This is the diary of an observant mathematician who documented the drama of the resolution of Fermat's Last Theorem as it unfolded around him from 1993 to 1995. Pierre Fermat claimed around 1637, in the most famous marginalia in the history of mathematics, to have a proof of the theorem that xn + yn = zn has no whole number solutions for n greater than 2. The other principal figure is the British mathematician Andrew Wiles, who emigrated to Princeton University (...) in the 1980s and who in 1993, at what for mathematicians is the relatively advanced age of forty, announced a proof of FLT. In the course of Wiles's initial exposition to mathematicians, before a full‐fledged proof could be published, a gap was discovered. This was too late to forestall announcements in the world press of an imminent proof. What had been an almost secretive devotion to the task by Wiles now became a rather more public and pressurized effort over the course of nearly a year. Wiles wondered at times if success could be achieved, but with the help of other mathematicians the gap was filled in and the full formal proof published in 1995.The statement of the theorem is likely to be the only part of the 1990s story that a nonspecialist can immediately appreciate, and the author has not especially addressed his book to the nonspecialist. Rather, this account is analogous to a well‐illustrated exhibition guidebook that serves as a memento and record to those who visited in person but that is not intended fully to inform those who did not experience it. For a broader account of the historical and mathematical background a reader can consult the three principal books published previously on the same topic by Amir Aczel, Simon Singh, and Alfred J. van der Poorten. The author knew many of the main players, attended most of the key talks, took notes, made recordings, and photographed. A major part of the book is a selection of sixty‐two photographs from the total of three thousand made by the author. He asked questions of Wiles and others and recorded both formal and informal reactions that he observed around him during the many public and nonpublic presentations that were made. Also, in keeping with the journal nature of his work, he has recorded his own reactions. Appendixes include an excerpt from Wiles's 1995 Annals of Mathematics publication and a synopsis by Ram Murty of the key results by Gerhard Frey, Jean‐Pierre Serre, and Kenneth Ribet that formed a basis for Wiles's work.It may interest historians and archivists to learn of the extent to which the primary sources for this story include e‐mail, web pages, photographs, and newspaper and television interviews. Though we recognize this reality of contemporary science, a diary account probably brings the issue home more directly than would studies by professional historians, who might feel obligated to do more of their own interviews, for example, rather than rely on the media. Mathematics has rarely had such a public spotlight turned on it—the proof of the four‐color theorem in 1976 is the only comparable event that comes to mind. Consequently, it has opened an unusual window into how mathematicians do mathematics. (shrink)

The Astronomical Diaries are a unique corpus of documents from Babylon containing daily observations of celestial and terrestrial phenomena in the last half millennium before the Common Era. They provide direct information on how Babylonian scholars conducted scientific research and viewed political, economic, and religious events of their time—in other words, how they experienced their era. The book under review is a good introduction to this corpus.

Abstract:This essay examines the experiences of three 19th-century African American travelers to Greece—David Dorr (1852), Frederick Douglass (1887), and John Wesley Gilbert (1890–1)—using evidence from their letters, diaries, and published writings. The essay shows that although each traveler's unique personal perspective shaped his response to seeing the ancient sites and monuments of Greece, all three men responded most deeply to a site connected with Greece's Christian heritage: the Areopagus or Mars Hill, where according to 19th-century understanding the Apostle (...) Paul had spoken the words recorded in the Book of Acts. (shrink)

Scholars have mostly analyzed information from mental health practitioners, attorneys, and institutions to critique mental health practices in the War on Terror. These sources offer limited insights into the suffering of detainees. Detainee accounts provide novel information based on their experiences at Guantánamo. Mohamedou Ould Slahi’s Guantánamo Diary is the only text from a current detainee that provides a first-person account of his interrogations and interactions with health professionals. Despite being advertised as a diary, however, it has undergone redaction from (...) American government officials. This article examines Slahi’s account of his interrogations and representations of mental health at Guantánamo and considers its role within the narrative function of the nation. At stake is the right of detainees to narrate, scholars to critique medical practices in the War on Terror, and the nation’s attempts to control its narration. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Surviving American Culture:On Chuck PalahniukEduardo MendietaIn an age in which American culture has become the United States' number one export, along with its weapons, low intensity conflict, carcinogenic cigarettes, its "freedom," and pornography, it is delightful and even a sign of hope that there are writers who have taken on the delicate and perilous task of offering a prognosis of what ails this culture. In the following (...) essay I argue that Chuck Palahniuk's works ought to be read as a mortician's report on American culture. Chuck Palahniuk broke into the literary world by way of the movie version of his first novel: Fight Club (1995). He has gone on to write six other novels: Survivor (1999), Invisible Monsters (2000), Choke (2001), Lullaby (2002), and Diary (2003). He also has published an interesting travel book, Fugitives and Refugees; A Walk in Portland, Oregon (2003), but since this is not properly fiction, I will not discuss it in this essay.1Clearly, Palahniuk has already produced a corpus worthy of careful consideration and analysis. Yet, as a west coast writer, far from the literary circles and brokers of the east coast, indeed far away from the clubs of self-promotion and self-monitoring that censure and hold in tight grip the monopoly of criticism that highlights "worthy literature," Palahniuk has not attracted a lot of critical attention. It is only with his most recent work Choke that he has began to be widely reviewed and commented on. In the following I provide a thematic reconstruction of each one of the six published novels, in chronological sequence. I will argue that Palahniuk is not trying to write the "great American novel," although he is profiling himself as a quintessential "American" writer in the midst of post–Cold War megalomania and celebrated Pax Americana. He has taken on a culture that has become so gargantuan, [End Page 394] fragmented, and differentiated but at the same time so rich, so self-reflexive, so historicized and also so mimicked that one novel cannot tell its story in one narrative with one dramatic thread. Many novels, many short cuts, many vignettes, are necessary: one polyphonic, asynchronous, temporally bi-directional, hyper-textual, and cyber-encyclopedic novel made up of individual novels, where each novel is the Bildungsroman of an American hero but told in reverse. These heroes, I will argue, are testimonies to the resilient power of individuals to resist even the most invasive and persistent onslaughts by culture on the physic life of freedom and individuality. I will also argue that he is neither a commercial nor academic writer; that is, he is not the kind of writer who writes either in order to maintain a living or secure tenure. He is a writer with a mission, a vision, and a very distinctive style. The stories that Palahniuk tells are stories that begin at the end, and end at the beginning: they are turned around Bildungsromans. They are, in other words, about unmaking, uncoupling, and disentangling our selves from the normal self into which we have been socialized. These stories are, thus, about the discovery of moral resources that lay dormant in the very simplicity of human solidarity and trust in our will to survive morally untainted, or at least redeemable. I will conclude by arguing that Palahniuk's novels are about surviving American Culture, and about how deviance is the health of the individual in a sick society.One could characterize Fight Club as the intelligent man's response to Robert Bly's Iron John (1990),2 or the fictionalized version of the Michael Kimmel's Manhood in America: A Cultural History (1996).3 Alternatively, one could argue that Fight Club is the fin-de-sieclé response to Barbara Ehrenreich's prognosis in her The Hearts of Men: American Dreams and the Flight from Commitment (1983) of 1970s and 1980s narcissistic and hedonistic masculinity.4 Chuck Palahniuk's first novel is a biting and poignant look at men in American culture after the end of affluence and the simultaneous "feminization" of masculinity. It is at the same time about the struggle for a viable sense of masculinity in an age in... (shrink)

In his essay “Pragmatism and Humanism,” William James recalls a friend’s disappointment that the “prodigious star-group” known as the Big Dipper “should remind us Americans of nothing but a culinary utensil.”1 Such, presumably, is the fault of generalization, though James himself is less than specific in illustrating the occasional parity of varied perspectives. For example, he posits two identical equilateral triangles, one inverted and overlapping the other, and notes, “You can treat the adjoined figure as a star, as two big (...) triangles crossing each other, as a hexagon with legs set up on its angles, as six equal triangles hanging together by their tips, etc.”. What he does not say is that the design.. (shrink)

Un principe nel deserto: Leone Caetani nel Sinai e nel Sahara. I diari, le lettere, le fotografie. By Valentina Sagaria Rossi. Accademia nazionale dei Lincei, Fondazione Leone Caeta- ni, vol. 28. Rome: Bardi ediZioni, 2018. Pp. 561, illus. €68.

