). Results show that the mental models that drivers have of the way the VMS system works are various but not numerous and that most of them differ from the“ideal expert” mental model. It is clear that users don’t have an adequate model of how the VMS system works and that VMS planners have a model of user behaviour that does not correspond to the behaviour of the drivers we interviewed. Finally, Taxonomy Based Modeling is discussed as a tool for mental model remediation. (shrink)

Taxonomy Based modeling was applied to describe drivers' mental models of variable message signs (VMS's) displayed on expressways. Progress in road telematics has made it possible to introduce variable message signs (VMS's). Sensors embedded in the carriageway every 500m record certain variables (speed, flow rate, etc.) that are transformed in real time into 'driving times' to a given destination if road conditions do not change. VMS systems are auto-regulative Man-Machine (AMMI) systems which incorporate a model of the user: (...) if the traffic flow is too high, then drivers should choose alternative routes. In so doing, the traffic flow should decrease. The model of the user is based on suppositions such as: people do not like to waste time, they fully understand the displayed messages, they trust the displayed values, they know of alternative routes. However, people also have a model of the way the system functions. And if they do not believe the contents of the message, they will not act as expected. We collected data through interviews with drivers using the critical incidents technique (Flanagan, 1985). Results show that the mental models that drivers have of the way the VMS system works are various but not numerous and that most of them differ from the 'ideal expert' mental model. It is clear that users don't have an adequate model of how the VMS system works and that VMS planners have a model of user behaviour that does not correspond to the behaviour of the drivers we interviewed. Finally, Taxonomy Based Modeling is discussed as a tool for mental model remediation. (shrink)

The increase of ETC vehicles on expressways has changed the proportion of ETC/MTC lanes at toll stations. Based on a driving simulator, three toll gate lane warning sign schemes were proposed in this study. Driving simulation experiments were conducted to study the influence of figures in warning signs at the manual toll station on the lane change timing of drivers. It was found that the addition of arrows to the warning signs can significantly shorten the response time and (...) guide the driver to make lane change decisions earlier to reduce the congestion between MTC vehicles and the mainline ETC vehicles at the toll plaza, thereby improving the traffic capacity and safety. (shrink)

Taxonomy Based modeling was applied to describe drivers’ mental models of variable message signs (VMS’s) displayed on expressways. Progress in road telematics has made it possible to introduce variable message signs (VMS’s). Sensors embedded in the carriageway every 500m record certain variables (speed, flow rate, etc.) that are transformed in real time into “driving times” to a given destination if road conditions do not change. VMS systems are auto-regulative Man-Machine (AMMI) systems which incorporate a model of the user: (...) if the traffic flow is too high, then drivers should choose alternative routes. In so doing, the traffic flow should decrease. The model of the user is based on suppositions such as: people do not like to waste time, they fully understand the displayed messages, they trust the displayed values, they know of alternative routes. However, people also have a model of the way the system functions. And if they do not believe the contents of the message, they will not act as expected. (shrink)

What do thoughts, hopes, paintings, words, desires, photographs, traffic signs, and perceptions have in common? They are all about something, are directed, are contentful - in a way chairs and trees, for example, are not. This book inquires into the source of this power of directedness that some items exhibit while others do not. An approach to this issue prevalent in the philosophy of the past half-century seeks to explain the power of directedness in terms of certain items' (...) ability to reliably track things in their environment. A very different approach, with a venerable history and enjoying a recent resurgence, seeks to explain the power of directedness rather in terms of an intrinsic ability of conscious experience to direct itself. This book attempts a synthesis of both approaches, developing an account of the sources of such directedness that grounds it both in reliable tracking and in conscious experience. (shrink)

What is involved when a group of agents decide to do something together? Joint action by a team appears to involve more than just the union of simultaneous individual actions, even when those actions are coordinated. We would not say that there is any teamwork involved in ordinary automobile traffic, even though the drivers act simultaneously and are coordinated (one hopes) by the traffic signs and rules of the road. But when a group of drivers decide to (...) do something together, such as driving somewhere as a convoy, it appears that the group acts more like a single agent with beliefs, goals, and intentions of its own, over and above the individual ones. [more]. (shrink)

Dans un texte désormais célèbre, Ferdinand de Saussure insiste sur l’arbitraire du signe dont il vante les qualités. Toutefois il s’avère que le symbole, signe non arbitraire, dans la mesure où il existe un rapport entre ce qui représente et ce qui est représenté, joue un rôle fondamental dans la plupart des activités humaines, qu’elles soient scientifiques, artistiques ou religieuses. C’est cette dimension symbolique, sa portée, son fonctionnement et sa signification dans des domaines aussi variés que la chimie, la théologie, (...) les mathématiques, le code de la route et bien d’autres qui est l’objet du livre La Pointure du symbole. -/- Jean-Yves Béziau, franco-suisse, est docteur en logique mathématique et docteur en philosophie. Il a poursuivi des recherches en France, au Brésil, en Suisse, aux États-Unis (UCLA et Stanford), en Pologne et développé la logique universelle. Éditeur-en-chef de la revue Logica Universalis et de la collection Studies in Universal Logic (Springer), il est actuellement professeur à l’Université Fédérale de Rio de Janeiro et membre de l’Académie brésilienne de Philosophie. SOMMAIRE -/- PRÉFACE L’arbitraire du signe face à la puissance du symbole Jean-Yves BÉZIAU La logique et la théorie de la notation (sémiotique) de Peirce (Traduit de l’anglais par Jean-Marie Chevalier) Irving H. ANELLIS Langage symbolique de Genèse 2-3 Lytta BASSET -/- Mécanique quantique : quelle réalité derrière les symboles ? Hans BECK -/- Quels langages et images pour représenter le corps humain ? Sarah CARVALLO Des jeux symboliques aux rituels collectifs. Quelques apports de la psychologie du développement à l’étude du symbolisme Fabrice CLÉMENT Les panneaux de signalisation (Traduit de l’anglais par Fabien Shang) Robert DEWAR Remarques sur l’émergence des activités symboliques Jean LASSÈGUE Les illustrations du "Songe de Poliphile" (1499). Notule sur les hiéroglyphes de Francesca Colonna Pierre-Alain MARIAUX Signes de vie Jeremy NARBY Visualising relations in society and economics. Otto Neuraths Isotype-method against the background of his economic thought Elisabeth NEMETH Algèbre et logique symboliques : arbitraire du signe et langage formel Marie-José DURAND – Amirouche MOKTEFI Les symboles mathématiques, signes du Ciel Jean-Claude PONT La mathématique : un langage mathématique ? Alain M. ROBERT. (shrink)

While traffic signals, signs, and road markings provide explicit guidelines for those operating in and around the roadways, some decisions, such as determinations of “who will go first,” are made by implicit negotiations between road users. In such situations, pedestrians are today often dependent on cues in drivers’ behavior such as eye contact, postures, and gestures. With the introduction of more automated functions and the transfer of control from the driver to the vehicle, pedestrians cannot rely on such (...) non-verbal cues anymore. To study how the interaction between pedestrians and automated vehicles (AVs) might look like in the future, and how this might be affected if AVs were to communicate their intent to pedestrians, we designed an external vehicle interface called automated vehicle interaction principle (AVIP) that communicates vehicles’ mode and intent to pedestrians. The interaction was explored in two experiments using a Wizard of Oz approach to simulate automated driving. The first experiment was carried out at a zebra crossing and involved nine pedestrians. While it focused mainly on assessing the usability of the interface, it also revealed initial indications related to pedestrians’ emotions and perceived safety when encountering an AV with/without the interface. The second experiment was carried out in a parking lot and involved 24 pedestrians, which enabled a more detailed assessment of pedestrians’ perceived safety when encountering an AV, both with and without the interface. For comparison purposes, these pedestrians also encountered a conventional vehicle. After a short training course, the interface was deemed easy for the pedestrians to interpret. The pedestrians stated that they felt significantly less safe when they encountered the AV without the interface, compared to the conventional vehicle and the AV with the interface. This suggests that the interface could contribute to a positive experience and improved perceived safety in pedestrian encounters with AVs – something that might be important for general acceptance of AVs. As such, this topic should be further investigated in future studies involving a larger sample and more dynamic conditions. (shrink)

Since the middle of the last century, normative language has been much studied. In particular, the normative function performed by certain sentences and by certain speech acts has been investigated in depth. Still, the normative function performed by certain physical artifacts designed and built to regulate human behaviors has not yet been thoroughly investigated. We propose to call this specific type of artifacts with normative intent ‘deontic artifacts’. This article aims to investigate this normative phenomenon that is so widespread in (...) our daily reality, but so often forgotten by scholars of norms and normativity. (shrink)

Siamo ormai lontani dalla stagione in cui la forza propulsiva della “svolta linguistica” si impose come tendenza dominante nel dibattito filosofico. Da varie angolazioni si è potuto parlare negli ultimi anni di pictorial turn come antidoto all’egemonia del paradigma linguistico in filosofia. Il volume Verità, Immagine, Normatività. Truth, Image, and Normativity non si inserisce direttamente in questa nuova tendenza, ma ruota comunque intorno a questioni che derivano dal medesimo sfondo. I 24 saggi qui raccolti tengono conto dei diversi ruoli che (...) le immagini possono svolgere, a seconda che si focalizzi la loro dimensione descrittiva o normativa, e indagano alcuni aspetti del rapporto tra immagine e linguaggio. Questi problemi di filosofia dell’immagine, intesa sia come immagine cognitiva sia come immagine grafica, costituiscono il fil rouge di questo volume. Una tale riflessione sui linguaggi figurati e sulla comunicazione visiva non-linguistica costringe a riformulare in termini nuovi le grandi domande concernenti le tradizionali nozioni di verità, oggettività, normatività, consenso e persuasione. (shrink)

With the increasingly powerful functions of vehicle-mounted entertainment facilities, people like to listen to music while driving to render different atmospheres and emotions. However, emotions are important factors affecting drivers’ decisions, behavior and may reduce drivers’ hazard perception, even promote dangerous driving behaviors of drivers. The purpose of this study is to explore the young and elderly drivers in assessing the HP difference under different emotional states. We conducted a 3 × 2 mixed experimental design with emotion as a within-participants (...) variable and age as a between-participants factor. A sample of 14 young drivers and 13 elderly drivers completed the HP self-assessment of road traffic warning signs under negative emotion, neutral emotion, and positive emotion, randomly. The results showed that the young had the highest self-assessment HP under the negative emotion arousal condition, while the old had the highest self-assessment HP under the positive emotion arousal condition. In addition, When both groups were in a positive arousal state, the older group perceived more hazards than the young group. The results could help designers create driving emotions suitable for different driver groups, thus improving their perception of hazards and reducing risky driving. (shrink)

