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Story highlights
- Colorado's secession referendum highlights state's urban-rural divide
- Gun control law, renewable energy bill among the issues driving vote
- 10 counties in northeastern corner and 1 in northwest will decide Tuesday
- Secession unlikely to get required OK from state legislature, U.S. Congress
Voters in 11 rural counties in northern Colorado will go the polls Tuesday to decide whether they want to continue living in the 137-year-old state or break off and form their own.
Even if a majority of voters in the referendum approve secession, breaking away would be a daunting, perhaps nigh-on-impossible path. A new state would require approval first in the Colorado legislature and then from the U.S. Congress, as laid out by Article IV, Section 3 of the Constitution.
But then, that's not the point.
The point, says Sean Conway, is to send a message "to the governor. Send a message to our legislators," said the commissioner of Weld County, the most populous of the 11 counties seeking to secede.
"We're tired of being ignored, we're tired of being politically disenfranchised, and if you don't wake up and you don't start to change things, you're going to see more movements like this begin to take a more serious face and move towards creating our own political entity that we believe will protect our very way of life and our economy."
Few in Colorado expect the secession movement to succeed. But for many in the 11 counties -- 10 in the northeast and one in the northwest that would join Wyoming -- it seems the only viable option for having their voices heard in a Democratic-controlled state legislature that they feel puts the concerns of urban residents ahead of the concerns of those in rural areas.
In part, rural Coloradans feel they weren't heard when the state passed a stringent gun control measure, a law that lead to the successful recall of two of the state's most powerful Democratic legislators.
But the straw that really broke the camel's back, according to Conway, was an energy bill that raised the amount of electricity that must come from renewable sources. Conway argues the law unfairly favored urban communities while putting a much harsher, more expensive burden on those in rural areas.
"We're not renewable-energy unfriendly out here in rural Colorado," Conway said. "But when you start imposing mandates different on other folks than yourself, that's the definition of tyranny, and I think it's kind of where this whole issue started to manifest itself."
No governor wants to preside over a breakup of his or her state, and Gov. John Hickenlooper is no exception.
"Rural communities are hurting, but it's not because of background checks on guns sales, civil unions for gay people or expanded renewable energy. In fact, these are popular proposals across communities large and small. The same is true of our efforts to protect water for agricultural uses, expand broadband into rural areas, and promote tourism and economic diversity across the state," the Democratic governor said in a statement.
"There may be a political agenda behind secession I don't get, because when I think of Colorado, it means all of our diverse communities and people. I can't imagine Colorado being Colorado without the Eastern Plains. If this talk of a 51st state is about politics designed to divide us, it is destructive. But if it is about sending a message, then I see our responsibility to lean in and do a better job of listening."
When it comes to the counties considering secession, politics run hand in hand with geography. When Seth Masket, a political science professor at the University of Denver did the math, he realized that had the 11 counties been a state of their own in the 2012 elections, that state would have been the second most Republican of all, behind only Utah. Yet Colorado overall went to President Barack Obama, earning 51% of the vote compared to Mitt Romney's 46%.
"You see this going on in a lot of states, that increasingly you have one-party control in a lot of state governments. Right now there are 43 states where one party is in control of both chambers of the state legislature," Masket said.
"That's actually the highest number since the 1950s, and the minority party is looking for ways to stop that in different places."
But Jeffrey Hare says secession isn't about politics.
"It's about having a government that is responsive to the needs of its communities, and what we've seen at the state level is an urban-based legislature forced their will against rural Colorado time and time again," said the organizer of The 51st State Initiative. "We think this is a healthy response to this urban-versus-rural divide that's not just the case in Colorado. It's really throughout the country."
Secession is not the only item on Colorado's referendum ballot Tuesday. While only the 11 northern counties will be voting on breaking away from the state, all the Centennial State will be voting on a school-funding bill and on raising new taxes for marijuana, which was recently legalized.
A new state from a portion of the old is not unprecedented, Conway said. Of the 50 states, five were once part of another: Tennessee, West Virginia, Kentucky, Maine and Vermont. Also worth noting: No state has broken away since West Virginia in 1863 and no state has technically seceded since North Carolina in 1861.
Not everyone in Weld County agrees with Conway and Hare. District Attorney Ken Buck says he won't be voting for the non-binding measure, even if he understands it.
"It's not the best strategy. The best strategy for dealing with the political issues is through the political system," said the U.S. Senate candidate.
Working through the system hasn't worked out for a lot of conservative causes lately.
"I think what's happening is that things are moving so fast the people don't feel included in the process. We've legalized marijuana. We've legalized civil unions. We've legalized a lot of things very quickly," Buck said. "That's a lot of change for people to accept."


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| By Marcy Gordon
(MSN) WASHINGTON — The Justice Department and JPMorgan Chase & Co. have reached agreement on all issues in a $13 billion settlement of a civil inquiry into the company's sales of low-quality mortgage-backed securities that collapsed in value in the financial crisis, a person close to the talks said late Monday.
The person said the documents spelling out the agreement could be signed as early as Tuesday.
The person spoke on condition of anonymity because the settlement has yet to be finalized.
Another person familiar with the talks, also speaking only on condition of anonymity, said the two sides were "very close" to a final agreement.
The deal is the largest ever reached between the government and a corporation. It eclipses the record $4 billion levied on oil giant BP in January in the worst offshore oil spill in U.S. history.
The nation's biggest bank will pay more than $6 billion to compensate investors, pay $4 billion to help struggling homeowners and pay the remainder as a fine.
The final issue — one that was not resolved until Monday — revolved around the $4 billion to compensate consumers. According to the first person close to the talks, some $1.5 billion will be a write-down to reduce the principal of homeowner loans, $300 million will enable homeowners to pay less now on their mortgages and the remainder of the $4 billion will go toward reducing mortgage interest rates, originating new loans and helping revive blighted properties in some of the hardest hit areas of the housing crisis such as Detroit. An independent monitor will be appointed to oversee the assistance to homeowners.
The deal is the latest chapter in the burst of the housing bubble in 2007 when bundles of mortgages sold by JPMorgan and other financial institutions left investors with billions of dollars in losses.
JPMorgan has said that most of its mortgage-backed securities came from Bear Stearns Cos. and Washington Mutual Inc., troubled companies that JPMorgan acquired in 2008.
Still to come is a decision on whether the Justice Department will file criminal charges against JPMorgan. An investigation is under way by the U.S. Attorney's office in Sacramento, Calif.
As part of the $6 billion to investors, $4 billion will resolve government claims that JPMorgan misled mortgage finance giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac about risky mortgage securities the bank sold them before the housing market crashed. That part of the deal was announced on Oct. 25. Fannie and Freddie were bailed out by the government during the crisis and are under federal control.
The Justice Department and the banks reached a tentative settlement in mid-October on the $13 billion, but the negotiations hit a stumbling block that has now been resolved. As part of any settlement, JPMorgan wanted to be able to collect money from a receivership involving Washington Mutual Inc., the biggest U.S. savings and loan. The S&L failed and was purchased by JPMorgan. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., which maintains stability and public confidence in the banking system, said JPMorgan should be responsible for any liabilities regarding the Washington Mutual acquisition.
The $13 billion JPMorgan settlement amount is only about half of its record 2012 net income of $21.3 billion, or $5.20 a share, which made it one of the most profitable U.S. banks last year.
Mounting legal costs from government proceedings pushed JPMorgan to a rare loss in this year's third quarter, the first under CEO Jamie Dimon's leadership. The bank reported Oct. 11 that it set aside $9.2 billion in the July-September quarter to cover the string of legal cases against the bank. JPMorgan said it has placed $23 billion in reserve to cover potential legal costs.
On Nov. 15, the company announced it had reached a $4.5 billion settlement with 21 major institutional investors over mortgage-backed securities issued by JPMorgan and Bear Stearns between 2005 and 2008. The investors, which include Goldman Sachs, said the bank deceived them about the quality of high-risk mortgage securities.
JPMorgan has faced other issues as well.
—In September, the company agreed to pay $920 million and to admit that it failed to oversee trading that led to a $6 billion loss last year in its London operation. In a separate case, the bank agreed to pay a $100 million penalty and admitted that its traders acted "recklessly" with the London trades. The Justice Department is still pursuing a criminal investigation of the trading loss and a possible cover-up at the bank.
—JPMorgan says it is responding to investigations by the Justice Department and other regulators in litigation over the Bernard Madoff Ponzi scheme, one of history's biggest frauds. JPMorgan has previously faced accusations that it and other banks ignored signs that Madoff was a con artist.
—The bank agreed to pay $410 million to settle allegations by federal energy regulators that it used improper bidding strategies to manipulate electricity prices in California and the Midwest over a two-year period.
—JPMorgan is one of several big international banks that have revealed they are subjects of an investigation into possible manipulation of currency trades.
Other banks have run into trouble too.
In August, the Justice Department accused Bank of America Corp., the second-largest U.S. bank, of civil fraud in failing to disclose risks and misleading investors in its sale of $850 million in mortgage bonds in 2008. The Securities and Exchange Commission filed a related lawsuit. The government estimates that investors lost more than $100 million. Bank of America disputes the allegations.
Goldman Sachs, Citigroup and other big banks — as well as JPMorgan — have been accused by the SEC of abuses in sales of securities linked to mortgages in the years leading up to the crisis. Together they have paid hundreds of millions in penalties to settle civil charges brought by the SEC, which accused them of deceiving investors about the quality of the bonds they sold. JPMorgan settled SEC charges in June 2011 by agreeing to pay $153.6 million and reached another such agreement for $296.9 million last November.
Read more: http://news.msn.com/us/jpmorgan-us-government-to-settle-for-dollar13b-source

subset: commoncrawl


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The younger Weaver, who has been sneakily good out for the better part of five seasons out in Anaheim, seems to finally be putting it into overdrive. His shutout last night moves him to 6-0 on the season, rarefied air for April.
We know the season started early, and we know it's generally unadvisable to crow about any kinds of stats in April, but: wow. He's scattered less than a base runner an inning over six overpowering starts, pitching into at least the seventh inning in all of them.
This is precisely the time in his career that Cliff Lee found another gear: near side of 30, couple years left on the contract. Big League Stew rightfully wonders who's going to open up their checkbooks after next season.
With all the talk about how it's another Year of the Pitcher, is Jered Weaver going to be the face of it?
Or maybe it'll be Ian Kennedy. April stats, people, April stats.


