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On Poetry
The Many Labors of Philip Levine
Mike Broida - 8.24.2016 | 1
I only first read about the work of Philip Levine last year, when I saw his obituary on the front page of The New York Times' website:
Philip Levine, a former United States poet laureate whose work was vibrantly, angrily and often painfully alive with the sound, smell and sinew of heavy manual labor, died on Saturday morning at his home in Fresno, Calif. He was 87.
Often considered a blue-collar, workingman's poet, much of Levine's most evocative work drew from his experience on the car assembly lines during the decline of The Paris of the West, Detroit. Like Levine, I also grew up in the industrial Midwest — about 170 miles west along Lake Erie, in Cleveland, the spiritual sister to Levine's native Detroit. While the era of an after-school job in a soap factory had passed me by, my childhood home was a short two miles from Cleveland's river valley, the heart of steel country, and the big rusted blast forges that spewed fire into the night sky. Recently, when a friend offered to buy me a book, I eagerly asked for Levine's What Work Is, his seminal, National-Book-Award-winning collection that cut to the quick of what it means to be a man of industrial means and memories, in search of "work."
As it turns out, to read Philip Levine in this moment is to crack open a road map into the zeitgeist of populist, nativist, and nationalistic sentiments fueling unrest in globalized, post-industrial nations across the world, from the rise of far-right political parties in Europe, to the United Kingdom's vote to leave the European Union, to the rise of both Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump in the U.S. presidential elections. Even as political support for both factions, originally deemed "protest candidates," spread to both rural and affluent demographics, the appeal of these movements comes from a Philip Levine-like anxiety of loss and decline. Campaign slogans like Sanders's "We need a political revolution" or Trump's "Make America Great Again," are bred from a despair of losing something that was once a golden promise of individual success. There's a palpable feeling of outrage and indignation at being left behind or sold out for the greater ideals of free trade and commerce, something that, way back in 1991, Philip Levine felt keenly, such as in his poem about the daily grind, "Every Blessed Day:"
Even before he looks he knows
the faces on the bus, some
going to work and some coming back,
but sealed in its hunger
for a different life, a lost life.
In the poem, the narrator, much like Levine once did, works at the "Chevy Gear & Axle #3." Before going to punch in, he tries to find the "elusive calm/his father spoke of and searched for all his life,/there's no way of telling. . ." To read Levine's poetry is to fall into the ragged void of inexplicable loss, and it is to read poems about people who know there should be something more but cannot wrap their mouths around those words or look too closely into its core for the sheer pain and misery of this long demise. In "Coming Close," Levine paints a portrait of a woman working at a polishing wheel — bone-weary after three straight hours without a single break — finding that the line between woman and machine wears away until:
. . .she would turn
to you and say, "Why?" Not the old why
of why must I spend five nights a week?
Just, "Why?" Even if by some magic
you knew, you wouldn't dare speak
for fear of her laughter, which now
you have anyway as she places the five
tapering fingers of her filthy hand
on the arm of your white shirt to mark
you for your own, now and forever
The woman's "'Why?'" seems to be a question with an eternal flame, and it would be easy to put all sorts of identifiers after it: Why are my student loans so untenable? Why am I unable to find good, honorable work in my small town? Why does this job make me feel like an animal or a machine? Why cannot I not seem to get ahead? Why do we do this at all? But the simple provocation is enough, and the lingering stain of it causes the disruption and the true notion that there is unfairness in this despair. The question is an answer to a lie that has been brought about after doing everything right: graduating college or applying endlessly for work or working two jobs yet feeling unable to live a life worthy of a human being, let alone an "American." In prognostic fashion, Levine's "why," as filthy and prohibitive as it might seem, is contagious and irreversible, and once it stains you it is forever a branding iron.
For Levine, however, the nature of this loss was not one of anger or even redemption, but of melancholy and introspection, as something that could always be delved into and learned from. Nowhere is this more potent than in the poem, "M. Degas Teaches Art & Science at Durfee Intermediate School." The narrator is a student in the class when the teacher draws a chalk line diagonally across the board and asks, "'What have I done?'" The children take cracks at the obtuse riddle — one guesses a hypotenuse, one the roof of a barn — but the narrator's thoughts are elsewhere, out on the window and on recess:
…It was early April,
the snow had all but melted on
the playgrounds, the elms and maples
bordering the cracked walks shivered
in the news winds…'
Yet despite the allure of the playground, the students are still stuck, trying to answer this incomprehensible question, and in many ways it feels the same as the "Why?" from earlier: if only the answer could reveal itself then they might be delivered to the sweet release of the playground or a quick sprint to the candy store to buy a Milky Way. Still, they are stuck in-between, not quite learning and not quite free: "I looked back for help, but now/ the trees bucked and quaked, and I knew this could go on forever." The desire for help and resolution is so powerful and desperate, perhaps because it feels so caustic now with the appeal of national leaders who can say this stasis, this eternity is not the fault of the disenfranchised working class or professional peoples, instead it is the fault of a series of convenient boogeymen: immigrants, ineffectual leaders, power-hungry economic trading blocks, a sepia tone-soaked desire for the "good old days" rife with lopsided and clear-cut ideals, punctuated by much more "winning." What's interesting about Levine's poetry in What Work Is is that he does not deign to imagine such woeful nostalgia and loss as solvable. For Levine, it is a clear and teachable thing to guide one's life. The point of M. Degas's question is not to solve the riddle, but to temper oneself in the face of its complex insolvability.
Central to all of this, quite clearly, is the elusive definition of "work," as alluded to by the titular poem. Levine's poetry shows it to be one of the most deeply held and vaguely defined words in English: work is eight hours in front of excel spreadsheets, but it's also eight hours laying asphalt or cleaning gutters or taking care of children. It's all the work people do in relationships, on themselves, for the greater good, for selfish ends, and more. You can see this in the poem, "Growth," detailing Levine's experience working as a teenager in a soap factory:
the squat Ukrainian dollied them in
to become, somehow, through the magic
of chemistry, pure soap. My job
was always the racks and the ovens—
two low ceilinged metal rooms
…the color of sick skin.
At once the work is ritualistic and meditative, wheeling these large drums back and forth, but despite its crass, grueling, and reductive nature, it is also singularly beautiful that their collective, rough, factory motions could — through the magic of chemistry and labor — turn fat into soap. The process is like alchemy, that amidst an act so disgusting and exhausting is the foundation of a civilized society, a thing as simple and essential as soap. Work, it would seem, is transcendent not just for the fat-turned-soap, but also for the young Levine himself at the end of the poem: "…my new life of working and earning,/ outside in the fresh air of Detroit/ in 1942, a year of growth." There is a bitter taste of nostalgia in that last line, and it is clear that Levine values the factory horrors as much as his time spent in school or doing much else, and that the work there was very much the work of becoming himself.
The dichotomy and variety of "work" and what it ultimately means to Levine is perfectly captured in "What Work Is," a poem that highlights Levine's simplistic yet evocative style while striking near the heart of the brutality of this loss and questioning. In the poem, Men are waiting in the rain for "work:"
…the grin
that does not hide the stubbornness
the sad refusal to give in to
rain, to the hours wasted waiting,
to the knowledge that somewhere ahead
a man is waiting who will say, "No,
we're not hiring today," for any
reason he wants.
The men are waiting for work, but there is also work being done to suffer through the rain, to have the patience and resilience to endure and earn that miserable answer. The narrator then shifts to remember his brother, who he thought he recognized in the crowd. He remembers their filial love and the work his brother did: working the night shift at Cadillac only to wake later to study German in order to sing Richard Wagner in an opera, as disparate a form of work as one waiting in the unemployment line at Ford Highland Park can imagine, but perhaps he can also begrudgingly admit that it is work, too. Finally, he wonders how long it has been since he's done the work to tell his brother he loves him, if he ever has even said so:
…You've never
done something so simple, so obvious,
not because you're too young or too dumb,
not because you're jealous or even mean
or incapable of crying in
the presence of another man, no,
just because you don't know what work is.
This one word, "work" is key to Levine's success as a poet, and his ability to adapt it to so many different situations and forms gives his poetry a bottomless depth and nuance that is at once immediate, harrowing, and personally estranged. It seems, as a culture, we have calcified in our definitions of work: work is global trade or work is done with your hands and rewarded with a pension, work is against others or work is for me, and on and on. The winnowing of the variety of work has lead to derision and confusion and an anger that is fueled by a terrible sorrow — if there is only one sort of labor, and that is taken from you, then what do you have left? To read Philip Levine is to remember that work is done at the Chevy Gear & Axle plant, it is done bent over the polishing wheel, it is done over the music stand, it is done while waiting in the rain, it is done while scribbling poems, and it is even done in the words you form from your very own mouth.
'Infinite Jest' in the Age of Addiction
Mike Broida - 7.11.2016 | 18
After twenty years, David Foster Wallace's grand overture on humans and addiction, Infinite Jest, has only become more powerful. Since its publication, the world has moved past the events and years of the novel's shaky mid-2000s dystopian world. But the most addictive force in Infinite Jest is a seemingly innocuous videotape referred to simply as "the entertainment." Television holds the strongest allure and danger to Wallace's many characters. It was an adversarial and endlessly interesting fixture in American life for Wallace, one that he wrote on at length in his essay "E Unibus Pluram." "Television, from the surface on down, is about desire," he writes. "Fictionally speaking, desire is the sugar in human food."
At the core of Infinite Jest is a story about addiction and the different ways that people find themselves hooked. Wallace's key argument is that to be human and alive is to be addicted to something, and the real power comes in choosing to what you might find yourself beholden. In his famous 2005 commencement address at Kenyon College, Wallace warned college graduates that, "There is no such thing as not worshiping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship." In Infinite Jest, Wallace's addicts are largely centered around Boston, on a hilltop near Brighton that separates an elite tennis academy run by a family shaken by a suicide and a halfway house filled with a picaresque crew of recovering drug and alcohol addicts. What brings them all together is that mysterious videotape, "the entertainment," a piece of media at once so literally captivating that it causes certain death. The viewer cannot look away and will forgo the entirety of Maslow's hierarchy for the sake of watching.
The worship is more multifaceted than just television and narcotics. The young boys at Enfield Tennis Academy worship the perfection of their tennis games and the rising of their rank, a task replete with ritual, superstition, and devotion. Yet some of the boys also use tennis to avoid family angst, failure, or personal faults, and in that way too the uncanny need to play tennis begins to resemble other addictions in the novel. The halfway house residents are addicted to cannabinoids and alcohol and cocaine and opioids and murdering small animals. The most dedicated of them, such as the halfway house staff member and partial-protagonist, Don Gately, have exchanged the worship of painkillers for the worship of A.A. itself.
Television, much like "the entertainment," is its own form of worship. It's the desire to be seen, the desire to be a voyeur. It's the desire to be approved of and to feel communal. Yet our concept of television has rapidly changed since 1990s, when television was still considered the "boob tube," a uniformly low art that was acknowledged as an aesthetic horror driven by shows like Cheers or The Price is Right. No one would confuse them for art. Now, we have entered — or passed through — television's Golden Age, and the duplicity and seduction of the media have become hidden behind good storytelling, compelling acting, and excellent cinematography. The Sopranos, The Wire, Breaking Bad, Arrested Development, Game of Thrones, Mad Men, and more have changed TV from a knuckle-dragging affair into something sophisticated and worthwhile.
Many of the shows that have marked the Golden Age of television first aired around 2000, right at the start of the current opioid epidemic — a spooky correlation, if not a scientific one. Since 1999, opioid overdoses in the United States have quadrupled as a result of increased prescriptions, heavy marketing from big pharmaceutical firms, and a cultural familiarity and acceptance with seemingly casual drug use. In the new century, our nationwide desire to be tuned out, euphoric, and entertained seems to go beyond both medium and function. While many of those who find themselves worshiping television are unaware of the effects of something like "the entertainment," perhaps no character is more aware of his addiction than Don Gately, an addict recovering from his own enthrallment to Demerol and Talwin, who would find himself at home in the America of today.
