Saturday, August 31, 2019

Teaching Competency of English Language Teachers

COMMUNICATION AS AN IMPORTANT SOFT SKILL IN LANGUAGE TEACHING Mrs. N. Mahalakshmi D. T. Ed. , M. A. , M. Ed. , NET. , PGDACE. Research Scholar Department of Education Annamalai University ————————————————- [email  protected] com Abstract ————————————————- English is being taught as a second language in our Indian schools. As it is our national language, much importance is given to this language in our education system. The language teachers are expected to be more competent to develop the basic skills of the language so as to develop the communicative competence of the learners.Now-a-days, soft skills are considered as another important aspect of the teachers for efficient teaching. Regarding the soft skills, communication skill is the most important one that is needed by the language teachers to optimize the learning experience of the students. This paper tries to reveal the need of Effective Communication Skill as one of the important soft skill for the language teachers. The concept of soft skills Soft skills can be said to incorporate all aspects of generic skills that include the cognitive elements associated with non-academic skills.Soft skills are identified to be the most critical skills in the current global education and the era of technology. The reorientation of education for sustainability also relates the importance of these soft skills. Soft skills in Education Vast research and expert opinions have been sought in the effort to determine the specific soft skills to be implemented and used in higher institutions of learning. Based on the research findings obtained, seven soft skills have been identified and chosen to be implemented in higher education as: * Communicative skills * Thinking skills and problem solving skills * T eam work force Life-long learning and information management * Entrepreneur skill * Ethics, moral and professionalism and * Leadership skill The important soft skill needed for the language teacher Communication is as important aspect of language teaching. Effective communication skills are required for effective language teaching. Teachers of English are expected to have good command over the language and possess excellent communication skills. Communication skills include – using the target language effectively, the way of speaking, body language and facial expressions, pitch and tone of voice and interpersonal skills.It is possible that they have some presuppositions about communication and communication skills which are considered to be one major factor in becoming an effective teacher. According to Dettmer, Thurston, and Dyck (1996), West and Cannon (1988), and Carl Rogers (1962) communication is among the most important skills for educators to possess. The role of commu nication is emphasized also by Lunenburg & Ornstein (1996, p. 176) as: â€Å"Communication is the lifeblood of the school; it is a process that links the individual, the group, and the organization†.A gap in meaning between the intended and the received message can cause problems in the outcome of even the best teaching decision. Poor listening skills, ambiguous use of verbal and nonverbal language, poor semantics, and differing values are all items that can distort a message. To become effective communicators, educators must be aware of these potential problems and consciously work to eliminate them from their classroom interactions. They must also become knowledgeable about the importance of language in the learning process which gives a vital role to language teachers.Body language of the teacher In the communication skill, the body language and the facial expression of the teacher is of much importance which arrests students’ participation. The ‘presence†™ that a teacher has in the classroom is crucial in determining ‘how much’ learning takes place and ‘how well’ learning takes place. A tension free atmosphere is extremely important in language learning classroom. More than what behaviour reveals, it is the non-verbal behaviour that is of significance. Self respect, confident behaviour and tone and eye contact are some positive indicators.Some of the ways in which body language can improve the desired atmosphere within the class are: * Keeping eye contact with the student you are talking to, and with every student in the class; * Standing ‘tall’ and walking in with head held high, instead of shuffling in, head bowed; * Having a calm, relaxed face – smiling and laughing easily; * Using facial expressions that show you are listening and responding to what the student is saying; * Smiling and nodding when a student is saying something; Linguistic competence versus Communicative competence Language is a tool of communication.One can communicate ideas, thoughts, feelings, opinions, attitudes, information and even misinformation through language. Different people express the same idea in different words. Language is a tool serving four main functions. These important functions are important for effective communication in the language classroom. The important functions of the language are: * Social function * Informative function * Expressive function * Directive function Keeping in mind these four important functions of language, let’s examine if our students are effective communicators in English.Most of our graduates are good at writing beautiful and very literary answers to questions on Shakespeare, Wordsworth and other great writers. However, their literary competence isn’t enough for them to be able to communicate effectively and efficiently in everyday situations. The ability to communicate requires us to use language to perform interpersonal functi ons such as starting a conversation, joining and leaving a conversation, making the hearer feel comfortable, giving options, and so on. Mere linguistic competence isn’t sufficient.Of course, there’s no denying the value of linguistic mastery, which is the basis for communicative competence. Without words and grammar patterns, one can’t think of building communicative competence. However, rules of use are more essential than rules of grammar. Many graduates don’t know how to introduce themselves and how to introduce others; they don’t know how to ask for information politely, how to disagree tactfully, how to offer suggestions, etc. This is one very significant aspect that we need to pay attention to. Secondly, their English is bookish.They don’t know that choice of syntax and vocabulary depends on the topic, the occasion, and the relationship between the speaker and the listener. It’s important to know what to say, when, to whom and h ow. Thirdly, the students need to be told that the vocabulary and syntax of spoken English are different from vocabulary and grammar of written English. They seem to be unaware of the fact that the words and grammar of spoken English are simpler than those of written English. As a result, they don’t use contracted forms and question tags while conversing and their English sounds bookish.Developing the communication skills of the learners In language teaching developing the skill of listening, speaking, reading and writing  skills should be given importance. These language skills are the foundation of communication skills. A good communicator is a keen and interested listener. Even a good listener cannot be an effective speaker. In order to be a good speaker, one has to master the accent, the rhythm and the intonation of the English language. Also one has to mind the tone of voice and make an effective use of facial expressions, gestures, eye contact, and posture.An excellen t communicator uses verbal and non-verbal language to achieve the best effect. In order to develop good communication skills of the students, the language teacher need to * develop the listening, speaking, reading and writing skills * to be able to use language to perform various functions * master the rhythm, accent and intonation of the language * understand the differences between spoken and written language * remember the difference between meanings and messages Conclusion To remedy this situation we need to connect literature teaching with life outside.In language teaching, the academic world and the real world should not stand apart as islands. From the standpoint of the learner, the great waste in the school comes from the learner’s inability to utilize the experiences he gets outside the school. To fill up this gap, the communication skill should be given importance in language teaching. Developing communication skills of the learners requires the efficiency of langua ge teachers. So, the communication skill should be given primary importance both at the pre-service and in-service level of the language teaching.REFERENCE * Applbaum, L. et. al. , 1973, Fundamental Concepts in Human Communication, Confield Press, London * Brown, H. D. 1981, Principles of Language Learning & Teaching, Prentice Hall, Enlewood Cligts. * Corner, J. et. al. , 1993, Communication Studies:An Introductory Reader, Edward Arnold, London. * Dickinsen L. and Carver D. J. 1980. Steps Towards Self-direction in Foreign Language Learning in Schools. ELT. Vol. 35:1-7. * Dickinsen L. 1987. Self-instruction in Language Learning. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.

