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Published August 10th, 2019
Posted in: New Comics This Week, Store Updates, Third Eye Blog, This Week's Highlights
POWERS OF X #2 continues the HOUSE OF X / POWERS OF X saga that Jonathan Hickman is using to make the X-MEN the #1 superheroes in comics today!
The X-MEN are bigger than they've been in decades, and it's all because of how freakin' awesome HOUSE OF X & POWERS OF X are! Get back into the X-MEN now!
The new X-MEN books have been taking our racks by storm, and we're telling ya now: every single issue so far (granted, there's only been a few!) — has had us HOOKED!
After the big shockers in last week's HOUSE OF X #2, the fun continues in the companion series, POWERS OF X this week, and Third Ey Faithful — you're not gonna want to miss this!
What's the scoop on HOUSE OF X and POWER OF X? In the vein of milestone moments for X-MEN like GIANT SIZE X-MEN #1 and X-MEN #1 (the Claremont / Lee collaboration), HOUSE OF X and POWER OF X reduce the X-MEN line down to just two primary books, both of which written by Jonathan Hickman.
While the mysteries behind what's actually going down in HOUSE OF X are too damn good for us to spoil here (trust us: you're gonna wanna read and see these unfold in person) — we'll say this: by the time you finish issue #1, your view of the X-MEN and their place in the Marvel Universe will have taken some drastic twists and turns, and left you with your jaw on the floor!
This is the definition of history-making comics, Third Eye Faithful, and we're so darn excited to share these moments with you as they happen!
So, where do things begin? The fun starts in HOUSE OF X #1, where we see how since the release of Uncanny X-Men #1, there have been four seminal moments in the history of the X-Men. Giant-Sized X-Men. X-Men. Age of Apocalypse. New X-Men.
Four iconic series that introduced a new era for Marvel's mutants and revolutionized the X-Men.
In House of X, Charles Xavier reveals his master plan for mutantkind…one that will bring mutants out of the shadow of mankind and into the light once more.
And, then in POWER OF X, superstar writer Jonathan Hickman (INFINTY, NEW AVENGERS, FF) continues his revolutionary new direction for the X-Men. Intertwining with HOUSE OF X, POWERS OF X reveals the secret past, present and future of mutantkind, changing the way you look at every X-Men story before and after.
HOUSE OF X / POWER OF X are set to change the entire landscape of the X-MEN in the Marvel U, and if you haven't read the X-Titles in quite sometime: this is the place to get back on board!
We've been lucky enough to read both issue #1s, and while we can't disclose what goes down — we can tell you right now: iconic characters, the X-Men you care about, the bad guys you love to see in action, the Marvel Universe and the X-Men interacting in a way that's downright fascinating, and a take on the X-Men that's so fresh — you'll never see it coming!
Wanna get on board? We've got issues 1 & 2 of HOUSE OF X and issue 1 of POWERS OF X in stock to get you up to date!
Click here for our Third Eye Guide to HOUSE OF X / POWERS OF X
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ABSOLUTE CARNAGE continues in two crucial tie-ins this week with ABSOLUTE CARNAGE: SCREAM #1 (of 3) and the ABSOLUTE CARNAGE: SEPARATION ANXIETY one-shot!!
One of the best events Marvel has done in quite some time continues to heat up with these two must-haves!
We loved the heck out of the first issue of ABSOLUTE CARNAGE last week (and we've still got copies in stock, and available to hook you up – fear not, Third Eye Faithful!), so when we saw that there'd be some killer tie-ins, we knew we were going to be all in, and we think many of you are going to be as well — cause let's face it: we want more, THAT'S how good it was!
First off, this week, we see the first of the 3-part ABSOLUTE CARNAGE: SCREAM mini-series, which showcases the iconic first ever woman to bond with a Venom symbiote: Patricia Robertson, and that same symbiote went on to become MANIA after!
Years ago, Patricia Robertson was unwillingly bonded to the clone of Venom that eventually became Mania, and she's been living in fear of symbiotes ever since.
But she's also been living with a secret, and with the coming of Carnage, Patricia must take a stand – and will have no choice but to confront her demons head-on!
The LIFE FOUNDATION Symbiotes return in a special one-shot with SEPARATION ANXIETY, tying into ABSOLUTE CARNAGE!!
If you grew up reading VENOM in the '90s, you probably remember the names RIOT, LASHER, and so on — well, now, all those classic LIFE FOUNDATION symbiotes have returned — and they're bonded to a stray dog, wandering the Midwest!
But as Carnage descends on New York, its siblings will find it impossible to resist the siren song of KNULL…
Snag a copy this week, and add to your ABSOLUTE CARNAGE collection!
Click here for our Third Eye Guide to ABSOLUTE CARNAGE
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The writer of DIE, Kieron Gillen, kicks off an all new series with ONCE & FUTURE #1, which puts a crazy terrifying spin on the King Arthur mythos!
When a group of Nationalists use an ancient artifact to bring a villain from Arthurian myth back from the dead to gain power, ex-monster hunter Bridgette McGuire escapes her retirement home and pulls her unsuspecting grandson Duncan, a museum curator, into a world of magic and mysticism to defeat a legendary threat.
Bestselling writer Kieron Gillen (The Wicked + The Divine, Star Wars) and Russ Manning Award-winning artist Dan Mora (Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Klaus) explore the mysteries of the past, the complicated truths of our history and the power of family to save the day – especially if that family has secret bunkers of ancient weapons and decades of experience hunting the greatest monsters in Britain 's history!
PUNISHER KILL KREW #1 kicks off a new 5-part mini-series, following the post-WAR OF REALMS adventures of FRANK CASTLE and it's the most fun we've had with the Punisher since Remender's FRANKEN-CASTLE!!
So, a few years back, BLACK SCIENCE, DEADLY CLASS, and UNCANNY X-FORCE superstar, RICK REMENDER, had a really rad run on the PUNISHER.
At the time, some folks loved it, others didn't — but we thought it was super fun, and loved every second of it, and that run was FRANKEN-CASTLE (ask us about the TPB next time you visit Third Eye!).
Now, we're seeing one of the most out there, and most cool riffs on the Punisher SINCE FRANKEN-CASTLE, and we're loving it!
ONE MAN. TEN REALMS. TOTAL WAR!
During the War of the Realms, Frank Castle made a promise of vengeance, and Frank Castle keeps his promises.
A van full of orphans is about to make that promise a lot more complicated.
How does a man kill gods and monsters?
Image's REAVER (from writer JUSTIN JORDAN of LUTHER STRODE fame) is blood-drenched sword-and-sorcery awesomeness: picture SUICIDE SQUAD or INGLORIOUS BASTERDS meets GAME OF THRONES!
Need your hard-hitting sword-and-sorcery fix now that GoT is gone? This could be it!
We LOVED the first issue of the red hot new IMAGE series, REAVER, and we're so pumped to see the next issue dropping this week with issue #2!
In REAVER #2, Hell's Half-Dozen's suicide mission to the Anvil leads them straight through Rael territory, home to the many nations of skin eaters.
Five of these dangerous convicts are prepared to fight for their freedom-but which one is working on a secret agenda of their own?
Start reading REAVER with REAVER #1, featuring an all new cover with a special reissue of #1!
The continent of Madaras once promised a new start for settlers, but 200 years after its discovery, the war rages on.
Deep within this savage and untamed land, a darkness builds at that must be stopped at all costs. To do so, the Imperials assemble six of its most despicable prisoners-a turncoat, a skin eater, a sorcerer and his bodyguard, a serial killer, and the Devil's Son-the only ones who can stop the end of the new world.
They are Hell's Half-Dozen. Join JUSTIN JORDAN (LUTHER STRODE) and REBEKAH ISAACS (Buffy the Vampire Slayer) for REAVER-a dark, grim fantasy for a post-Game of Thrones world.
SILVER SURFER: BLACK #3 delivers another incredible issue by the dream team of Donny Cates (ABSOLUTE CARNAGE, VENOM, THANOS WINS) and TRADD MOORE (LUTHER STRODE)
Some of the best SILVER SURFER art since MOEBIUS's PARABLE storyline — this book is pure awesomeness through and through — and it ties into the ABSOLUTE CARNAGE / VENOM saga with KNULL, too!
We're loving the heck out of the new SILVER SURFER BLACK MINI-SERIES which showcases a forgotten tale of the Surfer, as we're shown a very interesting encounter with KNULL, the Symbiote God who has been responsible for all the mayhem in ABSOLUTE CARNAGE and VENOM!
In issue #3, the Surfer's power is fading!
Is this the end of Norrin Radd as the all-consuming darkness descends upon him?
Or will help come in the form of an unexpected ally?
Wanna get caught up? We've got issues 1 & 2 in stock to get you current!
The legendary manga and anime of STARBLAZERS is re-imagined in an all new manga series with STAR BLAZERS VOL.1 SPACE BATTLESHIP YAMATO 2199!
2199 will be Earth's final year-unless the voyage of space battleship Yamato can succeed!
The alien Gamilas have devastated the biosphere, determined to reshape our planet into their own new home.
But a third force has intervened, as an emissary from the distant Iscandar has given humanity the plans for a faster-than-light drive.
If the Yamato can battle its way through the Gamilas fleet to reach Iscandar, their technology can heal the Earth-but the odds against us are literally astronomical . . .
The classic 1974 anime TV series Space Battleship Yamato became a fan phenomenon in North America under the title Star Blazers.
Now the epic tale of a legendary WWII battleship retrofitted as a spacecraft on a mission to save Earth has been remade by the generation of Japanese creators that grew up inspired by it-with staff including Yutaka Izubuchi (Cowboy Bebop: The Movie), Nobuteru Yuki (Kids on the Slope), and Hideaki Anno (Evangelion)!
WAR OF THE REALMS arrives in trade paperback this week – find out why this was one of Marvel's best event stories in quite some time!!
Holy crap: was WAR OF THE REALMS amazing, or what?
We were blown away with how darn good this was, and we cannot wait until those of you who waited for trade can dig in and find out for yourselves!
