text:
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W. H. Auden
|W. H. Auden
Auden in 1939 (from the Library of Congress)
Wystan Hugh Auden
21 February 1907
York, England
29 September 1973 (aged 66)
Vienna, Austria
|York, Birmingham, Oxford (UK); Berlin (Germany); Helensburgh, Colwall, London (UK); New York, Ann Arbor, Swarthmore (US); Ischia (Italy); Kirchstetten (Austria); Oxford (UK)
|British from birth, American from 1946
|M.A. English language and literature
|Alma mater
|Christ Church, Oxford
|Christianity (Anglicanism)
|Erika Mann (unconsummated marriage, 1935, to provide her with a British passport)
|George Augustus Auden (father), Constance Rosalie Bicknell Auden (mother), George Bernard Auden (brother), John Bicknell Auden (brother)
Wystan Hugh Auden[1] (/ˈwɪstən ˈhjuː ˈɔːdən/;[2] 21 February 1907 – 29 September 1973) was an Anglo-American poet,[3][4] born in England, an American citizen (from 1946), and regarded by many critics as one of the greatest writers of the 20th century.[5] His work is noted for its stylistic and technical achievement, its engagement with moral and political issues, and its variety in tone, form and content.[6][7] The central themes of his poetry are love, politics and citizenship, religion and morals, and the relationship between unique human beings and the anonymous, impersonal world of nature.
Auden grew up in and near Birmingham in a professional middle-class family and read English literature at Christ Church, Oxford. His early poems from the late 1920s and early 1930s, written in an intense and dramatic tone and in a style that alternated between telegraphic modern and fluent traditional, established his reputation as a left-wing political poet and prophet. In the late 1930s he became uncomfortable in this role and abandoned it after he moved to the United States in 1939. In his poems from the 1940s he explored religious and ethical themes in a less dramatic manner than in his earlier works, and combined traditional forms and styles with new, original forms. The focus of many of his poems from the 1950s and 1960s was on the ways in which words revealed and concealed emotions. He took a particular interest in writing opera librettos, a form ideally suited to direct expression of strong feelings.[8] Following his death in 1973, his memorial stone was unveiled in Poets' Corner, Westminster Abbey in 1974.
He was also a prolific writer of prose essays and reviews on literary, political, psychological and religious subjects, and he worked at various times on documentary films, poetic plays and other forms of performance. Throughout his career he was both controversial and influential. After his death, some of his poems, notably "Funeral Blues" ("Stop all the clocks"), "Musée des Beaux Arts", "Refugee Blues", "The Unknown Citizen", and "September 1, 1939", became known to a much wider public than during his lifetime through films, broadcasts, and popular media.[5]
- 1 Life
- 2 Work
- 3 Published works
- 4 Notes
- 5 References
- 6 External links
Auden was born in York, England, to George Augustus Auden, a physician, and Constance Rosalie Auden, née Bicknell, who had trained (but never served) as a missionary nurse. He was the third of three sons; the eldest, George Bernard Auden, became a farmer, while the second, John Bicknell Auden, became a geologist. Auden, whose grandfathers were both Church of England clergymen,[9] grew up in an Anglo-Catholic household that followed a "High" form of Anglicanism with doctrine and ritual resembling those of Roman Catholicism.[10][11] He traced his love of music and language partly to the church services of his childhood.[12] He believed he was of Icelandic descent, and his lifelong fascination with Icelandic legends and Old Norse sagas is visible throughout his work.[13]
In 1908 his family moved to Homer Road, Solihull, near Birmingham,[14] where his father had been appointed the School Medical Officer and Lecturer (later Professor) of Public Health. Auden's lifelong psychoanalytic interests began in his father's library. From the age of eight he attended boarding schools, returning home for holidays.[10] His visits to the Pennine landscape and its declining lead-mining industry figure in many of his poems; the remote decaying mining village of Rookhope was for him a "sacred landscape", evoked in a late poem, "Amor Loci".[15] Until he was fifteen he expected to become a mining engineer, but his passion for words had already begun. He wrote later: "words so excite me that a pornographic story, for example, excites me sexually more than a living person can do."[16]
Auden's first boarding school was St Edmund's School, Hindhead, Surrey, where he met Christopher Isherwood, later famous in his own right as a novelist.[17] At thirteen he went to Gresham's School in Norfolk; there, in 1922, when his friend Robert Medley asked him if he wrote poetry, Auden first realised his vocation was to be a poet.[10] Soon after, he "discover(ed) that he (had) lost his faith" (through a gradual realisation that he had lost interest in religion, not through any decisive change of views).[18] In school productions of Shakespeare, he played Katherina in The Taming of the Shrew in 1922,[19] and Caliban in The Tempest in 1925, his last year at Gresham's.[20] His first published poems appeared in the school magazine in 1923.[21] Auden later wrote a chapter on Gresham's for Graham Greene's The Old School: Essays by Divers Hands (1934).[22]
In 1925 he went up to Christ Church, Oxford, with a scholarship in biology, but he switched to English by his second year. Friends he met at Oxford included Cecil Day-Lewis, Louis MacNeice, and Stephen Spender; these four were commonly though misleadingly identified in the 1930s as the "Auden Group" for their shared (but not identical) left-wing views. Auden left Oxford in 1928 with a third-class degree.[10][12]
He was reintroduced to Christopher Isherwood in 1925 by his fellow student A. S. T. Fisher. For the next few years Isherwood was his literary mentor to whom he sent poems for comments and criticism. Auden probably fell in love with Isherwood, and in the 1930s they maintained a sexual friendship in intervals between their relations with others. In 1935–39 they collaborated on three plays and a travel book.[23]
From his Oxford years onward, Auden's friends uniformly described him as funny, extravagant, sympathetic, generous, and, partly by his own choice, lonely. In groups he was often dogmatic and overbearing in a comic way; in more private settings he was diffident and shy except when certain of his welcome. He was punctual in his habits, and obsessive about meeting deadlines, while choosing to live amidst physical disorder.[11]
Britain and Europe, 1928–38
In the autumn of 1928, Auden left Britain for nine months in Berlin, partly to rebel against English repressiveness. In Berlin, he said, he first experienced the political and economic unrest that became one of his central subjects.[12]
On returning to Britain in 1929, he worked briefly as a tutor. In 1930 his first published book, Poems (1930), was accepted by T. S. Eliot for Faber and Faber; the firm also published all his later books. In 1930 he began five years as a schoolmaster in boys' schools: two years at the Larchfield Academy in Helensburgh, Scotland, then three years at the Downs School in the Malvern Hills, where he was a much-loved teacher.[10] At the Downs, in June 1933, he experienced what he later described as a "Vision of Agape", when, while sitting with three fellow-teachers at the school, he suddenly found that he loved them for themselves, that their existence had infinite value for him; this experience, he said, later influenced his decision to return to the Anglican Church in 1940.[24]
During these years, Auden's erotic interests focused, as he later said, on an idealised "Alter Ego"[25] rather than on individual persons. His relations (and his unsuccessful courtships) tended to be unequal either in age or intelligence; his sexual relations were transient, although some evolved into long friendships. He contrasted these relations with what he later regarded as the "marriage" (his word) of equals that he began with Chester Kallman in 1939 (see below), based on the unique individuality of both partners.[26]
From 1935 until he left Britain early in 1939, Auden worked as freelance reviewer, essayist, and lecturer, first with the G.P.O. Film Unit, a documentary film-making branch of the post office, headed by John Grierson. Through his work for the Film Unit in 1935 he met and collaborated with Benjamin Britten, with whom he also worked on plays, song cycles, and a libretto. Auden's plays in the 1930s were performed by the Group Theatre, in productions that he supervised to varying degrees.[12]
His work now reflected his belief that any good artist must be "more than a bit of a reporting journalist".[27] In 1936, Auden spent three months in Iceland where he gathered material for a travel book Letters from Iceland (1937), written in collaboration with Louis MacNeice. In 1937 he went to Spain intending to drive an ambulance for the Republic in the Spanish Civil War, but was put to work broadcasting propaganda, a job he left to visit the front. His seven-week visit to Spain affected him deeply, and his social views grew more complex as he found political realities to be more ambiguous and troubling than he had imagined.[10][26] Again attempting to combine reportage and art, he and Isherwood spent six months in 1938 visiting China amid the Sino-Japanese War, working on their book Journey to a War (1939). On their way back to England they stayed briefly in New York and decided to move to the United States. Auden spent the autumn of 1938 partly in England, partly in Brussels.[10]
Many of Auden's poems during the 1930s and afterward were inspired by unconsummated love, and in the 1950s he summarised his emotional life in a famous couplet: "If equal affection cannot be / Let the more loving one be me" ("The More Loving One"). He had a gift for friendship and, starting in the late 1930s, a strong wish for the stability of marriage; in a letter to his friend James Stern he called marriage "the only subject."[28] Throughout his life, Auden performed charitable acts, sometimes in public (as in his marriage of convenience to Erika Mann in 1935 that gave her a British passport with which to escape the Nazis[10]), but, especially in later years, more often in private, and he was embarrassed if they were publicly revealed, as when his gift to his friend Dorothy Day for the Catholic Worker movement was reported on the front page of The New York Times in 1956.[29]
United States and Europe, 1939–73
Auden and Isherwood sailed to New York City in January 1939, entering on temporary visas. Their departure from Britain was later seen by many there as a betrayal, and Auden's reputation suffered.[10] In April 1939, Isherwood moved to California, and he and Auden saw each other only intermittently in later years. Around this time, Auden met the poet Chester Kallman, who became his lover for the next two years (Auden described their relation as a "marriage" that began with a cross-country "honeymoon" journey).[30] In 1941 Kallman ended their sexual relationship because he could not accept Auden's insistence on a mutual faithful relationship, but he and Auden remained companions for the rest of Auden's life, sharing houses and apartments from 1953 until Auden's death. Auden dedicated both editions of his collected poetry (1945/50 and 1966) to Isherwood and Kallman.[31]
In 1940–41, Auden lived in a house at 7 Middagh Street in Brooklyn Heights, which he shared with Carson McCullers, Benjamin Britten, and others, and which became a famous center of artistic life, nicknamed "February House".[32] In 1940, Auden joined the Episcopal Church, returning to the Anglican Communion he had abandoned at thirteen. His reconversion was influenced partly by what he called the "sainthood" of Charles Williams,[33] whom he had met in 1937, and partly by reading Søren Kierkegaard and Reinhold Niebuhr; his existential, this-worldly Christianity became a central element in his life.[34]
After Britain declared war on Germany in September 1939, Auden told the British embassy in Washington that he would return to the UK if needed, but was told that, among those his age (32), only qualified personnel were needed. In 1941–42 he taught English at the University of Michigan. He was called up to be drafted in the United States Army in August 1942, but was rejected on medical grounds. He had been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for 1942–43 but did not use it, choosing instead to teach at Swarthmore College in 1942–45.[10]
In the summer of 1945, after the end of World War II in Europe, he was in Germany with the U. S. Strategic Bombing Survey, studying the effects of Allied bombing on German morale, an experience that affected his postwar work as his visit to Spain had affected him earlier.[31] On his return, he settled in Manhattan, working as a freelance writer, a lecturer at The New School for Social Research, and a visiting professor at Bennington, Smith, and other American colleges. In 1946 he became a naturalised citizen of the US.[10][12]
His theology in his later years evolved from a highly inward and psychologically oriented Protestantism in the early 1940s to a more Roman Catholic-oriented interest in the significance of the body and in collective ritual in the later 1940s and 1950s, and finally to the theology of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, which rejected "childish" conceptions of God for an adult religion that focused on the significance of human suffering.[31][34]
