Opening Lines Research Articles

Revolution and Power in Puerto Rican Nonfiction

Revolution and Power in Puerto Rican Nonfiction

“Read the City Walls for Signs of My Life”: Four Reviews

“Read the City Walls for Signs of My Life”: Four Reviews Christopher Spaide (bio) More Anon: Selected Poems by Maureen N. McLane (Farrar, Straus & Giroux 2021) Blood on the Fog by Tongo Eisen-Martin (City Lights Publishers 2021) The Past by Wendy Xu (Wesleyan University Press 2021) Pilgrim Bell: Poems by Kaveh Akbar (Graywolf Press 2021) In early 1954, approaching his seventy-fifth birthday, Wallace Stevens faced a dilemma unique to monumental poets nearing the final stage of their careers: Should he publish a selected poems or a collected? Nothing but the hits, or everything, including all the misses? Writing to an academic acquaintance, he weighed his options: “They are different in the sense that people read selected poems but don’t buy them. On the other hand, they [End Page 150] buy collected poems but don’t read them.” It’s a fantastic little quip, a perfectly knotted rhetorical bow—but in Stevens’s case, it isn’t remotely true. When his Collected Poems was published that fall, it garnered him plenty of new readers and considerable sales, along with the Pulitzer Prize, his second National Book Award, and a celebratory birthday lunch at New York’s Harmonie Club, hosted by his publisher. (In the years since Stevens’s death, there have been several Selected Poems, any of which I recommend reading, buying, or both, even though none of them led to lunches of much literary-historical distinction.) Maureen N. McLane, the author of five collections and now her first selected poems, More Anon, has her own fantastic witticism about reprinting poems. It appears in her unsummarizable poetry-meets-prose-meets-everything-in-between memoir My Poets (2012), in an essay titled “My H. D.,” in a paragraph collaging appraisal and crafty quotation: It is no dispraise to be a poet best served by an anthology, a rigorously pruned selected—no dispraise particularly for this poet, who knew very well that “anthology” comes from the Greek: a gathering of flowers. “Little, but all roses.” True enough for H. D.; true enough for any number of poets whose work looks best when handpicked and arranged into a modest bouquet. But McLane, like Stevens, lucked out: her own gathering of flowers easily exceeds the rosy standards she set for H. D. Reprinting around a third of her previously published poetry, More Anon may be “rigorously pruned,” but its contents are so various, no mere bouquet but a botanical garden, that you might reasonably wonder how it all came from just one poet. The final poem in More Anon, “envoi: eclipse,” reads in full: [End Page 151] “I don’t trust myself / not to look.” From first page to last, More Anon presents McLane as a lowercase-e experimentalist, taking a methodical “look” at the marvelous; each new poem is an occasion to attempt something ever so slightly unprecedented, learn from the results, then promptly move on. Our ready-made phrase for dabbling among styles and stances, especially for young poets, is “finding one’s voice.” Counterintuitively, McLane found her first voices by throwing them every which way. The “envoi” to her debut, Same Life (2008), sounds like a post-breakup Chaucer, taking it hard, or a punkish Dickinson, promising mind-blowing sublimities: “Go litel myn book / and blow her head off.” That first book also includes a catechism, Sapphic love poems, a 118-line verse-essay on Susan Sontag, and episodes in the serial biography of a poet-scholar, Mz N. (That code name deserves an explanatory essay of its own: “Mz N” could be an alter ego for McLane—whose initials are two Ms and one N—or a glitchy abbreviation for an existentially “missing” person.) What all these one-off exercises had in common was their origin point: wonder. Sometimes it spilled from her opening lines (“Terrible things are happening / in Russian novels!”), and sometimes it came slowly to simmer: Sometimes we arrange to meetand after some wine they rememberand blush and wonderand ask if I too wonder. McLane embodied her wonder in a springy free-verse line, extendable and retractable as a lecturer’s pointer, and in her worldly palate for vocabularies, taking...