Asgard. Alfheim. Heven. Jotunheim. Muspelheim. Niffleheim. Nidavellir. Svartalfheim. Vanaheim.
All of the Ten Realms have fallen to Malekith and his army, except one: Midgard. Home to Thor's beloved humans. Home to heroes and gods alike.
Now, at last, Midgard burns. All hell breaks loose in New York City as Malekith and his allies begin their invasion – and our greatest heroes watch as Earth falls!
With Thor trapped in the land of the Frost Giants and Earth's forces overwhelmed, Black Panther, Jane Foster and Doctor Strange undertake a desperate gamble.
What can possibly stop Malekith and his army?
Spider-Man, Daredevil, Punisher, Ghost Rider, Blade, Hulk and more join the fray as Jason Aaron's epic Thor saga explodes across the Marvel Universe in an event for the ages! Collecting WAR OF THE REALMS #1-6 and WAR OF THE REALMS: OMEGA.
Marvel continues to expand on the world of Conan with the new AGE OF CONAN: VALERIA mini-series kicking off this week with issue #1!!
Journey into the Hyborian Age with Valeria, the hero from Robert E. Howard's classic CONAN story "Red Nails," on an all-new quest set before the fan-favorite tale!
Before her careers as a pirate and mercenary and before she crossed paths with the Red Brotherhood and the likes of Conan of Cimmeria, Valeria was a young woman from Aquilonia, seeking justice for a crime gone unpunished.
But as the formidable Valeria makes her way in this world, proving her capability against those who doubt her abilities as a young woman, she will find more than she bargained for in her thirst for revenge.
Her deadly fighting skills will be put to the test and her trust will be shaken as she hunts her brother's killer and comes into her own as a force to be reckoned with in the Hyborian Age! Don't miss the start of an all-new classic, from Meredith Finch (Wonder Woman, SAVAGE SWORD OF CONAN) and Aneke (Red Sonja, DC's Bombshells)!
BATMAN UNIVERSE #2 delivers the next big issue of the killer Brian Michael Bendis BATMAN series!!
OK, so you got Bendis, who is a bonafide modern legend in comics, and then you have one of the most red-hot new comic artists to hit the scene in the last few years: Nick Derington (many of you may know him from his work on those rad MISTER MIRACLE covers w/ Tom King!), and then you put 'em both together, and that's a recipe for freakin' awesome comics, Third Eye Faithful!
The quest for the secret of the stolen Fabergé egg and its buyer continues as Batman teams up with Green Arrow against the Riddler, then travels to Gorilla City.
But is the egg's strange energy adversely affecting the Dark Knight's mind?
Wanna get caught up? We've got issue 1 to get you up to date!
CONAN THE BARBARIAN: EXODUS #1 delivers more Conan goodness this week!!!!
Long have the stories told of CONAN, who came from the frozen hills of his homeland, Cimmeria, to tread the jeweled thrones of the Earth in the Hyborian Age – but now you will witness the epic tale of the young barbarian's first journey from home from visionary creator Esad Ribic!
Fifteen winters in Cimmeria have toughened the young Conan, but his greatest challenge lies ahead.
Braving the elements, without food, without shelter, without weapons, Conan must learn to survive even as nature itself conspires to stop him.
The snow freezes his bones. The wolves smell his blood. But if he can reach civilization, will his wounds heal…or will his troubles just begin?
GUARDIANS O/T GALAXY TP VOL.1 THE FINAL GAUNTLET delivers the first arc of THANOS WINS creative team Donny Cates & Geoff Shaw's epic new GOTG!!!!
THANOS WINS. COSMIC GHOST RIDER. Both of these things are awesome, both are connected, and yes, both are the creations of the dream team that is Donny Cates (ABSOLUTE CARNAGE, VENOM) and Geoff Shaw (THANOS WINS).
Now, the two have paired up to deliver some incredible storytelling and a fresh new spin on the GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY, and we're loving it!
The universe is on fire. Hundreds of worlds are at war. Never has there been such hatred and division across the cosmos.
Now, more than ever, the Galaxy needs Guardians – but in the aftermath of the Infinity Wars, who is left to answer the call?
On the plus side, Thanos is dead – but long live the new Thanos!
Who will it be? And can the Guardians find them before everything comes crashing down?
They're not the only ones on the hunt, though. Who are the Dark Guardians?
And what does the search for Thanos' successor have to do with Hela, goddess of death?
Prepare for the Guardians vs. the Dark Guardians vs. the Black Order! It's all-out chaos, and it's about to get worse.
Could the Mad Titan be fighting his way back from the grave?! Collecting GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY (2019) #1-6.
GWENPOOL returns in an all new 5-part mini-series with GWENPOOL STRIKES BACK #1!!!!
If you're like us, one of the raddest new characters of the last few years, GWENPOOL, was something you're probably missing, right?
Well, fear not, Third Eye Faithful: this week marks the return of GWENPOOL, and we're stoked!
That's right – everyone's favorite comics-fan-turned-comics character is back, and this time, she's playing for keeps!
Gwen Poole is desperate not to disappear into comic book limbo, so she's going to make an impact on the Marvel Universe!
First up: Unmask Spider-Man! And heck, maybe see if she can get some real super-powers while she's at it!
One of Marvel's best books going gets the prestige treatment in the new IMMORTAL HULK: Director's Cut editions beginning with IMMORTAL HULK: Director's Cut #1!
There's no doubt about it: IMMORTAL HULK is one of the bets darn books on the stands, and holy crap – we're loving every second of it STILL!
The horror has a name – and now it is unleashed in full graphic detail! You'd never notice the man.
He doesn't like to be noticed. He's quiet. Calm. Never complains. If someone were to walk up and shoot him in the head…all he'd do is die. Until night falls. And someone else gets up again.
The man's name is Banner. The horror is the Immortal Hulk. And trouble has a way of finding them both!
As reporter Jackie McGee tries to put together the pieces, Banner treads a lonely path from town to town – unearthing murder, mystery and tragedy as he goes. And what Banner discovers, the Hulk smashes!
The critically acclaimed reinvention of one of Marvel's biggest icons is re-presented in Director's Cut form, complete with Joe Bennett's savage pencils and more incredible bonus features!
THE WHITE TREES #1 from DAREDEVIL & SEX CRIMINALS superstar CHIP ZDARSKY and superstar artist KRIS ANKA arrives this Wednesday!!!!
We're telling ya, Third Eye Faithful: Chip Zdarsky is one of the most talented comic writers in the game today, and hey — his art's pretty darn rad too!
On top of that, pairing him with KRIS ANKA, one of the biggest superstar names in comics art, makes for some good comics, let us tell you!
CHIP ZDARSKY teams up with superstar Runaways artists KRIS ANKA and MATT WILSON for this spectacular OVERSIZED TWO-ISSUE MINISERIES!
In the fantastical world of Blacksand, peace was hard-won, and three unbending warriors carry the scars to prove it. Now, almost twenty years later, their children are missing and war is on the horizon.
Can they put aside their memories of the war-and each other-for one last adventure?
A must-read for any sword & sorcery fans – check it out this week!
AMAZING SPIDER-MAN: HUNTED arrives in trade paperback, delivering one of the best Spidey storylines we've read in a long time AND a perfect story arc to jump onto the incredible Nick Spencer / Ryan Ottley run of ASM!!!!!
We've been so hooked on AMAZING SPIDER-MAN since its relaunch under writer Nick Spencer (MORNING GLORIES, SECRET EMPIRE) and artist Ryan Ottley (INVINCIBLE), and this incredible KRAVEN RETURNS storyline is a MUST-READ and a perfect place to begin trying this epic run!
When Kraven returns, Spider-Man becomes the hunted! Sergei Kravinoff and his minions have been kidnapping animal-themed superhumans for months, and they need one more to complete the collection: the Spider. But what does Kraven want with all of them?!
In Central Park, the prey is let loose, and the hunt begins – but Kraven isn't the one in pursuit.
Who has Spidey in their crosshairs?
The Lizard has a target on his back, too – but he has a truly terrifying plan of his own!
Peter Parker will find himself in a horrible situation, but there are lives – innocent and otherwise – at stake, and…well…he's Spider-Man. When it comes to the big showdown, you have no idea how this one will go down!
THE BORGIAS delivers a killer graphic novel by two legendary comics creators: JODOROWSKY (METABARONS, THE INCAL, and films like HOLY MOUNTAIN and SANTA SANGRE) and MILO MANARA
Two of our favorite names in comics come together on this epic graphic novel, and if you appreciate just plain great comics — you need to check it out!
When Pope Innocent VIII dies, the corrupt Cardinal Rodrigo Borgia schemes, murders, and seduces his way into becoming the new pope, immediately securing positions for his family and thereby ensuring a Borgia dynasty.
Alejandro Jodorowsky and Milo Manara's sweeping four-part saga of sex, blood, and religion is now collected in a trade paperback edition for the first time ever!
The complete collaboration between legends Alejandro Jodorowsky (Metabarons, The Incal, Technopriests) and Milo Manara (Click!, Indian Summer)!
The new LOKI series rules! Check out LOKI #2 this week (and get issue 1, in stock now, if you haven't already!)
Restless with his new duties after the War of the Realms, Loki seeks out the advice of the closest thing Earth has to a king – TONY STARK, THE INVINCIBLE IRON MAN! – Close enough, right?
But it turns out old Shell-head isn't happy to see Loki on account of all that stuff he did.
Now the God of Mischief/Stories/Evil/Chaos has to outsmart the cleverest man in Midgard or die (again) trying. Meanwhile, could Thor be hatching a mischievous plot of his own?
Wanna get caught up? We've got issue 1 in stock to get you current!
The next issue of the new comic exploring the world of CRITICAL ROLE arrives with CRITICAL ROLE: VOX MACHINA ORIGINS #2
We love CRITICAL ROLE, and we're loving these new comics delving into the world of CRITICAL ROLE!
In issue #2, what's hiding beneath Gatshadow?
The members of Vox Machina track the missing Grog back to his old home in Westruun, where he appears to have been drawn to the local cursed mountain.
