Passionate Attention Research Articles

Aesthetics of dis-ability: A Short Study on Samuel Beckett’s Endgame

Locke, while writing his Second Treatise on Civil Government in 1689 states that all men by nature are ‘free, equal and independent’ but is everyone equal? We know by now that equity is the means through which true equality can be achieved but in order to make a change, we also need to accept the fact that ‘normalcy’ is nothing but a social construct. All those whom our society regard as ‘abnormal’, ‘incompetent’ or ‘non-productive’ have the right to live as much as ‘normal’ people do. When it comes to persons with disabilities, it gets even more complicated by the existing taboo. A sense of uneasiness and discomfort prevail whenever we confront bodies un-like our own. Some tend to sympathise while others tend to dismiss it altogether. Samuel Beckett tries to break this taboo by making use of characters in his writings who with their decomposing bodies, make an attempt to live the absurdities of life. His characters ‘stare at death with passionate attention’ but do not commit suicide because they are tenacious enough to live. Afterall as Molloy says, ‘To decompose is to live too’. The paper analyses Beckett’s Endgame in terms of disability and aesthetics. It aims to explore how the playwright makes use of theatre as a device to shatter the camera obscura that the bourgeoisie order maintains on bodies that it cannot contain. The able-bodied people witness man at his most vulnerable, striving to sustain by taking help of others thereby realising that co-dependency is evident and inevitable.

“A Bubble of Happiness and Visionary Beauty”: The Mystical Feminist Art of Barbara Mendes

“A Bubble of Happiness and Visionary Beauty”: The Mystical Feminist Art of Barbara Mendes Judith Margolis (bio) A recurring touchstone of Barbara Mendes’s art is the no-holds-barred inclusion of EVERYTHING. In hyper-detailed colorful paintings and black-and-white comicstrip drawings, Barbara delivers visionary spiritual narratives intertwined with a mix of irreverent, “big-mouthed” (her description), forthright, in your face, telling-it-like-it-is stories. Unexpected and moving is the relentless desire for communication with the Divine—an inclination that is personal, authentic, sincere and, it turns out, stupendously entertaining. Mendes, who lived the “Earth Mother” counterculture life in Southern Oregon, uses sequenced drawings to depict life lessons drawn from Bible stories, scenes from her Ashkenazi relatives’ lives and her own rural 1970s West Coast hippie life. Her ability to elucidate the commonalities in these experiences brings a juicy authenticity to her images.1 Barbara tells her story by way of a pungent crossover of fine art painting and outrageously intricate Comix-style drawings, laced with feminist woman-centered consciousness, goddesses and psychedelic imagery. Her personal narrative, woven throughout, reveals how crucial choices made under the combined influence of peyote and yeshiva learning have informed her life and her art. After attending art school in Manhattan, Mendes, born and raised in the New York metropolitan area in a secular family with proud Russian and Sefardi Jewish roots, set off on a life journey that would include San Francisco, southern Oregon and Los Angeles—coinciding in astonishing ways with my own diasporic journey, which began in the Bronx, New York and suburban New Jersey. What was the likelihood that we would both go from being rural counterculture farmers to becoming Torah-observant Jews? When she was living in the tiny town of Kerby, Oregon, I was living just a few miles away, on a commune in Takilma. Yet we only met in Los Angeles in 2009, when I was artist-in-residence at The 18th Street Art Center in Santa Monica and co-curating Women of the Book, an International Women’s Torah Midrash project. My friends Abby Yasgur and Joey Lipner had collaborated [End Page 149] in writing Max Said Yes, about the iconic music festival of Woodstock, and Barbara’s illustrations for it attracted my attention. I recruited her for Women of the Book, resulting in the inclusion of her colorful, psychedelic painting for the Torah portion of Kedoshim (Leviticus 19:1–20:27) in that body of work. Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 2. Barbara Mendes, cover illustration for Abby Yasgur and Joseph Lipner, Max Said Yes (Los Angeles: Change the Universe Press, 2009). In her mural laying out the ten Torah portions (parashot) in the book of Vayikra (Leviticus), Mendes the utopian visionary demonstrates her enthusiastic and passionate attention to detail, as she describes in pictures how to be holy and how to [End Page 150] be like God. Her drawings convey her complete immersion in the specifics of these stories. She told me in conversation: Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 3. Barbara Mendes, illustration in Abby Yasgur and Joseph Lipner, Max Said Yes. The Queen of Cosmos’s shawl is the moon and stars. In retelling the story, I suggest moral improvement by showing the people not only giving money to the poor, but giving a whole meal. The mural shows what should be, going beyond “not putting a stumbling block before the blind” to helping the disabled. I won’t name names, but in depicting evil, I based the details on real people with real flaws. [End Page 151] Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 4. Barbara Mendes, Vayikra mural. 2009. Oil on canvas. 72" × 192". Collection of the artist. [End Page 153] Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 5. Barbara Mendes, Vayikra mural, detail. Now “lapsed from observance,” as she puts it, Mendes remains deeply engaged in Jewish life, learning and culture. At the same time, her deeply feminist consciousness just won’t let her alone: [End Page 154] Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 6. Barbara Mendes, Vayikra mural, detail. I see the Queen of Cosmos everywhere...

