Things Got Research Articles

Christopher Logue and the Iliad

Christopher Logue and the Iliad* CHARLES ROWAN BEYE Icame to the Greek text of the Iliad when I was in my late teens after an outing with Plato’s Apology and Homer’s Odyssey. I never looked back: ancient Greek literature became my undergraduate major, Homeric epic my graduate specialty, a narrative technique of the poet of the Iliad my dissertation topic. I had the singular pleasure of introducing students to the ancient Greek language for almost every one of the forty-two years that I taught. And in almost every one of those forty-two years I also taught them either an introduction to Homeric Greek using the Iliad as my text, or a course in Homeric epic in English translation, sometimes both when enthusiasm for classical antiquity reached a dramatic peak in the sixties. In the English language course, I used to fret over my choice of the translation of the text of the Iliad. Because I could read the poem in the Greek of Homer I was acutely sensitive to the intricate structure of the phraseology which formed the basis of the Homeric language. Nobody talked like Homer; the text of the Iliad and Odyssey is sui generis, a language created over centuries by professional singers of tales who composed, collaborated, transmitted over time and place, all manner of stories. Like hip-hop which nobody speaks, only far more intricate. Out of that there came down to us the Iliad and the Odyssey. This simple bald statement, like equally unequivocal statements about the nature of God, can set off the equivalent of religious wars among professional Homerists. So we shall *Christopher Logue, War Music: An Account of Homer’s Iliad, Christopher Reid, ed. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016. 352 pages. arion 24.1 spring/summer 2016 leave it. The point is that the language in which the Homeric texts are written, and probably originally sung, is a thing of intricate, exquisite, complex beauty, well worth the effort to learn, and laughably unlike anything to be found in the so called “translations” of Homer. That there are thousands of them—and more being turned out every day when the readership is dramatically, if not fatally, declining—is testament to what is instinct in anyone who becomes intimate with the Homeric language: dammit, I can turn this into something that will bring across the ancient Greek. It doesn’t happen, didn’t happen to Richmond Lattimore who so very carefully retained the repeated epithets, the repeated phraseology; he was the translator du jour of the 1950s, albeit for many readers the great classroom snooze. Robert Fitzgerald, the favorite of English professors in those days—his more cautious, his more “poetic,” effort certainly was not action-packed; and although things got better with Robert Fagles—nowadays the almost authorized text, if only because Bernard Knox’s introduction to it is like the Homeric seal of approval—reading page after page of those interminable battles is not pleasant. Recently, I introduced a small group of senior citizens to the Iliad in a refreshingly honest course where the students were not examined and had the option of reading the poem or a brief precis—nothing concentrates one’s attention like realizing your days are numbered. After a few weeks, one gentleman brought up the tedium of reading the Fagles translation in toto, pointing out that page after page produced such boredom as to be unendurable. “All too true,” I said, adding with the freedom and candor of someone retired from his job; “I just don’t think translations work.” Which brings me to Christopher Logue’s account of the Iliad. And behind him the miracle of his being prompted, quite unwillingly, into the whole enterprise. BBC producer D. S. Carne-Ross has gained his fifteen minutes of fame for convincing Logue to make an English language script for a BBC broadcast of Homer’s telling of the great scene when Achilles fights with the river god, Scamander. Logue’s hesitachristopher logue and the ILIAD 166 tion was because he read no Greek. The genius moment was when Carne-Ross said he would tell him the story line for line, word...

Doctors of Empire: Medical and Cultural Encounters between Imperial Germany and Meiji Japan by Hoi-Eun Kim