Of course, he has. Giant spiders, evil skeletons, and something even more nefarious stand in the unlikely heroes' way when they venture under the mountain to find their friend!
The next big issue of the DCU crossover, EVENT LEVIATHAN, arrives with EVENT LEVIATHAN #3
The world's greatest detectives-Batman, Green Arrow, Lois Lane, Plastic Man, the Question and Martian Manhunter-have gathered to solve the mystery behind the true identity of Leviathan's leaders and the destruction of the world's top intelligence agencies!
Red Hood is their leading suspect-and he is on the loose!
Plus, the Silencer takes her shot! This mystery will unleash a new evil on the DC Universe!
MEGADETH: DEATH BY DESIGN features comics inspired by MEGADETH'S greatest songs of all time — from HANGAR 18 to THE CONJURING to WAKE UP DEAD and more!
We freakin' LOVE Megadeth at Third Eye, and when we saw this graphic novel hitting us this week – we had to share it with you!
Celebrating four decades of Dave Mustaine's legendary band, MEGADETH, this omnibus edition is 35 short stories inspired by 35 of MEGADETH'S greatest songs of all time.
Songs adpated include "Hangar 18" by METALOCALYPSE creator Brendon Small, "Rattlehead" by Brooklyn Gladiator creator, Dan Fogler.
Other stories adapted by Roche Limit creator, Michael Moreci and HACK/SLASH creator Tim Seeley as well as many, many more.
X-FACTOR #87 gets the Marvel FACSIMILE treatment for this iconic piece of '90s nostalgia!
Get inside the heads of one of the most uncanny mutant teams of all in an acclaimed classic from the stellar creative team of Peter David and Joe Quesada!
Havok, Polaris, Quicksilver, Wolfsbane, Multiple Man and Strong Guy – plus X-Factor's government liaison, Val Cooper – are all under "X-amination" by super hero psychiatrist Doc Samson! And the revelations are hilarious, heartbreaking and character-defining!
Learn how frustrating it is for the super-fast Pietro Maximoff to live in a normal-paced world! Discover Guido Carosella's hidden pain!
Explore Alex Summers' insecurities! And join Rahne Sinclair in confronting her deepest feelings!
Plus: More secrets from the psychiatric couch! It's one of the all-time great Marvel comic books, boldly re-presented in its original form, ads and all!
Hey gang! Here's a full listing of new releases arriving at all Third Eye locations…


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For over 60 years Marvin has hand crafted traditional sliding sash windows to the highest quality designed for those who cherish the look and traditions of the past but appreciate the technology and performance of the present. Your Marvin Sash window will retain the exterior appearance of the original window and preserve the look of your home while bringing energy efficiency and cost effectiveness into the twenty-first century. It also features a concealed tilt lever inside the lock of the exclusive integrated sash tracking and locking system, making the sash easy to open and tilt for ease of maintenance.
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Frade é um distrito do município de Macaé, no estado do Rio de Janeiro. Localiza-se a cerca de 55 Km da sede desse município, na região conhecida como serra macaense. Este distrito possui cerca de 1000 habitantes e tem sua alta turística nos meses do verão e também na última semana de Maio, onde celebra a festa de sua padroeira, com uma festa muito popular na região, e que atrai centenas de turistas. Esta festa é conhecida como Festa do Frade ou apenas Festa Maina. O vilarejo oferece aos visitantes pousadas bem localizadas, e opções de lazer diversas, como a pratica de pesca tradicional e "boiagem" (esporte onde se usam câmaras de ar de caminhões para descida nas correntezas do rio. No Carnaval, um tradicional bloco anima os visitantes e locais com bois e bonecas de 3 metros de altura. Na quarta feira de cinzas há uma celebração tradicional e única na região, chamada de "Enterro do Boi", onde uma "procissão" informal ao som de um bumbo levam as carcaças dos bois e bonecas pela cidade até seu destino final, onde são queimadas como símbolo do fim das festividades.

Distritos de Macaé

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaWikipedia


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The Truce Between Fabulism and Realism: On Gabriel Garcia Marquez and the Modern Novel
Charles Finch October 2, 2014 | 15 books mentioned 17 5 min read
When Gabriel Garcia Marquez died in April, the general flow of eulogy settled on two interpretations of his legacy: in the first, as a titanic but essentially regional author (The Times obituary called One Hundred Years of Solitude "the defining saga of Latin America's social and political history"); in the second, as a model for the diminishing novelties of subsequent magical realists, like Salman Rushdie and Isabel Allende.
Fair enough. Garcia Marquez himself saw his style as fundamentally linked to the politics of his continent in his lifetime. (Correctly — for example, nothing has ever better captured how important the theft of time must feel in a totalitarian state than the dictator who lives on and on for centuries in The Autumn of the Patriarch.) It's also true that he gave license to a new kind of fabulism, unique in that it didn't descend from Swift or Cervantes, and therefore didn't depend on either satire or comedy to atone for the recklessness of its inventions.
Those are narrow channels of influence, however, and there's a third, untracked, more expansive reading of his work to make. It might go like this: he solved an essential problem of the novel; he arrived at a moment of crisis for the form and offered the warring parties a graceful way out of it; and if there's a single novel that can claim paternity for the last 20 years of American fiction, it's probably One Hundred Years of Solitude.
That book was published in America in 1972, and it was a sensation, critically and commercially, William Kennedy famously calling it, with un-Albanyish zeal, "the first piece of literature since the Book of Genesis that should be required reading for the entire human race." (If you somehow haven't heard of it, One Hundred Years of Solitude is the multi-generational chronicle of a Colombian family called the Buendias.) At the time, there was a battle afoot between two kinds of fiction. Writers like Jean Stafford and Michael Shaara, traditional realists, were winning the Pulitzer Prize, while the National Book Award, inclined toward a more radical approach, went to John Barth and William Gaddis, campus experimentalists grinding out the logical final steps of the project inaugurated by Borges, by Ulysses, Hopscotch, Albert Angelo. Each side loathed the other. Updike's declaration about Thomas Pynchon — "I don't like the funny names" — might as well stand in for the whole cultural apparatus that was committed to realism; on the other hand Barth's foundational postmodernist essay "The Literature of Exhaustion" called realism "used up," and Gaddis said that such writing "never takes your breath away…it's for people who read with the surface of their minds, people with reading habits that make the smallest demands on them."
The great formal achievement of One Hundred Years of Solitude was that it treated the two positions not as antipodal but as dialectical. It satisfied the modernist commitment to narrative innovation in two ways, first in its compression and dilation of time — what would become the hallmark of magical realism — and second in its use of the fantastic, the twins who die at the same instant, the visitation of the ghosts, the glass city, Remedios being sublimated into heaven as she does the laundry.
But Garcia Marquez made the ingenious decision to embed those moments of originality within the stubbornly enduring structure of the traditional realist novel, turning his book into a family saga by way of a dream — Trollope by way of Barthelme. By doing so, he managed to defuse a central tension, one that had divided novelists since Hemingway and Joyce pitched their opposing camps. Of course, there were writers before Garcia Marquez who had blended the magical and the prosaic (Kafka, most famously) but none of them were perhaps as fully committed to narrative as Garcia Marquez seemed — to story. Meanwhile, other writers across the world had the same impulse, many of them, interestingly, in totalitarian states, including Milan Kundera and Danilo Kis, but their books were being passed around in samizdat, not, as Garcia Marquez's was, in suburban book clubs and city libraries. What makes One Hundred Years of Solitude a watershed moment of cultural history is that mix of plot, experimentation, acclaim, and popularity.
That's also why its influence has been so subtly pervasive. Many of our heaviest hitters — Franzen, Wallace, Eisenberg, Tartt, Saunders, Chabon — were born around 1960, and therefore came of age during the book's ascendancy. Considered in that light, their debt to it seems plain, whether or not they would acknowledge it, whether or not they found the book stimulating, indeed whether or not they've even read it.
The reason is that all of them play the same trick, filigreeing traditional realism with enough carefully selective post-modernism to claim its gloss of coolness — but without the unfortunate consequence of making their work difficult to read. In The Adventures of Kavalier and Clay there's the Golem of Prague; in The Art of Fielding there's the self-consciously literary exhumation of the corpse; in The Corrections, there's the magical device of Correctall, the pill that allows Chip Lambert to forget his anxiety and enter a state of dreamlike euphoria. (It's a sign of our age how often American magical realism is pharmaceutical, after Franzen's example — the decision-making drug in Indecision by Benjamin Kunkel; the test subjects in George Saunders's magnificent "Escape from Spiderhead.") Fiction is an essentially conventional art form, most at home in the bourgeoisie, but its practitioners have — quite rightly! — never been at ease with that fact. The compromise at which we've arrived is that every book now has the credibility of the avant-garde within a Victorian structure. It's more fun to claim the influence of John Hawkes than John Galsworthy; it's more fun to read a book whose plot is patterned after Jane Austen than B.S. Johnson.
Unsurprisingly, the first American novelist to take the full implications of Garcia Marquez on board may have been our smartest one, Philip Roth. (It's not a coincidence that he spent the 1970s publishing Eastern European novelists, and, as Roth Unbound described, sneaking money to them via illicit networks — a fact that ought to shame the Nobel committee members who have claimed that American writers are unworthy of the prize because they're too inward-looking, too insular.) His books The Counterlife and Operation Shylock were precursors of the great florescence of faux-mo novels in the 2000's, using false flags and mirrored characters without their pace or urgency. The logical culmination of the trend is probably The Marriage Plot, which states the tension outright, dropping a college student who just wants to read 19th-century novels into the semiotics craze of the 1980s.
