Posts tagged "John"

JOHN TRUDELL – THE FUTURISTIC POLICE STATE

More from a series of interviews recorded in 2003. In this one John makes a few predictions regarding social development in the near future (like now). I’m sorry to say that his vision on this one seems to have been tragically accurate. For more free material similar to this visit the FREE STREAMING MEDIA category at WWW.MOTHERSWORLDMARKET.COM The official Trudell website is WWW.JOHNTRUDELL.COM Also see WWW.TRUDELLTHEMOVIE.COM As always, thanks for taking the time to view this clip.
Video Rating: 4 / 5

Rising Sun Insider John Craig Releases First Chapter of his Novel ‘Japanthropologist’ Free on November Eleventh

Rising Sun Insider John Craig Releases First Chapter of his Novel ‘Japanthropologist’ Free on November Eleventh

(PRWEB) November 8, 2010

John Craig is the world’s first Japanthropologist, a cultural and linguistic expert highly familiar with the world’s least known country. He is an expert in the language and has worked as a translator and interpreter for leading edge scientists, thinkers and politicians. As a writer he has published 25 books dealing with the phenomenon of information and time acceleration, psychology, physics, ancient history and pilgrimage. He is a documentary film maker, public speaker and was the first person to teach remote viewing in Japan. All of this background has combined with his unique connection to Japan’s underworld, the yakuza, to create a one of a kind novel.

Entitled simply ‘Japanthropologist’ it is based on the true story not only of the yakuza hiring him to make a film about 2012 but is also a prophetic look at why we should take the ideas concerning 2012 more seriously. In it the plot unfolds in four countries along with leading edge insights into plasma physics, ancient cultures, alchemy and DNA research. It is both a brilliant fantasy and a highly possible future scenario for a world spiraling deeper into chaos by the minute.

The least likely characters in the redemption of a current world that seems hell bent on destruction are the yakuza, the main characters in this story. Feared in Japan and now well known in films internationally for their tattooed backs and their samurai swords, their inside world is revealed through their dealings with the plot’s hero-a fallen Jesuit priest. These damaged souls are led on a quest that takes them to an MI6 British psychic, an alchemically coded cross in France, a time traveling group in Italy and finally to a soul stirring ceremony with a wizened jungle shaman in Peru.

The conclusion is as startling as the very research that laid the foundation for this novel. After 25 non-fiction books John Craig, the Japanthropologist, weaves a tale of two worlds that just might be true. Though the characters have been altered to save the author from persecution in Japan there can be no doubt that the reader will know the truth. The yakuza know about 2012 and are actively preparing for a new world order centered on the imperial Japanese system. It was for that reason they arranged for the author of this novel to receive a highly coveted cultural award in 2009 in their attempt to buy his loyalty to their cause. After failing to complete the production of a 2012 documentary with the author as its central character John Craig left their seedy world in disgust. What honour? What samurai spirit? In revenge for the hijacking of his name and his work by the yakuza John Craig has written a book that brings to a completion his relationship with them and with Japan. The entire novel crackles with the energy of this truth.

The first chapter, a short story in itself will be released for free from November 11th 2010.

http://www.japanthropologist.com

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John W. Whitehead: The State of the Nation: Are We “Approaching Spiritual Death”?

John W. Whitehead: The State of the Nation: Are We “Approaching Spiritual Death”?
Fifty years ago, President Dwight D. Eisenhower cautioned the American people against an expansion of America’s military empire. To our detriment, we failed to heed Eisenhower’s warning.
Read more on The Huffington Post

Woman Stabs Boyfriend Over Facebook Page
Ac ouple in Indiana are making headlines after an altercation over Facebook led to one of them getting stabbed.
Read more on Hip-Hop Wired

Police: Armed home invasion was set-up
Two men were robbed at knifepoint after a pair of women, one with a young child, set them up for a home invasion, police said.
Read more on New Hampshire Union Leader

The Henry Rollins Show – The Corruption of Election 2008

Gore Vidal exposes the true intentions of the Bushites based on wisdom and known political patterns and their results.
Link to my site http://warholiansuperstar.com/

Duration : 0:8:51

Read more…

The Normal State of Man: Misery & Tyranny

Professor Milton Friedman gives a fascinating conjecture on the “Golden Ages” of different societies throughout history. He also points out the fundamental flaw inherent in every welfare state.

Excerpt from “The Open Mind” – A Nobel Laureate on the American Economy (1977)
http://www.theopenmind.tv/searcharchive_episode_output.asp?id=493

Duration : 0:9:7

Read more…

Gov. Rod Blagojevich

You’d think that the past history of so many Illinois Governors going to jail would have sent a message to Rod Blagojevich that he needed to mind his manners. One would also think that on the heals of the Rezko scandal to which Blagojevich was associated with and still under investigation that he would be more than careful. Ah, but we’re talking Cook (Crook) County, Illinois now aren’t we! 

Gov. Rod Blagojevich and his chief of staff, John Harris, were arrested by FBI agents on federal corruption charges Tuesday morning. Blagojevich and Harris were arrested simultaneously at their homes at about 6:15 a.m., according to Frank Bochte of the FBI. Both were transported to FBI headquarters in Chicago.

In one charge related to the appointment of a senator to replace Barack Obama, prosecutors allege that Blagojevich sought appointment for himself as secretary of Health and Human Services in the new Obama administration, or a lucrative job with a union, in exchange for appointing a union-preferred candidate.

Blagojevich and Harris, along with others, obtained and sought to gain financial benefits for the governor, members of his family and his campaign fund in exchange for appointments to state boards and commissions, state jobs and state contracts, according to the charges. “The breadth of corruption laid out in these charges is staggering,” U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald said in a statement.

And Barack Obama has to be excited that the primary season is over since a grand jury has now gotten involved in the Rezko-Obama land sale. A former Illinois bank official, now claiming whistleblower status, says bank officials replaced a loan reappraisal that he prepared for a Chicago property that was purchased by the wife of now-convicted felon Tony Rezko, part of which was later sold to next-door neighbor Barack Obama.

