Gold Letters Research Articles

"A Bunch of Tough Hombres": Police Brutality, Municipal Politics, and Racism in South Texas

"A Bunch of Tough Hombres":Police Brutality, Municipal Politics, and Racism in South Texas Brent M. S. Campney (bio) "Everybody knew the McAllen police were a bunch of tough hombres, especially the Boys on C shift," reported the Dallas Morning News on March 29, 1981. "Working the midnight-to-8 a.m. shift along the border is like being at war, the cops said. You have to be tough. The Boys on C shift worked at being tough." Many of the "Boys" wore black T-shirts with gold letters bearing "the legend, 'C Shift Animals.' They even had their own slogan: 'Kick…and Ask Questions Later.'" Only days earlier, the public had become aware of their misdeeds, revealed in six years of booking room videos recorded by the McAllen Police Department (MPD) and subpoenaed by a civil rights attorney. On these videos Anglo and Mexican American officers alike confirmed suspicions that they had beaten, kicked, and abused prisoners—in virtually all cases, working-class Mexican Americans.1 Station KGBT in nearby Harlingen played television footage of the beatings, bringing a flood of outrage. "One woman, like many of the callers, was almost in tears when she thanked us over and over again for showing such terrible things going on," noted a representative of the station. "She said as soon as she got through talking to us, she was going to call the McAllen police to demand an answer [as to] why those things had happened."2 She was not alone. "The police switchboard was lit up for hours after the tapes were shown on TV," declared James C. Harrington, the attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which had secured the videos and released them to the media.3 As investigators probed the scandal, some pointed to the mayor—already locked in a heated, racially tinged political race with Ramiro Casso, a Mexican American challenger—as an enabler. On May 3 the News reported that "the federal grand jury investigation of accusations of [End Page 787] brutality by McAllen police has broadened to include the possibility of a cover-up of the incidents by Mayor Othal Brand and other city officials."4 This study tells the story of the 1981 MPD scandal, its impact on the ongoing municipal election between an Anglo incumbent and a Mexican American challenger, and its role in unifying Mexican Americans in South Texas during a period in which they were beginning to seize the reigns of local and regional power. Historians such as David Montejano, Marc Simon Rodriguez, and Brian Behnken have incorporated the issue of police brutality into their scholarship on the Mexican American civil rights movement during the post World War II period. In his discussion of Colorado, for example, Rodriguez found that between "1962 and 1964, police brutality became a significant issue for Mexican Americans in Denver and was the spark that ignited community activism. Several young men had had interactions with the police, and what should have been no more than minor skirmishes led to the young men's deaths."5 Nevertheless, historians have focused on particularly egregious incidents in places like East Los Angeles and Dallas rather than on the issue of police violence more broadly. This study places police violence at the center of the story and addresses its significance in enforcing repression, promoting resistance, and transforming local and regional power relations.6 The study proceeds in five sections. In the first it details the history of police violence against Mexican Americans in Texas and in the Lower Rio Grande Valley (hereafter, the Valley) in the 1970s. In the second section it examines the role in these events of Othal Brand, the so-called Onion King, who owned one of the most powerful agribusiness interests in Texas and served as the mayor of McAllen. In the third it analyzes the MPD scandal, the roots of which dated back to the early 1970s. In the fourth it explores the mayoral campaign, election, and election runoff, all of which not only highlighted the police scandal but underlined racial and class divisions in this South Texas city. In the final section it considers the historiographical implications of its findings. To tell...

Slippery Kitsch and the Aesthetics of Power

ABSTRACTAllison Coffelt delves into the kitschy world of Donald Trump: It starts with the skin, trying so hard for gold it becomes orange; the hair—that goldilocks swoop; the dark suits and shiny ties; the golden letters on buildings named after him.

