Friday, August 30, 2019

Pro Clean

Company overview/ Statement of Problem Pro Clean LLC is an old-timer carpet cleaning business. It was owned and managed by Kevin Wilson and located in Knoxville, Tennessee. Wilson had to manage almost all functions of Pro Clean daily activities. In this industry, the problems Pro Clean faced are how to stay competitive and still make above average returns with one of his main competitor the King Rug. King Rug has a resolute business structure and is able to charge its customers with high prices which make King Rug much more profitable than Pro Clean. Another problem that Pro Clean has to face is the rapid expansion process.At the onset of the expansion, the business had started to churn cash as a result of the increased payroll expenses and the lease payments for the company’s vehicles. Wilson’s return on investment was dismal. Cash flow quickly became a problem and Wilson resorted to using his business and personal credit cards to finance his business. Environmental Sc anning/ Stakeholder Analysis Demographics of Pro Clean are composed mostly of customers from Knoxville, TN. Being located in the Suburban district and close to Condominiums near the City Center; most of its customers come from single-income families, above $250,000 annually.Most of these homes had pets/ young children. 20% of the business made up of the regular customers. Economically, Pro Clean is doing fine with its source of Revenue made up of cleaning carpet (77%), upholstery cleaning (9%), area rug cleaning (5%), tile and grout cleaning (5%), carpet and fabric protection (3%), and drapery cleaning for (1%). The culture of the customers of Pro Clean is those of frequent use. Average Pro Clean customers had their carpets cleaned every 12 months.Technologically, Pro Clean had improved from stuffing envelopes with direct mail material, answering phone calls and giving estimates to setting up a webpage so customers can easily and instantly know about the company’s profile and service. Pro Clean is just a local business thus it is not thinking about expanding to another country, however, it sought to expand locally with much difficulty Industry Analysis Pro Clean’s NAICS code is 339994. According to the United Census Bureau, a 339994 is a â€Å"Broom, Brush and Mop Manufacturing† Pro Clean conducts a pure competition in where there are many other competitors selling similar ervice in the industry. Its main competitors are D-Clean, King Rug, Green Clean, Right Clean and Kleen Clean. The industry is a growing market. The market grew approximately 5 percent per year, which was what Wilson’s business averaged as well. Currently, Pro Clean had built up a respectable 5 percent market share in Knoxville Now for Porter’s five forces model of Pro Clean, they are very weak to withstand the threat of new entrants because a number of national janitorial cleaning and carpet cleaning chains were advertising aggressively to establish new fra nchises in the city.The bargaining power of supplier of Pro Clean is rather weak. For a cleaning company, Pro Clean can pretty much buy their source of cleaning products pretty much from different suppliers and switch products without hurting the company’s balance sheet. The bargaining power of buyers of Pro Clean is rather weak also, because the customer can switch to another cleaner company in town where it might have a service which Pro Clean doesn’t have. In addition, there are approximately 60 cleaners in town competing in the same industry as Pro Clean. Substitute products are a huge disadvantage for Pro Clean.Some new customers who are not used to carpet cleaners preferred to buy the cleaning products and do the cleaning by them. The commercial cleaning market was serviced by janitorial service providers that offered a one-stop service to commercial businesses which Pro Clean does not offer. The intensity among the companies is cut throat. The market is very com petitive because the firms have similar service and almost equal status among buyers. The other companies are killing each other to differentiate themselves from their competitors by conducting additional source of revenue.For example, King Rug derives a substantive portion of its revenue from rug cleaning at its place of business and did well with cross selling and up-selling. Pro Clean however, did not successfully up-sell Company Analysis Pro Clean vision is to be the number one carpet and rug cleaners and â€Å"ready to take on even the best in Knoxville† Pro Clean’s mission to accomplish this vision is to â€Å"stay in touch with all its customers by sending out quarterly newsletters. † The current goal of Pro Clean is to organize their organizational structure where it had inaccurately expand too fast and thus hurting company’s current cash flow.To achieve this goal, Wilson had to lay off one of his cleaning technicians. He temporarily transformed t he cleaning technician position to that of sales and office administration. Wilson had to spend his personal time trying to develop the business as well as dealing with administrative and clerical tasks. SWOT ANALYSIS Strength: 1. Pro Clean has 5% overall market share of Knoxville carpet cleaning market 2. Its market shares grows at 5% annually 3. Their business venue is located in the city northeast residential district (most of its customers are residential people) 4.It has loyal customers which generates 60% of its income Weakness: 1. It has a poor organizational structures 2. Lower price charged to its customers making it to have difficulty covering overhead costs 3. It expanded too quickly, making a small return on investment. Opportunities: 1. Pro Clean might be able to target not only residential areas but also commercial as its main competitors do not target commercial areas 2. Pro Clean continue charging a lower price than its main competitor in the rug cleaning business Th reats: . Pro Clean competes in a highly competitive market 2. Other companies might crush Pro Clean by offering a cheaper service fee 3. Any frequent-customers who suddenly become unsatisfied might turn its revenue down. Pro Clean’s philosophy is that â€Å"each and every client is the most important facet of our company†. Pro Clean’s core competency is its ability to make on-site estimate visits, while other competitors gave approximate estimates over the phone and followed up with a detailed price once they were on site to clean.Porter’s value chain of Pro Clean is important to the health of the company. Their network (existing customers, technology and follow ups) are the most crucial in the relation of its income statement. They must keep on doing whatever they do best not to lose any existing customers otherwise the company’s operating income will suffer. STRATEGIC ANALYSIS The corporate strategy of Pro Clean is at a low level because it does not conduct any other form of business other than cleaning services.It has a cost-leadership business strategy as compared to its main competitors; it charged the least fee for cleaning services. Pro Clean ability to keep its existing customers is certainly a positive effect on the company’s image and it also can give a positive â€Å"free advertisement† to these customers’ relatives. The culture of Pro Clean is that the human resource works as a close knit team. While Wilson is out, his employees will routinely visit real estate agents and other referral sources for half of the day while others spent the remainder of the day in the office. ALTERNATIVE/SOLUTIONThe two main problems mention above is the significantly low pricing which makes it unable to cover its overhead costs while its main competitor can; and the other problem is the wrong decision of the expansion which was rather too soon for the company to handle. The main opportunity which Pro Clean might be able to consider is that it should aim for not only residential area carpet cleaning but also commercial area as it will hugely increase the number in their sales. Also, I believe that the expansion has already happened but it produces a little, if any, a positive return on investment.The way I would take advantage of this is to either sell the extra capacity/ plant or to maximize its ability to produce different product/services which might be able to generate more revenue for Pro Clean. For example, not only they do the cleaning business, but they also manufacture their own brand of Pro Clean cleaning products. I believe that Pro Clean can survive if these problems were to be exploited. With additional capital and better company strategies implications, Pro Clean will be able to dominate the cleaning industry locally. End Note Page

Thursday, August 29, 2019

Critical Period and Language Acquisition Essay

Part of the reason why Genie’s case fascinated psychologists and linguists so deeply was that it presented a unique opportunity to study a hotly contested debate about language development. Nativists believe that the capacity for language is innate, while empiricists suggest that it is environmental variables that play a key role. Essentially, it boils down to the age-old nature versus nurture debate. Do genetics or environment play a greater role in the development of language? Nativist Noam Chomsky suggested that the acquisition of language could not be fully explained by learning alone. Instead, he proposed that children are born with a language acquisition device (LAD), an innate ability to understand the principles of language. Once exposed to language, the LAD allows children to learn the language at a remarkable pace. Linguist Eric Lenneberg suggests that like many other human behaviors, the ability to acquire language is subject to what are known as critical periods. A critical period is a limited span of time during which an organism is sensitive to external stimuli and capable of acquiring certain skills. According to Lenneberg, the critical period for language acquisition lasts until around age 12. After the onset of puberty, he argued, the organization of the brain becomes set and no longer able to learn and utilize language in a fully functional manner. Genie’s case presented researchers with a unique opportunity. If given an enriched learning environment, could she overcome her deprived childhood and learn language even though she had missed the critical period? If she could, it would suggest that the critical period hypothesis of language development was wrong. If she could not, it would indicate that Lenneberg’s theory was correct. Genie’s Language Progress Despite scoring at the level of a one-year-old upon her initial assessment, Genie quickly began adding new words to her vocabulary. She started by learning single words and eventually began putting two words together much the way young children do. Curtiss began to feel that Genie would be fully capable of acquiring language. After a year of treatment, she even started putting three words together occasionally. In children going through normal language development, this stage is followed by what is known as a language explosion. Children rapidly acquire new words and begin putting them together in novel ways. Unfortunately, this never happened for Genie. Her language abilities remained stuck at this stage and she appeared unable to apply grammatical rules and use language in a meaningful way. At this point, her progress leveled off and her acquisition of new language halted. While Genie was able to learn some language after puberty, her inability to use grammar (which Chomsky suggests is what separates human language from animal communication) offers evidence for the critical period hypothesis. Of course, Genie’s case is not so simple. Not only did she miss the critical period for learning language, she was also horrifically abused. She was malnourished and deprived of cognitive stimulation for most of her childhood. Researchers were also never able to fully determine if Genie suffered from pre-existing cognitive deficits. As an infant, a pediatrician had identified her as having some type of mental delay. So researchers were left to wonder whether Genie had suffered from cognitive deficits caused by her years of abuse or if she had been born with some degree of mental retardation.

