Judd Herbert, Metatheatre 2, concentrates on the duplicity inherent in theatrical discourse as “combining overt mimetic representations of the story with covert performative and metadramatic clues pointed to its own operations at the risk of undermining or at the very least problematizing the fable.” In the simplest cases metatheatre involves “linguistic signs that, in addition to communicating developments in plot and characterization, explicitly designate the art of stagecraft and entertainment.” (The subsequent discussion shows, however, that he does not intend to exclude ambiguity or polysemy of the linguistic sign from his metatheatrical inventory.) Going beyond the notion of a dramatic “anti-form” in which the barrier between art and life is dissolved, Calderwood, Shakespearean Metadrama 5, intends “metadrama” in broader terms to comprehend the fact that Shakespeare’s plays are about “dramatic art itself—its materials, its media of language and theatre, its generic forms and conventions, its relationship to truth and the social order.” Such observations are common in metatheatrical criticism; cf. Gruber, “Systematized Delirium” 99: “Aristophanes’ real subject is drama, for his plays may be best understood as forming an ongoing self-conscious discourse on theatre.”

Excerpted from Figures of Play: Greek Drama and Metafictional Poetics, footnote 40, by Gregory W. Dobrov. Published by Oxford University Press, New York, 2001.

… In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such a Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which conceded point for point with it. The following Generations, which were so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that the vast Map was Useless, and not with out some Pitilessness in it, that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are tattered ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography.

The full text of ‘On Exactitude in Science’ by Jorge Luis Borges, fictionally attributed to Suárez Miranda in Viajes de varones prudentes. Translated by Andrew Hurley, published by Penguin Books, New York, 1998.

I met Jack Kennedy in November, 1946. We were both war heroes, and both of us had just been elected to Congress. We went out one night on a double date and it turned out to be a fair evening for me. I seduced a girl who would have been bored by a diamond as big as the Ritz.

She was Deborah Caughlin Mangaravidi Kelly, of the Caughlins first, English-Irish bankers, financiers and priests; the Mangaravidis, a Sicilian issue from the Bourbons and the Hapsburgs; Kelly’s family was just Kelly; but he had made a million two hundred times. So there was a vision of treasure, far-off blood, and fear. The night I met her we had a wild ninety minutes in the back seat of my car parked behind a trailer truck on a deserted factory street in Alexandria, Virginia. Since Kelly owned part of the third largest trucking firm in the Midwest and West, I may have had a speck of genius to try for his daughter where I did. Forgive me. I thought the road to President might begin at the entrance to her Irish heart. She heard the snake rustle however in my heart; on the telephone the next morning she told me I was evil, awful and evil, and took herself back to the convent in London where she had lived at times before. I did not know as yet that ogres stand on guard before the portal of an heiress. Now in retrospect I can say with cheer: that was the closest I came to being President. (By the time I found Deborah again—all of seven years later in Paris—she was no longer her father’s delight, and we were married in a week. Like any tale that could take ten books, it is best to quit it by a parenthesis—less than ten volumes might be untrue.)

Excerpted from An American Dream by Norman Mailer. Published by Vintage, New York, 1999.

The bird in its flight without the help of the wind drops half the wing downwards, and thrusts the other half towards the tip backwards; and the part which is moved down prevents the descent of the bird, and that which goes backwards drives the bird forwards.

When the bird raises its wings it brings their extremities near together; and while lowering them it spreads them further apart during the first half of the movement, but after this middle stage as they continue to descend it brings them together again.

When the bird lowers one of its wings necessity constrains it instantly to extend it, for if it did not do so it would turn right over. The bird when it wishes to turn does not beat its wings with equal movement, but moves the one which makes the convex of the circle it describes, more than that which makes the concave of the circle.

Excerpted from Leonard Da Vinci’s Note-Books, arranged and rendered into English, with introductions, by Edward McCurdy. Published by Charles Scribner and Sons, New York, 1906.

Bob Meeks, who would be 88 now, told me once that down in Frio County the life of a cowboy was more drudgery than excitement. The only fun in it, he reckoned, was giving the women hell on Saturday night–if you could find one. No, the old pastimes like bronc busting and calf roping have been out of favor on the serious ranches for years. The large remudas are gone and the horses are expensive and indulged more as pets and symbolic hobbies than as work animals. Joe Boy Ellis, the big general manager at the Circle K in Kaufman County, says there are three things he will fire a hand for, and roping is one of them. “We’ve got from two hundred to a thousand dollars in each head,” he said, “and we don’t want their hides skinned.”

