House Books Research Articles

The Regaining Territory of the Ojibwa Tribe in Louise Erdrich’s The Birchbark House Book Series

Native American people have been experienced in confronting the white people. One of their experiences in confronting the white people is written in the Louise Erdrich’s literary works, an Ojibwa author. Native American authors have different point of view in telling about Native Americans because they and their ancestors have bitter experiences in dealing with the white people, especially the Ojibwa tribe’s experiences living in the America where other Native American tribes cannot survive their tribes. This research focuses on the struggles of the Ojibwa people in getting their territory and the reasons why the Ojibwa people try so hard in keeping their territory. This research uses historical approach in its analysis. The method used is qualitative method related to literature study by using the five books of The Birchbark House book series as the primary data of this research. There are several conclusions based on the analysis of the data. The Ojibwa people are able to maintain their tribal presence in America against the white people. They can defend their tribe by using their intelligence, courage, and self-confidence. As for the reasons they prefer to choose their own way in getting territory because of several factors such as beliefs, relatives, and natural conditions of the land. Keywords: Historical Approach, Indian Territory, Native American, Ojibwa.

Reena NandaFrom Quetta to Delhi: A Partition Story

Nota Bene Ivan Vladislavić Flashback Hotel Archipelago Books South African writer Ivan Vladislavić offers this collection of dreamlike stories that highlights his surrealist writing style and imaginative voice. Flashback Hotel blurs the lines between dream world and reality but does so while relentlessly searching for tangible meaning and teachings within the absurd. Josephine Wilson Extinctions Tin House Books Winner of Australia’s Miles Franklin Literary Award in 2017, Josephine Wilson’s Extinctions intelligently defies expectations and unabashedly asserts itself as a masterful work of novelistic literature. Set distinctly in Australia, Wilson’s unique and intricately established characters come to life on the page, and their imperfections and traumas are portrayed naturally and honestly through her firmly grounded yet imaginative voice. reports devoted to street demonstrations against racism and police brutality. Luz, the somewhat innocent provincial young man who moved to Paris in search of a job, gets his first taste of tear gas and of charges by the CRS riot police. Overall, Luz’s lengthy graphic novel is a consistently amusing, sometimes moving account of the heyday of an irreverently satirical magazine, before it unwillingly became a worldwide icon. Edward Ousselin Western Washington University Huzaifa Pandit Green Is the Colour of Memory Kolkata. Hawakal. 2018. 64 pages. Huzaifa Pandit lives in Kashmir, India, a region under turmoil from two hostile nations that have kept this beautiful land locked in. Never a day goes by without shouts for “Azadi” (freedom) ringing out on the streets of this heaven on earth. Battles break out constantly between Indian security forces and gun-wielding “terrorists” or stone-pelting schoolgirls. Naturally, like any poet living in a contested land, Pandit’s poems also reflect this anguish. Pandit’s poetic journey, therefore, sends him in two directions, one toward a direct confrontation with the security forces like “Death in February,” where he writes, “Obituaries / that seek asylum from winter drought / in lost samovars of salted tea / at funerals to thirsty mourners.” Another way is to write of exiled poets like the Kashmiri English poet Agha Shahid Ali and spell it out: “I know I want to write a poem, but the futility of it / I can’t read, you can’t read.” “What does one do when plastic rainbows / pellet your lamenting lungs? / What does one do when amputated houses / grate against wilted coffins?” The bodies/coffins are really a nation torn asunder. These two distinctions set Pandit apart from the native and extranative Kashmiri poets, but, beneath the veneer of sorrow, he has a disguised sense of humor when he doesn’t talk about Kashmir at all in a poem entitled “Bedside Tales from Kashmir.” This is rare because his main concern is the Indian military and the besieged city of Srinagar where he teaches. In “Testimony in February,” he asks of the poet Ahmed Faraz, “We forgot your name / Won’t you silence our conversations?” For a poet living in a city under suppression by the Indian state, “Green is the colour of memory specked / with shades of yellow grey.” Pandit is emphatic that “The parchment of my heart / is empty, quite empty.” Ravi Shanker N Palakkad, India Reena Nanda From Quetta to Delhi: A Partition Story New Delhi. Bloomsbury India. 2018. 170 pages. The ethnic cleansing and mass migration of Hindus and Sikhs from the provinces that became Pakistan in 1947 form an important current of twentieth-century history. The events played a key role in shaping modern India. Many novels and stories have been published over the years that depict the atrocities, terror, and violence of Partition, on one hand, and the trauma of the survivors on the other. Reena Nanda’s new novel is a somewhat different slice-of-life memoir. Memory and family history intersect time WORLDLIT.ORG 107 Books in Review and space, and we are treated to a fascinating panorama of lost places and cultures from the vantage point of the author’s own family history. Centered on the character of Shakunt, the author’s mother (Nanda was born in 1945 in Quetta), the family saga traverses the years from before Shakunt’s birth—starting with the arrival of Shakunt’s grandparents as settlers in Balochistan—to the...

Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder by Caroline Fraser

Reviewed by: Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder by Caroline Fraser Anne K. Phillips (bio) Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder. By Caroline Fraser. New York: Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt, 2017. In 1976, Donald Zochert published the first biography of Laura Ingalls Wilder. Written for a general audience, it included an appendix, "The Truth of the Little House Books," which revealed that the fictional series did not always align with Wilder's life. This information surprised fans and challenged narratives perpetuated by the author and her daughter, Rose Wilder Lane. Forty years later, scholars and fans remain hungry for details about the truth of the series, the lives of its author(s), and the process of its composition. As Wilder scholarship evolved, it became clear that to tell the story of Laura must also mean telling the story of her daughter. Biographers—including Janet Spaeth, William Anderson, John E. Miller, Pamela Smith Hill, and Sally Ketcham—have demonstrated the degree to which, in life and art, Wilder and Lane's interactions and collaborations remained fraught. Hill's edited, annotated edition of Wilder's memoir, Pioneer Girl (2014), made accessible to mainstream audiences by the South Dakota Historical Society Press as the initial volume in its Pioneer Girl Project, brought to greater awareness the ways in which the fiction deviated from the facts of the Ingalls family's experience and was constructed and shaped by Lane as well as Wilder. In Prairie Fires, Caroline Fraser draws from decades of her own engagement with Wilder scholarship, including her editing of the Library of America edition of the Little House series. One of the NewYorkTimes Book Review's Best Books of 2017, Prairie Fires provides a remarkable breadth of knowledge of nineteenth- and twentieth-century American history and culture. As Fraser explains, "The truth comes clear when we see Wilder as part of a wider history" (5). That wide-angle approach to Wilder's life and works is a striking component of this beautifully written and highly engaging biography. Fraser opens with the perspective that the United States' approach to colonizing and annexing the Plains and the West should be linked to European American conflict with Native Americans in the 1850s and '60s, particularly the events of the US-Dakota War of 1862. Fraser asserts that these events shaped everything that followed: government policies, enduring psychological and emotional patterns, and, of course, literary reflections. What "opened the far west," as Fraser explains, "was not reasoned debate. It was wrath and righteous retribution" (24). [End Page 346] Building on this assertion, the volume weaves compelling "big picture" themes and events into a rich tapestry. Fraser sees Wilder's storytelling as adhering to the way in which her ancestors told their stories, reaching back to Samuel Ingalls, Laura's great-grandfather, who celebrated American Exceptionalism, found himself "transfixed by natural disasters," and espoused a "belief in self-reliance as an absolute sacrament" (32). Applying her research and interpretive skills to all phases of Wilder's life and experience, Fraser provides a satisfyingly thorough portrait. In light of Rosa Ann Moore's and others' writings, familiar to academics but less known by general audiences, and most notoriously represented by William Holtz's 1993 assertion that Lane should be seen as the primary author of the Little House books, Fraser's assessment of Wilder and Lane's interactions during the writing of the fiction will be especially of interest. Using an impressive array of resources, she delineates the patterns of Lane's depressions, manic phases, and other suggestions of recurring mental illness. Fraser also tracks with clarity and detail how Lane's "adopted grandson" Roger MacBride, under her aegis and with her encouragement, maneuvered himself into control of Wilder's writings and royalties. "Prairie fires" becomes a controlling metaphor for Wilder's life and works. Literally, it refers to the fires that roiled across vast acreages throughout the Midwest during the drought of 1871. However, "prairie fires" also alludes to the sound of the voracious locusts that devoured everything, not just in southern Minnesota but across 198,000 square miles (74). It is also an apt metaphor for the state of...

Jews in the texts of bishop Motiejus Valančius

This article aims to describe the attitude that the Lithuanian bishop Motiejus Valančius (1801-1875) had toward Jews. Up to now there was little written on this topic. Only in the diaspora (Vytautas Kavolis) and in contemporary Lithuania (Vygantas Vareikis) was Valančius’s anti-Semitism unambiguously identified or, alternately, vigorously denied (Vanda Zaborskaitė) as an erroneous opinion arising out of ignoring the context of most of his writings other than Paaugusių žmonių knygelė [Book for Grownups], Palangos Juzė [Palanga Joe], and Vaikų knygelė [Children’s Book]. Thus searching for an unbiased verdict requires looking at all of Valančius’s published texts, including his didactic tales, hymnals, catechisms, pastoral letters, political brochures, hagiographic writings, historiographic writings, letters, and his diary House Book written in Polish. It must be kept in mind that his texts intended for purely religious practice and catechesis had an even greater influence and therefore shouldn’t be ignored. An analysis of all of Valančius’s texts leads to the conclusion that the bishop did not transcend his epoch but held on to traditional anti-Judaist and anti-Semitic attitudes both in his didactic booklets and political brochures written for public education and in his books intended for catechesis and prayer: everywhere an attitude critical toward Jews shows through. This attitude undoubtedly merged with popular anti-Judaist stereotypes and even reinforced them in the Lithuanian consciousness; they began to fade only during the first period of independence as Lithuanians first encountered their modern Jewish neighbors. But Valančius was not radically antagonistic toward Jews; we see this very clearly in his House Book. His personal relationships with Jews were pragmatic, and during his Kaunas exile even friendly. In his private life he conscientiously observed the principles of Christian love.

Forms of Individuality and Literacy in the Medieval and Early Modern Periods ed. by Franz-Josef Arlinghaus