B a c k g r o u n d. Considering a scientific truth as a process is connected with the understanding a concrete truth as unity of absolute and relative moments of such process. Beginning by Hegel, truth was regarded as linear process with final point of its development. It was absolute truth, as return of absolute idea to itself in absolute spirit by Hegel. It was the third world by Popper as the world of objective truth. Ukrainian philosopher (...) Pavlo Kopnin opened development of truth for future, eliminating from it the final point in his materialistic interpretation of the truth as a process. However, such process was still regarded as linear process. It was natural for the stage of linear science. As I have already wrote (Dobronravova, 2017), modern stage of nonlinear science actualizes the considering of a scientific truth as nonlinear process. In situation of many variants of nonlinear dynamics the understanding of concrete truth needs to be updated. Such updating is the goal of the article. M e t h o d s. Dialectic method in addition to scientific realism is the most natural approach to research the modern nonlinear science. Methodologic conception of genetic constructivism by V. Stepin is foundation to consider the relations between theoretical and empirical levels of nonlinear knowledge. Criticism of correspondent conception of truth in internal realism by H.Putnam is initiative position in looking for right epistemolology of nonlinear science. Concrete truth as nonlinear process means the description of real nonlinear dynamics with knowledge about a choice, made by a self-organizing system between alternatives in bifurcation point. Nonlinear theories reconstruct few options of further development for nonlinear system. To explain a real situation in certain moment of such development means to describe the real choices by system in points of branching the possibilities. It means that nonlinear science becomes historical one that describes irreversible change of events. Methodologically it means the restriction for claim to repeat the results of empirical checking the predictions of theory, because of choice by chance in bifurcation points. This claim can work for nonlinear medium if different options can be realized in it simultaneously (like Benar's cells in layer of heated liquid or different parties in democratic societies). Otherwise things are going in the situations of historical kind, where the irreversible choice between alternatives has place (like historical choice between right-hand and left-hand traffic in different countries). Repetitions in empirical checking the predicted variants are not possible in principle because of random nature of choice in bifurcation points. R e s u l t s. Non-linear physical theories are descriptive, just like biological, geological and geographic theories. So arrogant condemnation of such theories by physicists and philosophers of science who took physics as a sample in many previous years founded on misunderstanding the specificity of different kinds of theories and their objects. Logical structure of explanation and prediction are not the same in non-linear theories. Non-linear theory can predict a set of possibilities but not the realization of certain one in certain moment. Concrete truth can be justified if human intervention provides the realization of special condition to choose selected variant. C o n c l u s i o n s. We have to understand that such task is more complicated, if we take into account the quantitative way to solve the nonlinear equations. The chain of iterations in approximate solution of such equations can rather give computer simulation of non-linear dynamics. Exact prediction with iteration formula of each next step of unfolding non-linear dynamics, does not guarantee the long scale prediction of complex nonlinear system state. It does not mean that knowledge we got about nonlinear phenomena are not useful for human practice. Thus, the change of dimension in fractal structures of "noise" in cardiograms lets to admit the first signs of heart illness and to cure heart in time. Meteorologists can warn pilots about oncoming storm, defining speed of rising flows in atmosphere by fractal dimension of pictures on the screen of radar. Those are the predictions in nonlinear science. Are they the proofs of concrete truth? Perhaps, yes, they are if we recall old formulation about practice as criteria of truth. (shrink)

The youngest population in society is recognized as that at the healthiest stage of life but is burdened by the occurrence of premature death that should be avoidable. There is a need to use adequate statistical methods in assessing the health status of the population of developmental age. The aim of the study was to analyze trends of mortality in children and adolescents by age and gender in the Podlaskie Voivodeship in the years 2003-2012 by joinpoint regression and to identify (...) the causes of mortality. The mortality rate was analysed according to gender and the age groups: 0, 1-4, 5-9, 10-14 and 15-19 years in the Podlaskie Voivodeship. The data were obtained from the Central Statistical Office for the period 2003-2012. Differences in mortality levels between age and gender subgroups were obtained by the Wilcoxon signed-rank test. Join- point regression was used to analyze the trends in mortality. The nomenclature of ICD-10 was used to assess the causes of mortality of children and adolescents. In the Podlaskie Voivodeship in the years 2003-2012 in the 0-19-year-old age group, the highest proportion of deaths (42.4%) occurred during the first year of life. There were differences in mortality rates between boys (8.0/104) and girls (3.1/104) in the 15-19-year-old age group (p < 0.01), and also between the 1-14-year-old and 15-19-year-old age groups (p < 0.01), both among boys (2.1/104 vs. 8.0/104) and girls (1.5/104 vs. 3.1/104). Monotonous trends were shown regarding total mortality rates in infants. There was a drop in the mortality rate of infant girls (AAPC = 5.3%, p < 0.05) and boys (AAPC = 4.7%, p < 0.05). Changes in the direction of the total mortality rate trend were visible in the population of boys aged 1-14 years, in which, between 2003 and 2010, a significant reduction in mortality (AAPC = 9.5%) was observed, while in the years 2010-2012 the trend was not significant. No statistical evidence was found that mortality changed among girls in the 1-14-year-old and 15-19-year-old age groups. Deaths in infancy were due to perinatal conditions and congenital mal- formations. The main causes of mortality in the 1-19-year-old age group were external causes, mainly traffic accidents and intentional self-harm. Joinpoint regression indicated a uniform decrease of mortality in the years 2003-2012 except for boys from 1-14 years old, for whom the decreasing trend was for the years 2003-2010 with subsequent stabilization. The main problems are still infant deaths due to perinatal conditions, traffic accidents and intentional self-harm in boys in the 15-19-year-old age group. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:A Picture Is a Patchwork of Color Laid Out in a Private Space in Which Lie Flat Imitations of LifeDavid Socher, Independent ScholarThe fish to be fried has an ontological head, an epistemic belly, and an aesthetic tail.1 A picture is a patchwork of color laid out in a private space in which lie flat imitations of life. Such a patchwork constitutes a make-believe visual field. I roll out (...) this suggestion under the following headings: Intention, Form and Content, Ontology, Picture Space, Make-believe, Photography, and Resemblance (see Figure 1).In Annie and Alfred's house the wallpaper has daisies, the linoleum has pine trees, the carpet has tigers, and the upholstery has sailboats. In Betty and Bill's house the wallpaper is plaid, the linoleum is checkerboard, the carpet is paisley, and the upholstery herringbone. Annie, Alfred, Betty, and Bill all have a few one-dollar bills and a few five-dollar bills. As you of course know, the ones have Washington on them and the fives have Lincoln on them. It goes without saying that these daisies, pine trees, tigers, sailboats, Washingtons, and Lincolns are, in fact, pictures, a word I have not used until now. The absence of that word was not particularly noticeable. That is just the way a daisy is on wallpaper and that is just the way a president is on currency. (The word picture is not the only word to act this way, to drop out in this fashion. Take the word name. When I am on a list it is because my name, or perhaps my number is on the list.) For starters let us bring aboard the term picture to include these daisies, trees, tigers, sailboats, and presidents. And let us note that there are no pictures in Betty's wallpaper, linoleum, carpet, and upholstery.Some pictures work harder than Annie's daisies. Consider, for example, the use of pictures in pedestrian traffic lights. The pedestrian WALK sign pictures (in plain white light) a walking figure. And the DON"T WALK sign pictures (in flashing red light) an upraised hand enjoining us to stop.2 The first directs us to walk by showing us an example of walking, by picturing a walking person. We do what the figure does. It walks, we walk. In the second picture we sort of make-believe it is the hand of a traffic officer holding [End Page 105] his hand up for us to stop. This picture does not operate by example. We are certainly not expected to hold up our hand; we are expected to stop. With this sign a picture is used to command by picturing a command. In the WALK sign a picture is used to command by picturing compliance. So these are two ways of using a picture to direct our actions—picturing compliance and picturing a command. Here is a third sign—a picture of a cigarette is overlaid with a red X. The sign tells us not to smoke. It does not picture either command or compliance. It pictures, rather, the prohibited thing. This sign has a non-pictorial content, the X. It signals the prohibition. Click for larger view View full resolutionFigure 1.Annie's daisies, sailboats, and presidents are not to be imitated like the walking figure, nor obeyed like the halting hand, nor avoided like the prohibited cigarette. In merely displaying their subject these pictures fulfill their mission (see Table 1).IntentionBut what is the subject of a picture? What determines who or what is pictured? The Cracker Jack box features a boy in a sailor suit. Shortly before that [End Page 106] confection went into production, the founder's young grandson died, and the founder put that picture on the box in his memory. Since, whatever the founder had in mind, we do not take the sailor boy on the box to be that grandson, it is not him. Excluding the important special case of photographs we require, as Wolheim put it, intention fulfilled to specify the subject of a picture.3 In this case, even if the founder regarded his memorializing gesture as one of putting his grandson... (shrink)

The overriding theme of the conference honoring Bob Cooter and his work is the question whether law and policy can change people’s preferences. The conventional “law and economics” answer is “no.” People have preferences that are fixed. What changes in law and policy do is to change how people behave by altering the costs and benefits people face in pursuit of their preferences. Put simply, the assumption of the “law and economics” model is that people respond to financial incentives by (...) changing how they act, not what they want. So, to take a simple example, imagine two people at the same starting point, both wanting to drive separately to visit a mutual friend. Their preference to get there promptly and safely is common to both of them, but how they act in pursuit of that goal may well differ. Moreover, government can alter how they drive to their friend’s by making changes such as putting in a freeway, or adding a new lane to the road, or installing lots of new traffic signals or stop signs along one route. The two people may have driven different routes previously, and they may alter their driving strategy in response to the policy changes government has adopted and may still decide that different routes are better for them. But they do not change their desire to see their friend in a prompt and safe manner. In this Article I offer a counterexample — an instance in which changes in law and policy can not only alter the behavior of some with fixed preferences, but also can impact the preferences of others. My example is about changes in society that can alter parenting style (of those parents with a fixed preference to have their children succeed) and can also change the underlying preferences that those children have as to how their lives should play out. (shrink)