Reviewed by: Doctors of Empire: Medical and Cultural Encounters between Imperial Germany and Meiji Japan by Hoi-Eun Kim James R. Bartholomew (bio) Doctors of Empire: Medical and Cultural Encounters between Imperial Germany and Meiji Japan. By Hoi-Eun Kim. University of Toronto Press, Toronto, 2014. xvi, 249 pages. $55.00, cloth; $55.00, E-book. How is one to explain the rapid and “seismic transformation … of medical science [in] Meiji Japan in just thirty years?” asks Hoi-Eun Kim. His answer is basically that from about 1870 Japanese medical authorities found German medicine an attractive model to follow and acted accordingly. In posing this question and providing this answer, Kim seems to be retelling a familiar story. But this is misleading; he gives only cursory attention to the Tokugawa background to modern Japanese medicine. The real contribution of the book is its analysis of how one country influences another and the thoughtful, nuanced account he offers of this process. He correctly emphasizes that the Japanese as protégés and the Germans as mentors each had agency. In his words, the historian of cultural borrowing should adopt a transnational perspective, consider reciprocal relations and engage in what Kim, borrowing from Lawrence Stone, has called “double prosopography” (p. 9).1 One of the first things we learn is that the drawing together of Japan and Germany in medical science was not the result of some inexorable, abstract process but rather followed the initiatives of particular people on each side (Iwasa Jun, Sagara Chian, and Guido Verbeck for Japan; Max von Brandt, Theodor von Holleben, Ernst von Bülow for the Germans). Nor did it have anything to do with some kind of constitutional affinity between the two countries, with a common tradition of rule by a military elite, or with geopolitics as commonly understood. In the field of medicine, Germany had many attractions for Japan as well as for other countries. Between 1870 and 1914, it had three times the number of universities of any other European country; thus, there were more professors of distinction than anywhere else. There was the unique German tradition of peregrinato academica that allowed students once admitted to move their enrollment easily from one institution to another. And with their systemic emphasis on research and publication as a requirement for advancement, German-speaking medical scientists led most of Europe not only in long-established fields such as pathology, anatomy, and surgery but also in the [End Page 435] vital, newly emerging specialty of bacteriology or—as the French called it—microbiology. The process of acquiring and expanding a tradition of medical expertise in Japan followed fairly predictable, straightforward channels. Two military physicians, Theodor Hoffmann and Leopold Müller, arrived from Prussia in 1870—there was as yet no Germany—while a small number of Japanese were dispatched to German-speaking institutions about the same time. Everyone had difficulty. The Germans spoke no Japanese, and even the Japanese who translated their lectures at first lacked the breadth of vocabulary needed for the purpose. Things got better eventually. In 1873 the Japanese government recalled its overseas students, and language proficiency standards were imposed after 1875. Hoffmann and Müller were succeeded by Emil Schultze and Albrecht Wernich that year; and they in turn by Julius Scriba and Erwin Baelz in 1881. The exorbitant cost of the German professors’ salaries helped to accelerate their replacement by Japanese successors. There were no more Germans after 1900. Important as the German professors were at this early stage, the contribution to modern medicine of the Japanese who studied in Germany was greater. Kim declares that we cannot establish with real certainty how many studied abroad in this period. But he is able to show that the numbers in Berlin alone could not have been fewer than 627 people, at least two of whom were women. He thinks that about 30 per cent were funded by one or another government agency. Others, who paid their own way, did so because they judged the career benefits to be worth the investment. The professional success of one of the women ryūgakusei (overseas student) makes the point: Despite many obstacles at both the Japanese...

Love in a Cold Climate: changes in the fortunes of LGBT men and women with learning disabilities?

Accessible Summary This study goes back to look at some research which was about gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) people with learning disabilities. Have things got better or worse for LGBT people as this research was performed? It is hard to say whether things have changed because we still do not know very much about the experiences of LGBT people with learning disabilities themselves. Summary‘Secret Loves, Hidden Lives?’ was a piece of research which explored the lives and loves of gay, lesbian and bisexual people with learning disabilities. The research arguably influenced the development of policy in that same sex relationships were subsequently mentioned in English government policy on learning disability. The research had an extensive programme of dissemination, and whilst no systematic attempt was made to measure the impact of the dissemination or the research, this study suggests ways in which the research might (or might not) have made a difference in relation to: telling untold stories, supporting front line workers with practical resources, challenging negative assumptions held by staff in services and putting LGBT people with learning disabilities in touch with each other. The study also considers work which was left undone and reflects on the opportunities to support LGBT people with learning disabilities in the current context of financial austerity.

Croatian Institute of Immunology: where have things got stuck?

The public is faced with a lot of contradictory information and dilemmas about the status of the Institute of Immunology in the government finance system. The Institute's financial position is unclear, as are arguments for its privatisation or possible reasons for staying in state ownership. This analysis is aimed at briefly clarifying the Institute's financial position and examining the justifiability of its privatisation vs. remaining in the state’s portfolio.

