text:
Close relationships - What's in it for us?
Constantine Sedikides delivered the Michael Argyle Lecture at this year's Annual Conference.
Humans are social animals. We spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about people, interacting with them, influencing them and being influenced by them. We crave social contact and find our relationships with friends, romantic partners and relatives rewarding for the most part. Why? What do close others do for us? What are the psychological benefits of close relationships? In particular, how does thinking about close relationships boost the self?
Perhaps thinking about close relationships is the equivalent of vitamins. Taking vitamins helps fight off winter illnesses, such as colds and flu. Likewise, thinking about close relationships helps fight off life adversities, such as being confronted with failure or unfavourable evaluations. More succinctly, bringing to mind close relationships helps lessen the blow of stressful life events. Such events now feel more manageable. Close relationships, then, are an important psychological resource. They bolster the self-system to the point where failure is taken more lightly and may even be seen
as a challenge rather than a threat.
With negative comes positive
We carried out an experiment to test the above ideas (Kumashiro & Sedikides, in press). All participants took what they thought was a valid and widely used intelligence test. The ominous 'Allport-Jameson Intelligence Test' consisted of difficult mathematical, analytical and verbal problems. To make matters worse, participants had only 25–45 seconds to respond to each problem. Due to the nature of the test, participants could not tell how well they did. At the conclusion of the test, participants learned that the experimenter would need around 15 minutes to compile a customised and comprehensive profile of their performance and intelligence. This was a pretext for the crucial manipulation that was about to follow.
Participants were requested to help, during the next 15 minutes, with an ostensibly unrelated short study. They were randomly assigned to three conditions. A third of participants (in the 'close-positive relationships' condition) were instructed to bring to mind a 'warm and positive relationship, that special person with whom you have the best relationship'. Another third (in the 'close-negative relationships' conditions) were instructed to bring to mind a 'cold and negative relationship,
the person with whom you have the worst relationship'. The final third of participants (in the 'neutral relationship' condition) were instructed to bring to mind a 'distant relationship, a person whom you don't know well and you neither like nor dislike'. Importantly, after participants recorded in each condition the relation's initials and the nature of the relationship (e.g. friend, co-worker, neighbour), they proceeded to spend three minutes responding in writing to each of five questions, such as 'What does this relationship personally mean to you?' and 'How does this relationship make you feel?' Thus, participants did not merely bring to mind a relationship, but they also thought in some depth about the personal relevance of the relationship.
The experimental saga was not over yet. The experimenter entered the room, announcing that he had finishing compiling the participants' individualised profiles. He then dispensed bogus performance feedback, ostensibly based on well-validated norms. Participants learned that their performance on the 'Allport-Jameson Intelligence Test' was 'poor', as their scores fell only at the 41st percentile of the distribution. The feedback hurt (as our measures indicated). Immediately afterwards, participants were informed that they would have the opportunity to receive additional information about their performance and intelligence. This information was allegedly accurate, pinpointed their weak points and difficulties in each test domain (mathematical, analytical, verbal), and could help them improve their future performance. Participants proceeded to indicate the degree to which they were interested in receiving additional feedback about their weaknesses. This was our main dependent measure.
As a reminder, we hypothesised that close-positive relationships are a self-bolstering resource. This resource armours the self-system to the point where, even following unfavourable performance feedback, individuals become more open
to accurate information about their performance limitations and intelligence failings. Despite being hit by a self-threatening evaluation, participants whose minds are now 'peopled' by close-positive relationships will be oddly receptive to further self-threatening information. The results confirmed our hypothesis. Participants in the close-positive relationships condition expressed a stronger interest in obtaining additional information about their weaknesses compared with participants in the other two conditions.
Why are participants who ponder a close-positive relationship more receptive to unfavourable (albeit potentially improving) feedback? We reasoned that there may be at least three explanations. First, participants are overwhelmed by warm feelings for the person with whom they have a close-positive relationship. Second, participants experience a rise in self-esteem. Third, participants are in a better mood. Warm feelings for the relation, elevated self-esteem, and better mood could each reassure and shield the self to the point where an additional hit can be easily tolerated. We assessed these explanations in a follow-up study (Kumashiro & Sedikides, in press).
Participants completed a difficult version of the Remote Associates Test (RAT: McFarlin & Blascovich, 1984). The RAT was said to be a valid and reliable assessment of an important intellectual ability: integrative orientation. Participants were supplied with 20 sets of three words (e.g. cotton, bathtub, tonic) and were requested to generate fourth words that could go with each word in a set (in this example gin). When participants were finished, they learned that a comprehensive and personalised profile of their integrative orientation would follow soon. In the meantime, their assistance in another,
short study would be appreciated.
Participants were randomly assigned to four conditions. One quarter thought and wrote about a close-positive relationship, another quarter about a distant-positive relationship, still another quarter about a close-negative relationship, and the final quarter about a distant-negative relationship. Those in the former two conditions wrote about how the relation was supportive of them, those in the latter two conditions about how the relation was critical of them. Subsequently, participants received unfavourable performance feedback. They learned that their integrative orientation ability was 'below average', as their scores lay on the 41st percentile of the distribution. Not surprisingly, they found the feedback unpleasant.
Next, participants recorded the level of their self-esteem and their mood. Specifically, they filled out the Heatherton and Polivy (1991) state self-esteem scale (example items: 'Right now, I am worried about whether I am regarded as a success or failure', and 'I feel inferior to others at this moment'). Also, participants filled out a mood scale (Martin et al., 1997), which consisted of both negative (e.g. anxious, nervous, down) and positive (e.g. calm, pleased, happy) adjectives. Finally, participants indicated the extent to which they were interested in receiving additional information about their weaknesses in the domain of integrative orientation.
The findings were consistent with those of the previous experiment. Compared with the other three conditions, participants who pondered the personal relevance of a close-positive relationship expressed the strongest interest in obtaining weakness-related information about their integrative orientation ability. Nevertheless, neither self-esteem nor mood accounted for this finding. That is, participants in the close-positive relationship condition neither had higher self-esteem nor were in a better mood than those in the other conditions. Finally, although participants reported relatively warm feelings for the close-positive relation (as manifested by independent codings of their writing protocols), these feelings did not predict higher interest in weakness-related feedback about integrative orientation.
The role of cognitive dissonance
So far, our research has established the resource function of close-positive relationships by demonstrating that participants dare solicit additional feedback about their weaknesses knowing full well that the feedback will be accurate (i.e. self-threatening). We wanted to understand better the consequences of this resource for social behaviour. In what other ways does the self-bolstering function of close relationships manifest itself?
One of the most counterintuitive contributions of social psychological research is the phenomenon of cognitive dissonance (Festinger & Carlsmith, 1959). This phenomenon refers to the discomfort experienced by a perceived inconsistency between one's attitude and one's behaviour (e.g. expressed attitude) and to the strategies one uses to re-establish consistency. For example, when becoming aware of an inconsistency between one's privately held and publicly expressed attitude, a person will strive to resolve this inconsistency by changing their initial attitude. Take the case of a student who privately opposes the policy to combat grade inflation in her university, given that such a policy would increase the rigour of exam-marking standards, thus resulting in substantially fewer first class and 2:1 degrees. Furthermore, assume that the student finds herself in the awkward position of having voluntarily written an essay that advocates such a policy. Cognitive dissonance theory predicts that she will now change her private attitude to be consistent with her public attitude: she will become more favourable towards the policy of curbing grade inflation.
If close-positive relationships function as a self-bolstering resource, they ought to eliminate cognitive dissonance. Pondering a close-positive relationship should affirm and replenish the self to the point where re-establishing cognitive consistency would become irrelevant and unnecessary. No change in private attitudes would occur.
In an experimental test of these ideas (Sedikides & Kumashiro, 2005), participants responded to a 15-item survey about their university. Only one of these items was pertinent to the objectives of our study. The item stated that the university should combat grade inflation by instituting higher marking standards and, by implication, lowering substantially the percentage of students who graduate with firsts or 2:1s. This was a rather covert way of gauging participants' attitude towards the alleged grade inflation policy. Note that only participants with an unfavourable attitude towards this policy were retained in the data analyses – and a high majority of respondents indeed held such an attitude.
