Anti-Dionysius

            In contemporary capitalism, the commodification of value reaches even (especially) the anti-thesis of capitalism. Our revolutionaries are not those instigating in labor unions or schools but the leading figures of capitalism itself. Disruptive action and revolutionary methodology is taken seriously as the practice of innovative capitalism. The struggle against hegemonic discourse and authoritarian life now takes the shape of an affirmation. Through intimacy with death, life blossoms. The dawn after a long day is not free of the toils from whence it arises.  The term ‘leading figure of capitalism’ ought not point to the established structures of globalized finance, but the closely-related yet still vanguard force of the techno-solution, which is governed only by what works, not by what is in its essence oriented towards the preservation of the whole for the sake of which it is born. Incorrigibility is a candid virtue in the land of endless growth.

Enemy of Fiction : A Philosopher's View

I just realized how polemical Searle's treatment of fictional discourse is.

"Why bother?" (332)

The attitude: imagination has its own territory, reality has its own territory, and never shall the twain meet. 

He seems to fall on tolerating ( hence excluding) fiction because

 a) it can at times ally with 'reality' by working for its health
 b) let loose its own energies in a more or less productively 

Polemical in the sense used by Carl Schmitt I should add.


Here's a relevant section:

Searle: "In the case of realistic or naturalistic fiction, the author will refer to real places and events intermingling these references with the fictional references, thus making it possible to treat the fictional story as an extension of our existing knowledge."(331)

The 'intermingling' of references implies that the realm of 'real' people, places, events is distinct from the realm of fiction. I suggest the precisely because such an intermingling is possible, demonstrably so, and has presumably been so for at least a long while, the distinction between 'real' and 'fiction' is perhaps the real fiction, ad infinitum. There is no meaningful break between the vertical connections and the horizontal conventions.

I have to get back to revising my final essay, so this is all I'll write for now but I'd love to return to this fore a more-comprehensive review of Searle's polemics and what it suggests about the relationship between philosophy and fiction.

Edit:


Does this mean:

Philosophy can no longer ( could it really ever?) ask the questions which refuse to die. Where have these questions gone now that philosophy no longer is a home for them? Literature  (poetry) - where they gather and -  live.

Liars

Liars cannot be champagne socialists, they are appetizer anarchists.

Are your feelings YOUR feelings?

Large-scale study on Facebook from 2013

"We show, via a massive (N = 689,003) experiment on Facebook, that emotional states can be transferred to others via emotional contagion, leading people to experience the same emotions without their awareness. We provide experimental evidence that emotional contagion occurs without direct interaction between people (exposure to a friend expressing an emotion is sufficient), and in the complete absence of nonverbal cues."

" it’s worth keeping in mind that there’s nothing intrinsically evil about the idea that large corporations might be trying to manipulate your experience and behavior. Everybody you interact with–including every one of your friends, family, and colleagues–is constantly trying to manipulate your behavior in various ways. … So the meaningful question is not whether people are trying to manipulate your experience and behavior, but whether they’re trying to manipulate you in a way that aligns with or contradicts your own best interests."

Contentious claim. There's no denying it, a tremendous power is available to the arbitrators of these communities - those who decide what you see and - feel.

Source:
http://technosociology.org/?p=1627

Colbert and Satire

I don't it's directly relevant to The Wolf of Wall Street, but I thought a lot about the coverage of #CancelColbert after our discussion on satire. Prior to the outbreak of #CancelColbert, someone on The Colbert Report's media team tweeted: "I am willing to show #Asian community I care by introducing the Ching-Chong Ding-Dong Foundation for Sensitivity to Orientals or Whatever." In response, activist and writer Suey Park to tweeted, "The Ching-Chong Ding-Dong Foundation for Sensitivity to Orientals has decided to call for #CancelColbert. Trend it," which ignited an uproar in the Twittersphere.

Anyway, I found two articles that critiqued the satire of The Colbert Report, both of them analyzing the discomfort and possible dangers–if that's the right word– of satire. Below are some relevant quotes.

Jay Caspian Kang writes:

"If I were to predict which minority group the writers of a show like “The Colbert Report” would choose for an edgy, epithet-laden parody, I’d grimace and prepare myself for some joke about rice, karate, or broken English. The resulting discomfort has nothing to do with the intentions of the joke or the political views of the people laughing at it. Even when you want to be in on the joke—and you understand, intellectually, that you are not the one being ridiculed—it’s hard not to wonder why these jokes always come at the expense of those least likely to protest."

