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text: Oh, Irina, please send me the link to the scone recipe! I love scones and I never find US scones to be as good as British scones.... Jenny Irina Rempt wrote: > On Thursday 17 May 2007, Phil Boswell wrote: > >> ...delurking for a moment then vanishing again into the haze, leaving >> behind him nothing but a semi-cryptic message and a tray of tea and >> scones >> > > Mmm, scones. Reminds me to put the recipe on my cooking pages (which now have > a grand total of seven recipes, because I started the project to cure > writers' block and that worked) > > Irina > >


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The Devils, Damsels, and Discipline of Jorge de Sena
Translated Portuguese literature lies mired in five names: postmodernist celebrities Fernando Pessoa and António Lobo Antunes; José Saramago, whose shiny Nobel Prize mesmerizes publishers crow-like; and the classic authors Eça de Queiroz and Luís de Camões. These are the ones that get translated and retranslated year in, year out, as if there weren't room for more. For evidence you need look no further than the silence over Raul Brandão's recent debut in English. Fortunately Dedalus Press, the leading publisher of diverse Portuguese literature, insists in changing things, and that's how we got Jorge de Sena's The Prodigious Physician, translated by Margaret Jull Costa. In principle, things should have worked out better for Jorge de Sena. After all, he made a wise career choice when he moved to the U.S. to teach first at the University of Wisconsin, then at UC Berkeley. His tenacious, if obscure, longevity in English sort of proves this: to date one novel, a short-story collection, and several volumes of his gorgeous poetry have come out. Alas, all have quickly faded in the face of general indifference. Why does he keep getting new chances? Writers don't become famous only because of their literary merit; it helps when influential agents notice them: George Steiner's infatuation with Pessoa did a lot for him; Saramago (who in the past was Sena's editor) probably wasn't badly served by Harold Bloom judging him "the greatest living novelist." Even Lobo Antunes has acknowledged that his breakthrough stemmed from American literary agent Thomas Colchie championing him, lending support to the opinion that to be known worldwide is to be known in English first and foremost. No such paladin ever defended Sena; instead his translations have been living off dividends from his college career. It's telling that he's been previously translated by former colleagues and students, whose prefaces betray that most Portuguese of feelings, saudade, the painful longing for an absent friend, in this case a man remembered at campus as an erudite, generous, fascinating figure. Born in 1919, Sena began publishing poems in the early 1940s in a magazine called Cadernos de Poesia, around which coalesced a band of young poets bent on revitalizing Portuguese poetry. By bringing to each verse an anger and brutality unusual in a country of mild-mannered lyricists, replacing Portuguese poetry's propensity for sentimentality with philosophical reflection, and dialoging with Europe's Modernism instead of burrowing in parochialism, he did just that. An engineer by education, he also pursued criticism and is rightfully considered one of Portugal's greatest literary critics. In a country that turned to France alone for literary fashions, his knowledge of the English language and literature, so unusual at the time, allowed him to carve a niche for himself. He translated, among others, Thomas Love Peacock, Eugene O'Neill, Evelyn Waugh, Ernest Hemingway, Graham Greene, William Faulkner, Edgar Allan Poe, and Emily Dickinson, whom he adored. (English was such a mysterious entity to his peers that he had to endure accusations of plagiarizing foreign poets.) His anglophilia also allowed him to widen studies about Pessoa. He translated his English-language poems and studied the legacy of English culture on Pessoa, who had been raised in British South Africa. (Sena once had to confirm to a scholar that Aleister Crowley, whom Pessoa had personally met, was not a fabrication of the jesting poet.) Sena's lifelong interest in Pessoa made him a suitable candidate to bring order to what is nowadays known as The Book of Disquiet, and he was one of the first editors to take a swing at it. He worked at it for five years before giving up. At the time he was living in exile in Brazil, a predicament that posed logistic problems about getting copies of the original manuscripts. Sena had fled there in 1959 after participating in a botched coup to overthrow the dictatorship ruling since 1926. In a move worthy of Pessoa, all that remains of this endeavor is his 60-page introduction for a nonexistent edition of Disquiet. Tragically, Brazil fell under a right-wing regime in 1964, too, and the following year he took up a teaching job in the U.S., remaining there until his death in 1978. Between his stay in Brazil and move to America, Sena published The Prodigious Physician, one of his most popular works. It originally belonged to a short story collection finished in 1964 and published two years later, Novas Andanças do Demónio (some stories were included in By the Rivers of Babylon). The novella didn't ride solo until 1977; in the accompanying preface, Sena explained that at the time he didn't have the conditions to publish it separately, so he let it "hitch a ride" with the other stories when an editor showed interest in them. The Prodigious Physician sounds like something in the vein of Angela Carter's mixture of erotica and myth. It chronicles the carefree wanderings of a beautiful young physician whose soul has been sold to the devil; who has a magical hat that grants any wish, from raising the dead to traveling in time; and whose blood has healing properties. These elements, plus the idea of an infatuated devil who lifts his beloved's legs when the Inquisition tries to hang him for heresy, come from the fusion and rearrangement of two medieval tales. Sena was no different from other writers at the time who were looking backwards to move away from realist fiction: Italo Calvino reusing the chivalric romance in The Nonexistent Knight or John Barth with the picaresque The Sot-Weed Factor. In Spain, Gonzalo Torrente Ballester was doing something even stranger in Don Juan by unleashing the legendary lover on the 20th century. Even so, for Portuguese literature at the time, this was a pretty weird book. Of the three types of writers co-existing within the regime we can dispense with two: the right-wing official author and the left-wing socialist realist, rechristened neo-realista (new realist) to avoid censorship. Often clumsy hacks prized mostly for extra-literary reasons, their value inflated insofar as they stuck to and flattered the pinched ideologies that respectively underpinned them. Sena, a life-long communist but too autonomous to follow party lines, belonged to the third type that just wanted to get on with the usual business of making great literature. As such, his fury over factions informed his own fiction. If readers keep this in mind, they'll appreciate this deceptively straightforward novella a lot better. The Prodigious Physician seems mathematically engineered to piss off fascists and neo-realists alike with democratic distribution. The collection it originally came in was particularly offensive because it was a rare incursion into a genre Portuguese authors seldom explored -- fantasy. To make matters