Next, participants were requested to write an essay, under the pretext of assisting a university committee that would investigate the grade inflation issue. Participants in the low-choice condition were instructed to write a strong and forceful essay in favour of combating grade inflation. In contrast, participants in the high-choice condition learned that the committee had enough 'against' arguments and needed more 'for' arguments. Their decision was voluntary, but nonetheless the committee needed strong, forceful arguments in favour of combating grade inflation. Participants proceeded to sign
a form, acknowledging that (1) they were writing the essay voluntarily, and (2) the committee would use their arguments in making a decision.
Following the essay writing, participants in the high-choice condition were assigned into four groups. Some of them thought and wrote about a close-positive relationship, some about a close-negative relationship, some about a neutral relationship, and some about no relationship at all. Finally, all participants completed the state self-esteem and mood scales from the previous study and, more importantly, indicated once again their attitude towards the grade inflation policy.
No cognitive dissonance effect was expected in the low-choice condition. Participants would not change their private attitude, because their public attitude (i.e. the essay writing) was imposed by an external factor – the experimenter. However, cognitive dissonance was expected to emerge in most high-choice conditions, given that participants voluntarily elected to write the essay in favour of combating grade inflation and, as such, they should change their private attitudes in order to settle the looming inconsistency. In particular, cognitive dissonance was expected to emerge in
three of the four conditions: close-negative, neutral, and no relationship. Importantly, cognitive dissonance was expected to be absent in the close-positive relationships condition. Participants, affirmed by the thoughts of a close other, would not feel the need to re-establish consistency between private and public attitudes.
Our hypotheses were confirmed. Participants in the close-negative relationship, neutral relationship, and no-relationship conditions who freely chose
to write the essay manifested cognitive dissonance; that is, their attitudes towards the policy became more positive. In contrast, participants who had pondered
a close-positive relationship maintained their anti-policy attitude (as did low-choice participants). Close-positive relationships eliminated cognitive dissonance. Nevertheless, as in our previous study, neither state self-esteem nor mood accounted for this finding.
Our results establish that close-positive relationships function as a self-affirming resource, but also point to several gaps in our knowledge. First and foremost, what is the exact mechanism through which close-positive relationships benefit the self? We ruled out state self-esteem, mood and warm feelings for the relation. There are several other viable candidates. One is unconditional acceptance. Perhaps a reason why individuals are not bothered by weakness-related feedback or by attitude–behaviour inconsistency is that close relationships make them feel secure or provide them with a safe haven. Two other possible mechanisms are generalised positive affect (Tesser, 2000) and self-esteem (Sedikides & Gregg, 2003), with both presumed to occur outside of conscious awareness. If so, measures that are very different from the ones we used would need to be implemented to capture the effect of these mechanisms. Finally, at the physiological level, researchers will do well to zero in on a potential surge in oxytocin levels that might accompany thinking about close-positive relationships (Taylor et al., 2000).
Several other research opportunities present themselves. In our research, we did not distinguish between different types of close-positive relationships. Which type (e.g. romantic partners, friends, family) is most effective as a self-bolstering resource? Also, what are some other behavioural consequences of this resource? For example, does relationship-induced self-bolstering influence performance-related variables such as task persistence, intrinsic motivation, and creativity (Wentzel et al., 2004)? More importantly, does relationship-induced self-bolstering influence prosocial behaviour?
Finally, what are some key individual differences that moderate the effectiveness of close-positive relationships as a self-bolster? We would speculate in favour of attachment style (Mikulincer & Shaver, 2001), self-esteem (Murray et al., 1998), and implicit self-theories (Dweck, 1999) as promising empirical directions. For example, pondering the personal relevance of close-positive relationships may result in more effective self-bolstering among secure (rather than avoidant or dismissive) persons and among high (as opposed to low) self-esteem persons.
Coping with life's adversities
Close relationships have high personal relevance. Individuals consider close others part of the self (Aron et al., 1991). Also, close relationships are associated with increased self-understanding and self-growth (Sedikides et al., 1994), reduced actual–ideal discrepancies (Campbell et al., 1994) and positive illusions (i.e. positive self-concept, exaggerated perceptions of control, unrealistic optimism: Martz et al., 1998). In addition, close relationships contribute substantially to life satisfaction and subjective well-being (Argyle, 1987). Thus, close relationships constitute a vital resource to the self.Interestingly, thinking of close others changes the self-system in important ways. This process, for example, buffers existential anxiety (Mikulincer et al., 2003) and lowers stress (McGowan, 2002). More importantly, thinking of close others induces exploratory intentions (Green & Campbell, 2000) and a state of cognitive openness (Green-Hennessy & Reis, 1998; Mikulincer & Arad, 1999).
We relied on the above two lines of research to generate our hypotheses. Close relationships have resource potential and contribute to cognitive openness and exploration. Psychological resources (e.g. success experiences, sense of control) increase willingness to obtain accurate but unfavourable feedback (Aspinwall, 1998; Trope & Neter, 1994). Hence, it follows that pondering the personal relevance of close relationships will buffer the self, thus making the individual more receptive to feedback about personal weaknesses and eliminating cognitive dissonance.
Our research supported these conjectures. Cognitive activation of close-positive relationships increased willingness to obtain accurate information about one's weaknesses on a domain, even in the face of prior failure feedback on that domain. Close-positive relationships shield the self to the point where, even following unfavourable feedback, accurate information about personal weaknesses is sought out despite its self-threat potential. In conclusion, our research establishes that close-positive relationships constitute a resource that enables the self to cope more effectively with life's adversities.
- Constantine Sedikides is Professor of Social and Personality Psychology and Director of the Centre for Research on Self and Identity at the University of Southampton. E-mail: [email protected].
Centre for Research on Self and Identity: www.soton.ac.uk/~crsi/centresinformation.htm
International Association for Relationship Research: www.iarr.org
International Society for Self and Identity: www.psych.neu.edu/ISSI
Argyle, M. (1987). The psychology of happiness. London: Methuen.
Aron, A., Aron, E.N., Tudor, M. & Nelson, G. (1991). Close relationships as including other in the self. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 60, 241–253.
Aspinwall, L.G. (1998). Rethinking the role of positive affect in self-regulation. Motivation and Emotion, 22, 1–32.
Campbell, W.K., Sedikides, C. & Bosson, J. (1994). Romantic involvement, self-discrepancy, and psychological well-being. Personal Relationships, 1, 399–404.
Dweck, C.S. (1999). Self theories. Philadelphia, PA: Psychology Press/Taylor & Francis.
Festinger, L. & Carlsmith, J.M. (1959). Cognitive consequences of forced compliance. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 58, 203–210.
Green, J.D. & Campbell, W.K. (2000). Attachment and exploration in adults. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 26, 452–461.
Green-Hennessy, S. & Reis, P.R. (1998). Openness in processing social information among attachment types. Personal Relationships, 5, 449–466.
Heatherton, T.F. & Polivy, J. (1991). Development and validation of a scale of measuring state self-esteem. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 60, 895–920.
Kumashiro, M. & Sedikides, C. (in press). Taking on board liability-focused feedback. Psychological Science.
Martin, L., Abend, T., Sedikides, C. & Green, J.D. (1997). How would I feel if…? Mood as input to a role fulfillment evaluation process. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 73, 242–253.
Martz, J.M., Verette, J., Arriaga, X.B. et al. (1998). Positive illusions in close relationships. Personal Relationships, 5, 151–181.
McFarlin, D.B. & Blascovich, J. (1984). Remote Associates Test (RAT) as an alternative to illusory performance feedback. Basic and Applied Social Psychology, 5, 223–229.
McGowan, S. (2002). Mental representations in stressful situations: The calming and distressing effects of significant others. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 38, 152–161.
Mikulincer, M. & Arad, D. (1999). Attachment working models and cognitive openness in close relationships. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 77, 710–725.
Mikulincer, M., Florian, V. & Hirschberger, G. (2003). The existential function of close relationships: Introducing death into the science of love. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 7, 20–40.
Mikulincer, M. & Shaver, P.R. (2001). Attachment theory and intergroup bias: Evidence that priming the secure base schema attenuates negative reactions to out-groups. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 81, 97–115.
Murray, S.L., Holmes, J.G., MacDonald, G. & Ellsworth, P.C. (1998). Through the looking glass darkly? When self-doubts turn into relationship insecurities. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 75, 1459–1480.
Sedikides, C. & Gregg, A.P. (2003). Portraits of the self. In M.A. Hogg & J. Cooper (Eds.) Sage handbook of social psychology (pp. 110–138). London: Sage.
Sedikides, C. & Kumashiro, M. (2005). On the resource function of relationships: Close-positive relationships as a dissonance reduction mechanism. Unpublished manuscript. University of Southampton.
Sedikides, C., Oliver, M.B. & Campbell, W.K. (1994). Perceived benefits and costs of romantic relationships for women and men: Implications for exchange theory. Personal Relationships, 1, 5–21.
Taylor, S.E., Klein, L.C., Lewis, B.P. et al. (2000). Biobehavioral responses to stress in females. Psychological Review, 107, 411–429.
Tesser, A. (2000). On the confluence of self-esteem maintenance mechanisms. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 4, 290–299.
Trope, Y. & Neter, E. (1994). Reconciling competing motives in self-evaluation. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 66, 646–657.
Wentzel, K.R., Barry, C.M. & Caldwell, K.A. (2004.) Friendships in middle school: Influences on motivation and school adjustment. Journal of Educational Psychology, 96, 195–203.
Difference and the psychology of conflict
Intergroup contact - Panacea for prejudice?
Why I study...close relationships


