Print eSignature Presentation Myself

Perspective 1:You might have come across these nature of images either through videos or articles at social/print media.There is one group of people in Pakistan (mostly right wing religious parties) that believes that USA, Israel and India are biggest enemies of Pakistan and Islam. They think that Pakistan is suffering at all fronts due to them. Whenever any bad thing happens either in Pakistan or rest part of Muslim world, they call protests after Juma Prayers. They curse these three countries and burning flags is their signature moment. They are in opinion that Pakistan was founded in the name of Islam so these countries want to eliminate us at every cost.Perspective 2:You might have come across these nature of pictures as well.During last decade, Honor of Prophecy (Namoos e Risalat) has become one of the most sensitive subjective in Pakistan. You may lose your life or face severe consequences in case of saying any unpopular opinion in general public over this subject. Salman Taseer, Shahbaz Bhatti and notably Mashaal Khan lost their lives on account of blasphemy charges. Local religious Cleric Khadim Hussain Rizvi has emerged over the years who leads Honor of Prophecy protests. last year when Asia Bibi was acquitted by Supreme Court of Pakistan from all blasphemy charges, protesters led by Khadim Hussain Rizvi came on roads and burnt public properties of innocent people. They abused/threatened govt of Pakistan, Armed Forces and Supreme Court. On account of these developments, one group of Pakistanis think that these type of people led by Khadim Hussain Rizvi are biggest enemies of Pakistan who are using Islam for their personal gain. They think they are giving bad name to our religion as well as country.I have presented both perspectives so I myself is not going to draw any conclusion. Please read and decide who are “Real Enemies” of Pakistan and Islam. I will be looking forward for your feedback and comments.Disclaimer: The author has written an answer by giving perspective of two group of people. Images were used as a reference to show the violent nature of protests. Author has no intention of disrespecting Pakistan, USA, Israel, India and Islam altogether.~MAKPictures were taken from Google Images

There isn't a chance that this is Georgia as Thant Zin Oo suggested. The terminal of  'e' in Garamond extends further and the 'a' should have a ball terminal, which is not present in the printed text shown here.I was thinking of Proforma myself considering the lack of a serif at the top terminal of 'a', but the descender of 'y' features a serif which is not present in the printed text, and the italic of Proforma is distinctly different. For one, it has an 'f' with a descender, which is not present in the printed text. This is highly unusual in italics for serif typefaces.The typeface looks very familiar to me with its straight y-descender, the serifless 'a' and the relatively wide and unusual b/d/o/p/q, but I can't place it.Update:I found the typeface. It's Joanna. Note also that there is a Joanna Nova, but that's not the typeface presented here, as Noanna Nova's italics are wider for starters. I would personally recommend using Joanna Nova rather than Joanna, but the typeface used for the Routledge classical series is Joanna in any case.The serifless terminal of 'a' already got me thinking about Eric Gill's Perpetua, but it wasn't that. The other shapes looked so familiar to me, particularly the wide and rather unusual bows of b/d. I was then reminded I had seen that exact quality in Gill Sans among others, and realized that this is a signature design aspect of Eric Gill. Hence, I found out it's Joanna. That also explains the straight descender of 'y' and the descenderless 'f' in the italic.

When I was going to school, I remember having trouble with math, like writing numbers under each other such as:112345I couldn't do the problem, but my father drilled in to me that the numbers have to be neat, and directly under each other (apparently, it's easier to learn that way).Growing up, my handwriting kept changing. In some instances, I noticed that people were mispronouncing my name, because my 'u' and 'r' looked like a "W," so I started concentrating on making sure they were appearing as different letters.I used to try to copy the handwriting of other people (not forging, just duplicating) but I couldn't do it consistently. Every few lines, my handwriting would change, and if I turned a page from front to back, I couldn't keep my writing consistent. So, if I was writing a letter, each page looked entirely different.Over the years, I have developed my handwriting to be so unique, that people compliment me (which I think is quite funny). It's basically 'fancy printing,' and my signature, if cursive, usually looks relatively the same. I noticed a while ago, that my fascination with crossword puzzles and similar books, is because I'm constantly writing the answers. My OCD is evident in my books, because there are words or individual letters that are written, crossed off, circled, all very methodically (to me) and it doesn't change from book to book.But, what became apparent to me, is that my need to 'answer' the puzzles (I won't look at the answers in the back) is more of a writing practice than a challenge, because I solve in pen.The way to develop neat handwriting is to practice, practice, practice. I've even been at presentations where the lecturer had a pad and a marker, and attendees will ask that I write the notes for the class to copy, because they like "the way I make my 'e's'."I've recently said that it makes no difference what education I have, what I can do, or the goodness I display, because all other people seem to comment on consistently, is "Wow, you have great handwriting."Practice, practice, practice .... we didn't grow up with computers and word processors, and if you have to fill out an application for something, you have to be able to write small enough (yet clear enough) for it to be read.

Scaringly difficult subject to write about, and surely, just as ambivalent. I possess no expertise on poetry nor on music, only what a curious & interested mind gathers over these past few years. Hastily point out mistakes or any others short-comings & fallacies.I will be quick to mention Milton, perhaps a little of Eliot, and lastly, Ezra Pound. The effect & connection between music and poetry has definitively varied throughout history. Sung epos & folklore songs, Provençal & Troubadour poetry,... roughly speaking, and this is my observation, the first wedge between the two has been made when poetry became much more erudite, soaked in words-meaning, and forgot the musical rhythms little behind, not that I value one over another.-- Anyway, 19. & 20. century welcomed the revival of the two, and again established connections. French symbolism, Modernism & new musical techniques ( revolution of style both in literature & music, the avant-garde was united across all fields ). Of course, one of the issues is how much of modern poetry can be marked as "narrative" in the obvious sense. The elements of music is such a vague term indeed…To start off with a quotation from Poe`s The Poetic Principle:Contenting myself with the certainty that Music, in its various modes of metre, rhythm and rhyme, is of so vast a moment in Poetry as never to be wisely rejected - is so vitally important an adjunct, that he is simply silly who declines its assistance, I will not now pause to maintain its absolute essentiality. It is in Music perhaps that the soul most nearly attains the great end for which, when inspired by the Poetic Sentiment, it struggles - the creation of supernal Beauty. It may be, indeed, that here this sublime end is, now and then, attained in fact. We are often made to feel, with a shivering delight, that from an earthly harp are stricken notes which cannot have been unfamiliar to the angels. And thus there can be little doubt that in the union of Poetry with Music in its popular sense, we shall find the widest field for the Poetic development. The old Bards and Minnesingers had advantages which we do not possess - and Thomas Moore, singing his own songs, was, in the most legitimate manner, perfecting them as poems.&A poem, in my opinion, is opposed to a work of science by having, for its immediate object, pleasure, not truth; to romance, by having, for its object, an indefinite instead of a definite pleasure, being a poem only so far as this object is attained; romance presenting perceptible images with definite, poetry with definite sensations, to which end music is an essential, since the comprehension of sweet sound is our most indefinite conception. Music, when combined with a pleasurable idea, is poetry; music, without the idea, is simply music; the idea, without the music, is prose, from its very definitiveness.And to finish, a section from a letter to James R. Lowell:I am profoundly excited by music and by some poems - those of Tennyson especially - whom with Keats, Shelley, Coleridge (occasionally) and a few others of like thought and expression, I regard as the sole poets. Music is the perfection of the soul or idea of Poetry. The vagueness of exultation aroused by a sweet air which should be strictly indefinite and never too strongly suggestive is precisely what we should aim at in poetry. Affectation which is thus no blemishMustek and Poetry have ever been acknowledg'd Sisters.  As Poetry is the harmony of Words, so Mustek is that of Notes...  Sure they are most excellent when they are join 'd.   