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Annie Steiner, née le  à Marengo (Algérie française) et morte le , est une militante algérienne du FLN.

Algérienne d'origine française, fille de pieds-noirs, juriste de formation, elle s'engage dans les Centres sociaux, membre du "réseau bombes" de Yacef Saâdi. Arrêtée le , elle est condamnée en mars 1957 par le Tribunal des forces armées d'Alger à cinq ans de réclusion pour aide au FLN, et incarcérée à la prison de Barberousse. Elle est libérée en 1961.

Biographie

Diplômée en 1949, elle travaille dans les Centres sociaux algériens, créés par Germaine Tillion (figure de la résistance et ethnologue anticolonialiste entrée au Panthéon en 2015). Leur mission est de soigner et d'alphabétiser la population. Là, avec ses collègues, elle fait face à la misère des Algériens. « Les gens avec qui je travaillais avaient déjà de bonnes idées, se rappelle-t-elle. Mais je suis sans doute allée plus loin qu'eux. »

Un souvenir : lors de la déclaration de la guerre, le , elle est chez elle avec son mari et deux amis. Spontanément, elle applaudit à la nouvelle. Son entourage sourit. Il ignore qu'elle entre, peu de temps après, en contact avec des militants du FLN. « Je ne militais dans aucun parti et les Algériens, sans doute, trouvaient ma décision étonnante. Ils ont peut-être fait une enquête sur moi et ils m'ont acceptée peu après, raconte-t-elle. Ils m'ont demandé : " Jusqu'où êtes-vous prête à travailler pour le FLN ? ". J'ai répondu : "Je m'engage totalement." » .
Elle fait alors partie d'une grande organisation de résistance.

Annie Fiorio-Steiner devient ainsi agent de liaison du FLN, transportant des lettres et des couffins : « On ne m'a jamais demandé de poser de bombes. J'ai transporté des ouvrages sur la fabrication d'explosifs mais j'ai surtout transporté des lettres qui ont permis les accords entre le FLN et le PCA (Parti communiste algérien). » L'ancienne militante reste très modeste quant à son rôle durant la guerre. « J'ai pu faire beaucoup de choses car je n'étais pas fichée, mais non parce que j'étais meilleure que les autres. »

Elle est arrêtée à son travail en  et détenue à la prison de Barberousse, où sont enfermés les militants du FLN avant leur procès. Là, elle rencontre ses « sœurs », des moudjahidates, qui l'accompagneront durant sa captivité. Meriem, Fadila et Safia étaient infirmières au maquis. Avec elles, Annie ressent une réelle solidarité, un lien indissociable face à la dureté et la solitude de la prison. Elle est intarissable sur le sujet. « Sans solidarité, il n'y a plus de groupe. Il fallait faire bloc et se soutenir mutuellement. » Avant son procès, ses "sœurs" lui préparent des bigoudis et l'habillent avec les moyens du bord : « Surtout, il ne fallait pas provoquer de la pitié au tribunal. »

Le  à l'aube, dans la cour de la prison de Barberousse où Annie Steiner est emprisonnée, sont guillotinés trois militants nationalistes, Mohamed Ben Ziane Lakhnèche dit « Ali Chaflala », Ali Ben Khiar Ouennouri dit « P'tit Maroc » et Fernand Iveton, seul Européen exécuté pendant la guerre d'Algérie. Le soir même dans sa cellule, Annie Steiner compose le poème Ce matin ils ont osé, ils ont osé vous assassiner.

En , elle est condamnée à cinq ans de prison et est emprisonnée à Maison-Carrée où elle rejoint des prisonnières de droit commun. Elle raconte, émue : « J'ai d'abord passé plusieurs jours au cachot où était enfermée une femme qui avait perdu la raison. La surveillante qu'on appelait Baqara (vache en arabe) m'a ensuite amenée dans les "cages à poules". C'était un grand dortoir avec des cellules très petites et grillagées. Devant moi, il y avait toutes les Algériennes, assises sur un banc posé contre le mur. »

Annie Steiner continue à faire front avec ses "sœurs" et paye ses actions au prix fort. « Nous avons obtenu de rencontrer le CICR (Comité international de la Croix Rouge) lors de sa venue dans notre prison. Devant le directeur, j'ai affirmé qu'il y avait des vers dans la viande qu'on nous servait. J'ai alors passé trois mois en prison disciplinaire à Blida (à 50 km sud-ouest d'Alger, ndlr). » Dans cette nouvelle prison, la jeune femme ne peut pas sortir de sa cellule. Elle obtient une demi-heure de sortie par jour après une grève de la faim de deux semaines. « J'étais révoltée et je le suis toujours bien sûr. Vous savez, la prison est une grande école », affirme-t-elle.

Annie Fiorio-Steiner est ensuite envoyée en France, dans des prisons de Paris, Rennes (Ouest) et Pau (Sud). En 1961, elle est libérée et se rend en Suisse alémanique où résident son mari et ses deux petites filles. « Après mon arrestation, il avait quitté l'Algérie et il avait emmené mes filles qu'il avait arrachées à ma mère. J'ai essayé de reprendre leur garde mais j'ai perdu mon procès devant les tribunaux suisses. » À la fin de sa vie, elle évoquait ce sujet : « Finalement, j'ai perdu la garde de mes filles, et c'est ça qui a été le plus dur. Je n'accepte pas le fait que l'on m'ait pris mes enfants. »

À Genève, elle rencontre Meriem qui lui paie le voyage pour rentrer en Algérie. À l'entrée du port d'Alger, des femmes, des émigrées kabyles de retour au pays, lancent des youyous pour célébrer la levée du drapeau algérien sur le bateau. Sans le sou, Annie est accueillie par ses "sœurs" de prison. Peu de temps après, elle occupe un poste de directeur au Secrétariat général du Gouvernement, poste qu'elle gardera plus de trente ans. Elle y aide de nombreux jeunes de l'administration algérienne à se perfectionner : « Ils avaient beaucoup de volonté. Ils sont comme mes enfants maintenant. »

Par modestie, Annie ne s'est jamais vantée de son parcours. Elle répète à l'envi que la guerre a été collective, menée par le peuple de façon anonyme.

À l'indépendance de l'Algérie, elle opte pour la nationalité algérienne, et n'a dès lors plus jamais quitté son pays. Son attachement aux principes du  l'incitait à se révolter encore vers la fin de sa vie : « J'ai toujours cet idéal de libération, je ne l'oublierai jamais » assurait-elle.

Références

Voir aussi

Bibliographie
 Jean-Louis Gérard, Dictionnaire historique et biographique de la guerre d'Algérie, Éditions Jean Curtuchet, 2001

Articles connexes
 Bataille d'Alger

Liens externes

 Annie Steiner, une rebelle préférant l'ombre à la lumière. Article paru dans le quotidien El Watan du
 Témoignage de Annie Steiner était présente lors de l'hommage à Lala Ourdia

Naissance en février 1928
Naissance en Algérie française
Naissance à Hadjout
Personnalité féminine algérienne
Poseur de bombe
Militante
Personnalité condamnée pour activités terroristes
Décès à 93 ans
Décès à Alger
Décès en avril 2021
Indépendantiste algérien pendant la guerre d'Algérie


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Deed of Grant for an Exclusive Right of Burial
The Deed of Grant is an important legal document, that confirms you are the current legal owner of the Right of Burial in a named grave and this should be stored in a safe place.
Extent of purchaser's rights
Ownership of an Exclusive Right of Burial does not imply ownership of the land itself or the right to carry out any particular activity on the grave plot. The owner does not, however, own the land itself, the ownership of the cemetery land remains with the Council. However the registered owner of the Grant of Exclusive Right of Burial has the automatic right to be buried in the grave; and may also allow others to be buried in the grave (space permitting).
Renewal of exclusive right of burial
An Exclusive Right of Burial is currently granted for a period of 99 years only.
After this period has elapsed a letter of notification will be sent to the last known address of the person named on the Deed.
It is important therefore, that you inform us of any change in address, in writing, so that we can amend our records accordingly.
Once the Rights have expired, the ownership reverts to the Council. No further burials can take place until the grave is purchased again. The law allows the disturbance of human remains after 75 years from the date of the last full burial in the grave.
Use of the grave for burial
Where an Exclusive Right of Burial has been granted in respect of the grave and a request is made to prepare it for a burial, the Deed of Grant must be presented at the Cemetery Office.
If the Deed of Grant is lost, the person requesting that the grave be opened, must make a statutory declaration under oath, that they have the right to do so. Possession of a Deed does not in itself give any person the right to have a grave opened, as that right lies only with the person named on the Deed.
Transfer of exclusive right of burial
If you wish to transfer an exclusive right of burial to another person, you can do so by means of a statutory declaration form obtainable from the cemetery office.
This will need to be filled in accurately, is a legally binding document and must be witnessed by a Commissioner for Oaths, Solicitor or Justice of the Peace and returned to the cemetery office, after which, a new Deed of Grant will be issued.
There may be a charge for this service.
It is important to note that a Transfer of Exclusive Right of Burial does not alter the expiry date of the original right of burial.
A fee is payable to Orbitas Bereavement Services, Limited for this service.
The person named on a Deed as owner of Exclusive Right of Burial in a grave also has the right to have a memorial erected on that grave.
However, before doing so a formal application for a permit must be made to the Cemetery Office giving full details of the memorial, this function is carried out by utilising the services of a Stonemason. Please note that only Stonemasons included on our Approved List may erect memorials in our cemeteries
Responsibility for any memorial erected on a grave lies with the person named on the Deed pertaining to it.
That person should be aware of the possibility of an unsafe memorial falling on visitors to the cemetery, or cemetery staff with possibly fatal results. Even small memorials can cause serious injuries, particularly to young children.
The safety of memorials is of great concern to the Company and any memorial which is considered a potential safety hazard may be re-affixed or laid to the ground without notice and all costs recharged back to the owner.
Sometimes nearby graves may need to be reopened and your memorial may need to be moved. To avoid delays to funerals, prior notice is not always possible. There are several reasons for moving memorials they are:
To gain access.
To protect the memorial from damage.
To protect cemetery operatives from danger.
It is very important that you let the Cemeteries Office know if there is any future change of name or address.
Damage to graves
Orbitas Bereavement Services will not be held responsible for any damage caused to a grave or memorial, except where it can be proven, that the damage is the result of grave digging or grounds maintenance operations.
It is strongly recommended that memorials are insured against all eventualities, your chosen stone mason may be able to assist you with this.
All vases, statues, plants and flowers etc. that are left on graves are left at the owners risk and it is recommended that such unfixed items are marked with the grave number and the name of the deceased to identify them and reduce their value to possible theft.
Anyone witnessing any criminal act in the cemetery grounds should report the matter to the local police and to the cemetery office.
Cemetery fees and charges
Code of burial practice
Exclusive rights of burial
Heritage and wildlife in our cemeteries

