text:
|. . . Paris
|. . . 1999-08-23
Paris as university town (courtesy of Librarians' Index):
Later the students moved to the colleges of "La montagne Saint-Genevieve". Afterwards, Place Maubert was given over to the gallows, and to torture by the wheel and at the stake, particularly under Francis I.
|. . . 1999-11-07
Although the pacing's a bit stodgy, 1936's Mayerling wins on performances, especially from the youthful-but-still-middle-aged Charles Boyer as Prince Rudolf: dissipated, undisciplined, and 100% tragically noble. I would say that Boyer was over-the-top great, but one of the reasons Boyer was always middle-aged was that he was never over-the-top. Under pressure, he just got more impacted.
Besides instigating this woman's marriage, Mayerling's other great achievement was getting me interested in the history of the Austrian-Hungarian empire. 'Cause, I've read Robert Musil and listened to Arnold Schoenberg till the cows came home, but not even the cows ever had the decency to tell me about Only Heir to Empire Dead in Double Love Suicide!, and, brother, that's what I call news.
Well, allowing some elbow room for glamor and the use of French actors, it turns out the movie actually does present the semi-official version of the story pretty accurately. Alas! for romance, it also turns out that not that many people ever believed that version of the story -- what's more likely to hit a Hapsburg: romance or assassination? -- and now it's been thoroughly disproved.
Even after learning that love means nothing, the "what happened next?" factor was still strong, especially since the next thing I found that happened next was the assassination of Prince Rudolf's mother, the Empress, less than a decade after the murder of her son. And by then we're getting close to the Great War.... Would I have to, like, go buy a book or something to work all this out?
No fear of that, because the Atlantic's already bought a book (coincidentally also from 1936) and put it up on the Web: Rebecca West's big dummy's guide to the Balkans, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon. I remember when its posting was announced as a public service during one of the more recent genocides, but of course it took an old movie to attract my attention....
|West works a well-established mainstream genre -- travel notes alternating with history lessons -- but you can't beat the combination of Balkans history and fascist-era travel for human (i.e., morbid) interest, and in its smoothly mainstream way the series builds to near hysteria by the time it reaches Sarajevo in Part 4:
'So when the poor mayor began to read his address of welcome the Archduke shouted out in a thin alto, "That's all a lot of rot. I come here to pay you a visit, and you throw bombs at me. It's an outrage." Then the Archduchess spoke to him softly, and he calmed down, and said, "Oh, well, you can go on." But at the end of the speech there was another scene, because the Archduke had not got his speech, and for a moment the secretary who had it could not be found. Then when it was brought to him he was like a madman because the manuscript was all spattered with the aide-de-camp's blood.'
|I'm a little worried about West's preoccupation with obesity, though. Would you agree with her that "Marie Vetsera was a very fat and plain little girl"? Ess, ess, Rebecca!
|. . . 2000-02-15
San Francisco présent (via Juliet Clark):
"The great goal so long sought had finally been achieved: that of making Paris an object of luxury and curiosity, rather than of use -- a ville d'exposition, a display city placed under glass... an object of admiration and envy to foreigners, unbearable for its inhabitants."
|. . . 2000-04-26
In New York in the 1980s you could always tell it was safe to talk to someone about music if you saw FM antenna wire tacked up all over their apartment, 'cause that meant they were trying to drag in from Upsala College, East Orange, New Jersey, the reluctant signal of WFMU, the radio station so hip that its program guide was a zine -- a pretty good one, too, especially when it came to graphics, what with Kaz DJ-ing there and bringing his fellow RAW artists along for the ride.
In 2000, Upsala is upsadaisied, there are no oranges in Jersey, Your Old Pal Irwin is calling himself just plain Irwin with a last name of some sort attached, and I'm dragging the signal across a much longer wire. But at least the signal is better!
|. . . 2000-06-18
|What proofs did Bloom adduce to prove that his tendency was towards applied, rather than towards pure, science?
|Insofar as wise critics have looked at science fiction, critical wisdom has it that the genre's most distinctive form is the series, and particularly the "fix-up": the novel built up of mostly-previously-published more-or-less integrated more-or-less independent short stories and novellas.
"I do not like that other world"
"More-or-less" being the distinguishing factor here. The close relationship of the pulp magazine and pulp novel industries led to many hero-glued fix-ups in other genres of popular fiction (Dashiell Hammett's and Raymond Chandler's early novels, for example); the short attention spans of protosurrealists, pseudosurrealists, and other artistes-fines led to a number of single-hero multiple-narrative (Maldoror, Miss Lonelyhearts) and single-narrative multiple-hero (As I Lay Dying) assortments.
"After God, [insert name] has created most..."
But what defines sf is not a peculiar approach to character or narrative but a peculiar attention to the implied context of the fiction. This implied context is usually called the work's "world," as in the quintessential sf skill "world building" or the quintessential sf hackwork "shared world" writing. Because the constructed context is what defines a "work" of sf, a single sf "work" can cover a great deal of time-space ground (as in Robert Heinlein's "future history") and incorporate many different lead characters and closed narratives.
"He's dead nuts on that. And the retrospective arrangement."
Given a long enough lifetime, sf authors sometimes start to wonder if all their worlds might somehow be "shared" in the all-in-one person of the author: Isaac Asimov's attempt to combine his Foundation universe with his Robotics universe to make Asimov Universe TM; Samuel R. Delany's multi-decade cross-genre remarks toward the modular calculus....
"...if the city suddenly disappeared from the earth it could be reconstructed out of my book."
Outside the sf genre, what this reminds me most of are Jack Spicer's notion of the "serial poem," Louis Zukofsky's notion that a poet's lifetime of work is best considered as one long work, and James Joyce.
(... further reflections generated by the essays in A Collideorscape of Joyce: Festschrift For Fritz Senn ...)
|As Jacques Aubert points out in "Of Heroes, Monsters and the Prudent Grammartist," child Joyce's writerly ambition, like that of many genre workers, was fired by reading heroic adventure stories: "Madam, I never eat muscatel grapes." And, also like many genre writers, Joyce continued (would "compulsively" be too strong a word?) to use the notion of the heroic (alongside the notion of author-as-trademark) as an organizing principle while undercutting it with a self-awareness that ranged from scathingly bitter to comically nostalgic.
In "Dubliners and the Accretion Principle" Zack Bowen very convincingly treats the collection of mostly-previously-published stories Dubliners "as a single unified work... the stories so interrelated as to form a type of single narrative" with a clear structural pattern and a loose but extensive web of inter-episode linkages. (A biographical tidbit unmentioned by Bowen backs this up: Joyce knew "After the Race" was a weak story but felt compelled to include it to save the overall shape of the book: a common architectural problem for the fix-up author.)
On the next hand, Christine van Boheemen's "'The cracked lookingglass' of Joyce's Portrait" makes a case for breaking apart A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, since all the chapters use the same semi-self-contained bump-down-and-bounce-up narrative structure rather than gliding smooth-and-steady towards maturity: "Instead of psychological and emotional growth, the fiction depicts repetition." Each episode imagines itself to be first, last, only and alone whereas it is neither first nor last nor only nor alone in a series originating in and repeated to infinity.... Van Boheemen's approach would imply that the "final" flight to Paris on the wings of artistic vocation is merely another roundabout to the next repetition. And Stephen's bedraggled comedown in Ulysses, so embarrassing to those who pictured him ascending to glory at an angle of fortyfive degrees like a shot off a shovel, certainly seems to give her approach the edge.
There hasn't been much need to remind readers of the heterogeneity of Ulysses, starting from its serialization episode by episode, each episode a chronologically, thematically, and stylistically closed unit. (Are there any other novels for which we refer to "episodes" by title rather than to "chapters" by number?) Timothy Martin reminds us again anyway in "Ulysses as a Whole" that inasmuch as anything can be said to tie the book together it's a shared context -- implicitly an externally documented day in the world, explicitly the inter-episode allusions and reflections, "many of them added late in the book's composition."
As always, the limiting case is Finnegans Wake, whose compositional history also includes serial publication and last-minute blanket-tucking additions. But here the repetition and fragmentation go simultaneously down and up the scale to such an extent that almost no one ever reads the book except as scattered sentence-to-page-sized episodes semi-explained by references to other episodes: "holograms" and "fractals" became rhetorical commonplaces for Wake scholars as quickly as for sf writers.
Maybe that's why Exiles seems like such a flimsy anomaly: it's a self-contained traditionally structured single work where a revue or a burlesque show might have felt more appropriate....
|. . . 2000-06-20
|still more france
hippy toast
only a silly, dirty, lazy, stoned hippy would be silly enough to try to make toast out of hamburger.
bob hope was so right about hippies! and everything else.
or maybe this is some kind of horrible retort to "french toast".
french toast is delicious but you never know what will offend french people.
[thanks Juliet.]
le chat perfect
cats are good.
we are all agreed that cats are good.
but parisians know that anyone can be better if they make an effort. even cats!
simply unstrand their pearls and you will see.
thus we stride proudly with verve toward the perfect cat.
[thanks Juliet again.]
|mr. pants
i am sorry.
|. . . 2001-07-10
Strange, that in a work of amusement, this severe fidelity to real life should be exacted by any one, who, by taking up such a work, sufficiently shows that he is not unwilling to drop real life, and turn, for a time, to something different. Yes, it is, indeed, strange that any one should clamor for the thing he is weary of; that any one, who, for any cause, finds real life dull, should yet demand of him who is to divert his attention from it, that he should be true to that dullness.
