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The Writer at The Memory Table
Amy Halloran January 13, 2011 | 5 books mentioned 4 5 min read
Author Mira Bartok was scheduled to talk to Terri Gross on Fresh Air this past Monday, but because of the attempted assassination of Congressman Giffords, the program focused on Arizona gun laws. Fresh Air featured Bartok and her memoir, The Memory Palace on Tuesday.
The irony of the shift is not lost on Bartok, who suffers from Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI). The artist and writer was hit by a tractor-trailer in 1999. The accident happened nine months after she got a concussion slipping on black ice, which left her brain vulnerable to future wounds.
Recovery from TBI is lengthy, and often incomplete, leaving people with fatigue, confusion about daily tasks, and memory problems. TBI is among those invisible disabilities with which people are perceived as functional because they present as such. This is frustrating for all involved, including the patient who assumes she should be better. Bartok herself needed time to learn that she was changed.
While she received treatment for some physical injuries form the accident, her longterm cognitive problems were not immediately identified. She couldn't do the things she used to do, like teach art, or draw while listening to music. Eventually, her TBI was diagnosed and she began working with cognitive therapists to develop strategies to handle the new ways her brain works.
Bartok describes her old self as having boundless energy and a sociable nature. She could make art while listening to music and help people when she wasn't working on her own projects. Now she has to protect herself. Grocery shopping can be impossible because of the lights and the choices. Having dinner in a restaurant with friends might be more sensory input than she can bear, and leave her unable to work on writing or art projects the next day.
These problems are hard to see. I met Mira Bartok at a writers' conference in 2009. She was part of a panel on brain injury, and spoke eloquently about her struggles to rebuild her writing life. Even from a podium, her warmth and wit are apparent. She's the kind of person you want to get to know.
When I had the opportunity to interview her for a disability rights newspaper, I fantasized that we might meet at an art museum so I could observe her observing the art.
"In your dreams, Amy!" she laughed.
Such an excursion was out of the question because it would involve driving, and focusing on our conversation in an uncontrolled environment. The day we spoke on the phone, she had no plans to write. Even the phone interview, she said, was draining.
Bartok keeps a memory table in her studio to remind herself of what she's doing and what she's done. While writing her memoir, she built a cabinet with a slot for every chapter, and filled it with notes and writing on the topic. The cabinet is cleared now, ready for her next project, an illustrated young adult novel.
"Above my desk are lists of things I can't remember anymore, the meaning of words I used to know, ideas I'll forget within an hour or a day. My computer is covered in Post-its, reminding me of which books I lent out to whom, memories I'm afraid I'll forget, songs from the past I suddenly recall," she writes in The Memory Palace.
The workings of the mind and the creative process are ripe subjects for memoir, and Bartok's is not the only book written from a TBI informed point of view. Floyd Skloot, father of Rebecca Skloot of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks fame and author in his own right, caught a virus on a plane that attacked his brain. The poet, marathon runner, and civil servant – Skloot worked for the Illinois Bureau of the Budget – was forced to stop and change completely. His book, In the Shadow of Memory is a tour of the virus, his childhood, and the way he reassembled a sense of self.
He followed this with The Wink of the Zenith: The Shaping of a Writer's Life, a map of how he became a writer, and how he became a writer again, after his illness. Skloot's persona on the page is very human and endearing, worth reading whether you are trying to figure out how to be a writer, or just trying to figure out how to be alive.
My interest in brain injury and writing is personal. My father's first set of strokes didn't hit his writing center, and he elegantly described his rehabilitation in a newspaper column. When, two years later, he had another series of strokes, he lost the ability to write. He used to be able to weave together nostalgic storytelling and current events and to sculpt his rage into thoughtful arguments on the op-ed pages of local papers.
My desire to help my father drew me to that panel where I met Mira Bartok. I took home hints from Linda Hogan and Allison Hedge Coke, other writers who learned to live and write in the wake of brain trouble. I left the room inspired by the way poet Peggy Shumaker's husband helped her heal and rebuild her ability to write.
The Alaska State Writer Laureate, Shumaker was riding her bicycle when a kid on a four-wheeler crossed into the designated bike path and almost killed her. Just Breathe Normally is her memoir in poems, and the poems span her childhood through her recovery. The book marks her path from being unable to read to being able to write again, and from anger to forgiveness for the person who hurt her.
I took what I heard from these authors, and tried to bring it home to my father. I told him about the steady application of self to task, and the slow progress that these writers made. I talked with him about stories he wanted to write, and helped flesh out some ideas.
His productivity has diminished since his last strokes, but he keeps at it, and the newspapers occasionally run what he writes.
I thought of him for another reason as I read The Memory Palace. The illustrated memoir unfolds the details of Bartok's mother's schizophrenia, and begs the question of what we owe our parents.
Bartok's mother, Norma Kurap Herr, was a gifted pianist who slid into mental illness early in her daughters' lives. Eventually, the two sisters changed their names and got unlisted phone numbers to insulate themselves from their mother's paranoid intrusions. She wasn't just suggesting what they wear, but visiting their jobs and threatening their employment, and making harassing phone calls that could number a hundred a day.
After Mira and Natalia's attempts to help their mother dramatically failed, Norma was homeless for nearly twenty years. During that time, Bartok corresponded with her mother, using a post office box. At the end of her life, a social worker stitched the family together with a phone call, and Mira, Natalia and Norma have a hospital reunion.
We cannot save our parents. They gave us life, and we struggle as adults with how to give them their due. In Bartok's case, she had to funnel her care and love for her mother into a letter driven relationship. As I struggle with how to help my father and mother navigate this revision of their lives, I am grateful to the writers who share their stories, which are maps, to help us all.
Amy Halloran lives on six city lots in upstate New York with her husband and sons. She writes for regional and national outlets about the changing food landscape, and records dispatches from her family's gardening, cooking and chicken raising enterprises on her blog, amyhalloran.com. Along with photojournalist Ellie Markovitch, she launched Storycooking.com, a home for food-based digital storytelling.
Shakespeare as God
Stephen Akey October 2, 2012 | 5 books mentioned 9 13 min read
My reading of Shakespeare tends to be seasonal: comedies in the spring and summer, histories and tragedies in the fall and winter. There are exceptions. A hot, sweaty tragedy like Othello or Antony and Cleopatra reads better in hot, sweaty weather, and a "problem" comedy like Measure for Measure seems less problematic during an autumn chill. I persist in this folly even when confronted with The Winter's Tale, three/fifths wintry tragedy, two/fifths vernal comedy, and wholly a masterwork, because Shakespeare seems to me more rooted in the earth and its rhythms than any other writer. Samuel Johnson believed that "Shakespeare is, above all writers, at least above all modern writers, the poet of nature." Johnson was speaking primarily of human nature, but if we extend the term to mean the other kind too, we get a little nearer the mark. Shakespeare is the poet of everything.
What then is the optimal time to read The Winter's Tale – in winter if you feel the burden is primarily tragic, in spring if you feel the opposite pull, or maybe (if you feel the issue is eternally undecided) in a blustery week in late March when the crocuses have begun to push through? (The logical solution – to read the first three acts in the winter and save the last two for warmer weather – is, alas, a reductio ad absurdum. Not that I haven't tried.) Theater people don't have the luxury to be so choosy, and I've seen excellent productions of The Winter's Tale at all times of the year, the most recent being a (winter) performance at the Brooklyn Academy of Music starring Simon Russell Beale and Rebecca Hall that left me in tears. A local high school production probably would have done the same. In my experience, The Winter's Tale plays more effectively on stage than more celebrated works like Hamlet or King Lear, which are sometimes doomed by theatrical self-consciousness and present obstacles to staging (the storm on the heath, for instance) difficult to surmount. In particular, Act IV of The Winter's Tale is so perfectly conceived that it seems as much carnival as theater. Slapstick, satire, music, dance, suspense, disguise, romance, bawdry, philosophy, sleight-of-hand: one mode of performance succeeding another, and all stage managed by the greatest dramaturge of them all. So yes, Shakespeare was a playwright – an actor, a director, a producer, in fact a man wholly of the theater – and The Winter's Tale is a play. But we can't always have the benefit of an actor as skilled as Simon Russell Beale interpreting Leontes for us, and even then, it's his interpretation, not ours. When we read the plays, we're actor, director, and lighting designer at once. And what we're reading, it's worth pointing out, is very largely poetry.
Seventy-five point five percent poetry, to be precise. The Winter's Tale is just about the golden mean – 71.5% blank verse, 3.1% rhymed verse, and 25.4% prose, plus six songs, the highest number in the canon, and appropriate for the genius of wit and improvisation who sings them, the "rogue" Autolycus. How I love Shakespearean metrics! Iago has 1097 lines to Othello's 860, 86.6% of The Merry Wives of Windsor is in prose, King John and Richard II have no prose whatsoever, 45.5% of A Midsummer Night's Dream is in rhymed verse, there are 150 named female characters in the canon as opposed to 865 male, and the actor who plays an uncut Hamlet has to memorize 1422 lines. (Cordelia, by contrast, makes her overwhelming presence felt with a mere 116 lines.) If there were a way of computing the Bard's earned run average, I would want to know that too.
Clinical as they might seem, these statistics do remind us of a salient fact: three quarters of Shakespeare's dramatic writing is poetry. (The other quarter is pretty good too. Shakespeare wrote the best prose as well as the best verse in the English language, and if there were anything other than prose and verse, he would have surpassed everyone at that as well.) Polixines's first lines in The Winter's Tale are, "Nine changes of the wat'ry star hath been / The shepherd's note since we have left our throne / Without a burden" (I.ii. 1-3). That's a long way from, "It's been nine months since I've been away from my kingdom." Even if Shakespeare had phrased the lines in prose, they would have been suitably orotund, something like the courtly politesse Archidamus and Camillo speak in the opening scene. ("Since their more mature dignities and royal necessities made separation of their society, their encounters (though not personal) hath been royally attorney'd . . . ") Nevertheless, they are in verse. No prose could match the effect of the bold initial spondee balanced by an unstressed pyrrhic before catching up with the regular iambic rhythm of the pentameter line. ("NINE CHANG/es of/the WAT'/ry STAR/hath BEEN . . .") It's like a bell going off. Surely what's greatest about Shakespeare is not that he knows where to put his iambs and trochees but that he writes so expressively within character. Polixines's periphrastic way of saying what could have been said much more simply is more than the eloquence one would expect of a king taking leave of another king. In evoking the moon and the waters and the shepherd's eternal rounds, Polixines conjures the elemental, folkloric realities that the play will traffic in. There will be shepherds, long passages of time, lots of water, and boy will there be "changes." Plus, this being Shakespeare, Polixines' lines are almost gratuitously beautiful. He just couldn't help it.
On the other hand, beauty has a job to do. It compels attention, and if you're paying attention to the words, chances are you're also paying attention to what words do: tell stories, define characters, establish themes, orchestrate emotions, explore ideas. Not that it's as easy as all that. There are times in The Winter's Tale when it's maddeningly difficult to figure out what the hell the characters are talking about. You are ill-advised to attend any production cold.
Harold Bloom has grumpily admitted to boycotting most productions of Shakespeare out of frustration with tendentious interpretations. For me the problem is less directorial overkill than the sheer difficulty of doing Shakespeare at all – finding actors who can speak the verse properly, trimming the texts to manageable lengths, not overdoing the dirty jokes, and so on. I usually attend three or four productions a year and happily settle for whatever patches of brilliance (sometimes sustained for nearly a whole evening) I can get. And yet I wouldn't want to deprive myself of the pleasure of unpacking the involutions of Leontes's soliloquies in The Winter's Tale at my leisure and with text in hand – partly because in the theater it's so hard to follow what this lunatic is actually saying. Even his faithful courtier Camillo at one point has to confess that he's mystified as to precisely what dark "business" his Highness is hinting at:
Leon. Was this taken
By any understanding pate but thine?
For thy conceit is soaking, will draw in
More than the common blocks. Not noted, is't,
But of the finer natures? By some severals
Of head-piece extraordinary? Lower messes
Perchance are to this business purblind? Say.
Cam. Business, my lord? I think most understand
Bohemia stays here longer.
(I.ii. 222-30)
It's true that the density of this language depends at least as much on formal rhetoric – all those tropes and devices that Shakespeare had drilled into his head as a schoolboy – as on versification. But what the poetry gives us that prose could not (or not so well) is a sense of formlessness within form. Leontes is falling apart. His jealous ravings feed on themselves in an ever more frenzied cycle of psychological dislocation. You might call it a nervous breakdown. Yet no matter how feverish his utterances, they all stay within the strict boundaries of ten or sometimes eleven syllables. If you're losing your mind in iambic pentameter, your mode of expression is necessarily compressed. No wonder Leontes is so hard to understand:
Affection! thy intention stabs the centre.
Thou dost make possible things not so held,
Communicat'st with dreams (how can this be?),
With what's unreal thou co-active art,
And fellow'st nothing. Then 'tis very credent
Thou mayst co-join with something, and thou dost
(And that beyond commission), and I find it
(And that to the infection of my brains
And hard'ning of my brows).
To my mind, no one has ever satisfactorily explained the meaning of the first line, but the sense of psychic violence is clear enough, as is the sense of delusion that Leontes unwittingly demonstrates in the following lines – he perfectly illustrates what he thinks he's criticizing. Hard as it is to follow this soliloquy on the page, it's that much harder in the theater, which doesn't allow for second readings or leisurely reflections on dense ambiguities. Unlike the pattern of some other geniuses, the movement of Shakespeare's late work (at least verbally) is toward an increasing complication rather than a simplicity or clarity of expression. Those Jacobean groundlings must have had remarkable attention spans, and no wonder. The linguistic transformation that they witnessed, according to Frank Kermode in Shakespeare's Language, "happened in the writing of Shakespeare and in the ears of an audience he had, as it were, trained to receive it."
Dense, compressed, harsh, impacted: these qualities don't stop Shakespeare's later dramatic verse from being magnificent. Has anyone ever rendered the grosser tendencies of the male imagination with more obscenely "reified" imagery? What makes Leontes's ravings especially sickening is that he pronounces them in the presence of his innocent son Mamillius:
Inch-thick, knee-deep, o'er head and ears a fork'd one!
Go play, boy, play. Thy mother plays, and I
Play too, but so disgrac'd a part, whose issue
Will hiss me to my grave: contempt and clamor
Will be my knell. Go play, boy, play. There have been
(Or I am much deceiv'd) cuckolds ere now,
And many a man there is (even at this present,
Now, while I speak this) holds his wife by th' arm,
That little thinks she has been sluic'd in 's absence,
And his pond fish'd by his next neighbor – by
Sir Smile, his neighbor.
(I.ii. 186-196)
When Simon Russell Beale spoke these lines at BAM, that "sluic'd" went through the audience – or at least through me – like a wound. Sometimes it's hard to believe just how graphic Shakespeare's imagery can be. As a woefully inexperienced undergraduate, I thought Pompey's description in Measure for Measure of Claudio's offense against sexual morality – "Groping for trouts in a peculiar river" – vaguely amusing. Amusing yes, vague no. There are some things no book can teach you.
The simplicity that many people would like to find in late Shakespeare as they do in the closing phases of Beethoven or Michelangelo is in fact there but selectively deployed and as much a matter of technique as of vision. Hermione's protestations of innocence during the horrendous trial scene have a dignified plainness in contrast to the casuistry with which Leontes arraigns her. ("Sir, / You speak a language that I understand not.") The language relaxes in the last two acts, as we move from suspicion and sterility to rebirth and reconciliation. Yet touches of lyricism occur earlier in the play (as in Polixines's "We were as twinn'd lambs that did frisk i' th' sun, / And bleat the one at th' other"), just as echoes of Leontes's rhetorical violence occur later in Polixenes's rage at the prospect of a shepherdess daughter-in-law ("And thou, fresh piece / Of excellent witchcraft, whom of force must know / The royal fool thou cop'st with"). Our Bard, who knew rhetorical tricks from hypallage to syllepsis, was not likely to disdain something so basic as plain contrast. Consider this contrast: Leontes, who earlier expressed the most extreme repugnance toward almost any form of physicality, now uses the homeliest of similes to express his wonder at the "miracle" of Hermione's transformation from statue to living creature in Act V: "If this be magic, let it be an art / Lawful as eating." Eleven lines later the loyal retainer Paulina, who has brought off the whole improbable spectacle, speaks the half line that is, for me, the most wrenching moment in the whole play: "Our Perdita is found." How like Shakespeare – to expand emotionally by contracting linguistically. (Compare the lonely, cuckolded Bloom's "Me. And me now" in Joyce's Ulysses – the emotional heart, in four words, of a novel much given to logorrhea.) To gloss such a line would be almost an impertinence, except to say that being lost ("Perdita," analogous to "perdition") and found is in some sense what the play is all about. It's not just Leontes who, rediscovering his wife and daughter, finds himself. Ideally, at a performance or in a reading, so should we.
