Professor Guerrero's Blog

Dr Copeland - Dr. Michelle Copeland's Emerge Facelift Cream

2012-01-26T18:15:00.001-05:00

Broadway Basketeers Gourmet Chocolate Gift Tower

2012-01-26T10:58:00.000-05:00

Broadway Basketeers Gourmet Chocolate Gift Tower - Valentines Day

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2012-01-24T12:31:00.002-05:00

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It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man

2012-01-24T12:23:00.000-05:00

Let philosophers look for the substance that underlies all of creation; that is the unreduced element of matter. Let mathematicians, astronomer, biologists, and physicists construct axioms and build a cosmos and so interpret reality within their limited models. Let linguists search for the Adamic language--but let master writers be free.

The fiction and non-fiction writer must be free to explore the depths of humanity. D. H. Lawrence said, "Being a novelist, I consider myself superior to the saint, the scientist, the philosopher and the poet. The novel is the one bright book of life."

Yet, as disparate and chaotic as fine writers might seem to be, we can see that there's some method to their madness. Master writers will tell the reader what their novel is about right from the very beginning; they may not say it openly, but the hint is there for the reader to catch.

Tongue in cheek: Opening Sentence

Whether we like it or not sometimes we just have to go on reading as we ask ourselves, "Where's this going to?" If Jane Austen in her opening sentence of Pride and Prejudice uses the language of axioms and mathematics -"a truth universally acknowledged"- we have no choice but to assume that she is being not only lighthearted but also playful.

"It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife."

Right away we feel that the novel will be humorous, light, and that the main theme will be about fortune and marriage.

A Sunday sermon: An opening Sentence

Having written his masterpiece, Ana Karenina, Tolstoy proceeds to write an opening sentence that would encapsulate what the long monster of a novel will be about. This is opening sentence what he came up with:

"Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."

And unhappy families are the main attraction. I can just hear Tolstoy saying, "Anyone can write about happy families; there's nothing interesting about them. But since unhappy families are unique in their own ill-fortunes-let's be on our way, let me tell you about the Oblonsky's, the Levin's, and the Karenina's."

More than a dream-a nightmare: A masterful opening sentence

The Colombian novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez once declared that Kafka's opening of his novelette The Metamorphosis, convinced him that he could write equally --if not better-- fantastic stories.

To dare to write the following sentence opener and book opener, Kafka must have felt total intellectual freedom:

"When Gregor Samsa woke up one morning from unsettling dreams, he found himself changed in his bed into a monstrous vermin."

Lesser writers beg for the readers' indulgence and suspension of disbelief. Faced with the problem of verisimilitude most fiction writers agonize over this speed bump. Not Kafka. With one stroke of the pen he dunks his readers into the depths of a hellish nightmare.

A flash-forward and a flashback:A Violent Sentence Opening

Years of solitude, firing squads, colonels, the Buendias, ice, fathers, and distant afternoons is what Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude is about.

"Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice."

Master writers distinguish between sentence openers, sentence openings, and first sentences. To ignore these basic concepts can only work to the detriment of the writer's creation.

Corporations are People Says Mitt Romney - What is the Definition of Corporation?

2012-01-23T16:38:00.000-05:00

What is the Definition of ‘Corporation’?
A corporation is a business organized as a legal entity separate and distinct from its owners under state corporation law.

How Did Justice John Marshall Define ‘Corporation’?
In 1819 Chief Justice John Marshall defined a corporation as “an artificial being, invisible, intangible, and existing only in contemplation of law.

Are Corporations People?
Corporations are owned by people (shareholders or stockholders) who purchase the stock, but the corporation itself isn't a human being, or human beings, or people. People fall in love, they beget children, they can read and write--corporations don't have these attributes and many others that make people people.

Whenever you feel like critizicing anyone," he told me, "just remember: Nick Carraway

2012-01-22T20:36:00.000-05:00

As Nick Carraway opens his narration of Gatsby, he tells us about his father's advice:

"Whenever you feel like criticizing anyone," he told me, "just remember that all the people in this world haven't had the advantages that you've had."

With the Republican primaries in full explosion --South Carolina, just after Iowa and New Hampshire, and moving on to Florida -- I feel sorry for Mitt Romney.

Why? must one feel sorry for a wealthy man? It's not a case of envy --as he defines criticism of his wealth-- but a case of character. In overcoming the Freudian shadow of his father, he has been relentless in his criticism of others, but especially Newt Ginrich and President Obama.

F. Scott Fitzgerald was a fine novelist who had a deep insight into the flaws of the wealthy. And he was correct in writing:

"Whenever you feel like criticizing anyone," he told me, "just remember that all the people in this world haven't had the advantages that you've had."

If you don't know where you are going, any road will get you there - Lewis Carroll

2012-01-21T23:30:00.000-05:00

In one of my courses, last semester, I had a mature student who was the leader of the class. Not only did he study, got high grades in his exams, participated in class, but he also showed dedication and patience.

As I gained his trust, one day he intimated that he had resolved “this time” to stay the course and get his associate degree. “For the past 20 years I’ve been in and out of college—totally unfocused.”

This is what happens to many people: they have no plan. As the saying goes: People do not plan to fail; they fail to plan.” And at the least distraction they stray from their path to success.

Lewis Carroll –through the Cheshire cat—said in Alice in Wonderland:

“If you don't know where you are going, any road will get you there.”

How true that is!

To succeed in life one must have a blueprint of the life we want to build. Just like engineers and architects we must have plans and blueprints to follow; these must be on paper. In other words, we must sign a contract with ourselves.

Private Equity Secrets Revealed - A Great Book

2012-01-21T22:20:00.001-05:00

Description:I worked in a small team, as most private equiteers do, investing many millions of dollars into seemingly successful businesses. We worked directly for our investors; not only as advisers or consultants, but as genuine investment partners. That meant we had carte blanche to buy any business we saw fit, as long as it adhered to our loose investment mandate and as long as the owner was willing to sell.

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* Private Equity Pros – interested in the secrets of other top PE firms
* Limited Partners – looking for the tricks used by PE general partners
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* Articulated Theories – on picking great companies in great industries
* Guidelines – on becoming the most valued Private Equiteer at your firm
* Advanced Formulas – for Valuations, Working Cap, CapEx, Covenants
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Private Equity Guide Books: Interview with Erlend Peterson, Author of “Rich by Choice"

2012-01-21T18:08:00.002-05:00

Posted on Private Equity Guide Books A Selection of Books that Can Make you a Professional in the Private Equity Field).

--------------------
Erlend Peterson is a financial planner with thirty-two years of experience managing money. He is the author of three books including “Money Changes Everything” and “The Challenge of Wealth.” “Rich by Choice” is specifically geared toward helping the middle-class become affluent.
Tyler: Welcome, Erlend. I know the topic of your book is one every reader wants to know about: “How can I make or save more money”? I understand personal experiences made you decide to become a financial planner and write these books. Would you tell us a little about why you decided to go down that career path?
Erlend: I retired at 40! Wow! Great! Beautiful wife, 6 kids, 3-1/2 acre estate with tennis court and swimming pool. Three years later, I was broke, so I decided to learn how to handle my money and invest.
Tyler: The first chapter of your book, “Rich by Choice” is titled “Rich or Poor, It’s Your Choice.” I am curious if you would agree that many people have a negative attitude toward money and feel they cannot improve their economic situations. The idea that they choose their own financial situation may seem overwhelming to them. What would you say to such people?
Erlend: Yes, it is possible to become rich. Anybody can.

a. Know that it is possible. All you need is a steady income

b. Decide to do it, you want to do it, you need to do it, and you know it can be done.

c. You start. Work out a plan and begin.

d. Follow your plan and watch your results month by month, year after year.
Tyler: Why do you think so many people find themselves with financial difficulties?
Erlend: People find themselves in financial difficulties for three reasons: (1) Personal finance, investing, and money management are not taught in our schools, not in high schools or college. That’s why I wrote my books. (2) In this country anyone can become rich, there are no restrictions, so I think a lot of people just assume that they will somehow become rich and they start spending as if they already were. (3) The banks and credit cards give credit to everybody. A lot of people take advantage of that and spend money they don’t have.
Tyler: Do you feel parents and schools need to take more responsibility toward teaching children about money? What kinds of suggestions would you have for teaching children about money?
Erlend: Yes, both parents and schools should start teaching children about money. Schools should start teaching classes about personal finance. When parents give their kids an allowance, they should start talking about money. An allowance is income. You can only spend money based on what you earn, your income. When the parents file their taxes, they should discuss that with their kids. Discuss cars and auto insurance, and that can lead to discussing other kinds of insurance: Homeowners, life, etc. Discuss their monthly bills occasionally: Water, gas, electric, cable and their charge accounts and credit cards. Take the kids into their bank and discuss the bank and what it does and what it doesn’t do.
Tyler: That’s great advice, Erlend. What do you feel sets “Rich by Choice” apart from the many other books about money out there, especially those by such well-known personalities as Suze Orman?
Erlend: Money is a number: 14 cents, $1.50, $2,000, $1,000,000.
a. My book has numbers, charts and tables, all the numbers you need to make your situation work.
b. Suze Orman has no numbers; neither do most of the other books that are available.
c. My books have true stories and practical illustrations that show how money works and how it will work for you.
Tyler: I understand your book has a seven-step plan to wealth. Would you tell us what those seven steps are?
The Seven Steps are:
1. Cash reserve
2. Insurance
3. Fixed income savings
4. Growth investments
5. Tax planning
6. Retirement planning
7. Estate planning
Tyler: In “Rich by Choice” you talk about how much insurance a person needs and which ones are essential. Would you give us a summary of your opinions on insurance?
Erlend: If you own a car in California and other states, you must have auto insurance. If you own a home, get homeowners insurance. Your home is a huge asset and it deserves protection. If you have financial dependents, parents, kids, others, you need life insurance to protect their income stream.
Tyler: Are there certain kinds of life insurance you wouldn’t recommend? Can a person have too much insurance? How much is enough?
Erlend: Not everybody needs life insurance. If no one is dependent on you for their income and financial needs, you don’t need life insurance.
In a typical family situation, the working parent or parents should have enough life insurance to provide total income for the family for two to five years if they die prematurely. This should be whole life or universal life. Plan to keep these policies for your lifetime. You pay the premium monthly or annually as long as you have the policy, or you can arrange to have the policy paid up at age 65 or some other age. These policies build cash value inside the policy as long as you make the payments, and this cash value build-up after 20 or 30 or 40 years can provide extra income for you in your retirement.
Other common types of life insurance are term life and variable universal life. Variable universal life invests some of your premium payments into various types of mutual funds, instead of the guaranteed fixed investment in the regular universal life and whole life policies. These mutual fund investments in the variable life policies can go up or down so there is considerable risk to the cash value portion of these policies. The monthly or annual premium or cost of variable life is much more than universal or whole life.
Term life insurance is issued for a specific term of years, usually 5-10 or 20 years. At the end of the term, the policy lapses, ends, or you can renew it based on your age then, at a much higher cost. Term life has no cash value build-up and is therefore much cheaper than the other policies.
Because of the great differences in these policies, it would be good to discuss your need for life insurance and get quotes from agents at three different companies.
Tyler: Thanks, Erlend. You certainly know about life insurance. How about real estate? We hear so much today about the importance of investing in it. How important do you think real estate is to gaining wealth and financial independence, and what would you say is the next best thing to do for people who are not interested in buying and selling properties?
Erlend: Real estate works, but it takes some cash and steady effort on your part. You must rent out the property, collect the rent, pay the property taxes, make repairs, etc. Real estate prices also run in cycles; the prices go up and down. They are high now. If you have the cash, the time and the skill, real estate works.
Mutual funds are much simpler:
a. Pick good funds, with 10-12% annual growth over the last 3 – 5 -10 years.
b. Make steady investments every paycheck.
c. Watch the results grow.
Tyler: What about U.S. Savings Bonds? Lots of people buy U.S. Savings Bonds regularly through their paychecks or they give them as gifts or save them to use for their children’s education. Do you feel U.S. Savings Bonds are a good investment?
Erlend: U.S. Savings Bonds are the safest investment in the world. They are backed by the full faith and credit of the U.S. Treasury. In the Seven Step process, they fit on Step 3, fixed income savings. The problem with them is they are (1) long term, 20 or 30 years, so you could lose money if you had to cash them in early, and (2) they only pay 4-5-6%. Good long-term investments should pay 8-10-12% or more. You can now buy most investments regularly through your bank or payroll.
Tyler: Which do you feel is more important, buying a home and then using your extra money to pay off the mortgage as quickly as possible, or to take that extra money and invest it?
Erlend: Let the mortgage run. It has tax benefits. Put all available income into tax qualified retirement plans: IRA, 401-K, 403-B, 457, etc. When you are investing the max in them, then make extra mortgage payments.
Tyler: What is the first thing you would suggest a person do to start the journey toward being rich?
Erlend: The first thing each person must do when they realize or decide that they want to be RICH is to stop and examine their present financial situation and think about their future situation and what they want it to be. This does not have to be done in detail down to the last dollar, but just enough to get a sense of where they are going. They need to know that it is absolutely possible to get there.
Knowing what you want to do and knowing that it is possible are the first step. Then you do it.
Tyler: Erlend, if people only learned one thing from your book, what do you hope it would be?
Erlend: That they can become rich, because anybody can, and therefore, that they will start NOW.
Tyler: Thanks so much, Erlend. I could easily think of a hundred more questions to ask you about money, but we’ll leave it up to the readers to get more information by purchasing a copy of your book “Rich by Choice.” Will you tell readers where they can get more information about your book and where to purchase it?
Erlend: And thank you, Tyler. I’ll be glad to answer your next hundred questions, ten at a time. I really want to help everybody who wants help, to become financially secure … that is, rich.
My books can be found on the Internet at:
petersonmoneybooks-money.com
petersonmoneybooks-riches.com
petersonmoneybooks-wealth.com
And at: Barnes & Noble book stores and Amazon.com
Tyler: Thank you, Erlend. I wish you and all our readers well on the road to prosperity.
http://www.readerviews.com/
Interview with Erlend Peterson
author of Rich by Choice: A Complete Guide to Your Financial Success
Seven Locks Press (2007)
ISBN 0979095034
Reviewed by Irene Watson for Reader Views (5/07)
Article Source:
http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Tyler_R._Tichelaar

