text:
Axon: Creative Explorations
Axon: Creative Explorations, Vol 11, No 1, July 2021
The Weight of an Empty Room
Cassandra Atherton and Paul Hetherington
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https://axonjournal.com/sites/default/files/article_pdf/Axon-11-1-Cassandra%20Atherton-Paul%20Hetherington.pdf
1. Fragmentation and Gap Gardening
Very little is known about Louis-Jacques-Napoléon Bertrand, whose literary pseudonym was Aloysius Bertrand. His biography consists of a series of fragments pieced together and is recited in scholarship and various encyclopedia. He was born on 20 April 1807 in Ceva, Piedmont, Italy and died when he was 34 years old on 29 April 1841 in Paris. In 1815 his family moved to Dijon, an ancient city that fascinated Bertrand, where he studied at the Collège Royal from 1818 to 1826. He contributed literary works to a local newspaper, which he managed, and — following a letter from Victor Hugo — travelled to Paris in 1828. There he met a variety of literary figures, including the poet Émile de Saint-Amand Deschamps and the famous literary critic, Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve. Failing to establish himself among the Paris literati, he returned to Dijon and became involved once more with newspaper publishing. His journalism reflected his strong Republican views. In 1933 he returned to Paris and probably in that year completed Gaspard de la nuit — Keith Waldrop says it was 'written over a period of years' (Baudelaire 2009: xi) — as well as a play, Peter Waldeck ou la chute d'un homme. He proposed unsuccessfully to a woman named Célestine. From 1835 to 1837 he borrowed a considerable amount of money before contracting tuberculosis, becoming seriously ill. He was hospitalised for extended periods and eventually died of the combined effects of the disease and starvation. His ground-breaking Gaspard was published posthumously in 1842 in an error-filled volume, selling 20 copies.
Between the sketchy details and tantalising fragments of Bertrand's biography, there are numerous gaps. These may be left as they are or filled with information deduced from Bertrand's literary works, or with speculation. Even if such information is included, Bertrand's biography remains full of mystery and is notable for its brevity and missing parts. It is a series of fragments of a life rather than any sort of whole, posing questions and suggesting many unresolved issues. As a result, David Carl's statement that '[f]ragmentary works … simultaneously seek and avoid closure, completion, and totality [and are] driven by the oldest of literary tropes: that of the journey or voyage, the quest' (2000: 25) may be applied to the record of Bertrand's life — even if any quest to find the author behind Gaspard de la nuit is almost certain to fail.
Yet Bertrand is an important writer. Almost every version of his skeleton biography acknowledges in one way or another that 'Bertrand's Gaspard de la nuit represents the first conscious attempt to write prose poetry' (Slott 1985: 69). Despite this significant achievement, and for good reasons, the chief scholarly focus of discussions about the nineteenth-century French tradition's important inauguration of the contemporary prose poem is Baudelaire's Spleen de Paris or Petits Poems en prose (Paris Spleen), and also writers such as Arthur Rimbaud and Stéphane Mallarmé. Indeed, while Bertrand's Gaspard has provided other artists with inspiration across many artforms, Dana Milstein observes that,
[d]espite Maurice Ravel's piano pieces [Gaspard de la nuit: Trois poèmes pour piano d'après Aloysius Bertrand], Antonio Giacometti's guitar suite and an adapted performance by the New York City Ballet, today Bertrand's name and texts remain virtually unknown, save a brief and ambivalent homage made by Baudelaire in the preface to his Petits poems en prose. (2003: 137–38)
Baudelaire wrote in this preface: 'the idea came to me to try something analogous [to Gaspard de la nuit], applying to the description of modern life — or, rather, to a certain modern and more abstract life — the procedure he [Bertrand] applied in painting a life long gone, strangely picturesque' (2009: 3). Marvin N Richards notes that Baudelaire's ambivalence about Bertrand may well be because, 'in order for his own project to be original, [Baudelaire] had to deny the importance of Bertrand' (Richards 1998: 543) but it may also be true that Baudelaire's somewhat equivocal assessment of Gaspard de la nuit accurately reflected his views of the work's merits.
Thus, Bertrand's major creative achievement is to some extent overshadowed by those who subsequently made creative use of his example and innovations. The numerous gaps in Bertrand's biography remind one that he has never received the kind of attention that would enable a fuller biographical narrative. We have argued elsewhere that one of the key features of prose poetry is that it 'may be viewed as a contemporary development of the possibilities of the poetic fragment, so beloved of the Romantic writers' (Hetherington and Atherton 2020: 23) and Marvin Richards has also argued that prose poetry is '[a]t once whole and standing alone ... [that it is] incomplete and stand[s] for a greater whole' (1998: 15). In this light, if one twins Bertrand's fragmented biography with his early and crucially important attempts at a new literary form — prose poetry — the result is a sense that not only is fragmentation the dominant feature of his life and work but, by extension, the main texts associated with him are stubbornly resistant to completion and closure.
We have been prompted by the sense of incompletion and openness in Bertrand's life and work to write a book length sequence of prose poetry. Our approach may be understood in terms of Rosmarie Waldrop's suggestive phrase, 'gap gardening' (2016: 157), which provides a way of understanding and transforming textual gaps and spaces and encourages an associated interrogation of language and meaning. Dan Chiasson teases out these ideas, stating that 'gap gardening':
asserts its meaning by undoing itself. The 'gaps' between words ('gap' and 'gardening,' for example) are, for Waldrop, the fruitful regions, the zones of transformation and possibility. Depending on how we take the phrase, the 'gap' is either the ground that poets 'garden' in or the crop that they eventually reap. The action of a poem (its 'gardening') is to transform the gaps, possibly into more gaps … In nature, nothing can come from nothing, but in language it happens all the time. (2016: n.p.)
In exploring both the proliferation, hollowness and exponential possibilities of gaps and spaces, our book-length prose poetry sequence, The Weight of an Empty Room, speculates on the existence of an elusive lover for Bertrand. It also shifts what we call the 'Bertrand narrative' to the Moulin Rouge, which becomes a contemporary setting for the staging of a fantaisie,[1] somewhat like Gaspard de la nuit itself.
The subtitle of Gaspard de la nuit includes the word Fantaisies and, as Dana Milstein argues,
Bertrand's use of the word Fantaisie in the subtitle is another adoption from artistic terminology. In painting and music, fantaisie denotes a work in which the artist's caprice and imagination take precedence over stylistic rules; the painter/composer is left to treat his subject matter liberally without respecting traditional approaches. (2003: 139)
The Weight of an Empty Room engages with Bertrand's sense of fantaisie by conceiving of the prose poem as a form of stage and studio. It also uses the fantastical elements of the Moulin Rouge cabaret shows as the backdrop to the contemporary reimagining of Gaspard de la Nuit — a work that evokes many of its own fantastical moments:
II. The Angel and the Fairy
A fairy hides herself in everything you see.
Victor Hugo.
This night a fairy perfumes my slumber full of chimeras with the most refreshing and the tenderest breathings of July, that same good fairy who plants again in his path the walking stick of the blind old man bewildered without it, and that same good fairy who wipes away the tears, and assuages the suffering, of the little gleaner girl whose bare foot a thorn has wounded. (Bertrand 2004: Kindle reference 2688)
By exploring fantaisie and its connection to reality — or questioning what is present and what is absent — our prose poetry sequence poses the question of whether, in one sense, Bertrand is not more alive as a fictional presence than as a biographical figure. In this way, The Weight of an Empty Room interprets Waldrop's idea of gap gardening as an opportunity not only for the proliferation of potential meanings but as an invitation to extend and enrich the possible gaps and spaces of Bertrand's life.
2. Rooms and Spaces
Prose poems are often visually identifiable by their ubiquitous box shape. This has led to their comparison to a variety of rectangular objects such as postcards, photographs, lunchboxes, windows, frames, bricks, presents, pillows, cages, coffins, suitcases, rooms and houses — all things associated with the quotidian which help to lend the prose poem a sense of familiarity. In particular, the comparison of poetry to rooms is identifiable in the meaning of the word 'stanza' — which, in Italian means both room and an aggregated group of lines within a poem, usually divided by line breaks. While stanzas are units in lineated poetry and the word 'stanzagraph' (Miltner qtd in Sabol, 2012: n.p.) for prose poetry has not become a popular term, we have argued that '[t]his comparison between prose poems and houses draws attention to the similarity between the prose poem's rectangular shape on the page and the act of looking from above at a room's plan. In this way, prose poems may be viewed as contained and restrictive "rooms" that "contain," and are able to release, significant effects related to condensed language, poetic imagery, "open" linguistic spaces, and a ramifying suggestiveness' (Hetherington and Atherton 2020: 85).
The prose poetry anthologies, The House of Your Dream: An international collection of prose poetry (2018) and A Curious Architecture: A selection of contemporary prose poems (1996), and the journal of prose poetry and flash fiction, Double Room — also the title of a prose poem by Baudelaire — refer to this connection. Indeed, the metaphor of the prose poem as room can also be extended to blueprints, floor plans, building plans, and aerial views of houses and other dwellings. In Donna Stonecipher's discussion of 'prose poetry as ontologically urban, as uniquely expressive of urban experience' (2017: 4), the prose poem is both an urban architectural plan and cityscape. In addition to exploring the prose poem as stage and studio, our sequence, The Weight of an Empty Room explores it as la camera — the bedroom — as a setting for experiences of fantaisie.