text:
Q: Best way to fix PHP error Undefined index - PHP 5.5 I have noticed some error logs since I tried a new open source trade script and I tried to fix them. Most of them are "Undefined property", "Undefined index" and "Undefined variable". So, I tried this answer (PHP: "Notice: Undefined variable", "Notice: Undefined index", and "Notice: Undefined offset") and now there are no error logs, but I am not sure if this is going to work without no issues. Here is the file's source code and bellow is my fix which I don't know if it is correct.
Please take a short look if you can. Thank you.
PHP errors:
PHP Notice: Undefined index: method in /var/www/html/security.php on line 379
PHP Notice: Undefined index: method in /var/www/html/security.php on line 380
PHP Notice: Undefined index: method in /var/www/html/security.php on line 381

Full Code:
<?php
include_once '../lib/common.php';

if (User::$info['locked'] == 'Y' || User::$info['deactivated'] == 'Y')
    Link::redirect('settings.php');
elseif (User::$awaiting_token)
    Link::redirect('verify-token.php');
elseif (!User::isLoggedIn())
    Link::redirect('login.php');

$step1 = false;
$step2 = false;
$step3 = false;
$step4 = false;

$authcode1 = (!empty($_REQUEST['authcode'])) ? urldecode($_REQUEST['authcode']) : false;
if ($authcode1 && empty($_REQUEST['step'])) {
    API::add('User','getSettingsChangeRequest',array(urlencode($authcode1)));
    $query = API::send();
    $response = unserialize(base64_decode($query['User']['getSettingsChangeRequest']['results'][0]));
    if ($response) {
        if (!empty($response['authy']))
            $step1 = true;
        elseif (!empty($response['google']))
            $step3 = true;
    }
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}

$cell1 = (!empty($_REQUEST['cell'])) ? preg_replace("/[^0-9]/", "",$_REQUEST['cell']) : false;
$country_code1 = (!empty($_REQUEST['country_code'])) ? preg_replace("/[^0-9]/", "",$_REQUEST['country_code']) : false;
$token1 = (!empty($_REQUEST['token'])) ? preg_replace("/[^0-9]/", "",$_REQUEST['token']) : false;
$remove = !empty($_REQUEST['remove']);

if ($remove) {
    if (empty($_REQUEST['submitted']) || (!empty($_REQUEST['method']) && $_REQUEST['method'] == 'sms')) {
        if (User::$info['using_sms'] == 'Y') {
            if (User::sendSMS()) {
                $sent_sms = true;
                Messages::add(Lang::string('withdraw-sms-sent'));
            }
        }
    }
    else {
        if (!($token1 > 0))
            Errors::add(Lang::string('security-no-token'));

        if (!is_array(Errors::$errors)) {
            API::token($token1);
            API::add('User','disable2fa');
            $query = API::send();

            if ($query['error'] == 'security-incorrect-token')
                Errors::add(Lang::string('security-incorrect-token'));

            if ($query['error'] == 'security-com-error')
                Errors::add(Lang::string('security-com-error'));

            if ($query['error'] == 'authy-errors')
                Errors::merge($query['authy_errors']);

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                Link::redirect('security.php?message=security-disabled-message');
            }
        }
    }
}

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    if (!($cell1 > 0) && $_REQUEST['method'] != 'google')
        Errors::add(Lang::string('security-no-cell'));
    if (!($country_code1 > 0) && $_REQUEST['method'] != 'google')
        Errors::add(Lang::string('security-no-cc'));

    if (!is_array(Errors::$errors)) {
        if ($_REQUEST['method'] != 'google') {
            API::add('User','registerAuthy',array($cell1,$country_code1));
            $query = API::send();
            $authy_id = $query['User']['registerAuthy']['results'][0]['user']['id'];
            $response = $query['User']['registerAuthy']['results'][0];

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        }

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            if ($_REQUEST['method'] != 'google') {
                if ($_REQUEST['method'] == 'sms') {
                    if (User::sendSMS($authy_id))
                        $using_sms = 'Y';
                }
                else
                    $using_sms = 'N';

                if (!is_array(Errors::$errors)) {
                    API::add('User','enableAuthy',array($cell1,$country_code1,$authy_id,$using_sms));
                    API::add('User','settingsEmail2fa',array(array('authy'=>1),1));
                    $query = API::send();
                    //$step1 = true;

                    if ($query['User']['settingsEmail2fa']['results'][0])
                        Link::redirect('security.php?notice=email');
                }
            }
            else {
                if (!is_array(Errors::$errors)) {
                    API::add('User','enableGoogle2fa',array($cell1,$country_code1));
                    API::add('User','settingsEmail2fa',array(array('google'=>1),1));
                    $query = API::send();
                    //$step1 = true;

                    if ($query['User']['settingsEmail2fa']['results'][0])
                        Link::redirect('security.php?notice=email');
                }
            }
        }
    }
}
elseif (!empty($_REQUEST['step']) && $_REQUEST['step'] == 2) {
    if (!($token1 > 0))
        Errors::add(Lang::string('security-no-token'));

    if (!is_array(Errors::$errors)) {
        API::settingsChangeId($authcode1);
        API::token($token1);
        API::add('User','verifiedAuthy');
        $query = API::send();

        if (!empty($query['error'])) {
            if ($query['error'] == 'security-com-error')
                Errors::add(Lang::string('security-com-error'));

            if ($query['error'] == 'authy-errors')
                Errors::merge($query['authy_errors']);

            if ($query['error'] == 'request-expired')
                Errors::add(Lang::string('settings-request-expired'));
        }

        if (!is_array(Errors::$errors)) {
            Messages::add(Lang::string('security-success-message'));

            $step2 = true;
        }
        else
            $step1 = true;
    }
    else
        $step1 = true;
}
elseif (!empty($_REQUEST['step']) && $_REQUEST['step'] == 3) {
    if (!($token1 > 0))
        Errors::add(Lang::string('security-no-token'));

    if (!is_array(Errors::$errors)) {
        API::settingsChangeId($authcode1);
        API::token($token1);
        API::add('User','verifiedGoogle');
        $query = API::send();

        if ($query['error'] == 'security-incorrect-token')
            Errors::add(Lang::string('security-incorrect-token'));

        if ($query['error'] == 'request-expired')
            Errors::add(Lang::string('settings-request-expired'));

        if (!is_array(Errors::$errors)) {
            Messages::add(Lang::string('security-success-message'));

            $step4 = true;
        }
        else
            $step3 = true;
    }
    else
        $step3 = true;
}

if (!empty($_REQUEST['notice']) && $_REQUEST['notice'] == 'email')
    $notice = Lang::string('settings-change-notice');
elseif (!empty($_REQUEST['message']) && $_REQUEST['message'] == 'security-disabled-message')
    Messages::add(Lang::string('security-disabled-message'));

if (User::$info['verified_authy'] == 'Y' || $step2)
    API::add('Content','getRecord',array('security-setup'));
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    API::add('Content','getRecord',array('security-setup-google'));
elseif ($step1)
    API::add('Content','getRecord',array('security-token'));
elseif ($step3) {
    API::add('Content','getRecord',array('security-google'));
    API::add('User','getGoogleSecret');
}
else
    API::add('Content','getRecord',array('security-explain'));

$query = API::send();
$content = $query['Content']['getRecord']['results'][0];
$secret = (!empty($query['User']['getGoogleSecret'])) ? $query['User']['getGoogleSecret']['results'][0] : false;
$page_title = Lang::string('security');

include 'includes/head.php';
?>

<?= $page_title ?>

 <?= Lang::string('home') ?> / <?= Lang::string('account') ?> / <?= $page_title ?>

    <? include 'includes/sidebar_account.php'; ?>

        <? if ($remove) { ?>
            <? Errors::display(); ?>

                            <?= Lang::string('security-enter-token') ?>

                        <form id="enable_tfa" action="security.php" method="POST">
                            <input type="hidden" name="remove" value="1" />
                            <input type="hidden" name="submitted" value="1" />

                                        <?= Lang::string('security-token') ?>
                                        <input name="token" id="token" type="text" value="<?= $token1 ?>" />

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 <?= Lang::string('security-disable') ?>

