text:
An interview with DAVID COWART
Author of THOMAS PYNCHON AND THE DARK PASSAGES OF HISTORY
2011, University of Georgia Press
David Cowart has been a published author for over thirty years. That's quite an accomplishment for most people who've chosen writing as a profession. But David writes about very specific things, like contemporary American fiction, and one subject in particular, has taken him down this long, sometimes cavernous path. When you read one of David's books you realize that he is passionate about his work, and that he is very passionate about one contemporary American fiction writer: Thomas Pynchon.
Pynchon's literary work covers some 50 years, so you'd think there would be enough material there to write several books. But during this period, Pynchon's only chosen to write occasionally, and often years pass between books. Which is fine with David, allowing him to spend time with his family, teach, and take some vacations. David currently teaches at the University of South Carolina, where he is a Louise Fry Scudder Professor and a Board of Trustees Professor. That's his day job. The rest of the time he's writing about what he loves most — fiction, and primarily contemporary American writers like Don DeLillo, and of course, Thomas Pynchon.
We sat down recently for an interview—he is his office, and I in mine—and spoke (over the phone) about a variety of subjects. When we ran out of time, we decided to continue the interview at another time. This is Part I of my interview with David Cowart.
The Writing Disorder: Talk about your new book, Thomas Pynchon and the Dark Passages of History.
David Cowart: In an earlier book (History and the Contemporary Novel), I had become interested in historiography. For a long time the historical novel was patronized as a type of pseudo-genteel genre. Henry James, for example, said it was doomed to a fatal cheapness. But Pynchon, defending Ian McEwan, actually referred to himself as an historical novelist.
If you think about claims made for representations of the past, whether by professional historians or by historical novelists, it generates some very interesting perceptions. My notion is that an historical novelist of genius, when well-informed, is perhaps better able to negotiate an encounter with the past than an actual historian, who is cursed with the obligation to remain factual. Neither novelist nor historian has all the facts, for some have disappeared from the record. For a long time, historians allowed themselves unconsciously to write versions of history that were too shapely—while novelists, naturally more self-conscious, more aware of what we now call meta-historical perspectives, offered more reliably self-conscious narratives about the past. In this, I'm merely echoing points made by that great theorist of historiography, Hayden White, author of a 1973 book called Metahistory, in which he showed how the same little span of nineteenth-century history, as told by four different historians, warped by turns through romance, satire, tragedy, or comedy. (He got these categories from Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism.) Anyway, it was quite an eye-opener. You can take White's precepts and discover that a narrative of American history that concludes with the Great Depression takes the shape of tragedy. Same thing if narrated from the perspective of native Americans. The comedic version—depending, again, on perspective—emerges if you end on a triumphalist note: the taming of the frontier, say, or the conclusion of World War II.
To bring to consciousness history's fictive dimension is, I think, a great advance for historiography, and something that perhaps the really great historical novelists, from Sir Walter Scott forward, knew all along.
When I was shaping the new Pynchon book, I was looking for some kind of conceptual anchor, and I discovered that it would be easy and natural to think about the emphasis in his work on history.
TWD: Would it be similar to documentary filmmakers today, where you sort of get their take on history or a particular event?
David: I certainly think of Errol Morris (I'm less familiar with Ken Burns) as a filmmaker animated by what I would characterize as a postmodernist recognition of just how labile the past is, history is, discourse is, representations of any kind, and so the most sophisticated filmmakers, documentarians, and novelists are all contriving to show their awareness of the perspectival problematic.
TWD: Can you talk about the influence of German culture on Pynchon's work?
David: I have wondered about that for a long time. I remember, years and years ago, this must be the early '70s, Richard Poirier, the only teacher I ever read a Pynchon book with, at Rutgers, in passing remarked that Pynchon seemed to be hostile to things German. In a way, any such hostility would be part of an apostolic succession, given the author's possible connection with Nabokov (who taught at Cornell while the future author was a student there). His wife being Jewish, Nabokov had personal experience with the dark side of German culture.
What I find reading Pynchon is that he knows a hell of a lot about German culture. He seems to have immersed himself in the history of German colonialism in south-west Africa (present-day Namibia). In V. and Gravity's Rainbow, he depicts a little-known corner of the colonial enterprise that is harrowing, utterly horrific. In the latter novel, he depicts his protagonist on a journey through what he calls The Zone, the collapsed entity that was the Third Reich.
Pynchon displays considerable knowledge of the German language and literature, too. I first discovered the poet Rilke by reading Pynchon—and it was a total revelation. I think Pynchon does appreciate German culture, but he is constantly looking at it from a global perspective. He likes to think about long-range trajectories of culture and globalization. And he can see how important German thought has been to western experience, western culture. But he remains acutely aware that certain German passions, German conceits, are dangerous in a variety of ways, especially the Faustian appetite for more power, more knowledge, at whatever spiritual cost. It is something I think that runs through all of Pynchon's work. Very interesting topic, I think.
TWD: When did you first become interested in Thomas Pynchon? What was your first experience or exposure?
David: This is a story I love to tell. It has to do with being in the Peace Corps in Ethiopia in 1969 and 1970. You were sent out to the back of beyond—cut off from other Americans, but they also sent with you a book locker, a shelf of books, and you found yourself reading through them. One of the books that caught my eye, with its distinctive paperback cover, was Pynchon's V. I remember that I read very deeply because I was kind of making up for all the skipping around I had done as an undergraduate, filling the many holes in my education. I didn't understand V., but I was quite exhilarated by it. I had the wonderful sense that this is changing my life—and it did. I had no electricity and after dark had to read by Coleman lantern. Periodically, you'd run out of kerosene, and you had the choice of walking out among the hyenas to get more, or going to bed early. For that book, I braved the hyenas.
It was an intellectual turning point: I did my dissertation a few years later on Pynchon.
I'm one of the few people who's been in both the Peace Corps and the Army. I was one of the last people drafted in this country. While I was in the Army, I was impatient to get on with graduate school. In my last days in the service, I was accepted into the graduate program at Rutgers, and it was just at this point that Gravity's Rainbow came out and, shortly thereafter, a brilliant response, in Saturday Review, written by Richard Poirier, who, as it happened, was the graduate director at Rutgers. I was kind of uninformed about where I was going. I thought, how serendipitous. And of course his was one of the courses I took in my first semester back in school. He was a superb teacher who taught by frustrating you. One of the books we studied in his class was The Crying of Lot 49, which I had read once previously. The course was an introduction to graduate literary studies, so we read a variety of texts. We'd read Anthony and Cleopatra one day and Pynchon the next. Poirier would play a version of Twenty Questions with us, he'd say look at this sentence, or look at this phrase, or look at this word, and then we would spend sometimes as much as three hours trying desperately to say something he thought worth hearing. And he would say, "Um hmm, what else?" I found it very frustrating because I wanted him to lecture, to share his vast knowledge. We would try in every way to get him to impart what he knew, but he would not do so. It was frustrating at the time, but it was very informative, it did teach me what a fine method Socratic pedagogy might be.
TWD: When did your interest in Pynchon turn scholarly?
David: My first published paper was on a Shakespeare sonnet, but that was for a graduate student journal. My first real professional publication came from writing about The Crying of Lot 49 (in fact, it began as a paper for Poirier). I discovered that the painter Pynchon refers to in that novel, Remedios Varo, really existed. And at that time, virtually nobody in the States had heard of her. This is in part a testimonial to his sensitivity, that he could recognize and turn to his own allusive ends work that would wait another decade or two to be properly known and celebrated.
His description of Varo's painting Bordando el Manto Terrestre ("embroidering the earth mantle") is important to what Oedipa Maas experiences in the story. Oedipa's remembered encounter with the painting is what scholars call a mise en abyme, a miniature version of the whole story. Varo depicts girls in the top room of a circular tower embroidering a great tapestry that is extruded through slit windows to cover—or, rather, to fill up and become—the world.
Oedipa seems to understand that Varo is reversing the paradigm of perception. We think the world is out there flowing in through our senses. We think that's what sensory perception is. What the artist suggests is that we, in our own cranial tower, weave the world, and extrude it, push it out there and take it for reality. But it is a personal reality. And this is the thing that troubles Oedipa Maas, she's trying to decide if what she sees (the Tristero, this enormous conspiracy), is really out there, or if she's just "weaving" it in her mind. As I researched Remedios Varo, I discovered that a number of her paintings, though not described in the book, seemed actually to complement Pynchon's own iconography, his imagination, his conceits.
That was my first published paper. When it came time to write a dissertation, I remember hesitating between E.M. Forster and Pynchon. Since everybody told me to do Forster, I decided to do Pynchon. And I had not studied American literature very much, I was really more specialized in British literature. But I did take a keen interest in current fiction. Of course once you write a dissertation, that's what you are. I was actually hired to teach modern/contemporary American literature. That was my good fortune.
So: that paper, that early graduate school effort, got developed and worked up, and actually got published. Then the dissertation, which became my first book, Thomas Pynchon, The Art of Allusion, 1980. And though I read and taught and wrote about the work of others, I always was watchful and anticipating new work by Pynchon. As it happened, he did not publish another novel for seventeen years after Gravity's Rainbow. I really appreciated that, because I could kind of catch up on things. And then came Vineland, which everybody was excited about, since he had been silent for so long. Some kind of block, we think, but don't know, because we know so little about this author. Since then, he's loosened up, he's produced more books.
TWD: He's doing a lot more work now than he used to.
David: Yes, and I have kept my hand in. Whenever he published a new novel, I would try promptly to write something about it. As a result, my most recent book is the product of reading, teaching, and writing about Pynchon's work over thirty years—almost forty, in fact.
Now I'm working on a short, introductory book for students new to The Crying of Lot 49.
TWD: So how do you get students today to get interested in someone like Pynchon?
David: English majors and graduate students usually do know about Pynchon. But he's still not a household name. It's a little bit frustrating when people ask about your interests, and you say you love to read, and they say, "what do you read?" or "Whom do you teach?" And I mention Pynchon, and there's a blank look, they don't recognize who he is.
Literary fiction exists now more and more in the margins, and that can be troubling or it can be enabling. DeLillo says that the serious novelist in our time operates at the cultural periphery, but he also affirms that that's actually a pretty good vantage. So with students, I always try to — they know from the outset that I am very passionate about this. I think he's a marvelous writer. And they're sufficiently impressionable, they're sort of new to it, they're looking for something to sink their teeth into, something to be excited about. And they take their cues from the nearest passionate reader, who often happens also to be their teacher. If you're not being coercive or beating them over the head with it, you enjoy considerable influence. They see that this has generated a lot of excitement on the part of the teacher or whomever, and that generates curiosity and interest.
He's a strange writer. You can always do a quick account of the bizarre things that Pynchon includes in his work. Everybody's heard about the alligators in the sewer, but I never heard about them until I read V. Or the basic idea of Gravity's Rainbow: a person whose sexual arousal coincides with the pattern of V2 rocket hits in London during WWII. That's bizarre on the face of it. But it turns out, also, to be an extraordinary paradigm for reversing common sense notions of cause and effect. What he wants to do there, and I think elsewhere, because he is scientifically well-informed, is to contrive ways to dramatize, bring home to the reader, the displacement of a Newtonian scientific model by a Heisenbergian or Einsteinian or quantum model. The first sentence of Gravity's Rainbow is "A screaming comes across the sky…" And if you read for a while, or think about it a little bit, you realize that, because the Rocket breaks the sound barrier, an explosion has in fact preceded that screaming. That's sort of a modest scientific point, one that's not particularly surprising, but it introduces a profound meditation on the ways in which the supposed laws of cause and effect get scrambled as science pushes its frontiers. I feel strongly that Gravity's Rainbow is the greatest American novel published since 1945.
TWD: A lot of the material in Pynchon's novels is based on his own experiences, and based on history and truth.
David: Yes, the tricky thing there, of course, is to determine, in the absence of much in the way of biographical information or detail or personal revelation, the extent of the personal experience it might figure. I was convinced, for example, when I picked up Vineland after that seventeen-year wait, that Pynchon must have become a father in the interim. (I had myself experienced parenthood in those years.) I was intrigued to notice him, just in passing, making remarks about a character who was proud to show his mother-in-law that he know how to change a diaper or which way the wiping was supposed to take place with baby boys or baby girls. Well, I was apparently a year off. The book came out in 1990, and Pynchon's son Jackson was born in 1991. But in some of my conversations with other ardents, there has been speculation that there may have been some other child out of wedlock. That could be part of his experience in this book.
Presumably—may it be far hence—he will pass away, and the various people who know him will come forward and we'll get more of the full story. One of the conditions of intimacy with Pynchon is, like you don't talk about Fight Club, well you don't talk about Pynchon.
TWD: There've been numerous books written about Pynchon's work, why do you think there's never been a biography?
David: Well, there's just too little material. And it's too easy to wander into speculation. I've had to be very cautious myself. But I've had the good fortune to count John Krafft among my scholarly friends. We've been communicating since we were both graduate students—thirty-odd years. John probably knows more about Pynchon than anyone outside his circle, and he probably has a better archive than anybody else. Although there hasn't been a biography, I know there will be one someday, possibly written by Krafft, or Krafft and another person. But it's going to need more information. All we've got now is an outline, we know where he went to school, when he graduated. We know he served in the Navy, and where he trained, he probably served in the Mediterranean. We know he got married to his longtime companion and agent, Melanie Jackson, in 1990. That fills five pages, maybe ten.
TWD: Well, people are always writing biographies that are speculative on famous people. I'm just wondering why no one has attempted something.
David: The more I think about it, the more interesting that question becomes. There's an inhibition that can set in, if you are the least bit nervous about bringing yourself to the attention of the author you're interested in. One thinks of Nabokov. During Nabokov's life, if you introduced certain ideas into your critical writing about him, I couldn't give you a specific example, but there was this idea that maybe he'd come after you, and satirize you in print, and make you look foolish. There is, of course, the possibility that you would be jacked-up in print for writing aggressively about Pynchon's private life.
I know there are a number of examples of his lawyers coming down hard on anyone trying to publish his likeness, or invade his privacy. CNN a couple of years ago tried to publish his image. They got him walking down the street, and the lawyers came down. Finally, CNN compromised by not identifying Pynchon in the footage. But he's fairly easy to spot, walking down the street. There's a paparazzo who photographed Pynchon at this time, as well. There are a few things like this, but I do think that people are a tad nervous about further invasions of Pynchon's privacy.
TWD: So whom does Pynchon write for?
