A concerned focus group is an effective and well-proven technique that is very frequently used by the different corporate companies for the major purpose of market research, thus enabling them to know the various viable opinions and the major perspectives of target audiences in regards to the various products, services and the concepts as well. A concerned focus group majorly comprises of a stipulated number of the people, usually around six to twelve, who have to honestly express all their thoughts and the true attitudes regarding the concerned products or ideas in an open, descriptive way to the surveyors. The concerned group members are literally allowed to thoroughly discuss among themselves, all their thoughts and the ideas if they want before the process of expressing them. This very effectively helps them form better and more confident opinions about the various concerned products and services.
A well organised ethnic group is ideally formed when the people identify with each other in respect of their cultural, historical, and social along with their religious backgrounds. The concerned group members are usually connected on the basis of their concerned homeland, their traditional cuisines, native languages, way of dressing, etc. that they also share with each other. An ethnic research is a very well-proven marketing initiative or method that ideally aims at getting a regular insight into the proper mindset, the various opinions and the preferences of the people belonging to the same social, financial, cultural and the geographical background regarding the various kinds of the brands, the different kinds of the products, ideas and also majorly the innovative concepts.
It literally helps in understanding of the various needs, the different expectations and various preferences of the people belonging to the particular geographical locations and the social classes.
It considerably helps the various marketing researchers to completely understand the various ideas and the concepts that would be better accepted by a particular class of the people. Hence, it considerably helps the various companies to rightly analyze the overall level of the acceptance for a particular product or service even before they are formally launched in the market.
Each of the company has its own unique and relevant logo, which very ideally marks their overall uniqueness. The ethnic research enables the marketers to know the various symbols, slogans or the concepts which a particular group relates to. It very ideally provides them a great chance to modify the various symbols or the slogans which are ideally associated with all their products in accordance with the various preferences of their various segments of TGs.
Any type of the major focus group is very ideally researched and is completely managed and hosted by a leader or moderator, who is solely responsible for asking of the different questions to the various group members regarding the various particular products and the services, in order to get a overall clear idea on all their views and the thoughts. The ethnic moderators are completely responsible for the proper conducting and the overall analyzing of the focus group researches with the ethnic groups that primarily involves the people who are sharing the same cultural, social and the historical background, the same regional language, similar kind of the physical appearance etc.
The wonderful theory of the well-proven qualitative market research is ideally based on the various well-researched scientific methods. The overall research is the extensive analysis of the overall scientific investigation that rightly consists of the certain characteristics that readily helps to find the right answers to the various questions by a collection of the various evidences which are rightly involved in the entire procedure. It is indeed one of the very effective ways for obtaining the right and perfect information on the various cultural values, consumer behaviours, opinions and the social ambiance of the specific population.
The overall function of the market research is done on the basis for the various product dealers in order to learn about the strength of the particular business. A good investigation very rightly provides the perfect answers to many of the business related questions and that rightly helps in order to understand the behaviour of the customers. The overall qualitative method is being considered to be a very flexible medium for the proper conducting of the study. As the relationship between the participant and the researcher is less formal in this particular method, the various possibilities of deriving the real results get even much higher.
The overall qualitative analysis rightly includes the various observations of the various participants, the focus group surveys, in-depth interviews, ethnography for the proper obtaining of a particular data. The overall qualitative methodology has some of the great advantages that makes it a most desired research strategy for most of the business houses all over the globe and also yields very favourable results after conducting the same process.
• The biggest benefit is that the overall research can be ideally completed faster as compared to the different quantitative methodologies as it rightly requires fewer participants in order to gather the various specific data on the concerned product. Even the various techniques which are involved in the particular process rightly make use of the various friendly methods in order to proceed with the particular study that is being conducted.
• The overall use of the various open-ended questions particularly offers a liberty to the different participants in order to answer the question which is asked by the concerned researcher in their own words. The overall freedom of the speech is one of the biggest factors that encourage the people to be a part of the overall qualitative research. The open-ended can literally derive the various responses that are completely meaningful and are in the right favor of the concerned cultural background of the respective participant.
• Any of the major and functional qualitative marketing research company ideally offers a very attractive monetary incentive to all the people who are involved in their study. It rightly attracts the higher number of the different people in the overall process of the study.
• It also rightly allows the various researchers with the desired freedom in order to explore the various responses to the different questions like how to or why a certain thing occurs which is directly or indirectly related to the concerned product or service. The various researchers can well understand the right reason for the massive decrease or increase in the demand of the concerned product and why any of the particular customers is switched to a different brand.
The vast concept of marketing is the strategic process of rightly and effectively communicating the overall value of a particular product or a service to the universe of the target and prospective customers, for the sole purpose of successfully selling that particular product or service in a convenient way.
If seen from a societal point of view, the overall vast concept of marketing is the effective link which is between a particular society's material requirements and its various economic patterns of the response. The overall concept of the marketing ideally satisfies all these particular needs and wants the through exchange of the various processes and also in the building of the long term relationships. The strategic process of marketing can be well looked at as an organizational function and a set of the effective processes for the purpose of creating, very fruitfully delivering and also communicating value to the large universe of the customers, and then managing the amicable customer relationships in the various ways that also rightly benefit the organization and its numerous shareholders. The process of marketing is the strategic mix of science and art of choosing the target markets through the careful market analysis and also for the process of market segmentation, as well as the proper understanding of the consumer buying behaviour and also providing the absolutely superior customer value.
There are indeed six competing concepts that exist in the present times and under which the various organizations can really choose in order to operate their business. The citation which is needed in the concerned production concept, the various product concept, the overall selling concept, the strategic marketing concept, the completely societal marketing concept and the very holistic marketing concept of a concerned. The different components of the overall holistic marketing are the relationship marketing, the process of internal marketing, the integrated marketing, and the socially responsive marketing which all have their own significances. The various set of the fruitful engagements which are very much necessary for the overall successful marketing management includes the capturing of the various marketing insights, connecting with the several prospective customers, the right way of building some really strong and impactful brands, shaping all the important market offerings, also delivering and the right way of communicating the right value, creating some long-term growth, and also right way of developing the various marketing strategies and the required business plans.


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text:
Q: javascript: how to access static properties I want to access a static property using an instance. Something like this
function User(){
    console.log('Constructor: property1=' + this.constructor.property1) ;
}
User.prototype = {
    test: function() {
        console.log('test: property1=' + this.constructor.property1) ;
    }
}
User.property1 = 10 ;   // STATIC PROPERTY

var inst = new User() ;
inst.test() ;

Here is the same code in a jsfiddle
In my situation I don't know which class the instance belongs to, so I tried to access the static property using the instance 'constructor' property, without success :(
Is this possible ?

A:
so I tried to access the static property using the instance 'constructor' property

That's the problem, your instances don't have a constructor property - you've overwritten the whole .prototype object and its default properties. Instead, use
User.prototype.test = function() {
    console.log('test: property1=' + this.constructor.property1) ;
};

And you also might just use User.property1 instead of the detour via this.constructor. Also you can't ensure that all instances on which you might want to call this method will have their constructor property pointing to User - so better access it directly and explicitly.

A: function getObjectClass(obj) {
    if (obj && obj.constructor && obj.constructor.toString) {
        var arr = obj.constructor.toString().match(
            /function\s*(\w+)/);

        if (arr && arr.length == 2) {
            return arr[1];
        }
    }

    return undefined;
}

function User(){
     console.log('Constructor: property1=' + this.constructor.property1) ;
 }

User.property1 = 10 ;

var inst = new User() ;

alert(getObjectClass(inst));

http://jsfiddle.net/FK9VJ/2/

A: Perhaps you may have a look at: http://jsfiddle.net/etm2d/
User.prototype = {
test: function() {
    console.log('test: property1=' + this.constructor.property1) ;
    }
}

seems to be problematic, although i haven't yet figured out why.

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaStackExchange


New York was not the first state in the US to tackle the regulatory reforms that distributed energy resources (DERs), renewable energy (such as solar and wind), and other new technologies have catalyzed for traditional utility regulations and business models. Hawaii and California are just two of the states that have already undertaken many of the major reforms necessary to accommodate them on the grid, driven by the rapid adoption of these technologies.
Rather than dealing with each individual issue separately, Governor Andrew Cuomo, the New York Public Service Commission (PSC), and the New York Department of Public Service (DPS or Staff) have undertaken the herculean task of considering the many different threads of the Utility of the Future as part of one overarching initiative, "Reforming the Energy Vision" (REV). This rather holistic approach to regulatory reform has not been without growing pains and skepticism for being overly ambitious and politically fraught.