Raw red meat for Hannity and El Rushbo!

In a complaint filed Thursday in the Circuit Court of Cook County, Kenneth J. Connor said that his reappraisal of Rita Rezko’s property was replaced with a higher one and that he was fired when he questioned the document. The complaint also said that the grand jury wanted information on Mrs. Rezko’s checking account and loan file and that the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. (FDIC) had audited the Rezko file – although Mr. Connor’s lower reappraisal had been replaced with a higher amount. “Connor’s internal whistle-blowing activity at Mutual Bank implicates Mutual Bank and the potentially guilty officers thereof to prosecution under federal and Illinois statutes,” said the complaint, filed by attorney Glenn R. Gaffney.

It’s just politics as usual!

Cook county politics especially.

Ernie Fitzpatrick
http://www.articlesbase.com/politics-articles/gov-rod-blagojevich-677051.html

“Unquenchable Russia”, or Forbidden Themes in Nabokov’s Prose

“…What I feel to be the real modern world is the world the artist creates, his own mirage, which becomes a new mir (“world” in Russian) by the very act of his shedding, as it were, the age he lives in” . Such an answer Nabokov once gave to an interviewer who was interested in his opinion regarding the modern world and contemporary politics. The book which contains this interview as well as many others, is entitled Strong Opinions, and, indeed, Nabokov is well-known not only for his brilliant fiction but for his original, independent and uncompromising views on creativity, art and the place of artist in the world. Whenever interviewed, he avoided discussion of “general ideas” such as social, political and moral issues and asserted that such global concerns lay outside the realm of art: “A work of art has no importance whatever to society. It is only important to the individual, and only the individual reader is important to me. I don’t give a damn for the group, the community, the masses, and so forth… There can be no question that what makes a work of fiction safe from larvae and rust is not its social importance but its art, only its art . A work of art, for Nabokov, is a world in itself, brought to life by one’s creative imagination. It leads its own independent existence, unrelated to its historical surroundings and realities. In the introduction to his Lectures on Literature Nabokov explains once again: “…The real writer, the fellow who sends planets spinning and models a man asleep and eagerly tampers with the sleeper’s rib, that kind of author has no given values at his disposal: he must create them himself. The art of writing is a futile business if it does not imply first of all the art of seeing the world as the potentiality of fiction” . In this statement, visions of cosmic grandeur and an obvious reference to the story of Adam and Eve reflect a parallel between creator-artist and creator-God. In one of his interviews Nabokov explicitly brings out this comparison: “A creative writer must study carefully the works of his rivals, including the Almighty. He must possess the inborn capacity not only of recombining but of re-creating the given world” .

Nabokov’s position is, to a degree, a reaction to the situation in Soviet Russia, where demands of the state dominated the needs of a human being, where the individual was suppressed by the collective and details by generalities. He asserts once again the power and independence of personal creativity, the ability of one’s imagination to build worlds of its own, and makes a sharp distinction between a work of fiction and everything outside of it, including the personality of its creator. “Literature is invention. Fiction is fiction. To call a story a true story is an insult to both truth and art” .

Nabokov insisted on a specific approach to literature from the readers as well. He renounced the usual tendencies of identifying oneself with a book’s characters, searching for clues to the social and political realities of the time the work was written, or trying to form “general ideas” about a book without absorbing all its specific details. Emotional involvement, he pointed out, could also prevent the reader from objective appreciation of the work “…A wise reader reads the book of genius not with his heart, not so much with his brain, but with his spine. It is there that occurs the telltale tingle even though we must keep a little aloof, a little detached when reading” .

Nabokov avoided formulating his ideas under the famous slogan “art for art’s sake” just as he avoided labels of all kinds, but this well-known phrase can undoubtedly be used to describe his views and attitudes towards literature. In this hierarchy of values, aesthetic concerns dominate all others, and the influence of a great work of art on its reader is limited to a “tingle in the spine”. However, it remains to be seen, to what extent Nabokov’s ideas penetrate his own fiction; whether his novels are entirely a product of his creative imagination or a result of the deep personal experience that saturates them with great intensity.

Nabokov changed countries and languages during his creative life, and it is interesting to analyze whether these changes affected his books. Comparing two of Nabokov’s novels, The Gift, written in Russian mostly in Berlin of the 1930s, and Pale Fire, written in English at a much later date, can provide an insight into these questions.

As Nabokov mentioned in the foreword to The Gift, “the main heroine” of the novel is Russian literature, and the main character is a writer, an emigre author Fyodor Godunov-Cherdyntsev, who shares many autobiographical details with Nabokov. Like Nabokov during his post-Cambridge years, Fyodor lives in Berlin of the 1920s, writes poetry and makes a living by giving lessons in English and French. He leads, for the most part, a solitary existence, devoting his time first and foremost to literature. Happy childhood in St. Petersburg, love of butterflies and chess problems, synesthesia, – all this Fyodor has in common with Nabokov. Description of certain episodes mirrors incidents from Nabokov’s own life, depicted much later in his autobiographical book Speak, Memory, – for example, the story of a childhood illness: high fever, obsession with numbers and a huge Faber pencil, given as a gift by the mother.

Perhaps, the most significant trait that Fyodor shares with Nabokov is passionate love of literary language, faith in the power of the written word: “Since there were things he (Fyodor) wanted to express just as naturally as unrestrainedly as the lungs want to expand, hence words suitable for breathing ought to exist” . Fyodor reflects on his youthful interest in rhyme and meter, analyzing the very mechanisms by which words interact and fit together like pieces of a puzzle to form the harmonious whole of a poem. Fyodor shares Nabokov’s dislike of generalities such as social issues or psychiatry. When he briefly considers the possibility of fulfilling his acquaintance, Mme. Chernyshevski’s yet unvoiced request to write about her son, he explains his aversion to the idea as follows: “I would have become enmired involuntarily in a “deep” social-interest novel with a disgusting Freudian reek” .

