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Tragedy, comedy, melodrama, mystery, fantasy, even opera and ballet: there have been more dramatizations of the life and character of Edgar Allan Poe than of any other figure in America's past with the exceptions of George Washington, Abe Lincoln, and possibly Pocahontas.(1) Most of these dramas about Poe exist only as unproduced and unproducible scripts resting undisturbed in the files of the Copyright Office or scattered here and there in theatre collections and among miscellaneous Poeana. Of the handful which have managed to reach the stage or screen, almost all have failed dismally and none has achieved anything more than modest success. Even when unstageworthy, all of these dramas, but especially those which have been produced professionally, are of interest at least to the extent that they represent versions of Poe and thereby record the impact of Poe, rather the impact of the image of Poe, upon the American mind.
The distinction of being the first drama about Poe to be staged in the legitimate theatre belongs to a play by George Cochrane Hazelton entitled The Raven.(2) It opened at Albaugh's Lyceum Theatre in Baltimore on. I l October 1895 with Creston Clarke, who was a grandson of Junius Brutus Booth and nephew of Edwin Booth, in the role of Poe. Although a review in the Baltimore Sun the following day commended Hazelton for following "closely the life of Poe as given by his biographers," his play in fact makes no serious effort to do so.(3) It is, instead, a conventional melodrama exploiting the prevailing romantic image of Poe.
The play opens on the lawn of the Allan home in Richmond. Poe is in love with Virginia Clemm, who is literally and conveniently the girl-next-door. Both his status in the Allan household and his love for Virginia are threatened, however, by Roscoe Pelham, A. M., an entirely fictitious character who is John Allan's secretary as well as the ubiquitous villain of the piece. When this scoundrel deliberately exposes our hero's gambling debts, John Allan disinherits and banishes his foster son. Act I closes with a proud Poe departing Richmond accompanied by Virginia and his faithful slave Erebus, determined to make his own way in the world. Ignoring almost the whole of Poe's literary career, Hazel ton carries the action from Richmond presumably in the late 1820s or early 1830s to Fordham Cottage in January of 1847. Here we discover that Poe has been unable to make a living by his pen and that Virginia is in fragile and failing health. While she is alone in the cottage, Roscoe Pelham enters and is about to force his attentions upon her when Poe returns. Fearful that her impetuous husband will quarrel with the villain, Virginia feigns gaiety, bursts into song, ruptures a blood vessel, and dies [page 19:] forthwith. In the very midst of mourning his child bride, Poe meets and falls in love with Helen Whitman, a wealthy poetess who resides in Fordham and to whom he is drawn by her uncanny resemblance to Virginia, a resemblance so close as to be little short of Morella-like reincarnation. Poe's plan to marry Helen is foiled, however, when who else but Roscoe Pelham, who just happens to be Helen's legal counselor, informs her that Poe has broken his temperance pledge. She dismisses Poe reluctantly, but, before exiting her life, he recites the whole of "The Raven," helpfully identifying it as "the heartrending confession of my famished soul." The play closes with Poe deranged and dying in Baltimore, where one! of Roscoe Pelham's henchmen has drugged him in order to use him as a repeater in an election then in progress, an election in which of course Roscoe Pelham is a candidate.
Hazelton's characterizations are no less fanciful than his plot. John Allan is more the stereotype of the plantation colonel than a Scottish merchant of Richmond. In the first act, Virginia is a coquettish Southern belle (presumably Hazelton's version of Sarah Elmira Royster). Thereafter she becomes the conventional heroine of melodrama, defending her virtue against the lascivious advances of the villain and sacrificing her life in the interest of her husband's well-being. Hazelton's Poe is equally unhistorical. In Act I he comes across as a bad imitation of something between Prince Hal and Romeo. Thereafter he degenerates into a ridiculous figure utterly lacking in either nobility or pathos. In Act III, Scene 2, for example, he is discovered kneeling at Virginia's grave holding a pistol to his temple while bidding a bitter farewell to a cruel world when he suddenly catches sight of Helen Whitman, drops the pistol, rises, and follows her off stage, "spellbound." And in his final speech delivered in his last lucid moment, Poe refuses a glass of medicinal brandy offered to him by his friend Tony Preston:
Nevermore! Thou demon of my life, at last I conquer thee! Oh, Tony, Tony, my heart is breaking! "I am a thing, a nameless thing, o'er which the Raven flaps his funereal wing!"
Presumably Hazelton intended this curtain speech to assure his shaken audience that Poe finally did manage to control at least one of his problems.
Catherine Chisholm Cushing's Edgar Allan Poe; A Character Study enjoys the distinction of being the first drama about Poe to reach the New York stage.(4) It ran briefly at the Liberty Theatre early in October of 1925. Although the New York Times panned the production, it did concede that "the incidents included in [the play] are based plausibly enough upon known biographical facts in the man's unhappy career."(5) One wonders just how familiar the reviewer was with these "known . . . facts," The play open [page 20:] with Poe returning to the Allan home in Richmond from a university in Washington, a university from which he was once suspended but now is expelled by the president for drinking and gambling. His "wild ways" are "the talk of the South," but he can be excused in some measure because he inherited his love of liquor from his father, who was a Virginia aristocrat of the bluest blood destined to have become America's finest actor had he had the strength to resist Demon Rum. Among those present at Poe's return are John and Frances Allan, Elmira Royster and her father, and Virginia and Mrs. Clemm. John Allan banishes his profligate foster son, but before Poe departs, he and Elmira defy both the Allans and the Roysters by announcing that they are engaged to be married. The engagement lasts for three years, terminating only when Elmira discovers that Poe is unable to support her. He is then free to marry his little cousin Virginia, who it turns out has loved him all along and has been encouraged by her conviction that she, and not Elmira, was the inspiration for "Annabel Lee." Because he had to compete with all of America's leading literary figures, Poe's winning both the one hundred dollar prize for fiction and the fifty dollar prize for poetry in the Baltimore Saturday Visiter contest is an enormous feat, little short of a Pulitzer. When the prizes are awarded in the early 1830s, Helen Whitman and Frances Osgood are present in Baltimore along with a character named Ludwig Griswold. "Grizzy," as his friends call him, is a vicious little sycophant who hates Poe and proves to be his nemesis. Impressed with Poe's having won both prizes, the "Editor," presumably of the Saturday Visiter, offers him a post on his magazine — a post above the wretched and envious Griswold. But Poe's tenure is brief. It ends with a kind of kangaroo court at which Bryant, Longfellow, Willis, and Griswold accuse him of having abused them as a critic. When Poe loses his editorial post, Virginia enters her decline and dies at Fordham, comforted in her last moments by Frances Osgood and Helen Whitman. Deteriorating badly, Poe next puts in an unexpected and madcap appearance at the Richmond home of John P. Kennedy. Among others who just happen to be visiting Kennedy at that moment are Nathaniel Parker Willis, J. H. B. Latrobe, Helen Whitman, Frances Osgood, and Elmira Royster — William Cullen Bryant is expected but fails to appear. At the close of "the man's unhappy career" in Baltimore, Poe is pursued by a raven (which most of the witnesses mistake for a bat) and is summoned by Virginia's spirit voice calling to him in her soft Southern accent, "Ed-gah." Then with the curtain slowly descending and the soft strains of "The Blue Danube" swelling in the background, Poe is heard to murmur, "Lenore. . .Lenore. . . ."
One may well wonder just how Miss Cushing's play ever managed to [page 21:] make it as far as any stage, much less a stage in New York. The answer, at least in part, probably lies in the playwright's determination to translate Poe into a character who would appeal specifically to an audience in the 1920s. She lays special emphasis upon Poe's life as the romance of a youth who rebels against convention and then goes down in pathetic defeat. He rebels first against the moral and social conventions represented by the Allans, the Roysters, and the president of that university in Washington. Then he rebels against the American literary establishment. When Willis, Bryant, Longfellow, and Griswold finally succeed in having him removed from his editorial post, he becomes a broken man. In character, then, he is very much a child of the "Roaring Twenties," but not the 1820s. When he confronts John Allan at the opening of the play, he is a typical college hellion right out of the Jazz Age:
John Allan
(On his feet, livid with anger)
Sira? What are you doing home from the University without permission?
I have permission, sir. Of His Excellency, the President!
The President?
(Royster leaps to his feet)
Mr. Allan You mean you've been suspended?
Oh, nothing so trivial as suspension, sir.
My God! You haven't been expelled?
(Bowing — Smilingly)
I am pleased to say I have had that exalted honor conferred upon me!
(Elmira only laughs. . . .)
Mrs. Allan
Oh, Eddie!
And why were you expelled, sir?
Well — there was quite a long list of virtuous reasons tabulated, as I recall —
Name them, sir.
For special excellence in branches of higher education not included in the curriculum if I remember rightly.
A rebel against her parents, Elmira is an appropriate companion to Miss Cushing's Poe. Their dialogue is laced with the jargon of "twenty-three skiddoo." When they part at the close of their engagement, for example, Poe bids Elmira farewell with "Goodbye, Golden girl!" to which she replies, "Goodbye, Weaver of Dreams!" Both Mrs. Osgood and Mrs. Whitman suffer gross vulgarization. They are much more like flappers than bluestockings. At the award ceremony in Act II, the Editor of the Saturday Visiter politely asks them if they "know Mr. Kennedy and Mr. Miller." "Better than their wives know them," quips Mrs. Osgood. And later in the same scene, when the Editor lets slip an ungentlemanly phrase, he bows to the ladies apologetically, "I beg your pardon," he says. "The hell you do," Mrs. Whitman snaps back. Mercifully, Virginia escapes this kind of treatment. Instead she plays her role as the conventional, sentimental, and sickly heroine. It is, indeed, a testament to at least the minimal good taste of theatre-goers in New York that, in spite of Miss Cushing's efforts at pandering to their interests, they sent her creature to an early grave. It failed to survive opening night.
