I was struck - indeed almost made dizzy - by the contrasting interpretations the media delivered following the London G20 meeting. In the end I wasn't sure whether the media was even covering the same event. This confusion continued till I realized that the contrasting commentary arose from more than a single consensus that Leaders, and in turn the media, concluded for this now completed meeting.
I should, before continuing, express abject apologies from my lengthy absence. I cannot at this moment go into what we were 'cooking up', but I'm hopeful that my absence was worth the lengthy silence.
So back to the G20 London meeting. As I was suggesting, the media was commenting on more than one consensus. consensus responds to different country motivations. In addition, each tackles a different set of solutions to the global financial crisis. We have multiple successful goals - or not.
The first consensus identified was "Avoiding the London 1933 Conference outcome". Prime Minister Brown was exceptionally alert to this outcome, as was President Obama. To the extent that the global financial crisis will be ameliorated by 'confidence', the trumpeting of this consensus is crucial. And it would appear that the triumphant-edge placed by the media on the London G20 arises from this conclusion and a review of the Leaders' Statement. The G20 Leaders left the meeting in unity and with a strong statement even if largely rhetorical.
The next consensus was "the Washington Consensus is dead" declarations. Prime Minister Brown and other European leaders - President Sarkozy and Chancellor Merkel - appeared to trumpet this consensus in their news conferences following the meeting. Though exactly what the leaders and commentators had in mind concerning the "Washington Consensus", I'm not totally sure, but it was evident the leaders trumpeted the view that unfettered and unregulated capitalism à la Consensus was gone. I must say such a view emanating from Gordon Brown seemed more than mildly strange.
This Consensus is all about financial regulation. Thus, statements about new regulation abound in the Leaders' Statement. There will be, it appears, new regulation of hedge funds, actions against tax havens, improving standards on valuation, "tough new principles on pay and compensation", as the Statement heralded, as well as regulatory oversight of the Credit Rating Agencies. All in all, as the Leaders' Statement declared, "… action to build a stronger more globally consistent, supervisory and regulatory framework for the future financial sector, which will support sustainable global growth and serve the needs of business and citizens." All in all, much to be worked out with little or no detail here and from the US point of view, and far more critically, no global regulator - whatever that was supposed to be.
Following on the heels of these two consensuses (yes, I looked it up and for the Latin lights in the crowd it is a 4th declension), there is third consensus, what I call "Beating the Great Recession" consensus. This view was pushed most noticeably by the new American Administration. In the "run up" to the Conference, US officials urged a coordinated fiscal stimulus approach to help extricate the global economy from downturns in economic growth, trade and investment. The negative response of some European leaders was "The Story" in the media preceding the actual Conference. But coordinated fiscal stimulus was not the central thrust of the London Statement. It would appear that the US Administration backed off this coordinated fiscal stimulus goal and left it to the Statement to express a collective need to "undertak[e] an unprecedented and concerted fiscal expansion," - without collective commitment. The Leaders' Statement does set out a a list of resources that have been pledged that total US$1.1 trillion to aid the global economy. Much of this lending is directed, somewhat surprisingly given the attitudes of countries toward the IMF in the recent past, to the IMF. While certainly these sums are material, one does wonder how stimulative some off these resources are. One example will suffice. There is a commitment to a new allocation of Special Drawing Rights for $250 billion but spread to some 185 countries - hmmmm.
The final consensus, is, I suppose, not really a consensus and not exactly expressed in the Leaders' Statement at all. In fact it was more a proposal for a rethink of the US dollar as the global reserve currency. This not yet identified and certainly not acted on consensus is what I would call "The Global Imbalances" Consensus. Proposed by Russia slightly earlier, the Governor of the Peoples Bank of China, Zhou Xiaochuan got quite some attention earlier with his posted speech on the need to move away from the US dollar as the global reserve currency.
While a proposal probably meriting discussion (although if the past is any indication the proposal will likely not bear much fruit) - it's probably not now - and probably not from China. As pointed out - indeed strongly pointed out by Paul Krugman - our own Nobel prize-winning columnist from the New York Times in his Friday April 3rd column - the proposal is a consequence of a China that is awash in US Treasury bills and facing an impeding and possibly severe US dollar devaluation. As Paul suggests, "So what Mr. Zhou's proposal actually amounts to is a plea that someone rescue China from the consequences of its own investment mistakes." The deep problem of persistent imbalances - huge US debt and huge China surplus will need to be addressed if we are to re-establish global economic and financial stability. The US will have to consume less and China will have to save less. These adjustments will not come overnight and not without pain, possibly a lot of it - but there is no consensus on this critical aspect of the global financial problem. Certainly not yet from London.


text:
Rahul Dravid cleared of conflict of interest charges by BCCI ethics officer | Sports News, The Indian Express
Sourav Ganguly, Rahul Dravid meet to discuss roadmap to improve NCA
In a relief for former India captain Rahul Dravid, the BCCI ethics officer DK Jain on Thursday dismissed the conflict-of-interest complaint against him, saying it was "bereft of any merit".
"I have rejected the complaint. Rahul Dravid doesn't have conflict of interest," Jain told PTI after issuing the order. "I am convinced that on facts at hands, a case of conflict of interest as enshrined in the Rules is not made out. Resultantly, the complaint is dismissed being bereft of any merit," read Thursday's order.
MPCA life member Sanjiv Gupta had filed a complaint against Dravid, alleging conflict of interest in his current role as Head of Cricket at the National Cricket Academy (NCA) and being an India Cements employee.
Jain had conducted a second round of hearing on Tuesday when Dravid was represented by his lawyer.
The 46-year-old former India captain had earlier explained his case in a personal hearing held in Mumbai on September 26.
In his earlier submission, Dravid had defended himself saying he has taken leave of absence from India Cements.
When Dravid was appointed, the former India captain was told by BCCI that a 'leave of absence' letter from India Cements, where he has been a vice-president for a decade, was enough to take up the new job at NCA and that it would free him of conflict of interest. The former cricketer did likewise.
"It is leave of absence which is what I have been asked to do at that stage. I will appear with my lawyer and represent my own case," Dravid had told The Indian Express.
As per Rule 38 (4) of BCCI constitution, no individual can hold more than one post at the same time. However, in Dravid's case the ethics officer has interpreted the rule a bit differently while in the order passed in June, Jain had found Sourav Ganguly and VVS Laxman conflicted for holding multiple posts.
"…mere holding of posts by an individual associated with the BCCI…may not per-se be sufficient for arriving at the conclusion of existence of 'conflict of interest'… (It) must also be tested on the anvil of reasonable apprehensions of, or actual favoritism, lack of objectivity, bias, benefits, etc." the order read. —PTI Inputs
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redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


A copy that has been read, but remains in excellent condition. Pages are intact and are not marred by notes or highlighting. The spine remains undamaged. There are no stickers on book or rips in dust cover.
Description: It integrates theory, practical circuits, and troubleshooting concepts, keeping mathematical details to a minimum. Delving more deeply into coverage of linear integrated circuits than discrete device circuits, the text guides readers through a system of pedagogical tools that both reinforces and challenges their understanding.