David: I think he writes for people who are passionate. People who care passionately about incandescent language, who want, if possible, to see culture and history and the progression of our civilization rendered as story. Always what we want from art is what Frost calls the momentary stay against confusion. And even the most innovative or experimental artist I think needs to give us something of that. So we live in times which in fact Pynchon helped to define, the era of paranoia. It was only months before the Kennedy assassination in 1963 that Pynchon's first novel came out and revealed its author as the poet of paranoia. And this is important, a great achievement on the part of the artist is to be that aware—to have the ability to place her or his finger on the pulse of the culture—to define the cultural moment. So I think he writes for people who want better to understand where things are now in these parlous decades after the moment of triumph in World War II (which I recently heard an impercipient but print-oriented person call World War Eleven). Pynchon seems to have tracked the energy, as Henry Adams says, out of one century, the twentieth, and well into the twenty-first. And so, even among sensitive readers, he's not for every taste. But go to Pynchon if you really want a handle on things, of the kind that is not to be had in the pages of New York Review of Books or the nightly news, or places like that. There's a certain kind of earnest discourse which tries to grapple with these questions but constantly disappoints. And writers like Pynchon or Don DeLillo or any number of truly gifted and insightful and talented and disciplined writers do contrive to deliver that thing we want art to give us. We want art to please us, to delight us. One laughs out loud reading Pynchon. And we want it to tell us something that makes things a little more understandable. The big question in Pynchon studies seems to be Pynchon's spirituality. Is Pynchon a religious person? Is he drifting towards a religious stance? Sort of the same thing happened in Nabokov studies. Nabokov has kind of been taken over now by critics who make him a heteroclite apologist for religion. And I think that's happened a little bit with Pynchon. I think they're wrong. I think he's a little too tough-minded for that sort of thing. He plays with supernatural conceits but without, as Wordsworth says, recommending them to faith.
The Writing Disorder: Thomas Pynchon attended Cornell University, correct? And he allegedly took a class with Nabokov?
David Cowart: He went to Cornell, but the story about his taking a class with Nabokov has been called into question. The old anecdote about Nabokov's wife, Vera, remembering Pynchon's distinctive handwriting hasn't been substantiated. The course was Masters of European Fiction, which the students called Dirty Lit, because the syllabus included Ulysses and Madame Bovary—perceived as pretty racy stuff at the time. My impression is that certain individuals have seen Pynchon's transcripts, yet no corroboration of such a direct encounter with Nabokov has been forthcoming.
Charles Hollander confirms, though, that Pynchon did cross paths with M.H. Abrams, editor of The Norton Anthology of English Literature. In an eighteenth-century course taught by Abrams, Pynchon wrote a paper comparing Rasselas by Samuel Johnson to Candide by Voltaire. The two sentences at the end of this paper stayed in the teacher's mind, and he would quote them to later students: "Like Candide, Rasselas ends on an imperative note: again, to submit; but above that, to endure. It leaves us with less hope than Voltaire, but with more determination."
There are other Pynchon stories in various quarters. I have long thought that Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me, by his Cornell classmate Richard Fariña, offers a droll picture of Pynchon as the character Heffalump. Jules Siegel, another Cornell classmate, wrote a tell-all in which he accuses Pynchon of running off with his wife. A less sensational romantic attachment was with Anne Cotton, a woman he dated when he interrupted his college education to do a two-year hitch in the navy. She later became registrar at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. I had a nice correspondence with her, but it ended shortly after she mentioned having some letters from Pynchon that she would send me. She probably got in touch with him, and he told her not to deal with these publishing scoundrels.
TWD: Do you see Pynchon more as a writer for men than women?
David: There's some preference on the part of male readers, and there's probably a slight preponderance of male students who opt to write about Pynchon's fiction. But I see a large amount of scholarly work on Pynchon being produced by women critics — Stacey Olster, Molly Hite, Deborah Madsen, Inger Dalsgaard, Kathryn Hume, Tiina Käkelä-Puumala, N. Katherine Hayles, Elaine Safer. I think that Pynchon is sufficiently sensitive and sufficiently resistant to a logocentric or phallocentric or patriarchal narrative (to indulge the jargon for a moment) to commend himself to a complete spectrum of readers. Pynchon really is a man for all tastes.
And that includes foreign tastes. Even abroad, Pynchon enjoys something like cult status, and scholars publish on his work in Australia, New Zealand, Malta, Belgium, Germany, Poland, Finland, Sweden, Denmark, Switzerland, Japan, Russia, Korea, China, Italy, France, Spain, and England.
TWD: Have you ever encountered Pynchon fanatics who were women?
David: Well, maybe not real Pynchon maenads meriting comparison with the King Kong Kultists in Gravity's Rainbow (lawn-party-on-the-birthday, name-their-children Benny and Zoyd, Friends-of-Thomas fanatics), but I've encountered some pretty enthusiastic women readers of Pynchon. They're the ones with whom I swap book recommendations that are well received on both sides.
I have a list of books I like to recommend when people ask. Things like Goodbye to All That or I, Claudius by Robert Graves. The Gold Bug Variations by Richard Powers. There's Tolkien, Kesey, Michael Ondaatje, Rosemary Sutcliff, Chang-rae Lee. I like Octavia Butler, too, the only true science fiction author that comes to mind as recipient of a MacArthur grant. I respond most passionately to books that are truly well written, regardless of their standing as serious literature. That's one of the things one learns when reading Pynchon. There really has been a coalescence of popular and highbrow forms. When Inherent Vice came out, I was struck by the blogger who wondered: "How is this different from Elmore Leonard?" And recently, reading the wonderful thrillers of Don Winslow, I've had the uncanny notion that this was Pynchon, writing under a pseudonym. Same wit, same mordant locutions, same California setting, same distrust of what Adam Levin, in his mammoth messianic fantasia The Instructions, calls the Arrangement (Kesey and Burroughs had their own names for the monolithic forces of respectability and conformity).
Pynchon has, of course, appropriated and interwoven and hybridized various fiction forms. That creative eclecticism, after all, is one of the characteristics of the postmodern aesthetic, that chipping away at the distinctions between high culture and popular culture.
That said, I am myself old-fashioned enough not to want to discard all such distinctions—this postmodern premise can be overdone. I like to invite the doctrinaire to consider the desert-island challenge: if they could take only one book into lifelong exile and it had to be either Finnegans Wake or, say, a novel by Neal Stephenson or Stephen King, which book, I ask, if it's all they've got for the rest of their days, would be worth reading and re-reading? A variant of the question is aimed at those who deny the intrinsic difference between a work of the imagination and a work of criticism or theory: would your desert-island book be something by Jacques Derrida, admirably complex and challenging, or would you rather have Gravity's Rainbow, admirably complex and challenging in a significantly different way? Me, I'd rather have—hands down, always, every single time—a work of the imagination that subordinates the big questions to sheer readerly exhilaration. As Nabokov said: "good books should not make you think—they should make you shiver." The narrator of that Adam Levin novel I mentioned a moment ago iterates this sentiment: "books with lessons are bad books." Not that one dispenses altogether with the traditional Horatian counter-weighting of delight with instruction.
TWD: You've written about Chuck Palahniuk's work as well.
David: I wrote a piece about his 2001 novel Choke (it will appear presently in a Continuum volume on Palahniuk). I'm not really a big fan, but he's certainly a clever writer, and he has articulated some of a generation's strong feelings of yearning, outrage, betrayal. You remember Tyler Durden's remarks in Fight Club:
"We are the middle children of history, raised by television to believe that
someday we'll be millionaires and movie stars and rock stars, but we won't.
And we're just learning this fact . . . So don't fuck with us."
Tackling Choke, I discovered a good deal of substance–it stands up well to analysis. I just don't feel, from page to page, that I'm in the presence of a great, humane writer. Nor, as Lev Grossman has observed, is there as much latitude these days for a writer to become the voice of her or his generation (I speak as a member of the generation that came of age in the sixties).
Early on, it's Fitzgerald and Hemingway. Then it becomes Burroughs or Ginsberg, then Kesey or Vonnegut or Heller, then Pynchon or DeLillo. But it's less and less easy now to emerge as the recognized voice of one's generation. As a society, we've become so multifarious, so different, so heterogeneous. What we have now are the various voices of gender identity and political identity, immigrant voices, geriatric voices, voices of environmental consciousness. The voices resist coming together in concert—and that's probably not a bad thing. Nor does any of this preclude discovery of the voice that speaks to you and the others who share your outlook and taste. That's one of the pleasures I find in reading Pynchon, and it's what keeps me sampling his successors.
I do think that for a long time now we have recognized a cadre or phalanx or generation of writers whose excellence tends to dim the luster of younger practitioners. Nevertheless, my next big project is to think seriously about a post-DeLillo, post-Pynchon generation. The great authors born in the 1930s (Barth, Barthelme, Gardner, Phillip Roth, Toni Morrison, DeLillo, Pynchon, Cormac McCarthy) have consolidated the postmodern aesthetic crafted by their slightly older cousins: Gaddis, Heller, Ginsberg, Vonnegut, Flannery O'Connor, Grace Paley (all born in the 20s). You have these really titanic, powerful figures who continue to be productive, continue to pop your eyes open in various ways. Cormac McCarthy has gone through several incarnations already.
So I want to know what's on the horizon. What's being brought to the novel, to storytelling, by writers born in the 40s or 50s or 60s—or, like Jonathan Safron Foer, Allison Krause, Dave Eggers, and Nathan Englander, the 70s? Are these younger writers consolidating the aesthetic crafted by the generation born in the '20s and '30s? Are they contesting it, reversing it, turning it upside down? David Foster Wallace was frequently quoted to the effect that he meant to return to a place of sincerity, to rethink some of the relentless irony of both the modernists and the postmodernists. But in fact, if you look at what he wrote, it seems to me that he is on that same postmodern spectrum. What I'm suggesting is that postmodernism is an aesthetic that has staying power. It's not universal (there's still a whole lot of perfectly respectable realist fiction being written), but if we're looking for something that represents a sustainable tradition, then postmodernism may just be getting started.
But it gets tricky, trying to imagine the future of American fiction. I do think, for what it's worth, that Richard Powers is one of the strongest writers of this younger generation. David Foster Wallace is very good, but—
TWD: I sometimes got the feeling that David Foster Wallace was overwhelmed by his own talent and abilities.
David: Yes, that's nicely put: his brain must have been like one long Terry Gilliam movie. But how awful the admixture of crippling depression. The Wallace story is terribly sad—the sadder for our hearing so belatedly about the psychological burdens he bore. Not waving but drowning . . . .
Wallace corresponded with Don DeLillo—I've just been reading a dissertation devoted to DeLillo as literary mentor (it's by Dawson Jones). But even as he sat at DeLillo's epistolary knee, Wallace sought, with only limited success, to free himself from the looming shadow of writers like DeLillo and Pynchon and Barth. He evidently knew Barth's work and learned a good deal from it—even as he self-consciously parodied any actual apostolic relationship (I'm thinking about his ludic treatment of the character Ambrose (obviously Barth) in "Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way."
TWD: Returning to Chuck Palahniuk. I've worked with three women (one an editor, one an assistant editor, and one an editorial assistant) who were somewhat fanatical about his work. They had read everything he had written (or nearly everything), gone to numerous book signings, and also paid to see him read his latest work. I'm just wondering what your take is on this writer's having such a devoted following among women?
David: I'm happy to hear that a youngish writer (well, no longer so very young—he's fifty now) is generating such passion on the part of readers. It's one more rebuff to those who keep pronouncing the novel dead. It's not. It may be moribund (no genre is immune to time and taste), but its funeral plot need not be purchased any time soon. It's good to hear that there are writers out there who can generate that kind of passion.
TWD: So who influenced Thomas Pynchon as a writer?
David: Easier to say what he has read. From the evidence of his own allusiveness, I think he is very widely read, as only a polymath can be. He knows his Jacobean drama, his Emerson, his Henry Adams, his Rilke, his Eliot, his Orwell. He delights in popular writers such as John Buchan and Alfred Bester. If he's faking his knowledge of German, Spanish, Russian, Japanese, Serbo-Croatian, and Afrikaans, he's doing a hell of a job of it. Whether in translation or otherwise, he has read a good deal of German and Spanish literature.
As for influence, per se, he has revealed a little about certain writers he took to early on—or came to respect. Some were formative. He came of age in the 1950s, a time when there was a lot of talk about conformity and a lot of anxiety about external influences and forces. This was white bread America; this was the conservative, unimaginative, Eisenhower era. And suddenly, like a bombshell, burst Norman Mailer, burst Allen Ginsberg, burst The Evergreen Review, burst Playboy magazine—all experienced by sensitive souls like Pynchon as liberating influences. They spoke to some visceral hunger on the part of the intelligentsia, and Pynchon was among the most famished.
TWD: You've written about John Gardner and his fiction. For me, John Gardner is better known for his books about (writing) fiction.
David: On Moral Fiction, for example, or On Becoming a Novelist or The Art of Fiction. Yes, and I salute you for being aware of them. Because he has entered the penumbra that awaits even good writers who have exhausted their fifteen minutes of fame, few people pay much attention to him now. Yet we might do well, still, to resurrect his dissenting voice, which is what comes through powerfully in On Moral Fiction. He made a mistake in that book, in that he named some names and seemed to be patronizing or disparaging some of the really important writers of his time. But he made a legitimate point, which was that we become what art says, what it shows us, what it says that we are. His homely example was that, growing up himself, he and his friends went to a lot movies and saw various charismatic actors smoking, so they all did that, and they all got cancer. He did so literally. Thus he strove in his work (and he is quite emphatic about this), to depict behaviors worth imitating among characters who are (or come to be) models of virtue. He wanted to present characters determined to rise above existential circumstance—and he glorified artists (I think of Vlemk the Box Painter or, more obviously, the Shaper in Grendel) whose idealizing depictions call real-life counterparts into existence. Gardner's idea is that an affirmational art will find its mirror in a larger cultural resurgence. He says for a long time now (certainly throughout the twentieth century), we've been getting nothing but the existential bad news from our artists. The Waste Land, so relentlessly bleak, is the foundational document of the age. If what you're getting from art are endless variations on this theme, it's not conducive to spiritual optimism, to purposiveness — to the idea that life can be made better. Cumulatively, such art fosters the growth of a healthy culture, a robust civilization. Gardner liked to contrast the art produced in the Renaissance or in Periclean Athens with the art produced in modern times, especially in the twentieth century. It's a telling point, and it brings us back to the question, what do we want art to do? Do we want it only to tell us, as rigorously as possible, the truth? We do expect art to be honest about the truth, however dark and bleak and painful, but Gardner resisted that conception of art because it slays no dragons—or, rather, it promotes the slaying of no dragons. We all know that no one can defeat a dragon, but heroes, who learn their trade from heroic fictions, nevertheless do so. Gardner was by training a medievalist. He read and taught and wrote about Beowulf, whose protagonist is a model of heroic virtue — a figure who embodies values that shaped the English-speaking world for centuries. Gardner was looking for ways to recover the kind of vision that animates the Beowulf poet. He wrote this absolutely brilliant book, Grendel, which is Beowulf from the monster's profoundly wrongheaded point of view. His relentless debunking of events in ancient Scandinavia notwithstanding, Grendel is king of the unreliable narrators. He's recognizable, if you listen, as a parodic version of the modern or contemporary writer who, understanding the absence of any supernatural comfort or prospect, dwells on the bleakness and the harshness of human existence. Grendel says, "I know, I know the truth, I know reality, I was there. I saw the ridiculously inglorious beginnings of the human struggle." Yet in the end he is bested by a hero who exists, paradoxically, only in a poem. Heroic narrative spawns its own instantiation.
It's Beowulf who, defeating Grendel, is a hero, but he is a hero at a remove. The one who really triumphs over Grendel, the one that Gardner ultimately shows as having wielded the positive and benign power of art—is the Beowulf poet, the Shaper. Gardner and the Shaper say it's the responsibility of the artist to cultivate what Keats called negative capability. Great artists may know there is no hope in the world yet still believe that if they keep telling hopeful stories, well, hope comes about.
I still teach Grendel almost every year, it's the one Gardner book that is perfect: it's short, accessible, entertaining, funny as hell.