New York theatre-goers eleven years later were only a little more receptive to Sophie Treadwell's Plumes in the Dust, another conventional dramatization of Poe's life.(6) This play survived eleven performances at the Forty-Sixth Street Theatre in November of 1936, with Henry Hull in the leading role. The brevity of its stage career notwithstanding, Plumes in the Dust comes closer than any other conventional play about Poe to achieving a successful union of dramatic essentials and biographical fact. The action is built around almost the same episodes in Poe's life that form the basis, though remote, of Miss Cushing's melodramatic abomination. They are Poe's break with John Allan in 1826-27, his winning of the Baltimore Saturday Visiter contest in the early 1830s, Virginia's decline and death at Fordham, Poe's relations with the New York literati, his last trip to Richmond, and his death in Baltimore. Both as drama and as biography, the finest [page 23:] moments in Plumes in the Dust occur in the opening scene, which represents Poe's strained relations with John Allan, whom Miss Treadwell characterizes as a hypocrite and a tyrant. Tension in the scene mounts steadily until mutual hostility between Allan and Poe erupts into a heated exchange. "You're a heartless, unprincipled, immoral reprobate," Allan charges; and Poe lashes back, "You dare to talk to me of heart! Of morals! You who keep your mistress — your common vulgar mistress — just around the corner from your home! — preferring your own low convenience to your wife's poor pride!" Unfortunately, Plumes in the Dust fails to sustain anything like this level of emotion in spite of Miss Treadwell's heroic measures, especially her jockeying of events in Poe's life. In Act II, Scene 2, for example, she has an inebriated and contentious Poe in the midst of a literary soiree jolted by the news that Virginia has died in his absence. In the following scene, where Poe courts the widowed Elmira Royster Shelton in Richmond, the playwright takes the liberty of having her Poe deliver as speeches to Elmira passages from letters that Poe had, in fact, written to Sarah Helen Whitman.
Although Plumes in the Dust is the most nearly successful conventional play about Poe, it does not quite succeed either as biography or as drama. It does not succeed as biography principally because it offers a distorted account of Poe's life. Like Miss Cushing, and Hazelton too, Miss Treadwell has the action of her play leap from Baltimore in the early 1830s to New York after 1845, thereby ignoring the most fruitful period in Poe's literary career. That Plumes in the Dust does not succeed as drama was explained by Brooks Atkinson in his review of the 1936 production for the New York Times.(7) The play is "an earnest pageant of desolation and melancholy," Atkinson reported. It is difficult, he continued, to dramatize Poe's life without turning it into "a minor 'Hamlet,'" and
Miss Treadwell and Mr. Hull have rather conspired toward that end. She has done it by putting on his lips opulent literary phrases that sound a little egregious when Mr. Hull speaks them with an actor's exuberant swagger. When he strides masterfully into a polite literary party and lays about him with purple patches and a good deal of rodomontade about his integrity as a critic, the life of letters sounds uncomfortably pompous.
Hollywood's most ambitious venture at dramatizing the life of Poe was a 1942 film released by Twentieth Century-Fox under the title The Loves of Edgar Allan Poe.(8) Based upon a screen play by Samuel Hoffenstein and Tom Reed, it starred John Shepperd as Poe and Linda Darnell as Virginia. Publicity described the film as "the unknown side of America's most famous [page 24:] literary genius, that surpasses his own startling stories of dark emotions and deep passions — [it] is the true drama of [Poe's] life, known only to the women who loved him." Though the studio insisted that there was no need of "doctoring" the facts, the film reduces "the women who loved him" to Virginia Clemm and Elmira Royster and pits them against one another in a struggle for Poe's affections, a struggle to which his literary career is largely rendered subordinate. That they might be suitable contenders for a poet's heart, Elmira is portrayed as "a beautiful brunette" under the influence of whose "spell" Poe "poured out the deepest passions of his heart," and Virginia is cast as a "Baltimore belle" whose "interesting little figure" is at one point displayed "in the pantalettes of the period." Among the episodes in this love story are an angry encounter between Poe and Elmira's husband in which the poet "socks" his antagonist on the jaw and an emotional visit by Elmira to the bedside of the dying Virginia at Fordham Cottage, a visit in which Virginia triumphs so completely over Elmira that the film fails to mention that Poe courted the widowed Mrs. Shelton two years after Virginia's death. Relegated to a desultory subplot, Poe's literary career is reduced to the simple terms of Poe as the champion of international copyright struggling against the exploitative practices of American publishers. In a vain effort to inject some life into this subplot, the picture offers a scene in which Thomas Jefferson counsels Poe to pursue his literary inclinations; it confronts Poe with the dilemma of choosing between editorship of the Southern Literary Messenger and editorship of Graham's Magazine; it exaggerates the significance of Poe's meeting with Dickens; and it humiliates Poe by having Griswold turn down "The Raven" for publication in the Broadway Journal. Just how thrilled the public was with this rendering of Poe is suggested by Theodore Strauss in his review of the film for the New York Times.(9) "As an addition to the library of films suitable for grade school edification and instruction," the review begins, "'The Loves of Edgar Allan Poe' may conceivably serve some purpose, particularly in those classrooms where the dull, the prosaic and uninspired is held to be appropriately educational. But as an adult drama about one of America's most complex men of letters it is no more than a postured and lifeless tableau." "Meanwhile," Strauss concludes, "a perceptive drama of an unhappy and greatly gifted man remains to be done."
But Strauss misses the point. The issue is not when a successful drama about Poe will be written but whether one can be written. And the prospect is not encouraging. As Professor N. Bryllion Fagin pointed out some years ago, the problem is that Poe's biography is unpromising as the stuff of drama, unpromising because it fails to furnish what Professor Fagin calls sufficient [page 25:] "complication, tension, romantic interest, and emotional appeal."(10) His life was, in Fagin's words, "relatively unadventurous":
It was neither colorful nor extraordinarily unfortunate, sad, or tragic. Charles Lamb began life in more unadvantageous circumstances; Charles Dickens knew greater poverty, at least in his childhood; Dostoievsky was more cruelly ravaged by spells of ill health; De Quincey, and probably Coleridge, imbided more laudanum; and Robert Burns consumed more alcohol.(11)
Professor Fagin could have gone on: Shelley was a more refractory child and a far less conventional adult; Cooper could boast a much less commendable college career; Melville suffered far more neglect at the hands of the reading public; Thoreau practiced more integrity; Longfellow knew greater domestic tragedy; and even Wordsworth led a sexual life more deserving of censure. What emerges from Poe's biography is not the romantic figure of the legend: that haunted and suffering spirit, victim both of his own genius and of a cruel fate, the high priest of pure beauty raging through the crass, ugly, and hostile world of nineteenth-century America. What emerges instead is the figure of a dedicated and disciplined craftsman, critic, and editor whose life was for the most part one of quiet indigence and domestic harmony. This figure, this "man behind the legend," as Edward Wagenknecht has called him, is appropriate not to tragedy or to melodrama: it is appropriate to documentary. And when playwrights such as Hazel ton, Cushing, Hoffenstein, Reed, and even Treadwell, playwrights beguiled by the image of the legendary Poe, have attempted to translate that image into something stageworthy, they invariably collide with the unyielding fact that Poe's life simply does not support the legend.
One way to avoid this collision is to write plays about Poe that steer as clear as possible from the facts of his biography. And this is precisely what some playwrights have been attempting in recent decades. They have turned from Poe's life to his mind, playing out their dramas in what they believe to be the recesses of Poe's own haunted psyche.(12) It is a shift from conventional drama to what we might call "psychodrama" (if we can appropriate that term), and it is nicely illustrated in a work entitled Poor Eddy. Written by Elizabeth Dooley and produced in 1953 by the Columbia University Theatre Guild, Poor Eddy is what the playwright calls a "ballet- biography."(13) Its format consists of what Mrs. Dooley describes as brief "realistic" scenes taken from Poe's life coupled with what she calls "arabesques," or renderings of the "otherworld" of Poe's "sleeping and waking dreams," These arabesques are ballet pieces which interpret passages recited from Poe's writings, chiefly [page 26:] passages from his fiction and poetry. Movement from realistic scene to accompanying arabesque is marked by distinctive "threshold" music and by the presence of a scrim behind which the actor-dancer playing Poe passes to indicate that action is moving from outward experience to imaginative or internal states of mind. The entire production consists of two acts, the first made up of three realistic scenes with their accompanying arabesques and the second act made up of five realistic scenes and five arabesques. The second scene in Act I is a good example of how Poor Eddy operates. Here the realistic scene is set in Philadelphia in 1840. Poe discovers that Virginia, now in her eighteenth year, is consumptive and that marital relations, which she and Poe have postponed for five years because of her age, must now be postponed indefinitely. In the accompanying arabesque, a narrator recites passages from "Ligeia" while the movements of the dancers express the triumph of love over death. Similarly, the following realistic scene presents the sudden bursting of a blood vessel in Virginia's throat, and the accompanying arabesque is based upon "The Masque of the Red Death." Because each of its eight realistic scenes is balanced with its arabesque, Poor Eddy stands as a transitional work between dramatizations of Poe's life and dramatizations of his psyche.
Nicholas Argento's opera The Voyage of Edgar Allan Poe, produced first in Minneapolis in 1976 and then in Baltimore the following year, goes a good deal further in shifting the balance from life to psyche.(14) Argento and his librettist, Charles Nolte, rest their version of Poe upon only one episode. It is his departure by boat from Richmond on his journey to Baltimore in the closing days of his life. In Argento's hands, this voyage becomes a recapitulatory vehicle, a complex metaphor blending Poe's life as the desperate and futile quest of a Romantic idealist with his works, principally "Annabel Lee," "Eldorado," Pym, and "MS Found in a Bottle." The opera represents an hallucinatory experience in which the disturbed psyche of the dying poet is haunted by painful episodes in his past; or as a voice informs him in the first scene of the opening act: he is "on a voyage of Discovery. A heart that hates annihilation like the tomb must gather the past into hallucination." Regrettably, Argento's version of Poe's suffering psyche hovers somewhere between the simple maudlin and the traditional Byronesque. "All I touched turned autumn in my hand," he whines at the close of the opera:
My youth, a fragile vessel caught upon the waves of a savage sea. My heart, my heart a ravaged garden without a single bloom. Look upon this ruin mocked by starless skies. How else shall I speak, how shall I speak my soul's pain? The buried loves of these sad eyes? I live within the storm. Pity me! I cannot write, I cannot think, I cannot love as others do. [page 27:] It is true. It is true! I murdered for my art! I killed all that I most loved, and sacrificed remembered bliss to feed my muse. It had to be. Have mercy on my life.
