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ICNIRP's latest guidelines for limiting radio frequency exposure have been published
...Read More >
The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Published an Updated Version of International Standard for Safety of Human Exposure to Non-Ionizing Radiation
The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) published an...Read More >
The OECD published a final report on the impact of the use of technology on the brain, cognition and well-being in children
In its report, the Organization for Economic Co-operation and...Read More >
The World Health Organization publishes new guidelines for kids under the age of five: less screen time, more physical activity, and maintaining sleep time
According to new guidelines issued by the World Health Organization...Read More >
The TNUDA Information Center has published updated Recommendations for Educated Use of Cellphones
In light of the time that passed since the publication of the...Read More >
The US National Toxicology Program (NTP) published the final draft of the study investigating the association between radiofrequency (RF) radiation exposure and cancer in rats and mice
At the beginning of November 2018 the final report of a...Read More >

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


The first thing we did was talk about my fitness level and how I maintain it. I told him about boxing and jumping rope, bicycling, and all the yard work I do. He asked me if I can do pull-ups, and had me show him. I was able to do four and a half, as usual. He seemed to indicate that put me at a slight advantage as a CrossFit beginner.
Next he demonstrated the deadlift, explaining as he lifted that you have to lift your chest, arch your back slightly, and pull backwards with your weight on your heels. This was all completely new to me and there were some gigantic-looking plates on the bar that I assumed he was going to take off. Nope! "Now you try it." Through boxing I've gotten good at following instructions on physical tasks, so Nick was quite happy with my form considering it was my first time. He asked me how that amount of weight felt. I said once I stopped being so nervous just from the look of the weights, and the fact that I'm to drop them with a deafening clank after each lift, the weight would feel heavy but comfortable. Every time I dropped it, I clapped my hands over my ears.
He said the place people are most likely to hurt themselves in weightlifting is on the eccentric lift, meaning when they're trying to put the weight down gently. Apparently the exercise is the lift only—not the setting down. So there are thick rubber mats and you drop the weights.
One thing about the deadlift has confused me in hindsight. I could swear he said I was lifting almost my body weight (he asked me what it was), but much later I thought I saw that the bar held two 15-kg plates. That would be about half my body weight. Maybe that's what he said, I don't know. Or maybe somebody had changed the weight in between, also a possibility.
After practicing a few deadlifts to make sure I was understanding how, he told me my first workout would be to do three drills as fast as I can, three times through: 500 meters rowing, 20 box jumps, and 12 deadlifts. I was starting to feel confident and validated; none of those intimidated me. It was tiring to do them three times through as fast as I could, but so what. I was tired. That's what I came for. A box jump is jumping with both feet onto the top of a block the height of the tops of my knees, and back off again, and back up, 20 times in this case. I was relatively quite slow the third time through, although I maintained a time of about 2:12 for all three 500-meter rowing sessions. My total time was 19:13 for the workout. Nick said that was decent.
Next we talked a bit about the structure of the "classes," which are based on a daily workout that he posts on the wall. People come any time between 5:00 and 7:00 and work through it, then work on whatever they want. This can include strength training, gymnastic drills, kettlebell workouts, and I'm not sure what else.
The workout Nick had put me through was kind of a benchmark workout that he said new people do to get established, and that people return to every so often to measure their improvement. I'm not sure how they time themselves because Nick can't possibly stand over everybody every time.
Then he suggested I try doing an assisted muscle-up on the rings. That means doing a pull-up as high as you can and then rotating the rings as you pull your head forward and elbows in, eventually "standing" vertically with your hands at your sides supporting you on the rings. This is one of the most difficult challenges and everybody wants to be able to do it. Several men can do it and only one woman, as far as I know. So I put on this VERY TIGHT harness, stood on a chair, and learned how to hold the rings with the false grip. Harness or no, I couldn't muscle myself up. The thing that seemed not to be working for me was the low end of my triceps, right above my elbow. It's as if that part of the muscle is weak and not ready to cooperate. I tried several times because I really wanted to do a muscle-up, even with mechanical assistance! Finally Nick helped me more by pulling down on the ropes while I tried to transition from pull-up to pressing, and ta-da! I muscled up and felt triumphant up there in mid-air, with my arms quivering, wishing I could have miraculously done it on my first try.
I could have quit at that point, but hey, I drove all the way up there so I was going to get all the punishment I could stand before I left. Nick observed that I'm in good condition and am ready to make a lot of progress. I was glad about that because it speaks so well of Cappy's boxing workout (which I'm still going to do once a week even if I join CrossFit). Of course, just now I got up for a minute and am already stiff all over!
Next I learned a few more lifts (or drills with weights): the thruster and the push-press (I think these are CrossFit-originated drills but I'm not sure), and the forward squat (a "real" lift). All of the lifts and weight drills emphasized the legs, like the boxing drills do, so as my legs tired I could feel myself resisting the urge to do the lifts more with the upper body. I think I stuck to reasonably good form and Nick seemed comfortable with letting me try a few more of each after asking questions. The forward squat was especially challenging for me because I didn't like the hold: elbows completely bent and as high as possible, with the weight bar resting on the fronts of the shoulders, the fingertips, and the throat. You have to keep the chest high ("Big chest!" he kept reminding me) and refrain from gripping the weight—it's supposed to just rest against the front of the body and shoulders as you squat and stand.
I tried it with the empty bar and then with 20 pounds added when I wasn't quite comfortable with the technique, so it didn't go very well at first. We removed the plates. He explained in more depth about how to breathe (and not breathe), holding your breath during the squat and pressing with the diaphragm to tense the abdominals and strengthen the core. It worked! Each time I remembered to not only hold my breath but press against the held breath, the squat felt much more natural. I still had trouble with the high chest position because it and the weight bar caused me to tip my head back in a way that wasn't comfortable for my neck. Also, my wrists did not like being flexed all the way back with my elbows up and the weight resting partly on my fingertips. I think I'm going to recover just fine, so I'll keep trying and hope to get used to those postures.
Just for fun, I then tried a few push-ups on some rings that were lowered to a foot off the floor, and I collapsed onto one knee on the third one. Nick wondered if I could do a pull-up on the rings at the normal height. I was confident enough to try that even though I was tired, because I did a few ring pull-ups yesterday in a city park. I only did two tonight, and decided it was quitting time.
The next step is to have a few personal sessions to teach me more of the lifts. Then I'll be able to show up (if I join) and do whatever workout is posted on the board, with coaching as needed from Nick and Dave.
I feel good about this because though it's demanding, and I'm not up to speed, I'm ready to work up to it. I'm not sure if I'm going to find strength training "addictive" as Nick described it, though I think his expertise and enthusiasm for it is inspiring. I want a lot of variety and don't think I want to spend too much time doing the same lifts over and over. But maybe it will become compelling as a means to achieve the variety of skills I do want, like the ability to do a muscle-up or to hold a handstand and walk on my hands. Why do I want to do these things? I don't know. I just do. I feel like, it's my body, I own it, and I want to be proud of it. I've felt that way as far back as fifth grade so I think it's organic.


text:
Spaghetti Juke Joint
By Fabrizio Poggi
Music Genre Blues
2015 release from the Italian blues singer and Oscar-winning harmonica player. Spaghetti Juke Joint finds the musician embracing the sounds that inspired his journey over four decades ago. Fabrizio Poggi has performed and recorded with many great blues, rock and singer-songwriters including Garth Hudson of The Band and Bob Dylan, The Blind Boys of Alabama, Marcia Ball, Jerry Jeff Walker, Zachary Richard, Flaco Jimenez, John Hammond, Little Feat, Charlie Musselwhite, Kim Wilson, Augie Meyers, Steve Cropper, The Original Blues Brothers Band, Richard Thompson, Eric Bibb, Guy Davis, Billy Joe Shaver, Ponty Bone and Otis Taylor.
Artist: Fabrizio Poggi
Title: Spaghetti Juke Joint
Label: Appaloosa Records
Chicken Mambo
Fabrizio Poggi
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text:
Q: Measuring Big O of multiplication in Python As I understand it, the Order of Complexity for multiplication is quadratic so if a multiply two 1-digit numbers together there will be 1 operation, two 2-digit numbers together there will be 4 operations, two 3-digit numbers 9 operations and so on.
I wanted to see this complexity by timing the execution of a program that simply multiplied two numbers together. Unexpectedly, regardless of the size of the numbers, the execution time is the same.
import time

num1 = 135
num2 = 342

start = time.time()
total = num1 * num2
finish = time.time()
elapsed = finish - start

print elapsed

So the result is 9.53674316406e-07 if I multiply two 3-digit numbers or two 30-digit numbers.
What is it that I'm misunderstanding?

A: Your numbers are far too small to exhibit any difference in the time taken to multiply them. Try some proper sized numbers of the order of 10106.
For example:
import time

for k in range(10):
    num = 10**(10**k)

    start = time.time()
    total = num * num
    finish = time.time()
    elapsed = finish - start

    print k, elapsed

On my machine this outputs:
0 2.86102294922e-06
1 5.00679016113e-06
2 2.14576721191e-06
3 7.86781311035e-06
4 0.000285148620605
5 0.010409116745
6 0.391373157501
7 15.7926459312

(I'm still waiting for 8).