Objective: To assess the antihypertensive efficacy of olmesartan medoxomil and ramipril on 24-h ambulatory blood pressure (ABP) in elderly hypertensive patients by pooled data analysis of two studies with identical designs (one Italian, one European).
Methods: After a 2-week placebo wash-out 1453 elderly hypertensive patients (65–89 years; sitting office DBP 90–109 mmHg and/or sitting office SBP 140–179 mmHg) were randomized to a 12-week double-blind treatment with olmesartan medoxomil 10 mg or ramipril 2.5 mg once-daily, up-titrated (20 and 40 mg olmesartan medoxomil; 5 and 10 mg ramipril) after 2 and 6 weeks in patients without normalized office BP. 24-h ABP was recorded at randomization and after 12 weeks.
Results: In 715 patients with valid baseline and end-of-treatment recordings baseline-adjusted 24-h SBP and DBP reductions were greater with olmesartan medoxomil (n = 356) than with ramipril (n = 359) [between-treatment differences and 95% confidence interval (CI), SBP: 2.2 (3.8, 0.6), P = 0.006; DBP: 1.3 (2.2, 0.3), P = 0.009]. Olmesartan medoxomil showed larger BP reductions in the last 6 h from the dosing interval and higher smoothness indices than ramipril. Olmesartan medoxomil reduced the SBP morning rise [−2.8 (−4.9, −0.8) mmHg], whereas ramipril did not [+1.5 (–0.6, +3.6) mmHg; P = 0.004 between-treatments]. Five hundred and eighty-two patients with sustained hypertension (office and 24-h ambulatory hypertension) showed the largest antihypertensive effect, with between-treatment differences still in favor of olmesartan medoxomil [SBP: 2.1 (3.9, 0.4), P = 0.019; DBP: 1.2 (2.3, 0.1), P = 0.032].
Conclusions: Olmesartan medoxomil provides a more effective and sustained 24-h BP control than ramipril in elderly hypertensive patients, particularly in the hours farthest from last intake.
Journal of Hypertension30(7):1468-1477, July 2012.


text:
Q: Grass tools not working in QGIS 2.14.3-ESSEN, OSGEO4W Windows 10
QGIS 2.14.3-ESSEN
OSGEO4W install  (current)
64-bit
Processing toolbox.
Grass tools do not work
Neither 6 nor 7. 6 makes sense as I do not see OSGEO4W installing it but 7 tools are not working either.
My Grass folder (7) appears to be C*:\OSGeo4W64\apps\grass\grass-7.0.4*
They are activated (I know they are not in the screenshot).
Grass 7 works as a standalone.

Error message:

Missing dependency. This algorithm cannot be run :-(  The specified
  GRASS GIS 7 folder does not contain a valid set of GRASS GIS 7
  modules. Please, go to the Processing settings dialog, and check that
  the GRASS GIS 7 folder is correctly configured

What exactly should go in these four yellow boxes?
Now when I try to manually enter my path to grass 7 I get a new error message (below). No msys folder exists in the latest version of OSGEO4W 64-bit so I cannot set this.
.
This solution (QGIS 2.14 standalone GRASS provider missing Msys folder, can't execute tools) appears to point to a spam link now and not mysys.

A: Have you used the Advanced Install option in OSGeo4W to make sure msys and GRASS 7 are both installed?
I usually run the express install first, then go back into Setup, tick over to Advanced Install, and grab any extra bits and pieces I like to use.
My GRASS 7 path is C:\OSGeo4W64\apps\grass\grass-7.0.4
GRASS 7 commands work for me but not GRASS commands - doesn't matter to me though.

A: I moved an old MYSYS folder and contents from an earlier QGIS install. 7 works now. I think for 6 to work Id have to install it and point to it.

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaStackExchange


I successfully soldered on a pin back handmade by me with sterling silver wire...can you believe that? Yes!
So, now I think I have to make like 6 of these or so to appease all my catty friends and their mothers.
Here is the back. The front is the next post down.
Now I have to finish the monkey I am working on....Heehee.
I made this cat out of copper sheet. The eyes are sterling silver wire rivets holding the head to the body.
Scott thinks it looks like a South Park cat, so that is what it is. Heehee.
It's quite small as you can see in my hand. I really don't know what I will do with it yet. It might be a pendant, or a pin.


Tri-State Forest Products, Inc. is a comprehensive full line wholesale distributor of commodities and building products, specializing in engineered wood products. For over 25 years we've been providing our brand of personal service accompanied with high quality products to the Tri-State market area. Our branches are located in Springfield, OH, Perrysburg (Toledo) Ohio, Indianapolis, IN, Edwardsburg, MI, Saginaw, MI, Gaylord, MI, Lexington (Nicholasville), KY, Milan, TN and a satelite location in Grand Rapids, MI with over 450,000 square feet of combined warehouse space.
Our goal and mission is to develop long-term relationships with our customers and provide them with an array of products at competitive prices through on time shipments. We know that successful business relies not just on quality products but also great service and relationships. That's why we're here for you before, during, and after the sale to ensure that we're meeting all of your needs. Tri-State provides specialized services to help promote your company's success, such as, Model Home Programs, Builder Breakfast Meetings, Product Training and Installation Seminars, and Emergency Response to application problems.


text:
Love Inspires Young Scholar's Research
Nathan Douglas
BLOOMINGTON, Ill.— Two years ago Nathan Douglas '15 (Monticello, Ill.) fell in love, but not with a person. While studying abroad in Barcelona, Douglas explored untouched alleyways and the Catalan language as he fell deeper into the discovery of what makes this city unique within the context of Spanish culture.
Douglas has just returned from his third trip to Barcelona, this time as a scholar investigating links between Nada, a novel set in 1940s Barcelona, and the Catalan region's current independence movement. A Hispanic Studies and secondary education double major at Illinois Wesleyan University, Douglas is a recipient of a Andrew W. Mellon Foundation's Re-Centering the Humanities grant for student scholars. The Mellon Scholars program allows students to conduct research with faculty members over the summer.
In his research, Douglas is taking stock of the Catalan region's centuries-long history of fighting central authority for greater autonomy. After the Spanish Civil War ended in 1939, long-held institutions were abolished and the official use of the Catalan language was banned for almost four decades.
Carmen Laforet's novel Nada is the story of a young woman, Andrea, coming to Barcelona to live with relatives and begin university studies. The glittering, sophisticated Barcelona of her youth is gone, along with her family's wealth. Described by some as Spain's The Catcher in the Rye for its adolescent search for identity, Nada also reflects a hungry people in a post-war city of crumbling churches and dangerous streets.
Douglas said some historical scholars dismiss fiction as a legitimate source for a history. "I counter that argument," said Douglas, who is mentored by Professor of Hispanic Studies Carmela Ferradáns. "Even though Nada is a novel, the characters have to function in a society that was real, so there has to be some degree of truth in the characters and their reactions to the circumstances Barcelona endured after the war. Studying the novel from that angle gives us the opportunity to take some historical meaning from it, other than just bits of culture here and there."
He's discovered Nada has parallels with the Catalan independence movement, which is scheduled for a vote in November. In 1978 Catalonia regained rights lost under Franco, but these freedoms did not fully reflect the autonomy that the Catalans possessed until the 18th century.
"Like Andrea in Nada, this new chapter in Catalan history has failed to match up with memory," Douglas explained.
In addition to a written report, Douglas will display photographs to visually present his findings. "I wanted to make my work more accessible to people," Douglas said. "It was another way to do research for me as well."
Douglas said the Mellon program is a tremendous opportunity to indulge his self-confessed "crazy obsession with post-Civil War Spain."
"I think this project will help me so much in graduate school," said Douglas, who plans to apply to Ph.D. programs in Spain. "I plan to write my thesis dissertation within the realm of this topic, so I'm laying the groundwork for the future."
Learn about other 2014 Mellon Scholars.


