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Exclusive: The Missing Pages of Laurent Binet's HHhH
Editor April 16, 2012 | 3 books mentioned 21 14 min read
In 2006, a young American expat named Jonathan Littell published one of the most audacious literary debuts in recent memory: a 900-page novel about the Holocaust, narrated by an aging ex-SS Officer. It was called Les Bienveillantes, and except for a few German bureaucratic terms, it was written entirely in French. (Littell had produced a cyberpunk novel in English at age 21, but subsequently renounced it as juvenilia.) Given its choice of protagonist, Les Bienveillantes might have seemed to be what marketers call "a tough sell," but it went on to win the Prix Goncourt – France's most prestigious literary award – and to move some 700,000 copies. It was subsequently translated into 17 languages, including English, where it became The Kindly Ones.
Meanwhile, a young Frenchman named Laurent Binet was tearing his hair out. Binet had been toiling away on a work-in-progress that turned out to have striking similarities with Littell's succès de scandale. Where The Kindly Ones featured cameos from Adolf Eichmann, Heinrich Himmler, and Reinhard Heydrich and concluded with a physical assault on the person of the Führer, Binet's novel-in-progress focused on many of the same characters, and culminated in Heydrich's assassination. These resemblances were superficial, of course. Littell's nervy postmodern update on the historical novel had affinities with William T. Vollmann's blend of research, pastiche, and hallucination. Binet's owed more to W.G. Sebald…and maybe Jacques Roubaud, insofar as he had already taken the step of writing himself into the book. Still, he seemed to have landed in a writer's nightmare, akin to that of the studio exec who realizes in postproduction that a version his movie Armageddon has just appeared under the title Deep Impact. What's a good postmodern to do? Well, write that into the novel, too.
Among chapters devoted to the plot against Heydrich and chapters devoted to his own research and aesthetic anxieties, Binet began to interpolate passages covering, in real-time, his reading of The Kindly Ones and his fears about what it meant for his book. These fears would prove unjustified; in 2010 his novel was published under the title HHhH (an acronym for "Himmlers Hirn heisst Heydrich" – "Himmler's brain is called Heydrich"). But his French publisher, Grasset, redacted all passages concerning The Kindly Ones, apparently for fear of offending Littell's admirers in the public, the press, and the académie Goncourt – which awarded HHhH its prize for first novels.
This month, an English translation of HHhH arrives in U.S. bookstores, trailing blurbs by the likes of Martin Amis, Bret Easton Ellis, and Wells Tower. This edition, too, is missing the Littell material. But Binet and his translator Sam Taylor have graciously allowed The Millions to publish the lost pages of HHhH for the first time anywhere. Their tone of comical anxiety and competitive ardor – of wishing at once for a colleague to succeed and to fail – will be familiar to many writers. Unsurprisingly, Binet ends up judging Littell harshly, as did many American critics, including this one (although I should confess that I still think about The Kindly Ones often). More important than their literary judgments, though, or their portrait of the artist as a young man, are the still controversial questions about representation and the Holocaust these pages candidly take up. Even relegated, as it were, to the margins of the published work, these questions transform the historical thriller at the heart of HHhH into a powerful meditation on the ethics of storytelling. — Garth Risk Hallberg
Next to me on the sofa is Jonathan Littell's weighty tome The Kindly Ones, which has just been published by Gallimard. The (false) memoirs of an old SS veteran, it is nine hundred pages long. Having created a massive buzz in the press, and sold out in most bookstores, this novel is crushing all its competitors on the bestseller list. Not only that, but its success is apparently causing problems for the entire publishing industry, as it is so long that it is lasting readers from September to Christmas, so they aren't buying any other books.
There is a savage review of the book in Libération, with the headline "Night and Mud." But even this review hails the author's depth of research simply because Jon Littell uses SS ranks. Apparently, if one writes "I caught a Scharführer by the sleeve: 'What's happening?' — 'I don't know, Obersturmführer. I think there's a problem with the Standartenführer ,'" that is enough to produce a "heady feeling of realism." I'm not sure if the journalist who wrote this is being ironic or not, but I'm afraid he isn't. I remember having made a joke on this subject in one (invented) line during one of my chapters on the Night of the Long Knives. But anyway…
One of the book's severest critics is Claude Lanzmann (although he also recognizes its good qualities), but according to his detractors, that's because he believes himself to be the only person in the world (along with Raoul Hilberg) with the right to talk about the Holocaust. I met Lanzmann once: he is, in the flesh, a courteous man with an impressive presence. If you judge him solely on his public statements, though, you might easily regard him as narrow-minded. In this case, however, I think he shows great judgment when he criticizes Littell for his character's "invasive psychology." Not a good sign. But he, too, acclaims the author's research: "Not one error; flawless erudition." Well, all right, if you say so.
Apart from these examples, everything else is ecstatic. In Le Nouvel Observateur: "A new War and Peace"; in Le Monde: "one of the most impressive books ever written about Nazism." And so on.
But the highest praise comes on the back cover of the book, where Gallimard has not skimped on the name-dropping: Eschyle, Visconti, even Grossman's Life and Fate. Talk about bringing out the big guns.
Obviously, the book is up for every literary prize in the galaxy.
So I begin to read it, feeling simultaneously suspicious and excited. After three pages, my feelings have turned to puzzlement. It is quite badly written, and yet at the same time it is so very literary. This is not at all how I imagined an eighty-year-old SS veteran speaking or thinking. And, of course, I am allergic to interior monologues, at least when we are supposedly talking about history.
I am saying all this now, before continuing with my reading, because I am sure that, when it comes down to it, I am going to devour this book.
Human Brothers
Let's begin with the first line of Jonathan Littell's novel: "Oh my human brothers, let me tell you how it happened."
I don't like this line. But the point here is not, for once, my personal tastes. Let's look more closely at that opening: "Oh my human brothers." With these first four words, we already know the book's thesis. By beginning in this way, Littell deliberately places his novel in the lineage of Hannah Arendt. He is proposing the idea that evil is not the prerogative of monsters, but that it emanates from people like you and me. I subscribe to this thesis, of course, but I fail to see how its validity can be demonstrated in a novel. Even a nine-hundred-page novel.
From the moment when you create an imaginary character — a character who belongs to you, whom you can make say anything you want ("Oh my human brothers," for instance), a puppet whom you are able to manipulate in any way you wish — it is easy and all too artificial to use this character to illustrate whatever theory you have in mind. A character may illustrate, certainly, but it cannot demonstrate anything. If you wish to suggest that the SS were sickened by the horrors they committed, you make your protagonist vomit at inconvenient moments. If you wish to suggest that the SS loved animals, you give him a dog. And then, to make it more real, you give the dog a name. Fritz?
But what interests me about the SS — if I wish to understand something about that troubled era, if I wish to extract something from all of that which can help me understand man and the world — is what they did, not what Jonathan Littell thinks they might have done.
The problem with this type of historical novel is that it shamelessly mixes the true with the plausible. That's fine if I know about the episode in question. But if I don't, I am left in limbo: perhaps this is true, or perhaps it's not.
I wonder how Jonathan Littell knows that Blobel, the alcoholic head of Sonderkommando 4a of Einsatzgruppe C in Ukraine, had an Opel. And I wonder whether Lanzmann, before deciding that The Kindly Ones did not contain "a single error, a single flaw," checked this detail. If Blobel really drove an Opel, then I bow before Littell's superior research. But if it's a bluff, it weakens the whole book. Of course it does! It's true that the Nazis were supplied in bulk by Opel, and so it's perfectly plausible that Blobel possessed, or used, a vehicle of that make. But plausible is not the same as known. I'm talking rot, aren't I? When I tell people that, they think I'm mental. They don't see the problem.
Perhaps Blobel had an Opel, or perhaps he had a BMW. And if Littell has invented the make of Blobel's car, perhaps he has invented all the rest. The dialogue, for example. I find it surprising that an SS officer could exclaim: "Il a pété les plombs!" ["He's blown a gasket!"] Littell's entire book can teach me only one thing: how this writer imagines Nazism. And I am not really interested in that, particularly when the depiction is so dubious. I want to know how things really happened, so I expect him to tell me — at the very least — when an episode is true and when it is his invention. Otherwise, reality is reduced to the level of fiction. I think that is wrong.
So, irrespective of the Opel question, Jonathan Littell's novel — as compelling as it may be (I am still at the beginning) — lost all credibility as a reflection on history from the moment its author chose to use a fictional protagonist. Which is a shame because, after all, it does seem quite well-researched.
I will, of course, apologize if it turns out that Blobel really did drive an Opel. But fundamentally, it wouldn't change a thing.
Littell's Portrait of Heydrich, p. 58
You might have guessed that I was a bit disturbed by the publication of Jonathan Littell's novel, and by its success. And even if I can comfort myself by saying that our projects are not the same, I am forced to admit that the subject matter is fairly similar. I'm reading his book at the moment, and each page gives me the urge to write something. I have to suppress this urge. All I will say is that there's a description of Heydrich at the beginning of the book, from which I will quote only one line: "His hands seemed too long, like nervous algae attached to his arms." I don't know why, but I like that image.
More on The Kindly Ones
Just a few more words. Let's agree on this: an interior monologue, if designed to reveal to us the psychology of an imaginary character, is at best an amusing farce. If it is supposed to allow the reader access to someone's thoughts, it becomes downright risible. An interior monologue can only ever reveal the psychology of two people: the author and the reader. And that is already quite a lot, let me tell you!
Having said that, I must admit something: I did not know that most of the cars used by the SS were Opels. Did they sign a contract with the firm? That is what I would like to ask Jonathan Littell. Or Lanzmann.
But, to return to the interior monologue, there is a real problem with The Kindly Ones: the tone of the imaginary SS veteran's supposed confession is unbelievably neutral, almost like a history book. It is the kind of tone I myself try to adopt when I describe horrors, in order to avoid the twin traps of pathos and grandiloquence (not that I always succeed). But what is the point of writing in the first person if you are going to erase practically all trace of subjectivity? From time to time, it's true, the narrator reminds us of his existence with little, discreetly ironic remarks. These don't seem very plausible to me, but still. Interior monologues are everywhere! But it is not even the psychological implausibility that bothers me; it is just the pointlessness of the procedure. Putting an idea, no matter how interesting, in the head of an invented character… I cannot bring myself to do it; I find it completely puerile, even if it is a dramatic convention.
One Last Word?
All right, this is my last word on this, I promise. I have just read my chapters about The Kindly Ones to my half brother. He pointed out that many historical novels use fictional inventions, sometimes with interesting results. Of course, I cannot deny that. For Alexandre Dumas to use historical material for its novelistic possibilities, and for him to mix it with his own invented stories, does not shock me at all. Everything depends on the author's intention. If it is to tell a beautiful and exciting story, without any other pretention, then that is perfectly fine; I would happily surrender to the pleasure of the novel. But I heard Jonathan Littell speaking on the radio, and apparently this was not his intention: he really did want, as I'd suspected, to understand evil. As Alexandre (my brother, not Dumas) put it, tackling a speculative question with a supposedly historical angle by way of an invented character (and, I repeat, even with solid research as backup) is "entropic." I don't really understand that word, but I know I agree with him. In fact, I think that what he means by "entropic" is something between "centripetal" and "tautological." So, upon closer examination, the term is inappropriate, which is a shame because it struck me as quite eloquent. But never mind, the idea remains the same. What I am saying is that inventing a character in order to understand historical facts is like fabricating evidence. Or rather, as my brother says, It's like planting false proof at a crime scene where the floor is already strewn with incriminating evidence.
I am not saying that all invented characters are worthless. I would happily swap Napoleon, Kutuzov, Julius Caesar, or Heydrich for Josef K. Or even the real Mark Antony for Shakespeare's Mark Antony. As soon as fictional characters are loosened from their historical roots, they are able to become universal — even if (and perhaps because) they differ from their historical models: Richard III, Rameau's nephew, Zaitsev in Life and Fate, Edison in Tomorrow's Eve, and so on. But in all these cases, we are not interested in what kind of car they drive.
A Littell Mistake, p. 209
Despite all this, I did end up getting into The Kindly Ones. In other words, I finally managed to abandon myself to the innocent pleasures of reading, except for my brain's never-ending production of critical and metacritical thoughts.
But, while lazing in the bath, book in hand, feeling vaguely guilty about the idea of spending my weekend in this way when I have a thousand things to do, what should I read, on page 209? In the course of his story, Littell writes that Heydrich "was wounded in Prague on May 29"! I cannot believe my eyes. Okay, okay, it's only a date. But for me, it's a bit like being told that the Bastille was stormed on July 12, or that the United States declared its independence on July 6.
I had been so close to trusting Littell that, when I saw this, I even came up with an excuse for him: it is possible, after all, that news of the assassination attempt was not divulged until two days afterward, and that even members of the SD, such as the narrator, were not informed immediately. But that doesn't make sense, because the story is supposedly being told by an SS veteran, years later, when the facts and dates are well known.
Of course, this doesn't discredit all of Littell's work. In the context of his book, it is a small and inconsequential error, probably nothing more than a simple typo. But I think again of Lanzmann: "Not a single error," he said! And I had believed him. This makes me think about the way we accept — daily, constantly, unthinkingly — the arguments of authority. I truly have a great deal of respect for Lanzmann, but the moral of this story is that everyone — even the world's most authoritative specialist — can make a mistake.
This makes me think of a specialist on the life and works of Saint-John Perse (the most famous specialist in France and, I imagine, in the world) who declared on the radio, with the learned assurance typical of French universities, that the poet was a "hardline" anti-Munich campaigner in 1938 when he was working at the Quai d'Orsay. This seems somewhat surprising, given that he was one of the two diplomats who had accompanied Daladier at the agreement's signing! Open any history book that mentions Munich, and you can check just how deeply Alexis Léger, the Foreign Office's general secretary, was implicated in this infamous agreement. But evidently this great specialist did not consider it useful to consult even one book, preferring to rely on a biographical note written by . . . the subject himself! According to Saint-John Perse / Alexis Léger,
In spite of his personal opposition to the so-called policy of 'appeasement' and to Hitler's well-known hostility towards him, the general secretary [talking about himself in the third person!] reluctantly agreed to attend the Conference as the Quai d'Orsay's representative, as the Foreign Secretary had not been summoned to this meeting of government heads.
Apparently, our specialist did not wonder what Saint-John Perse / Alexis Léger meant by "reluctantly." Was he dragged to Munich against his will, surrounded by policemen? Was his family threatened? Was it really impossible to contemplate resigning in protest of a policy that went so strongly against his personal beliefs? Was there really no choice, once the agreement had been signed, than to adopt that contemptuous, arrogant attitude toward the Czechs? Did he at least have the decency to resign after the agreement was signed in order to register his disapproval? Clearly, French literature specialists do not feel any great obligation to study history in much depth. But this does not prevent them sounding categorical. The end result is that this myth is taken up and spread by all the country's literary authorities. And the students swallow it. In any case, literary types rarely differentiate between fable and reality, so when it comes down to it, they couldn't care less about Alexis Léger's diplomatic career. But this does not prevent them from repeating, with the perfect assurance of those in the know, that Saint-John Perse, this great Nobel Prize winner, was a "hardline" anti-Munich campaigner. If he was anti-Munich, you have to wonder what a pro-Munich campaigner would look like. A German.