In her piece, Michelle Medina contends:

"While its often noted that comedy is a vehicle for change; it also works to facilitate stagnation.  Humor acts as a catharsis for many people’s internalized prejudices that can’t be freely expressed in ‘polite society’ but can be expressed in the socially acceptable medium of laughter (‘because we didn’t mean it’)."

Securities Fraud

After reading about Belfort, I looked up the different kinds of scams lumped under securities fraud. What surprised me was that insider trading, Ponzi schemes, and corporate fraud (like setting up dummy corporations, or publishing false reports) are lumped together with Belfort's "pump and dump" scheme. This is interesting because it seems to me that the latter falls onto a spectrum of lies, lie-like statements, and exaggerations that are considered acceptable in the context of sales, marketing, and advertising. Something like a insider trading, on the other hand, falls under another category entirely, and has no more benign variant.

There is some dissonance in the economic and legal framework we use to describe lying as it relates to making money, because there needs to be some arbitrary line to demarcate how much exaggeration is acceptable in selling something. Belfort's lies are prosecuted as fraud, right alongside lies that seem to be in a very different category, like Bernie Madoff's lies. What does it say about our system of classifying economic lies when the highest form of success is being able to sell something (oftentimes through exaggeration), but exaggerating a bit too much means being relegated to the same bin as Ponzi schemers?

Something else I was thinking about is what a stock price represents, and to what extent Belfort's scheme was a lie, under the concept of economic lie that is prevalent in our society. Unlike Madoff's lies, where investors were lied to about how much return they were getting, Belfort lies only in the positive statements he makes about the companies. The price of the stock itself is not a lie - that is, the phrases "overvalued stock" or "manipulated stock prices" are not meaningful, because the financial construct of tradable securities inherently incorporates an element of what we consider a kind of lie. Specifically, with any security you have the ability to lie about how valuable you think it is based on the value, volume, rate, and time at which you trade.

Lie Detection

I came across an interesting website for a company that claims to be able to do accurate lie detection using MRIs, mainly contracting legal and governmental work. I think this claim is pretty far-fetched, but there are a lot of ethical and legal implications if or when this technology becomes viable. The polygraph test, which is the most prevalent kind of lie detection in use, has certainly raised plenty of legal issues without ever maturing into a technology that is any good at actually detecting lies.

We've talked a lot in this class about the different kinds of lie, and I wonder if there are any differences in the brain between different classes of lies (the most prominent difference would probably be between lies that are self-deceptive and lies that deceive others). However, the publications that the company's website references are about ten years old and there hasn't been too much interest in the area for the past few years. Coupled with their failures in getting fMRI evidence admitted into courts, and the obvious problems with real-world application when a lie-detection apparatus involves a gigantic magnet, it would be interesting to see what level of genuine confidence the founders of these companies possess in their technology by subjecting them to their own lie-detection processes.

The company:
No Lie MRI

One of their references:
Classifying spatial patterns of brain activity with machine learning methods: application to lie detection

A good review of the state of the art and its implications on law, society, and ethics:
Functional MRI-based lie detection: scientific and societal challenges

(You might need to be on the UC network to view the papers)

La société du spectacle

Guy Debord wrote The Society of the Spectacle in 1967 (you can find an online version here: https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/debord/society.htm) only a year before the well-known May 1968 protests in Paris. It was very much in the 'spirit' of the time, i believe.

I first came to know about this book two years ago, after seeing it referenced in Martin Jay's Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in 20th Century France. I was at the time interested in how what counts as real came to change as philosophy and science developed in Modern Europe. 

It is of course important to think about sight and seeing and images in any discussion of 'lying'. The false image is among the origins of the lie. We often use visual metaphors, for instance, in discussing what we regard as false (apparent vs. true).

I don't know if Debord is a very helpful theorist in the context of this class, but I know that he was probably an influence on Foucault and many other prominent thinkers. If we're to think about lying in connection with power, and this is important in the case of Jordan Belfort in particular, it might be useful to give Debord a read. So I'll quote a few of the theses that I found interesting down below, and hopefully it'll be interesting to you all as well. 

The 9th Thesis:

In a world which really is topsy-turvy, the true is a moment of the false.