Rated 1 out of 5 by Mimsey from No better than regular paddle Thought this would solve a number of woes, instead, made matters worse. As it beats, the butter you try to cream, or batter you mix ends up "climbing" higher up the wall of the bowl, thus creating even greater need to scrape it down! It doesn't get to the batter at the deepest point of the bowl either! I tried both paddles, same recipe, the original paddle is better, and doesn't fling batter out of the bowl like this one did, I figure because the batter doesn't climb as high. I returned it! Go back to the drawing board KA.
Rated 5 out of 5 by Leeann from Please make an 8 quart!!!! I am giving this 5 stars because I LOVE it in my 5 quart. I came here to see if there was one available for the 8 quart. No dice. Please make an 8 quart option!!!
Rated 4 out of 5 by lizann1029 from Please Make One for My 8 qt. Mixer !!! My Commercial 8 qt. machine can't even cream butter with the regular paddle that came with it. I've tried adjusting the screw too many times with no improvement. Now I just pull out my old 3.5 qt. mixer to do the job. Maybe the flex edge beater would help me get the job done without having to use both mixers.
Rated 4 out of 5 by tsmith67 from Flex Edge Beater works just fine however... I rec'd this as a holiday gift, from husband, for my Professional 6QT Lift-bowl stand mixer. Just used for the 1st time this morning and it works fine however, would be a 5-star if it had the flex-edge on both sides.


text:
Taylor C. Shaw
The Charlotte Observer, The News & Observer and The Herald-Sun launched a conversation between readers and important thought leaders throughout North Carolina — The NC Influencers series. I worked across newsrooms to listen to audience questions, design and implement social media promotion plans for the series. We used Hearken's public-powered model to identify topics that resonated with our audience. (2018)
The digital team at KSHB-TV produced Taste & See KC, a series of custom videos for Facebook. Each video was produced with the consumer in mind: They were written in a conversational way, could be viewed with or without sound and ran between 45 seconds to a minute. Taste & See KC started off as a way for us to increase engagement on Facebook and has growing into a multi-platform experience. Additionally to the videos being posted on Facebook, we created a web page and worked with television producers to draw viewers to the site to watch videos in the series. (2017)
Poynter Women in Digital Leadership, 2017
Innocence isn't enough to free wrongfully imprisoned (KSHB-TV, July 2017)
Grandmother of tortured Kansas City, Kansas boy wants records unsealed (KSHB-TV, March 2017)
Work for home? Step out of your pajamas and find a coworking space to up your professional game (KSHB-TV, January 2016)
Fans fight for 'Battle at Bristol' Tickets (October 2017, WATE-TV)
Hey Vols! Find yourself in this panoramic image at #CheckerNeyland (October 2015, WATE-TV)
Vols fan makes iconic Neyland Stadium out of sand (September 2015, WATE-TV)
Survey: Tennessee top state for barbecue (May 2015, WATE-TV)
International Biscuit Festival (June 2015, WATE-TV)
Videos: The story behind the 'Years' project (Investigative Reporting Workshop, April 2014)
The 41 Action News team won the Missouri Broadcasters Association award for Best Local Website in 2016.
Missouri Broadcasters Association, 2016
Award for best website for a large TV station for KSHB.com
Tennessee Associated Press, 2015
Second place award for best website, WATE.com
Regional Edward R. Murrow Award, 2015
Award for best website, WATE.com
Interviews/Press
Local Edition: Here's what we've figured out about the future of local news (so far)
NABJ Students: Online Digital Movement (July 2017)
Poynter Local Edition: 'Newsrooms cannot do this alone' (July 2017)
The NABJ Multimedia Short Course at NC A&T State University is an intensive journalism workshop for college journalists.
Meet the 2017 Leadership Academy for Women in Digital Media (January 2017)
Check Out These Flawless Beyoncé, Adele and Rihanna Halloween Costumes (Time.com, November 2016)
Announcing ONA15 CNN Diversity Fellows (September 2015)
Featured in the "Peace Bulletin," a monthly magazine for faculty, staff and alum of Peace College (Fall 2013)
Featured in Herbert Lowe's Telling Stories One Tale at a Time (April 2012)
ONA Local Summit, Creating online communities to inform local storytelling (June 2018)
Since 2018, I served as lead digital and social media instructor for the National Association of Black Journalists Multimedia Short Course at N.C. A&T State University. I mentored college journalists in the areas of multimedia storytelling, online news production and social media best practices.
As a participant of the Poynter Leadership Academy for Women in Digital Media, I now hold weekly office hours.

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


text:
Items where Author is "Swann, C"
Swann, C and Piggott, D and Schweickle, M and Vella, S (2018) A Review of Scientific Progress in Flow in Sport and Exercise: Normal Science, Crisis, and a Progressive Shift. Journal of Applied Sport Psychology, 30 (3). pp. 249-271. ISSN 1041-3200 DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/10413200.2018.1443525
Swann, C and Keegan, R and Crust, L and Piggott, D (2016) Psychological states underlying excellent performance in professional golfers: "Letting it happen" vs. "making it happen". Psychology of Sport and Exercise, 23. 101 - 113. ISSN 1469-0292 DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.psychsport.2015.10.008
Swann, C and Piggott, D and Crust, L and Keegan, R and Hemmings, B (2015) Exploring the interactions underlying flow states: A connecting analysis of flow occurrence in European Tour golfers. Psychology of Sport and Exercise, 16 (P3). 60 - 69. ISSN 1469-0292 DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.psychsport.2014.09.007
Swann, C and Moran, A and Piggott, D (2015) Defining elite athletes: Issues in the study of expert performance in sport psychology. Psychology of Sport and Exercise, 16 (P1). 3 - 14. ISSN 1469-0292 DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.psychsport.2014.07.004
Swann, C and Crust, L and Keegan, R and Piggott, D and Hemmings, B (2015) An inductive exploration into the flow experiences of European Tour golfers. Qualitiative Research in Sport, Exercise and Health, 7 (2). 210 - 234. ISSN 2159-676X DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/2159676X.2014.926969
Swann, C and Keegan, RJ and Piggott, D and Crust, L (2012) A systematic review of the experience, occurrence, and controllability of flow states in elite sport. Psychology of Sport and Exercise, 13 (6). 807 - 819. ISSN 1469-0292 DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.psychsport.2012.05.006
Lee, C and Keegan, R and Piggott, D and Swann, C (2011) Walking the walk: A phenomenological study of long distance walking. Journal of Applied Sport Psychology, 23 (3). 243 - 262. ISSN 1041-3200 DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/10413200.2010.548848


