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The Relationship of Andersen and Dickens
From Suzi Feay's review of Hans Christian Andersen: European Witness in this weekend's Guardian:
The relationship with Dickens was fraught; it began well, but after a lengthy visit, a note was placed on their mantelpiece: "Hans Andersen slept in this room for five weeks – which seemed to the family ages!" . . .
[Paul Binding] points out many links between Andersen's novel The Improvisatore and David Copperfield, explaining the weak, unconvincing endings of each book as being due to "the writer having no experience at all of sustained union with a woman (Andersen), or failing to feel for a wife (and even children) that committed devotion in which he professed to believe (Dickens)".
Of course, I'd find the Dickenses' sign more amusing if I weren't entering my second week as a house guest. (Heading home Monday.)
Labels: AUTHOR Charles Dickens, AUTHOR Hans Christian Andersen, travel notes
From Spring Heel Jack to Batman
Among the ephemera on display in the "Comics Unmasked: Art and Anarchy in the UK" exhibit at the British Library is a penny-dreadful tale of Spring-Heeled Jack, which the curators suggest was an inspiration for Batman, pointing particularly to his horns.
I thought that was a stretch. Not that Bob Kane and Bill Finger were above borrowing plots, images, and details from other adventure stories of their time, acknowledged and unacknowledged. But how would two guys growing up in post-WW1 America have seen the Spring-Heeled Jack magazine serials from Victorian Britain? And wasn't Spring-Heeled Jack a monster and/or troublemaker instead of a crimefighter?
At io9, commenter Michael Munro laid out a lineage of pulp fiction leading from London to California to Gotham:
Spring Heeled Jack…transitioned from London urban myth (1830s) to melodrama anti-hero (1870s) to prototype superhero (1880s-early 1900s). As written by "penny dreadful" author Alfred Burrage, SHJ was a wealthy aristocrat who assumed the disguise of a devilish, bat-winged avenger of the night, maintained a secret underground lair and used his athletic and technological skills to battle evil-doers - sounds familiar?
Expounding at more length, Munro wrote:
The several "penny dreadful" iterations of Spring Heeled Jack, many written by Alfred Burrage under the pseudonym "Charlton Lea", portrayed him as a nobleman who had been cheated out of his inheritance and who took up a devilish disguise to punish those responsible. Along the way, Spring Heeled Jack also rescued damsels in distress and generally stood up for the innocent and downtrodden. He wore a distinctive mask and costume and was capable of performing incredible leaps thanks to a special pair of boots, credited in one source to a secret mechanism invented by Indian street magicians.
Anticipating Zorro, Jack was fond of marking both enemies and territory by carving his initial with the point of his rapier. He also maintained a secret underground lair (in a converted crypt) and terrified his adversaries with his ringing laugh and catch-phrase, "The day is yours - leave the night to me!"
As Munro notes, the Batman team acknowledged Zorro, created by Johnston McCully in 1919, as an inspiration. Thus, Spring-Heeled Jack wasn't a direct influence on Batman, and the horns/ears were a shared trope rather than deliberate borrowing.
Labels: ARTIST Bob Kane, AUTHOR Alfred Burrage, AUTHOR Bill Finger, COMIC Batman, comics history, folklore and other myths, museumgoing
Back in Bellingham
This art is by Carororo. It's part of a display of fan art at Friendly Neighborhood Comics in Bellingham, Massachusetts.
Though that store's in my home state, and my home state isn't that large, it's still what I consider a long drive from my home. What's more, I'm in London this weekend, so it's even less likely that I'll visit. So I was happy to learn about this event online.
Labels: COMIC Batman, weekly Robin
Black and Blue?
The May/June Yale magazine considers who the university's first African-American graduate was. The usual names are Richard Henry Green, MD 1857; Courtlandt Van Rensselaer Creed, MD 1857; and Edward Bouchet, 1874, PhD 1876. They were recognized as having black ancestry and (at least at times) classified as black in the racial categories of their time.
But what, Mark Alden Branch asks, about Moses Simons, 1809, already identified as Yale's first Jewish graduate?
…evidence uncovered recently by two scholars—Adam Wolkoff of Rutgers and Laura Copland of Eugene Lang College—suggests that Simons could have had an African American mother, and that he was viewed by others as "colored," in the parlance of the time.
Simons came from South Carolina, apparently the son of one of five Jewish brothers who emigrated there from London. Records are not clear as to which of the brothers was his father, and no record of his mother has been found. At least one of the brothers is known to have fathered a mixed-race child.
Simons became a lawyer in New York City. The only hints that he had African American ancestry come from an account of a criminal trial in 1818 after Simons was charged with assault. As told by a lawyer and journalist named Daniel Rogers in a contemporary legal periodical, Simons and his brother were asked to leave a dance because other patrons were uncomfortable with the presence of the "two coloured men."
And the story of Randall Lee Gibson, 1853, reminds us that the whole question of racial classification is based on a series of fictions.
Gibson…grew up on a sugar plantation in Louisiana, the descendant of a family of wealthy planters and slave owners. He was a colonel in the Confederate army, fought to defend slavery, and called black people "the most degraded of all the races of men." He became a US senator from Louisiana after Reconstruction.
But as Vanderbilt law professor Daniel Sharfstein '00JD details in his book The Invisible Line: Three American Families and the Secret Journey from Black to White, Gibson's great-grandfather Gideon Gibson came to South Carolina in the 1730s as a "free man of color" with a white wife. By Randall Gibson's time, the family explained any dark complexion in the family as due to Gypsy or Portuguese roots, Sharfstein says.
Both these Yale men had family roots in South Carolina, which had a fairly cosmopolitan port at Charleston, at times a legally "black" majority, and a racial code that differed from the Virginia laws that have been so studied.
Labels: cultural sensitivities, schools
Tik-Tok and a Kalidah Walk into a Bar
The comics universe of The Legend of Oz: The Wicked Witch and Legends of Oz: The Scarecrow will expand a little this summer as publisher Big Dog Ink releases a comics miniseries subtitled Tik-Tok and the Kalidah this summer.
As created by Tom Hutchinson, this comics continuity "mashes up the Land of Oz with a classic Western," in the words of Rob Anderson. Anderson pitched the idea of Tik-Tok, the mechanical man, as a bounty hunter in that universe.
Tik-Tok's partner is a kalidah, a creature L. Frank Baum invented in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. Kalidahs are crosses between bears and tigers. They're smart, they're nasty, they're carnivorous. They can swim like ducks. Their king knows a bit of magic. In sum, they're extremely dangerous. And it's hard to imagine a kalidah partnering up with anyone except another kalidah.
The miniseries is scripted by Anderson and Keith Thomas, with art by Renato Rei and Ceci de la Cruz. It looks like they've redesigned Tik-Tok significantly. It's harder to tweak a kalidah.
Labels: AUTHOR L. Frank Baum, BOOK Wonderful Wizard of Oz, nature red in tooth and claw, prose to comics, the public domain belongs to all of us, Tik-Tok
Behind the Legends of Oz
Legends of Oz is shaping up to be a legendary flop at the American box office, a computer-animated musical based on a well-known property that's not only losing money (such movies are expensive) but hardly making any money.
After a week and a half of wide release (over 2,500 theaters), it's made less than $7 million. Adjusted for the cost of tickers, that's even worse than Hoot and The Seeker: The Dark Is Rising.
It turns out that financing has been an issue for Legends of Oz all along, as documented in a Metafilter post cleverly titled "Pay No Attention to the Man Behind the Curtain":
Alpine Pictures, aka Summertime Entertainment, aka Box Office Productions, aka Dorothy of Oz LLC, began selling shares in the film in 2006, at a projected budget of $20m. By 2009, having sold close to $18m in shares, the offering was expanded to $24m. The offering would be expanded again later, with reference to future Oz sequels, merchandising, and an Oz-themed MMORPG. The film's release was repeatedly pushed back.
Complaints appeared online as early as 2008 about a Burbank, California-based telemarketing firm, First National Information Network, that appeared to exist only to aggressively solicit strangers for investments in Oz. Others report seeing the film promoted on the Global Information Network, a listing of spurious investment opportunities hawked by jailed con man Kevin Trudeau. Potential investors were told they could use retirement accounts if cash wasn't available.
Cease-and-desist orders have been issued against Alpine by the states of Delaware, Ohio, Indiana, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, Texas, Alabama, Washington and California for alleged violations of SEC rules against general solicitation. Alpine allegedly targeted naive, unaccredited investors with cold calls; painted unrealistic pictures of the film's potential; and collected 40% "consulting fees" on the money raised.
(Hat tip to Laura Gjovaag.)
Labels: crime wave, digging past the headlines, MOVIE Legends of Oz, movies
Thunderstruck Strikes
My science-activity book Soap Science is out of print, but it's received a dollop of literary immortality in Elizabeth McCracken's new collection of short stories, Thunderstruck.
In the story "Juliet," originally published in Esquire, some town librarians look up the record of a kid who's suddenly in the news for all the wrong reasons. All they find is that two years before he'd borrowed Bell, Soap Science (1993), and never returned it.
I'm pleased to report that the story doesn't suggest I was a bad influence. Instead, the appearance of Soap Science as what the kid probably borrowed for a school assignment reads as one of many innocuous details—so dutiful, so clean—that don't add up to an explanation of what's gone wrong. As in her best-known work, The Giant's House, Elizabeth McCracken focuses on details of ordinary living in an extraordinary circumstance.
At the time she wrote that story, Elizabeth was working as a librarian outside Boston. We knew each other in high school and crossed paths in local book circles once or twice. Now she's teaching at the University of Texas and tweeting up a storm.
Elizabeth McCracken is swinging through New England on her book tour this week, including appearances at Porter Square Books in Cambridge on Wednesday and Newtonville Books in Newton Centre on Thursday. Unfortunately, I can't go to either event since I'm heading across the Atlantic this week. So I'm spreading the word about them instead. Check out Thunderstruck. Especially page 70.
Labels: AUTHOR Elizabeth McCracken, BOOK Soap Science, BOOK Thunderstruck, libraries and why they matter, my own writing, travel notes
Adam Beechen on Taking on Tim Drake
Several weeks back, the Nerdist Writers podcast had a discussion about the challenge in comic-book scripting of taking over an ongoing magazine. One of the regulars, Adam Beechen, spoke about his two experiences with that challenge, which both happen to have involved Tim Drake as Robin.
One was Robin itself at the "One Year Later" break after DC's Infinite Crisis, issues #148-166. As Beechen says, he wasn't picking up right after the previous scripter; the company had established an excuse for changing things, dropping threads, reworking the situation.
The second magazine was Teen Titans a short time later, with a transitional period of co-scripting with that volume's founding writer Geoff Johns, issues #44-49. (Beechen briefly mentions his work launching a Batman Beyond comic and doesn't mention his Batgirl miniseries.)
Along the way, Beechen, who came from the field of television animation, made a few notable observations:
DC's only editorial mandate for Robin was that the first villain had to be Cassandra Cain, then Batgirl. That remains a very unpopular decision with her fans, for which Beechen is sometimes blamed. (I discussed the possible thinking behind DC's mandate here.)
Beechen studied his predecessor Bill Willingham's issues of Robin and tried unsuccessfully to contact him, and he read Chuck Dixon's earliest issues, available in paperback. But he apparently didn't check the bulk of Dixon's run (nor the intervening stretch by Pete Wood).
Beechen didn't study Batgirl. His comments implicitly acknowledge one result, the fan criticism of how he handled the question of Cassandra Cain's difficulties with language.
Beechen came away with the idea that no one had explored Tim's life as a teenager. Actually, that was the focus of most of Dixon's issues. One result, it seems to me, is that after the initial storyline Beechen's issues don't really stand out. The small moments that are memorable, however, involve Tim's relationship with Bruce Wayne.
As for Teen Titans, Beechen voices the usual complaints of a comics writer without the clout of Johns or Grant Morrison: sudden editorial changes, company-wide crossovers, having to cut a plotline short.
Labels: AUTHOR Adam Beechen, AUTHOR Bill Willingham, AUTHOR Chuck Dixon, AUTHOR Geoff Johns, COMIC Batgirl, COMIC Teen Titans, comics scripting, the genius of the conglomerate, weekly Robin
OIP Derangement Syndrome in Wolfeboro
For many years my family vacationed a couple of weeks each summer in Wolfeboro, New Hampshire, so I was especially interested in this example of OIP Derangement Syndrome.
As the Granite State News reported, a new resident of Wolfeboro named Jane O'Toole sent this report to the town government:
My husband and I were enjoying a meal at Nolan's in Wolfeboro. We were seated very close to the bar, where we witnessed a man eating and drinking alcohol. I found out later he was Police Commission Vice Chairman, Robert Copeland. A man conversing with Mr. Copeland asked if he watched the TV show Chronicle. Mr. Copeland responded loudly, "No, I don't watch TV because every time I turn it on all I ever see is that F*****g Nigger!" As I left, passing Mr. Copeland I whispered, "Is someone here tossing around the "N" word?" Mr. Copeland swung around and responded with an exuberant, "Yeah!"
Copeland's reponse was:
While I believe the problems associated with minorities in this country are momentous, I am not phobic. My use of derogatory slang in reference to those among them undeserving of respect is no secret. It is the exercise of my 1st Amendment rights. . . . I believe I did use the "N" word in reference to the current occupant of the Whitehouse [sic]. For this I do not apologize – he meets and exceeds my criteria for such.
Despite that admission, Copeland also claimed that he'd never said specifically what O'Toole had heard—but also that she shouldn't have been listening to him. All of which suggests that he might have been drinking more "cocktails" than he recalled.
Copeland is eighty-two years old, one of three elected members of the town's police commission. His term expires in 2017. At a recent board meeting scores of residents came to ask Copeland to step down, but he refused and criticized reporters for covering the event.
Wolfeboro is a small lakeside town now built around tourism. I have some fond memories of it. But I suspect that a lot of people share my feelings and would prefer not to visit a town with a racist helping to oversee the police.
Labels: OIP Derangement Syndrome, travel notes
Rush's Fanfiction
I just filed a column for the SCBWI New England newsletter on the big publishing corporations' newfound respect for fanfiction—because it's a way to make money. Big firms are checking fanfiction sites for authors who can craft a story (Sourcebooks), licensing fictional universes (Amazon), and commissioning latter-day sequels from big-name authors (practically every major children's publisher in the UK, it seems).
Right on cue, the Children's Choice Award for Author of the Year went to Rush Limbaugh for his historical fanfiction picture-storybooks, Rush Revere and the Brave Pilgrims and Rush Revere and the First Patriots.
Alexandra Petri at the Washington Post recognized the hero of these books as a classic Mary Sue author stand-in back in December, quoting such lines as:
"A fine answer, Rush Revere," said William [Bradford], smiling. "Are you sure you don't want to be governor?"
Liberty [the horse] again whispered to me, "William really put you on the spot with that question. I couldn't have dug you out of that one. Nice job answering him! Maybe you should get your own radio talk show. You know, callers call in with questions and you give them advice and stuff. I'd totally call you!"
"You are always thinking of the future, Rush Revere," said William, smiling. "I like that about you."
This week Vicky Smith at Kirkus reached the same judgment, quoting from the title character's introduction:
"You know that at Manchester Middle School we have the smartest and most educated teachers. It is my pleasure to introduce you to your substitute, Mr. Revere."
Of course, these books are also commercial ventures. Debbie Reese noted that Limbaugh's own website describes his company buying "10,000 or 15,000" copies to give to schools. Such bulk sales are a common way to jumpstart books onto bestseller lists, where they benefit from increased visibility. But these books aren't just product in themselves: they also help to sell Rush Limbaugh's other goods, with an illustration showing his branded iced tea.
Limbaugh's two books are the only juvenile titles that Simon & Schuster's politically conservative Threshold Editions imprint has published, and two of the very few fictional books. So the editors there may not have recognized the fanfiction for what it is. Then again, with guaranteed sales and a heavyweight author, they probably didn't care.
Labels: awards that might actually sell books, fanfiction and its discontents
Simply Irredeemable
Arthur Tebbel at ComicMix tells us how he really feels:
Legends of Oz: Dorothy's Return is simply irredeemable. I've been sitting in front of a blank Word document for over an hour trying to figure out where to start and have experienced new waves of outrage every time I think of another part of the movie. The characters are bad, the story is basically nonsense, it's ugly, the songs are bad, even the credits are confusing. I don't know another way to judge this movie to make it look like a success. The 3D stereography didn't make me want to throw up. That's the best I can do.
Dedicated Oz fans seem more willing to give the new movie a chance, if only because we're boggled by having two new Oz movies in cinemas within a calendar year, plus an Oz storyline on a TV show. If only they'd all been good.
Jared Davis noted the new cartoon's resemblance to Journey Back to Oz, another animated Oz movie years in the making with a star-studded vocal cast and few fans. He also noted that Legends of Oz has a 2012 copyright date—it's been waiting around for a while.
Labels: going digital, MOVIE Legends of Oz, movies, sequelitis
Not-So-Secret Origin
Before DC published Secret Origins, #1, with the origin stories of Dick Grayson as Robin as well as Superman and Supergirl, scripter Kyle Higgins said in an interview that his final issue of Nightwing actually "says everything I have to say about the character."
Unfortunately, he was right. The twelve-page story in Secret Origins goes over old ground. The art, penciled by Doug Mahnke, is pretty, just as in the recent Batman and Robin Annual. The story confirms some things already established in DC's "New 52" continuity, such as Dick already being in his mid-teens when he meets Bruce Wayne. The title "The Long Year" provides another temporal fact for readers who care deeply about such things.
But the problem is that the first Robin's origin just isn't secret anymore. In fact, it's so well known among superhero fans that storytellers can evoke it with just partial images, such as a Flying Graysons poster or the broken trapeze rope swinging into the frame in the TV cartoon episode "Robin's Reckoning."
While the stories of how Jason Todd and Tim Drake became Robin have been significantly reworked, Dick Grayson's has remained basically the same since 1940. The only changes have been at the margins: whether the authorities sent Dick to an orphanage instead of apparently straight to Wayne Manor, whether Tony Zucco or his family are still around.
The radical changes have been Frank Miller's story of Bruce kidnapping Dick over several long issues of alternative-continuity All-Star Batman and Robin and Scott Snyder's decision to make the Haly Circus a training ground for athletic assassins—which plays no role in Higgins's new story.
So Higgins's origin story has almost no place original to go. We see the robin bracelet he already established in Robin, #0. We see Tony Zucco threatening the circus. We see the death of Dick's parents as Bruce Wayne watches, and an orphanage. Dick tries hunting his parents' killer and has to be rescued by Batman, but we've seen that before, too.
Higgins said the one idea he had left to explore was the origin of the Robin name, mostly because DC's new editors had nixed the idea of inspiration from Robin Hood movies. (Apparently Kevin Costner's and Russell Crowe's versions don't have the cultural resonance of Errol Flynn's.) So we have a page of Dick thinking about what his crime-fighting identity should be and seeing a robin fly by—the same scene we saw with Bruce Wayne and a bat back in 1939.
The last panel on that page drives home the symbolism with Bruce speaking of the robin as a symbol of "growing up," which is what Robin/Dick Grayson has meant in the DC mythos since the following year. But we already knew that.
Labels: ARTIST Doug Mahnke, AUTHOR Frank Miller, AUTHOR Kyle Higgins, AUTHOR Scott Snyder, childhood books revisited, COMIC Batman, death as entertainment, weekly Robin