text:
The Crooked Mirror, Louise Steinman's Blog
journeys within and beyond
Archive for Los Angeles Public Library
Time Regained: Reading Józef Czapski in Billings, MT (about Marcel Proust, the Gulag, and reading as salvation)
Posted in ALOUD, Art and Culture, Crooked Mirror, history, Human Rights, Literature, Poland, social justice, translation, Travel with tags 2018 Midterms, Bergotte, Billings MT, Central Library, Czapki, David Ornette Cherry, don cherry, General Anders, Gryazovets, gulag, In Search of Lost Time, Jozef Czapski, Katyn, liminality, Los Angeles Public Library, Lubyanka, Monte Cassino, Paris, Poland, Polish officers, Proust, Sebald, Senator Jon Tester, Soviet prison camp, Susan Banyas, Swing Left, Vermeer, View of Delft, Zagajewski on May 30, 2019 by Louise Steinman
[from THE NOTEBOOKS OF JOZEF CZAPSKI, Polish limited edition]
I WOKE UP around 5:00 a.m., disoriented in an unfamiliar bed. I did not know east from west, up from down, where I'd find a floor to take the weight of my body. The hazy proportions of the room gave no clue; curtains blocked the winter light. In the moment my eyes opened, I lost my connection to those essentials that are, as Proust assures his readers, held fast by our psyches during sleep: "[T]he sequence of the hours, the order of the years, and the worlds."
My disorientation went beyond the geo-gravitational. One era of my life had ended, and the next had not yet begun. If I lived in a traditional society, I'd have been standing on the threshold of the hut listening as a priest beat drums and stirred strong potions, a state the anthropologists call liminality.
Just six weeks before, I'd been fired from my job of 25 years. It was a job I'd loved, that had drawn on my love of literature and my delight at convening people from across Los Angeles to engage with the issues of the day, to ask questions of innovative thinkers, to practice agreeing and disagreeing in a public forum. The events at Central Library, the hearth of the city, were free; homeless patrons sat next to lawyers and teachers and students to listen to Christopher Hitchens talk about religion or Ta-Nehesi Coates discuss reparations. They came to hear local poets read Walt Whitman translated into Farsi and Spanish; to celebrate novelists like Colson Whitehead and his re-imagining of the Underground Railroad, to learn from naturalists like Terry Tempest Williams, primatologists like Frans de Waal. Hundreds of literary luminaries — Susan Sontag, Toni Morrison, August Wilson, W. G. Sebald, Margaret Atwood, Adam Zagajewski, Ursula LeGuin — all presented their work on our stage over the years. At our last event, Nelson Mandela's granddaughter read from her grandfather's just-published prison letters. One evening, during his sound check, Cornel West pulled me aside to say, "You know, don't you, that this space is sanctified?" I did.
Now I was untethered from the satisfactions of my job and as well, from the scaffold of responsibilities that had, for so many years, structured the rhythms of my life. I was past the tearful stage, but I was still heart-torn, grieving. Luckily, I had been granted a writing residency that fall at an arts colony on a ranch outside of Sheridan, Wyoming, and Susan — my soul sister-in-art — had been awarded a residency there as well. Perhaps some time away would open a way to re-focus, to pick up the thread of my own writing life.
As a way to jumpstart our adventure, Susan and I schemed a rendezvous, picking a town on the map that neither of us knew at all — Billings, Montana — simply because it had an airport and decent airfares from Los Angeles, for me, and from Portland, Oregon, for Susan.
Susan rented us a car and a two-bedroom Airbnb bungalow in Billings. We planned to cook simple meals together, drink good wine, catch up on stories about our lives, plan collaborative projects, and, at the end of the weekend, drive the 70 miles to the Crow Reservation to spend some daylight hours at the Little Bighorn Battlefield, then travel the final stretch to the Wyoming ranch and our official residency.
At the last moment, life tectonics shifted. A mutual friend — jazz musician David Ornette Cherry — suffered a medical emergency. He couldn't breathe, barely managed to call 911 from his Portland studio before he suffered a cardiac arrest. David was "gone," the paramedics said, for four whole minutes, and was now in an induced coma, on a ventilator in a Portland hospital, in the limbo of the ICU, where machines bleated heart rates and IV bags dripped nourishment into human veins, between life and death, this world, that world, with Susan by his bedside. He had no family nearby. He was going to need a lot of support to pull through.
I wholeheartedly supported Susan's decision to stay behind, to forgo the residency if David didn't recover soon. I realized as well that it was too last-minute and too costly to redirect my itinerary.
Which is why I woke up alone, in a strange bed in a strange house in Billings, Montana, where I dreaded spending the weekend alone.
MORE. READ ENTIRE PIECE, as published in Los Angeles Review of Books, May 21, 2019
Resister in Sanctuary: We Won't Go
Posted in FRIENDS, history, Human Rights, Life and What about It, Los Angeles, Peace and social justice, social justice with tags 1960's, anti-war, Country Joe and the Fish, David Harris, Draft Resistance, Fixin' to Die Rag, General Hershey Bar, Grace Episcopal Church, Gregory Nelson, Joe Maizlish, L.A. Resistance, L.A. Resistance Archive, Los Angeles Public Library, psychedelia, sanctuary, The Cheetah, Vietnam war, Winter Dellenbach on August 14, 2018 by Louise Steinman
Joe Maizlish at Induction Refusal, 1968 Black and white photograph/L.A. Resistance Collection, Los Angeles Public Library
In one glass case, what first draws my eye is a REMEMBER JOE MAIZLISH bumper sticker identical to the one I affixed to the bumper of my dad's Ford Mustang in 1968. Yes, I do remember Joe Maizlish. Decades ago, I wrote to him in while he was in federal prison, where he served two and a half years of a three- sentence for refusing induction to the draft. Joe, now a psychologist and mediator, in present-day, is my neighbor in Silverlake.
The item, along with posters in fonts of various degrees of psychedelia, is on exhibit at WE WON'T GO: The L.A. Resistance, Vietnam and the Draft (at the Central Library's Getty Gallery until August 19). Curated by Winter Karen Dellenbach, an L.A. Resister, together with Ani Boyadjian, Research & Special Collections Manager for the Los Angeles Public Library, this inspiring display of civil disobedience was drawn from the Los Angeles Resistance Archives, acquired by the library in 2014. The collection includes letters, posters still and moving images, diaries, mimeographed newsletters, draft cards and other ephemera donated by members of the L.A. Resistance and their supporters. Essentially, this is a chronicle of the non-violent anti-draft activities of the L.A. chapter of the Resistance, a nationwide movement.
I recognize a black and white photo of General Hershey Bar, with his signature plastic B-52's worn as medals. The real General Hershey, a Nixon advisor, was head of the Selective Service, and General Hershey Bar was a familiar sight at anti-war rallies in the '60s. "Fixin-to-Die Rag" (Country Joe and the Fish) cues in my head:
"Well, come on all of you big strong men
Uncle Sam needs your help again
Got himself in a terrible jam
Way down yonder in Vietnam
Put down your books and pick up a gun
We're going to have a whole lot of fun"
MORE on Los Angeles Review of Books
Paradise on Hope: On the 25th Anniversary of the Central Library fire
Posted in ALOUD with tags Bertrand Goodhue, Central Library fire, Cornerstone Theater, Dean Cornwell, Ishi, Jorge Luis Borges, La Ballona Elementary, Los Angeles Public Library, Maguire Gardens, Posthuman Dada Guide on April 29, 2011 by Louise Steinman
"I have always thought that Paradise was a kind of library."
-Jorge Luis Borges
On a November morning, a crowd soaks up the wan sun in the Maguire Gardens in front of Central Library. The lucky ones sip coffee out of paper cups, others slump in the stupor of the unslept. A black feral cat slinks out of the shrubbery to forage. At a quarter to ten, the waiting throng jockeys for position at the three entrances to the Central Library: Flower Street, 5th Street, and Hope. At 10 AM, a Library security officer unlocks the tall copper doors, swings them outwards. The crowd surges inside in a race to reach computers, magazines, warmth, chairs, public restrooms.
I've worked at Central Library for sixteen years now, yet the urgency of this morning ritual never fails to move me. After all, this is no mad rush for rock concert tickets or wide-screen TV's. These people are hurrying into a library. This library is many things to many people—a place where scholars do serious research, where parents read aloud to their children, where jobseekers polish resumes. In the Literacy Center, volunteers tutor adults in reading, in the Popular Library commuters peruse audiobooks and in the public restroom near the 5th Street entrance, homeless women brush their teeth.
In the Mark Taper Auditorium, where I curate a lecture and performance series, Angelenos gather to listen to a physicist discuss black holes or a novelist extol "the human fidelity to beautiful ideas." We've presented Zen archers and hiphop poets, a panel of bloggers and journalists helped us envision the rocky future of the Los Angeles Times.
The Central Library was built in 1921 during one of LA's boom cycles. It may have been a time of shoddily constructed subdivisions, but the Central library was built to last. The building was a collaboration among the architect Bertrand Grosvener Goodhue, the painter Dean Cornwell, and the German-born sculptor Lawrie Lee. Goodhue's intent was to mimic Egyptian architecture: topping the library roof is a pyramid tiled on all four sides with images of the sun. At its apex is a golden hand circumscribed by the Serpent of Knowledge and holding aloft a torch: "the light of learning." The Goddess of Civilization, flanked by two black marble sphinxes, presides over the grand staircase to the rotunda. On her crown is a tiny replica of the library. Her staff rests on the back of a tortoise. On her the bronze breastplate are images of Romulus and Remus, the Egytian pyramids, the winged bull of Babylon, the goddess Shiva, a Minoan temple, a Phoenician ship, the Cathedral of Notre Dame, a Conestoga wagon, an American bison, and the Liberty Bell. From the facades of the building, bas reliefs of great philosophers and historians— Herodotus, Virgil, Socrates — peer down at all who enter.
The old building was a civic treasure; but it was stuffed to the ceiling with combustible material, lacked a sprinkler system, adequate ventilation and storage space for the collection. Recommendations on fixing the outdated building were doomed with the passage of Proposition 13 in 1978.	On April 29, 1986–an arson fire that originated in the Rare Books Room of Central Library sent smoke billowing into the afternoon sky. It took over 360 firefighters from sixty companies to subdue the stubborn blaze.
smoke billows from Central Library, April 29, 1986 photo: LAPL Photo Collection
In the days and weeks that followed, many librarians joined the salvage effort, working in foot-deep toxic stew of soot, mold, and melted debris without protective gear. Many contracted a wicked chronic bronchitis from these efforts. (The perpetrators have never been apprehended.) Nearly 400,000 books were destroyed, but the disaster did have a silver lining, mobilizing the public and civic leaders to rally behind the Save the Books campaign to raise funds to rebuild Central Library.
In 1993, the expanded, renovated, technologically updated building opened to great fanfare. I began working for the Library Foundation of Los Angeles that same year, with a mandate to create public programs. In my dreams that first year, I noted in my journal, Central Library often appeared as a maze, "with many secret areas as yet unopened to the public."
Every Thursday morning school groups visit Central Library. I watch the second graders sitting cross-legged on the marble floor of the Rotunda under the Zodiac chandelier. Their high-pitched voices blur in the vast hall. They look upwards with wonder and curiosity at Dean Cornwell's forty-foot high California history murals that cover the vaulting walls. Cornwell, a magazine illustrator, completed them in 1932. The murals are visually delightful and—if you've read much California history—intellectually distressing. Cortez steps ashore. Muscular heathens kneel at his feet, heads bowed, offering gifts of beads and pelts. " A chubby eight year old asks, "How did he paint it?" During Cornwell's lifetime, a newspaper called the Central Library murals "the largest ever executed by one man since Michelangelo decorated the Sistine Chapel."
Fragment, Central Library mural by Dean Cornwell
The docent crouches down next to the boy, who is the same hue as the kneeling Gabrielino. She points out how there are over three hundred figures, each one outlined in pale blue. "Look, those are the padres, they are holding the building plans for missions. They walked the length of California."
And I am back in my own fourth grade classroom at La Ballona Elementary in Culver City, melding flour, water, salt for my relief map of my home state. We constructed California missions out of popsicle sticks and learned that the Indians were grateful to be clothed, fed, and educated by the good padres. It wasn't until my thirties, working on a documentary film about Ishi, the last Yahi Indian in California, that I learned the uglier side of California history—the forced conversions, repression of native languages, the official state bounty on Indian scalps the plunder of resources Indians needed to survive– all painfully symbolized by those subservient figures in Cornwell's murals. I sit on the floor of the library and stare up at the Zodiac, thinking of Ishi— in his skins and seared scalp, mourning for his family.
There are plenty of books on the library's shelves that tell about the rich culture of California's indigenous peoples. I wonder if those second graders will someday possess the curiosity to seek them out and read them.
The library is open to all and, as the Great Recession tightens its grip, a growing number of L.A.'s homeless seek haven there during the day. The untreated mentally ill are among the regular visitors, ranting, sitting and staring, making entrances and exits through the lobby. A few weeks ago, a man attempted suicide in the library atrium. An email from the City Librarian went out to all staff: "A man jumped at 11:45 AM." No one could agree from which floor—some said the third, some the fourth. A librarian in the Literature Department caught the motion out of the corner of his eye. Some said he took a running leap, others that he stepped over the railing without hesitation. Without a doubt, he fell onto the Atrium Lower Level 1, where the first security officer to reach him was Officer Kyles, who I happen to know can speak in tongues. Damage was done, blood spilled, bones askew. Officer Kyles stayed by his side. "Did you pray for him?" I asked later. He nodded somberly. "He wasn't going to die on my watch." The jumper did live, surviving surgery and a tenure in the ICU at County Hospital. Officer Kyles says they're trying to find his family.
Recently, as part of our lecture series, the Surrealist poet Andrei Codrescu spoke about his Posthuman Dada Guide. During his talk it occurred to me that our jumper may have considered himself already in the posthuman world, that he'd moved on to the phase when one can exist half human, half bird.
There's a charming tiled fountain flanked by tangerine trees that I walk past every day en route to work, after climbing the stairs from Hope Street. It took years until I finally noticed the quote chiseled in the marble: "WISDOM IS THE RIPE FRUIT OF MUCH REFLECTION." The converse is now etched into my mind as well: ignorance is the unripe fruit of much inattention.
After all, for years I exited the library onto Hope Street at the end of every work day, without realizing this was the same Hope Street inscribed on my birth certificate. It wasn't until Cornerstone Theater mounted a site-specific production of "Candide" (re-titled "Candude, the Civil Servant") in the Central Library that I made the connection. At the climax of the play, the actors lead the audience on a journey through one of the library's underground tunnels and, at the finale, the hero Candude flung open the doors onto Hope Street. "Hope!" he cried, "here it is."
Hope Street, where I was born, just six blocks away from Central Library. I haven't come far from my origins. Perhaps that's why the idea of Central Library as a hearth of the city resonates so deeply with me. This life-quickened repository of wisdom, an un-virtual world where we daily interact with serpents of knowledge, goddesses of civilization, scholars, bodhisattvas, poets, madmen, would-be suicides. Where every morning at 10 AM (while there's still the budget and the public will to keep it open), the eager crowd rushes in.
[Written 2009, published originally in The Devil's Punchbowl: A Cultural & Geographic Map of California Today, Red Hen Press, 2010]
"Recognizing the Righteous in My Family's Polish Town"
"Slight Exaggeration" – An Interview with poet Adam Zagajewski (Los Angeles Review of Books)
"Who Will Write Our History?"
The Aphasia Book Club
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The Souvenir: A Daughter Discovers Her Daughter's War
Where to find my book THE SOUVENIR: A DAUGHTER DISCOVERS HER FATHER'S WAR
Upcoming talks, on-stage interviews
Louise Steinman's website
Sculptor Lloyd Hamrol's website
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text:
namespace Hypodermic
{