Fall 2015 brought a sobering study: Death rates for middle-aged white Americans had started to increase, bucking other demographical and historical trends. The cause behind this grand uptick in fatalities was largely attributed to drug and alcohol abuse, which has become brutal and rife in America's small, postindustrial towns and regions like New England and the Midwest. Heroin and its potent synthetic successor Fentanyl seem destined to find people, particularly those whose circumstances leave them unable to realize traditional markers of personal success in America. To be rural and "working class" is to live in an economy and culture that is increasingly focused on technically skilled and urbanized workers. To be left behind by your country, as one might feel in rural New Hampshire, is to open the door to something sinister but palliative: opioids. Opioids activate the reward centers of our brains. They give pleasure and a sense of wellbeing. They provide momentary fulfillment and satisfaction with one's life. Tolerance to prescriptions leads to cheaper, easier-to-get opioids, namely heroin and synthetic versions thereof. The how of these addictions is relatively simple, with doctors trained to relieve pain and large pharmaceutical companies pushing their products heavily to their masses, but the why feels more elusive.
Infinite Jest is set roughly in the mid 2000s, right into the thick of a prescription drug epidemic. Despite it being a novel inherently farcical and dystopian, Wallace's troupe of addicts have only become more commonplace. It's no mistake that in Infinite Jest two agents from rival governments, in fear and admiration of the power of the entertainment, discuss the seminal experiment of Rat Park: a foundational 1970s study of drug addiction that showed that rats when given a rich, fulfilling environment tended to avoid readily-available, opiate-laced water, but when faced with a stark and denuded cage, the rats found themselves hopelessly hooked on the same opiates. The denuded cage for a person can take a variety of forms: economic stagnation, faltering relationships, lack of enrichment or challenge in one's life.
The question for Wallace then is what exactly does it mean far a person to be in that cage? Early on in the novel, one character struggles with an infestation of cockroaches before coming up with a rather brutal solution:
The yellow tile floor of the bathroom is sometimes a little obstacle course of glasses with huge roaches dying inside, stoically, just sitting there, the glasses gradually steaming up with roach-dioxide. The whole thing makes Orin sick. Now he figures the hotter the show's water, the less chance any small armored vehicle is going to feel like coming out of the drain while he's in there.
This is perhaps the most heartbreaking image of addiction, not just of being imprisoned and slowly dying, but also being unconscionably trapped behind an invisible force field. It's to not realize that you are dying only that it is happening slowly, and to know yourself as the most disgusting, and hated of creatures.
While narcotics might present the most desperate and fanatical way to dismiss the denuded cage, there's a more salubrious method among American households. As Wallace argues in "E Unibus Pluram," television offers a perfect release. Instead of testing the parameters of one's crappy cage, TV offers escape: perfect families, perfect bodies, perfect jobs, and challenges that are deemed perfectly manageable by the implicit promise that the characters — and thereby the show — will triumph through to the next season. Now, in this Golden Age, the families are more real, the plot lines more complex: we feel smart, sophisticated, involved. If early TV was the heroin, now we have the Fentanyl. While watching Breaking Bad you "get" that Walter White is an antihero. In The Wire, you "get" the comparisons between drug dealers and the police as factions of equal merit. These things are like delicious breadcrumbs of self-confidence, completing little puzzles for our neurological reward centers. Make no mistake that each of these crumbs was laid down by an intentional hand, drawing us further and further in. Now, in this Golden Age, TV has snuggled up close to the critics that once derided it as stupid and trivial. TV as art makes Wallace's original statement in "E Unibus Pluram" ring just as true:
Television culture has somehow evolved to a point where it seems invulnerable to any such transfiguring assault. TV, in other words, has become able to capture and neutralize any attempt to change or even protest the attitudes of passive unease and cynicism TV requires of Audience in or to be psychologically viable at doses of several hours per day.
Could one imagine that the new season of House of Cards, inspired third-hand by Richard III, could be considered low-quality in The New York Times or any other critical venue that once trashed television as cheap and vapid?
From the easy access of cheap, reliable, and deeply enthralling television, comes the very Wallacean term: "binge-watch." The concept of consuming television in large swaths as if it were another narcotic like alcohol or cocaine or Oxycontin has a self-imposed irony to it. In Infinite Jest, one of the characters has an eerily prescient and predictive moment that anticipates the addictive, binge-watching nature of online video streaming:
What if — according to InterLace — what if a viewer could more or less 100% choose what's on at any given time? Choose and rent, over PC and modem and fiber-optic line, from tens of thousands of second-run films, documentaries, the occasional sport, old beloved non-'Happy Days' programs, wholly new programs, cultural stuff, and c., all prepared by the time-tested, newly lean Big Four's mammoth vaults and production facilities and packaged and disseminated by InterLace TelEnt
If I call the six hours I spent watching the old seasons of Parks And Recreation "binge-watching," then I am doubly insulated by, first, acknowledging upfront the gluttony of it, and, second, by the irony of calling it a binge in the first place. If I jokingly pretend I'm binging on television, then it's ironic because watching television is better than knocking back a case of beer, right? Yet television, like narcotics, has a certain intentionality behind it, as Wallace lays bare in "E Unibus Pluram": "Because of the economies of nationally broadcast, advertiser-subsidizer entertainment, television's one goal — never denied by anybody in or around TV since RCA first authorized field test in 1936 — is to ensure as much watching as possible." Wallace's conclusion is as true as ever, but due to the allure of the Internet as the new "low" art, filled by Youtube, Reddit, viral videos, and vociferous memes dominating the sort of repetitive desire that an American Gladiators marathon used to hold, TV had to change its tactics. Ultimately, the new strategy for capturing their viewers, to convince them of their true desire to watch more and more, was a sea change towards quality entertainment, turning TVs strongest critics into its greatest allies. After all, it is hard to feel poorly about spending a Saturday watching an entire season of The Wire, when its creator, David Simon, won a McArthur "genius" Grant
As a novel, Infinite Jest is intended as a loop. Once you finish the last page, the story pushes you to return to page one in order to put all the clues together and understand what you've read, over and over again. The final "joke" of Infinite Jest is that the book is intended to be almost as endless and mirthful as the addictions it depicts. To miss the desperate worshipping hidden beneath the strange, erudite, belly-deep joy of Infinite Jest is to fall prey to its pleasure. The ease of access to satisfaction in the Digital Age, from smart phone to Oxycontin, is perhaps even easier and more gratuitous than Wallace envisioned twenty years ago. The desire for distraction and appeasement has rushed up to meet this pleasure in all its forms, in these new ways to worship that shield the reality of disenfranchisement or pain. To have looked into the abyss of addiction, as Wallace does in Infinite Jest, is to see all of life's worst parts washed away by a torrent of pleasure. But what if the pleasure took too strong a hold? What if, in the end, you could not look away?
The City of Lost Things: Rediscovering Fernando Pessoa's 'The Book of Disquiet'
The first thing to notice about Lisbon is its relative quiet. The people tend to walk soundlessly through the streets, and the cars silently creep their way up and down the many hills. The most jarring noise comes from the ancient "eléctricos," the name for the creamy yellow trams that screech up the hills. Lisbon's charming sleepiness, I discovered, was not unique to me:
In the light morning mist of mid spring the Baixa comes sluggishly awake and even the sun seems to rise only slowly…A few passers-by signal the first hesitant stirrings of life in the streets and high up at a rare open window the occasional early morning face appears. As the trams pass, they trace a yellow, numbered furrow through the air, and minute by minute the streets begin to people themselves once more.
Thus observes Bernardo Soares from his café table on a sidewalk esplanade in The Book of Disquiet, the largely forgotten modernist classic by seminal Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa.
For my first trip to Lisbon, I knew I wanted to immerse myself during my four-day jaunt to the beautifully tiled, outmoded, and wholly Romantic Portuguese capital, which was how I found myself poring over Pessoa's The Book of Disquiet at his former café haunt, A Brasileira, several yards from the bronze statue that bears his likeness. Pessoa, often considered a writer lost to time, was a transformational Modernist who still has a strong presence in Lisbon — at least in the form of statues and prominence of place in the windows of Bertrand's (one of the world's oldest bookstores) on Rua Garrett. He is often compared to Franz Kafka: Both men are strongly associated with one place, be it Prague or Lisbon, and both died in obscurity, with much of their writing being discovered after their respective deaths. Pessoa felt himself a permanent outsider looking in on life in Lisbon, and much of these meditations were found on scraps of paper in an old trunk in his room, later turning into collections of poetry or The Book of Disquiet, as narrated by Bernardo Soares.
Bernardo Soares would become Fernando Pessoa's favorite and most prolific pseudonym, but Soares quickly grew from a name into its own life and person. The existence of Soares, as well as Ricardo Reis, Alberto Caeiro, and 70 other of Pessoa's identities are known as "heteronyms" for their expansive individual lives and personalities. For Pessoa, Soares, Reis, and Caeiro were people with desires, dreams, personalities, histories, and styles all their own. To say that Fernando Pessoa wrote The Book of Disquiet is disingenuous. Fernando Pessoa became Bernardo Soares, channeling each scrap of paper making up The Book of Disquiet through his alter ego.
The Book of Disquiet is much more philosophical quandary than it is a novel, and retroactively engineered at that, where various editors and translators arranged the hundreds of fragments and diary-type entries. As a result, no two editions are truly the same in order or content (my edition by the British publisher Serpent Tail Classics was on the slender side, only 272 pages, whereas the Penguin edition is 544 pages). Throughout the course of the "novel," Soares documents his days as a bookkeeper on Rua Douradores and the heavy ontological and existential musings that weigh down his hours, particularly the disconnect between the vivid world of the mind and the monotony of a daily, work-driven existence. As Soares writes, "my soul is a hidden orchestra; I know not what instruments, what fiddle strings and harps, drums and tambours I sound and clash inside myself. All I hear is the symphony." What makes Pessoa's creation of Soares so effective is the way that these feelings tap into the unspoken truths that most people feel, on those lonesome, idle days where it seems that the other seven billion people on this planet are automatons and that only you, standing in line at the grocery store or at the DMV, are perhaps the sole original spark in the universe — an undisprovable treatise.
There is something uncanny in how approachable Lisbon is as a city and in Soares's writing. Despite its confusing and cramped streets, endless hills, and shabby buildings, when the wind blows off the Tagus you can smell the ocean. From the summit of most hilltops you can see the wide stretch of the river as it heads out to the Atlantic, and from this it is simple to see how an entire culture could be so tied to the sea as the Portuguese are. Perhaps there is an antiquated magic in the air and a certain ancestral kinship in the city's layout. Soares notes it, too: "I love these solitary squares that are dotted amongst the quiet streets and are themselves just as quiet and free of traffic. They are things that wait, useless clearings amidst distant tumults. They are remnants of village life surviving in the heart of the city." Lisbon, at times, feels caught in amber. From the top of the old Moorish quarter of Alfama, the medieval castle of São Jorge still stands sentinel over the city. The little trams, the only really rational way to negotiate the steep hills, still wind up Alfama as they have done since the 1930s. When you ride one, you can see where the brass handles have been worn clean from the thousands of hands that have clung to them. Soares, too, rode the tram:
I'm riding a tram and, as is my habit, slowly absorbing every detail of the people around me…I sense the loves, the secrets, the souls of all those who worked just so that this woman in front of me on the tram should wear around her mortal neck the sinuous banality of a thread of dark green silk on a background of light green cloth.
Alfama was spared the worst of the apocalyptic 1755 earthquake that reshaped the city, and since Lisbon has avoided the terror of world wars and civil wars alike, Alfama is a look hundreds of years into the past, a place, like Soares, that the Portuguese always seem to be looking. While the fade of imperialism struck blows to all European powers, none have seemed to land in the same strange cultural stasis as Portugal and her former colonies.