Before registering, make your hotel reservation with the Hilton Waikiki Beach. Conference attendees will save $200 by entering their confirmation number from the Hilton Waikiki Beach at the start of the registration process. You will need your valid hotel confirmation number to claim this discount during registration.
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text:
Evolution of a Reader
Andi Diehn July 19, 2010 | 9 books mentioned 16 6 min read
I envy the way my oldest son reads, stretched out on the living room couch, all of a sudden this year taking up most of three cushions. Watch his face: his lips move, his eyebrows raise and lower in drastic measures, he smiles, winces, gapes and falls still all in a mere breath.
He practices the cliché – he devours books. But, even better, the books devour him.
I used to be the same way. When I was about ten a pen pal came to visit from all the way across the country and I didn't notice her for a few days after discovering a copy of Madeleine L'Engle's Meet the Austins in her suitcase.
"Want to go swimming?" she would ask. "Want to ride bikes? Want to watch TV?"
No. I was reading. I was busy becoming an Austin. There were four kids in that family and in my family there was only me, but for the duration of the book and all subsequent readings, I owned those brothers and sisters. I had to make sure Vicki recovered from her fall off her bike, that Maggie didn't get Suzie into too much trouble, that nobody froze during the ice storm. A beloved pen pal paled in comparison.
That's what reading used to feel like: changing into something better, or at least different, for a short time. Becoming the characters. Changing forever. Emily of New Moon, Ramona Cleary, any of Lois Duncan's savvy heroines, sad Davey from Tiger Eyes, clever kids from Paula Danziger – the list is long. I wasn't picky.
I'm not one of those creative types who has dark, damp memories of teenage loneliness and long-lasting existential horror, though I have tried at different times to cultivate that image. I was pretty happy. I had friends. I had a horse, a job I loved, parents who were wise enough to let me go most of the time. And I had books, though not quite in the same way I had them in my first decade. Camus and Shakespeare often jostled elbows in my backpack, they also shared space with Christopher Pike and whoever it was wrote the Sweet Valley High series – educational reading. I was a busy kid; I had only a few empty afternoons waiting like warm pools to slide into with a book. I read between the cracks of my daily life and didn't mind, didn't notice.
College was where I discovered other people liked books, too. I never got around to sniffing out the sororities, but within the first few weeks of my first semester I became an ardent member of the English Club. People in the English Club read aloud by candlelight and sipped red wine and walked to town to hear Martin Espada and Kurt Vonnegut. In that cramped, dusty office on the second floor of Bartlett Hall I was introduced to e.e.cummings (I know! So late!), James Merrill and Philip Roth in the form of Portnoy's Complaint.
Who proved to be useful during my sophomore year when I had time to kill while visiting my boyfriend in Atlanta. Portnoy was a keen distraction from curious thoughts about the wineglasses I found on a high shelf in my boyfriend's kitchen, suspicions about a certain girl he drove home from campus nearly every day, sinking alarm at his obvious comfort in her apartment when we went to visit. Portnoy kept me oddly sane during a tumultuous three-week visit. By the time I boarded a plane heading back to the frozen north, the book was a battered companion after having been read a few dozen times. No human friend could have withstood my needy attentions like that.
Reading as self-defense – a technique I've used often. Whenever I travel, I bring a familiar book to keep invasive home sickness at bay. A death in the family? I escape grieving guests to read upstairs in my bed. Marital eruptions? When the dust settles I can be found behind a book. Better than drugs or alcohol for numbing the occasional pain of daily life.
But the way I read in college was different from the way I read as a child. I read from afar. I noticed technique, I could sift through the narrative and explain why a book worked. I loved Roth, Garcia Marquez, Ford and O'Brien, but they were never able to maintain the spell that L'Engle could cast over the whole of me. Not that L'Engle is a better writer. But I was a different reader.
Graduate school was where I met writers and read their books and realized that real people wrote the books I loved. Not that I thought books arrived from some celestial source, but I'd never had a conversation with a writer whose name appeared on a book jacket or two. Before this, my wish to be a writer had shared characteristics with my wish to be a ballerina. Never mind I hadn't had a dance class since I was three. But Francois Camoin, Abby Frucht, Victoria Redel – they had written books, and they were sitting across the lunch table from me.
Knowing the authors did nothing to decrease the distance I felt from the books I held in my hands. Instead, as I learned better how to decipher the coded technique in any text, that highway between me and the book grew longer. As I became a better writer, I became a more distant reader.
When my first child was born I prepared by reading Carol Shields' Unless. Other expectant moms read thick how-to manuals. I dove headfirst into a story about a mother who acutely misses her daughter, about a daughter who confronts a harshness that alters the way she enters the world. I credit the book for getting me through 24 hours of hard labor. Not towards the end when there were so many people with me. But in the beginning of birth pains, at home while my husband snored in the other room, I escaped the so-far minimal disruption by kneeling on the floor and hovering over the book, rocking my body back and forth. Pain in my belly, pain in the book.
Babies arrive and yes, you might spend a bizarre amount of time watching them sleep, but you also might get a tiny bit bored and long for something normal to do. Like finish one of your favorite books. With my second baby I read Paula Fox's first memoir, Borrowed Finery, and with my third – well, don't tell him, but I can't remember. There were two other children who still needed my reassurance and advice, and brains can be foggy after giving birth. I know I read something, though. Perhaps it was self-defense again; perhaps I look to books to protect me from life's ultimate highs and lows; maybe I am addicted to the parallel highs and lows books have to offer. I see the world through book-colored glasses.
Now I am a professional reader. Reviewing books is one of several profit-driven jobs I do in between the tasks related to the care of three little boys and a house and a husband and a plethora of chickens. And reviewing has perhaps changed the way I read more than any other life shift. I read faster. I could, if I weren't so inconveniently honest, write a comprehensive and accurate review of most of the (bad) books after only 20 pages. But I keep going. I read with an ear open to possible quotes, I look for mistakes, patterns of textual mayhem, suggestions on how to improve the next book. Some days, reading all these bad books is enough to make me turn to television.
But there are good things about bad books. I read over my own fiction with an ear bent precisely toward what can go wrong. I read like a reader instead of a writer.
When I find myself audience to a good review book the sensation is akin to that felt while watching my middle boy learn to ride his bike. With fewer moments of sheer fear. I slow down, I bite my tongue to keep from cheering out loud, and I type very, very fast after I put the book down. I swoon over these books – The Dark Side of Love, Last Night in Montreal, The Cold Earth. And sometimes, even when the youngest son shrieks for cookies and the oldest laments the lack of toilet paper in the downstairs bathroom and the middle child begs loudly for a new bike, I don't quite hear them. I have been devoured.
Am I a happier reader now than I was when I was eight? Is today's generation happier than our cavemen ancestors? Evolution both solves problems and creates new ones; as plenty of recent books explain: happiness is relative. I still love to read. Reading might be sweeter now that I fall in love with fewer books. And sometimes knowing why I love a certain book is a sweetness in itself.
On my way to bed these days I pass my oldest boy still awake, eyes roaming the page in ever-widening sweeps. He's tired. "But I can't stop reading," he whispers.
[Image credit: Aurore D]
Andi Diehn lives with her husband, three children, a bevy of farm animals and too many books in rural New Hampshire. She has an M.F.A. from Vermont College and contributes regular articles and reviews to several publications; she has been "almost finished" with a novel for three years. Stop by at andidiehn.com or visit her shared blog.
Is Experience Overrated? One Writer's Checkered Résumé
Bill Morris October 27, 2015 | 9 books mentioned 10 6 min read
If I wanted to become a novelist, according to Flannery O'Connor, I didn't need to wander the world harvesting experiences. I needed to contemplate experience and then write about it.
Bill Morris | 9 books mentioned 10 6 min read
Their Lives Go On Until They Don't: The Trouble with Refugee Novels
Robert Rubsam January 28, 2019 | 9 books mentioned 8 min read
If art is in one sense the processing of reality, how can an artist hope to process that which, in all its horror and incoherence, resists interpretation?
Robert Rubsam | 9 books mentioned 8 min read
Nobody Hearts L.A.: A Personal Los Angeles Canon
Colin Marshall September 12, 2011 | 9 books mentioned 10 10 min read
1. A new, personal Los Angeles canon
You Millions habitués presumably prepare for life's big events the same way I do: by gorging yourselves on novels to do with those events, tenuously to do those events, and, well… beyond. Readying myself for a move to Los Angeles, I naturally turned to literature, but I decided to avoid the region's richest, oldest, most beloved literary currents: its unflinching examinations of Old Hollywood, its hardscrabble outsider odysseys toward the kingdom of celebrity, its hard-boiled tales of murderous intrigue and complex deceit beneath the palm trees. Those novels became iconic for a reason, but I had to ask: given Los Angeles' practically unfathomable size and diversity, what other kinds of literature does it offer?
So I asked all the readers I could for their recommendations of "alternative," "adventurous," "unusual," "non-canonical," or just "weird" Los Angeles novels, keeping the question purposefully vague enough to ensure a wide variety of responses. These five books, mentioned by readers based in the city and elsewhere as well as by readers for the city and against it, "clicked" together in my mind to form the beginnings of a new, personal, Los Angeles canon.