In that he appropriates and retells an older story, Gardner is an exemplary postmodern. What Borges talks about in "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote" is paradigmatic of the enterprise in this late phase of our culture in which artists are obliged to appropriate material from prior artists, then recapitulate, rename, retell it. We used to have this shibboleth about originality on the part of the artist. In fact, in no era is that quite an accurate account of what goes on in artistic creation. But more and more in our time, art is symbiotic, and artists are quite frank about their reconfigurations of prior art. Hence Smiley's A Thousand Acres, which is King Lear on and Iowa farm in the 1970s. Or Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea, which reframes Jane Eyre, or that strange rewind of Robinson Crusoe, Coetzee's Foe, or Stoppard's Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead. As Gardner appropriates and turns Beowulf inside out, Stoppard appropriates Hamlet and turns it on its head, makes it the vehicle of a meditation on our benighted era. It turns out there's a lot of this kind of thing going on, and it seems to be highly characteristic of postmodern imagining and storytelling—or, to borrow Joyce's pun, stolen-telling.
TWD: And Gardner had an influence on Raymond Carver's work.
David: Yes, Gardner was his teacher and mentor—Charles Johnson is another who benefited from Gardner's generosity. But I don't think Carver ever managed fully to embrace the moral fiction or affirmational frame or outlook that Gardner advocated. Which is as it should be. We don't want people to enlist under the banner of John Gardner or any other writer. From time to time they cross paths with or learn things from certain writers and go on to imagine freshly and, as Julian Barnes once said, knit their own stuff. The paradox is that no one actually invents ex nihilo.
TWD: Have you ever written any fiction?
David: I wrote a novel. Back when I was in the Army, I was a radio and television broadcaster. We were all flipping coins to see who would work during a holiday, and I said I will work all holidays and all weekends if I can work only three days a week. When this was accepted, I had some spare time, especially since I was stationed in Panama, and nobody was shooting at me. So I wrote a novel based on my Peace Corps experience in Ethiopia: I imagined myself in the midst of an uprising or revolution. It was a good exercise. This was before I attempted a dissertation or a scholarly book, and it taught me how you might sustain a lengthy piece of writing. Nothing ever came of that novel. For a while I sent it to around to publishers. On one occasion, it came back thicker than it left. And I thought, wait a second, what is this? It had been packed with another rejected manuscript—a bodice ripper by a man writing under a woman's name. So I repacked it and sent it on. I eventually had my typescript bound for posterity. Qualis artifex pereo!
I sometimes think that I will never retire, but if I ever do, I might make another attempt at fiction. I sort of decided that I could do one thing reasonably well, but probably not two things. Like the hedgehog and the fox, you know? The hedgehog does one thing well and the fox does many things. I was always a hedgehog and contented myself with scholarly writing about the creative work of others. Since I only write about books I like, I don't feel like a parasite, draining precious bodily fluids from the literary host. Our relations are symbiotic or mutualistic, like the crocodile and the Egyptian plover. I batten on them, and they derive some modest benefit from my ministrations.
TWD: Are there other writers in your family?
My mother wrote some things. After her death last year, I found some rejection slips from Redbook and other glossy magazines. Both of her sisters, my aunts, tried their hands (a romance novel, a short memoir). I also have an uncle who has published extensively on ecclesiastical history. My sister is a freelance medical and educational writer. My daughter, who is a prodigious reader, will one day erupt, volcano-like, in prose. My wife has published scholarly articles on academic libraries and librarianship. My father wrote a memoir about his experience in World War II, called Green Bars. He claimed he had a falling out with his commanding officer and never got promoted, so his second-lieutenant brass bars gradually turned green. It's immensely interesting and entertaining in an unself-conscious way. Also harrowing (he flew forty-four missions in a B-26). He doesn't obsess about his prose, but he has an instinct for clarity, rhythm, balance, directness, and economy that I wish I could inculcate in my students.
So yes, there are or have been other writers in my family. The grandparents didn't write, but they recited. I sometimes wonder about the extent to which my own literary sensibilities were shaped by dinner-table recitations of "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard" and "The Deserted Village" and "The stag at eve had drunk his fill / Where danced the moon on Monan's rill."
TWD: Pynchon is now in his seventies.
David: Yes—he was born in 1937, so he is now 75 years old. He and his great contemporary, DeLillo, were born less than a year apart.
TWD: What are your expectations of him in the coming years?
David: One wonders whether he might not, like Shakespeare, pass into a gentler, resigned, less angry phase. Probably not. I do think he will be productive for another decade at least. Saul Bellow was writing worthwhile books right up to the end (not to mention producing children—he had a daughter when he was in his eighties). My perception of Pynchon is that he has passion still—something of the savage indignation that lacerated the heart of Jonathan Swift. There's so much now to be indignant about, angry about, and royally pissed-off about, especially if you have the instincts of a satirist or a person who has a fairly passionate idea of how things ought to be.
One of Pynchon's convictions is that American Promise got sidetracked. He recurs to the idea of a malign switchman or "pointsman," some mythic figure who at a certain point shunted American culture onto tracks more plutocratic, less tolerant. There's a fine passage in The Crying of Lot 49 in which the heroine, Oedipa Maas, wonders what became of the possibilities, once so great, for diversity. How, she asks, had it ever happened here—so much disenfranchisement, such unconscionable concentration of wealth in such a small number of hands? Pynchon is passionate about this. And I think he will continue to be exercised by the spectacle of American public lives and American politics — American appetites — these are things he will continue to scrutinize, represent, subvert, and satirize.
He writes about the sixties in his three California novels, which are sometimes patronized as palate cleansers between the heavier fare of his large-scale fictions. He alternates the big, ambitious, thousand-page, door-stopper novels with more modest books set in (or oriented to) the 1960s, which he views as the American hinge decade. When in Vineland he returned to the ground already covered in Lot 49, people thought, leave this behind, the sixties are over and done. Now we understand better, having read a third California novel, Inherent Vice, that this is a sustained effort, a roman fleuve, an analysis of the decade in which the country awoke to some imperatives having to do with racial justice and our calling in the world. We awoke to those very important considerations, we briefly embraced them, then—well, it's like that poem by Salvatore Quasimodo, "Ed è subito sera." Suddenly, it's over. Overnight all the anarchic young folks became business majors. I was there for it, I remember. I managed to dodge that specific fate. There was a time when our students gravitated to the humanities. Now university administrators are closing down whole departments of philosophy, classics, foreign languages.
TWD: What about nonfiction. Do you think Pynchon will ever write a book of nonfiction?
David: Well, his occasional nonfiction pieces are much scrutinized and will no doubt eventually be collected. They are quite helpful in thinking about and reading Pynchon's stories and novels. His essay "Is it O.K. to be a Luddite?" is an ideal companion-text to Mason and Dixon. So while he has not undertaken a long work of nonfiction, when he does weigh in with a book review, a sketch, or an essay such as the one he wrote on the aftermath of the Watts riots, one is intrigued to hear him speaking in what one takes to be his own voice (one can of course hear that voice in a more literal way in those two Simpsons episodes in which he voices a character based on himself). From time to time, he will write a book review or liner notes for a CD or a comic sketch (the one on sloth is especially charming) or an introduction to someone else's book (a Barthelme collection, Jim Dodge's Stone Junction, reissues of Orwell's 1984 and Fariña's Been Down So Long). He does such nonfictional writing with some frequency.
TWD: And his introduction to his short story collection.
David: Oh yes, Slow Learner, very significant. In that essay (especially important to answering your earlier question about Pynchon's influences), you can almost see him with a deck of cards, sort of like W.C. Fields, being cagey and laying down personal information cards for the ardent to pounce on.
TWD: What is your own approach to writing? For instance, when you started your new book, how did you begin the process?
David: I used to do a first draft longhand, with a fountain pen my grandmother gave me in 1965. More and more, though, I compose at the keyboard.
The new book (my second on Pynchon) is a bit of an anomaly. I have characterized it as a kind of diary, because it includes material that goes back maybe thirty years. After Gravity's Rainbow came out, I always tried to write something about new work by Pynchon as soon as it appeared. So I gathered up all of those essays, thinking they might naturally turn themselves into a book. They didn't. Turns out, you have to provide quite a bit of cartilage, and you have to update, and you have to revise, revise, revise. Fortunately, a central idea was there all along, in Pynchon's emphasis on history.
More commonly, I begin a book with an interesting problem or question. For instance, the book I wrote on immigrant writers was conceived just after 9/11. Might we not discern in the perennial dream of the immigrant something to restore spirits bruised by so much hatred? Thus I came to write against the academic grain. Immigrants are supposed to be victims of our racism, our meat-grinder economic institutions, but I found novel after novel with a refreshingly sanguine take on the New World and its promise.
I usually try to write a speculative, introductory kind of essay, which I know will have to be revisited once it's been buttressed by a series of chapters. But that speculative essay is a useful document for trying to get a grant or sabbatical or other support.
Next I look for texts I think exemplary—and particularly compelling to me personally. In the immigrant writers project, I was delighted to find plenty of highly polished, completely literary works of fiction by a wide range of the recently naturalized—Bharati Mukherjee, Lan Cao, Ursula Hegi, Edwidge Danticat, and the amazing Chang-rae Lee, whose first two novels, Native Speaker and A Gesture Life are simply stunning. The latter is a lesson in how to render experience remote from your own. Since The Confessions of Nat Turner (attacked for its putative appropriation of an African American life), authors have been wary about representing the sexual or racial other. Lucky Shakespeare wasn't subject to any such proscription. In A Gesture Life, Korean American Lee imagines the story of a Japanese immigrant with a dark secret: during the great Pacific war, he was a medical officer responsible for keeping hapless Korean sex slaves healthy enough to serve the imperial army. It's the decent but self-deceiving Japanese American who narrates, and Lee contrives for his representations of Korean and other women—three in particular—to be tragically impercipient.
It's always an investment of about six to eight weeks to write about a book at chapter length. At first, it's just staring at the blinking cursor, but then it begins to quicken. I've learned that if I will simply write something, simply put some words on the page, no matter what they are, I eventually stumble across matter that will nudge me, something I can expand or modify. When I get really stuck, I just go through and start tidying up egregiously bad sentences—even though what's in them will eventually make its way to the dustbin. You do this long enough, and two or three neurons return from wherever they've been malingering. In my case, the process leads to discoveries. When you immerse yourself in the process, ideas eventually present themselves. I do enjoy the phase in which, as things come together, the work becomes pure obsession, and draft after draft from the printer suspires.
TWD: Do you write every day?
David: Not quite, but I'm a great believer in the nulla dies sine linea precept. It's good counsel, but often other responsibilities intervene. For a while I was a single parent, and, believe me, that'll put a crimp in your work day. And the teaching, of course, takes lots of time (and it should). Mostly, one writes in the summer, but I've learned not to wrap up a difficult chapter before school recommences in the fall. Better to have something well under way by August, then you can keep working on it through the fall semester. Same process over the winter holidays: get something going, finish it up over the spring.
TWD: Anything else in the pipeline?
David: I just finished a short monograph, a reader's guide to The Crying of Lot 49. It's a kind of vade mecum for general readers and students who are writing about this book.
TWD: Pynchon includes in his books lyrics for imaginary songs. Some of the funniest are in Lot 49.
David: That's one of his most charming innovations—his characters will simply stop what they're doing and perform a little song. It's always surprising and engaging—and often utterly hilarious. The best ones are in the first three novels—there's a slight falling off when we get to Vineland. But the lyrics in V., The Crying of Lot 49, and Gravity's Rainbow are wonderfully mnemogenic (I thank thee, Volodya, for teaching me that word). You find that you have memorized them without trying:
There was a young fellow named Hector,
Who was fond of a launcher-erector.
But the squishes and pops
Of acute pressure drops
Wrecked Hector's hydraulic connector.
I'll spare you "The Penis He Thought Was His Own." There have been a couple of—alas, rather untuneful—attempts to set Pynchon's wacky songs to music. He himself actually worked on a musical, "Minstrel Island," while he was in college. Perhaps it was in the back of his mind when he imagined, in Vineland, the ninja Ordeal of the Thousand Painful Show Tunes.
TWD: What is the version you know of Pynchon's winning the Pulitzer Prize — or actually, not winning it?
David: A panel of judges had chosen Gravity's Rainbow, but a supervisory body vetoed the award, claiming the novel was immoral and "turgid." If you look up Pulitzer fiction awards by year, you'll see a blank for 1974. Gravity did, however, win the National Book Award that year. He later received other awards that he declined (though he accepted the five-year MacArthur Foundation grant). The Pulitzer Prize fiasco remains one of the great embarrassments for American letters. The culture of book awards has gotten, it seems to me, more and more questionable. We want them to be meaningful, and we watch for the announcements. But some of the choices are absolutely off-the-wall or ridiculous. Toni Morrison may be the last American author to win the Nobel (and, honestly, it ought first to have gone to Pynchon, DeLillo, Cormac McCarthy, or maybe Margaret Atwood). The Mann Booker Prize, on the other hand, is still one to watch. The award nearly always goes to a truly distinguished book.
TWD: You've talked or written about more contemporary writers like Richard Powers, Octavia Butler, and Stewart O'Nan.
David: It's part of an ongoing quest to find some real staying power, some genius, somebody who over the course of a career can do something comparable to what Henry James or John Updike, or, now, DeLillo, Pynchon, or Cormac McCarthy has done. And as the culture shifts away from the novel as a prized and honored form, it may be inevitable that we'll see fewer truly great novelists. Or, worse, great new works of fiction will meet with complete indifference. On the other hand, maybe we just have to enter a small hiatus before we see the emergence, again, of someone who will truly move us as some of these writers have. As I said, Richard Powers does seem to do that.
TWD: Which books by Richard Powers do you recommend?
David: The book that sent me into orbit is The Gold Bug Variations. It's not quite as demanding as Gravity's Rainbow, but it's challenging, at well over 600 pages. His mind is so extraordinary and his command of the medium leaves you in a state of wonder—the way John Barth used to do (before he became too precious). Incandescent prose is something one values, and there is a remarkable command of history, emergent technologies, and science in its many manifestations. The Gold Bug Variations is a beautiful, powerful book, but not a particularly easy one. The book that one ought to start with is the highly readable and moving Galatea 2.2, which resembles Mary Shelley's Frankenstein in interesting and unusual ways. The Echo-Maker is also engaging. The other book that I particularly admire is Operation Wandering Soul, but I wouldn't urge anyone to start with that one.
I will certainly treat his work in my next critical effort, this book on the Tribe of Pyn—the younger writers influenced by or reacting against Pynchon and company.
TWD: Thank you very much for your time. I really enjoyed speaking with you and learning more about you and your work.
David: It's been a pleasure.
David's Favorite Authors
Thomas Pynchon
Don DeLillo
James Joyce
E. M. Forster
Richard Powers
And Some Favorite Books
Gravity's Rainbow
White Noise
Mao II
Operation Wandering Soul
David Cowart took his bachelor's degree at the University of Alabama. After teaching in Ethiopia in the Peace Corps, he took an M.A. at Indiana University, then served two years in the U.S. Army (in Panama). He took his doctorate at Rutgers University in 1977. Professor Cowart has since taught at the University of South Carolina, where he has been named a Louise Fry Scudder Professor and a Board of Trustees Professor. For three years, in the mid-nineties, he served as Director of Graduate Studies in English. He has been honored with a number of teaching awards, as well as important grants and fellowships, including an NEH Summer Stipend and a year-long NEH Fellowship. He has held Fulbright chairs at the University of Helsinki and at Syddansk Universitet in Odense, Denmark. In addition to lecturing in Latvia, Germany, and the Czech Republic, he has presented keynote addresses at international conferences in England, Poland, Japan, and Germany. In 2005, he toured Japan as a Fulbright Distinguished Lecturer. He is a consulting editor for the journal Critique.
In his major scholarly work, Professor Cowart has focused on American fiction in the period after 1945. In addition to the books listed on his Amazon.com author page, he is the author of approximately one hundred articles, notes, and reviews. His book on Don DeLillo won the SAMLA Studies Award in 2003. He is now working on a seventh book, in which he examines the idea of literary generations in the postmodern period.