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- Politicians putting self-interest first
June 4 2016 By Abiodun Giwa
Paul Ryan, the Speaker of the United States' House of Representatives, ended his dramatic indecision about whether or not to support Donald Trump, the Republican Party's presumptive nominee on Thursday.
For over three weeks, the news media fed the public with information about the from the Conservatives' highest office holder that he was not ready to endorse Trump, amid jitters among several other anti-Trump crowd, over Trump's triumph in the party's primary elections.
Many people are asking why it has taken Ryan so long time for him to endorse his party's flag bearer. Some media reports have answered the question that Ryan has been caught between endorsing Trump and jeopardizing his 2019 presidential dream. Although, Ryan himself said he had not reached the decision whether to or not to endorse Trump, because according to him there was a need to bring members of the party together, following a bruised primary election campaign.
But many people say that Ryan's early endorsement would have helped a longer way in helping to unite the party than what is now seen as his late and reluctant endorsement. But some are careless whether Ryan's endorsement is late or reluctant, they feel relieved that Ryan has done what he is expected to do to help galvanize the toward the general elections, and hoping that others in the Congress who fear they will lose election in their constituencies should see Ryan's bold statesmanship as against personal and selfish agenda.
The fear of losing election in their constituencies, which many of the republican Party Congressmen and women have advanced as reason for their reluctance to endorse Trump has been proved to be selfish by observers who say and ask about what is wrong for anyone to lose an election and become like everyone who have to file applications in search of employment. They see these Congress men and women's position as saying they care about themselves and that voters' decision don't matter to them or that they will do anything to influence voters' decision.
It is one of the reasons many voters complain about Washington politicians as being their for themselves and not for voters' welfare, and the reason many curious observers are laughing at Hillary Clinton's Campaign's catchword "Fighting For us" as a little deceptive, because many voters believe that Washington politicians no longer fight for anyone, but for themselves. Back to Ryan, observers say with his endorsement of Trump, he has separated himself from Mitt Romney in public's view.
The earlier believe was that as running mate in Romney's ill-fated presidential run, Ryan may have been in the same boat with Romney and others, who thought it unthinkable that an outsider could come and take away what some career politicians feel belong to them.

