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Issue 204, Spring 2013
Over the past three decades, Deborah Eisenberg has produced four short-story collections: Transactions in a Foreign Currency (1986), Under the 82nd Airborne (1992), All Around Atlantis (1997), and Twilight of the Superheroes (2006). She has also written a play, Pastorale (1982), a monograph on the artist Jennifer Bartlett (1994), and criticism, much of it for The New York Review of Books. Her preeminence as a short-story writer has been recognized by countless critics and a host of awards, including a DAAD residency, the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award for Literature, many O. Henry prizes, the pen/Faulkner Award for Fiction, a Lannan Literary Fellowship, and a MacArthur "genius grant."
The adult narrator of Eisenberg's story "All Around Atlantis" recalls, "Yes, I had nightmares—children do. After all, it takes some time to get used to being alive. And how else, except in the clarity of dreams, are you supposed to see the world all around you that's hidden by the light of day?" Learning how to live is difficult work for Eisenberg's characters. Her first three collections are largely populated by people whose efforts to piece together what things mean are hobbled; they are youths, travelers, immigrants, and people recovering from trauma—abuse, war, the death of a beloved. In her more recent stories, she also writes about outwardly settled people who, although they may live with spouses and own good china, lead provisional existences laden with perplexity. What mystifies her older characters is not so much how life works but that it is passing.
Our interview took place over three fiercely hot summer days, in the Chelsea apartment that Eisenberg shares with her partner, the writer and actor Wallace Shawn. She works in a small, light-swept garret, flanked by gorgeously planted terraces. On her writing table, next to her laptop, she keeps a little painting of a brick wall to remind her of the air-shaft view from a previous apartment.
Eisenberg speaks slowly, pausing often to find exactly the right words, and makes no effort to conceal her strong emotional responses, whether she is moved to laughter or tears. She is physically slight, but, dressed all in black, perched on a faded divan, and set off by the high, white walls of her living room, she has the arresting elegance of an eighteenth-century silhouette portrait.
Am I right that your first story was published when you were almost forty?
That would be about right. A story called "Flotsam" was the first to be published, though it was not the first to be written. The first story I wrote was called "Days," and I have very little affection for it.
I find it ingratiating. That's something one has to watch with first-person narrative, that special pleading for an "I" who is automatically in the right, or is even automatically lovable—whom the reader can snuggle up with and whose plight the reader can sniffle over. Because snuggling and sniffling can derail a more complex relationship between the reader and the material.
"Days" is also by far the most autobiographical piece of fiction I've ever written. I avoid using real people, including myself, in my fiction, but that piece started out as nonfiction—an account of going to the local YMCA and trying to run around the little track there as a way to endure the horrible ordeal of stopping smoking.
I had had no idea how deep the addiction went—it had essentially replaced me. I was a human being who had structured herself around the narcotic and the prop, who had melded with the narcotic and the prop. Once the narcotic and prop were no longer available, the human being simply died. I was left in a kind of mourning. I was grief stricken. I had murdered someone, and it was me. But as it turned out, that was the only way to allow a less restricted human being to take shape and live.
In what way was your smoking self different?
As a smoker, I was very brittle, very inelastic, rather reckless but not in any way adventurous. I could only sort of topple into one situation or another. I couldn't breathe, I couldn't move, I couldn't change, but I was safe—in the sense of being preserved. It was like being embalmed, like being smoked, I suppose.
When I decided to stop smoking, I didn't realize I would be dissolving the glue that held me together. But by the time you think you need to make a decision, that decision has already been made. The person I was leaving behind to die on the road was already half dead. Still, there wasn't anybody ready to take the place of that dying person for quite some time.
Did writing start to take the place of that dying person?
I'm not sure writing started to take that place, but I wouldn't have been able to write if I'd been smoking. I don't think of writing as therapeutic, but I don't know how I could have managed the despair if I hadn't started to write then.
Of course art-making isn't therapy, but I often think artists don't need to be quite so loath to admit some relationship between art-making and therapy.
Well, I understand that reluctance. If you think you're going to be late for a movie and you walk briskly to the theater, it might be good for you, but that's not why you're walking briskly. Writing does change you, and of course it feels good to do things, so you could say writing is de facto therapeutic. But really, one writes to write.
Of course, there are ancillary advantages to writing fiction. You get to leave your body, for instance, so you can have experiences that a person with your physical characteristics couldn't actually have.
I find it endlessly interesting, endlessly funny, the fact that we're rather arbitrarily divided up into these discrete humans and that your physical self, your physical attributes, your moment of history and the place where you were born determine who you are as much as all that indefinable stuff that's inside of you. It seems so ridiculous. Why can't I just buckle on my sword and leap on my horse and go charging through the forests?
But the real fun of writing, for me at least, is the experience of making a set of givens yield. There's an incredibly inflexible set of instruments—our vocabulary, our grammar, the abstract symbols on paper, the limitations of your own powers of expression. You write something down and it's awkward, trivial, artificial, approximate. But with effort you can get it to become a little flexible, a little transparent. You can get it to open up, and expose something lurking there beyond the clumsy thing you first put down. When you add a comma or add or subtract a word, and the thing reacts and changes, it's so exciting that you forget how absolutely terrible writing feels a lot of the time.
In "Days," the narrator, as she withdraws from her addiction, discovers agency and causality. The experience of knowing what she wants and then doing something to make it happen is revelatory for her. It sounds like agency and causality are a part of the pleasure of writing for you.
Until I stopped smoking, I was committed to inaction. So, yes, the pleasures of making something were new and intense for me when I started writing, and they remain intense.
Many of your female characters are committed to passivity, attached to powerlessness. There's even the little five-year-old in "Mermaids" who comforts herself by imagining her five-year-old male friend tying her up. What do you make of this phenomenon?
Are women attached to powerlessness, either in reality or in my stories? I don't know. But I do know that women haven't chosen powerlessness for themselves. Powerlessness has been thrust upon them, by other people. In any case, passivity can be very powerful. It's an efficient way of shifting responsibility—and blame—onto other people. And instead of having to do anything, you get to be angry all the time.
What's the pleasure in being angry? It's the most miserable state.
I'm a bit of an expert on anger, having suffered from it all through my youth, when I was both brunt and font. It's certainly the most miserable state to be in but it's also tremendously gratifying, really—rage feels justified. And it's an excellent substitute for action. Why would you want to sacrifice rage to go about the long, difficult, dreary business of making something more tolerable?
Why was inaction so important to you?
I suppose it was partly personal and partly generational. I came to the sixties early—sometime in the fifties I would say, but you could hear the sixties approaching from afar. And I grew up in a milieu that very much valued accomplishment and credentials. The whole thing made me sick, and I didn't want any part of it, so I cast those values from me. I was fastidious. I wouldn't think of accomplishing a thing or having even one credential—a principled stance that happened to be incredibly convenient for someone paralyzed by terror and confusion.
Your parents cared a great deal about accomplishment?
Yes. I find that painfully touching, really heartbreaking, to think of now, though I rejected it fiercely then. My parents were the children of Jewish immigrants and ambitiously sought to educate themselves well, to lead an assimilated, middle-class life.
Several generations, really, are required to complete an arrival. My grandparents worked so hard to establish a solid footing in this country for themselves and their children, and my parents continued the endeavor. By the time I came around, I didn't understand the problem at all, although I certainly felt repercussions of the difficulties. My parents were serious people who tried to live correctly, but they were so lacking in self-awareness as to be almost prodigies. I think maybe that's not so unusual among the first generation to be born here. They work so hard to fulfill their parents' hopes for them, to merit the sacrifices their parents made for them and the hardships they went through that they're not allowed to know anything about themselves.
Where did your family come from?
My mother grew up in Chicago, and my father grew up in a little city called Waukegan, in northern Illinois, that's famous for being the hometown of Jack Benny.
As far as I know, my mother's father was from Belarus. My maternal grandmother purported to come from Saint Petersburg. Did she? I have no idea. I was also told that she came from Kronshtadt. Close enough, I suppose.
My father's parents were probably from shtetels in Poland or Ukraine or Galicia. Of course, the borders were waving around so much back then you could be born in three places at once. The great cities of the Old World, like Saint Petersburg, Kraków, Vienna, Budapest, acquired a certain mythological function for that group of immigrants. The older my paternal grandmother got, my cousin Katherine tells me, the nearer to Vienna the place of her birth became, until she had been born in Vienna.
I remember once, when I was about five, asking my maternal grandfather, What was it like where you came from? And he said, It was cold. That was the end of the conversation. America was the beginning as far as many of those immigrants were concerned. What happened before that stayed in darkness.
There are certainly bits of my personality that I can't quite account for by my own life history. You know, certain neurotic characteristics, fears. It's a little like wondering why your hair is curly when no one else in your family has curly hair, and it turns out you were adopted.
Those of us who are the grandchildren of immigrants often have a void in our psyche that reflects a situation of danger or terror that our grandparents endured. The first generation born in the United States often tries to erase or suppress what they know of their parents' experience in order to provide a level playing field for their children, but in fact experience and fears can be transmitted in various forms across many generations. Many of us grew up knowing nothing, or next to nothing, about the horrors our grandparents lived through, and when we search for the source of certain anxieties, all we can locate is a kind of blank inscrutability.
You write about that blank inscrutability in "All Around Atlantis," one of a handful of your stories about the Hungarian diaspora. What's your interest in Hungarians?