Mark Twain's Literary Resources: A Reconstruction of His Library and Reading, Volume One

Mark Twain's Literary Resources: A Reconstruction of His Library and Reading, Volume One

Screening for prevention of sudden death in the young: what is new?

The optimal approach to screening young people to decrease the risk of sudden death remains unknown. It deserves the passionate attention that researchers, clinicians and families have given it. The new data from January 2018 to July 2019 are reviewed here. Cardiac findings associated with a risk of sudden death were reported in 0.4% of screened athletes. Well run programs continue report varying sensitivity for screening ECGs (between 86 and 100%). One major article reported a higher incidence of sudden death in young people than has been previously published (6.8/100 000 athletes). The rate of important findings in sophisticated screening programs is approximately 0.4%, suggesting that this is near the population rate of detectable disease in most athletic groups. ECGs are unquestionably capable of detecting disease that can be missed by history and physical, but the performance characteristics of ECGs continue to vary from study to study. In addition, the underlying cost and infrastructure of ECG and echocardiographic screening remains unaddressed by the recent literature. A few small studies have started to look at alternative technology approaches to ECG screening. VIDEO ABSTRACT.

Review of HRESs based on storage options, system architecture and optimisation criteria and methodologies

The fast-growing awareness of depleting fossil fuel and the adverse impact of conventional energy generation methods on the environment has brought passionate attention to renewable energy sources (RE source). Owing to stochastic nature of energy production from renewable energy system (RES), two or more sources are combined to form hybrid RE system (HRES). Optimisation of size, cost and reliability of power production of HRES are important factors in the planning of HRES. This study presents a review of optimisation tools and constraints on which HRES system is optimised. The types of storage/backup system available for HRES are also presented in this study.

Erratum to: Fabrication of reduced graphene oxide nanosheets doped PVA composite films for tailoring their opto-mechanical properties

Laminar graphene nanosheets have raised passionate attention due to their incredible physico-chemical properties. Its wide-scale, high-yield production at low-cost has made it possible to produce top class promising versatile polymer nanocomposites. Reduced graphene oxide (RGO) nanosheets were incorporated to prepare optically tunable and high mechanical strength polymer nanocomposite films. RGO-doped poly(vinyl alcohol) (PVA) nanocomposite films were prepared via solution casting. Low level RGO doping significantly altered the structural, optical and mechanical properties of pure PVA films. Most of the band structure parameters like direct/indirect band gap, band tail, refractive index, dielectric constant, optical conductivity and dispersion parameters were investigated in detail for the first time. Tauc’s, Wemple–DiDomenico, Helpin–Tsai and mixture rule models were employed to investigate optical and mechanical parameters. The applied models reinforced the experimental results in the present study. Advanced analytical techniques were engaged to characterize the nanocomposites films.