worse, the preface put forth a deliberate attack on "the second-rate aesthetics of the oh-so-esteemed traditional realism." (I don't understand why Dedalus didn't add value to this slim volume by appending the original prefaces.) If Sena had filled a previous collection with quotidian observations and autobiographical tinges, this one basked in what he called "the fantastic realism or the imaginative historicism," modes he judged better suited to depict his time than realism, which to him was almost "a spurious way of immobilizing reality, which, by its nature, is a continuous process." Instead of parading masses of peasants in fields and proletarians in factories, Sena invoked mythical and historical figures; instead of Capital, he pillaged 14th-century tomes for ideas. Even more perversely, Sena actually cared about style, even cared about difficulty. Jull Costa keeps intact his page-long paragraphs, interpolated with metrically rigorous poems, sometimes cascading down labyrinthine sentences with irregular punctuation. (If I had to quibble, I'd say she only missed the vocabulary's archaic flavor.) All of this flew in the face of neo-realism's doctrinal frugality; its motto was that books should be simple enough for the people to read them. Well, when you stop to think that around 1960 Portugal had a 30 percent illiteracy rate, you can estimate just how simple simple was. Even Sena's use of double columns encompassed a challenge to ideologies that professed to hold the Truth. What better way of questioning the regime's and the neo-realists' pretentions to infallibility than narrating the same event in simultaneous columns with contradictory facts? Reality, for him, wasn't realistically rendered unless fragmented and subjective. The Prodigious Physician also opposed the regime because it traduced conformity, sexual abstinence, and Catholic values. Few of his readers would expect a scene brimming with amoral homoeroticism between the protagonist and the devil: He lay there in a pose of patient, indifferent abandon, his head resting on his arms, and allowed the Devil, who was invisible, to work himself up into a frenzy of desires. Long caresses ran lightly over his skin, whispered kisses nipped his body all over, hands lingered on his crotch, a hardness pressed against him, trying to penetrate him -- it had been the same ever since he had reached manhood and whenever he took off his clothes and was alone. He put up with it as he might do with an unavoidable affliction, which neither excited him nor provoked feelings of horror or repugnance. Sex follows the nameless protagonist around, and he's long stopped seeing it as sacred. The physician was sold to the devil when his grandmother, "seeing him still prepubescent, but with the body of a grown man, had summoned the Devil, who had immediately enfolded him in a passionate embrace." In exchange for his indifference, "he had received immense powers and, over time, had come to think that the Devil wasn't really asking such a lot of him, contenting himself with a mere obliging availability, in which he, the young man, did not participate with so much as a gesture or a tremor." As the novella opens, he stops by a riverbank to freshen up, and a trio of maidens invite him to frolic. After that, they take him to a castle, where a widow languishes from an unknown ailment; he uses his blood to cure her, and they fall in love. In this enchanted castle gender roles have been subverted, and women rule over men who "had quite forgotten their position in society, and were made equal in sharing the same pleasures and submitting to the same rules of obedience." The novella's a paean to sexual freedom, but if it looks like Sena was foreshadowing hippie communes, for a Portuguese reader it's hard not to think of Camões's epic poem The Lusiads, where Venus rewards harried sailors with a magical island filled with Cupid-intoxicated horny nymphs in a dazzling display of eroticism. Sena was not only one of Camões's greatest scholars, he also shared his visionary hope in a paradisiacal society where women and men are equal and live bound by love. If I have a criticism to make, it's that this spiritual love too often feels exclusively earthly. Sena may write that the physician finds in the widow "the love of which [the Devil] knows nothing, the pleasure he cannot feel, and the furious joy that, even without love, does not exist in the lewd pleasures he can offer," but their relationship is rather cold. The novella's complex meditations on love appeal more to my intellect than my heart. It rejects the soul (the Devil even claims it doesn't exist) in favor of the body as the erotic center. Descriptions of breasts, thighs, hair, skin abound. Everybody ogles one another. The castle-dwellers party more than Poe's noblemen keeping the plague out. Perhaps this was Sena's goal, to emphasize the physicality of sex at the time when the regime controlled the body. He evidently relished in indecency, as the dirty epigraph by Arthur Rimbaud shows. But though I can appreciate the importance of transgression, gratification without an emotional grounding feels rather empty. Besides Rimbaud's, there's a second epigraph, belonging to 17th Jesuit priest Manuel Bernardes, author of a gigantic work of didactic moralizing. Readers won't need to know that Sena considered the good priest a symbol of intellectual and moral backwardness and oppression to appreciate the joke of juxtaposing his earnestly pious sentences with Rimbaud's scatology. He's made of the same cloth as the novella's castrating friars who prefer erecting scaffolds than their penises. In this part of the novella, Sena pushes too strongly in the direction of paper-thin parable when they unveil a "gigantic conspiracy by the Devil against the established order" that includes "sodomy, a whole range of crimes against nature, and a vast web of subversive propaganda." And it's hard not to see in Brother Anthony of Salzburg, "a famous expert and writer of treatises on matters infernal," a caricature of dictator António Salazar. But Sena is not so much forcing a parable as stating that Portugal's history had dead in its tracks. After three centuries under the Inquisition, followed by 100 years of relative freedom, a long dictatorship could only give the impression of static time: the present was the past, the past was the present. A few decades later, Lobo Antunes's big Salazar novel, The Inquisitor's Manual, would use the same metaphor. Instead of proclaiming a belief in progress, like neo-realist works, Sena's novella hinges on subtle cycles of birth, death and rebirth. Reality may as well look back to see itself as if on a mirror. Ribald and raunchy, The Prodigious Physician is nevertheless tinged with pessimism. Unlike the neo-realists, Sena was too realistic to know that utopias never work. Although their books have aged badly, this novella continues to resonate in our time in the way it celebrates equality between women and men, sexual freedom over prudery, reason over fanaticism, and the individual over the state. Plus, Sena adds more context to translated Portuguese fiction, which often floats in an ahistorical vacuum, Sena's blend of fantasy and realism predates José Saramago's magical realism and allegories, and his rage at castrating tyrants brings to mind António Lobo Antunes. In The Prodigious Physician's 100 pages we find all the main elements in the best contemporary Portuguese fiction. Jorge de Sena's obscurity is a mystery, but the solution to that is simple and begins with reading this little masterpiece.