A: You are correct that for large numbers multiplication is quadratic (or even with better algorithms at least >O(n)). As long as they fit in a 64-bit number you probably won't see any change. There's two problems you're running into 64-bit numbers will hold up to 9.223372e+18 (an 19 digit number) and your 30 digit numbers are just going to be two 64-bit numbers. Try something with several 64-bit numbers (say 10000, which would be an 180000 digit number):
import time
import random

for i in range(0, 190000, 10000):
    a = random.randint(10**i, 10**(i+1)-1)
    b = random.randint(10**i, 10**(i+1)-1)

    start = time.time()
    c = a*b
    end = time.time()

    print i, str(c)[0], end-start # str(c)[0] just in case optimization on c (unlikely)

Results:
0 1 0.0
10000 3 0.000855922698975
20000 5 0.00253701210022
30000 1 0.00445008277893
40000 4 0.00767087936401
50000 3 0.00982689857483
60000 1 0.0133669376373
70000 9 0.0174329280853
80000 4 0.0230648517609
90000 3 0.0251250267029
100000 4 0.0296058654785
110000 4 0.0344429016113
120000 3 0.0401389598846
130000 1 0.0457019805908
140000 2 0.0524950027466
150000 1 0.0619490146637
160000 5 0.0693421363831
170000 2 0.068922996521
180000 2 0.0755639076233

Conclusion based on 90000 and 180000 it's >O(n) but

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaStackExchange


This is a tangy, sweet combination of red peppers and jalapenos (medium hot). Use as a light and spicy salsa with cream cheese, or as a baste for most meats. A great morning "wakeup" on toast, or mixed with scramble eggs.


text:
package com.msi.tough.cf.elasticbeanstalk;

import java.util.List;

import com.msi.tough.cf.CFType;

public class ConfigurationTemplateType extends CFType {
	private String templateName;
	private List<OptionSettingsType> optionSettings;
	private String solutionStackName;
	private SourceConfigurationType sourceConfiguration;

	public List<OptionSettingsType> getOptionSettings() {
		return optionSettings;
	}

	public String getSolutionStackName() {
		return solutionStackName;
	}

	public SourceConfigurationType getSourceConfiguration() {
		return sourceConfiguration;
	}

	public String getTemplateName() {
		return templateName;
	}

	public void setOptionSettings(List<OptionSettingsType> optionSettings) {
		this.optionSettings = optionSettings;
	}

	public void setSolutionStackName(String solutionStackName) {
		this.solutionStackName = solutionStackName;
	}

	public void setSourceConfiguration(
			SourceConfigurationType sourceConfiguration) {
		this.sourceConfiguration = sourceConfiguration;
	}

	public void setTemplateName(String templateName) {
		this.templateName = templateName;
	}

