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Tag: Ishmael Reed
"American Airlines Sutra" — Ishmael Reed
May 14, 2019 BibliokleptLeave a comment
"American Airlines Sutra"
Ishmael Reed
put yr cup on my tray
the stewardess said 40,000
feet up. (well i've
never done it that way. what
have i got to lose.)
i climb into a cab & the
woman driver is singing
along with Frank Sinatra
"how was your flight coming in?"
(another one. these americans,
only one thing on their
minds).
Posted in PoetryTagged Ishmael Reed, Poetry
Reviews, March 2019 (and an unrelated wombat)
March 31, 2019 BibliokleptLeave a comment
Links to and brief excerpts from reviews I mustered this month (and an unrelated wombat):
I reviewed João Gilberto Noll's short novel Lord, writing,
…Lord is an abject and surreal tale of madness. Madness is perhaps not the correct term, although it does point towards Lord's gothic and abject modes. Perhaps it's more accurate to say that in Lord, Noll gives us a consciousness dissolving and reconstituting itself, a first-person voice shifting from one reality to the next with absurdly picaresque energy.
I also wrote about Ishmael Reed's novel The Last Days of Louisiana Red. First grafs—
Ishmael Reed's 1974 novel The Last Days of Louisiana Red is a sharp, zany satire of US culture at the end of the twentieth century. The novel, Reed's fourth, is a sequel of sorts to Mumbo Jumbo (1972), and features that earlier novel's protagonist, the Neo-HooDoo ghost detective Papa LaBas.
In Mumbo Jumbo, Reed gave us the story of an uptight secret society, the Wallflower Order, and their attempt to root out and eradicate "Jes' Grew," a psychic virus that spreads freedom and takes its form in arts like jazz and the jitterbug. The Last Days of Louisiana Red also employs a psychic virus to drive its plot, although this transmission is far deadlier. "Louisiana Red" is a poisonous mental disease that afflicts black people in the Americas, causing them to fall into a neo-slave mentality in which they act like "Crabs in the Barrel…Each crab trying to keep the other from reaching the top."
I really dug Joy Williams' debut short story Taking Care. From my review:
…enduring, patient love is unusual in Taking Care, where friendships splinter, marriages fail, and children realize their parents' vices and frailties might be their true inheritance. These are stories of domestic doom and incipient madness, alcoholism and lost pets. There's humor here, but the humor is ice dry, and never applied as even a palliative to the central sadness of Taking Care. Williams' humor is something closer to cosmic absurdity, a recognition of the ambiguity at the core of being human, of not knowing. It's the humor of two girls eating chips on a beach, unable to decide if the people they are gazing at are drowning or just having a good time.
I also reviewed Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower. First paragraph of the review:
Octavia Butler's 1993 novel Parable of the Sower imagines what a radical affirmation of life might look like set against a backdrop of impending extinction. Set between 2024 and 2027, Parable of the Sower conjures a crumbling America. Hyperinflation abounds, infrastructure is falling apart, water is scarce, environmental collapse is imminent, and the social institutions that bind the nation have all but frayed.
And I reviewed Jon McNaught's graphic novel Kingdom for The Comics Journal.
First two paragraphs:
Not much happens in Jon McNaught's latest graphic novel Kingdom. A mother takes her son and daughter to Kingdom Fields Holiday Park, a vacation lodge on the British coast. There, they watch television, go to a run-down museum, play on the beach, walk the hills, and visit an old aunt. Then they go home. There is no climactic event, no terrible trial to endure. There is no crisis, no trauma. And yet it's clear that the holiday in Kingdom Fields will remain forever with the children, embedded into their consciousness as a series of strange aesthetic impressions. Not much happens in Kingdom, but what does happen feels vital and real.
"Life, friends, is boring," the poet John Berryman wrote in his fourteenth Dream Song, before quickly appending, "We must not say so / After all, the sky flashes, the great sea yearns." In Kingdom, McNaught creates a world of flashing sky and yearning sea, natural splendor populated by birds and bats, mice and moths. In Kingdom Fields, waves crash in gorgeous dark blues, the sun rises in golden pinks, rain teems down in violet swirls, and the wind breezes through meadows of grass. It's all very gorgeous, and the trio of main characters spend quite a bit of the novel ignoring it. The narrator of John Berryman's fourteenth Dream Song understood the transcendental promise of nature's majesty, yet also understood that "the mountain or sea or sky" alone are not enough for humans—that we are of nature and yet apart from it.
Promised wombat:
The Invalid – Cheyne Walk 1869, 2017 by Walton Ford (b. 1960)
(About Ford's painting).
Posted in Art, Blog about, Books, ReviewsTagged Book Reviews, Ishmael Reed, João Gilberto Noll, Jon McNaught, Joy Williams, Octavia Butler, Reviews, riffs, Walton Ford
"Points of View" — Ishmael Reed
March 28, 2019 Biblioklept1 Comment
The pioneers and the indians
disagree about a lot of things
for example, the pioneer says that
when you meet a bear in the woods
you should yell at him and if that
doesn't work, you should fell him
The indians say that you should
whisper to him softly and call him by
loving nicknames
No one's bothered to ask the bear
what he thinks
"Dialog Outside the Lakeside Grocery" — Ishmael Reed
"Dialog Outside the Lakeside Grocery"
The grocery had provided him with
boxes of rotten lettuce
He was loading them onto a
yellow pick-up truck
He was a frail white man and
wore a plaid woolen shirt and
frayed dungarees
I was sitting in a gray chevrolet
rent-a-dent
"I have eight adult geese and
twenty-six ducks," he said
and i said
"I'll bet you have a big management
problem," and he said
"They're no trouble at all. My
wife raised two of them in the house.
When she goes near their pen
the geese waddle towards her
and nibble the lettuce out of her
"I'd never think of killing them"
he said
"They keep me out of the bars"
Posted in Art, PoemsTagged Ishmael Reed, Poetry
A review of Ishmael Reed's sharp satire The Last Days of Louisiana Red
March 8, 2019 March 8, 2019 Edwin Turner2 Comments
The Last Days of Louisiana Red begins with Ed Yellings, "an american negro itinerant who popped into Berkeley during the age of Nat King Cole. People looked around one day and there he was." Yellings is the West Coast counterpart to New-York-based Papa LeBas, a fellow Worker of Neo-HooDoo who fights against the secret forces of psychic slavery.
Sliding into the mythological motif that ripple through Louisiana Red, Reed writes,
When Osiris entered Egypt, cannibalism was in vogue. He stopped men from eating men. Thousands of years later when Ed Yellings entered Berkeley, there was a plague too, but not as savage. After centuries of learning how to be subtle, the scheming beast that is man had acquired the ability to cover up.
Yellings' mission is to destroy the psychic cannibalism that afflicts his people. He gets to it, and earns "a reputation for being not only a Worker [of the voodoo arts] but a worker too." Yellings' working class bona fides helps solidify his sympathies and his mission:
Since he worked with workers, he gained a knowledge of the workers' lot. He knew that their lives were bitter. He experienced their surliness, their downtroddenness, their spitefulness and the hatred they had for one another and for their wives and their kids. He saw them repeatedly go against their own best interests as they were swayed and bedazzled by modern subliminal techniques, manipulated by politicians and corporate tycoons, who posed as their friends while sapping their energy. Whose political campaigns amounted to: "Get the Nigger."
As always, Reed's diagnosis of late 20th-century American culture seems to belong, unfortunately, just as much to our own time, giving his novels a perhaps-unintended sheen of prescience. Reed's work points to dystopia, even as his heroes work for freedom and justice. And yet Reed gives equal air time to the forces that oppress freedom and justice, forces that find expression in "Louisiana Red":
Louisiana Red was the way they related to one another, oppressed one another, maimed and murdered one another., carving one another while above their heads, fifty thousand feet, billionaires few in custom-made jet planes equipped with saunas tennis courts swimming pools discotheques and meeting rooms decorated like a Merv Griffin Show set….
The miserable workers were anti-negro, anti-chicano, anti-puerto rican, anti-asian, anti-native american, had forgotten their guild oaths, disrespected craftsmanship; produced badly made cars and appliances and were stimulated by gangster-controlled entertainment; turned out worms in the tuna fish, spiders in the soup, inflamatory toys, tumorous chickens, d.d.t. in fish and the brand new condominium built on quicksand.
As a means to fight the culture of erosion, decay, and entropy, Yellings founds the Solid Gumbo Works. Here, he manufactures a gumbo—a spell, really—to combat "Louisiana Red." In the process he manages to cure cancer, which pisses off a lot of big corporations, and pretty soon Yellings is murdered. Papa LeBas is sent in from New York to solve the case.
Papa LeBas runs into trouble pretty quickly, mostly by way of Yellings' adult children: Wolf, Street, Sister, and the provocative and gifted Minnie, who leads a group of militants called the Moochers. Each of the children seem to embody an allegorical parallel to some aspect of the American counterculture of the late sixties and seventies, allowing Reed to mash up genres and skewer ideologies. There are a lot flavors in this gumbo: voodoo lore and California history bubble in the same pot as riffs on astrology and Cab Calloway's hit "Minnie the Moocher." Reed frequently compares and contrasts East with West, New York with California, underscoring the latter's anxieties of influence about being the New World of the New World. Throughout the novel, we get routines on Amos & Andy, slapstick pastiches straight out of George Herriman's Krazy Kat comix, hysterical nods to Kafka. Reed plays off early blaxploitation films like Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song and Superfly (not to mention Putney Swope), and synthesizes these tropes with kung fu imagery and neo-Nazi nostalgia garb. He turns Aunt Jemima into a loa at one point.
Reed's prose ping-pongs between genres, skittering from pulp fiction noir to surrealist frenzies, from bizarre sex to raucous action, from political essaying to postmodernist mythologizing. Through these stylistic shifts, Reed satirizes a host of ideologies that feed into "Louisiana Red." Aspects of the Berkeley youth movement, radical feminism, free love, and intellectual hucksterism all get skewered, but through an allegorical lens—Reed dares us, often explicitly (by way of a character named Chorus) to read Louisiana Red as an allegorical retelling of Sophocles' Antigone.
This retelling is both tragic and comic though, premodern and postmodern, a carnival of varied voices. The chapters are short, the sentences sting, and the plot shuttles along, pivoting from episode to episode with manic picaresque glee. Reed's narrator is always way out there in front of both the reader and the novel's characters, hollering at us to keep up.
Ultimately, The Last Days of Louisiana Red is a bit of a shaggy dog. It's not that it doesn't have a climax—it does, it has lots of climaxes, some quite literal. And it's not that the novel doesn't have a point—it very much does. Rather, it's that Reed employs his detective story as a frame for the larger argument he wants to make about American culture. Sure, Papa LaBas gets to the bottom of Yellings' murder, but that's not ultimately what the narrative is about.
When we get to the final chapter, we find LaBas, sitting alone "on a plain box" in the empty offices of the Solid Gumbo Works reflecting on the case in a way that, in short, sums up what The Last Days of Louisiana Red is about:
He thought of the eaters and the eaten of this parable on Gumbo…all 'oppressed people' who often, like Tod Browning 'Freaks,' have their own boot on their own neck. They exist to give the LaBases, Wolfs and Sisters of these groups the business, so as to prevent them from taking care of Business, Occupation, Work. They are the moochers who cooperate with their 'oppression,' for they have the mentality of the prey who thinks his destruction at the fangs of the killer is the natural order of things and colludes with his own death. The Workers exist to tell the 'prey' that they were meant to bring down killers three times their size, using the old morality as their guide: Voodoo, Confucianism, the ancient Egyptian inner duties, using the technique of camouflage, independent camouflages like the leopard shark, ruler of the seas for five million years. Doc John, 'the black Cagliostro,' rises again over the American scene. The Workers conjure and command the spirit of Doc John to walk the land.
So here, near the end of The Last Days of Louisiana Red, Papa LeBas—and Ishmael Reed, of course—conjures up the spirit of Doctor John, the voodoo healer who escaped slavery and brought knowledge of the hoodoo arts to his people. There's a promise of hope and optimism here at the novel's end, despite its many bitter flavors. But the passage cited above is not the final moments of Louisiana Red—no, the novel, ends, despite what I wrote about its being a shaggy dog story, with a marvelous punchline.
Ishmael Reed remains an underappreciated novelist whose early work seems as vital as ever. The Last Days of Louisiana Red is probably not the best starting place for him, but it's a great novel to read right after Mumbo Jumbo, which is a great starting place to read Reed. In any case: Read Reed. Highly recommended.
Posted in Blog about, Book Reviews, Literature, Reviews, RiffsTagged Hoodoo, Ishmael Reed, Mumbo Jumbo, Neo-HooDoo, Postmodernism, Reviews, riffs, The Last Days of Louisiana Red, Voodoo
"Kafka. Pure Kafka" (From Ishmael Reed's The Last Days of Louisiana Red)
March 4, 2019 BibliokleptLeave a comment
