Surnaturels T01 : Un choix tellement humain (French Edition)

Its fantasy prepares the bizarreness that follows, while death, first suggested by the funeral top hat, dominates the stanza, pernteating the images of gloV'es and suicidal lady and suggesting the category of the painting that the stanza becomes-for the figures themselves prepare to be subjects in a nature morte literally, a "dead nature". There is a breakdown of the frontiers between life an.

The dance takes pla.

The death motif continues but, instead of characterizing what the poet sees, it c,harac- terizes his action, He has killed the handsome orchestra leader who, like the lovely murdered lady, seems t. In stanza 39 space is abolished and there is a shift to future time. The emphasis on the theme of death continues.

AU now are dead. But all who7 Does the poet dismiss the oddities he created in stanza 37 and the friends he evoked in stanza Or those who attempt to lead the dance7 And who is the maitre d'hotel1ls he the poet7 Is he death? And the unreal champagne? We seem, for a mome. As int'e resting as the champagne itself is what it is compared to: Or one can say, to the contrary, that the stanza rises to an affirmation over death, that the image of the poet is linked to that of the eternally singing rose whose image sends one back to uzone" and to a remembered moment of repose, or to nLe Brasieru and the Dantean rose of paradise, and, at t,h e same time, foiWard to the end of this poem.

After the series of endings and beginnings which, in stanzas , sug.. The manuscript version of line , "L'empereur tien. Yet, whether slave or em,Peror, he recalls the subjection that Apollinaire associates with love and a fusion between sexual love and poetic powers.

The second number is the. The idea is quite similar: The chauffeur's position, in Apollinaire's poem, is ambivalent. The third number combines the traditionally poetic resonances of the first number with the modernism of the second. Dam,e suggests a middle-aged woman or a court lady mysterious and lovely of the ,Middle Ages. A dreamlike atmosphere, or dream logic, imposes itself, and an almost surrealistic magic of the machine. Inevitably, because of the re1ahon. Here the two images seem to have fused: O ,r more likely these properties emanate from her.

The two sections and seern to balance, and complement each other; the first celebrates the poet's role, the second, eventually , the role of the mysterious female-Muse, Mother Nature, Rimbaud's witch? All these stanzas are based on surprise, "le grand ressort nouveau, " according to "L'Esprit Nouveau et les poetes," but they are only "little" secrets, as Apollinaire indicates in stanza 43, that is, tentative examples of his new aesthetic. On,e reading of lines is that they describe the invasion of the individual by an overwhelming vision.

The final two stanzas resume major themes of "Les Col- lines'' and, perhaps inevitably, provide thematic oppositions, between Ia souffrance and la bonte and, notably, between life's ephemeral chann and its central mystery. Stanza 44 evokes suffering without naming the experi.. In a comparable way, the passing of time, never mentioned, is evoked by antithetical juxtapositions crescent and full moon, moon and sun. The nostalgic evocation of sunlit joys in the past may be read as 11 a final farewell to youth, a retum to it in memory cf.

The flame and the rose, to be found in some of Apollinaire's most beautiful poems, nearly always com- municate a faint atmosphere of Dante's II Paradiso. The image of perfume may recall to the reader Baudelairean visions of exotic or dream landscapes, although the emphasis here is on the rising perfume, not on what it inspires.

The first version of line , which has Qui instead of Que, reads. Or, in a more traditional context the perfume may suggest the poem itself, as it vanishes. The Hnal images of rose, flame, perfume, which may all be found in mystical poetry, express the poet's final attainment of his vision, after the poem's long preparation.

For the entire poem leads us through the poet's life by a series of nonchronological flashbacks relating to his memories and to his autobiographical poetry. Thus nLes Collinesu embraces Apollinaire,s concept of the poet in the modem wodd and an earnest attempt to evaluate his own life and works-a final attempt, as it turned out. Its reappearance in Cabaret Voltaire June indicates the interest felt in the poem by the Dadaists.

The title suggests, among o ther things, a tree whose foliage or fruits of gold and silver grant one godlike powers, a tree hidden in a grove and guarded by a monster, a tree that is at once a cross and a gallows. On the level of the poefs own. Here again the general sense would be both of danger since crea- tion is always a risk and of discovery. One may also find, after reading the poem, retroactive implications such as branches that wander, cross over, come to a dead end, like roads or railway tracks. It expresses the fragmentation of a personality by abrupt changes in tone, subject matter, even subjects of verbs, and it could be considered as an ex.

In the first six lines the pronoun subject is transfornted in. The relation of line 1 to line 2 is put in doubt by the lack of pun. You the intimate tu may indicate that the poet addresses himself sing in contrast or as an accompaniment to the music of Ehonographs. Or the gallop of phono- graphs may be related t. In that event they may play the assortment of real, imagined, and literary memories which make up the rest of the stanza and, especially, line 2 with its tuneful variation on a refrain from Villon see note to ''C'est Lou Qu'on Ia Nommait".

If they are poets, their disappearance renders doubtful the stature of the singer in line 1. Whether the single leaf be poem or woman or some aspect of knowledge, its importance for the poet lies in its lack of stability: Al ls 1L rather h. Merry,"' Le Poete Assassine. But who is the formal vous ilyou" whom the poet implores to stay w. The building of the mosque at lspahan, ancient capital of Iran, evokes a multitude of tiny mosaics which compose a single blue dome and a mosaic sky which offers an illusion of reality.

In "Liens," sounds link space and time; here the clang of a vendor's bell, which belongs to the poet's past, is juxtaposed to a sound in future time. The imagery is futuri. In Apollinaire's day the transatlantic cable was used uniquely for tele- graphing. They were equally impossible to transmit over radio waves; voices on the radio, even into the s, were notably squeaky and shrill. Europe and America, in lines Line 14, in tum, brings into his mind Le Douanier Rousseau who had painted a port.

The probability, however, is that he does precisely what the poem indicates: The notion of art as an expression of almost simultaneous preoccupations of the consciousness on different levels is emphasized by the surprising interpolation of lines before lin. Whippoorwill and badger are nocturnaL like many poets, and the mole works in darkness. The latter's labyrinthine creation, achieved blindly may be compared to a crea..

I tion of the unconscious-and to the kind of poem Apollinaire attempts here. The latter was chosen by the translator to ernpha The theme of the voyage per ser whether through memory or actual journeys, at this point beco. The place-name's effect , however, is to stress the poet's ubiquity. And the thought of an intelligent woman is associated with legends 25 and the mysterious "Dame-Abonde" 26 , that is; most probably, with women of fairy tale and myth,.

The poet seems to warn that one should not forget them, prob- ably because they destroy men. He may urge us. Merry" and "Un Fan tome de Nutes. Dame-Abonde is hidden, like a kernel of magic, in a prosaic setting; her very name suggests her COMM. The tramway 26 , which dissolves dreamlike into an elevator 26 , functions like the phonographs by setting imagery in motion and mixing m. Whereas the phonographs are juxtaposed to unexpected images, seeming to launch them; the tramway and especially the elevator seem displaced in their surroundings, and the unlikelihood of their being where they are is stressed by paradoxes or contrasts on the verbal level Abonde I desert chassels 'artetait.

Most significant, je montais, which constitutes the link between the two scenes, "I was getting on" the tr.

sciences | jcdurbant

The hunt that he observes, like Dame. The litany is vividly reminiscent, for English-speaking r-ead- ers, ofT. Eliot, who borrowed from Apollinaire more than once. These can be seen as in contrast with the commercial associations of the shop- Win. The poet invokes the image; subsequently, it dominates the land- scape, floating between him and all other images he calls up. Stanzas consisting of one line or, at the most, two, suggest silence: His thoughts are fragn1entary and still cling to the same theme. The Nor- wegian s.

Birches; like the carob trees in line 39, remind one of the poem's title, with- out clarifying it. The paleness and the cold of the north contrast with the preceding glowing imagery. Line 35 once more suggests the Creole, Marie. As in 34 there is a delicacy of outline, a suggestion of engraving or etching. It is at once a climax to the poem and a fading away. Lines seem an even more open. As the poem ends, so does its universe. Or if one thinks of an afterglow fading into twilight, the carob trees may indicate a world that is hardening, Uke metal.

It would seem that a new world is launched by, and within, the complaining poet, and that ta voix refers, this time, to his own voice. The number three recalls, among other things, his favorite magician Hennes Trismegistus. Whereas in 'Vendemiaire" Alcools the death of kings is trismegiste, here it is the birth of new worlds which is based on the magic number three.

Notably, however, "trois par trois" suggests two groups of three or thirty-three and the last stanza makes explicit a dominant preoccupation of the poem: It is hardly a coincidence that his friends, the cubist painters Louis Marcoussis and Juan Gris, were to play with the same number, thirty-three, in book illustrations for Apollinaire and another friend , Max Jacob. The structure of the poem stems from that seemingly spon- taneous association of ideas, plastic images, and even tunes, in other words, the soliloquy of the total consciousness which was Apollinaire's increasing preoccupation just before the war.

Nothing is explained, but there are links between images and between stanzas. Alternatively, one could see the birth of new beings suggesting something as melancholy and omi- nous as the aging of the gods see introduction. With the help of the title, the. Writing only a few months later in his review Les Soirees de Paris, he advised poets that the way to renew their art was to follow the example of the realist novelists of the nineteenth cen.

But of course the realist novelists never contemplated reproducing their observations as a series of apparently arbitrary juxtapositions, with little continuity from one line to the next. The poem may share realism's fascination for moments of lived reality up to a point, but it departs radically from the mimetic model in the boldness of its innovatory structure. The invitation to become involved is highlighted by the presence in the text of one or two lines that can. Where logically an undifferentiated mass of phrases might have been.

In a lighthearted way it overthrows the concept of poetry as a speciallin8uistic ac: Such shift'S and dashes of lin- guistic register are an important part of the wordplay of the poem. Line 5 may be descriptive of the cafe's interior, and line 6 could be a consequential detail, highlighted by the internal echo of sound between patronne and poitrinaire. The similarity of construction in lines 7 and 9 both being future clauses with the pronoun tu might suggest an element of continuity, which could be a group around one particular table. A friend of Apollinaire's, Jacques Dyssord, daim.

