Nuclear Experts Speak: “In a Nuclear War between the US and Russia, Everybody in the World would Die” https://t.co/eucD2fsD37 via @grtvnews
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Russia warns US against ‘Syria-style’ actions in N. Korea https://t.co/HoownCMwL5
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China and Russia dispatch ships to shadow Trump’s 'armada' as it approaches North Korean waters
https://t.co/1TdbgZsqtu via @telegraphnews— Sig Nordal, Jr (@signordal) April 17, 2017
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President Trump’s Loose Talk on North Korea https://t.co/Qptdc24SZP
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Reading Bernhard Schlink’s work in German and then in its English translation, as I’ve done with his latest novel, The Woman on the Stairs, can be disorienting. The original obviously affords a more direct encounter with Schlink’s style and literary sensibility. His German is structurally simple yet elegant and poetic — rhythmic and filled with assonance, alliteration, and half-rhymes. Immersing oneself in his language can be a sensuous experience.
But along with the pleasures come frustrations. For the non-native reader, the experience is akin to peering through a scrim veiling the author’s meaning — not unlike the efforts of Schlink’s protagonists to discern truth through the murk of misunderstanding.
In fact, one signature of Schlink’s fiction is the sudden perspectival shift. His plots — sometimes explicit detective stories, sometimes not — often contain elements of mystery. With each discovery, a Schlink protagonist reconsiders his view of his life, his relationships, and ultimately his own identity. Even the genre novels, like his Self trilogy, have an existential dimension.
Schlink himself is a former judge who is now a law professor, and the probing, analytical turn of mind that suits a jurist also informs his fiction. His best-known book is The Reader, an allegory of love and guilt that explores the complicated bonds between the postwar generation of Germans and their elders.
The weight of German history — the problem the Germans call Vergangenheitsbewältigung, or coming to terms with the past — is a powerful presence in Schlink’s work. Sometimes, as in The Reader, the historical references are both explicit and central.
Hitler, the tumultuous radicalism of the 1960s, the division and reunification of Germany — all are mentioned in The Woman on the Stairs. But they serve mostly as a backdrop to an obsession with a more personal past. The subhead of an admiring online review by Deutsche Welle, Germany’s international public television station, dubbed the novel’s concerns “Vergangenheitsbewältigung light;” the review itself described them as “all too human.”
Schlink’s unnamed protagonist, who doubles as the narrator, is a successful mergers-and-acquisitions lawyer who had once sought to be a judge. Stereotypically unimaginative and self-congratulatory, he disdains novels, tears, and the demands of children (including his own).
On the cusp of old age, he finds himself drawn back into the orbit of an elusive woman he had once loved and for whom he had (uncharacteristically) risked his career. Her unexplained betrayal has shadowed his otherwise conventional life, which included a marriage cut short by his politician wife’s fatal car accident.
As a fledgling lawyer, the narrator met Irene, the titular woman on the stairs, because of a legal conflict over a painting for which she had modeled. The relationship between portrait and subject — art and life, fiction and history — is another familiar Schlink theme, linked here to the interplay between past and present that shapes the book’s narrative structure.
Art has the capacity not just to idealize but, as Schlink’s characters note, to freeze time. The fictional painting — titled Woman on Staircase — directly evokes two actual ones. Irene describes the representational work as a response to Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2, the unsettling Cubist- and Futurist-influenced sensation of New York’s 1913 Armory Show. And in an “Author’s Note,” Schlink acknowledges the inspiration of Gerhard Richter’s Ema (Nude on a Staircase), a deliberately blurry 1966 portrait of the artist’s first wife, based on a photograph.
The novel begins when the narrator suddenly re-encounters the portrait in a Sydney, Australia, art gallery that is part of the city’s Botanic Garden — a place, he tells us, where “time stands still.” Peter Gundlach, the multimillionaire businessman once married to Irene, will later underline the point, declaring that “[p]aintings halt the march of time.”
Flashback scenes offer glimpses of the narrator’s youth, characterized by material comfort and emotional deprivation, and his initial interactions, in Frankfurt, with Irene and the portrait. The occasion of their meeting is a dispute between Karl Schwind, the painting’s creator, and Gundlach, its owner. Irene has left Gundlach for Schwind, and the two men are wrangling over both the painting and the woman, a contest in which Irene is both queen and pawn. The work in question seems to the narrator to embody a “jumble of power and seduction, resistance and surrender.” Falling hard for Irene (or perhaps just his image of her), he helps her escape the two men and abscond with the portrait. But while he fantasizes a life with her, she disappears without a trace.