Auden began summering in Europe in 1948, first in Ischia, Italy, where he rented a house, then, starting in 1958, in Kirchstetten, Austria, where he bought a farmhouse, and, he said, shed tears of joy at owning a home for the first time.[10]
In 1951, shortly before the two British spies Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean fled to the USSR, Burgess attempted to phone Auden to arrange a vacation visit to Ischia that he had earlier discussed with Auden; Auden never returned the call and had no further contact with either spy, but a media frenzy ensued in which his name was mistakenly associated with their escape. The frenzy was repeated when the MI5 documents on the incident were released in 2007.[35][36]
In 1956–61, Auden was Professor of Poetry at Oxford University where he was required to give three lectures each year. This fairly light workload allowed him to continue to winter in New York, where he now lived at 77 St. Mark's Place in Manhattan's East Village, and to summer in Europe, spending only three weeks each year lecturing in Oxford. He now earned his income mostly by readings and lecture tours, and by writing for The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, and other magazines.[12]
During his last years, his conversation became repetitive, to the disappointment of friends who had known him earlier as a witty and wide-ranging conversationalist.[10][37] In 1972, Auden moved his winter home from New York to Oxford, where his old college, Christ Church, offered him a cottage, but he continued to summer in Austria. He died in Vienna in 1973 and was buried in Kirchstetten.[10]
Auden published about four hundred poems, including seven long poems (two of them book-length). His poetry was encyclopaedic in scope and method, ranging in style from obscure twentieth-century modernism to the lucid traditional forms such as ballads and limericks, from doggerel through haiku and villanelles to a "Christmas Oratorio" and a baroque eclogue in Anglo-Saxon meters.[8] The tone and content of his poems ranged from pop-song clichés to complex philosophical meditations, from the corns on his toes to atoms and stars, from contemporary crises to the evolution of society.[5][26]
He also wrote more than four hundred essays and reviews about literature, history, politics, music, religion, and many other subjects. He collaborated on plays with Christopher Isherwood and on opera libretti with Chester Kallman, and worked with a group of artists and filmmakers on documentary films in the 1930s and with the New York Pro Musica early music group in the 1950s and 1960s. About collaboration he wrote in 1964: "collaboration has brought me greater erotic joy . . . than any sexual relations I have had."[38]
Auden controversially rewrote or discarded some of his most famous poems when he prepared his later collected editions. He wrote that he rejected poems that he found "boring" or "dishonest" in the sense that they expressed views he had never held but had used only because he felt they would be rhetorically effective.[39] His rejected poems include "Spain" and "September 1, 1939". His literary executor, Edward Mendelson, argues in his introduction to Selected Poems that Auden's practice reflected his sense of the persuasive power of poetry and his reluctance to misuse it.[40] (Selected Poems includes some poems that Auden rejected and early texts of poems that he revised.)
Early work, 1922–39
Up to 1930
Auden began writing poems at thirteen, mostly in the styles of 19th-century romantic poets, especially Wordsworth, and later poets with rural interests, especially Thomas Hardy. At eighteen he discovered T. S. Eliot and adopted an extreme version of Eliot's style. He found his own voice at twenty when he wrote the first poem later included in his collected work, "From the very first coming down".[26] This and other poems of the late 1920s tended to be in a clipped, elusive style that alluded to, but did not directly state, their themes of loneliness and loss. Twenty of these poems appeared in his first book Poems (1928), a pamphlet hand-printed by Stephen Spender.[41]
In 1928 he wrote his first dramatic work, Paid on Both Sides, subtitled "A Charade", which combined style and content from the Icelandic sagas with jokes from English school life. This mixture of tragedy and farce, with a dream play-within-a-play, introduced the mixed styles and content of much of his later work.[8] This drama and thirty short poems appeared in his first published book Poems (1930, 2nd edition with seven poems replaced, 1933); the poems in the book were mostly lyrical and gnomic mediations on hoped-for or unconsummated love and on themes of personal, social, and seasonal renewal; among these poems were "It was Easter as I walked," "Doom is dark," "Sir, no man's enemy," and "This lunar beauty."[26]
A recurrent theme in these early poems is the effect of "family ghosts", Auden's term for the powerful, unseen psychological effects of preceding generations on any individual life (and the title of a poem). A parallel theme, present throughout his work, is the contrast between biological evolution (unchosen and involuntary) and the psychological evolution of cultures and individuals (voluntary and deliberate even in its subconscious aspects).[8][26]
Auden's next large-scale work was The Orators: An English Study (1932; revised editions, 1934, 1966), in verse and prose, largely about hero-worship in personal and political life. In his shorter poems, his style became more open and accessible, and the exuberant "Six Odes" in The Orators reflect his new interest in Robert Burns.[8] During the next few years, many of his poems took their form and style from traditional ballads and popular songs, and also from expansive classical forms like the Odes of Horace, which he seems to have discovered through the German poet Hölderlin.[26] Around this time his main influences were Dante, William Langland, and Alexander Pope.[42]
During these years, much of his work expressed left-wing views, and he became widely known as a political poet although his work was more politically ambivalent than many reviewers recognised.[26] He generally wrote about revolutionary change in terms of a "change of heart", a transformation of a society from a closed-off psychology of fear to an open psychology of love.[11] His verse drama The Dance of Death (1933) was a political extravaganza in the style of a theatrical revue, which Auden later called "a nihilistic leg-pull."[43] His next play The Dog Beneath the Skin (1935), written in collaboration with Isherwood, was similarly a quasi-Marxist updating of Gilbert and Sullivan in which the general idea of social transformation was more prominent than any specific political action or structure.[8][26]
The Ascent of F6 (1937), another play written with Isherwood, was partly an anti-imperialist satire, partly (in the character of the self-destroying climber Michael Ransom) an examination of Auden's own motives in taking on a public role as a political poet.[26] This play included the first version of "Funeral Blues" ("Stop all the clocks"), written as a satiric eulogy for a politician; Auden later rewrote the poem as a "Cabaret Song" about lost love (written to be sung by the soprano Hedli Anderson, for whom he wrote many lyrics in the 1930s).[44] In 1935, he worked briefly on documentary films with the G.P.O. Film Unit, writing his famous verse commentary for Night Mail and lyrics for other films that were among his attempts in the 1930s to create a widely accessible, socially conscious art.[8][26][44]
These tendencies in style and content culminate in his collection Look, Stranger! (1936; his British publisher chose the title, which Auden hated; Auden retitled the 1937 US edition On This Island).[26] This book included political odes, love poems, comic songs, meditative lyrics, and a variety of intellectually intense but emotionally accessible verse. Among the poems included in the book, connected by themes of personal, social, and evolutionary change and of the possibilities and problems of personal love, were "Hearing of harvests", "Out on the lawn I lie in bed", "O what is that sound", "Look, stranger, on this island now" (later revised versions change "on" to "at"), and "Our hunting fathers".[8][26]
Auden was now arguing that an artist should be a kind of journalist, and he put this view into practice in Letters from Iceland (1937) a travel book in prose and verse written with Louis MacNeice, which included his long social, literary, and autobiographical commentary "Letter to Lord Byron".[45] In 1937, after observing the Spanish Civil War he wrote a politically engaged pamphlet poem Spain (1937); he later discarded it from his collected works. Journey to a War (1939) a travel book in prose and verse, was written with Isherwood after their visit to the Sino-Japanese War.[45] Auden's last collaboration with Isherwood was their third play, On the Frontier, an anti-war satire written in Broadway and West End styles.[12][26]
Auden's themes in his shorter poems now included the fragility and transience of personal love ("Danse Macabre", "The Dream", "Lay your sleeping head"), a theme he treated with ironic wit in his "Four Cabaret Songs for Miss Hedli Anderson" (which included "Tell Me the Truth About Love" and the revised version of "Funeral Blues"), and also the corrupting effect of public and official culture on individual lives ("Casino", "School Children", "Dover").[8][26] In 1938 he wrote a series of dark, ironic ballads about individual failure ("Miss Gee", "James Honeyman", "Victor"). All these appeared in his next book of verse, Another Time (1940), together with other famous poems such as "Dover", "As He Is", and "Musée des Beaux Arts" (all written before he moved to America in 1939), and "In Memory of W. B. Yeats", "The Unknown Citizen", "Law Like Love", "September 1, 1939", and "In Memory of Sigmund Freud" (written in America).[8] The elegies for Yeats and Freud are partly statements of Auden's anti-heroic theme, in which great deeds are performed, not by unique geniuses whom others cannot hope to imitate, but by otherwise ordinary individuals who were "silly like us" (Yeats) or of whom it could be said "he wasn't clever at all" (Freud), and who became teachers of others, not awe-inspiring heroes.[26]
Middle period, 1940–57
In 1940 Auden wrote a long philosophical poem "New Year Letter", which appeared with miscellaneous notes and other poems in The Double Man (1941). At the time of his return to the Anglican Communion he began writing abstract verse on theological themes, such as "Canzone" and "Kairos and Logos". Around 1942, as he became more comfortable with religious themes, his verse became more open and relaxed, and he increasingly used the syllabic verse he had learned from the poetry of Marianne Moore.[31]
His recurring themes in this period included the artist's temptation to use other persons as material for his art rather than valuing them for themselves ("Prospero to Ariel") and the corresponding moral obligation to make and keep commitments while recognising the temptation to break them ("In Sickness and Health").[8][31] From 1942 through 1947 he worked mostly on three long poems in dramatic form, each differing from the others in form and content: "For the Time Being: A Christmas Oratorio", "The Sea and the Mirror: A Commentary on Shakespeare's The Tempest" (both published in For the Time Being, 1944), and The Age of Anxiety: A Baroque Eclogue (published separately in 1947).[31] The first two, with Auden's other new poems from 1940 to 1944, were included in his first collected edition, The Collected Poetry of W. H. Auden (1945), with most of his earlier poems, many in revised versions.[8]
After completing The Age of Anxiety in 1946 he focused again on shorter poems, notably "A Walk After Dark", "The Love Feast", and "The Fall of Rome".[31] Many of these evoked the Italian village where he summered in 1948–57, and his next book, Nones (1951), had a Mediterranean atmosphere new to his work. A new theme was the "sacred importance" of the human body[46] in its ordinary aspect (breathing, sleeping, eating) and the continuity with nature that the body made possible (in contrast to the division between humanity and nature that he had emphasised in the 1930s); his poems on these themes included "In Praise of Limestone" and "Memorial for the City".[8][31] In 1949 Auden and Kallman wrote the libretto for Igor Stravinsky's opera The Rake's Progress, and later collaborated on two libretti for operas by Hans Werner Henze.[10][47]
Auden's first separate prose book was The Enchafèd Flood: The Romantic Iconography of the Sea (1950), based on a series of lectures on the image of the sea in romantic literature.[48] Between 1949 and 1954 he worked on a sequence of seven Good Friday poems, "Horae Canonicae", an encyclopaedic survey of geological, biological, cultural, and personal history, focused on the irreversible act of murder; the poem was also a study in cyclical and linear ideas of time. While writing this, he also wrote a sequence of seven poems about man's relation to nature, "Bucolics". Both sequences appeared in his next book, The Shield of Achilles (1955), with other short poems, including the book's title poem, "Fleet Visit", and "Epitaph for the Unknown Soldier".[8][31]
Extending the themes of "Horae Canonicae", in 1955–56 he wrote a group of poems about "history", the term he used to mean the set of unique events made by human choices, as opposed to "nature", the set of involuntary events created by natural processes, statistics, and anonymous forces such as crowds. These poems included "T the Great", "The Maker", and the title poem of his next collection Homage to Clio (1960).[8][31]