Reviewed by: Forms of Individuality and Literacy in the Medieval and Early Modern Periods ed. by Franz-Josef Arlinghaus Melissa Raine Arlinghaus, Franz-Josef, ed., Forms of Individuality and Literacy in the Medieval and Early Modern Periods (Utrecht Studies in Medieval Literacy, 31), Turnhout, Brepols, 2015; hardback; pp. viii, 317; 2 b/w, 13 colour illustrations; R.R.P. €90.00; ISBN 9782503552200. This collection began as a conference on the utility of Niklas Luhmann's systems theory for understanding premodern individuality, but the essays provide stimulating interdisciplinary discussions about individuality and premodern (mainly German-speaking) Europe independently of this framework. Three essays together offer a useful introduction to Luhmann's principles. Franz-Josef Arlinghaus applies the distinction he made between socially inclusive individuality—distinctive to medieval and early modern societies—and 'modern' individuality—grounded in its distance from society—to autobiography. Accordingly, premodern autobiography is characterized by a drive to be 'better' within the parameters of one's social affiliation (exemplified by the works of [End Page 142] Thietmar of Merseburg and Augsburg merchant Lucas Rem), as opposed to an emphasis on 'difference' in modern autobiography. David Gary Shaw rejects Luhmann's separation of 'the social and the psychic', arguing that, for a historian, the integration of these spheres through the concept of self is preferable (p. 125). Shaw is more positive about Luhmann's thinking around the individual and social structure, and pushes Luhmann's transition to the modern period back to the fifteenth century through considering 'self-expression' in sumptuary law, Thomas Hoccleve, and the almost unyieldingly 'impersonal' prose of William Worcester, all of which demonstrate 'the pressure coming from individual people to place themselves into the social world in ways that seem unpredictable sometimes, but always personal' (p. 147). When Gregor Rohmann argues that medieval inclusion identity was staged largely at the level of semantics, as shifting social structures did not offer a stable basis for identity, he inverts one of Luhmann's key oppositions. Changing medieval kinship structures and the transcendental focus of Christianity are central to this reconfiguration, which Rohrmann explores through the recollections of Hieronymus Koehler and the relationship of the 'I' to authority over a household in the writing-self of sixteenth-century house books: 'there is no "autobiographical pact" in house books, but the reciprocity of collective remembrance' (p. 227). In the 'ego documents' produced by Princess Elisabeth Charlotte, sister-in-law to Louis XIV, Marieke Böth finds that gender, nationality, and status are interwoven with health, virtue, and physical location in the maintenance of her self-identity. Brigitte Bedos-Rezak engages with the relationship of theory to historical context before turning to 'long twelfth-century' expressions of individuality, culminating in a consideration of the 'non-human' expression of individuality in the form of seals. Eva Kormann examines women's self-representation (with reference to lower-class masculine textual self-representation) c. 1800, when 'the genre of "autobiography" demands an autonomous self conception, but the contemporary gender order knows of no autonomous model for women' (p. 118), generically reflected in the frequent choice of letter format to write about their lives (a communicative medium, rather than the solipsistic genres used by men). Through the autobiography of Konrad Pellikan, Gabrielle Jancke critiques the spatial conceptualization of autobiography as 'interior' (private) for relegating other social, 'public' aspects of the individual self to a secondary exteriority. The more neutral 'person' is preferred to 'individuality' for opening up 'a complex field of entangled relations, actions, and flows of resources, i.e. considering them people busily involved in performative processes of "doing person" in relational and participative ways' (p. 174). Matthias Meyer deals explicitly with narratology's treatment of the individual (in which he finds little use for Luhmann's work). Of the three fifteenth-century texts he considers, the most truly 'autobiographical' is the non-narrative, predominantly account-keeping marginal notes of physician Johannes Tichtel— [End Page 143] 'an inventory of the self of a real-life individual' (p. 195)—,whereas the narrative characteristics of the others produce individuality as an organizing principle of the text itself. Christof Rolker examines names as practices of representation that contribute to individual and social identity. He considers...

The Overstory by Richard Powers

Richard Powers The Overstory New York. W. W. Norton. 2018. 502 pages. Approximately one-third of the way through Richard Powers’s The Overstory, a scientist whose findings had originally been attacked discovers that she is considered the pioneer of a respectable field. Patricia Westerford had argued that trees are “social,” form communities in forests, communicating and nurturing one another . Appropriately, her own self-imposed solitude is broken by a new companion. Building on recent studies by biologists in Europe, Canada, and the US, Powers has written a compelling novel that includes human and natural relationships. One might be tempted to say it is all about trees, but the structure keeps the focus on both. Short narratives of nine characters dominate the opening section, entitled “Roots.” While all grow up with a relationship to a tree or trees, one is not sure whether their stories will be unified in the “Trunk” section. But it begins to happen as unlikely pairings occur, several joining a movement to stop the clear-cutting of old-growth forests. The “Crown” section is hardly triumphal, featuring former activists , now fugitives, and others approaching a painful, wider consciousness. In “Seeds,” conclusions are foregone, as characters consider the future. Trees and forests are more complex and sensate than we have known. The world might be better served if humans simply disappeared from the planet. Some humans serve what comes to seem a superior form of life, attempting to cope with global deforestation through a massive, cooperative computer simulation and a more modest seed bank. Meanwhile, the trees communicate with receptive minds. The Overstory is a thesis book, though hardly didactic. Even Patricia Westerford’s lecturing is gracefully phrased. Much of the thesis is embedded in Powers’s witty and allusive style, with passages you find yourself rereading, even voicing for the pleasure they bring the ear. Finally, reading is pushed by the energy of the plot. As one character says, “The best arguments in the world won’t change a person’s mind. The only thing that can do that is a good story.” The scope of the novel is large, with characters’ perspectives and actions spreading in different directions. But the basic view of forest life, enunciated by Westerford , is the conceptual core. The core is ringed by human stories that enlarge to 502 pages of recycled paper. This is a book you may not finish or a book that will remain in mind once you finish. It confirms for me that Richard Powers is simply one of our best. W. M. Hagen Oklahoma Baptist University Julie Demers Little Beast Trans. Rhonda Mullins Coach House Books Originally written in French, this surrealist novel features a young girl forced into solitude in the wilderness of rural Quebec after her face begins growing hair. As she struggles to find her place, she comes to appreciate the value of relationships. At times childlike and at others honest, the fantastical , dreamlike writing brings this story to life. The Displaced: Refugee Writers on Refugee Lives Ed. Viet Thanh Nguyen Abrams Press Following an introduction by Viet Thanh Nguyen, these seventeen writers , many once child refugees, tell their stories, reflect on what it means to be a refugee and the expectations that come with it, and consider the dehumanization the recent upsurge in bigotry requires. The essays are consistently both eloquent and riveting. Nota Bene WORLDLIT.ORG 75 ...