Of Sensual Matters: On Audre Lorde's "Poetry Is Not a Luxury" and "Uses of the Erotic"

We are very familiar with the philosophical discussion about the relationship between the senses and the intellect. After all, writers such as Spinoza, Hume, Saussure, and Freud acquainted us with the idea that the intellect and the senses are in conversation with one another. Far from being a purely philosophical matter, though, the connections between the senses and the intellect were very much a part of the social movements of the late 1960s and afterward. Indeed, we can safely argue that those movements - in their own ways - represented a rehabilitation of the senses for the purposes of revolutionary change. One of the exemplars of this way of thinking was the writer, teacher, and artist Audre Lorde. As her classic essays Poetry Is Not a Luxury and Uses of the Erotic demonstrate, hers would be a progressive vision with certain affective and sensual mobilizations.Poetry Is Not a Luxury: Senses, Self, and Affect in Social TransformationPoetry Is Not a Luxury was first published in 1977 in Chrysalis: A Magazine of Female Culture. As Alexis De Veaux writes in her biography of Lorde, this feminist quarterly was important because it provided a platform for an emerging body of feminist cultural (2004, 177), publishing writers and theorists such as Michelle Cliff, Adrienne Rich, Mary Daly, and Lucy Lippard. Assuming the position of poetry editor in 1977, Lorde used that post to advance a theory of poetry that was personally and socially meaningful for women and to seed the very ideas that would culminate in her classic essay.Defining poetry as illumination, she begins the essay by arguing, quality of light by which we scrutinize our lives has direct bearing upon the product which we live, and upon the changes which we hope to bring about through those lives. It is within this light that we form those ideas by which we pursue our magic and make it realized (Lorde 1984, 36). For Lorde, poetry was a way to enact an intimate scrutiny needed for personal and social transformation, a way to critically engage the to set the stage for new interventions and articulations. In this way, poetry would be the linchpin between the personal and the social, [giving] name to those ideas which are - until the poem - nameless and formless, about to be birthed but already felt (36).Lorde s theory about engaging the as a way to initiate social transformations was part of a historical moment that placed new emphasis on connections between self- and collective transformations, emphases produced by a variety of social movements in the post- 1960s moment. In her own reflections about the 1970s, for instance, Toni Cade Bambara observed this about the as a catalyst for social change:The energy of the seventies is very different from that of the previous decade - The of American-style democracy, the bold analytical and passionate attention to our condition, status, and process - the whole experience ofthat era led to a particular spot in time, in the seventies. Some say it's been a period of retreat, of amnesia, of withdrawal into narcissism. I'm not so sure. I'd say the seventies is characterized by a refocusing on the self, which is, after all, the main instrument for self, group and social transformation. ( 1983, 13)Bambara in the passage sees the turn toward the revision of the as a means of critically attending to structural revisions. As a figure that arose in the demystification of American-style 'democracy,' the self that Bambara posits is not at all the of liberal individualism. Not willing to frame the revision of the as part of the declension of revolutionary ideals or as a capitulation to liberal democratic ideology, Bambara - like Lorde - understands the attention to the as an aesthetics of existence with personal and collective intentions, intentions that are appointed not for the continuation of liberal social formations but for their abolition. …

Ferromagnetism in Cu-doped ZnSe semiconducting quantum dots

The projection of integrating optical, magnetic and electronic functionalities into a single material have aggravated passionate attention in mounting wide band gap diluted magnetic semiconductor (DMS) in the midst of room temperature ferromagnetism. We report the evidence of ferromagnetism in Cu-doped ZnSe quantum dots (QDs) below room temperature, grown from a single source precursor by lyothermal method with the sizes of approximately 3.2–5.14 nm. QDs mainly exhibit paramagnetic behavior between 80 and 300 K, with a weak ferromagnetic/anti-ferromagnetic exchange at lower temperature as observed by superconducting quantum interference device (SQUID) magnetometer. From the Curie–Weiss behavior of the susceptibility, Curie temperature (T c) of Cu-doped ZnSe sample has been evaluated. From EPR, we obtain the Lande-g factor in the Zeeman interaction term as 2.060. Photoluminescence and EPR measurements support and confirm the view that Cu2+ substitutes for Zn2+ in Cu-doped ZnSe quantum dots.

