text:
[This essay, which first appeared in Brigham Young University Studies (1966), is here taken from Laurence Sterne, Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1980, pp. 201-27. Pagebreaks in the original edition are indicated as following: [201/202]. I would like thank to A. Walton Litz, Professor of English Emeritus, Princeton University, for whose seminar the essay was originally written in 1963.]
La Fosseuse's voice was naturally soft and low, yet 'twas an articulate voice — and every letter of the word whiskers fell distinctly upon the Queen of Navarre's ear-Whiskers! cried the queen, laying a greater stress upon the word, and as if she had still distrusted her ears — Whiskers; replied La Fosseuse, repeating the word a third time — There is not a cavalier, madam, of his age in Navarre, continued the maid of honour, pressing the page's interest upon the queen, that has so gallant a pair — Of what? cried Margaret, smiling — Of whiskers, said La Fosseuse, with infinite modesty. . . . 'Twas plain to the whole court the word was ruined: La Fosseuse had given it a wound, and it was not the better for passing through all these defiles — . . . the word in course became indecent, and (after a few efforts) absolutely unfit for use. The best word in the best language of the best world, must have suffered under such combinations. [Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy, pp. 344-347]
La Fosseuse endows the word with other than usual meanings by changing the context in which it appears until most unusual associations accrue to the tarnished innocence of whiskers. What La Fosseuse has done, though wittily of course, is to redefine whiskers in a way which is an implicit criticism of Locke's view of language. First of all, the passage is a commentary on Locke's assertion that "He that applies the words of any language to ideas different from those in which the common use of the country apphes them, however his own understanding may be filled with truth and light, will not by such words be able to convey much of it to others, without defining his terms. ... Standing for ideas than those they are usually annexed to ... they cannot make known the thoughts of him who thus uses them" (III, x, 29, 144). La Fosseuse has not defined his terms in the Lockean manner, yet he communicates only too well; for, as Sterne has demonstrated, the definition by context, whether it be of tone, of character, or of situation, is effective in communicating.
But the passage above also concerns the basis of Locke's view of language, that it functions as a sign for internal conceptions in order to [201/202] communicate them to the mind of another (III, i, 1, 3). This idea becomes most important when Locke demonstrates that essences, as they, are accessible to us, are not something which lies beyond us in another realm of existence, but are merely that core of mutually accepted definitions by which men designate an idea or thing. The true nature of objects and ideas, then, does not lie outside or "exist"; so that if men do not have clear ideas which are shared by others they will not have the same defitions of words, and with this confusion it would be, and foe this re often is, impossible to deal with the basic nature of theworld in man lives. Sterne in his own manner accepts this, and makes it part of his novel, but this view of language has become much transmuted before it appears in the novel's madcap action. For rather than seeing the difficul ties of definition, knowledge, and communication as a horrible form of isolation, Sterne sees them as a means to comedy which is saved from the Kafkaesque by a belief that human emotions are a strong enough force to link men — even those such as Toby and Walter Shandy — together in a nonlogical, illogical, and more-than-logical understanding. Sterne, then, having partially accepted Locke's view of words, that it is often chaotic, often abused, and often confusing because of bad definition, nevertheless sets out along his way to communicate his views and his comedy to the reader. His way is to demonstrate that words can be defined and that one can communicate by the use of connotations which are underlined by context, and in so doing he demonstrates that there are more ways to confute a philosopher than by kicking rocks.
Locke had written that
all the artificial and figurative applications of words that eloquence hath invented, are for nothing else but to insinuate wrong ideas, move the passions, and thereby mislead the judgment; and so indeed are perfect cheats. . . . They are certainly, in all discourses that pretend to inform or instruct, wholly to be avoided; and where truth and knowledge are concerned cannot but be thought a great fault. [III, x, 34, 146]
Locke believes that words can only function effectively when denotations, the definitions formulated within a purely inteflectual context, carry the burden of meaning. This denies the value of literature, which largely communicates not by denotation but by the indirect definition that the context of a dramatic situation provides. La Fosseuse, demonstrates the possibility of such definition by context, and such definition is actually implicit in Locke's view of language: Locke's view [202/203] is that because nature is only organized and hence only accessible in words which are, in turn, signs of ideas in the mind, one must go to the mind to understand what is meant when a person speaks of external reality. The minds of the speaker and the listener, then, are the contexts to which the word is related and by which it is defined (III, ix, 4, 105). Locke's attempt to define the bounds of human understanding leads to a consideration of the manner in which the mind works (Introduction, 2-4, 26-8), and, similarly, his concern with language leads to a need for knowledge of what the speaker means by a word; for each person has his own definition that is slightly different from anyone else's, and to communicate one must have, some knowledge of what a word means in the context of the other person's mind, After asking Uncle Toby where he received his wound, the Widow Wadman would certainly agree:
My uncle Toby returned into the parlour, and sat himself down again upon the sopha.
You shall lay your finger upon the place — said my uncle Toby. — I will not touch it, however, quoth Mrs. Wadman to herself.
This requires a second translation — it shews what little knowledge is gotten by more words — we must go to the first springs. [IX, xx, 624]
This second translation requires the gloss of each character's mind, for it is in this context, in this little world, that one must discover meanings for words. Sterne has produced comedy by making these contexts far more individual, far more private, far more hobby-horsical than Locke intended, and what he haqs done is to concretize an abstract idea, that is, to illustrate it and to qualify it, by bringing it from the category of words to the category of things. This placement of something from the world of abstract language in the world which represents everyday life produces an incongruity which is comic and may be, when recognizably derived from a particular source, satirical as well. A good example of Sterne's general method occurs when Trim enters the learned discussion about radical dryness and moisture:
And what conclusion dost thou draw, Corporal Trim, cried my father, from all these premises?
I infer, an'please your worship, replied Trim, that the radical moisture is nothing in the world but ditch-water — and that the radical heat, of those who can go to the expense of it, is burnt brandy — the radical heat and moisture of a private [203/204] man, an' please your honours, is nothing but ditch-water-and a dram of geneva — and, give us but enough of it, with a pipe of tobacco, to give us the spirits, and drive away the vapours — we know not what it is to fear death. [V, xl, 401-402]
That Trim should enter the discussion at all, or that he should use the scholastic term of inference, is one aspect of Trim's world encountering Walter's, but, the final encounter is the ossification of Walter's abstract idea by something from the world of existence. This reductio ad absurdum which causes or which results from the clashing of two worlds, two contexts, or two categories, is Sterne's primary comic technique, and it is, in essence, a comic extension of Locke which takes the philosopher from the world of his study into the world of action and conversation. In relation to the characters, the contexts may be those of the everyday world, those of the everyday world and a private one, or those of two private, isolated worlds, such as those in which Toby and Walter live.
Some of the finest comic scenes arise from the collision of the world of Toby and the world of Walter, but before Sterne can capitalize upon these collisions he must first establish the worlds of his characters, and he begins this early in Tristram Shandy. Hearing the noise of running feet over their heads while they are waiting for the birth of Tristram, Walter turns to Toby and asks him,
— I wonder what's all that noise, and running backwards and forwards for, above stairs. . . . — What can they be doing, brother? . . .
I think, replied my uncle Toby, taking his pipe from his mouth, and striking the head of it two or three times upon the nail of his left thumb , as he began his sentence, — I think, says he: — But to enter rightly into my uncle Toby's sentiments upon this matter, you must be made to enter first a little into his character, the outlines of which I shall just give you, and then the dialogue between him and my father will go on as well again. [I, xxi, 63]
This explanatory digression takes thirty-six pages in the Work text before we are returned to the next part of that sentence, but in that period Sterne has been able to establish Toby's hobby-horse, his modesty, and his history. Sterne sets the words of his characters firmly within the context of their personalities. In the case of Walter and Toby these personalities are isolating factors causing them to see everything in terms of the particular hobby-horse. In any conversation between these two humor [204/205] characters there is almost certain to be a lapse in communication as soon as an area of mutual hobby-horsicality is encountered.
At the one point when Walter seems to understand Toby's way of seeing things and hence appears to be communicating, it turns out, instead, that the subject of concern is not a bridge for Toby's fortifications but for his son's nose, which, along with Walter's own hobby-horse, has just been crushed by Slop's forceps — "Lead me, brother Toby, cried my father, to my room this instant" (III, xxvii, 215). And this, of course, requires the digression of fifty-eight pages which presents the world of Walter's mind and its belief in the importance of names, noses, birth, and education — all in some sense a comic commentary on both Walter and on Locke. My father
was serious; — he was all uniformity; — he was systematical, and, like all systemstick reasoners, he would move both heaven and earth, and twist and torture every thing in nature to support his hypothesis. In a word, I repeat it over again; — he was serious. [I, xix, 53]
Though he is well-meaning, this serious man's attempts to mold the world into system and pattern appear as the greatest absurdities, and, as his ossified vision continually peeps out upon the flux about him, he becomes both the target of gentle satire and the cause of comedy. Walter assures Yorick with the solemnity of science
that there is a North-West passage to the intellectual world. . . — The whole depends, added my father, in a low voice, upon the auxiliary verbs, Mr. Yorick. Had Yorick tread upon Virgil's snake, he could not have been more surprised. [V, xlii, 404]
Once again Walter's hobby-horse has thrust something of apparently minor importance into contact with something of a very different scale; and the difference in scale causes the surprise of an expectation which has been denied. The confrontation of two scales of value, of two contexts, reduces Walter's concern with auxiliary verbs to the level of absurdity. This typical reduction of an idea to absurdity by carrying it beyond its usual context derives additional force because Locke, in his chapter "Of Particles," makes much of a similar matter.
