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The Quarterly Conversation Gets A New Look
Scott Esposito July 28, 2008 | 3 books mentioned 1 3 min read
The guest post comes to us from Scott Esposito. Scott is the editor of The Quarterly Conversation and the host of the literary blog Conversational Reading. His writing on books has appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Chattahoochee Review, and the Rain Taxi Review of Books, among others.
The day a website redesigns itself, it's an admission of something. Exactly what, I think depends on the site itself, but inevitably it's a statement, a statement that is the product of a lot of thought. With all the work involved in a redesign, nobody would undertake one without good reason.
We've just redesigned The Quarterly Conversation, and I think I know what we're saying. One of the exciting things about this redesign is that we have an RSS feed, which now enables us to publish reviews and interviews in between issues. To kick things off, we just published a review of Monsieur by Jean-Philippe Toussaint and a review of Tom McCarthy's Tintin and the Secret of Literature. Later, in August, we'll be publishing an interview with a very innovative, fun author that promises to be quite interesting.
In addition to publishing more interviews and reviews, the RSS lets us send out regular news updates to readers of the site. So now we can share our pride at having been included in this year's Best of the Web anthology from Dzanc books; we're also alerting readers and potential contributors to a special section we'll be doing for the Winter issue.
The one thing you won't see change is our mission to publish high quality literary criticism. We're dedicated to giving our writers the space they need to write an in-depth book review, or to write a challenging, rewarding essay. We also remain dedicated to giving our writers the kind of close editing and feedback necessary to ensure that their piece is as good and substantive as can be. At a time when more and more old-media periodicals are openly proclaiming their belief that people want dumbed-down, superficial literary coverage, we remain steadfast in the belief that these exists a large audience that wants in-depth literary criticism that can be read by intelligent laypeople.
When we publish our 13th issue in September, we'll have been around for three years, and in that time the journal has gone from something some friends and I did on a lark to something with a solid foundation, four editors, a budget and production schedule, and writers from all over the globe who read and write in numerous languages.
In other words, the site has become a whole lot more professional; it's much less the vision of one man and much more a structure built and held up by many hands, and in acknowledgment of that, we've managed to develop – again with help, this time from two excellent web designers – a site that reflects the quality we've come to put into each issue.
The Quarterly Conversation is far from alone in this greater professionalism – many literature sites that originated around the same time have gone through similar developments, a fact that should please anyone who loves literature. In fact, it's appropriate that I write about this topic on The Millions, as it's developed into one of the most professionally run book blogs that I read.
I think what's going on in sites like The Quarterly Conversation and The Millions is something very timely and also something largely inevitable: many of the people who contribute to and operate these sites started out with nothing more than a blog and a simple desire to write about books. Bit by bit these people took what they were doing and made it better and better, and now the litblogosphere has produced some valuable resources and some intelligent critics who promise to become even better with time.
Of course, there has long been a dedicated literary scene, one that predates the emergence of blogs and online book reviews. What I'm happy to be observing is greater interaction and cooperation between the two. This is reflected in The Quarterly Conversation – a lot of our writers cross over between these two venues, and as time passes we're developing better and better relationships with some of the literary institutions that have been around for a while. Now that we've redesigned the site, this is something we're planning on focusing more energy on.
If you're new to The Quarterly Conversation, please drop by and see what we're all about. If you're already familiar with us, then come on over and see our new look. And make sure to let us know what you think and what you'd hope to see in future issues.
Scott Esposito is the author of The End of Oulipo? (with Lauren Elkin), forthcoming from Zero Books in January 2013. His criticism has appeared in The Paris Review Daily, Tin House, The Washington Post, Bookforum, the Los Angeles Times, The Barnes & Noble Review, and Publishers Weekly, among many others. He blogs at Conversational Reading and edits The Quarterly Conversation, an online magazine of book reviews and essays.
That's Too Much: The Problem with Prolific Writers
Drew Nellins Smith September 2, 2015 | 3 books mentioned 25 5 min read
Lately I've been struck by the notion that there might be no books more lost than those buried in the overwhelming bibliographies of authors who have simply published too damn much.
Drew Nellins Smith | 3 books mentioned 25 5 min read
Free Rides: Writing and Reading on Trains
Nick Ripatrazone March 3, 2014 | 3 books mentioned 1 6 min read
Gender Confusion: On Literary Sausage Parties
Edan Lepucki November 25, 2009 | 3 books mentioned 12 4 min read
The writers highlighted by Publishers Weekly certainly deserve our attention, but the kind of attention they got, I fear, is a reminder that they use the men's room.
Edan Lepucki | 3 books mentioned 12 4 min read
Dear Any Soldier: Vonnegut during Wartime
Odie Lindsey August 10, 2016 | 3 books mentioned 7 6 min read
An "Any Soldier" care package was no curatorial feat. Rather, it was a cardboard box filled with good intention, a.k.a., Chef Boyardee and Dinty Moore cans, as had been skimmed from a pantry, or collected by a church drive. It seemed designed to make both recipient and provider feel precisely, lukewarmly O-K.
This was fine. It was lovely.
Still. No offense, but when a troop saw an open Any Soldier box, we generally moved on without a glance. We wagered that anything worth anything had been picked out or bartered, and we were just too spent for a letdown.
An unopened Any Soldier package, however, held value. Because no matter how hard you tried to murder hope — a mandate of the job — you couldn't help but feel a flare of it ascend if you found an un-ravaged box. If you got to be the first and only Any Soldier.
This happened to me exactly once. The result: I learned about fiction from a box of Kurt Vonnegut books, Operation Desert Storm, 1991.
The scene was sand, and tent, and swelter, and blast concussion, and a small, unopened box, and me: a 19 year-old private in a camp in the desert void; a kid who'd gotten in enough trouble back home to risk his future, but who held enough privilege to get him out of said trouble; a kid whose father and grandfather had done tours in their respective wars. A white boy from the South who got into a state school based on base smarts and sub-base grades, the latter coupled to the asterisk* that he had joined the Army Reserve.
*He was a Good Kid who had found his way past setback c/o serving his country.
(At the time of my enlistment, the era of George H.W. Bush, the Army did not test for the chemicals I was fool enough to ingest.)
Point here was the Any Soldier box, unopened. No return address. I looked around as if to thwart a setup, then squatted on the sand floor of the tent and went at it. Ripping the tail of packing tape off of the top, I expected a reward of Spaghetti-O's or Cheerios, or pray-God, Jolly Ranchers.
There was nothing there. Nothing but books. I read Slapstick out of obligation, and because it sat on top of the stack, and because its cover featured an illustrated clown. The titular allusion to clumsy, physical violence was wedded to the novel's leitmotifs: "And so on" and "Hi ho." Though employed as one-liner punchlines, these phrases also imported rhythmic, recurrent notes of social satire. "Hi ho" in particular addressed the futility of any given situation, including my own. It became a snare-pop to the ridiculous, We're fucked, circumstance at camp, e.g., SCUD missile, Saddam, Sarin gas…Hi ho.
A few days later, when no one had rifled through the open box, I took it and stowed it in the sand under my cot. I then read Cat's Cradle and Player Piano, before turning to the two texts I'd actually heard of, Slaughterhouse-Five and Breakfast of Champions. The former was a devastating, on-the-nose narrative about a veteran, Billy Pilgrim, whose life cycled back and forth through time, war to postwar, and again back to war.
Yet it was Breakfast of Champions that snared me, that made me think about the writing process itself. Specifically, I fell in love with Vonnegut's "picture of an asshole" on page two, a description wed to an illustration like an asterisk:
Alongside crude scrawl, I'd been unaware that one could build a narrative out of nonlinear snippets, or wield language as declarative and disruptive as "Armistice Day was sacred. Veterans' Day is not."
Christ, I thought, this is writing?
This was naïve. Breakfast had spent a year on best-seller lists before I turned three; there was a reason that even an applied non-reader like myself knew the name Vonnegut.
In fact, I realize now how puerile and/or unhip this reads. Whatever. Hi ho. Because in that desert, on the eve of the ground assault, as Warthog jets and tactical missiles slashed the sky, and as Republican Guard mobilized within striking distance of our compound, Breakfast's complexity and humor, its polemic and timing and asterisk assholes were a revolution. Salvation, even.