Passionate attention and the psychophysiology of entrepreneurial intuition: a quantum-holographic theory

Successful entrepreneurs are passionate, innovative risk assessors whose actions are informed by accurate intuitions about future business opportunities. Often this intuitive foreknowledge involves perception of implicit information about nonlocal objects and/or events by the body's psychophysiological systems. A large body of experimental evidence has documented intuitive foreknowledge as a scientific fact, and recent studies using electrophysiological measures of autonomic nervous system activity have shown that such nonlocal intuition is related to the degree of emotional significance of the future event. A recent pilot study has found compelling evidence of intuitive foreknowledge in repeat entrepreneurs. Drawing on these findings and the principles of quantum holography, I develop a theory of nonlocal intuition. The theory explains how passionate attention directed to the object of interest (such as a potential future business opportunity) attunes the body's psychophysiological systems to a domain of quantum-holographic information, which contains implicit information about the object's future. The body's perception of this information is experienced by the entrepreneur as an intuition.

Building for the Raj: Richard Roskell Bayne

En 1995, l’Université de Victoria a acheté une collection de 735 dessins, aquarelles, plans d’architecture et autres éléments qui document la vie et la carrière de Richard Roskell Bayne (1836–1901), un architecte anglais et employé de la East India Railway Company qui a exercé sa profession à Kolkata et dans d’autres villes de l’Inde entre 1866 et 1890. Au début de sa carrière, Bayne a fait entre 1864 et 1866 un grand voyage d’études en Europe, au cours duquel il a réalisé des dessins d’édifices historiques et d’ornementations architecturales pour le compte de Heaton, Butler and Bayne, l’entreprise de vitraux de son frère Robert. Richard a produit des centaines des dessins d’un style raffiné en France, en Espagne, aux Pays Bas, en Italie et en Turquie et il s’est toujours intéressé à l’architecture de l’Inde. Le fait que plusieurs de ses dessins aient été mesurés laisse supposer qu’il a eu l’intention de les publier. À titre d’ingénieur-architecte des chemins de fer, il a dessiné non seulement des ponts, des gares, et des maisons, mais aussi des édifices plus monumentaux (East India Railway Office, Kolkata; New Market dans la même ville; Thornhill and Mayne Memorial, Allahabad; Hussainabad Clock Tower, Lucknow; Oak Grove School, Mussoorie et le palais du maharaja de Durbunga). Après avoir quitté l’Inde en 1892, il s’est établi comme architecte à Victoria. L’année suivante, il a participé au concours international pour la construction du Parlement de la Colombie britannique, mais sans succès. Il est mort en 1901.

Rationality, Agency, Contingency: Recent Trends in the History of Technology

When the Society for the History of Technology (SHOT) launched itself in the late 1950s, many U.S. historians found a compelling postwar framework for organizing research around an American consensus. SHOT’s founding generation participated in the scholarly spirit of the time although with its own particular emphases. Cold War ideology and a morally idealistic engineering creed defined technology, if well funded and unfettered by local political passions, as leading in a clean line toward democratic societies. Apart from this technologically specified version of American hegemonic progress, the received stereotype for technological history in the 1950s was no interpretation at all. Half a millennium of curiosity about artifacts had crystallized in a balkanized landscape, islands of passionate attention to minute changes over time in one’s artifact of choice—clocks, trains, automobiles, machine tools, weapons. An antiquarian paradigm and compelling Cold War urgency marked SHOT’s beginnings as a (barely) visible discipline in 1958. 1 Still, a handful of landmark books had begun to suggest new directions. Lewis Mumford and Siegfried S. Giedion, in particular, achieved an international reputation for major synthetic interpretations of western technological style. Louis Hunter’s Steamboats on the Western Rivers and I. B. Holley’s Ideas and Weapons: Exploitation of the Aerial Weapon by the United States During World War One were less broadly known but considered breakthrough works within SHOT, comprehensive histories that situated technologies in the rich economic and political context of their times. 2 The founders understood their journal title as a move from internalism toward the still inchoate approach seen in Mumford, Giedion, Holley, and Hunter. The new journal would emphasize context: Technology and Culture. Two principles more or less defined their emerging methodology. First, every technology has a context of origin. Historical actors, specific in motive, worldview, and resources, shape technologies, as does the ambient social order. Second, technological actors think distinctively; from the beginning, historians of technology almost unanimously rejected the received popular notion of technology as “applied science.” Engineers use science as one

Rousseau et Homère

Yves Touchefeu : Rousseau and Homer. The opposition, for J.-J. Rousseau, of the values of nature and the polity is well known, as is the fact the Discourse on the Origins of Inequality and the Essay on the Origin of Language celebrate the beginning of society which, at the dawn of history, allowed for a golden mean between the indolence of primitive life and the tension of civil life. This explains why Rousseau paid such passionate attention to Homer, for the world of Achilles and Ulysses led him to precisely those important moments at which emerging society was as if in tune with the natural order. The reference to Homer is particularly present in Emile. While this treatise on education begins by opposing categorically the education of the individual and that of the citizen, the Homeric imagery invites the reader to dream of a time when the two figures of "natural man" and "citizen" were not yet clearly separated into their contradictory relationship.