All the early advocates of women’s education, male and female, had proposed history as a central subject in women’s education—perhaps as the central subject. They envisaged it as a substitute for novel reading, which they viewed as strengthening women’s mental weakness and encouraging them in unrepublican habits of idleness, extravagance, and daydreaming.6 Many prominent women educators wrote history, among them Pierce, Rowson, and Willard. But besides such history writing and history advocacy by materialist educational reformers, American women wrote history (...) in other modes and contexts, and it is on these that I want to focus now.Speculating on history as a woman’s writing practice from the earliest years of the republic, my approach is purely literary in taking for granted, but considering it unimportant, that by present-day standards none of these women could have been “good” historians. More generally, I supposed that insofar as our present-day definition of literature or, more generally, of writing, invokes such forms as poem, play, story, and novel—and insofar as the feminist enterprise of recovering women’s writing further emphasizes such private, putatively unpublished forms as journal, diary, and letters—we have been instructed to perceive women writers as largely sealed off from public discourse, writing from somewhere outside the public sphere. This currently dominant view of women’s writing may be an inadvertent artifact of an unself-conscious, individualistic, curiously romantic definition of writing even among postmodernist critics; or, it may be a strategic view designed to focus attention on and valorize previously silenced or presently new forms of utterance. In contrast, to encompass diverse, already published, programmatically public instances of women’s writing in our definition is to begin to see how often and how openly American women have written in such forms. We then begin to recover a different sort of writing woman from the madwoman in the attic and acquire materials with which to begin constructing a different narrative of American women’s literary history. Nina Baym is Jubilee Professor of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Illinois, Urbana. She is the author of many books and articles on American and feminist literary topics. (shrink)

Questo articolo esplora la nascita della Fenomenologia americana nella "Nuova Fenomenologia" di Josiah Royce, proposta nel suo Thought Diary (1878-1880), in dialogo sia con il tema della pratica contemplativa di Husserl sia con la versione del pragmatismo di Peirce.

Entre 1820 et 1832, deux journaux de « questions-réponses » occupent le terrain de la presse mathématique aux États-Unis. Comme leurs prédécesseurs américains, The Ladies’ and Gentlemen’s Diary, or United States Almanac (1820-1822) et The Mathematical Diary (1825-1832) empruntent à leurs homologues anglais, dont le célèbre The Ladies’ Diary (1704-1840), ce format éditorial qui permet aux lecteurs de publier numéro après numéro des problèmes et leurs solutions. Dans le contexte d’une presse spécialisée précaire et à durée de vie limitée, la (...) relative durabilité dont bénéficient les deux titres, ainsi que l’élargissement sociogéographique de leur diffusion au cours de la période, sont la conséquence de pratiques éditoriales visant la fidélisation et la socialisation d’un lectorat le plus large possible. (shrink)

In a compelling chronicle of her search to understand Beauvoir's philosophy in The Second Sex, Margaret A. Simons offers a unique perspective on Beauvoir's wide-ranging contribution to twentieth-century thought. She details the discovery of the origins of Beauvoir's existential philosophy in her handwritten diary from 1927; uncovers evidence of the sexist exclusion of Beauvoir from the philosophical canon; reveals evidence that the African-American writer Richard Wright provided Beauvoir with the theoretical model of oppression that she used in The Second (...) Sex; shows the influence of The Second Sex in transforming Sartre's philosophy and in laying the theoretical foundations of radical feminism; and addresses feminist issues of racism, motherhood, and lesbian identity. Simons also draws on her experience as a Women's Liberation organizer as she witnessed how women used The Second Sex in defining the foundations of radical feminism. Bringing together her work as both activist and scholar, Simons offers a highly original contribution to the renaissance of Beauvoir scholarship. (shrink)

Social sciences research is entrenched with particular values, beliefs, norms, and practices that students, faculty, and researchers reproduce over time. In this article, the author argues for extending what counts as research within the social sciences to be more inclusive of differing methodologies and writing genres. Using personal narrative, diaries, and poetry, the author demonstrates unconventional ways of thinking about, doing, and writing research. He situates his personal experiences as a Ghanaian/American student within relevant literature to illuminate the (...) merging of his home cultural values with those of the academic community and the contradictions and struggles associated with this process. Ultimately, the story portrays the journey of a graduate student as he challenges traditional research norms to open up spaces for underrepresented students to feel more at home within academe. (shrink)

The posthumously published diaries and letters of Beauvoir and Sartre challenge the traditional account of Beauvoir as Sartre's philosophical follower. They show Sartre drawing on Beauvoir's account of relations with the Other in her metaphysical novel, She Came to Stay, as he began writing Being and Nothingness, and point to an unexplored Beauvoirean lineage of existentialism, including Bergson as well as Hegel, Kierkegaard, Husserl and Heidegger, and the African-American writer, Richard Wright.

"A compelling, insightful, and intimate portrait of William James as artist, philosopher, and psychologist, The Compromised Scientist explains James's emergence as a founding father of American experimental psychology. Unlike most books about James, this one emphasizes the fact that he had found a career as a painter and was not really a "buried" philosopher or psychologist. He was, in fact, an artist who was forced to compromise his urge to paint by developing a unique psychological language--the language of the (...) "stream of consciousness." Daniel W. Bjork offers an entirely new perspective on James by analyzing his famous diary as a record of his brilliant flight from art to psychology. In addition, Bjork explores the ways in which James's artistic orientation inevitably brought him into conflict with such other major psychological pioneers as Hugo Münsterberg, Edward Bradford Titchener, and James McKeen Cattell, all of whom dissented from James's psychological and professional outlook and, in particular, his enthusiastic crusade for the unconscious and psychic research. For them too, James was a "compromised scientist"--A man who had abandoned scientific standards. This indispensable study, complete with ample diary notations and illustrations, brings into new perspective the leading figure in American experimental psychology."--Provided by publisher. (shrink)