2. Faltering connections and free-floaters
Despite a shot of fresh currency from Tom Ford's film, Christopher Isherwood's A Single Man still tends to keep its distance from the usual roundups of Los Angeles novels, thanks to, what, the expat author's still thoroughgoing Englishness? The novel's proud spot in the canon of modern gay literature? But don't those very qualities make it just the novel-of-place to read? Seeing Los Angeles through a set of cultural and/or literary sensibilities unrelated to it allows Isherwood to approach and observe more obliquely — and thus much more interestingly.
Isherwood sets the story where and when he wrote it: early-sixties Los Angeles, where he taught at Los Angeles State College and his protagonist George teaches at the fictional San Tomas State College. Just as Isherwood drove across town to this inland school from his coastal Santa Monica home, George makes his similar highway commute with the Utopian zeal of someone raised on European roads. George, in the euphemistic parlance of his time, "prefers the company of men," and has lost Jim, the one man he especially prefers, a car wreck in distant Ohio having claimed him before the book even begins.
Covering one day of George's post-Jim existence — for mere existence it seems to have become — the novel finds him laboring under a burden of secrecy that, at least back then, still improved upon the onerous social conditions of most of the rest of the U.S. and much of Europe. Having let all but his closest friends believe Jim simply moved back to his parents' house and feeling detached both romantically and psychologically, George criss-crosses the city as he pleases: lecturing on Aldous Huxley, arguing with colleagues, visiting the moribund woman who once attempted to steal Jim, spontaneously making an off-routine gym visit, dining with and rebuffing the boozy advances of a lady friend, and darting off to a favorite bar in the middle of the night where he runs into (and eventually goes skinny-dipping with) one of his particularly enigmatic students. After all this, George may or may not die.
George also may or may not exemplify the usual generalizations about Los Angeles life. Everyone there has severed their actual roots, one generalization says, and that certainly holds true for George's best friend (another Brit), a pontificating fellow professor (another Brit), and several of his students. Everyone there encloses themselves in personal bubbles, another generalization says, only submitting to meaningful interaction when absolutely necessary. Tooling around the freeways between faltering connections with other free-floaters, George would seem to validate that charge, but Isherwood writes his one-on-one collisions of consciousness — be they with sycophant, confidant, former enemy, or current irritant — so richly that none of the Single Man's encounters with the loners who surround him could come off as so simple as an indictment.
3. The neighborhood allotted him
The title of Marc Norman's Bike Riding in Los Angeles reminds me that, lacking anything like the money for a car, I'll be doing just that. Luckily, Los Angeles proves shockingly bikeable, given the stereotypes about the local hatred even of walking. The bikeability increases when you roll your wheels onto the city's Metro trains, but those subway and light rail lines only began to open in 1990. Norman, writing this novel in the early seventies, wouldn't have enjoyed the option; bike riding in Los Angeles, for him, meant bike riding in Los Angeles.
Nor, then, does the Bike Rider enjoy the Metro option; Norman's exuberantly cycling, novel-writing protagonist heads up a cast of slightly cartoonish characters with severely cartoonish names: the Drag Cop, Derby, Flon, Marshal T — — — —, Sunny, and the Phantom Bike Rider play out their fragmented dramas in a succession of brief chapters with titles like "Street of Worries," "Famous Bicycle Mechanics," "Corn in the City," "In Ventura County," and "In Ventura County (Again)," which blow by in 122 pages that feel like even fewer. Nothing really gets "resolved," per se, but something about Norman's peculiar manner of storytelling — one driven by the psychological relationship you get to a place when you make your way through it in a supposedly unconventional way — makes resolution feel unnecessary.
Bike Riding in Los Angeles takes the basically familiar form of what I too grandly call a Silent Generation fever dream. Its ghostly crowd of players, passing laconically as they do on two wheels in and out of a narrative spiced with little-known regional history — extended interludes on the trials of an ill-equipped 1890 Pasadena Bicycle Club excursion provide extra comic bleakness — draw me back for further re-reading, and each trip through the book casts a brighter light on Norman's engagement not just with questions of how to bike in Los Angeles but of how to grow a novel in the city's supposedly arid literary soil:
All this barrenness bothers him, bothers him a lot, both as a writer and as a child of the neighborhood.
As a writer, selfishly he supposes, but then this is supposed to be his first-novel neighborhood. All the other writers he knows have one — some special corner in a mad city, some great soup from which they ladle all those wonderful laughing Italians and those charming drunk Irish and the candy-store ethics and the strong widows and all the lovers padding around in their socks with their shoes in their hands, all those rich chunks of things that give his friends' novels their tang and truth.
But he can't do that, not with the neighborhood allotted him.
4. It's making you up
No matter how vaguely, broadly, or just plain poorly I described my idea, everyone I hit up for suggestions for my inquest on alternative Los Angeles novels mentioned Steve Erickson. Perhaps the living literary figure most steeped in this particular metropolis, Erickson grew up in Los Angeles, went to UCLA, studied film both formally at school and informally at his mother's theater, has written for a variety of Los Angeles publications, teaches writing at CalArts, and enjoyed the sale of rights to his novel Zeroville to James Franco. He even pops up with some frequency at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books: long white hair, many thoughts to share, and almost implausibly laid-back.
Erickson lives in Los Angeles and works on a porous stretch of the border between fiction and fact. Given the bristling interconnections and complicated exchanges between Erickson's life, his career, his "non-fiction" books, and his novels, it makes no sense to discuss one of his works in isolation. I nonetheless feel compelled to do exactly that. In Amnesiascope, a benignly dystopian, thoroughly sexual, cinematically hazy semi-memoir (so fans say), Erickson crafts a Los Angeles where the worst has already happened: shaken down by a Big One-type earthquake, the city continues chugging along amid the rubble and the breakdown of civic order pretty much as well as always, thank you very much.
The nameless narrator, a film critic working a weekly paper headquartered in the husk of Hollywood Boulevard's Egyptian Theater, develops a fixation on what he calls "the Cinema of Hysteria." This he defines as "movies that make no sense at all — and we understand them completely," and he lives a life that makes just that kind of sense in this Los Angeles ringed by fire, sitting on flooded subway tunnels, and carved up into countless time zones separated by mere minutes. The narrator falls for a bisexual sculptor turned manic by an electric fence's shock; he keeps vigilant watch for "Justine," his Los Angeles' own equivalent of mysteriously flamboyant billboard star Angelyne; he invents a fake film from 1925 and reviews it, only to find all of Los Angeles agreeing that it exists; he writes and shoots an avant-garde piece of television porno called White Whisper; and he somehow winds up stuck in a bathysphere (a kind of round submarine, if you don't keep up on retro-futuristic technology).
You can argue that Amnesiascope's episodic components add up to nothing coherent, just as you can argue that all the disparate urban components of Los Angeles add up to nothing coherent, but neither claim will discourage anyone hooked on the experience of either Erickson's novels or Erickson's city. What, through the eyes and in the words of his protagonist, is the difference between this ruined, fantastical Los Angeles and the real, solidly standing one? Perhaps none exists:
The air is filled with this odd smell the city has taken on recently, not the common smell of sandalwood and hashish but a different smell I can't place, and as we sometimes tend to do we point things out to each other — the sites of famous suicides and old Hollywood love affairs — as though we're tourists, which, like everyone in L.A., we are. Sometimes we even make things up, though for all we know we're not making it up; in L.A. you think you're making something up, but it's making you up.
5. Some say it's too much
Behold the two-page spread preceding the main text of Karen Tei Yamashita's Tropic of Orange, a grid presenting the novel's seven main characters on the horizontal axis and the seven days it covers on the vertical. Its title? "HyperContexts." Might as well say "The Year is 1997" — or 1996, or 1995, take your pick. The book comes out of and saturated with the mid-nineties, the years of explosive media proliferation, the Icarus flight of ethnic studies, the first wide climate-change conversations, the aftermath of the 1992 riots — an era that gives Yamashita more than enough to work with.
Yamashita gets too much to work with, you could say, and indeed, this novel's 280 pages can feel overstuffed. Its group of seven characters all on their own periodically intersecting journeys include a housecleaner guarding a child from an organ harvester; the little boy's father, a hard-bitten Spanophone Chinese refugee; a media-worshipping, fully Americanized Japanese television reporter; a dreadlocked guardian angel of South Central who's never not listening to the radio; a street crazy born in a Japanese internment camp conducting traffic like an orchestra atop an overpass; a Mexican-American reporter beholden to the even then-unfashionable rush of the newspaper scoop; and a leathery wandering eccentric who finds a way to move the Tropic of Cancer. Not the Henry Miller novel — the actual line on the map.