If you don't know where you're going, any road - Lewis Carroll

2012-01-21T01:03:00.000-05:00

The famous citation "If you don't know where you're going, any road'll take you there" is really a paraphrase of a conversation between Alice and the Cheshire Cat in Chapter 6 of Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland:

"Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?"
"That depends a good deal on where you want to get to," said the Cat.
"I don’t much care where--" said Alice.
"Then it doesn’t matter which way you go," said the Cat.
"--so long as I get SOMEWHERE," Alice added as an explanation.
"Oh, you’re sure to do that," said the Cat, "if you only walk long enough."

If you don't know where you are going, any road will get you there - Lewis Carroll

2012-01-20T00:18:00.000-05:00

Lewis Carroll (1832 – 1898), English Logician, Mathematician, Photographer and Novelist, is especially remembered for Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. His writings and ideas have been an enormous influence in many fields of the arts and sciences, all over the world.

Carroll’s particular mix of creativity, puns, fantasy, word play, satire, Dadaist nonsense, and weird wit have gained him a place in popular culture. His most memorable characters are: Alice herself, the March Hare, the wise Dodo, a mad Hatter, the hookah smoking Blue Caterpillar, and the Cheshire Cat.

This famous cat is the source of such oft-quoted witticisms, puns and peculiar phrases. Take for instance:

“If you don't know where you are going, any road will get you there.”

Although many of Carroll’s witticisms may appear nonsensical —on the surface— if we dig a little deeper we can find some serious hidden pearls.

Here are some other famous sayings:

“Everything’s got a moral, if only you can find it”, “We called him Tortoise because he taught us”, “No good fish goes anywhere without a porpoise”, “She generally gave herself very good advice, (though she very seldom followed it)”, “I can't explain myself, I’m afraid, because I’m not myself, you see”, “The rule is, jam tomorrow and jam yesterday—but never jam today”, “Sentence first, verdict afterwards”, and “Curiouser and curiouser!”

My choices in life were either to be a piano player : Harry Truman

2012-01-19T23:23:00.000-05:00

Harry Truman was a different kind of President. He probably made as many, or more important decisions regarding our nation's history as any of the other 42 Presidents preceding him. However, a measure of his greatness may rest on what he did after he left the White House.

The only asset he had when he died was the house he lived in, which was in Independence Missouri . His wife had inherited the house from her mother and father and other than their years in the White House, they lived their entire lives there.

When he retired from office in 1952 his income was a U.S. Army pension reported to have been $13,507.72 a year. Congress, noting that he was paying for his stamps and personally licking them, granted him an 'allowance' and, later, a retroactive pension of $25,000 per year.

After President Eisenhower was inaugurated, Harry and Bess drove home to Missouri by themselves. There was no Secret Service following them.

When offered corporate positions at large salaries, he declined, stating, "You don't want me. You want the office of the President, and that doesn't belong to me. It belongs to the American people and it's not for sale."

Even later, on May 6, 1971, when Congress was preparing to award him the Medal of Honor on his 87th birthday, he refused to accept it, writing, "I don't consider that I have done anything which should be the reason for any award, Congressional or otherwise."

As president he paid for all of his own travel expenses and food.

Modern politicians have found a new level of success in cashing in on the Presidency, resulting in untold wealth. Today, many in Congress also have found a way to become quite wealthy while enjoying the fruits of their offices. Political offices are now for sale (cf. Illinois ).

Good old Harry Truman was correct when he observed, "My choices in life were either to be a piano player in a whore house or a politician. And to tell the truth, there's hardly any difference."

Top and Best-Rated Microwave Ovens

2012-01-13T13:32:00.002-05:00

I can do without my LED TV, without my cell phone, without my electric blanket, and even my computer—but I can never do without my microwave oven. This is unthinkable!

But what can you your do if your microwave is on the blink? Mine started to become as loud as an approaching subway. The turntable was kaput. Occasionally I could hear the fan belts squeak, and worst of all: cooking and heating time was taking longer.
I read somewhere that if your microwave oven takes longer than 2 minutes to boil a mug of water, then it is time to do something about it.

Will you go through the yellow pages and find someone to check if it can be fixed? It could be just a fuse blown out after all. But on second thought, you had the machine for the past 10 years. Shouldn’t we move the economy and purchase a new one? Ten years seems like a good return on investment.

In my case, I decided to replace it. The repairman shop across the street told me that just to open it and diagnose the illness would cost me $80. And if parts were needed that would bring me over $100, and maybe even $200.

With a little research in the Web I could tell that most new microwave ovens’ prices hover around $200. But the problem was to determine right away, what design, color, and style would appeal to my taste. The varieties are overwhelming.

Since I am a person of little technical knowledge I decided to consult the Consumer Report and other publications. Aha! What a bright idea. Lo and behold, these publications rank the little workhorses; that made it easy for me to make my mind as to what was suitable to my needs.

These little nuke ovens make use of powerful electromagnetic waves which helps heat food quickly. This is my main use, though I’ve been known to whip up a few meals in no time at all.

The top-rated large countertop model is the Whirlpool MT41555 PB. Further research told me that it wasn’t even over $200! Next came the GE Profile JES 2251 SJ [xx]. In third place I found the Whirlpool Gold GT41755PB. Now if you really want to go to town, and your needs demand an Over-the-range model, then by all means try a Samsung or a Kenmore—they go for about $500.

See details on the top 10-rated.

I can’t reveal my choice because this is a matter of personal taste. But I believe that any of the microwave ovens that are listed in the top ten can perform well. So go ahead and think about replacing the tired horse.

"Language is The House of Being." What It Means

2012-01-07T20:34:00.000-05:00

"Language is the house of Being. In its home man dwells. Those who think and those who create with words are the guardians of this home." —Martin Heidegger, German philosopher, Letter on Humanism, 1947

The philosopher Jose Ortega y Gasset once said that man had no nature, only history. While I respect this opinion, I think that man's real human nature is language. Just as the lesser god Prometheus handed fire to man, a major God handed a major boon to mankind: language.

After years of pondering whatever Martin Heidegger meant by "Language is the House of Being," it finally dawned on me (as I watched the news on TV) that Heidegger meant language is not only a construct, a shelter, an edifice, an abode, but the soul of humanity.

Through language we search heaven and earth; through language we accept or reject God; through language we accept or reject the absolutes that guide the human race.

And yes, it is only through language that we experience aesthetic bliss--and love.
Although bliss and love are more akin to the emotional life, the viscera, the central nervous system, the body can only partially express bliss and love. Language is indispensable, or if not, then try to tell that to painters, poets, and writers.
Take Trollope (in Pendennis):"It is best to love wisely, no doubt; but to love foolishly is better than not to be able to love at all." And Trollope went on to fill library shelves with language and love.

We think and we feel by using words. Though words are more adept and adequate to thinking than to feeling, we still recognize that even our deepest emotions must be converted into words to express what we feel. When we immerse ourselves in a good book we feel with and for the characters: with Don Quijote and Sancho we experience the real meaning of friendship; with Anna Karenina and Aschenbach we feel the exquisite pangs of deeply tormented souls; with Remedios The Beauty we ascend to heaven.

Can we build science without language? Isn't language the vessel of patterns, axioms, equations, paradigms, and formulas? Is wisdom achievable without language?

Even the most recalcitrant nihilist or atheist needs language to refute the existence of God; the same God that gave him the gift of language.

When humans master a language, they are never homeless. Even when their houses burn--as we watched the flames destroy thousands of houses in San Diego, California--their spirit, their humanity survives in the House of Being.

Augustine, City of God
Austen J, Pride and Prejudice
Austen J, "Marriage Proposals and Me"
Austen J, Emma
Borges, The Aleph
C. Bronte, Jane Eyre
Burroughs E,Tarzan
Cervantes, Don Quijote
Chaucer, Wife of Bath
Coelho P,The Alchemist
Coyle H, They Are Soldiers
Dante, New Life
Dickens C, David Copperfield
Dostoevsky, Crime&Punishment
ConanDoyle,Hound of Baskervilles
Dubner S, Superfreakonomics

DuMaurier D, Rebecca
Ellis B. E. American Psycho
Fitzgerald S, Great Gatsby
Flaubert G, Madame Bovary
Fleming I,Doctor No
Freud S, Leonardo Da Vinci
Friedan B, Feminine Mystique
GarciaMarquez, Of Love & OtherDemons
GarciaMarquez,OneHundredYrs
Guerrero M,ThePoison Pill

Grass G, The Tin Drum
Harris T, Hannibal Rising
Heidegger M,House of Being
Ishiguro K, Remains of The Day
Johnson S,Rasselas
Kafka,Metamorphosis
Kosinski J, The Painted Bird
Lee H,To Kill a Mockingbird
McBain Ed,Gutter and Grave
Murakami H,Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
Nabokov V, Lolita
Meyer, S, Twilight
Ortega,Dehumanization of Art
Poe E A, Gordon Pym
Prose F, Reading Like a Writer
Rushdie S,Midnight Children
Sabatini R, Scaramouche
Spark M, Prime of Miss Brodie

Stendhal, Red and Black
Sterne L,Tristram Shandy
Stevenson R, Dr.Jekyll & Mr.Hyde
Stoker B, Dracula
Thackeray W,History of Pendennis
Tolstoy L, Anna Karenina
Trollope A, Autobiography
Unamuno M, Tragic Sense of Life
Voltaire, Candide
Webb J, Fields of Fire
Wharton E, The House of Mirth
Woolf V, To The Lighhouse

The secrets of 'no-doze' prose:
Mary Duffy's Sentence Openers

Image via Wikipedia

Lindsey Vonn

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Book Review of The Book Of Five Rings by Miyamoto Musahi

2012-01-07T11:09:00.000-05:00

The Book Of Five Rings by Miyamoto Musahi, written in 1645, is about the "Way of Strategy,"which is using certain techniques to take down the enemy.

Because of when the book was written,you have to be aware of the imagery and language used - enemy, weapon, combat, sword, cutting and so on. Once you get beyond that, and use those words as metaphors, a lot can be gleaned from the book.

To adapt the book to our time, an enemy could be a metaphor for competitor.