Take It or Leave It: Guidebooks for Single Girls
"There are two sound ways for a girl to deal with a young man who is insistent. She can marry him, or she can say 'No.'" -- Ladies' Home Journal, May 1961 In 1962, a 40-year-old woman published a guide for single girls that shocked a nation (and spawned future memoir-manuals.) The author was Helen Gurley Brown, and the book was Sex and the Single Girl: The Unmarried Woman's Guide to Men, Career, the Apartment, Diet, Fashion, Money and Men. Racy title aside, the simple teal-blue book jacket was far from flashy -- if anything, it looked like a secret handbook. But the message inside was loud and clear, and Helen megaphoned it to the world: Single girls had sex, and often with multiple partners before marriage. Why pretend otherwise? "Should a man think you are a virgin?" she asked in one chapter. "I can't imagine why, if you aren't. Is he? Is there anything particularly attractive about a thirty-four-year-old virgin?" Drawing from her years of experience as a penny-pinching bachelorette in Los Angeles, Helen gave single women advice on everything from keeping a budget and finding an apartment to wearing makeup, meeting men, and staging a successful affair -- she'd survived plenty of trysts with married men -- but she was no longer single herself. She was comfortably married to the editor and movie producer David Brown, who had conjured up the idea for the book in the first place, and her status as Mrs. Brown was the ultimate testament to the fact that her man-trapping tips really worked, at any age. Though Sex and the Single Girl had no shortage of critics (Robert Kirsch of the Los Angeles Times called it "as tasteless a book as I have read this year"), it was an instant bestseller, generating a multimillion-dollar franchise that included an eponymous movie (starring Natalie Wood and Tony Curtis); a nationally syndicated column, "Woman Alone," written by Helen and aimed at single girls; a recorded album called Lessons in Love, which offered gems like "How to Talk to a Man in Bed;" a second book, Sex and the Office; and, of course, a magazine, the new Cosmopolitan, which Helen revamped from a staid general-interest title into a sexy single girl's bible in 1965. The original Sex and the Single Girl also inspired countless imitations, among them a cookbook, Saucepans and the Single Girl ("Guaranteed to do more for the bachelor girl's social life than long-lash mascara or a new discotheque dress," it promised), Sex and the Single Man, and Sex and the Single Cat. "A publisher asked me to write a 'me-too' book -- about sex and the college girl," Gloria Steinem told me in a recent interview. She declined, but future food critic Gael Greene took on the task of reporting from the real frontlines of the sexual revolution: the nation's college campuses. Her book, Sex and the College Girl, hit shelves in 1964. Along with guidebooks for single girls, there were also stern warnings. In 1963, two young, unmarried women were murdered in their apartment on the Upper East Side; one had been a Newsweek copy girl, the other a teacher. The high-profile double homicide was dubbed the Career Girl Murders, and it terrified thousands of single, working girls across New York City. It also inspired a morose 125-page safety manual, Career Girl, Watch Your Step!, written by Max Wylie, the father of one of the victims, who cautioned the Sex and the Single Girl set about the dangers of dating and living alone in the big city. There's no doubt that Helen Gurley Brown deserves credit for ushering in the sexual revolution and singles culture, but she was hardly the first woman to tackle writing a cheeky, charming guide for bachelorettes. Five decades earlier, in 1909, Helen Rowland, a noted satirist who penned biting aphorisms about the battle of the sexes for the New York World newspaper, collected her columns into an illustrated book of epigrams titled Reflections of a Bachelor Girl. (She began the column after the demise of the first of her three marriages.) Rowland followed up with more books, including A Guide to Men, published in 1922 -- the era of the flapper, with her short skirts, bobbed hair, loose morals, and penchant for cigarettes and petting parties. That year, Helen Gurley Brown was born in the small town of Green Forest, Ark. She grew up during the Great Depression, when wives and widows flooded the workforce, taking on jobs once meant for their husbands. Necessity paved the way for a new breed of woman who was capable of taking care of herself, and didn't have to rely on a man -- and popular culture reflected her newfound independence. In the summer of 1936, when Helen was 14, Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind topped the bestseller lists, as the nation fell in love with a flawed and fiercely determined heroine named Scarlett O'Hara. The same year, a Vogue editor named Marjorie Hillis published a self-help guide for single women titled Live Alone and Like It: A Guide for the Extra Woman. Who exactly was this Extra Woman, or E.W., as The New York Times later dubbed her? She was a woman who earned her own money and liked to spend it, and to reach her, Hillis's publisher, Bobbs-Merrill, ventured far beyond the bookstore to places where single women congregated. "They sent their salesmen to department stores around the country with a multi-page memo that outlined how to pair quotations from the book with items from the store, like negligees and pajamas, compact furniture, and cosmetics," says Joanna Scutts, who is currently working on a book about Hillis, The Extra Woman. "Hillis was resolutely a believer in material pleasure, beautiful objects, and the comforts of surrounding yourself with the things you loved." (Three decades later, Helen Gurley Brown's publicity team pitched Sex and the Single Girl to boutiques, singles resorts, and secretarial schools. In L.A., one bookstore's window display featured the guide, opened to the chapter "How to Be Sexy," paired with a black bikini.) In many ways, Hillis's books and their offbeat promotion offered a valuable blueprint for Helen Gurley Brown, with one major exception: Live Alone and Like It spoke primarily to a savvy, city-dwelling reader, while Sex and the Single Girl addressed a far simpler creature. It was meant for the plain, small-town girl -- or "mouseburger," to use Helen's famous coinage -- who might have aspired to be more like Hillis's sophisticated reader, or Hillis herself, only with a much more active sex life. (A minister's daughter from Brooklyn, Hillis had pragmatic attitudes about sex but didn't obsess over it, or men, the way Helen did.) Still, despite their differences, both authors recognized that the so-called problems faced by single women could actually be assets, even enviable luxuries. Long before Helen declared the working single woman as "the newest glamour girl of our time," Hillis addressed her with a cut-the-bullshit approach. Might as well face it: "An extra woman is a problem...Extra women mean extra expense, extra dinner-partners, extra bridge opponents, and, all too often, extra sympathy," she wryly observed in her first chapter, "Solitary Refinement." And yet, the right attitude could turn it all around. Being a "live-aloner" had its perks: namely, total freedom. Without a man of the house to serve, a woman could tend to herself, breakfasting in bed, basking in her nightly beauty ritual, and best of all, she could have her own bathroom, "unquestionably one of Life's Great Blessings," Hillis wrote. Like a witty, worldly aunt, Hillis doled out bon mots on other subjects like decorating a modern apartment for one, mixing a classic Manhattan, and the importance of having a chic bedroom wardrobe. "We can think of nothing more depressing than going to bed in a washed-out four-year-old nightgown," she noted, "nothing more bolstering to the morale than going to bed all fragrant with toilet-water and wearing a luscious pink satin nightgown, well-cut and trailing." Hillis also leveled with the legions of single women about the pros and cons of sex outside of marriage, and having an affair. "Certainly, affairs should not even be thought