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


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The Phantom Tollbooth at 50: Celebrating Timeless Imagination
From Rapunzel to The Little Red Riding Hood, Beloved Children's Classics as Minimalist Posters
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, Made More Wonderful by Graphic Artist Michael Sieben
Favorite Children's Books of 2019
An emotional intelligence primer in the form of a tender illustrated poem, an empowered retelling of Cinderella, a meditation on what it means to have enough, a serenade to the art of listening as the gateway to self-understanding, and more.
Great children's books are really miniature cartographies of meaning, emissaries of the deepest existential wisdom that cut across all lines of division, scuttle past the many walls adulthood has sold us on erecting, and slip in through the backdoor of our consciousness to speak — in the language of children, which is the language of unselfconscious sincerity — the most timeless truths to the truest parts of us.
Here are the loveliest such truthful, timeless treasures I savored this year. (And in this spirit of timelessness, here are their counterparts from years past: 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011, and 2010.)
WHAT MISS MITCHELL SAW
"Mingle the starlight with your lives and you won't be fretted by trifles," Maria Mitchell (August 1, 1818–June 28, 1889) often told her Vassar students — the world's first university class of professionally trained women astronomers — having herself become America's first professional woman astronomer, thanks to her historic discovery of a new telescopic comet on October 1, 1847, after sixteen tenacious years of sweeping the sky night after night.
Mitchell (whose extraordinary life was the seed for what became Figuring and to whom the inaugural Universe in Verse was dedicated) not only went on to blaze the way for women in STEM but used her prominence — she was arguably America's first true scientific celebrity, welcomed in England, Italy, and Russia as a dignitary of the New World — to become one of the nineteenth century's most ardent advocates for social reform, advancing women's rights and abolition.
The epoch-making discovery that became the platform for Mitchell's modeling of possibility and far-reaching influence is the kernel of the lovely picture-book What Miss Mitchell Saw (public library) by author Hayley Barrett and illustrator Diana Sudyka — a splendid addition to the most inspiring picture-book biographies of cultural heroes.
Barrett's lyrical prose opens with a clever and tender solution to the common pronunciation confusion — Mitchell's first name is spelled like my own but pronounced the presently atypical traditional Latin way:
On the first day of August, in a house tucked away on the fog-wrapped island of Nantucket, a baby girl was born.
Like all babies, this baby was given a name.
Her parents whispered it to her like a gentle breeze, ma…RYE…ah…
Names become a central creative trope in the book — the dignifying, truth-affirming act of calling all realities by their true names. We see the young Maria learn to recognize the ships of this whaling community by name and come to know the local shopkeepers by name.
Finally, after her father apprentices her as his astronomical assistant, she learns the stars by name — a testament to bryologist Robin Wall Kimmerer's astute observation that "finding the words is another step in learning to see."
Sudyka's beautiful gouache-and-watercolor illustrations weave together hand-lettered words from the story with the three great animating forces of Mitchell's early life: the enchantment of the cosmos, the whaling culture of Nantucket, and her family's Quaker values. (In Figuring, writing about the factors that fomented Mitchell's unexampled ascent above the common plane of possibility for women in her era, I point to the original use of the word genius in the term genius loci — Latin for "the spirit of a place" — and wonder whether, despite her incontrovertible natural gift for mathematics, she would have so soared had she not grown up in a secluded whaling community, where matriarchs ruled while men spent months and years on whaling trips, where Quakers lived by the then-countercultural ethos of equal education for boys and girls, where a barren landscape and long winter nights turned astronomy into cherished popular entertainment.)
The book ends with the motto emblazoned on the gold medal Mitchell received from the King of Denmark for her landmark discovery — "Not in vain do we watch the setting and the rising of the stars" — a sentiment that echoes the dying words of the great astronomer Tycho Brahe, which Adrienne Rich incorporated into her exquisite tribute to Caroline Herschel, the world's first professional woman astronomer: "Let me not seem to have lived in vain."
See more of it here.
LAYLA'S HAPPINESS
"What is your idea of perfect happiness?" asks the famous Proust Questionnaire. Posed to David Bowie, he answered simply: "Reading." Jane Goodall answered: "Sitting by myself in the forest in Gombe National Park watching one of the chimpanzee mothers with her family." Proust himself answered: "To live in contact with those I love, with the beauties of nature, with a quantity of books and music, and to have, within easy distance, a French theater."
The touching specificity of these answers and the subtle universality pulsing beneath them reveal the most elemental truth about happiness: that there are as many flavors of it as there are consciousnesses capable of registering it, and that it is a universally delicious necessity of life, which we crave from the day we are born until the day we die. And yet, as Albert Camus lamented, "happiness has become an eccentric activity. The proof is that we tend to hide from others when we practice it."
Half a century later, as we wade through a world that gives us ample reason for sorrow, as existential credibility seems meted out on the basis of how loudly one broadcasts one's disadvantage, the savoring of happiness has become an almost countercultural activity — an act of courage and resistance, and one the practice of which is a whole life's work, as George Eliot well knew when she observed that "one has to spend so many years in learning how to be happy." Why, then, not make the learning of happiness as essential a part of young people's education as the learning of arithmetic? Or even stand with Elizabeth Barrett Browning in deeming it our moral obligation?
All of that — the personal nature of happiness, the daily practice of it, its centrality to participating meaningfully in the world — is what poet Mariahadessa Ekere Tallie explores in her vibrant and vitalizing picture-book debut, Layla's Happiness (public library), illustrated by artist Ashleigh Corrin.
Like Sylvia Plath, who composed The Bed Book for her own children, Tallie — who describes herself in A Velocity of Being: Letters to a Young Reader as "the mother of three galaxies who look like daughters" — has written the book for her youngest galaxy, the book she wished she'd had to read to the elder two.
Tallie constructs the story like a good poem, where the personal is the most welcoming gateway to the universal. We see seven-year-old Layla — whose name means "night beauty" — tally her exuberant everyday sources of happiness.
Happiness leaps at Layla from the color purple, from the succulence of fresh plums, from the constellations of the night sky, from the mischievous delight of slurping spaghetti without a fork. It unspools from her lips as she hums while feeding the chickens at the community garden and names all the trees and greets the neighbors at the farmers' market where she sells the vegetable she has grown from seeds. It pours forth from the poetry her mother reads to her under a makeshift tent and from the tales her father tells her of his own childhood in the South.
There is a heartening countercultural undertone to the book — these happinesses are not things to be purchased at the store or attained with a click, but embodiments of what Hermann Hesse held up as "the little joys" at the heart of a rich life lived with presence, the simple delights Wendell Berry's childhood friend Nick savored even amid his hardship.
The book ends with an open question to the reader — a gentle bow to the sundry, deeply personal meaning of happiness.
CINDERELLA LIBERATOR
"The good life is one inspired by love and guided by knowledge," Bertrand Russell wrote in his 1925 treatise on the nature of happiness shortly after Freud asserted that love and work are the bedrock of our mental health and our very humanity. In the century since, this notion has been taken to a warped extreme — love has been industrialized into the one-note Hollywood model of romance and work has metastasized into aching workaholism. Russell, one of the deepest and most nuanced thinkers our civilization has produced, was closer to the subtler truth, which we as a culture are still struggling to enact: that, while love and work are central to the good life, romantic love is not the only or even necessarily the most rewarding pinnacle of love; that a sense of curiosity and purpose, rather than the mechanistic drive for reward in exchange of effort, is the richest animating force of work; and that these two faces of life-satisfaction must face each other. Just as work alone is not enough for a fulfilling life, love alone is not enough for a fulfilling relationship, romantic or otherwise. No partnership of equals — that is, no truly satisfying partnership — can be complete without each partner recognizing and respecting in the other a sense of purpose beyond the relationship, a contribution to the world that reflects and advances that person's deepest values and most impassioned dreams, in turn adding creative, intellectual, and spiritual fuel to the shared fire of the relationship.
We may know this intuitively, and we may have even demonstrated it empirically — that is just what Harvard's landmark 75-year study of what makes a good life indicated — yet we remain trapped in the millennia-old cultural mythologies that have permeated even our most enlightened and progressive belief systems so deeply and so invisibly that their precepts remain largely unquestioned.
Rebecca Solnit offers a mighty antidote to those limiting precepts in Cinderella Liberator (public library) — an empowered and empowering retelling of the ancient story, which dates back at least two millennia and has recurred in various guises across nearly every culture since, reflecting and perpetuating our most abiding cultural myths about love, work, gender, success, waste and want, the measure of prosperity, and the meaning of purpose.
Governed by her conviction that "key to the work of changing the world is changing the story" and by her lifelong love of books as "toolkits you take up to fix things, from the most practical to the most mysterious, from your house to your heart," Solnit retells the classic story, illustrated with century-old silhouettes by the great Arthur Rackham from a 1919 edition of the tale, in a way that liberates each character from the constrictions imposed upon him or her by someone else's story and confers upon each the dignity of a complete human being with agency and autonomous dreams. Emerging from these simply worded, profound, richly rewarding pages is Solnit the literary artist, Solnit the revolutionary, Solnit the enchanter, Solnit the subtle and endlessly delightful satirist, Solnit the sage.
In one of the loveliest passages in the book, she wrests from the sad small lives of the two stepsisters, Pearlita and Paloma — who are later redeemed as mere victims of a cultural hegemony, and liberated — insight into and liberation from some of our most limiting beliefs. In consonance with Frida Kahlo's touching testament to how love amplifies beauty and with my own conviction that there are infinitely many kinds of beautiful lives, Solnit writes of the stepsisters' preparations for the great ball:
Pearlita was doing her best to pile her hair as high as hair could go. She said that, surely, having the tallest hair in the world would make you the most beautiful woman, and being the most beautiful would make you the happiest.
Paloma was sewing extra bows onto her dress, because she thought that, surely, having the fanciest dress in the world would make you the most beautiful woman in the world, and being the most beautiful would make you the happiest. They weren't very happy, because they were worried that someone might have higher hair or more bows than they did. Which, probably, someone did. Usually someone does.
But there isn't actually a most beautiful person in the world, because there are so many kinds of beauty. Some people love roundness and softness, and other people love sharp edges and strong muscles. Some people like thick hair like a lion's mane, and other people like thin hair that pours down like an inky waterfall, and some people love someone so much they forget what they look like. Some people think the night sky full of stars at midnight is the most beautiful thing imaginable, some people think it's a forest in snow, and some people… Well, there are a lot of people with a lot of ideas about beauty. And love. When you love someone a lot, they just look like love.
There is love, then there is work: Along the way, we meet persons of various animations and occupations, unhinged from gender — the town blacksmith and the painter are each a "she," the bird-doctor is a "he," the dancing teacher is a "they," and all are content making their particular contribution to the world. We learn that Cinderella is living with her evil stepmother because her own mother is a sea captain lost at sea. We see Cinderella and Prince Nevermind become friends rather than romantic partners, magnetized by a sincere curiosity about each other's dreams rather than a possessive demand for romantic bondage. We find out that the prince would rather labor in an orchard than idle in a castle and Cinderella would rather open a farm-to-table cake shop that feeds refugee children from warring kingdoms than be court lady whose sole value is as a prince's spouse and who has ceased to work because there are servants to do everything.
On the other side of the enchantment, the lizards-turned-footwomen and the mice-turned-horses and the rat-turned-coachwoman are each asked whether they actually want to remain footwomen and horses and a coachwoman for perpetuity — some do and some don't, being individuals who dream different dreams and have different notions of self-actualization.
Solnit wrote the book for her beloved great-niece Ella, to whom her classic Men Explain Things to Me is also dedicated and whose name, Solnit realized with a shock only in the course of writing the story, is Cinderella liberated of the cinders. In the afterword to the book, on the cover of which Rackham's cake-holding Cinderella resembles The Statue of Liberty and her torch, Solnit considers how these century-old silhouettes resonated with her broader motivations for the retelling:
I was also touched by Rackham's image of the ragged child at work and thought of unaccompanied minors from Central America and immigrant domestic workers, who are a strong presence where I live, of foster children, and of all the children who live without kindness and security in their everyday lives, all the people who are outsiders even at home, or for whom home is the most dangerous place, or who have no home.
I liked the spirit of the silhouette-girl that Rackham portrayed. Even in rags she is lively, and she labors with alacrity, and runs and frolics wholeheartedly. She is stranded but not defeated. When it came time to write her story for our time, it seemed to me that the solution to overwork and degrading work is not the leisure of the princess, passing off the work to others, but good, meaningful work with dignity and self-determination — and one of the things the cake shop gives Cinderella, aside from independence, is the power to benefit others, because it's also a meeting place.
Solnit reflects on the more personal roots of her story, inspired also by her two grandmothers, "both of whom were motherless girls, neglected, undereducated; neither of whom quite escaped that formative immersion in being unloved and unvalued." She writes of one of them, a real-life Cinderella of the most tragic kind:
My paternal grandmother, Ida, was an unaccompanied refugee child who, after years without parents, made it from the Russian-Polish borderlands to Los Angeles with her younger brothers when she was fifteen. There, her long-lost father and stepmother also treated her as a servant.
Their tragedies were a century ago and more, but this book is also with love and hope for liberation for every child who's overworked and undervalued, every kid who feels alone — with hope that they get to write their own story, and make it come out with love and liberation.
THE FATE OF FAUSTO
In his short and lovely poem penned at the end of his life, Kurt Vonnegut located the wellspring of happiness in a source so simple yet so countercultural in capitalist society: "The knowledge that I've got enough."
A generation later, artist and author Oliver Jeffers — one of the most beloved and thoughtful storytellers of our time — picks up the message with uncommon simplicity of expression and profundity of sentiment in The Fate of Fausto (public library) — a "painted fable," in that classic sense of moral admonition conveyed on the wings of enchantment, about how very little we and all of our striving matter in the grand scheme of time and being, and therefore how very much it matters to live with kindness, with generosity, in openhearted consanguinity with everything else that shares our cosmic blink of existence.
Inspired by Vonnegut's poem, which appears on the final page of the book, the story follows a greedy suited man named Fausto, who decides he wants to own the whole world — from the littlest flower to the vastest ocean.
Building on Jeffers's earlier illustrated meditation on the absurdity of ownership, the story is evocative of The Little Prince (which I continue to consider one of the greatest works of philosophy) and its archetypal characters, through whom Saint-Exupéry conveys his soulful existential admonition — the king who tries to make the Sun his subject; the businessman who, blind to the beauty of the stars, is busy tallying them in order to own them.
Perhaps Jeffers is paying deliberate homage to the beloved classic — the first two objects of Fausto's hunger for ownership are a flower and a sheep.
One by one, he demands the surrender of sovereignty from all that he comes upon. The flower, being delicate and choiceless, assents to being owned by Fausto. The sheep, being sheepish, puts up no objection. Threatened, the tree bows down before him. (Oh how William Blake would have winced.)
When the lake questions Fausto's self-appointed authority, he throws a tantrum to show the lake "who's boss," and the lake surrenders.
But when the mountain, grounded in her autonomy, refuses to move, Fausto flies into a fit of fury so menacing that even the mountain breaks down and submits to being owned.
Restless with not-enoughness, not content to own the flower and the sheep and the tree and the lake and the mountain, Fausto usurps a boat and heads for the open sea.
Alone amid the blue expanse, he bellows his claim of ownership. But the sea is silent. Fausto yells louder still, unsure quite where to aim his fury, for the sea stretches in all directions.
Finally, the sea responds, calmly questioning how Fausto can wish to own her if he doesn't even love her. Oh but he does, he does, the riled Fausto insists. The sea, in consonance with the great humanistic philosopher and psychologist Erich Fromm's observation that "understanding and loving are inseparable," tells Fausto that he couldn't possibly love her if he doesn't understand her.
Anxious to stake his claim, Fausto scolds the sea for being wrong, barks that he understands her deeply, then swiftly demands that she submit to his ownership or he will show her who's boss.
"And how will you do that?" asks the sea. By making a fist and stamping his foot, Fausto replies. With her primordial wisdom, having witnessed human folly since the dawn of humanity, the sea invites Fausto to show her just how he plans to stamp his foot, so she can understand. And Fausto, "in order to show his anger and omnipotence," perches overboard and aims his foot at the sea.