So anyway, Saint-John Perse, Littell . . . you must always be suspicious, of everybody! Don't say I didn't warn you.
Littell Again
It's not my fault, but well-intentioned friends send me everything they can find about Jonathan Littell, and I am yet again forced to return to the subject. Things are not going well at all. I have just read the account of a speech he gave at a Normale Supérieure school, where he said: "Evil is committed by people like us, people who sleep, who shit, who fuck, and who have the same relationship as we do to the body and to the fear of death, with thought coming afterwards. All killers are like us."
Fair enough. In fact, I agree completely. Here again is Hannah Arendt's thesis, and here, again, I cannot deny its truth. But it is a very strange speech to justify his book, precisely because Littell seems to have done his utmost to invent the most singular character possible. Let us recall, for those few unfortunates who have not been able to read The Kindly Ones, that the SS veteran Aue is an intellectual who sleeps with his sister, kills his parents, actively participates in genocide, sucks off Robert Brasillach, survives a bullet in the head, is never separated from his Flaubert, and enjoys rolling in his shit from time to time. For a guy who is just like you and me, that is quite a list!
Do you often carry your Flaubert around with you?
Benamou
The vise is tightening around my book. The warning shot was in fact a nuclear attack. The atomic bomb was Littell, his Prix Goncourt, his million copies sold, and all the newsprint he's generated in reviews and exegeses. (Only this week, a reading guide called The Kindly Ones Decoded has come out.) What publisher of any kind of renown would want to publish a book on roughly the same theme in the decade to come? What publisher would be prepared to look like a follower, while taking the risk of publishing someone who is more or less unknown? There is more to lose than to gain: unsold copies if the book is a failure, being accused of opportunism or even cynicism if it's a success. And that's without even considering that the horde of critics who'd decreed that The Kindly Ones was the novel of the century will not want to go back on their decision (although, knowing them, this problem is surmountable).
My editorial problems don't end there. For years, I have been writing to the tranquil rhythm of my own erratic inspiration, but no one warned me that I was in a race against the clock. The longer I wait to finish my book, the greater the risk that I will arrive after the battle has ended. Someone told me on the phone the day before yesterday that a biography of Heydrich has just come out, written by a German whose name I have never heard, Mario Dederichs. It is translated into French and is already on the bookshelves at Gibert. I felt both excited and slightly ill. I was thrilled at the chance to learn new anecdotes and facts about Heydrich, but at the same time, I have to admit, it gets on my nerves a bit. And today, in a bookshop in Normandy, I discover a novel by Georges-Marc Benamou, entitled The Ghost of Munich, featuring frequent appearances by Alexis Léger / Saint-John Perse. If this continues, everything I have to say will already have been said! I am avidly reading Benamou's book: in literary terms, it has no merit, but it is pleasant to read all the same, and I am learning new things. At least, I think I am. No matter what, I know I have to stop reading. I need to hurry up and finish telling my story because I am convinced, probably irrationally, that I am the only person capable of writing it. This could seem pretentious, obviously. But I do not want my story to be wasted — it's as simple as that.
Littell Epilogue
A poster on an Internet forum expresses the opinion that Max Aue "rings true because he is the mirror of his age." What? No! He rings true (for certain, easily duped readers) because he is the mirror of our age: a postmodern nihilist, essentially. At no moment in the novel is it suggested that this character believes in Nazism. On the contrary, he is often critically detached from National Socialist doctrine — and in that sense, he can hardly be said to reflect the delirious fanaticism prevalent in his time. On the other hand, this detachment, this blasé attitude toward everything, this permanent malaise, this taste for philosophizing, this unspoken amorality, this morose sadism, and this terrible sexual frustration that constantly twists his guts… but of course! How did I not see it before? Suddenly, everything is clear. The Kindly Ones is simply "Houellebecq does Nazism."
Yesterday, I met a young woman who works in a library. She told me about an old lady, a former Resistance fighter, who regularly borrows books. One day, the old lady took home Littell's The Kindly Ones. Soon afterwards, she brought it back, exclaiming: "What is this shit?" When I heard this, I thought straightaway that it would require a great deal of willpower not to put this anecdote in my book.
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Draft Dave: Why Eggers Should Edit The Paris Review
Garth Risk Hallberg February 17, 2010 | 3 books mentioned 19 6 min read
It's a business-school truism that great leaders make for messy successions. Not only are their shoes hard to fill; no boss likes to contemplate his or her own obsolescence. (Think of Steve Jobs. Hell, think of King Lear.) And though its masthead is more likely to have graduated from Brown than from Wharton, the literary magazine is as subject as any other enterprise to the general principle. William Shawn's 35-year streak as editor-in-chief of The New Yorker, for example, yielded to the comparatively brief reigns of Robert Gottlieb and Tina Brown. Roger D. Hodge's tenure at Harper's, following the second long Lewis H. Lapham regime, lasted all of two years.
Even amid such tough acts to follow, the case of George Plimpton stands out. As the longtime editor of The Paris Review, Plimpton did the traditional things imposingly well. He charted the magazine's direction. He developed features. He cultivated and supported good writing. But he also, through his journalistic talents and his presence on the social scene, expanded our idea of what an editor could be: founder, ringmaster, patron, host, impresario, fundraiser, cheerleader, public face, presiding spirit, and living embodiment of the brand. Though slender of frame, he cast a big shadow.
Upon Plimpton's death in 2003, Brigid Hughes, then the managing editor, was tapped to lead the magazine. She was soon shown the door (a circumstance which led to the founding of A Public Space, with the help of a cadre of writers and donors loyal to Hughes) and the journalist Philip Gourevitch slotted into the role, somewhat against type. Gourevitch's Paris Review has been more consistently appealing than one might have expected it to be. (A great reporter does not always a great editor make.) But, given that Gourevitch has been more of a caretaker than a visionary, it was no great surprise to learn in November that he would be stepping down to focus on his own writing…leaving The Paris Review searching for its fourth editor-in-chief in seven years.
The good news is that the pool of available talent is probably larger now than it has been in years. I'd happily read a Paris Review run by former Spy editor Kurt Andersen, who writes well, is interested in everything, and seems to have a Rolodex the size of a card catalog. Likewise Dan Menaker. In the wake of Hodge's departure from Harper's last month, his name has been thrown around as well. If I was on the search committee, I'd certainly be looking at Keith Gessen, who, though young, is something of a scholar of the little magazine. Or The Paris Review could again try to hire in-house. (Having had a piece edited by Meghan O'Rourke, who pulls double duty with Slate, I'd hire her for just about anything.)
Finding the next Plimpton, however, is more than a matter of editorial acumen. The Plimptonian editor must be out in the world. She cuts a figure. She makes fireworks, and shoots them off, too. Tina Brown, now of The Daily Beast, and Vanity Fair's Graydon Carter have certainly learned a thing or two from Plimpton, but the only editor currently working in the world of little magazines who fulfills the polymathic model is Dave Eggers. And so, as absurd as it may sound prima facie, I'd like to propose that Eggers is the best candidate for editorship of The Paris Review. And, somewhat counterintuitively, that hiring him for the job might be as good for Eggers as for the magazine.
Eggers is an entrepreneur of distinction, a gifted fund-raiser, a networker, a talent scout, a celebrity, a philanthropist, and an accomplished graphic designer. Moreover, he has a particular editorial capacity that's always in rare supply: the capacity for vision. At his first two magazines – Might and (especially) McSweeney's – Eggers helped to distill into literary form the sensibility of those who came of age after The End of History…and before history unceremoniously resumed. Whimsical, highly aestheticized, conspicuously casual, reverent of childhood and its signifiers, bound by the dialectic of irony and sincerity, the style of McSweeney's has become the style of post-post-Modernism. It is No One Belongs Here More Than You and Everything Here Is The Best Thing Ever, yes, but also American Apparel and Avenue Q, the films of Michel Gondry and the career of Michael Cera. It is vast swaths of Echo Park and the Bay Area and Brooklyn.
The first obvious objection, then, to the marriage of Eggers and The Paris Review comes from Eggers' side of the aisle: he already has a magazine. But the truth is that McSweeney's (reportedly intended to have a forty-eight issue run, followed by a long hiatus) has, in its middle age, begun to run up against its built-in limitations. One need not slight the magazine itself (the recent "Panorama" issue, a loving tribute to the print newspaper and a manifesto on its behalf, reportedly sold out), or rehearse the whiplash speed at which subculture becomes mainstream, to feel that McSweeney's some time ago made the move from innovation to institution.
The Paris Review, too, is an institution, but one with a broader mission and a broader potential audience – a place where readers of McSweeney's, readers of Newsweek, and readers of The New York Review of Books might meet and mingle en masse. And because its appeal is less bound up with youth, it might offer Eggers, now pushing 40, new and different challenges…even as McSweeney's continued under the able hands that one sort of imagines mostly run it now anyway.
The second obstacle to the union is that Eggers, like Gourevitch, is a writer, and writing takes time away from editing. But here, too, Eggers, for all his successes, seems like a man in need of a jolt. His literary talent has always recalled for me David Foster Wallace's description of the tennis player's physique: hypertrophied in places and underdeveloped in others. This is true to some extent of all writers, but truer of Eggers than of, say his kind-of contemporary (and sometime collaborator) Zadie Smith. With impressive consistency, his books display visual acuity, inventive turns of phrase, and a fine ear for dialogue. Most importantly, they are full of compassion. But they also betray a countervailing tendency toward solipsism that the home crowd around McSweeney's has been unable or unwilling to call Eggers on, and that has held him back from being the novelist he seems to aspire to be. Which may be a way of suggesting that Eggers is still in his literary adolescence.
This solipsism expresses itself as constraint. There is, on the surface, a kind of airless stylization of the prose, all those floating pronouns and studied flatnesses. More deeply, there is the constraint solipsism imposes on plot and drama – on the interaction of characters, and thus, on their development. Of Eggers' longer narrative works, three are more or less nonfiction, one is a rewrite of a children's book, and two (You Shall Know Our Velocity and Away We Go) are lashed to picaresque conceits that substitute vignette for scene and propulsion for plot.
Most recently, these two forms of constraint – micro and macro – converged in the disappointing novelization, The Wild Things. Max goes to the island. Max does some stuff. Max does some other stuff. Then Max comes home. At no point in the book does Max, or his writer, feel the sense of discovery and possibility we saw in Spike Jonze's filmed sprint through the trees – or that marked the finest passages of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius.
The oddity of this is that Eggers is profoundly interested in other people. His best book overall, to my mind, has been What is the What, based on the story of Sudanese refugee Valentino Achak Deng. (I have not read Zeitoun, which seems to follow a similar strategy in telling the story of a Hurricane Katrina survivor.) This reportorial interest in the wider world is one that The Paris Review could nourish, even as it exposed Eggers to an even wider audience – one that might be less satisfied with his tics, and more demanding of writing in proportion with his enormous gifts.
Whether or not Eggers seriously considers throwing his hat into the ring, The Paris Review could certainly benefit from having an editor of his stature. The task that awaits Gourevitch's replacement may be more daunting than that which awaited him in 2005. In addition to hosting parties, raising funds, tending to the needs of writers, and serving as the public face of The Paris Review, the next editor will have to make the case to readers that, in this era of YouTube and the iPad, the bound literary quarterly is still worth their time and money. That's a mission Dave Eggers has already proven himself to be committed to. And The Paris Review, for nearly 60 years, has proven its commitment to the kind of great American writing I'd like to see more of from Eggers. Odds are these two commitments will be pursued on parallel tracks. But wouldn't it be great if they could meet?
Garth Risk Hallberg | 3 books mentioned 19 6 min read
Eight Hot Trollopes
William Weaver June 17, 2019 | 3 books mentioned 12 min read
An experiment for 21st-century readers: let's take a quick tour of the love scenes of a famous Victorian novelist to see if his writings still enflame.
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A Beautiful Man: On Peter Parker and the Amazing Spider-Man
Paul Morton May 2, 2014 | 3 books mentioned 4 10 min read
The problem with Spider-Man is the same problem with all popular comics heroes. Eventually, after several hundred issues, he hit a moment of stasis in which he stopped evolving, stopped discovering the strange hidden facets of his personality.
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Footprints in the Snow
Na Zhong November 19, 2017 | 3 books mentioned 6 9 min read
What is memory, if not a bundle of errors, a poem covered with edits?
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I love that this piece works without having read either novel. I'm kind of interested in reading HHhH, but I also feel a little intimidated by it.
Pingback: Zzzooom! Laurent Binet: De weggelaten passages uit 'HhhH' | DeJaap
Froma says:
These omitted sections on Littell convince me finally, if I needed convincing, that Binet's book is not for me. Its self-serving, narcissistic, and defensive/protective stance, labeled 'confessions of the author' has little to recommend it as a serious interrogation of how fiction and history work together. The obsession with Opel is only one case in point. But Littell's book lingers long and hard in memory as an astonishing, at times revolting, but always absorbing and original work.
Peter Tame says:
I am glad to read the second comment by Froma, since I was beginning to think I was the only one to find 'HHhH' self-centred and rather narcissistic. I gave a paper at the recent Paris conference ('AprèsVichy: l'écriture occupée') on 'HHhH' and received a fairly hostile reception, partly due to the presence of the author, Laurent Binet, in the audience. 'Le Monde des livres' (8th June 2012) features an article by Pierre Assouline on this conference and this paper in particular.
'HHhH' is, notwithstanding, a very interesting experiment with its problematic combination of fiction and history. It nudges the boundary between novel and historiography, perhaps even transgresses. No doubt the controversy over it will run for some time.
Kim Lockhart says:
My take after reading HHhH: yes, the "Writer's Notebook" passages can become annoying at times. Yet the tangents Binet goes on while trying to "purify" his facts are most often engrossing and the further I got into the book, the more tolerant I became of his fits and starts, and other literary mannerisms.
And here's the main thing: what a helluva documentation he provides about Heydrich, about the assassination, about the aftermath. Extraordinary storytelling !
Shane Quinlan says:
To me, Binet's anecdote about the resistance fighter returning the Kindly Ones smacks entirely of sour grapes.
I can't fathom his complaints about Blobel driving an opel and Aue being apparently detached from the Nationalist Socialist ideal. I checked through my copy of the Kindly Ones and didn't find any DaVinci code claim about everything being accurate. Secondly someone please tell me any Nazi who frankly conformed to that so called "ideal".
Both HHhH and the Kindly Ones are fantastic books. I'm going through HHhH at the moment. One thing I'll say about Binet is that he is hilariously bitchy.
Pingback: HHhH by Laurent Binet: A Review | The Book Smugglers
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Gerald Brennan says:
I read "HHhH" with a similar level of angst that Binet apparently had while reading "The Kindly Ones," as I'd written my own take on the Heydrich assassination while Binet was getting his work published. I found Binet's work engrossing, if a tad overrated–more clever than classic, with narrative interjections that seemed contrived to distract the reader from the fact that he couldn't write a convincing page of dialogue. I'm finally reading these missing pages, and it's amusing to see how similarly pissy he felt while reading Littell! (And in Binet's defense, I, too, would have gone bonkers if I'd read a supposedly well-researched book that claimed Heydrich was attacked on May 29th.) I'm taking comfort in the fact that everyone who's read my book ("Resistance") and Binet's seems to prefer mine.