Yamashita doesn't stop there, opting to lay a couple more Hollywood disaster movie plots (Hollywood disaster movies, might I add, being quite popular in the nineties) on top. First an epidemic of poisoned oranges sweeps through the state, then one of those oranges causes freeway crashes producing gridlock so widespread and so sustained that the homeless forge a makeshift city out of the miles of immobile vehicles. Yamashita also works in kidnapping, lucha libre pro wrestling, poetry, and performance art. Is it all just too much? Depends on what you can get into; some say Los Angeles is just too much.
As the nineties fall distant, so does the once-looming, fiery image of Los Angeles as the impetus for the apocalypse, as the site of the apocalypse — as the apocalypse. Yamashita preserves that overheated notion, but she also captures the Los Angeles that became a metropolis when nobody was looking, or, rather, it became a microcosm of the world, too large and varied for most to truly love but made startlingly hardy, adaptable, inventive, and enterprising by its sheer heterogeneity and freedom from the romanticizing strictures of public imagination. Or, in the words of Emi, Tropic of Orange's young broadcaster with no time for the past:
Have you ever seen an I heart L.A. sticker? People here heart everything else — Ensenada, Hussong's, Taos, Alaskan Huskies, Guatemala, even New York. That L.A. is a desert paradise, sunshine, blond people, insipid, romantic is B.S. Nobody hearts L.A.
6. The cortex set in concrete
"I had heard repeatedly that it was impossible to write a Los Angeles novel about all of Los Angeles," said Vanessa Place, author of La Medusa. "This seemed a stupid challenge to me, and I very much like stupid challenges." This newest, heftiest, and most ambitious alternative Los Angeles novel also looks and feels the messiest, but its messiness will only put you off if Los Angeles' messiness does — assuming it even strikes you as messiness in the first place. Sweep your eyes across the city; now sweep them across La Medusa's pages, their sudden format shifts; their words growing, shrinking, nearly bouncing; their wonky indentation and justification; their diagrams of the human brain. Exquisite organic order, or directionless chaos? It's a thin line.
The brain emerges as one of the book's guiding structures. Not so outlandish or unheard-of a notion, it turns out. As science journalist Jonah Lehrer observed:
L.A. is a big urban metaphor for the brain. […] For me, L.A. is simply the cortex set in concrete, lots and lots of concrete. Those freeways are big spindle and pyramidal cells — they connect the disparate areas — and the numerous downtowns (Century City, Santa Monica, the [San Fernando] Valley, etc.) represent the many functional modules inside the mind. Everybody complains that L.A. has no center — there is no there there, to paraphrase Gertrude Stein — but isn't that the point? The brain doesn't have a center either, and it works beautifully.
No wonder nobody "hearts" L.A.; it's the wrong metaphor. Hence the need to quote Lehrer at length rather than Place's authorial voice. Her novel might look like a shattered sheet of glass, but it reads all as a piece; no substantial section lifts out in a sensible way. Best of luck to any who dare to carve a representative sample of Place's storm of prose, ever shifting from "the Hole where the woman's golden belly is peopled grew dark" to "African-American male suffering from Type #1 immune-mediated diabetes mellitus" to "dude don't look smacked, wacked, n'otherwise cracked" to "INT. FEENA'S KITCHEN/LIVING ROOM—MIDCITY."
Place builds a Tropic of Orange-style ensemble, pulling from the pool of all the ages, races, occupations, and nationalities found in Los Angeles — that is to say, from all ages, all races, all occupations, and all nationalities. But you're on your own when keeping track of who's who and who's where; no HyperContexts here. Your guides to Place's neuro-Los Angeles come in forms including a surgeon and the ice cream-vending drug dealer he picks up, a lonely elementary school girl and her blinged-out voodoo-practicing grandmother, an albino trucker and his obese lesbian wife, a hallucinating prostitute, several figures of myth, and the actual bits and pieces of neuroanatomy themselves.
Those who expect to pick up every detail, trace back every reference, and track every narrative thread have, in La Medusa, a frustrating ordeal ahead. I can only recommend submerging yourself in the text — submitting to it — and making quick peace with the inevitability of not grasping everything. If you're like me, some elements, like Place's recurring evocations of the Beverly Hillbillies theme song and personal injury lawyer/bus ad fixture Juan Dominguez will amuse you every time; others, you'll never get a hold on. Bookworm host Michael Silverblatt — quite possibly Los Angeles' greatest reader — said that La Medusa is to Los Angeles as Ulysses is to Dublin. To hope for an airtight understanding of this novel is to hope for a complete understanding of Los Angeles, or of Dublin, or of Ulysses, or of every last process inside the human brain. While we can't call these ultimate understandings unattainable, what makes us so sure they exist to attain?
Image credit: hburrussiii/Flickr
Colin Marshall | 9 books mentioned 10 10 min read
Honey, Would You Read My Book?
Henriette Lazaridis February 2, 2015 | 9 books mentioned 4 6 min read
The transaction is fraught with expectation and fear, hope and anxiety. If it goes badly, the simple offer of pages to read can shake relationships, unsettle marriages, and open wide rifts between partners, lovers, friends.
Henriette Lazaridis | 9 books mentioned 4 6 min read
Tony Krch says:
Wow Andi! Just after reading this short sample I know without a doubt that I'd love to read probably pretty much anything you write. Your writing style kind of tends to grab me right away, which is rather rare for me.
So, what do you have published or about to be published, 'cause I'd love to buy my autographed copy early on.
Hugs, and hugs to Mike. Sounds like y'all are doing great and I don't even have words to describe how happy I am for you! :)
The writer of those Sweet Valley books was Francine Pascal, I think. Or was that just a pen name? There's a bit of story to that, if I remember correctly, but I read a lot of Sweet Valley books growing up. It's interesting what happens when you mature and realize that the people who wrote your beloved books had/have real lives. In my case, I was (and still am) a real fan of Enid Blyton. It was only a few months ago that I learned how negatively many parents and BBC people thought of her writing. As a kid, I didn't care. I was enthralled by her world and her characters. I can't pinpoint the exact difference between reading as a kid and reading now but there really is one. Hopefully, I'll never lose book lust.
J, I think you're right, Francine Pascal. Funny, I knew I could do a google search and come up with her name within half a second while I was writing this piece, but it felt like a more authentic reflection of the process if I left it forgotten. But now I wonder if it's truer to search out every fragment, simply because we can. Because that's the world we now inhabit. And would I have left out the name if she was of greater literary muscle and therefore embarrassing to have forgotten? Hmmm…
Leaving the author forgotten was the right move, I think. Leaves the writer reachably fallible, closer to the reader. Great piece, Andi.
I, too, fell in love with Madeline L'Engle's books. Now my 9 year old son is reading her!
Pamela Caldwell says:
What a lovely piece. Thanks.
Bronwyn says:
Wow Cold Earth and Last Night in Montreal look really good.
I too miss the days before I began blogging and working in publishing – just getting lost in whatever book I really felt like reading, and it being MY own hobby, not to do with a job, or anything.
Hmm… I don't think doing one or the other makes your reflection any less true. Had you chosen to look it up on google, you would still have the same train of thought, right? The only difference being that you now know the author's name, like a piece of your memory jostled back in place. Er… I wonder if I'm making any sense.
I loved the Emily of New Moon and Vicky Austin books. Thoughtful books about thoughtful girls.
Wow, that was just the essay I needed to get through my morning. Good to know that people can review books without sounding like pompous windbags. Thanks much!
Fantastic piece, Andi. Portnoy's Complaint was my first experience with "literary fiction" and I have many fond memories of reading his early works.
Cyndy says:
I was sucked in by the reference to L'Engle, who remains my first favorite author, and sold by the description of passing the torch. I just shut my daughter's light off at 12:30. It's long past her bedtime, but it's summer, and she was alternately reading and waiting for me to ask a question on Twitter of one of HER favorite authors. She got a reply back and probably went to sleep with her nose buried in the book, amazed that the creator of one of those worlds she inhabits for a while took the time to answer her question.
I'm jealous. I miss those days myself.
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Mike Nam says:
Oh the English Club office…I was quite happy when I was given the key. It was a nice place to take a nap when on campus as well, heh.
Oh, Interesting accompanying image at the top as well…I have Sea of Silver Light by Tad Williams, and the author autographed it for me at the old Borders book store that used to be in the World Trade Center mall.
And finally, loved the post!
Wonderful article, Andi! It makes me think about how my reading has evolved as well. I loved Madeline L'Engle and actually just reread A Wrinkle In Time, which has to be one of the most prominent stories about hope and love ever written.
I find lately I'm much more into non-fiction, especially memoirs as real life is so amazing in itself. But I still love a good story.
Keep up the good work, Andi! You're an inspiration.
Eminent Hacks
Matt Seidel January 10, 2014 | 9 books mentioned 2 7 min read
Each age furnishes new material for its own Dunciad, Alexander Pope's great satire in which the world is ruled by the goddess of "Dulness" and the King of Dunces, an "Antichrist of wit." In the poem, an "endless band" of Grub Street scribblers, poets, critics, and booksellers abase themselves in "high heroic games" to prove "who the most in love with dirt excel/Or dark dexterity of groping well." The competitions for these hacks include: an attempt to drown out a braying donkey with their jabbering ("So swells each windpipe; ass intones to ass"); a foot-race whose eventual winner is reenergized after falling into a sewer ("Renew'd by ordure's sympathetic force/ As oil'd with magic juices for the course"); and a dive into the Fleet Ditch, a contest wherein "Who but to sink the deeper, rose the higher."