It is true that Locke was working with abstract ideas in his study and that to remove them from this context will naturally make them absurd; [205/206] and to mock them is perhaps too unfair to Locke. But one point for which Locke cannot be excused, says Sterne, is his unbalanced and unbalancing elavation of understanding above wit and emotion, when the fact of the matter is that all must always be in balance. To one who sees the world as comedy the denial of importance to wit is the more alarming, because it "has been made the Magna Carta of stupidity" (111, xx, 202), enabling those without wit and humor to claim solemn wisdom as, their realm, while Sterne, one feels, would hold that wisdom is never,, solemn. Sterne says he does not write his book for such serious ones, but he does write it with them, with Mr. John Locke and Mr. Walter Shandy. "My father, whose way was to force every event in nature into an hypothesis, by which means never man crucified TRUTH at the rate he did" (IX, xxxii, 644), tries continually to impose system on all around him, while brother Toby, who sees everything in relation to his military hobby-horse, bumblingly exposes his obsession by taking everything as though it had immediate relevance to his own world: these two men are incarnations of Locke's statements in Chapter X, Tbe Abuse of Words, and as such they fulfill our expectations, for their contexts are so personal that they cannot communicate by words. After Toby has led Walter to his room, and after Sterne has carefully provided the setting with an elaborate description of Walter's posture of grief, he has Walter break the silence as follows
Did ever man, brother Toby, cried my father, rising himself up upon his elbow, and turning himself round to the opposite side of the bed where my uncle Toby was sitting in his old fringed chair, with his chin resting upon his crutch — did ever a poor unfortunate man, brother Toby, cried my father, receive so many lashes? — The most I ever saw given, quoth my uncle Toby, (ringing the bell at the bed's head for Trim) was to a grenadier, I think in Makay's regl-' ment. — Hadiny uncle Toby shot a bullet through my father's heart, he could not, have fallen down with his nose upon the quilt more suddenly.
Bless me! said my uncle Toby. [IV, iii, 274]
Although they are aware of each other's hobby-horse, they are nevertheless so concerned with their own that they cannot communicate with words, and their Marx brothers' dialogue continually impinges the..' world, the humor, the context of the one upon the other with the resultant double-meanings and plays on word and idea. But this does not leave Walter and Toby and us in isolated boxes, ghostly Robinson Crusoes [206/207] (to quote Ryle) living within the mechanical islands of our bodies; for granted that, because no one has the same context, denotational philosophical language will, for all its occasional efficiency, be most often subject to misunderstanding. Nonetheless, human beings have two means of communication: there is human feeling, which is the language of benevolence, and connotational meanings, which are the language of art. These cut across, even if they do not explain, the "riddles and mysteries" (IV, xvii, 293) among which we live, For all that Toby and Walter can rarely explain their ideas to each other, their good natures bind them together in a firm understanding, For example, after Trim has cut up Walter's boots for siege mortars to be used in Toby's scale-model war, a peculiarly chaotic conversation occurs, but, at last,
My father could not help smiling for his soul; — his anger at the worst was never more than a spark, — and the zeal and simplicity of Trim, — and the generous (hobby-horsical) gallantry of my uncle Toby, brought him into perfect good humour with them again. [III, xxii, 206]
The communication that takes place is not by the denotation of the words, but through the conclusions indirectly drawn by Walter — that Trim is zealous and simple and good in Toby's behalf, and that Toby is generously gallant for the sake of his country, both of which are perceived from a long-established context. Sterne has shown that Locke's Views of language are, in one aspect, quite correct, and he has used the problem of definition for his comedy. On the other hand, he has shown, first, that such problems of definition and comniunication are not of ultimate importance in relation to his characters; and second, that art, which defines in a non-Lockean manner, is a proper means of communication. Sterne has accepted definition by context, carried it beyond what Locke intended, and shown that, contrary to Locke's assertions, such definition by artistic context works better than attempts at denotational communication.
Walter's method of understanding once again points up Sterne's ernphasis upon the indirect aspects of communication. The context of Toby's goodness evokes the best of Walter's feelings, and this reliance upon the benevolence of feeling is dependent upon and derived from two major influences upon Sterne, the church and Locke: The favorable attitude toward feeling is in large part the result of the Latitudinarian [207/208] movement in the church (see Crane), and it is further supported by Locke's empiricism, which implies that, since all knowledge must be derived from experience, [therefore] all experience, all sensation must be good (van Ghent, pp. 95-100; similar is John Traugott's remark that "The following definition of sentimentalism at least suits Sterne's practice: By sensory apprehension of the behavior of other persons, and by comparing that behavior by an association of ideas with our own, we conceive a sympathy with other persons, . . . The core of Sterne's sentimentalism lies in his insistence that by certain public signs . . . we can come to understand individuality" [73-75]).
Sterne not only believes wit and judgment cannot be separated, but that "REASON is half of it SENSE; and the measure of heaven itself is but the measure of our present appetites and concoctions" (VII, xiii, 494). While this has many meanings and many contexts, among them that reason is empirically derived, it also means that "A man's body and his mind, with the utmost reverence to them both I speak it, are exactly like a jerkin, and a jerkin's lining; — rumple the one — you rumple the other" (III, iv, 160). Sterne's need to set things in context, in their complete and proper setting, causes him to see mind and body, head and heart, sex and love, and sense and nonsense in a series of continuums, a vision which prevents hardening of both the heart and categories. This rooting of things deeply within their context, which is one aspect of the wide perspective of a comic vision, makes the logic chopping of Walter and of Locke the more ridiculous. But although there is some mocking of Locke, and while there is some sharp satire, especially that of learned hokum, Sterne is primarily a writer, not of satire, but of comedy: Walter and Toby are by and large not targets of satire but the subjects of comedy. The multiple perspective created by the different contexts provides an irony which leads to understanding, not censure. The importance of these personal contexts requires Sterne to define his characters and provides one mechanical reason for the digressive structure of Tristram Shandy.
Thus far I have been discussing context or setting as it emanates from the minds of the various characters, and have been concentrating upon Toby and Walter Shandy, because they exemplify the individual mind as particular world at its most comically obvious. Sterne not only deals with the worlds of the mind, but with the adjacent worlds of art and life, and much of the novel is concerned with the encounter of the two. Sterne creates a fictive reader, the Sir or Madam to whom so many comments are addressed and who sits at Sterne's elbow watching the events and occasionally interrupting their presentation. While this reader provides an excuse for Sterne to address his audience through the voice of Tristram, his narrator, this convention is so used that this audience becomes a character in the novel like those repoussé figures in baroque [208/209] painting who turn half toward the audience and half toward the scene being presented. Sir and Madam have their own context which furnishes something for the novel to be fitted i to, or better, something to which the novel's "inner" action can be contrasted. While, of course, this reader is part of the novel and this is not real life, he or she represents the world of conventional novels and insensitive readers. This aspect of Tristram Shandy points up the problems of art as a means of communication. The critical history of the novel would suggest that many actual readers are in the same relation to the novel as is Toby to Walter: sympathy but not understanding. When Tristram assigns penance to his lady reader for not reading his novel closely enough, thus playing a joke both upon himself and upon the conventional skimmer of pages, he would seem to be emphasizing that aspect of his work which is likely to be neglected. "I wrote a careless kind of civil, nonsensical, good-humored Shandean book, which will do all your hearts good — And all your heads too, — provided you understand it" (VI, xvii, 436), he adds later in the novel, expecting that it will cure the spleen before it strikes the mind.
Tristram and his reader occasionally carry on a dialogue which is much like that of Walter and Toby, but this comedy is due as much to the reader's ignorance of events, his lack of proper context, as to his lack of perception. In the first chapter this fictive reader creates a comic misunderstanding by the infliction of a usual context and its associations upon the particular and peculiar situation of Walter Shandy's one night a month. After Walter Shandy has burst out, "Did ever woman, since the creation of the world, interrupt a man with such a silly question?" our reader inquires, "Pray, what was your father saying? — " — Nothing," replies Tristram (I, i, 5). The creation of this reader provides a means of varying comic distance and perspective, and, because such a device must interrupt the primary action, it also gives Sterne another way of controlling the pace of the novel. This fictional reader is about as close as one can get to bringing the audience into the story, and the creation of this outer circle adds a new context which not only provides additional possibilities for comedy but which also produces an implicit commentary on the relation of the novel to the world outside it.
Critics have remarked on Sterne's devices as means of criticizing the conventional novel of his time, though Richard C. Boys points out that Sterne is certainly not commenting upon Smollett or Fielding, and Mendilow remarks that Sterne was most interested in the problems of conventional techniques and their relation to reality (p. 166). But more important than these criticisms of contemporary fiction, some of which are tongue in cheek, is the novelist's concern with [209/210] the relation of convention to the reality it is supposed to represent. We see Sterne's attitudes toward the capability of literature from another vantage point when he brings objects from the external world into the novel, when he inflicts not representations of reality but real things upon the context of his fiction. Such expressionistic devices as the black page that follows the announcement of Yorick's death and the marble page that is to be an emblem of the novel are all attempts to gain a new notation that is more effective than words. Once an object is introduced into the context of a work of art, it no longer is an object, for it has become language. The most obvious example, perhaps, is the introduction of the musical notation for "Lilliburlero," which is used to describe Toby's character. Similarly, in the last book Trim gives an eloquent speech without words. As uncle Toby and Trim advance to a frontal attack on the willing Mrs. Wadman, Trim says the final word for the bachelor's life:
Whilst a man is free-cried the Corporal, giving a flourish with his stick thus — [and then Sterne gives the path of the stick's movement]. A thousand of my father's most subtle syllogisms could not have said more for celibacy. My uncle Toby look'd earnestly towards his cottage and his bowling green. [IX, iv, 604]
But, of course, these strangely introduced elements are not a marble page, a sheet of music, or a pattern of movement any longer; for once they have been introduced into the context of the novel, however uncomfortably or humorously they may remain there, they have become redefined by their present company. Once more Sterne has shown, that nondenotative language can communicate when it has the proper context. Sterne here reverses a frequent tactic, moving something from category of object into the category of word and idea. These contrasts between different orders of reality comment upon the nature of art by pointing out its limits, help keep it — or at least the reader — as flexible as the reality the novel is trying to present.