Dream, Bliss, and the Shaping of Emotional Meaning in Beowulf

<i>Dream</i>, <i>Bliss</i>, and the Shaping of Emotional Meaning in <i>Beowulf</i>

EFEITO DO TRATAMENTO CIRÚRGICO DA CURVATURA ESCOLIÓTICA SOBRE A COLUNA E MEMBROS SUPERIORES

ABSTRACT Objectives: Evaluate the surgical treatment of scoliotic curvature effects and sagittal radiographic parameters of the spine and upper limbs after surgical treatment with direct vertebral rotation (DVR) associated with type 1 osteotomy in adolescents with idiopathic scoliosis (AIS). Material and Methods: 41 patients with AIS were evaluated and compared before and after surgery. Scoliosis was confirmed by a radiographic of the spine. The radiographic parameters evaluated were: Cobb angles (proximal and distal thoracic), segmental kyphosis (T5-T12), total kyphosis (T1-T12), cervical lordosis (C2-C7), distance from the center of gravity of the skull to C7 (Cervical VAS), measurement of T1 slope (T1), neck slope, IT slope (AP), angle of the upper chest opening and plumb line C7-S1 (SVA C7-S1). Statistical analysis compared the pre- and post-surgical effects of sagittal cervical and shoulder parameters. Results: After the surgical procedure, significant reductions were observed for the following parameters of spine measurement: proximal and distal thoracic Cobb angle, with a correction of 68% of the main thoracic curve. The measurements of the inclination of the T1 profile and the inclination of the neck also improve after surgery. Regarding the shoulders, there was a reduction in T1 AP slope and intercoracoid angle after surgery. The other radiographic parameters did not show significant differences. Conclusion: Surgical treatment with direct vertebral rotation (DVR) associated with type 1 osteotomy promoted better sagittal radiographic parameters of the thoracic Cobb angles, T1 inclination of the cervical spine, neck inclination, and better shoulder symmetry. Level of Evidence II; Prospective study.

Austrian Studies: Literaturen und Kulturen: Eine Einführung ed. by Desiree Hebenstreit et al.

Reviewed by: Austrian Studies: Literaturen und Kulturen: Eine Einführung ed. by Desiree Hebenstreit et al. Andrew Barker Austrian Studies: Literaturen und Kulturen: Eine Einführung. Ed. by Desiree Hebenstreit, Arno Herbert, Kira Kaufmann, Rebecca Schönsee, Laura Tezarek, Christian Zolles. Vienna: Praesens Verlag. 2020. 623 pp. €37.80. ISBN 978–3-7069–1057–6. As a token of their esteem, nearly sixty scholars and writers (including Elfriede Jelinek) contributed to this volume marking Roland Innerhofer's retirement as 'Professor für Neuere deutsche Literatur mit besonderer Berücksichtigung der österreichischen Literatur' at Vienna University's Institut für Germanistik. The title Austrian Studies: Literaturen und Kulturen reflects that of the Institute's MA programme with which Innerhofer is closely associated: 'Austrian Studies — Cultures, Literatures, Languages', a course delivered not in English, but German. The links between it and this Festschrift are obvious; the inside cover even reproduces material found in the course description, where it is glossed as 'Österreichstudien — Kulturen, Literaturen, Sprachen'. This, presumably, is to demarcate 'Österreichstudien' from 'Österreichkunde'. Vienna's Institut für Österreichkunde, with its long-standing journal Österreich in Geschichte und Literatur, is located in the same building as the Institut für Germanistik. Particularly significant, however, is the decision to entitle this otherwise monoglot German volume Austrian Studies, rather than 'Österreichstudien'. Inevitably, this invites it to be read in the context of an established field of study that is global and multidisciplinary. The 'Vorwort' fails to address such issues. Instead, the editors assert that 'Austrian Studies' is a discipline still in its infancy ('eine junge Disziplin'), and that that which follows should serve as an 'Inspiration' to further scholarly effort (p. 13). They nowhere recognize that 'Austrian Studies' has a distinguished history with deep roots outwith Austria. The longevity of this journal (1990–) appears to have escaped notice, similarly that of the Americanbased Journal of Austrian Studies (2012–), whose origins stretch back to 1961. Equally overlooked is the establishment from the 1970s onwards of Centres and Institutes for Austrian Studies at, inter alia, the University of Minnesota, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Leiden University, with subsequent chairs elsewhere of Austrian Studies. Writing for The Vienna Review in 2012, Innsbruck-based Allan Janik, co-author of the ground-breaking Wittgenstein's Vienna (1973), advised: 'To Understand Austria, Ask a Foreigner!' Titles matter. Hence the decision to subtitle the volume Eine Einführung raises reasonable expectations of it providing a systematic survey of the topics and approaches that have shaped, for instance, the Austrian Studies journals over many decades. Indeed, the opening lines claim it will deliver just such [End Page 197] an 'Überblick' of the broad spectrum of 'Austrian Studies' 'aus literatur- und kulturwissenschaftlicher Sicht' (p. 11). However, since a Festschrift depends largely upon whatever material authors choose to submit, there was probably little chance of it achieving this goal. Among the contributors, Wynfried Kriegleder at least is happy to concede that in the 1970s American scholars were instrumental in 'Die Wiener Moderne' becoming an internationally recognized concept (p. 153). Few of the essays exceed ten pages, and some appear ephemeral. Both Konstanze Fliedl's consummate summary of the debates surrounding what is 'Austrian' about Austrian literature, and Simon Ganahl's quirky imagined conversation between Kraus and Altenberg, openly recycle material previously published elsewhere. Simply to list the fifty-seven items presented here would come close to exceeding the limited space available to a review such as this. Suffice to say, then, that most are literary or philological in nature, and with occasional exceptions, for example Stephan Müller's Nibelungenlied essay, they relate to the period post-1800. Most point to the authors' schooling in traditional Germanistik, supporting Janik's contention that many Austrian academics still hesitate to cross disciplinary boundaries. The essays are presented in seven broadly themed groups: 'Geschichtsbewusstsein'; 'Topographien'; 'Bürokratien und Institutionen'; 'Rhetoriken und Debatten'; 'Architektur'; 'Migration und Mehrsprachigkeit'; 'Avantgardistische Provokationen und Medienpraktiken'. These groupings are generally coherent, with the exception of 'Rhetoriken und Debatten'. This is a curious miscellany, where Heide Lexe's examination of modern children's literature rubs shoulders with Franz M. Eybl's study of a Baroque sonnet by Catharina Regina von Greiffenberg, this followed...