Portuguese is the sixth most spoken language in the world and, according to UNESCO, the fastest-growing European language after English. Yet despite the over 250 million speakers, the cultural and literary influence of the Lusophone — or Portuguese-speaking — countries has dwindled to nearly nonexistent. This in itself is rather baffling; after the United States, the largest country and economy in the western hemisphere is, unexpectedly, Brazil. Yet Brazil has been notably minor in the "Latin American Boom" that made Spanish-language authors like Gabriel García Márquez, Carlos Fuentes, and Mario Vargas Llosa household names in the United States. In most American bookstores, the most prominent and well-represented Lusophone author is the Brazilian writer Paulo Coelho for his parable, The Alchemist. A coarse equivalent would be like having The Bridges of Madison County be the sole emissary of American letters to non-English-speaking countries.
Somewhere along the way, Portugal, and her fellow Lusophones, lost the path of literary influence. The apathy towards reading and writing seems particularly dire in Brazil, as Vanessa Barbara, one of Granta's "Best Young Brazilian Writers," noted in an opinion piece for The New York Times titled, "Brazil's Most Pathetic Profession." "And yet, despite all this fanfare, when in Brazil, do not tell anyone you're a writer. Not only will they deny you credit at the grocery store, but almost certainly they will laugh at you, asking right away: 'No, seriously. What do you do for a living?'" The paucity of Portuguese writing is a global deficit, for Portuguese is an undeniably beautiful language to the ear and wonderfully varied, from the lovely sing-songy rhythms of Rio de Janeiro to the muffled notes of Lisbon, where the ends of words become puffed from lips like a ring of smoke that so perfectly fits their mournful folk music of fado. Fado is one of Portugal's strongest cultural touchstones, and, much like the blues in America, it is an ode to the mourning and melancholy days of a people and their history.
In Lisbon's Bairro Alto stands Tasca do Chico, a famous little bar that seats perhaps 20, shoulder to shoulder, with another 10 or so hanging out the windows. When the mood is right, the guitar and lute are plucked off the wall and the old owner with his pipe hushes the crowd, asking for silence as the two young men strum away and he begins to sing a melancholy tune about a girl he once knew. Soares describes fado, the wistful Portuguese folk music, as,
through its veiled words and its human melody, the song spoke of things that exist in every soul and yet are unknown to all of us. He was singing as if in a trance, standing in the street wrapped in a sort of ecstasy, not even aware he had an audience…The song belonged to us all and sometimes the words spoke to us directly of the oriental secret of some lost race.
Loss is a central part of life in Portuguese culture, particularly in Lisbon, where the gentle patina and crumble of an empire seems to hang in the air. The patron saint of the city is Saint Anthony, the patron saint of lost things. Empire, culture, literature all seem just out of reach in Lisbon, which in many ways is the most Portuguese feeling of all. Soares notes a longing for a past moment in Lisbon, for an unnamed soul who he has missed. "I love you as ships passing one another must love, feeling an unaccountable nostalgia in their passing." The Portuguese have a special word for this "unaccountable" feeling or longing to reach back into the past and capture a moment lost to the stream of time: saudade. Here, the translator Margaret Jull Costa translates it as "nostalgia" for the sake of simplicity. The original second clause reads as "há saudades desconhecidas na passagem," which might also be, "there are unknown saudades in the passage." Saudade is untranslatable into English and only really done by approximations like "nostalgia," but what Soares feels is keenly different throughout The Book of Disquiet, and his examples serve better than any definition. "With the aid of a cheap cigarette I can return, like someone revisiting a place where they spent their youth, to the time in my life when I used to smoke. The light tang of that cigarette smoke is enough for me to relive the whole of my past life." Saudade is the vividness of that past as well as the simultaneous reality that it is gone forever.
To call Lisbon a "city of lost things," is to say it is a place where those losses can be felt in the cafés and the streets and with each "Bom dia" you might say to a garçom on the esplanade, just as Fernando Pessoa did. You can feel the loss of power, the loss of culture, the loss of self, and the loss of time, the quiet aging happening to everything going around you: the bougainvillea hanging from the window box, the cracked tiles of the apartment across the way, or the people at the next table down. For Soares, the past is unforgettable and loss is a most palpable thing, and so is Lisbon.
But I love the Tagus because of the great city on its banks. I enjoy the sky because I see it from a fourth floor window in a street in the Baixa. Nothing in the countryside or in nature can give me anything to equal the ragged majesty of the calm moonlit city seen from Graça or São Pedro de Alcântara. For me no flowers can match the endlessly varied colors of Lisbon in the sunlight.
Love and Land: Ann Packer's 'The Children's Crusade' and the Legacy of 'East of Eden'
Mike Broida - 4.7.2015
My first image of California was the Salinas River valley, just south of Soledad, lush and green in the full peak of summer. This little grove is a rite of passage for millions of the county's eighth graders, standing on the river bank and listening to the gentle rustle of fauna in relative seclusion, as painted with John Steinbeck's brush in the opening scene of Of Mice and Men. Steinbeck's strokes spread over all of California as an iconic vision, especially in the opening scene of the parabolic epic East of Eden: "From both sides of the valley little streams slipped out of the hill canyons and fell into the bed of the Salinas River. In the winter of wet years the streams ran full-freshet, and they swelled the river until sometimes it raged and boiled, bank full, and then it was a destroyer." But that is not California anymore, and in the 60 years since East of Eden's publication, the dense farmland has become something else.
When writing about California, the land and Steinbeck hang as an overture, as family patriarch Bill Blair discovers in the opening of Ann Packer's new California epic, The Children's Crusade. He heads south, driving out of San Francisco, noting: "This king's highway boasted car lots and supermarkets, nothing to fill Bill's heart, but every so often a vista opened and included the sudden rise of yet more hills, some thickly forested, others the color of hay bales in autumn." Bill, in his exhaustion as a young doctor, is searching for the last vestiges of Steinbeckian farmland, finally settling on a broad stretch in the Portola Valley with a large, lovely oak tree:
He lay on the ground under the oak tree and looked up between its snaking branches at the bits of startling blue. He wanted to figure out a way to live under that sky without forgetting the other sky, halfway around the world, that for two years had seemed always gray and always to bear down on the land and sea, no matter the season and no matter the weather.
From here, Packer launches her broad and pensive family epic of the Blairs: Bill and his wife, Penny, followed by their four children, Robert, Rebecca, Ryan, and James. As adults, the four Blair children are brought together again when they must decide whether or not to sell their childhood home and land, the one that their father had founded for them. By settling the Blairs in the Portola Valley, a mere 100 miles away from Soledad, the legacy of East of Eden is inescapable.
East of Eden, lacking the social consciousness of Grapes of Wrath or the accessibility of Of Mice and Men, is possibly Steinbeck's most difficult work and relatively neglected — despite the scope of its ambition and the author's own declaration of it as his magnum opus. The story follows the thinly veiled biblical tale of Adam Trask and his brother Charles, as well as Adam's sons, Caleb and Aron, as they rise and fall on their paradisiacal slice of the Salinas Valley and contend with Adam's wicked wife, Cathy. Steinbeck's work is rife with the toil of Genesis: men versus the hardscrabble, scarcely arable land, then men and women versus their temptation as women face the trials of Eve, and brothers' hands twitch over the jealousy of Cain.
The inheritance of Steinbeck in Packer's multigenerational novel is strong and diffuse. The Blairs take their creation myth as seriously tied to their land, their house, and their oak tree, well before the advent of strip malls, subdivisions, and the rise of Silicon Valley mansions that narrow in their once green-and-brown landscape. In 1950, two years before East of Eden was published, farmers accounted for 12 percent of the labor force; in 2015, they only amount to one percent. With the evolution of farmland into Silicon Valley and the change from farming to an industrialized and urbanized workforce, the nature of conflict changes, too. Men no longer struggle against the land, toiling as Adam once did because of the bounty of Whole Foods down the road. For Packer's generations, the conflict has become a much more internal and introspective view of self.
Packer's Blairs might find themselves much more at ease with Celeste Ng's Lees in Everything I Never Told You or Jonathan Franzen's Lamperts in The Corrections, where the percolated failings of the parents — and the stress fractures of their marriage — have reverberating effects throughout the lives of their children. If East of Eden represents an essential parable of American Genesis, then The Children's Crusade is the complication of that parable and its strict morality. As the land has grown, so has its people, their lives replete with a dinner table trauma of harsh words and youthful brawls and spoiled clothes that hang about their days like the scent of ozone before a storm. Bill is the kind, conflict-avoidant, and well-meaning patriarch whose axioms of "carry on" and "children deserve care" are interpreted by each of his children differently. Penny is the manic mother fraught with unassailable dreams of her own artistry. Robert is the duty-bound and approval-driven eldest son, Rebecca the thoughtful and calculating daughter, Ryan the overly loving and close-minded middle child, and James the damaged and tossed aside youngest of the family. Initially, the "crusade" of The Children's Crusade is a foolish list, made by the children, of activities that might please their mother and engender her doting love. These are certainly pithy descriptions compared to the deep, sprawling mental landscapes that each of the children explores in their joint desperation to understand the loss of their childhood home, land, and the weighty portent of their father's oak tree. The land means so much to the four of them because it's where they have rooted their love and history, and in this singular love and necessity for the California earth, the Trasks and the Blairs are not so different.
Each of the four siblings narrates a section of the novel as adults looking back, with interluding scenes from their communal upbringing. The psychological weight is heavy and palpable for each child, such as Robert, who followed in his father's footsteps as a doctor. Although Robert is well-established in his mid-40s, all of his decisions are weighed against his father's imagined approval of him and his work. Often, Robert, Rebecca, Ryan, or James try to puzzle over their distant childhood memories in an attempt to piece together how they came to where they are in their lives. For the most troubled child, James, the turmoil of growing up focuses on his dire opposition to his mother, keying on one supremely traumatic moment surrounding his favorite stuffed animal that forms his "rocklike" opposition to her and results in them not speaking for more than a decade. For the Blairs, the land has been long conquered, leaving only the rolling hills of their own hearts and minds to plow through and build upon.
Throughout The Children's Crusade, Packer lets emotion do the heavy lifting, leaving the writing itself to snake a methodical trail about the characters, such as when Bill is talking to Robert. "As he spoke, his face changed around his eyes and mouth, as if love lived in particular regions of the skin, and Robert felt his own face grow warm." Packer's terse words ride high on this ripe emotion to the point of exhaustion, feeling each moment so deeply and fully on behalf of each child to the depth of minutiae. The story itself swings like a pendulum, with wandering interstitial and omniscient scenes of a summertime party, a family dinner, or a teenage birthday, filling in the thoughts of whichever family member is closest, even latching onto significant others, with such sudden leapfrogging that at times the cacophony of thoughts becomes oppressive. Between these are the children themselves, grown and worried adults now. In these passages, Packer shows the reach of her creation in the awful nuance of the fraught and doubtful adults in the fullness of their lives: Robert with his self-imposed mantel of pater familias, Rebecca with her thoughtful and oppressive problem-solving, Ryan with his burden of endless and unconditional love, and James with his rootless wanderlust — all of it so painfully real and confessional.
In East of Eden, Cathy is an evil and selfishly depraved soul set against her righteous and caring husband, and as a parable, it's simply a moralizing black-and-white tale baked into the beauty of the Soledad River valley. Yet in The Children's Crusade, the shift between the children's monologue and the collective memory pushes the reader into the role of investigative psychoanalyst. Packer is most certainly aware of this, having one of the children, Rebecca, become an introspective psychiatrist whose memory and its distortion is a constant tease in her life, probing what might be real and whether it matters or not. Treading through the mottled family life of the Blairs, Packer pushes you to ask these questions: What is the motivation behind each memory or action? How have these scenes built Robert or Rebecca or Ryan or James into who he or she now is? Why might they be so broken?
The Children's Crusade, at times, dips into heavy-handed moments, such as having a group of children sit around and discuss their "crusade" to bring their mother back into the fold, but if anything, the emotion and intent is genuine. For all the biblical Cain and Abel navel-gazing of East of Eden, the same hunger runs through Caleb's urgent desire for his father's love and approval. For both families, the crux of it is the dire attempt to fit together, with love as both the solvent and connective glue.