Wednesday, August 28, 2019

Supply Chain Strategy and Technology assignment - 5

Supply Chain Strategy and Technology - Assignment Example Directing tends to motivate the personnel. Normally, the pay for performance is one of the practices employed to encourage the transportation and warehouse personnel to endeavor to attain higher levels of productivity (Ailawadi and Singh 129). The balanced scorecard concept allows logistic managers to balance business perspective, especially in areas of finance, business processes, and customer satisfaction. The managers can analyze the views of the customers regarding the performance and effectiveness of the business (Lai and Cheng 157). Similarly, the concept aids the managers to get the internal view of the process in terms of cost and efficiency with an aim of creating value through improvement. Typically, the managers use the balanced scorecard concept to link business vision and strategies for actual performance, as well as, improvement. The ideal of perfect order is unrealistic operational goal due to the overwhelming challenges in the supply chain. Notably, the challenges in order capture, fulfillment, and channel management, as well as, inconsistencies in pricing render the realization of perfect order unachievable operational goal (Ailawadi and Singh 129). Similarly, the potential for errors, delays, and money wastage are extremely high. Such challenges make the efforts to fulfill the perfect order

The Management of Disasters Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 250 words

The Management of Disasters - Essay Example Disaster management remains an important aspect of State and National management due to the fact that the occurrence and magnitude of most disasters are unpredictable (Kaser, 2007). Due to the severity in the need of ensuring that the occurrence of disasters does not outwit efforts that can be made by government through state institutions in responding effectively to the disasters, there has often been the call for collaboration with other agencies in disaster management in control. One of such agencies is the non-governmental organizations (NGOs). It is agreed that partnership between government agencies and non-governmental organizations can be very important for disaster recovery and response efforts. Generally, disaster response has been said to be the venture that cannot be accurately budgeted for (McKee, Figueras and Chenet, 1998). This is because of the unpredictable nature of disasters. Consequently, the allocation of resources on the part of government is often inadequate an d thus requires additional input from these NGOs. What is next, the management of disasters has been said to be better approached if they will be carried out in a manner that is holistic and community-based (Healy and McKee,1997). Meanwhile, most of these NGOs are community-based and thus have a better understanding of the needs and demands of the indigenes. Their contribution to planning, recovery and response efforts, therefore, become more people-centered (Kaser, 2007). Finally, it has been said that the decentralization of disaster response enhances effectiveness and efficiency. This is because it guarantees that recovery and response efforts will be carried out in a more proactive manner due to the fact that there will be detailed urgency among the local people (Kaser, 2007). What is more, the fact that the process is decentralized means that much can be achieved within a shorter timeframe? Meanwhile collaborating with NGOs is one way of bringing about decentralization of the d isaster response agenda.

Tuesday, August 27, 2019

Sex In Our Society Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 750 words

Sex In Our Society - Essay Example 113). I agree with Joyce Garity that some of the adverts in teen fashion magazines are to blame for deteriorating morals in the society. The adverts are too suggestive that they end up brain washing the innocent children. An advertisement of Liz Claiborne fragrances showing a couple sprawled on their bed is a perfect example. After seeing this, the teenagers start fantasizing and would be tempted to think that their life is not complete if they are not practising the same. They end up trying this, and before they know it, the worst has happened and the consequences are with them. In addition, it is absurd to feature a naked girl in a teen magazine in the name of advertising cologne. Though the company sales will go up, it is not worth the harm it is causing the society. Above buying the cologne, the teenagers may be tempted to pose naked like the girl in the advert. In their minds, they are out to be famous among their peers. However, they may end up engaging in sexual activities that would ruin their young lives (Soble, 2008, P. 96). As Joyce Garity states, any teenager would be excited to see a young couple display affection publicly. In an advert, a young girl is laying on a luxurious bed in a dimly light room with her lover making her nails. If a suggestive picture like this has to appear in a magazine, it should not be a teenage magazine. Teenagers’ minds are easily washed away by anything they lay their eyes on. Within no time, they will go out experimenting on things that may ruin their lives. Teenagers’ world is full of sexual spontaneity and playfulness. They will take less or no time thinking about a responsible life. Instead, they admire musicians, actors, rock stars and other celebrities whose lives are full of sexual drama. These are their role models, and their talk is about which musician has slept with many women. The young adults rush to the

Monday, August 26, 2019

Consumer Law Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2500 words

Consumer Law - Essay Example Consumer protection law is a part of law that regulates personal law relationships between consumers and the firms that sell those products. Consumer protection policies are designed to guarantee fair competition and the free exchange of truthful information in the market arena. These laws are established to prevent businesses that take part in fraud or particular unfair practices from getting an advantage over their competitors and can too offer additional protection for the inferior and those incapable of taking care of themselves. Consumer Protection policies are a type of government directive that protects the welfare of consumers. For instance, a government might require businesses to unveil detailed information concerning products; mainly in areas where safety or health of the public is a concern, like food. Consumer safeguarding is associated to the thought of "consumer rights" as well as to the creation of consumer organizations that assist consumers put together healthier choices in the marketplace. Misleading and deceptive practices are the world over. And the plan is to make the consumers to pay more than they ought to for goods and services, or make them pay for items they don't need. Irrespective of if its misleading advertising, erroneous assumptions, or absolute lies, the outcome is alike: they may pay over what they ought to for what they should get. The interests of consumer can also be protected through enhancing competition in the marketplace that directly and indirectly offer good and services to consumers, steady with economic competence. Consumer protection may too be asserted through non-government organizations and persons as consumer activism. Consumer protection deals with a wide variety of issues, such as privacy rights, product liability, unjust business practices, deception, misrepresentation, and some other consumer/business interactions. These laws handle credit repair, debt repair, goods safety, service and sales deals, bill collector ruling, turnoffs, pricing, utility consolidation, personal loans which may guide to bankruptcy and much more. In Europe, some particular restrictions have been positioned on the standard of party autonomy. Such restrictions naturally apply in circumstances where there occurs a qualified extend of disparity between the parties in regards of their individual negotiating powers. A significant example of such a state of affairs occurs when a business sells products to a consumer and the consumer is deemed as being in an inferior position than the business. Therefore, the jurisdictional regulations in Europe require that the vendor can only take legal action against the consumer in the state where the consumer is dwelling; whereas the consumer can at all times sue the seller in the consumer's state of residence. The EU is dedicated to enhancing the quality of life of its residents. Additionally to direct action to defend their rights, the Union guarantees that consumer interests are put into the EU legislation in every relevant policy field. Because of the sole market and the sole currency open operation borders, as utilization of the internet and electronic commerce develops and as the service division grows, it is significant that the almost 500 million people

Sunday, August 25, 2019

Cost Control and Budgeting in Millennium Seoul Hilton Case Study

Cost Control and Budgeting in Millennium Seoul Hilton - Case Study Example Among these, power or electricity was found to be a major cost contributor. Further analyses revealed that there possibilities the use of electricity can be cut to an optimum level. Reduction of the consumption of power in the hotel would sufficiently reduce operational cost and thereby increase revenue. Based on the problem identified, it is proposed that a power cost saving plan will be developed and implemented. The first step is energy audit which would identify the trend and practices in electrical consumption in all section of the hotel and equate them to the volume of users. Once the information is at hand, areas where reduction can be implemented will be identified. Automated systems will be used instead of manual operations. Electronic devices that detect the optimum level of power needed in a particular area must be installed. For instance, a sensor automatically shuts off a light when there are no more users, etc. The solution will be implemented in few selected area to test the effectiveness. The data prior to implementation and during implementation will be recorded for validation purposes. The affectivity of the systems installed will be evaluated after six months of operation by comparing the consumption rate before and after using the systems. Consumption index will be obtained by dividing power consumption against total persons (consumers and employees). A lower consumption index would mean positive result. If the system is found to be efficient it will be replicated throughout the entire hotel systems.. Table of Contents POWER CONSUMPTION TREND AS POTENTIAL REVENUE ENHANCER FOR MILLENNIUM SEOUL HILTON 1 Management Summary 1 Table of Contents 3 Introduction 4 Findings 5 Analysis/Discussion 6 Recommendations 7 Conclusion 8 Bibliography/References 9 Hilton Hospitality, Inc. 2007. Millennium Seoul Hilton hotel. [Online]. Available: http://www1.hilton.com/en_US/hi/hotel/SELHITW-Millennium-Seoul-Hilton-hotel/index.do (19 October 2007) 9 Review Procedure 10 Introduction The Millennium Seoul Hilton is a Five Star Hotel situated at the foot of Mount Namsan and 1.5 miles from the business district of Seoul City, South Korea. The hotel can be considered a complete facility for business and leisure. For business purposes it has an Executive Lounge, a business center, and 8 meeting rooms that can accommodate 500 persons. It also has high-speed Internet access. Its support amenities for leisure and relaxation include 7 restaurants and bars catering Italian, French, Chinese, and Japanese foods aside from its native Korean specialties. It also has a health club, a golf driving range, a shopping area, a sauna, 82-foot swimming pool, and a well-equipped gym. Millennium Seoul Hilton hotel caters to individuals and families seeking for relaxation and leisure. But its services primarily is aimed on executives seeking for a place to do their business and other functions, meetings, conferences, seminars, and the likes. To suit the needs of the family they have babysitting services, children's video rental, cribs, high chairs, and family package offers. For the convenience of the business costumers they have audio-visual equipment rental, communication facility rental, office space rental, photo copying service, printer, secretarial service, and video conferencing service. The hotel offers several packages for tourists and family trips. The bulk however

Saturday, August 24, 2019

Peddler's Pub & JJ Rossy's Report Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1250 words

Peddler's Pub & JJ Rossy's Report - Essay Example ..8 8. References†¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦..9 Abstract JJ Rossy’s is struggling with the problem of being a bar in a college city that is densely populated. As a bar in the downtown part of Halifax, it caters to students from the local University. JJ Rossy’s faces competition from nightclubs and bars that are within a walking distance. Even though, JJ Rossy’s and Peddler’s, which is its sister bar, are run under similar systems of inventory, JJ Rossy’s has been unable to keep a clientele that is profitable akin to what Peddler has been able to do. The management also needs to come up with a way to stabilize the sales in the bar. The paper gives five alternatives that they can use including downsizing, diversification, modernizing, or a combination of diversification and modernizing. The paper then offers recommendations for JJ Rossyâ₠¬â„¢s problems, as well as an action plan for implementation of these recommendations. Problem Statement Immediate problem: Different from Peddler’s, JJ Rossy’s has unstable sales and is unable to attract profitable clientele consistently. Primary problem: Rossy’s management has not altered its concept of marketing since it was launched. The management has failed in modifying business strategy in order to incorporate the city’s demographics and industry trends. ... While the bar was launched in 1987, it has been run under the assumption that clients will always drink wherever there is entertainment and liquor. The lack of a strategy in marketing that seeks to take advantage of the city’s demographics, consumer psychology, and industry trends, tying it to their layout and capacity. Although the Rossys run both Peddlers and Rossy’s using similar inventory systems and suppliers, Peddlers have sales with more stability. They possess a profitable and loyal client base with all its operations run on the same floor, which makes interactions on an every day basis much easier. They also have a basic strategy in marketing aided by its smaller scale, organized operations, and efficient layout that assures patrons that they can attain straightforward entertainment and quality service every time. JJ Rossy’s, however, cannot profit from a similar concept alone. Since it has three floors and sits 1050 clients, its losses are higher in com parison to a bar that operates on a smaller scale during peak traffic periods when clients are slow in entering. Additionally, while the clients can visit a bar to take lunch, there is less audience during the day on the dance floor, making for inefficient management and bar space utilization. Another reason that makes it essential for JJ Rossy’s to sell more than basic entertainment and liquor is its target audience. Students fill the downtown area looking for the newest trendy joint. JJ Rossy’s bar size is a factor in their favor with students interacting with more people and willing to come back. JJ Rossy’s has the highest capacity for bars targeting those under 25, yet the uninvitingly dark decor is not impressive to them. If not for the dance floor on the upper level, the bar