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"What are you going to do with those? Decoration?" said the cashier as she eyed my purchase dubiously and weighed the bag. "Not for eating, right?"
I was in one of those small and chi chi produce shops where every gleaming pristine piece of fruit is placed just so, where tomatoes are always in season, and where you can pay a king's ransom for strawberries the size of golf balls. The kind of place the Brits would call a greengrocer and what I usually call a bit of a swindle.
There is one advantage to such a store however and it's this; they'll bring in the oddities that mainstream grocers won't. Three types of radicchio flown in from Treviso; fresh porcini mushrooms; wild blueberries, tiny and sweet. Those treasures are seasonal and all the more precious because of it; better buy some today, because next week they may be gone.
I had been on the hunt for one such prize and I wasn't disappointed. There, almost hidden from view, a bushel, filled to brim with tiny colourful Lady apples.
I knew exactly what I was going to do with these little beauties: give them an autumnal spin in the oven and then stuff them with herbed goat cheese. A perfect one bite seasonal sensation. Yes, they were for eating. But they sure look pretty too.
Baked Lady Apples Stuffed with Herbed Goat Cheese
makes 12
1 dozen Lady apples
¼-½ maple syrup
½-¾ c softened plain goat cheese
2-3 sprigs fresh thyme
1 large sprig fresh rosemary; more for garnish
1 1. Preheat the oven to 350˚F.
3 3. Place the apples, cut side up, and the tops, cut side down, on a large baking sheet. Bake for 20-30 minutes, or until the apples are softened but not mushy. The tops may be ready more quickly; if so, take them out and set them aside to cool while the apples continue to bake.
4 4. While the apples are baking, prepare the goat cheese filling. Chop the herbs finely and mix them into the cheese, incorporating fully.
5 5. When the apples are done, let them cool for 10 minutes. Fill each cavity with a generous spoonful of goat cheese, top each apple with a "lid" and finish off with a decorative sprig of rosemary in each apple. The apples can be made ahead and stuffed, covered and refrigerated. Bring to room temperature before serving.


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MOSCOW, March 4 (Reuters) - Russia said it had successfully test-fired an Intercontinental Ballistic Missile (ICBM) on Tuesday, with tensions high over its seizure of control in the Crimea and its threat to send more forces to its neighbour Ukraine.
The Strategic Rocket Forces launched an RS-12M Topol missile from the southerly Astrakhan region near the Caspian Sea and the dummy warhead hit its target at a proving ground in Kazakhstan, the state-run news agency RIA cited Defence Ministry spokesman Igor Yegorov as saying.
(Writing by Steve Gutterman; Editing by Kevin Liffey)
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.


text: PUBLIC LAWS-CH. 80-MAY 19, 1947 May 19, 1947 [H. R . 1098] [Public Law 74] Shoshone and Arap- abo Tribes, Wind River Reservation. Division of trust funds. Outstanding loans. Establishment of trust fund accounts. Interest. Division of future revenues. Availability of trust funds. Per capita pay- ments. Clailms against pay- ments. 25 U.S . C. 386a. [CHAPTER 80] AN ACT To authorize the segregation and expenditure of trust funds held in joint owner- ship by the Shoshone and Arapaho Tribes of the Wind River Reservation. Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, That the Secretary of the Interior is hereby authorized and directed to divide the trust funds on deposit in the Treasury of the United States to the joint credit of the Shoshone and Arapaho Tribes of the Wind River Reservation, Wyoming, including the unexpended balance of the treaty funds arising under section 12 of the Act of June 7, 1897 (30 Stat. 93), between the Shoshone Tribe and the Arapaho Tribe, crediting one- half of the total amount in the principal account to a principal trust fund account and one-half of the total amount in the interest account to an interest trust fund account for each tribe: Provided, That in dividing the funds there shall be taken into consideration in deter- mining the amount to be credited to each tribe the outstanding loans made from joint trust funds to the Indians of each tribe. SEC. 2. The Comptroller of the United States, upon request of the Secretary of the Interior, is authorized and directed to establish a trust fund account for each tribe and the Secretary of the Treasury shall make such transfer of funds on the books of his department as may be necessary to effect the purpose of section 1 of this Act: Pro- ,ided, That interest shall accrue on the principal fund only, at the rate of 4 per centum per annum, and shall be credited to the interest trust fund accounts established by this section: Provided further, That all future revenues derived from the Wind River Reservation under existing law shall be divided in accordance with section 1 of this Act and credited to the principal trust fund accounts established herein. SEC. 3 . Notwithstanding any other provision of existing law, the trust funds credited to the Shoshone Tribe and the Arapaho Tribe, respectively, under the provisions of this Act shall be available for expenditure or for advance to the tribe for such purposes as may be requested by the tribal council and approved by the Secretary of the Interior or such official as may be designated by him: Provided, That two-thirds of said trust funds as initially established, and two-thirds of all sums credited thereto during a period of five years from and after the enactment of this Act, shall be paid on the first day of Sep- tember and the first day of March each year, per capita, to the indi- vidual members of said tribes, and any sums distributed per capita out of the funds described in section 1 of this Act on or after April 1, 1947, shall be taken into consideration in determining the sums to be distributed under this proviso to the same effect as if this Act had been in force on and after April 1, 1947: Provided further, That said per capita payments shall not be subject to any lien or claim of any nature against any of the members of said tribes unless the tribal council of such member shall consent thereto in writing, except as to reimburs- able Treasury loans made to individual members of either tribe which may be due to the United States, and except as to irrigation charges owed by individual Indians to the United States, but this latter excep- tion shall not become operative until a report upon irrigation charges within the Wind River Irrigation Project has been made and becomes effective in accordance with the Act of July 1. 1932 (ch. 369, 47 Stat. 564). Approved May 19, 1947. 102 [61 STAT.


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|Authored By: California Dried Plum Board
|So moist and without all the fat.
|Diet Type: Vegetarian
|Serves: 12
|Cooking Time: Over one hour
|Heat oven to 350 degrees. Lightly coat 8 1/2 x 4 1/2 inch loaf pan with cooking spray; set aside. In small saucepan, bring dried plums, prune juice and water to a boil. Transfer dried plum mixture to food processor or blender; process until smooth. Stir in orange peel and set aside. In large bowl, combine wheat germ, flours, brown sugar, baking powder, baking soda and salt; stir to blend thoroughly. Mix in dried plum mixture, egg whites and pecans until thoroughly blended. Spread batter in pan; bake in center of oven about 50 minutes or until wooden pick inserted in center comes out clean. Cool in pan 10 minutes. Turn onto rack to cool completely.
|Printable Version
|E-mail a Friend


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You can order the selected products from one of the following suppliers. When you have selected a supplier, you will either be redirected straight to the supplier's webshop or the order will be e-mailed to the supplier.
Radiant House 2 Davis Road GB KT9 1TT Chessington (UK) Tel.: +44 2083 35 5577 E-mail: Web: www.stuff-uk.net/m-1873-sandberg.aspx


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This is an intro to rooting your Sprint Evo 4G or ANY Android device for that matter. I want everyone knows what root is and why you might need it. Whether you have a G1, Mytouch 3G, Slide, or Nexus One then you've probably heard about rooting or jailbreaking your phone and I just want to make sure you know what it all means. As a result, hopefully there will be a few more educated users out there.
HTC EVO simple root for Windows users
Warning: Hack at your own risk. Watch the videos below if this is your first attempt. Before you start, backup all the files from your SD card and delete/format your SD card.
First you need to download and install Microsoft .NET Framework on your PC: http://download.microsoft.com/download/1/B/E/1BE39E79-7E39-46A3-96FF-047F95396215/dotNetFx40_Full_setup.exe
Then install HTC Sync on your PC:http://member.america.htc.com/download/Driver/HTC%20EVO%20(Sprint)/HTC_Sync_2.0.40.exe
Then download the OTA Simple Root.zip and unzip: http://myevo4g.net/simple/?file_id=1
Open the OTA Simple Root folder and once inside, open the OTA Simple Root application program then click the buttons starting from Step 1-4 and FOLLOW THE ONSCREEN DIRECTIONS. If at anytime something goes wrong in any of the steps, don't panic. Just delete/format your SD car and start over from Step 1.
After you're done with Step 4, open the menu and click "Extras" then "Flash Recovery". Then select the Recovery of your choice.
After you've completed all the steps and have loaded a custom ROM, remove all of the files no longer needed on your sd card by clicking "Extras" then "Clean Root-Files." If that doesn't work, delete all the files manually (including PC36IMG file).
To boot into Recovery on your own, power down your phone then press and hold the power and volume down buttons until you get to the screen with the skating Androids.
Once you're in Hboot, wait for a second (its gonna scan for the PC36IMG file again so hopefully you deleted it) then use the Volume buttons on your phone to select RECOVERY and use the power button to select it.
You should now be in the custom recovery and from here you can wipe, wipe cache, wipe dalvik cache, and flash any custom ROM of your choosing.
Sending your phone back for warranty or return? Get back to stock here: http://theunlockr.com/2010/06/14/how-to-unroot-the-htc-evo/