Turns out the novel was the genesis text of "and so on," having been published well before Slapstick. (I'd been reading the books in random order.) These three little syllables brought a gale force sandstorm. Importing both resignation and protest, and echoing the dehumanized, passive-aggressiveness of war, "and so on" represented everything my comrades and I were going through, and would go through.
Character-wise, I learned that Kilgore Trout could recur in additional works, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, Breakfast and elsewhere; that his biography could alter, as could his physical appearance; that Trout's very presence may or may not have anything to do with the narrator in Slaughterhouse — let alone Vonnegut himself. In other words, a character did not have to look, act, feel, or even exist the same way, let alone stay in the same story, or in any story whatsoever.
The Rules, to employ Slapstick, had the consistency of a "sparrow fart."
Thus, reading Vonnegut in the desert, I was introduced to character, language, setting, satire, narrative structure, leitmotif, and an asterisk asshole. I vowed to get home alive, and to write.
Though my life did inch toward letters, it took another Iraq War for me to go all in. This time, the scene was grad school, Chicago, in the post-9/11 world. I was 32. Alongside workshops and lit theory, I scoured the public library for the primer texts I had avoided in high school and college. I read "Hills Like White Elephants," and wrote a weeper about a couple whose clipped dialog hovers just above their anguish. After reading Jay Mac et al., I produced a pair of astonishingly poor novels featuring bruised young men. I signed letters to friends back home with "so it goes" — the Slaughterhouse-Five catchphrase, as is repeated over 100 times in the novel — and did not cite my source.
I was working to be a writer, working quite hard, actually, but I was still mostly a mimic. Which was fitting, perhaps, since what came next was the most Billy Pilgrim-esque sort of echo: the call for a new war in the old desert — Iraq — against the old enemy — Saddam Hussein — as waged by a new President Bush. I was 19 again — only I wasn't. I was a bystander to my own memory.
This time, instead of mobilizing for deployment, I marched in the streets, hurling slogans and pamphlets. One afternoon, I stood at the back of a massive protest that featured an African-American state senator as keynote. (He was the only politician brave enough to oppose the 2003 invasion of Iraq, and I loved him for that, and his wisdom helped him become President.)
Yet just like those Vonnegut stories, made absurd by their refrain, our efforts came to naught. The war launched anyway. I lost it; I lay on the floor of my tiny apartment for days, skipping school and work and meals and sleep, and watching the war on television. Hi ho. I also wrote, finally, furiously, my depression unspooling with every hour of embedded news coverage. A rerun, I concurrently watched and remembered the sand and soldiers, Saddam and Bush. I recalled the lessons learned as the Any Soldier who found Vonnegut, or, perhaps, who was found by him.
At some point, the news coverage flashed a photo of Shoshana Johnson, a young, African-American female soldier. Shot in the legs, she was one of the first troops captured by the Iraqis.
She went to war. I went on a search: through humor, pain, sarcasm, critique, polemic. Filth. Violence. Quirk. Only, I didn't want to write about me. I wanted to write about soldiers whose war stories didn't earn as much coverage (and/or our relationship to the coverage itself). What's more, I needed to explore the culture of war, this Pilgrim-esque loop, this Vonnegut-esque recurrence, and how and why the hell we perpetuate it. I wanted to write my own version of an asterisk asshole. I wanted to pluck up the emotions of the faraway battlefield, and plop them right down in your kitchen, your office, your car wash. I wanted to bring the war home.
I sometimes regret that I have never sent those Vonnegut books to a new Any Soldier. Since 1992 I've only moved them from shelf to shelf, college to job, marriage to divorce, all over the country. Twice, they have spent a year in a pal's garage while I traversed the planet. Slapstick and Slaughterhouse, talismans of sorts. My war story, my memory, as written by someone else — which is mostly the case with a war story, it seems. Billy Pilgrim cycles back, just as George Bush cycles back, as did my grandfather and my father and me. As did Shoshana Johnson, and the thousands of young troops on my television. Any Soldiers, all the time, locked inside a story.
Image: Wikipedia
Odie Lindsey | 3 books mentioned 7 6 min read
the new TQC looks great – the RSS feed is a great idea that keeps the site fresh in between issues and is something we've been looking to implement at Brink. Thanks for sharing!
Our Growing Higher Ed Crisis: Making Myths In the Basement of the Ivory Tower
Bill Morris April 28, 2011 | 3 books mentioned 22 10 min read
Essays On Poetry
Frank O'Hara's Lessons for Being Gay
Christopher Richards July 1, 2013 | 3 books mentioned 6 8 min read
Everything I Know About America I Learned from Stephen King
Lydia Kiesling August 21, 2013 | 3 books mentioned 12 13 min read
Back in 1975, Stephen King began 'Salem's Lot, his second novel, with an epigraph from George Seferis: "Old friend, what are you looking for?/ After those many years abroad you come/ With images you tended/ Under foreign skies/ Far away from your own land." This summer, I settled down to read Joyland, something like the fiftieth novel Stephen King has published since he began his career forty years ago. I joke to no one in particular that Stephen King has an occult novel-writing machine, or a crack team of monkeys with keyboards, or a computer formula that writes his books for him, and Joyland does occasionally convey that quality of phoning it in; it just feels so easy for this guy. But it's still a Stephen King book, which means it has a kicking story and a sentimental old heart. And since I seem destined, this summer, not to pick up a book or watch a movie or engage with any kind of artistic project without having some kind of maudlin experience or generally going through something, reading this nostalgic whodunit set in the lost world of the summer carnival launched me on my own nostalgic expedition. In Stephen King's funhouse mirror, I saw all the other Stephen King books I have read since my childhood, under foreign skies, far away from my own land.
I am an only child and I grew up in a Foreign Service family, which means that my family picked up and moved every two to five years. Being a quasi-international child had a variety of effects, some transitory, some enduring. Foreign Service children, in my experience, inhabit a strange half-life of cosmopolitanism. Foreign words roll off their tongues, foreign foods succor them, and they are at home with thin toilet paper and thinner ketchup. But in the Foreign Service, your orientation is always in the direction of America, Washington D.C. or the Northern Virginia suburbs your magnetic pole. The very mission of the Foreign Service demands this, of course, and the logistics follow. Vacation is called "home leave"; in addition to all their assorted relatives, most people have some property back home, a building that they fret over and find tenants for and supply with new coats of paint on their short weeks stateside.
The orientation is spiritual as well as practical; overseas, I wore out VHS tapes my grandparents sent me, so that a select handful of episodes of 3-2-1 Contact, Reading Rainbow, and Sesame Street are seared into such a precious, way-back corner of my brain that should I dare to Google for a vignette of skating muppets singing "Feliz Navidad," I would probably have a stroke.
When I was a little girl in Athens (the first of our postings during which I was a sentient being for any prolonged period), this orientation west to the white dome, combined with the distance therefrom and the relative scarcity of things — products mostly — that are unfailingly associated with America, meant that for me the United States became imbued with an unspeakable glamour. It goes without saying (but I will say) that I never lacked for amenities — the life I am describing was a gift from my parents and divine Providence. That said, amenities-wise, the United States was the navel of the universe.
I had some early object lessons in globalization, imperialism, and the profound power of marketing. When the first McDonald's opened in Syntagma square, there were lines around the block, and I rejoiced at the limp pickles on my hamburger. When Wendy's set up shop in a grand old peach-colored building nearby — formerly housing the American Office of Defense Cooperation, now housing a mall — it was a goddamned revelation (it's not there anymore, evidently; the franchise pulled out of Greece in 2009). But there were still things I wanted. I remember hoarding dollar bills for the purpose of buying a book on home leave. To my knowledge it is still the case that it is hard and expensive to get all the books in English you want overseas.
My enthusiasm wasn't only on the material plane. One set of grandparents lived in the north-easternmost part of California in a very small town that feels pretty much like the edge of the world. I found this place so enchanting that I informed my grandparents of my plan to honeymoon there on the eventual occasion of my marriage. Sometimes I think I chose to roost in San Francisco largely due to the memory of that exotic scented air, snuffled up as we exited the airport to visit my other grandparents, who lived near the Bay.
Back in Washington after eight years of overseas living, I went to public school and listened to 99.1 WHFS and DC 101 and surreptitiously watched Roseanne and generally got to the business of acclimating. By the time my parents moved back overseas and I started high school in the U.S., the mild foreignness I had tried to slough off began to seem like an asset, and I embarked on the period I now think of as Working It. This involved a deft combination of encouraging any perception of foreign grandeur associated with my person, protesting too much about my normalcy, and scoring laughs off the Otherness of my new home (I'm sorry, Armenia, for the things I said).
