text:
Written by Einar Lunga
«I don't intend my books for the generality of readers. I count it a mistake of our mistaken democracy, that every man who can read print is allowed to believe that he can read all that is printed. I count it a misfortune that serious books are exposed in the public market, like slaves exposed naked for sale. But there we are, since we live in an age of mistaken democracy, we must go through with it»./"Jeg har ikke tenkt at mine bøker er for massen av lesere. Jeg regner det som en feil ved vårt misforståtte demokrati, at alle som kan lese det som er trykt tillater seg å tro at de kan lese alt som skrives. Jeg regner det som en ulykke at seriøse bøker blir eksponert i det offentlige markedet, som slaver som blir eksponert nakne for salg." (D.H. Lawrence: Forward to "Fantasia of the Unconscious")
Foreword: «Reading is as important for me as seeing; or, reading is a life changing function for me. It even transforms my brain and makes it a different kind of brain; without access to reading I believe I would feel like those strange eyeless fishes and worms living in deep dark caves of the underworld. Through reading my eyes also become something much more than normal eyes; yes, more like the eyes of an eagle, sailing through the skies and seeing everything down on the flat earth from high up in the heavens. Reading makes my eyes like all-seeing spiritual eyes; and even if there is a lot of things I would not like to suffer from I would never want to suffer from some kind of spiritual blindness. So; to celebrate the endless gifts I am given by reading; every new year, I decide for myself who to me is the most important writer that year. Most important, that is, the writer who for a moment can give me back my newborn eyes and teach me both to see again, and even to be a little blind again, but in new ways. To find such a writer is my version of going into the desert to visit a holy man, and It is also my own personal reader's Nobel price in litterature. Sometimes it is hard work to find just what I am looking for, as you all know there is a lot of writing souls and sellers out there to choose from.
In 2006 I never was in any doubt about who it was; I had by then started to read Cormac McCarthy. It was like coming home, like waking up some unknown part of myself who had been sleeping through all my years. I read all his books. The world became a different place, I myself became another type of person. I read these books with immense enjoyment, I read them first in english and then in norwegian language and all the time I had this feeling that 'I am learning something from this author'. To read the McCarthy books became an important part of my ongoing self education.
I also started to read some of the academic studies on his writing. It is still going on, I have met other writers in the meantime but I still read McCarthy today, 7 years later. We all support ourselves through having and making friends, and the writer Cormac McCarthy has become a close friend of mine, through his books he is frequently revisiting my place and my house. I recently reread his 'Blood meridian' partly to test if he still is a friend of mine with something to tell – unsuprisingly it was like reading a new book for the first time.
And so I can hear you ask: What about my eyes, what have reading him done to my eyes…the answer is that they now work almost like they did for me as a child…I can 'see'…»
To say something about the american writer Cormac McCarthy and his books, is inevitable to say something about a part of the earth that has dominated and redesigned human and animal existence through the last hundred years and more; the mysterious American society and lifeform. This society broke through in history like some strange and evolutionary sucessful animal and brought forward some new versions of human behavior and what it means to be human. As we all know, this evolutionary process is still ging on all over the place, there are americans doing all kind of business all over the world. There even is 'an american in me' doing business with the human soul.
For most of his writing life, Cormac McCarthy was a paradigmatical silent and invisible author trying to register and articulate the deepest voices and messages coming out of his own society. Steven Frye (2013) summarizes this image of McCarthy;
«He embodies but redefines the common notion of the artist as outsider. "
That is, as a genuine writing human used to be in former times; and as far as possible should go on being even in our attention craving times. Too much social attention and publicity in the here-and-now will for sure deform or even destroy every author's intrinsical authencity and rootedness in his social landscape.
The recent example of the norwegian writer Karl Ove Knausgård is a telling story and a sad warning: If you want to be an author, you have to avoid or limit exposure to social attention. Knausgård's greediness for attention and the medias greediness for everything that has attentive potential has without any doubt degraded the state of his extremely talented and promising writing. But we all know, if you start sellling your love to everyone, your love will soon be valueless to most people. Success and to much social attention creates a kind of quicksand that one can't get out of and that slowly strangles the writers genuine voice. When I have a look at my bookshelves, I even have started to feel a little embarrassed when I see the thick row of 6 Knausgård volumes.
McCarthy should know everything about this most basic quicksand law of the connection between attention and modern authorship. It seems that to be considered a seriously author and writer, you have to behave towards your writing in a virtuous way. That is precisely what Cormac McCarthy did most of his life.
For years, Cormac McCarthy was deeply occupied with generating hos own ideas and composing texts, plain and simple. He was doing the thing that mattered most to him; writing one book after the other in a gradually more selfmade language and style. He came up with books where a lot always was unsaid and where the unsaid was as essential and important as what was said and expressed. He wrote books that few people knew about and fewer people read and even fewer people admired and liked them. For such a writer the best book is always a book no one has read because it is still to be written.
Then something happened. Very fast, it seems from a distance. The monster of limitless publicity and then celebrity attacked the lonely author; like a greedy predator. Now everything is absolutely different. Our all too human greed for money and social attention caught up with the author McCarthy in the usual limitless hunt for a profitable victim. People who never thought of just reading his texts started to strangle and kill his books – one after the other- through making Oscarmonstrous stylish action movies in the most tasteless american style where more than everything is said and much more than everything is shown. After seeing one of those movies no one has left any wish for reading the book. The piece of art with endless open possibilities that the book was meant to be is stone dead and gone. Every new year to come this poor american writer will be loosing the Nobel litterature price again and again. In times like these, how can a poor genuine author survive and continue to be the only thing that once mattered for him, a creative author? The pathology of our modern pursuit of attention is an American pathology; Derber (2000) describes is like this:
«The pursuit of attention is now emerging as one of the electric organizing principles of American life. Not only are people pursuing attention in new ways, but there is evidence that we have begun to restructure our cultur – including even our politics and economy – around the idea of attention as a glittering ultimate recognition and reward. Celebrities are the icons, but the pursuit of attention is now being diffused and institutionalized, hardwired into our beings through new systems of media, business, and technology, and fueled by new aching deprivations that prey on our psyches. The result is a spreading virus of prosaic but dehumanizing behavior that subtly alienates us from one another and turns daily interaction into a veiled competition for recognition and respect.»
But ouside this pathology of attention, Cormac McCarthy is still a writer. The leading american literary critic Harold Bloom some years ago considered Cormac McCarthy to be one of the four major modern American novelists. He mentions him along with Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, and Philip Roth. McCarthys writing has often been compared to such central figures in american litteraure as William Faulkner and Herman Melville.
There is now a fast growing corpus of views and interpretations of Cormac McCarthy's novels and their different aspects. The presence of brutal and unexplainable violence and evil are something that provokes many of his readers, but is at the same time very characteristic of McCarthys image of human life. Critics focus both on his views on the role of violence in the history of the human animal; that it is an atavistic trait that is always with us – never far away- civilization or not. Others focus more on 'American violence' or the important place that voilence has in american history into our time; from the conquest of the West and thereafter a long sequence of very violent wars and interventions. Especially the Vietnam war did much to connect the american way of life to violence and domination. Americans has not much doubt about themselves when it comes to using violence, they have gone to their wars 'with God on our side'.
I do not believe it is an adequate way to understand the picture of human violence in McCarthys writing by regarding it as a sort of commentary on real episodes of violence og a sort of psychological theory of violence. It is never only concrete acts of violence he is showing us. It is violence as an aspect and part of a much more terrible nonrational darkness that goes with being human. From my viewpoint, his books are without doubt the best modern literary interpretation of something like a Schopenhauerian pessimistic view on the painful hopeless project of a human life in this hostile universe.
As he says himself about the dark side of living:
«The greatest litterature enables us to look into the very heart of darkness by making of the intolerable a thing of beauty».
«The secret source of humor itself is not joy but sorrow.»
«Words of wisdom are spoken without conviction and with no long-lasting effect»….