Later work, 1958–73
In the late 1950s Auden's style became less rhetorical while its range of styles increased. In 1958, having moved his summer home from Italy to Austria, he wrote "Good-bye to the Mezzogiorno"; other poems from this period include "Dichtung und Wahrheit: An Unwritten Poem", a prose poem about the relation between love and personal and poetic language, and the contrasting "Dame Kind", about the anonymous impersonal reproductive instinct. These and other poems, including his 1955–66 poems about history, appeared in Homage to Clio (1960).[8][31]
His prose book The Dyer's Hand (1962) gathered many of the lectures he gave in Oxford as Professor of Poetry in 1956–61, together with revised versions of essays and notes written since the mid-1940s.[31]
While translating the haiku and other verse in Dag Hammarskjöld's Markings, Auden began using haiku for many of his poems.[31] A sequence of fifteen poems about his house in Austria, "Thanksgiving for a Habitat", appeared in About the House (1965), with other poems that included his reflections on his lecture tours, "On the Circuit".[8] In the late 1960s he wrote some of his most vigorous poems, including "River Profile" and two poems that looked back over his life, "Prologue at Sixty" and "Forty Years On". All these appeared in City Without Walls (1969). His lifelong passion for Icelandic legend culminated in his verse translation of The Elder Edda (1969).[8][31]
He was commissioned in 1963 to write lyrics for the Broadway musical Man of La Mancha, but the producer rejected them as insufficiently romantic.[47] In 1971 Secretary-General of the United Nations U Thant commissioned Auden to write the words, and Pablo Casals to compose the music, for a "Hymn to the United Nations", but the work had no official status.[49]
A Certain World: A Commonplace Book (1970) was a kind of self-portrait made up of favourite quotations with commentary, arranged in alphabetical order by subject. His last prose book was a selection of essays and reviews, Forewords and Afterwords (1973).[10] His last books of verse, Epistle to a Godson (1972) and the unfinished Thank You, Fog (published posthumously, 1974) include reflective poems about language ("Natural Linguistics") and about his own ageing ("A New Year Greeting", "Talking to Myself", "A Lullaby" ["The din of work is subdued"]). His last completed poem was "Archaeology", about ritual and timelessness, two recurring themes in his later years.[31]
Reputation and influence
Auden's stature in modern literature has been disputed, with opinions ranging from that of Hugh MacDiarmid, who called him "a complete wash-out", to the obituarist in The Times (London), who wrote: "W. H. Auden, for long the enfant terrible of English poetry . . . emerges as its undisputed master."[50]
In his enfant terrible stage in the 1930s he was both praised and dismissed as a progressive and accessible voice, in contrast to the politically nostalgic and poetically obscure voice of T. S. Eliot. His departure for America in 1939 was hotly debated in Britain (once even in Parliament), with some critics treating it as a betrayal, and the role of influential young poet passed to Dylan Thomas, although defenders such as Geoffrey Grigson, in an introduction to a 1949 anthology of modern poetry, wrote that Auden "arches over all". His stature was suggested by book titles such as Auden and After by Francis Scarfe (1942) and The Auden Generation by Samuel Hynes (1972).[5]
In the US, starting in the late 1930s, the detached, ironic tone of Auden's regular stanzas set the style for a whole generation of poets; John Ashbery recalled that in the 1940s Auden "was the modern poet".[50] His manner was so pervasive in American poetry that the ecstatic style of the Beat Generation was partly a reaction against his influence. In the 1950s and 1960s, some writers (notably Philip Larkin and Randall Jarrell) lamented that Auden's work had declined from its earlier promise.[50][51] Auden was one of three candidates recommended by the Nobel Committee to the Swedish Academy for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1963[52] and six recommended for the 1964 prize.[53]
By the time of Auden's death in 1973 he had attained the status of a respected elder statesman. The Encyclopaedia Britannica notes that "by the time of Eliot's death in 1965 ... a convincing case could be made for the assertion that Auden was indeed Eliot's successor, as Eliot had inherited sole claim to supremacy when Yeats died in 1939."[54] With some exceptions, British critics tended to treat his early work as his best, while American critics tended to favour his middle and later work. Unlike other modern poets, his reputation did not decline after his death, and Joseph Brodsky wrote that his was "the greatest mind of the twentieth century".[7]
A memorial stone for Auden was placed in Poets' Corner in Westminster Abbey in 1974.[55]
Public recognition of Auden's work sharply increased after his "Funeral Blues" ("Stop all the clocks") was read aloud in the film Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994); subsequently, a pamphlet edition of ten of his poems, Tell Me the Truth About Love, sold more than 275,000 copies. After 11 September 2001 his 1939 poem "September 1, 1939" was widely circulated and frequently broadcast.[50] Public readings and broadcast tributes in the UK and US in 2007 marked his centenary year.[56]
Published works
The following list includes only the books of poems and essays that Auden prepared during his lifetime; for a more complete list, including other works and posthumous editions, see W. H. Auden bibliography.
In the list below, works reprinted in the Complete Works of W. H. Auden are indicated by footnote references.
- Poems (London, 1930; second edn., seven poems substituted, London, 1933; includes poems and Paid on Both Sides: A Charade[44]) (dedicated to Christopher Isherwood).
- The Orators: An English Study (London, 1932, verse and prose; slightly revised edn., London, 1934; revised edn. with new preface, London, 1966; New York 1967) (dedicated to Stephen Spender).
- The Dance of Death (London, 1933, play)[44] (dedicated to Robert Medley and Rupert Doone).
- Poems (New York, 1934; contains Poems [1933 edition], The Orators [1932 edition], and The Dance of Death).
- The Dog Beneath the Skin (London, New York, 1935; play, with Christopher Isherwood)[44] (dedicated to Robert Moody).
- The Ascent of F6 (London, 1936; 2nd edn., 1937; New York, 1937; play, with Christopher Isherwood)[44] (dedicated to John Bicknell Auden).
- Look, Stranger! (London, 1936, poems; US edn., On This Island, New York, 1937) (dedicated to Erika Mann)
- Letters from Iceland (London, New York, 1937; verse and prose, with Louis MacNeice)[45] (dedicated to George Augustus Auden).
- On the Frontier (London, 1938; New York 1939; play, with Christopher Isherwood)[44] (dedicated to Benjamin Britten).
- Journey to a War (London, New York, 1939; verse and prose, with Christopher Isherwood)[45] (dedicated to E. M. Forster).
- Another Time (London, New York 1940; poetry) (dedicated to Chester Kallman).
- The Double Man (New York, 1941, poems; UK edn., New Year Letter, London, 1941) (Dedicated to Elizabeth Mayer).
- For the Time Being (New York, 1944; London, 1945; two long poems: "The Sea and the Mirror: A Commentary on Shakespeare's The Tempest", dedicated to James and Tania Stern, and "For the Time Being: A Christmas Oratorio", in memoriam Constance Rosalie Auden [Auden's mother]).
- The Collected Poetry of W. H. Auden (New York, 1945; includes new poems) (dedicated to Christopher Isherwood and Chester Kallman).
- The Age of Anxiety: A Baroque Eclogue (New York, 1947; London, 1948; verse; won the 1948 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry) (dedicated to John Betjeman).
- Collected Shorter Poems, 1930–1944 (London, 1950; similar to 1945 Collected Poetry) (dedicated to Christopher Isherwood and Chester Kallman).
- The Enchafèd Flood (New York, 1950; London, 1951; prose) (dedicated to Alan Ansen).[57]
- Nones (New York, 1951; London, 1952; poems) (dedicated to Reinhold and Ursula Niebuhr)
- The Shield of Achilles (New York, London, 1955; poems) (won the 1956 National Book Award for Poetry)[58] (dedicated to Lincoln and Fidelma Kirstein).
- Homage to Clio (New York, London, 1960; poems) (dedicated to E. R. and A. E. Dodds).
- The Dyer's Hand (New York, 1962; London, 1963; essays) (dedicated to Nevill Coghill).[59]
- About the House (New York, London, 1965; poems) (dedicated to Edmund and Elena Wilson).
- Collected Shorter Poems 1927–1957 (London, 1966; New York, 1967) (dedicated to Christopher Isherwood and Chester Kallman).
- Collected Longer Poems (London, 1968; New York, 1969).
- Secondary Worlds (London, New York, 1969; prose) (dedicated to Valerie Eliot).
- City Without Walls and Other Poems (London, New York, 1969) (dedicated to Peter Heyworth).
- A Certain World: A Commonplace Book (New York, London, 1970; quotations with commentary) (dedicated to Geoffrey Grigson).
- Epistle to a Godson and Other Poems (London, New York, 1972) (dedicated to Orlan Fox).
- Forewords and Afterwords (New York, London, 1973; essays) (dedicated to Hannah Arendt).
- Thank You, Fog: Last Poems (London, New York, 1974) (dedicated to Michael and Marny Yates).
Film scripts and opera libretti
- Coal Face (1935, closing chorus for GPO Film Unit documentary).[44]
- Night Mail (1936, narrative for GPO Film Unit documentary, not published separately except as a program note).[44]
- Paul Bunyan (1941, libretto for operetta by Benjamin Britten; not published until 1976).[47]
- The Rake's Progress (1951, with Chester Kallman, libretto for an opera by Igor Stravinsky).[47]
- Elegy for Young Lovers (1956, with Chester Kallman, libretto for an opera by Hans Werner Henze).[47]
- The Bassarids (1961, with Chester Kallman, libretto for an opera by Hans Werner Henze based on The Bacchae of Euripides).[47]
- Runner (1962, documentary film narrative for National Film Board of Canada)
- Love's Labour's Lost (1973, with Chester Kallman, libretto for an opera by Nicolas Nabokov, based on Shakespeare's play).[47]
Musical collaborations
- Our Hunting Fathers (1936, song cycle written for Benjamin Britten)
- An Evening of Elizabethan Verse and its Music (1954 recording with the New York Pro Musica Antiqua, director Noah Greenberg; Auden spoke the verse texts)
- The Play of Daniel (1958, verse narration for a production by the New York Pro Musica Antiqua, director Noah Greenberg)
- ^ The name Wystan derives from the 9th-century St Wystan, who was murdered by Beorhtwulf, king of Mercia, after Wystan objected to Beorthtwulf's plan to marry Wystan's mother. His remains were reburied at Repton, Derbyshire, where they became the object of a cult; the parish church of Repton is named St Wystan's. Auden's father, George Augustus Auden, was educated at Repton School.
- ^ The first syllable of "Auden" rhymes with "law" (not with "how").
- ^ Auden, W. H.; ed. by Edward Mendelson (2002). Prose, Volume II: 1939–1948. Princeton: Princeton University Press. p. 478. ISBN 0-691-08935-3. Auden used the phrase "Anglo-American Poets" in 1943, implicitly referring to himself and T. S. Eliot.
- ^ The first definition of "Anglo-American" in the OED (2008 revision) is: "Of, belonging to, or involving both England (or Britain) and America." "Oxford English Dictionary (access by subscription)". Retrieved 25 May 2009. See also the definition "English in origin or birth, American by settlement or citizenship" in Chambers 20th Century Dictionary. 1983. p. 45. See also the definition "an American, especially a citizen of the United States, of English origin or descent" in Merriam Webster's New International Dictionary, Second Edition. 1961. p. 103. See also the definition "a native or descendant of a native of England who has settled in or become a citizen of America, esp. of the United States" from The Random House Dictionary, 2009, available online at "Dictionary.com". Retrieved 25 May 2009.
- ^ a b c d Smith, Stan, ed. (2004). The Cambridge Companion to W. H. Auden. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-82962-3.
- ^ Academy of American Poets. "W. H. Auden". Retrieved 21 January 2007.
- ^ a b Brodksy, Joseph (1986). Less Than One: selected essays. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. p. 357. ISBN 0-374-18503-4.
- ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r Fuller, John (1998). W. H. Auden: a commentary. London: Faber and Faber. ISBN 0-571-19268-8.
- ^ "W. H. Auden – "Family Ghosts""". Retrieved 18 November 2012.
- ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p Carpenter, Humphrey (1981). W. H. Auden: A Biography. London: George Allen & Unwin. ISBN 0-04-928044-9.
- ^ a b c Davenport-Hines, Richard (1995). Auden. London: Heinemann. ISBN 0-434-17507-2.
- ^ a b c d e f g Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. "Auden, Wystan Hugh" (SUBSCRIPTION ACCESS ONLY). Retrieved 21 January 2007.
- ^ In "Letter to Lord Byron" he names the saga character Auðun Skökull as one of his ancestors.
- ^ Mendelson, Edward (January 2011). "Auden, Wystan Hugh (1907–1973)". Oxford Dictionary of National Biography: online edition. Oxford University Press. Retrieved 26 May 2013.
- ^ Auden, W. H; ed. by Katherine Bucknell and Nicholas Jenkins (1995). In Solitude, For Company: W. H. Auden after 1940, unpublished prose and recent criticism (Auden Studies 3). Oxford: Clarendon Press. p. 193. ISBN 0-19-818294-5.