Even after I embraced the foreign, however, sometimes the glamour of America reflected back at me in curious ways. At a store in Yerevan I bought Pink Floyd CDs and a Led Zeppelin album called Live Over America that I haven't seen since. The first cigarettes I ever bought, before I wanted to smoke a cigarette but respected their currency, came from an open-air market and had red and blue packages and names like "American Dream." Back in Athens before college with the new Euro cheaper than the dollar, I hit the summer sales for garments from Kookai and the heavenly Zara, and one day scored some New Balance sneakers of an unorthodox style. (In boarding school, where an entire female bourse operates around the borrowing of clothes, it's good to have some stuff that no one else has.) I took the bus to a gleaming new cineplex in an Athenian suburb to watch American movies that, as the years passed, drew temporally ever-closer to their American release dates, the celebrity name transliterations on the marquis ever more sophisticated.
There is, obviously, nothing intrinsically interesting about an American with a passport and two pairs of genuine or otherwise New Balance kicks manufactured for a non-U.S. market. The world is full of meandering paths and displaced nationalities and people with much more exciting stories than my own. But your childhood is your childhood; as I get older, and the tables of circumstance turn, as I lose whatever light patina of foreignness I had or manufactured and there's a Zara in every American mall and a McDonald's in every city in the world, as I bemoan the garbage food and the garbage construction and the garbage policies of my country and yearn now for a seaside taverna and the glamour of Abroad, there are some early things that stick with me. I never see a 7-Eleven Big Bite and don't instinctively desire to eat it. I know that Heinz ketchup is unmistakable and precious and that a "cheeseburger" anywhere else is to an American cheeseburger what the grotesquerie of pressed dust we find in America is to a gyro. I don't use and barely deserve the driver's license I have, but I deeply admire a hot car. A new paperback purchased with crisp American dollars? That's bliss. A Stephen King book? That's Shangri-la.
I've done the math, and somehow throughout this modestly peripatetic life, in the hotel lobbies and the airports and the back seat of the car and during idle moments at my series of illuminating summer jobs — visa office photographer, gas station attendant, commissary stockist, slide scanner — I managed to read more books by Stephen King than by any other writer. I remember vividly the row of Stephen King books on the shelf of the basement library in the American Embassy Athens, a fortified Bauhaus dream downtown. Reading Joyland this summer, and then plowing through a handful of others for the second or third or fourth time, I was struck by how much of my conception of America comes from those thick books — what they said to me during that quasi-rootless time, and what they say to me now that both the vague internationalism and the natural solipsism of my childhood have mostly dissipated. For better or worse, I cut my patriotic teeth on the oeuvre of Stephen King.
I am hardly the first person to identify Stephen King as holding some claim to the title of America's chief scribe. Nearly twenty years ago, Jonathan P. Davis wrote Stephen King's America, an extended academic love poem to Stephen King as an author who "understood the human condition on all levels…who stood on the sacred ground of America…whose feelings about his country resonated throughout his fiction…" As with any attempt to distill the most somethingest traits of a given nation, the attributes typically end up being about things that are actually universal — among Davis's areas of inquiry are "Technology," "Childhood and Rites of Passage," and "Survival in a Despairing World." But I responded, as someone who has alternately fetishized and scorned my country of origin throughout my life, to Davis's instinct to celebrate King as the great American writer of the late twentieth century.
The success of a novelist has to do with the extent to which his work allows the reader to lose herself in the story, but the novels that really resonate are the ones that also invite the reader to apply them to her particular circumstances. In my case, Stephen King books appealed to my lingering sense, even in high school, of America's fundamental glamour, that feeling impelled both by the act of circumnavigating the globe broadly in the service of America's aims, and the foreignness imparted by its distance. And they achieved several things besides scaring and entertaining the hell out of me. At some level, Stephen King novels issued a necessary corrective to my wanton teenage materialism and overweening belief in American goodness. They did their own kind of national myth-making.
In America and Americans, John Steinbeck's dated, elegiac snapshot of American life in 1966, a book that in some ways encapsulates in non-fiction the portrait of America we find in Stephen King's corpus, Steinbeck writes: "One of the characteristics most puzzling to a foreign observer is the strong and imperishable dream the American carries. On inspection, it is found that the dream has little to do with reality in American life. Consider the dream of and the hunger for home. The very word can reduce nearly all of my compatriots to tears."
In The Stand, Larry Underwood looks around at the Maine coast, cleansed of people:
On either side of them the essence of honky-tonk beach resort had now enclosed them: gas stations, fried clam stands, Dairy Treets, motels painted in feverish pastel colors, mini-golf. Larry was drawn two painful ways by these things. Part of him clamored at their sad and blatant ugliness and at the ugliness of the minds that had turned this section of a magnificent, savage coastline into one long highway amusement park for families in station wagons. But there was a more subtle, deeper part of him that whispered of the people who had filled these places and this road during other summers. Ladies in sunhats and shorts too tight for their large behinds. College boys in red-and-black-striped rugby shirts. Girls in beach shifts and thong sandals. Small screaming children with ice cream spread over their faces. They were American people and there was a kind of dirty, compelling romance about them whenever they were in groups — never mind if the group was in an Aspen ski lodge or performing their prosaic-arcane rites of summer along US 1 in Maine.
In my adult grumpiness and the cold light of day, there are plenty of groups of Americans that I can take in without any pervading sense of their compelling romance, dirty or otherwise. But you can bet your ass I was receptive to this notion in my tender youth. Stephen King himself writes such a dirty, compelling romance that even now he breathes new life into that faded old vision of my homeland.
I would wager that most people who have heard of Stephen King know that he is from Maine; he grew up in Maine, he is a product of its schools, and little Maine towns, real or fictional, are where many of his worlds are built. (And Stephen King novels are all about world-building — although the publishers initially forced him to cut The Stand down to a reasonable size, the magisterial Complete and Uncut edition is one of his best books because it makes so much room for so many people, so many vignettes and backstories.) And even though Derry, à la It or Insomnia, or 'Salem's Lot from the novel of the same name, are characterized as being host to some enduring, elemental evil, this has an odd way of privileging place. These places are special.
Imagine knowing a place so well that you can write all of its inhabitants and landscape and make it feel so much like home, even home with something terrible lurking underneath. I think Stephen King books manage to appeal both to people who have experienced the tyranny and joy of the small town, as well as people who have known rootlessness in its many forms (not, of course, that the two are mutually exclusive). People in Stephen King novels are forever coming back to their hometowns after years away; no matter how long they are gone, they still know their physical and emotional topography.
The recurring characters and places, Mike Hanlon the librarian or the Secondhand Rose, Secondhand Clothes store, or even the Crimson King, contribute to that feeling that the world is just one big American town with all the same points of reference, where people read Misery Chastain novels and remember, or willfully forget, the fire at the Black Spot. (Even apart from the fast food chains springing up like toadstools across the globe, the nature of the Foreign Service, with its far-flung points of insularity, recalls a similar feeling. This will sound like Working It, but I once walked past a man on the street in Yangon whose wedding I had attended in Yerevan a decade before.)
I love the Real Talk that comes out of the characters residing in these towns, things like "[he] looked and acted like the kind of man who would ride his help and bullyrag them around but lick up to his superiors like an egg-suck dog." They remind me of things that my beloved grandpa said or was said to have said, how he might describe someone as looking like "forty miles of bad road."