}

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaGithub


text:
>> Home / Tutorials
literary studies, cultural history, and study skill techniques
01 – Nabokov's Stories – Introduction
September 24, 2009 by Roy Johnson
a critical examination of Nabokov's collected stories
The work of Vladimir Nabokov as a writer of short stories falls into what for the sake of convenience can be called three separate periods. During the first – the 1920s – he was developing his reputation as an émigré author living in Berlin, writing poetry, plays, reviews, film scripts, and novels as well as stories whilst supporting himself by giving lessons in tennis and English.
During the second – the 1930s – having established that reputation with his early novels written in Russian, he produced what are probably his finest stories. Towards the end of the decade however, he was forced to move to Paris and then to America where, feeling that he had lost his audience of the post-1917 Russian emigration, he began writing in English.
During the final period – the 1940s – he produced only a few more stories, and following the establishment of his international reputation as a novelist with the publication of Lolita in 1955, he effectively stopped writing short fictions from that time.
It is the purpose of this study to trace the development of his skill in the creation of short fictions through the whole of his fifty published stories, and in particular to examine his manipulation of traditional narrative modes.
Nabokov offers readers a challenging instance of multi-cultural influences. He was, to quote his own description of himself, "An American writer, born in Russia and educated in England, where [he] studied French literature before spending fifteen years in Germany" (SO,p.26). The fact that he actually lived in all those countries and absorbed their cultures through both daily life and their literary heritage makes the task of fully appreciating his work difficult enough; but when added to this one confronts the fact that he thought, spoke, and wrote in Russian, French, and English (though not, through personal antipathy, German) the task can become even more daunting. As George Steiner has observed:
"this polylinguistic matrix is the determining fact of Nabokov's life and art … To be specific: the multilingual, cross linguistic situation is both the matter and form of Nabokov's work" (Steiner,p.18).
A Note on Sources
There are no critical editions of Nabokov's work. His short stories first appeared in Russian émigré newspapers and magazines published in Germany in the 1920s and 1930s. Some stories were later collected and published in volume form in Berlin and Paris in the 1930s. Following his emigration to the USA he began to publish stories in The New Yorker and The Atlantic Monthly, and there was a collection in volume form in 1958 – Nabokov's Dozen.
However, some of the stories exist in two and sometimes three versions. Quite apart from the fact that the earlier stories were written in Russian and the later ones in English, the process of translating the earlier works has variously involved other people, Nabokov himself, or Nabokov in collaboration with others. And at each stage of translation or re-publication of his work Nabokov was much given to polishing and embellishment of what he had written, which usually resulted in additional layers of linguistic complexity.
It is significant in this respect that there have already been several attempts to establish a bibliographical description of his work. Fortunately for the English speaking reader, Nabokov before his death managed to re-translate (in collaboration with his son, Dimitri) the bulk of his stories. These are now available along with his editorial prefaces and bibliographical notes, in the following English editions:
Nabokov's Dozen, 1959
A Russian Beauty and Other Stories, 1973
Tyrants Destroyed and Other Stories , 1975
Details of a Sunset and Other Stories, 1976
In the Foreword to Details of a Sunset Nabokov offers his own bibliography with the remark "The collection is the last batch of my Russian stories meriting to be Englished" (DS,p.11) which lightly underlines the fact that other untranslated or uncollected stories do exist (some of them are paraphrased both in Andrew Field's Nabokov: His Life in Art and in Brian Boyd's biography Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years).
But until the literary archaeological work is done which will bring these stories into general circulation, both scholars and general readers alike have every reason to feel confident that the pieces in these four volumes represent Nabokov's oeuvre, issued with his authority, as a writer of short stories. It is for this reason that they will be used here as basic sources, and reference made to them by the initials of their titles.
Vladimir Nabokov: The Collected Stories – Amazon UK
Vladimir Nabokov: The Collected Stories – Amazon US
Vladimir Nabokov web links
Vladimir Nabokov greatest works
Vladimir Nabokov criticism
Vladimir Nabokov life and works
Filed Under: Nabokov - Stories Tagged With: Literary studies, Nabokov collected stories, The Short Story, Vladimir Nabokov
02 – A Matter of Chance
Part I – Apprentice Years: Stories 1924 – 1929
Following the revolution of 1917, Nabokov's family left Russia and settled in Berlin, which was one of the two principal centres of emigration along with Paris. Nabokov was sent to Trinity College Cambridge in 1919, and after graduation he rejoined his family, supporting himself by giving private English lessons and coaching tennis.
After having written mainly poetry in his youth, his first short stories appeared in the Russian language émigré newspapers printed in Berlin – notably Rul' (The Rudder) which had been edited by his father. The variety of narrative modes and strategies adopted in the first dozen or so stories suggest that he was casting around to locate the most comfortable approach to this particular literary genre – and he was at the same time of course also writing the first of his novels.
There are simple realistic narratives, prose poems, character sketches, contes, fantasies, and short meta-fictions which bring the conventions of fictional narrative itself into question. Many of the experiments he made, influenced not only by the narrative devices of his favourite Russian authors – Pushkin, Gogol, Chekhov – but by immediate predecessors such as Bely, bring him obliquely into line with other modernist writers and conscious prose stylists of the period (James Joyce, Katherine Mansfield, and Virginia Woolf) who, similarly, were seeking to intensify the expressive power of prose by bringing to it the devices and tropes of poetry. But at the same time it is interesting to note how skilfully he deploys the traditional devices of narrative prose, ringing the changes upon them to divert and engage the reader.
Nabokov is by now of course celebrated as a writer whose prose is full of puns, word games, and a variety of literary tricks: yet the early stories, for all the glitter and artfulness of his style, deal with themes which are both serious and universal. The three most important and regularly recurring of these are the relationship between life and death; the function of memory and its relation to the passage of time; and the nature of individual personality. To these might be added a fourth which runs throughout the whole of Nabokov's work until the late baroque inventions – the nature and the materiality of the objective world whose sensual qualities he takes great delight in recording. It sometimes seems as if he is observing such details in fear that they might otherwise be lost forever.
In his earliest published story, 'A Matter of Chance' (June 1924), a Russian émigré, Aleksey Luzhin (whose name was later to be given to the chess master of The Defense) is working as a dining car attendant on the Berlin-Paris express. In a state of terminal despair, he dreams of a lost St. Petersburg and a lost wife Lena; he has become a cocaine addict; and meanwhile he plans to commit suicide by putting his head between the buffers of two coupling carriages.
Unknown to him, his wife gets on the train to join him in Paris and meets an elderly princess who is a family friend of her husband. Luzhin just fails to put out the dining car reservation slips (and thus recognise his wife's name), and he cannot remember who the princess is when he sees her. His wife just fails to enter the dining car and loses her wedding ring instead. When the dining car is disconnected for cleaning Luzhin just fails to discover the ring, descends from the carriage to commit his fatal act, and is run down instead by a passing express.
Here we have the Nabokovian story in esse. The overt subject matter is émigré life, which was to form the substance of so many stories for the following twenty years. And the themes – separation, loss, and death – flow out of this subject: Luzhin is separated from his wife; he has lost his homeland; and he meets death both as a willed plan and the result of an arbitrary whim of fate (the passing train).
The form of the story is traditional – a small but dramatic incident from life, a compact narrative with a very definite resolution; and it is told in a manner similar to that adopted by many writers of short stories after Maupassant and Chekhov – in a spare and understated style, with carefully selected details.
Nabokov's inventiveness is well illustrated by the manner in which he plays with the conventions of literary suspense to subvert reader-expectation. Almost every one of the story's details – the wife's chance appearance, the princess who is a relative, the reservation slips, the loss of the ring – all act as clues suggesting that a meeting between Luzhin and his wife is likely to take place. But the 'chance' of it doing so is transformed into an ironic failure of circumstances.
The story is narrated in a traditional third person mode, and sets out to be normally realistic in its depiction of the world: 'The brick rear walls of houses went gliding past; one of them displayed the printed advertisements of a colossal cigarette stuffed with what looked like golden straw' (TD,p.146). But even at this early stage in his development there are signs of his drawing attention to the conventions of fiction by his faux-naive variation on traditional story-opening: 'He had a job as a waiter in the international dining car of a German fast train. His name was Aleksey Lvovich Luzhin' (p.143).
The cigarette advertisement also illustrates Nabokov's persistent desire to render as strikingly as possible the nature of the everyday world, particularly its surfaces and textures. And this concern meshes significantly with that of separation and loss in the sense that whilst vigorously trying to recapture his own past Nabokov offers as an antidote to the impossibility of ever doing so a joyous apprehension of the everyday world in Berlin – something which did not make him at first popular with his fellow Russian émigrés, who felt that this attitude was a form of cultural betrayal.
Yet there beneath the surface of German life as seen from the dining car of the schnellzug lies cultural continuity in his allusion to one of the greatest Russian novels (Anna's death beneath the wheels of a train in Anna Karenina, if not her period of drug addiction) a novel for which Nabokov had profound admiration, rating Tolstoy as 'the greatest Russian writer of prose fiction.'
Filed Under: Nabokov - Stories Tagged With: A Matter of Chance, Literary studies, Nabokov collected stories, The Short Story, Vladimir Nabokov
03 – Details of a Sunset
Death by vehicular locomotion is also introduced at the crux of 'Details of a Sunset' (June 1924), written shortly after Nabokov's first story. Mark Standfuss, a young sales clerk, is radiantly happy about now being engaged to Klara, who has previously been involved with a dubious and handsome lodger at her mother's house. Whilst he is en route to visit her, Mark's happiness makes him more than usually conscious of the world around him:
The houses were as gray as ever; yet the roofs, the mouldings above the upper floors…were now bathed in rich ochre, the sunset's airy warmth, and thus they seemed unexpected and magical, those upper protrusions, balconies, cornices (DS,p.22).
These architectural observations act as realistic details of the material world in which the narrative is set, but at the same time they form a significant element of its later plot development.
Not knowing that the handsome lodger has returned and Klara has in fact broken off the engagement, Mark jumps off a tram, almost gets run over, then goes on to Klara's where many of his previous observations seem to be mysteriously repeated and transformed: 'Klara's green dress floated away, diminished, and turned into the green shade of a lamp…Mark was lying beneath it' (p.25) – whereupon the reader realises that Mark is not at Klara's at all but in hospital where he is dying from the injuries sustained when he was run over by the tram.
What Nabokov introduces here for the first time, trying out something he was to use extensively in his later work as a novelist, is one variation on the notion of 'the double'. It is something he was aware of in Gogol (one of his favourite Russian writers) and Dostoyevski (not one of his favourites, but an influence nevertheless as later stories will show).
He makes clever use of the device by having one 'version' of Mark, the happy Mark who wished to live, comment on what he hoped would happen in returning to Klara – though the reader is alerted to the dubious status of the account when Mark is amazed by some of the very details he had noticed earlier: 'Mark could not understand how he had never noticed before those galleries, those temples suspended on high' (p.23).
But in fact the narrative had been signalling Mark's accident almost from the outset by skilfully planted images of extinction and death: 'Several moving vans stood there like enormous coffins…the heavy skeleton of a double bed' (p.18). And he also keeps missing his footing – once on arriving home, when moving along the tram, and of course getting off it. These details combine the functions of both poetic leitmotifs within the story and subtle hints concerning its outcome.
Yet at the same time Nabokov teases the reader with ambiguous clues related to what will happen. Just after we have learned that Klara in fact never wants to see Mark again, Nabokov as narrator remarks 'He had such a young face, had Mark…One would think that fate might have spared him' (p.22) which someone reading the story for the first time is almost bound to interpret as a comment upon his romantic disappointment, but which is actually related more fatefully to his death.
But as Nabokov himself suggests 'one cannot read a book: one can only reread it.' That is, only on second, third, or subsequent readings of a text can the reader appreciate all the subtleties and the artistry of its composition.
Nabokov also deals rather cleverly with the difficult moment of Mark's fatal slip from the tram. The reader is given a fair chance: all the impressionistic details of an accident are offered: 'the shining asphalt swept upward like the seat of a swing; a roaring mass hit Mark from behind' (p.23). But then comes the literary sleight of hand – 'and then nothing. He was standing alone on the glossy asphalt' (p.23). We are given every reason to think that Mark has survived the fall, especially when he says to himself 'That was stupid. Almost got run over' (p.23).
These are the first essays in narrative manipulation and the use of unreliable narrators which Nabokov was later to develop into cases such as the self-deceiving Smurov of The Eye and the paranoid liar Charles Kimbote of Pale Fire. But Nabokov always stays within the unwritten conventions of what is permissible in misleading the reader this way. The attentive reader is given just sufficient clues to avoid being taken in. For this reason Nabokov was surely right to change the original title of the story ('Katastrofa') which gave away too much at the outset.
Although Nabokov had not yet followed the practice of other modernist short story writers in eliminating any sense of plot or dramatic incident from his work (as Woolf and Mansfield had done by this time) he had, like them, realised that the careful organisation of detail – the harmonisation of motifs, the use of parallelism and poetic repetition as well as relating individual images to the theme – would have the effect of increasing what might be called the aesthetic density of the short story.
Here for instance the colour black is used to describe a number of everyday details (shadows, a fence, a wet roof, figures in the street) linking them to Mark's imminent death; and the descriptive details of Klara at the outset 'the red blaze of her hair' (p.17) are echoed in Mark's death-fantasy as 'The russet tufts of her armpits' (p.24).
It is also interesting to note, in connection with Mansfield and Woolf, that Nabokov was interested at this early phase in what they called 'Moments of Being' – those specially charged passages of experience in which the participant's senses seem unusually heightened in such a way as to create a sense of spiritual euphoria.
Nabokov went on to develop these notions – especially the frisson of the largely aesthetic moment – but here in slightly comic form Mark's ill-fated joy takes the form of a rapturous identification with the everyday objects around him:
Mark felt a sort of delicious pity for the frankfurters, the moon, the blue spark [of a tram] that receded along the wire, and, as he tensed his body against a friendly fence, he was overcome by laughter, and, bending, exhaled into a little round hole in the boards the words 'Klara, Klara, oh my darling' (p.18).
Filed Under: Nabokov - Stories Tagged With: Details of a Sunset, Literary studies, Nabokov collected stories, The Short Story, Vladimir Nabokov
04 – The Thunderstorm
In 'The Thunderstorm' (July 1924), Nabokov took as his central idea the Russian folk belief that the Old Testament prophet Elijah rode his chariot in the sky during thunderstorms. He pushed the element of narrative ambiguity to a point which makes it difficult for the reader to understand exactly what has happened in any realistic sense. This particular type of ambiguity, and the fact that the story involves a character from the Bible, are features which Nabokov did not repeat in any of his subsequent stories.
A first person narrator called Elisha, speaking to an unnamed 'you', describes a gathering storm one night in west Berlin. The wind, which he personifies as 'a blind phantom, covering his face with his sleeves' (DS,p.119) develops into a full blown storm – 'a white-haired giant with a furious beard' (p.120).
But then this giant, the prophet Elijah, loses a wheel of his chariot and on falling to earth asks Elisha to help him find it. Elisha locates a rusty pram wheel amongst a pile of rubbish in the courtyard, whereupon Elijah re-ascends into the heavens and Elisha rushes off into the dawn to tell his story to the unknown 'you'.
Obviously we are being invited to read the whole incident as a product of Elisha's excited mind. The reader has every reason to think that this is an imaginary episode. Immediately before the incident Elisha falls asleep, and just before the prophet departs Elisha closes his eyes, reopening them to find the courtyard empty.
This is a conventional device for suggesting that the events in between have taken place in the narrator's imagination whilst asleep. But if this is the case the fabrication rests at the level of mere fantasy: it is not shown in relationship to anything else, and it does not tell us anything about the narrator.
There is a curious correspondence between the two figures which might lead us to expect a further variation on the theme of the double. Quite apart from the similarity of their names, they are dressed in the same clothes. Elijah wears a 'drenched robe and sandals' (p.122), and Elisha has 'soaked bedslippers and a worn dressing gown' (p.123). But we are given no further information to make sense of these clues.
What the story seems to be is an early, not so successful exercise in the incorporation of Gogolian influence. For certain elements of Gogol are strongly present. A dreamy Elisha runs into the street in his 'bedslippers and worn dressing gown' (p.123) so much like one of the petty clerks of Gogol's tales. The story is an 'as if' fantasy, built upon the sort of unrealities which characterise 'The Nose'.
And Elijah in 'his fiery chariot, restraining with tensed arms his jet-black steeds…[which] tossed their blazing manes and rushed on ever more violently, down, down along the clouds' (p.120) recalls vividly the poor clerk invoking an imaginary troika at the desperate close of Diary of a Madman: 'Give me a troika with horses swift as the whirlwind! Climb up, driver, and let the bells ring! Soar away, horses, and carry me from this world!'
We might also note here, en passant, two of Gogols stylistic devices much used by Nabokov: the narrator addressing his own fictional creations (the coachman, the horses) and his use of semantic parallelism ("Drive on…Soar upward").
It is not a particularly convincing blend of realism and fantasy, but viewed in the context of the other stories he was writing at this time (to say nothing of the poetry, plays, and theatre sketches) it seems quite clear that Nabokov was casting round and experimenting until he found that approach to narrative which suited him best. As Brian Boyd observes, a propos of Nabokov's interest in different levels of reality, he was 'still searching for ways to fit a world beyond into the world of the human, but he had not found his own way yet.'
Filed Under: Nabokov - Stories Tagged With: Literary studies, Nabokov collected stories, The Short Story, The Thunderstorm, Vladimir Nabokov
05 – Bachmann
'Bachmann' (October 1924) marks an enormous step forward in Nabokov's mastery of narrative – particularly his exploitation of the combination and subtleties of third and first person mode. The story combines two of his favourite topics – Art and Death – in a subject which he treats many times throughout both his stories and novels – the artist-figure as a tormented eccentric, and a representative of the almost sacred belief Nabokov had in the value of individual human personality.
In many of his interviews and essays Nabokov expresses his horror of the general and the mass, and on the contrary his concern for the particular and the unique. It is an attitude which translated into artistic terms strongly reinforces his creation of a concrete and memorable world populated by credible and individualised characters.