Swiftly, inevitably, the laws of physics and human hubris take hold of Fausto, who disappears into the fathomless sea — a sinking testament to Ursula K. Le Guin's cautionary charge that unbridled anger "feeds off itself, destroying its host in the process." (How fitting, too, that Jeffers should choose the world of water — one of his supreme fixations as an artist, subject of some of his most haunting conceptual paintings — as the arena on which this final existential battle between the human animal and its ego plays out.)
Jeffers's subtle, powerful message emerges with the tidal force of elemental truth: When all is said and done and sunk and swallowed, there is only the realization at which Dostoyevsky arrived in his stark brush with death: that "life is a gift, life is happiness, each moment could have been an eternity of happiness," had it been lived with a sympathetic love of the world.
The sea, Jeffers tells us, feels sorry for Fausto, but goes on being a sea, as the mountain does being a mountain.
And the lake and the forest,
the field and the tree,
the sheep and the flower,
carried on as before.
For the fate of Fausto
did not matter to them.
We are dropped safely ashore to contemplate the fundamental fact that our lives — along with all of our yearnings and fears, our most small-spirited grudges and most largehearted loves, our greatest achievements and deepest losses — will pass like the lives and loves and losses of everyone who has come before us and everyone who will come after. Temporary constellations of matter in an impartial universe of constant flux, we will come and go as living-dying testaments to Rachel Carson's lyrical observation that "against this cosmic background the lifespan of a particular plant or animal appears, not as drama complete in itself, but only as a brief interlude in a panorama of endless change." The measure of our lives — the worthiness or worthlessness of them — resides in the quality of being with which we inhabit the interlude.
OVER THE ROOFTOPS, UNDER THE MOON
"You can be lonely anywhere, but there is a particular flavour to the loneliness that comes from living in a city, surrounded by millions of people," Olivia Laing wrote in her lyrical exploration of loneliness and the search for belonging. Our need for belonging is indeed the warp thread of our humanity, and our locus of belonging — determined in part by our choices and in part by the cards chance has dealt us in what we were born as and where — is a pillar of our identity. For those who have migrated far from their homeland, and especially for those of us who have migrated alone, without the built-in social support structure of a community or a family unit, this rupture of belonging can be particularly disorienting and lonesome-making. "You only are free when you realize you belong no place — you belong every place," Maya Angelou told Bill Moyers in their fantastic 1973 conversation about freedom — a freedom the conquest of which can be a whole life's work.
Poet JonArno Lawson, author of the wondrous Sidewalk Flowers, and artist Nahid Kazemi take up these complex questions with great simplicity and thoughtful sensitivity in Over the Rooftops, Under the Moon (public library) — a spare, poetic meditation on belonging and what it means to be oneself as both counterpoint and counterpart to otherness, as a thinking, feeling, wakeful atom of life amid the constellation of other atoms.
We meet a melancholy young bird, lonesome even among the other birds, lonesome while soaring above the cityscape, above houses filled with innumerable lives that feel so impossibly distant and alien.
Lawson writes:
You can be far away inside,
and far away outside.
One day, something subtle but profound shifts in the bird — the gaze of a young girl sparks a quickening of heart, a certain opening to the possibility of belonging, a new curiosity about the nature of life — about what it means to be.
We see the bird's plumage suddenly explode with color — the radiance of awakening, evocative of poet Jane Kenyon's piercing line: "What hurt me so terribly all my life until this moment?"
Color arrives,
sometimes when
you least expect it.
The story unfolds with a poet's precision and economy of words, punctuated by Kazemi's sprawling, stunning watercolors. What emerges is a gentle invitation to what Bertrand Russell so beautifully termed "a largeness of contemplation."
The bird moves through seasons of change, floats wordlessly across landscapes of possibility, alighting at last to a vastly different world — more colorful, more alive. In this foreign-looking land, which Kazemi's palm trees and Middle Eastern architecture contrast with the deciduous crowns and Western cityscapes of the melancholy world, the bird finds a homecoming among other birds — a newfound joy in being "alone and together, over the rooftops and under the moon."
"How is your heart?" I recently asked a friend going through a trying period of overwork and romantic tumult, circling the event horizon of burnout while trying to bring a colossal labor of love to life. His answer, beautiful and heartbreaking, came swiftly, unreservedly, the way words leave children's lips simple, sincere, and poetic, before adulthood has learned to complicate them out of the poetry and the sincerity with considerations of reason and self-consciousness: "My heart is too busy to be a heart," he replied.
How does the human heart — that ancient beast, whose roars and purrs have inspired sonnets and ballads and wars, defied myriad labels too small to hold its pulses, and laid lovers and empires at its altar — unbusy itself from self-consciousness and learn to be a heart? That is what artist and illustrator Corinna Luyken explores in the lyrical and lovely My Heart (public library) — an emotional intelligence primer in the form of an uncommonly tender illustrated poem about the tessellated capacities of the heart, about love as a practice rather than a state, about how it can frustrate us, brighten us, frighten us, and ultimately expand us.
My heart is a window,
My heart is a slide.
My heart can be closed
or opened up wide.
Some days it's a puddle.
Some days it's a stain.
Some days it is cloudy
and heavy with rain.
Across the splendid spare verses, against the deliberate creative limitation of a greyscale-and-yellow color palette, a sweeping richness of emotional hues unfolds. What emerges is one of those rare, miraculous "children's" books, in the tradition of The Little Prince, teaching kids about some elemental aspect of being human while inviting grownups to unlearn what we have learned in order to rediscover and reinhabit the purest, most innocent truths of our humanity.
Some days it is tiny,
but tiny can grow…
and grow.
There are days it's a fence
between me and the world,
days it's a whisper
that can barely be heard.
There are days it is broken,
but broken can mend,
and a heart that is closed
can still open again.
My heart is a shadow,
a light and a guide.
Closed or open…
I get to decide.
"Every man or woman who is sane, every man or woman who has the feeling of being a person in the world, and for whom the world means something, every happy person, is in infinite debt to a woman," the trailblazing psychologist Donald Winnicott observed in his landmark manifesto for the mother's contribution to society. Inseparable from the psychological role of mothering is the biological reality of motherhood — a biology almost alien in its otherworldly strangeness as a cell becomes a being, with a heart and a mind and a whole life ahead.
That glorious strangeness is what Paola Quintavalle celebrates in Crescendo (public library) — an uncommon picture-poem about the science of pregnancy, evocative of Ursula K. Le Guin's lovely insistence that "science describes accurately from outside, poetry describes accurately from inside [and] both celebrate what they describe."
Unfolding across lyrical watercolors by Italian artist Alessandro Sanna — who painted the wordless masterpieces Pinocchio: The Origin Story and The River — the story follows the growth of an almost-being inside a mother's womb over the nine months of gestation. As small as a sesame seed, it soon sprouts the buds that will blossom into arms and legs, grows its first organ — the heart — and develops its first senses, smell and sound.
By the third month, the fetus gets its fur coat, known as lanugo, and the first fragments of its miniature skeleton begin to form. By month four, fingerprints are being carved onto its tiny digits.
Visual metaphors drawing on the lives of other beings — a bird, a horse, a flower, a school of fish — populate Sanna's watercolor score of Quintavalle's spare, poetic chronicle of becoming, their geometry cleverly mirroring the curvature of the mother's belly that frames the story.
What strikes me is that each of us has undergone this absolutely astonishing process, with no conscious memory of it at all, and yet somehow we don't walk around in perpetual astonishment that this is how we came to be. Perhaps we should. I am reminded of the great poet and philosopher of science Loren Eiseley's words: "We forget that nature itself is one vast miracle transcending the reality of night and nothingness. We forget that each one of us in his personal life repeats that miracle."
"How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives," Annie Dillard wrote in her timely exhortation for presence over productivity. It may be an elemental feature of our condition that the more scarce something is, the more precious it becomes. Just as the shortness of life calls, in that Seneca way, for filling each year with breadths of experience, so the shortness of the day calls for the fulness of each hour, each moment. No day concentrates and consecrates its elementary particles of time more powerfully than the shortest day of the year. With our awareness pointed to its brevity by ancient rites and modern calendars alike, as we "rage, rage against the dying of the light," something rapturous happens — a kind of portal into heightened presence opens up as every minute ticks with a supra-consciousness of its passage, pulsates with an extra fulness of being, while at the same time attuning us to the cyclical seasonality of time, reminding us of the cycles of life and death.
That is what writer Susan Cooper and artist Carson Ellis celebrate in The Shortest Day (public library) — an illustrated resurrection of Cooper's 1974 poem by the same title, originally composed for John Langstaff's beloved Christmas Revel shows, which fuse medieval and modern music in grassroots theatrical productions across local communities.
Cooper's buoyant verses and Ellis's soulful, mirthful illustrations bring to life, across time and space and cultures and civilizations, the ardor with which our ancestors have welcomed the winter solstice since long before the astronomer Johannes Kepler coined the word orbit in an era when few dared believe that the Earth spins on its axis while revolving around the Sun. (It is a function of the tilt of Earth's axis and the elliptical shape of its orbit — another radical contribution of Kepler's, who debunked the millennia-old dogma of perfect circular motion — that when our planet's axial tilt leans one pole as far away as it would go from our star, we are granted the shortest possible day and the longest possible night of the year.)
"The present is not a potential past; it is the moment of choice and action," Simone de Beauvoir wrote. At bottom, choice and action always begin with "what if" — the mightiest spring for the utopian imagination, the fulcrum by which every revolution rolls into being. What if this world were freer, more beautiful, more just? "We will not know our own injustice if we cannot imagine justice. We will not be free if we do not imagine freedom," Ursula K. Le Guin wrote in weighing the transformative power of the speculative imagination. "We cannot demand that anyone try to attain justice and freedom who has not had a chance to imagine them as attainable."
That chance to imagine a better world is what French author Thierry Lenain and artist Olivier Tallec invite in What If… (public library), translated by Enchanted Lion founder Claudia Bedrick — a lovely celebration of our civilizational responsibility, in the beautiful words of the cellist Pablo Casals, "to make this world worthy of its children" and a testament to James Baldwin's sobering insistence that "we made the world we're living in and we have to make it over."
Although we don't yet know it, the story begins with an unborn child imagining himself into being as he imagines a better version of the world to be born into. Where he sees war, he imagines turning the soldiers' guns into bird perches and shepherd's flutes. Where he sees drought and famine, he imagines pulling rainclouds over the desert like enormous kites.
He places his child-body between the "gorging, ordering, shouting, and decreeing" orange-haired politician on the TV screen and the people mesmerized before it. He sits on the ocean shore and imagines it clean of human-inflicted pollution, buoying colorful fish.
He falls asleep on a mossy patch in the forest, listening to the wisdom of the trees. He sees heartache and tears, and imagines them salved by love.
"We have to hug," he decided, "and not be afraid of kisses. What if we start saying 'I love you,' even if we've never heard it before?"
"To see takes time, like to have a friend takes time," Georgia O'Keeffe wrote as she contemplated the art of seeing. To listen takes time, too — to learn to hear and befriend the world within and the world without, to attend to the quiet voice of life and heart alike. "If we were not so single-minded about keeping our lives moving, and for once could do nothing," Pablo Neruda wrote in his gorgeous ode to quietude, "perhaps a huge silence might interrupt this sadness of never understanding ourselves."
This inspiriting, sanctifying power of listening is what writer Holly M. McGhee and illustrator Pascal Lemaître explore in the simply titled, sweetly unfolding Listen (public library) — a serenade to the heart-expanding, life-enriching, world-ennobling art of attentiveness as a wellspring of self-understanding, of empathy for others, of reverence for the loveliness of life, evocative of philosopher Simone Weil's memorable assertion that "attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer."
Lemaître — who has previously illustrated the children's book about kindness Toni Morrison co-wrote with her own son — brings McGhee's buoyant words to life in his spare, infinitely tender lines and gentle washes of color.
to the sound of your feet —
the sound of all of us
and the sound of me.
The stars —
they are for you
and all of us.
They are for me.
The simple verses beckon the attention to envelop the whole world, from the immediacy of one's own sensorial surroundings — the ground, the Sun, the air, the stars — to the widening awareness of our shared belonging and our intertwined fates. Radiating from them is Einstein's notion of "widening circles of compassion" and Dr. King's immortal insistence that "we are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality."
Smell the air.
My air is yours and all of ours,
your air is mine.
Your heart can hold everything.
Including the world —
its darkness and its light.
Including your story,
including my story —
including the story
of all of us…
ROAR LIKE A DANDELION
"Her lovely and original poetry has a flexibility that allowed me the maximum of space to execute my fantasy variations on a Kraussian theme," Maurice Sendak wrote of the great children's book author and poet Ruth Krauss (July 25, 1901–July 10, 1993), with whom he collaborated on two of the loveliest, tenderest picture-books of all time.
A quarter century after the end of Krauss's long life, lost fragments of her daring poetic imagination coalesced into a manuscript that alighted to the desk of one of the great picture-book artists of our own time: Sergio Ruzzier. The resulting collaboration, across lines of space and time and life and death, is the wondrously imaginative Roar Like a Dandelion (public library), the dedication of which, penned by Ruzzier in a spirit of creative kinship and reverence, reads simply: "To Maurice."
Though structured as an ABC book, in a succession of short sentences each beginning with a consecutive letter of the alphabet, the book is rather an alphabetic catalogue of Krauss's quirky, free-spirited, infinitely playfully, subtly profound prescriptions for joy and existential contentment.
"Vote for yourself," Krauss urges under V, as a Ruzzier piglet is seen pledging allegiance to herself — that ultimate act of self-respect, the pillar of character.
"Roar like a dandelion," she exhorts in the line that lent the book its title, which sits like a Zen koan, to be contemplated from a thousand directions before it can be cracked, suggesting maybe that the mightiest roar is the silent roar; maybe that anger is corrosive to its host, for if a dandelion were indeed to roar, it would blow up its own delicate seedhead and lose all of its fluffy white parachutes of hope; maybe that the dandelion's yellow burst of blossom, so plentiful if we only pay attention, is nature's primal scream of joy.
"Make music," Krauss beckons in consonance with Sendak, who ardently believed that the making of music is the profoundest and most primitive expression of our intrinsic nature.
Page after page, letter by letter, Ruzzier's sweet, and stubborn creatures leap and tumble along the lines of Krauss's imagination with their joyous, mischievous magic.
ALSO: A VELOCITY OF BEING
It feels a little strange to include A Velocity of Being: Letters to a Young Reader (public library) here, because it was originally published in the final days of 2018 and because, of course, it is my very own labor of love. But it would be as strange not to include it — not because I devoted eight years of my life to this charitable endeavor, but because the first edition vanished into eager hands within a day, leaving scores of sweetly disappointed readers to wave theirs with unslaked eagerness into the new year. Since most of the world didn't meet the book until 2019, I too must consider it a baby of this year.
This collection of original letters to the children of today and tomorrow about why we read and what books do for the human spirit, all proceeds from which benefit the New York public library system, features contributions by 121 of the most interesting and inspiring humans in our world, including Jane Goodall, Yo-Yo Ma, Jacqueline Woodson, Ursula K. Le Guin, Mary Oliver, Neil Gaiman, Amanda Palmer, Rebecca Solnit, Elizabeth Gilbert, Shonda Rhimes, Alain de Botton, James Gleick, Anne Lamott, Diane Ackerman, Judy Blume, Eve Ensler, David Byrne, Sylvia Earle, Richard Branson, Marina Abramović, Regina Spektor, Elizabeth Alexander, Adam Gopnik, Debbie Millman, Tim Ferriss, a 98-year-old Holocaust survivor, Italy's first woman in space, and many more immensely accomplished and largehearted artists, writers, scientists, philosophers, entrepreneurs, musicians, and adventurers whose character has been shaped by a life of reading.
Accompanying each letter is an original illustration by a prominent artist in response to the text — including beloved children's book illustrators like Sophie Blackall, Oliver Jeffers, Isabelle Arsenault, Jon Klassen, Shaun Tan, Olivier Tallec, Christian Robinson, Marianne Dubuc, Lisa Brown, Carson Ellis, Mo Willems, Peter Brown, and Maira Kalman.
Art by Ofra Amit for a letter by Mara Faye Lethem from A Velocity of Being: Letters to a Young Reader. Available as a print.
Art by Olivier Tallec for a letter by Diane Ackerman from A Velocity of Being: Letters to a Young Reader. Available as a print.
Art by Violeta Lópiz for a letter by Lucianne Walkowicz from A Velocity of Being: Letters to a Young Reader. Available as a print.
Art by Shaun Tan for a letter by Tom De Blasis from A Velocity of Being: Letters to a Young Reader. Available as a print.
Art by Mouni Feddag for a letter by Alain de Botton from A Velocity of Being: Letters to a Young Reader. Available as a print.
Art by Cindy Derby for a letter by Rose Styron from A Velocity of Being: Letters to a Young Reader. Available as a print.
Art by Lia Halloran for a letter by Marina Abramović from A Velocity of Being: Letters to a Young Reader. Available as a print.
See more of the art here and read some of the loveliest letters here.
https://www.themarginalian.org/2019/12/16/favorite-childrens-books-of-2019/
best ofchildren's bookscultureillustrationMaria MitchellOliver JefferspoetryRebecca Solnitscience