A little about his biography
The american author Cormac McCarthy was born on july 20, 1933, on Rhode Island. He was given the name Charles after his father, but later he renamed himself Cormac after an Irish King. Cormac is the Gaelic equivalent of «son of Charles». In 1937 his family moved to Knoxville, Tennesse. He spent most of his childhood near Knoxville – and this is where many of his novels are set. He was raised Roman Catholic and attended Catholic High School in Knoxville. Later he studied at the University of Tennessee in 1951-52. where his major was liberal arts. He served in the U.S. Air Force from 1953; and stayed for four years, two of them he was stationed in Alaska where he was host in a radio show. In 1976 he moved to El Paso, Texas, where he lives today. McCarthy's writings mirrors his movement from the Southeast to the West — the first four novels being set in Tennessee, the last three about happenings in the Southwestern Texas and Mexico. The 1985 'Blood meridian' novel represents a shift in the setting of his writings, to the southwest. His books are therefore divided into the «Appalachian Period» and the «Southwestern Period»
Cormac McCarthys books, and generally on his writing
Cormac McCarthy; 'this immensely talented novelist'; is among the last honest american writers. It seems as difficult to write honestly as it is to live honestly in USA. Different highly developed styles and sorts of organized and group supported lying and cheating has become the dominating societal norm. This is not a big secret anymore, even if most people find it very difficult to accept. As David Callahan shows in his revealing book " The Cheating Culture: Why More Americans Are Doing Wrong to Get Ahead", it is a modern societal epidemic. Everybody is cheating. As actors and players in american or increasingly american influenced social life, we are continually forced or persuaded to cheat and lie. After a while without knowing much about it ourselves. When the greed for money, success and social status and acceptance become so much more important as dominating social values, than honesty and compassion…..the only thing that keeps us from lying is the juridical system….and that is not concerned about our daily social living. Many of us had a hope that this could change with Obama as president; one of his strong individual characteristics seems to be his will to honesty and authenticity. He was regarded as almost saintlike…..so with him there could be new hope for the american society….And after some years living in the shadow of president Barak Obama we all know the paradoxical truth; in America honesty can be worse than a honest lie.
In the passing I think it is also right to say that this expasion of social lying and deceiving systems are also something happening in Norway….and in most other western societies..as we are all heavily influenced from what is going on over there….
It seems that Cormac McCarthy has managed to live his life, and write his books, without becoming too much involved in the ususal and well accepted systems of lying in his society.
He has proved both through how he has lived his own life, and through his series of books, that he is a honest and authentic writer…..shunning all the accepted vulgarities of greedy selfpromotion….not looking for and running after all those money rewards, social attention and forms of success and status, or anything else modern americans are so unshamely and limitless greedy for. He is making gothic stories of 'terrible beauty', telling things he thinks is important about our human destiny and possibilites…and that is not very uplifting….describing 'a humanity that differs only in degree from the rest of the animal world', and showing «the powerlessness of humanity to withstand the powers of natural mutability»….
In McCarthys writing there is an 'abscence of vision'….as he says himself..»I don't know why I started writing. I don't know why anybody does it. Maybe they're bored, or failures at something else.»
And as if playing a basic Schopenhauerian tune…..he says:
«If people saw the world for what it truly is. Saw their lives for what they truly are. Without dreams or illusions. I don't believe they could offer the first reason why they should not elect to die as soon as possible.»
The orchard keeper (1965)
This is his first book, often somewhat underestimated…it is said to be part of his socalled triology of primitivism….containing his first three books…all with central characters who are animallike hominoid primitives with only a rudimentary facility with culture or language…in contrast to their creator. The early novels are said to be more about sin or «evil as a tendency within human beings, perhaps even as the essence of human beings»…
Outer dark (1968)
The basically homeless principal characters in this environment of malignity –
«I dont live nowheres no more» – are lost «an outer dark of incest, murder, infanticide and cannibalism»….. «Night fell long and cool through the woods about him and a spectral quietude set in. As if something were about that crickets and nightbirds held in dread….trees beginning to close him in, malign and baleful shapes that reared like enormous androids provoked at the alien insubstantiality of this flesh colliding among them."
«Before him stretched a spectral waste out of which reared only the naked trees in attitudes of agony and dimly hominoid like figures in a landscape of the damned. A faintly smoking garden of the dead that tended away to the earth's curve. He tried his foot in the mire before him and it rose in a vulvate welt claggy and sucking. He stepped back. A stale wind blew from this desolation and the marsh reeds and black ferns among which he clashed softly like things chained. He wondered why a road should come to such a place.»
Child of God (Norsk utgave: 2006)
It has been said about this book; «it is not a consummated work of art, but an affront on decency on every level»
Suttree (1979)
This book, with Cornelius Suttree as a sort of dropout hero, is different in many ways from the earlier books ; one reason is that McCarty began Suttree before his first three published novels. «In the context of so many religious images in Suttree (-), I suggest that Meister Eckhart, the greatest of the medieval mystics, offers insight into both the mysteries of Suttree and perhaps into McCarthy's oeuvre.» (John Rothfork, «Redemption as Language in Cormac McCarthy's Suttree,» Christianity and Literature 53, no. 3 (2004)) Sut, the books main character, lives in «a world within the world», 'a surrealistic dreamworld that exist outside the realm of reason', a world that is peopled by society's most marginal figures, the «ill-shapen or black or deranged, fugitive of all order, strangers in everyland», a «fellowship of the doomed»….and if those figures are lost in this world, they are not more at home in the next…»I always figured they was a God, I just never did like him», says one illshapen hominoid. At his son's grave Suttree wonders, «What could a child know of the darkness of God's plan? Or how flesh is so frail it is hardly more than a dream»……»they were moving as if to shape the dark to some purpose»…»there is just us, in the grip of no power save those of the words we happen to speak», «sometimes I dont know what people's lives are for»
-Suttree dreams of the Last Judgment:
«Mr. Suttree[,] it is our understanding [that you squandered your] years in the company of thieves, derelicts, miscreants, pariahs, poltroons, spalpeens, curmudgeons, clotpolls, murderers, gamblers, bawds, whores, trulls, brigands, topers, tosspots, sots and archsots, lobcocks, smell-smocks, runagates, rakes, and other assorted and felonious debauchees.» In his defense, and without even asking to consult a dictionary, Suttree says: «I was drunk.»
Blood meridian (1985)/Blodmeridianen (norsk 2010)
«the alpha and omega of the novel of violence»:
It is also said of some to be the greatest american novel, compared to 'Moby Dick'. In 2006 it was ranked as the third best american novel in in New York Times.
Haroald Bloom once he called Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian the ultimate Western: "It culminates all the aesthetic potential that Western fiction can have. I don't think that anyone can hope to improve on it, that it essentially closes out the tradition."
Human violence is very basic in McCarthys thought on human life: as he says himself :
«There's no such thing as life without bloodshed, . . . I think the notion that the species can be improved in some way, that everyone could live in harmony, is a really dangerous idea. Those who are afflicted with this notion are the first ones to give up their souls, their freedom. Your desire that it be that way will enslave you and make your life vacuous.» (quoted in Woodward, Richard B. «Cormac McCarthy's Venomous Fiction.» The New York Times Magazine, 19 April 1992)
«Blood Meridian received practically no recogniction and remains a novel that few Americans have ever heard of and fewer still have read.» – This is McCarthys most controversial and polarizing novel; – described as «a novelization of Pekingpah's west» – it is, as one critic writes, «the alpha and omega of the novel of violence. It is not a novel about violence. It is not a novel in which violence is incidental. It is not a novel in which violence is central. It is violence, period.»-«It is not a story for the squeamish, least of all for the philosophically squeamish. But it compels us to call forth from ourselves a capacity for understanding evil that the various meanings of our lives otherwise cause to be suppressed»(Bell)
«Blood Meridian sings hymns of violence, is gorgeous language commemorating slaughter in all it sumptuousness and splendor»(Steven Shaviro)
One of the epigraphs to Blood Meridian is taken from Jacob Boehme, renders this point metaphysical by saying that Boehme emphasized the notion of God as being or atman, so that «all human beings are fundamentally only one man» (222-23).
He explains that «Boehme described the Deity's mystical essence as the 'Ungrund' (the 'unground'), implying both nothingness and all, that which in being everything is equally an incomprehensible 'No thing'» (224).
McCarthy's tale about the moral landscape of the Southwest-frontier world is a tale about «fight with fists, with feet, with bottles or knives. All races, all breeds. Men whose speech sounds like the grunting of apes» «For the earth is a globe in the void and [in] truth there's no up nor down to it»…. McCarthys central point in this book is the pervasiveness of human evil; and it was never historical figures like Stalin or the nazis who invented the limitless and banality of human evil. The novel's extreme brutality and naked bloody violence has been compared to a «slap in the face» to readers living a domesticated modern life, cut off from the basic rawness and brutality of life.
As always in his writing, McCarthy is giving us a scene of human action, feeling and thinking reduced to somebasic parameters; here is no easy hiding away, no false comforts, no modern lies about inborn or institutionalized human kindness, peacefulness and friendfulness……we are not just the peaceful social persons we think we are – we are, as terrible as it seems – given to this world and to other beings as this monstrosity of a being, an anthropoid or a hominoid, yes, …a terrible and frightening sort of animal….and there is nothing called human progress…..we are as we are…..a potential plague…..