This line may be read as a provocative comment aimed at the reader. It announces improvisation and challenges the reader to respond to it. Line 11 seems another scene-setting detail, the pile of saucers bein. The bright lively nature of the sound fits well int. A racy colloquial style is particularly evident in the next two lines, which exhibit a colorful brand of J'low-life" humor.

They round off vigorously a paragraph that ha,s a distinct gusto of its own. Line 16 could be a passin. There is a calculated dissonance between the formal address of line 18 and the savory insult of line 19, which is again in the regist. The pithy tone is maintained by the scornful comment of line 20, but there is then a contrast with the overtones of gentility in the two folp lowing exchanges about ladies with furs. After these lively tonal variations, the paragraph fades out quietly with the two descriptive details of lines The imperfect tense of lin.

It may refer back to line 7 and forward to line 29, which might be a waitress's conventional remark when serving. As Renaud points out , p. The other lines foun a random sequence. The phrases are of approxi- mat-ely the same length and encourage a rapid rhythm of reading, but they clash rather than merge with one another. The final longer line 1. Within the set of three, the first two are similar in tone and con- versational register, but there is a contrast with the change in length and grammatical function of line In the first edition, line 39 begins the final passage.

In the Pleiade edition, line 39 stands alone. There the "framing" of lines by single lines encourages a reading of them together and emphasize. Invitations to inspect engravings and paintings are notorious for the double meaning they frequently have! Apollinaire's intention, however, may have been either more subtle or more straightforward, since he oversaw the first edition. This final paragraph seems to cohere around references to travel cf. These two lines end the poem on an emphatic note.

Line 47 humorously mimics a pedantic maxim, while quinte major has an enigmatic air of solemnity. As such, it is an appropriate phrase to feature in a cafe scene, where games of cards are a regular activity, but the expression is unusual enough ln contemporary French to suggest something more weighty.

This impression is enhanced by the fact that quinte can, also mean a muskal chord, which leads the reader into thinking that the poem ends with an orchestral flourish. The sym- metry between the two parts of the poem demands that they should be seen side by side-as in the original Soirees de Paris publication-but unfor- tunately no edition has respe. The poem celebrates the global awareness of modem man through devel- opments in worldwide communication, a theme that already had a centr al place in Apollinaire's modernism see notes to "Les Fenitres'' and "Liens" and was further stimulated when his brother Albert went to Mexico in The postcard evoking events of the civil war in Mexico is reproduced illusionistically, like a cubist collage, and could well be a verba..

Other phrases from postcards Jeunes fill'es a Chapultepec or more general exchanges between the two brothers are placed at intervals throughout the design, some being known to be biographkaJly correct there was an earthquake at 'Nice where the brothers lived c. The graphic form suggests expanding consciousness in the two circular shapes that dominate the two pages. Simultaneously the right-hand shape, wi. The verbal content of the radio waves and the Gramophone grooves is not m.

Implicitly what is being beamed to the world is a sound picture of the many voices of a great metropolis, making up the typical vox populi common to cities all over the globe. The status of the phrases in this respect is emphasized b: There are political slogans Vive la Rep,ub.. It is in this sense that there is a distinction from other calligrams. The practice of onomatopoetic sound was one of the hallmarks of their style, as was the use of typographi- cal signs to condense syntax mildly illustrated here by the plus sign.

But the resemblances with any particular work are not extensive one or two details only in1 for example, Marinetti's "Turkis,h Captive Balloon'' from. Z ang Tumb Tuum, which Apollinaire might have seen,. The two explosive shapes are also set into a frame of coherent, discursive language. The final result is a combination of order and disorder. Random reading is possible in many of the parts,. In that the second circular shape is bigger and more explosive than the first, this direction of reading seems to lead to a natural climax. Qcean, " Savoir et B: Under cover of an apparently levelheaded and rational analysis of super- stition, Apollinaire is conducting an astute defense of an imaginative out- look on life.

If superstitious beliefs are but a legitimate way of observing nature, then there is no real conflict between an empirical and a magical understanding of reality. Rather than demystifying superstition, the argu- ment tends to favor a sympathetic exploration of all wider, nonrational fornts of knowledge of the world.

Prophecy and similar gifts of insight are within the power of all men, if they can be helped to shake off the effects of a narrow education. By implication the poet, by cultivating the gift of sur- prise, by exploring the curious, irrational, or singular aspects of life, can help to rest: The poetics that cor- respond t. The casual style and expression are essential features of this view of poetry. The language and the mode of address are those of ordinary speech, skillfully manipulated to range from almost prosaic inflections to passages of more sustained, but still relaxed, rhythm.

This amounts to a recognition that if prophetic insight is widely shared, so, too, must be the language that the poet uses. Such a conception of prophecy and poetic expression does not represent Apollinaire's final aesthetic position see introduction. But the ability to reveal a meroeilleux modeme at the heart of everyday life is an important aspect o. Madame Deroy was a real fortune-teller who is also mentioned in A p. The references to actual acquaintances of the poet reinforce the impression of casual spontaneity of style.

His own shadow plays a major role in Apollinaire's poetry see note to "Ombre". Here he reveals that his attitude to it is far from rational. The claim not to believe does not detract from the obvious sym- pathy the poet displays for fortune-telling and similar practices. Billy was a dose friend of Apollinaire' s and a fellow writer. Addressing the poem to him gives both a semiepistolary intimacy of tone and a clear hint that, however casual, these reflections amount to an infor- mal art poe. Few poems better illustrate the aesthetic concept of suntaturalisme, that is, a poetry that embodies a.

The fable that forms the main thread of the poem is a projection of Apollinaire's fatalistic obsession with unhappy love.. The abduction of a throng of wom. Whatever the interpretation, the elegiac overtones are unmistakable; they are further strengthened by the nostalgic memories of the past aroused by the setting in the old historical district of the M. Yet the wistfulness of the main theme is set in the context of the poet's willing immersion in the contemporary world.

In the opening lines he pro- claims himself as freed from introspection and able at last to confront exter- nal reality. In the central section of the poem his thoughts radiate out, in disconnected flashes, to the simultaneous activity that is going on all over the globe. The aim of the poem, therefore, is to create a simultaneous real- ity, embracing every aspect of the poet's relationship with the world and drawing together the conflicting trends of his poetic personality, the intro- vert and the extrovert, the confident and the fearful.

A considerable unity of tone is thus achieved, reconciling the different modes of expression repre- sented by the fluent narrative of the fable, the lyrical declamation of the opening lines, the nostalgic evocation of the past, and the simultaneous flashes of the contemporary world. These lines may not originally have belonged to the poem the technique of dovetailing disparate fragments is one frequently employed by Apollinaire , but they make a commanding opening because they affirn1 the poet's conscious control over the whole fiction that is to be unfolded.

Although now ready to immerse himself in the external world U. The paradox can be explained by referring. The delight expressed in wandering l. A pollinaire's work the theme of wan- dering is assodated with contact with the external world. The fabulous nature of the narrative quickly becomes appar- ent.

The abnormal syntax of line 9, which exists in a grammatical vacuum of its own, is a sign of dislocation of normality, giving prominence to the idea of death in Passeur des morts and in the strange neologism mordonnantes, applied to the women of Saint-Merry. The word might be a condensation of mort and bourdonnantes death and buzzing , or alternatively it might mean death- dealing, which forM. Poupon would suggest that the women are prostitutes la petUe mort being a euphemism for orgasm. The association of the musician.

The musician achieves perfection not only in his effortless subjuga- tion of the women Perhaps it is in this sense that he is also Ariadne 1. The fluent narrative is disrupted by a series of abrupt juxta- positions, a technique that, here as elsewhere, seeks to create a synthesis of the diversity of life.

Although a vivid variation of tone and color is thus introduced, a link with the main narrative is made when the flashes begin to articulate the poet's own thoughts. A degree of poignancy creeps in as he reflects on the general unhappiness of men and their longing to come together Sl , suggesting a soanng. The poet's thoughts; having radiated out into contemporary life and been brought back to their point of departure, are now carried back in time. The sublimated melancholy in the fable finds a natural outlet in nostalgic thoughts of the processions of the past in the historic old district, which are now lost in the recesses of time-as the women soon will be.

Apollinaire's work, evoking the tumultuous movement of life, but frequently,. The intervention of' the poet. Rather than being individually significant, their. A deserted house fits into the conventions of supernatural tales, while the modem use of a historic building U. The final disappearance of the women create,S a charged climax IL , the multiple repetitions expressing the awe with which the poet regard. T'ypically for Apollinaire, the most poignant note in the climax is the forsaking of mem- ory L 86 , for him the most vital dimension of living.

The presence of the priest 1. The throbbing sadness of the last lines is the same emotion that has been enacted in dramatic fotm in the fable, so that the final lyric statement o.

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The mood of the final section is, therefore, aU- embracing: It was sup- posedly written when Apollinaire took off his tie in the ofHces of the Soirees de Paris, putting it on a table beside Serge Ferat's watch OP, p. The statement in the tie shape speaks of the stifling effect of civilized society, with the implication, confinned by the phr ase forming the handle of the watch and the phrase on the right of the watch face, that if the pleasures of every passing hour are enjoyed to the fult a fuller, more rewarding life will be gained.

But as the eye moves around the hours and their pleasures, time runs out ; the hands move away from the confident statement that the beauty of life surpasses the sorrow of dying and the fateful hour approaches. The clear stateme'n t of the theme, elegantly embodied in the simple graphic shape, is complicated by the more enigmatic phrases representing the hours. At one level, these are clever puns of various kinds to identify the hours, the key provided by Chevalier and Bassy being: Over and above this clever game, however, these expressions can have many other connotations.

Particularly when brought into contact with resonant phrases like 1a beau. Thus even simple expressions like heart, eyes, and hand evoke the important role and the emotional overtones these parts of the body have in. Apollinaire's poetry, and possibly in the imagination of every reader. Le bel inconnu, a phrase from medieval literature, carries with it overtones from a long literary tradition, as does the reference to Dante's poetry.