For some reason, I fill that inscrutable blankness my forebears left with Budapest. It's a repository for many of my fantasies—superb musicians and writers, splendid cafés, voluptuous pastries.
Among Jewish immigrants to America, there was, at a certain period, a hierarchy of nationalities. My forebears, wherever they were from, were at the bottom of that pile, and the Hungarian Jews were at the apex of that pile.
How did your grandparents establish themselves?
They did what so many others did. Back then, there was so much more economic mobility and less hostility—or less institutionalized hostility— toward immigrants. My father's father started out as a peddler, and then he had a store that sold all kinds of things. He did very well at it, and he was clever about investments and made a lot of money. He died quite young, just at the onset of the Great Depression, and the money was lost. My mother's parents always lived humbly, but they managed. That grandfather was an extremely talented tailor.
Was your mother educated?
She got herself educated. She was at the top of her class at a good high school in Chicago. Her older brother—and this was the cause of lifelong bitterness on her part—was sent to college, but she was a girl, and her parents said, Please, how could we afford this? But she went through the University of Chicago on scholarship and graduated Phi Beta Kappa. She was very proud of that. She was, on the one hand, very adventurous, intellectually, and on the other hand, very fearful—she'd always defer to the academic view, to the view of "the authority."
What was she was afraid of?
I have no idea. But I was the pure expression of her fears.
Do you think she would have been afraid of any daughter? Or were there particular things about you that scared her?
Both. There she was, trying—with not exactly all of her heart but with a large portion of it—to exemplify acceptability to the world she wanted to be a part of, and there I was, conspicuously the incarnation of her secret strangenesses and unacceptabilities.
From the get-go, I was a catastrophe. When I was two, before I could really talk, I was sent to a Viennese psychiatrist. In Chicago, I mean—not in Vienna. But she really was Viennese. At home, I would grab the phone and yell, Ja? just the way Dr. Emmy did.
What did you do to require a psychiatrist?
I was a juvenile delinquent, I guess. But it was a very lucky thing, actually, because the psychiatrist instructed my parents to send me to a wonderful day school on a little farm. It was run by two lesbian communists, and to this day I just light up with joy when I meet a lesbian communist. The school closed when I was eight, but it gave me a basis, a model of something that still emits faint little beeps of wholesome happiness inside me. It certainly freed me to a great extent from my incredible dependency on my dragon mother.
What was your father like?
He was a saintly pediatrician, very self-sacrificing, and of course he worked horrifying hours. And my poor mother was dealing with ravaging, chronic back pain. It's awful to live with that and it's terrible for the disposition. There was an atmosphere of anguish, despair, and melancholy in the house. It was alleviated a lot when my brother was around—we were all so happy to see him—but he's older and was away sooner. It's very hard to shake off that atmosphere sometimes, even now.
I have such a great life. I really do. But I always wonder, if I had to live my first twenty-five years over again, would I do it, even if I knew that I would go on to so wonderful a life?
You were twenty-six when you met Wally?
That's right. The Wallace with whom I still live.
Meeting him was a gigantic turning point?
You know, if you woke me up in the middle of the night and asked me, Can another person make someone happy? I'm sure I would shout, No! What a preposterous idea! But my actual life is evidence to the contrary.
That is, happiness isn't like a lollipop that somebody can hand you, but reciprocity can create a lot of space—a sort of playground. Among other things, I very much doubt that I would have had the courage to begin writing if it hadn't been for Wally, who strongly believed that people, including me, should do some work that gives them pleasure, if they have that opportunity.
The impulse to do something as difficult as sit down and write couldn't possibly come from someone else entirely. What do you think it was, in your thirties, that equipped you to want to labor at making a sentence?
Maybe every strange, alienated kid is presumed to write, because people had always said to me, Do you write? And up until I was about fifteen, reading was my great pleasure, and I read a lot. When I was fourteen or fifteen, I always carried a talismanic copy of Nightwood or Against Nature with me to ward off evil. I'm no longer sure exactly what those books represented to me, but they were very portable. When I was in high school, all my friends said they were going to be writers. And I thought, How come you get to be a writer, and I don't? I thought WRITER was written on their foreheads and they saw it when they looked in the mirror, and I sure didn't see it when I looked in the mirror.
I always thought of writing as holy. I still do. It's not something to be approached casually.
In the decades when you weren't writing, what were you doing—besides smoking cigarettes?
I went to a small college in Vermont called Marlboro. I was a terrible student. Toward the end of my second year, I left. With a guy. And we led a life that could be led in the sixties—going here and there, not getting hysterical about making a living, putting this or that in one's mouth and seeing what would happen. You know, the life of the mind, sort of.
Eventually he went to Canada to stay out of Vietnam, and I fetched up—and this was a great stroke of luck—at the New School for Social Research. My mother sent me an ad she'd clipped out of a newspaper, and she said, Anybody can get into this school, and I think you better go to it.
My terror of not having a college degree outweighed my terror of finishing college. It was unthinkable not to—one of those prospects, like getting pregnant, that meant you would just slide off the face of the earth. My parents would pay for school, and I didn't know what else to do. I felt that I'd really come to the end of the line in some way, and frankly, I was quite a wreck.
There was a new program at the New School that offered the second two years of undergraduate study. And they said, Do you want to study the humanities or the social sciences? And I thought, I know what humanities is—it's reading a book. I know how to read a book, so I'll do this other thing.
What was your response to political philosophy?
It was all kinds of social thought—political theory, economics, some psychology, a little philosophy of history, and so on. When I started, I realized that my classmates had read all of Marx, all of Freud, the neo-Marxists. They knew the Frankfurt School theorists, they had a grasp of history. I knew nothing. There was a whole, large vocabulary involved, a conceptual vocabulary that was completely alien to me. I couldn't comprehend a thing that was said, and my solution to this problem was to stay in bed.
Maybe it was true that anybody could get into that program, but it wasn't so easy to get out! There were two things that were required in order to pass the first year, and one of them was a paper for a certain class. Everybody else chose their subjects early and had written their papers. I showed up to the second-to-last class, and the professor said, Fortunately, there's one paper topic left, which nobody else wanted. So it's yours.
It was on some essays by Theodor Adorno concerning the relationship between sociology and psychology. So I went home with them, and I didn't know whether the book was right side up or upside down. I read those essays more than a thousand times without understanding a word. Then I read them once more, and I understood everything in the whole world.
We also had to take a comprehensive exam at the end of the first year. You had two weeks to pass it, and you had the year's syllabus. Everybody else had been in classes all year, but I had these two weeks. I've always been a very slow reader, but the urgency was great. That exam was one of the best and most exciting things that had happened to me in my whole life. It gave me a kind of foundation.
Foundation for apprehending the world?
Yes. It was a great school. Hannah Arendt and Hans Morgenthau and Robert Heilbroner and other remarkable people were attached to the graduate faculty then, and undergrads could go to their lectures. I sometimes went, and it was thrilling just to see people who could use their brains like that.
I'd been more or less in a fog my whole life, and here were people for whom it was all in a day's work to identify phenomena, scrutinize them, and apply processes of ratiocination. Not that I sat around reading, say, Heidegger from there on out, but when the time came for me to look at the world, I was a little prepared to do it. I also had some idea of what it meant to learn and how you could go about it.
When you finished school and were living in New York, what was the city like?
It was scrappy. I loved it. But I was very lonely, and I was very confused, and I didn't know what was going to happen to me. I wasn't equipped to do much of anything, and I was too fearful to go out and mix it up in the world, too self-conscious. I didn't think I could do anything. I didn't think I could get a waitressing job—I might as well have been trying to get hired as the head neurosurgeon at Columbia Presbyterian.
Did you manage to get a waitressing job?
Eventually. Eventually I did this and that, and at a certain point I got together with Wally.
Our first—I guess you'd call it a date—devolved into a passionate argument about Mao. Wally had studied Far Eastern history and was very skeptical about Mao's policies. I knew nothing whatsoever about the question, but I was appalled that someone would so confidently dismiss something that might benefit millions of people. It's funny to think of now, partly because it becomes more and more obvious to me how little people—even people who are supposedly great experts—know about anything. I was completely unaware that we were actually arguing about some abstractions that we were calling "China."
Presumably, your politics have evolved together throughout the years.
Inevitably one's ideas develop and change, but I've always been ready to oppose. I would say that I was born with the basic sense of politics I have now. Children are in a very weak position, so the question of justice is very alive for many of them. I'm no more alive to matters of social justice now than I was at the age of eight, but of course I know a lot more facts.
Not all children are so attuned to injustice.
I was pampered and very privileged, but I always felt out of place, even scorned. I was not a successful child, and I did not have the rewards of fitting in. It's very difficult to question a system of which you are a beneficiary, but it's easy to question a system of which you are not a beneficiary. So in a way it was almost as natural for me, growing up inside it, to question the validity of the standard middle-class values and beliefs, of cultural assumptions, as it would have been if I had grown up in East Harlem.
Your travels in Central America in the eighties influenced you and Wally quite a bit, did they not?
Well, after all, we didn't find ourselves there by accident—we went there. And we didn't go for a vacation—we went to see what our country was supporting there. We got ourselves equipped with phone numbers of journalists and human-rights workers and so on. We were very aggressive about meeting people who could show us what was going on and introduce us to people there, and we met many, many people who were chasteningly admirable.
Any English speaker can learn a little Spanish, so it was possible to get a real look at what was being done with one's tax dollars—that is, to get a look at how one's tax dollars were being spent to enforce a life of slavery for farmers and to murder people who fought against that. Nothing too unusual, unfortunately, but it's one thing to be familiar with the paradigm and another to see at close range the effects on individuals.