The Book Of Five Rings emphasizes the importance of practicing and mastering your art - becoming adept at what you do. Your strategy should either be decisive or fluid. You have a fluid strategy when you have obstacles in your way. Musahi outlines Principles of the Way of Strategy. Though the principles are over three and a half centuries old, they are still applicable.

Do not think dishonestly, The Way is in training, Become acquainted with every art, Know the Ways of all professions, Distinguish between gain and loss in worldly matters, Develop intuitive judgment and understanding for everything, Perceive those things which cannot be seen, Pay attention even to trifles, Do nothing which is of no use.

From the book, I found the following to be insightful nuggets: Lay your plans with true measure and then perform the work according to plan, thus you pass through life. The strategist makes small things into big things. The principle of strategy is having one thing, to know ten thousand things. Everything is difficult at first. If you do not look at things on a large scale it will be difficult for you to master strategy. Do what you have to do, even if it means doing it alone.Discern your competitor's capability and know your strong points.Do not show your hand. Do not let everybody know what you're doing. If your strategy doesn't work change it. When you're in a deadlock change your technique.Abandon efforts that do not work, think of your situation in a fresh spirit. Whenever we have become preoccupied with small details, we must suddenly change into a large spirit, interchanging large with small

Five Great Ideas: You must train day and night to make quick decisions. In strategy it is necessary to treat training as a part of normal life with your spirit unchanging. There is timing in everything. Timing in Strategy cannot be mastered without a great deal of practice. In strategy, it is important to see distant things as if they were close and to take a distanced view of close things. The Way to Understanding is through experience.

People in this world look at things mistakenly, and think that what they do not understand must be the void. This not true void. It is bewilderment. When your spirit is not in the least clouded, when the clouds of bewilderment clear way, there is the true void (By knowing things that exist, you can know that which does not exist; that is the void).

If you can get past some of the disturbing imagery you could gain a lot from The Book Of Five Rings. This is a book where you can take its concepts and apply them to your work and life. I recommend The Book of Five Rings. Avil Beckford, Chief Invisible Mentor, writer and researcher with over 15 years of experience is the published author of Tales of People Who Get It and its companion workbook Journey to Getting It. Subscribe to the Invisible Mentor Blog http://theinvisiblementor.com for great information to ignite your hidden genius, and explore the Resources page for free whitepapers and an e-book.

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Borges Stories: The House of Asterion (La Casa de Asterion) Spanish and English

2012-01-01T06:59:00.000-05:00

Jorge Luis Borges (1899 – 1986)

The House of Asterion (translated from the Spanish by Marciano Guerrero)

And the queen gave birth to a son named Asterion.
Apollodorus, Library, III, I

I know they accuse me of arrogance, perhaps also of misanthropy, and perhaps of insanity, too. Such accusations (which I shall punish in due course) are laughable. It is true that I do not leave my house, but it is also true that its doors (which are infinite* in number) are open day and night to both men and animals. Let him enter if he so wishes. He will not find womanish extravagance here, nor bizarre courtly ritual, but only quiet and solitude. Likewise, he will find a house like no other on the face of the Earth. (Those who declare that in Egypt exists a similar one—lie). Even my detractors admit that there is not a single piece of furniture in the house. Another ridiculous lie is that I, Asterion, am a prisoner. Need I repeat that there isn’t a single door closed, and should I add that there isn’t a single lock either? To all this, I did at some dusk step out onto the street; if I returned home before nightfall, I did so because of the fear that the faces of the rabble, faces discolored and as flat as an open hand, had induced in me. The sun had already set, but the helpless cry of a babe and the coarse supplications of the common herd signaled that I had been recognized. The people prayed, fled and fell prostrate; some climbed up to the stylobate of the temple of Axes, others gathered stones. Someone, I believe, hid himself under the sea. Not in vain was my mother a queen; I cannot mix with the populace, though my modesty wishes it.

The fact is that I am unique. What a man can transmit to others does not interest me; like the philosopher, I think nothing is communicable by the art of writing. Annoying and trivial minutiae have no place in my spirit, a spirit formed for greatness. Never have I discerned the difference between one letter and another. A certain generous impatience has not consented that I should learn to read. Sometimes I deplore this, for the nights and days are long.

Naturally, I do not lack for amusement. Like a charging ram, I run through the stone galleries until dizzily I tumble to the ground. Sometimes I crouch in the shadows of a cistern or at the corner of a corridor and pretend that I am being hunted. There are rooftops from which I can hurl myself until I am bloody. At any time I can play at being asleep, my eyes shut, my breathing heavy. (Sometimes I really do sleep, sometimes the color of the day has changed by the time I open my eyes). But of all the games I play, the one I prefer is pretending there is another Asterion. I pretend that he has come to visit me and I show him around the house. With great reverence I tell him: Now we return to the previous intersection, or Now we come unto another courtyard, or I knew you would like this drain, or Now you will see a cistern that has filled with sand, or Now you will see how the cellar forks. Sometimes I err and we both laugh heartily.

Not only have I imagined those games, but I have also meditated about the house. Each part of the house repeats many times, any particular place is another place. There is not one cistern, one courtyard, one drinking fountain, or one manger; there are fourteen [an infinitude of] mangers, drinking fountains, courtyards, and cisterns. The house is the size of the world; or rather, it is the world. Nevertheless, by dint of exhausting all the courtyards with their cisterns and the dusty galleries of grey stone, I have reached the street and I have seen the temple of Axes and the sea. This I did not understand until a night vision revealed to me that there are also fourteen [an infinitude of] seas and temples. Everything exists many times over, fourteen times, but there are two things in the world that seem to exist only once; above, the intricate Sun; below, Asterion. Perhaps I have created the stars and the Sun and the enormous house, but I no longer remember it.

Every nine years nine men enter the house so that I may deliver them from all evil. I hear their footsteps or their voices in the depths of the stone galleries and I run with joy in search of them. The ceremony lasts but a few minutes. One after another, they fall to the ground without even bloodying my hands. Where they fall, they remain, and the cadavers help to distinguish one gallery from another. I ignore who they are, but I do know that one of them prophesied, at the moment of his death, that someday my redeemer would come. Since then, the solitude does not pain me because I know that my redeemer lives, and in the end he will rise above the dust. If I could hear all the rumblings of the world, I would perceive the sound of his footsteps. Let’s hope he takes me to a place with fewer galleries and fewer doors.

What will my redeemer be like? I wonder. Will he be a bull or a man? Will he be perhaps a bull with the face of a man? Or will he be like me?

The morning Sun glittered on the bronze sword. No trace of blood remained.

“Would you believe it, Ariadne?” said Theseus. “The minotaur hardly put up a fight.”

—

* The original says fourteen, but there is ample reason to infer that in Asterion’s utterance, this adjectival numeral is no different to infinite.

La Casa de Asterión por Jorge Luis Borges

Y la reina dio a luz un hijo que se llamó Asterión.
Apolodoro, Biblioteca, III, I

Sé que me acusan de soberbia, y tal vez de misantropía, y tal vez de locura. Tales acusaciones (que yo castigaré a su debido tiempo) son irrisorias. Es verdad que no salgo de mi casa, pero también es verdad que sus puertas (cuyo número es infinito*) están abiertas día y noche a los hombres y también a los animales. Que entre el que quiera. No hallará pompas mujeriles aquí ni el bizarro aparato de los palacios, pero sí la quietud y la soledad. Asimismo hallará una casa como no hay otra en la faz de la tierra. (Mienten los que declaran que en Egipto hay una parecida.) Hasta mis detractores admiten que no hay un solo mueble en la casa. Otra especie ridícula es que yo, Asterión, soy un prisionero. ¿Repetiré que no hay una puerta cerrada, añadiré que ho hay una cerradura? Por lo demás, algún atardecer he pisado la calle; si antes de la noche volví, lo hice por el temor que me infundieron las caras de la plebe, caras descoloridas y aplanadas, como la mano abierta. Ya se había puesto el sol, pero el desvalido llanto de un niño y las toscas plegarias de la grey dijeron que me habían reconocido. La gente oraba, huía, se prosternaba; unos se encaramaban al estilóbato del templo de las Hachas, otros juntaban piedras. Alguno, creo, se ocultó bajo el mar. No en vano fue una reina mi madra; no puedo confundirme con el vulgo, aunque mi modestia lo quiera.

El hecho es que soy único. No me interesa lo que un hombre pueda trasmitir a otros hombres; como el filósofo, pienso que nada es comunicable por el arte de la escritura. Las enojosas y triviales minucias no tienen cabida en mi espíritu, que está capacitado para lo grande; jamás he retenido la diferencia entre una letra y otra. Cierta impaciencia generosa no ha consentido que yo aprendiera a leer. A veces lo deploro, porque las noches y los días son largos.

Claro que no me faltan distracciones. Semejante al carnero que va a embestir, corro por las galerías de piedra hasta rodar al suelo, mareado. Me agazapo a la sombra de un aljibe o a la vuelta de un corredor y juego a que me buscan. Hay azoteas desde las que me dejo caer, hasta ensangrentarme. A cualquier hora puedo jugar a estar dormido, con los ojos cerrados y la respiración poderosa. (A veces me duermo realmente, a veces ha cambiado el color del día cuando he abierto los ojos.) Pero de tantos juegos el que prefiero es el de otro Asterión. Finjo que viene a visitarme y que yo le muestro la casa. Con grandes reverencias le digo: Ahora volvemos a la encrucijada anterior o Ahora desembocamos en otro patio o Bien decía yo que te gustaría la canaleta o Ahora verás una cisterna que se llenó de arena o Ya verás cómo el sótano se bifurca. A veces me equivoco y nos reímos buenamente los dos.

No sólo he imaginado eso juegos, también he meditado sobre la casa. Todas las partes de la casa están muchas veces, cualquier lugar es otro lugar. No hay un aljibe, un patio, un abrevadero, un pesebre; son catorce [son infinitos] los pesebres, abrevaderos, patios, aljibes. La casa es del tamaño del mundo; mejor dicho, es el mundo. Sin embargo, a fuerza de fatigar patios con un aljibe y polvorientas galerías de piedra gris, he alcanzado la calle y he visto el templo de las Hachas y el mar. Eso no lo entendí hasta que una visión de la noche me reveló que también son catorce [son infinitos] los mares y los templos. Todo está muchas veces, catorce veces, pero dos cosas hay en el mundo que parecen estar una sola vez: arriba, el intrincado sol; abajo, Asterión. Quizá yo he creado las estrellas y el sol y la enorme casa, pero ya no me acuerdo.

Cada nueve años entran en la casa nueve hombres para que yo los libere de todo mal. Oigo sus pasos o su voz en el fondo de las galerías de piedra y corro alegremente a buscarlos. La ceremonia dura pocos minutos. Uno tras otro caen sin que yo me ensangriente las manos. Donde cayeron, quedan, y los cadáveres ayudan a distinguir una galería de las otras. Ignoro quiénes son, pero sé que uno de ellos profetizó, en la hora de su muerte, que alguna vez llegaría mi redentor. Desde entonces no me duele la soledad, porque sé que vive mi redeentor y al fin se levantará sobre el polvo. Si mi oído alcanzara los rumores del mundo, yo percibiría sus pasos. Ojalá me lleve a un lugar con menos galerías y menos puertas. ¿Cómo será mi redentor?, me pregunto. ¿Será un toro o un hombre? ¿Será tal vez un toro con cara de hombre? ¿O será como yo?

El sol de la mañana reverberó en la espada de bronce. Ya no quedaba ni un vestigio de sangre.

- ¿Lo creerás, Ariadna? – dijo Teseo. – El minotauro apenas se defendió.

—

* El original dice catorce, pero sobran motives para inferir que en boca de Asterión, ese adjetivo numeral vale por infinitos.

Happy New Year!

2011-12-30T13:25:00.000-05:00

To all my students and friends: 2012 will be a great year not because we simply wish it to be so, but because we WILL it to be so. Remember what Adam Smith said: only 3 roads can build your fortune: 1. Sell your skills 2. Sell a product, or 3. Sell both. You choose and the sky is the limit. Happy 2012!

Learn to Speak English Well

2011-12-24T07:39:00.003-05:00

Many students spend a lot of time and money on schools and programs that do not work. It’s so common and it’s sad.

Because of technology things are now different. If you have a computer or an MP3 player, you can learn to speak English well in a very short time. Even 15 minutes every day will improve our speaking faster than you can imagine.

