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Dependency Properties Overview
Microsoft Silverlight will reach end of support after October 2021. Learn more.
Silverlight provides a set of services that can be used to extend the functionality of a CLR property. Collectively, these services are typically referred to as the Silverlight property system. A property that is backed by the Silverlight property system is known as a dependency property. This overview describes the Silverlight property system and the capabilities of a dependency property. This overview also introduces specialized aspects of dependency properties, such as dependency property metadata, and how to create your own dependency property in a custom class.
This topic contains the following sections.
- Prerequisites
- Dependency Properties in Silverlight
- Dependency Properties Back CLR Properties
- Setting Property Values
- Property Functionality Provided by a Dependency Property
- Dependency Property Value Precedence
- Learning More About Dependency Properties
- Related Topics
This topic assumes that you have some basic knowledge of the CLR and object-oriented programming. In order to follow the examples in this topic, you should also understand XAML and know how to write Silverlight-based applications.
Dependency Properties in Silverlight
In Silverlight, dependency properties are typically exposed as CLR properties also. At a basic level, you could interact with these properties directly and never know that they are implemented as a dependency property. However, you should become familiar with some or all of the features of the Silverlight property system, so that you can take advantage of the dependency property features.
The purpose of dependency properties is to provide a way to compute the value of a property based on the value of other inputs. These other inputs might include external properties such as user preference, just-in-time property determination mechanisms such as data binding and animations/storyboards, multiple-use templates such as resources and styles, or values known through parent-child relationships with other elements in the object tree. In addition, a dependency property can be implemented to provide callbacks that can propagate changes to other properties.
For Silverlight types that are a DependencyObject and are visible in the UI in some way, most of the settable properties on the object are dependency properties, and can therefore support animation. For FrameworkElement derived types, the dependency property also can support styling. For read-only properties, it is less likely that the property is a dependency property, although there are some read-only properties that are still implemented as dependency properties because of WPF compatibility. For the uncommon cases where a settable property on a DependencyObject is not a dependency property, that property will be unable to support animation, data binding, or FrameworkElement styling.
In the SDK reference, you can definitively identify if a given Silverlight property is implemented as a dependency property. In the Remarks section, if there is "Dependency Property Identifier Field" and a link to an API (a field) where the name ends with Property, the property is a dependency property. This same convention of exposing a field and naming it in a corresponding way should be followed by custom or third party dependency properties also. For example, if there is a property named Ticks defined by a type, and a field named TicksProperty exposed by the same type (and the field is of type DependencyProperty), then Ticks is a dependency property.
Dependency Properties Back CLR Properties
Dependency properties and the Silverlight property system extend CLR-defined property functionality by providing a property store that backs a property, as an alternative implementation to the standard pattern of backing the property with a private field. The name of the type that identifies each property in the store is DependencyProperty. The other important type that defines the Silverlight property system is DependencyObject. DependencyObject defines the base class that can register and own a dependency property, and it is DependencyObject that maintains its dependency property values in a store.
Following is a summation of the terminology that is used in this documentation when discussing dependency properties:
Dependency property: A property that exists on a DependencyObject, is stored by the DependencyObject property store, and is identified by a DependencyProperty identifier on the owning DependencyObject.
Dependency property identifier: A DependencyProperty instance. In the case of an existing dependency property in the Silverlight core API, this instance is usually exposed as a public static readonly field, as a member of the same DependencyObject type that holds the dependency property. In the case of a custom dependency property, this field is obtained as a return value when registering a dependency property. You should then store this field as a member of the class. The dependency property identifier field can also be used as a parameter in APIs such as GetValue and SetValue that expose the fundamentals of the Silverlight property system, as well as other APIs where dependency properties are specified by identifier (for instance, some signatures of the PropertyPath constructor, or Setter.Property).
CLR wrapper: The actual get and set implementations for the property as it is visible to the CLR type system (which operates at a lower level architecturally). These implementations incorporate the dependency property identifier by using it in the GetValue and SetValue calls, thus providing the backing for the property using the Silverlight property system. GetValue / SetValue calls should be the entirety of the get and set implementations. The wrapper is not just convenience for callers, it also exposes the dependency property to any process or tool that uses reflection or the CLR type system as its basis, which is vital in many scenarios.
The following example defines a custom IsSpinning dependency property, and shows the relationship of the DependencyProperty identifier to the property that it backs.
Public Shared ReadOnly IsSpinningProperty As DependencyProperty = _
DependencyProperty.Register("IsSpinning", _
GetType(Boolean), _
GetType(SilverlightExampleClass), _
Public Property IsSpinning() As Boolean
Return CBool(GetValue(IsSpinningProperty))
End Get
Set(ByVal value As Boolean)
SetValue(IsSpinningProperty, value)
End Set
End Property
public static readonly DependencyProperty IsSpinningProperty =
"IsSpinning", typeof(Boolean),
typeof(SilverlightExampleClass), null
public bool IsSpinning
get { return (bool)GetValue(IsSpinningProperty); }
set { SetValue(IsSpinningProperty, value); }
Note: |
The preceding example is not intended as the complete example for how to create a custom dependency property. It is intended to help illustrate dependency property concepts for anyone that learns a concept best by looking at representative code. For a more complete example of creating a custom dependency property, see Custom Dependency Objects and Dependency Properties. |
Setting Property Values
As a broad generalization, you can set Silverlight properties either in code or in XAML. For purposes of code versus XAML distinctions, whether a property is backed by a dependency property generally does not matter. Either way, if a property is settable and you set it, a value is set to the object that holds the property in its property store, however that store is implemented. There are however properties that can only be set in code. In most cases this is because the type that the property accepts cannot be expressed in XAML. Also, certain property-related mechanisms exist that only work with dependency properties and not CLR properties in general because the mechanism uses DependencyProperty as a type; an example of this is Setter.Property, used in styles and templates.
Setting Property Values in XAML
XAML supports a variety of syntax forms for setting properties. The simplest form is as a string attribute. Which syntax to use for a particular property will depend on the type that a property uses as its value, as well as other factors such as the presence of a type converter. For more information on XAML syntax for property setting, see XAML Overview. Specific property usage syntax for XAML is typically found in the Syntax sections of reference pages and can also often be found in the Example sections.
In terms of syntax, the Silverlight XAML parser does not distinguish between standard CLR properties and those which are backed by a dependency property: each is processed as a string. However, there are several XAML-property system interactions that you should be aware of:
Only dependency properties can accept values that use the Binding or TemplateBinding markup extensions, because it is the property system (not the XAML parser per se) that engages to supply these values.
The Silverlight XAML parser bypasses the CLR wrapper whenever setting any style Setter value. For more information, see Custom Dependency Objects and Dependency Properties.
StaticResource Markup Extension can be used for any property being set in XAML; the property does not have to be a dependency property. However, that property does need to use a value that is shareable from out of a Silverlight resource dictionary as defined elsewhere in XAML, which is not strictly speaking a property system defined behavior. For more information, see Resource Dictionaries.
Setting Properties in Code
Setting dependency property values in code is typically just a standard CLR property usage exposed by the CLR wrapper.
scratchCanvas.Width = 200; //scratchCanvas is an existing Canvas instance
scratchCanvas.Width = 200 ' scratchCanvas is an existing Canvas instance
Getting a property value is also essentially a standard property usage:
double whatWidth = scratchCanvas.Width;
Dim whatWidth As Double
whatWidth = scratchCanvas.Width
You can also call the property system APIs GetValue and SetValue directly. This is not typically necessary if you are using existing properties (the wrappers are more convenient, and provide better exposure of the property for developer tools), but calling the property system APIs directly is appropriate for certain scenarios. This usage is representative of the fact that the actual property store for dependency objects is implemented in the DependencyObject class and is available to all instances of DependencyObject.
Properties can be also set in the initially loaded XAML and then accessed later in code, by accessing the run-time object tree by some means (event handlers in code-behind, FindName as an entry point, traversing the object tree from the root, and so on).
Property Functionality Provided by a Dependency Property
A dependency property provides functionality that extends the functionality of a property as opposed to a property that is backed by a field. Often, each such functionality represents or supports a specific feature of the overall Silverlight set of features:
Data binding
Property-changed behavior
Default value and ClearValue
Data Binding
So long as the dependency property to set is on a DependencyObject subclass, a dependency property can have its value set through data binding. Data binding works through a specific markup extension syntax in XAML, or the Binding object in code. With data binding, the final property value determination is deferred until run time, at which time the value is obtained from a data source.