He was a blonde. He lay in the bed, tossing turning. his room. What was that odor? The pungent odor of middle-class perfume making the air misty. He didn't feel right. His hair. What on earth was the matter with his hair? It was long and was covering the pillow. The pillows? They had a flower print and were pink. Pink? He rose in his bed and his breasts jiggled. BREASTS? THE BREASTS?? He looked back into the mirror next to the bed and his mouth made a black hollow hole of horror. "O MY GOD. MY GOD." He was a woman. You know what he said next, don't you, reader? He's from New York and so . . . you guessed it! "Kafka. Pure Kafka," he said. A feeling crept over him. Tingly. What could he do? He felt like screaming, but he couldn't scream. Was that someone coming coming down the hall? He ran and jumped back into the bed, pulled the covers up to his neck and pretended to be asleep.
From Ishmael Reed's 1974 novel The Last Days of Louisiana Red.
Posted in BooksTagged Books, Ishmael Reed, Kafka, Literature, The Last Days of Louisiana Red
Blog about Ishmael Reed's The Last Days of Louisiana Red (Book acquired 27 Feb. 2019)
March 3, 2019 March 8, 2019 Biblioklept1 Comment
A few weeks ago I went to my favorite used bookstore to pick up a copy of Ishmael Reed's follow up to Mumbo Jumbo, 1974's The Last Days of Louisiana Red. The store had a few copies of it, but they were all Dalkey Archive editions with ugly covers and bad binding, so I broke down and ordered a first edition Random House hardback online. (I was tempted to pick up the Avon Bard paperback version to match the covers of the other Reed books I own, which are so beautiful I'll share them here again):
Anyway, I did the design of the hardback the came in, which the jacket flap credits as Reed's own suggestion. Oh, and it's an old library book:
I read the first half of The Last Days of Louisiana Red this weekend. Reed's writing is bitter, prescient, zany, and mythological, telegraphed in a range of comic and tragic voices. The chapters are short, and the sentences sting. The plot—well, in Louisiana Red, Reed brings back Papa LaBas the Neo-HooDoo hero of Mumbo Jumbo, and sends him to the West Coast, to Berkeley, Carlifornia to investigate the murder of Ed Yellings. Yellings, a Neo-HooDoo man himself, has discovered the cure for cancer through his mysterious enterprise, the Solid Gumbo Works. Yellings' gumbo is also a cure for "Louisiana Red," a poisonous mental disease that afflicts black people in the Americas. Papa LeBas is alternately helped and hindered by Yellings' adult children: Wolf, Street, Sister, and the provocative and gifted Minnie, who leads a group of militants called the Moochers.
I'm really digging Louisiana Red, which, like the other early Reed novels I've read, synthesizes the history, folklore, mythology, and intellectual traditions of the African diaspora into a slapstick satire of USA at the end of the twentieth century. Reed cooks his gumbo with a wide variety of ingredients: voodoo lore and California history bubble in the same pots as riffs on astrology and Cab Calloway's hit "Minnie the Moocher." Reed satirizes the Berkeley youth movement, radical feminism, and intellectual hucksterism, all through an allegorical lens—he dares us, often explicitly (by way of a character named Chorus) to read Louisiana Red as an allegorical retelling of Sophocles' Antigone. While Papa LaBas appears to be the moral center of Reed's novel, delivering righteous condemnation after righteous condemnation of the Moochers and other persons afflicted with Louisiana Red, Reed nevertheless gives expression to a multitude of opposing viewpoints in the novel. It is a speaking novel, a novel that is both of its time but transcends it, as most of the problems and perils it diagnoses are, unfortunately, still with us. More to come.
Posted in Art, Blog about, BooksTagged Blog about, Ishmael Reed, riffs, The Last Days of Louisiana Red
A riff on starting Robert Coover's first novel, Origin of the Brunists
February 20, 2019 February 20, 2019 Edwin Turner1 Comment
Origin of the Brunists is Robert Coover's first novel. First published in 1966, this long novel tells the story of an apocalyptic religious cult that forms around the sole survivor of a mining accident. The novel begins with the Brunists prepping for the upcoming end of the world (doomsday is scheduled for the weekend). After this somewhat bewildering prologue, the novel shifts back a few months in time, to lay out the cult's genesis, a fatal mining accident.
Origin of the Brunist's early chapters are an engrossing and unexpectedly smooth launch into a 500+ page novel. I read the first 70 pages in one night, rapt in the weird world of West Condon, the fictional midwesternish mining town where the Brunist cult originates. I woke up the next morning and continued to read in bed. I was, and am, enthusiastic.
The second chapter of Origin of the Brunists is especially enthralling. Propulsive and engaging, the chapter zooms through the various consciousnesses of West Condon on the night of the novel's originating disaster, the horrific mining collapse that imperils hundreds of miners. Coover inhabits the voices and minds of his characters with an easy if often grimy grace here. Evocation of consciousness has marked much of Coover's work, from the early short story "The Brother" (1962) to his recent novel Huck Out West (2017). The man can throw his voice around. Origin of the Brunists overflows with voices. In small snatches of dialog and free-indirect speech, we get an aural and vivid picture of the miners, their children and spouses, as well as the other residents of West Condon.
The mining disaster chapter shuttles along with a filmic quality. Coover intercuts scenes of the miners escaping (or failing to escape) with a highschool basketball game, teenage lust in a parked car, and other odds and ends of West Condon life. The chapter builds in tension, reminding one of the climax of an epic movie, but one wedged unexpectedly at the narrative's outset.
Indeed, Coover's contest with film is something of a trademark. A signal example of this style can be found in the stories in his 1987 collection A Night at the Movies, or You Must Remember This. Stories like "The Phantom of the Movie Palace" and "Lap Dissolves" wrestle with film as a medium, deconstructing author and text, filmmakers and audiences, film reels and book pages. In the Night stories (and elsewhere, always elsewhere), Coover employs a host of metatextual techniques, dissolving one narrative into another, overlapping archetypes and synthesizing tropes, blending fables and history and commercial culture into a critique of American Pop mythology.
Coover's metafiction always points back at its own origin, its own creation, a move that can at times take on a winking tone, a nudging elbow to the reader's metaphorical ribs—Hey bub, see what I'm doing here? Coover's metafictional techniques often lead him and his reader into cartoon landscapes, where postmodernly-plastic characters bounce manically off realistic contours. The best of Coover's metafictions (like "The Babysitter," 1969) tease their postmodern plastic into a synthesis of character, plot, and theme. However, in large doses Coover's metafictions can tax the reader's patience and will—the simplest example that comes to mind is "The Hat Act" (from Pricksongs & Descants, 1969), a seemingly-interminable Möbius loop that riffs on performance, trickery, and imagination. (And horniness).
I'm dwelling on Coover's metafictional myth-making because I think of it as his calling card. And yet Origin of the Brunists bears only the faintest traces of Coover's trademark metafictionalist moves (mostly, so far anyway, by way of its erstwhile hero, the journalist Tiger Miller). Coover's debut reads rather as a work of highly-detailed, highly-descriptive realism, a realism that pushes its satirical edges up against the absurdity of modern American life. It reminds me very much of William Gass's first novel Omensetter's Luck (1966) and John Barth's first two novels, The Floating Opera (1956) and The End of the Road (1958). (Barth heavily revised both of the novels in 1967). There's a post-Faulknerian style here, something that can't rightly be described as modern or postmodern. These novels distort reality without rupturing it in the way that the authors' later works do. Later works like Barth's Chimera (1973), Gass's The Tunnel (1995), and Coover's The Public Burning (1977) dismantle genre structures and tropes and rebuild them in new forms. (I might contrast here with the first novels of William Gaddis (The Recognitions, 1955), Thomas Pynchon (V., 1963), and Ishmael Reed (The Freelance Pallbearers, 1967), all of which employ postmodern and metafictional techniques right out of the gate—but that's perhaps appropriate material for another riff).
While Origin of the Brunists doesn't tip into Coover's metatextual mode, it points towards his mythic style, but in a subtle, restrained way, as in this description of the moments preceding a high-school basketball game:
A ritual buzzer alerts the young athletes on the West Condon court and strikes a blurred roar from the two confronting masses of spectators. In a body, all stand. The mute patterns of run-pass-leap-thrust dissolve, congealing into two tight knots on either extremity of the court, each governed by a taut-faced dark-suited hierarch. Six young novices in black, breasts ablaze with the mark of their confession, discipline the brute roars into pulsing chants with soft loops of arm and skirt, while, at their backs, five acolytes of the invading persuasion pressed immodestly into sleek diabolic red, rattle talismans with red and white paper tails, seeking to neutralize the efficacy of the West Condon locomotive. Young peddlers circulate, selling condiments indiscriminately to all. A light oil of warm-up perspiration anoints the shoulders of the ten athletes chosen as they explode out of their respective rings to confront each other. Some of them cross themselves, some clap and cry oaths, others tweak their genitals.
These mythical touches are rare in the first section of Origin of the Brunists though. Instead, Coover seems to tease out the West Condoners' building of their own mythology, one cobbled from the apocalyptic strands of rural American Christianity, a religion divined through signs and wonders.
Such signs have much of their origin in Ely Collins, a miner-cum-preacher who meets his fate in the disaster. In a shocking scene that plays out with frank realism, Collins loses his leg:
"It's okay, boys," Collins whispered up at them. "I kin take it." And he took to praying again.
Strelchuk lifted the ax in the air and thought: Jesus! what if I miss, I've never swung a goddamn ax much, what if I hit the wrong leg, or—?
"Goddamn you, Mike!" Jinx screamed, losing control. "Quit messing around! This gas is knocking me out, man! We got to get us out of here!"
And while he was screaming away like that, Strelchuk came down with the ax, caught the leg right where he aimed, true and clean, just below the knee, and the blood flew everywhere, and Juliano was crying like a goddamn baby, and Bruno, his face blood-sprayed, went dumb, mouth agape, and broke away in a silent fit, but the leg was still hooked on, they couldn't get him free. Preach was still praying to beat hell and never even whimpered. Mike raised the ax again and drove down with all the goddamn strength he had, felt the bone this time, heard the crack, felt the sickening braking of the ax in tough tissue, and he turned and vomited. He was gagging and hacking and crying and the blood was everywhere, and still that goddamn leg was hooked on. Mario ripped away Collins' pant leg, took the wedge he had in his pocket, pressed it up against Collins' thigh. Strelchuk whipped off his leather belt and, using it as a tourniquet against the wedge, they stopped the heavy bleeding. Pontormo whined Italian. Strelchuk grabbed up the ax once more. His hands were greasy with blood and it was wet on his chest and face. He was afraid of missing or losing hold, and the shakes were rattling him, so he took short hacking strokes, and at last it broke off. They dragged him free. And Preacher Collins, that game old sonuvabitch, he was still praying.
I've quoted at such length to give a sense of Coover's meticulousness in Origin of the Brunists. The novel is thick with life, thick with voices, mimetic detail, shapes, smells, colors, sounds. West Condon feels utterly real, making the novel's dramatic absurdities all the more pronounced. The characters tell stories, weep and pray, bury their desires. Coover's command of character isn't absolute, but if his West Condoners sometimes teeter on the edge of grotesquerie they are nevertheless real, or as real as words on a page can be. More to come.
Posted in Blog about, Books, Postmodernism, RiffsTagged Ishmael Reed, John Barth, Metafiction, Modernism, Origin of the Brunists, Postmodernism, Robert Coover, Thomas Pynchon, William Gaddis, William H. Gass
Ishmael Reed at the Brockport Writers Forum, 1974
January 21, 2019 Biblioklept1 Comment
Posted in Books, LiteratureTagged Film, Interview, Ishmael Reed, Poetry, Video
A review of Ishmael Reed's Christmas satire, The Terrible Twos
December 17, 2018 December 13, 2018 Biblioklept2 Comments
Christmas approaches, so let me recommend a Christmas novel for you: Ishmael Reed's The Terrible Twos (1982). I read it back in unChristmasy August and dipped into it a bit again today, looking for a passage or two to share. Maybe the bit where Santa Claus starts an anti-capitalist riot in Times Square?, or where the First Lady is electrocuted while lighting the White House Christmas tree?, or where the idiot U.S. President meets Harry Truman in A Christmas Carol tour of hell? I scrounged for a big fat citation that works on its own, but I kept wanting to build a frame, set a stage, and ended up with this instead, a "review," a recommendation. A stage setting. Of course, Ishmael Reed's novels create their own stages, their own contexts and rhythms, and each paragraph, each sentence, each note fits into that context, blaring or humming or blasting the reader. Reed's satire is simultaneously bitter and salty and sweet and sharp sharp sharp, the sort of strange rich dish you gobble up too fast and then, Hell!, it gives you weird dreams. For months.