Blest pair of Sirens, pledges of Heav'ns joy,  Sphere-born harmonious Sisters, Voice, and Vers,  Wed your divine sounds, and mixt power employ  Dead things with inbreath'd sense able to pierceMilton could have very well be a musician, -his father was-, and his music appeared in print from time to time, one notable contribution was Fair Orian in collection of madrigals in Honour of queen Elizabeth, The Triumphs of Oriana.He was a close friend with a composer Henry Lawes, and the two collaborated on The Masque of Comus, 1634.There is also a distinction to be made between Greek & Roman musica practica, which was performed & sung, and the Pythagorean musica speculativa, theoretical & mathematical understanding, — changed to Christianised harmonia mundi during the Renaissance revival ). Harmonica mundi can definitely be encountered in Milton`s early poetry, At solemn music, Ad Patrem, & passages from 'Arcades', Comus, and 'On the Morning of Christ's Nativity'.From At solemn music:“ … disproportioned sinJarred against nature's chime, and with harsh dinBroke the fair music that all creatures madeTo their great Lord.”See how disproportioned resonates with Pythagorean proportions, and it became disproportioned with the Original Sin and the fall from Eden. The reconciliation between the Classical/Pagan & Christian aesthetics and tradition was one of the foremost issues of early Milton. A passage from On the Morning of Christ's Nativity';The lonely mountains o’er, And the resounding shore, A voice of weeping heard and loud lament; Edgèd with poplar pale, From haunted spring, and dale The parting Genius is with sighing sent; With flower-inwoven tresses torn The Nymphs in twilight shade of tangled thickets mourn.From Paradise Lost:Celestial voices to the midnight air [...]With heavenly touch of instrumental soundsIn full harmonic number joined, their songsDivide the night, and lift our thoughts to heaven.& in Hell:Their song was partial, but the harmony(What could it less when spirits immortal sing?)Suspended hell, and took with ravishment The thronging audience.Partial music of fallen Angels & Broken music of man. And Book V:Mystical dance, which yonder starry sphereOf planets and of fixed in all her wheelsResembles nearest, mazes intricate,Eccentric, intervolved, yet regularThen most, when most irregular they seem;And in their motions harmony divineSo smooths her charming tones, that God's own earListens delighted.A quick stop with T.S. Eliot and modernism before Pound.Modernism was a turbulent period, literature was chasing music, music was chasing language, and both were born out of impulse to restore expressivity & eloquence that the formality has lost. An important shift has happened, there is no absolute, right or left, right is not the opposite of left, ocean does not kill the fire.Poe & French symbolism played a pivotal role, and I am not confident nor do I know enough to speak about French climate and the effects of Poe in the second half of the 19. century here.Just as literature changed, so did music. Even the so called more traditional composers, like Ravel, are less formulaic and more abrupt, not to mention the likes of Stravinsky. What is very intriguing to me is how well does modern art produce tensions despite the loss of totality & coherence, and how idiosyncratic arbitration took over without losing the profound and human effect of tensity. In this sense, music was not longer a music in musical forms, but rather that of consciousness and its fragmentation.The seeming homelessness of arts in the period is a precondition of the changes that occurred, and this is what T. Hardy called the ache of modernism. There are no happy ends, formulaic tragedies ethically victorious, nor obvious redemption ( debatable, Last part of The Waste Land is an example ). The widening canyon of separation & inability of pristine connectivity is a precondition of the age, and in itself, its product - Postmodernism, a headless human still digging in a graveyard of modernity, seeking hopelessly for a regenerative bone & praying not to find it - he would have to leave. This is why modernism has no green heritage, only skeletons. In Joyce`s terms, Scrupulous meanness. Even the Hegelian aesthetics “in the suspension of equilibrium lies the tendency to return to a condition of equilibrium”, even musical form through dissonance to consonance, is depleted. If one here remembers the quotes from Poe and his posture of indefinitiveness, how it went from his to symbolism and from there to modernism, acclaiming the suggestive aspect.One of the drives of modernism was to thrust poetry back from the street, or jungle, to the sublime, the rightful place, to perform the duties it deserves. The restoration called for a path through prickly subjects, even ironic and laughable, like Prufrock`s underwhelming question, but it manages to pass exactly due to that vagueness, and we sense it as our own.Perhaps all this has been rather imprecise, let me speak about Eliot.So, while poetry attempts to convey something beyond what can be conveyed in prose rhythms, it remains, all the same, one person talking to another; and this is just as true if you sing it, for singing is another way of talking. The immediacy of poetry to conversation is not a matter on which we can lay down exact laws. Every revolution in poetry is apt to be, and sometimes to announce itself to be a return to common speech.... The music of poetry, then, must be a music latent in the common speech of its time.The Use of Poetry and The Use of Criticism: “Poetry begins, I dare say, with a savage beating a drum in a jungle, and it retains that essential of percussion and rhythm” - like music.Fairly, music of poetry may differ from music of music, an awkward saying that while musical elements are important for analysis, but the musical elements in poetry categorically & theoretically & applicably differ from those that we apply to music per se.'From Poe to Valery´, essay:Poetry, of different kinds, may be said to range from that in which the attention of the reader is directed primarily to the sound, to that in which it is directed primarily to the sense. With the former kind, the sense may be apprehended almost unconsciously; with the latter kind - at these two extremes - it is the sound, of the operation of which upon us we are unconscious. But, with either type, sound and sense must cooperate; in even the most purely incantatory poem, the dictionary meaning of the words cannot be disregarded with impunity.Precisely, from The music of Poetry;[m]y purpose here is to insist that a 'musical poem' is a poem which has a musical pattern of sound and a musical pattern of the secondary meanings of the words that compose it, and that these two patterns are indissoluble and one.Simply a level beside the denotation of words. In`The Music of Poetry´ another inspect of this climate is presented:The music of a word is, so to speak, at a point of intersection: it arises from its relation first to the words immediately preceding and following it, and indefinitely to the rest of its context; and from another relation, that of its immediate meaning in that context to all the other meanings which it has had in other contexts, to its greater or less wealth of association.Which can be directly linked to his writings On Dante:In English poetry words have a kind of opacity which is part of their beauty. I do not mean that the beauty of English poetry is what is called mere 'verbal beauty'. It is rather that words have associations, and the groups of words in association have associations, which is a kind of local self-consciousness, because they are the growth of a particular civilization.As many words, music ferries such a rich history of meanings, definitions, and relations that is difficult to analyse the impact. Music in one of the Archetypes, and they are hard to contain. Music is a structure separate of understanding, insofar as it escapes the restraints of conventional meanings. The Music of Poetry is, if one takes a leap of imagination, an objective correlative, if I dare expand the term. If I use a line from D. Davie; "It is language which happens through the speaker and not the speaker who expresses himself through language.”-— Can this also be said about music, when it comes to early Eliot?In an 'Aspects of Rhythm and Rhyme in Eliot's Early Poems', J. Chalker, in sum, `The Use “the steadiness and predictability of musical rhythm” is to produce psychological reassurance in the midst of emotional disturbance.´—Such irony, after reading Prufrock, if I thinks solemnly of rhythm, I would say it conveys anything but the reassurance and predictability, yes, the irony that is serves as a distraction from emotional disturbances, and in this fact lays reassurance.Quite enough of Eliot…Ezra Pound!''The idea that music and poetry can be separated,'' he wrote, ''is an idea current in ages of degradation and decadence when both arts are in the hands of lazy imbeciles.''Opera Le Testament De Villon:He started at least two unfinished operas, Cavalcanti and COLLIS O HELICONII.