Vanity Modern: happy days in the tourist playgrounds of Miami and Havana

2013 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 73-88
Author(s):  
Styliane Philippou

Ian Fleming's recently-opened Floridiana Hotel, in Miami Beach, where James Bond's client, Mr Junius du Pont, ‘promise[s] to make [him] comfortable’, was correctly matched in the film adaptation of Goldfinger with Morris Lapidus's Modernist Fontainebleau Hotel (1952–54) rather than with Miami's Mediterranean-style Hotel Floridian. Fleming was not enthusiastic about the architecture of the most expensive hotel in the world (at the time of its opening), nor about its ‘rich and dull’ gardens. He obviously chose it as a representation of the ‘easy, soft, high’ life of 1959 in Miami, and as the perfect setting for a gathering of American millionaires and secret agents, gamblers, gangsters, hitmen and prostitutes.Directly below Bond['s Aloha Suite], the elegant curve of the Cabana Club swept down to the beach – two storeys of changing-rooms below a flat roof dotted with chairs and tables and an occasional red and white striped umbrella. Within the curve was the brilliant green oblong Olympic-length swimming-pool fringed on all sides by row upon row of mattressed steamer chairs on which the customers would soon be getting their fiftydollar-a-day sunburn.The evening before, Bond had ‘the most delicious meal […] in his life’, at the most expensive restaurant of Miami. But the thought of ‘eating like a pig […] the easy life, the rich life revolted him. He felt momentarily ashamed of his disgust […] It was the puritan in him that couldn't take it'. It was also Fleming's nod to his readers, barely out of the grim austerity of postwar Britain, where food was rationed until 1954, bombsites abounded, housing was severely substandard or temporary, smog was thick and yellow, and wartime shortages lingered to the end of the decade. Despite Prime Minister Harold Macmillan's optimistic 1957 assurance to his fellow Conservatives that most of them had ‘never had it so good’, outside lavatories and no central heating were still common. His calls for ‘restraint and common sense’ were hardly answered by Bond's life of oyster-and-champagne dining and air-conditioned vacationing.

Author(s):  
Bas van der Vossen ◽  
Jason Brennan

The humane and workable solution to global poverty is freedom. We can help the poor—and help ourselves at the same time—by tearing down our walls and trade barriers. Both justice and good economic sense require that we open borders, free up international trade, and respect the economic liberties of people around the world. What global justice requires is an open world. Most books on global justice see the world’s poor as little more than mouths to be fed. Their authors see justice as a zero-sum game: some must lose so that others may win. They rely on controversial moral intuitions and outdated or mistaken economic beliefs about economic growth. Van der Vossen and Brennan present global justice as a positive-sum game: the methods that can best help the world’s poor also help everyone else. Using mainstream development economics and common-sense moral intuitions, they argue that instead of treating the world’s poor as helpless victims who must be rescued by the rich, we should remove the coercive limits that keep people poor in the first place. We should offer people the freedom to work, produce, trade, and migrate, in ways that help better themselves and others who are willing to cooperate with them. In Defense of Openness offers a new approach to global justice: we don’t need to “save” the poor. The poor will save themselves, if only we would get out of their way and let them.


LingVaria ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 14 (27) ◽  
pp. 217-230
Author(s):  
Olga Kielak

Pets in Three Models of Folk Description of the WorldThe goal of the paper is to show how three models of the world co-exist in folk narrations about pets. Identified in accordance with the methodology of the Lublin Słownik stereotypów i symboli ludowych (‘A dictionary of folk stereotypes and symbols’), the three models are: the mythological (inherited from the Proto-Indo-European and Proto-Slavic past), the religious (biblical, Judaeo-Christian), and the colloquial (common-sense, pragmatic). The author also speculates whether it is possible to connect the individual models with specific genres of folklore. The basis for the analyses is the rich material covering contexts from the end of the 18th to the beginning of the 21st century, which comprises three types of data: lexicographic, folkloristic, and ethnographic.


Author(s):  
Leemon B. McHenry

What kinds of things are events? Battles, explosions, accidents, crashes, rock concerts would be typical examples of events and these would be reinforced in the way we speak about the world. Events or actions function linguistically as verbs and adverbs. Philosophers following Aristotle have claimed that events are dependent on substances such as physical objects and persons. But with the advances of modern physics, some philosophers and physicists have argued that events are the basic entities of reality and what we perceive as physical bodies are just very long events spread out in space-time. In other words, everything turns out to be events. This view, no doubt, radically revises our ordinary common sense view of reality, but as our event theorists argue common sense is out of touch with advancing science. In The Event Universe: The Revisionary Metaphysics of Alfred North Whitehead, Leemon McHenry argues that Whitehead's metaphysics provides a more adequate basis for achieving a unification of physical theory than a traditional substance metaphysics. He investigates the influence of Maxwell's electromagnetic field, Einstein's theory of relativity and quantum mechanics on the development of the ontology of events and compares Whitehead’s theory to his contemporaries, C. D. Broad and Bertrand Russell, as well as another key proponent of this theory, W. V. Quine. In this manner, McHenry defends the naturalized and speculative approach to metaphysics as opposed to analytical and linguistic methods that arose in the 20th century.