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From the Cluttered Desk. . .
Lady Eagles continue winning ways
HOME RUN - Dawson sophomore Rylie Rodriquez (center with helmet) was greeted by her teammates at home plate after she smashed a solo home run against Goose Creek Memorial that gave the Lady Eagles an early 3-1 lead. Dawson went on to beat the Lady Patriots 9-5 to improve to 3-1 in district play. (Photo by Dr. David Davis)
PEARLAND — The Dawson Lady Eagles opened up District 24-4A action with a 6-4 loss to the Santa Fe Lady Indians. Both teams were pre-season picks to challenge for the district crown. Santa Fe has a one-game edge over the Lady Eagles in the league standings in the opening round.
Despite the disappointing loss, Dawson has rebounded with three straight wins to improve to 3-1 in the standings. The Lady Eagles have beaten Galena Park (10-0), Texas City (10-5), and most recently Goose Creek Memorial (9-5). Dawson is 14-6 overall.
Goose Creek Memorial jumped out to a quick 1-0 lead in the top of the first inning when Dawson starter Megan Stone issued a walk followed by an Dawson error placing two runners on base. A ground out moved the runners to second and third and a single scored GC Memorial's first run of the game. The Lady Eagles got a double play to end the scoring threat.
Dawson took the lead in the bottom of the second as the Lady Eagles took advantage of two hits by Niki Turner and Jena Guse plus a walk and error helped Dawson to plate two runs. Dawson added one more run in the frame to take a 3-1 lead.
After Memorial scored another run in the top of the third to cut the margin to 3-2, Dawson's Rylie Rodriguez opened up the bottom of the third with a towering home run over the left centerfield fence to spot Dawson to a 4-2 lead. Rose Sullivan and Turner hit back-to-back singles and Turner would eventually score after Memorial got a double play. Amber Langston punched a single to centerfield to plate Turner.
GC Memorial used a two-run homer off Stone to cut the lead to 5-4 in the top of the the fourth.
Dawson answered in their half of the fourth when Stone blasted a two-run double to increase the lead to 7-4.
Memorial scored their final run of the game in the top of the fifth and then Dawson added two more runs in the bottom of the fifth on a bases load single to post the 9-5 final score.
The Lady Eagles pounded out 16 total hits for nine runs while Stone, who picked up the win, allowed five runs on 11 hits, walked two, and struck out a pair.
Copyright © 2019 by Dr. David Davis. All Rights Reserved.