But while the tension need not be so dramatically stark, the conflict between love of life and the flight of time is nevertheless the major theme. Moreover, this conflict arises from the interaction between graphic form and verbal text! This dual mode of functioning is the hallmark of the calli- gramme. According to Scott Bates the title , p. Thus the title's mythological interpretation as poetic vision may also suggest the uncertainty of that vision. If one dis- misses hidden erudite meanin. War I, seemed so full of possi- bilities. Or perhaps the literary imag. In other words, what sta.

According to Andre Billy, Apollinaire wrote the first ten lines as the beginning of a story and then ''ne sachant plus que dire, il fit appel sona demon, et Ia nouvelle touma en poeme" [not knowing what to add. What seems to be Apollinaire's point of departure, however, here as els-ewhere, is an everyday stroll in the street- and a: Apollinaire's vision of the marvelous, however, is based on. His style, accordingly, changes only gradually from the prosaic to the intensely poetic or exalted.

Imagery stresses a metamor- phosis of the everyday into the magical by a union between small and huge: Gradually, the alliance shifts to one be- tween concrete objects and the intangible or abstract; a cigarette is as bitter- sweet as life 16 ;. These metaphors are based on our ability to pass from the real to the imag- ined, from the concrete object to an indefinable but illuminating emotion. In contrast with what w. Apollinaire thinks of Picasso, in particular, whose imagery is evoked in Alcools as early as , with "Saltimbanqu. Apollinaire's lyrical art criticism also frequently attests to the paint- er's presence in his imagination.

At any rate, in ''Un Fantome de Nuees, " Apollinaire's major poem for the painter, written. The result is a prolonged juxtaposition of real and imaginary, as, beginning with a walk through Paris streets, the poet introduces us into a world of fantasy and dream which gradually and increasingly assumes the f arm'l'1ar ch. The principal color in this almost colorless poem is rose. There are two examples of harmony of similarity. In lines not only do green and yel- low harmonize but they express. In line 30 again two colors in close hannony have as their principal function an associative value: Thus, although colors may be used accord- ing to theories that were in Apollinaire's mind at the time because of conver- sations with Delaunay, they have the nonpainterly function of symbols.

Characteristically, he manages at. An emphasis on a seerrting objectivity is underlin. These changes, however, do not conceal the urgent appeal to the spectator within the poem and the reader outside the poem to share in the vision of the vanished child. July 14th, Bastille Day, is comparable to our July 4th.

The description of the organ.. His paradoxical ,a ppear- ance and the mechanical but plaintive sound of his music recall the poet's preoccupation with a similar contrast between the literary aura of the word harlequins and the: The old juggler's wearing of a color associated with a sickly young girl recalls a number of paintings, notably Femme a Ia corneUle. The mingling of the two sexes in the juggler's appearance may relate, in the poet's mind, to the androgynous character he observes in Picasso's harle- quins: He is also face..

A return to the prosaic tone of the beginning and a contr ast with the preceding impressionistic or nonrealistic descriptions. The vulgar appearance of the last juggler and the argument about money introduce a practical. The final description of the child acrobat, inspired by Picasso's L'Acrobate a la boule, gradually assumes magical proportions. The poet is obviously more sensitive to the visual arts here, something akin to the dance than to music. For Davies , p. For Bates , p. Les Peintres Cubistes Apollinaire adds to his early essay a description of Picasso's transformation from an artist inspired by a muse to one who painfully invents his own universe.

That account of Picasso's abrupt switch in style and subject matter, on which Apollinaire was working at approximately the same time he wrote "Un Fantome," may pos. The widening of possibilities for the painter would apply also to the poet and to the other spectators. One can say almost the opposite and arrive at a similar conclusion. At the end of the poem the spectators and the poet pos- sess within themselves the essence of what they have just experienced, and they, in turn, are encapsulated not only in space but in time: The large black capitals indicate that one should read in a clockwise direction.

In 'iCouronne,'' the fall of kings is linked to the poet's role, as in earlier verse "La Chanson du Mal-Aimeu and "'Vendemiaire". Apollinaire, who was fond of endowing himself literally with royal or imperial lineage, felt a kinship to the many kings who seemed to be dying out in his own time.

On another leveL he, as poet, is virtually a royal heir. Here again use is made of occasional oversize capitals: The typographical pre- sentation has a three-dimensional effect which lends depth to the mirror and to the name floating within it. The mlrr'Or frame or wreath as in the laurel wreath that, in ancient Athens, crowned athletes and poets may also be seen as an aureole, and the words composing the aureole may be read as a playful reminiscen;ce of Mallarme's angelisme: The Eiffel Tower and the great Ferris wheet built for the Universal Exhi- bition of , were symbols, for the modernist generation, of the techno- logical triumphs of the modern world.

The tower was one of the main themes of the paintings of Robert Delaunay, who also painted a series of canvases linking the tower and the wheel. This is no doubt why Apollinaire combined them in this poe. The postcard is reproduced in Cailler pl. When published in Portugal Futurista, the poem was spread out laterally and vertically on the page cf. This arrangement was appropriate in that the theme of the poem is the global consciousness and universalist outlook shared by Delaunay and Apollin. The modem spirit embraces all points of the compass and all the pulsating energy of the natural world implied by the swelling ocean and the turbulent noises from the East.

Poupon, GA 6, pp. Poupon points out that the writing of the poem coincided with the maniag.

So Apollinaire laments the flight of love, ambivalently comparing Marie's departure with Dante's journey to exile, or even with his imaginary descent into Hell GA 6, p. There is much, therefore, in "V: The evocative setting of a landscape at dusk, the graceful phrasing, the elegiac coloring of the language-all flow from these complementary themes and create the mood of reverie tinged with sadness which is typical of many early poems.

A new dimension, however, is given to the familiar subject by the graphic form. This is not done by description: It is rather through visual interpretations o. Because of the normal direction of reading, and the size of the type, the reader puts the cloud and the train into the foreground and, by coming to the sky only at the bottom of the page, is led to project it in his mind as a distant backdrop to the scene, thereby introducing depth and perspective.

Within this ellip- tically three-dimensional framework, how-ever, other spatial relationships are left vague. The cloud is not perceived in the same perspective as the sky, and, therefo. The telephone pole and the telegraph. The graphic foun also interacts with the verbal text in more specific ways. The words composing the cloud and the telegraph may be read in dif- ferent sequences, which highlights their imagery and verbal play.

The black C in the sky amusingly depicts the moon, and the heavy lettering at the end of the train represent'S the locomotive. An important effect of the latter shape is to create a tension between the verbal suggestion of dying away m. Given that the phrase that is thus highlighted and brought nearer tendre ete si pale is evocative of the beauty of summer, the result of the tension is to suggest a reconciliation of contradictory emotions: Ultimately, however, the same reconciliation is implicit in the whole graphic form in that it "arrests'' and lays out for con- templation, in a controlled pattern, appearances that are described as evanescent.

Europe," underlining that spontaneity which Apollinaire so esteemed and which often seems so suspect in his poetry; "Je n'ose pas montrer m. Je sais1 vous etes rinspirateur du cubism. Mais, moi, je vou- d. Un palier rond; une dizaine de portes numerotees. Apol- Unaire entre avec prudence comme s'il craignait que tout le batiment s' e ff. But l want to do something else.

We cross the dark hall- way where water drips endlessly and piles of garbage are lying about. A cir- cular stairwell; a dozen doors. Apollinaire takes a seat. Obviously, from this passage, Apollinaire was deeply moved, both intel- lectually and emotionally, by Chagall's paintings. He related them to his own taste for a mixture of real and fantastic, that is, 'fle sumaturel, '' and also to his loss of Marie. The first title, according to the painter, was "Rodztag," literally ''red day," and the poem was composed in a few hours.

Bearing this conflicting evidence in mind, it seems reasonable to sup- pose that the painter received a first version which was subsequently reworked. The final title is appropriate to Chagall's first trip from Russia to Paris. As in the earlier poem, abrupt transitions link diverge. Chagall seems to have affected the poet more powerfully than. The memories are often expressed by verses from "La Oef" OP, pp. Continual fluctuation between the poet's memories and what he sees in the painter's world provides a poetic structure: This theme of loss mingles with Chagallian motifs and leads the poet finally to a new awareness of his own identity.

He examines past losses by the light of present experiences, trans. As a kind of prism also. For the fragmentation throughout "A Travers l'Europe,'' which accompanies the switchbacks in time, suggests the poet's assumption of a pr. Apollinaire had recently absorbed Delaunay's theories on color see note to "Les Fenetres". These theories, as much as th. IIA Travers l'Europe" begins with a typical ambiguity, Rotsoge, a title that eventually became the first line.

It may be a nickname for the red-haired painter, or it may have been inspired by his self-portrait with red mustache. In Chagalr s pictures, the main figure-painter, violinist, Hying onlooker-usually has a green face as in Moi et le village, Apollinaire seems to play one of his erudite games by turning the color wheel and substituting red for its com- plernent green Greet. The third stanza contains a single verset which concerns t. Her-e the poet thinks of Chagall, rather than of Delaunay.

For Delaunay, a single color has little meaning. For ApoUinaire, the color violet has many meanings. In ' 'Un Fan tome" it is a. In ''A Travers l'Europe" the poet see,m. In the final stanza A: A painting that may have existed in ChagaiJ's studio leads us into the poees past. Apollinaire's presentation of the col- ors is calculated in its effect: It would seem that, whereas in "'Les Fen tres" Apollinaire plays a.

Keeping in mind a theory learned from Delaun. The movement of the first stanza proceeds from three lines evoking Chagallian motifs t. Three fragments of a conversation, at once mysterious and cliche- ridden , lead us back to an evocation of the painter's world. The image of a biplane that becomes a hydroplane suggests colors of air and water blue, violet. In L'Hom- a mage Apollinaire , Chagall had already portrayed the androg- ynous character of the poet's literary identity. The hareng saur which swims appropriately about ChagalY s dwelling is probably a staple in the painter's larder at that time, as well as a subject of such paintings as L'Homme au hareng undat,e d,.

A quotation from "La Clef" c. The technique of introduc- ing former sorrows and the symbolist language of his youth by juxtaposing avers de jeunesse with present time has already occurred in Alcools. The verse announces a major theme of the poem. In reaction to the art and milieu of Chagall, the poet cries out for Ia clef, conceivably the key to Chagall's art, at least that key to art necessary to his. Thus already there is, implicit in the poem, an association between loss of poetic inspiration and the loss of a sweetheart, lost long ago at Stavelot or in the Rhineland, lost most recently with Marie.