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


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Cop killed in line of duty was sent to wrong house by traced 911 call
Posted 1:28 PM, March 8, 2018, by Tribune Media Wire, Updated at 01:35PM, March 8, 2018
CLINTON, Mo. — Authorities revealed Wednesday that police were actually sent to the wrong house when they were responding to a 911 call which led to three officers being shot, one of them fatally, according to WDAF.
Missouri State Highway Patrol said Wednesday afternoon that Clinton officers were sent to 306 West Grandriver Street for a 911 call in which Henry County 911 operators could hear two women arguing in the background but no one was directly speaking to operators.
When officers arrived at the Clinton home, they came into contact with Tammy Widger, Sgt. Bill Lowe with the Missouri State Highway Patrol said Wednesday. Widger told officers there wasn't a problem, and no one else was in the home.
After confirming the address with dispatch, officers entered the home, which is where they encountered 37-year-old James E. Waters, who fired at the officers and killed Officer Christopher Ryan Morton.
Officer Chris Ryan Morton
Officer Nathan Bettencourt is in stable condition, recovering from gunshot wounds and surgery at a Kansas City-area hospital. Officer Nicholas Kasper was also treated for gunshot wounds and was released from the hospital earlier Wednesday.
Additional agencies were called to the Clinton home, including members of the Bates County Tactical Team and the MSHP Troop A SWAT Team, who entered the home to get to Morton. Lowe said it took 15 to 20 minutes from the first 'officer down' call to get inside to him.
Missouri police officer dead after 911 call of women screaming
"That's just a guess. It could have been longer than that," Lowe said.
Then, just after midnight, officers entered the home again to apprehend Waters, who was found dead from a gunshot wound in a bathroom, Lowe said.
Lowe said Wednesday that further investigation traced the phone number from the 911 call to a Windsor, Missouri, address — not the Clinton home that police were sent to. Windsor is approximately 15 miles from Clinton.
"We were later able to determine it was not from that residence in which they were responding to," he said. "We are still investigating on how it transpired as far as giving the residence that the officers were sent to, but that will be part of the continuing investigation."
Lowe said Waters was part of another investigation involving an alleged rape, so that part of the investigation will also be in conjunction with the investigation into the shooting, he said.
On Wednesday, 37-year-old Widger was charged in Henry County with possession of meth with the intent to deliver as well as public nuisance, Henry County Prosecutor Richard Shields said. The county court has issued a warrant and set her bond at $25,000, he said.
"At this time, there's no clear correlation," Shields said of the woman's charges. "We're just alleging that she, at that time, was in possession and that possession at that time was with the intent to deliver."
"Yes, it is a coincidence that they were called to that specific address, and it is tragic that that happened, but the fact is they were in the act of committing crimes within that house," Lowe said. "They were doing so to ensure that nobody else was hurt or there wasn't any other problems, and so when they were given the information that no one was in the house, they had to verify that. And that point in time that's when the tragedy occurred."
Authorities on Wednesday released a mug shot of Waters from a November 2017 arrest for unlawful possession of a firearm and possession of a controlled substance.
Morton, who goes by his middle name, Ryan, was just 30 years old when he was killed Tuesday night.
James E. Waters. Mug shot from a November 2017 arrest for unlawful possession of a firearm and possession of a controlled substance.
Morton worked as a full-time Clinton police officer from Feb. 12, 2015, to Jan. 10, 2017. He then worked as a reserve officer until Sept. 24, 2017, when he returned to the force full time.
He also served in the Army National Guard as a specialist. He returned home in May of 2014 from Afghanistan where he served as a bridge crew member, a radio communications manager and maintained all military bridges in multiple regional commands.
The 30-year-old is from Knob Noster, Missouri, approximately 70 miles or an hour and 15-minute drive east from the metro. He attended Knob Noster High School and later studied at the University of Central Missouri.
This makes the second Clinton officer shot and killed in the line of duty in the past year.
It was seven months ago to the day that Officer Gary Michael was killed after he was shot during a traffic stop on August 6.
"It's just devastating," Henry County Sheriff Kent Oberkrom said. "Certainly when Officer Michael was killed on August 6 of last year it was just devastating to our community, and these things as we've said then and I'll say it again, they just don't happen in small towns like ours."
Now, once again, Clinton officers will face the horrible task of burying one of their own.
"It's just another tragic event for this community and especially this police department. They've endured a lot. They're going to endure more," Sgt. Lowe said.
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Wife Writes A Seriously Angry Letter To The "Other Woman." This Is Awesome.
1Wife Writes A Seriously Angry Letter To The "Other Woman." This Is Awesome.
Are you ready for one of the craziest craigslist letters you have ever read?
To reward you for your services I am offering you my husband for keeps. Should you accept your prize please note the following rules.


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Japan sci-tech
Japan Current Events
WordTalk Blog
TechTalkBlog
Top Ten Podcasts for Writers & Editors
Source: Jason Roeswell on Unsplash
Not too long ago we used to talk about Internet Time. The technology and how we used the Web changed so fast in the early years, it was a challenge to keep up. Now that the Internet is embedded into our daily living and routines, I don't hear the term used anymore.
I've replaced that phrase with Indie Publishing Time, because the industry is speeding forward like a Mad Max car chase. That's an over-the-top way of saying it's more than time I updated my best podcast rankings for busy writers and authors who don't want to spend hours online searching for and trying out podcasts to get to the good stuff to listen to and learn from.
Note that I've omitted some podcasts that use more than two hosts because of the way they talk over each other or cackle at each other's jokes. I've also omitted podcasts with poor audio, or when the hosts' voices, mannerisms, lack of interviewing skills, or repeated cliché phrases every show (There you go! Awesome! Cool!) grate on me.
Fortunately, there are now more than enough good podcasts available that I can be picky. These include several new and outstanding podcasters that have recently arrived on the scene, and a couple I've been late in discovering. Consequently, my previous Top 5 is now a Top 10. You can easily search all of these shows on Apple's iTunes under Podcasts.
So here goes.
#10 Bookworm starts with a splendid upbeat song called "Where Would We Be Without Books," and ends with an equally splendid "I Am a Bookworm," two original compositions by the Sparks. The catchy songs are somewhat at odds with the show's rather serious tone set by host, Michael Silverblatt, who interviews literary authors.
While the subject matter is somewhat esoteric as far as I'm concerned, given my focus on genre reading, the show is not stuffy. And Silverblatt, who reminds me of Howard Cosell, does a good job analyzing his guest's work and providing insights. It's worth a listen to stretch your horizon of interest and to learn what's going on in the literary world of novels.
Having said that, it would be nice if the host would occasionally condescend and talk with a more popular writer. There are many talented authors out there worth interviewing, Michael, even though they do sell a ton of books. I'd be happy to proffer some names.
#9 Writer's Bone. I've only listened to a few podcasts by Boston writers Daniel Ford and Sean Tuohy, and I may have been lucky in listening when only one or two of them were interviewing guest authors. Having read their podcast origin story, I see they like to invite their friends on, which to my fading hearing, usually means adding noise rather than enjoyment, so I'll have to see how this goes.
What put this podcast in the top ten was the recent interview with guest Barry Eisler, author of the anti-hero John Rain thriller series. The show was outstanding though more because the author was so articulate and informative rather than prompting from the host.
I read the first novel in Eisler's series, Rain Fall, and didn't care for it. But having heard him speak here, I will try one of his later novels. Fans of Eisler are welcome to recommend a title.
Of particular interest in the interview was Eisler's explanation on why he turned down a $500,000 book contract and instead chose to go indie! He has also bought back the rights to publish his novels and has retitled his John Rain series. The first novel now has the name A Clean Kill in Tokyo. I'm happy he didn't choose Killing Time in Tokyo.
#8 The Story Studio is the new name for what was The Self-Publishing Podcast--my number one podcast choice last year. But something happened to Johnny, Sean and Dave in 2017. Their podcast became less interesting, informative and entertaining. This is something they sensed themselves, which is why they've chosen a new podcast name that will enable them to widen their topic focus, so they say.
But three shows in under the rebranding and it is the same old, same old. So their #8 ranking is based more on potential and on what they have produced before. This is another podcast I will have to wait and see how it goes, given there are so many good shows to listen to now.
#7 The Creative Writer's Toolbelt is produced by author and creative writer tutor Andrew J Chamberlain, who hails from Kent in the UK. He has an outstanding podcast voice and won me over on first listening. He does best when delivering monologues on the craft of writing, which are thoughtful and informative.
However, he peppers his interviews with unnecessary "Yeses" and other terms of agreement while the occasional (fortunately) guest he has on is speaking, which drives my fingers close to the Stop button.
If you should ever read this, Andrew, listen to the podcasts of master interviewer Tim Ferriss, or his equally accomplished counterpart Terry Gross of Fresh Air fame on NPR. Both remain silent while the other person speaks, and they interrupt only to add or clarify something important. Please do the same. Interrupting long-winded speakers is fine and necessary; constant and unnecessary agreement with them is a distraction for listeners. You are producing the podcast for your audience, right? Not the guest.
#6 The Sell More Book Show from Jim Kukral and Bryan Cohen breaks the me-too podcast mold by rarely having a guest on to interview. Rather, they collect writing and publishing tips that have made the news in the week prior to the podcast, as well as present the top five recent happenings in the writing/publishing industry that's made the news. And they throw in their own views on these topics for good measure.
Kukral is an Internet marketer and the creator of the Author Marketing Club that helps authors sell books. He has a good podcast voice that is pleasant on the ear, as you might expect from a consummate marketer. Alas, that is not the case with author Cohen. But hey, they produce an informative show every week that I listen to, despite the cheesy recorded intro and gratuitous countdowns noises they use mid-way through the show.
#5 The Creative Penn has fallen a little in my rankings, but only because the new kids on the block are just so good. For those who don't know, the host Joanna Penn is an incredible authorpreneur: the writer of fiction, non-fiction, a public speaker, and creator of writing courses, as well as this long-running podcast.
She prepares well for the interviews—unlike some podcasters—because her questions are thought out and smart. She's also cut back on her cooing when agreeing with the host (the equivalent of Chamberlain's Yeses in #7). But her long intros include a segments where she reads tweets from her listeners about where they are when they listen to her, and a segment on her Patreon support. This makes the show overly long for my liking—I did say I was picky, and this criticism is probably something of a guy thing—but no doubt her legion of fans enjoy that side of it. I much prefer the approach of the podcaster that follows this.
Note that Penn's www.thecreativepenn.com website is a goldmine of writing resources that all newbie indies should check out.
#4 The Book Marketing Show is from a newcomer to podcasts Dave Chesson. But Chesson is no newcomer to indie publishing. His Kindlepreneur website is outstanding and a great resources for writer-publishers at any stage of development. He has a pleasant podcast voice now that he no longer squeaks, as he did sometimes when he spoke fast in the fist few shows.
As the title of the podcast suggests, he addresses different aspects of marketing. His presentation style is not to waste listeners' time with talking about off-topic subjects; he just gets right to the point. Consequently, his podcasts typically run about 20 minutes but are packed with useful information and advice.
#3 Self-publishing Journeys from Paul Teague is unique in that he has this writer- pal-you-chat-with-at-the-pub approach to speaking. His podcasts alternate between monologues on what he has been doing the previous week regards to writing and marketing his works (Paul's Podcast Diary) and then an interview with an author. What I particular like about the latter, is that he goes out of the way NOT to invite all the successful authors who are interviewed regularly on other podcasts. Despite the chatty manner, he knows how to ask questions and his Diary stuff is loaded with practical information.
#2 The Self Publishing Formula. This retains its number two ranking because former BBC radio reporter James Blatch does such a good job interviewing guests, while authorpreneur Mark Dawson adds a pinch or two of his experience at the beginning and end of each show. Curiously, the two don't seem to have that good a chemistry when speaking together, and their efforts to raise a laugh often falls flat. Still, the information from the show and Blatch's presentation is something other podcasters would do well to study.
#1 Smart Author by Mark Coker is easily the best podcast I listen to and the one I look forward to the most. While Coker has only recorded a dozen of so podcasts at the time of writing this blog, he has been prominent in the indie writing and publishing business for over a decade. In 2008 he launched Smashwords, the world's largest distributor of indie books, which boasts 120,000 authors.
From the first show, Coker spoke with the authority of experience. He uses the knowledge gained over the past ten years to produce some outstanding podcasts packed with good advice and solid information for publishing success. The high quality of his delivery (not content) dropped a little when he chose to read the 2018 edition of the Smashwords Book Marketing Guide over six shows. Not surprisingly, the reading never matched the smooth delivery of his normal monologues.
In a recent podcast, he said he wasn't sure how much longer he would continue with the show. I hope he is still doing it the next time I do an update!
And if you'd like to stay in touch, have a question to ask, or would care to hear about what I'm reading, writing and doing in Japan, subscribe to my monthly JohnBoydJapanWriter Newsletter. In return, I will send you a dark and mysterious short story titled The Ritual that can be read in 20 minutes but will take much longer to forget.
I'm the author of two suspense crime thrillers set in Japan: The Girl Who Danced Her Tears Away, and Killing Time in Tokyo, . More details here.