An Interview with Professor Kenneth Raymond on Supramolecular Chemistry: Symmetry Based Cluster Formation

A n I nterview with P rofessor K enneth R aymond on S upramolecular C hemistry : S ymmetry B ased C luster F ormation B S J Manraj Gill, Yana Petri, Tiffany Nguyen, Sabrina Berger Dr. Kenneth Raymond is a Chancellor’s Professor in the Department of Chemistry at University of California, Berkeley. Professor Raymond has been interested in a variety of topics in bioinorganic chemistry and coordination chemistry. In this interview, we focus on one of his specialties, the assembly of highly symmetric supramolecular clusters. We discuss not only the role of symmetry in the Figure #1. Dr. Kenneth formation of such molecular Raymond, Chancellor’s Professor of Chemistry structures but also the application of these clusters in catalytic chemistry. Berkeley Scientific Journal: How did you get involved in research in chemistry? Kenneth Raymond: I liked chemistry since I was 12 years old. I was 12 years old when I got my first chemistry set. My mother thought I was too young when I wanted it two years earlier. In those days, real chemicals came in those chemistry sets! In high school, I had a really good chemistry teacher who also taught physics. He let me have free run of the lab for making standard solutions. Aside from almost killing myself a couple of times, that was a really good experience! Also, it got me into Reed College, which turned my life around. In my first two years of high school, I had a math teacher that was sort of egg shaped and wore these purple dresses. She would be up next to the chalkboard and would get this perfect white ring around her. And she looked just like an Easter egg. She thought I was rude and I’m sure that’s true. She gave me bad grades for behavior but all of the people I was tutoring in the class were getting A’s. So, by my reckoning at the time, I thought I was winning this battle. In my junior year, I decided I didn’t want to be a juvenile delinquent; I wanted to be an intellectual. And that turned out to be more productive. BSJ: And was it at Reed that you began focusing on chemistry? KR: I started doing undergraduate research at Reed after my freshman year. And Reed had this undergraduate thesis. It’s up there on the shelf but I won’t show it to you, it’s too embarrassing. An undergraduate research thesis was great preparation for the PhD. The PhD was almost easy by comparison. My best friend at Northwestern Graduate School and I were probably the two best-prepared students. He was from Harvard; I was from Reed. So I was in a hurry; I went straight from graduate school to my job here. I have never applied for a job in my life! BSJ: Really? KR: It was a different world. My PhD supervisor was a very well known inorganic chemist at Northwestern. He pulled me into his office at the end of my second year and said, “Well Ken, things are going fast for you this year. What do you want to do in the future? Not industry right?” I said, “I don’t think so.” “Not the national labs?” “No.” “So you want to be an academic?” “Yeah, what do I do?” “Don’t worry I’ll take care of it.” Next thing you know, I get a phone call from Caltech, Berkeley, and Riverside. So I went off to give talks. Harry Gray, who just turned 80, introduced me at my interview at Caltech and I was so nervous—I had just turned 25. I got up and said, “It is very nice to be here at MIT.” True story! He thought it was a joke and everybody laughed. Things got easier after that and I got the job of my dreams and I kept it. Very dull job history; I’ve been here my whole career! Figure #2. The molecular structure of ferritin 35 • B erkeley S cientific J ournal • S ymmetry • F all 2015 • V olume 20 • I ssue 1

Efforts begin to sprout: publications in JCSM on cachexia, sarcopenia and muscle wasting receive attention.

Efforts begin to sprout: publications in JCSM on cachexia, sarcopenia and muscle wasting receive attention.

Mitchell Receives 2013 Ronald Greeley Early Career Award in Planetary Science: Response

I am honored to receive this award in memory of Ron Greeley. Although I did not have the opportunity to know him, I had the pleasure of getting to know his wife, Cynthia, at a luncheon prior to the special awards session at the AGU Fall Meeting. Cynthia is an intelligent and elegant southern woman with a confident gaze. She spoke fondly of Ron and of her sincere respect for his work ethic and dedication to planetary science. What most impressed me, though, was the respect Ron showed to her and the kids by always “giving them the evenings”; no matter how busy things got, Ron always kept his evenings open for Cynthia. This clearly meant the world to her. As a family man, I can only hope that my wife and kids will speak so kindly of me many years from now. I would like to dedicate this award to them in gratitude for their seemingly unconditional love and support.

Back From the Brink

Back From the Brink

Introduction: New Zealand/Aotearoa 2011 - Politics, Disaster, Spectacle

Things got really bad in New Zealand this year.