At their weakest, these post-Garcia Marquez books have been kinetic without moving, emotional without evoking any real sensation, readable without deserving to be read. The novel of this type that comes to mind for me is Absurdistan by the sometimes terrific Gary Shteyngart, a disagreeable blend of absurdism and soft sentimentality. Michael Chabon, Jonathan Lethem, Junot Diaz, Jonathan Safran Foer, and Colson Whitehead can feel similarly limited by their very limitlessness — their work at times too ironized for readers to treat its narrative seriously, but too committed to narrative to offer the sense of alienation, dread, and obliqueness we feel in, for example, Don DeLillo and William Gibson. The writer for whom cultural critics were so eager to give Garcia Marquez credit, Salman Rushdie, might be the least exciting of the bunch. The Pale King offers a glimpse of what David Foster Wallace's pushback against his own trend might have looked like — his reconnection with difficulty as a means of higher artistic consciousness.
Recent Pulitzer Prize committees have waded into this fray again; books of high seriousness, eschewing the jokey gloss of the comic book generation, have won the prize, including three lovely but deeply conservative novels, Tinkers by Paul Harding, March by Geraldine Brooks, and Olive Kitteredge by Elizabeth Strout. How much does that matter? The painter Gerhard Richter has spent the last 50 years dissolving what previously seemed like a crucial distinction between figurative and abstract painting; is it possible that novelists, too, no longer need to declare a single allegiance? If so, the books that Garcia Marquez gave a generation permission to write, produced during the truce between fabulism and realism, may begin to look odd: artifacts of the historical moment they thought they were creating. One of the pieces of shallow wisdom people like to repeat is that every great book either creates or dissolves a genre, and sometimes it's true. One Hundred Years of Solitude, though it hasn't quite received credit for this, established the school of fiction we currently consider great. It's up to some other genius to dissolve it.
Charles Finch is the author of the novel The Last Enchantments (St. Martin's Press, January 2014) and regularly reviews books for The New York Times Book Review, the Chicago Tribune, and USA Today. He has also written about fiction for The Millions, Slate, and The Point. You can find him at @CharlesFinch.
A Meditation on Exclamation Marks in Contemporary Poetry (!)
Nick Ripatrazone June 27, 2019 | 15 books mentioned 3 4 min read
For all their ubiquity in texts and emails, exclamation marks call attention toward themselves in poems: they stand straight up.
Nick Ripatrazone | 15 books mentioned 3 4 min read
Martha Cooper: A Reluctant Icon
Bill Morris May 20, 2019 | 15 books mentioned 6 min read
She never considered herself an artist. She was always more interested in documenting and preserving subcultures that were destined to blaze and then vanish.
Bill Morris | 15 books mentioned 6 min read
A Library of the Mind
Sam Allingham November 22, 2013 | 15 books mentioned 7 8 min read
Even if I managed to keep my mental concentration long enough to maintain one section of this library-of-the-mind, the idea of trying to juggle multiple sections ended up being too much, and I was forced to give up the whole project, having only completed one of Borges's hexagons.
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Doctors, Harp Lies, and Trump Talk
Andrew Bomback June 27, 2017 | 15 books mentioned 8 min read
Within the first couple paragraphs I found myself mumbling "Roth." And li and behold, there he was at the top of the second section. I think, however, you underestimate how and when he most effectively fused the two traditions.
In both The Human Stain and American Pastoral, most of the story that Zimmerman narrates is about events he hasn't seen or even heard about. The Swedes trips into the underground to find his daughter and her return at the end are not "real" events. They are closer to Marquez's history of the Buendias than a so called realist novel. By putting fantasy in the center of a realist novel without remarking the boundaries he fused both influences together.
Charles Finch says:
Tony, absolutely right – I often think about how Zuckerman never returns to round off the narrative of American Pastoral at the end, where you would expect him to
Jack Walter says:
The character of Remedios was not "sublimated" into Heaven, but rather "assumed."
I cannot understand the discussion regarding "post- Garcia Marquez" writers. Diaz and Franzen, I think, have no intention of writing prose that would have the same effect on the reader as DiLullo and Gibson. That whole paragraph seems like you're just spinning your wheels.
C.V. says:
Wonderful essay.
I just want to question two things-
Absurdistan, to my mind, is the best thing Shteyngart has written to date. "Soft sentimentality"- really? I thought it was pretty powerful and rather savage satire.
"shallow wisdom"- that's from Walter Benjamin. Shallow? Really?
Jack Walter – I suppose what I meant was that Diaz and Franzen want an effect of post-modernism, but not THE effect of it, which is embodied by Gibson and DeLillo.
C.V. – thank you so much for reading.
I meant more – shallowly repeated, repeated without thought and with satisfaction, than that it's shallow wisdom. You're right.
On Absurdistan I would disagree, though. I thought the satire was pretty clawless, the emotions pretty saccharine.
Ed Bast says:
Absurdistan is a terrible book, not so much "satire" as "ripped from the headlines except 6% absurder and the company names have been changed into unfunny amalgams of current companies". CV is right, though, it probably is the best thing Shteyngart has written to date.
By the way, Charles, I should also say I enjoyed the piece a great deal. I have been thinking about re-reading 100 Years for awhile. I think I reAd three or four times in six months in college, and never since. I was always worried that it wouldn't have the impact again. I think I'll go ahead and risk it.
Michael Travis says:
Ah, yes! It is that time of year again! Time to start the gnashing of the teeth, in that Philip Roth has not been awarded the Nobel Prize! (I know, this was basically a throw away line in the essay, but it is a complaint that I find rather irritating.) My response being, so what? Is he not famous and rich enough? Several of his novels have been made into movies. He's not been laboring in obscurity so many other writers. I'm also wondering about some of the other American writers–you just don't hear this sort of clamor for Cormac McCarthy or Joyce Carol Oates, for example. Or someone who IS more obscure, such as Stephen Dixon. American culture is already so dominant in the world, as anyone who has travelled abroad should know.
Think about it. If you look back at the list of winners how many of them really are still read today? Many seem to have faded into obscurity. At the same time, there have been many fine writers who were deserving and not recognized, and very much still read today–Tolstoy, Henry James, Edith Wharton, Kafka, Proust, Ibsen, Nabokov, Borges, Cortazar, Virginia Woolf, Calvino and on and on. If Roth wins this year, where is all that fine resentment going to go? It really is time to let this go. It sounds so petulant.
CCV says:
To be fair, a lot of "mainstream" or "literary" fiction here in American IS insular. Too focused on navel-gazing banalities with some heavy handed talk thrown in about some timely issues plaguing the uninteresting lives of people typically too affluent and sheltered to have their finger on the pulse of matters of real concern. Not that there aren't a number of Americans who deserve a Nobel. Writers like Ursula K Le Guin and Gene Wolfe are great writers whose massive bodies of work grapple with profound ideas and issues in ways that make them unique unto themselves and absolutely deserve being awarded as One-Of-The-World's-Greats, but, alas, they write science fiction and fantasy–never mind their fiction is far more prescient and pushes far more boundaries than most contemporary Literature-With-A-Capital-L–so they aren't "serious" writers. Pynchon and McCarthy are worthy too, and for Brit ex-pats, I'd say Alan Moore (is he here now?) and Neil Gaiman are also worthy…not that the Nobel committee would ever consider them. As the essay pointed out, though, many of the world's greatest, most daring writers went unawarded–Gaddis, the most prophetic American novelist of the 20th Century, lived his life in relative obscurity even HERE, not to mention the Nobels essentially ignoring post-modernism–so I've learned to not expect much of anything from such "honors".
….yes, Gaddis won two NBAs, but even my English professors hadn't heard of him.
Michael Travis, I agree with you that the Nobel's ultimately pretty uncertain as a measure of greatness (and at this point so politicized), and I have no strong feeling that Americans deserve it – BUT, Roth deserves it in my opinion, and his activities in the 70's and 80's put the lie to the committee's idea that American authors are too inward.
CCV, what do you think of Le Clezio as a postmodernist winner? I agree that they should be open to people who do "genre" work. I know John Sutherland argued that Elmore Leonard should have won it.
What on earth is faux-mo fiction? Dare I even ask?
Good article overall. I, myself, have a penchant for Magical Realism and its current trend as manifested in writers like Aimee Bender, Kelly Link, Karen Russell, Brian Evenson, and George Saunders. It is intriguing to read about their literary forebears.
I recently bought A Hundred Years of Solitude from the city of Faulkner. I've read Love in the Time of Cholera, so I already am indebted to Marquez for his influence on my own artistry, thinking, and prose. The other book awaits me on the shelves.
Judy Krueger says:
faux-mo is defined at Urban Dictionary: http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=fauxmo
Judy, wasn't aware of that meaning! I just kind of made the word up for this piece.
Robert Bruens says:
Márquez didn't solve anything. His popularity and influence can be attributed to marketing much more than some singularly unique literary achievement. Bulgakov was combining a relatively straightforward narrative with talking cats and witches and other magical flourishes decades before Gabo, and Vonnegut was writing highly readable yet often fantastical fiction throughout the years to which you refer here. You want to talk funny names? Try Kilgore Trout. Granted, Bulgakov may not have the same level of popularity, and Vonnegut may not have the same level of influence (at least among the highest brow halls of lit critics) but it's not as if either are especially obscure. Certainly the Franzen/Wallace/Eisenberg/Tartt/Saunders/Chabon generation would be familiar with both of them, and I don't think you've really made a convincing argument that Márquez did something so radically different we could only attribute the confluence of styles we see in this generation to their reading of his work specifically. Again, the key thing to understand about Márquez is that he has been very very well marketed (to the point where many Colombians I've met tire of how he stands in for their entire corpus of literature). You're conflating how he's been marketed with his actual achievements in the world of letters.
And I say this having quite enjoyed a couple of books by Márquez…certainly enough that I know that the 'a' in his name has an accent on it.
Robert, I think there's a long and interesting story about the fantastic in literature, which goes back farther than Bulgakov! I'm sure you noticed this paragraph, which I intended to cover a lot of the variety that was going on throughout the twentieth century in that direction:
"Meanwhile, other writers across the world had the same impulse, many of them, interestingly, in totalitarian states, including Milan Kundera and Danilo Kis, but their books were being passed around in samizdat, not, as Garcia Marquez's was, in suburban book clubs and city libraries. What makes One Hundred Years of Solitude a watershed moment of cultural history is that mix of plot, experimentation, acclaim, and popularity."