of before you are thirty," she wrote. "Once you have reached this age, if you will not hurt any third party and can take all that you will have to take -- take it silently, with dignity, with a little humor, and without any weeping or wailing or gnashing of teeth -- perhaps the experience will be worth it to you. Or perhaps it won't." In 1937, Hillis published Orchids on Your Budget, predating Helen Gurley Brown's practical financial advice for single girls, followed by Corned Beef and Caviar for the Live-Aloner -- a recipe book that might have inspired Helen's later Single Girl's Cookbook -- and New York Fair or No Fair, a travel guide for women headed to the 1939 World's Fair. (The same year, at the age of 49, Hillis shocked her readers by marrying Thomas H. Roulston, a wealthy widower who owned a chain of grocery stores, and moving to Long Island.) Most of these single-girl guides have gone the way of the chastity belt, but in the spirit of HGB, here are some of the wittiest and weirdest, along with some choice advice -- take it or leave it. Title: The Young Lady's Friend (1880) Written By: Mrs. H.O. Ward, compiler of "Sensible Etiquette" Written For: Proper young ladies of America On Keeping Cool: "The less your mind dwells upon lovers and matrimony, the more agreeable and profitable will be your intercourse with gentlemen." Title: Advice to Young Ladies from The London Journal of 1855 and 1862 (published in 1933) Selected By: R.D., from the weekly columns of "Notice to Correspondents" Written For: Proper young ladies of England On Coquetry: "Flirting is heartless and unprincipled; it leads to callousness in other respects, sullies the female mind, provokes retaliation, and is sure to end in heart-burnings, sorrows, and too frequently disgrace." Title: Reflections of a Bachelor Girl (1909) Written By: Helen Rowland, columnist for the New York World who became known as "the female Bernard Shaw" Written For: Men and women wanting a good laugh On the Importance of Taking the Long View Before Taking a Vow: "Before marrying a man, ask yourself if you could love him if he lost his front hair, went without a collar, smoked an old pipe, and wore a ready-made suit; all of these things are likely to happen." Title: Live Alone and Like It (1936) Written By: Marjorie Hillis, Vogue editor Written For: Single career girls in the city On Ladies and Liquor: "There is no simpler way of entertaining successfully than having a cocktail party, and there is no surer way of making a casual guest have a good time, than serving a highball. For breaking ice, mixing strangers, and increasing popularity, alcohol is still unrivaled." Title: Orchids on Your Budget (1937) Written By: Marjorie Hillis Written For: Style-conscious live-aloners with limited funds On Fashion Sense: "A cheap dress worn with good accessories will fool more people than an expensive dress worn with cheap accessories." Title: Sex and the Single Girl (1962) Written By: Helen Gurley Brown Written For: Small-town girls thinking of moving to the big city for romance and recognition On How to Meet a Man: "Carry a controversial book at all times -- like Karl Marx's Das Kapital or Lady Chatterley's Lover. It's a perfectly simple way of saying, 'I'm open to conversation,' without having to start one." Title: Career Girl, Watch Your Step! (1964) Written By: Max Wylie, father of career-girl murder victim Janice Wylie Written For: The Sex and the Single Girl set On Bachelorettes in the Big City: "Don't think of yourself as being safe. Think of yourself as being in danger all the time. This will make you wary. There is no better protection than an awareness of the dangers that might engulf you." Title: Saucepans and the Single Girl (1965) Written By: Jinx Morgan and Judy Perry, college roommates-turned-cookbook authors Written For: Unmarried women looking for the fastest way to a man's heart On Cooking for the Man in a Brooks Brothers Suit: "If you can cook without tripping over it, by all means wear your chicest hostess skirt. This is known as packaging the product." Title: Helen Gurley Brown's Single Girl's Cookbook (1969) Written By: Helen Gurley Brown Written For: Cosmo Girls On Ending the Affair: "When it comes to that dinner you know in your heart is to be the longed-for (on your part) last one, you must plan as wickedly as for a lovers' feast. It shouldn't be too difficult. Through careful observation of your companion through the months or years you'll know everything he actively hates -- what gives him tummy cramps or causes him to break out. These are the foods you carefully prepare and feed him tonight." Suggested dishes: Ceviche, Lamb Kidneys and Bacon, Refritos with Cheese.
A Year in Reading: Lydia Kiesling
Oh, what did I read this year. I read all the Dear Prudence columns and some of The New York Times Vows and 6,000 things on Wedding Bee and even more things on Facebook and a lot of Tweets I do not remember now. I read two-thirds of the things about the election and one-third of the Mormon mommy blogs. I read most of the Andrew Sullivan and some of the Ta-Nehisi Coates and half of The New Yorker, but not the thing about Hilary Mantel, because I didn't read Wolf Hall, until this week when I read half of it on the train. In the airplane I read Esquire. In the bathroom I read The Economist that I got free with the miles I accrued reading Esquire in the airplane. In the living room I read the alumni magazine I got free with the expense I incurred on my education. I read the whole Jonah Lehrer scandal. My favorite thing I read on Jezebel was a video of a dog fetching a cat. I read In Other Rooms, Other Wonders, and my word, was that good. I read The Appearance of a Hero, and wrote a whole review of it in my head called "Where the Bros Are" -- or was it "For the Bros"? -- but forgot to write it down (don't get me started on the things I didn't write this year). I read NW and couldn't stop thinking about the scene with the tampon string like a mouse tail and got the taste of metal in my mouth, thank you very much Zadie Smith. I read We Need to Talk About Kevin and got the feel of bleach in my eye and hamster in my sink, thank you very much Lionel Shriver. I read The Snow Child which was like Crystal Light with extra Splenda (that is not a compliment, in case it's not clear). I read The Silent House which gave me the willies (that is a compliment). I read the The Deptford Trilogy because every year I have to read something by Robertson Davies and like it and then forget what it was about. I read the Donald Antrim triple-decker (one, two, three), and those were the greatest old new things I read this year. I re-read Good-bye to All That and Tender is the Night and Midnight's Children. I did not re-read The Tin Drum or Middlemarch or The Chronicles of Narnia or any Sherlock Holmes stories, and I really feel it in my bones that I did not re-read these things. I did not re-read The Corrections or Cleveland's History of the Modern Middle East, which I was going to re-read to remember what is the deal with Syria. I only re-read half of one movement of A Dance to the Music of Time (one-eighth, then). I still did not read Witz or Swamplandia! or The Instructions or A Visit from the Goon Squad or Skippy Dies or The Art of Fielding, or How Should a Person Be? even though I spent $30 on it at a book thing to seem like a team player. More distressing, I still did not really read Don Quixote or Das Kapital or War and Peace, or a thing by Stendahl or Ulysses. I did not read one really hard book this year, except one by Buket Uzuner, and that was just hard for me, and I didn't really read that either, just 20 pages. As usual, to compose my Year in Reading is to confront my failures. Resolved for 2013: more paper, less screen. More reading, more revelation. More from A Year in Reading 2012 Don't miss: A Year in Reading 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005 The good stuff: The Millions' Notable articles The motherlode: The Millions' Books and Reviews Like what you see? Learn about 5 insanely easy ways to Support The Millions, and follow The Millions on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr.