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I just fell in love with a new cosmetic company, LUSH FRESH HANDMADE COSMETICS that makes the most luscious hand-made products.
I had adopted a cat around Thanksgiving that had been on kitty death row. I have tamed him down, but he seems to have taken over my bathtub. I really miss my relaxing bath time, so with my new Blue Skies and Fluffy White Clouds in Hand I was reclaiming my bathtub.
My cat, Supercat saw the bubbles floating around me and was fascinated and stood by the end of the tub in awe and even stuck his foot in. He got some bubbles on his head and I laughed so hard. I think my new relaxing Bubble Bar calmed the Savage Beast. I floated away in a blue sea of serene patchouli and popped the Frankinsense bubbles and let my worries slip into oblivion. Ahh peace and what a wonderful sleep I fell into.
I also am thrilled with the Coconut Deodorant Powder. See the video. It's the only deodorant that smells like coconut and you just rub it on wet skin under you arms or wherever you want to smell fresh and coconutty and tropical. Goes great with with Pineapple Grunt soap if you like Pina Coladas.
For more Fun and Fabulous Lush Products go to: http://www.lushusa.com
For more on author, Lori Peters go to: boxmonthly.com


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3 May 2020 -
Indicative Rate * AU$80 to AU$110
Pristine white beaches. Crystal clear waters. A breathtaking mountainous interior. Hamilton Island is best known as a place to relax. But it is also the perfect place to push yourself in paradise.
The Hamilton Island Endurance Series spans four endurance events from May through to November each year. The Hamilton Island Hilly Half Marathon, Great Whitehaven Beach Run, Hamilton Island Triathlon, Junior Triathlon and splash'n Dash and Whitehaven Beach Ocean Swim will test athletes on every level. Do them all or just do one. Race Hard. Recover Harder.
The challenging 21kilometre route takes participants along roads, fire trails and walking tracks through Hamilton Island's undulating interior. There's a race for everyone; the marathon for the fearless, a half marathon, a three by seven kilometre relay and three different distance options for the kids. This is a perfect challenge for the whole family.
|Cost AUD
|Valid From
|$80 - $110
|AUD110 per individual - Hilly Marathon participant. AUD80 per individual participant - Hilly Half participant. AUD120 per team (two person team). AUD180 per team (three person team).
Note: Information on listed products and services are provided by the operator and were correct at the time of publishing. Rates are indicative based on the minimum and maximum available prices of products and services. Please visit the operator's website for further information. All prices quoted are in Australian dollars (AUD).