And opera buffs had mercy on Argento's Poe, indeed, more than mercy. The Minneapolis correspondent to the New York Times pronounced the 1976 performance "a rich, mature and substantial creation," and the Baltimore Sun not only headlined its review of the 1977 production "A Critical Success," but it hailed the opera a "dynamic" accomplishment.(15) One of the reporters for the Sun did note, however, that he found "a few" bewildered members of the audience who confessed to not knowing "enough about Poe's life to follow all the characters associated with him" in the opera. And the same reporter admitted to having overheard Baltimore City Council President Walter S. Orlinsky grumble, "Why do they always sing in Chinese?" With all due respect to the legitimacy of Mr. Orlinsky's grievance, it is the student of Poe and the genuine Poe buff who have the greatest grounds for grumbling. For how are we to countenance such bizarreries, as Poe would have called them, such outrages as Argento's having cast Poe's wife Virginia as the Eurydice-like victim of her husband's unquenchable and ungovernable curiosity about death and Argento's having Poe's beloved mother Elizabeth portrayed in her son's hallucinations as a "slut" and a "whore" who consorts with the merged figures of John Allan and Rufus Griswold?(16)
Although Argento has his Poe die in Richmond without having in fact undertaken his voyage, we know, of course, that Poe's death occurred in Baltimore, where, according to one of the most tenacious features of the Poe legend, he was villainously drugged and exploited as a repeater in an election then in progress and subsequently abandoned in a shabby tavern. It is this legend which furnished the setting for Ted Davis's Poe: A Gathering Darkness, a drama currently making the rounds of college and university campuses as part of the repertoire of a small professional theatre company based in Boston.(17) Approximately a quarter of the action in Davis's play dramatizes the suffering of Poe at the hands of the scoundrels who seized him in Baltimore. The bulk of the action, however, represents, as in Argento's opera, hallucinations of the drugged, intoxicated, and dying Poe, hallucinations in which he is made to relive painful experiences in his past. But Davis's Poe does not relive these experiences alone. For in the manner of William Wilson's Doppelgänger, protagonist Poe is accompanied by an actor in the role of what the script calls "Shadow Poe." He is the protagonist's alter ego, his conscience, mocking, prodding, coaxing, prompting, contradicting, but, above all, compelling Poe to confront those painful realities which he dearly longs to evade. Principal among these realities is Poe's relationship to his [page 28:] wife Virginia, a relationship which, according to Davis's version, was a legitimate source of deep guilt. Virginia was Poe's "forever child," the innocent victim, a la "Ligeia" and especially "The Oval Portrait," the innocent victim of her husband's quest for ideal love and beauty. "I married her! Loved her! Cared for her," Poe says at one point. You "despised her," the Shadow Poe insists. "You invented a thing to love or rather you loved your own creation-a seduction of the spirit. Your words caressed your lover into existence . . . . But what your hands touched crumbled before you." "Untrue," Poe answers, "I know what love is! I stood by my Virginia in her time of need. I married the ideal — my perfect love." "And all the while," the Shadow reminds him, "your fantasy turned Virginia into someone — something else — your words shaped her, rearranged [her] membranous face, her mewling voice, her leprous skin, her infantile mind, the taste of the dead on her lips. Your marriage was the perfect fantasy — making love to a vision. No touching of mortal flesh." "I will not accept such a thing," Poe protests. "I'll prove you wrong." "Words exalt — flesh corrupts," the Shadow responds. "Think on this fact only . . . . Think on Ligeia . . . not Virginia . . . think on Ligeia." And then the mood on stage alters as Poe becomes the narrator in a dramatization of his tale "Ligeia."
Davis makes extensive use of Poe's fiction and poetry, and this is a feature his play shares with Argento's opera and Dooley's ballet-biography. And it seems to have been inescapable. For although Davis, Argento, and Dooley pretend to dramatize Poe's psyche, the fact is that we know precious little about it. Poe was both an extremely private as well as a very elusive person. Beyond the little domestic circle of himself, Virginia, and Mrs. Clemm, a circle into which we have only the fleetingest of glimpses, no one ever came close enough to Poe personally to have left us a record of what he really was like in mind and spirit. And his utterances, including his essays as well as his letters, especially his so-called love letters, are of little help because Poe was an incessant role-player, always the "creative actor," as Professor Fagin has called him.(18) Accordingly, in the absence of any other apparent avenue to his mind, those who would dramatize his psyche have turned to his imaginative works. But just as the unyielding facts of Poe's biography are the Scylla upon which has floundered every attempt to exploit his life and character in conventional drama, so the presumption that Poe's fiction and his poetry somehow constitute a window to his mind and spirit is the Charybdis into which attempts at psychodrama are inevitably drawn. It is an insidious presumption because it is so attractive and compelling, but above all it is an exquisitely ironic one because instead of promoting our appreciation or understanding of the real Poe, it carries us back to the very origins of [page 29:] the Poe legend, above all, to that feature of the legend as in some respects a hoax perpetrated by Poe himself on a grand scale. For did Poe not contribute immensely to the establishment of the legend by encouraging the notion that many of his poems and his stories are in some obscure way autobiographical documents, encouraging it by creating heroes who look like him, who display the mannerisms he assumed, and who speak from the pages of his fiction and his poetry with what appears to be the authentic voice of the author himself? The inevitable effect has been the conviction that Poe's mind was a haunted palace, that he had lost a Lenore and an Annabel Lee and could find solace only in drink and drug. Ironically, it was Poe's old nemesis Rufus W. Griswold who was one of the earliest and principal victims of this hoax. For was it not Griswold who, when Poe was literally only hours in his grave, solemnly instructed us that if we are really to know Poe's mind and heart, we must read his darkest works as "a reflection and an echo of his own history"?
1. The number of dramas written about Poe, even an approximation, is not ascertainable because the mortality rate of scripts which have been neither produced nor published is very high and because finding those which have managed to survive is haphazard at best.
2. George Cochrane Hazelton, The Raven: A Romantic Play in Five Acts. Copyright obtained 2 August 1893. Revised for production at Albaugh's Lyceum Theatre, Baltimore, 11 October 1895, as Edgar Allan Poe; or The Raven. Revised for printing as The Raven: A Play in Four Acts and a Tableau (New York, 1903). Revised for publication as a novel, The Raven: The Love Story of Edgar Allan Poe ('Twixt Fact and Fancy) (New York, 1909). The Raven, a motion picture by George Cochrane Hazelton copyrighted in 1915 by Essaway Film Manufacturing Company and "based on the poem by Edgar Allan Poe," probably is still another revision of the earlier play. My discussion of the play is based upon the typescript filed for copyright in 1893.
The earliest dramatization of Poe is Lambert A. Wilmer's little verse play Merlin, published in the Baltimore North American, 15 and 25 August and 1 September 1827, reprinted by Thomas Ollive Mabbott, ed. Merlin, Baltimore, 1827, Together with Recollections of Edgar A. Poe by Lambert A. Wilmer (New York, 1941).
3. Baltimore Sun, 12 October 1895, p. 10.
4. My discussion of this play is based upon a typescript filed for copyright in 1925.1 am grateful to the family of the late Miss Cushing for permission to quote from this copy.
5. New York Times, 6 October 1925, p. 31. [page 30:]
6. Plumes in the Dust originally was a four-act play entitled Poe, a typescript of which was filed for copyright on 21 January 1920. Miss Treadwell tightened up the action by shifting scenes and by reducing the original four acts to three. She also used information made available through publication of the Poe-Allan correspondence. My discussion of the play is based upon a prompt book on deposit at the New York Public Library. I am grateful to the late Miss Treadwell for permission to quote from this source.
7. Brooks Atkinson commented upon Plumes in the Dust in the Times on three occasions: 26 October 1936, p. 21; 7 November, p.14; and 15 November, xi, l. The first occasion was to review the premiere performance at Princeton, New Jersey, on 25 October. The second was to review the opening in New York on 6 November. And the third was to offer observations on the dramatic potentialities of Poe's life and character. I quote here from the 7 November review of the opening performance in New York.
8. A mimeograph of the screenplay is on deposit at the Enoch Pratt Free Library. I am grateful to Twentieth Century-Fox Film Corporation for permission to quote from this copy.
Film makers have by no means neglected Poe. A number of his tales have been made into motion pictures, some of them repeatedly, and there have been a number of original efforts "based upon" Poe. Some of these efforts, notably The Man With the Cloak (a 1951 MGM version of John Dickson Carr s short story "The Gentleman from Paris"), have incorporated Poe himself as a character in fictitious settings. For its lively interest in Poe even in its infancy, see Denis Gifford, "Pictures of Poe: A Survey of the Silent Film Era 1909-29," in The Edgar Allan Poe Scrapbook, ed. Peter Haining (New York, 1978), pp 129-132.
9. New York Times, 21 September 1942, p. 19.
10. N. Bryllion Fagin, The Histrionic Mr. Poe (Baltimore, 1949), p. 224.
11. Fagin, p. 3.
12. I do not wish to give the impression either that the threedramas I discuss here are the only efforts at what I call "psychodrama" or that this phenomenon is limited strictly to recent decades. The earlier efforts usually were fictions in which Poe himself is cast as a character in his own works, more often than not "The Raven."
13. My discussion of Poor Eddy is based upon a prompt book on deposit at the New York Public Library. I am grateful to Mrs. Dooley for permission to quote from this text.
14. The libretto to The Voyage of Edgar Allan Poe has been published in Commemorating the World Premiere of "The Voyage of Edgar Allan Poe,"edited by David J. Speer, et al. (St. Paul, 1976), pp. 41-79. I am grateful to Boosey and Hawkes, Incorporated, of New York, for permission to quote from the text of the libretto. [page 31:]
15. New York Times, 26 April 1976, p. 38; Baltimore Sun; 1 June 1977, p. B1.
16. Having discussed Dooley's ballet and Argento's opera, I should at least mention an "opera ballet" by Byron Stanley Schiffman entitled The Raven; or, Edgar Allan Poe, copyrighted in 1952, with new matter added in 1954. When I inquired, the Copyright Office was unable to locate its copy of the script. There is no record of production.
17. I wish to thank Ted Davis for furnishing me with a copy of the script, from which I quote with his permission, and for his willingness to discuss both his work and Poe at length.
18. Fagin, p. 16.
[S:0 - PAOT, 1986] - Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore - Lectures - Poe and Our Times - Poe in American Drama: Versions of the Man (John E. Reilly, 1986)