To Africanize Spain: Twentieth-Century Spanish Poetry and the Persistent Forms of al-Andalus

To Africanize Spain: Twentieth-Century Spanish Poetry and the Persistent Forms of al-Andalus

Influence of flow control on aerodynamic properties of an open cavity in rarefied hypersonic flows

The discontinuity at the thermal protection system tiles covered on an aerospace vehicle is modeled as an open cavity to numerically investigate rarefied hypersonic flows over it under various flow control styles using the direct simulation Monte Carlo method. The influence of flow control on flow structures (e.g., shock wave and vortex) and aerothermal properties (e.g., temperature distribution and wall heat flux) is analyzed in detail. The flow structures and aerothermal properties of the cavity flowfield are both changed greatly by the square control block on the cavity opening line, such as a reduction of about 79.5% of the maximum of wall heat fluxes near the reattachment corner, while these changes are gradually weakened with the control block moving down. The control blocks with different shapes still have the ability to change flow structures and thus the heat flux coefficients over the cavity surfaces, but shape has little effect, and the square control block has the strongest wall heat flux compared with the circular, triangular, and wedged control blocks. For the supersonic jet with different directions, the leftward jet has the best performance in eliminating high temperature gas inside the cavity and over the downstream wall and reducing wall heat fluxes over cavity surfaces, followed by the downward jet. The main reason is that the leftward and downward jets can effectively prevent momentum and energy exchanges between freestream with cavity surfaces.

Climate Collapse, Judgment Day, and the Temporal Sublime

It is commonplace today to hear climate change identified as the single most important challenge facing humanity. Consider the headlines from COP24, the United Nations Climate Change Conference held in Poland in December 2018. U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres opened the proceedings by calling climate change “the most important issue we face” (PBS 2018). The Secretary-General’s remarks paraphrase the opening line of the U.N.’s climate change web page, which announces that “[c]limate Change is the defining issue of our time and we are at a defining moment” (United Nations n.d.). Such statements about the singular significance of climate change—the most important, the defining issue—are often followed by proclamations about what hangs in the balance, and this was the case at COP24. There, the celebrated British naturalist Sir David Attenborough warned that “collapse of our civilizations and the extinction of much of the natural world is on the horizons,” amounting to, in his words, “disaster of global scale, our greatest threat in thousands of years” (PBS 2018).