But nice fat slices of Reed's prose can be served on their own, as John Leonard's 1982 NYT review of The Terrible Twos shows. Leonard's review is ten paragraphs long and he quotes Reed in full for two of those paragraphs, including this one, the longest paragraph in the piece:
Two-year-olds are what the id would look like if the id could ride a tricycle. That's the innocent side of 2, but the terrible side as well. A terrible world the world of 2-year-olds. The world of the witch's door you knock on when your mother told you not to go near the forest in the first place. Pigs building houses of straw. Vain and egotistic gingerbread men who end up riding on the nose of a fox. Nightmares in the closet. Someone is constantly trying to eat them up. The gods of winter crave them – the gods of winter who, some say, are represented by the white horse that St. Nicholas, or St. Nick, rides as he enters Amsterdam, his blackamoor servant, Peter, following with his bag of switches and candy. Two-year-olds are constantly looking over their shoulders for the man in the shadows carrying the bag. Black Peter used to carry them across the border into Spain.
Leonard (who describes the paragraph as "a kind of jive transcendence"— I'll settle for "transcendence") offers up this nugget as a condensation of Reed's themes and mythologies. The paragraph neatly conveys the central idea of Reed's novel, that American capitalism refuses to allow its subjects to Grow Up. It's a tidyish paragraph. Tidyish. Reed always sprawls into some new mumbo jumbo. The anarchic energy of his prose digs up old mythologies, boots skeletons out closets, and makes all the old ghosts of Western history sing and dance.
So there's a lot going in The Terrible Twos' not-quite 200 pages. Should I take a stab at unjumbling the plot? Okay, so: Reagan is elected president. Things are bad. Rough for, like, the people. Fast forward a few terms, to the early/mid-nineties (Reed's future…this is a sci-fi fantasy). Former fashion model Dean Clift ascends to the Presidency. Only he's just a puppet for his cabinet, a cabal of war-profiteering zealots secretly planning a genocidal operation that would not only destroy a nuclear-armed African nation, but also "rid America of surplus people." Surplus = poor. After Clift's wife dies in a freak (not-really-freak) Christmas-tree-lighting accident, his life changes, and Saint Nicholas (like, the real Santa) comes to visit him. Santa takes the President on a Dantean-cum-Dickensian trip through the hell of American past. The poor dumb idiot President transforms his soul. Hearing Truman lament the bombing of Hiroshima might do that (not that that's the only horror that haunts this novel—but a nuclear winter is not a winter wonderland, and Reed's characters, despite their verve, are all suffering from Cold War Blues). Clift goes on TV and advocates a Christmas Change—but too late. The conspiracy cabinet hits him with the 25th Amendment to the United States Constitution. Reed gives a history lesson to the highest office of the land, changes the man's life, and then imprisons him in a sanatorium. Satire at its cruelest.
But hell, what am I doing here, foregrounding President Clift? Or even Santa? There's so much more going on in The Terrible Twos: the secret sect of Nicolites who worship Saint Nick; devotees of Black Peter (a version of the Dutch tradition of "Zwarte Piet"); the North Pole syndicate; secret agents, thugs, and sundry assassins; punk rioters; a rasta dwarf (um, Black Peter). And somehow I've left out the novel's semi-hapless hero, Nance Saturday…
Look, the plot—the picaresque, mumbo-jumbo, always-mutating plot of The Terrible Twos is, yes, fun—but it's the prose, the energy, the commentary, and, yes, the prescience of the novel that makes it so engrossing and fun and terrifying. This is a book that begins: "By Christmas, 1980, the earth had had enough and was beginning to send out hints," a book that has the American President meeting with the American Nazi Party in the Oval Office, a book that has one character comment to another, on the election of Reagan, that "It feels good to be a white man again with him in office." The satire's prescience is painful, but Reed's wisdom—the ballast of this ever-shifting picaresque—anchors the commentary in a deeper condemnation: It has always been this way. Ishmael Reed seems so prescient because we keep failing the past. Same as it ever was. Thus The Terrible Twos plays out in a series of plots and schemes, retaliations and riots—but also wry comments and righteous resistance. And so if Reed's analysis of American history is unbearably heavy, it also points towards a negation of that heavy history, towards a vision of something better.
I shall give the last words to Reed's Santa:
Two years old, that's what we are, emotionally—America, always wanting someone to hand us some ice cream, always complaining, Santa didn't bring me this and why didn't Santa bring me that…Nobody can reason with us. Nobody can tell us anything. Millions of people are staggering about and passing out in the snow and we say that's tough. We say too bad to the children who don't have milk….I say it's time to pull these naughty people off their high chairs and get them to clean up their own shit. Let's hit them where it hurts, ladies and gentlemen. In their pockets. Let's stop buying their war toys, their teddy bears, their dolls, tractors, wagons, their video games, their trees. Trees belong in the forest.
A riot ensues.
Very highly recommended.
[Editorial note: Biblioklept ran a version of this review in December, 2017].
Posted in Books, Literature, PostmodernismTagged Books, Ishmael Reed, Literature, Novels, picaresque, Reviews, riffs, Satire, The Terrible Twos
George Saunders' "Little St. Don" and the limits of contemporary satire
June 27, 2018 June 27, 2018 Edwin Turner8 Comments
George Saunders has a new story called "Little St. Don" in this week's New Yorker. A satirical hagiography of Donald Trump, "Little St. Don" is a pastiche told in little vignettes, parables roughly allegorical to today's horrorshow headlines. Here's an example from early in the story:
Little St. Don was once invited to the birthday party of his best friend, Todd. As the cake was being served, a neighbor, Mr. Aryan, burst in, drunk, threw the cake against the wall, insulted Todd's mother, and knocked a few toddlers out of their seats, requiring them to get stitches. Then Todd's dad pushed Mr. Aryan roughly out the front door. Again, Little St. Don mounted a chair, and began to speak, saying what a shame it was that those two nice people had both engaged in violence.
Here, Saunders transposes the racist rally at Charlottesville into a domestic affair, a typical move for the writer. Saunders' heroes are often hapless fathers besieged by the absurdities of a postmodern world. These figures try to work through all the violence and evil and shit toward a moral redemption, a saving grace or mystical love. Collapsing history and myth into the personal and familiar makes chaos more manageable.
The vignettes in "Little St. Don" follow a somewhat predictable pattern: Little St. Don incites racial violence, Little St. Don makes up juvenile nicknames for his enemies, Little St. Don radically misreads Christ's central message. Etc.
The story's ironic-parable formula is utterly inhabited by Donald Trump's verbal tics and rhythms. Here is Saunders' Little St. Don channeling Donald Trump:
Gentle, sure, yeah, that's great. Jesus sounds like a good guy. Pretty famous guy. Huh. Maybe kind of a wimp? Within our school, am I about as famous as Jesus was when alive? Now that he's dead, sure, he's super-famous. But, when alive, how did he do? Not so great, I bet. Anyway, I like Saviours who weren't crucified.
We all know these terrible tics and rhythms too well by now—indeed they have ventriloquized the discourse. In repeating Trump's rhetorical style, Saunders attempts to sharpen the contrast between the narrative's hagiographic style and the amorality of the narrative's central figure. Saunders inserts this absurd language into a genre usually reserved for moral instruction to achieve his satire. The reader is supposed to note the jarring disparity between our culture's moral ideals and our current political reality. The result though is simply another reiteration of Trump's rhetoric. George Saunders is not the ventriloquist here. He is being ventriloquized. "Little St. Don" redistributes the very rhetoric it seeks to deride. It spreads the virus.
"Little St. Don" exemplifies just how limited contemporary literature's toolkit is when it comes to acutely skewering our zeitgeist. Trump's rhetoric purposefully surpasses absurdity; indeed, Trump's rhetoric is nihilistically absurd, the ur-huckter's argot that distills over two centuries of American con-artist culture for a 21st-century mass media environment. Ahistorical and amoral, Trump's rhetoric oozes outside the bounds of allegorical satire. His rhetoric is already kitsch, part and parcel of a self-ironizing aesthetic that is always only-joking-but-hey-not-really-joking. This rhetorical aesthetic is post-postmodern, and Saunders' postmodern techniques in "Little St. Don" cannot lance it, deflate it, or expose it—Trump's rhetoric is already exposed. Saunders here is simply describing it, repeating it, and reframing it within preëxisting literary genres.
Mashing up these genres is a typical 20th-century postmodernist move, one that Saunders' audience in The New Yorker could expect. Indeed, it seems that connecting with an audience is Saunders' main concern. But he's preaching to the choir. The story is like a mediocre cover band's copy of a terrible greatest hits record. In his mash-up we already know all the tunes, all the rhythms, and all the tones. Hell, we even know the mash-up's not-so-secret formula. Saunders simply confirms the emotional and intellectual gestures that preëxist in his New Yorker audience. His story is there to assure us of our own moral rectitude.
There is nothing wrong with a writer writing to please his audience. However, Saunders, who won the Booker Prize last year for his novel Lincoln in the Bardo, is frequently praised as the greatest satirist of his generation. "Little St. Don" is not great satire, but that is not exactly Saunders' fault. Again, what the little story does well (and why I find it worth writing about) is show us the limitations of literary fiction's power to satirize our ultra-absurd age. Reality runs a lap or two on fiction, trampling it a little.
This is not to say that fiction is (or has been) powerless to properly target absurd demagoguery and creeping fascism. A number of fiction writers in the late 20th century anticipated, diagnosed, and analyzed our current zeitgeist. Philip K. Dick, JG Ballard, Don DeLillo, Thomas Pynchon, Octavia Butler, Ishmael Reed, and Margaret Atwood all come easily to mind. To be fair, these writers were anticipating a new zeitgeist and not always specifically tackling one corroded personality, which is what Saunders is doing in "Little St. Don." Thomas Pynchon had 700 pages or so of Gravity's Rainbow to get us to Richard Nixon, night manager of the Orpheus Theater—that's a pretty big stage of context to skewer the old crook. But Pynchon's satire is far, far sharper, and more indelible in its strangeness than "Little St. Don." Pynchon's satire offers no moral consolation. Similarly, Ishmael Reed's sustained attack on a postmodern presidency in The Terrible Twos never tries to comfort its audience by suggesting that the reader is in a position of moral superiority to any of the characters. And I don't know how anyone can top JG Ballard's "Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan."
It might be more fair to look at another short piece from The New Yorker which engaged with the political horrors of its own time. I'm thinking here of Donald Barthelme's 1968 story "The Indian Uprising." Barthelme creates his own rhetoric in this weird and unsettling story. While "The Indian Uprising" is "about" the Vietnam War and the Civil Rights movement, it is hardly a simple allegory. To match the chaos and disruption of his time, Barthelme repeatedly disorients his audience, making them feel a host of nasty, contradictory, and often terrible feelings. The story requires critical participation, and its parable ultimately refuses to comfort the reader. None of this is particularly easy.
If Saunders' "Little St. Don" is particularly easy, perhaps that's because the moral response to Trump's rhetoric should be particularly easy. That a moral response (and not a rhetorical response anchored in "civility") is somehow not easy for certain people—those in power, say—is the real problem here. Saunders tries to anchor Trump's rhetoric to a ballast that should have a moral force, but the gesture is so self-evident that it simply cannot pass for satire, let alone political commentary. Saunders offers instead a kind of mocking (but ultimately too-gentle) scolding. He doesn't try to disrupt the disruptor, but rather retreats to the consolations of good old-fashioned postmodern literature.
But postmodern perspectives have thoroughly soaked our culture (whether we recognize this our not), and good old-fashioned postmodernism-by-numbers isn't going to work. "Little St. Don" reveals nothing new to its audience, it simply amplifies what they already know and believe, and does so in the very rhetoric that we need to overpower. Literary satire needs to do more than confirm our own morality while lambasting those who perpetrate evil—it needs to invent its own rhetoric, its own form, its own new language.
Ultimately, Saunders' genre distortions end up doing the opposite of what I think he intends to do. He wants the reader to look through a lens that turns history into fable, but that perspective assuages through distance, rather than alarming us. The ironic lens detaches us from the immediacy of the present—it mediates what should be slippery, visceral, ugly, vital, felt. Separating children from their parents and detaining them in concentration camps, banning entire groups of people from entering the country, fostering reckless xenophobia and feeding resurgent nativism—logging these atrocities as events that "happened" in a hagiographical history—no matter how ironic—promises a preëxisting, preordained history to come.