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Traditional WoodWorks
Welcome to my blog Traditional WoodWorks
The purpose of this blog is to provide a resource tool for traditional woodworking practices, projects, tips and tricks.
Wednesday, April 28, 2010
Plane upkeep
So today I decided I am tired of my planes getting rusty just sitting. When I was in TN, I didn't have this issue. So, I was reading around the net last night and from what I can figure, johnson's paste wax is what I will be using. I am doing a Home Depot run in a little bit and going to start that process.
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subset: commoncrawl


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Quick Reference
The religious changes which took place across early modern Europe, bringing about Protestantism and reviving the Catholic Church, had a wide-ranging impact on theatre and performance, as well as on ...
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The domestic violence victim at the centre of a bungle that has prevented her leaving Australia with her daughter has praised the efforts of police.
The woman, who cannot be identified for legal reasons, was informed by officers her husband, who was jailed for assaulting the woman and the couple's child, had applied from prison for the daughter to be placed on a Family Law Watch List.
An interim order was granted because once Australian Federal Police receive an application and it's filed with a court, an order is issued.
This order was granted despite the man not having to declare on his application that he was in jail for assaulting the child he was trying to prevent leaving the country.
The child was placed on the Watch List in May but the child's mother was not informed.
Its presence was detected weeks later by police who had been listening to more than 30 hours of calls the violent man made from prison.
"I want to thank the police," the woman said.
"If I wasn't made aware of the order I could've been stopped at an airport trying to leave the country and could face charges. They have supported me all the way, going above and beyond to help. So to them I say thank you."
The man is serving a four-month sentence for assaulting his ex-wife and daughter. But had the woman been caught leaving the country in breach of the order, she could've faced up to three years jail.
The bungle over the issue was first exposed on 9news.com.au last night.
What compounds the problems for this mother is while she pays thousands of dollars in legal fees, her violent ex-partner is having his challenges funded by the taxpayer through Legal Aid.
But Victoria's Attorney-General Martin Pakula said the government has no control over who gets Legal Aid funding.
"Victorian Legal Aid is independent of government and it makes funding decisions in accordance with the Legal Aid Act," Mr Pakula said.
"The Act prohibits any interference in decisions made about funding."
The department of federal Attorney-General George Brandis says it does not comment on individual cases due to privacy.
9NEWS has also approached Justice Minister Michael Keenan for comment. His portfolio includes the AFP.
A final decision on Family Law Watch Lists is a matter for the courts.
The mother is hoping the interim order will be overturned at a hearing shortly.
© Nine Digital Pty Ltd 2019