These days it is widely agreed that there is no such thing as absolute motion and rest; the motion of an object can only be characterized with respect to some chosen frame of reference.1 This is a fact of which many of us are well-aware, and yet a cursory consideration of the ways we ascribe motion to objects gives the impression that it is a fact we persistently ignore. We insist to the police officer that we came to a full (...) and complete stop at the stop sign, we fret that traffic is moving too slowly, we observe that the sun has dropped below the hills on the horizon, all without ever saying which frames of reference we have in mind. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Main Street as Art Museum:Metaphor and Teaching StrategiesElizabeth (Beau) Vallance (bio)In truth, walking down Main Street in many American small towns today is rather like walking through an art museum whose walls have mysterious gaps where paintings have been removed for cleaning. Maybe more accurately, walking down Main Street can be rather like walking through the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston after a Vermeer, two Rembrandts, and eleven (...) other artworks were stolen in 1990: since the Gardner's charter does not allow it to rearrange its holdings, the resulting gaps remained with only explanatory notes in their too-large spaces on my last visit there. A town I know well has a disturbing number of empty storefronts, identified with only the faint outlines of their former names, their windows holding explanatory notes in the form of signs proclaiming that they are for sale or rent. Thanks to Wal-Mart and other big-box stores thriving in a distinctly nonpedestrian strip north of town, the commerce that once thrived on Main Street has died or been removed to new locations, and the once-lively street-level shop windows that testified to downtown liveliness for foot traffic are now empty, awaiting new life as, very likely, antique shops or restaurants.But in principle, a walk down Main Street can be very much like a stroll through a museum gallery—visually rich, inviting unexpected choices, aesthetically rewarding. This article explores the concept of shop windows as visually ordered compositions much like paintings and other art objects and suggests some approaches to applying this concept in teaching a range of subjects and styles of art in both classrooms and actual museums. For the purposes of argument, we will assume that our mythical Main Street is alive [End Page 25] with businesses of many kinds, with the old-fashioned windows open to the street that allow us to "window shop" for many blocks. Some of my examples are drawn from the very enjoyable experience they still offer, of wandering from image to image, commenting as we go.Museum Visitors as Window-ShoppersConsider the behavior of the average museum visitor, a composite characterization drawn from my years as a museum educator and augmented by a few statistics on how people comport themselves in museums and other public places. The behavior of visitors in art museums is an especially clear case of how people observe deliberate compositions, for in art museums objects are typically arranged fairly sparely, with minimal crowding of the objects themselves, small labels that may or may not explain much about the painting or sculpture or silver tureen, good lighting, and a fairly hushed atmosphere, unless a crowd has gathered for a family festival or a major exhibition.Generally, people come to museums in pairs or small groups and not necessarily with a clear plan beyond perhaps seeing a particular favorite work of art or generally catching the highlights of the collection. Their purpose may be social as much as specifically educational, and those who come with companions tend to chat a bit as they walk through the collection. Generally, other things being equal, they turn to the right on entering the building.1 After that, however, visitors become unpredictable, and they meander among the objects in ways the museum cannot control unless visitors are following a live tour guide or a printed self-guiding tour that recommends stopping at selected objects in a predetermined order. Visitors may move to a large object located in the center of the gallery (such as a medieval suit of armor, an Egyptian mummy case, or an enormous painting on a freestanding wall partition), or to a case filled with many small precious-looking objects (such as pre-Columbian gold jewelry from Peru, or the tiny bass sculptures that are gold weights from the Ashanti culture in Ghana). They may be drawn to something in a familiar style, such as a large Impressionist painting or a Rembrandt-looking portrait. They may gravitate to a favorite object in the collection, or they may be attracted by a new acquisition or a work recently installed after many years in storage. At all these stops, they... (shrink)

The purpose of this article is to compare several street typologies (distributed from center to suburb) in Tirana, Albania while taking into consideration pedestrian behavior on these pathways. The streets "Myslym Shyri," "Bllok," "Kombinat" (an extension of Kavaja's Street), and "Ana Komnena" (formerly "Fusha e Aviacionit") will be the primary focus of this study. The following variables will be taken into account such as pedestrian behaviors, street identity, dissatisfaction, walking distance when shifting to another zone, effects of greenery on pedestrians, (...) time spent, points of interest, frequency, pavement quality, preferred walking periods, gathering places, utilization of benches, ambulant sellers, impact of vegetation and greenery, water basins, preference for public transportation, and road signs. Direct observations and a questionnaire will be used to determine the accurate information. The study should provide recommendations as guidance for municipalities and stakeholders to better understand the behavior of pedestrians in Tirana’s context. The streets that pedestrians frequent the most include the "Bllok" area and "Myslym Shyri" Street. The pedestrian resident population on "Myslym Shyri" street, which is dominated by people of all ages, including children, youth, and the elderly, has a slight advantage over the "Bllok" neighborhood. Furthermore, there is a wide variety of urban elements on Ana Komnena Street (formerly known as "Fusha e Aviacionit"). Meanwhile, the pedestrians on Kombinati’s street suffer a little bit more because of the traffic congestion and vehicle pollution. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:134 Feminist Studies 41, no. 1. © 2015 by Gabeba Baderoon Focal Length Gabeba Baderoon I take out the black and white photos I brought with me from Cape Town and haven’t looked at for years and stand them next to one another on the dining room table. In one, my mother in her white coat at the hospital looks up from her notes, distracted, in the grainy matte (...) finish you could ask for in the eighties instead of gloss. Here she is, younger, standing by the window, holding the telephone with its spiraling black cord to her ear, the curtain slanting to the side as she turns away from the camera. I take down from the wall the framed collection of Rafi’s baby photos I’d found wrapped in tissue paper among the tablecloths in the sideboard we inherited from his parents and line us up with each other. There he is, his face fitting into his mother’s shoulder; his brother holding him with hands under the armpits the way he was told; posing by a white door in a hooded woolen coat, his head reaching just above the handle. When I unwrapped them, the tissue paper had only one set of creases, untouched since she packed them for their long journey. In the soft focus of faded paper, I am standing with my back to a VW Beetle I know is pale green, my hands tucked behind me against the bumper, the license plate showing the number from the time before we moved from Uitenhage to Cape Town. In this one, I am on my mother’s lap, leaning against her like gravity. In the photo the focus shifts between my face and my mother’s. She is looking at me, like my father who is taking the picture. My face is clear and hers slightly blurred, as though his eyes are moving between us, as though the camera cannot capture the eye’s oscillation between two people one loves at the same time. One photo had been folded into three, bent once and then again to fit into a pocket, close enough to the skin to warm the paper, and then smoothed out again to fit into a frame. In it, I am turning sideways toward the camera—someone must have called my name—and a line creases just Gabeba Baderoon 135 beneath my eyes. Folded, hidden, forgotten, memory doesn’t come to me straight. The pleat of the curtain as she leans against it, his face in the crook of her shoulder as though he would never leave, me turning toward my name, the paper keeping its original crease. Poetry for Beginners In the evening poetry class for beginners in the community hall during the introductions a girl looking down behind her hair and a thick brown coat she doesn’t take off breathes in deep and risking something says fast my boyfriend’s in prison and I’m here to find out how to write to him through the bars and someone laughs and she pulls herself back into her coat and from inside looks past us and the next week doesn’t come back and I think of her for years and what poetry is I think of her long pause at the beginning her silence before and her silence after and I think this is my origin where poetry is risk, is betrayal and the memory of the first question how not to be alone 136 Gabeba Baderoon ID Photos In the small caravan parked permanently next to the Traffic Department with the handwritten sign ID Photos Taken Here its wheels rusted into place the young old photographer with dreadlocks and a tired poet’s face is shaking his head from side to side muttering some version of no just before me a woman in a long black skirt and black veil unties the loop of fabric knotted behind her head and her face briefly emerges the young old photographer sees everything hundreds of unclaimed photos line the inside of his caravan the making of identity interrupted and turned into small sad signs of something else we don’t look at... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Metazoa: Animal Life and the Birth of the Mind by Peter Godfrey-SmithMichael BrownMetazoa: Animal Life and the Birth of the Mind BY PETER GODFREY-SMITH New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020Carrying forward the project he began in Other Minds (2016), Peter Godfrey-Smith aims in Metazoa (2020) to cast light on the problem of consciousness by inviting meditation on the minds of our distant deep-sea cousins. To elaborate on (...) the Nagelian question of what it’s like to be a bat, he asks what it is like to be a crab, a shrimp, or a cephalopod. One will not find here the dense and fine-grain argumentation that is characteristic of academic monographs, but instead a freer exploration of ideas ranging from marine biology, to philosophy of mind, to animal psychology. Godfrey-Smith’s more modest goal is not to argue definitively for a single viewpoint, but to acclimate the reader to the challenging conceptual-shift he calls gradualism—namely, “the idea that in evolution, minds and experience come slowly into view, rather than appearing in a single move” (262).In the place of a barrage of observational data or dense philosophical argumentation, Godfrey-Smith paints a rich picture of the underwater environment, describes his personal interactions with the creatures that live there, and invites the reader to reflect on their activities and the cognition behind them. In this capacity, he walks a fine line—not anthropomorphizing the creatures, but presenting their actions as mentally agnostic as possible—to let the reader consider how much mental unity there might be, or how much self-or other-awareness may or may [End Page 130] not be present behind the beady mollusk eyes. Nevertheless, he strives to acquaint us with creatures we otherwise might not engage with. The several drawings of the animals and settings Godfrey-Smith discusses throughout the book aid this goal, as well as eight pages of vibrant photographs featuring several of the book’s “characters.”Because minds are things formed over time, Godfrey-Smith takes us through the first fossil evidence of animals in the Ediacaran, the appearance of shrimp-like ancestors in the Cambrian, the vast increase in size of the Ordovician, and the appearance of the octopus and dinosaurs of the Mesozoic. Yet, minds also develop under pressure and conditions of their environment, so Godfrey-Smith takes us on his dives to consider what environmental conditions led to the development of these submarine minds. As such, the text inventively winds its way across dimensions of space, time, and a variety of academic disciplines.In advancing the gradualist thesis, Godfrey-Smith entertains the Aristotelian notion of continuity between life and mind, as opposed to Descartes’ firm dualism. In this way, as noted in chapter 2, when a cell establishes its boundaries and controls the traffic of ions in and out, it becomes a kind of self. This leads him to a discussion of the glass sponge, multicellular but structurally simple, and yet a “collector and curator of biological light,” referring to its ability to channel light like a fiber optic cable (47). Chapter 3 considers the cnidarians—corals, in particular—in which the first signs of animal action appear. This action, like grasping, requires the appearance of a nervous system, and this increased complexity seems to give rise to agency, and more particularly, subjecthood. Chapter 4 invites us to consider the crab to guide reflections on early animal sensation. Of particular interest to this investigation are signs of feeling pain, such as the release of painkillers and the tending of wounds. Surprisingly, scientists find such behavior in shrimp. Chapter 5 returns to more philosophical considerations, attempting to stitch up false dichotomies of self-awareness and other-awareness, and activity and passivity, to name a couple. This sets the stage for chapter 6’s examination of the mysterious mix of mental unity and disunity in the octopus. With a decentralized nervous system, each arm seems to have a mind of its own, yet the creature nevertheless acts to unified purposes. Godfrey-Smith considers the resemblance to split-brain cases in humans, and the copresence of unified and disunified experience in... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Setting the Scientific Bar for the Genetics of BehaviorEric Turkheimer, PhD (bio) and Sarah Rodock Greer, BA (bio)We are grateful for the opportunity to respond to such a varied and challenging set of commentaries. They range from highly supportive to quite disputatious; we will repay the supportive ones ironically, by discussing them only briefly. That will allow us to expand a bit on the more difficult comments, and of (...) course the thoughtful reply from Dr. Dick.Knox, Allen, and DownesKnox, Allen, and Downes imagine a world in which effective polygenic scores for alcohol use exist and conclude that even then there would be no way to use them ethically. We agree, for the most part, but there are several distinctions to consider. The first is among physical, medical, psychiatric, and normal-range behavioral phenotypes. Effective polygenic scores exist for height, and to a somewhat lesser extent for medical conditions like coronary heart disease. Whether or not it is a good idea to deploy them in embryo selection or clinical medicine, that is already happening.We do not think an R2 of 0.35 polygenic scores for complex behavioral phenotypes will ever exist, for all the reasons we outlined in the original paper. If we allow ourselves to imagine it happening, however, there are two explanatory pathways to follow. The first is the raw R2, and let’s stipulate that with more enormous samples or exome sequencing or whatever, respectable values are eventually achieved. The second involves the causal validity underlying black-box prediction. Scientists are taking the first step down that path (although not in Spit for Science [S4S], see the reply below to Lee and Morris) by investigating direct and indirect effects between and within families and examining the portability of polygenic scores (PGS) across environments and ancestries. The most convincing causal evidence would involve the kind of mechanistic causal biology about which enthusiasts like to speculate, but there is little sign of that.We will grant another possibility. Suppose there was a PGS for alcohol at an R2 of 0.35 that worked between families and within them, in [End Page 455] North America, South Asia, Central America, and West Africa. Animal models confirmed that it is related to specific metabolic pathways involved in alcohol. It was related but not identical to other successful PGS that predict cannabis use and other addictions. Ancient DNA studies find that it is high in human remains that were preserved next to the casks of wine that they apparently loved. Pharmacologists use it to develop effective medications for withdrawal. This hypothetical PGS, mechanistically opaque though it might remain, would exist in what Cronbach and Meehl (1955) called a nomological network. It would have construct validity, similar to a good self-report questionnaire. Like PGS for coronary heart disease, people would want to have access to construct valid PGS, and there would probably be no way to prevent people from obtaining them. We repeat that we do not expect this to happen, and as we discuss in the response to Dick below, hypothetical discussions of future scientific outcomes usually turn out to be unscientific wishcasting. It is like insisting that cities need to develop traffic control systems for flying cars.SadlerSadler is probably correct that the exigencies of grant funding explain much of what we have observed in S4S. It is certainly a more charitable explanation than the alternatives. It is interesting to consider that one of several revolutions that have occurred in the years since S4S was conceived is in the realm of scientific design and reporting. Preregistration of research hypotheses might have prevented many of the more dubious outcomes of S4S. Yet those ideas have never been applied to grant proposals, as far as we know. Grant reviews reward grandiose promises. No one has ever received funding for announcing that they hope to make incremental progress at the margins of a difficult and perhaps intractable problem. There is no mechanism to check on whether the big promises in proposals were ever fulfilled. What does get checked is whether and where investigators have published, often without regard to what the... (shrink)