Thesis 24

The spectacle is the existing order’s uninterrupted discourse about itself, its laudatory monologue. It is the self-portrait of power in the epoch of its totalitarian management of the conditions of existence. The fetishistic, purely objective appearance of spectacular relations conceals the fact that they are relations among men and classes: a second nature with its fatal laws seems to dominate our environment. But the spectacle is not the necessary product of technical development seen as a natural development. The society of the spectacle is on the contrary the form which chooses its own technical content. If the spectacle, taken in the limited sense of “mass media” which are its most glaring superficial manifestation, seems to invade society as mere equipment, this equipment is in no way neutral but is the very means suited to its total self-movement. If the social needs of the epoch in which such techniques are developed can only be satisfied through their mediation, if the administration of this society and all contact among men can no longer take place except through the intermediary of this power of instantaneous communication, it is because this “communication” is essentially unilateral. The concentration of “communication” is thus an accumulation, in the hands of the existing system’s administration, of the means which allow it to carry on this particular administration. The generalized cleavage of the spectacle is inseparable from the modern State, namely from the general form of cleavage within society, the product of the division of social labor and the organ of class domination.

Thesis 43:

Whereas in the primitive phase of capitalist accumulation, “political economy sees in the proletarian only the worker” who must receive the minimum indispensable for the conservation of his labor power, without ever seeing him “in his leisure and humanity,” these ideas of the ruling class are reversed as soon as the production of commodities reaches a level of abundance which requires a surplus of collaboration from the worker. This worker, suddenly redeemed from the total contempt which is clearly shown him by all the varieties of organization and supervision of production, finds himself every day, outside of production and in the guise of a consumer, seemingly treated as an adult, with zealous politeness. At this point the humanism of the commodity takes charge of the worker’s “leisure and humanity,” simply because now political economy can and must dominate these spheres as political economy. Thus the “perfected denial of man” has taken charge of the totality of human existence.

Thesis 44:

The spectacle is a permanent opium war which aims to make people identify goods with commodities and satisfaction with survival that increases according to its own laws. But if consumable survival is something which must always increase, this is because it continues to contain privation. If there is nothing beyond increasing survival, if there is no point where it might stop growing, this is not because it is beyond privation, but because it is enriched privation.

Thesis 56:

The spectacular sham struggles of rival forms of separate power are at the same time real in that they translate the unequal and antagonistic development of the system, the relatively contradictory interests of classes or subdivisions of classes which acknowledge the system and define themselves as participants within its power. Just as the development of the most advanced economy is a clash between some priorities and others, the totalitarian management of the economy by a State bureaucracy and the condition of the countries within the sphere of colonization or semi-colonization are defined by specific peculiarities in the varieties of production and power. These diverse oppositions can be passed off in the spectacle as absolutely distinct forms of society (by means of any number of different criteria). But in actual fact, the truth of the uniqueness of all these specific sectors resides in the universal system that contains them: the unique movement that makes the planet its field, capitalism.

Thesis 198:

Those who denounce the absurdity or the perils of incitement to waste in the society of economic abundance do not understand the purpose of waste. They condemn with ingratitude, in the name of economic rationality, the good irrational guardians without whom the power of this economic rationality would collapse. For example, Boorstin, in L’Image, describes the commercial consumption of the American spectacle but never reaches the concept of spectacle because he thinks he can exempt private life, or the notion of “the honest commodity,” from this disastrous exaggeration. He does not understand that the commodity itself made the laws whose “honest” application leads to the distinct reality of private life and to its subsequent reconquest by the social consumption of images.

Thesis 215:

The spectacle is ideology par excellence, because it exposes and manifests in its fullness the essence of all ideological systems: the impoverishment, servitude and negation of real life. The spectacle is materially “the expression of the separation and estrangement between man and man.” Through the “new power of fraud,” concentrated at the base of the spectacle in this production, “the new domain of alien beings to whom man is subservient... grows coextensively with the mass of objects.” It is the highest stage of an expansion which has turned need against life. “The need for money is thus the real need produced by political economy, and the only need it produces” (Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts). The spectacle extends to all social life the principle which Hegel (in the Realphilosophie of Jena) conceives as the principle of money: it is “the life of what is dead, moving within itself.”

I hope some of this is thought-provoking!

Enduring Love

A book that I think is particularly relevant to this class is Ian McEwan's Enduring Love. It's about a man who saves a little boy from an escaping hot air balloon with the help of three others. One of the others turns out to be a religious nutjob who is convinced that he and the protagonist are cosmically linked, and that they belong together in god's great plan. The work is a fascinating study of both self-deception and protective lying: the religious guy believes with all his heart that the narrator loves him, and that all his protestations and denials and silences are part of a carefully-crafted code to obscure his love from himself, his wife and those he knows. The narrator, meanwhile, lies to his wife about his stalker, first not wanting to involve her and then fabricating encounters and threats to get her to take it seriously, since she thinks he's going crazy and it's all in his head. The book is a fascinating glimpse into fractured psychology and the things we do to convince ourselves of what we want to hear.