Had anything in your experience prepared you for that?
I had had an experience when I was seventeen that prepared me a bit for one aspect of traveling between the United States and Central America. One of the students at my boarding school was a boy named Thorsten Horton, and his father, Myles Horton, ran the wonderful Highlander Folk School, which trained labor organizers and civil-rights activists. Rosa Parks was one of the people who had gone there.
Thorsten said to me, and I can still remember his voice saying it, Hey, Eisenberg, do you want to get away from your mother this summer?
Well, the school had been in Monteagle, Tennessee, but the property and land was confiscated by the state. In any case, there was to be a campsite built for Highlander in the Smokies, and did I want to join in? I was allowed to go—I think because my brother was getting married later that summer and my mother wanted me out of the way.
The group consisted of a few young white people, mostly northerners, and a number of young black people from Birmingham, Alabama, where all hell had broken out and people were being subjected to all kinds of brutality. It was a proudly Klan county and we all ended up briefly in jail.
The cops came and awakened us in the middle of the night. First they joked about killing us, but then they said they wanted to make a legal example of us instead, so they took us into jail. I was charged with something called "assimilated intercourse." Very arcane. But eventually it was made clear that I was under eighteen and therefore could not be hanged, so the charge was switched to the other white girl, who was over eighteen, and that part of the case fell apart. Our lawyer was local and, needless to say, astoundingly courageous. This was the summer of 1963, the summer before the three boys—Goodman, Schwerner, and Chaney, the civil-rights activists—were murdered in Mississippi.
But the shock came when I returned home. People would say, What was it like, what happened? And when I answered, they would say, No, that's not what it was like, that's not what happened.
So, long before I went to Central America, I was familiar both with the lengths to which people would go in order to evade information and also with the pain of trying to synthesize mutually exclusive realities. The mind simply could not encompass, let alone reconcile, the reality of what we, as a nation, were enacting in Central America and the reality of the heedless, cheerful life that so many people in New York were leading. If one place was reality, the other place could not be reality.
And naturally the most sickening aspect of the disjuncture was the fact that we in the U.S. were benefitting from the violent and wretched world we had fostered in Central America. No degree of outrage would have been sufficient, but in fact there was very little attention directed to the matter at all.
The second time we went to Salvador, we met these absolutely charming young Americans—I think they were Methodists—bringing medicine to areas of violent conflict. They said to us, Why did you come back? You know this situation—you don't have anything more to learn here. And we said, It's just easier, it's more comfortable to be here than to try to live with this in New York or even discuss it at a dinner party there. And they said, That's why we're here, too.
In your story "Holy Week," an American travel writer, in order to deal with the disjunction between his American life and the lives he's witnessing in Central America, says, Sure the world is unjust, but we'd be ingrates if we didn't enjoy being on the winning side. His girlfriend doesn't buy that, so she just throws a little guilt-fueled tantrum. Have you found other ways to respond to the knowledge that your nice life and their poverty-stricken ones are not unconnected?
The way to respond is to be as much of an activist as you can be, in whatever way you can be.
But that's not what I've chosen to spend most of my time on, and naturally, if I'm going to spend my time writing fiction rather than, say, lying down in the path of a proposed tar-sands pipeline, and if I'm going to use my share, or more than my share, of the world's resources to lead this pleasant writer's life, I'm going to want to think there's some value in it—if not in what I myself write, at least in writing in general.
Perhaps I should be more suspicious of my belief that there is inherent value in literature. It could be pure, self-serving, soft-brained romanticism, the belief that probing the most delicate and subtle areas of the mind by, say, listening to music or reading, will develop what is human in you. There are abundant examples of reactionary, loony, virulently prejudiced artists and art lovers, so one can hardly insist that art is definitively good for the brain. But I believe that a lack of art is really bad for the brain. Art, itself, is inherently subversive. It's destabilizing. It undermines, rather than reinforces, what you already know and what you already think. It is the opposite of propaganda. It ventures into distant ambiguities, it dismantles the received in your brain and expands and refines what you can experience.
There's a fair amount of politics in your stories. Do you feel some political purpose when you write?
You know, we've been sitting here, using this word politics—but what do we mean by it? Let's say we mean social mechanisms, and systems of social mechanisms, that sort out who gets treated how. Well, every writer— everybody—has implicit views of the way people are related to one another through such systems. And those views are inevitably going to be expressed in a piece of fiction.
And if we mean by politics specific events that have occurred in reality, then yes, it's true that my fiction is set in a real, rather than in an invented, world. I, for example, am one of the many writers who portrayed in fiction some of the consequences of the destruction of the World Trade Center. It was a very defining, very altering event, and a shared experience. It would have been highly artificial, and in fact programmatic, to set a story in the United States—particularly in New York—at that time without at least acknowledging it.
Fiction is an excellent way to explore the relationships between people and their contexts. But any real exploration of those relationships is not going to be at all doctrinaire. It's not the purpose or practice of fiction writers to polemicize. On the contrary, fiction might be the most unfettered way to go excavating for evidence of real human behavior and feeling. And if you keep your hands off them, your characters are bound to demonstrate the workings of the world in ways that take you by surprise.
So to answer your question, no, using fiction to support a preexisting idea, about politics or about anything else, is not going to produce something that's valid, and it certainly is not going to produce anything that's interesting. But it's inevitable that your work will express your view of life— and that's desirable.
I used to rant and rail all the time about our national cultural hypocrisy and self-deception—the endless yattering about spreading democracy and our wonderful values and being a model culture, and so on. That just drove me insane. But then as soon as the pictures of torture in Abu Ghraib became public, there was an instantaneous adjustment. There were a couple of weeks of horror, and then we Americans immediately and with great equanimity— even alacrity—exchanged the idea that we were a high-minded and beneficent nation for the idea that we were sadists who tortured people in order to steal their resources.
Well, it turns out I liked it much better the old way, when we were self-deceiving hypocrites. And in retrospect, one can see that although the transition appeared to take only a few weeks, it was being prepared for some years, and by the time it was manifest, we had become very ready to embrace the image of ourselves as ruthless and punitive, as a nation that will assassinate its own citizens, that is willing to kill robotically by drones, that rejects hard-earned instruments of justice, like trials. That is, events that had occurred in the public sphere since 2001 became private events, too, and they were imprinting themselves on our souls in one way or another.
My point is that I wasn't conscious of what I was seeing at the time, and yet that period of transition is what permeates my last collection, Twilight of the Superheroes. In fact, obviously, it determined the title. I was living with baffling phenomena and writing stories about other people who were, too.
When you sit down to write, you don't start with a political point or idea. What do you start with?
I never start with anything.
I once heard Colson Whitehead say that he liked to write fiction because he liked to make things up, and it occurred to me that I hate to make things up. Or maybe I like to make things up, but I hate the feeling that I'm making something up. Until something I've written has the status of memory to me, it's just not in any way finished. It has to feel as though a totality that was hidden from me is being revealed. The whole thing has to all work at once.
So at a certain moment, near the end of the process, you see it all at once?
At the very end. I never know whether something is going to work until the last word of the last line of the last draft. Well, to be accurate, it's not the last draft. It's what I think is the last draft. Generally, after I've finished what I think is the last draft, it occurs to me to wonder why I've written the thing in the first place, and then I'm able to write what is really the last draft. But just toward the end of what will turn out to be the penultimate draft, there's a feeling that everything is rushing toward something—turning into an arrow headed at a target.
That must feel fantastic.
Oh, it does. It takes me a long, long time to write a story. There was a three-year hiatus between my last book and my first subsequent story. I just couldn't do anything of any interest during all that time. So most of the time, it's just maddening to sit there. But there are a couple of great weeks toward the end with each story.
So you hate making things up, but you have to start somewhere. How does that usually work for you?
I hardly know, myself. I can't explain it, I can't account for it. I don't feel that I have what people mean by an imagination, but when you fall asleep, your dream doesn't start by scratching its head and saying, Oh, no! I can't think of anything to dream!
Do your stories begin in observation?
I'm incredibly unobservant. I'm always amazed when people notice things and ask questions. Apparently I do take in a certain amount of information, but I don't know where it goes. It certainly doesn't seem to go to my brain.
It only reveals itself to you when you're tinkering with words?
Exactly. Although sometimes it reveals itself to me when I open my mouth.
I think it's essential to manifest yourself outward somehow. One of the crimes of our time is the way we consolidate resources on people who don't need them rather than educating people—I don't mean indoctrinating people, but educating people, so they can extrapolate their humanity, because that is the pleasure of being alive.
And yet you resisted that pleasure for many years.
Even now I have a huge resistance to getting to work, perhaps because my body knows how exhausting and shaming it's going to be. I don't want to go through the shame and the exhaustion! I mean this obviously cannot be true for most people who write.
Why not?
I have friends who are much more fluent, who write much more easily—certainly who write much more copiously. It's infuriating to be so constricted.
How do you overcome your resistance?
Either you have to quit for good or you have to tough it out. That's the choice. You have to be patient.
And eventually your fingers move?
Yes, it's like a Ouija board. I write down some little thing, and then eventually something comes out of that, or doesn't. I'm just trying to get down one accurate sentence and then another accurate sentence. And most of my time is spent rearranging the little counters in the sentence. And then the little counters on the page, and then the little counters in the whole.
But there is nothing in my mind when I'm writing until I'm well along in a piece. Until then I have no ideas, no conscious feeling. I'm a person with virtually no feelings.