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


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Nautičko sidrište Bobovišća
Bobovišća na moru, otok Brač
About anchorage
About location
Info about location
The island of Brač is the one of the sunniest Adriatic islands with more than 2,700 hours of sun in per year.
The average summer temperature is 23.8 C and winter temperature 8.6 C. The island of Brač is a typical Mediterranean island with long, hot and dry summers and short, mild winters.
With surface area of 394 km2 , the island of Brač is Dalmatia's most widespread island and third largest among 1185 islands, islets, rocks and reefs Croatia's Adriatic coast.
With its peak, Vidova gora (778 m), it is also the highest Adriatic island.
The island of Brač has excellent connection to the mainland and the rest of Europe.
Ferry lines Split – Supetar and Makarska – Sumartin sail several times a day.
Thanks to the island airport Brač is also connected with various parts of Europe.
Bobovisca na moru is located on the west coast of the island in a beautiful deep bay that is shared by the Bobovišća harbor and Vičja port.
Because of their natural positions these two bays are very secure and very peaceful. With the beauty and security they provide these two bays are very interesting for sailors.
There are also two taverns and two shops in the bay.
Brač international airport is located only a half hour drive from Bobovišća na moru.
The village has a permanent population of about fifty, who work in agriculture, fishing and tourism. The village is also known as the family residence of the Croatian poet Vladimir Nazor whose monument is located on the seafront…
Bobovišća na moru are a small Mediterranean fishing village with old houses and a long tradition of tourism. Beside superior ambiance and wonderful nature, Bobovišća will show you its historical heritage, which is still so alive that when you visit this place you will have a feeling that the sweet melancholy of centuries is touching you.
Sailing anchorage Bobovisca - location
Island Brac - location
43°21' N 16°28'E
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Kindergarten Children and Parents Purify Hearts through Buddha Bathing
Written by Lai Shao Bin & Jacqueline Khoo, KL & Selangor / Translated by Chong Pei Fen
A total of 139 students from Tzu Chi's kindergartens in Kuala Lumpur (Pandan Indah and Kepong) and 304 family members attended the 2015 Tzu Chi's 3-in-1 celebration of Buddha's Day, Mother's Day and Tzu Chi's Day at KL Tzu-Chi Jing Si Hall.
Considering their young age and lack of stamina, the Education Group seated the students and their families in the International Conference Hall. There, they experienced the dignified Buddha Bathing Ceremony through live video telecast.
After the grand ceremony, 25 teachers and volunteers brought the children and families to the waiting zone. The children were then led to the plaza in front of the KL Tzu-Chi Jing Si Hall and were positioned accordingly before their families joined them.
Praying for peace and bliss
Pan Hui Hui and her five-year-old son, Ye Ren Hao, had never joined a Buddha Bathing Ceremony in a large group. She was deeply impressed by the imposing atmosphere when hundreds of them lined up orderly before the Buddha bathing platform; and was especially moved the moment they pressed their palms together and raised their hands up high in a prayer. She felt like she was conversing with the Buddha, praying to Him to bless everyone with peace and bliss.
Hui Hui remarked that while performing the Buddha bathing ritual, we can evoke the loving-kindness in us and at the same time, pray for blessings for those who are suffering, like the quake victims in Nepal.
Hui Hui once took about two hours to reach her home in Petaling Jaya from the Da Ai Kindergarten in Kepong. Despite the distance and occasional heavy traffic, she has insisted on sending her son to the Kindergarten because of its good environment, which allows her son to learn life and moral principles.
Another parent, Guo Ren Mei, also has to overcome the distance issue to send her four-year-old twin children, Huang Jun Jie and Huang Jun Hong, from Seputeh to the Da Ai Kindergarten in Kepong. She is convinced that her cousin, who is a teacher, has the insight to give her the right recommendation. She is gratified to see the improvements in her sons thanks to the Kindergarten's character education. She revealed that the twin boys, who used to be the "little emperors" at home, are now able to take care of their daily life.
Before this, she has only read about Tzu Chi's Buddha Bathing Ceremony in the newspapers. This year, at the teacher's invitation, she and her family finally made it to the event. She was impressed by the well-ordered and spectacular formations and ceremony, which involved thousands of people.
Raising funds for Nepal quake victims
A week before the event, the Kindergarten teachers started to coach the children to make bookmarks for charity sale. Some students wrote their well-wishes on the bookmarks while some sewed the bookmarks. Some mothers were also there to help the children with things they could not complete by themselves, such as, putting thread through a needle and tying strings. Ma Ci Yan, mother of six-year-old Jiang Zi Fan, was not new to Tzu Chi's Buddha Bathing Ceremony as her daughter is in her third year at the Kindergarten. They were both delighted to be able to contribute what they could for the quake victims.
After performing the Buddha bathing ritual, the students started their charity sale for the Nepal earthquake victims at the foyer of the Gratitude Hall. With their tender voice, they called out to the passers-by to send their love and warmth to the quake victims. Ci Yan and Zi Fan held a poster and appealed to the passers-by to support the good cause. Within half an hour, all 26 bookmarks were sold.
Expressing gratitude to parents
On this special occasion, the Education Group also organized some activities to promote filial piety. Four-year-old Feng Shan Wei offered her mother, Chen Bi Yun, a foot-bath. Bi Yun had initially resisted that, but after watching a sketch showing the process of growth from birth, to being parents and eventually old age, she was moved and relented. She was reminded of her mother and with teary eyes, she shared her intention to give her parents a foot-bath when they visit the Jing Si Hall that afternoon.
Bi Yun, who participated in Tzu Chi's Buddha Bathing Ceremony for the first time, said that it helps to wash away the impurities and ignorance in one's heart. She also shared that her daughter, who was enrolled at the Kindergarten four months ago, has shown some improvements in her demeanour. She disclosed, "She is more obedient and reasonable now."
Bi Yun is confident with Tzu Chi's educational philosophies. She hopes that her daughter can learn the proper ways of dealing with people and issues at the Kindergarten that is full of love and kindness. She and her husband are both grateful to witness the positive transformations in their lovely daughter.
A total of 139 students from Tzu Chi's Da Ai kindergartens in Kuala Lumpur attended the Buddha Bathing Ceremony. [Photograph by Lee Wei Kean]
Volunteer mindfully taught the children the steps in performing the Buddha bathing ritual. [Photograph by Lai Jih Chuan]
The pure-hearted children sang the prayer song loudly and prayed piously for a world free from disasters. [Photograph by Lai Jih Chuan]
Pan Hui Hui (left), who attended the Buddha Bathing Ceremony together with her son, Ye Ren Hao (centre), was impressed by the dignified ceremony. [Photograph by Beh Chun How]
Four-year-old Feng Shan Wei offered her mother, Chen Bi Yun, a foot-bath. Bi Yun felt that their hearts were purified as they performed the Buddha bathing ritual. [Photograph by Beh Chun How]
A week prior to the Buddha Bathing Ceremony, teachers at the Da Ai Kindergarten coached the children to make bookmarks for charity sale to send their love to the Nepal earthquake victims. [Photograph by Xu Hui Zhong]
Jiang Zi Fan (4th left) and her mother, Ma Ci Yan (3rd left), held a poster and called out to everyone to support the charity sale. All the handmade bookmarks were sold within half an hour. [Photograph by Beh Chun How]
More in this category: « Melaka Buddha Bathing Ceremony – Pray for World Peace	Blessings of Buddha's Day with Aroma of Buns »


Members of minority faiths in Russia breathed a sigh of relief yesterday, welcoming President Boris Yeltsin's veto of a bill that would have sharply curbed their religious freedoms.
"The forces of light have prevailed over the forces of darkness," said Igor Diksa, a pastor and Evangelical church leader. "This is very important."
On Tuesday evening, President Yeltsin vetoed a bill that had been passed overwhelmingly by both houses of parliament, discriminating against nontraditional religious groups and favoring the Russian Orthodox Church.
Yeltsin rejected the bill because "many articles ... infringe citizens' constitutional rights and freedoms, establish inequality of different confessions, and contradict Russia's international obligations," he said in a message to the Duma, the lower house of parliament.
The draft law "On Freedom of Conscience and Religious Association" was strongly backed by the Russian Orthodox Church and the Communist Party, both worried about the growing influence of foreign churches and emerging indigenous denominations. But it aroused widespread international indignation. President Clinton expressed his concern, the United States Senate threatened to withhold $200 million in aid to Russia if the bill became law, and Pope John Paul II wrote to Yeltsin last week urging a veto.
Advocates of religious freedom in Russia complained that the bill went well beyond its stated intention of protecting citizens from cults and extremist groups such as the Japanese-based Aum Shinri Kyo, which had many followers here until it was accused of a nerve-gas attack on a Tokyo subway in March 1995.
The law would have barred all denominations except those registered at least 15 years ago - when the antireligious Communist state controlled religious affairs - from qualifying as "religious organizations," including Roman Catholics, Mormons, and independent Baptists. They would thus have been denied the right to own property, invite foreign speakers, or open bank accounts, among other things.
"We would have been sent back to the catacombs," said Pastor Diksa, secretary of the inter-denominational Committee for the Defense of Religious Freedom in Russia.
In the draft law, the Russian Orthodox Church, the country's largest religious group, along with Islam, Judaism, and Buddhism, is designated as a "traditional" Russian religion exempt from the restrictions.
Yeltsin said a law was needed to "defend the moral and spiritual health of the Russian people and impose reliable barriers against radical sects," and asked for the support of Duma deputies in amending the bill. "We cannot have a democratic society if we violate the Constitution and fail to defend the interests of any minority of our citizens," he warned.
The president's decision drew criticism from his political enemies. "The law is required to limit Western pressure on the minds of Russian citizens," said Communist deputy Viktor Ilyukhin. The veto, he charged, "provides further proof that Russia has become a protectorate of the West."
Though international protests appear to have weighed heavily in Yeltsin's veto, they were not the only factor. "It is not just international pressure as such," says Michael Bourdeaux, director of the Keston Institute in Oxford, England, which monitors religious life in the former Soviet Union. "It is also a question of international agreements that Russia has signed" promising religious freedoms.
The bill is being seen as a landmark in the ongoing struggle between the framers of the 1993 Constitution, under which all religions are equal before the law, and nationalist forces seeking to promote Slav traditions.
Yeltsin's action sends the bill back to parliament where a commission representing the Duma, the Federation Council (the upper house of parliament), and the president will seek to draft amendments.
If no agreement is reached on new wording, the Duma and Federation Council can override the presidential veto with a two-thirds majority, which appears well within their reach. Until the Duma resumes its sessions, probably in September, however, the bill would remain in limbo.