Self-discovery can be a pretty scary experience, which is why Tony Tanner in his Prefaces to Shakespeare wrote that the proper response to this play is one in which awe borders on horror: "It does not merely please or entertain. It should leave us aghast, uncertain of just what extraordinary thing we have just witnessed." Iambs and trochees will get you only so far. They signify that Shakespeare thought poetically, and thinking poetically means expressing experience in a highly concentrated manner. It's curious that as Shakespeare's language grew increasingly dense and demanding, his plots moved in the opposite direction – towards the deliberate improbabilities of folklore and fable. Shipwrecks, foundlings, treasure chests, prophecies, oracles, and hungry bears: if the plot of The Winter's Tale were to be retold stripped of its poetry, it "should be hooted at / Like an old tale," as Paulina says of the biggest improbability of them all – the apparent transformation of the martyred queen from cold statue to living flesh. To the disappointment of some, the patterned contrivances of the four late "romances" (Pericles, Cymbeline, The Winter's Tale, and The Tempest) necessarily entail a slackening of authorial interest in the particulars of character development. Othello's jealousy is motivated point by excruciating point; Leontes' jealousy just is. Sometimes it's well to think back to Samuel Johnson's point of view. Shakespeare is the poet of nature, and all that naturalism shines out amid the archetypal movements and resolutions of the late romances. Certainly these plays have evoked unusually personal responses. Northrup Frye, no critical slouch, wrote of The Tempest, it is a play "not simply to be read or seen or even studied but possessed." When Eric Rohmer wanted to depict a transfiguring moment in the life of his heroine in A Tale of Winter (Conte d'hiver, 1991), he did so by having her attend a regional production of The Winter's Tale and training the camera on her face during Hermione's transformation scene. Nothing like seeing a clunky, old-fashioned version in French to make you understand what Shakespeare can do without language.
Another curiosity about the romances is the degree to which they turn on the concept of forgiveness. "Pardon's the word to all," says Cymbeline late in the play of that title, jauntily brushing aside five acts worth of treachery, corruption, murder, and deceit. Was there something in Shakespeare's experience that turned his thoughts in his last years to the possibility of forgiveness? Had his many years as an absent husband and father begun to gnaw at him as he contemplated retirement and a return to the wife and family he had clearly neglected? Or had his wife Anne – perhaps understandably in the light of their long separation – been "sluiced" in his absence, and had he, with all his attendant guilts and slippages, to pardon her for that? Was he thinking of the Catholicism he might secretly have been raised in and of the doctrine of grace that – it could be argued – subtly informs these plays? Or was it something simpler and even more personal – namely, brooding on the usual fuckups that everyone racks up over time and hopes to be forgiven for? Virtually nothing is known of the man's inner life, but few people dispute the semi-autobiographical nature of The Tempest, with its sense of a valediction to the theater he had known and loved. So why not extrapolate a little from the work to the life?
Depends on whose life, I guess. While I'm very much interested in Shakespeare's life, I'm more interested in my own. What I extrapolate from The Winter's Tale is that if Leontes deserves a break, so do I. There came a time in my life when I needed to be forgiven. I wasn't. If I must take my consolation from a play rather than from any flesh and blood Hermione, that's not quite so bleak as it sounds. Yes, I would have preferred real forgiveness to the literary kind, but I find it no small consolation that at the end of his life the world's supreme imaginative writer returns again and again to a basic home truth: we must forgive each other. For me, reading Shakespeare is like going to church, except that in place of a God I could never and wouldn't want to believe in, I "commune," so to speak, with a mind that seems to comprehend all others and enforces no doctrinal obedience. This community of believers embraces anyone who has ever seen, heard, or read a word of Shakespeare's and been moved to wonder and reflection. That's what I call a catholic church.
The forgiveness I've spoken of is not without cost. Antigonus and Mamillius die, and when Hermione steps off that pedestal, she speaks to her daughter, not to her husband. Part fairly tale, part moral exemplum, The Winter's Tale is what religion would be if it could free itself of those hectoring, incomprehensible Gods. In the unveiling of the supposed "miracle" in Act V, the sage and long-suffering Paulina speaks the lines that could serve as the epitaph for all of late Shakespeare: "It is required / You do awake your faith." The fact that the miracle turns out to be completely naturalistic (the "resurrected" Hermione has been hidden away for sixteen years and has the wrinkles to prove it) means only that the faith required transcends any particular religious dispensation. It's a faith, first of all, in the reader's or spectator's willingness to enter without quibbling into the imaginative world that Shakespeare has created, but more than that, it's a faith in life itself – in the human imagination, and in our capacity for endurance, transformation, and renewal. As Leontes exemplifies, our capacity for hatred, rage, and murderous insanity is pretty impressive too. To see whole and to understand these contradictions – that too is an act of faith.
I don't presume to know what this or any other play by Shakespeare ultimately "means." They will not be reduced to "themes." Obviously, the plays and sonnets teem with ideas, a few of which are near and dear to my heart, but I could no more sum up the "themes" of Shakespeare's work than I could sum up the "themes" of my own life. If his work has any unity of meaning, it is simply that of life itself – its abundance, its ongoingness. In Shakespeare's Imagery and What It Tells Us, Caroline Spurgeon wrote that "The thought constantly in Shakespeare's mind," in The Winter's Tale, is:
the common flow of life through all things, in nature and man alike, seen in the sap rising in the tree, the habits and character of flowers, the result of the marriage of base and noble stock, whether it be of roses or human beings, the emotions of birds, animals and men . . . the oneness of rhythm, of law of movement, in the human body and human emotions with the great fundamental rhythmical movements of nature herself.
Spurgeon was writing in 1935. We tend to be skeptical of such claims now. There are no universals; or, as Terry Eagleton bluntly put it apropos of a couple of poems by Edward Thomas, "If these works are not 'just' nature poems, it is because there is no such thing" (How To Read a Poem). If language and culture mediate everything we can know, why should Shakespeare, the playwright-businessman writing for a motley provincial audience of sensation seekers and esthetes, be exempt? Wouldn't he be just as blinkered by the social prejudices of this time, just as imprisoned by the reigning discourse, as anyone else? So it would seem – until we turn to the plays themselves. There we find that our hearts speak to us in a different register than our minds do. There we find, as in Florizel's wooing Perdita, precisely that sort of "universality" that is supposed not to exist:
Still betters what is done. When you speak, sweet,
I'ld have you do it ever; when you sing,
I'd have you buy and sell so; so give alms;
Pray so; and for the ord'ring your affairs,
To sing them too. When you do dance, I wish you
A wave o' th' sea, that you might ever do
Nothing but that; move still, still so,
And own no other function. Each your doing
(So singular in each particular)
Crowns what you are doing in the present deeds,
That all your acts are deeds.
(IV.iv. 134-46)
Ever been in love? Florizel speaks courtly Renaissance verse because he's a prince. The shepherd's son, who isn't even granted the dignity of a name ("Clown"), woos the shepherdess Mopsa in rustic comic prose. Although Shakespeare grants Clown the full measure of his country kindness and courtesy, he won't let him talk like Florizel. Such were the parameters of the Jacobean worldview. I doubt any lover anywhere has ever spoken so beautifully as Florizel, but if you have been in love you'll recognize the feeling – the idealization that has yet to withstand the test of time but nonetheless ennobles both the lover and the beloved and creates, as it were, its own truth. How did the groundlings and the nabobs respond when they first heard those words at the Globe Theatre in 1611? My guess is that some of them reacted much as I do. They wept.
Stephen Akey | 5 books mentioned 9 13 min read
Beauty is Truth: The Case Against Banning The Bluest Eye
Kelsey McKinney September 24, 2013 | 5 books mentioned 8 3 min read
Some books are meant to bring chills of discomfort, tears built of disappointment, and tension created by problems that will never be solved. Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye isn't a happy book, and that is what makes it honest.
The story focuses on 9-year-old Pecola Breedlove, a young black girl in Lorain, Ohio who dreams of having blue eyes. While drunk, Pecola's father rapes her in "a hatred mixed with tenderness." He flees after leaving her pregnant, and the community of Lorain to pass judgment on her.
This week is "Banned Books Week," the annual campaign that focuses attention on and celebrates books that have been banned and challenged. A challenge is defined by the American Library Association as a formal, written request for a book to be removed or restricted from school libraries.
There is nothing about The Bluest Eye that is easy, and because of that it is one of the most challenged books in America. It is number 15 on the list of 100 most challenged books released by the ALA.
Parents, teachers, and school administrators have protested The Bluest Eye since its release in 1970. But unlike many controversial books from the 1970s, people continue to try to ban The Bluest Eye. In the past two months alone, the book has been challenged for its status on the 11th grade reading list for the Common Core, a set of national standards that has been adopted by more than 40 states.
The first strike came from Alabama State Senator Bill Holtzclaw who, in late August, bowed to Tea Party pressure and said that he thinks the book should be banned in schools. After being criticized by Republican Party members for opposing the repeal of the federal Common Core standards, Holtzclaw went on to tell the Alabama Media Group that The Bluest Eye "is just completely objectionable, from language to the content."
The second strike came after the conservative blog Politichicks published a post titled "(WARNING: Graphic) Common Core Approved Child Pornography." Debe Tehar, the president of the board of education in Morrison's home state of Ohio, began criticizing the inclusion of the book on the Common Core recommended list. She cited the controversial work as "pornographic."
To call The Bluest Eye pornographic is simply wrong. Accusing Morrison's work of containing child pornography both ignores the very important distinction between pornography and rape and displays the weakness of the arguments against the book.
"I don't want my grandchildren reading it and I don't want anybody else's grandchildren reading it," Tehar said.
Some readers want novelists to fix the lives of their characters. They want simple, clean stories that resolve themselves easily, but that is not what great literature is supposed to do.
Sure, high school dances and finding an identity can make entertaining stories. They can engage young readers and teach them literary techniques and plot development. But that is not the point of literature.
Literature should, on some level, be entertaining, but that cannot be its only intention. Art, be it painted, or written, or shown on the silver screen, is supposed to show us something about the world or about ourselves. Through the stories of those who are similar, we find our own flaws. Through the stories of others, we learn to empathize.
The Bluest Eye is a book made for empathy and sympathy. The characters deal with issues most readers will never face, and some that every reader will face every day. Few will understand personally incest and rape, but racism and a cultural standard of beauty is a human concern. The Bluest Eye hurts to read because it hurts to feel things as deeply as Morrison does.
To be clear, not every book is for every person. Some people will not like The Bluest Eye because of their own personal preferences. Banned Books week is not about reading every book just because it was challenged. Banned Books week is about celebrating books like The Bluest Eye for the beauty that lies between its narrow covers even though that beauty is made of heartbreak and mistreatment.
There is no neat bow for Morrison to tie everything up in at the conclusion of the novel, because most of the time there is no neat bow for life. The people of Lorain, Ohio make mistakes in The Bluest Eye. They are cruel, and selfish, and horrible to Pecola, and that has consequences.
The consequence of The Bluest Eye is the demise of Pecola. Her baby comes too soon and dies. She, as a result, loses her mind and spends her days "jerking her head to the beat of a drummer so distant only she could hear."
But what keeps the girls Pecola's age away from her throughout her insanity is not her absurdity or their own disgust, but a feeling that they had failed her.
Maybe that, ultimately, is what keeps readers away from The Bluest Eye. It is hard to read a story about a girl who feels the pressure of race so strongly that she dreams of blue eyes. It is hard to read a scene where a father rapes his young daughter. And it is hard to read about a society that condemns a girl for those things.
But all of those things are hard because they are true, and truth isn't supposed to be easy.
Kelsey McKinney | 5 books mentioned 8 3 min read
Book blogs: do they matter?
C. Max Magee September 6, 2005 | 5 books mentioned 2 min read
Here's another one: this time it's a CS Monitor article by Randy Dotinga called "Book blogs' buzz grows louder." Over the last year many newspapers have printed some variation of this article. In it, the author introduces his readers to this online literary subculture book blogs. (And once again The Millions fails to get mentioned, but congrats to Mark Sarvas who leads the article – I've got to borrow his PR person.) Almost invariably, these articles also try to assess the impact, if any, that these blogs have on book sales, and almost invariably that question proves very difficult to answer. Here's Dotinga's stab at it:But is anyone listening? Many book bloggers seem to be talking only to themselves, judging by the dearth of postings by outsiders on their sites. And it's hard to tell if bloggers' mash notes translate into sales at Barnes & Noble.Which is another way of saying that book blogs have no measurable effect on book sales. We are a drop in the bucket, as it were. It's hard to disagree with that conclusion. Extrapolating from my own numbers, the numbers I've seen mentioned by other book bloggers and the numbers mentioned in Dan Wickett's interviews with book bloggers (1, 2, 3, 4), I'd estimate that on any given day no more than 75,000 people worldwide read a "book blog." Most large publishers wouldn't bother buying an ad if it was only going to reach 75,000, and yet, if my experience is representative, the more prominent book bloggers are recieving e-mail pitches, catalogs, and review copies almost daily. Are these publishers fools to be courting us? Well, yes and no. Anyone expecting a burst of sales from being mentioned on The Millions is sadly deluded, and the same is likely true of an isolated mention on any of the dozens of other book blogs out there. But, collectively, we book bloggers are able to deliver something that is hard to come by: a targeted audience. Publishers know that the people who read book blogs are many times more likely to buy a book than non-book blog readers, and by thrusting books into our hands, they hope to reach our coveted audience and get a little word of mouth going. If all the pieces fall into place, I think it's possible that book blogs are capable of boosting the sales of a particular book, though not enough to get it onto any bestseller lists.But I have another theory as to why these publishers are courting us: It's fun. For the first time there is an informed, entertaining conversation about books going on that anyone in the world can listen in on. No longer do the desk jockeys in the publicity department have to spend all their time clipping reviews and engineering in-store events, now they get to read blogs – now they get to feel like they're a part of the book discussion. They get to reach out directly to the most passionate readers. (I suspect this is why authors and all sorts of publisher types seem to love book blogs, too.) So, sure they want us to sell some books for them if we can, but, secretly, I think they just want to join in the fun.
C. Max Magee | 5 books mentioned 2 min read
Two Novellas
Emily St. John Mandel September 16, 2010 | 5 books mentioned 5 5 min read
I've noticed an interesting trend recently toward what seems to me to be the deliberate miscategorization of books. Specifically, an insistence on the part of some publishers that practically everything's a novel. I understand the reasoning behind it—novels, the argument goes, are somewhat easier to sell than either novellas or short story collections, and all's fair in love, war, and literary fiction sales strategies—but it still seems unfortunate to me.
There's a good argument to be made that it doesn't really matter what we call the work, so long as it's good. I don't entirely disagree, but all artforms thrive on diversity, and it seems to me that a diversity of form should be celebrated, not hidden. It troubles me a little to see diverse works given what seems to me to be an inaccurate label and sent out into the world in disguise.
The small press Flatmancrooked, for example, declared Emma Straub's recent Fly-Over State (a wonderful book, praised elsewhere on this site) a "composite novel" on the book's Amazon page, which I found puzzling: partly because the book was published by Flatmancrooked's New Novella imprint, the name of which suggests a certain publication mandate, and partly because the edition I read was composed of a shortish novella followed by a longish short story, for a grand total of 77 pages. (Incidentally, every time I type out "Fly-Over State" I suffer considerable indecision over whether or not I should be capitalizing the Over, but that's neither here nor there.)
It's difficult to define the precise lines between a novel, a novella, and a short story, but the main difference, setting considerations of structure aside for just a moment, is of course one of length. There's no such thing as a 3,000-word novel or a 70,000-word short story. Novellas occupy a shifting gray area in the middle. There are other, increasingly archaic subcategories, but who wants to get bogged down in the fine distinctions between a novella and a novelette? Regardless, the novella is among my favorite forms, and it seems to me a pity that we can't just call it what it is.
Steven Amsterdam's recent short story collection Things We Didn't See Coming was, rumor has it, marketed as a novel in Australia, and here's where the question of structure comes into play. I have a hard time wrapping my head around the idea of Amsterdam's book as a novel—the stories, each one a clearly-defined episode in a life lived out in a dystopian near-future, are too discrete; each one stands alone, with a beginning, a middle, an end. In other words, it seems to me that it's a short story collection, although the lines between "short story collection" and "novel" can get awfully blurry sometimes—the stories in Things We Didn't See Coming were much more linked than the two pieces in Fly-Over State, but not as interdependent as, say, the parts that comprise Jennifer Egan's spectacular A Visit From the Goon Squad, a work whose classification seems decidable by a coin toss: was that a novel, or a collection of tightly interwoven short stories? The book's brilliant either way.
But then, of course, there are the books that are impossible to categorize at all, that slip through not only considerations of length and genre but through the gauze curtains that separate prose from poetry and poetry from stage plays, and the literary world is richer for them. Terese Svoboda's Pirate Talk or Mermalade declares itself a novel on the dustjacket, which seems a stretch given certain whitespace/page count considerations—because here's the thing: can't we just proudly declare a novella to be a novella, when the form's so wonderful, when there aren't enough words between the covers to call the work a novel and it's far longer than a short story?—but I don't want to get too bogged down here. It's a fascinating book and the length is the least interesting thing about it.
Pirate Talk or Mermalade is billed as a novel in voices—meaning that the only text is dialogue—about a pair of unnamed brothers who grow up by the Atlantic Ocean, raised by one of the worst cooks in modern literature ("Makes a person want to go to sea, your soup"), in a town where the hanging of captured pirates is a frequent entertainment. It's the early eighteenth century, and the older brother has been sent to sea.
The death of their domestically challenged Ma eventually drives the younger one to the ships as well, and their lives from that point until the day they're stranded in the Arctic are a delirious blur of hangings, mutinies, piracy, lost limbs and storms from Nantucket to the Carribean to the Indian Ocean. There is cannibalism, a talking parrot, mermaids. I'm susceptible to books about the sea—my childhood memories include harassing sea cucumbers in tidal pools and conducting staring contests with seals—and this book had me from the opening:
I've seen boats as big as this whale. I've seen gryphons the same size, with teeth growing in even as they were taking their last breath.
You have not. And not a live one.
I've been to sea, I've seen all you're supposed to, being at sea. I'm sixteen, after all."
Dan Chaon calls Svoboda a true American original, and I believe he's right. I'm enchanted, and yet in the end I find my reaction mixed. I think this book has some problems. There are moments when the action is unclear to say the least, and more seriously for a novel written entirely in voices, moments when it's difficult to tell who's talking. The brothers' voices are very similar; at the openings of chapters, it's often impossible to tell who's speaking until someone says something to identify themselves, and then you have to perform that awkward hopscotching maneuver whereby you trace every second line of dialogue back to the beginning to figure out who said what. The issue could have been fixed quite easily by giving the brothers names.
But there are also any number of moments where the technical issues are entirely unimportant, because the prose is funny and astoundingly beautiful and the characters feel fully alive. This book is something entirely new: a novella that's also a sort of poetry, a poetry that's also almost a stageplay. Pirate Talk is a strange and nastily beautiful book, frustrating because it comes so close to greatness, and I'm left with what must seem a strange response: I can't say that this book entirely succeeds, but I want to read everything Terese Svoboda has ever written. In any form, at any length.
In the impressionism of the work, the gorgeous unsteadiness of form—is this fiction, poetry, a stage play?—Pirate Talk reminded me a little of Roberto Bolaño's Antwerp, another novella in sheep's clothing: Bolaño referred to it as a novel, but the volume weighs in at 78 pages and few of those pages are full. Here also is a sense of reading a new form, although the book's thirty years old. Antwerp is an impossible little book, frustrating and fascinating. There is a campground, a crime, a red-haired girl involved with the drug trade. If there's a plot, it's well-hidden.
"The scorn I felt for so-called official literature was great," Bolaño writes in the essay that precedes the book, and it shows. The book is composed of 56 numbered segments, some only a paragraph long. Antwerp was written in 1980, a time when a young Bolano was shifting his principal form from poetry to prose, and the transition between forms is incomplete. Some sections are slivers of narrative—"With instructions in an envelope, I left the city"—while others read more like prose poems. The first section begins:
The kid heads toward the house. Alley of larches. The fronde. Necklace of tears. Love is a mix of sentimentality and sex (Burroughs). The mansion is just a façade—dismantled, to be erected in Atlanta, 1959. Everything looks worn.
There's a dreamlike quality to both novellas. I'm left with impressions of mermaids and polar bears, detectives, seaside highways in the rain.
Emily St. John Mandel | 5 books mentioned 5 5 min read
Robyn Ringler says:
Great article, Amy! Can't wait to read the book!
Randy Howard says:
Great article! In college, I took a line-drive to the face in the batting cage. I had a blow-out fracture of the cheek-bone, and a serious concussion. At 25, I received a fractured skull in a street fight. This summer I underwent a neuropsychological assessment. The results indicated that I have cognitive inflexibility and mild inattentiveness. However, the doctor couldn't conclusively say whether my injuries led to these conditions.
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A Physics of the Heart: On Grief, M-Theory, and Skippy Dies
Kalpana Narayanan February 20, 2014 | 5 books mentioned 8 7 min read
Some branches of physics suggest that we live today in a multiverse. Within the multiverse, our universe is one of many. One variation of string theory holds that all possible outcomes of an event actually happen, across different universes. In this universe, my friends are dead, but in a parallel universe, they decided to sleep in, or to let the driver drive, or to return the suicide package when it came in the mail.
Kalpana Narayanan | 5 books mentioned 8 7 min read
Light in the West and Shadows in the East
Jianan Qian September 13, 2018 | 5 books mentioned 6 min read
Beauty is not what we see in the light, but how we imagine what we cannot see.
Jianan Qian | 5 books mentioned 6 min read
The Anxiety of Influence: Children's Books and Their Grown-Up Counterparts
Edan Lepucki February 16, 2016 | 5 books mentioned 3 3 min read
A Beautiful Man: On Peter Parker and the Amazing Spider-Man
Paul Morton May 2, 2014 | 5 books mentioned 4 10 min read
Peter Parker was born in 1945 and grew up in Forest Hills, Queens, under the care of his uncle and aunt. Ben Parker was a gentle man. May was a doting but naïve caregiver. Peter was a prodigy and Ben and May Parker encouraged his scientific aspirations. It was a happy home, but at school Peter was the target of low-key verbal bullying and though an outside observer would have considered the taunts mild, they amounted to a form of abuse that haunted him well into his adulthood.
In the early 1960s, several young men and women in the New York City area gained superhuman powers thanks to a series of nuclear experiments held in violation of rudimentary safety codes. That was Peter's story. He was at a certain place at a certain time and a radioactive spider bit his hand. Within 24 hours, his body underwent a metamorphosis. He was now faster, stronger, and more agile than most members of the human race and possessed a sixth sense which warned him of danger. He sewed a red-and-blue suit which showed off his new thin-muscled body, a body he was proud of and for which he had done nothing to deserve.
He entered and won a wrestling contest. He was a great success, but he was too young to appreciate his good luck. In a moment of self-absorption, he failed to stop a thief. By coincidence that criminal would later kill Ben Parker, and upon discovering the consequences of his selfishness, the teenager decided he would use his powers to help others. He invented webbing fluid, a potent but non-lethal weapon which allowed him to swing across the skyscrapers of Lower Manhattan and trap opponents in viscous nets. He became Spider-Man, an amazing addition to the New York skyline. A hyphen separated the two parts of his name.
Stan Lee and Steve Ditko's Peter Parker first appeared in Amazing Fantasy #15 in December 1962. In his debut, he was friendless, miserable, and smarter than everyone in every room he ever walked into. Ditko, a former horror comics artist, had learned to draw humans at their most vulnerable and grotesque and his Peter Parker was an attenuated figure, handsome but not too good-looking, a little damaged. In the pages of The Amazing Spider-Man Parker proved to be a very good superhero, but he wasn't slick and that was part of his charm. "Isn't there just a little of Peter Parker in all of us?" That's the final line of The Amazing Spider-Man #27, from August 1965. In that issue, he loses his uniform and had to make do with a cheap version he picked up in a costume shop. Spider-Man lost his mask in fights. He also lost fights. He fought common colds while in the middle of fights. The superhero who could be you.
Peter Parker was Spider-Man for many reasons and not all of them could be named. He suffered an oppressive guilt for the death of his Uncle Ben, but guilt wasn't enough for him to do what he did; Parker doesn't even mention his uncle for three years following the origin story in Amazing Fantasy #15. The truth is that Peter Parker enjoyed being more powerful, better than his peers who made fun of him and better than the criminals he fought. His social circle knew nothing about his abilities, and he took an arrogant pride in his secret identity. He was a sadist, within limits. He never killed anyone, but he enjoyed humiliating and hurting his opponents, taunting them with one-liners — he was a Woody Allen fan but he lacked Woody Allen's talent — and he rarely softened a punch even when fighting those he could crush with two fingers. He started fights with Johnny Storm, the good-looking member of the Fantastic Four and the subject of Parker's envy and admiration. He was a narcissist.
He was also Spider-Man because he needed money. He sold photographs of his fights with criminal misfits and ugly men to J. Jonah Jameson, the publisher of Now! and The Daily Bugle, who wrote editorials prejudicing the general public against the young superhero. Peter's freelancing helped his Aunt May survive her widowhood and earned him spending cash. But in the end, he was profiting off of violence, on fights that he sometimes started. He was also a dishonest journalist. After he failed to photograph a battle with Sandman, he restaged it using large piles of sand.
Yet he was, at heart, a good man and he suffered for his goodness. In Amazing Spider-Man #1 he flirts with the idea of crime in order to help his Aunt May save their house, but he eventually takes pride in his basic decency. He privately acknowledged the good in even his worst bully, Flash Thompson. He was devoted to his aunt. He continued his work as a vigilante even while facing a public that hated him. He honored that role no matter how much it disrupted his personal life.
He grew older, his posture improved, and he found himself in a series of relationships with beautiful women who noticed his charm and his blue eyes. But he was an incompetent and absent lover, more loyal to his secret identity than he was to his women, though he did save their lives on numerous occasions. In the context of the time, he was strangely under-eager to take advantage of the sexual revolution. His life as a superhero could be exhilarating, but it brought him only so much joy. He was a loner. He was also a lonely man.
Thanks to the open-ended, half-planned nature of comic-book serial storytelling, Lee and Ditko could discover new facets of Peter Parker's psychology in small ways from one month to the next, allowing the man to contradict and amend himself to the point where his heroism was as strange as the anti-heroism of Walter White, his pop-cultural antithesis. John Romita took over for Ditko in Amazing Spider-Man #39 in August 1966 and completed Parker's transformation into a romance-comics heartthrob, discovering the depression inherent in the young man's doleful charm. So no, it's not so much that Spider-Man was the superhero who could be you, though Lee used that very phrase in the comics. Spider-Man was one of the few superheroes who was more interesting than the supervillains he fought.
Spider-Man and Peter Parker were inventions of New York, not the New York of our world, but a New York, despite all Lee and Ditko's use of proper landmark names, that was as foreign as Metropolis or Gotham City. When Marvel Comics introduced a new Spider-Man in its Ultimate Universe a few years ago, one who had a black father and a Latino mother, the decision only highlighted one of the weirder elements of the world Lee and Ditko created 50 years before. Parker was a working-class teenager growing up in 1960s Queens and yet his social circle — Mary Jane Watson, Gwen Stacy, Flash Thompson, Betty Brant, Ned Leeds — did not include anyone with an obvious white-ethnic marker, an Irish, Italian, or Jewish name. The interior of Parker's high school was based on the one Ditko attended in Johnstown, Penn. When Parker graduated high school he entered Empire State University, an amalgam of Columbia and City College, which again, oddly, had strikingly few non-white-ethnics. He mostly fought petty hoods who spoke like '40s B-movie gangsters. Parker's world was lily-white until issue #51 (August 1967), when Robbie Robertson, a black man, takes a city editor position at The Daily Bugle, and drug-free until issues #96 through #98 (May-July 1971), when Harry Osborn faces the consequences of his acid trips. And as much as he fancied himself an outsider, he was very much at home in his version of the city.
This New York provided a template against which Peter Parker, with all his self-doubts and all his angst, could invent himself. The superhero genre had existed for at least three decades before he showed up, and part of Parker wondered if he was a kind of Don Quixote, dressing up and playing out a fantasy for a world that did not need his heroism. But this particular New York did need him. The presence of supervillains, of the Green Goblin and Doctor Octopus, always prepared to kill thousands, suggested that this shadow New York was under constant threat of annihilation. In our world, Peter Parker would be a true madman. (Actually in our world, the U.S. government would have captured and held him in a terrible facility and re-engineered him into a super soldier. It also would have figured out a way to turn his webbing fluid into either a torture or lethal weapon on a massive scale. Imagine a giant thick substance designed to cover entire cities and suffocate all of its inhabitants.) But Parker challenged his homogenous version of New York and made it more interesting. In his New York, he could be a most beautiful man, like Don Quixote or Jean Valjean or Samuel Pickwick — Dostoevsky's three famous examples of the archetype — a figure whose greatest creation, born out of neurosis and genius, is himself.
This is why he is loved. This is why you want to be him. And this is why he is not the superhero who could be you.
The problem with Spider-Man is the same problem with all popular comics heroes. Eventually, after several hundred issues, he hit a moment of stasis in which he stopped evolving, stopped discovering the strange hidden facets of his personality.
Still, writers and artists attempted and sometimes succeeded in putting their signatures on Parker. In July 1973, Gerry Conway, Gil Kane, and Romita killed off Gwen Stacy in the middle of a fight between Spider-Man and the Green Goblin. There is a consensus among fans that she died from whiplash from the web Parker shoots to save her, thus providing a space for a new form of a guilt for Parker to explore. I was 10 when I got into reading my older brother's collection from the late '80s. That Spider-Man was still interesting. He was a college dropout, fighting to make rent, seriously wondering how he wasted his intellectual talents in the interest of crime fighting. But within a few years, after he married Mary Jane Watson, he ceased to be credible. In the early '90s, Todd McFarlane's artwork exaggerated Spider-Man's contortionism, while his writing accentuated his sadism and diminished his wit, transforming one of the great geek heroes into a dumb jock. By the 2000s, the storylines within the regular Marvel continuity had achieved a level of absurdity that demanded retconning. In one limited series set in the future, Parker's radioactive semen kills Mary Jane. Marvel writers in their attempts to be gritty, had become the equivalent of literary novelists who reach for Holocaust references as substitutes for gravitas. Their fascination with ultra-violence obscured the essence of Spider-Man.
Brian Michael Bendis and Mark Bagley's Ultimate Spider-Man, which launched in September 2000, started everything over again, and attempted to return the hero to his roots. In Bendis and Bagley's version, Parker was a millennial and his Uncle Ben and Aunt May were aging hippies. And Parker looked to John Hughes movies for inspirations for his one-liners. "It's almost Shakespearean in the sense that the theme of it, the morality of it, all of it holds true," Bendis told me in an interview that appeared in Ultimate Spider-Man: Ultimatum. "And you can change the setting, you could put it all on a space station and the story of Peter Parker getting bit by a spider would resonate all these ideas. So once I came to terms with that, that I'm adapting a work by Shakespeare, it became very freeing."
Bendis and Bagley did capture Peter Parker's morality. Their stories were cleanly plotted, Bendis's writing was slick, and Bagley's pen, and later that of Stuart Immonen who replaced him in the 111th issue (September 2007), looked more to Romita's romance than Ditko's horror ethos for inspiration. And yet that slickness and Peter's unquestionable decency formed the title's main flaw. Bendis's Parker was a little too charismatic. The characters in the Ultimate Universe loved him more than any of the comic's readers could. I liked the comic myself, but a true Spidey agoniste would have preferred the Peter Parker of the Ditko and Romita years.
Sam Raimi's Spider-Man trilogy was a throwback to the Ditko and Romita years. All three of his movies, even the much maligned Spider-Man 3, have fine moments, though they spend far more time studying Peter Parker's guilt than the other more disturbing aspects of his personality. Raimi's horror-movie pathos turned Spider-Man's villains into tragic figures. Alfred Molina's Doctor Octopus, in his final moments, rediscovers a moral clarity and sacrifices himself in order to undo his evil plans. Thomas Haden Church's Sandman attempts to grasp his dead wife's wedding ring even as his fingers dissipate into tiny molecules. Tobey Maguire's Spider-Man is sweet, naïve and gentle, and a fine presence, but he exists to counterbalance the weight of evil and age more than to exert his awesome self.
Andrew Garfield's Peter Parker in Marc Webb's Amazing Spider-Man movies, themselves modeled on the Bendis/Bagley and the Bendis/Immonen runs, is the most physically interesting one we've seen on screen. He's discovered the line between Parker's teenage awkwardness and Spider-Man's athleticism, Parker's brooding charm and Spider-Man's power, and beneath it all there lies his constant melancholy. He's a young-adult hero with a riot of conflicting rages that recall those suffered by Lee and Ditko's Parker. Working with a by-the-numbers screenplay, Garfield reimagines a beautiful man, a flesh-and-blood being, that otherwise would have been nothing more than a symbol, or, considering the nature of Sony and Disney/Marvel's competing interests, a trademark.
The Peter Parker of the regular Marvel Universe has no real fears in any of his battles, which he always manages to survive. He's barely aged 10 years in the 52 since he first appeared. Immortality has erased the stakes of his existence. He has no reason to evolve. These are the kinds of story-telling decisions, made in the interest of the profit motive, that can rob a character of his soul.
The best thing about the Peter Parker of the Ultimate Universe is his mortality. He dies at the age of 16 in Ultimate Spider-Man #160 (August 2011) saving his aunt, his friends, and his neighbors from the Green Goblin. Unless something happened in between the panels that Bendis did not mention, he dies a virgin. And he does not come back. Death makes his sweetness and his goodness tragic and beautiful. It makes Peter Parker human, and, in at least one particular way, a superhero who could be you.
I don't imagine the Spider-Man Lee and Ditko created in 1962 dying in any major battle, but I do imagine an alternate reality for him, one that diverges from the Marvel storyline sometime in the early '70s, when Parker is still in college. He realizes at that point that he's gone about as far as he could go as Spider-Man, which was always a fun but immature project. He learns to dislike violence and prefers helping people in more peaceful ways. He spends more time in costume at children's hospitals, and eventually starts showing up out of costume. More superheroes have shown up in New York, and most of them, he's now humble enough to realize, are better at crime fighting. He goes for one last night-swing, comes home to his apartment, folds up his costume and places it in a box at the back corner of his closet.
He starts dating more and notices that he has fewer inhibitions. After breaking up once with Mary Jane Watson, he starts dating a handsome man he meets in a chemistry lab. It goes on for a few months, he discovers a form of affection he didn't realize he was capable of, but he returns happily to Mary Jane.
He graduates college. He forgoes a hard career in science after he discovers an allergy to corporate structures and a love of teaching. He teaches in one of New York's magnet programs while at home he tinkers with his brilliant inventions, creating all sorts of wonders far more interesting than web fluid. He decides to keep his work to himself.
He marries Mary Jane and they have children. They enter into a routine by the time they hit their 40s. On Friday nights, they go up to the rooftop of their Park Slope home. Mary Jane lights up a joint. He performs some mild acrobatics. Then they go back downstairs.
The kids graduate high school. They graduate college. They get married and give him grandchildren.
And then Peter Parker, the most beautiful man New York has ever known, dies.
Image Credit: Wikipedia
Paul Morton | 5 books mentioned 4 10 min read