Stephen King's novels transmit deeper things than hometown nostalgia. As Johathan P. Davis points out in his book, much of King's work is concerned with the American devotion, in theory at any rate, to individual liberty. When King isn't being gross, with his bone splinters and clots of blood and patented semantic move of creating an appalling noun just by adding the word "meat" to the back of another one — e.g., "boymeat" or "greymeat" — he spends a lot of time on the freedoms of the individual. Glenn Bateman, the retired sociology professor of The Stand, spends most of the novel talking about the formation of society and the tension between freedom and social cohesion. When, at the end of that novel, spunky Fran and Stu, a laconic badass from East Texas, make the choice to leave the crowding and rules of the Boulder Free Zone for the rugged, dangerous liberty of the Maine coast, this is posited as a sensible choice, one that only a couple of badasses would make.
In Insomnia, when the yuppie, city-living children of Lois Chasse try to pry her out of her hometown and install her in a retirement community with "a Red Diet Plan, a Blue Diet Plan, a Green Diet Plan, and a Yellow Diet Plan," her beau Ralph "thought of eating three scientifically balanced meals a day for the rest of his life — no more sausage pizzas from Gambino's, no more Coffee Pot sandwiches, no more chiliburgers from Mexico Mike's — and found the prospect almost unbearably grim" (sometimes, freedom has a little bit to do with a Big Bite). Ralph prefers to die like his friend Jimmy V., without having to "show anyone either his driver's license or his Blue Cross Major Medical card." And then there are the abused women Dolores Claiborne and Rose Madder, who declare their independence through a vale of blood.
Ostensibly, every person spends his or her days in the exercise of whatever freedoms are afforded them, but America is famously a place where this individual liberty is (ostensibly) enshrined in founding documents meant to govern a collective whole — it's a nation of people living out their manifest destiny. Nobody understands, and in a sense reifies, this paradox like Stephen King. King disdains in his books the smug and unshakeable belief in personal rightness (he really has it in for yuppies), but he allows for a specialness that in many cases is literally divine — Dick Hallorann or Danny Torrance in The Shining, or Tom Cullen in The Stand, or any number of other characters endowed with exceptional ability, typically a clarity of vision, by some higher power. This is the kind of thing that really appeals to a child, especially an only child. I think it also resonates for good and ill with someone in a Foreign Service environment, which embodies a kind of exceptionalism, with its security doors and special badges and Fourth of July parties and commissaries filled with imported goods.
Stephen King believes in the individual; while his work battles what Steinbeck called "the screwball organizations which teach hatred and revenge to the ignorant and fearful people, using race or religion as the enemy," he devotes a lot of pages to what Steinbeck likewise calls "the pleasant, benign, and interesting screwballs…poets in flowing robes, inventors of new religions…" without whom we would be "a duller nation." King recognizes all of these screwballs as the real nobility of America. Often, they are teachers: in Insomnia, a character opines, "I think this country is full of geniuses, guys and gals so bright they make your average card-carrying MENSA member look like Fucko the Clown. And I think most of them are teachers, living and working in small-town obscurity because that's the way they like it."
That's American Dream talk, but I think a lot of Americans have a person like this somewhere up in their family tree. Isn't King himself the best testament? For all the pompous literary types he tears down in his work (like the Creative Writing Honors Seminar instructor in It, who calls the writer Bill Denbrough's horror stories "PULP" and "CRAP"), King sprinkles good teachers all over his work, along with other varieties of "benign screwballs" who, we suspect with folksy assurance, would do a sight better job of running the country than the people we pay to do the job.
The best patriots are always the most fiercely critical of their countries, and the critical difference between Stephen King and the big-gun schlock that he often shares space with in airport newsstands, is that Stephen King's writing is a sustained exercise in pointing out the crappy and the horrifying things we all subscribe to by living out our American, and human, existence. Steinbeck wrote that in America, "Fortunes are spent getting cats out of trees and dogs out of sewer pipes; but a girl screaming for help in the street draws only slammed doors, closed windows, and silence." Stephen King uses his stortytelling talents to counter this silence, to show us the worst things about the folks next door and, by extension, ourselves. King has hard words for the government, which does things like wipe out civilization with a series of evil fuckups, but many of his monsters and things that go bump in the night are actually the residents of ordinary little towns, which shelter wifebeaters and molesters and racists and complacent assholes. These characters aren't always bad because they're evil; sometimes they are weak and stupid, uncharitable, feeling sorry for themselves over a slight from a woman or a group. Sometimes they're just the beneficiaries of a hard row without the gumption and can-do to hoe it.
When a man is locked up briefly for assaulting his wife in Insomnia, a citizen asks "'How can assault be a misdemeanor?…I'm sorry, but I never did understand that part.' 'It's a misdemeanor when you only do it to your wife,' McGovern said, hoisting his satiric eyebrow. 'It's the American way, Lo.'" Stephen King talks about other things that comprise the American way. The evil presence living under Derry enriches itself on the pre-existing condition, so to speak, of its citizens. When the fire at the Black Spot–a nightclub built by the black soldiers on the nearby military base–burns scores of people alive, it was the sheet-clad town fathers, not the alien spider, who set the blaze.
On race (and gender), Stephen King has taken and acknowledged some very valid criticism. In his rush to write the whole America, he is basically one hundred percent responsible for the modern incarnation of the Magical Negro, for example in the character of The Stand's Mother Abagail, a rustic lady Moses who communes with the Lord and walks uphill and back both ways to fix a good supper for her guests. King himself, in a Playboy interview quoted in Davis's book, called Mother Abagail and The Shining's Dick Hallorann "cardboard caricatures of superblack heroes, viewed through rose-tinted glasses of white liberal guilt…" This is actually another part of my strange inheritance from Stephen King's work. Sometimes the hardest lesson about racism is that it's not always the guy in the sheet. Some discussions about race (beyond the easy ones like laughing at pictures of latter-day Klan members) and some articles about the number of black characters in Girls make me anxious and clammy.
In spite of these faults, there are worse primers on American life than a Stephen King novel, worse pieces of propaganda to absorb. Steinbeck said of the so-called American way of life, "No one can define it or point to any one person or group who lives it, but it is very real nevertheless…These dreams describe our vague yearnings toward what we wish were and hope we may be: wise, just, compassionate, and noble. The fact that we have this dream at all is perhaps an indication of its possibility." I don't feel that way all of the time, but during a summer spent getting reacquainted with Stephen King, between the nostalgia and blood clots and things that go bump in the night, for a moment or two I entertained the possibility.
Image via MShades/Flickr
Lydia Kiesling | 3 books mentioned 12 13 min read
The Myth of the 9/11 Novel
C. Max Magee September 11, 2007 | 3 books mentioned 2 2 min read
On this sad anniversary, USA Today trots out the now tired question, asking for, as if we're all looking for it, the mythical novel that will explain and place into context the tragedy of six years ago. In this case, USA Today points out the uninspiring sales of "novels inspired by 9/11" as compared to their non-fiction counterparts, but the subtext of these articles, and there have been many in many venues over the years, is twofold.First is that the serious novel's driving function is to make sense of our complicated world, to distill it to its essence so that years from now, when a young man asks how 9/11 felt, an old man can wordlessly slip a book into his hand. Second is this idea that every major event requires the culture to produce innumerable artifacts that are explicitly about that event. There are hundreds of films and TV shows that are primarily about 9/11, but where, the culture watchers ask, are all the novels?I wrote about this several months ago, when the publication of Don Delillo's Falling Man led several to seek the "9/11 novel" (Falling Man deemed to have failed in this respect), and I still believe what I wrote then.I would argue that nearly every serious novel written since 9/11 is a "9/11 novel." Writers, artists, and filmmakers, consciously or subconsciously, react to the world around them some way, and 9/11, from many angles, is incontrovertibly a part of our world. For example, even Michael Chabon's The Yiddish Policemen's Union, which is set in an alternate universe in which a temporary Jewish homeland has been set up in Alaska, is a "9/11 novel" in that it has internalized the post-9/11 sensibilities of shadowy government meddling in the Middle East and the feeling of an impending global and religiously motivated conflict. To expect a novel to explicitly place 9/11 into a context that offers us all some greater understanding of it is to misunderstand how fiction works.There may never be a so-called "defining 9/11 novel," but there are already many 9/11 novels, some more explicitly about 9/11 than others but all internalizing that event to one degree or another. Still, since it seems likely that we will not satisfactorily settle on the one anointed 9/11 novel, writers will have a topic to dust off every year when this anniversary rolls around.
C. Max Magee | 3 books mentioned 2 2 min read