        <? } elseif (User::$info['verified_google'] == 'Y' || $step4) { ?>

<?= $content['title'] ?>

<?= $content['content'] ?>

            <? Messages::display(); ?>

 <?= Lang::string('security-disable') ?>

        <? } elseif ($step1) { ?>

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<?= $content['content'] ?>

            <? Errors::display(); ?>
            <form id="enable_tfa" action="security.php" method="POST">
                <input type="hidden" name="step" value="2" />
                <input type="hidden" name="authcode" value="<?= urlencode($authcode1) ?>" />

                            <?= Lang::string('security-enter-token') ?>

                                <?= Lang::string('security-token') ?>
                                <input name="token" id="authy-token" type="text" value="<?= $token1 ?>" />

<input type="submit" name="submit" value="<?= Lang::string('security-validate') ?>" class="but_user" />

            </form>
        <? } elseif ($step3) { ?>

<?= $content['title'] ?>

<?= $content['content'] ?>

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            <form id="enable_tfa" action="security.php" method="POST">
                <input type="hidden" name="step" value="3" />
                <input type="hidden" name="authcode" value="<?= urlencode($authcode1) ?>" />

                            <?= Lang::string('security-scan-qr') ?>

                                <?= Lang::string('security-secret-code') ?>
                                <input type="text" id="secret" name="secret" value="<?= $secret['secret'] ?>" />

                                <img class="qrcode" src="includes/qrcode.php?sec=1&code=otpauth://totp/<?= $secret['label'] ?>?secret=<?= $secret['secret'] ?>" />

                                <?= Lang::string('security-token') ?>
                                <input name="token" id="token" type="text" value="<?= $token1 ?>" />

<input type="submit" name="submit" value="<?= Lang::string('security-validate') ?>" class="but_user" />

            </form>
        <? } else { ?>
            <?= (!empty($notice)) ? '

'.$notice.'

' : '' ?>
            <? Errors::display(); ?>
            <? Messages::display(); ?>

<?= $content['title'] ?>

<?= $content['content'] ?>

            <form name="start_auth" id="enable_tfa" action="security.php" method="POST">
                <input type="hidden" name="step" value="1" />
                <input type="hidden" id="send_sms" name="send_sms" value="" />
                <input type="hidden" id="google_2fa" name="google_2fa" value="" />

                            <?= Lang::string('security-enable-two-factor') ?>

                                <?= Lang::string('security-method') ?>
                                <select name="method" id="method">
                                    <option <?= ($_REQUEST['method'] == 'google') ? 'selected="selected"' : false ?> value="google">Google Authenticator</option>
                                    <option <?= ($_REQUEST['method'] == 'authy') ? 'selected="selected"' : false ?> value="authy">Authy</option>
                                    <option <?= ($_REQUEST['method'] == 'SMS') ? 'selected="selected"' : false ?> value="SMS">SMS</option>
                                </select>

                                <?= Lang::string('security-country') ?> (<?= Lang::string('security-optional-google') ?>)
                                <select name="country_code" id="authy-countries">
                                <?
                                if ($country_code1 > 0) {
                                    echo '<option value="'.$country_code1.'" selected="selected"></option>';
                                }
                                ?>
                                </select>

                                <?= Lang::string('security-cell') ?> (<?= Lang::string('security-optional-google') ?>)
                                <input name="cell" id="authy-cellphone" type="text" value="<?= $cell1 ?>" />

<input type="submit" name="submit" value="<?= Lang::string('security-enable') ?>" class="but_user" />

            </form>
        <? } ?>

<? include 'includes/foot.php'; ?>

Error lines:
<option <?= ($_REQUEST['method'] == 'google') ? 'selected="selected"' : false ?> value="google">Google Authenticator</option>
<option <?= ($_REQUEST['method'] == 'authy') ? 'selected="selected"' : false ?> value="authy">Authy</option>
<option <?= ($_REQUEST['method'] == 'SMS') ? 'selected="selected"' : false ?> value="SMS">SMS</option>

My fix (I added "!empty($_REQUEST['method']) && "):
<option <?= (!empty($_REQUEST['method']) && $_REQUEST['method'] == 'google') ? 'selected="selected"' : false ?> value="google">Google Authenticator</option>
<option <?= (!empty($_REQUEST['method']) && $_REQUEST['method'] == 'authy') ? 'selected="selected"' : false ?> value="authy">Authy</option>
<option <?= (!empty($_REQUEST['method']) && $_REQUEST['method'] == 'SMS') ? 'selected="selected"' : false ?> value="SMS">SMS</option>

A: You got error because you were trying to access array index, which doesn't exist, so
Use isset()
Like below
(isset($_REQUEST['method']) && $_REQUEST['method'] == 'google')

A: It seem like you have understood the reason for the notice; you attempt to access a array index that is not there. The only fix for this is to make sure the index exists before trying to fetch it. This is considered good practice either way and you should adapt to this approach: never access indexes you can not guarantee exist.
The most common pattern is to do something like:
$methodValue = null;
if (isset($_REQUEST['method']) and strlen($_REQUEST['method']) > 0) {
    $methodValue = $_REQUEST['method'];
}

This will not throw any notices, and you always know the value of the variable regardless if the index exists or not. This variable also provides a default value, which accessing the index can not.

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaStackExchange


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text:
El condado de Keith (en inglés: Keith County), fundado en 1873 se le llamó Keith en honor a Morrill C. Keith que fue propietario de uno de los mayores ranchos, es un condado del estado estadounidense de Nebraska. En el año 2000 tenía una población de 8.875 habitantes con una densidad de población de 3 personas por km². La sede del condado es Ogallala.

Geografía
Según la oficina del censo el condado tiene una superficie total de , de los que  son tierra y  (4,37%) son agua.

Condados adyacentes
 Condado de Arthur - norte
 Condado de McPherson - noreste
 Condado de Lincoln - este
 Condado de Perkins - sur
 Condado de Deuel - oeste
 Condado de Garden - noroeste
 Condado de Sedgwick - suroeste

Demografía
Según el censo del 2000 la renta per cápita media de los habitantes del condado era de 32.325 dólares y el ingreso medio de una familia era de 39.118 dólares. En el año 2000 los hombres tenían unos ingresos anuales 26.523 dólares frente a los 19.024 dólares que percibían las mujeres. El ingreso por habitante era de 17.421 dólares y alrededor de un 9,30% de la población estaba bajo el umbral de pobreza nacional.

Ciudades y pueblos
Las principales ciudades son:
 Ogallala
 Brule
 Paxton
 Keystone (no incorporada)
 Lemoyne (no incorporada)
 Roscoe (no incorporada)

Referencias

Enlaces externos

 Sitio web gubernamental del condado. (en inglés)

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaWikipedia


text:
'use strict';

exports.__esModule = true;

function _interopRequireDefault(obj) { return obj && obj.__esModule ? obj : { 'default': obj }; }

function _classCallCheck(instance, Constructor) { if (!(instance instanceof Constructor)) { throw new TypeError('Cannot call a class as a function'); } }

function _inherits(subClass, superClass) { if (typeof superClass !== 'function' && superClass !== null) { throw new TypeError('Super expression must either be null or a function, not ' + typeof superClass); } subClass.prototype = Object.create(superClass && superClass.prototype, { constructor: { value: subClass, enumerable: false, writable: true, configurable: true } }); if (superClass) Object.setPrototypeOf ? Object.setPrototypeOf(subClass, superClass) : subClass.__proto__ = superClass; }

var _ImmediateScheduler2 = require('./ImmediateScheduler');

var _ImmediateScheduler3 = _interopRequireDefault(_ImmediateScheduler2);

var _NextTickAction = require('./NextTickAction');

var _NextTickAction2 = _interopRequireDefault(_NextTickAction);

var _ImmediateAction = require('./ImmediateAction');

var _ImmediateAction2 = _interopRequireDefault(_ImmediateAction);

var NextTickScheduler = (function (_ImmediateScheduler) {
    _inherits(NextTickScheduler, _ImmediateScheduler);

    function NextTickScheduler() {
        _classCallCheck(this, NextTickScheduler);

        _ImmediateScheduler.apply(this, arguments);
    }

    NextTickScheduler.prototype.scheduleNow = function scheduleNow(work, state) {
        return (this.scheduled ? new _ImmediateAction2['default'](this, work) : new _NextTickAction2['default'](this, work)).schedule(state);
    };

    return NextTickScheduler;
})(_ImmediateScheduler3['default']);

exports['default'] = NextTickScheduler;
module.exports = exports['default'];

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaGithub


text:
Joseph C. Panjikaran (1888-1949) of Shertallay was a Syro-Malabar Catholic monsignor, historian, theologian, journalist, and the founder of the Dharmagiri Hospital, Kothamangalam, and the Congregation of the Medical Sisters of St. Joseph (Dharmagiri sisters).