text:
FC: Fun Times with Casey
1: I do not want to talk about it!! | I am not even paying attention to the activities in the background!! | Now does that look like a barn to you!! At least I made a new friend!!
2: I love how kids don't have long enough arms to make a bridge!!
3: I do not like pictures where we just smile normally!! | That is more like it!! Crazy is what I like!!
4: I wanted to wear all the colors to the Spotlight dance!!

subset: commoncrawl


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ANZAC Day Official President Function Tickets Available
Tickets are now on sale for the Official President's Function for the ANZAC Day Derby between South Fremantle and East Fremantle on April 25th.
It is one of the biggest day's of the 2017 WAFL Season, as the high flying South Fremantle Bulldogs get set to do battle with traditional rivals East Fremantle in what promises to be another intense derby contest.
This is your chance to see the game in style as part of the President's Function for the day.
Tickets are $60 which represents great value when you consider all of these great inclusions:
* Gate Entry
* Parking
* Three Course Lunch
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The Official Function Commences at 1.30pm with a pre-game ANZAC Ceremony to take place before the main game at 4.10pm. Television's at the venue will also be playing the Collingwood V Essendon match live.
To confirm your spot at Fremantle Community Bank Oval on ANZAC Day, call the club on 9335 1555.


text:
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Kay Dee Designs Camping Life Terry Towel


text:
Each quarter I teach a class on Character & Environment Design for the Animation Department, and each time I try to do a demo maquette to show how to approach armature, base sculpting, detail sculpting & texture, painting, etc. This time around, seeing as Halloween is rapidly approaching, I thought I'd try my hand at H.P. Lovecraft's famous slumbering monster, Cthulhu, an ancient evil creature that waits patiently in a sunken Cyclopeon city deep beneath the sea for his chance to rise and destroy humanity.
Click on any of these to bring up a bigger version of the picture in a new window.
One of the things that always bugs me is that, with rare exception, he's always depicted exactly the same. Human body, tentacles coming out from where his mouth would be, humanish hands with pointy fingernails, etc. He never looks remotely as inhuman as I expect from the writing.
He's described as HAVING tentacles - a cephalopod-inspired head, I think the prose says - and "vaguely anthropoid shape," meaning, to me, that he walks upright and has four appendages, nothing more. I wanted to distance this design as much from human while keeping to that basic idea as possible.
He's described as having claws - flabby claws, actually - so rather than the human-hand-with-claws-on-it approach, I decided to go with more of a vaguely crab-based approach.
I saw a gaming miniature of the character once with a lot of eyes, which was one feature that I wanted to keep. Oh, standing next to the monster, which is, I guess you might say, a "waterline" model, seeing as he's half-submerged, is a little Corto Maltese figure for scale. He's about seven inches tall, I'd guess, and about ten inches wide.
I wanted to show a mouth, and I did my best to make it as gross as possible. I didn't have any balsa when I was doing the initial sculpt, so I crudely made the teeth from wooden coffee-stirrers that I cut into triangles with wire-cutters.
He's described as being green, which I decided to ignore - I thought that, given his crab-like tendencies, I'd go with an orange more invocative of crabs, at least the type one sees in restaurants. He also is supposed to have small, mebranous wings, but I liked his back so much as he was coming along that I decided to ignore that little fact, too. He's painted with an assortment of those 44-cent Apple Barrell craft acrylics.
I painted the base to look like water. I'd thought about scuplting bursting waves, but decided agaist it. If my imagination ca't conjure up a few ripples, then I've no business making stories.
Anyway, this was an in-class-only project, so it took longer than it otherwise might, but, as I made clear last time, all of my outside-of-class time is being spent finishing Crogan's March. I'm hoping to have the entire thing inked by Tuesday night, and to have all my touch-ups finished by Saturday.
Monday, October 26, 2009
Each quarter I teach a class on Character & Environment Design for the Animation Department, and each time I try to do a demo maquette to show how to approach armature, base sculpting, detail sculpting & texture, painting, etc. This time around, seeing as Halloween is rapidly approaching, I thought I'd try my hand at H.P. Lovecraft's famous slumbering monster, Cthulhu, an ancient evil creature that waits patiently in a sunken Cyclopeon city deep beneath the sea for his chance to rise and destroy humanity.
Posted by Chris Schweizer at 4:52 PM 7 comments
Labels: Cthulhu, Cthulhu miniature, cthulhu sculpt, cthulhu statue
Sunday, October 25, 2009
Main story finished, framing sequence getting there...
I've been internet absentia for a while now, for pretty good reason - I've been trying extremely hard to finish Crogan's March by the end of October, because
1.That's the latest it can go to press and still hit shelves by year's end,
2. We're closing on a house on the 30th, and
3. My daughter is due to be born the following Wednesday, and I won't be much inclined to hole up in the studio once that happens.
So the next week is likely to be one of the more overwhelming, so I've been teaching, prepping lessons and grading, and then using every spare second (there are so few these days) to try and knock this out. The "story" part - the section in the middle, focusing on the Legionnaire - was expected to clock in around 144 pages, but it grew to 199. As of yesterday, those 199 are finished. I am inking the opening framing sequence today (six pages), before and after our Comics Art Forum (more on that later), and I'll be doing the last three pages tomorrow, though I've still got some dialogue editing to do before penciling those.
Once these are done, I have to go in and fix the numerous bolds in the first third of the book - I changed how I started making them, and need to go back and retroactively change the earlier versions - as well as a few artistic changes throughout. Nothing monumental, though - I feel confident I can finish in time.
Once the book is done, I'll have more time to update this blog - I've got a number of news things to post.
Above: A panel from near the end.
Posted by Chris Schweizer at 8:26 AM 1 comments
Sunday, October 4, 2009
SPX Report
Okay. It's been a while since I last posted, due to a crazy schedule dominated by teaching duties, a schedule which currently permits little time for working on pages and NO time for updating my blog.
Before getting back to normal, or as normal as can be expected during October, easily my most hectic month of the year, I thought I'd take a few seconds while scanning pencils to write a bit about my recent trip to Washington D.C.'s Small Press Expo.
My editor, James Lucas Jones, standing with saintly patience considering he expected me to have the book finished by this weekend, which it is not
This was the best SPX I've been to yet. The amount of foot traffic seems to have increased a LOT from previous years, which is nice. I changed up my usual buying strategy - in the past, I would sit at the table and sell until the end of the last day, then run frantically around during the show's last hour or so, trying to buy what books and mini-comics seemed my taste.
This year, though, I was dropping off an order with a comic shop within minutes of arriving in DC, and as such had a clear idea as to what my profit margin already was. Knowing I wasn't going to go into the red, I did my shopping first thing, taking my time, and walking around the show at a leisurely pace. I got lots and lots of great stuff, and feel like I had a chance to look at everything I wanted.
There were some things I had on my list of things to look for going in. There were two cartoonists in particular whose work I've developed a fondness for recently who were attending, and I wanted to pick up whatever they had on hand. The first, Kate Beaton, only had one book, which I snatched up. We all felt bad for her, in that her overwhelming popularity seemed to keep her from being able to have the sort of relaxed atmosphere most of us tend to enjoy about SPX, as she had a line around her table pretty much the whole time. That may have been great for her - it's of course nice to have your work appreciated - it just seems that she went from zero to superstar without ever having that comfortable getting-acclimated period.
The second was Corinne Mucha, whose work I first encountered in the tenth issue of the consistently excellent Papercutter anthology.
Greg Means, publisher of Papercutter
Mucha's comic was one of my favorites last year, and after getting a copy of the Ghost Comics anthology and being delighted by her contribution I decided to grab up whatever she had there. I got quite a few excellent minis and one book, and have been enjoying them a great deal. By coincidence, another anthology I got at the show, Wide Awake Press's Ancient Age, had yet ANOTHER Mucha story. She's quickly become one of my favorite new cartoonists, and I'm devouring her comics with joy and enthusiasm.
Sitting next to Mucha was a cartoonist with whose work I was entirely unfamiliar, but am glad that I picked up - Sam Sharpe. He had two straight-forward mini-comics - one of which, Return Me To The Sea, was a beautifully drawn, excellently told story (I've yet to read the other) - and a couple of collections of hysterical gag strips. I also bought a dvd from him, something I NEVER do at a comic show, because
A. it was about WWI pilots, and
B. the special effects, as showcased on the back, seem to be obviously models, and I'm a sucker for intentional artifice. Whether or not that's how it's played, I've yet to see, but look forward to having some time to give it a watch.
I was also impressed by the new books at the One Percent Press Table. My only disappointment with the 1PP table is that I'm rarely surprised anymore by the outstanding quality of both the comics they've made and the excellent production values implemented in printing those comics. Most times, when I find something as spectacular as what I find there, I flip out, and consider the show a success, then and there. But I expect that degree of excellence from 1PP, and, while I'm never disappointed, I also am rarely filled with elation upon leaving them, having found something completely unexpected. Anyway, the 1PP books I got this year were (as usual) some of the best books at the show, including a great 3-comic set by James Hindle, a formalist Galleon story from Alexis Fredrick-Frost, a new color piece by Joseph Lampbert, another fun action piece by J.P. Coovert, and a wonderful anthology including all four cartoonists, featuring perhaps my favorite Frederick-Frost story to date.
I had a lot of time to visit folks - Savannah friends and Oni friends getting the brunt of my company - and having a great time, all around. I picked up a lot of other great books, including Beard-themed books like Lumberjack! and Pranas Naujukitus's excellent Beard. James, Cory Casoni, and I went to the Smithsonian. A group of about 20 of us went to my yearly favorite restaurant, an Asian buffet that required a long, wet trudge through the pouring rain. And a great train ride, there and back!
I'm gonna wrap this up, but expect Crogan's March updates soon. Thanks to everyone there for making this such a great trip!
Posted by Chris Schweizer at 2:24 PM 2 comments