The following example sets the text for a text block, using a binding in XAML. The binding uses an inherited data context and an object data source (not shown).
<TextBlock Text="{Binding Team.TeamName}"/>
You can also establish bindings using code rather than XAML. See SetBinding.
Note: |
Bindings are treated as a local value for purposes of dependency property value precedence, which means that if you set another local value, you will eliminate the binding. |
Binding Sources, Binding Targets
In order to be the source of a binding, a property does not need to be a dependency property; you can use any CLR property as a binding source. However, in order to be the target of a binding, the property must be a dependency property.
If you are setting bindings in code, note that the SetBinding API is defined only for FrameworkElement. However, you can create a binding definition using BindingOperations instead, and thus reference any DependencyObject property.
For either code or XAML, remember that DataContext is a FrameworkElement property. By using a form of parent-child property inheritance, the binding system can resolve a DataContext that exists on a parent element, even if the child object (which has the target property) is not a FrameworkElement and therefore does not hold its own DataContext value. However, that parent element must be a FrameworkElement in order to set and hold the DataContext. Alternatively, you must define the binding such that it can function with a null DataContext.
Note: |
Applications targeting Silverlight 3 can only bind to target properties of a FrameworkElement. Support for binding to any DependencyObject dependency property was added in Silverlight 4. |
For a one-way or two-way binding to be effective, the source property must support change notifications that propagate to the binding system and thus the target. For custom CLR binding sources, this means that the property must support INotifyPropertyChanged. Collections should support INotifyCollectionChanged. Certain classes support one of these interfaces in their implementations so that they are useful as base classes for data binding scenarios; an example of such a class is ObservableCollection<T>.
For more information on data binding in Silverlight, and how data binding relates to the property system, see Data Binding.
Styles and templates are two of the main motivating scenarios for properties being defined as dependency properties. Styles are particularly useful for setting properties that define application user interface (UI). Styles are typically defined as resources in XAML, either as application-level or page-level resource dictionaries, or in XAML files that play a particular role in the overall Silverlight application model such as generic.xaml. Styles interact with the property system because they typically contain "setters" for particular properties. The most important property typically being set in this way is the Template of a Control, which defines most of the visual appearance and visual state for the Control.
For more information on styles and some example XAML that defines a Style and uses setters, see Style.
In order to be animated, the animation's target property must be a dependency property. Also, in order to be animated, the target property's value type must be supported by one of the existing Timeline-derived animation types.
When an animation is applied and is running, the animated value operates at a higher precedence than any value (such as a local value) than the property otherwise has. Animations also have an optional behavior that can cause animations to apply to property values even if the animation visually appears to be stopped, by using a HoldEnd behavior.
Animations in Silverlight are not just for the conventional usage of animation to produce one-time or repeating visual decorative elements. You can think of animations as being a state machine technique whereby you can set the state of individual properties or of whole controls based on some stimulus. This principle is embodied by the use of animations as part of the VisualStateManager state model for controls. For more information on animations, see Animation For more information on VisualStateManager, see Creating a New Control by Creating a ControlTemplate.
Property-Changed Behavior
Property-changed behavior is one of the main reasons for the "dependency" portion of the terminology for a dependency property. Maintaining valid values for a property where another property can influence the first property's value is a difficult development problem in many platforms. The Silverlight dependency property system builds in the capability for each dependency property to specify a callback that is called whenever its property value changes. This callback can be used to notify or change related property values, in a generally synchronous manner.
Many existing Silverlight dependency properties have a property-changed behavior. You can also add such behavior to custom dependency properties, and implement your own property-changed callbacks. For more information, see Example PropertyChangedCallback Implementation section of Custom Dependency Objects and Dependency Properties.
Default Value and ClearValue
A dependency property can have a default value defined as part of its property metadata. The difference between the default value of a regular property and of a dependency property is that the default value might apply whenever some other determinant in value precedence disappears (dependency property value precedence is discussed in the next section). For example, you might deliberately remove a template or an animation from a property, but want the value to be a reasonable default after you do so. The dependency property default value provides this value, without needing to be specifically set in all cases.
The case where you do need to deliberately set to the default value is if you have already set a local value. Setting the property again just sets the local value again and does not really restore the default. To reset the value to be the default again, and also to enable other participants in precedence that fall below the local value precedence to act again, you call ClearValue on the property.
Dependency Property Value Precedence
When you get the value of a dependency property, you are potentially obtaining a value that was set on that property through any one of the property-based inputs that participate in the Silverlight property system. Dependency property value precedence exists so that a variety of scenarios for how Silverlight properties obtain their values can interact in a predictable way.
For example, styles and templates are intended to be a shared starting point for establishing property values and thus appearances of a control. But on a particular control instance you might want to change some property-specific aspect of the control versus the common template, such as giving it a different background color or a different text string as content. The Silverlight property system uses local values at higher precedence than style and template provided values, thus enabling the scenario.
More information about the concept of dependency property precedence, and a listing of the order in which the precedence applies, is provided in the topic Dependency Property Value Precedence.
Learning More About Dependency Properties
Attached Properties Overview: An attached property is a type of property that supports a specialized XAML syntax in Silverlight. An attached property often does not have a direct correspondence with a CLR property hierarchy. The typical purpose of attached properties is to allow child elements to report property values to a parent element, even if the parent element and child element do not both possess that property as a possible member in a generalized type system. One primary scenario for attached properties in Silverlight is to enable child elements to inform the parent how they should be presented in UI; for an example of this scenario, see Canvas.Left.
Custom Dependency Objects and Dependency Properties: Component developers or application developers may wish to create their own dependency property, in order to enable capabilities such as data binding or style support, or for property-changed behavior.


text:
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subset: commoncrawl


text:
First Known Use: 15th century
adjective ob·scure \äb-ˈskyu̇r, əb-\
: not well-known : not known to most people
: difficult to understand : likely to be understood by only a few people
: difficult or impossible to know completely and with certainty
Full Definition of OBSCURE
: not readily understood or clearly expressed; also : mysterious
: constituting the unstressed vowel \ə\ or having unstressed \ə\ as its value
— ob·scure·ly adverb
— ob·scure·ness noun
See obscure defined for English-language learners
See obscure defined for kids
Examples of OBSCURE
- Many people shared an obscure sense of gratification that [Dylan] Thomas had died young, as a poet should. —Adam Kirsch, New Yorker, 5 July 2004
- But by 1830 the Boston Mission Board was desperate enough that it targeted an obscure sect of Oriental Christians, the Nestorians in faraway Iran, as a possibility for conversion. —Robert D. Kaplan, The Arabists, 1993
- I knew they were special from their jeans and T-shirts, their knowing, ironic looks when obscure works of literature were referred to. —Julia Alvarez, How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents, 1991
- Now at last Bacon could refer when he chose to his father's high position and his father's service—and no man could say it was done for self-aggrandizement, as a son who is obscure bespeaks the glory of past forebears. —Catherine Drinker Bowen, Francis Bacon, 1963
- [+]more
Origin of OBSCURE
Middle English, from Anglo-French oscur, obscur, from Latin obscurus
Related to OBSCURE
- Synonyms
- ambiguous, arcane, cryptic, dark, deep, Delphic, double-edged, elliptical (or elliptic), enigmatic (also enigmatical), equivocal, fuliginous, inscrutable, murky, mysterious, mystic, nebulous, occult, opaque
- Antonyms
- accessible, clear, nonambiguous, obvious, plain, unambiguous, unequivocal
Synonym Discussion of OBSCURE
obscure, dark, vague, enigmatic, cryptic, ambiguous, equivocal mean not clearly understandable. obscure implies a hiding or veiling of meaning through some inadequacy of expression or withholding of full knowledge <obscure poems>. dark implies an imperfect or clouded revelation often with ominous or sinister suggestion <muttered dark hints of revenge>. vague implies a lack of clear formulation due to inadequate conception or consideration <a vague sense of obligation>. enigmatic stresses a puzzling, mystifying quality <enigmatic occult writings>. cryptic implies a purposely concealed meaning <cryptic hints of hidden treasure>. ambiguous applies to language capable of more than one interpretation <an ambiguous directive>. equivocal applies to language left open to differing interpretations with the intention of deceiving or evading <moral precepts with equivocal phrasing>.