What distinguishes Marquez for me (and I'm open-minded about it) is the blend of a) being determinedly literary (Vonnegut was influenced by sci-fi, for instance) and b) his popularity, which may well be partly attributable to marketing – or accessibility. Regardless, that's why his book was a cultural watershed, and not merely a literary influence.
The Afterlife of Travel: On the Work of Philip Graham and Alma Gottlieb
Michele Morano October 10, 2014 | 15 books mentioned 5 7 min read
I Don't Love You, Toronto: On Books and Cities
Manjushree Thapa August 14, 2017 | 15 books mentioned 8 11 min read
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What is memory, if not a bundle of errors, a poem covered with edits?
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Kafka on the Go: Rereading The Metamorphosis
Matt Seidel April 25, 2014 | 15 books mentioned 11 min read
I had a simple plan: to peruse a novella repeatedly and in different settings, an experiment in reading during which I would surrender myself to what Edgar Allen Poe called that "fullness of [the author's] intention" best experienced in a "brief tale." All I needed was the right book: familiar yet strange enough to offer surprises during the third, fourth, and fifth readings, all within days of each other.
I had been casting about for the perfect title when I saw Susan Bernofsky's new translation of The Metamorphosis at an airport bookstore, the beautiful cover submitting the title letters to the same transformative process as the book's protagonist undergoes. This, I decided, would be my companion text as I semi-reclined on a plane, lay in bed, sat in a café, strolled upright in a park, and bellied up to a bar.
That The Metamorphosis is manifestly about change appealed to me for a project about repetition, though I had no expectation that reading it repeatedly would effect any such dramatic metamorphoses either in me or my literary judgment. Nor did it. Rather, this is a record of the adaptation of a reader's focus to his different environments.
Gregor Samsa, whose "particular zeal" allowed him to rise "almost overnight from petty clerk to salesman," awakens after "troubled dreams" to find himself transformed into "some sort of monstrous insect." Gregor's more immediate concern is that he has slept through his alarm and missed his train. (What one chooses to worry about in Kafka is always telling.) Having the misfortune to work in a "firm where even the most negligible falling short was enough to arouse the greatest possible suspicion," Gregor is visited by his incensed supervisor, whose immediate arrival is in a way no less far-fetched than Gregor's metamorphosis.
The family accustoms itself to Gregor's transformation. His sister Grete, whether from "childish frivolity" or jealous protectiveness, takes over the caretaking duties. Each Samsa returns to work to relieve the family of the "ancient debt" incurred by their father.
Meanwhile, Gregor slowly wastes away, eating and sleeping less and less, his movement hampered by an apple that his irate father had hurled at him and is now lodged in his back. Household staff quit, a charwoman and three eerie, bearded lodgers arrive — a new, financially necessary infestation. A final confrontation convinces the family that Gregor must go, a mandate to which Gregor eventually submits when he obligingly expires. Relieved and empowered, the Samsas expel the apartment's intruders and take the day off work to go on an outing: the first time the novella strays from the apartment. Gregor's, sister, her parents notice, has blossomed into a young woman.
Kafka at 35,000 Feet:
I started my experiment on board a Boeing 767. This setting seemed particularly fitting as nothing in modern life makes one feel quite as verminous as air travel: the cramped confines, the mixture of docility and entitlement, the accrued filth of travel, and food scarcely fresher than the rotten offerings supplied to Gregor daily.
I had sacrificed the aisle seat to my wife and slunk into the middle seat, then cravenly ceded the armrest to the stranger on my right, as this was certainly what Gregor, a creature of excessive considerateness (some might say servility) would have done. Thus hemmed in, I waited for the plane to reach cruising altitude before reacquainting myself with Gregor's plight.
Gregor, I noticed, gets into the most trouble when he puts himself on display. Gazing longingly at the dividing curtain in the aisle, I was tempted to imitate one of Gregor's ill-advised, visible breakouts and display myself — in my full, coach-stinking monstrosity — to the first class passengers. I was moved by the same resentment Gregor felt toward the lodgers and imagined myself making a similar complaint: "Just look at how these [passengers] take their nourishment while I was wasting away." Alas, I stayed seated, merely contenting myself with visualizing the back of my seat as its own "carapace" that would defend me from the repeated kicks from the child behind me.
As I was in a good position to appreciate, The Metamorphosis dramatizes a fight for and division of a limited space: how much space one takes up, how much one cedes, how much one feels entitled to, and how quickly, and in what manner, one navigates that space — aged bipeds and many-legged bugs alike have trouble getting around. Before the transformation, Gregor is a creature familiar with tight spaces, spending his salesman days on the road in "cramped hotel rooms" and at home in his "proper human room, if admittedly too small." (Asides like this last one reveal the peculiar mixture of self-denial and resentment in Gregor.) Once he becomes an insect, his room affords him only a "few square meters of space" over which to crawl, and so as not to offend the delicate sensibilities of his sister, he takes to squeezing himself under a settee, "where even though his back was a bit cramped and he could no longer raise his head, he at once felt right at home…"
Some flashes of rebellion and resentment notwithstanding, the generally pliant Gregor accepts his straitened quarters even as his family comes to suspect him of new territorial ambitions: "But now we have this beast tormenting us; it drives away our lodgers and apparently intends to take over the entire apartment and have us sleep in the gutter." When, late in the novella, Gregor is drawn into the "immaculate" parlor by his sister's violin playing, it is the last violation of the domestic space he is permitted. He dies that night, and his sister finally notices how little space he actually took up: "Just look how skinny he was." This moment of pathos quickly gives way to irony, as the Samsas, rid of their desiccated charge, look forward to relocating to a "smaller…more practical flat" over which they will have complete dominion.
Outraged on Gregror's behalf, I reclaimed the armrest in a small act of solidarity, clinging to it as zealously as the beleaguered beetle clings to his cherished picture frame when Grete and her mother attempt to remove it from his walls.
Kafka after Dark:
I adopted a more Proustian posture for my second reading. After all, Gregor's metamorphosis starts in bed with his "supine imaginings." Startled and only half awake, he examines "his curved brown belly segmented by rigid arches atop which the blanket, already slipping, was just barely managing to cling." Clutching my own sheet, I saw in that heroic blanket the whole drama: Gregor's own doomed quest to cling to a human past. Gregor will later drag his own sheet to cover himself — a painstaking labor that "cost him four hours" and speaks to the all-too human shame that remains with Gregor in his beastly form.
After the initial uncovering of Gregor's monstrous body, it would take a spreadsheet to keep track of the Samsas' various states of (un)dress. Gregor assumes that his sister is absent the first morning because "she must have just gotten out of bed and not yet begun to dress." The first time she does visit him in his room, she is "almost completely clothed." His father could previously be found "sitting in an armchair in his nightshirt," but now he wears a "smart blue uniform with gold buttons" at all times, a uniform which eventually becomes as soiled as Gregor's filthy shell. Gregor fixates on his mother's "unfastened skirts slipping one by one from her waist" as she hurries to stop his father from killing Gregor with the apple assault. She has taken a job in a dress show, "sacrific[ing] herself for the underclothes of strangers."
As for Gregor, his most beloved possession is a framed magazine ad picturing a lady "in a fur hat and fur boa who sat erect, holding out to the viewer a heavy fur muff in which her entire forearm had vanished." His former romantic interest is a girl who worked, naturally, in a haberdashery. And in Gregor's charged fantasy about his sister, he pictures her visiting his room, and kissing "her throat, which, now that she went to the office every day, she wore free of ribbon or collar."
There are erotic or Oedipal explanations for the novella's obsession with clothes, but it is also elegiac. Why wouldn't Gregor, who can now only outfit himself with a thick layer of dust, pay particular attention to the more refined coverings of the humans around him?
It was getting late, and as Gregor remarks before he ceases slumber altogether, "Human being need their sleep." I'll leave my bedroom attire to the reader's imagination and simply note that after turning off the light, I swaddled myself particularly tightly in my blanket that night.
Kafka at a Cafe:
Given Prague's robust café culture, reading The Metamorphosis at a coffee shop seemed de rigeur. Before my coffee had time to cool, I reached the passage in which Gregor shows himself for the first time to his mother, father, and the general manager. Frau Samsa backs up into the table and knocks over the coffeepot, prompting the first instinctual reaction Gregor experiences in his new form:
"Mother, Mother," Gregor said softly, gazing up at her. For a moment he had forgotten all about the general manager; on the other hand, he could not restrain himself, when he beheld this flowing coffee, from snapping his jaws several times. At this, the mother gave another shriek and fled from the table into the arms of Gregor's father as he rushed to her aid.
The father proceeds to "aid" Gregor by giving him a "liberating shove" through the too-narrow bedroom door, scraping his sides and mangling a few of his legs. As the narrator rationalizes: "And of course in his father's current state it could not possibly have occurred to him to open the door's other wing to create an adequate passage." Of course: the father's "current state," in which he is "uttering hisses like a wild man," logically prevents him from taking into account his son's. Instinct and logic are consistently at odds in the novella. Gregor is a creature who can't control his jaws from grotesquely snapping at the sight (or scent) of coffee, yet who in a later scene will ignore his instincts by deeming it unsportsmanlike to escape from his father's wrath by crawling on the walls and ceiling. He is rewarded for his consideration with a debilitating injury.
The Metamorphosis is full of confident logical statements that butt up against the profound illogicality of the novella's conceit. My favorite is Grete's reaction when she doesn't immediately see Gregor in his room: "…well, goodness, he had to be somewhere, it's not as if he might have flown away…" Why, pray tell, not? He has, after all, just turned into a giant bug. (Nabokov is convinced that Gregor does actually have wings, and thus could have flown away.)
It is no wonder then that the family's final judgment on Gregor takes the form of a logical pronouncement: "If it were Gregor, it would have realized a long time ago that it just isn't possible for human beings to live beside such a creature, and it would have gone away on its own." Of course.
