Tom sat cross-legged in the corner, next to his pack, winding a piece of duct tape around the frame of his glasses. A candle burned beside him, and Kate sat nearby, with her back against the wall and her knees drawn up, holding a beer bottle on her lap.

“Tom,” I said. “What did you mean, you never paid for your plane ticket?”

He didn’t look up. He tore off another strip of duct tape and carefully wrapped it around his glasses. “Next time I come to Africa I’m going to bring some superglue,” he said. “Life in Africa would be so much easier, if only we had some superglue.”

Excerpted from The Road Builder by Nicholas Hereshenow. Published by The Berkeley Publishing Group, New York, 2001.

From time to time we could see two forms glide by alongside the trees. We were passing in front of a bench, where a couple were seated side by side, making a single dark patch.

My friend murmured:

“Poor things! It is not disgust but an immense pity which I feel for them. Of all the mysteries of human life, there is one which I have thoroughly solved: the great torture of our existence lies in the fact that we are eternally alone, and all our efforts and all our acts are only an attempt to escape this solitude. Those two lovers on the bench, in the open air, are trying, like all living creatures, to put at least a temporary stop to their loneliness; but they are, and always will be, alone, just as you and I are alone.”

Excerpted from ‘Solitude’ by Guy de Maupassant. Appearing in The Complete Works of Guy de Maupassant, published by Walter J. Black Inc., New York, 1903.

And J. H. Plumb argues that this new engagement with pets within the bourgeois household is one of the means by which “quite humble men and women, innocent of philosophical theory, [were led to accept] perhaps unconsciously, the modernity of their world.”

The pet plays a complex cultural role in this period: as commodity, companion, paragon, proxy, and even kin. The practice of pet keeping was initially an urban phenomenon and served as a response to modern alienation and commodification by creating a being who could generate a sense of connection and meaning in a world of things. In this era of dramatic increases in consumption, pets were increasingly visible as a sign of prosperity and widely bred and sold for profit. New practices of selective breeding, developed at first for livestock, were exploited to produce more desirable types of ornamental fish, canaries, and pigeons, while exotic pets like parrots and monkeys were coveted possessions.

Excerpted from Homeless Dogs & Melancholy Apes: Humans and Other Animals in the Modern Literary Imagination. Published by Cornell University Press, Ithaca, New York, 2010.

Seventy-five years ago a poor beggar boy stood on London Bridge. With an old violin, on which he played wretchedly, he tried to draw a few pennies from the charitably disposed listeners. A stranger who was passing asked the lad for his fiddle and after doing some “tuning,” he began to play a low plaintive melody. A man paused to listen and threw some pennies in the boy’s cap. Then another, and another stopped, and instead of pennies, sixpences and shillings, crowns and a few sovereigns were thrown to the boy. In a few minutes there were thousands of people crowding the bridge and the boy’s hat was filled with coins. At the last the police had to command the musician to stop in order that the street might be cleared. It was the great Paganini who had thus charmed the multitude and filled the pockets of the beggar. But it was only a temporary relief for in a few months the money would be gone and the beggar as poor as before.

Excerpted from ‘Ways of Helping Others’ by T. M. Fothergill, appearing in Current Anecdotes, A Preacher’s Magazine of Illustrations, Homiletics, Sermons and Methods of Church Work, volume V, number 11. Published by F. M. Barton, Cleveland, August 1904.

It is well, this chiseling and unvailing [sic] of statues to commemorate great events, and the rearing of monuments for men and women who did well for the human race. It is not a waste of sculpture, not a waste of genius, not a waste of money … But there is a surer way of being remembered, and there are monuments more enduring than marble or bronze …

All that you do for others in this spirit becomes your permanent and ineffaceable memorial. The last great day will be the uncovering of that monument. Instead of the two hundred and fifty thousand people assembled at the uncovering of the monument … there shall be a great multitude, that no man can number, present at the uncovering or the monument that shall tell the story of your work, however great or imperfect. With congratulation and song, and ringing of bells, and all the harps of God and all the doxologies of heaven, that occasion will be celebrated. Does the glory seem too great for an unpretentious soul like you? It doth not yet appear what you shall be. But this I know: the righteous shall be held in everlasting remembrance, and they shall shine as the stars, forever and ever.

Excerpted from ‘Monuments’ in the ‘Editorial Comments’ section of Frank Leslie’s Sunday Magazine, volume 15, edited by T. DeWitt Talmadge. Published by Frank Leslie’s Publishing House, New York, June 1884.