Bachmann is a brilliantly gifted concert pianist and composer, but he is also eccentric and an alcoholic. Madame Perov, one of his admirers, follows him around Europe, sitting in the front row at every one of his concerts. They appear to become lovers, though Bachmann treats her badly. Yet on an occasion when Madame Perov falls ill he notices her absence, refuses to play, and absconds. She is summoned to the concert hall, wanders around all night in the rain looking for him, and eventually finds him in a hotel where they spend the happiest night of her life together, finding 'words the greatest poets never dreamed of' (TD,p.182). She dies the next day, and Bachmann subsequently goes to pieces.
The artist as comic Bohemian is a conventional enough literary figure. Bachmann has 'short legs in baggy black trousers' and whilst reading a newspaper at a party given in his honour 'without taking his eyes off the paper he absent-mindedly checked the fly of his trousers with one finger' (p.173). The relationship between talent (or genius) and eccentricity is something which many writers have treated, and Nabokov himself was to do so more extensively in his later novel The Defense where his chess master Luzhin is finally driven to suicide.
What is of prime interest here is the manner in which the story is told; for considering the fact that he was so young and had only been working in the short story form for less than two years, Nabokov took an enormous step forward in developing the complexity of his narrative.
The events are related in the first person by an unnamed narrator, and he is passing on an account of the incidents given to him by Bachmann's manager, the impresario Sack. This oblique narrative method is somewhat reminiscent of Joseph Conrad, another Anglicised polyglot and Slav, on whom Nabokov lectured to his colleagues in the Russian émigré literary circle around the time of the story's composition. The method enables Nabokov to do two things which were to fascinate him more and more as his work progressed – tease the reader and ring changes on the deliberate creation of unstable narratives.
When Madame Perov is invited to meet Bachmann at a friend's house for instance, her attention is immediately drawn to the dominant figure at a piano entertaining some ladies grouped around him:
The tails of his dress coat had a substantial-looking, particularly thick silk lining, and, as he talked, he kept tossing back his dark, glossy hair, at the same time inflating the wings of his nose, which was very white and had a rather elegant hump. There was something about his entire figure benevolent, brilliant, and disagreeable (p.172).
Both Madame Perov and the first time reader can be forgiven for assuming that this is a sketch of Bachmann (complete with the Gogolian details of coat and nose). Nabokov is playing with the attractions of stereotypes – the conditioned expectations of both the Madame Perovs of this world going to meet piano-playing celebrities, and our expectations as the readers of fictions about them.
In fact this character is not Bachmann at all but the impresario Sack, and we then gradually learn from the account of events he gives and which is relayed to us by the outer narrator, just what an unsavoury person he is.
Sack is greedy and shallow, and he completely fails to understand both Bachmann and Madame Perov. Bachmann he calls an 'absolutely abnormal individual' merely because he is 'cranky, capricious, grubby' (p.174). That is, he does not conform to Sack's own mediocre and conventional views of what is proper. And in describing Madame Perov he falls back on cliché, describing her after only their first meeting as 'an extraordinarily "temperamental" as he put it, extraordinarily high-strung woman' (p.174) even though she has done nothing whatever to warrant this description.
Even when Bachmann goes on alcoholic binges, Sack only bothers to search for him when it is necessary to get him in shape for a concert. And he cannot understand why Madame Perov could ever love the man whose talent he is exploiting: 'The mystery of the female heart' (p.177) he exclaims, speaking like something out of Flaubert's Dictionnaire des Idées Reçues.
Not only does he summon Madame Perov from her sickbed to search for Bachmann when he goes missing, but he is abusive to her when she arrives; he misdirects her into the slummy bar district; and then he abandons her. Finally, some years later, when he sees a shabby and unhappy Bachmann on a railway platform he ignores him because 'I was with a lady, and there were people around…It would have been awkward' (p.183).
What is of interest here is the fact that the outer narrator makes no comment at all on Sack: he merely relates what Sack tells him. Thus we are presented with a character who, whilst setting out to justify his actions, does exactly the opposite and reveals himself if we read closely enough as a shabby egoist. We are given Sack's view of things, but in the presentation he releases information which does not correspond with that view, and Nabokov offers us enough information to make an objective judgement.
Viewed another way, the reader is given the opportunity to make a gradual 'construction' of Sack's character as a moral vulgarian, enjoying what Wayne Booth calls 'The pleasure of collaboration' between reader and author. Of course such a complex strategy of delivering the story to us has its own problems. How can the outer narrator know what Madame Perov did or felt when nobody was with her?
Nabokov side-steps this potential trap with some very neat linguistic footwork. Statements of admitted invention are used as a subtle bridge into an account of what could be known or surmised. 'I imagine for some reason that when she started pulling on her stockings the silk kept catching on the toenails of her icy feet. She arranged her hair as best she could' (p.180). The transition here from surmise ('I imagine') to statement ('She arranged') is hardly noticeable. This is a very skillful manipulation of narrative mode in a twenty-five year old writer just embarking on his literary career.
Filed Under: Nabokov - Stories Tagged With: Bachmann, Literary studies, Nabokov collected stories, The Short Story, Vladimir Nabokov
06 – Christmas
In 'Christmas' (December 1925) Nabokov returns to a more traditional narrative mode to record one of the many evocations of his Russian childhood which grace the edges of his fiction. The setting is an accurate picture of the type of aristocratic country estate on which Nabokov had lived as a child (and inherited at the age of seventeen). It is enveloped in midwinter snow, and is presented complete with master (Sleptsov) and servant (Ivan) who might have strayed over from works by Chekhov or Tolstoy.
Sleptsov has returned to his estate to bury his recently deceased teenage son in the family vault of the village church. He is suffering under the burden of an almost insupportable grief and sense of loss. Wandering about his estate, he pictures his son in midsummer, collecting butterflies. He then assembles some of his son's effects, and on reading fragments of a diary recording the boy's youthful infatuation for a local girl (of which he was not aware) he feels that he will die from grief by the next day. But just then a chrysalis from the boy's collection bursts open in the warmth of the room and a large moth emerges, opens its wings, and takes a 'full breath under the impulse of tender, ravishing, almost human happiness' (DS,p.161).
The use of symbols here is conventional, but they are neatly deployed. Rather unusually for Nabokov, but in keeping with the social beliefs of a pre-Revolutionary Russia, they include Christian symbols. The story is set in the deepest part of the winter, at the turning point of the year, as a parallel to the depth of Sleptsov's grief. Crucifixes appear on the church and on a Christmas tree which Sleptsov wants taken away but which is retained by the faithful servant – holding on to traditions in very much the same manner as a servant in 'Master and Man' or Anna Karenina. And the events of the narrative reach their quiet climax on Christmas Eve, with the chrysalis, which was thought to be dead, acting as a symbol of resurrection – the rebirth of life and of Sleptsov's will to live.
Even though they are conventional, Nabokov shows delicacy and restraint in handling these symbols, just as he cleverly relates them to his theme and brings them into harmony with the structure of the story. At the climax of the story Sleptsov is reading his son's diary, which forms a living link between them: it turns out to be concerned with butterflies (the symbol of life in the story) and the boy's own sense of loss and separation from the girl he will never see again, following the end of a youthful romance the ignorance of which has separated his father from him. Artistically too, the chrysalis acts as a symbol of a supposedly dead past being brought back to life in the present.
For that is the sub-text of the story – Nabokov's attempt to record a past, his own personal experience of life in a pre-Revolutionary Russia to which he knows he can never return. He grieves for the loss of his own country and culture, but he can bring it back to life by an act of memory and artistic creation. It is for this reason that his autobiography bears the title Speak, Memory.
The story uses as some of its material a youthful love affair from Nabokov's own life, but it is not difficult to see Nabokov fictionalising his adult self as Sleptsov and his youthful self as the butterfly collecting son which he actually was in the years before the revolution. This is one response to the pain of irreversible exile – a meticulous and sensitive recollection of the past – and Nabokov was to make frequent use of this device in that part of his writing which seeks to record elements of his personal biography. But in his fiction he more frequently asserted his enthusiasm for life by a recording of the present, even when it was being experienced in Germany – as his next story shows.
Filed Under: Nabokov - Stories Tagged With: Christmas, Literary studies, Nabokov collected stories, The Short Story, Vladimir Nabokov
07 – A Letter that Never Reached Russia
It is possible that 'A Letter that Never Reached Russia' (January 1925) was a fragment of a novel, Happiness, which later became Mary, but it is given the coherence of a story by the unity of its themes.
A young man is writing to a young woman he left behind eight years before in St Petersburg. He evokes their past together but then stops himself and declares that it is the present, his life of exile in Berlin, of which he wishes to speak. He then describes his happiness in the perception of the everyday details of life: 'I get such a blissful, melancholy sensation when, late at night, its wheels screeching around the bend, a tram hurtles past, empty' (DS,p.84). These moments of aesthetic pleasure – rather like the Proustian or Woolfian 'moment' – are provoked by very ordinary objects and phenomena: the gurgling of water in pipes or the combination of light and texture as a girl with an umbrella walks under a lamp and 'a single taught, black segment of her umbrella reddens damply' (p.84).
But then the main themes emerge: how to respond to exile, and the affirmation of the will to happiness in the fight of Life against Death. These are evoked when he mentions a visit to the Russian orthodox cemetery where an old lady has committed suicide on the grave of her recently deceased husband. She has collapsed into grief (as Sleptsov threatened to do) whereas the letter writer remains stubbornly happy, and his reaction is a challenge to the forces of obliteration, loss, and death:
centuries will roll by…everything will pass, but…my happiness will remain, in the moist reflection of a streetlamp…in everything with which God so generously surrounds human loneliness (p.87).
This is a very positive response to the fact of exile and the recognition of death's inevitability, and the letter is in a sense written as much to Russia itself as to the girl he left behind there. It is one of the many stories Nabokov would write in which Russia and a woman are brought into symbolic parallel with each other – culminating in his masterpiece 'Spring in Fialta'.
The story was also historically significant at the time in that it struck a blow against the orthodox notion in the Soviet press that life for all exiles was a 'sterile and bitter purgatory'. Even under the most difficult circumstances Nabokov seems to have had what Brian Boyd calls 'a genius for personal happiness', and he transmits this very convincingly in his work.
As far as the development of his literary style is concerned, its significance lies in its being one further exercise in exploiting the possibilities of the first person narrative mode – a strategy he was to develop extensively in the stories and the novels which followed.
Filed Under: Nabokov - Stories Tagged With: A Letter that Never Reached Russia, Literary studies, Nabokov collected stories, The Short Story, Vladimir Nabokov
08 – The Return of Chorb
His next story, 'The Return of Chorb' (October 1925), was written just after the completion of his first novel Mary, and is therefore possibly influenced by the more complex structures of the novel form. Nabokov turns again to the theme of grief and loss, and he combines it with his ever-recurrent topics of death and recapturing the past. But he also introduces for the first time an element of grotesqueness and dramatic irony which were later to become hallmarks of his mature style.
What makes the story especially interesting is the skillful manner in which the sequence of events is rearranged in order to maximise the dramatic irony of the narrative – only to have the climax towards which all the events are pointing denied us.
The story begins with a German burger Herr Keller and his wife returning from the opera to discover that their son-in-law Chorb, a Russian litterateur of whom they disapprove, has come back from honeymoon with news that their daughter is ill. We then learn in flashback that she has in fact been electrocuted whilst on holiday in the south of France, and that Chorb has retraced their journey consumed by grief in his attempt to keep alive the image of his wife (whose name we never know). We also learn that his love for her was of a tender, almost chaste character, and that she was very happy on their honeymoon – which throws her father's disapproval of Chorb into a critical light.
Back in the narrative 'present', Chorb books into a seedy hotel and we learn that he occupies the same room as that to which he had 'escaped' from the Kellers' oppressive fuss on his wedding night. His intention is to mentally re-live their recent experiences so as to fix the image of his dead wife in his mind forever: 'All there remained was but a single night to be spent in that first chamber of their marriage, and by tomorrow the test would be passed and her image made perfect' (DS,p.66). He hires a prostitute just for company and goes to sleep as soon as they return to the room.
Whilst he is sleeping, the prostitute looks out of a window onto the opera house where crowds are emerging from the evening's performance of Parsifal. This is of course the opera the Kellers have been to see. This is a wonderfully constructed moment which brings together all the dramatic ironies of narrative past and present.
We already know about Keller's irate response to Chorb's news. We also know from what he has told the Keller's maid that he can be traced, and that he has compromised himself, albeit with a pure enough motive. Even some of the minor details of the story reinforce the irony here. Not only has Chorb been in the room before, but so has the prostitute. She like him recognises it from the picture of a pink baigneuse above the bed.
Chorb wakes with a terrible shock in the middle of the night, but realises that his ordeal is over. At that moment the Kellers arrive, to discover the prostitute just leaving. And Nabokov, with a very mature sense of restraint, ends the story at that point. Having created all the conditions for a dramatic finale, he witholds the events of the climax, leaving readers to effect the story's closure in their own minds.
For the point of the story is not merely to arrange a dramatic confrontation: it is to present contrasting sensibilities – the bourgeois and the aesthetic. The artist figure is misunderstood in the narrative, but Nabokov is inviting readers to empathise outside it.
Filed Under: Nabokov - Stories Tagged With: Literary studies, Nabokov collected stories, The Return of Chorb, The Short Story
09 – A Guide to Berlin
In 'A Guide to Berlin' (1925) Nabokov returns to the subject of 'Happiness even in exile'. In form it is not much more than a series of observations of everyday life in the city – sewerpipes, people at work, the zoo, a pub – yet Nabokov issues a warning in his editorial note to it: 'Despite its simple appearance the Guide is one of my trickiest pieces' (DS,p.90).
He invents for no immediately obvious reason a first person narrator with one arm, a scar, and a walking stick – a post-war veteran who speaks of his enthusiasm for Berlin life to his 'friend and usual pot-companion' (p.91) in the pub. We take it that the friend is some sort of 'other self'. The descriptions of objects and people are very typical of Nabokov's desire to record the materiality and the textures of the world in concrete and specific detail.
Quite apart from the fact that they are so sharply observed, these details also serve as springboards from which Nabokov launches flights of inventive and lyrical fancy – as in his meditation upon a snow-covered sewerpipe which reveals hidden connections between the phenomena he observes:
Today someone wrote 'Otto' with his finger on the strip of virgin snow and I thought how beautifully that name, with its two soft o's flanking the pair of gentle consonants, suited the silent layer of snow upon that pipe with its two orifices and its tacit tunnel (p.92).
The rest of the story is composed of similar images positively and enthusiastically conveyed. Apart from a brief remark that living is expensive, one would hardly guess that this was the Berlin of post-inflation economic collapse, the city in which Franz Kafka had died following the coal shortage only a few months previously.
But in fact Nabokov's real centre of interest and what holds together the apparently random observations is revealed during his reflections on the streetcar: 'The streetcar will vanish in twenty years or so, just as the horse-drawn tram has vanished' (p.92). His real subjects are time, memory, the evanescence of things, and the power of art to transcend them.
His answer to eternal decay is to make just such an exact record of even ordinary everyday trifles in order that the sense of life they represent should be available to those who live on after us: 'here lies the sense of literary creation: to portray ordinary objects as they will be reflected in the kindly mirrors of future times' (p.94).
To play further with the connections between time, memory, and identity, he goes on to describe the pub in which he and his companion are sitting. He notices the publican's son who he thinks 'will remember the billiard table and…my empty right sleeve and scarred face' which he then designates as 'somebody's future recollection' (p.98) – neatly projecting his own identity and the boy's memory into an imagined future.
Even though he was wrong about Berlin streetcars and could be wrong about the boy's future memory, the idea is a very deft encapsulation of Nabokov's early speculations on time, memory, and evanescence – but most importantly of all it reveals his confidence in the power of literary creation to transcend all three.
Filed Under: Nabokov - Stories Tagged With: A Guide to Berlin, Literary studies, Nabokov collected stories, The Short Story, Vladimir Nabokov
10 – A Nursery Tale
In this story Nabokov took what looks, in relation to his work as a whole, like a false move – a backwards step into the realms of fantasy. He himself rated it lowly – 'A rather artificial affair…with more concern for the tricky plot than for imagery and good taste' (TD,p.40) – and it was a genre he never used again.
'A Nursery Tale' (June 1926) features the devil visiting Berlin in the form of a middle-aged woman. She makes a pact with Erwin, a young office worker who is full of frustrated sexual longings. He can have as many women as he chooses at midnight of the following day – on the one condition that the total is an odd number. Erwin is greedy and selects thirteen by the appointed hour, only to discover that the last girl he chooses is the same girl as the first. He forfeits his chance and goes home depressed.
The story harks back through Gogol to E.T.A.Hoffmann, a source which Nabokov acknowledges by having his devil, Frau Monde, living at number thirteen Hoffmann Street. But despite the skills which Nabokov would later develop at moving credibly between various levels of fictionality, he seems ill at ease here. He fails to make his devil or the fantasy convincing.
Apart from dealing with a topic (frustrated sexuality) he would later make famous for himself, the story lacks any serious thematic concern. And even though the story has been 'revamped' (TD,p.40) the thinness of the material leaves exposed some of Nabokov's potentially irritating mannerisms, such as his tendency towards excessive alliteration: "pedalling with passionate power" (p.53) and "the lustrous leaves of the lindens" (p.47).
The story does however possess one feature which is of interest in tracing the development of Nabokov's literary style – this is the placing of subtle hints and clues within the narrative which have the ostensible purpose of signals from Frau Monde to let Erwin know that she has recognised his choice – "I shall have a sign given you [sic] every time – a smile…a chance word in the crowd, a sudden patch of colour" (p.46). These are not unlike the clues which Nabokov sprinkles in his own work as signals to his readers.
Given the centrality of Lolita in Nabokov's work, this story is mainly of interest for the early appearance of a Humbert-like figure who strolls through the later pages with a nymphet at his side: 'He was a famous poet, a senile swan…[who] strode with a kind of ponderous grace; his hair, the hue of soiled cottonwool, reached over his ears beneath his fedora' (p.54).
But even more important is the fact that Erwin's choice of girl turns out to be the precursor of many Lolita-like figures to come in Nabokov's work. She is described as 'a child [my emphasis] of fourteen or so in a low-cut party dress … mincing at the old poet's side … her lips were touched up with rouge. She walked swinging her hips very, very slightly'.
Figures such as these, as well as the whole of his later novella The Enchanter undermine the notion that the inspiration for Lolita was anything like the chimpanzee behind bars in the Jardin des Plantes which Nabokov claimed. Middle-aged pedophilia is alive and well in his work long before that excuse was offered to – and swallowed by – a gullible public.
Filed Under: Nabokov - Stories Tagged With: A Nursery Tale, Literary studies, The Short Story, Vladimir Nabokov