Friday, August 30, 2019

Carrying the Fire Individuation Toward the Mature Masculine

Carrying the Fire Individuation Toward the Mature Masculine and Telos of Cultural Myth in Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men and The Road maggie bortz So everything is necessary. Every least thing. This is the hard lesson. Nothing can be dispensed with. Nothing despised. Because the seams are hid from us, you see. The joinery. The way in which the world is made. (McCarthy, 1999b, 143) It was good that God kept the truths of life from the young as they were starting out or else they’d have no heart to start at all. (McCarthy 1999a, 284)Although many critics consider Cormac McCarthy to be the greatest living novelist in America, his dark, compelling vision did not reach a mass audience until the film adaptation of his novel No Country for Old Men (2005) was released in 2007. The film, directed by Ethan and Joel Coen (2007), won the Academy Award for Best Picture. A film adaptation of his latest novel, The Road (2006), which won the Pulitzer Prize, was released in la te 2009. McCarthy now has the public’s rapt attention. McCarthy’s visionary works can be read as dreams of our contemporary culture.Great works of art, like dreams, perform a compensatory function to the conscious attitudes of a society and may carry teleological implications. Jung viewed great art as an aperture to the collective unconscious, through which the role of the archetypes in shaping the psychological development of individuals and societies might be discerned (1930/1966, CW 15,  ¶Ã‚ ¶157, 161). McCarthy’s later novels, speaking in image and myth, the language of the unconscious, frame the collective psychic dissociation that prevents us, individually and collectively, from growing up.The final, transcendent image in No Country for Old Men, which appears in an old man’s dream, and the father-son imagery in The Road suggest that a reunion and recalibration of the inner Jung Journal: Culture & Psyche, Volume 5, Number 4, pp. 28–42, ISSN 1934-2039, e-ISSN 1934-2047.  © 2011 Virginia Allan Detloff Library, C. G. Jung Institute of San Francisco. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press’s Rights and Permissions website at www. ucpressjournals. com/reprintinfo/asp.DOI: 10. 1525/jung. 2011. 5. 4. 28. Maggie Bortz, Telos in No Country for Old Men and The Road 29 father and son, representing a â€Å"union of sames† in the split masculine archetype, constitute the requisite path of healing and maturation. This imagery may prefigure the emergence of a new cultural myth. Jungian analyst Joseph Henderson identified specific thresholds of initiation or psychological rites of passage â€Å"which make possible the transition from childhood to adolescence, from adolescence to early maturity, and from maturity to the experience of individuation† (2005, 11).Our culture, however, remains dominated by male adolescent energy, seemingly arrested in anachronistic identification with the uninitiated hero, still living out a negative mother complex: a myth of male regeneration through escalating violence inflicted on a feminine earth and on humanity. This entrenched cultural complex manifests in and is reinforced by social constructs of what it means to be male in modern America, including the myth of the self-made man and the ethic of individualism. This complex also bears â€Å"a revolutionary unattached shadow that would smash all fetters† (Hillman 2005, 56–57).To give a clinical example, some of my clients, on parole from the Oregon Youth Authority, are very likable boys for the most part who, at 14 or 15, have already spent a year behind bars in the state’s â€Å"baby† prison system. Their yearnings for identity are shaped by a culture of outer action devoid of inner meaning. The lack of connection to an inner life also appears in adult male populations in presenting symptoms like workaholism, anger issues, substance abuse, relationship problems, and sexual obsession. In older men, the dissociative phenomenon is related to the common tragedy of suicidal depression.Women, of course, are not immune to any of these things. It is axiomatic that masculine cultural dominants affect women’s lives and impact their relationships with men. On a deeper level, masculine psychological energy is present and problematic in the female psyche as well. Jung personified the unconscious masculine energy in a woman as an interior male image, the animus. â€Å"Her unconsciousness has, so to speak, a masculine imprint† (1951/1968, CW 9ii,  ¶29). James Hillman personified â€Å"the psychological foundation of the problem of history† in the archetypal magery of the senex (old man) and puer (young man) (2005, 35). Old men and young men are ubiquitous images in McCarthy’s work. No Country for Old Men and The Road appear to validate Hillman’s theory that a split in the masculine senex-puer archetype underlies the psychic malaise of our time and that work toward a â€Å"union of sames† must begin at the senex pole of that archetype. Although the reticent McCarthy seems to write from a Jungian-informed perspective, I was unable to discover any biographical data linking him to an interest in Jungian psychology.However, he frequently associates with physicists at the interdisciplinary Santa Fe Institute, a think tank located at the former site of the Manhattan Project, a collaboration McCarthy has tersely attributed to his enduring interest â€Å"in the way things work† (Voice of America 2008). C. G. Jung collaborated with Nobel 30 jung journal: culture & psyche 5:4 / fall 2011 Prize-winning physicist Wolfgang Pauli and was struck by the cogent parallels between quantum physics and his psychological theory (Pauli and Jung 1992/2001).Beyond the shared observer effect and the subject-object bond , quantum physics and Jungian psychology both venture into depths where the distinctions between energy and matter collapse. Following the development of nuclear weapons, Jung and Pauli also shared a deep concern about the future: they feared that in the absence of a greater understanding of man’s potential for evil, humanity would â€Å"destroy itself through the might of its own technology and science† (1957/1970, CW 10,  ¶585). Although McCarthy’s canon garners critical acclaim, his work also provokes controversy.Yale literary critic Harold Bloom admits to a â€Å"fierce† passion for Blood Meridian (1985), which he considers a masterpiece of American literature. Bloom also confesses that he had a hard time finishing the book because he â€Å"flinched from the overwhelming carnage that McCarthy portrays† (2009, 1). Literary critic Morris Philipson has written: â€Å"For culture, just as for therapy, symbols are not intuitions by themselves; th ey are only brute facts that must be interpreted† (1992, 226–227). There are brute facts aplenty inMcCarthy’s canon: scalping, massacres, executions, necrophilia, cannibalism, every imaginable kind of human evil, but his artistic vision reflects the ultimate mystery of the unconscious and does not lend itself to facile reduction. Symbolic images, whether interpreted or not, affect us. They represent living psychological dynamics that we experience as feelings, emotions, ideas, and impulses toward action. McCarthy’s earlier work is often celebrated for its lyrical style and long, commafree sentences.Critic Steven Frye wrote that, â€Å"for many of us that artistry, his mastery of beauty in language, is the only compensating factor for the bleak and uncompromising world he forces us to confront† (2005, 16). But in No Country for Old Men, the prose is clipped and minimalistic. The unconscious tends to turn up the music as required to equilibrate the co nscious attitude. Compensatory dreams may become repetitious or disturbing; symptoms may become more severe.Perhaps McCarthy’s style has changed because we have missed the subtler messages of the collective unconscious, and it is getting more obviously archetypal in its self-regulatory attempts. As if mirroring a quaternity, the pattern of psychic wholeness, No Country for Old Men contains four major characters. The landscape, as character, presents the energy of the dark, chthonic feminine. Llewelyn Moss, the hunter who becomes prey, embodies the immature masculine energy of the hero, a puer spirit contaminated by a negative mother complex. Anton Chigurh, the psychopathic killer, personifies evil in its human and god-like dimensions.The psychological protagonist, Sheriff Ed Tom Bell, is a senex figure with positive and negative attributes who struggles against his own nature to assimilate his shadow and to individuate toward the mature masculine. Each represents an autonomou s complex at work inside the collective psyche. Complexes are split-off parts of the personality or culture that â€Å" behave like independent Maggie Bortz, Telos in No Country for Old Men and The Road 31 beings† ( Jung 1937/1969, CW 8,  ¶253). The ultimate meaning of the quaternity in this cultural dream remains ambiguous. Jung thought that the automatic eneration of quaternary images, â€Å"whether consciously or in dreams and fantasies, can indicate the ego’s capacity to assimilate unconscious material. But they may also be essentially apotropaic, an attempt by the psyche to prevent itself from disintegrating† (Sharp 1991, 111). Both possibilities, further evolution and collective psychosis, must be entertained in reading the work. The interpretation of a dream often begins with a careful consideration of the setting. No Country for Old Men unfolds in 1980 in the wild, scrubby borderlands of South Texas and Mexico.The landscape is a raw, barren land of spr awling desert plain, lava scree, red dirt, and creosote, sparsely inhabited by Mojave rattlesnakes, scorpions, and birds of prey. The image of the border itself suggests an unstable and volatile place between two worlds where the usual rules do not apply, a sort of psychological no-man’s-land where consciousness and unconscious meet. Borders are the domain of the archetypal Trickster, who incites psychic change through creative and destructive interventions that disturb the established psychological order.The archetypal feminine is always a silent, powerful, brooding presence in McCarthy’s work. In his novels, anima or soul is sometimes represented by animals, feral creatures who need human protection, like the pregnant wolf that Billy finds trapped at the beginning of The Crossing (1999b). Sometimes, and usually briefly, followed by tragic consequences, the anima is projected onto young women in McCarthy’s novels. But the chthonic feminine, as landscape, is alw ays present in his novels, both as a primitive force of nature and as a deeply unconscious psychological dynamic in the characters’ psyches.Anima figures fare pretty poorly in McCarthy’s work. Billy must kill the beloved wolf in The Crossing to save her from a slow, agonizing death in a dog pit, where she has become the main act in a blood sport that entertains older men. In The Road, anima as landscape has been killed off entirely: the chthonic feminine is a fading memory, a charred and ruined relic. In No Country for Old Men, anima appears as landscape in foreboding form: High bloodweeds along the road. Wiregrass and sacahuista. Beyond in the stone arroyos the tracks of dragons.The raw rock mountains shadowed in the late sun and to the east the shimmering abscissa of the desert plains under a sky where raincurtains hung dark as soot all along the quadrant. That god lives in silence who has scoured the following land with salt and ash. (McCarthy 2005, 45) The dark fem inine landscape in No Country for Old Men mirrors the alchemical process of calcinatio and its products: salt, a metaphor for bitterness or wisdom, and soot and ash, the residue of fire. â€Å"The calcinatio is performed on the primitive shadow side, which harbors hungry, instinctual desirousness and is contaminated with the unconscious.The fire for the process comes from the frustration of these instinctual desires† (Edinger 1994, 21–22). 