Everyone who works on a ranch isn’t called a cowboy. The rancher himself, even if he lives and works on the place, may not like the handle. There is a subtle connotation on the term that is both appreciative and pejorative. A cowboy can be admired for his skill in the old ways, but they aren’t of much unless he’s Larry Mahan and has good public relations costuming. If he isn’t willing to stay put and mend fence, bale hay, and drive a tractor, he isn’t worth hiring. You find ranchers correcting you: “I’m a cowman, not a cowboy.” The former implies manful responsibility and no nonsense, a manager, a businessman in boots and gabardine; the latter suggests immaturity and a romantic nature. The hand who insists he is a pure cowboy and will not touch anything but leather and hemp and animals is often a drifter, a kind of bad actor who is playing a role rather than working at a trade. This is the cowboy portrayed in our music, who has captured the popular imagination. Our last rustic of the road, riding into the sunset away from the corruption of city slickers and science. The old movie-and-TV popular imagination saw the cowboy as a killer with a six-shooter, a gun for hire. The new musical romanticism has him a gentle knight, repulsed by arms and armor and aggression and refinery air, returning to a pastoral West. Neither, of course, was ever a reality.

Excerpted from ‘In Search of the Modern Cowboy’ by Bill Porterfield. Published in Texas Monthly, volume 3, issue 10, October 1975.

Medea: Jason, I crave thy pardon for the words I spoke, and well thou mayest brook my burst of passion, for ere now we twain have shared much love. For I have reasoned with my soul and railed upon me thus, “Ah! Poor heart! Why am I thus distraught, why so angered ’gainst all good advice, why have I come to hate the rulers of the land, my husband too, who does the best for me he can, in wedding with a princess and rearing for my children noble brothers? Shall I not cease to fret? What possesses me, when heaven its best doth offer? Have I not my children to consider? Do I forget that we are fugitives, in need of friends? When I had thought all this I saw how foolish I had been, how senselessly enraged. So now do commend thee and think thee most wise in forming this connection for us; but I was mad, I who should have shared in these designs, helped on thy plans, and lent my aid to bring about the match, only too pleased to wait upon thy bride. But what we are, we are, we women, evil I will not say; wherefore thou shouldst not sink to our sorry level nor with our weapons meet our childishness.

I yield and do confess that I was wrong then, but now have I come to a better mind. Come hither, my children, come, leave the house, step forth, and with me greet and bid farewell to your father, be reconciled from all past bitterness unto your friends, as now your mother is; for we have made a truce and anger is no more.

The ATTENDANT comes out of the house with the children.

Take his right hand; ah me! my sad fate! when I reflect, as now, upon the hidden future. O my children, since there awaits you even thus a long, long life, stretch forth the hand to take a fond farewell. Ah me! how new to tears am I, how full of fear! For now that I have at last released me from my quarrel with your father, I let the tear-drops stream adown my tender cheek.

Excerpted from Medea by Euripides, translated into English by E.P. Coleridge.

To fix the signs in terms in the expansion of a determinant of any order, the notion of an inversion is introduced. If, in an arrangement of positive integers, a greater precedes a less, there is said to be an inversion. Thus in the order 12543, there are three inversions: 5 before 4, 5 before 3, 4 before 3. In 2341576, there are four inversions. When applied to any term in the expansion of a determinant such as (7), we say there is an inversion of the order of the subscripts presents an inversion when the letters (apart from the subscripts) have the order abcd…1 of the principal diagonal. With respect to determinants of orders 2 and 3, it may be observed that the number of inversions is even when the term is positive, and that the number of inversions is odd when the term is negative.

Consistently with these conditions, we lay down the following

Definition. A square array of n² elements, such as has been considered in the cases n=2 and n=3, is called a determinant of the nth order. It is an abbreviation for the algebraic form of all the different products that can be formed by taking as factors one and only one element from each column and each row of the array, and giving to each term a positive or negative sign according as the number of inversions of the subscripts of the term is even or odd, when the letters have the same order as the principal diagonal.

Excerpted from Introductory College Alegbra by H.L. Rietz and A.R. Crathorne. Published by Henry Holt and Company, New York, 1923.

The American psychologist James, and the Danish psychologist Lange, independently of each other, put forward this theory in the early eighties of the last century, and it has since remained a great topic for discussion. According to the theory, the emotion is the way the body feels while executing the various internal and expressive moments that occur on such occasions. The “stirred-up state of mind” is the complex sensation of the stirred-up state of the body. Just as fatigue or hunger is a complex of bodily sensations, so is anger, fear or grief, according to the theory.