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Today I have no Hospital appointments, I've got a free day and still a whole month or so till I plan to return to work and normality. Thing is – am I getting bored? What am I doing with all of this time?
I have been giving myself little projects to do and you are looking at one of them, this blog! My mind is fairly clear of cluttered thoughts at the moment, deadlines, pressures, worries and so on, which is kind of nice, I can focus on a few personal projects for awhile. Quite refreshing to be honest.
I have been looking at ways of making this blog bigger and more interesting. I have come up with some new categories and looking at the content I could publish here in the months to come. I have also been playing around with http://www.nicklewis.net/photoblog and that seems to be taking shape – I am looking at amalgamating everything into one here, would make life a lot easier!
The "Transplant Diary" is growing too and my aim is to turn this into a book of some kind. This is some way off at the moment but the neat thing is, I am in fact writing it right now, in real time via this blog. When I do put the book together, its likely that I will use www.lulu.com as the onlne publisher. A cut of any profits made will go to kidney research charities and to the St Helier charity, S.H.A.K.
I shall of course return to doing some new photography, as soon as I am able and wish to tie some pictures together with words, to present you, my reader, with some interesting articles about great places around the UK – This will be known as "TravelBytes", a new section I shall kick off fairly soon, well later this year, once I am able to get out and about more freely again.
Plus many other things will also "happen"!!