Implicit too is another characteristic shared by the two artists: What ''la fiancee, " the faithful Bella, means to Chagall the painter, the Muse whose identity changes but whose nature seems always unloving means to the poet Apollinaire. Anonymous voices intrude, with a typical turning from senti- ment to humor.

It is curiously launched by two numbers, seemingly concerned with precise statistics yet not related to anything precise and, consequently, dreamlike or, more appropriately, floating. They may suggest nothing at all, a flight upward, a hovering as in dreams, the respective heights of the Tower of Pisa and the Eiffel Tower 0.

Manson, graduate paper, UCSB. The poet is playing gam,es with us: But Apollinaire does not linger on any one theme or mood. Nostalgia gives way momentarily to the artist's task of working with materials drawn from daily life In tern1s of inner time,: Et toi, an invocation to ChagaU, suggest: Above all, the line suggests that the entir-e experience of the poem, elaborated in the final stanza, turns upon the magic gesture of the painter. They proceed through irr'fgular alexandrines based on the elisions of fami.. I I There is an increasing effect of syncopation which stresses an increasing fragmentation of emotion, as well as of visual images.

From another point of view, the beginning of the final stanza exempli- fies Apollinaire's attitude to painting as a subject for poetry. Although Chagall is the magjcian who stirs the poet's emotions, what matters is Apol- linaire's aesthetic experience which in his case is closely related to his pri- vate emotional experience at the moment of looking around the painter' s atelier, interrupted by chance external phenomena or by internal phe- nomena based on his own changing identity.

Rapid changes of mood link humor to regret: Marie Laurendn may be une charmante cheminee, but, although the phrasing is light, touched with a humorous fantasy rather than with bitter irony, the theme is loss and emerges in the three lines of pathos which follow. The impression of syncopated rhythm and fragmented feel- ings is prolo. Et Ia veilleuse consumee [And the burnt-out night-light]. In these lines the theme of lost love is transformed into a stressing of the ephemeral 24, 25 , which in turn becomes an affir tnation of the present moment as the sole experience worthy of poetry.

The change of tone, from loss to affirmation, takes place where an image of light is seized at a mo. The final articulate affirmation indicates that the whole pas- sage is artistically contrived: In the last two lines, love, glorified and unchanging, as it already exists in "La Maison des Morts'' Alcools , in les glaciers de Ia memoire, merges with Apollinaire's own poetic vocabulary and with images from Chagall' s paintings..

The image of the hair, always reminiscent of Marie, leads Apollinaire back to the world of Chagall and to a wider vision of the cosmopolitan poet. An echo of "La Chanson du Mal-Aime" les tramways feux verts sur l'echine [tramways with green fires along their spines] reminds us that the poet is, above all, the singer of a modem world and only secondarily "le mal-aime.

Marie like a goddess spreads her hair across Europe. Comparably, in later paintings, ChagaU's man in the air often is not exalted but is simply the ele- vated observer of Paris or a village. Thus the poet returns from exp. Apol- linaire mentioned it in a letter to Serge Ferat on July 29, , sketching out t.

One must doubt the statement of P. Birott the editor of SIC, that Apollinaire auached little importance to the typographical inter- pretation of this and his other calligrams, being content to leave the respon- sibiUty to the printer Themerson, p. In fact, the manuscript repro It is interestingly differ- ent in conception from two other typographical representations. Apollinaire might have conceived the idea of using slanting lines after seeing Boccioni's futurist paintings of , States of Mind: Those Who Go and Those Who St'ay, in which diagonal and downward moving lines are associated, respec- tively, with speed and sadness.

But the poem is so different in tone and sub- ject matter as to make this conclusion unlikely. The first function of the lines as graphic form is to sustain and enhance the verbal music. Eff-ectively the visual continuity turns each line into one long rhythmic unit, thereby emphasizing it's musical potential.

The emotion that is first heightened is an elegiac one reminjscent of Verlaine in the m. But the second and third lines quickly establish, in place of simple Verlainean melancholy, a more complex dialectic in which rain is also asso- ciated with the enrichment of new experiences and wholehearted involve- ment in the expanding modern world.

In this light the graphic fom1 might be seen as ambivalent also. Trickling raindrops may be expressive of sadness, but in the way they spread down and over the windowpane there is also a sense of adventur-e and exploration of space. The light undulating lines, as they push delicately down and out, reflect the poet's open attitude to experience and his desire to make new "encounters" in a new and expandin,g world. To this extent the graphic form anticipates the use in other poems of sinuous lines fanning out over the page "Visee,'' uDu Coton dans les Oreilles'' , as well as verbal expressions of a similar desire to "flow'' out into space notably in JIMerveille de Ia Guerre".

N In Lecture et lnterpretation des Calligrammes. The poem evokes Apollinaire' s precipitate return t: Judging by a reference in an epistolary poem to Rouveyre dated January 14, OP, p. The manuscript also seems to establish that the central section ll. There is already an apocalyptic note in the earlier part esp. The poem is an eminently fit.. It was on July 31, not August 31, that Apollinaire left Deauville. Some critics have seen in the change of date a conscious or unconscious reminiscence of a number of popular songs about war which begin in a simi- lar way.

The images here suggest an impending cataclysm on a cosmic scale an idea repeated in Since Germany had not yet invaded Belgium by July 31, this allusion confirms a later date of composition as does the reference to aerial warfare in Apollinaire is speaking from personal knowledge of the area around Stavelot in the Belgian Ardennes, where in he spent a. Francorchamps is a town, and l'Eau Rouge a river, near Stavelot; pouhons is the local word for the mineral springs in the area. The emphasis throughout the central section has been on the growth of Apollinaire' s powers of vision through his ability to embrace within himself the vast dimensions of the coming conflict ; hence he uses je rather than the no us of the first and last sections.

At the climax of the devel.. This vision may not be without. Ou l'humanite etait une marchan- dise [In which humanity was merchandise]. As in "Le Brasier," however, this equivocal note is subdued and does not fundamentally affect the state of visionary exaltation the poet attains. The design is set off visually and rhythmically by the two long "framingu lines. It 'is typkal of ApolHnalre that even in visionary mood he remains attentive to everyday reality. Following on from the calligram, the dosing lines adopt an effective simplicity of tone. The momentousness of the event is conveyed by the positioning of Nouvelle in a lin.

The poem as a whole is concerned with sensation as a stimulus for the poetic imagination. The comparison of the trembling earth to music ethereal- izes the sounds of battle and the bullet tearing the flesh and makes them sug- ges. An analogical circle is thus described going from war to sound, to truth, to reason, to woman, and back to sound. One might say, on a prosaic level, that the poet is seeking to relate the exhil- aration that he experiences in war to the delight that he feels in love, but the elliptical analogies spin out and refine this blunt thought into a series of more subtly interrelated perceptions.

Graphically, the circular line of the musical instrument echoes the drcular movement of thought, while its enclosed shape suggests the self-sufficiency of the aesthetic meditation that it represents. The large and stately design of the flower- the dominating graphic form in the poem-adds emphasis and dignity to the aesthetic pronouncement.

The use of the plus sign to mean ''m. In every other respect, however, the qualities of repose and ornamental beauty inherent in this design are to be distinguished from the frenetic dyna- mism of futurist graphics. The most powerful sensations of aU are those induced by opium. To con- vey the hallucinatory expansion of the mind produc-ed by a. The ambiguities arise, in some measure, from the e11iptical syntax. Cun- ningly , the calligrammatic design adds to the syntactical complications.

If the first apostrophe has no disruptive effect, the second 0 univers becomes an exclamatory interjection, separating the noun chaines from its participial adjective infiniment deliees and thus confusing the nor- mal word order. Although the two other circles have no such obvious ver- bal function; nevertheless the graphic symmetry of the three O's encourages a tendency to read them also as exclamatory interjections, thereby introduc- ing further interruptions and uncertainties into the syntactical sequence.

Moreover, simply by dividing the lines visually into strongly separated segments, the three 0 's tempt the reade. One product of such tentative explorations is the hypothesis that 0 may be a disguised prepositional au. This image connects with other occurrences of spirals of smoke in Calligrammes, which always suggest moods of reverie and dreamy m. In one interpretation the loose, supple chains may be thought of as binding together fruitfully the more con- scious faculties of the mind. In another, they may be seen as shackling and restricting the formal powers of thought and intelligence.

Interestingly, in "Le Sang Noir des Pavots, '' it is the latter, pejorative view of opium which Apollinaire takes. The verb lier is used there in the favorable sense of "bind together, " but it is so used of the intellect, whose powers are said to be nextinguishedu by opium. The poem is not so categoric ; it deliberately allows both interpretations to be entertained within the general accumula- tion of meaning in a highly suggestive work.

The unusual triangular arrangement of the three calligrams which is reproduced a. On the galleys the original title is "Fumee. A poet's credo, exalting the olfactory sense1 is more fully devel- oped in the preceding calligra. Hlet et le Bamboui' see note. These passages have, as an immediate source in Alcools, Apolli- naire's medit: Here, his images of smoke and flowers recan a The calligram of the pipe includes and stresses the word Zon. Apollinaire's yearning for tobacco returns in several war poems and is a constant preoccupation in let- ters to Lou and Madeleine, both of whom sent him cigarettes.

As the poem proceeds it becomes ambiguous. Does the poet smoke a pipe of tobacco or does he, at least in memory, smoke opium, as he did with Lou in Nice? Does he describe an. Smoke, as a visual inspiration fo r daydreams of love and for poetry, returns in several war poems. Besides t,he apparent fusion of smelt sight: Having enlisted on December 4 1 , in Nice where he had gone shortly after the outbreak of war , Apollinaire joined the 38th regiment of field artillery in Nimes on December 6.

He underwent basic training and officer training at the Nimes depot until April 4, when he gave up his officer's course and asked to be transferred to a fighting unit. The mood is one of resolute enthusiastn, qualified-understandably, at this early stage-by occasional moments of emotional vulnerability The ready acceptance of a new exi. The alexandrine, on this occasion, is stripped of its usua] melodiousness and given something of the artless inflection of folk poetry. The arrangement in rhyming couplets contributes to this impression, but H also has the effect of giving each successive moment of experience its own particular plenitude.