(Sorry this is late. I totally forgot.)

Jordan Ash

In November 1772, a mysterious figure emerged from the Russian wilderness and quietly descended upon a peasant village.  His name was Emelian Pugachev, a Cossack, and he was about to set in motion what would become perhaps the biggest con in recorded history.

Pugachev was an army deserter who had been playing cat-and-mouse with Russian authorities.  He soon grew weary of the constant cycle of pursuit, capture, escape, and recapture, so he hatched a bold plan that, if successful, would’ve had him rise from lowly fugitive to Emperor of Russia.  It was a plan so brilliant in its simultaneous simplicity and audacity: Pugachev, the youngest son of a modest Cossack landowner, decided to begin convincing people that he was in fact the Holy Russian Emperor.

Emperor Peter III to be exact.  Over a decade before, Russia had been rocked by the violent coup that saw the overthrow and murder of Peter III.  Peter III’s assassination was partially due to his expressed wish for the emancipation of the serfs and greater equality for peasants.  For this reason he became very popular among the lower masses, but much less so amongst the elite. However a rumor began to spread around the empire that Peter III was not dead, but in fact wandering around the wilderness disguised as a peasant waiting for the right time to reveal himself and lead the serfs and peasants in what would’ve been something of a revolution. 

Pugachev sensed the popular desire for a “benevolent” tzar like Peter III, and he manipulated this desire.  It seems that all that was needed for Pugachev to amass a following of over 30,000 serfs, peasants, Cossacks, Muslims and others almost as simple as striding into that first village exclaiming: “I am Peter III.”   This simplification would not be too far from the truth, although his popular appeal was also reinforced by Pugachev’s promises to give all the marginalized groups exactly what they wanted.  His many proclamations were tailored to fit the specific desires of his particular audiences. 

Of course, for those skeptics, Pugachev had a few tricks up his sleeve.  Despite the fact that he was completely illiterate, Pugachev convinced the other illiterate peasants of what was supposed to be his elite education by confidently drawing lines of scribbles on paper and calling them decrees.  He had also managed to obtain a stamp roughly resembling an official imperial seal to reinforce his image. 

Russian troops were eventually diverted from battling the Ottoman Empire to put down the revolt.  Pugachev was arrested, tortured, made to confess, and then brutally executed.  His severed head was put on display in St. Petersburg to warn others against such ambitious plans of deceptive insurrection.   

Yes, Pugachev ultimately failed in his “big con”, but he must be given some form and degree of credit for the sheer scale of confidence it would take to lead thousands almost entirely on the basis of a lie. 

The Lies That Get in the Way of Justice

In light of all of the things that have happened yesterday, I would like to post on the decision to not indict Ferguson Police Officer Darren Wilson. Despite killing someone, Wilson goes free. Attached is a link which talks more about the Ferguson lie. This particular lie disrupts the credibility of the justice system.

The Ferguson Lie    

The serial killer who never killed a single person

On the fascination for liars and psychopaths

This is an older article (from a couple of years ago) but, because of this class, it came back to mind.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/oct/20/thomas-quick-bergwall-sweden-murder

It’s about a Swedish man Sture Bergwell who was “a murderer who never killed anybody.”

Bergwell was originally arrested for robbery (which did happen) but then confessed to being responsible for over 30 murders, and was then judged guilty for 8 of them.

The murders he confessed to were unresolved cases. Bergwell made a list of ones he could claim, learnt the details and fit them into a narrative in which he was the killer. As truth came to light, officials were greatly criticized for falling for his ploy. I think this brings us back to our discussions regarding con artists, how they are conscious of the expectation people have of a certain type. Once they are profiled as a certain type, they will play into our expectations. Here, if Bergwell was considered as insane, then loose ends and conflicted details wouldn’t play against him, but actually consolidate the view people had of him.

Another issue is “why?”
When questioned by journalists, Bergwell said “It was about belonging to something.” And then : "I was a very lonely person when it all started," he continues. "I was in a place with violent criminals and I noticed that the worse or more violent or serious the crime, the more interest someone got from the psychiatric personnel. I also wanted to belong to that group, to be an interesting person in here."