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What sort of person writes fiction about the past? It is helpful to be acquainted with violence, because the past is violent. It is necessary to know that the people who live there are not the same as people now. It is necessary to understand that the dead are real, and have power over the living. It is helpful to have encountered the dead firsthand, in the form of ghosts.
The writer's relationship with a historical character is in some ways less intimate than with a fictional one: the historical character is elusive and far away, so there is more distance between them. But there is also more equality between them, and more longing; when he dies, real mourning is possible.
Historical fiction is a hybrid form, halfway between fiction and nonfiction. It is pioneer country, without fixed laws. To some, if it is fiction, anything is permitted. To others, wanton invention when facts are to be found, or, worse, contradiction of well-known facts, is a horror: a violation of an implicit contract with the reader, and a betrayal of the people written about. Ironically, it is when those stricter standards of truth are applied that historical fiction looks most like lying.
It is, in some ways, a humble form. There are limits to the writer's authority. She cannot know her character completely. She has no power to alter his world or postpone his death. But in other ways it is not humble at all: she presumes to know the secrets of the dead and the mechanics of history.
The reputation of historical fiction is unstable. In the thirties, the Marxist literary critic György Lukács argued that early historical novels like those by Scott, Balzac, and Tolstoy showed that man's nature was not fixed but transformed over time; thus, they showed that revolution was possible and, in doing so, made it more likely. But these days the historical novel is not quite respectable. It has difficulty distinguishing itself from its easy sister the historical romance. It is thought to involve irritating ways of talking, or excessive descriptions of clothes.
The past, in fiction, has more prestige than the future, but, as with the future, its prestige declines with its distance from the present. Novels about the past hundred years or so are all right, but once you go beyond the First World War, once you leave indoor plumbing and move into crinolines and wigs, your genre status deteriorates very quickly. A book jacket depicting Henry VIII, or a queen wearing pearls, is off-putting to a certain sort of reader. Why would a writer write about the distant past, that reader might wonder, if not to escape the realist discipline imposed by familiarity? If not to flee to a world blurry enough so that men can behave like Vikings and not seem ridiculous, and ladies can be ladies without being pathetic? And if a writer writes about historically significant people then she is forced into a respectful posture that depreciates her status still further, since it has become one of the hallmarks of literary fiction that its authors regard their characters with something between affectionate condescension and total contempt.
These, then, are some of the obstacles that the serious novelist must consider in deciding to leave the safe precincts of the present and venture into the past.
The first novel that Hilary Mantel wrote was about the French Revolution. It did not start out as a novel, exactly, nor did she start out as a novelist. It was 1975, and she was twenty-three, living in Manchester and selling dresses in a department store. She had realized that she didn't have the money to finish her legal training, and, after a year working in a geriatric hospital, that she didn't want to be a social worker. She was bored with selling dresses; she had started taking books about the French Revolution out of the library, one after another. Then she began taking notes. After she had been doing this for some time, she asked herself, What am I doing? And the answer came: I am writing a book.
She had had no notion of writing fiction. She had considered reading history at university, but she saw that girls who did arts subjects ended up as teachers, and although she knew the world needed teachers, there was a depressing circularity to the business, clever girls becoming teachers to produce more clever girls to become teachers. People said, Oh, teaching, it's something to fall back on, which meant, When your husband leaves you you can support yourself. It wasn't enticing. Because she wasn't professionally trained as a historian, she thought that if she were to write a historical book it would have to be fiction. But she didn't know how to make things up, she didn't know when to make things up, and it seemed to her extremely unfortunate that she had to make things up at all.
She found that quite a bit was known about the revolutionaries. They had died young, but their wives and sisters had lived, and saved letters and kept diaries. So it was only here and there, at first, that she was compelled to invent things, filling in gaps. She might read about a conversation and deduce what other conversations must have preceded it. She might read about a separation and infer the quarrel. Whenever she could, she quoted directly from the record.
Public confusion deepened. Paris, a street-corner orator: "Only last week the aristocrats were given these Suspensive Vetoes, and already they're using them to buy up all the corn and send it out of the country."
But while with facts she was cautious, with form she was experimental. She tried everything. She read a lot of plays, and she loved Brecht, so she thought maybe she could write a Brechtian novel. She liked writing dialogue, it turned out, and much of the novel came out in that form.
"My observations fall into three parts. One, Philippe is a pea-brained, yellow-livered imbecile. Two, Félicité is a nasty, poxy, vomit-inducing whore."
"All right," Danton said. "And the third part of your observations?"
"A coup d'état."
In some places, the prose disappeared altogether, and she wrote in the form of a play. She didn't want to write an actual play, because plays involved other people, and she wanted full control. She employed multiple narrators, though not every major character got a chance to narrate: Robespierre did not, while the two others, Danton and Desmoulins, did. Later, she would have considered that imbalance a flaw, but at the time she was trying a bit of this and a bit of that and not worrying too much how it all fit together.
She had no interest in royalty or in aristocrats—it was the revolutionaries she cared about. She cared about them because of their political achievement, but also because they were young, as she was, and had been driven from the provinces to the capital, as she had, by extreme ambition. Camille Desmoulins—rash, witty, louche—was the easiest character for her to imagine because he was a writer.
I wonder why I ever bothered with sex, he thought; there's nothing in this breathing world so gratifying as an artfully placed semicolon.
Desmoulins had gone to school with Robespierre, and befriended Danton when they were both young lawyers in Paris. Danton was ugly, brutal, and charismatic.
"Citizen Danton?"
"Show my head to the people. It's worth the trouble."
Robespierre was morally rigid, physically weak, emotionally cold, and almost celibate. He cared about no one but Desmoulins.
"I don't hate. It blurs the judgment."
Because of his unappealing puritanism and his role in the Terror, Robespierre was commonly reviled. But, in the course of writing the book, she found that she liked Danton less and Robespierre more. She wanted to persuade the reader to feel as she did, but she knew she had written a scene that would seal the reader's dislike, right at the beginning: Robespierre's father leaned over his son with alcohol on his breath, and the child jerked back "with an adult expression of distaste." She tried to take the scene out, but she found that she couldn't, because she had seen it in her mind's eye and felt that it was true. She wrote little about ideas. For her, the politics of the revolution had to do with tactics and personal power: the lordly dominance of Mirabeau; Danton's cynical pragmatism; Robespierre's incorruptibility and uncanny political insight; the remorseless cruelty of Marat.
She knew, of course, that all her major characters would die young. She had been working toward this from the beginning; she called her book "A Place of Greater Safety"—that place was the grave. But they were her first characters, and they were very dear to her. Writing the guillotine scenes was hard. Afterward, she grieved.
The novel didn't sell. She finished it in 1979 and started sending it around to publishers and agents, but nobody was interested. "I wrote a letter to an agent saying would you look at my book, it's about the French Revolution, it's not a historical romance, and the letter came back saying, we do not take historical romances," she says. "They literally could not read my letter, because of the expectations surrounding the words 'French Revolution'—that it was bound to be about ladies with high hair." It was not, in general, a good time for historical fiction. A few years earlier, Gore Vidal had published a novel about Aaron Burr, and E. L. Doctorow had published "Ragtime," about the years before the First World War; Thomas Pynchon and Barry Unsworth had written historical novels. But it had been forty years since Robert Graves's wildly successful "I, Claudius," and there wasn't much else out there of a serious literary bent.
At this point, everything in her life had fallen apart. Her young marriage was ending, she was very sick and in pain much of the time, and her book had been rejected. Of these three things, there was only one that she had any real control over. She decided that if she was going to make a career as a novelist she had better try something completely different. Her eight-hundred-page historical novel had failed; well, she would write a two-hundred-page modern novel instead, and if that also failed she would reconsider whether this was what she was supposed to be doing.
The novel that emerged out of this desolate time in her life, "Every Day Is Mother's Day," was a bleak, airless story of awful people trapped in miserable lives: a deranged mother; a mute, malignant daughter; a coarse wife; a depressed failure of a husband. She punished her characters without mercy—tortured them with hostile spectres, child molestation, mold, filth, boredom, angst, canned food, social workers.
"We all get these fits of inadequacy," Florence said.
"Is that what they are?"
"You feel you're not doing what you should be doing." She spooned some sugar into her tea. "You feel, surely there's more to life than this. But there isn't, and it passes off."
She had set out to write a book different from her first, and it could hardly have been more so. "A Place of Greater Safety" involved herculean characters altering the course of history: young, fierce, brutal, and witty—everything was big, everything was important, the most trivial action took on heroic significance. In "Every Day Is Mother's Day," everything was small, decayed, repellent, cramped, and pointless. The book was bought at once, and published to glowing reviews.
It turned out that she had a knack for writing books so different that they could have been written by different people. She decided to follow "Every Day" with a sequel, "Vacant Possession," but the sequel, although it involved most of the same major characters, was in some ways nearly as different from the earlier book as that had been from her first. The deranged mother was dead, and the coarse wife had lost weight and changed her hair, which accounted for some of the relief, but the main difference was that the mute, malignant daughter had transformed from a passive, inscrutable menace into a verbal and purposeful one. Thus, while the misery remained, it was no longer trapped. Air rushed in. Description was replaced by dialogue, suicidal thoughts by homicidal ones. Propelled by the evil daughter's malevolent designs and a series of eye-popping coincidences, the story ricocheted about like a satanic farce.
" 'Bashed him twice on the head with a narrow-bladed axe, and slashed his jugular vein to obtain his blood.' "
"I hope this isn't giving you ideas," Sylvia said disapprovingly.
"This is how he was found. 'Face twisted and squashed into one shoulder, forehead deeply puckered, teeth clenched tightly together . . .' " Alistair laughed raucously. "Sounds just like you, Dad."
The marriage that ended and the sickness that ended it had both begun years before. She had met Gerald McEwen, who became her husband, when they were sixteen. They hung around in the same circle of Catholic kids in Manchester. They were both of Irish extraction, but his family was half a generation further advanced than hers: his father had left school at fourteen, like her mother, but, instead of going to work in a mill, as her mother had, he became an accountant.
She was a tiny, thin, pale girl with long pale hair and large pale eyes. Her teeth jutted to a point in the middle of her mouth, as though her jaw were triangular. Her nose was a curved beak. "Out of this timorous-looking person came this really loud voice," Gerald says. "It was a shock." They started having drinks in pubs, talking about politics. It soon became clear that they would be spending their lives together, and they talked about what those lives would be like. She would be a barrister, and he would join the family firm as an accountant. They would live nearby. They married when they were twenty. But then, while he was in university, his father suddenly died and the family firm had to be sold, so he dropped the idea of being an accountant. She went to the London School of Economics to read law, but then she discovered that training as a barrister required money that she didn't have. He trained as a geologist, and started teaching in Manchester, in his old school. She worked in a shop and started reading about the French Revolution. They were poor, they would always be poor, and when they saw the miserable, bored, beaten-down teachers who were Gerald's colleagues they knew they didn't want that life.
They decided to go abroad, and he applied for a job in Botswana. "It was a freezing night, because you were wearing that huge blue jacket of yours," she says. "When we saw the letter lying on the mat, it was a fat letter, so we knew it wasn't a rejection, and I felt just flooded by the promise of sunshine. I remember saying, But I'll never finish my book. And I shed two tears—but that was all. I didn't know what would be out there for me, and I had no idea what it would be like, but I thought, I will never be cold again."
Botswana in the late nineteen-seventies was barely developed. "There was no tourism," she says. "The airport was a tiny little airport with its sole amenity one white cast-iron table with two chairs, one of which wobbled. This country is the size of France, and you had, what, forty miles of tarred road? And there were no newspapers, no TV, no life except what you made." Gerald worked with a group of geologists who were mapping the country properly for the first time. She worked on her novel. But she was sick, and getting worse.
Back in England, when she was still at university, she had started feeling pains in her legs. She began vomiting, often. Then she had terrible pain in her middle. She went to see a doctor, and because she was so thin he tested her for anemia, but she wasn't anemic, so he decided the pain must be psychological. He prescribed antidepressants. She was indeed depressed, since she wasn't speaking to her family at the time, so she took them. When those didn't work, he sent her to a psychiatrist. The psychiatrist told her that her problem was stress brought on by an excess of ambition, unnatural in a woman. He gave her tranquillizers, but their only effect was to stoke her rage: she had fantasies of arson and killing people with knives. She kept these secret from him. The psychiatrist told her he didn't want her writing anymore; it was bad for her. He sent her to stay in the university clinic and prescribed antipsychotics, which, as she wrote in a memoir, "Giving Up the Ghost," pitched her into a hellish state:
You force yourself down into a chair, only to jump out of it. You choke; pressure rises inside your skull. Your hands pull at your clothing and tear at your arms. Your breathing becomes ragged. Your voice is like a bird's cry and your hands flutter like wings. . . . Every fiber of your being is possessed by panic.
She went off the drugs and functioned again, but her pain was no better. For years, she simply put up with it, until at last, in desperation, she went to the university library in Botswana, determined to make a diagnosis herself. She deduced that she had endometriosis, a disorder in which uterine cells are found in other parts of the body; the cells bleed each month and scar tissue builds up, and when that scar tissue presses against nerves it causes pain. Her pain was growing unbearable, but she had finally come to the end of her book, and she was determined to type out a fair copy to show to publishers and agents when she went back to England for Christmas. She spent weeks typing, finished, and collapsed.
In England, she saw various doctors. "I went into St. George's Hospital," she says, "and ten days later I came out minus ovaries, womb, bits of bowel, bits of bladder. Minus a future, as far as having children was concerned." It wasn't that she felt such a strong urge to have children—she had been married for seven years and hadn't tried to get pregnant. She was good for more than breeding, she thought. But she'd always assumed that she'd have the chance to change her mind.
While she was absorbing the idea that she was sterile, she and her husband divorced.
When women apes have their wombs removed, and are returned by keepers to the community, their mates sense it, and desert them.
She moved around England, staying with her mother, or with people she didn't really know. She was homesick for Botswana and for Gerald, she was popping barbiturates day and night to deal with both sorts of pain, and she was growing thinner. She got a day job in a bookshop and a night job in a bar, and thought about the books she might write in the future. Then, about two years later, Gerald came back to England, changed. He had been for a job interview in Jeddah, and it had frightened him. He felt confused and jittery. The old Gerald, she thought, would not have expressed such things. She had also changed. They decided to get back together. He got the job he had interviewed for, and though neither of them particularly wanted to live in Saudi Arabia, they decided that it would be an experience. They had to be married if she was to go there with him, so they married again, and in 1982 prepared to leave for Jeddah.
The thing that had not changed was her health. She was in pain again, nearly all the time. Doctors told her that she could not still have endometriosis. At last, one doctor disagreed, and prescribed hormones, which helped, but the effect of these was to make her gain weight. Not a little weight—astonishing amounts of weight. She had started out around a hundred pounds; within nine months she was more than a hundred and fifty, and she kept on growing rapidly from there. She grew through so many dress sizes so quickly that she could hardly keep herself in clothes. At first, she didn't mind being a bit fatter—she had always been very thin, and was sick of getting dirty looks from other women—but soon her body came to seem entirely alien to her, a weird excrescence. Girls in dress shops stared at her with contempt. People started treating her differently: when she was thin, they thought she was fierce and nervous; now that she was fat, they perceived her as placid and maternal, although those were the last things she was.
The only good thing about Saudi Arabia was that it gave her the material for a fourth novel, "Eight Months on Ghazzah Street." The bafflement and fright that Gerald had felt in his first few days there she felt, too, and that sense only grew worse. They lived in an unappealing company flat, which she rarely left. Being a woman, she was forbidden to drive, and there was nowhere close enough to walk to. She couldn't even go for a walk around the block, since if she appeared on the street alone men shouted lewd propositions at her or tried to run her over. She attempted to conform her clothing to the requirements of local decency, but there was always something wrong—some rule she had broken that nobody had told her of, some violation so subtle she could not detect it. Beyond these inconveniences, the kingdom was pervaded by an air of secrecy and violence. Crimes were not reported unless someone had been punished; people were jailed for infractions they weren't aware of committing; others had accidents and disappeared. When she and Gerald moved in, they were told that the flat upstairs from theirs was not lived in, but that they should never inquire what it was used for.
It occurred to her that she was living in a gothic novel. "All the markers were there," she says. "The woman travels to a strange place, her life is constrained there, and it's controlled by a man who seems to change his nature from the situation in which she first met him. There is the moment when she fears she is going mad. And then she has to realize no, I am not going mad, it is the external world that really is persecuting me." She was keeping a diary and realized that she was almost writing the book already—she just needed to find the core of it. One day, she climbed up onto the roof of her building, because it was the only place she could go outside to get some air. "I was craning down for some reason, and on my neighbor's balcony I saw a big crate, and something went click. I thought to myself, You could get a person in that crate. And then I suddenly knew what kind of novel it was."
They returned to England in 1986. They had lived abroad for nine years. It was time to go home. "The received wisdom was, either you come back after ten years or you don't come back, because you never fit," she says. "It's hard to come back to little England and the incessant rain."
When she was a child, she lived in a village in the northern part of Derbyshire—not a pretty English village but a bleak, dank, cold Northern village on the edge of the moors, its people "distrustful and life-refusing," she wrote in her memoir, working in the cotton mills from late childhood, living in cramped houses without bathrooms or hot water, barely educated in harsh schools.
I was conscious, from the first day in the first class, of the need to resist what I found there. When I met my fellow children and heard their yodeling cry—"Good mo-or-orning, Missus Simpson," I thought I had come among lunatics; and the teachers, malign and stupid, seemed to me like the lunatics' keepers. I knew you must not give in to them. You must not answer questions which evidently had no answer, or which were asked by the keepers simply to amuse themselves and pass the time.
From when she was about eight to when she was eleven, she lived with her two brothers, her mother, her father, and her mother's lover, Jack. It was hard to say when Jack had moved in; he'd been coming over for tea more often until one afternoon he didn't leave. He moved into her mother's bedroom, and her father moved to a room down the hall. This arrangement had a number of consequences. Her family was talked about, and children at school asked her who slept in which bed. Her mother's parents, to whom she had been very close, no longer spoke to their daughter. It was not possible for her mother to go to the shops. At first, she'd had only one brother, and then a second brother was born. After she was old enough to understand where babies came from, she assumed that this second brother must be Jack's child, and perhaps Jack and her mother did as well, but when he was grown he turned out to look so much like her father that it was clear he was not. Her mother, then, was sleeping with both men.
During this time, she discovered that her house was haunted. It wasn't only she who felt it—she overheard adults talking about the ghosts as well. She realized that they were as frightened as she was, and were helpless to protect her. She already understood that the world was denser and more crowded than her senses could perceive: there were ghosts, but even those dead who were not ghosts still existed; she was used to hearing talk in which family members alive and dead were discussed without distinction. The dead seemed to her only barely dead.
Until she was twelve or so, she was deeply religious. "When you're inculcated with religion at such an early age, or when you're receptive to it, as I was, you become preoccupied with the unseen reality," she says. "This other world, the next world, to me in my childhood seemed just as real as the world I was living in. It wasn't that I had a mental picture of it—it was that I never questioned its existence. I used to conduct a lot of imaginary conversations with God. I don't think Jesus was any less real to me than my aunts and uncles; the fact that I happened not to be able to see him was pretty irrelevant to me."
She felt, as a child, in a permanent state of sin. There was something terribly wrong about her, for which she was to blame, but which she had only limited ability to change. Catholic guilt continued to grip her even after she stopped believing in God. Her family's misery was encompassing and bewildering, and was it not likely that she was responsible for making her parents so unhappy? Might they not, without her, have a chance at a better life? But these suspicions were not so powerful as the effect of a thing that happened to her one day that she cannot explain.
She was seven or eight, and she was playing in the garden behind her house. She looked up. There was something there, in the coarse grass beyond the gate.
I can't see anything, not exactly see: except the faintest movement, a ripple, a disturbance of the air.
In her memoir, she says that she cannot write about this—technically, her prose isn't up to it.
There is nothing to see. There is nothing to smell. There is nothing to hear. But its motion, its insolent shift, makes my stomach heave. I can sense—at the periphery, the limit of all my senses—the dimensions of the creature. It is as high as a child of two. Its depth is a foot, fifteen inches.
She couldn't see it, but she knew that it was evil. She understood, too, that it had contaminated her.
Grace runs away from me, runs out of my body like liquid from a corpse.
She had sinned: she had seen what no human was meant to see. She hadn't just seen—she had looked. And therefore she was complicit with the thing, and it was now inside her.
My first thought is that I have seen the devil, that he did not wholly intend to show himself, and that I have only seen him because of a careless mistake on his part. I know that if you observe other people's mistakes—and they know you have observed them—they will make you suffer for it.
This encounter shadowed her for years. "It soured my view of the universe, and I felt on much more precarious ground. Until then, I thought the unseen reality was my friend, and after that I didn't think that anymore," she says. "I felt that God had done nothing for me in that moment. He might not be as strong as I'd imagined, and forces of evil seemed to be romping about unchecked."