Malva by Hagar Peeters

revenge murder as a teen. He’s a young man when he seizes control of a government ministry, a post he’ll hold—and ferociously defend—for decades. His life, which spans most of the twentieth century, is primarily a series of horrible events, most of them orchestrated by Carnero himself. Embroiled in disputes over land, religion, and power, he commits murder, arson, and petty theft. His jacket, Monge writes, was stolen “years ago from the first man he ever stuffed in his iron trunk and left to die.” Loads of novels ask us to sympathize with—or at least try to understand—the criminal mind-set. This one, though, stars a character who appears to be incorrigibly evil. It’s disconcerting to spend a couple hundred pages in the company of such a person, but this isn’t your standard character study. The book’s first sentence announces that Carnero is the personification of “the era in which he lived.” Armed with this clue, a reader can unlock the novel’s allegorical elements. The Arid Sky was originally published in the author’s native Mexico, and it’s no accident that Monge’s protagonist embodies the corruption and predation that, at various times, has plagued his country and many of its neighbors, including the United States. As translated by Thomas Bunstead, Monge’s prose is crisp, and his nonlinear narration creates a heightened sense of unpredictability. Though this is often a dispiriting tale, Monge is contending with universal themes. His depiction of unchecked power is a warning , one that will always be worth heeding. Kevin Canfield New York Hagar Peeters Malva Trans. Vivien Glass. Los Angeles. DoppelHouse Press. 2018. 224 pages. Malva, the debut work of Dutch poetturned -novelist Hagar Peeters, had my commitment by page 6; for serious students of Chilean poet Pablo Neruda and his contemporaries , the courtship may be even briefer . Narrated by Neruda’s all-but-forgotten daughter, Malva Marina Trinidad, the book is as lush with speculative literary history as it is with lyrical prose, picking its way through the sticky webs of family dynamics and revolutionary politics with a focus on neglected figures that aims to outpace the accounts of “prejudiced biographers.” Malva was born in 1934 to Neruda and his first wife, Marietje Hagenaar, with hydrocephalus, a then-untreatable condition that contributed to an early death at the age of eight. Though Neruda’s only child, she makes just a single fleeting appearance in his poetry. In this novel, Malva appeals to Peeters from an omniscient afterlife where she keeps the company of other “disabled” children hidden by their literary fathers while they were still alive (Daniel Miller and Lucia Joyce make an appearance). As Malva reclaims her father’s pen to tell her story of abandonment, the novel probes the question of how to make sense of Neruda’s political outspokenness in light of his silence on the subject of his own mute daughter, Anjum Zamarud Habib Prisoner No. 100: An Account of My Days and Nights in an Indian Prison Trans. Sahba Husain Zubaan Books A moving documentation by a Kashmiri activist, this book tells the true account of one woman’s time in an Indian prison after being arrested circumstantially under the Prevention of Terrorism Act. Part journal and part manifesto, the honest and emotionally resonant writing will move anyone interested in the plight of those imprisoned as well as their families, and Habib paints a realistic picture of state politics today. Nicolai Houm The Gradual Disappearance of Jane Ashland Trans. Anna Paterson Tin House Books This short novel is the first appearance in English of one of Norway’s younger but most gifted authors. In The Gradual Disappearance of Jane Ashland, Nicolai Houm turns the trope of a writer in search of a subject on its head by showing Jane’s tragedies in flashback, elaborating eloquently on her grieving process as she ill-fatedly stumbles through the Dovrefjell mountain range attempting to rediscover inspiration and closure. Nota Bene WORLDLIT.ORG 75 revisiting his poetry to find where Malva might fit among all the omissions. Malva is as much a triumphant meditation on disability as it is a fiercely...

Comemadre by Roque Larraquy

Roque Larraquy Comemadre Trans. Heather Cleary. Minneapolis. Coffee House Press. 2018. 152 pages. Comemadre begins in 1907 in Buenos Aires. A doctor at a sanatorium is in love with a nurse. Other doctors are also in love with the nurse. Other doctors have built a contraption to sever the heads of unwitting (and then willing) patients. The doctors have a theory: if the head can live for a few moments after being severed, perhaps it can see into the afterlife. The aforementioned head-chopper is fitted with a device to allow the heads to talk. The doctors record the results. There are moments in the first half of this novella that ache with a kind of horrifying melancholy. The first to lose her head, for example, is a young patient of the sanatorium. She has wanted to die, the logic goes, so why not put her out of her misery? Then her bereaved lover follows suit. Then there’s a plan, and the heads really begin to roll. Throughout it all our narrator , Quintana, keeps his focus on the nurse. The doctors are mostly unfazed by the large-scale murder. A scene toward the end of the first section, in which a great number of decapitations yield brief descriptions of post-severed utterances, is the highlight of the book. It’s sad, funny, and pitchperfect . The 1907 portion ends on a dark, accurate note, and one can’t help but wonder if the book would have greatly improved from simply ending there. The second half of the novella jumps forward in time a hundred years. A performance artist and his look-alike stage shows featuring severed body parts, eventually their own. It’s in this second half that Larraquy seems to lose a bit of focus. Whereas the 1907 half is darkly comic and focused, the 2009 half feels like it’s falling apart page by page. Which, when put into the context of degeneration and severing and corporeal decay, makes a bit of artistic sense. Comemadre seems to be circling around a point within its second half. Instead of sociopathic doctors scheming to trick people into giving up their heads Ursula K. Le Guin with David Naimon Conversations on Writing Tin House Books In this small, beautifully crafted book, the conversations range from style to point of view to genre to why we should use “they” as singular. Included are excerpts from the writers Ursula K. Le Guin and David Naimon discuss , excerpts from her own work, her own translation of Gabriela Mistral, and the diagram of a sentence from George Orwell’s 1984 during a discussion of rhythm. Together, Le Guin and Naimon demonstrate engagement at its finest. Claudio Magris Journeying Trans. Anne Milano Appel Yale University Press Claudio Magris, Italian writer, wanderer , and professor, presents this collection of essays written over the course of his years of travel. His travels have taken him across the world, and each of these essays is titled after where it was written as well as the inspiration that called it forth, giving easy mile-markers to an academic but eclectic volume. Nota Bene WORLDLIT.ORG 79 for science, we have artists dispassionately utilizing those parts for art. The attempt to connect the two falls flat. At one point we discover that a “modern-day” character is in fact related to Quintana. An artist wants to build a system of guillotines based on plans he’s found from the old sanatorium. It feels, paradoxically, simultaneously like being fed a cliché and not quite getting what the book is trying to say. With clear prose, dark humor, and a sense of humanity tucked behind all the morbidity, Comemadre is an uneven novella with one classic scene and a grim reminder of the disintegration of the body and the even quicker decay of the morality of powerful men. J. David Osborne El Paso, Texas Margarita García Robayo Fish Soup Trans. Charlotte Coombe. Edinburgh. Charco Press. 2018. 226 pages. Having garnered the praise of Juan Cárdenas and Juan Villoro, young Colombian author Margarita García Robayo is being published for the first time in English in a three-part volume entitled Fish Soup...