Being the last day of the trip and not looking forward to a long journey back home to Los Angeles, I woke up early to catch the 6am shuttle bus that picks you up from your hotel, over to Kayseri Airport. It costs TL 25 per person, and takes about just less than an hour to reach the airport 65km away from Göreme.
All the shuttle buses leaving Göreme for either Nevşehir airport or Kayseri airport will pick you up from your hotel and match their timings with the departure flight timings. These get generally full almost everyday, so make sure to reserve your seat at least 24 hours in advance (earlier in peak tourist season of June-August).
I had timed my departures from Kayseri to Istanbul and out of Turkey in such a way that I have enough time between flights and Pegasus airlines has an 8am flight from Kayseri to Istanbul Sabiha Gökçen airport (domestic), that takes about one hour. And my connection out of Istanbul Atatürk (international & domestic) was at 2pm. This meant that I had enough time to travel from the Asian-side airport (Sabiha Gökçen) of Istanbul over to the European-side airport (Atatürk) and still be able to meet the two-hour-prior-to-departure deadline.
If it's a weekday then the traffic in Istanbul can be treacherous and instead of getting blocked by taking the land route all the way, it's best to take the following option.
On weekends, when the Istanbul road traffic is slow, this will be a better and faster option.
This is the most expensive way of traveling between airports, but the easiest and comfortable. Simply take a taxi that takes just over an hour and costs TL 170-200.
Since it was a Sunday, I decided to take the option 2. The Havataş shuttle buses are convenient, comfortable and match their timings between buses at Taksim square, so you don't miss out on time. The shuttle buses run every 15 minutes from Sabiha Gökçen airport to Taksim Square; and every 30 minutes from Taksim square to Atatürk airport.
Note: All values in USD, unless otherwise mentioned, are approximate and based on the exchange rate at the time of publishing. Each cost is for one adult. The exchange rate at the time of publishing is assumed to be USD 1 = TRY 1.80.
Visiting towns of Çavuşin & Paşabağ, and Kaymaklı underground city.
Travel from Göreme to Kayseri & between Istanbul's domestic to int'l airports.
First day in the largest city.
Second day in the largest city.
Traveling from İzmir to Kuşadası & spending day there.
Visiting Efes & towns of Selçuk & Şirince.
Traveling from Kuşadası to Bodrum & day there.
Traveling from Bodrum to Ölüdeniz & day there.
Paragliding in Ölüdeniz & visiting Lycan ruins in Fethiye.
Main town of Cappadocia region.
Small towns of Uçhisar & Avanos in Cappadocia region.
Last day from Göreme to Kayseri & between Istanbul's domestic to international airports.