… and secret rendezvous, where sex happens, where love happens, and every second contains the feel of imagined possibilities. Because in America as the sun goes down, teen-agers by the millions are plotting in their bedrooms an escape, scheming ways to make love to hopeful others, talking to mother and father with complete blameless-ness, in a way so as not to arouse suspicion, then it’s out the window after midnight. Young and free! This waitress is one of them, I can tell by the way she licks her lips between sentences, for no reason except a subconscious desire to appear alluring, she radiates fantasy, and just as I begin to lose myself in her thighs, making love to her a thousand times in my mind, it all comes back to me, where I’m at, in a cafe, and her stare of knowing, and I can tell that in her mind she is suspicious of my looks, (and by the way I throw them at her bosom because I’m remembering the art of being honest and I think she’s beautiful … so I let her know with my eyes) which have in-fact been encouraged by raised eyebrows and tender winks, and such is the way of youthful-driven impulses, getting lost in the humanity of it all, lost in being human, in complete human-ness …

Exerpted from Literati: A Revolution of Living by Kanaan. Published by iUniverse, Lincoln, Nebraska, 2003.

At what period the office of killing animals for food became a separate trade, it may be difficult, if not almost impossible, to determine. Probably at different times in different countries, and in different parts of the same country. It is the province of civilization to make trades or professions; for, as the wants, either real or imaginary, of men increase, and there is a greater demand for any article, it becomes expedient for persons to confine themselves to fewer objects, by which much time is saved, and business is executed with the greater nicety. Thus, in any district, or town, or parish, it is better for one mane to confine himself to make clothes, or shoes, or to make houses of stone, or brick, or wood, or to kill animals for all the rest, rather than for each person, or each head of a family, to practise all these employments. Thus, no doubt, arose the first Butchers. And, from killing for others, they might soon get to kill their own animals, to sell out in small portions to such persons or families as might not be able to use a whole animal while it was good.

Excerpted from The Experienced Butcher by James Plumptre and Thomas Lantaffe. Published by Darton, Harvey, and Darton, London, 1816.

The first version, that of 1926 I believe: a carefully drawn pipe, and underneath it (handwritten in a steady, painstaking artificial script, a script from the convent, like that found heading the notebooks of schoolboys, or on a blackboard after an object lesson), this note: “This is not a pipe.”

The other version – the last, I assume – can be found in Aube à l’Antipodes. The same pipe, same statement, same handwriting. But instead of being juxtaposed in a neutral, limitless, unspecified space, the text and the figure are set within a frame. The frame itself is placed upon an easel, and the latter in turn upon the clearly visible slats of the floor. Above everything, a pipe exactly like the one in the picture, but much larger.

Excerpted from Ceci N’Est Pas une Pipe by Michel Foucault, translated and edited by James Harkness. Published by the University of California Press, Berkeley, California, 1982.

At the Modern Museum there was a show of dance photographs by Gjon Mili, many taken by his new stroboscopic and multiflash process, which records successive phases of movement at intervals of fractions of a second on a single plate. All of his pictures are intelligent documentation, and phototechnically they are very handsome indeed; and often they have a kind of friendly drollery in stopping the dancer dead just when he was making so very earnest an effort to rush ahead. Well, as I was looking at them and thinking of the many dance photographs I have seen, I wondered why most of them depress me so. Of course I like to look at dance pictures of myself as much as any ex-dancer does. But other people’s — documentation aside — generally look pretty foolish to me; the dancers in them look so busy getting nowhere. A shot can show you only one gesture, which is like hearing only one note of a piece of music, or one word of a poem. The more painstaking the photograph, the more pointless the effect. You don’t see the change in movement, so you don’t see the rhythm, which makes dancing. The picture represents a dancer, but it doesn’t give the emotion that dancing gives you as you watch it. A dancer onstage doesn’t look strained, and she isn’t a dry amoeba-shaped blob, a configuration of swirls of cloth and rigid muscles and swollen veins fixed forever in a small square of nothing, like a specimen on a slide. The dancer isolated in the camera field seems to be hanging in a void, nowhere.

Excerpted from ‘Carmen Amaya; Isadora Reconsidered; Dance Photographs; “Punch and the Judy” Revisited,’ written March-April 1942, in Dance Writings by Edwin Demby. Published by Dance Books Ltd., London, 1986.

After two years’ work, Delaware has become the 19th state to enact self-funding motorcycle rider training legislation. Meanwhile, similar bills in California and Ohio continue to inch toward enactment …

Ohio’s rider-ed proposal, House Bill 291, has cleared only its first hurdle. In early May the legislation received the approval of the House Highways and Highway Safety Committee, chaired by the bill’s main sponsor, Rep. Art Bowers (D-Steubenville). The Ohio General Assembly recessed for the summer before the House could vote on HB-29 [sic].