- ^ Auden, W. H. (1993). The Prolific and the Devourer. New York: Ecco. p. 10. ISBN 0-88001-345-1.
- ^ Harry Blamires, A Guide to twentieth century literature in English (1983), p. 130
- ^ Auden, W. H. (1973). Forewords and Afterwords. New York: Random House. p. 517. ISBN 0-394-48359-6.
- ^ The Times, 5 July 1922 (Issue 43075), p. 12, col. D
- ^ Wright, Hugh, "Auden and Gresham's" in Conference & Common Room, Vol. 44, No. 2, Summer 2007 online at schoolsearch.co.uk (accessed 25 April 2008)
- ^ Auden, W. H.; ed. by Katherine Bucknell (1994). Juvenilia: Poems, 1922–1928. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ISBN 0-691-03415-X.
- ^ The Old School: Essays by Divers Hands (London: Jonathan Cape, 1934) title details at books.google.com
- ^ Davenport-Hines, Richard (1995). Auden. London: Heinemann. pp. ch. 3. ISBN 0-434-17507-2.
- ^ Auden, W. H. (1973). Forewords and Afterwords. New York: Random House. p. 69. ISBN 0-394-48359-6.
- ^ Mendelson, Edward (1999). Later Auden. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. p. 35. ISBN 0-374-18408-9.
- ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p Mendelson, Edward (1981). Early Auden. New York: Viking. ISBN 0-670-28712-1.
- ^ Auden, W. H.; ed. by Edward Mendelson (1996). Prose and travel books in prose and verse, Volume I: 1926–1938. Princeton: Princeton University Press. p. 138. ISBN 0-691-06803-8.
- ^ Auden, W. H.; ed. by Katherine Bucknell and Nicholas Jenkins (1995). In Solitude, For Company: W. H. Auden after 1940, unpublished prose and recent criticism (Auden Studies 3). Oxford: Clarendon Press. p. 88. ISBN 0-19-818294-5.
- ^ Lissner, Will (2 March 1956), "Poet and Judge Assist a Samaritan", New York Times: 1, 39, retrieved 26 May 2013
- ^ Mendelson, Edward (1999). Later Auden. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. p. 46. ISBN 0-374-18408-9.
- ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o Mendelson, Edward (1999). Later Auden. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. ISBN 0-374-18408-9.
- ^ Tippins, Sherrill (2005). February House: The Story of W. H. Auden, Carson McCullers, Jane and Paul Bowles, Benjamin Britten, and Gypsy Rose Lee, Under One Roof In Wartime America. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. ISBN 0-618-41911-X.
- ^ Pike, James A., ed., (1956). Modern Canterbury Pilgrims. New York: Morehouse-Gorham. p. 42.
- ^ a b Kirsch, Arthur (2005). Auden and Christianity. New Haven: Yale University Press. ISBN 0-300-10814-1.
- ^ Allen, Liam (2 March 2007). "BBC report on release of MI5 file on Auden". BBC News. Retrieved 6 January 2010.
- ^ Mendelson, Edward. "Clouseau Investigates Auden".
- ^ Clark, Thekla (1995). Wystan and Chester: a personal memoir of W. H. Auden and Chester Kallman. London: Faber and Faber. ISBN 0-571-17591-0.
- ^ Davenport-Hines, Richard (1995). Auden. London: Heinemann. p. 137. ISBN 0-434-17507-2.
- ^ Auden, W. H. (1966). Collected Shorter Poems, 1927–1957. London: Faber and Faber. p. 15. ISBN 0-571-06878-2.
- ^ Auden, W. H.; ed. by Edward Mendelson (1979). Selected Poems, new edition. New York: Vintage Books. xix–xx. ISBN 0-394-72506-9.
- ^ Auden, W. H.; ed. by Katherine Bucknell (1994). Juvenilia: Poems, 1922–1928. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ISBN 0-691-03415-X.
- ^ Auden, W. H.; ed. by Edward Mendelson (2002). Prose, Volume II: 1939–1948. Princeton: Princeton University Press. p. 92. ISBN 0-691-08935-3.
- ^ Auden, W. H. and Christopher Isherwood; ed. by Edward Mendelson (1988). Plays and other dramatic writings by W. H. Auden, 1928–1938. Princeton: Princeton University Press. xxi. ISBN 0-691-06740-6.
- ^ a b c d e f g h i Auden, W. H. and Christopher Isherwood; ed. by Edward Mendelson (1988). Plays and other dramatic writings by W. H. Auden, 1928–1938. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ISBN 0-691-06740-6.
- ^ a b c d Auden, W. H.; ed. by Edward Mendelson (1996). Prose and travel books in prose and verse, Volume I: 1926–1938. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ISBN 0-691-06803-8.
- ^ Auden, W. H. (1973). Forewords and Afterwords. New York: Random House. p. 68. ISBN 0-394-48359-6.
- ^ a b c d e f g Auden, W. H. and Chester Kallman; ed. by Edward Mendelson (1993). Libretti and other dramatic writings by W. H. Auden, 1939–1973. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ISBN 0-691-03301-3.
- ^ Auden, W. H.; ed. by Edward Mendelson (2002). Prose, Volume II: 1939–1948. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ISBN 0-691-08935-3.
- ^ "United Nations – Fact Sheet # 9: "Does the UN have a hymn or national anthem?" (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on 25 March 2009. Retrieved 26 May 2013.
- ^ a b c d Sansom, Ian (2004). "Auden and Influence". In Stan Smith. The Cambridge Companion to W. H. Auden. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp. 226–39. ISBN 0-521-82962-3.
- ^ Haffenden, John (1983). W. H. Auden: The Critical Heritage. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. ISBN 0-7100-9350-0.
- ^ "Candidates for the 1963 Nobel Prize in Literature". Nobel Prize. 2013. Retrieved 3 January 2014.
- ^ "Candidates for the 1964 Nobel Prize in Literature". Nobel Prize. 2015. Retrieved 25 May 2015.
- ^ "Encyclopaedia Britannica Article: W. H. Auden". Retrieved 23 February 2008.
- ^ "Famous People & the Abbey: Wystan Hugh Auden". Retrieved 26 May 2013.
- ^ The W. H. Auden Society. "The Auden Centenary 2007". Retrieved 20 January 2007.
- ^ Auden, W. H.; ed. by Edward Mendelson (2008). Prose, Volume III: 1949–1955. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ISBN 978-0-691-13326-3.
- ^
"National Book Awards – 1956". National Book Foundation. Retrieved 2012-02-27.
(With acceptance speech by Auden and essay by Megan Snyder-Camp from the Awards 60-year anniversary blog.)
- ^ Auden, W. H.; ed. by Edward Mendelson (2010). Prose, Volume IV: 1956–1962. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ISBN 978-0-691-14755-0.
Printed sources
See also the listings on the criticism page at the W. H. Auden Society web site. In the list below, unless noted, publication data and ISBN refer to the first editions; many titles are also available in later reprints.
- Bloomfield, B. C., and Edward Mendelson (1972). W. H. Auden: A Bibliography 1924–1969. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia. ISBN 0-8139-0395-5. See post-1969 supplements in Auden Studies series listed below.
General biographical and critical studies
- Carpenter, Humphrey (1981). W. H. Auden: A Biography. London: George Allen & Unwin. ISBN 0-04-928044-9.
- Clark, Thekla (1995). Wystan and Chester: A Personal Memoir of W. H. Auden and Chester Kallman. London: Faber and Faber. ISBN 0-571-17591-0.
- Davenport-Hines, Richard (1996). Auden. London: Heinemann. ISBN 0-434-17507-2.
- Farnan, Dorothy J. (1984). Auden in Love. New York: Simon & Schuster. ISBN 0-671-50418-5.
- Fuller, John (1998). W. H. Auden: A Commentary. London: Faber and Faber. ISBN 0-571-19268-8.
- Mendelson, Edward (1981). Early Auden. New York: Viking. ISBN 0-670-28712-1.
- Mendelson, Edward (1999). Later Auden. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. ISBN 0-374-18408-9.
- Smith, Stan, ed. (2005). The Cambridge Companion to W. H. Auden. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-82962-3.
- Spears, Monroe K. (1963). The Poetry of W. H. Auden: The Disenchanted Island. New York: Oxford University Press.
- Spender, Stephen, ed. (1975). W. H. Auden: A Tribute. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. ISBN 0-297-76884-0.
- Wright, George T. (1969; rev. ed. 1981). W. H. Auden. Boston: Twayne. ISBN 0-8057-7346-0.
Special topics
- Haffenden, John, ed. (1983). W. H. Auden: The Critical Heritage. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. ISBN 0-7100-9350-0. Selected reviews of Auden's books and plays.
- Kirsch, Arthur (2005). Auden and Christianity. New Haven: Yale University Press. ISBN 0-300-10814-1.
- Mitchell, Donald (1981), Britten and Auden in the Thirties: the year 1936. London: Faber and Faber. ISBN 0-571-11715-5.
- Myers, Alan, and Robert Forsythe (1999), W. H. Auden: Pennine Poet . Nenthead: North Pennines Heritage Trust. ISBN 0-9513535-7-8. Pamphlet with map and gazetteer.
Auden Studies series
- Auden, W. H.; ed. by Katherine Bucknell and Nicholas Jenkins (1990) "The Map of All My Youth": early works, friends and influences (Auden Studies 1). Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-812964-5.
- Auden, W. H.; ed. by Katherine Bucknell and Nicholas Jenkins (1994). "The Language of Learning and the Language of Love": uncollected writings, new interpretations (Auden Studies 2). Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-812257-8.
- Auden, W. H.; ed. by Katherine Bucknell and Nicholas Jenkins (1995). "In Solitude, For Company": W. H. Auden after 1940: unpublished prose and recent criticism (Auden Studies 3). Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-818294-5.
External links
|Wikiquote has quotations related to: W. H. Auden
|Wikisource has original text related to this article:
|Wikimedia Commons has media related to W. H. Auden.
See also the descriptive list on the links page at the W. H. Auden Society web site.
- Archival material relating to W. H. Auden listed at the UK National Archives
- Works by W. H. Auden at Open Library
- Works by or about W. H. Auden in libraries (WorldCat catalog)
- "The W. H. Auden Society". Retrieved 21 January 2007.
- "Fourteen poems by Auden (Academy of American Poets site)". Retrieved 20 January 2007.
- "W. H. Auden on the BBC Poetry Season site (warning: links not available outside UK)". Retrieved 6 July 2009.
- "Auden reads "On Reading a Child's Guide to Modern Physics"". Retrieved 21 January 2007.
- "Recorded interviews with the BBC". Retrieved 21 January 2007.
- Michael Newman (Spring 1974). "W. H. Auden, The Art of Poetry No. 17". Paris Review. Retrieved 21 January 2007.
- Fenton, James (3 February 2007). ""A voice of his own", The Guardian, 3 Feb. 2007". London. Retrieved 3 February 2007.
- Bucknell, Katherine (4 February 2007). ""In praise of a guilty genius", The Observer, 4 Feb. 2007". The Guardian (London). Retrieved 6 February 2007.
- "W. H. Auden at Swarthmore". Retrieved 20 January 2007.
- "The W. H. Auden Society Newsletter". Retrieved 21 January 2007.
- "W. H. Auden – Family Ghosts (extensive genealogical website)". Retrieved 18 November 2012.
- Yale College Lecture on W.H. Auden – audio, video and full transcripts from Open Yale Courses
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text:
I can hardly think of a topic that is less engaging than wills and trusts. Thinking about one's demise is scary and all that legalese is hard to understand and boring. Creating a will or trust is really easy to put off and forget about – just do it later. Having been the recipient of an estate that came without a will or trust and dealing with probate, I can share first hand that is in not an experience that anyone would choose.
Enter Eric G. Matlin, Attorney at Law who has just published "Not Dead Yet"-so plan your estate", a book that is completely different, very creative and extremely informative.
Patricia Munro is a wife, mother and grandmother who will turn 60 this year. Although neither she nor her husband expect to die soon, they know that, for the sake of their adult daughters, it's time to set up provisions for that eventuality. She found that this book helped make that daunting prospect manageable, as you can see:
"I found this a clear, engaging, and well-written book. Thinking about one's legacy is never easy, even leaving aside the emotions. This book led me through each step of the process of ensuring that my wishes regarding end of life are clear, the disposal of my physical estate is protected so that it goes where I would want it to, and that my values are passed on to the next generation. The book includes definitions, summaries, and short anecdotes that helped me remember the content."
Mr. Matlin's book is unique in my experience. It "speaks" to the average person, and has the extra feature of a graphic novel that is charming and engaging. He shared these thoughts in his book. "My mantra has been to make the process of estate planning as transparent and understandable as possible to regular people who need it but are not necessarily super-wealthy or particularly enamored of lawyers. In furtherance of this goal, I wrote The Procrastinator's Guide to Wills and Estate Planning (Penguin Group USA/NAL., 2004)
With the help of my able staff, I have written estate plans for thousands of families, for people and families who ranged from having a negative net worth to those worth over $ 10 million."
The book is well organized and easy to follow with logos and color-coding. Interspersed, are comments like, "Though estate planning is a serious subject, it doesn't have to be entirely dreary. Black comedy, irony, satire and love all play a role."
Chapter 7, "The Will" with it accompanying quote "A man who dies without a will has lawyers for heirs" anonymous. I can also add to the heirs- the government. I experienced probate as a kind of torture to be avoided if at all possible.
The 24 chapters have an accompanying story in which Don and his family and friends graphically illustrate why estate planning is important, even to those who can't imagine why they would need it. In Chapter 24, the last chapter, entitled,
"At last", this quote, "Death is a distant rumor to the young" by Andy Rooney rings very true.
This book is highly recommended.
To purchase this book, go to the Amazon website
Photo credit:Randi Fiat