It turned out that the first part of her childhood was the easy part. When she was eleven, a moving van came, and she and her brothers, her mother, and Jack moved out. She never saw her father again. They moved a few miles away, to a lower-middle-class town in Cheshire, a step up. In this new place, the houses had rosebushes and bay windows and indoor bathrooms; the people who lived in them were office workers in Manchester. They spoke differently and their faces looked different. She went to a new school, where she had a good history teacher.
I said to my mother, Henry VII is interesting. No he's not, my mother said.
There were no ghosts in their Cheshire house, but the old unease was replaced by a new kind that was worse: her mother and Jack were pretending to be married, but they hadn't moved far enough away to keep their secret; there were people around who knew them from before. She was given a new surname, Jack's, but, unlike her brothers, who were too young to remember their old life, she did remember. Jack had a terrible temper. He would scream at her; she became very still, a small, frozen creature who knew his secret. Her mother was a more satisfactory antagonist: her mother and he fought so constantly, and with such vigor, that it seemed to her that they must enjoy it. Later, in her teens, she began writing down everything they said. She realized that, awful though their battles were, they were also quite funny, because they never changed. It came to the point where she, listening, could say, And now she's going to say this, and he's going to say that, and she'd be right.
It was not until shortly before his death that she and Jack spoke to each other without suspicion. After he died, his ghost visited her, but its presence was unobtrusive.
In the early two-thousands, she started work on a novel, "Beyond Black," about a fat professional medium named Alison, whose savage childhood has left her vulnerable to invasive spirits—notably Morris, the ghost of a lowlife john of her mother's. Disliking the administrative side of her work, Alison hires an assistant, Colette—thin, bitter, and looking for a change.
She had been able to get rid of Gavin for the modest price of a do-it-yourself divorce; it had hardly cost more than it would to put an animal down.
But in the end Colette leaves, because living with ghosts is something you'd never do if you had a choice.
"Peace and quiet?" Morris yelped. "How could you have peace and quiet? Wiv a past like yours? Not ten years old, and a man's testicles on your conscience."
"What testicles?" Alison yelled.
Across the landing, Colette's door opened. She stood in her bedtime T-shirt, very white and severe. "That's it," she said. "I don't intend to spend another night under this roof. How can I live with a woman who has rows with people I can't see, and who stands outside my bedroom door shouting 'What testicles?' It's more than flesh and blood can stand."
When she wakes in the morning, she likes to start writing right away, before she speaks, because whatever remnants sleep has left are the gift her brain has given her for the day. Her dream life is important to the balance of her mind: it's the place where she experiences disorder. Her dreams are archetypal, mythological, enormous, full of pageantry—there are knights and monsters. She has been to the crusades in her dreams more than once.
When she's starting a new book, she needs to feel her way inside the characters, to know what it's like to be them. There is a trick she uses sometimes, which another writer taught her. Sit quietly and withdraw your attention from the room you're in until you're focussed inside your mind. Imagine a chair and invite your character to come and sit in it; once he is comfortable, you may ask him questions. She tried this for the first time when she was writing "The Giant, O'Brien": the giant came in, but, before sitting down in the chair, he bent down and tested it, to see if it would take his weight. On that occasion, she never got any further, because she was so excited that she punched the air and shouted "Yes!" But from then on she could imagine herself in the giant's body.
So much of fiction is a matter of trying to force uncertainty and freedom into a process that is in fact entirely determined by choice or events. When she is writing historical fiction, she knows what will happen and can do nothing about it, but she must try to imagine the events as if the outcome were not yet fixed, from the perspective of the characters, who are moving forward in ignorance. This is not just an emotional business of entering the characters' point of view; it is also a matter of remembering that at every point things could have been different. What she, the author, knows is history, not fate.
When she is writing ordinary fiction, she has complete power over what happens, but she must feel that her characters have free will or else the dead hand of determinism will crush the book. She must feel that her control of them is partial—so light that it is barely sensed. Sometimes one of her characters will say something and it seems to her that she has no idea what is going to be said back until suddenly she does, because there it is, on the page. When this happens, she knows the process is working.
She finds this lightness, this relinquishing of control, difficult to achieve, especially since it cannot be accomplished by simple effort. Her mind does not naturally float about without direction: it is a machine designed for analytic thought. "I like my world, and particularly my inner world, to be organized," she says. "I like filing systems. But the whole process of writing novels is the opposite of that—it's do not label, do not define, do not decide, leave everything loose. You have to say to yourself, I take my hands off, I let my unconscious work for me. It's desperately uncomfortable! There's one whole side of my nature that makes me the least likely novelist in the world: the person who insists on getting the historical facts all lined up, and who feels that there's immense security in a good card index."
She is a woman whose first professional impulse was to be a barrister, and whose second was to be a social worker. She is the kind of logical, forceful person who is good at sorting out other people's foolishness and practical difficulties. But fiction is about creating foolishness and practical difficulties and allowing them to tangle and fester until they are beyond repair. "The only Shakespeare play I hadn't read, for many years, was 'Othello,' " she says. "I could not read it. I kept wanting to get hold of it and straighten it out about the handkerchief. But, finally, I made myself read it. I forced myself past the point of extreme discomfort."
Difficult as it is for her to be loose, it is even more difficult for her to be lazy; but that, too, is something she has had to learn to become, because the best ideas come to her when her mind is idle. When she was a child going to confession for the first time, she felt she hadn't any sins worth the trouble, and so she invented one: she said to the priest, "Father, I have been lazy." But as time went on she began to believe in her invention, and became terrified of any sign of slackening of effort. Some days, she acts busy to convince herself, even though it is the days when she makes not a single mark on the paper which yield weeks and weeks of work. It is very hard to cede control. "I don't think one ever quite learns to trust the process," she says. "I feel, What if I wake up tomorrow and I can't do it anymore? I know I'll always be able to write, in the sense of having a robust style that's sufficient to the occasion, and I know that books can be got onto the page by craft, but the thing that makes a phrase that fizzes on the paper—you always fear that may not be there any longer, because, after all, you did nothing to deserve it. You did nothing to contrive it. It's just there. You don't understand it, it's out of your control, and it could desert you."
Occasionally, the problem is not too much control but too little: she will become so intensely involved in writing a scene that the only way out of it is to shut down consciousness altogether by going to sleep. The curtain must be drawn between acts. This is especially true if she's writing about the past: she cannot simply put down her pen and reënter the present; there must be an intermission when the stage goes dark. This is how she remembers who she is and where she is.
In the last months of writing a book, as the end comes in sight, she becomes possessed. She doesn't go anywhere, or talk about anything other than the book. She stops only to eat. Her sleep and work hours become erratic: often she will wake up at three in the morning, write for several hours, and then go back to bed. She becomes more and more anxious: it feels to her like stage fright, unnaturally and intolerably prolonged, as though at last she were spinning all her plates at once, darting about from one to the other and terrified of making a mistake because she knows that if one plate spins off balance they will all come crashing down.
The contract that she signed for "Wolf Hall" was a contract for two books, the first of which, "The Complete Stranger," was to be set in Africa in the seventies and eighties. Usually, she begins a book in a tentative fashion, feeling her way in, testing the ground, but this time it was as though she'd been thrown into the lowest, darkest part of it right away. The writing was harrowing, and at night she had terrible dreams. She saw herself walking around her old house in Botswana: her memory had always been so powerful that the past was as vivid to her as the present. In the book, she wasn't writing about her own life, but imagining herself into that time and that place was enough to bring it all back: the worst months of her marriage; her pain, her illness and the terrible uncertainty about what it was; a close friend's suicide. The feelings were so disturbing that she decided to stop writing the book altogether and try her hand at "Wolf Hall" instead.
She had been thinking for a long time of writing a book about Thomas Cromwell—an adviser to Henry VIII, and for nearly a decade one of the most powerful men in Britain—but she had thought of herself as an eighteenth-century person. She had written about the French Revolution, and "The Giant, O'Brien," also set in the eighteenth century, and she saw the world through eighteenth-century eyes. She thought perhaps that she didn't have the energy to start over with a new period. But the idea didn't go away; and she knew that the five-hundredth anniversary of Henry VIII's coronation was coming up, in 2009, and that would be a very big deal in England. It would be difficult to sell a book about Henry after that, when everyone was sick of him. It was now or never.
She began to write "Wolf Hall"—and, all at once, she was happy. From the first moments, she was convinced that this was what she was meant to be doing, that everything in her life had brought her to this. She never showed her writing to anyone before it was virtually finished, but when she wrote the first page of "Wolf Hall" she wanted to show it to someone right away. "I was almost laughing to myself," she says. "I know the subject matter's dire, but I was filled with glee and a sense of power, a sense that I knew how to do this. It began to unscroll before me like a film; it was in the present tense because I didn't know what would happen next minute. It was as if after swimming and swimming you've suddenly found your feet are on ground that's firm. I knew from the first paragraph that this was going to be the best thing I'd ever done."
Before she began to write, she spent a long time learning about Cromwell and reading deeply in the period. She had always been intrigued by Cromwell's villainous reputation. Among both his contemporaries and historians, he was widely thought of as practically a sixteenth-century Himmler, and previous literary depictions—Robert Bolt's 1960 play "A Man for All Seasons," Ford Madox Ford's "The Fifth Queen"—had taken this view. Even his own biographer hated him. But, beginning in the nineteen-fifties, Geoffrey Elton, a historian at Cambridge, had argued that Cromwell was a farseeing modern statesman who had transformed the English government from a personal fiefdom of the king to a bureaucratic parliamentary structure that could survive royal incompetence and enact reforms through legislation rather than through fiat. In so doing, he helped to bring about the English Reformation without the kind of bloodshed or descent into absolutism that took place in much of the rest of Europe. By the time she began to read about Cromwell, academic fashion had moved on and a new generation hated him again, but she found Elton's arguments persuasive.
Like Robespierre, Cromwell could be brutal, but he promoted many of the right sorts of social reforms, and she could forgive him a lot for that. She was no longer an ardent socialist, as she'd been in university—she wasn't offended by pragmatism, and she appreciated a man who knew how to get things done. Certainly she was never going to sentimentalize, as Robert Bolt did, Cromwell's enemy, the saintly Thomas More, who died for his conscience and made sure that other people died for his conscience, too.
"I am glad I am not like you. . . . I mean, my mind fixed on the next world. I realize you see no prospect of improving this one."
She couldn't have written about the French Revolution now, she realized—she was too old, she had lost too much hope, she could no longer feel what those young men had felt. This was a book of middle age: her Cromwell was in his forties, he had travelled all over Europe, fought in wars, worked in banking, trained in the law, and finally, back in England, had become a businessman and an aide to Cardinal Wolsey. He could train a falcon and fix a jury, was said to know the New Testament by heart, and could persuade a king that his ideas were the king's own. He acquired a reputation for getting his way.
Lock Cromwell in a deep dungeon in the morning, and when you come back that night he'll be sitting on a plush cushion eating larks' tongues, and all the jailers will owe him money.
He came from the street, he was the son of a violent, alcoholic blacksmith from Putney, he looked like a murderer, and he frightened people. Nobody knew exactly what he'd done in his years abroad, and that blank period, that gap, was powerful.
She decided to leave the blank period blank and skip from the moment Cromwell left England as a child to the time, twenty-seven years later, when he had established himself in London. Only rarely did she make something up out of nothing—almost always there was some hint in the sources to suggest it. Even many of her tiny, novelistic details came from the archives—often from the gossipy letters sent by ambassadors to their home courts. There was a scene in the sequel to "Wolf Hall," "Bring Up the Bodies," for instance, in which a messenger gave Jane Seymour a love letter and a bag of money that Henry had sent her, although he was still married to Anne Boleyn; Jane gave back the money, then took the letter and kissed it, but gave it back unopened. That came straight from an ambassador's correspondence.
She couldn't always be sure that a character was in the place she said he was in at the time she put him there, but she spent endless hours making sure that he wasn't definitely somewhere else. "Once you play around with history, it trips a whole load of consequences," she says. "You know the TV drama 'The Tudors'? Well, they decided that it was a bit too complicated if Henry had two sisters, so they rolled them up into one. But then that sister had to marry somebody, and now they're in trouble, because really his younger sister married the old King of France, but at a previous stage they decided that the old King of France was boring, so they had brought in Francis I early. But then, oops, she can't marry Francis I, so we have to invent a king for her to marry! So it gets more and more ridiculous." She says, "I cannot describe to you what revulsion it inspires in me when people play around with the facts. If I were to distort something just to make it more convenient or dramatic, I would feel I'd failed as a writer. If you understand what you're talking about, you should be drawing the drama out of real life, not putting it there, like icing on a cake."
One of the things she'd always found attractive about the Henry story was that there was so much in it about women. No wives, no story. One of Cromwell's advantages at court was that he did not underestimate women—neither their usefulness as informants nor their cunning as enemies.
"Cromwell, you don't talk to women, do you? I mean, what would be the topic?"
This was always a problem with historical fiction, if you liked to stick closely to the record: there was very little information about women, on the whole, but if you wrote a novel without them it seemed off-kilter. In her first draft of "A Place of Greater Safety," she had written mostly about the men, but, years later, when a publisher came to hear of its existence and wanted to publish it, she built the women up. The absence of facts didn't seem as large a problem as it had before: now that she was a real novelist, she was used to putting thoughts into people's heads. But she stuck with what was plausible—she couldn't stand maudlin feminist mythmaking. "There was a time when, truffling around historical fiction for women, I seemed to come across nothing but ordinary women who happened to have a brilliant knowledge of herbs," she says. "Or the fascination with the figure of the witch."
She doesn't believe in inventing greatness or significance where none exists. This is why she likes historical fiction: she feels she can write about greatness only in historical moments that have already proved ripe for its flourishing. She believes that there are no great characters without a great time; ordinary times breed ordinary people (of the sort—dull, trapped, despairing—who inhabit modern novels). If Robespierre had lived out his life in Arras, she thinks, he would have ended up like one of her characters in "Every Day Is Mother's Day": not enough money, stuck in a bad marriage, frustrated at work, and crushed by self-contempt.
"Wolf Hall" is about politics, but it is also a song of England. Before she started it, she didn't feel like an English writer; England, to her, was the southern part of the country—the Protestant, green and pleasant part. Whatever England was, she didn't know it; it wasn't hers. But then something shifted, something loosened, and she took a great stride away from her past and planted her flag right in the center of Englishness—because nothing, she thought, could be more seminal to English identity than the reign of Henry VIII and the coming of the English Bible. Thomas Cromwell had showed the English how to know themselves: in 1538, he ordered parishes to keep records of baptisms, marriages, and burials. And now she, writing about Cromwell, would furnish another document of English self-knowledge. It would be political but also mythological, since Englishness contained equal parts of both.
Some say the Tudors transcend this history, bloody and demonic as it is: that they descend from Brutus through the line of Constantine, son of St. Helena, who was a Briton. Arthur, High King of Britain, was Constantine's grandson. He married up to three women, all called Guinevere, and his tomb is at Glastonbury, but you must understand that he is not really dead, only waiting his time to come again.
The mythological voice is one that, like the heroic voice, she feels free to use only when she is writing about the past. "The Giant, O'Brien," which she wrote before she felt English, is almost wholly in this voice—it is a song of Ireland. Until she wrote "Wolf Hall," she loved this book the best. Before she started to write it, she had something altogether different in mind—a big, thumping, realist historical novel, packed with research, focussed on John Hunter, a famous eighteenth-century surgeon. The giant, based on an enormous Irishman about whom almost nothing was known, would be a minor character. But, when she started to write, it turned into a fairy tale. Often, she sees her books, cinematically, but this one was entirely heard, in voices, and as she wrote it felt like singing.
It was a lament: that was the kind of song it was. When she was a small child, she had great-aunts and great-uncles who remembered Ireland, but by the time she was ten they were dead and her consciousness of being Irish drained away. Then, in mid-life, she started thinking about it again, wondering about the lost language, and lost people: how, when her great-grandmother's brothers went to America, they were never heard from again, because nobody could write, and nobody could read their letter anyway, if it came; and how in Ireland there had been no Thomas Cromwell to mandate parish records, so who could say if they had even existed? She was aware that there was a certain ripeness about Celtic nostalgia, but she felt it just the same—a sense of grief.
"Will I tell you what the woman said, as she stood on one leg? Will I tell you what she said? She said, 'I see your destruction, your utter destruction: you will not leave this house, none of you, neither hide nor hair, except for the fragments that are carried out in the claws of birds.' "
A year ago, she and Gerald settled in a very English place—Budleigh Salterton, a little village on the coast of Devon that she first visited when she was sixteen. It seemed to her then a kind of paradise—it was the first time she had walked through a meadow knee-high in wildflowers—and she resolved to live there one day. The village descends steep cliffs and continues by a pebble beach, along which stands a row of colorfully painted wooden bathing huts; it has white cottages with thatched roofs and rampant English flower gardens, and a high street with little shops that sell cups of tea and antique lace and West Country cream. Nothing much happens in the village, which is how she likes it. Of its population of five thousand, a large percentage are over the age of seventy, so it is a good place to grow old. She does not intend to move again.
She and Gerald live in a flat in a building that used to be a hotel, and she can see the sea from her window. On her walls there are reproductions of paintings of Thomas Cromwell, Camille Desmoulins, and Shakespeare. On her bookshelves, in addition to books about the Tudors and the French Revolution, there are a few objects—a pair of china dogs, a glass owl. On the window seat in the living room are a large stuffed lion, a stuffed lamb, and a stuffed dog. There is an old-fashioned many-drawered desk in the living room, but she works at a modern desk in the hallway that the elevator opens onto, surrounded by file cabinets.
They had always meant to live here eventually, but Budleigh is three hours from London, and until now they felt that they had to be closer in. Gerald travelled constantly for work, and she felt that making her career as an author involved obliging people and showing your face, so she did that as long as she thought she needed to, sitting on committees, judging prizes, giving readings, attending events. She went to hundreds of film screenings—she was The Spectator's film critic for four years—and wrote hundreds of book reviews.
Drabble wanders muttering through her own narrative like a bag lady.
She taught writing workshops, sometimes with a novelist friend with whom, afterward, she would drink gin and read certain students' work and roll around on the floor laughing.
She didn't mind being in front of an audience, but she found small talk a strain. She never lived in literary London proper—there were too many authors there, she thought, distracting themselves, participating in activities that felt like writing but weren't, such as talking about writing with each other. But in 2008 Gerald got very sick with diverticulitis and had to give up his career, and after she won the Man Booker Prize, for "Wolf Hall," she felt that she could dictate her own terms. She had discharged her public duties as an author; if people wanted to see her now, they could come to her.
These days, Gerald works as her manager. Before "Wolf Hall," she'd had good sales for a literary novelist, but never the sales or recognition of other novelists of her generation—McEwan, Amis, Rushdie. This may be because of the marginal status of historical fiction, or because her books are so startlingly different from one another. "If I had been more career-minded, I probably should have secured myself a public and written for it, by repeating what I do," she says. "But I've just not found that possible or desirable. The odd thing is, writers who do that, why don't they bore themselves, I wonder?" With the Booker, the flood of correspondence and solicitations suddenly became overwhelming, so Gerald stepped in.
She is much calmer now than she used to be. She never thought that she'd end up so calm. On the other hand, she never thought that she'd end up so fat, either, and, who knows, maybe she's calm because people expect her to be, a woman of her shape. (Even now, she sometimes has a powerful feeling that she's not in the right body.) She is calm, but that does not mean that she is any less ambitious. She deeply believes that a writer is only as good as her next paragraph. And making money is very important to her, coming from where she comes from. To her, one of the most significant markers of success in the world is to be able to open the household bills and know that she can pay them.
She isn't calm because she has reconciled herself to her medical fate: she has not. "I wasn't certain, and I'm still not certain, whether I wanted children," she says. "What I wanted was the choice. I have felt most sorrow in later life, over the last ten years, when grandchildren are being born, I suppose because I was very close to my own grandmother. Of course, it follows that if you're not a mother you're not going to be a grandmother, but that's not something you think of in your thirties. So the loss keeps changing its shape."
A hundred years ago in Danzig there lived a young woman named Stanisława Przybyszewska, who was gripped by such a passion for Robespierre that she died of it. She set out to write the best of all plays about the French Revolution and cared for nothing else. She lived alone in an unheated room and barely ate. She dated her letters by the Revolutionary calendar. She produced a play that was performed twice, savagely edited to a running length of five hours. She died of malnutrition and morphine addiction at thirty-three.
Hilary Mantel has never written a book of nonfiction, other than her memoir, but when she finishes the third volume of her Cromwell trilogy she plans to write a book about Przybyszewska, which she will call "The Woman Who Died of Robespierre." She wants to sit and think in a sustained way about what it is that she or anyone else is doing when she writes historical fiction. What sort of person writes fiction about the past? It is helpful to be acquainted with violence, because the past is violent. It is necessary to understand that the people who live there are not the same as people now. It is necessary to understand that the dead are real, and have power over the living. It is helpful to have encountered the dead firsthand, in the form of ghosts. ♦