It is all about listening to real native English dialogues and conversation. Each dialogue is about a real life situation and discusses a lot of slang, idioms, and other cool vocabulary native speakers use all the time. It is the kind of stuff you don’t learn in school. It will help you understand English movies and speak with and understand native speakers. Our teaching style is really fun and we promise you won't get bored. We'll teach you how to remember everything you learn and how to not forget things.

The program has 100 MP3 English lessons that you can download and listen to on your Ipod or computer. Each lesson has a PDF of the dialogue and an explanation of the important words and phrases.

Each lesson is around 10 to 15 minutes.

Emails from from over 5000 students from more than 70 different countries thank us for this program.
Click Here and Get a FREE e-book!

Writing Stragegies: What is a Clerihew?

2011-12-21T12:22:00.000-05:00

My own clerihew:

Economist Adam Smith
Taught facts not myth
To be rich here and in hell
Your skills or products sell

In the book A Jacques Barzun Reader I found
the following definition of a clerihew:

Which is of all the kinds of verse
The most informative and terse:
One line invokes a well-known named,
Three more disclose, for praise or blame,
In words that make one want to quote,
A single vivid anecdote.

Post your clerihew here--they are more fun
than Haikus.

The Upper East Side - Manhattan

2011-12-18T10:03:00.002-05:00

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Yesterday during my daily meanderings I ended up in East 86th (Old German town). It was a nostalgic walk.

When I was an undergrad at Columbia I used to visit 'El Corso,' on Saturday nights and have a great time there. I also used to visit the restaurant 'Lorelei,' and others. This time, I went into the huge Barnes and Noble and purchased two books: A Jacques Barzun Reader, and American Nietzsche by Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen.

Although The Corso and the Lorelei are gone, the street still maintains its vitality; I wonder if time is not an illussion?

Accounting Students at LaGuardia Community College

2011-12-08T01:53:00.000-05:00

Having completed their Accounting project as a team, Punet, Jose, Juan Carlos, Kevin, and Nico treat themselves to some burgers--and arroz con pollo!

How to Improve Writing Skills With Sentence Openers

2011-11-20T10:10:00.014-05:00

Take the following plain sentence:

Louise rushed to the bathroom where she scrubbed her hands throughly.

And compare it to the same sentence, but preceded by a ‘nominative absolute’ as opener:

Hands trembling, Louise rushed to the bathroom where she
scrubbed her hands thoroughly.

Here’s another example:

Eyes narrowed, fists clenched, lips trembling, he waited in the dark.

No Kindle, or Nook, or iPAD yet?

Then Download your copy of Sentence Openers

to your PC now for $7.95 only.

I got my copy through PAYPAL -
click the button below. Get your copy now! A.Katz.

Review of East of Tiffany's by Liu Lu

2011-11-12T11:38:00.002-05:00

As a person who lives in New York City, the book East of Tiffany's has caught my attention since I first read the tittle. If you travel to the Upper East Side of Manhattan, you will find many fashionable people crossing the streets. Even though I have just read a few chapters of this book, I would like to recommend it to all my friends because of the interesting stories that are described in this book; it makes me think deeply about how to have a meaningful life.

The Upper East Side always attracts many successful and rich people to live there. People who want to succeed hope to learn how to find the winning path in their lives through the experience that successful people have accumulated during the process of their success. East of Tiffany's is a series of funny and warm stories about a successful banker, including his loved ones and beloved pet, and his other personal experiences of success.

There are some people who believe that people of quality treat everything with an unbending manner except themselves and their business. However, this book may change their minds by showing a totally different picture of successful people, which proves that they never stop loving and caring about their families, pets, and friends during their lives. I recommend this book to everyone who wants to learn about life, love, and work.

Ask David's Book Review of The Poison Pill by Marciano Guerrero

2011-10-28T11:34:00.000-04:00

Book: The Poison Pill: A Business Gothic Thriller by Marciano Guerrero
Book Review: The Poison Pill: A Business Gothic Thriller by Marciano Guerrero
categories: Book, Gothic, Horror Thriller, Suspense, Veterans, Vietnam

Author: Marciano Guerrero
Publisher: iUniverse, Inc.

Well Written:

If you read Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte, Dickens, and Trollope you will realize that Guerrero's English is that good. If you are tired of Hemingway, Mailer, Updike, DeLillo, Chabon and other mediocre writers you will find "The Poison Pill" a great reading. In this humble, unassuming book you'll find rhetorical figures that make you think and lots of literary allusions. Oh, yes! Intelligent puzzles, too, a la Borges. It has been a long time since I read a book so well written. Where was Guerrero all these years?

To see the original review Click here.

Betty Friedan: The Feminine Mystique and Hillary Clinton

2011-10-25T14:30:00.000-04:00

Once in a life comes along a book that changes one's life.

Suddenly the words you read touch a nerve or click inside your mind, making you view reality in a new way.

The Feminine Mystique had the power not only to change people's way of thinking but also helped change their attitudes, and ultimately their behavior.

It certainly changed mine.

By putting her finger on that painful sore of society, Betty Friedan brought about the much needed rallying cry of the second wave of American feminism: "The problem that had no name." That cry resonated loud and clear through the nation for everyone to hear it: Equality for women!

Although equality for American women is still a few light years away from them, much has been accomplished. And though England had Margaret Thatcher, Pakistan Benazir Bhutto, and The Philippines Corazon Aquino, American society can't even begin to accept that a woman could become president.

Will American women put aside their petty hatreds and rancors to even consider that one of their own gender could become president? That remains to be seen.

When I see Hillary Clinton--on the TV debates--facing the hordes of menacing men: the hostile stares of the other male candidates, the hostile moderators (e.g., Tim Russell, who looked as if he had just eaten a baby), the camera-men, the technicians, the reporters, the beefy security men, the electricians, the burly grip-men, the carpenters, the unionized workers (all men!), my heart goes to her and I say, "That's a courageous woman."

Then I ask myself: "Where are the women? Painting their nails? Why aren't they supporting her?"

Well, there's one plausible answer: American women still wish to be treated like Daisy Buchanan (The Great Gatsby) or Lily Bart (The House of Mirth): worse than second class citizens--sexual objects. That this thing is happening in the twenty-first century boggles the mind;d that this thing is happening in America is degrading to women. What can be more telling of the plight of woman than the question a middle-age woman asked senator McCain, "How do we beat the bitch?"

Now a woman-candidate has been transformed--by a woman citizen--into a female beast!

How dare a woman run for president of the United States? She is a sub-human beast!

I can recall Chaucer's Canterbury Tales (in the early middle ages) advocating equality for women through That lovely character, the Wife of Bath.

Have we regressed?

If Hillary Clinton is elected, it will not be because women elected her; it will be because fair-minded men accepted the fact that woman live in this country, too. That the 14th Amendment applies to all Americans--not jus men. Equal representation and equal treatment shouldn't be empty words.

Noble, fair-minded men will elect the first woman president of the United States.

The writing techniques I employ in this article are all explained in Mary Duffy's writing manual:

Sentence Openers

Augustine, City of God
Austen J, Pride and Prejudice
Austen J, "Marriage Proposals and Me"
Austen J, Emma
Borges, The Aleph
C. Bronte, Jane Eyre
Burroughs E,Tarzan
Cervantes, Don Quijote
Chaucer, Wife of Bath
Coelho P,The Alchemist
Coyle H, They Are Soldiers
Dante, New Life
Dickens C, David Copperfield
Dostoevsky, Crime&Punishment
ConanDoyle,Hound of Baskervilles
Dubner S, Superfreakonomics

DuMaurier D, Rebecca
Ellis B. E. American Psycho
Fitzgerald S, Great Gatsby
Flaubert G, Madame Bovary
Fleming I,Doctor No
Freud S, Leonardo Da Vinci
Friedan B, Feminine Mystique
GarciaMarquez, Of Love & OtherDemons
GarciaMarquez,OneHundredYrs
Guerrero M,ThePoison Pill

Grass G, The Tin Drum
Harris T, Hannibal Rising
Heidegger M,House of Being
Ishiguro K, Remains of The Day
Johnson S,Rasselas
Kafka,Metamorphosis
Kosinski J, The Painted Bird
Lee H,To Kill a Mockingbird
McBain Ed,Gutter and Grave
Murakami H,Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
Nabokov V, Lolita
Meyer, S, Twilight
Ortega,Dehumanization of Art
Poe E A, Gordon Pym
Prose F, Reading Like a Writer
Rushdie S,Midnight Children
Sabatini R, Scaramouche
Spark M, Prime of Miss Brodie

Stendhal, Red and Black
Sterne L,Tristram Shandy
Stevenson R, Dr.Jekyll & Mr.Hyde
Stoker B, Dracula
Thackeray W,History of Pendennis
Tolstoy L, Anna Karenina
Trollope A, Autobiography
Unamuno M, Tragic Sense of Life
Voltaire, Candide
Webb J, Fields of Fire
Wharton E, The House of Mirth
Woolf V, To The Lighhouse

The secrets of 'no-doze' prose:
Mary Duffy's Sentence Openers

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Lindsey Vonn

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Definition of Words - Words Connotations

2011-10-19T09:37:00.000-04:00

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Word Connotations

Definition of Connotation:
Connotation means the power that words have to appeal to our senses and emotions. Knowing this particular bit of information can take a writer a long way in manipulating reader’s attention and emotions.

With connotation we suggest or imply instead of stating something bluntly. What this means is that writers aren’t restricted to the dictionary meaning of words because by means of connotation they can go beyond the dictionary—beyond literal meaning.

In addition, fine writers are aware of the different shades of meaning between synonyms. Just because the dictionary or a thesaurus lists several synonyms it doesn’t mean that they have the exact same meaning. To gain your readership’s sympathy or antipathy, you may want to use just the right noun: car, automobile, runabout, buggy, banger, clunker, wheels, bus, hot rod, jalopy, old crock, and racer—

In her novel Pride and Prejudice Jane Austen lets no room doubt that Mr. Darcy is a proud individual. Yet, she also lets readers see him as other characters see him: conceited, self-confident, and arrogant.

Simple connotation can be accomplished economically by a word, phrase, sentences, or direct statements.

Here are some examples of connotation:

Eleanor is a twit.
Stanley is a boob.
He always smells like garlic and sweat mixed with cheap man’s cologne.
President Bush smirked at the senator.

Jane Austen in her novel Mansfield Park presents Mrs. Norris as a consistent nag who sees nothing positive in the heroine, Fanny Price. By this consistency, readers are brought about to dislike her and to like Fanny. Surely this is an overt way of manipulating the readers’ emotions. At the end of the novel we are well prepared for, Mrs. Norris’ comeuppance as she quits Mansfield Park: “Not even Fanny had tears for Aunt Norris, not even when she was gone forever.”

Personal or Individual connotation are suggestive words that are applied to a particular individual, as in the examples cited above. However, connotations may also be used in a generalized or universal way. For example: Communists stink of dogma.

Generalized connotations can infect not only the name but also an entire genre. J. D. Salinger in his novelette, The Catcher in the Rye, by using the eponymous hero’s name ‘David Copperfield’ in one fell swoop shocks the reader into discarding an antiquated type of narration. Salinger implies —through the name David Copperfield— that the 19^th century novel, with all its sentimentality and flat language is passé, that readers will not find that old style in the Catcher:

IF YOU REALLY WANT TO HEAR about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don't feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.

Connotation using a disguised simile (a comparison without using ‘as’ or ‘like’):

She wore a pale-yellow sweater that resembled the hue of certain urine samples I’ve seen.

By describing the subject’s sweater with the colors of body excretion and of the worse possible kind, the writer is appealing to the reader’s aversions and discomfort that such signals produce.

The wind died and the silence that followed was broken by the sway and creak of the elms and cypresses.

Although the reader isn’t told explicitly, one can expect that the character associated with this scene is being marked for death—the connotation is that of a cemetery.

Connotation by infection:
In this type of connotation the meaning from an object or objects are transferred to a character. Let’s look at this example from Charles Dickens’ novel David Copperfield:

She [Miss Murdstone] brought with her two uncompromising hard black boxes, with her initials on the lids in hard brass nails. When she paid the coachman she took her money out of a hard steel purse, and she kept the purse in a very jail of a bag which hung upon her arms by a heavy chain, and shut up like a bit.