James says, we do not tremble because we are afraid, but are afraid because we tremble. By that he means that the conscious state of being afraid is composed of the sensations of trembling (along with the sensations of other muscular and glandular responses). He means that the mental state of recognizing the presence of danger is not the stirred-up state of fear, until it has produced the trembling and other similar responses and got back the sensations of them. “Without the bodily states following on the perception” – i.e., perception of the external fact that arouses the whole emotional reaction – “the latter would be purely cognitive in form, pale, colorless, destitute of emotional warmth. We might then see the bear, and judge it best to run, receive the insult, and deem it right to strike, but we should not actually feel afraid or angry.”

Excerpted from Psychology: A Study of Mental Life by Robert S. Woodworth. Published by Henry Holt and Company, New York, 1921.

“Do you feel strong enough to tell us your story?” asked Captain Simon.

“I am strong enough,” said Professor Sherman, “and I want to first of all thank you three gentlemen for your kind attention. But, gentlemen,” he exclaimed, “as an honorary member of the Western American Explorers’ Club in San Francisco, I feel sincerely that I owe the first accounting of my extraordinary adventure to that illustrious fraternity!”

At this, of course, Captain John Simon was somewhat hurt. After all, he had ordered the rescue of Professor Sherman when he found him floating around almost dead in a maze of broken planks and empty balloons, he had saved his life. And the ship’s doctor had healed and tenderly nursed the Professor back on the road of recovery. The ship’s cook had gone out of his way to prepare special, delicate food for him. They were all three most disappointed. That also made them much more curious. They tried all sorts of ways to get him to tell his story. They tried arguing with, persuading, tricking, and agitating him. They tried to entice him with spirits. They gave him medicine which made him dopey. But he only seemed to become more and more firm as he exclaimed as loudly as his strength would permit, “This tale of mine shall first be heard in the auditorium of the Western American Explorers’ Club in San Francisco, of which I am an honorary member!”

“Will you at least give me your name?” asked Captain Simon. “So that I might make a proper entry and report of the rescue in the ship’s log.”

“That information I shall not withhold,” said the Professor. “My name is William Waterman Sherman.”

Excerpted from The Twenty-One Balloons by William Pène Du Bois. Published by Penguin Books, multiple years.

The Western American Explorer’s Club, in the city of San Francisco, was honored as it had never been honored before in the first week of October 1883 by being promised to be first to hear the details of an unexplained, extraordinary adventure; the biggest news story of the year, the story the whole world was waiting impatiently to hear—the tale of Professor William Waterman Sherman’s singular voyage. Professor Sherman had left San Francisco August 15. He flew off in a giant balloon, telling reporters that he hoped to be the first man to fly across the Pacific Ocean. Three weeks later he was picked up in the Atlantic Ocean, half starved and exhausted, clinging to the debris of twenty deflated balloons. How he found himself in the Atlantic with so many balloons after starting out in the Pacific with one, caught and baffled the imagination of the world. When he was sighted and rescued in the middle of the wreckage of twenty balloons in the Atlantic by the Captain of the freighter S.S.Cunningham, en route to New York City, he was immediately put to bed, for he was sick and weary, suffering from cold and shock. He was treated with great care by the ship’s doctor, strengthened with food and brandy by the ship’s cook, honored by the personal attention of Captain John Simon of the S.S.Cunningham. When he was well enough to talk, the Doctor, Cook and Captain leaned over him at his bedside and said in excited tones, “How do you feel?”

“I could be worse,” said Professor Sherman, rather feebly.

Excerpted from The Twenty-One Balloons by William Pène Du Bois. Published by Penguin Books, multiple years.

These extensions of the activities of the state involved a parallel organisational development. The other side to the social citizenship that Marshall advocated was the rise of bureaucratic organisation in both the corporation and the state. It was the massive scale of the new national projects, bringing the same organisational principles into play in business and government, that obscured Smith’s public-private divide. The collective organisation of society appeared increasingly to fulfil Max Weber’s dire predictions of a comprehensive bureaucratic cage encasing human experience.