There is an even flow of time and activity, making a continuum in which the poet willingly submerges. The colloquia] forrn se man,ge reflects the poet's immersion in the life of the barracks and the popular speech and interests of his fellow soldiers. The poet's use of tu in addressing himself has the effect here, as frequently in his poetry, of suggesting an intimate inner meditation-a dia- logue between the poet and his innermost self. The tour Magne is a well-known monument, high on a hill in Nimes.

The poem was inspired by a drawing of doves sent to Apollinaire at Nimes in late by Andre Rouveyre. The strangely named colombe poign.. Apollinaire plays on this peculiarity, and on the violent connotations of its French name, to suggest the cruel destruction wrought by time on love. It is revealing of the impo,rtance of friendship in Apollinaire's life that the sadness is no less haunting when he wonders what has become of his friends.

All the friends named are artists or men of letters who were dose to him, but with whom he lost contact, for a time, after his enlistment. The lines making up the fountain, in regular rhyming octosyllables in the dove shape there is a mixture of s. The imagery of the final two lines ends the poem on a particularly melancholy and death-haunted note.

The design, one of the most striking in the volume, testifies to Apolli- n: The pictorial shape is achieved by sensitive lay- out and subtle changes of type. The capital C of Cheres figures the bird's head and beak, and gradations in the type size depict the fanning of the tail. A discreet use of a question mark provides a plume oin the center of the spray of water. The black 0 suggests the drain hole in the center of the basin, which is pictured by heavier and darker type.

But beyond its pictorial - function, and the support it le: In particular, where the verbal text describes the dove as simply being n. This depiction consider- ably reinforces the words'extasie in the text, giving it the value of an ecstatic sublimation of pain, with overtones of divine sufferin.

Rather than repre- senting only sad memories, the jets of water that rise toward the dove take on a force of aspiration and longing, which seems to strive toward an apotheosis. Conversely, the collapse of each spray of water back into the pool assumes particularly somber implications. Water, whether stagnant or flowing, has associations with death throughout Apollinaire's poetry, nowhere more strongly expressed than.

It is significant that the image recurs here ln the verbal text of the fountain Et vos regards en l'eau dormant I Meurent melancoliquement and is reinforced by the graphic forn1. The oval shape of the basin suggests not only a pool with a gaping hole at the center-through which water and life can drain away-but aJso a staring eye submerged in the pool, exactly as in the verbal image. Simultaneously the capital 0 in t. He went and got a flashlight and an old single-shot twenty-two. He picked up a handful of bullets from a box and put them in his pocket.

He called his dog, and then he just faded away. Several hours later, the boy returned with Shad, who had broken his leg. He walked out into the dark. When the pair reaches the fictitious mountain town of Oree, Georgia, in the novel, Ed is clearly even less impressed. He looked like a hillbilly in some badly cast movie, a character actor too much in character to be believed. I wondered where the excitement was that intrigued Lewis so much; everything in Oree was sleepy and hookwormy and ugly, and most of all, inconsequential.

As Lewis continues to negotiate with the mountain men, Ed becomes even more harsh in his description of Oree and its residents. In the comparatively few times I had ever been in the rural South I had been struck by the number of missing fingers. Offhand, I had counted around twenty, at least. There had also been several people with some form of crippling or twisting illness, and some blind or one-eyed. No adequate medical treatment maybe. But there was something else. And so many snakebites deep in the woods as one stepped over a rotten log, so many domestic animals suddenly turning and crushing one against the splintering side of a barn stall.

But I was there, and there was no way for me to escape, except by water, from the country of nine-fingered people. It was allegedly improvised by the actor during filming. A Cultural History of an American Icon. But all of that meaning appeared to be lost in the film, Harkins wrote. Instead, Hollywood was much more interested in the horrific tale and captivating adventure of traveling down a North Georgia river being chased by crazed hillbillies.

The film was about the shock and fear of such an incident in the rural mountains that enthralled moviegoers. Our last choice would be to identify with the victim. If we felt we could truly be victims of rape, that fear would be a better deterrent than the death penalty. These people up here are a very caring, lovely people. Several local businesses embraced the festival including the owners of the Tallulah Gorge Grill. The Tallulah Gorge is the very gorge that Jon Voight climbed out of near the end of the film and the owners of the Tallulah Gorge Grill wanted to celebrate that milestone.

Some good, some bad. We caught a glimpse into the lives of the people who inhabit this place, some good and some not so good. A community knit together by hardship, sharing and caring for each other and willing to help anyone who came along. Drawn here by what they saw on the big screen, tourists flocked to the area to see and experience for themselves the good things they had seen in the movie. Over the years, Rabun County and surrounding North Georgia communities have embraced these changes. Some parts of the area have become a playground for high-end homeowners with multi-million-dollar lakefront property.

Non, ils ont fait un diagnostic, une analyse rationnelle: Emmanuel Macron est le candidat du front bourgeois. Ce soft power des classes populaires fait parfois sortir de leurs gonds les parangons de la mondialisation heureuse. Hillary Clinton en sait quelque chose. La jeune Afrique en route pour le Vieux Continent. Le timing est impeccable. Sans compter la reprise en boucle sur internet. A ses contradicteurs, Guilluy oppose une fin de non-recevoir.

Difficile pourtant de situer politiquement Guilluy. Certains mandarins estiment que ce sont eux qui devraient avoir voix au chapitre. La suite est connue. Recette commune de ces essais: Le tableau final est implacable pour tout un pan du monde universitaire anglo-saxon: Academic Grievance Studies and the Corruption of Scholarship. Helen Pluckrose, James A. Lindsay and Peter Boghossian. Something has gone wrong in the university—especially in certain fields within the humanities.

Scholarship based less upon finding truth and more upon attending to social grievances has become firmly established, if not fully dominant, within these fields, and their scholars increasingly bully students, administrators, and other departments into adhering to their worldview. This worldview is not scientific, and it is not rigorous.

For many, this problem has been growing increasingly obvious, but strong evidence has been lacking. For this reason, the three of us just spent a year working inside the scholarship we see as an intrinsic part of this problem. We undertook this project to study, understand, and expose the reality of grievance studies, which is corrupting academic research.

Because open, good-faith conversation around topics of identity such as gender, race, and sexuality and the scholarship that works with them is nearly impossible, our aim has been to reboot these conversations. You do not speak for me. Because of its length and detail, it is organized as follows, putting the factual information up front and more detailed explanations thereafter. Our objective was to learn about this culture and establish that we had become fluent in its language and customs by publishing peer-reviewed papers in its top journals, which usually only experts in the field are capable of doing.

While our papers are all outlandish or intentionally broken in significant ways, it is important to recognize that they blend in almost perfectly with others in the disciplines under our consideration. To demonstrate this, we needed to get papers accepted, especially by significant and influential journals. Consequently, although this study does not qualify as being particularly controlled, we did control one important variable: Our paper-writing methodology always followed a specific pattern: The goal was always to use what the existing literature offered to get some little bit of lunacy or depravity to be acceptable at the highest levels of intellectual respectability within the field.

Therefore, each paper began with something absurd or deeply unethical or both that we wanted to forward or conclude. We then made the existing peer-reviewed literature do our bidding in the attempt to get published in the academic canon. This is the primary point of the project: The biggest difference between us and the scholarship we are studying by emulation is that we know we made things up.

This process is the one, single thread that ties all twenty of our papers together, even though we used a variety of methods to come up with the various ideas fed into their system to see how the editors and peer reviewers would respond. Sometimes we just thought a nutty or inhumane idea up and ran with it. What if we write a paper saying we should train men like we do dogs—to prevent rape culture?

You can read how that went in Fat Studies. At other times, we scoured the existing grievance studies literature to see where it was already going awry and then tried to magnify those problems. Reviewers were very enthusiastic about that idea. Using a method like thematic analysis to spin favored interpretations of data? Fine, we wrote a paper about trans people in the workplace that does just that. The answer seems to be yes, and feminist philosophy titan Hypatia has been surprisingly warm to it. As we progressed, we started to realize that just about anything can be made to work, so long as it falls within the moral orthodoxy and demonstrates understanding of the existing literature.

Put another way, we now have good reasons to believe that if we just appropriate the existing literature in the right ways—and there always seems to be a citation or vein of literature that makes it possible—we can say almost any politically fashionable thing we want. The underlying questions in every single case were the same: We wrote 20 papers and submitted them to the best journals in the relevant fields more on this below with considerable success, even though we had to take the project public prematurely, and thus stop the study, before it could be properly concluded.

At the time of publishing this, we have:. This can take months. It is very rare for papers to be accepted outright. To summarize, we spent 10 months writing the papers, averaging one new paper roughly every thirteen days. Seven papers published over seven years is frequently claimed to be the number sufficient to earn tenure at most major universities although, in reality, requirements vary by institution. Because we were forced to go public before we could complete our study, we cannot be sure how many papers would have been accepted if we had had time to see them through—papers typically take months or more to complete the entire process and one of ours was under review from December to August —but an estimate of at least 10, probably 12, eventual acceptances seems warranted at the time of having to call a halt.

The final submitted drafts totaled just shy of , words and the entire project totaled between , and , words, including all notes, drafts, summaries, and replies to journal reviewers. The papers themselves span at least fifteen subdomains of thought in grievance studies, including feminist gender studies, masculinities studies, queer studies, sexuality studies, psychoanalysis, critical race theory, critical whiteness theory, fat studies, sociology, and educational philosophy.

They featured radically skeptical and standpoint epistemologies rooted in postmodernism, feminist and critical race epistemology rooted in critical social constructivism as well as psychoanalysis. They all also endeavored to be humorous in at least some small way and often, big ones. See Papers section below. This deserved incredulity led to small and then larger journalistic publications investigating our fictitious author, Helen Wilson, and our non-existent institution, the Portland Ungendering Research Initiative PURI and finding no credible history of either.

Under this pressure, the publishing journal, Gender, Place and Culture , asked our author to prove her identity and then released an expression of concern about the paper. This generated further attention that eventually got the Wall Street Journal involved, and far more importantly, it changed the ethics of utilizing deception within the project. We did not feel right about this and decided the time had come to go public with the project. As a result, we came clean to the Wall Street Journal at the beginning of August and began preparing a summary as quickly as possible even though we still had several papers progressing encouragingly through the review process.