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Cheryl@walktoafrica.com
Sierra Leone 2011
Walk 2 Africa
Walk to Africa 2017
See The Light Event
In 2005, Desmond Bell, a pastor of the Door Christian Fellowship Church in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, contacted the Lighthouse Medical Mission Teams with an urgent plea. The government had issued a new ruling. Non-profit, religious organizations working in the Congo were required to provide social services to the community in order to maintain their legal status
in the country.
Pastor Bell, a friend whom many members of the Lighthouse Medical Mission Teams had met both in Sierra Leone and in the United States, needed help. He suggested that a medical team would meet this need. In May of 2006, a small team of 10 individuals traveled to Lumbumbashi, a city located in the southern portion of the Congo.
The medical team was a great success! Hundreds of people were medically served while warm relations were established with several of the local government authorities.
Lighthouse Medical Missions
We bring the love of God to the sick and dying in the poorer nations of the world.
© Lighthouse Medical Missions

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


Bursting with yellow gorgeous flowers, this bouquet is perfect to bring sunshine to someone's day! This arrangement features : Ruscus, Cocculus, Aster, Mini Calla, Gerberas and mixture of L.A.& Oriental Lilies. Always freshly delivered from our farms to your doorstep.


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Clueless: Crayola Brights & Rich Girl Prep
11 May '12 8 Apr '14 ContributorClothes from 1990s, Girls in Films, Premium
'Do you prefer "fashion victim" or "ensemble-y challenged"?' Josie Sampson, creator of Film Reel Fashion examines the legacy of Mona May's costume design for Clueless (1995, directed by Amy Heckerling).
When Clueless arrived onto screens in the mid-1990s, it ensured Alicia Silverstone's Cher Horowitz became an overnight sensation. Teenage girls identified with Cher's heartbreak and social worries, simultaneously envying her revolving wardrobe and online outfit chooser. Loosely based on the plot of Jane Austen's Emma, this is a High School film at its finest. Set in sunny Beverly Hills with a free rein of Daddy's credit card, the fashion is of utmost importance and communal acceptance. These are girls on the precipice of adulthood, their levels of sophistication undeveloped and gaudy. Inwardly, they are desperate to be taken seriously and their garishly matched designer uniforms are their outward attempts at this.
Cher is the most popular girl in school, surrounding herself with the social elite in one of the most affluent cities in the world. Her style is 'rich girl prep' and her signature patterned mini-skirts, knee high socks and patent miniature backpacks became emulated by girls the world over. The look is all about tasteless colour and texture, with Crayola brights adorning the pleats and pinstripe patterns. When more is more, accessories are bountiful; the tackier the better. The girls are drowning in faux-fur handbags, feather-trimmed coats and velvet headbands, with Cher's best friend Dionne (Stacey Dash) exhibiting a penchant for flamboyant hats.
The first time we meet Cher, she is decisively picking out her outfit for another day of school. Settling on a mustard yellow checked jacket complete with matching pleated skirt and white knee high socks, she exemplifies the student body's tasteless attempts at sophistication. We are next introduced to Dionne who is wearing a carbon copy of Cher's outfit, albeit in an eye wateringly clashing palette of red, white and black. Instead of being horrified at the ultimate fashion faux pas of wearing the same ensemble, the girls are smugly delighted to be as equally stylish as one another. After all, this is a place where berets appear to be not only socially acceptable, but actually fashion forward.
In Cher's world, appearance is the defining factor on which your successes in life depend. She is a lover of style over substance, often misusing or mispronouncing cultural references in an attempt to appear worldly. Indeed her later love interest, Josh, sarcastically remarks that her only direction in life is "towards the mall". On the morning of her driving test, instead of practicing procedures or revising vital knowledge, Cher is seen tearing the house upside down in search of a particular crisp white collared Fred Seagul shirt, considering it to be her "most responsible looking ensemble". She believes that by presenting herself in an immaculate and well put together outfit, she will project an image of herself as someone deserving of a driving licence, disregarding the need for any actual skills.
Similarly, when faced with the prospect of the first evening date with her object of desire Christian (Justin Walker), Cher is completely engrossed in the potential aesthetics. Outfit choices, lighting concepts and makeup are all carefully designed to showcase her to her very best. Any prospective personality or conversational factors do not enter her dating periphery. She settles on a vampish red dress, traditionally the colour of love and lust. In contrast, its skater style flair and Cher's sweetly pinned backed hair are young and childlike, suggesting again the idea of an adolescent girl desperately trying to break into the adult world. It is interesting to note here her use of the phrase "costume decisions" when deciding on which outfit to wear. Akin to a little girl playing "dress up" in her mother's clothes, the phrase emphasises the way that Cher sees her life status as a role she chooses to play, her clothes acting as the appropriate costume.
The sense that Cher is hovering on the fringes between socially-aware teen and beautiful young adult is showcased no better than the moment she descends down a staircase clad in a simple Calvin Klein slip dress. Its white colour connotes purity and virginal innocence, juxtaposing against its tight fit that displays her unmistakably womanly body. It is an obvious departure from the garish plaids and double denim we have become accustomed to seeing on Cher by this point and it is here that future love interest Josh (Paul Rudd) sees her as an object of adult lust for the first time. The dress represents such an iconic moment in the film that Calvin Klein re-released a run of the exact style and cut in 2010 to honour the fifteenth anniversary of the film's release. This act demonstrates the full extent with which Clueless impacted on real fashion trends; girls wanting to emulate that little bit of Beverley Hills chic, even fifteen years later.
The name checking of designers such as Calvin Klein adds further to the fantasy element of Cher's privileged life. In one memorable scene, she pleads with a mugger not to force her to the ground in her expensive Azzedine Alaïa dress. Begging that "It's an Alaïa", the mugger is momentarily dumfounded, responding, "An A-what-a?". She reasons that "it's, like, a totally important designer" and worthy of risking her life for. Previously, this was a name unfamiliar to the standard teenage population, making it instantly desirable in its unobtainability. With this, Clueless ushered in a generation of designer name lovers.
When new girl Tai, a then relatively unknown Brittany Murphy, arrives on the scene she is quickly shunned for her Nirvana-grunge appearance, despite being probably the most realistic portrayal of how teens dressed at the time of the film's release. The camera lingers, mimicking the disapproving stares her new fellow classmates are throwing her way. She is clad in an oversized flannel shirt and baggy corduroy trousers, with a huge bag filled with school books slung on her back. Her comfortably flat shoes are almost hidden from view. This is in instant contrast with Cher's statement Mary-Jane heels, which often enjoy a starring shot all of their own. The contrast is so extreme that it is Tai who looks wrong and costumed, while the other clownishly dressed students around her are the ones that appear acceptable. Indeed, one of her fellow students cruelly remarks that "she could be a farmer in those clothes".
It is up to Cher and Dionne to transform Tai, basking haughtily in their sense of self worth. The process begins with a shot of Tai's red hair dye being washed down the plughole. Perhaps alluding to the first arrival of the menstrual cycle, the shot signifies that, like Cher and the others, she is now embarking on her road to becoming a woman by learning how to dress. Tai emerges from the makeover another Beverly Hills clone and spends the rest of the film clad in preppy shift dresses and oxford collars.
Interestingly, as the film reaches its climax and Cher and co. realise their superficial wrongdoings, Tai loosens her Clueless makeover and somewhat reverts to her true self, albeit retaining some of Cher's unmistakeable fashion sense. This is comparable to real life girls whose style is often unconsciously influenced by their friendships, an idea that makes Tai and Cher more humanly accessible right at the point of their self discovery.
The west coast preppy flair delves us into a world of pure fantasy, far removed from the grunge style of its 1995 release. As a result, Clueless provided a fashion revelation, with girls everywhere longing to shop on Rodeo Drive. In the words of Cher, they would strive for "courageous fashion efforts" and work to makeover their wardrobes. Hopefully, like Cher, they were also inspired to makeover their souls in the process.
By Josie Sampson. Do visit her blog Film Reel Fashion.
You can watch Alicia Silverstone in Clueless at LOVEFiLM.com.
© 2012 – 2014, Contributor.
Clueless: Calvin Klein White Dress Makes Comeback
Tagged 1990s, Alicia Silverstone, Amy Heckerling, Azzedine Alaïa, Beverly Hills, Calvin Klein, Cher, clashing, Clueless, fashion, faux fur, Film Reel Fashion, flannel shirt, Fred Seagul, grunge, Josie Sampson, Justin Walker, mary jane shoes, matching, mini skirt, Mona May, Paul Rudd, plaid, pleated, Premium Content, preppy, red dress, slip dress, social acceptance, Stacey Dash, teenage, white dress
American Gigolo: Armani Gere
Doris Day in Pillow Talk: Couture Allure
6 thoughts on "Clueless: Crayola Brights & Rich Girl Prep"
textilehistorIE says:
14 May '12 at 18:40
Love it! I remember Clueless so well, and thought about the costume design a lot since rewatching it a few years ago. Especially interesting idea about the red hair dye.
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whitneygoller says:
Movie of my childhood. I even ended up watching this in a Lit course called Jane Goes To The Movies that was all about Jane Austen's cinema adaptations. Did anyone ever really dress like this?
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Meresu says:
7 Apr '14 at 06:20
What's funny is I had two of the outfits from the film which I purchased at Dillard's in 1991 a pink/teal/black plaid version of the opening "suit" and the black pleated mini w/ cream sweater set; and the film came out in 1995. Also I lived in a small farming community 60 miles from the nearest mall I was far from fashion forward. So while the accessories were amped up a bit the fashion was pretty close to current for the time.


One of the key areas of EUDRAC's work is the regulatory support of Orphan Drugs for rare diseases. We are Sponsors for Orphan Drug Designations and have supported a successful PRIME application for a treatment for X-Linked Hypohidrotic Ectodermal Dysplasia (XLHED). This is an orphan disease which most significantly affects new-born males. Babies are born with absent or abnormal ectodermal structures including a lack of sweat glands. The condition is associated with significant morbidities and an increased risk of infant mortality.
The EMA PRIME scheme (PRIority Medicines) was launched two years ago in March 2016 to facilitate increased regulatory support for medicines being developed for unmet medical needs. The aim of PRIME is to improve the availability of new medicines for patients for whom treatments currently either do not exist, or are inadequate .
Essentially, the EMA provides support at a much earlier stage in the development of a PRIME medicinal product and aims to be proactive in offering advice on development, particularly clinical trial design, to ensure that the authorisation of these medicines is as efficient as possible; it is expected that most PRIME medicines will be granted accelerated assessment by the CHMP.
A formal application for PRIME eligibility has to be made to the EMA. To be accepted, the applicant has to demonstrate that the medicine has a clear potential to provide beneficial treatment to patients with an unmet medical need; early clinical data must, therefore, provide sufficient evidence of efficacy.
Since its launch, there have been 177 applications for PRIME eligibility and 36 have been accepted (21%) including the application made by EspeRare for ER004, a protein replacement therapy for XLHED. EUDRAC provided EspeRare with regulatory support for this PRIME application and eligibility to PRIME was granted for ER004 on 13 October 2017 based on the seriousness of the disease and the recognition that it represents an unmet medical need for which there is a lack of available treatment.
EUDRAC participated in the pre-meeting telecon with the EMA in order to clearly identify who would be present at the Kick-off meeting and what information needed to be provide by EspeRare beforehand. The EMA also explained the purpose of the meeting and what the specific aims would be with respect to EspeRare's project.
EUDRAC then reviewed the information package and presentation that was prepared by EspeRare before it was submitted to the EMA in advance of this Kick-off meeting. EUDRAC also attended the PRIME Kick-off meeting held at the EMA, together with the representatives from EspeRare. The meeting discussed the future development plan for ER004, particularly the planned application for Protocol Assistance, and the support that will be provided by the EMA via its Committees and Expert Working Parties.
Following the outcome of the Kick-off meeting, EUDRAC has since participated in the pre-submission meeting between EspeRare and the EMA in preparation for Protocol Assistance, and is now providing regulatory input into the Briefing Package and the specific questions to be included.
This valuable experience of the PRIME scheme and the insight into how best to optimise communication with the EMA will be utilised for the future support of EspeRare's Orphan Drug Development for XLHED and other ODD that we are working on.


What is the Church Monuments Society?
The Church Monuments Society is for everyone who is fascinated by tomb carvings, from medieval effigies to modern gravestones. We organise excursions and study days, publish a journal and a newsletter, and advise on conservation and interpretation of monuments.
This year's competition is for an essay on an aspect of church monuments of any period in Britain or abroad. The aim of the competition is to inspire new authors for the CMS journal. Therefore, the competition is open only to those who have not already published an article in Church Monuments. The prize is £250 plus publication in our internationally-recognised journal.