Just as Sterne tries to keep his language from solidifying, so, too, he attempts to keep his novel and his reader limber, implicitly warning us that conventions are only conventions and not to be taken as reality. But, it is the nature and purpose of all system, whether it be of convention or of philosophy, to limit human experience by the imposition of pattern, [210/211] and hence to provide an order by which we can live. Systematizing is by nature solemn; it is also intrinsically false, both in that the system must in some areas be an inadequate description of reality, and in that it is too serious about its pretensions of adequacy. Sterne's comedy continually sets the various systems of John Locke, Walter Shandy, and the artist within a wider context, which is fatal to the solemnity of any systems that have pretensions of completeness. By its very nature and reason for existence, a system attempts to provide a complete context in its particular area, giving all the answers and expanding into all the empty spaces; but the eye of comedy is always matching context and system, which, inevitably, is a process of reduction for anything which is supposedly complete. Tristram Shandy uses, shatters, and comments upon Locke's view of language. Locke is suggestive and perceptive, but not complete enough, and, like Walter Shandy, he is too rigid and systematical. In Walter we see all the foibles of the system maker carried to greatest extremes. His encounters with life produce the most powerful, most comical commentary on systems of all kinds. At the opening of the novel and in the first long digression about him, the reader learns of Walter's systematizing hobby-horsicality and of its expression in elaborate theories of childbirth and childbearing. But from the beginning, the very beginning, of Tristram's existence the systems topple of their own weight; for, after all, it is Walter's systematic winding of the clock which causes all the trouble. He was a very exact man, and
As a small specimen of this extreme exactness of his, to which he was in truth a slave, — he had made it a rule for many years of his life, — on the first Sunday night of every month throughout the whole year, — as certain as ever the Sunday night came, — to wind up a large house-clock which we had standing upon the back-stairs head, with his own hands: — . . . he had likewise gradually brought some other little family concernments to the same period, in order, as he would often say to my uncle Toby, to get them all out of the way at one time ... from an unhappy association of ideas which have no connection in nature, it so fell out at length, that my poor mother could never hear the said clock wound up, — but the thoughts of some other things unavoidably popp'd into her head, — & vice versa. [I, iv, 8-9]
The problem with the system is that it does not take into account the nature of the human mind, which includes this association by habit as well as denotative faculties, and this, of course, is what is wrong with Locke. [211/212]
Having realized that his offspring's troubles had begun nine months before birth and had been increased by Slop's forceps, Walter next tries to counteract this with his opinion, "That there was a strange kind of magick bias, which good or bad names, as he called them, irresistibly impress'd upon our characters and conduct" (I, xviii, 50). This is an extreme example, perhaps, of Locke's point that taking words for things causes great difficulty in thought, but it is also an example of taking words too seriously and of trying to impose them on another order of reality. Once again, Walter's system helps destroy itself, for by choosing Trismegistus, a name of which no one has heard, and which resembles Tristram, the name he most dislikes, Walter provides the possibility for the inevitable Shandean confusion. Finally, when it is obvious that everything has gone wrong for Tristram, Walter begins to apply his system to the education of his son. He begins to write the massive Tristra-paedia, but by the time he has set his thoughts in order and culled the answers from the scholastic masters, three years have elapsed, and during the whole period, Tristram remarks, "I was all that time totally neglected and abandoned to my mother" (V, xvi, 375). These systems are not only removed from life but also prevent Walter from living and acting.
Better than all these systems of education are the disordered associations of good examples. Toby's benevolence towards the fly, which occurs when Tristram is ten years old, finds a way to the boy's heart —
I know, that the lesson of universal good-will then taught and imprinted by my uncle Toby, has never since been worn out of my mind: And tho' I would not depreclate what the study of the Literae humaniores, at the university, have done for me in that respect ... yet I often think what I owe one half of my philanthropy to that one accidental impression.
This is to serve for parents and governors instead of whole volumes upon the subject. [II, xii, 114]
Sterne uses Locke's theory of association, which Locke sees as "madness," and contradicts the system of the philosopher that will not allow the irrational to be anything but dangerous. (Traugott comments "Sterne's fun with Locke does not constitute a dislike or disapproval of the philosopher" (p. 47), but Sterne is not just playing with these ideas, he is contradicting them, especially where education is concerned.)
Walter imposes his version of reality upon those around him, even choosing to see Toby's natural reactions as system. His obsession with system is the more comical, because it is always so fantastic, and the [212/213] more Sterne piles detail upon detail, in the manner of Rabelais, the more absurd become Walter's methods. When Walter decides to put his son in breeches, he sets his immense, top-heavy system in movement, and, once he winds it up, it topples of its own weight. Having consulted Mrs. Shandy, who as usual is annoyingly acquiescent, he next goes to Albertus Rubenius, miring himself in an elaborate confusion of pedantry. Sterne carefully cites authorities for trivial points and indulges in elaborate mock-logical subdivisions, all of which serve to place a load of importance on something which is unimportant. Walter's northwest passage to the intellect, his fascination with Slawkenbergius, and his passion for argument are all things which Sterne uses to comment upon; not only these kinds of intellectual swamps but all systematizing. Much of Sterne's comedy comes from the destruction or stretching of system by matching it, implicitly or explicitly, with other systems and other contexts. He can bring the world of Toby into collision with Walter's, or Locke's into Toby's; he moves words into the order of things, and things into the order of words; he moves systems into the Shandean world of no-system; and he tries to move the reader and his context into the world of the novel.
Sterne not only confronts his two fictional worlds, one of art and one of life, he confronts various times, all of which are observed as occurring in the present. Tristram presents a story in the past as happening before us, and yet he is also the subject of this tale, appearing twice, once as child or embryo and once as author. In the midst of a dramatic scene comes "What was your father saying?" — Sterne is using time as a series of sliding panels, and once again he has burst the context in which we live, creating a vision, which by the presence of different vantage points, is necessarily ironic and potentially comic. Any view which contains the individual world of Sterne's characters, the interpretations of his reader, and the layers of different times must be ironic unless all those vantage points coincide, and in Sterne almost nothing, unless it be a sill and window, ever coincides.
The effect of these various contexts of time upon the novel is that everything, or almost everything, is presented as happening, and, therefore, little of the story is told to the reader. The advantage of this is that the entire action can be dramatic, for exposition as such does not occur; even when Sterne is supposedly presenting an expository digression, he [213/214] presents it as happening, and it becomes part of the action. This structure allows a great percentage of action, while simultaneously permitting authorical commentary for other purposes. With everything shown as becoming, as in process, the novel groups into scenes which are shown with little explanation, the significance becoming apparent from the context (Mendilow, p. 182). This occurs in the Phutatorius episode, where "Zounds! first is heard, and then the explanation follows, tracing what has happened by making it happen again, this time from an accessible point of view. Once again, context furnishes meaning,
This use of time as context in the novel is derived from Sterne's conception of time as individually perceived. After playing with the Lockean idea of duration (II, viii, 103), Sterne deals with it again when Walter and Toby are waiting for the delivery of Tristram.
It is two hours and ten minutes, — and no more, — cried my father, looking at his watch, since Dr. Slop and Obadiah arrived, — and I do not know how it happens, brother Toby,
— but to my imagination it seems almost an age.
— ' Tis owing, entirely, quoth my uncle Toby, to the succession of our ideas. [III, xviii, 188-189]
Just as all human beings have their own interpretations of language, they also have their own interpretations of time, for, as Toby says, time is measured by the movement of our train of ideas. Sterne takes this, manipulates it, and as usual, carries it to an extreme. In the process he contrasts inner and outer time, the personal and the objective contexts of human life.
This manipulation of time has been seen as similar to that of Proust, Mann, Woolf and Joyce. In a manner similar to these modern novelists, Sterne creates Tristram by rooting him in the context of the past, a past, moreover, which is portrayed as important in its presentness. The characters are set within their past, and, since this is to be a mocking commentary of many of Walter's ideas, Tristram's beginnings are found rather far back in time. Yet there are significant differences. Unlike Proust, to choose one example, Sterne is writing a history of himself more for others than to discover himself. There is no great need to accomplish this rendering within himself, and, significantly, Sterne's narrator uses much extrinsic information, some admittedly derived from [214-15] Toby and some unadmittedly derived from the convention of the omniscient author. For these reasons there is not Proust's emphasis upon either the active or passive memory, and, similarly, there is no yearning, no feeling of great loss in and through time. While Sterne would hold with Proust that "Une heure n'est pas qu'une heure, c'est un vase rempli de parfums, de sons, de projets et de climats," and while he might agree partially with "Ce que nous appelons la réalité est un certain rapport entre ces sensations et ces souvenirs qui nous entourent simultanément" (III, 889) — for these are, in essence, Lockean — he does not have the emphasis and tone to claim "ces résurrections de la mémoire . . . cachaient ... une vérité nouvelle" (III, 878).
The primary difference between Sterne and his heirs is that Sterne still has a confidence in the integrity of self, which, largely due to Sterne's contemporary, Hume, those who followed had lost. Hume's point is, that if experience is just "perceptions which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity, and are in perpetual flux and movement," the self has no unity and is "nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions" (quoted Meyerhoff, p. 32; my discussion of Bergsonian and modern ideas of time is largely dependent upon Meyerhoff.). Hume's explanation for what we call "self" is that habit creates a functional organization, but this is not enough to satisfy many. But Sterne did not have this problem, believing as he did in a fixed character and in the existence of the Soul, so he did not endow time with such importance or, most important, with such seriousness. Surprisingly enough, Sterne comes to many of the same conclusions and the same technical developments from his position as do the moderns with their peculiar concern with time. We have already seen the effects of this view on the structure of the novel. Quite similar, indeed, is Sterne's view of language and his suspicion of system: the Bergsonians, who see time as flow, feel that the mind imposes language as a means of congealing thought. Though this imposition is necessary it also renders all expression falsely. Like Sterne, these modern writers firmly embed their words with a series of widening contexts. Some are so chary of the limiting nature of words that, like Hermann Broch, they construct a gleichgewichtskonstellation, a gestalt in which only the total effect of the words communicates. These techniques are much like Sterne's elaborate definitions by context, and his comic vision with its suspicion of system and limitation arrives at much the same point as did those obsessed by time. The major difference is that of tone — but in comedy tone is everything. [215/216]
This suspicion of system comes from a view which sees that system is never a complete context — it always fits into or against another. Sterne's comedy occurs when he thrusts things from one context into another. Sometimes this collision is caused by and sometimes it causes extreme and absurd extension of an idea, a word, or a thing beyond its usual sphere. Sterne's point is that these collisions always occur and that systems which ignore this are, in their seriousness and in their rigidity, absurd; and while Sterne may satirize particular systems or particular foibles they are most important as comic examples, not as targets in themselves. Sterne's primary purpose is not to attack but to drive away the spleen with laughter and understanding.