continent. 2.1 (2012): 22–28. Jeroen Mettes burst onto the Dutch poetry scene twice. First, in 2005, when he became a strong presence on the nascent Dutch poetry blogosphere overnight as he embarked on his critical project Dichtersalfabet (Poet’s Alphabet). And again in 2011, when to great critical acclaim (and some bafflement) his complete writings were published – almost five years after his far too early death. 2005 was the year in which Dutch poetry blogging exploded. That year saw the foundation (...) of the influential, polemical, and populistically inclined weblog De Contrabas (The Double Bass), which became a strong force for internet poetry in Dutch in the years to follow. In the summer of that year, a lively debate raged in the aftermath of Bas Belleman’s article “ Doet poëzie er nu eindelijk toe ?” (“Does poetry finally matter now?”), on a blog specifically devoted to this question. Up to that point, the poetical debate in the Netherlands had largely been confined to literary reviews (which were often subsidized), having become mostly marginalized in more mainstream media, where poetry could be covered by only a small number of so-called authorities. As a result, literary debate had acquired a rather placid quality. Though a variety of camps with different aesthetics could be discerned, most poetical positions shared a general acceptance of poetry as a form of art somewhat apart from fundamental political concerns. Late modernists would pursue subtlety and density of reference. Others would insist poetry was best understood as a form of entertainment that should ideally be accessible and work well on the stage. Still others would insist that poetry is mostly a play with forms. Linguistically disruptive strategies were valued highly by some, but mostly for their aesthetic effect. Values of disinterested playfulness reigned supreme everywhere. Any idea that poetry could be a field in which one confronts politics and the world was decidedly marginal. This led to a climate in which most attempts at polemics were DOA, often based on far too superficial positioning and analysis. The greatest polemical debates were revolving around the question of whether poetry should be difficult or easy, with both camps defining their ideas of difficulty and accessibility in ways that were so utterly shallow as to make the entire point moot. Debates were performed, rather than engaged with. It was a postmodern hell of underarticulated poetics. Half-consciously, people were yearning for new forms of criticism that could put the oomph back into poetry. Weblogs provided for ways to explore debate directly outside of the clotted older channels of the reviews and the newspapers. Belleman’s essay and the resulting online activity had shown that there was a widespread eagerness to take poetry more seriously as a social art form. It was in this environment that Mettes started his remarkable project Dichtersalfabet . At that moment, Mettes was active mostly in academic circles, having become noted at Leiden University as a particularly gifted student of literary theory. Within the Netherlands, the field of literary theory has a very odd relationship to literature as it is practiced in the country. Academic theory tends to have a mostly international view and engage with international debates of cultural criticism, literary theory, and philosophy, with academics often publishing in English and attending conferences around the world. Literature itself however is much more concerned with domestic traditions. Consequently, in the Netherlands, there exists a language gap between academic theoretical practice (as it is studied in the literary theory departments) and literary practice (which, academically, gets studied in specialized departments of Dutch literature). The Dichtersalfabet can be seen as Mettes’s attempt to close this gap. It is also an attempt to bridge the divide between theory and practice, in which he could apply his theoretical knowledge in a very unorthodox and unacademic critical mode that moreover could reach far beyond the domain of conventional criticism. Mettes’s goal was to trace a diagonal through Dutch poetic culture, to “strangle” what he perceived to be its dominant oppressive traditions of agreeable irrelevance, in order to see whatever might be able to survive his critical assaults. But he could only do so by means of a very serious engagement with poetry itself. To this end, he would go systematically through the poetry bookshelf of the Verwijs bookshop (part of a mainstream chain of booksellers) in The Hague, buying one publication per blog item, starting from A and working his way through the alphabet, reading whatever he might encounter that way in the restaurant of the HEMA store (another big commercial chain in the country). He would subsequently write down his reading experiences, refraining however from trying to write a nuanced book review. Rather, he would write about anything that caught his attention and sparked his critical interest. This way of working would yield vast, at times somewhat rambling, dense, lively, and generally brilliant essays, in which he held no punches. He never hesitated to pull out his entire arsenal of concepts from the international theory traditions, while never degenerating into mere academic exercise and pointless intertextualities. The attempt was rather to live the poetry that he read, and to engage it with the full range of political, academic, cultural, and personal references that he had at his disposal—all that composed the individual named Jeroen Mettes as a reader. Often what he wrote would not be according to the standards of what we usually think of as a critical review of a book of poetry. Sometimes he would even be a little sloppy in his judgments of poets or representations of the books he read, for example by basing an entire essay on the blurb of a book rather than its poetry content. But what he did was always brilliant writing nonetheless—virtuoso riffs on poetic fragments randomly found within capitalist society, exposing an incisive and insistent poetical sensibility. Mettes read poetry for political reasons, to see whether poetry could offer him a way to deal with a political world he detested. The right-wing horrors of the Bush years, the Iraq war, and the turn of Dutch public opinion towards ever more conservative, narrow-minded, and xenophobic views alongside a complete failure of the political left to present any credible alternative, were weighing heavily on the times in which Mettes reported on his reading. Poetry was to measure this world, diagram it, to lay bare its inconsistencies and faults, to indicate where lines of flight might be found. Amid the ruins of a world wrecked by imperialist policies, corporate capitalism, and doctrinal neoliberalism it would have to show the possibility of a new community. And it was, through its rhythmical workings, to release the reading subject from his confinement to ideologically conditioned individuality and lead him into the immanent paradise of reading. The stakes were high. Much higher than anything Dutch poetry had seen for many years. Mettes’s blog was widely read from the start. His posts sparked lively debates. Some of these subsequently led to the publication of extensive essays on a few key poets in some literary journals, particularly Parmentier and the Flemish journal yang , for which Mettes would become a member of the editorial board, a few months after starting the Dichtersalfabet . This could have been the start of a brilliant career, but this was not to be. The initial manic energy that fueled the blog gradually subsided. The Alfabet was updated less and less regularly. Mettes sometimes just disappeared for many weeks, then suddenly returning with a brilliant essay. Until, on September 21, 2006, he posted his final blogpost, consisting of no text whatsoever. That night I learned from his mentor at Leiden University that he had committed suicide. Mettes and I had had some fruitful exchanges on poetry, rhythm, music, and form, mostly on the blogs, but also by email. Three weeks before his death was the last time I heard from him: a very sudden, uncharacteristically curt note saying “My old new sentence epic.” Attached to that message I found a DOC-file of a work so major that I felt intimidated. This was N30 , a text he had been working on for over five years. After his death, it took me a long time before I dared to read it in its entirety. In the meantime, the work of preparing the manuscript for publication was entrusted by his relatives to his colleagues at yang magazine. It took them a few years to brush up the text and to edit the Dichtersalfabet -blog (which, apart from the Alphabet project itself, incorporated many other fragments of political, polemical, and theoretical writing) into book form along with the essays. The result of this labor was finally published in 2011 as a two-book set, and Mettes burst onto the Dutch poetry scene for the second time. The work was widely reviewed, on blogs, in journals, magazines, and newspapers. Many critics who had not followed the blogs in 2005 showed themselves surprised, baffled even, by the intensity of Mettes’s critical writing. But for those who had read the blog, the main surprise was in the poetry. During Mettes’s lifetime, some of his poems had already been published in Parmentier . Although these were strong texts by themselves, in no way did they prepare readers for N30 . Nothing like it had been written in Dutch before. Instead, N30 explicitly follows the American tradition of Language Writing, directly referencing Ron Silliman and his concept of The New Sentence. However, it would seem that much of the poetical thinking around his use of this technique puts him closer to a writer such as Bruce Andrews. For Mettes, using non sequiturs as a unit of poetic construction was not only a way of reinventing formal textual construction, but it was another way of finding the fault lines in the social fabric. From the perspective of the Language tradition, one may put N30 somewhere between Silliman and Andrews. N30 shares an autobiographical element with Silliman’s New Sentence projects, and as in Andrews, there is a concern for mapping out social totality within text—what Mettes refers to as a “textual world civil war.” Again this shows a formal textual strategy for allowing the person “Jeroen Mettes” to be absorbed by the world, which here appears as a whirlwind of demotic and demonic chatter, full of violence, humor, intensity, beauty, disgust, sex, commerce, and strife. Influenced as it may by American precursors, Mettes’s tone and form end up quite different from his American counterparts, consistently referencing a world that is Dutch, all too Dutch, taking on the oppressive orderliness of Dutch society with its endemic penchant for consensus by introducing chaos into its daily life and laying bare its implicit aggressions. The work’s 31 chapters each have a different feel and rhythmical outline, but none of them follow a predetermined pattern. Rather, Mettes would consistently edit and reedit the text, randomly rewriting parts of it, as he explains in his poetical creed Politieke Poëzie (Political Poetry). N30 – referring to the 1999 antiglobalist protest in Seattle – was to be the first text of a trilogy. The work itself was written “in the mode of the present.” A second text was to be written in the mode of the future, and a third one, in the mode of the past, was going to be an epic poem about the Paris Commune, and to form an alternative poetic constitution for the European project. I still deeply regret that Jeroen Mettes never got to complete those projects, just as I would be very keen on knowing what he might have had to say about more recent political developments. Instead, in 2006, he remained stuck in the horrors of the present, that ended up consuming him completely. He left Dutch literature with some of its most piercing criticism and its most profoundly moving, exciting and powerful poetry. Excerpts from N30 Translated by Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei from Jeroen Mettes. "N30." In N30+ . Amsterdam: De wereldbibliotheek, 2011. Published with permission of Uitgeverij Wereldbibliotheek, Amsterdam. Chapter 1 1999. A day is a space too. And another man, who had chained himself, had his ribs crushed, and a motor has driven over somebody’s legs. Dutch health care system spends ±145 million guilders per year on worriers. A spiderweb vibrates as I pass by. Randstad renovating. She slaps her bag against her ass: “Hurry up!” OPINION IS TRUE FRIENDSHIP Your skin. It doesn’t express anything. “But the use of the sword, that’s what I learned, and you’ll need nothing more for the moment.” Just try to interrogate a guy like that. Gullit in Sierra Leone. Codes silently lying all around. But that’s simply what belongs to “that it’s just allowed”: that sigh of “world” (a word expressing that the trees are now standing along the water like black men with white bags in their hair); that’s nothing else right? And you see how everything has to move, and first of all what cannot do so. Without Elysium and without savings, barbarians lashing out, horny for an enemy, staring across the water, staring into the air—staring to get out of it. “You’ve never showed me more than the mall,” she said. All those “dreams” in the end—and now? It was lying on the stairway, so I picked it up and took it upstairs. Chapter 3 “You know what?” Telecommunication. For love… I don’t really like that cheap cultural pessimism, but… The holy city is on pilgrimage in the earthly bodies of the faithful until the time of the heavenly kingdom has come. The end of an exhausting autumn day behind the computer, my eyes filled with tears of fatigue. KITCHEN / INSTALLATION / SPECIALIST. Network integration. In the sun, stretched out on a sheet. (…) I don’t believe what I’m reading, because I want to believe something else. An illusion? Suits me. There’s a variety of shapes and tastes… “So what?” you may think. 102 dalmatians can’t be wrong. But I want more, dear… A feel good movie. I’m smashing the burned body. So what? We continue to save the European civilization. What’s there to win? Plato with poets = Stalin without gulag? Ball against the crossbar. No wonder. She comes straight to her point. She’s standing in the kitchen eating an apple. (…) The godless Napoleon had used her as a stable and wanted to have her taken down. “Our” Rutger Hauer. Ready or not here I come. Psst… are you also wearing a string? Nobody understands our desire. Cliffs breaking the waves and shattering the sunset. I used to be a real romantic (as a poet). A typical fantasy used to be the one in which I brutally raped mother and daughter Seaver from the sitcom Growing Pains . Nevertheless you only contain bad words. Eyelashes. Automatic or manual? That your skin always in the afternoon. Integration. The air is empty. Too bad! Hand in hand on their lonely way. Alaska! Chapter 12 May 5, 2001 [10:00-10:30] A dust cloud on a hill. Globe. Indian (British) (tie) / pope. Damascus. Rape. We’re carrying the ayatollah’s portrait through the streets. At the moment the girl is mostly suede jacket with white ribbons on her sleeves. A small explosion flares up/impact. Camouflage. Close up. We’re analyzing the situation. He’s dead right? Dead dead. Dead. Everything without, these, and only with the body. Indices signal death. Dollar bills are printed in factories. Holes. Light patch. Globe in a box. Microphone. What’s the situation? Grey impact on a green hill (field?). The water is blue. He has no lips. Interns on the background with skirts that are too long. This is an example of a sonnet. An Islamic woman pushes against the door of an electronics shop. Arrows (percentages (prices)). Is this what awaits the American? Touch screen interface. The word, an island, can only be a sign in that situation. We pull up a chair, join in on the fun. On the shelves only books about computers. One glance in the distance is enough to lighten up a luna park in the distance. She’s really desperate, especially when she laughs. Click. Ah. Next. And now it’s raining, but that’s ok. Yellow stains sliding over the south. Shallow caves light: clothes, boots, electrical equipment. 45. 22:10. Nothing gives you the right to eat more than people starving to death. The Hague. Slam dunk. Traffic light. Two H’s, one L (standing for the L (little prick)). We’re happy to say something. Clouds, small suns, temperatures, cities. The truth is never an excuse. Yellow. Yellow. Green. Yellow. Yellow. Yellow. Yellow. Green. Green. Yellow. Will you email me? Skeleton: “No.” Ex-nerds in brand-new and brightly red sport cars. $$$. I love. Shihab. Hooves in the sand. Skinny senior with over-sized sunglasses; old jockey (cap, trophy) smiling in slow motion. And there I am again, flashback, crying with my head in between my hands. Sometimes I’ve got the feeling that cannibals. Eyes: blue. Cancer. Why would I wait until tomorrow? Golden beams protruding from the lifted/lit earth. May 5, 2001 [11:30-12:45] You’ll remember this for the rest of your life. Graphs, diagrams. Bu$ine$$. Blue shirt, white collar, no neck (porn star). A name lights up. I’m hysteric. Will you join us? Letters falling in their words. Fingers set up a tent and start to dance. Young entrepreneurs from poor neighborhoods (read: black) guided by Microsoft. Kinda makes me happy, that sort of kitsch. A sense of exhaustion/impotence to see anything but the present. (…) Wouldn’t you like to? Orange explosion in an industrial zone. YOU’RE DOING THIS FOR AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL. Would you. A familiar face. Clouds and blossom. Sunflowers. Supermodels. Mountainous area in a rectangle: shades of brown, from dark to beige, more green toward the south. Tents and next to them (it’s all a blur) people. Plane. Stadium. Geometrical block of people. No, I ain’t crying. I don’t speak no more. I just want. Quote + photo. (Positive:) screaming crowd. Three-piece suit, seen from the back, before entering the arena. On the back: “Daddy abused me.” Oh, bummer. State of emergency has been declared and everyone has to cooperate. She’s cut her wrists. What we do know (…) is that there’s never been a unique word, an imperative name, nor will there ever be. [Click here for work that suits you.] Barefooted children are watching it (coherent pieces revelation of what’s lying below). Who knows how she’s changed during those two years. “Everything used to be better” + sigh. And here we are. An empty field of parquet. A city lying behind it. Explosion. Blue. A rain drop falling in my coffee. May 5, 2001 [14:30-15:30] A young Arafat on video speaking with raised finger. “I’m calling from my convertible.” Names on walls, victims, numbers… Tourists. Yellow. Yellow. “Your own child! Really, what kind of human are you?” I don’t want to hear it no more. A woman jumping out of the water in a yellow bikini against a background of fireworks and the Cheops pyramid. Thy sorrow shall become good fortune, thy complaints laudation. All planets will float and wander. Wo die Welt zum Bild wird, kommt das System (…) zur Herrschaft. It is something, but is it? May 5, 2001 [18:30-19:00] Iris. Leaves. NASDAQ. Open / and white and. For the one who’s doing nothing, just waiting. (…) NO DEFEAT is made entirely up of defeat -- since / the world it opens is always a place / formerly / unsuspected. October 2002. “Jeroen, I’m leaving for the cemetery, byeeee.” The rise of the middle class. My entire oeuvre is an ode to the. My entire head is a fight against the. God always demands what you cannot sacrifice. You may take that the easy way, but… “The state hasn’t made us, but we make the state” (Hitler). A stork exits the elevator. Skeletons of. Moscow. Helsinki. Palermo. Paris. Chapter 30 Like your paradises: nothing. United Desire, as only remaining superpower. And even though the sea is now calmer and the wind is blowing pleasantly in my face… Heart! Who determines whether a tradition is “alive”? The yellow leaf or the white branch? Mars. This sentence is a typical example. Most Dutch people are happy. No consolation. When I see a girl sitting at a table with a book, a notepad, a pen, a bottle of mineral water, her hand writing in the light—then I consider that one thing. “Presents,” “poetry,” “classics.” We are what we cannot make from ourselves. “Left”: mendicant orders, missionaries. Saint-Just: “A republic is founded on the destruction of its enemies.” She crosses the street with a banana peel between her fingers. (…) We chose our own wardens, torturers, it was us who called all this insanity upon ourselves, we created this nightmare… But “no”? Girl (just like a beach ball) talking rapid Spanish (Portuguese?) in a mobile phone. Do I have a chance now that her boyfriend is getting bold? CLIO, horny bitch. What else do you want? An old woman, between the doors of the C1000, is suddenly unable to go on; her husband stretches out his hand, speaking a few encouraging words. Selection from. Der Führer schenkt den Jüden ein Stadt. How can it reach us if we haven’t been already reached somehow? It doesn’t “speak.” No problem. Each word she uses is a small miracle, as if she doesn’t belong to it, to language, but wanders around with a pocket light looking for the exit; she’s never desperate (maybe a little nervous), lighting up heavy words from the inside. But indeed, we’re free. But the predicate is not an attribute, but an event, and the subject is not a subject, but a shell. That’s why also samurai, knights, and warriors raised the blossom as emblem: they knew how to die. Locked up in a baby carriage with a McDonald’s balloon. Blue helicopter, the blue sky. Whether you want to refer? The point is. How / Motherfucker can I sing a sad song / When I remember Zion? You’ll feel so miserable and worthless that you think: “If only I were dead!,” or: “Just put an end to it!” “So you’re an economist?” Her card—two little birds building a nest, her handwriting shaking—is still on the mantelpiece. Guevara: “No, a communist.” A straw fire, such was our life: rapidly it flared up, rapidly it passed. I’m fleeing, coming from nowhere. (…) Eazy-E drinking coffee with the American president. If I’d scream, would that be an event? Drown it: the cleaner it will rise up from the depths. No! The night, so fast… As if there’s something opened up in that face. Come on, we may not curse life. He shows me his methadone: “If you drink that all at once, you’ll die instantly.” The last one dictates how we should behave to deserve happiness. One shine / above the earth. “I want to go to Bosnia,” I said bluntly. I don’t even know the name of the current mayor. Let’s despise our success! “There is no future; this is the future. Hope is a weakness that we've overcome. We have found happiness!” Sun. Sushi. Volvo. I feel like a bomb about to explode at any moment. Makes a difference for the reconstruction right? The decor moves forward. Daughter of Nereus, you nymphs of the sea, and you Thetis, you should have kept his tired head above the waves! Alas! This sentence has been written wearing a green cap. I receive my orders from the future. A frog jumps into it. Her husband has turned the Intifada, which he follows daily on CCN, into his hobby, “to forget that he doesn’t have his driver’s license yet." Suddenly the sun slides over the crosswalk. Her (his?) foot is playing with the slipper under the table. Is this how I’m writing this book now? I’m not a fellow man. I hate you and I want to hurt you. These are my people. Their screaming doesn’t rise above the constantly wailing sirens which we've learned to ignore. My whole body became warm and suddenly started to tremble. Unfortunate is he who is standing on the threshold of the most beautiful time, but awaits a better one. Arafat’s “removal” is contrary to American interests. Jeep drives into boy. What you can do alone, you should do alone. A food gift from the people of the United States of America. Two seagulls. [...]. (shrink)