Kafka in the Park:
The airplane, bed, and even the tightly packed café had replicated the cramped nature of the Samsa apartment. It was time for some open space. The sun was shining for the first time in months, and I had a bench to myself in a gorgeous park with a view much better than Gregor's, which looked out on "a desert in which the gray sky and the gray earth were indistinguishably conjoined." I had read the novella three times now, so I decided this time to carry out an outdoor-friendly exegetical exercise and think up alternate titles for the novella. (In a perfect world, all English essay prompts about free will, fate, nature, and nurture should be replaced with one: Re-title the book in question and justify your response.)
Good Intentions: The novella is full of good intentions that backfire and those that can't always be expressed. Each time he escapes from his room, the agonizingly slow Gregor only survives by signaling his "good intentions" to his father that he is trying to return as quickly as he can. Each failure of empathy or understanding is recalled in the perfectly insensitive and deliciously ironic last line "…it seemed to [the Samsas] almost a confirmation of their new dreams and good intentions when their daughter swiftly sprang to her feet and stretched her young body."
Whimsical Extravagances: A phrase used in the beginning of the novella by the general manager in reference to Gregor's absence from work. Unlike his fellow salesmen who live "like harem girls," Gregor leads an ascetic, dutiful existence and has the "cautious habit" of locking his bedroom door at night. He has no friends to speak of and his romantic life consists of a glossy picture of a model. And yet, perhaps in Gregor's sporadic and orgiastic fits of crawling, in the pleasure he takes in feeling the cool glass of his beloved picture frame against his belly, the clerk sensed something whimsically extravagant about the dull salesman after all.
New Entertainments: Noticing Gregor's "peregrinations" and the "sticky trails they leave behind," Grete takes note of her brother's "new entertainments." While there is plenty of abject moping in the novella, there is also a pronounced appetite for fun. Gregor diverts himself with the "novelty of crawling" and by "playfully" taking bites of the food he seldom eats. He enjoys rummaging through the mess in his room with "ever-increasing" pleasure, even if these flights are followed by a sense of shame. The charwoman is clearly intrigued by, even fond of, her charge, and upon first seeing Gregor, the lodgers find him more entertaining than Grete's mediocre violin playing. Even Gregor's father adopts a tone both "furious" and "glad" upon steeling himself to punish Gregor for the first time. The metamorphosis has thus provided everyone in the household with new sadistic, voyeuristic, and freakish entertainments.
Pride Before the Fall: Coffee pots spill, violins drop, Gregor plummets from the bed and ceiling, man descends the evolutionary ladder, and apples rain down from on high.
And several more jottings to ponder on a nice afternoon in the park: Creatures of Habit; Special Accommodations; Social Mobility; The Doors; Exaggerated Deference; Gregor and the Women; Ancient Debts; Conditional Love.
Kafka at a Bar:
The celebratory fifth and final reading. Thinking it too pretentious to read Kafka at the bar, I secured a seat on an outside deck and made my way through one novella and a few IPAs. Given my earlier concerns, I was surprised to find myself sitting next to two patrons debating a Slavoj Žižek essay from a collection entitled Deconstructing Zionism. Had I woken up from troubled dreams to find myself transformed once again into a graduate student?
After about 40 pages, the sun and the seven percent beer took its toll. The conversations taking place around me made it even more difficult to focus. Various entertaining topics were discussed: the ethics of a 24-year-old playing on a 30-and-over softball team, Southerners' inability to drive in the snow, and overhead bin etiquette. In the snippet that made me lose all hope of continuing my engagement with The Metamorphosis, a man referred to a reviled co-worker as an "ass barnacle," thereby trumping Kafka's relatively tame takedown of the general manager as a "creature devoid of backbone and wit."
Well, I reasoned, eavesdropping happens to be a central part of the novella, and indeed of Kafka's oeuvre, so why not go with it? As a snooping peasant tells K. in The Castle, "There's always something new to listen to." There is a usually a sinister aspect to Kafkaesque eavesdropping, but in The Metamorphosis, it stems from Gregor's yearning to "be drawn once more into the circle of humankind." Instead he gets "tolerance, only tolerance." The Samsas do permit their son to listen in on their dull domestic scenes at night through a slightly open door, but he is told in no uncertain terms to disappear when he attempts to actually rejoin the circle. The last thing Gregor ever hears is his sister's exasperated "Finally!" as she impatiently watches him return to his room for the last time. Nevertheless, while dying he thinks back on his family with "nothing but tenderness and love," the grotesque proceedings and rough handling having done little to affect his thirst for human company.
I went to walk off my buzz, giving free rein to a drunken mawkishness about Gregor's goodness, an assessment of his character challenged forcefully in Bernofsky's afterword:
…Gregor's new physical state appears as a representation of his long-standing spiritual abjectness. Finally Gregor has only himself to blame for the wretchedness of his situation, since he has unwillingly accepted wretchedness as it was thrust upon him…Gregor Samsa, giant bug, is a cartoon of the subaltern, a human being turned inside out. He has traded in his spine for an exoskeleton…Gregor is a salesman, but what he's sold is himself: his own agency and dignity, making him a sellout through and through.
Seduced by the seeming clarity of the allegory, Bernofsky is too hard on Gregor, who is guilty, just as Joseph K. and most of Kafka's anti-heroes are guilty. But Kafka's allegories are more opaque; Gregor and K. are also perfectly innocent and, crucially, the actions of those around them are manifestly more despicable. To quote the decidedly pro-Gregor Nabokov: "Here is a point to be observed with care and love. Gregor is a human being in an insect's disguise; his family are insects disguised as people."
Re-readers, I'm convinced, are more judgmental than first-time readers, but on my fifth and buzzed reading, I had never felt more fondly about Gregor — a fussy, abject saint, but a saint nonetheless. Perhaps I would have revised this view had I gone through with a sixth reading, "Kafka with a Hangover," but to echo one of the alternate titles, that would have seemed like a "whimsical extravagance."
Matt Seidel | 15 books mentioned 11 min read

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


Vlad invited me to be involved in launching the very first BTA show. His dream was to bridge emerging artists/students with professional artists giving both the student and professional an opportunity to collaborate and experience something truly amazing and rewarding for all. Vlad brought his work ethic and artistic vision to BTA, sharing it with the students and professionals. He also brought other talented and well respected choreographers. I was taught how to convey a story. My passion as a dancer and artist came to life as I interpreted Vlad's vision through his direction. I performed in Prima Volta at 9, Senses at 10, On the Sawdust Trail as the lead "young boy" at 11 , and Checkmate as the lead "Noah" at 12. Having been a part of BTA has left me with wonderful memories. I cherish the many friendships and connections I have made. I will always be grateful to Vlad and BTA. I would highly recommend BTA to serious dancers considering careers in dance/arts. I would also encourage young people and all those interested in the arts to attend the performances. Watching is not just observing. It is a unique experience for the individual.
Starting at the age of 6, Shale began training with Vlad Novitski in contemporary, tap, jazz, modern, lyrical, hip hop and acro, competing for 6 years. During that time he was awarded many Regional and National titles. At age 9, Shale also began studying vocal music, violin, drama, and visual arts at Claude Watson School for the Arts in Toronto. It was there that he was discovered by the Artistic Director and Producer of "A Night At Massey Hall", where he improvised a dance solo to a full house with a 20 piece band playing Frank Zappa's, "I am the Slime" . Through that performance he was approached to be in a Maxwell House commercial which was the subject of an optimism campaign, featuring "colourblind", the solo Shale had performed earlier that year. When Shale was 11, he was a finalist and judges favourite on Canada's Got Talent. From there he was cast in the movies "An American Girl: Isabelle dances into the spotlight" and "StageFright". Shale began training exclusively in classical and contemporary ballet at 13 under the tutelage of Tatiana Stepanova. That same year Shale became the Youth Grand Prix winner of the prestigious international ballet competition, "YAGP" where he performed at the Lincoln Center in New York City and was offered several scholarships, namely to the acclaimed Bolshoi Ballet School, the Houston Ballet School, Harid Conservatory, and Academie Princess Grace of Monte Carlo where he currently resides and trains with Michel Rahn (former teacher of Benjamin Milipied) and is under the direction of Luca Masala. Shale has worked with many choreographers, most notably Marco Goecke, resident choreographer of Stuttgart ballet and choreographer in NDT. He made the piece "la valse", which he created on Shale as a soloist. It was performed at the legendary Opera Garnier de Monte Carlo where Princess Caroline was in attendance. Shale also works with Jean Christophe Maillot (Director of Les Ballets de Monte-Carlo) and was in the famous production of "Casse Noisette Compagnie"(showcased in 450 cinemas in Europe) sharing the stage with Bolshoi ballet Principals, Artem Ovcharenko and Olga Smirnova. In addition to being a dancer, Shale is also a choreographer. Most recently he self- choreographed a piece called "Dysfunctioning Robot" performed at the Futurum Project in Monte Carlo with Prince Albert of Monaco in attendance. In August of 2016 Shale danced the Nutcracker Male Variation at the "Gala of the Stars" in California sharing the stage with some of the most well respected principal dancers in the world, including Maria Kotchetkova, Danil Simkin, Xander Parish, and Yuan Yuan Tan to name a few.


Nasdaq OMX Chief warns of "perverted' dark pools.
The integrity of the markets has become a controversial issue and the scrutiny has intensified since the publication of Michael Lewis's book Flash Boys, which said the markets are rigged. Mary Jo White, chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission, recently announced sweeping recommendations to increase transparency in the markets.
Dark pools have become a particular focus because prices are only posted after a trade has been executed. The venues serve a legitimate purpose in facilitating large block orders for institutional investors, but the average trade size in dark pools is 187 shares, Mr Greifeld said.
"It's a perversion. Something is not working," he said, adding that the regulation for alternative trading systems, which include dark pools, "needs to be restored to its original purpose".


Why Did Activision Leave the ESA? Answer: "We're Special"
Posted on July 10, 2008, Jonathan Why Did Activision Leave the ESA? Answer: "We're Special"
In other words, Activision is so big now that it needs its own representatives working with government legislators. Kotick did however state that they weren't leaving the ESA altogether so much as taking some "time off." They may rejoin the ESA later on, but if at the rate they've been raking in cash these days, I wouldn't hold your breath.


