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NewPages Book Reviews
Posted January 9, 2012
The Night Before Christmas :: Betty Superman :: The Weary World Rejoices :: Red Plenty :: By Word of Mouth :: Pulp and Paper :: Thrown Into Nature :: Death-In-A-Box :: Power Ballads :: The Blood Lie :: Songs My Mother Never Taught Me
The Night Before Christmas
Fiction by Nikolai Gogol
Translated from the Russian by Constance Garnett
New Directions, November 2011
Paperback: 80pp; $9.95
Review by Olive Mullet
Russian writer Nikolai Gogol is famous for his serious satiric novel The Overcoat, but The Night Before Christmas, originally published in a 1926 short story collection, was Gogol's first work at age 27—an early contribution to Russian literature. Recognized then for its fine writing and humor, now it can also be appreciated as a charming picture of Ukrainian folklore. Instead of Scrooge or the Grinch, the devil and a witch make mischief on a night full of mystical forces, the night before Christmas.
Mischief must have darkness. On this beautiful moon and starlit night, the witch shows up first to "gather a whole sleeveful" of stars in her pocket. Then comes a wonderful portrait of the devil, starting with his appearance: a narrow face and legs so thin "he would certainly have broken them in the first Cossack dance," a "tail as long and pointed as the uniform coattails of uniforms nowadays," a "goat-beard under his chin," little horns on his forehead, and finally "a behind no whiter than a chimney sweep's." He proceeds to seize "the moon with both hands, grimacing and blowing; he kept flinging it from one hand to the other, like a peasant who has picked up an ember for his pipe with bare fingers" and finally puts it in his pocket.
The conflicts of the story are first, the devil wants to be-devil Vakula, the pious blacksmith, for his painting of a church mural ridiculing the devil. Then comes relationship conflicts: Vakula is in love with beautiful, vain Oksana. Vakula's mother, the witch Soloha, wants to marry Oksana's rich father Tchub for his wealth. But in Russia, for both mother and son to marry into the same family would be considered incestuous.
Actually Soloha has many admirers among the prominent community men, a fact she hides from each of them. The complications develop in farcical fashion when she, in fact, has to hide them in coal sacks after each appears at her doorstep. These sacks fall into the hands first of the blacksmith and then of Oksana and her young friends who during this particular mystical night can predict their future and take off their crosses, which makes them vulnerable to the devil. Vain Oksana's request that Vakula get her the same beautiful slippers as the Czarina Catherine's in St. Petersburg causes him to get the help of an exceedingly fat cohort of the devil (a wonderful mini portrait) who says whoever has the devil on his shoulder doesn't have to look far. The devil does indeed sit there, excited by finally besting Vakula in fulfilling his request.
The devil is, in fact, everywhere, in many conversational expressions like "that devil of a woman." And the devil is able to be "flying down the chimney and back again," because of the neglect to put a fire in the fireplace to ward him off. He even creates a blizzard, which "soaped Tchub's beard and mustaches with snow more briskly than any barber who tyrannically holds his victim by the nose."
Pictures of country life are delightful, like "the Christmas frumenty" with homemade vodka of different flavors such as mulled vodka and saffron vodka, which are sure to cause hangovers. The animals too are given character: "A bearded billy-goat used to clamber onto the roof, from which he would bleat in a harsh voice like the police-captain's, taunting the turkeys when they came into the yard, and turning his back when he saw his enemies, the boys, who used to jeer at his beard."
Even this 27-year-old Gogol gets in his satire of vanity involving cloth overcoats for showing social rank: "Things are queerly arranged in our world! All who live in it are always trying to outdo and imitate one another."
Plus there is some wonderful writing, like a passage describing Vakula's riding on the devil's back:
It was quite light at that height. The air was transparent, bathed in a silvery mist. Everything was visible, and he could even see a wizard whisk by them like a hurricane, sitting in a pot, and the stars gathering together to play hide-and-seek, a whole swarm of spirits whirling away in a cloud.
Little portraits delight as well, like that of the fearsome Ukrainian fighters, the Cossacks, known for their blades slicing from shoulders to legs. Here they whine about their lot to Catherine the Great, to the disgust of their electoral representative Potemkin. Right up to almost the last word, "caca"—a word used when speaking to children, which means dirty and refers here to the devil—the reader gets a flavor of Russia and its folklore.
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Betty Superman
Fiction by Tiff Holland
Rose Metal Press, August 2011
Chapbook: 44pp; $12.00
Review by Pete Michael Smith
Ten stories make up Tiff Holland's collection, Betty Superman. The stories themselves are short; altogether they fill only thirty-four pages, stapled into a lovely little edition from Rose Metal Press. But the size of Holland's collection is deceiving. These stories cover the span of a life as only linked shorts can. They invite the reader to fill in the spaces between the wacky and outrageous scenarios our narrator and her mother, Betty, find themselves in.
We meet Betty in the first story, "Dragon Lady," and the description reads like something from a personnel form at a company you wouldn't want to work for: "What she wears: sweaters, tight over missile-silo brassieres. Pink. Yellow. Two pairs of support hose and open-toed shoes, even in winter. Estée Lauder perfume. Frills. Too much hairspray on her cotton candy hair. Make-up, every minute she is awake. False teeth."
The description goes on, through the obnoxious singing, the inappropriate dancing, the bad job, the bad mom, the bad habits, and ends with the emphysema that will color our understanding of Betty in the following nine stories. We see Betty as the narrator sees her, and that means that our picture of her shifts all the time. In "Hot Work" we see her as a child might, and in "The Barberton Mafia" Betty and the narrator are almost equals, or the very least, on the most even of mother-daughter playing fields.
Betty is complex, and the format of this book (the winner of Rose Metal Press's fifth annual Short Short Chapbook Contest) allows for those complexities to exist in a way that a novel could not. A novel would be given to explanation and exposition and some sort of superstructure in the time-space continuum that Tiff Holland has no need for. Instead, we are free to move from third husbands to animal carcasses to lesbian aunts and the men they love. Our time in the transvestite beauty parlor is all too short, and yet, I'm happy to move on to Shakespeare in gardening hats and domestic assault.
So skillful is Holland in creating empty space that one comes to savor the things made explicit all the more: "Sometimes I had my students do 'procedural writing'—write how to do an everyday activity in the smallest detail." And from there, we are with Tiff Holland's narrator as she explicitly describes to Betty the process of pumping gasoline. So tender are her directions, and careful her considerations that there is no doubt in the readers' minds of her concern for her mother and the millions of everyday obstacles that stand before her.
It takes care, too, to keep from conflating Holland with her narrator. Their histories have some overlap, and the book itself is dedicated to the author's mother, Polly. It's an exercise in imagination to think of the litany of things that Holland has kept from us—for being too personal, too sad, and too honest—if in fact these stories are mixed with truth. Whether we take this little book as fiction-washed memoir or not, Tiff Holland offers us glimpses and peeks at a world and a family that it would be—if not a pleasure—interesting to know.
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The Weary World Rejoices
Poetry by Steve Fellner
Marsh Hawk Press, October 2011
Paperback: 64pp; $15.00
Review by Kevin Brown
Steve Fellner's collection of poems, The Weary World Rejoices, has much more weariness in it than rejoicing, but that is only because, as he writes in the first of three odes to Matthew Shepard, "Explanation never // satisfies. It / always wants // something / like redemption." Fellner is not trying to explain what it is like to be a gay man in 21st-century America; instead, he is trying to redeem it by showing the varieties of that life as it actually is.
One of the main ways he does this is to present readers with absurd situations, often framed by the openings of poems, to remind us that such a life is full of absurdity. For example, a poem about the first time he has sex is titled "Ode to Miss Piggy" and begins:
The first time I made love,
I heard your karate chops
swishing the air,
punctuating my head
hitting the headboard.
As he moves out from this opening, Fellner shows us a scene where the speaker is having sex for the first time with a man whose children are being entertained by watching The Muppet Show, while their father is in the bedroom with the speaker. The contrast of innocence and the loss of it is only heightened by how the situation must be kept secret.
The absurdity of life is reinforced by the following poem, one of three prose poems Fellner writes with his husband, Phil E. Young, titled "Doctor's Note," which opens:
His doctor told him that he was allergic to music. This explained the sudden rashes at the Scottish bagpipe festival, the nosebleeds at the high school chorus recital of Carmina Burina, the deep red welts that appeared halfway through a set by the band Sparklehorse at the 40 Watt club.
In this poem, Fellner (and Young) remind readers of a life lived without something essential, a theme that runs throughout this collection, as the speakers of the poems are often looking for something that is missing from their lives, which they often fill with sex that they admit is meaningless while looking for love.
The opening poem points to these two extremes as the speaker of "Globalization" remembers his sixth grade geography class where "We needed / to memorize the world. / I started with Antarctica, / then Zimbabwe. I've never liked / middles." When describing himself as a student later in the poem, he says, "Much to my shame, / I still can only remember one thing: / the correct answers. / Everything is either true or false."
Of course, life is not simply a beginning and end or true and false, and Fellner shows us the complexities of it, especially in the final section, a series of poems about Matthew Shepherd. However, he does not address Shepherd directly in most of the poems, using the metaphor of a crossword puzzle or crafting a scene where he sees a student in a bar one Saturday night to talk about what happened to Shepherd. In the final of three odes to Shepherd, Fellner describes a conversation with a poet who writes poems in the voices of people who died in the 1918 influenza outbreak. He worries that she is co-opting their stories—a fear she does not seem to share—but he ends his poem by saying that he is trying not to do the same with Shepherd: "I promise, Matthew, // I will never speak / for you. Only, I hope // near you."
Not all of the poems, though, focus on the weariness that comes with being a persecuted minority in America, as there are moments when Fellner's speakers find happiness, if only fleetingly. The best example is his poem for his husband, "A Love Poem for Phil." While the poem does begin by referencing trips to the psych ER, it moves to sharing sundaes at Friendly's and ends by saying:
See the exclamation
marks. Those
are for you. I promise
there's more where
those came from.
The collection's dedication reads, "for the young gay men / who never found a way." In this book, Fellner is trying to show that some gay men do find their way and that there are moments of rejoicing, even if they are few. This book is not an explanation of this fact, but it can give glimpses of redemption.
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Red Plenty
Fiction by Francis Spufford
Graywolf Press, February 2012
Paperback: 448pp; $16.00
Review by David Breithaupt
As a kid growing up in a rural community in central Ohio during the 1960s, I heard the word "Communist" bandied about as if it were the lowest form of life to crawl across the American landscape. I thought for a time they had to be like the ogres in Grimm's fairytales who kidnapped children and ate them. Surely they lurked behind every corner. They were to be feared and exterminated. Commies were bad.
When I reached high school and escaped somewhat the backwoods dogma of my town, I began to read about Communists on my own. What was all the fuss? They didn't seem that bad. The Russians, those mysterious people, simply had a different form of government. Did they really want to take over our country, give us a "red Reader's Digest" as Allen Ginsberg wrote in his great satirical poem, America? Who was marketing all this fear? What did Communists look like? Who were they? By the time I reached college, I knew at least that Communists did not eat children.
I wish I'd had Francis Spufford's wonderful new book, Red Plenty, back then. Here is a fine work that presents the Soviet people to us in ways we haven't seen before. Included is a series of episodes ranging from the late 1930s to the early 1970s, which show us aspects of the Russian people we may not have encountered in other more traditional writings. Many of the blurbs for this book have used the word "strange," but I find it imaginative. It is a bit of a genre-buster, and perhaps that is what mystifies some readers. Spufford states in his introduction that his book is neither a novel nor a work of history. What is it then? "Best to call this a fairytale then," Spufford writes, "though it really happened, or something like it. And not just any fairytale, but specifically a Russian fairytale, to go alongside the stories of Baba Yaga and the Glass Mountain that Afanaseyev the folklorist, collected when he rode over the black earth of Russia, under its wide sky, in the nineteenth century."
Indeed, this collection of stories or episodes, snapshots maybe, will leave you walking away with a more intimate relationship with the Soviet Utopian Experiment. In the story titled "Prodigy, 1938," a boy genius is hired as a consultant by a plywood factory to increase production efficiency, then begins to ponder his applications on a grander scale to take it to the next level, and then the next. Until what? Until the entire Soviet economy is fixed?
"Little Plastic Beakers, 1959" tells of an American exhibit at a conference on youth and sport by the Moscow City Soviet. This is my favorite East meets West story, in which two Russian university volunteers are delegated by district officials to "give comments" while on tour of the exhibit. Armed with "debating points" amidst a crowd of fellow Russians both envious and curious about the American way of life, one of the volunteers presses the tour guide with more and more statements attempting to diffuse the near-utopian presentation of US living:
"You make everything in America sound so good," Galen broke in with a rush. "You make it sound as if the country is nothing but a garden of roses. But this is not true at all is it? Because in America, there are terrible social problems. What, what about, the great terrible evil of racial discrimination, which you must know very well yourself?"
Roger, the tour guide, a student of Russian from the University of Virginia, holds up well under the assaults but eventually wears down. So do several of the exhibit-goers. "Why don't you leave the poor boy alone?" hisses a woman in the crowd. Encapsulated in this moment is that famous meeting between then vice-president Nixon and Krushchev at the American National Exhibition, with the former bragging of the magnificence of the American washing machine. That meeting was a battle of wills. Neither backed down.