Be a criminal for the evening when you wear this Orange Inmate Costume!
Featuring an ID Badge accessory for jail bird realness, this alarmingly bright fancy dress ensemble will make you a very convincing convict.
Grab some handcuffs and you'll be good to go! The inmate look is a hilarious idea for a occupations theme party!


text:
Friedrich Tinti (bis zum Adelsaufhebungsgesetz 1919 Reichsfreiherr von Tini; * 7. August 1888 in Wels, Schloss Lichtenegg; † 29. Oktober 1948 in Pöchlarn) war ein österreichischer Politiker und Gutsbesitzer sowie Herr und Landmann in Tirol.

Tinti  war von 1934 bis 1935 Abgeordneter zum Landtag von Niederösterreich sowie 1. Vizepräsident des Landtags. Vetter von Karl Heinrich Tinti.

Tinti war beruflich als Gutsbesitzer in Pöchlarn tätig und Oberleutnant der Reserve. Während der Zeit des Austrofaschismus vertrat Tinti den Stand der Land- und Forstwirtschaft zwischen dem 22. November 1934 und dem 17. Mai 1935  im Niederösterreichischen Landtag. Zudem war er während dieser Zeit 1. Vizepräsident des Landtags und seit 1931 Aufsichtsratsmitglied im Rüstungskonzern Skoda-Wetzler.

Literatur
 NÖ Landtagsdirektion (Hrsg.): Biographisches Handbuch des NÖ Landtages und der NÖ Landesregierung 1921–2000 (= NÖ-Schriften. Band 128). NÖ Landtagsdirektion, St. Pölten 2000, ISBN 3-85006-127-2.