Saint Kenelm in an Imaginative Illustration

Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Douce 368 (mid or late twelfth century) contains one of eight complete surviving copies of the Vita et miracula Sancti Kenelmi (1066–1075).1 The Vita is the earliest substantial account of the career of Kenelm, whose story would go on to feature in the South English Legendary and later English and Anglo-Latin texts. The narrative recounts Kenelm’s premonitory vision, decapitation, surreptitious burial, and posthumous rediscovery. In the climactic scene, the location of the saint’s murdered body is divulged to the pope in Rome by a dove carrying in its beak ‘a snow-white parchment inscribed with golden letters in English’ (‘niueam menbranam aureis litteris anglice inscriptam’, §10). In Douce 368 and other early manuscripts of the Vita, the English inscription is reported as a rhyming Latin couplet. However, three thirteenth- and fourteenth-century manuscripts gloss the passage with an English alliterative couplet: ‘In Klent Koubeche | Kenelm kunebearn/ liy under yorne | heaved bereved’ (‘In Clent Cow-valley, Kenelm the royal scion lies under a thorn-bush, decapitated’).2 The English alliterative couplet survives elsewhere in a free-standing late twelfth-century copy.3 An early eleventh-century application of the epithet cynebearn to Kenelm suggests that the alliterative poem predates the Vita.4 Like Cædmon’s Hymn, another miraculous English poetic utterance, the alliterative snippet on Kenelm seems to have moved from memory (in the earliest manuscripts) to the margins (in later manuscripts) and finally to the main text (in later redactions of the legend).

Wonderful Rusuti. Nemo propheta in patria

The work, hence the appreciation, of Filippo Rusuti deserves reconsideration. Both early and recent historiography show that Rusuti’s art has been either persistently outranked by that of Jacopo Toritti and Pietro Cavallini, or overlooked altogether. One cause of this neglect is the extreme physical difficulty of examining the single work ascribed with certainty to Rusuti-which is, in effect, “signed”-the Christ in Majesty with saints and apostles in the topmost register of Santa Maria Maggiore’s façade mosaic. Tucked high in the cavetto, this work was further obscured by the architectural addition of Ferdinando Fuga’s eighteenth-century benedictional loggia. New photos published for the first time here, however, complemented by review of documents from several phases of restoration, enable unprecedentedly close study of this work. Visual inspection finds its condition generally good, despite some damage, and the artistic quality easily the match of Torriti’s mosaics. In addition, suggestions emerge indicating that Rusuti may have had a hand in other portions of the basilica’s decoration. The new photos also allow analysis of Rusuti’s signature, which the artist placed beneath Christ’s feet embedded in the mandorla. Inscribed in gold letters against blue, the signature achieves an aesthetic effect sought by goldsmiths; an example is Guccio di Mannaia’s chalice, commissioned by Pope Nicolas iv. Looking farther afield, the signature’s placement finds a parallel in Autun, in Gislebertus’s name on Saint-Lazare’s tympanum. The multiple links between papal Rome and France during the late thirteenth century, and evidence of Rusuti’s service in France, imply that Rusuti could have encountered French dignitaries in the papal curia and the Colonna circle. These may have included Bérenger Frédol, who became cardinal of Ss. Nereo e Achilleo well before Rusuti’s departure for France, where he served Philip the Fair as Pictor regis.

Taking a stand against predatory publishers

Taking a stand against predatory publishers

Fashioning the Curator: The Chinese at the Lambing Flat Folk Museum

Fashioning the Curator: The Chinese at the Lambing Flat Folk Museum

My Humanist Detour from China to the United States

I would describe myself as an accidental humanist, if not atheist. That was very much how I felt when I found myself on June 4, 2010, standing at the podium of the sixty-ninth annual conference of the American Humanist Association. I was receiving the Humanist Pioneer Award. But what did I do to deserve the honor? The golden letters on the beautifully crafted award said: “To Wendy Liu for her pioneering work that advances Humanist values and critical thought through cross cultural perspectives on American Society.” The “pioneering work” presumably meant my writings on US-China relatedtopics, especially the collection of essays on my understanding of America from a Chinese and non-religious angle. As an aspiring writer, I was happy to be recognized for anything, not to say that particular angle. But that angle, with which I stumbled my way to the San Jose conference, was not an accident. It had come a long way with me on a journey starting in Xian, China, my hometown. Talking about Xian, the terracotta warriors of Qin Shihuang, the first Emperor of China, would probably come to one’s mind. Visitors have marveled at the work of ancient artisans, especially the rendering of individual facial features of the clay soldiers in eternity. In contrast to that humanistic touch was the cruelty of Emperor Qin, who ordered that upon his death the entrance to the underground mausoleum be sealed on completion, entombing the laborers inside to keep it secret.1 This is a brief but telling picture of humanism vs. tyranny in China–the once-upon-a time China.