I think this links back to the fascination that surrounds psychopaths. When he was still perceived as a murderer, he garnered a lot of interest in the Swedish media. Then when he withdrew from the spotlight, this, in turn, caught the interest of a documentary-maker. And once he was exposed interest didn't lessen; on the contrary it increased and he had a book written about him!

How To Lay Sod in 5 Easy Steps

“Look up there, the moon is green tonight.”

I looked up to the muddy grey sky, at the off-white moon that floated in the middle of the smog and the light pollution. It looked just the same as always to me.

            “Woah, it is really green!” I said incredulously. Lance nodded with a solemn wisdom. We sat in silence for a while longer.

            “Its because the lawns are really coming in.”

            “Huh?”

            “The lawns. On the moon. They tried to put down sod at first but it didn’t take and it all died. The moon got really yellow around then. But then they tried over with seeds, and it looks like the lawns are finally really coming in.”

            That made sense to me. The moon seems like it could really do with some grass, the videos from the moon landings and stuff always looked really bleak. I squinted intensely at the little bright oval and tried as hard as I could to see it as green, but nothing. 

            “Yeah, they must be,” I agreed. “Really green tonight.”

            After a while we got up and started walking back home. I couldn’t look up at the green moon while we walked because I had to keep my attention on my feet. I had to time each step perfectly, and sometimes I’d have to take a big jump once I fell behind, making sure each foot landed squarely in the middle of each concrete block of sidewalk. I peeked over at Lance who was walking in the same way. When I looked back down, I froze. My right sneaker was stuck to the ground, the white oval of the toe breaking the clean black line between two slabs of concrete.

            “Lance.” I was terrified. He stopped and looked at me, and then followed my gaze down to my shoe. He looked back up at my eyes.

            “Oh shit,” he said. “Mom.” Then he took off down the block, running back to where our mother would be collapsed across the living room floor, broken. I stepped off the sidewalk into the street and walked home, shamefully, through the green moonlight.

Dexter - Serial Killer/Con Man?

I started watching the tv show Dexter earlier this year, and I immediately thought back to it when we started discussing the themes presented in this course. The series is based around Dexter Morgan, a serial killer who follows a certain 'moral' code in that he only kills other serial killers or people he as otherwise verified as 'bad'. If this doesn't twisted enough, Dexter works as a blood spatter analyst from the Miami Metro Police Department. He often analyzes his own crime scenes, or, when the police department fails, takes it into his own vigilante hands to stop the murderer who's crime scenes he has been investigating.
As a child, Dexter's adopted father took notice of his psychopathic tendencies and need to kill, so rather than attempt to address this issue, he taught Dexter how to use this killing 'addiction' for the greater good. He imparted on Dexter a certain code he must employ whenever killing, so that Dexter could only kill bad people, people who didn't deserve to live.
In order to maintain his serial killer lifestyle, Dexter must don a persona of normalcy, portraying himself as an everyday lab geek, husband, brother, and father to the rest of society. This series then brings up obvious issues of lying and a sense of an 'essential self' that we have been discussing throughout the course. Every day of his life Dexter must live out a lie on some senses, hiding the essential part of his being; his need to kill. He lies to everyone around him, but what is the root, the need of this lie? For Dexter, his lying is imperative to his survival; if he wants to avoid a death sentence or spending the rest of his life in jail, this charade must remain in tact. Furthermore, Dexter lies to protect others. He can't bear the idea of his sister, his wife, his co-workers, and his own son, to ever know the truth of his true self. Is then Dexter's lying a positive action? Does it have ultimate roots in morality?
Furthermore, this series brings up important issues of life and its precious value. Dexter acts as a vigilante in many ways, bringing justice to the city, as he sees it, by killing off the murderous scum that don't deserve life. But who is he to evaluate whether they deserve life or not? Is this 'code' that his father imparted on him truly applicable in every possible situation?
If you get a chance to watch this show, I really would, because it really makes one question whether lying is always detrimental, or whether in some instances, like Dexter's, it's perhaps necessary, and for the best.

Gone Girl

I was originally going to post about this film when I saw it; however, I did not complete that post, so I figured I might as well share my thoughts now.

Overall, Gone Girl is an interesting film, within the context of both this class and another rhetoric course I am in, Rhetoric of Film: Gothic Horror.

With regards to this course, I have been intrigued with the notion of the liars paradox: that is, when you someone is telling the truth, yet you think they are lying. Because you think they are lying (when in fact they are telling the truth), you become the liar in search for truth.