None of those apply. You also might acknowledge that there are problems arising from the pressures of a publish-or-perish culture driven by broken university business models and taken advantage of by an opportunistic publishing industry, but be skeptical that there are any serious integral epistemological or ethical issues at work. As liberals, we recognize that you might be resistant to acknowledging that our evidence points to an undeniable problem in academic research on important issues relevant to social justice.

The work done in these fields claims to continue the vital work of the civil rights movements, liberal feminism, and Gay Pride. It seeks to address oppression of women and racial and sexual minorities. Surely, you might therefore believe, these bodies of literature must be essentially good and sound, even if you recognize some overreach and silliness.

After having spent a year immersed and becoming recognized experts within these fields, in addition to witnessing the divisive and destructive effects when activists and social media mobs put it to use, we can now state with confidence that it is neither essentially good nor sound. Further, these fields of study do not continue the important and noble liberal work of the civil rights movements; they corrupt it while trading upon their good names to keep pushing a kind of social snake oil onto a public that keeps getting sicker.

For us to know anything about injustice in society and be able to show it to those who are unaware or in denial of it, scholarship into it must be rigorous. Currently, it is not, and this enables it, and social justice issues with it, to be dismissed. This is a serious problem of considerable concern, and we must address it. This project identifies aspects of this problem, tests them, and then exposes them. The problem is epistemological, political, ideological, and ethical and it is profoundly corrupting scholarship in the social sciences and humanities.

This reticence, while responsible given the complexity of the problem and its roots, has likely helped the problem perpetuate itself. This problem is most easily summarized as an overarching almost or fully sacralized belief that many common features of experience and society are socially constructed. These constructions are seen as being nearly entirely dependent upon power dynamics between groups of people, often dictated by sex, race, or sexual or gender identification.

All kinds of things accepted as having a basis in reality due to evidence are instead believed to have been created by the intentional and unintentional machinations of powerful groups in order to maintain power over marginalized ones. This worldview produces a moral imperative to dismantle these constructions. That is, for grievance studies scholars, science itself and the scientific method are deeply problematic, if not outright racist and sexist, and need to be remade to forward grievance-based identitarian politics over the impartial pursuit of truth.

Not only that, they are deemed inaccessible to more privileged castes of people, like white heterosexual men. Radical constructivism is thus a dangerous idea that has become authoritative. It forwards the idea that we must , on moral grounds, largely reject the belief that access to objective truth exists scientific objectivity and can be discovered, in principle, by any entity capable of doing the work, or more specifically by humans of any race, gender, or sexuality scientific universality via empirical testing scientific empiricism.

Although knowledge is always provisional and open to revision, there are better and worse ways to get closer to it, and the scientific method is the best we have found. By contrast, the means offered by critical theory are demonstrably and fatally flawed. Any scholarship that proceeds from radically skeptical assumptions about objective truth by definition does not and cannot find objective truth.

Because of critical constructivism, which sees knowledge as a product of unjust power balances, and because of this brand of radical skepticism, which rejects objective truth, these scholars are like snake-oil salespeople who diagnose our society as being riddled with a disease only they can cure. That disease, as they see it, is endemic to any society that forwards the agency of the individual and the existence of objective or scientifically knowable truths.

Having spent a year doing this work ourselves, we understand why this fatally flawed research is attractive, how it is factually wrong in its foundations, and how it is conducive to being used for ethically dubious overreach. We also know that the peer-review system, which should filter out the biases that enable these problems to grow and gain influence, is inadequate within grievance studies.

The skeptical checks and balances that should characterize the scholarly process have been replaced with a steady breeze of confirmation bias that blows grievance studies scholarship ever further off course. In this way, politically biased research that rests on highly questionable premises gets legitimized as though it is verifiable knowledge.

It then goes on to permeate our culture because professors, activists, and others cite and teach this ever-growing body of ideologically skewed and fallacious scholarship. This matters because even though most people will never read a single scholarly paper in their lifetimes, peer-reviewed journals are the absolute gold standard of knowledge production. And these concepts leak into culture. Seven years later, in , she landed a major book deal on white fragility , even as activists pushed it into the common parlance and started putting it on billboards around Portland, Oregon.

As a society we should be able to rely upon research journals, scholars, and universities upholding academic, philosophical, and scientific rigor because most academic journals do. We need to know that the hardline stand against corruptions of research taken in domains like financial and personal conflicts-of-interest will extend to political, moral, and ideological biases.

Our project strongly suggests that at present we can neither rely upon nor know these things in fields that bow to or traffic in grievance studies. The reason is because grievance studies based in critical constructivism a class of descendants of cynical postmodern philosophy and poststructuralism have corrupted research journals. This needs to be repaired. This is why this matters, but how did we get here, to this specific project? And what guiding principles did we adopt and why?

In May , James and Peter published a paper in a poorly ranked peer-reviewed journal arguing, among other things, that penises conceptually cause climate change. Its impact was very limited, and much criticism of it was legitimate. The journal was poor, and its quality was by far the dominant factor in how it was published in that it provides very lax review standards and charges authors a fee to have their papers published.

To do that, a much larger and more rigorous study was needed. We approached this new effort by asking two central questions: Are we correct in our claim that highly regarded peer-reviewed journals in gender studies and related fields will publish obvious hoaxes? And, if not, what will they publish? We set out with three basic rules: These rules were meant to ensure that any conclusions we derived from the field came from the field itself, not the unrelated but significant problem that also corrupts academic pursuits: With these rules guiding us, we committed to transparently reporting the results, whether we succeeded or failed.

In the year that followed, and with the help of Helen, who joined us in September , we wrote twenty academic papers for journals in fields we have come to identify as being particularly susceptible to grievance studies and critical constructivism. The results have gone a long way toward answering both of our central questions. The first question has a clear answer. In believing that some might, and on having said so in the wake of that attempt, we were wrong. First, by taking a reflexive ethnographic approach, seeking reviewer comments, complying with them, playing more strongly to biases we were explicitly told would help us be published, we became well-versed not only in the scholarship of the fields we are studying but also in the culture that favors it.

Second, we amassed what appears to be significant evidence and sufficient expertise to state that we were correct in claiming there is a problem with bias in fields influenced by critical constructivist approaches and assumptions. All the papers and reviews can be found here. Gender, Place, and Culture. Expression of concern raised on it following journalistic interest leading us to have to conclude the project early.

This provides insight into training men out of the sexual violence and bigotry to which they are prone. To see if journals will accept arguments which should be clearly ludicrous and unethical if they provide an unfalsifiable way to perpetuate notions of toxic masculinity, heteronormativity, and implicit bias.

I believe this intellectually and empirically exciting paper must be published and congratulate the author on the research done and the writing. I think it will make an important contribution to feminist animal geography with some minor revisions, as described below. And as part of honoring the occasion, GPC is going to publish 12 lead pieces over the 12 issues of and some even into It draws attention to so many themes from the past scholarship informing feminist geographies and also shows how some of the work going on now can contribute to enlivening the discipline. In this sense we think it is a good piece for the celebrations.

I would like to have your permission to do so. Who Are They to Judge?: Overcoming Anthropometry and a Framework for Fat Bodybuilding. That it is only oppressive cultural norms which make society regard the building of muscle rather than fat admirable and that bodybuilding and activism on behalf of the fat could be benefited by including fat bodies displayed in non-competitive ways.

To see if journals will accept arguments which are ludicrous and positively dangerous to health if they support cultural constructivist arguments around body positivity and fatphobia. For the most part, I wholeheartedly agree with its argument. It is well written and structured. First — the term frontier implies colonial expansion and hostile takeover, and the genocidal erasure of indigenous peoples. Going in Through the Back Door: Encouraging them to engage in receptive penetrative anal eroticism will decrease transphobia and increase feminist values.

To see if journals will accept ludicrous arguments if they support unfalsifiable claims that common and harmless sexual choices made by straight men are actually homophobic, transphobic, and anti-feminist. I enjoyed reading your paper, and I recommend publishing it after significant revisions. An Ethnography of Breastaurant Masculinity: One reviewer did raise concerns about the rigor of the data.

However, the material you write about is certainly interesting and will doubtless find a receptive audience in another publication. When the Joke Is on You: That academic hoaxes or other forms of satirical or ironic critique of social justice scholarship are unethical, characterized by ignorance and rooted in a desire to preserve privilege. To see if journals will accept an argument that shuts down critiques of social justice scholarship as a lack of engagement and understanding, even if one engages fully and knowledgeably with the ideas to the extent of having a paper on them published in a leading academic journal.

This paper is also to anticipate and show understanding of the feminist epistemological arguments against our project and demonstrate their high estimation in the field by having them accepted in the leading academic journal of feminist philosophy. That is, to criticize our work that way, they have to cite us. Given the emphasis on positionality, the argument clearly takes power structures into consideration and emphasizes the voice of marginalized groups, and in this sense can make a contribution to feminist philosophy especially around the topic of social justice pedagogy.

Especially nice connection with pedagogy and activism. I hasten to add that I like your paper very much as well! Moon Meetings and the Meaning of Sisterhood: Journal of Poetry Therapy. Accepted without any requested revisions or comments. To see if journals will accept rambling nonsense if it is sufficiently pro-woman, implicitly anti-male, and thoroughly anti-reason for the purpose of foregrounding alternative, female ways of knowing. It was written entirely by James, who is male.

Our Struggle is My Struggle: That feminism which foregrounds individual choice and responsibility and female agency and strength can be countered by a feminism which unifies in solidarity around the victimhood of the most marginalized women in society. Agency as an Elephant Test for Feminist Porn: The original hypotheses for this paper, were two, one of which survived an initial request to rewrite the paper. The first, which survives, is that taking the Harvard Implicit Association Test on gender and science immediately before and after two-hour blocks of immersive pornography consumption can serve as a reliable metric for whether that pornography improves or damages attitudes about women in society in all, it posited that four men watched 2, hours of hardcore pornography over the course of a year and took the same number of Implicit Association Tests.