Arborified

Arborified TESSA RANSFORD Julia told me she worshipped trees. We were walking through Harvard Yard under the spreading elms on the way back from the Widener Library to her tiny apartment on Massachusetts Avenue. It was October 1981 and I was staying with Julia, having met her in Scotland only a few months earlier, when she was visiting her friend Dr. Emily Lyle at the School of Scottish Studies in Edinburgh’s George Square. Hence the title.* Baum is “tree” in German while Flora, flower, is the goddess of spring and desire, with her gardens, five gardens, like the star at the heart of an apple, or the fifth constituting that which subsumes the other four: “the fifth, the final garden is the garden of the whole,” writes Julia in her introduction. The five books, bound with green linen covers and gold lettering on the spines, are poem-gardens. Though numbered, they were not written and do not need to be read sequentially. Time is kairos, the now-time, spiralling and patterned. “The subject of the poem is desire,” wrote Julia in 1991 in “Query Re One’s Work,” a short essay on her work. “The poem itself is desired,” and she quotes Rilke (also a poet of gardens and trees): “Ach die Gärten bist du, / ach ich sah sie mit solcher / Hoffnung.” Book one is centered around the Tree of Life and book five around the Tree of Knowledge. In between are the books of Beauty, Truth and Goodness. *Julia Budenz, The Gardens of Flora Baum (Chelmsford, Massachusetts : Carpathia Press, 2011). Five volumes, 2,254 pages, hardcover , $175. Book One, By the Tree of Life; Book Two, Towards a Greek Garden; Book Three, Rome; Book Four, Towards Farthest Thule; Book Five, By the Tree of Knowledge. arion 20.2 fall 2012 Born on May 23, 1934 in New York City, Julia died in Cambridge, Massachusetts on December 11, 2010, her work almost finished, most of it digitized and proofed for final publication, then posthumously edited by Emily Lyle. Her life was her work, and it is strangely impossible to imagine her living after it was finished. Julia was nine years an Ursuline nun before leaving to study and then to write. The habits of perfection and devotion were not cast aside. She joined the convent after graduating and took a further degree , beginning to teach classics while still with the Ursulines . After leaving the convent in 1966, Julia took a degree in comparative literature (Greek, Latin, and English) at Harvard , before turning to creative work in the light of her scholarship and vision. I first encountered Julia’s work in the form of the poem “The Lay of The Last Monk” which begins book four, written mostly in Scotland and described by her as the book of “the good” which “blooms with human relations.” I read it in Edinburgh in Duncan Glen’s magazine, Akros (vol. 12, no. 36), in 1977. Nature, passion, intellect, life-fire are in every line. The ruined Cistercian Abbey in Melrose spreads beside the River Tweed at the foot of the three fairy Eildon Hills, where Julia has Anthea, a moon-goddess, meeting an inquisitive monk in what is an echo of Thomas the Rhymer’s encounter and sojourn with the Queene of Faerie. And the poem closes with tranquil beauty: Honey columns of stone rise on the slope In the rose of dawn. White silence and rainbow song Alternate in the air. A swan from the north Shakes his cold wings by the laurel in the southern sun. Walls are down. Paths are radiant. The death of Julia’s mother in 2002 occasioned an entry in The Diary of Flora Baum, a long sequence covering many years, which concludes book four. Julia’s father—when she was eleven years old, an age for the onset of discriminaarborified 156 tion—was dramatically converted from being a staunch Communist to Roman Catholicism. For Epiphany 2004, we have a sense of the transfigurative experience of taking vows: The marriage, the chapel, the chant, the Latin, The candle, the banquet, the sacrifice were facts Acting, dazzling, entrancing together . . . Ending with: The heart’s Latin lasts forever...