Are you a train enthusiast? You'll love the SteamRanger's Southern Encounter to Victor Harbor with Brenton Ragless and Second Chances SA.
Join Nine News' Brenton Ragless for the ride of a lifetime. On Sunday May 19, you'll depart Mount Barker at 10AM for a big day out.
"Travelling behind one of SteamRanger's beautifully-restored steam locomotives – given a 'second chance' to 'stay on track' – seems the most fitting way to share time together and celebrate the wonderful work of Second Chances SA.
This will be a fantastic day and an unforgettable journey. Read the info below to book your tickets now! Bookings for this event are essential.


The City of Longwood's Mayor and Commissioners have adopted a proactive attitude, dedicated to creating an environment that is not only business friendly but also has a focus upon making Longwood a place that attracts new businesses and grows our existing businesses through the provision of quality development, A-rated schools, ample parks and safe neighborhoods.
One of the many low cost advantages of doing business in Longwood is the ease of transportation.
Whether it's travelling in the Greater Orlando area or having to reach the Atlantic or Gulf Coasts; Longwood businesses have noted that the location has been a significant advantage and aided in the decision to locate their company in the City. Being in the central Florida area has enabled Longwood to enjoy the regional cooperation in economic development that has made the Orlando MSA famous. According to a recent report from the U.S. Department of Labor, Orlando added 52,200 jobs in 2015 and is now the No. 1 metropolitan area in the country for job growth. That's 8,700 more jobs than the year before, and the region's highest annual gain since 2004!
That attitude of collaboration has now placed the Orlando region first in job growth in the United States and an economic engine for Florida and the country.
• Managing the City's business incentive program.
• Encourage development and redevelopment of the industrial and commercial districts within the City of Longwood for increased economic vitality.
• Marketing and promotion of the City.
• Represent the City as a member of the Orlando EDC and Seminole Chamber of Commerce.
View the photos from the Groundbreaking and Ribbon Cuttings.