What do you mean by that? I've seen you laugh and cry and . . . What do you mean by that?
Oh, that's some other . . . aspect. Not the aspect of me that writes.
So there you are, dragging along your pencil, and . . .
You write something and there's no reality to it. You can't inject it with any kind of reality. You have to be patient and keep going, and then, one day, you can feel something signaling to you from the innermost recesses. Like a little person trapped under the rubble of an earthquake. And very, very, very slowly you find your way toward the little bit of living impulse. Of course, many writers manage to condense the process, but things accrue reality through all the millions of unconscious operations that go into writing.
Once you've caught a scent of that little bit of life, what then?
Then I have a big mess on my hands for quite some time. So I ask, What is this and what is this and what is this? I go about things as a hamster would— That's good, I want this little piece of straw. That's bad, get it out of the nest. Somehow I have a feeling, Well, this applies in some way. I may not know how, and I may not know why, but I can tell that here's something connected to something central.
I'm putting this into words, but I never remember when I've finished something how things began to take. But it is a kind of taking, a kind of quickening.
Your stories are so precise, it's hard for me to imagine you don't feel some control of the process.
I have a feeling of strict control over certain elements. I want the ambiguity of reality, but I don't want any linguistic ambiguity or intellectual ambiguity. To me, an objective is to convey the most ethereal possible experience with the greatest possible clarity. To reach in both directions.
So if something's unclear in the sentence, I'm going to purify it. And I can tell if something's irrelevant. The world is mysterious, everything that happens is mysterious, and you can't begin to approach mystery without absolute crystal clarity. Over the clarity of expression I have control. I make the words as amenable to understanding as I possibly can so that the true mysteries can fill up the pages.
For many of your characters—because they're children or emerging from trauma—the world is especially mysterious. What is familiar to most of us is new to them. What do characters who are ignorant of convention do for you? Why are you drawn to them?
I think of fiction as a kind of inquiry into what it is to be a human and what it is to be a human now. And my constant task, in my life as well as my writing, is to try to discard layers of obfuscation. If I start out with a character who is somewhat unencumbered by the received, I can start farther along.
Most of the process of writing for me is discarding things. I think, Just get rid of this, just tear it to the ground and start with something more fundamental, vital, and unformulated. Really try to see what's in front of you. I spend most of my time trying to tear away banalities.
There are an infinite number of ways to deceive oneself. You tear down one veil, and you think, Ah, the whole world lies right beyond this. But no—there's just another veil and then another veil after that. It's boring and stupid and clichéd, and the thing behind it is also boring and stupid and clichéd. So you try to improve on that and . . .
By the tenth generation maybe it's not so boring and stupid anymore. This process you describe of peeling back the layers of cliché makes me wonder if you regard writing as a spiritual practice in any way.
I've never known what is meant by "spiritual." That's a door that seems to be closed to me. When I sit down to work, I'm just trying to get one little thing right. So I suppose in that regard I do consider it a practice. But I don't have more far-reaching goals in mind at all. Just, let's get this little thing right.
But I think what you face when you try to strip away the veils is quite frightening. Because you're disclosing your own impulses, interests, and needs to yourself, and that can be truly sickening. You might find that what passionately interests you is watching a character go to Gristedes and pick up a package of Ring Dings. And you think, I can't really be interested in that. I can't really want to use up a piece of paper on that. But you can't get away from it. The prospect of facing one's own inanity is terrifying.
Is it the terror of one's own inanity, or is it the terror of what's not inane, what is challenging and upsetting?
Of course one fears that if one turns that tiny key a quarter of a turn in the lock, out will shoot flames and brimstone. But I'm not sure that you can distinguish between your own challenging, upsetting, obliterating demons and your own unchallenging, mundane, obliterating shallowness. When one writes, there's the double horror of discovering not only what it is that one so fears but also the triviality of that fear.
Has writing gotten any less difficult over time?
When you start writing, your incredulity at the childish, incompetent, graceless thing that you've done is shattering. One of the advantages of having experience as a writer—and there aren't many, in fact I can't think of any other—is that you know you can make the horrible thing better, then you can make it better again, then you make it better again. And you may not be able to make it good, but at least it's not going to be what you're looking at now.
Are there ways in which writing becomes harder with time?
Yes. Most ways. But I don't think it's actually age related, I think it's experience related. For one thing, once you've accomplished a certain thing, it's not available to be done again—you've dispatched it. You have new aspirations to fill the gap, but they're bigger aspirations.
Does writing a novel interest you?
That doesn't seem particularly congenial to me. Apparently, it's my aesthetic to want to make things that are oblique, glancing, ephemeral. Of course, there's a certain—rarely acknowledged but definite—attitude of condescension directed towards short fiction, as if nothing of real importance could be conveyed in less than x number of pages. I've certainly been made to feel that stories are a kiddie form, appropriate to women, as if stories were the equivalent of knitting socks for the men, who are out in the mines, actually doing something.
Sometimes I've felt that I should write a novel rather than a story because I'm just so exhausted and the fixed costs for a story are exactly the same as for a novel—you have to contrive a whole world each time. So, after all, it would be easier than writing a collection of stories. But that doesn't seem like a very interesting criterion to me—would it be easier? Even though I complain about the difficulty of writing, I actually don't want it to be easy. I want it to be something that I can't do. I want to be able to do something that I am not able to do.
To be serious, though, writing anything presents its own difficulties and of course writing a novel would feel every bit as insurmountable as writing a collection of stories.
But my stories are getting more complicated, or complex. They encompass more than they used to, because my aspirations have grown.
What are your aspirations?
That's something I can't entirely know. But I do know that I want to make a reader feel something that cannot be put into words, even though that feeling comes out of the words.
The stories of Katherine Mansfield were very important to me when I was a child. My parents owned a book of her stories that had big print and beautiful line drawings, and I thought it was a children's book. The stories were like mist, and I read them over and over. And the magic property of these Katherine Mansfield stories is that when you read them, even as an adult, you think, Now how did the words cause me to have that experience? I've just had an uncanny experience of enormous depth, but I can't see what it has to do with the words.
One of the best things about my adolescence was a movie theater in Chicago called the Clark Theatre. I used to sneak into the city with friends to go there. It showed the great European and Japanese movies, the Italian neorealists and the nouvelle vague and every movie you'd want to see, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. I must have seen Breathless fifteen times. Watching those movies I realized you could have simultaneous lines—the score, the visuals, the screenplay. It was counterpoint in a narrative form.
I'm just using polyphony as an analogy here. Let's say there are two musical lines, a treble and a bass line, that you're hearing simultaneously. You're experiencing each one, but you're also experiencing what's happening between them. Each line has complete integrity, but the space between them, the harmonic relationship, is just as critical an element, and it's that tension, the way it all works together—that is what is uncannily exciting. How I would love to be able to do something like that! I would love to make some experience for the reader that entails the words and could not be made with other words, but that is much more, and other, than what the words are. And I would love to make some experience that creates all kinds of reverberations between different elements.
Do you think of the thing that happens to a reader as something you control with the words or as something they bring to the words?
On one hand, I'd like to control the experience of the reader very tightly. But on the other hand, I want the reader to be making the experience along with me. And I'm sure that's one reason I have very few readers. A lot of people read to have somebody else tell them exactly what to do with their minds. Not that I don't enjoy reading in that way myself. Right now, I'm reading Trollope's The Way We Live Now, which couldn't be more enthralling, but it's nothing other than what it is. Reading it, I'm experiencing the great joy of excellent narrative. But as a writer, I don't have that much interest in narrative. Well, I am interested in narrative, of course, but I like to subordinate it. Or even to pry it out of the piece of paper so it just leaves its tracks—its shape, its motion. For me, a narrative is an expedient to get to something else.
Tell me more about the reader's role.
A piece of fiction is a communication. You're sending an urgent message in a bottle from your desert island. You hope that somebody's going to find the bottle and open it and say, S ... O ... X? No. S ... O ...
But the message that is found cannot be exactly the message you've sent. Whatever bunch of words the writer transmits requires a person, a consciousness on the other end, to reassemble it. You know how it feels when you read something that opens up a little sealed envelope in your brain. It's a letter from yourself, but it's been delivered by somebody else, a writer.
Nothing is more fortifying than learning that you have a real reader, a reader who truly responds both accurately and actively. It gives you courage, and you feel, I can crawl out on the branch a little further. It's going to hold.


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|Harvard at George Mason
|April 13/14, 2018
|7 p.m./3 p.m.
|Recreation and Athletic Complex
|Live Stats
|Harvard at George Mason
|George Mason All-Access
|Harvard trails, 10-13
|Last Meeting
|L, 0-3 (Feb. 12, 2017)
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. – The Harvard men's volleyball team is set to wrap up the regular season this weekend, April 13-14, with a pair of conference matches at George Mason. First serve on Friday is set for 7 p.m., while Saturday's contest is slated to begin at 3 p.m. Both matches will be available to watch on George Mason All-Access.
Last Time Out
Harvard earned a pair of significant conference wins this weekend against Princeton and NJIT to remain in second place in the EIVA standings. A balanced attack led the Crimson past the Tigers on Friday, 3-2, as three Harvard players tallied double-digit kills. Matthew Ctvrtlik recorded his fifth double-double of the season with a team-best 28 assists and 12 digs.