Boys, Richard C. "Tristram Shandy and the Conventional Novel," Papers of the Michigan Academy. XXVII (1951), pp. 423-436.
Crane, R. S. "Suggestions towards a Genealogy of 'The Man of Feeling', ELH, 1 (1934): 205-230.
Locke, John. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Ed. Alexander Campbell Fraser. New York, 1959. [In the text, Book 111, Chapter x, Section 29, page 144 is cited as (111, x, 29, 144).]
Mendilow, A. A. Time and the Novel. London, 1952.
Meyerhoff, Hans. Time and Literature. Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1954).
Proust, Marcel. A la Recherche du Temps Perdu. Ed. Pierre Clarac and Andre Ferr, 3 vols. Paris: Pleiade editions, 1954.
Sterne, Laurence. The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman. ed. James Aiken Work. New York, 1940. Quoted paqssages are cited in text as (V, i, 344-347).
Traugott, John. Tristram Shandy's World: Sterne's Philosophical Rhetoric. Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1954.
Van Ghent, Dorothy. The English Novel, Form and Function. New York and Evanston, 1961.
Last modified 1 February 2003


text:
Tuesday, December 8, 2009
Official Announcement: I'm going to AOL
SAUL HANSELL, FORMERLY OF THE NEW YORK TIMES, JOINS AOL AS FIRST EMPLOYEE OF SEED, AOL's NEW CONTENT MANAGEMENT PLATFORM
AOL has hired another prominent journalist to join AOL's full time editorial staff.
Saul Hansell, formerly of The New York Times, will be join us as Programming Director of AOL's Seed.com., AOL's first employee for the recently announced content management platform, expected to launch this month. Saul will be reporting to Mike Rich, senior vice president of AOL entertainment, and will be responsible for leveraging Seed across all of AOL's platforms.
Saul joined The New York Times in 1992 and most recently was covering the telecommunications beat, including wired and wireless communication of voice, data and video, including companies involved in telephone, Internet backbone, cable TV, Internet video, cellphone handsets, and other devices connected to networks, as well as communications policy and privacy. Launched in 2007, he was the founding editor of Bits, a blog on nytimes.com covering a wide range of technology topics with particular interest in Internet media, digital marketing, consumer electronics and the evolving business models for music and video.
Bits was named best blog among larger publications in the 2007 Best in Business awards by the Society of American Business Editors and Writers. His September 1989 story on computerized trading, ``The Wild, Wired World of Electronic Exchanges,'' won the Overseas Press Club's Morton Frank award for best magazine business reporting from abroad. He has also received awards from the Deadline Club of New York and the American Society of Business Press Editors. Saul received his Bachelor of Arts in Urban Studies/Economics from Columbia College in 1984.
19 comments:
- stk said...
Congrats, but "will be join as"??
- December 8, 2009 at 1:50 PM
- Unknown said...
congrats, sounds exciting. wanna hear more
- December 8, 2009 at 1:54 PM
- BrumleyGap said...
I'll miss your work at NYT
- December 8, 2009 at 1:56 PM
- John Sacke said...
All the best Saul ... enjoyed pitching you --- and will do so again soon. Cheers
- December 8, 2009 at 2:07 PM
- Unknown said...
Good luck, Saul. Couldn't have been easy to leave but, you know, you have seen the future and it's clearly software-assisted.
- December 8, 2009 at 2:35 PM
- Unknown said...
Congrats, Saul. Best of luck. Let us know if we can be of assistance.
- December 8, 2009 at 2:53 PM
- Unknown said...
Congratulations, Saul, and wish you much success in the new gig.
- December 8, 2009 at 6:35 PM
- Virginia Citrano said...
Definitely needing more details.
- December 8, 2009 at 6:48 PM
- Art Brodsky said...
Best of luck, Saul. Let us know if you come down to Va.
- December 8, 2009 at 7:27 PM
- From the Trenches said...
Best of luck, Saul. There is life after the NYT, take it from me!
All the best,--Riva Atlas
email@example.com - December 8, 2009 at 7:50 PM
- Unknown said...
Sounds Interesting. Will they be doing International news and Content as well? email@example.com
- December 8, 2009 at 8:06 PM
- Jerry Grasso said...
Saul: Congrats, I hope this goes well for you. Your voice will be missed at the Times, IMO.
- December 9, 2009 at 12:24 AM
- lkramer said...
Huge move...I'm really happy for you and AOL...I'm betting on them being a major player in the resurgence of original content on the web and you're a perfect guy to jump start that. Good luckQ - December 9, 2009 at 5:06 AM
- Unknown said...
Wow. The talent drain at the NYT is stunning, but I guess this is how creative destruction works. The new gig sure looks like a great challenge. Good luck.
Andy Schwartzman - December 9, 2009 at 7:43 AM
- Unknown said...
Saul. Happy for you. That's a bigtime job.
Best of luck with it and let's connect at something other than some conference.
Aaron Cohen - December 9, 2009 at 10:38 AM
- Norman Birnbach said...
- This comment has been removed by the author.
- December 9, 2009 at 2:30 PM
- Norman Birnbach said...
I'll miss your reporting from the Times. Now you get a behind-the-scenes (instead of a front-row) look at how AOL reinvents itself. Good luck!
- December 9, 2009 at 2:32 PM
- Brian O'Neal said...
Saul, Best of luck at Seed. In touch, Brian
- December 9, 2009 at 3:03 PM
- Unknown said...
Nice gig, Saul. Congratulations. We're all really proud of you and the great work you've done over the years.
- December 11, 2009 at 8:06 AM

subset: commoncrawl


text:
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For more information, call (800) 243-ROSS or visit www.mixers.com.


text:
Just breaking news: a new head of Nefertiti has been identified (left).
This, we now must acknowledge, is a head of the famous Queen Nefertiti, wife of the pharaoh Akhenaten (1353-1336 BCE). After some serious detective work, Dr Christian E. Loeben, Egyptologist at the August Kestner Museum in Hanover, Germany, has established its true and fascinating identity. It had been thought, wrongly as it now turns out, that this fragment of a face depicted the unisex pharaoh himself.
Dr Loeben has been able to demonstrate convincingly that it is in fact the illustrious queen, whose most famous portrait is the polychrome bust kept in the Berlin Museum (below left).
It measures barely 5.5 cm (2.2") in height, but the red-brown quartzite* head is a tiny masterpiece of Egyptian art.
"Until now, no Egyptologist had noticed that at the time of Pharaoh Akhenaten, only women's portraits were done in quartzite. Nefertiti is the only possible option for this remarkably fine miniature portrait," says Loeben.
"This is a truly sensational discovery," chimes in Dr Christian Bayer, Egyptologist at the University of Munster and specialist in Nefertiti: "It is very exciting to be able to add this extraordinary piece to the relatively limited collection of statues of Nefertiti."
The fact that this discovery has taken place this year is all the more remarkable given that it is exactly one hundred years since the German archaeologist Ludwig Borchardt found the world-famous bust of Nefertiti (left) in 1912, during his excavations at Tell el-Amarna, the new capital city founded by Akhenaten:
Suddenly we had the most alive Egyptian artwork in our hands, Ludwig Borchardt wrote in his diary for 1912. You cannot describe it with words. You can only see it.
That "most beautiful woman in the world" now reigns over the Neues Museum in Berlin, enthroned alone in a domed room that overlooks the length of the Museum (see Zenobia's low-down on her contentious discovery and possessive tug-of-war between Germany and Egypt in Two-Timing Nefertiti II).
The small quartzite head, on the contrary, is secluded in a private collection in Europe and is therefore not normally accessible to the public.
Queen Bee at BAAF
For the 10th jubilee edition of the Brussels Ancient Art Fair (BAAF), the organizers have arranged a large Egyptian art exhibition, entitled Ancient Egypt: Masterpieces from Collectors and Collections (June 6th to 10th). For the first time, the visitors will have the possibility to see mostly unknown Egyptian pieces, a majority of them coming from private collections.
The new Nefertiti will undoubtedly be the Queen Bee among those 120 exhibits. Dr Loeben describes his research in the limited-edition catalogue which will be sold during the BAAF exhibition (a snip at € 49). It's worth more than a peek as, after 10 June, the head returns to its private quarters ... and who knows when it will be seen again.
I am most grateful to Dr Stephanie Budin for the first report of this new identification on Pandora's blog (firstname.lastname@example.com). There will surely be many updates.
* Quartzite is a hard (7 Mohs) metamorphic rock of nearly pure silica, coloured by a small amount of iron oxide.
Updated again 6 June 2012
Back to the EEF-list where a number of Egyptologists have plunged into the debate. There are a few new arguments.
Does a shabti of Akhenaten always wear a beard? If it does, this head must be female; if not, it still could be Akhenaten. Right?
Martin Wolff (from France) says: "...all the known specimens for this pharaoh wear a beard and usually have no neck."
But, rebuts Anneke Bart (see above), "There are however plenty of examples of [shabtis] of men without a beard." And she cites examples dating to before and after Akhenaten of kings without a beard.
So the question of whether or not shabtis of Akhenaten himself could be beardless is still open.
The stone
Maria Sansalone (Egittophilia Forum Admin) points to a large use of quartzite in the Amarna period, citing Relief n° 171, showing Akhenaten offering to the Aten, from the Great Temple -- Copenhagen, Carlsberg Glyptotek (AEIN 1718) (http://www.flickr.com/photos/10647023@N04/3901689668/
The choice of red-brown quartzite, she suggests, alludes to the colour of the Sun.
It should be said, however, that Christian Loeben said that almost 100% of quartzite portraits were of women, which leaves some wiggle room for the head to be, exceptionally, of a male ruler.