Most clearly, Fyodor’s (and Nabokov’s) views on literature are expressed in Fyodor’s (imaginary) conversations with Koncheyev – a fellow emigre poet, the only one whose work he admires and whose opinions he considers valuable. When Fyodor and Koncheyev leave a literary gathering and walk together down the street, a unique, brilliant dialogue, filled with allusions to various works of Russian literature, takes place between them. “…There are only two kinds of books: bedside and wastebasket. Either I love a writer fervently, or throw him away entirely” , – declares Fyodor, and the two proceed to discuss what, in their opinion, is the best and the worst in the works by famous Russian writers. Both are utterly uninterested in “general ideas” or the moral significance of the writings they talk about (aspects which always attracted Russian critics and gained new importance in the Soviet period), and all they do is lovingly point out purely artistic findings of this or that writer. They praise Leskov’s Jesus – “the ghostly Galilean, cool and gentle, in a robe the color of ripening plum” or “the gray sheen of Mme. Odintsev’s black silks” in Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons. Speaking of dismissed Dostoyevski, Fyodor notes: “In the Karamazovs, there is somewhere a circular mark left by a wet wine glass on an outdoor table”, – and that, for him, is the only thing “worth saving” . As for several writers known for their beautiful depictions of nature, Fyodor ruthlessly criticizes them for mistakes in their descriptions of natural phenomena: “My father used to find all kinds of howlers in Turgenev’s and Tolstoy’s hunting scenes and descriptions of nature, and as for the wretched Aksakov, let’s not even discuss his disgraceful blunders in this field” . All these statements obviously echo Nabokov’s own approach to literature, with his love of detail, his insistence on accurate knowledge of the natural world and dismissal of any other criteria in judging works of literature.

Nabokov’s belief in the power of deception and invention in creating fiction frequently finds expression in his attempts to mislead the reader, to establish this or that false move in the development of the plot, which, after a few pages, turns out to be an illusion, a figment of the character’s imagination. The whole exchange between Fyodor and Koncheyev proves to be such an illusion: “Whose business is it that actually we parted at the very first corner, and that I have been reciting a fictitious dialogue with myself as supplied by a self-teaching handbook of literary inspiration?” However, the significance of this non-existent conversation in the novel is not limited to expression of opinions on art and display of Nabokov’s mystification devices. It shows the extent of Fyodor’s loneliness, the absence of interlocutors with whom he could share his extensive knowledge of literature and love of language: the degree of detachment from the surrounding world. In his book Speak, Memory Nabokov describes the way native Europeans were perceived by Russian immigrants in Germany or France: “These aborigines were to the mind’s eye as flat and transparent as figures cut out of cellophane, and although we used their gadgets, applauded their clowns, picked their roadside plums and apples, no real communication, of the rich human sort so widespread in our own midst, existed between us and them” . The Gift recreates that atmosphere of cultural and human isolation in which Fyodor has to dwell. Deprived of his own cultural environment, Fyodor feels nothing but resentment towards the German-speaking world he is trapped in. “The Russian conviction that the German is in small numbers vulgar and in large numbers – unbearably vulgar was, he knew, a conviction unworthy of an artist” , – and still he cannot help it, as he directs all his irrational hatred at a German who pushes him in a bus (and who, ironically, turns out to be a Russian).

Like Nabokov, Fyodor is trilingual, but his French and English in his current situation serve a purely utilitarian purpose, whereas Russian remains the language of his soul and his art. Riding a bus to one of his tedious teaching jobs, Fyodor thinks of himself: “…there he is, a special, rare and as yet undescribed and unnamed variant of man, and he is occupied with God knows what, rushing from lesson to lesson, wasting his youth on a boring and empty task, on the mediocre teaching of foreign languages – when he has his own language, out of which he can make anything he likes – a midge, a mammoth, a thousand different clouds” . This is why there are hardly any examples of word play and language switch in The Gift.

On the way to yet another hateful lesson Fyodor becomes completely immersed in the memories of Russia and his past life there, – memories ”swift and senseless, visiting him like an attack of a fatal illness at any hour, in any place” . The warm, sunny vision of the Russian countryside after a short summer rain stands out in such a sharp contrast with the surrounding colorless reality and the upcoming encounter with a hopeless pupil, that Fyodor ends up skipping the lesson and going home to his writings. This is another theme expressed in The Gift with great emotional power – the theme of nostalgia, longing for the lost homeland. Whenever faced with the question about Russia during his interviews, Nabokov gave replies such as “all the Russia I need is always with me” or “exile means to an artist only one thing – the banning of his books” . Sometimes, however, he speaks of Russia quite differently: “In the first decade of our dwindling century, during trips with my family to Western Europe, I imagined, in bedtime reveries, what it would be like to become an exile who longed for a remote, sad and (right epithet coming) unquenchable Russia, under the eucalypti of exotic resorts. Lenin and his police nicely arranged the realization of that fantasy” .

References to Russia in Nabokov’s novels, particularly The Gift, bear a trace of an overwhelming and bitter sense of loss, coming, undoubtedly, from personal experience. Like Nabokov, Fyodor transforms his inner world into art, and his poetry, born out of childhood memories, justifies, as he says, the years spent in exile. But even creative fulfillment in literature cannot fully relieve Fyodor of his nostalgia, which sometimes becomes almost a physical sensation: “For a long time he had wanted to express somehow that it was in his feet that he had the feeling of Russia, that he could touch and recognize all of her with his soles, as a blind man feels with his palms” . Again and again, he imagines an impossible return to his familiar and changed country: “And when will we return to Russia? What idiotic sentimentality, what a rapacious groan must our innocent hope convey to people in Russia. But our nostalgia is not historical – only human- how can one explain this to them?” Immediately following these lines is one of Nabokov’s central thoughts expressed through the words of his character and given a somewhat ironic ending: “It is easier for me, of course, than for another to live outside Russia, because I know for certain that I shall return – first because I took away the keys to her, and secondly because, no matter when, in a hundred, two hundred years, I shall live there in my books – or at least in some researcher’s footnote. There; now you have a historical hope, a literary-historical one…”