Where a business changes ownership or where a contract to provide goods or services is transferred between organisations the affected employees generally have the right to remain in their role with all of their terms and conditions intact. The law derives from the Transfer of Undertakings (Protection of Employment) Regulations 2006. The Regulations provide protection to employees against pay reductions, redeployment and dismissal and advice should be sought where there is any concern as to a relevant transfer.
You can directly instruct a barrister who is an expert in all aspects of TUPE law. You'll receive honest, expert advice based on the strengths or weaknesses of your case.
Cutting out third parties means it is often quicker to communicate directly with a barrister. You can contact your TUPE barrister by phone, email, Skype or another agreed method.


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Five Things I Love About Hamilton
I resisted for as long as I could.
As a writer, most of my friends are in the arts. And most of them (as do I) like many different forms of arts--theater, visual arts, music. But when my artsy friends started telling me about Hamilton, I sort of scoffed. I had been burned--many times--by artsy friends recommending theater or musicals to me. I tend to like movies where things blow up, and while I have a deep love for certain plays (which also tend to be very popular ones: Wicked, Phantom, etc.), these are the same friends who recommended me to a few of the most excruciating hours I'd had in a theater seat.
I shouldn't have doubted.
Hamilton is everything I love about musicals, plus a bunch of other stuff I didn't even realize I wanted. It is, to put it simply, the best musical that I've ever had the pleasure to listen to and I haven't even had the chance to see it yet. The entire album is available at various plays online for free, including NPR, YouTube, Amazon Prime, and Spotify.
And that's the first thing I respect about this play--the writer (and star), Lin-Manuel Miranda, wanted to make it accessible. He made sure the music was available online for free, and he made sure the play was entirely sung--you can understand everything just by the audio, without having seen the play.
Lin-Manuel Miranda is, to put it simply, one of the greatest composers and musicians of our age. Hamilton is genius. And speaking of genius, I keep getting lost in the Rap Genius annotations of Hamilton--you guys know I love a good Easter egg or hidden detail in a work, and Hamilton is full of them!
And that leads me to the second thing I love about Hamilton: All the new things I've learned.
Did you know that Aaron Burr was Vice President of America when he shot Hamilton? Or that Hamilton was killed (spoiler alert from like 200 years ago) in the same spot as his son had, when he was fighting a duel two years prior?
Did you know that Hamilton tried the first murder case in America after it became a country? Or that he was the subject of the first big sex scandal in the new America?
Did you know that as a child, Hamilton almost died--and watched his mother die--and became an orphan in the West Indies? That he wrote his way out--his poetry about a hurricane that devastated the island he was on caught the attention of learned men, who sponsored his trip to America and his education?
That's the third thing: the power of the word. A major theme running throughout the play is how powerful words are, something that I, as a writer, would obviously love. Words brought Hamilton out of poverty and out of the West Indies. Words gave him power as he rose the ranks during the American Revolution, they gave America power as he wrote in defense of the Constitution. Words gave Hamilton love as he wooed Eliza Schuyler, and they destroyed that love as he met Maria Reynolds.
And words killed him.
It was Hamilton's words--so influential--that cost Aaron Burr the presidency, that sent him on a mission of redeemed honor.
History comes alive in Hamilton--and it's about the people. That's such a cliche thing to say, but it's true. I can read the facts of history, I can know who's on the front of the ten dollar bill, but I don't understand. I don't know about motivations and desires and regrets and fears.
This is, ultimately, the power of all fiction. To make us not simply know facts, but to know truths that are indelible to all humanity. The American Revolution isn't a list of dates and battles--it's real blood, real loss, real triumph. Elections aren't the counting of ballots, it's understanding how one person can shape the history of a nation, of the world, it's faith that the majority can keep the path of government clear, it's raising your voice and hoping it joins a chorus.
Hamilton is the story of a man. A man who helped shape America in astounding ways and yet is often forgotten, but it's the story of a man. A man who had a past and a future and love and loss. And when we forget about the numbers and look at the people, that's when history becomes real.
But most of all, I love Hamilton for the music. It is--much like Hamilton himself--revolutionary. Musicals have a certain "style"...not Hamilton. Musicals have a common theme...not Hamilton. Hamilton stands on its own. It has a few songs with the typical "show tune" style, but mostly it's hip-hop and rap. It plays with words, it weaves them around and through, it creates sounds that have existed for decades but at the same time creates a totally new sound.
Check out this opening number, and wait for it, wait for the music to hit you:
I love what Hamilton says when he sings. The desperation to "write like you're running out of time" speaks to me, but I found myself most identifying with Aaron Burr's song, "Wait for It."
Publishing is a lot about waiting--waiting to be good enough for publication, waiting to get an agent, to sign a deal, for a book to come out, for a book to find its audience, for the next book to be written, waiting, waiting, waiting.
And there is a time when you wonder if the waiting is worth it. And you're working and striving and trying...but you're also still waiting.
This song is an anthem to wanting. Wanting more--more life, more chances, more love, more. Just more. If you're not satisfied, this is the song for you.
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Wallace "Wally' G. Blazier, of New Providence, passed away on Tuesday, January 12, 2016. Born and raised in Chatham, he has lived in New Providence since 1963. He was an engineer with Bell Labs and Lucent Technologies for 45 years. Wallace was a member of the Summit Old Guard, and the Union County Utilities Committee. He was involved with recycling, having established volunteer organizations to handle recycling in New Providence before the town took over. He was an avid reader who loved the outdoors.
Predeceased by his twin brother George D. Blazier, Wallace is survived by his wife of 52 years, Moira M. (nee: Shannon); daughter Doreen Murphy and her husband Joe, of Cranford, son Russell J. Blazier and his wife Christine of Seattle, WA, and son Curt M. Blazier and his wife Susan of Raleigh, NC; grandchildren Daniel and Brendan Murphy, and Sophie and Lexie Blazier; brother Stephen R. Blazier of Hackettstown, and several nieces and nephews.


A VR 1 may be used instead of a ZR 1 if zone selection is not required on the remote control.
The MP 44's REMOTE LEVEL port provides a means to control the level of the MASTER mix from a remote location. The range of control is 0 dB to -40 dB. Applications include 'gain riding' DJs, setting a comfortable listening level from a remote location and reducing the maximum available gain.
A port for a wired Remote Level control is provided for each of the six Outputs. Using the optional VR 1 Remote control provides an audio taper response from 0 dB to > -80 dB. To control more than one Remote Port with a single Remote control, it is only necessary to connect the Vc pin of each additional port.
Simply wire the Vc, Vr and ground wires of the ZONE REMOTE LEVEL port. The range of control is 0 dB to -40 dB.
Turn the power to the unit off until all connections are made. It is important to ensure that the Remote Ports are not subjected to sustained voltages outside the range of 0 to 5 VDC or high levels of static. Inputs are protected, however, caution is the better part of … you know. It is a good idea to install the wiring, connect it to the Remote and then make the final connections at the Remote Port.
Do not short the Vr pin to ground. This pin is current limited; however, excess heat is generated in the 5 V supply if a short occurs. Never subject the Vr pin to voltages above 5 V.
Variations in wire type do not greatly affect the performance of the remote controls. However, 22-gauge stranded wire with a flexible jacket is recommended. You may use 3-conductor unshielded remote control signal cable for shorter runs (less than 200 ft.) or 2-conductor (1 pair) shielded remote control signal cable (use the shield as the GND return) for longer runs (200 to 1000 ft.). The type of wire required is influenced by your installation and local electrical codes.


In the context of its humanitarian mission and upon the request of UNHCR in order to provide first aid and medical services during the process of refugees return to Syria from Masnaa border and Chebaa that took place in July 28 under the supervision of the Lebanese public security, the Lebanese Red Cross prepared two ambulances and a 4x4 vehicle with 10 paramedics, a mobile clinic and a medical crew at Masnaa area where they provided first aid and medical services to 39 health cases.
In Chebaa, the returnees gathered at Chebaa High School where two ambulances and two 4x4 vehicles were set up with 25 paramedics, administrative, logistic and mobile clinic with a large medical staff. From morning until the end of the mission, first aid and medical services were provided to 142 health cases, also 4 cases were transported to the hospital. The cases varied among children, elderly, women and people with special needs. Moreover, the Lebanese Red Cross stations in the surrounding areas were fully prepared to meet any emergency case.