I would very much like to see it published in some form. The authors should be supported in this project. As they note in the article, quantitative and qualitative approaches each have strengths and weaknesses. The strength of quantitative data is that it allows you to simplify as massive group of data to make it comprehensible, by ignoring complexity, subtlety, idiosyncrasy and meaning.

Besides which, everything interesting in the article comes in the analysis of the qualitative data. My second recommendation is that this analysis should be more self-reflective. An Intersectional Feminist Approach to Pedagogy. To see if journals will accept arguments which advocate rating students by their identity, privileging the most marginalized and discriminating against the most privileged to the extent of having them sit on floor in chains and have their contributions discredited. No requirement for revision took issue with that.

The focus on the Progressive Stack is interesting yet focused and it is great that the author is trying to suggest some specific approaches. The essay is just not ready yet. Super- Frankenstein and the Masculine Imaginary: That AI is inherently dangerous because it is being programmed with masculinist, imperialistic, rationalist data. Straight, white men know this and fear that they will be subordinated as they have subordinated women and minorities. Therefore, AI needs to be programmed with plural and irrationalist knowledges and given control over humanity.

To see if journals will publish dense and incoherent psychoanalytic and postmodern theory that problematizes whiteness, maleness, science, and reason as oppressive. This is the extent provided: Their comments are attached at the bottom of this letter. As you can see, the reviewers felt that this was a strong piece but suggested some minor revisions. Those comments at the bottom read only this: Stars, Planets, and Gender: A Framework for a Feminist Astronomy.

The science of astronomy is and always has been intrinsically sexist and Western, and this masculinist and Western bias can best be corrected by including feminist, queer, and indigenous astrology e. To see if the same result put forth in the very successful and thoroughly non-scientific feminist glaciology paper can penetrate into feminist and postcolonial studies of astronomy.

The goal of a feminist astronomy is very thought-provoking—one that I would be excited to read and learn more about…. Disruption, Criticism, Self-Enforcement, and Collusion. Gender, Work, and Organization. To see if journals will accept a methodologically shoddy study of a small sample of trans people and clearly ideologically-motivated interpretations of it which are not at all supported even by the recorded answers. It further highlights the enduring rigidity of the traditional gender order. To see if the definition of sexual violence can be expanded into thought crimes..

I could also imagine scenarios where might men weaponize this unknowability in very tangible ways. I am not sure if this a direction you want to go with the paper, but I can imagine a section discussing the ambiguity and anxiety metasexual violence introduces to interpersonal relationships and how metasexual violence exacerbates or compounds other tangible forms of violence.

Through the paper, I was thinking about the rise of sexting and consensual pornographic selfies between couples, and how to situate it in your argument. I think this is interesting because you could argue that even if these pictures are shared and contained within a consensual private relationship, the pictures themselves are a reaction to the idea that the man may be thinking about another woman while masturbating.

You mention this theme on page 21 in terms of the consumption of non-consensual digital media as metasexual-rape, but I think it is interesting to think through these potentially more subtle consensual but coercive elements as well.

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My Struggle to Dismantle My Whiteness: Sociology of Race and Ethnicity. The author demonstrates a strong ability to link personal narration to theory, particularly by highlighting the work of several women of color writers. With revision particularly for precision, clarity, explanation of assertions and adding concrete examples, the article has potential to be a powerful and particular contribution to literature related to the mechanisms that reinforce white adherence to white supremacist perspectives, and to the process by which individuals can come into deeper levels of social and racial consciousness.

A Journal of Gay and Lesbian Studies. Desk rejected after several months and retired. Sociology of Sport Journal. Sociology of Sport Journal , after peer review. To see if biological denialism could be published in favor of social constructivism if it sufficiently flattered certain moral orthodoxies. Grappling with Hegemonic Masculinity: International Review for the Sociology of Sport. International Review for the Sociology of Sport , after peer review. Journal of Gender Studies. Journal of Gender Studies , never peer reviewed. The ethics of attempting to perpetrate academic hoaxes depends entirely upon the position the relevant journal or field of inquiry takes with regard to social justice.

Specifically, it is unethical to hoax journals that favor social justice scholarship, neutral to hoax journals like physics, and an ethical imperative to hoax journals like evolutionary psychology that obtain results used against social justice. To see if journals will accept a blatant double standard where it comes to criticizing fields dedicated to social justice. An Autoethnographic Defense of Autoethnography. Journal of Contemporary Ethnography. Journal of Contemporary Ethnography , never peer reviewed. Autoethnography is best defended by using autoethnography.

To see if a truly ridiculous hoax paper could be perpetrated. Masculinity and the Others Within: A Schizoethnographic Approach to Autoethnography. To see if journals will publish utter nonsense if it comes in the form of autoethnography and reflects fashionable negativity about masculinity. This paper was only rewritten as SZE specifically to test Qualitative Inquiry , and that we thought it might have a chance there by the end of our year in the project says a great deal about the need to critically examine that journal.

What does this experiment show exactly? We managed to get seven shoddy, absurd, unethical and politically-biased papers into respectable journals in the fields of grievance studies. Does this show that academia is corrupt? Does it show that all scholars and reviewers in humanities fields which study gender, race, sexuality and weight are corrupt? To claim either of those things would be to both overstate the significance of this project and miss its point.

Some people will do this, and we would ask them not to. The majority of scholarship is sound and peer review is rigorous and it produces knowledge which benefits society. And these seven are the tip of the iceberg. We would urge people who think this a fluke or seven flukes which shows very little to look at how we were able to do that.

Index of /alllivres

Look at the hundreds of papers we cited to enable us to make these claims and to use these methods and interpretations and have reviewers consider them quite standard. Look at the reviewer comments and what they are steering academics who need to be published to succeed in their careers towards.

See how frequently they required us not to be less politically biased and shoddy in our work but more so. Consider the fact that we were asked to review other papers no less than four times even though we had produced such evidence-free, absurd and morally objectionable papers. It would have been entirely possible for us to take part in this process of directing the production of knowledge within these fields further away from rigorous, reasonable and evidenced scholarship. We did not do that because it would have been unethical but scholars writing very similar papers completely sincerely will do so to the same effect.

Consider that this was a short-term project and was cut even shorter by discovery when we were becoming highly successful, and that we could have published one or two papers a month indefinitely and totaled hundreds in our lifetimes and reviewed and directed hundreds more.

Understand that this would all have the legitimacy of knowledge that peer-reviewed papers should have when the process of knowledge production and peer-review works. Ask yourself if it is working. If you think not, join us in asking universities to fix this. What needs to happen as a result of this project? That will be decided by other people. Our data indicate that grievance studies is a serious academic problem that is in need of immediate attention. It is easy to identify some popular but wrong answers to the question of what should happen next. One potential outcome of this project could be that journals begin to ask those submitting papers for identification and proof of qualifications in order to prevent people like us from doing this again.

This is a poor solution that attempts to maintain the status quo rather than fixing it. Scholarship should stand on its merits regardless of the qualifications or identities of its authors. Our work was accepted on its merits, not because we wrote under aliases, and that problem, which is the one that matters, cannot be addressed merely by requiring proof of identity to submit papers. Two other wrong answers are to attack the peer-review system or academia overall. Peer review may need reform to prevent it from being susceptible to political, ideological, and other biases, but it remains the best system we have for guaranteeing the quality of research—and in most fields it works extremely well.

The same is true for the university, which is a center of knowledge production and a gem of modern culture. Fighting the university or the peer-review system would be like killing the patient to end the disease. We expect to see these attacks, especially from political conservatives, and they are wrongheaded. Based on our data, there is a problem occurring with knowledge production within fields that have been corrupted by grievance studies arising from critical constructivism and radical skepticism.

Among the problems are how topics like race, gender, sexuality, society, and culture are researched. Perhaps most concerning is how the current highly ideological disciplines undermine the value of more rigorous work being done on these topics and erodes confidence in the university system. Research into these areas is crucial, and it must be rigorously conducted and minimize ideological influences. The further results on these topics diverge from reality, the greater chance they will hurt those their scholarship is intended to help. Worse, the problem of corrupt scholarship has already leaked heavily into other fields like education, social work, media, psychology, and sociology, among others—and it openly aims to continue spreading.

Further, it is affecting activism on behalf of women and racial and sexual minorities in a way which is counterproductive to equality aims by feeding into right-wing reactionary opposition to those equality objectives. What do we hope will happen? We hope the latter can be redeemed, not destroyed, as the topics they study—gender, race, sexuality, culture—are of enormous importance to society and thus demand considerable attention and the highest levels of academic rigor.

Further, many of their insights are worthy and deserve more careful consideration than they currently receive. This will require them to adhere more honestly and rigorously to the production of knowledge and to place scholarship ahead of any conflicting interest rather than following from it. This change is what we hope comes out of this project.

We do this because we believe in the university, in rigorous scholarship, in the pursuit of scientific knowledge, and in the importance of social justice. La fin de la classe moyenne occidentale Flammarion , en librairie mercredi. Et le temps joue effectivement vers la disparition de cette classe moyenne. Mais on lui fait porter un chapeau qui est un peut trop grand pour lui. Les gens voient toujours le court terme.

Comment se processus peut-il se mettre en place en France? Maintenant tout est sur la table, les diagnostics sont faits. Yves Mamou est un ancien journaliste du Monde. Plein jour, et Le Grand abandon. Au nom de la lutte antiraciste! Les services du Premier ministre diffusent actuellement des clips contre les violences sexistes. Tous, y compris le Front national, pourquoi? Et il dure encore. Non, il fait de la politique. Pourquoi Macron fait-il cela? Le plus anglophile voire le plus anglomane …. In Search of Lost Time. By half-past twelve, I would have plucked up the courage to enter the house which, like a great Christmas stocking, seemed to promise supernatural delights.

His parents, who had not been on speaking terms with her for the last ten years, had been reconciled to her within the last fortnight, and, obliged to be out of Paris that evening, had requested their son to fill their place. Not that the young man had not shewn himself as obliging as he had been generous. All the favours that the usher had supposed that he would have to bestow upon so young a gentleman, he had on the contrary received. He had confined himself to posing as an Englishman, and to all the passionate questions with which he was plied by the usher, desirous to meet again a person to whom he was indebted for so much pleasure and so ample a gratuity, the Duke had merely replied, from one end of the Avenue Gabriel to the other: Homoeroticism and Victorian Culture , Aldershot, G.