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Japanese punk band Peelander-Z joins us as we get pumped up for this weekend's Great GoogaMooga festival in Prospect Park, Brooklyn. They're from Planet Peelander, love Hall & Oates, and are way into food… Barbecue to be exact. Catch them at The Great GoogaMooga this weekend!
What do you think will be the Great-est part about GoogaMooga?
Of course, Fooods! We love to eat all kinds of food on [our] U.S. tour! After eating everything, We will play [a] super happy show onstage!
Which musical act are you most looking forward to seeing?
I really want to see Peelander-Z, but unfortunately it's impossible! I want to dance with Daryl Hall & John Oates!!! Yes!
What are you looking forward to eating?
Dinosaur Bar-B-Que and Momofuku!! Yeahhhh! Eating Party!
Tell us one thing about your band that no one knows!
We are not human-beings! We come from Planet Peelander!
We love saying "GoogaMooga." Feel free to entertain us and use it in a sentence… however you like.
Don't think too much! Just come join GoogaMooga!
The Great GoogaMooga is an "amusement park of food and drink" and live music going on this Saturday and Sunday in Prospect Park, Brooklyn. Go on, get your Googa on!


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rabbittransit operates its programs without regard to race, color, or national origin.
York Fixed Route is a public bus system of 15 regular routes throughout York County, a connection route to Lancaster, and three routes serving Hanover.
Freedom Transit, a division of rabbittransit, is a Transit in the Parks System offering three fixed routes serving the Gettysburg area including the Blue Line, Gray Line and Lincoln Line.
rabbitEXPRESS offers commuter bus service which operates multiple round trips on weekdays between York and Harrisburg, between York and Northern Maryland, and between Gettysburg and Harrisburg.