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Using Diigo for Research from kim trefz on Vimeo.
The students are learning to use Diigo which is a social networking website in which they are using for organizing their online research. They have the ability to save articles from reliable websites that support their topics, and they have the option to highlight and make notes as they share their discoveries with others in their group.
The students are now ready to begin their research with the goal of solving a problem regarding their space mission/aviation topic of choice. They will use their guiding questions and the more direct questions pertaining to their topic as they look for possible solutions throughout valid websites. They are learning to narrow their search through Googling specific topics, analyzing sites for validity, bookmarking the sites that are valuable for solving their problem, and Using a collaborative group created on Diigo that will allow them to share and store their information that they have gathered.


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Neural networks and deep studying currently present the perfect solutions to many problems in image recognition, speech recognition, and pure language processing. This guide will educate you most of the core concepts behind neural networks and deep studying.
Deep Learning can be used by undergraduate or graduate college students planning careers in both industry or analysis, and by software program engineers who want to begin utilizing deep learning of their products or platforms. A website gives supplementary materials for both readers and instructors. But the further AI advances, the extra complicated turn out to be the problems it needs to resolve. And solely Deep Learning can solve such complex problems and that is why it is on the heart of Artificial intelligence.
Well, this course is different. We are totally dedicated to making this probably the most disruptive and powerful Deep Learning course on the planet. With that comes a … Read more


text: This is interesting. Probably u guys must ve seen this already. For those who haven't, its worth a watch!! This video is done by Mr.Alphonse Puthren only using still photographs. I ve seen a few experiments with still photographs before also, but nothing was as good as this one. Happy to see that our people are coming out with such experiments.


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New 2017 Jaguar F-TYPE S Convertible AWD
Residual $51,547. Lease Term: 39 months. 7,500 miles/year. $3,995 cap cost down plus tax, title, doc, $795 Acquisition fee, and 1st payment due at signing. Includes $2,000 customer cash rebate from Jaguar. Based on MSRP $95,458. $0 Security Deposit. Stock #17436. See dealer for full details. Expires 1/31/18.


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Happy New Year to all my visitors to this blog!
Stitching update - I have done a bit of stitching over the Christmas break - mainly small samplers of different stitches, one for the Take a Stitch Tuesday challenge, the other 3 for my City and Guilds course.
The first weeks stitch for the Take a Stitch Tuesday challenge was Herringbone - I had already done some experimentation with this stitch before Christmas - see here, so I decided to try stitching on hand painted silk with Caron Watercolours thread - it has puckered a bit but creates some interesting patterns.
For the City and Guilds module that I am doing I needed to do a selection of stitch samples, many of which I had done on calico, but since doing the Library of Personal Stitches course had decided to redo on linen. These are the latest ones that I have done - fly stitch. Here I have used a piece of hand dyed scrim over a piece of white linen to add a bit of colour to the base fabric.
These are example of thorn stitch using a variety of thicknesses of yarns and varying the sizes of the stitches.
On the left of this sample is a leaf done in Roumanian stitch and on the right using fishbone stitch.
Tuesday, January 09, 2007
Labels: embroidery, Module 1, Take a Stitch Tuesday
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Tripura India's second smallest state lies at the southern extremity of the north east region of the country bordered by Bangladesh on three sides. To the north is the state of Assam while Mizoram lies to its north east. Located between 22 ° 56 and 24 ° 32 north latitude and 90 ° 09 and 92 ° 20 east latitude it is one of the most picturesque states in the region. Once a princely state it ceded to the Indian Government after partition in 1947. With 60% of its land under forests Tripura has four wild life sanctuaries supporting a wide variety of flora and fauna. Today it is increasingly becoming popular as a tourist destination being accessible round the year. However the best months are from October – March. The monsoons are heavy and turn the green hills into richer hues of deep green. Stately Palaces and thickly forested hillsides teeming with a wide variety of flora and fauna, large lakes and floating islands, is how Tripura can be described in a nutshell.
This quaint little state lies in an area of 10,500 Sq.Kms and is populated with 19 different tribes, while the remainder are largely emigrant Bengali and Manipuri and other Indian communities.
The British East India Company first made inroads into Tripura and made it part of their east Indian territories in the 19 th century while later the British Empire had taken over most of the North East region leaving the rulers of the states as titular heads.
Today Tribal Discovery offers great package tours and cultural tours in this nature rich state.
Air : Regular flights operate to Agartala from Guwahati, Silchar, Udaipur , Melaghar and Unakoti. Indian Airlines has daily flights to and from Calcutta and three flights per week from Guwahati. Jet Airways has flights to Agartala from Kolkata. The Airport is 12 km from Agartala city via the Ujjayanta Palace . Pawan Hans also operate regular helicopter services from Agartala to Dharmanagar a small town in north Tripura.
Rail : The railway station nearest to Agartala is Kumarghat. The railways are constructing a narrow gauge rail line right up to Agartala which should be completed soon.
Road : Regular bus services are available to Agartala from Guwahati. An Agartala -Dhaka bus service connects Bangladesh quite easily.
Nagaland Tour6 Nights / 7 Days
Wild Life Assam Nagaland Tour15 Nights / 16 Days
Mopin Festival13 Nights / 14 Days
Tawang Trekking14 Nights / 15 Days
Tawang Kaziranga13 Nights / 14 Days
Nagaland Tours North East India12 Nights / 13 Days
Aoling Festival konyak Tribe18 Nights / 19 Days
MONPA TRIBAL TREK12 Nights / 13 Days


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Skypeak Adventures
Two-Hour Atmosphere Aerial Adventure Pass in St Marys - $24 for a Child/Student or $34 for one Adult (Valued Up To $59)
- Highlights
- Fine Print
- Company
- Video
the offer
Take your thrill-seeking to new heights with two-hour passes to experience Sydney's newest aerial adventure park in St Marys, Skypeak Adventures!
Two-hour Atmosphere aerial adventure pass for a child/student is $24 (value $51)
Two-hour Atmosphere aerial adventure pass for one adult is $34 (value $59)
Your two-hour pass will give you access to an epic adventure course suspended in the sky featuring more than 50 aerial challenges like barrel runs, rope climbs and trapeze swings
You can even ride a snowboard, bike and boat, or have a sky-high picnic with your friends!
Head to the 'Video' tab to a glimpse of the action-packed course
Get your thrills any day of the week
Fly through the air with the greatest of ease, thanks to a two-hour Atmosphere aerial adventure pass from Skypeak Adventures in St Marys!
Whether you're a climbing rookie or an avid scaler, today's offer is perfect for all skill levels. This epic adventure course is spread out over three levels for you to explore, and don't worry, you'll be strapped in with a harness so you can be utterly fearless!
Whether you want to test yourself by riding a bike mid-air, or perhaps fancy kicking back with a picnic in the sky, there's really no other experience quite like it!
Keep moving with more exciting deals over at our Sydney and Activities pages.
What We Like
Free all-day parking available and on-site cafe
Awesome holiday activity for all ages - bring the whole family!
The recently opened adventure park already has over 8.6K fans on Facebook
Check out the 'Fine print' tab for all terms and conditions that apply to this offer
The Fine Print
Offer expires on 31 March 2018
Online books are essential and subject to availability and weather conditions. All bookings must be made at least 48 hours in advance
In the event of severe weather, bookings may be rescheduled
Available Monday to Wednesday & Friday 9:00am-5:00pm; Thursday, Saturday & Sunday 9:00am-7:00pm. Please arrive 30 minutes before your scheduled session time
Voucher valid for one person and must be used in one visit
Child/student voucher valid for ages 17 years or under. Adult voucher valid for 18+
Members can purchase multiple vouchers for themselves and as gifts for different recipients
Maximum of one voucher may be redeemed per booking
Customers must be at least 1.4 metres tall for this course, with maximum weight of 130kg
Participants aged 16 and under must have on-site supervision by a parent or legal guardian
An online waiver form is required to be completed by all participants prior to commencing. For participants aged 17 and under, a parent or legal guardian will need to sign this waiver
48-hour cancellation policy applies, non-attendance and late cancellation voids voucher
Not valid in conjunction with any other offer and not redeemable for cash
Redemption instructions can be found on your voucher
The Company
Corner Boronia and Forrester Roads, North St Marys, NSW, 2760


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"If It Doesn't Challenge You, It Won't Change You."
All throughout life, people become set in their own ways. Although self-confidence is a good thing, change can be good for people. Every day one wakes up and chooses to either have a good day or a bad day. Everyday people are faced with obstacles. The bottom line is being challenged and pushed to do something can lead a person to do extraordinary things. Challenging yourself or someone else can very easily change that person-- for better or for worse? Now, that's up to you and more importantly the other person.