In Boxing Inside the Box: Women's prose poetry, Holly Iglesias critiques 'the confinement of gender construction' in her comparison of the prose poetry box to 'pressure cooker, sand box, sanctuary, laboratory, dungeon, treasure chest' (2004: 15) and, importantly, draws attention to the use of the word 'box' as a slang term for the vagina. Waldrop's gap gardening could also be read as a reclamation of two slang terms for vagina (gap and lady garden) that, together, emphasise fruitfulness and transformation rather than lack. She states:
Perhaps the greatest challenge of the prose poem … is to compensate for the absence of the [right-hand] margin … I cultivate cuts, discontinuity, leaps, shifts of reference, etc. 'Gap gardening,' I have called it, and my main tool for it is collage. (Waldrop qtd in Ramke n.d.: n.p.)
Moreover, gap gardening has been discussed as being 'beyond gender' or as 'a (gender-) neutral space within which to decenter infusion of space and objects with heterosexual implication' (Dewey 2016: n.p.) We use this relocation of space to place the gendered body under pressure and explore the transformative possibilities of fantaisie. In this way, we combine Iglesias's and Waldrop's philosophies of prose poetry in a contemporary reimagining of Bertrand's unnamed lover, the presence of whom is no more than a series of vague and tantalising hints in Gaspard de la nuit. More generally, Slott has asserted, 'It is important to determine whether Gaspard is indeed a parody of romanticism or just an example of the complex use of romantic irony' in which 'Bertrand simultaneously uses and refuses romantic lyricism' (Slott 1985: 70 and 69). In our case, we have employed some of the ironic tropes available to the invocation of the lyric present in contemporary poetry and have also used the backdrop of the Moulin Rouge as a way of exploring various questions about the place of romanticism and romantic tropes in modern society, while also conjuring Bertrand's lover as a character who is at once both flesh and blood and a ghostly literary figuration.
After '[e]ncountering the engravings of Jacques Callot and Rembrandt' (Milstein 2003: 138), Bertrand subtitled Gaspard de la nuit: Fantaisies à la manière de Rembrandt et de Callot. In The Weight of an Empty Room, the characterisation of the female protagonist as a dancer in the chorus at the Moulin Rouge is the primary device enabling the rectangular prose poem to be read as a kind of literary stage — and while this might not directly relate to Callot's and Rembrandt's techniques in their etchings, Milstein argues that Bertrand's 'aesthetic objective is to rescind traditional relationships between original and copy, and to annihilate barriers imposed between the author, text, and reader' (2003: 138). Bertrand's fantaisies incorporate and to some extend replicate ideas drawn from Callot and Rembrandt while transforming and repurposing them.
We attempt something similar in our prose poetry sequence, focusing on the figure of the chorine as an example of what we term a real simulacrum — a way of both representing and challenging ideas of original and copy. The chorine figure may be understood as both original and copy at once as she responds in her particular way to the need for dancers in the chorus at the Moulin Rouge to strive for sameness and uniformity. They wear the same costumes, hairstyles and make-up; they must meet strict guidelines for height and build; and the movements of the chorus as a whole are orchestrated so that dancers' individual identities are subsumed within the overall choreography of the dance and the general, desirable collective 'persona' of the chorus. The following statement from the Moulin Rouge webpage is instructive:
Serious dance training with a good classical base and advanced modern / jazz.
Minimum height female dancers: 175cm/5'9 I Minimum height male dancers: 185cm / 6'1. A slim graceful figure for the girls and well-proportioned muscled body for the boys. Great stage presence and bright personality. (Moulin Rouge n.d.: n.p.)
As theatrical counterparts to the corps de ballet (or body of the ballet), Moulin Rouge's chorus dancers similarly 'work mostly in a group, undifferentiated from one another… [and, indeed,] [i]n some 19th-century ballets the corps women are deliberately identical figures' (Sulcas 2007: n.p.). Chorus dancers are trained to dance the same steps, often at the same time, so that they appear almost as carbon copies. In this way, the stage becomes an illuminated rectangle of illusion. Jean Baudrillard argues that illusion may be understood 'not as simulacrum or unreality, but as something which drives a breach into a world that is too known, too déjà vu, too conventional, too real' (1998: 71) — and the strange, tantalising, choreographed uniformity of the Moulin Rouge drives such a breach into conventional notions of the 'real'. In The Weight of an Empty Room the illusion, dreams and nightmares of Gaspard de la nuit are re-interpreted through a cabaret show at the Moulin Rouge.
3. Prose Poetry and Breath in the COVID-19 pandemic
In order to link ideas of fantaisie and identity, we decided to locate many of the prose poems in The Weight of an Empty Room in the female protagonist's home. As part of our research, we found a Parisian studio apartment advertised on a real estate website that would be affordable on a dancer's wage and which is a short commute to the Moulin Rouge. We set many of the poems in this compact space, exploring la camera as part of the common living area in a studio. Here, the prose poem functions as a kind of 'everyday boudoir', demonstrating that intimacy and sexual relations may play out in various intense ways when not spatially separated from other parts of life. In this respect, the prose poem box becomes a way of mirroring the rectangular studio in which kitchen, sofa, bedroom, bed — and pillow — all exist in one space in a series of relatively uninterrupted relationships. Treating this apartment metaphorically in our writing enables a kind of upfront intimacy where words butt up against one another like the conjoined areas of the studio apartment.
We have suggested elsewhere that a prose poem by Kate North:
invokes, activates, and personifies the chronotope of the house, both in its form of the prose poem—in looking at the work, one can imagine a view of three rooms and a connecting passageway … It is as if breathing within the house permits it a kind of creaturely life [yet] … the prose poem operates in, and accentuates its sense of, a claustrophobic TimeSpace' (Hetherington and Atherton, 2020: 143).
Conceiving of many of the prose poems in our sequence as analogous to a one-roomed studio intensifies this sense of constriction and shallow breathing, and is in contrast to the deeper breathing of so much lineated poetry. Lineated poems usually encourage a pause or breath at the end of each line — and even around the complete text of poems, situated as they are in a field of white space — whereas the prose-poem-as-studio's sentences run right up to and wrap at the right margin, disallowing any sense of expansiveness.
Abigail Beckel and Donna Stonecipher are two of the most convincing scholars on the concept of breath and breathing in prose poetry. Beckel's description of the prose poem's 'breathless gallop of words' and 'onrushing momentum' (2010: n.p.) and Stonecipher's discussion of how 'open space' functions as a 'space to breathe' (2017: 76) provide important commentaries on the way in which prose poems squeeze everything together. As a result, and although small breaths may be snatched between sentences, the only fully released breath is possible at the end of the work when the prose poem opens out into the white space that follows the final sentence. This restricted opportunity to breathe deeply is also relevant to dancers. In many dance routines there is very little opportunity for deep and relaxed breathing until a routine concludes. In this way, one may link the various confined spaces of the prose poem, the studio apartment and dance routines and, for these reasons, we wanted to include a range of references to breath and breathing in The Weight of an Empty Room, connected to the way pressure builds in the chest when deep breathing is not possible.
Furthermore, during the period we undertook research, the COVID-19 pandemic began. As is well known, the virus often attacks the respiratory system, making breathing difficult. In serious cases, people are put on respirators and given oxygen — and there is the risk that they may die from respiratory failure. Given that Bertrand died from tuberculosis intensified by starvation, the pandemic provided further impetus to incorporate references to breathing in our sequence — along with disparate imagery which, like a kind of poetic furniture, is often jammed together in our prose poems' close quarters. In keeping with these preoccupations, we refer to the way the Moulin Rouge was shut down on 12 March 2020 and their dancers were required to continue rehearsing at home, usually in their small Parisian apartments. One commented on the difficulty of '[w]orking out in my small 30 square-metre (apartment)' (Lacsina 2020: n.p.).
As The Weight of an Empty Room emphasises intimacy, an abiding sense of claustrophobia and breathlessness in its re-imagination of the relationship between Bertrand and his young lover, so the prose poems that voice various exchanges between the lovers feature words such as 'wheezing', 'squeezed' and 'clenching'. This not only helps to focus the sequence's main themes, but it also relates to the ways in which the rhythms of breathing and the variability of the heartbeat inform the experience of reading prose poetry:
[I write]
In my small room, your hands are shadowy spiders on my skin, running over me time and again. Can breath travel half the world to meet in our separate rooms? I sense warmth on my neck, smell your toothpaste's mintiness. There are surprises of light, like blurs of the known. Your returning words expand, as if you might be uttering your tight, clenching sentences again. Yet the weight of space jemmies us. I sing those lyrics we composed.
