Moment You Research Articles

Two Poems

Combustion of Early Summer; and The Love of My Life James Mccorkle Combustion of Early Summer The elation of the past is over, the news tells us, Suggesting it was there to begin with Or recoverable, like a heavy ore or a shipwreck. But on closer inspection, the past buzzes around us, A conversation in another room we thought dormant, Soon its occupants will crash through the door Wearing green sequin blouses that remind us of mermaids, The ones seen years ago in waterless tanks among dried starfish And draped nets, waving to us from a place free of storms. You wonder about other places, less advertised, If another design had not been accomplished That drew upon a new notion of heaven. Cushioned by the afternoon's orchid heat, Enveloping us with implied betrayals— It is possible, the narrator might be whispering— There we might be unfurling like sails, Never going taut, the wind pulls us over the water, Whole populations streaming over reefs with marlin and sailfish. Stories that make us up, until we are bankrupt, And we wonder who these people are claiming their pound Of flesh off our backs, pushing us into the dusty crowd. We are trapped in the same voices we've known for years, Words drop among the glowing debris of streets— Which are yours or mine, what was said or when, unknown. Sorting things out, nothing really fits: The puzzle of mountains with pieces from a regatta, We have pieces from other lives, The difficulty is to remember them, hoping Caligula or Curie do not figure As the locking piece, the keyhole, the knob. Dreams stare back at us, a coiled snake Leading us deeper into houses or along streets To a harbor whose palms have rotted, the furniture staved-in. Along the shore the dead talk with us—they are the waves And the salvage-birds, the jackals that swarm Through the old hotels and in the weedy temples. These sidereal landscapes compound: for a moment You are there, in the mullein-heat of ruins, before we lose sight Of the landscape, the dream chopped to a memory At other times, there are sections we dimly remember: Another bay's cerulean expanse tips into the sky, Scattered sails tack for an unseen buoy. The regatta holds its shape, like dreams that continue after waking, The city fills out for us again, with its seepage-stained Water-towers and the pigeon-clutter of roofs. In the dense exhaust of afternoon, we move in and out of shadows Along Houston Street, as though bathing in ink And then washing clean of all traces, The remaining light is so strong our white shirts Blanch the photographs of all tone: were you to the left, Or is that someone else strayed into the frame? The shield of light expands over the imagined horizons, Everything fills itself with all else, That anything could be no longer interests. The traffic lights change like dominoes falling, All the way up town as we move each to another, A roundel where passion is only in the figure. Everything said spirals to a period, A rose that has dried almost to blackness, Its scent a window left open long ago. We slide to this point perspectives chart, Infinite movement allowed only one course, What was meant to happens remains off stage, So much for the pavane we whirled into; Sticking your tongue out, crossing your eyes, you spin Across stage, into the water-meadows abutting tank-farms. The stage goes black, the curtains tear, Children are sent in to rip the floorboards up For firewood, pigeons circle out of the cracked vault. Returning dripping with sedge and reeds, Tannic perfume soaks your clothes: no one can describe Your departure or arrival, yet we all have ideas. Momentary grace or seduction?—no one knows Your reasons for taking up with us, perhaps the loneliness Of watching cities turn more fatal and rapturous Each epoch slides into the next and claims its dead: What is the cost of all this, what has been put aside To keep the body tandem to the sulphur-lit city. When you spun into your volute, there was...