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This baked tofu recipe will add some personality and flavor to what you might otherwise consider a boring food item. Once baked the tofu tastes great on salads, with crackers, or just all by itself.
- 1 lb of firm tofu.
- 1/3 C soy sauce.
- 1 Tbs water.
- 1 Tbs maple syrup.
- 1 Tbs ginger, finely chopped
- 1 tsp curry powder
- ½ tsp five-spice powder.
Cut the tofu into bite sized cubes and place in an oven safe dish with a cover.
In a bowl, whisk together the remaining ingredients and then pour over the tofu. Marinate the tofu in your refrigerator for 1-2 hours.
Preheat your oven to 350°F (175°C).
Cover the dish and bake for 30 minutes.
Uncover, and bake for an additional 20 minutes.


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|AgentRisk Europe
|Other Robo-advisors
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|Assets protection
|Protect assets on your command by talking to Richard (AgentRisk Europe's A.I)
|No short-time protection from market drops
|Machine learning driven strategies to increase income and returns
|No option strategies to increase returns
|AgentRisk Europe
|Wealth Managers
|Online dashboards
|Passive dashboards
|Active Management
|Active Management using Machine Learning
|No active management (unless fees 2%+)
|Risk Management
|Dynamic Risk Management using behavioural Analytics using A.I (patent pending)
|Risk management using 5-10 questions done once every six months
|Income, growth and capital preservation portfolios
|Income and growth portfolios
|Assets Protection
|Protect assets on your command using option strategies
|No protection of assets using option strategies
|Machine learning driven strategies to increase income and returns
|No strategies
|Liquidation can take up to a week
|Using ETFs (lower fees)
|Using Mutual Funds
|0.6% yearly flat fees for AUM
|1.2% average fee
What types of accounts does AgentRisk Europe currently support? Agentrisk Europe currently supports taxable investment accounts including individual, joint, trust accounts and IRA that feature a portfolio value greater than AgentRisk's Europe minimum amount requirement.
Can I transfer a portion of an existing brokerage account to AgentRisk Europe? Yes. Through a fully electronic process you can transfer all or part of your account from most brokerage firms. AgentRisk Europe will recommend a transfer plan for each of the securities in your account and generate a list of assets to be transferred.
Can I take a look at a sample portfolio before committing? Your portfolio contents will depend on your financial profile and the strategy that will be applied to your account. However, you can get a better idea of what your portfolio will look like by clicking here to learn more about our portfolios.
Which custodian does AgentRisk Europe work with? AgentRisk Europe chose Interactive Brokers (IB) as its brokerage partner and custodian. Interactive Brokers is one of the most trusted and established brokerage firms in the world, rated Top Online Broker for the Sixth Consecutive Year by Barron's 2016.
What is the minimum amount required to invest with AgentRisk Europe? Our account minimum is €50,000, which entitles you to an actively managed, diversified portfolio of low cost index funds enhanced with our proprietary option overlay.
What happens if my financial circumstances change? Our portfolios and strategies are dynamic. Simply update your profile and your portfolio will automatically be adapted to your new needs.


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Friday, June 4, 2010
Daydream material?
Anyone want some sandwich inspiration? Check out this long slide show.....
Posted by Indy Grub Review at 7:29 AM
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A local's thoughts on finding good grub in Indianapolis, whether from chain restaurants, local restaurants, fast food or new products from the grocery.


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Scottish Conveyancing Legislation
Scottish Conveyancing Legislation is a comprehensive looseleaf bringing together all statutes and statutory instruments which deal with or impinge upon Scottish conveyancing practice. It is updated as legislation and statutory instruments come into force. Contributors include Professor Meston, Professor Roderick Paisley, Professor Kenneth Reid and Professor Douglas Cusine. Fully annotated, it takes into account the significant changes in the law relating to conveyancing in recent years


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Timothy Lutts — a leading growth stock expert — is the chief analyst and editor of the s...
Farmland: A New Kind of REIT
05/13/2016 7:00 am EST
Focus: REITS
Even during the financial crisis in 2008, farmland values barely stumbled while the market fell almost 40%, recalls Briton Ryle, editor of The Wealth Advisory.
The most straightforward way to invest in farmland is to go out and buy a farm.
However, there's a relatively new asset class that will let you get in on the profits of farmland ownership and the lucrative rental income that goes along with it.
There is a new asset class in the REIT universe. It's in the business of buying up quality farmland and renting it right back to the local farmers that best know how to maximize that property's profit potential.
The oldest of these investment vehicles is about three years young, and there are only three to choose from. Wall Street executives run two of them — executives with absolutely no experience in farming or valuing farmland.
The third, our latest recommendation, is Farmland Partners (FPI). CEO, Paul Pittman, is a farm kid from Illinois who went to the University of Chicago and earned a bachelor's degree in agriculture.
He then went to Wall Street and learned the ropes of corporate banking before returning to his roots and starting a farming and farmland investment company.
Farmland Partners tries to buy farmland from farmers who have fallen on hard times and are forced to sell his land or a family that has inherited a farm and is trying to unload an unwanted asset.
After making sure the land is arable and high quality, FPI purchases the property and, whenever possible, leases it back to the farmer who's always tilled that patch of land.
Eventually, the company amassed a huge portfolio of active farms and decided to spin the properties off into a REIT that would rent the land back to the current farmers in order to generate revenue.
The company has grown very quickly over the past two years since its IPO in 2014. It currently owns 258 farms with an aggregate of 108,163 acres.
Since it's a REIT, in order to keep that sweet tax exemption, the company has to disburse at least 90% of its income to shareholders each and every year — making for some pretty lucrative dividend payments.
Basically, FPI is a farmland REIT run by farmers. We're getting in on the ground floor of what promises to be a profitable type of real estate investment.
So if you can't go out and literally buy the farm, add shares of Farmland Partners to your portfolio for a limit entry price of $11 per share.
I'm not expecting astronomical growth this year, so the 12-month price target is $15.25, but keep in mind that this is an investment in the future, and what we really want is slow, steady growth and those sweet, sweet income payments as we wait.
Subscribe to The Wealth Advisory here…
By Briton Ryle, Editor of The Wealth Advisory
More from MoneyShow.com:
A REIT with the World's Safest Clients
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If you haven't realized by now, most of my posts are about dumb (in my humble opinion) things I find on my Facebook page. Today's topic is about a video of Dinesh D'Souza using an analogy to describe the problem of often discussed "free stuff" presented in this campaign cycle. You can watch the full video by following the link below, or if you would prefer not to give them the click I will recap the relevant section below (I click so you don't have to).
First off I love edited videos like this that are intentionally manipulative. This was filmed supposedly in a debate setting with Bill Ayers. Presumably there was a rebuttal. If this analogy was so fantastic, why not include the rebuttal? "Proud Cons" are actually setting up their readers for failure. Some poor conservative keyboard warrior is going to present this analogy to some smart ass Bernie Sanders supporter like me and get ripped to shreds. The least Proud Cons could do is give them a chance to prepare a counter rebuttal.
Dinesh converts "Free Healthcare" into a grocery store experience. Which is smart, not everybody can relate to the necessity of a life saving medical intervention, but we've all stood in line to buy some cocoa puffs. In Dinesh's scenario everyone now has the opportunity to go to a grocery store, fill up their cart with whatever they want and when they get to the cash register "somebody else will pay."
The first thing Dinesh claims will happen is everyone will then fill up their cart with things they don't need, "12 cartons of milk and 45 cartons of bologna" to be specific. This isn't the main point I want to make, but let's pause here for a second. Not only is this an extremely cynical view of humanity, but simply doesn't transfer back to the healthcare field. No one goes to the doctor for the fun of going to the doctor. Even if nothing is wrong, people go to the doctor because they think something is wrong. The two concerns Dinesh might possibly have about people "filling up their carts with things they don't need" are Hypochondriacs and drug seekers, both of whom might finally be able to afford treatment under Bernie's medicare for all plan.
The second thing Dinesh claims is the grocery store will realize that they can charge whatever they want because the person receiving the benefit is not the person paying. He concludes that the benefit receiver and the grocery store are conspiring together to rip off the taxpayer (never mind that the benefit receiver is a tax payer). I concede this might be possible in Dinesh's hypothetical grocery store, but it is exceedingly unlikely that benefit receivers will load up with 45 cartons of the hospital's equivalent of bologna. And we know that with better access to health care people spend less money on healthcare because they receive the preventative care they need to avoid expensive health issues down the road. So it is the hospitals jacking up their prices that are left holding the proverbial "screwing the american taxpayer" bag.
We see the same thing play out in terms of minimum wage, or a living wage. Workers demand a higher minimum wage, congress raises the minimum wage (after raising their own salaries first, of course) and then the corporations jack up prices to maintain profits, to maintain CEO salaries, to maintain executive bonus. And people, in all of their wisdom, direct their anger at the people who only want to live above the poverty line if they are working a full time job, or to work a full time job instead of being cut off at 39 hours. Newsflash, if a corporation can't afford to pay its employees a decent wage, it hasn't earned that profit.
If higher prices are the concern the anger should be directed at the people responsible, that is, the hospitals who are more concerned about profit than patients. The anger should not be directed at those who want to use the healthcare system without filing for bankruptcy.