She writes
Your heartbeat is under these floorboards, in this wide, orange room that looks toward the Eiffel Tower. I drop a marble and watch it run across twisted timber — as decades ago you did — laughing at the wood's curl and torque. Your ghost taps my body with the force of a reflex hammer — that striking involuntariness we knew; the wheezing of wood and dust as evening squeezed and closed. Later, in darkness, your image catches between eyelashes. We are lying on the Persian carpet, levitating over pine. (Revised versions of Atherton and Hetherington 2021: n.p.)
In an appeal to gap gardening, fantaisie is cultivated in the gaps and spaces in these prose poems via intertextuality. There is a Poe-esque 'heartbeat under these floorboards' and a fairy-tale-like 'Persian carpet' where the lovers are 'levitating over pine'. Additionally, a sense of the uncanny pervades the works, expressed in phrases such as 'blurs of the known'. Coupled with the images of 'shadowy spiders on my skin, / running over me time and time again' and '[y]our ghost tapp[ing] my body', an uncomfortable sense of insufficiency or foreboding rushes in on the reader. The final two sentences of the first poem juxtapose weight and lightness, so when 'weight of space' begins to act as a jemmy, energy is suddenly released and becomes transformed into weightless, sung lyrics. These are both a comfort and an indication of how the characters in these works are often grasping at absence and thin air.
It is also important to note that in the story world of Gaspard de la Nuit, Bertrand is not said to be the author of the work:
Gaspard de la Nuit is presented as the work … of the diabolical 'monomane' Gaspard de la Nuit, who, we learn in a liminary note signed by Bertrand, accosts him on the streets of Dijon and thrusts the manuscript on him ... Having received Gaspard's 'grimoire' (spellbook), Bertrand tells us, he feels compelled to publish it. (Marmarelli 2005: 71–2)
We decided to compose some of our prose poetry sequence as epistles that pay tribute to this 'grimoire' and also address — sometimes obliquely, sometimes more directly — the question of authorship in Bertrand's text. As the male protagonist becomes ill, the authenticity of the prose poem epistles and who wrote them — or who is writing them — may be examined by the reader. This questioning constitutes — or may be construed as — metatextual moments that problematise the nature of the fictional world and relationships depicted in The Weight of an Empty Room. As this problematisation happens it also questions the relationship of a notional, fictional or putative 'biography' to the 'real'.
For example, the prose poems below — headed 'She writes' and '[I write]' — may be read as correspondence between lovers or the deluded imaginings of a feverish mind as the narrator becomes ill. The references to not 'sleep[ing] well', a 'sleeping silhouette' and a 'room … walled in words and arms' open up both possibilities — they could refer either to the experience of jetlag and the expressions of lovers who are separated; or they may well be hallucinatory experiences:
I didn't sleep well. Your breathing's familiar rhythm haunts me here. I stare past your sleeping silhouette — yes, I see it — to the horizon's lights. I have lost our sense of synchronicity: you disturb me every night. Do you remember the floor-to-ceiling window where the moon gathered the wind-varnished sky?
My room becomes an idea of a different room. Empty space has collared me and your words open our old opacities — each puzzling at the other's meaning. The room is walled in words and arms. A faint light hesitates, as if through drawn blinds. I'm hemmed in, like an injunction—but what holds in memory's cycling spaces? Here are dull right angles. Here is cold plaster meeting my hands. (Revised versions of Atherton and Hetherington 2021: n.p.)
In these works, the trope of breathing is disrupted and its rhythm becomes asynchronous. This asynchronicity is explored in the ideas of being 'haunt[ed]' by another; the invocation of an absent other's 'familiar rhythm'; and, most explicitly, in references to 'lost … synchronicity', 'disturb[ance]', and 'cycling spaces'. While there is potential romance in open spaces, a 'floor-to-ceiling window' and the expanse of a 'wind-varnished sky', these poems question what the reality behind such tropes may be. The question that ends the prose poem entitled 'She writes' also opens the poem out into a space bigger than itself. Yet, even this idea of the sky is juxtaposed by the idea of containment; of someone being oppressively squeezed in their accommodation. The 'cold plaster meeting my hands' becomes the moment where the poem's persona pushes back on an immurement that may allude to the constrictions of a room, the oppression of memory, the constrained spaces of the prose poem itself, the historical death and immurement of Bertrand, the absence of the 'grimoire' — or all of these things at once.
The Weight of An Empty Room is both a contemporary re-imagining of Aloysius Bertrand and his relationship with an unnamed, elusive lover and also a way of quizzing the way biography may be constructed and understood. Through using a combination of Waldrop's gap gardening and Iglesias's feminist frame, this prose poetry sequence exploits some of the ramifications and negations of silence, reinterpreting Gaspard de la nuit as a choreographic fantasie for the page in which suggestion is often given priority over fact. The prose poetry sequence becomes studio, stage and boudoir and, as this prose poetry sequence fleshes out a fantaisie of Bertrand's life, it repurposes the question once posed by Baudelaire: 'Which of us has not, in his ambitious days, dreamt the miracle of a poetic prose, musical without rhythm [i.e. metre] or rhyme, supple enough and striking enough to suit lyrical movements of the soul, undulations of reverie, the flip-flops of consciousness?' (2009: 3). The prose poem becomes a way of understanding language and its many, sometimes conflicting, representations of a life.
[1] We have retained the French spelling of the word 'fantaisie' to mean creative imagination and fancy.
Works cited:
Atherton, C and Hetherington, P 2021 'The Weight of an Empty Room', Beltway Poetry Quarterly, 22 (1) (April 2021), at https://www.beltwaypoetry.com/poetry/poets/names/cassandra-atherton/
Baudelaire, C 2009 Paris Spleen: Little poems in prose, trans. Keith Waldrop, Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press
Baudrillard, J 1998 Paroxysm: Interviews with Philippe Petit, trans. Chris Turner, New York, NY: Verso
Beckel, A and Rooney, K 2010 'Field Notes: A preface', in The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Prose Poetry: Contemporary poets in discussion and practice, ed GL McDowell and FD Rzicznek, Brookline, MA: Rose Metal Press, xi–xiv
Bertrand, A 2004 Gaspard de la nuit: fantasies in the manner of Rembrandt and Callot, trans. Donald Sidney-Fryer, Encino, CA: Black Coat Press. Kindle Location 1–3341
Carl, DG, 2000 Fraying the Selvage: The fragment as literary symgenre, PhD thesis, University of California, Davis
Chiasson, D 2016 'Mind the Gap: The poetry of Rosmarie Waldrop', The New Yorker, 18 April, at https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/04/18/gap-gardening-by-rosmarie-waldrop
Dewey, A 2016 'Gender and the 1980s Prose Poem: Rosmarie Waldrop's Curves to the Apple', Revue française d'études américaines, 147 (2), at https://www.cairn-int.info/journal-revue-francaise-d-etudes-americaines-2016-2-page-66.htm
Hetherington, P and Atherton, C 2020 Prose Poetry: An introduction, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press
Lacsina, N 2020 'COVID-19: Moulin Rouge dancers train during Paris lockdown', Gulf News, 16 April, at https://gulfnews.com/photos/lifestyle/covid-19-moulin-rouge-dancers-train-during-paris-lockdown-1.1587047374349?slide=5
Marmarelli, T 2005 'Other Voices: Strategies of spatial, temporal and psychological distancing in the French prose poem', Pacific Coast Philology, 40 (1), 57–76
Milstein, D 2003, 'Gaspard de la Nuit: Humor, the eau-forte, and the chiaroscuro vignette', College Literature, 30 (2) (Spring), 137–161
Moulin Rouge n.d., 'Auditions Dancers: First step to the Moulin Rouge', n.p., at
http://www.moulinrouge.fr/the/auditions-danseurs?lang=en
Ramke, B n.d. 'Rosmarie Waldrop: Response and bio', Double Room: A Journal of Prose Poetry and Flash Fiction, at https://doubleroomjournal.com/issue_one/RW_ResBio.html
Richards, M 1998 Without Rhyme or Reason: 'Gaspard de la Nuit' and the dialectic of the prose poem, Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press
Sabol, B 2012 'Hotel Utopia by Robert Miltner: Review and interview', Poetry Matters: Poetry Book Reviews and Interviews, 9 August, at http://readwritepoetry.blogspot.com/2012/08/hotel-utopia-by-robert-miltner.html
Slott, K 1985 'Bertrand's Gaspard de la Nuit: The French prose poem as a parody of Romantic conventions', Francofonia, no 8 (Primavera), 69–92
Stonecipher, D 2017 Prose Poetry and the City, Anderson, SC: Parlor Press
Sulcas, R 2007 'Often a Swan, Rarely a Queen' The New York Times, 16 December, at
https://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/16/arts/dance/16sulc.html
Waldrop, R and Duffy, N 2016 Gap Gardening: Selected poems, New York, NY: New Directions
11 Poetry as Speculation
Cassandra Atherton is a widely anthologised and award-winning prose poet and scholar of prose poetry. She was a Harvard Visiting Scholar in English and a Visiting Fellow at Sophia University. She co-authored Prose Poetry: An Introduction (Princeton University Press, 2020) and co-edited the Anthology of Australian Prose Poetry (Melbourne University Press, 2020). She is associate editor at MadHat Press (USA) and Professor of Writing and Literature at Deakin University.
Paul Hetherington is a distinguished Australian poet who has won or been nominated for over thirty national and international awards and competitions and is Professor of Writing at the University of Canberra, head of the International Poetry Studies Institute and founder of the International Prose Poetry Group. He is co-author of Prose Poetry: An Introduction (Princeton University Press, 2020).
URL: https://axonjournal.com/issues/11-1/weight-empty-room
The Centre for Creative & Cultural Research