The Crimson extended its win streak to six matches Saturday night against NJIT, sweeping the Highlanders in three sets. Harvard posted its highest team attack percentage of the season, outhitting NJIT .500 to .274. The seniors shined on senior night as Brad Gretsch knocked down double-digit kills for the 11th time this season and Marko Kostich posted a season-high .778 hitting percentage.
Scouting George Mason
George Mason currently sits atop the EIVA standings with an 11-1 record, recently coming off its lone conference loss of the season to Penn State last weekend. The Patriots top the league in both kills (1108) and assists (1028), while sophomore Hayden Wagner leads the EIVA in kills per set at 3.60. The Crimson attack will go up against Johnny Gomez who has registered 2.59 digs per set and Bryce Gatling who has put up 1.00 blocks per set at the net. A weekend sweep for the Crimson will allow Harvard to host the 2018 EIVA Championship Tournament, while one or two wins for George Mason will mean the Patriots will play host.
We Want Moore
Senior co-captain Riley Moore has dominated for the Crimson on attack this season. The 6-5 middle blocker leads the EIVA in hitting percentage at .448, good for third in the nation. Moore has registered hitting percentages over .600 in eight matches this season when tallying seven or more kills. On top of this, the Santa Monica, Calif. native has recorded zero errors in six matches when hitting above .400.
Earning his second player of the week honor this season, Moore was tabbed the EIVA Offensive Player of the Week and the Off the Block/Molten National Middle Attacker of the Week on April 2 after registering 24 kills and hitting .784 between the two matches.
Coaches' Corner
Head coach Brian Baise is in the midst of his 10th season at the helm of the Harvard men's volleyball program this weekend. Baise owns a 112-96 record on the sidelines, including an 87-58 record over the past six seasons.
Six-Year Streak
For six-years straight, the Harvard men's volleyball team has received the American Volleyball Coaches Association Team Academic Award. As one of 19 collegiate men's programs in the nation to earn the award, the team compiled for a top-five GPA among all men's programs.
Ivy League Network
The Ivy League Network returns for a fifth season as the home for all live streaming and on-demand video content for each of the conference's eight institutions. Broadcast in full HD and featuring a live score bug and play-by-play and color commentary, the Ivy League Network provides fans with unprecedented access to the Ancient Eight.
Multiple subscription options are available to fans, including school-specific and league-wide passes. To learn more about the Ivy League Network or to sign-up today, click here.
What's Next?
The Crimson will prep for the EIVA post-season playoffs, April 19 and 22. The host of the tournament will be determined after this weekend's matches. A sweep will allow Harvard to host the 2018 EIVA Championship Tournament, while one or two wins for George Mason will mean the Patriots will play host.

subset: commoncrawl


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Hollande celebrates 60th amid love life rumours
François Hollande was due to spend his 60th birthday yesterday at a "mystery location" in southeastern France, as rumours continued to swirl over his love life following speculation - hotly denied - that he intends to marry actress Julie Gayet.
Since the start of the month, France's Socialist president had been officially on holiday at La Lanterne, an 18th century country residence for presidents and prime ministers at Versaille, which boasts a swimming pool and tennis court.
But the Elysée Palace let it be known yesterday that he had discreetly moved down South for his birthday at an undeclared location in Provence with his "family" - including his four children, Thomas, Clémence, Julien and Flora.
The mystery birthday celebrations came weeks after speculation that Mr Hollande intended to wed Miss Gayet, 42, on his birthday after calls for the French president to clarify his status.
Revelations of Mr Hollande's affair with Miss Gayet made headlines around the world in December, prompting the president to end his relationship with Valérie Trierweiler, 49, the following month.
In recent weeks, party leaders were reportedly concerned that if he failed to formalise his relationship with the actress, the constant rumours could overshadow the Socialists' 2017 election campaign. Closer magazine, which first revealed the president's secret night-time trysts with the actress, then reported that the couple had resumed their "love story", claiming earlier reports that their affair was over had been planted.
Last week, however, Voici, another glossy, published images of Miss Gayet on a beach in Corsica with another man, believed to be finance management lawyer Pierre Puybasset. The magazine said the actress stayed five days before returning to Paris.
Miss Gayet had enjoyed a "holiday of love" on the Mediterranean island, according to Atlantico, a news website. Mr Hollande poured more cold water on rumours of impending marriage by telling French journalists: "The only event I know about on August 12 is my birthday.
No need to bring presents, gifts or sugared almonds." One "old friend" said that the president was far happier leaving his complicated love life behind for the bachelor life.
(© Daily Telegraph London)
Irish Independent


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Alongside our café provision, we wish to promote healthy eating and ensure that meals in our staff dining areas are priced in a way that favours healthier options.
Various meal deals and new products will be promoted here:
Value For Money Meal Deals – Available from February 2016 in staff dining areas only
New Products
Pasta, Rice and Noodle Pots
A selection of healthy eating pasta, rice and noodle pots will be trialled in Stobhill and New Victoria staff dining areas in late Spring 2016.
All sauces are low in fat, salt and sugars and comply with healthy living award criteria.
Would you like to keep up to date with local health news from us?


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Living in Sunderland, which is the north east of England, really limits you when it comes to catching pike. I either have to travel 2 to 3 hours South to the Lake District or 2 to 3 hours North to the Scottish Borders. It was the Scottish Borders where I served my piking apprenticeship.
When I think back to those days, which were only a few years back, I still feel excited. We would pass loch after loch and I wanted to fish them all. I reckon I've probably wet a line in most of them now.
We always had a little boat which was perfectly suited to fishing these waters. The majority of the time, due to rules on the waters, we used an electric outboard. This set up suited us, as most of our boat fishing was done in the spring and Autumn were we could trolled and lure fish on the drift. We didn't dead bait so much from the boat then, I think we were too impatient. We just wanted action and fast action.
In the early days a 6lb fish was an achievement, even if it was on heavy tackle. As we learned more and more, we lightened our tackle and were catching a dozen or so jacks on a loch each. We would then move lochs and catch a few more. I think my record for one day, number wise is 22 jacks to lures.
We were fairly content initially but my mind soon begun to wonder. I had hit early success in my piking adventure and landed two 20 lb + pike in two visits to a particular loch. So this deluded me slightly were I thought catching specimen pike regularly was going to be easy.
For the following winter season we upgraded our boat, initially we viewed a Bontwicho 15' and purchased a 12' cathedral hulled foam filled dory type. Naturally we were eager to test this new boat out. We headed up to Scotland for an overnight bivvy session. I think the first day there was a breeze on the water and with only a Minn Kota electric motor fitted to the boat, due to the rules, we opted to bank fish instead.
I think we had a few jacks, the biggest being around 7lb. But the following morning my fishing partner, Ian was excited. Ian loved being afloat and fishing with lures and today it was flat calm.
By 2pm we had thrashed the water with lures but without any fish being landed. At this point the fish finder almost went black with fish. I thought this could be the bream shoal that the water was reputed for. I cast a heavy jerk bait through them the shoal a few times without success as I thought big pike would be following the bream picking off the weak and injured. Nothing took the lure, the water has also a reputation for big perch having caught one over 2.5lb before. So I then fitted a small 9cm Rapala lure on my UL outfit and cast out. I had a hit immediately and it was solid, a big pike had taken the tiny lure.
The fight started and every time I got the pike close to the boat it powered off taking lots of line off the small match type reel. When I got the pike along side the boat it looked as if it was almost half the length of the boat. This is when I started getting anxious. This water had produced a 30lb pike and I thought this was it. There was one problem though, it was lightly lip hooked by a size 10 treble and I struggled to move it until it tired. Eventually Ian netted it. The pike was very long with a huge head, but was just over 23 lb and I was ecstatic. I couldn't believe I landed it on such light gear.
The fight started and every time I got the pike close to the boat it powered off taking lots of line off the small match type reel. When I got the pike along side the boat it looked as if it was almost half the length of the boat. This is when I started getting anxious. This water had produced a 30lb pike and I thought this was it. There was one problem though, it was lightly lip hooked by a size 10 treble and I struggled to move it until it tired. Eventually Ian netted it. The pike was very long with a huge head, but was just over 23 lb and I was ecstatic. I couldn't believe I landed it on such light gear.
It was shortly after this where Ian suggested we fish Lake Windermere. The border lochs were being pressured and we were finding set lines and blatant poaching. I was right up for Windermere and me being me, started the research. I posted on forums, spoke to anglers who had fished it. All I got was negativity, "I've fished it for years biggest fish 15lb". "I blanked my first 10 visits" I wasn't fazed, I wanted a Windermere 20, after all the water held them.
Ian suggested we hired a boat, he then suggested we hired a guide. After all Windermere is England's largest lake of over 11 miles long. Through the old P&P forum I stumbled across Eric Hopes name and I called him and arranged a date back end of November. We agreed to meet Eric at 9am at a jetty on the north side of Windermere. Initially myself and Ian were disappointed "9 o'clock, that's half the day gone" we we're die hard anglers, very much used to setting off before 5am and even as early as 2.30am. So we set off at 4am and arrived before 7am with our lure rods ready. We found a long jetty and started launching the lures out, I remember using a favourite lure at the time, a Salmo perch. I'd caught everywhere with this lure and I had a hit straight away but missed it. I had another hit and landed a small jack. I'd caught my first pike on Windermere after only 10 minutes or so. Ian also had a hit and I had another but we never managed to land any more pike.