«A legion of horribles, hundreds in number, half naked or clad in costumes attic or biblical or wardrobed out of a fevered dream with the skins of animals and silk finery and pieces of uniform still tracked with the blood of prior owners, coats of slain dragoons, frogged and braided cavalry jackets . . . and all the horsemen's faces gaudy and grotesque with daubings like a company of mounted clowns, death hilarious, all howling in a barbarous tongue and riding down upon them like a horde from a hell more horrible yet than the brimstone land of christian reckoning, screeching and yammering and clothed in smoke like those vaporous beings in regions beyond right knowing where the eye wanders and the lip jerks and drools.»
«The following evening as they rode up onto the western rim they lost one of the mules. It went skittering off down the canyon wall with the contents of the panniers exploding soundlessly in the hot dry air and it fell through sunlight and through shade, turning in that lonely void until it fell from sight into a sink of cold blue space that absolved it forever of memory in the mind of any living thing that was.»
As readers of 'Blood meridian' –
«We are called to no responsibility, and we may lay claim to no transcendence. Blood Meridian is not a salvation narrative; we can be rescued neither by faith nor by works not by grace»……. (Steven Shaviro)
All the pretty horses: 1992
«If you dont have the money to buy it, or a library where you can borrow it, so go out and steal it», said a norwegian critic on this book. 'All the pretty horses' won two amercan literature prices in 1992 – The American National Book Award og National Book Critics Circle Award.
Not a country for old men (2005)
«evil is real, and evil walks this earth like a natural man.»
'Not a country' is not a very good book; but it is impressive in what it tries to explore.
This is in a way a story about human fate and choice, as can be said in just one sentence:
«Everything you do closes a door somewhere ahead…»
As McCarthy writes :
"Somewhere you made a choice. All followed to this. The accounting is scrupulous. The shape is drawn. No line can be erased. I had no belief in your ability to move a coin to your bidding. How could you? A person's path through the world seldom changes and even more seldom will it change abruptly. And the shape of your path was visible from the beginning."
But of course, it is also about our greed for money, power, dominance – and a little about how impossible it is to be good, to carry the light………what we still has to do as a necessity…because the alternative is an existence no one of us would want to have.
The Road, 2006/2009 'Veien' in norwegian)
«The Road paints a world of the darkest fears of the current American subconscious.» (Emily Lane, 2010)
«A few weeks ago I read what I believe is the most important environmental book ever written. It is not Silent Spring, Small Is Beautiful or even Walden. It contains no graphs, no tables, no facts, figures, warnings, predictions or even arguments. Nor does it carry a single dreary sentence, which, sadly, distinguishes it from most environmental literature. It is a novel, first published a year ago, and it will change the way you see the world.» (George Monbiot, 2007)
McCarthys siste bok gjør sterkt inntrykk på leserne, som bør være foreberedte før de går i gang med lesningen –
«Any prospective reader of this book must be of sound mind and body when they begin, or the effects on them could be catastrophic.» («A Nightmare Vision of the Fall of Mankind,» The Evening Standard (London, England), 6 November 2006, 37) '
McCarthys siste bok er endelig ute på norsk….bare løp til bokhandelen, kjøp boken selv om den koster 349 kr, og nyt å lese og bli inntatt av denne teksten, du vil møte et språk og en fortelling og en stemning som erobrer deg og ditt tanke, ditt sinn…med bilder, følelser, uttrykk og ord -og en intens visjon og forestilling om vår verden, om tiden, før-nå-senere, om oss mennesker og om menneskepesten, og om våre muligheter for det gode og det onde, om vårt liv i mørke og det sårbare etterlengtete lyset…som vi kan velge å la brenne i oss, vise veien….men for en vei…..
The road is his latest book; published in english in 2006…the norwegian translation is scheduled for sept. 2008……and is out just now…run to the bookstore….
The movie version expected late 2008…I have low expectations for that….I dotn see how such a copymovie can make things more clear…..but you never know…..
The road is so far McCarthys most debated novel….it is clearly a book that is making a very strong impression on readers, all over the world….
J.A. Gray comments ironically that –
«the Road is McCarthy at his most «pedestrian»….and truly, this is in a way book on the art of human walking. So, it is true in another way than Gray means to tell us…, the story in the book is basically a last walk; a father and a child wandering as a pair of lonely and lost pilgrims towards something we as humans call 'the south', but as we learn, such places are meaningless outside our imagination and human ways …..or rather, as we brutally wake up from our human dream state…we find that everything is always just another part of a potentially totally hellish landscape …there is no salvation, no paradise, no escape….we are all the way walking through a gray and cold postapocalyptic wasteland. The Road is a true psychological or antropological pilgrimage, a pilgrims progress that is in reality a regress…..we are walking trough a wasteland into nothingness….. together with a truly damned human race. 'Nights dark beyond darkness and the days more gray each one than what had gone before' – with no other intention than just staying alive, keeping alive; and thinking about what one is willing to do to keep alive. The father keeps a pistol with two deadly bullets in case….there is nowhere to go for McCarthys modern pilgrims; what shall we as readers look for – «Perhaps in the world's destruction it would be possible at last to see how it was made. Oceans, mountains. The ponderous counterspectacle of things ceasing to be. The sweeping waste, hydroptic and coldly secular. The silence.»
«The frailty of everything revealed at last. Old and troubling issues resolved into nothingness and night.»
In 'The Road' McCarthy is taking his basic and reductive Schopenhauerian vision and philosophy of human life – «human beings are the tortured souls (-) and the devils» – he has partly taken over from or in a literary way developed further from Faulkner and Melville, and he is going one step further…a decisive step that is……as he is writing he succeds in letting us see and feel what this world is about, what living is about…when one wants to see through 'the veil of Maya'….What do we see ? As McCarthy is saying: «If people saw the world for what it truly is. Saw their lives for what they truly are. Without dreams or illusions. I don't believe they could offer the first reason why they should not elect to die as soon as possible.»…….or in Schopenhauers pessimistic philosophy…..the best would be not to be born……but….we are……are'nt we ? So we have to learn to live this impossible life….and to do that we have to be honest…..and McCarthy is helping us to be honest….as he is giving us versions of human living reduced to basic parameters….taking away our blindfolds…showing us that what we fear, the sorts of living we dont want to live……The road is therefore a very important book about human life as a desperate pilgrimage with no happy ending, with no soultion, without a future…the terrible fact is that sooner or later this book is going to be the truth…..we are all of us walking on 'this road' ……he us showing us…where we are going, what will be coming…….so, the best would be not to be born…….but we are…..
"There is no prophet in the earth's long chronicle who is not honored here today" "there is no later" (-) "this is later."
«When he woke in the woods in the dark and the cold of the night he'd reach out to touch the child sleeping beside him. Nights dark beyond darkness and the days more gray each one than what had gone before.
With the first gray light he rose and left the boy sleeping and walked out to the road and squatted and studied the country to the south. Barren, silent, godless. He thought the month was October but he wasnt sure. He hadnt kept a calendar for years.
«We wouldnt ever eat anybody, would we? No. Of course not. Even if we were starving? We're starving now. You said we werent. I said we werent dying. I didnt say we werent starving. But we wouldnt. No. We wouldnt. No matter what. No. No matter what. Because we're the good guys. Yes. And we're carrying the fire. And we're carrying the fire, yes. Okay.»
«You cant. You have to carry the fire. I dont know how to. Yes you do. Is it real? The fire? Yes it is. Where is it? I dont know where it is. Yes you do. It's inside you. It was always there. I can see it.»
Further remarks on Cormac McCarthy and his relation the pessimistic philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer
There seems to exist a deep kinship between the writing of McCarthy and Schopenhauers philosophical ideas about the world and human life.
Schopenhauers thinking has of course influenced many important authers, like Tolstoj, Hardy, Melville, Faulkner, Conrad, Beckett, Kafka, and so on. Sometimes it seems right to say that McCarthy in his books has no vision at all, there is no philosophy he is articulating, just giving a vision of a brutal and violent, indifferent and extrahuman world and life process…..where primitivity and animality is more basic than human qualities. But at the same time, to say that McCarthy is visionless is not quite right. I his very few interviews it seems that he is formulating a philosophy; like this – «I think the notion that the species can be improved in some way, that everyone could live in harmony, is a really dangerous idea. Those who are afflicted with this notion are the first ones to give up their souls, their freedom. Your desire that it be that way will enslave you and make your life vacuous.»
