Blue Valley Research Articles

Representations of Experimentation in Contemporary Arabic Theatre

Art is a dynamic and renewing aesthetic vision. Since the dawn of creativity, arts have sought to break away from tradition and embrace new forms and elements in response to intellectual and other changes. Theatre, in particular, has experimented with its structure and content due to its inherent flexibility and transformative nature. Social and environmental conditions in the Arab world have driven theatre practitioners towards innovation.Many Arab playwrights responded to the events of 1967 by adopting an experimental approach in theatre. Egyptian playwright Sayyed Hafez is a key figure who emerged in the 1970s, contributing significantly to the renewal of theatrical composition. Realizing that traditional theatre was no longer effective in engaging society, Hafez introduced innovative ideas.Until the early 1970s, Arab and Egyptian theatre was predominantly traditional. However, new efforts to revitalize it began with Hafez's experimental play "The Pride of Triviality in the Land of Meaninglessness," which broke classical norms and offered new perspectives on characters, settings, and heroism.Hafez continued his experimental approach in subsequent plays, such as "It Happened as It Happened but No Event Happened," "Silent Drums in the Blue Valleys," and "They Are as They Are but Not the Vagabonds." These works reflect his desire for rebellion and passion for experimentation in theatrical writing.This study aims to analyze the features of experimentation in Sayyed Hafez's theatrical texts and their impact on the construction of the theatrical text. The significance of the research lies in exploring these experimental tendencies, benefiting specialists in theatrical criticism. The objective is to identify representations of experimentation in Hafez's plays.

Using GIS to Select Ideal Sites for Municipal Wastes Transfer Station: Case Study of Embu Municipality

In Kenya, many local authorities face uphill challenges in dealing with wastes especially volume reduction and proper disposal. There is minimal solid waste segregation and recycling further compounding the problem of open dumping. The study’s objective was to identify suitable areas to consider for the construction of a multi-purpose waste transfer and recovery facility within Embu municipality. There was also a need to popularize waste bulking and improve on ways of compiling waste data which was lacking in their municipal waste management system. The study used a mixed approach design encompassing ground surveys, interviews, questionnaires, data modeling and Analysis. In this case study, Geographic Information System (GIS) was used to evaluate Population, land use and proximity to waste receptacles as impact factors influencing waste management in this town. GIS-based analysis identified Kangaru, Blue valley, Majengo and Itabua Wards as suitable areas for the construction of waste transfer station. The identified regions contained a total area of 0.15km2 of suitable sites from the initial 0.40km2 identified as Preliminary sites. These wards had motor able roads, with agricultural land use and were within the town suburbs. GIS provided appropriate tools for compilation, analysis and management of information related to generation, collection and disposal of Municipal Wastes. The study recommends the adoption of an integrated waste management approach where public views and the use of geospatial tools are incorporated in all aspects of municipal waste management.

Prodan fluorescence detects the bilayer packing of asymmetric phospholipids

The bilayer phase behavior of asymmetric phospholipids, palmitoylstearoylphosphatidylcholine (PSPC) and stearoylpalmitoylphosphatidylcholine (SPPC), with different vesicle sizes (large multilamellar vesicle (LMV) and giant multilamellar vesicle (GMV)) was investigated by fluorescence spectroscopy using a polarity-sensitive fluorescent probe Prodan under high pressure. The results were compared with those of a symmetric phospholipid, diheptadecanoyl PC (C17PC). The difference in phase transitions of the PSPC and SPPC bilayers and in thermodynamic quantities of the transitions was hardly observed between LMV and GMV as the case of the C17PC bilayer. On the other hand, the Prodan fluorescence showed clear differences between LMV and GMV of the asymmetric PC bilayers. From the second derivative of Prodan fluorescence spectra, the three dimensional image plots in which we can clearly see the location of Prodan in the bilayer membrane as blue valleys were constructed for LMV and GMV under high pressure. We revealed from the plots that the bilayer packing is significantly dependent on not only the vesicle size but also the acyl-chain asymmetry of PC molecule in addition to the phase states. It was found that the packing of the gel phases of the asymmetric PC bilayers is weaker than that of the symmetric PC bilayer, and the size of vesicle affects the packing of the interdigitated gel phase the most markedly among three gel phases. This study suggests that the Prodan molecules can detect the effect of vesicle size on the phase states for the asymmetric PC bilayers, and they become a useful indicator for various membrane properties, especially bilayer interdigitation.