32 jung journal: culture & psyche 5:4 / fall 2011 The characters in No Country for Old Men are ambivalent about the landscape. Uncle Ellis tells the sheriff: This country was hard on people. But they never seem to hold it to account. In a way that seems peculiar. That they didnt . . . How come people dont feel like this country has got a lot to answer for? They dont. You can say that the country is just the country, it dont actively do nothing, but that dont mean much . . This country will kill you in a heartbeat and still people lov e it. (McCarthy 2005, 271) On one hand, the landscape represents a terrible archetypal mother, the surrealistic backdrop of a burgeoning drug war, which is itself the continuation of many barbaric historical slaughters. In other respects, the characters identify positively with the landscape. She still nurtures according to her increasingly limited abilities. Moss can still find antelope in her deep interior space and a river saves him from certain death early in the book.All of the novel’s central male characters are veterans: they have gone to war and risked their lives to protect â€Å"the country. † The power of the landscape, however, is muted in No Country for Old Men as opposed to McCarthy’s earlier Western novels. Even the moon, the symbol of feminine consciousness, is disfigured. It is as though man’s relentless dominance, his continual conquests, savagery, and ever forward â€Å"progress† have effectively depotentiated the chthonic femini ne, and she has regressed more deeply into the unconscious.Behind the mask of our technological society lurks a negative mother complex, a dissociation from and opposition to the feminine principle. Complexes are not ours to eliminate. On the contrary, they commonly persist beyond the life of the individual and perpetuate themselves across generations. According to Jung, â€Å"A complex can be really overcome only if it is lived out to the full . . . If we are to develop further we have to draw to us and drink down to the very dregs what . . . we have held at a distance† (1954/1968, CW 9i,  ¶184).Unconsciously living out this collective negative mother complex is a dangerous and precarious proposition: it means consuming the natural world and each other in the process. The second major character, Llewelyn Moss, a welder and Viet Nam veteran, is hunting antelope in the desert when he stumbles across the surreal, slaughterhouse scene of a failed drug deal. Moss finds a case o f money, a load of heroin, and one dying Hispanic man pleading for water. He takes the money, but his conscience nags him and he comes back to the scene that night with a jug of water for the dying man.His belated act of compassion commences the novel’s ostensible journey: Moss runs with the money, pursued by Anton Chigurh, a rival hoard of drug dealers, and Sheriff Bell. Classical Jungian theory links both the puer and the hero to the Great Mother: the puer via regressive attachment, the hero via opposition. James Hillman argued, however, that whereas the hero is always bound up in a battle with the mother, the puer spirit is defined in relationship to the father and is not heroic in the classical sense. Maggie Bortz, Telos in No Country for Old Men and The Road 33Puer consciousness is a masculine psychological energy representing, in alchemical terms, â€Å"a new spirit born of an old spirit† (2005, 117). Hillman contended that whereas the emergent masculine ego migh t pattern itself in association with either archetype, an alchemical â€Å"union of sames† in the puer-senex archetype represents the requisite path of individuation toward the mature masculine. Moss initially seems to reflect qualities of the archetypal puer-like opportunist. Like other mythological puer figures, such as Icarus or Bellerophon,1 he does not recognize his limitations and is more vulnerable than he realizes.During his first encounter with the drug dealers, Moss injures his feet by walking barefoot in the river gravel and then traversing the country in wet boots. A gunshot wound suffered during his first encounter with Chigurh further lames him for the abbreviated duration of his life. The classic puer injury to the foot suggests a fatal weakness where this immature consciousness meets the world. Once Moss takes the money, however, his thoughts, feelings, and behaviors clearly pattern boy or uninitiated hero psychological energy.His heroic quest is about cashâ⠂¬â€his spirit is literalized in currency. Moss is skillful with weapons, which are described in elaborate detail. Literary critic Jay Ellis astutely observed the technological fetishism with which McCarthy describes Moss’ preoccupation with weapons and tools: To pre-adolescent (and increasingly, adolescent and older) male readers still uncertain about their vulnerability and power in the world . . . the minutiae surrounding objects that afford their user power in the world become all-important . . .Anything that can be added on to an already desirable object that will afford greater lethality, great speed, greater vision, or more information, fills in for what young men fear they lack. (2009, 138) Ellis noted that these powerful weapons and tools ultimately do little for Moss: he misses his opening shot at an antelope and is ultimately gunned down by drug dealers at a cheap hotel. Sheriff Bell, in contrast, is dubious of sophisticated weaponry. â€Å"Tools that comes into our hands comes into theirs too . . . Some of the old time sheriffs wouldnt even carry a firearm† (McCarthy 2005, 62–63).Moss’ interactions with women betray an oblique hostility and adolescent insecurity. He uses sarcasm to dismiss and deflect his young wife. Moss mentions â€Å"mother† specifically twice in the book, both times in relation to death, and appears to dialogue with her elsewhere. Shortly before he is murdered, Moss picks up a teenage girl who is hitchhiking. The mother complex speaking through Moss tells the girl: â€Å"Most people’ll run from their own mother to get to hug death by the neck. They can’t wait to see him† (McCarthy 2005, 234).Moss’ unconsciousness of his own limitations, of any transpersonal ideals, and of the insurmountable evil he both confronts and secretly carries within him, costs him his own life; the collateral damage includes the deaths of his wife and the young hitchhiker. 34 jung journal: culture & psyche 5:4 / fall 2011 At this point in the senescence of our culture, McCarthy seems to say, the hero is as good as dead. Although Moss’ heroic tale entices the reader into the novel, as critic Jay Ellis (2009) has noted, this part of the story collapses midway through with Moss’ death when Sheriff Bell’s process emerges to dominate.This apparent literary dismissal of the heroic neurosis may reflect its psychological status as a secondary pathology, as a symptom of failed initiation that masks a religious problem: the missing God â€Å"who offered a focus for spiritual things† (Hillman 2005, 121). The third major character, Anton Chigurh, psychopath and assassin, represents the most potent force in the collective psyche at this time. He is a complex, quasiarchetypal shadow figure, a paradoxical psychic presence who acts as the dynamist or catalyst in the larger psychological process of the novel.When the reader meets Chigurh, he is a prisoner i n a small, rural county jail. While the arresting deputy chats on the phone, Chigurh, in one fluid move, gets his manacled hands in front of his body and around the jailor’s neck. After the grisly murder, Chigurh nonchalantly uses the bathroom, binds his injured wrists with tape and paper towels, and sits at the desk â€Å"studying the dead man gaping up from the floor† (McCarthy 2005, 6). There is no emotion in the scene beyond the horror it evokes in the reader. The motif of the murdered jailor has appeared elsewhere in McCarthy’s work.Here, Chigurh represents an archetypal impulse or tendency that has been banished, repressed, â€Å"locked up,† but has now freed itself to act. Chigurh, unlike Moss, is not motivated by money. When he eventually recovers the satchel of stolen cash, he returns it. Killing people is Chigurh’s job. The world is his abattoir. He is the quintessential bounty hunter, a contemporary iteration of the scalp hunters in Bloo d Meridian. He prefers to dispatch his victims (and to open doors) with a cattlegun. Other people become objects or livestock to him, and in this way, he prefigures the cannibals in The Road.Anton Chigurh seems to embody shadow qualities properly belonging to the personal unconscious of the other characters, as though the archetypal split between the contaminated puer and ineffectual senex created a psychological void that he is obligated, through some inscrutable psychological rule, to fill. In some respects, he is like a photographic negative of Moss. He even mirrors Moss’ limp, sustaining a leg injury while inflicting one. When Chigurh is injured in a car crash late in the book, he buys a boy’s shirt to make a sling for his broken arm, mirroring Moss’ earlier purchase of a boy’s coat on the Mexican border.Chigurh certainly needs no help from anyone. Women who spend too much time around Chigurh, like those who become involved with Moss, wind up dead. An aura of the negative hero seems to radiate around him. At the same time, Chigurh seems to carry some qualities of the negative senex that seem related to Sheriff Bell. As a senex figure, Bell represents, among other things, Maggie Bortz, Telos in No Country for Old Men and The Road 35 justice, law, and the process whereby these concepts are enforced in human affairs through the sometimes arbitrary power of an established order.Within an individual psyche, these ordering and moral functions are often associated with the senex archetype, and, inevitably, a murky shadow accompanies them. â€Å"A morality based on senexconsciousness will always be dubious. No matter what strict code of ethical purity it asserts, in the execution of its lofty principles there will be a balancing loathsome horror not far away† (Hillman 2005, 260). (The first line of the book suggests as much: â€Å"I sent one boy to the gaschamber at Huntsville† [McCarthy 2005, 3]. Like a dark reflection of the senex compulsion for law, order, and measurement, Chigurh is a man of exacting principles: â€Å"principles that transcend money or drugs or anything like that† (153). As Moss’ wife begs for her life, Chigurh shakes his head. â€Å"You’re asking that I make myself vulnerable and that I can never do. I have only one way to live and it doesn’t allow for special cases† (259). Anton Chigurh serves as a vehicle of unconscious projection for the reader. His sadistic acts and complete emotional detachment inspire terror. This character, so indefinably foreign, o marginally human, does not seem like one of us, but he is an irrefutable psychological truth that belongs to our culture. He represents something we should know about ourselves that remains unconscious, like a not yet understood dream. While Chigurh’s vulnerability to physical injury suggests a human shadow figure, his disappearing acts, miraculous escapes, and his association with fat e lend him a supernatural aura that suggests the archetypal shadow. By the end of the novel, Bell comes to believe that Satan â€Å"explains a lot