The Unfinished Enlightenment: Description in the Age of the Encyclopedia (review)

Reviewed by: The Unfinished Enlightenment: Description in the Age of the Encyclopedia Per Serritslev Petersen Joanna Stalnaker, The Unfinished Enlightenment: Description in the Age of the Encyclopedia. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2010. 240 pp. Thomas Jefferson famously announced his American Enlightenment project (carved in gold letters on the wall of the Trustees’ Room of the New York Public Library) as follows: “I look to the diffusion of light and education as the resource most to be relied on for ameliorating the condition promoting the virtue and advancing the happiness of man.” Like Jefferson (who actually bought a copy of the Encyclopédie while in Paris), Joanna Stalnaker also starts her study of the Enlightenment with France to conclude it in her native US with the “unfinished” business of Google’s current mass-digitization of books and libraries (Google Books) as a kind of postmodern high-tech Enlightenment project. It is “unfinished” because the American Google project seems to be as riddled with complexities as that of the original French Enlightenment. Will Google Books, for instance, tend to favor the Internet practice of reading only snippets rather than complete books? Stalnaker focuses on the crucial role of description in French Enlightenment encyclopedism, documented by the sheer number of articles on description in Diderot and d’Alembert’s Encyclopédie and the Encyclopédie méthodique. Her study falls into three main parts. Part I deals with the theory and practice of description in natural history as manifested in Buffon and Daubenton’s ambitious Histoire naturelle, générale et particulière (1749–1789) and Bernardin de Saint-Pierre’s more experimental and less scientific Études de la nature (1784–1788). Part II addresses the issue of description in the Encyclopédie (1751–1752) itself, using Diderot’s article on the stocking machine as a case study, and concludes by analyzing the genre of descriptive poetry as an “attempt to give poetic form to Enlightenment encyclopedism” (125). In Part III, Stalnaker deals with description as physical as well as moral-political topography. She compares Louis Sébastien Mercier’s two descriptions of Paris, the twelve-volume Tableau de Paris presenting pre-revolutionary Paris and its social mores and Le nouveau Paris, presenting revolutionary Paris where Mercier, thanks to his moderantisme, was imprisoned and barely escaped execution during the Terror. The figure of Mercier as describer in the two works is, Stalnaker notes in her Introduction, significantly [End Page 175] differerent: in Tableau de Paris he serves both as “a unifying principle and as an agent of change,” whereas in Le nouveau Paris he has become “a self-conscious historical subject whose fragmented perceptions and limited point of view can only provide a kaleidoscope of perspectives, in a way that marked a definitive break with the Enlightenment’s descriptive project” (27). As a well researched and well argued interdisciplinary study of Enlightenment description, Stalnaker’s book evidently transcends C. P. Snow’s two-culture chasm, the still on-going post-Enlightenment conflict between the sciences and the humanities. In her Introduction, Stalnaker comments on the late-Enlightenment “cordoning off of literature from science” and on how “the absolute divide between science and literature” was further reinforced by late-twentieth-century structuralism and poststructuralism (4). Still, in her Preface, she insists on describing her book as “very much a literary study,” even though it pays close attention to “epistemological context” (xii), arguing, somewhat paradoxically, that since “the trajectory of [her] work has been from text to context, it is perhaps not surprising that [she] still tend[s] to favor literary analysis” (xiii). But it is surely surprising if by literary analysis she is aligning herself and her interdisciplinary study with some updated version of American New Criticism as distinct from, one would imagine, more suitable methodological paradigms such as Discourse Theory or Cultural Studies. Stalnaker’s detailed study of the complexities of scientific description in Buffon and Daubenton’s Histoire naturelle and Saint-Pierre’s Études de la nature is perhaps the best and most stimulating part of her book. Buffon and Daubenton were originally collaborators working together according to a specific division of labor, one based on the so-called history-description divide...

G.-M. de Schryver (Editor). A Way with Words: Recent Advances in Lexical Theory and Analysis. A Festschrift for Patrick Hanks

A Way with Words is a Festschrift volume to honour the 70th birthday of Patrick Hanks. The volume is attractively printed on thick, good quality paper, hardbound in cloth and supplied with a cover sleeve (which, I admit in shame, I have a habit of throwing away, but this one has an adorable portrait of Patrick which can be enjoyed quite independently of the book). The title on the cover is rendered in golden letters, perhaps a hint at the level of contribution the dedicatee has made to the study and description of meaning.