There is another class, and with this class we side, who sit down to a work of amusement tolerantly as they sit at a play, and with much the same expectations and feelings. They look that fancy shall evoke scenes different from those of the same old crowd round the custom-house counter, and same old dishes on the boarding-house table, with characters unlike those of the same old acquaintances they meet in the same old way every day in the same old street. And as, in real life, the proprieties will not allow people to act out themselves with that unreserve permitted to the stage; so, in books of fiction, they look not only for more entertainment, but, at bottom, even for more reality, than real life itself can show. Thus, though they want novelty, they want nature, too; but nature unfettered, exhilarated, in effect transformed. In this way of thinking, the people in a fiction, like the people in a play, must dress as nobody exactly dresses, talk as nobody exactly talks, act as nobody exactly acts. It is with fiction as with religion: it should present another world, and yet one to which we feel the tie.
If, then, something is to be pardoned to well-meant endeavor, surely a little is to be allowed to that writer who, in all his scenes, does but seek to minister to what, as he understands it, is the implied wish of the more indulgent lovers of entertainment, before whom harlequin can never appear in a coat too parti-colored, or cut capers too fantastic.
-- Herman Melville, The Confidence-Man, His Masquerade
Canons is the crrrrraziest people! I mean, I love Melville, but what could be nuttier than assigning a book like Moby Dick to a bunch of kids?
Beats me, but doing a big film adaptation of Pierre, or, The Ambiguities has got to come close.
And POLA X is a pretty close adaptation, given that the story's been bumped forward 150 years. Leos Carax even improved the original by explaining the dark sister as a refugee from the Balkans, which takes care of Melvillean mysteries like her lack of education, her fear of authority, and why in the world a false marriage would be more useful than a firmly stated fraternity. And should Herman Melville have developed a time machine, and travelled into the present day, he would almost certainly watch the Carax version, perhaps on a DVD, would he not? And then it seems clear that the incandescent metal coil of competition would drive deep into his heart, and heat and stir his blood, turning him into a lava lamp of nineteenth century American fiction -- is that not also true? And so it would follow that upon returning to his own time, Melville would modify his novel to make Isabel an escaped slave, which would match Carax's explanations point for point and up the ante by explaining the mysterious weightiness of the paternal sin and Pierre's resultingly mysterious compulsion to atone. And then Carax, in despair, would fold.
Which would be just as well, because the movie doesn't work.
As long as I'm rewriting history, would there have been any way to make it work? First, a true film adaptation of Pierre would have to be about a spoiled kid squandering all of his fortune and then some on making a film, a film upon which he would be desperately staking the fate of himself and all his loved ones, a film which would ultimately not be accepted by any festivals, which would, at best, go straight to video. Next, the film itself -- the film which told the story of this sad indie director -- would have to be equally utterly disastrous for the career of its maker, a contemptuous and self-loathing disaster much bigger than, for example, Les Amants du Pont-Neuf, a disaster on the level of The Lady from Shanghai or Marnie. But then also the look of the film must be fevered and murky rather than slick and glamorous.... Oh, perhaps if George Kuchar had married Geena Davis, we'd be approaching the necessary conditions -- but what are the odds? Slim; very slim.
|. . . 2002-03-16
Instructions to a Painter, first
Marcel Duchamp to Jean Crotti, 17 August 1952 (iffily translated from French):
You were asking my opinion on your work, my dear Jean. It's very hard to say in just a few words, especially for me as I have no faith -- religious sort -- in artistic activity as a social value.
Artists of all eras are like Monte Carlo gamblers and the blind lottery sends some on their way and ruins others. To my mind, neither winners nor losers are worth bothering over. It's business, good for the winner and bad for the loser.
I don't believe in painting in itself. Every painting is made not by the artist but by those who look at it and grant it their favors; in other words, no painter understands himself or knows what he does -- there's no outward sign to explain why a Fra Angelico and a Leonardo are equally "recognized."
It all happens through our little friend luck. Artists who, during their life, have managed to get people to value their junk are excellent traveling salesmen, but nothing guarantees immortality to their work. And even posterity is a pretty slut who retracts some, resuscitates others (El Greco), and remains free to change her mind in 50 years.
This long preamble to tell you not to judge your own work as you are the last person to see it (with true eyes). What you see there isn't what makes merit or shame. All words used to explain or praise it are false translations of what takes place past the sensations.
You are, like all of us, obsessed with the accumulation of principles or anti-principles which generally cloud your mind with their terminology and, without knowing it, you are a prisoner of what you think a liberated education.
In your particular case you are certainly the victim of the "School of Paris," that good joke which has lasted for 60 years (the students awarding themselves prizes, in cash).
To my mind there's no safety but in esotericism. But for 60 years we've attended the public exhibition of our balls and multiple hard-ons. The Lyons grocer speaks in enlightened terms and buys modern painting.
American museums want at any price to teach modern art to young students who believe in the "chemical formula."
All this breeds only vulgarization and complete dissipation of the original fragrance.
This doesn't cancel what I said above, because I believe in the original fragrance but like any fragrance it evaporates very quickly (a few weeks, a few years at most); what's left is a dried nut classified by the historians in the chapter "History of Art."
So if I tell you that your paintings have nothing in common with what we see generally classified and accepted, that you've always produced things entirely your own, as I truly believe, that's not to say that you have the right to be seated next to Michelangelo.
What's more, this originality is suicidal, in the sense that it distances you from a "clientele" used to the "copies of copyists" that are usually called "tradition."
Another thing, your technique is not the "expected" technique. It is your technique, you own borrowed from no one -- there again, the clientele isn't attracted.
Obviously if you'd applied your Monte Carlo system to your painting, all these difficulties would have changed to victories. You could even have started a new school of technique and originality.
I won't speak of your sincerity because that's the commonplace most widely spread and least valid. All liars, all bandits are sincere. Insincerity doesn't exist. The malign are sincere and succeed by their malice but their being is made of malicious sincerity.
In 2 words do less self-analysis and work with pleasure without worrying about opinions, yours and those of others.
|. . . 2002-03-20
The English Restoration seems startlingly close, as if a veil was lifted for a few decades and then hurriedly pulled back into place for two hundred more years. Generations of state-church tussling, civil war, and dictatorship had left England a fragmented culture bound together by a tradition of insecurity, uncertainty, and paranoia. Installation of the most tolerant monarch in its history unloosed a flood of free expression: of sexual pleasures and horrors, atheism and fanaticism, financial panic and soured idealism, class distinctions crossed and fetishized, free love and cheating at cards....
All very twentieth century save for the lack of whining. Among Restoration writers, hypocrisy and self-pity were more unforgivable than failure or disgrace, since, after all, failure and disgrace lay so clearly outside an individual's control. Most valued was a slantwise directness of insight and impulse, coupled with a humorously stoic awareness of the probable consequences.
Although newspapers, novels, and television weren't yet in full swing, many other aspects of modernity snapped into focus: science blossomed free of alchemy and astrology; for the first time, women wrote professionally (including all-round woman-of-letters Aphra Behn); diaries and letters and memoirs suddenly became compulsively readable narratives rather than bare inventories of purchases or devotions; William Congreve's comedies (largely predicated on their young heroes' fears of bankruptcy) remain the best in the English language; John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, remains the most exfoliative of English poets.
For reasons we won't go into, the Victorian era offered little open support to its Restoration forebears, and into the mid-twentieth century much material was more or less supressed. Congreve stayed in print, though, and at present the writings of Pepys, Rochester, and the Female Wits are probably more accessible than ever before. But one of my favorite Restoration relics has never quite recovered its former visibility, and so I decided to produce an online edition.
Now Heav'ns preserve our faith's defender
From Paris plots and Roman cunt,
From Mazarine, that new Pretender,
And from that politique, Grammont.
-- John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester
The memoirs of the Count de Grammont were written in French, but I associate them with the English Restoration since they were ghostwritten by Anglo-Irish Anthony Hamilton, since (apart from some short introductory chapters) they're set entirely in the court of Charles II, and since, most germanely, I know them through a remarkable nineteenth-century English edition aimed at the Sophisticated Gentleman.
As I've mentioned before, it's one of my favorite books, largely due to its internal linkage. But I'm finding it a bit intractable to both online publishing and online reading: luxuriant sentence structure, multipage paragraphs, and gargantuan notes all work more efficiently in paper technology than in computer hypertext, and the tiny none-too-tidy print clogs OCR.
A bit at a time seems the best way to proceed. And so, contrary to my previous practice, I'll be issuing the Memoirs in serial fashion.
Of this initial installment, I actually slighly prefer the bizarre Victorian wrapping to the contents proper, although Hamilton's declaration of methodology, Grammont's Sgt.-Bilko-like account of seventeenth-century warfare, and his easy socializing with both king and rebel during an armed rebellion all hold their charms.
Next in the hopper, though, is his introduction to the English court, and then we'll be cooking with gas!
|. . . 2002-07-17
Movie Comment: Eric Rohmer: With Supporting Evidence
"Every possible decision entails some sacrifice, paradox or irony. But irony doesn't subvert morality; morality is about choosing the lesser of two ironies."Godard was louder and funnier, but the best criticism in Cahiers du cinéma was written by Eric Rohmer, and it used to seem sad to me that he didn't, like Godard, keep it going as an occasional thing.
-- Raymond Durgnat on Eric Rohmer
One of the rewards of sitting through this two-part TV interview-with-dumbass-arty-touches is that instead of sad it now seems inevitable, and louder, and funnier. Unlike Godard's too-cool-for-school improvs, Rohmer's criticism was labored over; it was never "occasional" prose. Even if it had been, there's no room for any occasion outside movie-making in Rohmer's post-Cahiers life: every strand, scrap, and moment of his existence is replete with movie-making, and the tools and souvenirs of movie-making threaten to bury him as we watch, cassettes, notebooks, videos, photos, lights, filters (colored tracing paper), reflectors (made in 1959 from tin foil and a portfolio), projectors, photos, and props piling on the desk like from Harpo's inexhaustible trench coat....
|I've always been against destruction. I think that in order to build, we mustn't destroy.