( Two short recordings of the latter can be found here )Rhythm & Music, “the hardest quality of a man's style to counterfeit”.In his three essays about Music in Transatlantic Review, he strongly focuses & advocates time and time-intervals, arguing:“A sound of any pitch, or any combination of such sounds, may be followed by a sound, or any combination of sounds, providing the time interval between them is properly gauged; and this is true for any series of sounds, chords, or arpeggios”Emphasization of space and rhythm was, by space - `space in between concise images - in juxtaposition´ - one of prime concerns of Imagisme. Reader`s interaction is needed to form a connection between them. ( A short answer about In A Station of the Metro ) Another short poem, Alba:As cool as the pale wet leaves  of lily-of-the-valleyShe lay beside me in the dawn.Pound˙s poetry, rhythm & music was always more about reaction than explanation, which, I think, anyone who has read him can agree, and that might very well be the only thing on which we can agree. Therefore Poetry & Music are two in one to achieving this reaction.I will briefly present his own attempt to compose a work based on his own poem, Sestina Altaforte (1909 )Loquitur: En Bertrans de Born.Dante Alighieri put this man in hell for that he was a stirrer-up of strife.Eccovi!Judge ye!Have I dug him up again?The scene in at his castle, Altaforte. "Papiols" is his jongleur."The Leopard," the device of Richard (Cúur de Lion).IDamn it all! all this our South stinks peace.You whoreson dog, Papiols, come! Let's to music!I have no life save when the swords clash.But ah! when I see the standards gold, vair, purple, opposingAnd the broad fields beneath them turn crimson,Then howl I my heart nigh mad with rejoicing.IIIn hot summer have I great rejoicingWhen the tempests kill the earth's foul peace,And the lightnings from black heav'n flash crimson,And the fierce thunders roar me their musicAnd the winds shriek through the clouds mad, opposing,And through all the riven skies God's swords clash.IIIHell grant soon we hear again the swords clash!And the shrill neighs of destriers in battle rejoicing,Spiked breast to spiked breast opposing!Better one hour's stour than a year's peaceWith fat boards, bawds, wine and frail music!Bah! there's no wine like the blood's crimson!IVAnd I love to see the sun rise blood-crimson.And I watch his spears through the dark clashAnd it fills all my heart with rejoicingAnd pries wide my mouth with fast musicWhen I see him so scorn and defy peace,His lone might 'gainst all darkness opposing.VThe man who fears war and squats opposingMy words for stour, hath no blood of crimsonBut is fit only to rot in womanish peaceFar from where worth's won and the swords clashFor the death of such sluts I go rejoicing;Yea, I fill all the air with my music.VIPapiols, Papiols, to the music!There's no sound like to swords swords opposing,No cry like the battle's rejoicingWhen our elbows and swords drip the crimsonAnd our charges 'gainst "The Leopard's" rush clash.May God damn for ever all who cry "Peace!"VIIAnd let the music of the swords make them crimson!Hell grant soon we hear again the swords clash!Hell blot black for always the thought "Peace!"As a remainder, poem’s speaker is the Gascon nobleman and war-loving troubadour Bertran de Born, who lived in the second half of the twelfth century. There is no way Pound would have wrote the poem in 1914, even 1913, with its pro-war orientation, but in the end, it is a traditional subject of epic.If one isolates the ending words of each stanza:peace – music – clash – opposing – crimson – rejoicing [Stanza I]rejoicing – peace – crimson – music – opposing – clash [Stanza II]clash – rejoicing – opposing – peace – music – crimson [Stanza III]crimson – clash – rejoicing – music – peace – opposing [Stanza IV]opposing – crimson – peace – clash – rejoicing – music [Stanza V]music – opposing – rejoicing – crimson – clash – Peace [Stanza VI]crimson – clash – Peace [Envoi]Not to get into a detailed analysis of this one poem and its technical mastery of Anglo-Saxon metre & alliteration, more famous in his translation The Seafarer.“The phrases are short (two to six small, quick bars), often similar but generally asymmetric, and impetuous with anapest driven leaps, creating an almost flickering quality. The sestina form, however, is used for purely structural function. There is no attempt at word painting or at a sonic/cognitive equivalent. The music matches the original poem, one note or chord per syllable, through the third line of the second sestet. From this point musical irregularities gradually encroach upon the monosyllabic relationship with the text. His formal method was to assign one or two extremely brief music segments (each segment consisting of a different chord, or two or three chords with or without a unison note) as a “sonic signifier” to identify each line of Altaforte’s six end words. When the end word appeared in its new position in the following sestet its sonic signifier would appear as a recognizable determinant. . . .“Remembering category #4 concerning “Criticism via music” in Pound’s essay “Date Line,” we can reflect upon the interpretive insights given us when Pound interrelates music and verse.2 As can be seen above, the temptation to read “Damn it all!” as a colloquial emphatic anapest is dissuaded by Pound’s more pungent cretic ( – ˘– ), giving equal emphasis to “Damn-all.” At the end of the line a spondee (two quarter notes) gives accentuation to “stinks peace,” correcting a tendency to slight “stinks” as a moderately unstressed syllable if giving “South stinks peace” the quite natural reading of a cretic. Similarly, in line six of the same stanza, “heart nigh mad” might be rendered a cretic, yet Pound’s musical setting as three stressed syllables heightens the emotional pitch of the poem by raising the tension on “nigh.” . . .“Under the influence of Antheil’s constantly changing time signatures and note durations[applied to the opera Le Testament] the solo violin sestina utilizes a constant shifting of the number of microbeats per bar from 1/4 to 21/32, with a frequency of triple and quintuple meters presaging the metric simplification of his music over the next two years. Yet Pound’s notation is not secure enough to avoid frequent miscalculations of the note lengths versus the time signatures.“A chordal piece with almost no single notes, frequently using triple- and quadruple-stops with one to three open strings, it repeatedly necessitates the use of “broken chords” or arpeggiation. The result is often a scratchy, disjointed, leaping quality as the player prepares the fingers to approach each new multiple stop. Yet the “breaking” of the chord also favors a clarification of the harmony by lessening the biting dissonance to produce a more consonant sound, often focusing on open fifths or, in arpeggiation, the sweetened effect of an incomplete major seventh chord. Although aesthetically clarified by a few interpretive markings (bowings, accents, staccati, glissandi, sordino, string specification), technically the piece is filled with impracticalities: jagged, wide leaps; constant multiple stops; and some extremely difficult quadruple- stops, which at best render the work barely playable, if not unplayable. (These challenging famous last words often eventually offer an extremely good performance!)” . . . ( Sestina Altaforte” Ezra Pound sets his poem to music )Aforementioned unfinished COLLIS O HELICONII;HYMN TO APHRODITEAphrodite subtle of soul and deathless,  Daughter of God, weaver of wiles, I pray thee Neither with care, dread Mistress, nor with anguish Slay thou my spirit.   But in pity hasten, come now if ever!  From afar, of old, when my voice implored thee,  Thou hast deigned to listen leaving the golden House of thy father  With thy chariot yoked, and with doves that drew thee Fair and fleet around the dark earth from heaven,  Dipping vibrant wings down the azure distance Through the mid ether:   Very swift they came; and thou gracious Vision Leaned with face that smiled in immortal beauty,  Leaned to me and asked, “What misfortune threatened?”  Why I had called thee?   “What my frenzied heart craved in utter yearning,  Whom its wild desire would persuade to passion?  What disdainful charms madly worshipped, slight thee?  Who wrongs thee, Sappho?   “She that fain would fly, she shall quickly follow She that now rejects, yet with gifts shall woo thee,  She that heeds thee not, soon shall love to madness,  Love thee, the loth one.”( John Myers O’Hara translation 1910, which Pound recommended )Scenario/librettoPound described his third opera as half-finished (GK 368). A libretto, two arias, and three instrumental works are the sum of materials we have to inform the staging of the opera Collis O Heliconii. Pound’s libretto refers only to the Catullus poem (see my comments and transcription of Pound’s libretto, COLLIS xvi–xix; 102–111). The joining of the opera’s central aria in Latin—Catullus’ carmen 61—and a secondary aria in Greek—Sappho’s “Poikilothron”—continued the pairing of languages heard in the second opera Cavalcanti (Italian and Provençal). The composer’s principal motivation for relating the Latin and Greek poems in an opera was to anchor modern English lyrics in the Greek rhythms while demonstrating how a grasp of Latin will refine a poet’s style.The four key actions of Sappho’s Poem 1 are Sappho’s invocation to the goddess Aphrodite; the goddess’s descent from heaven; Aphrodite’s direct address to Sappho regarding her dominance over human will; and Sappho’s invitation to Aphrodite to take action side by side to reverse an unrequited love.The relationship of the Sappho invocation to the Catullan poem, which is widely accepted as an epithalamium, is not an obvious one. But even if we overlook recent scholarship that depicts carmen 61 as a lampoon of an epithalamium, we can find structural resemblances between the two poems. Sappho’s poem provides an authorial match to Catullus’ carmen 61: each poet inserts her- or himself into the poem; each writes in a way that distances the poet as author from the passions written about; and each poem includes a theme of same-sex preference. It was Henry Wharton who first introduced the English reader to Sappho’s love for a female and possibly Theodor Bergk who earlier had done the same for the German reader (Williamson 51–52).2For contrast and drama in his opera, Pound would develop the literary relationship between Sappho and Catullus. He had named them in his 1929 essay “How to Read” as among the essential canon of authors "who actually invented something" (LE 27). In 1934, Pound praised Catullus for his treatment of sapphics: “. . . the only man who has ever mastered the lady’s metre” (ABCR 47). He published the essay “Date Line” the same year, claiming that the musical setting of a poet’s words was a fourth form of criticism (LE 74). Had Pound’s attempts at setting the two poets’ words to music led him to these declarations?Pound’s preference was for us to hear the two poets’ words in the original language, their rhythms and styles brought directly to our ear through the music—the successful formula he had used to dramatize the Cavalcanti–Sordello literary relationship in his second opera. Pound’s pairing of Sappho’s 1 with Catullus 61 removes Sappho from the sphere of influence of Ovid, where most readers became acquainted with her through reading the Heroides. The opera was to place her Latin legacy clearly on the side of Catullus. For more on this, see COLLIS, chapter V, “Sappho.”SapphicsEzra Pound's holograph score of his setting of Sappho Poem 1 from his 3rd opera,Collis O Heliconii.Shown: Introduction to End of Stanza 1 with sapphic stanza and transcription of Pound's lyrics added in red.Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library (YCAL 53, Box 46/1015)Reprinted by permission, Second Evening Art. All rights reserved.Pound’s musical events in the Poikilothron convey a feeling for the meter through quantity and syllabic durations. Only the first stanza (see music score above) corresponds wholly to the sapphic stanza as defined by the Alexandrian grammarian Hephaestion (2nd century A.D.). Here is the sapphic meter as it has come down to us from Hephaestion’s manual of Greek meters, the Enchiridion:– ˘ – x – ˘˘ – ˘ – x– ˘ – x – ˘˘ – ˘ – x– ˘ – x – ˘˘ – ˘ – x– ˘˘ – –[The x represents an “anceps” in which the syllable can be short or long.]O’Hara, too, conformed only his first stanza to the Hephaestion sapphic. He maintained the feeling of sapphics through quantity (eleven syllables in the first three lines, five in the fourth), through a liberal use of the choriambic foot – ˘˘ – (though not always in the Hephaestion choriambic position), and through sounds in English that evoke the Greek sounds. Pound follows suit in the music (see the entry on Stanza 4 below).Musical InfluencesWhen Pound approached the setting of a Greek poem accompanied by lyre, he did not attempt to imitate ancient Greek music. Though he had acquired vol. 1 of the Lavignac Encyclopedia of Music which features Maurice Emmanuel’s entry on Greek music, he relied on this text more for its relevance to poetic meter than for compositional ideas.He lent Mary Barnard his own volume, recommending it as the preferred source for understanding how to write sapphics in American English using Emmanuel’s system of musical forms and strategies (Barnard, 56, 58).For his melodies, Pound looked beyond Greece, east to Indonesia. Pound turned his attention to the Javanese scale as had Claude Debussy, but distanced himself from the composer, lamenting that Debussy had turned to composing ‘mush.’3 Debussy had been influenced by performances of the Javanese gamelan at the Paris Exposition of 1889. Access to information about and recordings of world music were random and haphazard, the nascent field of ethnomusicology being represented by only a few key individuals until well into the 1950s.The specific source for Pound’s approach to the Sappho aria, however, is traceable to the Austrian Erich von Hornbostel, one of the earliest musicologists to make field recordings of the music of Indonesia. Hornbostel reported his findings in “Phonographierte Melodien aus Madagaskar und Indonesien” in 1909. Pound most probably learned of him from his friend, the American concert pianist Katherine Heyman, who mentioned Hornbostel in her 1921 bookThe Relation of Ultramodern to Archaic Music (58).4 On July 7, 1924, Pound programmed an arrangement of a Hornbostel Javanese transcription for solo violin, played by Olga Rudge in Paris.5Pound’s Musical Strategy: Modality and TonalityTo the ear accustomed to a diatonic scale, the intervals of Pound’s unusual scale join with the rhythms “to cut a shape in time” (Barnard, 55). Pound’s single accidental of C# in his scale for the Poikilothron aria resembles the transcriptions of Sumatran music compiled by von Hornbostel at the turn of the century.Pound employs six tones —A, C#, D, E, F, (G)—and avoids B altogether. The use of five tones only in stanzas one through four creates a sense of modal music, i.e., a type of scale that is sui generis, where each tone has equal weight, rather than tonal, which is a hierarchical system of music with a central pitch to which the other pitches relate. In modal music the notes do not function as harmony. Only in the fifth stanza does Pound introduce the G to create the sense of a musical key with the stable relationships of the fourth between D and G, and the already present fifth between D and A. The six-tone scale, with certain features acting like a diatonic scale which has seven tones, implies the key of D minor. B is simply avoided and the C# serves as a raised “seventh” step which wants to resolve to D.When the tritone sounds between G and C#, the composer moves from modal to tonal music. In Stanza six, he resumes modality.The contours of Pound’s melodies arise from the qualities of spoken word in the poem—supplication, solicitation, question, demand, and judgment—, the intervallic movement expanding and subsiding with the emotion. The composer brings forward the contours of Sappho’s words through timbre, dissonance, tritone, and accent. Guided by the belief that he can recover the form apart from the formulaic metrics passed down by tradition, he does not attempt to recover ancient Greek melody, but presents new composition as his fifth form of criticism (LE 74–75).Stanza 4: Inner form in Sappho’s Poikilothron:In stanza four, Sappho’s rhetorical devices lead to a highly structured colloquy between the poetess and goddess, even as the language remains colloquial. The composer strives to make this duality salient—structural formality/linguistic familiarity—not only to transmit Sappho to a modern audience but to promote his own interest in Sappho as a mortal poet conversant with the gods.At stanza four we find rhyming patterns in the syllables: otti deute / kotti deute. Here, Pound foregrounds Sappho’s word play by striking the repeating hard surfaces of her Greek consonants—t, d, p, k—against his neo-Sumatran scale, the strangeness of the scale serving to inflect each sound. Sappho’s voice rings out, resonant and striking in her Poundian afterlife, with none of the Ovidian invention and melodrama qualifying her poetic achievement.Stanza 4, lines 3–4, bars 45–49“You asked, what pray tell have I suffered and why pray tell do I call?”Following three breathy vowels on the same pitch, “e-re ot-”, the consonant load of the syllables, “ti”–“dau”–“te”–“pe”–“pon”–“tha,” meets each of the descending pitches with percussive impact. The final syllable pepontha (“have I suffered”) hits the bottom of the singer’s tessitura on A,an octave and a minor sixth below “e-re ot-.” The word kotti (“and what”) rebounds one octave higher on the A, then C# and A again,before a second leap downward to the low A. There follows a third and lesser rebound and descent. The word melodykalemmi (“do I call”), broken by a sixteenth rest, gives the illusion that all is settling down. Pound delivers the last syllable “-mi” on the less-than-resolute e to end the stanza (supported by an A in the violin).Stanza 5: the tritone in Pound’s aria Poikilothron:The Music Column of Make It New 2.1 discussed Pound’s use of the interval of the tritone to insert a critical marker indicating genius within the music. In the Sappho aria, we might expect that when Sappho refers to herself in the poem’s fifth stanza (“kotti moi”), Pound will employ the tritone, and he does not disappoint. He makes the tonality of the tritone salient by preceding it with modality in the preceding four stanzas and in the subsequent sixth stanza.What Pound said:“The more Greek a man knows the better his English cadence is likely to be, and the greater richness, variety, height, precision, colour of his criteria; the greater the variety of his ideas and memories of what verbal melody can be and should be; and the finer his perception of all verbal sounds whatsoever.”(Ezra Pound. “Dust upon Hellas.” Time and Tide XV.45 [November 10, 1934]: 1429–1430).“Greek seems to me a storehouse of wonderful rhythms, possibly impracticable rhythms. If you don’t read it and if you can’t read Latin translations from it, it can’t be helped. Most English translations are hopeless. The best are in prose.”(Ezra Pound. Letter to Iris Barry. July 1916. L 87).( SAPPHO IN POUND’S THIRD OPERA, COLLIS O HELICONII )I would still say that Pound`s musical interest & experimentation ( Classical Greek and Latin, 11th- and 12th-century troubadours like Arnaut Daniel and Gaucelm Faidi, French trouvères like Guillaume le Vinier, and their 14th- and 15th-century heirs like Dante, Cavalcanti and Villon ) were an extended branch, or outgrowth, of his colossal studies in versification. The sound, not semantics!Arthur Daniel, if Pound were asked to give a name of his idea forerunner of whom he said: “when the Provençal [language] was growing weary, and it was to be seen if it could last, and [he] tried to make almost a new language, or at least to enlarge the Langue d’Oc, and make new things possible” —Make it new! The famous motto.OBLIGATORY listening, a different reading of Sestina Altaforte. If you do not hear the music, Sir, God help thee…So, how does understanding of music impact poetry? — Some say intrinsic, and some have not given it a thought or two. Same goes with criticism & analysis.