The objects being described are two boxes, a purse, and a bag, yet the subterranean connotative meaning is not intended towards the objects but to the character of the subject—Miss Murdstone. In other words, the connotative words exert power on the subject by contagion; just like a contagious disease.

Greatness and Achievement: A Tribute to Steve Jobs

2011-10-06T08:01:00.008-04:00

Image via WikipediaLet's run a little test. If you think of the word 'greatness,' who may you be thinking of? Chances are you are thinking of heroes, famous individuals, accomplished professionals--senators, presidents, scientists, Steve Jobs perhaps?

But how did Steve Jobs become famous? How did he become such an incredible achiever?

What is an undeniable fact is that all accomplished individuals start somewhere: with being positive! The good news is that you, also, may start there. And the most wonderful aspect of these goods news is that being positive doesn't cost anything: it's free!

People who believe in themselves will achieve their goals; will achieve nearly anything. The sky is the limit. Whether you have clear goals in mind for your future, or thoughts for a bright future, thinking positively is the beginning of the journey.

Just knowing that is half of the battle.Practicing is the other.

Be positive and believe in yourself, first! Listen to that "inner voice" that Steve Jobs spoke about. The second part of being positive is taking action. While goals and dreams are wonderful, action is what makes those goals come to fruition; action makes them become a reality. Positive energy turns your dreams into reality. All other factors such as determination, motivation, and hard work, are secondary--being positive comes first.

Why is that? Because along the journey we will experience setbacks--that is for sure. The true champions of life will pick themselves up, shake the dust off, and move on. They allow no time for discouragement. Steve Jobs was fired from his own company. Can you imagine a worse setback than that? But he didn't mope around his house lamenting his ill star; blaming others. No Sir! He excelled in other projects until he returned to Apple.

You --my good friend-- were destined for accomplishment. Now 'accomplishment' means getting things done; it doesn't matter in what field of endeavor. And accomplishments come in different sizes and magnitudes. Getting a high school diploma for example. So is getting a college degree or two. But schooling isn't the only way to achieve something--only a stepping stone. Helping a friend, neighbor, or relative could be a tremendous accomplishment.

The journey is full of many accomplished goals, and once a goal is achieved, tackle a new one and a new one in an endless geometric series. If you get a college degree, think of it as part of the journey. Of course you'll get satisfaction, but greater satisfaction is in store in the future.

Success isn't just for a few gifted individuals. It's for all of us! We all are born with the potential and the energy to get things done; the blueprint is in our genes. Don't waste it. Being positive in outlook will help channel energy, creativity, and imagination into the accomplishment of our goals.

Instead of thinking, "Oh, no. I can't do that--it takes too long," say: "Oh, yes! Si Se Puede--it won't take long!"

After you get some things done, don't stop there. Move on to the next project,and the next, and when you look over your shoulder you'll see behind you a constellation of small and large accomplishments. A character in Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude, as he awoke from a long torpor exclaimed: "We are made of time!"

I go a step beyond and I say: "We are made of projects!" The French philosopher Jean Paul Sartre once said, "Man is a useless passion." I never believe that. A man would be a useless passion if he didn't have a project. In Steve Jobs we have a man of many projects; and that is what enriched his life and ours.

Fame and fortune are ephemeral, wispy, and soon burns off like the morning fog. Though not all your accomplishments will bring fame and fortune, some of them will--and if not, satisfaction will be its own reward.

So, the next time you think of 'greatness,' think of yourself as an achiever! Think of Steve Jobs, think of a great American, think of the man who by his projects became a true citizen of the world.

Steve Jobs isn't just an American hero or just an American genius. He now belongs to the whole human race.

Inferiority Complex?

3 Qualities for Success

The Best Leader?

How I Manage my Time

Adam Smith and Wealth

Boethius and Fortune

Employee of the Moth Everyday

If you are interested in seeing how I achieved personal success in the United States, you may find my book of short stories East of Tiffany's interesting. Some of the stories are based on my life as an executive, investment banker, and financial adviser to wealthy investors in the East Side of Manhattan.
Close to half-million people have read East of Tiffany's so far. Order your copy from either Amazon.com or Barnes and Noble. See the link on the right sidebar.

Since English is my second language, Mary Duffy --a master of the English language-- aided me not only with the editing, but she also contributed her own stories. I love her writing in "When You Wish Upon a Star." This is a story based on a personal friend's life.

Senada Selmani, model, college student

I get 'A' in all my term papers, and my co-workers tell me I write great e-mails and memos. Not only was I accepted to a great college, but I got full scholarships--all on the strength of my essays! Get Mary Duffy's

Sentence Openers

Itching to Become a Writer? Get started with Sentence Openers!

Becoming a Writer - Raymond Chandler on Dashiell Hammett

2011-10-05T09:45:00.000-04:00

Image by Antonio Marín Segovia via Flickr

In The Long Week End, which is a drastically competent account of English life and manners in the decades following the First World War, Robert Graves and Alan Hodge gave some attention to the detective story. They were just as traditionally English as the ornaments of the Golden Age, and they wrote of the time in which these writers were almost as well-known as any writers in the world. Their books in one form or another sold into the millions, and in a dozen languages. These were the people who fixed the form and established the rules and founded the famous Detection Club, which is a Parnassus of English writers of mystery. Its roster includes practically every important writer of detective fiction since Conan Doyle.

But Graves and Hodge decided that during this whole period only one first -class writer had written detective stories at all. An American, Dashiell Hammett. Traditional or not, Graves and Hodge were not fuddyduddy connoisseurs of the second-rate; they could see what went on in the world and that the detective story of their time didn't; and they were aware that writers who have the vision and the ability to produce real fiction do not produce unreal fiction.

How original a writer Hammett really was it isn't easy to decide now, even if it mattered. He was one of a group-the only one who achieved critical recognition-who wrote or tried to write realistic mystery fiction. All literary movements are like this; some one individual is picked out to represent the whole movement; he is usually the culmination of the movement. Hammett was the ace performer, but there is nothing in his work that is not implicit in the early novels and short stories of Hemingway.

Yet, for all I know, Hemingway may have learned something from Hammett as well as from writers like Dreiser, Ring Lardner, Carl Sandburg, Sherwood Anderson, and himself. A rather revolutionary debunking of both the language and the material of fiction had been going on for some time. It probably started in poetry; almost everything does. You can take it clear back to Walt Whitman, if you like. But Hammett applied it to the detective story, and this, because of its heavy crust of English gentility and American pseudo gentility, was pretty hard to get moving.

I doubt that Hammett had any deliberate artistic aims whatever; he was trying to make a living by writing something he had firsthand information about. He made some of it up; all writers do; but it had a basis in fact; it was made up out of real things. The only reality the English detection writers knew was the conversational accent of Surbiton and Bognor RegiS. If they wrote about dukes and Venetian vases, they knew no more about them out of their own experience than the well-heeled Hollywood character knows about the French Modernists that hang in his Bel-Air chateau or the semi-antique Chippendale-cum-cobbier's bench that he uses for a coffee table. Hammett took mur-
der out of the Venetian vase and dropped it into the alley; it doesn't have to stay there forever, but it looked like a good idea to get as far as possible from Emily Post's idea of how a wellbred debutante gnaws a chicken wing.

Hammett wrote at first (and almost to the end) for people with a sharp, aggressive attitude to life. They were not afraid of the seamy side of things; they lived there. Violence did not dismay them; it was right down their street. Hammett gave murder back to the kind of people that commit it for reasons, not just to provide a corpse; and with the means at hand, not hand-wrought dueling pistols, curare and tropical fish. He put these people down on paper as they were, and he made them talk and think in the language they customarily used for these purposes.

He had style, but his audience didn't know it, because it was in a language not supposed to be capable of such refinements. They thought they were getting a good meaty melodrama written in the kind of lingo they imagined they spoke themselves. It was, in a sense, but it was much more. All language begins with speech, and the speech of common men at that, but when it develops to the point of becoming a literary medium it only looks like speech. Hammett's style at its worst was as formalized as a page of Marius the Epicurean; at its best it could say almost anything. I believe this style, which does not belong to Hammett or to anybody, but is the American language (and not even exclusively that any more), can say things he did not know how to say, or feel the need of saying. In his hands it had no overtones, left no echo, evoked no image beyond a distant hill.

Hammett is said to have lacked heart; yet the story he himself thought the most of is the record of a man's devotion to a friend. He was spare, frugal, hard-boiled, but he did over and over again what only the best writers can ever do at all. He wrote scenes that seemed never to have been written before.

With all this he did not wreck the formal detective story.

Nobody can; production demands a form that can be produced. Realism takes too much talent, too much knowledge, too much awareness. Hammett may have loosened it up a little here, and sharpened it a little there. Certainly all but the stupidest and most meretricious writers are more conscious of their artificiality than they used to be. And he demonstrated that the detective story can be important writing. The Maltese Falcon mayor may not be a work of genius, but an art which is capable of it is not "by hypothesis" incapable of anything. Once a detective story can be as good as this, only the pedants will deny that it could be even better.

Hammett did something else; he made the detective story fun to write, not an exhausting concatenation of insignificant clues. Without him there might not have been a regional mystery as clever as Percival Wilde's Inquest, or an ironic study as able as Raymond Postgate's Verdict of Twelve, or a savage piece of intellectual double-talk like Kenneth Fearing's The Dagger of the Mind, or a tragi-comic idealization of the murderer as in Donald Henderson's Mr. Bowling Buys a Newspaper, or even a gay Hollywoodian gambol like Richard Sale's Lazarus No.7.

The realistic style is easy to abuse: from haste, from lack of awareness, from inability to bridge the chasm that lies between what a writer would like to be able to say and what he actually knows how to say. It is easy to fake; brutality is not strength, flipness is not wit, edge-of-the-chair writing can be as boring as flat writing; dalliance with promiscuous blondes can be very dull stuff when described by goaty young men with no other purpose in mind than to describe dalliance with promiscuous blondes. There has been so much of this sort of thing that if a character in a detective story says "Yeah," the author is automatically a Hammett imitator.

And there are still a number of people around who say that Hammett did not write detective stories at all—merely hardboiled chronicles of mean streets with a perfunctory mystery element dropped in like the olive in a martini. There are the flustered old ladies —of both sexes (or no sex) and almost all ages— who like their murders scented with magnolia blossoms and do not care to be reminded that murder is an act of infinite cruelty, even if the perpetrators sometimes look like playboys or college professors or nice motherly women with softly graying hair.

There are also a few badly scared champions of the formal or classic mystery who think that no story is a detective story which does not pose a formal and exact problem and arrange the clues around it with neat labels on them. Such would point out, for example, that in reading The Maltese Falcon no one concerns himself with who killed Spade's partner, Archer (which is the only formal problem of the story), because the reader is kept thinking about something else. Yet in The Glass Key the reader is constantly reminded that the question is who killed Taylor Henry, and exactly the same effect is obtained-an effect of movement, intrigue, cross-purposes, and the gradual elucidation of character, which is all the detective story has any right to be about anyway. The rest is spillikins in the parlor.

But all this (and Hammett too) is for me not quite enough.

The realist in murder writes of a world in which gangsters can rule nations and almost rule cities, in which hotels and apartment houses and celebrated restaurants are owned by men who made their money out of brothels, in which a screen star can be the finger man for a mob, and the nice man down the hall is a boss of the numbers racket; a world where a judge with a cellar full of bootleg liquor can send a man to jail for having a pint in his pocket, where the mayor of your town may have condoned murder as an instrument of money-making, where no man can walk down a dark street in safety because law and order are things we talk about but refrain from practicing; a world where you may witness a holdup in broad daylight and see who did it, but you will fade quickly back into the crowd rather than tell anyone, because the holdup men may have friends with long guns, or the police may not like your testimony, and in any case the shyster for the defense will be allowed to abuse and vilify you in open court, before a jury of selected morons, without any but the most perfunctory interference from a political judge. It is not a fragrant world, but it is the world you live in, and certain writers with tough minds and a cool spirit of detachment can make very interesting and even amusing patterns out of it. It is not funny that a man should be killed, but it is sometimes funny that he should be killed for so little, and that his death should be the coin of what we call civilization. All this still is not quite enough.