In this passage, there are two distinct perspectives on Russia, two different ways of perception – that of an artist and that of a simple human being, and it is the more independent, proud and detached position of an artist that Nabokov prefers to present to the world. He always vigorously protested against being identified with his characters, and, perhaps, it was his way of concealing that part of himself, which contained his own human feelings and dreams, often painful, often helplessly irresolvable. Nevertheless, just like in one of Fyodor’s childhood memories colors leak into his vision of letters and irrevocably affect his perception of language, this private and forbidden world of Nabokov inevitably enters his fiction in various guises and through different characters. Besides the theme of nostalgia, there is another highly personal development of the plot in The Gift, and it is Fyodor’s relationship with his father. Konstantin Godunov-Cherdyntsev is an explorer who is also very absorbed in his occupation and uninterested in the major upheavals that occur in Russia. In 1917, despite the troubled situation in Russia, he departs on one of his expeditions and never returns. It is another loss that haunts Fyodor: even though there is hardly any hope of seeing his father again, he keeps dreaming of his return, imagining that one day he would meet his father on the street, or hear a phone call… In one of the most poignant episodes in the novel, the phone rings, after all, in the middle of the night, and Fyodor rushes to the house of his former landlady along the streets of Berlin which suddenly become transformed into a beautiful, mysterious world somewhat reminiscent of St. Petersburg in a white night. Fyodor enters the room and sees his father. “With a moan and a sob Fyodor stepped toward him, and in the collective sensation of woolen jacket, big hands and the tender prickle of trimmed mustaches there swelled an ecstatically happy, living, enormous, paradisal warmth in which his icy heart melted and dissolved” . And again, almost unbearably this time, the whole scene turns out to be one of Nabokov’s false twists, and Fyodor wakes up from yet another dream to a cold and empty morning.

Nabokov denied a work of art any kind of “truth” aside from artistic one, but the episode with Fyodor’s father radiates with human truth: warmth, longing, vulnerability, the void of shattered hopes… One just has to remember the tragic death of Nabokov’s own father, to understand where all this is coming from.

In The Gift, covers are often transparent, and its hero is presented from multiple angles. He is not just a writer who “treats life as a possibility of fiction”, he is a human being who sees the world through the prism of his own experience, his own joys and sorrows.

The Gift was the last novel Nabokov wrote in Russian. In 1940, he immigrated to the United States and, since then, wrote his major works only in English. The change, as he said, was not easy: “My complete switch from Russian prose to English prose was exceedingly painful – like learning anew to handle things after losing seven or eight fingers in an explosion” . Pale Fire, one of Nabokov’s English novels, was written partially at the end of his stay in America, partially in Switzerland, where Nabokov spent his later years. The novel has important structural and thematic similarities to The Gift. Like The Gift, where a whole separate chapter is devoted to Fyodor’s biography of Chernyshevsky, a book on its own, Pale Fire contains a work of literature within it – a long poem written by an American poet John Shade. The rest of the novel is a commentary, which for the most part has nothing to do with the poem itself. It is an elaborate story of remote Zembla, whose king has been swept off the throne by the revolution and fled the country. Gradually, it becomes clear that Charles Kinbote, Shade’s neighbor and the author of the commentary, is himself the fugitive king. Therefore, as in The Gift, there is a theme of exile and a theme of creativity, though in Pale Fire they take quite a different development.

As Kinbote explains, “the name Zembla is a corruption not of the Russian zemlya, but of Semblerland, a land of reflections, of “resemblers” . Zemblan language resembles several European languages at the same time. There are obvious traces of Russian in it, and some words are borrowed almost unchanged: for example, there is a picture of bogtyr (bogatyr’ in Russian) in a Zemblan history book, and there are “stone-faced, square-shouldered komizars” (Russian: commissar) maintaining order on Zemblan streets after the revolution. Besides, French and German can be vaguely discerned in other phrases. “Minnamin, Gut mag alkan, Pern dirstan (my darling, God makes hungry, the Devil thirsty)” , – a Zemblan nurse says to Kinbote, and one hears, besides the Russian “alkat’” and, possibly, the English “pernicious”, “mon amie”, “Gott”, and the first person of the German “mochten”.

Nabokov in his interviews stressed that Zembla is not Russia, and, indeed, there is another Russia in the novel, a totalitarian state that contributes to the Zemblan revolution. Kinbote talks about “the tainted gold and the robot troops that a powerful police state from its vantage ground a few sea miles away was pouring into the Zemblan Revolution” . Kinbote’s constantly talks about Zembla, but his memories of it lack that depth of human feeling, which marks Fyodor’s nostalgia. Even though Kinbote repeats again and again “my Zembla”, “dazzling Zembla” , tenderness that shines through the best pages of The Gift, is missing from his story. It is essentially a story of himself and his escape from the country. For a king, Kinbote shows a remarkable lack of interest in the revolution that struck his country and the possible causes which led to it. He is more preoccupied with aesthetic and literary pleasures and calls the whole business of politics “a tiresome subject” . As for the revolution, all he can say about it is that it was “tedious and unnecessary” . In Kinbote’s attitude, there is some of Nabokov’s own indifference towards social and political issues. On the whole, the theme of exile is treated in the novel with certain coldness and detachment, but there are passages, which by their warmth and profound lyricism can be compared to The Gift. For example, Kinbote comments on his roommate who gets up early in morning and plants flowers with a very curious name: Heliotropium turgenevi. “This is the flower whose odor evokes with timeless intensity the dusk, and the garden bench, and a house of painted wood in a distant northern land” . Even aside from the reference to Turgenev, it is clear that this land, for Nabokov, is no other than Russia, – not the monstrous police state in the vicinity of Zembla, but the real, immortal, beloved Russia of Nabokov’s memory. And this short passage retains more emotional freshness and power than colorful descriptions of Zemblan mountains that have no counterpart in the author’s childhood recollections.