Inscription and divine presence: golden letters in the early medieval apse mosaic

The ninth-century apse mosaic in the church of S. Cecilia in Trastevere in Rome impinges on the viewer's space with a series of frontal, forward-gazing figures and draws attention to itself by mean...

Response: Performative Reflections on Love and Commitment

Response: Performative Reflections on Love and Commitment Judith Butler (bio) I am very grateful for the two thoughtful essays on Excitable Speech. I thought to respond by focusing on two of the points made in those essays. The first one was posed by J. Hillis Miller. He asks me to think about the kind of effective force that speech acts have when they do not wound, but rather convey love. How do we think about the speech act “I love you?” The second is a question posed by George Shulman. He asks me to think about commitment. So I will do my best to write briefly about love and commitment from the perspective of a theory of performativity. Miller is right to point out that if words have the power to wound, they also have the power to convey love. It is interesting that, for Miller, the opposite of wounding is not reparation but love, and it is true that the speech act that conveys love is one that brings up other questions about the relationship between language and the body. I would like to say first that to say “I love you” is, of course, to submit to a cliché. And it may be that we are only willing to submit to such a cliché for certain people and under certain circumstances. One can easily inhabit the anonymity of the phrase as a way of minimizing the exposure created by the speech act. We can ask, what kind of exposure is this? Who or what is exposed? It is a speech act that is said to some “you,” not knowing whether the “you” will receive or return the speech act as well. In fact, if the speech act is too quickly returned, it feels automatic or, rather, like the other is actually hiding within the folds of the cliché. Sometimes it seems to matter more when there is some silence that indicates that the utterance has actually stilled language for a moment. We rely on those forms of stillness even as we do not know precisely how to fill them with speech. In saying “I love you,” a [End Page 236] certain “I” is installed in one of the most repeated phrases in the English language, a marketed phrase, one that belongs to no one and to anyone. One risks a full evaporation into an anonymous citationality: I speak as countless others have spoken, say the same words, and you are equally substitutable at such a moment. On the one hand, the citationality of the speech act offends our sense of singularity or even authenticity, if that is a value we have. On the other hand, it is precisely through the citationality of the speech act that the body emerges in a specifically linguistic form. I give some somatic feeling to you, or try to, when I say these words, and I want the words to carry that feeling from here to there to find its destination with you, and to be received there, or even to alter who you are and what you feel. Even as the utterance is citational, it is also transitive. But its transitivity is never actually automatic. One can receive the Hallmark card with the love proclamation printed in gold letters, and quickly throw it away without a second thought. Sometimes someone says “I love you” and we find them slightly mad or overwrought. We recoil, step away, turn away. And of course, that can always happen to us: there is a chance that our speech act will be refused, and when and if it is, we are ourselves refused, and we feel that refusal in a bodily way. So what then is the relation between speech and body here? It is crucial to remember, as Shoshana Felman has argued, that the speech act, when voiced, comes from the mouth and throat. The body is not only its vehicle, but something is bodied forth in the saying. Our body is not simply “over here” as a spatiotemporal given, but is itself given over, exposed, and “spoken” through the speech act that emerges either as sound, as text, or in some visual form. “The body...

Sentimental Figures of Empire in Eighteenth-Century Britain and France. Lynn Festa . Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006. Pp. viii+300.

Sentimental Figures of Empire in Eighteenth-Century Britain and France. Lynn Festa . Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006. Pp. viii+300.

Kunst mit Botschaft: Der Gold-Seide-Stoff für den Ilchan Abū Saʽīd von Iran (Grabgewand Rudolfs IV. in Wien) – Rekonstruktion, Typus, Repräsentationsmedium

A unique cloth of silk and gold with Arabic inscriptions praising the Ilkhan Abū Saʽīd “Būsaʽīd”), Mongol ruler of Iran (1316-35), survives in three pieces used for the burial garment of Rudolph IV at Vienna (d. 1365). Presenting some of the findings from a new study of this textile, this article reconstructs the original cloth, draws attention to a specific type of striped design and discusses its context of use. In the reconstructed cloth, bold inscriptions in broad golden letters, alternating with a delicate repeat pattern, ran lengthwise from both short sides in opposite reading directions. Meeting at some point in the cloth, they divided it into two parts, raising questions about its use. While striped designs are well-known, this monumental type with large inscriptions may have been a new form, relating to Iranian textile traditions and ṭirāz inscriptions in Islamic art; contemporaneous Chinese art seems to have had no particular bearing on the motifs. In the cloth as a medium of representation, monumental inscriptions and gold may have visually communicated an identity, both Islamic and Mongol, of the Ilkhanid ruler.