Between North-South Civil War and East-West Manifest Destiny: Herman Melville’s “I and My Chimney” as Geo-Historical Allegory

Between North-South Civil War and East-West Manifest Destiny: Herman Melville’s “I and My Chimney” as Geo-Historical Allegory

АДАПТИВНОЕ ОБНАРУЖЕНИЕ СТАЦИОНАРНОГО ГАУССОВОГО СИГНАЛА НА ФОНЕ НОРМАЛЬНОГО ШУМА С ПОСТОЯННЫМ УРОВНЕМ ЛОЖНОЙ ТРЕВОГИ

PACS number: 84.40.Xb Purpose: Efficiency analysis of the Cell-Averaging Constant False Alarm Rate processor (CA CFAR-processor) as applied to detection of stationary Gaussian signals against a normal noise background with unknown and/or varying from scan to scan power. Design/methodology/approach: Standard methods of the theory of optimal filtration and statistical signal processing are used to calculate the true detection probability and false-alarm rate. Findings: Analytical expressions have been derived for the scaling factor which ensures a constant level of the false-alarm rate, as well as for the true detection probability in dependence on the number of the reference cells and signal-to-noise ratio. It is shown that for efficient application of the given algorithm, the number of the reference cells should be 20 to 30, depending on the signalto-noise ratio μ. In this case, the amount of loss in the signal-tonoise ratio does not exceed 1 to 2 dB as compared with the situation where the noise power is a priori known and invariable. With μ≥30 dB the amount of loss proves to be negligibly small and the need in adaptation vanishes. Conclusions: The results obtained testify to the efficiency of application of the CA CFAR processors to detection of targets corresponding to Swerling model 1 against a normal noise background with unknown power associated with clutter and/or scattering from irregularities of the propagation medium. Key words: target detection, false alarm rate, detection threshold, signal-to-noise ratio, cell averaging Manuscript submitted 26.06.2017 Radio phys. radio astron. 2017, 22(3): 231-237 REFERENCES 1. LEVIN, B. R., 1968. Theoretical fundamentals of statistical radio engineering, Volume 2. Moscow, USSR: Sov. Radio Publ. (in Russian). 2. KAY, S. M., 1998. Fundamentals of Statistical Signal Processing , Vol. II: Detection Theory. New Jersey: Prentice Hall. 3. BARTON, D. K., 1998. Modern Radar System Analysis . Boston, London: Artech House Books. 4. SKOLNIK, M. I., 2008. Radar Handbook . New York et al.: McGraw Hill Professional. 5. BAKULEV, P. A., BASISTOV, Y. A. and TUGUSHI, V. G., 1989. Signal processing with a constant false alarm rate. Izv. Vyssh. Uchebn. Zaved. Radioelektronika . vol. 32, no. 4, pp. 4 15 (in Russian). 6. HAYKIN, S., 2007. Adaptive Radar Signal Processing . New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons Inc. 7. EL MASHADE, M. B., 2014. Performance enhancement of conventional CFAR processors in ideal and multitarget environments. Radioelectron. Commun. Syst . vol. 57, is. 7, pp. 287 305. DOI: https://doi.org/10.3103/S0735272714070012 8. LONG CAI, XIAOCHUAN MA, QI XU, BIN LI and SHIWEI REN, 2011. Performance Analysis of Some New CFAR Detectors under Clutter. Journal of Computers . vol. 6, no. 6, pp. 1278 1285. DOI: https://doi.org/10.4304/jcp.6.6.1278-1285 9. FINN, H. M. and JOHNSON, R. S., 1968. Adaptive detection mode with threshold control as a function of spatially sampled clutter level estimates. RCA Rev . vol. 29, no. 3, pp. 414 464. 10. SWERLING, P., 1960. Probability of detection for fluctuating targets. IRE Trans. Inf. Theory. vol. 6, is. 2, pp. 269 308. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1109/TIT.1960.1057561 11. SIDOROV, Y. V., FEDORYUK, M. V. and SHABUNIN, M. I., 1989. Lectures on the theory of functions of complex variable . Moscow, USSR: Nauka Publ. (in Russian).

Theatre of the Unimpressed: In Search of Vital Drama by Jordan Tannahill

<i>Theatre of the Unimpressed: In Search of Vital Drama</i> by Jordan Tannahill

AlexMarshall, Republic or Death! Travels in Search of National Anthems. London: Random House Books, 2015, 346pp. £14.99 (hbk).

AlexMarshall, Republic or Death! Travels in Search of National Anthems. London: Random House Books, 2015, 346pp. £14.99 (hbk).