"The Unified System, 1970" is a more offbeat story, perhaps one of the pieces which earned the book the "strange" monikers. Here we have the medal-laden Lebedev attempting to meet with a Soviet minister. He is put on permanent hold in the waiting room while others come and go. He is told to come back another day. He prefers to wait. While he waits, a parallel story unfolds describing in almost medical terms what 50 years of smoking has done to Lebedev's lungs. Descriptive portraits of how the chemicals in tobacco smoke have invaded his DNA and disturbed the cell tissues eventually causing a carcinoma are given. His increase in coughing worsens to the point where he is forced to leave without even having glimpsed the minister, but not before one wonders about the dual journey of his lungs' struggle to survive and Lebedev's own life's story.
I can see this book as having a fairytale life down the road, though right now it seems too close to our present time to take on that aura. But it will in time, I'm certain. And I wonder how future generations will perceive it. Spufford writes:
The Russian fairytale began to be told in the decade of famine before the second world war, and it lasted officially until communism fell...This book is about that moment. It is about the clearest version of that idea, the most subtle of Soviet attempts to pull a working samobranka out of the dream country. It is about the adventures of the idea of red plenty as it came hopefully along the high road.
I thank Mr. Spufford for this long overdue adventure.
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By Word of Mouth
Poems from the Spanish, 1916-1959
Translated from the Spanish by William Carlos Williams
Edited by Jonathan Cohen
New Directions, October 2011
Paperback: 167pp; $16.95
Review by Patrick Dunagan
After more than fifty years of James Laughlin's New Directions publishing the work of William Carlos Williams, to have yet another new collection is a splendid surprise. Although many of these translations already appear in Williams's Collected Poems, when all are gathered together from these separate sources and placed in company with a few other renegade poems not found there, the continuing necessity of considering the influence of Williams's biracial heritage upon his work is evident. To not recognize this aspect of Williams's identity is to risk missing a key component of his poetry. This is a danger editor Jonathan Cohen notes with his assertion that "Pound failed to understand that Williams identified himself as American because of his Hispanic background." The multi-layered cultural identity of Williams celebrates the rich, fertile brewing ground that the Americas remain.
The collection begins with translations first attributed solely to the poet's father, William George Williams, originally appearing in the small avant-garde magazine Others, of which Williams was an associate editor at the time. Cohen argues for their inclusion based on the fact that during the same period, father and son collaborated on a translation of Rafael Arévalo Martínez's story, "The Man Who Resembled a Horse." As Williams later writes, "In his last years when [my father] was getting ready to die [of colon cancer] I tried to invent ways to keep him entertained, one of them happened to be to help me translate Rafael Arévalo Martínez's story." In Cohen's opinion, "another, surely, was the translation project for Others," as he notes, "George Williams was very much a traditionalist in his own literary taste, and naturally inclined towards translating poetry in the prevailing Victorian manner, not in the 'new verse' manner of Carlos Williams, using colloquial speech without rhyme and abandoning meter for measure." While Cohen's reasoning is sensible enough, he also offers further assurance from Williams's biographer, Paul Mariana: "I have a strong sense that they really did work together on these."
And in case of further doubt, Cohen's annotations to José Santos Chocano's poem "The Song of The Road" (La Canción del Camino) offer the opening lines as rendered by John Pierrepont Rice for comparison with Williams's own translation. As with all of Cohen's excellent annotations, the soundness for inclusion of this work as identified with Carlos Williams is redoubled in strength. Here are the first four lines in Chocano's Spanish: "Era un camino negro. / La noche estaba loca de relámpagos. Yo iba / en mi potro salvaje / por la Montaña andina." Here is Rice's version: "The way was black, / The night was mad with lightning; I bestrode / My wild young colt upon a mountain road." And here is Williams's: "It was a black road. / The night was mad with lightnings. I was riding / my wild colt / over the Andean range." Not only does the immediacy of Williams's version irrefutably announce it as a product of the Modern Age—"It was a black road" and "I was riding" as opposed to the Victorian happenstance of "The way was black" and "bestrode"—but Williams carries over Chocano's specificity as well, retaining its locality as "Andean range"—"Montaña andina". Insisting a focus on what the words are ("lightnings"), not necessarily how they function, Williams doesn't seek to gloss over the texts with any additional polish. If there's a grade of evaluation he seeks to be met with his testing of the English language's ability to carry the Spanish, it is what in later years he terms as the American Idiom, his contribution towards an international conversation of poetry.
The second section of the collection, "And Spain Sings / 1930s," is comprised of poems from Spain dating "from around the fifteenth century (possibly older) and also from the late 1930s, specifically, the years of the Spanish Civil War," the event of which devastated Williams. These translations provide him with opportunity to explore his own interests in, as well as show his support for, the continuing strength of the imagination as evidenced in Spanish poetry. One noted result of this shared conviction among writers of the time is And Spain Sings: Fifty Loyalist Ballads Adapted by American Poets, where several translations by Williams appear.
The third and final section, "Sweated Blood / 1940s & '50s," contains translations of Latin American poets. Many are poets Williams had the opportunity to meet. Quite a few were also texts brought to his attention by Rutgers professor José Vázquez-Amaral, who after much struggling became "in 1971, founding chairman of the new Spanish and Portuguese Department" there. Also included is a poem by Williams's own mother Raquel Hélène (Elena) Rose Hoheb Williams, "her only poem!" And with a nice bit of panache, the final poem is Eunice Odio's "To W.C.W.," written after a visit to his home where she had felt she was "facing a true poet." For Odio: "En el estaba contenida / la enramba." (Or, as Williams phrased it, "The whole arbor / is contained in him.")
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Pulp and Paper
Fiction by Josh Rolnick
University of Iowa Press, October 2011
Paperback: 192pp; $16.00
Review by Jodi Paloni
Josh Rolnick writes like a storyteller. He places his characters in the middle of complex situations, but doesn't leave them stranded. Instead, he inhabits their psyches and builds compelling scenes for them to respond to trouble in the best way they know how, by lunging headlong into it. Meanwhile he creates scenes that rivet you to a sliver of time and the gloom of place, sweeping you up in the first sentences of his eight tales and setting you down at the end of each one with greater faith in the human race.
His prize-winning debut collection, Pulp and Paper, is rife with snarky narrators. An angry father, against his better judgment, finally confronts his grief when he agrees to meet with the cheerleader who killed his son. Two youths attempt to woo a couple of female out-of-towners on holiday at a seaside resort by dazzling them with smelly eels and fish guts with heart-breaking results. Small town tragedy brings a local burned-out newsman face to face with the limitations of his dying pride. And after three years of filling the niche of man around the house, a young boy attempts to sabotage his mother's budding romance, employing imagination with a vengeance.
Normal people in difficult situations make gratifying choices in the final hour of discovery. And that's just in New Jersey. The second half of the book, and four more stories, are located in New York.
In searching for the one thing that kept me reading for four hours without looking up, I discovered that there wasn't just one thing, but the confluence of interesting plots, heart-rich interactions, and the odd humor of grave situations. Yet, the cream that kept rising to the top was in the striking descriptions that both skimmed the surface and reached for depth in the same string of sentences. I noticed a pattern. First, the observation. Next, a simple example followed by another or two. Then a strange twist, one that often verged on sarcasm, exposing the underlying struggle.
Here's one from the opening story, "Funnyboy":
For a while, there is genuine sympathy. People you don't know come to your house with a tuna casserole. The phone rings so often you have to shut it off before you go to bed. You get crayon drawings from school children. One little Picasso sent us a picture of a stick bicycle, broken in two, with tears streaming form the handlebars.
And, another from "Innkeeping," where each of the rooms in a dilapidated ocean-side guesthouse is named for a literary writer, and a boy eavesdrops on his mother's date:
Silence. And this time the silence held. From the timbre of the wind in the duct, though, I knew that I was still getting clear reception from the Melville Room. At first, I thought maybe Tweedy [mom's new boyfriend] was just tongue-tied. But as the quiet swelled, reality slapped me in the face like a renegade wave.
And here's a favorite, from "Mainlanders," a story that taken alone is worth paying full price for the book as two adolescents grapple with lip-glossed love. It goes like this:
We sucked in our stomachs, puffed up our chests, selected the biggest waves and rode them all the way into the sand crab zone, a skipped shell from their sun-kissed toes. And if they happened to look or god forbid smile–if they made even fleeting eye contact–our entire world opened up, and every other thing in our lives, good, bad, or ugly, sloughed away.
Train wrecks. Abortions. Unrequited love. Missed opportunities. Second chances.
One trouble after another, told with compassionate details that make a difference in keeping the reader reaching for what comes next, only to be left bereft when the last story is told. Not because the ending to this remarkable double quartet paled, but because after a full afternoon of reading masterful prose by a lake in the sun, the collection was done. Or, as our Rolnick's carousel man points out in the final sentence, "as quickly as it had come to me, it was gone."
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Thrown into Nature
Fiction by Milen Ruskov
Translated from the Bulgarian by Angela Rodel
Open Letter, November 2011
Paperback: 294pp; $15.95
Review by Wendy Breuer
Novels that focus on contemporary foibles are often flattened in time by the ephemeral. In Thrown into Nature, Bulgarian writer Milen Ruskov sidesteps the obsolescence problem by giving us a picaresque novel set in sixteenth century Spain. Guimarães da Silva, acolyte and student, narrates his adventures with his mentor, Dr. Monardes, a true figure out of history, the "discoverer" and promoter of tobacco as the cure for whatever ails you.
The work purports to be a compendium of cures attributable to this miracle drug: against intestinal worms, female swelling; driving away spirits; curing lovesickness, bad breath, aching joints; the healing of scabs, toothaches, fevers; elimination of indecision, resolution of doubts; against headaches and plague. This "cutting edge" practice sends Monardes and da Silva into contact with historical and fictional characters in full renaissance dress. As the story romps along, the author occasionally gets carried away, bringing in everyone from the Lope de Vega and Ben Jonson to the Barber of Seville, and somehow throwing in Ralph Waldo Emerson for good measure.
Delightfully translated, the work reads with deadpan zaniness out of Monty Python and the Wizard of Oz. The ironic humor is aimed at humbug, greed, and received wisdom in all its forms, afflictions that never seem to go out of style. Ruskov slyly takes on greed, jingoism, class privilege, and corruption in high places. We are also treated to a spot-on fractured take on history. Regarding the Spanish Armada: "They wanted to cleanse Spain a little. So they loaded up as much Castilian scum as they could, they loaded up misbehaving nobles, they loaded up Lope...Have you heard of Lope?" Or this: "[W]e must give up the Low Countries because…señores—we have already stolen everything valuable there." The reader can easily see past the costumes to recognize present day analogs, yet suspension of disbelief is pleasurable and easy.
What raises this novel above a simple spoof of anachronistic science is the sometimes dubious voice of the narrator, da Silva. A Portuguese scamp passing as a Spanish aristocrat, before signing on with Dr. Monardes he made his living blowing smoke rings for money in bars. A mix of literalist, romantic and skeptic, he begins by tossing aside religion, the idea of the soul, and the unlimited potential of reason:
the world is simply mad Nature's work…the incarnation of chaos. […] If Nature put on a human face and strolled around the streets of Sevilla, she would have long since been locked up as a dangerous maniac, perhaps even burned at the stake by the Inquisition…she alone is the procreator of the world. Not the Devil or God…
He addresses the reader directly, expressing constant adulation for his teacher even as his growing skepticism eventually blossoms into full-blown charlatanism. He also talks aloud to his secret inspiration and muse, French poet Pelletier du Mans: "Life is a strange thing, isn't it, Pelletier? You want it and you don't. It lures you and repulses you. Like a bitter medicine or like a sweet drink that makes your head hurt afterwards." Required to give a smoke enema to the five year old future Felipe III, he remarks: "I imagined what would happen if he were to get the runs while I was blowing tobacco fumes into the tube. In Sevilla there is a man everyone calls Shit Mouth, thanks to his habit of always making gloomy prophesies but, of course, this expression could also have a literal meaning."
Meanwhile, the self-described "humanist and renaissance man" Monardes holds forth about bodily humours, blockages and the unlimited properties of tobacco in restoring balance. He travels to England to engage in a debate on tobacco duly reported by his assistant in a hilarious chapter entitled: "On the Debate by the Honorable, Learned Scholars Dr. Cheynell, an Englishman, and Dr. Monardes, A Spaniard, with the Foolish and Ignorant English King and His Sycophantic Servants Who Present Themselves before the Civilized World as Physicians—to Their and Their Chieftain's Great Shame."
But the reader can see that Monardes leads his patients and da Silva down the path of logical fallacy, consistently confounding association with causation, his own smooth bedside manner being one of the principle confounding variables. In the end, da Silva's take on chaotic Nature has the last word as he deduces that the miracle cure is slowly killing his mentor. Yet this does not prevent him from seizing the opportunity to carry on the "great work" when Monardes succumbs. There is a dark Eastern European cynicism behind the drollery here.
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Fiction by Alta Ifland
Subito Press, January 2011
Paperback: 95pp; $14.00
Review by Patricia Contino
"We are nothing but characters in a book" surmises the child narrator forever staring into the window of "Mrs. Q.'s Drugstore." It is left to the reader to determine the exact relationship among the trio of peepers and if they ever work up the courage to see those "things that she must have at the counter." But by the end of Death-In-A-Box readers will have a very good idea of Alta Ifland's writing talent.
As an anthology Death-In-A-Box is refreshingly hard to pinpoint. Some pieces, such as the title work, are miniature horror stories. Others are short essays or autobiographical sketches. What makes Death-In-A-Box a bit more than a graduate school portfolio (the book was published as the result of being awarded the 2010 Competition for Fiction sponsored by the University of Colorado at Boulder's Creative Writing Program) is how imaginatively Ifland incorporates her Romanian émigré background into her writing.
The first way she accomplishes this is by creating a sense of isolation. The three children afraid to enter the drugstore are never apart but "spend most of the time at the window, watching the world outside." This brings to mind images of the thousands of physically and mentally abused and abandoned orphans that international media outlets exposed in the violent aftermath of Romanian dictator Nikolai Ceausescu's downfall in 1989.