text:
I get into Jessica's car and immediately pluck something out of the little forest of trinkets on the dashboard. First I fiddle with a wooden Scrooge McDuck toy. Jessica reaches over to set upright a little Ganesh idol that had fallen over.
She puts the car into gear and pulls out, and I swap the Scrooge toy for a sequined thimble-sized box. I pry it open and a white powder sprinkles out. "I think I just spilled your stash," I joke.
Jessica laughs. "That's ash."
"Ash?" I handle it a bit more delicately now.
"A good friend gave that to me when I left Seattle the last time. It's from this man in India — a guru — he just squeezes his fist and ash comes out."
At a red light, she flicks the box open, and dips a finger in so she can rub a pinch into her forehead — over her third eye. "I haven't been able to get that locket open in a while."
"I guess you just have to be properly centered, like me," I tell her. I brush some ash off of my leg. "Hey. Now my pants are holy."
Build it up, then turn it down.
Taco Del Mar
Onion Pie
I was sure that I had never read Lydia Davis' Almost No Memory before. But aspects of one of the stories seemed familiar. There was a couple working as caretakers for a house in the countryside. The money from that job and the money they earned from other unspecified work was barely keeping them fed. They felt distracted, unattached to everybody around them. (At the table next to me, a pair of men passed a copy of The Little Prince back and forth between them. One described the dimensions of the copy he'd had as a child, while the other was concerned about how closely the illustration colors matched the older editions. The book ended up on the table between them, never opened. The one guy started reading another book, the other wrote on a pad of paper. The title that he wrote at the top of his page was "Poop".) When an onion pie surfaced in the story, I realized that the same onion pie and the same cabin fever had played a part in Paul Auster's memoir, Hand to Mouth. Auster is Davis' ex-husband. The two of them had written quite different stories about the same incident. The climax of that part of Auster's book centers around the onion pie. The impact of the story is concentrated there, like a punchline. In Davis' story the onion pie is the halfway point, there are two more seasons to get through in that house, and the tone is spread thinly across the whole story.
From Off the Streets of Cleveland
Pekar/Crumb, American Splendor #9
Harvey Pekar, everyman/oddball-cartoonist of some renown, and his family are blogging.
Photo Friday – Broken
Setting the Pace
With her left hand, she holds open a thick mass-market paperback. She is reading the last few paragraphs of the book. Everything, it seems, is wrapping up nicely – no loose ends. Without looking up from the book, she takes a long drag from the cigarette that she holds in her right hand. The ash perched precariously at the tip of the cigarette is as long as the unsmoked portion of the cigarette. When she finishes her drag, she exhales and feels around in front of her with her smoking hand. She locates the handlebars of her scooter and triggers the accelerator, gliding forward a few feet and then slowing to a stop when she retracts her hand from the scooter to have another puff. If she can keep the steering relatively straight, she can stay the course. She'll finish the book before the sidewalk narrows, just beyond the end of the college building.
Photologgers in Ballard
The Seattle Pfhotologgers Guild met yesterday to forage for pictures in Ballard.
Attending: Manuel,
Jerry,
tyd,
Some of the photos posted by the others: buffoonery.org, Samantha, Jerry Kindall, Bongo, thenyoudiscover.com, Flipdingo.
A young guy strolled over and stopped me as I was walking up Harbor Steps tonight. He wore an oversized policeman-style cap. He carried a clipboard. "Excuse me. Are you an artist, a writer, or a poet?"
His inflection was internally conflicted, and it wasn't apparent if it was a yes or no question or if he was giving me three options – artist, writer, or poet.
I answered, "No."
" . . . a reggae musicfan?"
That cryptic pronunciation again: ". . . a reggae-music fan?" "A reggae music fan?" Admittedly, the distinction was less important this time.
I crossed the street. There was a guitar player and a drummer sitting in the lobby of the Art Museum, their backs to the window. They had no audience. It was just them and a family of camel statues.
Singular and Plural
Language from a bank document:
"Any references in this agreement to gender include masculine, feminine, and neuter. Unless otherwise indicated by the context any singular references include the plural and any plural references include the singular."
In other words: By they, we may mean he, and by he, we may mean she. And that goes double for you.