It is very clear that McCarthy has no romantic or grand or other humanistic illusions about Homo Sapiens and the place he occupies in nature….or nature occupies in him….McCarthy turns his literary back on all sorts of comforting traditional transcendental nonsense in his 'metaphysics of violence' (Bell) – it is only violence and its different horrific forms that can be said to be transcendental….behind and over all living and changing things…there is a life's war…and a brutal world….indifferent and blind to human concerns. As Schopenhauer puts it: «The world is just a hell and in it human beings are the tortured souls on the one hand, and the devils on the other.»(PP)
Published novels
The orchard keeper: 1965. His debut novel, won the Faulkner Award for a first novel
Outer dark: 1968
Child of God:1973 – in norwegian 'Et guds barn'
Suttree: 1979 Blood meridian: 1985
All the pretty horses; vol I in The border triology: 1992, won the National Book Critics Circle Award and the National Book Award for fiction in 1992 – in norwegian – 'Alle de vakre hestene' in 1993 The crossing; vol. II in The border triology: 1994, på norsk i 1995 – 'Over grensen' Cities of the plain, vil III in The border Triology: 1998, in norwegian 'Byene på høysletten' in 1999 The border triology came in 2002, 'Grensetriologien' came in norwegian in 2006
No country for old men: 2005 – in norwegian 'Ikke et land for gamle menn' in 2007
The Road: 2006 – in norwegian 'Veien' in september 2008
Books on Cormac McCarthy and his writing
Cant, John.; Cormac McCarthy and the myth of American Exceptionalism. New York : Routledge, 2008.
Steven Frye (ed.); The Cambridge Companion to Cormac McCarthy. Cambridge University Press, 2013
Robert L Jarrett: Cormac McCarthy, Twayne Publishers, New York 1997
R. W. Barcley Owens: Cormac McCarthys Western Novels, The University of Arizona Press, Tucson 2000
Lilley, James D.;Cormac McCarthy: New Directions; University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque
Guinn Matthew. «Ruder Forms Survive: Cormac McCarthy's Atavistic Vision.»
Myth, Legend, Dust: Critical Responses to Cormac McCarthy. Ed. Rick Wallach. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2000. 108-15.
Hall, Wade, and Rick Wallach, eds. Sacred Violence: A Reader's Companion to Cormac McCarthy. El Paso: U of Texas at El Paso P, 1995. Lilley, James, ed. Cormac McCarthy: New Directions. Albuquerque: U of New Mexico P, 2002.
Young, Thomas D., Jr. «The Imprisonment of Sensibility: Suttree.» In Perspectives on Cormac McCarthy. Ed. Edwin T. Arnold and Dianne C. Luce. Rev. ed. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1999. 97-121.


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2015 Women's Football Offseason Update #1
[This is the first of five articles I wrote previewing the 2016 women's football season. For the next installment in the series, read here.]
Well, it's silly season in women's football…that wild and wacky time of year when new teams appear, while established teams call it quits, jump from league to league, merge, or split in two. Ah, the offseason. Here's a mid-offseason update to get you caught up on the last three months of happenings within the sport.
Becoming the #2's #1
The biggest shakeup of the 2015-2016 offseason is one that is still bizarrely unconfirmed. Many women's football fans already know the long saga of the Pittsburgh Passion, but just in case, here you go.
After winning a major national championship in 2007, the Pittsburgh Passion hit a six-year championship dry spell from 2008-2013. During that time, they stamped themselves as a top contender in the premier league in women's football (the IWFL from 2008-2010 and the WFA from 2011-2013), but they were unable to get over the hump and capture a second national title.
The triumvirate of the Chicago Force, Boston Militia, and D.C. Divas were largely to blame for the Passion's frustrations. In five playoff appearances from 2008-2013, Pittsburgh went a combined 0-5 against those three teams. Meanwhile, either Chicago, Boston, or D.C. went on to win the conference title all six of those years.
The Pittsburgh Passion then rocked the sport after the 2013 season by leaving the WFA and going back to the IWFL. While the IWFL was the premier league in women's football from 2008-2010, they were clearly the #2 league in the sport by 2013, a much smaller league with no franchises on Pittsburgh's competitive level. This set the Passion up to completely overwhelm and dominate the smaller league.
The Passion obliterated their competition in the IWFL in 2014 on their way to the IWFL national title. It became the first time since 2008 – when a single top competitive league in women's football was first established – that a team from the #1 league in the sport dropped down to win a title in the #2 league. Take a look at the chart below.
Year #1 League Champion #2 League Champion
2008 IWFL Dallas Diamonds NWFA H-Town Texas Cyclones
2009 IWFL Kansas City Tribe WFA St. Louis Slam
2010 IWFL Boston Militia WFA Lone Star Mustangs
2011 WFA Boston Militia IWFL Atlanta Xplosion
2012 WFA San Diego Surge IWFL Montreal Blitz
2013 WFA Chicago Force IWFL Carolina Phoenix
2014 WFA Boston Militia IWFL Pittsburgh Passion
Look at the six champions of the #2 leagues from 2008-2013. Five of the six – the H-Town Texas Cyclones in 2008, the Lone Star Mustangs in 2010, the Atlanta Xplosion in 2011, the Montreal Blitz in 2012, and the Carolina Phoenix in 2013 – had played in that league for their entire existence when they won the league title. The lone exception is the 2009 St. Louis Slam, although that's largely a technicality. After the NWFA dissolved in 2008, most of its members jumped over to the newly-formed WFA for the 2009 season. The St. Louis Slam, who had played in the NWFA for their entire existence, went on to win the WFA title in its first year in 2009.
The point is…every single #2 league champion from 2008-2013 was native to that league (or, in St. Louis' case, a predecessor league). Their titles didn't result from an abrupt change in leagues…to the contrary, each of those teams won the championship in the league in which they originated or in which they had competed for years.
Pittsburgh, on the other hand, jumped into the IWFL in 2014 from the WFA, ready to dominate. I want to be very clear: I have a lot of respect for many of the teams in the IWFL, including the Blitz, the Phoenix, and several others. But those teams were on a different level developmentally from where the Passion were when they entered the league in 2014. Pittsburgh left a league of competitive equals to go to a league where they faced none.
I gave an example of what I'm talking about back in January 2014 shortly after the Passion made the move to the IWFL. The reigning 2013 IWFL champions were the Carolina Phoenix, a solid team that boasted a roster of 36 players. The 2013 Pittsburgh Passion, on the other hand, featured 96 players! I know quality is more important than quantity in many respects, but such a massive difference in roster size is a huge advantage in women's football, where smaller teams are often forced to play players both ways out of necessity.
Of course, teams jumping from larger leagues to smaller leagues and immediately rolling to titles is nothing new in women's football; teams like the Memphis Dynasty and Jacksonville Dixie Blues have made similar moves in the past. However, it had never been done on this scale before…an elite team in the #1 league that had narrowly failed to get over the hump and win a championship jumping down to the #2 league and capturing a high-profile national title.
Coulda Been A Contender
The biggest irony of Pittsburgh's move to the IWFL is that the 2014 WFA season might have been their best chance to overcome the Chicago-Boston-D.C. troika. All three teams lost one of their best playmakers to injury for a substantial part of the 2014 regular season – quarterback Sami Grisafe for Chicago, running back Whitney Zelee for Boston, and quarterback Allyson Hamlin for D.C. Had Pittsburgh stayed healthy, 2014 might have been the year for the Passion to finally secure home field advantage throughout the WFA playoffs…but we'll never know.
The Pittsburgh Passion repeated their IWFL title in 2015, and this time the D.C. Divas captured the WFA championship. It was another ironic outcome for Pittsburgh – of the Chicago-Boston-D.C. triumvirate, the Divas were the team the Passion had the most success against, defeating them in regular season games in 2012 and 2013. Yet it was the Divas who came away with the most coveted championship in women's football by overcoming Boston and Chicago for the crown, while Pittsburgh was left to run roughshod over a smaller league.
On top of all that, the Pittsburgh Passion racked up their long winning streak against IWFL competition without facing their top rivals from the WFA on an interleague basis. The Boston Militia and D.C. Divas would have been receptive to playing the Passion in interleague matchups, as they struggled to compile eight-game regular season schedules in Pittsburgh's absence. Yet no interleague games between Pittsburgh and top WFA teams were scheduled in 2014 and 2015, and it was precisely that lack of local competition that Militia owner Ernie Boch cited as the primary reason for folding his team after winning the WFA title in 2014.
The Pittsburgh Passion's presence in the IWFL the past two seasons created an awkward situation. Outsiders with little knowledge of the sport and die-hard Passion partisans alike celebrated Pittsburgh's championship success with glowing praise, but knowledgeable women's football fans had to reconcile Pittsburgh's success with the reality that their recent championships were only achieved after switching leagues and no longer competing against their top competitive rivals.
Full disclosure: I have been openly critical in the past of Pittsburgh's move. If Pittsburgh wants to play in the IWFL, I have no issues with that, of course – every team should be allowed to play in whatever league they want. But if you're going to call your team a dynasty (or at least not shy away from others doing so), you can't duck the top teams in the top league and pretend they don't exist. You can't leave a league filled with competitive equals, refuse to play them on an interleague basis, and then demand "world championship" respect for dominating a league filled with less-developed teams. It doesn't work that way…
…or at least it shouldn't. Unfortunately, there are so many folks out there who scarcely know women's football exists that it's easy to pull the wool over their eyes. When they hear, "We went undefeated and won the title!" they don't examine it any more closely than that. It's one of the natural drawbacks of a less-publicized sport, and sometimes teams and leagues try to leverage the overall public's lack of awareness about women's football for their own gain. Since part of my mission is to help make the sport more accessible to the general public by educating potential women's football fans about the realities of the sport, I often find myself at odds with those who'd prefer not to have such information publicized.