The increased scale of organisation accompanying the extension of the activities of the state raised issues of control that challenged representative democracy. The paradox of modern development was that the public sphere was now the area out of control. The incongruity was even greater because the operations of the business corporations were increasingly subject to public scrutiny. It was a matter of public concern that their collective organisation should be transparent. What was now public was the whole area of collective organisation, however owned, and the private reverted to the individual and the personal. The fall of public man (Sennett, 1977) thus coincided with the rise of the corporate state.

Excerpted from Governance in the 21st Century, chapter 6, ‘Society as Social Diversity: The Challenge for Governance in the Global Age,’ by Martin Albrow. Published by the Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development, 2001, Paris.

As reported in the Seattle Times: Twenty years ago … passengers and crew aboard United Airlines flight 232 from Denver to Chicago heard a loud midair blast at the rear of the plane. The engine mounted in the tail of the DC-10 had exploded at 37,000 feet.

With two good engines still operating on the wings, Capt. Al Haynes, of Seattle, wasn’t unduly worried as he shut down the fuel flow to the dead engine.

But shrapnel from the exploding engine had severed all the hydraulic lines.

From that moment on, Haynes couldn’t budge any of the flight-control surfaces on the wings and the tail. It was as if, when driving a car, the steering wheel would no longer turn the wheels.

Carlisle, Pennsylvania. October 13, 2006.

As reported by airdisaster.com, an eyewitness view from Capt. Haynes: The time of day that our engine failure occurred was another very lucky circumstance. Almost four o’clock in the afternoon, it was approaching shift change at Marion Health Centre and St Luke’s Hospital and all the other emergency services around the Siouxland area (Sioux City and surround communities). By the time we did arrive in Sioux City, our plight having been reported, the morning shifts were being kept on and the day shifts were just going on duty, so both hospitals were double-staffed. Furthermore, there were so many volunteers from the various emergency units and health clinics around the area that the hospitals had to turn some of them away.

And, as a final piece of luck, it was the only day of the month when the 185th Iowa Air National Guard was on duty, and there were 285 trained National Guard personnel standing by waiting for us when we got to Sioux City. So, taking all of those things into account, it is clear that there was just an unbelievable amount of luck involved in our getting the aircraft there, in our having available the level of help that there was, and in our having the survival rate that we did have.

Excerpted from ‘20 years ago, pilot’s heroic efforts saved 185 people as plane crashed‘ by Dominic Gates and ‘Eyewitness Report: United Flight 232‘ as reported by Capt. Al Haynes.

A: Absorbed in our discussion of immortality, we had let night fall without lighting the lamp, and we couldn’t see each other’s faces. With an off-handedness or gentleness more convincing than passion would have been, Macedonio Fernández’ voice said once more that the soul is immortal. He assured me that death of the body is altogether insignificant, and that dying has to be the most unimportant thing that can happen to a man. I was playing with Macedonio’s pocketknife, opening and closing it. A nearby accordion was infinitely dispatching La Comparsita, that dismaying trifle that so many people like because it’s been misrepresented to them as being old…I suggested to Macedonio that we kill ourselves, so that we might have our discussion without all that racket.

Z: (mockingly) But I suspect that at the last moment your reconsidered.

A: (now deep in mysticism) Quite frankly, I don’t remember whether we committed suicide that night or not.

The complete text of ‘A Dialog about a Dialog’ from The Maker by Jorge Luis Borges. Published in Collected Fictions by Viking, New York, 1998.

But when the social bond begins to be relaxed and the state weakened, when private interests being to make themselves felt and small associations to exercise influence on the state, the common interest is injuriously affected and finds adversaries; unanimity no longer reigns in the voting; the general will is no longer the will of all; opposition and disputes arise, and the best counsel does not pass uncontested.

Lastly, when the state, on the verge of ruin, no longer subsists except in a vain and illusory form, when the social bond is broken in all hearts, when the basest interest shelters itself impudently under the sacred name of the public welfare, the general will becomes dumb; all, under the guidance of secret motives, no more express their opinions as citizens than if the state had never existed; and, under the name of laws, they deceitfully pass unjust decrees which have only private interest as their end.

Does it follow from this that the general will is destroyed or corrupted? No; it is always constant, unalterable, and pure; but it is subordinated to others which get the better of it. Each detaching his own interest from the common interest, sees clearly that he cannot completely separate it; but his share in the injury done to the state appears to him as nothing in comparison with the exclusive advantage which he aims at appropriating to himself.

Excerpted from The Social Contract: Or, Principles of Political Right, by John-Jacques Rousseau. Published by Wordsworth Editions Limited, Hertforshire, England, 1998.