Settler Societies, Open Societies, and Colonialism

Settler Societies, Open Societies, and Colonialism Matthew L. Basso (bio) David Hackett Fischer. Fairness and Freedom: A History of Two Open Societies, New Zealand and the United States. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012. 656 pp. Appendix, notes, maps, illustrations, and index. $34.95. During the presidency of George W. Bush, it was commonplace for politically progressive Americans to claim that, if things got bad enough in the United States, they were going to move to New Zealand. Although usually unmentioned, New Zealand’s attractiveness to would-be expats stemmed first and foremost from linguistic and cultural similarities rooted in both countries’ British colonial pasts. It was, however, the perceived differences between the two that were crucial to the public face of this comparison. New Zealand did not fancy itself an imperial power. Its race relations were considered superior, as were its attitudes toward the environment. It had a low crime rate and tight regulation of guns. Conservative religious values did not overly influence its centrist, if not left-leaning politics, which were manifested by a national health system. Although much of this is true of Canada too, New Zealand, in addition, has that well-publicized Lord of the Rings landscape. If New Zealand occupying this particular place in the imagination of some Americans is relatively new, the interest in comparing the two nations is much older. For well over a hundred years pundits and intellectuals have been writing about the relative merits of the two countries; but none has considered the question to the extent that David Hackett Fischer does in his latest book, Fairness and Freedom: A History of Two Open Societies. Over more than 600 pages, Fischer shows that, far from just interesting cocktail talk, putting the two countries side-by-side reveals facets of their history that often lay in the shadows. For Fischer there is a second payoff to the comparison: it also sheds light on the operation and possible trajectories of open societies, the social and political system first described by Henri Bergson and elaborated on by Karl Popper, which increasingly defines nations around the globe. Fischer’s basic argument is that “fairness” is the overriding characteristic of New Zealand, “freedom” that of the United States, and that the reason two seemingly similar open societies have followed these different guiding [End Page 36] principles can be found in their histories. Fairness and Freedom elaborates extensively on these points, and in so doing provides a wide-ranging history of both nations. It is the sort of deeply researched, highly erudite, and eminently readable work of scholarship that we have come to expect of Fischer. However, because it raises but fails to adequately address important questions about the intertwined and multivalent aspects of fairness and freedom, the complex character and history of both countries and the transnational Pacific connections that link them, and the place of colonialism in these two open societies, it is ultimately a frustrating book. Fairness and Freedom consists of an introduction, conclusion, and thirteen chapters broken up into three sections—“Origins of Open Societies,” “Nation Building as Open Processes,” and “Open Societies in World Affairs.” In a helpful introduction, Fischer examines the language of fairness across English-speaking countries, one of the numerous places where this book offers unexpected rewards. (He does not provide an equally nuanced treatment of “freedom,” perhaps because he published a book on the concepts of freedom and liberty in U.S. history not long ago.) A variety of evidence, including the remarkable number of terms New Zealanders use to delineate types of fairness and unfairness, like “fair dinkum” and, intriguingly, “yankee grab,” suggest the importance of the concept (p. 14). However, although they share an affinity for fairness, Fischer notes that what it means to put it into practice is and has been a point of contention. Some New Zealanders put “fairness to the individual first” (p. 8), while others had a collectivist ideal. New Zealand feminists argued that fairness had to apply to employment, whereas business leaders held “a true concern about equity must emphasise individual freedom and opportunity” (p. 9). Māori, New Zealand’s indigenous peoples, critiqued the application of the idea of fairness...

From little things: How it all started

When Stephen Lock retired from editing the British Medical Journal in 1991 after a quarter of a century with the journal, I was just in my third year of editing Emergency Medicine Australasia (or Emergency Medicine as it was then). I remember thinking how long that period of Lock’s journal editing was, and realising how diametrically opposed were the requirements of being an emergency physician (rapid decision-making, short concentrated attention span, time periods measured in minutes to hours) and those of a journal editor (strategic long-range planning, judgements considered over months to years and time periods measured in years to decades). I was an unabashed fan of Stephen’s and of his successor Richard Smith, and the wonderful, eclectic, human medical journal they put together over all those years. Balancing journalism and science became their journal’s hallmark, presenting a human and sometimes humorous face to medicine, ensuring that art, music, history and personal reflection were given equal stand