Much of last year's growth was due to natural increase – more births than deaths – but more people also came to Sacramento from other parts of the nation than left.
Businesses and some municipalities like population growth because it can stimulate economic growth. More people means more construction, more customers and more tax revenue. The trade-off is that growth can lead to sprawl, traffic gridlock and environmental problems, especially if it's not handled well.
Gordon Garry, director of research at the Sacramento Area Council of Governments, said last year's growth tracks well with the projections of regional planners.
Growth in residential construction continues to lag behind population growth, Garry said. Developers aren't yet building houses fast because the region is only now clearing vacant inventory left from the foreclosure crisis.
Ragland and several other experts said construction will increase if more people begin moving from the expensive Bay Area to more affordable Sacramento. Such "Bay Area transplants drove much of the population growth seen during the last decade, but haven't yet arrived in droves during this recovery.
Placer County grew 1.6 percent from 2012 to 2013, a faster rate of growth than all other counties in the state except tiny Alpine County, which added a couple of dozen people to its population of roughly 1,000.
Roseville will add several hundred homes this year, a faster rate of growth than prior years, said Chris Robles, the city's economic development director.
"We're planning for growth and we are seeing that now," Robles said.
After two consecutive years of population declines, El Dorado County also saw growth from 2012 to 2013. Most residents would see that as a plus, said Laurel Brent-Bumb, CEO of the El Dorado County Chamber of Commerce.
"If you don't have more rooftops, you can't attract more businesses," she said.