It seems that, to Kinbote, being in exile means not so much the loss of the homeland as the loss of his name and title (which he now has to hide), and thus partially the loss of his identity, and in this way his isolation and detachment is more complete than that of Fyodor in The Gift. One of the critics of Pale Fire interprets his behavior as follows: “…he is trying to get the poet John Shade to confirm his identity, to validate the Zemblan reality which is his hope of salvation by turning it into a poem” . With maniacal persistence Kinbote keeps talking with Shade about Zembla: “I mesmerized him with it, I saturated him with my vision, I pressed upon him, with a drunkard’s wild generosity, all that I was helpless myself to put into verse” . Kinbote calls his relationship with the poet “friendship”, but, in fact, he cannot care less about Shade as a human being with his own hopes and sorrows. While commenting on the poem, he utterly neglects the parts about Shade’s wife and daughter. Sybil Shade, who protects her husband from his neighbor’s intrusions, for Kinbote, is just as annoying obstacle in the way, and to him, the tender lines that Shade devotes to his wife are nothing but “embarrassing intimacies” . Kinbote haughtily deals with the theme of Shade’s daughter, Hazel’s, suicide, obviously a very painful and personal subject for the poet, as if it was merely a stylistic device: “The whole thing strikes me as too labored and long, especially since the synchronization device has been already worked to death by Flaubert and Joyce” . When Kinbote feels lonely and afraid in his empty house, he wishes that Shade had a heart attack, – just to have an excuse to come over and escape loneliness and fear. At the end of the novel, when Shade has been mistakenly shot by the assassin, his “friend” is in no hurry to call for help: instead, he rushes to hide the poem, which, he thinks, contains the story of his own life.

In comparison to Kinbote, John Shade appears to be a much more appealing character, and he possesses some traits that bring more human warmth into his image: he can be lazy, he likes hearty meals, brandy and wine; he loves his wife and daughter and is generally more tolerant towards people who are not as bright and talented as he is. Nabokov gives his character some of his most cherished thoughts. For example, Shade, who is also a teacher of literature, expresses his views on teaching: “First of all, dismiss ideas, and social background, and get the freshman to shiver, to get drunk on the poetry of Hamlet or Lear, to read with his spine and not with his skull” . However, since Shade’s personality is seen in the novel only through Kinbote’s uncaring eyes, his inner world is more or less concealed from the reader. It is only through Shade’s poem that one can glimpse into the questions, which preoccupy the poet. The poem, on the whole, is a painful, difficult search for meaning, an attempt to make sense of the whole puzzle of human life and death, to find a way of transcending one’s mortality. No human thought or emotion can relieve one from being trapped in one’s own finite world. Everything fails except art: art for its own sake, art that contains a unique, perfectly harmonized inner reality, which can be perceived as a reflection of a greater pattern:

I feel I understand

Existence, or at least a minute part,

Of my existence, only through my art,

In terms of combinational delight…

“Combinational delight”, indeed, is important not only in Shade’s poem but in the whole novel. As in The Gift, artistic detail is a focus of concentration in Pale Fire, but here attention is focused on an even subtler level where language itself is analyzed. Pale Fire is an example of extremely dense prose where individual words are more than just carriers of meaning: they become, in a way, themselves a subject of the novel. One of Shade’s warmest images of his family together is a memory of the evenings when both he and Sybil helped their daughter to understand really obscure words from her English textbook. A difference of one letter in the words “mountain” and “fountain” becomes crucial in the story of Shade’s attempt to penetrate the mystery of the hereafter. The book is filled with examples of word play, often involving several languages, and references to numerous works of literature (some of which are likely to be Nabokov’s own inventions). In Shade’s poem, there are such peculiar combinations as: “Fra Karamazov, mumbling his inept all is allowed” , which is a mixture of Alyosha Karamazov, Raskol’nikov, and, perhaps, Italian painter Fra Angelico with his intensely spiritual religious art. But nobody in the novel is more involved in digging into words than Kinbote. He is constantly preoccupied with deciphering literary allusions, musing over interplay of words, meanings, rhymes and sounds. Nabokov mentioned in his lectures that a dictionary should be a necessary attribute of a good reader, and, ironically, Kinbote, who can hardly be called a good reader, dutifully follows the lines of Shade’s masterpiece with his dictionary. For the most part, he is obsessively searching references to Zembla and his own life story in the poem, but sometimes he simply takes aesthetic pleasure in certain lines of it:

“Lines 131-132: I was the shadow of the waxwing slain by feigned remoteness in the windowpane.

The exquisite melody of the two lines opening the poem is picked up here. The repetition of that long-drawn note is saved from monotony by the subtle variation in line 132 where the assonance between its second word and the rhyme gives the ear a kind of languorous pleasure as would the echo of some half-remembered sorrowful song…” Shade’s commentator genuinely enjoys the magic of words, and so does Nabokov, whose multilingualism, artistic sense and incomparable mastery of language found full expression in the creation of the truly marvelous poem, as well as other parts of the novel.

Perhaps, the refined world of literature allows Kinbote a way of escape from his troubled personal reality, and so it does for Shade, and, to a degree, for Fyodor in The Gift, and, ultimately, for Nabokov. In his commentary, Kinbote recounts an episode when someone in the presence of Shade tells a story of a mad railroad worker, who “thought he was God and began redirecting the trains”. “That (“mad”) is the wrong word”, – he (Shade) said. – “One should not apply it to a person who deliberately peels off a drab and unhappy past and replaces it with a brilliant invention” . Still, comparison of Nabokov’s novels shows that the most “brilliant invention” becomes truly alive only if the light of one’s own human experience, however “drab and unhappy”, illuminates it from within. In Pale Fire the walls sheltering Nabokov’s private world of memory and feeling are thicker than in The Gift, and the novel follows more closely Nabokov’s ideas of art as elegant deception, an entirely invented world which should be approached on aesthetic rather than emotional grounds. This is the major difference between Pale Fire and The Gift.