Prometheus bound, but myriad loose ends

Prometheus bound, but myriad loose ends

Habla Con Ellos—Talk to Them: Latinas/Os, Achievement, and the Middle Grades

Moving bilingual children beyond subordinated categories toward full engagement in relevant and authentic learning that embraces their communities.Our faculty in the Education Department at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte often spends time discussing issues we see within our middle grades program, including with our undergraduate teacher candidates in clinical and student teaching settings, with practicing teachers in initial licensure programs, and those learning their way into an M.Ed. in Middle Grades Education. It was at one such meeting that we found ourselves returning to the concern of our content area teachers not feeling knowledgeable about working with Latino newcomers. We were talking our way around the edges of the topic, hoping for solid language that would give clear voice to this issue, when Jeanneine shared this story:I'd never encountered a child who truly couldn't speak a single word of my own language. Yet there they were, two gorgeous Latina girls sitting quietly in the very back of the room, hands folded, staring at the tree outside the window, surely bored half to death, understanding absolutely nothing. The teacher wasn't helping much either because, just like me, she didn't know what to do or even where to begin. She didn't speak their language, and they didn't speak hers. Much to my dismay she made a beeline straight for me after class, and I was pretty sure it wasn't to discuss the student teacher I'd come to observe next block. Instead, just as I feared, it was to eagerly ask for my advice on how to work with those two girls. My conversation on the topic was short, with that five minutes pretty much covering everything I knew. That day lefta real mark on me. That image, though 20 years old, is still so vivid in my head that I can recall the yellow shirt one of the girls was wearing. Like I said, it lefta mark on me because it forced me to confront something that was a dangerous void in my teacher life, and I realized I'd better figure it out fast. I'm worried that our program still isn't where it should be in this area, and especially given our growing Charlotte Latina population.Jeanneine later shared that things got better for the two Latina girls with the arrival that semester of an English as a second language educator. This teacher helped them on their way to learning a new culture, navigating a new school, and, even more important, becoming a part of the school community through both curricular and extracurricular activities. In time, the language became easier for them, too, opening not only academic doors but social windows, which are critically important to young adolescents (Strahan, L'Esperance, & Van Hoose, 2009; Stevenson, 1998).Twenty years later, thousands of young adolescents now come into our middle grades classrooms from a rich array of countries, some with a strong working knowledge of English, some with emerging proficiency in their new language, and some with nothing at all in terms of mainstream communication skills-many, like those two young girls, are of Latino heritage.Culture plays a critical role in the most effective middle schools (NMSA, 2010), and we consider transnational children of immigration to be a great wealth, a rich blessing. We work tirelessly to equip today's middle grades teachers to serve this group of children better than we did 20 years ago. As teacher educators within The University of North Carolina Charlotte's large, urban college of education, we now regularly receive requests for assistance from middle and high school teachers and administrators who are interested in establishing a better school environment for their increasingly diverse adolescent populations. In central Piedmont, a large and growing number of Latino families accounts for much of that diversity.As of 2007, Latinos comprised 15% of the total U.S. population, with approximately one-third selfidentifying as Mexican in origin. …

Queer Youth Resilience: Critiquing the Discourse of Hope and Hopelessness in LGBT Suicide Representation

Queer Youth Resilience: Critiquing the Discourse of Hope and Hopelessness in LGBT Suicide Representation

Beyoğlu, Turkey

80 worldliteraturetoday.org top photo: gabriele quaglia bottom photo: vince millett outpost I n the nineteenth century, as Old Istanbul south of the Golden Horn struggled to awaken from its medieval slumber, a new European-style city sprang to life on the north shore: Pera. Foreign embassies built their palatial residences on the hills among Pera’s vineyards, competing for space with the prosperous businesses and Frankish houses of Ottoman Greeks, Armenians, and Jews. Pera, now known as Beyoğlu, became the Ottoman Empire’s window to the West, the lens through which most Turks first saw European culture. Through the difficult first half-century of the Turkish Republic and the 1950s and ’60s that Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk has rightly described as “melancholy,” Beyoğlu struggled to maintain this role. Things got worse, then much better. Symbolic of Turkey’s phenomenal economic and social progress during the 1990s was the opening of a new foreign-language bookshop in Beyoğlu on İstiklâl Caddesi (Independence Avenue), the former Grande Rue de Péra. Robinson Crusoe Kitabevi (www.rob389.com), founded in 1994 by Uğur Eruzun and Deniz Kunkut, was designed to bring foreign authors to Turkish readers in their original language. “Our customers include Turks who want to read foreign authors in the original version, foreign residents who want both books in English and a good selection of the best Turkish authors in Turkish, and visitors looking for guidebooks, histories, contemporary studies, and Turkish literature in translation,” staff member Seda Ateş explained. “The best-sellers in the shopwindow satisfy some customers and help to cover our overhead, but it is the well-selected assortment of new, standard, and classic works that gives Robinson Crusoe its literary and philosophical depth.” Ateş proudly showed me the shop’s authors’ guest book bearing the tributes and signatures of Adonis (Ali Ahmad Said Esber), Arundhati Roy, Jacques Derrida, John Freely, Godfrey Goodwin, Soraya Faroqhi, and, of course, Istanbul native Orhan Pamuk. And yes, Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, first translated into Turkish a century and a half ago, became and still is one of the most popular novels for both young and mature Turkish readers. Tom Brosnahan’s latest book is the humorous travel memoir Turkey: Bright Sun, Strong Tea (brightsunstrongtea.com). Beyoğlu, Turkey Tom Brosnahan ...