居間の変化と客間・寝室の配置からみた二階建て住宅の理念形成

This paper clarified the idea of 2 story house in modern Japan by using the discourse of 63 housing books published from the late Meiji to early Showa periods. From the previous research it is thought that functional differentiation of floor plan promoted 2nd floor planning. Therefore, this research focused on the change of the "Ima" of the 1st floor at the time. "Ima" conventionally had the function as a private room, but also included various functions such as accompanying functions of sleeping and talking with visitors. Eventually, "Ima" shifted to a public room function western living room, we assumed that the establishment of functions of each other room was promoted and led to two stories planning. We analyzed how changes in the function of the "Ima" and that arrangement method affect the discourse of the arrangement method to 2nd floor of the drawing rooms" and the bedrooms. At the first, we confirmed that “Ima” changed its function as a public room in early Taisho era, and the discourse changed so that it was placed on the south side of the plan. In addition, around the time of the late of Taisho periods, the proposal of the ”Ima” which became a Western-style room appeared. In this way the “Ima” got priority than the drawing rooms. So the discourses of the drawing rooms arranged on 2nd floor were described in middle of Taisho period intensively. From the above, we considered that the idea appeared about the changing arrangement of the drawing rooms to the 2nd floor to secure a space for the “Ima”. On the other hand, the discourses of bedroom's arrangement on 2nd floor did not formed smoothly than the drawing rooms it. It seems that the main factor was due to could not set up wet area on 2nd floor by municipal wastewater undeveloped at that time in Japan; It was difficult to put in bathroom around the bedroom like a western housing sleeping space. However, the discourses of arranging to the bedroom at 2nd floor were also appeared in early Showa period. It seems that the major factor were the idea of the western style's the Ima (sitting on chairs, that means the living room) spread among the architects, on contrarily the idea of traditional sleeping style on tatami were reduced. Also, we confirmed that there were some discourses attempt to cope with towards the problem of municipal wastewater. The discourses regarding the drawing room's arrangement on 2nd floor were caused from only a solution for the plan of the relationship between the Ima. In contrast, the discourses regarding the bedroom's arrangement on 2nd floor were caused from to the primary purpose to establish the sleeping space in the Japanese houses. It were consistent to arrange on 2nd floor. We considered that the discourses related to the bedroom arrangement at early Showa period leading to aspects of the the 2nd floor of the modern housing. In other words, It means that the planning idea of the 2 story houses had already begun to formed from this period. Also, from the housing books at the time, we could find that the attempt of the architects to clearly define the role of the living room changing from the traditional room concept (which allowed the inclusion of various functions).

Amid the Mockingbird's Laughter: Non-Indian Removals in Laura Ingalls Wilder's Depression-Era Novels

Amid the Mockingbird's LaughterNon-Indian Removals in Laura Ingalls Wilder's Depression-Era Novels Amy S. Fatzinger (bio) Most frontier stories share a common theme: non-Indians take possession of the land, while American Indians are forced from the region or fade out of the story. In her Little House series, Laura Ingalls Wilder reverses that theme twice—twice it is the Ingalls family who exits the disputed territory while American Indians appear to remain on their land. Wilder's first scene depicting non-Indian residents' forced removal from Indian Territory occurs in Little House on the Prairie, when the federal government identifies the In-galls family as illegal squatters on Osage land and the family leaves their homestead amid a mockingbird's laughter. The second scene appears in These Happy Golden Years, when Laura's visiting uncle recounts his experience as a member of a group of trespassing miners driven out of Lakota lands by soldiers. Both scenes suggest that non-Indians, including Wilder and her relatives, were in the wrong when they rushed into Indian Country, thus contradicting the premise of manifest destiny and confounding a basic expectation of a frontier narrative. These scenes are important to more fully understand Wilder's portrayal of Native characters and themes, and when examining them it is useful to consider that most of Wilder's novels were published during the Great Depression and are a product of that time at least as much as they are of the frontier times reflected in the content. The scenes in Wilder's novels depicting non-Indians' removals from Indian Country are startling in the context of frontier literature or even historical facts but far less so in the context of Depression-era literature in which writers more commonly sought to examine America's past. Situating the Little House texts as literature of the Depression helps to shed light on [End Page 181] some of Wilder's probable motivations as a writer and complicates first impressions regarding her portrayal of American Indian people and issues. In 1915, well before the publication of the first Little House book in 1932, Wilder's daughter, Rose Wilder Lane, encouraged her mother to record her frontier experiences. She wrote to her mother and advised her to emphasize Only one generation ago Indians and forests and half a continent practically untouched by the human race. Free land, free fuel for the hunting it—"Go west, young man, and grow up with the land," And "Uncle Sam is rich enough to give us all a farm." That sort of thing. And do it all concretely—don't say those things were so, show that they were so. (Lane qtd. in Anderson, Literary 39) Lane was born into a pioneer family in Dakota Territory herself, but her letter suggests that in 1915 she embraced the mythology of the frontier where she herself had once lived. "Make it real," she told her mother, "because you saw it with your own eyes" (39). Wilder, however, either intentionally ignored her daughter's advice or found that she could not follow it, as she created the Little House novels with a more complex view of America's frontier past than the one Lane initially advocated for, particularly where Native people were concerned. Even as Wilder's protagonist, Laura, and her family participate in westward expansion as they travel from home to home on the Midwestern prairies during the 1870–80s, Wilder recalls her family's experiences in a manner that is often critical of expansion; the frontier that Wilder "saw with [her] own eyes" and reflected upon was quite different from the imaginary frontier Lane proposed. During the next several decades, though, Lane's perspective on frontier history evolved, perhaps as a result of her own experiences of writing about her family's pioneer history and helping her mother with the Little House series. The content in the Little House novels was informed by Wilder's own experiences but not solely by her experiences as a child on the frontier. Her childhood memories were filtered through her lifetime of experiences as she recalled and recorded them, and perhaps no [End Page 182] experience was...

What is a Question?