Pingback: » National Book Critics Circle Award finalist in Fiction: Laurent Binet, HHhH (2010; 2012 English translation) Gogol's Overcoat
Mr Binet apparently knows Littell's aim in The Kindly Ones.
"He is proposing the idea that evil is not the prerogative of monsters, but that it emanates from people like you and me. I subscribe to this thesis, of course, but I fail to see how its validity can be demonstrated in a novel". Did Littell ever state: "The Kindly Ones' intention is to demonstrate that evil emanates from people like you and me"? In that case, Mr Binet can have his say. But I wonder if this was the case.
Concerning the Opel and the fictionary characters, has Mr Littell ever said that his novel was an attempt to tell people everything but the truth? That it was an exact recollection of facts? Of course not! Then, Mr Binet, why bother criticising?
And then he completely ruins his reasoning when he states that "the tone of the imaginary SS veteran's supposed confession is unbelievably neutral". If we are to follow Mr Binet's reasoning, this sentence is not plausible at all, unless Mr Binet has known Heydrich mind How can he know that Heydrich was not neutral when he talked to himself about the Holocaust? That is exactly his main argument, that it is better not to tell if you don't know the whole truth, that it's better not to invent.
I don't think I need to go on, you'll more or less see my point.
By the way, I haven't read The Kindly Ones and I am not in favour or against it!
Pingback: Review: HHhH, Laurent Binet | Reading the End
steve joseph says:
When Laurent Binet started his research on Heydrich in 1996, did he come across "The killing of Obergruppenfuhrer Reinhard Heydrich" by Callum McDonald, which had been published six years previously? Binet supplies no acknowledgements or bibliography, so I cannot tell. The McDonald book covers exactly the same ground, as a popular history. If you read that first, the stuffing is knocked out of HHhH, leaving little more than Binet's self absorptions to engage the reader
Most, if not all, of the above comments suffer from a sever lack of nuance in interpretation. Of course, they're not to blame since it's the author who plays with their view of the narrator. These two are not the same people. Yes, they share a name and life details but the narrator's obsession is purposefully interweaved with the narration itself. The author leaves no gaps or mistakes in the historical accuracy so as to be able to play with the fiction of the narrator. There is a certain obsession but it's a mistake to see this as the narrator's, or even author's, narcissism.
I so enjoyed reading these extracts – but the editors made a good decision to cut them from the book, no?
Carlos Maza says:
I finished reading HHhH a couple of days ago. I was sad and worried: a f****ing great book, a lesson on the ethics of writing. Every time I read such a good book, two or three years pass before I find another one son exciting. So, to find the "lost pages" of HHhH wae great news. Thanks.
Philippe Jobin says:
Binet's comment are definitely usless, pointless and not accurate. His book il very poor and weak, only historicly factual. Littel's book is a post-modern and psyhadelic masterpiece. No comparison is worth it all!
Psychadelic*, sorry about that…quality level of an "apocalypse now", "full metal jacket" or "the deer unter", as a speech or artistic work about war. Nothing less than that…to compare with, Binet has written "bright shining light", "uncommun values" or "platoon": no big deal, just a western…not really relevant nor significant.
"The Deer Hunter*", sorry again…french dictionary on my cell phone! :-(
hotel em campos do jordao says:
Binet's comment are definitely usless, pointless and not accurate.
My Body Is Mine
Natassja Schiel March 23, 2017 | 3 books mentioned 9 min read
It was 2010, six months after returning to Portland, Ore., from a stint of working as a stripper on the Pacific island of Guam. My car radio was tuned to NPR on my drive home from a boring office job. "This is Fresh Air. I'm Terry Gross," the familiar voice sounded from the speakers quietly as I turned out of the parking lot. I listened passively, as I always did, while stuck in traffic at this time of day. My apartment was only a two-minute drive — extended to 10 minutes in traffic. "I've always wondered who responds to ads like this one," Terri Gross continued, "which was in the back of the Village Voice: Attractive, young woman wanted for nurse role-play and domination. No experience necessary, good money, no sex. Well, my guest actually answered that ad and spent four years as a professional dominatrix in midtown Manhattan. And now, she's written a memoir about it called Whip Smart." I turned up the radio and wished for the traffic to worsen, to be stuck in my beat up silver Kia for the duration of the interview. I wanted to know everything, but not just because the guest had been a dominatrix, but because she wrote about it. I couldn't imagine writing about my experience as a stripper, but especially my experience working in Guam, despite the fact that my plan was to major in creative writing. I'd write about lots of things, I'd thought. Just not that. I wanted to know about the kind of person that would write about it and then go on NPR. Then Terri Gross said, "It may be the first dominatrix memoir that mentions growing up listening to NPR." The author was Melissa Febos. I was hooked.
I got home even faster than I anticipated. I sat in my car, turned off the windshield wipers and watched the rain pitter-patter before me. I listened for the next half hour, without moving, close to crying but not exactly sure why. At the close of the interview Gross questioned Febos about whether her academic and career prospects might be damaged by her publishing Whip Smart. Not only had she been a dominatrix, but she was also a recovering heroin addict. I leaned into the radio, my own potential future breathing down my neck — I'd long been terrified that my five year career as a stripper might hold me back. It was the primary reason I felt I couldn't write about it. "I have no idea if they're going to interfere, but there's nothing I can do about that. I'm sure that there are certain universities that would object to hiring me because of those experiences, but that doesn't affect my view of their value," Febos answered. As I had so many other times in my life, I wished I could be that bold.
During the interview, I learned that Febos attended The New School — a university I'd never heard of before. It was located in the West Village, not far from NYU. As soon as the interview ended I did two things: purchased Whip Smart and Googled The New School. I realized immediately that it was the university for me. Ten months later I started my studies there as my family scoffed that I'd never be able to survive in New York.
I read Whip Smart in a single night. Febos wrote about sex work in a way I'd never read before. That in the beginning everything about it makes one feel powerful, but how that feeling erodes with time, never fading completely away. But eventually there is acceptance that there are disempowering as well as empowering aspects to the work. I read the memoir Strip City, too, in which Lily Burana defines this for exotic dancers as "stripper damage." I love that characterization, but it still feels a little too simple, too boiled down. As the years go on, more than anything, dancing settles into a routine — just like any other job. It loses the intrigue, mystery, the newness and glittering of the taboo. Things that were once novel or shocking become dull and meaningless. There is a getting-through-the-day that takes over. Febos writes:
When people asked me how the work affected me, my line was: "I don't know yet; ask me in ten years." When I thought about how long I would do it for, I assumed that there would come a day when I simply couldn't anymore, when everything about it had become banal and sad and I was done.
I felt similarly about dancing, and yet the times I tried to force an ending didn't work. I couldn't find a straight job or a straight job didn't pay enough or I'd have a good straight job for a few months and then get laid off because of the economy. At the time I heard Melissa Febos's interview I'd claimed I'd retired. I had two part-time office jobs, a full time school schedule, but still picked up shifts at the club I'd grown to consider my "home club" in Portland. I needed to save for my move to New York City.
But it was an extreme way to live. Sometimes I was up for 48-hours at a time in order to manage it all. I kept stripping a secret at the time. It seemed necessary after living in Guam. I had discovered upon my return that everyone that loved me had been worried. I didn't talk about it much. I was accused of doing things I hadn't (mainly prostitution). No one knew exactly why I went nor would they listen nor was I fully willing to be honest anyway. When I started to dance again I insisted silently to myself it was just about the money, but the moment I stepped back in the club, the moment I slithered into my favorite piece of sheer pink lingerie, brushed black mascara onto my eyelashes, and slipped into my eight-inch platform shoes, I felt relieved. I felt home. I was addicted.
Febos, too, felt addicted to sex work. In some ways it was worse then her heroin habit because she couldn't kick it, like she did the drugs. Febos turned to her sober roommates looking for advice when she wanted quit sex work, but wasn't able to:
…when I went to my roommate and expressed my reluctance, she looked at me in disbelief.
"Yeah he sounds really annoying. But fifteen hundred dollars? Come on. I would do it if I could." What she meant was if she had the opportunity. At this point, I was starting to know better…I could not imagine my roommate going through what I knew a session entailed.
For fifteen hundred dollars. For an hour's work. It sounded amazing, when you don't know what the work meant, or when you pretended not to.
In Whip Smart, it starts to feel like she loathes the dungeon and judges everyone around her for participating in it — even though she, herself, is part of that world. I often made fun of the desires of my strip club regulars, not considering the fact that I was participating in exactly what they wanted of me. During one session, Febos suddenly feels that she and her client were brought together by some unknowable force. That there must be something more to her being in those rooms with men hoping for humiliation and her pleasure in doling it out:
Who was this man? What did we have in common to have both ended up in this room? I teetered over his face, peering into it for a dizzy moment. In what direction had this man come from, and where was he going? It was a feeling too objective to be compassion, but I suddenly felt on equal footing with him. For a moment, we formed two halves of a perfectly balanced scale.
And then I looked down at his erection and realized that the feeling was probably not mutual.
Years after the publication of Whip Smart, Febos published an essay in the "Sex, Again" issue of Tin House titled "My Melissa." In it she explores the ways her lovers rejected her identity as a person who worked as a dominatrix:
After he read the memoir I'd written, he said, I think of her as a different person. Not my Melissa. He preferred me shy. So I distanced myself from the woman I'd written about.
…He drew a line between the body I wrote about and the one he loved.
This is common. One man I dated found what I had done in my past disgusting. When money was particularly tight I told him I was considering going back, and he said he'd leave me and then refused to talk to me for the rest of the day. I wasn't that girl anymore, he asserted. I was someone else. But I was. I was always the girl that stripped and so much more. Febos ends her essay:
There are not two of me. I am not four times removed from myself. There is Melissa. The one who still dims the lights before she undresses. The one who once put her foot inside a man's asshole. The one who wrote that book, and the next one. The one who prefers making love to bodies that look like her own. Who was never allowed to love her own body.
What I mean is, the next lover who tells me it wasn't me won't be a lover I'll keep. And if you want to know how it felt to spank someone, I will tell you how it feels to be asked such a question.
"Kettle Holes," another essay, was published in Granta six months before the release of Febos's new collection of essays Abandon Me. "Kettle Holes" explores her attraction to the dungeon. The foundation, she discovered, was in her formative adolescent years when a boy she had known spit on her — later it became a fetish that she acted out in the dungeon.
What do you like? the men would ask. Spitting, I'd say. To even utter the word felt like the worst kind of cuss and I trained myself not to flinch or look away or offer a compensatory smile after I said it. In the dungeon's dim rooms, I unlearned my instinct for apology.
Febos found the idea of spitting on someone without consent unthinkable, but for men who wanted it? Who asked for it? It was, in a way, a loophole. As a stripper, I never wanted to hurt the men I danced for, but like Febos, when they asked for torture, I delighted in complying. One man wanted me to smoother him with a pillow for hours, another had me crush his testicles with my eight-inch stiletto heel repeatedly. I glowed after both of these interactions, happier about the fact the interaction had happened, than the hundreds of dollars they'd paid. I insisted I wasn't angry, that I actually loved men, and here again are parallels:
You must work out a lot of anger that way, they suggested. I never felt angry in my sessions, I told them. I often explained that the dominatrix's most useful tool was a well-developed empathic sense. What I did not acknowledge to any curious stranger, or to myself, was that empathy and anger are not mutually exclusive.
After I'd quit dancing, I also came to believe that my attraction to stripping had much to do with my adolescence. I was sexually abused as a child. I developed early and was told many times, starting at the age of 12, that I oozed sex. That I was sex. That sex embodied me. Stripping was a way to control the thing people asserted I was, whether I wanted it or not, and then have the power to control it. I learned how to say no to men as a stripper. Before getting naked in front of groups of strangers, I hadn't yet realized that my body was mine:
In the dungeon, my identity was distilled once again to its objective meaning. And those men, like all the men before them, prescribed my body's uses. But this time, my job was to deny instead of acquiesce, to say no instead of yes. Maybe this was the best way to learn how to form those sounds in my own mouth.
The essays in Abandon Me explore several of Febos's important personal relationships: with her adopted sea captain father, the love affair with a woman named Amaia, her brother, and meeting her biological father — a member of the Wampanoag tribe. These pieces culminate in the 173-page title essay, "Abandon Me." It is within this section that alongside her love affair with the married Amaia, Febos meets her birth father. Each relationship bounces off the other. The relationship with Amaia rips apart while the relationship with her biological father, painfully and slowly, stitches together. The essay opens: "Every story begins with an unraveling. This story starts with a kiss. Her mouth the soft nail on which my life snagged, and tore open."
I devoured these pages. Curled up on my coral-colored couch, I sometimes looked up as if someone might catch me in the act of crawling into her mind and living there for a while. It felt like I was being folded into her prose. Six months before I started reading Abandon Me, I'd learned who my father was, and that he had passed away seven years prior. Even with the theme of abandonment so clear, I wasn't expecting to find something so specifically relatable. I expected that of Whip Smart. Of "My Melissa." Of "Kettle Holes." And many of the elements leading up to the title essay I had grabbed onto, lived within, but here was where Febos tore me open and never let me go.
Abandon Me doesn't have graphic, shocking scenes like Febos's first, instead she goes further into the messy vulnerable, human parts of herself. In "All of Me" Febos writes of her propensity for secrets, she created a "secret world in drugs and desire." She didn't acknowledge her desire to be seen, but wrote and published Whip Smart anyway: "a story full of things I'd never spoken aloud to anyone." She comes to terms with the fact she'd always wanted to be seen. "It's a violent way to emerge, to tell a secret," she goes on. Right now, I'm grappling with the possibility of exposing my own secrets. Seven years after I heard Febos's NPR interview, I'm in the middle of revisions on my memoir about working as a stripper on the island of Guam. I wonder if I can muster the courage to put it into the world, still unsure that what I want is to be seen. But, I'm comforted that Febos found the courage to do so. It makes me feel understood. And in a small way, I'm emboldened by it.
Natassja Schiel | 3 books mentioned 9 min read
Will Kindle Worlds Commodify Fan Fiction?
Elizabeth Minkel June 3, 2013 | 3 books mentioned 1 6 min read
Kindle Worlds might seem like a vast step up for your average fanfic writer, the best of whom are paid in praise alone. If it didn't feel like such a fundamental and remotely insulting misunderstanding of fan culture, if it didn't feel like a prime chance for corporations to exploit rather than promote, I might even praise Amazon.
Elizabeth Minkel | 3 books mentioned 1 6 min read
How to Write the Perfect Five-Paragraph Essay
Rion Amilcar Scott September 4, 2019 | 3 books mentioned 5 min read
The classic comp exercise is often thought of as facile—the opposite of mature, fully realized work. That's exactly why Rion Amilcar Scott took it on.
Rion Amilcar Scott | 3 books mentioned 5 min read
Essays The Millions Interview
Borges, Burgin, and Infinity
Ryan Krull February 10, 2017 | 3 books mentioned 2 7 min read