2020 ◽  
Vol 2 (4) ◽  
pp. 32-54
Author(s):  
Silvia Spitta

Sandra Ramos (b. 1969) is one of the few artists to reflect critically on both sides of the Cuban di-lemma, fully embodying the etymological origins of the word in ancient Greek: di-, meaning twice, and lemma, denoting a form of argument involving a choice between equally unfavorable alternatives. Throughout her works she shines a light on the dilemmas faced by Cubans whether in Cuba or the United States, underlining the bad personal and political choices people face in both countries. During the hard 1990s, while still in Havana, the artist focused on the traumatic one-way journey into exile by thousands, as well as the experience of profound abandonment experienced by those who were left behind on the island. Today she lives in Miami and operates a studio there as well as one in Havana. Her initial disorientation in the USA has morphed into an acerbic representation and critique of the current administration and a deep concern with the environmental collapse we face. A buffoonlike Trumpito has joined el Bobo de Abela and Liborio in her gallery of comic characters derived from the rich Cuban graphic arts tradition where she was formed. While Cuba is now represented as a rotten cake with menacing flies hovering over it ready to pounce, a bombastic Trumpito marches across the world stage, trampling everything underfoot, a dollar sign for a face.


2013 ◽  
Vol 42 (4) ◽  
pp. 15-22
Author(s):  
Lars Rømer

This article investigates how experiences of ghosts can be seen as a series of broken narratives. By using cases from contemporary as well 19th century Denmark I will argue that ghosts enter the world of the living as sensations that question both common sense understanding and problematize the unfinished death. Although ghosts have been in opposition to both science and religion in Denmark at least since the reformation I will exemplify how people deal with the broken narrative of ghosts in ways that incorporate and mimic techniques of both the scientist and the priest. Ghosts, thus, initiate a dialogue between the dead and the living concerning the art of dying that will enable both to move on.


2018 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 112-119
Author(s):  
VLADIMIR GLEB NAYDONOV

The article considers the students’ tolerance as a spectrum of personal manifestations of respect, acceptance and correct understanding of the rich diversity of cultures of the world, values of others’ personality. The purpose of the study is to investgate education and the formation of tolerance among the students. We have compiled a training program to improve the level of tolerance for interethnic differences. Based on the statistical analysis of the data obtained, the most important values that are significant for different levels of tolerance were identified.


1993 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 165-177
Author(s):  
Karen Harding

Ate appearances deceiving? Do objects behave the way they do becauseGod wills it? Ate objects impetmanent and do they only exist becausethey ate continuously created by God? According to a1 Ghazlli, theanswers to all of these questions ate yes. Objects that appear to bepermanent are not. Those relationships commonly tefemed to as causalare a result of God’s habits rather than because one event inevitably leadsto another. God creates everything in the universe continuously; if Heceased to create it, it would no longer exist.These ideas seem oddly naive and unscientific to people living in thetwentieth century. They seem at odds with the common conception of thephysical world. Common sense says that the universe is made of tealobjects that persist in time. Furthermore, the behavior of these objects isreasonable, logical, and predictable. The belief that the univetse is understandablevia logic and reason harkens back to Newton’s mechanical viewof the universe and has provided one of the basic underpinnings ofscience for centuries. Although most people believe that the world is accutatelydescribed by this sort of mechanical model, the appropriatenessof such a model has been called into question by recent scientificadvances, and in particular, by quantum theory. This theory implies thatthe physical world is actually very different from what a mechanicalmodel would predit.Quantum theory seeks to explain the nature of physical entities andthe way that they interact. It atose in the early part of the twentieth centuryin response to new scientific data that could not be incorporated successfullyinto the ptevailing mechanical view of the universe. Due largely ...


2014 ◽  
Vol 31 (2) ◽  
pp. 75-100
Author(s):  
Bakare Adewale Muteeu

In pursuit of a capitalist world configuration, the causal phenomenon of globalization spread its cultural values in the built international system, as evidenced by the dichotomy between the rich North and the poor South. This era of cultural globalization is predominantly characterized by social inequality, economic inequality and instability, political instability, social injustice, and environmental change. Consequently, the world is empirically infected by divergent global inequalities among nations and people, as evidenced by the numerous problems plaguing humanity. This article seeks to understand Islam from the viewpoint of technological determinism in attempt to offset these diverging global inequalities for its “sociopolitical economy”1existence, as well as the stabilization of the interconnected world. Based upon the unifying view of microIslamics, the meaning of Islam and its globalizing perspectives are deciphered on a built micro-religious platform. Finally, the world is rebuilt via the Open World Peace (OWP) paradigm, from which the fluidity of open globalization is derived as a future causal phenomenon for seamlessly bridging (or contracting) the gaps between the rich-rich, rich-poor, poor-rich and poor-poor nations and people based on common civilization fronts.


Author(s):  
Joanna Rzepa

This chapter offers a historical account of the presence of Paradise Lost in translation and Polish literature, especially how the poem’s reception in Poland has been shaped by complex modes of linguistic and cultural transfer. The chapter explores the historical and political contexts in which Paradise Lost was translated into Polish, discusses the most important actors involved in its publication, and analyses the strategies employed by the translators. It demonstrates that the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century translators of Milton, who worked at a time when Poland had lost its political sovereignty, focused specifically on the form of the poem, presenting models for a modern Polish epic poem that could help sustain Polish cultural identity. The focus of the twentieth-century translators, who lived through the world wars, shifted from the form to the rich imagery of Milton’s poem, in particular his exploration of the themes of vanity, destruction, and exile.


Author(s):  
Alison More

The first chapter focuses on the wider spiritual context from which penitential movements developed. The rich and vibrant spiritual climate of the early thirteenth century saw the emergence of a number of new expressions of religious life. These new forms of devotion were predominantly characterized by a desire to live according to the gospel while remaining in the world. Throughout Europe, groups of laywomen ran alms houses, cared for lepers and practised other forms of active charity. From the middle of the thirteenth century onwards, the fact that these women did not fit traditional categories was seen as increasingly controversial. Consequently, those responsible for the spiritual care of such groups encouraged them to adopt many external signs of religious life such as a recognized habit, a rule, and even some degree of enclosure.


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