What is a Question? Sarah Bay-Cheng (bio) At the very end of her life, Gertrude Stein is rumored to have asked, “What is the answer?” Receiving no response, she continued, “But what is the question?” Stein’s query (whether accurately reported or not) can be read in two distinct ways. The first, and most salient in a death-bed scene, is as retrospective reflection. One may think of her pondering the answer to life, a version of the often-asked, “What was it all for?” This very question, in fact, constituted the climax of Stein’s final dramatic writing, the opera The Mother of Us All (1945-46) in which the titular character Susan [End Page 40] B. Anthony returns from the dead to consider the consequences of her “long long life” and her impact on American history. Less evident, perhaps, is that Stein’s question also points forward even as it simultaneously thwarts this progression. All questions—even questions about questions—look to the future as the temporal space of a possible answer. Stein’s question, however, suggests a future in which even knowing what to ask is uncertain and must therefore return back to the site of the original query. She locks the seemingly linear act of questioning and answering into a space where the question turns back in on itself perpetually. (That Stein stages her final words as a continuous present will surprise few.) This circular questioning process is essential to the criticism of contemporary performance. The unique temporal properties of performance—whether mediated, live, or on the spectrum between the two—simultaneously invoke the past, the present, and the future. Formulating a critical question about performance is therefore imbricated within peculiar notions of time and action. The salient questions about any given work—What happened before? What is happening now? What happens next?—must be suspended within a current moment that considers all of these simultaneously. Critical questions in performance are therefore intrusions into a process. One has to artificially freeze an event already in motion and interject a framework for analysis. Considering contemporary performance, then, the question is an interruption and a temporal suspension of what is also acknowledged as an ongoing event. This suspension allows both critic and audience to examine a particular moment as a synecdoche of a larger performance work, while also acknowledging that any one moment is inadequate even if it is the only thing available. In his stunning collection, Clockfire, poet Jonathan Ball captures this essential reality of performance criticism rather well: “The play is over. Applaud or jeer. Step out into the street and pick a path. Meanwhile, the play begins again, in your absence. Without you.”1 [End Page 41] Sarah Bay-Cheng SARAH BAY-CHENG is Professor and Chair of Theater and Dance at Bowdoin College. Her research interests include avant-garde literature, theater, and cinema, technology and performance, digital humanities, and contemporary performance. Her publications include Performance and Media: Taxonomies for a Changing Field (2015) and Mama Dada: Gertrude Stein’s Avant-Garde Theater (2004); she also has served as editor for several publications including Mapping Intermediality in Performance (2010) and Poets at Play: An Anthology of Modernist Drama (2010). Other publications include book chapters and articles regarding theater, performance, and digital culture. Her recent research focuses on digital historiography and performance with a book on this topic currently in progress. Notes 1. Jonathan Ball, Clockfire (Toronto, CA: Coach House Books, 2006), 70. Copyright © 2017 Johns Hopkins University Press

Putting on the Dog: Canine Characterization in Fiction and Nonfiction

Putting on the Dog:Canine Characterization in Fiction and Nonfiction Kate McIntyre (bio) Shiloh by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor. Atheneum, 2000, 144 pp., $7.99 (paper). My Dog Tulip by J. R. Ackerley. NYRB Classics, 1999, 208 pp., $14 (paper). Fifteen Dogs by André Alexis. Coach House Books, 2015, 176 pp., $17.95 (paper). Animals Strike Curious Poses by Elena Passarello. Sarabande, 2017, 200 pp., $19.95 (hardcover). I'm writing a collaborative novel in which dogs become hyperintelligent and reset the existing mammalian pecking order, good-naturedly overtaking and enslaving humans. I know dogs but haven't lived with one since I was young, so it seemed important to review the literature. I wanted the dog characters I created to be vivid and accurate in their dogginess. Because the dogs in my novel are filled with determination and pluck, bursting with ideas about how to reshape the world to suit them, I wanted to read books with similarly self-possessed canines at their center. What I found was that books with dogs as main characters are, in fact, not necessarily books about dogs but books about humans' relationship to dogs. Sometimes dog characters are used as lenses to bring new clarity to the human characters; other times the dogs are objects for humans to fight over; yet other times dogs function primarily as symbols—of loyalty, of humbleness, of steadfastness, of violence. Dogs can also serve as lower-stakes stand-ins for people. You want a really dramatic moment in [End Page 197] your book, one that will show that you mean business but not take away any of the important characters? Kill the dog. You want to demonstrate just how irredeemably evil a character is? Have him kill the dog. Mostly, dog stories are about a human looking at a dog rather than a shared gaze or a dog looking back at a human. A dog's relationship to the world is profoundly different from a person's, starting with its lower vantage point and continuing through its sensory capabilities, lack of opposable thumbs, strong sense of power structures, and relatively low intelligence. Dogs live with us and seem to enjoy doing so, but it's hard to know exactly what their embodied experience feels like. I read for answers. I was nervous to undertake this project because I'm tender-hearted toward animals, and if there's one thing I know about dog books, it's that you can never count on a dog to live. There's a whole subgenre of educational dying-dog novels for children, which strikes me as a great cruelty. I can't remember the characters or situations in novels I read just last year, but Where the Red Fern Grows, the story of a little boy and of his two beloved redbone coonhounds that come to grief at the claws of a mountain lion (Dan the coonhound gets the worst of it; the boy's mother carefully washes his exposed intestines with soapy water and uses a sewing needle to stitch up his abdomen, though of course sepsis takes him shortly afterward and Ann the coonhound dies of grief on his grave) will follow me as long as I have a memory. More dead dogs: Old Yeller, Sounder, Marly, Cujo, the Hound of the Baskervilles. To save you, dear readers, from a similar unpleasant experience, I have offered a helpful note at the end of each section about whether or not the dog dies and, if it does, how that makes me feel. The books reviewed here, two works of fiction and two of nonfiction, push past the dead dog as heart-tugging plot element, offering nuanced explorations of the human-canine bond. ________ Shiloh, published in 1991, was children's author Phyllis Reynolds Naylor's sixty-fifth book and her most acclaimed. It won the Newbery Medal from the American Library Association, and it's easy to see why, for the wonderfully rich storytelling voice, rendered in dialect, of the young protagonist, Marty. The novel is set in poor, rural West Virginia, and the lives of the people it depicts are not easy. Marty and his family worry about having enough...