Following decades of neglect, the work of the German Jewish philosopher, literary author, cultural critic, and poet Günther Anders (1902–1992) is gaining increasing recognition in the English-speaking world. This translation of “Résistance heute” (Resistance Today) makes one of Anders’s most programmatic and polemical short texts available. Published at the height of his anti-nuclear activism, “Resistance Today” is the written version of a speech Anders delivered in November 1962 upon acceptance of the northwest Italian city of Omegna’s Resistance Prize (other notable (...) recipients included Jean-Paul Sartre and Frantz Fanon). It first appeared in print in the West German left-wing journal Das Argument in November 1963. Clearly written for the occasion, the text condenses (and often further radicalizes) key premises about the end of history, the amoral character of work, and the continuity between Nazi totalitarianism, the nuclear age and the world of consumerism that are developed in great nuance across a range of books that Anders had recently published. Key co-ordinates include: Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen 1 (The Obsolescence of Human Beings 1, 1956), his groundbreaking critique of technology; Der Mann auf der Brücke (The Man on the Bridge, 1959), a philosophical travel diary occasioned by Anders’s 1958 visit to Japan and his participation at the World Conference Against Atomic and Hydrogen Bombs in Tokyo; Burning Conscience (1961), a correspondence with the American reconnaissance pilot Claude Eatherly, who scouted the target area before the Enola Gay went on to drop the atom bomb on Hiroshima. It seems likely that Burning Conscience, which turned into an international bestseller, occasioned the award of the prize. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Receiving Søren Kierkegaard: The Early Impact and Transmission of His Thought by Habib C. MalikJ. KellenbergerHabib C. Malik. Receiving Søren Kierkegaard: The Early Impact and Transmission of His Thought. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1997. Pp. xxii + 437. Cloth, $59.95.At the end of the twentieth century no one who has any acquaintance with Western philosophical or religious thought would fail to recognize Kierkegaard’s name. This (...) was not always so. Kierkegaard wrote in his native Danish in the first half of the nineteenth century, and for decades his thinking and his name were virtually unknown outside Scandanavia. Habib C. Malik’s book contains the richly detailed story of how Kierkegaard’s thought became known in Europe and in the English-speaking world. Malik breaks down the reception of Kierkegaardian ideas into several phases: “non-reception,” the beginnings of reception, “misreception,” suppression, and serious reception. In the first phase Kierkegaard was read in Denmark, but not understood. In [End Page 637] the second phase, during the 1840s and 1850s while Kierkegaard was still alive, his writings started to become known outside Denmark in Scandanavia (and even reached North America via Scandanavian-American immigrants). In the period of “misreception,” as Malik calls it, Kierkegaard’s ideas or catch-words are appropriated but not fully understood—as with Ibsen, Malik argues. After Kierkegaard’s journals and papers began to be published in the 1870’s, there developed a new kind of interest in Kierkegaard, the “biographical-psychological approach,” initiated by Georg Brandes, in which Kierkegaard’s ideas and themes were interpreted in terms of the crucial events in Kierkegaard’s life. This approach led to the substance of Kierkegaard’s thinking being suppressed by what became a morbid interest in Kierkegaard’s personal life, such as a preoccupation with Kierkegaard’s relationship to Regine Olsen and then reading “The Diary of a Seducer” or key parts of Fear and Trembling as an expression of this event. The period of suppression reaches into the 1880s and 1890s as scholars and translators, like Christoph Schrempf, use Kierkegaard for their own ends. Schrempf, a Lutheran minister who renounces his belief, looks to Kierkegaard for support for his new stance and translates Kierkegaard into German, omitting passages that do not foster his end. Finally there is the period of serious reception, or its beginning, especially in the German-speaking world. Malik ends the story of Kierkegaard’s reception with the period following the First World War, before the development of twentieth century Existentialism.In the book’s eight chapters a vast number of minor and major cultural figures are dealt with. Some, like Hans Christian Andersen and Hans Christian Ørsted (the rector of Kierkegaard’s university and the discoverer of electromagnetism, whose approach to religion was cosmological) Kierkegaard knew and interacted with. Most, like Ibsen, Brandes, Schrempf, and Hans Peter Barford (the first editor of Kierkegaard’s extensive papers) and Albert Bärthold (who learned Danish to translate Kierkegaard into German and during the 1870’s regularly produced translations and commentaries) enter the story after Kierkegarrd’s death. Malik recounts Kierkegaard’s Kirkekampen (church-struggle) with the Lutheran Danish state-Church, and he brings out how Kierkegaard’s writing in this period of his “Attack on Christendom” greatly influenced the way he was initially received. He discusses the reaction to Kierkegaard by the early Swedish writer and feminist Fredrika Bremer, and he discusses Kierkegaard’s later influence on such various thinkers and writers as Miguel de Unamuno, Rainer Maria Rilke, Franz Kafka, and Ludwig Wittgenstein (to name some of the more familiar).There are many nuggets of detail in the book. For instance, those who have read Walter Kaufmann’s Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist would know that in 1888 Brandes called Kierkegaard to Nietzsche’s attention, but too close to the onset of Nietzsche’s madness for him to read Kierkegaard. However we learn from Malik that Brandes in a letter had characterized Kierkegaard as “one of the profoundest psychologists that have ever existed” and that Nietzsche in his reply in February of 1888 actually expressed the intention to “take up the psychological problem of Kierkegaard” when... (shrink)

This is the first definitive account of Fruitlands, one of history’s most unsuccessful—but most significant—utopian experiments. It was established in Massachusetts in 1843 by Bronson Alcott and an Englishman called Charles Lane, under the watchful gaze of Emerson, Thoreau, and other New England intellectuals. Alcott and Lane developed their own version of the doctrine known as Transcendentalism, hoping to transform society and redeem the environment through a strict regime of veganism and celibacy. But physical suffering and emotional conflict—particularly between Lane (...) and Alcott’s wife, Abigail—made the community unsustainable. Drawing on the letters and diaries of those involved, Richard Francis explores the relationship between the complex philosophical beliefs held by Alcott, Lane, and their fellow idealists and their day-to-day lives. The result is a vivid and often very funny narrative of their travails, demonstrating the dilemmas and conflicts inherent to any utopian experiment and shedding light on a fascinating period of American history. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Flight of DesireThe Conversion of Sherman AlexieScott Richard Lyons (bio)Sherman Alexie's audacious arrival onto the Native American literary scene in the early 1990s felt like the start of something new—but it was also the end of something old: namely, the Native American Renaissance (NAR).1 Younger by a generation than the graying canonized figures of preceding decades—N. Scott Momaday, James Welch, Leslie Marmon Silko, Gerald Vizenor, among others—Alexie (...) assumed the pose of an enfant terrible and suggested that his elders were trying a bit too hard to produce an ultimately inauthentic sense of traditionalism. "We've been stuck in place since House Made of Dawn," he complained to an interviewer in 1997.2 Rather than presenting his readers with sick and/or depressed Indians caught between two worlds who discover healing in cultural restoration—the dominant plotline of NAR novels—Alexie's innovative characters played basketball and blues guitar, obsessed about their crushes and classes, and worried more about fitting into the modern world than healing it with some spiritual return to ancient Indian wisdom. Stylistically and thematically, Alexie was always closer to the likes of a George Saunders or Junot Diaz than he was to the serious modernists who had [End Page 27] inspired his NAR predecessors, and his political outlook more closely resembled the "identity politics" of younger Indian academics than the "sovereignty" discourses of twentieth-century tribal councils. Alexie wielded humor and pathos to great effect and always seemed to have his finger on the pulse of newer audiences, including those of us who call Indian reservations home. Alexie's influence on everyday Native American culture has been underestimated.Born to Salish parents in 1966 and raised on and off an eastern Washing-ton reservation, Alexie has published (as of this writing) twenty-six books of poetry, fiction, and memoir, much of which has been lauded for its dark humor and tender compassion in the face of serious and challenging topics—sexual abuse, chemical addiction, parental abandonment—as well as for its "reservation realism": the sense, often reiterated by Alexie himself, that his work speaks more authentically to real Indian life than most Native American works. His first published fiction was a collection of short stories, The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven (1993), followed two years later by his first novel, Reservation Blues (1995). In 1996 Alexie published his second novel, Indian Killer, which moved in a different, darker direction. Departing reservation settings for the city of Seattle and supplanting his humor with a horror sensibility, Indian Killer is about a serial murderer who scalps his white male victims and the subsequent racial tensions that arise. In keeping with Alexie's identity politics, a significant theme of the novel is "ethnic fraud"—the claiming of false Indian identity by non-Indians—a topic that received serious treatment during the 1990s and that supplies another layer of meaning to the novel's title.3 But Indian Killer is primarily about the murder of white men, and the most that anyone could say about the moral questions it raises is that Alexie seems to have left them for the reader to decide. Arnold Krupat decided to call Indian Killer a "warning to whites."4 A decade later, Alexie published two short books, each having a foothold in the lucrative young adult (YA) genre: The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (2007) and Flight (2007). The former was immensely successful, critically and commercially, while the latter has barely been written about at all and has not sold as well. What explains this difference? Is True Diary simply a better book than Flight?Whenever we identify some literary text as good, great, better—or worse—than some other texts, we are obliged to answer the big, implicit question: What makes literature good? For René Girard, the answer to that question was simple: Great literature always announces the "novelistic [romanesque] truth," not the "romantic [romantique] lie" about the mediation of mimetic desire.5 The truth is that our desires are never just our own. We always imitate the desires of others, which leads to mimetic rivalry with those same models, who... (shrink)