The crown
Ah, the crown. This, as Lutz Franke (from Germany) stresses, depends on whether or not the details above the ear of the head refer to the specific Blue Crown of Queen Nefertiti. That's what she's wearing as the "most beautiful woman in the world" portrait in Berlin Museum.
The argument may well hinge on such traces of her crown -- but that's not something we can determine from the published photograph (top left). There's clearly tabs and things above the ear ... but what?.
So, Nefertiti ... or not? We'll probably have to wait until Christian Loeben comes out with his full case for identifying this head as a portrait of the queen.
A third update on 8 June 2012
Martin Wolff, who is quoted above on Akhenaten's beard, returns to the EEF-list to report on his re-examining many of the known shabtis of the pharaoh. Yes! There is one example that is -- and always was -- beardless: It's a shabti head in the Brooklyn Museum (left). It's made of grey quartzite or, more likely (to my eyes, at least) of sandstone and its dimensions are very close to those of our rare new head.
Eureka! Or not?
Does one shabti make a summer?
But now Christian Loeben speaks for himself (his text and photographs are in the Ancient Egypt catalogue [link via Martin Wolff]), so you can read Dr Loeben's full case for the prosecution. He discusses the stone and the crown but the crux of the matter is in the ear:
I've made the ear-plug clearer by circling in red |
So, if Egyptologists agree that Akhenaten was never represented with ear-plugs, then it's more than likely that Dr Loeben is right in identifying the subject of the statuette as Queen Nefertiti.
But will the Egyptologists agree? Stay tuned for more updates as they get their teeth in Christian Loeben's text. I wouldn't bet good money yet on 'Game, set and match'.
A fourth update on 12 June 2012
Ear-plugs (or earrings)
Will it all come down to the ear-plugs -- and not the crown, as I previously thought?
There's general agreement that wearing ear-plugs or earrings in this period does point to a female. Have a look at this plaster head (left), another artist's model from the same sculptor's workshop in Amarna as the Berlin Museum's Nefertiti ('most beautiful woman in the world'). It's thought to be a study of Kiya, a secondary wife to the pharaoh Akhenaten. She, too, wears prominent ear-plugs or earrings. And so do other models of the royal ladies.
Which is pretty good evidence, one would think, that the quartzite head does at least represent a royal Amarna female, even if not necessarily Nefertiti. It could as well be Tiye, Meritaten, or any other female member of the family. On the basis of this feature alone, it really can't be assigned to any particular individual lady.
But at least it's firmly female. That's the consensus.
Or so I thought.
And lo and behold, Philip Arrhidaeus (of Flanders) has snatched away this simple certainty. There's been a long discussion of the new head, too, on the Egypte forum Pr Kmt (in Dutch).
The starting point is that Akhenaten was often depicted with pierced ears.
As Martin Wolff (on the EEF-list) had asked quite reasonably: "Why would Akhenaten have pierced ears if not to wear earrings? The fact that to date we have never found a statue of him with earrings does not mean it never existed."
In Ancient Egypt, indeed, never say 'never'.
Philip Arrhidaeus showed this relief on the Egypte forum (left). The pharaoh is wearing an earring. He also pointed to a drawing on an ostracon that was found at Amarna: the king is again depicted with an earring.
Neither image is of a statue, it is true. So we haven't come full circle with our identification of the quartzite head.
Not yet.
Upper left: photograph from the EEF BBS website (submitted by Raymond Betz). Photo credit: Alain Speltdoorn.
Below left: Welt Online.
Illustrations added in third update
Above: Statue Head of Amenophis IV. Quartzite or sandstone, 2 3/16 x 2 1/16 in. (5.5 x 5.3 cm). Brooklyn Museum, Charles Edwin Wilbour Fund, 37.514. Creative Commons-BY-NC.
Below: Face of Queen Nefertiti. Ancient Egypt, Masterpieces from Collections and Collectors.
Illustrations added in fourth update
Above: plaster face from the Amarna workshop of the sculptor Thutmose. Photo credit: Keith Schengili-Roberts (via Wikipedia).
Below: relief of Pharaoh Akhenaten, Royal Museum of Scotland, Edinburgh.


text:
The fatalities have been 2,391, to date, with more reported in every cable from San Coloquin, but it is not yet decided whether the ultimate blame is due to the conductor of Car 22, to Mrs. Simmy Dolson's bland selfishness, or to the fact that Willis Stodeport patted a sarsaparilla-colored kitten with milky eyes.
It was a hypocritical patting. Willis had been playing pumpum-pullaway all afternoon, hence was hungry, and desirous of winning favor with his mother by his nice attitude toward our dumb friends. Willis didn't actually care for being nice to the dumb friend. What he wanted was cookies. So slight was his esteem for the kitten — whose name was Adolphus Josephus Mudface — that afterward he took it out to the kitchen and tried to see if it would drown under the tap of the sink.
Yet such is the strange and delicate balance of nature, with the lightest tremor in the dream of a terrestrial baby affecting the course of suns ten million light-years away, that the patting of Adolphus Josephus Mudface has started a vicious series of events that will be felt forever in star beyond mounting star. The death of exiled Napoleon made a few old men stop to scratch their heads and dream. The fall of Carthage gave cheap bricks to builders of mud huts. But the false deed of Willis Stodeport has changed history.
Mrs. Simmy Dolson was making an afternoon call upon the mother of this portentous but tow-headed Willis, who resides upon Scrimmins Street, in the Middle-Western city of Vernon. The two matrons had discussed the price of butter, the iniquities of the fluffy-headed new teacher in Public School 17, and the idiocy of these new theories about bringing up young ones. Mrs. Dolson was keeping an ear on the car line, for the Oakdale cars run only once in eighteen minutes, and if she missed the next one she would be too late to prepare supper. Just as she heard it coming, and seized her hat, she saw young Willis edge into the room and stoop to pat the somnolent Adolphus Josephus Mudface.
With a hatpin half inserted Mrs. Dolson crooned, "My, what a dear boy! Now isn't that sweet!"
Willis' mother forgot that she had intended to have words with her offspring in the matter of the missing knob on the flour bin. She beamed, and to Willis she gurgled, "Do you like the kittie, dearie?"
"Yes, I love our kittie; can I have a cookie?" young Machiavelli hastened to get in; and Aldebaran, the crimson star, throbbed with premonition.
"Now isn't that sweet!" Mrs. Dolson repeated — then remembered her car and galloped away.
She had been so delayed by the admiration of daily deeds of kindness that when she reached the corner the Oakdale car was just passing. It was crowded with tired business men in a fret to get home to the outskirts of Vernon, but Mrs. Simmy Dolson was one of those plump, amiably selfish souls who would keep a whole city waiting while she bought canary seed. She waved at the car and made deceptive motions of frantic running.
The conductor of the car, which was Number 22, was a kind-hearted family man, and he rang for a stop halfway down the block. Despite the growling of the seventy passengers he held the car till Mrs. Dolson had wheezed aboard, which made them two minutes late. That was just enough to cause them to miss the switch at Seven Corners; and they had to wait while three other cars took the switch before them.
By that time Car 22 was three and three-quarter minutes late.
Mr. Andrew Discopolos, the popular proprietor of the Dandy Barber Shop, was the next step in the tragedy. Mr. Discopolos was waiting for this same Oakdale car. He had promised his wife to go home to supper, but in his bacchanalian soul he desired to sneak down to Barney's for an evening of poker. He waited one minute, and was tremendously moral and determined to eschew gambling. He waited for two minutes, and began to see what a martyr he was. There would never be another Oakdale car. He would have to walk home. His wife expected too darn much of him, anyway! He waited for three minutes, and in rose tints and soft gold he remembered the joys of playing poker at Barney's.
Seven seconds before the delayed Oakdale car turned the corner Mr. Discopolos gave up the struggle, and with outer decorum and inner excitement he rushed up an alley, headed for Barney's. He stopped at the Southern Café for a Denver sandwich and cuppacoffee. He shook for the cigars at the Smoke House, and won three-for's, which indicated to him how right he had been in not going home. He reached Barney's at seven-thirty. He did not leave Barney's till one-thirty in the morning, and when he did leave he was uncertain of direction, but very vigorous of motion, due to his having celebrated the winning of four dollars by buying a quart of rye.
Under a dusty and discouraged autumn moon Mr. Discopolos weaved home. Willis Stodeport and Mrs. Simmy Dolson and the conductor of Car 22 were asleep now; even the disreputable Adolphus Josephus Mudface had, after a charming fight behind the Smiths' garbage can, retired to innocent slumbers on the soft folds of the floor mop, in the corner of the back porch where he was least likely to be disturbed by mice. Only Mr. Discopolos was awake, but he was bearing on the torch of evil destiny; and on one of the planets of the sun that is called Procyon there were floods and earthquakes.
When Mr. Discopolos awoke in the morning his eyes were filmy and stinging. Before he went to his shop he had three fingers of pick-me-up, which so exhilarated him that he stood on the corner, swaying and beaming. Normally he had pride in his technic as a barber, but now all his more delicate artistry was gone in a roving desire for adventure. With a professional eye he noted the haircut of a tough young man loafing in front of the drug store. It was a high haircut, leaving the neck and the back of the head bald clear up to the crown. "Be a joke on some fellow to cut his hair that way!" giggled Mr. Discopolos.
It was the first time in a year that he had needed, or taken, a drink before afternoon. Chuckling fate sent to him the next torchbearer, Mr. Palmer McGee.
Palmer McGee was one of Vernon's most promising young men. He lived at the University Club; he had two suits of evening clothes; and he was assistant to the president of the M & DRR He was a technical-school graduate and a Spanish scholar, as well as a business system expert; and his club-grill manners were as accurate as his knowledge of traffic routing.
Today was his hour of greatness. He had, as the result of long correspondence, this morning received a telegram inviting him to come to New York to see the president and directors of the Citrus and Southern Steamship Company about the position of Buenos Aires manager for the company. He had packed in 10 minutes. But he had an hour before his train, with the station only 20 minutes away by trolley. Instead of taking a taxi he exuberantly walked from the club to Selden Street to catch a car.
One door from the corner he beheld the barber shop of Mr. Discopolos, which reminded him that he needed a haircut. He might not have time to get one in New York before he saw the steamship directors. The shop was bright, and Mr. Discopolos, by the window in a white jacket, was clean and jolly.