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Home » Russian Aggression » War in Donbas » Occupied Donetsk: re-settlement of Russian "immigrants", all-pervasive fear & ecological disaster
Occupied Donetsk: re-settlement of Russian "immigrants", all-pervasive fear & ecological disaster
Many locals have taken up quarters in basements. Photo: Radio Liberty
2018/09/09 - 10:10 • International, More, Ukraine, War in Donbas
Source: Day.kyiv.ua
Translated by: Christine Chraibi
Russian journalist Kseniya Kirillova talked with Donetsk resident Elena Nekrasova (name changed for security reasons) who recounted the recent wave of searches and intimidation after the assassination of the so-called "leader of the DPR" Alexander Zakharchenko in occupied Donetsk.
"The Russian militants have always intimidated the locals, ever since they arrived in our area… so that almost no one dares to speak out or voice a pro-Ukrainian position as they know they could be killed on the spot. Right from the beginning of the war, they clearly demonstrated what would become of anyone that criticized or complained too much.
People are afraid to express their feelings, their outrage, because they could be thrown into jail, or threatened, mocked, humiliate, brutally tortured… and eventually murdered. For example, from the very first days of the occupation, the invaders demanded that businessmen pay tribute money, which for some reason they called a "tax". To further "inspire" Donbas entrepreneurs to cooperate, "DPR officials" took them to the former SBU building, where the terrorists interrogate and torture locals. This was an effective move. After hearing the terrible cries of tortured prisoners, the businessmen agreed to everything.
This fear is all pervasive; it's everywhere; people look around before acting or speaking, and stop chatting as soon as they see the militants." says Elena Nekrasova.
According to Elena, after the explosion that killed "DPR" warlord Zakharchenko in the Separ Café, the "DPR" police and militant forces carried out extensive searches of apartments, buildings and vehicles.
"People were even more frightened, but discontent is growing. The local population continues to be replaced by new arrivals from Russia. These Russian militants come with children, wives and retired parents; most recently many have arrived from Vorkuta and Irkutsk. They settle here and receive "DPR passports" in addition to their Russian passports. The authorities give them other people's apartments, houses or dormitories.
Apparently, food prices in our city have grown at the same rate as in Vorkuta, but Donetsk residents don't receive "northern" pensions or relocation allowances, which are issued to "newcomers" from Russia. Our pensions amount to approximately 3,000 Russian rubles (38 euros/$44 US), so locals simply don't have enough money for food. The people are very discontented. They say that the authorities have activated another famine, another genocide." complains Elena.
The elderly and children suffer the most
Elena maintains that the Russian "immigrants" in Donetsk were more distressed about Zakharchenko's death than the locals, who are actually more worried about their daily problems than about the fate of the Russian invaders or warlords.
"Grocery products are very expensive, low quality and unsavoury. People everywhere complain that diseases have risen: disorders of the stomach, liver, kidneys, blood vessels, heart; the number of strokes has increased… Teeth start to crumble, break and fall out. There's little money for medical treatment. There's also a severe shortage of doctors and medical personnel." adds Elena sadly.
However, the problems listed by Elena pale in comparison with the ecological disaster brewing in the Donbas. Last spring, Ukrainian media recently reported that the "DPR" occupation administration stopped pumping water from the "Yunkom" (Young Communard) Mine in the city of Bunhe, where an "experimental" nuclear explosion was conducted in 1979. At that time, Soviet scientists hoped to eliminate sudden methane and coal dust emissions. However, the explosion did not help prevent gas emissions, but in its place, a dangerous radioactive chamber called "Klivazh" (Cleavage) formed. Environmentalists state that, in the event of a halt in water evacuation, radioactive waste will be mixed with uncontrolled groundwater and will gradually rise to the surface from a depth of 1000 meters. This will lead to an ecological catastrophe.
"Polluted water rises to a certain level, enters small streams, and finally falls into the tributaries of the Siversky Donets River. We all know that this river is the main water artery in the region. But, there's a more serious problem than the water contaminated with radioactive substances. When these substances penetrate the soil, they become even more dangerous because new harmful chemical compounds are formed. These compounds are virtually unknown and have yet to be studied. The environment, which was created at a depth of 1000 meters, has many harmful "resources", which may impact the region for millions of years. Today, it's being gradually washed out and these elements are being brought up to the surface." explained the chairman of the Independent Trade Union of Miners of Ukraine Mikhailo Volynets in an interview with Ukrinform.
Experts have also noted that underground water displaces methane, which comes to the surface, penetrates into basements and first floors, where it may explode or poison the residents. Moreover, it is highly likely that sooner or later polluted water will enter the Sea of Azov. Elena Nekrasova declares that these processes has already begun, and the consequences are visible to the naked eye in the city of Donetsk.
"They've stopped pumping water from the closed mines. Accordingly, the level of mine water rises and erodes the soil. Houses and buildings have already started to move, the foundations are crumbling, and large cracks have appeared in the walls. It's a real catastrophe. First, it's an environmental disaster; second, the mine is polluted with chemicals, not to mention the radioactive chamber. There's a huge crack in my basement, the floors are sagging and the foundation is sinking. The walls are inclined, with cracks running everywhere. In other words, our city is beginning to collapse in the literal sense of the word." sums up Elena.
Tags: Donbas war (2014-present), ecological disaster, International, Russia, Ukraine
Kseniya Kirillova
Kseniya Kirillova is a Russian journalist that focuses on analyzing Russian society, political processes in modern Russia and the Russian-Ukrainian conflict. She writes for Radio Liberty and other outlets and is an expert of the Center for Army, conversion, and disarmament studies and the Free Russia foundation.
» International, More, Ukraine, War in Donbas » Occupied Donetsk: re-settlement of Russian "immigrants",...