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From Bristol to Africa
From America to Bristol
The ships return to Bristol
Estates within 2 miles of Bristol
Estates within 10 miles of Bristol
Luxuries from abroad
The Places Involved
Home › Bristol and Transatlantic Slavery › Slavery Routes › From America to Bristol › Profits ›
The Royal Fort
List of slaves on Spring Plantation
Sir Robert Yeamans, c1682
The Royal Fort in the Clifton area of Bristol (now owned by the University of Bristol) was built by Thomas Tyndall. It was built in about 1767 on the site of the Royal Fort precinct, which was a fort built during the English Civil War in the 1640s to protect the city. A picture of the original fort can be seen here. The Tyndall family had financial connections with the slave trade. Some members of the family were also slaving agents on Jamaica in the Caribbean for a number of Bristol merchants. Under the company name 'Tyndalls and Ashetton' they sold the enslaved Africans from the ships to the plantation owners in Jamaica. Before Tyndall's house was built, the old Royal Fort buildings were inhabited throughout the late 17th and early 18th centuries. A number of people who had associations with slavery lived there during this time. One of these people was John Elbridge, who owned the Spring Plantation on the Caribbean island of Jamaica.
Arnos Court, in Brislington, south-east Bristol, and its gothic-style 'Black Castle' were built in the late 1750s by William Reeve. He was a Quaker (a member of a religious society known for their peaceful beliefs). He owned copper-smelting and brass-making businesses. Reeve was also a slave merchant. The Black Castle was a folly – a structure built for fun, or to enhance a view. It was built using blocks made from the waste (called slag) from his brass-making business. The slag building blocks were black, and these blocks can be seen in many buildings in and around Bristol. Reeve went bankrupt in 1775 and his house and business were sold to a member of the Tonge family, who were also important slave traders.
Ashton Court, in the south west of the city, has a long history dating back to medieval times. Its manor house was extensively renovated in the mid-eighteenth century when its owner John Hugh-Smyth married the £40,000 (worth about £2,000,000 today) heiress Rebecca Woolnough. Her wealth came partly from the Spring plantation in Jamaica, which her family owned. Pictured here is a list of the slaves on the Spring Plantation in Jamaica from 1st October, 1782. Through Rebecca, the Smyth family of Ashton Court owned a share in the plantation. The slaves, their occupation and fitness are listed. Several old women are noted as 'useless'. The 'New Negroes' are noted as 'marked Fi3' and 'DRS' – they might have been branded with an identifying mark by a previous owner.
Now a private school for girls, Redland Court, in Redland, Bristol, has longstanding Caribbean connections with the slave trade. The original house was owned by Sir Robert Yeamans in the 1680s, whose portrait can be seen here. His brother, Sir John, was one of the early British settlers of the island of Barbados in the Caribbean. He was also a settler in and early Governor of South Carolina, in America. Both South Carolina and Barbados were slave colonies and had many plantations worked on by enslaved Africans. Sir John's son, Colonel Robert Yeamans of Barbados, eventually inherited Redland Court. He then sold it in the early eighteenth century to another Barbados plantation owner, Thomas Maycock. Maycock, at his death in 1731, gave the life-time use of the house to his mistress Ann Ely, also a plantation owner. By 1738 the estate in Redland was purchased by a London grocer, John Cossins. He rebuilt the house and the nearby Redland Chapel at the time of his marriage to Martha Innys. Cossins' new wife had inherited land in the Caribbean from her family. On the death of Cossins, she inherited Redland Court. When she died, it was left to her brothers who also inherited wealth from the Caribbean. No wonder there are African heads carved in stone on the back of Redland Chapel – the history of the building is connected with many who were linked to the slave trade.
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Home1:400 Scale ReviewsEça De Queiroz: TAP Air Portugal Lockheed L-1011 Tristar 500 CS-TEG by NG Models
Eça De Queiroz: TAP Air Portugal Lockheed L-1011 Tristar 500 CS-TEG by NG Models
September 21, 2020 Richard Stretton 1:400 Scale Reviews 1
Licensing is a funny thing; on the one hand some people want official releases and on the other I'd argue most people don't care. I fall firmly into the latter category as charging for the use of your branding on a model seems rather spurious to me. It's not like getting official permission necessarily guarantees quality, as there have been plenty of times official models are staggeringly inaccurate both in terms of the livery and the actual aircraft. The Herpa Cathay Pacific models are a good example. They may be official but they are rubbish. NG models has at times observed perfect licensing protocol and at other times hasn't. In this case it has, which means the collector gets exactly the same model they would have got anyway, but it now has a steep price increase associated with it. Portuguese airlines seem to be sticklers for licensing in general. I still recall one time I posted an image of an Aeroclassics SATA A310 and I was told to take the image down by SATA themselves, even though I was just a collector.
Pedro Aragão / CC BY-SA 3.0 GFDL
The Tristar 500 was a rather desperate attempt by Lockheed to regain some of the ground lost by the near collapse of Rolls-Royce, which had put the kibosh firmly on developing improved versions of the Tristar engines able to compete with the range of the McDonnell Douglas DC-10-30 and DC-10-40. The latter were powered either by General Electric CF-6s or Pratt & Whitney JT9Ds, which progressively increased the type's range from a widebody medium range trunkliner to a long-range globetrotter. Unable to do this Lockheed instead cut the weight of the Tristar to enable greater range.
The Tristar 500 was an obvious choice for airlines with significant standard Tristar fleets such as British Airways, Air Canada, Delta and LTU. What the Tristar 500 also provided was an excellent aircraft for smaller national airlines that had either tried larger equipment, but couldn't make 747s work, or who needed a smaller widebody upgrade on their existing 707s. In the latter category BWIA, Air India and Air Lanka fitted while in the former Alia Royal Jordanian and TAP Air Portugal had both operated small numbers of 747s.
Tap's route towards the Tristar 500 was not straight forward. It initially ordered three with an option for two more in September 1979, but just as it gained the necessary financial package to buy the aircraft the Portuguese Government stepped in and refused permission for the order. This was due to heavy losses TAP suffered in the previous years. In order to justify the fleet expansion, the management needed to present a restructuring plan designed to make the airline viable within the next five years.
No sooner was this obstacle negotiated than industrial action stopped negotiations again and it wasn't until October 1980 that the order was confirmed. The first aircraft was delivered in January 1983 and the fleet grew to five when the options were taken up. The fleet grew to seven aircraft in 1988/89 with the addition of a pair of ex-Alia aircraft one of which became CS-TEG. This frame, formerly JY-AGJ, was named Eça De Queiroz, after the famous Portuguese writer of the 19th Century. All of the TAP Tristars were named after famous Portuguese historical figures.
JetPix [GFDL 1.2 (http://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/fdl-1.2.html) or GFDL 1.2 (http://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/fdl-1.2.html)]
CS-TEG's service with TAP lasted only for just under six years as TAP began to take delivery of new Airbus A340-300s in November 1994. She was one of the pair leased to Air India in late 1995 and her subsequent career included service in Sweden with Novair as SE-DVI, before a return to the Portuguese register as CS-TMP with Air Luxor and LUZair.
The format for my reviews is to split them into three key areas:
The mould of the aircraft
The paint and livery
Printing and quality control
Each can get a maximum score of 10 for a section giving a maximum combined total score of 30.
THE MOULD
It is hopefully well known by now that the only real competitor to the NG Models Tristar 500 is the old Dragon Wings version dating from the turn of the century. Certainly, the Gemini Jets and Lockness Models versions from the past couple of years can be easily discounted as they do not portray a real aircraft. They instead portray a weird Tristar hybrid without many of the features that make the 500 unique.
It helps that the standard-length NG Tristar is so good but that wouldn't count for anything if NG had ignored the differences. As a recap they are:
A decrease in length by just under 4 metres
A redesigned and shorter forward and rear wing fairing where it meets the fuselage
An increased wingspan (by an extra 3 metres) at the tip.
The different middle engine / fuselage connector (shared with the L-1011-200)
Gemini got 1.5 of the 4 and Aeroclassics managed slightly better (about a 2 although the undercarriage and nose are worse). NG Models gets about a 3.5. My only criticism is that the complete shape of the middle engine fuselage fairing (frisbee) isn't spot on. It's still a little too concave.
What you do get of course is the perfect nose shape, beautiful fuselage and amazing tail section. The latter is particularly nice with an excellent engine to fuselage width and perfect angles. The complex tailcone, engine exhaust area is tightly fitted and looks great. The wings of course demonstrate the extended wingtips and a good angle. These are all major features that have been incorrect or poorly reproduced on the competition.
The undercarriage is very attractive but does repeat the minor errors of the standard-length version. The forward process on the nosegear is a little large and the angle of the maingear doors is not quite correct.
Criticism of the NG Tristars has been centred on the angle of the forward engine rims but it is pleasing to see that NG Models has recently improved this and the engine rims correctly angle backwards, albeit only slightly. This modification to the mould removes the only real problem it had and elevates it from the 9 I have previously given it to a 10.
SCORE – 10
PAINT & LIVERY
This is a rather curious registration to choose for this model since it does not represent the TAP Tristar 500 in the delivery colours and as noted it wasn't even a machine delivered directly to TAP. The primary difference is the belly colour, which was natural metal on the original aircraft not light grey. It is a little disappointing that they have done this unless they are planning on subsequently producing the original version as well. I certainly would have preferred the original colours. It wouldn't surprise me at all if this is the sort of interference from TAP themselves you sometimes get when a model is fully licensed. Airlines rarely know their own histories so it would be a typical mistake for them to make.
At least the rest of the livery is the TAP classic orangey red and green, which NG has gotten perfect. In some photos it looks like there is a thin line between the red and green but other close up shots show this isn't true. The cheatline is well placed and takes it diagonal route up the tail well, producing an interesting curve over the shape of the number two engine.
The titles and tap tail logo are good and as you can expect from NG the tiny text under the Portuguese flag and the aircraft name are actually legible under magnifying glass. NG even replicate the white and silver panel detail visible on many photos of the aircraft.
PRINTING & QUALITY CONTROL
Printing is one of NG's strongest points and to compare the models from different manufacturers printing the best thing to do is flip them over and look at the undersides. Yes, you may not see them when the model is on display but the detail put in their shows how much the brand cares about getting it right elsewhere. NG cares. The underside of their Tristars are spectacular, especially at the rear. NG have taken printing to another level and this L-1011 has the finest.
Build quality is very good with all major components in place and fixed well. Nonetheless the continuing wheelhub issue of NG Tristars continues with this one too. Of the wheelhubs on this model half of them (5 of 10) have the undetailed wheelhubs. Annoyingly of the maingear it is only the inside hubs that are correct while the outside ones are lacking in details. This should be an easy issue to fix but it hasn't been now after several months.
SCORE – 9
This is a fabulous model but is it better because it is licensed by TAP (and the box doesn't even mention NG)? No, it isn't and I suspect if NG had been able to ask collectors, we'd have got the natural metal belly version and a more typical rego of one of the original 5 L-1011s. Still, you can't argue with the score. The question is whether the model is worth the extra $$ added to the already not insubstantial cost of an NG Tristar. Well, yes, it is – just.
FINAL SCORE – 29/30
1:400 Scale Diecast Models
CS-TEG
L-1011-500
L1011 Tristar
Lockheed L-1011
NG Models
Tristar 500
Yellow-top: TAESA Boeing 727-31 XA-SQO by Aeroclassics
Gemini Jets September 2017 Releases
September 7, 2017 The Diecast Flier 0
Gemini Jets has announced its September lineup of 18 new diecast model aircraft releases. This month brings several new models which will certainly be popular. Highlights for the 1:400 scale releases include the release of […]
Stubby Spoiler: China Southwest Airlines Boeing 737-66N B-2155 by Panda Models
July 16, 2019 Richard Stretton 0
Widebody airliners garner significantly more interest in 1:400 scale than narrowbodies, especially if they are not completely modern, which unbelievably nowadays the 737 Next generation series isn't. Even so it is far from a classic […]
The A350 Counts to 10: Lufthansa Gemini Jets A350-900
March 6, 2017 Richard Stretton 1
Welcome to the first of hopefully many model reviews partnering Yesterday's Airlines with "The Diecast Flier". In these reviews I will do something that until now I've avoided – reviewing individual models rather than the […]
'Cheatline is well placed'? Sorry, I have to disagree with you there, as the port side is cleartly printed slightly too high. This is clearly evident on the head-on photo, where the post side is not quite lined up with the starboard side round the nose.