Friday, August 23, 2019

The Human Microbiota Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 500 words

The Human Microbiota - Essay Example The gut microbiome takes part in broad range host related processes and has remarkable effect on human health (Greenblum, Peter and Elhanan 1). The gut microbiome has been straightforwardly caught up in the etiopathogenesis of a number of pathological conditions. These include: inflammatory bowel diseases (IBD’s), Autism, Circulatory disease and Obesity. In addition to that, gut microbiome also influence: immune system response as well as conditioning, dietary calorific availability, post-surgical recovery and drug toxicity plus metabolism. Gut Microbiome as well conducts significant physiological roles that define the host, such as: intestinal response, immune system maturation, xenobiotic as well as energy metabolism and epithelial cell injury repair (Kinross, Ara and Jeremy 1). The gut microbiome, in most mammals, mainly consists of 4 bacterial phyla that execute most of the various physiological processes in the host, these include: Actino-bacteria, Fermicutes, Proteobacteria as well as Bacteriodetes. Every host has a characteristic biological association with its gut microbiome plus by definition this controls individual threat of disease. Recent advances in systems biology founded on the next generation ‘omics’ techniques have been able to explain the gut microbiome comprehensively at a functional (proteomic, metabolic as well as transcriptomic) and genetic level. Consequently, these studies have generated new knowledge about the gut microbiome’s genetic variability among individuals, species as well as populations. Furthermore, the studies have highlighted the significance of gut microbiome to human health (Kinross, Ara and Jeremy 1). Being aware of the genetic variation of gut microbiomes, within as well as among hosts, would assist in gaining insight into the evolutionary forces that shape these communities. Furthermore, studying the genetic variation of human gut microbiome may well provide insight into budding relations

Thursday, August 22, 2019

Glorious Celebration Essay Example for Free

Glorious Celebration Essay Maya Angelou, born Marguerite Johnson, is regarded as one of the celebrated American writers alive. Besides writing a lot of memorable works, she is also the subject of other authors who have written a lot about her life and works. There is her biography written by two of her friends, Marcia Gillespie and Richard Long, along with her nephew Rosa Butler. Mary Jane Lupton writes a biography-cum-writer’s guide on Maya Angelou’s works. L. Patricia Kite also writes a similar book depicting her life story and so does Jill Egan who highlighted the trials Angelou went through but also the triumphs as well. In his work, Jeffrey Elliot compiled interviews made by several authors on Maya Angelou to create a verbal mosaic of the life and works of the writer. Lyman Hagen makes a critical analysis of her works and managed to find the â€Å"secret† behind the success of Angelou. Priscilla Ramsey makes a critical analysis of Angelou’s poems in a journal. Another analysis is made by William Sylvester. Carol Neubauer analyzes one of her works, The Heart of a Woman to understand the woman behind the words. Sidonie Ann Smith wrote an analysis of Angelou’s first work The Song of a Caged Bird which centers on self-acceptance. Gillespie, M. , Butler, R. J. and Long, R. A. (2008). Maya Angelou: A Glorious Celebration. New York: Doubleday. This biography was written by her friends Gillespie and Long with her nephew Butler. This was written and published in celebration of Angelou’s 80th birthday and as the title of the book suggests, it has been 80 glorious years of her life though it has had its ups and downs as the authors hold nothing back in relating the colorful life of one of America’s celebrated literary artists. The book covers the traumatic experience she had at a young age to the beginning of her literary talents during her adolescence; she ventured briefly into acting and took part in the civil rights movement, rubbing elbows with Martin Luther King and Malcolm X until the time she took part in the inauguration of President Bill Clinton. Though Angelou had a troubled youth, she moved on and it was through literature that she was able to pull through and used it as her vehicle to express happiness and optimism. Lupton, M. J. (1998). Maya Angelou: A Critical Companion. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Publishing Group, Inc. Lupton provides a critical analysis of Angelou’s 5-volume autobiography. For each one, she provides an general overview, a background of the story. This would be followed by an analysis of various points of view like a narrative in the case of Heart of a Woman then describe the structure of the story where patterns are found. Then there is a plot development which focuses on revealing the character of the subject followed by a character development which reveals the character’s personality as the story develops. Then there is the thematic issues which identifies the theme of the story. This is followed by styles and literary devices which describes what devices were deployed by Angelou. This book would be a reliable guide to anyone who reads Angelou and needed a quick reference to its technical aspects besides the stories themselves. Kite, L. P. (2006). Maya Angelou. Minneapolis: Lerner Publications Company. This book is a biography of Angelou. The author touches on the personal aspects of Angelou’s life. She starts the story in 1993, the day Angelou recited a poem at President Bill Clinton’s inauguration and segues back to the day she was born and moving progressively to 1996. Her poems are mentioned here but not fully presented. This book caters mainly to elementary school students and serves as an ideal starter for anyone who appreciates poetry and will be surely inspired after reading Angelou’s story. Egan, J. (2009). Maya Angelou. A Creative and Courageous Voice. Pleasantsville, New York: Gareth Stevens Publishing. As the title suggests, this book mainly tackles the life and times of Maya Angelou. In the nine chapters of this book, Egan takes the reader on a journey covering the life and times of Angelou which is fraught with trials and tribulations but also of the courage to go one despite its presence. In the chapter â€Å"Finding Her Voice† was the start of Angelou’s literary career which was meant to be a form of therapy but later on became her calling. In the latter chapter, â€Å"A Glorious Legacy,† she turned to writing greeting cards for Hallmark not because she needed a job but for the love of writing and the celebration of life. Elliot, J. M. (Editor). (1989). Conversations with Maya Angelou. Jackson City: University of Mississippi Press. Elliot has compiled several interviews made by selected authors with Maya Angelou. Each interview or conversation tells the same story. It is about the triumph over adversity and her works serve as her vehicle of conveying that message. Angelou also clarified that her works are not exclusively dedicated to African-Americans though she lived through the turbulent times with them, but for all mankind. This book is ideal for scholars and students who wish to gain more insight to the woman behind remarkable works. Hagen, L. B. (1997). Heart of a Woman, Mind of a Writer and Soul of a Poet. Lanham Maryland: University Press of America. Hagen’s work is a critical analysis of the works of Maya Angelou. The first chapter is devoted to telling her life story. Chapter 2 reveals Angelou’s â€Å"secrets† to her very successful works which is the use of humor to offset the trying times she had gone through in her life instead of dwelling on the hurts of her past. The rest of the chapters makes an analysis of her works – her autobiographies and her poems as well as other aspects of Angelou’s multi-faceted life. These are purely analysis and do not give the full text of her works save for excerpts used in making the analyses. Ramsey, P. R. (1984). Transcendence: The Poetry of Maya Angelou. Current Bibliography on African Affairs 17 (2). 139-153. Priscilla Ramsey makes an in-depth analysis on the poems of Maya Angelou. Angelou’s poems are grounded on the reality of life as she has experienced them. Angelou uses her poems as a means to express her thoughts and sentiments not only about her own life but also the events that were unfolding around her from segregation to the civil rights movement. Angelou has practically employed every known literary device to be able to write elaborate poems that pretty much capture life the way she has seen it through her own eyes. Sylvester, W. (1995). Maya Angelou: An Overview. In T. Riggs (Editor) Contemporary Poets. New York: St. James Press. Sylvester gives an overall analysis of the poems of Maya Angelou. While doing so, he highlighted events in Angelou’s life which have had a profound influence on her, from William Shakespeare which she confessed was her â€Å"first love† to her involvement in the civil rights movement as an organizer working alongside Martin Luther King. Sylvester reveals that her poems are uniquely hers and are not imitations of other works as revealed with unique words she used. Neubauer, C. E. (1983). Displacement and Autobiographical Style in Maya Angelou’s Heart of a Woman. Black American Literature Forum 17 (3). 123-129. Neubauer makes an in-depth analysis of one of Angelou’s work Heart of a Woman which is more of an autobiography. Her starting point is the time she already reached adulthood, highlighting her different careers especially in one of the turbulent times not only of her life but to all black Americans for this was the civil rights movement. She uses her own life experience to mirror how â€Å"little people† felt. She provides a grassroots level view of the things happening in society here through her own eyes. She also compared and contrasted the styles of two of its prominent movers, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, finding the latter more congenial. Smith, S. A. (1973) The Song of a Caged Bird: Maya Angelous Quest after Self-Acceptance. The Southern Humanities Review. 365-375. This is another analysis of a work by Maya Angelou. From the year, one can tell this is one of the earliest analysis made and this is â€Å"fresh† from the recent events of the previous decade where Angelou had been very active in the civil rights movement. But this story highlights the childhood of Angelou which was anything but happy. Her youth is a journey to freedom from â€Å"imprisonment† caused by misery and highlighted moments of struggle as she moved on until she finally attained the freedom she sought and it all boil down to self-acceptance. Angelou’s story is not a mere autobiography but also serves as a lesson in life where self-acceptance is the main theme and one of the keys to coping with life’s problems.