Palmer McGee popped into the shop and caroled "Haircut; medium." Magnetized by Mr. Discopolos' long light fingers he closed his eyes and dreamed of his future.
About the middle of the haircut the morning's morning of Mr. Discopolos rose up and jostled him and dimmed his eyes, with the result that he cut too deep a swath of hair across the back of Mr. McGee's sleek head. Mr. Discopolos sighed, and peeped at the victim to see if he was aware of the damage. But Mr. McGee was sitting with eyes tight, lips apart, already a lord of ocean traffic, giving orders to Singhalese planters and to traders in the silent northern pines.
Mr. Discopolos remembered the high-shaved neck of the corner loafer, and imitated that model. He ruthlessly concealed the too-deep slash by almost denuding the back of Mr. McGee's head. That erstwhile polite neck stood out as bare as an ostrich.
Being an artist, Mr. Discopolos had to keep the symmetry — the rhythm — correct, so he balanced the back by also removing too much hair from in front — from above Mr. McGee's Yalensian ears.
When the experiment was complete Mr. McGee looked like a bald young man with a small wig riding atop his head. He looked like a wren's nest on top of a clothes pole. He looked painstakingly and scientifically skinned. At least it was thus that he saw himself in the barber's mirror when he opened his eyes.
He called on a number of deities; he said he wanted to assassinate Mr. Discopolos. But he hadn't time for this work of mercy. He had to catch his train. He took his maltreated head into a taxi, feeling shamefully that the taxi driver was snickering at his haircut.
Left behind, untipped and much berated, Mr. Discopolos grumbled, "I did take off a little too much; but rats, he'll be all right in couple of weeks. What's couple of weeks? Believe I'll go get a drink."
Thus, as ignorant as they of taking any part in a progressive tragedy, Mr. Discopolos joined Willis Stodeport, Adolphus Josephus, Mrs. Dolson and the too-generous conductor of Car 22, in the darkness of unimportance, while Palmer McGee was on the Pullman — and extremely wretched.
He fancied that everyone from the porter to the silken girl across the aisle was snickering at his eccentric coiffure. To Mr. McGee queerness of collar or hair or slang was more wicked than murder. He had rigidly trained himself to standards in everything. There were, for example, only three brands of whisky on which a gentleman could decently get edged. He was the most dependable young man in the general offices of the M & DRR, and before that he had been so correctly pleasant to the right fellows and so correctly aloof with the wrong fellows, so agreeably pipe-smoking and laudatory of athletics that he had made both junior and senior societies at Yale. He had had no experience to teach him to bear up under this utter disgrace of a variation from the standard of haircutting.
As the train relentlessly bore him on toward New York he now and then accumulated courage to believe that his haircut couldn't be so bad as he knew it was. He would stroll with noble casualness into the smoking compartment, and the instant it was free of other passengers he would dart at the mirror. Each time he made the same quaking discovery that he was even more ridiculous than he remembered.
By day, trying to read or scan the scenery or impress fellow smokers; by night, folded in his swaying berth — he could think of nothing else. He read only one paragraph of the weighty book which all persons carry on all Pullmans in the hope that they will be forced to finish it because they have nothing else to read. He grew more and more sensitive. Every time he heard a laugh he was sure that it was directed at him; and because he so uncomfortably looked away from the absent-minded gaze of fellow passengers he made them gaze the harder.
The beautiful self-confidence which had always concealed Mr. McGee's slight defects from himself and had helped him to rise to the position of assistant to the railway president was torn away, and he began to doubt himself, began to feel that others must doubt him. When he finally crept up the cement incline in the New York station, after a writhing glance at the redcaps, to see if New Yorkers would notice his ludicrousness as much as people had on the way through — he wondered if he could not return to Vernon and wire the steamship directors that he was ill.
He was not exaggerating about the importance of this trip to New York. The directors of the Citrus and Southern Line really were waiting for him. They needed him.
It is a curious fact of psychological economics that there are almost as many large employers waiting and praying for the chance to pay tens of thousands a year to dependable young men as there are dependable young men waiting and praying for the chance to earn a thousand a year. The president of the Citrus and Southern, the pouchy blob-nosed dean of South American and West Indian shipping, had been in the hospital for six months, after Peritonitis. From his bed he had vaguely directed the policies of the company. Things had run well enough, with the old clerks working mechanically. But a crisis had come. The company had either to expand or break.
The Green Feather Line, weary of litigation, wanted to sell all its ships to the Citrus and Southern, which if it bought them might double its business. If some other company bought them and vigorously increased competition the Citrus and Southern might be ruined.
The Citrus and Southern held a five months' option. By the end of that period they hoped to have found the man who could connect the sick president's brain with the general office's body — and they believed that in Palmer McGee they had found that man.
McGee did not know how carefully he had been watched. He had never met one of the directors or officers of the Citrus and Southern, had never seen one of them, and their correspondence had been polite but not exciting. But the two suave gentlemen who had been poking about Vernon lately had been commercial secret agents of the Titanic Rating and Credit Company; and they knew all about McGee, from the number of drinks he had at the club to the amount of his bank account and his manner of listening to the stories of the chief shippers of the M & DRR.
The Citrus and Southern chiefs were certain that they had found their man. McGee was to be sent to Buenos Aires, but only on test. If he was as good as they thought, he would in three months be brought back as vice president, at a salary nearly four times as large as the one he had received in Vernon. In this crisis they had the generosity of despair.
They were to meet McGee in the president's suite at the hospital at four-thirty; and the train got in at three-fifteen.
McGee went to a hotel, and sat still, scared, looking at himself in a dressing table mirror. He became momently more rustic, more tough, more skinned and awkward in his own eyes.
He called up the hospital, got the president. "Th-this is McGee. I — I'm coming right over," he quavered.
"Huh! That fellow sounds kind of light-waisted. Not much self-confidence," complained the president to his old friend, the chairman of the board of directors. "Here, prop me up, Billy. We must give him a thorough look-over. Can't take any chances."
The note of doubt was a germ which instantly infected the chairman. "That's too bad. The Rating and Credit people reported he was a find. But still — of course — "
When Palmer McGee faced the president, the first vice president and a committee of four directors, three of the six had already turned from welcoming eagerness to stilly doubt. He felt that doubt. But he interpreted it thus:
"They think I'm a complete boob to have a haircut like this. Think I don't know any better. And I can't explain. Mustn't admit that I know there's anything wrong — mustn't admit I was an easy mark and let a drunken barber carve me up."
He was so busy with these corroding reflections that he did not quite catch the sharp question which the president fired at him:
"McGee, what's your opinion of the future of the competition between Australian wheat and the Argentine crop?"
"I — I — I didn't quite understand you, sir," lamented poor McGee, victim of the cat of the trembling stars.
The president thought to himself: "If he can't get as dead simple a question as that — wonder if the first vice president wouldn't do, after all? No. Too oldfogyish."
While he meditated he was repeating the query, without much interest; and without interest he heard McGee's thorough but shaky answer.
And McGee forgot to put in his unusual information about the future of New Zealand grain.
Two hours later the president and directors decided that McGee "wouldn't quite do"; which meant that he wouldn't do at all; and they wearily began to talk of other candidates for the position. None of the others were satisfactory.
Four months later they decided that they would have to go slow; wait for the president to recover. They could find no one adaptable enough to coordinate the president and the working management. So they gave up their option on the steamers of the Green Feather Line.
The best of the jest was that Palmer McGee had looked rather well in his flippant haircut. Because the Chapel Street barber had started cutting his hair a certain length when he had been a Freshman in Yale he had kept up that mode, which was respectable but dull. But the semi-shave had brought out his energetic neck muscles. Never had he looked so taut and trim. Though dozens of people between the Vernon barber shop and the New York hospital had noticed his uneasiness none of them had considered his coiffure queer — they had merely wondered whether he was an embezzler or a forger.
McGee returned to Vernon broken, and General Coreos y Dulce, ex-president of the Central American republic of San Coloquin, entered the train of victims of Willis Stodeport, of Scrimmins Street.
The general had colonized Ynez Island, lying off the coast of San Coloquin. Fields of cane and coffee he had created, and he was happily expropriating 2,000 melodious natives. The general was a merry and easy ruler. When he had accepted the presidency of San Coloquin, after certain military misunderstandings, he hadn't even executed anybody — except a cousin or two, merely for politeness' sake.
His colony on Ynez Island was served by the steamers of the Green Feather Line. The business was not yet sufficient to warrant a regular stop, but General Dulce had a private agreement with the manager of the Green Feather, as well as one with the sick president of the Citrus and Southern, which latter agreement was to take effect if the company took over the Green Feather boats.
But when the Citrus and Southern gave up their option the Green Feather fleet was bought, not by another Atlantic line, but by a Seattle firm, for their Alaskan and Siberian trade. Consequently the general had to depend for service on a tin-can line which ran out of San Coloquin.
The owner of that line hated the general; had hated him when the general had been president, and had added to that hate with every meditative gin rickey he had sipped in the long years since. The general's fruit spoiled aboard the creaky old steamers; it was always too late to catch the boat north. His coffee was drenched, and his sugar short weight. When the general desperately bought a freighter of his own it was mysteriously burned.
Poverty and failure closed in on Ynez Island. The colonists hadn't enough to eat. When the influenza reached the island the weakened natives died in hordes. Some of them fled to the mainland, carrying the disease. The number of fatalities that would probably have been prevented by comfort and proper food and a supply of drugs has been estimated by Dr. Prof. Sir Henry Henson Sturgis at 3,290. One of the last to die was the broken-hearted general.
Before he died the wheel of fate had turned past him and stopped at a certain European monarch. The general had in all his colonizing and his financial schemes been merely the secret agent of that monarch. The king was uncomfortable on his throne. It rocked and squeaked and threatened to give way at the seat. It was kept together only by many fees for repairs — jolly gifts to the duke who hypocritically led the opposition party, to a foreign agent, to certain clerics and editors and professors, even to the ostensible leader of the left wing of the radical party.