    template <class T>
    class ProvidedInstanceRegistrationActivator : public IRegistrationActivator
    {
    public:
        ProvidedInstanceRegistrationActivator(const IRegistration& registration, const std::shared_ptr< T >& instance)
            : m_registration(registration)
            , m_instance(instance)
        {
        }

        std::shared_ptr< void > activate(IResolutionContext&) override
        {
            HYPODERMIC_LOG_INFO("Activating provided instance of type " << m_registration.instanceType().fullyQualifiedName());

            return m_instance;
        }

        void raiseActivated(ComponentContext&, const std::shared_ptr< void >&) override
        {
        }

    private:
        const IRegistration& m_registration;
        std::shared_ptr< T > m_instance;
    };

} // namespace Hypodermic

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaGithub


(1) A pilot battled to avoid a plane crash as his stricken aircraft circled over Colchester(2) Although it is impossible to predict whether there will be a crash , property prices are unlikely to continue to rise at rates seen in the past 10 years.(3) According to authorities in Montrose, he remains unaccounted for after his seat was ripped from the aircraft during the crash .(4) As is usual in the case of an aircraft crash , many unidentifiable small pieces of aluminum and steel also surfaced.(5) If you use a mobile phone and you crash your car you are likely to be prosecuted.(6) A high-speed head-on car crash claimed the lives of a teenager and two elderly women, an inquest heard.(7) It is believed the fault was linked to an operation centre at West Drayton as air traffic controllers switched to a manual system during the computer crash .(8) James replied sharply, yelling over the crash of waves and thunder alike.(9) She watched the waves crash down onto the shore as the sun set, and she smiled.(10) A soldier lost control of his Army vehicle and caused a crash , a court heard.(11) One of the key triggers to a price crash is rising unemployment.(12) With the average Welsh house price at 7 times my wages I am fervently hoping that prices crash , as are most of my friends.(13) Everyone at the table winced as they heard the bathroom door slam, and a crash as something fell.(14) the economy could crash again(15) My parents were taken to the accident and emergency department after a car crash near the motorway.(16) Just as he was about to open his mouth to speak, there was a loud crash , followed by the screeching of the train's breaks.
Meaning and definitions of crash, translation in Afrikaans language for crash with similar and opposite words. Also find spoken pronunciation of crash in Afrikaans and in English language.
Tags for the entry "crash"
What crash means in Afrikaans, crash meaning in Afrikaans, crash definition, examples and pronunciation of crash in Afrikaans language.