In everything that can be called art there is a quality of redemption. It may be pure tragedy, if it is high tragedy, and it may be pity and irony, and it may be the raucous laughter of the strong man. But down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. The detective in this kind of story must be such a man. He is the hero; he is everything. He must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor-by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it. He must be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world. I do not care much about his private life; he is neither a eunuch nor a satyr; I think he might seduce a duchess and I am quite sure he would not spoil a virgin; if he is a man of honor in one thing, he is that in all things.

He is a relatively poor man, or he would not be a detective at all. He is a common man or he could not go among common people. He has a sense of character, or he would not know his job. He will take no man's money dishonestly and no man's insolence without a due and dispassionate revenge. He is a lonely maq and his pride is that you will treat him as a proud man or be very sorry you ever saw him. He talks as the man of his age talks-that is, with rude wit, a lively sense of the grotesque, a disgust for sham, and a contempt for pettiness.

The story is this man's adventure in search of a hidden truth, and it would be no adventure if it did not happen to a man fit for adventure. He has a range of awareness that startles you, but it belongs to him by right, because it belongs to the world he lives in. If there were enough like him, the world would be a very safe place to live in, without becoming too dull to be worth living in.

Becoming a Writer - Flannery O'Connor "Truth in Fiction"

2011-10-04T00:53:00.000-04:00

Image by marklarson via Flickr

Truth in Fiction

Fiction is an art that calls for the strictest attention to the real—whether the writer is writing a naturalistic story or a fantasy. I mean that we always begin with what is or with what has an eminent possibility of truth about it. Even when one writes a fantasy, reality is the proper basis of it. A thing is fantastic because it is so real, so real that it is fantastic. Graham Greene has said that he can't write, "I stood over a bottomless pit," because that couldn't be true, or "Running down the stairs I jumped into a taxi," because that couldn't be true either. But Elizabeth Bowen can write about one of her characters that "she snatched at her hair as if she heard something in it," because that is eminently possible.

I would even go so far 'as to say that the person writing a fantasy has to be even more strictly attentive to the concrete detail than someone writing in a naturalistic vein-because the greater the story's strain on the credulity, the more convincing the properties in it have to be.

A good example of this is a story called "The Metamorphosis" by Franz Kafka. This is a story about a man who wakes up one morning to find that he has turned into a cockroach overnight, while not discarding his human nature. The rest of the story concerns his life and feelings and eventual death as an insect with human nature, and this situation is accepted by the reader because the concrete detail of the story is absolutely convincing. The fact is that this story describes the dual nature of man in such a realistic fashion that it is almost unbearable. The truth is not distorted here, but rather, a certain distortion is used to get at the truth. If we admit, as we must, that appearance is not the same thing as reality, then we must give the artist the liberty to make certain rearrangements of nature if these will lead to greater depths of vision. The artist himself always has to remember that what he is rearranging is nature, and that he has to know it and be able to describe it accurately in order to have the authority to rearrange it at all.

The peculiar problem of the short-story writer is how to make the action he describes reveal as much of the mystery of existence as possible. He has only a short space to do it in and he can't do it by statement. He has to do it by showing, not by saying, and by showing the concrete-so that his problem is really how to make the concrete work double time for him.

In good fiction, certain of the details will tend to accumulate meaning from the action of the story itself, and when this happens they become symbolic in the way they work. I once wrote a story called "Good Country People," in which a lady Ph.D. has her wooden leg stolen by a Bible salesman whom she has tried. to seduce. Now I'll admit that, paraphrased in this way, the situation is simply a low joke. The average reader is pleased to observe anybody's wooden leg being stolen. But without ceasing to appeal to him and without making any statements of high intention, this story does manage to operate at another level of experience, by letting the wooden leg accumulate meaning. Early in the story, we're presented with the fact that the Ph.D. is spiritually as well as physically crippled. She believes in nothing but her own belief in nothing, and we perceive that there is a wooden part of her soul that corresponds to her wooden leg. Now of course this is never stated. The fiction writer states as little as possible. The reader makes this connection from things he is shown. He may not even know that he makes the connection, but the connection is there nevertheless and it has its effect on him. As the story goes on, the wooden leg continues to accumulate meaning. The reader learns how the girl feels about her leg, how her mother feels about it, and how the country woman on the place feels about it; and finally, by the time the Bible salesman comes along, the leg has accumulated so much meaning that it is, as the saying goes, loaded. And when the Bible salesman steals it, the reader realizes that he has taken away part of the girl's personality and has revealed her deeper affection to her for the first time. If you want to say that the wooden leg is a symbol, you can say that. But it is a wooden leg first, and as a wooden leg it is absolutely necessary to the story. It has its place on the literal level of the story, but it operates in depth as well as on the surface. It increases the story in every direction, and this is essentially the way a story escapes being short.

Now a little might be said about the way in which this happens. I wouldn't want you to think that in that story I sat down and said, "I am now going to write a story about a Ph.D. with a wooden leg, using the wooden leg as a symbol for another kind of affliction." I doubt myself if many writers know what they are going to do when they start out. When I started writing that story, I didn't know there was going to be a Ph.D. with a wooden leg in it. I merely found myself one morning writing a description of two women that I knew something about, and before I realized it, I had equipped one of them with a daughter with a wooden leg. As the story progressed, I brought in the Bible salesman, but I had no idea what I was going to do with him. I didn't know he was going to steal that wooden leg until ten or twelve lines before he did it, but when I found out that this was what was going to happen, I realized that it was inevitable. This is a story that produces a shock for the reader, and I think one reason for this is that it produced a shock for the writer.

Now despite the fact that this story came about in this seemingly mindless fashion, it is a story that almost no rewriting was done on. It is a story that was under control throughout the writing of it, and it might be asked how this kind of control comes about, 'Since it is not entirely conscious.

I think the answer to this is what Maritain calls "the habit of art." It is a fact that fiction writing is 'Something in which the whole personality takes part --the conscious as well as the unconscious mind. Art is the habit of the artist; and habits have to be rooted deep in the whole personality. They have to be cultivated like any other habit, over a long period of time, by experience; and teaching any kind of writing is largely a matter of helping the student develop the habit of art. I think this is more than just a discipline, although it is that; I think it is a way of looking at the created world and of using the senses so as to make them find as much meaning as possible in things.

Fiction Stories - Jorge Luis Borges "The South"

2011-10-03T14:29:00.000-04:00

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The man who landed in Buenos Aires in 1871 bore the name of Johannes Dahlmann and he was a minister in the Evangelical Church. In 1939, one of his grandchildren, Juan Dahlmann was secretary of a municipal library on Calle Cordoba, and he considered himself profoundly Argentinian. His maternal grandfather had been that Francisco Flores, of the Second Line-Infantry Division, who had died on the frontier of Buenos Aires, run through with a lance by Indians from Catriel; in the discord inherent between his two lines of descent, Juan Dahlmann (perhaps driven to it by his Germanic blood) chose the line represented by his romantic ancestor, his ancestor of the romantic death. An. old sword, a leather frame containing the daguerreotype of a blank-faced man with a beard, the dash and grace of certain music, the familiar strophes of Marlin Fierro, the passing years, boredom and solitude, all went to foster this voluntary, but never ostentatious nationalism. At the cost of numerous small privations, Dahlmann had managed to save the empty shell of a ranch in the South which had belonged to the Flores family; he continually recalled the image of the balsamic eucalyptus trees and the great rose-colored house which had once been crimson. His duties, perhaps even indolence, kept him in the city. Summer after summer he, contented himself with the abstract idea of possession and with the certitude that his ranch was waiting for him on a precise site in the middle of the plain. Late in February, 1939, something happened to him.

Blind to all fault, destiny can be ruthless at one's slightest distraction. Dahlmann had succeeded in acquiring, on that very afternoon, an imperfect copy of Weirs edition of The Thousand and One Nights. Avid to examine this find, he did not wait for the elevator but hurried up the stairs. In the dark, something brushed by his forehead: a bat, a bird? On the face of the woman who opened the door to him he saw horror engraved, and the hand he wiped across his face came away red with blood. The edge of a recently painted door which someone had forgotten to close had caused this wound. Dahlmann was able to fall asleep, but from the moment he awoke at dawn the savor of all things was atrociously poignant. Fever wasted him and the pictures in The Thousand and One Nights served to illustrate nightmares. Friends and relatives paid him visits and, with exaggerated smiles, assured him that they thought he looked fine. Dahlmann listened to them with a kind of feeble stupor and he marveled at their not knowing that he was in hell. A week, eight days passed, and they were like eight centuries. One afternoon, the usual doctor appeared, accompanied by a new doctor, and they carried him off to a sanitarium on the Calle Ecuador for it was necessary to X-ray him. Dahlmann, in the hackney coach which bore them away, thought that he would, at last, be able to sleep in a room different from his own. He felt happy and communicative. When he arrived at his destination, they undressed him, shaved his head, bound him with metal fastenings to a stretcher; they shone bright lights on him until he was blind and dizzy, auscultated him, and a masked man stuck a needle into his arm. He awoke with a feeling of nausea, covered with a bandage, in a cell with something of a well about it; in the days and nights which followed the operation he came to realize that he had merely been, up until then, in a suburb of hell. Ice in his mouth did not leave the least trace of freshness. During these days Dahlmann hated himself in minute detail: he hated his identity, his bodily necessities, his humiliation, the beard which bristled upon his face. He stoically endured the curative measures, which were painful, but when the surgeon told him he had been on the point of death from septicemia, Dahlmann dissolved in tears of self-pity for his fate. Physical wretchedness and the incessant anticipation of horrible nights had not allowed him time to think of anything so abstract as death. On another day, the surgeon told him he was healing and that, very soon, he would be able to go to his ranch for convalescence. Incredibly enough, the promised day arrived.

Reality favors symmetries and slight anachronisms: Dahlmann had arrived at the sanitarium in a hackney coach and now a hackney coach was to take him to the Constitucion station. The first fresh tang of autumn, after the summer's oppressiveness, seemed like a symbol in nature of his rescue and release from fever and death. The city, at seven in the morning, had not lost that air of an old house lent it by the night; the streets seemed like long vestibules, the plazas were like patios. Dahlmann recognized the city with joy on the edge of vertigo: a second before his eyes registered the phenomena themselves, he recalled the corners, the billboards, the modest variety of Buenos Aires. In the yellow light of the new day, all things returned to him.

Every Argentine knows that the South begins at the other side of Rivadavia. Dahlmann was in the habit of saying that this was no mere convention, that whoever crosses this street enters a more ancient and sterner world. From inside the carriage he sought out, among the new buildings, the iron grille window, the brass knocker, the arched door, the entranceway, the intimate patio.

At the railroad station he noted that he still had thirty minutes. He quickly recalled that in a cafe on the Calle Brazil (a few dozen feet from Yrigoyen's house) there was an enormous cat which allowed itself to be caressed as if it were a disdainful divinity. He entered the cafe. There was the cat, asleep. He ordered a cup of coffee, slowly stirred the sugar, sipped it (this pleasure had been denied him in the clinic), and thought, as he smoothed the cat's black coat, that this contact was an illusion and that the two beings, man and cat, were as good as separated by a glass, for man lives in time, in succession, while the magical animal lives in the present, in the eternity of the instant.

Along the next to the last platform the train lay waiting. Dahlmann walked through the coaches until he found one almost empty. He arranged his baggage in the network rack. When the train started off, he took down his valise and extracted, after some hesitation, the first volume of The Thousand and One Nights. To travel with this book, which was so much a part of the history of his ill-fortune, was a kind of affirmation that his ill-fortune had been annulled; it was a joyous and secret defiance of the frustrated forces of evil.

Along both sides of the train the city dissipated into suburbs; this sight, and then a view of the gardens and villas, delayed the beginning of his reading. The truth was that Dahlmann read very little. The magnetized mountain and the genie who swore to kill his benefactor are—who would deny it?—marvelous, but not so much more than the morning itself and the mere fact of being. The joy of life distracted him from paying attention to Scheherazade and her superfluous miracles. Dahlmann closed his book and allowed himself to live.

Lunch—the bouillon served in shining metal bowls, as in the remote summers of childhood—was one more peaceful and rewarding delight.