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IPCAA Kudos
Graduate students in the Interdepartmental Program in Classical Art and Archaeology continue to bring distinction to the Kelsey Museum, which offers them office space. Here are a few of their more notable recent achievements:
Bjorn Anderson is collaborating with Margaret Root on "Imperial Legacies, Local Identities: References to Royal Achaemenid Iconography on Nabataean Crenellated Tombs" for this year's special issue of Ars Orientalis on "Medes and Persians." He hopes to head to the American Center of Oriental Research in Amman, Jordan, next year.
Shilpi Bhadra will present a paper on the origins of the Mycenean state at the Canadian Classical Association's annual meeting in May.
Geoffrey Compton gave a talk in October entitled "Professional Merchants and Transnational Class Formation in the Late Bronze Age Eastern Mediterranean" at the Bryn Mawr College Graduate Student Symposium "Amateur or Professional." An abstract of the paper is available at http://www.brynmawr.edu/archaeology/2001symposium/abstracts.html.
Elizabeth de Grummond was a panelist in a forum entitled "Interdisciplinary Research and the Future of Graduate Education in Archaeology" at the 67th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology in March. She continues to work as a
graduate intern in the Department of Antiquities at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles.
Henrik Dey (with Grant Parker and Sue Alcock) published "Sitting Down with the Barrington Atlas" in the Journal of Roman Archaeology 14 (2001). He has also been selected to moderate the first on-line course in archaeology offered at U-M through Fathom.com.
Jennifer Gates presented papers at the Chacmool Conference at the University of Calgary in November and at the Bryn Mawr College Graduate Student Symposium in October. The Chacmool Conference article will be published next year. Her coauthored (with Sue Alcock and Jane Rempel) section of the Blackwell's Companion to the Hellenistic World is due out next year. And her "Call It Like You See It: The Power of the Graeco-Persian Paradigm" will appear in the Ars Orientalis volume on "Medes and Persians." She has been awarded a Summer Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowship to study Egyptian Arabic and a State Department Fellowship from the American Research Center in Egypt to pursue her fieldwork.
Melanie Grunow presented "Architectural Images in Roman Historical Relief: The Significance of Sightlines" at the Archaeological Institute of America (AIA) in January. The paper is based on a chapter of her recently completed dissertation, "Architectural Images in Roman State Reliefs, Coins and Medallions: Imperial Ritual, Ideology, and the Topography of Rome." She is also preparing the web version of the recent exhibition "The Fabric of Everyday Life: Historic Textiles from Karanis, Egypt."
Jeremy Hartnett presented "Directing the Roman 'Eye': Urban Architecture and the Viewer" at the College Art Association annual meetings in February and "Roman Domestic Facades and the Architecture of Interface" at the AIA annual meetings. He has also been selected to participate in next summer's U-M Center for Research on Learning and Teaching/Rackham Seminar on College Teaching: Preparing Future Faculty.
Brenda Longfellow has received a Kress Foundation Travel Fellowship in the History of Art and a U-M Center for European Studies summer travel grant for study in Italy. She delivered "Visualizing the Present through the Past: Spolia in Rome" at the Classical Association of the Midwest and South annual meetings. She coauthored "Roman Kilns and Rural Settlement: Interim Report of the 1999 Season of the Leptiminus Archaeological Project" for Echos du Monde Classique/Classical Views and published "A Statuette of Venus and Cupid in the Kelsey Museum" and "Head of a Tanagra-Style Figurine in the Kelsey Museum" in the Bulletin of the University of Michigan Museums of Art and Archaeology.
Jessica Davis Powers gave a talk entitled "The Allusive Landscape of Hadrian's Villa at Tivoli" at the AIA annual meetings.
Adam Rabinowitz has received a U-M Rackham Predoctoral Fellowship to work on his dissertation on the social function of the symposium in the Greek and indigenous communities of archaic Sicily and South Italy.
Jane Rempel presented papers at the Second Annual International Congress on Black Sea Antiquity, in Ankara, Turkey, and at the AIA meetings in Philadelphia. The Black Sea conference proceedings will be published next year. She will spend the coming academic year on a U-M Institute for the Humanities Graduate Student Fellowship, writing her dissertation on the intersection of elite presentation and the rural landscape in the Bosporan kingdom.
Molly Swetnam-Burland published "A Bronze Figurine of an Etruscan Dancer in the Kelsey Museum" in the Bulletin of the University of Michigan Museums of Art and Archaeology.
Drew Wilburn has been awarded a 2002-2003 Fulbright Fellowship for travel to Cyprus, where he will work at a number of sites (Kourion, Arsinoe, Paphos) while writing his dissertation on the archaeological evidence for magic in Cyprus, Spain, and Karanis.
Copyright © 2002 The Kelsey Museum of Archaeology, University of Michigan. All rights reserved.


Downloading your ePortfolio is easy! First, you need to go to your ePortfolio Managment page. Once you are on the ePortfolio management page, click on the actions button in the lower left of the appropriate ePortfolio. Then choose the export icon. After you click the export button, choose the Download button and the download should begin in your browser. It will download a compressed file, usually named PresentationPortfolio.zip to your downloads folder. Because the file is compressed, you may need to extract the files before using them. This is dependent on your computer, but if you click here you will be brought to a Wiki page on how to handle .zip files.


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What next for Apple TV hacking?
by editor @ AppleTVHacks.net • April 25, 2007 April 25, 2007 in News
Whilst some interesting working is being done with plugins for the Apple TV, the number of new hacks as declined. While this is somewhat inevitable as certain milestones are achieved, we think there is still a lot to be done. Here are some of the current and possible future projects for the Apple TV.
Apple TV in your Car
AppleTVHacks is not aware of any teams currently attempting this, but we are sure it is only a matter of time. DVD players are becoming commonplace in cars, certainly in family vehicles where the kids can be kept entertained whilst travelling.
The Apple TV represents the next step in evolution for exactly this scenario, you can load up content for the kids, which they can choose between (fight over!) themselves while you concern yourself with experimenting with your cruise control. When the kids aren't listening, you can use it to stream music through the car stereo, and everyone is happy.
Add the fact that your wireless probably reaches the Garage where the car is parked and updating the content becomes a breeze.
Content Subscriptions
Until Apple deliver a functioning install of the iTunes Store that is integrated with the Apple TV operating system, anyone looking for automated downloading of their favourite shows ready for watching when they get home from work is stuck.
The Apple TV can already handle using other media players, and so all that is needed is another source of content. Enter torrents, which combned with RSS subscriptions could automatically obtain content as it appears. All that is needed is for these elements to be tied together, maybe wrapped up in a plugin and a microwave that does the popcorn on a timer.
Man in the Middle Upgrade
This could be the most important hack to date; it would allow hacking and upgrading the Apple TV without any need to open the case or download and apply patches using a USB drive. That is of course, if it is possible….
The Apple TV uses a built in Software Update mechanism which contacts Apple's servers to check for updates. These updates will presumably allow Apple to fix and enhance the Apple TV's built in features (no updates have been seen yet). You may be aware that these built in features are actually just plugins to the core application, which means the Software Update system would have the ability to access the plugins.
This hack would involve tweaking the settings on your wireless router to trick your Apple TV into asking for Software Updates from your computer. Your computer could then provide additional plugins of your choosing and you'd never have had to void your warranty in the process.
Linux on the Apple TV
Obviously, any hardcore geeks are keen to see Linux on any new electronic device, and the geeks over at AwkwardTV are working on exactly that.
Whilst we've already seen Mac OS X on Apple TV, there would be some benefits to having Linux running. Most notably that Linux is free and might unlock features of the Apple TV for those without an OS X install to apply.
Some initial success has been made, but there is a fair way to go yet before installing Linux on the Apple TV becomes useful to anyone who isn't doing it just for the fun of it. One to keep an eye on.
editor @ AppleTVHacks.net
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Confrontation is an RPG / tactical strategy hybrid from French developer Cyanide Studios, which is also set to release the RPG Game of Thrones in the upcoming weeks. Confrontation is based on a miniatures and dice war game, where small groups of soldiers battle each other. I've never played the war game (I'd never even heard of it until recently; apparently it's more popular in Europe), but I'll try to give you an idea if the computer version of the game is worth your time and money.
Confrontation takes place in the land of Aarklash, where factions of people seem to be perpetually at war. As the game opens up, you take control of four Griffin soldiers, and you learn that the Scorpion faction has figured out how to clone a giant war beast called the Mecasyatis. You then spend the rest of the campaign trying to thwart the Scorpion threat, and this effort takes you through the lands of the Jackal and the Wolfen, the other two factions in the game, which means you get to fight everybody.
As you play through the campaign, you eventually unlock a dozen soldiers for the Griffin faction. These soldiers get a variety of skills to damage and debuff their enemies, and heal and buff their allies, and they generally fall into four classes: tank, healer, dps, and crowd control. During each mission, you get to work with four of these soldiers, and some of the fun in the game is trying out different combinations to see how they work together.
Each time you kill an enemy or reach a sanctuary during a mission, your soldiers earn experience (the soldiers you're not controlling also earn some experience, just not as much). Then when your soldiers gain levels, they earn points to spend on their attributes, including strength, constitution, agility, vivacity (think dexterity), intelligence and wisdom. All of the attributes are useful to all of the soldiers -- for example, intelligence makes damaging skills work better, but it also improves defense against damaging skills -- and since attributes get more expensive the more your upgrade them, Confrontation isn't really a min/max game. You're better off taking a more moderate approach. Every other level, your soldiers also get a point to spend on their skills. Each soldier gets five or six skills, and each skill has five ranks.
As an example, one of the soldiers in the game is named Darius. He's the leader of your band of soldiers (as far as the story is concerned), and he's a tank. He gets six skills: Avenging Arm (to damage enemies), Divine Command (to dispel "control" debuffs), Divine Protection (to increase the physical armor of nearby allies), Exaltation of Soldiers (to increase the hit chance of nearby allies), Frontal Assault (to charge at and provoke enemies), and Holy Prayer (for self-healing). Since Darius is a tank, each of his skills costs 50 stamina out of 100 stamina total, which means you can't just spam his skills during a battle. You have to pick just the right moment to use them.
The best part of Confrontation is the battle engine. The game is good at creating opposing groups of enemies to challenge your party, and you have to pay attention to who you're fighting so you can eliminate the most potent threat first. Most of the challenge in the game comes from avoiding debuffs. Things like provoking, charming, silencing, fearing, and immobilizing prevent your soldiers from using their skills, which is where most of their power comes from, and so if you just attack enemies randomly, or allow your soldiers to pick their targets, then you're going to get into trouble. You always have to knock out the annoying spellcasters in the back first (such as the Neuromancer for the Scorpion faction), or your entire party might get disabled and slaughtered, no matter how powerful it is.


We are well positioned in the heart of all the people of Honduras, in each of the families who rely on our brands and allow us to be a part of their growing families, and led to the growth of our operations across the country.
The history of our Group in Honduras begins with the opening of its leading chain La Curacao, which was established in 1955 as a specialist in the sale of appliances and home furnishings, is the first to introduce the credit sales with installment payments in the country.
In the year 2000 Unicomer Group acquired the store chains La Curacao, Radio Shack, Almacenes Tropigas and since the beginning of our operations we have strived to offer customers benefits that facilitate their lives, with different added values, accessible credit programs, quality brands at the best prices, warranty, and support, consolidating over the past twelve years the leadership of our brands in the Honduran market.
Our values and teamwork are our flags that provide customers the security and ease of purchase in a well-known company that cares about providing excellence in service, in addition to innovative programs that make shopping an unforgettable experience.
We are well positioned in the heart of all the people of Honduras, in each of the families who rely on our brands and allow us to be a part of their growing families and led to the growth of our operations across the country.
Undoubtedly, these results have not been carried out without the commitment of our employees, the trust of our customers and shareholders to whom we are grateful every day, committed to the highest of our efforts to continue growing and reaching the goals we have proposed.