A Year in Reading: Keith Gessen
At the beginning of 2010 I was in Ukraine, and trying to understand what was going on there. Two contemporary historians, both dissidents, helped explain. Georgiy Kasianov writes in Ukrainian, Russian, and English; his history of post-independence Ukraine (in Russian) is a great and funny book that bravely resists the nationalist narrative pushed forward by the Ukraine-for-Ukrainians lobby. In English his edited volume, A Laboratory of Transnational History, is recommended. It includes an essay by John-Paul Himka, a Canadian historian of Ukrainian origin who has for a number of years kept up a lonely moral crusade against the nationalist elements of the Ukrainian diaspora in North America. You would think the margin for historical error in a territory and period as finite as Western Ukraine during the Second World War would be pretty thin; you'd be wrong. I tend to read books in spurts. After Ukraine, I read a number of dystopian novels for an article I was writing. The best were Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go and Houellebecq's The Possibility of an Island. I preferred the Houellebecq. In fact, though Elementary Particles is still his best book, this one is his funniest. "In order to pass the time I told him the story of the German who ate the other German whom he'd met on the internet." Very funny. At this point, having settled again on American soil, I decided to figure out what was going on with our foreign wars. I read Rory Stewart's amazing and funny book about walking through Afghanistan in the wake of the American defeat of the Taliban in late 2001 (The Places In Between), and then Megan Stack's Every Man in This Village Is a Liar, which begins with her entering Afghanistan a bit earlier, right on the heels of the American invasion, tagging along with an Afghan warlord who will eventually try to sneak into bed with her. Stack's book was so good that I could hardly believe it, so I read Dexter Filkins' Forever War just to check. It was also very good. Forever War has more bombs exploding; Every Man has more of a comparative sweep. At this point, almost without intending to (I was waiting for someone to give me their copy of Freedom), I read Ian Frazier's funny, epic, surprising Travels in Siberia. Then I read Freedom, which is as good as everyone says it is. Reading Frazier and Franzen back to back underscored, first, that they have quite similar names, and, second, the deeply Midwestern quality of Freedom. There's a great passage at the end of the Siberia book in which Frazier talks about how his father used to berate him, back in his Ohio childhood, for living such a sheltered existence and knowing nothing about the rest of the world. This is a uniquely American, perhaps American-suburban, prejudice--the idea that Ohio couldn't possibly be further away from, say, Siberia. What Frazier points out, in his quiet, uninsistent way, is that the center of the most economically powerful nation on earth can't pretend that it's far away from anywhere, much less one of the world's largest oil-producing regions, which is what Siberia is. It seems that a deep awareness of the truth of this--of the interconnection of the American suburbs and the rest of the world--is one of Franzen's important contributions to American fiction and American self-understanding over the past ten years. In June, my book of interviews about the financial crisis with a hedge fund manager was coming out, and I realized I still knew nothing about the financial crisis. I read as fast as I could to avoid humiliation. Many of the books were bad. Their authors had the difficulty of writing from another country--like the Ukrainian historian Kasianov, who writes partly for Russians--but in a language that the people in that other country (that is to say, us) didn't know. So they could either pretend that we knew it already, or treat us like idiots. They did a bit of both. The Michael Lewis books--his newest, The Big Short, and his oldest, Liar's Poker--stood out among all these for their clarity and wit, although I should add that I haven't yet read John Lanchester's I.O.U. or Yves Smith's ECONned, both of which are supposed to be good. When the HFM book came out, I did mostly manage to aovid humiliation--for example, by sleeping through a scheduled radio interview. But non-humiliation was not enough. I decided to get to the bottom of things by reading Capital. But I couldn't understand it. I began to read around Capital--David Harvey's Limits to Capital; Peter Singer's Marx; Immanuel Wallerstein's Historical Capitalism; Michael Harrington's The Twilight of Capitalism; Edmund Wilson's To the Finland Station. The only one I really got through (aside from the Wallerstein book, which is like 100 pages long because he uses no examples) is To the Finland Station. I'd inherited the notion somewhere or other that Wilson's book wasn't first-rate as intellectual or political history. This is untrue. Of all the secondary sources on Marx, it has been the most valuable to me. It will certainly always be the most entertaining. It gives a different kind of genealogy of Marx, through the French historians rather than the German idealists, and also it has a beautiful and sympathetic account of the relationship between Marx and Engels. Just a lovely book, almost as good as Parallel Lives. At around this time, about a month ago--and still stuck about a third of the way through the first volume of Capital--I concluded that I would never understand Marx's obsession with the concept of "price" until I went back to Adam Smith and the original formulation of the theory of price that Marx is taking issue with. So that is where you find me today, about a fifth of the way through the first volume of The Wealth of Nations. Maybe a quarter of the way. Other great books I happened to read that came out in 2010 were Elif Batuman's The Possessed; Sam Lipsyte's The Ask; and Zachary Mason's The Lost Books of the Odyssey. I recommend all three without reservation; they are instant classics. Another book I think everyone ought to read is Thomas Chatterton Williams's Losing My Cool. It's a complex, very honest, very entertaining memoir about a young man's education that has not received anything like the serious consideration and discussion it deserves. And a final book I recommend from 2010 is And the Heart Says Whatever, by my very witty girlfriend, Emily Gould. More from a Year in Reading 2010 Don't miss: A Year in Reading 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005 The good stuff: The Millions' Notable articles The motherlode: The Millions' Books and Reviews Like what you see? 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Ethical Vampires, Part I
Vampires figure the anxieties of their cultural moment. They come out at night—and during periods of social and political turmoil, and their habits and looks mutate to personify the fears of the age in which they appear. Bram Stoker's Dracula dramatized Victorian fears of sex as morally corrupting and fears of English culture as threatened by invading foreigners. The vampires of Anne Rice's Vampire Chronicles, published primarily in the 1980's, shared a certain kinship with the ruthless, amoral financier characters of the age, Gordon Gekko of Oliver Stone's Wall Street and Patrick Batemen of Bret Easton Ellis' American Psycho, but their most striking feature was their homosexuality. Rice's vampirism as blood-borne pathogen also came to seem a metaphor for AIDS—a taunting metaphor, since her beautiful men could not die. So what about our vampires—the vampires of Charlaine Harris' Sookie Stackhouse novels or those of Stephenie Meyer's ubiquitous Twilight? Our vampires seem a domesticated, morally evolved breed. Meyer's vampires have been defanged altogether (Meyer only agreed to sell the film rights with the caveat that the Cullens could not be depicted with fangs in any film version), while the vampires of Charlaine Harris' Sookie Stackhouse novels (better known as HBO's True Blood) have discretely retractable fangs. Both authors' vampires are committed to humane, sustainable diets. Indeed, if Michael Pollan wrote for vampires, he might recommend the diet devised by the vampires of Meyer's Twilight. The members of the Cullen household, the forward-thinking vampire "family" at the center of the series, forswear feeding on humans. "I don't want to be a monster," Edward Cullen, Meyer's teenage vampire hero explains to his human beloved, Bella Swan, when she asks him about his diet. Turning from the gruesome practices of most of the rest of the vampire community in Meyer's alternate version of contemporary America, the Cullens feed only on wild animals