text:
Laid-off Target workers support each other online
As former Target workers bond online, businesses and schools are reaching out.
March 30, 2015 — 5:40am
In the first days after being laid off, John Drevlow pledged to stick to a daily routine, as he did in 12 years working for Target Corp.
He still wakes up at 6 a.m. and helps get his young sons ready for school. The rest of the day is less defined but, nearly three weeks after becoming one of 1,700 people let go by Target, it still revolves to a large degree around his former colleagues. But now, that happens online.
"That's the amazing thing — it still feels like we're a team," Drevlow said. "I reflect a lot about if this layoff would have happened 15 or 20 years ago, our experience would have been entirely different. I joke, I can sit in my office at my house, and it feels like I'm just working from home. Because I'm connecting with the same people I used to work with."
Layoffs tend to be a solitary and isolating experience. But so far, that has not been the case for many of the people Target laid off on March 10 in the largest-ever downsizing of its corporate headquarters.
Friends, peers, businesses and schools across the Twin Cities reached out to exiled Target workers with ideas, job leads and offers for discounts on everything from photo headshots to yoga.
Meanwhile, recruiters from Home Depot, Gap and other retailers have flown in to meet former Target employees. On Thursday, Amazon.com staged a recruitment party at the Surly Brewing Co.'s new taproom in Minneapolis.
Aaron Lavinsky, Star Tribune
John Drevlow watched as his 3-year-old son, Eli, pointed to places he's visited on a map in John's home office.
When Drevlow settles in at his home computer each morning, one of his first stops online is a private Facebook group that connects Target employees and those it recently idled. The nearly 5,000 people in the group share job leads, contacts at potential employers, interviewing tips and words of encouragement.
The Facebook group is also a forum for working through the emotions of the layoff. Many former employees shared an optimism for their future. Some discussed tougher moments, such as the odd and sad feeling of shopping at Target now as a "guest" instead of an employee. Others asked for advice on everything from whether to wear pantyhose to an interview to how to transfer contacts over from their company cellphones.
Last week, a handful of ex-Target workers on the forum announced they landed new jobs. Some others confessed they aren't ready to jump into a full-blown job search.
Kevin Khottavongsa, 27, worked in business licensing at Target for just a few weeks. The layoff dealt him another big blow after the death of his father in January.
"It felt like everything got pulled from underneath my feet," he said. "But now I get to get to start over and prioritize my needs."
He said the Facebook group has provided a lot of moral support. "It is amazing that a group of people can band together and keep myself and other former peers afloat," he said.
Community mobilizes
Khottavongsa is one of about 300 of the former Target workers to sign up for nondegree executive education classes at the University of St. Thomas, something Target offered to pay for as part of its severance package to employees.
There are already wait lists for some classes, so now the school is thinking about adding some more sessions, a university spokesman said.
The University of Minnesota's Carlson School of Management is holding a half-day "unexpected job search" workshop next month to help. The school has also kept tabs on the recruiters coming to town to meet the laid-off Target workers.
"It's exciting to see that people want to quickly hire these workers," said Maggie Tomas, director of career center at graduate school. "It's also fortunate we're in a really nice job market and we're in a state with a low unemployment rate. Those are the silver linings."
That rosy job outlook and the strong interest from prospective employers have boosted many workers' confidence and diminished the ego bruising that typically happens in a layoff, Tomas said. "It doesn't feel like a stigma at all," she said.
The outreach will be of use some time to come. Target is not done yet with its cuts; a smaller number is expected in coming months.
For the laid-off employees, it's easier to explain to prospective employers that they were part of a cut that included 1,700 people. Dozens have taken I Am Mpls, a local booster group, up on its offer to profile them on its Facebook page to highlight them to prospective employers.
Drevlow has been chronicling the ups and downs of being a victim of corporate downsizing in several posts on LinkedIn.
"There's a little bit of 'Why me?' " said Drevlow, who is in his mid-30s and spent his entire career with the company. "But it's a pretty easy question to answer. It's not personal. The company just had to make a decision and remove layers. You were in the wrong spot at the wrong time."
John Drevlow called his wife to find out about medicine dosage for his son, Jonathan, who spend the day home sick from school. John Drevlow wore a suit to Target last week, knowing full well that he was walking into his own execution after working there for 12 years out of college.
He saw firsthand how the company had become too slow to make decisions under layers of management.
"It's hard to turn an organization like that around without making some tough decisions," he said. "Target is a great company and I have nothing but goodwill toward them."
Suiting up
After Target executives told investors in New York on March 2 that they were planning to downsize the 13,000-strong headquarters staff, Drevlow began to think he was vulnerable. He'd just transferred to a new job as a product manager for shoes. But his paperwork had not yet been processed, so he felt he was in a sort of limbo.
On the morning of March 10, he decided to meet his fate with grace and wear a suit to work, something he'd rarely done after the company last year moved to a business casual dress code.
"There was this sense of walking into my own execution," Drevlow said. "There was this moment of, maybe if just stop and don't go in, this won't happen. But you have to face it."
After learning he was on the list, Drevlow texted his wife, Lisa, and she replied that she was safe. Then, as he later described on LinkedIn, one of the lowest days in his career ended up becoming one of the best nights of his life.
Drevlow went from one restaurant or bar along Nicollet Mall to another, running into co-workers and friends. They comforted one another and told each other how they had improved each other's lives. It was a moment of elation that has kept him feeling buoyant about his future — a "This is your Target life moment," Drevlow said.
At home, as he tried to find a new routine, Drevlow has taken over more of the household chores, such as folding laundry and cooking dinner and watching expenses as the family adjusts to be a single-income household for a while.
When he talks to those who are still at Target, he sees that they are struggling in a different way: trying to figure out who is doing what job amid a giant reorganization that is still not settled. "Their world has been turned upside down, too," Drevlow said.
One thing he's trying to stick with is his daily CrossFit workout.
Drevlow and a group of co-workers went to the Life Time Fitness at the Target Center every day during their lunch break to work out together. About half of that crew was let go in the layoff.
Next month, his fitness gang is planning to reunite for one last workout together one month after the layoff day. They're calling it "Target Tuesday."
Business Mackay: Successful sales rely on 'yes or yes' propositions
Music Bruno Mars has it all in St. Paul — except originality
Variety 'Gamification' makes a competition out of everyday life
Business Gen Z will start shaping Top Workplaces this summer
Local Wetterlings sue, stopping release of files in Jacob's investigation
Mackay: Successful sales rely on 'yes or yes' propositions
Bruno Mars has it all in St. Paul — except originality
'Gamification' makes a competition out of everyday life
Gen Z will start shaping Top Workplaces this summer
Wetterlings sue, stopping release of files in Jacob's investigation
Stock indexes were posting slight losses in early trading on Wall Street Wednesday as a weak showing for railroad operator CSX pulled industrial companies broadly lower.
U.S. home construction slipped last month as an uptick in the building of single-family homes was offset by a big drop in apartment construction.
March 10: Layoffs begin at Target; Dayton meets CEO Cornell
March 11: Target cuts come all at once
March 12: After the layoff, Target starts tearing down corporate walls
Target hires Facebook exec to lead IT operations • Business


text:
Jean-François Delmas, dit Francisque Delmas ou Jean-Francisque Delmas, né à Lyon le  et mort à Saint-Alban-de-Montbel en Savoie le , est un baryton-basse français.

Carrière

À la sortie du Conservatoire de Paris, où il étudia avec Bussine et Obin, il débute à l'Opéra le 28 septembre 1886 dans le rôle de Saint-Bris dans Les Huguenots de Meyerbeer.