Rhymes with OBSCURE
abjure, adjure, Adour, allure, amour, Ashur, assure, brochure, ceinture, cocksure, coiffure, conjure, contour, couture, demure, detour, dirt-poor, endure, ensure, faubourg, for sure, Fraktur, grandeur, gravure, guipure, hachure, immure, impure, insure, inure, kultur, land-poor, langur, ligure, manure, mature, mohur, parure, perdure, procure, rondure, secure, siddur, tambour, tandoor, tenure, Uighur, unmoor, velour, velure
verb ob·scure \äb-ˈskyu̇r, əb-\
: to make (something) difficult to understand or know : to make (something) obscure
: to hide or cover (something) : to be in front of (something) so that it cannot be seen
Full Definition of OBSCURE
transitive verb
: to make dark, dim, or indistinct
: to conceal or hide by or as if by covering
: to reduce (a vowel) to the value \ə\
— ob·scu·ra·tion \ˌäb-skyu̇-ˈrā-shən\ noun
See obscure defined for English-language learners
Examples of OBSCURE
- Throughout this book, the ground of fact becomes obscured entirely by a deep layer of speculative quicksand. —Helen Vendler, New Republic, 10 June 2002
- But evening comes or even noon and some combination of nervous tensions obscures my memories of what whiskey costs me in the way of physical and intellectual well-being. —John Cheever, New Yorker, 13 Aug. 1990
- … [Mr. Schuller's]… "Early Jazz" brought a sometimes Olympian precision to writing about an art that has often languished in the whale's belly of sociology, obscured by pretension and blubbery thinking. —Stanley Crouch, New York Times Book Review, 2 Apr. 1989
- It was eight o'clock when we landed; we walked for a short time on the shore enjoying the transitory light, and then retired to the inn and contemplated the lovely scene of waters, woods, and mountains, obscured in darkness, yet still displaying their black outlines. —Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Frankenstein, 1818
- [+]more
Origin of OBSCURE
(see 1obscure)
First Known Use: 15th century
noun ob·scure \äb-ˈskyu̇r, əb-\
Definition of OBSCURE
Examples of OBSCURE
- … who shall … through the palpable obscure find out his uncouth way …? —John Milton, Paradise Lost, 1667
Origin of OBSCURE
(see 1obscure)
First Known Use: 1667
OBSCURE Defined for Kids
adjective ob·scure \äb-ˈskyu̇r, əb-\
Definition of OBSCURE for Kids
: not easy to see : faint <an obscure light>
: hidden from view <an obscure village>
: not easily understood or clearly expressed <I struggled with an obscure chapter in the book.>
: not outstanding or famous <It was written by an obscure poet.>
Definition of OBSCURE for Kids
: to make difficult to see or understand <Clouds drifted across the sky, obscuring the thin sliver of moon. — Brian Jacques, Redwall>
Learn More About OBSCURE
Next Word in the Dictionary: obscuredlyPrevious Word in the Dictionary: obscurativeAll Words Near: obscure
Seen & Heard
What made you want to look up obscure? Please tell us where you read or heard it (including the quote, if possible).


text:
Turkey rejects secularism, turns Islamic
The news from Turkey is disquieting. The Guardian reported;" Erdogan clinches victory in Turkish constitutional referendum:"
Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, has achieved victory in a historic referendum on a package of constitutional amendments that will grant him sweeping new powers.
Sadi Güven, the head of Turkey's high electoral board (YSK), confirmed the passage of the referendum on Sunday night, based on unofficial results.
The yes campaign won 1.25m more votes than the no campaign, with only about 600,000 votes still to be counted, Güven told reporters in Ankara, meaning the expanded presidential powers had been approved.
However, disparities persisted into Sunday evening, with the opposition saying not all ballots had been counted and they would contest a third of the votes that had been cast.
Güven said the YSK had decided to consider unstamped ballots as valid unless they were proved to be fraudulent, after a high number of complaints – including one from the ruling Justice and Development party (AKP) – that its officials had failed to stamp some ballot papers.
The no campaign said the YSK's last-minute decision raised questions about the validity of the vote. But Güven said the decision was taken before results were entered into the system and that members of the AKP and the main opposition were present at almost all polling stations and signed off on reports. He said official results were expected in 11-12 days.
The result of the referendum sets the stage for a transformation of the upper echelons of the state and changing the country from a parliamentary democracy to a presidential republic, arguably the most important development in the country's history since it was founded on the ashes of the Ottoman Republic.
Erdogan said he would immediately discuss reinstating the death penalty in talks with the prime minister and the nationalist opposition leader, Devlet Bahçeli. The president said he would take the issue to referendum if necessary.
Not a resounding mandate was achieved in today's "muted victory" in the Turkish national referendum leaving the country divided:
The narrow victory will nevertheless come as a disappointment for the country's leadership, which had hoped for a decisive mandate for the plan that could see Erdogan remain in power until 2029 if he wins successive elections.
The result will set the stage for a further split between Turkey and its European allies, who believe Ankara is sliding towards autocracy. The European commission said on Sunday night that Turkey should seek the "broadest possible national consensus" in its constitutional amendments, given the yes campaign's slim margin of victory.
Results carried by the state-run Anadolu news agency showed the yes vote had about 51.3% compared with 48.7% for the no vote, with nearly 99% of the vote counted. Turnout exceeded 80%.
The country's three largest cities – Istanbul, Ankara and Izmir – voted against the changes, and so did the vast majority of Kurdish voters and many of the coastal cities, indicating a general decline in the ruling party's support
In a press conference in Istanbul following his party's declaration of victory, Erdogan said that unofficial results showed there were about 25m yes votes, 1.3m more than no.
But in an unusually muted victory speech, Erdogan said foreign powers should respect the referendum's outcome. He said: "We've got a lot to do, we are on this path but it's time to change gears and go faster … We are carrying out the most important reform in the history of our nation."
Erdogan claimed support for constitutional change had risen in south-east Turkey and hailed a "profound" jump in support for a presidential system that was unpopular just two years ago. Overseas votes were a "big part" of that success, he said, adding that his new executive presidency would probably come into effect after the 2019 election.
Erdogan called the prime minister, Binali Yildirim, and other political allies to congratulate them on the victory, although, in an indication of the ruling AKP's disappointment, the deputy prime minister said they had received fewer votes than they expected.
Our comment
Erdogan and AKP celebrate while concerned opposition challenges alleged narrow victory requesting a recount of 60 percent of votes cast.
Was there the expected jiggery pokery over the ballot counting in the nation referendum? Without independent foreign monitors present, how do we know if this vote count wasn't tampered with? How can Turkish voters trust the integrity of the ballot system under the Islamist autocracy of the neo Sultan Erdogan and his cronies conspiring to overturn the 1923 Constitutional legacy of Turkish Republic founder Kemal Ataturk.
In a land of Islamic ascendency under Erdogan, dystopia will follow today's referendum under cover of darkness at noon.
Darkness at Noon in Erodgan's Turkey
If you want to know what was at stake in today's National Referendum in Turkey read this New York Times Magazine article, "Inside Turkey's Purge". The article by Suzy Hansen rivals the paranoia portrayed in the thinly disguised world of Stalin's Great Purge of the 1930's in Russia in former Communist Arthur Koestler's classic novel, Darkness at Noon.
Great swaths of lives swept aside by the dystopian vision of President Erdogan, that if implemented by today's outcome would end the last vestige of freedom of thought, free expression with random imprisonment, torture sending those desperate to leave to opt for refugee smugglers to bring them to exile in Europe and elsewhere.
All because Erdogan brooks no opposition following his faux coup of July 2016 allegedly perpetrated by exiled former ally Sheik Fethullah Gulen's mythical FETO network. Then there are the Kurds whose liberal Peoples Democratic Party leader, (HDP) Selahattin Demirtas and thousands of elected officials he accuses of being stalking horses for the outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party, PKK, the cease fire of 2013 which he struck with jailed leader Abdullah Ocalan he overturned in July2015 with open warfare against the largely Kurdish southeastern region turning cities there into virtual moonscapes.
Erdogan's quest of becoming autocrat for life will denude Turkey of its educated class, industrialists, journalists, educators, jurists, prosecutors and secular military. It will. likely lead to oppression of significant religious and ethnic minorities, prominent among them, Alevis and Kurds. The economy will suffer from lack of foreign investment, unemployment rising and real income plummeting. The Erdogan family and AKP operatives will reap enormous wealth from corruption. Foreign relations with the EU, UK and US may enter a dark period, with the threat of loss of NATO membership and alliance with another dystopian country Putin's Russia.