Five years before Willis Stodeport had patted Adolphus Josephus Mudface, the king had realized that he was in danger of using up all his private estate. He had speculated. He had called General Coreos y Dulce from Central America; and it was royalty's own money that had developed the colonization of Ynez Island.
It had been impossible for the king to keep in touch with the details of the colonization. Had he learned of the loss of the Green Feather service he might have raised funds for the purchase of the whole fleet when the Citrus and Southern gave up the option. But the proud, dogged general, with his sky-climbing mustachios and his belief that one Castilian was cleverer than four Andalusians or eight gringos, had been certain that he could pull through without help from the royal master.
It was not till the approach of death that he sent the coded cablegram which informed the king that he could expect no income from Ynez Island. Then the monarch knew that he could not keep his promises to certain peers and ministers; that his wordiest supporters would join the republican movement; that the gold-crusted but shaky-legged throne would at any moment be kicked out from beneath him by rude persons in mechanics' boots.
So it came to pass that at a certain hour the farthest stars quivered with mystic forces from the far-off fleck of dust called Earth, forces which would, just for a sketchy beginning, change all the boundaries and customs of Southern Europe. The king had at that hour desperately called in the two ministers and the one foreign emissary whom he trusted, and with that famous weak smile had murmured: "Gentlemen, it is the end. Shall I flee or — or — You remember they didn't give my cousin the funeral even of a private gentleman."
At that hour, in a hovel in the Jamaica negro quarter of the capital of San Coloquin, General Coreos y Dulce, friend of composers and masters of science, was dying of nothing at all but sick hope and coldly creeping fear, and a belief that he had pneumonia.
A thousand and more miles away the president of the Citrus and Southern Steamship Company was writing his resignation. His old friend, the chairman of the board of directors, again begged: "But this means the ruin of the company, Ben. We can't go on without you."
"I know, Billy," the president sighed, "but I'm all in. If we could have found someone to carry out my ideas I could have pulled through — and the company could have. Shame we were fooled about that McGee fellow. If we hadn't wasted so much time looking him over we might have had time to find the right man, and he'd have taken enough worry off my shoulders so that — well, I'll about pass out in three months, I reckon, old man. Let's have one more go at pinochle. I have a hunch I'm going to get double pinochle."
About half an hour after that, and half a continent away, Palmer McGee left the home of the president of the M & DRR. He walked as one dreaming. The railroad president had said: "I don't know what the trouble is, my boy, but you haven't been worth a hang for quite a while now. And you're drinking too much. Better go off some place and get hold of yourself."
McGee crawled to the nearest telegraph office that was open, and sent a wire to the Buffalo & Bangor, accepting their offer in the purchasing department. The salary was not less than the one he had been receiving, but there was little future. Afterward he had a cocktail, the fourth that evening.
It cannot be authoritatively determined whether it was that evening or the one before that a barber named Discopolos first actually struck his wife, and she observed, "All right. I'll leave you." The neighbors say that though this was the first time he had mauled her, things had been going badly with them for many months. One of them asserts that the trouble started on an evening when Discopolos had promised to come home to supper, but had not shown up till one-thirty in the morning. It seems that, though he had forgotten it, this had been her birthday, and she, poor mouse, had prepared a gay little feast for them.
But it is certainly known that at the same hour on the same evening there was much peace and much study of the newspaper comics in the house of the Stodeports on Scrimmins Street.
Willis stooped to pull the tail of Adolphus Josephus Mudface, now a half-grown cat. Mrs. Stodeport complained: "Now, Willie, do let that cat alone! He might scratch you, and you'll get fleas and things. No telling what all might happen if you go patting and fooling with — "
Mr. Stodeport yawningly interrupted: "Oh, let the child alone! Way you go on, might think something dreadful would happen, just because he strokes a cat. I suppose probably he might get one of these germs, and spread it, and before he got through with it, maybe be the cause of two, three people taking sick! Ha, ha, ha! Or maybe he might make somebody rob a bank or something just awful! Ha, ha, ha! You better hold in your imagination, mamma! Well — "
Mr. Stodeport yawned, and put the cat out, and yawned, and wound the clock, and yawned, and went up to bed, still chuckling over his fancy about Willis having a mysterious effect on persons five or six blocks away.
At exactly that moment in a medieval castle about four thousand miles from Willis Stodeport the king of an ancient nation sighed to the Right Honorable the Earl of Arden, KCB, special and secret emissary of the British throne: "Yes, it is the twilight of the gods. I take some little pride in saying that even in my downfall I can see clearly the mysteries of fate. I know definitely that my misfortune is a link in a chain of events that impressively started with — "
" — with the loss of thousands of lives and millions of pounds, in San Coloquin," mused Lord Arden.
"No! No! No! Nothing so earthly and petty. I have long been a student of astrology. My astrologer and I have determined that this evil chance of myself and my poor people is but the last act in a cosmic tragedy that started with an esoteric change in the magnetism of Azimech, the cold and virgin star. At least it is comforting to know that my sorrows originated in nothing trivial, but have been willed by the brooding stars in the farthest abysses of eternal night, and that — "
"Um. Oh, yes. Yes, I see," said the Earl of Arden.
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text:
To understand how to taste chocolate you must eat it in its solid form without any additions, such as nuts or caramels. Virginia introduced a line of solid chocolates known as "Select Blends" and "Select Origins".
"Select Blends" is a chocolate that is formulated from cocoa beans from different parts of the world designed for a particular flavor profile. This flavor profile remains consistent from year to year.
SAN MARCO WHITE CHOCOLATE 80g
This Select Blend white chocolate has a balanced creamy light caramel taste.
Ingredients: White Chocolate (Sugar,
Contains: Milk, Soy.


text: Unoiled Fox on black sand beach. U. S. Fish and Wildlife Service Response to Grounding/Oil Spill off Unalaska Background Information The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is responding to the grounding of the 738-foot cargo vessel M/V Selendang Ayu, off Unalaska Island in the Aleutian Islands. The vessel, carrying approximately 483,000 gallons of heavy bunker fuel oil and 21,000 gallons of diesel fuel, ran aground and broke apart on Wednesday, December 8. Six of the vesselââ¬â¢s crew members were lost in the rescue effort. The vessel is located between Skan Bay and Spray Cape (53ð 38ââ¬â¢ 04ââ¬Â, 167ð 07ââ¬â¢ 30ââ¬Â) on the western shore of Unalaska. The area is accessible only by water or air. The lands in the spill area are managed as part of the Alaska Maritime National Wildlife Refuge. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Regional Spill Response Coordinator is directing the Service response from Dutch Harbor, Alaska. The Service response efforts are being conducted within the Unified Incident Command Structure, and Service biologists are directing wildlife response activities within this joint command.


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Desert Reptiles
Reptiles are some of the most interesting creatures of the desert. Reptiles can withstand the extreme temperatures because they can control their body temperatures very easily. There are two main types of desert reptiles: snakes and lizards.
Many species of rattlesnakes can be found in the desert. Rattlesnakes have a noisy rattle they use to warn enemies to stay away. If the predator isn't careful, the rattlesnake will inject venom with its sharp fangs. Other desert snakes include the cobra, kingsnake and the hognose.
Lizards are probably the most bizarre looking animals in the desert. While some change colors and have sharp scales for defense, others change their appearance to look more threatening.
One such creature is the frilled lizard. When enemies are near, the lizard opens its mouth, unveiling a wide frill. This makes the lizard look bigger and scarier. The shingleback has a tail with the same shape as its head. When a predator bites at the tail, the shingleback turns around and bites back!
There are only two venomous lizards in the world, and one of them is the gila monster. It has a very painful bite! If you see one, it's best to get away!


text: Play your favourite songs in your car in an easy and uncomplicated way via Bluetooth, a USB stick or a micro-SD card. The Media&Assist transmits your music and calls to your radio and at that even supports voice control via assistants like Siri. Additionally, it charges your devices blazingly fast thanks to Qualcomm Quick Charge 3.0.If your car doesn't have an Aux input, Media-In USB port or Bluetooth receiver, you do not have to retrofit it with a new and expensive radio in order to play your music in a comfortable way. The Media&Assist transmits your songs via a USB stick, a micro-SD card or Bluetooth to your FM radio. You simply have to plug it into your car´s auxiliary power outlet. Additionally, this clever gadget can also be used as a car charger and a speakerphone. Since it supports intelligent assistants such as Apple Siri or Google Assistant it is even possible to operate the 4smarts Media&Assist completely handsfree.


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Madeira is a rocky island in the Atlantic Ocean. It was once an oceanic superpower, and ruled one of the largest empires in all the early-mid-Medieval period (April 15th to June 3rd, 1324).
At some time in the first millennia BC the Phoenicians sailed to Madeira in simple canoes made of kevlar-reinforced fiberglas. These people -- known to science as "the Master Baiters" -- lived by fishing, squid-herding, gambling, gathering wild beans, and manipulating the international finance and stock markets.
A few centuries later the Portuguese discovered Madeira and colonized it, wiping out the indigenous people by the simple but brutal method of pointing their fingers and laughing at them.
(Travel tip: When you are in Madeira please don't point your finger and laugh at the locals. They know that trick, and will require you to forfeit a payment consisting of half your liver.)
Government and Politics[edit]
Madeira is a semi-autonomomous protectorate of Morocco. The anarcho-communist rebel leader Dr. Alberto João Jardim has for over two decades fought the Moorish government for the rights of Madeirans to flush their own toilets...although Mohamed Bouzoubaa, the Moroccan Minister of Fards, has said that "...Morocco will never, ever give Madeirans lavatory rights." Indeed, the droit d'flusseur has historically resided in the Arab aristocracy and has never been granted to people who live on a crusty little island.
Lying in the famed "sandfly belt" of the tropical Atlantic, Madeira enjoys a robust trade in tourists. Most are exported to Antarctica to work the penguin plantations; others are harpooned, flensed, and rendered to an amber light oil which is sold to fat Belgian bastards as acne salve. Another important industry in the island is the manufacturing of fake penises made of cheese, which are exported to countries like Japan where members of Parliament wish they had larger dongles.
