Dead Letter Research Articles

"No One Is His Own Sire" : Dead Letters and Kinship in Melville's Pierre

"No One Is His Own Sire" : Dead Letters and Kinship in Melville's Pierre

The Living Word

The Bible, which is indisputable regarded as the inspired word of God, is written under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. Man, as an earthen vessel, was used by the Holy Spirit to pen the revelation of God’s truth in Jesus Christ. The Holy Scriptures are “God breathed” words to the Church and are key in interpreting and fulfilling God’s telos for creation. This write-up wishes to emphasize and survey the critical role of the Holy Spirit in the Scriptures. Due to the inspiring role of the Spirit, the word of God is not a dead letter, rather a life-giving word that spills new life into the believer and the Church. Precisely this connection of Spirit and letter marks the Holy Scripture as living and active and conveys the desired transformative dimension for the individual believer and the faith community.

Der Einfluss und die Stellung des Völkerrechts in den Verfassungssystemen einiger ost- und Mitteleuropäerfassungssystemen Einiger Ost- und Mitteleuropäischer Transformationsstaaten

Der Einfluss und die Stellung des Völkerrechts in den Verfassungssystemen einiger ost- und Mitteleuropäerfassungssystemen Einiger Ost- und Mitteleuropäischer Transformationsstaaten

The European Standards and Guidelines for Quality Assurance in the European Higher Education Area in Portugal and the Czech Republic: Between the Worlds of Neglect and Dead Letters?

The paper enquires into the institutional impact of European policies, as embodied by the Standards and Guidelines for Quality Assurance in the European Higher Education Area (ESG). Theoretically, the work departs from the ‘worlds of compliance’ framework in relation to EU law implementation to study EU initiatives under the Open Method of Coordination. Empirically, it presents how ESG are taken up by higher education institutions in Portugal and the Czech Republic. The study finds a substantial misfit between the modes of governance traditionally ascribed to Portugal and the Czech Republic and the identified patterns of ESG translations in those countries.

Tax Shelter Regime for Start-Ups: Finally Up and Running

This note discusses recent developments regarding the tax shelter for start-ups, which, although enacted more than a year ago, remained dead letter until the recent enactment of the Bill on Various Provisions of 5 October 2016.

Whosoever Holds This Hammer

Whosoever Holds This Hammer Dawn Manning (bio) Whosoever holds this hammer, if he be worthy, shall possess the power of Thor. Before sunrise, I’m at the bench, saw teeth sunk deep in a new sheet of silver, dust gilding my jeans in a sparkling snowscape, breath-fog on my glasses. Outside the lab just beyond the thinning tree line, electronic church bells knell the hours, the gray lanes of the freeway string uneven beads of traffic into unkempt tangles in the mall parking lot. I strike a strip of copper on the folded edge, chase out the air, force it to curl in on itself— a nautilus whose molecules yield and spread out faster under my brass hammer than the inner unstruck ring can master. The sky’s dull and tarnished by low snow clouds, flat and featureless as nickel. I chase my hammer across the plain, raise up bright mountains by the range—light the torch, coin my own sun. [End Page 79] Dawn Manning dawn manning is a writer and metalsmith living in Greater Philadelphia. She is the author of Postcards from the Dead Letter Office. She was the 2017 Mona Van Duyn Scholar in poetry to the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and her poems have received the Beullah Rose Poetry Prize, the San Miguel Poetry Prize, and other honors. Copyright © 2017 University of North Carolina Wilmington

The Draft Regulation on Safeguarding Competition in Air Transport:

European carriers are facing growing competition from foreign airlines that have often been accused of receiving government subsidies representing an unfair advantage. To address this issue, the European legislator introduced Regulation 868/2004 allowing to unilaterally impose financial burdens on non-EU carriers in an attempt to level the playing field. However, Regulation 868/2004, designed to protect against unfair pricing practices and subsidisation, remains a dead letter. The Act’s replacement legislation was heralded as one of the key components of the recently revitalised EU Aviation Strategy. This paper analyses the draft proposal for the new Regulation, controversies arising over its interpretation and application and finally the underlying concept of unilateral measures.