One cannot deny that putting Asimov's Foundation series up on the big screen presents a real challenge, between screenwriters, producers, and directors, to say nothing of the moguls who finance and greenlight the project only if they think it might make a profit.The easiest part to explain is the moguls. Experience often shows that if you aim high as to intelligence, the movie ends up as a small "indie" film, or about as successful as one, but if you aim low, there is little to no risk of losing money by insulting the intelligence of the audience. Even the very stupidest movies can become "cult classics" out of their sheer stupidity (think of "Food Fight" or "Garbage Pail Kids" or "Felix the Cat" or “Plan 9 From Outer Space”). Foundation does not scale down well in intelligence, so very little money will ever likely be put into it.Producers and directors want to put lots of explosions and space battles in it because they think this will make the movie more exciting to audiences, but this would so severely betray and violate the whole point and charm of a Foundation film. The temptation seems to be to use the title, and perhaps some of the characters and basic situations, and then throw a lot of name stars and useless special effects, love affairs and sex scenes, shootouts and chases, all with no connection to the story at it, and hope that makes it a hit. But it is the writers who have the biggest challenge.Dr. Asimov gives this account of his rereading of the original Foundation trilogy when preparing to begin its next novel, “Foundation’s Edge”: “… about the end of May, I picked up my own copy of The Foundation Trilogy and began reading. I had to. For one thing, I hadn't read the Trilogy in thirty years and while I remembered the general plot, I did not remember the details. Besides, before beginning a new Foundation novel I had to immerse myself in the style and atmosphere of the series. I read it with mounting uneasiness. I kept waiting for something to happen, and nothing ever did. All three volumes, all the nearly quarter of a million words, consisted of thoughts and of conversations. No action. No physical suspense. What was all the fuss about, then? Why did everyone want more of that stuff?—To be sure, I couldn't help but notice that I was turning the pages eagerly, and that I was upset when I finished the book, and that I wanted more, but I was the author, for goodness' sake.”One of the biggest criticisms of the work is that it seems to consist almost entirely of people talking in rooms. An attempt to turn those conversations into impressive space battles would invariably fall flat on its face. The complaint has also been made that there are no continuing characters in this series. Though a person might show up in a couple segments (e. g. Salvor Hardin), and of course, Hari Seldon’s influence in the form of the Seldon Plan runs throughout the whole series, unifying it, there are no characters who exist throughout the whole thing. There is always the question of what to leave out and what to keep in, and what might be added that an audience would want to see. Audiences are often hard to please, and probably hardest when dealing with going from a book to a movie where the book is so well-known that everyone watching the movie will quickly see what was changed, and generally comment unfavorably on that difference.Then there is the problem of what to do with the technology. Extrapolations of 1940’s technology pervade the series, and when putting it to film what should one do? The most common approach seems to update the technology to predictable extrapolations of whatever technology is current when the film is being shot. It is generally easier and can help present day audiences to feel we are dealing with a “future” when seeing technologies which seem so to us today. But such attempts rapidly become dated, and instead of portraying a time at least 12,000 years in the future it ends up instead portraying a time at least 20 years past. Think of how AOL-styled emails of “You’ve Got Mail” (1998) rapidly came to look ridiculous in comparison to the snail mail of “Shop Around the Corner” (1940) that still hold up. Or again, “The Puppet Masters” (1994), following the book so closely in some ways (especially in the first part) and in the casting of the three main leads, but then deviated in several ways (most notably from a technological standpoint) by introducing satellite heat signature recognition as a way of detecting who is infected and deleting the whole Titans subplot.The biggest problem in that area was the slow progress in computer technology in the Foundation series. Who could have believed in the 1940’s and 1950’s that computers would become so powerful and at the same time so microminiaturized within a scant 50 years, and yet at the same time Robotics (and especially the ability to create a functional humanoid robot, complete with at least apparent feelings, thoughts, creativity, problem-solving, and imagination, as to approximate human capabilities, coupled with machine-like perfection and speed, remains far behind the levels that Asimov expected for the same period in his Robot series. So here we are supposedly 12,000 or more years in the future and yet in the story shipboard computers are barely above the level of the surprisingly primitive computers of the Apollo Lunar Module. Since computing power does factor in on occasion, what do we do with that in such a movie?Granted, these are all serious challenges, far too great for the limited imaginations of our typical Hollywood types to work with (hence their proclivity to make dumb sequels and retreads, all because they just can’t think of anything else), so it really is quite possible that there may never be a Foundation movie, or just as bad, never a credible adaptation of it that retains anything much at all of what the series is truly all about. But is it really all that impossible? I think not.Let’s start with one of the easier things to deal with, namely the technology of so distant a future. There is a new and better approach that already has some precedent in the steampunk and retrofuturism movements, first glimpsed on film (that I know of) in “1984” (1984), in which the technology seen was not the mid-1980’s technology as it actually existed currently, but a reasonable projection of the future from what things were like in 1948 when George Orwell originally penned the novel. By 1984, real offices often had mainframe computers with (dumb) terminals in each office, and would email to transmit messages about, but in “1984” they are still using pneumatic tubes. It is as if someone with all the cinematography skills and techniques and experience we have today were to have existed back in 1948 and had been sufficiently funded to apply those skills as needed. With this approach, all of the technological anachronisms of Foundation cease to be a problem; we are simply telling the story as originally envisioned by the author, and as originally read by its first readers in it own original time. This could also be a good approach in connection with the men and women and how they relate to each other, no need to impose contemporary norms; anyway, Asimov has some truly good and strong female characters as written, albeit set in ways that seem out of sync with how people view things today. Just treat it like a period piece.Next, let’s look at how the problem of the moguls (and of funding) might also be solved, and best so “in the typewriter,” so to speak. The answer to this is largely staring us in the face already, namely the fact that so very much of the series is just people talking in rooms. How about simply forget trying to figure out portrayals of the things discussed and simply have the conversations as given in the series itself? That one thing alone would be a truly vast savings on production costs. Another big savings would be that for what few space battles are seen the technology that now exists has made the production of such scenes much easier and cheaper that it would have been in former years. CGI graphics today has come a long way, and even “last year’s technology” in that could still look quite excellent and sufficient for the needs of this series.People talking in rooms doesn’t sound very exciting, and hardly a basis for a movie, but then recall “My Dinner With Andre” (1981) which, despite being literally nothing but two guys having a conversation in a restaurant, actually manages to be quite captivating as a truly excellent film. Only, instead of discussing philosophies of life what we have here are power brokers discussing the direction the future should take, making all-important decisions, negotiations, and even outright takeovers. As Khan said (in the Star Trek episode, Space Seed), “It has been said that social occasions are only warfare concealed.” Or again, think of your average courtroom drama. What, after all, IS a “Courtroom Drama,” but “people talking in a room”? And for that matter, one early scene consists of Hari Seldon himself in some sort of actual “trial.” About 95% of the whole Foundation saga can properly be regarded as a “bottle show.” It is always the search for survival, as well as the truth about the Plan: How will Hari Seldon avoid having his group shut down by the Empire? How will the Foundation, now located on Terminus at the edge of the Galaxy, drive Anacreon from their soil? How can the Foundation religion be used to turn aside a subsequent attack from Anacreon? How will trade replace the religion as a much further means of expansion? How does the Foundation survive the last great attack of the declining old Empire? What recourse is there if history fails to unfold as planned? And so forth.Any film that rises even the tiniest bit above the mere shoot-em-up has to feature scenes of exposition, people talking and explaining what has been going on, or what scam the bad guy is trying to pull, or what the good guy is doing to fight it, or “whodunit?” and so forth. The Foundation series is almost pure exposition. So actually, it is mostly comprised of the most interesting part of most films. Where would Star Wars be without “No, Luke, I am your father”? All the swordplay that precedes and follows that iconic moment of exposition almost might as well be a mere arm-wrestle for all the interest it has in comparison.Science fiction writer and critic James Gunn said of the Foundation series, “Action and romance have little to do with the success of the Trilogy—virtually all the action takes place offstage, and the romance is almost invisible—but the stories provide a detective-story fascination with the permutations and reversals of ideas.” If any attempt to film Foundation is to prove credible, at the very least this