On that note, Pittsburgh Passion fans and players don't want to hear any of this criticism of their favorite team. The thing is, I know that the Pittsburgh players and fans aren't to blame for any of it – after all, they don't get to decide what league the Passion plays in or what interleague matchups they schedule. All the players can do is try to win against the schedule put in front of them, and they have performed admirably in that regard. The blame rests with the people who put that schedule in front of them, and while players and fans may have input on that issue, they don't have the final say.
I believe Teresa Conn, the co-owner of the Passion, is the one who ultimately held the cards here, and that's the other complicating factor. No one wants to say anything negative about Conn, who is a longtime veteran of women's football and, according to anyone you care to ask, a real credit to the sport. She has been involved in growing women's football for over a decade and is a giant within the game. But with all that said, I think she's a good woman who made a severe miscalculation, and I don't think moving the Passion to the IWFL will go down as one of the best moves of her career. But that's just my opinion.
Believe me, I'm not trying to enrage probably the largest fanbase in women's football, since I have a lot of respect for the Passion organization. But as always, I have a responsibility to be honest and call it as I see it, even if that means making enemies here and there. The thing is, what those Pittsburgh fans and players may not understand is that I'm actually arguing that they deserve better. The Pittsburgh Passion are a proud franchise in women's football history that deserves to be competing against the elite in the sport rather than hammering less-developed teams by thirty points every week. Pittsburgh-Boston and Pittsburgh-D.C. are the kinds of games that can grow this entire sport and attract mainstream attention…and mainstream respect.
Where's Your Passion?
That was a long and winding road to here, but it brings me to the biggest news of the offseason. The Pittsburgh Passion have spent the past two years isolated from most of the other elite teams in women's football. Times may be a-changin'…although it appears the WFA dropped the ball on the announcement.
In years past, the WFA has had teams submit bids on hosting the league's championship weekend, with preference going toward defending league champions. I know the D.C. Divas, as 2015 WFA champions, were excited about the prospect of hosting the 2016 national championship game…Washington, DC, has never hosted a women's football national championship game, so folks here were fired up about the possibility.
Instead, the WFA declared on October 2 that it was awarding the 2016 WFA championship game (and, apparently, all WFA national championship games for the foreseeable future) to a group headed by the owners of the Pittsburgh Passion. It was disappointing news to many in the Divas camp, although there are rumors that this deal brings with it the possibility of high-level media coverage…rumors which, even unsubstantiated, make the awarding of the championship game to Pittsburgh a bit of a no-brainer.
But here's where things get weird: nowhere in the WFA's October 2 announcement did they actually say that the Pittsburgh Passion were joining the WFA for the 2016 season. For over a month, neither the WFA nor the Pittsburgh Passion have confirmed that, hey, the Passion have returned to the WFA.
Now, it stands to reason that this is the case. First and foremost, why would the WFA award its national championship to an ownership group of a team from another league? That's ludicrous on the face of it. For the IWFL's part, they have scrubbed the Pittsburgh Passion from their team directory (and that's one page on their site they keep religiously updated with the latest accurate information, unlike, say, this page).
So I think it's safe to say that the Pittsburgh Passion have returned to the Women's Football Alliance for the 2016 season. But for over a month, that statement has been 99 percent solid but not 100 percent confirmed.
(Again, for those who think I don't criticize the WFA…this has to be regarded as a massive PR blunder. What should have happened is for the Passion and WFA to jointly make a public statement that Pittsburgh has returned to the WFA after a two-year absence, followed by a second announcement that the Passion have been awarded hosting rights for the 2016 league championship weekend. Alternately, you could break the news of both developments at the same time, emphasizing the Passion move first and the league championship game location second. To make the second announcement first and then fail to make the first announcement for over a month is, well, less than ideal, to be kind.)
WFA Expansion
I have also been critical of the WFA's rather apathetic approach to expansion the past several years. Since acquiring a flood of refugees from the IWFL in 2011, the WFA has basically been contracting ever since. In 2012, the WFA featured 58 teams, but by 2015, that number had shrunk to just 40 teams.
That's not a horrible number overall, but there were geographic strains as well. The WFA had just two functional teams – the Boston Renegades and the D.C. Divas – on the East Coast by the end of 2015. From as far south as the Carolinas all the way up through Maine, and as far west as Pennsylvania, there were only two WFA teams in that entire region. Considering that this region encompasses many of the biggest media markets in the country, the lack of WFA representation in the Northeast was troubling, to say the least.
I'm pleased to see that the league has rebounded with an aggressive round of expansion this offseason. New planned additions to the WFA for the 2016 season include:
Philadelphia Phantomz
Richmond Black Widows
Fayetteville Fierce
Memphis Stars
Alabama Fire (Birmingham, AL)
Franklin Nightmare (Franklin, TN)
Port City Jaguars (Shreveport, LA)
Flint City Riveters
East Texas Lady Crusaders
Mile High Blaze (from independent)
Colorado Voodoo (from IWFL?)
Pittsburgh Passion* (from IWFL)
The asterisked Passion are, as noted, unconfirmed. It is unclear if the Colorado Voodoo are the former Colorado Springs Voodoo of the IWFL…that would appear to be the case from the logos and social media chatter, but the IWFL hasn't officially scrubbed the Voodoo from their team directory and, again, that's something they ordinarily keep pretty well up-to-date.
In other team news, the WFA's Portland Shockwave and Portland Fighting Fillies have announced a merger to become the Portland Fighting Shockwave. The merger into one Portland franchise should allow the Fighting Shockwave to better challenge the regional supremacy of the Seattle Majestics in the Pacific Northwest. I love the move…anything that allows for the possibility of an elite women's football team in Portland I'm all for.
The other major WFA news of the offseason was the addition of a second league championship for smaller-market teams. This will provide postseason opportunities to newer teams that may not be capable of competing in the playoffs against the elite WFA franchises at this stage of their development. It's unclear at this point if there will simply be a separate playoff bracket for small-market teams or if this will be a full-fledged second tier, similar to what the IWFL had in place from 2008-2010.
Personally, I hope it's the latter, but either way, I think it's a great development for the WFA. Let's face it…many, many women's football teams know well before the season starts – if they are being candid – that they're not going to take down the Chicago Force, for example, come playoff time. What, then, do these teams have to play for? It's important for the WFA to give these teams something to compete for, some kind of incentive to remain in the same league as Chicago while knowing that there are still goals to attain. I think that was the idea behind the "regional bowl games" proposed by the league last year, and I assume that's the purpose behind this small-market championship as well. Regardless, I'm all for it.
With all these new developments and a dozen new teams on board already, it's looking like a very nice offseason for the Women's Football Alliance.
IWFL Expansion and a New Look for the WSFL
The IWFL has publicized six new potential additions to the league for the 2016 season, including four expansion teams: the Woodland Wildcats (near Houston, TX), the Bakersfield Bombers, the Maine Mayhem, and the Granite Grey Wolves. The Mayhem and Grey Wolves will take over the territory of the Northeast Rebels, who announced their dissolution earlier this offseason after four straight winless seasons. The Mayhem will operate in Maine, where the Rebels resided for most of their history, while the Grey Wolves take up residence in New Hampshire, where the Rebels played their final few seasons in the former territory of the defunct New Hampshire/Manchester Freedom.
I don't know much about the Bakersfield team, but mark my words: the Woodland Wildcats look like they could be a real contender in the IWFL. Laura Cantu, the legendary former quarterback of the Houston Energy, is the team's head coach and a member of their front office…that alone should tell you the Wildcats mean business.
The IWFL also has two new acquisitions from other leagues. The Tulsa Threat are moving to the IWFL after five seasons in the WFA. Also, the New York Knockout are returning to the IWFL after one season competing in the W8FL, where they won the 2015 W8FL championship.
Meanwhile, the Women's Spring Football League (WSFL), the #3 league in women's football, has announced that it will rebrand into the United States Women's Football League (USWFL). The league, under Mary Butler's leadership, had probably the best season in its existence in 2015, featuring a solid ten-team core. To this point, there is no public news about any offseason changes to the league's lineup of teams, so no new info to report there.