This paper is a fragment of the book “Kaja od Radosława, czyli historia Hubalowego Krzyża”, which was published by Warszawskie Wydawnictwo Literackie Muza in 2006. It will be published by the American publisher The Military History Press under the title “Kaia Savior of the Hubal Cross”. Covering a century of Polish history, it is full of tragic and compelling events. Such historic events as Polish life in Siberia, Warsaw before the war, the German occupation, the Warsaw Uprising, life in (...) Ostaszków, and the rebuilding of Warsaw are included.The hero Kaia is a woman, christened Cesaria, whose father was expelled to Siberia in 1905 for conspiring against the tsar. Kaia spent her early childhood there, and the family lived near the mountain Altaj. A chapter shows how the Polish community lived there, organized their daily lives, etc. In 1922, the family returned to free Poland, the train trip back taking almost a year. This ordeal is highlighted as a series of stops sometimes lasting for weeks because of heavy snow accumulation, the men shoveling a pathway for the train to pass through, many deaths occurring from the frigid cold with the “caboose” used as a mortuary for Poles to be returned to their homeland for burial. Kaia entered the school system, was eventually educated as an architect, and then World War II started. She lived under the German occupation for the first few years, and later became a conspirator by helping the underground movement. She joined the Armia Krajowa in 1942. At considerable risk, her apartment became a meeting place for the conspirators.After Hubal’s death, one of his couriers gave Kaia the Hubal Cross Virtuti Militari. The cross was with her for the ensuing 50 years. During the Warsaw Uprising, in which she was a courier, she carried the cross around her neck. Many times, she had to travel via the Warsaw underground sewer system. Twice, she was wounded. After the Warsaw Uprising collapsed, she went to the east territory to look for her mother. She was captured by the Russian NKVD in Białystok and sent to Ostaszków. An interesting scene describes one of many interrogations: the Russian interrogator asks if she knows about the cross. Her reply causes a puzzled look on his face. The cross was never discovered (she had hidden it in a specially made shoe). Protection of the Virtuti Militari Cross, which at first had been a challenge to Kaia to survive the Uprising and Russian imprisonment, later became a symbol of courage and determination of the Polish people. In 1946, Kaia returned to Poland very ill and weighing only 38 kg (83.6 pounds). Eventually recovering her health, she worked as an architect involved in the rebuilding of Warsaw totally decimated by the Germans.In the Warsaw Uprising chapter, Kaia’s diary is included, and the book relates the scenes and events that she described. One such experience is most moving. It was a quiet moment, i.e. the shooting had subsided. On a warm beautiful August night, she was sitting, enjoying the quiet alone when, a young man sat down next to her. He was a colleague from architectural school. Together, a few months earlier, they had attended a university ball, and Kaia remembered him as always being funny and amusing. Then, she noticed he was missing one eye and part of his chin. He returned her gaze and jokingly said, “I still have one eye left”. And then, he quietly sang a popular song that they had danced the waltz to… “Not to be in love on such a beautiful night is a sin”… Kaia had to be in the same mood as he was and smiled. A few days later, half of his body was covered in ruins…he could not be helped. His death lasted several days, and he is buried in Powązki Cemetery, like many soldiers of the Uprising. (shrink)

A pathbreaking new study of women and morality How do people decide what is "good" and what is "bad"? How does a society set moral guidelines -- and what happens when the behavior of various groups differs from these guidelines? Martha Saxton tackles these and other fascinating issues in Being Good , her history of the moral values prescribed for women in early America. Saxton begins by examining seventeenth-century Boston, then moves on to eighteenth-century Virginia and nineteenth-century St. Louis. Studying (...) women throughout the life cycle -- girls, young unmarried women, young wives and mothers, older widows -- through their diaries and personal papers, she also studies the variations due to different ethnicities and backgrounds. In all three cases, she is able to show how the values of one group conflicted with or developed in opposition to those of another. And, as the women's testimonies make clear, the emotional styles associated with different value systems varied. A history of American women's moral life thus gives us a history of women's emotional life as well. In lively and penetrating prose, Saxton argues that women's morals changed from the days of early colonization to the days of westward expansion, as women became at once less confined and less revered by their men -- and explores how these changes both reflected and affected trends in the nation at large. (shrink)

This investigation places recent research about changes in wives' and husbands' domestic labor in the context of well-known reporting differences between different kinds of housework surveys. An analysis of the “reporting gap” between direct-question reports of housework hours from the National Survey of Families and Households and time-diary reports from Americans' Use of Time, 1985, shows that both husbands and wives overreport their housework contributions. Furthermore, gender attitudes, total housework, class, education, income, family size, and employment status together significantly affect (...) the overreport, although the variables operate in different ways for wives and husbands. It is concluded that changing and uneven social perceptions of the appropriate domestic roles of women and men have resulted in reporting biases that do not necessarily correspond to actual changes in housework behavior. These findings cast doubt on claims that contemporary husbands are doing more housework than their predecessors. (shrink)

The purpose of this article is to analyse how the background knowledge of travellers from the Old World have determined how they would experience American space. Such knowledge is more specifically directed in my study towards religion and politics, as my analysis intends to scrutinise how such realms made – and still make – subjects get to questionable conclusions since both Christianity and capitalism have had the normative tradition of disregarding the possibility of any meanings to deviate from their (...) main epistemes. My specific context, in this sense, concerns the travel book A Journey in Brazil and Maria Helena Machado’s compilation of William James’ diary – Brazil through the Eyes of William James – both written during the same trip to the Amazon. Main findings are: Louis Agassiz ambitious projects in America – more specifically the Amazon – prevented him from being as challenged by the journey as William James ends up being; there is enough literary evidence to assume that, in overall terms, his Christian bigotry made him immobile and unflappable when facing difference. (shrink)