Weblinks

Einzelnachweise

Landtagspräsident (Niederösterreich)
VF-Mitglied
Österreicher
Geboren 1888
Gestorben 1948
Mann

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaWikipedia


Initiating and executing interdisciplinary research on various issues related to the chair system and the development of centers of excellence.
Coordinate and organize MSc and PhD programs relevant for the chair.
Assist M.Sc. and PhD students to play various roles in assisting course delivery.
Organize, control and monitor laboratories under the chair. This includes establishing research laboratories, requesting for purchase of new equipments, preparing standard laboratory rules and regulations, preparing standard laboratory manual, preparing and maintaining documentation of maintenance and operation manuals for all equipments.
Assign instructors for courses administered under the chair based on the request of academic program officer.
Ensuring that the teaching-learning process is focused on academic principles that are up to date and emphasize research and an enquiry based.
Focusing on bridging the gap between theory and practical knowledge through strong partnerships between the academic staff, students and industrial partners.
Autonomously administering the budget allocated by the Faculty and funds obtained from the chairs external, third-party research and community service.
Negotiating and securing funding in addition to the budget from the institute, the university as well as potential external funding sources.
Recruiting and selecting new staff members, counseling of new and junior staff members, carrying out necessary performance assessments and making arrangements for the professional development of all staff under the chair.
Integrating student research and projects in order to increase their relevance and ensure that the results of such efforts benefit the stakeholder sponsors.
Regularly conferring with members of the chair on such matters as the courses they will teach, their scheduling and the selection of textbooks and laboratory manuals.
Periodically revising the course listings, course contents, the scheduling of courses and securing supplementary teaching materials under the chair.
Recruiting and selecting new staff members, counseling of new and junior staff members, carrying out necessary performance assessments and making arrangements for the professional development of all staff.
Allocating equitable staff workloads, taking the balance of the staff member's engagement in teaching, research, consulting, scholarly publication, committee activity and relevant off-campus activities into account.
Analyze evaluation report of all instructors and advisors on time.


text:
Heckler, 82, wins apology from Labour
@swajones
Wed 28 Sep 2005 21.47 EDT First published on Wed 28 Sep 2005 21.47 EDT
The Labour Party was forced to apologise yesterday to an 82-year-old delegate who was manhandled out of the Brighton conference for heckling the foreign secretary during a speech about the war in Iraq .
Walter Wolfgang, a veteran Labour activist from Richmond Park in south London, was dragged from the hall by stewards after shouting "nonsense" as Jack Straw spoke of Britain's success in bringing democracy Iraq.
Mr Wolfgang tried to re-enter the hall, but was refused permission under Section 44 of the Prevention of Terrorism Act. His conference pass was also confiscated.
Steve Forrest, a constituency party chairman from Erith and Thamesmead in south-east London, was also ejected after complaining about Mr Wolfgang's treatment. Mr Wolfgang, a party member for 57 years, told the BBC 2's Daily Conference Live programme: "I shouted 'nonsense'. That's all I said. Then these two toughies manhandled me out."
A Labour party spokesman admitted that Mr Wolfgang had been treated in an "inappropriate manner". He apologised for the incident and promised an investigation.
Labour conference


text:
← Rare shots of Hao and Mon sitting together on my hand (usually Mon is camera shy and Hao doesn't like Mon that much)
No explanation was really needed… →
High radiation means delays in decommissioning crippled Fukushima reactors
Posted on April 22, 2012 by doug
The decommissioning process at the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant faces a further obstacle after Tokyo Electric Power Co. said radiation readings in the containment vessel of the No. 2 reactor were at fatal levels on March 27.
It said readings were detected as high as 72.9 sieverts per hour, which would be fatal to humans in the event of a leak.
That is also enough to affect electronics in robots or other remote-controlled equipment used to probe the reactor ahead of final decommissioning.
Junichi Matsumoto, acting general director of TEPCO's Nuclear Power and Plant Siting Division, said, "We believe it is the effect from the fuel (that melted) and leaked into the containment vessel. For the decommissioning operation, we will need to develop equipment that can withstand high radiation levels."
The March 27 announcement marked the first time TEPCO directly measured radiation levels within the containment vessel of the No. 1 to No. 3 reactors where reactor meltdowns occurred a year ago.
TEPCO workers inserted an industrial endoscope into the containment vessel of the No. 2 reactor and measured radiation levels at eight locations. The highest reading of 72.9 sieverts was recorded about 4.2 meters from the bottom of the vessel.
After the Fukushima nuclear disaster flared, the highest radiation level recorded was about 10 sieverts per hour last August around piping near the main exhaust duct of the No. 1 and No. 2 reactors.
At that time, the high radiation was considered the result of fuel leaking during the venting process. The latest reading is not only much higher but reinforces the possibility that the decommissioning process will be prolonged.
High radiation levels can cause electronic parts to malfunction. The latest measurement throws another spanner in the works: Much more work will need to be done to decontaminate the area to reduce radiation levels.
Decommissioning of the No. 1 to No. 3 reactors will involve the unprecedented process of collecting nuclear fuel that has melted into the containment vessel.
Decommissioning was initially expected to take around 30 years, but that estimate will likely now have to be revised.
ref: http://ajw.asahi.com/article/0311disaster/fukushima/AJ201203280034
Posted in General	Tagged japan, nuclear power, radiation	permalink
High radiation means delays in decommissioning crippled Fukushima reactors — 2 Comments
yackle01 on April 23, 2012 at 12:25 am said:
30 years? I will be 115 years old. But I want to live until 120
Doug Lerner on April 23, 2012 at 12:27 am said:
I think you should be able to make it until at least 120.doug


text:
package org.embulk.filter.timestamp_format;

import org.embulk.EmbulkTestRuntime;

import org.embulk.spi.time.Timestamp;
import org.joda.time.DateTimeZone;

import org.junit.Before;
import org.junit.Rule;
import org.junit.Test;

import java.util.Arrays;

import static org.junit.Assert.assertEquals;
import static org.junit.Assert.fail;

public class TestTimestampParser
{
    public DateTimeZone zone;
    public Timestamp expected;

    @Before
    public void createResource()
    {
        zone = DateTimeZone.UTC;
        expected = Timestamp.ofEpochSecond(1463065359, 123456789);
    }

    @Test
    public void testJRubyParser()
    {
        String rubyFormat = "%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S.%N %:z";

        TimestampParser parser = new TimestampParser(Arrays.asList(rubyFormat), zone);
        try {
            Timestamp actual = parser.parse("2016-05-13 00:02:39.123456789 +09:00");
            // embulk >= 0.8.27 uses new faster jruby Timestamp parser, and it support nano second
            // embulk < 0.8.27 uses old slow jruby Timestamp parser, and it does not support nano seconds
            //assertEquals(expected, actual);
        }
        catch (IllegalArgumentException ex) {
            fail();
        }
    }

    @Test
    public void testJavaParser()
    {
        String javaFormat = "yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm:ss.nnnnnnnnn Z";

        TimestampParser parser = new TimestampParser(Arrays.asList(javaFormat), zone);
        try {
            Timestamp actual = parser.parse("2016-05-13 00:02:39.123456789 +09:00");
            assertEquals(expected, actual);
        }
        catch (IllegalArgumentException ex) {
            fail();
        }
    }
}

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaGithub


One bit of news that might easily have been missed was that there was a new version of the iOS SDK released, version 1.3.0. This was a pretty small release for features, but incorporates a lot of feedback from developers, and addresses a couple of common issues.
GooglePlus.bundle - the translation strings and image assets for the Google+ Sign-In button.
This means adding the files is just a case of dropping in those frameworks, but it does mean that when upgrading you have to change imports to refer to the classes inside the framework name, e.g. #import <GooglePlus/GooglePlus.h>. Helpfully, that GooglePlus.h header includes all of the files you need, so unless you're keen to minimise links, you can just drop that in and forget about it.
Note that you might get yourself into trouble if you try this with a GPPSignIn that is not signed in - the authenticator wont be set, and you'll make unauthenticated calls. In the future, the team may have the library return nil for the plusService if its not authenticated, which should hopefully make this more obvious!
The third thing that was made easier was a common question from developers - how can I make sure I have an access token, to send to a server for example? In the background, the SDK holds a (hour-long) access token and a (long-lived) refresh token for you, and after the user interactively signs-in both are available. However, because the access token is relatively short-lived, only the refresh token is written to the keychain. This could cause a bit of confusion: when the user starts an app again and is signed-in smoothly with the trySilentAuthentication method, the sign-in delegate would get a callback, but then when it tried to grab the access token, the response would be nil as the SDK has only checked for the presence of the refresh token.
This would be taken care of automatically when calling GTLService* functions, and it was always resolvable by calling the authorizeRequest: method on the GTMOAuth2Authentication object (for example, with 'nil'as the request) to force a token to be generated, but that was not entirely obvious! In version 1.3.0 and up that is handled for you, so you can just grab the token and carry on. This also has the nice property that if the user has disconnected your app, then on calling trySilentAuthentication you'll receive a callback to didFinishWithAuth:error: with the error argument set appropriately.


text:
Q: Free Graded Commutative Algebra on a Graded Vector Space Let $V$ be a graded vector space, thought of as a collection $\{ V^n \}_{n \ge 0}$ of vector spaces. Let $V_{odd} = \bigoplus_{n \text{ odd}} V^n$ and $V_{even} = \bigoplus_{n \text{ even}} V^n$. I am trying to show that there is a functor
$$
\Lambda \colon \mathsf{GVec} \longrightarrow \mathsf{CGAlg}
$$
between graded vector spaces, and commutative graded algebras which is left adjoint to the forgetful functor - i.e. $\Lambda V$ should be the free commutative graded algebra on $V$.
One way to define this is $\Lambda V = E( V_{odd} ) \otimes S(V_{even} )$ where $E$ denotes the exterior algebra and $S$ the symmetric algebra.
However I am having trouble showing that it is commutative.
We can think of the exterior and symmetric algebras as polynomial algebras on basis elements of each of $V_{odd}$, $V_{even}$ respectively, subject to some relations. Let $\underline{x} \otimes \underline{y}, \underline{z} \otimes \underline{w}$ be elements in $\Lambda V \otimes \Lambda V$, where the underline means a monic monomial. Multiplying these gives
$$
(\underline{x} \otimes \underline{y} ) \cdot (\underline{z} \otimes \underline{w}) = (-1)^{|\underline{y}| | \underline{z}|} \underline{x} \underline{z} \otimes \underline{y} \underline{w} \ \ \ \ \ \ \ \ \ \ \ \ \ (1)
$$
by definition of the tensor product of graded algebras. However if we apply the braid to the element $\underline{x} \otimes \underline{y}\otimes \underline{z} \otimes \underline{w}$ this gives
$$
(-1)^{| \underline{x} \otimes \underline{y}||\underline{z}  \otimes \underline{w}| } \underline{z} \otimes \underline{w} \otimes \underline{x} \otimes \underline{y} = (-1)^{(| \underline{x}| +  |\underline{y}|)(|\underline{z}\ + |\underline{w}| )} \underline{z} \otimes \underline{w} \otimes \underline{x} \otimes \underline{y}
$$
then multiply we get
$$
(-1)^{(| \underline{x}| +  |\underline{y}|)(|\underline{z}| + |\underline{w}| )} (-1)^{|\underline{w}| |\underline{x}|}\underline{z} \underline{x}\otimes \underline{w} \underline{y}
$$
We can swap $\underline w$ and $\underline y$ since they live in the symmetric algebra, and can swap $\underline z$ and $\underline x$ after multiplying by $(-1)^{| \underline x| |\underline z | }$ so the above expression simplifies to
$$
(-1)^{|\underline y| |\underline z| + |\underline y| |\underline w |} \underline{x} \underline{z}\otimes \underline{y} \underline{w}  \ \ \ \ \ \ \ \ \ \ \ \ \ (2)
$$
(1) and (2) should be the same. What have I done wrong?
EDIT: Just to be clear I am trying to show that $\mu \sigma = \mu$ where $\sigma$ in $\mathsf{GVec}$ is the braiding $a \otimes b \mapsto (-1)^{|a||b|}b \otimes a$ and $\mu$ is the multiplication.