Application of text mining in library book procurement

With the diversification of readers’ preferences, the continuous growth of book price and the shortage fund for purchasing books, it becomes increasingly important to explore reads’ real needs and spend limited money on those needed books. In this context, Chinese Word Segmentation technology combined with Chinese Library Classification are used to explore readers’ reading preferences by using news, management and finance disciplines’ borrowing data of Jinan University in the year of 2015. Results showed that readers showed remarkable preferences for books of a specific subcategory or theme. Meanwhile the hot borrowed books often gathered in a few core publishing house, with the core publishing house books accounting for 70%, 63% and 76% of the total sampling books for news, management and finance discipline respectively. All in all, this research is of great significance for the book procurement job of the high school library.

About My Mother by Ros Schwartz &amp; Lulu Norman

Nhu, who merits an entire chapter on her feminine, glamorous wickedness. Her fullframe portrait gushes, “Power is marvelous . Absolute power is absolutely marvelous .” The author’s sister—at times a sane, if one-dimensional voice—disgusted by her brothers’ violent play and the conditions of war alike, remains largely undeveloped. This graphic memoir reminded me how much form matters. We don’t read graphic novels to make complete sense of history but rather to try to understand and process the human impact of moments in that history, through our senses, our bodies. Though words and facts were sometimes a distraction, this is a compelling story about one man’s very internal, embodied, and unfinished struggle to understand not only widespread human suffering but also a childhood that was unjustly drawn and colored by war. Alison Mandaville California State University, Fresno Tahar Ben Jelloun. About My Mother. Trans. Ros Schwartz & Lulu Norman. London. Telegram Books. 2016. 247 pages. There is a sort of prophetic air that accompanies much of the titular figure’s speech in Tahar Ben Jelloun’s About My Mother . Though autobiographical in some moments, Jelloun appears aware that his personal reflection is peripheral, instead focusing much of his efforts on instilling life in his fading parent, Lalla Fatma. Fortunately, Jelloun captures his mother’s essence splendidly, conveying quirks and anecdotes naturally. With About My Mother , Jelloun illustrates a life remarkably, not only in a celebratory fashion but also in a way that recognizes and reconciles the reality of loss. Set in his childhood home, Jelloun’s detail about the location from which he finds himself several decades removed at the novel’s onset bolsters the two most visible characters outside himself, his mother and her personal assistant, Keltum. There’s a feeling the place conveys, with the living room’s broken chandelier and a myriad of colorful medications, which can almost be smelled through the author’s vivid prose. This attention to detail often lends itself to the weariness of Jelloun’s visit as perception melts into itself and time slows to a crawl, made evident as “images fall from the [television] screen and mingle with the dust on the carpet.” Chapters of quiet examination are interrupted by episodes of his mother’s delusional fervor, interwoven within the narrative to the rhythm of a persistent soul. One instance finds Jelloun’s mother preparing for the arrival of her three husbands, each of whom are long deceased. A similar excerpt finds Lalla Fatma claiming she was visited by her third spouse and the author’s father, whom, she recalls, appears exceptionally sharp. After her son reminds her of his father’s fate, Lalla comically resolves that “death suits him.” Jelloun conjures a realistic and engaging image of Alzheimer’s disease, but it is the revelations his mother voices that allow the novel to resonate. Jelloun recognizes that despite his mother ’s failing faculties, a life of adversity and Michal Viewegh Bliss Was It in Bohemia Trans. David Short Jantar Set against the backdrop of 1960s political upheaval in Czechoslovakia, Bliss Was It in Bohemia employs humor to portray the struggles of a family at odds with itself and with its political surroundings. With a unique juxtaposition of comedy and chaos, the author reflects the complexity of human emotional responses, telling stories both of universal human experience and particular historical significance. Kimball Taylor The Coyote’s Bicycle Tin House Books This fascinating work of nonfiction represents one journalist’s quest to discover how seven thousand bicycles wound their way through a surprising number of hands to wind up abandoned just across the border from Tijuana, centered on a mysterious figure named El Indio. Kimball Taylor’s gift at capturing human stories in a manner as captivating as fiction transforms this Quixotic journey into a landmark work on the recent history of human smuggling into the United States. Nota Bene WORLDLIT.ORG 91 passion strives to persevere. Perhaps the fiery and sporadic nature of his mother’s condition is what makes this work most harrowing, as Lalla Fatma’s moments of liveliness bring forth a momentary hope within the shadow of inevitability. Due to this, the work can at times seem emotionally...

Emotions, speech, and the art of politics in fifteenth-century York:House Books, mystery plays and Richard duke of Gloucester

ABSTRACT:The YorkHouse Booksprovide much-cited evidence of Richard III's relationship with the City of York in 1485, yet the nature and purpose of theHouse Bookshas never been satisfactorily explored. Through a focus on the records of a single year (1476–77), this article places their development within the context of new forms of civic bureaucracy in England and France in which the recording of emotions and speech had particular rhetorical and political significance in the reign of Edward IV. This expanding culture of civic literacy led not only to the creation of fuller records of civic politics and events (including the surviving texts of the Corpus Christi drama), but also enabled new forms of political activity.

Demand-driven Service Innovation: Discovery and Analysis in Chinese Law Libraries

AbstractThis article introduces readers to a new perspective on meeting library user needs. The author employs Kano theory to examine library user demands in Chinese law libraries and how law libraries in China have tried to meet user needs on three different levels. The Kano model was first introduced by Professor Noriaki Kano of Tokyo Rika University. The model was based on the assumption that customer needs are constantly changing and the question becomes how to meet library users’ evolving demands. The article summarizes demands of Chinese law library patrons on three levels: basic needs, performance, and excitement demands. Currently, most Chinese academic law libraries meet the basic needs of library users, but they need to further enhance user satisfaction and promote the law libraries’ status as a legal information center instead of merely a place to collect and house books.