What you do in the days post-marathon is almost as important as what you do in the days before. Recovering after running a marathon is vital and something that many people neglect. Having run 26.2 miles, you may not feel like moving again for a while, but you shouldn't allow your nervous system to sleep completely. Long-distance running takes its toll on your body and leaves you at risk of dehydration, extra fluid in your muscles and even damaged muscle tissue. Mark Wood, Head of Education and Training at British Military Fitness shares his expert advice for an efficient recovery.
0 – 2 days: Complete rest – congratulate yourself for having run a marathon! Make sure you drink water in small amounts, frequently, to help with the dehydration and flush out the extra lactic acid that builds up after intense exercise.
2 – 4 days: Full body stretching, with particular focus on legs. Supplement this with some light activity such as swimming, due to the low impact nature of the activity.
To complement stretching, try foam rolling too. This is a form of self-massage along with a 'foam roller', used by athletes to release muscle tightness and tension. Use your body weight to apply weight over the roller to stretch out the tight muscles – it will be painful (and if an area really hurts, go easy on it), but it reduces muscle stiffness and leads to a better recovery.
5 – 7 days: Up the ante slightly by adding in some light, short-duration jogs (around 30 minutes). Supplement this with lots of stretching / foam rolling.
The overall aim of this plan is to recover safely and effectively by keeping the nervous system moving gently. Therefore, exercise is key, but the amount done should be minimal and low impact.
As well as the obvious physical factors, the stress of running a marathon can affect your immune system, making you more susceptible to colds and flu, so it's important to eat a balanced diet with plenty of vitamins, and drink lots of water. In addition, some people often find they gain weight after running a marathon – do not be alarmed, this is usually due to water retention and will pass.