Letters of Gold: Enabling Primitive Accumulation through Neoliberal Conservation

In Capital I, Marx wrote that the history of the separation of the producers from the means of production “is written in the annals of mankind in letters of blood and fire” (Marx, 1976: 875). This ‘so-called primitive accumulation’, or ‘accumulation by dispossession’ in David Harvey's words, continues unabated. Yet, its framing has changed considerably. Increasingly, capitalists have tried to avoid writing primitive accumulation in ‘letters of blood and fire’. Instead, they focus on creating the ‘enabling environment’ for accumulation by positing neoliberal capitalism as the ‘only alternative’. This short essay focuses on nature conservation in Southern Africa to illustrate that this seemingly ‘civilized’ or ‘inevitable’ accumulation is none other than the induced self-marginalisation of local people under the ‘golden letters’ of win-win neoliberal conservation.

Your Brain on Fiction

In our daily practice as readers' advisors, we generally focus on the immediate issue at hand--getting book into the hands of particular reader. This is as it should be, and we need to be facile at providing our readers with appropriate suggestions that are based on our discussion with them about what appeals to them about their reading. It is also important, though, to step back occasionally and to think about how readers, rather than an individual reader, respond to what they read. Here, Duncan Smith describes his experience in working with reader over the past two decades in which he recorded her talking about her reading experience. Smith moves from the individual to the universal in suggesting that better understanding of the reading experience will allow readers' advisors to make more thoughtful suggestions to our readers. Smith is the creator and product manager of EBSCO Publishing's electronic readers' advisory resource NoveList. He inaugurated this column in the Winter 2000 issue of this journal, when Mary K. Chelton was its editor, with his article Talking with Readers.--Editor Ruiz Zafon's Shadow of the Wind opens with the ten-year-old main character Daniel, awakening from dream--a nightmare really. The nature of Daniel's bad dream is that he can no longer remember his mother's face. Daniel's mother had died six years earlier as result of cholera epidemic. Daniel's father runs bookshop, and that may explain his unusual solution for calming his son's fears. The father takes his son to secret and magical place called the Cemetery of Forgotten Books. You enter the cemetery through carved wooden door blackened by time and humidity. (1) To Daniel's eyes, the cemetery appears to be a carcass of palace, place of echoes and shadows. For Daniel's father and his colleagues who attend the Cemetery of Forgotten Books, have souls--the soul of the person who wrote it and of those who read it and lived and dreamed with it. Books are brought to the cemetery when they are no longer remembered. There they live forever waiting for the day when they will reach new reader's hands. It is tradition at the Cemetery of Forgotten Books that whenever someone enters its rooms for the first time, they choose book to adopt and make lifelong promise to keep the book alive by reading it, ensuring that it will never be forgotten again. Daniel's path to the book he adopts is reminiscent of the way many readers find books in libraries. He roams through row after row of shelves until title catches his eye. In his case, it is timid volume sitting on the corner of shelf bound in wine-colored leather with gold letters. Just like the readers who roam the stacks in our libraries, Daniel pulls the book off the shelf, flips through few pages, tucks the book under his arm and heads home. Back home, Daniel starts to read the book to which he has made lifelong commitment. As he reads the opening lines, Daniel experiences what happens to all of us when we start reading not just book but the right book. Once he starts reading, he cannot stop. He reads through the afternoon, through the evening. The world of the book becomes as real to him as the world of his room. He doesn't stop until he is finished, and once he is done he remembers something that one of his father's regular customers had said: Few things leave deeper mark on reader than the first book that finds its way into his heart. Those first images, the echo of words we think we have left behind accompany us throughout our lives and sculpt palace in our memory to which sooner or later no matter how many books we read, how many worlds we discover or how much we learn or forget--we will return. For Daniel, the book he adopted from the Cemetery of Forgotten Books was the book that found its way into his heart. The book's author was unknown to Daniel--Julian Carax. …