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Audit critical of state's handling of private data
Minnesota's legislative auditor is recommending changes to the way the state selects and manages outside vendors who handle sensitive data for the state.
Auditor Jim Nobles' recommendations stem from his examination of a data security breach at a Texas company hired to verify that new hires are authorized to work in Minnesota.
Nobles spent almost four months picking through the state's troubled history with Bellaire, Texas-based Lookout Services, which was hired by state officials in July, 2009. The state was under pressure to comply with Gov. Tim Pawlenty's 2008 executive order to verify all new hires.
On Wednesday, Nobles published a chronology showing how the state picked a vendor one staffer described as "too good to be true" when it came to price, and signed a contract absolving the vendor of all security risk:
"The selection of the vendor, the management with the vendor, the agreement with the vendor just never was on solid ground and I think the principle reason is the people doing it just didn't take into consideration data security issues that were involved," he said.
In the rush to implement the federal Department of Homeland Security's E-Verify program, state internet technology staff consistently were not adequately involved at the outset or as problems popped up along the way, Nobles found.
Last Oct. 29, a Minnesota State University employee in Mankato attended a Lookout Services training session and alerted her supervisor that she could see names, birth dates and social security numbers for employees at other companies. The employee reported the problem to supervisors and ultimately to Minnesota's Management and Budget Office, which held the contract with Lookout Services.
Lookout Services officials convinced the office that the problem was corrected and breach had not included state of Minnesota data. On Dec. 2, the same employee told her supervisor the problem was not fixed. A few days later, Minnesota Public Radio found state employees' personal data was visible online without a password. That led the state to cancel the contract with Lookout Services.
Chris Buse, the state's chief information security officer, told Nobles he didn't learn about the problems with Lookout Services until well after the fact.
"The thing that surprised me was that I didn't learn about it from within the organization," Buse said. "I learned about it from the legislative auditor's office. And that was the thing that bothered me about this particular situation is that we need to have better ways to engage the central security office and that's what our 'enterprise incident management standard' really does."
Buse said agencies are now required to notify his office -- the Office of Enterprise Technology -- when such an incident occurs. He supports the auditor's recommendation to involve state technology staff when signing agreements with outside vendors handling sensitive data and to actively monitor them. Buse said those improvements are already underway:
"We always thought the oversight and management of third-party vendors was something that we needed to get a better handle on," he said. "If the report has done anything, it's probably elevated the priority of that in relation to all the other security problems that we have on our plate today."
Nobles' recommendations were also embraced by staff members at the Office of Management and Budget who are eager to move on from the Lookout Services debacle, but it's not so easily swept away. Lookout Services has sued the state for breach of contract.
From Nobles' reading of the contract, the state didn't protect itself very well.
"Somebody that's out there running a business, offering the kind of services that Lookout was offering, should have provided better security but frankly, they told state up front in their service agreement, in black and white they would not be responsible for state data," Nobles explained. "Even the data that was encrypted. The data that was not public data. They told state in their service agreement that they would not take any responsibility for it, and the state signed the agreement anyway."
The report is silent on what happened to the state employee who first alerted state authorities to the security problems with Lookout Services. Her employer, Minnesota State University-Mankato, declined to comment.
An individual with knowledge of the situation but who asked not to be named, said the employee, "received serious discipline for involvement in the matter."