subset: commoncrawl


text:
Found 1 resultsAuthor Title Type [ Year]
Filters: First Letter Of Title is C and Author is McRae-Clark, Aimee L [Clear All Filters]
"Comparing Adult Cannabis Treatment-Seekers Enrolled in a Clinical Trial with National Samples of Cannabis Users in the United States", Drug Alcohol Depend, vol. 176, pp. 14-20, 2017.,


text:
Erik S. Lesser / EPA
Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney laughs as he returns to the stage with his wife Ann as his running mate Paul Ryan waits for them at a Republican National Convention farewell victory rally at Lakeland Linder Regional Airport in Lakeland, Florida on Friday.
After accepting the Republican party's nomination for president, Mitt Romney celebrated and showed off his new wings - a new campaign plane. Painted along the side of the plane is his campaign's motto, 'Believe in America,' and website, along with his "R" logo on the tail. The customized jet is a McDonnell-Douglas 83. Apparently, his running mate, Paul Ryan, has a similar plane, a DC-93.
His first trip aboard the the aircraft is to New Orleans where he will view damage caused by Hurricane Isaac.
Brian Snyder / Reuters
Mitt Romney is joined by vice-presidential candidate Paul Ryan and their wives at a campaign rally in front of their new campaign plane in Lakeland, Florida on Friday.
Justin Sullivan / Getty Images
Secret Service agents guard the campaign bus of Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney during an RNC Farewell Victory rally on Friday in Lakeland, Florida.
Stan Honda / AFP - Getty Images
Republicans gather in Tampa, Florida to officially nominate Mitt Romney and his running mate, Paul Ryan, as the party's candidates for the 2012 presidential election.
Slideshow: Mitt Romney


text:
Houston considers ban on texting while driving
Mayor Parker says city may act on its own if statewide ban fails again
Houston will consider an ordinance banning texting while driving if the Legislature again fails to enact a statewide ban, Mayor Annise Parker said Tuesday.
Parker, flanked by 30 people ranging from high school students to the fire chief, announced the official start of the city's campaign against texting while driving.
Known as It Can Wait, Houston, the program will use social media, news media and community activism to get the word out, the mayor said.
While officials believe Houston is the first U.S. city to take on the issue with a major campaign, the local program mirrors the 3-year-old It Can Wait program started nationally by AT&T.
Noting that April is National Distracted Driving Awareness Month, the mayor characterized texting while driving as an epidemic that cuts across all communities.
"We have to change the culture that says, 'I'm just taking my eyes off the road for a moment. It's no big deal,' " Parker said at the news conference, held in the City Hall rotunda. "But it is a big deal. It kills people."
In 2011, she said, 13 percent of more than 3,000 traffic fatalities across Texas could be blamed on texting while driving.
Local rapper Bun B, who has made a public service video announcement about the issue with the mayor, also spoke at the news conference.
"As a person who has, I guess, a bit of influence with the young people of Houston, I felt it was imperative to be a part of this program," he said. "Our young people … have learned to text and communicate with these electronic devices before they learned to drive, so they're incorporating it into their driving."
Several bills to restrict or forbid the use of handheld wireless devices while driving are working their way through the Legislature. But if the measures don't become law, Parker said, she has a draft ordinance prepared and will start talking to the City Council about it.
The Legislature banned texting while driving during the 2011 session, but Gov. Rick Perry vetoed the bill. A spokesman for Perry has said he still thinks public education is a more effective strategy than "government micromanagement."
Texas is one of 11 states that haven't passed legislation banning texting by all drivers. The state does ban texting in school zones, by motorists under 18, or by bus drivers who carry children under 17.
"I prefer to see something at the state level," Parker said. "This really isn't something that will be solved with a new law, although it will help. This will be solved by the community setting a new standard, saying, 'Enough is enough. This isn't acceptable any longer.' "
Other Texas cities that have banned texting while driving include West University Place, Bellaire, Austin, Arlington, San Antonio and El Paso.
While laws against texting while driving may be difficult to enforce, the mayor noted, laws requiring people to wear seat belts were passed before shoulder straps made seat belts visible from outside the car.
"It's a way of getting people's attention," Parker said of the new safety campaign.