Electronic Databases: A Brief Survey

As the bank slogan goes, electronic deposit, you could be somewhere else today (and not standing here in line), so too, with electronic data sources, we can spend our time much more efficiently reading, analyzing or, better yet, writing up the results of our research instead of wading through page after page of citations, juggling several tomes at one time as we try to cross reference our data and write the results out on notecards or pieces of paper. Electronic information sources can produce in seconds results that take hours by hand. Because they require less effort and save so much time, they invite us to look for data in ways that before we would have discarded as being too time-consuming. What follows is a survey of some of the traditional and non-traditional electronic sources of information that can be of use to us in research and teaching. Dialog Information Services of Palo Alto, California provides access to three hundred databases containing over 152 million units of information. Several of these are of traditional interest to the hispanist, though we are probably more accustomed to thumbing through their pages than viewing their contents electronically: the MLA International Bibliography, ERIC (Educational Resources Information Center), Dissertation Abstracts, and Linguistics and Language Behavior Abstracts. The MLA International Bibliography contains citations to over 850,000 documents in literature, language, linguistics, and folklore from 1964 to 1987. It is updated monthly from December through May and again in September. These updates will continue until everything from 1921 to the present is available. The cost of searching this database is $66.00 per hour, plus the cost of connecting to it, and 15 cents for each citation printed off line and mailed to you, typed, or displayed on your screen. Special rates of $15.00 per hour are available to academic institutions and there are discount contracts for high usage accounts. There is an annual contract fee of $25.00 for your password and there are no minimum use charges. You connect to the MLA International Bibliography or other database with your modem through a local telelcommunications network such as Telenet or Tymnet. There is a $10.00 per hour charge for using these networks in addition to the cost of connecting to Dialog. In a limited number of cities Dialog provides its own communications service, Dialnet. Connections are made at 300, 1200, and in most cases, 2400 baud. Dialog is available twenty-four hours a day everyday except Sunday from 3:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m. Dialog will provide communications software for the IBM family of microcomputers specially developed for use on their network should you wish to purchase it. However, any high quality telecommunications program can be used and most of these will allow you to save to disk whatever appears on your screen. Dialog Information Services provides a wealth of information on all of its databases from the moment you subscribe, and you are kept up to date through periodic supplements to the original materials that you receive.' The chapter dealing with searching the MLA International Bibliography is forty-two pages in length and contains detailed instructions for searching, along with samples of searches based on different key words (author, title, special descriptor) that you might use. It also deals with the organizational changes that the MLA made in the International Bibliography in 1981 and their consequent implications for data searches. With practice you can design very sophisticated strategies; however, the details of searching can at first seem quite complicated, if not intimidating. Because of the costs involved, it is imperative that you work out as much of your strategy as possible, well in advance of dialing into Dialog. ERIC contains data from 1966 to the present and costs $30.00 per hour of connect time, plus 14 cents for each citation printed off line or 10 cents for each typed, or displayed on line. Dissertation Abstracts spans from 1961 to the present and costs $72.00 for each

Further Notes from a Voluntary Exile

In my growing up days, evolution was a forbidden word and creation was seen as an instantaneous affair. Salvation worked the same way. At some fortuitous moment you got saved and that took care of matters forever. It took years for me to alter that mindset and realize that what was really essential was process, not productjourney, not destination. All of nature speaks to this becoming, this slow evolution that takes one from beginnings toward some largely unknown destination. My beginnings were in Mississippi. The first people and places and values that I met and cherished were the people, places, and values of Mississippi, and first impressions seem, somehow, to be the most lasting ones. Perhaps that's because childhood is the one time when life is most thoroughly experienced and absorbed. Children give themselves over completely to the business of living. Everything is new and different. Impressions soak into the very soul and leave indelible stains. Later, when one is busy with doing, living for the sheer wonder of watching and listening and feeling is lost. One is still impressed, but not indelibly. Also, each image is fleeting, rather than sustained, since life moves along at a faster pace. As a child I stayed in the same setting, watched the same people, the same scenes time after time. Other writers may not be so firmly tied to one region because their watching, listening, feeling years were spent in a variety of settings, while mine were spent solely in Mississippi. As a girlchild, I knew all about the Southern Belle image I was supposed to have. Yet I never quite managed to pull it off. First there was the problem of hair. Mine was the wrong color and had no curls. Like Jana, the protagonist in a short story I wrote several years ago, I was a tomboy whose hair was more often adorned by wisps of hay or pine needles than by velvet ribbons. The heart of that story is a flashback triggered by news of the death of Jana's Uncle Will, the one person in her life who has encouraged her to be herself, rather than the prim and proper Southern Belle the world expects her to be. The story ends when Jana, now a college student far from home, sits before her mirror, snipping away the hated curls, one by one. She has changed. She has come to question the old ideas and assumptions. And once that questioning has begun, Jana can never be the same again. So it is with all of us. The South I grew up in was strict and explicit in its mores-spiritual, social, and sexual. Certain ideas, actions, and attitudes were appropriate, while others were not. And what was appropriate was seldom negotiable. Every little girl growing up in Mississippi knew that she was expected to be a little lady at all times. And all of us knew what little ladies could and could not do. The logic of this carefully guarded ladyhood is apparent. Theoretically, a little girl who grew up behaving like a lady would remain a virgin until marriage, become a perfect helpmeet to a worthy man, and raise children who would reflect the best aspects of the southern culture. Conversely, a little girl who was headstrong enough to break one part of the code of ladyhood was in imminent danger of slipping into the abyss. And since the example set by one rebellious girlchild could lead to the ruination of many, there was no room for compromise. Those who fell short might not be immediately punished, yet they knew wherein they had failed and suffered the hell of knowing they had never quite measured up. But the tyranny of appropriateness reached far beyond matters of everyday dress and decorum and into the world of religion. God moved in mysterious ways his wonders to perform. He not only managed to keep his separate

Staph Aureus and Corynebacterium Pyogenes Mastitis in a Free Stall Dairy

After sitting through so many mastitis lectures, one easily gets the impression that all practitioners who talk about mastitis really do is sit around doodling the time away at their desks with their nose in the latest journal until that fateful moment when the phone rings. On the other end of the line is a dairyperson in distress (vapid DAPID), calling all your expertise out to solve a mastitis problem. At that moment you mobilize, just like the SWAT team, grabbing your detco recorder, flowmeter, culture tubes and CMT paddle as you fly out the door and proceed code 3 to the scene of the crime.
 In real life the scenario goes more like this. You have just finished palpating 50 or 60 head with 2 more herds to go. The office has just called on the radio and asked if you could pick up an OB on the way. They report that the calf should be ready to come out because its tail has been showing for 2 days already. As you are hurriedly washing off your boots preparing to roar off in search of "the aroma", your dairyman casually asks, "Say doc, have you got anything good for mastitis?"