Up From Brittany: A New Voice on the French Literary Scene

Up From Brittany:A New Voice on the French Literary Scene Suzanne Nash Tilliette, Pierre-Alain. Gapos, vies chimériques. LePassage, 2011. 294pp. Tilliette, Pierre-Alain. Mots en mosaïque. LePassage, 2017. 187pp. Tilliette, Pierre-Alain. Un sentiment humain. LePassage, 2015. 351pp. Pierre-Alain Tilliette is a Breton writer, who lives with his family in Paris, where he is Conservateur des fonds étrangers at the Bibliothèque de l'Hôtel de Ville. The tragi-comic inventiveness of his fiction, with its Gaelic humor and extraordinary linguistic virtuosity, has made a small stir in France, but is still virtually unknown in the English-speaking world. His first novel, Gapos: vies chimériques, published by LePassage in 2011, described in Le Monde as "une des excellentes surprises de ce début de l'année" ("one of the delightful surprises of the beginning of this year"), placed him squarely in the lineage of Rabelais to Joyce. In 2015, Tilliette's second Bildungsroman-gone-awry, Un sentiment humain, lived up to that promise: "déroutant de complexité mais toujours saisissant" ("puzzling by its complexity but always engaging").1 Tilliette's humane sensibility and hilarious use of popular French idioms propel the reader forward through the inchoate yearnings of a motley assortment of characters whose fates play out in an ancient house on the Brittany coast. Immediately upon opening these novels, English-speaking readers of French and native French speakers discover, as if for the first time, the creative resources of the language they thought, like Molière's M. Jourdain, they had been speaking all their lives. Translating Tilliette's work will be a daunting task. "Gapos, c'est moi" ("Gapos, that's me"), says the narrator, but without the dark irony of Flaubert, more in the spirit of an apologetic idealist "qui souffre avec les autres mais qui ne peut pas les souffrir" ("who suffers for others even though he finds them insufferable") (33), a forlorn hidalgo "qui ne tient plus debout que grâce aux articulations coincées de son armure rouillée" ("who can only stand up thanks to the blocked joints of his rusty armor") (76). "[…] j'ai demandé à Gapos de partir en ma compagnie, de m'aider à traverser" ("I asked Gapos to leave with me, to help me to cross over" (16). Gapos will be the ferryman, the balsero, who carries with him the fragile embers of his and the narrator's dreams on a fabulous ocean of words. Even when nothing is happening to this "gap os" (gap of bones?), besides [End Page 186] the seemingly most trivial interruptions of ordinary existence, the reader is launched on an unexpectedly delightful linguistic adventure, with the narrator's warning: "Cy entrez, vous, que rebute pas rédhibitoire l'idée qu'une infinitésimale aventure, aux longs et complexes préparatifs pour un imperceptible dénouement incertain, va se jouer là" ("Enter here, you who are not put off by the crippling idea of an infinitesimal adventure with long and complex preparations for an imperceptible and uncertain outcome") (13). Embarked on the flow of consciousness of a loveable everyman, marooned "entre être ou ne plus être" ("between being or no longer being") (17), who quits his job in the Ministry of Dead Letters, one rediscovers in Tilliette's "bouquin qui pointe tout juste son nez hors de la marée innombrable des mots" ("little book pointing its nose just above the tide of numberless words" (11) the incomparable satirical energy of the French language. The semblance of a plot begins to emerge by chance in this valiantly self-doubting version of a Bildungsroman, as various characters, all preoccupied by their own trivial pursuits, encounter Gapos during his search for an answer to the big question: "Tu mourras! et auparavant, tu bosseras! Merde alors..." ("You will die! and before that you'll work like a dog! Shit...") (96). But if Gapos is a would-be philosopher bent on making sense out of contingency by writing an Aléatoire Encylopédie Individuelle Ontologiquement Ubiquiste, (a Random, Ontologically Ubiquitous Individual Encyclopedia), he is also a humble homme moyen sensuel looking for "une âme soeur" ("a soul mate"), "une femme qui m...