text:
using System;

namespace Clifton.Payment {
    [Serializable]
    public class CardNumberNullException : ArgumentNullException {
        public CardNumberNullException() { }
        public CardNumberNullException(string message) : base(message) { }
        public CardNumberNullException(string message, Exception inner) : base(message, inner) { }
        protected CardNumberNullException(
          System.Runtime.Serialization.SerializationInfo info,
          System.Runtime.Serialization.StreamingContext context)
            : base(info, context) { }
    }

    [Serializable]
    public class CardNumberInvalidException : FormatException {
        public CardNumberInvalidException() { }
        public CardNumberInvalidException(string message) : base(message) { }
        public CardNumberInvalidException(string message, Exception inner) : base(message, inner) { }
        protected CardNumberInvalidException(
          System.Runtime.Serialization.SerializationInfo info,
          System.Runtime.Serialization.StreamingContext context)
            : base(info, context) { }
    }

    [Serializable]
    public class CardTypeNotSupportedException : NotSupportedException {
        public CardTypeNotSupportedException() { }
        public CardTypeNotSupportedException(string message) : base(message) { }
        public CardTypeNotSupportedException(string message, Exception inner) : base(message, inner) { }
        protected CardTypeNotSupportedException(
          System.Runtime.Serialization.SerializationInfo info,
          System.Runtime.Serialization.StreamingContext context)
            : base(info, context) { }
    }

    [Serializable]
    public class ExpirationNullException : ArgumentNullException {
        public ExpirationNullException() { }
        public ExpirationNullException(string message) : base(message) { }
        public ExpirationNullException(string message, Exception inner) : base(message, inner) { }
        protected ExpirationNullException(
          System.Runtime.Serialization.SerializationInfo info,
          System.Runtime.Serialization.StreamingContext context)
            : base(info, context) { }
    }

    [Serializable]
    public class ExpirationOutOfRangeException : ArgumentOutOfRangeException {
        public ExpirationOutOfRangeException() { }
        public ExpirationOutOfRangeException(string message) : base(message) { }
        public ExpirationOutOfRangeException(string message, Exception inner) : base(message, inner) { }
        protected ExpirationOutOfRangeException(
          System.Runtime.Serialization.SerializationInfo info,
          System.Runtime.Serialization.StreamingContext context)
            : base(info, context) { }
    }

    [Serializable]
    public class ExpirationFormatException : FormatException {
        public ExpirationFormatException() { }
        public ExpirationFormatException(string message) : base(message) { }
        public ExpirationFormatException(string message, Exception inner) : base(message, inner) { }
        protected ExpirationFormatException(
          System.Runtime.Serialization.SerializationInfo info,
          System.Runtime.Serialization.StreamingContext context)
            : base(info, context) { }
    }

    [Serializable]
    public class CardExpiredException : Exception {
        public CardExpiredException() { }
        public CardExpiredException(string message) : base(message) { }
        public CardExpiredException(string message, Exception inner) : base(message, inner) { }
        protected CardExpiredException(
          System.Runtime.Serialization.SerializationInfo info,
          System.Runtime.Serialization.StreamingContext context)
            : base(info, context) { }
    }