of things that otherwise dont have no explanation† (McCarthy 2005, 218).Chigurh himself confesses that he has found â€Å"it useful to model himself after God† (257). For our culture at this time, we might say Chigurh is God, the dark God grown more human, closer to consciousness. Chigurh resembles the God-image Jung discovered in the Book of Job. Jung found that Yahweh, egged on by Satan, possessed, in part, â€Å"an animal nature† (1952/1969, CW 11,  ¶600) and, in this way, was â€Å"less than human† ( ¶599). Like Yahweh, Chigurh is guilty of â€Å"murder, bodily injury with premeditation, and denial of a fair trial† ( ¶581).For Jung, Yahweh’s cruelty to Job is â€Å"further exacerbated by the fact that Yahweh displays no compunction, remorse, or compassion, but only ruthlessness and brut ality† ( ¶581); we find the same divine heartlessness, fed by the unconscious, in Chigurh. Chigurh shares another trait with Yahweh: â€Å"Nowhere does he come up against an insuperable obstacle that would force him to hesitate and hence make him reflect on himself † ( ¶579). In Jung’s view, the Christ symbol represents only an intermediate stage in a process of divine development in which God effectively dissociated from his own dark side.Identification with the exclusively â€Å"good,† loving aspects of the divinity â€Å"is bound 36 jung journal: culture & psyche 5:4 / fall 2011 to lead to a dangerous accumulation of evil† (1952/1969, CW 11,  ¶653). Anton Chigurh symbolizes that magnetic, irrational pull to incarnate God’s darkness, â€Å"the ultimate source of evil, its absolute home† (Stein 1995, 144). Chigurh slays the cultural hero and provokes Bell’s psychological development: he is the dynamic agent, the terrorist , and instigator of Bell’s emergent connection to the unconscious. The realization of the self as an autonomous psychic factor is often stimulated by the irruption of contents over which the ego has no control† (Sharp 1991, 120). The irruption of contents like this can destroy the ego. In his Trickster role, Chigurh is not unlike Satan in the Book of Job or the serpent in the Garden of Eden. Evil serves a psychological function. â€Å"The stirring up of conflict is a Luciferian virtue in the true sense of the word. Conflict engenders fire, the fire of affects and emotions, and like every other fire it has two aspects, that of combustion and that of creating light† ( Jung 1954/1968, CW 9i,  ¶179).The conscious attitude determines whether the conflict is ultimately illuminating or destructive: we either evolve from our mistakes or we unconsciously dig deeper into our accustomed defenses. Sheriff Bell, a country lawman approaching sixty, is the novel’s psyc hological protagonist. As a senex figure, Bell seems to represent, at least in part, the conservative function of the archetype, â€Å"the fastness of our habits† (Hillman 2005, 48), â€Å"the principle of long-lasting survival through order† (284). Psychological movement, once incited by Chigurh, depends entirely on Bell’s interior process.Paradoxically, the path of psychic evolution begins with the senex in a process of disintegration. The novel takes its title from the first line of W. B. Yeats’ most celebrated poem, â€Å"Sailing to Byzantium,† which contrasts the material world with the transcendent world of art from the viewpoint of an aged man. It urges a belated attention to one’s soul. To the extent that art is an aperture to the collective unconscious, the journey to Byzantium implies an intrapsychic movement from the ego toward the Self.Critic John Vanderheide has observed that the renunciation of the physical world expressed in à ¢â‚¬Å"Sailing to Byzantium† and No Country for Old Men is forced on the narrator by old age and approaching death, conditions he is powerless to change (2005). Consume my heart away; sick with desire And fastened to a dying animal It knows not what it is; and gather me Into the artifice of eternity (Yeats 1926/1952, 490, stanza III, ll. 21–24) This felt sense of mortality, hopelessness, and limitation is often the cue that ignites the process of individuation.The collective unconscious calls aged men; whether they will respond and how is another matter entirely, but this painful territory is no country for young men. Maggie Bortz, Telos in No Country for Old Men and The Road 37 As senex figure, Bell is the ostensible boundary keeper of the cultural psyche, but he is flooded with content that he cannot repress. Bafflement pervades his monologues. He longs for times past when the world made more sense to him, but Bell’s nostalgia is more than a regressive symptom, it implies â€Å"a separation of halves, a missing conjunction† (Hillman 2005, 182).Bell carries notable qualities of the positive senex. His most authentic self is related to others. He sees himself as a shepherd to the people assigned to his care. â€Å"I’ve thought about why it was that I wanted to be a lawman. There was always some part of me that wanted people to listen to what I had to say. But there was a part of me too that just wanted to pull everybody in the boat† (McCarthy 2005, 296). His psyche is anchored in an imago of the positive feminine in the form of his anima figure, his wife of thirtyone years, Loretta.The escalating violence, his inability to contain it, and the imperatives of his own interior process force Bell to examine the psychological orientation that has guided his life. Bell confronts his own provisional life, an adulthood founded on a lie. As a young soldier in France during World War II, he fought bravely, but in the face of overw helming odds and certain death, fled the battlefield and his dead companions. He was awarded a Bronze Star for his service, an honor he tried to refuse. His election as county sheriff followed from this heroic misidentification.Bell confesses this history to his Uncle Ellis, an elderly lawman disabled in the line of duty, late in the book. â€Å"I didn’t know you could steal your own life,† he says (McCarthy 2005, 278). Bell concludes that his history resurfaces because â€Å"sometimes people would rather have a bad answer about things than no answer at all† (282). Bell endures the part of the alchemical process associated with the death and decay of the old substance, the old way of being in the world. He experiences his growing edge of consciousness as a defeat.Bell makes a final break with the inauthentic hero and our culture’s idea of what it means to be a man: he quits in the middle of the hunt. His decision to retire reflects an understanding of his own limitations and is guided by a deeper psychic injunction. I always knew that you had to be willin to die to even do this job. That was always true. . . . If you aint they’ll know it in a heartbeat. I think it is more like what you are willin to become. And I think that a man would have to put his soul at hazard. And I wont do that. I think now that maybe I never would. (McCarthy 2005, 4)Bell begins to acquiesce to and participate in his interior process, going back through his memories, paying attention to his dreams, engaging in active imagination. He ponders the memory of an image he encountered on the battlefield in France, â€Å"a stone water trough† carved â€Å"to last ten thousand years† (307). A trough contains water, a symbol of the unconscious, perhaps the personal unconscious, but perhaps the collective one. The trough symbolizes a way of understanding content arising from the unconscious and resonates as a religious symbol. For Jung, 38 jung jou rnal: culture & psyche 5:4 / fall 2011 an had the need for a felt connection to something larger than his ego deeply embedded into the fabric of his being, but man lost his sense of larger meaning and purpose somewhere amid the horrors and upheavals of the twentieth century. Jung believed that the modern collective failure to channel this instinct, to carve another indestructible stone trough, was both symptom and root cause of our collective dissociation. Bell rejects the notion of carving a trough himself; it must be a collective enterprise, and no new myth has yet emerged to replace the dying God-image of our culture.Bell’s only child, a daughter, died as an infant thirty years before the story begins. Childlessness is associated with the negative senex. â€Å"When the senex has lost its child . . . A dying complex infects all psychic life† (Hillman 2005, 263). Late in the book, Bell confides to the reader that for many years he has dialogued with this dead infant d aughter (McCarthy 2005, 285). In Jungian theory, that imaginary child would be considered a psychic reality. The novel’s ultimate meaning resides in two dreams about his dead father.In the first dream, â€Å"he give me some money and I think I lost it† (McCarthy 2005, 309). His father imparted something of great value to him for safekeeping, but he misplaced it, perhaps irretrievably. The second dream is a powerful reiteration of the first and evokes Jung’s famous dream of carrying a small light in the fog (Jung 1961/1965, 88). The setting is a cold, snowy night in a remote mountain pass. Bell and his father ride horseback. It was like we was both back in older times and I was on horseback goin through this pass in the mountains.It was cold and there was snow on the ground and he rode past me and kept on goin. Never said nothing. He just rode on past and he had this blanket wrapped around him and his head down and when he rode past I seen he was carryin fire in a horn the way people used to do and I could see the horn from the light inside of it. About the color of the moon. And in the dream I knew that he was goin on ahead and that he was fixin to make a fire somewhere out there in all that dark and all that cold and I knew that whenever I got there he would be there. (McCarthy 2005, 309)Although the dream can be viewed as regressive, in that it invokes Bell’s childhood relationship and a longing to live out an old, honorable myth that has become irrelevant in the modern world, it clearly carries teleological implications. Bell goes forward into the dark night, into the unknown, toward death. He and his father ride horses, numinous animals in McCarthy’s work that suggest connection to anima or soul. Horses also represent an older and an arguably more connected way of moving through the world. Bell’s father carries fire, a symbol for the light of consciousness or spirit, in a horn, a Gnostic symbol of maturity. The hor n is a dual symbol: from one point of view it is penetrating in shape and therefore active and masculine in significance; and from the other it is shaped like a receptacle, which is feminine in meaning† (Cirlot 1962/1971, 151). While the image of the horn may suggest a new hieros gamos, a union of masculine and feminine energy, the dead father carries it, not the dream ego Maggie Bortz, Telos in No Country for Old Men and The Road 39 itself. Bell’s passivity in the dream seems problematic. On the other hand, it is conceivable that Bell’s lack of agency is an auspicious sign. In the absence of ego and into its emptiness an imaginal stream can flow, providing mythical solutions between the senexpuer contradictions† (Hillman 2005, 66). Bell’s own father aspects are deeply unconscious: he has no living children and, in this respect, has lost his father’s â€Å"inheritance,† a future presence in the chain of life. Paradoxically, behind Bellà ¢â‚¬â„¢s senex mask we find a son looking for the father within. As in most of McCarthy’s books, the missing psychic presence is the father: there is never a shortage of symbolically fatherless boys in his work.However, in this novel, the puer appears in the form of Bell as an old man. Bell’s unconscious frames its