This is a major premise of the film because a lot of people suspect Nick of killing his wife; however, it is actually his wife Amy who has framed him. She is a writer, famous for her children's stories. The film is literally a movie version of a fictional narrative that is about fiction, a liar. Just like all the stories in this course, it is this never ending cycle of fiction and the search for truth.

In fact, this film really complicates romantic relationships. To be honest, if I saw this movie with my significant other I'd feel really strange because it makes you question the inherent Truth & idea that you can completely know someone when you're in a romantic relationships with them.

The film distorts this notion to the point that Amy frames Nick; Nick realizes this that he's been framed and confronts her. By the end of the film, Nick is still bound to Amy for many reasons but it is a distortion of the idealized form of romance that is embedded within American narratives.

The film asks questions and builds upon cultural anxieties about romance: can you ever fully and truly know your lover? Do you love the person for what you've project them to be or who they truly are?

In an odd way, the ending of the film critiques the romanticized ideal of unconditional love. In contemporary culture, we believe unconditional love to be an unchanging love. But reality is, unconditional love requires you to love someone despite their faults, the way they change as a person, and more than anything - their lies. Because if all humans are liars (if it is inherent in the performative and means of socialization), then we are bound to confront this notion of truth and lies at some point. So unconditional love means to love despite the lies and that you will never truly 'know' someone, even the person you bound yourself to for eternity.

The Serial Podcast - a true crime investigation

As an avid listener to Ira Glass' "This American Life" series, I was more than excited when I heard they would be creating a new true crime series. "The Serial Podcast", created by Sarah Koenig, has captured the nation's attention to a murder that occurred 15 years ago in Baltimore to high school to honor roll student Hae Min Lee. Initially, it appears to be a simple story about a high school romance gone horribly wrong. An angry ex-boyfriend who snapped due to an inability to deal with rejection. Koenig, after receiving the case file out of the blue, decides to talk to the supposed perpetrator Adnan Syed. An inmate of a Baltimore prison, they discuss the events freely leading to mixture of anger, conviction, and doubt in regards to whether he truly committed the murder. Mr. Syed is the ultimate unreliable narrator and he isn't the only one. With numerous players including past friends, a disbarred lawyer, detectives, and other suspects - everyone appears to have different narratives of what truly happened. "Serial" is powerful in that it explores the fickle nature of memory and how easily people can be tainted due to external or internal circumstances. How can one truly recall where they were and what they were doing on a particular day even 5 years ago? What were you doing on a Thursday 2 months ago? This begs the question - what essentially is truth if no one remembers it? The series is a roughly 12 hour meditation on the nature of truth and the American justice system. With countless lies being weaved throughout this ongoing story, I believe it would make a great companion piece to this class.

More info -

Serial is currently the #1 ranked podcast on itunes. There are even spoiler podcasts about Serial (such as "The Serial Serial") that discuss the case on a weekly basis with such fervor it reminds me of shows like True Detective.

The show is currently on Episode 9 (and it should be listened to chronologically)

http://serialpodcast.org/

Have a wonderful thanksgiving everyone.

An experiment with an unreliable narrator

This story is something I wrote, playing with the idea of an unreliable narrator. I'm not sure how well that part of it turned out but the story is amusing, I think.

The Bench by the Road

            "We had to do it, don't you see?" he said, seating himself at a bench at the edge of the park.

            "Whom do you mean by 'we'?" I asked, following his lead and taking a seat.

            "My sister and I, of course. They were our friends, and nobody knew about them. It had to stay that way. So we did what had to be done."

            "I'm listening." The day was a bit cool; it was still only autumn, but the weather had already turned, and I buttoned up my black pea coat against the breeze.

            "It began years ago. It was all just great fun back then, cameraderie for the four of us. Suburban life as a young child has its dull moments, but for two country kids like Harry and Mary it was always exciting. They really took a liking to us, as soon as we introduced ourselves. I mean, we really made them."

            "You made them?"

            That's right, they were ours."

            "I'm not sure I follow what you mean," I commented, but he seemed not to hear, and continued telling his story.

            "For a time, we were inseperable. We enjoyed it, and we played some great games together. I can still remember the time Harry and I climbed up to the top of the water tower, and tested each other to see how close we could get to the edge. Harry was better at it than I ever was, his balance was about as good as his guts. Daring, you know, it's a big deal for a boy. Mary and Sis' hadn't wanted to come along, they had their own girl things.