There's a teleological neatness to this way of thinking (History will record!) that is wonderfully comforting in the face of such horror. Throughout his career George Saunders has moved his characters through horror and pain to places of hope and redemption. He loves the characters, and he wants us to love them too. And here, I think, is perhaps the biggest failure of "Little St. Don" — Saunders loves his reader too much. The story wants to make us feel comfortable now, comfortable, at minimum, in our own moral agency and our own moral righteousness. But comfort now will not do.
Posted in Literature, Post-postmodernism, Postmodernism, Rhetoric, Riffs, short fiction, Short StoriesTagged Donald Barthelme, Donald Trump, George Saunders, Ishmael Reed, Late Postmodernism, Literature, Little St. Don, Postmodernism, postpostmodernism, Reviews, riffs, Satire, Thomas Pynchon
December 13, 2017 December 13, 2017 Edwin TurnerLeave a comment
But nice fat slices of Reed's prose rest can well on their own, as John Leonard's 1982 NYT review of The Terrible Twos shows. Leonard's review is ten paragraphs long and he quotes Reed in full for two of those paragraphs, including this one, the longest paragraph in the piece:
Bowles/Oyono/Reed (Books acquired, 30 May 2017)
May 31, 2017 May 31, 2017 BibliokleptLeave a comment
Posted in Art, book acquired, BooksTagged Book Acquired, Books, Books Acquired, Ferdinand Oyono, Ishmael Reed, Paul Bowles
A review of Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down, Ishmael Reed's syncretic Neo-HooDoo revenge Western
February 20, 2017 February 20, 2017 Edwin Turner2 Comments
Ishmael Reed's second novel Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down tells the story of the Loop Garoo Kid, a "desperado so onery he made the Pope cry and the most powerful of cattlemen shed his head to the Executioner's swine."
The novel explodes in kaleidoscopic bursts as Reed dices up three centuries of American history to riff on race, religion, sex, and power. Unstuck in time and unhampered by geographic or technological restraint, historical figures like Lewis and Clark, Thomas Jefferson, John Wesley Harding, Groucho Marx, and Pope Innocent (never mind which one) wander in and out of the narrative, supplementing its ironic allegorical heft. These minor characters are part of Reed's Neo-HooDoo spell, ingredients in a Western revenge story that is simultaneously comic and apocalyptic in its howl against the dominant historical American narrative. Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down is a strange and marvelous novel, at once slapstick and deadly serious, exuberant in its joy and harsh in its bitterness, close to 50 years after its publication, as timely as ever.
After the breathless introduction of its hero the Loop Garoo Kid, Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down initiates its plot. Loop's circus troupe arrives to the titular city Yellow Back Radio (the "nearest town Video Junction is about fifty miles away"), only to find that the children of the town, "dressed in the attire of the Plains Indians," have deposed the adults:
We chased them out of town. We were tired of them ordering us around. They worked us day and night in the mines, made us herd animals harvest the crops and for three hours a day we went to school to hear teachers praise the old. Made us learn facts by rote. Lies really bent upon making us behave. We decided to create our own fiction.
The children's revolutionary, anarchic spirit drives Reed's own fiction, which counters all those old lies the old people use to make us behave.
Of course the old—the adults—want "their" land back. Enter that most powerful of cattlemen, Drag Gibson, who plans to wrest the land away from everyone for himself. We first meet Drag "at his usual hobby, embracing his property." Drag's favorite property is a green mustang,
a symbol for all his streams of fish, his herds, his fruit so large they weighed down the mountains, black gold and diamonds which lay in untapped fields, and his barnyard overflowing with robust and erotic fowl.
Drag loves to French kiss the horse, we're told. Oh, and lest you wonder if "green" here is a metaphor for, like, new, or inexperienced, or callow: No. The horse is literally green ("turned green from old nightmares"). That's the wonderful surreal logic of Reed's vibrant Western, and such details (the novel is crammed with them) make Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down a joy to read.
Where was I? Oh yes, Drag Gibson.
Drag—allegorical stand-in for Manifest Destiny, white privilege, capitalist expansion, you name it—Drag, in the process of trying to clear the kids out of Yellow Back Radio, orders all of Loop's troupe slaughtered.
The massacre sets in motion Loop's revenge on Drag (and white supremacy in general), which unfolds in a bitter blazing series of japes, riffs, rants, and gags. ("Unfolds" is the wrong verb—too neat. The action in Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down is more like the springing of a Jack-in-the-box).
Loop goes about obtaining his revenge via his NeoHooDoo practices. He calls out curses and hexes, summoning loas in a lengthy prayer. Loop's spell culminates in a call that goes beyond an immediate revenge on Drag and his henchmen, a call that moves toward a retribution for black culture in general:
O Black Hawk American Indian houngan of Hoo-Doo please do open up some of these prissy orthodox minds so that they will no longer call Black People's American experience "corrupt" "perverse" and "decadent." Please show them that Booker T and MG's, Etta James, Johnny Ace and Bojangle tapdancing is just as beautiful as anything that happened anywhere else in the world. Teach them that anywhere people go they have experience and that all experience is art.
So much of Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down is turning all experience into art. Reed spins multivalent cultural material into something new, something arguably American. The title of the novel suggests its program: a breaking-down of yellowed paperback narratives, a breaking-down of radio signals. Significantly, that analysis, that break-down, is also synthesized in this novel into something wholly original. Rhetorically, Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down evokes flipping through paperbacks at random, making a new narrative; or scrolling up and down a radio dial, making new music from random bursts of sound; or rifling through a stack of manic Sunday funnies to make a new, somehow more vibrant collage.
Perhaps the Pope puts it best when he arrives late in the novel. (Ostensibly, the Pope shows up to put an end to Loop's hexing and vexing of the adult citizenry—but let's just say the two Holy Men have a deeper, older relationship). After a lengthy disquisition on the history of hoodoo and its genesis in the Voudon religion of Africa ("that strange continent which serves as the subconscious of our planet…shaped so like the human skull"), the Pope declares that "Loop Garoo seems to be practicing a syncretistic American version" of the old Ju Ju. The Pope continues:
Loop seems to be scatting arbitrarily, using forms of this and that and adding his own. He's blowing like that celebrated musician Charles Yardbird Parker—improvising as he goes along. He's throwing clusters of demon chords at you and you don't know the changes, do you Mr. Drag?
The Pope here describes Reed's style too, of course (which is to say that Reed is describing his own style, via one of his characters. The purest postmodernism). The apparent effortlessness of Reed's improvisations—the prose's sheer manic energy—actually camouflages a tight and precise plot. I was struck by how much of Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down's apparent anarchy resolves into a bigger picture upon a second reading.
That simultaneous effortlessness and precision makes Reed's novel a joy to jaunt through. Here is a writer taking what he wants from any number of literary and artistic traditions while dispensing with the forms and tropes he doesn't want and doesn't need. If Reed wants to riff on the historical relations between Indians and African-Americans, he'll do that. If Reed wants to assess the relative values of Thomas Jefferson as a progressive figure, he'll do that. If Reed wants to attack his neo-social realist critics, he'll do that. If Reed wants to critique the relationship between militarism and science, he'll do that. If Reed wants to tell some really dirty jokes about a threesome, he'll do that. And you can bet if he wants some ass-kicking Amazons to show up at some point, they're gonna show.
And it's a great show. Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down begins with the slaughter of a circus troupe before we get to see their act. The real circus act is the novel itself, filled with orators and showmen, carnival barkers and con-artists, pistoleers and magicians. There's a manic glee to it all, a glee tempered in anger—think of George Herriman's Krazy Kat, or Thomas Pynchon's zany rage, or Robert Downey Sr.'s satirical film Putney Swope.
Through all its anger, Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down nevertheless repeatedly affirms the possibility of imagination and creation—both as cures and as hexes. We have here a tale of defensive and retaliatory magic. Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down is the third novel of Reed's novels I've read (after Mumbo Jumbo and The Free-Lance Pallbearers), and my favorite thus far. Frankly, I needed the novel right now in a way that I didn't know that I needed it until I read it; the contemporary novel I tried to read after it felt stale and boring. So I read Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down again. The great gift here is that Reed's novel answers to the final line of Loop's prayer to the Loa: "Teach them that anywhere people go they have experience and that all experience is art." Like the children of Yellow Back Radio, Reed creates his own fiction, and invites us to do the same. Very highly recommended.
Posted in Art, Book Reviews, Books, Literature, Postmodernism, Reviews, RiffsTagged African-American literature, Art, black literature, Ishmael Reed, Krazy Kat, Postmodernism, Putney Swope, Review, Reviews, riffs, Thomas Pynchon, Westerns, Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down
February 16, 2017 February 20, 2017 Edwin TurnerLeave a comment
A review of Ishmael Reed's Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down
Posted in Art, Books, Literature, Postmodernism, Reviews, RiffsTagged American literature, Art, Black writers, Books, Comedy, George Herriman, Ishmael Reed, Krazy Kat, Postmodernism, Putney Swope, Reviews, riffs, Slapstick, Thomas Pynchon, voodoo fiction, Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down
Teach them that anywhere people go they have experience and that all experience is art (Ishmael Reed)
February 9, 2017 February 16, 2017 Biblioklept2 Comments
I the Father which wert in heaven conjure and command thee
O Legba master of the crossroads to connect this cowboy's circuit to Guinea and summon forth:
Cousin Zaka who will parch their fields and slaughter their livestock and make their herd winding up the Chisholm stumble into a Twilight Zone
O Gu rust their fire firearms and cause their horseshoes to slip off the animals' hooves
O Judas Iscariot who ratted on the Ghoul give me the treachery to turn this town upside down and spill evil from all its pockets
O Jack Johnson give me the power to rise for the bell until Yellow Back Radio is down for the count
O Doc John, Doc Yah Yah and Zozo Labrique Marie Laveau the Grand Improvisers if I am not performing these rites correctly send the Loa anyway and allow my imagination to fill the gaps
O Mack Hopson blood of my blood teach me the secret of the 12 rabbits and the cheesecake
O Baron-La-Croix grip Drag Gibson so that every other day last rites will be requested
O Johnny of the delicate feet
Red-Eyed Ezili
Marinette of the dry arm send the dead swiftly to make my vengeance so complete and artsy craftsy that I though an amateur will be admired by houngans the world over
O General Dig, bury Drag Gibson in the stomach of swines next to George allace
A hoo doo spell/curse/prayer from Ishmael Reed's 1969 novel Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down.
Posted in Art, BooksTagged Hoo Doo, Ishmael Reed, spells, voo doo, Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down
Americans love being conned (Ishmael Reed)
February 2, 2017 February 2, 2017 Biblioklept4 Comments
It was Bo Shmo and the neo-social realist gang. They rode to this spot from their hideout in the hills. Bo Shmo leaned in his saddle and scowled at Loop, whom he considered a deliberate attempt to be obscure. A buffoon an outsider and frequenter of sideshows.
Bo Shmo was dynamic and charismatic as they say. He made a big reputation in the thirties, not having much originality, by learning to play Hoagland Howard Carmichael's "Buttermilk Sky" backwards. He banged the piano and even introduced some novel variations such as sliding his rump across the black and whites for that certain effect.
People went for it. It was an all the newspapers. He traveled from coast to coast exhibiting his ass and everything was fine until the real Hoagland Howard Carmichael (the real one) showed up and went for Bo Shmo's goat. He called him a lowdown patent thief and railed him out of town. You would think that finding themselves duped, the impostor's fans would demand his hide. Not so, Americans love being conned if you can do it in a style that is both grand and entertaining. Consider P.T. Barnum's success, Semple McPherson and other notables. A guy who rigs aluminum prices can get himself introduced by Georgie Jessel at 100 dollars a plate but stealing a can of beer can get you iced.
So sympathetic Americans sent funds to Bo Shmo which he used to build one huge neo-social realist Institution in the Mountains. Wagon trains of neo-social realist composers writers and painters could be seen winding up its path.
From Ishmael Reed's 1969 novel Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down, which I am loving the hell out of.
Posted in BooksTagged Con Artists, Con men, confidence men, Ishmael Reed, Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down