Religious Experience in the Work of Richard Wagner by Marcel Hébert

Reviewed by: Religious Experience in the Work of Richard Wagner by Marcel Hébert Richard Bell Religious Experience in the Work of Richard Wagner. By Marcel Hébert. Edited by C.J.T. Talar. Translated by C.J.T. Talar and Elizabeth Emery. (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press. 2015. Pp. xlvii, 128. $65.00. ISBN 9 8-0-813-227412.) Although the Jesuit philosopher Abbé Marcel Hébert (1851-1916) left seminary "a convinced Thomist" (p. xxi), his philosophical outlook was to change considerably after studying Kant and Schopenhauer. This, together with the growing interest in Wagner in France (see especially the Revue wagneriénne) and the symbolist movement which looked to Wagner for its inspiration, meant that it was natural for this priest to turn to the composer for new inspiration in what was later to be termed "Modernism." Hébert taught at the École Fénelon in Paris, becoming its director in 1895. However, when his unorthodox views become known to the Church hierarchy, he resigned his position and in 1903 "quietly left the church" (p. xxiv n. 10). Although his book Le sentiment religieux dans l'œuvre Richard Wagner (1895) sparked interest, its impact being enhanced by the review of the Wagnerian Abbé Arthur Mugnier, "the confessor of all Paris," it has fallen into obscurity, unjustly in my view. Therefore I welcome this translation with its foreword by Stephen Schloesser and introduction by the translators C.J.T. Talar and Elizabeth Emery (who have also included a translation of Mugnier's review). Their rendition reads well and Hébert's original footnotes are supplemented by references to English [End Page 599] translations of Wagner's prose work by William Ashton Ellis, to modern translations of the Ring, and to English translations of secondary literature. The purpose of Hébert's book is to trace the evolution of Wagner's view of "religious experience" ("sentiment religieux") in key stage works and theoretical writings, starting with the sketches Jesus of Nazareth (1849) and finishing with Parsifal (1882). The book is full of insightful remarks showing, for example, a close study of Arthur Schopenhauer with nuanced comments on the relation of Wagner to the philosopher (pp. 52–56). I wonder though whether he does full justice to Christian theology in the Jesus of Nazareth sketches, where he claims that the composer had replaced the ancient beliefs of Christianity with "an entirely naturalistic and humanitarian faith" (p. 36) and that he "interpret[s] the doctrine of Jesus through his own anarchist doctrine" (p. 31). I may add that although Houston Stewart Chamberlain was impressed on meeting Hébert (letter to Cosima Wagner of December 16, 1893) he made a similar criticism of the Abbé in this book Richard Wagner. Hébert closes his work by reflecting on the then current situation in France "in which the renewal of philosophical, scientific, and historical ideas has rendered Christian theology a dead letter for the intellectual elite" (p. 97). Wagner appears to come to the rescue in that he breaks us free from 'dogma' since, as he puts it in his essay Religion and Art (1880), music alone has the capacity to "reveal in incomparable accuracy the very essence of the Christian religion" (p. 95 n. 11). The composer certainly suited Hebert's Symbolist agenda. Generally speaking, Hébert knows his Wagner although it is striking that the actual music is not discussed. Wagnerians may wonder why he dates Georg Herwegh's introduction of Wagner to the philosophy of Schopenhauer as early as 1852 (rather than 1854); but there is some justification for this view and the editors' Introduction (p. xxxii) refers to Edouard Sans' 1969 book on Wagner and Schopenhauer and qualify Hébert's claim. Note that Hébert quotes from "The Work and Mission of My Life" and "Letter on Music" to provide "an accurate summary" of his thought in the ten-volume selected works. However, the former was actually written by Hans von Wolzogen, and although Wagner did sign the original English manuscript he later distanced himself from it. The latter work is better known as "Music of the Future" and is a rough French equivalent...