detective-story fascination with permutations and reversals of ideas must feature at the center of it all. Yes, there can be room for some action or romance, but these things must take a back seat (if present at all). Think of Murder She Wrote, or Columbo, or Ellery Queen. It is not any (much) action or romance that drives the tale (though those things can enter in occasionally), but (in those cases) the seeking for the truth. This last of course points to something else about how to do it, namely as a television miniseries. Think of the different ways that a war is portrayed in films versus television shows: In a feature film one can have a “cast of thousands,” a veritable sea of soldiers fighting throughout a vast battlefield, but on television it makes far more sense to show merely a few single pairs of soldiers duking it out. Foundation is full of such “single pairs” and small groups “duking it out” with psychohistory, or with the mentalic powers of the Mule or of the Second Foundation.That leads to the last point, namely casting decisions. When making feature films one often tends to seek out known “name” talent, but in this case such “name” talent should only be permitted if their own interest in such a project would make them willing to accept a pay scale commensurate with that of new and (relatively) unknown and untried acting talent. It is amazing how people, especially those who understand how a future career in acting depends upon their performance here, can rise to the occasion in ways that surprise everyone including themselves. As for the lack of continuing characters throughout the series, even that need not be considered much of a problem. Making a series about, for example, the Bible, or even such a miniseries as Roots, certainly did not suffer from the lack of a single continuing character (unless you want to count God in the first case, or Racism (as like a “character”) in the second. And for that there is Psychohistory and the Seldon Plan.So, is it doable? Absolutely! Will it happen, and in a credible manner? Unfortunately those sorts of decisions extremely seldom fall to those capable of making them competently. Given enough time, almost anything, however unlikely, is practically bound to occur, eventually. Just don’t hold your breath waiting for it.ADDENDUM:Well, it looks like this could happen after all. Apple has greenlit a feasible effort which even includes Isaac Asimov's own daughter among the production staff. Perhaps previous attempts have failed due to attempts to compress such a vast saga into a single film instead of a series. For myself, I pictured a 4-part miniseries, each part (ranging from 90 to 120 minutes including credits) taking on about three "installments" per part:Part 1 (Founding the Foundation): The Psychohistorians, The Encyclopedists, The MayorsPart 2 (Facing the Empire): The Merchant Princes, The Traders, The General (I will get to the rationale for the order reversal, below)Part 3 (The Mule): The Mule (both parts, as published November and December 1945), Search by the MulePart 4 (The Two Foundations): Search by the Foundation (all three parts, as published November and December 1949 and January 1950)I had dreams of trying to write the screenplay myself (contract or no, just for my own interest), but that probably won't ever be realized, at least not in the immediately foreseeable future, but I do have some thoughts; they are truly mine, apart from their direct borrowing from Asimov's original work and also the existing stories authorized by the Asimov estate, and I offer them freely, hoping that other fans will pick up on these and say, "yes, these are good ideas" and hope the production will be positively influenced by them.One idea is to borrow a bit more from the original series as published in Astounding, which differs somewhat from the book versions. For example, the original published installment (now known as the Encyclopedists) had a short series of paragraphs portraying a meeting conducted by Hari Seldon which might be combined with the closing parts of the Psychohistorians, such that he says, not merely to Gaal Dornick one on one, but to his gathered Psychohistorians and Mathematicians at the close of the last meeting he is to preside at, "I am finished!"In that same vein of pointing to the original published stories, The Traders would be about an episode from the past life of Lathan Devers. It would be added after the part (in The General) that introduces Emperor Cleon II and Brodrig and before we return to Bel Riose and Ducem Barr. Sennet Forrell and his three cronies are again gathered, and Sennet is introducing his fellow members to this Trader who really is a real Trader (unlike the fake "Trader" Jaim Twer who was found out by Hober Mallow), loyal to the Foundation, a great spy, brilliantly clever, and extremely resourceful. To illustrate the point, the events of The Traders (or "The Wedge") are told as a backstory (in only 5-10 minutes of screen time - or 3-5 minutes if we are trying to squeeze it all into a one hour episode) so that audiences can better understand and appreciate who he is, and deepen his character with real Asimov Foundation material originally so intended.(For the books, it made sense to reverse the order of the two stories since to end the first volume on a relatively minor trading victory would have made a very weak ending for the book. The triumph of Hober Mallow and his successful navigation of a Seldon Crisis made for a strong and fitting climax to the first book. So the order was inverted, and as Lathan Devers could not have possibly lived long enough to precede Mallow and then yet still face the Empire, a new protagonist Limmar Ponyets was introduced, along with a few textual adjustments made to that story and Mallow's to make it seem as if their inverted order made sense. But as originally published, it was Lathan Devers who first sold nuclear gadgets to the Askonians, and that could be here reasonably restored. The only other alternative has been to omit The Traders altogether as does (for example) the BBC radio series production.)Now, Apple has greenlit a 10-part television series - how would that divvy up? What I had is effectively 12 parts, but with The Traders subsumed into The General, and the Search by the Foundation, originally published in three parts (but actually not quite as many words as the two parts of The Mule, anyway), could be reduced by producing it in two parts, which brings us down to 10.In point of fact, it appears that Dr. Asimov seems to have expected that his final Foundation novella would be cut into two parts as was his Mule novella, since there is what makes a great cliffhanger in the middle of the middle part, namely where young Arcadia, having just realized that Lady Callia is a Second Foundationer, has just been deposited in a vast and unfriendly space port. She sees signs lit up for ships going all sorts of places; one is even going to Terminus but she can only head-shake "no" openmouthed as she dare not go to the one place she most wishes to go. Doubtless the Second Foundation is setting a trap for her there. In blind fear and panic she spins, seemingly endlessly, in circles not knowing where to turn, where to go, who to trust (as in “a circle has no end”), and now realizing that she knows where the Second Foundation is, and that her life is forfeit should the Second Foundation capture her and learn of her guilty knowledge, she collapses in tears, feeling as lonely and frightened as an abandoned child, but with the weight of the entire future of Galactic civilization upon her shoulders. She looks up as if expecting some answer from a Deity, but all there is, is the camera looking down at her, pulling away as she gets smaller and as more and more of the surrounding crowd bustles around her, grey and altogether indifferent to her plight as the credits roll, until she seems to disappear, lost in the crowd.Narrator: Each segment should have as its narrator someone who is close to the events, but never the main character; Gaal Dornick makes a good narrator for The Psychohistorians, Yohan Lee for The Encyclopedists and The Mayors, Tinter (a lieutenant aboard Mallow's ship) and Ankor Jael (Mallow's trusted friend during his trial and the "War" with Korell), Ducem Barr for The General, Toran Darell (husband of Bayta) for The Mule, Hans Pritcher for Search by the Mule, Homir Munn and Mrs. Palver for Search by the Foundation. The bits of the Encyclopedia Galactica could be read by either the current narrator or by someone else (if someone else, then ideally Peter Jones or someone with a peter jonesey sort of voice as a sort of reference forward-back to the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy would be ultra-cool).Second Foundation anonymity: To keep the Second Foundation figures anonymous in their meetings on their home planet (because their identity has to be concealed during their interactions with ordinary people in ordinary places), all sorts of unusual perspectives could be used. Obviously, no faces can be shown, but very small portions of the actor's face can be shown in extreme close-up: the raising of an eyebrow, the furrowing of a forehead, the crooking of a finger (along with several other hand and arm gestures), the jutting of a chin, the curling of part of a lip, the appearance of a dimple, also figures seen from behind, at a distance, or as black silhouettes against a wall chock full of brightly glowing math equations. Electronically deepen their voices to borderline unrecognizability and add that echo effect to indicate that we are not hearing words conventionally spoken but thoughts intimated to each other through the tiny gestures seen in the various close-ups. Or think of all the ways the faces of the doctors and nurses were cleverly concealed during the twilight episode “Eye of the Beholder” until the reveal at the end.Attention to details from the books could also add greatly despite their seeming insignificance, for example when hologram Seldon puts down his book it disappears, or when the dowagers wonder who Prince Regent Wienis is walking up the stairs to his private room arm-in-arm (Hardin) they lift ornate but actual and recognizable lorgnettes to their faces (I hate the way recent printings of the book just say that the dowagers just "stared after them" - blah!), or Onum Barr finding a box of canned goods (and his passport, returned) in a box on his doorstep after Hober Mallow leaves his planet of Siwenna, showing volumes about Mallow’s character in about ten seconds of screen time, or an actual descending grid of glowing energy squares three meters on a side descending upon the spaceport crowd where Preem Palver is waiting and then bribes an official. And many people