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Category: Media and Journalism
Cross-border Talks received key support!
(source: Cross-border Talks)
By having the Transform!Europe foundation as a partner the blog moves towards its expansion and adds a new co-host who is a Czech-Finnish cross-border person
Cross-border Talks, 2 April 2022
In March 2022 the Cross-border Talks podcast won a grant from the Austria-based Transform!Europe foundation for the development of 26 episodes. The grant covers various types of costs, related to production: episode preparation, transcription, translation, edition and other technical and operative costs. It doesn't harm the editorial independence of the team, but provides new opportunities, as it opens the hosts of the podcast to a large group of progressive European and international activists, experts and politicians, who are part of the Transform!Europe network.
Also in March, the team of the podcast was joined by Veronika Sušová-Salminen, another cross-border person. She is a Czech historian and political analyst currently living in Finland. She holds a Ph.D. in historical anthropology from the Faculty of Humanities of Charles University. Her research areas are nineteenth- and twentieth-century Central European and Russian history and politics. She is a regular political commentator in several Czech newspapers. Her book on the politics of Putin's Russia was published in 2015.
We see these two pieces of news as recognition that the initial efforts of the podcast, accomplished by Malgorzata Kulbaczewska-Figat and Vladimir Mitev have been seen positively by knowledgeable and open-minded people, who have realised that there is potential in this media effort. All of us are looking with fresh powers to continue practicing the cross-border reflection on international relations, which we see as our humble contribution to the formation of a regional and EU public space.
Photo: Transform!Europe's logo (source: Transform!Europe)
Subscribe to Cross-border Talks' YouTube channel! And follow this blog's Facebook page!