Read this opening stanza of Ms. Hansen's riveting and disturbing profile of Darkness at Noon :
The police officers came to the doctor's door in Istanbul at 6 a.m. — dawn raids usually start then, sometimes 5:30 — and one of them said, "You are accused of attempting to kill President Erdogan."
The doctor couldn't help it; he laughed. "Really? I did that?"
The police officers smiled, too. "Yes. Also for attempting to destroy Turkey and for being a member of a terrorist organization."
"Really?" He looked at them. They carried pistols. "Can I have a cigarette then?"
The police seemed surprised. They didn't expect a Gulenist to smoke. I'm not a Gulenist, the doctor insisted. That didn't help him. He would soon be one of the many thousands of people in Turkey caught in the machinery of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's purge.
The police searched the doctor's house and his books and overturned his things, looking for evidence that he was a Gulenist, or a supporter of Fethullah Gulen, an Islamic cleric who began preaching in Turkey in the 1960s and whose followers number as many as five million. Gulen has been living in exile in Pennsylvania since 1999, which partly explains why the police were looking for American $1 bills whose serial numbers start with "F" — the Turkish government claims that these were used in some mysterious way by something it has branded the Fethullah Gulen Terrorist Organization, or FETO, which it blames for the attempted coup in Turkey on July 15, 2016.
At present, several pieces of evidence can suggest that you may be a member of FETO, including having had an account at Bank Asya, which was founded by Gulenists; running the ByLock encrypted communication app on your phone (thought to have facilitated planning for the coup attempt); possessing those F-series dollar bills; sending your children to a school associated with Gulen; working at a Gulen-affiliated institution (a university, say, or a hospital); having subscribed to the Gulen newspaper Zaman; or having Gulen's books in your house. One action implicated the doctor: When he returned to Turkey after living abroad for three years and moved into a new house with his wife and children, he opened an account at the nearest bank up the street: Bank Asya.
RELATED ARTICLE: How Erdogan's Victory Might Be Europe's Defeat


text:
At PERMA-DRY, we understand the stress a flooded basement can cause. The sense of panic, the uncertainty of the next step, the unexpected financial burden…to say nothing of the severe physical damage water can inflict upon a home and to personal property.
Unfortunately, these kinds of emergencies are never planned for. At PERMA-DRY, nothing is more important than our customers who fall victim to them. In developing an effective approach to waterproofing and concrete repair that targets, seals and ultimately eliminates leaks in as little as a few hours, PERMA-DRY is the permanent, cutting-edge response to water-damaged basements. Not only that, but we guarantee our repair for as long as you own your home.


text: Big River delivers affordable, high-speed Internet and telephone service to areas the 'big guys' tend to write off. We meet your telecommunications needs through several methods, including building broadband towers in the communities we serve. These are also the neighborhoods where we live. Our employees are your neighbors, friends, and even family. We don't want to be the biggest, but we strive every day to be the best. Choose Big River for your home or business and let your neighbors take you to the web-wide world.


text:
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Welcome to Stars!wiki, a resource for and by Stars! players.
(From RGCS): Stars! is an Advanced, Interstellar, Turn Based Strategy Game and a member of 4x genre (eXplore, eXpand, eXploit, eXterminate) of PC games. It was written by Jeff Johnson and Jeff McBride with help from Jeffrey Krauss (collectively known as the Jeffs). Written in response to finding a distinct lack of quality games in the genre, it was truly a game ahead of its time. It is by far one of the most strategically in-depth and balanced games in existence. It has kept people addicted for years, and still supports a loyal player community.
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text:
When working with a buyer prospect, they must posses what I call the three C's of a buyer:
1. Commitment
2. Compromise
3. Competitiveness
A Champion Agent expects commitment from the client. Most trainers will tell Agents to ask buyers, "Are you working with another Agent?" That really isn't the right question or wording. The word working has too broad a definition. Working could mean they met an Agent at an open house; they are receiving property matches from them; there is an Agent who farms their neighborhood. The word working doesn't mean they will buy and sell with that Agent.
Read More: http://bit.ly/9vCmpx


text:
Fernando Pessoa & His Heteronyms
You will never get to the bottom of Fernando Pessoa. There are too many of him.
"After looking for him in the poems, we look for him in the prose," wrote the scholar and translator Edwin Honig. Yet we find him nowhere. This was, after all, a poet whose maxim was, "To pretend is to know oneself." Cyril Connolly noted that Pessoa "hived off separate personalities like swarms of bees." He pretended relentlessly, employing more than seventy personae in his self-searching circus. They were not so much disguises as extensions and iterations of himself. "How idyllic life would be," he once wrote, "if it were lived by another person."
For some authors, the task of writing is a descent into the self. Pessoa ventured in the opposite direction, using his heteronyms as a means of escape and claiming that within his mini-populace, he was the least "real" and compelling of the bunch. The others were constellations swirling around him. In the context of psychoanalysis, a split identity is seen as a wound that needs healing. But in Pessoa's mind(s), there was nothing disorienting about it. "I've divided all my humanness among the various authors whom I've served as literary executor," he explained. "I subsist as a kind of medium of myself, but I'm less real than the others, less substantial, less personal, and easily influenced by them all."
Although the basic facts of his life are now known, creating a "biography" of Pessoa is a slippery task indeed. "There never was a good biography of a good novelist," F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote in his journals. "There couldn't be. He is too many people, if he's any good."
Fernando António Nogueira Pessoa was very, very good.
Some things about him can be said for sure. He was born on June 13, 1888, in Lisbon, Portugal, and spent his first seven years there. His surname means "person" in Portuguese. He was five when his father, the music critic Joaquim de Seabra Pessoa, died of tuberculosis. Six months later, Fernando's baby brother, Jorge, died. His paternal grandmother suffered from bouts of insanity and was in and out of mental hospitals for the last twelve years of her life. After his father died, his mother, Maria Madalena Nogueira Pessoa, remarried, and the family moved to South Africa, where the boy's stepfather, João Miguel Rosa, served as the Portuguese consul of Durban, a British-governed town. By that time, the precocious Pessoa could already read and write. He had produced what is believed to be his first poem in the summer of 1895, when he was seven years old, in response to learning that the family would be moving to South Africa. The poem was called "To My Dear Mother":
Here I am in Portugal,
In the lands where I was born.
However much I love them,
I love you even more.
He attended a primary school run by Irish and French nuns and became fluent in French and English. And at Durban High School he was a brilliant student. Clifford Geerdts, a former classmate, recalled a boy who was morbid, as well as "meek and inoffensive and inclined to avoid association with his schoolfellows."
Pessoa gained three younger half siblings from his mother's second marriage: Henriqueta (with whom he was closest), Luís, and João. He read and loved Keats, Shelley, Shakespeare, Dickens, Poe, and Byron. His first pseudonyms were Charles Robert Anon, also known as C. R. Anon, and Alexander Search, for whom he printed calling cards. Then there was Jean Seul, who wrote only in French. The shy boy created poems and stories, and even "edited" fake newspapers—a bit like an early-twentieth-century version of The Onion—with news, spoofs, editorials, riddles, and poems, all written by a staff of "journalists" who'd sprung from his imagination and whose biographies he'd made up. Later, in recalling his childhood, Pessoa wrote that "[a]ny nostalgia I feel is literary. I remember my childhood with tears, but they're rhythmic tears, in which prose is already being formed." Nothing really mattered to him apart from his writing. Real life was beside the point. "I've always belonged to what isn't where I am and to what I could never be," he once wrote, conceding his fixation on dreaming and escape. "All I asked of life is that it go on by without my feeling it."
In 1905, Pessoa returned to Lisbon to attend university. (He would never again leave the city.) Though he dropped out after two years, he got a fine education on his own by sequestering himself in the National Library to read literature, history, religion, and philosophy. He began writing short stories, some of them under the name "David Merrick," as well as poems and essays, occasionally in Portuguese but more often in French and English.