Time is likely to be one of the factors behind this change: Pale Fire was written almost twenty years later than The Gift, as greater and greater distance separated Nabokov from his Russian past with which he had stronger emotional bond than with the years spent abroad. Another important factor is, probably, language. Nabokov was very proud of his English works and repeatedly called himself an American writer, but sometimes he provided his readers with unexpected revelations such as: “My private tragedy, which cannot, indeed should not, be anybody’s concern, is that I had to abandon my natural language, my natural idiom, my rich, infinitely rich and docile Russian tongue, for a second-rate brand of English” . In another interview, when asked which language he considered the most beautiful, Nabokov replied: “My head says English, my heart, Russian, my ear, French” . It is possible to say that for him Russian conveyed emotional power, while English had more of an intellectual appeal, and this is one of the reasons why Pale Fire, written in English, appeals to the brain more than it does to feelings.

One of the most striking confessions that bridges Nabokov’s inner world with his public self exists in a poem. An Evening of Russian Poetry, written in English in 1945, is a rhymed presentation of a public lecture which Nabokov gives to an audience of American students, predominantly female. Russian poetry is the theme of the lecture, but Nabokov approaches it in the way typical for him: he does not talk about schools, trends and periods. Again, he speaks of letters, shapes, individual intricate details, and hidden tenderness shines through his words, staying invisible for his listeners. They ask him questions about his favorite trees and stones, echoing that insensitive critic from The Gift, whose “discussion of Koncheyev’s book boiled down to his answering for the author a kind of implied questionnaire (Your favorite flower? Favorite hero? Which virtue do you prize most?)” In Nabokov’s discussion of Pushkin and Nekrasov everything merges and melts together: the sky and the grass, the beauty of verse and human feeling, – and inevitable theme of exile. Nabokov speaks of memories, saying openly: “I must remind you in conclusion that I am followed everywhere and that space is collapsible” . His private tragedy is lost on his young listeners, whose innocent inquiry prompts what becomes the most remarkable ending of a poem:

How would you say “delightful talk” in Russian?

How would you say “good night”?

Oh, that would be:

Bessonnitza, tvoy vzor oonyl i strashen;

lubov moya, otstoopnika prostee.

(Insomnia, your stare is dull and ashen,

my love, forgive me this apostasy.)

All of Nabokov’s carefully hidden private world that, he insists, “cannot, indeed should not, be anybody’s concern”, is suddenly revealed in these poignant lines: long nights, loneliness, the feeling of guilt over abandoning one’s language and nostalgia for inaccessible, unforgettable, “unquenchable Russia”.

Bibliography

1). Kernan, Alvin B. “Reading Zemblan: The Audience Disappears in Nabokov’s Pale Fire”. Vladimir Nabokov (Modern Critical Views). Ed. Harold Bloom. Chelsea House Publishers, 1987. 101-125.

2). ???????, ????????. ???. ??????: ??????, 1990.

3). Nabokov, Vladimir. The Gift. New York: Capricorn Books, G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1970.

4). —. Lectures on Literature. Harcourt Brace & Company, 1982.

5). —. Pale Fire. New York: Quality Paperback Book Club, 1993.

6). —. Poems and Problems. McGraw-Hill International, Inc. 1970.

7). —. Speak, Memory. New York: Quality Paperback Book Club, 1993.

8). —. Strong Opinions. McGraw-Hill International, Inc. 1973.

Elena Koutcherova
http://www.articlesbase.com/fiction-articles/unquenchable-russia-or-forbidden-themes-in-nabokovs-prose-204030.html

Hell or Heaven: Firsthand Authors Describe your Fate

Our earthly existence demands that we plan for our future in the best way that we can. We must conduct our affairs in this life in a prudent manner regarding investments, education, insurance and such to guide us towards the goal of safety and contentment. But what about a strategy regarding the afterlife when our brief stay on this planet is over?

Bill Wiese and Don Piper are two authors who describe in vivid detail the ultimate outcomes of our worldly lives in books respectively entitled “23 Minutes in Hell: One Man’s Story About What He Saw, Heard, and Felt in that Place of Torment” and “90 Minutes in Heaven: A True Story of Death and Life”. The aptly named books describe firsthand the reality of two extreme destinations one of which lies ahead of each of us according to our own freewill choices.

Wiese’s “23 Minutes in Hell” began at 3:00 a.m. on Monday, November 23, 1998 when he found himself being hurled through the air completely out of control before landing in what appeared to be a prison cell. He was “fully awake and cognizant” throughout the entire event during which he was led to experience a peril well beyond what can be imagined in this life.

“There is never any peace of mind. No rest from the torments, the screams, the fear, the thirst, the lack of breath, no sleep, the stench, the heat, the hopelessness, and the isolation from people.” Bill adds that “this place was so terrifying, so intense, and so hostile that it would be impossible for me to exaggerate the horror.” The hideous, seething creatures together with an overwhelming sense of hopelessness made one trapped in a “sea of tormented souls”.

The other end of the spectrum is explained by Don Piper’s “90 Minutes in Heaven” which describes his experience while declared dead after his car was struck by an eighteen-wheeler at about 11:45 a.m. on January 18, 1989. He was greeted in the heavenly realm by what he called a “celestial welcoming committee” of incredibly joyous people whom he had known previously that had passed on from earthly life.

Piper described the sensational level of bliss by stating that “everything I experienced was like a first-class buffet for the senses. I had never felt such powerful embraces or feasted my eyes on such beauty. Heaven’s light and texture defy earthly eyes or explanation. Warm, radiant light engulfed me. As I looked around, I could hardly grasp the vivid, dazzling colors. Every hue and tone surpassed anything I had ever seen.” Don was in another dimension and felt “fully alive” in a state of awe that human words are not capable of expressing.

The hell and heaven experiences of both authors are precisely in line with another source that has displayed irrefutable accuracy over time. This book is a compilation of 66 works written by about 40 authors over the course of approximately 1,500 years in three different languages on three different continents. The book that calls one’s attention to what awaits all in the afterlife is called the Bible.