Figure 1. Sustainable Model (Adopted from Aras and Crowther, 2007).
Those four aspects should be kept in an equilibrium which can be achieved by reviewing the four activities in consideration of the internal-external and short-term long-term focus context.


Take note of the date and the time intervals (when the activity started and when it ended) that your "Walk" activity (in this case) took place.
Then, click on "+ Add" to create your "Walk" activity.
A window will pop up and you will to name your activity.
Then, you will need to select the activity type under "Training routine".
Finally, enter the date and time interval that you took down and click on "Save".
Your new "Walk" activity will then appear under the "Activities" tab on your Hexoskin Dashboard.
How do I download/import Hexoskin data?


text:
The War Of The Great Books
What seemed to be just another tempest in the teapot of academia has escalated into a matter of national values and politics. Who would have believed that the choice of which books Stanford University students must read would create so much tumult? And that the controversy goes back so far?
Benjamin Mcarthur
Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind must surely be the most unexpected happening of American intellectual life in recent years. It is an erudite, closely argued book of philosophy and cultural criticism. That it should sit atop the New York Times best-seller list for eleven weeks and produce a hard-cover sale of a half-million copies defies publishing's common sense.
Unexpected, but not unprecedented. The Education of Henry Adams, a gloomy meditation on the course of American development, was a nonfiction best seller of 1919. In recent decades Michael Harrington's The Other America, a statement of outrage at American poverty, and Christopher Lasch's The Culture of Narcissism, an indictment of a self-absorbed culture, also won unforeseen acclaim. We embrace our Cassandras. Socrates criticized Athenian democracy and was forced to sip the hemlock; Allan Bloom charges America with mindlessness and becomes a millionaire.
But our society's admirable habit of rewarding its severest critics does not explain the Bloom phenomenon completely. By raising fundamental questions about the very basis of modern education, Allan Bloom has started a war of ideas within the intellectual community. After an initially warm reception by most reviewers and continued endorsement by conservative thinkers, Bloom's work came under heavy fire. "A most enticing, a most subtle, a most learned, a most dangerous tract," Benjamin Barber wrote in Harper's, "one of the most profoundly anti-democratic books ever written for a popular audience." The book was scorched by the reviewer David Rieff in The Times Literary Supplement as one "decent people would be ashamed of having written."
The usual tempest-in-a-teapot nature of academic fights has taken on larger dimensions with the battle passing over into the political arena. On the left, Jesse Jackson joined demonstrators at Stanford University last year protesting the traditional required Western Culture course. They demanded and got a broadening of the reading list to include works of "women, minorities, and persons of color." Calling this event another example of the "closing of the American mind"— because it appears to replace a concern for classic standards and values with a narrower focus on current problems—the former Secretary of Education William Bennett has mounted the ramparts on the right alongside Bloom, warning of a "nation at risk" because of mediocre schools and exhorting colleges to "reclaim a legacy" of humanistic learning.
We are, in short, witnessing another round in the war between the ancients and moderns first described by Jonathan Swift in his mock-heroic satire of 1697, "The Battle of the Books." In that struggle set in the royal library, the modern volumes envied the ancient volumes' privileged position on Mount Parnassus. The ancients' refusal to come down provoked the moderns to attack. But where the classic authors commanded the heights in Swift's day, in ours the battle lines have reversed. Science and the apparently limitless march of knowledge overshadow older axioms and make uncertain the very notion of absolute, "classic" truth. The Closing of the American Mind, then, represents something of a rearguard action on behalf of traditional authorities.
But Bloom is not the first to lead an American counterattack against modernist philosophy. His diagnosis of America's ills (educational shallowness) and his prescriptions for its cure (diligent study of Plato et al.) continue a line of argument developed by Robert Hutchins and Mortimer Adler more than half a century ago. By the same token, the sparks Bloom's book struck rekindle memories of the reception given their Great Books seminars in the thirties and the publication of the Great Books of the Western World in 1952.
The story of the Great Books—the most ambitious championing of the classics in American history—has several facets. It is an account of our national genius for marketing culture. It is another example of our penchant for self-development. But above all, it is about the search for a proper democratic education and raises the question, Have we of the twentieth century anything to learn from works of the past?
Through the nineteenth century that was a question cultured people would hardly have considered asking. The speeches and letters of the public figures of that century reveal an impressive familiarity with the classics of Western civilization. These were considered the repository of wisdom and culture, and an educated person—by definition—knew them well. But as the old-time classical curriculum of the colleges gave way to the more utilitarian-minded elective system of the new universities, the voices of Plato, Tacitus, Euclid, and even Shakespeare began to wane. Undergraduates sought "useful" learning that prepared one for "real life." By the 1920s the fragmented curriculum prevailed at many colleges and universities. The Great Books movement began as a counter-revolution to these changes in higher education.
The modern Great Books curriculum was born at Columbia University in 1919 when a professor of English named John Erskine first offered his General Honors course. Its format was simple. Once every week the class would meet and discuss a single classic. Erskine had been dismayed by his students' lack of acquaintance with the great texts of Western culture and their lack of any common intellectual grounding. This deficiency not only resulted from the new style of higher learning but also reflected a Columbia student body more heterogeneous and less patrician than before. The Great Books, Erskine and his colleagues believed, would be a means of sharing the mantle of culture with the brightest of the immigrant sons.
But Erskine's General Honors course remained a little-known preserve of humanistic culture on Morningside Heights until it discovered two champions with an eye for public relations—Robert Hutchins and Mortimer Adler.
In 1929, at age thirty, Robert Maynard Hutchins gave up the deanship of Yale Law School to become president of the University of Chicago. His youthfulness in itself caught the public's eye, but when he attacked the prevailing form of higher education and set out to establish Chicago as a model of collegiate learning, educational hell broke loose. From the early 1930s until his retirement from the presidency in 1951, Hutchins kept the university at the forefront of public consciousness. "It is not a very good university," he was fond of saying, "it is simply the best there is." With its leader twice on the cover of Time magazine, the University of Chicago became identified with its president in a way no other university has since Charles W. Eliot's tenure at Harvard in the late nineteenth century.
Hutchins accomplished this through a combination of personal magnetism, gritty determination to redirect the inertial forces of the university, and a circle of accomplices who shared his vision. Strikingly handsome and possessing an astringent wit, Hutchins was a "natural-born stemwinding hell-raiser," wrote one observer. He frequently disarmed critics with his epigrammatic replies. "There are two ways to have a great university," he responded to alumni unhappy about seeing their alma mater drop football. "It must either have a great football team or a great president."
The faculty conflict early in his presidency simmered for more than a decade before reaching a boil in a full-scale faculty revolt in 1944. The precipitating issue was Hutchins's conviction that higher education in America suffered from acute confusion over means and ends and that the cure for this illness should be administered first to the University of Chicago. Hutchins's "New Plan" of 1931 devoted the initial two years of college solely to general education. Class-attendance requirements were tossed out the window, as was the accounting of course credits. Instead, students simply had to prepare themselves as they wished for the comprehensive examinations, which they could take whenever they felt ready.
Hutchins continued to press for further changes over the next decade. Perhaps the most radical change was his encouraging the early entry of high school students into the college. Combining the last two years of high school with the first two years of college, students could receive their baccalaureate degrees after the usual sophomore year of college.
The Chicago faculty could accept many of these structural changes with equanimity, but not so the philosophy that underlay Hutchins's effort. For the Chicago president intended to reunify learning along the lines of the medieval universities. Inspired by Aristotle and Aquinas, Hutchins envisioned a higher education based on an updated version of the ancient trivium and quadrivium. The idea that the modern university should surrender its devotion to research and the scientific method in the pursuit of timeless, unified truth brought outraged charges of medievalism and even fascism from academic critics.
Faculty opposition prevented Chicago from becoming a thirteenth-century University of Paris. But it did not stop Hutchins and Adler (who was a product of the earlier Columbia experiment in Great Books) from inaugurating in 1930 a reading course that was the inspiration for the later, much expanded Great Books reading program and the eventual publication and marketing of a series of volumes called the Great Books of the Western World. The Chicago Great Books class—all the more novel for having the president teaching freshmen—attracted national attention and a procession of distinguished visitors.