Pessoa, who had very poor vision and wore glasses, lived with relatives or in rented rooms, chain-smoking, reading, writing, and earning a modest salary as a translator for firms that conducted business abroad. Later he worked as a bookkeeper. He had few friends. "Since childhood I had the tendency to create around me a fictitious world, surrounding myself with friends and acquaintances that never existed," he wrote later. (As a boy, he'd invented the Chevalier de Pas, a faithful "playmate" who sent letters to him.) In 1910, at the age of twenty-two, he admitted that "[t]he whole constitution of my spirit is one of hesitancy and doubt. Nothing is or can be positive to me; all things oscillate round me, and I with them, an uncertainty unto myself." He understood better than most the destabilizing effect of living with perpetual uncertainty. "Am I happy or sad?" he asked in one poem. "My sadness consists in not knowing much about myself. But then my happiness consists in that too."
If he had no idea who he was, his heteronyms were equally stumped. "In each of us there is a differingness and a manyness and a profusion of ourselves," wrote one of his mental offspring. Rather than being distressing, this notion of endless expansiveness offered tremendous comfort. "I suffer the delicacy of my feelings with disdainful attention," Pessoa explained, "but the essential thing about my life, as about my soul, is never to be a protagonist. I've no idea of myself, not even one that consists of a nonidea of myself. I am a nomadic wanderer through my consciousness." Put it like that, and you can't help but envy him.
It is crucial to make the distinction that Pessoa's "others" were heteronyms rather than pseudonyms.He insisted that they were separate from him. "I'm the empty stage where various actors act out various plays," he once wrote. In Pessoa country, unification was not possible or even desired. He was a breeder of beings, and always in pursuit of another. "I break my soul into pieces," he wrote, "and into different persons." He explained:
A pseudonymic work is, except for the name with which it is signed, the work of an author writing as himself; a heteronymic work is by an author writing outside his own personality: it is the work of a complete individuality made up by him, just as the utterances of some character in a drama of his would be.
Pessoa led a timid and introspective life, yet he was no hermit. Nor did he attempt to hide his heteronyms—he was quite transparent about the fact of their (separate) existence. Unlike many pseudonymous authors, Pessoa seems not to be secretive but the opposite: utterly guileless, psychologically honest, earnest rather than serving up ironic posturing. His heteronymic conceit didn't spring from a desire to fool anyone or attract attention. This was a private matter.
In his writings, Pessoa went so far as to analyze the genesis of his heteronyms; he understood that readers would be curious. He suggested that the identities derived from "an aspect of hysteria that exists within me," and diagnosed himself as either "simply a hysteric" or a "neurasthenic hysteric," but leaned toward the latter. Also, he noted, "The self-division of the I is a common phenomenon in cases of masturbation."
He claimed that the various people he had "procreated" often sent him greetings, and that he could hear and see them, even if no one else could. Was this the result of talent or sickness? He stopped short of calling himself crazy. Throughout his life he grappled with the possibility of insanity—his anxiety undoubtedly fueled by his grandmother's illness—but he was never able to draw conclusions about himself one way or the other. Perhaps he recognized that being sound enough to produce his work was what mattered most. That he was so obsessively drawn to Shakespeare's Hamlet was more telling than he may have realized.
Pessoa argued that just as a novelist becomes annoyed when readers assume that his characters' feelings and experiences are mere stand-ins for his own, so too should people respect that Pessoa's heteronyms were utterly separate from him. If they occasionally happened to express his ideas, so be it; but he said this was not calculation on his part, only chance. Although he acknowledged the strangeness of all this, he felt it was not for him to judge whether these heteronyms actually did or did not exist. Besides, he noted, he wasn't even sure which one, Hamlet or Shakespeare, was more real—or "real in truth." (He added that he had no proof that Lisbon existed, either.) Further, he said that he agreed with some of the theories expressed by his heteronyms but disagreed with others. Still, they coexisted peacefully enough. All their work was dictated to him, and they weren't seeking his advice or consent. He was not artist but amanuensis, nothing more.
Although socially ill at ease, Pessoa enjoyed meeting acquaintances in coffeehouses and restaurants, keeping tight control over his interactions. One scholar noted that those who knew Pessoa described him as cordial, if inscrutable: "He could be a delightful man, full of charm and good humor, a humor that was very British, though with none of the traditional grossness in it. But this role was also that of a heteronym, which saved him from intimacy with anyone while allowing him to take a modest part in the normal feast of daily life." One man who knew Pessoa in later years recalled, "Never, when I bade him goodbye, did I dare to turn back and look at him; I was afraid I would see him vanish, dissolved in air."
There is no evidence that Pessoa yearned for more than his "modest part" in daily life. He once wrote that he wanted to be loved, but never to love: "Passivity pleased me. I was only content with activity just enough to stimulate me, not to let myself be forgotten."
He was a lifelong outsider, but in 1910 he founded the magazine A Águia; and in 1915, he became part of the nascent Portuguese avant-garde, a Lisbon group of intellectuals who founded a journal, Orpheu, which introduced modernist literature to the country. At first it was ridiculed, but soon the publication won respect, and the criticism that appeared in Orpheu became highly influential. Only a few issues were released before it folded, yet within this group of intellectuals, Pessoa found a strong sense of kinship. He went on to associate with other literary journals (both as editor and writer), publish chapbooks, issue a political manifesto called O Interregno, and start a press called Olisipo, which failed. For a London editor, he translated into English three hundred Portuguese proverbs. Literary activity constituted his "real" life, but he paid the bills with his dreary day job, working as a clerk. (He had this dull occupation in common with fellow toiling authors Herman Melville, Franz Kafka, and Constantine Cavafy.)
He wrote and wrote—in the daytime when he could, or else at night, and usually while standing up. On March 18, 1914, he had a kind of breakthrough: "I wrote some thirty-odd poems, one after another, in a sort of ecstasy, the nature of which I am unable to define," he recalled. "It was the triumphant day of my life.… What followed was the appearance of someone in me to whom I immediately gave the name Alberto Caeiro. Forgive the absurdity of the sentence: In me there appeared my master."
Caeiro, the first of Pessoa's major heteronyms, had been "born" in 1889 and would die in 1915. He had "no profession or any sort of education," was of medium height, pale, with blue eyes, and died consumptive. Once, Caeiro spoke in an "interview" of his humble accomplishments: "I don't pretend to be anything more than the greatest poet in the world," he said. "I noticed the Universe. The Greeks, with all their visual acuity, didn't do as much." He was joined by Alvaro de Campos, born in Tavira on October 15, 1890 ("at 1:30 pm"). Campos was a bisexual, unemployed naval engineer who'd studied in Glasgow and was now living in Lisbon. He was tall, Pessoa noted—"1.75 meters tall, two centimeters taller than I"—and "slender with a slight tendency to stoop."And he was "fair and swarthy, a vaguely Jewish-Portuguese type, hair therefore smooth and normally parted on the side, monocled." In him, Pessoa invested "all the emotion that I allow neither in myself nor in my living." Ricardo Reis was a classicist and physician, born in 1887 ("not that I remember the day and the month, though I have them somewhere," Pessoa wrote) and living in Brazil. Pessoa explained that Reis "is a Latinist by virtue of school training and a semi-Hellenist by virtue of his own efforts."
Then there was the "semi-heteronym" Bernardo Soares, an assistant bookkeeper living in downtown Lisbon who "seems always to be tired or sleepy." He was the closest to Pessoa's own voice, experience, and sensibility, and therefore the closest identity to a pseudonym. These men formed a "dramatic ensemble," and Campos even claimed that Pessoa did not exist.
Because he never had children of his own, Pessoa was father to his heteronyms, and they were quite a handful: there was also the suicidal Baron of Teive, who produced just one manuscript, The Education of the Stoic, having allegedly destroyed everything else he had written. Raphael Baldaya was an astrologer. Maria José was a nineteen-year-old hunchback consumptive suffering madly from unrequited love. And Thomas Crosse was an advocate of Alberto Caeiro's work. Yes, Pessoa's heteronyms actually critiqued—sometimes savagely, sometimes kindly—one another's writings. They also collaborated on projects (Crosse worked with his brother, I. I. Crosse) and translated one another's work. These diverse personae—or, Pessoae, you might say—wrote thousands and thousands of pages, and most of those texts were left behind as fragments to be transcribed and translated after Pessoa's death. It's a vast archive, much of it untouched even to this day.
Aside from Pessoa's almost spiritual devotion to his work, his life in Lisbon was uneventful and his routine predictable. He was an eccentric man.