text:
Customer Reviews
All reviews are from people who have redeemed deals with this merchant.
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text:
There is this . . . thing, idea, philosophy, or what-not that I hold . . . no . . . cling to, for better or worse, and I do this because today, tonight, this morning, whatever it may be . . . that's all I have. You see, as silly and untrue as it may be, I believe everything is going to be all right. Along with this belief, I have this one hope. I hope the Astrologists have a more solid handle on ultimate truth than anybody else, as that would amuse me to no end, and then I would know, beyond merely believing, that everything is going to be all right.
I am at any given moment only half serious, if any seriousness at all is emanating from my being, and I believe life, time, the universe, everything, etc. flows in interesting and complex paths, currents if you will, and if you can manage to find one of these paths, life, well, goes a lot smoother than if you were to, say, paddle up stream . . . for lack of a better metaphor. I tend to ramble when I talk and bounce from situation to situation with a lack of judgment, often mistaken for apathy, but really it's just unadulterated acceptance for life, which I love. Now there are those that argue that I am quite deliberate, and scarily so, but I personally don't see it. I follow the path, and the current does all the work. Besides, deliberate people know what they want to do for the rest of their lives. They have plans, maps, mission statements, and other largely depressing motifs. I have . . . a cheap straw hat that I wear on long trips. I call it my traveling hat, and this mystifies my friends and family, because all the other days of the year it functions solely as a festive storage bin for my keys and wallet. See, they don't understand why I think this hat is such an amazingly good idea. But I do think it's a good idea, and this, above all else (even my silent yet feverish rooting for the Astrologists), keeps my sane.
No, I am not deliberate. Allegedly deliberate, maybe, but definitely not certainly deliberate. And this, to meander with a little more alacrity to my point, stems from my core belief that everything is going to be all right. One way or another, in this life or any ascertained sequels, everything is going to be all right. And when I proclaim this to anyone who might or might not be listening, it spews from my mouth with the sort of absolute conviction that bends reality to my will . . . as non-deliberately as possible.
If you enjoyed this essay, please consider making a tax-deductible contribution to This I Believe, Inc.


text:
I created Paper Aeroplane because I love to help small businesses tell their story, creating brands and developing brands they can be proud of.
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If you would like to see my packaging portfolio pre-Paper Aeroplane Creative, please get in touch.
No job is too big or too small for Paper Aeroplane. I have been fortunate to work with some of the best freelance design talent both London and the West Country have to offer and I happily collaborate with others on projects. I have colleagues who can help me with all aspects of the design process, from name generation to pre-production and handing the more complicated artwork, so you are in safe hands.
Please drop me an email if you would like to have a chat about any possible projects and if I can't help, I most likely know someone who can.
Paper Aeroplane created the branding for both of my companies and I could not be any happier with Lucie's work. Her ideas were always spot on - as if Lucie had managed to read my mind - and she made the process simple and stress-free. I wholeheartedly recommend Lucie to any start up or small company!!!
Brands I have designed for


text:
The move has been forced on the company, which counts Coca-Cola, Red Bull and Heineken among its customers, because the increase in demand that usually accompanies the summer season has failed to emerge. Just three months ago, Rexam said it expected business to pick up in the second half of this year.
Rexam is sitting on a £2.6bn debt pile that would become more expensive to service should its credit rating be downgraded further. Ratings agency Standard & Poor has already cut the company's rating from "BBB" to "BBB-", leaving it a notch above junk rating. A relegation to junk status would also deny Rexam access to a pool of institutional investors who can only hold investment grade debt.
In a short statement, Rexam said that the board believes "the risk of a downgrade to sub-investment grade has significantly increased and had now become unacceptably high.
"The loss of investment grade credit rating would be detrimental to the group, both in terms of the cost and the availability of future credit."
The cash call, which is being managed by Citigroup and RBS Hoare Govett and was revealed in The Sunday Telegraph, will be the first to tap shareholders in order to specifically preserve a company's investment grade status.
Although Rexam insisted yesterday that it remains comfortably within the covenants on its debts, it added that the absence of the expected upturn will cut "its ability to generate significant cash flows to pay down debt in 2010".
Rexam's decision to tap shareholders underlines how some of even the world's most defensive companies – Rexam also makes packaging – are being hurt by the global downturn. The company, which has 100 manufacturing facilities in more than 20 countries, has already reduced production capacity in the US and said yesterday that it is considering more cost-cutting measures.
Leslie Van de Walle, chief executive, is expected to announce the rights issue on Thursday, alongside its first-half results.
Shares in the group are down 8pc this year and closed at 323¾p on Friday.


text: Hello guys, I read a methode about brring and use them to earn some decent money. No I got my own idea on how to do it I need a Brring account ofcourse The problem is, that they only allow US Residents to use Brring. But I am from The Netherlands (Europe) and want to use Brring. So what I need is a way to bypass the US Limit, or I will need someone who wants to verify my account. (paying for verificition ofcourse) So what will do the best?


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Millersylvania State Park is ideally located in a country setting and forested region of southern Olympia, with an easy drive to the state capital and historic downtown Olympia. The park is nestled in broad stands of old-growth cedar and fir trees and is filled with hiking and biking trails. Deep Lake offers boating, fishing, and swimming. Picnic shelters built by the Civilian Conservation Corps in the 1930s sit on the shore of Deep Lake.
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, call (888) 226-7688 or the Washington Telecommunications Relay Service at (800) 833-6388. Residences are reservable up to nine months in advance. A two-night minimum stay is required. A non-refundable reservation fee applies. If a reservation is changed or canceled, fees may change as well.
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text:
Francesco is a an Austrian illustrator living in Vienna.
His illustrations depict a lovely sense of humour and combine story telling with bold graphics with often surreal imagery, and has worked for clients from over the world.
See more of Francesco's work on his website, with a few example below.
There's also a great article covering his work over on Creative Boom
All illustrations are the property of francescociccolella.com


text:
My mom and I have made this meal together many times it reminds me of family, love, and home. I know this recipe sounds like a lot of work (and it is) but it's worth it. If you cook this dish, make sure Frank Sinatra plays in the background as you dance around the kitchen... Ol' Blue Eyes makes it taste better.
Here's our recipe for the BEST eggplant parm you will ever eat. I hope you enjoy it as much as we do!
- Yield
- 9-12 servings
- For the fried eggplant:
- 6 medium eggplants
- Kosher salt
- 4C seasoned breadcrumbs
- Locatelli pecorino romano grated cheese
- 5-6 eggs
- 1 large brick of Polly-O whole milk mozzarella cheese
- Olive oil
- For the Sunday gravy:
- 4 cans of Tuttorosso tomato puree
- 2 cans of Tuttorosso crushed tomatoes
- 2 cans of Contadina tomato paste
- 1 package of 3-way ground beef, pork, and veal
- 1 package of sweet Italian sausage
- 1 package of braciole (super thin flank steak)
- 1 package boneless pork spare ribs
- 2 sticks of Hormel pepperoni
- 4C seasoned bread crumbs
- Locatelli pecorino romano grated cheese
- 2-3 eggs
- Polaner minced garlic
- Italian flat leaf parsley
- Olive oil
- Salt & pepper
- My instructions exceed the character count by 3x, so rather than cut them down until they are unrecognizable, I thought it might be better to include a link to my blog for the full directions and a picture of the dish: http://notinpinebrookanymore.blogspot.com/2011/05/mammas-eggplant-parmigiana.html The one thing I will include here is this: Most people who think they don't like eggplant say it's because it's bitter and seedy. That's because it wasn't made right. To avoid that, first peel the eggplants with a vegetable peeler. Then slice them about a 1/2 inch thick. Next, find a big grill pan and start lining it with layers of sliced eggplant. After each layer, give a liberal toss of the kosher salt. Once they're all on there, top it with an upside-down sheet pan and place some cookbooks or a cast-iron pot on top to weigh it down. This is THE most important step, as it will draw out the bitterness and pack down the seeds. If you make this dish, I'd love to hear what you think!