In still photos, Rohmer always looks dignified and aristocratic. In action, he's an enthusiastic (if still very polite) goofball, fondly mimicked by Jean-Louis Trintignant in My Night at Maud's and by Hugues Quester in Tale of Springtime, more like a monomaniacal Roland Young than like cold-blue-blooded Antonioni.
Maybe most like Joseph H. Lewis: happy as a pig in low-budget slops.
|I believe more and more what I wrote in my last article, that is, that cinema has more to fear from its own clichés than from those of the other arts. Right now, I despise, I hate, cinephile madness, cinephile culture. In "Le Celluloid et le marbre" I said that it was very good to be a pure cinephile, to have no culture, to be cultivated only by the cinema. Unfortunately, it has happened: There now are people whose culture is limited to the world of film, who think only through film, and when they make films, their films contain beings who exist only through film, whether the reminiscence of old films or the people in the profession. The number of short films by novices who in one way or another show only filmmakers is terrifying! I think that there are other things in the world besides film and, conversely, that film feeds on things that exist outside it. I would even say that film is the art that can feed on itself the least. It is certainly less dangerous for the other arts.
If movies are your entire life, life can't enter your movies except through the knotholes and the rust-streaking leaks and the breezy gaps between the amateurish joins. Hollywood can pay to seal itself in; Rohmer can't, and that's exactly what he enjoys about the process.
So nice to think that this is what can happen to a fine analytical critic. Loving the pre-decadent days of cinema, Rohmer, almost uniquely, understands and follows its percepts, that is, its precepts -- that is, its restrictions, which is to say its freedoms. As the man says, it's better to have fifty films made by crews of ten than to have one film made by a crew of five hundred. You can't have a healthy art form without excess production.
Taking the responsibility of adaptation as seriously as any other responsibility, Rohmer didn't go through the same improvisational process with the three movies he's based on existing texts. Instead, as if to fill up any time gained by starting with a finished script, all three laboriously emphasized technical demands and formal experimentation -- and stumbled (sometimes with a triumphant lurching leap) over anti-realistic (or stiff, or inappropriate) acting, or even (in the latest, anyway) horrendous structural problems in the script.
Rohmer is a great moviemaker, and so his experiments are interesting. But one reason he's a great moviemaker is that his rote way of making movies works reliably.
His latest 100-super-movie-au-maximum, Tale of Springtime, I figured was planned from the start as a wiser and more gynocentric answer to My Night at Maud's. It turns out the philosophical discussions that connect the two films were only constructed after long negotiations with the actress who had been cast as the lead. She was a philosophy scholar, the sketchy teacher of Rohmer's original plan was, at her request, realized as a philo prof, and the bare branch blossomed from there.
That's the routine that works, like the seasons. Rohmer quietly worries for decades at vague ideas, suspending their resolution until they can opportunistically latch onto the particulars of setting and collaborator. He films in vacation spots because that's where his friends' empty houses are; he picks amateur actors because they're unyielding enough to propagate story and grateful enough to do it again and because he can afford them; his shots are dictated by his cheap bundle of equipment, and he loves it like a muse. New life is born of abundant wish and a lack of choice.
|. . . 2003-05-11
Ante Modernism
Since our latest serial completed, Zukofskymania has been sweeping the nation. And wherever there's sweeping to be done, a Dovetonsils is sure to be found listlessly smearing the same bit of dirt back and forth before asking for spare change.
So it was no surprise to get this postcard from Anselm Dovetonsils during his recent two-week stand as laureate of Paris (Las Vegas):
A Texas Hold'em table
Lower limit two hundred dollars
Upper limit four hundred dollars
Stand pat, Dovetonsils! Stand pat!
|. . . 2005-08-14
A reader puts words or something like them in our mouth:
nobody likes me, everbody hates me just because i eat worms
Speaking of unwisely tossed off asides in rants about straitened access to higher education, Peli Grietzer writes, regarding my Animal House tribute:
I stumbled, in an old post, upon a peripheral declaration I found very interesting and provoking - "... as Wes Anderson decided to drop the pretense that less-than-wealthy characters held any interest for him." - and felt an urge to comment, as old as it was. I'm not quite sure if it was meant as an accusation or merely an observation, and consequently not sure if I'm attempting to practice apologetics or am just riffing, but as I see Anderson has no interest whatsoever in the wealthy - He is purely interested the extravagantly rich, and that's a fundamental distinction: It's no longer an issue of an aristocratic choice of social-economic milieu, obfuscated as natural and commonsensical, but of writing about the stuff of legend.
In his work there's a romantic, imaginary artifice of aristocracy that has more to do with Oberon's court or the minor Olympic Gods than with the modern upper class. (Though with Paris Hilton and everything I might not have a good grasp on how surreal the upper-class truly is, but still.)
His interest seem to be in characters utterly removed from life's usual concerns not in a manner mimetic or reflective of any social phenomenon, but in a glorified, accented and fantastical way, either because they went so far up the social ladder they are utterly unaware of its struggles (the Tennenbaum kids), and thus even when broke and working as elevator-boys they do not feel any hardship (Royal Tennenbaum), or because they have no intention to struggle up the social ladder, but have a pretty easy time getting by with nearly no money (Dignen from Bottle Rocket), or because they're still kids and have no obligations or constraints (Rushmore), or because they live on a submarine and go hunting sharks (Life Aquatic). But the key feature here is that all those life-styles a presented in an equally magnified, unrealistic manner, not as defaults but as extravagant imaginations- a kind of an idealized projection of fundamental emotional and existential (god I wish there was a better word for this) concerns into a plane without necessities or concrete outside limitations where only choice and emotional constraints are factors (thought it's only about 70% true about Bottle Rocket).
Anderson isn't producing a biased, snobbish vision of social reality- he isn't producing a vision of social reality at all. I like to think of Wes Anderson as kind of the ultimate Fuck You to Jameson (not the whisky).
Paul Kerschen writes:
I was talking yesterday to our mutual friend J.F., and she was explaining how in the stories she used to write at age eleven the main characters were generally princesses, because they were the only ones who had the right resources -- if you want to write a scene at the ocean involving whales or something, the princess can just up and go to the ocean. Given how Anderson's films are either about childhood or weird overgrown children, I always figured that was his idea also. I quite like the later films, but don't find anything in them as affecting as the scenes in Rushmore where Max, who can't always rely on Bill Murray's millions, actually has to work to protect his fantasy and ends up lying about his poor barber dad, etc. There's a binocular vision there, while later on, in order to preserve the integrity of the fantastic, Anderson elects to close one eye.
The original context of my remark probably made clear that it sprang from an idiosyncratic case of class resentment — or maybe class petulance. I enjoyed the fantasy of a non-wealthy character being painfully but harmlessly ridiculous; it was nice to get that break. Clearly, though, a large American audience doesn't require such eccentricity. And The Life Aquatic's dud tragedy clearly indicates that Anderson should continue to stay far away from consequences.
I like your way of putting it. It's fun to picture Royal Tenenbaum or Steve Zissou pulling out a spy glass, making like Popeye, and scanning the backdropped horizon....
|. . . 2006-02-13
Since the capitulation of Paris the soldier has tended to sink more and more into a paid official, receiving his orders from financiers with his salary, without being allowed a voice even in questions involving peace and war. The same fate has overtaken the producing classes; they have failed to maintain themselves, and have become subjects of the possessors of hoarded wealth. Although the conventions of popular government are still preserved, capital is at least as absolute as under the Caesars, and, among capitalists, the money-lenders form an aristocracy. Debtors are in reality powerless, because of the extension of that very system of credit which they invented to satisfy their needs. Although the volume of credit is gigantic, the basis on which it rests is so narrow that it may be manipulated by a handful of men. [...] The aristocracy which wields this autocratic power is beyond attack, for it is defended by a wage-earning police, by the side of which the legions were a toy; a police so formidable that, for the first time in history, revolt is hopeless and is not attempted. The only question which preoccupies the ruling class is whether it is cheaper to coerce or to bribe.- The Law of Civilization and Decay: An Essay on History
by Brooks Adams (1895-6)
Brooks Adams never set "The Law" in a single line of Greek and arithmetic; his wife's suggested title was The Path to Hell: A Story Book. He thumps out a simple enough pattern, though.
History describes the inverse relationship of two emotions: Fear and Greed. ("That's not where I want to be.") As a population centralizes, Fear becomes less important, Greed more. The power (or status or survival — he makes no distinction) of an individual (or "organism", "type", "breed", "race" — he makes no distinction) in any community (or "culture", "civilization", "nation", "race" — he makes no distinction) is determined by whether Fear or Greed has the ascendancy. Military heroes and priests rule the Fearful; capitalists rule the Greedy. As Greed accelerates, the increasingly capitalistic community becomes dependent on cheaper external goods and labor. Eventually this leads to collapse, dispersion, and Fear.
The leading indicators (or the sole engines — he's vague) of cultural change are control of financial exchange and access to the units of exchange.
Follow the money: Rome plundered Europe and the Near East. The merchants plundered Rome. The Church plundered Europe. Italy plundered Constantinople. Portugal stole the Indies trade from Italy. Spain plundered the New World. The Dutch stole the ocean trade from Spain. Improved technology re-centered trade in England. England plundered India. Germany plundered France. Bankers plundered everyone.