A sense of belonging neither here nor there empowers the author. In the powerful "False Memories Of Not Myself"—a piece of memoir writing that will assist younger generations of readers and writers in understanding what life in a Soviet satellite state was like—Ifland recalls returning to America from a trip and realizing
that my only possession, besides my body, was the luggage I had with me…It was as if I didn't exist—if one could say that. It wasn't a painful realization, on the contrary, it came as a lightness overcoming the darkness and heaviness of being. If the plane had exploded, we would have dissolved into thin air and disappeared without a trace…Often, when I walk around and do things, I am nothing but pure-impure air. And something inside me keeps muttering, "not-a-soul-not-a-soul."
Ifland is able to laugh at her immigrant status, as she does in "The Garbage Woman" when adding extra ingredients to the phrase, "That takes the cherry off the cake!" More seriously, a western observer might be labeled culturally insensitive for making this welcome, all-too unspoken observation in "False Memories Of Not Myself" regarding the universal characteristics of narcissism:
Those who "resist" under dictatorships are those whose only power is that of silencing their survival instinct, those for whom career and honors, that is, the recognition of one's ego, mean nothing or not enough, or those who are on the edge of society and have nothing to lose. Each time I find myself before someone who displays great pride in the big leather armchair she is sitting in, I wonder what they would have done in other circumstances, another country, another time.
Other memories of her homeland are more truthful and non-pleasant. The strong narrative of "False Memories Of Not Myself" contains sinister fairy tale characters who are real:
They were nice people, especially the women, who were always eager to lend you a bit of sugar and flour, depending on the circumstances, or even money, who would take care of your progeny almost with a maternal tenderness while you were at work, and who, with the same undiminished ardor, would write anonymous letters to the neighborhood police to inform the authorities that you were a traitor and a spy. Not that they like to write, no. In fact, for the most part they were illiterate. But they wanted to participate in the life of the community, and what ties to community together better than lying and denouncing?
Another way Ifland keeps her writing original is by relishing her literary ancestral ties to Dracula without adding another vampire tale to an already bulging canon. "Fried Brains" is a gory parable of the final years of the Ceausescu regime. Her plot and word play on the idiomatic Romanian expression "Fried patience," which translates as "nothing to eat," is too good to reveal. In "Twin Sisters" Alta meets Alda, her new neighbor who may or may not be her dead twin reincarnated. In a twist on the vampire legend, Alda sleeps all day, not because she is under a spell but because she
hates reality. She thinks that the real is a prison for people with no imagination. So each afternoon I give her a medicine that puts her into a deep sleep. It is a sleep like death—or so she told me, because I never tried it—and each time, she wakes from it with a sense that life has just started.
This parallel universe, along with those of fact, fiction, or a combination of both, is what makes Death-In-A-Box a wild journey.
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Power Ballads
Fiction by Will Boast
University of Iowa Press, September 2011
Paperback: 184pp; $16.00
Review by Ryan Wilson
Will Boast's Power Ballads, winner of the Iowa Award for Short Fiction, can at times feel as layered and as over-produced as its moniker. For one, the book, thematically linking the lives of various musicians, unfolds as a short-story cycle, which by the nature of the form allows a freedom and an unevenness to the storytelling on par with, say, Van Halen post-David Lee Roth.
It's the sort of collection that goes down easy with both hipsters queued to the scene and those un-hip and ready to critique both hipsters and their scene. Boast threads that needle via the details. For example, in "Lost Coast," when we meet West Coast upstart singer-songwriter Keaton Wilding (one part Bon Iver, two parts Fleet Foxes), a childhood friend turned music critic need only judge his fashion choices to understand Keaton's philosophy: "The sandals and ball cap were gone, replaced by threadbare cords, a faded Members Only jacket, and, the latest in affections, a pair of boat shoes, no socks. Clothes chosen to be a parody of clothes." Yet this zeitgeist specimen fares better than his backing band: "your typical bunch of wasters—longhaired, glassy-eyed disciples of their instruments who could break your heart with a string bend, a rim check, a double lead—who in ten years would probably be redoing the siding on your house."
It would be both easy and interesting for this music critic to narrate a traditional novel full of musician characters, but Boast returns throughout Power Ballads to the adventures of the more subdued jazz drummer, Tim. In the lead story, "Sitting In," Tim is a middle-school kid addicted to playing polka music with middle-aged men each Sunday night in southern Wisconsin. In the title (and most amusing) story, Tim gains experience by playing the skins for the reunion tour of a little remembered 80s hair band called Soldier, in which each band member dresses in some sort of military garb on stage ("you're describing the Village People," Tim's girlfriend tells him). They also recreate the Iwo Jima Memorial on stage each night during songs such as "Iron Curtain" and "DMZ," heavy metaphors for the various combats of the heart. Later in "Dead Weight," Tim turns into the veteran musician when he's hired by the studio to tour with a radio-friendly act of young twins "concocted in some secret lab buried deep in the vanilla heart of America." The twins sing songs entitled "Crazy Girrrl" and "Hooded Justice" as Tim pretends to play the drums behind them to a soundtrack being cranked through the sound system.
While Boast's humor and cynicism regarding the industry are pitch-perfect, he also invests in Tim as a character, complicating his story arc with troubled relationships with his fiancée Kate and his father. Several of the best stories don't involve music at all, but instead delve into the sacrifices children make for their aging and disabled parents. In "Beginners" Tim must weigh his own dreams of playing with a notable jazz musician across Europe while visiting his blue-collar father who's just suffered an industrial accident. In "The Bridge," Tim visits Kate, who's put her life on hold to care for her fragile mother who never liked her daughter dating a musician. In the finale, "Coda," Tim reflects back on his disjointed relationship with Kate, and how his waking hours of the day were so divergent from her mainstream life.
Besides "Lost Coast," only two of the stories veer away from Tim's orbit. "Sidemen" taps into the long-suffering spouse of a John Prine-ish folk singer. But her longings are what you'd expect: insecurities about motherhood and fidelity. "Mr. Fern, Freestyle" is the typical redemption song of a retired funkmaster turned choir teacher who wakes up one day when his students decide to make music of their own. Though thematically relatable, these two offerings feel more like B-side material.
Given his eye for detail and the scope of the lives he's created, Boast's first book ironically feels as promising as the much-hailed EP his singer-songwriter Keaton Wilding releases in "Lost Coast." Boast's collection earns his own generic praise: "An astonishing debut." And yet Power Ballads still feels like the EP paving the way for something more: the LP, or in Boast's case, a complete novel.
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The Blood Lie
Young Adult Fiction by Shirley Reva Vernick
Cinco Puntos Press, October 2011
Paperback: 137pp; $15.95
Review by Aimee Nicole
The Blood Lie is labeled as a Young Adult/Jewish Studies book, but I think the main intention of the writer was to present it as Jewish Studies. The characters, plot, and narration did not seem aimed at appealing to the young adult reader, but at telling a story of Jewish history. A young girl, Daisy, gets lost in the woods and the Jewish people of the town are accused of kidnapping her for a blood sacrifice for Yom Kippur. These people are soon ostracized and forced to band together.
Jack's love interest in Daisy's older sister Emaline is compelling, as is the religious conflict between them. Nowadays, religion and background do not need to match in order for a relationship or marriage to be socially acceptable; however, in the late 1920s, Jack's concerns are realistic and intriguing to read about. Many things remind Jack of the tall wall of religion between them: "Jack tried to think of something else to say, but Emaline's pendant commandeered his attention. The crucifix. It's what stood between Emaline and him, like an electrified fence, all glittery and metallic and masquerading as jewelry."
The American dream is also a common theme throughout the novel, which strikes a chord with the reader, as many of us are fortunate to already be living in the States. Sometimes it is easy to take that luxury for granted, and so it is always nice to be reminded of the struggle people go through to live here. The Blood Lie challenges this dream by exploring the reality that some people, who moved their entire lives to America in order to be free, were often barely able to get by in the 1920s. Jack sees Massena, New York as a trap. Generations continue working hands-on jobs, whereas Jack wants to be a musician and break free of his predetermined future.
Two conflicts fought with each other throughout the entire book. The story was either about the tension between the townspeople and the Jews as a result of the Daisy "kidnapping" or about Jack's future and preparation for his interview/musical audition. However, there was nothing cohesive about the two ideas; they just alternated rather than meshing together to create a believable and credible story. The fact that the book begins by introducing Saturday, September 22, 1928 as Jack's birthday was an interesting choice. The birthday did not seem to have an impact on the storyline and could have been left out, producing an almost identical story.
By the end of the story, Emaline has suggested that Jack take Sarah (a nice Jewish girl from their town) to the fall festival dance. The dance was not an important part of the story, and Emaline's suggestion came out of nowhere. She said that she would really like to go with Jack, but knew it could never happen. Although the characters are clear in their feelings and intentions through dialogue and narration, I didn't really believe them. I didn't get too invested in the characters, with the exception of Jack's future as it was so important for him to get out of Massena; however, we never learn how the interview/audition goes and whether he goes to the new school. The themes of alienation and religious conflict work well in the book, but I found myself unable to fully enjoy it.
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Songs My Mother Never Taught Me
Poetry by Murray Shugars
Dos Madres Press, April 2011
Paperback: 63pp; $18.00
Review by Kevin Brown
Murray Shugars's collection of poems, Songs My Mother Never Taught Me, is clearly divided into three sections with distinct differences in approaches to the craft. The first section, which gives the book its title, is the strongest of the three, as Shugars creates a distinct world in this section. These poems are much more narrative than the other two sections and draw mostly on his childhood, though the speaker of the poems moves into adulthood in the poems about war.
What gives these opening poems such power is the strong sense of place Shugars is able to create. While it is a place where people are clearly suffering, he is able to show us the beauty that is found even there. In "Plastic Milk Jugs," for example, Shugars shows us a friend's father: "Bobby's dad, John, sways in the doorway. / He has his eyes closed and head bowed / like a deacon praying. He's hugging / a muzzle-loading rifle. He lets out a snore." The father seems a sympathetic character, as we are told about his injury and the painkillers he takes, which lead to this semi-sleep that he walks around in. By the end of the poem, though, John has shot Bobby's dog instead of the plastic milk jugs of the title; in the distance, "The big saw at the mill is screaming / down the middle of a pine log. / Sawdust piles on the floor / faster than a boy can sweep," showing how both Bobby and the speaker feel about their lives.
Shugars also does a good job showing these characters' desires, especially the speaker's growing desire for Holly Anne, a girl he later he realizes he did not care about as he once thought. In the first poem where she appears—named after her—she and the speaker are lying in the hayloft, probably having sex, though that is left to the reader to decide. Shugars describes the scene: "Wind through the open loft like a naked boy / Diving from the high banks of Crockery Creek." The line break here emphasizes the scene we are currently seeing, giving us the impression the speaker is naked, though that is never described. The second line, though, connects to another poem later in the first section, also about Holly Anne. In "Rhapsody," the speaker is older, now married, but remembering when he was fourteen when "She languished on a hill above / the desperate splashes I made / diving naked from the high banks." These connections that run throughout the opening section provide a depth of character and place lacking in the rest of the collection.
The second section, "A Litany of Things Known," moves to more imagistic, almost surrealistic poems. One of the best examples of this approach is "Self Portrait Holding the Camera at Arm's Length," a clear reference to Ashbery's "Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror," though Shugars updates the technology to a camera, with a mention of Frank Stanford, as well (there are others throughout the collection). Instead of the narrative poems of the first section, here we see lists of images piled one on another:
I wrote the forty-one verses of the universe on an acorn.
I have the manifest humility of the peacock.
I am the cat that trods to all the measures of the music,
the russian blue who left the mouse's head
at the foot of your mother's bedstead.
I the thieving squirrel of beech tree birdseed.
I the purple rook who steals
only the best handmade shoes.
This shift helps lead the reader into the final section, which is made up of one longer poem in five sections: "Searching For Duende." In this poem, Shugars channels Ginsberg, while making numerous allusions, including several to The Odyssey, Neruda, Shakespeare, and García Lorca, among others. As in the previous section, we have a speaker who makes declarations about himself through one image after another in an attempt to evoke an emotion, not create a narrative to follow. Section V begins:
I am a furiously militant Odysseus lost between distant war
and home, hollow-eyed and hungry but still dancing,
a lunar paralytic on the splintered deck of my craft, the odor
of nocturnal ports in my hair. The sea repeats
the unrepeatable approach of the papal nuncio night.
In this closing poem, Shugars comes back to themes and ideas he has worked throughout the book. He talks about love and the pursuit of it, with the connections to The Odyssey, while also commenting on war and writing, two other themes that have come up throughout the work. While the last section is not as strong as the first, it still does an effective job of wrapping up the collection, though I am left wishing there were more of the earlier poems.
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adidas Women's Training Jacket
This lightweight jacket by adidas is the perfect cover up for chilly spring runs in light showers.
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The contemporary design of this jacket makes it perfect for wearing with your skinny jeans, vest top and Converse plimsolls. Alternatively, keep your look sporty with the adidas printed tights, fitted vest top and running trainers.
Useful info:
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- Hood with contrast drawcord
- High neck, zip-up function