Full disclosure: I covered the WSFL (now USWFL) in-depth last season, providing recaps for every single league game as a volunteer staff writer. I did this in an effort to promote the league, which – as the smallest of the three major U.S. leagues – gets too little coverage otherwise. About midway through last season, however, I found my line of communication to Butler's office abruptly cut, for some reason. Numerous messages went unreturned.
I'm a loudmouth, so it's certainly possible I said something to upset the league…or perhaps it's just a misunderstanding where the league got too busy to respond to my requests. Honestly, no ill will either way. Butler has hired Tracy Parker to serve as USWFL commissioner and has made vocal statements that only she and Parker officially represent the league or are authorized to speak on its behalf. Perhaps that's directed at me, perhaps not…I truly don't know and again, honestly, no ill will either way. I think Butler is an effective leader who should do a fine job for the USWFL, and I wish her and her league the best. But I wanted WSFL/USWFL fans to know that it appears my days as an unpaid league staff writer have come to an end…which, again, is A-OK.
While the USWFL appears to still have a solid core of teams in place, the four-team W8FL has had two major departures. The two teams that played in the 2015 W8FL championship game, the New York Knockout and the Cape Fear Thunder, are not expected to participate in the W8FL in 2016. It is also unclear if the W8FL will undergo a similar rebranding as their parent league, the USWFL.
Finally, two old names from women's football past have declared their intentions to restart. The Dayton Diamonds and Las Vegas Showgirlz are both attempting to return from hiatus. The Diamonds competed for four seasons before folding after the 2011 WFA campaign. The Showgirlz closed up shop last year after nine strong seasons from 2006-2014 and were replaced in the WFA by the Sin City Sun Devils. The Showgirlz have stated that they plan to compete as an independent team in 2016 as they try to complete their resurrection.
A New Era of Women's Indoor Football?
The Lingerie Football League (or Legends Football League, if you prefer) has received a fair amount of publicity lately for their smutty brand of women's indoor football. It's worth noting that while women's outdoor football has been around continuously since 1999, legitimate women's indoor football has never really taken off. There have been various attempts over the years – the most notable of which was the Women's Indoor Football League (WIFL), a vaporware scam that bilked a lot of well-intentioned female athletes out of tryout fees and inspired me to write a 20-part exposé on the league. (Yes, seriously…don't steal from women's football players. It makes me mad.) Well, the concept of legitimate indoor women's football is being floated again, with two different leagues trying to make a go of it.
The first is the Women's Indoor Gridiron League (WIGL). The WIGL tried to launch last year with teams like the Conshohocken (PA) Lady Steel, the Wilmington (DE) Widows, and the Garden State (NJ) Gladiators. None of these teams got out of the planning stages, however. Still, the WIGL has pledged a 2016 comeback, with the South Florida Eagles one of the latest rumored teams. There is also a Facebook group more or less dedicated to the league called the Women's Indoor Tackle Football Group.
The WIGL is a theoretical offshoot of the Indoor Gridiron League (IGL), a non-pro men's football league. The IGL is owned by Joe Krause, who also owns the Philadelphia Yellow Jackets of the American Indoor Football (AIF) league. Krause has an intriguing history as the former Vice President of Sales for the Philadelphia Soul of the Arena Football League. Unfortunately, the AIF has a pretty lousy reputation in indoor football and the IGL has never been able to escape non-pro status, which raises questions as to whether or not the WIGL will ever become viable.
Another person trying to establish a women's indoor football league is no stranger to fans of women's football. Randall Fields, the former head of the WSFL, has released plans to launch the Ladies Indoor Football League (LIFL) in the fall of 2016. The LIFL intends to operate in the Midwest in its first season with a planned national rollout in the years to follow.
Four teams are set to launch in the LIFL's inaugural season: the Chicago Assault, the Iowa Heartbreakers, the Milwaukee Ice, and Minneapolis Storm. The LIFL is positioning itself as an alternative to the LFL, with a nearly transparent "I" in the LIFL logo and taking in several former LFL players and coaches.
The Chicago Assault is anchored by a pair of former players of the LFL's Chicago Bliss, Dana Dixon and Bridget McDonnell. The Iowa Heartbreakers were originally named the Omaha Heartbreakers before moving their headquarters across the Mississippi River to Council Bluffs, Iowa; the Heartbreakers named former Omaha Heart head coach Dontae Allen as the team's general manager and signed a former Heart player, Marissa Mitchell Riley, to their roster as well. The Milwaukee Ice claims to be a continuation and renaming of the LFL's Green Bay Chill, which operated out of Milwaukee in its final season. The Ice have signed former Chill assistant head coach Darius Jenkins to serve as their general manager.
[Edited to add (October 2016): The LIFL announced Riley's "signing" in July 2015, and I have added a link to where the LIFL made that announcement. Riley has since sworn off the league and re-committed to the LFL; please see her comment below. That's not a surprising development, given that the LIFL has now gone over a year without playing a single game. Despite any claim of "faulse accurations", my article was correct when it was written. Still, my thanks to Melissa Mitchell-Riley for the update on her current playing status, even though being an LFL player under the thumb of Mitch Mortaza is hardly worth bragging about.]
The LIFL has also publicized plans to launch a developmental league in the spring of 2016 called the Ladies American Football League (LAFL). The LAFL will serve as the spring recruiting pipeline to the LIFL. So far, the LAFL consists of three teams – the Arkansas Falcons, the Music City Mizfits, and the Cape Fear Thunder. The Thunder are coming over from the W8FL, a league they initially joined in 2011 when it was under Fields' ownership and where they spent several seasons.
Give Thanks for Women's Football!
A couple teams have also decided to fill an otherwise slow offseason with plans for fall contests. The IWFL's Detroit Pride publicized an October game against the Kansas City Storm, but the game was postponed at the Storm's request. The plan was then to hold the contest sometime in November instead, but given the Storm's shaky history – they have scarcely seen the field the past five years – it seems somewhat unlikely.
Perhaps a better chance would be given to the LAFL's Music City Mizfits, who have announced that they will make their franchise debut against the WFA's Derby City Dynamite in a Thanksgiving Day game called the Juice Bowl. The Mizfits are an expansion team in an expansion league, so skepticism is in order until we see them take the field, but it looks like the first game in the LAFL's history could be right around the corner.
It's an intriguing development…a one-game fall exhibition during the otherwise slow fall period might help generate some fan interest locally in women's football and give women's football players incentive to stay in solid physical shape during the offseason. It will be interesting to see if fall football exhibitions are a trend that will take off in the future.
Still two months away from the start of 2016 women's football training camps, so there is much more to come! Stay tuned, and thanks for reading!

subset: commoncrawl


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Following on from our look at fantastic login pages comes a look at more comprehensive form design such as contact forms, order forms, sign up forms and comment forms. Below are just some of the best examples on the web.
WPCoder uses a high quality image of a clipboard for their order form.
Alex Cohaniuc uses a piece of paper for his contact form.
Paramore Redd have a nicely styled, clean contact form.
Graphik uses a big friendly header on their contact form.
Kontain clearly defines form fields by using bounding boxes and colour.
Tumblr uses big form fields and a nice clean appearance.
News Pond gets users to focus on their sign-up form with the use of a background glow.
Duoh uses a big bold header and a paragraph to introduce their contact form.
Neutron Creations fills in fake details on their contact form, showing clearly, at a glance, what details should be entered.
Ballpark has a nice clean design with clearly defined sections.
Dragon Interactive uses a tab interface to distinguish the type of message on their contact form.
Substrakt uses the familiarity of a postcard for their contact form.
Battle.net implements a progress tracker for each step of signing up to their service.
Tuitive uses sIFR for non-web safe fonts on the label tags of their contact form.
David Hellmann uses plastic tape for the label tags of his contact form.
Elliot Jay Stocks uses nice big and clear elements on the comments form of his blog.
Be Inspired
As you can see, forms don't have to be boring, there are a number of different ways that you can make forms more interesting and more usable, increasing the chance that users will sign up to a service or send feedback.
Feel free to share your own form designs and any others that you have seen out there in the comments.


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Time to Vote for Your March Book!
The members of Real Simple's online book club can now vote for their March 2013 read.
Hi, Bookies:
March, at least here in New York City, is always sort of neither here nor there. Not quite winter, though the calendar says otherwise until nearly the month's end. And not quite spring: The weather can still be raw. But on the best days, you can sense the coming change in season, as the breeze blows softer and you catch the slightest scent of spring on it. To get us through the last stretch before it officially arrives, we'll have a good read you select from the choices provided by March discussion leader Shannon King. Shannon is a dedicated reader, though how she manages it with small children and a big job is a mystery to me: A first-time club leader, Shannon is RealSimple.com's general manager. Check out her four picks below, then vote for your favorite by 11:59 p.m. ET on Sunday, February 24.