Tomorrow I'll wake up at the ranch, he thought, and it was as if he was two men at a time: the man who traveled through the autumn day and across the geography of the fatherland, and the other one, locked up in a sanitarium and subject to methodical servitude. He saw unplastered brick houses, long and angled, timelessly watching the trains go by; he saw horsemen along the dirt roads; he saw gullies and lagoons and ranches; he saw great luminous clouds that resembled marble; and all these things were accidental, casual, like dreams of the plain. He also thought he recognized trees and crop fields; but he would not have been able to name them, for his actual knowledge of the countryside was quite inferior to his nostalgic and literary knowledge.

From time to time he slept, and his dreams were animated by the impetus of the train. The intolerable white sun of high noon had already become the yellow sun which precedes nightfall, and it would not be long before it would turn red. The railroad car was now also different; it was not the same as the one which had quit the station siding at Constitucion; the plain and the hours had transfigured it. Outside, the moving shadow of the railroad car stretched toward the horizon. The elemental earth was not perturbed either by settlements or other signs of humanity. The country was vast but at the same time intimate and, in some measure, secret. The limitless country sometimes contained only a solitary bull. The solitude was perfect, perhaps hostile, and it might have occurred to Dahlmann that he was traveling into the past and not merely south. He was distracted from these considerations by the railroad inspector who, on reading his ticket, advised him that the train would not let him off at the regular station but at another: an earlier stop, one scarcely known to Dahlmann. (The man added an explanation which Dahlmann did not attempt to understand, and which he hardly heard, for the mechanism of events did not concern him.)

The train laboriously ground to a halt, practically in the middle of the plain. The station lay on the other side of the tracks; it was not much more than a siding and a shed. There was no means of conveyance to be seen, but the station chief supposed that the traveler might secure a vehicle from a general store and inn to be found some ten or twelve blocks away.

Dahlmann accepted the walk as a small adventure. The sun had already disappeared from view, but a final splendor exalted the vivid and silent plain, before the night erased its color. Less to avoid fatigue than to draw out his enjoyment of these sights, Dahlmann walked slowly, breathing in the odor of clover with sumptuous joy.

The general store at one time had been painted a deep scarlet, but the years had tempered this violent color for its own good. Something in its poor architecture recalled a steel engraving, perhaps one from an old edition of Paul et Virginie. A number of horses were hitched up to the paling. Once inside, Dahlmann thought he recognized the shopkeeper. Then he realized that he had been deceived by the man's resemblance to one of the male nurses in the sanitarium. When the shopkeeper heard Dahlmann's request, he said he would have the shay made up. In order to add one more event to that day and to kill time, Dahlmann decided to eat at the general store.

Some country louts, to whom Dahlmann did not at first pay any attention, were eating and drinking at one of the tables. On the floor, and hanging on to the bar, squatted an old man, immobile as an object. His years had reduced and polished him as water does a stone or the generations of men do a sentence. He was dark, dried up, diminutive, and seemed outside time, situated in eternity. Dahlmann noted with satisfaction the kerchief, the thick poncho, the long chiripa, and the colt boots, and told himself, as he recalled futile discussions with people from the Northern counties or from the province of Entre Rios, that gauchos like this no longer existed outside the South.

Dahlmann sat down next to the window. The darkness began overcoming the plain, but the odor and sound of the earth penetrated the iron bars of the window. The shop owner brought him sardines, followed by some roast meat. Dahlmann washed the meal down with several glasses of red wine. Idling, he relished the tart savor of the wine, and let his gaze, now grown somewhat drowsv, wander over the shop. A kerosene lamp hung from a beam. There were three customers at the other table: two of them appeared to be farm workers; the third man, whose features hinted at Chinese blood, was drinking with his hat on. Of a sudden, Dahlmann felt something brush lightly against his face. Next to the heavy glass of turbid wine, upon one of the stripes in the tablecloth, lay a spit ball of breadcrumb. That was all: but someone had thrown it there.

The men at the other table seemed totally cut off from him. Perplexed, Dahlmann decided that nothing had happened, and he opened the volume of The Thousand and One Nights, by way of suppressing reality. After a few moments another little ball landed on his table, and now the peones laughed outright. Dahlmann said to himself that he was not frightened, but he reasoned that it would be a major blunder if he, a convalescent, were to allow himself to be dragged by strangers into some chaotic quarrel. He determined to leave, and had already gotten to his feet when the owner came up and exhorted him in an alarmed voice:
"Senor Dahlmann, don't pay any attention to those lads; they're half high."
Dahlmann was not surprised to learn that the other man, now, knew his name. But he felt that these conciliatory words served only to aggravate the situation. Previously to this moment, the peones' provocation was directed against an unknown face, against no one in particular, almost against no one at all. Now it was an attack against him, against his name, and his neighbors knew it. Dahlmann pushed the owner aside, confronted the peones, and demanded to know what they wanted of him.

The tough with the Chinese look staggered heavily to his feet. Almost in Juan Dahlmann's face he shouted insults, as if he had been a long way off. His game was to exaggerate his drunkenness, and this extravagance constituted a ferocious mockery. Between curses and obscenities, he threw a

long knife into the air, followed it with his eyes, caught and juggled it, and challenged Dahlmann to a knife fight. The owner objected in a tremulous voice, pointing out that Dahlmann was unarmed. At this point, something unforeseeable occurred.

From a corner of the room, the old ecstatic gaucho—in whom Dahlmann saw a summary and cipher of the South (his South)—threw him a naked dagger, which landed at his feet. It was as if the South had resolved that Dahlmann should accept the duel. Dahlmann bent over to pick up the dagger, and felt two things. First, that this almost instinctive act forced him to fight. Second, that the weapon, in his clumsy hand, was no defense at all, but would only serve to justify his murder. He had once played with a poniard, like all men, but his idea of fencing and knife-play did not go further than the notion that all strokes should be directed upward, with the cutting edge held inward. They would not have allowed such things to happen to me in the sanitarium, he thought.
"Let's get on our way," said the other man.
They went out and if Dahlmann was without hope! he was also without fear. As he crossed the threshold, he felt that to die in a knife-fight, under the open sky, and going forward to the attack, would have been a liberation, a joy, and a festive occasion, on the first night in the sanitarium, when they stuck him with the needle. He felt that if he had been able to choose, then, or to dream his death, this would have been a death he would have chosen or dreamt.

Firmly clutching his knife, which he perhaps would not know how wield, Dahlmann went out into the night.

Definition of Words - Epithets

2011-10-03T12:12:00.000-04:00

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Epithet is a term used in writing to qualify or define a specific quality of a person or thing. So, instead of using one word (adjective) writers use a phrase which contains two or more words, which makes the words an ‘adjectival phrase.’

Examples:

The chalky white cliffs of Dover.
Silver snarling trumpets (John Keats in The Eve of St. Agnes).

Homeric epithets are adjectival terms —usually a compound of two words— that Homer used in in his epic poems Iliad and Odyssey. Through the years these epithets have become recurrent formulas for distinguishing a specific noun: fleet-footed Achilles, bolt-hurling Zeus, the wine-dark sea.

James Joyce in his Ulysses parodied the formula in his reference to "the snot-green sea."

Conventional epithets dentify historical or legendary figures, as in John the Landless, Lorenzo the Magnificent, Patient Griselda, and Richard the Lionheart.

An epithet can also function as an identifying phrase that stands in place of a noun: Alexander Pope's "the glittering forfex" is an epithet that evokes the scissors with which the Baron performs his despicable act in The Rape of the Lock (1714).

The frequent use of derogatory adjectives and phrases in invective and diatribes tends to make people think that epithets are always negative and uncomplimentary; not so, as it can be seen in the above examples.

Transferred epithets by contagion transmit meaning from qualifying adjectives to nouns other the ones they are properly attached to. Jorge Luis Borges used this figure with great effect: “the useless cry of a bird,” “the silent handkerchief of the strangled.”

Definition of Words - Literalism

2011-10-02T08:23:00.000-04:00

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Definition of Words: Literalism

Literalism is a rhetorical figure of thought that takes words and statements in their literal sense. Skillful writers take a familiar expression and highlights it in such a way that readers will focus in its literal sense rather than in its usual metaphorical sense.

Just like people of good sense get annoyed at habitual punsters, readers can also get annoyed when they see overuse of this rhetorical figure. Yet, it can be a great tool for writers to inject a bit of humor in their writing.

Shakespeare —a master rhetorician— used it with much success. Here is a scene from The Taming of the Shrew:

Curtis: All ready; and therefore, I pray thee, news?

Grumio: First, know, my horse is tired; my master and mistress fallen out.

Curtis: How?

Grumio: Out of their saddles into the dirt; and thereby hangs a tale.

Curtis: Let's ha't, good Grumio.

Grumio: (striking him): There.

Curtis: This is to feel a tale, not to hear a tale.

Grumio: And therefore it is called a sensible tale.

When Curtis tells Grumio: “Let’s have it, good Grumio,” he means that Grumio should expand on the news; to which Grumio responds literally by striking him. The exchanges that follow aren’t really examples of literalism—but of puns.

An extreme use of literalism we find in the following the Christian Bible literally. Methuselah, the oldest man mentioned in the Bible, lived to be 969 years of age (Gen. 5: 21-27). The number of years —969— is to be understood literally; in consequence, many theories have been spawned to explain that incredible phenomenon.

Lacan - The Mirror Stage

2011-10-01T23:42:00.000-04:00

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"The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience"

Jacques Lacan

The conception of the mirror stage that I introduced at our last congress, thirteen years ago, has since become more or less established in the practice of the French group. However, I think it worthwhile to bring it again to your attention, especially today, for the light it sheds on the formation of the I as we experience it in psychoanalysis. It is an experience that leads us to oppose any philosophy directly issuing from the Cogito.

Some of you may recall that this conception originated in a feature of human behavior illuminated by a fact of comparative psychology. The child, at an age when he is for a time, however short, outdone by the chimpanzee in instrumental intelligence, can nevertheless already recognize as such his own image in a mirror. This recognition is indicated in the illuminative mimicry of the Aha- Er/ebnis, which Kohler sees as the expression of situational apperception, an essential stage of the act of intelligence.

This act, far from exhausting itself, as in the case of the monkey, once the image has been mastered and found empty, immediately rebounds in the case of the child in a series of gestures in which he experiences in play the relation between the movements assumed in the image and the reflected environment, and between this virtual complex and the reality it reduplicates - the child's own body, and the persons and things, around him.

This event can take place, as We have known since Baldwin, from the age of six months, and its r~ has often made me reflect upon the startling spectacle of the infant in fronTo["the mirror. Unable as yet to walk, or even to stand up, and held tightly as he is by some support, human or artificial (what, in France, we call a "trotte-hebe"), he nevertheless overcomes, in a flutter of jubilant activity, the obstructions of his support and, fixing his attitude in a slightly leaning-forward position, in order to hold it in his gaze, brings back an instantaneous aspect of the image.

For me, this activity retains the meaning I have given it up to the age of eighteen months. This meaning discloses a libidinal dynamism, which has hitherto remained problematic, as well as an ontological structure of the human world that accords with my reflections on paranoiac knowledge.

We have only to understand the mirror stage as an identification, in the full sense that analysis gives to the term: namely, the transformation that takes place in the subject when he assumes an image - whose predestination to this phase-effect is sufficiently indicated by the use, in analytic theory, of the ancient term imago.

This jubilant assumption of his specular image by the child at the infans stage, still sunk in his motor incapacity and nursling dependence, would seem to exhibit its an exemplary situation the symbolic matrix in which the I is precipitated in a primordial form, before it is objectified in the dialectic of identification with the other, and before language restores to it, in the universal, its function as subject.

This form would have to be called the Ideal-I,' if we wished to incorporate it into our usual register, in the sense that it will also be the source of secondary identifications, under which term I would place the functions of libidinal normalization. But the important point is that this form situates the agency of the ego, before its social determination, in a fictional direction, which will always remain irreducible for the individual alone, or rather, which will only rejoin the coming-into-being (Ie devenir) of the subject asymptotically, whatever the success of the dialectical syntheses by which he must resolve as I his discordance with his own reality.