The cause of his canonisation was initiated by the Diocese of Kothamangalam in 2010.

Life
Joseph C. Panjikaran was born on 10 September 1888 in the village of Uzhuva, in the diocese of Ernakulam as the son of Chacko Panjikaran and Mariam Kanichattu.

Panjikaran became director of the propagation of faith in the Vicariate of Ernakulam. He believed that the church had responsibility to provide medical services to the poor and the sick. He opened a hospital named Dharmagiri at Kothamangalam, Kerala in 1934 and founded the congregation of Medical Sisters of St. Joseph in 1944.

He died of a heart attack on 4 November 1949.

References

1888 births
1949 deaths
People from Alappuzha district
Syro-Malabar priests
Indian Eastern Catholics
University of Madras alumni
20th-century Indian historians
20th-century Indian archaeologists
Historians of India
Historians of the Catholic Church
20th-century Indian Roman Catholic priests
Indian newspaper editors
20th-century Indian Roman Catholic theologians
Canon law jurists
Canonical theologians
Papal chamberlains
Founders of Catholic religious communities
20th-century venerated Christians
Eastern Catholic Servants of God
Malayalam-language journalists


text:
A Maestro At The Met
WARNING: Vultures Eyeing NYCHA
By Ari Paul
Welcome to Nyack
By Bill Batson
Seaside Stories
By Saskia Kahn
Notes on a Fallen Star
Excerpts from J.-B. Pontalis's Brother of the Above
By J.-B. Pontalis, translated from the French by Donald Nicholson-Smith (International Psychoanalytic Books, 2012)
A Pack of Damn Lies
By Matt Igoe
A Letter to Attorney General Holder
By the Whistleblower Defense League
Ethical Criticism
By Martha Schwendener
JOCK REYNOLDS with Phong Bui
FRANCESCO CLEMENTE with Alex Bacon
VINCENT KATZ with Phong Bui
Blighted Luminance UGO RONDINONE with Jarrett Earnest
MICHAEL PORTNOY 27 Gnosis
By Chloé Rossetti
Wait, Later This Will Be Nothing: Editions by Dieter Roth
By Becky Brown
GORDON MATTA-CLARK Above and Below
SANFORD WURMFELD Light & Dark
JOEL SHAPIRO Sculpture and Drawings, 1969-1972
ZHANG XIAOGANG
DANH VO's Portentous Art Mother Tongue and I M U U R 2
By Bansie Vasvani
Art Criticism That Made A Difference
By Darren Jones
Jean-Michel Basquiat Commented On Your Status
By Noah Becker
Criticism After Utopian Politics
By Pac Pobric
Criticism on the Spot
By Christina Schmid
DAVID DIAO TMI
12 Paintings by LAURA OWENS
BEN LA ROCCO Fugue State
By Corina Larkin
JOHN MOORE Portals
SERGEI TCHEREPNIN Ear Tone Box
The Artful Recluse: Painting, Poetry, and Politics in 17th-Century China
CORDY RYMAN Adaptive Radiation
MARY LUCIER New Installation Works
CLAES OLDENBURG The Street and The Store and Mouse Museum/Ray Gun Wing
POIGNANCY ON VIEW Giosetta Fioroni: L'Argento
By Alana Shilling-Janoff
SUSANNA HELLER Phantom Pain
Edo Pop: The Impact of Japanese Prints
By Gail Victoria Braddock Quagliata
KATE TEALE The Sea Is All Around Us
TED STAMM Paintings
SOMEDAY IS NOW: The Art of Corita Kent
By Michael Duncan
ANDREW KUO You Say Tomato
By Ryan Lee Wong
Painting Advanced
By Matthew Shen Goodman
Lyrics for Love and Loss
By J.W. McCormack
BILL CHENG with Scott Cheshire
Fractured Knowledge
By Orli Van Mourik
Divided We Fall
By Amy Cavanaugh
A Classless Education
Frederick & Fyodor
By Rayyan Al-Shawaf
By Katharina Smundak
Electronic Engagement
Lonnie Holley's Past, Present, and Future
By Christopher Nelson
The Producer As Critic
SOON THE EARTH WILL BE IN THE SQUARE JILL SIGMAN with Siobhan Burke
THE PRESENT GENERATION Chinese Realities/Documentary Visions at MoMA
By Jason Fox
THE COMMUNARDS OF WALL STREET On Zoe Beloff's The Days of the Commune
By Jason Livingston
DESCRIPTION OF A STRUGGLE Straub-Huillet's Class Relations
By Jonathan Andrews
Being Walt Disney: Lucas Hnath and the Theater of Celebrity
By Heidi Schreck
Delusion to Delusion to Delusion: How I Wrote a Movie and Then Got it Made
By Halley Feiffer
Perché No Pass a Night Formal You at the Hotel Colors?
By Ben Gassman
What It Means To Disappear Here: UglyRhino comes to Port Royal
By Susan Soon He Stanton
By Josef Winkler
Love and the Demonstration
By Mahmoud Saeed, translated from the Arabic by William M. Hutchins
ARROWSCHMITT!!!
excerpt from The Raw Edge - Issue 01
By Devin Clark
from Demian
By Hermann Hesse
By Drew Gardner
By Patricia Spears Jones
By Cliff Fyman
Heavy Sublimation
By Leonard Schwartz
EILEEN MYLES and Noel Black
Corrected Slogans: Reading and Writing Conceptualism
By Courtney Fiske
Art In Conversation
Portrait of Vincent Katz. Pencil on paper by Phong Bui.
It would be difficult to imagine interdisciplinary studies in graduate programs in the last two decades without acknowledging the inventive pedagogy of Black Mountain College. Even though it lasted only 23 years (1933 – 1956) and enrolled fewer than 1,200 students, Black Mountain College is still considered one of the most progressive and experimental institutions in art education. Shortly after the long-awaited second printing of Black Mountain College: Experiment in Art (MIT Press, edited by Vincent Katz with essays by Martin Brody, Robert Creeley, Vincent Katz, and Kevin Power), poet, translator, art critic, editor, and curator Vincent Katz welcomed publisher Phong Bui to his Chelsea loft to talk about the history of the legendary college.
Phong Bui (Rail): As I was reading Chapter III (Biomorphs: Humanism/Surrealism) of Black Mountain College: Experiment In Art, I came across a statement by Jacob Lawrence from a letter he sent to Josef Albers before his arrival at Black Mountain as a teacher for the 1946 summer session, "My belief is that it is most important for an artist to develop an approach and philosophy about life. If he has developed this philosophy he does not put paint on canvas, he puts himself on canvas." This reminded me of Charlie Parker's famous remark, "Music is your own experience, your own thoughts, your wisdom. If you don't live it, it won't come out your horn." You've pointed out this couldn't be more diametrically opposed to Albers's teaching philosophy. How can you otherwise describe Albers's inclusive spirit and broad mindedness, yet very concrete teaching method?
Vincent Katz: There was a contrast. Albers had his method of teaching, which was very strict and sequential, that the students had to adhere to. But as a pedagogue in a larger sense, he took a much wider approach. He was hired to guide the art program, which was to be central to the whole vision of the school that would stress experimentation and diversity. Students would be able to devise their own curricula and there was no governing board. Working on the farm and physical facilities was required. John Andrew Rice (the first rector) and Ted Dreier reached out and were put in touch with Philip Johnson, then the director of the department of architecture at MoMA, just at the moment when the Bauhaus had been closed down, in July of 1933, so it was perfect timing. The college opened in the Blue Ridge Mountains, near Asheville, North Carolina, in September of 1933.
Rail: Albers and his wife Anni came to the U.S. shortly thereafter.
Katz: Johnson wrote to Albers informing him that the college wanted to invite him to be the head of the art department. Albers replied that he spoke very little English. Dreier wrote back and convinced him to come. Actually, Anni spoke very good English, so she was able to help him in the beginning. Josef would develop close connections with MoMA and various artists and collectors in NYC, not to mention his Bauhaus colleagues, Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer, who would end up teaching at Harvard. They invited him to join them there, but Albers, once he arrived at Black Mountain and felt the nourishing situation there, became very enamored of it, partly because he knew that, in addition to offering things that were taught at the Bauhaus, he also had the opportunity to open up new experiences for his students and himself.
Rail: We tend to forget that in 1919 it was the tail end of Expressionism, which the Bauhaus embraced at first as part of its project to create a unity of styles for the new age. People were frustrated after four years of World War One; they wanted a new start, what Max Weber referred to as a "new objectivity." But as soon as the economy was stabilized by 1921–22, there arose a desire for new technology, trained specialists with cool and rational minds to carry out new tasks. This inspired at the Bauhaus the moral and philosophical conviction that by learning a few basic elements through a systematic method, students would be able to create new order and unity with the use of new technology and usher in a new standard of living. In fact, it was a school for architecture, industrial design, and graphic arts, not for painting and sculpture.
Katz: Right. Architecture was considered by Gropius to be the crown of the arts, and it was the discipline that everything led up to. It took everything below it into account, because drawing, painting, sculpture, and building with various materials could all be considered elements in a larger architectural picture. The Bauhaus curriculum mixed courses in applied and fine arts, which was radical, but it had a traditional view of the student passing from novice to apprentice to master. In addition, the Bauhaus incorporated the sexist limitation that women were not allowed to study architecture but were instead encouraged to study weaving. Anni Albers was so talented that, in addition to her art works, she was making commercially viable fabrics, which were able at certain points to help support the school.
Rail: She was ahead of her time. I remember her saying, "If there was a need to connect to the art of the past it would be in the art of other cultures, instead of the old, overly exhausted, and standardized aesthetic of European establishment."