they hunt in the woods around their home on Washington's Olympic Peninsula. And even in this (by some standards) less murderous diet, they take a sustainable approach, carefully alternating their hunting grounds so as not to decimate the local populations of deer and cougars. Carlisle, the patriarch of the Cullen clan and the originator of what they refer to as their vampire "vegetarianism," goes even further in his determination to be good. Through hundreds of years of practicing this vegetarianism, Carlisle has perfected his self-control to such a degree that he remains seemingly unmoved in the presence of human blood. His control is so great that he can practice human medicine. Not only does he not kill human beings—he heals them and saves their lives. The vampires of Charlaine Harris' Sookie Stackhouse novels, which are also known as the Southern Vampire Mysteries and are the basis of Alan Ball's hit HBO series True Blood, share with Meyer's Twilight a kinder, gentler vampire whose physical beauty seems the outward sign of his moral improvement. Gone are the days of the repulsive and remorseless Count Dracula, with his hairy palms and rank breath, his insatiable hunger for blood. Like Twilight, Harris' series presents a morally enlightened vampire. Set in an alternate version of the contemporary American South, the Sookie novels depict a world in which vampires have declared themselves publicly, sought and won some civil rights, and live openly amongst humans. Their emancipation from the shadowy world of myth and legend is possible because a synthetic blood developed by the Japanese allows them to refrain from feeding on humans. Living only on bottled blood, however, doesn't satisfy like organic warm-from-the-body human blood. Fortunately for the vampires and humans who occupy the Sookieverse, Harris' mythology also revises the nature of the vampire bite. Unlike Meyer's vegetarian Cullens, Harris' vampires still feed on humans, but do so more considerately and in moderation. In the Sookie novels, being bitten by a vampire isn't normally lethal, nor does it turn one into a vampire. In fact, the vampire's bite, a quintessential symbol of sex (penetration, exchange of fluids), becomes pleasurable for human and vampire alike rather than damning or damaging: "I felt Bill's teeth against my neck, and I said "Yes!" I felt his fangs penetrate, but it was a small pain, an exciting pain," Sookie says of her first bite, given to her by the prosaically named vampire Bill Compton. ("I thought it might be Antoine, or Basil, or Langford!" Sookie responds, laughing, when Bill first tells her his name.) But the point of vampire Bill's prosaic name is that he's one of us—that vampires are people too. Harris' and Ball's versions of Sookie's world are full of such prosaic details of modern vampire life. Their vampires play Wii Golf, serve Fresca to guests, shop at the mall, wash their hair with Herbal Essence shampoo, wear Dockers, renovate their homes. For Ball and Harris, vampires are people too, both materially and morally. And while the melodramatic pitch of Twilight makes Edward and his kin seem like they couldn't possibly do such grubbily vulgar things as shopping or styling their hair, their artfully tousled locks and well-cut leather jackets tell another tale. These vampires, our vampires (whether we like it or not), do and feel human things: They attend high school, practice abstinence and medicine, tend bar, go to the prom, get married, create computer databases, lobby for civil rights. They cry, fall in love, feel guilty, worry about whether they have souls and what state those souls might be in. Which is why they've gone vegetarian—or at least Whole Foods sustainable. Our vegetarian vampires, I think, are afflicted with the same crises of conscience that we are as first-world twenty-first century humans. We eat too much, we shop too much, we use too much fuel, water, land; we mistreat the animals on which we depend for food and the other peoples whose labor produces for us the cheap abundant goods we have all grown so used to. The vampire's insatiable hunger for blood mirrors our insatiable hungers for food, wealth, property, and possessions. Contemporary vampire fiction mirrors our collective anxiety about our need for self-discipline and a return to a more humane approach to our fellow beings: Now, the vampire, the most appetitive and unrepentantly murderous of our culture's mythic archetypes, restrains himself in our popular fiction. He has become a "vegetarian" of sorts, the vampire version of a Whole Foods shopper, who prefers humanely raised meat, free range eggs, sustainably farmed produce. From the shimmering pâleur of the vampire radiates something new and hardly otherworldly: an aura of white liberal guilt. But being kinder to your food, whatever it might be, isn't the be all and end all of ethical living, nor does it mean you're not a vampire. Harris and Ball's versions of the Sookieverse acknowledge this: that even as we try mightily to live ethically, the dangerous, cruel, and illicit—the side of human character that the vampire has always represented—cannot be vanquished altogether. Vampire Bill, born and raised in the antebellum South, may be an attentive suitor and a perfect gentleman whom Sookie can take home to her grandmother, but he's also a self-professed murderer and his sexual appetite can turn terrifying. All of the characters in Sookie's world, both human and vampire, have this same moral ambivalence. Harris/Ball's vampire is not all bad, but their human, in turn, is not all good. The world of Meyer's Twilight, on the other hand, embraces Stoker's basically strict segregation of good and evil. The heroes and heroines of Twilight are all understood to be morally exemplary. Meyer often has Bella compare Edward's body and soul to that of an "angel" (and Stephenie Meyer doesn't offer a single sly wink to let you know that she knows it's all a bit over the top—which is really impressive in a way. I certainly couldn't get through 2000+ pages of treacly teenage melodrama without a single devious aside to my audience). So, in both Twilight and the Southern Vampire Mysteries, vampires do and feel human things--but a crucial philosophical difference between Harris' books (and Ball's series) and Meyer's remains. Harris insists, as Meyer does not, that people are vampires—that people do and feel vampiric things—rape, murder, illicit and subversive sexual desire, manipulation, betrayal. After all, the first vampires, the sadistic historical figures out of whose strange cruelties the idea of the vampire came, were human beings: the fifteenth-century Romanian prince Vlad Dracul (meaning "dragon" or "devil"), whose name Bram Stoker immortalized in Dracula, and Erzébet Báthory (known as the Beast of Csejthe), the sixteenth-century Hungarian countess sometimes referred to as the first female serial killer. Báthory tortured and killed hundreds of young serving girls and bathed in their blood, believing that the blood of virgins had powerful restorative and magical properties. Prince Vlad was known for torturing his enemies and citizens alike, often en masse—usually by impaling them on stakes. He liked to make public spectacles of these executions, sometimes eating meals while watching them. He was also, more mundanely, known for unscrupulous labor practices such as working his peasant laborers to death. Karl Marx refers to this exploitative cruelty of Vlad's in Capital and uses the figure of the vampire repeatedly to describe the behavior of the capitalist—though he never makes the connection between the vampire and his historical forebear (nor does Marx to Vlad by name; he refers to him "a Wallachian boyar," but the practices he describes are Vlad's). This basic connection between human monstrosity and the vampire is explicit in the Harris novels. Harris' vampires have gotten a little nicer, but her humans have picked up the slack. As her vampire characters limit their consumption of human blood, her human characters drink vampire blood in a tidy little economy of gore. Vampire blood heals humans with extraordinary speed, makes them more attractive, sharpens their senses, and enhances their libidos. It is the recreational drug of choice in Harris' fictional world. In the first two scenes of blood drinking in the first Sookie novel, Dead Until Dark, Harris reverses the traditional roles of human and vampire: vampire becomes victim, human becomes blood drinker. In the first, an unsavory trailer trash couple, the Ratrays, begin draining the vampire Bill Compton using needles and medical tubing. They plan to sell his blood as a recreational drug. In the second scene of blood taking, human