CocoaNav JS is a light version of CocoaNav. It's faster to use as the class list is static (dumped from CocoaNav), but also less powerful as you can't search methods or protocols, only classes. And sometimes it's beachballing and looking like it will crash Safari, but I assure you it won't ! Just let it run.
CocoaNav is Leopard only, and I see Tiger users and Windows users checking the page out :) If you're one of them, this will give you a quick way to discover the Cocoa Class Tree, each class having a link to Apple Developer.
EDIT : turns out that slowdown occurs when I set the canvas's dimensions. I use it to draw lines between classes. On my Mac the layout produces a 1198x16000 table, the canvas is overlaid beneath and sized to cover it all. If Safari allocates one big plane, that comes up to a 73 Mb RGBA surface. Anyone got any canvas tips, or a better way ? I'm just drawing lines here.
Works best in Firefox 3. I just tested Webkit's nightly, it still locks up for up to 30 seconds in some cases. Firefox will just take 1-2 seconds to redisplay.


text:
Defamiliarization and the Unprompted (Not Innocent) Eye
Articles Issue #24 BY Bence NanayJuly 11, 2018
Defamiliarization
One of the key concepts of Russian formalism is defamiliarization.1 Here is the most succinct exposition of what this concept means:
If we start to examine the general laws of perception, we see that as perception becomes habitual, it becomes automatic….Such habituation explains the principles by which, in ordinary speech, we leave phrases unfinished and words half expressed….The object, perceived in the manner of prose perception, fades and does not leave even a first impression; ultimately even the essence of what it was is forgotten….Habitualization devours work, clothes, furniture, one's wife, and the fear of war….And Art exists that one may recover the sensation of life; it exists to make one feel things, to make the stone stony. The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived, and not as they are known. The technique of art is to make objects "unfamiliar," to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged.2
A distinctive feature of Russian formalism, something we do not see in Bell and Fry or in Wölfflin and Riegl (or see it more rarely, see Section IV below), is this emphasis on the analysis of everyday perception and the ways in which art encourages us to perceive differently. But it is difficult not to read the concept of defamiliarization as a naïve early statement of what art historians and aestheticians of the second half of the 20th century criticized as the "Innocent Eye" tradition. As talking about the Innocent Eye is now universally frowned upon, defamiliarization has not been taken as seriously as it should have been. The aim of this paper is to revive the concept of defamiliarization by showing that it has nothing to do with the "Innocent Eye" tradition and to propose a new interpretation of it in terms of distributed attention. I conclude that this reinterpreted concept of defamiliarization can be very useful for contemporary post-formalist accounts of the history of vision (and imagination as well as visual attention).
Shklovsky, De Chirico, Proust, Musil
What I take to be the central idea of defamiliarization is not primarily a claim about art or aesthetics. It is a claim about perception: everyday perception is different from the way we perceive (or should perceive) works of art. This idea (with its undeniable Kantian overtones) was quite widespread around the time when Shklovsky first wrote about defamiliarization (in 1914,3 although his most widely known description of the phenomenon I quoted above is from 1917). Here is a famous passage by Giorgio de Chirico from 1912, for example:
One clear autumnal afternoon I was sitting on a bench in the middle of the Piazza Santa Croce in Florence. It was of course not the first time I had seen this square….The whole world, down to the marble of the buildings and the fountains, seemed to me to be convalescent. In the middle of the square rises a statue of Dante draped in a long cloak, holding his works clasped against his body, his laurel-crowned head bent thoughtfully earthward. The statue is in white marble, but time has given it a gray cast, very agreeable to the eye. The autumn sun, warm and unloving, lit the statue and the church façade. Then I had the strange impression that I was looking at all these things for the first time.4
This experience of seeing something he had seen many times but as if he saw them for the first time is very close to what Shklovsky means by defamiliarization. What I take to be the big move of Russian formalists is that they connected this duality between everyday perception and these special, defamiliarized instances of perception with the idea of formalism. This connection, in the case of Shklovsky is that one way in which we can achieve defamiliarization is to use unusual or exaggerated formal properties. As he says, "the technique of art is to make objects "unfamiliar," to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception."5
The general idea of some kind of connection between defamiliarization and forms is not new.6 Here is Proust, in 1913:
But even the ugliness of faces, which of course were mostly familiar to him, seemed something new and uncanny, now that their features,—instead of being to him symbols of practical utility in the identification of this or that man, who until then had represented merely so many pleasures to be sought after, boredoms to be avoided, or courtesies to be acknowledged—were at rest, measurable by aesthetic coordinates alone, in the autonomy of their curves and angles.7
A lot is going on in this quote. We have the (broadly Kantian) insight that this experience is devoid of practical utility. We also have a formalist spin with the emphasis on curves and angles. And also the seeing of something familiar in a new light, with fresh eyes. And we see versions of all these three ideas in the writings of Shklovsky (even in the longish quote above). But the way Proust makes the connection between defamiliarization (the idea of seeing of something familiar in a new light, with fresh eyes) and forms ("the autonomy of…curves and angles") is different from Shklovsky's. Proust seems to suggest that defamiliarized seeing is the seeing of formal properties. When we see something as if we saw it for the first time, we see curves and angles. For Shklovsky, in contrast, the experience of seeing something as if we saw it for the first time is achieved by means of formal qualities that are difficult to process. For Shklovsky, form is the means to the end of defamiliarized vision. For Proust, forms and defamiliarized vision are two sides of the same coin.
Another author who connects the discussion of defamiliarization and forms is Robert Musil.8 His concept of "other condition" is a version of the concept of defamiliarization: the "other condition" is a way of perceiving the world that is very different from the way we normally perceive it.9 In "Toward a new aesthetic,"10 first he complains how obscure writers and philosophers tend to be when describing this "other condition" and then proceeds to give a pretty obscure description himself:
There is neither measure nor precision, neither purpose nor cause: good and evil simply fall away, without any pretense of superiority, and in place of all these relations enters a secret rising and ebbing of our being with that of things and other people. It is in this condition that the image of each object becomes not a practical goal, but a wordless experience.11
In order to understand Musil's account of the "other condition," we need to also have a closer look at two related topics that very much informed his way of thinking about the Other Condition. The first one is his formalism. Musil was a formalist—somewhat surprisingly for someone who is credited as the par excellence philosophical (that is, content-based) novelist. Being a formalist in Austria/Germany in his time was also much more unusual than, say, in England or Russia. Nonetheless, he endorsed a fairly sophisticated version of formalism that was more similar to Roger Fry's than to Clive Bell's.12
But his formalism is even closer to that of Russian formalists and the Shklovsky himself—a theme that I can't fully explore here. While Shklovsky put the emphasis on the "unfamiliar," Musil is interested in what makes our perception of the "unfamiliar" different from everyday perception. And his answer has to do with a concept that have since had a long career in analytic aesthetics—that of uniqueness.
While the uniqueness in the domain of aesthetics, at least within the analytic tradition, has either been conceived as a metaphysical claim or as a claim about aesthetic evaluation (and neither way of cashing out the importance of uniqueness has been particularly successful), Musil focuses on the uniqueness of our experience. Here is what he says: "Every work of art offers not merely an immediate experience but an experience that can never be completely repeated, that cannot be fixed but is individual, even anarchic. [That is where] it takes its uniqueness and momentary quality from."13
Musil's view here is an application of a distinction he has been making throughout his life, between the "ratioid" and the "nonratioid" domain. Here is the best (and earliest) characterization of this distinction from his 1918 essay "Sketch of what the writer knows": "Roughly delineated, this ratioid territory embraces everything that science can systematize, everything that can be summarized in laws and rules; primarily, in other words, physical nature….The ratioid area is characterized by a certain monotony of facts, by the predominance of repetition…; but above all the chief characteristic of this area is that in it facts can be unambiguously described and communicated."14 "If the ratioid area of the domination is the "rule with exceptions," the nonratioid area is that of the dominance of the exceptions over the rule….In this region facts do not submit, laws are sieves, events do not repeat themselves but are infinitely variable and individual."15 Morality and aesthetics are supposed to be part of the nonratioid domain.
After introducing the concept of the "other condition," Musil warns against understanding the contrast between ordinary perception and the "other condition" as a difference between intellect and the senses. This, he argues, would amount to embracing some kind of anti-intellectualist pan-romanticism, and this is certainly not something he would want to do. Instead, the contrast is between the repeatable (ratioid) and the nonrepeatable (nonratioid) domain. While our ordinary perception groups things together in categories the instantiations of which are repeatable and interchangeable, the other condition takes everything as a unique individual—not as something repeatable and interchangeable. So here is where Musil's ratioid/nonratioid distinction meets his brand of formalism: when we are looking at the world in a practical manner, say, when we are hungry, we see things as belonging to these two categories only: edible or non-edible (or, maybe, edible in case of emergency…). This is clearly a phenomenon in the ratioid domain. But when we are in this "other condition," we see things for what they are and for what they uniquely are: not as an edible thing that could be interchangeable with some other edible things, but as a unique, not interchangeable entity.16
This concept of course bears various traces of Kant's thinking—a connection Musil would probably not like. At one point in The Man without Qualities, he even describes the "other condition" as "a state entirely free from purpose."17 But it is a very specific and very unusual way of cashing out the general idea of "disinterested pleasure": what makes it disinterested is that we appreciate the object's uniqueness, without trying to find a template of what to do with it or how to think about it. Note that Musil is also against taking the contrast between ordinary perception and the "other condition" to be a conceptual/non-conceptual distinction, as, for him, this distinction stands at every level of perceptual processing—just like the ratioid/nonratioid distinction.
But what is more interesting from the point of view of the present paper is the similarity with Russian formalism. But rather than describing the Other Condition on the analogy of our experience of unfamiliar objects, Musil takes a slightly different approach. We can, after all, experience unfamiliar objects in a variety of ways: if we have some strong practical inclination, we will experience this object as one that can or cannot be used for these practical purposes. But this has little to do with "what makes the stone stony."
Nonetheless, it could be argued that the Russian formalists and Musil were really after describing and understanding the same experience. When Shklovsky says that "Habitualization devours work, clothes, furniture, one's wife, and the fear of war….And Art exists that one may recover the sensation of life; it exists to make one feel things, to make the stone stony,"18 it is easy to see how habitualization is a part of the ratioid domain and defamiliarization, therefore, must be a nonratioid phenomenon. This is where Musil's and Shklovsky's way of thinking about the relation between defamiliarization and formalism seem to converge.
Defamiliarization and distributed attention
The reason why I spent so much time on the similarities between Russian formalism and Musil's views is because I believe that Musil can help us interpret the concept of defamiliarization in a way that points beyond mere historical interest in this slippery notion.
Russian formalists are interested in the experience of the unfamiliar. But as encountering something that is unfamiliar seems to exclude the possibility of using well-practiced attentional resources for approaching them, it seems that encountering an unfamiliar object is likely to prompt one to attend to it in a distributed manner.
If we encounter an object that is not familiar, we don't really know how to attend to it: what properties of it we should attend to and which ones we should ignore. We have no precedent of how to do this as we have not encountered this object before. So we have no blueprint to follow: we try out attending to all kinds of properties of the object—our attention is distributed. In other words, if we encounter an unfamiliar object, we tend to approach it with distributed attention.
Thus, the metaphor of defamiliarization could be interpreted easily in this framework. If an object is unfamiliar, we do not know how to approach it, therefore, we tend to attend to a number of its properties to figure out what to do with it or what can be done with it. If an object is familiar, we just attend to those of its properties that we need to attend to. When the Russian formalists describe the experience of the unfamiliar, they really describe a way of attending to this object that is less focussed than it normally would be. They describe distributed attention.
Let's go back to the De Chirico quote in the previous section. The experience he describes is an experience that is very much akin to encountering something for the very first time. As encountering something for the very first time seems to imply some version of distributed attention (as we have no precedent to go by for approaching the object visually), these views seem to be consistent with the reading of defamiliarization as distributed attention.
And this is the point where we can return to the comparison with Musil. Here is what I take to be Robert Musil's clearest characterization of the Other Condition, which appears to make the same connection with distributed attention:
Everything was shifted out of the focus of attention and has lost its sharp outlines. Seen in this way, it was all a little scattered and blurred, and yet manifestly there were still other centres filling it again with delicate certainty and clarity. For all life's problems and events took on an incomparable mildness, softness and serenity, and at the same time an utterly transformed meaning.19
And Musil is not the only one who makes the connection between defamiliarization and distributed attention. Take Roger Fry's famous description of his experience of watching a film (which also clearly indicates how close Fry was to Russian formalism before Bell's influence):
If, in a cinematograph, we see a runaway horse and cart, we do not have to think either of getting out of the way or heroically interposing ourselves. The result is that in the first place we see the event much more clearly; see a number of quite interesting but irrelevant things, which in real life could not struggle into our consciousness, bent, as it would be, entirely upon the problem of our appropriate reaction. I remember seeing in a cinematograph the arrival of a train at a foreign station and the people descending from the carriages; there was no platform, and to my intense surprise I saw several people turn right round after reaching the ground, as though to orientate themselves; an almost ridiculous performance, which I had never noticed in all the many hundred occasions on which such a scene had passed before my eyes in real life. The fact being that at a station one is never really a spectator of events, but an actor engaged in the drama of luggage or prospective seats, and one actually sees only so much as may help to the appropriate action.20
Fry talks about irrelevant aspects of the perceived scene that, if the scene were observed in an everyday, habitualized manner, would have gone unnoticed. In other words, we are attending to aspects of the perceived scene we would not be attending to otherwise. Our attention is distributed attention. D. H. Lawrence gives a surprisingly similar characterization of the way attention is exercised when we engage with art: "The essential quality of poetry is that it makes a new effort of attention, and "discovers a new world within the known world."21
The concept of defamiliarization is easy to confuse with an appeal to the "innocent eye," which has a very bad reputation among the art historians of the last half-century (and rightly so). The difference between accounts of defamiliarized experience that emphasize the "as if encountered for the very first time" aspect of this experience and appeals to the "innocent eye" is the topic I now turn to.
Innocent eye versus unprompted eye
Statements of defamiliarization are often difficult to detach from other seemingly similar claims in the vicinity. Here is a famous quote by Stan Brakhage, avant-garde filmmaker par excellence, which I take to be a clear statement of the defamiliarization view:
Imagine an eye unruled by man-made laws of perspective, an eye unprejudiced by compositional logic, an eye which does not respond to the name of everything but which must know each object encountered in life through an adventure of perception. How many colors are there in a field of grass to the crawling baby unaware of "Green"? How many rainbows can light create for the untutored eye?22
Brakhage talks about the untutored eye and this sounds dangerously similar to the concept of "innocent eye." In general, Brakhage's emphasis on seeing something without employing concepts (like the concept of "green")—an emphasis he shares with Aldous Huxley and many others23 —makes this general approach to defamiliarized experience be jeopardized by being subsumed under the heading of "innocent eye" tradition. I argue that the kind of picture Shklovsky, de Chirico, Proust, Musil and Brakhage are after is very different from the concept of "innocent eye" (in spite of some unfortunate statements that muddy the waters—including Shkovsky's own, see his talk of "the sensation of things as they are perceived, and not as they are known"). But in order to do so, I need to say something brief about the concept of innocent eye.
A significant proportion of the art history and aesthetics of the second half of the 20th Century can be described as a long fight against the concept of the "innocent eye."24 The general idea of the innocent eye originates from John Ruskin, who famously said that:
The whole technical power of painting depends on our recovery of what may be called the innocence of the eye; that is to say, of a sort of childish perception of these flat stains of colour, merely as such, without consciousness of what they signify, as a blind man would see them if suddenly gifted with sight.25
A lot is going on in this famous quote. It is easy to spot the classic formalist assumptions: what we should pay attention to is the formal properties of paintings (for example, the "flat stains of colour"), not what they signify. But there is also an allusion to seeing things for the first time—an idea I want to salvage. To make things even more complicated, Ruskin's subsequent discussion of how our non-innocent eye sees green grass as green even though it would look yellow if we were to focus merely on its look brings in various issues about color constancy. Nonetheless, what I take to be the core of Ruskin's view is that what he labels the "innocent eye" is vision that is untouched by our knowledge of the world: of what we know about the color of grass in general, for example.
This is the view Gombrich and Goodman (among others) reacted against. Here is Ernst Gombrich: "The innocent eye is a myth. […] seeing is never just registering."26 And "we must doubt all the more whether such an achievement of innocent passivity is at all possible to the human mind."27 And again: "Reading an image, like the reception of any other message, is dependent on prior knowledge of possibilities; we can only recognize what we know."28 Nelson Goodman is equally dismissive when he says that "the innocent eye is blind."29 This stance is not exactly new, arguably it goes back at least to the early 18th Century, to Jonathan Richardson's Theory of Painting, where he says: "For 'tis a certain maxim: no man sees what things are that knows not what they ought to be."30 As Picasso summarizes, "our knowledge influences our vision."31
From a psychological perspective, it should be clear that this "innocent eye" debate is about the cognitive penetrability of vision—about whether vision is an encapsulated process, sealed off from what goes on in the rest of the mind. And it should also be clear that the contemporary consensus is that things are not looking good for the proponents of "innocent eye" from that point of view. The view according to which perception is cognitively impenetrable—that is, according to which our eye is innocent seems to be plainly false.32 There are top-down processes that influence perceptual processing as early as the primary visual cortex33 or the thalamus.34 And these top-down just become more numerous and more diverse as the perceptual processing continues.