The Ohio bill would increase motorcycle registration fees by $4, pooling those additional funds for use by the Department of Highway Safety. The department estimates that seven training sites could be established during the program’s initial year.

Excerpted from ‘Delaware enacts rider ed law,’ appearing in American Motorcyclist, the monthly journal of the American Motorcyclist Association, published October 1985.

The elements of management commitment and employee involvement are complementary and form the core of any occupational safety and health program. Management’s commitment provides the motivating force and the resources for organizing and controlling activities within an organization. In an effective program, management regards worker safety and health as a fundamental value of the organization and applies its commitment to safety and health protection with as much vigor as to other organizational goals …

A practical analysis of the work environment involves a variety of worksite examinations to identify existing hazards and conditions and operations in which changes might occur to create new hazards. Lack of awareness of a hazard stemming from failure to examine the worksite is a sign that safety and health policies and/or practices are ineffective. Effective management actively analyzes the work and worksite to anticipate and prevent harmful occurrences …

Workplace hazards often can be eliminated by redesigning the jobsite or job. Where it is not feasible to eliminate such hazards, employers must control them to prevent unsafe and unhealthful exposure. Employers must eliminate or control the hazard in a timely manner once it becomes apparent. Specifically, as part of the program, employers should establish procedures to correct or control present or potential hazards in a timely manner.

Excerpted from ‘Construction Industry Digest,’ publication 2202, of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, an agency of the United States Department of Labor.

Respirators protect the user in two basic ways. The first is by the removal of contaminants from the air. Respirators of this type include particulate respirators, which filter out airborne particles; and “gas masks” which filter out chemicals and gases. Other respirators protect by supplying clean respirable air from another source. Respirators that fall into this category include airline respirators, which use compressed air from a remote source; and self-contained breathing apparatus (SCBA), which include their own air supply.

Respirators should only be used when engineering control systems are not feasible. Engineering control systems, such as adequate ventilation or scrubbing of contaminants are the preferred control methods for reducing worker exposures.

NIOSH issues recommendations for respirator use. Industrial type approvals are in accordance to the NIOSH federal respiratory regulations 42 CFR Part 84. Development of respirator standards are in concert with various partners from government and industry.

Excerpted from subsection ‘Respirators’ under the Workplace Safety & Health Topics area of the website of the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, a subsidiary of the Centers for Disease Control.

The concept of relative focus on involvement is related to what Bateson (1972) describes as the double bind in communication — a phenomenon that he introduced to account for pathology but that, Scollon (1982) demonstrates, characterizes all human communication. As rephrased by Becker (1982), humans continually subject each other to simultaneous conflicting messages to the effect that “You are like me” and “You are not me,” or, put another way, “I want to be close to you” and “I want to be separate from you.” These two conflicting messages necessarily grow out of the conflicting human needs to be connected to other people and to be distant from them — that is, not to be engulfed by closeness.

Indeed, humans are not the only creatures caught in this double bind. Bettelheim (1979) cites the example of porcupines who seek shelter in a cave during a cold winter. They huddle together for warmth, but their quills prick each other, so they pull away. Then they get cold again. They must continually adjust their closeness and distance in order to balance their simultaneous but conflicting needs to be close to each other and not to get pricked.

Excerpted from ‘Relative Focus on Involvement in Oral and Written Discourse’ by Deborah Tannen. Appearing in Literacy, Language, and Learning: The Nature of Consequences of Reading and Writing, edited by David R. Olson, Nancy Torrance and Angela Hildyard. Published by Cambridge University Press, New York, 1985.

Myths and rituals are the stories and practices that define a culture. A myth is a story with symbolic elements that represents a culture’s ideals. Each culture creates its own stories to help its members understand the world. Many companies (and perhaps most advertising agencies) are in a sense in the myth business; they tell us stories that we collectively absorb. Some marketers tell these stories more overtly than others: Disney stages about two thousand Cinderella weddings every year; the princess bride wears a tiara and rides to the park’s lakeside wedding pavilion in a horse-drawn coach, complete with two footmen in gray wigs and gold lamé pants. And the Shrek movies remind us that even the ugliest suitor can land the princess if his heart is in the right place. To appreciate some more of the “popular culture gods” we worship, just tune in to next year’s Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade and observe the huge balloon figures floating by.

Excerpted from Launch! Advertising and Promotion in Real Time by Michael Solomon. Published by Flat World Knowledge, Nyack, New York, 2010.