text:
Tacloban, Philippines (CNN) -- Juvilyn Tanega sits inside her sweltering tent looking at pictures of the children she will never see again.
All six died the night of November 8, along with their father and their grandmother.
Tanega now lives alone near her own father in the Philippine city of Tacloban, still trying to come to terms with her appalling loss.
They died as they tried to shelter from Typhoon Haiyan inside their wood and tin shack. Tanega somehow survived the wall of water that swept away her family and her future.
She is one of 100,000 people, according to the United Nations, who now live in tents throughout the region of the central Philippines devastated by one of the strongest storms ever recorded.
A staggering one million live in conditions considered by the UN to be unsafe and vulnerable to future storms.
"I want to leave but I can't," she says. "There's nowhere for me to go and I am at the bottom of the list for a new house."
The tragic reality for Tanega is that she is a low priority for a new home because she doesn't have children. The best she hopes for now is to go back to school, get a qualification and try to start a new life somewhere else.
Seven months after Haiyan, the city of Tacloban still bares the vivid scars of its destructive path.
The airport is still only partially rebuilt, while much of the city is a mix of mangled steel structures, concrete shells that used to be houses, roadside graveyards, tents and crowded temporary homes known as "bunkhouses".
The 4WD vehicles of aid organizations can been seen everywhere.
But Tacloban is not sinking in despair. The city is recovering. Power is mostly restored, the town center once again throbs with business and noise, both the Coca-Cola and Pepsi plants are back in operation and the hotels are open.
"I love Tacloban" signs are springing up, or are being repainted.
At the Alejandro Hotel a sheet hangs from the roof with the words "Tacloban Tindog" ("Stand Up Tacloban").
The city is not yet standing tall but it's trying.
The biggest single problem is housing.
The storm surge destroyed thousands of homes on the coastal strip. Most were shanties. With nowhere else to go, people are rebuilding over the remains of their old houses, using whatever they can scavenge from the wreckage. New timber is in short supply.
However they are building exactly where the government doesn't want them to, right in the danger zone.
Anything like a repeat of the 8 meters-high wall of water that crashed through the coastal strip would once again wash away these homes.
READ MORE: Returning to a city still struggling, but determined
The government initially banned any new building within 40 meters of the sea but that was modified because it was impractical. There are no hard rules about where to rebuild but it is clear that the government sees these new rebuilt homes as temporary.
"It is too dangerous to build back there. It is too exposed," says Panfilo Lacson, Presidential Adviser on Rehabilitation and Recovery.
"Yolanda (the local name of Haiyan) is the new normal as far as we are concerned. We have to build places that can stand up to that sort of weather," he says.
The government is planning to build 200,000 new homes to house a million people. They will be away from the shoreline on land not prone to mudslides and solid enough to withstand the most extreme winds (Haiyan's sustained wind speed was measured at around 199mph / 320kmph).
"We have the money for it," says Lacson.
But progress has been glacially slow, say the people of Tacloban. The master recovery plan has only just been tabled.
Politics, bureaucracy, finding and acquiring suitable land have all contributed to the fact that of the 200,000 homes planned, only about 130 had been completed by the middle of May.
"Building Back Better" is the government's slogan but that is wearing thin on the streets here.
For people like Tanega, the slogans mean nothing.
"We've been waiting a long time. I don't know how long my suffering will go on," she says.
"Who do I run to, who do I lean on? I don't have a family, no husband to rely on. I am not important."
The government says it understands and it's ramping up re-development. But now it is a race against time. At the beginning of June the new typhoon season began. And Tacloban and the surrounding area is one of the most typhoon-prone parts of the planet.
GALLERY: After Typhoon Haiyan and six months later


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incl. 19 % USt zzgl. Versandkosten
Gewicht: 0.0020 kg
Hersteller: Pololu
Lagerbestand: 0
Nicht auf Lager.Art.Nr.: 2119
The Pololu step-up/step-down voltage regulator S7V7F5 is a switching regulator (also called a switched-mode power supply (SMPS) or DC-to-DC converter) that uses a buck-boost topology. It takes an input voltage from 2.7 V to 11.8 V and increases or decreases the voltage to a fixed 5 V output with a typical efficiency of 90%.
This flexibility in input voltage is especially well-suited for battery-powered applications in which the battery voltage begins above 5 V and drops below as the battery discharges. Without the typical restriction on the battery voltage staying above the required voltage throughout its life, new battery packs and form factors can be considered. For instance, a 4-cell battery holder, which might have a 6 V output with fresh alkalines but a 4.8 V nominal voltage with NiMH cells and a 4.0 V output with partially discharged cells, can now be used for a 5 V circuit. In another typical scenario, a disposable 9 V battery powering a 5 V circuit can be discharged to under 3 V instead of cutting out at 6 V, as with typical linear or step-down regulators.
In typical applications, this regulator can deliver about 1 A continuous when the input voltage is higher than 5 V (stepping down) and 500 mA continuous when the input is lower than 5 V (stepping up). The regulator has over-voltage, under-voltage, and short circuit protection, and thermal shutdown prevents damage from overheating; the board does not have reverse-voltage protection.
For a similar regulator with a wider operating range and an adjustable output, consider our step-up/step-down voltage regulator S8V3A.
The step-up/step-down regulator has just three connections: the input voltage (VIN), ground (GND), and the output voltage (VOUT). These three connections are labeled on the back side of the PCB, and they are arranged with a 0.1″ spacing along the edge of the board for compatibility with standard solderless breadboards and perfboards and connectors that use a 0.1″ grid. You can solder wires directly to the board or solder in either the 3×1 straight male header strip or the 3×1 right-angle male header strip that is included.
The input voltage, VIN, should be between 2.7 and 11.8 V. Lower inputs can shut down the voltage regulator; , so you should ensure that noise on your input is not excessive, and you should be wary of destructive LC spikes (see below for more information).
The output voltage, VOUT, is regulated to a fixed 5 V, but it can be as high as 5.2 V when there is little or no load on the regulator.
The efficiency of a voltage regulator, defined as
(Power out)/(Power in), is an important measure of its performance,
especially when battery life or heat are concerns. As shown in the
graph below, this switching regulator typically has an efficiency of 85%
to 95%. A power-saving feature maintains these high efficiencies even
when the regulator current is very low.
The maximum achievable output current of the board varies with the input voltage but also depends on other factors, including the ambient temperature, air flow, and heat sinking. The graph below shows output currents at which this voltage regulator's over-temperature protection typically kicks in. These currents represent the limit of the regulator's capability and cannot be sustained for long periods, so the continuous currents that the regulator can provide are typically several hundred milliamps lower, and we recommend trying to draw no more than about 1 A from this regulator throughout its input voltage range.
When connecting voltage to electronic circuits, the initial rush of current can cause voltage spikes that are much higher than the input voltage. If these spikes exceed the regulator's maximum voltage, the regulator can be destroyed. If you are connecting more than about 9 V, using power leads more than a few inches long, or using a power supply with high inductance, we recommend soldering a 33 μF or larger electrolytic capacitor close to the regulator between VIN and GND. The capacitor should be rated for at least 16 V.
More information about LC spikes can be found in our application note, Understanding Destructive LC Voltage Spikes.
ACS714 Stromsensor Breakout Board -30 to +30A
RPi-Shield-Bridge (Raspberry Pi 1 - Arduino Adapter)
USB-Host-Shield (SparkFun)


