Commencement address

Address to the graduating class of 1964 by Howard Nemerov, member of the Faculty of Literature and Languages at Bennington College, on leave during 1963 while serving as Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress

RISK AS A STRUCTURAL ELEMENT OF MODERN CIVILIZATION IN THE “RISK SOCIETY” CONCEPT BY ULRICH BECK

Цель. Статья посвящена актуальной проблеме бытия современного общества, специфической особенностью которого постоянное взаимодействие с рисками. В качестве предмета анализа выступает концепция «общества риска», сформулированная Ульрихом Беком для обозначения специфического способа обращения с неопределённостью. Целью, которую ставит перед собой автор, является анализ содержания ключевых характеристик общества риска в условиях современной социальной действительности.Метод или методология проведения работы. Основу исследования образуют герменевтический и феноменологический методы.Результаты. Результаты работы заключаются в том, что автор эксплицирует понятие «общество риска», введённое У. Беком для характеристики современной цивилизации. Постоянная модернизация формирует необходимость рискованного поведения. Риски становятся неотъемлемой частью социальной реальности, так как они являются результатом нормального развития общества, а не каких-либо катаклизмов и «патологий». Поэтому главной специфической особенностью бытия современной цивилизации является её рискогенный характер, так как она сама постоянно порождает риски.Область применения результатов. Результаты работы могут быть применены в сферах связанных с управлением и прогнозированием рисков в обществе (риск-менеджмент).Purpose. The article is focused on the problem of existence of the modern society the specific feature of which is the constant interactions with risks. The “risk society” concept formulated by Ulrich Beck to define the specific way of dealing with the uncertainty is under analysis. The aim of the study is to analyze the content of the key characteristics of risk society in the conditions of modern social reality.Methodology. Hermeneutic and phenomenological methods constitute the basis of the research.Results. The author explicates the ”risk society” concept introduced by U. Beck to characterize the modern civilization. The constant modernization causes the need for risky behaviour. Risks become the integral part of the social reality as they are the result of the adequate development of the society but not of cataclysms and pathology. Hence, the main specific peculiarity of the existence of the modern civilization is its risk-generating character because it is constantly engendering risks.Practical implications. The results of the work can be applied to the spheres of human activity connected with the risk management and forecasting

ОДЫШКА, СВЯЗАННАЯ С ТРЕВОГОЙ: ОШИБКИ И ТРУДНОСТИ ДИАГНОСТИКИ

Two clinical cases that demonstrate the difficulties diagnosing the causes of shortness of breath, coupled with anxiety, are analyzed. From the standpoint of modern neurophysiology it explains the relationship of these conditions. There were revealed typical diagnostic mistakes: «the effect of precocious focusing", "the negative effect of the narrow specializationПроанализированы два клинических наблюдения, демонстрирующие трудности диагностики при-чин одышки, сочетающейся с тревогой. С позиций современной нейрофизиологии объясняется взаимосвязь этих состояний. Раскрываются характерные диагностические ошибки: «эффект ран-ней фокусировки», «негативный эффект узкой специализации»

Analysis of haplotypes of CAT, TLR4, and IL10 genes in bronchial asthma patients comorbid with arterial hypertension

Co-occurrence of cardiovascular diseases is significantly common among patients with bronchial asthma. Genetic factors can have a significant effect on the development of hypertension in patients with asthma. Objective of the study was to investigate the associations of polymorphic variants relating to quantitative changes in the expression profile (eQTL) of the CAT, TLR4, and IL10 genes with the development of bronchial asthma co-morbid with arterial hypertension.Material and methods. Genotyping of 48 eQTL SNPs of the CAT, TLR4, and IL10 genes was performed using MALDI-TOF mass spectrometry in patients with «isolated» asthma (n = 145) and arterial hypertension (n = 144) and their combination (n = 146), as well as in the control group of healthy individuals (n = 152). Using logistic regression, an analysis of the associations of haplotypes with the studied diseases was carried out.Results. An association of bronchial asthma in combination with arterial hypertension with haplotypes formed by eQTL SNPs of the CAT and TLR4 genes was established. The spectrum of haplotypes associated with comorbidity of asthma and hypertension differs from the haplotypes associated with “isolated” asthma.Conclusion. The molecular base of asthma and hypertension comorbidity can be associated with variants that control the expression of TLR4 and CAT genes