During the first years of the post-war era, many French scientists travelled in the United States. As they looked for a reference to be used in rebuilding their own scientific landscape, their diaries say as much about the rise of the American biomedical complex as they do about their perception of research in the country. In order to illustrate how the French biologists adopted, competed with, or challenged the American model and how transatlantic exchanges played a critical (...) role in the molecularization of the life sciences, this paper presents three trajectories of laboratories. These include the services respectively led by P. Lépine and J. Monod at the Pasteur Institute, and G. Schapira’s biochemical research unit at the Hôpital des Enfants Malades. The three studies document the massive transatlantic circulation of materials, techniques, instruments, and people during the scientific reconstruction. The reconstruction however produced highly differentiated characters each operating in his own niche: the biotechnological inventor, the neo-clinician, and the fundamental biologist. The comparison situates the rise of molecular biology within the context of a rapidly expanding biomedical research system. It will help in understanding how, in contrast to the American situation, a logic of “demedicalization” became in France a means for developing biology at the molecular level. (shrink)

The long-term scientific interests of Alexander von Humboldt ranged from anthropology and ancient American studies to geology and geography, climatology and cultural theory, physics and plant geography to language history, volcanology and zoology. As a scientist, he crossed different disciplines and explored new paths of knowledge. Humboldt developed a transdisciplinary and, in the widest sense, nomadic knowledge as a traveller through the sciences. Like a nomad, he did not seek to possess or destroy a territory (of knowledge): no wonder (...) that he became the co-founder of an ecological and geo-ecological thinking. Humboldt wrote and published his works in German as well as in French. In his American Travel Diaries, which returned to Berlin in November 2013, and which are still awaiting their scientific analysis, Humboldt constantly changes between German and French, but also between Latin and Spanish. The author of the Kosmos couldn’t be used for nationalist purposes. Thus, Alexander von Humboldt can be understood as a nomad of science in constant movement, and in this sense as a world citizen. This first theorist of globalization shifted between the words, between the sciences, between the worlds. For him, the greatest possible mobility was not only a scientific program, but also the program of a life – his life. Humboldt wasn’t concerned with any specialization that would lead to a fragmented dialogue with other specialists. He was concerned with a nomadic knowledge, which, thanks to his extensive network of correspondents, always delivered the opportunity to argue from different disciplinary standpoints at the same time. His thinking doesn’t know the limits of interdisciplinary or “disciplined” research oppressing us today, but it rather took aim at the creation of a new world, in which mankind would be able to live together on a planetary scale in freedom and peace. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Buddhist-Christian Studies 20 (2000) 265-267 [Access article in PDF] Book Review Community, Violence, and Peace: Aldo Leopold, Mohandas K. Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., and Gautama the Buddha in the Twenty-First Century Community, Violence, and Peace: Aldo Leopold, Mohandas K. Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., and Gautama the Buddha in the Twenty-First Century. By A. L. Herman. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998. xi + 245 pp. (...) At first glance, this title might seem a bit over the edge: how could an author intelligently juxtapose such diverse thinkers as an ecological scientist, two advocates of human rights, and an ancient religious founder? For the most part, the author succeeds in demonstrating that the twenty-first century requires a definition of community that includes environmental, social, and spiritual concerns. In a format particularly [End Page 265] helpful for undergraduate teaching, he carefully rehearses at the end of each section three central questions: how does this thinker contribute to our understanding of community? Does his approach lead to the diminishment of violence? Does it facilitate peace?For the first quarter of the book, Herman explores various aspects of community. Drawing from Erich Fromm, Socrates, and Aldous Huxley, he demonstrates that out of enlightened self-interest, all people seek peace for themselves. He is careful to point out, however, that the Socratic virtues of wisdom, courage, self-control, and justice, which arise from within, are far superior to the uniformity of the World State as described in Huxley's Brave New World, which leaves nothing uncontrolled by the external authorities. Both lead to nonviolence and peace, but the World State can fall prey to what Fromm terms cultural insanity.Supplementing his discussion of Aldo Leopold with references to the work of Rachel Carson and J. Baird Callicott, Herman emphasizes that ideas of community peace must be informed by holistic structures of nature, particularly as articulated in Leopold's Sand County Almanac. However, he also warns that if the welfare of the biotic community takes precedence over all other concerns, then society could fall into a state of ecofascism.Herman's chapter on Mahatma Gandhi ably summarizes the life and works of this great political reformer, with particular focus on his formative years in South Africa. Influenced by John Ruskin and Leo Tolstoy, Gandhi developed the concept of the "Ashramic community," a means of collective, intentional living designed to effect social change. After describing the Phoenix Settlement (1904, Johannesburg), the Sabarmati Ashram (1915, Ahmedabad), and Sevagram Ashram (1933, Wardha), Herman presents a fifteen-page play script based on the Asian travel diaries of Professor George P. Conger, chair of philosophy at the University of Minnesota from 1937-1953. Conger spent two months at Gandhi's ashram in Wardha, India, in 1933, and in the play called "Salt," his students take up issues including the ill treatment of Jews in Germany, the definition of nonviolence, and emphasized, as does Gandhi, the necessity for self-transformation to achieve personal and community peace.Martin Luther King Jr. inspired by the example of Mahatma Gandhi, employed nonviolent techniques to bring about the many successes of the American Civil Rights Movement. Herman provides a brief biography of Martin Luther King Jr., quotes several of his pivotal sermons, and emphasizes the notion of beloved community as critical to King's thinking. He writes that "in King's interpretation of agape, it is your being loved that gives you value; and it is your selflessly loving others that gives them value and makes the beloved community possible" (p. 138). According to King, fear and racial discrimination prevent one from entering into the beloved community. By changing laws, and, more importantly, changing the hearts of individual people, a more peaceful community can be built.The least successful chapter of this book discusses Gautama Buddha and the "karmic community." Rather than focusing directly on Buddhist theories of Karma, Herman engages in a long discussion of the Bhagavad Gita, an important Hindu text, as a foil to explain Buddhist theories... (shrink)