Here is a famous (and old) experiment):35 if we have to match the color of a picture of an orange heart to color samples, we match it differently (closer to the red end of the spectrum) from the way we match the color of a picture of some other, orange shapes. This shows that our recognition of the object in question (the heart) influences the color we experience it as having. A more recent experiment:36 Two pictures of identical (mixed race) faces were shown to subjects—the only difference between them was that under one the subjects read the word "white" and under the other they read "black." When they had to match the color of the face, subjects chose a significantly darker color for the face with the label "black." In general, one's experience is not determined in a bottom-up manner by the perceptual stimulus: it depends on language, attention, the contrast classes and one's expectations.37
It is important to highlight that in order to deny the innocence of the eye, it is enough to endorse a very weak sense of cognitive penetrability—so much so that it wouldn't even count as cognitive penetrability under many formulation of cognitive penetrability because all it implies is that our perceptual experience is subject to top-down attentional influences —something even those who deny the cognitive penetrability of perception would accept.38 Even those who maintain that perception is not cognitive penetrable allow for top-down influences before and after "early vision." But from the point of view of the "innocent eye" debate, it is irrelevant whether there is one brief part of perceptual processing that is sheltered from top-down influences. Proponents and opponents of "cognitive penetration" agree that our eye is not innocent.
It is important to point out that the distinction between "cognitive penetration" and the innocent eye claim is not the same as the somewhat technical distinction in analytic philosophy between conceptual and non-conceptual content. According to some philosophers of perception, perceptual content is conceptual: it has concepts as some of its ingredients. According to others, perceptual content has nothing to do with concepts: it is pre-conceptual or non-conceptual. Importantly, both of these views are consistent with cognitive penetration. Perception—whether or not it is conceptual—is influenced by our cognitive processes.
Again, there is no such thing as "innocent eye." But the "innocent eye" claim is very different from the one I would like to salvage: the view that some experiences in the aesthetic context are akin to seeing things for the very first time. To make things simple, I will call this conception the "unprompted eye" and contrast it with the concept of "innocent eye." Even if we assume, as we should, that the eye is never innocent—that our vision is always deeply influenced by our beliefs, previous experiences and expectations—it is still possible to see something as if we saw it for the first time.
But this distinction between the innocent eye and the unprompted eye will be mysterious unless we specify what makes the unprompted eye unprompted. And I argued that it is the exercise of distributed attention: if our eyes are "prompted," we come with fixed preconceived ideas about how we should look at something. Suppose that you are hungry and you open your fridge. You will be likely to see the objects there as belonging to two different categories: edible and not edible. The way you're attending to these objects is very much determined: you are zeroing in on very specific properties of the objects (roughly, their edibility or nutritional value) and you will actively ignore all their other properties. In other words, your perception is prompted: you will experience the objects in a way that is determined by pre-existing factors (like your quest for food).
Contrast this with experiences of a certain kind, where there is no such prompting of the eye: you have no fixed and preconceived way of visually approaching the object you're looking at. In this case, your visual curiosity is not zeroing in on any fixed and predetermined set of properties: there is no pre-established prompt. You are trying to make sense of the object by trying out attending to a wide variety of its properties—just as you would do with an object you have never encountered before.
To be absolutely clear, we have very strong (empirical and philosophical) reasons to hold that both of these two kinds of experiences are non-innocent in the Gombrichian sense: both the experience of scavenging the contents of my fridge and the experience of artworks are influenced by various top-down factors such as my previous encounter with food and art, my beliefs about nutritional values and the exhibition I'm attending and my expectation of culinary or artistic value. But just because both experiences are cognitively penetrated doesn't mean that both are prompted. The prompted versus unprompted distinction is made within the category of non-innocent eye (because that is the only kind of eye there is).
Post-formalist conclusion: The history of (defamiliarized) vision
What we got so far is an account of defamiliarized perception that avoids the pitfalls of the innocent eye tradition. Defamiliarized perception is seeing with unprompted eyes (not with innocent eyes, as no eyes are innocent). And seeing with unprompted eyes means attending in a distributed manner.
We have seen how these ideas of defamiliarization are related to formalism in Shklovsky's writings: one way of achieving defamiliarization is by confronting the observer with challenging formal properties. But the idea of defamiliarization interpreted as unprompted vision and distributed attention makes it possible to make connections to another streak of formalist thinking—and one that seems more relevant these days, especially in the context of post-formalism:39 the historicity of vision.
According to an influential view within art history, the way the ancient Greeks saw the world was importantly different from the way we now see the world and part of what art history should study is exactly how human vision has changed in the course of history. If the ancients did see the world differently from the way we do now, then in order to understand and evaluate their art, we need to understand how they perceived it (and how this is related to the way they perceived the world). Thus, so the argument goes, the history of vision is a necessary precursor to art history. This general line of argument goes back at least as far as Tacitus,40 but it has become one of the most important premises of art history and aesthetics since the early 20th Century.
The general idea behind the history of vision claim is that visual experience changes in various ways in the course of history. We should, therefore, not assume that people in ancient or medieval times perceived in the same way as we do now. Further, one important aspect of understanding the art of earlier times is to understand the way people perceived artworks then.
The most explicit statement of this claim comes from Heinrich Wölfflin, in one of the best-known passages in the history of art history: "Vision itself has its history, and the revelation of these visual strata must be regarded as the primary task of art history."41 While Wölfflin's provocative statement has become an important slogan for generations of art historians, the general idea that vision has a history had another major and in some ways even more influential proponent in the context of the turn of the Century German/Austrian art historical tradition, namely, Alois Riegl. Riegl's main guiding principle in The Late Roman Art Industry was that the way people perceived the world in ancient times is radically different from the way we perceive now. More precisely, he argues that ancient people saw only "individual self-contained shapes"—and this explains some crucial features of their representational visual art.42 But even within the ancient era, he hypothesizes that the Egyptians perceived the world differently from the way the Greeks did and the Greeks differently from the way the Romans, especially the late Romans, did.
Perhaps the real influence of the history of vision claim was provided by the application of this general and abstract idea to the question of modernity—an idea that is present in the work of a very diverse group of thinkers: Charles Baudelaire, Georg Simmel, Friedrich Nietzsche, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Siegfried Kracauer, Lev Malevich, to mention just a few.43 But it was Walter Benjamin who made this application of the history of vision claim most explicitly and most influentially. Inspired by Riegl's general claims about the history of vision,44 he says:
During long periods of history, the mode of human sense perception changes with humanity's entire mode of existence. The manner in which human sense perception is organized, the medium in which it is accomplished, is determined not only by nature but by historical circumstances as well.45
Alois Riegl's influence is clear in these passages and especially in the ways in which Benjamin applies these general ideas to specific periods in art history: "The period of migration in which the late Roman art industry and the Vienna Genesis came into being, had not only a different art, but also a different perception from classical times."46
Benjamin's main interest, however, is not the late Roman art industry, but the change in art and perception that happened at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th Century. And Benjamin's claim is that modernity is a change in "sensorium" and this idea has become one of the guiding principles of theorizing about modernity. For Benjamin, this change in "sensorium" was brought about by technological changes. Not just the changes in the streetscape around us: the speeding cars and the skyscrapers that Malevich and Baudelaire like to emphasize, but also the technological changes in art itself. As Régis Debray summarizes, "Photography has changed our perception of space, and the cinema our perception of time (via montage)."47
Still, the application of the idea of the history of vision does not stop, and does not begin, with modernity. As Jonathan Crary argues at length, the general mode of perception may have undergone some important form of change already in the first half of the 19th century.48 And theorists of postmodernism rely on the principle of the history of vision as much as theorists of modernity do. Frederic Jameson, for example, argues that postmodernism offers "a whole new Utopian realm of the senses."49 The premise all these arguments share is that history, and art history, can be understood, at least partially, as the history of perception. This assumption is so deeply ingrained in much of the discourse on 19th and 20th century art and culture and in (at least some branches of) art history and aesthetics that it has been taken for granted without further discussion. As Whitney Davis summarized, "according to visual-culture studies, it is true prima facie that vision has a cultural history."50 And one of the guiding ideas of post-formalism has become the claim that vision (and imagination) has an (art) history.51
How does the concept of defamiliarization (understood as distributed attention) fit into this framework? The concept of visual attention has not played a significant role in the history of vision debate, not even in its post-formalist version that puts the emphasis not on vision, but other Sehformen, especially imagination. One exception is André Malraux, who famously wrote that: "The creation of every great art is inseparable from [the] metamorphosis in the manner of seeing, which does not properly belong in the realm of vision, but of attention."52 But if vision has a history, we can reasonably assume that visual attention (understood as part of perception) also has a history. In fact, given the rich empirical literature on cross-cultural variations in visual attention,53 the default assumption would need to be that attention is not a cultural universal—so we should expect not just cross-cultural, but also historical variations.
It should be clear from the discussion of defamiliarization that the kind of distributed attention I have talked about played an important role in the early 1900s and probably also some time before that. But it is not clear that, say, 15th century observers exercised distributed attention in the same way as early 20th century observers did. And even if they did, it is not clear that looking at pictures or artworks in general was considered to be the appropriate and even recommended context for such defamiliarized vision and distributed attention.
The present paper is not the place to outline such historical project, but it is worth noting that none of the "visual skills" Michael Baxandall talks about in his thorough study of how 15th century Italian humanist observers looked at pictures implies (or is even consistent with) the kind of distributed attention that is entailed by defamiliarized vision.54 If this is so (and I won't pretend that I've established this historical claim), then distributed attention does have a history.55 The history of (distributed) attention would be an important step towards understanding the history of vision and, as a result, should be of special interest to post-formalist art history.56
1. See Lawrence Crawford, "Viktor Shklovskij: Differance in defamiliarization," Comparative Literature 36:3 (Summer 1984): 209-19 and Kristin Thompson, Breaking the Glass Armor. Neoformalist Film Analysis (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), 10-11.↑
2. Victor Shklovsky, "Art as Technique," in Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays, ed. Lee T. Lemon and Marion J. Reis (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1965), 11-12.↑
3. Victor Shklovsky, "The Resurrection of the Word," in Russian Formalism: A Collection of Articles and Texts in Translation, ed. and trans. Stephen Bann and John E. Bowlt (Edinurgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1973), 46; see also Richard Sherwood, "Viktor Shklovsky and the Development of Early Formalist Theory of Prose Literature," Twentieth Century Studies 7-8 (1972): 26-40.↑
4. Giorgio de Chirico, "Meditations of a Painter," in Theories of Modern Art: A Source Book by Artists and Critics, ed. Herschel B. Chipp (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1968), 397-398.↑
5. Shklovsky, "Art as Technique," 12.↑
6. See Bence Nanay, "Aesthetic attention," Journal of Consciousness Studies 22:5-6 (2015): 96-118. See also Nanay, Aesthetics as Philosophy of Perception (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016).↑
7. Marcel Proust, Swann's Way, trans. C. K. Scott Moncrieff (New York: Modern Library, 1928), 469-70.↑
8. I focus on de Chirico, Proust and Musil here, but statements that are surprisingly similar to Shklovsky's are not difficult to find in other authors—from William Blake and Wolfgang Iser all the way to Gilles Deleuze (see especially Deleuze, Cinema 1: L'Image-temps [Paris: Minuit, 1985]).↑
9. Robert Musil, "Toward a New Aesthetic," in Precision and Soul, ed. and trans. Burton Pike and David S. Luft (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 199.↑
10. Ibid.↑
12. The clearest exposition of Musil's ideas about formalism is his essay "Literati and literature," Precision and Soul, ed. Pike and Luft, 70-89.↑
13. Musil, "Toward a new aesthetic," Precision and Soul, ed. Pike and Luft, 205.↑
14. Musil, "Sketch of What the Writer Knows," Precision and Soul, ed. Pike and Luft, 62.↑
15. Ibid, 63; see also Musil, "The German as Symptom," Precision and Soul, ed. Pike and Luft, 150-192.↑
16. For analysis, see also Nanay, "The Dethroning of Ideocracy: Robert Musil as a Philosopher," The Monist 87:1 (January 2014): 3-11.↑
17. Musil, The Man without Qualities (1930-1932), trans. Eithne Wilkins and Ernst Kaiser (London: Picador, 1979), 238.↑
18. Shklovsky, "Art as Technique," 11.↑
19. Musil, The Man without Qualities, 144-45.↑
20. Roger Fry, "An Essay in Aesthetics" (1909), in Vision and Design (London: Chatto and Windus, 1920), 18-19.↑
21. D. H. Lawrence, introduction to Harry Crosby's Chariot of the Sun (1928) in The Cambridge Edition of the Letters and Works of D. H. Lawrence, ed. James T. Boulton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 107.↑
22. Stan Brakhage, "Metaphors on vision," Film Culture 30 (Fall 1963): 25; see also P. Adams Sitney, Visionary Film: The American Avant-Garde, 1943-2000 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002).↑
23. Here is a representative Huxley quote: "We must preserve and, if necessary, intensify our ability to look at the world directly and not through that half opaque medium of concepts, which distorts every given fact into the all too familiar likeness of some generic label or explanatory abstraction." See Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception (London: Chatto and Windus, 1954), 74.↑
24. For a summary, see David Carrier, Principles of Art History Writing (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 1991).↑
25. John Ruskin, The Elements of Drawing (London: Smith, Elder and Co., 1857), 22.↑
26. Ernst Gombrich, Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972), 298.↑
27. Ibid, 297.↑
28. Gombrich, The Image and the Eye (London: Phaidon, 1982), 255.↑
29. Nelson Goodman, Languages of Art (Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs Merrill, 1976), 8.↑
30. Jonathan Richardson, An Essay on the Theory of Painting (London: n.p., 1725), 147.↑
31. Brassai: Conversations with Picasso, trans. Jane Marie Todd (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 273.↑
32. R. L. Goldstone, "Effects of Categorization on Color-Perception," Psychological Science 6:5 (September 1995): 298-304. T. Hansen, M. Olkkonen, S. Walter, and K. R. Gegenfurter, "Memory Modulates Color Appearance," Nature Neuroscience 9:11. (2006): 1367-68; G. Lupyan and M. J.Spivey, "Perceptual Processing Is Facilitated by Ascribing Meaning to Novel Stimuli, Current Biology, 18:10 (2008), R410–R412; G. Lupyan, S. L. Thompson-Schill, and D. Swingley, "Conceptual Penetration of Visual Processing, Psychological Science 21 (2010): 682-91; G. Lupyan, and E. J. Ward, "Language Can Boost Otherwise Unseen Objects into Visual Awareness," Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 110:35 (2013), 14196–14201; Nanay, Between Perception and Action (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013); C. Teufel, and B. Nanay, "How to (and How Not to) Think about Top-down Influences on Perception," Consciousness and Cognition 47 (2017): 17-25; but for a critical analysis see also C. Firestone and B. J. Scholl, "Top-down" Effects Where None Should Be Found: The El Greco Fallacy in Perception Research," Psychological Science, 25:1 (January 2014): 38-46.↑
33. S. P. Gandhi, et al., "Spatial Attention Affects Brain Activity in Human Primary Visual Cortex," Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 96 (1999): 3314-19.↑
34. D. H. O'Connor, M. M. Fukui, M. A. Pinsk, and S. Kastner, "Attention Modulates Responses in the Human Lateral Geniculate Nucleus, Nature Neuroscience 5:11 (2002): 1203-9.↑
35. J. L. Delk, and S. Fillenbaum, "Differences in Perceived Color as a Function of Characteristic Color, The American Journal of Psychology 78 (1965): 290-93.↑
36. D. T. Levin and M. R. Banaji, "Distortions in the Perceived Lightness of Faces: The Role of Race Categories," Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 135 (2006): 501-12.↑
37. See Hansen et al., " Memory Moderates Color Appearance," 1367-68; See also Lupyan, et al., "Language Can Boost Otherwise Unseen Objects into Visual Awareness," 14196–14201.↑
38. Zenon Pylyshyn, "Is Vision Continuous with Cognition? The Case for Cognitive Impenetrability of Visual Perception," Behavioral and Brain Sciences 22 (1999): 341-423.↑
39. David Summers, Real Spaces: World Art History and the Rise of Western Modernism (London: Phaidon, 2003); Whitney Davis, A General Theory of Visual Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011); Davis, "Post-Formalism," nonsite 7 (2012); Davis, "Succession and Recursion in Heinrich Wölfflin's Kunstgeschichtliche Grundbegriffe," Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 73:2 (Spring 2015): 157-164.↑
40. See Tacitus, Dialogus de oratoribus Book I (10). (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001)↑
41. Heinrich Wölfflin, Principles of Art History (New York: Dover, 1932), 11.↑
42. Alois Riegl, The Late Roman Art Industry, trans. Rolf Winkes (Rome: Giorgio Bretschneider Editore, 1985), 232.↑
43. For a good summary see David Frisby, Fragments of Modernity: Theories of Modernity in the Work of Simmel, Kracauer, and Benjamin (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986).↑
44. Karen Lang, Chaos and Cosmos: On the Image in Aesthetics and Art History (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006), esp. 136-78; Thomas Y. Levin, "Walter Benjamin and the Theory of Art History," October 47 (1988): 77-83.↑
45. Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken, 1969), 89.↑
47. Régis Debray, Vie et mort de l'image (Paris: Gallimard, 1992), 178.↑
48. Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992).↑
49. Frederic Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991), 7.↑
50. Davis, A General Theory of Visual Culture, 7.↑
51. Ibid.; Davis, " Post-Formalism"; Davis, " Succession and Recursion in Heinrich Wölfflin's Kunstgeschichtliche Grundbegriffe."↑
52. André Malraux, Museum Without Walls (New York: Doubleday, 1967), 206.↑
53. Richard E. Nisbett, K. Peng, I. Choi, and A. Norenzayan, "Culture and Systems of Thought: Holistic vs. Analytic Cognition," Psychological Review 108 (2001): 291-310; Takahiko Masuda and Richard E. Nisbett, "Attending Holistically versus Analytically: Comparing the Context Sensitivity of Japanese and Americans," Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 81 (2001): 922-34; Masuda and Nisbett. "Culture and Change Blindness," Cognitive Science 30 (2006): 381-99; Y. Miyamoto, R. E. Nisbett, and T. Masuda, "Differential Affordances of Eastern and Western Environments," Psychological Science 17:2 (2006):113-19; J. O. Goh, M. W. Chee, J. C. Tan, V. Venkatraman, A. Hebrank, E. Leshikar, et al., "Age and Culture Modulate Object Processing and Object-scene Binding in the Ventral Visual Area, Cognitive, Affective, and Behavioral Neuroscience 7 (2007): 44-52; H. F. Chua, J. E. Boland, and R. E. Nisbett, "Cultural Variation in Eye Movements during Scene Perception," Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 102 (2005): 12629-33; L. J. Ji, K. Peng, and R. E. Nisbett, "Culture, Control and Perception of Relationships in the Environment," Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 78 (2000): 943-55.↑
54. Michael Baxandall, Painting and Experience in Fifteenth Century Italy: A Primer in the Social History of Pictorial Style (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972).↑
55. Nanay, "The History of Vision," Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 73:3 (Summer 2015): 259-71.↑
56. This work was supported by the ERC Consolidator grant [726251], the FWO Odysseus grant [G.0020.12N] and the FWO research grant [G0C7416N]. I am grateful to two anonymous referees and Sam Rose for comments.↑
Tags: FormalismLiterary CriticismVisuality
Bence Nanay
Professor of Philosophy and BOF Research Professor at the University of Antwerp. He is co-director of the Centre for Philosophical Psychology at the University. His research focuses on philosophy of mind, philosophy of biology and aesthetics.
ArticlesIssue #9
Bernhard's Way