message in terms of a reunion and recalibration of the father and the son, as though directly addressing the split masculine archetype that appears to block the evolution of our culture. â€Å"This split gives us . . . the search of the son for his father and the longing of the father for his son, which is the search and longing for one’s own meaning† (Hillman 2005, 61). The dream image suggests a path of potential healing, a â€Å"union of sames† in this split archetype, and might represent the nascent emergence of a new myth.In the end, the dream’s telos remains hauntingly ambiguous. We are only at the beginning of a process. In the face of such pervasive and unbridled evil and unconsciousness, one man’s individuation seems like a very small thing, a very small thing that requires much effort, attention, devotion, and suffering. The last line of the book immediately follows the second dream: â€Å"Then I woke up† (McCarthy 2005, 309). â€Å"Waking up,† increasing consciousness, is the entire point. And thus the novel ends on a slender strand of hope.We must dream this dream on, in the Jungian tradition, and look toward the next dream for further clarification. McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic novel, The Road, is properly understood as a psychological progression of No Country for Old Men. In The Road, McCarthy resolves the ambiguity of the quaternity image presented in No Country for Old Men. It becomes clear that the imagery portends a collective psychosis and, at the same time, the possibility that some individuals may be ready to assimilate unconscious content. In The Road, the ch thonic feminine as landscape has een killed off entirely in an unnamed catastrophe marked only by â€Å"a long shear of light and then a series of low concussions† (McCarthy 2006, 45). Given McCarthy’s long preoccupation with man’s proclivity toward evil, the apocalypse was likely manmade: perhaps an all-out nuclear war. There are few survivors. Civilization itself is a fading memory. A nameless father and son wander the scorched landscape, â€Å"the cauterized terrain,† hoping to scavenge enough canned food to survive while evading roving bands of cannibals (12). The boy’s mother has committed suicide in despair. 40 jung journal: culture & psyche 5:4 / fall 2011McCarthy seems to suggest that the feminine will be eradicated from the picture entirely, the negative mother complex played out to its inevitable conclusion in man’s escalating shadow enactments before work on the fundamental problem can begin in what is left of humanity. As Anton C higurh says, â€Å"one’s path through the world seldom changes and even more seldom will it change abruptly† (McCarthy 2005, 259). Despite the horrors, a new symbol, the image of a divine child, an elaboration of the dream imagery of No Country for Old Men, does emerge out of the ruin and ashes of The Road.This symbol arises from the ground of catastrophic loss. The end of the via longissima is the child. But the child begins in the realm of Saturn, in lead or rock, ashes or blackness, and it is there the child is realized. It is warmed to life in a bath of cinders, for only when a problem is finally worn to nothing, wasted and dry can it reveal a wholly unexpected essence. Out of the darkest, coldest, most remote burnt out state of the complex the phoenix rises. Petra genetrix: out of the stone a child is born. (Hillman 2005, 64)In The Road, the father and son are â€Å"each other’s world entire† (McCarthy 2006, 5), representing a â€Å"union of samesâ €  in the masculine archetype and, possibly, the beginning of a new cultural myth. The nameless father in The Road struggles to â€Å"evoke the forms. Where you’ve nothing else construct ceremonies out of the air and breathe upon them† (63). He views his son as a sacred being. As he is dying, the father sees his son â€Å"standing there in the road looking back at him from some unimaginable future, glowing in that waste like a tabernacle† (230). Unlike Jesus, this son is not sacrificed back to the father. In the puer is a father drive—not to find him, reconcile with him, be loved and receive a blessing, but rather to transcend the father which act redeems the father’s limitations† (Hillman 2005, 161). The father’s job is to initiate the son before he dies: to provide a sense of meaning that makes existence tolerable. In The Road, individual meaning is symbolized in the son’s sacred responsibility to carry the light of conscio usness, the only thing of value in a post-apocalyptic world, into the overwhelming darkness that confronts him. This fragile possibility, however, resides in the individual, not within a culture or group.Critic Kenneth Lincoln saw McCarthy’s novels as â€Å"lamentational canticles of warning, not directives† (2009, 2). Part of Bell’s function is prophetic: he hints at â€Å"where we’re headed† (McCarthy 2005, 303). â€Å"I know as certain as death that there aint nothin short of the second comin of Christ that can slow this train† (159). McCarthy is first and foremost a storyteller. He is not an activist and does not make prescriptive statements, and it is a mistake to read him that way. The blind man in The Crossing explains the function of storytellers. â€Å"He said that they had no desire to entertain him nor yet even to instruct him.He said that it was their whole bent only to tell what was true and that otherwise they had no purpose a t all† (McCarthy 1999b, 284). I imagine that McCarthy shares the blind man’s views and also those of Jung, who in writing about art Maggie Bortz, Telos in No Country for Old Men and The Road 41 underscored the fundamental depth psychological tenet that â€Å"a dream never says ‘you ought’ or ‘this is the truth. ’ It presents an image in much the same way as nature allows a plant to grow, and it is up to us to draw conclusions† (1930/1966, CW 15,  ¶161).Those of us who are conscious enough to draw conclusions from this work must do so now and prepare ourselves as best we can for the dark new world to come. endnote 1. Bellerophon, son of the King of Corinth, was the hero of Greek mythology who killed the Chimera. Bellerophon, inflated by his triumph, felt entitled to join the gods on Mount Olympus and attempted to fly there on the winged horse, Pegasus. His presumption offended Zeus, who orchestrated the hero’s dismount. Belleroph on plummeted to earth, crippled in the fall. note References to The Collected Works of C. G. Jung are cited in the text as CW, volume number, and paragraph number.The Collected Works are published in English by Routledge (UK) and Princeton University Press (USA). bibliography Bloom, Harold. 2009. Bloom’s modern critical views: Cormac McCarthy. New York: Infobase Publishing. Cirlot, Juan Eduardo. 1962/1971. A dictionary of symbols. Trans. Jack Sage. New York: Philosophical Library. Edinger, Edward F. 1994. Anatomy of the psyche: Alchemical symbolism in psychotherapy. Chicago: Open Court. Ellis, Jay. 2009. Fetish and collapse in No country for old men. In Bloom’s modern critical views: Cormac McCarthy, ed. Harold Bloom, 133–170. New York: Infobase Publishing. Frye, Steven. 2005.Yeats’ â€Å"Sailing to Byzantium† and McCarthy’s No country for old men: Art and artifice in the new novel. The Cormac McCarthy Journal, 5, 1: 14–20. Henderson, Joseph. 2005. Thresholds of initiation. Wilmette, IL: Chiron Publications. Hillman, James. 2005. Senex and puer. Putnam, CT: Spring. Jung, C. G. 1930/1966. Psychology and literature. The spirit in man, art, and literature. CW 15. ———. 1937/1969. Psychological factors determining human behavior. The structure and dynamics of the psyche. CW 8. ———. 1951/1968. The syzygy: Anima and animus. Aion. CW 9ii. ———. 1952/1969. Answer to Job. Psychology and religion: West and East.CW 11. ———. 1954/1968. Psychological aspects of the mother archetype. The archetypes and the collective unconscious. CW 9i. ———. 1957/1970. The undiscovered self (present and future). Civilization in transition. CW 10. ———. 1961/1965. Memories, dreams, reflections. Recorded and ed. by Aniela Jaffe. Trans. Richard and Clara Winston. New York: Vintage Books. Lincoln, Kenneth. 2009. Cormac McCart hy: American canticles. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. McCarthy, Cormac. 1985. Blood meridian: Or the evening redness in the west. New York: Random House. 42 jung journal: culture & psyche 5:4 / fall 2011 McCarthy, Cormac. 1999a.All the pretty horses. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. ———. 1999b. The crossing. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. ———. 2005. No country for old men. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. ———. 2006. The road. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. No country for old men. 2007. Screenplay by Ethan Coen and Joel Coen. Based on the novel by Cormac McCarthy, No country for old men, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005. Directed by Ethan Coen and Joel Coen. Pauli, Wolfgang, and C. G. Jung. 1992/2001. Atom and archetype: The Pauli/Jung letters, 1932– 1958. Eds. Carl Alfred Meier, Charles Paul Enz, and Markus Fierz. Trans. David Roscoe. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Philipson, Morris. 1992. Outline of Jungian aesthetics. In Jungian literary criticism, ed. Richard Sugg, 214–227. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Sharp, Daryl. 1991. C. G. Jung lexicon: A primer of terms and concepts. Toronto: Inner City Books. Stein, Murray. 1995. Jung on evil. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Vanderheide, John. 2005. Varieties of renunciation in the works of Cormac McCarthy. The Cormac McCarthy Journal, 5, 1: 30–35. Voice of America. 2008. Cormac McCarthy and Thomas McGuane write stories set in the American west. Interviewed by B. Klein and S. Ember. Radio broadcast (February 11), voanews. om (accessed October 27, 2009). Yeats, William Butler. 1926/1952. Sailing to Byzantium. In Immortal poems of the English language, ed. Oscar Williams, 490. New York: Washington Square Press. maggie bortz earned an M. A. in Counseling Psychology with an emphasis in Depth Psychology from Pacifica Graduate Institute, Carpinteria, California, and an M. J. in Journalism from the University of California, Berkeley, Graduate School of Journalism. She is a Qualified Mental Health Professional (QMHP) working toward licensure as a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist (LMFT) at the Center for Family Development in Eugene, Oregon.She plans to open a private counseling practice in Portland in 2012. Correspondence: 5873 SW Terwilliger Blvd. , Portland, OR 97239. abstract This alchemical hermeneutical study analyzes Cormac McCarthy’s novels No Country for Old Men and The Road as cultural dreams using Jungian and post-Jungian theory. McCarthy’s work elucidates the archetypal process of individuation toward the mature masculine in our time. Following McCarthy’s imagery and James Hillman’s work, I focus on the split in the senex-puer archetype that structures the masculine psyche as the ultimate psychological site of our cultural dissociation.I also examine the teleological implications in the novel regarding the evolution of the God-image, which reflects manâ€℠¢s understanding of the objective psyche, as well as the nature and psychological function of human evil. key words alchemy, archetypal psychology, chthonic feminine, Coen brothers, cultural psychology, dream interpretation, Jungian interpretation of literature, landscape, literature as cultural dreaming, masculine archetypes, Cormac McCarthy, mechanization, No Country for Old Men, puer, The Road, senex, symbol Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.