MINDFUL PRACTICE

MINDFUL PRACTICE

Are Things Getting Worse?

Today's systems might be purposefully designed, but they'll evolve and grow. The key to future dependable infrastructure and services is to align incentives (for example, for profitability, resilience, structure, and innovation) to ensure that initial systems are adaptable, then shape their growth so that services and systems develop with the right levels of resilience and redundancy.

Are Things Getting Better or Worse? It Depends!

This article references an analysis that describes the performance of a group of mortgage borrowers in 2009 using eight metrics: housing price depreciation, annual income, new revolving accounts, new mortgage accounts, cash velocity, problem debt percentage, resolution, and first lien foreclosure. Using these metrics, the study compares the borrowers’ 2009 performance with their 2011 performance. The purpose of the study was to evaluate how well the 2009 population was doing in 2011: Did they improve along key metrics or did they regress? And what might that mean? Again, conventional wisdom is off point. Although many have asserted that the property performance dictates, or at least profoundly influences, borrower default and foreclosure behavior, that just isn’t so. Events beyond property depreciation (or appreciation) are affecting borrower behavior and driving borrowers toward default. Events like ill health, reduction in income, and/or loss of job have had a profound effect on borrower default and foreclosure. These events produce a general state of distress that causes the borrower to fail to service many kinds of debt including and beyond mortgage debt. <b>TOPICS:</b>Performance measurement, fixed income and structured finance

Pets for Older People: A Matter of Value

As a professional photographer, most of my subjects have been animals. But of course, I have come to realize that with animals there are people. And I have learned how fascinating the interactions between people and their animals can be. The opportunity to present the stories of five such pairings has been most interesting. All of these persons are older women and all live in their own homes. BEATRICE PARKS Me: Bea, tell us a little bit about you. Bea: I was born in Decatur, Illinois. And I have a twin sister who is still living also. Our father died on Halloween the year before we were born, in October, and we were born in April. It left our mother with four children and a pregnancy. I was born in 1919, and he died on Halloween in 1918. The flu epidemic. My mother had a struggle, but she saw that we went to school. Me: What did she do? Bea: She did house work for people and then some of the people at the hospital where we were born knew our circumstances and they helped her with food and things like that. And then, my eldest brother when he turned 14, he quit school and started working. Me: What did he work at? Bea: He worked at the Wabash Railroad. As things got improved, then he went to night school. So he even graduated college. So he got his education and my sister and I went thru high school and graduated. Me: How much older was your brother? Bea: I think he was 8 years older than we. There were three others then before we came. After we graduated, we started working in a factory near us. Of, yes, I forgot. My mother put us in an orphanage from when we were two until we were six. And then she remarried and our father couldn't have been any nicer to us than our step father was. He was a gem. I still remember nice things about the orphanage. They treated us really nicely. So then after we graduated, we went to work in a lamp factory. We assembled lamps. Floor lamps. They taught us the wiring and everything. We got all of ¢9 an hour. We worked 54 hours a week. Then some of the fellows got the silly notion that we should go on strike, so we went on strike for six weeks. And went back to work at ¢11 an hour, plus we only worked 44 hours a week and then we had to pay $5 a month union dues. Me: How did you feel about the union dues? Bea: I wasn't in favor of it, but everybody went out and the factory closed so we couldn't go in. So then, President Roosevelt, I think, made a minimum wage at ¢25 an hour. Well, that doubled our income, you know, and 40 hours a week. Well, we still got more with that, then later on, the war started and we got ¢40 an hour. Then I got a chance to move to St. Louis and got a government job. Me: How did that come about? Bea: Well, we had an inspector that came to inspect, well when the war came along, they did ammunition. And the inspector that came to inspect it all the time said there was government work in St. Louis. I was married by then and he wouldn't work, (my husband) and we had a child. So we separated and my mother took care of my son. I came to St. Louis to work and I went home every weekend and so I just progressed along. I stayed with the government in different jobs until I was 53. Well then, I remarried (actually I remarried at 42). Then my husband got ill and the government offered early retirement if we had 25 years and were 50 years old, and I happened to have 25 years of service and I was 53, I took an early retirement and my husband lived for 4 more years and then passed away, and then I was lost. And then, lying in bed at night, I always had my biggest thoughts. And I always wanted to be a nurse. So I called the teaching hospitals. They wouldn't take me (the teaching hospitals), I didn't know how to go about it. They said by the time I graduated, I would be ready to retire and they wanted working nurses, so then, another night I got the idea that my husband had some very nice LPN's when he was sick and maybe I could be a LPN. …