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I can't believe these are the only pictures I took at BlogHer 10 but alas, it appears to be true. Excuse any grammatical atrocities in the captions—I really struggled over the whole me vs. I thing since they are captions, not sentences. Blerrrgghhh. Feel free to (gently) correct me.
Okay, since I can't put links in the captions, which makes NO sense, here are the folks featured in my pix:
Megan Deb Jenny Katie Jessica Suebob Adam Anissa Kate Debbie Devra Rita Pillsbury Doughboy


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See you next year!
Schedule TBA
Height/Weight: 5'6" / 135 lbs.
Brady Bacon is a third generation driver. He started racing when he was five years old driving quarter midgets. He then started racing micro midgets when he was 10 years old. He continued running the cars with much success until he was 15 when he started racing sprint cars and midgets as well. Towards the end of the 2006 season after much success in the USAC National Midget Series Brady signed onto the Driver Development Program with Chip Ganassi Racing. He began racing for Kasey Kahne's USAC team in 2007 and raced with them through the end of 2008 in the full USAC National Midget and Sprint Car Series on both pavement and dirt. Brady graduated from a private Christian school one year early, bypassing his sophomore year with extra classes, so he could pursue his racing career. He not only excelled in racing but also academically; he was a National Merit Scholar as well as Valedictorian of his class. He got back together with former car owners Mike and Megan Eubanks in 2009 to pursue his winged sprint car career. Brady had a great 2010 and 2011 season finishing the ASCS tour 3rd in points. In 2011 Brady took over full ownership of the 99 program and now operates Brady Bacon Racing. Brady enjoys being as versatile as possible with his racing. Brady not only drives but he is also responsible for all setup and mechanical decisions on his own cars while trying to gain every advantage that he can. He is currently driving in the Lucas Oil ASCS National Sprint Car Series and is 3rd in points with 6 races to go in the 2012 season. Brady has also run a handful of USAC sprint car and midget races as well as with the World of Outlaws. So far in his 2012 season he has 12 Wins, 35 top five finishes, and 51 top ten finishes out of 64 starts.
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Need easy hydration on-the-run? The lightweight Salomon XR Sensibelt features a velcro adjustable belt to comfortably carries an ergonomic 20 oz water bottle at your back via Salomon's unique angled 4D fit system. A ventilated zipper pouch stores gels, warmers or other small essentials for your adventures.
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Here on Cape Cod, fun is synonymous with stand up paddleboarding (SUP). We've got the hottest gear and the lowest rental rates in town.
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Jeane Blush
Rock Me Sweater
Sweater from JEANE BLUSH with open sections at one of the upper sleeves. Short style. Hand washing is recommended.
Made of 100% Acrylic
Model is 175 cm tall and is wearing a size Small.
Item no.: 396350-0259
Colour: Dark Red
Size reviewsSmall in size
Complete the look
More about the brandJeane Blush is for the girl who loves to dress up but also wants stylish clothes for her everyday wardrobe needs. That's why when searching the Jeane Blush range here at Nelly.com you will be able to find something for all occasions.
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The Honorable Tom Schedler, the Louisiana Secretary of State attended the July quarterly meeting of the Webster Parish Convention and Visitors Commission. Secretary Schedler participated in a check presentation by the Commission to the Friends of Germantown.
In April, the Commission voted to approve a grant of up to $15,000 to provide additional funding needed for construction of a new Visitor Center at the Germantown Colony Museum this year.