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You are here: Home / News & Resources / Pimlico Plumbers self-employment status flushed down the drain
Supreme Court ruling: Pimlico Plumbers self-employment status flushed down the drain
A seven-year legal dispute came to an end – perhaps – this week when the Supreme Court decided freelance plumber Gary Smith is entitled to make a claim for holiday and sick pay against Pimlico Plumbers, the company he used to work for.
Mr Smith's contract lay at the heart of the wrangle, and by ruling that he was not self-employed, the stage is now set for the status and working rights of thousands of people who have joined the booming gig economy to come under fresh scrutiny.
Are Hudson Contract clients affected by the ruling? The short answer is, 'Yes'. But only in a good way.
More about that in a moment. But first, a brief recap of the dispute itself.
To cut a long story short, Mr Smith was a self-employed plumber who carried out work for Pimlico Plumbers for six years until he had a heart attack and wanted to reduce his hours.
Contracts were watered down
Pimlico Plumbers refused Mr Smith's request to move to a three-day week. He was dismissed, and the employment dispute began – with Pimlico Plumbers losing the case at every stage of the process, up to and including the Supreme Court ruling.
The courts have poured over the contract between Pimlico Plumbers and Mr Smith. And whilst there were some features of a self-employed contract, the plumbing firm had watered them down to such an extent that it changed the relationship from business to business to one of a 'worker' – and under the Employment Rights Act, 'workers' are entitled to some basic employment rights.
Had Mr Smith been legitimately self-employed, he would have been perfectly entitled to reduce his hours, turn down work, and work for whoever else he wanted to. But his contract removed these rights.
He should also have had the right to sub-contract his work to any other suitably qualified freelance plumber, or to bring a helper (at his own expense) to do the heavy lifting, and get through more work in less time if that's what he chose to do. But the contract's substitution terms were so restrictive he couldn't do any of this – his right amounted to little more than being permitted to swap shifts with another employee.
Now Pimlico Plumbers boss blows another valve
Having followed – and written – about the London plumbing firm over the years, the puns have been hard to resist. 'Contracts springing a leak' . . . continuous appeals from Pimlico Plumbers owner Charlie Mullins have been 'like putting expensive parts on a rusty old boiler that was clearly beyond repair'… and employment status 'flushed down the drain'.
And now? Mr Mullins says he's considering a further appeal . . . this time to a European court.
He described the decision of the three High Court judges in the latest round of the battle as 'terrible', telling journalists: "This decision will potentially leave thousands of companies employing millions of contractors wondering if one day soon they will get a nasty surprise from a former contractor demanding more money, despite having been paid in full years ago."
The message to Hudson Contract clients
Clients have understandably been asking whether or not the judgement affects Hudson Contract, and as I said, it certainly does.
I believe the earlier Employment Appeal judgement set out some useful pointers as to where Pimlico went wrong and how far a client can go when agreeing terms with freelance contractors.
In fact, it helps us to underline:
Why we refuse to modify our contracts of self-employment
Why we insist that sub-contractors are treated like sub-contractors
Why we can work only with clients who are willing to follow our procedures and comply with our auditing
Our own lawyers will no doubt use the Pimlico judgement to drive home the point that for all the reasons Pimlico Plumbers has lost its employment status claim, Hudson Contract wins those brought against us or our clients.
And this is why we happily continue to indemnify every client against the financial consequences of an employment tribunal claim: Unlike the Pimlico guys who are taxed as self-employed but act and are treated like employees, operatives contracted to us are legitimately self-employed.
Tags: Opinions, False Self Employment, Legislation, Sham Contracts


text:
The Real Reason Behind the Cavs' Woes
Sam Bisno, Editor-in-Chief
It's no secret that the Cavaliers are struggling. They're 6-13 since Christmas. At the time of writing this article, they're 30-22, having fallen to a virtual tie with the Wizards for third place in the East, as the Bucks, Pacers, and Heat have all clawed their way to within two games of the 2016 champs, while the next best Raptors and frontrunner Celtics have pulled away with 6.5- and 7.5-game leads respectively. During this stretch, they've won by an average of just 8 points, with half of their victories being decided by less than 5. Meanwhile, their losses have been blowouts; they're getting outscored by an average of 13.1, including 28-, 34-, 24-, and 32-point differential drubbings at the hands of Minnesota, Toronto, Oklahoma City, and Houston. They've blown leads as large as 22. Since their 99-92 Christmas day defeat to the Warriors, they're 0-7 against teams with better winning percentages than them. LeBron James, who astoundingly has had the worst plus-minus rating in the entire NBA for the duration of that roughly month-and-a-half-long span, summed up his team's misfortune following yesterday's 116-98 collapse to the 17-36 Magic on the road – a game in which they had the edge by as many as 21: "It's been tough….If we're still serious about the season, then we've got to play some good ball at some point."
This trend has left many pundits wondering the same thing: why? Why are the Cavs floundering so? What exactly is causing this downfall? And they all seem to be arriving at the same conclusion. ESPN's Adrian Wojnarowski: the Cavs are "failing to defend". CBS Sports's Chris Barnewall: the Cavs' defense is "horrendous". SB Nation's Paul Flannery: the Cavs must "fortify their defense". NBA.com's Tom Withers says that Cavs fans have "grown tired of their lack of defense". And so on.
When I watched the Cavs get trounced 120-88 at home just four days ago without mustering a lead even once throughout the three-hour humiliation, this narrative was perpetuated by broadcasters, coaches, and players alike: defense, defense, defense. Now, I'm no basketball expert, and I certainly don't wish to challenge the consensus of some of the top minds of the games, but, at least from my casual standpoint, the numbers seem to point in a different direction.
Let's take a look at that February 3rd game, for example. The Rockets are averaging 114.1 points per game. They scored 120. So, six points above average. That's three layups, maybe a couple of corner trey's. The Cavaliers are averaging 109.0 points per game. They scored 88. That's a difference of 21. For a team whose main weakness is supposedly its defense, it's odd that they managed to contain what is widely considered to be the second-best offensive unit in the league, and yet they didn't even touch 90 on their side of the scoreboard. Over and over again, however, the viewers were reminded by the commentators of how bad the Cavs' defense was, with almost no mention of what was going on on the other side of the ball.
This pattern continues. Cleveland shot an abysmal 39.1% from the field – just 26.7% from beyond the arc – and dished out just 22 assists. Meanwhile, they grabbed 47 boards – more than the average of the league-leading 76ers (46.7).
"But Sam," I hear you saying, "That's just one game." You'd be correct, dear reader, so let's broaden our lens a bit, and return the infamous 19-game ruination the Cavs have suffered since Jesus's birthday. Before the rough patch, they were scoring 111.3 per game and allowing 107.6. During the spell, their offensive production has plummeted to a measly 104.8 points, while their defensive output sits at 113.3 allowed per contest. Granted, both numbers have gone in the wrong direction for the C-towners, but their ability to score has worsened more so than that of their foes.
At the very least, it's hard to definitively say that poor defense is the major factor at play. At most, everyone is pursuing a red herring, and the Cavs should just quit trying to stop their opponents from making buckets in a game where Giannis Antetokounmpo can dunk from practically the foul line on a regular basis and Stephen Curry can pull up 30-foot jumpers in his sleep, and get back to executing plays like that sexy Wade-to-LeBron turn-back-the-clock alley-oop against the Thunder last month with consistency.
Whatever the reasons may be, they're scuffling, and they're going to have to figure something out sooner rather than later if they want a chance at making it to the finals for the fourth consecutive year.
Stats courtesy of NBA.com, Basketball-reference.com, and NBCSports.com.
Top Sports '11-'12: The man who would be king
Shohei Ohtani Comes to the States
Fifa, Football, and Fantasy: Week 9
A case for the defense


text:
var url = require('url');
var querystring = require('querystring');

var HEADER_CONTENT_SECURITY_POLICY = "Content-Security-Policy",
    HEADER_CONTENT_SECURITY_POLICY_REPORT_ONLY = "Content-Security-Policy-Report-Only",
    rPolicy = /([-_a-zA-Z0-9]+)(:report-only)?/i;

module.exports = function (sCspUrlParameterName, oConfig) {
    var allowDynamicPolicySelection = oConfig.allowDynamicPolicySelection || false,
        allowDynamicPolicyDefinition = oConfig.allowDynamicPolicyDefinition || false,
        defaultPolicyIsReportOnly = oConfig.defaultPolicyIsReportOnly || false;

    return function cspMiddleware(req, res, next) {
        var sHeader,
            sHeaderValue,
            sCspUrlParameterValue,
            oParsedUrl,
            oQuery,
            oPolicy,
            mPolicyMatch,
            bReportOnly = defaultPolicyIsReportOnly;

        if (req.method === "POST" &&
            req.headers["content-type"] === "application/csp-report" &&
            req.url.endsWith("/dummy.csplog")
        ) {
            // In report-only mode there must be a report-uri defined
            // For now just ignore the violation. It will be logged in the browser anyway.
            return;
        }

        // If a policy with name 'default' is defined, it will even be send without a present URL parameter.
        if (oConfig.definedPolicies["default"]) {
            oPolicy = {
                name: "default",
                policy: oConfig.definedPolicies["default"]
            };
        }