Tite Kubo, the son of a town council member in Fuchu, Aki District, Hiroshima. He never took drawing seriously until he was 17; after reading Dragon Ball he knew he wanted to be a manga artist. At the age of 18 he submitted his first concept for the series Zombiepowder but it got rejected. Zombiepowder was rejected multiple times until Kubo was 22, when it finally was accepted by Shonen Jump. It did not last long; it was cancelled after four volumes in late 2000. His next series, Bleach, about a high school student who becomes a shinigami and fights hollows, was not such a failure. Bleach began regular publication in 2001. It has been running in Weekly Shonen Jump ever since.
Hot-tempered 15-year-old Ichigo Kurosaki, the hero of the popular fantasy-adventure Bleach , has the unsettling ability to see spirits who are unable to rest in peace. His sixth sense leads him to Rukia, a Soul Reaper who destroys Hollows (soul-devouring monsters) and ensures the deceased find repose with the Soul Society. When she's injured in battle, Rukia transfers her sword and much of her power to Ichigo, whose spiritual energy makes him a formidable substitute Soul Reaper. But the orange-haired teenager isn't sure he wants the job: too many risks and moral dilemmas.
~Sliding Scale of Plot VS Character: The series Bleach is very Action orientated (lots of fight scenes) but the story itself is more Character orientated, when Tite Kubo focuses on specific characters, he does a great job, but the plot is slow. In fact, with Bleach, there are a lot of subtle hints and clues that a first-time reader might not necessarily pick up. There's also a lot of back-story and character history that is only hinted at within the first three volumes, but it does get explained and does make sense.
~I Found This Humerus: While there are lots of good fight scenes (if that's what you're into), it's the wide range of humour that I enjoy the most about this series. As the series progresses, it does get Darker and Edgier, so the humour balances things out.
~Long Term Commitment: While I think highly of the Bleach Manga series, I did stop reading the series half-way through The Lost Agent Arc. This is for multiple reasons, the primary reason being Arc Fatigue and the fact that the reader in dumped right into the middle of a time-skip and I was introduced to a whole bunch of new characters (via an organization called "Xcution") that I cared very little for (mind you, this is at least 50 volumes into a 74 Volume series). I'm going to attempt to read it from the beginning.
All in all, it's a good action urban fantasy with a super intricate plot, and I am happy to recommend.
Previous Stim Toy Review: Artist's Collection Knock Off Tangle Jr.