First Source Hiring: An Essential Tool for Linking the Poor to Employment or a “Dead Letter” Progressive Policy?

Although cities have revived as economic centers for the middle and upper classes, poor and minority communities continue to be locked out of urban job markets. First Source Hiring is designed to act as both a linkage program and a targeted hiring rule to ensure low-income residents have opportunities to work on publicly sponsored projects. A first wave of FSH began in the 1980s but was abandoned due to political push-back. A second wave emerged in response to growing inequality in the 1990s and 2000s. In this article, we review the literature on FSH development and implementation through a Four Rs evaluation framework. Then, we use case studies of FSH for Los Angeles World Airports, the Atlanta BeltLine, and the City of San Francisco to assess the potential of “second-wave” FSH programs to make meaningful contributions to linking disadvantaged job seekers with opportunities.

Dead letters on a page? Civic agency and inclusive governance in neopatrimonialism

ABSTRACTNeopatrimonialism has explanatory power regarding the limitations of post-war democratization because it considers the combination of formally-democratic institutions together with power relations based on patronage. Neopatrimonialism does not however explain why marginalized groups make political claims in such inhospitable climates, nor have their experiences of governance processes been adequately explored. This paper addresses this gap based on empirical research in Bosnia-Herzegovina, applying a framework of civic agency to elaborate the goals and capacities of civil society actors. Under what conditions can civic agency foster inclusive governance outcomes? The research found that perceptions of limited and ambiguous outcomes from engagement in governance processes encourage civil society organizations to have incrementalist goals and limit self-perceptions of capacity. Inclusive outcomes were nonetheless more likely with persistent intentions and actions. Transactional capacities based on ties to political actors rather than participatory capacities based on political mobilization were more likely to lead to inclusive governance outcomes.

The Contemporary Presidency: Judicial Restraint and the New War Powers

[I]t is the exclusive province of [C]ongress to change a state of peace into a state of war. (UnitedStates v. Smith 1806, 1230) [I]t is error to suppose that every case or controversy which touches foreign relations lies beyond judicial cognizance. (Baker v. Carr 1962, 211-12) [N]one of the legislation drawn to the court's attention may serve as a valid assent to the Vietnam War. Yet it does not follow that plaintiffs are entitled to prevail. (Mitchell v. Laird 1973, 616). War Is a Three-Branch Question From the founding to 1950, war usually proceeded in constitutional order: congressional authorization followed by executive enforcement. Over that century and a half, federal judges adjudicated dozens of war-related disputes raised by private litigants that hinged on executive branch adherence to Congress's prior legislative direction. Today, presidents of both parties order new offensive military actions abroad without explicit congressional consent before or even during the conflict. Although House and Senate majorities eventually support these actions one way or another (bills and/or appropriations), on 10 occasions, members of Congress (up to 110 at a time) challenged presidential wars in federal court. These unsuccessful lawsuits deserve new attention because they reflect a quiet, but steady, three-branch constitutional revolution on war that has taken place in the United States, under both parties' watch and under a variety of foreign policy contexts. If all three branches now interpret congressional silence as consent, constitutional war processes have flipped, and the War Powers Resolution is a dead letter. This article offers three arguments about these developments, using case law, institutional archives, and interviews with members of Congress and their attorneys. (1) First, there is no constitutional reason for federal courts to demur on war powers suits filed by members of Congress, outside of decades of judge-made precedent. Federal judges and scholars are divided on whether courts should take these cases, not whether they can. Second, federal courts hold member--plaintiffs to a different standard than private interest litigants. Members of Congress must show supermajority disapproval of the president's unilateral actions whereas private war litigation once hinged on prior simple majority authorization of the action. Third, the legal postures of all three branches reflect deeply ingrained institutional habits, not partisan differences. Unlike other public policy areas, presidential war is not ideologically divisive. Reflecting this new normal, the United States has been engaged in a military campaign against the so-called Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) since August 2014, with no Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF). According to the Department of Defense, Operation Inherent Resolve has cost an average of $11 million per day for 450 days of operations, which destroyed or damaged over 16,000 targets. (2) While calling for new AUMF in the State of the Union Address in January 2015, and sending a proposal to Congress earlier that year, President Barack Obama and his administration maintained that the necessary authorization is already in place through the 2001 and 2002 AUMFs (against al-Qaeda and Iraq, respectively; Weed 2015b). While ISIS-related terrorist attacks in France have fueled some bipartisan criticism of administration strategy, a new AUMF is unlikely (Carney 2015). Despite repeated cries of lawlessness against the president on domestic policy actions, members of Congress have not pursued a lawsuit on the ISIS actions. Even if members did band together to file a suit that challenged the current ISIS campaign, it is unlikely to jump the formidable hurdles to member suits that federal courts have built over four decades. However, a House-sanctioned lawsuit against the Obama administration on enforcement of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) was recently granted standing to proceed on the merits regarding whether the administration spent money on ACA implementation that was not appropriated by Congress (see United States House of Representatives v. …