Saint Peter's, Leo the Great and the leprosy of Constantine

È possibile rialzare all'età di Costantino la datazione di due mosaici situati sull'arco di trionfo e sull'abside della basilica vaticana di San Pietro, sulla base della reinterprctazione delle loro iscrizioni. Sulla facciata della chiesa possiamo anche ricostruire il soggetto apocalittico di un terzo importante mosaico e attribuirlo al periodo di Papa Leone Magno (440–61). Alcune sillogi del VII secolo d.C. ci informano circa la presenza dell'immagine di Costantino accompagnata da una lunga iscrizione in cui si fa allusione alla sua guarigione miracolosa dalla lebbra e al suo battesimo. Questo testo ha evitato la discussione sull'origine dell'AchisSilvestri, che ha una notevole importanza in quanto è il primo documento che attesta chiaramente questa leggenda. Inoltre esso è significativamente connesso a Papa Leone Magno — nel contesto del dibattito circa la supremazia del papa di Roma — e probabilmente con la famiglia di Costantino stesso. Infatti il mosaico fu pagato da Flavius Avitus Marinianus, pretoriano prefetto del 422 e console un anno più tardi, e da sua moglie, Anastasia, che fu probabilmente una stranipote dell'imperatore Costantino.

Langdell's Prodigal Grandsons: On Duncan Kennedy's Critique of American Legal Education

At a stage of life when German law students habitually prepare to finish their studies by intravenously absorbing law at commercial preparation courses, American law student Duncan Kennedy had a somewhat different notion. In a law review article he virtually pulled to pieces what he had experienced as Ivy League education at Yale Law School. In 1983, meanwhile a member of an Ivy League law school faculty, Kennedy resumed his critique in a self-published pamphlet widely known as the Little Red Book. Although being available only at the Harvard bookstore or via mail order from the author, Kennedy's statement has gained quite remarkable fame. It has been reviewed by the most esteemed law reviews, and has been quoted and widely discussed among legal scholars. Now the Little Red Book has even formally arrived in the ivory tower of legal academia: handsomely published, equipped with a fore- and afterword by the author, encompassed by thoughtful essays and, yes, gold letters engraved on the spine. The typescript of the original book however, once consciously produced in a semi-professional manner with a circulation of around 3000 copies, has been preserved. Thus readers do hold the original text in their hands, despite gold gravure.

The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists

Back to table of contents Previous article Next article Book ReviewsFull AccessThe Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup ArtistsAlan D. Schmetzer M.D.Alan D. Schmetzer M.D.Search for more papers by this authorPublished Online:1 May 2006https://doi.org/10.1176/ps.2006.57.5.736AboutSectionsPDF/EPUB ToolsAdd to favoritesDownload CitationsTrack Citations ShareShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InEmail The book The Game is another of Neil Strauss's biographies, but this book is partly autobiographical and a brief history of a group of self-styled "pickup artists"—people who essentially make a full-time career of trying to achieve multiple sexual conquests. The book has a thin, leather-like cover, gold lettering, and a bound-in ribbon bookmark, much like a Bible. The symbolism is intentional, as the book chapters are based on specific techniques and "moves" that form a "bible" of the art of seduction—how to "select a target," "approach and open," remove "the obstacles," "create an emotional connection," and so forth. Although "men will deny it" and "women will doubt it," Strauss declares this to be a true story and asks that the reader blame not the players but The Game. The book features a number of theories or "schools" of seduction. The running thread throughout is the author's search for his own perfect pickup technique and for a sense of satisfaction in life. The Game's goal is to be able to pick out a random "target" person in any setting, no matter how many competing companions are already present, and by virtue of the right combination of behaviors, body language, and words develop an attraction that ends with a phone number, a kiss, or the ultimate prize—a sexual encounter. Strauss arranges to meet various instructor-mentors, the "gurus," from whom to learn along the way. Each guru has had to study the art of the pickup as a set of behaviors to be analyzed and reduced to a given formula that he can both use and teach to other "nerdy" types, as they are called, during weekend workshops.The author goes from one guru to the next, perfecting his own style, and, in fact, he renames himself "Style." But by the end of the book, Strauss tires of The Game and does not like the way his new perspective has objectified women. Because of his new-found techniques, though, he finally finds one woman who is more than a conquest to him.The journey is liberally sprinkled with cameo appearances by celebrities, like Heidi Fleiss, Tom Cruise, and Paris Hilton, to name a few, and both domestic and foreign exotic locales. Strauss is able to laugh at his own foibles as well as describe the despair that can come with a narrow or shallow approach to life.This book has sufficient psychological and social subtext to be of interest to psychiatrists, psychologists, and other mental health professionals, both as a diversion and perhaps as a warning of how boundary violations could begin. Many of the described techniques sound plausible, and, for people so inclined, they might even work!Dr. Schmetzer is professor and assistant chair for medicine in the department of psychiatry at the Indiana University School of Medicine in Indianapolis. FiguresReferencesCited byDetailsCited ByNone Volume 57Issue 5 May, 2006Pages 736-736PSYCHIATRIC SERVICES May 2006 Volume 57 Number 5 Metrics PDF download History Published online 1 May 2006 Published in print 1 May 2006