So it seems to be a habit with us. What makes Adams's account most impressively legalistic is his tone, the attorney's habit of argument by inevitability. "She had no choice but to pull the trigger." "You have no choice but to find her guilty." "The Knights Templar might as well have argued with gravitation." "That ostentatious, sordid, and cowardly race, being better adapted, rose to dominance."
"a habit with us" - Seeing as how they've truncated your sense of us-ness down to somewhat minus the last 3 millenia, with an unspoken codicil that any pre-our-history human lives were larval and inconsequent, like indigenes generally, even the useful ones, it might get more toward the actual analysis of motivation to say "this here us".
Fear and Greed are the driving wheels of this particular clot of this particular primate spooge, what we are as a race, or specie, is rather larger than what passes for history now.
I see where you're coming from and I'm getting there, although I can't blame you if you're tired of waiting. I meant this first part as summary, not as endorsement. (I wonder how many "Little Nell must die" letters were sent to Dickens.)
|. . . 2006-11-10
We eat, we drink, we eat and drink prodigiously, with gusto, it would do your heart good to see us, you'd get bored, you'd be appalled, you'd resent me, no, this will not become a food column, albeit I am a column of food.
I will meet two obligations, that's all.
1. La Zucca, Venezia
Admirers of strong flavors and grace under pressure will have no trouble finding a good time in Venice. La Zucca stood out by its lack of frenzy. Frenzy's fine, some of my best friends are frenzied, but modulation is nice, too.
Especially the kitchen wasn't frenzied, nor slow, but lent focused attention to each dish qua dish, which tells with that stuff that's not boiled dough or fried squigglies — you know, vegetables.
The overall effect was very California cuisine, except with Italian produce, and except for the cost. Those familiar with the Bay Area, imagine if Alice Waters priced the way Berkeley Bowl does. As if observation and accuracy were necessities of life instead of luxuries accessible only by the wealthiest.
After we paid, our extremely efficient server (who might've owned the place) came back and gave us each a stack of business cards, I guess to hand out to our fellow movers and shakers, so here you are.
2. All'Allegria, Udine
Udine is a good town to get out of. That's why we went there, and why we slept for three nights in a comfortably sterile and soundproof hotel on the same block as the train station and the bus station.
But on our last night, after many rebuffs, we were determined to extract some pleasure from Udine's hard nut. A kind Venetian gentleman had recommended some restaurants. With his list, we ventured forth. Then returned to the hotel rebuffed. Then ventured again.
Cranky, tired, and in my case bruised and bleeding, we made unpromising material all'Allegria. We fell into the hands of a master.
I tell you, Myrtle, it was just like meeting Charles Boyer. Solicitous without smarminess, engaged without familiarity, quick to suggest, quick to catch demurral, he seated us, he soothed us, we fascinated him, later he conveyed the chef's fascination as well. When we asked for a wine suggestion, he apologetically wondered if we'd be willing to take a fresh selection with each course; he opened, poured, discoursed, succinctly, sufficiently.
In all this, not a hint of the obsequious, only noblesse oblige. He represents the kitchen: he controls our food; we are at his mercy; he is a warm-hearted man.
I took notes, it seemed the thing to do. Prosecco to soften the edge of evening. First course: Thin slices of peppery salami, of crudo di San Daniele, of cooked prosciutto, startlingly fresh, almost milky. Second courses: Pasta e fagioli. Cjarsòns, large ravioli with a sweet-and-sour filling, covered with grated smoked ricotta, a line of ground spices on the side. Stanig Sauvignon Blanc, from Colli, full, perfumed. Third courses: Frittura mista, squid, sardines, zucchini, something crayfish-like. Frico, a sizzling slowly roasted loaf of cheese and potato, served with polenta and perfectly intense arugula. Tenuta Beltrame, a Cabernet Sauvignon from coastal Aquileia, tasting of surf, bridged the dishes; our host expressed special satisfaction in our approval, the wine was made by his best friend. Finishing with an air of vanilla and stone fruit, Malvasia di Nonino ÙE grappa.
We were by no means alone. The dining area filled with the locals who had filled the bar; next to us was a table of physicists, from Germany, from Poland, from Russia, from the UK, attempting ethnic jokes, possibly part of the conference for whose sake Udine's galleries had been closed; their voices were muffled by the womb.
King of Hosts! We were hungry, and you fed us; we were weary, and you gave us shelter; I left a tip.
wot no risi e bisi?
In northeast Italy, October's not big on fresh peas. On the other hand: mushrooms!
|. . . 2014-11-18
A year later and I keep re-reading this. Well, it's a pretty little thing innit? Gorgeous cover. Glossy paper. Fourteen pages of mouth-tested prose. Title chimes with an Alan Halsey. Proofreading! (You don't really notice the otherwise omnipresent din of typos till you enter an eerily silent space like this one.)
Maybe because I finished The Wine-Dark Sea right before the chapbook arrived, it reminds me more of Robert Aickman than any other Harrison story has reminded me of Robert Aickman. The soppingly grounded Englishness of it. Its protagonist of a certain age and dislocation and curiously libido-free urge to couple. Most of all its pacing: a determined no-nonsense but no-particular-tourist-destination-in-mind tramp into what critics call "dread" (the unaccountable corporate flight of nesting colonies of terns and gulls), not minding the gaps at all, or at least making only token efforts to fill them. This particular gap's as good as a nod to an Aickman influence:
'That yellow lichen on the roofs down there,' Hampson said, 'I wonder what it is?'
She laughed.
'I thought you were a local,' she said.
Like all the best influences, Aickman's-on-Harrison was retroactive: verification rather than emulation. They'd independently developed an architecture of negative space.
Harrison, at least, consciously recognized and worked it. Here he explains how he wrote the story which first drew the comparison:
The way I started out, I asked myself a question: How would you write a horror story and take all the horror out of it? How would you write a ghost story and remove almost everything? — a couple of sentences, a pair of sentences that would do the trick... "The Ice Monkey" was my first attempt at that. I wrote it as a normal horror story in which it's quite evident what had happened. And then I spent two or three weeks just removing sentence after sentence that directed the reader towards the normal ending, until finally you're left only two sentences in four thousand words which give you the clue as to what might or might not have happened. [...] Yeah, scraped it out. To see what would happen. I wanted to see where it would fall over. [...] After you've been doing it for twenty years, you put fewer of them in. When I started I had to throw out whereas now I know what not to put in.
But they differ in the thoroughness of their erasures. Aickman rarely sealed his unsettling build-ups without a deflationary appearance by crap F/X. Harrison's more likely to scrape away even that much comfort. His multi-volume fantasy series isn't threaded by hero's quest or cod-Gondal dynastic charts but by ways of not-knowing a city. Although some of us have always been creeped by roses, his dark occult novel horrifies mostly through absence. His macho sporting-life naturalism lacks self-pity, rivalry, the thrill of victory, or even the thrill of disillusionment.
Here are the dreadfully recurring associations of "Getting Out of There":
That last develops into the most blatantly anti-realistic aspect of the story, and it's hardly a Famous Monster of Filmland.
I took it — because we have to take things somehow — as a temporally-displaced dream-version of social media. I don't how you would take it; I'm pretty sure the bait wouldn't attract huge buzz from the buzzers of record. Very important novelists like Eggers and Amis (and Sinclair Lewis and Upton Sinclair) are newsworthy because they're journalists; they're terrified of burying the lede. Whereas Harrison knows the lede's there to enrich the soil. Insofar as "Getting Out of There"'s bit of fantasy was ripped from today's headlines, it was then collaged into plaster-of-paris, and then painted over.
And then discarded for a vacuum-welded clampdown of the unutterably mundane. The twirly-shiny bit played misdirection in a sleight-of-hand maneuver which models our sleight-of-hand transfer from post-youth to pre-senescence. After which, as the poet sang, "You may ask yourself, well, how did I get here?" It wasn't where we were watching.
There's nothing jokey or puzzly about the gaps that bind this free indirect discourse. They're mimetic: deliberate sacrifices of discursive freedom for the respite of further indirection. A temporary but renewable respite. Renewable to a point.
tl;dr It's a horror story whose ultimate brain-melting horror is a happy ending.
Speaking of Harrison, "The Killing Bottle" is a fine fannish-vocational-scholarly analysis of his style.
|. . . 2015-06-16
SUPERSTITION. 1. ... religion without morality. ... 4. Over-nicety; exactness too scrupulous.- A Dictionary of the English Language by Samuel Johnson
A view held in late antiquity is that the use of the words superstitiō 'superstition' and superstitiōsus 'superstitious' with reference to religion derives from the idea that such practices were superfluous or redundant.- Oxford English Dictionary
January 31, 1930: At last J.J. has recommenced work on Work in Progress. The de luxe edition by ? soon to come out — about the old lady A.L.P. I think. Another about the city (H.C.E. building Dublin). Five volumes of the Encyclopedia Britannica on his sofa. He has made a list of 30 towns, New York, Vienna, Budapest, and Mrs. Fleischman has read out the articles on some of these. I 'finish' Vienna and read Christiania and Bucharest. Whenever I come to a name (of a street, suburb, park, etc.) I pause. Joyce thinks. If he can Anglicize the word, i.e. make a pun on it, Mrs. F. records the name or its deformation in the notebook. Thus 'Slotspark' (I think) at Christiana becomes Sluts' park. He collects all queer names in this way and will soon have a notebook full of them. The system seems bad for (1) there is little hope of the reader knowing all these names — most seem new even to Joyce himself, and certainly are to me. And supposing the reader, knowing the fragment dealt with towns, took the trouble to look up the Encyclopedia, would he hit on the Joyce has selected? (2) The insertion of these puns is bound to lead the reader away from the basic text, to create divagations and the work is hard enough anyhow! The good method would be to write out a page of plain English and then rejuvenate dull words by injection of new (and appropriate) meanings. What he is doing is too easy to do and too hard to understand.