Katz: She was very progressive. Other artists, including Picasso and Matisse, had looked towards non-Western cultures, but they were importing the look on the surface in simplicity of forms or certain distortions of images. Whereas Anni was interested in something deeper, and that's part of the reason the Alberses started to make many trips to Mexico to study Mayan art, which had a big influence on both of their own work. Both Alberses were deeply affected by world events and wrote eloquently about the role of making art in creating moral confidence. "Our world goes to pieces; we have to rebuild our world," Anni wrote. And, "We learn courage from art work." While researching Black Mountain College: Experiment in Art, I studied the writings and notes of both Alberses in the North Carolina State Archives. Many documents were published for the first time in this book. During my reading, I came across an article Josef had published in a Bauhaus magazine on design in 1928, in which he wrote about exercises devised to make students see materials in new ways. He reintroduced students to the sheet of paper, implying that our minds are used to seeing a piece of paper only as a flat object to be drawn on. Instead, he would emphasize the edge of the paper, instructing students to fold, staple, tie, sew, the paper, changing its entire sense of form. "Our aim is not so much to work differently as to work without copying or repeating others," he wrote.
Rail: Similar to how Kandinsky talks about different ways a line can appear in his book Point and Line to Plane: It can float or sit on the paper, and a drawn line is different from an etched line, and so on.
Katz: Exactly. But at the same time Albers would invite artists like de Kooning, Kline, and Tworkov to teach in the Summer Art Institutes, and their teaching method was essentially to let the students paint and then comment on situations the students themselves developed in their work, which became a standard way to teach but was radical then. There were occasional conflicts. For example, at the end of de Kooning's stay at Black Mountain in the summer of 1948, Albers came to see de Kooning and he said, "I heard something about a bunch of students quitting the program. You know anything about that?" And de Kooning said, "I know all about it. I told them that if they want to be serious artists they should quit and move to New York." [Laughs.] It's a philosophical belief, in a way, that if you want to be a painter, you go to the place where the painters are, and you have that life: you drink with them every night, you paint with them every day, and that's your community, your whole life.
Rail: Just like Lawrence's "[you do not] put paint on canvas, [you put yourself] on canvas."
Katz: Yeah, he of course had a very different experience as an African American, which was central to his art and which he wanted to make apparent. That is why he underlined the phrase, "he puts himself on canvas" in the letter. But what interests me is this mutual respect where Lawrence could think, "I know you don't agree with this, but I'm going to underline it." And Albers would respond, "Okay, I'm not going to go there." In addition to allowing differences to coexist, there was a lot of support activity at Black Mountain. There was very little access to images of art in those days, so Albers would borrow glass slides from MoMA and other institutions. They would ship glass slides from New York and other places to North Carolina, and he would project them in his class. He was tireless in his desire and ability to give his students a wide exposure to the arts from ancient to modern and contemporary. He also organized exhibitions of varied artists including works by faculty members at Black Mountain.
Rail: Anni Albers organized a few exhibitions of pre-Colombian and Mayan art as well.
Katz: And they amassed a library of significant books and catalogues. Albers wrote a circular in 1943 and mailed it out, asking for donations of books and slides for his popular course "Seeing Art." The college had no color reproductions and no slides. He went on to explain that, at that time, most faculty members received no salary; they worked for room and board. And he asked for contributions of books. MoMA's Director, Alfred Barr, responded, sending books on Miró, Klee, and Walker Evans.
Rail: We forget that Albert Skira didn't publish beautiful color illustrated art books until the 1950s. But, in particular, what initially compelled you to undertake such an ambitious project? You've written a volume that is more comprehensive than any of the previous publications on the same subject, from the early volumes of Fielding Dawson (The Black Mountain Book. E.P. Dutton, 1970; expanded edition North Carolina Wesleyan, 1991) and Martin Duberman (Black Mountain College: An Exploration in Community, E.P. Dutton, 1972) to Mary Emma Harris (The Arts at Black Mountain College, MIT Press, 1987; reprinted 2002); Mervin Lane (Black Mountain College: Spouted Seeds, An Anthology of Personal Accounts, University of Tennessee, 1990); and Caroline Collier, Michael Harrison (Starting at Zero: Black Mountain College 1933–57, Arnolfini and Kettles' Yard, 2005).
Katz: It began with Juan Manuel Bonet, who was then the Director of the Reina Sofía Museum in Madrid. He asked me if I would like to curate an exhibition on Black Mountain. I had curated a Rudy Burckhardt retrospective for IVAM (Valencia Institute of Modern Art) where he had previously been the director. Then when he became the director at the Reina Sofía he did an amazing series of exhibitions, which were of multiple sensibilities, partly because he is a poet. He believes in combining literature, music, visual art, and dance in the same exhibition. The first one I saw in Valencia was based on the Spanish critic and poet Cirlot, who championed artists like Miró from the very early days, then continued to write about works by American Abstract Expressionists. When Bonet asked me to do this exhibition he put all his resources behind it.
Charles Olson, Black Mountain College, 1951, Writing The Maximus Poems. Photograph by Jonathan Williams. Collection of Jonathan Williams.
Rail: How long did it take you to curate?
Katz: About two years, which was a short time frame, considering that I was in Rome on the Rome Prize at the same time doing a translation of Sextus Propertius. My study had Propertius books on the tables, but on the walls were all these images of Black Mountain artists. It ended up being an exhibition of over 300 objects, from books, manuscripts, to everything else: paintings, drawings, prints, sculpture, films, audio, and so on. Since the exhibition didn't travel, I thought it would be great if there could be an English edition of the catalogue, so we got in touch with MIT Press, and they agreed. In the meantime, I was taking trips to Madrid from Rome, while diving into the research and reaching out to and interviewing those who had studied at Black Mountain as well as reading everything written on the subject. It was almost like doing two projects, because the book is really a book, more extensive than a catalogue would normally be. That is due to Bonet, because he has a passion for the subject, and he has a passion for books; he had the resources available, and he said, "Let's go for it." At the American Academy in Rome, I met the composer and musicologist Martin Brody, who was there at the same time, and when I found out he was the president of the Stefan Wolpe Society, it just came together. I said, "Would you want to write about the musical history of Black Mountain?" and he said, "Yes." Juan Manuel wanted to bring in Kevin Power, and I thought it would be very useful if he could detail the contents of Robert Creeley's Black Mountain Review, because that is such a central document in American literature.
The Black Mountain Review is something a lot of people refer to but not many have read, because it hasn't been reprinted. People don't easily have access to it. Power gave a synopsis of each issue that I think is very useful. For the final essay I asked Creeley if he would write about Olson, and he wrote a brilliant memoir of his friend, beginning with their marathon correspondence long before they ever met in person. They were colleagues, working together for years, but they met physically for the first time at Black Mountain.
Rail: And Creeley already had the publication of Divers Press under his belt.
Katz: Yes, in Mallorca from 1953–55, he published books by Paul Blackburn, Robert Duncan, Larry Eigner, and others. He had access to a very good printer, Mossèn Alcover, who printed Black Mountain Review as well. One of Olson's legacies was that he encouraged his students to publish their own work, almost like zines but with attention paid to the craft of printing. He was a big champion of that. I found that really inspiring. Jonathan Williams recalled Olson's saying, "Don't ever be intimidated by the disdain or the lack of interest of the world. Get yourself some type, get yourself some paper, and print it," which led to a rich culture of self-publishing, including collaborations between poets and artists, in the 1950s and '60s. Creeley was more of an outlaw figure. There is a great photo of him taken by Williams at Black Mountain called "Portrait of the Artist as a Spanish Assassin," where he looks very formidable—you didn't mess with Creeley. Williams began Jargon Press while still a student at Black Mountain. Also, we shouldn't forget that Olson was a trained debater at Wesleyan and Harvard, and had additional experience working for the Office of War Information during World War Two. Whereas Creeley was more laconic in those days; later he changed, and became more expansive. Olson was always fluid and forceful. I'm reading this book, Charles Olson at Goddard College (Cuneiform, 2011),that Kyle Schlesinger published, on Olson's trip to Goddard College and the talks he gave there. Olson was speaking about Melville and you can sense this wave of verbiage, language, and ideas. It doesn't all hold together as one consistent topic but there are brilliant glints in there. I think that must be how he taught. He was obviously a polymath, he was all over the place, but that is what was exciting. It wasn't coherent but it also wasn't rigid. It was a trade-off that was invigorating for that time period. You can sense that both Olson and Albers were intimidating in different ways. Rauschenberg said of Albers many years later, "I found his criticism so excruciating and so devastating that I never asked for it. Years later, though, I'm still learning what he taught me." Albers once tore up a piece by Elaine de Kooning, who was really a mature artist, not a student; she was just