        // Use random protocol, host and port to establish a valid URL for parsing query parameters
        oParsedUrl = url.parse(req.url);
        oQuery = querystring.parse(oParsedUrl.query);
        sCspUrlParameterValue = oQuery[sCspUrlParameterName];

        if (sCspUrlParameterValue) {
            mPolicyMatch = rPolicy.exec(sCspUrlParameterValue);

            if (mPolicyMatch && mPolicyMatch[1] && oConfig.definedPolicies[mPolicyMatch[1]] && allowDynamicPolicySelection) {
                oPolicy = {
                    name: mPolicyMatch[1],
                    policy: oConfig.definedPolicies[mPolicyMatch[1]]
                };
                bReportOnly = mPolicyMatch[2] !== undefined;
            } else if (allowDynamicPolicyDefinition) {
                // Custom CSP policy directives get passed as part of the CSP URL-Parameter value
                bReportOnly = sCspUrlParameterValue.endsWith(":report-only");
                if (bReportOnly) {
                    sCspUrlParameterValue = sCspUrlParameterValue.substr(0, sCspUrlParameterValue.length - ":report-only".length);
                }
                oPolicy = {
                    name: "dynamic-custom-policy",
                    policy: sCspUrlParameterValue
                };
            }
        }

        if (oPolicy) {
            sHeader = bReportOnly ? HEADER_CONTENT_SECURITY_POLICY_REPORT_ONLY : HEADER_CONTENT_SECURITY_POLICY;

            if (bReportOnly) {
                // Add dummy report-uri. This is mandatory for the report-only mode.
                sHeaderValue = oPolicy.policy + " report-uri dummy.csplog;";
            } else {
                sHeaderValue = oPolicy.policy;
            }

            // Send response with CSP header
            res.removeHeader(HEADER_CONTENT_SECURITY_POLICY);
            res.removeHeader(HEADER_CONTENT_SECURITY_POLICY_REPORT_ONLY);
            res.setHeader(sHeader, sHeaderValue);
        }

        next();
    };

};

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaGithub


Welcome to the home of inspiration.
We love everything about the home and here we share with you inspiring trends and ideas that can be achieved in your own home. We're experts in our field and we're always here to help you create your dream home.
Discover a huge selection of articles and photography to get your ideas flowing, from real customers bedrooms and kitchens to design tips and trends. Explore the sections below and let the inspiration juices flow.
Kitchens: What's Hot In 2019?


text:
The 1986 United States Senate election in Oklahoma was held on November 3, 1986. Incumbent Republican U.S. Senator Don Nickles won re-election to his second term.

Democratic primary

Candidates
James R. Jones, Representative for Oklahoma's 1st district

Results

Results

See also
 1986 United States Senate elections

References

 https://www.ourcampaigns.com/RaceDetail.html?RaceID=3663

Oklahoma
1986
1986 Oklahoma elections

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaWikipedia


Just how crazy is Jared Leto's Suicide Squad performance? Do Anthony Mackie and Sebastian Stan want to be the new Captain America? What would Hugh Jackman look like as Old Man Logan? Which Civil War side is Stan Lee on? Could CBS' Supergirl influence the comics? Read about all this and more in today's Superhero Bits.
The Avengers and the Justice League assemble as the New York Mets pose in their Underoos.
Stan Lee has already declared his side in Captain America: Civil War.
Jim Lee hints at how CBS' Supergirl show could influence the comics.
The gang's all here for the Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. Season 3 premiere.
Arrow's David Ramsay promises "you won't be thinking of the X-Men at all" once you see Diggle's helmet in action.
Robbie Amell said he wanted to star in a Batman Beyond film, so fan artist Bosslogic made it happen.
Ever the diplomat, Captain America (Chris Evans) says "nobody's right, nobody's wrong" in Civil War.


1. After removing the panel inspect the cluster for damage and or wiring issues. Repair any issues.
2. Remove the Cluster backing plate retainer screws and separate the cluster from the plastic housing.
3. On the '67 cluster, remove the wires for the alternator and oil pressure gauges or in the case of the '68 it will be the fuel and alternator.
4. next remove the speed nuts from the back of the housing and retain them. You'll use these to install the Tribute Automotive Products tachometer.
5.Remove and retain the fiberboard separators for reuse. Also retain the plastic alternator offsets as these will be used on the tachometer as well.
6. prep the Tribute Automotive tachometer for install. Feed the wires through the upper hole on the cluster backing plate as shown.
7. Make sure that the tach is sitting in the center of the chrome panel. Use a plastic offset and speed nut on one of the lower studs to hold the tach in place while you check the position.
after you are satisfied tighten the speed nut until it is snug. DO NOT over tighten. Take the top fiber board and cut a hole in the center for the tach wires.
8. Re-install all fiberboard peices (install the top ones first then remove the one "place holder" mentioned in caption seven and re-install the lowers with the plastic stand-offs in place as shown.
Inspect the panel for good fit and make sure that the Tribute automotive Products tachometer is correctly situated.
9. Use the included wiring diagram to wire the Tribute Automotive Products tachometer to the panel correctly.
10. If you have a '68 Mustang we can provide you with a fuel gauge to complete the dash panel.


text:
Cannon Beach – miasto w hrabstwie Clatsop w stanie Oregon w USA. Największą atrakcją turystyczną miasta jest monolit skalny Haystack Rock.

Hrabstwo Clatsop
Miasta w stanie Oregon


text:
I am passionate about creating and maintaining a strong risk-management framework
Maiju StockelKvamme
Maiju joined The Club in January 2020 as Head of Risk Management, leading the risk management and compliance team.
In October of that year, a Business Operations section was established , responsible for the quality, control, flow and handling of all operational insurance-related transactions and documentation. Maiju was subsequently appointed Head of Business Operations and Risk Management.
Maiju has a Master's in Economics and Business Administration from University of Vaasa in Finland and, prior to joining The Club, worked for 12 years in finance. Her roles during that time included, among others, managing the operations, risk and legal function within a finance company.
She says: "I am passionate about creating and maintaining a strong risk-management framework, which is the foundation of good internal governance, and about focusing on control, compliance and standardization in The Club's operations."
Maiju StockelKvammeHead of Risk Management & Business Operationsmaiju.stockelkvamme@norclub.com+47 952 75 955


Centre researchers Dr Luke Selth, Head of the prostate cancer research program in the Dame Roma Mitchell Cancer Research Laboratories and A/Prof Lisa Butler, Head of the prostate cancer research program at SAHMRI, have been profiled as health (research) leaders from the University to honour the 120 year anniversary of Sir Howard Florey. See Adelaide Now article where Luke and Lisa are featured with our dedicated consumers Dario Priori and Norman Thompson.
The University also welcomed back Alumnus, Prof Chris Sweeney, a Medical Oncologist at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School, and long term research collaborator with Professor Wayne Tilley in the Dame Roma Mitchell Cancer Research Laboratories. Professor Sweeney's academic focus is the management of prostate and testicular cancer, and he spoke on advances in the pharmacological treatment of advanced prostate cancer.
This entry was posted in News, Research and tagged DRMCRL, Florey, prostate cancer. Bookmark the permalink.


Ceramic Lamp Shade. Ceramic Lamp Shade Dome Pendant Light Lighting 0. Ceramic Lamp Shade XL Lampshade For Pendant Concrete Effect Made In Italy 11. Ceramic Lamp Shade 649 Best Simple Minimal Images On Pinterest Lighting 2. Ceramic Lamp Shade XL Lampshade For Pendant Concrete Effect Made In Italy 13. Ceramic Lamp Shade Geom Lampshade Mint 4. Ceramic Lamp Shade Curls Mini Luminaire By Muhammad Moussa Table 5. Ceramic Lamp Shade Best 25 Light Ideas On Pinterest Design 18.
Ceramic Lamp Shade Best 25 Lamps Ideas On Pinterest Hanging For 6. Ceramic Lamp Shade 3d Models Ceiling Light Strata Art Glass Amp Seaside 14. Ceramic Lamp Shade Square Arts Crafts Tile And Copper With Pine Cones 16. Ceramic Lamp Shade Vintage Foter 15. Ceramic Lamp Shade XL Lampshade For Pendant White Glaze Made In Italy 3.


text:
docker tag hewlettpackardenterprise/core-hubot docker.io/hewlettpackardenterprise/core-hubot:latest
docker push docker.io/hewlettpackardenterprise/core-hubot:latest


Everything Irish and Ireland! It's all about the craic! Make friends and have a wonderful time! Try to keep politics down to a dull roar. There are categories at the left and placing posts into the most appropriate category would be helpful to everyone. The Google Terms Of Service apply everywhere. No hate speech, no pornographic material, no spamming etc. Basically, rules that already make good sense. The Community is moderated by Susan Prediger and Dirk Talamasca. If you would like to be a moderator, drop one of us a private message and we shall try to make that so. The Ireland Community features News and Information on Irish Artists, Irish Photographers, Photographs of Ireland, Festivals, Culture, Music, Literature, History, Wildlife, Agriculture, Economics, Business, Irish Tourism, Pubs, Restaurants, Recipes, Hotels and Heritage Centre locations.


Image Title: Elegant Napoleon Galaxy See Thru Outdoor Gas Fireplace Gss48st See Through Gas Fireplace Designs. Filename: elegant-napoleon-galaxy-see-thru-outdoor-gas-fireplace-gss48st-see-through-gas-fireplace-designs.jpg. Image Dimension: 900 x 630 pixels. Images Format: jpg/jpeg. Publisher/Author: Rupert Jast. Uploaded Date: Wednesday - January 23rd. 2019 03:01:37 AM. Category: Interior. Image Source: decoist.com.
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