The evidence is clear that the Bible gives harsh descriptions in regards to the reality of the “damnation of hell” ( Matthew 23:33 ). It warns of “everlasting destruction” ( II Thessalonians 1:9 ), “place of torment” ( Luke 16:28 ), “fire that never shall be quenched” ( Mark 9:43 ), ), “weeping and gnashing of teeth” ( Luke 13:28 ), “where their worm dieth not” ( Mark 9:44 ), “everlasting fire” ( Matthew 18:8 ), “outer darkness” ( Matthew 8:12 }, and “lake of fire burning with brimstone” ( Revelation 19:20 ) to name but a few of the wake-up calls regarding the “danger of hell fire” ( Matthew 5:22 ).

Heaven, on the other hand, is a place where “they shall hunger no more, neither thirst any more” ( Revelation 7:16 ) and “there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain: for the former things are passed away.” ( Revelation 21: 4 ). It will be an indescribable “eternal weight of glory” ( 2 Corinthians 4:17 ) for those who cherish and abide by the Bible’s teachings. It will be a place of pure love beyond our finite comprehension.

Bill Wiese gives his support and states that “the Bible is far more unique than any other book written. It has been scrutinized by an endless array of scholars, historians, archeologists, scientists, mathematicians, and the like for thousands of years. There have not been any discrepancies or errors that could not be cleared up with good scholarship.”

Bill supports this claim by listing quotes from both acclaimed scholars and respected historical figures who support the absolute reliability of the Bible. Don Piper is also one who conveys his full conviction with respect to the truth of the Scriptures without question.

So what guidelines are to be followed to enter the gates of heaven and avoid the described torments of hell after reading “23 Minutes in Hell” and “90 Minutes in Heaven” and the most popular book in the history of the world? The answer is clearly to pay close attention to the life and teachings of Jesus Christ as the only “mediator between God and men” ( 1 Timothy 2:5 ) to gain our heavenly triumph.

Both Bill Wiese who suffered the anguish of hell and Don Piper who had to leave the indescribable bliss of heaven to an agonizing recovery believe that their lives are meant to tell the world of the consequences that await us all. They are using their experiences to warn anyone and everyone about the realities of what they lived through. They also wish to share the truth that the only way to escape the eternal and hopeless trappings of hell is a commitment to the saving grace of Jesus Christ.

My own unfortunate life events are what led me to find this truth. I have suffered the effects of having been comatose for 11 days, walked away from a burning car wreck, been struck by a Mack truck and have escaped a handful of other potentially deadly or crippling circumstances. Failure has certainly not been a stranger in my life in other ways as well. I share a belief with the authors that my experiences in this life are meant for salvation on both a personal level as well as for readers who simply need to get right with God through Jesus Christ.

My advice? Find and join, if you haven’t already, a true Christian church that bases its teachings strictly on the verses contained in the Bible. Avoid at all costs any “feel good” or watered down alternatives that compromise the truth for the sake of profit or political correctness. Finally, believe the words of Jesus in John 14: 6 of “I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me.” Your eternity depends on it.

( Bill Wiese’s “23 Minutes in Hell: One Man’s Story About What He Saw, Heard, and Felt in that Place of Torment” and Don Piper’s “90 Minutes in Heaven: A True Story of Death and Life” and the Bible can be purchased at http://www.christianbook.com )

Brian Connors
http://www.articlesbase.com/religion-articles/hell-or-heaven-firsthand-authors-describe-your-fate-138609.html

World War II Names Still In Our Vocabulary – Part Three – The Blitz

This is the third of a series of articles that document some of the names, places, catch words, and other items that are now lodged permanently in our vocabulary, History was made some 68 years ago. We dare not forget.

From July to February, the name of the game is football. It starts with the exhibition season and ends with the Super Bowl extravaganza. Out of World War II has come a term about which which we all know. It is called The Blitz.

The blitz is a team defensive move in which the defense sends more players than the offense can block. When the defense is running the blitz, it sends linebackers or even defensive safeties in order to try to tackle the quarterback or disrupt his pass drop. If it works, the quarterback is sacked behind the line of scrimmage for a huge loss. If the quarterback can “read” the defensive signals and pick up the blitz, it means a touchdown. The defensive team is risking its pass defense in order to get to the quarterback. One commentator picked up a verse from the Bible. You either live by the blitz or else die by the blitz.

By nature, blitzes are risky endeavors for the defense. Since the defense is taking away coverage defenders to rush the QB, there necessarily are holes in pass coverage. The defense does not and cannot cover all offensive players, but rather through the blitz, is proactively involved in rattling the QB, sacking the QB, disrupting QB timing, or forcing him to make an error such as an interception or fumble.

The blitz gets its name from the Blitzkrieg, a German strategy of the “Lightning War” during World War II. In World War One, most of the battles were fought in trenches. Both sides fortified their trenches heavily, and ended up taking heavy casualties while gaining little ground. Ironically after World War One, the British devised a new strategy. The strategy was first put forward by Colonel John Fuller, the chief of staff of the British Tank Corps. Fuller was disappointed with the way tanks were used during the First World War and afterwards produced Plan 1919. This included a call for long-range mass tank attacks with strong air, motorized infantry, and artillery support. These ideas were developed in more detail in his books, Reformation of War (1923) and Foundation of the Science of War (1926).

The British Army ignored Fuller’s ideas. However, leaders of the rebuilding German Army studied Fuller’s ideas in detail. They asked the government to commission the production of new tanks that would enable them to use Blitzkrieg tactics in any future conflicts The Germans called the Fuller plan Blitzkreig or Lightning War.

After Adolf Hitler obtained power in 1933, the German government was open about its tank production. In the spring of 1934 the German Army began developing the Panzer tank. Over the next few years the Panzer I, Panzer II, Panzer III and Panzer IV were produced.
During the invasion of Poland in September, 1939, it became clear that the outstanding performer was the Panzer IV as it had the perfect combination of speed, agility, firepower and reliability. Over the next few years it became the backbone of Blitzkrieg and over 9,000 of these tanks were produced.