While Raf Simons' drug references were intentional, other brands were blindsided.
With the opioid crisis in America, drugs seem to be an overriding topic of conversation among lawmakers and the public these days. And the fashion industry is no exception.
Raf Simons based his entire fall men's collection on "Christiane F.," a 1981 film that "depicts the realities of drug use and addiction," according to his show notes. His line used a series of color-coded patches with letters that spoke to the "abbreviated names of narcotic substances: LSD, XTC, GHB and 2C-B." In case the message was too obscure, a couple of deconstructed hoodies with "DRUGS" across the front in big, block letters drove home the point.
But a couple of other brands had unplanned marijuana moments during their shows at New York Fashion Week: Men's.
At the Death to Tennis show on Wednesday afternoon at Pier 59, a rapper named Smokepurpp seated in the front row lit up a joint while models were walking down the runway.
The smell and the smoke prompted a beefy security guard from the venue to approach him and tell him to put it out in no uncertain terms. Noticeably unhappy about it, Smokepurpp did snuff it out, but then his equally beefy bodyguard went chest to chest with the security guard. Although the altercation didn't last long, show attendees were clearly distracted by this spectacle and undoubtedly missed a few pieces walking down the runway.
Later that evening, Grungy Gentleman had a similar experience. Its show at an event space in SoHo featured an array of real people walking the runway including NFL players such as Darrelle Revis with which the brand has a capsule collection. One of the models was rapper Don Zio P, who lit up a joint and gleefully smoked it during his turn on the runway.


We report on the first demonstration of quantum cascade detectors based on ZnO/ZnMgO quantum wells grown by molecular beam epitaxy on an m-plane ZnO substrate. The sample is processed in the form of square mesas with special attention paid to the passivation of the side facets. Photocurrent spectroscopy reveals a resonance at 2.8 μm wavelength slightly blue-shifted with respect to the intersubband absorption peak at 3 μm wavelength. The photocurrent persists up to room temperature. The peak responsivity amounts to 0.15 mA/W under irradiation at Brewster's angle of incidence of the top surface of the mesas.
Type-II InAs/GaSb superlattice (T2SL) has recently matured into a commercially available technology addressing both MWIR and LWIR spectral domains. As the prerequisites such as Quantum Efficiency (QE) and dark current were met, more advanced figures of merits related to the ElectroOptic (EO) system as a whole can now be studied in order to position this technology. In this paper, we focus on modulation transfer function (MTF) measurements. Knowing the MTF of a detector is indeed of primary importance for the EO system designers, since spatial filtering affects the system range. We realized MTF measurements on a 320x256 MWIR T2SL FPA provided by IRnova, using a Continuously Self Imaging Grating (CSIG). The advantage of this experimental configuration is that no high performance projection optics is required. Indeed, the CSIG exploits the self-imaging property (known as Talbot effect) to project a pattern with known spatial frequencies on the photodetector. Such MTF measurements have never been done in Integrated Detector Dewar Cooler Assembly (IDDCA) configuration, so we had to study the effect of the vibrations induced by the cryocooler. Vibrations indeed affect the MTF measurement in the same way electrical diffusion would do. Using three accelerometers we optimized our experimental setup and extracted MTF measurements with reduced vibrations. The pixel size is 26μm for a pitch of 30μm.
Since 2010 Onera works on the characterization of the nightglow radiation for night-vision applications in moonless conditions. This radiation is mainly due to the deexcitation of hydroxyl molecules in the upper atmosphere (~87km). It is present in the visible range and reaches its maximum value in the short wavelength infrared bands between 1.4 and 1.8μm (Meinel bands). Although few energy reaches the ground, this radiation is emitted over the whole sky and therefore may be an interesting additional light source for night vision systems in moonless or cloudy sky conditions. Moreover, observation of the nocturnal sky in the short wave infrared band gives access to dynamic processes studies, these processes perturbing emission of radiation. In this paper, we present works carried out at Onera about observation and modelling of nightglow radiation.
The development of new low-noise infrared detectors, such as RAPID (CEA LETI/Sofradir) or SAPHIRA (Selex), has given the possibility to consider infrared wavefront sensing at low ux. We propose here a comparative study of near infrared (J and H bands) wavefront sensing concepts for mid and high orders estimation on a 8m- class telescope, relying on three existing wavefront sensors: the Shack-Hartmann sensor, the pyramid sensor and the quadri-wave lateral shearing interferometer. We consider several conceptual designs using the RAPID camera, making a trade-off between background flux, optical thickness and compatibility with a compact cryostat integration. We then study their sensitivity to noise in order to compare them in different practical scenarios. The pyramid provides the best performance, with a gain up to ∼ 0.5 magnitude, and has an advantageous setup.
InAs/GaSb superlattice (SL) is a peculiar quantum system for infrared detection, where electrical and optical properties are directly governed by the composition and the periodicity of the InAs/GaSb cell. Indeed, several structures with different InAs to GaSb thickness ratios in each SL period, can target the same cut-off wavelength. Likewise, the type of conductivity of the non-intentionally doped SL structure is also linked to the InAs/GaSb SL period. The objective of this communication is to use the flexibility properties of InAs/GaSb SL to design and then to fabricate by MBE a pin photodiode where the active zone is made of different SL periods. Electrical and electro-optical characterizations are reported. The results show that SL structure for the MWIR domain can be designed by combining the best of each SL periods.
The RAPID camera is an Avalanche Photo Diode array allowing very fast observation from the optical to the infrared with still a low noise per read. The camera born from a large collaboration within the FUI/FOCUS is intensively tested at IPAG (Grenoble) on an interferometric bench and will soon replace the actual camera of the PIONIER interferometer mounted on the visitor focus of the VLTi. We shortly present here the PIONIER instrument design and success to then focus on the RAPID tested performances. We will then resume the performance tests made on sky with the PIONIER. The RAPID camera is the first IR APD matrix ever mounted on an on-sky astronomical instrument. We show here how this fast, low-noise, large-band and sensitive camera improves PIONIER and the optical interferometry in general.
This paper is devoted to the presentation of a new technique of characterization of the Intra-Pixel Sensitivity Variations (IPSVs) of astronomical detectors. The IPSV is the spatial variation of the sensitivity within a pixel and it was demonstrated that this variation can contribute to the instrument global error. Then IPSV has not to be neglected especially in the case of under-sampled instruments for high quality imaging and accurate photometry. The common approaches to measure the IPSV consist in determining the pixel response function (PRF) by scanning an optical probe through the detector. These approaches require high-aperture optics, high precision mechanical devices and are time consuming. The original approach we will present in this paper consists in projecting high-resolution periodic patterns onto the whole sensor without classic optics but using the self-imaging property (the Talbot effect) of a Continuously Self Imaging Grating (CSIG) illuminated by a plane wave. This paper describes the test bench and its design rules. The methodology of the measurement is also presented. Two measurement procedures are available: global and local. In the global procedure, the mean PRF corresponding to the whole Focal Plane Array (FPA) or a sub-area of the FPA is evaluated. The results obtained applying this procedure on e2v CCD 204 are presented and discussed in detail. In the local procedure, a CSIG is moved in front of each pixel and a pixel PRF is reconstructed by resolving the inverse problem. The local procedure is presented and validated by simulations.
We report in this paper decisive advance on the detector development for the astronomical applications that require very fast operation. Since the CCD220 and OCAM2 major success, new detector developments started in Europe either for visible and IR wavelengths. Funded by ESO and the FP7 Opticon European network, the NGSD CMOS device is fully dedicated to Natural and Laser Guide Star AO for the E-ELT with strong ESO involvement. The NGSD will be a 880x840 pixels CMOS detector with a readout noise of 3 e (goal 1e) at 700 Hz frame rate and providing digital outputs. A camera development, based on this CMOS device and also funded by the Opticon European network, is ongoing. Another major AO wavefront sensing detector development concerns IR detectors based on Avalanche Photodiode (e- APD) arrays within the RAPID project. Developed by the SOFRADIR and CEA/LETI manufacturers, the latter offers a 320x255 8 outputs 30 microns IR array, sensitive from 0.4 to 3 microns, with less than 2 e readout noise at 1600 fps. A rectangular window can also be programmed to speed up even more the frame rate when the full frame readout is not required. The high QE response, in the range of 70%, is almost flat over this wavelength range. Advanced packaging with miniature cryostat using pulse tube cryocoolers was developed in the frame of this programme in order to allow use on this detector in any type of environment. The characterization results of this device are presented here. Readout noise as low as 1.7 e at 1600 fps has been measured with a 3 microns wavelength cut-off chip and a multiplication gain of 14 obtained with a limited photodiode polarization of 8V. This device also exhibits excellent linearity, lower than 1%. The pulse tube cooling allows smart and easy cooling down to 55 K. Vibrations investigations using centroiding and FFT measurements were performed proving that the miniature pulse tube does not induce measurable vibrations to the optical bench, allowing use of this cooled device without liquid nitrogen in very demanding environmental conditions. A successful test of this device was performed on sky on the PIONIER 4 telescopes beam combiner on the VLTi at ESOParanal in June 2014. First Light Imaging, which will commercialize a camera system using also APD infrared arrays in its proprietary wavefront sensor camera platform. These programs are held with several partners, among them are the French astronomical laboratories (LAM, OHP, IPAG), the detector manufacturers (e2v technologies, Sofradir, CEA/LETI) and other partners (ESO, ONERA, IAC, GTC, First Light Imaging). Funding is: Opticon FP7 from European Commission, ESO, CNRS and Université de Provence, Sofradir, ONERA, CEA/LETI the French FUI (DGCIS), the FOCUS Labex and OSEO.
