Heavy Years Research Articles

Invisible War

WORLDLIT.ORG 23 gentlemen, please excuse the inconvenience, but this young lady is a foreigner, she doesn’t have papers, and we will not move until she gets off of the bus. The murmurs grow. The driver kills the motor. Without the air-conditioning a light, hot wind enters. The woman in seat twelve approaches and the nervous and hysteric woman insists, dragging her s’s, that she is not a foreigner. Listen, don’t cause problems for us. We still have ten hours to go. We want to get there, too. But she keeps screaming that she won’t get off and then Elena gets up, joins them, and asks her to show her ID. The officer approaches them. Too late. She should sit down before the man arrives. Too late. His enormous gold watch shines when it passes before her eyes as he reaches for the foreigner’s ID. Stupid. Stupid, naïve idiot. An incautious woman is a poor imitation of a female. She hates her. She hates all the bitches who spend their money on bad replicas of voter IDs or birth certificates. She realizes that she’s the stupid one here. She should sit down and shut up. Close her eyes and let the stupid cow figure it out on her own. Turn her back and head to her seat. One second of imprudence could bring it all tumbling down. The officer’s voice is tense. Isolated babblings from around the bus demand that the woman get off and quit resisting. It’s fake, officer, the ID is fake, Elena finally blurts out, first with fear, then with the security that she couldn’t have made a better choice because no one can doubt her now. She’s released her voice with fury and burden. She turns her back on them. The officer yanks on the woman and, struggling, they both descend from the darkness of the aisle into the asphyxiating night. An empty spot remains. Elena could change seats. Stretch her legs and fall asleep with the weakness she carries in her skin. She settles in. Out the window she observes the three men and two women, in line, awaiting interrogation. She would like to have an affair with an officer. Their height attracts her. Not to mention the badge. Her hair is poorly cut and she’s a little overweight, but that, too, was pure strategy. Guats, lazy asses, stupid sheep, she says to herself, letting her barrio talk escape. She’s at peace. Some are left behind, others simply continue. This world is for the clever. And the fortunate. Surely the most difficult part of the night has passed. She moves her head. There’s no reason to be nervous. She’s practically Mexican. Four more years in Mexico and she won’t have to move. She wants to go to Juárez, no further. Once again the rattle of the motor rises, almost licking her legs. The bus’s lights advance, cutting a swath in the night, slashing it, revealing, along with the sun, the ordinariness of things. We’ll see what happens tomorrow, she thinks, yawning. Translation from the Spanish By Julie Ann Ward Editorial note: From Barcos en Houston © 2005 by Nadia Villafuerte. English translation copyright © 2017 by Julie Ann Ward. Invisible War by Gábor Schein Glints of the tram. The nondescript houses dream numb underwater dreams. Faces are transparent bubbles popping off from the windows where water used to break through. The pedestrians crossing to the other side of the street drag heavy years in their shopping bags. Better to forget them. Some ended up on the hook of a quick death. Some merely fell ill and when they healed, let ivy run over the balcony railings and grew flowers in a case. While continuing to write, on and off, less and less. The screech of brakes can’t wake you now from sleep. Cartilage calcifies, an uninhabitable archipelago sediments on the frontal lobe. And nothing can dull the metronome beats of fear. The tram gets stuck on an octagonal square. The passengers scream and bang the doors. No help in sight. They’re slowly overgrown by...

The Use of Energy Dispersive X-Ray Microanalysis in the Geological Sciences: 30 Years of Heavy and Creative Application

Abstract Considering the heavy use by the geological community that followed, it is not surprising that first two authors of the introductory paper in Science on the energy dispersive x-ray spectrometer applied their x-ray microanalysis skills predominantly in the geological sciences. The energy dispersive spectrometer became first commercially available at an ideal time for the geological community. During the 1960’s, mineralogists and petrographers like K. Keil, J.V.P. Long, J.C. Rucklidge, J.V. Smith, A. Albee, and A. Chodos demonstrated that electron microprobe analysis with wavelength dispersive spectrometers could provide accurate in-situ analysis of portions of individual mineral grains on a scale not readily obtainable by other techniques (e.g., 2-3 and cited refs.). The electron microprobe enabled analysis of features observed by reflected- and transmitted-light polarized optical microscopy (prime tools of the mineralogist and petrographer) and was beginning to be used routinely for the study of meteorites and terrestrial rocks and even more exotic types of specimens, like individual microparticles from sediment and airborne particulate samples.

Climatic Change, Natural Disasters of Agriculture and Grain Yields in China during the Past 15 Years

This paper analyses the main features of the climatic change in the past 15 years compared with that of the last 50 years, and the emphasis of the discussion is directed to the relations between climatic change, natural disasters of agriculture and grain yields in China. The conclusion arises that precipitation is the major factor to affect grain yields in China, while the effects on grain yields caused by temperature variation appear obvious in high latitude areas and high elevation areas. Generally the ratio of grain yield reduction to its production is 3-5% each year, and in some individual years it can reach 10%, the total reduction percentage of grain yields caused by natural disasters of agriculture, ranges from 5% to 10%, and in some particularly heavy years it can reach above 10%.