The Heavy: A Mother, A Daughter, A Diet—A Memoir, by Dara-Lynn Weiss
A follow-up to the controversial 2012 Vogue article in which Weiss discussed why she decided to put her 7-year-old daughter on a diet, the book promises to be thought- and discussion-provoking.
Flight Behavior, by Barbara Kingsolver
In Kingsolver's latest, powerful novel, Dellarobia Turnbow, an unhappy young Tennessee farm wife, stumbles upon what seems to be a miracle: a valley alive with beautiful monarch butterflies. But outsiders ascribe darker reasons to the butterflies' presence, reasons that spark tensions and challenge beliefs.
A Thousand Splendid Suns, by Khaled Hosseini
Like his debut novel, The Kite Runner, Hosseini's wildly popular best-seller is set in Afghanistan. Here, two women, thrown together through cruel circumstances, forge a bond that is stronger than the forces—both political and personal—that conspire against them. A riveting, bittersweet story.
Maine, by J. Courtney Sullivan
A runner-up in our October 2012 poll, Maine could be the antidote to late-winter blahs: Love and family are at its heart, as three generations of Kelleher women unpack their secrets, hopes, and longings when they arrive at their summer cottage in Maine.


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Instant Pot at (800) 828-7280 between 9 a.m. and 5 p.m. PT Monday through Friday, or at http://instantpot.com and click on "Instant Pot Smart recall" under "Useful Information" for more information.
Recall Details
This recall involves Instant Pot "Smart" and "Smart-60" electric pressure cookers. They are stainless steel with black molded plastic attachments, have a control panel/keypad on the front and measure about 12 inches in diameter and 12 inches tall. They are Bluetooth® enabled and can be controlled by an app. "Instant Pot" and "Smart" are printed on the front of the control panel. Serial numbers between 1410 and 1503 and manufacture dates between 12/1/2014 and 6/1/2015 are included in the recall. The serial numbers and dates are printed on a label on the bottom of the pressure cooker's base.
Consumers should stop using the recalled product immediately and contact Instant Pot for instructions to receive a free replacement base, which consists of the entire bottom of the pressure cooker including the control panel. The firm is contacting all purchasers directly.
The firm has received reports from three consumers of being shocked while using the pressure cooker.
Online at Instantpot.com and Amazon.com from November 2014 through May 2015 for about $250.
Double Insight Inc., of Canada
The U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission is charged with protecting the public from unreasonable risks of injury or death associated with the use of thousands of types of consumer products under the agency's jurisdiction. Deaths, injuries, and property damage from consumer product incidents cost the nation more than $1 trillion annually. CPSC is committed to protecting consumers and families from products that pose a fire, electrical, chemical or mechanical hazard. CPSC's work to help ensure the safety of consumer products - such as toys, cribs, power tools, cigarette lighters and household chemicals -– contributed to a decline in the rate of deaths and injuries associated with consumer products over the past 40 years.
Federal law bars any person from selling products subject to a publicly-announced voluntary recall by a manufacturer or a mandatory recall ordered by the Commission.
To report a dangerous product or a product-related injury go online to www.SaferProducts.gov or call CPSC's Hotline at 800-638-2772 or teletypewriter at 301-595-7054 for the hearing impaired. Consumers can obtain news release and recall information at www.cpsc.gov, on Twitter @USCPSC or by subscribing to CPSC's free e-mail newsletters.
Please use the below phone number for all media requests.
Phone: (301) 504-7908
Spanish: (301) 504-7800


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Bonding & Grounding
Pipe Clamp with Grounding Connector for pipes with outside diameter 5.6"-6.6", (142.2mm-167.6mm), (2) #6AWG-250MCM conductors, includes stainless steel hardware. Supports ground wires from metal pipes. The connector provides a ground connection for the pipe and supports up to two wires parallel or perpendicular to the pipe. Select the clamp that best matches the size of the pipe. UL Listed.


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Internet privacy bill would set rules for online marketing
Here is a look at some of the things that Rep. Rick Boucher, chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Communications, Technology and the Internet, hopes to put in a bill governing Internet advertising.
– Web sites that collect information about visitors – or use an outside company to do that – in order to target advertising on their own pages would be required to prominently disclose what information they gather. The Web sites would have to describe in detail how that information is used, how long it is retained and whether it is shared with third parties. The sites would be required to allow visitors to "opt out" of data collection altogether.
– Web sites that share user information with outside advertising networks, which place ads on sites all over the Internet, would be required to obtain user approval before collecting data. That is, consumers would have to "opt in." But these sites could qualify for an opt-out requirement by meeting certain conditions. For instance, a site could let users review, modify and delete profiles created about them. Or it could ensure that ads contain links to inform users what information is being collected and provide a chance to opt out of targeted pitches.
– Web sites that deal with sensitive personal information, such as medical and financial data, sexual orientation, Social Security numbers and other ID numbers, would be subject to the opt-in rule. So would sites that share consumer information with unaffiliated third parties for commercial purposes.


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Saturday, August 28, 2010
My Bad
9 comments:
- Leanne said...
I hear you about committment! Thx goodness the hockey season finishes here for us this friday and considering it has been going since MARCH! I'm ready for a break too! LOL!!
Loving your scrappy challenge entries too! Wow! Those blue eyes! ..x
- August 28, 2010 at 7:31 PM
- Leanne J said...
LOVE LOVE Them all.. i think you are totally amazing and talented scrapper and wonderful lady to boot.. awesome work and i must say that the pic of the bibs looks awesome..yay..
love it.. you inspire me.. thanks. and thats seriously..you do.
- August 28, 2010 at 9:45 PM
- Paula said...
Simply brilliant layouts...especially love 'grateful', with all that white space.
- August 28, 2010 at 10:34 PM
- Cathy said...
Fantastic LO's Jules!! I love the way you layered the background on your Grateful LO and that photo of your son is simply gorgeous!!
- August 29, 2010 at 9:55 AM
- Alannah said...
what gorgeous layouts you have...I was prompted here by stb
- August 29, 2010 at 6:24 PM
- Christine said...
Fantastic layouts! Everytime I stop by your blog I am amazed at the eye-candy! You have a wonderful way of using your sewing machine - love it!
- August 30, 2010 at 8:11 AM
- Treesa said...
wow amazing layouts! Love them all!
- August 30, 2010 at 3:41 PM
- Binxcat1 said...
I am your newest fanatical fan I tell you!!!!!! LOVE THEM ALL! and thanks for playing at STB... just love love love your stuff chick! ;)
- September 1, 2010 at 2:40 AM
- Debbie Lawrence said...
OMGoodness Julie, your LO's ROCK at the moment. Thanks for joining in over at Scrap the Boys!!!!!
- September 1, 2010 at 8:34 AM


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|The Scott Effect
|Written by:
|Steven Kane
|Directed by:
|Michael Katleman
|Running time:
|41 minutes
|Original airdate:
|May 30, 2016 (special premiere)
June 12, 2016 (postponed)
June 19, 2016
|Nielsen rating:
|18-49 rating:
Viewers (million):
Tom Chandler is sent to Asia to investigate a possible mutation of the Red Flu. Captain Slattery and his crew deliver the cure to southeast Asia but they might be heading toward an unforeseen threat.
It has been four months since Dr. Rachel Scott's murder and the discovery of a cure for the pandemic that wiped out eighty percent of the world's population. Reporting live from St. Louis, President Jeffrey Michener addresses the population of the United States via radio. According to Michener, the American Reconstruction Plan was on course, the cure being spread far and wide to other parts of the world. While things were not perfect, they were slowly going back to normal.
Meanwhile in Southern Japan, with several bodies lying around, a woman tries to administer the cure to her son but the boy dies. The virus has mutated. Noticing this, Michener calls Chandler into his office for debriefing. According to Michener, the rumors of a possible mutation in Japan led the U.S. to suspect foul play on the part of President Peng Wu of China. The president sends Chandler to Asia to investigate and look for lingering signs of the disease while he was there.
Shortly after, Chandler calls Slattery, who is now in command of the USS Nathan James, to warn him of the possible danger as they head to Vietnam. The James has been sailing around the world delivering Dr. Scott's cure. Andrea Garnett is now Executive Officer while Carlton Burk's older brother Cameron Burk joins the crew as the ships new Tactical Action Officer.
Arriving in Hong Kong with Valerie, the two are enthusiastically greeted by Wolf Taylor, who Chandler had called ahead of time. The pair are greeted by Sasha Cooper, who presents herself as Peng's translator. Following a short reunion, the four head to a political dinner with the Chinese president.
Arriving in Vietnam, Nathan James settles off coast, with a majority of the crew heading to shore for a celebratory dance. Carmeron Burke is left in charge while his brother Carlton and Captain Slattery are among those who go ashore.