    [Serializable]
    public class CardSecurityCodeNullException : ArgumentNullException {
        public CardSecurityCodeNullException() { }
        public CardSecurityCodeNullException(string message) : base(message) { }
        public CardSecurityCodeNullException(string message, Exception inner) : base(message, inner) { }
        protected CardSecurityCodeNullException(
          System.Runtime.Serialization.SerializationInfo info,
          System.Runtime.Serialization.StreamingContext context)
            : base(info, context) { }
    }

    [Serializable]
    public class CardSecurityCodeFormatException : FormatException {
        public CardSecurityCodeFormatException() { }
        public CardSecurityCodeFormatException(string message) : base(message) { }
        public CardSecurityCodeFormatException(string message, Exception inner) : base(message, inner) { }
        protected CardSecurityCodeFormatException(
          System.Runtime.Serialization.SerializationInfo info,
          System.Runtime.Serialization.StreamingContext context)
            : base(info, context) { }
    }

    [Serializable]
    public class DollarAmountNullException : Exception {
        public DollarAmountNullException() { }
        public DollarAmountNullException(string message) : base(message) { }
        public DollarAmountNullException(string message, Exception inner) : base(message, inner) { }
        protected DollarAmountNullException(
          System.Runtime.Serialization.SerializationInfo info,
          System.Runtime.Serialization.StreamingContext context)
            : base(info, context) { }
    }

    [Serializable]
    public class DollarAmountInvalidException : FormatException {
        public DollarAmountInvalidException() { }
        public DollarAmountInvalidException(string message) : base(message) { }
        public DollarAmountInvalidException(string message, Exception inner) : base(message, inner) { }
        protected DollarAmountInvalidException(
          System.Runtime.Serialization.SerializationInfo info,
          System.Runtime.Serialization.StreamingContext context)
            : base(info, context) { }
    }
}

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaGithub


text: UPDATE t2 SET b = 5


I retired in May after 35 years working for the Claverack Cooperative Insurance Company. While there I worked in various positions in, Underwriting, Claims, Investments and held positions of Secretary and Treasurer of the Company. I remain a director of Claverack and a director of the Mid Hudson Cooperative Insurance Company in Orange County. I also serve on the investment and audit committees of both companies. I am married to my husband Paul Stupplebeen for 20+ years. In my time off I love spending time with my dogs, reading and going to the beach.


The Regency is a luxury 129 unit apartment community offering high-rise living in New Bedford's downtown historic district. Standing 16 stories high, it is the city's tallest building. Residents can savor beautiful city and sunset views, as well as stunning vistas of New Bedford Harbor & Buzzards Bay.
All apartments were remodeled in 2010-2011. There are three tiers of finishes in the individual apartments offering a selection of styles to choose from. A wide variety of floor plans are available.
The Regency has a 24 hour Fitness Center. The Club Room features a gas fireplace. Residents may also enjoy the Billiards Room and a Media Room. Laundry rooms are located on each of floors 2 through 14, and penthouse units on the 15th and 16th floors have individual in-unit washers and dryers.
This mixed-income apartment community includes one, two and three bedroom units; 86 market-rate apartments, 33 affordable apartments for people earning 50 percent of area median income, and 10 "workforce" units for people earning 65 percent of area median income.
Residents may smoke in their own apartments, but not in common areas. Households may have up to two cats with a one-time pet fee. Apartments are unfurnished. Leases are for 12 months, with short term options available after a year of residing at the property.
The Regency is just steps away from delicious eateries, unique shopping, galleries, museums, a world-class performing arts theater, a National Park and working waterfront, as well as ferries to Martha's Vineyard, Nantucket and Cuttyhunk. Residents are just minutes to beautiful beaches and parks and enjoy easy access onto highways to Providence, Newport, Boston and Cape Cod.
The Regency: The Height of Downtown Living!


text:
August 1, 2017 / David Archer	/ Leave a comment
Tambourine Jazz Solo
Here are some leftovers from my Instagram account. Regretably everything is of my own creation. Don't steal, it's not nice. Stuff ranges from new books I'm working on to the plight of the lonely idiot, a homage to Ronald Searle, a picture of a cat and the album of my alter ego "Roy Morbidson" where I play 96 hours of my own melancholic solo Jazz tambourine compositions.
© D. Archer. July 2017
September 7, 2014 / David Archer	/ Leave a comment
Wherever you are I know you are not here.
July 24, 2014 / David Archer	/ Leave a comment
I heard that this song that was originally written by Jimi Hendrix in 1989 for his ill-fated Skegness Summer Spectacular "Vinyl Lionel and the Spunkettes". In the audience that day, yes you guessed it was a certain young man from Seattle searching for a new direction, that man was no other than Barry Hillsberg (also known as Terrence Trent D'Arby, also known as Petula Clark, also known as Gladys Knight and the Pips). Barry was on holiday with his maiden aunt (who had one leg shorter than the other but that is of no significance) when, during an allergic reaction to some undercooked shellfish he experienced the future sound that would define a generation, confuse most old people, have the power to raise the dead and un-cook spaghetti. He likened the sound of this new music to "milk flowing from the nipples of virgin Unicorns" a term he would later come to regret as it had already been used by the Disney corporation in 1956 and they sued him for all his money and he died.
Rumours of his death were greatly misquoted and in the summer of 1993 Barry returned to his hallucinations to invoke the spirits of the shellfish he had eaten on that fateful Thursday afternoon. His maiden aunt (short legs, attractive for her age, seeks gentleman 60 plus for long walks on the dark side of the moon, non smoker, horse lover and BDSM threesomes) was not in the room.
In the quiet of the bedroom Barry began to lick his hamster in an attempt to enter a shamanic state of mind. Three fur balls later he put down the hamster and picked up the Colorado River toad his maiden aunt kept in her bedside table, next to that strange, ribbed, plastic candle that didn't seem to have a bulb in it but which he could hear her trying to switch on every night, he concluded that there must be something wrong with the bulb because all it did was buzz. Barry was not very experienced at licking toads so first he paid it lots of compliments, bought it flowers, wrote poetry and sent her random expressions of love for three years before he got around to licking it. It was worth the wait, the toad agreed to marry Barry on the proviso that he never mentioned their night in Brighton to his maiden aunt.
Anyway, Barry began to trip, the lights were flashing rampant in his eyelids, cocooned in a wall of sound he began to see the grey outline of the shellfish walking towards him wearing a bowler hat. Barry knew there had to be something wrong, a bowler hat with brown loafers? Barry began to panic, this was a bad trip and he needed to get off. So he did.
It wasn't until the summer of 1995 that Barry was able to talk about his experiences to "Hello" magazine for a huge amount of money and the first syndicated royalty rites to his upcoming marriage to the scale model of Liberace that his maiden aunt kept in her other bedside table (again no bulb all buzzing). Shortly after being forcibly ejected from the offices of "Hello" magazine Barry went on the run to avoid all the publicity and scandal of being branded left-handed.
Barry Hillsberg was a deep and confused man, his life was one made tragically longer when he had himself cryogenically frozen three weeks before he died, fortunately a power cut revitalised him, took ten years of his bald spot and cured his acne. Barry went on to describe his out-of-body experiences in his ninth autobiography "Im sorry but I forgot to mention this bit" and became a huge TV star in Iceland (the country not the Supermarket chain).
Barry Hillsberg (26), thinker, dreamer, drinker, poet, artist, vegetarian, amateur psychiatrist, underwear model and trainspotter died, eventually, by death in 2008. He couldn't fit his intended epitaph on his headstone because it was only very small and it cot £3.78 per letter for the inscription (I know, £3.78) so his tombstone, under a small pile of syringes in Methadone corner of Westminster Abbey simply reads "BH. I'm dead. Feed cat".
R.I.P. Barry Hillsberg. Shine on you crazy diamond. Which is what he did until he properly died in 2012, during the omnibus edition of Coronation Street. He wasn't actually in the episode, he choked on a small Cheese and Onion flaky pastry Quiche. Found three days later by his maiden aunt she stole the money from his wallet and never returned his library books, fortunately Khama caught up with her in 2013 and she was shot whilst buying a Cheese and Onion flaky pastry Quiche at the petrol station across from her flat which was run, only part-time on an evening, by Sting.
To follow is too late
October 19, 2013 / David Archer	/ 1 Comment
there was no time,
only you;
it's when the talking stops
and I am left to think
about the size of the night
in the small numbers of the clock when
I miss the radio the most,
the audience of one,
the place for homeless thoughts
and mis-shaped, guilty love.
I have no more reach left in me
so I take myself to bed
because no one else will;
there I close my day
with you in the picture on the shelf,
the remains of someone else,
knowing the hole in my heart
is where you forever are.
© D. Archer. October 2013.
The Morrissey the More I forget!
October 1, 2013 October 1, 2013 / David Archer	/ 7 Comments
The trouble with
This Charming Man when
trying to write poetry
listening to your iPod
is that there is no Joy
Division in the New Order
of The Beautiful South;
The Morrissey
the more I forget
all my Stevie Wonder thoughts
come to nought;
I feel like The Jam on
a Jimmy Cliff sandwich;
my words Wither like Bill;
tears Weller in my eyes like Paul;
If I knew The Cure
I would Johnny Cash in all
for one minute
U2.
This poem is also called "The curse of trying to write Poetry when listening to your iPod at the same time", it's like a driving your car and trying to do your ironing at the same time, impossible for me anyway..
September 22, 2013 / David Archer	/ 2 Comments
Obviously the words are not copyright myself and neither unfortunately is the artwork, I came across the image on the inter-web just as I was having my daily dose of Morrissey and by-jingo a contemporary juxtaposition of worlds collided (not as oblique as the Peanuts' strip I admit). Also, I'm a bit miffed that I can't see who the artist is on the Vader illustration as I would sing your praises and give full credit without a doubt.
The black frame and the drop shadow are © D. Archer 2013 but that's all I have contributed, all the interesting and talented stuff belongs to real people.
August 25, 2013 August 25, 2013 / David Archer	/ Leave a comment
Today just seems to be one of those days when every song on my iPod stops me in my tracks and demands my attention. As a music lover I couldn't wish for more but as for a productive afternoon I'll just have to write it off as research.
Anyone for a shuffle?
Words by Morrissey. Doodle © D. Archer. August 2013
Sunday Morning Kitchen Spinning
December 30, 2012 / David Archer	/ 5 Comments
Sunday morning was meant to be spent listening to songs like these. Keep the faith.
September 7, 2012 / David Archer	/ 4 Comments
Song of the day.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZujLW2-d3Jo
A Once Lost Northern Soul
November 19, 2011 November 9, 2011 / David Archer	/ 7 Comments
my small one bedroom flat
Northern Soul so loud
it makes my ears bleed;
then starts your
favourite song
I stop spinning
and realise
it is you
I really need.
Its is no longer cold and I am no longer lost.