Are you a family physician looking to sell your practice? You're not alone. In a 2014 Practice Profitability Index survey conducted by CareCloud and QuantiaMD, researchers found that 24% of physicians are considering selling their practice and 12% are actively looking to sell.
It's not always easy to keep your little ones safe around the house, but these seven baby-proofing tips can help. Better still, each one can be performed using everyday household items.


Fabulous view of the ICW. Unit is nicely upgraded with flooring, kitchen cabinets, bathroom and more. Just right as a primary or second home. Rent long/short term VRBO. Centrally located just over the McTeer Bridge in Port Royal with easy access to shopping, medical facilities, and downtown Port Royal and Beaufort.


Iroko heartwood is mostly yellow to gold or medium brown, with color usually darkening over time. The pale yellow sapwood is obviously delineated from heartwood.
Iroko has a medium to coarse texture, open pores,with an interlocked grain.
This wood is diffuse-porous with big pores in no precise arrangement. It has solitary and radial multiples of 2-3; tylosesis common. Growth rings are indistinct; rays are visible without lens. Parenchyma is banded, paratracheal parenchyma is vasicentric, and the wood is aliform (winged, lozenge) and confluent.
Iroko is very resilient and resistant to rot and insect attacks; it is sometimes substituted for true Teak.
Iroko is mostly easy to work, but its interlocked grain may cause some tearout during surfacing processes. In addition, deposits of calcium carbonate are at times present, which can have a substantial dulling effect on cutters. Iroko finishes and glues nicely.
Iroko has no characteristic odor.
Even though severe reactions are very uncommon, Iroko has been reported to be a sensitizer. Most common reactions include eye, skin, and respiratory irritations. Iroko can cause additional health problems in sensitive persons, including asthma-like symptoms, boils, or hypersensitivity pneumonitis.
Iroko is imported at a moderate price. Veneer is often for sale and is inexpensively priced.
This species is not listed in the CITES Appendices; however, Iroko is on the IUCN Red List. It is listed as vulnerable becauseof population reduction over 20% in the previous three generations, which is caused by decline in the wood's natural range and by exploitation.
Iroko is used for flooring, cabinetry, veneer, furniture, boat building, turned objects, and smaller specialty wood items.