Eric then arrived in the Beagle, we loaded up and off we went. He had a huge outboard and blasted us to the first location, he anchored up and 5 dead bait rods were out, 2 for Ian, 2 for me and 1 for Eric. After an hour or so Eric indicated it was time to move. Ian twitched his bait, stopped and his float went under. He was in to the first fish. Eric netted Ian's first Windermere pike, which weighed just under 9lb, although looking at the photo it looks huge. Eric mastered camera angles. We then headed south, trolled a bit which was maybe our idea and settled on the last location. As we were beginning to lose light my float went under. Not having so much boat and float experience I wound down, felt the resistance of the cuddy and struck against it. The pike was on and I started t0 reel in the fish, just as Eric was about to net it the fish shook the hooks. I felt a bit red faced but hey ho I'd just lost a pike of around 18lb. We then head back and Eric was supportive of our custom and his words were he was pleased to be out with 2 nice anglers who didn't put him under the usual pressure, this comment remains with me.
The second time I fished Windermere was probably a bit of a gamble as we were not really prepared for such a massive water. Even though it was a flat calm day in September. We launched the dory complete with 2.5hp engine. It wasn't winter and we adopted the tactics of the Scottish lochs. Looking back now this was a bit naive even if we didn't stray far off the bank. Initially when we changed from the electric motor to the mariner 2.5hp outboard our catch rate dropped. We had a few blanks on the river and up Scotland. However we were back to trolling lures on the mighty lake Windermere. We fished hard all day and eventually a Windermere pike took my trolled shallow invader lure in 10' of water. The pike was a stunning mid double and I was a happy piker and thought I'd made up for losing the pike with Eric a year prior to this catch.
We wanted to concentrate more on Windermere and the following year we bought a 17' Wilson flyer with a 30hp engine, the 2.5hp engine was promoted to back up auxiliary engine. This purchase was made in April 2013 so we intended to fish Windermere properly during the 2013 winter. At this point I'd only fished Windermere twice.
I work offshore so miss large chunks of home life, that of course doesn't stop Ian. He loves this boat and was out every opportunity. On the sea, on the river and Windermere. He had a few overnighters on Windermere, using the boat with his dad or alone. I was of course on the end of the phone envious of his position whilst I was stuck working offshore. This was the summer and maybe Autumn of 2013. Ian from memory had a low and mid double, the bigger fish on a Mepps spinner.
We never made Windermere together during 2013 due to other commitments.
It was February 2014, I was coming to the end of my offshore leave. There were big pike being caught all over Facebook and the forums. I knew Ian was planning to fish Windermere the following week. It was Sunday and I was due to leave the house at 6am Wednesday morning. I approached my wife "darling" can I fish Tuesday. She agreed and I text Ian, he and his dad were up for it. So we planned Windermere the following Tuesday. Due to the launch we used not opening until 9am I agreed to be at Ian's for 6am.
I was at Ian's bang on 6am and his dad arrived at the same time. The boat sat there looking a bit neglected as it hadn't been used for a good few months.
We hitched the boat up to my car and head off to the lakes. It normally takes around 2.5 hours with the boat so a 5 hour round trip. We were at the launch before it opened and had everything prepared ready to go for 9am. My research of this lake never stopped, it was like an obsession I studied the lake maps and catch results. I don't know why but after fishing this water twice I thought I knew it. It was winter and very cold and I knew the depth fish were coming out, I knew where they were heading to spawn. Or at least I thought I did. This was the same with a few waters I worked on, sometimes I looked an expert and I give advice to people on the forum, then I would tell them I've only fished the place a few times. I'm not sure if this is a good thing or not but I devoted a lot of time to learning and my passion has evolved over the years.
With this in mind Ian and I knew where we were heading. Ian had his thoughts and I had mine. We both settled on a place to anchor up. Anchoring was difficult as the weather was wild this day. Every time we went to anchor we drifted off position. We tried again and again as each time we weren't happy as we anchored in the wrong place. Eventually the boat held in my spot and I proceeded to put my rods together. I had 2 x loch tamers ready with big floats and quick releases so all I had to do was attach a 4oz lead and a trace. I baited up with a large herring and a mackerel and took the front spot of the boat. This left Ian and his dad the full back deck for their 3 rods. Ian spent more time messing around getting his dad sorted after he managed a few tangles but I was fishing and watching my floats.
Once we had the baits in the water we decided to stick it out here due to the hassle of anchoring. It was after a few hours when my float went under, I struck into a fish and began winching it up. When it broke the surface we knew it was a good fish as it took off. The first time Ian went to net it he missed and the fish took off again. Ian has never missed a fish before and the fish I lost with Eric went through my mind. Eventually it was netted. We sent Ian's dad into the cuddy so we could unhook the fish. Ian weighed the fish and it went 21 lb exactly. It was a short but solid, fat fish and I was ecstatic. Three times of fishing this vast water and I had achieved what I wanted, a Windermere 20+.
I have so many targets now and waters I want to master, I haven't pike fished the years most pikers have who will be reading this and a low twenty is still a dream fish to me.
I have so many targets now and waters I want to master, I haven't pike fished the years most pikers have who will be reading this and a low twenty is still a dream fish to me.
James Potts aka JimK2


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Sunday, December 30, 2012
Sunday inspiration
Today's video inspiration features a portrait created entirely from push pins—15,000 of them, to be exact! It took several weeks for the artists to create the portrait, and the result is amazing!
In the second video, the artists talk about their process and what happened behind the scenes, which is also pretty fascinating. Enjoy!
18 comments:
Geez, it makes my complaining about painting the laundry room seem so whiny by comparison.ReplyDelete
Very cool! In Rotorua, New Zealand there is a Jelly Belly store at the top of the tram...there are pictures made from Jelly Belly Jelly Beans- Starry Starry Night, Mona Lisa and a few others- amazing!ReplyDelete
Happy New Year!
- Replies
Wow. That is an incredible amount of patience to do that!ReplyDelete
Wow ... where would anyone come up with an idea like that?ReplyDelete
and I agree...patience and sore thumbs!
Happy New Year Dana!
Thanks for sharing - this is really incredible! The end result is just like looking at a photograph.ReplyDelete
oh my gosh! I love the unusual talent you find and post!!!ReplyDelete
It's amazing how much our eyes and minds can fill in what we can't actually see or isn't even there. It's kind of like those sentences that are typed all crazy but you can read them because your mind just fills in what isn't really there with what is familiar. In this case we just fill in a human face. Awesome!! :)ReplyDelete


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How I got here:
I have spent 7 years working with post-conflict and displaced communities in Latin America and the Middle East, particularly with young people at risk of violence and conflict with the law. I'm a graduate of Tufts University and University College London and hold degrees in International Relations and Social Cognition. Since my time as an undergraduate, working with former guerrilla combatants in Guatemala, I have known that my passion lies at the intersection of conflict and cognition, in the space where the violent realities of international politics meet with our deeply held beliefs, schemas, and psychological profiles.
After a brief stint at the World Economic Forum, I worked for three years as an Emergency Response Coordinator in Za'atri Refugee Camp in Jordan, leading various projects on violence reduction, youth leadership, and alternative education with some of the strongest people I'll ever know. Following my time in Za'atri, I pursued my graduate education as a Fulbright Scholar at University College London, and continued to work with Syrian refugees across various stages of their migration journey—from Greece, to Germany, to Canada, and the United States—conducting research on the links between forced displacement, belonging, psychology, and social behavior, and assisting in the design of programs that promote trauma-informed approaches to inclusion, participation, and violence prevention.
What I do now:
I'm a researcher, technical consultant, and program designer, and currently wear several hats, including as an Innovation Fellow for Beyond Conflict and as a Head Researcher for Between Borders. As an independent consultant, I leverage my technical expertise in social cognition, social neuroscience, mental health, and participatory community development to more deeply understand and engage the links between brain, mind, and behavior in contexts of forced displacement, trauma, and violence, especially among young people. You can explore some current and past projects.
For a bit more about my work in Za'atri Camp and before, please refer to my LinkedIn profile here
**The front cover photo is of a story handwritten by a young Syrian refugee in Za'atri Refugee Camp. The story chronicles the journey of a young king who reigns over a village with high walls, surrounded by a desert filled with wolves and monsters. The king spends his time, each night, sneaking outside the walls, planting trees and digging wells, trying to find a way to engage the "hostile" territory and create a garden for the city residents to finally leave the gates and explore the world beyond.**


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Moose rentals, vacation homes direct from the owners
You will find many studios, apartments, houses and villas for your vacations in Moose. Contact the owners directly on the IHA site and enjoy the best rental rates, promotions and last minute deals that meet your budget. Visit the photo gallery on private rentals for a break with family or friends. All vacation listings on IHA are verified, plan your trip to Moose with absolute confidence!
Unusual ! Caidal Tent for rent near Moose for 1 person
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Sunday sees the return of the Oscars, a chance for Hollywood's elite to reaffirm that people do indeed like them, really really like them, and maybe pick up an award or two.
Sticking with our lifelong policy of "everything's better when there's money on it", Londonist has laid out a significant amount of its meagre earnings on what we hope will be the best dogs in show.
Before we get to the choices, we should give you a glimpse into our, not particularly well thought out or historically succesful, gambling theories.
First up, we don't bet on favourites. If we wanted a low return on investment we'd get a high interest savings account. High risk, high return. Oh yes.
We made an exception for The Incredibles purely because we loved the bits with the car, and also, in the same way we never bet on Manchester United winning, any money gained from a result for the execrable Shrek 2 would be tainted.