The actresses Lillian Gish and Ethel Barrymore, Orson Welles, the columnist Westbrook Regler, and the publisher of the Washington Post, Eugene Meyer (his daughter, Katharine Graham, was a member of the class)—all stopped by the classroom to observe firsthand what they had read about in the national press. Gertrude Stein's visit was the most memorable. Her insistence that "Greek ideas must be studied in Greek, Latin ideas in Latin" was too much even for Adler. When he protested, Stein thumped him on the head.
Whatever outsiders may have thought, for a generation of students the Great Books course constituted a moment in their lives that remains for many, decades later, the epitome of education. Twenty or so students sat around a large table, with the interlocutors Hutchins and Adler at the head. Adler (the "great bookie," as Hutchins affectionately called him) would pose a question, field the response, then doggedly pursue the student through a refinement of the answer. Hutchins enlivened the dialectical proceedings, being by turns sarcastic and wry. George H. Watkins, a member of the first Great Books class at the Chicago Law School in 1934, recalls that when the formal two-hour period ended, the entire class frequently moved to Adler's apartment, where debate continued until midnight; on other evenings Hyde Park bars echoed with the discussion of Aristotelian first principles.
The Chicago faculty wondered how students, many just freshmen, could possibly read a classic a week. The eminent classicist Paul Shorey put this question to Hutchins, recalling that "when I was a senior at Harvard, it took us a whole year to study Dante's Divine Comedy." "The difference," Hutchins shot back, "is that our students are bright."
Given the faculty suspicion, the Great Books curriculum at Chicago always faced an uncertain future. But Hutchins and Adler's vision, transplanted to St. John's College in Annapolis, became the basis for the most thoroughgoing Great Books approach to education in America. The country's third oldest college, St. John's was teetering on the edge of bankruptcy in 1937 when Stringfellow Barr and Scott Buchanan—refugees from the Chicago wars—agreed to attempt its revival if they could have a free hand. They instituted a completely prescribed four-year curriculum based on discussion of the Western classics by small groups. At St. John's the tutors (academic rank was abolished) took a back seat to the texts, which were proclaimed the true college faculty. All tutors were to be sufficiently versed in the St. John's reading list of more than a hundred books so that they could lead discussions of them all. The result, proclaimed an admiring Life magazine, was a student body holding a "broad grasp of the history of ideas that would put to shame the students of larger colleges." Moreover, St. John's defined the history of ideas to include mathematics and a rigorous four-year program of laboratory science. But rather than work with up-to-date lab equipment, St. John's students re-created the landmark experiments of Western science: dissecting an ox heart as did William Harvey; using a replica of Aristarchus's diopter to measure the size of the earth; and learning to use Ptolemy's astrolabe.
To this day, students pursue their studies at St. John's with a sober diligence rare on most campuses. It and its sister institution in Santa Fe remain the collegiate beacon of the Great Books movement even though similar alternative programs have been set up in a number of colleges.
Despite his successes with an undergraduate clientele at Chicago and the establishment of a thriving St. John's, Robert Hutchins believed that the future of the Great Books movement lay in adult education. The very definition of a "Great Book," after all, was one that repaid a lifetime of study, and the greater experience that adults brought to their reading would enrich understanding.
The university's active adult extension division began carrying the benefits of Great Books culture to the public in 1939 by sponsoring off-campus discussion groups. The most influential of these was composed of Chicago's business elite. This so-called Fat Man's class resulted from the suggestion to Hutchins by Wilbur Munnecke, university vice-president and a former Marshall Field executive, that businessmen desperately needed the broad understanding and right purposes that the Great Books could provide. Executives from Swift & Co., Hart, Schaffner, and Marx, and other companies were not spared Hutchins's barbs during the discussions any more than were the undergraduates. But their response was so enthusiastic that they kept coming week after week to the sessions at the downtown University Club. Hutchins's gift for publicity once again bore fruit. The Fat Man's class conferred a new cachet on the idea of studying old books.
The years after World War II witnessed a great expansion of Great Books discussion groups. The 167 participants in 1943 had multiplied to some 50,000 in three hundred cities by 1948. Much of Si this growth resulted from the establishment of the Great Books Foundation in 1947.
Realizing that the opportunity for national cultural reform outstripped the ability of the university to administer it, Hutchins asked Lynn A. Williams (one of the Fat Men) to take on the task of selling culture to the public. The Great Books Foundation's primary mission was to train discussion leaders and otherwise promote the reading of great books. It also issued a number of inexpensive editions of some hard-to-find classics.
Mortimer Adler led in the planning, including issuing instructions for discussion leaders. The approach of the leaders, he asserted, "can make or break the seminar. The prime requisite ... is that the leaders be interested, vitally interested, in the book and in the group, and that they show their interest." This can best be demonstrated by "leaning forward and speaking rather quickly and intensely," said Adler—in an exhortation that was essentially a self-description—so as to "provoke controversy." But leaders must also be good listeners. "Unless they have fallen into the sinful habit of Intellectual pride, they should really want to know, for their own education, what the other person thinks."
Propelled by energetic leadership and organizational support, the Great Books became something of a fad. In the fall of 1948 Chicago's mayor declared "Great Books Week." Adler lectured at downtown department stores, and he and Hutchins conducted a discussion of Plato before three thousand people at Orchestra Hall. They repeated the performance in Milwaukee. Adler's endless trips around the country as a kind of "Socratic traveling salesman" carried the Great Books idea to the farthest reaches of America.
Mark Twain defined a classic as "a book which people praise and don't read." But Twain was wrong for the decade or so after World War II. Why the renewed curiosity about the classics? Clearly more was involved than salesmanship by Adler or Hutchins. The challenge of a recently defeated fascism and a still-threatening communism involved rethinking the foundation of our democratic faith. Scientific materialism, the new coin of academia, was tainted by its association with totalitarian horrors and now seemed an inadequate base for democracy. Hutchins had been preaching since the early 1930s that an "education for democracy" must rest on the immutable tenets laid forth by the great works of our Western tradition. That message won a wide hearing in a nation hungry for guidance.
There was a level of seriousness about the endeavor that seemed appropriate to the grim new atomic age. The historian Dixon Wecter saw in the Great Books movement a desire to transcend the "pervasive spirit of anti-intellectualism" and "triviality" so often present in the culture. Americans also found an attractive sense of community in the biweekly gatherings. With an international war effort over, people welcomed a return to the neighborhood fires of their local libraries surrounded by familiar faces. "Your friends and neighbors will be there," a foundation promotional brochure promised. "You will meet your minister, banker, lawyer, company president, fellow workers, doctor, [and] grocery clerk...."
The strict rules the Great Books Foundation laid down for leaders in conducting discussion bespoke, on the one hand, a desire for group conformity. Leaders were instructed to allow only people who had read the selection to participate and to disallow discussion of any book not a part of the series. On the other hand, leaders were to respect and even nurture individualism. That lay people rather than professors led the groups was considered a strength, for they would not deaden discussion by their authority. Further, Adler admonished group leaders to avoid acting like a "teacher who knows the right answers and is imparting his knowledge to the group. … Try to keep it fixed in your mind that you are actually no wiser … than the others in the group." Nothing was to intrude upon the silent dialogue between reader and author. Following John Erskine's admonition that the texts should be read "as if they were just out today,"participants were forbidden from citing any historical or critical commentary in making their points. Although the basic intent of Great Books study was to ascertain "Truth," the real object of most discussions, wrote the sympathizer Edward A. Fitzpatrick in 1951, was the self-expression of members and the subsequent discovery of "the variety of opinions that exists and [that] one's opinion is as good as another's."
Such a purpose may sound too obvious to deserve comment. But in the McCarthyite America of that time, espousing unpopular opinions could make trouble. Librarians, in whose facilities many of the Great Books discussions took place, needed reassurance that the selections would not anger patriotic organizations and religious leaders. And even though Karl Marx was read, wrote one librarian, discussion "contributed to a safer, more understanding citizenship."