A New Interpretation of the Opening Lines of the Assur Letters

Abstract In this paper a new interpretation of the hatura-clauses in the Hieroglyphic Luwian Assur letters will be presented. First of all, it will be argued that the Hieroglyphic Luwian lexeme hatura-, which is usually connected to the Hittite verb ḫatrae- ‘to send’, ‘to write’ and translated as ‘letter’, is in fact related to the Hittite word ḫattuli- and Cuneiform Luwian ḫattulaḫid-, meaning ‘health’,‘wellbeing’. Secondly, the article will suggest that the Hieroglyphic Luwian word api, which is usually translated as ‘back’, or ‘again’, primarily functions as a discourse marker. Lastly, it will be proposed that the Hieroglyphic Luwian word for ‘letter’ or ‘message’ is (*205)atun(i)-. These new interpretations yield a better understanding of the opening lines of the Assur-letters and elucidate some other opaque passages of this intriguing correspondence.1

The Unhurried Hermeneutics of Anti-Black Violence in Toni Morrison’sParadise

AbstractThe opening lines of Toni Morrison’s Paradise (1997) are undeniably some of her most famous: “They shoot the white girl first. With the rest they can take their time. No need to hurry out there… . there is time and the day has just begun” (3). While the novel eventually reveals the identity of those who constitute the “they” of the opening action, in a move that has received much critical attention, it famously leaves the first victim anonymous. This essay, however, draws our attention to “the rest.” What of the infamous black women of Paradise for whom the violence is slow and drawn out or the many more in our country whose names we say to rebuke a system of injustice that continues to insist that there is “no need to hurry” for “there is time and the day has just begun”?Privileging a reading of time over space, the essay puts Morrison’s Paradise in conversation with Rob Nixon’s Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (2011) and Moya Bailey’s Misogynoir Transformed: Black Women’s Digital Resistance (2021) in order to address the urgent need for a temporal reframing of anti-Black violence. Paying particular care to what Karla Holloway describes as the “comparative laxity” to which Black women in this country have historically been subjected and the extent to which that comparative laxity persists in the face of spectacular scenes of violence, the essay concludes with an examination of Breonna Taylor’s murder in 2020. It considers how the events that resulted in her death, like the fictional raid that frames Morrison’s novel, are byproducts of white supremacist systems of slow violence and misogynoir designed to wear down the opposition by attrition.

John C. Swanson. Tangible Belonging: Negotiating Germanness in Twentieth-Century Hungary.

John C. Swanson. <i>Tangible Belonging: Negotiating Germanness in Twentieth-Century Hungary.</i>

The Anna Karenina principle and stock prices

The Anna Karenina principle (AKP) based on the opening line of Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, “All happy families are all alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way” is applied to financial markets. We test the AKP by defining happy firms as positive return firms and unhappy firms as negative return firms and analyse whether happy firms are more “alike” than unhappy firms. We use return correlations, cross-sectional return and cross-sectional volatility dispersion as measures and find for different stock index constituent samples totalling more than 8000 stocks that the AKP does not hold in general. In contrast, we find that the average return volatility of unhappy firms is larger than that of happy firms. This cross-sectional version of volatility asymmetry also implies that unhappy firms are more stressed than happy firms.

Amber Brian, Bradley Benton, Peter B. Villella and Pablo García Loaeza, translators and editors. History of the Chichimeca Nation: Don Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxochitl’s Seventeenth-Century Chronicle of Ancient Mexico

Amber Brian, Bradley Benton, Peter B. Villella and Pablo García Loaeza, translators and editors. <i>History of the Chichimeca Nation: Don Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxochitl’s Seventeenth-Century Chronicle of Ancient Mexico</i>

Ali Smith's and Olivia Laing's Fictions of Immediacy

Ali Smith's and Olivia Laing's Fictions of Immediacy

Sympathetic Vibrations

Sympathetic Vibrations

Η τεθλασμένη πρόσληψη της αρχαιοελληνικής ποίησης και το ποίημα «Πάνω σ’ ένα ξένο στίχο» του Γ. Σεφέρη