We think Foxx will get passed over for the Best Actor but get the sympathy vote for best supporting, and 25/1 is just too tempting. Scorsese will probably get best director but the odds are crap and whilst the technical achievement was great, and people peeing into bottles is normally a winner with us, we genuinely think Sideways was better.
Ah yes, Sideways. This is the cinematic basket into which Londonist is cramming many of it's cash filled eggs. Sure, it's resulted in people we know becoming prone to "amusing" outbursts abusing Merlot, but it's a class film and we think it will have generated a lot of goodwill amongst the voters tired of hearing how this is Scorsese's year.
So it breaks down like this:
Best Actor
Don Cheadle (Hotel Rwanda)25/1
Best Actress
Imelda Staunton (Vera Drake)8/1
Best Actor in a Supporting Role
Jamie Foxx (Collateral)25/1
Best Actress in a Supporting Role
Natalie Portman (Closer)9/2
Best Director
Alexander Payne (Sideways)14/1
Best Film
Best Foreign Film
Downfall (Germany)8/1
Best Animated Feature
The Incredibles 1/9
Film to win most Oscars
Sideways 16/1
And although Londonist is not usually given to posting on a weekend, we will be making an exception this Sunday night/Monday morning in order to follow the coverage and post live on the ceremony. If only because we love sleep deprivation and watching people cry.
Wish us luck.


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As all our invitations are handmade, these are just some of our core ranges that are available and pricing for some key elements. Each item shown can be fully customised by changing the shape or colour but we can also start from scratch, using some of these as inspiration perhaps, and design something custom for you.
Please contact us for more information or a free consultation.
Another striking but understated design, this DL pocketfold is ice white with a gentle shiny, floral, pattern overlaid (it has to be seen to be appreciated) is very simply decorated with a narrow, white satin ribbon and a beautiful diamante bow with delicate crystal chains that adds movement and catch the light as it moves. Securely closed with a Velcro dot.
A soft sheen, ivory, square bookfold – this time decorated with a silk feel, Italian paper with a beautiful lace design called 'Flanders de Jour'. This paper is ivory with a slightly darker ivory design so the effect is subtle but gorgeous – add to that a 25mm satin ribbon (in ivory) slightly gathered to an Apple Blossom Pearl embellishment and the overall effect is just sheer class.
We love the subtle silk texture on this floral paper and the gentle rose and ivory colours. This DL pocketfold in soft sheen ivory is set of with regency rose paper, an antique pink, satin ribbon and a lovely dusk pink resin rose. The ribbon is closed at the back with Velcro so it's easy to open.
A lovely Kraft card invitation, in the shape of a square pocketfold tied with twine or ribbon, with some hidden sparkle inside. The inserts are a gentle ivory and there is a stripe of lace across the middle of the invitation enhanced by a twinkly pearl and diamante embellishment. Definitely more chic than shabby!
This design holds a special place in our hearts, being the very first order that we got and although we have come a long way, this is still very popular today. As with all our designs with tartan, if we are able to match your tartan in the ribbon then we will do – there is a huge range available. The ivory folded card is made of handmade Mulberry paper which has a rustic but soft texture, this is then decorated with tartan ribbon and a cluster of three thistles, tied with a bow. The vellum insert is printed with a celtic design top and bottom. The original and still one of the best.
This invitation is a kraft card book fold with matt ivory inserts. It is decorated with a strip of delicate ivory lace which is overlaid with a narrow hessian ribbon and a couple of lovely paper roses in a colour of your choosing – perfect for a rustic themed wedding.


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A couple of days ago I got an ad for a new book, still in beta, from the Pragmatic Bookshelf – Seven Languages in Seven Weeks: A Pragmatic Guide to Learning Programming Languages, by Bruce Tate. The book covers some key concepts in seven different languages (Clojure, Haskell, Io, Prolog, Scala, Erlang, and Ruby) over the course of seven weeks, with the discussion of each language broken up into bite-size "days" of discussion, examples, and coding assignments. The idea (which I totally buy into) is that seeing how different languages with different programming paradigms handle various problems will improve one's understanding of programming overall.
According to the author, he used an online poll to choose the languages, and then made a few tweaks – JavaScript was just too popular, Python was too like Ruby, etc. While it's not exactly the list I would have chosen – Io? Prolog? – it's a pretty buzz-worthy collection. Since I already know Python, I'm happy enough that it didn't win out over Ruby.
The seven in seven thing is sort of a gimmick, I suppose, but a darned good one. I've always liked the idea of learning different languages, both human and programming, and this will give me a framework to hit some of the programming languages I've had on my list for a while.
My plan is to post my reactions as I work through this grand tour of languages, particularly from a Python perspective. It begins with Ruby, which unsurprisingly seems pretty familiar, but then I've only covered one "day" so far.
Now if only someone will come up with a similar book for human languages that includes Hindi, Mandarin and Finnish, I'll be set for the rest of the year…


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Judicial Council completes Recommended Standards for interpreters working in court settings
October 2017, saw the launch of the Recommended National Standards for Working with Interpreters in Courts and Tribunals, published by the Judicial Council on Cultural Diversity (JCCD).
This published work is the result of two years of research and consultation, prepared by a JCCD appointed specialist committee.
The JCCD is an advisory body formed to assist the Australian courts, judicial officers and administrators, to positively respond to issues cultural diversity in Australia. The Council is composed of members drawn predominately from the judiciary, with select representation from legal and community bodies. Members are selected to balance gender, court level and represent all Australian geographical areas. Many judicial officers serving the council come from diverse cultural backgrounds.
Access to fair and equal justice is a legal and moral right in Australia, with "equality before the law," a principle of our legal system. As Australian proceedings are normally conducted in English, it has long been understood that people from non English-speaking backgrounds should be given access to interpreters, ensuring they receive fair treatment in formal processes. The system should be fair to everyone, regardless of social status, education, disability, or cultural background.
However experience in this sector indicates that there are common problems encountered with interpreters in the court system, such as;
- A lack of clarity about who is responsible for engaging an interpreter
- A lack of training by court officials in assessing the need to engage interpreters
- Interpreters and translators who may not have a suitable standard of training and qualifications.
The Hon. Wayne Martin AC, Chief Justice of Western Australia, and current Chair of the JCCD explained the reasoning behind the project, in an address to the Hellenic Australian Lawyers Association, Brisbane, 10 June 2016.
"In many areas, it will be clear beyond argument that cultural and/or linguistic differences place persons at a significant disadvantage in relation to the justice system generally," Chief Justice Martin said.
Research conducted by the JCCD into improving access for women facing cultural and linguistic challenges in the Australian Courts system, confirmed that "the effective use of interpreters by courts and tribunals shows significant deficiencies in current practices and procedures," said Chief Justice Martin.
A JCCD report on Migrant and Refugee Women's Experience of the Courts identified communication barriers as an obstacle preventing women from Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities, migrants and refugees, from interacting effectively with the courts.
The JCCD commenced a project intended to address the issues revealed by the research, and provide officers of the court, and interpreters, with a set of standards they can use as a guide to best practice.
The final work produced out of this project is the Recommended National Standards for Working with Interpreters in Courts and Tribunals, available from the resources section of the JCCD website and directly here.
Professor Sandra Hale, Professor of Interpreting and Translation, University of New South Wales and National President of AUSiT, was engaged as an expert by the JCCD, along with Hon Dean Mildren AM FRD QC, formerly a judge of the Supreme Court of the Northern Territory. The project committee included Mark Painting, CEO of NAATI, Mrs Collen Rosas, Director of the Aboriginal Interpreting Services, and Ms Magdalena Rowan, Senior Lecturer, Interpreting and Translating, TAFE SA.
"Interpreters play an essential role in the administration of justice in our linguistically diverse society," write the authors of the National Standards.
Justice Melissa Perry of the Federal Court of Australia, who chaired the project committee, spoke at the official launch about the humanitarian and legal rights to equality before tribunals, courts and the right to a fair trial.
"The difficulties of communication may be overlaid by other complex barriers to justice. For example, in the case of our indigenous peoples, factors such as intergenerational trauma and experiences of discrimination, racism and poverty impact on indigenous perspectives of the justice system. Cultural concerns may add further degrees of complexity," Justice Perry said.
"The consequences of a failure to meet the legal standard may lead to an invalid administrative decision or a miscarriage of justice with consequential delays and economic and social costs. For example, the State may have to bear the cost of a retrial, while the accused and witnesses are put through the trauma of a rehearing."
"For those with no or limited proficiency in the language of our courts and tribunals, interpreters therefore make their participation possible, and play an essential role in ensuring that justice is done and can be seen to be done in civil and criminal matters," she said.
The standards are not enforceable on any particular court but seen as a guide to best practice in the judicial system. For example in June 2017, the Queensland Courts adopted a process to fast-track access to interpreters in Family Violence situations.
The project committee explain that it is necessary to build flexibility into the recommendations. This will allow for situations where there are shortages of qualified interpreters in a particular language. For this reason, the Recommended Standards have been designed with a set of minimum standards, and optimum standards that can be applied when there is a pool of qualified interpreters available. The standards can be implemented progressively as capacity allows.
The Recommended National Standards are an in-depth tool for court officials to use; in assessing when to engage an interpreter, how to engage one, and what to expect from them in a court setting.
It also prescribes standards for interpreters such as; impartiality, confidentiality, duty to the court and the process of carrying out justice, duty of accuracy and duty of competency.
The Assistant Minister for Social Services and Multicultural Affairs, Senator Zed Seselja, spoke at the recent launch about Australia's place in the world as a diverse, prosperous and socially cohesive nation, with nearly half the population born overseas or with at least one parent who was.