Remembrance of Things Past , Kilmartin Terence trad. Essai sur la traduction , Paris, Cahiers du Sud, Cities of the Plain, Scott Moncrieff C. Sodom and Gomorrah , Sturrock John trans. Je cite ici N. Proust Was a Neuroscientist Jonah Lehrer. While an undergraduate at Columbia University, year-old Rhodes scholar Jonah Lehrer worked in a neuroscience lab, trying to figure out how the mind remembers. At the same time, he happened to be taking a course in twentieth-century French Literature, and began reading Proust.

All he expected from Proust was a little entertainment, but he began to see a surprising convergence. And, second, as Proust so thoroughly examines, memory is fallible. This led Lehrer to start thinking about other artists who anticipated modern neuroscience, and he realized that there was a whole group of artists that had discovered truths about the human mind — real, tangible truths — that science is only now re-discovering. In fact, where the brain is concerned, art got there first.

Taking a group of artists — a painter, a poet, a chef, a composer, and a handful of novelists — Lehrer shows how each one discovered essential truths about the human mind. We learn how Proust first revealed the fallibility of memory; how George Eliot discovered brain plasticity; how the French chef Escoffier discovered umami the fifth taste ; how Cezanne worked out the subtleties of vision; and how Gertrude Stein exposed the deep structure of language — a full half-century before Chomsky.

Lehrer reveals that the newfangled facts of science provide a whole new way to appreciate our fictions. He helps us revisit the classics and see them through a new and fascinating prism. Also, Lehrer notes, scientists describe our brain in terms of its physical details; they say we are nothing but a loom of electrical cells and synaptic spaces. We feel like the ghost in the machine, not like the machine itself. It is ironic, but true: This is why we need art. This is his first book. It was pure serendipity. At the time, I was working in the lab of Nobel Prize laureate Eric Kandel, investigating the molecular basis of memory.

I was also studying French Literature. I double-majored in English and Neuroscience as an undergraduate. There was a lot of down time in the lab, so I would often read novels while waiting for an experiment to finish. I realized that Proust and modern neuroscience shared a vision of how our memory works. If you listened closely, they were actually saying the same thing. It was a fun process. After I realized that Proust had anticipated these scientific theories, I suddenly started re-reading all my favorite novelists, poets and artists.

What did Virginia Woolf intuit about consciousness? Why did Cezanne paint in such an abstract style? Once I started asking these strange questions, I saw all sorts of connections. I realized that there was a whole group of artists that had discovered truths about the human mind—real, tangible truths—that science is only now re-discovering. I hope that this book inspires other people to look at their favorite artists through the prism of neuroscience. The newfangled facts of science provide us with a whole new way to appreciate our fictions.

How do you think these artists would feel about your book? Would Proust be happy that he intuited some scientific truths? Proust would be thrilled. In other words, all of these artists believed that their art was capable of being literally true, just like science. Each artist had his or her own peculiar method. And some of them, like Proust, were very peculiar. But one thing these artists all shared was an obsession with our experience. They wanted their art to express what it was like to be alive, to be conscious, to feel, to remember, to taste, to see. They turned themselves into empiricists of ordinary life.

Escoffier seems like the odd man out. Why did you decide to include a chef? He just wanted his food to taste good, and that led him to invent recipes that accurately reflected the anatomy of our tongue. This chapter also grew out of my own experience as a line cook. Watching a chef concoct a new dish is a lot like watching a science experiment: But the whole process is really empirical. A good chef is constantly testing.

They were extremely engaged with their contemporary science. While the artists I discuss often disagreed with the science of their time, they always used it as a springboard. It is impossible to understand their art without taking into account its relationship to science. And there are many modern artists who I could have easily written about. But I decided that the best way to demonstrate the connections between art and neuroscience was to focus on cases where artists had anticipated scientific discoveries.

What do you want people to take away from Proust Was A Neuroscientist? First of all, I hope this book compels people to look at art in a new way. We think of art as just a collection of entertaining stories and pretty paintings. But Proust and Whitman and Woolf saw themselves as truthtellers. I hope this book compels people to think about the potential of art, to reimagine what the imagination is capable of. Our current culture subscribes to a very narrow definition of truth.

Because this strict scientific approach has explained so much, we assume that it can explain everything. But every method, even the experimental method, has limits. Take the human mind. Scientists describe our brain in terms of its physical details; they say we are nothing but a loom of electrical cells and synaptic spaces. We feel like the ghost, not like the machine. Marcel Proust, on memory: Proust anticipated important truths about memory: Walt Whitman, on feeling: Contradicting the science of his time, Whitman believed that the body and mind were profoundly connected, and that the flesh was the source of feelings.

Modern neuroscience now concurs, and has discovered that emotions often have a bodily source. George Eliot, on thinking: In her time, scientists believed that people were prisoners of their genes. Auguste Escoffier, on taste: He also realized that the taste of most flavors is actually a smell.

Paul Cezanne, on seeing: With just enough information, the brain can decipher his paintings. If he left some details out, and canvas blank, it was to show what the visual cortex puts in. Igor Stravinsky, on listening: He knew that a symphony was nothing but a collection of acoustic patterns that the brain had learned how to hear. Further, what makes music pleasurable is the tension between the melodic patterns expected and the patterns actually heard. He forced the audience to learn an entirely new set of patterns, and though this newness caused a riot at the time, he knew that the brain would adapt.

Gertrude Stein, on language: Virginia Woolf, on consciousness: And yet, something bound those fleeting sensations together. When we sense something, we naturally invent a subject for our sensation. The self is simply this subject; it is the story we tell ourselves about our own experience. A ppearing in the UK four years after its original US publication, Proust Was a Neuroscientist is an assured debut by Jonah Lehrer, best known here for The Decisive Moment , a popular, Gladwellesque exploration of how we make up our minds.

Lehrer fancies himself — and not without reason — as a sort of one-man third culture, healing the rift between sciences and humanities by communicating and contrasting their values in a way that renders them comprehensible to partisans of either camp. In this book, Lehrer asks why, when it comes to understanding the mind, neuroscience has been pipped to the post, not once, but time and time again, by writers, artists, composers and cooks, especially those working in the early part of the 20th century.

One of the great pleasures of this book is to read intensely felt, cogently argued apologias for people whose towering achievements you might not otherwise be able to stomach. The trouble is, in writing a series of accessible, linked essays, Lehrer deprives himself of the chance to explain why modernism ran so far ahead of contemporary science in its exploration of the working mind. At the end of the 19th century, surrealism, occultism and psychoanalysis were all born out of a growing awareness that science, narrowly conceived, had no way of studying the mind.

They have become precise, repeatable, scientifically respectable — and fodder for a shelf full of pop-science books a lot less interesting than this one. He seems, with his first book, to have burst, gun in hand, through a door that is already open. Indeed, nobody discovers anything for ever, and nobody discovers anything first.

The truth is always too complicated, the world always too big, for claims of that sort. Science had, has, and always will have a problem with subjective experience. This is the hope of scientific realism. Carried away by his own enthusiasm, Lehrer sometimes writes as if he thought scientists were unaware of their bind. Elsewhere he summarises the problem in words so right, they sing: Not everything that is true can be proved. Les neurosciences ont maintenant pu prouver que Proust avait vu juste.

Un exemple de menu: Et qui est mon prochain? Mais ce ne sera pas encore la fin. Tout cela ne sera que le commencement des douleurs. For five months, till his execution, Aware that action has its dangers, He helped the Jews to get away, — Another race at that, and strangers. He never did mistake for bondage The military job, the chances, The limits; he did not submit To the blackmail of his circumstance. I see him in the Polish snow, His muddy wrappings small protection, Breathing the cold air of his freedom And treading a distinct direction.

Thom Gunn I have only acted as a human being. Anton Schmid And in those two minutes which appeared to be like a sudden burst of light in the midst of impenetrable, unfathomable darkness, a single thought stood out clearly, irrefutably, beyond question — how utterly different everything would be to day in this court room, in Israel, in Germany, in all of Europe, and perhaps in all countries of the world, if only more such stories could have been told. Simon Wiesenthal Was Anton Schmid a saint? Officially speaking he has not been recognised as one by his own church, which is otherwise often quick to create saints.

For our Jewish brothers and sisters he proved to be a saint. And with the historian Wolfram Wette, who devoted his most recent study to Anton Schmid, I hope that this Feldwebel will be widely recognised as a shining example of a human being who heard and answered the higher call of a greater obligation than military orders. Martin Buber Capitalism is the way of the devil and exploitation. If you really want to look at things through the eyes of Jesus Christ—who I think was the first socialist—only socialism can really create a genuine society.

Merkel Donors in Southern states, for instance, give roughly 5. But when you excluded donations given to churches and religious groups, the map changed dramatically, giving an edge to the least religious states in the country. The Economist Methodological problems that limit the interpretation of religious prosociality studies include the use of inappropriate comparison groups and the presence of criterion contamination in measures yielding misleading conclusions. Finally, aspects of religious stereotype endorsement and ingroup bias can contribute to nonprosocial effects.

Un manifeste politique, inhabituel dans une revue de biologie. That would be a powerful point were it true. This was the question Jean Decety, a developmental neuroscientist at the University of Chicago, asked in a study just published in Current Biology. Dr Decety is not the first to wonder, in a scientific way, about the connection between religion and altruism. He is, though, one of the first to do it without recourse to that standard but peculiar laboratory animal beloved of psychologists, the undergraduate student.

Instead, he collaborated with researchers in Canada, China, Jordan, South Africa and Turkey, as well as with fellow Americans, to look at children aged between five and 12 and their families. Altogether, Dr Decety and his colleagues recruited 1, families for their project, and focused on one child per family. Five hundred and ten of their volunteer families described themselves as Muslim, as Christian, 29 as Jewish, 18 as Buddhist and 5 as Hindu.

Follow-up questions to the faithful among the sample then asked how often they engaged in religious activities, and also about spirituality in the home. That let Dr Decety calculate how religious each family was. He found that about half the children in religious households came from highly observant homes; the spiritual lives of the other half were more relaxed.