Reproduced with the kind permission of the author. Currently available in the collection I Looked Alive . © 2010 The Brooklyn Rail/Black Square Editions | ISBN 978-1934029-07-7 Originally published 2003 Four Walls Eight Windows. continent. 1.1 (2011): 43-51. Introduction Ben Segal What interests me is instigated language, language dishabituated from its ordinary doings, language startled by itself. I don't know where that sort of interest locates me, or leaves me, but a lot of the books I see in the stores (...) seem to lack language entirely. Gary Lutz (2006). This issue of continent.'s fiction section features a reprint of “This Is Nice of You” from the first edition of Gary Lutz's collection I Looked Alive . That book was originally released by Four Walls Eight Windows in 2003 and has since been reissued in 2010 by The Brooklyn Rail/Black Square Editions. Calamari Press has also reissued Lutz's Stories in the Worst Way (originally published by Knopf, largely forgotten and dismissed, and then re-issued by the too-short-lived 3rd Bed). “This Is Nice of You” was edited for the re-issue of I Looked Alive and, as the original book is out of print, the earlier version of the story has been hard to come by for some time. This initial version is a bit longer than the new version—Lutz is a master of tightening down his texts to their most linguistically intensified cores—but it is in no way sloppy. It is a great privilege for continent. to be able to make available rare texts of (first) aesthetic and (second) scholarly value. For those readers unfamiliar with Gary Lutz, I believe this story will serve as a worthy introduction. Like Raymond Carver, Diane Williams, Christine Schutt, and so many other important twentieth century and contemporary short story writers, Lutz studied with and was edited by Gordon Lish. This connection is apparent in his attention to sound and the sentence as compositional unit, but Lutz's is a unique voice. “This Is Nice of You” bears Lutz's trademark torqued and turning syntax, his sexed-but-nameless characters, his rendering of the human body and its emissions as utterly discomfiting. Lutz's preoccupations with the mundane raise ordinariness, via startling language and observation, to grandiosity and grotesquery. In the fall of 2008, Lutz delivered a lecture entitled “The Sentence is a Lonely Place” to writing students at Columbia University. The lecture was later printed in The Believer (and is linked below). In it, he spoke about the importance of the sentence as a compositional unit, as even the distinguishing formal characteristic of prose. Specifically, Lutz explained that, from Lish, he had developed a "poetics of the sentence." Accordingly, Lutz constructs his stories at the level of the sentence, paying extreme attention to the material of words- their letters and their sounds- and the way they abut one another and interact on this material level even before they are employed in the service of traditional aims of fiction like meaning or story. Lutz often uses a(n almost constraint-related) technique called consecution. Letters or sounds from one word are carried forward into the following, producing drama and movement in the language itself at a level entirely apart from that of plot. For example, you can see how the 't's in the first sentence of “This Is Nice of You” repeat fast and hard through met and then soften into the 'th's of brothers and they. This close attention to the specific material and characteristic conditions of prose means that Gary Lutz's work always involves both a happening in language and of language. “This Is Nice of You” has a richness and depth that is hidden not in symbolism or obscure reference but on the surface of the page, in the language of every sentence. FURTHER READING Lutz, Gary. “ The Sentence Is a Lonely Place. ” The Believer January, 2009. Web. Short stories and excerpts at Web del Sol . Web. Taylor, Justin. “ An Interview with Gary Lutz .” Bookslut. July, 2006. Web. THIS IS NICE OF YOU [156] [1] I was a man dropping already well through my forties, filthy with myself, when, taking a turn at the toilets one afternoon, I met two brothers-they said they were brothers-who swore they had a sister, a schoolteacher, an officer of instruction at the county college, a whirlwind midlife turmoil of everything already put to ruin, who had gone off from a new marriage in an old car, an upkept and ennobling sedan, but had returned now to the apartment and [157] was living there alone with the little runoff there was from the marriage-some outcurved appliances, apparently, and low-posted furniture promoting its own mystery but becoming figurable in certain concentrations of TV light-and, above all, a telephone (on a pedestal, they insisted), the handpiece of which she gripped in lieu of exercise, or in fury, and I thus let out my little, reliable cry that I was in fact a student of the telephone, that it was a debasing apparatus in the main, with its meager economy of bells and tones, and the intimacy of the mouthpiece that sent your breath, tiny aftervapors of it, back toward your lips, so that regardless of the party accepting the outgoing products of your voice, you were, at most, in a further, rivaling exchange with yourself alone, and this is what must have brought the two of them around, the men who proclaimed brotherhood with the woman, because they offered me her phone number, put it at my disposal on a piece of paper one of them had already committed it to, a tearing from a menu, and the looks the men were now giving me had deletions in them, already, of my exact, beanpole shape and size. So off I went to a pay phone, the nearest canopied one I could find. The woman answered after the second ring and said she needed a lift right that very moment into the little, unlevel city close by. She was idling in the doorway of the building when I pulled up in front, and I helped her into the car, then got back in myself. I had always had a way of not having to look at people that nonetheless brought them to me in full, and so I still am certain of the susceptive and impressible comp-[158]lexion, the shimmer on the mouth, a lipstick of low brilliance, a difficulty around the eyes, the hair short and rayed out exclamation ally, skin bagged up over the elbow bone, conflict even in how her arms stayed at her sides—in sum, a spinal loveliness for me, an off-blonde quantity with shadowed, thumbworn hollows that put me out of as much as I might have ever known of women before. I set the two of us into the narrow traffic, and I remember telling her, by way of explaining the little burden which I had shifted, by now, from the shelf of the dashboard and onto my lap, that when you lived in filth, as I then did, a daily newspaper came to count for a lot, although instead of the thick-supplemented local paper I bought a trimmer one from a backlying town—not, of course, for any affluences of native data it carried, but as an article of house ware: a rough immaculacy in four lank sections, a set of fresh, hygienic surfaces to come between the table, say, and whatever I had going for me at the table, if the table was where I was going forward—because what else so cheap comes so clean and far-spreading? The woman told me that her own trouble with paper was that through a modest hole, no larger than a quarter, that had been drilled a foot or so above the floor (the standard height, she had reasoned, of legitimate electrical outlets), and by means of which her faculty office had at last gained communication with the roomier but unoccupied office next door, more and more often shot a single sheet of paper, plain copier paper she had rolled just barely into a tube, [159] so that after landing on the floor of the neighboring office the paper would preserve little if any of the curl, and there would be nothing written or typed on it, of course, and it was always a blank sheet that had been ageing on her desk for some time and had already been moved around, or advanced, from station to station on the desktop, coming into further creaselets and crimps and other infirmities—paper, in short, still too bare and unfraught to be thrown responsibly and forgettably away, and yet too seasoned and beset with irritations of the surface (a molelike blemish, say, or what looked like a tiny hair, an eyelash, sunk into it, or frecklings, or notational pressings of a fingernail), too wrought, in sum, for the paper to be appointed to any secure curricular purpose. Her office, she claimed, was in fact full of such paper, much-handled and singularized sheets of it by the loose, functionless hundred. I had to get it across to the woman that I myself no longer had an office, or any other place to divide me reliably from everybody else, and that for much of the daylight I thus appeared to be among people because I kept putting myself where people came together into even closer-fitting assortments, the viewing areas and showrooms and rotundas and such: I took in the lean-to look of the women, the tongues coming and going in what the men kept thinking of to say—whole families of low knees for me to bark my shins against during the crowded and involving way out. At home afterward, in the one room where my life was packed down, I would keep my nose stuck in the safehold of the phone [160] book, where the names of people suffered reduction to mere episodes of the alphabet and underwent humbling declensions down every column (Lail, Lain, Laine, Lainerd), and he names of streets, of the towns and townships, got docked in crude, heedless abbreviations (the vowels almost always the first to get poked out), and I would run my eyes over the telephone numbers themselves, each sequence of digits another fallible run of the infinite. I thus corrected my feelings for people and assembled myself emotionally into whatever else I had at hand—the obligating arms of the clothes hangers, usually, or the keen-angled understructure, the guardian legginess, of the ironing board. The woman said that in her case, though, it was more a matter of making slow circuits of the classroom where she had to put across the Emporial Sciences, retail theory and methods, to heat-giving and suggestive young women, some of them world cruelties already. There was the cooing of empty stomachs in the hour just before lunch, and the braying and fizzle of loaded stomachs in the low hours of the afternoon. She would recite her notes in a voice barely loyal to anyone octave, a tiny alluvium of slaver hardening at the corners of her mouth on the days she gave the glassy lozenges a slow, warming suck, and she would take lowering notice of how whatever she said succumbed at once to freak spellings and razzing paraphrase in the big, dividered notebooks; and because in midafternoon light the world looked as thorough, as filled in, as it was ever going to get, a better way to set about ruining her eyes was to review how hair had [161] established itself on the arms of the young women, because almost every arm had brought across itself a welcome and diversifying shadow. On one girl it would be a fine, driftless haze afloat above the white of the arm, never seeming to touch down on the skin itself. (An atmosphere, at most, of chestnut brown.) On another, it was as if copper wire, the narrowmost lengthlets of it, had been stuck into the fleshy batter of the thick, freckled forearms. On a third: a field of it–wheat-colored, thin-spun. On a fourth; a differencing, darkish updrift that shaded off as it approached the inner bend of the elbow, then re-emerged at the base of the upper arm as whiskery fringe. On others it was a brassy or rust-colored frizz, or it was as coarse as cornsilk, or it looked fussed on, as if the arm had been slowly stroked with charcoal. But here the woman broke off, or I may well have made an interruption of my own—I think I must have asked whether she was hungry, and she said if I was, and so on one of the lesser streets I parked the car and led her down into a belowstairs eating house I still remembered. Sandwiches were presently lowered in front of us. I watched her remove the festooned toothpick from hers and then play her fingers over the toasted planes before she took a fond first bite. "This is nice of you," she said. I must have looked at her in the way I then had of getting people to speak so they would not seem to be dwelling any longer on my features, because if on the well-set face the mouth and eyes are said to seem frozen in elegant orbit about the til) of the nose, then mine was a face that behold-[162]ers, regarders, could not help trying to round off with greater success, to goad the particulars of it back into the arcs they had wandered away from—the mouth, for instance, having been pursed and pinched suchwise that it seemed resident more on one side of the face than the other—and there were other signs of original strife to be busied with (slapdash eyebrows unbunched, it appeared, from reserves of hair elsewhere on my person; a showing of adult acne, a shrivelly little relevance of it, confined to the declivity of my nose); and so to be polite, the woman thus sank her gaze into her sandwich, and told me, in a voice lowered accordingly, that, one late-childhood summer, she had devoted herself to collecting postage stamps: it was a tongue-involving sideline to early-arriving puberty, and she liked having to lick the pale, gummed hinges instead of the sticky backs of the stamps themselves before entering everything into the hosting album; and once, during some foul weather between her and a brother (the older, thrown-over one, who had already made a habit of fooling the underside of his arm across the top of hers and calling her "pussified"), she reached for the shoe box in which she had let duplicate stamps accumulate—Spanish ones, mostly, of a fading orange—and sent the box slooshing through the lower air so that the stamps showered onto the brother's bare legs with a full, delicate harm. The woman was now touching up the surface of her iced tea with tiny activities, initiatives, of the longspun spoon. I myself was good at getting my touch onto things, although in a way that seemed to mix up the motive atoms inside [163] them, but I was satisfied that for the moment my sandwich, the unbitten-at half of it, was displayable and fit and local to my plate. The woman went on to say that, as a child, she had been bundled off, many an afternoon, to the slope-ceilinged quarters of a bachelor uncle who, when speaking of anybody not immediately present, could not bring himself to use the person's name but instead would say "an acquaintance of mine in ..." and then mention the name of some lapsed homeland, or little-loved rural orchestra, or backset building about to come down; and it was never a riddle, this device of his (not once could the girl have been expected to identify any of the subjects), and no matter how often and aloud he insisted that particularizing persons any further—bringing even a first name down upon anyone of them—would have been indecent, he claimed, much like doing things to people while they slept, the girl accepted all of the uncle's prim and extravagant evasion for what he surely must have intended it to be: a neat, protective trick to space the world out a little further in her favor, to scatter the population so that wherever her hand might at last come down, it would have to be on herself alone. And here I could sense that the woman wanted from my mouth an account of as much as I myself might have ever managed of attachment, so I told her I had once owned a house (a rising, really, of much-fingered, handwrought architecture that amounted to a little family of rooms above garages: a boxlike building with a rattly thorax of downspouts [164] and drainpipes and an unfolded but full-toned fire escape), and I had had for a time a boarder, a student, a high-colored, loose-packed representative of declining girlhood, hung with necklaces and barrettes, a girl of precise but shifting leanings and inclinations; and the afternoon she had come round to ask after the room, I stood in the entranceway, handshaken and