text:
Story highlights
- Many companies have secret pay practices: Discussing wages a firable offense
- They say women who think they are paid less than men can't find out; some never suspect
- Writers: Low-wage women workers most likely keep quiet, live with pay discrimination
- They back Paycheck Fairness Act, which would ban employer retaliation for discussing pay
Imagine this: You've toiled at a company for years and followed all the rules. You're productive, diligent, and respected by your peers. In short, you're a model employee. But the latest round of raises that have consumed the office leave you thinking that your male colleagues -- despite having the same job title -- make more than you.
You begin to suspect you're the victim of gender discrimination. So, you decide it's time to "lean in" and secure the equal pay you deserve -- 77 cents on the dollar, the nation's going rate, just won't cut it.
But when you take this information to your boss you're told that the company's pay practices are secret and you can be fired for discussing them.
Throughout America, countless women find themselves between a rock and a hard place. They suspect they're being denied equal pay, but have no way of confirming it. Or worse, they don't know they're being shortchanged because company policies prevent them from discussing their wages.
The Equal Pay Act of 1963 was passed to prohibit wage discrimination on the basis of sex and sought to ensure that women earn equal pay for equal work. Its purpose was clear: Eliminate the gender wage gap, which hurts women and families. But 50 years later, pay discrimination is alive and well. Gag rules that require employees to keep their pay secret perpetuate this inequity. It's time for our wages to get out from behind the secrecy paywall.
A majority of private sector workplaces in America prohibit or discourage employees from discussing their wages with co-workers. As a result, employees who mention what they earn are threatened with retaliation, including harassment, demotion, or termination.
Women who believe they're the victims of unequal pay face an impossible choice: Jeopardize their economic livelihood or suffer the indignity and economic consequences of discrimination. Low-wage women workers -- many of whom live paycheck to paycheck and are seen as replaceable by their employers -- are especially likely to choose silence and live with pay discrimination rather than risk their jobs.
Still others will have no clue that they are being paid less. Pay secrecy policies can keep women in the dark for years. Take Lilly Ledbetter, who worked as a supervisor at a Goodyear plant in Gadsden, Alabama, for nearly two decades without knowing that she had been denied equal pay. Had it not been for an anonymous note, she would never have learned that she was earning substantially less than her male colleagues. Pay secrecy facilitated Goodyear's discrimination.
The Supreme Court, meanwhile, has exacerbated the problem. For decades, plaintiffs were typically afforded discovery, the opportunity to secure testimony and documents from their employer, before resolution of their claims. But in two deeply divided decisions, the Supreme Court recently abandoned that practice and now requires plaintiffs to provide more detailed information about the alleged discrimination before discovery.
This higher burden is nearly insurmountable for women alleging unequal pay. Because of pay secrecy, their complaints often begin with a strong hunch that can only be verified through corporate records and sworn statements. Denying them access to this basic information is tantamount to locking them out of the courthouse.
Unsurprisingly, workplaces that have abandoned punitive pay secrecy, like the federal government and many unionized workplaces, have been particularly effective in reducing the gender wage gap. Female federal workers are paid 89 cents, and unionized female workers 88 cents, for every dollar paid to men.
Economists have posited that more transparent workplaces will lead to greater worker satisfaction and productivity, while closed pay practices will lead to lower motivation and mistrust of management. Permitting workers to discuss their wages would also make managers more accountable.
The Paycheck Fairness Act, reintroduced in Congress, would prohibit retaliation against workers who discuss their wages. The legislation has been blocked, but if passed, would finally close loopholes in the Equal Pay Act. It would permit workers to compare notes and determine whether they're being paid fairly, without fear of retribution.
If the legislation continues to stall, President Obama can and should act. He can sign an executive order requiring federal contractors to abandon punitive pay secrecy and protect nearly 22% of the American workforce. Those refusing to comply would lose the government as a client.
And let's not let states off the hook. State laws can provide important protections against employer retaliation. In August, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie signed a law banning retaliation against workers who inquire about salary. New Jersey joins states like Vermont, Colorado, Michigan and California in outlining explicit protections for workers seeking equal pay.
Justice Louis Brandeis famously said the best remedy for social and industrial disease was publicity and sunlight its most effective disinfectant. Fifty years after the Equal Pay Act, pay secrecy still masks discrimination. There is only one way to fight this darkness: light.


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Trading Season
Everyone in the world of baseball hears about the blockbuster trades toward the end of July. It's plastered on every TV screen and sports ticker. It's talked about on every sports talk show and morning radio show. You see the interviewed players during huge press conferences. People watch the superstars first appearances with new teams while wearing new uniforms in anticipation. There is a behind the scenes to these trades, however. In most cases, minor league players are the tiny blip on the ticker. They are the player to be named later, or the Cliff Lee for Justin Smoak and "some minor leaguers." From the day I showed up here in Frisco, TX about a month ago, trading season took its toll on my team. I wanted to share with you a quick behind the scenes view on what it's like when these trades go down.
3 Comments
Great information, Mike!
I know as a Mariners fan, I'm really excited to have both Josh and Blake in our organization can't wait to see them in the big leagues soon and I hear nothing but good things about Lawson too!
Thank you for sharing your perspective, it is very illuminating and I'm happy to see how positive you are about trades.
I, obviously, am a Giants' fan, could you please give me the 411 on Michael Main, what your thoughts are about his repertoire, what are his best pitches, what does he need to work on, what type of guy is he, is he laid back or very hyper, etc. Thanks for anything you can share!
Great insight, you forget there are real people behind these trades. As a Marlins fan I was sad to see Jorge Cantu go, great guy! Well take good care if Evsn and you all take good care of Jorge please. He has great at bat music!


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Tags: Budget, Govinda, Headlines, Hrithik Roshan, Incompetent sub-editors with Oxford degrees, Raja Bhaiyya, Shakespeare
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- And we're back after a long break in which we did fukkat-all! Here's what happens when you run out of story ideas: fukkatgyan.wordpress.com/2013/08/22/hac… 6 years ago
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text:
hand pulled screen print on thick French Paper Company Construction Whitewash 100 lb cover stock
20 x 30 inches
hand signed limited edition
CONCEPCIÓN STUDIOS is an award-winning design studio based in California's San Francisco Bay Area specializing in graphics for the music industry. After graduating from Cal Poly in San Luis Obispo, CA, founder Patrick Concepción began Concepción Studios as a vehicle to create graphics and to photograph for the entertainment industry. Drawing on years of experience as Art Director of the world's largest music industry merchandise company Bravado International Group, Patrick brings his knowledge of graphic design and photography history and inherent skill in fine art to the company, producing unique pieces that possess the individuality and expression of fine art. With clients ranging from Paul McCartney to the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Lady Gaga to MUSE, Concepción Studios has earned international recognition with works published in The New Yorker, TIME Magazine, and Gestalten along with album art aired on the Tonight Show, CONAN, and Jimmy Kimmel Live.


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Despite the proclamation of a state of emergency in the Rakhine State (old Arakan State) of Myanmar on the night of June 10,2012, and the patrolling of the streets of the capital Sittwe and other Townships by the security forces, the Thein Sein Government has not yet been able to restore normalcy.
2. Incidents of sectarian violence between the Buddhists and the Bengali-speaking Rohingya Muslims continue to be reported. Though there are no reports of any new fatalities, incidents of arson with the Muslims allegedly setting fire to the houses of Buddhists are being reported. Muslims carrying small-arms have been patrolling the Muslim-inhabited areas of Townships to protect the Muslims from retaliatory attacks by the Buddhists. This reflects their lack of confidence in the ability of the security forces to protect them.
3.Representatives of the Rohingyas have accused the Thein Sein Government of imposing a news black-out in the State in order to prevent news of the real state of affairs from reaching the international community.
4.Despite their continuing support to the Thein Sein Government's policy of reforms, the US and the European Union countries are concerned over the inability of the security forces to restore law and order.
5.At a time when the situation continues to cause concern, the decision of the United Nations to withdraw all its staff numbering over 40 from the Rakhine State has come in for criticism from Western human rights organisations.
6. The Human Rights Watch of the US has alleged that the situation in the State was tending to get out of control and called for the despatch of international human rights observers to the State.
7. To the disappointment of the Rohingyas, Aung San Suu Kyi, who met the representatives of the agitated Muslim community in Yangon, has not chosen to visit the Rakhine State. Nor are there reports of her taking up vigorously with the authorities the measures required for putting an end to the sectarian violence.
8. She is going ahead with her European tour starting on June 14, covering Switzerland, Norway, the UK, Ireland and France. She seems confident of the stability and durability of the Government of Thein Sein and reportedly does not anticipate any threat to it from hardline pro-Beijing elements in the Army during her absence from the country.
9. In the past, whenever she was released from house arrest, she had avoided going abroad due to fears that the Army, which was then in power, might not allow her to return to the country. She does not appear to have any such fears this time. Since 1988, she went out of the country for the first time last month when she went to Bangkok.
10. She is not taking any of the senior leaders of her National League for Democracy (NLD) with her. They will stay behind in Myanmar during her absence. She is being accompanied to Europe only by two of the younger members of the NLD.
11. Western human rights organisations have been concerned over the continued refusal of the Bangladesh authorities to allow entry of Rohingya women and children fleeing from the violence in the Rakhine State. There are already about 300,000 Rohingyas in camps in the Cox's Bazaar area of Bangladesh for many years posing security problems to the Bangladesh authorities. They apparently do not want to add to their number. ( 14-6-12)
( The writer is Additional Secretary (retd), Cabinet Secretariat, Govt of India, New Delhi, and, presently, Director, Institute For Topical Studies, Chennai, and Associate, Chennai Centre For China Studies. E-Mail: firstname.lastname@example.com . Twitter: @SORBONNE75 )


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A 50-year-old Forest Hill man died after a vibrator became stuck in his bottom and he was too embarrassed to see a doctor, an inquest heard today (August 12).
Nigel Willis could not remove the sex aid and spent five days lying on the sofa of the Dartmouth Road home he shared with his elderly mum.
He was left dizzy, weak and unable to move, Southwark Coroners' Court heard.
The diabetic was eventually rushed to Lewisham Hospital on December 30 after a friend begged him to get help. He was admitted to intensive care on New Year's Eve after suffering septic shock.
Surgeons managed to remove the vibrator, which had become stuck so deep in Mr Willis's rectum it had perforated his bowel.
Mr Willis was a diabetic who was single and unemployed at the time of his death.
Lewisham Hospital consultant Dr Adebowale Adesina said: "The history was that his friend or carer called an ambulance because he complained of dizziness, weakness and was unable to move from the sofa for five days."
It was discovered Mr Willis had a "foreign body" in his anus and he underwent emergency surgery.
Mr Willis' condition deteriorated and he became less responsive, dying at 7am on February 7 this year.
The post mortem conducted by Dr Peter Jerreat determined the cause of death to be multi-organ failure, sepsis and a perforated bowel.
Assistant coroner to inner-south London Sarah Ormand-Walshe said: "This is a sad case of a man who died at 50 years of age.
"He appears to have had a foreign object which has become stuck in the lower part of his bowel and had been there for a number of days when he was encouraged to go to hospital by his friends on December 30.
"That night it was discovered that it looked like he had a perforated bowel."
Ms Ormand-Walshe said Mr Willis was left 'fighting for his life' over the ensuing days.
The coroner ruled Mr Willis died as a result of an accident.