Near-Infrared wave front sensing allows to enhance sky coverage with adaptive optics. The recently developed HgCdTe avalanche photodiode arrays are promising, but still present an unperfect cosmetic. After the fine characterization of such a HgCdTe array, we propose a statistical model of the pixel response. Assuming the cosmetic is partially corrected, we simulate the impact of the residual error on a Shack-Hartmann wavefront sensor measurement. The study shows the operability of such a real time correction, and of the HgCdTe APD array characterized in this framework: the RAPID camera.
In this communication, we examine the influence of the SL period of InAs/GaSb superlattice (SL), with diverse InAs to GaSb thickness ratio, on the material and device properties of midwave infrared pin photodiodes. Three SL devices made of three different periods, but exhibiting the same cut-off wavelength at 5 μm at 77K, were grown by molecular beam epitaxy on p-type GaSb substrates. Optical and electrical characterizations (photoluminescence, current-voltage, capacitance-voltage, and photoresponse measurements) were performed and analyzed in order to explain the results obtained. Our investigations show the strong influence of the SL composition on both the material and photodetector properties, such as residual doping concentration, shape of the response spectra and dark current values.
The multispectral imaging technique consists of imaging a given scene at various wavelengths of interest, each one containing a different spectral information. By analyzing this spectral content, the chemical species that are present can be localized on the image and identified by reconstructing their spectral signature. In this way, following Ebbesen's seminal work in plasmonics , purely metallic or hybrid metallodielectric structures [2, 3] seem to be ideal candidates to perform spectral filtering due to their extraordinary transmission efficiency  and polarization selectivity. Moreover, their compact feature makes it possible for them to gather in wide arrays of filters that, once integrated into a cooled infrared camera, can achieve real-time multispectral imaging . As seen in Figure 1.d. the spectral signature reconstruction of a chemical species strongly depends on the number of filters and their transmission spectra for the designed matrix. In order to improve the multispectral camera, a complementary approach consists of changing the filter design to realize a tunable filter whose spectral shape can be adjusted in real time according to the imaged scene. We focused our attention on the superposition of subwavelength gratings which seems to be a structure of great potential for multispectral imaging applications [6, 7].
The purpose of this paper is to give an overview of the state of the art wavefront sensor detectors developments held in Europe for the last decade. The success of the next generation of instruments for 8 to 40-m class telescopes will depend on the ability of Adaptive Optics (AO) systems to provide excellent image quality and stability. This will be achieved by increasing the sampling, wavelength range and correction quality of the wave front error in both spatial and time domains. The modern generation of AO wavefront sensor detectors development started in the late nineties with the CCD50 detector fabricated by e2v technologies under ESO contract for the ESO NACO AO system. With a 128x128 pixels format, this 8 outputs CCD offered a 500 Hz frame rate with a readout noise of 7e-. A major breakthrough has been achieved with the recent development by e2v technologies of the CCD220. This 240x240 pixels 8 outputs EMCCD (CCD with internal multiplication) has been jointly funded by ESO and Europe under the FP6 programme. The CCD220 and the OCAM2 camera that operates the detector are now the most sensitive system in the world for advanced adaptive optics systems, offering less than 0.2 e readout noise at a frame rate of 1500 Hz with negligible dark current. Extremely easy to operate, OCAM2 only needs a 24 V power supply and a modest water cooling circuit. This system, commercialized by First Light Imaging, is extensively described in this paper. An upgrade of OCAM2 is foreseen to boost its frame rate to 2 kHz, opening the window of XAO wavefront sensing for the ELT using 4 synchronized cameras and pyramid wavefront sensing. Since this major success, new developments started in Europe. One is fully dedicated to Natural and Laser Guide Star AO for the E-ELT with ESO involvement. The spot elongation from a LGS Shack Hartman wavefront sensor necessitates an increase of the pixel format. Two detectors are currently developed by e2v. The NGSD will be a 880x840 pixels CMOS detector with a readout noise of 3 e (goal 1e) at 700 Hz frame rate. The LGSD is a scaling of the NGSD with 1760x1680 pixels and 3 e readout noise (goal 1e) at 700 Hz (goal 1000 Hz) frame rate. New technologies will be developed for that purpose: advanced CMOS pixel architecture, CMOS back thinned and back illuminated device for very high QE, full digital outputs with signal digital conversion on chip. In addition, the CMOS technology is extremely robust in a telescope environment. Both detectors will be used on the European ELT but also interest potentially all giant telescopes under development. Additional developments also started for wavefront sensing in the infrared based on a new technological breakthrough using ultra low noise Avalanche Photodiode (APD) arrays within the RAPID project. Developed by the SOFRADIR and CEA/LETI manufacturers, the latter will offer a 320x240 8 outputs 30 microns IR array, sensitive from 0.4 to 3.2 microns, with 2 e readout noise at 1500 Hz frame rate. The high QE response is almost flat over this wavelength range. Advanced packaging with miniature cryostat using liquid nitrogen free pulse tube cryocoolers is currently developed for this programme in order to allow use on this detector in any type of environment. First results of this project are detailed here. These programs are held with several partners, among them are the French astronomical laboratories (LAM, OHP, IPAG), the detector manufacturers (e2v technologies, Sofradir, CEA/LETI) and other partners (ESO, ONERA, IAC, GTC). Funding is: Opticon FP6 and FP7 from European Commission, ESO, CNRS and Université de Provence, Sofradir, ONERA, CEA/LETI and the French FUI (DGCIS).
In 2010, the existence of a zero of transmission at high wavelengths different from the Rayleigh Wood anomaly was highlighted when two identical subwavelength gratings are brought close enough. We recently revealed the origin of this transmission extinction and the mechanism is recalled here. Furthermore, we present an experimental setup to measure the amplitude of this extinction and study its spectral behavior when changing geometrical parameters which represent a real technological challenge. This way a new generation of tunable filters in the mid-infrared with perfect spectral shape control and high rejection efficiency can be designed with practical use to gas sensing applications.
In this paper, we report the development of low flux short wavelength infrared radio-imaging systems to study the radiance due to nightglow emission. This radiation is mainly due to the desexcitation of hydroxyl molecules in the upper atmosphere. It is present in the visible range and reaches its maximum value (at ground level) in the short wavelength infrared band between 1.4 and 1.8μm. The nightglow may be an interesting additional light source for night vision systems in moonless or cloudy sky conditions. In this paper, we describe the experimental setup and present first results of the measurement campaigns that we performed at the Observatoire de Haute-Provence in France and at the European Southern Observatory site of La Silla in Chile.
Free-space optical (FSO) communication systems have currently a restricted range, because of atmospheric effects which reduce their application range. The goal of the SCALPEL project is to study the feasibility of long range FSO systems (goal: 20 km), i.e. to estimate how dedicated devices could enhance the range of FSO communication systems, for example by changing the link's wavelength for a better atmospheric transmission and weaker turbulence effects, and/or by using an innovative adaptive optics device to compensate, at least partially, turbulence perturbations. In this paper, we study how the atmosphere constrains the system design in terms of transmission and turbulence. We show that the system cannot work unless it has a full-wave adaptive optics correction, and that a wavelength around 4 μm presents several advantages toward the usual wavelength, i.e. 1.55 μm. A first design of the system is then presented, including the source and the sensor.
We report the performances of LWIR (λc = 9.0 μm at 80K) HgCdTe electron injected avalanche photodiodes (e-APD). In these devices, the exponential gain curve, up to gains equal to 23 at 100K, and the low excess noise factor close to unity (F ~ 1-1.25) are indicative of a single carrier multiplication process, which is electron impact ionization. The dark current is mainly due to a diffusion current at low reverse bias and tunneling currents at high reverse bias. A Monte Carlo model has been developed for understanding the multiplication process in Hg1-xCdxTe e-APDs. We find a good agreement between first simulation results and experimental measurements of the gain and the excess noise factor in both MWIR (x = 0.3) and LWIR (x = 0.235) e-APDs at 80K. Furthermore, simulations do not show any heavy hole impact ionization. This model which enables to perform phenomenological studies aims at identifying the main physical and technological parameters that influence the gain and the excess noise. In the present work, it is used to study the influence of the thickness of the ndoped region on the gain and the excess noise factor. We found that F still decreases while the thickness of the n- layer decreases. However, an optimum thickness of the n- layer exists around 1μm in terms of gain-voltage characteristic.
A Monte Carlo model is developed for understanding the multiplication process in HgCdTe infrared avalanche photodiodes (APD). A good agreement is achieved between simulations and experimental measurements of gain and excess noise factor on midwave infrared electron injected Hg0.7 Cd0.3Te APD manufactured at CEA/LETI. In both cases, an exponential gain and a low excess noise factor - close to unity out to gains greater than 1000 - were observed on 5.1-μm cut-off devices at 77K. These properties are indicative of a single ionizing carrier multiplication process that is to say in our case the electron. Simulations also predict that holes do not achieve enough energy to impact ionize and to contribute to the gain, which confirms the previous observation. A comparison study is presented to explain the effect of different combinations of scattering processes on the avalanche phenomenon in HgCdTe. We find that alloy scattering with random scattering angle increases multiplication gain and reduces excess noise factor compared to the case including impact ionization only. It also appears that, in the more complete scattering environment, optical phonon scattering delays significantly the onset of avalanche.


The last has not been heard of Jussie Smollett's assault case as a jury is set to hold in the coming week.
According to TMZ, the two brothers who were initially arrested in over Jussie's assault are said to be living somewhere in Chicago under the watchful eyes of the police. The gist is that the police do not want people to get in touch with them according to pulse.ng.
TMZ also reports that the apartment of the two Nigerians which was searched by the cops had some suspicious evidence like torn magazine pages which is been suspected to have been used to send the threat notes to Jussie Smollett.
Sources close to TMZ says the police believes the brothers purchased the rope that was around Jussie's neck after the incident, there is no surveillance video at the hardware store because it erases after a week.
The source also reports the police thinks there have been red flags since the beginning of the investigation. For example, the police were surprised that when Jussie took them to the crime scene, he was able to show them the camera located at the spot where he was attacked.
Trouble in PDP Kabba/Bunu Federal Constituency, as Aspirants Reject Imposed Candidate!