April 28, 1930: His method is more mechanical than ever. For the 'town references,' he scoured all the capital towns in the Encyclopedia and recorded in his black notebook all the 'punnable' names of streets, buildings, city-founders. Copenhagen, Budapest, Oslo, Rio I read to him. Unfortunately he made the entries in his black notebook himself and when he wanted to use them, the reader found them illegible.- Reflections on James Joyce: Stuart Gilbert's Paris Journal,
ed. Thomas F. Staley & Randolph Lewis
Joyce lost his faith but kept his superstition. And proselytized. By constructing reality effects which transform from red herring to vital clew on research and re-reading, Joyce fed the generic allures of puzzle-mystery and conspiracy theory into formalist realism, and thereby trained a generation of Joyceans into an everything-connects superstition of their own.
But while in the midst of serializing those carefully cross-wired diagrams of sub-sub-trivia across Ulysses, he began to immerse them in pointedly redundant anti-reality effects. "Cyclops" may be scrupulous about something, but whatever it is ain't "meanness." And after his increasingly bouncing babes were carted to the printshop and carted back again, he would improvise riffs across the proofsheets, snatching any chance to strengthen the scribbly cross-hatched fabric of the book or merely to, like the god of creation, wake up bleary-eyed and say Fuck me what was I doing last night?
On reading a letter from his daughter Milly, who had just turned 15 on 15 June, Bloom says 'Fifteen yesterday. Curious, fifteenth of the month too.' More to the point, Joyce's revision in proof gives the letter 15 sentences. But every editorial attempt to 'correct' Milly's adolescent syntax and punctuation, by reverting to earlier versions, has of course changed the count and obscured the point. So too, the passage in which Bloom reflects on the rate at which an object falls to earth ('thirty-two feet per second') is heavily revised in print to make it the 32nd sentence in the paragraph, where reversion to earlier readings, as in the 1984 edition, obscures that convergence of sign and sense. On page 88, Joyce added in proof a sentence of eight words to expand a newspaper death notice. It reads: 'Aged 88, after a long and tedious illness.' To page 77 he added in proof the phrase 'seventh heaven'; and on page 360, Bloom meditates on cycles.- Bibliography & the Sociology of Texts by D. F. McKenzie
What this showed McKenzie and John Kidd was that James Joyce thought his books too brittle to survive a page break. What it shows me is an unquenchable thirst for suspicious coincidence. Such details might have struck some unknown peculiar reader of the first edition, as they happened to strike the first edition's known peculiar writer; peculiar readers of later editions will presumably be struck by plenty of details of their own. Throw enough and someone will be struck. And who knows but that many of the belated recognitions of 1950s and 1960s Joyceans were just as casually opportunistic? If Joyce considered each precious intersection vital, wouldn't he have included them in his first drafts and poured them into the ears of his authorized explicators?
The contingent and ephemeral hold all we can reach of the necessary and eternal; we mold meaning from the pleasantly stinking loam of chance — such Good News can't be carried in rice-paperish porcelain; its vehicle should be built to survive chipping; should, ideally, become self-healing....
Or so I gather from the cheerfully incorporated bloopers and wide-world-of-kitchen-sinks ("Frightful stench, isn't it? Just too awful for words") method of Finnegans Wake, and from Joyce's remarks when questioned by a friendlier sort than Gilbert: his hope that a random reader in some far-off location would trip across a regional reference (my own muddy MO! my own K.C. jowls, they sure are wise!) and feel peculiarly addressed. In this work, at least, the readerly goal writerly assumed doesn't seem to have been full mastery — mulching libraries and and acquaintances so rapidly, odds are slim that Joyce himself would recall much source material after a month — but frequent recognition.
(Why a lad or lassie from Baton Rouge or Bucharest should bother to position themselves so as to encounter these happy accidents would be an unfriendly question to ask any author, I think, and at any rate went unanswered.)
Absolute control remaining unreachable, the artist might endeavor to maximize happy accidents. During my first reading of Finnegans Wake in 1980, I found a history of the Beatles, and, if we choose to take auctorial intention into account, this would be as the author intended. Most attempts to adapt Joyce's works to other media have been miserable things. The relative success of John Cage's slick and cheesy Roaratorio depends on chance, but isn't happenstance.
Flaubert's invention of detached formalist realism had the (possibly unanticipated) effect of rallying readerly sentiments against the all-powerful know-it-all artificer and toward his deluded, destructive protagonists. Eventually, in Trois Contes, he worked out of this particular bind by letting his protagonist retain her delusions (with Joyce following suit in "Clay"). But his less detached-realistic works avoided the question altogether. We can easily picture the endearingly idiotic tenacity of Bouvard and Pécuchet as a one-joke comic strip like "Little Sammy Sneeze" or "The Family Upstairs" or "That's My Pop!" Lines on paper don't sense pain as we know it.
Joyce found a way to join forces with himself. Even on my first, unaided reading, I felt rightness in the increasingly grotesque gigantism of Ulysses, and when I return to the book, that (possibly unanticipated) affective response is what I want to relive: an alliance with breathing ugly-as-life almost-humans repeatedly smacked down under floods of mocking inflation and bouncing up again ignorant as corks and damaged as new. Yes, the two male leads are having one of the worst days of their lives, presumably at the behest of some author. But because The Author in Our Face has directed our attention to his louder, noisier, and impotent assaults, the result is less like a vivisection than like a mixed-animation heroic epic of "Duck Amuck" starring Laurel and Hardy.
I've never managed a similarly direct response to Finnegans Wake, although I keep hoping. It looks like giants all the way down. Faced with a foundational secular religious document, I want Krazy Kat and I get Jack Kirby's New Gods.
James Joyce and Louis Zukofsky share an odd career pattern: a hermetic retreat into and outrageous expansion of the nuclear family, attempting to fit all space-time into an already crowded apartment.
The "cocooning" idiom bugged me from the start. A cocoon isn't a cozy retreat or celebration of stasis. By definition, cocooning occurs with intent to split. Maybe it's appropriate for them, though?
Previous vocational guidance: Joyce as science fiction writer; Joyce as life coach.
|. . . 2016-12-31
In a post I persistently remember as "Dawn Powell for President," Roger Gathman noted Hillary Clinton's roots in conservative Chicago and asked, "But how about the Midwesterner who returns from the East Coast?"
For me, the question triggered a resurgence of survivor's guilt, resolving into the usual hysterical paralysis. But even as the Drama Queen express barreled away, another train of thought launched towards Hollywood's most peculiar specialist in Midwestern You-Can't-Go-Home-Again-or-Can-You parts: Brooklyn orphaned-and-abusively-bred Barbara Stanwyck.
Back in 1939, Remember the Night had dragged Stanwyck back to Indiana in the custody of killjoy D.A. Fred MacMurray (but this is a Mitchell Leisen picture so at least he's an attractive killjoy). There she's rejected by a shockingly real representative of the Heartland's evil-hearted 30%, meets warm welcomes from not-so-realistic representatives of the open-hearted 20%, sinks gratefully into the embrace of family and community, and is then rejected by them. Big romantic finish while the Breen Office chants "Lock Her Up!"
In All I Desire, Stanwyck's Naomi returns to Wisconsin under her own steam. This makes for a very different story, directed by a very different storyteller.
For some reason, The Film Dictionary of Received Ideas is considered particularly authoritative on "Sirk, Douglas," but Sirk was not a simplistic thinker. Instead of Sturges's-and-Leisen's rigid segregation of good and evil souls, here they're so thoroughly intermingled with the middling majority that, well, sometimes we almost can't tell them apart.
And embodiments of Naomi's original disgrace continue to walk the mean streets of Riverdale, although they seem to have slipped her mind during her busy years on the road: her extramarital lover remains a pillar of good ol' boy society and has assumed a pointedly paternal role towards her son — the family's youngest child, born long after his two sisters and so closely to Naomi's escape that he may have precipitated it.
So Juliet Clark is certainly right to predict that "we can only feel relieved to be on the outside looking in" at this all-American home. But consider (as Stanwyck's character must) the alternative.
After ten years Naomi Murdoch's theatrical career has skidded midway down the music hall bill, with sour prospects ahead. (We'll never know how much talent she started with; she'd already borne three children, so she would have been trying to enter the profession at, let's say, age 28 or so?) Ostensibly, at least, she's seizing an opportunity to give her kid a thrill and pick up a little egoboo by way of a little fraudulence, after which she'll shed the pretense of stardom and return to her grind. But from the moment she struts off the train, she seems, so to speak, at home, which is to say on the stage, facing challenges, hitting her marks, sparking glee at each new win. She may not have been able to conquer Paris and London but this audience she can handle, and she'll surely find more opportunities to recite Shakespeare here than in burlesque.
The hometown hoaxer of Sturges's Hail the Conquering Hero is scabied by guilt; for the con-maiden of Sturges's The Lady Eve, the allure of sincerity goes foot-in-hand with the similarly vulnerable intimacy of full-frontal lust. In Riverdale, though, all self-expression is strictly utilitarian (albeit with none-too-well-thought-out motives); Naomi's just best at it.