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


text:
Xiǎo Bì de gùshì é um filme de drama taiwanês de 1983 dirigido e escrito por Chen Kunhou, Hou Hsiao-hsien e Chu T'ien-wen. Foi selecionado como representante de Taiwan à edição do Oscar 1984, organizada pela Academia de Artes e Ciências Cinematográficas.

Elenco

Doze Niu

Ligações externas

Filmes em língua mandarim
Filmes de Taiwan

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaWikipedia


Me: Are you Don Draper now?
Him: People want what they can't have.** I'm just saying.
*This is among Don's many life-altering dilemmas in Season 3 of Mad Men.
**Don says this to his wife when she angrily demands to know why he is unwilling to sign the contract which she only learns about through his boss, who calls her to access Don's "softer side."


text:
WHS World History Class Studies "Conquest & Its' Impact"
Students in Mrs. Defore's World History class completed their first big project of the year, "Conquest and Its' Impact".
One of the final products included a museum exhibit where students highlighted one aspect of their learning. The museum was set up in the library, and each class visited. Students were encouraged to leave "I like" and "I wonder" comments for the exhibitors.
EXHIBIT PICS (compliments of WHS Yearbook)
library exhibit
defore


Möller, T.; Bernst, I.; Panoglou, D.; Muders, D.; Ossenkopf, V.; Röllig, M.; Schilke, P.
MAGIX provides an interface between existing codes and an iterating engine that minimizes deviations of the model results from available observational data; it constrains the values of the model parameters and provides corresponding error estimates. Many models (and, in principle, not only astrophysical models) can be plugged into MAGIX to explore their parameter space and find the set of parameter values that best fits observational/experimental data. MAGIX complies with the data structures and reduction tools of Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA), but can be used with other astronomical and with non-astronomical data.
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Secretary Mineta testified about traffic congestion at airports and highways, impacts of the congestion on the economy, and potential solutions to the problems.
Representatives and industry officials spoke to reporters about initiatives to improve customer service on airlines. Following their remarks they answered questions from the reporters.


announced that 30 libraries in the Eastern Cape would be established as libraries of excellence, to serve as community development centres.
The news that Sarah Baartman District Municipality is terminating Makana Municipality's internet services and removing its computers from the libraries here shocked councillors in Wednesday's Social Development Portfolio Committee meeting.
However, head librarian Patricia Njilo was assisted by Councillor Brian Fargher in explaining that the current situation in the libraries was "chaotic".
"There are four entities assisting with computers and internet services," Fargher said.
Njilo said the District Municipality had withdrawn its services for exactly that reason. "They say we should have one system run by one organisation," Njilo said.
Makana is still in negotiations with the Department of Sport, Recreation, Arts and Culture about having them take over the service.
Njilo confirmed that the Hill Street (town) library would reopen after being closed for renovations for almost a year.
National Library Week would be celebrated next week, with Wednesday 22 March earmarked for reopening the library.
While in local government, library services fall under the portfolio of Social Development, in the province they fall under arts and culture.
And in her policy speech on Wednesday, libraries were on the agenda when Majodina unpacked her R895 944 million budget.
Under Library and Archive services, she announced an allocation of R2 million for Mzansi Libraries Online – a programme to identify and establish 30 more libraries of excellence to serve as community development centres.
The sum of R7.9m is earmarked for upgrading Information and Communication Technology across libraries, with 20 libraries to be configured into SITA Library Information Management System (SLIMS) in the 2017/18 financial year.
This is set to improve management of information and accountability for library material in libraries, Majodina said.
Library infrastructure in the province will receive R9.8m.
Close to home, Alice (R5.8m) will get a new library built.
The conversion of classrooms into libraries in rural communities will receive R1m.
Even closer to home, the Department will pursue the Oral History project of the kwa-Ndancama forced removals in Grahamstown.
This would grow library collections, which in turn would attract more public participation in the Department's archives.
"This seeks to promote and preserve oral history with a view of capturing silent voices and muted identities, especially African experiences during the colonial era," Majodina said.
A documentary on Wars of Resistance would form part of the programme components.
The Department would, in partnership with the Oral History Association of South Africa and the National Archives of South Africa host the 14th National Oral History Conference at Walter Sisulu University in Mthatha as part of the OR Tambo centenary celebrations, Majodina said.
Young people are targeted in Majodina's budget, through the Young Patriots Programme.
"To instil a sense of patriotism, nation building and social cohesion amongst the youth, especially those in school, the Department in partnership with Department of Arts and Culture (DAC) and National Youth Development Agency (NYDA) will roll out a programme of flag verification, hoisting of flags in schools and stage social cohesion and nation building dialogues," Majodina said.
A R15m budget to celebrate in institutionalised days will see all national days commemorated in the context of the life and times of Oliver Tambo, as part of Tambo's centenary, starting in April.
Each of the Eastern Cape's eight districts will have a sub-theme – for example, in the Alfred Nzo District it will be 'Alfred Nzo as a Long Serving Secretary-General under President OR Tambo and in the OR Tambo District, 'Nelson Mandela as a Political and Life-Time Ally of OR Tambo'.
In the Sarah Baartman District, under which Makana Municipality falls, it is 'Sarah Baartman as an International Symbol of Racial Discrimination and Oppression'.


If you're within reasonable driving distance (and even if you aren't – ), I hope you can stop in at Katy Budget Books this Tuesday (Oct. 23rd) at 6:30 p.m. I'll be signing copies of PHOENIX UNBOUND. My awesome mother-in-law will be there with me for moral support, and Mr. Draven of course in all his silver-haired glory. So if you're not interested saying hi to me, come say to hi to them. They're far more interesting than I am anyway. And of course, it's always awesome to support the small indie book stores.
Grace Draven is a Louisiana native living in Texas with her husband, kids and a big, doofus dog. She has loved storytelling since forever and is a fan of the fictional bad boy. She is the winner of the Romantic Times Reviewers Choice for Best Fantasy Romance of 2014 and 2016, and a USA Today Bestselling author.
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Steeped in history and blessed with natural and man-made scenery, Pampanga offers several sightseeing options for visitors. Pampanga has always enjoyed the title, "The Culinary Center of the Philippines". It is populated by resourceful hardy folk who are justifiably proud of their famous Kapampangan cuisine. The province has remnants of a long and colorful history. It houses a booming night life and tourist destinations. It is the site of world-class resorts, casinos, duty free shopping, and golf courses.
Right near the center of Pampanga is the town of Mexico. This town has seen such significant economic progress since it became home to large commercial malls, such as the SM City Pampanga supermall and Robinson's Starmills. Communities Philippines brings you closer to where modern living amidst the countryside ambience is becoming a reality - Sorrento. Sorrento puts a high note to life, charming and with an accent of old world distinction, the themed houses takes inspiration from Italy's classic villages. Its home feature arches, columns, and large windows allowing for an abundance of natural light, a beautiful sunset and a panoramic view of the scenic country side. The lush landscape plus themed houses truly add to an increased valued property.
Sample computation only. Price may change without prior notice.


text:
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UN Syria talks resume, Russia hopes for progress on a new constitution
Record ID: 876278
MetadataFrames
Title: UN Syria talks resume, Russia hopes for progress on a new constitution
Summary: VARIOUS OF GATHERING MEMBERS OF SYRIA'S MAIN OPPOSITION HIGH NEGOTIATIONS COMMITTEE (HNC)
Embargoed: 31st May 2017 17:09
Keywords: constitution opposition government war UN Syria talks
City: GENEVA, SWITZERLAND
Topics: Government/Politics,United Nations
Reuters ID: LVA0046H89ZK7
Story Text:Syrian Intra-talks resumed on Wednesday (May 17) at the United Nations in Geneva where the Syrian government delegation, headed by Bashar al-Jaafari arrived to meet with Syria's Special Envoy Staffan De Mistura.
Earlier, De Mistura met with Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Gennady Gatilov, who said he hopes the political process can get an additional impulse especially on a new constitution.
De Mistura also met with U.S. Representative to the Syria Ceasefire Task Force, Henry S. Ensher.
Meanwhile members of Syria's main opposition High Negotiations Committee (HNC) took part in a gathering organised to show solidarity with detainees in Syrian government jails.
The sixth round of talks kicked-off on Tuesday (May 16) in Geneva where De Mistura said the talks will be shorter and more business-like in order to achieve efficiency and make real progress.
He stressed that there was no solution to Syria's devastating six-year civil war without a political settlement on the horizon, saying that the alternative is surrendering to the facts on the ground.
This round of intra-Syrian peace negotiations, dubbed as "proximity talks" in which the two sides are not expected to speak face to face, is the third in 2017.
While some progress on the humanitarian front has been achieved, opposing delegations remain at odds as to what the future, peaceful Syria, might look like.
De Mistura's job is to help bridge deep-seated gaps between rival delegations, while ensuring that any outcome is in line with UN Security Council resolutions.
While progress on the political track has been slow, the U.N. stands by its commitment to pursue peace through political negotiations to prevent further bloodshed in a country where as many as 400,000 people have died and millions more have fled their homes.
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