Effect of Vesicle Size on the Prodan Fluorescence in Diheptadecanoylphosphatidylcholine Bilayer Membrane under Atmospheric and High Pressures

The bilayer phase behavior of diheptadecanoylphosphatidylcholine (C17PC) with different vesicle sizes (large multilamellar vesicle (LMV) and giant multilamellar vesicle (GMV)) was investigated by fluorescence spectroscopy using a polarity-sensitive fluorescent probe Prodan under atmospheric and high pressures. The difference in phase transitions and thermodynamic quantities of the transition was hardly observed between LMV and GMV used here. On the contrary, the Prodan fluorescence in the bilayer membranes changed depending on the size of vesicles as well as on the phase states. From the second derivative of fluorescence spectra, the three-dimensional image plots in which we can see the location of Prodan in the bilayer membrane as blue valleys were constructed for LMV and GMV under atmospheric pressure. The following characteristic behavior was found: (1) the Prodan molecules in GMV can be distributed to not only adjacent glycerol backbone region, but also near bulk-water region in the lamellar gel or ripple gel phase; (2) the blue valleys of GMV became deeper than those of LMV because of the greater surface density of the Prodan molecules per unit area of GMV than LMV; (3) the liquid crystalline phase of the bilayer excludes the Prodan molecules to a more hydrophilic region at the membrane surface with an increase in vesicle size; (4) the accurate information as to the phase transitions is gradually lost with increasing vesicle size. Under the high-pressure condition, the difference in Prodan fluorescence between LMV and GMV was essentially the same as the difference under atmospheric pressure except for the existence of the pressure-induced interdigitated gel phase. Further, we found that Prodan fluorescence spectra in the interdigitated gel phase were especially affected by the size of vesicles. This study revealed that the Prodan molecules can move around the headgroup region by responding not only to the phase state but also to the vesicle size, and they become a useful membrane probe, detecting important membrane properties such as the packing stress.

Morgan's Things

FEATURED AUTHOR—ROBERT MORGAN Morgan's Things____________________ Fred Chappell ONE OF THE HALLMARKS OF ROBERT MORGAN'S poetry is an insistence upon the power of the object, the usually homely, usually palpable thing that implies and embodies both a personal and a cultural history. Representative poems bear such titles as "June Bug," "Radio," "Bellrope," "Water Tanks," "Church Dust," and so forth. William Carlos Williams' famous dictum, "No ideas but in things," takes a different turn in Morgan's thought. His things conjure up a universe of ideas as well as of observations, memories, and longings. The seeming simplicity of a single object can burgeon into complex manifolds of idea. "Rearview Mirror" is a prime example; only ten lines long, it suggests volumes of cosmological theory. Morgan often employs objects in his fiction in the same way that he does in his poetry, but the effects are sometimes different and can be equally complex. In poems like "Manure Pile," the object is studied with a close, fixed gaze, judiciously described, until mental associations come flocking to it like honeybees to a rodent carcass and it begins to seethe and throb with possibilities and implications. In most cases, the objects in his verse unfold themselves, revealing recesses of fresh but orderly surprise. But in the fiction, and particularly in the short fiction, the object may be used to stabilize the narrative, to bind it to theme, to serve as leitmotif for character and structure, and to link to other stories, drawing them into affinitive thematic compass. The best short-story volume for study ofMorgan's objects is The Balm of Gilead Tree (Gnomon Press, 1999), not only because it includes selections from the earlier collections (The Blue Valleys, 1989; The Mountains Won't Remember Us, 1992), but also because of the structural design of the book. The Balm ofGilead Tree provides an episodic, roughly chronological, and strongly thematic history ofthe southernAppalachian region. The different historical periods, with the characteristic episodes, are customarily differentiated by particular objects. The history begins in the sixteenth century with the incursion of Hernando de Soto into the wilderness of the Cherokees as he searches for riches, and it continues through the eighteenth and nineteenth 19 centuries as the mountains open to the outer world with the construction of roads and bridges and the region is transformed by the frightening changes brought about by the Civil War. In the twentieth century come the two world wars and the crushing encroachment of industrialism. These huge historic movements and gradual revolutions of rural life are enacted in brief stories that are mostly tightly circumscribed and specifically localized. The common themes that run through all of them—greed and exploitation, poverty and endurance, virtue and corruption—are often attached to certain objects. The first story in the book, "The Tracks of Chief de Soto," offers a clear example of the usage of contrasting objects. The story is told by a young Cherokee girl who is planting corn seed in the early springtime. Upon the correct timing and the prescribed manner of this planting the survival of the clan depends. The image of the corn and its attendant urgency are in the girl's mind all through the story as the Spanish marauders invade the village to rape and destroy, to enslave the women and elders and children and to set them digging for gold. Corn, which represents life, and gold, representing destruction of the land and of kinship with the land, are opposed to each other. It is the gold which triumphs. Gold and silver, and their cognate image, money, are recurrent in the volume. In "Kuykendall's Gold" the object at stake is an actual pot of gold, stashed away by a lustful old miser. Except for the fact that Morgan chooses to narrate from a young woman's point of view, this story could have been included in the Decameron or Les Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles or in scores of folk ballads. In "A Brightness New & Welcoming" the main opposed objects are a clean spring in contrast to a filthy well that Civil War prisoners must drink from; but here again gold appears in the form of John's coveted...