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Would you like one of us to speak to your organization?
Our biggest goal is to educate, and make others aware of the grief journey that Angel Families go through. One way to educate and make others aware is by speaking to organizations, groups, etc. about the journey of grief.
If you would like Kristina, or one of our team members, to come and speak to your organization, please fill out the following form. Make sure to inform us of specific dates you are interested in (if that applies) and whom you would like to have speak to your organization (if other than Kristina).


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Reviews by Tera
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4 / Celebrations / Erotic Romance / Reviews / Reviews by Kerry / Romantic Suspense/Suspense
#Review #ReleaseBlitz ~~ Devil's Deal by Aleatha Romig
by Louisa · May 19, 2021
Release Date: May 18
What is your desire?
Lust, money, or power?
I am the man who can make every dream come true, for a price.
Years ago, a fight for supremacy took place between the two most powerful families in New Orleans. The battle was set in the metaphoric octagon, with the spotlight blazing. The city sat in paralyzed fear, awaiting word of a victor.
Abraham Ramses versus Isaiah Boudreau.
One man would emerge victorious and rule the city of sin.
Neither understood that the devil was in the details.
Neither lived to see the rising sun.
I'm Everett Ramses, son of Abraham, and I am the devil.
I took my rightful place as king of New Orleans.
Now, my realm is threatened by a man with false claims to the Boudreau family.
I know what I must have to secure my empire—who I must have.
The rightful daughter of Isaiah Boudreau, Emma North, must be my wife. Together we will reign stronger than ever before. But first, she must take the devil's deal.
*DEVIL'S DEAL is a full-length novel that begins with the prequel FATE'S DEMAND previously titled The Deal.
Kerry's 3.5 Blush Review
Rhett Ramses is the most powerful man. He's handsome and dangerous; he's feared my many. There's nothing that happens in his city of New Orleans he doesn't know. Rhett is all about games, and he doesn't lose! Every King needs a Queen, and Rhett Ramses has set his eyes on Emma O'Brien.
Emma O'Brien is a quiet woman who's been dealt a terribly hard life. Emma is in New Orleans on a business trip, but what happens to her next is unfathomable. Emma finds herself being held against her will. It's all part of a business deal. Will Emma be able to survive, or will she submit to Rhett Ramses?
Devil's Deal is full of twists, lies and murder!! The story was so incredibly intriguing. If you enjoy reading about overbearing men, this book is one you will want to read. I enjoyed reading the history of New Orleans. It is an enchanted city full of secrets where Aleatha takes us on a journey back in time. It was fascinating and alluring in true Aleatha fashion!! The ending will leave you guessing until Angel's Promise.
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Meet Aleatha Romig
Aleatha Romig is a New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and USA Today bestselling author who lives in Indiana, USA. She grew up in Mishawaka, graduated from Indiana University, and is currently living south of Indianapolis. Aleatha has raised three children with her high school sweetheart and husband of over thirty years. Before she became a full-time author, she worked days as a dental hygienist and spent her nights writing. Now, when she's not imagining mind-blowing twists and turns, she likes to spend her time a with her family and friends. Her other pastimes include reading and creating heroes/anti-heroes who haunt your dreams and bring your imagination to life!
Aleatha released her first novel, CONSEQUENCES, in August of 2011. CONSEQUENCES became a bestselling series with five novels and two companions released from 2011 through 2015. The compelling and epic story of Anthony and Claire Rawlings has graced more than half a million e-readers. Aleatha released the first of her series TALES FROM THE DARK SIDE, INSIDIOUS, in the fall of 2014. These stand alone thrillers continue Aleatha's twisted style with an increase in heat.
In the fall of 2015, Aleatha moved head first into the world of dark romantic suspense with the release of BETRAYAL, the first of her five novel INFIDELITY series that has taken the reading world by storm. She also began her traditional publishing career with Thomas and Mercer. Her books INTO THE LIGHT and AWAY FROM THE DARK were published through this mystery/thriller publisher in 2016.
In the spring of 2017, Aleatha released her first stand-alone, fun, and sexy romantic comedy with PLUS ONE, followed by the sweet stand-alone, ONE NIGHT.
Aleatha is a "Published Author's Network" member of the Romance Writers of America and PEN America. She is represented by Kevan Lyon of Marsal Lyon Literary Agency.
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IT'S LIVE ~~ The Vault – A Sinfully Sexy Collection – VOLUME ONE
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New Destinations Inspired by Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker Added to Star Tours at Disney Parks
As millions of Star Wars fans head to theaters for the final conclusion to the Star Wars Skywalker saga this weekend, guests at Disney Parks can board the Starspeeders and head to new destinations inspired by Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker.
Join C-3PO and R2-D2 on Star Tours including the new adventure on the surface of the ocean moon Kef Bir. Disney says it is one of the wildest destinations they have ever created with their partners at Industrial Light & Magic. The updated adventures include an urgent transmission from Lando Calrissian to join in the last battle!
With this new Rise of Skywalker update, Star Tours now offers more than 100 storytelling combinations (for the next few months the attraction will exclusively feature the destinations inspired by Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker).
Star Wars Day: May the 4th Has Arrived at Disney Parks!
Star Wars: Galactic Starcruiser - Photos & Video!