Wednesday, August 21, 2019

Sylvia Plaths Psychic Landscapes Essay Example for Free

Sylvia Plaths Psychic Landscapes Essay In the following essay, I will examine the development of Plaths poetry through analysis of major themes and imagery found in her description of landscapes, seascapes, and the natural world. Following the lead of Ted Hughes, critics today tend to read Sylvia Plaths poetry as a unity. Individual poems are best read in the context of the whole oeuvre: motifs, themes and images link poems together and these linkages illuminate their meaning and heighten their power. It is certainly easy to see that through almost obsessive repetition some elements put their unforgettable mark on the poetry: themes such as the contradictory desires for life and death and the quests for selfhood and truth; images like those of color, with red, black and white dominating the palette; and symbols of haunting ambiguity, for example, the moon and the sea. But equally obvious is the striking development that Plaths work underwent in the course of her brief career as a professional poet. This is perhaps most readily seen in the prosody: from exerting her equilibristic skill at handling demanding verse forms, such as the terza rima and the villanelle, she broke free of the demands of such literary conventions and created a personal verse form which still retained some of the basic elements of her earlier academic style. She turned the three-line stanza of the villanelle into a highly flexible medium. Freed from the prosodic strictness of poems like Medallion, written in 1959, this verse form reappeared in poems composed in the last year of her life in a superbly liberated yet controlled form. Some of her finest and most personal poems are written in this medium, for example, Fever 103 °, Ariel, Nick and the Candlestick, Lady Lazarus, Marys Song, and the late Sheep in Fog, Child and Contusion. More important, though, is the development one can observe in Plaths handling of images and themes, of settings and scenes. My concern in this essay is Plaths use of landscapes as settings. There are indoor settings in her poetry, such as kitchens and bedrooms, hospitals and museums, but the outdoor ones are in overwhelming majority. Plaths use of landscapes and seascapes is indeed one of the most characteristic features of her poetry. They put their mark on a considerable part of the work and appear throughout her career, linked as they are to her experiences as a woman and a poet. The seascapes with their crucial relevance for themes like the daughter-father relationship, loss and death, deserve a special and thorough treatment of their own and will have to fall outside the scope of this essay. No reader can fail to note the many items of nature that Plath makes use of as setting and image. Three scholars have paid special attention to this aspect. In her pioneering work, The Poetry of Sylvia Plath: A Study of Themes (1972), Ingrid Melander includes analyses of poems set in different landscapes and seascapes that Plath knew; in addition to discussing a group of poems connected to the sea, she deals with the following landscape poems: two poems on the moorland (Hardcastle Crags and Wuthering Heights); two idylls (Watercolor of Grantchester Meadows and In Midas Country); and three landscapes as experienced by the traveller (Sleep in the Mojave Desert, Stars over the Dordogne and Two Campers in Cloud Country). Melanders approach is thematic and she makes no attempt to suggest development or continuity concerning this aspect of the poetry. In Jon Rosenblatts Sylvia Plath: The Poetry of Initiation (1979), in my view still the most useful book-length critical study, the idea of development is a main concern. He devotes one chapter to Plaths use of landscapes and seascapes, focusing on the transition from early to late poetry as part of his overriding argument: that Plaths poetry enacts a ritual of initiation from symbolic death to rebirth. He programmatically refrains from placing her poems in extraliterary contexts, such as her biography. Edward Butscher, on the other hand, goes to the other extreme in his critical biography, Sylvia Plath: Method and Madness (1976), where he makes no essential difference between the life and the poetry. While he offers many imaginative and perceptive comments on Plaths anthropomorphizing of nature, they naturally become subsumed in the telling of the story of the poets life and also, frequently, slightly distorted by Butschers  psychoanalytically loaded thesis about the emergence of Sylvia Plath the bitch goddess. Since the appearance of these three studies Sylvia Plaths Collected Poems has been published (1981) with a securer and more precise dating of the poems than before, and we are now in a better position to deal with the poems chronologically. The Journals of Sylvia Plath (1982) also add to our knowledge of the composition of the poems. Linda W. Wagner-Martins recent biography (1987) has given us a firm platform to build our critical studies on, by confirming or correcting information provided by previous biographies and memoirs. With the premise that Plaths poetry should be read as a unity I wish to study the development of her use of landscapes throughout her career, paying special attention to the role the landscape plays in the individual poemquantitatively and qualitativelyand to the way the poet creates psychic landscapes out of concrete places, scenes and objects. I tie this discussion firmly and consistently to actual landscapes Sylvia Plath had seen. With a poetry like Plaths, which is highly subjective and concrete, it is surely a disadvantage to disconnect the poems from the poets life. My use of biography aims at illuminating the poetic process, and my main interest is in the subtle and gradual shift in the poets technique: the process by which her landscapes become increasingly psychic and at the end fragmented. Sylvia Plath evidently looked upon herself as a city person (in spite of her documented love of the sea). Amidst the beautiful scenery at an artists colony in upstate New York she complained: I do rather miss Boston and dont think I could ever settle for living far from a big city full of museums and theaters. Nevertheless she seldom used the cities and towns where she lived, more or less permanently, as settings in poems. Cambridge, England; Northampton, Massachusetts; Boston and London, these places made little impact on the poetry as cityscapes. When she draws on such settings, she usually lets her persona move from the streets and buildings to parks or gardens or surrounding fields. When she remembers Cambridge, she sees meadows and fields outside the town, as in Watercolor of Grantchester Meadows (1959). Of Northampton she commemorates above all a park with frog pond, fountain, shrubbery and flowers, as in Frog Autumn and Childs Park Stones, both written in 1958. Where the town of Northampton itself does figure, in Owl (1958), it is as a frivolous contrast to harshly elemental nature. Commenting on an actual experience in the summer of 1958 such as described in this poem, she noted: Visions of violence. The animal world seems to me more and more intriguing. One of the rare poems with a London setting is Parliament Hill Fields (1961), but typically the scene has a rural touch. (It is set on Hampstead Heath). Inspiredand sometimes proddedby her husband who was versed in country things, Sylvia Plath the city person turned to nature for topics and scenery. Shortly after having met Ted Hughes in the spring of 1956 she confided to her mother: I cannot stop writing poems! . . . They come from the vocabulary of woods and animals and earth that Ted is teaching me. Prodded or inspired, Plath drew on her personal experiences of different places and landscapes as raw material for many of the poems. One might actually plot locations and stages of her life on the map of her work. Among the poems that open her career as a professional poether debut can conveniently be set to 1956we can find scenes from her stay in England and her travels on the Continent. Later there will be scenes from New England and other parts of the United States and Canada. After her return to England in 1959 she set many of the poems in Devon and a few in London. Ones immediate reaction to Plaths outdoor scenery is that the per sona never seems to be quite at home in nature. Descriptions of nature will most often register feelings of estrangement, fear and the like. This is true even of poems commemorating travel experiences in happy moods, such as camping in a California desert (Sleep in the Mojave Desert) or by a Canadian lake (Two Campers in Cloud Country), poems written in 1960. Plaths depictions of places and landscapes reveal her interest in pictorial art. She said that she had a visual imagination and that her inspiration was painting, not music, when I go to some other art form. We know of this interest in art, American and European, and the inspiration she derived from specific paintings resulting in, for example, the poems Snakecharmer (1957) and Yadwigha, on a Red Couch, Among Lilies (1958), both modelled on paintings by Henri Rousseau, and Sculptor (1958), dedicated to her friend Leonard Baskin. Her own efforts as a draftswoman establish a link between her verbal gifts and her graphic talents. Some of her drawings have been reproduced; The Christian Science Monitor (November 5 and 6, 1956) illustrated her reports about a summer visit to Benidorm in Spain with a couple of strictly realistic sketches by her hand: sardine boats pulled up on a beach; a corner of a peasant market; and trees and houses clinging on to steep sea cliffs. In his collection of essays on Plaths poetry, editor Charles Newman included three drawings of scenery that we can recognize in the poems; strong pen strokes show an old cottage in Yorkshire (Wuthering Heights); an irregular row of houses in Benidorm; and small fishing boats left for the winter on the bank of a river nea r its outlet into the ocean at Cape Cod. She evidently did not give up the habit of drawing. As late as October 1962, in a letter to her mother, she rejoices over the gift of pastels that she will surely find time to use. By and large Plaths early poems betray the same sort of literary artificiality that marked most of her Juvenilia; they strain too noticeably toward effect and cleverness. But there are some whose subjects and settings introduce thoughts and moods which reverberate in the rest of the oeuvre. Winter Landscape, with Rooks is one such poem. The very title tells us that this scene is rendered by a painterly poet. It describes a pond where a solitary swan floats chaste as snow. To the observer-speaker it is a landscape of chagrin scorn[ed] by the setting sun. The speakers mind is as dark as the pond: walking about like an imaginary rookthe only creature fit to match the wintry landscapeshe finds no solace from her sorrow at the absence of a cherished person. In a journal entry for February 20, 1956 Plath outlined the scene that inspired some of the realistic details of this poem. On her way to a literature class which was to be held at some distance from her Cambridge college, she noticed rooks squatting black in snow-white fen, gray skies, black trees, mallard-green water. The real rooks are missing from the  poem; there is only a metaphorical one. We find features that will characterize a great deal of the poetry to come: the color scheme of black, white and red; the theme of loss and frozenness; and the parallel between landscape and human observer. Plath referred to the poem as a psychic landscape. From now on her poetic landscapes will embody association between scene and mood. What marks Winter Landscape, with Rooks as an early poem is the lack of proportion between the loss suggested and the mood resulting from the contemplation of a calm winter scene. The poem ends with a sigh of self-pity: Whod walk in this bleak place? The punning title of another poem written in 1956, Prospect, suggests comparison with a painting, calling to mind, for example, the Italian veduta of landscape or city. We find in it some of the same elements as in Winter Landscape, with Rooks: the fen, here with its gray fog enveloping rooftops and chimneys, and this time not with a metaphorical rook but two real ones sitting in a tree, with absinthe-colored eyes cocked on a lone, late, / passer-by. As in an impressionist painting much is made of colororange, gray, black, greenat the expense of line and composition, but here too there is suggested a psychic element: the solitary human being neither seeks nor derives protection or comfort from nature. Alicante Lullaby, one of several poems inspired by Plaths stay in Spain in the summer of 1956, attempts to record the actual sounds of a busy little Spanish town. The poet uses onomatopoeia to recreate realistic sounds. (Evidently Sylvia Plath regretted that she did not have