At dinner with Peng and several other ambassadors, Chandler "pokes the elephant" by asking Peng if he knew what the Scott Effect was. Not waiting for an answer, Chandler informs him that the effect represents the number of people needed for a cure to spread effectively. If that number was not reached, a disease had the potential to spread, with the cure eventually burning out. In a subtle power play, Chandler accuses Peng of neglecting his duty to spread the cure, opting to keep it all for himself for the sake of political China. With animosity forming between the two, Peng excuses himself from the table.
Back in Vietnam, the crew of the Nathan James is in full rager mode, with Slattery clearly uncomfortable. Slattery flags down Danny Green telling that he's being sent home to see his wife and newborn son to his excitement.
On the James however, Cameron Burk picks up three unidentified ships heading to their location. Alisha suggest warning Captain Slattery, but Cameron thinks calling on an open channel is a bad idea and sends the helicopter instead. In the club, Slattery decides it is time to go and has Rios gather the crew when he notices the men from the Seahawk and thus realizes something is wrong.
Suddenly the lights go out, leading to a brutal ambush of the party and its particopanta. The members of the James are captured and taken into captivity. Green and Burke are able to make it out and find their way to the Seahawk only for a truck to show up and destroy the helicopter with a RPG missile launcher.
Meanwhile, Chandler steps outside to see a much softer Peng then the one that had presented himself at dinner. He appealed to Chandler, informing him that he was doing his best. Parts of the conversation felt off, however, with Peng words appearing more as a warning than an emotional appeal. Suddenly after, Chandler receives the information of the events in Vietnam and learn that the president has ordered him home. As Cameron Burke list off the names of those MIA (Missing In Action), Kara makes a tough decision, ordering the ship to wait for reinforcements.
Just as he was about to head back with Valerie, Chandler realizes the missing members of the Nathan James might still be alive and disembarks from the plane just before it takes off. He meets up with Wolf and Cooper and tells them his plan to go to Vietnam and look for his old crew. Meanwhile, Valerie finally descrambles a voice communication and turns the plane around so she can inform Chandler. Chandler, Cooper, and Wolf notice the plane turning back when suddenly the plane is blown out of the sky to the three's horror.
- "I'm not worried about tigers. I brought a Wolf." ( Chandler to Sasha Cooper)
- Eric Dane as Captain (CNO) Tom Chandler
- Adam Baldwin as Captain (CO) Mike Slattery
- Bridget Regan as Naval Intelligence Officer Sasha Cooper
- Charles Parnell as Command Master Chief Russ Jeter
- Travis Van Winkle as Lieutenant Danny Green
- Marissa Neitling as Deputy Chief of Staff Kara Green
- Christina Elmore as Lieutenant Alisha Granderson
- Jocko Sims as Lieutenant Carlton Burk
- Bren Foster as Australian Senior Chief Petty Officer Wolf Taylor
- Kevin Michael Martin as Gunner's Mate Second Class Eric Miller
Guest StarringEdit
- Mark Moses as US President Jeffrey Michener
- Maximiliano Hernandez as Ensign (Chief Medical Officer) Rios
- Elisabeth Röhm as Chief of Staff Allison Shaw
- Ness Bautista as Master-at-Arms First Class Javier Cruz
- Fay Masterson as Commander (XO) Andrea Garnett
- Chris Sheffield as Lieutenant (Junior Grade) Will Mason
- Michael Curran-Dorsano as Lieutenant Juan "Gator" Mejia
- Ben Cho as Chief Fire Controlman Carl Nishioka
- Adam Irigoyen as Seaman Apprentice Ray Diaz
- LaMonica Garrett as Lieutenant Cameron Burk
- Fernando Chien as Chinese President Peng Wu
- Nestor Serrano as Secretary of Foreign Affairs Alex Rivera
- Elyse Mirto as Debbie Foster
- Vivian Nguyen as Ai
- Tania Raymonde as Valerie Raymond
- Eidan Hanzei as Toshiro
- Devon Gummersall as Reporter Jacob Barnes
- Hina Abdullah as EWO
- Eileen Fogarty as Vietnamese Delegate
- Drew Fonteiro as Dennis (credit only)
- Kristina Ho as Vietnamese Woman 1
- Yong Kim as Korean Man
- Andrea Martinez as OOD
- Stephen Oyoung as Lau Hu
- Dat Phan as Tran Ha Binh
- Shamar Sanders as Helmsman
- Akiko Shima as Grandmother
- Blake Webb as Flight Officer
- Although credited as EWO the name of Hina Abdullah's character is given as Dalia Jaffe in previous and future episodes.
Episode Deaths Edit


text: Simple yet with elegantly designed with high impact and splash proof for safety and durability, Beebest Batik Series features you a smooth and pleasant shower experience. Equipped with the State-of-Art iELB for safety purpose, it also carry along a Built-in Thermal cut-out device to prevent scalding. Beebest Batik Series assured that every shower time is a safe, sensational shower experience for all of you.


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I just listened to the latest album, Aranjuez, by classical guitarist, Miloš Karadaglić. Originally from Montenegro, Miloš as he's often called, has made quite a name for himself in the world of classical guitar music. This latest album is filled with beautiful and relaxing music inspired by music traditionally played in the region of the … Continue reading
Tag Archives: Spain
Ohio Theatre Tour: Islamic Architecture
During my tour of the Ohio Theatre a couple of weeks ago, I learned that the Ohio Theatre, designed and built by architect, Thomas Lamb, was built in the Spanish Baroque style. (Palace Theatre was French, Ohio Theatre was Spanish – very multi-cultural). Our docent went on to explain that that style was heavily influenced … Continue reading
Buskers: Granada, Spain
These are a couple of guitarists in Granada, Spain playing traditional Spanish guitar music. They were very nice and were happy to pose while I took a picture. I probably listened to them for a good half hour or more since they were really good and, for January, it was quite nice out! Granada is … Continue reading


text: The 8th grade girls planned, organized, and ran a retreat for the 2nd graders as they prepare their first Holy Communion sacrament. The students enjoyed time in the chapel, popped balloons containing catechism questions, took a 'trust walk', made a project about Eucharistic Adoration, played "Jesus" bingo (the eighth graders made pictures of Jesus, grapes, chalices and more), decorated cookies shaped like Communion hosts (and ate them), and also enjoyed lunch together. The event culminated with a Pinata game.


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Sexual harassment is any behaviour/ gesture/ language that is persistent, unwelcome and is of a sexual nature. This includes requests for a sexual relationship, contact or favours together with an indirect or explicit promise of preferential treatment, or the threat of detrimental treatment if the request is declined.
Sexual harassment can have long-term effects on the well being of an individual.
Sexually offensive verbal comments
Uninvited touching, kissing or hugging
Indirect, rude sexual remarks
Repeated comments or teasing about someone's alleged sexual activities
Persistent unwelcome social invitations, letters, emails or phone calls from workmates at work or home
Hints or promises of preferential treatment in exchange for sex, or threats of deferential treatment if sex is not offered
Offensive body gestures
Any person who sexually harasses an individual may be subject to legal action. It is unlawful in any work related context, including conferences, work functions, office Christmas parties and business trips. It is also unlawful in personal, non work-related contexts.


text: VIVA Artists All Members Show VIVA presents an all-members show of 2d & 3d works, at the Hardware Store Restaurant, June, 2019. ELIGIBILITY Open to all members of VIVA presenting 2D and 3D works of art GOALS OF THIS SHOW The first purpose of this show is to sell art! We want to show off the work of as many VIVA members as we can with a great turnout of all participating artists on First Friday. We also need photos of the artists to a greater and recognizable connection with the artists and the community. SUBMISSIONS Each artist is encouraged to submit 3 works for consideration, 1 will be chosen from each artist. Please give us your most recent work or work that may have never been shown before. Send your best and let's show the community the depth of VIVA Artists! 2D art must be 20" x 20" including frame or smaller and must be ready to hang. The majority of 2D works will be displayed at the Hardware Store Restaurant and Gallery. This will be a "Salon Style" show to be able to accommodate as many works as possible. 3D works should be no larger than 12" x 12" x 12". All works must be for sale. EMAIL SUBMISSIONS to Kristen Reitz-Green with the following info: 1. digital photo of works, title, size, and price 2. photo and name of artist 3. address and best phone number 4. number years you have lived on Vashon DEADLINES Art must be submitted by May 15th to be considered. Notifications will be emailed by May 18. Assure your spot and enter early! DELIVER accepted art to the Hardware Store Restaurant on Thursday, June 6th from 10am to 1pm for immediate hanging. Art will be hung according to delivery so get there early for the best spots! Please contact me directly if you need to make special arrangements for art delivery or pick up. PICK-UP for all unsold art is TUESDAY JULY 2ND Checks for sold work will be sent within 30 days. Questions? Contact Kristen Reitz-Green.Find out more »