Detroit: A Saturday Night, 1944

and the horn of the moon. Then he shook his head like he was trying to clear his thoughts, and he spit down into the branch and said, "Now, it's late, and I've got to head to the house and to the bed. I'll lay you out a quilt, and when you come in you can take Zora's little pallet in the parlor, and in the morning we'll fry us up a breakfast of eggs and biscuits and think more about it." But I stayed right there at the spring until I heard the screen door slam shut. Then, after a little while, I walked home real slow in the moonlight and made it back just before dawn, another day waiting. And old man Jake Reves put his fiddle under the bed to gather dust, and he never did take it out again as long as he lived. Detroit: A Saturday Night, 1944 My father fiddles the knobs of our Philco, screech to squawk as the green dial rakes across stations, the static of distance hissing before he fine-tunes the music from Nashville, the Grand Ole Opry. To the twang of banjos he strikes a match with his thumbnail, cups his hands around the flame, lights his Lucky. He pats his foot as voices flock round the cigarette's red glow, his little lantern swung back and forth through this faraway dark, signal calling over mountains to the blue valleys, curling smoke from the homefires, wings of song settled down there. -Jeff Daniel Marion 32 ...

The Blue Valleys (review)

Morgan, Robert. The Blue Valleys. Peachtree Publishers, Ltd., 1989. $15.95. Before I discovered The Blue Valleys, the last thing I needed was another collection of stories about loss, the deterioration of the natural landscape, and nostalgia for the past. I'm too much of a cynic to believe that the golden past was ever that golden. I think we need to be honest about the past to keep the present bearable. I think I've found a kindred soul in Soet and now fiction writer Robert !organ, native North Carolinian, winner of a Guggenheim Fellowship, and professor at Cornell University. In The Blue Valleys, I found a lot of nostalgia, but presented so artfully that the stories drew me in and kept me reading even when the distractions of daily living were pounding at my door. I don't take such storytelling lightly. For example, I didn't think I could bear to read a Civil War prison storyuntil Morgan began spinning "A Brightness New and Welcoming," for which he won the Jacaranda Review fiction prize for 1988. John Powell is a Tar Heel dying of dysentery in a filthy Union prison camp in Chicago. In his delirium he dreams of his young wife, Louise, his home in the North Carolina mountains and the spring that waters his farm. On the hottest days of July the water was cold when he came down from the cornfield. It tasted of quartz rock deep under the mountain. Sometimes when he found a specially brilliant crystal he would place it in the spring to sparkle for all to see. Spring water was touched by all the mineral wealth it had passed through, the gold and rubies, silver and emeralds in the deep veins. The water was a cold rainbow on the tongue. The contrast between the misery of Powell's prison conditions and the rich beauty or his mountain homeplace creates a tension relieved only by his death. I found this story a portentous introduction to other stones with modern settings in which the characters come near achieving a ripe perfection of life only to be disappointed. In "Let No Man," Morgan writes about Josie, a woman in her 30s who's been working at a cotton mill since high school graduation. She stakes her future (and 15 years' worth of savings) on an elaborate wedding to Nathan, a laborer. Overweight at 164 pounds and with weak eyes as a result of a childhood case of poison ivy, Josie can't believe her good luck in finding a husband at last. And such a fine man, too, one who has never even made a pass at her. During their long, hot drive to Myrtle Beach ana a honeymoon suite with a vibra-bed, she congratulates herself on finding a man who won't step out with other women after they're married. I don't want to give away too much of the climax of this tightly constructed, Roignantly comical story but, sadly, iatnan has neglected to tell her about a certain condition he's had since childhood . You'll weep for Josie-and for all women who marry to find heaven and find hell instead. Morgan sets the collection's last story, "Blinding Daylight," in "the haze and. tree-breath of the high mountains," where David, a middle-aged college professor and sometime artist, has gone with the intention of committing suicide. He has returned to his childhood home, now empty for both his parents are long dead, to find his mother's pistol, "a revolver with a delicate embroidery of rust on the barrel." As he walks, he is reminded of an earlier time when he had contemplated taking his own life, only to find his artistic vision reawakened by the familiar woods and pastures of the old homeplace: Above the Briggs Place he stopped at an abandoned field that might at one time have been under polebeans. An old Ford, its windows and headlights broken, rusted on its axles blocking the only access road to the 60 remote clearing. Later he fancied a number had been painted on the door, but he couldn't be certain. The next day...

Dark mountains and blue valleys: part 2 of a trilogy

Dark mountains and blue valleys: part 2 of a trilogy