Refracted Modern Greek reception of Ancient Greek poetry and George Seferis’ poem ‘Upon a Line of Foreign Verse’The term ‘refracted’ describes instances where Modern Greek reception of Ancient Greek poetry is mediated through one or more intertexts, like Italian-Latin or French-Latin. After treating briefly Dionysios Solomos’ poem ‘The Shade of Homer’ (1821-1822) the paper focuses on George Seferis’ ‘Reflections on a Foreign Line of Verse’ (1931). Each of the two poets claims the Homeric heritage for himself as a Greek poet through a poem that constitutes a refracted reception of Homer. The former opens a chain of three literary windows one after the other: first the appearance of Homer to the character Ennius in Petrarch’s Latin epic Africa; next Cicero’s ‘Dream of Scipio’; and finally the appearance of Homer to the Latin poet Ennius, who in the proem of his Annals represented himself as a reincarnation of the Greek poet. In responding to Solomos about a hundred years later Seferis treated the subject of Homeric Odysseus’ sea wanderings by commenting on ‘Heureux qui, comme Ulysse, a fait un beau voyage’, the opening line of Joachim du Bellay’s famous sonnet XXXI of the collection Les regrets (1558). Most probably Bellay reached back to Homeric Odysseus through a passage of Ovid’s collection of elegies written in exile and entitled Ex ponto. Ovid conceived his banishment from Rome to a region of modern Romania as the analogue of Odysseus’ wanderings away from Ithaca and became a source of inspiration for Du Bellay and other poets.

Eudocia’s Singing Deacon: Another Programmatic Passage In Late Antique Christian Verse

AbstractAmongst the varied literary output of the fifth-century empress Aelia Eudocia is a hexameter paraphrase of the martyrdom of Saints Cyprian and Justina. The opening lines of the poem, which were rediscovered in the second half of the 20th century, describe the conversion of Justina (Justa) to Christianity through the preaching of a deacon named Praulius. Even as Eudocia remains close to her prose model(s), she imposes her own interpretation upon the text through subtle variation and careful choice of poetic vocabulary. In her version, she depicts the preacher Praulius as a Christian counterpart to the traditional singer of hexameter poetry, linked also to her own poetic activity. This description of Praulius’ transformational preaching, prominently placed at the outset of the poem, constitutes another programmatic passage in late antique Christian verse.

Retuning Chaucer's Instrument: Chaucer and the Trots Once Again

ABSTRACT Thirty-five years ago in this journal, I argued on the basis of my analysis of ten translations of key passages in the Canterbury Tales that we could not trust translators to give accurate renditions of what Chaucer wrote. In this follow-up study, I analyze ten different translations of the famous opening lines in the General Prologue, beginning with “Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote.” I look first at the wide variety of ways the translators render the word soote at the end of the first line. Then, through a series of questions, I call attention to the many ways these ten translators introduce inaccuracies large and small into their renditions of Chaucer's first four lines. At the end, I consider the question of the appropriateness of Christopher Lauer's unusually free translation of the Reeve's Tale.

Real-time Approximate Routing for Smart Transit Systems

The advent of ride-hailing platforms such as Lyft and Uber has revolutionized urban mobility in the past decade. Given their increasingly important role in today's society, recent years have seen growing interest in integrating these services with mass transit options, in order to leverage the on-demand and flexible nature of the former, with the sustainability and cost-effectiveness of the latter. Our work explores a set of operational questions that are critical to the success of any such integrated marketplace: Given a set of trip requests, and the ability to utilize ride-hailing services, which mass-transit routes should the transit agency operate? How frequently should it operate each route? And how can ride-hailing trips be used to both help connect passengers to these routes, and also cover trips which are not efficiently served by mass transit? We study these under a model in which a Mobility-on-Demand provider (the platform ) has control of a vehicle fleet comprising both single-occupancy and high-capacity vehicles (e.g., cars and buses, respectively). The platform is faced with a number of trip requests to fill during a short time window, and can service these trip requests via different trip options : it can dispatch a car to transport the passenger from source to destination; it can use a car for the first and last legs of the trip, and have the passenger travel by bus in between; or it can use more complicated trips comprising of multiple car and bus legs. Given a set of rewards for matching passengers to trip options, and costs for operating each line (i.e., a bus route and associated frequency), the goal of the platform is to determine the optimal set of lines to operate (given a fixed budget for opening lines), as well as the assignment of passengers to trip options utilizing these lines, in order to maximize the total reward. We refer to this as the Real-Time Line Planning Problem (RLpp). We first demonstrate the computational limits of RLpp by showing that no constant-factor approximation is possible if we relax either one of two assumptions: (i) access to a pre-specified set of feasible lines, and (ii) no bus-to-bus transfers. These assumptions are practically motivated and common in the literature, but our work is the first to formally demonstrate their necessity.

The Cambridge Companion to The Federalist

The Cambridge Companion to The Federalist