He smoked eighty cigarettes daily and drank a lot. He hated having his photograph taken. He never arrived on time for an appointment, always showing up too early or too late. He had terrible posture. He was very interested in the occult. He dressed formally, with a bow tie and homburg hat. Obsessed with horoscopes, he considered making his living as an astrologer. He produced horoscopes for himself, his acquaintances, and even his heteronyms. Although he enjoyed reading plays, he almost always found them flawed.
Pessoa is known to have had only one significant love affair, with a young woman named Ofélia de Queirós. (She eventually married, and died in 1991.) When they met, the aptly named Ofélia was nineteen and working as a secretary at the same firm where the thirty-one-year-old Pessoa worked. He declared his love for her one day with lines taken from Hamlet, and then kissed her, she recalled, "like a madman."
After the failure of the relationship, Pessoa argued that love was a false notion, anyway—"it's our own concept—our own selves—that we love," and argued that "the repression of love sheds much more light on its nature than does the actual experience of it." Yet Ofélia said that Pessoa was entirely to blame for their breakup. "Little by little, he withdrew until we stopped seeing each other altogether," she recalled. "And this was done without any concrete reason whatsoever. He did not appear or write for several days because, as he said, there was something wrong with his head and he wanted to go to the insane asylum." He had written her more than fifty letters—some affectionate, drunk with love, others bitter and accusatory: "Why can't you be frank with me?" he demanded in March 1920. "Why must you torment a man who never did any harm to you (or to anybody else) and whose sad and solitary life is already a heavy enough burden to bear, without someone adding to it by giving him false hopes and declaring feigned affections? What do you get out of it besides the dubious pleasure of making fun of me?"
Elsewhere, he expressed—unheard of, for him—moments of insecurity and alienation: "I'm all alone—I really am….I'm going crazy from this sense of isolation and have no one to soothe me, just by being near, as I try to go to sleep." Yet he was just as quick to assume control and withdraw. "By the way," he wrote a few weeks later, "although I'm writing you, I'm not thinking about you. I'm thinking about how much I miss the days when I used to hunt pigeons." And Pessoa even had Alvaro de Campos ("Naval Engineer") write on his behalf, explaining that his friend's "mental state prevents him from communicating anything, even to a split pea."
Some scholars contend that Pessoa was a latent homosexual who sublimated his sexual impulses.
Ultimately, the author remains, like his work, "vastly unfinished, hopelessly unstructured, and practically unknown," as the scholar and translator Richard Zenith has written. It is no accident that one volume of verse that Zenith translated is entitled Pessoa & Co. The Portuguese writer formed a Corporation of One, of which he was CEO and every employee from the top of the ladder to the bottom rung. Pessoa's dozens of constructed alternate selves, Zenith noted, "were instruments of exorcism and redemption. They were born to save him from this life that he felt ill-equipped to live, or that offended his aesthetic and moral sensibilities, or that simply bored him." Although alter egos had become fashionable accessories for European writers in the early twentieth century, no one took the ruse as far as Pessoa did—and certainly no one has since.
As the scholar Jorge de Sena noted at the first international symposium on the author's work (held at Brown University in 1977), Pessoa was hardly the first to eradicate any trace of autobiographical feeling and experience from his writing. Yet de Sena pointed out that although the alter egos of modernists such as Gide, Joyce, and Eliot produced masterpieces, they never went to the extremes that Pessoa did. He annihilated himself in the name of artistic creation. "Unceasingly I feel that I was an other, that I felt other, that I thought other," Pessoa wrote. "I am a spectator of myself…I created myself, crevasse and echo, by thinking. I multiplied myself, by introspection…I am other even in my way of being."
"Poets don't have biographies," Octavio Paz wrote in his marvelous introduction to A Centenary Pessoa. "Their work is their biography." Who could make a greater claim to this than Pessoa? "I am, in large measure, the selfsame prose I write," he confessed. "I unroll myself in periods and paragraphs, I make myself punctuation marks.…I've made myself into the character of a book, a life one reads."
George Steiner called Pessoa "one of the evident giants in modern literature." John Hollander declared that if Pessoa had never existed, Borges would have had to invent him. C. K. Williams praised his "amazing audacities, his brilliance and his shyness." Harold Bloom included Pessoa on a list of twenty-six writers he considered essential to the Western canon, which featured Dante, Shakespeare, and Proust, and argued that Pessoa was not a madman but a reborn Walt Whitman, "who gives separate names to 'my self,' 'the real me,' or 'me myself,' and 'my soul,' and writes wonderful books of poetry for all of them."
Pessoa was the loving ringmaster, director, and traffic cop of his literary crew. He tended to each of their biographies with meticulous specificity, and attentively varied their styles, idioms, techniques, genres, ideologies, and interests. He killed some off and let others live. Whereas the work of poets is typically fed by outside stimuli, Pessoa's creativity seems to have fed off itself—like one of the contemporary artist Dana Schutz's famous "Self-Eater" paintings. One persona stirred another and another, and perhaps that apparently arbitrary transmission of energy explains why so much of Pessoa & Co.'s work took shape in unfinished fragments. The ideas born of this collective were too much for one man to set down on paper. "My character of mind is such that I hate the beginnings and the ends of things, for they are definite points," he explained.
What was Pessoa aiming for with his menagerie? What drove him toward multiplicity? Because "true" biographical information about him is so limited, it is difficult to say. All we have are his written accounts of his motives and the speculations of others. Pessoa was in pursuit of self-abdication. He wanted to escape both body and mind. "Pessoa sought to expel not only his sexual desires," Zenith wrote, "but his friendly affections, his religious tendencies, his aggressive feelings, his humanitarian urges, his longing for adventure, his dreams, and his regrets." Anyone attempting to define Pessoa reductively, as a mere cocktail of pathologies, should think again. As Zenith noted, "Psychoanalysis is too poor a science to explain the case of Pessoa, who seems to have been simply, mysteriously, possessed by a demon—that of detachment."
In a 1977 interview, Edwin Honig echoed the notion of Pessoa's essential unknowability: "Being both complex and simple, he is always hovering over some piece of mysterious ground, like moonscapes with mile-deep craters—terribly attractive but also very forbidding." It's understandable why Pessoa has drawn comparisons with T. S. Eliot and Wallace Stevens, both masters of the elusive. "Reading [Pessoa's] best poems," Honig said, "you never know if you're plumbing the depths or if you're dangling there above without even touching ground. There's always that paradox in his secret, something unanswerable. Though he invites you to share it, he resists your advance the moment you accept the invitation." (This was not unlike his personal life. In work and in his social dealings, he always preferred a bit of distance.)
By taking leave of himself, becoming invisible to the extent that he could, he was free to roam in contradiction, paradox, and complexity without being labeled as this or that kind of writer. He could hold up mirrors, play with them, and then smash them to bits. As Jorge Luis Borges wrote in his "Ultra Manifesto," the true artist does not reflect himself, but razes himself and creates from there. "Two aesthetics exist: the passive aesthetic of mirrors and the active aesthetic of prisms," he wrote. "Guided by the former, art turns into a copy of the environment's objectivity or the individual's psychic history. Guided by the latter, art is redeemed, makes the world into its instrument, and forges—beyond spatial and temporal prisons—a personal vision."
In private life, Pessoa was a demure and awkward man. But his "personal vision" as a writer was startling and brave, anything but ordinary.
Much more than mere pseudonyms, Pessoa's heteronyms were so wildly different from one another that they allowed him to explore his imagination endlessly, without paying any price. Well, up to a point: that very messiness, the refusal to be defined as just one man, explains why he is not more widely known today. (Pessoa once described his oeuvre as "a drama divided into people instead of into acts.")
Certainly to many literary types he is a significant figure—the blessing of Harold Bloom is no small thing—but his books are not easily found. It's true that more of his work has been translated into English over the past decade, yet Pessoa hardly helped the matter of his legacy. In fact, he made things rather difficult by leaving behind a trunk full of journalism, cultural criticism, philosophy, plays, poems, political essays, and horoscopes, much of it illegible and unfinished. The trunk was discovered, after his death, in his rented room in Lisbon.
The material—nearly thirty thousand manuscript pages—is daunting for even the most intrepid scholar to sift through. Some have begun, then abandoned, their Pessoa projects. The monumental task of deciphering, organizing, and translating his work is still in progress, and perhaps always will be. Pessoa wrote haphazardly in different languages, on loose scraps of paper, in journals and notebooks, on the backs of envelopes, and on the official stationery of the firms for which he worked. As Richard Zenith has written, the work stands "like variously sized building blocks—some rough, others exquisitely fashioned—of an impossible but marvelous monument." Pessoa didn't care for cohesiveness in any area of his life. Yet the quality of much of these thousands of texts, however fragmented or arbitrary, is generally exceptional enough to prove much more than the ramblings of a crazy person.