Auto Cross September 16 Raw results .
Here's a link to my photo album.
There are some screen shots of run times through the day as well. I didn't get the last bit as I had to leave early in the afternoon.
Looking forward to next year events.


As discussed in person you can add below salient Points pertaining to Hydraulic Fixtures in our Site.
1. Hydraulic Fixtures enable Consistency in Positioning and Clamping Work Pieces.2. Faster & Reliable than mechanical fixtures.3. Clamping Forces can be controlled to optimum levels avoiding job distortion due to excessive clamping forces.4. With suitable interfacing, totally automated CNC or PLC controlled machining possible. 5. Enhanced safety for Man, Machine & Job.
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text:
Courchevel is offering Aquamotion
Anne Autret - 11/04/2018
Aquamotion. This is the name of a complex dedicated to aquatic fun, relaxation and well-being, which opened this winter at Courchevel 1650.
An investment of 63.5 million euros, 15,000 m2 of floor space, of which 10,000 m2 is inside: with a green roof, huge windows and an aerial ballet of curved lines, the complex has grand style in the heart of the largest ski area, the most connected to the world. It has a great attraction for VIPs attending the Alpine resort, with three palazzi and 16 5***** hotels, but also for families and mountain lovers, during summer and winter.
It took four years to prepare this extraordinary structure, built overlooking the valley. There is innovation and the latest equipment for "a unique experience" everywhere. Is Aqualudique a sports area? It combines a wave of indoor surfing, a novelty in the mountains, a 25-meter tank, a climbing room, a 110-meter canyon, a giant Pentagliss, an open lagoon on the outside...
There has been a Wellness space for over 18 years around a beautiful relaxation pool, three saunas, a caldarium, a hammam, a salt cave with a giant screen... Regarding the Spa & Bathing space, there are 19 large cabins. It offers: facial and body treatments offered by the Algotherm brand, a selection of modelage, bathing treatments (massages under affusion, multi-jet baths...) and wellness moments ranging from a few hours to several days. As of July, Pure Altitude treatments will enrich the offer.
Aquamotion is also distinguished through its restaurant. A little hungry after being on the aquabike or a beauty regimen? Head to Café Nikki or Cabana Grill. After Miami, Saint-Tropez, Monaco and Ibiza, the American Nikki Beach group has settled in the mountains, and it has its own Courchevel Aquamotion. In essence, a new trendy destination has been born. Its added value? Admission prices: €22 to enter the Aqualudique space (a 3-hour pass), €12 for children. The center will reopen on June 13, after a spring break.
http://youspa.eu/en/magazine-article/561-courchevel-is-offering-aquamotion
http://www.youspa.eu/ufiles/big/UID575ED7BA5B4FB_image_1.jpg
Anne Autret
I am a journalist specializing on the subject of beauty, health, fashion, distribution and marketing (luxury and mass market ). Previously editor and director of the information site estheticfactory.fr (Aef group) for the general public, and of the professional magazine CosmétiqueSpa, editor and deputy head of the Fashion Daily News and journalist of the magazine.

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


text:
South Los Angeles (tidigare South Central Los Angeles) är ett område i Los Angeles County i Kalifornien, som består av 25 stadsdelar inom staden Los Angeles (bland annat Watts) och tre kommunfria områden. Befolkningen består till största del av afroamerikaner och personer med latinamerikansk härkomst.

Distriktet var en gång karaktäriserat av gängbrottslighet av de kriminella gängen Crips och Bloods. Största delen av kravallerna i Los Angeles 1992 pågick här.

Kända personer födda eller uppvuxna i South Los Angeles, i urval

Musiker

 Barry White
 Charles Mingus
 Charles Wright & the Watts 103rd Street Rhythm Band
 Coolio
 Da Lench Mob
 Eric Dolphy
 Ice Cube (musiker och skådespelare)
 Ice-T
 Jay Rock
 John Cage
 Keb' Mo'
 Kendrick Lamar
 Kurupt
 Murs
 Nipsey Hussle
 The Pharcyde (musikgrupp)
 Ras Kass
 Schoolboy Q
 Skee-Lo
 Tone Lōc (musiker och skådespelare)
 Tyrese Gibson (musiker och skådespelare)
 WC
 Young Maylay (musiker och skådespelare)
 Etta James

Idrottare
 Andre Miller
 Baron Davis
 Florence Griffith-Joyner
 Ozzie Smith
 DeSean Jackson

Övriga
 Diane Watson, politiker
 Maxine Waters, politiker
 John Singleton, filmskapare

Referenser

Externa länkar

Los Angeles
Stadsdelar i Los Angeles

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaWikipedia


Why do puppies bite? especially Adorable Tea Cups Puppies Photo Album. When puppies are born they explore the world through their eyes, ears, sense ofsmell and unfortunately their teeth.
Awesome Siberian Husky Puppies Image Gallery is pretty image labelled Puppies, upload on December 19, 2016 and has size 816 x 616 px.
Apbt Puppies Photo Collection1 is awesome image labelled Puppies, posted on June 1, 2015 and has size 816 x 1213 px.
Adorable Sheepdog Puppies Photo Album is beauty photo labelled Puppies, entry on December 15, 2017 and has size 816 x 552 px.
Bichon Maltais Blanc Assis & Coquin Sur Fond Blanc is pretty picture related with Puppies, upload on November 28, 2016 and has size 816 x 815 px.


text:
New Acer Notebooks Pile on Performance
Douglas Dixon
Acer introduced its 2016 back-to-school product line at its Next@Acer global press conference on Thursday at the World Trade Center in New York City. The announcements included powerful new Predator gaming systems, new consumer notebooks including convertibles and 2-in-1s, a rugged Chromebook for work, plus other mobile and wearable devices.
While these systems were not specifically designed for video editors, Acer's performance-oriented designs and aggressive pricing make these products interesting for mobile video work.
All we're looking for is advanced CPUs for video processing, strong graphics co-processing to move pixels, expansive main memory to hold runs of video frames, plenty of local disk space for higher-def clips, and fast interfaces for expanded external storage. And all this, of course, with options to squeeze down into smaller, more portable sizes without having to sacrifice too much.
Predator 17 X Gaming Notebook
At the high end, the new Predator 17 X notebook brings overclocking performance and desktop grade components to mobile gaming. The expansive 17.3-inch screen is available with either a FHD (1920 x 1080) or 4K UHD (3840 x 2160) display.
It's powered by a 6th Generation Intel Core i7-6820HK processor, with NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 graphics, and can be overclocked to speeds of up to 4.0GHz for the CPU, up to 1310MHz for the GPU, and up to 3.7GHz for VRAM. And to cool these hot engines, the design uses a custom triple-fan cooling system with front side intakes pulling cool air into the laptop.[image:blog_post:60276]
Then for moving data, the Predator 17 X has DDR4-2133 memory, and enterprise level NVMe PCIe solid state drives for up to 1TB in a three-SATA-SSD RAID 0 array, plus separate 2TB HDD. For external drives, Thunderbolt 3 on USB-C provides speeds up to 40 Gbps on one compact port — that's up to 8X faster than USB 3.0 and 4X faster than USB 3.1. And for networked transfers, the Ethernet and Wi-Fi connections can work simultaneously with different endpoints.
Along with the new compact Predator G1 Desktop, these systems are designed for virtual reality (VR) applications including virtual travel, working with devices from major vendors including Oculus, HTC Vive, OSVR and StarVR.
The Predator 17 X notebook is hefty at 16.65 x 12.66 x 1.75 inches and 10 pounds, with a battery life of up to 3 hours. It will be available in North America in June with prices starting at $2,799.
Aspire R 15 Convertible Notebook
Acer has also expanded its Aspire line of consumer notebooks with the Aspire R 15 thin convertible, providing real power in laptop package. The soft-closing hinge design allows the unit to lay flat, and permits easy conversion between laptop, tablet, display, and tent modes.
With a 15.6", 1920 x 1080, touch display, the R 15 is full powered with 6th Generation Intel Core i7/i5U processors, NVIDIA GeForce 940MX graphics, and USB 3.1 Type-C port. It supports up to 12GB memory and up to 512GB SSD or 1TB HDD storage.
The attractive design uses a metal top cover with a hairline-brushed finish and a bottom cover of 40% glass fiber and silver particles to improve rigidity.
The Aspire R 15 is 14.59 x 10.08 x 0.78 inches and 4.7 to 4.9 pounds (SSD or HDD), with a battery life of up to 9 hours. It will be available in North America in May with prices starting at $699.
Aspire S 13 Ultrathin Notebook
Next, the Aspire S 13 still packs serious power into an ultrathin design, at only 0.57 inches thick and 2.86 pounds with the 13", 1920 x 1080 display with optional touch.
The S 13 still is seriously powered with 6th Generation Intel Core i7/i5/i3U processors and Intel HD Graphics 520, plus a choice of ports including a USB 3.1 Type-C port to transfer up to 5Gbps, and a USB 3.0 port that supports power-off charging. It supports up to 8GB of memory and up to 512GB of SSD storage.[image:blog_post:60275]
The Aspire S 13 is 12.87 x 8.98 x 0.57 inches and 2.86 to 3 pounds (with touch screen), with a battery life of up to 11 to 13 hours. It will be available in North America in May with prices starting at $699.
Switch Alpha 12 2-in-1 Notebook
Then for even better portability, the Switch Alpha 12 is a 2-in-1 notebook — with the keyboard unit and a detachable tablet screen with a built-in multi-position kickstand.
The 12-inch touch display has 2160×1440 resolution. But the rest of the key specs are the same as the Ultrathin, with Intel Core i7/i5/i3U processors, Intel HD Graphics 520, USB 3.1 Type-C port, up to 8 GB of memory, and up to 512GB of SSD storage. There's also a MicroSDXC slot for additional files.[image:blog_post:60277]
To avoid over-cooking from all this power in the tiny package, the Switch Alpha 12 is liquid cooled, removing the fans for better cooling and silent operation.
The Switch Alpha 12 is 11.5 x 7.93 x 0.62 inches and 2.76 pounds (pad + keyboard), with a battery life of up to 8 hours. It will be available in North America in June with prices starting at $599.
Fewer Compromises
As you can see from the Acer announcements, notebooks can provide plenty of power and speed for video work, even in smaller, more portable designs. From the 10-pound Predator 17 X gaming notebook to the 2 2/3-pound Switch Alpha 12 detachable tablet, you can be powered by serious Intel Core i7 processors and move data at USB 3.1 Type-C speeds. You'll give up storage and screen size with the thin designs, of course, with a maximum of 8GB of memory and 512GB of SSD storage, but have a system at or under 3 pounds. Or in the same price range you can step up to a 15 inch display, NVIDIA graphics, and 1TB of storage. The choice is yours.
For more information, visit www.acer.com.
Douglas Dixon is a developer and writer who covers digital media at Manifest-Tech.com.
Nicole is a professional writer and a curious person who loves to unpack stories on anything from music, to movies, to gaming, and beyond.


Dog Whistler - The Original by Mobeezio, Inc.
Dog Whistler is the best free option out there. The interface is better than many of the paid apps. A slider control is given to adjust the frequency and several pattern options are given.
* New add-on option/feature: ability to create a ringtone from any frequency!