It is difficult to say how successfully Great Books seminars fulfilled this promise. At the least, as one supporter suggested, it was better than "wasting their time in cocktail lounges or bridge clubs. . . ." But the author Ben Ray Redman wondered how much better. Though acknowledging discussion groups to be part of a traditional American passion for self-improvement, Redman doubted that they were an effective means to that end. He questioned Adler's assumption that the average person can comprehend all the Great Books, especially without the historical background to the text that the program deliberately ignored. Redman's own experience at a Great Books discussion of Lucretius's On the Nature of Things, where the proceedings degenerated into a "muddle of blind-alley arguments, profitless repetitions, irrelevant remarks, silly opinions, and fundamental misunderstandings," reinforced his skepticism about Socratic dialogue for the masses.
Publication of the Great Books of the Western World ollowed a parallel yet independent path from the Great Books Foundation. William Benton, founder of the Benton and Bowles advertising agency, later an associate of Hutchins at the University of Chicago, a U.S. senator, and a member of the Fat Man's class, complained of the difficulty of obtaining the classics. A swashbuckling businessman, he had engineered an unusual joint publishing venture with the university and the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Benton now suggested to Hutchins that Britannica produce a quality set of the Great Books to be marketed much like the encyclopaedia. Hutchins endorsed the project only on the condition that a way be devised to ensure that the books would be taken off the shelf and read. In attempting to answer Hutchins's challenge, Mortimer Adler soon found himself embarked on one of the largest ventures in American book publishing.
To say that any individual is qualified to become the authoritative guide to Western thought would seem presumptuous. Yet Mortimer Adler came closer than anyone else to filling that role, with the Great Books of the Western World as the testament to his success. Though he followed the usual academic path of Ph.D. followed by a university appointment (at Chicago, through Hutchins's intervention), Adler remained always an outsider to academia. Compulsive, combative, intensely intellectual, he was temperamentally incapable of compromise on educational issues. (To this day he is without his bachelor's degree from Columbia because he disdainfully refused to attempt the required swimming test.)
But if Adler's neoscholasticism put him at odds with professional philosophers, he has succeeded in reaching a wide public audience in a career now spanning seven decades. Besides being our most famous advocate of the classics, Adler wrote the enormously popular How to Read a Book (published in 1940 and still in print) and conceived the changes for the revolutionary Britannica 3. And most recently his Paideia Proposal has shared in the attention given educational reform.
Adler's fascination with the classics began in Erskine's General Honors course at Columbia. While an instructor at Columbia he taught sections of the class and also, along with the later eminent classicists Scott Buchanan and Richard McKeon, taught at the People's Institute in New York, a sort of Socratic Hull House where Russian Jewish immigrants sharpened their dialectical rapiers.
When Adler met Hutchins in 1927, Hutchins admitted to having no idea what constituted an adequate education. Adler shared with him his convictions about a curriculum of great works and found a ready convert. The two complemented each other well in their long association. Hutchins the administrative patron and revolutionary point man; Adler, the philosophical systematizer and idea man. If Robert Hutchins was the Absalom of the educational world, seeking to overthrow the enthroned order, Mortimer Adler was his Achitophel, whispering encouragement and advice.
Selecting the books to be included in the Great Books of the Western World (GBWW) was assigned to an advisory board, aided by Adler and Hutchins. Authors were divided up rather like a football team—into first and second strings. "We had no differences of opinion about which Greeks to include and only a few about Roman, Hellenistic, and mediaeval writers," Adler recalled. "Our disagreements became more numerous as well as more acerbic when we considered modern authors from the seventeenth century on." Many of the second-string authors, including Cicero, Calvin, and Nietzsche, ultimately had to be trimmed from the team of seventy-four greats. The criteria of selection were not simply originality, literary merit, and historical significance but also the importance of the works in speaking to the great ideas that have persisted in Western thought. The editors also determined that because they lacked the perspective to judge the significance of contemporary thinkers, the set would end with William James and Sigmund Freud.
Unlike Charles Eliot's earlier Harvard Classics (1909-10), comparisons with which Adler constantly made, the GBWW contained a generous number of mathematical and scientific works, included because of the conviction that a liberal education meant acquaintance with all the important ideas. Different, too, from Eliot's set was the editorial decision to print complete works rather than excerpts. And the 443 titles of the GBWW would be presented, at Adler's insistence, with virtually no scholarly apparatus or introductions; the authors were to speak for themselves without the intrusion of "lesser minds."
But even more challenging than deciding what to include and what to leave out was finding a means to make the set something other than a dust catcher on the shelf. Adler tried to solve this problem with an index. Not an ordinary index, but an index of staggering proportion and intent. This "Syntopicon" (a term he coined) would be a guide to the major ideas of Western thought. It would allow the reader who wished to read in the set rather than tackle the whole works to do so by topics, exploring, say, the idea of fate as commented upon by Dante, Goethe, and Marx.
Adler's Syntopicon sprang from the central philosophical belief that there has been through the millennia of Western culture an ongoing discussion of the primary issues that face all humanity. This "Great Conversation," the title of Hutchins's introductory volume to the GBWW, "began in the dawn of history and … continues to the present day." No other civilization, claimed Hutchins, has had the sort of on-going dialogue concerning truth, beauty, justice, and other cherished values that Western civilization has. "Imagine the greatest minds of all times gathered around a table," a GBWW sales brochure proposed, "Homer, Plato and Aristotle … and on through the ages to Shakespeare, Gibbon, Darwin, and Freud."
But producing this "Baedeker to 30 centuries of Western thought," as Time called it, proved to be a task of far greater magnitude than Adler expected. He won approval from Benton and the Britannica officers in 1943 for a sixty-thousand-dollar budget over a two-year span.
Ultimately the project consumed two million dollars and took eight years. Deciding on the essential ideas of Western thought took two years in itself. These were finally reduced to 102, with further subheadings for all of them. At that point the staff of more than thirty, consisting largely of University of Chicago and St. John's students (including an aspiring writer named Saul Bellow), pored through 443 works, compiling references to each idea. Before personal computers this meant thousands of index cards laboriously handwritten and then typed by a large secretarial pool.
The entire project very nearly stopped dead in the water. Financial constraints at Encyclopaedia Britannica forced a drastic trimming of the indexing staff for the last two years. Then, as the fifty-four-volume set was finally ready for printing, Britannica decided it could not afford the cost. In desperation Hutchins and Adler appealed to a thousand wealthy individuals to become patrons of the GBWW by purchasing a special founders' edition of the set for five hundred dollars each. Gentle arm twisting and appeals to join the ranks of Alexander the Great and the Earl of Shaftesbury as patrons of learning had their effect. The needed five hundred sets were sold, and in 1952 the Great Books of the Western World, with its thirty-two thousand pages and more than twenty-five million words, came off the press.
Presentation of the founders' sets came at a gala dinner in New York's Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in April of that year. The patrons, including Alfred Vanderbilt, Nelson and David Rockefeller, Conrad Hilton, John Mott, and Father Theodore Hesburgh, heard eloquent testimonials to the cultural promise of the Great Books. The French philosopher Jacques Maritain commended the "pioneering spirit of America" for seeking to restore to its rightful honor the "notion of tradition." Hutchins advised that "the fate of our country, and hence of the world, depends on the degree to which the American people achieve liberal education." The GBWW represented the "placing in the hands of the American people the means of continuing and revitalizing Western civilization...."
For Adler, Hutchins, and their fellow believers, the greatest danger facing America was not international communism but a seriously eroded commitment to the ideal of a liberally educated citizenry. America's position of leadership in the free world—a responsibility acutely felt and endlessly discussed during the early Cold War years—required our attention to such ageless questions as "What is the good life?" "What is a good state?" "Is there a God?" "What is the nature and destiny of man?" Individuals reflecting on such quesstions were not simply furthering their own education but also building up a store of national wisdom sufficient for any challenge the country might face. Britannica organized a community acquisition plan, persuading wealthy individuals to make sets available to local schools and libraries. The "great conversation," limited to a few in Periclean Athens, would become in America a broadly based democratic exchange of ideas.