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CRYSTAL LAKE IL- Furniture superstore, Steinhafels, will be hosting its grand opening event on Friday, February 15th at 9:45 AM in Crystal Lake, Illinois. Steinhafels is a fourth generation, family-owned business and is Wisconsin's #1 furniture retailer. Since their opening in 1934, Steinhafels Furniture has been providing quality home furnishings, and home décor choices for a wide variety of tastes and budgets. They serve Wisconsin and northern Illinois with a total of 17 stores; Crystal Lake to be their 18th store.
Crystal Lake is excited to welcome this growing family business with their second Illinois location. Steinhafels and the shopping center owner, IRC Retail Centers, are making substantial investments to refresh and rebuild the space at 5846 Northwest Highway. "We are thrilled to welcome Steinhafels to Crystal Lake and are grateful for their investment in our vibrant business community. They had the vision to see the retail potential in this site and transformed a vacant space into a beautiful new facility" said Crystal Lake Mayor Aaron Shepley. The 99,089 sq ft furniture superstore, between Best Buy and Ross Dress for Less will offer an extensive selection of home décor, mattresses and furniture including seasonal furniture and a clearance center.


You know when it just 'happens', and you find one that just fits, works and sounds like the 'sound in your head' ?
Anyway, I had an inkling that a Gibson would be for me, as most of my 'heroes' I grew up with played them, and the records I heard were full of those things.
Then, the guy handed me the Atkin. Now I don't know much about them, although some of you had recommended them to me. It was light years ahead of the Gibsons, in every way.
It was bang in tune, had a louder and more sweeter, musical throw; was a great strummer, and a lovely finger picker. The action was perfect.
And it has a gorgeous aged relic feel to it. I haven't got to worry about bangs and scrapes, and it is already 'worn in'.
Needless to say, it came home with me (Website photos below).
This model is originally based on the Buddy Holly 1943 model.
"The Forty Three pays homage to the legendary banner-era J-45, a classic design that has inspired us both as players and guitar makers. After working with the Buddy Holly Guitar Foundation to recreate Buddy's 1943 J-45, we decided to permanently add this exacting replica to our range.
Direct and powerful, but with an easy-playing shorter scale length, it's easy to see why this guitar has been favoured by so many singer-songwriters over the years. The big-bodied J-45 shape, combined with a Sitka spruce top and mahogany back and sides, delivers warm mids, solid lows and great definition. It's a timeless acoustic guitar tone."
Congrats! Those 43s are superb. Alister's guitars are exceptional. Enjoy!
Pretty much heaven right there. That is one hell of a guitar.
Lovely. The Buddy Holly connection would have drawn me to it, I must admit, and it looks gorgeous. GAS attack strikes yet-a-bloody-again.
Gorgeous. I had an Atkin OM and foolishly let it go. One day I will own another of Alistair's guitars.
Beautiful! That headstock shape is so cool!
Briefly tried one at the show at Olympia today. Lot of background noise but it did seem very good.
Firstly, I havent even needed to tune the Atkin yet... impressive.
But man alive, I kept going back to this lovely Atkin. I just could not put it down.
Very light in weight, gorgeous (and I mean gorgeous) smell, lovely vintage case, great lacquer checking, subtle relicing, worn in feel.
And, I really mean this, the best acoustic sound Ive heard. Wow.
Really cool. Ever since I've taken the decision to drastically reduce the electric guitars I own. I've been playing acoustic more and more. I've been reading up on Atkin and Brook guitars.
I need to find a store where I can go in and try some models of both. In particular to me the Atkin 0037 and 037 are really appealing.
I remember when that came in for review. Unreal.
Let me know as I may have missed that copy, as I was on me hols last June, and Id like a hard copy.
Wow, your review echoes my own findings.
Have you guys had the opportunity of playing a Brook acoustic? I'm probably going to try some this week, as well as some Atkins.
I played the 43 at the guitar show. It was too loud at the event to really hear in any detail but it felt and looked lovely.
The Atkin guys were very friendly to. I could see myself ordering from them I the future.
I should have a copy somewhere if you want it.
I played a few at Coda and I thought they were much better than the Gibsons.
What pick ups are you using ?
The Forty-Three looks brilliant. Serious congrats.
Had a short play on a forty-three yesterday. Sounded great, balanced, not muddy or bright. Louder than I was expecting too.
I was really looking forward to seeing the ageing up close but was a bit disappointed with the one I tried in that the 'checking' went in funny concentric circles and just didn't look realistic. Looked like a pool of solvent had been put on the top and allowed to evaporate. Other than that it looked and felt great though. Not sure how different one is to another in the ageing aspect?
Two weeks or so into ownership, and it remains the best, most fun and beautiful acoustic I've ever played !
I recently bought an Atkin off a friend... I'd been fancying a J-45 for years and he had this one for sale. It's a custom build, so basically a J-45 shape but not quite the same.
It seems to be the guitar I've been looking for (for a very long time), and nearly a year on I'm still amazingly happy with it. So much so, in fact, that I've decided to sell just about all my other acoustics, because there's no point having a bunch of guitars around that aren't getting played!