The purpose of this article is to discuss how a person can properly change his or her Will, what happens if the change is done improperly and what effect marriage and divorce has on the Will. For a review of when a change might be necessary, please see my checklist Reviewing Your Will and Powers of Attorney Checklist.
Should a change to a Will be needed, then a document called a Codicil can be made. The Codicil refers to the original Will, then states the changes desired and then confirms the original Will. The Codicil must be executed in the same manner as the Will and therefore requires two witnesses who are present at the same time to witness the signature of the testator (the testator being the person who makes the Will and Codicil). The exception to the rule regarding witnesses occurs when the testator writes out the Codicil completely in his or her own handwriting, not typewritten, and then signs his or her name at the bottom of the Codicil.
Since Codicils are often short and simple, it is possible for one to prepare his or her own Codicil. However, there are a number of disadvantages in not having a lawyer draft and arrange for the execution of a Codicil. Firstly, it may be that the change will create certain legal or practical problems which the lawyer may advise against doing. Secondly, if the changes are such that someone may challenge the Will on the grounds of testamentary capacity or undue influence, it would be better to have the lawyer draft the Codicil and be present at the execution of the Codicil so to testify that the client was not unduly influenced and had testamentary capacity. Thirdly, the Codicil may be improperly drawn or executed. It is actually quite common that Wills and Codicils executed by non lawyers are not done right. Finding the witnesses where the lawyer did not arrange for the execution of the Will is also another practical problem. Fourthly, the Codicil will show the changes. This may not be desired if someone is being removed as a beneficiary or has their legacy reduced. Fifthly, it is better to keep the Codicil and Will together so that it is known upon death that there is a Codicil in existence and that may not be the case if the lawyer is holding the Will but not the Codicil. Sixthly, if the Codicil has to go to probate, there will be extra time and costs to prove the holograph Will. Generally, a Bank Manager's Affidavit with the signature card is needed to prove the Will if it is a holograph. I may be biased because I am in the business of drafting Wills, but I believe the Codicil should only be used for temporary purposes and that the person should get a lawyer to prepare a proper new Will.
As it is just as easy and will cost the same to have a new Will drawn as it would be to prepare a Codicil and for the reasons stated above, I recommend that a new Will be prepared by the lawyer and that it be properly executed before the required two witnesses. At that time, the lawyer can also advise as to any changes in the law such as the Family Law Act, which might affect the original Will. Also, at that time, there would be a review to discuss whether there are opportunities for estate planning so to increase the size of the estate.
If one wants to make the changes himself or herself, then I suggest the form as shown in the appendix of this article be used. If the form is used and there are not two witnesses present at the time, IT MUST BE HANDWRITTEN BY THE TESTATOR to be valid.
Often people make changes on their original Will such as crossing out names or paragraphs. An alteration has no effect unless it is signed (not initialled) by the testator and two witnesses. Of course, if the Will is a holograph Will (completely in the handwriting of the testator) then the alteration is valid, if signed just by the testator. It is also improper to insert a new page in the Will without properly executing the whole Will.
A Will is automatically revoked upon marriage unless the Will specifically states that the Will is made in contemplation of marriage. There is the following exception. If a testator has a Will in which "x" is a beneficiary and he later marries "x", then upon his death "x", who is now the widow, has the option of taking the bequest given in the Will or taking her benefits according to law which apply when there is no Will.
If after making a Will a person divorces his or her spouse then unless it is expressed in the Will to the contrary all bequests to the former spouse are revoked. Also revoked is the appointment of the former spouse to be the executor or trustee.
The foll owing is a sample Codicil which must be witnessed by two witnesses who are present at the same time and observe the testator sign, otherwise it is not valid unless the Codicil is done completely in the handwriting of the testator.
The witnesses cannot be the executors or beneficiaries or spouses of the executors or beneficiaries.