The portrait, however, surfaces in Sydney, and a private eye finds Irene living, without proper papers, on a nearly deserted Australian island. Temporarily abandoning his responsibilities, the narrator sails off to meet her. Soon enough, rather improbably, Schwind and Gundlach also show up. (Literal realism has never been Schlink’s forte — nor, for that matter, his aim.) The two men argue the respective merits of art and commerce and then depart, leaving the narrator alone with the dying Irene.
The narrative unfolds in a series of short chapters, segueing between past and present in English prose that seems both staccato and unadorned. As the lawyer grows closer to Irene, he struggles with intimacy, closure, impending loss, and the homely rigors of caregiving. He slowly relinquishes his obsession with judgment by questioning his own. At Irene’s request, he becomes a modern-day Scheherazade, recounting their imagined life together as a way of staving off death. He invents a healing “fiction, but fiction in which we appeared as we really were.” It draws on his actual experiences and her suggestions and becomes, like the best novels, more vivid and true than reality.
No doubt some readers and critics will find The Woman on the Stairs unduly sentimental. In the end, the narrator realizes that Irene was not just his fantasy but “a woman with a life of her own.” He thinks: “How courageously she had lived it; how timidly I had lived mine.” The lessons are indeed obvious — precisely the ones he needed to learn. But the narrator’s emotional transformation is also poignant, earned, and utterly convincing. The scrim lifts, and, in the language of the heart he now knows, his way forward becomes clear.
The Barnes & Noble Review http://ift.tt/2pq4MM8
Have you heard? It’s National Park Week! With over 400 amazing places to visit, you’re sure to discover incredible views, fascinating history and outstanding recreational opportunities. Another great reason to visit national parks is to observe wildlife. So take the kids and see if you can enjoy the parks as much as these mountain goats at Glacier National Park in Montana. Photo by Rick Sheremeta (http://ift.tt/18oFfjl).
American life expectancy is on the decline for the first time in decades and there are a number of factors that come into play. Today, let’s talk about two important variables that are affecting our normal life expectancy — obesity and opioids.
More Americans are becoming obese. Roughly a third of the people in the United States are. This leads to a number of health problems as well as a decline in overall life expectancy.
Obesity as a cause of early death is the easiest to prevent. Being just 40 pounds overweight can shave 3 years off of your life expectancy while being 100 pounds overweight can shave off a decade.
There are a few things that have made America number one in terms of obesity, one of which includes our diet. We eat more processed foods than anyone else, and we only get an average of 30% of our daily calories from fresh unprocessed foods.
Government subsidies have made these processed and fast foods more profitable for decades, and it has made this diet a cultural norm for everyone here. Our attitudes toward work play a role in our weight issues, too.
When we work more and play less, we become so stressed out that we often turn to food for comfort. This can also contribute to obesity.
Obesity on its own is bad enough for your body, but it also increases the risk of cancer and type 2 diabetes. It can also lead to heart disease and stroke.
If this sounds like you, here are some simple ways in which you can turn your health around:
See Also: Foods That Will Help You Keep Your Family Healthy
Opioid prescriptions have been on a steep rise for decades, and this has led to an increase in addiction. People start off taking pain medications with a prescription for various reasons. When their supply runs out, they are left with a dilemma: buy it on the streets or seek addiction treatment.
Since addiction treatment still hasn’t surpassed the advances in opioid prescriptions, many still prefer to buy their supplies off the street. Eventually, the habit becomes too expensive to maintain such that addicted people switch to cheaper and more readily available heroin.
This has led to a surge in heroin-related overdose deaths. In 2014 alone, nearly 30,000 people died from heroin overdoses, and that number has continued to skyrocket. There has been constant news regarding people passing out from overdosing with heroin while driving, sometimes with their children in the car. It has become a serious national health crisis.
See Also: Spiritual Pointers for Quitting a Bad Habit
What is probably the most shocking thing about the latest American life expectancy statistics is the disparity between different socioeconomic classes. The life expectancy for lower-class Americans has gone down significantly over the past several decades, while the life expectancy for higher class Americans has gone up dramatically over the same period.
In 1980, the poorest American man could expect to live to 76.2 years, while the poorest American woman could expect to live to 82.5 years. Today, that same man will only live to 76.1 years, while that same woman will only live to 78.3 years.