an ear for music.) In another poem, Departure, the speaker, taking leave of her temporary Spanish refuge sketched in bright colors, is able to note, with self-irony, that nature does not grieve at all at the parting. The reason why she leaves is decidedly unromantic: The moneys run out. The last glimpse of the scene is unromantic in another way and may suggest a parallel between the speakers mood and nature: what she sees is a stone hut Gull-fouled and exposed to corroding weathers, and morose and rank-haired goats. It may all be in the viewers eyes. Returning to the favored rook in Black Rook in Rainy Weather the poet again  musters up self-irony to face her urge to commune with nature. She might wish to see some design among the fallen leaves and receive some backtalk / From the mute sky, but this, she knows, would be to expect a miracle. Still, she leaves herself open to any minute gesture on the part of nature lending largesse, honor, / One might say love even to the dullest landscape and the most ignorant viewer; this could be achieved, for instance, by letting a black rook arrange its feathers in such a way as to captivate the viewers senses and so grant // A brief respite from fear / Of total neutrality. The miracle has not happened yet, but the hope of such a moment of transcendent beauty and communion is worth the wait. She knows that it might in fact be only a trick of light which the viewer interprets as that rare, random descent of an angel. The next set of landscape poems, chronologically, are located in the West Yorkshire moorland which Sylvia Plath knew from visits with her husbands family. November Graveyard introducing this group describes a setting where naturetrees, grass, flowersstubbornly resists mourning over death. But it does not deny death; the visitor notes the honest rot which reveals natures unsentimental presentation of death and decay. And the poet concludes that this essential landscape may teach us the truth about death. Coming at the end of Plaths first year as a professional poet this poem may be seen to exemplify a minor change in her depiction of landscapes; elements of nature are discreetly anthropomorphized: skinflint trees refuse to mourn or wear sackcloth, the dour grass is not willing to put on richer colors to solemnize the place, and the flowers do not pretend to give voice to the dead. Two other Yorkshire poems, The Snowman on the Moor and Two Views of Withens, written the following year, offer realistic glimpses of the moorland as backdrop for descriptions of relationships between people and of attitudes to nature. In the first poem, a condensed narrative relates a husband-and-wife quarrel with the woman being brought down from her pride by a vision of indomitable male power in the guise of a giant snowman; and in the second, we have in capsule form a definition of two very different  attitudes to natureperhaps also to lifeepitomized in two persons differing responses to a bare landscape and a dilapidated farmhouse with literary and romantic associations. (The scenery is associated with Emily Brontes Wuthering Heights.) The speaker of the poem regrets that she cannot respond the way the you does. To her, landscape and sky are bleak and the House of Eros is no palace. Hardcastle Crags gives a harsher view of a human being alone and defenseless in an unresponsive, absolute landscape. The poem derives its power from a very detailed, realistic picture of fields and animals, stones and hills. The last Yorkshire poem written in 1957, however, with the title The Great Carbuncle, brings in an element of wonder performed by nature: a certain strange light with magical powerits source remains unknowncreates a moment of transfiguration for the wanderers. The Great Carbuncle may allude to a drop of blood in the Holy Grail. But it is a painfully brief moment: afterwards the body weighs like stone. In a poem written in September 1961, Wuthering Heights, Plath returned to the ambiguous fascination this moor landscape held for her. The mood, though, has now become unequivocally sinister. The descriptive details have lost much of their realistic significance. The solitary wanderer bravely step[s] forward, but nature is her enemy: the alluring horizons dissolve at her advance, wind and heather try to undo her. Images of landscape and animals are consistently turned into metaphors for the human intruders feeling of being insignificant and exposed. A seemingly harmless thing such as the half-closed eyes of the grandmotherly-looking sheep makes the speaker lose her sense of identity and worth: it is as if she were being mailed into space, / A thin, silly message. This landscape is indeed psychic to an extent that Winter Landscape, with Rooks was not. This is most certainly a result of Plaths greater ability to transform realistic, concrete objects and scenes into consistent sets of me taphors for her thoughts and emotions. New Year on Dartmoor is a somewhat later poem, inspired by a walk Sylvia Plath took with her small daughter on Dartmoor some distance from the Hugheses home in Devon; the poem may have been written in late December 1961. NEW YEAR ON DARTMOOR This is newness: every little tawdry Obstacle glass-wrapped and peculiar, Glinting and clinking in a saints falsetto. Only you Dont know what to make of the sudden slippiness, The blind, white, awful, inaccessible slant. Theres no getting up it by the words you know. No getting up by elephant or wheel or shoe. We have only come to look. You are too new To want the world in a glass hat. The poem shows how Plaths technique of using landscape scenes has changed even more. Here there is very little realistic description; the setting becomes completely metaphorized and gives rise to the speakers inner words, both sad and humorous, addressing her child who is accompanying her. The year is new and to the child the newness is exciting but baffling. Only the mother is aware of a rawer reality beneath the glinting and the clinking, and she knows what newness entails of challenge and hardships. In the fall of 1959 Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes spent several weeks at Yaddo, the artists colony in upstate New York. Although she was at first charmed by the old-fashioned beauty of the estate, she soon tired of it, and on the whole the Yaddo poems do not express any genuine pleasure in nature. Some of  the poems she set in the grounds of the estate evidence a certain strain of finding something to write about and of getting the most out of the scenery. She was pleased with Medallion, a poem she defined as an imagist piece on a dead snake. Nature is here in a somewhat macabre fashion used to aestheticize death. The speaker is only a cool observer. In another Yaddo poem featuring animals, Blue Moles, with its unequivocal message that strife and violence are the modes of nature, nature is anthropomorphized; the speaker empathizes with the moles (Down there one is alone) while the sky above is sane and clear. The anthropomorphizing tendency is strong in the Yaddo poems; it does not serve to explain nature, rather to express the human protagonists feelings and moods. Thus in Private Ground the grasses / Unload their griefs in the protagonists shoes, and in The Manor Garden items from nature are used to parallel and explain the growth of a foetus in a human body. It is not enough for Plath in these poems to call forth a human mood or attitude from a fairly detailed, more or less realistic picture of objects and scenes in nature; now she will more readily metaphorize natural processes, and detailed pictures become rarer. Often key words or phrases will suffice to hint at a parallel or an origin in nature. Early in 1959 Plath had made clear what she wished to achieve in her nature poems. After finishing Watercolor of Grantchester Meadowsa memory of the Cambridge surroundingsshe noted: Wrote a Grantchester [sic] poem of pure description. I must get philosophy in. As every reader knows, Plath was wrong about this poem: in her picture of a seemingly idyllic landscape, cruelty and violence are lurking beneath the smooth appearance. The realistic scenery is distorted, not in the direction of the ugly and the grotesque, but in the direction of nursery-plate prettiness. The philosophy is apparent: terror and violence in the shape of an owl swooping down on an inoffensive water rat are at the heart of creation. Melville had said the same thing in Moby Dick when he let Ishmael reflect on the tiger heart that pants beneath the oceans skin. Plaths most ambitious piece of writing done at the artists colony was the  sequence Poem for a Birthday. Making notes for it she acknowledged the influence of Theodore Roethke. The greenhouse on the estate must have been a special link to him; it was a mine of subjects. Her tentative plans for the poem were these: To be a dwelling on madhouse, nature: meanings of tools, greenhouses, florists shops, tunnels, vivid and disjointed. An adventure. Never over. Developing, Rebirth, Despair. Old women. Block it out. Her ambition was to be true to [her] own weirdnesses. Starting as an end-of-autumn poem it immediately turns into a seemingly random search for the origins and processes of the self; the landscape disappears, and forays into the past take over. The poem comes full circle by ending with a hope of birth into a new life. Poem for a Birthday is an indication of the direction Plaths poetry was to take from now on: toward greater use of free associations and juxtaposition of fragment s of scenes and objects, experiences lived and imagined, feelings and thoughts harbored. Sylvia Plaths life and surroundings in Devon, where she lived from September 1961 to December the following year, provided rich material for poetry. Court Green, the thatch-roofed house the Hugheses had bought, sat in a two-acre plot with a great lawn, in spring overflowing with daffodils, with an apple orchard and other trees that found their way into the poems. The settings of the poems she wrote in Devon are very varied. Several are set indoors, for instance, in a hospital (The Surgeon at 2 a.m., Three Women), a kitchen (An Appearance, The Detective, Lesbos, Cut, Marys Song), an office (The Applicant), or an unspecified interior (The Other, Words heard, by accident, over the phone, Kindness). These interiors are never described; they are often to be inferred by a situation dramatized or an action going on, such as cooking a Sunday dinner or being served tea. Action and character play the greater role. The trees and flowers of the Court Green garden appear in several poems, such as Among the Narcissi, Poppies in July and Poppies in October, all from 1962. But in these poems too there is much more story or incident than description. The Moon and the Yew Tree offers a good example of how Plath used nature as material for poetry at this transitional stage in her career. Written in October 1961 this was the first poem for which she drew on her immediate  Devon surroundings. As we see from Ted Hughess comments, she still needed an occasional prodding to find a topic: The yew tree stands in a churchyard to the west of the house in Devon, and visible from SPs bedroom window. On this occasion, the full moon, just before dawn, was setting behind this yew tree and her husband assigned her to write a verse exercise about it. This nature poem is marked by the metaphorical mode already in the opening line: This is the light of the mind, cold and planetary. Using a phrase from an earlier poem (Private Ground) the poet creates a transition to the garden landscape by anthropomorphizing nature: The grasses unload their griefs on my feet as if I were God. The light of the mind does not help. The speaker complains: I simply cannot see where there is to get to. Following the upright lines of the yew tree, the speakers eyes seek the mother moon. Yew tree and church, one planted in the earth but striving toward heaven, the other bringing the message of heaven to earth, have nothing to give the speaker. She faces her real self: it is not the Church with its mixture of far reaching authority (the booming bells), its holiness stiffened by convention (the sculptured or painted saints floating above the heads of the churchgoers) and its somewhat sentimentalized sweetness (the mild Virgin), it is not these she can identi fy with: she is the daughter of the wild female moon with her dark and dangerous power. Plath herself evidently read this poem slightly differently. Introducing it in a BBC program she said that a yew tree she had once put into a poem began, with astounding egotism, to manage and order the whole affair. It was not a yew tree by a church on a road past a house in a town where a certain woman lived . . . and so on, as it might have been in a novel. Oh no. It stood squarely in the middle of my poem, manipulating its dark shades, the voices in the churchyard, the clouds, the birds, the tender melancholy