‘A dead letter of the statute book’: the strange bureaucratic life of the Bihar Food Economy and Guest Control Order, 1950–1954

ABSTRACTIn the years following India’s independence, food shortages threatened to destabilize the country. In response, the Indian Ministry of Food in 1950 introduced the Food Economy and Guest Control Order. This statute was designed to check waste by limiting the number of guests permitted at social gatherings and regulating the types of food items served. The Guest Control Order quickly became a flashpoint between the bureaucrats in Delhi who conceived of the austerity measures and their counterparts in state capitals tasked with implementing the policy. This article examines the correspondence between the Ministry of Food and the Bihar Supply and Price Control Department regarding the Guest Control Order for insight into early debates about the appropriate role of the state in the economy. The exchange reveals the conflicting priorities – e.g. national objectives versus local exigencies, social cohesion versus enforceability – that characterized state policy in the early years of independent India. In these debates, assumptions about Indian culture, in general, and food practices, in particular – e.g. what is good for citizens to eat, how these foods ought to be eaten – became contested in the lawmaking process and emerged as central to the process of early nation-making.

Social Reform in Colonial Bengal: Revisiting Vidyasagar

This paper looks at Vidyasagar’s programme for widow marriage while also discussing his campaign against Kulin Brahmin polygamy, child marriage and prostitution – some of the evils that plagued nineteenth-century Bengali society. Vidyasagar’s diligent effort for the legalisation of widow marriage ultimately paid off in 1856 as the British colonial administrators drafted widow marriage into law. The two tracts that Vidyasagar published in 1856 in favour of widow marriage have been looked into some detail as well as opposition to his programme from none other than Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay, arguably the greatest Bengali novelist till date. Statistically speaking, not many widows married under the Hindu Widow’s Remarriage Act, making the Act, according to some critics, almost a dead letter. However, whether statistics alone does justice to the long-term impact Vidyasagar’s movement has had on Bengal’s social and intellectual life is also discussed.Philosophy and Progress, Vol#55-56; No#1-2; Jan-Dec 2014

The Failure of Labor Dispatch Regulation and Its Remedy

In the course of the drafting, enactment and amendment of the Labor Contract Law of the People’s Republic of China, the legal provisions regulating labor dispatch have been tightened up. In practice, however, the labor dispatch system is flourishing in a way that defies market trends. The ultimate reason for this is that much of the system goes under the name of human resource outsourcing to bamboozle the public and evade the law, in effect making the legal provisions a dead letter. The result is that the more the industry is regulated, the more it multiplies and the more chaotic it becomes. Based on comparative law research methodology, this article reviews the legal systems relating to labor dispatch in Germany, the US and other countries. It demonstrates and affirms the institutional value of the labor dispatch system, and categorizes its different types. The fundamental cause of the phenomenon of labor dispatch’s assumption of the guise of human resource outsourcing is the absence of substantive review. We suggest introducing and perfecting such investigation to stem the industry’s deep-seated abuses.