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Power Components
|Artist: Zon Vern Pyles
Zon Vern Pyles is an award-winning synthesist known throughout the world as a premiere sound designer and programmer. He has composed music for film, television and radio and programmed factory patches for Clavia/Nord, Quasimidi, Korg, Alesis and Moog (he programmed all 128 factory patches for the Minimoog Voyager Performer Edition).
His current plans include live performance (with synthesist Markk Roberts) and a new CD release later this year where you can hear his dual-manual, three-cabinet Synthesizers.com synthesizer in action.
The following recordings made by Zon are 100% Synthesizers.com plus effects:
More information about Zon and his projects:


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Battling up Dexterity (E1 5b)
© Si dH, Sep 2005
Route: Dexterity
Climbers: Alex


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WP Currie Cup player arrested
One of Western Province's stalwarts during their recent Currie Cup campaign was arrested on suspicion of drunk driving last weekend.
According to the Cape Times, the 20-year-old back-line player was arrested in the early hours of Sunday morning after he was stopped at at a routine road block.
The player was reportedly on his way home after attending a farewell of a WP team-mate who is off to Australia to play for the Western Force in next year's Super Rugby competition.
The player was set to appear in the Strand Magistrate's Court after his blood alcohol levels were above the legal limit.
The WP Rugby Union confirmed via a press statement that one of their players were arrested but did not comment further.
"WP Rugby fully supports safe and responsible road usage," the statement read.
"WP Rugby will also support the player, who has an exemplary disciplinary record to date, through its employee assistance programme.
"The matter is currently being investigated by the authorities. Western Province Rugby thus regards the matter as sub-judice and neither WP Rugby, nor the player, will comment further."