with which I contemplated iteverything! I couldnt subdue it. And, in the end, my poem was a poem about a yew tree. The yew tree was just too proud to be a passing black mark in a novel. As I have indicated, another reading of the poem highlights the moon as the one who is taking over the scene. The yew tree appears again in Little Fugue, written in 1962, but only as an introductory image bringing in a contrast through its blackness counterpointed with whiteness in the concrete form of a cloud (The yews black fingers wag; / Cold clouds go over). Black and white do not merge, just as the blind do not receive the message of the deaf and dumb. These counterpointing absences prefigure the main theme of the fugue: the speaker-daughters despair at not being able to reach her dead father: Gothic and barbarous he was a yew hedge of orders. Now he sees nothing, and the speaker is lame in the memory. The fugue ends by finally joining the two items from naturethe black yew tree and the pale cloudas images of a marriage between death and death-in-life. The Devon milieu is the scene also for Among the Narcissi. Here an ailing old neighbor is the main subject, the flowers attending upon him like a flock of children. Another poem with a Devon setting is Pheasant. It is a scene in the drama of tensions in a marriage, of suspicions, hurt, jealousy and anger, which was begun in Zoo Keepers Wife and continued in Elm, The Rabbit Catcher, Event, Poppies in July and Poppies in October. Two poems written in the last month Sylvia Plath spent in Devon, Letter in November and Winter Trees, testify to the almost uncanny equilibristics she was capable of by now in realizing highly different topics, scenes, moods, as it would seem from one moment to the next. Anger at deception (The Couriers), longing for spiritual rebirth (Getting There), tender anguish at a childs future (The Night Dances), revulsion at death (Death Co.) and fascination with the dynamics of motion and life (Years), naked hatred and contempt (The Fearful), these are some of the emotions embodied in the November poems. Letter in November is set in the Court Green garden. It is unusual for Plath at this stage in her career in that it contains a fairly detailed picture of the scenery. The letter is addressed to an unspecified receiver (perhaps a child) apostrophized as love. It describes, in a relaxed tone, details of a well-known garden which in this moment of seasonal transition is shifting color and form as if by some kind of magic that a child would  understand. The speakers boots squelch realistically in the wet masses of fallen leaves. The old corpses buried under the death-soup she is walking in prefigure the despair at total defeat revealed in the final allusion to the destruction of a heroic army at Thermopylae (The irreplaceable / Golds bleed and deepen, the mouths of Thermopylae). Was the lovingly detailed description of her garden an incantation for a moments relief from pain? Winter Trees is also set in the garden. WINTER TREES The wet dawn inks are doing their blue dissolve. On their blotter of fog the trees Seem a botanical drawing Memories growing, ring on ring, A series of weddings. Knowing neither abortions nor bitchery, Truer than women, They seed so effortlessly! Tasting the winds, that are footless, Waist-deep in history Full of wings, otherworldliness. In this, they are Ledas. O mother of leaves and sweetness Who are these pietas? The shadows of ringdoves chanting, but easing nothing. The opening image, of trees barely visible in the early morning fog, might have led us to expect a landscape of the kind Plath wrote in her earlier years, that is, a fairly realistic description with a mood attached or a philosophy as the outcome of pictures turned into metaphors. In this poem, however, trees are immediately turned into an aesthetic product: a drawing presenting themselves (On their blotter of fog the trees / Seem a botanical drawing)! This idea is at once dropped and without the modulating help of language we are brought into the human domain of memories, relationships between people, values and morality. Memories, rings, weddings, abortions, bitcherythese words hint at a miniature narrative of past love and union, contrasted with ugly losses and failures. The speakers muted despair has turned into disgust at the very idea of human femaleness. The trees have become symbols of ideal humanity: at the same time as they partake of the solidity and security of elemental earthliness, they achieve spirituality. Visited by a god, these Ledas share in the sacred, but being Ledas they also know suffering. In a last transformation, the trees take on the appearance of the grieving mother of another god. The final lines of the poem express the speakers anguished cry lamenting her inability to partake of the perfection and pity of nature. Being a woman she appeals to a Mother Goddess for a clue, but no sounds or sights in nature bring her relief. This superb poem is an example of the skill and power Plath had reached in her thirtieth year. Within the span of a few short lines she manages to create a complex of sight and sound, history and myth, Christian and pagan, ugliness and beauty, hope and despair. As has been argued by a recent critic, this is a fine example of Plaths ability to raise her poetry above the level of the private and the confessional to a level of universality. The poems Sylvia Plath wrote in the last few weeks of her life maintain  continuity with her earlier work in subject matter and style. She still favors the two- or three-line stanza, and essential also in these poems are emotions and attitudes such as love for childrenwhat Helen Vendler so succinctly refers to as the small constructiveness of motherhoodhatred of deception, and conflicting urges toward stasis and motion. But as a whole they are more concise and more referentialeven to the point of obscuritythan earlier poems. They do not offer easy readings, for one thing because images from strikingly different spheres of life are juxtaposed, with no apparent associations to join them. By establishing links to the earlier poetry as reference and source material we may be in a better position to read these difficult texts. Plaths use of landscapes is one such line to pursue. In these late poems recognizable, actual landscapes do not occur; here the poet uses only fragments from her experiences of various kinds of scenery, fragments that often suggest moods and attitudes similar to those that the more fully described landscapes had once signified. The first poem dated 1963, Sheep in Fog, was begun in December 1962 and completed the following January, and it works as a transitional poem. It is the last poem Plath wrote in which we can recognize the outlines of an actual landscape. It keeps some of the elements of poems set in an English landscape, with touches of the moorland, perhaps Dartmoor where Plath took riding lessons. She introduced the poem for a BBC program with these words: In this poem, the speakers horse is proceeding at a slow, cold walk down a hill of macadam to the stable at the bottom. It is December. It is foggy. In the fog there are sheep. This is of course only the bare skeleton around which the poem itself has been fashioned. The title suggests a realistic landscape with figures, and we find several such items: hills, horse and fields. No sheep are visible in the poem; the dolorous bells indicate their presence. There is a watercolor aspect to the hills dimly seen in the fog, the faint line of smoke from a passing train and the touch of color provided by the horse. Human references, which are counterpointed with the touches of nature scenery, take over in the latter part of the poem. The speaker interprets the scene as an expression of her own situation. Resignedly registering her own inadequacy (People or stars / Regard me sadly, I disappoint them) she  perceives her situation as darker and darker. Against the normal order in nature All morning the / Morning has been blackening. She fears that she has to accept nothingness as her lot, even after death; this is expressed in the image of the distant fields which thr eaten / To let me through to a heaven / Starless and fatherless, a dark water. This is no longer a psychic landscape of the kind exemplified by Winter Landscape, with Rooks; in Sheep in Fog the landscape as reality almost ceases to exist. Items from Sheep in Fog reappear in even more fragmentary form in Totem, a poem written on the same day as the former one was completed. Here we find a train on a useless journey, darkened fields, and mountains letting us glimpse an unchanging sky. These fragments of a landscape are only small signs in a composition overwhelming in its rich confusion, of images which all spell the greed of inevitable death. Plath spoke of this poem as a pile of interconnected images, like a totem pole. Other late poems have a similar quality of interconnected images like a totem pole in which fragments of landscapes may reappear in a weak or distorted form. In The Munich Mannequins the yew tree from beside the Devon church has been transformed into a part of a womb (the womb // Where the yew trees blow like hydras); an unhappy memory of Sylvia Plaths own visit to Germany in 1956 in search of roots identifies the city of Munich as a place of death and sterility. In Child, expressing a mothers wish to create a happy world for her child, there are remnants of the Devon garden in bloom as a contrast to the mothers worried Wringing of hands. Gigolo recalls a Mediterranean setting with crooked streets, cul-de-sacs and fruits-de-mer, alluring and disgusting as the professional seducer himself. In Mystic there may be traces of a summery Atlantic coastmemories of smells of pines, sun-heated cabins and salty windsas well as references to the harsh London winter Sylvia Plath was facing while she was composing these poems (The chimneys of the city breathe, the window sweats). These fragments accompany a more important religious imagery. The poem has been interpreted in several ways; one interpretation sees it as the mystics dark night of the soul, but the last line, The heart has not stopped, indicates hope of an end to this night. And in Edge, one of the two last poems Plath  wrote a few days before her death, she may have drawn on visual memories of the Yaddo estate. The perfected body of the woman whose epitaph the poem is and her children make up a sculptured group of death. In addition to other allusions, such as the Laocoon group, here inverted from struggle against death to fulfilled death, this group may vaguely recall the marble statuary at Yaddo. In the preceding pages we have seen how Sylvia Plath sought inspiration and raw material for her poetry in different settings and how she very early saw the potential for psychic qualities or parallels in realistic word paintings. In depicting external reality she is not concerned with representing, as faithfully as possible, shapes and lines, color and light, objects and figures. She hardly ever devotes an entire poem to something that looks like mere description of a scene in nature. There is always a metaphorical touch or dimension to the realistic composition. At times there is a narrative hinted at or rendered in some detail. Her landscape poems do not give the impression of a spontaneous pleasure in nature, nor of a wish to understand the processes of nature. They seem rather to serve as mirrors for a self in search of identity and truth. Plaths career as a poet was brief, but even so it is possible to see a development in her use of landscapes, toward more metaphorizing, more anthropomorphizing of nature, and in the late poems, more fragmentation of scenes in nature. In the early poetry she includes more documentable detail, sometimes established already in the titles of poems, such as Hardcastle Crags and Two Views of Withens. She may have coerced herselfor been proddedto broaden her palette by consciously turning to now one, now another landscape that she had experienced, but at the end she no longer had to look for settings as inspiration. Elements of landscapes came to her when she needed them as pieces in a mosaic more fraught with meaning than the early psychic landscapes. She had at her command an extraordinary set of highly diverse materials which she juxtaposed into poems of striking originalitysometimes with less than complete success. Even though we may not be able to reach into the obscurest crevices of her imagery and thought, the poems Sylvia Plath wrote in the last few weeks of  her life haunt us with their cries and whispers. Recognizing fragments of earlier landscapes may not be the most important clue to these and other poems, but it may help us clear the ground for entering deeper into her poetic world. Source: Brita Lindberg-Seyersted, Sylvia Plaths Psychic Landscapes, in English Studies, Vol. 71, No. 6, December, 1990, pp. 509-22.