Délaissant une carrière internationale, il reste fidèle pensionnaire du Palais Garnier où il chante plus de 60 rôles. Il est à la création d'une quarantaine d'opéras contemporains, plus ou moins oubliés, dont principalement Le Mage (1891), Thaïs (1894) de Massenet et Monna Vanna (1909) de Henry Février, et des premières telles Salammbô de Reyer (1901), Siegfried de Richard Wagner le 3 janvier 1902, Roméo et Juliette de Gounod, Ariane et Barbe-Bleue de Dukas, Patrie ! de Émile Paladilhe ou L'Étranger de Vincent D'Indy. Il est aussi un remarquable Don Juan, Mephistopheles et Antar.

De par sa voix puissante et sa tessiture de baryton-basse, il est un interprète wagnérien admiré, spécialement dans les rôles de Wotan (la tétralogie), Gurnemanz (Parsifal), Hans Sachs (Les Maîtres Chanteurs de Nuremberg).

Il quitte l'Opéra en 1928.

Distinctions

 (Officier de l'Instruction publique)

Notes

Liens externes

Chanteur français d'opéra
Baryton-basse français
Naissance à Lyon
Naissance en avril 1861
Chevalier de la Légion d'honneur
Décès en septembre 1933
Décès à 72 ans
Personnalité liée à la musique classique décorée de la Légion d'honneur
Officier des Palmes académiques

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaWikipedia


text:
'Succession' star Brian Cox talks memoir, Logan Roy's planned exit, turning down 'Game of Thrones'
Bryan Alexander
It was so Logan Roy.
In October, as Scottish Emmy-winning actor Brian Cox's memoir was released in the U.K, portions were revealed to be worthy of the "Succession" star's bombastic media titan and biting Roy family patriarch.
Johnny Depp was labeled "overrated," action star Steven Seagal called "ludicrous in real life," and Edward Norton "a nice lad but a bit of a pain in the arse because he fancies himself a writer-director."
As Cox's memoir, "Putting the Rabbit in the Hat" (Grand Central, 352 pp., out Tuesday) hits U.S. shelves, Cox has diplomatically written an addendum that will be added to the still-unscheduled paperback addition.
"There were certain things I wanted to clarify as I was accused of being disrespectful," Cox says. "It should be an ongoing conversation. Maybe I will write Part 2 of this book where I examine more in my life."
Until then, "Rabbit in the Hat," written while Cox was filming the third "Succession" season, will have to suffice. The conversational, unfiltered tome covers Cox's rise from poverty to Royal Shakespeare Company stage actor sharing the stage with Laurence Olivier to John Gielgud with screen appearances ranging from "Braveheart" to "X2: X-Men United."
Cox discussed some memorable memoir moments:
'Succession' star Brian Cox: Writes on 'overrated' Johnny Depp, 'ludicrous' Steven Seagal in memoir
Logan Roy was not meant to survive 'Succession' Season 1
Cox says that in initial talks with "Succession" producers, including creator Jesse Armstrong, Logan Roy was supposed to "a one-season part."
"That was the plan," Cox says. "But when I brought that up later, that idea was quickly crushed. It was clearly going to be more than one season."
So Roy recovered from his Season 1 stroke as the show's creators and fans, and Cox himself, fell in love with the bombastic character. Keeping Roy alive also provides needed story tension that propels the drama.
"If you think about, as the title suggests, it's got to be about Logan trying to find his successor," Cox says. "Once he's gone, there's no problem."
Show writers have made clear the similarities between Cox and Roy, including sharing the Scottish hometown of Dundee ("I thought that was a weird thing to do," he says). Cox feels little in common with the "tragic" figure, "the absolute antithesis of who I am."
"I'm a socialist, anti-capitalist, all things Logan abhors," Cox says. "If Logan met me, he wouldn't stand me for two minutes."
How Brian Cox's Logan Roy: Leads his 'Succession' family to new lows of super-rich nastiness
Why Cox turned down 'Game of Thrones'
Cox says he turned down HBO's "Game of Thrones" one-season offer, which featured a dramatic death. Timing also played a factor in Cox passing on doomed King Robert Baratheon; Mark Addy took the part and was gored to death by a boar. In the memoir, Cox cheekily writes he Googled to recall who took the part.
"I knew it was Mark Addy that played it. But when I was writing that, for the life of me I couldn't remember who it was. I'm at the stage where I do lose names."
While he missed out on the "GOT" success and fortune, Cox says he "loved" the HBO series.
"It was a great show," says Cox, who worked with co-creator David Benioff in 2004's "Troy," starring as King Agamemnon alongside Brad Pitt's Achilles.
Cox was overlooked on 'Harry (expletive) Potter' franchise
In his tome, Cox playfully ponders why so many of his revered acting contemporaries landed roles in the franchise he jokingly calls "Harry (expletive) Potter."
"It was kind of weird, really," says Cox, who figures the part he might have played was Mad-Eye Moody, portrayed by Brendan Gleeson onscreen. He's still not sure how he missed out on all eight movies.
"It's a hard lesson to learn, but an agent of mine once told me, 'You know Brian, not everybody likes you,' " says Cox, who insists he simply expresses his opinions. "But you could see people discussing it and saying: 'What about Brian Cox? And then, 'No, he's a bit difficult.' It's absolute bollocks, but there you go. I'm the easiest person in the world to work with."
He was the OG big-screen Hannibal Lecter
"Succession" fans now stop Cox on the street to request Logan Roy swears. Before the show, fans would ask the Cox to repeat lines from 1986's "Manhunter," the first screen appearance of author Thomas Harris' cannibalistic serial killer Dr. Hannibal Lecter.
"It's a fantastic role," Cox says. "The thing about Lecter is don't oversell him. Let him be his mysterious self."
Cox was never approached for Jonathan Demme's 1991 drama "The Silence of the Lambs," in which Anthony Hopkins played Dr. Lecter to an Oscar and screen villain immortality. Cox hasn't broached Lecter with his friend Hopkins.
"We discuss many things, but that doesn't come into the conversation, and quite right too."
Cox jokes that he got "my revenge" directing Demme in a 2000 episode of HBO's prison drama "Oz."
"I had to tell (Demme) not to look into the camera, 'That's something we don't do as actors,'" Cox says, laughing. "That sort of joking. But he was so considerate and nice. And he had brilliant vision. It's a pretty fantastic film."
Book's addendum mends celebrity fences
In Cox's two-page memoir addendum, the author concedes he was "a bit harsh and sometimes too hasty for my own good, appearing somewhat glib at times" when discussing fellow actors.
He comments on Depp's "loyal and powerful fan base (which I have often borne the brunt of)," noting that Depp "has the gifts of a great silent screen player." Norton has become a writer-director and "showed his worth with his excellent creation 'Motherless Brooklyn.' " Seagal is not mentioned.
Cox ends the addendum noting his wife of two decades, Nicole Ansari (his third marriage). "She has been my rock," he writes.


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We need artists. We don't have high standards.
Come up to Rm. 263 of the UCC to The Gazette office and volunteer for our graphics section. You will get the opportunity to do some very creative art while laughing at all the hacks slaving away at their computers as you gleefully draw the day away.
We accept submissions for our Friday comics page, but we'd also love to have people come in and draw graphics for our paper. This year there is a very unique opportunity for artists at The Gazette because we are introducing our Weekend Edition (you're currently reading it) and the cover will often feature avant-garde art work. There has never been a better time to make your mark.


coal crusher working in thermal power plant yemen; ... (FPL) filed a petition to buy a 330-MW coal-fired power plant in Florida before then phasing it out of service.
A coal based thermal power plant converts the chemical ... So it is taken to the Crusher house and ... How does Coal based CFB boiler for power plant working?
Thermal Power Plant Working ... coal crushing plant in pakistan yemen crusher. coal crusher price coal mining mumbai. coal crusher processing plant project.


The West Bank, part of the Occupied Palestinian Territories bordering the Kingdom of Jordan, is about 2,270 square miles. In small areas, the Palestinian Authority (PA), exercises some governing responsibilities under the auspices of the Israeli military. Israel's "separation wall" cuts off thousands of West Bank Palestinians from their farmlands and severely restricts their movement, affecting Palestinians' access to employment, education, and medical care. (Source: IMEU).
In contrast to the Gaza Strip from which Israeli citizens were removed in 2005, Israel continues to build settlements in the West Bank on Palestinian land, thus violating the laws of occupation as stated in the Fourth Geneva Convention. The Convention prohibits an occupying power from transferring its citizens into the territory it occupies and from transferring or displacing the population of an occupied territory within or outside the territory. (Source: HRW).
Since the annexation of East Jerusalem in 1967, Israeli authorities have promoted a two-fold goal of expanding the city's Jewish population and reducing its Palestinian population. Palestinians who lived in East Jerusalem and were present when a June 1967 census was taken were considered "permanent residents" of the State of Israel. (East Jerusalem residents who were not present during the 1967 census lost the right to live there.) "Permanent residents" can lose this status if they are out of the country for six years, take the citizenship of another country, or cannot demonstrate that East Jerusalem is the "center" of their life. Many have been forced to move beyond Jerusalem's municipal boundaries because Israel has routinely denied permits for the building of new homes in densely crowded East Jerusalem and destroyed homes it claims were built without proper permits.
The European Union has attempted to help alleviate the water situation for Palestinians in the West Bank. The Israelis, however, have a history of demolishing EU-funded structures. On May 18, 2016, Israeli authorities delivered four demolition notices ordering several Palestinians to remove their EU-funded water tanks (which were part of a UN water development program). Nearly 7.4 acres of land is dependent on the tanks for irrigation. After Israeli authorities deliver a demolition order, the owners of the properties have seven days to remove the structures or they are charged for the demolition. (Source: Ma'an News).
The disparity and the cruelty of the Occupation can also be seen by comparing water consumption in the West Bank for Palestinians and for Israelis: The nearly 600,000 Israeli settlers use six times more water than the entire population of the West Bank (some 2.86 million people). Israel's discriminatory water policies have undermined the West Bank economy, which was traditionally agricultural and dependent on water resources for the irrigation of crops.


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