Levertov and Rilke: A Sense of Aesthetic Ethics

It is ironic that at the very beginning of her career one of the poets with whom Denise Levertov was immediately associated was the Czech poet Rainer Maria Rilke. As Harry Marten has noted: Kenneth Rexroth, an early anthologizer of her work, linked her loosely with a diverse group of post-Second World War British neoromantic poets whose work exhibits a ruminative melancholy of the sort displayed Stephen Spender's and J.B. Leischman's popular and influential translations of Rainer Maria Rilke. Noting that this sort of verse has a dreamy, nostalgic sorrow about it . Rexroth observed that in poets like Denise Levertov this poetry reaches its height slow, pulsating rhythms, romantic melancholy, and undefined nostalgia. (8-9) What makes this association ironic is the listing of qualities on which it is based. For although Levertov's apparent affinity with did fact develop into a lifelong connection, that connection rests on entirely different grounds than those suggested above. Levertov herself has spelled out considerable detail the history of her interest Rilke. In the concluding essay of Light Up the Cave, Rilke as Mentor, she describes how she already been writing for many years, and had been reading for seven or eight, when I first came to America and began to read Williams, Pound, and Stevens (283). Indeed, as decisive as was the influence of the last three--especially William Carlos Williams--on her subsequent development, all the useful and marvelously stimulating technical and aesthetic tendencies that I came upon the 1950s were absorbed into a ground prepared not only by my English and European cultural background general but more particularly by Rilke's concept of the artist's task. (283) Thus helped prepare the cultural and conceptual ground which all these new tendencies so fruitfully grew. But he did more. In many respects he also helped Levertov attain that very balance which has been fundamental to her achievement as a poet--the balance between what she has called her sense of the pilgrim way and her new, American, objectivist-influenced, pragmatic, and sensuous longing for the Here and Now (PW 69). For if Williams can be viewed as the main source of the latter, must be viewed as a primary source of the former, as perhaps the single most important spokeman for inner experience, for the translation of the visible into the invisible--for the transcendence of simple mimesis favor of spiritual realization. It was early 1947, according to Levertov, that she began making her own index for Rilke's Selected Letters, in many ways the most important book of Rilke's that I obtained (LC 284). And one of the passages she not only indexed but underlined(1) is the famous passage where describes as to impress this fragile and transient earth so sufferingly, so passionately upon our hearts that its essence shall rise up again, invisible, us. We are the bees of the Invisible. The |Duino~ Elegies show us engaged on this work, the work of perpetual of beloved and tangible things into the invisible vibration and excitability of our nature. (Selected Letters 394) If, then, such transformation is our task--a task incumbent upon not just artists but human beings general(2)--it is impossible that any kind of merely documentary realism (PW 90) should satisfy. Though one begins with a passionate attention to things, one does not remain trapped a world of objects precisely because one's attention is so passionate.(3) On more than one occasion, Levertov quotes with approval Rilke's insistence that If a thing is to speak to you, you must for a certain time regard it as the only thing that exists, the unique phenomenon that your diligent and exclusive love has placed at the center of the universe, something the angels serve that very day upon that matchless spot. …

Literacy as “Passionate Attention”

Literacy as “Passionate Attention”

MENTAL HEALTH'S THIRD REVOLUTION.

There have been three mental health revolutions. Pinel led the first, bringing humane concern for the mentally ill; Freud led the second, bringing passionate attention to the intrapsychic life of man. The third revolution, now in the making, is appropriately a corporate effort without an eponym as yet. Mental health, always a public health problem, is finally adopting public health strategies, with strong support from some quarters and resistance from others.