in the original series smoke. I know that smoking is frowned on these days, but who is to say that a cancer-free tobacco couldn't be invented in the next 12-50 thousand years? Anyway, the scene where Ebling Mis is sitting on the desk of an intimidated Mayor Indbur, warning him about an upcoming Seldon crisis, definitely loses something if he can't also be blowing cigar smoke into the Mayor's face, and the poor Mayor trying not to cough as he doesn't smoke.Other things to bring in would be details from the synopses from Astounding, for example that the original "Warlord of Kalgan" whom the Mule displaces and later installs over the conquered Terminus was not some Kalganian native acquiring hawkish tendencies, but one of many Empire Generals-turned-Warlords of various regions:"Meanwhile, the old Empire has fallen quite to pieces, with the various splinters under the shifting, incoherent control of successions of warlords, whose ephemeral military rule waxes and wanes chaotically. It is to these warlords that certain elements of the Independent Traders look for help against the Foundation. However, none of these warlords are at all anxious to tangle with a Foundation known to have defeated the Empire singlehanded and known to be invincible by the established laws of psychohistory. There is only 'The Mule." ... As the story opens, he has just captured the planet of Kalgan without a fight, though its former warlord was known to be a capable warrior, entirely ungiven to surrender." And Bail Channis is a military man, though he does not wear his uniform while on his expedition with Hans Pritcher.Other details could flow from the other approved Foundation books by others; perhaps some details, especially regarding Linge Chen, and other background characters drawn from Foundation and Chaos by Greg Bear, could be incorporated into The Psychohistorians segment, or slight wear and tear, missing ceiling portions, litter in the streets not picked up, as indicated in Forward the Foundation, despite the still-otherwise gleaming planet-city of Trantor. Or in giving a history leading up to The Mule (in a short opening narrative admittedly not in the book) brief mention (and glimpse scenes) of the Fall of Trantor as conquered by Gilmer and the preservation of the Imperial Library by the students (omitting all mention of the Second Foundation however), as drawn from Harry Turtledove's "Trantor Falls" from Foundation's Friends.It might also not hurt (though it is not clear what effect it would have on the series, beyond what Hari Seldon's image is saying during the Mule crisis) to have some idea what the Seldon crisis for that time would have been if there were no Mule. Perhaps the Empire-General-turned-Warlord of Kalgan hopes, if he cannot destroy or conquer the Foundation, at least "make off" with its Traders or a signNow percentage of them, and perhaps through them some of their technology that they sell as well. (Originally he hoped to provoke a war between the two foundations, but scanning the furthest regions of the galaxy in vain searching for it he concludes that it is of no account and no help.) So he then turns to creating a civil war within the Foundation - perhaps he can set the Traders at war with the corrupt oligarchy that rules them from Terminus, and many Trader worlds would have joined him, but the few that didn't along with a surprising strength from the Terminus Oligarchy side who have at their beck and call the entire Foundation technology - which the Traders understand far too little of to be of much benefit to the Kalgan Warlord - and so he fails and better relations (something kind of like a union) forms among the Traders to strengthen their bargaining position against the Oligarchy who then begin dealing with them more honestly. But for those third and fourth Seldon crises the end has the Seldon image explaining the Crisis, but as the camera pans around (during the closing credits) no one is in the room.A carefully worked out chronology, specifying how many years into the Foundation era each story is, would be easy to give at the outset of each segment or after any major duration within a segment.Now, can anyone tell me that all of this would not add up to "utterly cool" if only it could be so produced?

Yes, it’s complicated though in how to make a substantial sales number and monetary income. You have to curate your answers, design the text itself which means that you have to have some foresight about what you’re doing. Designing where and whom it’s going to as much as possible with the return intent of your brand, marketing plan or a direct sale.I have a wide range of books for sale across many vendors—-Amazon, Barnes and Noble, eBay and several smaller bookstore chains for both paperback and EBook/digital books. I only discovered Quora a couple of years ago though my membership is much longer. I didn’t know what it was because many, many, many things are attached to my specific Kyle Phoenix email accounts then I clicked on it one day and understood what it was.At the same time I was in the 8th year of my own blog The Kyle Phoenix Show Blog an offshoot of The Kyle Phoenix Show TV series, it too in it’s 8th year. The challenge with producing media(a TV show episode a week, 52 weeks a year times 8 years (now times 10)) is that I’m always looking for content, trying to find ways to purpose content. While yes there was also the Kyle Phoenix Videos on YouTube, Sclipo, Metacafe and others—-I was starting to run dry on what I could do, explore, was interesting to an audience.I am also challenged with cross-pollinating my content in manageable ways that create a synergistic whole. If you go to one venue you should be able to easily navigate or become aware of the others. If you Goggle or web search my name you should get natural #1 to 10 search results of me through SEO (that sounds “simple” but it’s like a web based ratings fight to infuse good, valuable, searchable content and have whatever new you create attach to that and enhance those listings/searches.)So by my Quora writing debut I was looking for new ideas, topics and synergistic relationships to expand marketing and branding. make no mistake Quora is marketing and branding, which has increased over the past couple of years to the whole membership with the sponsored/focused ads you see in the Home Stream.Though I am a small operation if you read some of my other posts, article, blogs, I have an IT/corporate work history before my foray into education and my parents owned and operated several businesses while I was growing up, encouraging me to start businesses including a small national one by the time I was 14.I say all of that to then qualify as I say I keep a deep insight level of analytics on every platform that I release my work too.One of the check points I’m looking at when I consider whether or not a platform is appropriate for anything Kyle Phoenix related in content, services, etc is the breadth of the platform and the depth of analytics that I can pull from it. Most importantly I’m looking at paralleling analytics—-which goes to the specific question of tracing content creation/posting, my Quora work being viewed by 3.5 million and its infusion to my SEO which is again a re-infusion (hopefully) back to the other Kyle Phoenix platforms. My overall design is that there are no stragglers in my portfolio of relationships and the relationship must have a long term potentiality.The long term existence of a platform is because of that synergistic relationship. When I put in a book or announce on a TV show episode that my work is on Quora—-I have links/logos etc.—-a viewer/reader must be able to follow that through. I say that so infaticly because I’m very time conscious.A TKPS episode from 2018 will exist in reruns after first run syndication on the Time Warner/Spectrum cable system,then on Facebook, Twitter & Instagramthen my blog, and on my YouTube channel.As marketing platform then, Quora has to be durable to that time now, 2018, to as far as say 2028, because I will have to incorporate so much of announcing, promoting and back-linking to it, the Quora platform.Now that you have insight into my operation and thinking: does it increase my published/EBook sales?Yes it does.It also increases my TV show viewership directly on the Blog/YouTube where episodes are located and I’m slowly experimenting with incorporating videos/links to Quora answers.It also increases my sales because I can directly talk about books—-fiction and non-fiction as part of a writing question and answer/tutorial and outlining of my writing and production process.Further outlining the production and writing process does multiple things for my publishing arm of my company:it allows me to articulate processes (I’ve written on here about the Michael Gerber E Myth intensive business development process I’ve gone through-—taking all of 2017 to complete a back-sight, oversight, insight, forecast and planning)it allows me to capture followers, potential readers/watchers on here and on other spaces like Facebook, YouTube and my private mailing list when I communicate privately with people (an amazing variety of simply casual readers, all the way up to billionaires!)it supports my blog by the fact that I mirror entries from here to there as the central hub of blog/article/post writings. I think this is an important point if you are constructing a portfolio and/or looking at monetizing your work or potentially so.One, you must have as much proprietary ownership of your work as possible. (I read the terms and conditions and print it out and it sits in it’s Quora binder which is a print out of all of my entries here—-as both a detailed list and yes, a full print out of the blog/article/answer from here including the pictures.I also back up all of these answers into separate files into subject folders. Because a chunk of my work is monetized and another chunk therefore monetizable, I treat all of my output with a ruthless business respect and recording and control.I offer this because of the above continuity throughout the media AND the fact that platforms may/will go out of business and you don’t want to lose all of your content. (Within that you might also create things which are found objectionable on one platform but not another. Your work can’t be deletable permanently by the behest of a singular platform.)it allows me to incorporate and therefore monetize this Quora content in other formats across my portfolio of media outlets. I’ve turned Quora Answers into YouTube videos, TKPS TV show episodes, it’s paralleled on my blog and I also have lifted answers wholesale for chapters in non-fiction books.It acts as a library warehouse —-which from the digital and physical material I have and peruse, I’m looking at turning into it’s own book of essays.I know a simple question has so many facets.Mainly because people who are starting out in publishing often think in very plodding, binary terms, about publishing itself:Write book,publish book,sell book,get money,perhaps repeat.