You Suck: A Love Story Chapter 14~15

Chapter Fourteen Powers for Good The Emperor was sitting on a black marble bench just around the corner from the great opera house, feeling small and ashamed, when he saw the striking redhead in jeans coming toward him. Bummer lapsed into a barking fit and the Emperor snatched the Boston terrier up by the scruff of the neck and stuffed him into the oversized pocket of his coat to quiet him. â€Å"Brave Bummer,† said the old man. â€Å"Would that I could still hold that kind of passion, even if it were fear. But my fear is weak and damp, I've barely the spine for a dignified surrender.† He'd felt like this since he'd seen Jody outside the secondhand store, where she'd warned him away from the owner. Yes, now he knew her to be one of the undead, a bloodsucking fiend – but then, not so much a fiend. She had been a friend, a good one, even after he had betrayed Tommy Iff to the Animals. He could feel the City's eye on him, could feel her disappointment in him. What does a man have, if not character? What is character, if not a man's measure of himself against his friends and enemies? The great city of San Francisco shook her head at him, ashamed. Her bridges slumped in the fog with disappointment. He remembered a house somewhere and that same look on the face of a dark-haired woman, but mercifully, in an instant that memory was a ghost, and Jody was bending to scratch behind the ears of the steadfast Lazarus, who had never been agitated by her like his bug-eyed brother, who even now squirmed furiously in the woolen pocket. â€Å"Your Majesty,† Jody said. â€Å"How are you?† â€Å"Worthless and weak,† said the Emperor. She really was a lovely girl. He'd never known her to hurt a soul. What a cad he was. â€Å"I'm sorry to hear that. You have plenty to eat? Staying warm?† â€Å"The men and I have this very hour vanquished a corned beef on a sourdough roll the size of a healthy infant, thank you.† â€Å"Tommy's Joynt?† Jody said with a smile. â€Å"Indeed. We are not worthy, yet my people provide.† â€Å"Don't be silly, you're worthy. Look, Emperor, have you seen William?† â€Å"William of the huge and recently shaven cat?† â€Å"That's the one.† â€Å"Why yes, we crossed his path not long ago. He was at the liquor store at Geary and Taylor. He seemed very enthusiastic about purchasing some scotch. More energetic than I've seen him in many years.† â€Å"That was how long ago?† She stopped petting Lazarus and stood. â€Å"Little more than an hour ago.† â€Å"Thank you, Your Majesty. You don't know where he was going?† â€Å"I should think to find a safe place to drink his dinner. Although I can't claim to know him well, I don't think William passes the evening in the Tenderloin often.† Jody patted the Emperor's shoulder, and he took her hand. â€Å"I'm so sorry, dear.† â€Å"Sorry? About what?† â€Å"When I saw you and Thomas the other night, I noticed. It's true, isn't it? Thomas has changed.† â€Å"No, he's still a doofus.† â€Å"I mean he is one of your kind now?† â€Å"Yes.† She looked up the street. â€Å"I was alone,† she said. The Emperor knew exactly how she felt. â€Å"I told one of his crew from the Safeway, Jody. I'm sorry, I was frightened.† â€Å"You told the Animals?† â€Å"The born-again one, yes.† â€Å"And how did he react?† â€Å"He was worried for Thomas's soul.† â€Å"Yeah, that would be Clint's reaction. You don't know if he told the other Animals?† â€Å"I would guess yes, by now.† â€Å"Okay, don't worry, then, Your Highness. It's okay. Just don't tell anyone else. Tommy and I are leaving the City just like we promised those police detectives. We just have to get things in order.† â€Å"And the other – the old vampire?† â€Å"Yes. Him, too.† She turned and strode away, heading into the Tenderloin, her boot heels clacking on the sidewalk as she kept her pace just below a run. The Emperor shook his head and rubbed Lazarus behind the ears. â€Å"I should have told her about the detectives. I know that, old friend.† There was only so much weakness he could confess to at one time – that, too, a fault. The Emperor resolved to sleep somewhere cold and damp tonight, perhaps in the park by the Maritime Museum, as penance for his weakness. There was no way she was going to remember his new mobile number. It was five in the morning before Tommy had finished moving all of the furniture, books, and clothes. Now the new loft looked almost exactly like the old loft had looked, except that it didn't have a working phone line. So Tommy sat on the counter of the old loft, looking at the three bronze statues and waiting for Jody to call. Just the three statues left to move: Jody, the old vampire, and the turtle. The old vampire looked fairly natural. He'd been unconscious when he'd been bronzed, but Tommy had the biker sculptors downstairs pose him as if he was in midstep, out for a stroll. Jody was posed with her hand on her hip, her head thrown back as if she'd just tossed her long hair over her shoulder, smiling. Tommy turned his head to the side, getting perspective. She didn't look skanky. What made Abby say the statue was skanky? Sexy, well yes. Jody had been wearing some very low-cut jeans and a crop top when he'd posed her for the electroplating, and the bikers had insisted upon exposing more of her cleavage than was probably decorous, but what could you expect from a couple of guys who specialized in making high-end garden gnomes acting out the Kama Sutra? Okay, she looked a little skanky, but he didn't see how that was a bad thing. He had actually been delighted when she came streaming out of the ear holes to materialize, stark naked, in front of him. If she hadn't killed him, it would have been the fulfillment of a sexual fantasy he'd nurtured for a long time. (There had been this old TV show he'd watched as a kid, about a beautiful genie who lived in a bottle – well, Tommy had done some serious bottle polishing over that one.) So the Jody statue stayed. But the old vampire, Elijah, that was a different story. There was a real creature in there. A real scary creature. Whatever bizarre events had brought them to this spot had been set off by Elijah Ben Sapir. He was a reminder that neither he – Tommy – nor Jody had chosen to be vampires. Neither had chosen to live out the rest of their days in the night. Elijah had taken their choices away from them, and replaced them with a whole new set of scarier, bigger choices. The first of which was how the hell do you deal with the fact that you have imprisoned a sentient, feeling being in a shell of bronze, even if he is an evil dick-weed from the Dark Ages? But they couldn't let him out. He'd kill them for sure if they did. Really kill them, too, a complete death, the kind with no nooky. Suddenly Tommy was angry. He'd had a future. He might have been a writer, a Nobel Prize winner, an adventurer, a spy. Now he was just a foul dead thing, and the furthest his ambition would reach was his next victim. Okay, that wasn't really true, but still, he was pissed off. So what if Elijah was trapped in bronze shell forever. He'd trapped them in these monstrous bodies. Maybe it was time to do something monstrous. Tommy picked up Jody's statue and threw it over his shoulder and, despite his great vampire strength, followed it over backward as it clanged against the floor. Okay, it had taken the two bikers and a refrigerator dolly to get the statues up here, maybe a little planning was in order. It turned out he could move the statue pretty efficiently if he slung it over his back and let one of her feet drag, and so he did, down the steps, half a block down the sidewalk, and back up the steps of the new loft. Bronze Jody looked happy in the new place, he thought. The turtle took half as long. She, too, looked pleased with the surroundings. As for Elijah, Tommy figured what was the point of being in a city on a peninsula if you didn't take advantage of the water now and then. And Elijah evidently liked the ocean, since he'd come to the City on his yacht, which Tommy and the Animals had managed to blow to smithereens. The vampire statue was even heavier that Jody's, but Tommy felt energized by the idea of getting rid of it. Just a short twelve blocks to the sea and that would be that. â€Å"From the sea ye came, and to the sea ye shall return,† Tommy said, thinking that he might be quoting Coleridge, or maybe a Godzilla movie. As Tommy dragged the bronzed vampire down Mission Street, he considered his future. What would he do? He had a lot of time to fill, and after a while, figuring out new ways to jump Jody would only fill up a part of his nights. He was going to have to find a purpose. They had money – cash the vampire had given Jody when he turned her – and what was left of the money from the sale of Elijah's art, but eventually that would run out. Maybe he should get a job. Or become a crime fighter. That's it, he would use his powers for good. Maybe get an outfit. After a few blocks Tommy noticed that Elijah's toe, the one that was dragging on the sidewalk, was starting to wear away. The bikers had warned Tommy that the bronze shell was pretty thin. It wouldn't do to unleash a claustrophobic and hungry ancient vampire when you were the guy who had imprisoned him, so Tommy stood the vampire on the corner for a minute while he dug through a trash bin until he found some heavy-duty plastic Big Gulp cups, which he fitted on the vampire's dragging foot as skid protection. â€Å"Ha!† Tommy said. â€Å"Thought you had me.† A couple of guys in hip-hop wear walked by as Tommy was fitting the cups on the vampire's feet. Tommy made the mistake of making eye contact and they paused. â€Å"Stole it from a building on Fourth,† Tommy said. The two nodded, as if they were saying, Of course, we were just wondering, and proceeded to move down the sidewalk. They must sense my superior strength and speed, Tommy thought, so they wouldn't dare mess with me. In fact, the two had confirmed that the white boy in the ghost makeup was crazy – and what would they do with a four-hundred-pound statue anyway? Tommy figured he'd drag the statue to the Embarcadero and toss it off the pier by the Ferry Building. If there was anyone around, he'd just stand at the rail like he was there with his gay lover, then shove the statue in when no one was looking. He felt enormously sophisticated about the plan. No one would ever think a guy from Indiana was pretending to be gay. That kind of thing just wasn't done. Tommy had known a kid once in high school who had gone up to Chicago to see the musical Rent and was never heard from again. Tommy reckoned he'd been disappeared by the local Kiwanis Club. When he got to the Embarcadero, which ran all along the waterfront, Tommy was tempted to just chuck Elijah in the Bay right there and call it a night, but he had a plan, so he dragged the vampire that last two blocks to the promenade at the end of Market Street, where the antique streetcars, the cable cars, and the cross-bay ferries all converged in a big paved park and sculpture garden. Here, away from the buildings, the night seemed to open up to his vampire senses, take on a new light. Tommy stopped for moment, stood Elijah by a fountain, and watched heat streaming out of some grates by the streetcar turnaround. Perfect. There was absolutely no one around. Then the beeping started. Tommy looked at his watch. Sunrise in ten minutes. The night hadn't opened up to him, it had been shutting him down. Ten minutes, and the loft was a good twenty blocks away. Jody was quickstepping along the alleyway that came out in front of their old loft. She still had twenty minutes until sunrise, but she could see the sky lightening, and twenty minutes was cutting it too close. Tommy would be freaked. She should have taken the cell phone with her. She shouldn't have left him alone with the new minion. She'd finally found William, passed out in a doorway in Chinatown, with Chet the huge cat sleeping on his chest. They'd have to remember not to leave William with any money from now on, if he was going to be their food source. Otherwise he'd go elsewhere for his alcohol, and that wasn't going to work. He was making his staggering way home on his own. Maybe she'd let him take a shower at the old loft – they weren't going to get their deposit back anyway. There was still a light on in the loft. Great, Tommy was home. She'd forgotten to get a key for the new place. She was about to step out of the alley when she smelled cigar smoke and heard a man's voice. She stopped and peeked around the corner. There was a brown Ford sedan parked across the street from their old loft, and in it sat two middle-aged men. Cavuto and Rivera, the homicide detectives that she'd made a deal with the night they'd blown up Elijah's yacht. They'd moved just in time, but then, maybe not quite. She couldn't get to the new place either. It was only a half a block away, and she'd have to cross in the open. And even then, what if it was locked? She jumped four feet straight up when the alarm on her watch went off. It was toward the end of their second shift after returning to the Safeway that the Animals sobered up. Lash was sitting by himself in the wide backseat of the Hummer limo, his head cradled in his hands, hoping desperately that the despair and self-loathing he was feeling was only the effect of a hangover, instead of what it really was, which was a big flaming enema of reality. The reality was, they had spent more than a half a million dollars on a blue hooker. He let the hugeness of it roll around in his head, and looked up at the other Animals, who were sitting around the perimeter of the limo, similarly posed, trying not to make eye contact with one another. They'd had nearly two semi trucks of stock to put up that night, and they'd known it was coming because they'd ordered it to make up for the time they'd been away and Clint had let the shelves get low. So they'd sobered up, put their heads down, and thrown stock like the Animals that they were. Now it was getting close to dawn and it was dawning on all of them that they might have severely fucked up. Lash risked a sideways glance at Blue, who was sitting between Barry and Troy Lee. She'd taken Lash's apartment on Northpoint, and made him sleep on the couch at Troy Lee's, where there were about seven hundred Chinese family members, including Troy's grandmother, who, every time she passed through the room during the day, when Lash was trying to sleep, would screech, â€Å"What's up, my nigga!† and try to get him to wake up and give her a pound or a high five. Lash had been explaining to her that it's impolite to refer to an African American as a nigga, unless one was another African-American, when Troy Lee came in and said, â€Å"She only speaks Cantonese.† â€Å"She does not. She keeps coming in and saying, ‘What's up, my nigga? â€Å" â€Å"Oh yeah. She does that to me, too. Did you give her a pound?