The fact is that the total form of the body by which the subject anticipates in a mirage the maturation of his power is given to him only as Gestalt, that is to say, in an exteriority in which this form is certainly more constituent than constituted, but in which it appears to him above all in a contrasting size (un relief de stature) that fixes it and in a symmetry that inverts it, in contrast with the turbulent movements that the subject feels are animating him. Thus, this Gestalt - whose pregnancy should be regarded as bound up with the species, though its motor style remains scarcely recognizable - by these two aspects of its appearance, symbolizes the mental permanence of the I, at the same time as it prefigures its alienating destination; it is still pregnant with the correspondences that unite the I with the statue in which man projects himself, with the phantoms that dominate him, or with the automaton in which, in an ambiguous relation, the world of his own making tends to find completion.

Indeed, for the imagos — whose veiled faces it is our privilege to see in outline in our daily experience and in the penumbra of symbolic efficacy - the mirror image would seem to be the threshold of the visible world, if we go by the mirror disposition that the imago of one's own body presents in hallucinations or dreams, whether it concerns its individual features, or even its infirmities, or its object projections; or if we observe the role of the mirror apparatus in the appearances of the double, in which psychical realities, however heterogeneous, are manifested.

That a Gestalt should be capable of formative effects in the organism is attested by a piece of biological experimentation that is itself so alien to the idea of psychical causality that it cannot bring itself to formulate its results in these terms. It nevertheless recognizes that it is a necessary condition for the maturation of the gonad of the female pigeon that it should see another member of its species, of either sex; so sufficient in itself is this condition that the desired effect may be obtained merely by placing the individual within reach of the field of reflection of a mirror. Similarly, in'the case of the migratory locust, the transition within a generation from the solitary to the gregarious form can be obtained by exposing the individual, at a certain stage, to the exclusively visual action of a similar image, provided it is animated by movements of a style sufficiently close to that characteristic of the species. Such facts are inscribed in an order of homeomorphic identification that would itself fall within the larger question of the meaning of beauty as both formative and erogenic.

But the facts of mimicry are no less instructive when conceived as cases of heteromorphic identification, in as much as they raise the problem of the signification of space for the living organism - psychological concepts hardly seem less appropriate for shedding light on these matters than ridiculous attempts to reduce them to the supposedly supreme law of adaptation. We have only to recall how Roger Caillois (who was then very young, and still fresh from his breach with the sociological school in which he was trained) illuminated the subject by using the term "legendary psychasthenia" to classify morphological mimicry as an obsession with space in its derealizing effect.

I have myself shown in the social dialectic that structures human knowledge as paranoiac' why human knowledge has greater autonomy than animal knowledge in relation to the field of force of desire, but also why human knowledge is determined in that "little reality" (cepeu de realitf), which the Surrealists, in their restless way, saw as its limitation. These reflections lead me to recognize in the spatial captation manifested in the mirror stage, even before the social dialectic, the effect in man of an organic insufficiency in his natural reality - in so far as any meaning can be given to the word "nature."

I am led, therefore, to regard the function of the mirror stage as a particular case of the function of the imago, which is to establish a relation between the organism and its reality - or, as they say, between the Innenwelt and the Umwelt.

In man, however, this relation to nature is altered by a certain dehiscence at the heart of the organism, a primordial discord betrayed by the signs of uneasiness and motor uncoordination of the neonatal months. The objective notion of the anatomical incompleteness of the pyramidal system and likewise the presence of certain humoral residues of the maternal organism confirm the view I have formulated as the fact of a real specific prematurity of birth in man.

It is worth noting, incidentally, that this is a fact recognized as such by embryologists, by the term foetalization, which determines the prevalence of the so-called. superior apparatus of the neurax, and especially of the cortex, which psycho-surgical operations lead us to regard as the intraorganic mirror.

This development is experienced as a temporal dialectic that decisively projects the formation of the individual into history. The mirror stage is a drama whose internal thrust is precipitated from insufficiency to anticipation and which manufactures for the subject, caught up in the lure of spatial identification, the succession of phantasies that extends from a fragmented body-image to a form of its totality that I shall call orthopaedic - and, lastly, to the assumption of the armor of an alienating identity which will mark with its rigid structure the subject's entire mental development. Thus, to break out of the circle of the Innenwelt into the Umtoelt generates the inexhaustible quadrature of the ego's verifications.

This fragmented body - which term I have also introduced into our system of theoretical references - usually manifests itself in dreams when the movement of the analysis encounters a certain level of aggressive disintegration in the individual. It then appears in the form of disjointed limbs, or of those organs represented in exoscopy, growing wings and taking up arms for intestinal persecutions - the very same that the visionary Hieronymus Bosch has fixed, for all time, in painting, in their ascent from the fifteenth century to the imaginary zenith of modern man. But this form is even tangibly revealed at the organic level, in the lines of "fragilization" that define the anatomy of phantasy, as exhibited in the schizoid and spasmodic symptoms of hysteria.

Correlatively, the formation of the I is symbolized in dreams by a fortress, or a stadium - its inner arena and enclosure, surrounded by marshes and rubbish-tips, dividing it into two opposed fields of contest where the subject flounders in quest of the lofty, remote inner castle whose form (sometimes juxtaposed in the same scenario) symbolizes the id in a quite startling way. Similarly, on the mental plane, we find realized the structures of fortified works, the metaphor of which arises spontaneously, as if issuing from the symptoms themselves, to designate the mechanisms of obsessional neurosis - inversion, isolation, reduplication, cancellation and displacement.

But if we were to build on these subjective givens alone - however little we free them from the condition of experience that makes us see them as partaking of the nature of a linguistic technique - our theoretical attempts would remain exposed to the charge of projecting themselves into the unthinkable of an absolute subject. This is why I have sought in the present hypothesis, grounded in a conjunction of objective data, the guiding grid for a method of symbolic reduction.

It establishes in the defenses of the ego a genetic order, in accordance with the wish formulated by Miss Anna Freud, in the first part of her great work, 'and situates (as against a frequently expressed prejudice) hysterical repression and its returns at a more archaic stage than obsessional inversion and its isolating processes, and the latter in turn as preliminary to paranoia alienation, which dates from the deflection of the specular I into the social I.

This moment in which the mirror stage comes to an end inaugurates, by the identification with the imago of the counterpart and the drama of primordial jealousy (so well brought out by the school of Charlotte Buhler in the phenomenon of infantile transitivism), the dialectic that will henceforth link the I to socially elaborated situations.

It is this moment that decisively tips the whole of human knowledge into mediatization through the desire of the other, constitutes its objects in an "abstract" equivalence by the cooperation of others, and turns the I into that apparatus for which every instinctual thrust constitutes a danger, even though it should correspond to a natural maturation - the very normalization of this maturation being henceforth dependent, in man, on a cultural mediation as exemplified, in the case of the sexual object, by the Oedipus complex.

In the light of this conception, the term primary narcissism, by which analytic doctrine designates the libidinal investment characteristic of that moment, reveals in those who invented it the most profound awareness of semantic latencies. But it also throws light on the dynamic opposition between this libido and the sexual libido, which the first analysts tried to define when they invoked destructive and, indeed, death instincts, in order to explain the evident connection between the narcissistic libido and the alienating function of the I, the aggressivity it releases in any relation to the other, even in a relation involving the most Samaritan of aid.

In fact, they were encountering that existential negativity whose reality is so vigorously proclaimed by the contemporary philosophy of being and nothingness.

But unfortunately that philosophy grasps negativity only within the limits of a self-sufficiency of consciousness, which, as one of its premises, links to the meconnaissances [misrecognitions] that constitute the ego, the illusion of autonomy to which it entrusts itself. This flight of fancy, for all that it draws, to an unusual extent, on borrowings from psychoanalytic experience, culminates in the pretention of providing an existential psychoanalysis.

At the culmination of the historical effort of a society to refuse to recognize that it has any function other than the utilitarian one, and in the anxiety of the individual confronting the "concentrational"4 form of the social bond that seems to arise to crown this effort, existentialism must be judged by the explanations it gives of the subjective impasses that have indeed resulted from it; a freedom that is never more authentic than when it is within the walls of a prison; a demand for commitment, expressing the impotence of a pure consciousness to master any situation; a voyeuristic-sadistic idealization of the sexual relation; a personality that realizes itself only in suicide; a consciousness of the other than can be satisfied only by Hegelian murder.

These propositions are opposed by all our experience, in so far as it teaches us not to regard the ego as centered on the perception-consciousness system or as organized by the "reality principle" - a principle that is the expression of a scientific prejudice most hostile to the dialectic of knowledge. Our experience shows that we should start instead from the function of meconnaissance that characterizes the ego in all its structures so markedly articulated by Miss Anna Freud. For, if the Verneinung [denial] represents the patent form of that function, its effects will, for the. most part, remain latent, so long as they are not illuminated by some light reflected on to the level of fatality, which is where the id manifests itself.

We can thus understand the inertia characteristic of the formations of the I, and find there the most extensive definition of neurosis - just as the captation of the subject by the situation gives us the most general formula for madness, not only the madness that lies behind the walls of asylums, but also the madness that deafens the world with its sound and fury.

The sufferings of neurosis and psychosis are for us a schooling in the passions of the soul, just as the beam of the psychoanalytic scales, when we calculate the tilt of its threat to entire communities, provides us with an indication of the deadening of the passions in society.

At this junction of nature and culture, so persistently examined by modern anthropology, psychoanalysis alone recognizes this knot of imaginary servitude that love must always undo again, or sever.

For such a task, we place no trust in altruistic feeling, we who lay bare the aggressivity that underlies the activity of the philanthropist, the idealist, the pedagogue, and even the reformer.

In the recourse of subject to subject that we preserve, psychoanalysts may accompany the patient to the ecstatic limit of the "Thou art that," in which is revealed to him the cipher of his mortal destiny, but it is not in our mere power as practitioners to bring him to that point where the real journey begins.

KEYWORDS: jacques lacan, lacanian, lacan

Dehumanization of Art in KINDLE - Translation by Marciano Guerrero

2011-09-30T19:34:00.002-04:00

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KEYWORD: Ortega Gasset

My translation of “The Dehumanization of Art”

Because other translations contain many errors —and rather than translations are the translator’s paraphrasing and interpretation— I have labored to present a fresh and accurate translation that honors the memory of Jose Ortega y Gasset. One aim has motivated me from beginning to end of this project: my wish that my translation may become the authoritative translation ever rendered into the English language.

The Dehumanization of Art— is now a constant in music, literature, aesthetics, and philosophy, having come to mean that in post-modern times human-shaped mimesis (representation of the human) is irrelevant to art. According to Ortega, the arts don't have to tell a human story; art should deal with its own forms—and not with the human form.

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Lazarillo of Tormes: Chapter 5c About the Pardoner

2011-09-29T16:03:00.000-04:00

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Some of the respectable men there wanted to get up and throw the constable out of church to avoid any scandal. But my master stopped them and told them all not to bother him under penalty of excommunication. He told them to let him say anything he wanted to. So while the constable was saying all that, my master kept quiet, too. When he stopped speaking, my master told him if he wanted to say anything more he should go ahead. And the constable said,

“I could say plenty more about you and your dirty tricks, but I've said enough for now.”

Then the pardoner knelt down in the pulpit, and with his hands folded, and looking up toward heaven, he said:

“Lord God, to whom nothing is hidden and everything is manifest, for whom nothing is impossible and everything is possible, you know the truth of how unjustly I have been accused. As far as I am concerned, I forgive him so that you —Oh Lord!— may forgive me. Pay no attention to this man who knows not what he says or does. But the harm that has been done to thee, I beg and beseech thee in the name of justice that you do not disregard it.

“Because someone here may have been thinking of taking this holy indulgence, and now, believing that the false words of that man are true, they will not take it. And since that would be so harmful to our fellow men, I beg you, Lord, do not disregard it; instead, grant us a miracle here. Let it happen in this way: if what that man says is true —that I am full of malice and falseness— let this pulpit collapse with me in it and plunge one hundred feet into the ground, sinking six feet under where neither the pulpit nor I shall ever be seen again. But if what I say is true —and he, who has been won over by the devil, to deprive those who are here present from such a great blessing is saying false things— let him be punished and let his malice be known to all.”

Hardly had he finished his speech when the self-confessed constable fell flat on his face, hitting the floor so hard that it made the whole church echo. Then he began to roar, frothing at the mouth, twisting it, and his whole face, too, kicking and hitting and rolling around all over the floor.

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I got my copy through PAYPAL -
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