Upper-middle-class men and women have made the most significant gains in life expectancy during the same time period. Upper-middle-class men could expect to live to see 79.9 years in 1890, while upper-class men could expect to live to see 82.6 years.
Today, those same men can expect to see 87.8 years and 88.8 years respectively–a significant increase. Upper-class women have made similar gains, going from a life expectancy of 86.1 years in 1980 to a life expectancy of 91.9 years today.
Do upper classes experience less stress, healthier lifestyles, and receive better medical care than the lower classes? Learn more about the decrease in American life expectancy from this infographic.
What can you do to increase your chances of long-term survival?
The post What’s Behind America’s Lagging Life Expectancy? appeared first on Dumb Little Man.
Grand Canyon National Park – Arizona – USA (by Carlos Adampol Galindo)
You must have heard a lot of people say that the ‘first impression is the last impression’. Frankly, that can be quite true. The first few moments you spend with a person is crucial since it will determine the direction of your conversation and even your relationship.
Whether you are set for an interview or dealing with an important client, you need to make a good impression in the first thirty seconds. The impression you create is the fine blend of your personality, body language, and communication skills.
When you are able to mix up all these three elements in the right proportion and present them before other people, you’ll be able to give your presence more impact.
On an average, a person can hold his attention towards another for the first eight to ten seconds of their meeting. After that, the attention gets diverted to other things. If you want to impress others with your personality, try to capture their attention within that time frame.
Here are five ways that will help you make a good impression in less than thirty seconds.
Before you try to talk freely to a person, you need to open up your body. Your body language and movements are essential when making a good impression.
Prior to the conversation, you should take a deep breath, boost up your confidence and stretch your shoulders. It will make you appear stronger.
A relaxed and confident person is able to communicate freely with others. If you are too tensed up, you will not be able to make the desired impact.
People like talking to live persons, not inanimate objects. Making eye contact is one good way to make the person you are talking to feel that way.
You may find it awkward to keep looking into the eyes of the other person, but it gives your presence more impact. It enables you to communicate non-verbally, which is one of the best ways to establish a connection.
People who avoid making eye contact are often the people who don’t have enough confidence. Therefore, if you want to make a strong first appearance, make visual contact.
When talking to a person for the first time, trying to make a connection can be difficult. One good way to start is to find things you both share.
If you are introduced by a friend or someone you know to another person, you can start off the conversation by talking about that person who introduced you. You can also talk about common interests, like business or profession.
Avoid giving a long introduction about yourself. No one is interested in knowing all those details. If you want to have a long relationship with the person, you need to make a good impression for the relationship to flourish.
See Also: How To Keep A Conversation Going With 8 Different Topics
A friendly smile can win the hearts of others when you talk to them. It makes the discussion friendlier, infusing the willingness to go ahead with the discussion.
Keep a friendly and genuine smile on your face when you talk. It will give you the impression of someone who is easy to approach and amicable. It delivers a sense of warmth to the people you are talking to.
Introverts are often associated with people who find it difficult to smile. These people are not as outgoing as others and may find it hard to create a positive impression. Whatever the topic of discussion, make sure you start off in a light-hearted manner.
When you have thirty seconds, it’s easy to feel pressured about speaking the entire time. After all, need to create an impression, right?
Well, that’s not always the case. It’s still best if you can provide the other person an equal opportunity to talk. Communication is not a single-way process so you and your partner should have an equal chance of sharing and listening.
Although you need to start the conversation, make sure to just speak for a while and allow the other person to speak after. When he’s talking, listen and respond with appropriate body languages so you can make a good impression.
You should blink, nod and smile at the right moments. These actions can make the other person feel that you are acknowledging what he is saying. Thus, you can develop a relationship that rests on mutual respect and warmth.
See Also: First Day at Work? How to Make a Good Impression
Along with these, you can also ask questions. This is a sign of your interest and engagement. Even if you do not agree with what the other person is saying, you need to respond strategically.
When you try to make a good impression in the first thirty seconds, you should make your appearance pleasing. Showing non-aggressiveness and mutual understanding are some of the best strategies to develop a relationship.
Hopefully, these tips will be beneficial to you the next time you need to make a quick good impression.
The post 5 Ways To Make A Good Impression In Less Than 30 Seconds appeared first on Dumb Little Man.
Sig Nordal 