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In English, in French
My American friend wrote me this morning: How does it feel to live, free of Berlusconi? Are the people of Italy rejoicing in the streets?
Here in Turin, the news was hardly noticed, because although it is good news, it is also old news. It was expected, a fully foreseen turn of events, part of the long goodbye of an Italian ruler who came in power in distant 1994 and is still clinging to authority with all his histrionic might.
Italian politics have never lacked for stage histrionics, but Berlusconi is very likely the most ridiculous Italian state leader ever. Beppe Grillo, the leader of the opposition Five Star Movement, is a television comedian, but Grillo is the picture of sobriety and decency compared to Berlusconi. Grillo has found peers such as Dario Fo, the Nobel Prize Winning dramatist, and Gianroberto Casaleggio, a brainy Internet guru in a Milanese suit and tie. So even a professional comedian can find dignity in Italian public life if he looks for it, but not Berlusconi. Berlusconi has been flung out of his Parliamentary senate seat and forbidden to run for office, because he was found guilty of fraud and prostitution with a minor. More


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Last month, President Obama received a huge boost to his reelection campaign when the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reported that the unemployment rate had fallen below 8 percent for the first time since he was inaugurated in January 2009. The unemployment had hovered around 8.2 percent for the first eight months of this year.
The quick drop in September's unemployment rate was driven by a historic 873,000 jump in the number of Americans telling BLS they were employed. Since 1950, the BLS had reported only one other month with a higher job gain: June of 1983, when 991,000 Americans got new jobs and the U.S. economy was growing 9.3 percent. Today, GDP is growing at just 1.3 percent.
September's unemployment drop looks even more anomalous when you compare it to the jobs numbers reported over the same time frame by U.S. employers. The BLS actually produces two surveys every month: 1) a survey of 60,000 households by Census workers (the household survey that produces the unemployment number); and 2) a survey of approximately 440,000 individual worksites (the employer survey that produces the "jobs created" number). The household survey has always reported more total jobs in the U.S. than the employer survey, but month to month the two surveys mostly move in tandem with strong job gains and losses usually showing up in both surveys.
But not in September's report. Last month, while the household survey showed a 873,00 job gain, the employer survey reported much more modest 114,000 job growth, a 759,000 job gap. By contrast, in June 1983 when the household survey reported record 991,000 new jobs, the employer survey reported 378,000 jobs created, a gap of just 613,000.
So just how anomalous was the 759,000 job gap between the September household and employer surveys? It has only happened two other times since 1950.
Now the gaps between the household and employer surveys are supposed to be completely random statistical occurrences. But see if you can guess which months they occurred in:
1) An already weakening economy is hit with a spectacular terror attack. In response, the President of the United States stresses how important it is for Americans to keep the economy going. The employer survey reports a loss of 243,000 jobs. But Americans tell the BLS that 605,000 jobs were created, a gap of 848,000.
2) In the midst of a weakening economy, the President of the United States gives a State of the Union where he says America is engaged in a "war against terrorism" and that, "When America works, America prospers, so my economic security plan can be summed up in one word: jobs." The month after that speech U.S. employers reported a loss of 146,000 jobs while Americans tell the BLS that 737,000 jobs were created, for a gap of 883,000.
The two months in question? September 2001 and February 2002.
So looking ahead to tomorrow's BLS report, what is the track record for the household and employer surveys the month after anomalously high discrepancies? Here is a chart of the household and employer survey from the months before and after September 2001:
And here is a chart of the household and employer survey from the months before and after February 2002:
In both cases you can see that the employer survey showed steady job losses over all three months while the household survey yo-yoed back and forth between job losses, a job gain, and then losses again. Now here are the last three jobs reports:
Again the employer survey is steady, this time showing weak job growth, while the household survey has gone from small job losses to a huge job gain. If history is any indicator, tomorrows jobs report will show the household survey returning to reality.
In 2001, unemployment ticked up from 5.0 percent in the September report to 5.3 percent in the October report. But in 2002 unemployment stayed flat at 5.7 between February and March 2002 before rising by .2 to 5.9 in April.


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Azimut Yachts
Paolo Vitelli founded Azimut-Benetti Yachts in Torino, Italy, in 1969. In 1983 the company had designed its first handmade model made of fiberglass, the 105' Farlaka. The 105 Farlaka immediately began being mass produced and became a hot item on the Italian market. Shortly after, Azimut had developed a solid reputation for their "pleasure boats" and became one of the leading Italian brands in the industry. In 1985 Azimut took control of the historical Benetti Brothers shipyard in Viareggio. Azimut was able to successfully inherit the Benetti Brothers shipyard, an Italian landmark, because of Vitelli's careful planning and investing, which thus allowed them to launch approximately 60 different models of yachts in the next 20 years. In 1999, Vitelli's smart investing yet again led them to take control of the Moschino dockyards in Fano, open a service and delivery center in Savona, completely refurbish the Benetti shipyards in Viareggio (when they changed their name to Azimut-Benetti), and open a new industrial plant in Avigliana which equaled 100,000 square meters. The Avigliana plant is where they continue to produce approximately 350 yachts, ranging from 12 and 21 meters long, per year. Azimut-Benetti is a leader in the yacht industry and continues to expand and take part in development in order to expand their empire.


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Avery Nejam
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Nominations are currently being accepted for the eighth annual Night of Excellence Awards for Manitowoc County High School Athletes, sponsored by Holy Family Memorial's Rehab Plus & Sports Medicine, which will be held Friday, June 8.
Night of Excellence is an awards banquet which recognizes and honors Manitowoc County's superb athletes, coaches, teams, and Special Olympians. A variety of awards are handed out to nominated individuals and teams for their excellent performance, hard work, and dedication to their sports.
Awards available for nomination are:
• Team of the year
• Coach of the year
• Male athlete of the year
• Female athlete of the year
• Male "commitment to excellence"
• Female "commitment to excellence"
• Breakthrough athlete of the year
• Comeback athlete of the year
• Integrity in leadership-for coaching
• Special Olympian athlete of the year
Now is your chance to nominate an athlete, coach or team. Nominations can be submitted by any individual. Guidelines for nominating are listed on the nomination form.
Nomination forms are available at Manitowoc County high schools, Rehab Plus' Harbor Town Campus location, and can be downloaded from the sports medicine page of the Holy Family Memorial website, www.hfmhealth.org/sportsevents
Nominations are due by May 16th to HFM Rehab Plus and Sports Medicine, attention Krystel Otto. For questions, contact Krystel at 320.3138, or firstname.lastname@example.com