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaStackExchange


The ease of use, the simplistic website for everyone in the office to use, the good reporting and charts we can use for board meetings, we love it all! Our organization has been using Constant Contact for over 5 years, and we have enjoyed every minute of it! From the ease of use to the simplicity of the website and sending emails, we have had much growth with Constant Contact! If you are a nonprofit organization looking for an easy and affordable tool in sending bulk and blast emails, take a demo of Constant Contact!
The ease of use, the simplistic website for everyone in the office to use, the good reporting and charts we can use for board meetings, we love it all!
Our organization has been using Constant Contact for over 5 years, and we have enjoyed every minute of it! From the ease of use to the simplicity of the website and sending emails, we have had much growth with Constant Contact!
If you are a nonprofit organization looking for an easy and affordable tool in sending bulk and blast emails, take a demo of Constant Contact!
That customers can be in multiple lists and we don't have to worry because they still receive only 1 email. Cons: The non-search feature Love it! Wish it had a search feature and some other basic features as the company all shares access to it and it's hard to track down what other people sent in previous years.
That customers can be in multiple lists and we don't have to worry because they still receive only 1 email.
Love it! Wish it had a search feature and some other basic features as the company all shares access to it and it's hard to track down what other people sent in previous years.
Great customer service. Whenever we encountered problems with data uploads/downloads or other situations, the phone support was quick to answer and very knowledgeable. Inexpensive for the quality of email platform. Great for small businesses. Not catered towards mid to large organizations selling multiple products and services. Unable to created multiple lists for product or services with the option for recipients to unsubscribe from just the one list (unsubscribes from all). Overall the Constant Contact tools are easy to use and very professional. We are a mid-sized financial institution that sends around 14 to 28 thousand emails per week. When I came into my role we had been using Constant Contact for a number of years. However, I felt that we had outgrown its capabilities. The platform is primarily for small businesses and some of the features were lacking for what we needed. Specifically, the ability to create separate subscription lists. That said, the customer service is amazing and if you live/work in the Boston area then there are always training seminars going on. As a financial institution, it is worth paying more for an email marketing platform that integrates with your core or at least that is customized for the industry.
Great customer service. Whenever we encountered problems with data uploads/downloads or other situations, the phone support was quick to answer and very knowledgeable. Inexpensive for the quality of email platform. Great for small businesses.
Not catered towards mid to large organizations selling multiple products and services. Unable to created multiple lists for product or services with the option for recipients to unsubscribe from just the one list (unsubscribes from all).
Overall the Constant Contact tools are easy to use and very professional. We are a mid-sized financial institution that sends around 14 to 28 thousand emails per week. When I came into my role we had been using Constant Contact for a number of years. However, I felt that we had outgrown its capabilities.
The platform is primarily for small businesses and some of the features were lacking for what we needed. Specifically, the ability to create separate subscription lists. That said, the customer service is amazing and if you live/work in the Boston area then there are always training seminars going on.
As a financial institution, it is worth paying more for an email marketing platform that integrates with your core or at least that is customized for the industry.
I really enjoy that we can store and organize many different lists of emails in many different groups. This makes contacting our members easy. We can update a large group of people quickly. Constant Contact has helped us keep up with multiple emailing lists and made it a breeze to contact those people in just minutes. We use it with sending out updates, prayer lists, devotionals, and more. I would say to definitely try out this software if you are looking for a way to stay in contact with different groups of people, whether they are in large or little quantities.
I really enjoy that we can store and organize many different lists of emails in many different groups. This makes contacting our members easy. We can update a large group of people quickly.
Constant Contact has helped us keep up with multiple emailing lists and made it a breeze to contact those people in just minutes. We use it with sending out updates, prayer lists, devotionals, and more.
I would say to definitely try out this software if you are looking for a way to stay in contact with different groups of people, whether they are in large or little quantities.
Easy to learn, has many usable report features, efficient With the latest updates, it doesn't appear there is customer support through Live Chat. I have had to call for help and hold for an unreasonable amount of time. We use Constant Contact for all of our communication to school families. The emails are easy to create with many choices of templates and they all look professional. The reports available make our job easier and help us continuously improve our communication. We know who receives emails, who opens them and when, what links are shared, etc. The software is easy to learn and it takes no time to become a pro using it! Maybe best of all, it is very affordable! Encourage your stakeholders to "self-manage" their emails. Get them off to the right start by teaching them to add and delete emails on their own.
With the latest updates, it doesn't appear there is customer support through Live Chat. I have had to call for help and hold for an unreasonable amount of time.
We use Constant Contact for all of our communication to school families. The emails are easy to create with many choices of templates and they all look professional.
The reports available make our job easier and help us continuously improve our communication. We know who receives emails, who opens them and when, what links are shared, etc.
The software is easy to learn and it takes no time to become a pro using it! Maybe best of all, it is very affordable!
Encourage your stakeholders to "self-manage" their emails. Get them off to the right start by teaching them to add and delete emails on their own.
Constant Contact was founded as "Roving Software" in 1995. Their founders saw email as "a valuable marketing tool that would help small businesses level the playing field in the battle against big business." In 2014, they released a powerful new interface designed to be the all-in-one marketing solution. In 2016, Constant Contact was acquired by Endurance International Group.
Constant contact emphasizes small businesses as their intended customers.
Yes, for the first 60 days.
No, but sign up is free.
Email Automation: Set up an email series for similar customers – like contacts in the same area, or who attended an event. With email automation, when you send targeted messages, your relationships and results improve.
Event Marketing: Packed events are good for growing businesses. But juggling the details in Excel takes up a lot of precious time. Everything you need to plan and manage your upcoming seminar, fundraiser, or party can now be done in one account.
Online Donations: Your business' donors can easily view your page—and more importantly, donate—while they're on the go. Promote your fundraiser with Constant Contact's email and social media tools.
Surveys & Polls: Start with their pre-written questions and tweak them, or craft your own. Choose from seven types of survey questions — from multiple choice to sliding scales. View individual results, or track trends. You'll get real-time insight into what people really want so your business can plan what to do next.
Coupons: In less than ten minutes, you can create a coupon, add your business' logo and branding, and hit send. Constant Contact helps you track everything: new email addresses, coupons claimed, redemptions and who shares the coupon on social media.
Constant Contact is an all-in-one marketing solution who focuses on making small businesses succeed. They started out as a small company who understood the power of email and how it could help small businesses compete with much larger ones. Their pricing plans reflect their desire to help small businesses by offering tons of features while keeping prices low. What makes Constant Contact stand out from other marketing solutions are the seminars and training sessions with marketing professionals they offer either online or in person.
Constant Contact offers a wide range of features small businesses can use to compete with other businesses. They both offer unlimited emails, contact management, apps and integrations, a mobile app, customizable templates, and many more. Constant Contact offers the best of sales CRM software, and email marketing software, like MailChimp, which makes them a versatile option to consider.
Constant Contact's pricing plans also reflect their goal of helping small businesses by remaining low and offering almost the same amount of features in each plan. They start at $20 and $45, and they offer discounts if your business chooses to do either a six-month or twelve-month prepaid plan. From there, depending on your business' list size, the plans go up in price, but not too steeply.
What makes Constant Contact stand out the most are the seminars and training sessions they offer customers. Customers can sign up for either online or in-person seminars where marketing professionals will work with you personally to ensure you get the most of their services. Their desire to maintain a strong connection with the community should tell you that they are actually looking to help you.
Overall, Constant Contact is a great, versatile marketing solution small businesses should strongly consider. Their features are not revolutionary and can be found in other marketing solutions; however, Constant Contact goes the extra mile by offering online and in-person seminars and training sessions to their customers so they feel confident about using this all-in-one marketing solution to its fullest potential. Their prices are cheap and can be tailored to fit your business' needs.
What Do You Think of Constant Contact?


You'll feel the sunshine on your shoulder and sand between your toes with this cute GIFTABLES Organic Pearl Rectangular Engraved Tray from Beatriz Ball.
Engraved with the slogan, "Life is Better at the Beach," this delightful mini tray is distinguished by its rich, hand finished surface, and practical size.
Perfect on the bar or dining table, or on a desk, bedside table, or coffee table as a decorative accent. An ideal hostess gift for a coastal friend!


If you have those basic requirements, you can hem and haw all you'd like about how your background could be better if only you had experience with <fill in random technology or framework here>, but you're just wasting your time. The truth is that your background will never be perfect!
The fastest way to a remote job is to iterate through a series of first-round interviews. This exercise will do a lot for you. First, it may just land you that remote job you've convinced yourself you're not ready for. Second, it will give you amazing feedback not only on your weaknesses but also perhaps more importantly on your perceived strengths.
When you have feedback on what prospective employers like about your background and what their concerns are, you can hone and fine-tune your approach so that you can be more effective in your next round of interviews.
If you're worried about running out of interview opportunities, don't! The remote development field is exploding. If you're ready to go on that first round of interviews, we can help. For more information, check out the free ebook available from the banner ad in this post.