An Overview Of Trends In Tourism

An Overview Of Trends In Tourism Tourism is a rapidly changing industry. Outline the key trends in tourism demand at the start of the 21th century and examine their impact on accommodation providers. Tourism is a travel outside for the usual environment. People travel for recreational, leisure or business purposes. The 21th Century tourism has become a popular global leisure activity that will grow in new heights as it becomes more accessible to a larger cross section of the global population. The tourism industry is one of the most resilient and dynamic sectors of the economy and will result in commensurate economic opportunities for developed and emerging destinations around the world. A big number of challenges will be also created in attracting and serving increased tourism demand and in mitigating any potential negative externalities that will emerge as a result of tourisms rapid growth. The tourist industries of the successful destinations will strike a sense of balance in developing by monitoring international trends, ensuring that the benefits of tourism are more than any potential negative impact and achieve a more fair distribution of tourism profits. Tourism is a profi table business and that is a good reason for countries to focus on honing their abilities in tourism. The 21th century improves that tourism is a rapidly changing industry. In 2001 was a decrease of 0, 6% in international tourist arrivals, compared with 2000, and the decrease is continued for the first six months of the 2002 of 0, 2%. In 2008, there were over 922 million international tourist arrivals, with a growth of 1.9% as compared to 2007. International tourism receipts grew to 642 billion euro in 2008, which mean an increase in of 1.8%. The international demand for a travel suffered a slowdown that began in June 2008, as a result of the late 2000 recession. During the first eight months of 2008 the growth from 2007 to 2008 was only 3.7%. The markets of Asian and Pacific were affected. Europe stagnated during the summer, while the Americas performed better, reducing their expansion rate but keeping a 6% growth from January to August 2008. During the same period the Middle East continued its rapid growth reaching a 17% growth as compared to the same period in 2007. This slowdown on international tourism demand was also reflected in the air transport industry, with a negative growth in September 2008 and a 3.3% growth in passenger traffic through September. The hotel industry also reports a slowdown, as room occupancy continues to decline. During September and October the global economic situation deteriorated dramatically, as a result of the global financial crisis. For the remaining of 2008 the growth of international tourism is expected to slow even further continuing into 2009. The slowdown in demand growth has already hit the top spender countries. The long-haul travel is the most affected by the economical crisis. This negative trend intensified as international tourist arrivals fell by 8% during the first four months of 2009, and the decline was exacerbated in some regions due to the outbreak of the influenza AH1N1 virus. During 21th century tourism industry is characterized by numerous issues and trends that present threats and opportunities. Many countries suffered from terrorist threats that have been increased. After the attacks in New York and Washington that followed by two wars, in Afghanistan and Iraq and continued with terrorist attacks in the Bali (bombing 2002 and 2005), in London, Madrid, Bangkok and other destinations. The result of this terrorist attacks is to increase the need of people for safety and security. These procedures are creating inconvenience. Inconvenience we see at the airports with longer lines and in visa policies and standards that are stricter. Another issue of this century is that China growth into a large source markets in the Asia Pacific region. China has become a primary focus of the worlds tourism industry and the Chinese nationals have been increasingly visiting international destinations and this trend will continue to increase from now on. During this century new destinations are coming to the tourism market. India, Egypt, South Korea, Vietnam, New Zealand, South Africa, Eastern Europe and the Philippines have been recently launched. As a result competition to mainstay destinations, such as Australia, Thailand, Singapore, and Malaysia, increases. The UNWTOs Tourism 2020 Vision forecasts that international arrivals are expected to reach nearly 1.6 billion by the year 2020. The total tourist arrivals by region shows that by 2020 the top three receiving regions will be Europe (717 million tourists), East Asia and the Pacific (397 million) and Americas (282 million), followed by Africa, the Middle East and South Asia. Regions like Europe and America are expected to show lower rates. Europe will achieve the highest level of arrivals, although there will be a decline from 60% in 1995 to 46% in 2020. It will be fast grow in the long-haul travel worldwide at 5.4% per year over the period 1995-2020, than intraregional travel, at 3.8%. In an attem pt to increase the value and synergy for the tourist and the participating economies the emergence of sub-regional cooperative agreements is on the rise. In the long term prospects is also to increase the awareness and consciousness among travellers for the sustainable and green tourism. For many countries tourism is vital. Greece, Thailand, Egypt, Fiji, Maldives are examples of these counties due to the large intake of money for businesses with their goods and services and the opportunity for employment in the service industries associated with tourism. ¶ These service industries include hospitality services, such as accommodations, including hotels and resorts. Even with problems related to the global economic slowdown, travel and tourism are already part of consumer behavior. That mean that people like to travel are still willing to travel. The European countries have observed increases in domestic tourism, more travel within the same region, increases in travel by road and rail, increases in the individual trips, more direct booking, and an increased use of low-cost airlines. Some changes are temporary but many of them are structural. The supply has two main elements, the destinations and the industry. The future of the destinations depends on their ability to adapt to demand. The effects are more visible in the industry. The tour operators and the accommodation providers have been hit harder by the weakness of the outbound markets, later booking, the tendency towards shorter length of stay, and cost-cutting on business trips. The industry has to adapt to these new facts. The hotels all over the world enjoyed a boom through mid 2007. The levels of the occupancy were high as the room rates and the levels of the travelers were strong. However, the global financial crisis put a damper on hotel occupancy that continued into 2008 and 2009. A big number of hotel construction projects have been cancelled. Travel and tourism operators best-positioned to suffer the least damage are those able to offer low-priced options. In order to avoid losing sales  ¶during the periods of economic slowdown hotels and airlines have increasingly invested in low-cost brands. This economic downturn led to an increase of demand for low and mid-priced hotel and dec reased the demand for luxury hotels. The travellers looking for economy travel accommodation. On the other hand the average daily room rates become higher because of the non-existed competition and the low number of chained hotel outlets. http://www.ncsu.edu/tourismextension/documents/top10traveltrends.pdf http://www.ensino.uevora.pt/tmp/cursos/PPT/TIC/aula_02_anexo2.pdf http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tourism http://www.traveldailynews.com/pages/show_page/7543-Tourism-Trends-by-Tourism-Control-Intelligence http://www.tiac-aitc.ca/english/documents/advocacy/2009/2008StatisticsCompendiumFinal.pdf

Tuesday, August 20, 2019

Avoiding the Retirement Bust Essay -- Expository Classification Essays

Avoiding the Retirement Bust    A recent Gallup poll indicates that nearly 75 percent of 30-to-49 year olds worry about not having enough money to live a comfortable retirement. In addition, 60 percent of those polled say they don't earn enough money to save for retirement. What do these recent polls suggest about many of the baby boomers' financial concerns? Fortunately, for those individuals who are inclined to take charge of their own destinies, several types of tax-deferred retirement savings exist. The government introduces these various retirement savings options to meet the specific needs of three distinct groups of income earners: the self-employed, employees of businesses offering retirement savings incentive plans and just about anyone else who has earned income and is interested in saving for the future.    The first type of option is known as either a Keogh or a Simplified Employee Pension (SEP) plan. These retirement savings plans were created for individuals who either have self-employment income or are partners in their own business. In bo...

Monday, August 19, 2019

Preparing For Our Deaths :: essays research papers

Preparing for Death   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  A lack of preparation for our deaths is a serious problem whether it is because we don’t know the exact time or just don’t want to face death. In a article in time magazine by John Cloud he writes â€Å"We will spend more time getting ready for two weeks away from work than we will for our last two weeks on earth† (Cloud,2000,p.60). We should prepare for our deaths to show our wishes concerning treatment and life support as well as other aspects. We should make choices while we are still well, so that we are treated properly before we die. Frank Ostaceski said â€Å"we have more preparation for how to operate our VCRs than we do for how we die†(Cloud,2000,p.60).   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  In today’s society we all try to prolong life as long as possible. Technology is finding new ways that we can stay healthier and lead productive lives longer. Governor Lamm said â€Å"we should be careful in terms of our technological miracles that we don’t impose life on people who, in fact, are suffering beyond our ability to help†(Collins,1991,p.540). That is the real issue at hand; are we in fact over stepping our boundaries by keeping people alive who are maybe beyond our help. â€Å"Machines can extend the length but not always the quality of life† (Cloud,2000,p.62). As doctors, they need to think about the well being of the patient and if any methods could really help the situation.   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  It is hard to let someone that is close to us die, but we need to look beyond the fact that you will miss them. You need to think about what is best for the patient and if they are terminal; prolonging their life is not the best thing. It is important to prepare for our own death and make our wishes known. A living will is one way of doing that. A living will is a document explains to your doctor what types of treatment you want if you become terminally ill. A living will only works when you are terminal, it does not come into effect if you are in an accident and need emergency treatment. Some people may feel that a living will is not for them, when in fact everyone should have a living will. Most people assume that a living will means that they are refusing treatment, which is not true. A living will just explains your wishes.

Sunday, August 18, 2019

Sustainable Development Essay -- Politics, Modern Culture, Huaorani

Sustainable development, when applied to the development of a system, creates complexity for the stakeholders involved in and affected by that development. To delve this complexity, solid definitions must be proposed for development and sustainable development in order for a framework to be established through which these complexities can be understood. Furthermore, these definitions are necessary evils for explorations of the intricacies of sustainable development due to the various paradigms used to define â€Å"development† and â€Å"sustainable development.† One definition of development, and the one that will be utilized within this report, is the, â€Å"utilizing resources to advance the complexity of a whole society.† From this, a definition of sustainable development can be expressed as, â€Å"a modus operandi for development which ensures that the cost to environment and to any individual human being from development is equally compensated.† This definition allows for a unification of the drive to develop with those who lose from any form of development; thus, it can be renamed â€Å"ideal development.† As is beautifully exemplified in the case of the Ecuadorian tribe the Huaorani, socio-political and economic factors allow for them to feel the benefit of sustainable development, but at the cost of the environment. Nevertheless, the problem still remains of what â€Å"modus operandi† should be adopted for dealing with development. As will become clear from an analysis of how the Huaorani tribe interacted with oil conglomerates, the utilitarian solution is the most viable solution because it ensures that the society conducting the development, and thus the large population of people encapsulated within that society, reap the benefits that created inter... ...want to choose harvesting the oil instead of this plan because the state would be able to directly benefit economically and not be tied to private sector investments. Thus, the state’s push to harvest the oil would most likely destroy the biodiversity of the planet, thus making sustainable development, as previously defined, difficult to acquire due to economic pressures. From this analysis, it can be concluded that selling the land allows for sustainable development from the perspective of the tribes and Ecuador as a whole, but does not allow for sustainable development in relation to the environment. Furthermore, this analysis highlights the pivotal role of money in determining sustainable development in that money, as is exemplified here, has the ability to transcend ethical dilemmas through the opportunities it opens up for those who are receiving it.