Pope's "true dunces" display a heroic devotion to abjection that has its own kind of purity, a purity that rivals (even as it parodies) the dedication of a talented writer in thrall to the "reckless consciousness of art" (as Henry James puts it in "The Next Time.") We take for granted the difficulty of ascending to the empyrean heights of genius, but descending into the "majesty of mud" poses its own challenges for those unpure hacks not blessed "with all the might of gravitation." Or to put it in distinctly non-Augustan terms, hackin' ain't easy.
Take Wilton Barnhardt's ruefully comic Lookaway, Lookwaway. Its self-loathing antihero, Gaston Jarvis, is a boorish and once-acclaimed novelist who has stooped to drunkenly dictating a series of historical adventures about Cordelia Florabloom, a Confederate heroine dodging Union perfidies to locate her missing husband. Presiding over a bourbon-fueled, one-man Algonquin Roundtable at an elite Charlotte country club, Gaston gets on his high horse to justify being a hack (incidentally, a word derived from hackney, an "ordinary," and presumably not so high, horse):
You arteeestes ever wonder with whose profits the Germans (who run all of American publishing) pay for your little literary exercises? It takes a Gaston Jarvis or two to pay for your little writing hobby, your linguistic divertissements, to underwrite your little post-divorce, post-modern, post-plot-and-character twaddlings…
But behind Gaston's bluster lies his failure to write his arteeestic masterpiece, a Trollope-like tale of the rise and fall of a family in the New South that was to lay bare the contradiction at the heart of Southern life: "There's something fatal from what the slave trade fostered, a kind of barbarism side by side with civility." Lookaway, Lookaway ends in a pathetic duel between Gaston and his best friend over the "dereliction" that led to the project's abandonment, a spectacular parody of the genteel, chivalrous culture that Bernhard has so spectacularly debunked throughout his novel.
His earlier defense of hackwork notwithstanding, Gaston is ultimately ready to die for his betrayal of his talent and of the conundrum-filled South he so loves. The moral stakes of such a betrayal are clear because Gaston is a successful hack, but what if his conscious turn to schlock produced a masterpiece that troubled the easy distinction between high and low art?
Such is the premise of two studies of the writerly life: Mark Haskell Smith's latest novel, Raw: A Love Story, a satirical journey into the "slaughterhouse of ideas and origination," and Henry James's "The Next Time," a short story about the "age of trash triumphant." Pitched in very different comic registers, each features a hack manqué and considers the morality, and frustrations, of hackwork that transcends its own limitations.
Mark Haskell Smith's dark, priapic satires (Moist, Delicious, Salty, Baked) are marked by a Waugh-like callousness towards the grotesque deaths that result as his plots gather their murderous momentum. The gods of comedy can be as cruel as the gods of tragedy, and satirists like Smith, however anarchic or amoral their works may appear, are ultimately concerned with the inescapable forces of retribution. How a perverse comic justice applies to those who engage in "shitting on the altar of literature" is the subject of Raw, his latest novel presided over by a particularly vengeful "Book Goddess" (one character suspects her of cursing him with impotence).
In Raw, Curtis Berman turns to celebrity ghostwriting after failing to sell his epic, "Malamudesque" novel about the Ethiopian Jewish Diaspora. "Writers have been doing stuff life this for hundreds of years. Kingsley Amis, Larry McMurty, H.P. Lovecraft. There are lots of great writers who have worked ghosting. For chrissakes, Dickens wrote newspaper ads": So does Curtis, who has a tattoo of Beckett's dictum Fail Better "emblazoned in a font called American Typewriter on his right bicep," defend his hackwork from his literary crush and avenging angel, Harriet Post.
Harriet is a high-minded literary critic determined to discover who has ghostwritten the bestselling roman à clef for Sepp Gregory, a vapid reality television star famous for his abs, which he gleefully displays to legions of adoring fans and high-culture radio hosts alike. She decides to expose this "callithump of fraud" by tracking Sepp to California, where the star of Sex Crib is promoting the book he didn't write and dispensing surprisingly deep statements about the nature of reality to fans seeking the secret behind his physique: "Crunches are real. Even on TV."
The book in question, Totally Reality: A Novel, is a commercial and critical success, "a Heart of Darkness for the realty TV generation" written so well that Harriet wonders at one point if Michael Chabon could be the ghostwriter. Totally Reality, we are made to believe, is both dreck and not dreck, "actively accelerating the culture toward the trash heap" even as it is the Great American novel and a work of cultural anthropology in the tradition of Margaret Mead. Referring to his follow-up project, a novelization of another reality star's life, Curtis muses: "Sandy Panties could be an important book."
The descent into hackwork frees Curtis from his sclerotic, self-defeating devotion to the high literary that produces its own kind of dreck. What stains Curtis is not so much the glorification of his new vocational path as his growing preoccupation with the very recognition and material goods his reality-star subjects crave. Flush with cash after signing a new book deal, Curtis considers getting trashed at a bar, as "that's what a lot of writers do when they sell their souls, that's what he imagined Faulkner or Franzen or Bret Easton Ellis would do." Instead, he goes to the Mac Store: "If he was going to produce dross, he'd at least write it on a nice laptop." For reasons I won't disclose here, that purchase will prove to be a fateful decision, reminding all aspiring hacks that the Book Goddess is better appeased with libations than electronics.
Harriet is at risk of angering the Book Goddess as well — especially in one fantasy involving Sepp and a first-edition DeLillo as a sex prop — but this is all part of her liberating embrace of genre fiction and their attendant clichés. She first fancies herself an existential heroine from a Camus novel or as a proto-feminist character out of Charlotte Brontë. But when thrown into Smith's raw comic world, Harriet makes a "mental note to add some genre books to her reading list" and by necessity learns how to pleasurably inhabit different genres: pulp fiction, the western and the erotic novel. The last is particularly important in this "Love Story" since amid the novel's competing realities, Smith locates the most stable truth in the kind of ecstatic sex that makes one forget the distinction between hackwork and high art.
Henry James might blush to be compared to so ribald a writer as Smith, but the Master also profiles (albeit less louchely), an author turning to "gutter-pipes and slop-buckets." In "The Next Time," Ralph Limbert, whose writing is "as fine as the spray of a lawn-irrigator," justifies his new and hopefully better-paid style to his adoring friend: "What is 'success' anyhow? When a book's right it's right — it brings money like potato or bee. Success be hanged! — I want to sell…Of course I've everything to unlearn."
Unlearn it he can't. Limbert would like nothing better than to devote his considerable talent to selling out and achieving an economic, rather than an artistic, success. Alas, he fails, and fails better each time — a feat he manages even without a tattooed reminder to help him. His journalism, which he tries desperately to make "chatty" and "vulgar," always "reeks of the literary." Desperately needing to support a wife and children, he attempts to write popular novels, but each heroic effort to be bad yields a "magnificent mistake," a "grand…collapse," a "hideous…triumph" more radiant and unpopular than the last. (Limbert's sister-in-law, Jane Highmore, is by contrast a successful novelist who yearns to produce a Limbert-like "exquisite failure" and escape just once from the "doom of popularity." She is a figure differently blessed but as comically cursed as Limbert.)
James's tale, melancholy ending aside, justly proclaims its own "excellent comedy." Limbert's repeated "miscarriages" have a certain farcical quality — the narrator, who is even more "splendidly unpopular" than Limbert, must pretend that each new masterpiece is actually rubbish to appease him. And Limbert is not without a Wildean irony toward his plight: "'He wrote to [a literary journal] that such work as he has done is the very worst he can do for the money.'"
But "The Next Time" is more broadly a fable about the laws of talent, one might say the tyranny of talent. There is much talk of "sacrifice" in the story, the notion that the journalistic and novelistic hackwork Limbert does is a betrayal of his genius. However, as the narrator points out, "what was talent but the art of being completely whatever it was that one happened to be? One's things were characteristic or they were nothing." Talent, maddeningly, is precisely that which refuses to be betrayed. This is comforting for Limbert's small group of adoring fans but tragic for the genius himself.
Time and again, Limbert's efforts to betray his talent are sabotaged by "some obscure interference of taste, some obsession of the exquisite" that reveal his genius no matter with what "infernal cunning" he tries to disguise it. A touch of the common and the vulgar, such as Highmore has, comes not through works but "by grace." James confines Limbert to his ruinously high eminence while bestowing true hacks with a kind of election denied to Limbert and, presumably, to James himself, an author T.S. Eliot famously described as having "a mind so fine no idea could violate it."
Ultimately, an ailing Limbert blissfully retreats "into grand indifference" and produces "Derogation," whose title reflects on his career-long, cruelly ironic and ultimately fruitless pursuit of abjection. The fatal effort of producing his final "splendid fragment" grants Limbert, if not grace, then a merciful release from his tyrannical talent, which proves as powerful as Pope's "Dulness" over her legions of pure hacks.
Image Credit: LPW
Matt Seidel | 9 books mentioned 2 7 min read
After the Welfare State: Kathy Acker and the American Health Care System
Andrew Strombeck July 10, 2018 | 9 books mentioned 8 min read
"I sit in chair. I hurt." The scene is shocking and ordinary, disturbing and workaday. It is one of thousands that occurred in New York alone in the 1970s.
Andrew Strombeck | 9 books mentioned 8 min read
The Homeland of Stories: On Lingual and Cultural Identity
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Escaping the Waste Land: On Flannery O'Connor and T.S. Eliot
James McWilliams March 27, 2017 | 9 books mentioned 11 7 min read


