“Temperate and Nearly Cloudless”: The 9/11 Commission Report as Postmodern Pastiche

“Tuesday, September 11, 2001 dawned temperate and nearly cloudless in the eastern United States”. Thus begins Chapter One of the 9/11 Commission Report, a chapter that bears the title, “‘We have Some Planes’”. As with all good pop fiction, the reader awaits to see what this quote means, although we know already that it will mark a crucial moment, one that renders the innocuous urgent, or gives meaning to a startling chaos of coincidence. Pop culture has taught us the formula well: Everything looks fine; high school kids sip pop and dance in front of the juke box; Ole Doc Jones is mowin’ the lawn while Mrs. Jones makes lemonade. BUT strange noises have been heard in the cellar; no one can find the cat; Mr. Grundy insists he saw flashing lights last night, but no one believes him because Mrs. Grundy says he’s been acting strange ever since she flushed his Viagra; mysteriously, all the clocks in Indianapolis have started running fast or slow by exactly 24 hours. Then we hear the message on the police radio: “we’ve got some planes…as large as football fields hovering over every Wall-Mart in the nation”. At last someone will believe the geeky newspaper boy and his big brother’s girlfriend, who knew all along he was on to something. Let’s hope it’s not too late

Panel. Cold War Faulkner

The Unlikely Patriot: Faulkner as Cold Warrior and Goodwill Ambassador for the U. S. Department of State / Deborah Cohn, Indiana UniversityBetween 1954 and 1961, Faulkner was recruited by the State Department to serve as good will ambassador and travel to “strategic” countries in Latin America, Asia, and Europe. These were the years of the Cold War, and as a Nobel Prize winner, Faulkner’s very person attested to the height of U.S. cultural achievement, while his style was figured as expressing artistic—and, by extension, democratic—freedom, as well as opposition to the social realism underpinning officially sanctioned Soviet politics and art. In this paper, I examine how constructions of Faulkner as both southerner and American interacted with one another on these tours. I further study how both his official travels and his pronouncements on race relations in the United States played directly into the State Department’s battle against communism. We—He and Us—Should Confederate: Intruder in the Dust, the Dixiecrat Campaign, and Faulkner\u27s Cold War Agenda / Alan Nadel, University of KentuckyIntruder in the Dust conducts a dialogue with Strom Thurman’s 1948 Dixiecrat Presidential Campaign, in the context of Cold War premises that inform Faulkner’s Nobel Prize speech. These premises, consistent with the policy of “containment,” made segregation a palpable threat to the nation’s ability to win the Cold War. To reimagine a nation in which the South participates in, rather than obstructs, the struggle to prevail over Communism, Faulkner stages, in the events surrounding the death of Vinson Gowrie, the end of the “separate but equal” doctrine supported the Supreme Court under Chief Justice Fred Vinson. In so doing, Faulkner adapts Great Expectations by inverting the power dynamics of Dickens’s novel, placing the child in the role of Magwitch who must devote his life to repaying the man—here Beauchamp—who saved him in the marshes. This inversion enables Faulkner to embrace the principles of the Dixiecrat campaign in order to renounce its objective. William Faulkner and the Problem of Cold War Modernism / Harilaos Harry Stecopoulos, University of IowaThis paper examines Faulkner’s most difficult experience with U.S. cultural diplomacy: his participation in the People-to-People (PTP) program. I first examine the absurd, yet pointed, letter with which Faulkner began his official duties for the PTP program, and then turn to his wry commentary on cold war modernism in The Mansion (1959). Through a linked reading of those two texts, I argue that Faulkner’s work for the PTP program prompted an attempt to reclaim from the cold war state the very modernist aesthetic he was meant to wield on behalf of the anti-Communist struggle. That attempt took fragmented shape, but in its very messiness, Faulkner’s riposte to the state made manifest the writer’s refusal to surrender his aesthetic to those cold warriors who found in modernism little more than a propagandistic symbol of artistic and popular freedom

The brain decade in debate: I. Neurobiology of learning and memory

This article is a transcription of an electronic symposium in which some active researchers were invited by the Brazilian Society for Neuroscience and Behavior (SBNeC) to discuss the last decade's advances in neurobiology of learning and memory. The way different parts of the brain are recruited during the storage of different kinds of memory (e.g., short-term vs long-term memory, declarative vs procedural memory) and even the property of these divisions were discussed. It was pointed out that the brain does not really store memories, but stores traces of information that are later used to create memories, not always expressing a completely veridical picture of the past experienced reality. To perform this process different parts of the brain act as important nodes of the neural network that encode, store and retrieve the information that will be used to create memories. Some of the brain regions are recognizably active during the activation of short-term working memory (e.g., prefrontal cortex), or the storage of information retrieved as long-term explicit memories (e.g., hippocampus and related cortical areas) or the modulation of the storage of memories related to emotional events (e.g., amygdala). This does not mean that there is a separate neural structure completely supporting the storage of each kind of memory but means that these memories critically depend on the functioning of these neural structures. The current view is that there is no sense in talking about hippocampus-based or amygdala-based memory since this implies that there is a one-to-one correspondence. The present question to be solved is how systems interact in memory. The pertinence of attributing a critical role to cellular processes like synaptic tagging and protein kinase A activation to explain the memory storage processes at the cellular level was also discussed.University of Bristol Department of PsychologyUniversidade Federal de São Paulo (UNIFESP) Departamento de PsicobiologiaUniversity of California Center for Neurobiology of Learning and Memory Department of Neurobiology and BehaviorUniversity of California Neuropsychiatric InstituteUniversidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul Instituto de Biociências Departamento de BioquímicaUniversity of Edinburgh Department of NeuroscienceUniversity of Arizona Department of PsychologyNorthwestern UniversityUniversidade de São Paulo Instituto de Biociências Departamento de FisiologiaUniversidade Federal do Paraná Departamento de Farmacologia Laboratório de Fisiologia e Farmacologia do Sistema Nervoso CentralUNIFESP, Depto. de PsicobiologiaSciEL

Toward a second-person neuroscience

LS & BT : equal contributions (shared first-authorship)Peer reviewedPreprin

"Temperate and Nearly Cloudless": The 9/11 Commission Report as Postmodern Pastiche

�Tuesday, September 11, 2001 dawned temperate and nearly cloudless in the eastern United States�. Thus begins Chapter One of the 9/11 Commission Report, a chapter that bears the title, ��We have Some Planes��. As with all good pop fiction, the reader awaits to see what this quote means, although we know already that it will mark a crucial moment, one that renders the innocuous urgent, or gives meaning to a startling chaos of coincidence. Pop culture has taught us the formula well: Everything looks fine; high school kids sip pop and dance in front of the juke box; Ole Doc Jones is mowin� the lawn while Mrs. Jones makes lemonade. BUT strange noises have been heard in the cellar; no one can find the cat; Mr. Grundy insists he saw flashing lights last night, but no one believes him because Mrs. Grundy says he�s been acting strange ever since she flushed his Viagra; mysteriously, all the clocks in Indianapolis have started running fast or slow by exactly 24 hours. Then we hear the message on the police radio: �we�ve got some planes�as large as football fields hovering over every Wall-Mart in the nation�. At last someone will believe the geeky newspaper boy and his big brother�s girlfriend, who knew all along he was on to something. Let�s hope it�s not too lat

My Mind is Weak but my Body is Strong : George Plimpton and the Boswellian Tradition

Comments on the “Boswell technique” of interviewing, which aims “to elicit the maximum rise from (the) subject and thus guarantee the most dynamic copy.” Recounts the interview between Plimpton and Hemingway in which Plimpton asked the most mundane and irritating questions