A Questionnaire on Materialisms

Recent philosophical tendencies of “Actor-Network Theory,” “Object-Oriented Ontology,” and “Speculative Realism” have profoundly challenged the centrality of subjectivity in the humanities, and many artists and curators, particularly in the UK, Germany, and the United States, appear deeply influenced by this shift from epistemology to ontology. October editors asked artists, historians, and philosophers invested in these projects—from Graham Harman and Alexander R. Galloway to Armen Avanessian and Patricia Falguières to Ed Atkins and Amie Siegel—to explore what the rewards and risks of assigning agency to objects may be, and how, or if, such new materialisms can be productive for making and thinking about art today

Review of \u3ci\u3eThe Frederic Remington Studio\u3c/i\u3e By Peter H. Hassrick

This short book concerns the Remington Studio Collection-a permanent installation at the Buffalo Bill Historical Center in Cody, Wyoming, featuring the artifacts Remington displayed in his New Rochelle studio, as well as some of the paintings he made late in his career. The author noted Remington scholar Peter Hassrick, discusses the studio and argues that the Studio Collection paintings, many of them small landscapes, transcend Remington\u27s time and place to achieve a universal significance. In making this argument, however, Hassrick neglects to consider how the very category of the universal, insofar as it refers to American art, is itself a historical and political phenomenon. The Frederic Remington Studio is a second edition of the book written by Hassrick in 1981. The new volume includes new photography, much of it in color, and an expanded and sometimes illuminating text. For example, Hassrick makes an instructive comparison between Remington\u27s studio and that of the cosmopolitan New York painter William Merritt Chase, using Chase\u27s studio to exemplify the feminized art space against which Remington-his studio full of snowshoes, guns, and swords, among other rugged objectssought to react. For the most part, however, Hassrick writes of Remington\u27s career, seeing it as a progression towards the artist\u27s ultimate achievement: the impressionist and post-impressionist paintings of his last few years. About these late paintings, many of them in the Studio Collection, Hassrick argues that only the universals remained-the land, the light and the colors. These works, he argues, transcend their time. Such an argument demonstrates Hassrick\u27s Modernist aesthetic. So too does his praise of pictorial design at the expense of subject matter. Remington\u27s small painting entitled Taos Pueblo, for example, shows the artist\u27s interest in the abstract shapes and interlocking planes of the adobe structure. The formal qualities of Remington\u27s art are important, as Hassrick was the first to demonstrate. Yet, by holding uncritically to a Modernist position, Hassrick fails to consider the historical specificity of his own line of argument. Hassrick\u27s aesthetic is ultimately traceable to the writing of Clement Greenberg, the art critic whose defense of abstract painting became enormously influential in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Among American art critics, it was Greenberg who first successfully argued that the best art concentrated solely on its own formal properties. In holding uncritically to this Greenbergian aesthetic, Hassrick produces a twofold irony in his writing on Remington. First, as the art historian Elizabeth Johns has noted, he endorses the viewpoint of precisely those Modernist critics who have disparaged Remington\u27s great realist paintings as bad art. Second, Hassrick reproduces the Cold War political sensibility out of which Greenberg\u27s ideas emerged. The art historian Serge Guilbaut has demonstrated how Greenberg championed a pictorial language of abstract formalism partly as a reaction to Soviet ideology and its propagandistic art forms. In this Cold War context, Guilbaut points out, the claim of abstract painting to be an apolitical, universal, and humanist language, expressive of individual freedom, helped to symbolize democratic liberties in the free world. Many differences separate Greenberg and Hassrick, of course yet at the heart of Hassrick\u27s assumptions about Remington is the Greenbergian idea that Remington\u27s formally self-conscious late works, in which subject matter becomes less important, constitute an apolitical humanist vision. In this sense, Hassrick\u27s view of Remington\u27s universal late art reproduces a Cold War political position. My purpose here is not to disparage Hassrick\u27s work. Elsewhere he has written perceptively about the politics informing the first major wave of Remington scholarship in the late 1940s: The United States had just won World War II, and American scholars sought to establish an unprecedented place for the American experience in world history and culture. The West and its artists found welcome places in these expanding national investigations, and a number of western artists were \u27discovered\u27 in the process. In such a passage, Hassrick is himselfGuilbaut to Harold McCracken\u27s Greenberg. What I encourage Hassrick to do-in keeping with his own line of inquiry-is to consider the Cold War roots of his own approach to Remington

Howard Nemerov

A reading given by Howard Nemerov at Bard College, September 6, 1965 at Albee Social. Audio quality poor.https://digitalcommons.bard.edu/poetry_at_bard/1141/thumbnail.jp