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Cleópatra, última rainha da dinastia egípcia de Ptolomeu

Mitologia grega
 Cleópatra (filha de Bóreas)
 Cleópatra (filha de Idas)

Personagens históricas
Obs: A numeração das Cleópatras é uma construção moderna, e não é consensual entre historiadores
 Cleópatra (esposa de Pérdicas II da Macedónia), mencionada em Górgias, diálogo de Platão
 Cleópatra (esposa de Filipe II da Macedónia), assassinada por Olímpia
 Cleópatra da Macedónia, irmã de Alexandre Magno
 Cleópatra I, filha de Antíoco e esposa de Ptolemeu V Epifânio
 Cleópatra II, filha da anterior e esposa de Ptolemeu VI Filómetor
 Cleópatra III, filha da anterior e de Ptolemeu VI Filómetor, e esposa do seu tio Ptolemeu VIII Evérgeta II
 Cleópatra Teia, irmã da anterior e esposa dos reis selêucidas Alexandre Balas, Demétrio II Nicátor e Antíoco VII Sideta
 Cleópatra Selene I, filha de Ptolemeu VIII Evérgeta II
 Cleópatra IV, filha de Ptolemeu VIII e de Cleópatra III
 Cleópatra V Selene, irmã da anterior e esposa de Ptolemeu IX Sóter II
 Cleópatra VI, filha de Ptolemeu XII e esposa do rei selêucida Antíoco VIII Filómetor
 Cleópatra Selene II, Cleópatra e Marco António, foi rainha da Mauritânia
 Cleópatra Berenice (filha de Ptolemeu IX Sóter II)
 Cleópatra (filha de Mitrídates VI do Ponto)
 Cleópatra de Jerusalém, esposa de Herodes, o Grande, e mãe de Herodes Antipas

Filmes
 Cléopâtre (1899), com Jeanne d'Alcy
 Cleopatra (1912), com Helen Gardner
 Cleopatra (1917), com Theda Bara
 Cleópatra (1934), com Claudette Colbert
 Cleópatra (1963), com Elizabeth Taylor
 Cleopatra (1999), com Leonor Varela e Timothy Dalton
 Cleópatra (2007), produção brasileira com Alessandra Negrini

Outros usos
 216 Cleópatra, asteroide
 Cleopatra (Waterhouse), pintura feita por John William Waterhouse em 1888
 Cleopatra (canção), da banda Weezer