Here we can see the initial stages of the project at Riverbank Lodge in Upington, which started around 22 September, contract period was set at two months. About 1600m3 of Gabions to be erected. On site training, structure design and site visits were offered by Gabion Baskets in Johannesburg.


What is reality? Is there an "absolute" reality, or is reality merely relative "in nature?" If Isaac Newton were alive today, could Newton make claim to reality as he did gravity, space, and time, or has Einsteinium thought overruled Newtonian thoughts on reality as well as our thoughts on gravity, space, and time? Many make claim reality is nothing more than their personal interpretation of the world, but just about everyone interprets the world differently. Are there really a multitude of realities? Many of us, men and women alike, perceive and then define the world as it best fits their desire of what they wish the world to be. Most people only see and hear what they want to see and hear; they almost never agree as to the objective truth of things as they really are; they almost never agree as to what is reality.
This book is not a scientific study objectively testing reality. The thoughts I put forth herein are merely my attempt at objectively postulating what I believe to be an "absolute" reality pertaining to sometimes-specific and sometimes-general situations in life.


You are invited to consider applying for the position of Geriatrician/Geriatrics Hospitalist-Educator and/or Internal Medicine Site Director. These positions are located in the Geriatrics and Extended Care (GEC) service and Medicine Education service of the Bedford VA Hospital in Bedford, Massachusetts, which has the largest long-term care facility in the VA system.
As Geriatrician/Geriatrics Hospitalist-Educator for the Community Living Center and Geriatric Evaluation Management unit, you'll be part of an interprofessional approach and collaborate with the Primary Care, Mental Health, and Home Based Primary Care services, and have responsibility for the care of Veterans in a broad based geriatric program. You will have a range of clinical responsibilities that include sub acute, rehabilitation, long-term, dementia, hospice and geropsychiatric care.
We are actively expanding the depth and breadth of its graduate medical education training programs and you can expect to spend up to 25% of your time working with the Chief of Staff training trainees. Your key functions include providing medical diagnoses, work ups and treatments within the scope of knowledge, privileges and patient needs.
Making provisions for, and coordinating care of dying patients, including but not limited to, advance preferences, management of pain, bereavement counseling and management of physical problems. Collaborating with Associate Chief of Staff GEC in performance improvement activities. Directing teaching and facilitation of trainees' educational and scholarly activities.
Preferred experience includes a minimum of two years in related clinical geriatric care. Preference will be given to candidates who are board certified or board eligible in Geriatric Medicine and those who are BC/BE in Family Medicine or Internal Medicine are welcome to apply.
You will help lead the further development and expansion of internal medicine training at the Bedford VA, to include competency-based curricular innovation, implementation, assessment, and oversight relating to internal medicine trainees' clinical and academic experiences. You will be involved in direct teaching and facilitation of educational and scholarly activities, working closely with program directors of affiliated residency program and clinical section chiefs. You will be a key member of the new health professions education team tasked with developing health professions education throughout the institution.


text:
Hubble loses an eye
Analysis points to power supply problems
Lucy Sherriff Mon 9 Aug 2004 // 09:27 UTC
One of Hubble's four science instruments stopped working last week, NASA said on Friday. Engineers are looking into recovery options, but the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph (STIS) was not slated for upgrade or replacement on any servicing mission.
NASA says it is has convened a team to investigate the outage. Preliminary reports suggest a broken power supply: STIS suffered a similar problem in 2001. The investigators will continue to monitor the problem over the next few weeks, and hope their analyses suggest a way to fix it.
If it can't be fixed from the ground, it is unlikely it will be fixed at all. Sean O'Keefe, NASA's chief administrator, has not indicated he is likely to change his mind about the moratorium on Shuttle Servicing missions to Hubble. All flights to Hubble were grounded after the loss of the Shuttle Columbia.
STIS was installed in 1997 to aid Hubble's search for black holes, and went into suspend mode on Tuesday. It was only designed to operates for five years, so has already exceeded its mission requirements.
The instrument has contributed a huge amount to our knowledge of the universe. Among other things, scientists using STIS have confirmed the age of the universe by finding the coolest (oldest) white dwarf stars in our galaxy; taken pictures of Saturn's aurora and made the first ever measurements of the chemical make up of the atmosphere of an extrasolar planet.
While STIS is offline, its observation time has been allocated to other peer reviewed projects using the other three instruments. ®
NRC pleads case for Hubble mercy mission
NASA seeks Hubble robot rescue input
Columbia debris tested for re-entry stress

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


If history were taught in the form of stories, it would never be forgotten (Rudyard Kipling).
Much earlier this year, my sweet-teen daughter told me of a local auditioning opportunity for a pre-professional ballet program in the Big City and asked if she could attend. She's been dancing since she could walk and dreams of nothing but ballet, so I kinda knew this day would come, but just not yet.
My heart cringed slightly before I said yes, thinking it would be a good experience overall: she could see the local pool of dancers her age, and when she was rejected, she could set her own bar higher and work towards a new goal.
She was one of four kids crammed into a packed room of more than eighty young adults for a coveted spot at the summer intensive of a highly esteemed ballet school in the Big City.
My heart broke for her.
Two weeks later, we received the brief email that would change our lives: she was accepted, and she was a scholarship recipient!
Now the question was, could this single mother of four make this happen for her eldest blessing, the one who sacrifices much and serves much to help make this household work even somewhat on those somedays? Could I scrape together the necessary one month's room & board from our slim pickings budget?
I was willing to pray.
I was willing to try.
There wasn't a bone in my body that wanted to say no, no matter what it cost me.
Today, we are less than two weeks away from this amazing experience that will form and shape the life of my daughter, a beautifully-spirited young lady who has a dream so much bigger than I could have ever dreamed for her. We've purchased the horde of clothing, tights, and shoes needed. We've a stash of hairbands and pins and spray. We're opening checking accounts, hunkering down at the DMV for a state ID, and spending lots of mommy-girly times together, talking about the weeks away from home that are coming oh-too-soon.
Who doesn't need a little jazz in her life?
But we could use your heartfelt prayers.
You see, I'm still praying.
There isn't a bone in my body that wants to say no---not at this point. But I'm just not sure I have all it will cost me, and I'm waiting on Him... as patiently as I can, telling myself not to panic, not to panic, n o t t o p a n i c.
There isn't much I wouldn't do to make this happen for her. If there's anyone in my life that has made these past five turbulent years just a wee bitty easier for me, it's her, my sweet Deary-lou. She's endured my moments of frustration, of defeat, of sorrow, with more grace than I have, and yet these years have cost her much too. In the midst of her own pain, she has been my best cheerleader and encourager and supporter--and she even thinks I'm awesome.
And so I can't stop praying (Lord hear me!) or trying... to bring her one step closer to her dream, even if that step takes her far from me... for a time.
Congratulations to your dear daughter. She'll get a lot out of this opportunity and you'll not regret making the practicalities work our for her. Good luck!
I'm gonna shut up now. Please, tell me what YOU think.


The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) has sued the federal government on behalf of a former Navy enlisted man who says he was discriminated against after seeking to wear a beard for religious reasons.
The plaintiff, Jonathan Berts of Fairfield, California, enlisted in the military in 2002. He sought the religious exemption in 2011, the San Francisco Chronicle reported.
The request was denied because at the time the Defense Department did not grant religiously motivated requests to allow facial hair. The Navy initially allowed Berts to wear the beard for four years because he had a skin condition.
When he subsequently requested permission to grow his beard because of his Muslim faith, the request was denied, says a lawsuit Berts filed last week in U.S. District Court in Sacramento.
The suit further claims that Berts was transferred from a job as an instructor to an "abandoned, roach-infested building" where he spent his days by himself watching over office equipment.
Although Berts agreed to an honorable discharge in 2011, he did not really want it and has applied for re-enlistment. He remains in the Naval Reserve.
Since Berts left active duty, the Defense Department has loosened its rules about facial hair as it relates to religious beliefs.
"We appreciate that the Department of Defense has made strides in updating its stance on religious accommodations," CAIR attorney Brice Hamack told the Chronicle.
Nonetheless, Hamack insisted that the military "remedy the harm caused" to Berts.
In the lawsuit, Berts seeks to return to active naval service as well as a pension and other benefits.
CAIR itself has long been under fire over allegations of links to the Muslim Brotherhood. In a 2009 court decision, it was confirmed as a participant in a conspiracy to provide funds to Hamas, a designated terrorist organization, in Gaza.
Hamas has been revealed to be an affiliate of the Muslim Brotherhood, an international Islamist group with its headquarters in Egypt.
The Department of Defense should insist on uniform grooming standards. It's not only a matter of keeping a uniform appearance for military dress, but a matter of combat readiness and safety. If a service member can't or won't comply, for whatever reason, then he/she should not be able to serve, especially in a volunteer Armed Forces.