The unrepentant criminal of Sturges's Remember the Night and the tempted ladies of Sirk's There's Always Tomorrow and All That Heaven Allows gladly lose their burden of selves in Good Clean Fun. But at no moment in All I Desire does Stanwyck convey pleasure untinted by performance. In Double Indemnity, what men mistake for sensuality is simply Mrs. Dietrichson's delight in manipulation; Mrs. Murdoch may have encountered similar confusion — and may still.
(A few critics even predict that lechery will send Naomi back to the creep she nearly killed. I can't see it. Stanwyck was a magnificently wide-ranging movie star but one thing she could never play convincingly on-screen was being pushed around. If Naomi strays again, it'll be with someone of more practical use; Colonel Underwood, maybe.)
All I Desire's' "unhappy happy ending" is not all tragic and not all sacrifice. It's the role of a lifetime.
From which I conclude that if the Democratic party had shown the good sense to nominate a HUAC-supporting union-attacking self-martyring workaholic for president and relocated her to Illinois, she might have drawn a plurality of the state's votes.
(On the other hand, the original novel, screenplay, and directorial intent had Naomi opting again for self-exile, possibly after a bridge-burning public self-exposure, presumably to expiate her sins by someday dying in the traditional gutter. So maybe it really is just a crapshoot.)
Naomi's got the situation well in hand
Josh Lukin reflects on 1952:
Your HUAC reference got me thinkin' —the candidate who was uncritical of McCarthy (see Howe, Irving, Steady Work) managed to lose in his native Illinois during the McCarthy era. To be fair, he seems to have lost everywhere except in a handful of states where his running-mate was popular. And thank Heaven he did, 'cause where would we be without the four civil libertarians Ike put on the Court, right?
Copyright to contributed work and quoted correspondence remains with the original authors.
Public domain work remains in the public domain.
All other material: Copyright 2015 Ray Davis.


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If you're planning on opening a new restaurant, you're probably buried in the details of what the place will look like, what equipment to use, everything down to the types of spoon to buy. When it comes to dishes, follow these tips to help you pick the perfect set for your establishment.
The very first thing you think of when it comes to dishes is likely to be the material. Paper? Glass? Plastic? China? Once you start thinking about it, the more options there are to weigh up. If you decide on plastic or paper, make sure to choose biodegradable or recyclable options. People consider everything when choosing to dine somewhere, including environmental sustainability. Glass is extremely classy but prone to scratches, so be prepared to polish constantly and replace often. China is a universal favourite, being cheap and easy to maintain as well as more durable than the other options.
As with the fish and chip concept, you have to consider the type of restaurant you are opening. Consider cultural norms when thinking about what to serve food on. Glass plates are typically seen in swanky, upper-class establishments, and it would be a little odd to see a pile of chicken nuggets and peas plated on a slab of glass. However, if a gourmet meal were presented to you on a plastic plate, what would be your first thought? A lot of thought must go into your selection. The new restaurants opening in London this year. https://london.eater.com/2018/4/10/17219424/london-restaurant-openings-2018 all consider these things when selecting their supplies.
How long things are going to last is an important factor when choosing any catering supplies. Durable materials like the ones found on https://www.247cateringsupplies.co.uk could be great for ensuring minimal chips and damage to glass or china. Obviously, paper plates will succumb quickly to liquid damage, so that makes them very vulnerable around anything other than fish and chips. If you are running a fish and chip restaurant, however, paper plates could be the answer since your meals won't dissolve them.
These tips should help you make the best selection of dishes while considering material, sustainability and your restaurant as a whole. Everything matters when opening a new business, right down to the tiny side plate you serve your starters on.

subset: commoncrawl


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IAG To Buy Air Berlin's Austrian Leisure Airline Niki
British Airways and Iberia parent IAG is to buy Air Berlin's Austrian leisure airline Niki for EUR€20 million (USD$24 million).
International Airlines Group (IAG) confirmed the agreement to acquire the insolvent airline, which will see it take on 740 former Niki staff and 15 Airbus A320-family aircraft.
IAG will provide additional liquidity to Niki of up to €16.5 million and establish a new Austrian subsidiary of its Spanish low cost carrier Vueling to house it.
The deal also includes slots at Vienna, Düsseldorf, Munich, Palma and Zurich airports.
"Niki was the most financially viable part of Air Berlin and its focus on leisure travel means it's a great fit with Vueling," IAG chief executive Willie Walsh said. "This deal will enable Vueling to increase its presence in Austria, Germany and Switzerland."
Niki ceased flying two weeks ago after Lufthansa dropped its offer to buy the airline from its insolvent parent Air Berlin. The German flag carrier said it had become apparent the European competition authorities would not approve Niki's integration into Lufthansa low cost unit Eurowings.
Air Berlin administrators put Niki back on the block, attracting four interested parties including IAG and the airline's founder, former racing driver Niki Lauda. The other parties dropped out leaving IAG to negotiate a final deal.
The acquisition is subject to regulatory approval.


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Mistress Barbara's Page Of Pain
Mr. Grumpy Tells All!
Bill Gates is a filthy (insert favourite Oedipal expletive here). Hey. It had to be said. What's that? Your system won't stop crashing since you uninstalled version 4.0? Oh well, just reinstall. Whoops! Windows thinks it's still running the new version. Bill Gates: what a sphincter. Gee, it's getting harder and harder to maintain that PG rating!
Now. On to the French. Before I rant and rave, I'm going to give our non-Canadian brethren a brief history lesson. Canada, and most of North America was originally owned by the British with the exception of Mexico and some southern states which were owned by the Spanish. The French got in on the action early on and founded Lower Canada which is basically Quebec and some parts of the Maritimes (note to Americans: the fiddly little provinces above Maine). Before you start going on about the Bayou, I should mention that it was founded by evil, filthy, French pirates so that doesn't really count. For more on this, wait until I get to the war of 1812 some day. So Quebec and England had another of their economic battles over sugar cane and slaves and, of course, some of that fighting happened here. Our man Wolfe kicked French butt in a decisive battle by attacking the mostly-undefended rear of the Citadel in Quebec City. The Citadel is a big-assed French fort with lots of canons where modern troops are taught first-hand about grenades. Not too many are taught second hand as they use live ones, but nothing teaches you respect for munitions like seeing your comrades blown to bloody chunks for a laugh. The French to this day will tell you that attacking their weak point was a sneaky and unfair move and that the English should have gotten blown out of the water like real men. Once again proving that the sun will never go down on the British Empire because not even God trusts the English in the dark.
Now then. The French are a race of politicians and have turned defeat into a niggling kind of oneupmanship. Quebec is a large province and to get elected one must get their votes. Therefore, Canadian politicians drag the other 9 provinces into Quebec issues to placate them (or, more specifically, their politicians). Here's an interesting political twist. The United Nations human rights legislation was drafted and proposed by a Canadian. Canada has been condemned under that legislation because of Quebec's bigoted language laws. And they think they're threatened by US???
Last year, they had a go at Micro-bytes for being English. Now they've just enacted legislation which calls for all French text on web pages to be twice the font size of the English text.
The moral: Think Locally. Act Globally. Yup. That's the French for ya.
The good news is that they've gotten Exploder to behave at the expense of every other Microsquish product in the system. So cool. I can surf the web while I go out of business. Hey! Maybe this is why there's so many slackers in Seattle!
Gee. Uninstalling Exploder was a bad idea, too. Good thing I have the Non-Microsoft First Aid to sort out most of this mess. Unfortunately, the MSIE uninstall also took out a ton of files on my hard drive effectively crippling Borland C's help system (ho hum. another reinstall). Corrupt start menu I can see, but the previous looks like seek and destroy operations to me. But hey, it could be a coincidence. That's the beauty of Microsoft's marketing plan. Release buggy software that any self-respecting, integrity-laden developer would call a beta and you can blame the most evil of actions on software faults.
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Nathan Richardson is a freelance travel, editorial and commercial photographer based out of Cork, Ireland. Clients include National Geographic, The Sunday Times, The Irish Times, Alamy Images and many other magazines, guidebooks and newspapers worldwide.
"It is the stories I get to tell, and the people I get to meet, from goat herders in Mongolia to soap vendors in Syria – that's makes everything I do worthwhile.
Getting to visit breathtaking sights and be immersed in some amazing and unique cultures is a great blessing and privilege. However, there is a heavy responsibility to be honest and empathetic towards the people and cultures I am photographing, while at the same time approaching each subject with an enthusiasm and curiosity that grabs the viewer."
– Nathan Richardson


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Author(s): Zondervan; Zonderkidz Staff
The NIrV Outreach Large Print Bible for Kids will enable you to present first-time Bible readers with an easy way of discovering the Scriptures as an unfolding story. This Bible is lightweight, functional, and readable, making it easy to keep God's Word on hand at all times.
Features of the NIrV Outreach Large Print Bible for Kids include:


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The attraction of 'topicals' is obvious. They are widely used to treat Sunspots. Some topical treatments are licensed to treat superficial skin cancers.
Topical Treatment Summary
- Picato® gel is still relatively new – usually for solar keratosis
- Efudix® is the most widely prescribed – typically for solar keratosis or IEC
- Diclofenac gel (Solareze®) has a niche for solar keratosis
- Imiquimod (Aldara®) is the second most commonly prescribed – most often for sBCC and solar keratosis.
I can't remember which skin cancer cream I used before
This will probably jolt your memory. Efudix is usually applied to an area of sunspots twice daily without a break whereas Aldara® is usually applied for 3 nights per week. Efudix is the most widely used in Australia because sunspots are so common.


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Chelsea and Diego Costa's dispute remains unresolved on eve of new season
Chelsea and Diego Costa's dispute is no nearer to a resolution as the Blues begin their Premier League title defence in an apparent legal wrangle with the exiled striker.