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Bourne's Bryce Stowell has dominated the Cape League this summer, and has earned the start for the Western Division in tomorrow night�s All-Star game in Chatham.
BOURNE � A major league scout early this week was talking about different indicators scouts use to judge potential. He brought up WHIP � walks and hits per inning pitched. The scout said that if a pitcher could keep that figure down to 1.00 or less, that was a good indicator.
He could have taken out a picture of Bourne Braves pitcher Bryce Stowell as a definition of the term.
The Cal-Irvine right-hander has dominated the Cape League this summer, and has earned the start for the Western Division in tomorrow night�s All-Star game in Chatham.
Stowell has pitched 33 innings this summer and allowed only 21 hits and seven walks, which gives him a 0.85 WHIP � well under the scout�s positive threshold. Factor in his 42 strikeouts and the Cleveland Indians, who drafted him on the 22nd round as a summer draft-and-follow, must be impressed. Stowell, like all draftees, must sign by Aug. 15 or go into next June�s draft.
�I�ve met with a few people in the organization and they want me to go out and keep playing,� Stowell said. �I�m sure as time lapses we�ll start talking, but they just want me to go out and pitch right now.�
Stowell is advised by Scott Boras, who is known to maximize the price tag on players. �Right now, I�m playing it by ear,� said Stowell. �If it works out, it works out. If it doesn�t, school is there. I�d finish with my degree (in criminology) almost on time.�
The California native suffered his first loss Tuesday in a rare relief appearance of 1� innings, a warmup for tomorrow. The all-star start is a real honor, he said, and one he wasn�t expecting.
�Once I got word of that, I was kind of shocked. I didn�t know I was looked upon that way. There are great pitchers in this league and to be named among the elite pitchers is something I�ll be able to tell my kids about.�
Stowell throws in the low 90s and occasionally brings up a 95 on the gun. He keeps hitters guessing with a slider and change.
His low walk total is no accident � it�s what he came to Bourne to fine-tune. �One thing I really wanted to work on this summer is control � limiting free bases. If I do that, it puts a lot of pressure on the offense and takes it off the defense.�
Bourne manager Harvey Shapiro and his teammates behind him are appreciative.
�He knows how to pitch,� Shapiro said. �He has enough of a selection of pitches, and he hits spot. He�s ahead of the hitters, and the positional guys like playing behind him.�
Stowell was undrafted out of high school, and had his choice of continuing his career at Pepperdine, Cal-Irvine or Long Beach State. He chose Pepperdine, despite the fact his father, Mark, was a Cal-Irvine center fielder in 1980-81.
He decided to transfer after a 2006 freshman year in which he pitched just 16� innings. Pepperdine wouldn�t give him his athletic release, so he had to sit out 2007 before playing this year as a red-shirt sophomore.
�It just wasn�t a fit for me,� Stowell said, reluctant to go into details about the Pepperdine parting.
Stowell did get to pitch in Hyannis last summer, going a deceiving 1-5 with a 3.72 ERA. He struck out 44 in 38� innings, allowing 32 hits and walking 13.
It was a great way to get back into the swing, and it paid off this spring. He became the Anteaters� Saturday starter and posted an 8-3 record and a 3.26 ERA, with 101 strikeouts in 88� innings. Stowell blanked Oral Roberts in the Nebraska Regional final, sending his team to the Super Regionals against LSU.
�Coming off a year of not pitching, to step in and fill a role like that was something I was really proud of,� Stowell said. �Every week (during the year he had to sit out) I�d throw a bullpen early on. Depending on if the team was home or away, I�d throw a simulated game to the starters. It kept me in shape and had me face live hitters, but you can�t compare it to a real game.
�Just having a summer, a season and another summer under my belt, I�ve seen so many situations, hitters and counts I haven�t seen before. It�s really helped me. I think going through those innings, good or bad, helped me get to where I�m at right now and will continue to help me through my career.�
His college season ended abruptly � he gave up back-to-back-to-back homers in the first inning of the decisive Super Regional loss to LSU. He lasted only two-thirds of an inning and gave up six runs on five hits.
�Just one of those days the ball was going out of the yard. Sometimes you can�t explain why. It was pretty loud in that place, 9,000 people. They came out in full force. It was definitely a good experience for me to take it all in and see what that�s all about.�
The rough outing hasn�t affected him at all on the Cape. In one of his first starts here, against Falmouth on June 28, he was lifted after pitching six innings of no-hit ball. Stowell said it didn�t bother him at all � in fact, he gained respect for Shapiro for the move. �My pitch count was a little bit up and the coaches are watching that. One thing players appreciate up here is these coaches aren�t trying to wear you out. I definitely respect coaches looking out for welfare of kids.�
Stowell was an All-Freeway League MVP at La Habra, Calif., High School.
Baseball was his main sport, but he also excelled in a physically demanding one.
�I played four years of water polo,� Stowell said. �Definitely have some fun memories of that. A very tough sport. It�s something that helped me mature, helped me get ready for this.�


text:
New York
11 May 2004
Price realised
Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960-1988)
Napoleonic Stereotype circa '44
signed, titled and dated 'Jean-Michel Basquiat "NAPOLEONIC STEREOTYPE CIRCA '44" NOV. 1983' (on the reverse)
acrylic and oil crayon on canvas
66¼ x 59¾ in. (168 x 152 cm.)
Painted in 1983.
Galerie Bruno Bischofberger, Zurich (acquired from the artist)
Acquired from the above by the present owner, Cologne
Contact Client Service
New York +1 212 636 2000
London +44 (0)20 7839 9060
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Arts, 1986, p. 126 (illustrated in color).
New Art International, 1988, p. 14 (illustrated in color).
Harenberg Kunsttageskalender, 1992, p. 9 (illustrated in color).
U. Grosenick and B. Riemschneider, eds., Art at the Turn of the Millennnium, Cologne, 1999, p. 63 (illustrated in color).
L. Marenzi et. al., Jean-Michel Basquiat, Milan, 1999, p. 78 (illustrated in color).
R. Marshall and J.-L. Prat, Jean-Michel Basquiat, vol. 3. Paris, 2000, p. 152, no. 9 (illustrated in color).
Malmö, Rooseum, Jean-Michel Basquiat Julian Schnabel, April-May 1989, p. 32, no. 14 (illustrated in color).
Marseille, Musée Cantini, Jean-Michel Basquiat--Une Retrospective, July-September 1992, p. 115 (illustrated in color).
Berlin, Martin-Gropius-Bau and London, American Academy of Arts, American Art in the 20th Century, May-December 1993.
Trieste, Civico Museo Revoltella, Jean-Michel Basquiat, May-September 1999, p. 79 (illustrated in color).
On September 15th 1983 Michael Stewart, a young black graffiti artist, was arrested and subsequently died from injuries sustained during his arrest by the New York City police. All too aware of the precariousness of his position as the first black star in an all-white art world, Jean-Michel Basquiat was deeply upset by the news of Stewart's death, pointing out nervously and repeatedly to his friends in the weeks that followed, how easily "it could have been me".
No matter what the degree of his wealth or fame, Basquiat remained throughout his brief and meteoric career the victim of racial prejudice. Whether it was in his persistent inability to hail a cab or in his being constantly stereotyped and pigeonholed as a 'black' artist, Basquiat had to contend, like so many of his 'heroes' with life alone in a white man's world. This basic fact, which must have seemed to grow more acute to the young artist as his fame grew, also only served to reinforce Basquiat's self-identification with the 'heroes' who populated his personal pantheon of 'royalty'. From athletes such as Hank Aaron, Mohammed Ali and Sugar Ray Robinson to musicians Miles Davis and Dizzy Gillespie or those who died young, like Charlie Parker or Jimmie Hendrix and Janis Joplin, both dead, like Basquiat himself would be, at 27, Basquiat's close personal identification with these role models informed both his attitude and his worldview. "Most kings get their heads chopped off," Basquiat seemed to conclude, the lone figure of the hero could not survive as such for long in this world. Among the greatest of black American heroes was the "Brown Bomber", the boxer Joe Louis, who for a time became a patriotic hero of all Americans across the racial divide in the 1930s and 40s. Basquiat first celebrated Joe Louis in his 1982 painting St. Joe Louis Surrounded by Snakes in which he depicts the 'haloed' figure of Louis surrounded by the white trainers and advisors whose greed and ambition would eventually lead to Louis' financial ruin.
Napoleonic Stereotype (sometimes titled Napoleonic Stereotype circa '44) is an intense and highly detailed hieroglyphic painting depicting one the most famous and politically significant moments in the dramatic story of Joe Louis' career; his 1936 bout with the German champion boxer Max Schmeling. Widely expected to win the fight with ease, the undefeated Louis was knocked out by Schmeling and the fight was immediately interpreted as a racial victory lauded by Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels as a triumph for Aryan Germany and Nazism. The Nazi weekly journal Das Schwarze Korps (The Black Corps) commented: "Schmeling's victory was not only sport. It was a question of prestige for our race." In America, Louis' defeat stunned the press both black and white who also could not help but see the fight in racial terms. As one black writer articulated, "we sincerely wanted Joe to win, because it does something to the Nation's view toward Negroes... the masses put stock in champions ...the Negro is no less inferior because Louis loses ...but the average white will respect a champion." (cited in Lauren Sklaroff, Joe Louis and the Construction of a Black American Hero 1935-45, University of Virginia).
A popular song even took root in black communities entitled 'Don't be a Joe Louis'. In 1938 at a rematch between Louis and Schmeling, Louis knocked out the German boxer in the first round. Louis went on throughout the 1940s to become what some still consider to be the best fighter there ever was.
As in St. Joe Louis surrounded by Snakes it is Louis' victimization at the hands of the white community that Basquiat has chosen to paint in this painting. Basquiat does not choose to paint the "Brown Bomber's" symbolic 1938 triumph over the white-supremacy of Nazi Germany, but rather the cause of his humiliation and vilification.
Like so many of Basquiat's paintings of his heroes as saints, this painting is a modern-day scene of martyrdom, for Basquiat's heroes, like saints, all seem to die for our sins. Depicted in the pictorial language and conventions of cartoon violence--a fact knowingly alluded to by the inclusion of the copyright byline ) 1936 KING FEATURES SYNDICATE, (a reference to the part of the Hearst Entertainment and Syndication Group responsible for publishing many of the comic books and cartoons of which Basquiat was such a devotee)--Basquiat portrays this historic fight as a sick comedy. The figure of Joe Louis is here represented as a punch-bag with a deaths-head skull absorbing the mechanical blows of the white boxer. The word 'boxed' is given a wry double-meaning by being written repeatedly and framed in such a way that it takes on its alternate meaning of being trapped, and this boxing covers much of the canvas. At the lower center of the painting a large orange death's -head/saint- figure with its eyes crossed out is drawn above the also crossed-out word 'crown'. This is the trademark symbol with which Basquiat often adorned his heroes, but here, the word 'crown' also alludes to the crown of the "heavyweight championship". The words "heavyweight, champ, world" appear crossed-out above the large orange death's head as if suggestive of the two kinds of crown that Louis was contending for--one as the heavyweight champion of the world, the other as saintly hero and warrior of the oppressed.
Special Notice
On occasion, Christie's has a direct financial interest in lots consigned for sale. This interest may include guaranteeing a minimum price to the consignor of property or making an advance to the consignor which is secured solely by consigned property. Such property is offered subject to a reserve. This is such a lot
As its decor is offered at auction on 20 November, we look back on the nightclub's history as a playground for the rich and famous, from Frank Sinatra to Diana Ross
From the Hollywood Hills to the heart of Hong Kong, five elevated escapes with a bird's-eye view of the city