As markets drift lower again, Aviva is bucking the trend after a couple of positive City comments.
Aviva reported strong results... with the highlight being a significant reduction in the internal loan to £4.1bn (first half of 2013 £5.1bn), with plans to reduce this to £2.2bn by end 2015. This had been a legacy issue weighing on the shares, and improvement here bodes well for the risk perception of the stock, in our view. In addition, there were also markedly higher cash remittances to group (remittance ratio 72% versus 49% in 2012), and we expect Aviva to reach its [target of] more than 80% in 2014; this is gives us greater confidence in our above-consensus dividend forecasts (+13% and +23% in 2014 and 2015, respectively).
The stock has come a long way from the time of the dividend cut last year, and is up 68% from the low point. The shares did particularly well at first half and full year results, where progress was made on the group's targets, and one can be forgiven for thinking the upside has been missed. However, our litmus test is that Aviva still screens cheap compared to its major UK life peers, and the inherent valuation discount that has plagued the stock historically has not completely eroded. Hence, we remain buyers, as we expect continued erosion of this discount as the restructuring story plays out.
A return to top-line life growth and a relentless drive to improve efficiency by an impressive management team lead us to increase our target price and upgrade to sector perform.
In the market Aviva has added 8.5p to 518p.
This is unlikely to reveal much but afterward Carney will be answering questions on the market manipulation, it will be interesting to see how much he admits the Bank of England knew. Central Bank credibility at the moment is not riding high.
Banks are weaker with Barclays down 5.35p to 236.65p and Royal Bank of Scotland 4.3p lower at 315.5p, the latter hit by a reduce recommendation from Nomura.
Among the risers Sports Direct International has climbed 20.5p to 829.5p as the retailer outlined plans to give founder Mike Ashley a £65m bonus to recognise its recent growth performance. The company of course is a user of controversial zero hour contracts.
Next reports its 2014 results on 20 March and we expect these to lead to consensus earnings upgrades given Next's online momentum and an improving outlook for the UK consumer. We have nudged up our high end 2015/16 pretax profit forecasts as we now assume a slightly better Retail like for like and higher gross margin owing to the recent strength of sterling. Next's valuation is in line with the UK general retail sector but we think it deserves a premium owing to high online exposure (around 50% of profit) and high earnings visibility.
But Marks & Spencer, lacking a strong online presence, is down 1.6p at 479.9p.
Among companies reporting results, Close Brothers is up 53p to £14.93 as it unveiled a 21% rise in first half operation profit.


mona K photography is an on-location, natural-light portrait photographer located in Omaha, Nebraska. Serving Omaha, Lincoln, Council Bluffs and surrounding areas in Nebraska and Iowa. mona K photography is available for travel to most destinations. mona K photography specializes in newborn, babies, children, families, couples, senior and wedding photography. all website and blog images and content are property and copyright of mona K photography 2012. images may not be reprinted without permission from mkp. please note that it is illegal to scan prints, right click or screen shot online proofs or other online images featured on my blog or website, make copies from prints, and sell or alter images received on CD or print form.


text:
Q: Prove that $X \in \mathcal{L}^p$ if and only if $\sum\limits_{n=1}^{\infty}n^p \mathbb{P}(A_{n})$ is finite. I have the following problem on my problem set:

I approached the problem this following way, which I think is the right path but I'm still struggling:

We have $A_{n} = \{n-1\leq |X| < n\}$ and we know that $X \in \mathcal{L}^p$ if $\mathbb{E}(|X|^p)$ is finite. For every $\omega \in A_{n}$, it holds that $(n-1)^p\leq |X|^p < n^p$. For any $\omega \in \Omega$, since $(A_{n})$ defines a partition:
  \begin{gather*}
 \sum\limits_{n=1}^{\infty}(n-1)^p 1_{A_{n}} \leq |X|^p < \sum\limits_{n=1}^{\infty}n^p 1_{A_{n}}\\
 \sum\limits_{n=1}^{\infty}(n-1)^p \mathbb{P}(A_{n}) \leq \mathbb{E}(|X|^p) < \sum\limits_{n=1}^{\infty}n^p \mathbb{P}(A_{n})
\end{gather*}
  Now, if $\sum\limits_{n=1}^{\infty}n^p \mathbb{P}(A_{n})$ is finite, it implies that $\mathbb{E}(|X|^p)$ is also finite, which means that $||X||_{p} =  [\mathbb{E}(|X|^p)]^{1/p} < +\infty$ and $X \in \mathcal{L}^p$.

This is only halfway. Now I need to prove that if $\sum\limits_{n=1}^{\infty}n^p \mathbb{P}(A_{n})$ if finite, then $\mathbb{E}(|X|^p)$ is also finite. I procede the following way:

Using the above inequalities, if $\mathbb{E}(|X|^p)$ finite, then $\sum\limits_{n=1}^{\infty}(n-1)^p \mathbb{P}(A_{n})$ is finite and also is $\sum\limits_{n=1}^{\infty}(n)^p \mathbb{P}(A_{n+1})$ since we also have that $\sum\limits_{n=1}^{\infty}(n)^p \mathbb{P}(A_{n+1}) \leq \mathbb{E}(|X|^p) < \sum\limits_{n=1}^{\infty}(n+1)^p \mathbb{P}(A_{n+1})$. The same logic tells us that  $\sum\limits_{n=1}^{\infty}(n)^p \mathbb{P}(A_{n+1}) < \sum\limits_{n=1}^{\infty}(n)^p \mathbb{P}(A_{n})$.

I couldn't compare anything else in order to achieve the result. Any ideas? Am I on the right path? Thanks a lot in advance!!