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Among gastropods, dimorphism is reported in shell size, radular characteristic, and to a lesser extent in shell shape. The relationship of dimorphic characters of the shell with spawning is scarcely studied in literature. Buccinanops globulosus is an interesting model to study sexual dimorphism in shell shape, because the adults attach their egg capsules to the females' own shells (callus zone). Our hypothesis is that the shell dimorphism is evidenced in the form (size and shape) of callus zones of the females' shells, compared with the males'. In order to test this hypothesis we use a 3D geometric morphometrics (GM) method with several advantages over 2D GM. The relationship between callus shape and size was allometric. During growth, the main callus shape changes are related to the mean size increment, which is more evident in larger females. These callus zones are characteristically slender in males and small females, and more inflated in large females. Our analyses revealed that female shells are different from male ones and those differences are significant on the callus zone where the egg capsules are attached by the female. This finding suggests a relationship of the shell form with spawning. Our findings are not only relevant in terms of the shell dimorphism of the particular spawning substrate area (callus zones) and its reproductive implications, but also provide insights into the evaluation of shell shape variation on areas without type I or II anatomical landmarks in 3D GM.


text:
About JCM
Mycobacteriology and Aerobic Actinomycetes
Identification of Mycobacteria in Solid-Culture Media by Matrix-Assisted Laser Desorption Ionization–Time of Flight Mass Spectrometry
Paul G. Saleeb, Steven K. Drake, Patrick R. Murray, Adrian M. Zelazny
Paul G. Saleeb
Laboratory of Clinical Infectious Diseases, National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, Maryland
Steven K. Drake
Critical Care Medicine Department, Clinical Center, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, Maryland
Patrick R. Murray
Microbiology Service, Department of Laboratory Medicine, Clinical Center, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, Maryland
Adrian M. Zelazny
For correspondence: azelazny@mail.nih.gov
DOI: 10.1128/JCM.02135-10
Matrix-assisted laser desorption ionization–time of flight mass spectrometry (MALDI-TOF MS) has recently been introduced into the clinical microbiology laboratory as a rapid and accurate method to identify bacteria and yeasts. In this paper we describe our work on the use of MALDI-TOF MS for the identification of mycobacterial isolates. We developed a protocol for protein extraction from mycobacteria and utilized it to construct a database containing 42 clinically relevant type and reference strains of mycobacteria. The database was used to identify 104 clinical isolates of mycobacteria. All members of the Mycobacterium tuberculosis complex were identified accurately at the complex level but could not be separated at the species level. All other organisms were identified at the species level, with the exception of one strain of M. kansasii (accurately identified but with a low spectral score) and three pairs of closely related strains: M. abscessus and M. massiliense, M. mucogenicum and M. phocaicum, and M. chimaera and M. intracellulare. These pairs of organisms can currently be identified only by multilocus gene sequence analysis. We conclude that MALDI-TOF MS analysis can be incorporated into the work flow of the microbiology laboratory for rapid and accurate identification of most strains of mycobacteria isolated from solid growth media.
The genus Mycobacterium consists of nearly 150 species, many of which are clinically significant. These organisms cause significant morbidity in humans, including pulmonary infections, skin and soft tissue infections, and disseminated disease. Rapid and accurate diagnosis of mycobacterial infections is of utmost importance due to the fact that inappropriate treatment may lead to drug resistance or unnecessary exposure to drug toxicities. Accurate identification in the microbiology laboratory is challenging because biochemical testing is slow and unable to identify less common species, molecular probes are available for a limited number of species, and gene sequencing is technically cumbersome and relatively expensive.
Matrix-assisted laser desorption ionization–time of flight mass spectrometry (MALDI-TOF MS) is recognized as a powerful tool for the identification of bacteria and yeasts in the clinical laboratory (2, 16, 17, 18, 21). This technique allows identification of organisms on the basis of unique spectral fingerprints produced by extracted proteins (9). The method is relatively simple, rapid, and associated with significantly lower consumable costs than traditional microbiological identification methods (16). Although the MALDI-TOF MicroFlex LT mass spectrometer (Bruker Daltonics Inc., Billerica, MA) and associated software are expensive initially (approximately $200,000), the continuing consumable costs are inexpensive (less than $1 per isolate).
There has been limited work thus far on the use of MALDI-TOF MS for the identification of mycobacteria (5, 6, 10). This paper describes our efforts to develop and validate MALDI-TOF MS for the identification of mycobacterial organisms. In this study we developed a protein extraction protocol specifically designed for mycobacteria, created an identification database of clinically relevant type and reference strains of mycobacteria, and challenged the database with clinical isolates from our institution. We demonstrate that MALDI-TOF MS can be used in the clinical laboratory for rapid, accurate identification of mycobacteria from solid culture media.
Mycobacterial type and reference strains and clinical isolates.The NIH mycobacterial database library was created from type and reference strains obtained from the American Type Culture Collection (ATCC; Manassas, VA), the Culture Collection of the University of Göteborg (CCUG; Göteborg, Sweden), and the Deutsche Sammlung von Mikroorganismen (DSM; Braunschweig, Germany). The library was then challenged with clinical isolates recovered in the NIH Clinical Microbiology Laboratory. Clinical isolates for all mycobacterial species were obtained from patients at the NIH Clinical Center, a research hospital where studies are conducted with patients from diverse regions of the United States and worldwide, with the exception of 9 Mycobacterium tuberculosis strains that were isolated in South Korea as part of an ongoing NIH study. Identification of all clinical isolates was performed by use of the AccuProbe test (Gen-Probe, San Diego, CA) or by sequencing of secA1 (23), 16S rRNA (4, 12), or hsp65 (11) genes. The reference strains and clinical isolates were frozen at −80°C until they were tested. Most strains were thawed at room temperature, subcultured onto Middlebrook 7H11 agar, and incubated at 37°C. M. marinum was incubated at 30°C, M. xenopi was incubated at 42°C, and M. haemophilum was cultured onto sheep blood agar and incubated at 30°C.
Protein extraction protocol.The MALDI-TOF MS protein extraction protocol for mycobacteria was as follows: a disposable 10-μl inoculating loop was used to obtain mycobacterial colonies grown on Middlebrook agar. The organisms were suspended in 500 μl of distilled water in a 1.5-ml screw-cap Eppendorf tube and heated to 95°C for 30 min to kill the mycobacteria. The tube was briefly vortexed, and a plastic micropestle (pellet pestle, 749521-1500; Kimble Chase, Vineland, NJ) was subsequently used to disperse the suspension in the Eppendorf tube for approximately 30 s. The tube was centrifuged in an Eppendorf 5415D centrifuge at 13,000 rpm for 2 min, and the supernatant was completely removed. The pellet was washed with 300 μl of distilled water and centrifuged at 13,000 rpm for 2 min, and the liquid was removed. The pellet was then suspended in 1.2 ml of 70% ethanol, vortexed briefly, and centrifuged at 13,000 rpm for 2 min. The supernatant was decanted, the pellet was briefly spun in the centrifuge, and all residual liquid was completely removed with a pipette. Fifty microliters of 70% formic acid and 100 to 200 μl of 0.1-mm-diameter glass beads (zirconia-silica beads, 36270-62; Cole-Parmer Instrument Co., Vernon Hills, IL) were added to the pellet. The suspension was vortexed for 10 min, 50 μl of 100% acetonitrile was added, and the sample was vortexed for another 10 min. The sample was centrifuged for 2 min at 13,000 rpm, and the supernatant was utilized for analysis by MALDI-TOF MS.
MALDI-TOF mass spectrometry.One microliter of supernatant from each test sample was pipetted onto a spot on the MALDI-TOF steel target plate, and 1 μl of the calibration standard (protein calibration standards I and peptide calibration standards II; Bruker Daltonics Inc., Billerica, MA) was pipetted onto a separate spot. After the samples had dried, 2 μl of the MALDI matrix (a saturated solution of α-cyano-4-hydroxycinnamic acid in 50% acetonitrile and 2.5% trifluoroacetic acid prepared daily) was pipetted onto the samples and calibration standard. A slide warmer (Premiere slide warmer, XH-2002; Daigger, Vernon Hills, IL) heated to 35°C was used to expedite uniform drying of the samples and matrix. The samples and matrix routinely dried within approximately 5 min. Spectra were acquired over a mass/charge (m/z) ratio of 2,000 to 20,000 using a MALDI-TOF MicroFlex LT mass spectrometer (Bruker Daltonics Inc., Billerica, MA) in linear mode and summing 1,000 laser shots over 20 sites on each sample.
Spectral analysis.Criteria established by Bruker Daltonics for construction of the reference database are that each spectrum must contain at least 25 peaks with a resolution greater than 400, of which 20 of the peaks must have a resolution greater than 500. The NIH mycobacterial database was created with spectra meeting these standards, with a minimum of 8 quality spectra per organism required for entry of the mycobacterial strain into the reference database. During this study clinical isolates were run in quadruplicate, and the spectral patterns were matched with those in the NIH and the manufacturer's databases. The BioTyper software (version 2.0.4) assigned scores of 0 to 3, with higher scores indicating a greater probability of correct organism identification. The scoring software is a proprietary algorithm, calculating a logarithmic score on the basis of spectral matching patterns. On the basis of our previous experience with bacterium and yeast identification by MALDI-TOF MS, accurate identification is obtained with scores of 1.8 or greater (17, 18).
Optimization of extraction protocol for mycobacteria.Working with mycobacteria in the open work area of the laboratory poses significant risks to laboratory personnel. To address this, we evaluated a heat-killing protocol. Mycobacterial growth from the surface of an agar plate was collected with a disposable 10-μl loop, transferred to a 1.5-ml Eppendorf tube with 500 μl of distilled water, and heated to 95°C for 30 min. The heated suspension was vortexed, subcultured onto Middlebrook 7H11 agar, incubated, and checked weekly for growth. The entire procedure was performed for 20 different mycobacterial species, including M. tuberculosis. None of the species grew after 6 weeks of incubation, indicating that the extraction protocol could be performed safely in the open laboratory after this heat-killing step.
Initial attempts at protein extraction using the protocol for bacteria and yeasts (18) did not yield adequate spectra for MALDI-TOF MS analysis. Acid-fast staining of the heated samples showed that the mycobacteria had clumped together. Different methods for dispersing the clumps were compared, including repeatedly passing the suspension through a narrow-gauge needle into a syringe, grinding the specimen in a 15-ml conical tube with a tissue grinder, and grinding the specimen in a 1.5-ml Eppendorf tube with a micropestle. Acid-fast staining demonstrated that the micropestle had dispersed the clumps more than the other techniques. In addition, the micropestle was the least cumbersome and the most cost-effective (approximately $0.70 per micropestle).
Despite the successful disruption of clumps with the micropestle, the quality of spectra for several species was still poor and precluded adequate organism identification. It was noted that the problematic isolates (e.g., selected strains of M. abscessus and M. fortuitum) produced smooth colonies on solid growth media. We recognized that mycobacterial colony morphology may be a function of the presence of glycopeptidolipids (GPLs) in the cell wall, as has been shown in the case of the M. avium complex and M. smegmatis (14). We then hypothesized that the extraction reagents were unable to penetrate the GPL-rich cell envelope for adequate protein extraction in these isolates. Several methods for physically breaking up the cell envelopes were considered. We hypothesized that zirconia-silica beads should be able to accomplish this without destroying the proteins needed for accurate identification by MALDI-TOF MS. We compared the quality of the spectra produced by beads of different diameters (0.1 mm, 0.2 mm, and 0.4 to 0.6 mm) for analysis of a smooth strain of M. abscessus and M. fortuitum. Beads were added to the first extraction reagent (70% formic acid) in an Eppendorf tube containing one of these organisms, and the tube was vortexed for 10 min. The best results were obtained with 0.1-mm-diameter beads. After incorporation of the use of the micropestle and silica beads into the mycobacterial protein extraction protocol, we were able to generate reproducible high-quality spectra for all species of mycobacteria that were analyzed.