asweat, and from what would later be my memory of the girl, I made off with, first, how every pore of her nose seemed to be sheltering within itself a tiny dark seedlet, a grain of something immediately, enormously valuable. And an almost lipless mouth (just a slit, practically), the teeth inside looking wet, watered-it was my life's chore, at that instant, to keep from sending the back of my thumb blotterlike across the line of them (I was later to learn she drank everything cold and through the narrowest of straws). And her hair: it was tea-colored hair she had, long and reachful, an unstopped downcome of it. Tall for a girl, but she managed to stay out of much of her height and put herself across as somebody backward, or behind. I must have told the girl, as best I could, that I of course had a wife, a full-faced, imperishable partner, though for the moment she was gone otherwhere in the marriage, and here the woman, my present companion, my tablemate, whose feet were now parked, in parallel, on the grade of my upper leg, interrupted to say that her husband, too, had been such a liar, and what could I bring up by way of reply other than that a lie is a truth struck through with other, further truth, or that a lie is the present multiplied by the past or that a lie [165] is an outcry of borrowed hope? The woman gave me an allowed look of disgust, her eyes lowered but still popular with me, and on I went with what had now become the girl of my story. For there had been a great, gainful carpet in the room I put the girl into, a matty expanse of coarse, grabby piles, an engrossing affair that took things into itself and held them tight, misered them, and I of course insisted that the girl not bother herself with its upkeep, that I enjoyed weekly access to a prestigious, upstanding vacuum cleaner; but no sooner was the girl out of the house each morning than I would withdraw from my room, where time was unportionable, and loose myself into the ticktock impertinence of the girl's room and get down on my knees, and, going after the carpet first with my fingers, then with a forceps, and finally by unspooling lengths of clear package-sealing tape and pressing them against the tufts in neat rectangles to catch what I might have missed, I brought vast tracts of the carpet to depletion, recovering not simply the girlinesses, the girleries, one would expect (buttons, straight pins, downed jewelry), but flirtier personalia in the form, say, of a stray confetto brought into the world when a page had been wrung with out caution from a spiral-bound notebook, or some pleated paper shells of the chocolates she required, or one of the bargain antihistamines she took to get her naps going, or a trash-bag tie ragged enough to show the kinked line of the wire within (this I would get wound around my finger), or a cough drop enwrapped like a bonbon (I would undo the [166] wings of the wrapper and have to decide whether to suck the drop all down or begin chewing it midway)—I became the following, the public, that these things, these off-faIlings, had come to have; but mostly there was hair, afloat above the uppermost pushings of the fabric of the carpet an almost continuous haziness of loose hairs of all lengths and sources, and I would have to set them out on a fresh sheet of paper and assort them according to the regions of the body they had taken their departure from, and in no time I had nest-like filiations of broken filaments and smaller involvements of the hairs that made me think of hooks, of barbs, of treble clefs, and each pile required a separate envelope, to be filed in a separate shoe box for every sector of the body until, I hoped, the boxes themselves would no longer be enough and I would have raised something semblable, brought up something equal in volume to the comprehensive girl herself. And her wastebasket! For every bit of rubbish, every dreariment she tossed into the thing, I would, in secret, deposit a reciprocal discard of my own, matching a spotted, confessory tissue of hers with a lurid throwaway after my own heart–the cardboard substructions of a fresh parcel of underwear, maybe, or tearings from pantyhose I now and again pressed against a span of my forearm to work onto it the complications of female shading I otherwise made do, choosily, without. I thus built the two of us up together in her trash! One afternoon-it was another of those lifeful, unsam-[167]pled days on which the world humors us each a little differently to keep us nicely on our last legs—I discovered in the wastebasket an inch-deep textbook of hers, a paperback with a celery-colored cover that had come partly unglued, and this dilapidation I paired off, naturally, with a name-your baby guide to whose pages, during my recurrent turnings of them, in bed or at table, I had contributed dried produces of my person, a chemical splendor entirely mine. This coupling sent a sudden spigoty thrill from me that forced an unbuckling and an unzipping and a cleanup with a handkerchief I then ventured responsively into the wastebasket as well. It was in the bathroom afterward that I found a suds-clouded puddle on the unlevel floor of the tub, a little undrained remainder, rimmed with offscum, of the girl's prolonged early-morning soak, and this was as much as I needed to get on my hands; I pressed them flat against the wet porcelain, then flapped them around in the air, and that was when I noticed it—in the amphitheater of the toilet bowl, an orange-yellow tint, or value, to the waters. When the girl arrived home that evening, I told her, of course, that I had discovered fresh, unforeseen trouble within the tank of thelet (a misalignment of the trip lever, a waywardness of the float ball, a ulation of the lift wires, kinks and defects, really, throughout the entire system) and that in fine it was an apparatus now operable only by means of advanced and strenuous equilibrial manipulations that it would be unseemly, inhospitable, of me to pre-[168]sume to burd to burden her with–so that from here on out, following any leak or evacuation she need merely lower the lid and then, before quitting the room, ring the handbell that had been placed on the would seeeverythinghing else. But the bell never rang, not even once, and from my window the next morning I watched the girl carry from the house a little plastic bag distended balloonishly, much like those bags you will remember having seen in the hands of children bearing homeward their solitary carnival-prize goldfish. In fact, I never ran across the likes of the girl again. The man who came to collect her things-not the father, apparently, but an advocate, an upholder-l found to be dull-eared and lax in his speech, and the better part of his face seemed to have already begun making tiny, rotational departures from whatever it was that the eyes, themselves impressively mobile, were just that moment having to take in. (Was there a lamp in the house that was not that night slopping its wattage over everything?) I guess I was waiting for the man to take a laggard, last-minute interest in me, and by now I was pushing everything out into the paired first person–it was, I said, “Our night shot,” and I began including the two of us in whatever it might be doing out, the expected sprinkles and such—but he was no friendship buff, and he paid no heed to my telling him that the only dress of hers I'd ever twidged myself into even part of the way had been the simplest of them all, a large-buttoned wonder of depthless blue, and then only on the principle that one naturally fits whatever one has into whatever somebody else [169] had first, or how else would the world keep getting any taller with people? The man just went about the removal of the girl's things without having to be reminded too noticeably, I guess, of how every dick hangs by a thread. My listener, though, had by this time brought about some becoming slowings of her arm—it was an arm inclinable to langorous diagonals and magicianly swoops through the air above the tabletop—but it no longer was involving itself with her plate, so I suggested we shove off, I made payment for the food, and on our way to the car, and then in the car as I took to following her pointings, the directional tilts of her head, she said that you naturally kept putting more and more of yourself into another person, at first wondering how much she can take, how much of you is accumulable and how much she can hold, and you're letting things out, disbursing yourself, and you've soon got things set up in her, and room is being made for even more of you, and if you bring this off with enough people, even two or three, what you've got is at first a comfort, because you can pass yourself along and move a little more widely through the world and leave it to these others to man your grievances, your disappointments; and what brought this to mind, the woman said, was a term of financial hardship she had contrived for herself a few years back, an unpaid leave of absence from scrupling letter grades onto quiz papers (propped-up As, and upended Bs made to look, rather, like fannies; all As and Bs, no Cs or anything lower, the difference between an A and a B having less to do with the accuracy of whatever facts might [170] have been impounded in provided for an answer than with anything recallable about the way the enrollee ad conformed her body to the confining perpendiculars of her chair and the navel-level writing surface that projected from it, or the way there might one day have been an unignorable blush on the instep of a once-moseying foot, disburdened of its shoe, that had got itself trapped in the grillwork of that cagelike involvement, intended for books, that was welded to, or otherwise schemed into, the underworks of the chair)—this had been a duration, in short, of controlled difficulty when the misexpenditure of even a twenty-dollar bill had set her thrilling, gloating, over everything she would miss out on, and one afternoon she had made an engagement for a haircut, just a trim, and very early in the session the haircutter, a woman ill-defined in the face but otherwise full of conspicuities of emotion, set down the prevailing scissors and pressed the flat of a lukewarm hand against the woman's cheek, held it there for a good minute or longer, while the other hand eventually found its way into a drawer, a shallow treasury of slender specialty scissors, one pair of which the cutter withdrew and began routing deductively through the woman's hair, the other hand staying put on the cheek, longer and longer, and the woman went home and for afterward the bathtub was now a more likely destination than any of the upright furniture, and it got easier to fill the tub with further clarifying volumes than to clear space on the difficult heights of the sofa, and she was hardly claiming to have become a cleaner [171] person in result—she in fact would often discover, voyaging about her body, a browned, fractionary detail of a larger crepe of toilet tissue that must have got itself stuck in some assy crevice and was impossible to get plucked out of the revolving suds—she was saying only that she spent more and more of her time thus immersed, ill off in water, and the haircutter had surely had a hand in it, the woman was doing some of the cutter's life now, coming into some of its wrong, because you sometimes have to look to somebody else's life to get dimensions set back even part of the way around your own, and it should not have to be any less your own life when it comes from somebody else, and you could surely fudge a society out of anyone available person and get this person doubling for the many, so that in the little run of things perpetuable from one person to the next, every loose moment stood to become a complete, active finality. But by now this was a new day, with only an hour or so off it already, and the place the woman had made me bring us to, the man's place, with a promise that the man was elsewhere—this was on a little offshoot of a street, a stewy efficiency apartment the color had long ago gone out of; and when, once in bed, still clothed, I found among the sheets and blankets a spoiling pair of the man's underpants, one of the leg openings of which was puckered into an avid, sloppy mouth, I held myself accountable for redisposing the fabric until I got a befitting featurelessness back onto it; but all the while, I am sure I had to make myself go over again in my mind that if the body is the porter of as many organs of affec-[172]tion as there might one day turn out to be, then the idea was to let the thing carry you to where you would otherwise never have any reason to arrive, because I listened for the unmelodiof the the thede ofthe woman's zipper, and then the woman made me put myself out of my own clothes, the attritional corduroys and overshirt, and got herself up at last onto the topic not of the man whose apartment it was (because his story was scarcely the story of how the boy who decides he is half a girl no sooner starts to worry about where the other half might than he gets careless with where he rests his eyes, or what he gives even the feeblest of fingerholds to, and anything, even a crumbly triangle of pie offered on a saucer instead of on a pie plate proper, comes in easy, ready, wronging answer), but of her husband, and how, no more than a couple of months into the marriage, he had begun snugging away in his undershorts a little source of chanc, reliable frictions to nudge him onward through the workday—anything company-keeping that could be counted on not to slide out of the elasticky leg holes: a half-dollar packet of chocolate tittles, maybe, that was barely noticeable in the baggy surround of the widecut trousers so popular at the time. For by now the woman had at last brought what is usually called the other mouth to within only inches of my lips, but it is not a mouth, obviously, although I let myself go along with the goodwill behind the comparison, the way I will remain loyal to anything deliberately and faithfully misunderstood, and I fussed my tongue against the vital trifles hung inside of her, as much of the curtailed finery as I could find, [173] and gave the whole insimplicity of it a slow-circling, examinational lick, until I was taking a sudden tepid downwash on the tongue. It was a familiar, latrine in dribble that must have tasted, no doubt, like trouble just starting out.p [1] Editor's Note: Original pagination from first edition print denoted with bracketed page numbers. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to make a comparison between different streets typology (with a distribution from center to suburb) specified in Tirana, taking into account the pedestrians' behavior on these streets. This paper will primarily focus on the following streets: “Myslym Shyri” street, “Bllok” area, “Kombinat” area, (an extension of Kavaja’s Street), and also “Ana Komnena” street (former “Fusha e Aviacionit”). The pedestrian actions, likeness, dissatisfaction, walking distance while transferring to another zone, greenery effects on pedestrians, time spent, (...) points of interest, level of frequency, pavement quality, the favorite time for walking, meeting points, benches usage, ambulant sellers, vegetation and greenery impact, water basins, public transport preference, and road signs are some of the topics to be addressed in this paper. Determination of these data will be made by employing a questionnaire and direct observation. The study should provide recommendations as guidance for municipalities and stakeholders to better understand the behavior of pedestrians in Tirana. The “Bllok” area and “Myslym Shyri” Street are the most frequented streets by pedestrians. “Myslym Shyri” street has a slight edge over the “Bllok” area and is populated by different categories of pedestrians involving children, youth, middle ages, and the elderly. Ana Komnena Street (former "Fusha e Aviacionit") is not lacking any urban components. Meanwhile, the pedestrians on Kombinati’s street suffer a little bit more because of the traffic jam and vehicle pollution. (shrink)