Head coach Antonio Conte on Friday said there was "no news" on Costa and responded "I don't know" when asked when the striker might return to London.
A Chelsea spokesman intervened, saying: "Nothing to report on that."
Last week Chelsea dismissed as "nonsense" claims by a lawyer said to be representing Costa that Conte was forcing out last season's top scorer.
But Press Association Sport understands a legal process is ongoing and there is no appetite to discuss the striker.
Conte has said it was decided in January, with Costa and his agent, Jorge Mendes, that the Brazil-born Spain international signed from Atletico Madrid in July 2014 would leave Stamford Bridge this summer.
So far this summer Costa, according to his Instagram posts, has been in Brazil. His rumoured preference of a return to Atletico is complicated by their transfer embargo, which expires in January 2018.
Chelsea open their Premier League title defence against Burnley at Stamford Bridge on Saturday after a summer of speculation.
Conte's future was also shrouded in doubt after rumoured friction over Chelsea's transfer activity.
The Italian belatedly signed an improved two-year contract, but it was not an extension to his deal, which expires in 2019.
Conte said: "My state of mind is clear. At the moment I signed a new contract, and then I decided to stay, I decided to work for this club, and then to try to give every day 120 per cent.
"I'm doing my best every day."
Chelsea have been active in the transfer market, signing striker Alvaro Morata from Real Madrid, plus defender Antonio Rudiger, goalkeeper Willy Caballero and Tiemoue Bakayoko, the midfielder bought from Monaco before Nemanja Matic was sold to rivals Manchester United.
Conte led the Blues from 10th the previous campaign to the Premier League trophy last season.
He suggested few fancied Chelsea's title chances this time last year and not many would back the Blues now.
He added: "It was the same last season. Not one person believed Chelsea would win the title.
"This season, in this moment, I agree with these people who think this."
One of the reasons for Conte playing down expectations on Chelsea is the size of his squad ahead of a return to the Champions League.
It is something Conte has bemoaned, but Arsenal manager Arsene Wenger had an answer, pointing to Chelsea sending numerous players out on loan.
Former England captain turned pundit Alan Shearer, meanwhile, said there was "something brewing which isn't nice" at Stamford Bridge.
Conte said: "I'm not looking for sympathy of any coaches for this situation.
"The situation is clear. If the club decide to send on loan players for their development it's because these players are not ready to play for Chelsea."
Conte kept his counsel on Chelsea's transfer business, with the summer window open until August 31.
"My only task is to focus on the pitch," Conte said.
"The club is trying to do their best on the transfer market."
Morata was signed for a reported fee rising to £70 million and could make his Premier League debut against the Clarets.
An ankle knock Pedro sustained in the Community Shield penalty shootout loss to Arsenal could mean Morata will start alongside Michy Batshuayi, who scored the decisive goal in Chelsea's title success at West Brom in May.
Morata on Friday told Marca "they're already killing me" over scrutiny of his two pre-season games and his 15-minute cameo at Wembley, when he missed a penalty in the shootout.
Conte said the Spain striker needs time to bed in, while simultaneously outlining the importance of the leading forward in his team.
"He's starting to understand what I want (from) him during the game," Conte said.
"But he needs time to understand, to adapt to our style of football, above all for a striker.
"This role is more difficult to adapt than the other roles."
PA Media


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Key points:
The FinPlan Report Suite provides everything you need to analyse and manage your firm's performance.
Each month, you should refer to the Practice Management Report.
This comprehensive analysis covers all aspects of your business (Written, Issued and Received figures) as well as showing Pipeline and Outstanding commission.
Each Adviser has a personal analysis report which provides a summary of their own figures, whilst the company owners and managers can run the full report, based on details from all advisers.
FinPlan provides an Income Report to analyse and summarise income over any period, and broken down by source (client or provider) as well as the adviser.
There are three types of report available in the Report Suite:
(1) Press the chart button on the Toolbar to access the Report Suite;
(2) Choose the report category from the left-hand column;
(3) The Practice Management Report is part of the MI & Compliance section;
(4) The Adviser Report provides an analysis report for a specific Adviser;
(5) Income Analysis, Breakdown and Trend Reports are available in their own section of the Report Suite.
The main Report Suite provides analysis across all clients and business transacted.
The Client Portfolio Report provides a client-facing report for a single client (or joint-couple) detailing their current investments and holdings.
To generate a Portfolio Report for a client, open the client record and access the Reports at the bottom left-hand side of the screen and choose Portfolio report.


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Opening of Wilson, N.C. Facility Provides VIP Guests with Line Demos; Company Leadership in Attendance for Interviews and Speeches
Wilson, North Carolina, USA – Hoffmann Neopac, a global provider of high-quality packaging for a broad array of industries and applications, officially opened its first U.S. facility on Thursday, May 16 with a ceremony that included tours, demonstrations and remarks from senior executives. Focusing primarily on small-diameter tubes, the 37,000-square-foot plant in Wilson, NC boasts a high-speed tube line capable of producing some 80 million tubes annually, as well as floorspace for several additional packaging lines to come.
At the grand opening, guided tours showcased the facility's amenities, equipment and potential product output portfolio. More than a dozen Neopac customers and some 30 community VIPs, Chamber of Commerce members and strategic partners attended a demonstration of the high-speed tube line – a configuration currently producing a 13.5mm version of the company's Twist'n'use™ Tube, a small-volume single-dose solution that, once the cap is twisted, is irrevocably opened.
The new facility positions Neopac to best serve the needs of the North American market in a twofold capacity: in the small tubes niche, especially in the pharma, cosmetics and animal health sectors, and also for emerging applications such as cannabis-based creams and liquids.
Speeches by key Neopac executives included an introduction from Mark Aegler, CEO of Hoffmann Neopac AG; a facility overview given by Douglas Voreis, Managing Director of Neopac U.S.; and a products and capabilities explanation led by Richard Misdom, Sales Manager Pharma NA at Neopac.
"The opening of the new manufacturing facility is a big success and further establishes our increasing presence in the North American marketplace," said Mark Aegler, CEO of Hoffmann Neopac. "Between guided plant tours, live demonstrations and informative speeches, guests witnessed firsthand the leadership and innovation offered by the state- of-the art Wilson facility and its talented team."
About Hoffmann Neopac
Hoffmann Neopac is a privately-owned company, headquartered in Thun, Switzerland. The group produces high-quality metal and plastic packaging in six locations: HOFFMANN tins in Thun and CMP tins in Holland; Polyfoil® and plastic tubes with NEOPAC in Switzerland, Hungary and the US; and 3D Neopac in India. Its longstanding customers include internationally active pharmaceutical, cosmetics and consumer goods manufacturers in the European, North American and Asian markets.
Including its new production facility in the United States, Neopac employs around 1,250 employees and has a capacity of 1.3 billion tubes. The company is dedicated to sustainability in both its manufacturing processes and corporate culture, including a dedicated eco-conscious packaging portfolio.
For more information, visit www.neopac.us.
Hoffmann Neopac
contact: Christopher Dale
Turchette Agency (973) 227-8080
ext. 116 email@example.com


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This policy has been formally adopted on April 19th 2013. Do not edit this page without consulting with the OBO Technical group. Change adopted March 2017 to add obsolete metadata to non-maintained PURLs. See issue https://github.com/OBOFoundry/OBOFoundry.github.io/issues/344. Comments to firstname.lastname@example.com
Identifiers are managed by giving requesting projects a series of numerical ids that have a common prefix, sometimes known as a namespace. For example, a project might request and obtain the prefix "MOBO". The ontology would then use ids of the form http://purl.obolibrary.org/obo/MOBO_0000001 , http://purl.obolibrary.org/obo/MOBO_0000002 …
In order to ensure that there is no prefix redundancy, i.e. only one project/resource is using the namespace "MOBO", these are allocated by the OBO Foundry technical working group.
The technical working group reserves the right to make decisions based on their experience and judgement. In addition to uniqueness of prefixes, other criteria are for example that there not be overlaps of usage. This includes awareness that there can be the appearance of overlap between accession numbers used in databases and prefixed URIs. For example, we would probably not create a prefix "ISBN" and would instead make alternative suggestions.
- While there are no review requirements, participation in the OBO Foundry implies willingness to discuss your project and collaboratively develop it. You are strongly encouraged to build upon the existing suite of ontologies available in the OBO library.
- We recommend projects be orthogonal to each other (i.e., no domain overlap). For those classes that are common across multiple resources (e.g., the class cell) we recommend importing terms from an already existing ontology. At a minimum, we expect attribution of existing work.
Status of ontology development
- A project should exist, with work started. We will not "pre-book" prefixes and domains for potential future resources.
- The required namespace must be available.
- The resource must be publicly available when released.
- There must be a contact person for the resource. We ask that the contact person for resources be subscribed to our main communication channel, the obo-discuss list.
- The requestor and/or contact person should be ready to discuss issues such as whether the ontology is orthogonal, whether there is potential to collaborate with existing efforts.
- It is expected that solicitation of a prefix is done before the prefix is used for identifiers. A common strategy is to develop an ontology, request a prefix, and translate the initial URIs used to the PURLs some time before the initial release. There is no guarantee that you will be granted your prefix, even if you have been using it in your file.
Information needed for a prefix request
You must first make your ontology available via a stable URL. Provide this to us, together with the following metadata:
- id: prefix of ontology in lowercase, e.g. mobo, uberon, chebi, cl
- title: concise title of your ontology
- home page: this can be a GitHub URL
- contact: name, email and github username
- tracker: URL of issue tracker (typically GitHub)
Note that we recommend you set up an ontology repository in GitHub using the Ontology Development Kit. This will create the required metadata fields for you.