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaStackExchange


text:
This Entry
Confessions of A Hypnotic Game Author
Exploring Ruins
A blog by Alex Greene in General
mythras Exploring Ruins
Entry posted by Alex Greene in writing · April 9, 2022
A personal note before I begin this week's post.
Last week's hiatus could not have been more timely. I ended up going through a week from hell. I am not entirely convinced it isn't going to turn out to be a fortnight from Hell, but at least the crises I faced this last week have been resolved.
Can't speak for tomorrow's crises, but then again tomorrow doesn't exist yet.
Ruination
What do you think of, when you think of ruins?
There are many types of ruins, but they all have the same ending: places which are no longer being used, for whatever reason.
A ruin might have been abandoned due to economic reasons, or due to the death of the person who kept the community together. A place can be brought to ruin by enemy conquest, or by natural disaster. However it happened, a ruin is a place where dreams died, and the past can only serve as a warning to the present.
Types of Ruin
Here are some ideas as to what sort of ruin the Adventurers can find themselves in. Roll on 1d20 or choose.
Age of Ruins
Next, look at the age of the ruins. Roll 1d10 or choose.
Some ruins have a claim to fame; a place in the history books. Think of the ruins of Troy and Pompeii, of Sutton Hoo and Derinkuyu. Imagine the Great Library of Alexandria at its height and its nickname, "The Place of The Cure of The Soul." Imagine the now-vanished workshop od Tapputi, the world's first recorded scientist, chemist, perfumer, and the inventor of the distillery. Or your world's oldest amphitheatre, where the most famous historical playwright of your fantasy world once trod the sand and delivered her impassioned monologues, and entertained the crowds with philosophically-charged plays and parables?
An abandoned hospital, thousands of years old, on the site of your world's first university, will be charged with a different kind of energy than the wreckage of a deserted psychiatric hospital abandoned due to an outbreak of plague ten years ago.
How / Why Did The Ruin Form?
Most ruins form from either economically-motivated abandonment, warfare, a natural disaster, disease, famine, conquest, invasion, ideological imposition, or the cessation of some form of resource on which the ruins depended.
Economically-motivated abandonment: That's simply money. People stopped coming to the place, perhaps because the location was no longer central to the city and a new place had opened up in the centre of a new, expanded community. Consider a temple sited on a hill. The supporting city builds a new temple in the centre, and people stop coming to the old temple, eventually trigge3ring its abandonment as the priesthood move to the new temple.
Warfare: The city of Troy was thought of as a Greek myth, until it was discovered (and then blown to smithereens by explosives. Go figure). Also, the capital of Ancient Corinth deserves a mention here. Corinth is the place where the Corinthians lived, accorsing to the Biblical Letters of Saint Paul. They were also mentioned in the Acts of The Apostles in the same bible. You can thank the Romans for destroying the place, and the sea for claiming the rest of it.
Natural disaster: Consider Pompeii, smothered for more than a millennium by Vesuvius. Your ruins could be buried in several hundred feet of volcanic ashes, washed away by a tsunami, or even (in your fantasy world) partly obliterated by a falling rock. A very small falling rock, which made a big mess, like Chelyabinsk in 2013.
Disease: A horrific way to go, diseases such as the plague, smallpox and so on can ravage entire regions of the countrydside. In the Harnworld setting, The Red Death (smallpox) claimed millions across Northwestern Lythia, including the island of Harn. The nation of Thonia (which has its own geographic module, published by Kelestia Publications) was all but rendered a barren wasteland. Thonia's thriving, yet isolated, civilisations were all but eradicated by the Red Death.
Famine: Famine can also lay waste entire regions. Famine can be caused by a number of factors: war, disease, drought, natural disaster - but also stupidity. Cultivation requires effort, planning, and resources: a crop which fails can turn a paradise island into a Summerisle.
Conquest / Invasion: Going back to the ancient city of Troy, and to Alexandria. In both cases, imagine what they would have looked like today, if they had not been scrubbed down to the foundations by some ugly brute invaders. The same goes for ideological imposition: look at all those Abbeys and Monasteries which were ordered shut down by Henry VIII.
Cessation: Not exactly famine, as such, or even economic abandonment. Sometimes, a natural resource which drew people to a civic centre just dries up. Water from a natural spring (perhaps blessed by the Gods), or a herb which becomes extinct, or even some technology on which the rest of the region depends, but which becomes obsolete with the advent of a new technology (such as iron in the Bronze Age, or the mouldboard plough, or irrigation).
Why Explore These Ruins?
What would bring the Adventurers to an abandoned site? As Gamesmaster, you could think of a few reasons, but here are half a dozen ideas to set you off.
Rescue: Someone has gone wandering away from the community, off into the wilderness, and they've become stuck somehow amid the ruins on the hill. Perhaps they fell through a sinkhole to an undiscovered complex beneath; or perhaps they might have fallen foul of some bandits who have taken refuge there. Either way, time is of the essence before the missing person is killed or dies of exposure.
Reclamation: The ruins have now been bought up by a landowner, who wishes to develop the property. The Adventurers can be tasked with going there to clear out the monsters which have taken residence there, and which occasionally have been making forays into the town during times of famine. They could also venture there in order to find out some reason why they should not build there - perhaps it is credibly haunted, or there is still a trace of lingering plague there, and so on.
Shelter: - The Adventurers are passing by, when a storm hits, or snow, or they spot an oncoming invasion, and the ruins provide shelter and concealment.
Exploration: - There are rumours of a lost treasure of some kind hidden in the ruins. Don't knock this one: you never know when your clumsy excavations in the floor of an ancient Abbey may reveal a hidden copy of The Qur'an from the 13th Century.
Diplomacy: - Circumstances might require a neutral meeting point for meetings intended to bring a war to an end, or to conduct some state of affairs between cultures or nations. What better place than a ruin which nobody can lay claim to, or even a ruin which has cultural significance to both parties (e.g. a ruined Abbey where a treaty had been signed between two warring nations six hundred years before, the first time both nations had gone to war with one another).
Trade: - Your Adventurers have someone or something. The other side has someone or something. What better place to arrange the exchange than a place which has excellent sight lines for one or both teams' snipers? Or maybe they could go there with a genuine intent to swap ...
In the end, a ruin can be more than just a place to store random monsters to chop into little pieces. If you think that the abandoned places of the world can be more interesting to explore without bands of wandering monsters, feel free to use the above guidelines to work out some adventures to throw at your Adventurers. Who knows; they could uncover a Derinkuyu in some unexplored part of the world, and build up a population in the tens of thousands livin underground, with themselves as the leaders of an entire community and the complex as their base of operations - or they could content themselves with building an underground home, and building a regional power base with trade coming to them.
Just watch out for those ancient ghosts ...
Edited April 9, 2022 by Alex Greene
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Sperry Posters in "PEARL JAM: LIVE IN TWO DIMENSIONS"
Chuck Sperry & Chris Shaw design for Pearl Jam will rock San Francisco transit for the rest of the summer!
Opening on Saturday, July 27 at the Haight Street Art Center in San Francisco, PEARL JAM: LIVE IN TWO DIMENSIONS is an extensive exhibition of Pearl Jam gig posters. Covering the entire official Pearl Jam poster series from its origins, development, and eventual growth into one of rock's most remarkable achievements in graphic art, this show will serve hardcore poster collectors, casual fans, and the general public alike.
The opening reception of PEARL JAM: LIVE IN TWO DIMENSIONS will take place on Saturday, July 27th from 5pm – 8pm. The exhibition will be free and open to the public through September 2019.
A very limited offering of Sperry's Pearl Jam Miami poster will be available to buy at the opening. Chuck will be at the opening to sign his books – High Volume, Helikon and Chthoneon – which will be available through Haight Street Art Center.
Brought together below is a check-list of all the posters Chuck Sperry created for Pearl Jam, Ten Club and Eddie Vedder. Which is your favorite? Which ones will be in the show? Which posters do you have in your collection?
Filed Under: News Tagged With: Ames Brothers, Chris Shaw, Chthoneon, Chuck Sperry, Eddie Vedder, EMEK, Haight Street Art Center, Helikon, High Volume, Pearl Jam, Ten Club
"The Oracle" & "The Seer" Blotter Art Release & Book Signing, Chuck Sperry at Shakedown Gallery, Haight Street
Shakedown Gallery is hosting "Drop The Mics: A Blotter Art Show".