Today the movement of ideas, capital and people is faster and wilder than at any point in history. Globalization has made the world more interconnected. The flows of traffic in this new network have not only accelerated to new levels, but the directions of movement have multiplied and abandoned the well-worn paths. The cultural dynamics of globalization have presented new challenges to the existing models for explaining the forms of belonging and the patterns of exchange that are occurring in (...) the world. Culture is no longer understood as the discrete and unique expression of activities and ideas that occur in particular places. No culture can exist in isolation. The process of hybridization in the deterritorialization of cultures and peoples demands new theories of flow and resistance and is compelling artists and intellectuals to rethink their methods. Cultural critics and curators are also in need of new conceptual frameworks. There is an urgent need for a new vocabulary in art discourse that is able to make sense of the complex forms of representation that are incorporating images from different locations and that simultaneously activate signs that contain within them a multiplicity of other signs, each embodying a series of contrary or competing codes. To do justice to both the complexity of the artwork and the intellectual potential of these new conceptual headings we need to develop frameworks that can address both these signs of difference and the process by which signs are made out of the plays with difference. The concept of translation can serve as a tool that can both make sense of the broader dynamic of cultural exchange and explain specific forms of cultural representation. I am particularly concerned with the ways in which contemporary artists and art writing deal with issues of mobility and attachment. What sort of place does art connote if it is constantly evoking the shuttling between places? In what language can the artist articulate the recognition that translations fail as often as they succeed? How does a bi-lingual or a bi-cultural person speak their mother-tongue and see the world, which operates in a different or hybrid language? These questions push the available conceptual frameworks for cross-cultural exchanges to the limits. In this article I re-examine the conceptual viability of the term hybridity in light of the new debates on creolization and globalization. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to contribute to the discussion of expertise and skilled movement in sport by analysing the bodily practice of learning a new movement at a high level of skill in parkour. Based on Sennett’s theory of craftsmanship and an ethnographic field study with experienced practitioners, the analysis offers insight into the skilful, contextual and unique practice of parkour, and contributes to the renewed discussion of consciousness in sport at a high level of skill. With Sennett’s (...) concept of craftsmanship, it is possible to describe and grasp important aspects of obstacles put up, repetitions and material consciousness in developing perceptual and physical skills in parkour. The parkour craftsmen conduct a constant dialogue between concrete, material practices and thinking. It is argued in the article that Sennett’s ideas about craftsmanship are, in many ways, similar to Dreyfus and Dreyfus’ concept of mastery, but are less elitist and exclusive than the theory of skill acquisition... (shrink)