In his lifetime, he wasn't exactly the Emily Dickinson of Lisbon—well, except for having apparently died a virgin. Mostly he kept to himself, to be sure, yet he also published hundreds of poems, journalistic pieces, and essays. He became a respected intellectual figure, if not quite a celebrity, but his literary genius was not widely recognized until after he died. In his home country, he is now considered the greatest Portuguese poet since Luís de Camões, the sixteenth-century author of the epic Os Lusíadas (a text Pessoa is said not to have cared much about). He is also regarded as one of the greatest modernists in any language and is surely one of the most fascinating literary figures of any era.
On November 29, 1935, the forty-seven-year-old Pessoa suffered from abdominal pain and a high fever. He was taken to the Hospital de São Luís, where he wrote, in English, his last words: "I know not what tomorrow will bring." The next day he died from cirrhosis of the liver.
Near one of the coffeehouses he used to frequent, a statue of Pessoa now stands. At the time of his death, those who knew his work understood that the country had lost an important man. "Fernando Pessoa is dead," a young doctor (and later a distinguished literary figure) named Miguel Torga wrote in his journal. "As soon as I heard the news in the paper, I closed my surgery and plunged into the mountains. There, with the pines and the rocks, I wept for the death of the greatest poet of our times, whom Portugal watched pass by in his coffin, on his way to immortality, without even asking who he was."
In the opening lines of what is perhaps his best-known poem, "The Tobacco Shop," Pessoa declares:
I'm nothing.
I'll always be nothing.
I can't want to be something.
But I have in me all the dreams of the world.
He was someone who felt like "nothing" to such an extent that he strove for self-expulsion, yet like Walt Whitman, he contained everything that he needed, desiring nothing from the universe beyond his imagination. It's a statement that presents the speaker as both meek and grandiose: I have nothing, I am nothing, but don't you wish you had what I have, don't you wish to be what I am? Pessoa's self-abnegation is the source of his power and vitality. In his free-floating way, he implicates us, his readers, in the telling and interpretation of his story. As he wrote in his posthumously published masterpiece, The Book of Disquiet:
I am the suburb of a non-existent town, the prolix commentary on a book never written. I am nobody, nobody. I am a character in a novel which remains to be written, and I float, aerial, scattered without ever having been, among the dreams of a creature who did not know how to finish me off.
Pessoa has been dead for decades. We haven't even begun to finish him off.
This excerpt is from Nom de Plume: A (Secret) History of Pseudonyms by Carmela Ciuraru from HarperCollins.


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Libraries — especially those open to the public — perfectly embody the idea that education and culture exist as a basic human right, not the exclusive domain of the privileged elite. As such, they certainly play an integral role in keeping the species moving forward (or, at least, in circles that sometimes move forward) and ensuring the survival of important slices of history, culture, philosophy, science, math, and, obviously, literature. Thanks to the following institutions, both the shape of libraries and the world completely changed in large and small ways alike.
Royal Library of Ashurbanipal:
Seeing as how it inspired Alexander the Great and Ptolemy to build the Library of Alexandria, it's safe to declare the Royal Library of Ashurbanipal — once located in the Assyrian capital of Nineveh — a game-changing institution. It boasted nearly 31,000 texts before its 612 A.D. destruction, and gifted the modern world with The Epic of Gilgamesh and a treasure trove of Assyrian literary, historical, political, and philosophical texts no longer lost to time.
Library of Alexandria:
Probably one of most influential educational institutions of all times, this intellectual center of the Ptolemaic empire hosted works, symposiums, and studies by the likes of Hypatia, Euclid, Archimedes, Catherine of Alexandria, and more ancient thinkers and scientists still influential today. Before its hotly debated annihilation, the Library of Alexandria is theorized to have housed hundreds of thousands of volumes pertaining to literature, science, math, philosophy, history, civics, and other liberal arts topics.
Villa of the Papyri:
Lucius Calpurnius Piso Caesoninus' private holdings in Herculaneum mostly burned in the 79 A.D. eruption of Mt. Vesuvius yielded one of the most comprehensive collections of Epicurean philosophy in archaeological history. In addition, it also introduced scholars to the previously unknown works of Philodemus, unlocking a completely brand new area of inquiry for Classics buffs and a broader understanding of Roman thought.
Nalanda University Library:
From roughly the fifth century A.D. until almost the 13th, the library at Nalanda University housed the world's largest repository of Buddhist and Hindu religious texts, inspiring students as nearby as other towns in the Indian state of Bihar and as distant as Greece. Thanks to the monks who ran the show, it contributed to the spread of both the practice and the understanding of two still-major world religions.
House of Wisdom:
During the Islamic Golden Age, House of Wisdom in what is now Baghdad, Iraq, served as an epicenter of religious and scientific inquiry, and academics behind the Translation Movement, which converted Greek texts into Arabic, started up here. Caliph Harun al-Rashid launched the initiative, but it was his son al-Ma'mun who nurtured relationships with great thinkers in the arts, sciences, philosophies, and theologies and encouraged them to flock here and transform it into one of history's most influential think tanks.
Imperial Library of Constantinople:
Thanks to the Crusades, the millennia of knowledge collected in the Imperial Library of Constantinople perished, but not before it could leave a major mark on antiquity's greatest minds. Because many of the original Greek papyri began disintegrating over time, founder Constantius II decreed the staff to transfer them to a more permanent medium to ensure future generations of learners could pick up a few things from the past.
Central Library of Astan Quds Razavi:
Since 1457, the one million volumes owned by the Central Library of Astan Quds Razavi headquartered in Mashad have provided deep insight into Islamic thought, history, math, and science. Over time, its collection of rare and ancient manuscripts has spread to 35 different locations all categorized under one heading, spread mostly over Iran, but also stretching as far as India.
Biblioteca Malatestiana:
Europe's very first public library opened in Cesena, Italy, in the mid-15th century, inviting anyone wishing to peruse its wares and enjoy the stunning architecture; the citizenry did, after all, collectively own the extensive compilation of Greek and Roman texts and codices. Although the Islamic Golden Age likely launched the very idea of a public library, Biblioteca Malatestiana finally brought the concept to the "Western" world, which eventually spread thanks to the continent's lust for colonialism.
Vatican Library:
Seeing as how Catholicism stands as one of the most influential political and religious forces in the world, it makes perfect sense that its holdings boast some rare, essential historical and philosophical texts in multiple ancient and modern languages, from multiple regions and eras. These include, of course, official papal documents and decrees. Since around 1475, it has grown to encompass multiple media and even offers up library science courses, and continues to attract scholars across disciplinary lines.
Biblioteca Palafoxiana:
Mexican culture changed forever when Spanish imperialists organized the nascent nation's very first public library in Puebla, which provided conquered, exploited indigenous peoples with all the religious texts they need to become good little slaves ⦠for free! Historians debate over whether or not Biblioteca Palafoxiana can be considered the very first public library on the North American continent.
Bibliotheque nationale de France:
A plethora of French monarchs oversaw the establishment of the National Library of France, but it particularly stood out as a symbol of the bloody revolution. After being opened to the public for roughly 100 years, freedom fighters bolstered the collection with the spoils of slaughtered elites and encouraged the populace to seize knowledge and think for themselves.
Library of Congress:
Library of Congress serves as America's preeminent research library and one of its most integral archives preserving national (and, to some extent, even world) history. All of the country's copyrights (for books or otherwise) pass through here, and its filing system provides the framework for the majority of university and research libraries today; like many national institutions, it circulates a copy of every significant literary work published in the dominant language.
National Library of Poland:
Nazi occupation saw Poland's intellectual gem set ablaze, with hundreds of thousands of priceless books, paintings, musical compositions, and other cultural hallmarks destroyed in the name of hate. Since the end of World War II, however, it has rebuilt itself into the nation's largest literary archive, offering up a symbol of hope, healing, and renewal for the ravaged Polish peoples.
Smithsonian Institution Libraries:
As the official libraries serving one of the world's largest, most prestigious research complexes, it makes perfect sense that the 20 facilities that comprise the whole stands as an incredibly influential, game-changing place. Thanks to its numerous digital holdings, anyone with an Internet connection can browse and learn a little something about most academic fields.