Join us Saturday, December 15, 2018 for the exclusive San Francisco release of two new Chuck Sperry blotter art pieces – "The Oracle" & "The Seer." Chuck Sperry will be there in person to sign his books, "Chthoneon, The Art of Chuck Sperry" & "Helikon, The Muses of Chuck Sperry."
"Drop The Mics: A Blotter Art Show"
Exhibition and pop-up gallery
Shakedown Gallery
411 Haight Street
Exhibition: December 1, 2018 to January 1, 2019
Chuck Sperry blotter release and book signing:
Saturday, December 15 – 3pm to 6 pm.
Random lottery numbers will be handed out at 2:30 pm, half an hour before the show.
Perforated blotter sheet
Drop the Mics features an amazing collection of art by some of your favorite psychedelic and visionary artists. The show will feature many signed limited blotter art editions, plus rare archival prints including pieces from Mark McCloud's notorious Institute of Illegal Images.
New and Pre-Released limited edition artwork will be available from:
Alex Grey, Stanley Mouse, Chuck Sperry
Mark Henson, Emek, Jonathan Singer
David Cooley, Richard Biffle, Sommer Biffle
Mark McCloud, Banjo, Jeff Wood
Mike DuBois, Jonathan Solter, Randal Roberts
Tripp, Sarah Farah, Mikio, William Giese
Lizzy Layne, Bigfoot, Jake Kobrin, Zoltron
Stay tuned to Shakedown Gallery for updates on additional events happening during the month.
Filed Under: Art Prints Tagged With: Alex Grey, Banjo, Bigfoot, Chthoneon The Art of Chuck Sperry, Chuck Sperry, David Cooley, Drop The Mics, EMEK, Helikon The Muses of Chuck Sperry, Jake Kobrin, Jeff Wood, Jonathan Singer, Jonathan Solter, Lizzy Layne, Mark Henson, Mark McCloud, Mike DuBois, Mikio, Randal Roberts, Richard Biffle, Sarah Farah, Shakedown Gallery, Sommer Biffle, Stanley Mouse, The Oracle, The Seer, Tripp, William Giese, Zoltron
October 15, 2016 By squirt
The Rock Poster Society • Festival of Posters 2016
Photo credit: Bless Hyperion
The first time Chuck Sperry saw a psychedelic rock poster he was 5 or 6 and had mustered up the nerve to climb the attic stairs into his big brother's bedroom.
There, pinned to the wall, was a drawing of a fat prop plane with umbrellas. He studied the lettering, then sneaked back up a second time until he could finally make out the words, "Jefferson Airplane, an Ectodelic Trip, Civic Auditorium Dance, June 4, 9-1, $2.25."
"I remember staring at that poster in the late 60's while my brother Jody and I recorded The Who's Tommy in its entirety on a reel-to-reel tape recorder," said Sperry laughing.
Sperry followed that poster to Haight-Ashbury, where he found love, an amazing apartment and the charmed life of a poster artist.
He timed it just right to have been selected by art director Arelene Owseichik to join Bill Graham Presents' "New Fillmore Series" of posters in 1994. His career spanning 500+ handmade, limited edition, screen printed Rock Posters and art prints – not to mention 200+ art shows in over a dozen countries – has not slowed since then.
In fact, Sperry's career is speeding up; He will have a solo exhibition in New York City at Spoke Art Gallery on November 19, 2016. There he will present his newest wood panels and archived classic rock posters and art prints. He will also present his newest book, "Helikon, The Muses of Chuck Sperry" devoted entirely to his screenprint on wood panels.
"Recently I had the great honor to make five posters – over the last year – for The Who. They gave me massive props by showing my posters on the huge stadium stage screen before and after their concerts. When I saw them in Oakland this year, I thought about my brother and me in 1969 in his room under that Jefferson Airplane poster."
On Saturday, Oct. 22, Sperry's art will proudly be on display at the Festival of Rock Posters in the Hall of Flowers in Golden Gate Park.
The Festival, put on by the nonprofit all-volunteer Rock Poster Society, is a highly anticipated annual art event. This year marks the 50th anniversary of the invention of the psychedelic rock poster. To honor this important milestone, artists, dealers, and collectors are coming from around the country, to create one of the largest TRPS events to date.
"The psychedelic style stood out from everything else," says Sperry, now 54, and still a resident of that same apartment in The Haight.
Sperry has lived in The Haight for 26 years, and has worked as an artist for all that time. He's made shows from Buenos Aires to Paris, Athens to Japan. His art is in the permanent collections of many prominent museums as well as The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
He owns an art studio/gallery in West Oakland where he regularly hosts very well-attended art shows and open houses. Presently he is working on a series of four Jerry Garcia portraits for the Garcia family's foundation, which collectors are avidly awaiting.
"Wes Wilson did a series of 10 or 12 posters that ignited all of these other artists to get started," Sperry says. "Stanley Mouse, Alton Kelley,Victor Moscoso, and Rick Griffin were breaking all the printing rules by putting colors like red and blue next to each other, which vibrated the eye. You had to be hip in order to even read the posters. It was really a revolutionary artistic statement."
According to Ben Marks, vice president of the Rock Poster Society, the style for psychedelic rock posters can be traced to that most un-psychedelic of bands, the Association, singing "Windy" and "Cherish". It was drawn by Wilson using flames for lettering. If you've taken a course in hippie hieroglyphics you can make out the words "July 22-23, Fillmore Auditorium."'
"San Francisco's Psychedelic style completely changed graphic aesthetics around the world," says Sperry. The 50th anniversary of the Human Be-In is Jan. 14, and that will launch a year of tributes to the Summer of Love. Posters from the Be-In, and other Summer of Love shows will be at the Hall of Flowers and so will three of the artists, Moscoso, Mouse and Wilson, signing posters. Also there, will be Emek and Gary Houston from Portland, Jim Pollock from Chicago, Mark Arminski from Detroit, and Sperry.
Admission fee will decrease as the day goes on. Get there at 10 a.m. and it is $20. At 11 a.m. it drops to $10 and after 3 p.m. it is free. The risk in waiting is that the good stuff may already be gone. The line is expected to form at dawn, with people in lawn chairs.
Last year, Sperry was able to find a mint-condition tour program from the Grateful Dead tour of Egypt, in 1978, for $100. The artist, Mouse, signed it for him, and Chuck was stoked.
"The collectors are so fervent that they want to get their hands on these limited edition posters first thing in the morning," says Sperry. "We're talking about a tradition that started in 1966, and there is still this great enthusiasm!"
Festival of Rock Posters: 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Saturday, Oct. 22 at the Hall of Flowers, Ninth Avenue and Lincoln Way, Golden Gate Park. Admission: $5 for members. For non-members $20 at 10 a.m., $10 at 11 a.m., free after 3 p.m. trps.org
Filed Under: News, Press & Reviews Tagged With: Arlene Owseichik, Bill Graham, EMEK, Festival of Rock Posters 2016, Gary Houston, Jim Pollock, Mark Arminski, SFGate, Spoke Art, Stanley Mouse, The Rock Poster Society, Victor Moscoso, Wes Wilson
May 31, 2015 By squirt
Pearl Jam Poster Art at SeaTac Airport, Seattle
Last week Pearl Jam, EMP, SeaTac Airport debuted the "Push Me, Pull Me" poster exhibit at the Seattle International Airport (SeaTac). I am very honored to have my art represented in the show! This exhibit will run for a minimum of 2 years and possibly longer. If you are traveling through Seattle take a walk by Terminal A1 to check it out.
Unveiling of new EMP Museum exhibit on Pearl Jam's historical poster art as the latest installment of the Sea-Tac Airport Experience the City of Music Program, 27 May 2015, Concourse A, Sea-Tac Airport.
Filed Under: Events, News, Rock Posters Tagged With: Ames Bros., Brad Klausen, Chuck Sperry, EMEK, EMP, Ken Taylor, Munk One, Pearl Jam, Push Me Pull Me, SeaTac Airport
The Art of Musical Maintenance 10 at Goodfoot, Portland
The Goodfoot in Portland, Oregon is proud to announce that "The Art of Musical Maintenance 10″ is open until Jan 27th. Goodfoot is displaying the newest installment of their annual show of music posters from around the country. The artists in this show are as diverse as the music. Likewise, the artist's techniques vary as well (from hand drawn to computer generated design). There are over 40 artists from around the country, and around 300 framed posters.
Artists in the show: Alan Hynes, Ben Wilson, Billy Perkins, Brad Klausen, Brian Methe, Carisa Lu Von Gasser,Chris Haberman, Chris Shaw, Chuck Sperry, Craig Horky, Dan Stiles, Dan Ness, David D' Andrea, David Welker, DKNG studio, EMEK, Frank Kozik, Furturtle, Gary Houston, Gigart,Guy Burwell, Heidi Elise Wirz, James Flames, Jay Ryan, Jeff Wood, John Howard, John Vogl, Justin Hampton, Justin Helton, Justin Santora, Lil Tuffy, Marq Spusta, Mirjam Dijkema, Nate Duval, Powerslide Design, T-Bone Aljaxx, Todd Slater, Tyler Stout, Uncle Charlie, zoltron
Check the Goodfoot website for a full catalog of posters online – soon!
The Goodfoot
2845 SE Stark, Portland, Oregon
Open daily 5-2:30
Filed Under: Events, News, Rock Posters Tagged With: Alan Hynes, Ben Wilson, Billy Perkins, Brad Klausen, Brian Methe, Carisa Lu Von Gasser, Chris Haberman, Chris Shaw, Chuck Sperry, Craig Horky, Dan Ness, Dan Stiles, David D' Andrea, David Welker, DKNG studio, EMEK, Frank Kozik, Furturtle, Gary Houston, Gigart, Guy Burwell, Heidi Elise Wirz, James Flames, Jay Ryan, Jeff Wood, John Howard, John Vogl, Justin Hampton, Justin Helton, Justin Santora, Lil Tuffy, Marq Spusta, Mirjam Dijkema, Nate Duval, Powerslide Design, T-Bone Aljaxx, Todd Slater, Tyler Stout, Uncle Charlie, Zoltron