(Literally my wall, mind, computers, looks like this as I merge, compare, consider and synergize multiple platforms and media types. Often platforms answer similar questions but in different languages. Blogs and Quora answer how many views differently than the cable TV show does so re-translating it back up the line to gauge effect is often a project within itself platforms have (or you can design) a chart from your Day One and compare what it was before Quora posts, during and after. The specificity of the platforms analytics make this task tedious, easy, fun, insightful, enlightening or all of them once. I’m big on printing stuff out and doing binders that I have file cabinets for and that I regularly update. I also have digital files and comparative spreadsheets that I create because the information will be disparate.Like Amazon can tell me what and generally where a book of mine was sold. But it doesn't have who—-sex, age, race, etc.. YouTube does, deep demographics. Quora doesn’t. Facebook Analytics does. Time Warner/Spectrum gives me a rough number ,500,000 viewers, but not demographic specifics unless I go into their analytics and tweak out my sliver of time, 28 minutes on Thursday, able to be live streamed seen through the studio MNN.org.)(Always, always always be marketing…and analyzing your data…..)In fact, publishing is more like—build audience blog, TV show, videos, etc.write book,break out chapters for blog,build blog audience,build LinkedIn, Facebook, Quora, Instagram, Twitter audience—-constantly and consistently—-forever.publish book,include backlinks in your email signature, your text signature, the back of your head. “Kyle Phoenix”—-business cards, pamphlets, brochures—-networkers, in passing, cocktail parties, stuffing into free newspapers and guides and even paid magazines when and wherever you aresell book,digitize book,double your profits—-royalties and affiliate sales of your own product—-like being a hooker who also runs an Uber—-get them coming and going.make videos about book plot/content,do book signings,sell books,do book presentations,gather email addresses,purchase Constant Contact and Sendlane books and memberships to mail out announcements about newsletter which highlights book chapters,design and send out newsletter linkssend out newsletter PDFs(contemplate) weekly/monthly newsletter and/or yearly magazine (digital)experiment with e-newsletter (Dan Kennedy advice)agree to back links to your blog from other peoplesell books,post on Quora and mention past and forth coming books which gives readers a deep insight and therefore sparks interest in past, present, future books,answering Quora questions and mentioning books, mentioning name/Hashtag (passive branding) allows one to target a specific demographic (much like Facebook) does by reasonable sense of age, gender, sex, sexuality, race, socioeconomic levelssell books,capture and analyze data and operational influences from one platform to another,e-tool, re-hype, readjust posts (marketing strategy),maintain and monitor SEO,sell books,curate comments sections of all platforms to avoid junk/spam comments,sell books,notice several other people are selling your books on EBay—-at a higher price that you don’t get royalties on,fume as you’re proud that you’re getting big enough and popular enough to get re-sold,monitor to insure that there are no illegal copies/pirated copies of work though you expect like EBay sellers there will eventually be a small percentage where you will fume and be proud in the same moment,sell books, fume-proud as your book gets over-cut priced on Amazon (I see a book for $9.99 someone else sells a copy for $20.99—-which I may have autographed. Did I get a royalty on that? Once, yes. But It’s now potentially being sold multiple times. So I get $2 and the book itself, now a singular product separated from the Collective of my Business (which is what allows the back channeling of royalties) gets sold multiple times—-up to so far I’ve seen about $29 in cash—-that I made maybe $2 off of, Amazon $7 and the re-seller $20.)ship free copies to people, reviewers, influencers, stores, groups and potential bookstore partners,offer partners/other businesses to include them in your synergistic machine which means half a dozen platforms, TV show, blogs, Tweetssell booksrepeat process for entire catalogue of books (I have about 100 so far published with another 50 to 150 coming out through 2020. You quickly learn that publishing is a mass numbers game and that other arms of my media portfolio help to compensate for the fact that publishing is a long game of profit not always immediate so I have to do other things (show, blog, videos) to generate revenue to pay for all of the upfront costs of publishing books.)I forgot to add audio books—-I’m recording them now in studio.I also forgot podcasts—-again recording in studiosell books.repeat, repeat, adjust, repeat, repeat, adjustNow you see why it’s a complicated Yes answer.Yes, I’ve done a lot of work before Quora and before I started publishing books in 2013 that allows me to focus attention to myself to the books themselves. That time has taught me strategies online and offline to sell books better and more efficiently and use marketing time and money. I can maximize Quora and infuse it into an overall Kyle Phoenix Effect to generate sales.You can do it too.I maximize all of the below along with Quora to report blogs/articles and book info/pieces.Recently looking at analytics—-a Quora post about my mother is doing better than one about Oprah. Go figure! But that’s two different demographics—-my mother’s post seems to have a lot of international views/Upvotes. The Oprah one is a combination of pop culture and business interest.I do think about how a Quora post will be received and if I can reference my books or content when I consider questions to write about which means of nearly 1300 posts, about 1000 reference back in some way.But you’ll have to develop a system to do so. I’ve made a lot of money online but it took time, ingenuity, understanding bits and bobs and pieces of internet possibility and synergistic abilities. I haven’t even included used book sales and affiliate marketing.My VisionThis is how I look at my work, my brand, my products, my signNow—-actually I use a Star Trek metaphor and have yes, a binder outlining shuttles, runabouts, starships, deep space stations, moons and planets and the associated products/platforms in terms of signNow, content and connectivity to others and each other.I see Quora essay/article as a Shuttle/craftand if the numbers pop over say 3–5k views, a runabout. It’s got warp legs (distance) to it.A blog post/article is a runabout because it’s small, compact but can travel far with hyper linkage back to the starship (book) or hubs—store, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, etc (deep space station). Based upon size and scope my Quora page is a small space station and I’m constantly looking at creating/co-opting design moons, planets and eventually Dyson spheres to act as bases to launch all of this insanity forth. And that I have greater content, context and censorship control over. Which is why I keep Quora a small space station. All your eggs in one basket and such….Michael Gerber, taking one through the E Myth Development process to improve your business (there’s books, PDFs, videos, it’s very exciting and intense), tells us entrepreneurs to STOP on a day.I did.You STOP on your day—-mine was November 2016 and use their process—-7 Phases to evaluate your business/production/product through.Then pretend it is Day One from whenever you created whatever you have. Mine was 2003 when I was making $50k a year on the side selling books, DVDs, CDs online and wanted to work smarter rather than shipping/working harder so I began infusing dropshipping into my business and then developing products I had created myself to sell.E-Myth asks: What would you do differently then if you knew what you know now?It took me a year to do that processes and re-construct my business as a planet, moon, space station, fleet of starships with runabouts and shuttles.I recommend you find your own insane analogy for your book and Quora and design from there.(Yes, somewhere in this mess is a manuscript called Life Strategies where I reviewed like 100 business books with developmental slants on them. Yet to be released. I have literally hundreds of books unreleased.)To that final point, I know the above sounds like a lot outlined—-and I’ve really outlined only an overview portion pertaining to Quora. But remember you’re looking at me as 6 years of book publishing, 10 years of social media marketing/content creation, 15 years of online selling and marketing and 25 years of entrepreneurship.Wherever you are in your process START and month by month, week by week, day by day build a brick at a time. You can see if you type me into Google and note without hashtag, with hashtag, with key words, etc the listings of stuff and because of the vagaries/people on the internet I’m number one present on my name but that took close to 10 years to establish, hold, and constantly know how to infuse into to maintain.I will also add that I have been writing for well over 30 yeas. I love to write. I love it in so many dimensions and Quora not only has been a tool/platform back into my professional work but I use it for a release valve. Think of it this way—-I’m a professional ballerina, Broadway performer but sometimes I like to come to a disco and just DANCE.Quora is where I dance, I play, I don’t have to Nazi edit myself or my work, I work out thoughts and ideas. I have fun.Yes, 2000–5000 word essays and thoughts are “fun” for me.Have fun with your work, with the exploration of platforms and with Quora….and back-link like a mofo….#KylePhoenix#TheKylePhoenixShow

What are some of the shortest short stories you ever came across? After 37 years of marriage. Jake dumped his wife for his Young secretary.His new girlfriend demanded that they live in Jake and Edith's multi-million dollar home and since the man's lawyers were a little better he prevailed.He gave Edith his now ex-wife just 3 days to move out. She spent the 1st day packing her belongings into boxes crates and suitcases.On the 2nd day she had to movers come and collect her things.On the 3rd day she sat down for the last time at their beautiful dining room table by candlelight put on some soft background music and feasted on a pound of shrimp a jar o...