Asha Senapati is a colorectal surgeon with a wide breath of experience, but her specific remit at St. Mark's is to establish the Pilonidal Disease Centre.
Naila Arebi is Director of St Mark's Hospital Inflammatory Bowel Disease Unit and graduated as a Doctor of Medicine from the University of Malta Medical School. She pursued her post-graduate training in Oxford and London leading to accreditation in Gastroenterology and General Medicine in 2004.
After several months of development and testing, we at St Mark's Academic Institute are delighted to announce the launch of our brand new website.


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Gather Brings Pastry Chef Deanna Scimio on Board
by Andra Zeppelin Dec 20, 2012, 3:07am MST
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Gather, new café and lounge, set to open in the Golden Triangle under the direction of ChoLon chef Lon Symensma, has tapped chef Deanna Scimio for its pastry program.
Gather, housed under the same roof as Galvanize, a Denver-based digital startup hub, will be open from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. and will dish out breakfast, including fresh pastries - scones, muffins, and more- baked in-house by chef Scimio who was most recently serving as an instructor at Cook Street School of Culinary Arts.
A native of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Scimio arrived in Colorado to attend college at the University of Colorado. After a year and a half in school and a job at Alfalfa where she fell in love with making chocolate mousse, Scimio decided to pursue her passion for pastries.
Scimio attended the Culinary School of the Rockies (now renamed Escoffier- School of Culinary Arts), where she later served as an instructor in the pastry program. In the last 16 years, Scimio baked and crafted pastries in many places from Provence, France to Vail, Colorado. In 2006, she joined the Frasca Food and Wine team, leading the pastry program at the acclaimed Boulder restaurant. Scimio also created desserts for Fruition, Masterpiece Deli, and Table 6.
Gather will open its doors on Monday, January 7, 2013 with the coffee program and limited food and will launch its full menu on January 14.
· ChoLon Chef Lon Symensma to Open Gather, a New Cafe [EDen]
Deanna Scimio[Photo: Frasca Food and Wine]
1062 Delaware Street, Denver, CO 80204 303 823 4172
ChoLon
1555 Blake Street, , CO 80202 (303) 353-5223 Visit Website
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Our mission at YellowDot is to transform your life through unique mobile products; outstanding service and our passion to bring the latest innovation to you. Discover the best mobile games, get access to Africa's largest video portal and so much more.
We have a wonderful opportunity for a Devotional Portal Manager based in Nigeria. The ideal candidate will build and preserve trusting relationships with our Devotional Portal Content providers and Religious Bodies. We will rely on you to outperform our competition and maintain our company focus on driving our Religious services.
To succeed in the role, you should be an excellent communicator, able to work with our Account Managers and campaign teams ad build rapport with customers. We expect you to be a strategic thinker with an analytical mind and strong problem solving skills. Ultimately you will maintain strong relationships with Churches and other Religious bodies to drive our Devotional Portal growth.
We are looking for a candidate from Nigeria. Please ensure your CV is emailed with your laters / last payslip to michelle@yellowdotafrica.com. If you have not heard from us within three weeks, please note that your application was not successful.


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Drama Desk Award
2002 Outstanding Director of a Musical Oklahoma! Nominee
1999 Outstanding Director of a Play Not About Nightingales Winner
1995 Outstanding Director of a Musical Sunset Boulevard Nominee
1983 Outstanding Director of a Play All's Well That Ends Well Winner
Outer Critics Circle
1999 Outstanding Director of a Play Not About Nightingales Nominee
1987 Outstanding Director Les Misérables Winner
2002 Best Direction of a Musical Oklahoma! Nominee
1999 Best Direction of a Play Not About Nightingales Nominee
1995 Best Direction of a Musical Sunset Boulevard Nominee
1990 Best Direction of a Musical Aspects of Love Nominee
1987 Best Direction of a Musical Les Misérables Winner
1987 Best Direction of a Musical Starlight Express Nominee
1983 Best Direction of a Musical Cats Winner
1983 Best Direction of a Play All's Well That Ends Well Nominee
1982 Best Direction of a Play The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby Winner
48 PhotosA Little Night Music Opening Night
Trevor Nunn and Suzanne Bertish


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Australia's Westpac to refund 200,000 customers for missed benefits
Westpac Bank CEO Brian Hartzer listens to a question from the Australian government's Economics Committee at Parliament House in Canberra, Australia, October 11, 2017. AAP/Lukas Coch/via REUTERS
(Reuters) - Australia's Westpac Banking Corp (WBC.AX) said on Thursday it will pay refunds to about 200,000 customers who should have received cash benefits, as the country's lenders seek to ease concerns about their governance after a series of scandals.
Westpac said it would pay the customers about A$65 million ($51 million) in total, resulting in an after-tax charge of A$45 million ($35.3 million).
The customers were supposed to receive cash payments for holding multiple "packaged" accounts since 2010 but did not get the money, Australia's No. 2 lender said.
"Some customers did not receive discounts on ancillary products such as home and contents insurance and term deposits," Westpac said in a statement issued to the Australian Securities Exchange.
"The packages have since been simplified and all benefits are now automated."
The government has increased scrutiny of the banks after a number of scandals shook public confidence in the sector, including alleged breaches of money-laundering laws by the Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA.AX).
But Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull has rejected opposition calls for a powerful judicial enquiry into the financial sector, saying existing laws and self-regulation are enough to improve the banks' governance standards.
Westpac shares closed up 0.5 percent on Thursday, in a flat overall market.
Reporting by Rushil Dutta in BENGALURU; Editing by Byron Kaye and Stephen Coates


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Eat like LeBron James
By Izak Tareb, Jan 30, 2019
LeBron James has been destroying the NBA for over a decade and has been the league's MVP four times already. There is no question that King James has put in the time in the gym, and on the practice court, but is there a secret behind his success? To keep in top shape James follows his own unique eating regime, and now you can eat like the three-time NBA champion.
16 seasons strong
James is 33 but remains the main man on the court. A lot of the credit for that goes to his workout regime, but a huge part of staying healthy is about the right diet. James makes sure he eats the right foods at the right time, but he isn't afraid to cut loose during the offseason. One of his favorite breakfasts of all time is Fruity Pebbles, but he only saves that for special occasions. James loves the colorful cereal so much he even has a range of sneakers designed in his name dedicated to them.
The serious stuff
When he's in training James stay away from sugary treats, getting his sweetness from naturally sweet foods like fruit smoothies instead. James believes that sugar slows down his recovery time between games. He is especially keen to stay off the sugar in the postseason. James says whoever recovers the fastest during that period puts themselves in a position to be successful.
His meals will typically involve lean meats and some carbs to get him through the grueling schedule. Chicken is a favorite of James', and he often has green beans with salad on the side. To stay eating well without loading up on carbs James substitutes pasta for fruit to go alongside his grilled chicken.
How he unwinds
It isn't all about sticking to a rigid diet for King James and when he isn't playing he is definitely eating! The Lakers star loves lobster, and if he isn't eating it with steak then he's throwing it in salad while on vacation. James has a sweet tooth, and when he's not getting enough of his favorite Fruity Pebbles, he goes big on dessert. The NBA star compared himself to swimming icon Michael Phelps after admitting he loves nothing more than chowing down on a pizza.
He did say that as much as he loves them, he has to wait until after he's played a game before he treats himself to one. One of his biggest loves is a bottle of wine, or two, and he often shares what he's drinking with his social media followers. James earns a lot of money thanks to his huge salary, and he puts some of those millions to good use. He has been known to spend over $500 per bottle while enjoying a drink or two.
LeBron James is one of the best players to ever star in the NBA, and he has been at the top for 16 years. While some of his eating habits might not be what you expect from an elite athlete, clearly they work well for him as his three NBA titles show.