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The duration of firm-destination export relationships: Evidence from Spain, 1997-2006
AbstractThis paper uses survival analysis to investigate the duration of Spanish firms' trade relationships by destination over 1997-2006. Whereas firm export status is highly persistent, firms' destination portfolio is very dynamic: a typical firm-country exporting relationship has a median duration of two years. Yet, if a firm manages to export to a country beyond two years the risk of exiting that market sharply falls afterwards. The results indicate that not only firm heterogeneity but also destination heterogeneity are crucial to explain survival in export markets. In particular, country (political) risk heavily shapes the effect of firm, product and other destination characteristics on the length of trade relationships. Whereas firm productivity, comparative advantage, partners' GDP and proximity enhance duration of trade with low-risk countries, they have no effect on trade survival with high-risk countries. On the contrary, information spill-overs are particularly relevant to enhance survival of trade relationships with high-risk countries.
Download InfoIf you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the proper application to view it first. In case of further problems read the IDEAS help page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
Bibliographic InfoPaper provided by Department of Applied Economics II, Universidad de Valencia in its series Working Papers with number 1102.
Length: 34 pages
Date of creation: Jan 2011
Date of revision:
Handle: RePEc:eec:wpaper:1102
Contact details of provider:
Postal: Edifici Departamental Oriental, Campus dels Tarongers, Avda. dels Tarongers, S/N (4P15), 46022 - València
Phone: 963 82 83 49
Fax: 963 82 83 54
Web page: http://www.estructuraeconomica.es
More information through EDIRC
Related researchKeywords: firm exports; export destinations; survival analysis;
Other versions of this item:
- Silviano Esteve-Pérez & Francisco Requena-Silvente & Vicente J. Pallardó-Lopez, 2013. "The Duration Of Firm-Destination Export Relationships: Evidence From Spain, 1997–2006," Economic Inquiry, Western Economic Association International, vol. 51(1), pages 159-180, 01.
- C41 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Econometric and Statistical Methods: Special Topics - - - Duration Analysis; Optimal Timing Strategies
- F10 - International Economics - - Trade - - - General
- F14 - International Economics - - Trade - - - Empirical Studies of Trade
This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:
- NEP-ALL-2011-01-23 (All new papers)
- NEP-BEC-2011-01-23 (Business Economics)
- NEP-INT-2011-01-23 (International Trade)
ReferencesReferences listed on IDEAS
Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.:
- De Loecker, Jan, 2007.
"Do exports generate higher productivity? Evidence from Slovenia,"
Journal of International Economics,
Elsevier, vol. 73(1), pages 69-98, September.
- Jan De Loecker, 2004. "Do Exports Generate Higher Productivity? Evidence from Slovenia," LICOS Discussion Papers 15104, LICOS - Centre for Institutions and Economic Performance, KU Leuven.
CitationsCitations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
Cited by:
- Joachim Wagner, 2012.
"International trade and firm performance: a survey of empirical studies since 2006,"
Review of World Economics (Weltwirtschaftliches Archiv),
Springer, vol. 148(2), pages 235-267, June.
- Joachim Wagner, 2011. "International Trade and Firm Performance: A Survey of Empirical Studies since 2006," Working Paper Series in Economics 210, University of Lüneburg, Institute of Economics.
- Wagner, Joachim, 2011. "International Trade and Firm Performance: A Survey of Empirical Studies since 2006," IZA Discussion Papers 5916, Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA).
- Harold Creusen & Arjan Lejour, 2011.
"Uncertainty and the export decisions of Dutch firms,"
FIW Working Paper series
- Arjan Lejour & Harold Creusen, 2011. "Uncertainty and the export decisions of Dutch firms," CPB Discussion Paper 183, CPB Netherlands Bureau for Economic Policy Analysis.
- Muñoz Sepulveda, Jesus Angel & Rodriguez, Diego, 2013. "Geographical and Industrial Spillovers in entry decisions across export markets," MPRA Paper 48063, University Library of Munich, Germany.
- Gullstrand, Joakim & Persson, Maria, 2012.
"How to Combine High Sunk Costs of Exporting and Low Export Survival,"
Working Papers
2012:32, Lund University, Department of Economics.
- Persson, Maria & Gullstrand, Joakim, 2013. "How to Combine High Sunk Costs of Exporting and Low Export Survival," Working Paper Series 962, Research Institute of Industrial Economics.
- Fernandes, Ana M. & Paunov, Caroline, 2012. "The risks of innovation : are innovating firms less likely to die ?," Policy Research Working Paper Series 6103, The World Bank.
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Show & Tell: Happy Halloween from Chia Gus
Please note comments are moderated. After being approved your comment will appear below.
Submitted by Valentina Vayntraub | October 27 2011 | Permalink
Oh wow! First off.... GORGEOUS face! And to top it all off you got the most unique and fun costume ever! Love it! Going to share this on lapofluxurypets.com!
Submitted by Anonymous | October 27 2011 | Permalink
Gus is so cute! I love the costume!! Gus looks like my dog Sadie except Sadie is black and white instead of brown and white. We were told when we adopted her that she was a chihuahua mix but we really do not have any idea what she is only that we love her very much.
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Discover Author
Sara Faith Alterman is a regular feature writer for NewEnglandFilm.com, and is the associate director of distribution of BuyIndies.com, an independent film catalog. Since studying film theory at the University of Rochester and comedy writing with Second City, Sara has written sketch comedy for ImprovBostson and has had her work featured in publications, including The Independent, Carolina Woman magazine, and the Discovery Network's Great Chefs magazine. Sara lives in Boston, is working on her next novel, and hates writing about herself in the third person.
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Boston • LeBron James saw his share of disappointment in Boston when he was with the Cleveland Cavaliers.
Then he joined the Miami Heat, and things only got worse.
ScheduleAll games at 6:30 p.m. on ESPN
May 28 » Miami 93, Boston 79
May 30 » Miami 115,Boston 111 (OT)
June 1 » Boston 101,Miami 91
Sunday » Boston 93,Miami 91 (OT)
Tuesday » Boston 94,Miami 90
Boston leads series 3-2
Thursday » Miami at Boston
x-Saturday » Boston at Miami
x-if necessary
|Join the Discussion
|Post a Comment
Miami has lost seven of eight on the parquet floor since James arrived to form a superteam modeled after the new Big Three that hung the Celtics' unprecedented 17th NBA championship banner.
The Heat will need a victory here in Game 6 of the Eastern Conference finals on Thursday night to avoid a fourth straight loss to the Celtics, a fifth straight loss in Boston and a second straight year of failed promise from the trio of James, Dwayne Wade and Chris Bosh.
"We plan to win the ballgame. We've got to win. That's all we've got to do," Wade said Wednesday before the Heat boarded a plane to return to Boston. "Can't listen to the noise. I'm not. I'm sure our team is not. We're just focused on winning this ballgame."
It was in Boston that James said goodbye to Cleveland, ripping off his jersey as he left the court after Game 6 of the 2010 Eastern Conference semifinals after the Celtics spoiled the two-time defending NBA MVP's best chance to win a title with his hometown team.
But Miami has had even bigger struggles in Boston, winning just once on the parquet since Kevin Garnett, Paul Pierce and Ray Allen joined forces. The Celtics knocked the Heat out of the playoffs in the first round of the 2010 playoffs, one series before eliminating James' Cavaliers. (The Heat did eliminate the Celtics from the playoffs last year, but they needed just one win in Boston.)
In all, Miami has lost 15 of its last 16 regular-season games in Boston.
"Why would you think about that? What does it do for you? Is it going to change anything? No," Wade said. "You've got to go out and try to play — each game is its own. You can't say, 'Oh, well, we're down one point and we've lost 15 out of 16 here. We're not going to win.'
"It doesn't work that way."
Miami finished seven games ahead of the Celtics in the lockout-shortened regular season to earn home-court advantage, then gave it back on Tuesday night when Boston beat the Heat 94-90 to win Game 5.
That means the Celtics just need to win at home on Thursday to advance to the NBA Finals for the third time in five years.
"I know how much pain this team has given me over the years," James said. "I think I guess it's only right that we will be going up there in an elimination game. In order for us to keep our season going, we have to win in their building."
That would force the series back to Miami for a decisive seventh game, giving the Celtics a fallback if they should falter at home.
But they're not interested in that.
"We have one home game left, and that's it in this series," coach Doc Rivers said Wednesday. "We have to understand that, and we have to come with that sense of urgency. Our guys understand that, and I think so does Miami."
The Celtics would also like to avoid a Game 7 so they can rest their banged-up regulars, including 30-somethings Ray Allen, Paul Pierce and Kevin Garnett.
Allen, who missed the first two games of the postseason because of bone spurs in his right ankle, left Game 5 in the third quarter when his ankle stiffened but returned in the fourth and sank two free throws with 14 seconds left to give Boston a four-point lead.
"He just said it's locked on him again," Rivers said. "That's happened a couple of times. He needed our doctor to maneuver it ... so he can run again."Next Page >
Copyright 2014 The Salt Lake Tribune. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.


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Experience the treasures of Costa Rica's Central Highlands.
From guided nature and cultural tours to national park excursions, our qualified guides are ready to share "Exceptional Costa Rica Experiences" with you within Villa Blanca's own guided day and night tours of the cloud forest, and also offer a variety of nature and adventure tours at their doorstep.
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Please review a variety of exciting, high-value tours and packages to make your Costa Rica vacation a truly exceptional experience. Designed to help you enjoy the widest array of activities and hotel offerings, we are also able to offer custom packages for groups and special events in addition to popular favorites that have delighted our guests for years.