            "The two of them were homeschooled by their parents, who were still a bit old-fashioned, since they were from... well, somewhere. We never really thought that out. A farm, in any case. It doesn't matter. They would come visit us at lunch, and we would always wait by the edge of the school's field for them to come. They always refused our offers for parts of our lunch, insisting they had already eaten, though we imagined they weren't so well off. It was just so polite, as only such people can be. I never could get used to that about them. So we would sit there on the bench by the road and talk with our two friends.

            "And the other kids would look over at us with an odd something in their eye. Sis' would always notice it first, but I was always sure it was jealousy. We left it at that, and nobody ever asked us what we were doing by the edge of the field. It was as if they didn't even know we were there. So we acted like it too, and never talked to anybody else about it. They were our secret friends, who only existed when nobody else was there. But those looks, they said so much more than any of us could have expressed, especially at that age."

            I interrupted: "Would you say they seemed accusing?"

            He leaned back on the bench for a moment, thinking. After a moment he replied, "I still think they were jealous. We spent so much time with Harry and Mary, we started to ignore our real, good friends. And when you're ten, you don't really care about that, it's just fun to run about and make a ruckus. Scrapes, mud, torn clothes – all signs of a fine afternoon in the walnut orchards."

            "When did that change?"

            "It took a long time, at least to a kid. By the time we had noticed that we had lost some true friends, it was too late to save those friendships. We never really got close with the same people again, but by the end of all this, it didn't matter. Grade school ended and we moved on to middle school. We made other good friends."

            "Like Harry and Mary?"

            "No. That was a mistake. It was that damned politeness, I started to think something was strange about that. Too polite, just too polite – at least when we were together, the four of us.

            "Sometimes they would sleep over, and then Harry would sleep in my bed and Mary with Sis'. That's when things changed. Not at first; the first few times they slept over, they stayed how they always were. It wasn't until the winter, that first winter after we made them, that they started to change. I noticed how my sister was acting at breakfast, and I knew something had happened. After they had gone, and we were on our way to school, I asked her about it, throwing a nervous glance around to make sure they were out of earshot.

            "I said, 'What is it, I saw how you looked earlier. What happened?' And she replied, 'Just Mary. She was so wierd! When I wanted to sleep, she wouldn't stop talking. And it wasn't just talking, she was talking about you.' I tried to find out what she had said, but Sis' just shut up and stared down as she walked. I knew it wasn't good, but I just ignored it. Or tried to. I started to get mad about Mary, in that way only children get mad and want to pull hair or throw dirt. Tantrum-and-then-cry mad. It passed by lunchtime, and we sat together and ran around our bench by the road, chasing each other until we fell down, laughing.

            "But that wasn't the end of it. The two of them began to spend much more time at our house, since it was rather cold. Maybe it was only since we were indoors more and were more bored. I only remember the feeling. Either way, they stayed over more often, and I noticed that Harry wasn't quite acting the same, too. I started to really be annoyed by him, it could just be so stupid!"

            "Do you remember what exactly it was that he did?"

            "No, unfortunately I just know how I felt back then; those vague notions of the memories from the child I was at the time."

            "You and your sister were also changing, growing up. I'm sure that had something to do with this," I ventured. This sudden confession of a half forgotten childhood left me feeling unsure. I had never seen this side of him before, never heard this story. The cold seemed to creep in more deeply around the cuffs and collar of my coat.

            "You're right. We started to be annoyed by that kind of friend. It was just little quirks about the two of them, mannerisms that started to get on our nerves. We began to deeply despise them, but only secretly, between each other. Until one day, when I decided I would get back at Harry.

            "I pushed him out of the bed while he was sleeping, and left him there on the floor without a blanket. It was really only a harmless prank, but the shivers he had the next day were something else. I pretended not to know anything, claiming he must have fallen out, but told Sis' everything after they had gone. She laughed, and I knew she was going to do it too, the next time they stayed over."

            "They didn't stay away after you had done this for some time?"

            "Well, they never really left. And we decided on the spot to trap them."

            "Trap them? And nobody noticed?"

            "Who would have? We kept them in our closets, behind our clothes, and kept them gagged and blindfolded, so nobody could see them and they coudn't see anybody. Not that they would have, anyway. We let them live in the dark. Every now and again, on the occasional sunny days that winter, we brought them outside and would tear off the blindfolds, and see how they squirmed when the light burned their eyes. Then we would throw them back in the closet. After a while they couldn't stand up anymore, and we tied their hands to coat hangers to keep them up."

            "You did this to your friends?" I stood up and faced him. I was perfectly beside myself, his calmness all the more infuriating (where was his moral compass?), and I had to fight back the urge to call the police. Curiosity won out over my outrage, however, and I sat down again as he continued.