Saturday, August 17, 2019

Compare and Contrast Lennie and Crooks Essay

Don’t judge a book for its cover. In the book â€Å"Of Mice and Men†, the people in the bunkhouse had their differences and similarities. Crooks and Lennie had their own differences and similarities, Crooks suffered from racism while Lennie didn’t, Crooks was a lonely man while Lennie had George, and both of them were outside of society. Crooks suffer from racism. He lives alone in his own bunkhouse. Curley’s wife treats him like if he was her slave, one time she entered his room and started denigrating him because of his color. He also doesn’t goes to the â€Å"saloon† to play cards or hang out with the other guys. Lennie has George; they have someone to count on. Tough George sometimes makes fun of Lennie they still know someone is there. On the other hand, Crooks has nobody to rely on. Also, they don’t go further their relationship. They both remain outside of society. Crooks started being a hostile; he wanted to be alone and didn’t let anyone get into his room. Lennie is mentally retarded; this is what makes other people make fun of him or he’s unable to do things. At last, they both rest in Crooks room because they don’t fit in the group of men. As they weren’t the same they still had their own differences and similarities, which made them, get together. Lennie had George but Lennie didn’t fit in the group that made him lonely and that’s one part that brings them together, by loneliness. People are not meant to be alone, everyone is meant to have someone in their lives.

Friday, August 16, 2019

Lifes Ups and Downs Essay

One warm weekend in June, my girlfriend decided she wanted to take me on a weekend getaway to none other than Las Vegas, Nevada, a place where no one else existed but me and her. So I thought. I was totally ecstatic; at this point it’s been moths since we’ve been out just the two of us with no kids. The first night we get there we get dressed up and make reservations at our favorite restaurant. The moment we get to the restaurant, she starts acting weird and all of a sudden does not find a single thing on the menu appetizing and complains of a stomach ache, so we leave in a hurry. Arriving back to our suite, there is a card taped to the door with her name on it. So many thoughts are racing through my mind, â€Å"She is planning something special for us, she has a surprise for me, maybe she ordered room service while we were out and it was inside waiting for us.† As quickly as the thought came they left, we entered the room only for her to admit she was just too tired and needed to rest. So I let her, I laid next to her wondering what was going on, what was going on in her mind. It was almost like we were living in two different worlds. As she slept curiosity suddenly came over me, very quietly I got out of bed grabbing her bag which contained the note that was tapped to the door, into the bathroom I went. My eyes could not believe what was written so boldly across the paper â€Å"I HOPE SHE WAS WORTH IT.† I could not resist questioning the matter at hand, I woke her up and she blatantly denied there being any meaning to this card. We argued hard and like ever before, almost like she had forgotten who I was, like I didn’t matter to her. The rest of the night went on and we were both hurt. I used indirect termination strategies to spare my heart anymore hurt. I couldn’t come to terms that this was finally coming to an end. Four years later, I found out I was never her one and only I was simply her girlfriend number two. Being very cautious to every relationship offer that came my way, I turned down so many. I did not care to see another relationship. I was never one to â€Å"get-over† a bad situation, but I knew I had to move on; I couldn’t come to terms with my last break up. Just as soon as I let down my guard, there she was someone who made me feel alive again. She helped me heal every wound in my heart and soul. Until, I started to see some similarities from my past relationship. She was so secretive, there began to be relational violence. I had to wear sunglasses everywhere I went even if I was inside because of the bruises I would have from the nights before when I didn’t do what I was asked in a timely manner. When the questions came from my friends and co-workers I had to lie. My life has never had so much deception I soon began believing in my own lies. I questioned her I didn’t understand why I had become her human punching bag. She was so cold and nonchalant towards me. As the days went by the dresser drawers slowly became empty the closet became empty and there seemed to be less and less of her things at my place. I wanted to know what was happening, was my life slowly slipping away again? So I picked up the phone and attempted to call her, I got no answer. Days went by without me hearing from her. Then I realized our relationship had ended in sudden death. There was no contact between us. The outside world became non-existent to me. I could not cope with the thought of another relationship ending so sudden. My life hasn’t been the same, how do you wake up one day to a world that isn’t your own? Relearning life one day at a time has been tough but I am a fighter this too will make me stronger!

Thursday, August 15, 2019

Cantaloupe Description

The Cantaloupe At first glance, the cantaloupe looks round and light grayish-tan, with a hint of green. From afar it looks round and plain, about the size of a peewee soccer ball. On approach, the circular shape is less perfect with subtle dents and bumps all around. Surrounding the sphere shaped fruit are light tan lines like a dense city map with all the streets intertwining and curving around without any significant pattern, not geometric like gridlines. On the surface, there are small matchbook sized patches color the skin, some more yellow and other patches that are darker green.A particular indention looks like the fruit might have laid on a rock on the ground while it was growing. One end, where the flower might have once been, is the palest of yellow circles. On the opposite edge, the stubby vestige of a stem remains. This dried up nub is the brown and shriveled, slightly indented from the rest of the globe. Surrounding the stem is a dark circle of hunter green. Picking it up from the counter, the weight of this globular object seems significantly heavier than it looks, like a mini bowling ball.Despite the volume, it feels that the weight is not solid which is proven by the hollow sound the fruit makes when tapped, like patting a child on the head. The delineated lines feel like webbing and give the fruit a rough feel, but it’s not an uncomfortable roughness. The experience is somewhere in between a prickly cactus and a furry peach. At this point my mind starts to wander. Should I cut it open now or wait? Should I take a break? I look outside at the fat flakes of snow coming down outside and remind myself to get back to the task at hand.There is no resentment or anger. I look again at this object I have assigned myself to detail. When I am at a loss as to how to describe something in particular my mind wandering happens more frequently. I continue to focus my attention back to the cantaloupe as soon as I realize I’ve been distracted. I hol d the cantaloupe to my eye. There is a faint line of brownish green that runs through the net-like lines covering the fruit. Some of the spaces between the lines look like parks because they’re darker green, while others ook grey like the concrete of a parking lot. My mind wanders again and I start to look to see if there are any recognizable maps in squiggles. I see a roundabout that reminds me of an intersection in England and another resembles the neighborhood where I grew up. The intertwining layers of the lines remind me of overgrown vines on a wall covering another layer of skin. The underneath layer has the vague look of green splotches, almost veins, like the streaks that run through blue cheese. I thump the cantaloupe again. It substitutes as a drum to make a tune.Apparently it has different thicknesses inside because the sound it makes when you knock it on the end is a higher pitch than when you rap it in the middle. One spot must be particularly thick because the s ound is more substantial. Rubbing the skin makes the same sound as rubbing your hands together on a dry winter day. I try to make other noises using the produce, but intuition tells me that the only way to get another sound is to drop it on the floor. I’m not willing to do that. Before cutting into the orb, I notice a whiff of eau-de grocery store produce aisle a bit past its sell-by date.The smell isn’t strong and it’s only when I touch the fruit to my nose that I smell this. I then sniff each different area of the outer layer and notice that where the flower once might have been the smell is much stronger and sweeter. I scratch my finger nails on the rough skin, but it doesn’t affect the scent the way it would with an orange or lemon. It’s time to cut into the orb. Even as the knife makes the first gouge, clear pale orange juice escapes. I lick my fingers and find the sweet taste refreshing and different.Although the juice is the color of a Satsu ma mandarin or a commercial worthy carrot, it tastes nothing like either. Slicing the melon in half, the cantaloupe now resembles a geode, with a plain outside and a brightly colored exotic inside. It’s filled with seeds and goo in the center. The slimy innards resemble the finest angel hair pasta, but instead of being the color of regular noodles, they are varying shades of orange, some even translucent. I carve out this gooey inside and the sweet smell now fills the air with its cloying tropical fermented flower mell. Friends who have been watching a movie in the other room come to see if they can have some, the smell having tempted them away from what they are doing. Ironic, because I’m no longer interested in the cantaloupe and ready to toss it into the composting bin. I send everyone away so that I can continue on. The meaty flesh isn’t too tough, nor is it too soft. I take a bite and let the flavor rush across my tongue. The taste reminds me of summers on the farm eating the freshest fruits and vegetables straight out of the garden still warm from the sun.There’s a touch of salt in the taste, but the sweetness overpowers it. In spite the firm texture, the fruit feels soft and chewy and the volume of nectar is astounding. The tissue is softer and moister than the similar essence of a pumpkin and more compact than the inside of a fig. Squishing the orange flesh with my fingers, it all but dissolves into juice. What little remains is the finest of strings as soft as silk. I find a seed still attached, that I missed. The kernel is a flat oval with semi-pointed ends. Like a flat football with the air taken away, but miniscule in comparison.It’s almost as though the surrounding fibrous slime is dissolving in the air as I watch. I break open a seed using my fingernail. It’s soft and waxy, not much there. I take a wedge of the sliced cantaloupe and look at the difference between the skin and the edible meat. Like a rainb ow, the color changes from thick rind on the outside to the orange moist, fleshy core on the inside. Like the color spectrum, the differences in shades are subtle, but quick. A yellow stratum is the most predominant, but considering the layer in question is less than an eighth of an inch thick, this golden subcutaneous layer isn’t very big.I make sure there isn’t anything I’ve overlooked and to check my notes for missing descriptive words. I’m shocked to look at the clock and see that more time has passed than I would have expected. I went several hours without checking my watch; something I can only do when I’m not bored. Learning to look beyond the obvious is something I already knew how to do. I enjoy observing people and watching facial expressions for meaning. What I’m not good at it is sitting still and holding my attention for long periods of time. Exercises like this help to train my brain to â€Å"settle own, focus, and catch upâ⠂¬  as local monologuist Josh Kornbluth says. While I had to make a few self directed corrections along the way, I was fairly pleased that I was able to block out a significant amount of what was going on with family and friends in the other rooms and outdoors. Yes, there were a few times that my attention wandered, but I was back on track in seconds rather than hours or days. The reward at the end was to finish a paper I was happy with and to share the small remainder of the cantaloupe with my friends while on a weekend away. Mission accomplished!