The GBWW's long-awaited appearance stirred much comment. Most reviewers were sympathetic to the goal of adult liberal education and to the effort involved in producing the set. Jacques Barzun hailed the Syntopicon as a "stupendous achievement." The distinguished British philosopher C. E. M. Joad introduced a Saturday Review symposium on the GBWW with an endorsement of the humanistic faith with which Hutchins had infused the project. Inevitably scholars quibbled over authors in their areas of expertise who were missing. Barzun was disappointed by the relatively small quantity of imaginative literature, which in his mind betrayed a "high-minded axe-grinding in the direction of intellectualism." Scientific selections evoked many puzzled responses. The historian of science I. Bernard Cohen thought the science collection only of "archeological value." In such a dynamic field, he asked, how could the editors believe that Galen and Hippocrates remain standard scientific texts?
While Great Books supporters—the ancients—insisted on the classics' continuing vitality in providing the answers to contemporary American dilemmas, the moderns just as firmly denied this. Many of John Dewey's followers saw the GBWW as simply the culminating product of the wrongheaded careers of Hutchins and Adler. The search for eternal truths embedded in a set of great books offended America's strong pragmatist tradition, which emphasized progressive, changing truth. The philosopher Richard Rorty's recent critique of Bloom continues the pragmatists' dispute with Hutchins: "Deweyans cannot see why knowledge should be thought of as a unity (rather than, say, as a bag of tools). The university as flea market … is fine with us."
Another line of attack was aimed at a troubling corruption of high culture believed implicit in the GBWW. Dwight Macdonald scored some damaging hits against the project in a New Yorker article, "The Book-of-the-Millennium Club." Besides questioning the assumption that the average reader can appreciate Aquinas's disquisition on "Whether an Inferior Angel Speaks to a Superior Angel?" or other passages of esoterica without some introductory notes, Macdonald went on to indict what he saw as the raison d'être of the set: the Syntopicon. Adler's obsession with classifying the great ideas and seeing them as part of a seamless transmillennial conversation tended to universalize the diverse phenomena of life. To believe, as Adler apparently did, that ideas, like words in a dictionary, can be reduced to a row of "definite, concrete, distinguishable entities" is mistaken. "An idea," Macdonald countered, "is a misty, vague object that takes on protean shapes, never the same for any two people."
Even worse, in Macdonald's eyes, was the blighting technique of Madison Avenue in hawking Western civilization's greatest intellectual treasures. Macdonald could not have known about—but would not have been surprised at—William Benton's suggestion (deflected by Adler) that "Adultery" rather than "Angel" would be a better eye-catcher to open the Syntopicon. Macdonald did note that after sales of the GBWW lagged in the early years, Britannica brought on its supersalesman Kenneth M. Hardin to direct marketing. Hardin's decision to go after the mass market, "the butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker," quadrupled sales. In 1961 more than fifty thousand sets were sold, and GBWW salesmen were living well. But this could be done only through a hard-sell approach, emphasizing, as Macdonald wrote, "Respect for Culture, Keeping up with the Adler-Joneses, and, above all, the Obligation to the Children, who would be forever disadvantaged if their parents failed to Act Now on this Opportunity for a mere $10 down, $10 a month...."
Many parents did act. But did their purchase herald a new age of philosophic wisdom in America?
For Allan Bloom the early promise of the Great Books program was not fulfilled. It was thwarted by what he sees as the philosophic poverty of our universities today. His accusations have aroused even more vitriolic comment than Hutchins or Adler ever knew. Perhaps part of the antagonism stems from the provocative tone Bloom delights in employing. What was once said of Robert Hutchins applies equally well to him: "His way of saying things is so annoying that good men cannot keep their minds on what he is saying."
But some did listen carefully to Hutchins and were disturbed by what they thought they heard. In the 1930s John Dewey detected a nascent authoritarianism in the Hutchins program. Similar charges are lodged today against Bloom and his governmental counterpart, William Bennett. Why should a diverse student body be subject to a single curriculum? Isn't this sort of rigorous classical education intrinsically elitist? Who is to determine the "truth" that students will be given? And isn't the pursuit of social justice, after all, more important than a quest for a holy grail of truth? These criticisms, laden with political and ideological implications, have in the eyes of some tainted the entire Great Books program as being simply an adjunct to a New Right agenda.
Nevertheless, for an American public searching for some moorings of belief in an unsettled world, Allan Bloom seems to have his finger on something important. In the pendulum swings of American culture we are clearly on the return arc from the experimentalism and tradition bashing of the sixties. Political conservatism inspires a similar mood in education. Where Hutchins and Adler appealed to a fear that free world leadership required more wisdom than our colleges were giving, Bloom speaks to a society anxious lest its international competitiveness become compromised by inferior schooling. Just as Hutchins's Chicago reforms reacted against the dominance of progressive educational theories, so Bennett and others are responding to the liberalized curriculum of the sixties and seventies. It is not surprising that the past few years have seen a raft of studies—E. D. Hirsch, Jr.'s Cultural Literacy, Diane Ravitch and Chester R. Finn's What Do Our 17-Year-Olds Know?, and William Bennett's report "To Reclaim a Legacy" the most prominent of them—bewailing an educational system in disrepair.
Though the battle of the Great Books has increasingly been waged with political cudgels, there is nothing intrinsic to the study of the classics tending toward a particular political persuasion. Bennett is, of course, strongly identified with the Reagan administration, and Bloom is known as a scourge of the academic left. Yet Hutchins was a New Deal Democrat, whose career after Chicago centered on liberal causes fought from institutions (the Fund for the Republic and the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions) that to conservatives epitomized dangerous left-wing politics.
In truth, the Great Books are both profoundly conservative and perilously radical: conservative because they assume there is a repository of wisdom containing abiding truths; radical because engagement with them can upend unexamined assumptions and arm one with whetted knives of critical thought. A Great Books education, as William Bennett attested from experience, can "shake you up a little, get you breathing, quicken your senses and animate a conscious examination of life's enduring questions."
This may be a laudable goal, but it is a view of education normally alien to a culture steeped in utilitarian values. Americans avoid philosophic speculation, Tocqueville noted, and use tradition only as a source of useful information in their perpetual quest for better ways of doing things. Bloom, frustrated by this characteristically American disdain for the life of reflection, has nevertheless found the country in agreement with him as it undergoes one of its periodic moods of guilt over alleged cultural philistinism. The rush to buy The Closing of the American Mind, the renewed sales vigor of the Great Books of the Western World, and the increasing numbers enrolled in adult and junior Great Books programs testify to a new affirmation that"ideas do matter."
"Where would Emerson find his scholar now?" Alfred Kazin asked in these pages recently. In Allan Bloom and his call for a return to Socratic wisdom? Probably not. Emerson, who more than any thinker defined the place of ideas in America, desired a "philosophy of insight and not of tradition." He urged every age to write its own books and warned that reverential study of great books might produce only great bookworms. Still, Bloom shares with Emerson the passionate belief that books "are for nothing but to inspire." The Great Ideas are not ends in themselves or objects to be possessed, but guides for identifying and achieving the good life.
Yet certain points of agreement do not augur any final truce in America's battle of the books. Our culture is split between what Emerson called "the party of the Past" and "the party of the Future," the former upholding tradition and its wisdom, the latter looking ahead to greater days and new ideas. The party of the Future maintains the loyalty of most Americans at most times. That is why the ancients must struggle just to hold their ground. Yet we will not call for their surrender. For as our nation sails swiftly into an uncharted future, we will always throw wistful glances at our past, the only compass that can give us our heading.
Chicago (IL)


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Q: EF Db-first, can EF populate non-entity properties? I have a model in DB-first with my own POCOs, where I have mapped lots of entities to the database. For one of these POCOs I have now added a new property, which is populated outside of normal usage of EF, via a stored procedure, with the result restructured to fit my needs.
Is it possible to get EF to populate it without doing it myself manually? If I do context.Datas.Include("NewData"), I would be able to somehow map what's needed for it to include NewData, e.i. a method call.
In my scenario I do only need to have read capabilities, I will not need to update any data via EF.
public class Data
{
    ...
    public NewData NewData {get;set;}
}

today filled with:
var dataObject = contect.Datas.First(...);
dataObject.NewData = context.GetDataFromStoredProcedure(...);

but would like to be able to:
var dataObject = contect.Datas.Include("NewData").Where(...);


New music from Cash! It's his take on Common's Blue Sky produced by No I.D.! This is another freebie from Cash as he prepares us for his next release, T.M.I.M. 2.0! I definitely love this beat and Cash got on it like No I.D. made it for him and not Common! Lol But I think Common would be proud of this freestyle because Cash did it justice! Enjoy!!!