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Online Meetings for Small Business
Finding a worthwhile and affordable conferencing solution can be challenging for small businesses. That's why GlobalMeet® was designed with the user in mind. Our goal is to give small business owners the conferencing features they really need to successfully run their company. We do this by providing an easy-to-use interface, personalized URLs, an award-winning mobile app and more!
See how PGi can help your small business drive results.Contact a Meeting Expert
Online Meetings On the Go
Whether you are in the office or on the go, our small business conferencing solutions give you the same full-featured experience from your computer or mobile device. The GlobalMeet app allows you to host meetings directly from your phone or tablet and offers features like screen sharing, multipoint video, file sharing, chat and much more.Sign Up For Free
No Downloads Required
Any small business owner knows that time is of essence. When meeting with a sales prospect, client or even team member, you can't afford to wait for everyone to download software. That's why PGi's cloud-based web conferencing solution, GlobalMeet, doesn't require your guests to download anything. Simply share the meeting URL and get started!Sign Up For Free
Reduced Travel Costs
Between time out of the office and travel expenses, costs can add up fast. For small businesses, keeping these costs down is of the utmost importance. Virtual meetings help save you time and money by eliminating unnecessary travel while still allowing you to meet face to face, anytime, from anywhere.Sign Up For Free
PGi & Small Businesses
See how other small businesses are using PGi's web conferencing solutions.Wacth Video
eBooks and Articles
Check out our resources for Small Businesses.Resources
Small Business Conferencing Benefits At a Glance
- Reduce travel costs by hosting more virtual meetings
- Meet face-to-face with video meetings from any device
- 24/7/365 live customer support
- Flexible pricing to fit any small business budget
- Cloud-based software; no downloads required
- One solution for all your audio and web conferencing needs
- High quality audio through your phone or VoIP
- Enterprise quality security
- Mobile apps let you work in an office or on-the-go


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Can't see your area? Let us know where we should be next
We have 2 pricing options – you can choose the one that suits you best.
We get commission on your revenue:
We pay you a fixed amount each month:
All our hosts provide a $150 deposit when they join Airsorted, to go towards the total setup costs. You can find out more about this below.
We can offer you discounts when listing more than one property with Airsorted. Speak to the team to learn more.
Your $150 deposit goes a long way. It goes towards:
If you decide you'd like to stop using Airsorted for good, we'll happily return your deposit.
There are just two things we require before we can refund a deposit:
If you haven't done, or are unable to do these things, you can still leave the service, in this case we just need to keep the deposit as partial cover of your setup costs.
Like Airbnb, we take commission from the total amount each guest pays, including their cleaning fee. This covers the management cost of arranging linen collection and cleans.
Like any host, you'll receive payments from Airbnb (minus their fee) the day after a guest checks in.
We collect our commission from your account via weekly Direct Debits. Cleaning fees are collected separately, two days after each clean has taken place.
All of this occurs automatically – so you never have the hassle of making manual payments.
Here's an example breakdown:
Your total
|Your first guest stays! They make a payment for their stay and a cleaning fee.
|Airbnb take their standard hosting fee of 3%
|We take our management commission of 15% and the initial guest cleaning fee.
|This is your total earnings after the booking.
+ $1,452 Booking cost
+ $48 Cleaning fee
- $49.50 3% Hosting fee
- $239.33 management fee
- $48 guest cleaning fee
+ $1,500(Example payment)
- $49.50
- $287.33
+ $1,452 Booking cost
+ $48 Cleaning fee
+ $1,500(Example payment)
- $49.50 3% Hosting fee
- $49.50
- $239.33 management fee
- $48 guest cleaning fee
- $287.33
Airbnb will pay you directly on the second day of each booking. The nightly rental and the cleaning fee from the guest will come into your account at the same time. Airsorted will then collect the cleaning fee 48 hours after the clean in order to pay the laundry provider and housekeeper, and collect the management fee via weekly Direct Debits.
You can see a history of all of your bookings, guest reviews and earnings in the host dashboard. We'll create an account for you to login and manage all of your Airsorted preferences when you join us. Here's a sneak peak of how the performance tab looks...
We add a cleaning fee to your Airbnb listing, which your guest pays. Guests are used to seeing this on Airbnb listings.
The one exception is the very first clean in your property. This is the only clean you'll need to pay for, but you can also book one-off cleans whenever you like if you're using the property yourself.
Two days after a clean has taken place, we'll collect the cleaning fee from your account. The cost of a clean is unique to your property, and ensures cleans of the highest standard are delivered.
We do take a commission on the cleaning fee your guests pay (just as Airbnb does). We do this to cover the cost of organising linen collection and cleans for your property.
We will happily help with this - we can replace these materials at cost if you'd like us to.
Some hosts would like services that go beyond standard Airbnb management and we're happy to help with those tasks as well. If you would like to enlist one of our 'Sorters', we offer:
'Sorter' call-out
Price to be determined.
Mid-range maintenance call-out:
Price to be determined.
Specialist call outs
Charged at cost:
The charges for any of these maintenance services goes entirely to the person/company completing the task. Organising any of this for you is included in our management fee.
Hosting without support can take up to 50 hours each month. That's 600 hours a year. Or the time it takes to master a new language*…
*The Foreign Service Institute of the US Department of State's approximate learning expectations for languages, based on the time it takes to achieve "proficiency".


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Wheelie Car Seat Travel Bag4752
Recommended for use when bringing car seat on the plane. Wheelie folds up easily to store in the plane's overhead compartment.
- Interior buckle strap holds car seat in position
- Reinforced bottom seam adds durability
- Repositioned D-ring increases ease of pulling
- High quality dual rubber wheels for smooth rolling
- Hard bottom and resting pegs keep car seat and bag up off of the ground.
- Double zipper opening makes it easy to put car seat in and take it out of travel bag
- Shoulder strap attached to D ring to easily pull Wheelie
- Heavy-duty denier nylon protects car seat
- Easy to carry with adjustable, detachable shoulder strap
- Clear identification pocket
- Packaged in reusable storage bag
- Measures 32"H x 20"W x 20"D
Fits Britax Marathon, Boulevard, Roundabout, Decathalon, Perego, Evenflo, Cosco, Century, Eddie Bauer, Graco, Safety 1st and most popular car seat styles.
Note: The Wheelie Car Seat Travel Bag does not fit the Britax Regent, Recaro Signo, Cosco Summit, or Evenflo Appolo.
Gift Wrap not available.


text: Rogers is an ideal Arkansas city to settle and put down some roots. Not only does it offer big-city amenities with a small town feel, but CNN Money named it one of the top 100 places to live in America. Thanks to its proximity to a major corporate headquarters, this city offers a lifestyle that is both affordable and upscale. But that is not all, as Rogers is also close to amazing natural resources that offer plenty of recreation for locals all year long.


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Wild Way of the Vikings
Season 37 Episode 10 | 53m 29s
Experience the natural world through the eyes of the Vikings. From the killer whales of the North Sea to the volcanic mounts of Iceland, see the deep history and cultural respect the Vikings had with the land and sea. Ewan McGregor narrates.
Aired: 02/13/19
Expires: 02/11/23Video has closed captioning.
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Major support for NATURE is provided by the Arnhold Family in memory of Henry and Clarisse Arnhold, Sue and Edgar Wachenheim III, the Kate W. Cassidy Foundation, the Lillian Goldman Charitable Trust, Kathy Chiao and Ken Hao, the Anderson Family Fund, the Filomen M. D'Agostino Foundation, Rosalind P. Walter, the Halmi Family in memory of Robert Halmi, Sr., Sandra Atlas Bass, Doris R. and Robert J. Thomas, the Hite Foundation, Charles Rosenblum, the Arlene and Milton D. Berkman Philanthropic Fund, the Sun Hill Family Foundation, the M. & H. Sommer Foundation, Ron Hull, the Bradley L. Goldberg Family Foundation, by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, by PBS, and by Viewers Like You.


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Project Developer - Kurt Williams
Project Manager - Bryan Crostreet Superintendent - Rick Wright
*Due to the unique challenges that each building site presents, the cost figures are based only on the facility design and construction. The site development costs are not included.
**Cost does not reflect owner supplied FFE (fixtures, furnishings and equipment).


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Lookup Country Information API - Libraries
The Lookup Country Information API simplifies the search for country profiles using letters or numeric ISO country codes. The use of two-letter and three-letter codes or numeric codes is sufficient to generate descriptive details of a country including its name and continent as well as its associated alpha or numeric ISO codes. The API sends requests in URI Query String/CRUD format and returns responses in JSON format.


text: I'd like for people to take really good pictures of their rims when there's an opportunity say at the next tire change...or if they have a bare rim sitting around. I'm really interested to see the profile shapes of the Snowflake rim versus the spoke rim of the day. I can't say as I've ever seen a Snowflake rim in person...all I have are the stock spokes on my /7. I know there are more rims types out there...Lester's, the Y-spokes mags, etc. Might be a good idea to have good shots of all of these...could be interesting!


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Notwithstanding any other applicable provision of law, the initial authorization in this Act or any other Act heretofore or hereafter enacted to construct, pursuant to section 5907 of this title, any fossil energy demonstration plant shall expire at the end of the three full fiscal years following the date of enactment of such authorization, unless (1) funds to construct each such plant are appropriated or otherwise provided pursuant to applicable law prior thereto, or (2) such authorization period is extended by specific Act of Congress hereafter enacted.
42 U.S. Code § 5915a. Expiration of initial authorization to construct fossil energy demonstration plants
(Pub. L. 95–39, title I, § 105, June 3, 1977, 91 Stat. 184.)
References in Text
This Act, referred to in text, is Pub. L. 95–39, June 3, 1977, 91 Stat. 180. The provisions of this Act relating to an initial authorization for construction pursuant to section 5907 of this title are not classified to the Code.
Section was not enacted as part of the Federal Nonnuclear Energy Research and Development Act of 1974 which comprises this chapter.