No account of Madeira would be complete without a mention of the famous wine, the vinho da roda. The grapes for this saucy, sassy, sunstruck beverage are grown in Australia. New Zealand wineries ferment the grape and bottle the wine. It is then shipped to Madeira and sold. Although many people believe that Madeira produces Madeira wine, occasional discoveries of a pickled kiwi bird or kangaroo tick inside the bottles indicates its true origin.
One of the largest sources of profit for the island of Madeira is the export of Football (or Soccer) players. The best specimens of these small, quick and nimble creatures are typically exported throughout continental Europe. The lesser specimens are packaged in small canisters with gun powder and used for the islands annual display of fireworks.
Natural Features[edit]
The Cabo Girão towers 580 meters over the sapphire-hued surf, rather like the giant Atlas hunched over a toilet tinted Tidy-Bowl blue. The clever tourist does not ask what happens when Atlas finally does his business.
Highest point on Madeira, Pico Ruivo stands above a maze of ridges, hills, outcrops, aretes, tourist kiosks, and cliffs. A lofty 1862 meters elevation, the Pico originated as an immense volcanic chancre which once stood perhaps 2000 meters higher. Erosion, downfaulting, general depression, and lingering sadness over the Spanish defeat at Trafalgar caused the mountain to shrink to its present height.
In Madeira, by law, tourists can only pee at the Pico Ruivo WCs, where "due to high cleaning costs" they must pay 50 euros for using them. Everyday the tourists climb up and since recently there's lots of them, they form queues. There is always some incontinence, subject to a fine of 100 euros. All the pee is collected and channeled in special aqueducts called levadas which carry it around, irrigating Madeira Wine vines throughout the isle. The wine is unique precisely because since most tourists are old and obese, their diabetic urine contains lots of glucose, which allows for a wonderfully sweet wine.
Surfing was a major atraction on the island, but since the locals of Jardim do Mar (once a legendary surf spot) begun to praise Dagon, everyone who tries to surf that area goes missing. Often we can see some foreign surfers corpses impaled in espetada sticks in the big wall near the sea. That area is where they sacrifice surfers to the lovecraftian god. They later sell the meat to restaurants so that tourists eat them.
The long-toed wood pigeon (Colomba trocaz) inhabits the laurel hedges of the mountainous central portion of Madeira. This peculiar bird makes a tasty pie, but in the dense foliage and malarial heat of the island it has always been hard to hunt. It has evolved a particularly long center toe, with which it makes rude gestures of contempt at those who hunt it.
The monk seal (Monachus monachus) frequents the rocky shoreline of Madeira. Being sworn to chastity, monk seals are among the most threatened of the world's pinnaped species. Even the wandering faggot-bird is more inclined to produce offspring than these serious, God-fearing beasts. At night the sound of their plainsong chants soothes the weary traveler to sleep. He awakens refreshed, only to find that the Madeiran tart he picked up after supper has stolen his wallet, watch, shoes, jacket, pants, and corneas.
(Travel tip -- In the case where your corneas have been stolen, don't forget to cancel any sight-seeing excursions you may have booked. Not much point in trying to see the sights when you're blind, eh?)
Over the last 10 years a lot of tunnels have been built by a mysterious man named by locals as João "the mole" Jardim. scientists have worked out that if this man and his army builders and their big yellow drilly Thunderbird 2 accessories (aka moles)the island will crumble into a flat island that will be know as campester Insula. The tunnels provide walkways for the giant gerbil like monsters that roam the island at night terrorizing the people of Madeira. last year a reported 100 people were injured by these animals on their way back form the annual fireworks while suck in a 6000 car long traffic jam. These animals were shipped to Madeira as eggs and lost by Sir A.Hitler during the war when he was trying to hide weapons. Many attempts to recover the eggs were held in the 1930's by a Mr I.Jones, but no luck was to be had as they were hidden under the airport during building, only to be discovered after the eggs had hatched causing detestation across the island.


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Story highlights
Violence in Juarez has dropped from its peak in 2010
Juarez was known as the deadliest city in the world
Authorities don't credit one single tactic for the reduction in violence
There are still an average of two killings a day in Juarez
Once known as the deadliest city in the world, the Mexican border city of Ciudad Juarez deserves a new nickname.
The city – infamous for tales of unsolved murders and gangland shootings – recorded 750 homicides in 2012, a significant drop from the previous year when 2,086 people were killed.
Statistics from the Chihuahua State Attorney General's Office show that Juarez ended 2012 with the fewest killings the city has seen since drug-related violence encapsulated it five years ago.
Opinions differ on why the homicide rate has dropped so quickly, but one thing is clear: Juarez is now a city where residents feel safe enough to walk the streets and go out with a relative sense of safety.
"There is no superman, or one person that did all the changes," said Arturo Valenzuela, president of the bureau of public safety in Juarez. "It was a multifunctional process."
Between 2007 and 2011 more than 9,000 people were killed, with the peak coming in 2010, when Juarez saw a record 3,116 homicides, or about 8 murders per day, according to figures released by the attorney general's office.
No single factor is responsible for restoring relative tranquility, but a key factor was that for the first time there was a team effort and coordination between local police and civil society organizations, Valenzuela said.
"The players [that helped bring down the violence] have also been leaders of the local police and the politicians," he said, referring to new government administrations that came to power during this period. In 2010 Mayor Hector "Teto" Murguia took the reins from Mayor Jose Reyes Ferriz, and the state of Chihuahua also got a new governor.
The withdrawal of federal agents – often accused of corruption – in 2011 also brought relative calm to Juarez, Valenzuela said. At the same time, the municipal police received better equipment and salaries under new Police Chief Julian Leyzaola.
The drop in violence is reflected in the city's economic growth, Murguia said.
At least three new high schools and sports facilities opened in 2012, and hundreds of businesses – including restaurants, nightclubs and grocery stores – reopened throughout the city, Murguia said.
The growth was supplemented by funds earmarked by the administration of former Mexican President Felipe Calderon, he said.
Murguia credits law enforcement, security specialists and "no one else" for the changes in Juarez.
But the sentiment among many Juarez residents is more cynical. They say that the bloody turf war between the Sinaloa cartel and the Juarez cartel that was responsible for the carnage has been won by the Sinaloans, led by the world's most wanted drug lord, Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman.
Chihuahua state prosecutor Jorge Gonzalez Nicolas disputed that view, saying that the most important factor in 2012 was the arrests of the heads of local criminal groups, including "El Diego," the head of La Linea, the armed wing of the Juarez cartel.
Since October 2010, there were at least 4,000 arrests, including the detention of 250 kidnappers and 200 extortionists, as well as the seizure of 2,500 guns, Gonzalez said.
The strides made to improve security in Juarez are noticeable, but the city's homicide rate is still twice as much as it was five years ago. In 2007, there was an average of about 0.82 murders per day. In 2012, there were two murders per day, according to the attorney general's office.


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Efforts are underway to develop a navigation stack for the arms analogous to the navigation stack for mobile bases. This includes a wide range of libraries that can be used for collision detection, trajectory filtering, motion planning for robot manipulators, and specific implementations of kinematics for the PR2 robot.
As part of this effort, Willow Garage is happy to announce the release of our first set of research stacks for arm motion planning. These stacks include a high-level arm_navigation stack, as well as general-purpose stacks called motion_planners, motion_planning_common, motion_planning_environment, motion_planning_visualization, kinematics, collision_environment, and trajectory_filters. There are also several PR2-specific stacks. All of these stacks can be installed on top of Box Turtle:
Significant contributions were made to this set of stacks by our collaborators and interns over the past two years:
- Ioan Åžucan (from Lydia Kavraki's lab at Rice) developed the initial version of this framework while an intern at Willow Garage over the summer of 2008 and 2009 and has continued to contribute significantly since. His contributions include the OMPL planning library that contains a variety of probabilistic planners including ones developed by Lydia Kavraki's lab over the years.
- Maxim Likhachev's group at Penn (including Ben Cohen, who was a summer intern at Willow Garage in 2009) contributed the SBPL planning library that incorporates the latest techniques in search based motion planning.
- Mrinal Kalakrishnan from USC developed the CHOMP motion planning library while he was an intern at Willow Garage in 2009. This library is based on the work of Nathan Ratliff, Matthew Zucker, J. Andrew Bagnell and Siddhartha Srinivasa.
Additional contributions also came from Radu Rusu, Matei Ciocarlei and Kaijen Hsiao (from Willow Garage) and Rosen Diankov (from CMU).
These stacks are currently classified as research stacks, which means that they have unstable APIs and are expected to change. We expect the core libraries to reach maturity fairly quickly and be released as stable software stacks, while other stacks will continue to incorporate the latest in motion planning research from the world-wide robotics community. We encourage the community to try them out to provide feedback and contribute. A good starting point for is the arm_navigation wiki page. There is also a growing list of tutorials.
Here are some blog posts of demos that show these stacks in use:
- JSK demo (pr2_kinematics)
- Robot replugged (pr2_kinematics)
- Hierarchical planning (OMPL, move_arm)
- Towers of Hanoi (move_arm)
- Detecting tabletop objects (move_arm)
You can also watch the videos below that feature the work of Ben Cohen, Mrinal Kalakrishnan, and Ioan Åžucan.
The individual stack and package wiki pages have descriptions of the current status. We have undergone a ROS API review for most packages, but the C++ APIs have not yet been reviewed. We encourage you to use the ROS API -- we will make our best effort to keep this API stable. The C++ APIs are being actively worked on (see the Roadmap on each Wiki page for more details) and we expect to be able to stabilize a few of them in the next release cycle.
Please feel free to point out bugs, make feature requests, and tell us how we can do better. We particularly encourage developers of motion planners to look at integrating their motion planners into this effort. We have made an attempt to modularize the architecture of this system so that components developed by the community can be easily plugged in. We also encourage researchers who may use these stacks on other robots to get back to us with feedback about their experience.
Best Regards,
Your friendly neighborhood arm navigation development team
Sachin Chitta, Gil Jones (Willow Garage)
Ioan Sucan (Rice University)
Ben Cohen (University of Pennsylvania)
Mrinal Kalakrishnan (USC)