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For those that have considered contribute back to the WordPress project but weren't sure what the experience might be like, you should check out this helpful post from Aaron Jorbin with his story.
Hanging out in the #WordPress irc channel or on the wp-hackers mailing list, a question that comes up from time to time is "How do I get a bug patchedâ€. I recently had a patch committed, so I thought I would detail the process from start to finish to help others get an idea of the process.
He shares three lessons he learned during the experience - make it easy for non-coders to see the change, getting suggestions from other developers on the patch and realizing that sometimes, a small change in one place can break other things too.


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Television networks need viewers so they can charge advertisers for access to their audience.
Nielsen viewers, that is.
Most TV ratings come from a small segment of the population — those who have tracking boxes hooked up to their televisions.
U.S. & World
News from around the country and around the globe
Oprah Winfrey, once the queen of daytime television, knows this all too well.
Sunday night, during the Grammys, Oprah let slip on Twitter that she needed a boost for her struggling OWN network.
"Every 1 who can please turn to OWN especially if you have a Nielsen box," Oprah tweeted to her 9.2 million strong Twitter following. The tweet has since been removed.
The tweet immediately drew a critical response from some in her audience who called her "desperate" and "unethical" and other media watchers who said worse.
Noted new media critic Jeff Jarvis tweeted, "Isn't that, uh, illegal?" Sort of is.
The message actually violates Nielsen rules which clearly state that networks won't openly solicit Nielsen viewers. Winfrey is beholden to such a contract.
Oprah had her hand slapped by the ratings organization.
"I removed the tweet at the request of Nielsen," Winfrey said in a statement Monday. "I intended no harm and apologize for the reference."


text: I spotted this 2010 Tesla Roadster in Sechelt B.C. Canada...near Vancouver ...I was in this town one day as I have some property there and I parked next to this Tesla. I was shocked to see it at first..knowing how few of them were made. My late husbands father who is an 83 year old Scottish farmer that spends most of his time in a barn or on a tractor had told me all he wanted for Father's Day was a ride in a TESLA!!! I was surprised he knew what one was...he said he had seen it on the news. So when I saw this Tesla parked next to me I knew I had to do something to get a ride for my Father in law. I noticed on the one side it said SECHELT and on the other TESLA....so when I got home I looked up Sechelt Tesla on google and there it was that the Mayor of Sechelt owns this car...so I sent a polite email to him explaining my wish ....and he invited us for a ride!!! What a great day it was... my father in law still talks about it...very impressive car to be in...so smooth...the Mayor still Drag races every year at the airstrip in town....look it up on youtube SecheltTesla..I am looking forward to Tesla coming to Vancouver June 2013


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Bernie Kelly's
Bernie Kelly's
1968 Camaro
Hometown: Dingmans Ferry
Color: Bahama Blue
Mileage: 525
Pet name: Saint
Value: $45,000
Under the hood: Big block Chevy
Origin: Kelly's Auto. We had the car sitting outside for years and then one day my son thought we should build it.
Special features: 871 blower with two 950 cfm carbs; estimated 800hp
Favorite place to cruise: At any quarter-mile dragway
Other rides: '69 Camaro, '70 Mustang Mach 1
Which make and model did you learn to drive on? 1970 Mustang Mach 1


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A decade ago, as China closed in on membership in the World Trade Organization (WTO), key negotiators now say, it wasn't talk of opening a huge market to grain or machinery that threatened talks: It was haggling over movies, the ultimate soft-power export.
Today, Chinese consumer confidence has soared. That has lifted movie ticket sales, which jumped 64 percent in 2010 to $1.5 billion, thanks partly to a 3-D craze and a mushrooming of cinemas in China. But what's also grown is official wariness of the influence of foreign media, so much so that Beijing – a WTO member since 2001 – has all but ignored a March WTO deadline to open film distribution to greater foreign participation, and has refused to discuss the annual cap of 20 imported films.
In late May, taking a page out of China's 1972 playbook – when Beijing gave two rare black-and-white bears to Washington's National Zoo after President Nixon's historic visit – envoys from DreamWorks Animation went to Sichuan Province bearing "Kung Fu Panda 2," part of DreamWorks's effort to establish a paw-hold in the globe's fastest-growing movie market. The China Film Group (CFG) released the film nationwide on May 27, dubbed into Chinese.
Their effort drew on lessons from the release of the first "Kung Fu Panda" in China right before the 2008 Beijing Olympics. Many loved it, making it the first animated feature film here to gross more than 100 million yuan ($15 million) in ticket sales. Others said DreamWorks's take on China's ancient culture fell as flat as its 2-D portrayal.
Fast-forward three years and the stakes are higher. Tickets costing as much as 120 yuan ($18.50) helped China become the No. 2 movie market after the United States for 20th Century Fox's "Avatar." After its January 2010 release, it went on to gross more than $200 million in China. Walt Disney Pictures's "Pirates of the Caribbean 4: On Stranger Tides" recently topped the opening weekend figures for "Avatar."
Those kind of box-office numbers get the attention of US moviemakers. They ensure that the studios will increasingly take into account not only what will fly with China's middle-class audience but also with Beijing censors, who must approve every film.
Disney learns the hard way
Disney learned the hard way that media minders in Beijing watch for anything, anywhere, that questions China's unity and the supremacy of the Communist Party. In 1997, Disney, whose interests in China extend to publishing, merchandising, and theme parks, upset Beijing by releasing director Martin Scorsese's "Kundun," a film about the current Dalai Lama's exile to India after the People's Liberation Army's occupation of Tibet. Though it was never intended for release in China, insiders say Disney's initiatives in China were stalled for years afterward.
Beyond political considerations, US filmmakers are also trying to engage Chinese audiences more directly, instead of assuming that what plays well in New York will also be snapped up by filmgoers in Shanghai.
Fox International Productions recently made two Mandarin-language films that it distributed via Beijing-based partners Huayi Brothers Media. The romantic comedy "Hot Summer Days," which FIP made for $2 million, grossed roughly $22 million. FIP then got Hollywood hitmaker Doug Liman, director of "The Bourne Identity," to boost a martial-arts comedy, "The Butcher, the Chef, and the Swordsman," at the Pusan International Film Festival in South Korea last October.
Hollywood studios complain about their limited access to China. But they are also currying favor with the CFG, gatekeeper to the wallets of Chinese moviegoers. CFG sees itself as the guardian of Chinese mores. Films must contain the proper "Chinese elements" to be approved for release.
The plot of Sony's doomsday picture "2012" featured Chinese ark-builders as saviors of the story's flood victims. The overwhelmingly positive attention the film received in the state-controlled press hints at China's eagerness for Hollywood to abandon its historical vilification and fantasization of China in favor of helping it look good to the world.
No more Chinese enemies in the movies
Hollywood seems equally eager to do so. MGM recently scrubbed all references to a Chinese enemy from its upcoming remake of the 1984 cold-war-era drama "Red Dawn," digitally replacing Chinese military insignias with North Korean ones in a late edit.
Betting that China's multiplex owners, like their counterparts around the world, want as many high-earning 3-D films as possible, DreamWorks is playing one of its strong cards: attention to detail.
"3-D technology forced us to give depth to the film and show off the research we did in China so carefully this time around," says Raymond Zibach, veteran DreamWorks production designer for "Kung Fu Panda," during a three-day promotional tour to this cradle of the panda.
Before the first "Kung Fu Panda," which took five years to make, Mr. Zibach fought with DreamWorks chief executive officer Jeffrey Katzenberg for a China visit. He was told it would be too costly. Then the movie grossed $633 million worldwide. On his second request, Zibach got his trip.
In November 2008, with much of the first film's core creative crew in tow, Zibach went to Beijing; to Chengdu, in central China, to see pandas face to face; and then, outside Chengdu, to Mt. Qingcheng, a wellspring of Taoist philosophy and home to its own kung fu tradition.
"The mountain changed how we went about making the second film," says the California native, revisiting Chengdu and Mt. Qingcheng in late May, on only his second trip to China. "We absorbed its colors, its misty atmosphere, and its magic."
His group took 40,000 photos on that first trip and have incorporated inspiration from China's architecture and color palette into the sequel's computer-generated imagery. Local audiences may perk up at the Chinese characters for Mt. Qingcheng carved into rocks in digital scenery. "That's not product placement. It was just a nod of 'thank you,' " Zibach says.
Not long before Zibach and his team arrived to research the sequel, Mt. Qingcheng was a mess, its park and kung fu school closed in the wake of the magnitude-8.0 Wenchuan earthquake in May 2008, which collapsed thousands of buildings and killed some 68,000 people.
"We wanted to help in whatever way we could," Zibach says, "and I was so proud to hear from Chinese who saw the movie that they felt it was a part of them, that they'd had a hand in making it."
How a trip to China shaped Kung Fu Panda 2
DreamWorks Animation's Raymond Zibach says the first "Kung Fu Panda" film was designed from books and Internet research, but he knew he had to go to China for "Kung Fu Panda 2": "We'd fallen in love with pandas from afar and had to go see them for ourselves to get the second film right," the production designer says.
Mr. Zibach digitally "painted" the film's sets based on photographs he took in the Forbidden City – the walled North China city of Pingyao, in Chengdu (the capital of Sichuan Province) – and on Mt. Qingcheng, a center of kung fu tradition.
The character of baby Po, the panda who grows up to be the film's hero, was drawn after studying the movements of a baby panda at a Chengdu panda breeding facility.
The movements of Lord Shen, the evil peacock villain, are based on a particularly flexible and captivating kung fu master Zibach observed at Mt. Qingcheng.
Architectural and landscape details were drawn from elements such as the ceramic animal tiles found along traditional Chinese sloping roofs and from the lush green bamboo forests. Classical Chinese painting and martial arts films of the past decade – think "Hero" and "House of Flying Daggers" – also played a role in the film's "look," Zibach says.