† â€Å"No, I didn't give her a pound, motherfucker. She called me a nigga.† â€Å"Well, she's not going to quit unless you give her a pound. It's just the way she rolls.† â€Å"That's some bullshit, Troy.† â€Å"It's her couch.† Lash, exhausted and already hungover, gave the wizened old woman a pound. Granny turned to Troy Lee. â€Å"What's up, my nigga!† She offered and received a pound from her grandson. â€Å"That shit is not the same!† Lash said. â€Å"Get some sleep. We have a big load tonight.† Now half a million dollars was gone. His apartment was gone. The limo was costing them a thousand dollars a day. Lash looked out the blackout windows at the moving patchwork of shadows thrown by the streetlights, then turned to Blue. â€Å"Blue,† he said. â€Å"We have to get rid of the limo.† Everyone looked up, shocked. No one had said anything to her since they'd finished stocking. They'd brought her coffee and juice, but no one had said anything. Blue looked at him. â€Å"Get me what I want.† Not a hint of malice, not even a demand, really, just a statement of fact. â€Å"Okay,† Lash said. Then to the driver he said, â€Å"Take a right up here. Head back to that building where we went last night.† Lash crawled over the divider into the front passenger seat. He couldn't see shit out the blackened windows. They'd only gone about three blocks into the SOMA district when he saw someone running. Running way, way too fast for a jogger. Running – like he was on fire – running. â€Å"Pull up alongside of that guy.† The driver nodded. â€Å"Hey, guys, is that Flood?† â€Å"Yeah, it is,† Barry, the bald one, said. Lash rolled down the window. â€Å"Tommy, you need a ride, man?† Tommy, still running, nodded like a bobble-head on crack. Barry threw open the back door, and before the limo could even slow down, Tommy leapt in, landing across Drew and Gustavo's laps. â€Å"Man, am I glad you guys came along,† Tommy said. â€Å"In about a minute, I'm going to – â€Å" He passed out in their laps as the sun washed over the hills of San Francisco. Chapter Fifteen Broken Clowns Inspector Alphonse Rivera watched the broken clown girl – black-and-white-striped stockings and green sneakers – come out of Jody Stroud's apartment and head up the street, then turn and look back at their brown, unmarked sedan. â€Å"We're made,† said Nick Cavuto, Rivera's partner, a broad-shouldered bear of a man, who longed for the days of Dashiell Hammett, when cops talked tough and there were very few problems that couldn't be solved with your fists or a smack from a lead sap. â€Å"We're not made. She's just looking. Two middle-aged guys sitting in the car on the city street – it's unusual.† If Cavuto was a bear, then Rivera was a raven – a sharp-featured, lean Hispanic, with just a touch of gray at the temples. Lately he'd taken to wearing expensive Italian suits, in raw silk or linen when he could find them. His partner was in rumpled Men's Wearhouse. Rivera often wondered if Nick Cavuto might not be the only gay man on the planet who had no fashion sense whatsoever. The knock-kneed kid with the raccoon eye makeup was making her way across the street toward them. â€Å"Roll up your window,† Cavuto said. â€Å"Roll up your window. Pretend like you don't see her.† â€Å"I'm not going to hide from her,† Rivera said. â€Å"She's just a kid.† â€Å"Exactly. You can't hit her.† â€Å"Jesus, Nick. She's just a creepy kid. What's wrong with you?† Cavuto had been on edge since they'd pulled up an hour ago. They both had, really, since the guy named Clint, one of the night crew from the Marina Safeway, had left a message on Rivera's voice mail that Jody Stroud, the redheaded vampire, had not left town as she had promised, and that her boyfriend, Tommy Flood, was now also a vampire. It was a very bad turn of events for the two cops, both of whom had taken a share of the money from the old vampire's art collection in return for letting them all go. It had seemed like the only option, really. Neither of the cops wanted to explain how the serial killer they'd been chasing had been an ancient vampire, and how he'd been tracked down by a bunch of stoners from the Safeway. And when the Animals blew up the vampire's yacht – well, the case was solved, and if the vampires had left, it would have all been good. The cops had planned to retire early and open a rare-book store. Rivera thought he might learn to golf. Now he was feeling it all float away on an evil breeze. A cop for twenty years, without ever so much as fixing a traffic ticket, then the one time you take a hundred thousand dollars and let a vampire go, the whole world turns on you like you're some kind of bad guy. Rivera was raised a Catholic, but he was starting to believe in karma. â€Å"Pull out. Pull out,† Cavuto said. â€Å"Go around the block until she goes away.† â€Å"Hey,† said the broken clown girl. â€Å"You guys cops?† Cavuto hit the window button on his door but the ignition was off, so the window didn't budge. â€Å"Go away, kid. Why aren't you in school? Do we need to take you in?† â€Å"Winter break, brain trust,† said the kid. Rivera couldn't hold the laugh in and he snorted a little trying to. â€Å"Move along, kid. Go wash that shit off your face. You look like you fell asleep with a Magic Marker in your mouth.† â€Å"Yeah,† said the kid, examining a black fingernail, â€Å"well, you look like someone pumped about three hundred pounds of cat barf into a cheap suit and gave it a bad haircut.† Rivera slid down in his seat and turned his face toward the door. He couldn't look at his partner. He was sure that if it was possible for steam to come out of someone's ears, that might be happening to Cavuto, and if he looked, he'd lose it. â€Å"If you were a guy,† Cavuto said, â€Å"I'd have you in handcuffs already, kid.† â€Å"Oh God,† Rivera said under his breath. â€Å"If I were a guy, I'll bet you would. And I'll bet I'd have to send you to the S and M ATM, because the kinky shit is extra.† The kid leaned down so she was eye level with Cavuto, and winked. That was it. Rivera started giggling like a little girl – tears were creeping out the corners of his eyes. â€Å"You're a big fucking help,† Cavuto said. He reached over, flipped the ignition key to â€Å"accessory,† then rolled up his window. The kid came over to Rivera's side of the car. â€Å"So, have you seen Flood?† she asked. â€Å"Cop?† She added  «cop » with a high pop on the p, like it was punctuation mark, not a profession. â€Å"You just came out of his apartment,† Rivera said, trying to shake off the giggles. â€Å"You tell me.† â€Å"Place is empty. The douche nozzle owes me money,† said the kid. â€Å"For what?† â€Å"Stuff I did for him.† â€Å"Be specific, sweetheart. Unlike my partner, I don't threaten.† It was a threat, of course, but he thought he might have hit pay dirt, the kid's eyes opened wide enough to see light. â€Å"I helped him and that redheaded hag load their stuff into a truck.† Rivera looked her up and down. She couldn't have weighed ninety pounds. â€Å"He hired you to help him move?† â€Å"Just little crap. Lamps and stuff. They were like, in a hurry. I was walking by, he flagged me down. Said he'd give me a hundred bucks.† â€Å"But he didn't?† â€Å"He gave me eighty. He said it was all he had on him. To come back this morning for the rest.† â€Å"Did either of them say where they were going?† â€Å"Just that they were going to leave the City this morning, as soon as they paid me.† â€Å"You notice anything unusual about either of them – Flood or the redhead?† â€Å"Just day dwellers, like you. Bourgeois four-oh-fours.† â€Å"Four-oh-Fours?† â€Å"Clueless – Pottery Barn fucktards.† â€Å"Of course,† Rivera said. He could hear his partner snickering now. â€Å"So you haven't seen them?† the kid said. â€Å"They're not coming, kid.† â€Å"How do you know that?† â€Å"I know that. You're out twenty dollars. Cheap lesson. Go away and don't come back here, and if either of them contact you, or you see them, call me.† Rivera handed the kid a business card. â€Å"What's your name?† â€Å"My day-slave name?† â€Å"Sure, let's try that one.† â€Å"Allison. Allison Green. But on the street I'm known as Abby Normal.† â€Å"On the street?† â€Å"Shut up, I have street cred.† Then she added, â€Å"Cop!† like the chirp of a car alarm arming. â€Å"Good. Take your street cred and run along, Allison.† She shuffled off, trying to swivel nearly nonexistent hips as she went. â€Å"You think they left the City?† Cavuto asked. â€Å"I want to own a bookstore, Nick. I want to sell old books and learn to golf.† â€Å"So that would be no?† â€Å"Let's go talk to the born-again Safeway guy.† Four robots and one statue guy worked the Embarcadero by the Ferry Building. Not every day. Some days, when it was slow, there were only two robots and a statue guy, or on rainy days, none of them worked, because the silver or gold makeup they used to color their skin didn't hold up well in the rain, but as a rule, it was four robots and one statue guy. Monet was the statue guy – the ONLY statue guy. He'd staked his territory three years ago, and if some poseur ever showed up, he had to meet Monet on the field of stillness, where they would clash in the motion-free battle of doing absolutely nothing. Monet had always prevailed, but this guy – this new guy – was really good. The challenger had been there when Monet arrived in the late morning, and he hadn't even blinked for two hours. The guy's makeup was perfect, too. He looked as if he had really been bronzed, so it was beyond Monet why he would choose to get his collections in Big Gulp cups that he'd jammed his feet into. Monet carried a small portfolio case, with a hole cut in it where tourists could stuff their bills. He had primed his money hole with a five today, just to show the challenger that he wasn't intimidated, but the truth was, after two hours, he hadn't made half of what he saw the newcomer take in, and he was intimidated. And his nose itched. His nose itched and the new statue guy was kicking his ass. Normally Monet would change positions every half hour or so, then stand motionless while the tourists taunted him and tried to make him flinch, but with the new competition, he had to stay still as long as it took. The robots on the promenade had all assumed poses from which they could watch. They only had to hold still until someone dropped cash into their cup, then they would do the robot dance. It was boring work, but the hours were good and you were outside. It looked like Monet was going down. Sundown. He felt like his ass was on fire. Tommy came to to the sound of a riding crop being smacked against his bare butt and the rough bark of a woman's voice. â€Å"Say it! Say it! Say it!† He tried to pull away from the pain but couldn't move his arms or legs. He was having trouble focusing his vision – waves of light and heat were rocketing around his brain and all he could really see was a bright red spot with waves of heat coming off of it and a figure moving around the edges. It was like staring into the sun through a red filter. He could feel the heat on his face. â€Å"Ouch!† Tommy said. â€Å"Dammit!† He pulled against his bonds and heard a metallic rattling, but nothing gave. The red hot light went away and was replaced by the blurry form of a female face, a blue face, just inches away from his own. â€Å"Say it,† she whispered harshly, spitting a little on the â€Å"it.† â€Å"Say what?† â€Å"Say it, vampire!† she said. She whipped the riding crop across his stomach and he howled. Tommy squirmed against his bonds and heard the rattling again. With the spotlight moved away, he could see that he was suspended by very professional-looking nylon restraints to a brass, four-poster bed frame that had been stood on end. He was completely naked and evidently the blue woman, who was dressed in a black vinyl bustier, boots, and nothing else, had been whaling on him for some time. He could see welts across his stomach and thighs, and well, his ass felt like it was on fire. She wound up to smack him again. â€Å"Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa,† Tommy said, trying not to screech. He only realized then that his fangs were extended and he'd bitten his own lips. The blue woman held up. â€Å"Say it.† Tommy tried to keep his voice calm. â€Å"I know you've been doing this for a while now, but I've only been awake for about a minute of it, so I have no idea what you are asking me. If you slow down and repeat the whole question, I'll be happy to tell you whatever I know.† â€Å"Your safety word,† said the blue woman. â€Å"Which is?† Tommy said. He noticed for the first time that she had enormous boobs spilling out of that bustier and it occurred to him that he had never seen big blue boobs before. They were kind of mesmerizing. He wouldn't have been able to look away even if he weren't strapped down. â€Å"I told you,† she said, letting the riding crop fall to her side. â€Å"You told me what a safety word is?† â€Å"I just told you what it is.† â€Å"So you know it, then?† â€Å"Yes,† she said. â€Å"Then why are you asking?† â€Å"To see if you're at your breaking point.† She seemed to be pouting a little now. â€Å"Don't be a dick, this isn't my specialty.† â€Å"Where am I?† Tommy asked. â€Å"You're Lash's Smurf, aren't you? Are we at Lash's?† â€Å"I'm asking the questions here.† She snapped the riding crop against his thigh. â€Å"Ouch! Fuck! Stop that. You have issues, lady.† â€Å"Say it!† â€Å"What is it? I was asleep when you told me, you stupid bitch!† He was wrong, he was able to look away from the blue boobs. He snarled at her, something coming up from deep inside him that he didn't even recognize – something that felt wild and on the verge of out of control – like when he first made love with Jody as a vampire, only this felt – well, lethal. â€Å"It's Cheddar.† â€Å"Cheddar? Like the cheese?† He was getting beating because of cheese? â€Å"Yes.† â€Å"So I said it. Now what?† â€Å"You're broken.† â€Å"‘Kay,† Tommy said, straining against the heavy nylon straps, understanding now what he was feeling. He was going to kill her. He didn't know how yet, but he was as certain of it as of anything he had ever known. Grass was green, water was wet, and this bitch was dead. â€Å"So now you have to turn me,† she said. â€Å"Turn you?† he said. His fangs ached, like they were going to leap out of his mouth. â€Å"Make me like you,† she said. â€Å"You want to be orange? Is this another Cheddar thing? Because – â€Å" â€Å"Not orange, you nitwit, a vampire!† she said, and she snapped the riding crop across his chest. He bit his lips again and felt the blood running down his chin. â€Å"So for that you needed all the hitting?† He said. â€Å"Come over here.† She leaned up and kissed him, then pushed away hard and came away with his blood on her mouth. â€Å"I guess I'm going to have to get used to this,† she said, licking her lips. â€Å"Closer,† Tommy said.