The success of the Blitzkreig was overwhelming. The Germans finished off Poland in six weeks. It was now France’s turn. On May 10, the blitzkrieg rolled through the Ardennes. In three weeks, the British had to evacuate their entire army at Dunquerque. By mid-June, France had surrendered. The Germans held a victory parade through the Arc De Triumph, something that the French still remember to this day in 2007.

Sir Winston Churchill made a speech. “The Battle of France is over. The Battle of Britain has begun.” The German aerial attacks over England would now be simply called, “The Blitz.” Beginning in August 1940, German bombers visited England every day. By September, the Blitz had failed. The Royal Air Force (RAF) proved it could win over the Luftwaffe.
The Blitz went into night attacks. From September until June 1941, the Luftwaffe visited London from sundown to sunup with incendiary bombs and high explosive weapons. By July 1941, the Blitz had ended. The Luftwaffe was needed to go fight the Soviets. It would now be up to the Soviets to stop the Blitzkreig. However, the Blitz did return to England when the momentum of World War II was on the side of the Allies. It came in the form of the buzz bomb.

In June 1944 the first flying bombs fell on London. They were usually called ‘buzz-bombs’ or ‘doodle-bugs’. At first only one or two fell, but soon it became obvious that a regular bombardment was under way.
The most noticeable aspect of the doodlebugs was their sound, which was quite unlike any ordinary plane. It had a strange tearing and rasping sound, more like a two-stroke motor-cycle.. South London was on their regular flight path, and many of them fell nearby, causing damage and loss of life.

The RAF brought the first jet fighters into operation to try to catch them as they were much faster than piston-engined fighters. They would fly alongside them and flip their wing to spill them harmlessly into the open fields below. Some of them failed to explode and one was put on display at a store in Canterbury.

There is no doubt that these things did a great deal of damage in London within the space of a few weeks. The allied armies were advancing on the launching sites in Northern France and Belgium, and there was concern that they would not get there in time to prevent more damage and loss of life.

Soon, however, the buzz bombs were replaced by the far more frightening V2 weapons. These were rockets proper, much larger and more destructive which gave no notice at all of their arrival. They continued to fall on London at intervals during the last winter of the war, 1944-45. The V-2 ballistic missile (known to its designers as the A4) was the world’s first operational liquid fuel rocket. It represented an enormous quantum leap in technology, financed by Nazi Germany in a huge development program that cost at least $ 2 billion in 1944 dollars. Despite the scale of this effort, the inaccurate missile did not change the course of the war and proved to be an enormous waste of resources.

After the war, personnel and technology from the V-2 program formed the starting point for post-war rocketry development in America, Russia, and France. The Allies seized tons of documents, hundreds of experts, and dozens of V-2 missiles. Emerging from World War II was Dr. Wernher Von Braun

Before the Allied capture of the V-2 rocket complex, Dr. von Braun engineered the surrender of 500 of his top rocket scientists, along with plans and test vehicles, to the Americans. For fifteen years after World War II, Dr. von Braun would work with the United States army in the development of ballistic missiles. As part of a military operation called Project Paperclip, he and his “rocket team” were scooped up from defeated Germany and sent to America where they were installed at Fort Bliss, Texas. There they worked on rockets for the United States army, launching them at White Sands Proving Ground, New Mexico. In 1950 von Braun’s team moved to the Redstone Arsenal near Huntsville, Alabama, where they built the Army’s Jupiter ballistic missile.

In 1960, his rocket development center transferred from the army to the newly established NASA and received a mandate to build the giant Saturn rockets. Accordingly, von Braun became director of NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center and the chief architect of the Saturn V launch vehicle, the superbooster that would propel Americans to the Moon.

Dr. Von Braun also became one of the most prominent spokesmen of space exploration in the United States during the 1950s. In 1970, NASA leadership asked von Braun to move to Washington, DC, to head up the strategic planning effort for the agency. He left his home in Huntsville, Alabama, but after about two years he decided to retire from NASA and to go to work for Fairchild Industries of Germantown, Maryland. He died in Alexandria, Virginia, on 16 June 1977.

And so, the Blitz came peacefully to an end. It is probable that while living in the DC Metro Area, Dr. Von Braun could have watched the Dallas Cowboys run the blitz against the Washington Redskins. Quarterbacks such as Jurgensen, Bradshaw, Namath, Elway, and Manning will know the Blitz in the same way as we all do, every Sunday. Let it stay that way, forever more.

Bob Carper
http://www.articlesbase.com/sports-and-fitness-articles/world-war-ii-names-still-in-our-vocabulary-part-three-the-blitz-122843.html

American Police State, Operation Defuse 12, Fusion Centers & Information Sharing

American Police State, Operation Defuse 12, Fusion Centers & Information Sharing

Texans for Accountable Government and The Liberty Restoration Project talk about the use of fusion centers and information sharing. Originally set up to keep information on terrorists these information centers are now being used to track criminal activity as well private citizen and peaceful dissenters who might be considered a risk.

A Fusion Center is a terrorism prevention and response center that was started as a joint project between the Department of Homeland Security and the US Department of Justices Office of Justice Programs between 2003 and 2007.

The fusion centers gather information not only from government sources, but also from their partners in the private sector.

In this video we hear from John Bush of Texans for Accountable Government. .

Visit the We Are Change Austin Website at;

http://wearechangeaustin.org/

Visit the Operation Defuse Website at;

http://www.operationdefuse.com/

Visit the Texans For Accountable Government Website at;

http://www.tagtexas.org

Visit the Liberty Restoration Project Website at;

http://www.libertyrestorationproject.org/

This video was produced by Psychetruth

http://www.youtube.com/psychetruth

http://www.myspace.com/psychtruth

Music by
Jimmy Gelhaar
www.jimmy.us

Copyright © Target Public Media LLC, 2010. All Rights Reserved.

This video may be displayed in public, copied and redistributed for any strictly non-commercial use in its entire unedited form. Alteration or commercial use is strictly prohibited.

Duration : 0:5:39

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