Conducting research during or in the aftermath of disasters poses many specific practical and ethical challenges. This is particularly the case with research involving human subjects. The extraordinary circumstances of research conducted in disaster settings require appropriate regulations to ensure the protection of human participants. The goal of this study is to systematically and qualitatively review the existing ethical guidelines for disaster research by using the constant comparative method. We performed a systematic qualitative review of disaster research ethics guidelines to (...) collect and compare existing regulations. Guidelines were identified by a three-tiered search strategy: 1) searching databases, 2) an Internet search, and 3) a search of the references in the included documents from the first two searches. We used the constant comparative method for analysis of included guidelines. Fourteen full text guidelines were included for analysis. The included guidelines covered the period 2000-2014. Qualitative analysis of the included guidelines revealed two core themes: vulnerability and research ethics committee review. Within each of the two core themes, various categories and subcategories were identified. Some concepts and terms identified in analyzed guidelines are used in an inconsistent manner and applied in different contexts. Conceptual clarity is needed in this area as well as empirical evidence to support the statements and requirements included in analyzed guidelines. (shrink)

Associations between language and executive functions are well-established but previous work has often focused more on EFs than on language. To further clarify the language–EF relationship, we assessed several aspects of language and EFs in 431 Swedish children aged 4–6, including selective auditory attention which was measured in an event-related potential paradigm. We also investigated potential associations to age, socioeconomic status, bi-/multilingualism, sex and aspects of preschool attendance and quality. Language and EFs correlated weakly to moderately, indicating that relying on (...) measures of vocabulary alone may overestimate the strength of the language–EF relationship. Contrary to predictions, we found no correlations between selective attention and EFs. There were however correlations between morphosyntactic accuracy and selective auditory attention which is in line with previous work and suggests a specific link between morphosyntax and the ability to suppress irrelevant stimuli. In Sweden, socioeconomic differences are rather small and preschool is universally available, but nevertheless, aspects of parental SES predicted children’s performance on all measures. Bi-/multilingual children performed lower on language also when controlling for SES, highlighting the need for interventions to reduce inequalities in educational outcomes already in preschool. A female advantage was found for both language and EFs, whereas preschool attendance and quality were not significantly related to outcome measures. Future work should include longitudinal studies of language and EF development, include children from diverse SES backgrounds and contribute toward a theoretical framework that further clarifies the language–EF relationship. (shrink)

Mental health problems start early in life. However, the majority of adolescents fulfilling the criteria for mental health disorders do not receive treatment, and half of those who do get treatment drop out. This begs the question of what differentiates helpful from unhelpful treatment processes from the perspective of young clients. In this study, we interviewed 12 young people who entered mental health care reluctantly at the initiative of others before the age of 18. Their journeys through mental health care (...) varied significantly despite sharing the same starting point. Our analyses resulted in a model of three trajectories. We describe relational and structural facilitators and obstacles within each trajectory and have formulated narratives highlighting core experiences differentiating them. Trajectory 1 was characterized by a rapid loss of hope, leading the adolescents to conclude that mental health care was not worth the investment. Trajectory 2 was characterized by a lingering hope that never materialized into a constructive therapeutic process despite prevailing efforts by both therapists and adolescents. Trajectory 3 was characterized by genuine meetings, allowing the therapist to transform from an unsafe stranger into a safe, competent, and benevolent adult. We discuss how our results have implications for understanding agency displayed by adolescent clients in therapy, therapist flexibility and authenticity, service organization, and attributional processes influencing clinical judgment and therapeutic processes when adolescent psychotherapy has a difficult starting point. (shrink)

Teaching and learning mathematics through enactive metaphorizing necessarily rests on interactions of teachers and learners. In this commentary, I illustrate that supporting learners’ enactive ….

The contribution of roots to the biology of the whole plant is being reevaluated in the light of classical and recent findings. In addition to their role in water and nutrient uptake and in symbiotic associations, plant roots also synthesize a remarkable variety of secondary metabolites. These chemicals, many of which are used as pharmaceuticals, agrichemicals, flavors, dyes, or fragrances, may help the plant cope with biotic and abiotic stress. Root cultures are being used as experimental systems to explore both (...) root‐specific secondary metabolites and their biological significance. They may also provide future systems for commercial production of plant specialty chemicals. (shrink)

Hotel websites display textual and non-textual strategies with the aim of turning online visitors into customers. This article focuses on two related textual aspects: how consumers are discursively construed and how conditional constructions are used in order to persuade and convince consumers of the adequacy of the hotel. The framework adopted for the analysis combines Stern’s notion of ‘implied consumer’ with a corpus-driven approach. The corpus data comprises 114 British hotel websites and totals half a million words. This is a (...) subcorpus of COMETVAL, a database compiled at the University of València. The results reveal the importance of a number of words that address consumers directly or indirectly. These words intertwine with others to form patterns that help establish a bond between hoteliers and their clients. Further exploration of the corpus confirmed that some conditional sequences such as if you and should you are used by advertisers to speculate about the needs and wishes of consumers that the hotel can fulfil for them. The analysis suggests that conditional structures are a distinctive discursive characteristic strongly associated with the dialogic nature of the discourse hotel websites. (shrink)

Purpose This paper presents an ethnographic study of gamete donation in Latvia. The aim of the study is to describe and analyse the practice of applying responsibility in gamete donation cases from the perspective of anthropology and ethics. Methods We performed thirty semi-structured interviews with laypeople and five focus group discussions among adolescents. The third source of data was media analysis: 57 articles discussing assisted reproduction in Latvian electronic popular media as well as internet discussions among ART participants. The data (...) were processed using Atlas.ti. Results The data showed that the situation of ART responsibility is formulated through defining one’s relationship to the gametes, to the nation and the relationship between parent and child. Conclusions The practice of gamete donation does not create new responsibilities but uses already existing relations in a situation marked by new knowledge. Relationships among ART users, donors and physicians often result in an imbalance of responsibility sharing. The framework of relational ethics is one possible way to change the practice of balancing and sharing responsibility in ART applications. (shrink)

Nature & the seasons -- Outdoor pursuits -- The spirit of self-sufficiency -- The joy of fika -- The Nordic kitchen -- Healthy hedonism -- Design & home -- Kinship, conviviality & openness -- How to hygge-at a glance.