Sookie, who has been beaten almost to death by the Ratrays for preventing their attempted draining/murder, drinks vampire Bill's blood at his insistence. At first, Sookie gags on the blood, but as she forces herself to swallow, knowing it's her only chance of survival, she begins to enjoy it: "Suddenly, the blood tasted good, salty, the stuff of life . . . my hand clamped the vampire's wrist to my mouth. I felt better with every swallow." This human taste for blood becomes the emblem of other vampiric traits. Harris' and Ball's human characters can be arrogant, chilly, and race-proud: murderers, rapists, self-righteous hate mongers, child molesters. Harris' vampires may inevitably have a detached, cool demeanor, an unnerving lack of human emotional response, a disregard for laws and a disdain for human lives, but on balance the people in her books are little better. Her heroine's most potentially devastating encounters come more often at the hands of humans, rather than vampires. Sookie's great uncle molests her as a child; a local man revolted by relationships between human women and vampires attempts to kill her when she starts dating vampire Bill; an anti-vampire church called The Fellowship of the Sun blows up a hotel during a massive vampire conference killing scores of humans and vampires and nearly killing Sookie. Alan Ball's version of the Sookieverse also inverts the traditional structure of the vampire genre (vampires = bad; humans = good) to expose human moral failings, cruelties, abuses of power. In one of True Blood's most socially canny plots, a young woman addicted to vampire blood coerces her boyfriend into kidnapping a gentle, paunchy middle-aged vampire. They tie him up with silver chains and keep him in the basement, thereby assuring themselves of an unlimited supply of V or V-juice, as vampire blood is called in Ball's series. The vampire starves and becomes weakened in his captivity and his hunger causes him excruciating pain. He senses that his female captor is going to kill him and confronts her about it, as she's milking blood from his tender, weakened arm. She punches him savagely and commands him angrily: "Don't you dare get morally superior on me." She tells him that she gave up a full scholarship to Vassar to work in an impoverished village in Guatamala, helping to bring clean water to the village. She continues, "I am an organic vegan and my carbon footprint is miniscule 'cause I know that ultimately we're all just a single living being. But you are not." The scene indicts Whole Foods piety as morally insufficient—as a frail ethical blind that can obscure and justify monstrous selfishness and cruelty. By reversing the roles of human and vampire, turning the human into the torturer, the scene suggests that we humans are the vampires now—that we have always been. For Ball and Harris, the essence of the vampire is a ruthless, violent selfishness that characterizes fanged and unfanged characters—humans and vampires—alike. The Sookie Stackhouse novels and True Blood continually pose the question, "Who's the vampire now?" They repeatedly refuse easy distinctions between good and bad, right and wrong, vampire and human. In another such equivocal scene, an ancient vampire saves Sookie from an aspiring human rapist. This vampire, it turns out, believes himself damned and intends to destroy himself by walking out into daylight (where the sun's rays will burn him to death). "We take the blood of innocents," he explains, when Sookie asks why he thinks himself an abomination. She counters his claim with the question, "Who is innocent?" He says simply, "children"—the vampire fed exclusively on children for centuries. But Sookie, in gratefulness for his kindness, still decides to bear witness to his self-destruction, a decision that the vampire doesn't understand. "I am an evil creature," he tells her. (A confession that might seem more noble and poignant in light of the Catholic Church's failures this week to take such responsibility for crimes against children.) "But you did a good thing, saving me," Sookie responds. To her own surprise, she cries when the vampire steps into sunlight and begins to disintegrate. Meyer's fiction, on the other hand, scrupulously avoids such subtle moral shading, favoring instead the stark good/evil duality of Victorian vampire fiction—more on this in Part II.


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Yoga is a low-impact activity designed to increase flexibility, balance, and coordination with poses.
Yoga is a low-impact activity designed to increase flexibility, balance, and coordination with poses. Wear comfortable clothing and please bring a yoga mat or towel for comfort. A limited number of mats will be provided. Registration is not required.
Participants must sign a waiver each class, and anyone under 18 must have parent/guardian consent and signature.
Financial assistance for this special project is made possible with Federal funds from the Institute of Museum and Library Services administered through the Health Literacy Grant by Oklahoma Department of Libraries.
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MFN Staff
The Military Family Network News, February 22, 2008
You are stationed in Belgium and you are shopping for the perfect gift for you loved one online. You find that perfect gift and go through the process of filling out the order form and get to the address portion only to have your computer tell you that this store does not ship to AFO/FPO (Air/Army Post Office or Fleet Post Office) locations. You start the search all over again and test the order form to see if they ship to AFO/FPO addresses. Some stores online will have information on AFO/FPO addresses before hand and many stores do not.
Shopping-Bargains.com, now starting their tenth year in business, has added a great feature for military families that will help military families in showing them which stores offer AFO/FPO shipping before they begin to shop. Our new military-friendly feature was designed to assist military personnel and their families shop from online stores that ship beyond our national borders via AFO/FPO (Air/Army Post Office or Fleet Post Office) or military shipping. We wanted to make it easy for our military customers to tell at-a-glance if a store offered AFO/FPO shipping. said Mike Allen, president of Shopping-Bargains.com
The Military Family Network has been in partnership with Shopping-Bargains.com since 2004 in helping military families get the best deals and coupon offers.
Mike has supported The Military Family Networks mission and has helped many military families with information on how to do some smart shopping. MFN has just released its resource guide Your Military Family Network and we were honored to have Mike contribute a chapter on finding bargains online. said Luis Trevino V.P. of Media and Communications.
Since some stores offer AFO/FPO shipping and some do not it can be frustrating to fill an online shopping cart only to find out during checkout that you will have to look elsewhere since they dont ship to military addresses outside the country. Thus we added a simple information pane with this information.
This information pane (see example HERE) resides in an upper right hand section on each stores main page the page that contains all that stores coupons and deals.
Heres how it works. If the store offers AFO/FPO shipping, a green Yes will appear. If not, a red No will be displayed. For stores and service providers that dont ship anything (like Symantec with software downloads only) or for those few which with we have incomplete information in our database, nothing will be displayed.
Shopping-Bargains.com also added another new feature designed to enhance shopper trust. Mike stated Since we are beginning our 10th year of operation this month, we felt it would be helpful to show the year a store or service provider was first listed on Shopping-Bargains.com. Since we try to list only reputable and trusted entities and monitor customer feedback regarding them, it is helpful to know how long a store has been in business and listed with us. This information is now clearly visible for all our customers to review.
So with all this in mind, Shopping-Bargains.com invites you to try out these new features and wants to know what you think.


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Nicolai Ouroussoff writes:
In the early 1990s the architect Lebbeus Woods, left, produced a series of dark and moody renderings that made him a cult figure among students and academics. While most of his friends and colleagues have abandoned their imaginary cities to chase lucrative commissions, Mr. Woods has shown little interest in building.
