X-Rated

rich murphy

 

 

In the boudoir of two colors the easy

reading of children fills tool boxes

with rattles and thumbs. Love

can’t be shaken from blunt tongues

 

insisting for fifty years with groin

and groan. Race relations concern

the residents of the North and South

Poles in a dream of schoolyard games

 

among us and them. Each evening

married couples masturbate in each

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Caption 1.        Anticipation is premature when she starts sweating
                       On a high stool before plate glass.

 

Caption 2:        It’s photo realism: city grays, a
                       red coat moving, a man loping
                       smoking in black.

 

Caption 3:        She is writing, pretending not to have…
                       So he will call out to her.

     

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Hooking Up

laura kipnis

The burning academic question of the day: Should we professors be permitted to "hook up with" our students, as the kids put it? Or they with us? In the olden days when I was a student (back in the last century) hooking up with professors was more or less part of the curriculum. (Okay, I went to art school.) But that was a different era, back when sex — even when not so great or someone got their feelings hurt —fell under the category of experience, rather than injury and trauma. It didn't automatically impede your education; sometimes it even facilitated it.

But such things can't be guaranteed to turn out well — what percentage of romances do? — so colleges around the country are formulating policies to regulate such interactions, to protect against the possibility of romantic adversity. In 2003, the University of California's nine campuses ruled to ban consensual relationships between professors and any students they may "reasonably expect" to have future

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I was dismayed to read James Brody’s "Defense Mechanisms in EP?: Nope" in the Fall/Winter 2003 issue of this journal, although I can’t honestly say that I was surprised. Many scientists routinely dismiss Freud’s theories as unworthy of serious consideration, often without the benefit of an accurate understanding of what these theories actually state.[1] I think that this is a mistake, for reasons well expressed by Clark Glymour, a fine philosopher of science and fierce critic of Freud’s scientific pretensions. ‘Even when Freud had the wrong answer to a question, or refused to give an answer, he knew what the question was and what was at stake in it. And when he was deeply wrong it was often for reasons that still make parts of cognitive psychology wrong.’[2]

Although Freud is often off base — sometimes very far off base — his engagement with fundamental questions about the human mind can still provide food for thought, but

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Although rational in many ways, the idea of considering human beings as something apart from nature is dangerous. Evolution has shaped all organisms, us included. Moreover, we are all shaped to live in particular environments. If animals are kept under unfavourable conditions their health tends to deteriorate, they typically behave oddly and appear discontent. People living in modern societies show similar ailments, as witnessed by the incidence of various maladies, including mental disorders. I believe it is possible to alleviate these problems by creating living conditions closer to those our genes are adapted to; but in order to do so, we need to accept our biological inheritance.

 Our ancestors once lived in

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Sharon

james brody

 

Fiction is a peculiar gossip that, unlike essays, demands lies rather than encourages them, clever lies that seem to be true while not resembling anyone living or dead. The following might have been good fiction.

Repairs to Verona from the last world war were still incomplete in the spring of '56 but the coming generation of Italians and Americans rediscovered self indulgence through rising incomes, television, and rock

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Every reviewer has two tasks: to tell you what the author did and how well he did it. Many of us, however, take advantage of the author and hitch a free ride, expounding our own answers to his questions and using his prominence to draw attention to ourselves. I’ve done so here.

Excellence: Definition, Evidence, and Explanation

“Excellence exists and it is time to acknowledge and celebrate the magnificent inequality that has enabled some of our fellow humans to have so enriched the lives of the rest of us.” (Murray, 2003, pp. 449-450)

It’s about time!
Murray summarizes human achievement across three millennia and in three cultures, translates its history into graphs, and explains the greatness and subsequent decline, especially in Western Europe, in science and art in the 15 decades before and after 1850. He affirms that greatness exists and pleads that a belief in truth, beauty, and good catalyze

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art

Regroup

emil alzamora

22 x 36", oil on paper 2002