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As part of national Safer Internet Day, the James Kennedy Public Library is hosting a class on basic methods you can use to protect yourself on the internet. This session will cover information on basic programs, what to avoid, and potential fixes for problems.
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AikiWeb Aikido Forums
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Koshinage Ukemi
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I train at a dojo where ukemi is given a great deal of consideration, a practice which I think is great. However that means that when we practice Koshinage we're focusing ourselves mainly on the ukemi (mainly because many of us literally suck at breakfalls).
Okay, that out of the way I have to say that today while practicing Koshinage I took a couple of particularly nasty falls. Apparantly I must have done something incorrectly, because now my ankle hurts; hopefully it's not fractured or anything. Doesn't feel that bad. Obviously I want to avoid this kind of thing in the future; I'd hate to limit my time on the mat by an injury, not to mention the effect it would have on my tap dancing career. :)
My question basically is this: Does anyone have any tips on falling out of Koshinage? My sensei is really beautiful in her ukemi, but I'm just not getting it. (I think I may be afraid of heights; at 6' 6" tall it's a long way down!) I know to let my weight fall over nage's hips for what should be a really soft breakfall, but when you weigh 250 lbs it's a little easier said than done to get hoisted up.
Can anyone help me to stop chickening out on my breakfall and landing in a sobbing heap on the floor?
Much thanks,
funny you should ask, i was just talking about this to someone after class today. My first dojo had a great way of teaching breakfalls, and since i like flying anyway (yes, i'm a bit lighter than 250#) i was an eager uke for koshinage...but the only instruction i got was to stiffen my legs (i think that makes the throw cleaner looking, but not really sure)...and other wise i just went along for the ride (it was a school that did NOT grab the arm or gi of nage, everyplace else i've been has you grab something).
My last dojo had a great way of working up to koshi's...first we'd do the technique ending with uke rolling, essentially a kokyunage, nage kneeling next to uke. After a while we'd move on to the same technique, but nage would be kneeling almost in uke's way while uke would roll. Next, the same thing but uke has to roll over a crouched down nage's hips. Finally we'd get up and do the technique as a koshinage.
when i told my sempai (at now my current dojo) about this he wondered how that made nages better...i told him i thought what it really did was just make the ukes more relaxed and committed to the attack, which made both nage's technique and uke's fall better. If you are afraid of the fall, you tend to hang back, which complicates nage's throw, and either or both can get hurt. You actually have an advantage in the fall due to your size, in that you are not falling from 6'6 (or whatever) but from the height of your nage's hips (usually, although my very favorite is over the shoulder so it's a bit higher) so the reality of it is you could probably nearly roll over your shorter nages. Going slowly but with commited motion (no stopping or hanging back) through the entire technique and you'd probably have a much softer landing.
Finally, since you are lucky enough to be at a school that stresses ukemi (as did my first dojo) i'd recommend the obvious--get one of the seniors to work with you on those falls
hope you have a good flight :)
I remember when I first became interested in Aikido. I was nervous that my height of 6'6 might be a problem, so I emailed someone. If I'm not mistaken, it was the one and only Jun. I received a reply soon after full of encouragement, and I've been studying ever since. I've found some movements my being so tall, is a probelm to overcome, but on a few I think being taller than most makes things a tad easier. Keep working on the breakfalls.. (ukemi is my biggest issue too by the way).
And thank you to Jun, I owe you a favor I can never repay.
Oshinkan Dojo
Whoops! I realized half a second too late I forgot a n in our dojo's name!!! Sorry Sensei!
Onshikan Dojo
Hello, I am a little confused on what your koshi nage technique is. Is it like judos Ogoshi nage or is it a koshi gaeshi (Hip over turn). The difference being that in Ogoshi you are standing in front of uke and he goes over 1 hip and koshi gaeshi your basically side on to ukes front and he goes over both hips (almost over your back). The reason I ask is because we practice both throws and I have mostly only seen koshi gaeshi in aikido books (Aikido by Kisshomaru Ueshiba page 94-95).
Any info would be great.
Thanks for all the advice! It is a throw over both hips, for us, but we just call it koshinage. I'm not too sure but different variations might have different names. In response to an earlier post the gradual step up to koshinage as you described is something we practice; I just never quite get the earlier parts right so the full throw never works out! Most of what you said was familiar, but the idea of keeping your legs stiff was a new one for me. If I'd kept my legs more stiff they wouldn't have cracked into the ground like a whip, I bet. (though my foot's feeling much better today!)
The best thing I think my sensei teaches on that breakfall is to let your weight fall past nage's hips so that your're much closer to the ground before you rotate for the breakfall. If only I could get that far without panicking!
As far as being tall, it hasn't really hurt me that much; shihonages are hard to get low enough to go under the arm and I've yet to pull of a decent Koshinage as nage, not to mention getting bent over all the time on shorter ukes. But hey, there are plenty of large, very good aikidoka out there, so I guess I shouldn't complain.
Thanks everyone for the advice! It is much appreciated!
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What is a living will?
A living will, also known as an advance directive, is a legal document by which a person can make known their wishes regarding life-prolonging medical treatments. It is an important document as it makes sure your family and your doctor are aware of your wishes about certain medical treatment if you are no longer able to speak for yourself.
Why do I need a living will?
- If you have particularly strong feelings about medical treatment that you would or would not like to receive, in case you are not in a position to express those wishes, then you need to put a living will in place.
- A living will is different to the powers given by a health and welfare lasting power of attorney as in the living will you yourself are making the decision in advance about your treatment. A health and welfare lasting power of attorney delegates the decision making responsibility to someone else who will act as appropriate, according to the circumstances at the time
When do I need to put a living will in place?
- As soon as possible. An accident or illness could arise at any time and could lead to a situation where it is too late for you to express your wishes and you no longer have the capacity to do so.


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Program Information
Clinical Deployment of An Automatic Planning Interface for Overlap Volume Histogram Based Treatment Planning
J Moore*, J Herman, K Evans, W Yang, T McNutt, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MarylandSU-E-T-212 Sunday 3:00:00 PM - 6:00:00 PM Room: Exhibit Hall
Purpose: To develop and deploy an interface to support automatic treatment planning which predicts achievable dose levels for organs at risk (OARs) from patients with similar or more complicated anatomies queried from a database. This interface will provide an easy to use method of selecting the best known achievable dose values for a given patient, and use them to automate the planning process.
Methods: An overlap volume histogram (OVH) describes the distance a target structure can be expanded with the volume of the compared overlap structure. An OVH is generated for each target/critical structure pair and stored in a database with dose-volume histograms (DVHs) for each patient. For all patients, structures are consistently named by mapping ROI names to a set of common names. For a new patient, the patient database is queried for the lowest achievable dose for each OAR from patients in the database with the same or lower overlap distance. The plan parameters and generated objectives are then automatically loaded into treatment planning system for optimization. The final clinical plan from each patient is added to the database to improve the results of future queries.
Results: The system has been accepted by the dosimetrists for clinical use. Automatically generated plans required less dosimetrist interaction to achieve similar coverage to manually generated plans while OAR doses were reduced or no worse than the manually generated plans.
Conclusion: Automatic planning tools can aid dosimetrists in quickly generating plans which maintain target coverage and produce comparable or reduced dose to OARs. Our interface has simplified the process enabling the broader use of the system across our dosimetry staff.
Contact Email


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Master trusts will have to prove they are financially sustainable under tougher new rules published by the government today.
The Pension Schemes Bill also confirms The Pensions Regulator will be given new powers to intervene where a master trust – a multi-employer scheme designed for auto-enrolment – is at risk of failing.
The Bill sets out five criteria master trusts will have to meet: the scheme must be financially sustainable, those involved in the scheme must be fit and proper, the scheme funder must meet certain requirements to give assurance about its financial situation, the scheme must have adequate governance and administration processes, and the scheme must have an adequate "continuity strategy".
Pensions minister Richard Harrington says: "We want to make sure that people saving into master trusts enjoy the same protection as everyone else, which is why we are levelling-up that protection, to give these savers more confidence in their pension schemes."
The Bill also begins the process of introducing a cap on early exit charges for occupational pension scheme members wanting to access their savings.
It does not set down a precise cap at this stage, however.
TPR chief executive Lesley Titcomb says: "We are very pleased that the Pension Scheme Bill will drive up standards and give us tough new supervisory powers to authorise and de-authorise master trusts according to strict criteria, ensuring members are better protected and ultimately receive the benefits they expect."
The Bill was announced following the Queen's Speech in May.
The People's Pension policy and market engagement director Darren Philp says: "Millions of people are now saving into master trusts, and as auto-enrolment continues these numbers will only continue to grow. There are a lot of schemes in the market now, and it would be unrealistic to think they will all survive. There is now likely to be a period of market consolidation – and savers need to have their assets protected while this takes place."
He adds: "We need quality standards to be met before players can operate in the market, including proper scrutiny of the people who run schemes. Most importantly, we need to make sure that savers do not see their pension pots damaged by covering the cost of collapsing schemes – or, worst of all, lose their savings entirely."