"The need for qualified interpreters and translators is vital – from helping people with commercial transactions to accurately conveying critical information in a hospital intensive care setting or helping "people understand complex legal documents," Senator Seselja said.
"Engaging appropriately qualified interpreters in courts goes a long way to ensuring procedural fairness by allowing each court user, including victims and witnesses, to understand and to be understood," he said.
The launch of the Recommended National Standards for Working with Interpreters in Courts and Tribunalscoincided with the release of the JCCD's other project; the National Framework to improve accessibility to Australian Courts for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women and migrant and refugee women.
The JCCD and project committee is grateful for the support and assistance from the Migration Council of Australia (MCA).
(author: Jenna Gray, 31 Oct 2017)
Published: 31/10/2017


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The Financial Relativity Index as of October 31st shows the following:
The two changes in the index since the end of September are an increase in market risk to cautionary from green light status, and a continued degradation of the credit market indicator. I wrote at length in my previous article on the credit market signal and how the deterioration in this particular metric has forewarned many business cycle driven economic downturns, and usually is a good leading indicator of a stock market correction.
The focus of this update is on the sudden jump in market risk as measured by the Financial Relativity Index. Given the downward pattern which has formed off a new all-time high of 2190 in the S&P500 (SPX) on August 15, 2016, less than 3 months ago, there is a very good chance that the market is about to roll over into a much deeper decline for a much longer time period than it has in the previous 7 years. The perfect storm to bust the market bubble formed over the last seven years may now be in place.
Financial Relativity Index now shows escalating Market Risk
The Market Risk Index model I use as a major input in judging whether the stock market is about to correct is based on a number of technical measures. At the end of September the model did not show enough signs of an imminent breakdown, and on a scale of 1-20 showed a subdued risk of 4. However, as my last article pointed out, the Financial Force Index I utilize to gauge market risk was not in-sync with the market risk measure. The difference in the measures may have been created because many investors waited until after the end of the 3rd quarter to assess their portfolios and implement changes. In addition, the US presidential election was 6 weeks away at the end of the 3rd quarter, and the perceived odds of a major financial market change at the time was low, as Hillary Clinton was already choosing new furniture for the White House for her arrival.
However, the odds of a major disrupting financial change represented by Trump versus a more of the same Clinton presidency, appear be playing into the market odds-making machine as of early November. The election and its implication for fiscal and monetary policy, however, are not the only variables which are driving the markets increasing risk of a downturn. So, I warn investors not to be lulled into thinking the market is casting an electoral vote. The Financial Relativity Index is confirming that a a financial storm is in the works, regardless of who wins the White House.
The model as of October 31, 2016 rose to a cautionary level of 8 on a scale of 20. The model reading is in between the 50th and 72nd percentile of back dated readings reaching back to 1956 (month end data-points). The technical reason that the model changed over the past month is highlighted in red. In simple terms, the rate of change in market growth over the recent past has slowed down substantially relative to the past 12 months. When this happens, the market is saying something is changing, and usually when it changes in a negative direction as quickly as it did in the past month, that something is not good for stocks going forward.
Another concern I would note to investors at this time is that the stock market does not usually bounce off a low achieved in a previous correction, move to a new all-time high, and then show signs of a new correction, all within a 12 month time span. This rare pattern, however, is what investors presently are facing when reviewing the U.S. equity markets.
Another concern I would note to investors at this time is that the stock market does not usually bounce off a low achieved in a previous correction, move to a new all-time high, and then show signs of a new correction, all within a 12 month time span. This rare pattern, however, is what investors presently are facing when reviewing the U.S. equity markets.
Typical market recoveries post correction usually exhibit a long upward move in stocks of at least a 2-4 year time period before trouble for equities re-emerges. However, I suspect the market did not really find a fair value bottom in the last downturn. Instead, the combination of the Yellen Fed put, low energy prices, capital flowing into the U.S, from the EU and Japan due to NIRP and a mortgage sector move to free up lending requirements on mortgages gave the U.S. market life going into the 2016 Presidential election.
However, most of these market stimuli are now either waning or even turning in the opposite direction. And now the market appears to be entering a tumultuous time period, similar to the early 1970s and early 1980s in which upsurges in the stock market are followed much quicker by downturns. The analog of today to the 70s for me is interesting. Back in the 70s and early 80s the U.S. market faced high inflation, high interest rates, high rates of government spending growth and a low national debt relative to GDP - the exact opposite of today. The reversal of the economic problems in the 70s required a major fiscal and monetary policy shift, which has culminated in the U.S. ending up on the opposite end of the scale on all of the these metrics over 40 years later.
Although the times are diametrically opposite in so many ways economically, in my assessment, there is a high probability that the future path for stocks will be as tumultuous as the 70s as the extreme position of the current metrics reverse or as many say "revert to the mean". Trying to hold off the reversal with government stimulus plans and targeting interest rates as in the 1970s is likely to cause the market to be range bound for many years, with recent highs possibly being territory not approached for the next decade. For those who remember the 1970s, the S&P500 reached 118 in December of 1972. This range was not broken through on a sustained basis again until the election year of 1980. The policy remedy that reversed the high interest rate, high inflation pattern of the 1970s created a volatile time for stocks in the early 1980s. However, eventually it created a long-term sustainable framework for equity growth. I fully expect that not dealing with current low rate, low inflation, high debt economy today would end up putting stocks into a zombie-like state with more down-turns than upturns, just like the 1970s; whereas, if policy decisions are made that reverse this path, I expect a more immediate downturn, but the creation of an environment where equities can move much higher in the future.
What to look for to confirm the stock market is breaking-down
In the Financial Relativity Index model, the usual market confirmation signal of a correction is a year over year collapse in returns to investors, almost always off within 2-3 months after reaching a new all-time high. The big moves downward have typically occurred after a quick spike in the market to a new all-time high, followed within 2-3 months by a down move that puts year-over-year returns in negative territory. This signature market phenomenon is explained in detail in my book, Theory of Financial Relativity.
As of the end of October 2016 investors who bought the DOW market index (DJIA) 12 months ago made a small 2.9% return. Using the S&P500 as a measure, returns over the 12 month time period were only 2.3%. This puts the market on the cusp of the warning zone within just 3 months after achieving a new all-time high.
What I have found is that the confirmation break-point in the market typically occurs when the month end year-over-year returns turn negative. The market, because it has an upward bias through time, rarely signals negative year-over year returns for any extended period of time unless it is about to undergo a full correction of 10% or greater. I wrote an article during the beginning of the last market correction in 2015 which explained this market signal. You can read this article entitled, "Dow Sends Rare Signal at August 2015 Month End Close" here. The year over year major market return decline pattern is a trusted signal savvy investors anticipate to tell them when it is time to get out of the major US equity markets. The signal in August 2015 confirmed a correction bottom that was reached in February of 2016. The Market Risk Index in the Financial Relativity Index was in warning territory at a value of 10 in June and July of 2015 prior to the 2015 early 2016 market correction.
Based on month end close data, I estimate that the battle ground in November 2016 for whether the market is truly going to enter a major correction will be 17,720 on the DOW and 2080 on the S&P500. To signal a downturn in progress, the market needs to close below these levels and hold them through month end. The confirming signal would be a year end close below 17,425 on the DOW and 2044 on the S&P500. If the market breaks down below these levels going into year end 2016, I expect that the recent correction lows will be tested and broken, with a much deeper bottom eventually formed.
Election Cycle adding drama to a market that wants an excuse to go down
The Financial Relativity Index now shows investors are becoming uneasy with their risk adjusted year over year returns. The changing appetite for U.S. equities coincides with a US presidential election. However, investors should not confuse cause and effect. The data show that the market is responding to negative forces of change which are likely to happening regardless of the election outcome.
If Trump wins the presidency, which is now more likely than on October 25th, I expect the market to correct more quickly and deeply, as it did after the 1980 election. Such a correction would be triggered by the market pricing in the unknown effects of his proposed policy changes (or maybe just billionaires like George Soros hitting the sell button because their horse in the race to White House did not win). These policy changes, I expect, will begin to reverse the low interest rate, low inflation and high U.S. debt malaise that currently caps the US economy and by extension growth in US stock returns. Alternatively, if Clinton wins, the "more of the same" scenario for the stock market will likely resemble the range bound turmoil experience in the 1970s.
In either scenario, the intermediate term does not bode well for equity returns.


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March 20, 2014 at 12:00 pm EST | by Staff reports
Kylie release party at MOVA
MOVA Lounge (2204 14th St., N.W.) hosts a CD release party for Kylie Minogue's new "Kiss Me Once" album Saturday night.
DJs will be playing Kylie songs all night. Drink specials are $6 for bottom shelf drinks and $9 for top shelf drinks. Martinis are $3 extra.
For details, visit movalounge.com.
see video ad here: https://vimeo.com/89095670


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Uplifting quotes can change the course of your life.
The words you speak are manifested in the life you lead. If you speak words of beauty, then you will be there (India Airie, Voyage to India) in that beautiful space, steeped in tranquility.
It may sound outlandish, but speaking positive words of wisdom and words of encouragement to yourself and others can truly turn your day around.
One day turns into a week, a month, and eventually, a lifetime.
Graciously allow yourself to try it!
...to read the articles and return each day to read the quotes listed on their respective pages.
Visit these pages often and start speaking beautiful words to yourself and see where it leads you.
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