auditing his class. What happened was, since she had missed a lesson from a previous class she tried to combine two lessons into one work, but Albers decided it did not fulfill the required sequence of exercises, so he just ripped it in half. Pat Passlof told me she left the class because she couldn't bear to see an artist's work get destroyed like that. It was just too harsh. Susan Weil said that everybody was in tears at some point in Albers's class. If you were in his class you might have preconceptions of "I'm going to go in here, express myself, and you're going to teach me to make form and color and it's all going to be great." No, it's not going to be like that. [Laughs.] Here is step one: a piece of paper. You are not allowed to draw on it. Francine du Plessix Gray said that Olson told her she shouldn't publish anything for 10 years. Then after 10 years, she should look at what she had written to see how good or bad the writing was, which she thinks was really useful, good advice. Michael Rumaker, in his book Black Mountain Days (Spuyten Duyvil, 2012), speaks similarly about his encounter with Olson. He brought in his first story, which was a conventional, trivial piece. But Olson's method, instead of saying, this is conventional, let's work on this, was to demolish the piece in front of everyone. But then, when Rumaker came back to write something that blew Olson away, Olson was mute at first and then told the class this was good, serious work. Rumaker believed that he was like a little child when he arrived there, and Olson cleared out the cobwebs and helped him to see and write reality.
Portrait of the Artist (Robert Creeley) As a Spanish Assassin, Black Mountain College, 1954. Photo: Jonathan Williams. Black Mountain College Museum and Arts Center, Asheville.
Rail: Our generation takes for granted the idea of self-publishing.
Katz: Totally. I'm sure in those days people didn't feel that they could publish a book on their own.
Rail: I also think it's important to note that Olson, with his grand cultural theory trying to synthesize everything from anthropology, psychology, and quantum mechanic theory to art, theater, music, and whatever, didn't set out a goal to revolutionize Black Mountain. He in fact admired his predecessors and the philosophy and history of the school. Olson often stressed the central aim and consistent support was to teach method, not content; to emphasize process, not product.
Katz: He definitely was respectful of the tradition of Black Mountain College and he emphasized process as being part of that tradition. He wrote, in a college prospectus, "A good teacher is always more a learner than teacher…Teachers in a place like this…should always bear in mind…that we would provide the students with a liberal education if we merely gave them the privilege of looking on while we educated ourselves." One of the things that most of those people that were at Black Mountain had in common was that they were running away from traditional academia, which was their other option. I'm thinking of someone like M.C. Richards, who was teaching at the University of Chicago and hating it. Partially, being a woman, being marginalized, she saw academia as a microcosm of the rat race, full of uninteresting competitivity. When she came to teach at Black Mountain, she found the freedom so exhilarating that she stayed, becoming a central fixture there. She edited a literary magazine and translated the Satie play that Cage and Cunningham put on in 1948. Other writers such as Eric Bentley and Alfred Kazin came for shorter periods. Even if it was temporary, they came to find a respite from conventional ways of making and looking at things.
Rail: You know the way that I learned about Black Mountain was through de Kooning's painting "Asheville" (1948), which I saw at the Phillips Collection in 1984 on a school trip to Washington D.C. Soon I learned that it was painted while de Kooning was teaching at Black Mountain. As Elaine said, he kept working on this small painting, which reintroduced color and other figural possibilities. It was a big deal.
Katz: It was a major deal. I tried to write for every artist a focus on one or two works that resulted from their stay at the school or that were done close to that time, and it was an interesting literary exercise. I mean, how are you going to organize all that material, because you can't just start at day one and go to day x at the end. That's why I grouped it into categories. Even with that, there is so much overlap. With each artist I tried to give a little bit of his or her history. I tried to focus on what was essential about that period in their life. Why were they at Black Mountain at that precise time? What was happening in their career and in the culture? But also to see if the experience transformed them, if I could identify any change. And I feel that with de Kooning there was a change, as you mentioned. A change from black–and–white to color and to a different use of form, and it happened then.
Rail: Given that all of those famous artists from Europe and New York would come into the woods of Asheville, North Carolina. I'd be scared. [Laughs.]
Katz: I know. It wasn't in genteel New England, romantic California, or charming, scrappy, Chicago. But Albers was invited at a certain point to leave there: Gropius was always trying to get him to come to Harvard. But after a year, once he got it going, he didn't want to leave. Josef and Anni were excited by the non-traditional program but also the remote environment, not being in the city. You can't get much more rural than that, even now: it is in the southwest corner of North Carolina.
Rail: Exactly. It's in a particular place. Quite amazing. Meanwhile, what sorts of things do you think that de Kooning taught? I can't help but to think of something Rudy Burckhardt told me: after having brought a bunch of paintings based on buildings based from photographs to show de Kooning, de Kooning just crumbled a piece of paper and put it near the window and said, "Why don't you paint this?"
Katz: And Rudy refused, which he later regretted. He said he had to paint something he was interested in. As far as I know, de Kooning's Black Mountain class was more like a workshop environment, where people would paint, and he would comment on what they did. Elaine de Kooning wrote about it, contrasting Albers's teaching methods with de Kooning's. She wrote, "Albers presented his students with the same specific problems, Bill waited until they had evolved their own set of problems on canvas before discussing the range of options open to them."
Rail: Was there any time that de Kooning and Albers were in the same class?
Katz: No, that wouldn't work. But they were in the same lunchroom, which was considered by many people the key spot of the school. Someone like Olson came from an environment that was very word–oriented. He was a text man. And for him to be at Black Mountain College, taking the helm of an institution that already had this principle of cross-fertilization, I think it was extremely rich and awakened a lot of possibilities in him. It was at Black Mountain that he became much more aware of visual art. There is a quote I use in the book by Cage where he says, "Any experimental musician in the 20th century has had to rely on painters." And there is a James Schuyler quote that is not about Black Mountain but is very similar: "In New York the art world is a painter's world; writers and musicians are in the boat, but they don't steer." It is a little bit self-deprecating, but you have these cases in which I feel the visual artists were the trailblazers. People like Cy Twombly, who was 23, and Rauschenberg, who was 25, were doing mature work in 1951 at Black Mountain, and Olson was aware of that and it changed his mental picture of the arts. Same with the composers and musicians who were there, people like Lou Harrison and Stefan Wolpe. In fact Wolpe, through his relationship with Kline, developed a concept of abstract expressionist musical compositions. Again, it was in the lunchroom where you heard what you never had heard before. That's where the first happening—Cage's Theater Piece No. 1—took place in 1952, and that's where Erik Satie's play The Ruse of Medusa was staged in 1948. M.C. Richards translated the text, Buckminster Fuller played the lead role, Elaine and Willem de Kooning made the sets, and Arthur Penn was the director. So it was a physical locus, too. Then you realize the effect of the physical environment out there, the visual aspect of the landscape, that it was far out in the deep country, with the opportunity to live a very simple life. Students were required to work on the farm and on the building project. Fielding Dawson writes about that a lot in the Black Mountain Book, which is exciting because he writes short vignettes that give you sharp pictures of the life the students had at Black Mountain. They had freedom to create their own curricula, and they tried out romantic lifestyles. They were treated like adults basically. In Black Mountain's last seven years, Olson did take on the mantle of what had gone before, but by virtue of his being a poet the college started on a different path, which eventually led to its closing in 1957.
The Ruse of Medusa, performance at Black Mountain College, 1948: Buckminster Fuller with Merce Cunningham. Photo: Clemens Kalischer. Courtesy of the artist.
Rail: It's better to be romantic than bureaucratic and complacent. I remember George Segal told me when he went to Meyer Schapiro and asked whether he knew people who could give $500 to pay the rent for the last year of the sinking Hansa Gallery, Schapiro told him a parable of a flower blooming radiantly and then dying. I must say, when it comes time that it just becomes work instead of fun and different challenges and opportunities for reinvention that keep me on my toes I will talk my colleagues into letting the Rail die rather than let it become just another nonprofit.