Desambiguação

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaWikipedia


The USDA forecast Vietnam's 2012/13 milled rice production at a record 27.7 million tons, up 0.6 million or 2 percent from last month and last year. National rice area was also forecast at a record 7.8 million hectares, up 0.2 million or 2 percent from last month and up 1 percent from last year. Crop yield was estimated unchanged at a record 5.66 tons per hectare. The overall increase in rice production this month was attributed to unusually large increases in seasonal rice area in southern Vietnam's Mekong River Delta (MRD). Rice farmers reportedly took advantage of lower than normal floodwaters in October to plant extra acreage on lands normally submerged at that time of year.
The Mekong River Delta in southern Vietnam is a vast alluvial plain formed over the millennia from silt deposited by the floodwaters of the world's 12th longest river, which also ranks in the top ten rivers in terms of total water discharge and sediment load. The Mekong River itself is 2,700 miles long, stretching from the Tibetan Plateau in China to the South China Sea in southern Vietnam. It drains an area equivalent to 313,000 square miles of land along its path. Vast areas of the MRD experience flooding on an annual basis, as a result of heavy monsoonal rainfall in the upper Mekong River catchment. The topography of the region is extremely flat, with most areas lying just above sea level (0.7-1.2 meters in height).
The MRD is a veritable rice growing paradise of ample rainfall (1800mm or 72 inches per year), tropical temperatures, and fertile soils. Add to this the vast dyke and irrigation infrastructure built by the Vietnamese, and you have a nearly perfect agricultural environment for continuous year-round rice cultivation. The development of irrigation systems has been greatly enhanced in the past 40 years with a network currently estimated at 30,000-40,000 kilometers of inter-connected canals within the MRD alone. Nationwide, the FAO (Aquastat) estimates that fully 97 percent of all land sown to rice in Vietnam is irrigated. Farmers in the MRD region cultivate 3 crops of rice each year, divided into winter, spring, and autumn seasonal periods. Total rice production currently averages about 15.3 million tons (milled basis), with the spring crop being the largest (6.75 million tons) followed by the autumn (5.75 million) and the winter crop (0.54 million tons).
The MRD is Vietnam's most important rice growing region, contributing 50 percent of total national rice production. As far as seasonal rice crops are concerned the MRD is the country's largest producer of both spring and autumn rice, contributing 53 and 79 percent of national output respectively. The country's important rice export sector is also centered here, with 90 percent of total milled rice exports originating from this region. Vietnam is the world's second largest rice exporting nation, following Thailand, and is estimated to have exported a record 7.4 million tons of rice in 2011/12; it is forecast to export another 7.0 million tons in 2012/13. Rice is the staple food in Vietnam, and it is cultivated on the vast majority of agricultural land. FAO estimates that rice is sown on 75-85 percent of the country's total arable land area. Though per capita rice consumption has been falling in recent years owing to a growing economy and rising incomes, the government has been determined to continue to increase annual rice production to ensure domestic food security while also supporting a large export industry - which brought in nearly US$4 billion last year. Vietnam's population is growing by a factor of approximately 1.0 million people per annum, and thus total rice demand is actually increasing despite falling per capita consumption.
In the last several years the government has provided financial support to farmers in the MRD to reinforce or increase the height of existing dykes and build new ones for enhanced seasonal flood control. It set a target of increasing the acreage sown to late autumn rice by 100,000 hectares through improved flood protection, with an expectation of increasing rough (paddy) rice output by 1.0 million tons. Recent statistics from the country's Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development (MARD) indicate that rice area in 2011/12 actually increased 135,000 hectares during the spring and autumn growing seasons, while an additional 100,000 hectares is forecast for 2012/13. Rough rice production also reportedly increased by 1.13 million tons in 2011/12 owing to expanded area in the MRD, while it is forecast to increase by another 1.0 million tons in 2012/13 for the same reason.
The government's program to increase rice acreage by protecting larger land areas from seasonal flooding is apparently succeeding. Typically half of all available rice lands in the MRD are submerged by floodwaters during the period in which the late autumn crop is sown (July/August). FAS - Ho Chi Minh City reported that owing to a combination of low seasonal floods brought about by below normal monsoon rains this summer over Laos and northeastern Thailand (upper Mekong River region) and improved dyke construction, about 105,000 hectares of additional land was able to be sown to the late autumn rice crop. The area increase occurred primarily in provinces bordering southern Cambodia, as seen in the MODIS satellite images above. The provinces which contributed to this area expansion were An Giang (60,000 hectares), Dong Thap (25,000 hectares), Long An (20,000 hectares), and Ben Tre (5,000 hectares). It was also reported that historically farmers in both Long An and Ben Tre had never been able to cultivate rice during the late autumn period, owing to excessive flooding. Now they have an opportunity to increase local production and income, by cultivating rice during a season when local market prices are typically the highest.


Questions about example sentences with, and the definition and usage of "Bluemoon"
The expression is "once in a blue moon" It means "very rarely" "not very often" 예문: The grumpy man smiles once in a blue moon That teacher is really tough on her students. She only gives out A's once in a blue moon. My dad is really busy with his work. He has free time to do something fun once in a blue moon.
Example sentences with, and the definition and usage of "公司"
Example sentences with, and the definition and usage of "Paige"
Example sentences with, and the definition and usage of "Leverage"
Example sentences with, and the definition and usage of "G"
Example sentences with, and the definition and usage of "Bluebear"
Example sentences with, and the definition and usage of "bluebell"
Example sentences with, and the definition and usage of "blueprint"


text:
The People Behind Lolcats Now Want Emails From Crazy People
By Jennifer Van Grove 2009-07-31 12:14:09 UTC
Internet meme maker Ben Huh is the CEO of Pet Holdings, the company behind I Can Has Cheeseburger?, FAIL Blog, and a number of other LOL worthy community-powered sites. On Wednesday they quietly launched a little side project called Emails From Crazy People, which highlights — you guessed it — emails from crazy people.
The site itself is comedic relief at the expense of other peoples' crazy, which is by no means an endangered commodity. Even without the fanfare of a big publicized launch, the two day-old site is already pulling in mind-blowing traffic. Huh tells us that within the first 30 hours alone, Emails From Crazy People saw 1 million page views. It's not surprising that the self-explanatory site is a hit with us web types — we all get emails from crazy people that, at surface value, are hilarious in their nonsensical nature. Case in point, one of today's emails, Everyone Loves a Party, shows a frustratingly funny email exchange of misunderstanding (or not) between a guy throwing a house warming party and another guy who thinks he's invited, and so invites his uninvited friends as well. It's just one example of the emails from crazy people that land in inboxes across the world, and Huh and team are hoping to bring that crazy to light with the site and your submissions.
I spent a few minutes chatting with Huh about Emails From Crazy People, and he tell us that the idea for the site came from everyday work life, and the frequency of emails received that are absolutely unintelligible. The concept took two months to come to life, and the name was always a primary focus. The goal was to create something that would make people laugh, site unseen. They also wanted a name that was immediately shareable and understandable to those exposed to a tweet about the site. Nicely done guys.
Huh and team were also initially planning to keep it under the radar until they had received more user submissions. But a request for content on their hit property, FAIL Blog, pretty much determined that Emails From Crazy People would be an instant meme, and they're now doing everything in their power to handle the crazy influx of traffic already coming their way.
We'll certainly be keeping our eye on the site, if not just for laughs, but to also see how "crazy" people will respond to their emails being on display for the whole world to enjoy. In response to a question on whether or not they expect any backlash, Huh half-jokingly wondered, "What is the legality of email sent from one crazy person to another, and then published on the web?" and, "Can crazy people be organized?"
Should they mobilize, we'll keep you informed. Until then, have you checked out Emails From Crazy People? Let us know what you think of the new site in the comments.
Topics: Ben Huh, email, humor, lolcats, Social Media


text:
/*
 * Varian,Inc. All Rights Reserved.
 * This software contains proprietary and confidential
 * information of Varian, Inc. and its contributors.
 * Use, disclosure and reproduction is prohibited without
 * prior consent.
 */
/* DISCLAIMER :
     * ------------
     *
 * This is a beta version of the GALAXIE integration library.
 * This code is under development and is provided for information purposes.
 * The classes names and interfaces as well as the file names and
 * organization is subject to changes. Moreover, this code has not been
 * fully tested.
 *
 * For any bug report, comment or suggestion please send an email to
 * gilles.orazi@varianinc.com
 *
 * Copyright Varian JMBS (2002)
 */

// File     : Wavelets.h
// Author   : Bruno Orsier : Original Delphi code
//            Gilles Orazi : C++ translation
// Created  : 06/2002
// Comments : Integration computation class and functions
//            Performs wavelets transform and denoising
//            by wavelets shrinkage.
//
// $History: Wavelets.h $
/*  */
/* *****************  Version 6  ***************** */
/* User: Go           Date: 16/10/02   Time: 16:20 */
/* Updated in $/Orlando_2000/DLL_Integration/Cpp */
/* backup */
/*  */
/* *****************  Version 5  ***************** */
/* User: Go           Date: 9/10/02    Time: 9:53 */
/* Updated in $/Orlando_2000/DLL_Integration/Cpp */
/* backup */
/*  */
/* *****************  Version 4  ***************** */
/* User: Go           Date: 2/07/02    Time: 14:55 */
/* Updated in $/Orlando_2000/DLL_Integration/Cpp */

#include "integrator_types.h"

class Wavefilt {
public:
    unsigned long
    ncof,
    ioff,
    joff ;
    double* cc ;
    double* cr ;
    Wavefilt(int n) ;
    ~Wavefilt() ;

    void pwt(double* a, unsigned long n, int isign) ;
//WARNING : indexes are 1-based.

private:
    double* wksp;
};

//--------------- Wavelet shrinkage functions -------------

INT_FLOAT softshrink(INT_FLOAT x, INT_FLOAT s);
INT_FLOAT semisoftshrink(INT_FLOAT L1, INT_FLOAT L2, INT_FLOAT x);
INT_FLOAT semisoftshrink2(INT_FLOAT L1, INT_FLOAT L2, INT_FLOAT x);