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June 15, 2000 Film » Screens
Crash of the Titan
Disney-esque characters and anime stylings don't mix, but the battles are cool
By Luke Y. Thompson
Titan A.E. are the Drej
Ah, the sleek beauty of animated violence.
It's the year 3028, and man . . . is an endangered species! (Haven't we heard that somewhere before, like last month?) But this time around, the threat is a little more intimidating than those effeminate, Xenu-worshiping Conehead psychologists in platform boots. The villains in Fox's new animated spectacular Titan A.E. are the Drej (pronounced "dredge," as in "dredge up all the good sci-fi movie ideas that have been used already and recycle them"), a neon-blue race of energy beings halfway between the Independence Day invaders and Tron's video game warriors, who speak in digital surround-sound bass and have their own portable Death Star, er, mothership that destroys whole planets in a single blast. The level of computer effects used here is superior to that of many live-action movies, and it's never more evident than during the apocalypse sequence that kicks things off (A.E. stands for After Earth). Given the subject matter and the eye-popping computer effects, there has been much speculation that U.S. animation has finally evolved beyond the kiddie stage; that Titan A.E. may be the film that makes animation safe for adults and shatters our homegrown stereotypes. And it's a good start. But it bears mentioning that the film's co-director/producer is Don Bluth.
Remember him? The former Disney employee who brought us such Nutrasweet overloads as An American Tail and All Dogs Go to Heaven. Bluth thinks classic Disney animation is the pinnacle of the genre; did you really believe he'd take it to the cutting edge? Sorry, folks. Whatever your opinion may be of the Japanese anime look of stylized, triangular-faced humans, it's certainly no worse or more generic than the wide-eyed cutesy-wannabe-Disney style employed by Bluth. Every alien in the film looks like a classic Disney talking animal, from Janeane Garofalo's gun-toting kangaroo to the turtle-with-glasses straight out of Robin Hood, here named Gune and voiced by John Leguizamo.
Still, the designs aren't quite congruent with the more teen-oriented story line: A wisecracking giant bug, for instance, is introduced early on, only to be splatted into goo by a Drej trooper, leaving just his dentures unscathed. Lead hero Cale (Matt Damon), meanwhile, envisions himself sustaining a gaping, bloody hole in his stomach at the hands of his enemies. Yet another character gets his neck aggressively broken. The fact that everyone looks like a Disney character makes these acts of violence seem doubly perverse. From a technical standpoint, however, it should be noted that the merging of three-dimensional CG animation with traditional hand-drawn works just fine.
The film's plot is classic hero's journey -- reluctant warrior seeks mysterious object that will save his people -- embellished with story elements previously seen in Superman, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Star Wars, the Star Trek films, and even Battlefield Earth: A key development calls for a spaceship that's been derelict for years -- and used as a house -- to function perfectly, explained away by the ludicrously expository line, "She's still got her ionic vacuum drive; those things never drain!"
Our hero Cale is a layabout with abandonment issues because his father never came back to find him after Earth was destroyed. Recruited by the mysterious renegade captain Korso (Bill Pullman), Cale discovers that his genetic code activates a map that will lead them to the Titan, a spaceship containing some kind of highly advanced secret that scared the Drej enough to provoke their preemptive attack on Earth. And thus the journey begins. Korso's ship, as is the norm in these animated movies, is crewed by a team of lovable misfits, all of them wacky aliens except for one who just happens to be the perfect love interest: a Goth-punk chick named Akima, voiced by Drew Barrymore and wholeheartedly ripped off from the character Freefall from the comic book Gen13. Since primary Titan A.E. scripter Ben Edlund is a big name in the comic world, it's unlikely he missed the resemblance.
Misgivings aside, Titan A.E. delivers some of the most well-thought-out and executed action sequences to hit the screen in quite some time. It's rare to find an action movie with one solid, memorable sequence these days, and Titan A.E. has at least four, all of which are truly impressive and should keep audiences sufficiently distracted from such minor details as character and script.
While plot is clearly secondary in a movie of this type, there are some story holes and stylistic choices that cannot be ignored. And let's not even begin to count nitpicky inconsistencies, the way Internet geeks undoubtedly will, because there are plenty of obvious, major ones to consider.
None of this ultimately matters, really. Folks will go to Titan A.E. looking for summer escapism, and most of them will be pleased. Is it worth the goofy characters and weak story for the effects and action sequences? Absolutely. Go, have fun. Just don't expect the American equivalent of Ghost in the Shell or Princess Mononoke. Titan A.E. is merely a baby step toward animation as a medium not just for kids, but hey, as the Chinese say, that's how the journey of a thousand miles begins.
Tags: Film Lead, Reviews
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Transparent data encryption or always encrypted?
Transparent Data Encryption (TDE) and Always Encrypted are two different encryption technologies offered by SQL Server and Azure SQL Database. Generally, encryption protects data from unauthorized access in different scenarios. They are complementary features, and this blog post will show a side-by-side comparison to help decide which technology to choose and how to combine them to provide a layered security approach.
TDE is intended to add a layer of security to protect data at rest from offline access to raw files or backups, common scenarios include datacenter theft or unsecured disposal of hardware or media such as disk drives and backup tapes. For a deeper look into how TDE protects against the risk of malicious parties trying to recover stolen databases: data, log files, snapshots, copies or backups and to review TDE best practices see Feature Spotlight: Transparent Data Encryption (TDE).
Enabling TDE on databases provides the ability to comply with many laws, regulations, and security guidelines established across various industries that require data to be encrypted at rest. Unless data stored in a SQL database has no protection requirements at all, there should be no reason to disable TDE. It is, however, important to recognize that TDE only adds one layer of protection for data at rest and remaining risks must be addressed at the OS file system and hardware layer, see Bitlocker documentation to learn more.
TDE encrypts the entire database using an AES encryption algorithm which doesn't require application developers to make any changes to existing applications. TDE performs real-time I/O encryption and decryption of the data and log files. Once the database is loaded into memory, the data is accessible to administrators (DBAs) of SQL Server (sysadmin, db_owner), and Azure SQL Database (cloud) administrators and can be used by all roles and applications that have access to the database. If a database contains sensitive data in specific columns that needs to be protected from administrator roles and remain encrypted in memory, using Always Encrypted should be evaluated in addition to TDE.
TDE offers two options for encryption key management, service managed keys and customer managed keys. For service managed keys, the TDE protector is a certificate stored in the master database of the server. For customer managed keys, the TDE protector is an asymmetric key protected by an EKM module or Azure Key Vault. When using Azure SQL Database TDE with Bring Your Own Keys (BYOK) the TDE Protector never leaves the key vault, but Azure SQL Database needs to access the key vault to decrypt and encrypt the Database Encryption Key (DEK) used to decrypt and encrypt the data. After the encrypted DEK is sent to key vault for decryption, the unencrypted DEK is stored in memory until the TDE Protector in key vault is deleted or access to SQL Database has been revoked. In this case, the database will go offline within 24 hours and the DEK will be removed from memory.
Always Encrypted is a feature designed to protect sensitive data, stored in Azure SQL Database or SQL Server databases from access by database administrators (e.g. the members of the SQL Server sysadmin or db_owner roles), administrators of machines hosting SQL Server instances,), and Azure SQL Database (cloud) administrators. Data stored in the database is protected even if the entire machine is compromised, for example by malware. Always Encrypted leverages client-side encryption: a database driver inside an application transparently encrypts data, before sending the data to the database. Similarly, the driver decrypts encrypted data retrieved in query results.
Column encryption keys are used to encrypt data in the database. These keys are stored in the database in the encrypted form (never in plaintext).
Column master keys are used to encrypt column encryption keys. These keys are stored in an external key store, such as Windows Certificate Store, Azure Key Vault or hardware security modules. For keys stored in Azure Key Vault, only the client application has access to the keys, but not the database, unlike TDE.
The unique security benefit of Always Encrypted is the protection of data "in use" – i.e., the data used in computations, in memory of the SQL Server process remains encrypted. As a result, Always Encrypted protects the data from attacks that involve scanning the memory of the SQL Server process or extracting the data from a memory dump file.
By protecting data from high-privilege users who have no "need-to-know," Always Encrypted provides a separation between those who own the data (and can view it) and those who manage the data (but should have no access). This enables customers to confidently store sensitive data in the cloud, delegate on-premises database administration to third parties, or to reduce security clearance requirements for their own DBA staff.
Unlike TDE, this is only partially transparent to applications. Although the client driver transparently encrypts and decrypts data, the application may need to be changed to adhere to requirements/limitations of Always Encrypted. For example, Always Encrypted only supports very limited operations on encrypted database columns. This is one of the reasons why we recommend you use Always Encrypted to protect truly sensitive data in selected database columns.
TDE as the first line of defense (and to meet common compliance requirements) to encrypt the entire database at rest.
TLS to protect all traffic to the database.
Always Encrypted to protect highly sensitive data from high-privilege users and malware in the database environment.