Thursday, August 29, 2019

MULTINATIONAL CORP-EVOL & CUR ISSUE Movie Review

MULTINATIONAL CORP-EVOL & CUR ISSUE - Movie Review Example ations for instance in a number of places in the United States like in Nevada which has the largest landfill amongst other similar places like New York, Hawaii, New Jersey, and south Carolina all the way to China’s Beijing, an upcoming economic giant and shows ways in which proper garbage management practice and poor garbage management practice as well. The main concern for Quintanilla was to keenly observe where trash or the garbage goes, the party that handles it and the beneficiaries of the whole process whether economically or environmentally. Quintanilla portrays garbage collection to be both an epidemic and an opportunity. An epidemic because the landfills pose an environmental threat to the ever growing landfills surrounding localities with residential settlements or an opportunity to the garbage collection and management companies not forgetting the stakeholders who take home a collective annual minimum of more than $50 billion from what Quintanilla terms as â€Å"a 21st century goldmine† with most of the credits going to the operators of the more than 2200 landfills scattered all over the United States (Quintanilla). In fact some innovative individuals pipe the gas from the damp sites to generate electricity. The documentary film recognizes the fact most of the landfills that handle approximately 250 million tons of garbage in America annually appear to be doing an effective job by effectively managing these sites that generate lots of profit by either recycling or putting the waste into other useful economic uses like the production of electricity by factories a good example that â€Å"Trash Inc.† team visits is Apex in Las Vegas the largest landfill in the U.S (Quintanilla). Capitalizing of the garbage waste management by companies in the private sector is surely an effective management tools to proper garbage disposal as none of the garbage goes to waste. However a change in geographical landscape tells all the difference between proper management and

Wednesday, August 28, 2019

Health and Safety Regulations of NSW and Risk Management Essay

Health and Safety Regulations of NSW and Risk Management - Essay Example According to the discussion, non-compliance issues consist of non-trained health and safety representatives handling important positions in the organization, appointment of ineligible candidates for places like bar and casino, etc. After conducting an audit of the whole situation and deriving the above finding several recommendations, the objectives behind them and a probable time estimate has been clearly mentioned in the action plan in Appendix 2. In Appendix 1 a risk assessment matrix has been developed to highlight the intensity of each hazard or risk that took place in the organization. The major laws which affect most of the business as Occupational Health and Safety (OHS) would be improved to Work Health Safety (WHS). The revised laws have been implemented from the year 2012. According to the new WHS, the focus of the employee should be on the making proper work arrangements and also maintaining good relationships for carrying out the business. The focus of the employer should be on the impact of the workplace, health and safety issues of the employees. Companies have the right to consult with other companies or organization regarding safety and health issues of the organization. The individuals in the organizations would be no longer termed as workers; rather they should be regarded as employees. Implementing health and safety measures in the organization would be given primary importance and the employees also have the right to raise voice if they find that these norms do not meet the standards in their organization. Every employee must hold an entry permit to enter the organization. These are the basic changes that have been made in the new guidelines. Now let us consider the breaches that took place in Titanic Cove Resort (TCR), with reference to WHS laws.

Tuesday, August 27, 2019

ECE teacher's Reflection on practice Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 750 words

ECE teacher's Reflection on practice - Essay Example Theorize: The episodes with Ryan reflected the Te Whaariki principle of Relationships. Ryan was indeed responsive and reciprocated my attempts at establishing rapport with him. I also met the goals of the strands of well-being, belonging, communication and exploration. For well being, goal 2 of nurturing his emotional well-being was met as he felt safe with me, enough to go about the routines of the day. This likewise meets goals 2 and 3 of the strand of belonging. For the strand of communication, my interactions with Ryan met the goals of developing verbal communication skills as I urged him to talk about his trip and his volcano as well as the goal of discovering and developing different ways to be creative and expressive as I allowed him to express his own ideas in his sand play. Finally, in the activities, goals 1 and 4 were met. Ryan’s creative play with the sand and the tunnel he was making with the volcano was acknowledged and appreciated that he was encouraged enough t o think of expanding his ideas as he developed working theories for making sense of the natural world. In this case, it was his interest in volcanoes. Muellar Tokunaga (2006) shared that allowing children to indulge in their own imaginative play makes them more engaged in learning. Ryan’s sand play with volcanoes was accompanied by his active imaginative thinking as he came up with other ways to make his play more interesting (creating a tunnel with it). Act: I will be more attentive to Ryan and listen to his ideas. I will refrain from pushing my own ideas unless he asks for my own opinion. That way, I will encourage him to come up with his own original ideas. I will do the same with the other children and be more responsive to their needs. Brewer, J. (2001) Introduction to Early Childhood Education. Allyn & Bacon. Ministry of Education (1996) Te Whariki He Whariki Matauranga mo nga Mokopuna o Aotearoa. NZ: Crown. Muellar Tokunaga, N. (2006). Learning from very young children . The First Years: Nga Tau Tuatahi. New Zealand Journal of Infant and Toddler Education, 8(2), 44-46. REFLECTION 2 Analyse: Everyone was excited about the water play activity since it was sure to relieve the children of the heat. I know how much they loved to play with water and got excited myself of the fun they will have. However, in my zeal to let them enjoy the activity, I mistakenly suggested an activity to Jay that could be possibly dangerous not only for him but for the other children. Telling him to ride the bike with his wet body would be risky because he may slip and fall badly on the ground. Worse, he will also endanger children playing in the water in case he loses control. It was a good thing another teacher had the good sense to stop him from following my suggestion. I felt so guilty for not having thought of his and the other children’s safety even if all I wanted was for them to enjoy. Theorise: Edgington (1999) posits that children learn best in an environmen t that makes them feel secure and confident enough to develop their own ideas with open-ended experiences. They actively engage in learning by partaking of fun, play-based hands-on experiences while adults around them challenge and extend their thinking. In this case, children were allowed to explore water play. This is applying Te Whaariki’s strand of Exploration, specifically goal 4, as the play helps them â€Å"develop working theories for making sense of the natural, social, physical and

Monday, August 26, 2019

NO Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 250 words - 2

NO - Essay Example In as much as organizations such as Coca Cola have productively gone through the global expansion process, the efforts of several other entities have been unsuccessful. Consequently, market seekers should ascertain that they introduce strong and competitive brands into the foreign market and similarly make sure that they establish good customer relations for the investments to be rewarding (Hill, 2014). Cost minimizers take part in worldwide expansion by establishing low cost production sites in a foreign country in order to make sure that they remain cost competitive both locally and internationally. For such ventures to be successful, the entities should ensure that they put reasonable and affordable price tags on their products, as such an approach will directly benefit the customers, hence ensure that they widen their clientele. Since its establishment in 1911, IBM has unquestionably developed into one of the most reliable technological firms globally. Technology experts argue that the organization has remained relevant because of its competitive advantages that include continuous innovation, routinely introducing solid technology into the market and at the same time embracing the outside and inside practice where it listens to the input of both its employees and customers. Such advantages have fairly supplemented IBM’s efforts in global expansion. By listening to the input of its customers, the organization has for example established operations in smaller markets like Vietnam, Philippines and Czech Republic while at the same time taking advantage of growing economies like China as recommended by its market analysts. Cost-benefit analysis is different from capital budgeting analysis on the basis of their objectives, as the former focuses on both the benefits and costs of carrying out a given project over a specific period, while the latter examines the productivity of a foreign investment by incorporating the economic, political, social,

Sunday, August 25, 2019

Stem Cell Research Legislation Paper Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1250 words - 1

Stem Cell Legislation - Research Paper Example It is hoped that such cells can be developed to replace dysfunctional cells in conditions like spinal cord injury, Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, diabetes, and various other medical conditions. A look into the American stem cell research legislations proves that the country needs to make such laws regarding patents and intellectual rights to ensure that the government and the federally funded researchers have access to stem cells. In addition, there should be clear government guidelines regarding the agreement between patent holders and researchers. The advancements in research were not free from ethical issues and legal disputes. As reported by National Bioethics Advisory Commission (1999) this is mainly so because the sources for stem cells are one week old embryos called blastocysts which are usually created through in vitro fertilization to treat infertility, five to nine week old embryos of fetuses obtained through elective abortion, embryos created through in vitro fer tilization for research purposes, embryos created through cloning or somatic cell nuclear transfer, and finally, adult tissues like umbilical cord blood and marrow. The controversy almost entirely surrounds taking stem cells from human embryos and fetuses because the process destroys them. Admittedly, the American administration has always been open to the ethical concerns surrounding embryo research. Throughout history, the government did not provide any funding to support researches on stem cells from human embryos. So, the federal law rightly prohibited the HHS from funding any such research. In the year 1994, President Bill Clinton issued an executive directive to the NIH that it should not allocate funds to develop human embryos for research purposes. Two years later, in 1996, there was a legislative ban on NIH’s spending on stem cell research from human embryos. Thereafter, every year, the government passed such a ban. As Wertz (2002, p. 674-678) points out, according t o the ban, federal funds could not be used for the development of human embryos for research purposes where human embryo is destroyed, discarded, or knowingly subjected to risk of injury or death. However, as the Wisconsin scientists successfully grew embryonic stem cells into specialized cells, there arose increased demand from NIH to again look into the governmental ban on stem cell research from embryos and fetus. The opinion of the HHS’ General Counsel was that the existing law that only prohibited the use of HHS funds for human embryo research would not ban research on stem cells because stem cells are not within the legal definition of human embryo. According to the definition provided, embryo is an organism that is capable of developing into a full human being when implanted in the uterus. It is claimed that the pluripotent stem cells are not able to grow into a human being. Thus, the opinion reached was that HHS could fund such stem cell researches that manage to get the stem cells from embryos using private means. The restriction only applied to those researches that want to derive stem cells from embryos using federal funds. Though there was congressional opposition, NIH made it clear that it would support stem cell research once it managed to issue guidelines and to establish an oversight committee. Thus, the NIH guidelines appeared in August 2000 that made it clear that researches using pluripotent stem cells from human embryos can be conducted using NIH funds. However the condition was that the stem