            "They weren't anymore. We hated them. We wanted to get rid of them, we just didn't know how – but it was just a matter of time. We were all there was keeping them in this world. And we weren't done with them yet. We invented all sorts of ways to torment them, things only children know how to think up – some of which only sounded cool but probably didn't really work – and would try them out when nobody was around. I can't remember any of the details now, but I would steal bits of things from Dad to turn into devices to try out on them. Every now and again, Dad would find his things in the backyard, bent up after our tinkering, and he would blow his top."

            "He never asked what they were or why you did it?"

            "No, he just got angry. That was his way." His statement was almost naively plain, but in that way that makes one believe it all the more. His facial expression, a mix of definitiveness and, if I read it properly, fear, supported his credibility.

            "What would you do?"

            "I only really remember one time, since it was winter and the school was closed, we tied them to the bench by the road with a rope I took from the garage, and would offer them food every now and again. ‘Oh, but you won't take it, you already ate at home,‘ we would say, and eat it ourselves. Then we would laugh, and run around the bench until we fell down, laughing even harder."

            "Nobody pulled over to ask what was going on?"

            "All our neighbors knew we were just playing around. It was all harmless, after all! So, one day, Sis' and I were hunting around in the garage, the treasure chest for all our fantastic torture techniques, and we found a dusty box of snail poison. We took it right away, back to the bench where we had left them, and made them eat it. They squirmed and protested, but it was time to move on, to put an end to it. Then we buried them where we knew we could always find them again."

            "Under the bench by the road?"

            He gave me a quizzical, unbelieving glance, and shifted on the bench to look at me straight-on. He seemed to be waiting for me to figure something out.

            "No, in our minds, where else?" he finally answered. "That's where we all put the figments of our imaginations when we're done with them. You didn't think they were real, did you?"

FROM CHELSEA LOW ON ARRESTED DEVELOPMENT

My favorite TV show, Arrested Development, features a main character who is probably the youngest and definitely the only con woman we have seen so far this semester, Maeby Funke. At just 14 years old Maeby learned that she could earn money much faster than working at her family's banana stand by lying and conning. First, she posed as her imaginary wheelchair-ridden "sister" Surely Funke and raised money for a mysterious terminal illness she called "BS." After her first con went off without a hitch and surprising success, Maeby's next con took place at a major movie studio while she was tagging along with her aspiring actor father to an audition. Maeby cleverly conned her way into a job as a movie executive which she held down for the next year, during which she produced several films. Her lies were only exposed when her cousin sent invitations to her 16th birthday party to everyone he found in Maeby's address book, which was filled with movie executives and celebrities who had no idea that the movie executive they'd worked with for the past year was only half the age she claimed to be. Afterwards, she briefly held a job at another movie studio until it was discovered that she had no high school diploma.

The following clip shows how Maeby would deflect any comments in conversation that could expose her true age. Her signature catchphrase "marry me!" became a running gag throughout the show because of how often Maeby would need to use it on her clueless coworkers complimenting her youthful appearance. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cAH2NMjHOGU

This all might have been avoided if Maeby's plan to become a devout Christian hadn't quickly gone awry due to a simple misunderstanding....

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FsBpjqsI1tQ

The Great Gatsby Just Might Help Us Understand "The Wolf Of Wall Street"

We've mentioned it before but Fitzgerald's "The Great Gatsby" easily could have been included in our reading list for this semester. As we're starting to read "The Wolf of Wall Street," I find myself identifying many connections between the two stories. I found this review of The Great Gatsby from when the film came out last year.

http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/the-serious-superficiality-of-the-great-gatsby

At the time it helped me sort out the way I felt about the over-glamorized, seductive portrayal of such a classic book. But reading this review with The Wolf of Wall Street in mind, it actually helps me make sense of this book as well. In the quote below, just one of many that stood out to me, the writer could have easily been talking about Jordan Belfort, or even Tom Ripley or Frank Abagnale Jr., any of our characters obsessed with fantasies and aware of people's willingness to believe in them.

"Fitzgerald understood the pleasure of giving in, and he saw people as desperate to give in to nearly anything -- a drink, a person, a story, a feeling, a song, a crowd, an idea. We were especially willing, he thought, to give in to ideas -- to fantasies. "Gatsby" captures, with great vividness, the push and pull of illusion and self-delusion; the danger and thrill of forgetting, lying and fantasizing; the hazards and the indispensability of dreaming and idealization."