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Fant lite lakselus under villaksens utvandring i 2009 : Reduced levels of salmon lice found during wild salmon migration in 2009
Working paper
Permanent linkhttp://hdl.handle.net/11250/115680
Issue date2009
MetadataShow full item record
When the Atlantic salmon migrate to the sea during spring and early summer, the levels of salmon lice are recorded in selected fjord systems. In 2009, in both the Hardangerfjord and the Hjeltefjord, the levels of salmon lice were the lowest ever recorded, and in the Hardangerfjord much lower than in 2008.
Nr. 6 - 2009
Marine research news
No. 6 - 2009


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This week's teaser is gearing up for the release of STRIPPED. Remember, it hits the shelves January 3, but you can pre-order now!
Everyone likes a good villian, right? Let's meet Dmitri today.
- Excerpt taken from STRIPPED, available Jan 3, 2012
This singular moment, where the two of them knew no greater paradise than the pleasure of their bodies, was more priceless to Dmitri than any wealth, any power. Struck by momentary tenderness, he lifted up to brush his lips against hers.
"Moya lyubov´," he whispered.
"Moya lyubov´," he whispered.
Yes, love her—the only woman he had ever loved. For that matter, the only thing. What he would do without her, he didn't know. She made the duties he must carry out possible, and the next few days
apart, after so many already past, would be impossible. Yet it was necessary. She alone could teach Iskatel´ how to smoothly make the women subservient. But if Iskatel´ didn't cooperate with Natalya, or Iskatel´'s
ineptitude put her in harm's way, Iskatel´ would join the murdered women in the grave.
For Natalya, Dmitri would kill even his own Bratva family.


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One down two to go
Last Saturday Garnock travelled 'doon ' the water for a crucial West Div 1 with fellow relegation candidates Helensburgh.
The visitors had a strong squad and coach Gavin Blackburn was rewarded with four points after a gutsy performance. Rory Walker was reinstated to standoff,partnering his younger brother Keir and along with number 8 Matt Shiells were instrumental in securing the victory.
In bright though chilly conditions , Helensburgh had the advantage of the wind and slope in the first half. With both sides wearing similar coloured strips the spectators had difficulty in deciphering the players, but the referee had no problems and awarded Garnock a penalty for offside after 1 minute converted by Rory Walker.
The home kicker soon missed a similar effort and Helensburgh had the better of the next 20 minutes without scoring. Garnock's defence was sound with Jared Reekie and Jordan Taggart outstanding and after 28 minutes full back Chrissy Neill broke out of his 22 metre zone into the Helensburgh half.He was stopped illegally and Walker kicked the penalty for Garnock to lead 6-0.This was still the score at half time despite more pressure from the homesters.
Garnock started the second half well, increasing their lead to 9-0 immediately from a Walker penalty. This seemed to rouse the home team with their usual vociferous support and their right winger squeezed in for a try in the corner. This was converted brilliantly by the standoff who also added 2 penalties for Helensburgh to lead 13-9.
With 20 minutes to go Garnock had to dig deep,introducing substitutes David Miller and veteran Grant Ruxton. Rory Walker started to use the breeze to good effect kicking well to both corners and they were rewarded. From a lineout fully 30yards from the try line,Johnny Watson as usual secured possession and the pack rumbled over the line,Matt Shiells gaining his 13th touchdown of the season. Rory Walker converted for Garnock to regain the lead 16-13 and their forwards were now dominating their tiring opponents.
After another good forward drive, substitute Luke Wynn was held up over the line.But they were not to be denied and from the 5 metre scrum Alan Miller forced his way over for a unconverted try.
Garnock played out the last 5 minutes denying Helensburgh an important bonus point,winning 21-13. This victory gave them a lifeline in the relegation struggle though they still need to win the next 2 Saturday home matches versus Oban and Lenzie, both kicking off at 3pm at Lochshore.
Garnock squad. Neill, Anderson, Taggart, Woods, R.Walker, K.Walker, J.Miller, O'Neil, F.Miller, Watson, A.Miller , Ramsay-Miller, Shiells ,Reid. Subs. Ruxton, D.Miller, Wynn, Halbert.


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Musical instruments linked to child development - The Nation: Tepika Rodsakan, a lecturer at Faculty of Fine Arts' Music Department, is doing a PhD degree at Chulalongkorn University's Faculty of Fine and Applied Arts. The research funding was from the National Research Council of Thailand.
Tepika said the inspiration for her novel approach to learning came from organising activities for special needs children at Panya Wuthikorn School.
During the activities, she found the children had limited knowledge of how to use Thai and foreign musical instruments and that they were too big.
Tepika tried to get the kids play normal instruments like the flute, but they had trouble playing them as the instruments have seven finger holes.


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Here's couple of wide field images from last night. As my 190MN is away for repair following a mishap in last month's storms, I used my 460EX with a Canon 200mm f/2.8L lens attached. M44 (aka Praesepe aka the Beehive Cluster) is 18 x 5min exposures, while Markarian's Chain of galaxies straddling the border between Coma Berenices and Virgo was 16 x 5min. As well as three Messier galaxies I can see at least 19 NGC galaxies in this image, as well as one or two other fainter ones. And this is all with a nice bright moon in the sky along with a touch of light pollution 🙂
Lulin and the Beehive
The picture below is a composite of 50 separate 30 second images taken at ISO400 using a Canon EOS 400D with a 200mm lens at f/2.8. The moon was so bright that I couldn't do 30 seconds at ISO800 – the images was just completely washed out. It's only a shame that I didn't remember to take the frames in RAW mode – so I ended up with a load of jpgs 🙁
Flats and darks were applied, and subsequent processing performed using Images Plus. Images were stacked on the comet, producing the trails of the stars as the comet moved past.
Autoguiding's working!
Well, while M3 was being captured, the optics on both scopes started to dew up. I ended up with 10 x 2min images which were processed to give this image. It's not as sharp as I'd like – more work on focusing required – but at least the guiding worked 🙂


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I hope you all had a lovely few days whatever it is you celebrate. Our Christmas was much quieter than last year (when we were back in the UK) but it was a lovely anyway. We were awoken by a very excited small boy at the crack of dawn, well I am not sure dawn had actually cracked. We opened the stockings and snuggled under the blankets until the heaters had warmed up downstairs.
Daddy-ebi designs industrial mixing machines, so what? you say, well many of the machines got to cakes shops and so each year on Christmas eve we get a super fancy cake and this year was no exception, we end up having fancy cake for Christmas breakfast with pink champagne.
And then it is time to get on and open the presents, we have a tradition or a game if you like, started by my mom, I think to keep a track of who got what and from whom. The rules...
1. The youngest person picks a gift from under the tree, reads the label and gives it to the intended person.
2. Once the gift has been opened then next youngest takes a gift, etc. etc.
3. If you pick a gift labelled to yourself you must put it back.
4. The game continues until everything is opened.
Ebi-kun was more than chuffed with all the Beast Quest books he got, should keep him going for the holidays at least!
And as time goes by I realised I married a True Yorkshireman rather than a Japanese man - my grandfather would have got on well with him.
Turkey dinner and all the trimmings, lovely! Although I did cook enough to feed a small army, we will be eating leftovers for a week!
Ebi-kun loves to tuck into a bit of leg!
The rest of the was spent building this Lego set, watching Muppets Christmas Carol (and poking daddy to make sure he didn't doze off) and playing games.
Christmas day ebi-kun started with a runny nose by last night he was coughing like he smokes 60 a day so instead of a playdate with his yochien friends today it is going to be a trip to the doctor, we are supposed to be going skiing in a couple of days so I don't want him to get any worse.


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23 Feb Keynote | An Evening with Colm Toíbín
Woodstock Bookfest presents a world premiere, featuring Irish writer Colm Toíbín, reading the words of author John Hersey.
Lost Dreams is an unpublished short story by the late John Hersey, author of Hiroshima and dozens of other books. Lost Dreams was his part of a collaborative performance piece combining spoken word and music.
His partner on the project was his musician son, Upstate NY resident Baird Hersey.
More about John's legacy as a writer, and his son Baird, from the New Yorker.
Now more than twenty-five years later, the music is finished and the piece is ready to be performed, for the first time, in a synergy of creativity at the Woodstock Bookfest.
The short story will be read by writer Colm Toibin, with Baird's musical accompaniment performed by violinists Katherine Hannauer and Laura Hackstein.
Colm Tóibín is the author of seven novels, including The Master, winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; Brooklyn, winner of the Costa Book Award; The Testament of Mary, and Nora Webster, as well as two story collections. Three times shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, Tóibín lives in Dublin and New York.
Toibin's latest novel, House of Names, (Scribner, paperback, 2018) is a "written with the 'knowledge that the time of the gods has passed,' and his take on the classic myth of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra in House of Names evokes a husband's vanity and a wife's rage, casting the fragility of our closest bonds in fresh light." (Vogue)
The performance piece will be followed with Colm regaling the crowd with stories and anecdotes, Q&A, and book signing.
Get a Full Festival pass and you'll get to take in the Story Slam on Thursday night. Then sail into the weekend: attending all the wonderful panels, breakfast, both Little Bites and Big Libations Cocktail Parties, and both evening events. And share the bounty from our always-stuffed goody bag.
Or treat yourself to The Whole Shebang for $450. Here's what you'll get:
All of the above PLUS the One Day Intensive of your choice.