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December 19, 2011 17:18 ET
TORONTO, ONTARIO--(Marketwire - Dec. 19, 2011) - Crocodile Gold Corp. (TSX:CRK)(OTCQX:CROCF)(FRANKFURT:XGC) ("Crocodile Gold" or the "Company") announced that its Board of Directors has adopted a limited duration Shareholder Rights Plan (the "Rights Plan"). The Rights Plan will expire at 5:00 p.m. (Toronto time) on February 29, 2012. The Rights Plan is intended to ensure that in the context of the unsolicited take-over proposal for Crocodile Gold common shares announced by Luxor Capital Group, LP ("Luxor"), the Board has sufficient time to identify, develop and negotiate alternatives to maximize shareholder value. The Rights Plan also seeks to ensure the fair treatment of shareholders and to provide them with adequate time to properly assess any potential take-over bid without undue pressure.
The Board has authorized the issuance of one right in respect of each common share of the Company outstanding at 5:00 p.m. (Toronto time) on December 15, 2011 and each share issued thereafter. The rights will become exercisable if a person, together with its affiliates, associates and joint actors, acquires or announces an intention to acquire beneficial ownership of common shares which, when aggregated with its current holdings, total 20% or more of the outstanding common shares of the Company (determined in the manner set out in the Rights Plan). Following the acquisition of 20% or more of the outstanding common shares, each right held by a person other than the acquiring person and its affiliates, associates and joint actors would, upon exercise, entitle the holder to purchase common shares at a substantial discount to the market price of the common shares at that time.
The Board has the discretion to defer the time at which the rights become exercisable (which it has done in respect of the proposed Luxor offer) and to waive the application of the Rights Plan if the Board determines it is in the best interests of the Company to do so.
The Rights Plan permits the acquisition of control of Crocodile Gold through a "permitted bid", a "competing permitted bid" or a negotiated transaction. A permitted bid is one that, among other things, is made to all holders of common shares for all of their shares, is open for a minimum of 60 days and is subject to an irrevocable minimum tender condition of at least 50% of the common shares held by independent shareholders.
Although the Rights Plan is effective immediately, it remains subject to acceptance by the Toronto Stock Exchange. A copy of the Rights Plan will be available under the Company's profile at www.sedar.com.
About Crocodile Gold
Crocodile Gold is a Canadian company with operating gold mines in the Northern Territory of Australia and a land position of over 3,300 square kilometres. Crocodile Gold is currently mining from the Mottrams and Princess Louise open pit mines and is developing the Cosmo underground mine. Ore is processed at the 2.4 million tonne per year Union Reefs Mill. Crocodile Gold has 3.175 million ounces of National Instrument 43-101 compliant measured and indicated mineral resources (51.85 million tonnes at an average grade of 1.9 g/t gold) and 2.14 million ounces of inferred mineral resources (36.35 million tonnes at an average grade of 1.8 g/t gold). The Company has an exploration program in place with a main focus on the Union Reefs Project, the Cosmo Mine and the Maud Creek Deposit.
Qualified Person
Bill Nielsen, P. Geo of Crocodile Gold is a "qualified person" as such term is defined in National Instrument 43-101 and has reviewed and approved the technical information and data included in this press release.
Cautionary Note
Certain information set forth in this press release contains "forward-looking statements", and "forward-looking information" under applicable securities laws. Except for statements of historical fact, certain information contained herein constitutes forward-looking statements which include management's assessment of Crocodile Gold's future plans, the outcome of the proposed bid and the board and Special Committee's recommendations regarding the bid, the value of the Company's common shares, operations and mineral resource estimates and are based on Crocodile Gold's current internal expectations, estimates, projections, assumptions and beliefs, which may prove to be incorrect. Some of the forward-looking statements may be identified by words such as "expects" "anticipates", "believes", "projects", "plans", and similar expressions. These statements are not guarantees of future performance and undue reliance should not be placed on them. Such forward-looking statements necessarily involve known and unknown risks and uncertainties, which may cause Crocodile Gold's actual performance and financial results in future periods to differ materially from any projections of future performance or results expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements. These risks and uncertainties include, but are not limited to: liabilities inherent in mine development and production; geological, mining and processing technical problems; Crocodile Gold's inability to obtain required mine licenses, mine permits and regulatory approvals required in connection with mining and mineral processing operations; competition for, among other things, capital, acquisitions of reserves, undeveloped lands and skilled personnel; incorrect assessments of the value of acquisitions; changes in commodity prices and exchange rates; currency and interest rate fluctuations; various events which could disrupt operations and/or the transportation of mineral products, including labour stoppages and severe weather conditions; the demand for and availability of rail, port and other transportation services; the ability to secure adequate financing and management's ability to anticipate and manage the foregoing factors and risks. There can be no assurance that forward-looking statements will prove to be accurate, as actual results and future events could differ materially from those anticipated in such statements. Crocodile Gold undertakes no obligation to update forward-looking statements if circumstances or management's estimates or opinions should change except as required by applicable securities laws. The reader is cautioned not to place undue reliance on forward-looking statements.
Crocodile Gold Corp.Rob HopkinsManager, Investor firstname.lastname@example.com
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By Jodie Lynn
As I reflect on previous experiences, this is what I see,
A bagel and bowl of oatmeal breakfast made just for me.
The bagel was a little hard and the oatmeal turned out the same,
However, oh what sad looks there would be if I didn't eat -- and what a shame.
So as I got big hugs and tried to chew and swallow,
My husband noticed the signal that a glass of juice needed to follow.
He hurried down the stairs and upon his return, it was plain to see,
The orange juice that had been made was as weak as could be.
I gave a little smile as I flew into the bathroom murmuring I'd be right back,
What happened next would be classified as a costly choking attack.
As I was pouring out the juice and with water filling up,
I thought I heard a distinctive sound of a pup.
My teeth were quickly brushed,
My hair haphazardly combed,
I peeked out the window and a puppy I did see roam.
The kids were yelling for me to come out,
In addition, I could see the youngest begin to pout.
I was taken to a chair and told to stay put,
"Please don't move," said my oldest, "not even one foot!"
Next on the agenda I was given cards that were made at home with glue, crayons, and lots of glitter too; along with a message inside that said, "I love you."
They are much more special than the store bought kind,
A little oatmeal slightly attached on the outside made them really shine!
While tears down my cheeks did roll,
A big sigh of relief came from my soul.
The dog I had seen earlier must have surely been gone by now,
Moreover, was I ever glad -- wait, I hear a bow-wow!
"Hey, don't get up, there's one more surprise!" the two of them together yelled.
I was told to close my eyes and not to open even one -- "NO MATTER WHAT!"
And upon hearing a whistle,
The dog they had wanted - I knew I had got!
As I was instructed to open my eyes,
I looked towards my husband and he looked towards me,
I knew there was only one response that would be right,
I smiled at my kids and hugged the pup tight!
She helped herself to a sticky half-eaten bagel as if it was steak,
And with the kids laughing and the doorbell ringing,
I knew she must not have been a mistake.
While she is still with us to this day and has brought us great joy,
The vet bills can be high and so is the price of a dog toy.
As I've contemplated the previous year and this time have tried to suggest my gifts in a way, I can't help but wonder - what's in store for this Mother's Day?
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