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaGithub


text:
Q: Fixing electrical controller (with joystick) on Pride Quantum 600 power wheelchair The momentary switch is bad on a Pride Quantum 600 power wheelchair.  The picture is below.  It turns on, but you have to hold the rubber button/switch in the correct spot with the right temperature before it will turn on.  What could be the problem or cheapest way to fix this?  The part to replace the entire controller (what you see in the picture is $1750).  The part number says J6, but the Jazzy and Quantum use the same controller.
Pride J6 Joystick Controller with Flying Leads (Part #: ELEASMB5009)

A: After a lot of investigation and internet searching, I came across this YouTube video, which was very helpful in understanding what was inside.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5UYn138cKCI
This did not solve the issue, but it helped me understand what to look for.  In the video, he mentions you need a T10 security torx screwdriver.  It actually requires a T10 torx (normal) screwdriver before removing the shell of the controller.
To solve the issue, I ended up buying a new controller keypad on Ebay for $33.90.  MAKE SURE TO UNPLUG THE WIRES IN THE BACK OF THE WHEELCHAIR BEFORE REPLACING.
Pride part # RECPART1061
Merits part # P75736
Shoprider part # P75736

Keypad for 6 Key Button VSI Joystick Controller Pride, Merits,
  Shoprider. NEW

As you can see, the on/off switch was worn down to the nub!  See top switch/button in the first image.

Finished product!

If you need to buy a new controller, purchase a used one with the following name, not the part number shown in the question, as suggested by my durable medical provider.  Pride (manufacturer) will not let you ask questions unless you have an account with them, so you have to trust the staff at a distributer, who in my case were wrong, and would have charged me for the copay of a $1750 controller, which was the wrong part number.  The serial number of the chair did not give them the correct part number, so never trust that.  Always look at the number on the actual component!
Correct part name:

6 Key 50 Amp VSI Joystick Controller with Flying Leads

Here's some detail if the keypad is bad, and you need to replace the entire controller.
Pride Mobility: CTLDC1419

PG Drives Technology: D50693.01

Compatible Models :
Jazzy 600
Jazzy 610
Jazzy 1103
Jazzy 1103 Ultra
Jazzy 1143 Ultra
Jazzy J6
Pride J6

A: This isn't an answer to guide your repair, but it is an answer for how to deal with it, if you live in the US.
The Wheelchair is a medical device.  The maker is required to do post market surveillance for adverse events.  This crappy switch preventing you from using your medical device is an adverse event.
Call the company that made the chair, and tell them that your plan is to report this as an adverse event to  the MAUDE system through Medwatch (https://www.accessdata.fda.gov/scripts/medwatch/index.cfm?action=reporting.home), and ask if they can offer you service before you do that.  This system can actually trigger FDA recalls, and I believe manufacturers are required to respond to such reports.

A: The joystick looks fairly new (<3yrs old) . Unless there was excessive force, I would suggest it is a defective component and that you request an RMA for free repair.

LIFETIME LIMITED WARRANTY
  For the lifetime of your power chair from the date of purchase, Pride will repair or replace at our option to the original purchaser, free of charge, any of the following parts found upon examination by an authorized representative of Pride to be defective in material and/or workmanship:
  Structural frame components, including:
   Main Frame
TWO-YEAR LIMITED WARRANTY
  For two (2) years from the date of purchase, Pride will repair or replace at our option to the original purchaser,
  free of charge, any of the following parts found upon examination by an authorized representative of Pride to be
  defective in material and/or workmanship:
  Electronic components, including: Main frame assemblies, including:
   Charger Assembly Caster forks  Metal seat framing
   Controller  Caster beam
   Joystick

If they refuse to assist, then make a  You Tube video exposing the quality defects of the part and send it for refurbishment to a 3rd party.

A: I misunderstood the problem to be the joystick rather than the ON/ON tactile button.  These Carbon membrane contact switches are notorious for excess force degradation and surface oxidation with dust and smoke acting as insulation.
Cotton  Q tips with pure alcohol usually resolve cleaning the carbon surface.
The contacts on the PCB must be gold (Au) plated and not any other method (Sn-Pb-Ni-Ag-Cu etc).  In Fact ALL metal contacts must be Au gold plated for any contact rating <=2A, which is true for mechanical switches and relays.    If not, premature failures will occur.
In the 70's Hewlett Packard made all their circuit boards dip gold-plated 20~30u" thick (not flash e-plated 1~2u") and the card edge fingers needed servicing from time to time from regular use.  In every maintenance manual,  HP specified the exact part number of the PINK PEARL ©®™ eraser to clean the gold plated finger contacts.
However I have seen escalation of failures in carwash kiosks where the (ab)users found their car key tips would make the membrane button work, until it was totally destroyed.
In the 80's our factory in Flemington NJ, designed a robot for testing the quality of their keyboards for the B21 computers to simulate 10 years of daily use.
Attention to quality reliability with accelerated life testing is something I find lacking in our field of Design and Test Engineering and those who are in volume production need to educate themselves on HALT/HASS/ORT life testing to fix reliability issues.

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaStackExchange


text:
Q: How to run Js file Locally in FLutter I'm developing an app, is it possible to run js file in flutter?
example:  https://aviolin.github.io/metronome i want to run this in Flutter locally( i have js file of this app)


text:
1-31-15 Panthers Beyond
By Staff | Jan 30, 2015
Christenson strong first meet
University of Jamestown freshman and 2014 Rugby High School graduate Hannah Christenson competed in her first indoor track and field meet Jan. 17 at the Northern State University Triangular in Aberdeen, S.D.
Christenson not only won the open 400-meter dash, but led off the team's 1,600-meter relay. Christenson ran the individual race in 62.87 seconds and the relay leg in 62.80. The Jimmies were second in the event.
"Hannah also had a great pre-season," UJ coach Jim Clark said in a press release. "She worked hard when she was there, but more importantly, she was always there."


text:
Andy Lawrence
Section 2: Preparation
in Filmmaking for fieldwork
Chapter DOI:
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ABSTRACT / EXCERPT
This section looks at what is required to ensure the success of a film project before one arrives on location. A written proposal deepens our engagement with a subject area and helps to tackle the obstacles that commonly threaten to derail a filmmaking and research journey. Due to lengthy production schedules and the limited funds available to research projects, hiring equipment can be unpractical, so ethnographic filmmakers tend to favour lightweight gear that can be carried easily and is affordable to own. In this section, we consider how to find the equipment most suitable for your project and how to practice using it with all the manual functions that help to create high quality images and sounds.
Filmmaking for fieldwork
A practical handbook
Filmmaking; Fieldwork; Documentary; Ethnography; Videography; Video editing; Sound editing
Section 1: Why make a documentary film?
Section 3: Recording
Section 4: Editing
Section 5: Distribution
Afterword: The journey continues
Art, authorship and activism
Authors: Ian Scott and Henry Thompson
This book charts and analyses the work of Oliver Stone – arguably one of the foremost political filmmakers in Hollywood during the last thirty years. Drawing on previously unseen production files from Oliver Stone's personal archives and hours of interviews both with Stone and a range of present and former associates within the industry, the book employs a thematic structure to explore Stone's life and work in terms of war, politics, money, love and corporations. This allows the authors both to provide a synthesis of earlier and later film work as well as locate that work within Stone's developing critique of government. The book explores the development of aesthetic changes in Stone's filmmaking and locates those changes within ongoing academic debates about the relationship between film and history as well as wider debates about Hollywood and the film industry. All of this is explored with detailed reference to the films themselves and related to a set of wider concerns that Stone has sought to grapple with -the American Century, exceptionalism and the American Dream, global empire, government surveillance and corporate accountability. The book concludes with a perspective on Stone's 'brand' as not just an auteur and commercially viable independent filmmaker but as an activist arguing for a very distinct kind of American exceptionalism that seeks a positive role for the US globally whilst eschewing military adventurism.
British cinema of the 1950s
Editors: Ian Mackillop and Neil Sinyard
This book offers a startling re-evaluation of what has until now been seen as the most critically lacklustre period of the British film history. It includes fresh assessment of maverick directors; Pat Jackson, Robert Hamer and Joseph Losey, and even of a maverick critic Raymond Durgnat. The book features personal insights from those inidividually implicated in 1950s cinema; Corin Redgrave on Michael Redgrave, Isabel Quigly on film reviewing, and Bryony Dixon of the BFI on archiving and preservation. A classic image from 1950s British cinema would be Jack Hawkins in The Cruel Sea, the epitome of quiet English integrity. Raymond Durgnat's A Mirror for England: British Movies from Austerity to Affluence, which deals extensively with British films of the 1950s, was written in the mid-1960s and was published in 1970. In a 1947 article called 'Angles of Approach' Lindsay Anderson delivered a fierce attack on contemporary British film culture, outlining a model for a devoted politics of creation, well in line with what we would later understand as auteurism and art cinema aesthetics . The war films of the 1950s together constitute the assented-to record of the emotions and moral judgments called upon to set in order those disorderly events. The book also talks about the Festival of Britain, White Corridors, and four Hamer's post-Ealing films: The Spider and the Fly, The Long Memory, Father Brown and The Scapegoat. A number of factors have contributed to the relative neglect of the 1950s as a decade in British cinema history.