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LAFD to hire 165 firefighters after recruiting controversy
Newly appointed Chief Ralph Terrazas pushed up the hiring deadline to fill vacancies and reduce response times
Daily News
LOS ANGELES — With a new fire chief awaiting confirmation and thousands of expected applicants, the city of Los Angeles is beginning the process of hiring 165 new firefighters even as standards and procedures are being revamped to avoid the problems that have plagued the department in the past.
Applications will be accepted from 8 a.m. today through midnight Thursday. Mayor Eric Garcetti, who last week selected Assistant Chief Ralph Terrazas to be the next chief, had previously pushed up the hiring deadline to fill vacancies and help reduce response times.
Garcetti spokesman Yusef Robb said the mayor believes bringing in additional firefighters is critical to keeping our city safe.
"Mayor Garcetti directed that steps were taken to restart hiring now through an improved process," he said. "The new process will continue to be reviewed as we look ahead to more hiring over the next year. The goal is to ensure there is a level playing field that results in hiring the best possible firefighters."
The move comes even as a report is still in the works by the RAND Corp. on how hiring procedures should be amended. RAND officials said they hope to have a draft to city officials by the end of July.
The department's criteria for candidates came under criticism this year because of the number of recruits who were related to firefighters, as well as accusations that some received special training to prepare them for the process.
Some 850 applicants who had previously cleared the city requirements are now being required to reapply to the department to put candidates on equal footing.
Frank Lima, president of the United Firefighters of Los Angeles City, has estimated the LAFD has lost 560 firefighters over the last six years and continues to lose about 10 a month through retirement or other factors.
Those interested in joining the department will need to begin the process by clicking on the "For Job Seekers" tab atop the city website's homepage at www.lacity.org.
"We are going to use a stratified random sampling to get the number of applicants down to about 300," said Gloria Sosa, assistant general manager of the personnel department, noting they'll look at the totality of hopefuls, break them down by gender and ethnicity and then randomly select a smaller group.
Those chosen to move on will be eligible to take a written test on Aug. 2 that gauges reading, math and mechanical aptitude. After passing that bar, applicants will undergo more detailed background checks, including medical and psychological tests.
The final group of candidates will be selected by the fire chief to move on to formal firefighter training.
Sosa said the city this year hopes to create two classes of 60 and one of 45 to reduce the number of vacancies. Starting salary for recruits is $59,382, with city benefits kicking in immediately for those hired.
Copyright 2014 Daily News
All Rights Reserved


text:
Sterling Police Department
March 24
- Alyssa Sporing of Otis reported a theft from auto at 1206 N. Seventh St., which occurred between 5 p.m. March 23 and the time of the call. A $20 bill was reported stolen.
March 23
- At 2:55 p.m., 42-year-old Amy Alexis Whited of Sterling was charged with obstructing a peace officer, resisting arrest, attempting to influence a public servant, possession of less than two grams of methamphetamine and criminal impersonation at 1460 E. Chestnut St.
- At 8:45 a.m., 43-year-old Norene Alma Skraback of Sterling was arrested on a warrant for third degree assault, a crime against an at-risk adult, and obstruction of a telephone after she came to the police department to report harassment on March 20.
March 22
- At 2 p.m., Manetta Kuhlmann of Sterling reported a theft and trespassing at 122 Grant Place, which occurred about the time of the call. Two brown and blue lawn gnomes valued at $30 were stolen.
March 21
- At 10:10 a.m., Mark Gockley of Sterling reported identity theft at 429 Plainview Ave., which occurred between 8 a.m. July 1, 2012, and 10:02 a.m. March 21.
March 20
- At 10:50 p.m., 19-year-old Zachary James Buhler of Sterling was charged with DUI and possession of less than an ounce of marijuana near the intersection of Arianne Street and S. Ninth Avenue. He was held on a $1,000 personal recognizance bond.
- At 8:20 p.m., Steven Vierow of Sterling reported a theft at 601 N. Sixth St., which occurred about the time of the phone call.
March 19
- At 7:30 p.m., 25-year-old Audrey Jean Reynolds of Sterling was issued a summons for theft at the Sterling Walmart, 1510 W. Main St. on March 5.


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Elizabeth Edwards v. Ann Coulter
From NBC's Mark Murray and Domenico Montanaro
The wife of Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards called into MSNBC's "Hardball" on Tuesday to confront Ann Coulter on her personal attacks on her husband and family.
Coulter, the controversial conservative commentator, appeared on an outdoor set with host Chris Matthews -- and also with dozens of supporters and detractors waiting to ask questions. But there was another person waiting to pose a question to Coulter: Elizabeth Edwards.
According to an Edwards campaign aide, Elizabeth Edwards wanted to call into the show when she heard that Coulter would be taking questions, and she called a Hardball producer to get the phone number needed to dial into the show. The result is the exchange below:
Chris Matthews: You know who's on the line? Somebody to respond to what you said Edwards yesterday morning -- Elizabeth Edwards. She wanted to call in today we said she could. Elizabeth Edwards go on the line you're on the line with Ann Coulter
Elizabeth Edwards: Hello, Chris.
CM: You wanna say something directly to the person who's with me?
EE: I'm calling you … in the south when we -- when someone does something that displeases us, we wanna ask them politely to stop doing it. Uh - I'd like to ask Ann Coulter -- if she wants to debate on issues, on positions -- we certainly disagree with nearly everything she said on your show today -- um but uh it's quite another matter for these personal attacks that the things she has said over the years not just about John but about other candidates -- it lowers our political dialogue precisely at the time that we need to raise it. So I want to use the opportunity … to ask her politely stop the personal attacks.
Ann Coulter: OK, so I made a joke -- let's see six months ago -- and as you point out they've been raising money off of it for six months since then.
CM: This is yesterday morning, what you said about him.
AC: I didn't say anything about him actually either time.
EE: Ann, you know that's not true. And once more its been going on for sometime.
AC: I don't mind you trying to raise money. I mean it's better this than giving $50,000 speeches to the poor.
EE: I'm asking you
AC: Just to use my name on the Web pages…
EE: I'm asking you politely…
AC: … but as for a debate with me, um yeah, sure. Yeah, we'll have a debate
EE: I'm asking you politely to stop personal attacks.
AC: How bout you stop raising money on the Web page then?
EE: It didn't start it did not
AC: No you don't have cause I don't mind
EE: It did not start with that you had a column a number of years ago
AC: OK, great the wife of a presidential candidate is calling in asking me to stop speaking
CM: Let her finish the point...
AC: You're asking me to stop speaking stop writing your columns, stop writing your books.
CM: OK, Ann. Please.
EE: You wrote a column a couple years ago which made fun of the moment of Charlie Dean's death, and suggested that my husband had a bumper sticker on the back of his car that said ask me about my dead son. This is not legitimate political dialogue.
AC: That's now three years ago
EE: It debases political dialogue. It drives people away from the process. We can't have a debate about issues if you're using this kind of language.
AC: Yeah why isn't John Edwards making this call?
CM: Well do you want to respond and we'll end this conversation?
EE: I haven't talked to John about his call.
AC: This is just another attempt for –
EE: I'm making this call as a mother. I'm the mother of that boy who died. My children participate -- these young people behind you are the age of my children. You're asking them to participate in a dialogue that's based on hatefulness and ugliness instead of on the issues and I don't think that's serving them or this country very well.
CM: Thank you very much Elizabeth Edwards. Do you want to -- you have all the time in the world to respond.
AC: I think we heard all we need to hear. The wife of a presidential candidate is asking me to stop speaking. No.
Thursday, June 28, 2007
Elizabeth Edwards skewers Ann Coulter
Subscribe to: Comment Feed (RSS)


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Depending on your account needs, Carson Bank has several options, ranging from the basic Business Checking to the more customized Treasury Checking Account.
A Business Premier Money Market pays a competitive rate and offers the flexibility of a checking account.
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The Lethifold (also known as a Living Shroud) is a carnivorous and highly dangerous magical creature. It is also considered a Dark creature because of its aggressive and violent nature.
Physical Description
Its appearance resembles that of a black cloak roughly half an inch thick, although it gets thicker if the Lethifold has recently digested a victim. It glides along the ground and other surfaces in an unknown form of locomotion, in search of its prey, humans. It attacks its prey at night, when the target is asleep, and suffocates and digests it in its bed.
Protection from a Lethifold
The only form of protection against a Lethifold is a Patronus. Other spells such as the Stunning Spell will not work. [1]
The Lethifold is a very rare species, and can only be found in the tropics.
Lethifold Attacks
The first recorded survivor of a Lethifold attack was a wizard named Flavius Belby. Belby was on holiday in Papua New Guinea, and he managed to escape because he was not fully asleep at the time. He repelled the Lethifold with a Patronus Charm, something other people are unable to do because they are either asleep or Muggles (or both). It is impossible to determine the number of Lethifold victims, as they leave no clues of their presence.
Much easier to calculate is how many people have faked a Lethifold attack, for their own reasons. One known case of an individual attempting to fake a Lethifold attack was Janus Thickey, who disappeared in 1973, leaving behind a note reading "Oh no, a Lethifold's got me, I'm suffocating". Because of this and his empty bed, Thickey's wife and children began mourning him. However, he was soon discovered living five miles away with the landlady of the Green Dragon.[1]
"Lethifold" comes from two roots: lethum, variation of letum, which is Latin for "death", "annihilation", "ruin", and fold, which possibly pertains to the creature's cloak-like appearance. Lethi- is also similar to Levi-, which is reminiscent of levitation (an ability of the Lethifold) and levis, a Latin adjective, meaning "light" (a quality that Lethifold also possess). It is possible that the Ancient Greek lethe, the name of one of the rivers of Hades and meaning "forgetfulness", is also a point of origin, since mortals touched by its waters forgot their lives, ceased to struggle, and (generally) drowned.
Behind the Scenes
- It is possible that the Lethifold could be a hybrid or a relative of the Dementor, for both their similar descriptions and their inhumane behaviors.
Notes and references
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|Flobberworm · Horklump
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|Centaur · Demiguise · Erkling · Erumpent · Golden Snidget · Graphorn · Griffin · Hidebehind · Kappa · Kelpie · Merpeople · Occamy · Phoenix · Re'em · Runespoor · Snallygaster · Sphinx · Tebo · Thestral · Thunderbird · Troll · Unicorn · Winged horse · Yeti
|Acromantula · Basilisk · Chimaera · Dragon · Horned Serpent · Lethifold · Manticore · Nundu · Quintaped · Wampus cat · Werewolf