Oral Letter and Written Trace: Samson Raphael Hirsch’s Defense of the Bible and Talmud

Classical Protestant theology distinguishes between the dead letter of Judaism and the living spirit of Christianity. German Judaism has been seen as adopting these Protestant categories by portraying the Bible as the “spirit of authentic Judaism” and denigrating the Talmud as dead letter. I demonstrate that view is mistaken as both the leading figure of the Berlin Haskalah, Moses Mendelssohn, and the “founding father” of Reform, Abraham Geiger saw the Talmud as expressing the living spirit of the biblical letter. I further argue that in his early work, the architect of German Neo-Orthodoxy, Samson Raphael Hirsch followed this approach. But with the massive growth of Reform in the 1840s, Hirsch changed his view developing an entirely novel account of the Talmud’s relation of the Bible, which broke free of the Protestant dichotomy between dead letter and living spirit. Instead, Hirsch cast the Talmud as the oral letter and the Bible as written trace. I further argue that Hirsch presented these new concepts in the form of a Bible translation and commentary, in order to counter the enormously popular Reform Philippson Bible.

Ethnic Cleansing and the Indian: The Crime That Should Haunt America by Gary Clayton Anderson

Reviewed by: Ethnic Cleansing and the Indian: The Crime That Should Haunt America by Gary Clayton Anderson Ashley Sousa Ethnic Cleansing and the Indian: The Crime That Should Haunt America. By Gary Clayton Anderson. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2014. Pp. [x], 462. $29.95, ISBN 978-0-8061-4421-4.) In Ethnic Cleansing and the Indian: The Crime That Should Haunt America, Gary Clayton Anderson argues that colonial and United States policies toward and treatment of Native Americans were not genocidal, but are instead better understood as ethnic cleansing. Anderson examines the Indian policies of the British North American colonies and the United States from 1607 to the end of the allotment era, drawing on dozens of episodes to support his argument that Euro-Americans, from colonial governors to presidents and frontier settlers, pursued ethnic cleansing as a consistent, stated Indian policy. [End Page 135] Anderson’s argument is strongest where he shows, in painstaking detail, a centuries-long effort by colonists and American citizens, by means fair and foul, to strip Indians of their land. He ably illustrates this effort across different eras of Indian policy and regions of what is now the continental United States. Whether this constitutes a policy of ethnic cleansing is less clear, as he offers no definition of ethnic cleansing beyond mentioning the prohibition of forced deportation and relocation of populations under international law. His argument would benefit from drawing more on the theoretical scholarship on genocide and ethnic cleansing. On the question of genocide his intervention is less convincing, owing to inconsistencies in how he defines genocide. Anderson calls the legal definition of genocide—the one set out in the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide—a “dead letter” because it allows too many crimes and perpetrators to fall under its definition (p. 4). He relies on the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court as the standard against which to characterize violence against native peoples because he contends that for violence to be considered genocide, “a legitimate government must plan, organize, and implement the crime” (p. 13). Even with this narrower scope, he adds his own criteria to further refine the definition, maintaining that no genocide could have been perpetrated against native peoples because “large numbers of Indians survived” (p. 4)—a criterion inconsistent with the legal definition. Anderson’s argument is also confused by his inconsistent definition of “Indians.” In some cases, he treats native peoples as one group, which allows him to emphasize the large number of Indian survivors of white violence. This has the effect of diminishing the severity of violence perpetrated against Indian people while treating them as a monolithic group rather than as hundreds of distinct societies that engaged and experienced colonialism differently. In other cases, he argues that the deaths of specific groups in particular episodes of violence “hardly equal the numbers of those killed under other regimes,” suggesting that the murder of a few hundred or few thousand people does not constitute genocide (p. 217). Scholars familiar with particular regions or episodes covered in the book might take issue with Anderson’s use of evidence in certain cases. For example, in his discussion of California’s Indian policy, he fails to account for the explicitly genocidal rhetoric espoused by the state’s political leadership, including at least two governors, as well as their funding of militias bent on exterminating Indians. Such omissions cast doubt on his conclusion that “there is no evidence that any state or federal governmental entity ever supported” the actions of California militias that planned to exterminate the Indian population (p. 217). As an intervention into the growing field of scholarship on the question of genocide in North America, Ethnic Cleansing and the Indian deserves the attention of scholars in the field, as well as those teaching courses in the field of Native American history that grapple with the genocide question. Whether or not readers agree with Anderson’s conclusions, his arguments and evidence will surely provoke lively conversations. [End Page 136] Ashley Sousa Middle Tennessee State University Copyright © 2016 The Southern Historical Association