New York Public Library:
America's second largest public library (and largest public library system) has received enough grants from the likes of Andrew Carnegie over the years, it simultaneously takes on a museum role; how many others of its ilk can boast ownership of a Gutenberg Bible? Since its 1895 inception, all branches, no matter their focus, have strived to reach out to local communities and promote history (particularly of largely marginalized demographics), science, art, literature, and plenty more.
Warburg Institute Library:
Like the National Library of Poland, the Warburg Institute Library, which now calls University of London home, struggled mightily to preserve intellectualism and creativity in peril because of fascism, this time within Germany's borders. Founder Aby Warburg intended for it to promote art history, anthropology, and other global cultural hallmarks, but partner and director Fritz Saxl had to quickly smuggle the entire collection out in 1933 lest it fall forever to Nazi suppression.
British Library:
With more than 150 million holdings (14 million of these being books), this prestigious research library — along with the Library of Congress — exists as the biggest in the world; almost more of a museum than anything. As such, it provides a safe home to rare manuscripts, books, and other cultural items and allows locals and visitors alike to explore the world's myriad curiosities.
Room to Read:
Founded in 2000, Room to Read involves libraries of more than one single institution, but still holds quite the influence over the populace. The nonprofit builds libraries in African and Asian communities with few resources and finances, ensuring equal educational opportunities in corners of the globe ravaged by poverty, war, exploitation, and other human rights horrors.
Internet Archive:
Internet Archive sports an entirely different library structure than the others listed here, but still receives recognition by the American Library Association as a valuable institution. Like its name gives away, the Internet Archive is an Internet archive of completely free media — not just books — meant to educate anyone who simply wants to learn more; it has courted controversy due to its open source nature and occasional run-ins with exploitation, however.
Joe and Rika Mansueto Library:
University of Chicago boasts the very first almost fully automated library, which stands poised to revolutionize the industry and completely change the role of library science professionals over time. At the Joe and Rika Mansueto Library, users input the materials they need, and a robotic arm delves deep into underground archives to retrieve it — no getting lost in the stacks or commandeering a student assistant for help. Considering the massive expense involved, though, chances are this arrangement will take a while to dominate.


text:
improving interoperability of public emergency response communication
devices with each other—and with cell phones, CB radios and
walkie-talkies—is continuing development this summer, providing a
testing ground for planners and experiential learning for School of
Information Studies students.
and software under development at the iSchool, Virginia Tech and the
Rochester Institute of Technology is designed to maintain communication
between emergency responder devices—even if cell towers and Internet
networks go down during a natural or manmade disaster. iSchool students
will be evaluating whether this expanded communication capability to
engage with citizens and other stakeholders at an emergency or disaster
incident is beneficial.
technologies, called iDAWG (Intelligent Deployable Augmented Wireless
Gateway), work with a new type of software application, called edgeware.
The edgeware application to be tested is called "Gridstream X." Both
initiatives have been developed in the Wireless Grid Innovation Testbed (WiGiT)
at the iSchool. Through WiGiT-developed cognitive radio interfaces and
the abilities of the "Gridstream X" software, iDAWG is intended to
integrate with the Federal Emergency Management Association's (FEMA)
Integrated Public Alert and Warning System (IPAWS). IPAWS is the
communication system used by most police and fire agencies and emergency
management responders.
to iSchool Professor Lee McKnight, part of the program's research
aspects this summer includes observation of a full-scale, multi-agency
emergency exercise. The iSchool has arranged for 25 of its students to
participate as observers in an on-the-ground crisis incident exercise
involving 44 agencies in Madison, Onondaga, and Oswego counties. The
inter-agency drill also will help assure that the responders meet
communication and response standards for policies and training in
accordance with guidelines for local and state emergency response, plus
federal FEMA and Homeland Security standards.
iDAWG initiative is proceeding with funding from the National Science
Foundation Partnerships for Innovation. The three schools' current
efforts also involve creation of a next-generation secure resilient
serverless transmission network, which integrates cognitive radio for
crisis response using wireless grids.
iSchool has been involved in research work on wireless grid technology
since 2002, a track record that puts Syracuse University and Virginia
Tech at "the center of research on wireless grids edgeware and cognitive
radios, with a decade of experience in the field, which no one else can
claim," McKnight observed.
work is underway with the Rochester Institute of Technology on more
information-gathering that would include aerial recording and
transmission of visual incident information, according to McKnight. This
is the Advanced Situational Awareness System (ASAS), a project of the
iSchool and Rochester Institute of Technology's Information Products Laboratory for Emergency Response (IPLER).
crisis incident exercise is providing a range of educational
experiences for iSchoolers, from undergraduate and master's students to
executive Ph.D. and doctoral graduate program professionals.
Joshua Foust will be recording response aspects in photo and video
formats on location during the training exercise. Graduate students will
also be positioned in the WiGiT lab in Hinds Hall to observe and record
occurrences and responses to iDAWG. Several iSchool doctoral students
are using the exercise as a component in their thesis projects on
outcomes. For example, Joseph Treglia's thesis examines information
sharing among the participating agencies and also gauges community
engagement and participation. Dale Meyerrose, who will be on site during
the exercise to serve in a media coordinating capacity, is assessing
wireless grid applications in the medical field. Robert Hartling is
researching the potential of improved communication through iDAWGs in
making crisis situations more manageable. Tyson Brooks is studying how
the wireless grid works in a cloud security environment, according to
involved in and staying informed about the weekend exercise will be
funders and potential business and information technology partners,
McKnight noted. He said that VRC, a SU Wireless Grid Lab funding source,
is sending CEO Roberto Montoya to visit during the exercise. National
Instruments is contributing cognitive radios for the drill. Wireless
Grids Corporation is the maker of the Gridstream X software, which was
founded by McKnight in 2004.
articles and assessments will be produced after the exercise and will
be presented in scholarly journals and discussed in forums. That
includes the Enterprise Cloud Leadership Council annual conference, where WiGiT version 0.2 specs are planned for demonstration, McKnight noted.
Source: Syracuse University


text:
How to Write an Academic Paper in 5 Hours
When going through college, there are times when academic assignments mount and you find it very hard to get all the work done. When deadline looms and you have to finish an academic paper within a matter of hours, what can you do with the crisis situation? Below are some tips on how to write an academic paper in as little as five hours.
- The Main Point of Your Essay. It sounds easy to come up with a thesis statement, but it is actually the most difficult part of the process. In your paper, you need to answer a particular question or defend a particular viewpoint. To come up with a thesis statement, think back on any material you may have read, or anything related to the topic you have heard in class. The missing factor which will turn a question into an answer is your thesis statement. Don't speculate, be specific when you get someone to do my homework online.
- For What Reason and Wherefore Does It Go? You don't have to try hard to sound smart. Instead, keep your paper simple, and use a straightforward argument that's easy to follow. The opposite usually occurs when you try to use big words to sound knowledgeable. Remember, good writing is clear writing. The trick is to pull the correct information from your head, and state it with precise language. Use whatever information you got from class and transform it to simple and concise statements.
- Do Some Last Minute Research. By scraping together a thesis statement and writing down anything you can think of to support it, you are done gathering half of the material which is not enough to finish your paper. Do not panic. The answer is in your text book. Quickly look up your information in the index part of your textbook and see if you have missed something that could support your thesis. Keep digging into the book and find any quotes that could be used for your paper. You will soon gather enough information.
- 1-2-3 Essay Structure. Now you are ready to get into the actual writing of your academic paper. The easiest trick is to structure your paper in three parts: the introduction, the body, and the conclusion. Include your thesis statement in your introduction, support it in the body of the paper, and revisit it in the conclusion part.
- Don't Mess Up. Now you have come up with a draft of your academic paper, but your job is not done yet. Do not let some stupid mistakes mess up your grade. Proofread your paper, make sure all the errors are corrected, the sources are cited, the thesis statement is solid, the writing is sound, and the format follows the guidelines.


text: Helen Lyle is a student who decides to write a thesis about local legends and myths. She visits a part of the town, where she learns about the legend of the Candyman, a one-armed man who appears when you say his name five times, in front of a mirror. Of course, Helen doesn't believe all this stuff, but the people of the area are really afraid. When she ignores their warnings and begins her investigation in the places that he is rumored to appear, a series of horrible murders begins. Could the legend be true?