Katz: Well, the other thing about Black Mountain that I am interested in is that they had no board. A board can give you stability but it also imposes its ideas on you. Rice, Dreier, and the others who started the place, renegades from academia, said, we don't want anyone imposing on us. The last thing they wanted was for someone else to call the shots. For the entire 23 years they often didn't know if they were going to be able to make it. In the early years people like Dreier and Rice and the Alberses were very motivated about keeping the school functioning. They worked really hard and got funding every year. During Olson's era, from '51 to '56, he expended a lot of energy in other areas, in creating challenging courses, in innovative teaching methods, on his own writing: he started to write the Maximus Poems there, and wrote many essays. In the end, he did live up to his goal of having teaching be partially a case of allowing the students to observe how professionals work.
Rail: Absolutely. Not that different from what Rice said earlier, "An individual, to be a complete person, must be aware of his relationship to others." At Black Mountain the whole community became his teacher.
Katz: Or as Creeley notes in his essay in the book, Olson once said, "I need a college to think with." When I started studying Black Mountain I thought, "Oh, this is great but it's just a bunch of different people. There is no real overarching idea." But the more I study it the more I realize there are consistent beliefs that we are talking about now. One of them that started with Rice was that the school was going to allow student participation in decisionmaking. Rice believed in "cooperative intelligence," whereby the group, including the teacher, examined topics, as opposed to the teacher being the possessor of the information, which he might or might not impart to the students. Rice also believed theory should be integrated with other forms of knowledge. This connects to what Olson was saying about the student watching the master. You observe the discipline of somebody working.
Rail: When you began to work on the text were you aware that Rice, like you, studied classics at the University of Chicago?
Katz: Not at the beginning. I knew the poets very well and most of the artists who had been there, but I didn't know much about Rice until later.
Rail: I feel it is very hard to talk about Rice without mentioning John Dewey's immense influence on education and social reform. Dewey also taught at the University of Chicago from 1894 until 1904, which is where Rice came into contact with his ideas. After 1904 he went to Columbia where he taught until his retirement in 1930. It was at Columbia that the veritable eccentric Albert Barnes went to audit his courses. It is interesting how the application of pragmatism, the advocacy for learning by doing, was put into use at Black Mountain. Did you set out with a list of alumni who were available for interview?
Katz: Yes. I began with Creeley, whom I knew already. Then continued with John Chamberlain, Joseph Fiore, Basil King, Kenneth Noland, Pat Passlof, Dan Rice, Dorothea Rockburne, Susan Weil, Gerald van der Wiele, John Wieners, and others. Black Mountain College of course was not only about the arts. A lot of other disciplines were studied there and were sometimes integrated and came together in this focal point. Dorothea had already completed the course at the Beaux-Arts in Montreal, so she already knew technical aspects of painting very well by the time she arrived at Black Mountain. She was more fascinated by Max Dehn, the mathematician known for his work in topology and geometric group theory, which had a central influence on her whole conception of art making. Chamberlain set up a studio and worked on sculpture independently while studying poetry with Creeley and Olson. Dawson pursued a hybrid course of visual arts and writing. Dan Rice had been a professional musician before Fiore convinced him to commit to painting. That was in fact a common experience of students at Black Mountain: being able to cross boundaries academically. Almost anything that anybody wanted to study, the college would find a way for it to be taught. It came from the desire of somebody to learn it. I find, again, that's the opposite of the way most educational institutions are run even today. The standard model is you choose from what they're offering. At Black Mountain, the student proposed something and the institution found a way to satisfy that desire. Which is pretty revolutionary, if you think about it.
Rail: I couldn't agree more. How did you manage to afford all participants equal attention?
"At Black Mountain, the student proposed something and the institution found a way to satisfy that desire. Which is pretty revolutionary, if you think about it."
Katz: It wasn't easy. This was an arts exhibition in an art museum, so that was the focus, and I tried to be as methodical as I could. I can't say that I gave equal emphasis to everybody, but I tried to locate artists according to my own perception of the time period and their artistic achievements. But at the same time I wanted to highlight people I felt were under-acknowledged, someone like Leo Amino, who was very inventive in using plastic and found materials to create natural forms in his sculpture. He fits into a context there of artists I call biomorphs, but then, of course, those categories have overlaps, because Amino's work relates to somebody like Richard Lippold, who also has connections to Cage. Then there were a few artists who had mixed allegiances. Ray Johnson started out as a devotee of Albers; he had all his notes in order from day one on. Then when he met John Cage, he fell for Cage's ideas so much that it was as if the world didn't exist before Cage. He did this violent thing of burning all his notes from Albers's class, which is too bad because it would be great to have those notes as a reference. But we know he was all about ephemerality in his art. He would mail work to friends, which we now refer to as mail art, an important contribution in the late 1950s. Another such figure was Fielding Dawson, who was torn between Olson and Kline. I love that image of them at loggerheads, because Olson was a very domineering figure. He was about six foot eight and 240 pounds and very verbal and opinionated, while Kline could be a street fighter. He was laconic and a master of the one-liner. I always imagine Kline with a smile across his face: no matter how intense the situation, he took it in stride. Dawson was in the middle because he loved both of them, even though he did move to New York and stayed with Kline. Dawson was also symptomatic of Black Mountain in the sense that he was always a writer and a visual artist. I think of Basil King the same way. He's been a painter all his life, and now he has a sizeable following for his writing.
Rail: Another great example.
Katz: Absolutely. So this idea of hybridity was definitely fostered there. But that can be dangerous because you can get too unfocused if you don't know what you're doing. Being at Black Mountain was always like being in the real world. It was preparation for being in the real world: no one's telling you what to do. You're making your own decisions. And that's how it was there.
Rail: That's what Chance Operations (Chapter V) was all about. Again, Cage, like Anni Albers, was connecting to the art of another culture through his deep interest in Zen Buddhism while Merce Cunningham was trying to translate elements from daily life into art. But how about someone like Buckminster Fuller, whose name we associate as much with the world of architectural invention and geodesic domes, as with his connection to Black Mountain where he was exposed to overlapping disciplines?
Katz: Fuller was like a shooting star, a brilliant light that makes a huge impression and then passes. He was very influential philosophically, and he was influenced by people at Black Mountain like Arthur Penn, a student at the time, who broke through Fuller's stage fright in his acting role in the Satie play and got him to perform. Fuller came twice: in 1948 he tried unsuccessfully to mount a geodesic dome. In 1949, after working on it for a year in Chicago, he was able to do it successfully at Black Mountain.
Rail: Lastly, Vincent, do you think that having grown up in an environment of poets, writers, and artists all of your life enables you to have a natural understanding of the philosophy of Black Mountain?
Katz: That's a hard question to answer. I like the part in the beginning of Duberman's book where he recalls interviewing the Alberses, which reminds me now of the beginning of Carlos Castaneda when he meets Don Juan, who says to him, "You stay out on the porch and find your spot. There's a spot on the porch." And Castaneda is like, what the hell is he talking about? And he spends all night on the porch and he finally finds the spot and he has this kind of vision there. It's like that. In other words, Duberman was sort of being, I don't know if tested is the right word, but maybe it is, by the Alberses. He was thinking, "I don't know what kind of book I want to write about Black Mountain, but one thing I am sure of is I want to break out of my mode and do something that reflects the experimental attitude of Black Mountain, but I'm afraid it won't be accepted in academia." And then finally, after a long time, Josef Albers says Duberman should not simply recite dates and facts but describe the impact Black Mountain has had on him. And then Duberman realizes that he should do it and his book is written in an experimental mode that hopefully reflects the ethos of Black Mountain. So I think on one hand, we have a desire to be "academic" in the best sense, because that means intellectual rigor, research, thoroughness, and awareness of what other people have written and thought on the subject. But on the other hand, Black Mountain by its very nature partially resists that. It's this kind of liquid mercury substance that can't be pinned down exactly. So you want to have an approach that's also open enough. And to get back to your question, maybe yes, growing up around artists and poets I saw a lot of models of people who made their own lives. Not only did they sacrifice for their art, which they did, but they chose how to make their lives around the work, and vice versa. This gets back to Jacob Lawrence's quote, which really means that the life and the art are almost one.
Phong Bui

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl