text:
Imagine a tall, Black, former-NFL-player-turned-preacher walking the streets of a ghetto, dragging a ten-foot, sixty-pound cross, and stopping along the way to pray with crack cocaine dealers. In the early days of The Worldwide Christian Center, this is where you would have found the Rev. Dr. O'Neal Dozier every Saturday. Each week he made a pilgrimage through the heart of the infamous section of Pompano Beach, known as Collier City, on a mission to win souls and see lives changed.
"I have no fear of taking the ministry to the streets," said Rev. Dozier, who first arrived in Pompano Beach in 1955 on a migrant-worker bus from South Carolina. "They respect me and what I'm trying to do. When they see me, they try to hide their drugs and alcohol."
The mission, according to Rev. Dozier, was not his idea. "God told me to do this. That's why I have no fear. I've taken this cross to crack houses. My message is, 'Stop trying to get money by ways of the world–drugs, prostitution, games of chance.' I tell them that God will begin to bless them spiritually, financially, and in every way if they will turn to Him."
Saturday services for the community were held in a open field across from the Masonic Temple on Northwest 27 Avenue and Fourth Street in Collier City. Meanwhile, directly across the street in front of a convenience store, crack cocaine sales were openly made, buyers coming and going with frequency. A stark contrast, on one corner Eternal Life was offered with the price already paid in full. On the next corner, death was sold, at a high price.
Rev. Dozier believes that the church has a mandate to help meet the physical needs of the poor, as well as present the gospel. For the past thirteen years, The Worldwide Christian Center has operated a food pantry distributing food to the poor every Saturday. From time to time, the church provides meals for the entire community, on that same corner where the Rev. Dozier first preached and ministered to Collier City residents.
The Worldwide Christian Center was founded and incorporated on July 18, 1985. Sunday services were originally held in the North Fork Elementary School Cafetorium. In June of 1987, services were relocated to a storefront in the Collier City section of Pompano Beach. In February of 1996, the doors of The Worldwide Christian Center opened at its current location, 450 North Powerline Road in Pompano Beach.


text:
It's Friday, so here are some ideas on a few fun things to do this weekend. Check our picks for the activities to hit and places to explore. Here's what's happening in and around Tiverton-Little Compton.
When/Where: Friday, July 13 at 7 p.m. on 455 Lexington Rd.
Why Go: Come see recreationalist Rob Velella bring Nathaniel Hawthorne back to life with stories that explore the dark side of human nature.
Pricing: Free
When/Where: Friday, July 13 at 8 p.m. at the Colonial Inn at 48 Monument Square.
Why Go: "For those about to rock, we salute you." A free concert by three local performers that will tap into the legends of rock n' roll. Don't forget that Saturday night will feature
Price: Free
When/Where: Saturday, July 14, at 10:30 a.m. at on 89 Thoreau Street.
Why Go?: Featuring Jenny the Juggler, this all ages show has magic, games and more.
Price: $10/person.
When/Where: Saturday, July 14 starting at 8 a.m. on 343 Bedford Rd., Carlisle.
Why Go?: Another shot at this weekly gathering of the best local vendors in the area. Crafts, artisans, food, music and more.
Price: Varies depending on item(s).
When/Where: Sunday, July 15, at 1 p.m. on 177 Main St. in Acton.
Why Go?: Local magician Rupayan Neogy will perform his illusions for an all-ages audience.
Price: $11

subset: commoncrawl


text:
You wont find any talk of HTML, PHP or creating WP Themes here. What you will find is an easy to follow WordPress manual that will help you understand the basics of editing your site content.
You can read the WordPress Guide online or download the PDF, eBook or (brandable) Word document for reading offline. You can even pass it on to your clients to use if you've built them a site using WordPress. Enter your email, download and start learning today!
When you download the Easy WP Guide you will receive these great benefits.
We'll never sell your email details or spam you, because we know just how annoying that is!
I get a lot of emails asking for advice on which plugins or themes to use, or which hosting service is best.
So, to try and help you with this task, I thought I'd share with you some of the more common plugins, themes and services that I use on a regular basis, both on my own sites and when I'm building client sites.
Read more »
Looking for something in particular? Perform a search across our online version of the Easy WP Guide.


text:
641: Free
Title text: Asbestos is bad; definitely get the one on the right. Wait -- this one over here has no swine flu! Now I can't decide.
[edit] Explanation
Asbestos is a fibrous material most commonly used for its heat-resistant properties. It was commonly used in housing insulation until its astonishingly destructive effects on human lungs were known. The use of asbestos in housing is now banned, but it is still quite common in laboratory hot pads, as well as in concrete industrial buildings where the risk of it getting into the air is minimal.
The comic depicts a common advertising trick taken to an absurd extreme; quite clearly all of the cereal products depicted are asbestos-free, but most have opted not to advertise the fact because it should be obvious. A more realistic example can be found in confectionery products, wherein the term "fat free" might be applied when it's clear that sugar, gelatin, and other ingredients involved in the product are in no way related to, or contain, fat.
Ironically, the "asbestos-free" disclaimer could also cause a customer to distrust the product on the grounds of "damning by faint praise" - if the best thing they can say about a product is that it doesn't contain a toxic building material, do we really want to know what actually is in this stuff?
The claim in the title text - that the product has no swine flu - is equally superfluous, as any food product containing disease-causing viruses would be subject to recalls, severe fines, and quite a few people losing their jobs; the fact that the product is actually on a supermarket shelf implies that it already has a stellar reputation for not causing serious illness.
Staypuft is also the company that produces marshmallows in Ghostbusters.
[edit] Transcript
- [A shelf holds 3 boxes of cereal. Each box shows a bowl of cereal.]
- GenCo Oat Cereal
- StayPuft Oat Cereal
- RedFarm Oat Cereal (with additional text in a star) Asbestos-free!
- I hate whatever marketer first realized you could do this.
[edit] Trivia
- Impressive-sounding but meaningless advertising claims are revisited in 1096: Clinically Studied Ingredient.
"it doesn't contain a synthetic, lab-grown building material"
Actually asbestos is a natural material (so some marketers would have you believe it can't be bad). It used to be mined in Quebec.
Modified the above to switch the example from "cholesterol" to "fat". The statement:
- A more realistic example can be found in various fruit- and vegetable-based foods that advertise themselves as "cholesterol-free," which is exactly what we would expect since cholesterol is only found in animals in nature.


text:
Anatomy Intensive Workshop
with Dr. Josh
North Shore Yoga–Northfield
March 14th–15th,
Friday 1:00 pm–5:00 pm
Saturday 1:00 pm–5:00 pm
[Full Weekend: $150 or $80 per day]
This Anatomy Intensive workshop is material applied specifically to the movements of yoga asana. Although we will explore the poses in the Ashtanga Primary Series and some of Intermediate Series, the application is "non-denominational" and works equally well for any Vinyasa Practice. This workshop allows the details of Western anatomy to be more directly useful to the yoga teacher or practitioner, and has great explanatory power for analyzing asana and problems with asana, adjustments in the poses, and therapeutic applications. The intent of this workshop is to convey a "lens" on anatomy that is immediately useful for the yoga teacher or student.
We will also address some of the most common muscular imbalances, the most common injuries from yoga, what patterns are causing them, and how to recover and prevent re-occurence.
Dr. Josh Akin is
a graduate of Logan College of Chiropractic where he earned
a Bachelor of Science degree in Life Sciences as well as his
Doctor of Chiropractic degree. Prior to Logan College, Dr.
Akin attended Illinois Wesleyan University where he obtained
a Bachelor of Science degree in Chemistry. While at Logan,
he became certified in Active Release Technique, a soft tissue
treatment that deals all injuries, both acute and chronic.
Dr. Akin is a native of Naperville, IL where he attended Benet
Academy, played football and began his journey into the field
of Chiropractic.


text:
The Obama Administration (aka The Gang the That Couldn't Shoot Straight, The Keystone Cops, The Worst Administration Ever and a host of other non-flattering handles) has failed miserably in its economic efforts. To any non economist and non cult member it was obvious from the beginning that their programs could not and would not work. Unbiased common sense, generally found in non-economists, was the only pre-requisite to understanding why.
Allan Meltzer, one of the non mal-educated economists, discusses the key reasons why in a Wall Street Journal editorial:
Two overarching reasons explain the failure of Obamanomics. First, administration economists and their outside supporters neglected the longer-term costs and consequences of their actions. Second, the administration and Congress have through their deeds and words heightened uncertainty about the economic future. High uncertainty is the enemy of investment and growth.
It was not difficult to foresee the failure once the Obama team's plans became known. Many blogs and economists published early articles arguing that Obamanomics could not work. After 18 months in, this Administration is still trying to blame Bush for their utter failure. Recall the difficulties President Reagan inherited from the hapless Jimmy Carter. While I should not depend upon old memories, I cannot once recall Reagan blaming Carter for his problems. First, such behavior was out of character for Reagan. Second, when you know what you are doing and confident in your actions, you don't blame others. Third, success needs no scapegoats. As Dr. Meltzer pointed out, the economy under Reagan at this same point was growing at 9%.
The contrast with President Reagan's antirecession and pro-growth measures in 1981 is striking. Reagan reduced marginal and corporate tax rates and slowed the growth of nondefense spending. Recovery began about a year later. After 18 months, the economy grew more than 9% and it continued to expand above trend rates.
Arguably, it is unfair to compare different economic events in different time periods. However, 18 months in, we are barely above water and gasping for air. That is nowhere near what the Obama Administration told us would happen if their programs were passed. Remember, unemployment was never going to get above 8%?
Many pundits are now predicting a second-dip recession beginning during the second half of this year. Some believe that the The Great Recession is morphing into The Great Depression. Forecasts and politics aside, the economic policies of this Administration must be judged as a dismal failure. They arguably have worsened the recession and, less arguably, placed the country closer to insolvency.
It is time to pronounce Obamanomics dead and move on to what does work. These remedies are not mysterious or unknown, only inconsistent with a socialist agenda.


text:
USAIRBAG SETS UP AT BOGUS BASIN THIS WEEKEND Skiers and boarders can catch big and have a soft landing with USAirbag at Bogus Basin, 9 a.m. to 8 p.m. Dec. 27 28, and 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Dec. 29. Three jumps cost $10 and 10 jumps go for $25. The 60-by-60-foot inflatable landing pad will be at the lower bowl off the Deer Point Quad so spectators can see it from the lower lodge. A separate fee is required to jump on the air bag, and tickets can be bought at Bogus Basin, or at usairbag.com/shop. There are no age restrictions for jumpers, but they must be a minimum of 48 inches tall. All riders must sign a waiver, and those under age 18 must have a parents permission and signature to jump on the air bag. All jumpers must wear a helmet.
SOME BIRD-HUNTING SEASONS ARE CLOSING The following hunting seasons in Idaho are winding down soon:Æ Pheasants open through Dec. 31 in North and Southwest Idaho.Æ Forest grouse, which includes ruffed, spruce and dusky (blue) grouse, open through Dec. 31 in most of Idaho.Æ California and bobwhite quail open through Jan. 31 in North and Southwest Idaho. Æ Chukar and gray partridge open through Jan. 31.Æ Duck and Canada goose seasons in Southwest Idaho open through Jan. 24.
SNOWSHOEING BASICS CLASS JAN. 8 Space is still left for a free snowshoeing basics class at 7 p.m., at the Boise REI store, 8300 W. Emerald St. Call 322-1141 or go to rei.com/stores/boise for registration. The class will cover snowshoeing gear and places to get started.


text:
Contact Us
Why Choose Us?
- Family Owned
- Honest & Up-Front Pricing
- Prompt Project Completion
Garage Door Repair in Nashville
For residents of Nashville, garage door repair is one of the specialty services provided from Valhalla Industries, LLC. Whether you have the standard or electronic type, we can take care of any problem, at a price that will be kind to your budget.
How long have you been putting off getting that problem with your garage door fixed? Have you tried fixing it yourself with less than satisfactory results? A call to Valhalla Industries, LLC can get the problem solved once and for all. With affordable pricing and a dedication to top-quality workmanship, we can have things working right again.
Reliability is the cornerstone of our company. We offer prompt service, and we make sure you're satisfied with the job before we call it done. From Mt. Juliet to Hendersonville, our customers have found out how quality service can make a difference. From doors that keep jamming to broken panels to problems with remote systems, we are always up to the task.
For Nashville garage door repair, choose Valhalla Industries, LLC. We provide service for residential and commercial customers, and our reputation for exceptional workmanship is solid. We've stayed in business for over 60 years because we put the customer first. Call us today and tell us how we can help you.
Call 615-887-1696 Today!
We'll be happy to answer any questions you have.


text:
This itinerary will help you plan a weekend in and around the rainforest. You'll have plenty of opportunity to hike, swim, and relax beneath the lush canopy of El Yunque. But you'll also be visiting a lovely beach, a local culinary institution, and a historic site. Of course, you can easily extend this itinerary to a week, and many people who can't get enough of the vibrant, earthy magic of the rainforest do just that. For those of you with only three days to spare, here are a few tips to help you get started:
- Rent a car - I cannot stress this enough. To get to the inns and small hotels in the rainforest, and to explore the surrounding area, a car is an absolute necessity. Don't rely on taxis.
- Pack hiking shoes - seems like a no-brainer, but many of the trails in El Yunque are quite challenging, and sneakers can easily lead to sprained ankles.
- Forget the five-star resort experience - People who come to El Yunque don't love it for its pampering attentions; rather they come to enjoy a rustic and natural retreat. So should you.
- Do your groceries - In the rainforest, there are no restaurants, and I wouldn't recommend foraging for berries. As such, you'll want to pack a picnic lunch or two while you're here. Groceries are a good idea.


text:
The city of Rancho Palos Verdes and Trump National Golf Club Los Angeles have settled a $100 million lawsuit over delays to the Trump Organization's plans to build 20 luxury homes on the golf club property, the city announced Wednesday morning in a news release dated Tuesday.
The news release did not disclose the terms of the settlement.
The Trump Organization filed the lawsuit in December 2008, alleging that the city "improperly withheld permission" to build the homes by imposing restrictions that were not applied to other residents.
"I'm encouraged by the cooperative relationship that continues to mature between the city and the Trump Organization," Councilman Jerry Duhovic said in the news release. "The dismissal of the litigation by both parties is a major step in the right direction."
On Aug. 7, the city council approved a two-year extension of Trump's development agreement for the property following a series of modifications to the development and the approval of geologic plans for certain home sites, according to the news release.
For Palos Verdes news, follow @PVPatch on Twitter and "like" us on Facebook.
Last week, the city council also approved the Trump Organization's request to change the name of Ocean Trails Drive, which leads up to the golf course, to Trump National Drive.
"The progress we have been able to make with the city in recent months has convinced us that we have entered a new era where the city and Trump National … can work together," Jill A. Martin, assistant general counsel for Trump National, said in the news release.


text:
2,873pages on
this wiki
this wiki
We want want you to help us improve on 2,873 articles and the quality of our Wiki!
New Pages | New Photos | Categories | Tutorials | Affiliations
The Cartoon Network Wiki is a collaborative wiki focusing on focusing on the Cartoon Network television channel, along with its shows, characters, commercial ads, websites and various aspects about the channel. The channel was founded on October 1, 1992 and has since then gone through many rebrands, became one of the most successful television networks in animation history and had some of the most memorable and very popular shows and events featured.
Vote for our next Featured Article!
Coming soon!
What show are you looking forward to more?


text:
Seven southern Illinois residents were indicted on June 7, 2011, in a third superseding indictment, charging conspiracy to manufacture methamphetamine, the United States Attorney for the Southern District of Illinois, Stephen R. Wigginton, announced today.
On June 9, 2011, Holly R. Phelps, a/k/a "Holly Libbert," 26, of Marion, Andrew J. McCann, 24, of Murphysboro, and Joshua B. Jordan, 20, of Grand Tower, appeared in federal court in Benton, on the one-count third superseding indictment charging conspiracy to distribute more than 500 grams of methamphetamine. William Wohlwend, 34, and Michael J. Crowden, 26, both of Gorham, Alan Michael Cain, 18, of Grand Tower, and Patrick McLane, 29, of Wolf Lake, are scheduled to make their initial appearance in federal court on June 27, 2011. Nine co-defendants have made appearances and been arraigned in federal court on this case. Two additional co-defendants, Rodney D. Phelps, age 39, of Grand Tower, and Geoffrey A. Phelps, age 31, of Marion, are currently fugitives.
The conspiracy offense occurred between 2009 and April 6, 2011, in Jackson, Union, Randolph, and Williamson Counties. The offense carries a penalty of a term of imprisonment from 10 years to life, a fine of not more than $10 million, and a term of supervised release of at least 5 years. Under the law, a defendant is presumed to be innocent of a charge until proved guilty beyond a reasonable doubt to the satisfaction of a jury.
The ongoing investigation is being conducted by the Jackson County Sheriff's Office, Murphysboro Police Department, Union County Sheriff's Office, and Drug Enforcement Administration, pursuant to those agencies' participation in the Project Safe Neighborhoods Initiative. Project Safe Neighborhoods is a joint and cooperative effort of local, state, and federal law enforcement, and state and federal prosecuting authorities, aimed at ridding communities of illegal drugs and guns. The Jackson County States Attorney's Office also assisted during the investigation.
The case is assigned to Assistant United States Attorney Amanda A. Robertson for prosecution.


text:
Real news. Real funny.
Real news. Real funny
If you can read this, either the style sheet didn't load or you have an older browser that doesn't support style sheets. Try clearing your browser cache and refreshing the page.
• • •
16225 clicks; posted to Main » on 26 Mar 2013 at 7:48 PM (1 year ago) | Favorite | share: more»
Share this link:
Article Comments close
36 Comments (+0 »)
Archived thread
Displayed 36 of 36 comments
This thread is archived, and closed to new comments.
Submit a Link »
Stories from our partner sites:
15 Sexiest Places For A Tattoo!
10 Celebrities Who Are Genuine Badasses
15 Most Disturbing Films Ever Made
12 Reasons Why Australia Is A Death T...
More news at Scribol »
Four New Posters And A New Trailer Gi...
Jessica Simpson's 'Magical' 4th Of Ju...
5 Reasons We're Excited for 'Masters...
Fashion Fails: Jennifer Lopez's Half-...
More news at Starpulse »
Texas Or Taxes?
Dumbest Things About The Kentucky Derby
10 Marathons and Races Only An Idiot...
UPDATED: Best Papal Wardrobe Malfunct...
More news at truTV »
First of 3 Victims Identified in Fata...
'Liberte & Justice For Paws' For Sund...
Travelzoo: Travelsmart with Gabe Sagl...
'Gayle On The Go' For Sunday, July 13
More news at KTLA »


text:
Your are here: Home // Posts Tagged With roynon elementary school
Athlete gives back to community
After a six-year volleyball career, senior setter Kendall Kraiss is graduating and saying goodbye to the competitive sport she fell in love with in high school.
Roynon brings 'Trucks for Bucks'
Food truck mania hit Roynon Elementary School Saturday afternoon in an event dubbed Food Trucks for Tech Bucks.
Roynon students get fit, raise money
Roynon Elementary School held its first Raccoon Rally, a walk-a-thon to help raise money for next year's school programs.


text:
If you ask me about my family, I will undoubtedly mention food. Meals have always been a centerpiece of our time together. The table is where we come together, not just to eat, but to talk, to share, to be a family.
For years, we would gather at The Farm, as we call my grandparents' home, for weekly dinner. Twelve people spanning 59 years in age would cram around the kitchen table for Sunday afternoon or Monday night dinner.
These days, the gatherings are less frequent and more hectic: The original 12 has become 26 and now includes seven infant-to-preschool-age great-grandchildren. We don't fit around that dinner table any more, but we still gather to break bread—or pork and applesauce, aebleskiver at Christmas, or summer and fall vegetables from the big garden.
I imagine many people would share some version of this story—a family, or community, that comes together around food. And yet, I also know that there are many whose story is very different, people for whom food is not a joy but a coveted necessity in short supply.
In Wyoming, I worked with a program that helped provide weekend food for children who otherwise depended on school meals to survive. Some of the children's families had lost jobs or suffered medical emergencies that decimated their budgets; other children were victims of neglect or parents' drug abuse. Said one third-grader, receiving the food: "Somebody really does care about me, don't they?" Food, for her, was hope.
I am fascinated by the many roles that food plays in our lives: That something as simple as a sandwich can mean survival, or that in another context it may be an entertainment, a symbol of a culture and heritage, or even a prop in the complexity of human relationships.
This issue of Pacific magazine explores food and its connection to the Pacific University story. Read what students eat and how they stay healthy on campus. Learn how what you eat speaks to who you are. Find out how students, professors, staff and alumni are seeking solutions to food inequity in our world. Meet Pacific alumni who are farmers, brewers and vintners. And, go online to share your own stories (and recipes!) with us.
Jenni M. Luckett
Editor | email@example.com


text:
Whitley Penn
6 Employee Reviews (View Most Recent)
1 person found this helpful
"Great if you are in Management, but everyone else is just a number including clients."
Pros – Clients -Large firm so there is different expertise for many different kinds of tax issues.
Employees - Great for career focused individuals right out of college with no responsibilities.
Cons – Whether you are a employee or a client you are truly just a number.
The fees are very high for the work they perform and they might have a senior manager sign the return showing they did the work but really an intern did it.
Unless you are in upper management your family and time does not matter to them. They will work you to death and get rid of you when they are done. It is extremely long hours and they do not care about your family or your personal needs.
They have the employees fill out surveys said what a great company they are so they can get another award, but everyone is scared to tell the truth. The have competely differnet rules for every level. Turnover is very high.
Advice to Senior Management – Stop worrying about how big the company is and running the lower level employees into the ground. Treat every level the same.
No, I would not recommend this company to a friend
1 person found this helpful
"They do not appreciate their employees and the hard work that is required."
I worked at Whitley Penn
Pros: I can't think of one. Cons: Poor management and lack of appreciation and respect towards their… Advice to Senior Management: Replace that management team No, I would not recommend this company to a friend More
"Excellent company that is growing but will have to learn to trust middle managers"
I worked at Whitley Penn
Pros: Whitley Penn is a Leading regional tax and accounting firm in North Texas. They have other specilized interests such as litigation support and various… Cons: Partner ran firm. With that sometimes comes hidden agenda's. Most are dealt with. Firm has grown very fast. Too fast. … Advice to Senior Management: Trust your middle managers. Don't try to perform their job. You will benefit by having this… Yes, I would recommend this company to a friend More


text:
Updated Feb 11, 2013 - 6:50 pm
Suns GM Lance Blanks: I expect everyone to stay through the trade deadline
Originally published: Feb 11, 2013 - 5:12 pm
Still, based on recent rumors surrounding the team's interest in Iman Shumpert of the New York Knicks and Al Jefferson and Gordon Hayward of the Utah Jazz, it appears Lance Blanks and Co. may surprisingly be buyers rather than sellers before the NBA trade deadline on February 21.
Then again, rumors are just that, rumors.
When asked on Arizona Sports 620's Doug & Wolf Monday if he anticipates everyone staying on the roster through the deadline, Blanks didn't hesitate.
"Yeah I do," Blanks said. "I anticipate that, but you've got to be careful with it. I don't want to get on the radio and pound my chest and tell you things will stay status quo and then sure enough a deal gets done and someone gets moved.
"We understand that we're not in a position to have this team static. Even the best teams in the league are not in that situation, but especially us, because we're trying to raise the level of our talent everywhere."
In addition to players like Jared Dudley and Marcin Gortat being thrown around as possible assets contending teams might by eying, the Suns fit the bill as an attractive trade partner because of their collection of picks heading in to June's draft.
Currently, the Suns hold two lottery picks (their own and one acquired in the Steve Nash trade last summer with the Los Angeles Lakers). If the Lakers make the postseason, they would keep their pick, and the Suns would instead take the Miami Heat's selection at the end of the first round.
Phoenix also has two second round picks in 2013.
With those future selections in their back pocket, Blanks said the best move the front office might make in the coming weeks is not pulling the trigger on a deal.
"Sometimes it's the decision that you don't make that's the right decision," said Blanks. "I think we've done a good job thus far of balancing risk, while not doing something silly that puts our organization in the ditch."
Blanks' only deadline move as general manager came back in 2011, when the Suns sent Goran Dragic and a protected first-round pick to the Houston Rockets for Aaron Brooks. Brooks averaged just 9.6 points per game in 25 appearances with Phoenix.
Dave Dulberg, Web Content Editor - ArizonaSports.com
- Suns relationship with Bledsoe described as headed towards ruined
- The Pulse: Fans say Suns need to negotiate smaller contract with Eric Bledsoe
- Report: Phoenix Suns' P.J. Tucker arrested in Scottsdale in May for extreme DUI
- ESPN Insider: Goran Dragic is a max-contract candidate after next season
- Eric Bledsoe: 'I can understand the Suns are using restricted free agency against me'
- Chris Sheridan - Tuesday July 22Chris Sheridan weighs in on if Kevin Love will join LeBron in Cleveland.
- Ryan McDonough, Phoenix Suns general manager - Monday July 21General manager Ryan McDonough talks about the Phoenix Suns' offseason plans.
- Isaiah Thomas, Phoenix Suns point guard - Monday July 21Isaiah Thomas talks about his skill set and what he brings to the franchise.
- Marc Spears, Yahoo NBA writer - Friday July 18Yahoo NBA writer Marc Spears says the Warriors are backing out from a Kevin Love trade.
- Paul Coro, AZCentral Sports Suns beat writer - Thursday July 17AZCentral Sports Suns beat writer Paul Coro talks about the continuing free agency of Eric Bledsoe.


text:
Posts for June, 2011
Vonnegut Week: 'God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater'
On June 2 the Library of America publishes "Kurt Vonnegut: Novels & Stories 1963-1973" (856 pages. $35), which includes four novels from his peak years. Recommended Reading is looking at each of the novels in turn this week.
"God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater" (1965), Kurt Vonnegut's 5th novel, rests on a brilliant concept ruthlessly carried out: a rich man, Eliot Rosewater, gives away money to the needy as directly as possible, upsetting a lot of people in the process. It is a provocative thought experiment in disinterested love, with occasional stunning gems like this from Rosewater:
"I'm going to love these discarded Americans, even though they're useless and unattractive. That is going to be my work of art."
This comes from a writer who's identified himself variously as atheist, agnostic and humanist, but it sure makes me think of Jesus.
A great concept and pithy lines make for an interesting book, but in the case of "God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater," they don't make for an exceptionally pleasurable one. Vonnegut thought highly of it, giving GBYMR a grade of A in his self-evaluation in "Palm Sunday." I'd lower that grade by at least a letter.
Vonnegut could be a bitter satirist, even a cynical one, but at his best he was also an entertaining storyteller. Unfortunately, reading "God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater" is like listening to a manic friend talk on and on. It wears a reader out.
"A sum of money is a leading character in this tale about people," Vonnegut declares in the opening line. True to that statement, he makes many cutting observations about Americans and wealth, capitalism and charity.
Eliot Rosewater is president of the Rosewater Foundation, a philanthropic family tax shelter established by his father, Senator Lister Ames Rosewater. The restless Eliot, a World War II vet and apparent alcoholic, bounces around the country's small towns, awkwardly estranged from his wife, ingratiating himself with local fire departments. He perches in the family homeland, Rosewater, Ind., and does good deeds for the locals who ask, sometimes with cash.
Meanwhile, a conniving foundation lawyer, Norman Mushari, schemes to get Eliot declared insane and committed so control of foundation funds will shift to a distant, sad-sack relative, with Mushari grabbing a big chunk along the way.
While I've read the other books in this Library of America collection before, this was my introduction to "God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater." What I found most interesting in it was the presence of seeds that would bloom in later books.
World War II plays an important background role in this novel. Eliot's obsession with firefighters is rooted in a tragic wartime experience. Near the end of the novel, Eliot remembers reading about firestorms that occurred during the bombing of Dresden, the event which animates Vonnegut's next novel, "Slaughterhouse-Five."
"God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater" also brings on Kilgore Trout, the sci-fi writing character widely considered to be Vonnegut's mouthpiece:
Trout's favorite formula was to describe a perfectly hideous society, not unlike his own, and then, toward the end, to suggest ways in which it could be improved.
The Trout who appears in "God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater" is a cleaned-up Kilgore, likened to a "kindly country undertaker." Readers will have to wait for "Breakfast of Champions" for Trout in full, bitter, varicose-veined glory.
My June 2 post will be on "Slaughterhouse-Five" (1969), Vonnegut's masterpiece. Earlier posts in this series include a look at "Cat's Cradle" and an introductory overview.
Tags: Kurt Vonnegut : Vonnegut Week
Permalink | Email This Blog
Vonnegut Week: 'Slaughterhouse-Five'
On June 2 the Library of America publishes "Kurt Vonnegut: Novels & Stories 1963-1973" (856 pages. $35), which includes four novels from his peak years. Recommended Reading is looking at each of the novels in turn this week.
"Slaughterhouse-Five" (1969) is Kurt Vonnegut's "Kind of Blue," his "London Calling," the work in which he put all his talents together and added an extra dimension. He fused his skill as a commercial storyteller, his inventiveness as a speculative fiction writer and his metafictional playfulness with an unexpected lyricism. He transmuted his World War II experiences as a prisoner of war during the Allied bombing of Dresden into a book that can be read multiple times in a lifetime.
While the tone of "Cat's Cradle" is bitter and that of "God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater" manic, "Slaughterhouse-Five" sounds a somber depth that some have called fatalistic, but I prefer to see as a bone-deep acceptance. It is one of the most compelling war stories in American literature, while also being one of Vonnegut's least preachy books.
"All this happened, more or less. The war parts, anyway, are pretty much true," he writes in the remarkable opening chapter, an autobiographical tale of how he came to write this novel. His whiskey-soaked war chatter with a fellow vet is interrupted by the friend's angry wife, who lets Vonnegut have it:
"You'll pretend you were men instead of babies, and you'll be played in the movies by Frank Sinatra and John Wayne or some of those other glamorous, war-loving, dirty old men. And war will look just wonderful, so we'll have a lot more of them."
Vonnegut promises her he won't glamorize war, and he doesn't. Instead he gives us Billy Pilgrim, not much more than a baby when he's drafted into the Army, sent off to the European theater as a chaplain's assistant, and nearly beaten to death by a fellow American before both are taken prisoner by the Germans.
This might have been the makings of a traditional war story, but not for Vonnegut. He also has Billy kidnapped by a flying saucer in 1967, when he's taken to the planet Tralfamadore and displayed in a zoo for a while (where he's also mated with a former Earthling movie star, Montana Wildhack).
From his friendly hosts, who see in four dimensions instead of our paltry three, he learns something about time:
"The most important thing I learned on Tralfamadore was that when a person dies he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, so it is very silly for people to cry at the funeral. All moments, past, presents, and future, always have existed, always will exist. The Tralfamadorians can look at all the different moments just the way we can look at a stretch of the Rocky Mountains, for instance."
Billy becomes unstuck in time, his awareness bouncing from one bead on his life's timeline to another. This enables Vonnegut to tell Billy's story "somewhat in telegraphic schizophrenic manner" of Tralfamadorian tales. For example, he whisks Billy from a collecting point for prisoners of war to his optometry office decades in the future. This quick-cut time shuffling allows Vonnegut to spread out the Dresden portion of Billy's timeline so the banality and the horrors can be absorbed, all the way through the flame-throwing disposal of multitudinous corpses and the shooting of an American POW for looting a teapot.
Billy also has the foreknowledge that he'll be murdered at age 46, but seems untroubled by this. After he is injured in a plane crash, he feels an urgency not to prevent his death but to tell people about the Tralfamadorians and what he learned. He types letters to the editor. He goes on a radio talk show. His grown daughters embarrassed and thinks he's going crazy. She doesn't know that he was once the greatest zoo attraction on Tralfamadore. The first question he was asked by the Tralfamadorian crowd watching him:
"Are you happy here?"
"About as happy as I was on Earth," said Billy Pilgrim, which was true.
As if he somehow intuited (or, in the Tralfamadoran sense, knew) that "Slaughterhouse-Five" would be the nexus of his literary work, Vonnegut brings many of his other books' protagonists into this one. Howard W. Campbell Jr., the American Nazi propagandist of "Mother Night," visits Billy and other American prisoners of war in Dresden. Later, when Billy is in the hospital recovering from a breakdown, the man in the next bed is fellow vet and millionaire Eliot Rosewater ("God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater'), who introduces Billy to the work of Kilgore Trout, the sci-fi writer who shows up in many Vonnegut novels:
"If Kilgore Trout could only write!" Rosewater exclaimed. He had a point: Kilgore Trout's unpopularity was deserved. His prose was frightful. Only his ideas were good.
In Vonnegut's next novel, "Breakfast of Champions" (1973), readers find out a lot more, good and bad, about the power of Trout's ideas. My June 3 post, which concludes this series, will be on "Breakfast of Champions." Earlier posts in this series include looks at "God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater," "Cat's Cradle" and an introductory overview.
Tags: Kurt Vonnegut : Vonnegut Week
Permalink | Email This Blog
Vonnegut Week: 'Breakfast of Champions'
On June 2 the Library of America published "Kurt Vonnegut: Novels & Stories 1963-1973" (856 pages. $35), which includes four novels from his peak years. Recommended Reading is looking at each of the novels in turn this week.
Kurt Vonnegut knew that "Breakfast of Champions" (1973) was a problematic book. He gave it a C+ in his self-evaluation collected in "Palm Sunday."
"I am programmed at fifty to perform childishly," Philboyd Studge, Vonnegut's narrator and thinly veiled stand-in, writes in the preface. And so Vonnegut does. In spots he sounds like an 11-year-old who just discovered how fun it was to say "penis" and "beaver" and "underpants" aloud, so he does it over and over.
Most significantly, when Vonnegut, or Studge, or whoever the author-narrator is, directly enters the book as a character in the latter half, it sags considerably, until a surge at the very ending.
Yet I suspect this flawed novel will be ready and enjoyed for years to come, because it also contains some of the best of Vonnegut. He may have been trying, as he wrote in the preface, "to clear my head of all the junk in there." But in the course of doing so, he wrote a remarkable novel about mental illness, satirized the ever-growing branding of American life, and made a few environmental points.
As he explains in Chapter 1, "Breakfast of Champions" is "a tale of a meeting of two lonesome, skinny, fairly old white men on a planet which was dying fast." That would be businessman and Pontiac dealer Dwayne Hoover, "on the brink of going insane" and headed for a violent rampage, and Kilgore Trout, the prolific but unknown science fiction writer who shows up in other Vonnegut novels. Through the machinations of Eliot Rosewater, the millionaire who is Trout's only fan, the writer is invited to speak at the Midland City arts festival. Trout, as reluctant as the prophet Jonah to go, decides to deliver an angry in-your-face to the arts lovers.
Hoover, whose wife has committed suicide by eating Drano, has been quietly going crazy for some time, but his hid it from most of his employees, even his loyal secretary and mistress Francine Pefko, and from the local people who all but worship him as fabulously well to do. "Dwayne Hoover's body was manufacturing certain chemicals which unbalanced his mind. But Dwayne, like all novice lunatics, needed some bad ideas, too, so that his craziness could have shape and direction."
The book alternates between two journeys, Trout's to Midland City, and Hoover's around the city trying to avoid his illness, until they meet in the Holiday Inn lounge, where Hoover reads a story by Trout that sets his mental kindling ablaze.
Along the way, our narrator takes time for a thousand digressions, some sarcastic, some serious. We hear summaries of the concepts of many of Trout's stories, such as the anticonservation epic "Gilgongo!," in which a planet celebrates the extinction of species, because it already had a bewildering diversity of life froms. Nature there was too creative for them. We also learn about Sacred Miracle Cave, a tourist scam run by Hoover's nephews, which is being polluted by chemical runoff from a nearby defense industry.
Vonngeut did not give female characters leading roles in the novels collected in this Library of America volume, but in this book he shows considerable compassion for the way that working-class women were dependent on the men in their lives, and how those women suppressed parts of themselves to survive.
My appreciation for "Breakfast of Champions" grew years ago after the first time I heard actor Stanley Tucci's audiobook recording of the novel. I've listened to it multiple times since then, always with pleasure. In particular, when I read the words of Kilgore Trout, I'll always hear them in Tucci's acid-etched delivery.
While "Breakfast of Champions" may be Vonnegut's metafictional joy ride, Tucci's narration makes me take it as a throwback to old-fashioned storytelling, in which the bard might throw in anything to keep his listeners' attention. You think Og didn't digress, whisper asides, tell jokes on himself to the gang around the campfire?
And though I have accused the Vonnegut narrator of slowing down the novel when he enters as a character, I find the final paragraph of the book, when Trout cries out to his creator, compelling. If we met our Creator in person, we might cry out the same plea.
This concludes Recommended Reading's Vonnegut Week. Thanks for joining us. Earlier posts in this series included looks at "Slaughterhouse-Five," "God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater," "Cat's Cradle" and an introductory overview.
Tags: Kurt Vonnegut : Vonnegut Week
Permalink | Email This Blog
Quick Reads: Stephen Colbert, Yukio Mishima, Pittsburghese and the F-Word
No Fact Zone, the Stephen Colbert fansite, has posted a long, two-part Q&A with Colbert on an array of topics, including his musical guests and his relationship with Jon Stewart and the oddest stunts he's pulled on 'The Colbert Report':
Q: So what of all these insane things, what really sticks in your mind like 'I cannot believe that we did that.'
A: I loved marrying myself, the 'I am Mrs. Colbert'. 'I am Mrs. Colbert' is pretty great. I would say there's a lot in Guitarmageddon that's pretty great. There's Guitarmaggeddon, and there's having a light saber fight with George Lucas, having the Hungarian ambassador come on to do a lead guitar solo. All those things, as that first year evolved, we thought 'Oh, look how much open field running there is.' We can always go back to home base, of sort of false reconstruction of self-important punditry, but there's so many other things that fit in with the character. Because anything he talks about is worthy of being on TV, because he believes it so. Anything he does is worthy of being on TV. There's still some things that I imagined I would do very early on in the show that we've never really done, that I hope to do someday. They're quite silly, and not really pundit-based, and slowly but surely we've doled them out. You know, maybe I'll stop doing the show once I've done all of those, but there's so many ideas from the very beginning of the show that we're still doing these days. We always wanted to do silly, but when we found out how silly we could be and the show didn't break, that was a great joy.
Q: Since you've been doing The Colbert Report, have you met anybody, had any guests, or met somebody at a fundraiser, that just turns you into that kind of a fanboy, the Oh my gosh I can't believe I'm meeting you kind of a person?
A: Oh, so many. I mean, tonight I have Lithgow on the show, John Lithgow. Meryl Streep… The first time I met Neil deGrasse Tyson, actually. I mean, Neil's become a friend now, but the first time I met Neil I was kind of starstruck. Almost all the musicians. Almost all the musicians am I starstruck by, I'm overawed by what they do, I'm incredibly moved by it. Meeting Tony Bennett, Randy Newman, R.E.M., Elvis Costello. Paul Simon, I got to sing with Paul Simon, I got to sing "The Sound of Silence" with Paul Simon. I mean, I freaked out after doing that.
[A tip of the Recommended Reading baseball cap to Splitsider for the link.]
Meanwhile, at the Guardian, Robert T. Kelly reads through 'The Sea of Fertility,' the novels that Yukio Mishima sent off to his publisher on the day of his ritual suicide in 1970:
If he had meant the work to be his magnum opus, it was doomed to be occluded by his suicide. These four books – Spring Snow, Runaway Horses, The Temple of Dawn and The Decay of the Angel – are a saga of 20th-century Japan: a story of national decline that nonetheless proposes redemption through the endurance of a certain soul, forceful enough to be reborn ad infinitum.
Finally, OnlineUniversities.com has compiled the excellent '40 Fascinating Lectures for Linguistics Geeks,' with links to video of language-related lectures, talks and interviews, including Jesse Sheidlower, editor-at-large of the Oxford English Dictionary, considering (with some humor) the enduring power of 'The F-Word,' and Alan Siegel advocating 'Let's simplify legal jargon!'
At Carnegie-Mellon University, Barbara Johnstone talks about my native dialect, 'Pittsburghese':
Tags: Stephen Colbert : Yukio Mishima
Permalink | Email This Blog
Author Visits: The stupendous Arthur Plotnik, the tree-hugging Candice Gaukel Andrews
It's a big week for author visits in the Milwaukee area. Francisco Goldman, author of "Say Her Name," the acclaimed novelized memoir about the death of his young wife, talks at 7 p.m. June 8 at Mequon's Next Chapter Bookshop, 10976 N. Port Washington Rd.
At the same time that night, Danielle Sosin reads from "The Long-Shining Waters," her tale of three women in different eras growing up along Lake Superior, at Boswell Book Company, 2559 N. Downer Ave. "All three stories are amazingly textured, reflecting lightly worn research on topics including Ojibwe life, Superior geology and - especially - the tools and rituals of daily work, from sewing and fishing to bartending and glassblowing," wrote our reviewer, Mike Fischer.
But if your boss could be reading only one book this week from a visiting author right before she does your performance review, then you'd want it to be Arthur Plotnik's new one: "Better Than Great: A Plenitudinous Compendium of Wallopingly Fresh Superlatives" (Viva Editions, $15.95).
A writer, editor and publisher, Plotnik has written multiple books for writers and editors, including "The Elements of Editing" and "Spunk and Bite." But what could be as fabulous, stupendous, showstopping, socko-boffo and epiphanic as this neatly organized, humorous yet helpful "acclamatory hoard" of words for praising. He offers 15 categories of words organized on general concepts (great, sublime, forceful, wicked cool), a further 73 subcategories, a helpful index and tips for coining your own laudatory neologisms.
Alas, poor Arthur, you were born in the wrong era: you might have been the greatest circus handbill copy writer ever. But you can still make your mark on society: Chris Berman and the rest of the ESPN crowd could use a vocabulary makeover.
Plotnik speaks at 7 p.m. June 7 at Boswell Book Company.
Candice Gaukel Andrews might have wished for a copy of Plotnik's praiseworthy compendium when shewrote "Beyond the Trees: Stories of Wisconsin Forests" (Wisconsin Historical Society Press, $26.95), a history, survey and appreciation of state forests, from the mighty Chequamegon-Nicolet up north to the urban gem of Milwaukee's Havenwoods State Forest to the petite Point Beach State Forest along the Lake Michigan shoreline. Her book includes more than 150 photos and 17 maps.
Andrews will read at 7 p.m. June 9 at Mequon's Next Chapter Bookshop. Go ahead, ask her the question you're dying to ask her: If you could be any kind of tree, what tree would you be?
Tags: Arthur Plotnik : Candice Gaukel Andrews
Permalink | Email This Blog
More Summer Reading lists
Last weekend I offered you 52 book recommendations for summer reading, from Ann Brashares' 'Sisterhood Everlasting' (which returns to the 'Traveling Pants' teens as young women) to 'The Bone House,' Brian Freeman's powerful mystery set in Door County and Washington Island.
Now National Public Radio, which has become an important source of information about new books, has launched its 2011 Summer Books site, which aggregates the revelant book stories and lists for easy browsing and listening.
We love the local angle here at Recommended Reading, so let me direct you first to Susan Stamberg's piece, "Indie Booksellers Target Summer's Best Reads," which features Daniel Goldin, owner of Milwaukee's Boswell Book Company, 2559 N. Downer Ave. Daniel, one of three indie booksellers interviewed, picks Dean Bakopoulos' new novel "My American Unhappiness," former Wisconsinite Nina Revoyr's novel "Wingshooters," and four other books.
Elsewhere on the site, Karen Russell tells readers "You Must Read These Gleefully Deranged Stories," meaning the ones in Kelly Link's "Stranger Things Happen," and Heller McAlpin reviews Ann Patchett's new novel, "State of Wonder," accompanied by an excerpt from the book. (Patchett will read from her book at 7 p.m. June 22 at Boswell Book Co.)
Later this season, NPR plans to add some young-adult book picks and some selections from brand-name librarian Nancy Pearl.
NPR has helpfully compiled a list of all of its critics' reading picks on a single page.
Tags: Daniel Goldin
Permalink | Email This Blog
The Unbridled 25-cent ebook experiment
As part of a collaboration between Unbridled Books and the American Booksellers Association, three local bookstores are selling a selection of ebooks for 25 cents each June 9 through 11.
Milwaukee's Boswell Book Company, Mequon's Next Chapter Bookshop and Oconomowoc's Books & Company are selling 25 books from Unbridled, an independent publisher, through Google eBooks on their stores' websites.
Unbridled publishes quality literary fiction. its catalog includes Peter Geye's Lake Superior shipwreck novel "Safe from the Sea," though that novel isn't part of this sales promotion.
Independent bookstores around the country now sell Google eBooks through their websites. They can be read online through computers, tablets and other devices, or downloaded to iPods and smartphones. While they can't be downloaded to Kindles, they can be transferred to Nooks and Sony readers.
Amazon.com, which sells the Kindle and operates the Internet's highest-profile ebookstore, always has a selection of ebooks at discount prices or even for free. But the Unbridled sale is unusual both in offering a big collection of fiction from a single publisher and in being designed to appeal to the customers of brick-and-mortar bookstores.
"I'm pretty sure that's not the way I want to read most of my books," wrote Daniel Goldin, Boswell's owner, on his blog. "But everyone makes different decisions about these things and many of you have said to us that you want to read at least some of your books on wireless devices. "
The best-known book of the 25, Emily St. John Mandel's "The Singer's Gun," is also the one that Next Chapter Bookshop owner Lanora Haradon would recommend to the curious. Her book, which won an Indie Booksellers Choice Award in May, centers on a one-time document forger who's gone straight, but finds himself getting pulled back into crime.
Boswell's Goldin also recommends Elise Blackwell's "The Unnatural History of Cypress Parish," in which an old man, awaiting the onslaught of Hurricane Katrina in Louisiana, remembers what happened in the great flood of 1927.
To buy the 25-cent ebooks, readers need or will need to open a Google account; if you have a Gmail address or use Google Docs or other Google services, you already have one. They will also need to create an online account with one of the local bookstores. Readers can then begin shopping through the Boswell, Next Chapter or Books & Company websites. (Purchases will also be charged 1 cent sales tax per book.)
I bought an ebook from both Boswell and Next Chapter Thursday morning. Within minutes I had both books on my iPod Touch.
Tags: Unbridled Books
Permalink | Email This Blog
UWM professor's translation strives to make Sophocles sing
In preparing his new translation of Sophocles' tragedy 'Oedipus Rex' (University of Wisconsin Press, $9.95), David Mulroy wanted to create verse that would be music to his English-speaking readers.
"In my experience, available translations fail to convey the essential fact that Greek tragedies as originally performed were -- in one word -- dynamic," Mulroy writes in his preface.
In particular Mulroy, a University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee professor of classics, was irked that the choral odes of Greek tragedy were generally turned into free verse in English translations.
"For the original audiences ..., the songs of the chorus were the best-loved parts of most tragedies," Mulroy writes.
"One of the goals of my translation is to convey the fact that strophes and antistrophes were stanzas of easily learned songs, sung and danced to by a chorus."
With that in mind, Mulroy translated the choral odes into short rhymed stanzas. He points out that the Greeks did not use end rhyme and employed different meters, but still believes his approach of short, songlike stanzas for contemporary English-speaking readers would be the "practical equivalent of the odes of Greek tragedy."
As an example, compare a choral passage from an unrhymed translation with Mulroy's rendering of the same passage. Here's a passage translated by Canadian scholar Ian Johnston:
Oh sweet speaking voice of Zeus,
you have come to glorious Thebes from golden Pytho —
but what is your intent?
My fearful heart twists on the rack and shakes with fear.
O Delian healer, for whom we cry aloud
in holy awe, what obligation
will you demand from me, a thing unknown
or now renewed with the revolving years?
Immortal voice, O child of golden Hope,
speak to me!
Here's the same segment in Mulroy's translation:
O dulcet voice of Zeus, with what design
have you come down from Pytho's golden shrine
to splendid Thebes? My mind is wracked with horror,
my limbs are trembling. God that Delos bore,
Ah-ahh! Paean! I stand in awe of you.
Will you accomplish something strange and new?
Or will the years as they unfold
reveal what they revealed of old?
Will I lament? Will I rejoice?
Tell me now, immortal voice,
O child of golden hope.
Mulroy includes a detailed introduction on the tragedy, related Greek history and interpretive issues of the play, including the question of whether Oedipus could be blamed for his fate.
Tags: David Mulroy : Sophocles
Permalink | Email This Blog
Polish favorites for Polish Fest week: Stanislaw Lem
In celebration of Milwaukee's Polish Fest, which opens June 17 at the lakefront Maier Festival Park, I wanted to recommend some of my favorite Polish reading. (In English translation, of course: I grew up in a neighborhood that was half Polish-American, but my grasp of the language never got past the title of the Polish prayerbook, "Pan z Wami.")
Stanislaw Lem studied medicine, worked in scientific research, and wrote a bounty of sci-fi novels and stories remarkable for both their intelligence and sarcastic sense of humor. Like Shakespeare, Lem might have also been moved to write "what a piece of work is man," but Lem's subtext would be very different.
Moviegoers may remember he wrote the novel "Solaris," upon which both the 1972 Andrei Tarkovsky film and the 2002 Soderbergh movie (starring George Clooney) were based. Human scientists are studying the ocean that covers the planet Solaris; it appears to be a gigantic lifeform. The more intensely they probe it, the more the ocean or planet reflects their own guilts and anxieties back at them. The novel embodies a recurring Lem idea: that humans would be unlikely to communicate successfully with alien life forms.
While fascinating, "Solaris" is a tough read and not the first Lem book I would recommend to anyone.
"Tales of the Pirx the Pilot" and "More Tales of Prix the Pilot" are collections of stories about a spaceship pilot, from his cadet days to captaincy, as he solves problems in space, often with little more than his ingenuity to call on. Anyone's who read Robert Heinlein's "Starman Jones" or watched a few episodes of "Star Trek: The Next Generations" with please would enjoy Pirx.
If Lem plays it straight in the Pirx stories, his tales featuring the space explorer Ijon Tichy mock both human folly and the familiar tropes of science fiction itself. In "The Seventh Voyage" from "The Star Diaries," Tichy gets caught in a time loop, and ends up in arguments and hand-to-hand combat with his future self.
Lem's serious and deeply philosophical novel "His Master's Voice" ought to have been sobering reading for anyone working on the SETI project. Lem describes the attempts of scientists to decode a possible signal from outer space. Like "Solaris," "His Master's Voice" is not optimistic about the chances of humans successfully communicating with alien intelligences.
In my June 15th Recommended Reading post, I'll share some thoughts about another favorite Polish writer, the poet Wislawa Szymborska.
Tags: Stanislaw Lem
Permalink | Email This Blog
Polish favorites for Polish Fest week: Wislawa Szymborska
In celebration of Polish Fest, which begins June 17 at the lakefront Maier Festival park, I'm recommending a couple of favorite Polish writers this week, in English translation.
The Nobel Academy awarded Wislawa Szymborska the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1996 for "poetry that with ironic precision allows the historical and biological context to come to light in fragments of human reality." The academy's well-intention praise is more obscure and harder to read than Szymborska's power-packed little poems, which don't require an advanced degree or membership in a literary -ism to appreciate.
One of her greatest hits, "In Praise of Feeling Bad About Yourself," begins this way:
The buzzard never says it is to blame.
The panther wouldn't know what scruples mean.
When the piranha strikes, it feels no shame.
If snakes had hands, they'd claim their hands were clean.
In "Some Like Poetry," she appreciates the relative popularity of the art she practices:
Some -
thus not all. Not even the majority of all but the minority.
Not counting schools, where one has to,
and the poets themselves,
there might be two people per thousand.
"Cat in an Empty Apartment," another of her signature works, imagines the shock and grief of the dearly departed's feline:
All the closets have been scanned
and all the shelves run through.
Slipping under the carpet and checking came to nothing.
The rule has even been broken and all the papers scattered.
What else is there to do?
Sleep and wait.
Just let him come back,
let him show up.
Then he'll find out
that you don't do that to a cat.
Going toward him
faking reluctance,
on very offended paws.
And no jumping, purring at first.
In "Under a Certain Star," she offers a mea culpa for how she writes:
Do not hold it against me, O speech, that I borrow weighty words,
and then labor to make them light.
Pick up either her "Poems New and Collected" or "View With a Grain of Sand: Selected Poems." Keep it on the nightstand and read from it once in a while to your cat. You'll be glad you did.
Tags: Wislawa Syzmborska
Permalink | Email This Blog
Happy Bloomsday, and tales of brave 'Ulysses'
Happy Bloomsday, everyone! On June 16 each year, fans and scholars of James Joyce's novel 'Ulysses' celebrate Bloomsday, the name now given to the anniversary of the day in 1904 when the novel's action takes place.
Ireland's James Joyce Centre, a keeper of the Joycean flame, has an outline of Leopold Bloom's day, in case you want to refresh your memory. The JJC also offers info on Bloomsday events in Ireland and elsewhere.
Last year I wrote about "Ulysses" and other circadian novels, whose action takes place entirely within a single day. I also tweeted favorite lines from the novel throughout the day.
This year, Stephen from Baltimore is leading a group effort to "translate" Ulysses into Twitter. He calls it "tweading":
The Bloomsday tweaders are you, anyone in the world who would like to volunteer to take a section of the novel and condense/congeal/cajole it into a string of 4-6 tweets that will be broadcast as a quick burst on @11ysses. "Bloomsday bursts" will be posted every quarter hour starting at 8 o'clock in the morning (Dublin time) on 16 June and continue for the next 24 hours.
I'm not a fan of condensing Joyce's words. To me, a point of celebrating Bloomsday is to celebrate Joyce's writing, as overgrown as it sometimes was. But the @11ysses experiment may be worth checking out on Twitter.
If Twitter is too many words for you, you can try the ongoing Bloomsday web comic.
For those who like to listen, Irish native Frank Delaney has been recording five-minute podcasts on "Ulysses" for a year now. He combines a spirited reading of a small portion of the text with discussion and explanation.
Let's not forget that Joyce built his story about one day in the life of an Irish everyman on the back of the great myth of Ulysses, or Odysseus, the crafty king of Ithaca who has a series of remarkable adventures during the 10 years it takes him to get home after the Trojan war.
In his honor, and Mr. Bloom's, here's a suitable musical number for the day:
Tags: James Joyce : Bloomsday
Permalink | Email This Blog
Bloomsday: 'Ulysses,' newspapers, and the correction a reporter might have had to write
As a newspaper guy, I'm both pleased and amused by the role newspapers play in James Joyce's 'Ulysses,' the mammoth novel about one day in Dublin in 1904. That's partly a reflection of a time in history without radio, TV and the Internet, of course, as well as an excuse for Joyce to have fun with words.
Leopold Bloom, the novel's protagonist, sells ads for the Freeman's Journal. During his day in Dublin, he attends the funeral of a friend, Paddy Dignam. So does Joe Hynes, a reporter who writes up the funeral for the Telegraph. Short as Hynes' story is, it's filled with mistakes, which Bloom notices when he reads it later in the novel (the parenthetical remarks are Bloom's thoughts):
This morning (Hynes put it in, of course), the remains of the late Mr Patrick Dignam were removed from his residence, no 9 Newbridge Avenue, Sandymount, for internment in Clasnevin. The deceased gentleman was a most popular and genial personality in city life and his demise, after a brief illness, came as great shock to citizens of all classes by whom he is deeply regretted. The obsequies, at which many friends of the deceased were present, were carried out (certainly Hynes wrote it with a nudge from Corny) by Messrs. H. J. O'Neill & Son, 164 North Strand road. The mourners included: Patk. Dignam (son), Bernard Corrigan (motherinlaw), John Henry Menton, solr., Martin Cunningham, John Power eatondph 1/8 ador dorador douradora (must be where he called Monks the dayfather about Keyes's ad), Thomas Kernan, Simon Dedalus, Stephen Dedalus, B. A., Edward J. Lambert, Cornelius Kelleher, Joseph M'C. Hynes, L. Boom, C. P. M'Coy, - M'Intosh, and several others.
Bloom, of course, can be rightfully irked that Hynes butchered his name as "L. Boom." But apart from the garbled line which was likely a typesetting error, Hynes got several other things wrong, too.
If Hynes were working under our standards, I can imagine the correction he would have had to write the next day:
In an article in yesterday's Telegraph about the funeral of Patrick Dignam, a mourner named Leopold Bloom was misidentified as L. Boom. Also, on further review, a man named in the article as "M'Intosh" can't be definitively identified as such. Furthermore, Stephen Dedalus and C.P. M'Coy were not present at the funeral; the article incorrectly stated they attended.
Tags: Bloomsday : Ulysses : James Joyce
Permalink | Email This Blog
Listmania: The Guardian's 100 greatest non-fiction books
This week the Guardian, one of my favorite sources of book coverage, published its list of the 100 greatest non-fiction books, to coincide with the release of the shortlist for the Samuel Johnson Prize, an annual award for non-fiction writing:
The list we've come up with rewards readability alongside originality, heaps praise on perfect prose and rounds it all off with a dash of cultural significance. It's clearly a mug's game to make any kind of claim for definitiveness but, whatever you make of our list and its (doubtless many) omissions and imperfections, there's no question that it features a whole heap of truly great books.
True enough, the list reads like an artful balancing of old-school Great Books and picks from modern and contemporary times, with Herodotus and Susan Sontag, Frederick Douglass and Wole Soyinka, Niccolò Machiavelli and Karl Marx.
A list like this cries out for nitpicking, but I want to praise a few of its selections:
Delightfully, it includes Gertrude Stein's "The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas" (1933), Stein's most accessible book, and an entertaining view of Paris in the Lost Generation years.
Among the history choices, the list makes room for E.P. Thompson's "The Making of the English Working Class" (1963), one of the late Milwaukee bookseller A. David Schwartz's favorite books.
William James' "The Varieties of Religious Experience" (1902) can be read with profit by almost anyone anywhere on the spectrum of religious belief. It's also part of the underpinning of Alcoholics Anonymous, and by extension all of the 12-step programs.
In inviting readers to comment, the Guardian book editors cheerfully offer a self-critique of the list:
As you've doubtless gathered, this is a very left-leaning, liberal, limey kind of list. But this is the Guardian: what else would you expect? Perhaps you feel the whole thing's a little too Noam Chomsky; maybe you think we should have tried harder to counterbalance the weight of dead, white men; possibly you take exception to our somewhat skewed sense of geography (there's no question we could use some help with, for example, South American literature). So here's your chance to tell us: what have we missed?
So take a look at the Guardian's 100, and let 'em have it.
Permalink | Email This Blog
Shelf Awareness for Readers a welcome addition to email inboxes
Shelf Awareness, which has published an excellent daily e-newsletter for people in the book biz since 2005, has started a free, twice-weekly e-newsletter for readers, with plans to write about 25 books each week. Editor Bethanne Patrick writes:
You'll see that not only have we expanded the number of books we're covering; we've also expanded the kinds of books we're covering. You'll find literary fiction, commercial fiction, biographies and memoirs, cookbooks, YA novels, children's books and more. Our terrific corps of reviewers includes booksellers, critics, librarians and authors. In each issue we'll also feature a "Starred Review," highlighting an especially worthy title.
Books reviewed in the June 17 issue include Kate Christensen's novel "The Astral," Daniel H. Wilson's "Robopcalypse," Marcus Sakey's thriller "The Two Deaths of Daniel Hayes," Wisconsin writer Kevin Henkes' young readers' novel "Junonia," and Irshad Manji's argument for Islamic reform, "Allah, Liberty and Love."
The e-newsletter will be delivered by 11 a.m. Central time to subscribing inboxes on Tuesdays and Fridays. All Shelf Awareness asks for is email registration. Such a deal.
You can also find Shelf Awareness on Facebook and Twitter. E-newsletter editor Patrick tweets under the nom de guerre @thebookmaven.
Tags: Shelf Awareness
Permalink | Email This Blog
Traveling, with Roberto Clemente and Michael Harvey
I'll be traveling the next couple of days, so Recommended Reading will take a holiday June 22 and return June 23.
On this jaunt I'm planning to read Wilfred Santiago's graphic novel "21: The Story of Roberto Clemente" as well as Chicago writer Michael Harvey's biothriller "We All Fall Down," which is slated for July 14 publication.
See you Thursday.
Permalink | Email This Blog
James Thurber and Keith Olbermann make a dynamic duo
I haven't watched Keith Olbermann since he was on SportsCenter more than a decade ago, so I didn't know he had been reading James Thurber stories weekly on "Countdown," his MSNBC show, until it ended earlier this year. Olbermann had been reading them to his dying father, Theodore, and his dad encouraged to read them on the show.
But having listened to about one-third of "The James Thurber Audio Collection: Fables and Selected Stories by James Thurber" (Harper Audio), I agree with Olbermann's father. Normally I like my audiobook narrators to be good vocal actors, not larger-than-life personalities, but I'll make an exception here. Olbermann's big, blustery narration plays up the manic, occasionally unhinged moments in Thurber's comic stories, leading me to a new level of appreciation for the Ohio-born New Yorker humorist.
Olbermann's sports background surely supports his reading of "I Went to Sullivant," Thurber's tale of the outlandishly tough elementary school he attended, with teenage 4th graders leading Sullivant to victory against high school, then getting in bar brawls downtown. In this and other stories, Olbermann does character voices well enough for audio comedy.
This collection of 23 stories and fables, about 3 hours long, includes Thurber's most famous piece, 'The Secret Life of Walter Mitty." It's a digital-only audiobook which can be downloaded through Audible.com, iTunes, Emusic.com and other sites that sell digital audiobooks.
Tags: James Thurber : Keith Olbermann
Permalink | Email This Blog
Remembering Martin H. Greenberg, the Green Bay Packager
Martin H. Greenberg edited and organized so many collections and anthologies of science fiction, fantasy, mystery and other writing, he was sometimes called the Green Bay Packager.
Greenberg, a retired University of Wisconsin-Green Bay professor, died June 25 at age 70. While still teaching at the university, he began a sideline of editing anthologies and packaging books, working with some of the biggest names in popular fiction, including Isaac Asimov, Tom Clancy, Stephen King and Sue Grafton.
"He helped publish more than 2,500 books, including novels, anthologies, and nonfiction works," according to a statement in the obituary that his family published in the Green Bay Press Gazette.
In a 2001 article, the Journal Sentinel's Dave Tianen described the range of Greenberg's many entertaining fiction collections:
"The books Greenberg has published cover an enormous range of topics and interests. A sampling of titles includes 'Alien Pregnant By Elvis,' 'Election Day 2084: Science Fiction Stories About the Future of Politics,' 'Single White Vampire Seeks Same,' 'Weird Tales from Shakespeare' and 'Sherlock Holmes in Orbit'."
As anthologist and book packager, Greenberg might conceive the concept for a collection, seek stories that fit the concept, negotiate the necessary permissions with the authors and other rights holders, and see the book through to publication. He often worked with co-editors, some of whom were big-name writers in their fields. According to a Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America post, Greenberg and Asimov edited more than 120 anthologies together.
In his academic career, Greenberg was a political scientist with a specialty in terrorism and national security.
Surprisingly, for a guy who was involved in so many books it would take a supercomputer to compile his bibliography, Greenberg told Tianen he worried about coming up dry:
"I was always scared I'd run out of ideas. A lot of it is simply reading the news, trying to stay a little bit attuned to pop culture. My youngest daughter, Madeline (14 in 2001), tries to make her old father hip. She's a reader and she loves science fiction conventions."
"The most remarkable thing about Marty," writer and frequent collaborator Mike Resnick posted on Facebook, "is that he sold over 2,000 anthologies and packed some 700 novels without making a single enemy along the way."
Tags: Martin H. Greenberg
Permalink | Email This Blog
UWM grad writes entertaining guidebook to Andy Warhol's New York
While Andy Warhol was born in Pittsburgh, he made New York his home. A celebrity worshipper who became a celebrity, he must be one of the New Yorkiest New Yorkers ever.
Thomas Kiedrowski, who leads tours to Warhol sites in New York, has written an excellent new guidebook to the pale one's haunts, "Andy Warhol's New York City: Four Walks Uptown to Downtown," scheduled for release July 12 by The Little Bookroom, which specializes in travel books, often with a literary or artistic angle.
In the book, Kiedrowski, a University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee alum with a degree in film, gives the published equivalent of a smart docent's last tour of the day, a little gossipy with plenty of entertaining digressions.
Kiedrowski has divided his survey of 80 Warhol sites into four walks: the Upper East Side about E. 70th St., the Upper East Side between E. 57th and E. 68th streets, Midtown, and Downtown (including Greenwich Village). Suitably enough, in a book designed to encourage gawking, he opens with Truman Capote's early 1950s residence at 1060 Park Ave.; the young, unknown Warhol hung around the building in the hope of meeting Capote.
The guidebook includes sites that still exist in the identities that Warhol knew them, such as the Guggenheim Museum at 1071 Fifth Ave. and the Chelsea Hotel at 222 W. 23rd St.; buildings that still stand but have changed, including homes where he and his friends lived and galleries where they showed work; and structures that have since been razed.
In one of the most tantalizing entries, Kiedrowski describes the Andy-Mat, the first in a proposed chain of Andy Warhol fast-food restaurants, which had been planned to open in 1977 at 933 Madison Ave. (at 74th St.). Inspired by their visits to Schrafft's years earlier, Warhol and business partner Geoffrey Leeds conceived a joint that served comfort foods such as shepherd's pie, Irish lamb stew, mashed potatoes and the like. Kiedrowski quotes Warhol:
"I really like to eat alone. I want to start a chain of restaurants for other people who are like me called Andy-Mats — 'The Restaurant for the Lonely Person.' You get your food and then you take your tray into a booth and watch television." The Andy-Mat didn't come to fruition, but what a vision the man had.
A guidebook is not a biography, but this sturdy paperback is rich with details about Warhol, some surprising. He liked to visit churches, Catholic, Byzantine Rite and Episcopal. He also shopped compulsively for art and antiques, and in high-end department stores, particularly Bloomingdale's at 1000 Third Ave. His famed work space was dubbed The Factory, but there were actually four Factories, starting with the Silver Factory (1964-'67) at 231 E. 47th St., and ending with the Last Factory (1984-'94) in a former Art Deco electrical substation. Both of those Factories, alas, have been razed.
Kiedrowski provides a detailed index and several appendixes with info on the names of people and the art exhibits mentioned in the book. Of all this book's many grace notes, the most exquisite are photographs of the young and youngish Warhol, in the years before Valerie Solanas shot him in 1968.
Duane Michals' extraordinary photograph of Warhol in 1958, his hands pressed up against the windowpane door of 242 Lexington Ave., seems to encapsulate the young artist's personality.
Tags: Andy Warhol : Thomas Kiedrowski
Permalink | Email This Blog
Author visits: Rebecca Makkai and her librarian on the lam, Douglas Armstrong and his posse
Chicago writer Rebecca Makkai makes the first of two southeastern Wisconsin visits this week to read from her much-talked-about debut novel, 'The Borrower' (Viking, $25.95).
In a laudatory review in the Chicago Tribune, Wendy Smith had this to say about "The Borrower":
"In her bracingly tough-minded tale of a discontented librarian who hits the road with a maladjusted 10-year-old, Rebecca Makkai tips her hat to a shelf-load of children's literature, offering sly echoes of everything from "Charlotte's Web" by E.B. White to "Where's Spot?" By Eric Hill, while crafting her own distinctive sound in a first novel definitely not for kids. Makkai avoids almost all the pitfalls of debut fiction, including sentimentality and undigested autobiography..."
Makkai will visit Mequon's Next Chapter Bookshop, 10976 N. Port Washington Road, at 7 p.m. June 30. She'll return here at 7 p.m. July 20 for a gig at Boswell Book Company, 2559 N. Downer Ave.
Meanwhile, a diverse quartet of local writers will read, answer questions and sign copies of their books at 7 p.m. June 29 at Books & Company, 1039 Summit Ave., Oconomowoc.
They include former Milwaukee Journal and Journal Sentinel reporter and columnist Douglas Armstrong, reading from his novel "Even Sunflowers Cast Shadows"; poet Marilyn Taylor, who has served as both Milwaukee's and Wisconsin's poet laureate; Angela Woodward, author of the novella "End of the Fire Cult"; and former local guy Paul McComas, who recently published a collection of his speculative fiction called "Unforgettable: Harrowing Futures, Horrors, & (Dark) Humor" (Walkabout Publishing).
Tags: Rebecca Makkai
Permalink | Email This Blog
The case of the $625 book (by appointment only)
If you see the normally active Daniel Goldin, owner of the east side's Boswell Book Company, sitting down in the store this week, it may be that he's feeling a little lightheaded after buying two copies of a book that lists for $625.
Yes. I wrote $625. The kind of money you'd pay for an electric guitar, or a good bicycle, or some bling.
As Goldin points out in his store's blog, Boswell and Books, it's not just any book: It's Nathan Myhrvold's magnum opus, 'Modernist Cuisine: The Art and Science of Cooking,' a lavishly illustrated, six-volume, 2,438-page set. Here's how Michael Ruhlman described it in the New York Times:
"As scientific as it is gastronomic, it is virtually an encyclopedia of cooking, a visual roller coaster through the world of food and cooking tools, as well as a compendium of 1,500 recipes.
"Ultimately, it is a manifesto declaring that the new form of laboratory-inspired cooking — led by Grant Achatz in the United States; Heston Blumenthal in England; and Ferran Adrià, the father of this cuisine, in Spain — is a cultural and artistic movement every bit as definitive as Impressionism in 19th-century France or Bauhaus in early 20th-century Germany. It proclaims a revolution "in techniques, aesthetics and intellectual underpinnings of gastronomy."
Oy. Excuse me for a moment while I refresh my mind with something easy, like the cetology chapter on "Moby-Dick."
With its dazzling photography and intense detailed directions, it seems like a combination of art book, scientific manual and professional treatise. Here's another slice of Ruhlman's take on it:
"Among those worth the price alone for cooking professionals are the scores of parametric recipes, tables giving recommended times and temperatures for a variety of techniques, everything from how long to sous vide different cuts and thicknesses of meat to how long to microwave various vegetables. The table for custard lets you pick your desired consistency based on what percentage of egg you use and the temperature you cook it to, to create a thick Anglaise-style sauce or a stand-alone custard. I tested it, it's brilliant, I'll use it forever."
"With this kind of attention," Goldin writes on his blog, "and knowing my customers the way I do, I'm convinced we have at least two people out there who would be interested."
So Goldin, both an optimist and a dealmaker, is selling "Modernist Cuisine" for a mere $550. It "is available for viewing by appointment only, and because of the special nature of this book, it is sold nonreturnable. That's why our only copy on the floor ... is kept in its shipping box. I can't have a customer come back to me saying a page was ripped and it came that way. The way the book is being released, I'm pretty sure that each copy is hand-inspected."
Now, lest you think Boswell has gone all uptown on you, rest assured the store has plenty of normally priced books, as well as excellent sale tables with novels and nonfiction discounted almost to a price of a venti latte.
But if you are aching to get your sous-vide freak on in a high-end way, email Goldin (firstname.lastname@example.com) for an appointment. Just take note of what Goldin writes:
"Yes, this book is so hot that we positioned by one of the fire extinguishers."
Tags: Daniel Goldin : Boswell Book Company
Permalink | Email This Blog
Penguin's new iPhone app an annotated list of 1,500 books
Penguin Classics has released a new iPhone app that's an annotated catalog of its 1,500 book titles, from ancient Greek, Roman and Chinese writers to contemporary fiction. It offers capsule descriptions of the titles as well as functions that allow readers to save the names of books they want to read to a list, and a "More Like This" function that recommends complementary reading to any given book I like. For example, when I clicked "More Like This" for James Joyce's "Dubliners," the Penguin app suggested Maria Edgeworth's satirical novel "The Absentee" and Charles Robert Maturin's Gothic novel "Melmoth the Wanderer," as well as other Joyce titles.
The app also offers a Penguin Classics Quiz with questions from a selection of the books. The one-minute lightning round I played offered questions from books by Jane Austen, Graham Greene, William Shakespeare, Friedrich Nietzche and the epic Gilgamesh.
Just to make this completely clear, the app does not off the texts of these books. It's a fancy interactive catalog with search and recommendations tools.
(A tip of the Recommended Reading baseball cap to Galleycat for pointing me toward this app.)
Permalink | Email This Blog


text:
August 2, 2014
OCTOBER 14, 2006 -- Pratt Elementary Principal David Anderson is charged with possession of cocaine. Charleston Police made the arrest Saturday Morning.
Anderson was seen leaving Washington Manor in Charleston--and police say that's when they found him with the drugs. Anderson has been released from jail.
The charge is a misdemeanor. It carries a sentence of up to six months in jail and a fine of $1,000 dollars.
WSAZ attempted to contact both Anderson and Kanawha County Superintendent Dr. Ron Duerring, but did not reach either.


text:
Steptoe Butte, shown here, is the type example of a steptoe, an old upland that has been surrounded by younger lava flows. (Because his name was given to the butte, Lt. Col. Edward Steptoe qualifies as a geologic eponym.) In Italy, similar landforms around Etna volcano are called dagalas. Both are varieties of kipuka, the Hawaiian word for an "island" of older land surrounded by lava. Steptoe Butte is a state park and Kamiak Butte is a county park. The views from their peaks are expansive. Both are registered as a National Natural Landmark.
You might imagine that these steptoes preserved the plants and animals on them from harm as lava flooded the surrounding countryside. But likely the hills caught fire, and if they didn't the intense heat would have sterilized them.