The Oldest Daughter Visits the Scene

The Oldest Daughter Visits the Scene D. L. Hall (bio) On State Road 715, between Pahokee and Belle Glade, a white Buick Regal and a green station wagon race toward each other like magnets on a collision course. A gray fog is rising from the sugar cane fields on both sides of this highway. The northbound Regal passes an old truck also headed to Pahokee. As it passes, it runs off the western shoulder. The startled driver yanks the wheel too hard to the right. Her car shoots back across the northbound lane. As this happens, high above this scene, beyond the moon and stars, a row of dominoes begins to teeter in a slow, deliberate motion. Eleven children are sleeping safely at home. When they wake, they'll hear news that will end their childhoods. The Regal shoots across the lane in front of the truck and runs off the road on the east side. The driver yanks hard to the left. The car lunges left again, heads west, crosses the yellow line. The station wagon slows and tries to pull off the road, but it cannot get far enough away. For a brief moment the two drivers click into each other's sight. In their eyes there is recognition of something planned long ago, before birth, before this life. There is a moment before they hit that they know all their roads have led to this spot. After the brief surprise there is a knowing that fills each driver's body just before their cars kiss. The cars strike each other front to front, engine to engine, like the fists of a fighter, but there is no anger. There is simply a collision of fates. Free-falling dominoes echo through eleven childrens' dreams as both cars collapse in and up; their hoods bend upward from the bottom like tin lids lifted from a can. The driver of the Regal is thrown forward first; the gearshift punctures her chest. When her last breath is punched out of her body, [End Page 83] she is already above the scene. To her surprise and relief, the woman's oldest daughter's future spirit is there to hold her hand. Together they watch as her body, below them, is thrown into the back seat. Her necklace breaks, and her car keys bend. Her bones snap. She bleeds from a cut across her face. The driver of the station wagon dies from the impact. His passenger is unconscious and bleeding. Her knees are crushed by the weight of the dash. The driver of the white truck pulls over. He peeks into the white car. The lady is lying in the backseat with a strand of gray hair stuck to the side of her open mouth. She isn't breathing. He crosses the street and looks into the green car. He can't see the driver who is under the dashboard, but the passenger is breathing. Cars slow down and stop. "Are they alive?" a sugar mill worker asks. A semi truck pulls up and radios for the police. The man from the truck waves at people to go on around, but this is the Glades. Every car that passes knows it must be someone they know, but cars are too bent up to recognize. A young policeman arrives, tired from the night shift. He knows the lady in the Regal, but he doesn't recognize the car. He looks like a marine, strong and handsome in his blue suit. When he sees the side of the white car, his knees buckle. He stops and stares. No, he says to himself. Don't let it be. He walks a little closer and reads the gold lettering of the car's name, hanging on its side. He walks back to his car and puts his hands on the hood, whispering "I told her, I told her." The man from the truck says, "We called an ambulance. There's a lady alive in the green car." He looks up and nods. The green car is smashed and smoking from oil on its hot motor. Just beyond, banana trees line the ditch by the skating rink. All...