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40 Inspirational Marco Pierre White Quotes On Success
Marco Pierre White is a British chef, restaurateur, and television personality from Leeds. White has been dubbed the first celebrity chef, and the enfant terrible of the UK restaurant scene. White was the youngest chef ever to have been awarded three Michelin stars. He has trained notable chefs such as Mario Batali, Gordon Ramsay, Curtis Stone, and Shannon Bennett. May these Marco Pierre White Quotes On Success inspire you to take action so that you may live your dreams.
1. "I have no regrets in my life. If not for the mistakes that I made I would not be the man I am today." Marco Pierre White
2. "I cannot teach anybody how to cook. All I can do is show them, share methods with them." Marco Pierre White
3. "I came from the old world of gastronomy. Many years ago I walked into the kitchens of the Hotel St George and I feel very fortunate that I worked for chefs that were behind their stoves. I saw that world of gastronomy. I can sit here today and say that I saw the golden age of gastronomy. It's gone, it's gone. It's never going to have that anymore, once the accountants get involved the romance fades. That's the reality." Marco Pierre White
4. "Mother Nature is the true artist and our job as cooks is to allow her to shine." Marco Pierre White
5. "A tree without roots is just a piece of wood." Marco Pierre White
6. "Chefs today choose to step onto that treadmill where they have to be seen. Every day they have to go to this party, they have to go to that party. But then you think, Who is doing the cooking?." Marco Pierre White
7. "The more I invested in myself, the kinder I was to myself and the more I understood myself." Marco Pierre White
8. "Today there are very few chefs at that high level who are behind their stoves. You don't feel their presence within the room. Where's the romance? Where's the show? Where's the theater? The modern day restaurant – it's like dining in a chapel. It's boring." Marco Pierre White
9. "If you are not extreme, then people will take shortcuts because they don't fear you." Marco Pierre White
10. "If you've been given opportunities then you have to create opportunities. If you're given knowledge by people, share your knowledge. If you were born with talent, show your talent off." Marco Pierre White
11. "Once you accept and understand yourself, you do things for the right reasons, not the wrong ones, rather than being fuelled by your insecurities." Marco Pierre White
12. "I didn't understand myself well enough to be an ambassador to my world, to inspire people to want to cook, to inspire young people to want to come into my industry." Marco Pierre White
13. "People who can give themselves every day. They're the people that I admire, they're real people." Marco Pierre White
14. "There are many times in my life when I could've thrown in the towel. Many times in my life when I was on the floor. And when you're on the floor, never allow anybody to pick you up. It doesn't matter how long you stay there, make sure you pick yourself up and dust yourself down. Whatever happens, whether you go home today or you don't go home today, that's irrelevant. What's relevant, is you take the knowledge from the experience and you grow as a person." Marco Pierre White
15. "I've paid my price, a high price, I watched my mother die. I look at everything I've been given now as a form of compensation. A person who has regrets is a person who casts anchors." Marco Pierre White
16. "It's extraordinary these obsessions. You conquer one but then you move onto another." Marco Pierre White
17. "Don't dress for others, dress for yourself. Clothes should be an extension of what you represent and what you feel inside." Marco Pierre White
18. "At the end of the day it's just food, isn't it? Just food." Marco Pierre White
19. "Once you accept you are being judged by people who have less knowledge than yourself, then what's it worth?" Marco Pierre White
20. "I think if you've been given something in life you have a moral duty to give things back." Marco Pierre White
21. "I think self-discovery is the greatest achievement in life, because once you discover yourself and accept what you are, then you can fulfil your true potential and be happy." Marco Pierre White
22. "Eating is one of the most important aspects of living. I like indulging. I like to eat one food at a time, to savor each individual thing." Marco Pierre White
23. "Strategy will compensate the talent. The talent will never compensate the strategy." Marco Pierre White
24. "Nine out of ten English chefs have their names on their chests. Who do they think they are? They're dreamers. They're jokes. Just ask yourself how many chefs in this country have Michelin stars and how many have their names on their jackets. We all wear blue aprons in my kitchen because we're all commis. We're all still learning." Marco Pierre White
25. "It's not about what you achieve, it's actually what you do for your industry and that's what I think is important. And when people look at me and they see my achievements with the restaurants do you know what I think? I think I did more than that. What I achieved was teaching young men and young women when they were young and inspiring them." Marco Pierre White
26. "Once you grow up and discover yourself as a human being you look at things for what they are." Marco Pierre White
27. "People do peculiar things in life and they do for whatever reason but I think one of the greatest crimes in life is when you lie." Marco Pierre White
28. "I can't imagine anything worse than trying to impress a girl with dinner. To be honest, I'm always impressing myself, not other people." Marco Pierre White
29. "Gastronomy is the greatest form of therapy that anyone can be exposed to." Marco Pierre White
30. "We're in a world that is run by accountants and I think that it's sad in many ways." Marco Pierre White
31. "I am a believer that if you bring children into this world, then you have a responsibility to do your best and support and guide them until the day you die." Marco Pierre White
32. "Females make better cooks than men. Females have a better palate. They have a better sense of smell. They never take shortcuts; this is why they're very good in kitchens. The weakness in what they do is they are not as physically strong as men, so they're never really given the opportunity." Marco Pierre White
33. "I have no problem in asking a diner to leave for two reasons: 1. If they are rude to my staff. No one has that right. If we make a mistake, allow us to rectify it. 2. If they are loud and abusive at the table. They have no regard or respect for the other diners, who may have worked very hard to save up their cash to afford your prices." Marco Pierre White
34. "The most poisonous source in any kitchen is a chef's ego." Marco Pierre White
35. "I spent my days on the riverbanks, in the woods, in the fields. I unraveled everything within my life. Self-discovery is most important to me." Marco Pierre White
36. "The customer is the most important." Marco Pierre White
37. "I'm not a worrier. I like sleeping." Marco Pierre White
38. "Keep it simple. Perfection is lots of little things done well." Marco Pierre White
39. "If you have a dream, you have a duty and a responsibility to yourself to make it come true." Marco Pierre White
40. "Success is born out of arrogance, but greatness comes from humility." Marco Pierre White
I hope you enjoyed these Marco Pierre White Quotes On Success. Do let us know which one was your favorite in the comments section below.
Check Out Marco Pierre White's Top 10 Rules Of Success From Evan Carmichael:
35 Women Quotes On Success
35 Inspirational Gigi Hadid Quotes On Success


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IAC sells CollegeHumor to executive Sam Reich, resulting in 100+ layoffs
Technologies » Technologies. Main
IAC has sold off a majority stake in CH Media, the parent organization behind CollegeHumor . The new owner? CH Media's chief creative officer Sam Reich.
Reich announced the move on Twitter, saying that digital media holding company IAC "made the difficult decision to no longer finance us," but that it would allow him to "run with the company."
He continued, "Of course, I can't keep it going like you're used to. While we were on the way to becoming profitable, we were nonetheless losing money — and I myself have no money to be able to lose."
In fact, Reich said that more than 100 people are losing their jobs as a result.
Bloomberg reports that the company will be left with a team of between five and 10 people. It also reports that IAC will maintain a minority stake in the company.
In a statement, IAC said, "Sam was the best choice to acquire CH Media and define its next chapter. The decision places CH Media with an owner who is beloved by fans, passionate about the business and sees a future we believe in."
CollegeHumor launched its own subscription streaming service called Dropout in 2018, and Reich said, "The #1 way you can support me is to stay subscribed to Dropout." He claimed the service still has six months of additional content ready to go, and that it will be launching version 2.0 at the end of this month.
After noting that many Dropout shows may need to take "bold new creative directions in order to survive," Reich added, "I will, however, do my very best to stay true to the talent, shows, fans, and principles that got us where we are today. We dropped out once before; we can do it again. Independent comedy lives on — just now more independent (gulp) than ever before."
The streaming wars to come
» Thyssenkrupp CEO Prefers Selling Minority Stake In Elevator Division : Report
» VCs bet $12M on Troops, a Slackbot for sales teams
» Uber now lets you buy transit tickets in Denver
» Essential lays off nearly one-third of its staff
» Row over 'tasteless' Irish Nazi auction
» German police raid self-proclaimed "Reich citizens"
The battle over which flag to fly in America's Chinatowns
According to P&S Intelligence, the European electric two-wheeler sharing market is predicted to generate revenue worth $597.2 million by 2025, advancing at a CAGR of 35.0%
Decrease user churn by better managing expectations
Asbury Automotive Group Schedules Release of Fourth Quarter and Full Year 2019 Financial Results


It takes a generation to get settled and build a community. Just as the young professionals are now inspired to give back to their community, Timbercreek and the City of Ottawa want to destroy our community. But we've come together to fight these unjust evictions. We are not going to let them destroy our tight-knit and healthy community.
DO NOT sign anything Timbercreek gives you. If you do, you will give Timbercreek the right to evict you.
You DO NOT have to move out.
Despite what Timbercreek is telling you, THEY HAVE NOT HAD ANY PERMITS APPROVED BY THE CITY OF OTTAWA. The demolition permits will not be approved until all essential services have been cut. They cannot cut essential services while the houses are still occupied.
Timbercreek must obtain building and demolition permits from the City of Ottawa. Timbercreek has applied for them, but we can force the City to deny these permits.
To evict a tenant, Timbercreek must apply to the Landlord and Tenant Board, only they can order an eviction. First there is hearing. It takes a long time.
The more vocal and public you are about this injustice, the more power you have.
Forced evictions and mass displacement of a community are GROSS violations of human rights. We have the RIGHT to stay in our neighbourhood. But we have to FIGHT FOR THIS RIGHT.
WE WILL WIN IF WE STICK TOGETHER. There is strength in numbers. Organizing makes us stronger. Join us!
Come to our meetings and meet with our lawyers and professionals who are helping us. They will tell you about your rights.
Herongate Tenant Coalition is an organization exclusively of tenants in the Herongate neighbourhood. We are organizing to defend our neighbourhood. Join us!
herongatetc@gmail.com • 613-415-6822 • Stop the evictions! No demolition!
These are the faces of the community Timbercreek and the City of Ottawa want to destroy. Some families have lived here for decades; others less than a year. But we all make up the wonderful, vibrant community that is Herongate. It takes years to build a strong, tight-knit community. Now the rich and powerful in Ottawa want us out so they can build luxury apartments.
We will fight to the end to save our entire community from complete erasure. We are fighting to defend Herongate.


