Tuesday, March 31, 2009

My daughters


Desi y Ariana

Octavio Paz

Octavio Paz Lozano (March 31, 1914April 19, 1998) was a Mexican writer, poet, and diplomat, and the winner of the 1990 Nobel Prize in Literature.

Born:March 31 1914(1914--)
Mexico City, D.F., Mexico
Died:March 19 1998 (age 84)
Mexico City, D.F., Mexico
Occupation:Writer, Poet, and Diplomat.
Nationality:Mexican
Writing period:1931 - 1965
Literary movement:Marxism, Surrealism, and Existentialism
Debut works:Caballera (1931)
Influences:Gerardo Diego, Juan Ramón Jiménez, Sor Juana de la Cruz, D.H. Lawrence, Nathaniel Hawthorne, William Butler Yeats, Alfonso Reyes, and Antonio Machado.
Influenced:Guillermo Sheridan, Eric Whitacre, Carlos Fuentes, Eliot Weinberger, Ilan Stavans and Monique Fong Wust.

Early life and writings

Paz was born in 1914 in Mexico City during the Revolution. Born to Andalusian Josefina Lozano, and Octavio Paz Solórzano, a journalist and lawyer for Emiliano Zapata involved in agrarian reform following the revolution, activities which caused him to be largely absent from home. Paz was raised in the village of Mixcoac (now a part of Mexico City) by his mother, his aunt and by his paternal grandfather, Ireneo Paz, a liberal intellectual, novelist, publisher and former soldier supporter of President Porfirio Díaz.

Paz was introduced to literature early in his life through the influence of his grandfather's library, filled with classic Mexican and European literature. During the 1920s, he discovered the European poets Gerardo Diego, Juan Ramón Jiménez, and Antonio Machado, Spanish writers who had a great influence on his early writings. As a teenager in 1931, under the influence of D.H. Lawrence, Paz published his first poems, like Caballera. Two years later, at the age of 19, Octavio Paz published Luna Silvestre ("Wild Moon"), a collection of poems. In 1932, with some friends, he founded his first literary review, Barandal. By 1939, Paz considered himself first and foremost a poet.

In 1937, Paz abandoned his law studies and left for Yucatán to work at a school in Mérida for sons of peasants and workers. There, he began working on the first of his long ambitious poems, Entre la piedra y la flor ("Between the stone and the flower") (1941, revised in 1976), obviously influenced by T.S. Eliot, which describes the situation of the Mexican campesino (peasant) under the greedy landlords of the day.[1]

In 1937, Paz was invited to the Second International Writers Congress in Defense of Culture in Spain during the country's Civil War, showing his solidarity with the Republican side and against fascism. Upon his return to Mexico, Paz co-founded a literary journal, Taller ("Workshop") in 1938, and wrote for the magazine until 1941. In 1938 he also met and married Elena Garro, now considered one of Mexico's finest writers. They had one daughter, Helena. They were divorced in 1959. In 1943 Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship and began studying at the University of California at Berkeley in the United States and two years later he entered the Mexican diplomatic service, working in New York for a while. In 1945 he was sent to Paris, where he wrote El Laberinto de la Soledad ("The Labyrinth of Solitude"), a groundbreaking study of Mexican identity and thought. In 1952 he travelled to India for the first time and, in the same year, to Tokyo, as chargé d'affairs, and then to Geneva, in Switzerland. He returned to Mexico City in 1954, where he wrote his great poem Piedra de sol (Sunstone) in 1957 and Libertad bajo palabra (Liberty Under Oath), a compilation of his poetry up to that time. He was sent again to Paris in 1959, following the steps of his lover, the Italian painter Bona Tibertelli de Pisis. In 1962 he was named Mexico's ambassador to India.
Octavio Paz’s route was his own, not mine, but behind that route a path is traceable, and in that path I recognize an invaluable lesson: society and solitude — how to make these two compatible? His answer was to live life in full, alone and with others. To make oneself present by tracing one’s past and betting on the future.
Ilan Stavans[2]

Later life

In India, Paz completed hundreds of works, including El mono gramático (The Monkey Grammarian) and Ladera este (Eastern Slope). In 1965 he broke up with Bona and married Marie-José Tramini, a French woman who would be his wife to the end of his days. In October 1968, he resigned from the diplomatic corps in protest of the Mexican government's repression of students who were fighting to achieve true democracy in the country, a movement that ended abruptly when the army opened fire against demonstrators in the Plaza de las Tres Culturas in Tlatelolco. He sought refuge in Paris for a while and returned to Mexico in 1969, where he founded his magazine Plural (1970-1976) with a group of liberal Mexican and Latin American writers. From 1970 to 1974 he lectured at Harvard University in Cambridge, where he held the Charles Norton Chair. His book Los hijos del limo ("Children of the Mire") was the result of those courses. After the government closed Plural in 1975, Paz founded Vuelta, a publication with a focus similar to that of Plural and continued editing that magazine until his death. He won the 1977 Jerusalem Prize for literature on the theme of individual freedom. In 1980 he was awarded an honorary doctorate from Harvard University and in 1982 he won the Neustadt Prize. A collection of his poems (written between 1957 and 1987) was published in 1988. In 1990, he was awarded the Nobel Prize."[3]

He died of cancer in 1998. In his 2003 essay on Paz, Ilan Stavans wrote that he was “the quintessential surveyor, a Dante's Virgil, a Renaissance man”.[4] Guillermo Sheridan, who was named by Paz as director of the Octavio Paz Foundation in 1998, published a book, Poeta con Paisaje (2004) with several biographical essays about the poet's life until 1968.

Writings

A prolific author and poet, Paz published scores of works during his lifetime, many of which are translated into other languages. His poetry, for example, has been translated into English by Samuel Beckett, Charles Tomlinson, Elizabeth Bishop and Mark Strand. His early poetry was influenced by Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, as well as religions such as Buddhism and Hinduism. His poem, Piedra de Sol ("Sunstone") written in 1957, was praised as a "magnificent" example of surrealist poetry in the presentation speech of his Nobel Prize. His later poetry dealt with love and eroticism, the nature of time, and buddhism. He also wrote poetry about his other passion, modern painting, dedicating poems to the work of Balthus, Joan Miró, Marcel Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta. Several of his poems have also been adapted into choral music by composer Eric Whitacre, including Water Night, Cloudburst, and A Boy and a Girl.

As an essayist Paz wrote on topics like Mexican politics and economics, Aztec art, anthropology, and sexuality. His book-length essay, The Labyrinth of Solitude (Spanish: El laberinto de la soledad), delves into the minds of his countrymen, describing them as hidden behind masks of solitude. Due to their history, their identity is lost between a precolombian and a Spanish culture, negating either. A key work in understanding Mexican culture, it greatly influenced other Mexican writers, such as Carlos Fuentes.

After a tale by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Paz wrote the play, La hija de Rappaccini (1956), a lyrical tale of love, death and the loss of innocence. The plot centers around a young Italian student who wonders about the beautiful gardens and even more beautiful daughter (Beatrice) of the mysterious Professor Rappaccini. He is horrified when he discovers the poisonous nature of their beauty. Paz adapted the play from the eponymous 1844 short story by Nathaniel Hawthorne, combining it with sources from the Indian poet [Vishakadatta]. Paz also cited influences from Japanese Noh theatre, the Spanish auto sacramental and the poetry of William Butler Yeats. Its opening performance was designed by the Mexican painter Andrea J. First performed in English in 1996 at the Gate Theatre in London, the play was translated and directed by Sebastian Doggart and starred Sarah Alexander as Beatrice. In 1972, Surrealist author André Pieyre de Mandiargues translated the play into French as La fille de Rappaccini (Editions Mercure de France). Mexican composer Daniel Catán turned the play into an opera in 1992.

Paz's other works translated into English include volumes of essays, some of the more prominent of which are: Alternating Current (tr. 1973), Configurations (tr. 1971), The Labyrinth of Solitude (tr. 1963), The Other Mexico (tr. 1972); and El Arco y la Lira (1956; tr. The Bow and the Lyre, 1973). Along with these are volumes of critical studies and biographies, including Claude Lévi-Strauss and Marcel Duchamp (both, tr. 1970) and The Traps of Faith, an analytical biography of the Mexican 16th century nun, poet and thinker Sor Juana de la Cruz.

His works include the poetry collections La Estación Violenta, (1956), Piedra de Sol (1957), and in English translation the most prominent include two volumes which include most of Paz in English: Early Poems: 1935–1955 (tr. 1974), and Collected Poems, 1957–1987 (1987). Many of these volumes have been edited and translated by Eliot Weinberger, who is Paz's principal translator into American English.

Disillusioned with communism

Originally Paz showed his solidarity with the Republicans during the Spanish Civil War, but after learning of the murder of one of his comrades by the Republicans themselves he became gradually disillusioned. While in Paris in the early fifties, influenced by David Rousset, André Breton and Albert Camus, he started publishing his critical views on totalitarianism in general, and against Stalin in particular.

Later, in both Plural and Vuelta, Paz exposed the violations of human rights in the communist regimes. This brought him much animosity from the Latin American left and some university students. In the Prologue of the IX volume of his completed works, Paz stated that from the time when he abandoned communist dogma, the mistrust of many in the Mexican intelligentsia started to transform into an intense and open enmity; he did not suspect that the vituperation would follow him for decades.

There can be no society without poetry, but society can never be realized as poetry, it is never poetic. Sometimes the two terms seek to break apart. They cannot.
Octavio Paz[5]


In 1990, during the aftermath of the fall of the Berlin wall, Paz and his Vuelta colleagues invited several of the world’s writers and intellectuals to Mexico City to discuss the collapse of communism, including Czeslaw Milosz, Hugh Thomas, Daniel Bell, Agnes Heller, Cornelius Castoriadis, Hugh Trevor-Roper, Jean-Francois Revel, Michael Ignatieff, Mario Vargas Llosa, Jorge Edwards and Carlos Franqui. The Vuelta encounter was broadcast on Mexican television from 27 August to 2 September.

The animosity of some Mexican leftists to Paz’s political views persisted until his death, and beyond.
http://www.letraslibres.com/index.php?sec=25&sibuscar=1&opciones=ALL&revsel=3&qry=octavio+paz

Schoenen

"Schoenen"
"Mia Hamm"
"Bikini "
Gal.3:9 "So then they which be of faith are blessed with faithful Abraham."


Twin Island Resort (Maafushivaru)
Twin Islands, Maafushivaru - Ari Atoll


















italian Blog


La Primavera!

The 21st of March was the official beginning of Primavera (Spring), and as the proverb goes: ‘a San Benedetto una rondine sotto il tetto’ (for Saint Benedict a swallow under the roof), because in the Italian calendar the Saint for the 21st of March is San Benedetto, and when the swallows appear it’s a sign that spring has arrived. But this year the swallows haven’t appeared yet! Nevertheless la Primavera e’ in piena fioritura (Spring is in full blossom), and because we had a very cold winter and a lot of brina (frost) in February, the flowers that are normally early are late this year, so that everything seems to be coming out at the same time: the bright yellow pompons of the Mimosa are giving way to the white blossoms of the Ciliegi (cherry trees) and the Susini (plum trees). The fields are covered in Primule (Primroses), whose pale yellow color counterbalances the purple of the Viole Mammole (Dog Violets) and Crochi (Crocuses), whilst bunches of Elleboro (Hellebores) sprout all along the hill sides.
When walking through our orto (vegetable garden) we become inebriated with the perfume of Giunchiglie (Jonquils, a small variety of white narcissus or daffodil) and Narcisi (Narcissus or daffodils), whose bright yellow trumpets stand proudly next to the blue of the wild Giacinti (Hyacinths). In private gardens and parks the Camelie (Camellias) are displaying their beautiful round flowers in a rich variety of nuances, from blood red to the most delicate pink. The first timid Farfalle (Butterflies) are venturing out, together with a few Api (Bees), while Lucertole (Lizards) are darting up and down the stone walls. The air is filled with il cinguettare degli uccelli (the twitter of the birds) busy preparing their nidi (nests).
Following the amenti (catkins), le gemme (buds) are timidly popping out on the branches of the trees, creating a pale green mist on the horizon against the vivid azzurro of the sky, while the bright green erba (grass) is shining new and fresh after yesterday’s rain which has regenerated the landscape after the long winter.

Sunday, March 29, 2009

Market

"Adam Smith"
"PriceSmart"

"Market"
Prov. 25:24
"It is better to dwell in the corner of the housetop, than with a brawling woman and in
a wide house."

interior of exterior -Featured on the Home Page March 29 -09
Sheikh Zayed Mosque in Abu Dhabi
Chess: "Adam Smith" "Market" "PriceSmart"

Friday, March 27, 2009

Silver

"Los Fabulosos Cadillacs"
"Estrellas y Latidos"
Marina Mercante

Prov 31:14
"She is like the merchants' ships; she bringeth her food from afar."

Cadillac Ranch III
Light Painting at Cadillac Ranch



black-bellied whistling duck

Chess: "Marina Mercante" "Fabulosos Cadillacs" "Estrellas y Latidos"

Thursday, March 26, 2009

Cointreau

Cointreau
Guatemala
Vat 69
Violeta
Goliath
Prov.31:4
"It is not for kings, O Lemuel, it is not for kings to drink wine; nor for princes strong drink: "

Deut. 14:21
"Thou shalt not seethe a kid in his mother's milk."

Erynn dans un champ de colza
Springtime Wishes


Kittens

Brown Bears - San Diego Zoo


Sylvia Falls
On the National Pass walking track at Wentworth Falls in the Blue Mountains of Australia.
 Ladybugs in Grass
by Ocean / Corbis
Chess: "Cointreau" "Vat 69" "Goliath" "Guatemala" "Kosher"
Cointreau

Cointreau
is a brand of triple sec liqueur, and is produced in Saint-Barthélemy-d'Anjou, a suburb of Angers, France. Cointreau sources its bitter oranges from all over the world, usually Spain, Brazil and Saint-Raphaël, Haiti.
In addition to being imbibed as an apéritif, Cointreau is sometimes used as a digestif. Cointreau is considered to be either a premium brand triple sec or a unique category of liqueur. With a 40% alcohol content, Cointreau is strong for a triple sec which usually has an alcohol content around 23%
Vat 69

Vat 69 whisky is a scotch blended whisky, produced by William Sanderson.
In 1882 William Sanderson prepared one hundred casks of blended whiskey and hired a panel of experts to taste them. The batch from the vat with number 69 was proclaimed as the best tasting one and the famous blend got its name. The whisky was at first bottled in port wine bottles.

History

William Sanderson, born in Leith in 1840, started an apprenticeship with a wine and spirituous liquors producer at the age of 13. In 1863, he already owned his own business and produced liqueurs and whisky-mixtures. In 1880, his son William Mark joined the business. He convinced his father to bottle the different blends. Sanderson already bottled his liqueurs, but he did not like the idea of bottling whisky. His son was finally successful in convincing him.
The typical VAT 69 bottle was introduced to the market and was not changed for the next hundred years. In 1884, Sanderson bought the Glengarioch Distillery. It was situated in the middle of a barley field. The distillery was meant to ensure the delivery with grain-whisky. Sanderson took care that there were always new products to be blended, because DCL, which was a strong society at that time, controlled such a big amount of the production, that it could influence the supply of the competing company very sensitively. Therefore Sanderson, together with Usher and Bell founded a company to produce grain-whisky, which still exists today as the "North British Distillery". Sanderson got a few Malt Whiskies that he needed to blend his VAT 69 from a friend, John Begg, who owned the "Royal Lochnagar Distillery". When Begg died, Sanderson became director of Begg's Distillery. In 1933, Sanderson's company merged with Booth's Distilleries, which merged again with the DCL-Group in 1935. In autumn 1980, "Vat 69 Reserve" from the House of Sanderson had its world-première in England. Chosen and optimal stored malt whiskies are used to produce this De-Luxe-Whisky.

Blend

Despite the name it is not a vatted malt but a blend of about 40 malt and grain whiskies. The different malts are blended with each other at the optimal ripening stage to ensure the best blend. This means that a light malt of eight years, having reached its ripening summit and coming from the Lowlands adds the same result to the blend as an 18-year-ripened peat malt from Islay. Therefore, there are no standardised , age-descriptions of Vat 69 Reserve.
Since autumn 1980, Glenesk, which is a 12 year old Highland Single Malt (40 %), is available from Sanderson in Germany. Glenesk is stored for at least 12 years in sherry barrels. Since 1964, William Sanderson & Sons Ltd. overlooks the sale of "Antiquary", which is a 12 year old De-Luxe-Scotch-Whisky (40 %).

Tuesday, March 24, 2009

Henry James's magic touch

TLS

candlelight drop

Henry James's magic touch


Henry James
THE COMPLETE LETTERS
Edited by Pierre A. Walker and Greg W. Zacharias
Volume One, 1855-1872
492pp. University of Nebraska Press. £57.
978 0 80322 584 8




The letters of writers offer a strangely public view of their private selves. Most people put on a show in their correspondence, but for a writer that show involves a professional display. How much they decide to invest in it says a great deal about them – about how deeply they have been stained by work. It may be a sign of more important virtues if a writer writes boring letters, for it proves that he doesn’t take his literary self too seriously, that he is willing, at times, to let it drop. Henry James’s correspondence presents a particularly interesting test of that willingness. As a novelist, he created a kind of prose that was most remarkable, perhaps, for its finish. His style gave his characteristic colour to whatever it touched on. Part of the attraction of his letters lies in the fact that they allow us to question how consistently, as a friend, a brother and a son, he managed to keep it up.


The answer, refreshingly, at least in the first instalment of The Complete Letters, is hardly at all. 1855–1872, published in two volumes, edited by Pierre A. Walker and Greg W. Zacharias, covers the period from his twelfth birthday to his twenty-ninth. His letters have never before appeared in their entirety. The University of Nebraska Press is attempting, slowly, to make up for that fact in a scholarly edition that obviates the need for any other. They have included at the end of each letter, among very full explanations of every possible obscurity, a list of line breaks, elisions, misspellings, deletions and rewritings. The effect, sometimes, is to create the impression of a man not of flesh and blood but of footnotes, errata and abbreviations, though these in fact rarely get in the way of a full appreciation and often help it along. They allow us to see James in the process of rewriting himself. One sign of a great letter-writer may be that the chief interest of the letters does not lie in the way they expose their author. On these terms, the young James was far from a great correspondent.

The most interesting thing about the early letters is the clue they offer as to how he outgrew them. Martin Amis, in Experience, mentions Osric as the type of his adolescence – Hamlet’s fawning courtier is shown up by his pretensions. There are flashes of Osric in the young James, to such an extent that one suspects that he must have inherited a good deal from the shared banter of his extraordinary family. Dissatisfied with his children’s American education, Henry’s father moved the family to Geneva, in 1859. On arrival there, Henry wrote to a friend from home, Thomas Sergeant Perry, “It came to pass three weeks ago, and since then I have’n’t had the time to write – yes, for the first time in my life almost I can really say I have’nt had the time”. What is so characteristic about the line isn’t immediately obvious – something, perhaps, about the slightly particular insistence on an otherwise commonplace phrase. There is also the little boastful presumption of his experience: “for the first time in my life”. He was sixteen. But the true Jamesian touch may lie in the simple fact of the statement: three weeks at school seemed to him so great an event that it exhausted his own capacity to relate it.

But the Osric manner, far from suggesting a false note, is really the line James will eventually learn to stick to. He doesn’t much at first, and often shows himself capable of a touching straightforward simplicity. “Perhaps you would like to know about my school”, he writes to Perry a little later. And again: “Here are five pages all about myself, but the reason I have written so much is because I like nothing better than for you to write about your own manners + customs, and suppose that you have the same taste in regard to me”. Later, in a burst of un-Jamesian excitement, to the same friend, he writes, “I think I must fire off my biggest gun first. One—two—three! Bung Gerdee bang—bang . . . . . !!! What a noise! Our passages are taken in the Adriatic, for the 11th of September!!!!!”. After three years in Europe, the Jameses were coming home, and Henry was going to see his friend again.


His relations with Perry are both the occasion and the subject of his most interesting early letters, but his pen can sketch his feelings as well as he can write them: there is a charming little drawing of the way he intends to fly, hat and dog scattering in the burst, into Perry’s arms on their reunion. The manner in which he gives himself up to the friendship suggests, as much as anything else, the appetite of a younger and less prodigious son for pre-eminence in someone’s affections. But he fears at times that he cannot live up to it:


I pictured to myself in writing yesterday, your joy in hearing we were at last so near – but you frighten me by telling me that you think of me so much, sleeping and waking – I am not so white as your imagination paints me.

What, one wonders, was his great concealed sin, unless it was only the excuse for a kind of invitation? Still, there is something modest and pleasant in his deprecation, which seems at odds with the great confident unabashed subtleties of his later style.

Finding a style is, of course, one of the things these letters help him to accomplish; he begins, as he himself admits, by trying several on. “To no style am I a stranger”, he writes, with conscious pomp, to Perry (James was seventeen), “there is none which has not been adorned by the magic of my touch.” After the fact, we can begin to trace several of the tricks that will become characteristic: his quaint insistent dips into idiom, for example, “Travellers of all nations wish to ‘do’ a few Swiss Mountains”, or his wonderful bursts of brevity (“I delight in seeing you ferment. One day rich wine will come of it”). He reserves his most elegant flourishes, like many young writers, for the beauties of nature: these mark, amid the more casual prose of his letters, a notable break in tone, and one can occasionally see him gathering his forces to make it. William, the revered older brother, receives many of these poetical tributes. “The Spring arrives with little steps”, Henry writes, between gossip from home, and after a significant dash. (A “will” has been crossed out – his thoughts had outrun his pen.) “The grass is green but the air is almost as cold as March. Nothing has befallen us.” That last phrase is the great refrain of these volumes, and James gives the sentiment a constantly varied repetition. “This place is at the present moment as empty as this blank page + as silent withal . . . . You may imagine that existence has not been thrilling or exciting. To have seen no one and done nothing – unless it be read; which I have done to some extent”, he tells Perry some years later. By then he is twenty-four, and it is wonderful how time advances, by painless bounds, in someone’s correspondence. One feels, with James, that the gaps between letters are expressive of another kind of gap. How to fill the blank page, in both senses, without a conscious active striving after life or effect, is the difficult task he has set himself.


It is the tour of Europe, which he makes on his own at the age of twenty-six, that gives him the means. The subtlety of which he was capable, of which his style was capable, seems to have struck him, on landing in England, with something of the same astonishing force that it strikes many of his readers. It opened up for him, and us, a world of beautifully grained uneventfulness. One has the sense, almost, in reading his successive impressions, of London, of England and its countryside, of Geneva and the Swiss Alps, and then, after an initial reluctance, most magically of Italy, that we are watching someone in the process of getting dressed – into something very fine. James, it turns out, as a letter-writer, is more interesting clothed than naked; even if, as his style matures, he has learned to exercise a greater control over how much he gives away. Such control comes with its own problems; and in the course of his tour, these are expressed by an almost comically literal “objective correlative”. “Uneventfulness” is just what he suffers from, in the most painful way. The great drama of James’s European tour, which gives a point and plot to the scattershot narrative of the letters, is the story of his constipation – though we must wait for him to write to Willy, his beloved older brother, to hear the real progress of his condition:


I may actually say that I can’t get a passage. My “little squirt” has ceased to have more than a nominal use . . . . In fact, I don’t pretend to understand how I get on. When I reflect upon the utterly insignificant relation of what I get rid of to what I imbibe, I wonder that flesh + blood can stand it.

A series of pills prescribed by a doctor in Florence provide him with a temporary relief, sufficient to allow him to see Rome. England in general, and Malvern in particular, is the place that beckons to him when they begin to fail. The preference hardly flatters his adopted home, though it may go a little way to explaining why he settled there in the end instead of Italy: “In the midst of these false + beautiful Italians [the English] glow with the light of the great fact, that after all, they love a bath-tub + they hate a lie”. Plumbing matters as much as art.


The problem seems too perfectly Jamesian (he was, famously, the writer accused of chewing more than he could bite off), but it also reveals one of his most surprising strengths, both as a correspondent and a novelist. His subtlety and elegance are only the excuse for an unembarrassed frankness. Frankness is important to him. It doesn’t come easily, and much of his artfulness is really only a striving after it. “Thank Willy for his excellent letter”, he writes to his sister. “I feel at last, almost for the 1st time since my departure, as if some real speech had passed between us.” Real speech is what he turns to his family for; and it is touching to see how dependent the young James remains, not only on his parents’ money, but on their good opinion of his use of it. He insists from the first that his European tour is only a form of investment, from which they can expect in the future a very high rate of return. Money is another one of the dirty facts of life that he is willing to exploit as a metaphor for something less dirty: “I had far rather let Italy slumber in my mind untouched as a perpetual capital, whereof for my literary needs I shall draw simply the income . . . ”. The parents of feckless and spendthrift children can everywhere take heart: sometimes they do come good.


Nothing tests his capacity for “real speech” so much as the death from consumption of his dear cousin Minny Temple, at the age of twenty-four. Mourning generally stretches our talent for finding what Philip Larkin called “words . . . not untrue and not unkind”. What James makes of it also gives our sympathy for him its first real test. Minny became the model for Isabel Archer in The Portrait of a Lady. James is surprisingly honest, as soon as he hears the news, about his desire to consider it from an aesthetic point of view. “A few short hours have amply sufficed to more than reconcile me to the event + to make it seem the most natural – the happiest, fact, almost in her whole career.” That seems a quick digestion of real life, even for a novelist; and it is wonderful and slightly chilling how soon he can turn it to real use:


You will all have felt by this time the novel delight of thinking of Minny without that lurking impulse of fond regret + uneasy conjecture so familiar to the minds of her friends . . . . There is nevertheless something so appealing in the pathos of her final weakness and decline that my heart keeps returning again + again to the scene, regardless of its pain. When I went to bid Minny farewell at Pelham before I sailed I asked her about her sleep. “Sleep,” she said: “Oh. I don’t sleep. I’ve given it up.” And I well remember the laugh with which she made this sad attempt at humor. And so she went on, sleeping less + less, waking wider + wider, until she awaked absolutely!


Of course, artfulness in a writer can also be an impulsive defensive gesture, and later James is frank enough, and subtle enough, to admit the fact: “While I sit spinning sentences she is dead: and I suppose it is partly to defend myself from too direct a sense of her death that I indulge in this fruitless attempt to transmute it from a hard fact into a soft idea”. That “suppose” deserves our admiration: he isn’t sure of the excuse, and neither are we.

By the end of these volumes, James is twenty-nine years old and about to set forth for Europe again. He has become more or less the writer we know him as – no longer in awe of father or brother, sufficiently convinced of his own extraordinary sensibilities to give them, in his letters, a free rein. The peculiar diffidence he suffered from has been transformed into a more positive and forceful quality: the public man has emerged from the private correspondent. Taken as a whole, these two volumes tell a terrific and sometimes terrifying story, of the effect on a personality of its own growing sense of the talent at its disposal. “Wherever we go we carry with us this heavy burden of our personal consciousness + wherever we stop we open it out over our heads like a great baleful cotton ombrella, to obstruct the prospect + obscure the light.” James’s umbrella was certainly large, but it let in a great deal of light, and on the whole, these letters show him in the best of it. The fact that we still like him as much in his confident maturity as we did in his hesitant youth may have something to do with the sweet, dull, generous, loving loneliness of the role he has been cast in here: a man on his own, thinking of others, and sitting down to write them a letter.
_______________________________________________________

Benjamin Markovits's third novel, Imposture, was published earlier this year.

Thursday, March 19, 2009

Musmanni

Musmanni
Osaka
Boots 


Prov. 31:27

"She looketh well to the ways of her household, and eateth not the bread of idleness."




Jizo statues in Chingodo Shrine, Asakusa, Tokyo




Chess: "Osaka" "Musmanni" "Luigi Brothers" "Boots"

Tuesday, March 17, 2009

Ray

Electric Motor
Michael Far
aday
Prov. 27:14

"He that blesseth his friend with a loud voice, rising early in the morning, it shall be counted a curse to him."


Milestone Basin, Ca.
Chess: "Electric Motor" "The Shining" "destello" "Ray" "Michael Faraday"

Michael Faraday

Michael Faraday (1791-1867)
British physicist and chemist, best known for his discoveries of electromagnetic induction and of the laws of electrolysis. His biggest breakthrough in electricity was his invention of the electric motor.

Born in 1791 to a poor family in London, Michael Faraday was extremely curious, questioning everything. He felt an urgent need to know more. At age 13, he became an errand boy for a bookbinding shop in London. He read every book that he bound, and decided that one day he would write a book of his own. He became interested in the concept of energy, specifically force. Because of his early reading and experiments with the idea of force, he was able to make important discoveries in electricity later in life. He eventually became a chemist and physicist.

Michael Faraday built two devices to produce what he called electromagnetic rotation: that is a continuous circular motion from the circular magnetic force around a wire. Ten years later, in 1831, he began his great series of experiments in which he discovered electromagnetic induction. These experiments form the basis of modern electromagnetic technology.

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Inventors

Cahuita

Anthoney & Cleopatra
Cahuita
Hebrews 12:14
"Follow peace with all men, and holiness, without which no man shall see the Lord:"

Kylemore Abbey, Ireland, September 2007

Kylemore Abbey, Ireland
Chess: "Ocho" "8" "Octavius" "Antony and Cleopatra" "Cahuita"

RIGHTEOUSNESS AND HOLINESS

These two attributes are rather hard to separate, so we have put them together for the purpose of this study. Righteousness, in its basic meaning, is something that is straight without any deviation. But holiness is more in the realm of being separate, set aside for something special.

Holiness is an attribute that man must have if he is to see the Lord Heb. 12:14. Those who stand before God in love must be holy and without blame Eph. 1:4. These high standards of God's requirements are a source of despair for the Christian. All believers in the Roman church had sinned and come short of the glory of God. Can any do better?

The red imported fire ant
The red imported fire ant (Solenopsis invicta), or simply RIFA, is one of over 280 members of the widespread genus Solenopsis. Although the red imported fire ant is native to South America, it is best known in the United States, Australia, Taiwan, Philippines, and the southern Chinese province of Guangdong. In January 2005, several ant-hills belonging to fire ants were found in northern Hong Kong. Later, after a thorough search for the ant was conducted there, several hundred ant-hills were found in different parts of Hong Kong. There were also reports of ant hills in Macau, the former Portuguese enclave that borders the province of Guangdong. They have recently been introduced in the Philippines in July 2005 when an infested cargo plane coming from Texas (via California) arrived in Manila.

Colonies were accidentally introduced into the United States in the 1930s through the seaport of Mobile, Alabama[1]. Cargo ships from Brazil docking at Mobile unloaded goods infested with the ants; they have since spread from Alabama to the coastal plain and piedmont of almost all of the southeastern states, as well as into California. The ants were accidentally introduced into Australia in 2001, in a similar way[2].

Overview

RIFA are more aggressive than most native ant species and have a painful sting. A person typically encounters them by inadvertently stepping into one of their mounds, which causes the ants to swarm up the person's legs, attacking en masse. The ants respond to pheromones that are released by the first ant to attack. The ants then swarm and immediately sting when any movement is sensed.

Texas fire ant


RIFA are efficient competitors to other ants, and have been successful at enlarging their range, notably in the United States, where they have gradually spread north and west despite intense efforts to stop them. Today they are found in most of the southeastern states, including Texas, Oklahoma, Louisiana, Arkansas, Mississippi, Alabama, Tennessee, Georgia, Florida, North Carolina, South Carolina, Maryland, and Virginia. It is not uncommon for several fire ant mounds to appear suddenly in a suburban yard or a farmer's field, seemingly overnight. Even in the San Francisco, California, area, there are large numbers of red imported fire ants. (At least one community uses the presence of fire ants as a publicity opportunity: Marshall, Texas, hosts an annual fire ant festival.)
Current distribution of the RIFA in the United States
RIFA are still on the move, often traveling from one area to another in turf, root balls of nursery plants, and other agricultural products. They are a pest, not only because of the physical pain they can inflict, but because their mound-building activity can damage plant roots and lead to loss of crops. Their stings are rarely life-threatening to humans and other large animals, causing only 80 documented deaths as of 2006. They often kill smaller animals such as birds. They sometimes kill newborn calves if the calves do not get on their feet quickly enough. The sting of the RIFA has venom composed of a necrotizing alkaloid which causes both pain and the formation of white pustules which appear one day after the sting.

Red imported fire ants are extremely resilient and have adaptations to contend with both flooding and drought conditions. If the ants sense increased water levels in their nests, they will come together and form a huge ball or raft that is able to float on the water, with the workers on the outside and the queen inside. Once the ball hits a tree or other stationary object, the ants swarm onto it and wait for the water levels to recede. To contend with drought conditions, their nest structure includes a network of underground foraging tunnels that extends down to the water table. Also, despite the fact that they do not hibernate during the winter, colonies can survive cold conditions as low as 16 °F (−9 °C).

At present, RIFA in the United States can be controlled but not eradicated. A number of products are available, which can be used on a mound-by-mound basis to destroy ant colonies when they appear. With all such efforts, it is important to reach and kill the queens, which may be as far as six feet (2 m) underground; otherwise, some queens may simply move a short distance away and quickly re-establish the colony.

Green Beer for Fewer Greenbacks



DRINKING UP THE SUN: Brewer and co-owner Alex Stiles toasting the sun in front of the Lucky Lab's solar array. He drinks Solar Flare Ale, which is "light and balanced with a slight malty character and a refreshing hops bitterness," according to co-owner Gary Geist.
IMAGE COURTESY OF GROVER P. THUMPER

You have probably heard of green buildings, green cars and, perhaps, even green phones. But were you aware that green beer is flowing from the taps of some U.S. breweries, and not the kind for St. Patrick's Day tomorrow? Among the leaders of the movement is Lucky Labrador Brewing Company in Portland, Ore., which for the past year has been saving big bucks by using solar energy to heat water used in the brewing process.

Lucky Labrador's first green beer, "Solar Flare Ale," was an instant sensation when it was introduced in February 2008, according to brewery co-owner Gary Geist. Sales spiked in the month following the beer's debut, Geist says. But, he notes that going solar is more about long-term benefits than about temporary sales spurts.

He says the entire system, which includes 16 solar panels on the brewery roof, cost about $70,000 up front but that it ended up costing only about $6,000, thanks to a $21,000 (30 percent) federal tax credit, a $35,000 (50 percent) state tax credit, and an $8,000 incentive from the Energy Trust of Oregon (a nonprofit that assists businesses taking steps to reduce their gas and electrical energy consumption). It was quite the investment, he says, given that it saves the company about $3,000 annually in gas bills, which means it will have paid for itself by this time next year.

To understand how the sun powers Lucky Lab's beer-making operation, you must first understand how the beer is brewed. There are three stages to brewing, and two of them require very hot water, Geist explains. The first is to mix barley with water that's about 160 degrees Fahrenheit (71 degrees Celsius) in a nine-foot- (2.7-meter-) tall steel tank called the "mash tun" (the traditional term for barrel). When combined with hot water, the enzymes in the barley convert its starch into sugars.

Using a large fiberglass paddle, a brewer stirs the mixture, which Geist says looks like "cereal in water." After about an hour and a half, the sugary liquid, now called "wort," is separated from the barley with a sieve and transferred into a kettle, where it is boiled, along with hops—plants containing oils that give beer its bitter aroma and flavor. Finally, the wort is removed from the kettle, cooled, and then poured into a closed tank called a fermenter where it is combined with yeast, microbes that convert the sugars to alcohol and carbon dioxide.

The solar power drives the first step of the brewing process when the barley is mixed with hot water, says Bruce McLeod, lead installer for Ra Energy, the company that provided Lucky Lab with its system. Water entering the mash tun gets its heat from 16 four-by-10-foot (1.2-by-3-meter) "solar thermal collectors," thick panels atop the brewery's roof. As the panels absorb heat from the sun, a liquid made of propylene glycol and water that resists freezing during Oregon's cold winters within them becomes scorching hot (up to 230 degrees F, or 110 degrees C), McLeod explains. This broiling liquid passes through pipes into a heat exchanger, which transfers the heat energy to water stored in a massive 1,500-gallon (5,680-liter) tank in the brewery. This storage tank supplies hot water not only for the brewing process but for the kitchen and bathroom sinks, too, according to Geist.

He notes that the system works like a hybrid car, meaning it gets its energy to heat water from two sources: solar energy, used in the mash tun phase, and natural gas, which is necessary for the kettle phase. The reason the sun cannot drive the whole process, he says, is because the solar system cannot heat water beyond 180 degrees F (82 degrees C), which is shy of the 212 degrees F (100 degrees C) needed to make it boil.

For this reason, Lucky Labrador cannot go 100 percent green—though it gets kudos from enviros for reducing its natural gas consumption by about 25 percent in the past year.

Does the beer taste any different? Not a bit, Geist says, noting he has no regrets about his decision to brew green.

"We discovered that going solar was not only good for sustainability," he says, "but a good business decision with a great investment return."

Source : scientific american