Volume 21 of _The Annual of Psychoanalysis_ is especially welcome for bringing to English-language readers timely contributions from abroad in an opening section on "Psychoanalysis in Europe." The section begins with a translation of Helmut Thomae's substantial critique of the current state of psychoanalytic education; Thomae's proposal for comprehensive reform revolves around a redefinition of the status of the training analysis in analytic training. Diane L'Heureux-Le Beuf's clinical diary of an analysis focusing on the narcissistic elements of oedipal conflict probes (...) the degree to which the analytic method can be applied to "nonstructured" analysands. And Nella Guidi shows the clinical value of supplementing Freud's notion of unobjectionable positive transference with the complementary notion of unobjectionable negative transference. Section II, on "Psychoanalysis and Hysteria," offers original contributions to Freud scholarship in the form of Jules Glenn's reconsideration of Dora's "Dynamics, Diagnosis, and Treatment"; William McGrath's analysis of the way Freud's hostility to religious superstition gained expression in his early work on hysteria; and Marian Tolpin's self-psychological reprise on the case of Anne O. The section concludes with Elisabeth Young-Bruehl and Sarah Cummin's provocative "What Happened to 'Anorexie Hysterique'?" which questions the contemporary separation of anorexia from hysteria and explore the sociohistorical reasons the separation came about. Section III, "Clinical and Theoretical Studies," begins with Nancy Kobrin's discussion of Freud's ideas about autonomy, including the terms Freud used and the way Strachey translated them into English. Her goal is to deepen our understanding of how Freud spoke and thought about an individual's sense of self. Frank Summers shows how object relations principles, which are shared by various object relations theories, can inform the conduct of analysis at all levels of pathology, including neurosis. And Henry Smith examines the meaning and value of the "analytic surface," a metaphor that highlights the relationship between the analyst's attention and the patient's attention. A final section on "Applied Psychoanalysis" offers contemporary examples of applied analytic inquiry in anthropology, art, and literature. Roy Grinker, III and Roy Grinker, Jr., in a methodological contribution to psychoanalytic anthropology, examine what is revealed when a native people are asked to retell a story introduced by them by their Western observers. Danielle Knafo explores the art and life of the Mexican surrealist Frida Kahlo through the concepts of the mirror, the mask, and the masquerade. And David Werman closes the volume with a comparative study of Edgar Allan Poe's and James Ensor's obsession with revenge, and the role it played in Poe's writing and Ensor's etchings, respectively. Bringing readers the influential reform proposals of Thomae, a rich sampling of recent Freud scholarship, applied contributions traversing three disciplines, and original clinical contributions reflecting American and European sensibilities, Volume 21 of _The Annual_ is true to the spirit of this distinguished series. It testifies to the scope of analytic inquiry, and it exemplifies the yield of such inquiry in the hands of gifted scholars and clinicians. (shrink)

Julie Houts has cultivated a devoted following as "Instagram's favourite illustrator" (Vogue) by lampooning the conflicting messages and images women consume and share with the world every day. A collection of darkly comic illustrated essays, Literally Me chronicles the daily exploits of "slightly antisocial heroines" (Refinery29) in vivid, excruciatingly funny detail, including: -The beauty routine of a deranged bride who aspires to be "truly without flaws" on her wedding day -What happens when Kylie Jenner has an existential crisis and can (...) no longer "step out" -A journey to Coachella by the Four Horsewomen of the Apocalypse -The true dating confessions of a fembot -The terrifying description for Alice Staunch's book How to be the Perfect Feminist -The diary of Fiddle Ficus, a tree that lives inside a CÉLINE store, and much more. Literally Me marks the launch of a brilliant new social satirist. Julie's singular voice and beautiful illustrations reveal the truth about the absurdity of life in the social media age: the line between becoming a total `Girlboss' and a 21st-century American Psycho is razor-thin."--Dust jacket. (shrink)

Simone de Beauvoir's 1949 feminist masterpiece, The Second Sex, has traditionally been read as an application of Sartrean existentialism to the problem of women. Critics have claimed a Sartrean origin for Beauvoir's central theses: that under patriarchy woman is the Other, and that 'one is not born a woman, but becomes one.' An analysis of Beauvoir's recently discovered 1927 diary, written while she was a philosophy student at the Sorbonne, two years before her first meeting with Sartre, challenges this interpretation. (...) In this diary, Beauvoir affirms her commitment to doing philosophy, defines the philosophical problem of 'the opposition of self and other,' and explores the links between love and domination. In 1927, she thus lays the foundations of both Sartre's phenomenology of interpersonal relationships and of her own thesis, in The Second Sex, that woman is the Other. Her descriptions of the experience of freedom and choice point to the influence of Bergson, specifically his concepts of 'becoming' and élan vital. Tracing Beauvoir's shift from her apolitical position of 1927 to the feminist engagement of The Second Sex points to the influence of the African-American writer, Richard Wright, whose description of the lived experience of oppression of blacks in America, and whose challenge to Marxist reductionism, provide Beauvoir with a model, an analogy, for analyzing woman's oppression. (shrink)

The Celebration of Death in Contemporary Culture investigates the emergence and meaning of the cult of death. Over the last three decades, Halloween has grown to rival Christmas in its popularity and profitability; dark tourism has emerged as a rapidly expanding industry; and funerals have become less traditional. "Corpse chic" and "skull style" have entered mainstream fashion, while elements of gothic, horror, torture porn, and slasher movies have streamed into more conventional genres. Monsters have become pop culture heroes: vampires, zombies, (...) and serial killers now appeal broadly to audiences of all ages. This book considers, for the first time, these phenomena as aspects of a single movement, documenting its development in contemporary Western culture. Previous considerations of our fixation on death have not developed a convincing theory linking the mounting demand for images of violent death and the dramatic changes in death-related social rituals and practices. This book offers a conceptual framework that connects the observations of the simulated world of fiction and movies--including The Twilight Saga, The Vampire Diaries, Night Watch, Hannibal, and the Harry Potter series--to social and cultural practices, providing an analysis of the specific aesthetics and the intellectual and historical conditions that triggered the cult of death. It also considers the celebration of death in the context of a longstanding critique of humanism and investigates the role played by 20th-century French theory, as well as by posthumanism, transhumanism, and the animal rights movement, in the formation of the current antihumanist atmosphere. With its critique of movie and book blockbusters and the death-related social rituals, festivals, and fashions that have coalesced into the cult of death, this timely volume will appeal to anyone hoping to better understand a defining phenomenon of our age. Scholars and general readers of cultural studies, film and literary studies, anthropology, and American and Russian studies will find this book thought-provoking. (shrink)

This article draws on the conclusion of the Commission on the Humanities in The Humanities in American Life that the aim of a liberal arts education is to foster critical reasoning through the use of language or discourse. This paper maintains that the critical method is in itself insufficient to achieve its purpose. Its failure is in its exclusion of feeling and of silence from the thinking process. Hence, the ultimate object of my analysis is to correct and to (...) complement the critical method with the aesthetic method of teaching the humanities. Central to the aesthetic method is art as a means to cultivate contemplative and creative skills. The essay brings out and examines the value of art as voices of silence in Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Dionysius, Bonaventure, Maurice Merleau‐Ponty and Paul Gauguin, and pays particular attention to the diaries of Eugène Delacroix. In the course of doing so, I shall be trying to make clear that art teaches us how to listen and how to encounter ourselves totally and completely. It goes on to suggest several pedagogical principles or consequences that flow from this aesthetic pedagogy. (shrink)