Our heater broke this winter. It wasn't quite the disaster as it sounds, but it was pretty annoying.
One morning, we woke up, and our house was a sauna. At night, we always set our thermostat to 62 degrees. On this particular morning, it was set at that, but the temp was pushing 90 degrees.
We couldn't figure out how to turn it off so we just flipped the breaker. We did not want our heating bill to skyrocket during the already high season.
Fortunately, a few weeks previously, I had received a NewAir QuietHeat15 space heater to try out. This was a perfect opportunity to test it to it's limits!
It kept us nice and toasty the entire time we had our heat shut off. During the day, we had it in our kitchen/dining/living room area (around 500-600 sq ft), and at night, we moved it to our bedroom (again, the heat was working properly downstairs for the kiddo's rooms, so don't worry, they didn't need it!).
It's lightweight and has a handy handle on the back, so it was even easy for my preggo self to move it around.
I can't decide which feature of this heater is my favorite. The timer, where you set it and it shuts off on its own-which is programmable up to 12 hours. Or the safety feature that turns it off if it were to fall over.
-Uses ceramic heating, instead of glowing coils to provide even heat to your space.
-"Cool Touch Housing" which reduces the risk of fire or accidental burns.
-AND, not a safety feature, but the design is really nice! It doesn't look like an eye sore in your beautiful home, in fact, it fits right in!
It also has a remote! We always used the timer when we turned it on, so we never needed it, but it's still definitely worth a mention.
If you have a space (office, dorm, RV, etc.), that could use a heater with fabulous safety features, that works great, I would highly recommend the NewAir QuietHeat15 space heater. And if you order now, you can use the code "MAMABYFIRE" to get 20% off. That's a great deal for this awesome heater!
**Photos courtesy of NewAir QuietHeat15.


Star Anchor Hunt | 8:30 PM everyday only on Star News | STAR News has launched a unique reality show. For the very first time in India, a reality show will be used to source the best talent to become News Anchors with STAR News.
After months of hardship, dedication and lots of learning, our 'Star Anchors' are now ready to conquer their dream. Dream of becoming a change agent in society. Dream of becoming people's voice that can shape the country. Dream of becoming a News anchor in India's most promising news channel – Star News. After becoming Star Anchors, Akshay and Meenakshi were busy completing their assignments with Star News. They went through in depth training and grooming sessions after beating their competition in Anchor Hunt. The biggest, most promising and most valuable prize offered to them in 'Star Anchor Hunt' is now reality. Yes, they are now full-time news presenter on Star News and you can see them presenting news on television. Akshay Shukla and Meenakshi have started their new job with us and here are few videos of them presenting their first ever professional news bulletin on Star News. Keep watching Star News to see them in Action!
The Hunt for the 2 best TV News Anchors comes to an end in Season 1 of Star Anchor Hunt. Check out how the finalists perform in the last elimination round of the season. Will they be able to face up to our special guest, the charismatic and honorable MP, Mr. Lalu Prasad Yadav.
Registrations for Star Anchor Hunt 2011 have already begun. Log on to http://www.staranchorhunt.com/ to register.
Meenakshi Kandhwal's journey in star anchor hunt from her auditions to becoming the winner of star anchor hunt.
Akshay Shukla's journey in Star Anchor Hunt.
The whole journey of Akshay Shukla in Star Anchor Hunt from the auditions to the grand finale.
Lalu Prasad Yadav's comments on the state of the Indian railways in his own unique style.
Lalu took at dig at Nitish's gesture of returning Modi's donation towards the Kosi floods as a gimmick. On being questioned by Deepak Chaurasia whether he would have returned the money if he was in Nitish's place, he replied in the negative. Lalu said that why should he return the money, it is not Modi's personal funds. The people of Gujarat have sent the money, so why should Bihar not accept it.
Lalu Prasad's views on past election results.
Lalu Prasad Yadav expresses his thoughts on past election results.


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Roulette Variation Guide: How Differences Change the Game
CasinoSource.ca
» blog »
We went over the basics of roulette a few weeks ago. The original beginner's guide to roulette touched on today's topic: different kinds of roulette.
There are multiple variations of roulette to enjoy. The game is thought to originate in France – hence the European and French versions – but as it made its way 'across the pond' to America, a new set of rules was created.
Fast forward a few centuries and the technological innovations afforded by the Internet then took roulette in a whole new direction. Here's a guide to some of the most popular forms of the game, and the differences between each.
This is the most popular form of roulette on the continent, as the name suggests. European roulette is the classic version of the game, which dates back to the 18th century, with numbers 1-36 and the single zero pocket.
You'll find European roulette available in the vast majority of both bricks-and-mortar and online casinos.
As roulette made its way across the Atlantic Ocean a new pocket – the double zero – was added to the wheel, and American Roulette was born. This added double zero meant the amount of numbers in American roulette became 38, one more than its European counterpart.
American roulette is the version of the game you'll find in most casinos in the US, however, even if you live outside of the USA, you'll still find American roulette in many online casinos. It's basically the same as European roulette apart from that one significant difference: the wheel has a single zero and a double zero.
French roulette is very similar to the European version, although there's one key difference: in European Roulette, if the ball lands on zero and it doesn't feature in your staking plan, your money is gone.
However, in French roulette, there is the rule of La Partage. This dictates that if you have an even money bet and the ball lands in zero, half of your stake will be returned in consolation.
Some versions of French roulette also incorporate the Prison rule. If you have an even money wager live and the ball lands on zero, you can decide to leave your bets on the table for another spin; thereby keeping them 'in prison', so to speak.
The clue's in the name, and mini roulette does exactly what it says on the tin. The Mini Roulette board and wheel are scaled down versions of the traditional set up, and usually feature the numbers 1-12 (plus zero).
Naturally, your odds of winning increase for many of the available wagers, and your payouts will decrease as a result.
Quite the opposite of Mini Roulette, the Multi-Wheel variant really turns the excitement up to eleven. Here you can specify how many wheels you want in play – usually an amount between two and eight are available – and you place your bets across the wheels.
It can, when your luck is in, result in some seriously handsome wins.
Double-Ball Roulette
One wheel, two balls: that's the predictable premise behind Double-Ball roulette. Here two balls are in play, so you have more betting options at your disposal. You can wager that both balls will land on the same number, which brings a tidy return of 35/1.
Or, you can go big and bet that both balls will land on a specified number – a long shot, granted, but one that pays a lucrative 1,200/1.
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Infiniti Of Naperville is located at the address 1550 West Ogden Avenue in Naperville, Illinois 60540. They can be contacted via phone at (630) 241-3000 for pricing, hours and directions.
For maps and directions to Infiniti Of Naperville view the map to the right. For reviews of Infiniti Of Naperville see below.


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American, married to a Palestinian refugee, and mother to 2 Palestinian-American young adults.
They also learned that even when they overstep and go too far, someone will always be there to make excuses for them, candy coat their actions, and otherwise shield them from public scrutiny. Let's have a full accounting of all the emails, calls, and meetings that went into the initial pressure to rescind the award. The people and organizations who pushed to have Angela Davis' award rescinded should be fully exposed. Even after re-instating the award, the BCRI is talking in circles trying to shield the very people who got them into this mess in the first place.
On Birmingham civil rights institute votes to give award to Angela Davis after all,
Ooooh, passive aggressive burn. Feel better? It feels so good doesn't it, to be able to kick her and talk down to her like that? We all know why she bugs you so much. At least your roots in Pennsylvania are most likely deeper than hers.
On Abulhawa: For 36 hours I was detained on a dirty bed in my homeland, then deported,
Her real home is Jerusalem. Her family was forced out against their will because they weren't Jewish.
On Susan Abulhawa is deported from Israel for second time in three years,
Israel fears literature.
It's comical, the only part of the post you contested is "Jews only roads." Apparently the rest of it stands without argument. Because technically, people who are not Jewish could drive those roads. As long as they have Jewish minders.
No, she's not allowed to return to her home. Just like all Palestinians.
Was surprised today (Wednesday morning) to see what could have been a Mondoweiss article on the front page of the NYT International Edition, written by Ben Hubbard and David M. Halbfinger
"The ascendance of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in Saudi Arabia was a boon for Israel…He cared little for the Palestinian cause and was seen as someone able to impose the Trump peace plan on the Palestinians…"
On Khashoggi murder has set back US-Israel effort to confront Iran,
The same can be said about USA unfortunately. And the divisions are becoming more and more visible.
On Malcolm Hoenlein on fostering Jewish power, inoculating 5-year-olds for Israel, and preventing intermarriage,
I think when he graduated he was three months younger than she had been when she graduated.
On Detained by Israel for a week, with bedbugs, Florida student becomes a public-relations catastrophe,
Yeah, big surprise the people getting more than half of other people's land said yes, and the people who were expected to give away more than half of their land said no.
On Ocasio-Cortez and other new Dems 'need to be educated' on Israel, says Rep. Eliot Engel,


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Here's Who The UN's World Food Program Wants To 'Step Up'
addkm/Shutterstock
By Lauren Cahn/May 24, 2022 11:40 am EST
The mission of the Nobel Prize-winning U.N.'s World Food Programme is to end global hunger. Last October, Tesla's CEO, Elon Musk, set aside just under $6 billion, which the program's head, David Beasley, seemed to believe was earmarked for donation to the program, per AP News. Beasley's belief came out of a Twitter dialogue in which Musk seemingly pledged $6 billion of his own liquidated Tesla stock to the program for the purpose of solving the global hunger crisis.
The catch, however, which was expressed unequivocally by Musk, is that as a condition for the donation, the program was tasked with describing – right in the Twitter thread in question, exactly how $6 billion will end global food insecurity. However, that has not happened thus far. In fact, Beasley long ago walked back an earlier statement, attributed to him by CNN, to the effect that if only Elon Musk would donate what amounts to 2% of his enormous wealth to the program, it could end world hunger once and for all. As Beasley tweeted back in October, "$6B will not solve world hunger, but it WILL prevent geopolitical instability, mass migration and save 42 million people on the brink of starvation," per Fortune.
Nevertheless, in a statement to AP on the occasion of the 2022 World Economic Forum now taking place in Davos, Switzerland, Beasley reminded the world the program's still waiting – and not solely for Musk, for that matter.
Attention billionaires of the world, the UN's World Hunger Programme sees you
Bloomberg/Getty Images
When Elon Musk set aside nearly $6 billion to help finance the work of an unnamed charity, the head of the UN's World Hunger Programme, David Beasley, may have gotten a bit ahead of himself in thinking that all, or even any, would go to the program (per AP). This happened shortly after Musk discussed making a donation if the program could explain how it would end world hunger (per Fortune). However, the explanation has not happened, and the money has not landed in the hands of the UN program. Although Beasley is still on about Musk's conditional pledge, he, on behalf of the program, is now calling upon billionaires everywhere to "step up." And by step up, he means donate generously to the cause of world hunger.
"Step up now, because the world needs you," Beasley said via AP on the occasion of the 2022 World Economic Forum currently being held in Davos, Switzerland. AP says it is being attended by some of the world's richest individuals, including Musk, who's worth approximately $200 billion, and philanthropically-inclined former Amazon CEO, Jeffrey Bezos, whose net worth falls in the ballpark of $130 billion, according to Forbes. But Musk and Bezos, neither of whom have responded thus far to AP's request for comment, aren't the only billionaires in the world. Beasley's plea is intended for all of them, according to AP.


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