Dead Letters? The Uniform Civil Code through the Eyes of the Indian Women's Movement and the Indian Supreme Court

VRÜ Verfassung und Recht in Übersee , Seite 148 - 174

Scribblers and Scriveners: Poe, Melville’s Bartleby, and Antebellum Literary New York

ABSTRACT: Critics have variously read “Bartleby, the Scrivener,” a tale about the death of a legal copyist and putative Dead Letter Office worker, as Melville’s statement about failed attempts at communication, the lack of an audience for the American literary artist, and his own increasingly futile search for readers. As he penned “Bartleby,” Melville probably had in mind another author of serious and significant literature compelled to eke out a living by writing for magazines. That author was Edgar Allan Poe, who, from late 1844 to early 1845, labored at hackwork a mere seven blocks away from Wall Street to support himself and his family. Drawing on the recollections of friends, acquaintances, and business associates who knew the ill-fated writer, Melville describes his scrivener in terms that recall contemporary accounts of Poe during his New York years, and he includes in “Bartleby” allusions to “Some Secrets of the Magazine Prison-House” and “The Cask of Amontillado.” Undoubtedly aware that Poe’s dreams for sustained editorial and artistic independence had failed to materialize, Melville created a narrative about a man whose skills cannot secure for him the life he desires—a story about a thwarted writer, a figure whom Melville, in 1853, very likely feared he had become.

Report on the first year of applying initial assessment of nutritional status in hospital inpatients

Abstract Introduction. Since 2012, Polish hospitals are recommended to implement the assessment of the nutritional status and appoint nutrition support teams. Aim. To evaluate the application of initial assessment of inpatients’ nutritional status in the first year of its implementation in clinical practice. Material and methods. A retrospective analysis of medical documentation of patients admitted to hospital in the year 2012 was conducted. The research sample included one in ten medical records. Results. A total of 433 medical records was analyzed. In 5.3% medical records a lack of duly completed Subjective Global Assessment questionnaires was revealed. In 81.8% cases a calculated Body Mass Index (BMI) was not found. No instances of renewed calculation of BMI were recorded. In 49.7% cases no information on diet recommended to the inpatient was found. With the exception of the internal medicine ward, in 87% of the cases the diets were not recommended in writing by a physician or included in the medical orders documentation. The inpatients classified as undernourished were usually recommended a diet containing 2000 kcal + additional 300 kcal as second breakfast and afternoon snack. Information on cooperation with the nutrition support team and on inpatient’s nutrition was not included in the nursing documentation. Conclusions. During the first year when the obligatory patient nutritional status assessment was introduced in Polish hospitals, the awareness of its significance, nutritional therapy planning and monitoring of the results were insufficient. The assessment of nutritional status seems to be another dead letter in patient medical documentation.