continent. 1.4 (2011): 279—285. Concerning its Transitive Nature, the Conversion of Native Americans of Spanish Colonial California, Indoctrinated Catholicism, & the Creation There’s no direct archaeological evidence that Jesus ever existed. 1 I memorized the Act of Contrition. I don’t remember it now, except the beginning: Forgive me Father for I have sinned . . . This was in preparation for the Sacrament of Holy Reconciliation, where in a confessional I confessed my sins to Father Scott, who looked like Jesus, (...) at least in Western cultural representations of Jesus since the middle ages, and if Jesus put on a few pounds. Father Scott was long-haired, redheaded, bearded, chubby, and tall. When he left church with the procession of altar servers and Eucharistic ministers, yelling, “Sing a Good Song Unto the Lord,” he smiled, hands folded, and he gazed over his parishioners, and bounced along. For four months every year he lived among the Crow Nation in Montana, where towards the end of his tenure at Our Lady of Refuge, they adopted him as an honorary member of their tribe. * This is the prayer we chanted, holding hands, every night before dinner: Bless us oh Lord, for these our gifts, which we are about to receive, our bounty through Christ, our Lord, Amen. Then we all said, God bless the cook! When we were with my grandparents, Grandpa said, God bless Chicky, and Holly, and Harvey, and Boots—all the dead dogs. * My sister tells me that she sits next to a handsome man on a flight across the country. After chitchat, she withdraws her book. She’s reading Kevin Sampsell’s A Common Pornography . After a few moments, the handsome man also reads from his book—his leather-bound Bible. Sister thinks, Oh, Jesus—too bad. She falls asleep. Later, settled in Nashville, she opens her volume and out falls a Jesus-covered card that reads, You can still find God and Salvation! Because that handsome God-fearing young man saw that word— pornography . * I suppose Father Jim’s dark hair, beard, and glasses made me think doctoral-ly of him. He called while I was in the midst of a breakup, after I’d twice attempted suicide, and my mother was desperate for help. She somehow found and phoned him. And Jim, now years out of Our Lady of Refuge’s parish, twenty years since my baptism, years even since he’d left the priesthood and the Catholic faith, still made the effort to bring me back into the fold. He said, “Have you seen a priest?” I did not respond, as I was more shocked to hear his voice than anything, so I said, “How are you, Father Jim? Sorry, I guess I shouldn’t call you ‘Father.’” And I said, “Why did you leave the priesthood? Do you have a girlfriend?” He said that I should call him just “Jim.” He said, “Do you need someone to talk to?” I said, “Not really.” He said, “Call your mother; she’s worried about you.” That was the last time I talked to Father Jim. * Mother let me know just how disappointed Jesus was. I cried and cried, and said I was sorry. Into my hands she placed my missal, ordered forty Rosaries. She said next Saturday I would go to confession. I hated confession. Who wouldn’t? * I realize, of course, that this page is a kind of confessional. * The Kumeyaay, Ipai, Tipai, Chumash, Esselen, Rumsen—all Native Americans of Alta California—shared similarities in their religions. Southern Californian tribes made use of Datura, or jimpson weed, a hallucinogen, for religious rituals. In the creation, God made brother sky and sister earth. Brother and sister mated, and sister gave birth to all things on Earth, including people, but it was difficult to distinguish people from all other aspects of Earth because everything was alive: granite and obsidian, the Pacific and its waves, the San Diego and Los Angeles Rivers. Wiyot—a hero—was very powerful, born from lightning, the son of the Creator and a virgin. When Wiyot thought that human women’s legs were more beautiful than Frog’s, Frog became jealous and poisoned Wiyot. The dying Wiyot went to all the people’s villages, and he distributed his power among them. He said, “When I die, I should be cremated.” The people built the fire and funeral pyre. When the fire was ready, and the people about to place Wiyot’s body upon it, Coyote came and snatched away Wiyot’s heart. * My friend Nick told me once how he ate some jimpson weed and that he hallucinated for three days. His family took a road trip and, while driving over the Sierra Nevada mountains, he kept seeing dinosaurs roaming the open meadows and charging down snowy slopes. So it’s no wonder that Native Americans who ingested this plant would have developed religion. * Walking Castroville’s streets after school I got into fights but mostly watched other boys scrabbling on the asphalt. I went to Burger King for Whoppers. Me and my friends cussed. Antonio admonished me when I said, “damn,” while strutting a sidewalk alongside the church. He said, “Jaime”—pronounced Hi-May, which was what all the Mexicans called me—“you’re crazy, eh. Don’t cuss at the church.” He meant while at church, as in, within its vicinity. I said, “We’re not in church.” Once we’d crossed the street, Tony said, “Damn dude, you’re fuckin crazy!” * Blessed Father Fray Junípero Serra raised the Eucharistic goblet to his lips, and candlelight danced on the blood’s tiny waves. Incense clouded the church so completely that some of the Pame natives grew nauseous. So, too, felt Blessed Father Fray Junípero Serra later that night, as he bent over a ceramic bowl and vomited blood, not only the Lord’s, but his own, for poison had laced the sacred vessel into which he poured the sacrament. The physician tending to the sick prelate urged him to take the remedy he’d prepared. But Blessed Father Fray Junípero Serra refused, said that he would pray, for he had never taken any medicine in his life, and he never would. * The Chumash of El Valle de Los Osos called themselves the Stishni, separating themselves from Chumash of other regions, those varying tribes of the central California coast that spoke mutually unintelligible dialects of their Hokan language. This made learning their languages impossible for the Spanish friars, to say nothing of translating the Doctrina. Thus the priests baptized few natives, despite the help that the tribes offered the fledgling settlements in the form of meat and acorn meal, which the Spaniards found repugnant. Some from these cultures, feeling threatened by the newcomers, shot flaming arrows into the thatched roofs of the mission structures. And why wouldn’t they feel threatened when priests chastised them for performing, for example, their Coyote Dance, wherein a man donning a coyote-skin-and-skull costume dances while a singer sings his tale, which laments the human feces strewn imaginatively about the Earth? Coyote, meantime, tries to get an onlooker to lick his genitals, and finally engages in public sexual intercourse with a female tribe member or two, then ends the dance by defecating. Though the Franciscans called such forbidden acts devilry , the Chumash maintained their Datura cult religion, along with the enforced Christianity. For the Chumash, the Earth was made of two enormous snakes that caused earthquakes when they slithered past one another—a vast reptilian tectonics. In the 20th century, long after Blessed Father Fray Junípero Serra and his cohorts had died, when asked by an anthropologist about religious contradictions, conflating the Datura and Christian cults, a Chumash man replied, incredulous: “But these are two different religions.” * When Portolá ordered that if by March 19th, the feast day of St. Joseph, the San Antonio had not arrived in San Diego Bay to relieve them, the Sacred Expedition to Nueva California would be abandoned, Blessed Father Fray Junípero Serra prayed a novena for San José’s intercession. And lo, a lookout sighted the San Antonio ’s sails—what seemed to the priest a miracle—that very Saint’s feast day. Europeans would stay in California, and Blessed Father Fray Junípero Serra would continue to reap a great harvest of souls for the Lord. By the end of mission secularization in 1836—sixty-six years after the San Antonio rescued the Spaniards—Native American populations in California had declined by seventy-three percent. * When Peter the Aleut would not renounce his Eastern Orthodox faith the padre of San Francisco had a toe severed from each foot with each refusal, totaling ten. The native Ohlones employed in this gruesome task—their obsidian chiseled knives tearing through skin and grinding bone—continued as per their orders, and cut off also each of Peter’s fingers (equals a total of twenty refusals). They quartered the martyr, spilled his bowels, as if from bear attack, attack by a bear in the shape of a Catholic. * Blessed Father Fray Junípero Serra absolutely believed that the slow rate of conversion for the native people was due to the influence of the Devil, who had been outraged by the coming of the Catholics to California, this region that he had long