Where to Find Used Computers

Just as a new car drops in value the moment you drive it out of the showroom, a new computer depreciates the second it leaves its shipping carton.

The Law of Psychoanalysis

Is there an ethics of psychoanalysis? In other words, there a properly psychoanalytic ethics, one proper to psychoanalysis? In still another formulation, but this time in German, gibt Es, does It give: a Law, a morality, an obligation? And if It gives, if there a gift, can we, without fail, free ourselves of this debt, this obligation? First imagine the kind of answer a psychoanalyst would give such a question these days. He would sit silent, most assuredly. Your question, he would say silently, is a demand, a demand to know what the obligation, the Law, the Sovereign Good, is. Now, any demand, inasmuch as it formulated in language, inevitably opens desire-insatiable, insaturable desire-of that for which it a demand, beyond itself: be it the Other-thing or Nothing. Such the Law which the Law of language and the Law of Desire indissociably. So I am not allowed to satisfy your demand. Quite the contrary, I would be very guilty were I to pretend to know what you should do and how you ought to proceed in order to gain access to happiness, to satisfaction, to bliss. This impossibility itself, to which I am bound, as you are. From the moment you began to speak, to question me, to challenge me, you gave yourself over to the order of desire, forever. Henceforth your question and your desire, which are also mine, must remain.

THOMAS JEFFERSON WRITES TO HIS 11-YEAR-OLD DAUGHTER ON THE SUBJECT OF DRESS

Martha, Jefferson's oldest daughter, who was born on September 27, 1772, was temporarily placed under the care of relatives after her mother's death on September 6, 1782. A year later her father sent her this letter advising her "on the subject of dress." Annapolis, Dec 22, 1783 ... I omitted ... to advise you on the subject of dress, which I know you are a little apt to neglect. I do not wish you to be gaily clothed at this time of life, but what you wear should be fine of its kind. But above all things and at all times let your clothes be clean, whole, and properly put on. Do not fancy you must wear them till the dirt is visible to the eye. You will be the last who is sensible of this. Some ladies think they may, under the privileges of the dishabillé, be loose and negligent of their dress in the morning. But be you, from the moment you rise till you go to bed, as cleanly and properly dressed as at the hours of dinner or tea. A lady who has been seen as a sloven or a slut in the morning, will never efface the impression she has made, with all the dress and pageantry she can afterwards involve herself in. Nothing is so disgusting to our sex as a want of cleanliness and delicacy in yours. I hope, therefore, the moment you rise from bed, your first work will be to dress yourself in such style, as that you may be seen by any gentleman without his being able to discover a pin amiss, or any other circumstance of neatness wanting ....

Imagery: The artistic style in the therapists communications

WHEREAS poetry and the arts seek to illuminate, psychoanalysis seeks to unravel. Both might address, at times, what Edmund Gosse has referred to, in his confidence to Henry James, as the “obstinate twist” in the hidden personality. Art, often, and psychological treatment more often, moves toward the achievement, for the individual, of that “quieter time” Gosse later reached: “Some beginnings of that Sophoclean period when the wild beast dies. He is not dead, but tamer; I understand him and the trick of his claws” (Hyde, 1969). A special affinity has often been felt between the psychoanalyst and the artistic. Perhaps one reason is that both share a common goal. There is a penetrating concern with the stuff of inner and outer reality, with life as it is lived and people as they underlyingly are. It is true that no single theory on the function of art will suffice, yet one of the ultimate ends of art is to humanize life to show and absorb one in experiencing its fullness and richness. Similarly, one of the ends of psychoanalytic treatment is also to enable the patient to get in touch with this richness, to experience a full immersion in existence. In the shadow area at the edge of consciousness lie the feelings without which a person can neither relatively know nor be himself. Beyond the removal of symptoms, an ideal goal of depth psychotherapy is to assist the patient’s inner self to stretch, breathe, look about, and grow. In the service of this goal, what is therapeutic is “feeling” to quote e. e. Cummings, “not knowing or believing or thinking.” Perhaps one of the deeper aims of therapy, like that of this poet for himself,’ is to enable the patient, on increasingly more basic levels, to express, as Cummings continues, oneself in words, because when you believe or you know, you’re a lot of but the moment you feel, you’re yourself.” “nobody:butthink or you other people: nobody but