One issue that arose while the use of silica beads with formic acid for protein extraction was considered was the possibility that heat generated during vortexing may lead to formylation of the proteins and subsequently result in misidentification of the organisms. We addressed this concern by vortexing 10 μl of peptide standards with the beads in 70% formic acid for 10, 20, or 60 min. The negative control consisted of 1 μl of untreated peptide standards plated directly onto the MALDI-TOF steel well. For the positive control, we boiled 10 μl of the standards in 50 μl of formic acid at 55°C for 60 min prior to plating on the target. MALDI-TOF spectra were acquired and analyzed. Compared with the negative control, spectra of the positive control had shifted by multiples of 28 m/z (the mass of a formyl group), indicating that formylation had occurred. No formylation occurred in the samples that were vortexed for 10 or 20 min, and a minimal amount of formylation occurred in the sample that was vortexed for 60 min. Consequently, we concluded that no changes were needed in our 10-min extraction protocol.
Creation of mycobacterial database.Our novel protein extraction protocol allowed us to create our own database of mycobacterial signatures. Forty-two type and reference strains comprising 37 species of mycobacteria were analyzed by MALDI-TOF MS and produced spectra meeting the requirements for incorporation into the NIH mycobacterial database (Table 1). The NIH database contains three species in the M. tuberculosis complex (M. tuberculosis, M. bovis, M. africanum), 24 other species of slowly growing mycobacteria, and 10 species of rapidly growing mycobacteria. The Bruker database (version 3.0.2.0), on the other hand, contains 50 strains of mycobacteria, comprising 18 species. The NIH database is more comprehensive, containing additional clinically relevant species, including M. bolletii, M. haemophilum, M. massiliense, M. scrofulaceum, and M. szulgai. Similar to the Bruker database, our database contains M. avium; however, we were able to incorporate a more complete catalogue of M. avium complex organisms that includes M. chimaera, M. colombiense, M. intracellulare, M. mantenii, and M. marseillense (Table 1). By creating our own database, we have opened the possibility for the future addition of other species of mycobacteria into the database as needs arise. This is of special importance, because the number of species within the genus Mycobacterium is increasing rapidly (19) and clinical laboratories will be challenged to remain abreast of this ever-expanding taxonomy.
Reference strains incorporated into the NIH mycobacterial MALDI-TOF database
Testing the library.One hundred four clinical isolates comprising 17 species of mycobacteria were analyzed by the NIH mycobacteria library (Table 2). Only one isolate, an M. kansasii strain, had a spectral score of <1.8. It was correctly identified but had scores ranging from 1.61 to 1.78. All M. tuberculosis complex isolates attained scores of >2.0 and were unambiguously differentiated from nontuberculous mycobacteria. An example of the spectral patterns obtained for these organisms is shown in Fig. 1. The 26 M. tuberculosis complex organisms tested included 7 isolates of multidrug-resistant (MDR) and extensively drug-resistant (XDR) Beijing and non-Beijing strains of M. tuberculosis from patients in South Korea. The remainder of the isolates were obtained from native and foreign-born patients referred to the NIH Clinical Center, including two strains of M. bovis. Although MALDI-TOF MS accurately classified all isolates as members of M. tuberculosis complex, it was not able to separate them into the individual species. Likewise, three other pairs of closely related organisms could not be distinguished: M. abscessus and M. massiliense, M. mucogenicum and M. phocaicum, and M. chimaera and M. intracellulare.
Clinical isolates identified by MALDI-TOF MS
Expanded view of MALDI spectra representing 3 clinical isolates. (A) M. abscessus (BioTyper score, >2.0); (B) M. kansasii (BioTyper score, >1.8); (C) M. tuberculosis (BioTyper score, >2.0).
Clinical isolates of M. abscessus and M. massiliense, identified in the microbiology laboratory by sequencing of the secA, rpoB, or hsp65 genes, could not be discriminated from each other by MALDI-TOF. This is not surprising because members of the M. abscessus group (i.e., M. abscessus sensu stricto, M. bolletii, and M. massiliense) are closely related phylogenetically and cannot be differentiated readily on the basis of single-gene sequencing (7). Multilocus sequencing, as performed in our laboratory, is necessary for proper identification of these organisms (22).
MALDI-TOF MS was also unable to differentiate M. mucogenicum from M. phocaicum, another set of closely related species of rapidly growing mycobacteria (3). Similar to M. abscessus and M. massiliense, multilocus gene analysis is necessary for accurate differentiation of these two organisms (3). M. mucogenicum and M. phocaicum have similar clinical presentations: both organisms usually cause catheter-related infections (1, 3) and have similar antibiotic susceptibility patterns (1). Thus, there are few, if any, clinical implications in the inability of MALDI-TOF MS to differentiate between these two closely related species.
The third pair of organisms that could not be differentiated by MALDI-TOF MS was M. chimaera and M. intracellulare. These two organisms are closely related, differing by only 1 base pair in their 16S rRNA gene regions (15, 20); however, differentiation is possible on the basis of their nucleotide differences (20 bp) in the 16S to 23S internal transcribed spacer (ITS) region. Thus, the ambiguity encountered when these organisms are identified by MALDI-TOF MS is not surprising. Finally, there are conflicting reports as to whether or not M. chimaera is a more virulent species than M. intracellulare (15, 20).
In our initial work developing the mycobacterial database, we experienced problems with low spectral scores when the database was challenged with the M. marinum clinical isolates. To resolve this, we replaced the M. marinum type strain, ATCC 927, with a recent clinical isolate, M. marinum 2006 1152. When the clinical strains, as well as the original type strain, were retested all were correctly identified with spectral scores of >2.0. This observation underscores the value in using a diverse collection of strains for building the database. The type strain of this species was originally described in 1926, and it is possible that significant changes in the protein profile of this species have occurred in subsequent years.
Aside from the limitations noted above, MALDI-TOF MS analysis of mycobacteria worked quite well for the identification of mycobacterial isolates in our laboratory. During the study, each clinical isolate was assayed in quadruplicate for MALDI-TOF identification so we could determine the minimum number of tests per sample necessary for accurate identification. Of the clinical isolates with spectral scores of >2.0, a score of 1.8 or greater was achieved for 99% of the strains with the first spot tested. Thus, a single test is required for the identification of most organisms. Two strains of M. kansasii had consistently low spectral scores (e.g., range, 1.7 to 1.9), which may reflect the genetic diversity of this species. The heterogeneity of M. kansasii has also been encountered during analysis by sequence analysis of the 16S rRNA gene (13). Again, supplementation of the database with additional strains of M. kansasii may resolve this issue.
Few previous studies have addressed the utilization of MALDI-TOF MS for accurate identification of mycobacteria. Hettick et al. (6) compared the utilization of whole-cell preparations with protein extracts for the identification of six species of Mycobacterium. They observed that the extraction reagents (trifluoroacetic acid and acetonitrile) but not the matrix solution inactivated mycobacteria. Since similar results were obtained with both whole cells and protein extracts, the authors concluded that the utilization of protein extracts is preferable to whole-cell preparations, as the mycobacteria are rendered inactive by the extraction reagents. We concur with the authors regarding the importance of using protein extracts for MALDI-TOF MS identification. Our protocol differs, however, in that methods to disrupt clumps and enhance protein extraction (i.e., the utilization of the micropestle and glass beads) are incorporated into the procedure to allow accurate identification of a wide variety of mycobacteria. Furthermore, the organisms are rendered inactive at an early step in our extraction protocol by heat killing to allow all subsequent processes to be conducted in the open laboratory.
Similar to our analysis, Pignone et al. (10) were able to identify correctly a large number of mycobacteria (36 of 37 strains tested). Unlike our study, though, whole cells were used for MALDI-TOF MS analysis. We reiterate our preference in utilizing protein extracts to minimize exposure of laboratory workers to viable mycobacteria.
In a later work, Hettick et al. (5) describe their attempts to discriminate among strains of mycobacteria using MALDI-TOF MS. They conclude that strain differences are likely due to differences in relative abundance of shared m/z values rather than the presence or absence of specific peaks. Although we did not attempt to discriminate among strains of the same species in our study, we do anticipate that MALDI-TOF MS can be utilized for strain differentiation of mycobacteria.
Overall, our work extends these studies by describing a specific protein extraction protocol that is useful for all types of mycobacteria, as it accounts for this genus's hardy cell envelope and tendency to form clumps. We also demonstrate that our extraction protocol can be utilized to create a mycobacterial database into which different species of mycobacteria can be incorporated indefinitely. Our results indicate that it is quite feasible to incorporate MALDI-TOF MS for routine identification of mycobacteria into the work flow of the clinical microbiology laboratory. With some minor exceptions noted above, identifications were accurate to the species level. Results were obtained rapidly: the turnaround time from sample preparation to results was approximately 90 min, a significant improvement when one considers the time necessary for identifying mycobacteria using phenotypic tests, gene probes, or sequencing. In short, we believe that this study justifies the use of MALDI-TOF MS for the routine identification of isolated colonies of Mycobacterium species. Studies of the use of this technology for identification of mycobacteria from liquid growth media are under way.
We thank Steven M. Holland for his mentorship throughout the project and his review of the manuscript. We also thank Clifton E. Barry and Isdore C. Shamputa for providing clinical strains and Yvonne R. Shea and the staff of the mycobacteriology laboratory for assisting in specimen preparation.
This research was supported by the Laboratory of Clinical Infectious Diseases and the Intramural Research Program of the NIH Clinical Center, Department of Laboratory Medicine.
Received 21 October 2010.
Returned for modification 27 November 2010.
Accepted 3 March 2011.
Accepted manuscript posted online 16 March 2011.
Copyright © 2011, American Society for Microbiology
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Journal of Clinical Microbiology Apr 2011, 49 (5) 1790-1794; DOI: 10.1128/JCM.02135-10
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By Brian Zinchuk , Local Journalism Initiative Reporter / Weyburn Review
Husky Energy, which was acquired by Cenovus Energy, had been Saskatchewan's top oil producer for the first 11 months of 2020.
According to the Saskatchewan Ministry of Resources, from January to November, 2020, Husky produced 31.7 million barrels of oil. It has been the dominant player in northwest Saskatchewan. That will now revert to Cenovus, as of Jan. 1, when the deal closed.
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Vermillion Energy Inc. has operations around the world. In Saskatchewan, their focus is in the southeast, and came in at eighth with 5.5 million barrels.
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