Requesting the prefix
The requests proceeds in 2 steps:
First send an email to obo-discuss with your request to allow community feedback (you may need to apply to join group first.)
Submit your request to our tracker
(Optional) make a Pull Request on OBOFoundry.github.io and purl.obolibrary.org/
We expect general discussion to take place on the obo-discuss list, while technical follow-up will take place on the tracker.
Example of such request:
Allocate 2 weeks to give members of the community time to provide feedback and for the operations committee to act on the request. We will usually respond on the tracker ticket and acknowledge your request/provide a tentative creation date. If you don't hear back from us after 2 weeks, please send a note to the firstname.lastname@example.com or request follow-up via the tracker ticket.


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I Am The Daughter of a Man
The main room in our SIT villa was filled with powerhouse women today. The first lecture came from Professor Rula Qawas, a self-proclaimed activist for Jordanian women's liberation: "It is who I am. Damn it all to heck, I'm a feminist." The charismatic speaker exploded into her talk almost immediately, building up to a point when the space felt more like a rally than a lesson.
The professor covered a lot of ground concerning women's rights in the hour we had her for, but the part that captured my attention most was her explanation of the journey of a Middle Eastern woman's life.
When the woman is born, she is the daughter of a man, Qawas said. She will marry, because she is expected to. If not, she would be considered a "spinster," a responsibility to bear for her parents. The concern, aside from being a "hag," would be the worry of where she would live if her parents died. She would have to live with her brother.
When the woman is married, she becomes the wife of a man. Qawas spoke of her sadness when she goes to weddings and the women say, "I am the wife of," rather than their name.
"You have a name, you have an identity, tell me who you are," she roared to our group of about 45 people.
When the woman gives birth to a son (Inshallah), she becomes the mother of a man. If she doesn't have a son, her husband has a right to divorce her. Here in this patriarchal society, the family's nationality is passed through the father. This creates a need for boys in the family, Qawas said.
"This is their journey."
What struck me most about this wasn't necessarily the journey Qawas described, but rather how similar it is to a woman's journey in Kazakhstan. I listened to her speak and I couldn't help but think back to my counterpart I taught with who just wanted to find a husband and have children. The school I taught English in was overflowing with young teachers who just wanted to be like everyone else: get married, have babies, have sons. My colleagues that were recently engaged, married or pregnant would walk with an air of accomplishment, as if they had achieved something.
It was usually on these days my counterpart and I would go to a café, eat shashlik and she would tell me about how she worried she wouldn't find someone. It broke my heart that a strong and intelligent woman like she would feel so inadequate just because she didn't have a man and a son.
Qawas said that Arab women have a long road ahead in their fight for equality, but they are on the right track. I wonder if one day there will be an Arab Spring for women too.


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The United Nations refugee agency has launched a Ramadan appeal to help thousands of refugee youth in Kenya go to school. UNHCR said many youth at
There are many ways Muslims wish each other a happy Ramadan at this special time, but there's some debate over which is the best greeting
The annual Qur'an memorization competition organized by Jamia Mosque will kick off next weekend with the girls' event. The event to be held on May 11
On April 27, the last day of Passover, John Earnest, a 19-year-old white male, walked into a synagogue in Poway, California and opened fire with an assault
Somali fashion model Halima Aden has made history by becoming the first Muslim model to appear in Sports Illustrated magazine wearing a hijab. Sports Illustrated is


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Confronting a scene of congealed blood, scattered body parts, shelled buildings, bullet holes and the smell of burned flesh, United Nations monitors in Syria quietly collected evidence on Friday of a mass atrocity in a desolate hamlet, more than 24 hours after Syrian forces and government supporters blocked their first attempt to visit the site.
The monitoring team's journey to the hamlet, Qubeir, filmed and posted online, presented the outside world with the first visual proof from a neutral official source that a horrific crime had occurred there.
No corpses were found, and the team's officials said many of the facts behind the killings, which occurred Wednesday, had yet to be determined. But it seemed clear that the perpetrators had hastily sought to conceal what had happened, reinforcing suspicions that the government, by thwarting the monitors' efforts to reach the site on Thursday, had bought time for a cover-up.
Activist groups have accused President Bashar al-Assad of orchestrating the killings in a campaign to terrorize opponents in Syria's 16-month uprising against him, which has grown more violent and sectarian despite numerous diplomatic entreaties and the presence of United Nations monitors since April.
Mr. Assad's government, dominated by his minority Alawite sect, has denied responsibility for the killings in Qubeir, where the residents were part of the Sunni majority, and he has called the accusation a propagandist lie. But it remains unclear why the monitors were not permitted to visit the site much sooner.
"Some homes were damaged by rockets from B.M.P.'s, grenades and a range of caliber weapons," a spokeswoman for the monitors, Sausan Ghosheh, said in an e-mailed description of the visit, using the abbreviation for a Russian-made armored personnel carrier used by the Syrian military. "Inside some of the houses, the walls and floors were splatted with blood. Fire was still burning outside houses, and there was a strong stench of burnt flesh in the air."
Amid the uproar over the Qubeir killings, the fourth massacre in Syria in two weeks, multiple clashes flared in other Syrian locales on Friday, including Damascus neighborhoods close to the center of the capital.
International efforts to find a way out of the Syrian crisis intensified in Washington, where Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, an outspoken opponent of President Assad, met privately with Kofi Annan, the special envoy of the United Nations and Arab League. Mr. Annan, whose peace plan that placed the monitors in Syria is widely considered a failure, has insisted the plan can work if the big powers put more pressure on Mr. Assad.
Antigovernment activists who first reported the Qubeir mass killings on Wednesday night, which they blamed on government troops and plainclothes militiamen known as shabiha, said that as many as 78 people, half of them women and children, were slaughtered in the hamlet, a clutch of low-lying farmhouses with a population of 130 amid cornfields about 20 miles from the city of Hama.
But Ms. Ghosheh, the spokeswoman, who accompanied the monitors, said the number and names of the victims had not been confirmed, the community was empty of residents, and "thus the observers were not able to talk to anyone who witnessed Wednesday's horrific tragedy."
She said it would take time to sort out conflicting information from residents of neighboring villages. "We need to go back, cross-reference what we have heard and check the names they say were killed, check the names they say are missing," she said.
The monitoring team's Qubeir video shows smoke outside homes, a large hole from an artillery shell, interior wreckage and bullet scarring, a bloodstained mattress, a congealed pool of blood and an unidentified man from a neighboring village holding a sheet with the remains of human flesh. Another unidentified man is seen pointing to a framed portrait, then breaking down in tears.
A third man is seen saying in Arabic: "Young children, infants, my brother, his wife and seven children, the eldest only sixth grade, all dead. I will show you the blood. They burned his house."
A few foreign journalists who were permitted to travel with the monitoring team also reported evidence of multiple killings and signs of attempts to hide the bloodshed. A BBC correspondent, Paul Danahar, said that neighboring villagers who approached the monitors blamed the shabiha for the killings, and that they said the militiamen trucked the bodies away. Another villager said sticks had been used to kill children.
"This has basically been a scorched-earth policy by whoever this was; they've killed the people, they've killed the livestock, they've left nothing in the village alive," Mr. Danahar said in an audio recording posted on the BBC News Web site. He called it "an appalling scene."
In one house, he said in his reporting, he saw "pieces of people's brains on the floor."
"There is a tablecloth covered in blood and flesh," he continued, "and in the corner, the blood has been pushed into a pile by someone trying to clean it up and, frankly, giving up because there's simply too much of it."
The official Syrian account of what happened in Qubeir was starkly different. A report on the Syrian Arab News Agency Web site quoted witnesses as saying that terrorist groups, the government's euphemism for the opposition, had attacked Qubeir with rocket launchers and machine guns, nine people had been killed, and the military and law enforcement authorities had been called in to protect the hamlet.
The report criticized unidentified "bloody satellite channels which are counterfeiting the truth to serve their interests," an apparent reference to CNN, Al Jazeera and others carrying opposition accounts of the killings.
The Friday mayhem elsewhere in Syria included clashes between troops and activists in at least one restive district of Damascus, where explosions could be heard. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a British group with a network of informants in Syria, reported clashes in at least three Damascus neighborhoods, while in Homs, a center of antigovernment sentiment, the group reported "the most violent shelling" it had seen since the anti-Assad uprising began.
Some experts on Syria have described the Qubeir killings as part of a new stage in the conflict that has crossed dangerously into sectarian hatreds, fomented by Mr. Assad's government, a situation for which efforts like Mr. Annan's peace plan are too late.
"We've reached the point of no return," said Salman Shaikh, director of the Brookings Doha Center in Qatar and a former United Nations official. "Diplomacy has not kept up with the reality on the ground."
Mohamed A. Alsiadi, a Syrian émigré who is the coordinator of the Arabic Language and Cultural Studies Program at Fordham University in New York, said that he had never had much faith in Mr. Annan's peace plan, and that the Qubeir killings proved his skepticism. "Assad is very smart," Mr. Alsiadi said. "He knows when to put pressure, ease pressure. They're playing games with us."
Mr. Annan, who spoke briefly with reporters in Washington before meeting with Mrs. Clinton, has fended off criticism that his plan cannot work and that the Syrian president has never intended to honor it.
"Some say the plan may be dead," he said. "Is the problem the plan or the problem is implementation? If it's implementation, how do we get action on that? And if it's the plan, what other options do we have?"