Novel Extracts

Novel Extracts Peter Whitehead Nora and ... (1990)1 Nora and ... was Whitehead's first published novel. It is a Paris-set narrative that unfolds against the backdrop of the 1968 student riots. Within this violent and libidinal context, the repressed research scientist Raymond Faulkner meets the feline and impassioned ex-student Nora, who we learn is working to complete one of her father's psychoanalytic case studies. Much of the novel circulates around the textual and sexual dynamics generated by this archive project. However, Whitehead also places emphasis on the practice and ritual of protest. In particular, as is reflected in the following extracts, he often returns to and develops upon imagery initially explored in Benefit of the Doubt. From Chapter 1 It wasn't easy to reach even the Boulevard St. Michel, but finally he found a small side-street he could slip through, and was quite startled to find himself close behind a group of students hastily building a barricade. A couple of cars had been thrust together and were being covered with splintered advertising material, torn from nearby walls and a Tabac kiosk. He recognised a fragment of the life-size poster for Les Folies-Bergère. It was strange to see the pink stockings and white frilly knickers kicking up over the bonnet of a Renault Quatre, as if the luscious creature was enjoying a quick bang before things got worse. Two students nearby were frantically using scaffold poles to dig near the trees, loosening the cobblestones. Why had he not expected the confrontation to be so passionate? He was astonished he'd so successfully blocked the images from his mind, preferring the easy way out, to think the [End Page 871] French were as usual blowing something up out of all proportion. He was clearly quite immune to such images, to imagining such violent anarchy actually on the streets. Not now, here, today, Paris, 1968. Where had all this energy come from so suddenly? He reached the main Boulevard in time to see another phalanx of police advancing up the street behind riot shields, and he nervously slipped into a doorway to hide and keep out of trouble. Further down the street were rows of armoured police cars looking like tanks behind the advancing police. A wave of students stormed down the main boulevard towards them, throwing what ever they could lay their hands on. The police advanced steadily and the students were forced back, but this clearly didn't matter to them—gaining ground was irrelevant—it was the ecstasy of the thrusting and screaming and hurling that mattered and after every retreat they thrust forward again, until more students came sweeping down the street from behind as if from nowhere and Raymond couldn't believe his eyes when he saw the pitched battle between the uniformed police and the scruffy people's army of students. But he felt nauseated suddenly, when something seemed to click in his mind and he was able to stop looking, and see, to know that the blows were real blows, and the staggering students were really being brutally beaten. He looked round, deciding he must escape, and saw he was hiding near an emergency exit door of the Luxembourg Cinema. He couldn't understand why the cinema seemed to be still open. He didn't know the violence had only spilled over from the university precincts into the neighbouring streets earlier that evening. He crept round towards the foyer and was amazed to see the woman in the ticket-booth calmly looking out from behind her window, knitting. Maybe she had left her glasses at home. He wondered what she must be thinking—obviously it was a film about one of those wars that people never stopped making films about. He asked her what film was showing, to make conversation. Apart from being over eighty and clearly almost blind, she was definitely confused: "A nouvelle-vague film. La Benéfice du Doute!" When he asked for more details, she said it was a play by Wilhelm Shakerspierre about the Vietnam war. Curious to learn more about the Bard's remarkable, hitherto undocumented divinatory powers, Raymond looked for a...