Production and rain use efficiency in short‐grass steppe: grazing history, defoliation and water resource

Abstract. Grassland in the semiarid shortgrass steppe, subjected to 50 years of heavy, light, and no grazing intensity, was clipped to simulate the natural pattern and intensities of defoliation by cattle or not clipped. A level of water resource treatment was superimposed upon the grazing and clipping treatments. Half of the plots were supplemented with additional water to simulate a wet year and half were not supplemented in a year of average precipitation. All three treatments interactively determined above‐ground production. Water treatment had the largest overall effect on above‐ground production. Current‐year defoliation had no direct significant effect on production, but mediated differences between both longterm grazing and watering treatments. Long‐term ungrazed compared to grazed grassland was capable of responding to high amounts of precipitation, but was also most affected by low amounts of precipitation and, therefore, displayed greater variability in above‐ground production and rain use efficiency. Only in the year of average precipitation, defoliation increased rain use efficiency in long‐term lightly, but not heavily, grazed treatment. This suggests a water conservation mechanism of defoliation that is reduced with heavy grazing.

Winter Count II by Frederick Manfred

Reviews 257 Winter Count II. By Frederick Manfred. (Minneapolis: James D. Thueson, Publisher, 1987. 56 pages.) In the foreword to Winter Count II, Frederick Manfred explains that in “the winter time, when braves and chiefs didn’t have much to do,” they would “get out their winter count calendar (a scraped buffalo hide) and . . . paint on the hide a pictograph of the most important event of the past year.” Manfred was struck by the idea, resulting in Winter Count I (1966) and now in Winter Count II, “some little throws of light for each year from 1964 through 1985,” plus a few poems from earlier years. I enjoyed reading Manfred’s first book of poems, and the second volume is, I think, even better. As a reader, that was enough. As a reviewer, I had to ask why. A few of the early ones are rhymed. One, “A Heavy Year,” has a compli­ cated rhyme scheme. Some of them read like lovely prose, prose so trimmed and packed it works as poetry, call it what you will. “Lily Susan,” a 391-line poem about Manfred in Paris, is a good example. And there are recurrent themes: death and the desire to live forever; a sense of time in which past, present, and future are stage-center at the same moment; Manfred’s well-known love of nature; and his moving, beautiful, and often comically self-deprecating dreams of pretty young women. But none of these standard approaches answered my question. Prosody and themes do not a poem make. So I read again and suddenly realized there was something medieval about Manfred’s poetry. I don’t mean dated or in any sense old-fashioned, but Manfred is a Frisian child of Chaucer’s 14th century, and yet he is also very much at home in 20th-century Siouxland, a reincarna­ tion who makes a boon companion for his neighbors in Luverne, Minnesota. This realization did not constitute an answer. Critics pursue questions but end by saying, “Let’s read the poem again.” Recognizing something about the nature of Manfred’s hitting power, however, can be helpful. For Manfred, the earth and everything on it is alive, a rock and a plum tree as much so as the prettiest woman you ever saw. Our modern split between realism and romanticism does not apply. For the contemporary medievalist, both are part of the world, just as dreams and scientific facts—some of them, not all of them—and the often harsh facts of everyday life are all things that happen. Manfred is in complicity with this variety, and in Winter Count II he makes us feel a little bit more at home in a world which accommodates, without prejudice, both an irresistible fascination and the inevitable disappointment, both the cruel and the sublime. MAX WESTBROOK The University of Texas at Austin ...

Shakespeare on the Wars of England

In these grim and heavy years, despite all their inroads upon leisure, it seems likely that Shakespeare is read more widely and loved more deeply in this country than for many generations past, and since foreign communiqués as well as British ministers of the crown have been known to quote from him, it may be conjectured that the world as well as these islands is sensible of a part of the debt that humanity owes him. Be that as it may, there is perennial refreshment in the blended wit and wisdom and fancy of his immortal pages, and a timely privilege for his countrymen in the fact that his Histories dealt with anguished, bitter years. To be sure, we read him more for his timelessness than for his timeliness, and allow, with the speaker in King John that ‘He is but a bastard to the times, That doth not smack of observation.’ Such observation is just philosophy; but even philosophy reacts to the stimulus of its immediate environment.

Further Observations on the Phytoplankton of the River Thames

THE consequent present heavy year, with floods, its has unusually not been great very rainfall favourable and cons quent heavy floods, ha not en ve favoura le for comparative investigations of the river Plankton. The disturbing influence due to the height of the water and the strength of the current has been very noticeable in some of the samples collected, especially in those of May 2. The speed of the current on that day was quite four times the usual one, and it is a well-known fact that the quality of the Plankton is considerably dependent on the rate of the stream (cf. Zacharias, '98, p. 4 6 ; Zimmer, '99, p. 7) ; a continuation of such conditions for several days would probably have a very considerable effect on the composition of the Plankton, and this would most likely last for some time after the restoration of the normal state of affairs. It is therefore