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A seemingly trivial question came up when I
reorganised some of my teaching materials. We all know that light intensity decreases as the distance between the light source and the observer increases. Hence, the apparent magnitude of a celestial object is not a measure of its luminosity, or more precisely, the amount of light energy the object emits per unit time in a certain specified frequency window. That is why astronomers use the notion of absolute magnitude, which is defined as the apparent magnitude of the object when observed at a distance of 10 parsecs (pc) from it, as a measure of luminosity, or more precisely, the power of light emitted in that specified frequency window from the object. (By definition, a celestial object is 1pc from the Sun if its angle of parallax equals 1arcsecond.) My question is: why the distance used in this definition is set to be 10 pc?
Since light intensity depends on the luminosity of the light source as well as the distance between the light source and the observer, the above definition of absolute magnitude is truly a measure of luminosity as the latter variable is fixed. Surely, the definition of absolute magnitude works perfectly well if we replace the 10 pc by any arbitrary but fixed positive distance from the celestial object. However, some choices of this fixed distance are more natural than the others. Although contemporary astronomers often investigate the absolute magnitude of objects such as nebulae and galaxies, stars were very first objects that astronomers wanted to find their luminosities. Note that astronomers measure distance of nearby stars by the method of trigonometric parallax. In other words, the angle of parallaxes of nearby stars is what we can directly measure (See figure 1). That is why astronomers usually express interstellar distances in pc rather than in light years or in metres. In fact, the typical distance between two neighbouring stars is about 1 pc; and the distance to the nearest star from the Sun, Proxima Centauri, is about 1.3 pc. In this regard, either 1 or 1.3 pc appear to be more natural in defining absolute magnitude. (In contrast, the use of 1 light year as the fixed distance is less natural.) So, why we adopt 10 pc in the absolute magnitude definition in the first place?
I was surprised that nobody asked me this question in class, nor anyone in the Space Museum lectures. And at this point, you should realize that this seemingly trivial question is not that trivial after all. I tried to answer this question in vain by asking my colleagues and friends, by consulting a few astronomy and history of astronomy books, and by searching the web using keywords such as "origin of absolute magnitude".
After searching the answer for a whole afternoon, I decided to switch my strategy. Rather than relying on secondary sources, I should find out the original one. I began by digging up the origin of the word "absolute magnitude" through the online version of Oxford English Dictionary. To my delight, it quotes something from a 1902 paper by J. C. Kapteyn [1]. To my
further delight, thanks to the NASA Astrophysics Data System
(http://adswww.harvard.edu/index.html), this paper from an already discontinued journal is available to the public on the web for free!
In that paper, Kapteyn investigated, among other things, the distribution of stars as a function of luminosity, proper motion and parallax. The brighter stars he used in his study were drawn from the Auwers Bradley catalogue, which contained J. Bradley's observations in 1750-1763 and was reduced to the modern form by incorporating the extremely accurate measurements by A. von Auwers in the 1890's. Furthermore, Kapteyn used an earlier (inaccurate) result that the luminosity of the Sun was
4x1010 times that of Vega, which is about half the currently accepted value. Then, Kapteyn stated,
"From these data it can be easily derived that the sun, when transferred to a distance corresponding to the parallax =
0."10, would have the apparent magnitude 5.48. I will adopt 5m.5, which accidentally agrees with the mean magnitude of the Bradley stars. ... We further define the absolute magnitude (M) of a star ... as the apparent magnitude which that star would have if it was transferred to a distance from the sun corresponding to a parallax of 0."1."
So, it is clear that the adoption of 10 pc as the defining distance for the absolute magnitude is rather arbitrary and coincidental - a point already emphasized by Kapteyn himself in his paper. And after the adoption by A. S. Eddington in his 1914 book[2], the definition of absolute magnitude was crafted in stone.
We learn two things here. First, the 10 pc used to define absolute magnitude is conventional rather than "natural". Second, the power of the web in solving academic problems is vividly demonstrated, but only if you know how to use it effectively.
[1] J.C. Kapteyn, Publications of the Kapteyn Astronomical Laboratory Groningen, no. 11, pp. 3-32 (1902).
[2] A.S. Eddington, Stellar Movements and the Structure of the Universe, MacMillan, London (1914).


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Celebrity Fear Factor Malaysia involving 30 celebrities who make up 15 teams in pairs. Plan 13 episodes will feature two challenges they must then every episode. All participants are required to perform a given challenge. If fear or fail to take themselves, participants will be eliminated! Malaysian celebrity who will succeed in all these challenges? Everything in Malaysia Celebrity Fear Factor!
Aaron Aziz continues to spread its wings when given the trust to handle the latest programs and be given a new lease well received by the audience of Celebrity Fear Factor Malaysia who chose Cape Town, South Africa as a destination.
General about this program adapted from the program format is quite popular in the United States where the participants will test the mental and physical endurance of participants in each of the challenges faced by the suitability of Malaysian culture.
Can the group of 15 celebrities Malaysia option fraught with challenges and obstacles to be passed later? Do not forget to watch the special appearance as the main host Aaron Aziz Celebrity Fear Factor Malaysia on Astro Ria (104) and Mustika HD (134) on December 29, 2012!
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YouTube and My Damn Channel: Breaking News
Today, Google made a major announcement setting the stage for new programming on YouTube. We're honored that My Damn Channel is working to create a new YouTube original channel as part of this initiative.
We launched www.MyDamnChannel.com back in 2007 - dedicated to giving the most talented people in entertainment a studio and distribution platform where they can co-create, produce and showcase the best original video programming. We've made thousands of videos and many of the most watched and awarded comedy series like "Wainy Days," "You Suck at Photoshop," "Horrible People," "Daily Grace" and political satire from the great Harry Shearer. We've been supported by major advertisers who partner with us to reach engaged, loyal fans online with media campaigns and branded entertainment that break through the noise.
In addition to running our own site, we've always syndicated to other outlets and YouTube has been a powerful partner since we launched our first channel there in 2007.
In February, 2012, we're expanding our YouTube relationship to give you MY DAMN CHANNEL LIVE: a hosted, 30-minute, weekly comedy show featuring world premieres of our original videos and series. We'll bring you stars you love and new talent too.
MY DAMN CHANNEL LIVE will also invade your screens daily with 10-minute, interactive blasts from our host. You'll see our new live show on a dedicated channel on My Damn Channel, on a new channel on YouTube, and in syndication.
We'll keep you plugged in on the birth of our new baby with fresh updates about all the artists we're signing and the new series we're producing from now 'til launch. I want to give HUGE thanks to everyone who's supported My Damn Channel. A few short years ago, Warren Chao and I were two crazy fools with a power point presentation and a dream. The fact that one of the most revolutionary companies in the world just tapped us for their new adventure blows us away and we're counting on all of you to be watching.
Rob Barnett
Founder/CEO, www.MyDamnChannel.com


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Ribbon - Bags - Boxes
Under The Big Top Bags (50 pc)
Kids will smile when they receive fun circus themed prizes and candies in these Under The Big Top Bags! These bags are perfect for circus themed goody bags or as a fun way to give out prizes.
- 50 Under The Big Top Bags.
- Bags Measure 12 1/2 Inches x 17 Inches.
- Plastic.
- Candy & Prizes Not Included.
Green Plastic Bags (50 pc)
Looking for durable bags for your birthday party or event? These Green Plastic Bags are ideal to use as goody bags or favor bags.
- 50 Green Plastic Bags.
- Bags Measure 8 3/4 Inches x 12 Inches.
- Plastic.
- Green.
Smile Face Cellophane Goody Bags (1 dz)
This cute assortment of cellophane bags are perfect to hold party favors or candy for a variety of party themes.
- 1 Dozen per set
- 11" Cellophane bags
- Smile face design
Blue Snowflake Cello Christmas Bags (1 dz)
Looking for snowflake themed bags for your Christmas party? These Blue Snowflake Cello Christmas bags are perfect for any Christmas or Winter themed party.
- 1 Dozen Blue Snowflake Cello Christmas Bags.
- Bags Measure 11 1/2 Inches.
- Cello.
- Perfect for Candies or Christmas Bake Sales.
Orange Cellophane Bags (1 dz)
Make all of your homemade treats look picture perfect with these Orange Cellophane Bags. These bags are perfect for edible treats and small toys.
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- Bags Measure 11 Inches.
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Regular Price: $4.84
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Santa Themed Cellophane Bags (12 pc)
Use these great holiday themed bags for party treat bags or fun holiday cookies!
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- Accessories not included.
Frosted Star Gift Bags (1 dz)
Fill frosted star gift bags with favors and treats or use them as gift wrap for a sparkly star look.
- Plastic gift bags measure 9 1/4"
- Assorted colors
- Each bag has a matching color handle
- 1 dozen.
Tropical Fish Goody Bags (1 dz)
Put your pool party, beach party or luau party favors into these cellophane tropical fish goody bags.
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Baby Boy's First (1st ) Birthday Goody Bags - 8 pc
Celebrate his first birthday with Baby Boy's 1st Birthday treat sacks! Fill these goody bags with toys and treats for your party guests!
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Glitzy Chicks Chello Bags (1 dz)Make your treats look even more amazing for your girly party with these Glitzy Chicks Chello Bags. Perfect for holding candies or other homemade treats. These bags go great with other pieces of the Glitzy Chicks party collection. Each bag measures 5 Inches x 11 1/2 Inches. 1 Dozen Bags per Set. Learn More


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Ray-Ban Aviator Sunglasses - Gold
- In Stock
3 reviews
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- Next day delivery available
Ray-Ban Aviator Sunglasses - Gold
Standing the test of time since their 1930s origins this pair of gold aviators by Ray-Ban add a little girly charm for the summer.
In the iconic tear-drop shape, the lenses of these sunglasses feature a gradient adding detail and charisma. Gold metal frames are subtle yet make an impact, while the double bridge detail create the timeless shape we love for effortless cool.
Channel effortless cool this season by teaming these aviators with a pair of skinny ankle grazers, cute cami top and block heeled sandals.
Useful info:
- Aviator sunglasses by Ray-Ban
- Tear-drop shaped lenses
- Gradient lenses
- Ray-Ban logo to lens
- Gold metal frames
- Adjustable nose pads


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We protect Sanchez and all will be fine.
[QUOTE=NewYorkSackExchange;4233651]the 2 turnovers killed it last night. otherwise the team had the chance.
I just don't feel it this season. 9-7 no playoffs.[/QUOTE]
Totally agree. Those two turnovers which led to 14 points by the Pats. Plus the first drive coming up empty with a missed SHORT field goal...that is the difference right there. That and bad clock management. We beat ourselves in that game. It sucks. But you brush ourself and move on.
We got a game this Thursday. We can still make the playoffs. And the division title isn't even out of the question yet. Mathematically yes, we will need help to take the title....but we WILL make the playoffs.
Jets will regroup. This team won't implode. We are best when underdogs. Each of the last two years we've gotten better and risen to the occassion when the chips were down. This year will be no exception.
I predict a 10-6 record MINIMUM. Jets are gonna rebound off this lose in a big way. Wait and see. The run starts Thursday in Denver.