held in his dominion. * In his reception speech for the Nobel Prize for Literature, John Steinbeck said, “Man himself has become our greatest hazard and our only hope. So that today, St. John the Apostle may well be paraphrased: In the end is the Word, and the Word is Man—and the Word is with Men.” * In 1602, when Sebastián Vizcaíno and his friars sang mass on Catalina Island, as many as a hundred Pimungans witnessed the rite, asking by signs what it was about. According to Vizcaíno’s records, the Californians marveled not a little at the idea of Heaven and at the image of Jesus crucified. * Vizcaíno was brought to a prairie on Santa Catalina Island where the Pimungans worshipped their sun god. Upon the prairie they had placed an icon, a headless figure with horns protruding from the body, a figure that Vizcaíno predictably described as a demon. The Pimungans urged Vizcaíno not to approach the image of their deity, but he ignored them. He placed his crucifix against the wooden figurine and prayed the Our Father. Vizcaíno told the natives that his prayer was from Heaven, and that their god was the Devil. Vizcaíno held out his crucifix, encouraging the Pimungans to touch it and receive Jesus. He pointed at the sky and indicated Heaven. The Pimungans worshipped a sun deity, so they were impressed with this white man and his description of his god, for their gods seemed to be one and the same. It’s no wonder then that Vizcaíno’s diary reports the natives being pleased with this exchange. “Surely,” the diary says, “they will be converted to our Holy Faith.” * The Miwok women wailed and scratched at their faces when their men consorted with Sir Francis Drake and the other Englishmen who had landed on California’s coast in the summer of 1579. “The blood streaming downe along their brests, besides despoiling the upper parts of their bodies of those single coverings . . .they would with furie cast themselves upon the ground . . . on hard stones, knobby hillocks, stocks of wood, and pricking bushes.” Drake and his men fell themselves to their knees in prayer, their eyes Heavenward, so that the natives might see they prayed to God and they too might worship God then their eyes that had been so blinded by the deceiver might be opened. * Father Fray Antonio de la Ascención—Carmelite friar in Vizcaíno’s party—writes that the Indians of California can “easily and with very little labor be taught our Holy Catholic faith, and that they would receive it well and lovingly.” He calls for two hundred older and honorable soldiers to ensure brotherhood during the conquest, so that peace and love—the best tools to pacify pagans—should reign. The religious, the friar says, should likewise be wise and loving to easily quell animosities between Spaniards and the heathen, and therefore avoid war. The Spaniards should bring with them trinkets—beads, mirrors, knives—to distribute amongst the gentiles, so that they might come to love the Christians, and see “that they are coming to their lands to give them that of which they bring, and not to take away the Indians’ possessions, and may understand that they are seeking the good of their souls.” No women are to accompany the conquest, says Father Fray Antonio, “to avoid offenses to God.” * In 1955 Wallace Stevens admitted himself to St. Francis Hospital in Hartford, Connecticut. There, it’s rumored he converted to Catholicism before dying of stomach cancer, exclaiming to his priest after the baptism, “Now I am in the fold.” Stevens’s late-career poems seem less cynical, more in awe of being and death (read “Metaphor as Degeneration” from The Auroras of Autumn ). He could have chosen from at least three secular hospitals in Hartford at the time. * I was reading Stevens’s Collected Poems when I joined eHarmony and listed that as my “currently reading” book among the “more than twelve” books a year that I would read. I fell in love with my wife when she said, “Are you sending your work out to literary journals?” Prior to this, the first girl I talked to on the phone, when I explained my doctoral exams, said, “So, you’re like, reading Stephen King and stuff?” When I said not exactly she responded defensively: “He must be doing something right, since he makes all that money.” * Mom walked me, my brother, and sister, through the Stations of the Cross. We did this on Ash Wednesdays, or whenever she thought we needed extra God after church. It might’ve happened before church, though that’s unlikely because we were always late. Anyway, it’s easiest to walk the Stations of the Cross when there’s no one else around. To walk the actual Stations means one goes to Jerusalem and walks the Via Dolorosa to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. So the Stations elsewhere—usually paintings, or low-relief sculptures upon church walls—serve as a kind of virtual Dolorosa. Mom held our hands and started from the rear of Our Lady of Refuge: the First Station. Mom said we should say a prayer at each Station and to think of all the pain Jesus went through so that we could go to Heaven. It was hard to keep thinking about that one thing for so long. My mind went to that Saturday’s little league game, to the donut and chocolate milk (our after-church reward from Castroville Bakery), and as I grew older I thought about girls. When you’re thirteen you can’t not think about the girl’s butt in the pew in front of yours as she kneels and stands to pray throughout mass. * It grew increasingly juvenile to lie awake at night daring myself to utter a simple sentence. Even if I said I didn’t believe in God, wouldn’t He know the truth? He was omniscient, like a narrator. Even the idea of Him as a him ceased making sense. Not only did this come with a budding realization of my paternalistic culture, but due to the simple question of why? If God was everything, everywhere, all knowing, then why would he be a man? There’s that question: If God is a man then God must have a penis, and if so, what for? * The Catholic Church incorporates some modern scientific research into its dogma concerning the formation of the Universe, Solar System, and Earth, as well as evolution. According to Catholic doctrine, in approximately the fifth millennia BCE, humans began to worship the one true God. Those humans were Adam and Eve, though the Church says humans had been around for thousands of years prior to Adam and Eve. The Church claims to be infallible. Every time the Church changes its doctrine it remains infallible. * One Catholic writer, Tom Meagher, writes that “Modernism[—]the idea that we come to our beliefs individually through emotional or personal experiences[—]has crept into our Catholic schools.” * Catholics believe that evil spirits, given power through Original Sin, can imbue ordinary inanimate objects of everyday use. Thus, such objects should be blessed in order to induce in them the desire to serve the good. Such objects are not limited to, but include, “new ships and boats, railways and trains, bridges, fountains, wells, cornmills, limekilns, smelting furnaces, telegrams, steam engines, and machines for providing electricity.” * In The Sound of Music Julie Andrews and Christopher Plummer sing together: “Nothing comes from nothing, nothing ever could...” * To explain competing theories on the very early universe, and pre-verse would be another book. What was the inflaton? Did (mem)branes collide, initiating the Big Bang, as opposed to Lemaître’s primordial atom, a singularity? Without a unified theory there’s gravity hanging out there, fucking everything up. We cannot make sense of the mechanics of the Planck Epoch—0-10-34 seconds into the Universe’s creation—named for Max Planck, who stumbled into the discovery of quantum mechanics in the early twentieth century. * My students often ask if I believe in God, since I espouse evolution, the Big Bang, Science, reject a strictly biblical or creationist theory of the Universe. I tell them that yes, I believe in God, though not the God that they imagine one must believe in. * When questioned regarding the rumor that, before his death, founder of quantum mechanics Max Planck had converted to Catholicism, he replied that he did not believe “in a personal God, let alone a Christian God.” * Physicist and Catholic priest George Lemaître, who formulated the theory and wrote the 1946 book The Primeval Atom Hypothesis , was made a household name by then-detractor Fred Hoyle, who pejoratively referred to the idea as a “Big Bang.” * Suicide is a mortal sin. To end one’s own life one must have despair, which is to lose hope, which is to lose faith, and to disbelieve in God. * Archaeology has uncovered graffiti in all of California’s missions—Indian pictographs inscribed into the adobe, covered with layers of whitewash. Native deities and depictions of cultural practices show that tribespeople never fully gave up their native traditions even after baptism and coming to the missions. There was something inside Native Californians that would never die. (shrink)